Another Birthday

I turned 70 today.  A day like any other day.  Showers in the morning. In the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sky brightened, so I went out for a walk.  It was one of those spring walks during which one is accompanied by birdsong the entire time, with the choristers unseen.

At about 10 o’clock last night this thought occurred to me: “When I wake up tomorrow morning, I will be 70 years old.”  I confess that this realization, as it hit home, did provoke a bit of . . . alarm? wonderment? dread?  But I evaded any attempt to sort out exactly what response the occasion called for.  Instead, I began to bring to mind poems that I hoped might help me to put the situation into perspective.  Of course, this was no doubt another attempt at evasion. But it is what I am accustomed to do.  What follows herein is a journey through the poems that came to mind, as one of them led to another.  (All of them have appeared here before, on various occasions.)

This poem floated up first:

                    On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.  Ury includes this note to the poem: “The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement.”  Ibid, page 33.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

Given that Walter de la Mare’s poems are often on my mind, it was not surprising that this appeared next:

               Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate’er befall.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 605.  The italics appear in the original text. The poem was first published in de la Mare's O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953), his final volume of poems.  As long-time (and much-appreciated) visitors here may recall, “Now” has appeared here on several occasions.

Stanley Spencer

"Bluebells, Cornflowers and Rhododendrons" (1945)

Perhaps it is the month which led me from “Now" to the next poem, which I have identified in the past as my favorite April poem:

                    Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin Books 2004), page 187.  The poem was first published in Kavanagh’s Weekly on April 19, 1952.  Ibid, page 280.

As always happens, “Wet Evening in April” inevitably sent me to the next poem (the two poems have, for some reason, been linked together in my mind for quite some time):

          Consider the Grass Growing

Consider the grass growing

As it grew last year and the year before,

Cool about the ankles like summer rivers,

When we walked on a May evening through the meadows

To watch the mare that was going to foal.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, page 112.  The poem was first published in The Irish Press on May 21, 1943.  Ibid, page 271.

Stanley Spencer, "Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene" (1947)

What came to mind after Kavanagh’s two poems is a poem I have been fond of for years, but which, in its lovely and quiet way, may have been waiting for just this occasion, and whatever may follow.

            From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate

Over a London mews -- to contemplate --

Is it the sky above -- the stones below?

     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,

     Or thinking forward to futurity

That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,

Quietly folded are the quiet hands,

Rarely he speaks.

     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,

     So much to spend?

What is it he seeks?

Whate’er he be,

He is become to me

A form of rest.

     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs

     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,

And not unblest. 

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954), page 251.  The poem was written in 1907, the year in which Coleridge died. 

Stanley Spencer, "Garden at Whitehouse, Northern Ireland" (1952)

This past week I have been visiting one of my favorite books: Burton Watson’s Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets.  Mary Coleridge’s “From My Window” took me to one of my favorite poems in Watson’s book:

                    Aboard a Boat, Listening to Insects

As though delighting, as though grieving, each with its own song --

an idler, listening, finds his ears washed completely clean.

As the boat draws away from grassy banks, they grow more distant,

till the many varied voices become one single voice.

Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767-1837) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 92).  A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning “Chinese poem”) is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

Thus ended last night’s one-poem-leads-to-another excursion, which, as I noted above, was likely an attempt to evade the reality of arriving at the age of 70.  One thing is certain: I have not returned from my (admittedly delightful) excursion with any conclusions, advice, or wisdom.  But I do believe there is a thread or two running through the poems.  Or perhaps, in the end, this turning 70 business is all very straightforward:

     Simply trust:

Do not also the petals flutter down,

     Just like that?

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 363.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

The Wind in the Pines

In this part of the world, the deciduous trees are empty, save for a few leaves fluttering drily on otherwise bare branches.  Gone (at least for now) are the green days of whispering, soughing, and roaring boughs.  Passing through a leafless grove on a windy day, one hears the empty branches clacking and clicking against one another high overhead.  The trunks and large limbs creak and groan, like the masts of a sailing ship in a storm as described in a seafaring tale.

But, ah! -- the wind in the pines is always with us.  

When the wind passes

     in the pines, autumn already

          seems lonely enough --

and then a fulling block echoes

     through Tamakawa Village.  

Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 136.  The poem is a waka (as are the two poems which appear below).  The sound of fulling blocks in the night signifies deep autumn in Japanese poetry (and in turn reflects the influence of Chinese poetry (in which the sound of fulling blocks on an autumn night is often heard) on Japanese poets).  For more on fulling blocks in Japanese and Chinese poetry, please see an earlier post from 2021.

