Perspective, Part Thirteen: No Choice In The Matter

Something obvious:  in the aftermath of the sad and painful events that life inevitably brings our way, one may gain some perspective on what really matters during our time above ground.  Which is not to say, mind you, that the gaining of perspective outweighs, or completely compensates for, the pain and sadness.  No, I'm not willing to go that far.  I need to think that one over for a while (and live longer) before I accept that proposition.

I'm reminded of the final five lines of Randall Jarrell's "90 North" (which appeared here in full a few years ago):

I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness -- that the darkness flung me --
Is worthless as ignorance:  nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness.  Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom.  It is pain.

Randall Jarrell, Blood for a Stranger (1942).

My view is not as bleak as Jarrell's:  I'm simply offering his view for what it is worth.  I'd say that, while I don't wish to engage in wishful thinking, I'm willing to learn while I'm here, with sadness and pain as part of the package.  Not that I have any choice in the matter, of course.

John Brett, "Southern Coast of Guernsey" (1875)

This much I do know:  one mustn't be seduced by the many Siren songs of false security the winds waft to us.

                              Money

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
          'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
          You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
          They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
          Clearly money has something to do with life

-- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
          You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
          Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing.  It's like looking down
          From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
          In the evening sun.  It is intensely sad.

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

The final four lines are, I think, among Larkin's finest:  that inimitable plain-spoken and elegant combination of matter-of-fact honesty and sheer beauty that he often achieves as a poem comes to an end.  Of course, I say this as one who loves Larkin's poetry.  Others may find that the lines exemplify exactly what they don't like about him.  Perhaps one test of whether Larkin is your cup of tea is how you react to:  "It is intensely sad."

John Brett, "Forest Cove, Cardigan Bay" (1883)

Yes, better pain and sadness -- for they are direct evidence of love and affection -- than false security.

                 Remembering Golden Bells

Ruined and ill -- a man of two score;
Pretty and guileless -- a girl of three.
Not a boy -- but still better than nothing:
To soothe one's feeling -- from time to time a kiss!
There came a day -- they suddenly took her from me;
Her soul's shadow wandered I know not where.
And when I remember how just at the time she died
She lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to talk,
Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood
Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow.
At last, by thinking of the time before she was born,
By thought and reason I drove the pain away.
Since my heart forgot her, many days have passed
And three times winter has changed to spring.
This morning, for a little, the old grief came back,
Because, in the road, I met her foster-nurse.

Po Chu-i (772-846) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, Chinese Poems (1946).

Do not be taken in by Po Chu-i's affectation of a gruff manner in a few places in the poem:  he is never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, and he is always wary of sentiment.  For instance, I think we know that this is whistling in the dark:  "By thought and reason I drove the pain away."  As is this:  "my heart forgot her."  Hardly.

John Brett, "The Norman Archipelago (Channel Islands)" (1885)

"Breathe On Me Still, Star, Sister"

Rainer Maria Rilke's "Evening" (which appeared in my previous post) closes by referring to one's life as

. . . the fearful and ripening and enormous
Being that -- bounded by everything, or boundless --
For a moment becomes stone, for a moment stars.

The translation of those lines is by Randall Jarrell.  The juxtaposition of stone and stars puts me in mind of a poem by Jarrell that appears in the same collection in which his translation of "Evening" appears.

                                 Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Large Flints" (1963)

                  The Meteorite

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One; and bent and put it to her lips
And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters --
Breathe on me still, star, sister.

Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960).

                                     Eliot Hodgkin, "Four Flints" (1939)

I never felt that I understood this poem, and then I came upon a passage in a memoir of Jarrell written by Mary von Schrader Jarrell, his second wife. Soon after they first met, she and Jarrell were out for a walk along a dry stream bed in Colorado, where she found an unusual-looking stone.  She suggested jokingly to Jarrell that it was a meteorite.  Jarrell later wrote "The Meteorite":  he is the meteorite; she is the star.  Mary von Schrader Jarrell, Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell (1999), pages 9-10.

