Dreams

Each year I grow fonder of the robins who spend the winter here, gathering into small flocks, making their way across the meadows and through the woodlands.  I suspect this fondness is partly a product of aging.  Growing up in Minnesota, I was always on the lookout for rarer, more colorful birds: cardinals and Baltimore orioles, for instance.  Robins were generally regarded as being lovable, but commonplace, with one exception: in the dark, cold, snowbound, and legendary Minnesota winters of yesteryear we all awaited "the first robin of Spring."

Ah, what an inattentive, distracted, and somnolent life I have lived! The robins stroll and peck and chatter with one another, the flock spread out widely across a bright green field on a sunny late winter afternoon: alone, but together; each one of them catching the slanting yellow light, each one of them unlike anything else in the World. Agleam.  I have been fast asleep.

                           In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,

     Under old trees the shadows of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

     Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

     And if there is

Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing

     Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

     Over the fields.  They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000), page 71.  The poem was first published in March of 1923. Ibid, page 121.

"These dreams that take my breath away."  More on this anon.  But, in the meantime, here is something complementary to put beside "In the Fields":

"Lessons from the world around us: certain localities, certain moments, 'incline' us towards them; there seems to be the pressure of a hand, an invisible hand, urging a change of direction (of the footsteps, the gaze, or the thoughts); the hand could also be a breath, like the breath behind leaves, clouds, sailing boats.  An insinuation, in an undertone like someone whispering 'look,' 'listen,' or merely 'wait.'  But is there still the time, the patience to wait?  And is 'waiting' really the right word?"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Cherry Tree (Le Cerisier) (The Delos Press 1991), pages 13-14.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "Little Park, Lyme Regis" (1956)

At times, Charlotte Mew's poetry seems to echo the religious concerns found throughout Christina Rossetti's poetry.  However, there is a hesitation, a questioning, in Mew's poems which is seldom present in Rossetti's work (which can perhaps be described as devotional).  Thus, "In the Fields" begins with a query to God: "Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?"  Mew continues: "And if there is/Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?"  What might have seemed a straightforward hymn to Nature and Creation is transformed into something else entirely by those four lovely and remarkable lines. (By the way, "the strange heart of any everlasting thing" deserves a great deal of attention in itself.  "Strange heart"?  Wonderful.)

But I fear I am wandering too far into the much-to-be-avoided territory of explanation and explication.  It is the beguiling beauty of "these dreams that take my breath away" which captures me, and which in turn leads to this:

               Do Dreams Lie Deeper?

          His dust looks up to the changing sky

               Through daisies' eyes;

          And when a swallow flies

               Only so high

          He hears her going by

     As daisies do.  He does not die

In this brown earth where he was glad enough to lie.

          But looking up from that other bed,

     "There is something more my own," he said,

     "Than hands or feet or this restless head

          That must be buried when I am dead.

     The Trumpet may wake every other sleeper.

               Do dreams lie deeper --?

                    And what sunrise

     When these are shut shall open their little eyes?

     They are my children, they have very lovely faces --

          And how does one bury the breathless dreams?

          They are not of the earth and not of the sea,

They have no friends here but the flakes of the falling snow;

               You and I will go down two paces --

                    Where do they go?"

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, pages 73-74.  The poem was first published in The Rambling Sailor (Poetry Bookshop 1929) after Mew's death in 1928.  

I confess that I have never known quite what to make of this, other than to say that I love it.  I do not propose to pick apart its many wonders.  But please compare "Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?" with this: "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  One senses the hesitation and questioning that I mentioned above.  But, again, it is the beauty which captures me.  "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  As well as this: "Do dreams lie deeper --?" And this: "You and I will go down two paces --/Where do they go?"

Once more, some thoughts by Philippe Jaccottet may be apt, not as a direct commentary on Mew's two poems, but as a kindred exploration of the World:

"Of all my uncertainties, the least uncertain (the one least removed from the first glimmers of a belief) is the one given to me by poetic experience: the thought that there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being.  But I am incapable of attributing to this unknown, to that, any of the names allotted to it in turn by history.  Can it therefore teach me no lesson -- outside the poetry in which it speaks --, offer me no directive in the way I conduct my life?

"As I reflect on all this I begin to see nonetheless that the poetic experience does give me direction, at least towards a sense of the high; and this is because I am quite naturally led to see poetry as a glimpse of the Highest and to regard it in a sense (and why not?) as it has been regarded from its very beginnings, as a mirror of the heavens."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (The Delos Press/The Menard Press 1997), page 157. The italics appear in the original text.

Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)

"There is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being."  In his poetry and prose, Philippe Jaccottet is an eloquent, patient, and painstaking observer of the beautiful particulars of the World, but a key feature of his work is his continual recognition of the ineffable mystery that lies at the heart of the World.  Words will always fail us.

