How To Live, Part Twenty-Five: Senescence

When it comes to aging, we can learn a thing or two from the ancient Chinese poets.  Yes, their poems do occasionally evince a sense of regret for, and a stoic resignation to, the passing of time, the loss of youthful vigor, and the approach of death.  But there is none of that "do not go gentle into that good night" business.  Too histrionic.  Instead, the overall message is that the best way to live out one's closing years is with equanimity, propriety, and serenity.

     In Answer to Vice-Magistrate Zhang

Late in my life I only care for quiet.
A million pressing tasks, I let them go.
I look at myself; I have no long range plans.
To go back to the forest is all I know.
Pine breeze:  I ease my belt.  Hill moon:  I strum
My lute.  You ask -- but I can say no more
About success or failure than the song
The fisherman sings, which comes to the deep shore.

Wang Wei (701-761) (translated by Vikram Seth), in Vikram Seth, Three Chinese Poets (Faber and Faber 1992).

Here is another translation of the same poem.

          An Answer to Assistant Magistrate Zhang

In the sunset years of my life, all I desire is quietude;
The ten thousand affairs of this world no longer involve my heart.
As to my future?  I have no better plan
Than to retreat to my old forest.
There the pine wind will loosen my girdle
And the mountain moon will smile on me as I pluck my lute.
Sir, do you ask the principle behind success and failure?
Listen to the fisherman's song drifting up from the deep river estuary.

Wang Wei (translated by Chang Yin-nan and Lewis Walmsley), in Chang Yin-nan and Lewis Walmsley, Poems by Wang Wei (Charles E. Tuttle Company 1958).

This version sounds more formal and quaint than Seth's version, but I think it is lovely.  I particularly like:  "The ten thousand affairs of this world no longer involve my heart."  (A side-note:  "ten thousand," not "million" (as used by Seth), is the correct literal translation.  It makes sense that Wang Wei would use "ten thousand":  he was a devout Buddhist, and "the ten thousand things" is a phrase that is used in Buddhist thought to describe the distractions of the world.)

John Lawson, "An Ayrshire Stream" (1893)

English translations of Chinese poetry often end up sounding fairly relaxed and colloquial.  However, it is important to remember that traditional Chinese poetry was governed by strict rules of prosody relating to the number of lines, the number of characters per line, end-rhyme, and verbal and tonal parallelism within and across lines.  Wang Wei's poem is in the form known as "regulated verse":  an eight-line poem containing five characters in each line, with a single rhyme appearing at the end of the even-numbered lines.  In addition, verbal parallelism is required in the second and third couplets.

Bearing all of this in mind, consider a third translation of the poem.

     In Response to Vice-Magistrate Zhang

In late years I care for tranquility alone --
A myriad affairs do not concern my heart.
A glance at myself:  there are no long-range plans.
I only know to return to the old forest.
Pine winds blow, loosening my belt;
The mountain moon shines as I pluck my zither.
You ask about reasons for success and failure:
A fisherman's song enters the shore's deeps.

Wang Wei (translated by Pauline Yu), in Pauline Yu, The Poetry of Wang Wei (Indiana University Press 1980).

Yu's use of end-stopped lines of a similar length has the virtue of reproducing the image-by-image and thought-by-thought flow of the original text, and thus to some extent echoes the formal structure of the original.  When it comes to form, perhaps this is the best one can hope to achieve in translation, since the other prosodic features (five characters per line, end-rhyme, and tonal parallelism) are impossible to replicate in English.

James Paterson, "Moniaive" (1885)

As I was writing this post, the following poem by W. B. Yeats came to mind.

   The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."

W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods (Macmillan 1903).

It is wonderful how one can read a poem in one's youth, have it lodge in one's mind, and then have it reappear when one least expects it.  I'm not saying that it came back to me in whole:  first the title floated up, then the phrase "their knees/Were twisted like the old thorn-trees."

