Journey

The swallows have departed.  The tall, dry meadow grass rustles in the nearly empty air.  Now and then a sparrow suddenly flutters up from beside the path, then flies off toward the trees surrounding the field.  Ghostly white tufts of thistle seed float past, rising and falling.

                    Swallows Flown

Whence comes that small continuous silence

     Haunting the livelong day?

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

     Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

     Had vanished -- could not stay?

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

None of this comes as a surprise.  Still, every year there is a pang. Something along these lines: "Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --/in a lifetime how many springs do we see?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  A time comes when you realize with certainty that the seasons you have seen far outnumber the seasons that remain to you.  This is not a bad thing to take to heart.

                                  The Last Swallow

       The robin whistles again.  Day's arches narrow,

       Tender and quiet skies lighten the withering flowers.

       The dark of winter must come. . . . But that tiny arrow,

       Circuiting high in the blue -- the year's last swallow,

Knows where the coast of far mysterious sun-wild Africa lours.

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

Alfred Thornton (1863-1939)

"Hill Farm, Painswick, Gloucestershire"

The dragonflies seem to have vanished as well.  I remember an afternoon this past summer when I stood in the middle of a field as the swallows climbed and dived and swerved and skimmed just above the tops of the green meadow grasses.  On that day, the dragonflies were also out in the field, and they and the swallows circled around me.  Please bear with me, but, as I stood there, I couldn't help but think of this: "At the still point of the turning world."  (T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton.")  (Fortunately, it can't be helped: certain of the poems we loved when we were young never leave us, do they?  They remain within us always, waiting.)

Being but man, forbear to say

Beyond to-night what thing shall be,

And date no man's felicity.

          For know, all things

          Make briefer stay

Than dragonflies, whose slender wings

     Hover, and whip away.

Simonides (556-467 B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 234.

A few years after coming across Simonides' dragonflies, I happened upon this, and the two are now forever linked:

"October 6, 1940.  Late in the season as it is, a dragonfly has appeared and is flying around me.  Keep on flying as long as you can  -- your flying days will soon be over."

Taneda Santōka (1882-1940) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries (Columbia University Press 2003), page 102. Watson provides this note to the passage: "This is the last entry in Santōka's diary, written four days before his death."  Ibid, page 102.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "The Pant Valley, Summer" (1960)

Whenever the topic at hand is the evanescence of the beautiful particulars of the World, it seems that Edward Thomas hovers over my shoulder.  And often, as in the case of this post, he is in the company of his friend, Walter de la Mare.  I don't know what I would do without the two of them.

          How at Once

How at once should I know,

When stretched in the harvest blue

I saw the swift's black bow,

That I would not have that view

Another day

Until next May

Again it is due?

The same year after year --

But with the swift alone.

With other things I but fear

That they will be over and done

Suddenly 

And I only see

Them to know them gone.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (Edna Longley, editor) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 131.

Swifts and swallows go well together.  Antic sprites that frolic and then vanish.

Alfred Thornton, "The Upper Severn"

A thought by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "Earth never grieves!" ("Autumn in King's Hintock Park," in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).)  One can find comfort and equanimity in the thought that, once our short time in the World is over, the seasons will continue to come and go without us, with their generations of leaves and birds and clouds.

                         At Night on a Journey

Bell-sounds night after night -- falling on whose ears?

The traveler's dream: forty years pass in an instant:

Sitting up by shutters under the pines, I forget "I" --

Clouds issue from the peaks, the moon courses the heavens.

Ryūshū Shūtaku (1308-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 59.  Ury includes this note to the poem: "The second line refers to a Chinese folktale that became popular in Japan. A man who has come to the capital to seek his fortune lies down for a nap and experiences in dream all the vicissitudes of a long, glorious but ultimately tragic official career; awaking, he discovers that no more time has passed than it has taken for his supper of yellow millet to cook."  Ibid, page 59.

When I walk down an avenue of trees on a sunny day, my attention is usually focused upward, on the leaves turning in the wind, set against blue and gold.  But one afternoon this past summer my eyes were drawn to the swaying shadows of branches on the asphalt pathway before me.  A beautiful, ever-changing world of its own, replicating in its own fashion the beautiful, ever-changing world overhead.  After a few moments passed, I noticed down on the sunlit pathway the small but distinct shadow of a butterfly that was balancing out on the shadow of the far tip of one of the moving branches.  As I watched, the shadow of the butterfly flew away.  I looked up, but I saw no butterfly in the sky.