The continuity of Japanese poetry up until the 20th century is a wonderful thing.  A beautiful poem (or an evocative, beautiful image or phrase within a poem) was never forgotten by poets or readers, and its echo might return years or centuries later in a new poem.  The new poem did not identify the source of the echo.  No footnotes were provided.  Nor were they necessary.  Everyone who read the poem, or heard it recited, recognized the echo.  And thus the earlier poem's beauty was preserved, renewed, and brought into a new world.  A long string of resonating echoes developed.  Nothing was lost to Time, or left behind.  Imagine that.

I come so seldom,

and yet how sad in the night

     sounds the wind in the pines.

And she, there beneath the moss --

does she too hear it, endlessly?

Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) (translated by Steven Carter), Ibid, page 153.  The occasion for the writing of the poem was Fujiwara no Shunzei's visit to the grave of his wife.  He spent the night at a nearby Buddhist temple.  Ibid, page 153.

Saigyō, a friend of Fujiwara no Shunzei, and a reclusive dweller in the countryside for much of his life, wrote this: 

Mountain village

where wind makes sad noises

in the pines --

and adding to the loneliness,

the cry of an evening cicada.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 146.  The sound of cicadas (or, alternatively, crickets) in the twilight of late summer or early autumn provides another memorable series of lovely echoes in Japanese poetry.  But that requires a post of its own, at another time.  As does the cry of quail at evening in the deep grass.

Paul Nash (1889-1946), "Berkshire Downs" (1922)

Of course, I am not suggesting that Japanese poets alone are sensitive to the allure (be it melancholic or soothing) of the wind in the pines.  For instance, quite some time ago I discovered this poem in The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, which was compiled in 1912 by the redoubtable Arthur Quiller-Couch:

      Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,

        And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet, as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

        And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

        Even we,

        Even so.

George Meredith, in Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor), The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford University Press 1912), page 465.  The poem was originally published in Meredith's A Reading of Earth (Macmillan 1888).  One of those poems which, once read, is not forgotten.  (An aside.  I have Quiller-Couch's book beside me as I write this, and I notice that my copy bears a Tokyo bookstore's small decorative paper label on the inner flap of the dust-jacket.  I often visited the bookstore during two extended stays in Tokyo in 1993 and 2000, and I purchased the book during one of those visits.  How time passes.  "Overhead, overhead/Rushes life in a race,/As the clouds the clouds chase.")

Meredith's poem captures wonderfully how it feels to stand or sit within a grove of pines.  The stillness.  The silence.  The soft ground surrounding the trunks of the trees.  The mull and duff.  I remember "mull and duff" from Howard Nemerov's lovely poem "Again": "the nevergreen/Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor."  (Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches, Poems 1973-1975 (University of Chicago Press 1975), page 52.  "Nevergreen" is a neologism of Nemerov's invention, it would appear.)

"A wind sways the pines."  Reading Meredith's opening line, I cannot help but think of this:

            The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,

And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,

So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say

On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.

It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated

On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,

The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997), page 472.  "The Region November" was not published during Stevens' lifetime.  It was likely written in 1954, the year prior to his death.  (Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (edited by Milton Bates) (Alfred A. Knopf 1989), page 324.)

Pines are not specifically mentioned in "The Region November," but the "swaying, swaying, swaying" brings to mind the look of pines in the wind, at least for me.  And, speaking of echoes of past poems, consider these lines from Stevens' "The Snow Man," published in Harmonium in 1923, thirty years before he wrote "The Region November": "One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow . . . and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind."               

John Nash (1893-1977), "Autumn Berkshire" (1951)

The three waka from 11th and 12th century Japan and the poems by Meredith and Stevens suggest that hearing or seeing or feeling the wind in the pines is an occasion of pensive melancholy, with accompanying intimations of mortality.  I suspect that many of us might agree.  And yet . . .

Last week I came upon a group of busy, chattering sparrows flitting and hopping and pecking in the dry, leaning stalks of wild grass alongside a paved pathway.  As I have noted here in the past, I have come to think of the sparrows (and also the robins) as my winter companions.  I doubt if they regard me in that fashion.  As I came nearer, the entire group flew several yards away onto the lower branches of a tall pine standing alone out in the meadow beside the pathway.  They disappeared into the dark boughs, twittering and clucking.  How warm, dry, and soft it must be within the depths of that pine.  Calm, still, and quiet.  Even when the wind blows.  A place of shelter, refuge, and rest.  Or do those enveloping boughs provide only a brief respite?

