Leaves, Again

When I was growing up in Minnesota, we used to preserve fallen leaves by ironing them between two sheets of wax paper.  Otherwise, a saved leaf was likely to one day crumble to dust in your hands.

I remember searching for the "perfect" leaf to preserve.  Oak.  Elm.  Maple. Birch.

Where have all those wax-encased leaves gone to?  In a box or a scrapbook somewhere.  But where?

Green thoughts, the feel of pink -- remembered in the mind;
but those spring splendors, like dreams, are gone beyond recall.
The whole village in yellow leaves, I shut the gate, lie down --
once again the year is already deep into fall.

Kashiwagi Jotei (1763-1819) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

The fallen leaves are always reminding us of . . . something.  In the grand scheme of things, they whisper to us of transience and mortality.  No surprise there.  But they get more personal than that.  I suspect that most of us could trace a path back into our past leaf by leaf, if we wished.

Do you remember that day in the park, and the leaf that you saved so as to never lose the memory of that moment?  Who knows how far back we could go?

               A Musician's Wife

Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.

And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren't
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage.  Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.

You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.

And always, when I came back to my sister's
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.

Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
Against the shutters.  And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again.

Weldon Kees, in Donald Justice (editor), The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press 1975).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

The trees are nearly empty.  The wind and the rain have seen to that.  Now is when our companionship with leaves begins in earnest.  Call me sentimental (I am unapologetically guilty), accuse me of embracing the Pathetic Fallacy (guilty again), but, as the fallen leaves stroll with me down the street, the wind coming up from behind us, I cannot help but feel that we are in this together.

                                        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, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Chestnut Leaves" (1973)

When it comes to leaves, and their place in our lives, a visit to Robert Frost is a necessity.  He knew a thing or two about this topic.  In his simple-sly way he says it all.

              In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will (1913).

"A crowd, a host, of golden daffodils . . . fluttering and dancing in the breeze."  (William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.")

The arc of our life is not complicated:  dancing flowers and fallen leaves.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Four Dead Leaves" (1961)

Persistence

One of my afternoon walks takes me through a former army post (now a park) that is located on the bluffs beside Puget Sound.  During the Second World War, the post was a way-stop for those departing to the Pacific.  One stretch of the walk takes me along an abandoned road.  On the west side of the road a wide meadow slopes down to the Sound -- an expanse of glittering blue or flat grey, according to the weather.  On the other side, a meadow slopes upward to what was once the parade ground.

Each year I watch the meadows edge further and further into the road. During the summer, wild sweet peas move towards one another from either side.  The ever-present moss of this part of the world has worked its way into the cracks of the asphalt.  In their seasons, swallows, thrushes, and warblers skim across the meadow grasses.

How long before the road vanishes?  Will I be around to see it?

                    Rose Bay Willow Herb

The flower of our times, the gipsy of hedgesides
Has turned the squatter of bomb, demolition
And building sites, following machines
As the gull the plough.  Still in Cullen's Planting
It crowds the gaps in the system of blackberry bushes
And covers your coat in Autumn with the silken kisses
Of its seeds or on a windy day
Thousands of parachutes in exodus
Blow across Partridge Hill; it marches in lanes
Along the hedgesides most recently cleared.
But now in towns and cities, climbing heaps
Of dusty rubble and perching in cavities
Of broken walls, it sweeps to confrontations,
The Nature for ever at our cultured elbow,
Ready, should we make a fatal mistake,
To grow in the bulldozer's scoop and through the telly.

Stanley Cook, Woods Beyond a Cornfield: Collected Poems (Smith/Doorstop Books 1995).

H. C. Bryer

"79 1-2 High Street, Southampton, with Norman Chimney" (1950)

I do not offer my anecdote as some sort of metaphor for, say, Mortality, the Implacability of Time, or the Passage of Civilizations.  "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"  Or something like that.  No.  Rather, I am moved by the matter-of-factness with which the World goes about its business. The impassive persistence of life is a wonderful thing.

  River Colne at Wakefield Road, Huddersfield

Marshalled into Huddersfield
Between the BR Manchester line and A62,
The Colne sidesteps the jumble and nearly new
At the centre of the fifteenth largest town,
Swings wide and steers towards this bridge,
Under trees that were it left alone
A hundred years, it would undermine.
Along this reach, over its series of weirs
It combs itself clean from centuries' pollution
By people's lives.  The semi-darkness squeezes
Out a solitary duck, white
And veering about at the head of its wake.

