What Matters

In my post of November 30, I mentioned the green fields we are fortunate to have throughout winter in this part of the World. Whether the day is dull grey or bright blue, I never tire of that green. I suppose I am easy to please.  But always grateful, or so I hope.

Earlier this week, the fields came to mind when I happened upon this:

                       Fragrant Grass

Fragrant grass, who knows who planted you,

Already spread in several clumps there by the terrace?

You have no mind to compete with the world --

What need is there for this deep rich green?

Wang An-shih (1021-1086) (translated by Burton Watson), in Kōjirō Yoshikawa, An Introduction to Sung Poetry (translated by Burton Watson) (Harvard University Press 1967), page 97.

John Nash (1893-1977), "Dorset Landscape" (c. 1930)

Today, as the sun descended toward the long dark silhouette of the distant mountain peaks, I watched a million bare twigs and branches turn to gold in the late afternoon light.  At the end of my walk, a thin line of crimson clouds lay along the far horizon.

"Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 249.)  Well, yes, true.  Nonetheless, the World is there.  It is not a chimera.  As Wang An-shih beautifully reminds us.

The green is always with us.  And I grow fonder and fonder of the ever green World with each passing year.  Where would we be without the green?

Happy New Year, dear readers, I wish you all the best.

John Nash, "A Path through Trees" (c. 1915)

Longing

It was a clear, windy autumn morning on the western shore of the Isle of Skye.  I paused.  The person I was with continued walking through a green field toward the ruins of a grey stone tower that stood on the edge of a cliff. Beyond her, the waters of the Little Minch were brilliant blue and white-capped, stretching to the Outer Hebrides in the distance.  There was no one else around.

As the moment unfolded, I knew that it was perfect.  At the same instant, I felt a sudden awareness of the passing of time.  This awareness came in the form of a catch of breath.  It was immediately followed by a longing, a longing for I knew not what.  The wind buffeted in my ears.  I continued walking.

That was long ago, and I was young.  But the autumn morning on Skye was not my first encounter with this peculiar sort of longing, nor was it the last.

The moment returned to me this week after I read this:

     I am in Kyoto,
Yet at the voice of the hototogisu,
     Longing for Kyoto.

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 175.

"The hototogisu corresponds more or less to the English cuckoo.  The breast of the male is blackish, with white blotches.  The breast of the female is white, the inside of the mouth red; it has a crest of hair on the head. . . . From early summer, it sings day and night, and ceases in autumn."

Ibid, page 161.

John Nash (1893-1977), "Dorset Landscape" (1930)

Here is an alternative translation:

     Even in Kyoto --
hearing the cuckoo's cry --
     I long for Kyoto.

Bashō (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass (editor), The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 11.

The original Japanese is simple (on the surface):

     kyō nite mo  
kyō natsukashi ya   
     hototogisu

Kyō is an earlier name for Kyoto; nite is "in;" mo is "even;" natsukashi is "long-for;" ya is a particle of emphasis (similar to "!" in English, but less emphatic; there is a softer aesthetic element to it); hototogisu is "cuckoo." Note that there is no reference to the cuckoo's "voice" or "cry":  those are interpolations made by Blyth and Hass.

The following translation perhaps captures best the deep simplicity of the original:

even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto --
a hototogisu

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 294.

John Nash, "The Barn, Wormingford" (1954)

The standard interpretation of Bashō's haiku is that the Kyoto that is longed for is the old, vanished Kyoto.  Thus, Blyth writes:  "Bashō is at this moment living in Kyoto, but at the sound of the voice of the hototogisu a wave of yearning flows over him for the past, the Kyoto of dead and gone poets of old."  Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn, page 175.

Perhaps.  But I wonder if the "longing" of which Bashō writes is the sort of longing that I experienced for a moment on the Isle of Skye.  A Japanese commenter on the haiku articulates what I am trying to get at:  "Somehow we tend to feel nostalgic in early summer, when hototogisu cry.  At times we get homesick, too, while in our own home."  Nunami Keion (1877-1927) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, page 294.

"At times we get homesick, too, while in our own home."  Exactly.

          Nostalgia for the Present

At that very instant:
Oh, what I would not give for the joy
of being at your side in Iceland
inside the great unmoving daytime
and of sharing this now
the way one shares music
or the taste of fruit.
At that very instant
the man was at her side in Iceland.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alan Trueblood), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Borges's phrase hits the nail on the head:  "Nostalgia for the Present."

A longing for the present in the present.  Which makes no sense, of course. But it happens.

