Choristers

The wild grasses that cover the meadows are deep green and growing tall.  Scattered amidst the swaying green, close to the ground, are small pinkish-purple wildflowers.  You have to look closely, or you will miss them.  Their name is unknown to me.  But I am acquainted with them, and I look forward to their arrival each May.

     Among the grasses,
A flower blooms white,
     Its name unknown.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page 289.

There are those who seek to know the names of each of the beautiful particulars of the World, and I admire and envy their curiosity and diligence.  I wish them well.  We are all in pursuit of beauty, and I am in no position to say one path is better than another.  But I am, and shall remain, blissfully ignorant when it comes to the names of most of those beautiful particulars.  Thus, "the small pinkish-purple wildflower that comes in May" will suffice for me.

     The names unknown,
But to every weed its flower,
     And loveliness.

Sampū (1647-1732) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 123.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

Despite the inevitable importunities of Events, as magnified and distorted by the clamor, bad faith, and ultimate emptiness of "news," the World -- the real World -- quietly runs its serene course, and always will.  Nameless, profound.  We can attend to it, or not.  The choice is ours.

               The Knight in the Wood

The thing itself was rough and crudely done,
Cut in coarse stone, spitefully placed aside
As merest lumber, where the light was worst
On a back staircase.  Overlooked it lay
In a great Roman palace crammed with art.
It had no number in the list of gems,
Weeded away long since, pushed out and banished,
Before insipid Guidos over-sweet
And Dolce's rose sensationalities,
And curly chirping angels spruce as birds.
And yet the motive of this thing ill-hewn
And hardly seen did touch me.  O, indeed,
The skill-less hand that carved it had belonged
To a most yearning and bewildered brain:
There was such desolation in the work;
And through its utter failure the thing spoke
With more of human message, heart to heart,
Than all these faultless, smirking, skin-deep saints,
In artificial troubles picturesque,
And martyred sweetly, not one curl awry --
Listen; a clumsy knight, who rode alone
Upon a stumbling jade in a great wood
Belated.  The poor beast with head low-bowed
Snuffing the treacherous ground.  The rider leant
Forward to sound the marish with his lance.
You saw the place was deadly; that doomed pair,
The wretched rider and the hide-bound steed,
Feared to advance, feared to return -- That's all!

John Leicester Warren, Rehearsals: A Book of Verses (Strahan & Company 1870). (A side-note: "marish" (line 25) is not a misspelling. It is a precursor of "marsh.")

Stanley Spencer, "Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene" (1947)

How the World presents itself to us is ever a source of surprise and mystery, isn't it?  We need to be attentive and receptive, for it often appears in a humble guise, without pretense, making no demands, easily missed.

                    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.

Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767-1837) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 92).

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

Mystery

I am always grateful for the unexpected gifts that poetry provides.  For instance, a few days ago I discovered this:

                              A Stranger

Her face was like sad things:  was like the lights
Of a great city, seen from far off fields,
Or seen from sea:  sad things, as are the fires
Lit in a land of furnaces by night:
Sad things, as are the reaches of a stream
Flowing beneath a golden moon alone.
And her clear voice, full of remembrances,
Came like faint music down the distant air.
As though she had a spirit of dead joy
About her, looked the sorrow of her ways:
If light there be, the dark hills are to climb
First:  and if calm, far over the long sea.
Fallen from all the world apart she seemed,
Into a silence and a memory.
What had the thin hands done, that now they strained
Together in such passion?  And those eyes,
What saw they long ago, that now they dreamed
Along the busy streets, blind but to dreams?
Her white lips mocked the world, and all therein:
She had known more than this; she wanted not
This, who had known the past so great a thing.
Moving about our ways, herself she moved
In things done, years remembered, places gone.
Lonely, amid the living crowds, as dead,
She walked with wonderful and sad regard:
With us, her passing image:  but herself
Far over the dark hills and the long sea.

Lionel Johnson, Ireland, with Other Poems (1897).

Where had this poem been all these years?   What a beautiful and wondrous thing it is.