Alas, I am not capable of drawing a brilliant parallel between Yeats's poem and Wang Wei's poem to Vice-Magistrate Zhang.  I'll have to simply leave the two of them side-by-side.  Which is perfectly fine.  This morning I looked out over the deep-blue waters of Puget Sound as row after row of brilliant white cumulus clouds moved slowly across a sky-blue sky.  This afternoon, I noticed that the lilacs -- creamy white and soft purple -- have come into bloom.

Sidney Vincent North (1873-1930), "White Houses"

As I have noted in the past, during the Edo Period in Japan (1603-1867) a tradition developed of writing poems in Chinese.  These poems are known as kanshi.  The poets who composed kanshi were steeped in Chinese poetry, and they strictly followed the requirements of Chinese prosody.  Not surprisingly, therefore, the best kanshi often sound like poems written centuries earlier in China.  Yet there is still a Japanese sensibility present, an underlying hint, say, of the unique concreteness and implication of waka and haiku.

The following poem was written by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672), who is generally regarded as the finest of the kanshi poets.  It is his last recorded poem.

          Leaning on a Cane, Singing

Leaning on a cane by the wooded village,
trees rising thick all around:
a dog barks in the wake of a beggar;
in front of the farmer, the ox plowing.
A whole lifetime of cold stream waters,
in age and sickness, the evening sun sky --
I have tasted every pleasure of mist and sunset
in these ten-years-short-of-a-hundred.

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

The poem is, coincidentally, written in the same "regulated verse" form as Wang Wei's poem to Vice-Magistrate Zhang:  eight lines, with five characters in each line.  More importantly, the mood of the poem is, I think, quite reminiscent of Wang Wei's poem:  equanimity, propriety, and serenity.

Robert McGown Coventry, "The Haven" (1908)

"You Linger Your Little Hour And Are Gone, And Still The Woods Sweep Leafily On"

This year, as autumn has turned, two phrases have been recurring to me. First:  "Slow, slow!"  (From Robert Frost's "October.")  And second:  "Earth never grieves!"  (From Thomas Hardy's "Autumn in King's Hintock Park.") By the way, the exclamation marks (which are appropriate, I think, given the sentiments expressed) appear in the originals.

The phrases came to me again this past week when I finally got around to visiting a grove of trees that is one of my favorite autumn haunts.  Alas, the trees were half empty.  I was reminded of Ishikawa Jozan's lines about paying a late visit to the spring cherry blossoms:  "When blossoms were at their finest I neglected to call./The blossoms did not betray me.  I betrayed the blossoms."  (Ishikawa Jozan, "Fallen Blossoms on the Eastern Hills.")

But the trees remain beautiful.  The upper branches, exposed to the wind, are nearly bare; the lower boughs less so.  In a breeze, one can still hear, if not a roar, at least a whoosh and a rustle.  And the gold and red against a blue sky?  Well, that's autumn, isn't it?

As I stood beneath the trees, I had another thought:  All of this goes on quite well with or without us.  No waiting around.  Indifference? Impassivity?  Those are human concepts.

                         Stars

How countlessly they congregate
     O'er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
     When wintry winds do blow! --

As if with keenness for our fate,
     Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
     Invisible at dawn, --

And yet with neither love nor hate,
     Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva's snow-white marble eyes
     Without the gift of sight.

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

When A Boy's Will was first published, Frost included, in the table of contents, a brief gloss for each poem.  (The glosses were removed in subsequent reprintings.)  His gloss for "Stars" was:  "There is no oversight of human affairs."

David Muirhead (1867-1930), "The End of Autumn"

I do not intend to get bogged down in the critical discussion of whether Frost was the bucolic nature poet and the front-porch Yankee philosopher of caricature (a self-created caricature to a great extent) or whether he was, lo and behold, "dark," "bleak," and "harrowing."  Like any great poet, he was capacious.  I will say this:  there is a thread of loneliness -- both personal and cosmic (consider, for a start, "Desert Places") -- that runs through everything he wrote.

          On Going Unnoticed

As vain to raise a voice as a sigh
In the tumult of free leaves on high.
What are you in the shadow of trees
Engaged up there with the light and breeze?

Less than the coral-root you know
That is content with the daylight low,
And has no leaves at all of its own;
Whose spotted flowers hang meanly down.

