"Love, What It Is"

What is love?  I haven't a clue.  I'd like to think that I have experienced it. But who really knows?

Call me a coward, but I tend to think that love is one of those experiences that are so intimately bound up with the essence of being human that they can only be lived, and any attempt to "explain" or "define" them is doomed to failure.  The nature of the soul, the notion of beauty, and the experience of death fall into the same category.

I am thus tempted to fall back upon my old standby in situations of this sort:  "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness) (1921).  Of course, Wittgenstein is only repeating what Taoist and Buddhist philosophers stated centuries ago. And what they say is true, you know.  (Contrary to what purveyors of Science would have you believe, all of this explaining we moderns engage in gets us nowhere.)

Claughton Pellew-Harvey, "View from the Studio" (1930)

Still, I believe that the subject of love can be approached aslant, which is where poetry comes in.  Hence, for example, I recently came across the following poems by Robert Herrick.

               Love, What It Is

Love is a circle that doth restless move
In the same sweet eternity of love.

Robert Herrick, Poem 29, Hesperides (1648).

Herrick's most recent editors suggest that the source of the poem is a traditional proverb.  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 519.  They also cite two lines from a masque by Ben Jonson titled "Love's Welcome at Bolsover" as a possible source:  "Love is a circle, both the first and last/Of all our actions."  Ibid.  Finally, they reference a passage from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy:  "[Love is] circulus a bono in bonum, a round circle still from good to good; for love is the beginner and end of all our actions."  Ibid.

I next encountered this, in which "from good to good" (coincidentally or not) makes an appearance:

                         Upon Love

Love is a Circle, and an Endless Sphere;
From good to good, revolving here, and there.

Robert Herrick, Poem 839, Hesperides.

This helps to illuminate "Love, What It Is."  To some extent.  Both poems sound lovely, and feel as though they have the ring of truth.  After encountering them, I came across a third poem by Herrick which brings things together.

                    Of Love

How Love came in, I do not know,
Whether by th'eye, or ear, or no:
Or whether with the soul it came
(At first) infused with the same:
Whether in part 'tis here or there,
Or, like the soul, whole every where:
This troubles me: but I as well
As any other, this can tell;
That when from hence she does depart,
The out-let then is from the heart.

Robert Herrick, Poem 73, Hesperides.

"This troubles me" is marvelous.  And this is wonderful:  "Or whether with the soul it came/(At first) infused with the same."  As is this:  "like the soul, whole every where."  In this context, love as a circle, love as "an Endless Sphere," and love as a "sweet eternity" make perfect sense.  The final two lines are lovely, and bring us back to earth.

W. G. Poole, "Plant Against a Winter Landscape" (1938)

However, I do not wish to be reductive.  (And I do not think that Herrick is being reductive.  He simply provides us with beautiful possibilities.) Defining love destroys it.  As I say, it is best approached tangentially, at an oblique angle.

                    Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves, Poems (1927).

Few poems capture love's heart-pang and its internal airiness (that catch of the breath) as well as this.

Duncan Grant, "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder."  Yes and no, experience teaches us.  But I do think that the feeling of an absence -- of a lack -- is another way of approaching love aslant.  Absence brings home what fullness is.  Or something like that.

Only the moon
high in the sky
as an empty reminder --
but if, looking at it, we just remember,
our two hearts may meet.

Saigyo (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991).  The poem is an untitled waka (five lines, with a syllable count in Japanese of 5-7-5-7-7). It is prefaced by this note:  "When I was in retirement in a distant place, I sent this to someone in the capital around the time when there was a moon."  Ibid, page 123.

     The Land with Wind in the Leaves

Distance cannot remove me from that place.
I stand half a world away and here it is:
A green sway and roar -- blue, vast, open
And refusing always to let me depart.

     Yorkshire 1987 -- Tokyo 1992

sip (Tokyo/Seattle 1992).

Richard Eurich (1903-1992), "The Window" 

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Three: "Blessed Is He That Has Come To The Heart Of The World And Is Humble"

I came across this poem a week or so ago and it keeps returning to me.

Were we sure of seeing
a moon like this
in existences to come,
who would be sorry
to leave this life?

Saigyo (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 158.  The poem is a waka:  five lines, with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7 in the original Japanese.