Because I am fond of the poets of the Nineties, I was familiar with a few of Lionel Johnson's poems, but this had eluded me.  As it happens, it is not typical of his verse, which usually consists of rhymed stanzas or non-stanzaic poems in heroic couplets.  In contrast, "A Stranger" is written in unrhymed blank verse.  I have the sense (and I may well be wrong) that Johnson was so emotionally taken by the woman who is the subject of the poem that he wanted to set down the experience with as much immediacy as he could.  In this, he has wonderfully succeeded.

There is a mystery at the heart of "A Stranger":  the mystery of the human soul.  To his great credit, Johnson  neither caricatures nor patronizes the woman:  he recognizes the uniqueness of her soul, and this is what moves him.  Yes, he does speculate, but he never violates the dignity of her soul. Pity is a difficult and delicate thing, for we can never presume to know what lies within the soul of another.

Albert Goodwin (1845-1932), "The Tower of London" (1897)

The mystery of each human soul also lies at the heart of a favorite poem of mine, which appeared here back in November of 2011.  As is the case with "A Stranger," it is a Victorian poem that does not sound or feel "Victorian" as we tend to think of that term.

                  The Knight in the Wood

The thing itself was rough and crudely done,
Cut in coarse stone, spitefully placed aside
As merest lumber, where the light was worst
On a back staircase.  Overlooked it lay
In a great Roman palace crammed with art.
It had no number in the list of gems,
Weeded away long since, pushed out and banished,
Before insipid Guidos over-sweet,
And Dolce's rose sensationalities,
And curly chirping angels spruce as birds.
And yet the motive of this thing ill-hewn
And hardly seen did touch me.  O, indeed,
The skill-less hand that carved it had belonged
To a most yearning and bewildered heart,
There was such desolation in its work;
And through its utter failure the thing spoke
With more of human message, heart to heart,
Than all these faultless, smirking, skin-deep saints;
In artificial troubles picturesque,
And martyred sweetly, not one curl awry --
Listen; a clumsy knight who rode alone
Upon a stumbling jade in a great wood
Belated.  The poor beast with head low-bowed
Snuffing the treacherous ground.  The rider leant
Forward to sound the marish with his lance.
You saw the place was deadly; that doomed pair,
The wretched rider and the hide-bound steed
Feared to advance, feared to return -- That's all!

John Leicester Warren, Rehearsals: A Book of Verses (1870).  "Marish" (line 25) is, according to the OED, a "poetic, archaic, and regional" form of "marsh."  A note:  when Warren republished the poem 23 years later, he changed "heart" to "brain" in line 14.  John Leicester Warren, Poems Dramatic and Lyrical (1893).  I have used the original 1870 version.

The ostensible subject of the poem is a work of art.  But, of course, the true subject of the poem is the artist and his "human message," his "most yearning and bewildered heart."  Like Johnson, Warren does not patronize the subject of his poem.  Again, what we are given is a moving depiction of a unique and unfathomable soul.

Albert Goodwin, "Landscape"

I have sometimes made hasty and ill-advised judgments about other people, which I will always regret.  Given how little we know about ourselves, we ought to tread lightly when it comes to the mystery of others.  We should not presume to know too much.

As long-time readers have heard here before, "we should be careful//Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."  (Philip Larkin, "The Mower.")  As Johnson and Warren show us, there is a thread that connects us all, if only we look.  But a mystery always remains unplumbed.

     The previous owner:
I know it all, --
     Down to the very cold he felt.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 168.

     When I looked back,
The man who passed
     Was lost in the mist.

Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 85.

     A lantern
Entered a house
     On the withered moor.

Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 283.

Albert Goodwin, "Durham Cathedral" (1910)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Two: "Humanly Alive"

In a recent post, I used C. P. Cavafy's poem "Ionic" to raise the question whether we live in a disenchanted world.  I am not suggesting that, like Yeats, we go searching for fairies in the gloaming.  But it is worthwhile to consider how much the deification of Progress and Science has cost us in terms of human truth.