Stanley Cook, Ibid.

Eliot Hodgkin, "The Haberdashers' Hall, 8 May 1945" (1945)

"Earth never grieves!"  (Thomas Hardy, "Autumn in King's Hintock Park.") This is not a cry of despair.  It is simply a statement of lovely fact.  The sweet peas have now shrivelled and fallen.  But they are far from finished. The warblers, thrushes, and swallows have departed.  But only for a spell. The moss goes on doing what it does.  We humans fit in somewhere.  For a spell.

                    Wood by a Road

Scythed grass and nettles blanch at the side
Of the seedy pomp of the late summer wood
And in the misfortunes of a risky world
I admire how these trees succeed.

Oaks and silver birches cup their hands
Above the sparking flowers of creeping plants
Never intending to emerge to the wind
Or the damp that drags the cobwebbed bent-grass down.

No birds sing but a thrush with a worm
Tacks the path with his prints in a running stitch
And a rabbit puts a distance between us;
Moths stay painted on hawthorn bushes.

All that a wood can do, the wood has done:
The dark green leaves extend their hands
Indicating nothing left to hide;
Everything prospers on the brink of decline.

Stanley Cook, Ibid.

Gerald Gardiner (1902-1959), "Norfolk Brick Kiln"

"An Act Never Is Worthier Than In Freeing Spirit That Stifles Under Ingratitude's Weight"

As I age, one of my resolutions is this:  Don't be querulous.  The flip side is this:  Be grateful.  I don't claim to be without fault in obeying my own resolutions.  But I try to keep them in mind.

On a daily basis the news of the world arrives at our virtual doorstep.  The news is rarely good.  In fact, it is usually horrific.  Otherwise it would not be news.  Our personal lives are, like all else, subject to the vacillations of constant change, good and bad.  Permanent bliss with happy faces all around is not our lot, I'm afraid.  But this state of affairs ought not to preclude gratitude.

If I may be forgiven a personal note.  Earlier this year, I received the proverbial wake-up call in the middle of the night (2:15 a.m., to be exact) bringing news of personal loss from half a world away.  Today I watched a row of trees shedding yellow leaves in the wind against a dark grey sky.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

                           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, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996). All of the ellipses appear in the original.

Ivor Gurney can embarrass you into gratitude for life and its never-ending wonders.  He most likely wrote "The Escape" in the autumn of 1923, after he had been involuntarily committed to an asylum.  But this is certainly not the poem of a madman.  Far from it.  From the beginning to the end of his life, Gurney never ceased to love and treasure everything in the World, no matter how humble.  We all can learn from him.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Seven Brussel Sprouts" (1955)

Here is another way of looking at things, working from the inside out.

          Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf

At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated.  My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself:  it must be that the soul
has some secret sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast encompassing
circle can take in all, accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid), Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

"The universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting."  If we think of the universe in this fashion, how can we approach it -- and our own life -- with anything but gratitude?

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

Again, Ivor Gurney:

            Common Things

The dearness of common things --
Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves,
And the whole family of crockery --
Wood-axes, blades, helves.

Ivory milk, earth's coffee,
The white face of books
And the touch, feel, smell of paper --
Latin's lovely looks.

Earth fine to handle;
The touch of clouds,
When the imagining arm leaps out to caress
Grey worsted or wool clouds.

Wool, rope, cloth, old pipes
Gone, warped in service;
And the one herb of tobacco,
The herb of grace, the censer weed,
Of whorled, blue, finger-traced curves.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Five Oyster Shells" (1961)

To revisit, with apologies, a statement that has appeared here on more than one occasion:  "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 6.44 (italics in original) (translated by C. K. Ogden) (1921).

                             The Miracles

What things I have missed today, I know very well
But the seeing of them each new time is miracle,
Nothing between Bredon and Dursley has
Anyday yesterday's precise unpraised grace.
The changed light, or curve changed mistily
Coppice now bold cut:  yesterday's mystery.
A sense of mornings, once seen, for ever gone,
Its own for ever; alive, dead, my possession.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems.

Words like "mystical" (Wittgenstein), "soul" (Borges), and "miracle" (Gurney) cause many moderns to feel uncomfortable.  They regard the words with irony.  (Irony being their primary way of looking at the World.) The twin gospels of Science and Progress make such words, and those who utter them, seem old-fashioned, out-of-sync.  But these things are a matter of belief all the way around, aren't they?

Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

Parta Quies

Someone I care for deeply has suddenly passed away, at far too young an age.  I haven't the heart today for anything but this poem, which is all I can grasp onto at the moment for some small, passing comfort.  I will return when I am able.

            Parta Quies

Good-night; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
     Have these for yours,
While sea abides, and land,
And earth's foundations stand,
     And heaven endures.

When earth's foundations flee,
Nor sky nor land nor sea
     At all is found,
Content you, let them burn:
It is not your concern;
     Sleep on, sleep sound.

A. E. Housman, More Poems (1936).

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

"Earth Never Grieves"

Today was -- I'm afraid there is no other way to put it -- A Glorious Autumn Day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  The barest wisp of a wind.  The trees are half-empty, save for the Japanese maples, which are at their bright red brilliant peak.  On my afternoon walk, the only sounds were the cluck and chirp of birds in the distance and the rustle and crackle of leaves underfoot.

All seemed still and unchangeable.  I was doing my best to keep my mind empty, in deference to the World.  But some lines by Wallace Stevens appeared:  "He wanted to feel the same way over and over. . . . He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest/In a permanent realization." But, of course, that is not in the cards.  There shall be no walking beside the river, "under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast."  For which we should be thankful.

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

Upon returning, the following poem by Thomas Hardy came to mind.  It has appeared here before, but, as I am wont to say of poems that I like:  it bears revisiting.

  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 (1909).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

On a first reading, the following poem by C. H. Sisson is not as easily accessible as Hardy's poem.  However, it is worth the effort to puzzle it out.

                                Leaves

Leaves are plentiful on the ground, under the feet,
There cannot be too many, they lie below;
They rot, they blow about before they are rotted.
Were they ever affixed to trees?  I do not know.

The great connection is from the leaf to the root,
From branch, from tendril, to the low place
Below the burial ground, below the hope of the foot,
The hand stretched out, or the hidden face.

On all occasions, or most, remember this:
Then turn on yourself like a small whirlwind of leaves.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

The two poems say roughly the same thing, don't they?  The final two lines are particularly lovely.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

                         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, Collected Poems: 1924-1962 (1963).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Leaves" (1941-1942)

A Single Flower

As I was out walking this week, I noticed a single flower growing in a seam of the sidewalk.  It had five yellow petals, and was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter.  I searched, but I could not find any similar flowers nearby.

The world around us contains innumerable small dispensations of this sort, doesn't it?

Imagine this:  for the brief time that it blooms, that tiny yellow flower stands at the center of the surface of our spinning globe.  The flower is the mid-point:  everything else on Earth flows up to it and away from it.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Hyacinth Bulbs" (1966)

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1870).  Tennyson left the poem untitled.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Five Variegated Ivy Leaves" (1960)

Small Things

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Woodspurge" prompted me to pay closer attention to the soil as I weeded the garden yesterday.  As I recently noted in connection with the annual awakening of the ant world, there is a great deal going on at ground level, much of which escapes our notice.

Eliot Hodgkin, "The Haberdashers' Hall, 8 May 1945" (1945)

             In the Fallow Field

I went down on my hands and knees
Looking for trees,
Twin leaves that, sprung from seeds,
Were now too big
For stems much thinner than a twig.
These soon with chamomile and clover
And other fallow weeds
Would be turned over;
And I was thinking how
It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

Whenever I read Andrew Young's poetry, I cannot help but feel that I have paid insufficient attention to the world around me.  The following poem provides another instance of Young teaching us how to be on the lookout for things that we might otherwise miss.

                        The Fairy Ring

Here the horse-mushrooms make a fairy ring,
     Some standing upright and some overthrown,
A small Stonehenge, where heavy black snails cling
     And bite away, like Time, the tender stone.

Andrew Young, Ibid.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Undergrowth" (1941)

"The Year's Awakening"

Perhaps I am rushing things, but any day now I expect to see the first crocus of the year.

I know nothing about the movement of the spheres, but I have been watching as, week by week, the sun has been setting further and further to the north, across the waters of the Sound, behind the Olympic Mountains, and out into the Pacific.  By June, it will be setting far to the northwest, beyond the Canadian border.

Soon the crocuses will come.

                               Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Hyacinth Bulbs" (1966)

            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 (1914).  In a note, Hardy indicates that the poem was written in February of 1910.