Most poetry is, explicitly or implicitly, a meditation upon our mortality, and upon the transience of all that surrounds us.  A few poets add something along these lines:  "Death is the mother of beauty."  To wit:  our existence is fleeting, but this contingency has the virtue of bestowing a bittersweet loveliness upon all that we behold (provided that we remember to pay attention).  Saigyo's poem falls within this tradition.  This is not surprising: he was a Buddhist monk, and thus was steeped in the doctrine of impermanence.

But what makes this poem wonderful (and I am mindful of not wishing to destroy it through explication) is the way in which Saigyo's meditation on the passing beauty of this life is placed within another dimension entirely: the possibility of "existences to come."  Yet it is important to note that this possibility is qualified; it is not used to provide false comfort:  "were we sure of seeing."  Mystery remains.

Richard Eurich, "Snow Shower over Skyreholme" (1973)

"Existences to come."  A phrase likely to raise eyebrows among those who have boarded the Science and Progress express.  I have written previously of enchanted and disenchanted worlds, so I will not repeat that discussion here.  Suffice it to say that some see humanity's time on earth as the story of a quest for "knowledge" and "rational" explanations, and of an escape from "superstition."  That disenchanted world has certainly turned out to be a resounding success, hasn't it?

I realize that I can be accused of reactionary romanticizing, but I prefer this:

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say:  "I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone).  This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish.  Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory."
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship.

Anonymous (translated by Gilbert Murray), in Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, "Critical Appendix on the Orphic Tablets" (written by Gilbert Murray) (Cambridge University Press 1908), pages 659-660.

These lines were inscribed in Greek on a paper-thin gold tablet that was discovered in Petelia in southern Italy.  The tablet is believed to date from 300 to 200 B. C.  "The tablet had been rolled up and placed in a hexagonal cylinder hanging from a delicate gold chain and doubtless worn by the dead person as an amulet."  Ibid, page 573, footnote 1.

Here is another translation of the inscription:

You will find to the left of the house of Hades a wellspring,
and by the side of this standing a white cypress.
You must not even go close to this wellspring; but also
you will find another spring that comes from the lake of Memory
cold water running, and there are those who stand guard before it.
You shall say:  "I am a child of earth and the starry heavens,
but my generation is of the sky.  You yourselves know this.
But I am dry with thirst and am dying.  Give me then quickly
the water that runs cold out of the lake of Memory."
And they themselves will give you to drink from the sacred water,
and afterward you shall be lord among the rest of the heroes.

Anonymous (translated by Richmond Lattimore), in Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (University of Chicago Press 1955).

Richard Eurich, "The Rose" (1960)

The following passage is written by Gilbert Murray, and appears in a discussion of the plays of Euripides.  However, I think that the thoughts expressed stand on their own outside of that context.

"Reason is great, but it is not everything.  There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life.  These things are Gods or forms of God:  not fabulous immortal men, but 'Things which Are,' things utterly non-human and non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity."

Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897), page 272.

A crucial element missing from the modern "rational" worldview is humility:  we think we know -- or will eventually know -- everything. (Whether this "knowledge" has anything to do with our life or our soul is another matter, of course.)

                      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 (1938).

Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

Ice And Stars

Here we are "in the bleak mid-winter."  I realize that, by the calendar, winter began just a week ago.  But, as a matter of emotion, it feels as though winter begins sometime in mid- to late-November, when the wind whirrs through the empty trees.  Or so it seems to me.

But things are not all that bleak.  The sun has passed through its lowest arc.  The longest night is behind us.  Things are afoot in the heavens. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote this in another season, but it seems apt now: "The crooked arm of the old oak tree points upwards to the moon."  Dorothy Wordsworth, journal entry for March 24, 1798, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (edited by Pamela Woof) (Oxford University Press 2002), page 150.

"Skating on the K.s' pond last night after eating too much ham.  Eight-thirty.  Many stars.  No moon.  Orion's sword and girdle brilliant and all the other constellations whose names I have forgotten or never knew.  I am reminded of my youth and its skating ponds, of the ardor for strength, courage, and purpose excited in me then by the starlight.  It is nearly the same.  My feelings may be less ardent, the stars seem to burn more tenderly these days, but my openmouthed delight in finding them hung above the dark ice is no less."

John Cheever, in Robert Gottlieb (editor), The Journals of John Cheever (Alfred A. Knopf 1991), page  88.

Richard Eurich, "The Frozen Tarn" (1940)

Although I was never much of a skater during my childhood in Minnesota, I can still recall the lakes being turned into skating rinks in the winter.  My fondest memories are of those lakes at night:  a black expanse overhead; the sound of the slicing skates.  (There is another thread in the pattern as well:  my maternal grandparents first met while skating on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis.)

