Dwelling

First and foremost, autumn awakens an impulse to run out into the World before it is too late.  Time is passing.  And the duration of autumn's beauty is numbered by the leaves on the trees.

But autumn also awakens a contrary impulse:  an urge to settle in, to turn inward.  Consider the endearing activity of the squirrels at this time of year: when I see them intently scurrying about among the fallen leaves, I think of the long nights that await both them and us. Yes, it is time to make ready a burrow, a nest, a refuge.

This little house
No smaller than the world
Nor I lonely
Dwelling in all that is.

Kathleen Raine, from "Short Poems," The Oracle in the Heart (Dolmen Press 1980).

But, whether our movement be outward or inward, I suspect that for most of us the emotional tenor of either movement is the same:  that pensive, wistful, and bittersweet autumnal feeling that we have come to know so well.  It only deepens with the years.  But this is not a bad thing.  Far from it.  Many of us live for autumn.

"They seek retirements in the country, on the sea-coasts, or mountains: you too used to be fond of such things.  But this is all from ignorance.  A man may any hour he pleases retire into himself; and nowhere will he find a place of more quiet and leisure than in his own soul:  especially if he has that furniture within, the view of which immediately gives him the fullest tranquillity.  By tranquillity, I mean the most graceful order.  Allow yourself continually this retirement, and refresh and renew your self."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 3 (translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor), in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).

Paul Drury, "September" (1928)

As I have noted here on more than one occasion, I see nothing wrong with sentimentality.  The default modern posture is irony.  The essence of modern irony is self-regarding knowingness and distance from life.  Who needs that?  I will take sentimentality over irony any day.  It is a matter of choosing warmth over coldness.

"The unspeakable blessedness of having a home!  Much as my imagination has dwelt upon it for thirty years, I never knew how deep and exquisite a joy could lie in the assurance that one is at home for ever.  Again and again I come back upon this thought; nothing but Death can oust me from my abiding place.  And Death I would fain learn to regard as a friend, who will but intensify the peace I now relish."

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), page 112.

"A Quiet Normal Life."  Isn't this what most of us want?  "Here in his house and in his room,/In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked . . ."

                    Her Room

At first, not breathed on,
Not a leaf or a flower knew you were gone,
Then, one by one,

The little things put away,
The glass tray
Of medicines empty,

The poems still loved
Long after sight failed
With other closed books shelved,

And from your cabinet
Remembrances to one and another friend
Who will forget

How the little owl, the rose-bowl,
The Brig-o' Doone paperweight,
The Japanese tea-set

Lived on their shelf, just here,
So long, and there,
Binding memories together,

Binding your love,
Husband and daughter in an old photograph,
Your woven texture of life

A torn cobweb dusted down,
Swept from the silent room
That was home.

Kathleen Raine, The Oval Portrait and Other Poems (Enitharmon Press 1977).

Robin Tanner, "The Gamekeeper's Cottage" (1928)

The outward and inward movements of autumn take place within a larger context, of course.  The seasonal round feels as if it will go on for ever.  The wistfulness of autumn is, we know, a prelude to "the bleak mid-winter," which has its own charms, but which will in turn awaken in us thoughts of "the cherry hung with snow."  And so it beautifully goes.

There is, though, a deeper theme at work beneath it all.

                       Words in the Air

The clear air said:  'I was your home once
but other guests have taken your place;
where will you go who liked it here so much?
You looked at me through the thick dust
of the earth, and your eyes were known to me.
You sang sometimes, you even whispered low
to someone else who was often asleep,
you told her the light of the earth
was too pure not to point a direction
which somehow avoided death.  You imagined
yourself advancing in that direction;
but now I no longer hear you.  What have you done?
Above all, what is your lover going to think?'

And she, his friend, replied through tears of happiness:
'He has changed into the shade that pleased him best.'

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998).

Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

Inhabitants of the air?  Yes.  There's no getting around that.  But, in the meantime, here we are.

My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe;
When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens, One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 43.

Robin Tanner, "Martin's Hovel" (1927)

The Names Of Stars

I do not know the names of stars.  I have come across them in reading, of course.  But, looking at the crowded sky, I cannot place the names to the faces.  Though I find the faces beautiful and entrancing.

Mind you, I am not flaunting my ignorance.  I would love to find myself in the company of someone who could look up into that vastness and begin to name names.  In the same way, I admire those who can rattle off the Latin binomials for flora and fauna.  But my resources are limited.  As I have noted before, I am the sort of person who reads a poem or two a day, and then needs to turn them over and over, daydreaming all the while. Becoming a namer of stars is simply not in the cards, I'm afraid.

I do, however, have a favorite piece of star-lore.  What we, in English, call "the Milky Way," the Japanese call ama-no-gawa:  "river of the heavens" or "river of the sky" or "river of Heaven."  I believe that I can locate the river of Heaven, if pressed.

Graham Sutherland, "Lammas" (1926)

This apostrophe on my ignorance was prompted by coming across the following poem.

                         The South

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for,
nor their places in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
-- these things perhaps are the poem.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by W. S. Merwin), Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

"The silence of the sleeping bird" is particularly nice, I think.

Paul Drury, "September" (1928)

Still, the naming of stars is a lovely thing, reminiscent of the naming of flowers:  heart's ease, lad's love, forget-me-nots . . .  Thomas Hardy's phrase "constellated daisies" comes suddenly to mind, as well as Andrew Young's lines about a field of daisies at night:  "For where the folded daisies are/In every one I see a star."

                    Mirach, Antares . . .

Mirach, Antares, Vega, Caph, Alcor --
From inch-wide eyes I scan their aeon-old flames,
Enthralled:  then wonder which enchants me more --
They, or the incantation of their names.

Walter de la Mare, Inward Companion: Poems (1950).