John Nash, "A Gloucestershire Landscape" (1914)

There is a dreamlike quality to this experience.  But, at the same time, the present moment -- and everything that surrounds you at that moment -- is crystal clear and luminous.  You will never be more wide awake.

                              Abersoch

There was that headland, asleep on the sea,
The air full of thunder and the far air
Brittle with lightning; there was that girl
Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,
And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest
On the calm tide.  There were people going
About their business, while the storm grew
Louder and nearer and did not break.

Why do I remember these few things,
That were rumours of life, not life itself
That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?
Was it just that the girl smiled,
Though not at me, and the men smoking
Had the look of those who have come safely home?

R. S. Thomas, Tares (Rupert Hart-Davis 1961).

John Nash, "Mill Building, Boxted" (1962)

Companions

As I walked through the backyard a few days ago, it was full of twitterings and snatches of song.  Sparrows, chickadees, robins, starlings?  I'm no expert on these ornithological matters.  Besides, as is their wont, they were shy, and thus hidden.

In my younger years, I was on the lookout for bedizened birds: cardinals, orioles, tanagers, and the like.  But now I am fond of these workaday companions, who are with us always.  Think of the generations of them that have accompanied us through our lives!  There is little in life that is constant, or that can be relied upon, but this humble, comforting chorus has never ceased.

                    Winter Garden

The dunnock in the hedge -- is he fearful
or fastidious?  His eyes are fixed on the bird table
where five free-for-all sparrows
peck in a shower bath of crumbs.

A mouse zigzags
among the frozen raspberry canes,
going nowhere elaborately.

Three apple trees look as if they'd get on rehearsing
as Macbeth's witches
if they had the energy.

And, only seven hours old,
the day begins to die.

-- The sparrows have gone, telling everybody, and the dunnock
is giving us all
a lesson in table manners.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

John Nash, "Winter Scene, Buckinghamshire" (1920)

As a rule, Japanese waka and haiku poets do not traffic in "symbols," "metaphors," or "allegories."  They simply report what is going on in the World around us.  All this thinking that we do is highly overrated.

If they didn't sing
we'd just take them
for deeper-hued leaves --
the flocks of greenfinches
feeding on willow buds.

Saigyo (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991).

Now, I acknowledge that it certainly took some thinking on Saigyo's part to compose this poem.  But the thinking went into figuring out how to present this beautiful piece of the World to us with the least amount of interference and elaboration.  Lest we destroy Saigyo's lovely report on experience, we must resist mightily such thoughts as:  "The flocks of greenfinches symbolize . . ."  Or, worse:  "The meaning of this waka is . . ."  No.  We must stop all that.  Saigyo has given us the World.  That is enough.

John Nash, "Winter Scene"

When it comes to birds, I suppose that anthropomorphism is always a danger (the Pathetic Fallacy, sentimentality, et cetera).  But is this really a danger?  If we don't see ourselves out there in the World, then where do we see ourselves?  In the mirror?  In the phantasies, phantasms, and frauds of popular culture?

     Family of Long-tailed Tits

Their twittering isn't avant-garde
or confessional or aleatory.
It doesn't quote other birds
or utter manifestos telling them
how to sing.

It's congruent with their way of flying,
for that, too,
is a sweetest, softest twittering
to the eye.

The clumsy, clever human
bumbles about in the space
between his actions and his words.
No congruence there.

He listens with envy
while their song flirts
from one twig of silence
to another one.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

The Stranger

On several occasions in his poetry and prose Edward Thomas describes enigmatic meetings with strangers encountered during his walks through the countryside.  I use the word "enigmatic" because, although I take it on faith that the strangers actually existed, one also comes away with the feeling that Thomas has encountered a doppelgänger.  The strangers are not of the Other World, nor are they menacing.  Rather, they carry with them a sense of mystery and melancholy.  Which sounds a great deal like Edward Thomas himself.

In his poem "The Other" Thomas never actually meets the stranger. Instead, Thomas inadvertently discovers, through conversations with innkeepers, that someone resembling him has just passed that way. Thomas soon finds himself dogging the stranger's footsteps. The poem is too lengthy (at 110 lines) to post in full.  But here is the second stanza:

I learnt his road and, ere they were
Sure I was I, left the dark wood
Behind, kestrel and woodpecker,
The inn in the sun, the happy mood
When first I tasted sunlight there.
I travelled fast, in hopes I should
Outrun that other.  What to do
When caught, I planned not.  I pursued
To prove the likeness, and, if true,
To watch until myself I knew.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

"To watch until myself I knew" is a quintessential piece of studied ambiguity by Thomas.  As is:  "What to do/When caught, I planned not." Is he the pursuer or the pursued?  Or both?  (Ambiguity worthy of Robert Frost.  But more on him later.)