The anecdote provides a good lesson:  poems often have their origins in prosaic circumstances.  I am reminded of Wallace Stevens's explanation of "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," that lovely and enigmatic poem:  at the time that he wrote it, he was worried about a rabbit that was visiting his garden each morning and eating the flower bulbs.

                    Eliot Hodgkin, "Feathers and Hyacinth Heads" (1962)

Evening

I confess that the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke strikes me as being somewhat overwrought and histrionic.  Having said that, I am willing to admit that the fault is my own: I cannot match his romantic passion, and I am too dull to penetrate what seems to me to be his obscurity.  Moreover (and this is likely a crucial "moreover"), because I am bereft of German, I am dependent upon translations -- which no doubt means that I am missing the whole point.

Still, because I consider this to be a blog about enthusiasms, not strictures, I do not intend to warn anybody off Rilke's poetry.  Although my tastes tend to run to the likes of Larkin and Edward Thomas and Hardy, I am not interested in grinding axes.  Life is too short.

Well, after that little diversion, there are poems by Rilke that I like a great deal.  The following poem (which, as it happens, was translated by Randall Jarrell) came to mind after I posted Jarrell's "The Breath of Night." Twilight, stars in the trees, eternity, mortality, and so on . . .

                     James Bateman (1893-1959), "Woodland and Cattle"

                       Evening

The evening folds about itself the dark
Garments the old trees hold out to it.
You watch: and the lands are borne from you,
One soaring heavenward, one falling;

And leave you here, not wholly either's,
Not quite so darkened as the silent houses,
Not quite so surely summoning the eternal
As that which each night becomes star, and rises;

And leave you (inscrutably to unravel)
Your life: the fearful and ripening and enormous
Being that -- bounded by everything, or boundless --
For a moment becomes stone, for a moment stars.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Randall Jarrell), in Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960).

                               James Bateman, "Lullington Church" (1939)

For purposes of comparison, here is another translation of the same poem.

                         Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Stephen Mitchell (editor and translator), The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1982).

              James Bateman, "The Pool, Blockley, Gloucestershire" (1926)

"The Breath Of Night"

The following poem by Randall Jarrell is, I think, a nice companion piece to A. E. Housman's planetary "parable" that appeared in my previous post. Jarrell was fond of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, and the poem feels a bit like the beginning of a fairy tale -- idyllic, but with a darkening path, disappearing into a deep forest, ahead.

                                  Lucien Pissarro, "April, Epping" (1894)

          The Breath of Night

The moon rises.  The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.

A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb.  The cock crows

From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars, in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.

Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.

Randall Jarrell, Losses (1948).

Jarrell's poem and Housman's "Revolution" both bring to mind Wordsworth's lines:  "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,/With rocks, and stones, and trees."

             Lucien Pissarro, "The Dunmow Road from Tilty Wood" (1915)

"I Am Just Going Outside And May Be Some Time"

Randall Jarrell's "90 North" prompted me (in pedestrian fashion) to think of the following polar poem by Derek Mahon, which takes place at 90 South rather than at 90 North.  The poem is a villanelle, and one of the refrains is:  "I am just going outside and may be some time."  These words were spoken by Captain Lawrence Oates in March of 1912.

Oates was a member of Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole, which began on November 1, 1911.  After reaching the Pole, the five-man group began the return trip.  Oates was suffering from frostbite to his feet, and his condition was slowing down the group, which was running out of food. On March 15, 1912, knowing that his condition was endangering the lives of the others, Oates asked them to leave him behind.  They refused.  On the morning of March 16 or 17 (Scott, who was recording events in his diary, had lost track of the date), Oates said to the others:  "I am just going outside and may be some time."  He left the tent and was never seen again.

His sacrifice was unavailing.  The remaining members of the group died less than two weeks later after a blizzard prevented them from reaching their next food cache.

      Thomas Moran,"The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" (1893-1901)

                         Antarctica

'I am just going outside and may be some time.'
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
He is just going outside and may be some time.

The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Need we consider it some sort of crime,
This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest?  No,
He is just going outside and may be some time --

In fact, for ever.  Solitary enzyme,
Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He takes leave of the earthly pantomime
Quietly, knowing it is time to go.
'I am just going outside and may be some time.'
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Derek Mahon, Antarctica (The Gallery Press 1986).

