All Is Well With The World

This week I saw my first woolly bear caterpillars of the year: one on Monday afternoon and another this afternoon.  The traveler I encountered today was crossing a pathway frequented by walkers and bicyclists.  As with all woolly bears at this time of year, it was charmingly, touchingly intent upon its singular, solitary journey. 

Fearing that it might be crushed by an inattentive passer-by, I stayed beside it as it made its way toward the meadow beyond the pathway. (This is something we all do if the occasion arises.  I am not seeking praise.)  I watched it disappear safely into the fallen leaves and the short grass beneath a maple tree, the grass now green again with the autumn rain.

                Shinto

When sorrow lays us low

for a second we are saved

by humble windfalls

of mindfulness or memory:

the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,

that face given back to us by a dream,

the first jasmine of November,

the endless yearning of the compass,

a book we thought was lost,

the throb of a hexameter,

the slight key that opens a house to us,

the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,

the former name of a street, 

the colors of a map,

an unforeseen etymology,

the smoothness of a filed fingernail,

the date we were looking for,

the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,

a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities

travel secretly throughout the earth.

Those modest gods touch us --

touch us and move on.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Hoyt Rogers), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)

Twilight

Autumn is always the same:  each year we make the same outward and inward passage.  The quickening rise to brilliance.  The inevitable denouement (which is known from the start).  Bittersweet and pensive wistfulness.  Wistful and bittersweet pensiveness.  Pensive and wistful bittersweetness.  We know autumn well.  Or so it seems.

Autumn is never the same:  you are not who you were last autumn.  And who was the person who passed through that long-vanished autumn, x years ago?  That never-to-be-forgotten autumn?  Only a few wispy revenants remain.

            On Inishmaan
            (Isles of Aran)

In the twilight of the year,
Here, about these twilight ways,
When the grey moth night drew near,
Fluttering on a faint flying,
I would linger out the day's
Delicate and moth-grey dying.

Grey, and faint with sleep, the sea
Should enfold me, and release
Some old peace to dwell with me.
I would quiet the long crying
Of my heart with mournful peace,
The grey sea's, in its low sighing.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

Samuel Palmer, "The Weald of Kent" (c. 1833)

"The twilight of the year."  Perfect.  But, as Symons suggests, for all of the loss that attends it, autumn -- like twilight -- can be a source of peace.  Yet it is a peculiar sort of peace:  a combination of exhilaration and sadness, the two of them changing places from moment to moment or, quite often, present together at the same time.
 
                 Into the Twilight

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

I confess that I love this sort of thing.  Unashamedly, unapologetically, and without irony.  What a wrong turning the 20th century was.

Samuel Palmer, "The Harvest Moon" (c. 1833)

Yeats, Symons, and the other poets of the Nineties are in their element when it comes to twilight and autumn.  Hence, as one might expect, autumn twilight brings them to the very heart of the matter:  shadows, fleeting gleams, hopeless love, lost love, murmuring waters, mist, dreams, desires, the moon-washed sea . . .

              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, London Nights (1895).

Like Yeats, I would love to live in a "grey twilight" world.  Like Symons, I would love to "linger out the day's/Delicate and moth-grey dying."  Is this quaint daydreaming, mere escapism?  It depends upon what one thinks of the 21st century.

Samuel Palmer, "The Timber Wain" (c. 1833)

Yeats wrote the following poem on the other side of the fin de siècle.  Does it reveal him as having moved beyond the twilight world of the Nineties and its ofttimes autumnal mood?

     The Coming of Wisdom with Time

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

W. B. Yeats, The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).

Yeats is implying that a poem such as "Into the Twilight" involved some youthful "lying," some aesthetic "sway[ing]" of "leaves and flowers in the sun."  Yes, that poem, and many like it, were indeed a product of their time.

But what of "the root is one"?  I'm not at all certain that the ever-increasing rhetoric and self-dramatization of Yeats's later poetry brought him any closer to that root.  I think that, at their best, the poets of the Nineties are exactly right about "the root":  twilight and autumn (and, of course, autumn twilight) are indeed at the heart of the matter.  Withering into the truth.