You grasp the bark by a rugged pleat,
And look up small from the forest's feet.
The only leaf it drops goes wide,
Your name not written on either side.

You linger your little hour and are gone,
And still the woods sweep leafily on,
Not even missing the coral-root flower
You took as a trophy of the hour.

Robert Frost, West-Running Brook (1928).

A coral-root is a lovely little thing, after all.

David Muirhead, "The Fen Bridge, near Dedham (Constable's Country)"

Is Nature beneficent?  Or is it threatening?  Both, of course.  But, either way, it is keeping its thoughts to itself.  Best to get used to the silence.  The beauty is not lessened.

                         Acceptance

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened.  Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future.  Let what will be, be.'

Robert Frost, Ibid.

A side-note:  please bear with me as I return to the continual conversation between Frost and Edward Thomas that I mentioned in my previous post. Here is Thomas in the final stanza of "Out in the Dark" (his final poem but one):

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

And Frost responds:  "I have been one acquainted with the night."

David Muirhead, "A Lowland Landscape"

"Those Spring Splendors, Like Dreams, Are Gone Beyond Recall"

There is a plainspoken serenity to traditional Chinese lyrical poetry that provides a beautiful counterpoint to the ofttimes declamatory and rhetorical character of traditional English poetry.  I realize that this is a huge generalization.  I can only say that there comes a time when, in search of peace and quiet, I need to turn from the thinking and the emoting of English verse to the (relatively) straightforward statements one finds in Chinese poetry.

But this is not a matter of simplicity versus complexity.  On the surface, Chinese poetry, especially when translated into English, may appear "simple."  However, from the standpoint of thought and emotion, the best Chinese poetry is every bit as allusive and as full of implication as the best English poetry.  Moreover, from the standpoint of prosody and formal structure, a great deal of traditional Chinese poetry is arguably more complex than English poetry.  (More on this in a moment.)

During the Edo (or Tokugawa) period (1603-1868), a significant number of Japanese poets devoted themselves to writing poems in Chinese.  The poems they wrote are known as kanshi (a Japanese word meaning -- no surprise -- "Chinese poem").  All of the poems that appear in this post are kanshi.

One frost cleared the air, drove away the hovering shadows,
slimmed down the shape of the hills, reddened the groves.
Finest of all, the scene in the persimmon orchards:
in late sun, on tree after tree ten thousand dots of gold.

Rokunyo (1734-1801) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).  The poem is untitled, and is the first in a sequence titled "Three Poems Composed as I Walked Through the Village."

William MacGeorge (1861-1931), "Riverscape, Autumn"

The Japanese kanshi poets rigorously applied the strict rules of Chinese prosody.  The four poems that appear here are all in the form known in Chinese as chueh-chu (zekku in Japanese).  This form consists of a quatrain in which each line consists of the same number of Chinese characters (five, seven, or, rarely, six).  The second and fourth lines must rhyme.  A rhyme is optional in the first line.

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), Ibid.

As if the prosodic features that I have mentioned were not enough, there is an additional layer of complexity in the chueh-chu form (and in most Chinese poetry):  the rules of "tonal parallelism" must be followed.  To quote Burton Watson, "the rules for tonal regulation, or tonal parallelism, as it is sometimes called, are highly complex."  Burton Watson (editor and translator), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 10.  The rules may be broadly summarized as follows:

"In principal they decree that a single line shall not have more than two, or at the very most three, syllables or words in succession that belong to the same tonal category [i.e., "level" tones or "deflected" tones], and that in the second line of a couplet the words in key positions shall be opposite in tone to the corresponding words in the first line of the couplet.  This latter results in the second line of the couplet producing, in terms of tone, a mirror image of the first line."

Ibid, page 10.

Whew!  This is the basis for my earlier statement that traditional Chinese poetry is arguably more technically complex than English poetry.  (If one wishes to delve further into this subject, I highly recommend Watson's Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (Columbia University Press 1971), which combines an excellent historical examination of Chinese poetry with fine translations by Watson of exemplary poems.)  This brief explanation should also demonstrate that, although English translations of Chinese poetry are usually almost conversational in tone, they belie a complexity that can never be replicated in translation.