Dreams: absolute clarity coupled with evanescence.  Gone in an instant, never to be recalled.  "These dreams that take my breath away."  "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  Charlotte Mew was onto something.  But the mystery remains.

                     The Sunlit House

White through the gate it gleamed and slept

     In shuttered sunshine: the parched garden flowers,

Their fallen petals from the beds unswept,

     Like children unloved and ill-kept

               Dreamed through the hours.

Two blue hydrangeas by the blistered door, burned brown,

     Watched there and no one in the town

     Cared to go past it, night or day,

     Though why this was they wouldn't say.

But I, the stranger, knew that I must stay,

     Pace up the weed-grown paths and down,

     Till one afternoon -- there is just a doubt --

     But I fancy I heard a tiny shout --

     From an upper window a bird flew out --

               And I went my way.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, page 55.  The poem was written before July 29, 1913, and was first published in 1921.  Ibid, page 117.

Philippe Jaccottet has also written of a garden:

"I should very much like to go beyond these meagre findings, to extract from these scattered signs an entire sentence which would act as a commandment.  I cannot.  I claimed in the past to be a 'servant of the visible world.'  Yet what I do is more like the work of a gardener tending a garden and too often neglecting it: the weeds of time.

"Where are the gods of this garden?  I sometimes see my uncertainties as the snowflakes whirled by the wind, stirred, blown upwards, abandoned, or the birds half obeying the wind, half playing with it, and offering us the sight of wings which are sometimes as black as night, sometimes gleaming with the reflection of some strange light.

"(So it would be possible to live without definite hopes, but not without help, with the thought -- so close to certainty -- that if there is a single hope, a single opening for man, it would not be refused to someone who had lived 'beneath this sky.')

"(The highest hope would be that the whole sky were really a gaze.)"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures, page 159.

Gilbert Spencer, "Wooded Landscape"

"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) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 7, in Donald Keene (editor and translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Perhaps we should think of this uncertain life as a series of dreams. If we are attentive -- and, above all else, grateful -- these dreams can take our breath away.

To a mountain village

   at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

   from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

All winter long, the robins have charmingly chattered amongst themselves about practical matters (the weather, the search for food, where to spend the night) as they walked and flitted across the meadows.  But, at this time of year, by ones and twos they fly up into the bare branches of the bordering trees and begin to sing.

          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 (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.  Ury provides this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window" (c. 1937)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Seven: Arrival

Last week the first crocuses appeared: two clumps of light purple, dark purple, and white flowers in the muddy far corner of a neighbor's front yard, next to the sidewalk.  This week they have arrived in earnest, blooming everywhere, increasing in number by the day.  More tentatively, a few daffodils with small yellow flowers have emerged here and there.  The tulips still bide their time.

All of this can be explained perfectly well by science, of course.  Or perhaps not.

            The Year's Awakening

How do you know that the pilgrim track

Along the belting zodiac

Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds

Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds

And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud

Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,

And never as yet a tinct of spring

Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;

        O vespering bird, how do you know,

                How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,

Hid in your bed from sight and sound,

Without a turn in temperature,

With weather life can scarce endure,

That light has won a fraction's strength,

And day put on some moments' length,

Whereof in merest rote will come,

Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;

        O crocus root, how do you know,

                How do you know?

Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces (Macmillan 1914).

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James is coy.  One senses that he has a certain sympathy with mysticism (which, for me, is the heart of the book), but he generally remains circumspect with respect to his own feelings until he reaches his "Conclusions."  Then, in the final paragraph, he writes:

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.  By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true."

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green, and Co. 1902), page 519.

There are those who will think that James does not go far enough. Others will think that he goes too far.  I am simply grateful for this thoughtful articulation of a reasonable way to look at, and live in, the World.  I might quibble with "consciousness" as being too intellectual, abstract, or psychological.  On the other hand, James' philosophy and writings are grounded in psychology (or so it seems to me), so I can understand why he would use the word.  I would lean more toward the presence of "other worlds" of "existence" or "being," rather than "consciousness."  Using either of those words brings immanence into consideration.  But I am far out of my depth at this point.  To wit: please don't ask me what "existence," "being," or "immanence" mean.  I will have no answer.  I have only inarticulable inklings about these things.

Edward Salter (1835-1934), "Dolerw House and Gardens" (1876)

There is one fine phrase of James' that I have no quibble with whatsoever: "higher energies filter in."  As a Wordsworthian pantheist, I find this thought to be wholly congenial, and true.  For instance: spring is here, regardless of the date on the calendar. Higher energies filter in, bearing messages.  We only need to step out the door to receive them.

          A Contemplation upon Flowers

Brave flowers -- that I could gallant it like you,

          And be as little vain!

You come abroad, and make a harmless shew,

          And to your beds of earth again.

You are not proud:  you know your birth:

For your embroidered garments are from earth.

