Frolic and Detour

Forty-one years on, I retain very little from my three years of law school.  Memories of friendships.  And of a love.  Alas, lost.  As for "The Law" itself, only a few scattered phrases remain from all those books and lectures.  For instance: "frolic and detour."  The concept comes from the law of torts: an employer is not liable for the actions of an employee who engages in activity which is beyond the scope of his or her duties.  I have never had occasion to address frolic and detour in the "practice" of law.  On the other hand, I habitually engage in frolic and detour when it comes to the reading of poetry.

Recently, I have been spending time in the company of Bashō and Walter de la Mare.  As my decades with them have passed, their companionship has become more and more comforting.  And essential.  Where would I be without them?

Hototogisu --

through a vast bamboo forest

moonlight seeping

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 314.

A hototogisu "is a bird that looks like an English cuckoo, but is smaller and has a sharp, piercing cry."  Ibid, page 198.  R. H. Blyth describes it as follows: "The hototogisu corresponds more or less to the English cuckoo.  The breast of the male is blackish, with white blotches.  The breast of the female is white, the inside of the mouth red; it has a crest of hair on the head. . . . From early summer, it sings day and night, and ceases in autumn."  R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 161.

Blyth provides this translation of Bashō's haiku:

     Moonlight slants through

The vast bamboo grove:

     A hototogisu cries.

Ibid, page 161.  The Romanized version ("Romaji," to use the Japanese term) of the haiku is: hototogisu/ōtakeyabu wo/moru tsukiyo.  Ibid, page 161.  Hototogisu means "cuckoo"; ōtakeyabu means "large bamboo grove;" wo is a particle which identifies ōtakeyabu as the object of moru tsukiyo; moru means "to seep;" tsuki means "moon" and yo means "night" (hence, the compound word tsukiyo can mean either "moonlight" or "moonlit night").  

A distinctive difference between the two translations of the haiku is that Ueda translates the Japanese word moru as "seeping," whereas Blyth opts for "slants through."  As a matter of beauty, I prefer Blyth's "moonlight slants through" to Ueda's "moonlight seeping," but Ueda's translation of moru is arguably more accurate.  A second difference is that Blyth states that the hototogisu "cries," whereas Ueda does not.  Again, Ueda's translation is arguably more accurate: Bashō gives us only the word hototogisu to commence the haiku, with no accompanying verb.  Haiku poets, in stating the name of a particular bird, will quite often leave it up to the reader to infer whether the bird is singing (or chirping, warbling, or silent).  (But I should be careful not to overstep my bounds: given my limited experience with Japanese, I am an amateur, with no right to quibble with, much less express opinions on, translations.  But it is interesting to consider the choices that different translators make.) In any case, whichever of the two translations one prefers, Bashō's haiku is lovely, affecting, and haunting.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

Thus began a day or so of frolic and detour.  Soon after reading Bashō's haiku, I happened upon this:

An echo, perhaps?

From the valley, then the peak --

a cuckoo's call.

Gusai (died 1376) (translated by Steven Carter), in Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 281.

With Walter de la Mare on my mind, Gusai's echoing call of the cuckoo/hototogisu took me further afield (and happily so): 

          Echo

Seven sweet notes

In the moonlight pale

Warbled a leaf-hidden

Nightingale:

And Echo in hiding

By an old green wall

Under the willows

Sighed back them all.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 415.  "Echo" was originally published in Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (Faber and Faber 1941).  Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes is ostensibly a book of children's verse. However, as all those who love Walter de la Mare's poetry know, one should bear in mind the subtitle to de la Mare's Come Hither, his wonderful anthology of poetry (published in 1923): "A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages."  

In 1942, de la Mare's volume of Collected Poems was published, consisting of poems for adults.  In 1944, his volume of Collected Rhymes and Verses was published, consisting of poems for children. In the preface to the latter volume, de la Mare writes: "To what degree and in what precise respect the contents of this volume differ from the contents of Collected Poems are little problems which I will not attempt to explore.  Somewhere the two streams divide -- and may re-intermingle.  Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source.  And here, concerning that -- nor will I even venture on an Alas -- silence is best."  