                                                         Raymond Booth
                                                          "Crocus" (1962)

Christmas, Part Three: "Christmas, Someone Mentioned, Is Almost Upon Us"

The following poem by Patrick Kavanagh comes from the period of high spirits that he experienced in the mid- to late-1950s following his successful surgery for lung cancer in the spring of 1955.  As I have noted in previous posts, Kavanagh experienced a poetic rebirth during this period, and his poems of the time are marked by ecstatic verbal flights about the wonder and beauty of Life and of the World.

In this case, the approach of Christmas sends him off on unexpected, but beguiling, tangents.

                            Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Hyacinth Bulbs" (1966)

                                   Winter

Christmas, someone mentioned, is almost upon us
And looking out my window I saw that Winter had landed
Complete with the grey cloak and the bare tree sonnet,
A scroll of bark hanging down to the knees as he scanned it.
The gravel in the yard was pensive, annoyed to be crunched
As people with problems in their faces drove by in cars,
Yet I with such solemnity around me refused to be bunched,
In fact was inclined to give the go-by to bars.
Yes, there were things in that winter arrival that made me
Feel younger, less of a failure, it was actually earlier
Than many people thought; there were possibilities
For love, for South African adventure, for fathering a baby,
For taking oneself in hand, catching on without a scare me, or
Taking part in a world war, joining up at the start of hostilities.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).

                                                       Eliot Hodgkin
                        "A Pictorial Recipe For Your Plum Pudding" (1961)

The poem is in the 14-line quasi-sonnet form that Kavanagh often favored during his "Canal Bank" period.  I say "quasi-sonnet" because, to purists, he was not always precise in his meters and rhymes.  However, I am no purist, and I find his playful use of the form perfect for his mood at the time.

As to what it all "means," who knows?  For instance, I don't know quite what to make of the list of "possibilities" in the last four lines.  "Catching on without a scare me" may be an idiomatic expression that I am unaware of.  "Taking part in a world war, joining up at the start of hostilities" perhaps reflects the Cold War frights of the time (the poem was first published in a periodical in 1959).  I suppose the point may be that, in Kavanagh's euphoric, death-dodging state of mind, anything that comes his way bears the possibility of wonder and joy.  Something to bear in mind at this time of year (or at any time of year).

                                        Eliot Hodgkin, "Quinces" (1969)

Reticence

One needn't go on at length to capture the heart of autumn -- and of life. Sometimes (most of the time?) we say far too much.  A single sentence will suffice.

                                     Eliot Hodgkin, "Leaves" (1941-1942)

     Blowing from the west,
Fallen leaves gather
     In the east.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949).

                                         Eliot Hodgkin, "Squash" (1952)

The wind has brought
     enough fallen leaves
To make a fire.

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

                       Eliot Hodgkin, "Nine Peaches in a Paper Bag" (1961)

     Along this road
Goes no one,
     This autumn eve.

Basho (1644-1694) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949).

                            Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

"Breathe On Me Still, Star, Sister"

Rainer Maria Rilke's "Evening" (which appeared in my previous post) closes by referring to one's life as

. . . the fearful and ripening and enormous
Being that -- bounded by everything, or boundless --
For a moment becomes stone, for a moment stars.

The translation of those lines is by Randall Jarrell.  The juxtaposition of stone and stars puts me in mind of a poem by Jarrell that appears in the same collection in which his translation of "Evening" appears.

                                 Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Large Flints" (1963)

                  The Meteorite

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One; and bent and put it to her lips
And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters --
Breathe on me still, star, sister.

Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960).

                                     Eliot Hodgkin, "Four Flints" (1939)

I never felt that I understood this poem, and then I came upon a passage in a memoir of Jarrell written by Mary von Schrader Jarrell, his second wife. Soon after they first met, she and Jarrell were out for a walk along a dry stream bed in Colorado, where she found an unusual-looking stone.  She suggested jokingly to Jarrell that it was a meteorite.  Jarrell later wrote "The Meteorite":  he is the meteorite; she is the star.  Mary von Schrader Jarrell, Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell (1999), pages 9-10.

The anecdote provides a good lesson:  poems often have their origins in prosaic circumstances.  I am reminded of Wallace Stevens's explanation of "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," that lovely and enigmatic poem:  at the time that he wrote it, he was worried about a rabbit that was visiting his garden each morning and eating the flower bulbs.