You do obey your months and times, but I

          Would have it ever spring:

My fate would know no winter, never die,

          Nor think of such a thing.

Oh, that I could my bed of earth but view

And smile, and look as cheerfully as you!

Oh, teach me to see death and not to fear,

          But rather to take truce!

How often have I seen you at a bier,

          And there look fresh and spruce!

You fragrant flowers, then teach me, that my breath

Like yours may sweeten and perfume my death.

Henry King (1592-1669), in Norman Ault (editor), Seventeenth Century Lyrics from the Original Texts (William Sloane 1950).

William James continues the paragraph quoted above as follows:

"I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all.  But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!'  Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds.  Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament, -- more intricately built than physical science allows."

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, page 519 (italics in original text).

John Knight (1842-1908), "English Landscape"

James ends the final paragraph of his "Conclusions" with these words (which immediately follow the quotation above):

"So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express.  Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?"

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, p. 519.

The last sentence is absolutely wonderful.  It is revealing (and moving) to see James speak of "faithfulness" in the context of the intellectually distancing term "over-belief."  And the sudden appearance of "God" is startling.  The sentence is beautiful, extraordinary. 

                              In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,

     Under old trees the shadows of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

     Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

     And if there is

Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing

     Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

     Over the fields.  They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

Alfred East (1844-1913), "A Bend in the River"

Choristers And Companions

While out for an afternoon walk this past week, I realized that I often fail to listen to what is going on around me.  My path takes me through meadows and wooded areas in Discovery Park, which, although it is a city park, is akin to a nature reserve.  According to the Seattle Audubon Society, more than 250 species of birds have been seen in the Park, including thrushes, warblers, wrens, swallows, chickadees, goldfinches, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, vireos, and waxwings.  And, of course, robins, sparrows, jays, and crows.

Not surprisingly, therefore, my walks take place amid a chorus of singing, twittering, chirping, chattering, whistling, and warbling.  But too often I am daydreaming, and the music passes me by.

"It was widely rumored that certain persons had heard celestial music coming down from heaven around two o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day.  And they say it has been heard every eighth night since.  Some told me in all seriousness that they actually heard the music at such and such a place on such and such a night.  Others dismissed it as simply a prank played by the wanton wind.  I, for one, was inclined to take the idea seriously, but could neither accept it as completely true or reject it as absolutely impossible.  For heaven and earth are filled with strange and mysterious powers. . . . In any event, I found myself intrigued, and invited a group of my friends to come to my humble cottage on the nineteenth day of March.  We all listened intently, from early evening on, but we heard nothing until the first sunbeams touched the far end of the eastern sky. Then all at once we heard a voice -- we heard music -- coming from the plum tree near my window.
                                     
                                             Only birds
                                        sing the music of heaven
                                             in this world."

Issa (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa), in Nobuyuki Yuasa, A Year of My Life: A Translation of Issa's Oraga Haru (University of California 1972). Oraga Haru was written in 1819.

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

In his poem "Bird-Language" (which has appeared here previously), W. H. Auden speculates that "fear . . . rage, bravado, and lust" may be heard in "the words/Uttered on all sides by birds," but he ultimately concludes that "All other notes that birds employ/Sound like synonyms for joy."  Yes, I concede that all is not sweetness and light in the world of bird communication.  Yet, compared with human communication, all bird conversations (and soliloquies) sound like celestial music to me.  (Save, perhaps, for the cawing of crows and the screeching of jays.)

Call me sentimental, but I am inclined to the view that those unseen choristers -- hidden off in the tall grasses of the meadows or up in the leafy boughs of trees -- are indeed motivated by joy.  Joy and beneficence.

     To the Nightingale, and Robin Red-Breast

When I departed am, ring thou my knell,
Thou pitiful, and pretty Philomel:
And when I'm laid out for a corse, then be
Thou sexton (red-breast) for to cover me.

Robert Herrick, Poem 279, Hesperides (1648).  In the third line, Herrick uses the word "corse" rather than "corpse."

Herrick was wont to revisit his favorite themes.  He was particularly fond of robins.

                 To Robin Red-breast

Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this,
     Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.

Robert Herrick, Poem 50, Ibid.

The image of birds providing kind offices to the dead was a common one in the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan periods.  In the following poem by John Webster, those offices are performed by the robin and the wren.  (In a moment, we shall hear of the wren from Issa.)

                              A Dirge

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.

John Webster, from the play The White Devil (1612).

Michael Garton (1935-2004), "Woodland Clearing"

I am well aware that the notion of birds as heavenly choristers is looked upon askance by modern products of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment." These moderns are equally troubled by the notion of a human soul.  For them, human beings, and human "reason" and "rationality," are the measure of all things.  How odd and how sad it is to constrict humanity, the World, and existence in such a fashion.