William MacGeorge, "Kirkcudbright"

One of the things that I find interesting about kanshi is that they have the "feel" (a purely subjective term, I concede) of classic Chinese poetry, while having, at the same time, a Japanese sensibility (again, a purely subjective term).  The following poem by Ishikawa Jozan, perhaps the most well-known kanshi poet, provides a good example of what I am trying to get at.

               Falling Leaves Mingle with the Rain

Frosted leaves, trailing the wind, fly, scatter in a tumble,
tumbling with the sudden shower, now this way, now that.
Parting from branches, leaf after leaf raps at my door and window,
joining with the sound of drops from the tall eaves of my study.

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) (translated by Burton Watson), in Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets.

It is important to remember that, during the Edo period, haiku was transformed into an important art form by Basho (1644-1694).  The lives of Basho and Ishikawa Jozan overlapped.  (In terms of its poetic and artistic importance, the period is remarkably similar to the Elizabethan era.)  Thus, the imagery in "Falling Leaves Mingle with the Rain" has (to me, at least) a Japanese quality to it that is quite distinctive, and that has affinities with haiku.

William MacGeorge, "River Landscape on a Sunny Day"

But I feel that I have gotten way off into the explanatory weeds!  Let's return to poetry.  The purpose of this post, believe it or not, is to share four lovely poems about autumn.

             Returning at Night from an Autumn Village

River village where they held the fair, moon just coming up,
little path skirting the woods, leading into field embankments:
some family's old graves deep among the trees,
the single gleam of a votive lamp, cold and mournful.

Tate (pronounced ta-tay) Ryuwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), Ibid.

"The single gleam of a votive lamp" brings to mind the grey stone lanterns that one sees in Japanese cemeteries.  "Cold and mournful" perhaps, but lovely to behold at night.

William MacGeorge, "Autumn near Kirkcudbright with Children"

Abundance

And so we move into October.  Leaves are the first thing that comes to mind, at least for me.  Those bearers of joy and wistfulness.  There can never be enough of them, can there?

Placing so much value on them now, wishing them to stay longer as they disappear, I wonder whether I gave them the attention they deserved from spring through summer.  "First known when lost."  Or something like that.

I am reminded of two lines from a poem by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) about fallen cherry blossoms in spring:  "When blossoms were at their finest I neglected to call./The blossoms did not betray me.  I betrayed the blossoms."  Burton Watson (editor and translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

                      Economic Man

He would have liked to find a use for leaves,
So simple a thing it seemed, so many of them
Flying and falling, going to waste and wet
And stopping up the gutters and the drains
Or drying in the still November days
Until swept into heaps, gone up in smoke
As if all summer's shade had never been.

And so he dreamed, and idly enough,
For many summers, many falls, until
His spell upon the earth was done, come time
To fall, while the useless leaves still came and went,
And the green had told him nothing, nor the sere,
That he might leave for men to profit by.

Howard Nemerov, War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now (University of Chicago Press 1987).

Funny thing about leaves:  they have no agenda; they pay us no mind. Imagine being nothing but yourself.

John Milne Donald, "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

However many years pass, my heart-of-autumn feeling will always come from 50 or so years ago, in the lost land of Minnesota.  The earthy scent that comes after jumping into a pile of raked-up oak leaves.  At dusk, looking down the street at neighbors standing beside their smoky piles of burning leaves.  No, we shan't have any of that anymore, shall we? Someone's idea of "Progress":  an autumn world without the smell of burning leaves.

   Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

"And who's to say where/The harvest shall stop?"  Is this one of those mischievous Frostian endings?  Is it an expression of joy at the inexhaustible beauty of the wondrous World around us?  Or is it a reminder of mortality?

Alexander Brownlie Docharty, "An Autumn Day" (c. 1917)

All of this abundance comes our way unbidden, unasked for.

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).

As I suggested in a recent post:  gratitude ought to be with us always. "Who's to say where the harvest shall stop?"