The wind in the pines.  Over the centuries, the echoes continue in Japanese poetry. 

     A cool breeze;

The vault of heaven is filled

     With the voices of pine trees.

Onitsura (1660-1738) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume One (Hokuseido Press 1963), page 97.

And this:

One learns to bear solitude 

     from the sound of the pine-wind. 

Shōhaku (1443-1527) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, page 319.  This two-line verse appears as verse 64 in Minase Sangin Hyakuin ("Three Poets at Minase"), a hundred-verse renga written in 1488, with Shōhaku, Sōgi (1421-1502), and Sōchō (1448-1532) as the contributing poets.  Ibid, pages 303-326.

And, finally, this:

Twilight -- the only conversation

     on this hill

Is the wind blowing through the pines.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 76.  The poem is a waka.

This small gathering of poems about the wind in the pines is but a limited introduction, the product of my inadequate knowledge and memory.  It also serves as an admonition to my sleepwalking self: Pay attention.  Be grateful.

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946)

"View of the Sussex Weald" (1927)

Postscript.  The beautiful particulars of the World may lose their color, wither away.  Change or vanish.  But the World bestows compensations, dispensations, gifts.  A sunset in the distant pines.  No wind.

Winter Twilight (Discovery Park, Seattle)

"The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.  Consider living creatures -- none lives so long as man.  The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn.  What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity!  If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream."  Kenkō (1283-1350), Tsurezuregusa (Chapter 7), in Donald Keene (translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Messages

Where does one begin when it comes to autumn?  And where does one begin when it comes to the poetry of autumn?  For some unknown reason, these lines by Ezra Pound (a translation of lines written by Li Po in the 8th Century) suddenly arrive, unbidden: "What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,/There is no end of things in the heart."  (Ezra Pound, "Exile's Letter," in Cathay (Elkin Mathews 1915), page 22.)  (An aside: I first read these lines when I was a sophomore in college, taking a course titled "Yeats, Pound, and Eliot."  I was in the midst of falling in love with poetry. Fifty years later, here I am: still in love, still falling in love anew.)

Well, yes, autumn: "There is no end of things in the heart."  And thus, each autumn, one returns to what one loves in the season, and in the poetry of the season.  As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, I have on more than one occasion described autumn as the season of bittersweet wistfulness and of wistful bittersweetness.  What is one to do with such beauty, with its passing, with its loss?  But I am merely repeating what each of us already knows, aren't I?

                         Standing in the Evening

In the yellow dusk I stand alone before the Buddha hall;

pagoda tree blossoms fill the ground, cicadas fill the trees.

Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart,

but something special -- the sadness of these autumn days!

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by Burton Watson), in Po Chü-i, Selected Poems (Burton Watson, editor) (Columbia University Press 2000), page 50.  In China, pagoda trees bloom in late summer or early autumn, depending upon the region in which they are located.

Here is another poem by Po Chü-i, one which I visit each year as autumn makes its first appearance.

                            The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;

Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.

On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;

In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.

Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;

Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.

In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,

The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chü-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57.  The poem is written in the eight-line lü-shih ("regulated verse") form, which, in addition to having tonal and rhyming requirements, calls for verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets. (See Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), pages 8-12, 374.)

Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882), "Cheyne Walk, Chelsea" (1870)

Since mid-September, I had been waiting to see my first woolly bear caterpillar of the year.  To no avail.  I had nearly given up hope.  A few weeks ago, out on my afternoon walk, I thought to myself (my walking thoughts are quite mundane): "I guess I won't be seeing any woolly bears this year."  Then, after about ten minutes of walking along an asphalt pathway that passes between two large meadows, I saw a small dark shape up ahead of me in the middle of the pathway. I approached, and there it was: a woolly bear crossing from one meadow to the other, heading westward toward the waters of Puget Sound and the setting sun.

I did what I always do in these circumstances (and for which I seek neither credit nor praise, since this is something we all do, I presume): I stood watch in the middle of the pathway to make certain that he or she made a safe passage, unharmed by inattentive walkers or bicyclists.  In the focused, single-minded, and, yes, lovable fashion of woolly bears, it successfully crossed the pathway and disappeared into the dry grass of the meadow.  And so, as always happens with humans and woolly bears -- who meet only to part -- we each went our destined way.