"What a marvelous time it was when everything was alive, according to human imagination, and humanly alive, in other words inhabited or formed by beings like ourselves; when it was taken as certain that in the deserted woods lived the beautiful Hamadryads and fauns and woodland deities and Pan, etc., and, on entering and seeing everything as solitude, you still believed that everything was inhabited and that Naiads lived in the springs, etc., and embracing a tree you felt it almost palpitating between your hands and believed it was a man or a woman like Cyparissus, etc., and the same with flowers, etc., just as children do."

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013), page 77.

Yes, I realize there is no turning back.  And I also realize that the soft golden light of Classical Greece is itself a myth.  For instance, we know from Herodotus that, when the Persian heralds sent by Darius asked the Athenians and the Spartans for a tribute of earth and water (signifying obeisance), the Athenians threw the herald into a barathrum ("pit of punishment") and the Spartans threw theirs into a well.  The heralds were told (a paraphrase):  "There's plenty of earth and water down there." Herodotus, The Histories, Book VII, Chapter 133.  Thus, I harbor no illusions.  (Well, perhaps a few.)  But we have lost something.

Charles Mahoney (1903-1968)

"Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden" (c. 1936)

                    Echoes of Hellas

O choir of Tempe mute these many years,
O fountain lutes of lyric Hippocrene,
On whose polluted brink no Muse is seen.
No more, between the gleaming vales, one hears

Apollo's footfall or the sobbing tears
Of Daphne budding finger-tips of green.
No nymphs are bathing with their huntress Queen
In the warm shallows of the mountain meres,

Great Pan is dead:  he perished long ago:
His reedy pipes these uplands never heard.
What trembling sounds from yonder coppice come?

Some ravished queen, who tells the dale her woe?
Nay, since the maids Pierian here are dumb,
The nightingale is nothing but a bird.

John Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), Collected Poems (1903).

A note:  I have previously posted John Leicester Warren's poem "The Knight in the Wood," which I highly recommend.

Charles Mahoney, "The Artist's Hand"

               Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide With Me'.

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

Charles Mahoney, "The Garden" (1950)

"The Knight In The Wood"

The following poem is a little-known poem that was written by a little-known poet.  However, I think that it says something important about art (in the broad sense of any creative activity, including poetry).  I hope that I do not sound too high-falutin', but I am not interested in art that cannot tell us something about what it means to be a human being, and, perhaps, how to get through an ordinary day in a sensitive, dignified manner.  (In other words, no dead sheep suspended in formaldehyde-filled glass tanks for me, thank you.)  But enough.  The poem says it much better than I can.

               The Knight in the Wood

The thing itself was rough and crudely done,
Cut in coarse stone, spitefully placed aside
As merest lumber, where the light was worst
On a back staircase.  Overlooked it lay
In a great Roman palace crammed with art.
It had no number in the list of gems,
Weeded away long since, pushed out and banished,
Before insipid Guidos over-sweet,
And Dolce's rose sensationalities,
And curly chirping angels spruce as birds.
And yet the motive of this thing ill-hewn
And hardly seen did touch me.  O, indeed,
The skill-less hand that carved it had belonged
To a most yearning and bewildered heart,
There was such desolation in its work;
And through its utter failure the thing spoke
With more of human message, heart to heart,
Than all these faultless, smirking, skin-deep saints;
In artificial troubles picturesque,
And martyred sweetly, not one curl awry --
Listen; a clumsy knight who rode alone
Upon a stumbling jade in a great wood
Belated.  The poor beast with head low-bowed
Snuffing the treacherous ground.  The rider leant
Forward to sound the marish with his lance.
You saw the place was deadly; that doomed pair,
The wretched rider and the hide-bound steed
Feared to advance, feared to return -- That's all!

John Leicester Warren, Rehearsals: A Book of Verses (1870).  (A note on line 25:  a "marish" is a marsh. According to the OED, the word is "now poetic, archaic, and regional.")  An aside:  the "Listen" at the beginning of line 21 is, I think, a very fine (and affecting) touch.

                       Charles Mahoney (1903-1968), "The Artist's Hand"