               On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), Ibid, page 33. Ury includes this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

John Aldridge, "Stubble Field, Thaxted" (1968)

Dreams

Each year I grow fonder of the robins who spend the winter here, gathering into small flocks, making their way across the meadows and through the woodlands.  I suspect this fondness is partly a product of aging.  Growing up in Minnesota, I was always on the lookout for rarer, more colorful birds: cardinals and Baltimore orioles, for instance.  Robins were generally regarded as being lovable, but commonplace, with one exception: in the dark, cold, snowbound, and legendary Minnesota winters of yesteryear we all awaited "the first robin of Spring."

Ah, what an inattentive, distracted, and somnolent life I have lived! The robins stroll and peck and chatter with one another, the flock spread out widely across a bright green field on a sunny late winter afternoon: alone, but together; each one of them catching the slanting yellow light, each one of them unlike anything else in the World. Agleam.  I have been fast asleep.

                           In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,

     Under old trees the shadows of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

     Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

     And if there is

Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing

     Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

     Over the fields.  They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000), page 71.  The poem was first published in March of 1923. Ibid, page 121.

"These dreams that take my breath away."  More on this anon.  But, in the meantime, here is something complementary to put beside "In the Fields":

"Lessons from the world around us: certain localities, certain moments, 'incline' us towards them; there seems to be the pressure of a hand, an invisible hand, urging a change of direction (of the footsteps, the gaze, or the thoughts); the hand could also be a breath, like the breath behind leaves, clouds, sailing boats.  An insinuation, in an undertone like someone whispering 'look,' 'listen,' or merely 'wait.'  But is there still the time, the patience to wait?  And is 'waiting' really the right word?"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Cherry Tree (Le Cerisier) (The Delos Press 1991), pages 13-14.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "Little Park, Lyme Regis" (1956)

At times, Charlotte Mew's poetry seems to echo the religious concerns found throughout Christina Rossetti's poetry.  However, there is a hesitation, a questioning, in Mew's poems which is seldom present in Rossetti's work (which can perhaps be described as devotional).  Thus, "In the Fields" begins with a query to God: "Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?"  Mew continues: "And if there is/Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?"  What might have seemed a straightforward hymn to Nature and Creation is transformed into something else entirely by those four lovely and remarkable lines. (By the way, "the strange heart of any everlasting thing" deserves a great deal of attention in itself.  "Strange heart"?  Wonderful.)

But I fear I am wandering too far into the much-to-be-avoided territory of explanation and explication.  It is the beguiling beauty of "these dreams that take my breath away" which captures me, and which in turn leads to this:

               Do Dreams Lie Deeper?

          His dust looks up to the changing sky

               Through daisies' eyes;

          And when a swallow flies

               Only so high

          He hears her going by

     As daisies do.  He does not die

In this brown earth where he was glad enough to lie.

          But looking up from that other bed,

     "There is something more my own," he said,

     "Than hands or feet or this restless head

          That must be buried when I am dead.

     The Trumpet may wake every other sleeper.

               Do dreams lie deeper --?

                    And what sunrise

     When these are shut shall open their little eyes?

     They are my children, they have very lovely faces --

          And how does one bury the breathless dreams?

          They are not of the earth and not of the sea,

They have no friends here but the flakes of the falling snow;

               You and I will go down two paces --

                    Where do they go?"

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, pages 73-74.  The poem was first published in The Rambling Sailor (Poetry Bookshop 1929) after Mew's death in 1928.  

I confess that I have never known quite what to make of this, other than to say that I love it.  I do not propose to pick apart its many wonders.  But please compare "Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?" with this: "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  One senses the hesitation and questioning that I mentioned above.  But, again, it is the beauty which captures me.  "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  As well as this: "Do dreams lie deeper --?" And this: "You and I will go down two paces --/Where do they go?"

Once more, some thoughts by Philippe Jaccottet may be apt, not as a direct commentary on Mew's two poems, but as a kindred exploration of the World:

"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.  But I am incapable of attributing to this unknown, to that, any of the names allotted to it in turn by history.  Can it therefore teach me no lesson -- outside the poetry in which it speaks --, offer me no directive in the way I conduct my life?

"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."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (The Delos Press/The Menard Press 1997), page 157. The italics appear in the original text.

Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)

"There is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being."  In his poetry and prose, Philippe Jaccottet is an eloquent, patient, and painstaking observer of the beautiful particulars of the World, but a key feature of his work is his continual recognition of the ineffable mystery that lies at the heart of the World.  Words will always fail us.

Dreams: absolute clarity coupled with evanescence.  Gone in an instant, never to be recalled.  "These dreams that take my breath away."  "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?"  Charlotte Mew was onto something.  But the mystery remains.

                     The Sunlit House

White through the gate it gleamed and slept

     In shuttered sunshine: the parched garden flowers,

Their fallen petals from the beds unswept,

     Like children unloved and ill-kept

               Dreamed through the hours.

