Trees And Epitaphs

This afternoon I walked down a green tunnel of trees.  Is there anything lovelier than to stand beneath a tree in summer looking up through the interlaced leaves into a blue sky?  Especially if the leaves are rustling in a breeze?  I can think of no better way to spend Eternity.

Which leads me to Thomas Hardy.  Although I don't know why.

John Constable, "Malvern Hall, Warwickshire" (1809)

     A Necessitarian's Epitaph

A world I did not wish to enter
Took me and poised me on my centre,
Made me grimace, and foot, and prance,
As cats on hot bricks have to dance
Strange jigs to keep them from the floor,
Till they sink down and feel no more.

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

J. M. W. Turner

"Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland" (c. 1798)

        Epitaph on a Pessimist

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,
     I've lived without a dame
From youth-time on; and would to God
     My dad had done the same.

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

Hardy includes this note to the poem: "From the French and Greek."  Hardy owned a copy of J. W. Mackail's Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1906), which contains the following translation of a Greek epitaph:  "I Dionysius of Tarsus lie here at sixty, having never married; and I would that my father had not."  J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (1970), page 557.  "Dionysius of Tarsus" becomes "Smith of Stoke" in order to bring us up-to-date.

Hardy's sympathetic reading of Schopenhauer is perhaps reflected in "Epitaph on a Pessimist."  Schopenhauer opined that, when all is said and done, not having been born may have been the best option for us.  Giacomo Leopardi, who Schopenhauer admired, came to the same conclusion.  Yes, it sounds harrowing, doesn't it?  But, when you read Schopenhauer and Leopardi, they are two extremely jolly fellows, and are quite entertaining about the whole business.

          Cynic's Epitaph

A race with the sun as he downed
          I ran at evetide,
Intent who should first gain the ground
          And there hide.

He beat me by some minutes then,
          But I triumphed anon,
For when he'd to rise up again
          I stayed on.

Thomas Hardy, Ibid.

"Epitaph on a Pessimist" and "Cynic's Epitaph" were published together in the September, 1925, issue of The London Mercury, when Hardy was 85.

George Lambert, 

"View of Copped Hall in Essex, from Across the Lake" (1746)

Hardy wrote all of these epitaphs when he was in his eighties.  Thus, he would seem to be trying them on for himself.  But we are all cynics and pessimists and necessitarians at some point in our lives, aren't we?  For all of Hardy's supposed pessimism, his compassion for, and his empathy with, his fellow human beings never wavered.  The epitaphs are for him and for each of us.

     A Placid Man's Epitaph

As for my life, I've led it
With fair content and credit:
It said: 'Take this.'  I took it.
Said: 'Leave.'  And I forsook it.
If I had done without it
None would have cared about it,
Or said: 'One has refused it
Who might have meetly used it.'

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

Francis Towne, "Haldon Hall, near Exeter" (1780)

                         Epitaph

I never cared for Life: Life cared for me,
And hence I owed it some fidelity.
It now says, 'Cease; at length thou hast learnt to grind
Sufficient toll for an unwilling mind,
And I dismiss thee -- not without regard
That thou didst ask no ill-advised reward,
Nor sought in me much more than thou couldst find.'

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922). "Toll" (line 4) is "a proportion of the grain or flour taken by the miller in payment for grinding."  OED.

I think that the final two epitaphs best describe Hardy himself.

John Glover, "Thirlmere" (c. 1820)

"He Has No Nice Felicities That Shrink From Giant Horrors": Charlotte Smith

R. S. Thomas's "The Cat and the Sea" got me to thinking of poems that are set on seaside cliffs.  Here is a sonnet by Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), who was responsible for bringing the sonnet back to life in the late-18th century.

                                 Sonnet.
     On Being Cautioned Against Walking On
   A Headland Overlooking The Sea, Because
          It Was Frequented By A Lunatic.

Is there a solitary wretch who hies
   To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
   Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
   Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-utter'd lamentation, lies
   Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
   I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
   From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (Second Edition, 1800).  The italicized words in line 11 appear as such in the original.  In a note to the line, Smith states that the words have their source in two lines from Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (1791):  "'Tis delicate felicity that shrinks/When rocking winds are loud."

As to the subject matter and tenor of the poem:  Smith's poems are often reflective of a difficult life.  Her father forced her into an unwanted marriage at the age of 15, and she subsequently had 12 children.  Her husband was a spendthrift (in addition to being a philanderer), and, when he was sent to debtor's prison, she joined him there.  She eventually left him, and supported herself and her children with her writing (which included both novels and her sonnets).  When the popularity of her novels began to wane, she fell into poverty.   

                             John Constable, "Weymouth Bay" (c. 1819)

How To Live, Part Five: "Better A Wrecked Life Than A Life So Aimless"

Today, Christina Rossetti offers a word of advice on How to Live.  To wit:  darkness lies before us; thus, we had best not live our life as a "pastime."  (Easier said than done, I know.)  The Oxford English Dictionary defines "pastime" as  "a diversion or recreation which serves to pass the time agreeably. . . . Also: a practice commonly indulged in." 

                              Pastime

A boat amid the ripples, drifting, rocking;
Two idle people, without pause or aim;
While in the ominous West there gathers darkness
            Flushed with flame.

A hay-cock in a hay-field backing, lapping,
Two drowsy people pillowed round about;
While in the ominous West across the darkness
            Flame leaps out.

Better a wrecked life than a life so aimless,
Better a wrecked life than a life so soft:
The ominous West glooms thundering, with its fire
            Lit aloft.

