Compensations, Revisited

In a recent post, I suggested that autumn's losses are accompanied by compensations.  One of those compensations is the sound of empty trees. The other day I walked down an avenue of mostly leafless trees -- only a few stragglers remained, most of them, curiously, out on the tips of branches.

The day was breezy.  The trunks creaked, as I imagine the masts of a wooden ship might creak in a wind.  Higher up, the empty branches clacked and clattered against each other.  To borrow from Wallace Stevens's "The Region November":  the trees seemed to be "saying and saying."  But not, alas, in any known language.  Which is not to say that communication is wholly impossible.

The fairy tale atmosphere of James Elroy Flecker's "November Eves" and Louis MacNeice's "The Riddle" may be apt as well.  As may be the following poem by Thomas Hardy.

                                    Emily Carr, "Inside a Forest" (c. 1935)

             Night-Time in Mid-Fall

It is a storm-strid night, winds footing swift

          Through the blind profound;

     I know the happenings from their sound;

Leaves totter down still green, and spin and drift;

The tree-trunks rock to their roots, which wrench and lift

The loam where they run onward underground.

The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate

          To a new abode;

     Even cross, 'tis said, the turnpike-road;

(Men's feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late):

The westward fronts of towers are saturate,

Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925).

                                          Emily Carr, "Clearing" (1942)

Life Explained, Part Twenty-Nine: "Where Lies The Land To Which The Ship Would Go?"

The image of life as a sea voyage -- pleasurable or painful, paradisal or hellish, aimless or purposeful -- has its origins in antiquity.  As one might expect, Explanations of Life abound.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) was a friend of Matthew Arnold's. Hence, he would have been familiar with the somewhat bleak sea-vision presented by Arnold in "To Marguerite -- Continued":  "Yes! in the sea of life enisled . . . We mortal millions live alone."  In the following untitled poem, Clough offers a sea-vision that may not be as bleak as Arnold's -- at least, for example, there is a prospect of companionship.  The only catch is that the voyage appears to lack a destination (or a port of embarkation, for that matter).

                                         Emily Carr, "Seascape" (c. 1935)

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from?  Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck's smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace!
Or, o'er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights when wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from?  Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

Arthur Hugh Clough, Poems (1879).

Of course, some would say that a destination is beside the point.  For instance, C. P. Cavafy in "Ithaka":

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery. . . .

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems: Revised Edition (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press 1992).

                                          Emily Carr, "Sky" (1935-1936)

"Revolution"

My previous post was something of a rant about the reaction of the media to the recent mass murder in Colorado.  I always regret such rants:  they raise my blood pressure and, worse, they enmesh me in a contemporary culture that I prefer to leave to its own devices.  Better to keep one's own house in order.  And keep one's mouth shut.  And keep the television turned off.

Moreover, what I was inarticulately attempting to say is much better said by A. E. Housman in the following poem.  Of the poem, Housman wrote: "most readers do not seem to see that it is a parable."  Archie Burnett (editor), The Letters of A. E. Housman, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press 2007), page 610.

                                   Emily Carr, "Inside a Forest" (c. 1935)

                      Revolution

West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
     Day's beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nightmare and her foal
     Drown in the golden deluge of the morn.

But over sea and continent from sight
     Safe to the Indies has the earth conveyed
The vast and moon-eclipsing cone of night,
     Her towering foolscap of eternal shade.

See, in mid heaven the sun is mounted; hark,
     The belfries tingle to the noonday chime.
'Tis silent, and the subterranean dark
     Has crossed the nadir, and begins to climb.

A. E. Housman, Last Poems (1922).

                                   Emily Carr, "Forest Landscape" (1932)

"Jigsaw"

A. S. J. Tessimond's poetry can be a bit sardonic.  He is particularly caustic when it comes to the follies of what we now call "popular culture." However, two things save him from misanthropy and bitterness.  First, he has a romantic side.  Glimpses of love, beauty, and hope appear just when you think that he doesn't have it in him.  More importantly, he does not exempt himself from his gimlet-eyed view of the world.  One senses that he knows all too well the behavior that he describes in his poems.

                             Jigsaw

This one can understand but cannot act,
Defeated by detachment and division.
That one can act but cannot understand,
Defeated by desire and concentration.
This one can gain and grasp but not enjoy,
Defeated by his haste and heat and hardness;
And that one can enjoy but not acquire,
Defeated by his softness and self-loving.
And so the half-man seeks the one he is not,
The friend or lover moving where he cannot,
The other terminal, the arc's completion,
The periscope with which to see round corners,
The one who still may someday, somewhere, somehow
Lead him across the frontiers of forbidden
Land, to a world reversed, looking-glass country
Beyond this bondage and beyond this boredom
Of this too known, too own world, this round narrow
Room here behind the mouth and nose and eyes.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

This idea of searching for the ideal self or the ideal land is a subject that Tessimond also visited in "Where?"

                                                           Emily Carr
                                      "Light Swooping Through" (c. 1938)