Perspective

As I mentioned in a recent post, I did my best to completely ignore the presidential election.  I also chose not to vote in it:  I do not consider it my civic duty to cast a vote for the least unappealing candidate in a given election.  So I sat this one out.

However, I have been paying attention to the reactions of those who are not happy with the result of the election.  Their reactions are remarkably similar to the reactions of those who were not happy with the Brexit vote.  I expressed my feelings on this subject in a post I made on June 29 titled "Humanity."  Please bear with me, dear readers, but I feel compelled to restate those feelings at this time by reposting some of my thoughts:

"What concerns me is how the politicization of culture and of individual consciousness encourages people to adopt stereotypical, patronizing, and dehumanizing views of those who are on the other side of a political issue. This has been glaringly apparent in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and it has been an ongoing feature of the presidential campaign.

"Who among us is in a position to adopt such views?  Do those who hold these views realize that they are in fact dehumanizing themselves in the process?  They have become exactly what the politicians, political 'activists,' and media oversimplifiers and crisis-mongers want them to be: political animals."

"Being politicized leads to evaluating and judging the world and other human beings in terms of classes, categories, and clichés.  Never underestimate the allure of a priori conclusions.  For the politicized, everything appears to be simple and subject to explanation.  Us and them. The enlightened versus the benighted.

"All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual human being or with the individual human soul."

Thus concludes the homily for the day (and my unseemly quoting of myself, for which I apologize).

   Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be --
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost, A Further Range (Henry Holt 1936).

Make no mistake:  each of us is standing there on the sand.  "There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,/A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry."

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

On the morning after Election Day, I stepped out into the garden.  Birds were chirping.  Squirrels were busy gathering seeds and nuts for the coming winter.  The World was still here.  My beautiful and wonderful country was still here.  Nothing had changed.

     The autumn wind is blowing;
We are alive and can see each other,
     You and I.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 413.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "The Cottage Window"

"Now Is The All-Sufficing All Wherein To Love The Lovely Well"

Walter de la Mare continued to use (without irony) "thou" and "thee" and "thy" in his poems into the middle of the 20th century.  I think (without irony) that this is wonderful:  it shows that he was true to his Muse (another bordering-on-the-obsolete word that de la Mare was wont to use).

But please do not get the idea that de la Mare was living in an antiquarian dreamworld.  He was well-acquainted with the realities of the past century. To cite one instance:  he lost his friend Edward Thomas in the First World War.  Of the many elegies written for Thomas, de la Mare's "To E. T.: 1917" (which has appeared here previously) is (for me at least) the most moving   -- and the one which best captures the essence of Thomas.

De la Mare's poetry does not receive the attention it deserves, which is unfortunate.  His final volume of poems appeared in 1953, when he was in his eightieth year.  And he was still writing fine poems.

                    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).

"Whate'er" is also a word that one would not expect to come across in mid-20th century English or American poetry.  A great loss, I would say.

Hilda Carline (1889-1950), "Luxembourg Gardens, Paris"

If a poet is writing well in their seventies or eighties, we may be able to learn a thing or two from them about life.

                       Lethe

Only the Blessed of Lethe's dews
     May stoop to drink.  And yet,
Were their Elysium mine to lose,
Could I -- without repining -- choose
     Life's sorrows to forget?

Ibid.

A wise question, that.

I am reminded of a poem from The Greek Anthology that I posted here earlier this year.

This stone, beloved Sabinus, on thy grave
     Memorial small of our great love shall be.
I still shall seek thee lost; from Lethe's wave
     Oh! drink not thou forgetfulness -- of me.

Anonymous (translated by Goldwin Smith), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849), page 107.

Stanislawa De Karlowska, "The Eyot, Richmond" (1941)

This is the last poem in de la Mare's final volume.

                       The Owl

Apart, thank Heaven, from all to do
To keep alive the long day through;
To imagine; think; watch; listen to;
There still remains -- the heart to bless,
Exquisite pregnant Idleness.

Why, we might let all else go by
To seek its Essence till we die . . .