So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

     Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam'd upon the ice:  and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp'd short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 manuscript), Book I, lines 465-489, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Prelude (Oxford University Press 1959), page 28.

"As if the earth had roll'd/With visible motion her diurnal round" brings to mind "roll'd round in earth's diurnal course" from "A slumber did my spirit seal," which was written in the same year as the passage quoted above.

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973)

"Winter Landscape, West Cults, Aberdeen" (1940)

A dome of darkness overhead.  Dark depths below.  Between the two, skaters curving on a sheet of ice.  The poetic possibilities are obvious. (More so than, say, ice-fishing.  Although ice-fishing does have its charms.)

      The Midnight Skaters

The hop-poles stand in cones,
     The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
     Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
But not the tallest there, 'tis said,
Could fathom to this pond's black bed.

Then is not death at watch
     Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch
     Earth's heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
     Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
     Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.

Edmund Blunden, English Poems (1925).

Ronald George Lampitt (1906-1988), "Skating By Moonlight"

Harbors

I have been in a vague 1920s mood this week, and thus found myself perusing Georgian Poetry, 1920-1922, the final installment of Edward Marsh's five-volume series that began in December of 1912.  There is something homely (in the sense of "simple, plain, unsophisticated") and comforting about these volumes, with their paper-covered boards, gilt-lettering, and now age-toned pages.

I realize that I am constructing a dream-world:  how can I possibly say that I have been in "a vague 1920s mood this week" when I have no conception of what the 1920s were like in England, across the sea?  But escapism is what it is.  I confess:  at times I long for a different world entirely.

Yes, I know that human nature was no different then, that a horrific war had just ended, and that economic calamity and another war were on the horizon.  Yet there is something fundamentally decent, restrained, circumspect, and seemly about the poems one encounters in Marsh's anthologies.  Something that is the exact opposite of the world in which we now find ourselves.

Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

Earlier this year I posted poems by William Kerr and J. D. C. Pellow that appeared in Georgian Poetry, 1920-1922.  A few days ago, I discovered this poem in the same volume.

                              Evening

When little lights in little ports come out,
Quivering down through water with the stars,
And all the fishing fleet of slender spars
Range at their moorings, veer with tide about;

When race of wind is stilled and sails are furled,
And underneath our single riding-light
The curve of black-ribbed deck gleams palely white,
And slumbrous waters pool a slumbrous world;

-- Then, and then only, have I thought how sweet
Old age might sink upon a windy youth,
Quiet beneath the riding-light of truth,
Weathered through storms, and gracious in retreat.

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962).  The poem was originally published in Orchard and Vineyard (1921).

The image of the lights of the village "quivering down through water with the stars" is particularly fine.  As is "slumbrous waters pool a slumbrous world."  And, at my age, I find the concluding lines something to aspire to. (Although I have no illusions about "the riding-light of truth" beaming overhead!  But, as for "gracious in retreat":  one would hope so.)

Richard Eurich, "Robin Hood's Bay in Wartime" (1940)

I have a soft spot for poems set in peaceful harbors at night.  Hence, "Evening" brought this poem to mind (which, coincidentally, was also published in 1921).

                       Boats at Night

How lovely is the sound of oars at night
     And unknown voices, borne through windless air,
From shadowy vessels floating out of sight
     Beyond the harbour lantern's broken glare
To those piled rocks that make on the dark wave
     Only a darker stain.  The splashing oars
Slide softly on as in an echoing cave
     And with the whisper of the unseen shores
Mingle their music, till the bell of night
     Murmurs reverberations low and deep
That droop towards the land in swooning flight
     Like whispers from the lazy lips of sleep.
The oars grow faint.  Below the cloud-dim hill
The shadows fade and now the bay is still.

Edward Shanks (1892-1953), The Island of Youth and Other Poems (1921).

Think of it:  T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land would be published in the following year.  I was once entranced by it, and I still find it . . . interesting. But it now seems overwrought.  And Eliot seems full of himself.  When it comes to "modernism," I suppose I am an apostate.  "Evening" and "Boats at Night" seem more, well, human.  These sorts of poems may not be ironic enough, or unillusioned enough, for some "modern" tastes.  They certainly do not pass muster for the avant-garde.  They are unashamedly "old-fashioned."  All the better.

Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

Finally, a poem which (for me, at least) has the same evocative feeling as the poems by Sackville-West and Shanks.

     A Ship, an Isle, a Sickle Moon

A ship, an isle, a sickle moon --
With few but with how splendid stars
The mirrors of the sea are strewn
Between their silver bars!
          *     *     *
An isle beside an isle she lay,
The pale ship anchored in the bay,
While in the young moon's port of gold
A star-ship -- as the mirrors told --
Put forth its great and lonely light
To the unreflecting Ocean, Night.
And still, a ship upon her seas,
The isle and the island cypresses
Went sailing on without the gale:
And still there moved the moon so pale,
A crescent ship without a sail!

James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), in John Squire (editor), The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker (1916).  The ellipses are in the original.

Flecker was of a romantic bent, which was further colored by the time he spent in the Mediterranean and the Middle East as a consular official.  In tone and diction, his poetry often has a Romantic-Victorian feel to it. However, in a number of poems he adopted a more direct, less florid approach, while still retaining his distinctive sensibility.  (In this regard, I recommend a perceptive essay (unfinished) that he wrote about A. E. Housman.  Flecker remarks of A Shropshire Lad:  "[T]here are no cacophonous lines.  Mr. Housman has achieved this fine result mainly because he has used pure spoken English with hardly any admixture of poetic verbiage."  James Elroy Flecker, Collected Prose (1920), page 226.) It is a pity he died so young.

Richard Eurich, "Whitby in Wartime"

Fish

A confession:  I don't find puns humorous.  Mind you, I find much in life and in the world that is quite humorous.  But puns?  No, not puns.  I realize that there are those who find puns delightful and highly entertaining.  Just as there are those who find mimes and limericks and clowns to be delightful and highly entertaining.  I shan't pass judgment.

William Wigley (1880-1943), "Mevagissey Quay, Cornwall"

I do reserve the right to make rare (extremely rare) and wholly arbitrary exceptions.  Thus, I shall give Derek Mahon a pass on the following poem.

                    Soles

'I caught four soles this morning'
said the man with the beard;
cloud shifted and a sun-
shaft pierced the sea.
Fisher of soles, did you reflect
the water you walked on
contains so very many souls,
the living and the dead,
you could never begin to count them?

Somewhere a god waits,
rod in hand,
to add you to their number.

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

As a child 50-odd years ago in Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota, I attended what was called "Sunday school."  Every so often we would sing, as a group, a song called "I Will Make You Fishers Of Men."  As we sang, we made casting and reeling-in motions with our arms and hands.  I offer this simply as a random recollection of a lost world, not in the service of any message or creed.

William Peters Vannet, "Arbroath Harbour" (c. 1940)

"Soles" puts me in mind of this:

     Fisherman and/or Fish

There was a time when I,
The river's least adept,
Eagerly leapt, leapt
To the barbed, flirtatious fly.

Thrills all along the line,
A tail thrashing -- the sport
Enthralled: but which was caught,
Which reeled the other in?

Anglers aver they angle
For love of the fish they play
(Arched spine and glazing eye,
A gasping on the shingle).

I've risen from safe pools
And gulped hook line and sinker
(Oh, the soft merciless fingers
Fumbling at my gills!)

Let last time be the last time
For me with net or gaff.
I've had more than enough
Of this too thrilling pastime.

The river's veteran, I
Shall flick my rod, my fin,
Where nothing can drag me in
Nor land me high and dry.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

C. Day Lewis is usually lumped together with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender as one of the "Thirties Poets."  I prefer the more personal lyrical poetry of his later years.  His earlier poetry has a political cast (no pun intended!) that I find boring.

But I am one of those who believes that "political poetry" is an oxymoron. Hence, for example, a phrase such as "the poetry of witness" gives me the willies.  (And makes me want to immediately immerse myself in the poetry of, say, Ernest Dowson or Philip Larkin or Emily Bronte.)  But to each their own.  We all have our own peculiar axes to grind and oxen to gore.

Richard Eurich, "Coast Scene with a Rainbow" (1952)

Spring

Spring came in a rush this week.  Overnight (or so it seemed) all of the trees came into leaf at once.  Perhaps this was merely a trick of the light.  But the coming to greenness had a suddenness about it that was startling.

From a distance, the groves of hardwoods -- though the dark limbs of winter remain visible -- are now covered in a mist of light-green:  not yet the deep-green of summer.  "Nature's first green is gold . . ."

