Present

I am an escapist.  The past month I've spent a great deal of time in 17th century Japan in the company of Gensei, a Buddhist monk-poet, and in Victorian England in the company of Christina Rossetti.  From what world am I fleeing?  I suspect you know.

"I have not yet looked at the newspaper.  Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife.  I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish."

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Archibald Constable & Co. 1903), page 7.

Unlike Henry Ryecroft, I am not amused by what appears in the newspapers (or in their modern electronic successors).  Hence, I am content to leave news out of my life entirely.  "Where, to me, is the loss/Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard."  (Mary Coleridge, "No Newspapers.")  Of course, in this day and age snippets inevitably seep through -- insidious, noisome.  Our life is now akin to being forever stranded in an airport departure lounge, forced to listen to the ever-present cable news presenters dissembling from an unasked-for television screen hovering in the air somewhere above us.  Ah, welladay!

But we have it within us to live a seemlier life, a life of peace and quiet, of small things.

Trailing my stick I go down to the garden edge,

call to a monk to go out the pine gate.

A cup of tea with my mother,

looking at each other, enjoying our tea together.

In the deep lanes, few people in sight;

the dog barks when anyone comes or goes.

Fall floods have washed away the planks of the bridge;

shouldering our sandals, we wade the narrow stream.

By the roadside, a small pavilion

where there used to be a little hill:

it helps out our hermit mood;

country poems pile one sheet on another.

I dabble in the flow, delighted by the shallowness of the stream,

gaze at the flagging, admiring how firm the stones are.

The point in life is to know what's enough --

why envy those otherworld immortals?

With the happiness held in one inch-square heart

you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

Gensei (1623-1668) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei (Columbia University Press 1983), page 70.  The poem is untitled.

"The point in life is to know what's enough."  Exactly. "September 1 -- the beards of Thistle & dandelions flying above the lonely mountains like life, & I saw them thro' the Trees skimming the lake like Swallows."  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 799 (September, 1800).

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Glamis Village in April"

On his walk, Gensei misses nothing.  "In the deep lanes, few people in sight;/the dog barks when anyone comes or goes."  A mere commonplace?  But perhaps Gensei is echoing a line in a poem written in China twelve centuries earlier by T'ao Ch'ien (who was revered by Japanese poets): "A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes."  ("Returning to the Fields" (line 15) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918), page 78.)  Or perhaps he is simply (and not so simply) paying attention to the World.  Never underestimate the commonplace, the quotidian.  These terms are not pejorative.

               Lark Descending

A singing firework; the sun's darling;

     Hark how creation pleads!

Then silence: see, a small gray bird

     That runs among the weeds.

Edmund Blunden, Poems, 1930-1940 (Macmillan 1940).

While out walking yesterday afternoon I heard no larks singing in the cloudless sky.  But I did hear an unseen woodpecker far off in the woods, hammering.  A small thing.  "There have been times when looking up beneath the sheltring [sic] Trees, I could Invest every leaf with Awe."  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804, Notebook Entry 1510 (September, 1803).

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

An aside, in closing.  I am ever in search of those who have found serenity and equanimity.  This is why I have long been fond of Gensei, and of his poetry.  Thus, I was delighted when, a few weeks ago, I unexpectedly came upon this, which was previously unknown to me.

     Homage to Gensei

Last night I lay awake

From some sound in the night

And pictured I could take

(Knowing that I could not)

The firm and quiet way

Of the gentle monk Gensei,

Who watched from his Grass Hill

(Three hundred years away)

Beneath a favorite tree,

Or from his leaky hut,

Travels of crow, cloud, sail;

With some food and wine

Welcomed the always rare

Visit from old friends; wrote

His poems, though unwell

Much of the time; read; gave

Lessons, again while sick,

Kept clear of pedantry

(And all he wrote of it

Rings true of it today),

With his goose-foot walking stick

To keep him company

Took walks, kept his mind free

And agile as the air,

Transcending tragedy,

Under his bent old pine

With writing brush in hand

Quiet at close of day

Saw out the evening sun

Across the shadowy land.

     *        *        *        *        *   

Slight rustlings in a tree

And a slow car going by

Returned me to what's mine,

What it had all come to,

What I still had to do

With my own dwindling days.

Alan Stephens, Collected Poems, 1958-1998 (Dowitcher Press 2012).  The ellipses are in the original text.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)

Two Worlds

A politicized culture (or, more properly, "culture") inevitably tends toward puritanism: the elect and the impure.  Ever-recurring, the latest iteration of the self-anointed is upon us.  O, Tychon, god of small things, god of the humble, please grant us relief.

Earlier this week, revisiting The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (948 wonderful pages), I discovered this:

                           Arrogance

I saw bleak Arrogance, with brows of brass,

Clad nape to sole in shimmering foil of lead,

Stark down his nose he stared; a crown of glass

Aping the rainbow, on his tilted head.

His very presence drained the vital air;

He sate erect -- stone-cold, self-crucified;

On either side of him an empty chair;

And sawdust trickled from his wounded side.

Walter de la Mare, The Burning-Glass and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1945).

A thought from Walter Pater comes to mind:

"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.  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.

"Each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." The temptation is great to conclude that one is wise and virtuous.  A comforting delusion.

                                           Learning

To believe you are magnificent.  And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.  Enough labor for one human life.

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998), page 60.

Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935)

"Harvesting, Forest of Birse, Aberdeenshire" (1900)

The trees are still mostly full, still mostly green.  Yesterday afternoon, in a gusty wind, their boughs tossed and roared.  The day was clear and brilliant, and dappled light and shadow turned and turned on the ground.  It could have been a summer day.  But, at intervals, lines of fallen leaves rushed along the sidewalks and the streets, carried away by the wind.

What has become of the two woolly bear caterpillars who appeared in my last post?  I encountered two more of the lovely, endearing creatures last week.  Like their companions, they were crossing a path, headed off toward the trees, full of intent, going about their appointed business.  As for humanity, we always have been, and always will be, a scold-ridden species, confused and grasping, forever meddling, never content.  Best to keep one's own counsel.  A woolly bear caterpillar.  "Everything Is Going To Be All Right."

         Mute Opinion

                    I

I traversed a dominion

Whose spokesmen spake out strong

Their purpose and opinion

Through pulpit, press, and song.

I scarce had means to note there

A large-eyed few, and dumb,

Who thought not as those thought there

That stirred the heat and hum.

                      II

When, grown a Shade, beholding

That land in lifetime trode,

To learn if its unfolding

Fulfilled its clamoured code,

I saw, in web unbroken,

Its history outwrought

Not as the loud had spoken,

But as the mute had thought.

Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (Macmillan 1901).

David MacKay (1853-1904), "Crail at Harvest Time"

"The imperceptible movement of an invisible soul and the enormous sun."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-79 (Seagull Books 2013), page 159.)  There is the world.  And then there is the World.  Where does one reside?

          From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate

Over a London mews -- to contemplate --

Is it the sky above -- the stones below?

     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,

     Or thinking forward to futurity

That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,

Quietly folded are the quiet hands,

Rarely he speaks.

     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,

     So much to spend?

What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,

He is become to me

A form of rest.

     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs

     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,

And not unblest

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis  1954).

Duncan Cameron (1837-1916), "Harvest Time in Lorne" (1888)

News

Ah, "news"!  What place should we give it in our lives?  I concede that it has some practical benefits.  For instance, it provides us with warnings of volcanic eruptions, approaching typhoons, and imminent tornadoes.  (Yet, in our day and age, even these warnings are likely to be given a political overlay of some sort.)

All in all, it is best to dispense with news entirely.  Paying attention to it drags us into the politicization of life that has been poisoning our culture (such as it is) for years, and which proceeds apace.  The internal editing required is not worth the time and effort.  Our souls were sent here on more important business.  Time is short.

               News

The people in the park
are not news:
they only go to prove
what everyone knows --
the sufficiency
of water and a few trees.

The people in the gallery
are not news either:
they are here for more trees
and the permanence of water
of various kinds:  everything
from the seastorm to spring rain.

Walking in the street,
we are not news, you and I,
nor is the street itself
in the first morning sun
which travels to us from so far out
sharpening each corner with its recognition.

News
wilting underfoot, news
always about to lose its savour,
the trees arch over the blown sheets
rain is reducing to a transparent blur
as if water with trees were alpha and omega.

Charles Tomlinson, The Vineyard Above the Sea (Carcanet 1999).

Stanhope Alexander Forbes (1857-1947)

"The Harbour Window" (1910)

Here is my news for the week.  Patches of purple-pink and pink-white sweet peas have appeared in the meadows that slope down to the bluffs above the waters of Puget Sound.  Beside the paths I walk, the blackberry bushes are blossoming:  countless five-petaled white stars. Tiny crab apples are growing on a solitary tree that stands beside a wide field.  On a windy day, the tall grass in the field tosses and sways like a sea.

                         No Newspapers

Where, to me, is the loss
     Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard;
A butterfly flits across,
     Or a bird;
The moss is growing on the wall,
     I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  The poem was written in 1900.

Thomas Creswick (1811-1869) and Alfred Elmore (1815-1881)

"Dorothy Vernon's Doorway, Haddon Hall" (1865)

Mirrors, Glimmers, Glimpses

In this part of the world, one must learn to embrace greyness and inclemency.  Otherwise, you may find it difficult to venture beyond your doorstep.  You learn to adapt.  For instance, after living here a certain number of years, one day, without making a conscious decision to do so, you stop using umbrellas.  It just happens. Cumbersome things, after all.  A hat or a hood (or neither) will do.

But, beyond the minor practicalities, there is this:  the World has a way of providing us with compensations, however small and however fleeting.  If we fail to remain on the lookout for these compensations, all is lost, whether we abide at the Equator or in farthest Thule.

He who has lived in sunshine all day long,
               His happy eyes
From too much light defending,
               He cannot duly prize
One gleam of light at the day's ending.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  The poem is untitled.  It was written in 1888.

"One gleam of light" may be all that we get, but it is more than enough.  A few days ago, while out for a walk, I saw the first tuft of blossoming crocuses -- pale purple -- next to the sidewalk.  The dark green shoots of daffodils have begun to emerge as well.  Unexpected compensations.  Enough to subsist upon.

"All I have been able to do is to walk and go on walking, remember, glimpse, forget, try again, rediscover, become absorbed.  I have not bent down to inspect the ground like an entomologist or a geologist; I've merely passed by, open to impressions.  I have seen those things which also pass -- more quickly or, conversely, more slowly than human life.  Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed -- like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world -- I've thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world.  Too much said? Better to walk on . . ."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Paysages avec Figures Absentes) (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 4.  In the original French text, the passage ends with the ellipses.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "February Afternoon"

In this matter of the World's freely-bestowed compensations, we should never forget the miraculous puddle.  I have sung the praises of puddles -- those World-reflecting wonders -- in the past, and I will do so again now.  At the beginning of last week, on my afternoon walk, I was marveling at how the beauty of bare branches set against a cloud-dappled blue sky becomes deeper, more profound, when seen on the surface of a humble puddle.  But that is not the end of it:  the beauty takes on yet a different aspect as you begin to walk.  All of the intricacy, color, and depth moves along with you, at your feet, as you pass beside the bright water -- an entire upside-down World in motion.