Hark, now! that Owl, a-snoring in his tree,
Till it grow dark enough for him to see.

Walter de la Mare, O Lovely England and Other Poems (1953).

The meditation on "Idleness" is marvelous.  But then comes the last couplet, which carries the poem off into another realm entirely.  The lines embody the underlying current of mystery (in an unworldly, supernatural sense) that has often been commented upon in de la Mare's work.  This is a quality that de la Mare shares with Thomas Hardy, who he knew and admired.

"Till it grow dark enough for him to see":  what a lovely way to close a poetic career!

Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)

"But Well To Say And So To Mean, That Sweet Accord Is Seldom Seen"

I recently posted here a few poems by Robert Herrick from his Hesperides. Since then, I have continued to wander amongst the 1,130 poems in that volume.  (I didn't count them!  They are numbered in the edition that I am reading.)  A book consisting of more than a thousand poems may sound forbidding, but the entire enterprise is airy, light (albeit with some darkness here and there), delightful, and -- above all -- wise.

Each time that I read Herrick, I come away with a refreshing and invigorating sense of having encountered the world and its denizens in all of their variety.  Here is but a tiny instance.

                         Distrust

To safe-guard Man from wrongs, there nothing must
Be truer to him, than a wise Distrust.
And to thy self be best this sentence known,
Hear all men speak; but credit few or none.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

"Sentence" (line 3) is used in an older sense: "A quoted saying of some eminent person, an apophthegm.  Also, a pithy or pointed saying, an aphorism, maxim."  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), pages 541 and 563, citing OED.

Gilbert Spencer, "Air Raid Warning" (1940)

Herrick's poem brings to mind this:

Throughout the world if it were sought,
     Fair words enough a man shall find;
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
     Their substance is but only wind.
But well to say and so to mean,
That sweet accord is seldom seen.

Thomas Wyatt, in E. M. W. Tillyard (editor), The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (Chatto & Windus 1949).

This has long been one of my favorite poems, no doubt for its music.  It is one of those poems that you inadvertently have in your memory after having read it a few times.  As an example of pure poetry, it falls into the same class (for me at least) as Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal," upon which I have apostrophized on a previous occasion.

Gilbert Spencer, "Summer Evening, Hook End Farm" (1957)

In offering these poems, I do not have in mind the private sphere.  I am merely in one of my periodic grouches about the disingenuous dissembling that goes on in the public sphere.  I turn to the following poem whenever I fall into this mood.

             Leave Them Alone

There's nothing happening that you hate
That's really worthwhile slamming;
Be patient.  If you only wait
You'll see time gently damning

Newspaper bedlamites who raised
Each day the devil's howl,
Versifiers who had seized
The poet's begging bowl.

The whole hysterical passing show
The hour apotheosized
Into a cul-de-sac will go
And be not even despised.

Patrick Kavanagh, Poems (1955).

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (1952)

"Synonyms For Joy"

Near the end of his life, W. H. Auden wrote the following poem:

He has never seen God,
but, once or twice, he believes
he has heard him.

W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (edited by Edward Mendelson) (1991).

We have no way of knowing what Auden may have heard.  Voices?  Music? Thunder?  Or does he have something more theologically recondite in mind?  This is purely speculation on my part, but, on the basis of his poetry, I am putting in a vote for bird-song.

Gilbert Spencer, "Little Milton near Garsington" (1926)

                  Short Ode to the Cuckoo

No one now imagines you answer idle questions
-- How long shall I live?  How long remain single?
Will butter be cheaper? -- nor does your shout make
        husbands uneasy.

Compared with arias by the great performers
such as the merle, your two-note act is kid-stuff:
our most hardened crooks are sincerely shocked by
        your nesting habits.

Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, may huff and puff but they
cannot extinguish your magic:  you marvel
the commuter as you wondered the savage.
        Hence, in my diary,

where I normally enter nothing but social
engagements and, lately, the death of friends, I
scribble year after year when I first hear you,
        of a holy moment.