I am not in a position to make pronouncements about the existence or non-existence of heaven or of the soul.  Who would presume to do so?  These things are not matters of theology.  Nor are they matters of science. Theology and science both posit a certainty that does not exist.

                              Here Lies a Prisoner

               Leave him:  he's quiet enough:  and what matter
               Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
          that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                              Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).

Christopher Sanders, "Sunlight through a Willow Tree at Kew" (1958)

Sooner or later, one comes to the realization that there are no certainties in life.  Except one.  Our death.  Anyone who tells you otherwise -- theologians, scientists, politicians, social or political "activists" of any stripe -- is dissembling.  They know nothing.

In fact, this uncertainty is a glorious thing.  It is why we turn to poets and artists, poems and paintings.

Will we spend eternity listening to birds carrying on conversations above our graves?  Nobody knows.

     Look!  this lonely grave,
With the wren
     That is always here.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 342.

Fairlie Harmar, "The Bridge at Monxton" (1916)

Becoming A Poem

Those who have departed often return unexpectedly.  One then feels ashamed for having failed to properly attend to one's memories of them. This is not a matter of ghosts or of spirits, but of full-bodied presences in the mind's-eye:  when they return, they are right there in front of us.  Silent.

          Last Poem

Stand at the grave's head
Of any common
Man or woman,
Thomas Hardy said,
And in the silence
What they were,
Their life, becomes a poem.

And so with my dead,
As I know them
Now, in his
And her
Long silences;
And wait for, yet a while hence,
My own silence.

F. T. Prince, Collected Poems: 1935-1992 (The Sheep Meadow Press 1993).

Here is the lovely inspiration for Prince's poem:

"The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."

Thomas Hardy, notebook entry for May 29, 1872, in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978).

I'm surprised that Prince uses "common" rather than Hardy's "prosaic": the transition from "prosaic" to "poem" is wonderful.  I'd wager that Hardy would have described himself as prosaic.  Aren't we all?  And "common" as well.  Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't faced the facts.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

The following passage perhaps provides a roundabout instance of what Hardy has in mind.

Thus did he speak.  "I see around me here
Things which you cannot see:  we die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left."

William Wordsworth, "Book First: The Wanderer," lines 469-474, The Excursion, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume V (Oxford University Press 1949), page 24.

The lines are spoken by "the Wanderer."  "The Author" has found him drowsing in the sun, "the shadows of the breezy elms above/Dappling his face."  Ibid, lines 440-441.  The Excursion is a diffuse poem, with a tendency towards the long-winded, but one of the things that Wordsworth may be getting at is that we all have it in us to live, like the Wanderer, in our own "peculiar nook of earth."  But does that nook indeed die with us?  Is there "no memorial left" of how we have lived?

Hardy suggests that each of us ("prosaic" though we are), together with our peculiar nook, becomes a poem.  It certainly seems that way when the departed return to visit us.  A sentimental notion, I concede.  But I have no quarrel with sentimentality.

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

I suspect that the subject matter of this post may be traceable to the fact that I have been visiting Thomas Hardy's poetry over the past few weeks.  As I have noted in the past, communings with the departed are a matter-of-fact occurrence in Hardy's poetry.  Things are seen out of the corner of one's eye.  There are tappings on windows and whispers in the boughs of trees. But these signals are never a cause for alarm.  Hardy -- sunk in the past as he was -- treats them as commonplaces.  Who does not think of the dead? And who's to say they are not thinking of us?

Hardy admired the poetry of Charlotte Mew, and he, along with others, helped procure a Civil List Pension for her when she was in financial straits.  The departed are plentiful in her poetry as well.

                              Here Lies a Prisoner

               Leave him:  he's quiet enough:  and what matter
               Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
          that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                                   Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Downie Mill" (1962)

In the end, we all return to silence, don't we?

       The Best Thing to Say

The best thing to say is nothing
And that I do not say,
But I will say it, when I lie
In silence all the day.

C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Carcanet 1998).

"The Best Thing to Say" is one of Sisson's harrowing final poems, a selection of which appeared here five years ago.  He doesn't present a pretty picture.  Thus, it falls upon Thomas Hardy -- the purported "pessimist" -- to provide us with hope.  Yes, each of us returns to silence.  But we each become a poem.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Braes o' Lundie"

Prisoners

I readily admit that I cannot come up with a unifying theme that brilliantly ties together all of the following poems.  I have encountered them by chance over the years, and now they have come to be associated with one another in my mind.  What do they share?  A single word.

          The Prisoners

Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.

James Reeves, Subsong (Heinemann 1969).

I suppose that Plato's cave may come to mind.  Although, as soon as I come up with something like that, I cringe.  No allusion-hunting or symbol-mongering permitted.  Belay that explication!

Albert Scott Cox (1863-1920), "French Farm"

          So Long in Prison

Sunlight on the shore proclaims:
This is your day of liberation.
The south wind has a handshake for
The lean prisoner with haunted eyes.

