Empires. Animula. Blossoms and Warblers.

Given the situation in which the world now finds itself, I had thought to descant upon the folly and evil of self-appointed emperors and their imaginary, ultimately chimerical empires.  I had intended to begin with this:

        The Fort of Rathangan

The fort over against the oak-wood,

Once it was Bruidge's, it was Cathal's,

It was Aed's, it was Ailill's,

It was Conaing's, it was Cuilíne's,

And it was Maeldúin's:

The fort remains after each in his turn --

And the kings asleep in the ground.

Anonymous (translated by Kuno Meyer), in Kuno Meyer (editor), Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (Constable 1913).  I first discovered the poem in Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Constable 1923).

I planned to eventually arrive at this:

                         In Yüeh Viewing the Past

Kou-chien, king of Yüeh, came back from the broken land of Wu;

his brave men returned to their homes, all in robes of brocade.

Ladies in waiting like flowers filled his spring palace

where now only the partridges fly.

Li Po (701-762) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

But I soon realized, dear readers, that I would only be telling you something you already know.  Moreover, of what value is historical "perspective" (or the "perspective" of immutable human nature) when singular and irreplaceable lives are being lost, or forever damaged, at this moment?  I no longer had any heart for the project.  "Perspective" is an inappropriate indulgence for someone who is out of harm's way, living in a place that is not at war.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "A Castle in Scotland"

Around the same time, for reasons unknown, I remembered this:

            Animula 

No one knows, no one cares --

An old soul

In a narrow cottage,

A parlour,

A kitchen,

And upstairs

A narrow bedroom,

A narrow bed --

A particle of immemorial life.

James Reeves, Poems and Paraphrases (Heinemann 1972).  "Animula" is usually translated into English as "little soul."  

Reeves' poem prompted me to return to a poem purportedly written by the Emperor Hadrian (ah, an emperor) on his deathbed.  The poem begins: "animula vagula blandula."  It has been translated into English dozens of times over the centuries.  My favorite version is that of Henry Vaughan:

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,

The guest and consort of my body,

Into what place now all alone

Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?

No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,

Nor jests wilt thou afford me more.

Henry Vaughan, "Man in Darkness, or, A Discourse of Death," in The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652), in Donald Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (editors), The Works of Henry Vaughan, Volume I: Introduction and Texts, 1646-1652 (Oxford University Press 2018), page 318.

As a preface to his translation of the poem, Vaughan writes:

"You may believe, he was royally accommodated, and wanted nothing which this world could afford; but how far he was from receiving any comfort in his death from that pompous and fruitless abundance, you shall learn from his own mouth, consider (I pray) what he speaks, for they are the words of a dying man, and spoken by him to his departing soul."

Ibid, page 318.

Finally, Hadrian and Vaughan led me to T. S. Eliot's "Animula," and, in particular, these lines:

'Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul'

To a flat world of changing lights and noise,

To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,

Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,

Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,

Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,

Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure

In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,

Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea.

     *     *     *     *     *

Issues from the hand of time the simple soul

Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,

Unable to fare forward or retreat, 

Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,

Denying the importunity of the blood,

Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,

Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;

Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

T. S. Eliot, "Animula," lines 1-10 and 24-31, in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (Harcourt, Brace and Company 1936).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Springtime in Eskdale" (1935)

There is yet another way of considering this matter: "You are a little soul, carrying around a corpse, as Epictetus used to say."  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 41 (translated by W. A. Oldfather).

Marcus Aurelius' quotation from Epictetus may be read in light of the section of the Meditations which immediately precedes it, and which is quite wonderful:

"Cease not to think of the Universe as one living Being, possessed of a single Substance and a single Soul; and how all things trace back to its single sentience; and how it does all things by a single impulse; and how all existing things are joint causes of all things that come into existence; and how intertwined in the fabric is the thread and how closely woven the web."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 40 (translated by C. R. Haines).

Empires.  Animula.  And yesterday afternoon I walked through Spring, which persists in being here, despite everything.  "How intertwined in the fabric is the thread and how closely woven the web."

A man of the Way comes rapping at my brushwood gate,

wants to discuss the essentials of Zen experience.

Don't take it wrong if this mountain monk's too lazy to open his

     mouth:

late spring warblers singing their heart out, a village of drifting

     petals.

Jakushitsu Genkō (1290-1367) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, "Poems by Jakushitsu Genkō," The Rainbow World: Japan in Essays and Translations (Broken Moon Press 1990), page 127.

What are we to do?  "It's a sad and beautiful world."  (Mark Linkous (performing as Sparklehorse), "Sad and Beautiful World.")

To a mountain village

   at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

   from the vespers bell.

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

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

Our Place

A few days ago, I walked down an alley of trees that, in spring and summer, is my favorite tunnel of leaves.  I had been away for nearly a week.  I noticed that, in my absence, nearly all the leaves had fallen, save for a few lonely, rattling survivors here and there, hanging on, fluttering back and forth in the wind.

The day was grey and cold.  I was nearly embracing a feeling of bleakness when, suddenly, a grey dove flew up out of the brown wild grass meadow to the left of me, crossed over the path in front of me, and disappeared into the depths of a pine tree off in the meadow to the right.