A lovely and enlightening statement by de la Mare.  Over the years, I have come to make no distinction between his "adult poems" and his "children's verse and rhymes."  They indeed "sprang from the same source," and ultimately arrive at the same place: Beauty and Truth.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Boreland Mill, Kirkmichael" (1950)

A hototogisu.  Followed by a nightingale.  And now the goddess Echo had appeared, drawing me further on:

High up the mountain-meadow, Echo with never a tongue

Sings back to each bird in answer the song each bird hath sung.

Satyrus (1st Century B.C. -- 1st Century A.D.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent & Sons 1951), page 358.

A bit later on my wanderings, this came to mind:

Nought to the far-off Hades but an empty echo cries.

There, mid the dead, is silence.  My voice in the darkness dies.

Erinna (mid-4th Century B.C.) (translated by F. Lucas).   Ibid, page 279.  Erinna is "said to have died at nineteen, but ranked with Sappho by some ancient judgments, though little of her work survives.  Her chief poem was a lament, The Distaff, for her dead girl-friend Baucis."  Ibid, page 279.

James McIntosh Patrick, "City Garden" (1979)

Finally, my frolic and detour came to an end when the following poem arrived, unaccountably, from somewhere.  (Although there is a connection with Walter de la Mare.)

               At Common Dawn

At common dawn there is a voice of bird

So sweet, 'tis kin to pain;

For love of earthly life it needs be heard,

And lets not sleep again.

This bird I did one time at midnight hear

In wet November wood

Say to himself his lyric faint and clear

As one at daybreak should.

He ceased; the covert breathed no other sound,

Nor moody answer made;

But all the world at beauty's worship found,

Was waking in the glade.

Vivian Locke Ellis (1878-1950), in Walter de la Mare (editor), Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Constable & Co. 1923), page 360.

[Postscript.  Please accept my apologies for the long absence, dear readers.  Writing this post, I realized how much I have missed being here.  Thank you for your patience.]

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

Fragments

Recently I've been spending time with The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation.  Published in 1938, and edited by T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra, it contains short lyric poems and epigrams, as well as excerpts from epics, long poems, and plays.  Whenever I visit the Greek world I am reminded that human nature has never changed, and never will.  Our capacities for good and evil, nobility and folly, and everything in between, remain constant. 

Another anthology of Greek verse to which I often return is F. L. Lucas' Greek Poetry for Everyman.  The epigraph of the volume consists of an untitled poem by Lucas:

Where lowlands stretch for ever,

Rank pasture, mud-banked river,

And bullocks flick and browse,

     And flies carouse;

Or the city's smoke-pall thickens

And the sullied sunlight sickens --

There the heart cries "How far

     The mountains are!"

Till, on some windless even,

Vast cloud-peaks rampart Heaven,

And sunset hues with rose

     Their timeless snows;

Above this age's shuffle,

Its buzz, and rush, and scuffle,

So towers, far off, at peace,

     The world of Greece.

F. L. Lucas (editor and translator), Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), page vii.

By returning to the verse of ancient Greece (and of the Hellenistic world) am I abandoning the modern world, while romanticizing -- or imagining -- a world of golden light that may have never existed?  But of course.  Why not?

Leopold Rothaug (1868-1959), "Classical Landscape" (1939)

Beauty and Truth present themselves to us in fragments, not all at once in a seamless web.  If such a seamless web exists, it is beyond our ken in this World.  Now and then we glimpse scattered threads, or what might be emerging patterns.  To use a phrase from William James which I quoted in my most recent post: "higher energies filter in."  (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green, and Co. 1902), page 519.)  Still, fragmentary Beauty and Truth are enough to keep one occupied for a lifetime.