Should not your voice, so long in prison,
Be raucous as a gull's?
But hear what song those wings
Carving the vacant spaces of the air
Raise like a statue to this day's release.

James Reeves, Ibid.

The two poems appear side-by-side in Subsong.

Dane Maw, "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)

A Sorrowful Sigh of a Prisoner

Lord, comest Thou to me?
     My heart is cold and dead:
Alas that such a heart should be
     The place to lay Thy head!

Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (edited by R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers) (Penguin 2001).

On the surface, Rossetti's devotional verse seems to have a great deal of certainty about it.  But, when read in the context of her non-religious verse, a tension becomes noticeable -- something to do with the heart versus the soul, I would guess.

David Chatterton (1900-1963), "River Scene with Bridge"

                                 Here Lies a Prisoner

                 Leave him: he's quiet enough: and what matter
                 Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
     that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                                      Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000). In the original, the third line is a single line.  However, due to margin limitations, it does not appear as such here.

This is the sort of breathtaking poem that makes one wonder why Charlotte Mew's poetry is not better known.  Further, such a wondrous thing gives one pause:  what might English (and American) poetry be like now if Mew and Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen had lived long and healthy lives?

Delmar Harmood Banner

"Yews in Mardale Churchyard before Destruction" (1945)

Perspective, Part Seven: "What's Little June To A Great Broken World . . . What's The Broken World To June"?

The following poem was written by Charlotte Mew when the enormity of the First World War had begun to sink in, particularly after the First and Second Battles of Ypres in the autumn of 1914 and the spring of 1915.  The first six lines are a moving evocation of the "grief" and "dread" of that time. But the final two lines turn the poem into something else entirely -- without minimizing that grief and dread.

                              June, 1915

Who thinks of June's first rose to-day?
        Only some child, perhaps, with shining eyes and rough bright hair will
                     reach it down
In a green sunny lane, to us almost as far away
        As are the fearless stars from these veiled lamps of town.
What's little June to a great broken world with eyes gone dim
From too much looking on the face of grief, the face of dread?
        Or what's the broken world to June and him
Of the small eager hand, the shining eyes, the rough bright head?

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).  The second line is a single line, but does not appear as such due to margin limitations.

The phrases "What's little June to a great broken world" and "what's the broken world to June" are marvelous in and of themselves.  But the transformation that takes place during the movement from the first phrase to the second and onward to the close of the poem is remarkable.

John Linnell, "The Windmill" (1844)

As I have noted before, Thomas Hardy was a great admirer of Charlotte Mew's poetry.  He, along with John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, took the initiative to obtain a Civil List Pension for her due to her lack of financial resources.  After learning that she had been awarded the Pension, she wrote a letter to Hardy thanking him for his efforts.  The letter reads, in part:

"It seems so generous -- unreasonable -- when -- from head to feet . . . I know myself to be unworthy of it.  I owe it to the amazing kindness of friends to most of whom I am practically a stranger -- and to the weight of great names -- with yours coming first.  I am told that I ought to be proud that you should have spoken for me -- indeed I ought -- But pride -- in that sense -- with me (I hope you will understand) -- is a sort of surprise and confusion -- a humbling but a touching thing.  What I do feel is gratitude and entire unworthiness.  And you will believe that I thank you from my heart."

Letter from Charlotte Mew to Thomas Hardy (January 1, 1924), in Betty Falkenberg, "A Letter from Charlotte Mew," PN Review, Volume 32, Number 3 (2006).

John Linnell, "Reapers, Noonday Rest" (1865)

There are interesting parallels between the final two lines of Mew's "June, 1915" and Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'."  Hardy's poem was first published in January of 1916.  However, it was written (according to the date appended to it by Hardy) in 1915.  Thus, Mew and Hardy were thinking similar thoughts, and putting them to paper, in the same dispiriting year.  And both of them were able to pull off a difficult-to-achieve trick:  placing things into a timeless perspective without slighting the ghastliness of what was currently taking place, and without abandoning empathy for those who were immediately affected by that ghastliness.

  In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'

                        I
Only a man harrowing clods
     In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
     Half asleep as they stalk.

                        II
Only thin smoke without flame
     From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
     Though Dynasties pass.

                        III
Yonder a maid and her wight
     Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
     Ere their story die.

          1915.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).

John Linnell, "Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load" (1853)

June. Lost Love.

Charlotte Mew was unlucky in love, and this is often reflected (obliquely) in her poetry.  One senses the depth of her disappointment, but self-pity is not evident.  She stoically moves forward.  Or is she whistling in the dark?  And there is something else -- the future, ultimate thing that we all shall come to -- that insistently sidles along beside her, often seeming to be of comfort.