John Nash, "The Lake, Little Horkesley Hall" (c. 1958)

The poem ends with this stanza:

And now I dare not follow after
Too close.  I try to keep in sight,
Dreading his frown and worse his laughter.
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the inn door: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases.  Then I also shall cease.

I don't wish to overwork the image, but notice the reference to leaving "the dark wood" in the second stanza, as well as "I steal out of the wood to light" in the final stanza.  Dante's selva oscura comes to mind.  But we needn't go that far afield:  dark woods are a recurring element in Thomas's poetry. "Out in the dark over the snow/The fallow fawns invisible go."  ("Out in the Dark.")  "The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark."  ("The Combe.") "The green roads that end in the forest."  ("The Green Roads.")  "Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead/Hang stars like seeds of light/In vain." ("The Dark Forest.")

And, speaking of doppelgängers, dark woods inevitably bring to mind Robert Frost.  "One of my wishes is that those dark trees,/So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,/Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,/But stretched away unto the edge of doom."  ("Into My Own.")  And, of course:  "The woods are lovely, dark and deep."  ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.")  With each year that passes, my appreciation for the continual conversation between Thomas and Frost (a conversation that did not cease with Thomas's death) grows and grows.

John Nash, "The Barn, Wormingford" (1954)

A few days ago I came across one of these strangers in Thomas's The Icknield Way.  It is evening, and Thomas is walking southwest through the downs beyond Dunstable, Bedfordshire.

"The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth.  And this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so joyous and so bright and out of reach.  I was glad to be there, but I fell in with a philosopher who seemed to be equally moved yet could not decide whether his condition was to be described as happiness or melancholy.  He talked about himself.  He was a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost.  He told me of just such another evening as this and just such another doubt as to whether it was to be put down to the account of happiness or melancholy."

Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (1913), page 137.

Thomas then recounts the stranger's story.  He had been "digging all day in a heavy soil."  Then, at evening, he heard "a woman's voice singing alone somewhere away from where he stood.  He forgot who and where he was." The singer "was among the dark trees."  The singing went on for a while, then stopped.  He heard the sound of "a low laugh drawn out very long an instant afterwards."  The woman never appeared.

"He shivered in the cold.  The last dead leaves shook upon the beeches, but the silence out there in that world still remained.  She was walking or she was in her lover's arms, for aught he knew.  No sound came up to him where he stood eager and forlorn until he knew that she must be gone away for ever, like his lyric desires, and he went into his house and it was dark and still and inconceivably empty."

Ibid, pages 142-143.

With that, Thomas concludes the stranger's story.  The next sentence brings his encounter with the stranger to an end:

"As I turned into the inn and left him he was inclined either to put down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological."

Ibid, page 143.

Again, I take it on faith that this stranger who Thomas "fell in with" on the Icknield Way actually existed.  But I think that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Thomas.  "He was a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost."  This is Thomas through and through.  As is:  "he was inclined either to put down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological."  Thomas was never one to be easy on himself.

John Nash, "The Garden" (1951)

The stranger's story of the elusive, mysterious singing woman finds its parallel in a poem by Thomas.

          The Unknown

She is most fair,
And when they see her pass
The poets' ladies
Look no more in the glass
But after her.

On a bleak moor
Running under the moon
She lures a poet,
Once proud or happy, soon
Far from his door.

Beside a train,
Because they saw her go,
Or failed to see her,
Travellers and watchers know
Another pain.

The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than others' presence,
Whether life splendid be
Or utter black.

I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
She might have been.

She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other: she
May not exist.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems.

This sounds a great deal like the stranger's "lyric desires," doesn't it?  Yet Thomas was, if such a thing exists, a realistic romantic.  To wit:  "this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens."

Earlier in The Icknield Way, Thomas engages in a bantering conversation with another stranger about the possibility of living on the moon.  Thomas says: "I should like to try."  The stranger responds: "Would you?"  Thomas replies:  "Yes, provided I were someone different.  For, as for me, this is no doubt the best of all possible worlds."  The Icknield Way, page 115.  Or, as he says in another poem:  "There's nothing like the sun till we are dead." And Frost has something to add here as well:  "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better."  ("Birches.")