These surprises -- reminders, messages, gifts -- often seem to arrive when we most need them, don't they?

                        Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

John Drinkwater, Tides (Sidgwick & Jackson 1917).

Joshua Anderson Hague (1850-1916), "Landscape in North Wales"

Please bear with me, dear readers:  "Reciprocity" is one of my favorite poems, and it has appeared here on several occasions.  After the encounter with the lone dove, I thought of it.  I also thought of it a few months ago, when I read this:

                                Man

     Weighing the stedfastness and state
Of some mean things which here below reside,
Where birds like watchful Clocks the noiseless date
     And Intercourse of times divide,
Where Bees at night get home and hive, and flowers
               Early, as well as late,
Rise with the Sun, and set in the same bowers;

                                  2.
     I would (said I) my God would give
The staidness of these things to man!  for these
To his divine appointments ever cleave,
     And no new business breaks their peace;
The birds nor sow, nor reap, yet sup and dine,
               The flowers without clothes live,
Yet Solomon was never drest so fine.

                                  3.
     Man hath still either toys, or Care,
He hath no root, nor to one place is ty'd,
But ever restless and Irregular
     About this Earth doth run and ride,
He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where,
               He says it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

                                  4.
     He knocks at all doors, strays and roams,
Nay hath not so much wit as some stones have
Which in the darkest nights point to their homes,
     By some hid sense their Maker gave;
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
               And passage through these looms
God order'd motion, but ordain'd no rest.

Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans (1650), in Donald Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (editors), The Works of Henry Vaughan, Volume I: Introduction and Texts 1646-1652 (Oxford University Press 2018).  "Toys" (line 15) likely means "whims." Donald Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (editors), The Works of Henry Vaughan, Volume III: Commentaries and Bibliography (Oxford University Press 2018), p. 975 (citing The Oxford English Dictionary).

"Man" and "Reciprocity" both put me in mind of a phrase by William Wordsworth that appears near the end (lines 928 and 929) of Book I ("The Wanderer") of The Excursion:  "the calm oblivious tendencies of nature."

Joshua Anderson Hague, "Late Autumn"

Each autumn, I grieve for the loss of the leaves.   The ever-turning kaleidoscope of innumerable greens overhead.  The flickering, swaying patterns of light and shadow on the ground.  And the sound  -- at all times, and in all weathers, the sound.

But this afternoon, walking beneath the spacious empty branches of a long row of trees, I wondered about my grieving.  The day was windless and the trees were absolutely silent.  The silence was breathtaking.  As was the look of the declining yellow light on the trunks of the trees, on the thousands and thousands of twigs and branches.  The World was aglow.  Silent and aglow.

As I walked home, Philip Larkin's line from a poem about spring came to mind:  "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."  Well, that's the way of the World, isn't it?

                       The Spider

There is craft in this smallest insect,
with strands of web spinning out his thoughts;
in his tiny body finding rest,
and with the wind lightly turning.
Before the eaves he stakes out his broad earth;
for a moment on the hedge top lives through his life.
The ten thousand things should all be thus,
the way the Creator meant us to be.

Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Japanese Literature in Chinese, Volume I: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Early Period (Columbia University Press 1975), page 107.

Joshua Anderson Hague, "Haymaking"

Another Time

I have spent a fair portion of the new year in the 17th century.  My sojourn began when I returned to one of my favorite anthologies:  Norman Ault's Seventeenth Century Lyrics.  Browsing through it, I came upon this:

                  The Retreat

Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back, at that short space
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A sev'ral sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
          Oh, how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence the enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm trees;
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), in Norman Ault (editor), Seventeenth Century Lyrics (William Sloane Second Edition, 1950); originally published in Silex Scintillans, Part I (1650).

"Sev'ral" (line 18) means "individual," "different," or "separate and distinct."  Robert Herrick uses the word in this sense in his lovely two-line poem "Dreams":  "Here we are all, by day; by night we're hurl'd/By dreams, each one, into a sev'ral world."  "Stay" (line 27) means "delay" in this context.

"Bright shoots of everlastingness" is wonderful, and is not likely to be forgotten once encountered.  "A white, celestial thought" is lovely.  But I am also fond of:  "Some men a forward motion love,/But I by backward steps would move."  Wise counsel, I think.

Not surprisingly, "The Retreat" puts many in mind of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."  For a time (particularly in the 19th century), it was believed that Wordsworth had been directly influenced by "The Retreat," as well as by other poems by Vaughan with a similar theme.  However, this conclusion is questionable. Still, even though there may not be a direct influence at work, the similarity of feeling and thought in the two poets is at times remarkable.  (For an interesting discussion of this topic, please see Helen McMaster, "Vaughan and Wordsworth," The Review of English Studies, Volume 11, Number 43 (1935), pages 313-325.)

Roland Pitchforth (1895-1982), "Bainbridge" (1928)

After reading "The Retreat," the following poem by Thomas Traherne, another 17th century poet, came to mind.  It has appeared here before, but it is always worth a revisit.