Two blue hydrangeas by the blistered door, burned brown,

     Watched there and no one in the town

     Cared to go past it, night or day,

     Though why this was they wouldn't say.

But I, the stranger, knew that I must stay,

     Pace up the weed-grown paths and down,

     Till one afternoon -- there is just a doubt --

     But I fancy I heard a tiny shout --

     From an upper window a bird flew out --

               And I went my way.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, page 55.  The poem was written before July 29, 1913, and was first published in 1921.  Ibid, page 117.

Philippe Jaccottet has also written of a garden:

"I should very much like to go beyond these meagre findings, to extract from these scattered signs an entire sentence which would act as a commandment.  I cannot.  I claimed in the past to be a 'servant of the visible world.'  Yet what I do is more like the work of a gardener tending a garden and too often neglecting it: the weeds of time.

"Where are the gods of this garden?  I sometimes see my uncertainties as the snowflakes whirled by the wind, stirred, blown upwards, abandoned, or the birds half obeying the wind, half playing with it, and offering us the sight of wings which are sometimes as black as night, sometimes gleaming with the reflection of some strange light.

"(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, page 159.

Gilbert Spencer, "Wooded Landscape"

"The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.  Consider living creatures -- none lives so long as man.  The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn.  What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity!  If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream."

Kenkō (1283-1350) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 7, in Donald Keene (editor and translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Perhaps we should think of this uncertain life as a series of dreams. If we are attentive -- and, above all else, grateful -- these dreams can take our breath away.

To a mountain village

   at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

   from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

All winter long, the robins have charmingly chattered amongst themselves about practical matters (the weather, the search for food, where to spend the night) as they walked and flitted across the meadows.  But, at this time of year, by ones and twos they fly up into the bare branches of the bordering trees and begin to sing.

          On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.  Ury provides this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window" (c. 1937)

How to Live, Part Thirty-One: Repose

Reading the poetry of Robert Herrick always helps to put our day-to-day world into perspective.  For instance:

                         Nothing New

Nothing is new: we walk where others went.

There's no vice now, but has his precedent.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648), in Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume I (Oxford University Press 2013), page 132.  

The most recent editors of Hesperides suggest two possible sources for Herrick's poem.  First, Ecclesiastes I.9-10: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.  Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."  Second, Juvenal I.147-149: "Posterity will add nothing more to the ways we have, our descendants will do and desire the same things, all vice stands [always] at its high point."  (Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 627.)

Of course, the fact that there is nothing new under the sun provides cold comfort amidst the daily welter -- the horror and the folly -- of the news of the world.  But perhaps we should at least add a line to Herrick's couplet in order to provide a semblance of balance.  Something like this: "There's no virtue now, but has his precedent."

More importantly, beyond the dichotomy of vice and virtue, good and evil, there is -- at any and every moment -- something else, something further, something of another sort altogether.

                 On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Roofing a New House"

This "something else" is where words come to an end.  Yet still we persist.  This is what human beings do.

"The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous.  But this calls for unusual strength of soul.  The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness.  It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances.  The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming."

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (Viking 1975), page 306.

Bellow's passage is absolutely wonderful.  Still, he is only reaffirming what has been said before, in many times and places and languages.  And, for all his acuity, eloquence, good humor, and wisdom, we ultimately arrive at this (which, I acknowledge, raises questions about the value of what I am doing at this moment):

The more talking and thinking,

The farther from the truth.

Seng-ts'an (d. 606 A. D.) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 68.  

Seng-ts'an was the Third Patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism.  The lines appear in a work by him titled Hsin Hsin Ming.  Hsin Hsin Ming has been translated as (for example) "Faith in Mind," "On Trust in the Heart" (Arthur Waley), "Inscription on Trust in the Mind" (Burton Watson), and "Faith Mind Inscription."  (Blyth identifies the source of the lines as "Shin Jin Mei," which is the Japanese transliteration of Hsin Hsin Ming.  The Japanese transliteration of Seng-ts'an is "Sōsan.")

John Aldridge, "February Afternoon"

At some point, does one simply leave the welter behind, turn away, and keep quiet?

                    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).

For those of you, dear readers, who may not be acquainted with the poetry and prose of Walter de la Mare, I would suggest that the final two lines of "A Recluse" should not be taken as a criticism of the recluse.  I would argue that, in de la Mare's world, the lines are arguably the highest form of praise (shot through with wistfulness and loss).

John Aldridge, "The Pant Valley, Summer, 1960"

In a deceptive way, it seems so very simple.  It has all been said (and done -- rarely) before.  But Bellow is right: "this calls for unusual strength of soul."  I certainly cannot, and will never, claim to have that strength.  As I have said here in the past, if one is lucky, and in the right place at the right time, one may catch glimpses, see glimmers.  