                                                      Thomas Moran
             "Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming Territory" (1882)

Life Explained, Part Twenty-Eight: "Pain Comes From The Darkness/And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain."

The middle of summer may seem like an odd time to offer up the following poem by Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), given its frigid setting.  However, it popped into my head for some reason, and it is, I think, a poem fit for any season.

Jarrell is now perhaps best known as a critic of poetry.  His criticism is free of the jargon, theory, and political agendas that taint most contemporary criticism.  He displays a deep knowledge of, and a devotion to, poetry. (There was a time, believe it or not, when criticism was written out of love.) He wrote perceptive essays on, among others, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, and Robert Graves.  His observations are still incisive and thought-provoking more than half-a-century later.

His poetry has suffered from some neglect in recent years (with the exception of "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," which has long been a standard anthology piece).  However, he wrote a number of fine poems that deserve greater attention.

I first encountered the following poem in my younger years, and I was quite taken with it at the time.  Reading it now, I find that, well, I am still quite taken with it, but perhaps for less romantic, more prosaic, reasons.  As I have noted before, rereading poems is always a good idea, since you are not the same person that you were when you last read them, whether the interval is months, years, or decades.

                              Richard Eurich, "The Frozen Tarn" (1940)

                              90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all night -- till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,
The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,
And I gave my great sigh:  the flakes came huddling,
Were they really my end?  In the darkness I turned to my rest.

-- Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence
Of the unbroken ice.  I stand here,
The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare
At the North Pole . . .
                                         And now what?  Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.
The world -- my world spins on this final point
Of cold and wretchedness:  all lines, all winds
End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless.  In the child's bed
After the night's voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain -- in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.
Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone --

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness -- that the darkness flung me --
Is worthless as ignorance:  nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness.  Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom.  It is pain.

Randall Jarrell, Blood for a Stranger (1942).

Well, what can I say?  Jarrell himself called it "a pessimistic poem."  But there you have it.  The Larkinite in me is drawn to the final two lines: "Pain comes from the darkness/And we call it wisdom.  It is pain."  If I came across those lines not knowing of "90 North," I would swear that Larkin had written them.  Jarrell wrote the poem in 1941, when Larkin was 19 years old, so Jarrell's harrowing expedition preceded Larkin's later exploration of the same territory.

                Douglas Percy Bliss, "Urban Garden Under Snow" (c. 1946)

"Neither Out Far Nor In Deep"

Elizabeth Bishop's sandpiper -- "looking for something, something, something" -- leads us to Robert Frost's "people along the sand."  Is the following poem cynical and misanthropic?  Or is it a wistful reflection on our shared human predicament?  Or is it both?  (Frost, I suspect, would prefer to have it both ways.)

   Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be --
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

Perhaps how one feels about the poem depends upon how one's day (or life?) has gone.  Randall Jarrell, who writes wisely about Frost's poetry, has this to say about the poem:

It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly -- he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance.  And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too -- something touching about our absurdity?  If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted.  The tone of the last lines -- or, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets -- allows for this too.

Randall Jarrell, "To the Laodiceans," Poetry and the Age (1953).

William Pritchard -- another wise commentator on Frost -- holds the view that "you couldn't really know how to read the tone of the poem, because Frost had deliberately made its tone opaque, equivocal."  Howell Chickering, "Chaucer by Heart," in Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard (1998), page 92.

                                         John Hammond Harwood
                           "Merry-Go-Round at the Seaside" (1947)

"Snow Falling And Night Falling Fast, Oh, Fast"

We have had our first snowfall, a snowfall accompanied by icy winds out of Canada and Alaska.  As always, it was lovely to watch the snow swirl down beneath the streetlights as night came on.  Being in a Robert Frost mood of late, one of his bleaker poems came to mind.  (As has often been noted  -- beginning, perhaps, with Randall Jarrell's fine essay "To the Laodiceans" in 1952 -- the notion of Frost as a grandfatherly, comforting, proverbial poet misses a great deal.)

                         Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

                       Akseli Gallen-Kallela, "Imatra in Winter" (1893)