I thought of puddles when I came across these four lines later in the week:

Thou mirror that hast danced through such a world,
So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world,
That hast so much reflected, but, alas,
Retained so little in thy careless depths.

Matthew Arnold, fragment from "Lucretius," in Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (Longmans, Green 1965), page 585.

Allott notes that this fragment echoes a passage in Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna":

          Hither and thither spins
          The wind-borne, mirroring soul,
          A thousand glimpses wins,
          And never sees a whole;
Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.

Matthew Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna," Act I, Scene II, lines 82-86, Ibid, page 159.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this image of the soul as a mirror. "Thou mirror that hast danced through such a world,/So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world" is indeed a lovely thought.  But, at the risk of oversimplifying (and/or misinterpreting) Arnold's point (which originates in his reading of the philosophical remnants of Empedocles), I wonder if he isn't being a bit too pessimistic about the soul's capabilities.  His vision of the soul as a mirror seems far too passive.  My limited experience with puddles suggests that some mirrors may "retain" (to use Arnold's word) a great deal of the World upon -- and beneath -- their surfaces.

John Aldridge, "The River Pant near Sculpin's Bridge" (1961)

As the crocuses and the daffodils emerge, the flitting and twittering spirits arrive as well.  I recently noticed a single dove disappearing into a bush in the back garden.  I hope, as was the case last year, I will be hearing coos outside my window later this spring and through the summer.

Saturday afternoon, walking through the woods, I noticed that the bushes beside the paths have come into leaf.  (I hadn't noticed this earlier in the week.  I was no doubt inattentive.  On the other hand, these things sometimes happen in the space of a day, or overnight.) At the tip of each twig is a single leaf or a small, unfolding spray of leaves.  I was entranced by one bush in particular:  at the center of each green spray was a circle of tiny white blossoms, a cluster of bright yellow stamens at the heart of each blossom.

                                   The inward frame
Though slowly opening, opens every day
With process not unlike to that which cheers
A pensive Stranger, journeying at his leisure
Through some Helvetian dell, when low-hung mists
Break up, and are beginning to recede;
How pleased he is where thin and thinner grows
The veil, or where it parts at once, to spy
The dark pines thrusting forth their spiky heads;
To watch the spreading lawns with cattle grazed,
Then to be greeted by the scattered huts,
As they shine out; and see the streams whose murmur
Had soothed his ear while they were hidden:  how pleased
To have about him, which way e'er he goes,
Something on every side concealed from view,
In every quarter something visible,
Half-seen or wholly, lost and found again,
Alternate progress and impediment,
And yet a growing prospect in the main.

William Wordsworth, "Home at Grasmere," The Recluse, Part I, Book I, lines 472-490, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume 5 (University of Oxford Press 1949).

To combine Arnold and Wordsworth:  in "such a world,/So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world," "the inward frame/Though slowly opening, opens every day."  Glimpses and glimmers.

John Aldridge, "Roofing a New House"

Last night's sunset over Puget Sound brought to mind these lines: "the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset/Smoulders in smoky fire." (John Masefield, "On Eastnor Knoll.")  However, that is too strong a description:  it was more delicate than "lurid," more deep orange-pink than primary, burning red.  Still, "smoulders in smoky fire" rings true.

But more striking than the sunset was a large oval orange-pink-purple gleam that appeared out in the middle of the Sound after the sun had disappeared beyond the Olympic Mountains.  There is surely a scientific explanation for why the pool of light appeared there when it did:  something about the sun's declining rays glancing off the clouds, et cetera.  Ah, well, there are always explanations, aren't there?  They take the life out of the World.

"Slanting Pillars of Light, like Ladders up to Heaven, their base always a field of vivid green Sunshine."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 1577 (October, 1803).

We should attend to these glimmers and glimpses.  Who knows where they will lead us?

"Of all my uncertainties, the least uncertain (the one least removed from the first glimmers of a belief) is the one given to me by poetic experience:  the thought that there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being.
* * * * *
As I reflect on all this I begin to see nonetheless that the poetic experience does give me direction, at least towards a sense of the high, and this is because I am quite naturally led to see poetry as a glimpse of the Highest and to regard it in a sense (and why not?) as it has been regarded from its very beginnings, as a mirror of the heavens . . .
* * * * *
(So it would be possible to live without definite hopes, but not without help, with the thought -- so close to certainty -- that if there is a single hope, a single opening for man, it would not be refused to someone who had lived 'beneath this sky.')

(The highest hope would be that the whole sky were really a gaze.)"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne),  Landscapes with Absent Figures, pages 157 and 159.  The italics and the ellipses are in the original text.

John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

How To Live, Part Twenty-Seven: Equanimity

I began this series of posts back in August of 2010.  I neglected to note at the outset of the series that I am completely unqualified to provide any advice on "How to Live."  I have never harbored, and will never harbor, any such presumption.  Hence, any advice that appears here is solely attributable to the poets and their poems.  I am merely the befuddled messenger.