William Samuel Jay, "At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

Perspective, Part Five: "A Handful Of Sand"

My previous post amounted to a rant of sorts about political beings.  Some perspective is in order, both for myself -- for being on a high horse -- and for political beings (left, right, or center) the world over.

               Recording Thoughts

Years ago I retired to rest,
did some modest building in this crinkle of the mountain.
Here in the woods, no noise, no trash;
in front of my eaves, a stream of pure water.
In the past I hoped to profit by opening books;
now I'm used to playing games in the dirt.
What is there that's not a children's pastime?
Confucius, Lao Tzu -- a handful of sand.

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Richard Eurich, "Boats at Lyme Regis" (1937)

Or, as put differently by Geoffrey Scott:

    All Our Joy Is Enough

All we make is enough
Barely to seem
A bee's din,
A beetle-scheme --
Sleepy stuff
For God to dream:
Begin.

All our joy is enough
At most to fill
A thimble cup
A little wind puff
Can shake, can spill:
Fill it up;
Be still.

All we know is enough;
Though written wide,
Small spider yet
With tangled stride
Will soon be off
The page's side:
Forget.

Harold Monro (editor), Twentieth Century Poetry (1933).

Richard Eurich, "Lyme Regis" (1930)

Compensations

Every autumn, I hope that October will be free of wind and rain so that the leaves will stay a little longer.  Every autumn, my hopes prove to be forlorn. But there are always compensations.

Yesterday, on my afternoon walk, I passed through a grove of Big-Leaf maples.  The grove is about 200 yards long, and the interlacing top boughs form a canopy overhead.  The compensation of which I speak was at my feet:  the path down which I walked was completely covered with a carpet of fallen leaves.

Granted, this is not unexpected in autumn.  But what set this carpet apart was its pattern of colors.  Fallen Big-Leaf maple leaves are usually yellow or brown, or a rusty combination of the two.  However, because it is still early autumn, hundreds of large green leaves had fallen in the wind as well.  The green and brown and yellow leaves created a lovely tapestry of colors upon the path that lay before me.  The path was a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle, of yellow and green and brown.

                      Thomas Hennell, "The Avenue, Bucklebury" (c. 1941)

             Falling Leaves Mingle with the Rain

Frosted leaves, trailing the wind, fly, scatter in a tumble,
tumbling with the sudden shower, now this way, now that.
Parting from branches, leaf after leaf raps at my door and window,
joining with the sound of drops from the tall eaves of my study.

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

                Thomas Hennell, "The Guest House, Cerne Abbas" (c. 1940)

A lonely four-mat hut --
All day no one in sight.
Alone, sitting beneath the window,
Only the continual sound of falling leaves.

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

                  Thomas Hennell, "The Beech Avenue, Lasham" (c. 1941)

"Leaning On A Cane"

A time arrives (imperceptibly, it would seem) when one begins to exhibit an increased interest in poems about mortality.  In due course, this interest may become more specific, more pressing.  Thus, for instance, the ability of a poet to look certain facts in the face -- with equanimity and without bravado -- may suddenly begin to strike a nerve (something between a welcome sense of recognition and an urge to flee).

When it comes to equanimity without bravado, the Chinese and Japanese poets seem to have this mortality business well in hand.  Whether this has something to do with Taoism and/or Buddhism, I am not competent to say. The following two poems by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) are, I think, fine examples of what I am trying to get at.

                                                C. H. H. Burleigh
      "The Burleigh Family Taking Tea At Wilbury Crescent, Hove" (1947)

                  Up After Illness

Old and sick here in spring mountains,
but the warm sun's just right for a skinny body.
I sweep the bedroom, put the bedding out to air,
peer into the garden, leaning on a cane.
Birds scold, as though resenting visitors;
blossoms are late -- it seems they've waited for me.
Trust to truth when you view the ten thousand phenomena
and heaven and earth become one bottle gourd.