A wonderful coincidence?  A lovely moment of serendipity?  So one might say.  Prosaically.  But I was not content to leave it at that on the afternoon on which the woolly bear and I shared a brief interval of time and space in the World.  Nor am I content to leave it at that now. The World sends us messages.  Unexpectedly.  It is up to each of us to make of them what we will.  I had received a message.  The message was wordless.  And words cannot explain it. 

A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō (Twayne Publishers 1970), page 50.

     People are few;

A leaf falls here,

     Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

     The stillness;

A bird walking on the fallen leaves:

     The sound of it.

Ryūshi (died 1681) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 365.

     The leaf of the paulownia,

With not a breath of wind,

     Falls.

Bonchō (died 1714) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 130.

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (italics in the original text).)

Another way of looking at the World's messages:

"Gifts are still occasionally given us, particularly when we have not asked for them, and I cling to the hope of understanding the link between certain of them and our inner life, their meaning in relation to our most persistent dreams."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 3.)

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "Autumn by the River"

At times, words are not sufficient.  Nor are they required.  Perhaps (likely?) at the most important times.  So says a person who loves poetry.  So says a person who has maintained a blog (fitfully) for more than 15 years, relying upon words.  A person who returns each autumn -- faithfully and unfailingly -- to the beautiful words of the following poem.

                 Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice 

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).

"Remember what an Atom your Person stands for in respect of the Universe, what a Minute of unmeasurable Time comes to your share, and what a small Concern you are in the Empire of Fate!"  (Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book V, Section 24, in Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus: His Conversations with Himself (1701), page 78.)

It all comes back to the leaves, their rising and their falling.  While we are here, and after we are gone.

                    Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues

Long as the whole of time:

A single aimless man

Carries a black garden broom.

He is too far to hear him

Wading through the leaves, down autumn

Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson, 1924-1962 (Phoenix House 1963).

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

"In a lifetime how many springs do we see?"  This is the final line of "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade," a four-line poem by Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) which has appeared here on several occasions. However, as Po Chü-i observes above in "Standing in the Evening": "Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart."  Thus, with apologies and gratitude to Su Tung-p'o, I find myself thinking: "In a lifetime how many autumns do we see?"  This thought is a product of age, no doubt.  Which, I should add, is not a bad thing.

                                   Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate (pronounced ta-tay) Ryuwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).  The poem is in the form of a kanshi, a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, adhering to the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

The following poem provides a lovely and moving complement to Tate Ryuwan's poem:

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371.  The poem is untitled.

Autumn.  The World.  Sending us messages.  Gifts, as Philippe Jaccottet would say.  

The wind has brought

     enough fallen leaves

To make a fire.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 67.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Autumn, Kinnordy" (1936)

Small Things

One afternoon last week, as I walked along the edge of a grove of pines and maples, I heard a bird's voice up ahead, high in a pine.  Not a song or a warble, but two firm, quick calls of the same note, with the sequence repeated three or four times.  Then silence.  A minute or so later, the two calls were again repeated three or four times, but from another pine, closer this time.  The message seemed to be something along the lines of: "I'm here. I'm here."  Not an alarm or a warning.  Rather, an announcement of sorts (perhaps a greeting?) to any nearby listeners.

I kept walking -- waiting for further calls, and looking up into the trees to see if I could find the source.  Then, as I passed beneath the overarching branches of a group of tall bushes, a pileated woodpecker flew down from the left, just ahead of me, and landed on the branch of a bush on my right, at eye level a few yards away.  (Please note that I am no expert when it comes to the identification of birds.  I knew the name of the bird because I have long had a reliable source: Birds of Discovery Park (prepared by the Seattle Audubon Society and the Seattle parks department), a two-page list of the more than 200 species of birds that inhabit the place where I take most of my walks.)

What a wonderful sight he or she was: a bright red pointed crest on the top of its head, two thin white stripes on its black face, with the stripes continuing down its neck, and a black-feathered body.  I see the woodpeckers a few times a year, but nearly always at a distance: tapping away up in a tree, my eyes drawn to them by the hollow drumming.  Seldom do I see them close at hand.  After pausing a moment on the branch, it flew away into the sunlight and shadow of the grove.  

I have recently been revisiting the poetry of Saigyō.  A day or so after my encounter with the woodpecker, I came upon a poem (a waka) I hadn't read in quite some time:

Were we sure of seeing

a moon like this

in existences to come,

who would be sorry

to leave this life?

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 158.

These poems we read and love: we carry them within us.  They wait patiently.  When the time is right, we find them again, or they return to us.  Often serendipitously.  Saigyō's poem arrived in such a fashion. 