                       The Salutation

                    These little limbs,
          These eyes and hands which here I find,
This panting heart wherewith my life begins,
          Where have ye been?  Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my new-made tongue?

                    When silent I
          So many thousand thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
          How could I, smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears, perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

                    I that so long
          Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
          To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Such eyes and objects, on the ground to meet.

                    New burnished joys
          Which finest gold and pearl excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs of boys,
          In which a soul doth dwell:
Their organizëd joints and azure veins
More wealth include than the dead world contains.

                    From dust I rise,
          And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes
          A gift from God I take:
The earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,
The sun and stars are mine; if these I prize.

                    A stranger here
          Strange things doth meet, strange glory see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
          Strange all and new to me:
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), in H. I. Bell (editor), Traherne's Poems of Felicity (University of Oxford Press 1910).

In contrast with Vaughan's backward-glancing soul, Traherne's blithe soul is content -- nay, delighted -- to be abroad in the World.  But then, Traherne is writing from the perspective of childhood, in the absence of experience.  Traherne's use of "strange" (as well as of "stranger" and "strangest") in the final stanza is lovely.  I am reminded of Vaughan's quotation, in one of his prose works (a translation of Johannes Nierembergius), of an unnamed "divine":  "Excellent is that advice of the divine:  To live a stranger unto life."  Henry Vaughan, Flores Solitudinis (1654).

Reading "The Salutation" and "The Retreat," I am compelled to report, dear readers, that the 17th century is a nobler, more gracious and graceful, and altogether more civilized place than the world we inhabit today.  Yes, I know:  those moderns who believe in the gods of Progress, Science, and political and social utopianism will howl in disagreement.  They will say: "For  centuries, humanity has been ridding itself of its ignorant and superstitious ways.  We in the modern world have arrived at the apex of human progress and enlightenment."  Well, no.

Roland Pitchforth, "Hebden, Yorkshire"

At this point, with the soul's wayfaring under consideration, I can hear two of my beloved poets of the fin de siècle calling to me.  Hence, please bear with me as we spend a brief idyll (a wistful and melancholic idyll, I concede) in the 1890s.

                    The Soul's Progress

It enters life it knows not whence; there lies
     A mist behind it and a mist before.
     It stands between a closed and open door.
It follows hope, yet feeds on memories.
The years are with it, and the years are wise;
     It learns the mournful lesson of their lore.
     It hears strange voices from an unknown shore,
Voices that will not answer to its cries.

Blindly it treads dim ways that wind and twist;
     It sows for knowledge, and it gathers pain;
          Stakes all on love, and loses utterly.
Then, going down into the darker mist,
     Naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,
          It staggers out into eternity.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (Macmillan 1889).

Yes, the poets of the Nineties had a different view of things than Vaughan, Traherne, and the other poets of the 17th century.  Although melancholy is not absent from 17th century poetry, the fin de siècle poets made an art of evoking and cataloguing it.  As I have stated here on more than one occasion, I am not ashamed to say that I am quite willing to surrender myself to them.

            Vitae summa brevis spem nos
                    vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
          Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
          We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
          Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
          Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, Verses (Leonard Smithers 1896).  The title of the poem is taken from Book I, Ode 1, of Horace's Odes.  It may be translated as:  "the short span of our life forbids us to indulge in a long-term hope."  Ernest Dowson, Collected Poems (edited by  R. K. R. Thornton) (Birmingham University Press 2003), page 225.  

The correspondences between the two poems are wonderful.  Ah, the fate of the soul!  In Symons's view, "there lies/A mist behind it and a mist before," and, in time, "naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,/It staggers out into eternity."  ("Into the darker mist," mind you.)  Dowson takes (perhaps) a marginally more hopeful view of the soul's journey:  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

But, for all of the differences between Symons and Vaughan, Dowson and Traherne, we mustn't forget this:  for each of them the soul is real, and we owe it our attention.

Roland Pitchforth, "Burnsall" (1925)

In our time, the word "soul" is viewed in much the same way as the word "evil":  both words make most moderns nervous.  Not me.  This is one of the reasons why the 17th century seems congenial to me, as does the fin de siècle world of Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson.  Vaughan, Traherne, Symons, and Dowson can speak of the soul without doubt and without irony.  Why should it be otherwise?

There was a time when a person could as a matter of course address his or her own soul.  This was not necessarily a product of religious fervor, nor was it a sign of madness.  It was simply the way of the world.

For instance, the Emperor Hadrian (76-138) did so in what is purported to be his death-bed poem, which begins with the phrase animula vagula blandula.  John Donne, another poet of the 17th century, translated the opening two lines of Hadrian's poem as follows:

My little wandering sportful soul,
Guest and companion of my body.

John Donne, in E. K. Chambers (editor), The Poems of John Donne (Lawrence and Bullen 1896).

Henry Vaughan translated the entire poem:

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The guest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor jests wilt thou afford me more.

Henry Vaughan, The Mount of Olives: Or, Solitary Devotions (1652).

We live in an age of technological miracles.  But a great deal of what it means to be human has gone missing.

Roland Pitchforth, "Cottage, Bainbridge" (1928)