John Nash, "Autumn, Berkshire" (1951)

Corn

Growing up in Minnesota, my earliest images of excursions outside of the city were of lakes and cornfields.  Corn was emblematic of the farmlands that spread in all directions.  "Up North" lay the endless woods and the dark, granite lakes of the Iron Range.

My sharpest memories of corn are autumnal:  dry, rustling harvested stalks and, all around on the ground, bright yellow kernels.  All suffused with corn-scent.  And -- if we were lucky -- a huge sky full of Canadian geese flying southward in large, straggling V-formations, a wondrous and thrilling clamor of honks coming down from overhead.

But spring and summer were lovely as well:  row upon row of whispering and waving, deep-green limber stalks -- like fields of tall grass.  "Knee high by the Fourth of July" was what they used to say.

John Nash, "Ripe Corn" (1946)

These things never change, do they?  The following poem was written in China about 16 centuries ago.

                    New Corn

Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
I will clothe myself in spring-clothing
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
By the mountain-stream a mist hovers,
Hovers a moment, then scatters.
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.

T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918).

This poem is an excellent example of the beauty of Waley's translations. He is always faithful to the literal and emotional sense of the original.  But he is also a wonderful poet in his own right, with a fine sensibility.  Thus: "Swiftly the years, beyond recall."  One gets the feeling that this line is a bit more romantic than the Chinese original:  it seems to come out of centuries of English poetry.  But one is willing to give Waley the benefit of the doubt, because it is clear throughout his translations that he has immersed himself in a long-vanished world.

John Nash, "The Cornfield" (1918)

The next poem is of a different nature altogether.  It perhaps reflects the life of the man who wrote it, a life that was harsh and brutal in its beginnings. But withal I find it lovely.

                    The Villain

While joy gave clouds the light of stars,
     That beamed where'er they looked;
And calves and lambs had tottering knees,
     Excited, while they sucked;
While every bird enjoyed his song,
Without one thought of harm or wrong --
I turned my head and saw the wind,
     Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair,
     Into a dark and lonely wood.

W. H. Davies, The Song of Life and Other Poems (1920).

John Nash, "Cornfield at Wiston-by-Nayland, Suffolk" (1932)

"I Am Your Old Intentions She Said And All Your Old Intentions Are Over"

W. B. Yeats's "Ephemera," which I posted last week, goes quite well with the following poem by Thomas Hardy.  Although the poem was first published in 1899 (in Hardy's first collection of verse), it was written much earlier in Hardy's life.  He appended "1867" to it when it was published. Thus, the poem either was based upon an incident that occurred in 1867 or was written in that year, likely the latter.  Richard Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), page 98; Dennis Taylor, "The Chronology of Hardy's Poetry," Victorian Poetry, Volume 37, Number 1 (Spring 1999), pages 1-58.

In 1867, Hardy was 27 years old.  Yeats was 19 when he wrote "Ephemera." It is not surprising that the two young romantics might alight upon a similar theme and similar images.  But in their own idiosyncratic fashions, of course.

John Nash, "Autumn, Berkshire" (1951)

                    Neutral Tones

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
          -- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
          On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
          Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
          And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1899).

"Neutral Tones," like "Ephemera," is a poem that I discovered in my twenties.  I recall being particularly taken with:  "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die."  The entire poem is evocative of that time of life, isn't it?

John Nash

"The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble" (1922)

The following poem provides a nice complement to both "Neutral Tones" and "Ephemera."  Serendipitously, next Monday will be "Monday the 28th of October."

               Eastville Park

I sat on a bench in Eastville Park
It was Monday the 28th of October
I am your old intentions she said
And all your old intentions are over.

She stood beside me, I did not see her
Her shadow fell on Eastville Park
Not precise or shapely but spreading outwards
On the tatty grass of Eastville Park.

A swan might buckle its yellow beak
With the black of its eye and the black of its mouth
In a shepherd's crook, or the elms impend
Nothing of this could be said aloud.

I did not then sit on a bench
I was a shadow under a tree
I was a leaf the wind carried
Around the edge of the football game.

No need for any return for I find
Myself where I left myself -- in the lurch
There are no trams but I remember them
Wherever I went I came here first.

C. H. Sisson, Anchises (Carcanet 1976).  Eastville Park is in Bristol, where Sisson was born and raised.

Sisson's use of "impend" in "the elms impend" (line 11) is lovely:  he combines the word's usual emotional sense (e.g., "impending doom") with its less commonly used physical sense: "to hang over" or "to overhang."