A further disclaimer:  as I have stated in the past, I do not believe that the purpose of poetry is to edify.  A poet who sets out to write a poem aimed at teaching us something is doomed to failure.  Thus, for instance, that contradiction in terms known as "political poetry": a soi-disant "poem" that purports to instruct us on the rightness or wrongness of a political belief (left, right, or Martian) does not, under any circumstances, qualify as poetry.  Self-regarding propaganda, yes. Poetry, no.

That being said, we do read poetry for its Beauty and its Truth.  Well, at least I do, although I may be wholly misguided.  Accordingly, the poems that appear in this series are in the nature of memoranda to myself:  they are reminders of the possibilities that Beauty and Truth open up for us.

Here, then, is a bit of good advice about how to live:

                               Precept

Dwell in some decent corner of your being,
Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet,
Not in its devious crooked corridors
Nor in its halls of riot.

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (Heinemann 1964).

Charles Holmes (1868-1936), "Bude Canal" (1915)

Note that Reeves acknowledges that each of us does have "devious crooked corridors" and "halls of riot" within us.  Given that we are wont to hold overly flattering views of ourselves, the recognition that these corridors and halls exist is in itself an important first step.  But this is often a matter of one step forward, two steps back.  Still, most of us try to do our imperfect best.

And once I knew
A hasty man,
So small, so kind, and so perfunctory,
Of such an eager kindness
It flushed his little face with standing shame.

Wherever he came
He poured his alms into a single hand
That was full then empty.  He could not understand.
A foolish or a blessed blindness,
Saint or fool, a better man than you.

Edwin Muir, in Peter Butter (editor), The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir (The Association for Scottish Literary Studies 1991).  The poem is untitled.  Muir wrote it in the final years of his life, and did not publish it during his lifetime.

Perfection is not in the cards for any of us, and the sooner we realize this the better.  "A foolish or a blessed blindness" that leads to the practice of kindness is certainly not a bad thing.  If nothing else, it suggests the presence of humility, which, it seems to me, is a good place from which to begin.

                         From the Latin (but not so pagan)

Blessed is he that has come to the heart of the world and is humble.
He shall stand alone; and beneath
His feet are implacable fate, and panic at night, and the strumble
Of the hungry river of death.

Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (Duckworth 1938).

Yes, "there will be dying, there will be dying,/but there is no need to go into that."  At least not yet.

Charles Holmes, "The Yellow Wall, Blackburn" (1932)

We live our lives in "the vale of Soul-making."  In that vale, exalted alpine heights and expansive seaside vistas -- and their wide perspectives -- are few and far between.  Most of our time passes in the manner of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, waning towards evening, half-lit.  And yet.  Just over a year before writing of "the vale of Soul-making," Keats wrote this:

"I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness -- I look not for it if it be not in the present hour -- nothing startles me beyond the Moment.  The setting sun will always set me to rights -- or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel."

John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Robert Gittings (editor), Letters of John Keats (Oxford University Press 1970), page 38.

At the risk of making a tenuous connection, a statement made by my favorite mystic may be worth considering at this point:  "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.4311, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by C. K. Ogden).  An alternative translation is:  "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." (Translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness.)

What Keats and Wittgenstein have to say about living in the present moment is nothing new:  they are repeating wisdom that has been known in all places and at all times.  But this wisdom has to be learned anew by each soul that arrives here.  "Dwell[ing] in some decent corner of your being,/Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet" is, I think, an essential element of the learning process:  living in the present moment requires presence of mind.  Easier said than done, of course.

                         Rarities

Beauty, and grace, and wit are rare;
     And even intelligence:
But lovelier than hawthorn seen in May,
Or mistletoe berries on Innocent's Day
The face that, open as heaven, doth wear --
With kindness for its sunshine there --
     Good nature and good sense.

Walter de la Mare, Inward Companion and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1950).

Charles Holmes, "A Warehouse" (1921)

I fear that I have floated too far off into the ether.  Let's face it: inhabiting the present moment on a consistent basis (even without adding "eternity" or "timelessness" into the mix) is not something that most of us are up to.  I know that I'm not.  But something short of that may be enough to bring us a measure of repose.

In this matter of Soul-making we need to proceed in a measured, attentive, and thoughtful fashion.  There are no short-cuts.  Wrong turns and dead-ends are common.  Thus, coming anywhere close to possessing a modicum of "good nature and good sense" is, as de la Mare observes, a rare accomplishment indeed.  Enough work to keep us busy for a lifetime, with no guarantee of success.  Moreover, none of us will ever be in a position to say of ourself that we possess "good nature and good sense."  How could we?  That is for others to decide.

Yet, if we "dwell in some decent corner of [our] being," and if we "come to the heart of the world and [are] humble," we may be headed in the right direction.  And if -- an enormous if -- we are patient, receptive, and fortunate, we may arrive at a place of serenity.

                 From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  Coleridge wrote the poem in 1907, the year in which she died (at the age of 45).

Charles Holmes, "Scholar Gipsy" (1917)

Eclipse

"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily."  La Rochefoucauld (translated by Stuart Warner and Stéphane Douard), Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales (1665).  A wise observation, particularly when an eclipse comes your way.  Alas, "the path of totality" passed two hundred miles to the south of us, but we did experience 92 percent totality here in Seattle.

