"Strange How The Count Of Time Revalues Things!"

The smallest things can evoke the essence of a season.  Or of a life.  This past Sunday, a cloudless day, I was walking on the bluffs above Puget Sound, which glittered in the west.  As I walked past a wide green field in which people were flying kites and dogs were frolicking, a strong breeze buffeted my ears.  In an instant, that sound brought back the distilled essence of decades of windy Marches, the details of which I have long forgotten.

At that moment, I did not feel "happy" or "sad."  Nor did I regret the irrevocable passing of the years, years that had briefly returned, and then vanished again.  Instead, I felt an inarticulate sense of calmness and serenity.

     Everything Is Going To Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
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, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

Samuel Bough, "Shipyard at Dumbarton" (1855) 

As I think back now on that windy moment I experienced on Sunday, I am reminded of an anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein:

"When he was about 21 years of age . . . something occurred that had a lasting impact on him.  He saw a play in Vienna which was mediocre drama: but there was a scene in which a person whose life had been desperately miserable, and who thought himself about to die, suddenly felt himself to be spoken to in the words, 'Nothing can happen to you!'  No matter what occurred in the world, no harm could come to him! Wittgenstein was greatly struck by this thought (as he told me approximately forty years later)."

Norman Malcom, "A Religious Man?" in F. A. Flowers (editor), Portraits of Wittgenstein, Volume 4 (Thoemmes Press 1999), page 192.

This anecdote can be interpreted in any number of ways.  Norman Malcolm puts a religious gloss upon it.  In the case of the enigmatic and mystical Wittgenstein, who can say?  But I have a vague notion of what he was getting at.  I think.  Or at least I have inklings of the feeling of which he speaks.

Samuel Bough, "Fishing Boats Running into Port: Dysart Harbour" (1854)

These visceral, bone-deep, and crystal-clear distillations of our past are wonderful.  Inexplicable and wonderful.

                         White Cloud

One evening in the blue month of September
we lay at peace beneath an apple bough.
I took her in my arms, my gentle lover,
and held her closely like a dream come true --
while far up in the tranquil summer heaven
there was a cloud, I saw it high and clear;
it was so white and so immense above us
and, as I watched, it was no longer there.

Since then so very many different evenings
have drifted blindly past in the general flow;
perhaps the apple orchards have been flattened,
and if you ask me where the girl is now
I have to admit I really don't remember.
I can imagine what you're going to say
but even her face I truly can't recapture,
I only know I kissed it there that day.

Even the kiss I would have long forgotten
if that one cloud had not been up there too --
I see it and will always see it plainly,
so white and unexpected in the blue.
Perhaps the apple boughs are back in blossom,
maybe she holds a fourth child on her knees;
the cloud, though, hung there for a moment only
and, as I watched, it broke up in the breeze.

Bertolt Brecht (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Echo's Grove (The Gallery Press 2013).

Samuel Bough, "Dunkirk Harbour" (1863)

Brecht's meditation on the quirkiness and the majesty of how our memory works is strikingly paralleled in the following poem, which has appeared here before, but is worth revisiting.

                         Revaluation

Now I remember nothing of our love
So well as the crushed bracken and the wings
Of doves among dim branches far above --
Strange how the count of time revalues things!

Patrick MacDonogh (1902-1961), Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001).

We never know what our revenants will turn out to be, do we?  A lone white cloud, crushed bracken, the wings of doves among dim branches far above: we each have our own list.  What survives out of our thousands of moments of living is a mystery.  Which is perfectly fine.

Samuel Bough, "Edinburgh from Leith Roads" (1854)

"He Too, A Restless Sea-Bird, Roams The Wave"

My previous post contained a poem by Li Po in which he likened himself to a gull suspended between earth and sky:  "Drifting, what am I like?/A gull between earth and sky" or "Floating on the wind,/What do I resemble?/A solitary gull/Between the heavens and the earth" or "Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness? /Sky and earth and one sandy gull" (depending upon the translator).

Half a world away, and about 12 centuries earlier, the Greek poet Callimachus (c. 310 BC- c. 240 BC) expressed similar thoughts about our human lot.

Stranger, whoe'er thou art, found stranded here,
O'er thee Leontichus heaped up this grave,
Whilst at his own hard lot he dropped a tear:
He too, a restless sea-bird, roams the wave.

Callimachus (translated by Henry Wellesley), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849).