Poetry and art do not "progress."  Has modern art "progressed" beyond Samuel Palmer?  Has contemporary poetry "progressed" beyond the poetry of the Nineties?

Samuel Palmer, "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)

Night Thoughts

At the beginning of winter, I tend to be drawn to Chinese and Japanese poetry.  Perhaps the spareness and the directness of the poetry match the look of the world at this time of year.  But spareness and directness do not preclude intimation and depth.

In a recent post, I mentioned that I like to let a poem sit with me for a while in order to give it time to unfold.  I think this is particularly important with respect to Chinese and Japanese poems.  They are deceptively short and "simple."  We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that they are therefore "simplistic."  Appreciating them takes patience and -- for those of us who are not Chinese or Japanese -- a willingness to let go of our discursive tendencies (as well as of our tendency to jabber).

The fact that a "simple" four-line poem by Li Po (701-762) can be translated into sometimes widely varying English versions suggests that there may be more to the poem than immediately meets the eye.  This doesn't mean that the poem needs to be "explicated" or picked apart.  It just needs to be given time to quietly sit.

          Still Night Thoughts

Moonlight in front of my bed --
I took it for frost on the ground!
I lift my eyes to watch the mountain moon,
lower them and dream of home.

Li Po (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (translator and editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

Graham Sutherland, "Lammas" (1926)

            In the Quiet Night

The floor before my bed is bright:
Moonlight -- like hoarfrost -- in my room.
I lift my head and watch the moon.
I drop my head and think of home.

Li Po (translated by Vikram Seth), in Vikram Seth, Three Chinese Poets (Faber and Faber 1992).

In a note to the poem, Seth states that "the moon in line 3 is specified as a hill moon or mountain moon."  Ibid, page 51.

Samuel Palmer, "The Bellman" (1879)

                    On a Quiet Night

I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.

Li Po (translated by Shigeyoshi Obata), in Shigeyoshi Obata, The Works of Li-Po the Chinese Poet (J. M. Dent 1923).

Graham Sutherland, "Michaelmas" (1928)

               Quiet Night Thoughts

A pool of moonlight on my bed in this late hour
like a blanket of frost on the world.

I lift my eyes to a bright mountain moon.
Remembering my home, I bow.

Li Po (translated by Sam Hamill),  in Sam Hamill, Banished Immortal: Visions of Li T'ai Po (White Pine Press 1987).

My lack of Chinese precludes me from opining as to which translation is the "best."  Of course, this raises the perennial question:  is the "best" translation the one that is the most "accurate" or the one that captures the "poetic" essence of the original?  I am not about to dive into that oft-contested battle.  I only wish to suggest that this sort of poetry deserves patience and contemplative attention, for it has a depth that belies its surface simplicity.

Samuel Palmer, "The Lonely Tower" (1879)

A Lost World, Part Three: "Grave Sweet Ancestral Faces"

The following poem by Kathleen Raine has its source in a painting by Samuel Palmer.  I'm guessing that the painting she has in mind is the one that appears immediately below.  However, any number of paintings and engravings by Palmer (a few of which have appeared here previously) evoke a similar atmosphere.  My sense of Palmer is that he knew he was witnessing the passing of a world, and that he wished to preserve what he could of it before it vanished.

Samuel Palmer

"Coming from Evening Church" (1830)

          Returning from Church

That country spire -- Samuel Palmer knew
What world they entered, who,
Kneeling in English village pew,
Were near those angels whose golden effigies looked down
From Gothic vault or hammer-beam.
Grave sweet ancestral faces
Beheld, Sunday by Sunday, a holy place
Few find, who, pausing now
In empty churches, cannot guess
At those deep simple states of grace.

Kathleen Raine, The Oracle in the Heart (1980).

The poem brings to mind Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country, both of which have a similar elegiac feeling.

Robin Tanner, "Harvest Festival" (1930)

The following poem by Derek Mahon goes well, I think, with Raine's poem.

                 Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide With Me'.