W. H. Auden, Epistle to a Godson (1972).

"Merle" (line 6) is another name for the blackbird.  The word has its origins in French, and the OED states that it is found "frequently in Scottish poetry from the 15th century onwards."  The references to the cuckoo's "shout" making "husbands uneasy" (lines 3 and 4) and to its "nesting habits" (line 8) refer to the tendency of some species of cuckoo to take over the nests of other birds.

Gilbert Spencer, "Tarrington Court, Herefordshire" (1961)

             Bird-Language

Trying to understand the words
     Uttered on all sides by birds,
I recognize in what I hear
     Noises that betoken fear.

Though some of them, I'm certain, must
     Stand for rage, bravado, lust,
All other notes that birds employ
     Sound like synonyms for joy.

W. H. Auden, City Without Walls (1969).

The two poems call to mind Auden's "Their Lonely Betters," which has appeared here previously.  This is its closing stanza:

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

Gilbert Spencer, "The Terrace" (1927)

"I Tread On Many Autumns Here"

Over the weekend we had a strong wind-storm, and the trees have now lost most of their leaves.  I'm not inclined to hear voices when I am out and about in the World.  Today, however, as I walked beneath bare branches, through piles of fallen leaves, I heard the trees say something along these lines:  That's it.  We're done.  Ah, look at the waste around us!  It's sad, isn't it?

Have no fear.  I'm not going mad.  I did not reply.

William Rothenstein (1872-1945), "St Martin's Summer"

The images of leaves underfoot in C. H. Sisson's "Leaves," which appeared here recently, reminded me of the following poem by Andrew Young.

      Walking in Beech Leaves

I tread on many autumns here
     But with no pride,
For at the leaf-fall of each year
     I also died.

This is last autumn, crisp and brown,
     That my knees feel;
But through how many years sinks down
     My sullen heel.

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

The poems by Sisson and Young in turn bring to mind the second stanza of Robert Frost's "In Hardwood Groves," which I have posted here before:

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.

Gilbert Spencer, "Burdens Farm with Melbury Beacon" (1943)

Well, one way or another, leaves -- and we -- reach the same destination. The World provides us with any number of symbols and metaphors and allegories for our journey towards this destination.  If forced to choose among the options, I would opt for leafhood.

        June Leaves and Autumn

                             I
Lush summer lit the trees to green;
     But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
     They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
     Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
     With store of days to come.

                             II
At autumn-end I fared that way,
     And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
     Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
     Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
     Had length of days in store.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

James Bateman, "Lulington Church" (1939)

How To Win Friends And Influence People. Or Not.

This post is not misanthropic.  Really.  Rather, it is about sociability and conviviality.

Let me be clear:  sociability and conviviality are wonderful qualities.  Who wouldn't wish to be sociable and convivial?  But there is a mistaken tendency to equate an absence of those qualities with misanthropy.  Think of the hail-fellow-well-mets and bon vivants that you have crossed paths with in your life.  Were they, without exception, lovers of humanity?  Or, think of a politician.  Any politician, without exception.  I rest my case.

Some of you may be appalled by the following poems.  But please bear in mind:  they have nothing whatsoever to do with misanthropy.  Trust me.

Richard Eurich, "The Window"

               As Much As You Can

Even if you can't shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Do not degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social relations and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton University Press 1975).

E. M. Forster met Cavafy while working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War, and they became friends.  Forster was instrumental in introducing Cavafy's poetry to the English-speaking world. Of Cavafy, he wrote:

"He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it, and, in conversation, he has sometimes devoted a sentence to this subject.  Which is better -- the world or seclusion?  Cavafy, who has tried both, can't say. But so much is certain -- either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life."

E. M. Forster, "The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy," Pharos and Pharillon (Hogarth Press 1923), pages 96-97.

William Adeney (1878-1966), "The Window"

                         Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff --
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death --
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (The Marvell Press 1955).

A confession:  many decades ago, "Wants" was the poem that made me shake my head in wonder and delight, smile, and say to myself:  "This is the poet I have been waiting for."

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window"

          Wishes of an Elderly Man
Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Walter Alexander Raleigh, Laughter from a Cloud (1923).