Richard Eurich (1903-1992), "Whitby in Wartime"

The following two poems are splendid arrival-of-spring poems.  They capture wonderfully the coming out of hibernation feel of the first long days of the season.   That sense of emerging from a winter burrow, eyes squinting and blinking, out into sunlight and color.

   The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush

Before the first visitor comes the spring
Softening the sharp air of the coast
In time for the first 'invasion'.
Today the place is as it might have been,
Gentle and almost hospitable.  A girl
Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel,
Light-footed, swinging a book-bag,
And the doors that were shut all winter
Against the north wind and the sea mist
Lie open to the street, where one
By one the gulls go window-shopping
And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein
Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong
The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant
Stands at the door as if the world were young,
Watching the first yacht hoist a sail
-- An ideogram on sea-cloud -- and the light
Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;
And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

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

"An ideogram on sea-cloud" is particularly lovely.

Richard Eurich, "Queen of the Sea, 1911" (1954)

                              Kinsale

The kind of rain we knew is a thing of the past --
deep-delving, dark, deliberate you would say,
browsing on spire and bogland; but today
our sky-blue slates are steaming in the sun,
our yachts tinkling and dancing in the bay
like race-horses.  We contemplate at last
shining windows, a future forbidden to no-one.

Derek Mahon, Ibid.

The lines "We contemplate at last/shining windows, a future forbidden to no-one" bring to mind two other poems.  Mahon's "Everything Is Going To Be All Right" (which has appeared here before) closes with these lines:

The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Derek Mahon, Ibid.

Philip Larkin's "High Windows" ends as follows:

                                 . . . And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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

Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

Noise

We are surrounded by noise.  My definition of noise is catholic:  the noise of which I speak is both audible and visible.  Any electronic screen is noisy. Thus, for instance, a politician talking on a TV screen with the sound turned off is cacophonous.  And, at the risk of alienating some of you, dear readers, I'm afraid I have to say that electronic books (or whatever they're called) are visibly noisy as well.  To be consistent, I'm perfectly willing to admit that blogs are generators of noise.  (Although some of us hope that our noise is in the service of silence.)

I once read a book about the Renaissance which contained a chapter about how the day-to-day world of that era sounded.  The author included the chapter in order to provide an evocative sense of how vast the difference is between that time and our time.  Think of it.  No planes passing overhead. No cars.  Nobody talking on cell phones.  The most common recurring sound?  Church bells over the rooftops and the fields.

Mind you, I have no immediate plans to repair to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe.  Yes, I am a hypocrite.  I am a consumer and a purveyor of noise. But I prefer silence.

Richard Eurich, "Landscape with Chestnut Trees" (1968)

                  Period

It was a time when wise men
Were not silent, but stifled
By vast noise.  They took refuge
In books that were not read.

Two counsellors had the ear
Of the public.  One cried 'Buy'
Day and night, and the other,
More plausibly, 'Sell your repose.'

R. S. Thomas, H'm (1972).

Richard Eurich, "Snow over Skyreholme" (1937)

                Golden Silences

There is silence that saith, 'Ah me!'
     There is silence that nothing saith;
          One the silence of life forlorn,
     One the silence of death;
One is, and the other shall be.

One we know and have known for long,
     One we know not, but we shall know,
          All we who have ever been born;
     Even so, be it so, --
There is silence, despite a song.

Sowing day is a silent day,
     Resting night is a silent night;
          But whoso reaps the ripened corn
     Shall shout in his delight,
While silences vanish away.

Christina Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).

Richard Eurich, "From Haworth, Yorkshire" (1965)

     The quietness;
A chestnut leaf sinks
     Through the clear water.

Shohaku (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 231.

This haiku provides a fine example of how lovely a haiku can sound in Japanese.  Here is the Romanized Japanese original:

     Shizukasa wa
kuri no ha shizumu
     shimizu kana

Shizukasa means "quietness" or "silence."  Wa is a particle that makes "quietness" the subject of the sentence (sort of).  Kuri is "chestnut."  Ha is "leaf."  No is a particle which makes the phrase kuri no ha mean "chestnut leaf."  Shizumu is a verb meaning "to sink."  Shimizu means "clear water." Kana is difficult to translate.  It usually means "I wonder" when used in everyday conversation.  However, when it is used at the end of a haiku, it expresses a sense of reflection combined with wonderment (or so it seems to this amateur):  perhaps something along the lines of "Ahhh . . ."