Ishikawa Jozan, in Burton Watson (editor/translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

               Osmund Caine (1914-2004), "Washing at No. 25, Kingston"

       Leaning on a Cane, Singing

Leaning on a cane by the wooded village,
trees rising thick all around:
a dog barks in the wake of a beggar;
in front of the farmer, the ox plowing.
A whole lifetime of cold stream waters,
in age and sickness, the evening sun sky --
I have tasted every pleasure of mist and sunset
in these ten-years-short-of-a-hundred.

Ibid.  According to tradition, this was Ishikawa Jozan's final poem.

                                   Gilbert Spencer, "The Terrace" (1927)

On A Boat At Night, Revisited

During the Edo Period (1603-1867) in Japan, a tradition developed of writing poems in Chinese.  These poems in Chinese by Japanese writers are known as kanshi.  According to Burton Watson, "the writing of such verse came to be an important mark of the educated man, much as the writing of Latin verse was for English gentlemen of the same centuries." Burton Watson (editor/translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and other Edo Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page x.

In addition to complying with the technical requirements of Chinese verse (e.g., number of lines, number of Chinese characters per line, rhyme, and tonal parallelism), the Japanese poets also echoed the subject matter of the Chinese poets.  As I noted in a previous post, poems written while travelling by boat were a staple of T'ang Dynasty poetry.  Thus, it is not surprising to see similar poems among the kanshi written by Japanese poets.

                        Kenneth Macqueen (1897-1960), "Beach Patterns"

The following poem is by Okubo Shibutsu (1767-1837).  The translation is by Burton Watson.

                    Aboard a Boat, Listening to Insects

As though delighting, as though grieving, each with its own song --
an idler, listening, finds his ears washed completely clean.
As the boat draws away from grassy banks, they grow more distant,
till the many varied voices become one single voice.

Ibid, page 92.

          Kenneth Macqueen, "Receding Tide Near Coolum, Queensland"

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) is perhaps the most well-known kanshi poet (along with Ryokan, whose poems have appeared here in the past).  The following poem by him sounds strikingly similar to many Chinese poems of the T'ang Dynasty.  It also exemplifies, I think, the distinctive qualities of classic Chinese poetry.

On the one hand, it may be nothing more than a lovely, yet commonplace, observation of a passing moment.  But, then again, it may hold within it untold depths.  However, it is critical to note that those depths -- if they are there -- have nothing to do with Western concepts such as "symbolism," "metaphor," "allegory," et cetera.  Any depth is solely in the thing itself, in the moment itself.  But, to bring the circle back around, perhaps there is no depth at all: it is nothing more than a lovely, yet commonplace, observation of a passing moment.  And yet . . .

          Spending the Night at Murotsu

Numberless sails voyaging west and east --
with evening they'll be scrambling to enter this one inlet.
Ahead of us the waves of eighteen choppy seas;
we'll tie up the boat here, wait for a favorable wind.

Ibid, page 10.  Murotsu is a port town on the island of Awaji, which lies in Japan's Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku.

                                    Kenneth Macqueen, "Wave Sketch"

"The Blossoms Did Not Betray Me. I Betrayed The Blossoms."

A few months ago, I posted a series of poems in which the poets conveyed their experiences of mistaken identity when it comes to "Frost, Blossoms, Snow, and Moonlight."  I neglected to include the following poem by Walter de la Mare in the series.  It now seems appropriate.

               The Cherry Trees

Under pure skies of April blue I stood,
Where, in wild beauty, cherries were in blow;
And, as sweet fancy willed, see there I could
Boughs thick with blossom, or inch-deep in snow.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (1938).

                     John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Roofing a New House"

Today was a windy and rainy day, and I fear for the longevity of this year's blossoms.  The usual bitter-sweet cherry blossom-spring and leafy-autumn wistfulness arises.  Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) offers an interesting perspective on this feeling.

          Fallen Blossoms on the Eastern Hills

Cherry blossoms filling the ground, sunset filling my eyes:
blossoms vanished, spring old, I feel the passing years.
When blossoms were at their finest I neglected to call.
The blossoms did not betray me.  I betrayed the blossoms.

Ishikawa Jozan (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor/translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

                                   John Aldridge, "Landscape" (c. 1940s)