                    From a Window

        Up here, with June, the sycamore throws
        Across the window a whispering screen;
    I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,
Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.
        But I mean to go through the door without fear,
        Not caring much what happens here
                        When I'm away: --
How green the screen is across the panes
        Or who goes laughing along the lanes
    With my old lover all the summer day.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929.

The "whispering screen" of the sycamore is beautiful, as is the subsequent "how green the screen is across the panes."  Note the equivocation of "not caring much what happens here" in line 6.  Writing "sycamore more" (line 3) is a risky move, isn't it?

Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher (1923-2004), "Flint Castle" (1996)

"From a Window" is reminiscent of two other poems by Mew -- poems without the ever-present shadow so close at hand.

          I So Liked Spring

    I so liked Spring last year
        Because you were here; --
            The thrushes too --
Because it was these you so liked to hear --
            I so liked you --

        This year's a different thing, --
            I'll not think of you --
But I'll like Spring because it is simply Spring
            As the thrushes do.

Charlotte Mew, Ibid.

Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher, "Pumpkin Field"

                            Sea Love

Tide be runnin' the great world over;
          T'was only last June-month, I mind, that we
Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the lover
          So everlastin' as the sea.

Heer's the same little fishes that sputter and swim
          Wi' the moon's old glim on the grey, wet sand
An' him no more to me nor me to him
          Than the wind goin' over my hand.

Charlotte Mew, The Farmer's Bride (1921 edition).

The rhythm of the sea can be felt in "the toss and the call in the breast of the lover" in line 3.  The final two lines are sad and true and perfect:  stoic and resigned, but still with that hint of whistling in the dark.  "The wind goin' over my hand" is particularly lovely, I think.

Geoffery Scowcroft Fletcher, "Sea Palling, Norfolk"

"When I Look At Lovely Things Which Pass"

Perhaps I am easy to please, but I never cease to be amazed at the way these things work.  Now -- just as the last of the cherry, apple, and pear blossoms drift to the ground -- on come the lilacs, the rhododendrons, and the azaleas (to name but a few).

And they in turn will soon be replaced, until all of this rising and opening and fading and falling has its denouement in an empty December to come. But there is no need to dwell on that now.

William Callow (1812-1908), "Easby Abbey, Yorkshire" (1853)

                           In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,
     Under old trees the shadows of young leaves
Dancing to please the wind along the grass,
     Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
     And if there is
Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing
     Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
     Over the fields.  They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000.) The poem was first published in 1923.

William Callow, "Old Avenue, Inveraray"

The following poem by Walter de la Mare (which has appeared here before, but which is worth revisiting) provides, I think, a nice complement to Mew's poem.

             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, O Lovely England and Other Poems (1953).

William Callow, "Confluence of the Greta and the Tees" (1872)

Perspective, Part Three: "Our Windows, Too, Are Clouded Glass"

We live in a world of shameless self-promotion, overweening egotism, and dubious, spurious, and/or ill-gotten "accomplishments."  What evidence supports this assertion?  Any head-of-state that you can name.  And any "celebrity" that you can name.

Of course, this has always been the way of the world.  However, this age differs significantly from previous ages:  in our time, these people insert themselves into our consciousness in electronic ways that are pervasive and well-nigh unavoidable.  Unless, say, one chooses to repair to a yurt on an empty, wind-swept steppe somewhere in Mongolia.  (Provided that the steppe is free of cellphone towers, of course.)

In the absence of an avenue of escape, one needs perspective.  One needs to remind oneself that these sorts of people are not normal.  They have nothing to do with real life, or with our lives.  Humility and empathy are alien to them.  Thus, they would not know what to make of a poem such as the following.  Never in a million years would it occur to them that Charlotte Mew is trying to tell us something about ourselves, something that we ignore at peril to our souls.

                                       Duncan Grant, "Still Life" (1957)

                 On the Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows -- every pane --
     Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
     The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk
     Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
     With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
     The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
          The hare-bell bowing on his stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
     To fainter music; nor do we to them
               Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
     Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
     To them, yes, every pane!

Charlotte Mew, The Farmer's Bride (1916).

                                Duncan Grant, "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

"Virtue"

There is something to be said for staying the course.  (While being mindful that "everything passes and vanishes," as William Allingham writes.)  Or does staying the course only seem admirable from without?  Perhaps what is seen as faith and fortitude from the outside is resignation and habit from the inside.  On the other hand, this line by Bob Dylan has haunted me for quite some time (since 1975, to be exact):  "And old men with broken teeth stranded without love."  ("Shelter from the Storm," Blood on the Tracks.)

The following poem by Bernard O'Donoghue is, along with Norman MacCaig's "Old Couple in a Bar," offered as a further commentary on (i.e., an attempt to escape from) Charlotte Mew's "frozen ghosts" of Brittany.