All of this leads to the following wonderful sequence:  shizukasa . . . shizumu . . . shimizu.  This is the sort of thing that gets "lost in translation."

Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

How To Win Friends And Influence People. Or Not.

This post is not misanthropic.  Really.  Rather, it is about sociability and conviviality.

Let me be clear:  sociability and conviviality are wonderful qualities.  Who wouldn't wish to be sociable and convivial?  But there is a mistaken tendency to equate an absence of those qualities with misanthropy.  Think of the hail-fellow-well-mets and bon vivants that you have crossed paths with in your life.  Were they, without exception, lovers of humanity?  Or, think of a politician.  Any politician, without exception.  I rest my case.

Some of you may be appalled by the following poems.  But please bear in mind:  they have nothing whatsoever to do with misanthropy.  Trust me.

Richard Eurich, "The Window"

               As Much As You Can

Even if you can't shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Do not degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social relations and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton University Press 1975).

E. M. Forster met Cavafy while working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War, and they became friends.  Forster was instrumental in introducing Cavafy's poetry to the English-speaking world. Of Cavafy, he wrote:

"He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it, and, in conversation, he has sometimes devoted a sentence to this subject.  Which is better -- the world or seclusion?  Cavafy, who has tried both, can't say. But so much is certain -- either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life."

E. M. Forster, "The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy," Pharos and Pharillon (Hogarth Press 1923), pages 96-97.

William Adeney (1878-1966), "The Window"

                         Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff --
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death --
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (The Marvell Press 1955).

A confession:  many decades ago, "Wants" was the poem that made me shake my head in wonder and delight, smile, and say to myself:  "This is the poet I have been waiting for."

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window"

          Wishes of an Elderly Man
Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Walter Alexander Raleigh, Laughter from a Cloud (1923).

Charles Dawson, "Accrington from My Window" (1932)

"I Desired My Dust To Be Mingled With Yours Forever And Forever And Forever"

I knew nothing of Chinese poetry until I encountered the following poem by Li Po (701-762) in the mid-1970s, when I was in college.  I thought then, and I still think, that it is one of the loveliest poems that I have ever read.

Richard Eurich, "Docks at Goole, Early Morning" (1971)

          The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.  I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
                              As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Li Po (translated by Ezra Pound), in Ezra Pound, Cathay (1915).

Richard Eurich, "Robin Hood's Bay in Wartime" (1940)

Whatever one may think of Ezra Pound, he deserves our gratitude for having played a key role in introducing Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences.  He, along with Arthur Waley (whose work I have commented upon before), pioneered the translation of Chinese poetry into English at the beginning of the 20th century.

In general, I tend to share Philip Larkin's view of Pound's less-than-beneficent influence on Western culture.  Pound was one of the infamous "three Ps" identified by Larkin:

"This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker [Charlie], Pound or Picasso:  it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous:  it has no lasting power."

Philip Larkin, All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971 (Faber and Faber 1985), page 27.  Larkin includes the following footnote to the above passage:  "The reader will have guessed by now that I am using these pleasantly alliterative names to represent not only their rightful owners but every practitioner who might be said to have succeeded them."  Ibid.

However, I think that Pound did not go off the deep end poetically, philosophically, politically, and psychologically until he abandoned lyric poetry for The Cantos around 1917 or so.  Prior to that time he wrote some fine poems.  Further, his exploration of non-English poetry led him to Chinese poetry, which resulted in the beautiful translations contained in Cathay.  Although Pound has been criticized for not always being faithful to the original Chinese texts, he did bring an instinctive poetic sensibility to the translations, which is evident in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter."

Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

Perspective, Part Five: "A Handful Of Sand"

My previous post amounted to a rant of sorts about political beings.  Some perspective is in order, both for myself -- for being on a high horse -- and for political beings (left, right, or center) the world over.

               Recording Thoughts

Years ago I retired to rest,
did some modest building in this crinkle of the mountain.
Here in the woods, no noise, no trash;
in front of my eaves, a stream of pure water.
In the past I hoped to profit by opening books;
now I'm used to playing games in the dirt.
What is there that's not a children's pastime?
Confucius, Lao Tzu -- a handful of sand.

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Richard Eurich, "Boats at Lyme Regis" (1937)

Or, as put differently by Geoffrey Scott:

    All Our Joy Is Enough

All we make is enough
Barely to seem
A bee's din,
A beetle-scheme --
Sleepy stuff
For God to dream:
Begin.