John Nash, "The Garden" (1951)

Bourne

I first encountered the word "bourne" in the title of a poem by Christina Rossetti.  I had no idea what it meant, but I immediately felt that it was a lovely word.  There was something about the look and the sound and the feel of it that was restful and peaceful.  It conveyed a sense of repose.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word -- in the sense used by Rossetti -- as follows:  "The limit or terminus of a race, journey, or course; the ultimate point aimed at, or to which anything tends; destination, goal."

I recently came across the word again in a poem by Walter de la Mare.

                       The Bourne

Rebellious heart, why still regret so much
A destiny which all that's mortal shares?
Surely the solace of the grave is such
That there naught matters; and, there, no one cares?

Nor faith, nor love, nor dread, nor closest friend
Can from this nearing bourne your footfall keep:
But there even conflict with your self shall end,
And every grief be reconciled in Sleep.

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

John Nash, "Avoncliffe: from the Aqueduct"

The word brings to mind a passage from one of my favorite books.

"I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones, and find a deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.  There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon?  There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet.  There is no such dignity as that of death.  In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.  The dead, amid this leafy silence, seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers:  As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!"

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), pages 183-184.

The OED defines "gratulation" as "manifestation or expression of joy; a rejoicing," or "a feeling of gratification, joy, or exultation; rejoicing in heart."  Another sense (designated as obsolete) is "reward, recompense."

John Nash, "Wakes Colne Mill, Colchester, Essex" (1931)

Here is the poem in which I first discovered "bourne."

                 The Bourne

Underneath the growing grass,
     Underneath the living flowers,
     Deeper than the sound of showers:
     There we shall not count the hours
By the shadows as they pass.

Youth and health will be but vain,
     Beauty reckoned of no worth:
     There a very little girth
     Can hold round what once the earth
Seemed too narrow to contain.

Christina Rossetti, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866).

John Nash, "Rocks and Water" (c. 1950)

Winter Into Spring, Part Three: "Thaw"

Edward Thomas wrote four four-line poems:  "In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)," "The Cherry Trees," "When he should laugh," and "Thaw."  "Thaw," as one might expect, fits well with my recent theme of Winter Into Spring.

                                              John Nash, "Winter Scene"

                              Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

In her comment to the poem, Edna Longley notes that the phrase "delicate as flower of grass" was also used by Thomas in a prose piece titled "Flowers of Frost":  "The beeches that were yesterday a brood of giantesses are now insubstantial and as delicate as flowers of grass."  Ibid, page 285.

                     John Nash, "Winter Scene, Buckinghamshire" (1920)

As I have noted before, Michael Longley is an admirer of Edward Thomas's poetry.  Thus, it may not be merely a coincidence that he has also written a four-line poem titled "Thaw."

                              Thaw

Snow curls into the coalhouse, flecks the coal.
We burn the snow as well in bad weather
As though to spring-clean that darkening hole.
The thaw's a blackbird with one white feather.

Michael Longley, The Echo Gate (1979).

Longley's poem is an excellent companion piece to Thomas's poem:  his poem looks inward; Thomas's poem looks outward.  And "freckled" becomes "flecks."  And the "rooks" turn into "a blackbird."  But the same territory -- be it inward or be it outward -- is explored by both poets.

                       John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

"Again"

There are snowfalls, and then there are snowfalls.  For instance, the snowfall that signals the beginning of winter is a thing unto itself.  As one might expect, it has nothing to do with the "official" date on which winter begins.  It has nothing to do with the solstice.

Rather, this particular snowfall is a sensual and emotional event.  It involves the light (be it early or late), the drift of the wind, and the way in which the snow whirls out of the sky.  A blizzard is not required.  A few flakes will do.  Something inside you says:  Ah, it is here.

                              John Nash, "The Garden in Winter" (c. 1943)

                            Again

Again, great season, sing it through again
Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change
That makes October burn out red and gold
And color bleed into the world and die,
And butterflies among the fluttering leaves
Disguise themselves until the few last leaves
Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams
That carry them along until they sink,
And through the muted land, the nevergreen
Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,
The wind go ashen, till one afternoon
The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale
Above the river on whose slow black flood
The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.

Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches (1975).

                          John Nash, "The Garden under Snow" (c. 1924)

"The Consent"

During my afternoon walk, I pass beside a large field of wild grasses.  At this time of year, the field is a mixture of grey and tan and brown.  The field has no trees, save for a single crab-apple that stands at one edge of the field.  Its leaves have now all fallen.  A nearly perfect circle of gold, orange, and red lies on the ground beneath the tree's empty branches.