A small thing, my encounter with the woodpecker, but of inestimable value.  A value best left unspoken, unarticulated.  But not to be forgotten.  One of those gifts which -- suddenly, unaccountably -- are bestowed upon us by the World.

Christopher Sanders (1905-1991)

"Sunlight Through a Willow Tree at Kew" (c. 1958)

Small things, never to be forgotten.  Seven years ago in May, a hundred or so feet away from the spot where I spent a moment with the woodpecker, I came across a dead mole lying on its back beside the same path.  In my post of May 23, 2018, I wrote this about the mole: "He or she was a small, dark-brown thing, about eight inches long, its pinkish-white, fleshy front paws open to the sky.  It was those tiny, outspread paws that particularly touched me."

I closed the brief post with this poem, which has appeared here on more than one occasion:

               A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,

That so much lived below the ground,

Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,

For you to raise a mound 

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (Secker & Warburg 1985), page 63.  The poem was originally published in Speak to the Earth (Jonathan Cape 1939).

I find it hard to believe that it has already been seven years since I shared that short time with the mole.  As the saying goes (repeated at more frequent intervals as one ages, in my experience): "It seems like only yesterday . . ."  Should I let go of my memory of the mole?  Am I being "sentimental"?  A fair number of moderns (wise, undeceived, and ironic) are wont to scoff at "sentimentality."  This is sufficient to convince me to embrace it further.

                  What?

What dost thou surely know?

What will the truth remain,

When from the world of men thou go

To the unknown again?

What science -- of what hope?

What heart-loved certitude won

From thought shall then for scope

Be thine -- thy thinking done?

Tis said, that even the wise,

When plucking at the sheet,

Have smiled with swift-darkening eyes,

As if in vision fleet

Of some mere flower, or bird,

Seen in dream, or in childhood's play;

And then, without sign or word,

Have turned from the world away.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 290.  The poem was originally published in The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

Patrick Symons (1925-1993), "Oak Arch Grey" (1981)

Exchanging glances with a pileated woodpecker.  Leaning down to look at a lifeless mole lying open to the huge blue sky.  These small things were fated never to be forgotten.  But, when it comes to the gifts the World bestows upon us -- its beautiful particulars -- there is no hierarchy.  Nothing is quotidian or commonplace if we are attentive and grateful.

                         The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life; whatever

Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . . 

Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never

Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles

Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done

Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed

Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), in Ivor Gurney, Selected Poetry (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996), page 46.  The punctuation, and the ellipses (in lines 2 and 9, and between lines 8 and 9), are as they appear in the original typescript.  The poem was not published during Gurney's lifetime.

"Hedge sparrow."  Yes, I understand.  My afternoon walk takes me along a path that passes through the center of a large meadow of tall wild grass.  Nearly every day, sparrows suddenly appear out of the grass ahead of me, and hop and skip away down the path.  I've come to think of them as companions, but I suspect they don't regard me as such.  Still, I harbor the fancy that they are starting to tolerate my presence.  Small things, of inestimable value.

      Compare and Contrast

The great thinker died

after forty years of poking about

with his little torch

in the dark forest of ideas,

in the bright glare of perception,

leaving a legacy of fourteen books

to the world

where a hen disappeared

into six acres of tall oats

and sauntered unerringly

to the nest with five eggs in it.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2005), page 432.

In the year before his death, Walter de la Mare said to a friend who came to visit him: "My days are getting shorter.  But there is more and more magic.  More than in all poetry.  Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful."  (Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth 1993), page 443.)

     The world of dew

is the world of dew. 

     And yet, and yet --

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 191.  R. H. Blyth provides background to Issa's haiku: "This verse has the prescript, 'Losing a beloved child.' . . . He had already lost two or three children when this baby girl died."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 433.)

Robert Ball (1918-2009), "Mrs. Barclay's Pond, Harborne" (1949)

Autumn Into Winter

As I have mentioned here in the past, each day I read a poem in the morning and a poem in the evening.  This was today's morning poem:

                                   Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate Ryūwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 117.  A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning "Chinese poem") is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of Chinese prosody.  (For a discussion of kanshi, please see my post of November 2, 2014.)  

I have read "Autumn Ends" several times in the past, but I hadn't revisited it recently.  This morning, I came upon it while browsing through Watson's anthology, which is one of my favorite books.  After reading the poem, it occurred to me: isn't today the day of the winter solstice, or was it yesterday, or is it tomorrow?  I checked: it is indeed today.  Reading poetry tends to put one in the way of serendipity.