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

"The Planet On The Table" Revisited

About a year or so ago, I came across the following poem by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) and immediately thought of Wallace Stevens's "The Planet on the Table" (which appeared in my previous post).  Hulme died in World War I (in September of 1917 at the age of 34).   He wrote only a few poems during his short life.  All of them are brief and "imagistic."

He is perhaps better known for his critical and philosophical writings and for his out-sized personality, which had quite an impact on the early 20th-century "modernists" (e.g., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and others).  Interestingly (and on an entirely different literary front), Hulme and Robert Frost got to know each other when Frost was living in England from 1912 to 1914.

                      Eliot Hodgkin, "Nine Peaches in a Paper Bag" (1961)

                         The Poet

Over a large table, smooth, he leaned in ecstasies,
In a dream.
He had been to woods, and talked and walked with trees.
Had left the world
And brought back round globes and stone images,
Of gems, colours, hard and definite.
With these he played, in a dream,
On the smooth table.

T. E. Hulme, in Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960), page 163.

"The Poet" sounds like a poem that Stevens could have written.  It is interesting to see the two poets exploring similar territory.  The common theme in the poems is creation: in Stevens's words, "makings of [the] self" and "makings of the sun."  Hulme's suggestion that the act of creation is akin to being "in a dream" may find some parallel in Stevens's reference to "Ariel" (the sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest) being the creator of his poems.  But I don't want to get too carried away with this sort of thing.  I just think that the two poems go well together.

                                Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

"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)

"The Wake Vanishing Behind A Boat That Has Rowed Away At Dawn"

Although this is my favorite season, my recent spate of posts containing bitter-sweet autumn poems is starting to get to me.  Despite the fact that we have made barely a dent in the cornucopia (sorry, I couldn't resist) of autumnal verse, a brief respite is in order.  I feel a need for perspective.

Alas, the "perspective" that I have hit upon has a bitter-sweet air of its own. To wit:  the whole of Life (the World, Nature, Existence, "everything that is the case," et cetera) is, after all, a matter of "here today, gone tomorrow," isn't it?  Yet, if one presents that truism in a beautiful fashion, it is (for me at least) comforting.  (And, oh yes, bitter-sweet.)

                       Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

   To what
Shall I compare the world?
   It is like the wake
Vanishing behind a boat
That has rowed away at dawn.

Sami Manzei (8th century) (translated by Edwin Cranston), A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup (Stanford University Press 1993).

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

Like dew that vanishes,
like a phantom that disappears,
or the light cast
   by a flash of lightning --
so should one think of oneself.

Ikkyu (1394-1481) (translated by Steven Carter), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991).

                                    Eliot Hodgkin "Eight Feathers" (1957)

Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It's like an echo
   resounding through the mountains
      and off into the empty sky.

Ryokan (1758-1831) (translated by Steven Carter), Ibid.

                                 Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Large Flints" (1963)

"Dance Of The Macabre Mice"

I do my best to keep politicians out of my consciousness.  The admixture of self-importance and childishness is laughable and breathtaking, but vexing.  (Particularly in heads of state.)   However, you cannot avoid them entirely.  The best that you can do is keep them in perspective and in their place.  As follows.

               Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback.  The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name.  It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur's sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State.  Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?
What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,
The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936).

                         Eliot Hodgkin, "Chiswick Park in the Fog" (1948)

In Boughs: Stars, Planets, And A Wasp Trap

Quite some time ago, I remarked upon Walter de la Mare's fondness for the word "lovely."  His friend Edward Thomas was fond of the word as well.

        The Wasp Trap

This moonlight makes
The lovely lovelier
Than ever before lakes
And meadows were.

And yet they are not,
Though this their hour is, more
Lovely than things that were not
Lovely before.

Nothing on earth,
And in the heavens no star,
For pure brightness is worth
More than that jar,

For wasps meant, now
A star -- long may it swing
From the dead apple-bough,
So glistening.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (2008).

                            Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

However, what brought me back to "The Wasp Trap" was not the word "lovely," but the thought of stars and planets in the boughs of trees.  Another instance of one thing leading to another.

                           Stars and Planets

Trees are jars for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkling-still, but they never cease
Inventing nursery rhymes and huge explosions
And migrating in mathematical tribes over
The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It's hard to think that the earth's one --
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

Norman MacCaig, Trees of Strings (1977).

                                     Eliot Hodgkin, "Leaves" (1941-1942)