For purposes of reference, a prose translation from a 20th-century edition of The Greek Anthology may be helpful:

"Who art thou, shipwrecked stranger?  Leontichus found thee here dead on the beach, and buried thee in this tomb, weeping for his own uncertain life; for he also rests not, but travels over the sea like a gull."

Callimachus (translated by W. R. Paton), in W. R. Paton, The Greek Anthology, Volume II (Heinemann 1919).

Samuel Bough, "Edinburgh from Leith Roads" (1854)

Here is another versified translation of Callimachus's poem:

Whoe'er thou art that on the desert shores,
     Leontichus has found, he lays to rest;
While his own life of peril he deplores,
     With sweet repose, oh never, never blest:
Condemn'd to travel o'er the watry plain,
And, like the corm'rant, rove about the main.

Callimachus (translated by William Todd), in William Todd, The Hymns of Callimachus, Translated from the Greek into English Verse (1755).

I am particularly fond of "with sweet repose, oh never, never blest."  I suspect this takes some liberty with the Greek original, but it is very fine nonetheless.

Samuel Bough, "Dutch Lugger Entering the Thames"

Wellesley limits himself to four lines; Todd takes six lines; the following version expands to eight lines.

Whoe'er thou art in tempests lost
And driv'n ashore by surges tost,
Leontichus laments thy doom,
And lays thy body in this tomb;
But mourns his own unhappy state,
Expos'd, like thee, to certain fate;
Expos'd to plow the wat'ry plain,
Or, like a sea-mew, skim the main.

Callimachus (translated by H. W. Tytler), in H. W. Tytler, The Works of Callimachus, Translated into English Verse (1793).

The English versifications by Wellesley, Todd, and Tytler no doubt contain some flourishes that are at variance with the Greek original.  Still, I cannot say that this is to be regretted.  (Easy for me to say, with my absence of Greek!)  I think that all three versions are lovely, and I find it difficult to choose a favorite between them.

An aside:  in a footnote to his translation, Tytler provides some cultural background to the setting of the poem:

"As the ancients imagined no misfortune so great as remaining unburied after death, so no pious act was reckoned equal to that of bestowing the rites of sepulture on a dead body when found by accident. Because it was the common opinion that the souls of the deceased were obliged to wander from place to place, upon the banks of the river Styx, till their bodies had received the funeral rites."

Ibid, page 267.

Samuel Bough, "Fishing Boats Running Into Port: Dysart Harbour" (1854)

"Reality Is An Activity Of The Most August Imagination"

At least one critic has suggested that the word "august" in the title of the following poem is a pun, the primary sense being "majestic, stately, sublime" (OED).  I'm not so sure about that.  Wallace Stevens was not without humor, but he doesn't seem to be the type who would go in for puns.  But who knows?

In any case, it is an appropriate poem for the final day of August, when the slow turn to autumn has become evident:  that cast of yellow light and those shadows, that blue sky that has acquired a further degree of depth, that breeze with an ever-so-slight chill just beneath the surface.

Samuel Bough (1822-1878), "The Hayfield, Coming Storm"

   Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.

There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night's moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems," Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

Samuel Bough, "Edinburgh from Leith Roads" (1854)

The whole of Stevens's philosophy (poetic and otherwise) is, I think, summed up in that single sentence:  "Reality is an activity of the most august imagination."  "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" is an articulation of the same thought.  The following poem, which appears in a two-poem sequence titled "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It," is a further iteration of the idea.

     The World Is Larger in Summer

He left half a shoulder and half a head
To recognize him in after time.

These marbles lay weathering in the grass
When the summer was over, when the change

Of summer and of the sun, the life
Of summer and of the sun, were gone.

He had said that everything possessed
The power to transform itself, or else,

And what meant more, to be transformed.
He discovered the colors of the moon

In a single spruce, when, suddenly,
The tree stood dazzling in the air

And blue broke on him from the sun,
A bullioned blue, a blue abulge,

Like daylight, with time's bellishings,
And sensuous summer stood full-height.

The master of the spruce, himself,
Became transformed.  But his mastery

Left only the fragments found in the grass,
From his project, as finally magnified.

Wallace Stevens, "The Rock" (1954), Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

The seasons are paramount in Stevens's poetry.  The spruce of Stevens's summer is vastly different than his spruce of winter in "The Snow Man": "The spruces rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun."

Yes, of course:  "The world is what you make of it."  "Reality is an activity of the most august imagination."  While we are here.  As the seasons unfold around us.

Samuel Bough, "Shipyard at Dumbarton" (1855)