                               John Nash, "The Barn, Wormingford" (1954)

                      The Consent

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone:  the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What signal from the stars?  What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender?  and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us:  Now.

Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches (1975).

Watching the crab-apple gradually lose its leaves each year is always a sad experience.  And seeing the circle that surrounds the empty tree in November comes as a sort of annual soft exclamation of finality, something like the "now" that closes Nemerov's poem.

Ah, but in Spring the crab-apple blossoms will be lovely.

                   John Nash, "The Lake, Little Horkesley Hall" (c. 1958)

"Yet The Heart Would Counsel Ill"

The recent terrible event in Colorado has provoked the usual media-led "analysis."  To wit: "How could this happen?"  "Why did this happen?" "How can we prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again?"  To this end, the standard parade of so-called "experts" (criminologists, psychologists, "social scientists" of all stripes, lawyers, politicians, et cetera) are asked to explain this latest horror to us.

Of course, the absurd premise is that "analysis" of this sort will enable us to understand why this event took place.  Yes, yes:  if we can just understand, all will be well.

I do not wish to minimize, or to be glib about, the event itself:  it is horrible and tragic.  Lives have been lost; other lives have been changed for ever. But I find the urge to explain and understand the event through the media and its "experts" to be symptomatic of a profound shallowness in the modern world's view of the ultimate mystery of human nature.

                                                           John Nash
                              "The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble" (c. 1922)

Bells in tower at evening toll,
And the day forsakes the soul;
Soon will evening's self be gone
And the whispering night come on.

Blame not thou the faulting light
Nor the whispers of the night:
Though the whispering night were still,
Yet the heart would counsel ill.

A. E. Housman, Poem XVII (untitled), More Poems (1936).

                    John Nash, "Walled Pond, Little Bredy, Dorset" (1923)

"Begin Afresh, Afresh, Afresh"

Because I am a creature of habit, I return to certain poems at the same time each year.  For instance, I read the following poem by Philip Larkin each May because, um, it takes place in May.  Plus, it is a very fine poem.  Plus, reading any poem by Philip Larkin will put a smile on your face and will make you feel that all is right with the world.  Well, almost any poem.  But don't ever let anyone tell you that he is a "gloomy" poet.  Nonsense.

                 The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?  No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).

                                       Paul Nash, "Granary" (1922-1923)

As I have noted before, the last line of "The Trees" reminds me of "The Region November" by Wallace Stevens.  (A poem that I read each -- yes -- November.)  Stevens's poem closes with these lines:

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems," Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

                                     John Nash, "The Thunderstorm"

"We Should Be Careful Of Each Other, We Should Be Kind While There Is Still Time"

The subject of hedgehogs brings to mind a lovely -- if sad -- poem by Philip Larkin.  (Of course, "lovely -- if sad" perhaps describes the lion's share of his poems.)  It is one of the few poems written by Larkin between the publication of High Windows in 1974 and his death in 1985.

                    John Nash, "Walled Pond, Little Bredy, Dorset" (1923)

                      The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed.  It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably.  Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

In a May 20, 1979, letter to his friend Judy Egerton, Larkin wrote:  "At Easter I found a hedgehog cruising about my garden, clearly just woken up: it accepted milk, but went back to sleep I fancy, for I haven't seen it since." Anthony Thwaite (editor), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985 (Faber and Faber 1992).  On June 10 of the same year, Larkin wrote to Egerton:  "This has been rather a depressing day:  killed a hedgehog when mowing the lawn, by accident of course.  It's upset me rather."  Ibid. Larkin wrote "The Mower" on June 12.

Betty Mackereth, who worked with Larkin at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, wrote the following comment about the poem:

"I remember too well Philip telling me of the death of the hedgehog:  it was in his office the following morning with tears streaming down his face. The resultant poem ends with a message for everyone."

The Philip Larkin Society Website (May 2002).

                                 John Nash, "Rocks and Water" (c. 1950)

Snow, Concluded

The snow that we received earlier this week has mostly vanished. However, the remaining bright white patches upon the lawns (which stay green all winter long in our temperate climate) and in the hollows of the open fields (grey-brown underlaid with green) are lovely.  All of which evokes the titles, at least, of the following two poems.

               Wet Snow

White tree on black tree,
Ghostly appearance fastened on another,
Called up by harsh spells of this wintry weather
You stand in the night as though to speak to me.

I could almost
Say what you do not fail to say; that's why
I turn away, in terror, not to see
A tree stand there hugged by its own ghost.