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

Nowadays, the word "nostalgia" has acquired a vaguely pejorative sense. As has the word "sentimental," with which it is often paired.  At least that's my perception.  But perhaps I'm being defensive, since I do not find anything inherently wrong with nostalgia or sentimentality, as long as we realize that the past was not "better" in all respects than the world in which we presently live.  I'm pleased that we now have electricity and plumbing. Beyond that . . .

Of course, there are those who choose to believe that we have "advanced" beyond those lost times and that human history is an unbroken narrative of "progress," as measured in scientific and political terms.  How quaint and beguiling a notion.

"Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.  Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Paragraph 132 (translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe) (Basil Blackwell 1969).

Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

            New World

New world, I see you dazzle,
Like the sun on a door-knocker
In a straight street inhabited
By people I do not know.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

Autumn Moon

Is the moon different in autumn?  I have no hard evidence, only inklings.  I am one of those who is lucky enough to have fond childhood memories of the sight and smell of piles of raked-up burning leaves.  Am I deceiving myself, or did a large yellow-orange waxing moon rise each year through the bare branches of the oaks and elms as the leaves smoldered up and down the block?  In 1964, for instance, the moon reached its first quarter on October 13 and was full on October 21.  The time frame fits.  Might this be a tantalizing clue?  Perhaps I am not imagining things.

Samuel Palmer, "Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep" (c. 1831)

                    Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night --
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

T. E. Hulme, in A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960).

As I have suggested before, wistfulness is an (the?) essential component of autumn.  Thus, "the wistful stars" (line 6) seems right.

Hulme wrote only a handful of poems (40 or so, by my count).  He is best known for the influence of his aesthetic and philosophic thoughts and writings on budding "modernists" such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  On September 28, 1917, he was killed in Flanders by the blast from an artillery shell.  He was 34.

Samuel Palmer, "Shepherds under a Full Moon"

                    The Moon

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Whom the first Adam saw.  The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament.  Look at her.  She is your mirror.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Willis Barnstone), Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Samuel Palmer, "Late Twilight"

As is often the case, Japanese and Chinese poets have a way of perfectly summing things up in a matter-of-fact and direct fashion.  But, as always, the calm surface covers deep depths.

     Down from the mountain,
The moon
     Accompanied me,
And when I opened the gate,
The moon too entered.

Okuma Kotomichi (1798-1868), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn  (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 388.

The form of the poem is a tanka (often referred to nowadays as a waka), which consists of five phrases (usually rendered into separate lines in English translations), with a syllable count per line of 5-7-5-7-7.

Samuel Palmer, "Harvest Moon" (c. 1831)

"The Trees Around Are For You, The Whole Of The Wideness Of Night Is For You"

Mary Coleridge's "In Dispraise of the Moon," which appeared in my previous post, describes the moon as follows:

She wakes her dim, uncoloured, voiceless hosts,
Ghost of the Sun, herself the sun of ghosts.

The second line put me in mind of one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens, a poem which, incidentally, is set in August ("the most peaceful month").  In it, Stevens takes a more charitable view of the moon and its ghosts.

Samuel Palmer, "The Bellman" (1879)

       A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of.  It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter.  The grass is full

And full of yourself.  The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

I have previously ventured a guess as to what the poem may be "about" or what it "means."  On the one hand, it is perhaps Stevens's sublimest, most moving articulation of his belief that what makes us human is our imagination (living in -- and transforming -- a real world of moons and rabbits and cats).  On the other hand, it may simply be a tale about a rabbit that was digging up and eating the bulbs in Stevens's flower garden.  Either version is fine by me.

Samuel Palmer

"Coming from Evening Church" (1830)

               Song

There are great things doing
In the world,
Little rabbit.
There is a damsel,
Sweeter than the sound of the willow,
Dearer than shallow water
Flowing over pebbles.
Of a Sunday,
She wears a long coat,
With twelve buttons on it.
Tell that to your mother.

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

For those interested in another view of rabbits, I recommend "The Rabbit's Advice" by Elizabeth Jennings, which I have posted previously.

Samuel Palmer, "The Lonely Tower" (1879)

"Where All The People's Brains Are Turned The Wrong Way"

I don't know exactly what it is, but there is something beguiling and lovely about the following poem.  Some may find it too sentimental.  Others may think that there is not much to it.  But I am very fond of it.  Maybe I am simply a soft touch when it comes to dogs . . .