Charles Dawson, "Accrington from My Window" (1932)

Life As A Work Of Art, Part Six: "Only The Disconsolate Hero Survives"

As one ages, commonplaces become eternal verities.  Truisms are recognized as being true.

For instance:  the longer one lives, the more one gets the uneasy feeling that Reality consists of bad actors appearing in an ill-conceived sequel to a movie that wasn't very good in the first place.  Or, alternatively, that it consists of unconvincing characters in one of those novels that are awarded prizes and are described as "lyrical and moving" in reviews and blurbs.

Commonplaces, yes.  But here is the proverbial rub (of which we are all aware):  how do we avoid becoming one of those bad actors or unconvincing fictional characters?  Alas, dear reader, we don't.

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (c. 1952)

            Novels I Have Never Written

From novels I have never written
The ghosts have long departed,
Leaving tenantless the Sussex country houses
And the palazzo steps green with moss.
Only the foundations remain
On which were to have risen
The towers and cloisters of the fatal school.
In the unfinished rooms
The conversations have shivered into silence.
The moving incidents,
The revealing situations,
The moments of profound psychological insight --
All are lost, unwanted,
Like garden furniture rusting in a summer-house.
All the ghosts have departed, unaccounted for,
Some perhaps for South America,
Others to get what employment they can
As car-park attendants and waiters in seaside hotels,
Or they have simply died.

Only the disconsolate hero survives,
Sitting on an upturned packing-case in an empty house,
With the electricity and the telephone cut off,
Nothing to eat, no money, and nowhere to go.
Too round a character to disappear quietly,
Too big a man to be pensioned off or eased into a sinecure.
Presently, perhaps, he will reappear in Oxford
As one of those dusty, forgotten dons whom I have heard
Talking to themselves in the High,
Or a faded roue living on the Cote d'Azur
On the savings of a discarded opera-singer --
Someone who can sustain the pretence
Of having been influential in former days,
The intimate of writers, friend of diplomats . . .

James Reeves, The Password and Other Poems (Heinemann 1952).

George Charlton, "Welsh Chapel" (c. 1950)

The Life imitates Art/Art imitates Life motif is, of course, an ancient one. And, as I have noted before, each generation tends to have the erroneous view that its own age is uniquely wise and/or uniquely cursed in comparison with prior ages.  Perspective is required.

That being said, I do think that a bad actor in a small hamlet in medieval Swabia had less capacity for creating mischief than a bad actor with a website (or a blog?) in today's "global village."  Moreover, today's bad actors and unconvincing characters number in the millions, and are always clamoring for attention.  What's worse, many of them become heads of state, politicians, media mouthpieces, "journalists," social scientists, and celebrities.

Osmund Caine, "Wedding at Twickenham Parish Church" (1948)

"An Atlantic High Prince Of Vapour . . . A True Monarch Of Air"

One might expect Ivor Gurney to have it in him to write a visionary poem about a single cloud.  And, sure enough, he did.  Yet Gurney's states of exaltation are nearly always firmly rooted in the here-and-now.  One has the sense that, whatever his verbal flights, Gurney's feet are in the dirt -- and he never forgets this fact.

It is a bright day in May.  A man is out walking alone in the English countryside.  He is hot and parched.  He thinks of water.  Then, after a sudden shadow passes, he looks up into the sky.

Hans Heysen, "Pewsey Vale (South Australia)" (1947)

                                 The Cloud

One could not see or think, the heat overcame one,
With a dazzle of square road to challenge and blind one,
No water was there, cow parsley the only flower
Of all May's garland this torrid before-summer hour,
And but one ploughman to break ten miles of solitariness.
No water, water to drink, stare at, the lovely clean grained one.

Where like a falcon on prey, shadow flung downward
Solid as gun-metal, the eyes sprang sunward
To salute the silver radiance of an Atlantic high
Prince of vapour required of the retinue
Continual changing of the outer-sea's flooding sun
Cloud royal, born called and ordered to domination,
Spring called him out of his tent in the azure of pleasure,
He girt his nobleness -- and in slow pace went onward
A true monarch of air chosen to service and station;
And directed on duties of patrolling the considered blue.
But what his course required being fulfilled, what fancy
Of beyond-imagination did his power escape to
With raiment of blown silver. . . .