But, beyond this nice bit of happenstance, I realized that, with each passing year, "Autumn Ends" seems more and more apt.  Something along these lines: "In a lifetime, how many springs do we see?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  Or this: "the years just flow by like a broken-down dam."  (John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery.")  Ah, well, no help for it.

John Milne Donald (1819-1866), "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

As I am wont to say: "In poetry, one thing leads to another."  Thus, not surprisingly, my favorite autumn poem came to mind soon after I read "Autumn Ends" this morning.  The poem usually appears here each autumn, but this year it makes its appearance on the first day of winter.

                   Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife 

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975), page 3.

It is lovely to find "rustling" leaves in both "Autumn Ends" and "Leaves."  It is those rustling leaves that follow us on our autumn walks -- dogging our footsteps -- that capture the heart of autumn.  And Mahon takes things a beautiful step further: "It is autumn, and dead leaves/On their way to the river/Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road."

George Vicat Cole (1833-1893), "Autumn Morning" (1891)

Today I went for my daily late afternoon walk, both poems still on my mind.  After intermittent rain, often heavy, in the morning, the sky overhead and to the west was clearing: a mix of blue, gold, pink, and orange.  The sun was on its way to disappearing beyond the waters of Puget Sound, beyond the Olympic Mountains, off into the Pacific.  Not a bad way to bring autumn to a close, to enter winter.

The ground remains strewn with all of those rustling leaves.  But the sparrows, our companions throughout the winter, were lively, sporting in the remaining sunlight.  Of course, they know what the fallen rustling leaves are telling us.  But they go on being their sparrow selves.

After seeing them twittering and flitting in the bushes and on the green meadow grass, I thought of this:

                        The Bamboo Sparrow

Doesn't peck up millet from the government storehouse,

Doesn't bore holes through the master's house;

It dwells a lifetime in the mountain groves

And roosts at nightfall on a branch of bamboo.

Gido Shūshin (1325-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1992), page 68.  "The Bamboo Sparrow," like "Autumn Ends," is a kanshi.

Alexander Docharty (1862-1940), "An Autumn Day" (1917)

I returned from my walk.  I have not yet read my poem for the evening.  However -- again, one poem leading to another -- I thought of this tonight: 

          The River

Stir not, whisper not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river,

Whose whispering willows,

Whose murmuring reeds

Make silence more still

Than the thought it breeds,

Until thought drops down

From the motionless mind

Like a quiet brown leaf

Without any wind;

It falls on the river

And floats with its flowing,

Unhurrying still

Past caring, past knowing.

Ask not, answer not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river.

Patrick MacDonogh (1902-1961), Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001), page 86.

Rustling leaves.  Sparrows.  Autumn into winter.  The river.

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

Journey

The swallows have departed.  The tall, dry meadow grass rustles in the nearly empty air.  Now and then a sparrow suddenly flutters up from beside the path, then flies off toward the trees surrounding the field.  Ghostly white tufts of thistle seed float past, rising and falling.

                    Swallows Flown

Whence comes that small continuous silence

     Haunting the livelong day?

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

     Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

     Had vanished -- could not stay?

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

None of this comes as a surprise.  Still, every year there is a pang. Something along these lines: "Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --/in a lifetime how many springs do we see?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  A time comes when you realize with certainty that the seasons you have seen far outnumber the seasons that remain to you.  This is not a bad thing to take to heart.

                                  The Last Swallow

       The robin whistles again.  Day's arches narrow,

       Tender and quiet skies lighten the withering flowers.

       The dark of winter must come. . . . But that tiny arrow,

       Circuiting high in the blue -- the year's last swallow,

Knows where the coast of far mysterious sun-wild Africa lours.

Walter de la Mare, Inward Companion (Faber and Faber 1950).

Alfred Thornton (1863-1939)

"Hill Farm, Painswick, Gloucestershire"

The dragonflies seem to have vanished as well.  I remember an afternoon this past summer when I stood in the middle of a field as the swallows climbed and dived and swerved and skimmed just above the tops of the green meadow grasses.  On that day, the dragonflies were also out in the field, and they and the swallows circled around me.  Please bear with me, but, as I stood there, I couldn't help but think of this: "At the still point of the turning world."  (T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton.")  (Fortunately, it can't be helped: certain of the poems we loved when we were young never leave us, do they?  They remain within us always, waiting.)

Being but man, forbear to say

Beyond to-night what thing shall be,

And date no man's felicity.

          For know, all things

          Make briefer stay

Than dragonflies, whose slender wings

     Hover, and whip away.

Simonides (556-467 B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 234.