                    Country Letter

Dear brother Robin this comes from us all
With our kind love and could Gip write and all
Though but a dog he'd have his love to spare
For still he knows and by your corner chair
The moment he comes in he lyes him down
and seems to fancy you are in the town.
This leaves us well in health thank God for that
For old acquaintance Sue has kept your hat
Which mother brushes ere she lays it bye
and every Sunday goes upstairs to cry
Jane still is yours till you come back agen
and neer so much as dances with the men
and Ned the woodman every week comes in
and asks about you kindly as our kin
and he with this and goody Thompson sends
Remembrances with those of all our friends
Father with us sends love untill he hears
and mother she has nothing but her tears
Yet wishes you like us in health the same
and longs to see a letter with your name
So loving brother don't forget to write
Old Gip lies on the hearth stone every night
Mother can't bear to turn him out of doors
and never noises now of dirty floors
Father will laugh but lets her have her way
and Gip for kindness get a double pay
So Robin write and let us quickly see
You don't forget old friends no more than we
Nor let my mother have so much to blame
To go three journeys ere your letter came.

John Clare, in Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter (editors), John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript (1920).  The spelling and punctuation are as they appear in Clare's manuscript.

So, where lies the appeal of the poem?  Perhaps this:  there is truth and beauty in the commonplace.  And when the commonplace is put into heroic couplets, even more so.

Samuel Palmer, "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)

Here is part of a letter that Clare wrote to his wife on July 19, 1848, while he was in the Northampton Asylum:

"My Dear Wife,
     I have not written to you a long while, but here I am in the land of Sodom where all the people's brains are turned the wrong way.  I was glad to see John yesterday, and should like to have gone back with him, for I am very weary of being here.  You might come and fetch me away, for I think I have been here long enough.
     I write this in a green meadow by the side of the river agen Stokes Mill, and I see three of their daughters and a son now and then.  The confusion and roar of mill dams and locks is sounding very pleasant while I write it, and it's a very beautiful evening; the meadows are greener than usual after the shower and the rivers are brimful.  I think it is about two years since I was first sent up in this Hell and French Bastille of English liberty.  Keep yourselves happy and comfortable and love one another.  By and bye I shall be with you, perhaps before you expect me."

Ibid, pages 40-41.  The spelling is as it appears in Clare's letter.

Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

The "perhaps before you expect me" in Clare's letter brings to mind his escape from an earlier asylum (Fair Mead, in High Beech, Epping Forest, Essex) in July of 1841.  During that escape, he walked back to his home in Northborough, which was 90 or so miles away.  He later wrote an account of his travels, in the form of a daily journal, which he gave to his wife.  At one point, he describes sleeping out in the open at night:  "I lay down with my head towards the north, to show myself the steering point in the morning."  Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (1865), page 283.

     Journey Out of Essex
   or, John Clare's Escape
       from the Madhouse

I am lying with my head
Over the edge of the world,
Unpicking my whereabouts
Like the asylum's name
That they stitch on the sheets.

Sick now with bad weather
Or a virus from the fens,
I dissolve in a puddle
My biographies of birds
And the names of flowers.

That they may recuperate
Alongside the stunned mouse,
The hedgehog rolled in leaves,
I am putting to bed
In this rheumatic ditch

The boughs of my harvest-home,
My wives, one on either side,
And keeping my head low as
A lark's nest, my feet toward
Helpston and the pole star.

Michael Longley, No Continuing City (1969).

Samuel Palmer, "Harvest Moon" (c. 1833)

"I Have Been A Hazel-Tree, And They Hung The Pilot Star And The Crooked Plough Among My Leaves"

There was a time (during my college years and immediately thereafter) when I was in love with the poetry of Yeats.  I'm sure that many others have had the same experience.  A few lines can capture the essence of this youthful infatuation.  "When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . ."  "A pity beyond all telling/Is hid in the heart of love . . ."  "The trees are in their autumn beauty,/The woodland paths are dry . . ."  "And the white breast of the dim sea/And all dishevelled wandering stars."  It is easy to see why I was beguiled.