A dreamy and elusive World it is.  Like late August and early September: afternoon tree shadows lengthening each day across a bright meadow, new umber tints in green leaves, a thin thread of coolness in the wind, a slight but unmistakable change in the angle of the sunlight.

     A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

     A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō (Kodansha 1982), page 50.

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

October

And so we find ourselves in October, that brilliant month, the heart of autumn.  Yet the leaves have long since begun to turn red and gold. Those that have already fallen have been rattling at our heels for weeks, spun along the ground by a wind that carries a chill thread. The tree shadows have been steadily lengthening across the fields since late August.  Still, October is something else altogether, isn't it? We have arrived.  As I am wont to say each year (and I beg your forbearance once again, dear readers): we are now well and truly in the season of bittersweet wistfulness, wistful bittersweetness.

I am fond of the poets of the Nineties.  Theirs is a world of twilight and mists, a melancholy world of lost or unattainable love and conflicted faith; a dream-haunted, Death-haunted world.  Have I frightened you away from them?  I hope not, for their poetry can be quite moving and lovely.  And, as one might expect, they are in their element in autumn.

             Autumn Twilight

The long September evening dies

In mist along the fields and lanes;

Only a few faint stars surprise

The lingering twilight as it wanes.

Night creeps across the darkening vale;

On the horizon tree by tree

Fades into shadowy skies as pale

As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes,

Grown pensive now with evening,

See, lingering as the twilight wanes,

Lover with lover wandering.

Arthur Symons (1865-1945), London Nights (Leonard Smithers 1895).

Too florid or too Romantic for modern tastes?  No doubt.  But who in their right mind pays any attention to modern tastes?  Of what account are Beauty and Truth in the news of the world that appears each day, or in the daily world of endless, empty distraction?  Of no account whatsoever, as far as I can tell.  This is not a misanthropic comment on humanity.  Rather, it is a description of our current "culture."  Yet, come what may, I have faith in individual human souls.  Beauty and Truth will always find their preservers.

"Autumn Twilight" has its share of the Beauty and Truth of autumn. But, if the poets of the Nineties are not your cup of tea, autumn's Beauty and Truth can be found in a sparer, more restrained (but still passionate) form as well:

Even in a person

most times indifferent 

to things around him

they waken feelings --

the first winds of autumn.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 67.  The poem is a waka.

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

Saigyō and Arthur Symons were both moved by autumn.  I have no interest in deciding which of the two poems contains a more beautiful, or a more truthful, articulation of what autumn can mean to a human being.  A fool's errand, that.  Separated by seven centuries, on opposite sides of the planet, the human truth of autumn, and its beauty, is the same.  

I am reminded of what Edward Thomas wrote about poetry and poets:

"What [poets] say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification.  If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty. But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), page 86.  

This is the finest, and most beautiful, description of poetry I have ever come across.  (A side-note: I presume that "for if what poets say is true and not feigning" is an echo, transformed, of Shakespeare's "for the truest poetry is the most feigning" from Act III, Scene iii of As You Like It.)

With that, it is time to return to autumn with Arthur Symons:

                  Autumn

There is so little wind at all,

The last leaves cling, and do not fall

From the bare branches' ends; I sit

Under a tree and gaze at it,

A slender web against the sky,

Where a small grey cloud goes by;

I feel a speechless happiness

Creep to me out of quietness.

What is it in the earth, the air,

The smell of autumn, or the rare

And half reluctant harmonies

The mist weaves out of silken skies,

What is it shuts my brain and brings

These sleepy dim awakenings,

Till I and all things seem to be

Kin and companion to a tree?

Arthur Symons, The Fool of the World and Other Poems (William Heinemann 1906).

And, once more, Saigyō:

Crickets --

as the cold of night

deepens into autumn

are you weakening? your voices

grow farther and farther away.

Saigyō (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home, page 82.  The poem is a waka.

"True and not feigning."  At any time, and in any season, human messages such as these are few and far between.

George Vicat Cole (1833-1893), "Harvest Time" (1860)

I look forward to the coming brilliance, melancholy, exhilaration, and sadness of October.  But, a few days ago, I stumbled upon this:

             On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.  

The poem is a kanshi: a poem written in Chinese characters by a Japanese poet.  Ryūsen Reisai was a Zen Buddhist monk.  Ury provides the following note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

The poem feels like a coda of sorts to the emotions evoked by October, and autumn.  Or a comment upon them.  Scraps from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" (from Four Quartets) come to mind: "at the still point of the turning world;" "neither from nor towards." Whatever the season, there it is: the World.  As ever, there is only one appropriate response: gratitude.

Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935)

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