A few years after coming across Simonides' dragonflies, I happened upon this, and the two are now forever linked:

"October 6, 1940.  Late in the season as it is, a dragonfly has appeared and is flying around me.  Keep on flying as long as you can  -- your flying days will soon be over."

Taneda Santōka (1882-1940) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries (Columbia University Press 2003), page 102. Watson provides this note to the passage: "This is the last entry in Santōka's diary, written four days before his death."  Ibid, page 102.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "The Pant Valley, Summer" (1960)

Whenever the topic at hand is the evanescence of the beautiful particulars of the World, it seems that Edward Thomas hovers over my shoulder.  And often, as in the case of this post, he is in the company of his friend, Walter de la Mare.  I don't know what I would do without the two of them.

          How at Once

How at once should I know,

When stretched in the harvest blue

I saw the swift's black bow,

That I would not have that view

Another day

Until next May

Again it is due?

The same year after year --

But with the swift alone.

With other things I but fear

That they will be over and done

Suddenly 

And I only see

Them to know them gone.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (Edna Longley, editor) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 131.

Swifts and swallows go well together.  Antic sprites that frolic and then vanish.

Alfred Thornton, "The Upper Severn"

A thought by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "Earth never grieves!" ("Autumn in King's Hintock Park," in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).)  One can find comfort and equanimity in the thought that, once our short time in the World is over, the seasons will continue to come and go without us, with their generations of leaves and birds and clouds.

                         At Night on a Journey

Bell-sounds night after night -- falling on whose ears?

The traveler's dream: forty years pass in an instant:

Sitting up by shutters under the pines, I forget "I" --

Clouds issue from the peaks, the moon courses the heavens.

Ryūshū Shūtaku (1308-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 59.  Ury includes this note to the poem: "The second line refers to a Chinese folktale that became popular in Japan. A man who has come to the capital to seek his fortune lies down for a nap and experiences in dream all the vicissitudes of a long, glorious but ultimately tragic official career; awaking, he discovers that no more time has passed than it has taken for his supper of yellow millet to cook."  Ibid, page 59.

When I walk down an avenue of trees on a sunny day, my attention is usually focused upward, on the leaves turning in the wind, set against blue and gold.  But one afternoon this past summer my eyes were drawn to the swaying shadows of branches on the asphalt pathway before me.  A beautiful, ever-changing world of its own, replicating in its own fashion the beautiful, ever-changing world overhead.  After a few moments passed, I noticed down on the sunlit pathway the small but distinct shadow of a butterfly that was balancing out on the shadow of the far tip of one of the moving branches.  As I watched, the shadow of the butterfly flew away.  I looked up, but I saw no butterfly in the sky.

               On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), Ibid, page 33. Ury includes this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

John Aldridge, "Stubble Field, Thaxted" (1968)

No Grieving

Most of the leaves have fallen.  One day last week -- a proverbial "brilliant autumn day" -- I walked past a grove of big-leaf maples bordering a small glade.  The ground beneath the maples was covered with red, russet, and yellow leaves.  There was no wind.  Now and then, a few of the remaining leaves drifted down.  Each one made a soft tick as it landed on the dry, deep leaf-carpet.

     People are few;

A leaf falls here,

     Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

A single leaf falls in a sunlight-pierced, shadowed grove, joining its predecessors.  I cannot help but return to the lines from Yeats which appeared in my most recent post: ". . . and the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom."  (W. B. Yeats, "Ephemera.")  There is something to be said for waning autumn.

     Leaves falling,

Lie one on another;

     The rain beats on the rain.

Gyōdai (1732-1793) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 365.

The haiku by Issa and Gyōdai are statements of fact.  Lovely statements of fact.  Records of two evanescent moments made by two evanescent human beings.  But there is much more afoot.  "The real nature of each thing, and more so, of all things, is a poetical one. . . . Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page x.)  

And this:

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was that he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."

R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (the italics are in the original text).

In noting that Issa's and Gyōdai's haiku are "statements of fact," I am not suggesting that the poems are emotionless observations, devoid of feeling.  Any fine haiku is an embodiment of kokoro, a Japanese word (based on the Chinese character for the Chinese word xin) which can mean "heart," "mind," or "spirit" or, in certain contexts, all three of them at once: heart-mind-spirit.  Thus, the distinctive melancholy of autumn inhabits both of the two haiku: that combination of heartbreaking beauty and resigned acceptance each of us knows so well.  