But at some point it all seemed too high-pitched.  Added to that was Yeats's penchant for self-dramatization and for oracular pronouncements based upon questionable cosmologies.  And then I discovered, in turn, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Philip Larkin.  I immediately felt:  "This is more like real life."

Don't get me wrong:  in terms of sheer volume of beautiful and memorable poems, Yeats has few (or, perhaps, no) equals.  His poetry still delights me when I read it.  But, as the saying goes, the thrill is gone.  I am perfectly willing to concede that my falling out of love is due to a spiritual, emotional, and/or aesthetic failure on my part.  Or perhaps I just grew old. (After all, The White Album no longer means to me what it once did.)

All of this leads up to a lovely poem by Yeats -- a poem that goes well with Ezra Pound's "I stood still and was a tree amid the wood."

Samuel Palmer, "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)

   He Thinks of His Past Greatness when a Part
                of the Constellations of Heaven

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.
O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?

W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

Nobody does this sort of thing better than Yeats.  I confess that I can still feel the pull.

Samuel Palmer, "Harvest Moon" (c. 1833)

Christmas, Part Seven: "Out In The Dark"

Edward Thomas wrote the following poem on December 24, 1916:  his last Christmas Eve in England; his last Christmas Eve.  He was killed at the Battle of Arras less than four months later.

Given these circumstances, there is a temptation to, in retrospect, read things into the poem that are perhaps not there.  In fact, the subject and the emotional tenor of the poem are characteristic of the Edward Thomas that one comes to know from all of his poems.  His personality is evident throughout the poem.  In this regard, I refer you in particular to a phrase in the final line that is quintessential (and lovely) Thomas:  "if you love it not."  The entire poem turns upon those words.

                                    Samuel Palmer, "The Bellman" (1879)

       Out in the Dark

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, -- near,
Yet far, -- and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

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

               Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Snow Falling on a Town"

After Thomas's death, his wife Helen sent a volume of his posthumously-published poetry to Thomas Hardy.  Hardy wrote a letter to her thanking her for the gift, and praising the poetry.  Later, Hardy wrote the following poem.

 The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House

One without looks in to-night
        Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in to-night
        As we sit and think
        By the fender-brink.

We do not discern those eyes
        Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes
        Wondering, aglow,
        Fourfooted, tiptoe.

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922).

It is nice to think that Hardy may have written the poem with "Out in the Dark" in mind.  However, to my knowledge, there is no direct evidence that this is the case.

                                          Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

Two Autumns

A few years ago, I posted two translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Herbsttag" ("Autumn Day").  I have since suggested that I find Rilke's poetry to be a bit overwrought for my taste.  But I acknowledged that the fault is likely my own for not being able to match his passion.  However, when it comes to autumn, a little overwroughtness is acceptable at times.

All of which leads to another poem by Rilke, one that is perhaps less well-known than "Autumn Day."  I again offer two translations, since the different approaches of translators can be interesting.

                             Samuel Palmer, "The Weald of Kent" (c. 1833)

                          Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling from far away,
as though a distant garden died above us;
they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

And through the night the hard earth falls
farther than the stars in solitude.

We all are falling.  Here, this hand falls.
And see -- there goes another.  It's in us all.

And yet there's One whose gently holding hands
let this falling fall and never land.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by William Gass), in William Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (Knopf 1999).

                   Samuel Palmer, "Pastoral with a Horse-Chestnut Tree"

                             Fall
                        after Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling from trees
in dying gardens far above us; as if their slow
free-fall was the sky declining.

And tonight this heavy earth is falling away
from all the other stars, drawing into silence.

We are all falling now.  My hand, my heart,
stall and drift in darkness, see-sawing down.

And some still believe there is one who sifts and holds
the leaves, the lives, of all those softly falling.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robin Robertson), in The Times Literary Supplement (July 30, 1999).