All our joy is enough
At most to fill
A thimble cup
A little wind puff
Can shake, can spill:
Fill it up;
Be still.

All we know is enough;
Though written wide,
Small spider yet
With tangled stride
Will soon be off
The page's side:
Forget.

Harold Monro (editor), Twentieth Century Poetry (1933).

Richard Eurich, "Lyme Regis" (1930)

Enlightenment

As I have noted before, I do my best to avoid politics, both domestic and international.  Life is too short.  I believe that trying to behave decently towards others is the most politic thing that one can do with one's life. Speaking for myself, this is struggle enough for one brief stay above ground.

Moreover, there is always the problem of having to identify your place on the political spectrum.  I suppose that I am a reactionary.  A wistful, laissez-faire reactionary.

On the other hand, there are those who like to think of themselves as being "progressive" and "open-minded" and "tolerant" when it comes to political matters.  (And, for them, everything is a political matter.)  There is something of a religious fervor about this self-designation.  It does seem to make them feel better about themselves.  Self-esteem (our modern mantra) is a wondrous thing, isn't it?

It has been edifying to see some (not all, but some) of these self-designated "progressive" and "open-minded" and "tolerant" political beings openly celebrating the recent death of a well-known politician.  Yes.  Of course. Why not?  Throw a party.  After all, from time immemorial the demise of an opponent (real or imagined) has always provided a perfect occasion to reaffirm the eternal verity of one's own deeply-held beliefs.

Now.  As to the state of the souls of the celebrants . . .

Richard Eurich, "Eddistone Light" (1974)

             The Pier

Only a placid sea, and
A pier where no boat comes,
But people stand at the end
And spit into the water,
Dimpling it, and watch a dog
That chins and churns back to land.

I had come here to see
Humbug embark, deported,
Protected from the crowd.
But he has not come today.
And anyway there is no boat
To take him.  And no one cares.
So Humbug still walks our land
On stilts, is still looked up to.

W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems (1941).

Paul Nash, "The Studio, New House, Rye" (1932)

"Fisher-Folk"

The first stanza of Ernest Dowson's "In a Breton Cemetery," which comments upon the harsh life of Breton "fisher-folk," puts me in mind of a poem by Arthur Symons, Dowson's fellow Nineties poet.  Symons's best-known poems are set in the usual urban Decadent haunts: London, Paris, Venice, et cetera.  But Symons also spent a fair amount of time in out-of-the-way seaside towns in England, Wales, and Ireland, and these places find their way into a number of his poems.  (With the requisite twilit, grey-tinted melancholia and world-weariness of the Decadents still intact, of course.)

                            Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

          The Fisher's Widow

The boats go out and the boats come in
Under the wintry sky;
And the rain and foam are white in the wind,
And the white gulls cry.

She sees the sea when the wind is wild
Swept by the windy rain;
And her heart's a-weary of sea and land
As the long days wane.

She sees the torn sails fly in the foam,
Broad on the skyline grey;
And the boats go out and the boats come in,
But there's one away.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

                                        Richard Eurich, "P.Z. 576" (1974)

I like the recurrence of "the boats go out and the boats come in":  as with the movement of the tide.  The alliteration throughout the poem seems to embody the sound and the motion of the sea as well:  "wintry sky;/ . . . white in the wind,/And the white gulls cry."  And:  "She sees the sea when the wind is wild/Swept by the windy rain."  

I wonder about line 8: "As the long days wane."  The source would seem to be Tennyson's well-known lines in "Ulysses":  "The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep/Moans round with many voices."  Symons, like most Victorian poets, was brought up on Tennyson's verse.  Was this a conscious or an unconscious borrowing?  I suspect that it was done in homage to Tennyson, but that is just a guess.

                                   Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

Lists, Part Seven: As The Year Comes To A Close

As the year comes to a close, we are encouraged to come up with resolutions that will help us to straighten up and fly right in the new year.  I'm afraid that my resolutions are the usual prosaic suspects:  fewer words are better (i.e., don't add to the cacophony); simpler is better; kindness is better.  All of which will be broken within the next 15 minutes or so.

But here is one that I hope might have a longer duration:  pay closer attention.  The following poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) provides a good start.

   Green Waters

Green Waters
Blue Spray
Grayfish

Anna T
Karen B
Netta Croan

Constant Star
Daystar
Starwood

Starlit Waters
Moonlit Waters
Drift

Ian Hamilton Finlay, in The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (Edna Longley, editor) (2000).