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

The ellipses at the end of the poem appear in the original.  "The considered blue" (line 16) has always puzzled me, but perhaps Gurney has in mind the sense "held in consideration or regard, respected."  OED.  "The azure of pleasure" (line 13) is very nice.

Gilbert Spencer, "Blackmore Vale" (1931)

"The Soul's Progress" Revisited

Some might think that Arthur Symons's "The Soul's Progress" (which appeared in my previous post) presents a too-bleak view of our time on earth.  To wit:  "Blindly it treads dim ways that wind and twist" and so on. But, like most everything else (I'm afraid), it all depends on how you look at it.

For instance, Japanese poets have been writing about Existence for centuries, and they share Symons's view that we enter this world from a mist and depart into a mist.  But, the way they go about it, what sounds like a catalogue of horrors in an English sonnet sounds like a lovely walk in the park in a Japanese poem (filtered through Buddhism, with Taoism in the background).

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window"

     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 Edward Cranston), A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup (Stanford University Press 1993).

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).

     A temporary lodging
on this side of the road all
     must go, in the end.

To recover the time he rested,
The traveller hastens on.

Shinkei (1406-1475) (translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen), Heart's Flower: The Life and Poetry of Shinkei (Stanford University Press 1994).

Bertha Ridley Bell

"Interior of a Cottage at Brockhampton" (c. 1950)

"Like the wake vanishing behind a boat that has rowed away at dawn." "Like dew that vanishes . . . or the light cast by a flash of lightning."  "The traveller hastens on."  A far cry from a soul that "staggers out into eternity," isn't it?

For the Japanese poets, this is simply the way that it is, and there is no need to bemoan that fact.  Thus, even as they describe the evanescence and the transience of our life, they do so in words that show their acute awareness of, and appreciation for, the beauty that surrounds us.  I recently quoted this line from Wallace Stevens, and it once again seems apt:  "Death is the mother of beauty, mystical."

Charles Ginner

"Through a Cottage Window, Shipley, Sussex"

Winter Into Spring, Part One: "Last Hours"

In my previous post, I noted the imminent arrival of the crocus.  However, as I suggested, perhaps I shouldn't be too impatient.  All in good time.

This shoulder season of winter into spring does have its own attractions. The passing of winter does not possess the same wistfulness quotient as the passing of summer into autumn or of autumn into winter.  Yet, it is a time whose vanishing beauties cannot help but awaken a feeling of regret.

For instance, the sight of bare branches against the sky can be as lovely as the threshing and unresting castles (thank you, Philip Larkin) of spring and summer.  I will miss them.

                                 Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (c. 1959)

                 Last Hours

        A gray day and quiet,
        With slow clouds of gray,
And in dull air a cloud that falls, falls,
                    All day.

        The naked and stiff branches
        Of oak, elm, thorn,
In the cold light are like men aged and
                    Forlorn.

        Only a gray sky,
        Grass, trees, grass again,
And all the air a cloud that drips, drips,
                    All day.

        Lovely the lonely
        Bare trees and green grass --
Lovelier now the last hours of slow winter
                    Slowly pass.

John Freeman, Memories of Childhood and Other Poems (1919).

             Gilbert Spencer, "Burdens Farm with Melbury Beacon" (c. 1943)

Gloss

In my previous post, I made an amateur attempt to gloss a poem by Basho. In addition, I posted three different versions of the haiku, hoping to show that translating a mere seventeen syllables is a very tricky thing.  This is especially true when the seventeen syllables are capable of containing Life, the World, and the Universe.   The following poem by John Hewitt sheds some light on the process of translation.

                                                         Gilbert Spencer
                                              "Air Raid Warning" (1940)

     Gloss, on the Difficulties of Translation

Across Loch Laig
the yellow-billed blackbird
whistles from the blossomed whin.