Ewen McCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                                           John Nash, "Winter Scene"

          Hedges Freaked with Snow

No argument, no anger, no remorse,
       No dividing of blame.
There was poison in the cup -- why should we ask
       From whose hand it came?

No grief for our dead love, no howling gales
       That through darkness blow,
But the smile of sorrow, a wan winter landscape,
       Hedges freaked with snow.

Robert Graves, New Poems (1962).

                       John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

R. S. Thomas On Christmas

The word that comes to mind when I think of R. S. Thomas is fierce. However, having said that, I feel that I have fallen into the stereotypical view of Thomas as The World's Grumpiest Poet.  To wit, the man who was peremptory when not silent, living in an unheated stone cottage on the coast of Wales.   To my mind, this makes him, well, a human being.  And, of course, there's this:  his poetry is often graceful and beautiful.

Thomas's fierceness is reflected in his lifelong battle with God.  This battle consisted of Thomas stubbornly waiting upon God's equally stubborn silence, with Thomas commenting upon this state of affairs in his poems. The battle was made a great deal more piquant by the fact that Thomas served as an Anglican priest for 42 years, ministering to rural parishes in Wales (the subject of another of his love-hate relationships).

All of this leads to a seasonal note:  over the years, Thomas wrote a number of lovely Christmas poems.  How shall I describe the poems?  A bit fierce, yes, but withal lovely.  A selection follows.

                Song

I choose white, but with
Red on it, like the snow
In winter with its few
Holly berries and the one

Robin, that is a fire
To warm by and like Christ
Comes to us in his weakness,
But with a sharp song.

R. S. Thomas, H'm (1972).

                                        John Aldridge, "Winter" (1947)

                  Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out.  In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

R. S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies (1995).

                                 John Nash, "The Garden in Winter" (1967)

                  Lost Christmas

He is alone, it is Christmas.
Up the hill go three trees, the three kings.
There is a star also
Over the dark manger.  But where is the Child?

Pity him.  He has come far
Like the trees, matching their patience
With his.  But the mind was before
Him on the long road.  The manger is empty.

R. S. Thomas, Young and Old (1972).

                                     Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959)
                         "Landscape with Trees, a Lake and a Village"

"A Lowly Hope, A Height That Is But Low"

It is time to leave the sandy shores (and deserts) of Time and Mortality.   However, before we depart, I cannot resist a visit to two sea-side poems by Christina Rossetti.

          Birchington Churchyard

A lowly hill which overlooks a flat,
   Half sea, half country side;
   A flat-shored sea of low-voiced creeping tide
Over a chalky weedy mat.

A hill of hillocks, flowery and kept green
   Round Crosses raised for hope,
   With many-tinted sunsets where the slope
Faces the lingering western sheen.

A lowly hope, a height that is but low,
   While Time sets solemnly,
   While the tide rises of Eternity,
Silent and neither swift nor slow.

William Michael Rossetti (editor), The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti (1904).

Birchington is located in Kent.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti's brother, was buried in All Saints Churchyard in Birchington in April of 1882.  Rossetti wrote the poem that same month.  There are many fine things about the poem, my favorite being "A lowly hope, a height that is but low."  (Note the anticipatory "lowly hill" in the first line, "low-voiced creeping tide" in the third line, and "Round Crosses raised for hope" in the sixth line.)  And then, just when you think that it couldn't get much better, comes this:  "Silent and neither swift nor slow."  (And "a hill of hillocks" is no small thing either.)

                               John Nash, "Sand Dunes and Rocky Coast"

      One Sea-Side Grave

Unmindful of the roses,
   Unmindful of the thorn,
A reaper tired reposes
   Among his gathered corn:
   So might I, till the morn!

Cold as the cold Decembers,
   Past as the days that set,
While only one remembers
   And all the rest forget, --
   But one remembers yet.

Ibid.

In a note to the poem, William Rossetti writes:  "It would seem to most people that these lines also relate to Birchington; my belief, however, is that they relate to Hastings, where Charles Cayley lies buried."  Charles Cayley proposed to Christina Rossetti in 1866, but she declined.  It is speculated that she loved Cayley, but did not wish to marry him because he was an agnostic, while she was a devout "High Church" Anglican.  He died in 1883.  The poem was written in the spring of 1884.

                                         John Nash, "Norfolk Coast"

"Houses Will Build Themselves And Tombstones Rewrite Names On Dead Men's Graves"

Perhaps this shifting sands business is not a one-way street.  Perhaps the scattered remains of Ozymandias and Soulac's buried minster are not the end of the story.  The following poem by Andrew Young (1885-1971) is about a sandy place in the north of Scotland.