The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (edited by William Michael Rossetti) (1904).  "Better a wrecked life" took me aback when I first read it:  it did not seem "Victorian."  But that only shows that I underestimated Victorian poetry at the time.

                                 John Constable, "Old Sarum" (1834)

"Our Sky-Blue Slates Are Steaming In The Sun": Derek Mahon

My previous post featured Stanley Cook's "Second Marriage," which contains the lines:  "The sky stops crying and in a sudden smile/Of childish sunshine the rain steams on the roofs."  The lines bring to mind a poem by Derek Mahon, who is a wonderful poet of sea-coasts and sea-side towns -- "The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush," "Day Trip to Donegal," "Beyond Howth Head," and "The Sea in Winter," to name but a few. 

                                 Kinsale

The kind of rain we knew is a thing of the past --
deep-delving, dark, deliberate you would say,
browsing on spire and bogland; but today
our sky-blue slates are steaming in the sun,
our yachts tinkling and dancing in the bay
like race-horses.  We contemplate at last
shining windows, a future forbidden to no-one.

Derek Mahon, Antarctica (The Gallery Press 1986).

                        John Constable, "The Sea Near Brighton" (1826)

"Days Are Where We Live": Derek Mahon And Philip Larkin

I was of a mind to begin this post with an apostrophe to human folly.  But then I went for an afternoon walk in a blustery mist above the waters (grey and white-capped) of Puget Sound.  The wind roared (what else?) in the intricate and empty branches of a row of trees.  I realized that the folly was all mine.  Who among us is not enmeshed and implicated?  Better to think of the days.    

               Dream Days

'When  you stop to consider
The days spent dreaming of a future
And say then, that was my life.'

For the days are long --
From the first milk van
To the last shout in the night,
An eternity.  But the weeks go by
Like birds; and the years, the years
Fly past anti-clockwise
Like clock hands in a bar mirror.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (Viking/The Gallery Press 1991).

                  John Constable, "Cloud Study, September 25, 1822"

               Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber and Faber 1964).

                          John Constable, "Cloud Study, July 28, 1822"

"The Drowsy Motion Of The River R"

As we have seen in "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," Wallace Stevens speaks of the World as a river -- "an unnamed flowing."  Of course, this idea is certainly not one that is unique to Stevens.  But, for Stevens, the flowing of the World means nothing unless the Imagination is applied to it.  Thus, Life consists of two motions:  the motion of the World and the motion of the Imagination.  Perhaps this is expressed best in the title of one of Stevens's late poems:  "Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination."

Whew!  How's that for some high-falutin' talk?  I don't know what got into me.  Enough palaver.  The only thing that matters is the poetry.  To wit:

                         An Old Man Asleep

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth -- your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

                         Eero Jarnefelt, "Pond Water Crowfoot" (1895)

And, on the subject of motion, consider this:

   The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

                                John Constable, "Cloud Study" (1822)

A Single Leaf (Revisited): Dorothy Wordsworth And Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I came upon the following information in Maurice Hewlett's essay "The Crystal Vase," which first appeared in the December, 1919, issue of The London Mercury.  The essay begins as a discussion of the merits of various writers of published letters, journals, and diaries.  However, it soon turns into an appreciation of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth -- William's sister and Coleridge's friend.  Hewlett notes:  "We may see deeply into ourselves, but she sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern."

Hewlett writes:

   Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him [in the late winter of 1798].  Here is a curious point to note.  Dorothy records:
   "March 7th. -- William and I drank tea at Coleridge's. . . . Observed nothing particularly interesting. . . . One only leaf upon the top of a tree -- the sole remaining leaf -- danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind."
   And Coleridge has in Christabel:
          The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
          That dances as often as dance it can,
          Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
          On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Maurice Hewlett, A Green Shade: A Country Commentary (1920).

I have since discovered that her brother and Coleridge relied upon Dorothy Wordsworth's observations of nature on more than one occasion, putting them to use in their poetry.  But it is best to go to the source and read her journals, which are indeed wonderful.

                                                 John Constable
        "Hampstead Heath, Looking Towards Harrow at Sunset" (1823)

"The River Of Rivers In Connecticut": Wallace Stevens

The following poem by Wallace Stevens is not explicitly about autumn.  However, something about the season -- the clear and slanting light, perhaps -- always brings it to mind.  The poem is, I think, one of Stevens's finest.  He wrote it late in his life -- a time when he tended to pare back a bit the preciousness and abstraction of his earlier work and to speak more directly.  (Something that he seemed to acknowledge in "First Warmth" ("I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life . . .") and its successor, "As You Leave the Room.")    

          The River of Rivers in Connecticut

There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intellligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun.  On its banks,

No shadow walks.  The river is fateful,
Like the last one.  But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it.  The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

                       John Constable, "Harwich Lighthouse" (c. 1820)

Thomas Hardy: June 2, 1840

Thomas Hardy was born on this date 170 years ago.

In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'

                    I.
Only a man harrowing clods
   In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
   Half asleep as they stalk.

                   II.
Only thin smoke without flame
   From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
   Though Dynasties pass.

                   III.
Yonder a maid and her wight
   Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
   Ere their story die.

                  John Constable, "Gillingham Bridge, Dorset" (1823)

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns -- a gay survival from Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms -- days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotion to a monotonous average.
   -- Tess of the d'Urbervilles

               John Constable, "Weymouth Bay from the Downs above
                              Osmington Mills, Dorset" (c. 1816)

     Waiting Both

A star looks down at me,
And says:  'Here I and you
Stand, each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, --
          Mean to do?'

I say:  'For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come.' -- 'Just so,'
The star says:  'So mean I: --
          So mean I.'