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937)

"The Old Mill, Weston Turville" (1927)

Autumn's particular form of melancholy is, not surprisingly, present in my favorite autumnal poem by Thomas Hardy.  As is so often the case (at least for me) when reading Hardy's poetry, the poem contains a line which, once encountered, stays with you for a lifetime.

   Autumn in King's Hintock Park

Here by the baring bough

     Raking up leaves,

Often I ponder how

     Springtime deceives, --

I, an old woman now,

     Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue

     Raking up leaves,

Lords' ladies pass in view,

     Until one heaves

Sighs at life's russet hue,

     Raking up leaves!

Just as my shape you see

     Raking up leaves,

I saw, when fresh and free,

     Those memory weaves

Into grey ghosts by me,

     Raking up leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,

     Raking up leaves,

New leaves will dance on high --

     Earth never grieves! --

Will not, when missed am I

     Raking up leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).  Hardy added the subscript "1901" at the bottom of the poem. The date may be put into context by Hardy's comment on the poem in a letter he wrote to a friend in December of 1906: "I happened to be walking, or cycling, through [the park] years ago, when the incident occurred on which the verses are based."  (J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 207.) 

"Earth never grieves!"  This is the line that has stayed with me for several decades.  Years after having first come across it, I was delighted to discover this passage in a letter written by Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, his long-time companion: "Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what.  Don't you think it's a good line?  A very good line."  (Philip Larkin, letter to Monica Jones (January 29, 1958), in Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica (edited by Anthony Thwaite) (Faber and Faber 2010), page 235.)  I also heartily agree with another comment made by Larkin relating to Hardy (which has appeared here on more than one occasion): "[M]ay I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show?"  (Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic" (1966), in Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 174.)  Larkin's comment was correct at the time he wrote it in 1966.  It remains correct.

[A side-note.  Hardy's comment on the source of "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" brings to mind a statement attributed to him in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (a biography which was ascribed to his wife, Florence Hardy, when it was first published, but which was actually written mostly by Hardy): "I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred."  (Thomas Hardy and Florence Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 408.)  These lines from one of Hardy's poems come to mind: "O the regrettings infinite/When the night-processions flit/Through the mind!"  (Thomas Hardy, "The Peace-Offering.")  We each have our own "regrettings infinite" and flitting "night-processions," don't we?

A poem about Hardy by Siegfried Sassoon, who often visited Hardy at his home in Dorset, provides an evocative glimpse of Hardy and his haunting, ever-present past.

                     At Max Gate

Old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair,

Courteous to visiting acquaintance chatted

With unaloof alertness while he patted

The sheep dog whose society he preferred.

He wore an air of never having heard

That there was much that needed putting right.

Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn't there.

Good care was taken to keep him out of sight.

Head propped on hand, he sat with me alone,

Silent, the log fire flickering on his face.

Here was the seer whose words the world had known.

Someone had taken Mr. Hardy's place.

Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems: 1908-1956 (Faber and Faber 1961).  "Max Gate" was the name of Hardy's home in Dorchester.  The younger poets of Hardy's time often tended to make their way to Hardy in his later years.  For instance, in addition to Sassoon, Walter de la Mare and Edmund Blunden became his friends, and were invited for visits.  Like Sassoon, both of them wrote poems about Hardy.]

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "A City Garden" (1940)

"Earth never grieves!"  As for us, there is no escape from grief and grieving, is there?  This is neither a complaint nor a lament.  Grief and grieving are part and parcel of the beauty of the World.  What can one do?  Continue to pay attention to the beautiful particulars of the World.  Above all else, remain grateful.

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371. The poem is untitled.

"Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"  One can only hope to find the equanimity of Hsin Ch'i-chi.  Or the equanimity (and the beauty and truth) of this:

"Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring -- these are even more deeply moving.  Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as 'Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered' or 'On being prevented from visiting the blossoms' inferior to those on 'Seeing the blossoms'? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, 'This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms.  There is nothing worth seeing now.'

"In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.  Does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms?  The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house -- such a man truly knows what love means."

Kenkō (1283-1350) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 137, in Donald Keene (editor), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 115 and 118.

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Moniaive" (1885)

After all my long-windedness, I find myself returning once again to my favorite poem of autumn.  (For which I beg the forbearance of long-time -- and much-appreciated! -- readers of this blog.)

                Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).

Come to think of it, "Leaves" has something to say about grieving, equanimity, and beauty.

As does this:

The wind has brought

     enough fallen leaves

To make a fire.

Ryōkan (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens, One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 67.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979)

"Burdens Farm, with Melbury Beacon" (1943)