I had no desire to view the event through eclipse glasses.  Instead, as the time arrived, I walked out into the back garden to see how dark it would become.  It never became dark, only slightly dim:  an unusual smoky, dusky honey-gold yellow light.  As it turned out -- and to my surprise, never having experienced a solar eclipse before -- it was the ground, not the sky, that proved to be of greatest interest.

 Seattle Partial Eclipse:

Leaf-Veiled Light (Apple And Cherry) On Garden Stones

Does beauty most often make itself known in "the half colors of quarter-things"?  In crescents of wavering light on garden stones?  Or in the bright corona of an obscured sun?

He who has lived in sunshine all day long,
                    His happy eyes
From too much light defending,
                    He cannot duly prize
One gleam of light at the day's ending.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  The poem is untitled.

Seattle Partial Eclipse:

Leaf-Veiled Light (Japanese Maple) On Pathway

I apologize for being too self-referential, but earlier this month I said this of the sun (not having the eclipse in mind at all):  "we come to know our star through its revelations, emanations, and creations."  My memory of the Great Eclipse of 2017 will be of lovely crescents of light strewn across the grey granite stones and pathways of the garden, set beside patches of green.

            The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (Alfred A. Knopf 1936).

Seattle Partial Eclipse:

Leaf-Veiled Light (Apple And Cherry) On Garden Stones

For Mary Coleridge

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, one of my oft-repeated precepts regarding poetry is this:  It is the individual poem that matters, not the poet.  Of course, I make no claim of originality for this thought.  Thus, for instance, I happened upon the following observation by Rosanjin (a Japanese potter and artist) this past week:

"The sort of person who, when shown a painting, steps up to examine the artist's seal understands nothing about paintings.  The same may be said of the sort who immediately asks who painted it."

Rosanjin (1883-1959) (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter), in Sidney Cardozo and Masaaki Hirano, The Art of Rosanjin (Kodansha 1987), page 120.

So it is with poems and poets.  Whether a poet is a "major" or a "minor" poet in the estimation of readers or critics is of no moment to me.  Likewise, I have no interest in debating which poets are "good," "better," or "best."  Do I have favorite poets?  Of course.  But I never think of them as being in competition with one another.  Again, it is the individual poem that matters.

I came to know Mary Coleridge by discovering the following poem in an anthology two or three decades ago (I don't recall the exact year).

               L'Oiseau Bleu

The lake lay blue below the hill.
     O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
     A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
     The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
     It caught his image as he flew.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

Mary Coleridge was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  She was born in 1861, and she died in 1907 at the age of 45.  Hence, one might be tempted to describe her as a "Victorian poet."  But that would be a mistake.  The use of terms such as "Victorian," "Romantic," or "Modernist" is over-simplistic, and often provides an excuse for not reading and appreciating individual poems.  I think that "L'Oiseau Bleu" is a lovely poem that happens to have been written in the Victorian era.  To me it seems timeless.

William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

"The Festival of St Swithin (The Dovecot)" (1866)

Now, having just pontificated upon the need to focus upon poems rather than poets, I am going to contradict myself (perhaps).  To wit:  I find it very comforting to spend time in the company of Mary Coleridge.  She is thoughtful, sensitive, sensible, and self-effacing.  These are qualities that I admire in any poet -- and in any person.

A comment made by Kingsley Amis about Edward Thomas (which has appeared here on more than one occasion) comes to mind:

"How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology (Hutchinson 1988), page 339.  For me, Mary Coleridge does this as well.

We never said farewell, nor even looked
     Our last upon each other, for no sign
Was made when we the linkèd chain unhooked
          And broke the level line.

And here we dwell together, side by side,
     Our places fixed for life upon the chart.
Two islands that the roaring seas divide
          Are not more far apart.

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge.  The poem is untitled.

William Holman Hunt, "The Haunted Manor" (1849)

A thread of unrequited, disappointed, and lost love runs through Coleridge's poetry.  It is a hint, not a preoccupation.  There is no woe-is-me melancholy or complaint.  She was clear-eyed about life.

"It comes to me that what we seem to need we are not given.  Joy cannot be born of necessity.  There is need of patience and need of peace, but no cry of need will bring joy."

Mary Coleridge, in Edith Sichel (editor), Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge (Constable 1910), pages 277-278.

Death and transience were often on her mind, but, again, not in a melancholy way.  She had an enviable perspective on things:  "Birthdays now seem to me to be like the lamp-posts along a road when you are nearing the end of a long, dark, delicious drive."  Mary Coleridge, in The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge, page 73.  Or, consider this:

"Art is an odd thing, isn't it?  It's almost the only thing that seems to me to remain unchanged throughout one's life, and it does away with all possibility of hell, and all necessity of heaven.  You forget the dead too, and yet you know it is no treason to forget them there.  And you forget yourself."

Mary Coleridge, Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, pages 267-268.

Yet she was ever mindful of a larger context as well:

"More and more as life goes on I feel as if one of the big temptations of it were to rest content with negative ease and freedom from worry, and to forget that that's only the body of happiness and not the soul.  Looking into the fluffy white heart of an oleander, the other day, a kind of rapture at its uselessness came over me, at the divine heedlessness of anything but glory and beauty at the making of it."

Mary Coleridge, Ibid, page 276.

                            Self-question

Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,
     Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?
Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
                         Thou little heart?

Dust art thou, and to dust again returnest,
     A spark of fire within a beating clod.
Should that be infinite for which thou burnest?
                         Must it be God?

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge.