Not, as you might expect,
a Japanese poem, although
it has the seventeen
syllables of the haiku.
Ninth-century Irish, in fact,
from a handbook on metrics,
the first written reference
to my native place.

In forty years of verse
I have not inched much further.
I may have matched the images;
but the intricate wordplay
of the original -- assonance,
rime, alliteration --
is beyond my grasp.

To begin with, I should
have to substitute
golden for yellow
and gorse for whin,
this last is the word we use
on both sides of Belfast Lough.

John Hewitt, Collected Poems (Blackstaff Press 1991).

I think that it is best to concede that no translation can ever capture the original.  We delude ourselves if we think otherwise.  But does that mean that reading translations is not worth our while?  Speaking for myself, I am not willing to give up the poetry of, for example, Basho, Po Chu-i, Wang Wei, or C. P. Cavafy because I do not know Japanese, Chinese, or Greek.  I realize that I will inevitably be missing something in the absence of the original, but I can only hope that something of the heart of the original is conveyed in a good translation.

                                                        Gilbert Spencer
                           "The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (c. 1952)

"Such Are The Things Remain Quietly, And For Ever, In The Brain"

It's odd what sticks in one's memory.  I'm not talking about births, deaths, marriages, et cetera.  Rather, I'm talking about the random scenes that carry no apparent freight of significance in terms of our life story.  But they nonetheless retain a clarity that is akin to a vivid dream from which one has just awoken.

For instance:  I recall standing in a harvested cornfield in Minnesota on a sunny autumn day nearly 50 years ago.  On the ground around me were corn cobs and corn kernels.  I  remember the bright yellow of the kernels against the dark soil.  High overhead hundreds of Canadian geese, in V-formations, flew away to the south.  Down from the sky came the unending sound: honk, honk, honk.

I have no urge to derive any "meaning" from this memory. There is no skein to be untangled.  It is not the beginning of a path into a dark (or magical) forest.  I've come to the conclusion that the fact that these things happened is enough in itself.

                               Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (c. 1959)

                        History

Sometimes, when walls and occupation seem
A prison merely, a dark barrier
Between me everywhere
And life, or the larger province of the mind,
As dreams confined,
As the trouble of a dream,
I seek to make again a life long gone,
To be
My mind's approach and consolation,
To give it form's lucidity,
Resilient form, as porcelain pieces thrown
In buried China by a wrist unknown,
Or mirrored brigs upon Fowey sea.

Then to my memory comes nothing great
Of purpose, or debate,
Or perfect end,
Pomp, nor love's rapture, nor heroic hours to spend --
But most, and strangely, for long and so much have I seen,
Comes back an afternoon
Of a June
Sunday at Elsfield, that is up on a green
Hill, and there,
Through a little farm parlour door,
A floor
Of red tiles and blue,
And the air
Sweet with the hot June sun cascading through
The vine-leaves under the glass, and a scarlet fume
Of geranium flower, and soft and yellow bloom
Of musk, and stains of scarlet and yellow glass.

Such are the things remain
Quietly, and for ever, in the brain,
And the things that they choose for history-making pass.

John Drinkwater, Loyalties (1922).

                                Harold Jones, "The Black Door" (c. 1935)

Helpless

When I was a child I longed to be an adult.  This longing was based upon two presumptions:  first, that adults were free to do what they wanted to do (within the limits of law and morality, of course), and, second, that they knew exactly how to do these things (i.e., that they acted with complete self-assurance).  I have since learned (speaking solely for myself) that those two presumptions were a bit optimistic.

The following poem by Frances Cornford (1886-1960) examines this state of affairs from a different angle, but it perhaps expresses part of what I am trying to get at.

                  Stanley Spencer, "The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

                         Childhood

I used to think that grown-up people chose
To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose,
And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,
On purpose to be grand.
Till through the banisters I watched one day
My great-aunt Etty's friend who was going away,
And how her onyx beads had come unstrung.
I saw her grope to find them as they rolled;
And then I knew that she was helplessly old,
As I was helplessly young.

Frances Cornford, Collected Poems (1954).