Beset with insomnia, Ivor Gurney often went on night-long walks in the country and the city.  Not surprisingly, stars and their constellations often appear in his poetry as his companions on these walks.

                         Stars Sliding

The stars are sliding wanton through trees,
The sky is sliding steady over all.
Great Bear to Gemini will lose his place
And Cygnus over world's brink slip and fall.

Follow-my-Leader's not so bad a game.
But were it leap frog:  O to see the shoots
And tracks of glory; Scorpions and Swans tame
And Argo swarmed with Bulls and other brutes.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

Graham Sutherland, "Michaelmas" (1928)

Finally, on constellations, there is this.  We cannot say for certain that it was composed by Edward Thomas.  But we do know that it was found on a page in his daughter Bronwen's autograph album.  It is untitled.

This is the constellation of the Lyre:
Its music cannot ever tire,
For it is silent.  No man need fear it:
Unless he wants to, he will not hear it.
                                                         E. T.

Cardiff University Library Archive

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (Oxford)

"Interval"

"Fair after foul weather" -- the subject of my previous post -- got me to thinking about one of my favorite poems by Edward Thomas.  Thomas started writing poetry in December of 1914, and he wrote the following poem during that month.

When Thomas was debating with himself whether to begin writing poetry, Robert Frost suggested to him that he should, as a start, turn some of his descriptive prose passages into verse.  "Interval" is not, unlike some of Thomas's poems, traceable to a specific passage in his prose writings. However, one can see that he took Frost's advice to heart: the first six stanzas are wholly descriptive.  Of course, to call them merely "descriptive" is to sell them short: very few poets (or writers in general) are capable of writing with such deceptively simple depth.

Then, in the final two stanzas, the touch that makes Thomas who he is (and, I believe, a great poet) comes to the fore:  the sudden turn into a wider realm that is intensely personal and, at the same time, common to us all. Very few poets are capable of carrying this off on a consistent basis. Thomas is one of those who does so, again and again.

                                   Robin Tanner, "Martin's Hovel" (1927)

      Interval

Gone the wild day:
A wilder night
Coming makes way
For brief twilight.

Where the firm soaked road
Mounts and is lost
In the high beech-wood
It shines almost.

The beeches keep
A stormy rest,
Breathing deep
Of wind from the west.

The wood is black,
With a misty steam.
Above, the cloud pack
Breaks for one gleam.

But the woodman's cot
By the ivied trees
Awakens not
To light or breeze.

It smokes aloft
Unwavering:
It hunches soft
Under storm's wing.

It has no care
For gleam or gloom:
It stays there
While I shall roam,

Die, and forget
The hill of trees,
The gleam, the wet,
This roaring peace.

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

Note how each of the first six stanzas is a single sentence.  Each stanza is similar in spirit and in imagery (although not in form) to a haiku.  (I am not suggesting that Thomas modeled the stanzas on the haiku form.  This is simply how they strike me.)  The final two stanzas -- which make the turn into the wider realm -- consist of a single sentence that runs across the stanzas.

As is often the case in Thomas's poetry (and prose), death makes an appearance. But, please note: Thomas is not morbidly obsessed with mortality.  Honesty was always his instinctive governing principle.  If death makes an appearance -- or love or beauty -- so be it.  Whatever is in one of his poems is there because it is true to what Thomas thought and felt.  Remember: "True and not feigning."

                                  Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

"But I Learnt How The Wind Would Sound After These Things Should Be"

As I have noted before, I (like many others, I suspect) was introduced to Edward Thomas by coming across "Adlestrop" in an anthology.  Although "Adlestrop" brought me to Thomas, the following poem was the one that took my breath away -- and I immediately realized that (for me, at least) Edward Thomas would never be just another poet.  I still feel that way after about three decades.         

               The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain:  old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

Thomas wrote the poem in March of 1915.  The house referred to was located at Wick Green near Steep in Hampshire.  Thomas's family began living there in December of 1909.  The house was located on a hill.  Hence the wind.

How I feel about "The New House" in particular, and Thomas's poetry in general, is reflected in these words from C. H. Sisson about Thomas:

He is, without doubt, one of the most profound poets of the century.  What did he say?  He said what is in the poems, and there is no message beyond them.  But he belonged to the underside of the world, from which renewal must come, and he speaks with conviction of matters which may be touched and felt.

C. H. Sisson, English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (1971), page 79.

                                Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

"Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"

Earlier this week, I noted that two of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems are set in March.  The first of those poems was "Vacancy in the Park."  Today I give you the second.  Again, this is one of Stevens's late poems.  In fact, it is the final poem in his final book (his Collected Poems), which was published in 1954 -- the year before his death.

I suspect that Stevens seldom did anything without due deliberation.  He was, after all, a lawyer who worked for an insurance company (the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company) for nearly 40 years.  Hence, although Stevens is much too complex for me to suggest that a single poem sums up him or his thousands of lines of poetry, the fact that he chose this poem as his final published words bears consideration.

     Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry -- it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away.  It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock, in Collected Poems (1954).

                                 Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)    

"The Fall Of Leaf Across The Shoulder Of The Northern World": Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is a wonderful poet of autumn.  (He is also particularly good when it comes to trees and snow.)  Here is a poem of his for this time of year.

                         The Crossing

September, and the butterflies are drifting
Across the sky again, the monarchs in
Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light
To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow
That seems to be the average of their drift,
Though what you mostly see is a random light
Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,
Whatever it may be, the rise of hills
And settling of seas, the fall of leaf
Across the shoulder of the northern world,

The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .
All that's preparing now behind the scene,
As the ecliptic and equator cross,
Through which the light butterflies are flying.

Gnomes and Occasions (1973).

                                      Paul Drury, "September" (1928)