William Holman Hunt, "Our English Coasts, 1852" (1852)

Each poem that we read has unknown possibilities within it.  We never know where it will lead us.  It may very well change our life.  I will be forever grateful for having long ago encountered "L'Oiseau Bleu."  Without it, I might never have known of Mary Coleridge, and my life would be much diminished.

"When we were out this afternoon, we saw the larks descending to the ground, almost without a flutter of their wings, as if they flew upon their singing.  Some people's lives are like that; they progress by harmony rather than movement."

Mary Coleridge, Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, page 229.

She is buried in Grove Road Cemetery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.  She and her family were on holiday in Harrogate when she died of complications from surgery for acute appendicitis.  The epitaph on her gravestone reads: "Perfect Love."

Some in a child would live, some in a book;
     When I am dead let there remain of me
Less than a word -- a little passing look,
Some sign the soul had once, ere she forsook
     The form of life to live eternally.

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge.  The poem is untitled.

John Everett Millais (1829-1896), "The Vale of Rest" (1858)

Detachment

This week, I returned to the following poem:

            From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

What led me back to the poem?  I suspect that I needed relief from the overwrought reaction (in some quarters) to the presidential election.  There are those who believe the End of the World is at hand.  Of course, if the other candidate had been elected, there would have been an overwrought reaction (in some quarters) from those on the other side, some of whom would have believed the End of the World was at hand.

I can see why the elderly gentleman in Coleridge's poem beckoned to me.

Alexander Sillars Burns (1911-1987), "Afternoon, Wester Ross"

Alternatively, I may have been subconsciously called back to the poem by this, which I had come across a day or so earlier:

"Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality:  only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.  Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed.  For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru) (Ignatius Press 2009), pages 46-47.  The text of the book is based upon a lecture delivered by Pieper in Bonn in 1947.

Can one maintain "a receptive attitude of mind" if one's life is bound up with politics?  I have my doubts.  The reprehensible stereotyping engaged in, and the bigotry and sense of superiority displayed by, those on the losing end of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election demonstrate how a preoccupation with politics can destroy one's sense of fellow feeling and humanity.  But I will leave that topic alone, having visited it in my previous post.

As for silence:  the culture of politics is nothing if not noisy, isn't it?  "Those who do not remain silent do not hear."  Yes, exactly.

     How Sordid Is This Crowded Life

How sordid is this crowded life, its spite
And envy, the unkindness brought to light:
It makes me think of those great modest hearts
That spend their quiet lives in lonely parts,
In deserts, hills and woods; and pass away
Judged by a few, or none, from day to day.
And O that I were free enough to dwell
In their great spaces for a while; until
The dream-like life of such a solitude
Has forced my tongue to cry 'Hallo!' aloud --
To make an echo from the silence give
My voice back with the knowledge that I live.

W. H. Davies, The Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (Jonathan Cape 1942).

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

Yesterday evening I was walking south beside a meadow as the sun neared the ridgeline of the Olympic Mountains.  In a few minutes it would vanish.  The sky overhead and to the west was clear, but grey-purple clouds, shot through with orange and pink, lay along the horizons to the south, east, and north.  The deep-blue waters of Puget Sound were darkening.

I noticed a wordless calling sound -- a bleat of sorts -- coming from behind me, up in the sky.  It grew louder.  I soon realized that the sound was the honking of a flock of geese.  I stopped and waited for them.  They passed directly overhead -- three or four dozen Canadian geese in a ragged, shifting V-formation, all of them honking.

I have been hearing that sound for more than half a century.  Autumn is not autumn without it.  Continuity and certainty within ceaseless change.

                    Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --
later ages know them merely as a list of names.
Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge
goes on year after year, making the same sound.

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 336.

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973), "Drambuie, Wester Ross"

I will always prefer wild geese to politicians ("a list of names").  But I shan't attempt to impose this preference on others.  For me, politics is the destroyer of repose, reflection, and tranquility.  I understand that others may feel differently.  So it goes in this "vale of Soul-making."

"[T]here is also a certain serenity in leisure.  That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru), page 47.

I am not fond of the assumption of certainty that accompanies political discourse.  So many utopian master plans!  All of them based upon classes, categories, and caricatures.  All of them chimerical.  All of them leaving individual human beings and individual human souls out of account.

                      A Recluse

Here lies (where all at peace may be)
A lover of mere privacy.
Graces and gifts were his; now none
Will keep him from oblivion;
How well they served his hidden ends
Ask those who knew him best, his friends.

He is dead; but even among the quick
This world was never his candlestick.
He envied none; he was content
With self-inflicted banishment.
'Let your light shine!' was never his way:
What then remains but, Welladay!

And yet his very silence proved
How much he valued what he loved.
There peered from his hazed, hazel eyes
A self in solitude made wise;
As if within the heart may be
All the soul needs for company:
And, having that in safety there,
Finds its reflection everywhere.

Life's tempests must have waxed and waned:
The deep beneath at peace remained.
Full tides that silent well may be
Mark of no less profound a sea.
Age proved his blessing.  It had given
The all that earth implies of heaven;
And found an old man reconciled
To die, as he had lived, a child.

Walter de la Mare, The Burning-Glass and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1945).

With respect to the final two lines of the poem, it is important to remember that de la Mare considered childhood to be a charmed and magical time, the loss of which is to be regretted.

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), "Harvesting in Galloway"

Change

I am easily pleased.  In that spirit, I come to you with my annual May report:  the ants have emerged from their winter hibernation and are going about their business again.  "What is of more interest to you, the American presidential election or the ants erecting mounds of particolored grains of sand in the seams of sidewalks on a sunny afternoon in May?"  My response to that question is obvious.