                              George Bellows, "The Lone Tenement" (1909)

                           Virtue

He had been unfaithful once, unlikely
as that seemed when, silver-haired and blind,
he let her lead him up the aisle each Sunday.
Some Jezebel, the story was, had lured him
off to Blackpool one weekend, long in the past.
I went along to Mass when I came home,
and enjoyed hearing the praise on every side
of such an exemplary grandnephew.
After he died, she moved to sheltered housing
somewhere near Parbold in the scenic north
of Lancashire, but we sometimes still went
to take her to Mass, tearfully sniffing
into her scented hankie, recalling George
and how she missed his arm upon her shoulder.

Bernard O'Donoghue, The Times Literary Supplement (November 19, 2004).

                                George Bellows, "Blue Morning" (1909)

"Old Couple In A Bar"

Charlotte Mew's vision of the old couple in Brittany as a pair of "frozen ghosts" is a bit discomfiting.  Thus, an alternative view of love in old age is worth considering.

                       Old Couple in a Bar

They sit without speaking, looking straight ahead.
They've said it all before, they've seen it all before.
They're content.

They sit without moving: Ozymandias and Sphinx.

He says something! -- and she answers, smiling,
and taps him flirtatiously on the arm:
Daphnis and Chloe: with Edinburgh accents.

Ewen McCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).  MacCaig wrote the poem in December of 1980, at the age of 70.

                                     Samuel Palmer, "Sheep in the Shade"

MacCaig performs a neat trick by moving from the "frown, and wrinkled lip" of the "shattered visage" of Shelley's Ozymandias to the pastoral love of Daphnis and Chloe on a timeless Greek island.  A shepherdess and a shepherd ("with Edinburgh accents") sitting in a pub.  Yes, this is indeed preferable to "frozen ghosts."  (Although there is a time and a place for frozen ghosts as well.  I would not wish to be without them entirely.)

                   Samuel Palmer, "Pastoral with a Horse-Chestnut Tree"

"Frozen Ghosts"

Some may disagree, but I think that Charlotte Mew and A. E. Housman do have something in common:  their love poetry is nearly always about either unrequited love or love requited, but lost.  The following poem by Mew seems to depart from the pattern.  Still, I seem to detect a specter of future loss hovering at the edges.  But perhaps I am being unfairly pessimistic.  I would not wish to deprive Mew of any happiness she was able to find.

                                   The Road to Kerity

Do you remember the two old people we passed on the road to Kerity,
Resting their sack, on the stones, by the drenched wayside,
Looking at us with their lightless eyes through the driving rain and then
     out again
To the rocks and the long white line of the tide:
Frozen ghosts that were children once, husband and wife, father and
     mother,
Looking at us with those frozen eyes --; have you ever seen anything quite
     so chilled or so old?
                       But we -- with our arms about each other,
                               We did not feel the cold!

Charlotte Mew, The Farmer's Bride (1921).  Kerity is a sea-side village in Brittany.  Please note that lines 3, 5, and 6 are single lines, but the length limitations of this format do not permit them to appear as such.

                           James McIntosh Patrick, "City Garden" (1979)

The following poem is, alas, more in keeping with the way Mew's life turned out.  But here is the proverbial rub:  poetry is oftentimes born of sadness, isn't it?

               I so liked Spring

    I so liked Spring last year
        Because you were here; --
                The thrushes too --
Because it was these you so liked to hear --
                I so liked you --

        This year's a different thing, --
                I'll not think of you --
But I'll like Spring because it is simply Spring
                As the thrushes do.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).

                            James McIntosh Patrick, "A City Garden" (1940)

Perspective, Part One: "O Little Waking Hour Of Life Out Of Sleep!"

"Eternity is not length of life but depth of life" -- the epitaph discovered by Charlotte Mew on a child's gravestone in a rural churchyard -- got me to thinking about all of those dreamy, death-haunted poems written by the poets of the 1890s.  I recently posted Ernest Dowson's "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam," which contains the quintessential Decadent statement on the matter:  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

The following poem by Arthur Symons is reminiscent of Dowson's poem. But, in addition, it -- like the epitaph found by Mew -- helps to put things into perspective.

              Tristram Hillier, "Snails" (from Shell Nature Studies) (1957)

                            Epilogue

O little waking hour of life out of sleep!
When I consider the many million years
I was not yet, and the many million years
I shall not be, it is easy to think of the sleep
I shall sleep for the second time without hopes or fears.
Surely my sleep for the million years was deep?
I remember no dreams from the million years, and it seems
I may sleep for as many million years without dreams.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

Of course, one might be prompted to respond:  "That is all very well and good, assuming you have a soul!"

              Tristram Hillier, "Fossils" (from Shell Nature Studies) (1957)

"Eternity Is Not Length Of Life But Depth Of Life"

Charlotte Mew, like any self-respecting Victorian poet, wrote her share of graveyard poems.  Although I think of Mew as a modern poet, her life (she was born in 1869, and died in 1928) spanned both the Victorian and the "modern" worlds.  Perhaps her funerary poems are a sort of remnant of her Victorian origins (with a touch of Romanticism thrown in).