                    Culbin Sands

Here lay a fair fat land;
   But now its townships, kirks, graveyards
Beneath bald hills of sand
   Lie buried deep as Babylonian shards.

But gales may blow again;
   And like a sand-glass turned about
The hills in a dry rain
   Will flow away and the old land look out;

And where now hedgehog delves
   And conies hollow their long caves
Houses will build themselves
   And tombstones rewrite names on dead men's graves.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1960).

The fate of the townships, kirks, and graveyards was, according to the Forestry Commission of Scotland, sealed by the great storm of 1694.  In later years, a forest was planted to arrest the sands.  Much of the forest was felled during the First World War to provide framing and duckboards for the trenches.  The trees have now grown back.  So, who knows what might happen?  The thought that one day "tombstones [will] rewrite names on dead men's graves" is an appealing one.

                                        John Nash, "Incoming Tide"

"The Salt Wind": Two Poems

Eugene Lee-Hamilton's "Soulac" (which appeared in my previous post) contains the lines:  ". . . as the salt winds sweep/The restless hillocks of ill-bladed sand."  "Salt winds" reminded me of a poem by Norman MacCaig that contains the phrase "salt wind."  MacCaig's poem, like "Soulac," is about the passing of time, but the perspective is different.  Although aging and mortality are acknowledged, there is a lovely recognition of the life that accompanies them.

        Old Poet

The alder tree
shrivelled by the salt wind
has lived so long
it has carried and sheltered
its own weight
of nests.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                          Samuel Palmer, "A Farm in Kent" (c. 1826-1832)

There is something to be said for brevity and directness (bearing in mind that they do not preclude depth and implication and suggestiveness).  The Chinese and Japanese poets come to mind.  In fact, "Old Poet" sounds as though it could have been written by, say, Wang Wei or Ryokan.  We should also remember, for example, that Edward Thomas wrote a number of fine four-line and eight-line poems.

Thom Gunn, in an excellent essay on the poetry of Thomas Hardy, makes an observation that merits thinking about in connection with brevity and directness.  Gunn notes approvingly the absence of "rhetoric" in Hardy's poetry, contrasting it with "the strain of all that rhetorical striving" in Yeats's poetry.  Gunn writes:  "Rhetoric is a form of pretence, of making something appear bigger or more important than you know it is."  Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," The Occasions of Poetry (North Point Press 1985), pages 104-105.

As one might expect, poems that are brief and direct tend to be short on rhetoric.  "Old Poet" is, I think, a wonderful example of a great deal being accomplished in a small space, without rhetoric.

                                 John Nash, "Wintry Evening, a Pond"

"Slow, Slow!"

Of course, autumn is not autumn without Robert Frost.  Earlier this month, I quoted Frost's friend Edward Thomas on the season:  "Now, now is the hour; let things be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be thought of; let these remain.  And yet we have a premonition that remain they must not for more than a little while." (Edward Thomas, The South Country (1909), page 272.)  Thomas wrote his thoughts, and Frost wrote the following poem -- which independently echoes Thomas's thoughts -- before the two first met on October 6, 1913.

                     October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost --
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

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

In 1913, Thomas's prose and Frost's poetry still contained archaisms -- Romantic and Victorian -- that would pretty much disappear in Frost's newer poetry and in Thomas's yet-to-be-written poetry.  There is always a danger of over-dramatizing (and over-sentimentalizing) the fateful (in a wondrous sense) meeting of Frost and Thomas, and their all-too-brief friendship, cut short by Thomas's death in France.  But I do think that the year or so that they were able to spend together -- walking and talking -- led to a stripping away and a paring down that is characteristic of their best work.

                                John Nash, "Autumn, Berkshire" (1951)

"Now It Is September And The Web Is Woven. The Web Is Woven And You Have To Wear It."

Today was beautiful:  warm and bright and cloudless cornflower blue.  But the wind is now of autumn.  And the yellow and angled light is of autumn. Something is incipient.

Recently, I gently questioned R. S. Thomas's assertion that Wallace Stevens's "one season was late fall."  However, I did acknowledge that some of my favorite poems by Stevens are set in autumn.  Here is one that is set in early fall.  Today's weather -- "what is there here but weather, what spirit/Have I except it comes from the sun?" -- brought it to mind.

                            The Dwarf

Now it is September and the web is woven.
The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,
That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being,
Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibble
And coffee dribble . . . Frost is in the stubble.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

                                           John Nash, "Autumn" (1933)