                         Change

Ah, there is no abiding!
     Signs from heaven are sent,
Over the grass the wind went gliding,
     And the green grass grew silver as he went.

Ah, there is no remaining!
     Ever the tide of ocean ebbs and flows,
Over the blue sea goes the wind complaining,
     And the blue sea turns emerald as he goes.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

The ants, in their antic and endearing fashion, remind me that there is constancy within change.  But I harbor no illusions:  this constancy is a qualified constancy.  Each year I am greeting a new generation of ants, not old acquaintances.  As for me, I am simply on a different schedule.  We are all walking in a straight line towards eventual dust.  This is not cause for alarm or sadness or brooding.  It is just something that we need to get used to, and accept.

"Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted.  Matter is in a perpetual flux; change is always, and everywhere, at work, it strikes through causes, and effects, and leaves nothing fixed, and permanent.  And then how very near the two vast gulphs of time, the past, and the future, stand together!  Now upon the whole, is not that man a blockhead that thinks these momentary things big enough either to make him proud, or uneasy?

Remember what an atom your person stands for in respect of the universe, what a minute of unmeasurable time comes to your share, and what a small concern you are in the Empire of Fate!"

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book V, Sections 23 and 24, in Jeremy Collier (translator), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702).

Bertram Priestman, "The Sun-Veiled Hills of Wharfedale" (1917)

"What a small concern you are in the Empire of Fate!"  Yes, most of our life is a matter of getting over ourselves, isn't it?  Of course, we never truly get over ourselves.  (Perhaps mystics and saints do.  But I'm not sure about that.)  The best we can hope for is to gain perspective, bit by bit:  to recognize the contingency and the fragility of every breath we take.

                            Garramor Bay

Now the long wave unfolded falls from the West,
The sandbirds run upon twittering, twinkling feet:
Life is perilous, poised on the lip of a wave,
And the weed that lay yesterday here is clean gone.

O visitor, fugitive creature, thing of a tide,
Make music, my heart, before the long silence.

L. A. G. Strong, Northern Light (Gollancz 1930).

Bertram Priestman, "Wareham Channel, Dorset" (1910)

I am very lucky.  When I go out for my afternoon walk, I can, on the one hand, watch the wonderful progress of rising anthills in the seams of sidewalks.  On the other hand, I can turn a corner and see, to the west, the snow-covered Olympic Mountains towering beyond the blue and glittering expanse of Puget Sound.  We live our lives between these anthills and peaks.

Yesterday, I watched a single white sail move across the waters of the Sound from south to north, now in the sunlight, now in the shadow of a passing cloud.

                    Times Go By Turns

The loppèd tree in time may grow again,
Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;
The sorriest wight may find release of pain,
The driest soil suck in some moistening shower;
Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.

The sea of fortune doth not ever flow,
She draws her favours to the lowest ebb;
Her tides hath equal times to come and go,
Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web;
No joy so great but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard but may in fine amend.

Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring,
No endless night, yet not eternal day;
The saddest birds a season find to sing,
The roughest storm a calm may soon allay:
Thus, with succeeding turns, God tempereth all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.

A chance may win that by mischance was lost;
The net that holds no great, takes little fish;
In some things all, in all things none are crossed;
Few all they need, but none have all they wish.
Unmeddled joys here to no man befall;
Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.

Robert Southwell (1561-1595), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (Sloane 1949).

Bertram Priestman, "The Great Green Hills of Yorkshire" (1913)

These things the poets and the ancient philosophers tell us about "change and chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All") are regarded by many moderns as mere "truisms."  As if the modern world had advanced beyond them in all of its supposed knowingness and sophistication.  As for me, I am quite content to live by truisms.  They are, after all, true.

     Tilling the field:
The man who asked the way
     Has disappeared.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 165.

Life is not a matter of metaphysical speculation or of theory.  Science, politics, economics, and other modern (and utopian) preoccupations are of no relevance whatsoever in our soul's contingent world.  It is all beautifully simple.  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

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

Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 85.

Bertram Priestman, "Kilnsey Crag, Wharfedale, Yorkshire" (1929)

Blue

As I am wont to do, I was recently contemplating the obvious:  where would the loveliness of the world be without all of its variations on blue?  And for me, any consideration of blue begins and ends with the sky.  Isn't the blue of the sky the standard by which we judge all beauty?

What could be purer?  Or more serene?  What could hold more mystery, while at the same time providing the calm assurance that all is well?  It is hard to turn away from.  Closing the door on it seems a betrayal.  But there it remains, impassive and perfect.  It is not going anywhere.

          This Loafer

In a sun-crazed orchard
Busy with blossomings
This loafer, unaware of
What toil or weather brings,
Lumpish sleeps -- a chrysalis
Waiting, no doubt, for wings.

And when he does get active,
It's not for business -- no
Bee-lines to thyme and heather,
No earnest to-and-fro
Of thrushes:  pure caprice tells him
Where and how to go.

All he can ever do
Is to be entrancing,
So that a child may think,
Upon a chalk-blue chancing,
"Today was special.  I met
A piece of the sky dancing."

C. Day Lewis, The Room and Other Poems (Jonathan Cape 1965).

Harald Sohlberg, "Night" (1904)

A brief aside before we proceed further into blue:  C. Day Lewis's description of the butterfly's way of moving through the world is reminiscent of a poem by Robert Graves that has appeared here before.

             Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has -- who knows so well as I? --
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves, Poems 1926-1930 (1931).

As much as we may admire the single-minded and diligent bees of the world, isn't it the butterflies that charm us?

I am reminded of the Emperor Hadrian's death-bed description of his soul: animula vagula blandula.  "My little wand'ring sportful Soul."  (John Donne, 1611.)  "Poor little, pretty, fluttering thing."  (Matthew Prior, 1709.) "Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite."  (Lord Byron, 1806.)  A butterfly making its way, this way and that, around a garden.

Henry Moore, "Catspaws Off the Land" (1885)

"A piece of the sky dancing" naturally leads to "sky-flakes":

                    Blue-Butterfly Day

It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

Flowers that fly and flakes of the sky lead in turn to this lovely thought:

     A flower unknown
To bird and butterfly, --
     The sky of autumn.

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

Francis Dodd, "Ely" (1926)

It all comes back to the sky, doesn't it?  But perhaps my opening paean was too simplistic.  Robert Frost is infinitely more canny (and eloquent) about these things than I can ever hope to be.  He understands the seductiveness of the sky, but . . .

                    Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) --
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

Frost has a point.  I ought not to get too carried away.  The sky -- perfect, but impassive -- is no place to dwell.  Our world is one of butterflies and birds and flowers.  As he says in "Birches":  "Earth's the right place for love."

John Brett, "Britannia's Realm" (1880)

So let us, then, keep the blue of the sky in perspective.  Yes, there are times when we look up into it and say:  I wish this moment could last for ever. Yet, here is Frost again in "Birches":  "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it and begin over."  Our world is one of fragmentary blue.  But not any the less lovely for that.

                  L'Oiseau Bleu

The lake lay blue below the hill.
     O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
     A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
     The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
     It caught his image as he flew.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

Still, I persist in thinking that the blue of the sky remains the standard by which we judge all else.  Where would the infinite, ever-changing blues of the water be without it?  And what of the trees -- green, or gold and red, or empty -- that stand before it?

                         The Nest

Four blue stones in this thrush's nest
I leave, content to make the best
Of turquoise, lapis lazuli
Or for that matter of the whole blue sky.

Andrew Young, in Leonard Clark (editor), The Collected Poems of Andrew Young (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

Now I hear the water and the trees say:  Ah, but where would the blue of the sky be without us?

Gerald Dewsbury, "Sycamore and Oak" (1992)

From A Window

I am always skeptical of people who display a high degree of certainty about how the World works.  Such certainty is often grounded in politics, science, or theology.  Or narcissism.  Or madness.

How can they be so certain?  Part of me (a very small part) on occasion envies them:  such certainty makes things seem simpler.  It appears to provide an explanation for what confounds us.  (Seem and appears are the operative words.)  The World is beyond peradventure a confounding place, so I understand certainty's attraction.

Alas, my sole certainty is this:  the World shall for ever remain a mystery to me.  Take a look out the window.   Everything before you is a beautiful enigma.

                              From My Window

Now when the University students have abandoned
their game of bowls in the garden, with their cries of "Two" or "Six"
and the evening sky goes soured milk,

There are left the brightening windows of the rich owners of flats;
their meaningless finny gestures, dumb departures and entries;
a deaf man's theatre twenty times.

And quite indifferent towards the students or the rich
there are left the children of the poor, playing tag on a sandy waste,
and miles off southward ring the trams.

Alone on a building site a watchdog stalks by the fire,
wooed and repulsed by the jump-away flames, or raises its head
at a barking that chips a hole in distance.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton 1963).

Carlo Pedreschi, "View from Duncan of Jordanstone College" (1976)

The quotidian (I use "quotidian" in an entirely affirmative, non-pejorative sense) is suffused with ineffable mystery.  Each of us, for instance: quotidian souls, each with infinite value.

               From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

I admire Coleridge's deference and discretion.  She speculates, but she does not attempt to caricature or pigeon-hole the man.  And her speculations are gentle and lovely:  "I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs/A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,/And not unblest."

Cedric Morris, "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

Do we ever truly know ourselves?  How, then, can we presume to know others?  The worst sort of certainty is that certainty which makes assumptions about the soul of another.

                    Neighbours

From the bay windows
Of the mouldering hotel across the road from us
Mysterious, one-night itinerants emerge
On to their balconies
To breathe the cool night air.

We let them stare
In at our quiet lives.
They let us wonder what's become of them.

Ian Hamilton, Fifty Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

James McIntosh Patrick, "The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window" (1948)

"A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn."  So writes Po Chu-i. Such a realization is a source of freedom, not a sentence of doom.

                                               At the Window

But then I drew up the curtain and looked out of the window.  Yes, there it still was, the old External World,  still apparently quite unaware of its own non-existence.  I felt helpless, small-boyish before it:  I couldn't pooh-pooh it away.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (1934).

There it is.  Out into the World you go.

                          The Window

Looking through a narrow window day by day
They behold the world go by on holiday;
Maid to man repeating "Love me while you may,"
All go by them, none returns to them:  they stay.

They behold love pass, and life passing away,
And each day puts on the face of yesterday,
And their hearts are sighing "Love me while you may,
Love is lovely, life is passing:  'tis to-day."

All shall be to-morrow, still the elders say;
Many lenten morrows come and pass away,
And the world goes by, and as of old time they
Looking through a narrow window watch the way.

Arthur Symons, Love's Cruelty (1923).

Anthony Eyton, "Open Window, Spitalfields" (1981)