Such is the case with Greek verse, a great deal of which survives only in fragments: the lovely, beguiling, affecting remnants of otherwise lost poems and plays.  In returning to The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation this time around, I have been reading fragments of plays, known only by their titles (if that) and a few surviving scattered lines.  The lines quoted hereafter all come from these vanished works.  Unavoidably out of context, but, in their isolation, gemlike.

Last peaks of the world, beyond all seas,

Wellsprings of night, and gleams of opened heaven,

The old garden of the sun.

Sophocles (translated by Gilbert Murray), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 385.

Yes, of course: the golden light, wine-dark sea, and star-filled sky of Greece.  The eternal Hesperian gardens we all long for.  But there is a simpler, more down-to-earth side to this Paradise as well:

                                        Ah, what joy

Can out-joy this -- to reach the land -- and then

Safe lodged, with happy drowsing sense to hear

The raindrops pattering on the roof outside!

Sophocles (translated by Walter Headlam), Ibid, page 383.

The rainy evening described by Sophocles is part of the World of lovely commonplaces that one comes across so often in these fragments, and also, for instance, in the epigrams of The Greek Anthology.  A reminder that one of the things that enchants us about the Greek world is its day-to-day intertwining of life and art.

There is no comfort in adversity

More sweet than Art affords.  The studious mind

Poising in meditation, there is fixed,

And sails beyond its troubles unperceiving.

Amphis (4th century B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), Ibid, page 526.

But another thread winds in and out of the beautiful fragments as well, never out of sight or mind.

Alas, how right the ancient saying is:

We, who are old, are nothing else but noise

And shape.  Like mimicries of dreams we go,

And have no wits, although we think us wise.

Euripides (translated by C. M. Bowra), Ibid, page 455.

Hugo Darnaut (1851-1937), "Sunken Splendor" (1900)

"Mimicries of dreams."  Even an idealized Greece would not be Greece without an abiding and pervasive awareness of our evanescence.

But my fate, on some throbbing wheel of God,

Always must rise and fall, and change its being:

As the moon's image never two nights long

May in one station rest: out of the dark

The young face grows, still lovelier, still more perfect,

Then at the noblest of her shining, back 

She melts and comes again to nothingness.

Sophocles (translated by Gilbert Murray), Ibid, page 384.

It ought not to take a year of plague to remind us of our mortality.  Any good poet has death on his or her mind.  "The paradise of Flowers' and Butterflies' Spirits."  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 1736 (December 1803).)  "A rainbow balanced on an empty house in a verdant combe."  (Philippe Jaccottet, The Second Seedtime: Notebooks, 1980-1994 (translated by Tess Lewis) (Seagull Books 2017), page 150.)  In this World, how could it be otherwise?  Why would we want it to be otherwise?

Mourning your dearest friends, be wise in grief,

They are not dead, but on that single road

Which all are bound to travel, gone before.

We too, in after days, shall overtake them;

One road-house shall receive us, entered in

To lodge together for the rest of time.

Antiphanes (4th century B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), Ibid, page 518.

There is no turning away.  Greek verse is full of touching laments and epitaphs for the departed.  And there is no shortage of contemplations upon the dark, endless silence of death, where all are shorn of memories.  "Emptily from here to Hades floats the echo,/Hushed among the dead.  My voice goes down the night."  (Erinna (4th century B.C.) (translated by C. M. Bowra), Ibid, page 522.)  The poets, in all times and in all places, tell us there can be no turning away.  "And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?  But enough of that -- I'm off to bed."  (Bashō (1644-1694), "Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling," in Burton Watson (translator), Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life (Shambhala 2002), page 95.)

No mortal is born free from suffering: --

He buries children, and begets him new,

And also dies himself.  And yet men grieve

At bringing earth to earth!  It is Fate's will

To reap Life's harvest like the fruited ear,

That one should be, one not.  Where is there cause

For grief, when only 'tis the path of Nature?

Nothing is dread that Fate makes necessary.

Euripides (translated by Walter Headlam), Ibid, page 461.

Leopold Rothaug, "Far Away" (1945)