                                     Gilbert Spencer, "The Terrace" (1927)

Life Explained, Part Eighteen: "An Aimless Unallayed Desire"

I confess that I tend to think of Matthew Arnold as a staid Victorian:  the inspector of schools, the prescriptive author of Culture and Anarchy, the long-winded poet of "Empedocles on Etna," et cetera.  But I should know better.  In fact, his poetry has surprising moments of passion and directness.  For instance, the following poem sounds like something that Thomas Hardy could have written in the early 20th century.

                        Destiny

Why each is striving, from of old,
To love more deeply than he can?
Still would be true, yet still grows cold?
-- Ask of the Powers that sport with man!

They yoked in him, for endless strife,
A heart of ice, a soul of fire;
And hurled him on the Field of Life,
An aimless unallayed Desire.

Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852).

Kenneth Allott, who edited and annotated The Poems of Matthew Arnold (1965), believes that Arnold wrote "Destiny" in 1849 or 1850, when he was 27 or 28 years old.  For an interesting investigation of Arnold's poetic career, I recommend Ian Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (Bloomsbury 1998).  Nicholas Murray's A Life of Matthew Arnold (Hodder & Stoughton 1996) is also excellent.    

Although I have posted the following poem once before, I think that reading it in conjunction with "Destiny" may throw some light upon both poems.  (It is untitled.)

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel -- below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel -- there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

The poem was published in The Cornhill Magazine in November of 1869, but it was never reprinted in any of the collections of Arnold's poetry that were published in his lifetime.

                                        Gilbert Spencer, "Allotments"

"The Absurdity Of Stretching Out Our Arms Incessantly To Grasp That Which We Cannot Keep"

A few posts back, I quoted the following line of verse by Ryokan:  "If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things."  This bit of advice has been around in all ages and in all places.  Acting upon it in one's own life is, of course, another matter entirely.

The line kept bouncing around my head.  I seemed to recall that Samuel Johnson had said something along the same lines.  (As Walter Jackson Bate writes in his biography of Johnson:  "Whatever we experience, we find Johnson has been there before us, and is meeting and returning home with us.")  I eventually found what I was looking for in one of my journals:  I had recorded Johnson's thoughts for future reference. 

"Every man has experienced, how much of this ardour has been remitted, when a sharp or tedious sickness has set death before his eyes.  The extensive influence of greatness, the glitter of wealth, the praises of admirers, and the attendance of supplicants, have appeared vain and empty things, when the last hour seemed to be approaching; and the same appearance they would always have, if the same thought was always predominant.  We should then find the absurdity of stretching out our arms incessantly to grasp that which we cannot keep, and wearing out our lives in endeavours to add new turrets to the fabrick of ambition, when the foundation itself is shaking, and the ground on which it stands is mouldering away."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 17 (May 15, 1750).

The Chinese poet Su Tung-P'o (also known as Su Shih) (1037-1101) beautifully expresses the same thought in a more oblique fashion:

Misty rain on Mount Ro, the incoming tide at Sekko --
Before you have been there, you have many regrets;
When you have been there and come back,
It is just simply misty rain on Mount Ro, the incoming tide at Sekko.

Su Tung-P'o (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Haiku, Volume One: Eastern Culture (1949).  I think that perhaps Blyth should have omitted the phrase "it is just simply" from the final line.

                                  Gilbert Spencer, "Bedroom Window"

Moonlit Apples Of Dreams. Moon-Washed Apples Of Wonder.

As you amble through the series of Georgian Poetry anthologies compiled by Edward Marsh from 1912 to 1922, you soon realize that you are not strolling through the "modernist" land of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  Here, rather, you come across the likes of Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, a young Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, and Siegfried Sassoon.  Alas, not an Imagist or a Symbolist or a Free-Versifier in sight.

                                           Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979)
                                                   "Bedroom Window"

And, occasionally, you will encounter someone who is all but unknown today.  Someone who once may have written a small gem of a poem.  John Drinkwater, for instance.

                           Moonlit Apples

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green.  There goes
   A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
   Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,
   And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
   On moon-washed apples of wonder.

Georgian Poetry: 1918-1919 (1920).

                             Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)