                                 Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

   Some Preliminary Definitions

Your life:
A collection of facts;
A succession of desires;
A whirl of thoughts.

Your death:
Abiding;
Unfathomable.

The world around you:
An intractable paradise.

sip

               Richard Eurich, "Coast Scene with Rainbow" (1952-1953)

"I Clutch The Memory Still, And I Have Measured Everything With It Since"

I recently posted Seamus Heaney's "The Peninsula," which ends with the following stanza:

And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.

Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark (1969).

The idea that certain landscapes seen on certain days end up staying with us, and thereafter serve as a sort of reference point throughout our lives, is one that Derek Mahon has considered as well.  The following poem was first published in 1968.  Thus, it is not unlikely that Mahon and Heaney were separately writing along similar lines within a year or so of each other.

     Thinking of Inis Oirr in Cambridge, Mass.

A dream of limestone in sea-light
Where gulls have placed their perfect prints.
Reflection in that final sky
Shames vision into simple sight;
Into pure sense, experience.
Atlantic leagues away tonight,
Conceived beyond such innocence,
I clutch the memory still, and I
Have measured everything with it since.

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (1999).  The poem first appeared in Mahon's Night-Crossing (1968) under the title "Recalling Aran." Inis Oirr (anglicized as "Inisheer") is one of the Aran Islands.

                                Richard Eurich, "Eddystone Light" (1974)

"Let Us Go Home Across The Shires": W. S. Graham

My knowledge of the poetry of W. S. Graham (1918-1986) is limited to what I have encountered here and there in anthologies.  I recently came across the following lovely poem by him.

          The Stepping Stones

I have my yellow boots on to walk
Across the shires where I hide
Away from my true people and all
I can't put easily into my life.

So you will see I am stepping on
The stones between the runnels getting
Nowhere nowhere.  It is almost
Embarrassing to be alive alone.

Take my hand and pull me over from
The last stone on to the moss and
The three celandines.  Now my dear
Let us go home across the shires.

W. S. Graham, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1979).

I found the poem in The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (Bloodaxe Books 2000), which is edited by Edna Longley.  We owe a debt of gratitude to Longley for her work on the poetry and prose of Edward Thomas, which culminated in The Annotated Collected Poems of 2008.  Her criticism is excellent, and may be found in Poetry and Posterity, Poetry in the Wars, and other volumes.  She is the wife of Michael Longley, whose admiration for Edward Thomas is evident in his own poetry.

                         Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

"Love Without Hope": Two Poems On The Same Theme

The following poem is one of Robert Graves's best-known poems -- at any rate, it seems to pop up in anthologies quite a bit.  It shows that, when he isn't in one of his moony, mythological, exasperating "White Goddess" moods, Graves is very good indeed.

                      Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves, The Welchman's Hose (1925).

For some reason, I thought of "Love Without Hope" in connection with a poem by Joan Barton.  But now I wonder if these two poems are in fact "on the same theme."  In any event . . .

                           The Mistress

The short cut home lay through the cemetery --
A suburban shrubbery swallowing up old graves
Iron palings tipped with rusted fleur-de-lys
A sort of cottage orne at the gates,
Ridiculous and sad;

And lost in their laurel groves,
Eaten up by moss,
Stained marble, flaking stone like hatches down,
The unloved unvisited dead:

In the no-man's-land of dusk a short cut home --
The exultant sense of life a trail of fire
Drawn into that tunnel roofed with the cypress smell
And walled with silence adding year to year:

Too far, too far: always
Under the smothering boughs in airless dark
The spirit dwindled, and the fire
Flickered then failed:

Gently implacably from the shade
The indecipherable dedications spoke
'Dear wife' . . . 'devoted mother' . . .
'Beloved child' . . .

Joan Barton, The Mistress and Other Poems (1972).

                                     Richard Eurich, "Sea Wall" (1985)           

"The Cat And The Sea"

I am here to report that Life does indeed imitate Art.  I take my afternoon walks along a bluff above Puget Sound.  On most days, the Olympic Mountains (sometimes their snowy heights, sometimes only their tiered, green-blue foothills) can be seen across the water to the west.  A few days ago, I saw a black cat sitting in a field with the Sound as a backdrop.  He or she was likely out on the prowl from one of the nearby houses.  And here is the Art (set in March as well):

   The Cat and the Sea

It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.

R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper (1958).

                                   Richard Eurich, "Cornwall" (c. 1958)