Before turning to one of Mew's poems, here is a passage from her essay "The Country Sunday":

"Often on moonlit nights, while from within the church the wheezy voluntary sounded, the moon, to my thought, has touched white headstones, giving them a weird and wakeful prominence -- leaving the unmarked mounds bathed in a gentler, more forgetful light.  Under the sward they slumbered more securely, those of whom men recorded nothing, leaving their virtues and their names with God; those whom man had remembered seeming to have missed their rest.  Still I recall one puzzling line, written on a small marble slab over a child, whose short years numbered only three -- 'Eternity is not length of life but depth of life,' and I have since many times wondered what was the history of that little child."

Charlotte Mew, "The Country Sunday" (published in 1905), Collected Poems and Prose (edited by Val Warner) (Virago Press 1981), page 371.

                     Harold Hussey, "Tomb in Hurley Churchyard" (1940)

It is difficult to top the unknown philosopher who carved "Eternity is not length of life but depth of life" on the child's grave marker.  This rural philosopher may have stolen a march on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, many years later, wrote:  "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311 (Pears/McGuinness translation).

The following poem by Mew seems appropriate.

            On Youth Struck Down
         (From an unfinished elegy)

Oh! Death what have you to say?
'Like a bride -- like a bride-groom they ride away:
You shall go back to make up the fire,
To learn patience -- to learn grief,
To learn sleep when the light has quite gone out of your earthly skies,
But they have the light in their eyes
               To the end of their day.'

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).

                                                    John Piper
     "Tombstones, Holy Trinity Churchyard, Hinton-in-the-Hedges" (1940)

"A Quoi Bon Dire?"

Charlotte Mew's "Smile, Death" (which appeared in my previous post) has a bit of a Romantic/Gothic air to it that is not necessarily characteristic of Mew's poetry as a whole.  Although she certainly addresses Love and Time and Death in her poems, she usually does so in a lower-case fashion.  The following poem is a fine example.  Two possible translations of the title are:  "What's the good of saying/speaking?" or "What's the point of saying/speaking?"

                        Beryl Sinclair (1901-1967), "Winter, Regent's Park"

               A Quoi Bon Dire?

     Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
     And everybody thinks that you are dead,
                         But I.

     So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
     And everybody sees that I am old
                         But you.

     And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
     That nobody can love their way again
                         While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

Charlotte Mew, The Farmer's Bride (1916).

To my mind (and I claim no originality to this thought), the tone and diction of a poem such as "A Quoi Bon Dire?" show that Mew is in the line that moves from Thomas Hardy through Edward Thomas to Philip Larkin (to name the key figures).  This line, which is often thought of as being poetically "traditional" (or "old-fashioned"), sounds more contemporary and more natural to my ear than the oftentimes portentous and artificial "Modernism" of Eliot and Pound and their followers, which to me sounds dated and stilted.

                            Beryl Sinclair, "Winter, Regent's Park" (1941)      

"On, On Let Us Skate Past The Sleeping Willows Dusted With Snow"

Over the past few posts I have inadvertently stumbled into a sort of contemplation of Life and Fate from a cosmic perspective.  It all began innocently enough with Christina Rossetti's "Love hath a name of Death." From there, one thing led to another.

A return to Earth is in order.  Perhaps an ice-skating excursion with Charlotte Mew (following our earlier excursions with Edmund Blunden and A. S. J. Tessimond) will do the trick.  Although, come to think of it, Mew is not exactly the jolly, happy-go-lucky ice-skating type . . .

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

                              Smile, Death

Smile, Death, see I smile as I come to you
Straight from the road and the moor that I leave behind,
Nothing on earth to me was like this wind-blown space,
Nothing was like the road, but at the end there was a vision or a face
               And the eyes were not always kind.

    Smile, Death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me,
On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow;
Fast, fast down the frozen stream, with the moor and the road and the
  vision behind,
    (Show me your face, why the eyes are kind!)
And we will not speak of life or believe in it or remember it as we go.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).  Please note that line 8 is a single line, but the length limitations of this format do not permit it to appear as a single line.  The other (somewhat idiosyncratic) line indentations are Mew's own.

                    Eliot Hodgkin, "Feathers and Hyacinth Heads" (1962)

In a note to the poem, John Newton (the editor and annotator of Mew's Complete Poems) states:  "This poem and 'Moorland Night' are perhaps the poems of Mew's that show the clearest signs of her enthusiasm for Emily Bronte's poetry."  Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).  I would venture to say that, in "Smile, Death," Mew gives Bronte a run for her money when it comes to gloomy moorland meditations.

In any case, I suppose that we have now returned to Earth from the cosmos, after a fashion.

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Seven Brussels Sprouts" (1955)