There are certainly a great number of variations between Gass's version and Robertson's version.  This may be attributable to the fact that Robertson identifies his version as being "after Rilke."  When a translation is described as being "after [insert name of poet]" this is usually a signal from the translator to the reader that the translation is not "literal," and that some artistic license has been employed.  (I realize that the phrase "literal translation" is an oxymoron.)  In any case, I am in no position to render an opinion on either translation since I have no German.

However, at least the translators do agree on two things:  "the leaves are falling" and "we all are falling"/"we are all falling now."  I think that we can assent to both of those statements.

                               Samuel Palmer, "The Timber Wain" (c. 1833)

Clouds

Please bear with me as I stay with Robert Bridges's "April 1885" a moment longer.  My favorite lines of the poem are these:  "On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower/In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south."  I am reminded of the paintings and drawings by Samuel Palmer that appear in this post.  Clouds -- white clouds, bright clouds -- were an essential part of Palmer's visionary vision of the world.

                              Samuel Palmer, "The White Cloud" (c. 1832)

The lines also remind me of the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "Cut Grass"(another of those un-Larkinesque Larkin poems that often go unnoticed):

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

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

                          Samuel Palmer, "The Bright Cloud" (c. 1833-1834)

And, finally, the clouds of another visionary, Ivor Gurney:

               There Was Such Beauty

There was such beauty in the dappled valley
As hurt the sight, as stabbed the heart to tears.
The gathered loveliness of all the years
Hovered thereover, it seemed, eternally
Set for men's joy.  Town, tower, trees, river
Under a royal azure sky for ever
Up-piled with snowy towering bulks of cloud:
A herald-day of spring more wonderful
Than her true own.  Trumpets cried aloud
In sky, earth, blood; no beast, no clod so dull
But the power felt of the day, and of the giver
Was glad for life, humble at once and proud.
Kyrie Eleison, and Gloria,
Credo, Jubilate, Magnificat:
The whole world gathered strength to praise the day.

P. J. Kavanagh (editor), Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (Oxford University Press 1982).

           Samuel Palmer, "Drawing for 'The Bright Cloud'" (c. 1831-1832)

A non-cloud-related note:  I may be guilty of oversimplification, but I think that "as stabbed the heart to tears" gets close to the emotional core of a great deal of Gurney's poetry.  But I hasten to add that I am no expert on the matter.  It's just a thought.

                               Samuel Palmer, "The Bright Cloud" (c. 1834)

"Old Couple In A Bar"

Charlotte Mew's vision of the old couple in Brittany as a pair of "frozen ghosts" is a bit discomfiting.  Thus, an alternative view of love in old age is worth considering.

                       Old Couple in a Bar

They sit without speaking, looking straight ahead.
They've said it all before, they've seen it all before.
They're content.

They sit without moving: Ozymandias and Sphinx.

He says something! -- and she answers, smiling,
and taps him flirtatiously on the arm:
Daphnis and Chloe: with Edinburgh accents.

Ewen McCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).  MacCaig wrote the poem in December of 1980, at the age of 70.

                                     Samuel Palmer, "Sheep in the Shade"

MacCaig performs a neat trick by moving from the "frown, and wrinkled lip" of the "shattered visage" of Shelley's Ozymandias to the pastoral love of Daphnis and Chloe on a timeless Greek island.  A shepherdess and a shepherd ("with Edinburgh accents") sitting in a pub.  Yes, this is indeed preferable to "frozen ghosts."  (Although there is a time and a place for frozen ghosts as well.  I would not wish to be without them entirely.)

                   Samuel Palmer, "Pastoral with a Horse-Chestnut Tree"

"Reluctance" Revisited: "All The Leaves Want To Go"

The following poem by Norman MacCaig perhaps bears consideration in conjunction with Robert Frost's "Reluctance."

            Autumn

Wanting to go,
all the leaves want to go
though they have achieved
their kingly robes.

Weary of colours,
they think of black earth,
they think of
white snow.

Stealthily, delicately
as a safebreaker
they unlock themselves
from branches.

And from their royal towers
they sift silently down
to become part of
the proletariat of mud.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

When it comes to our leafy fate, I opt for "reluctance" rather than "wanting to go."  But, in the end, it is a matter of six of one, half a dozen of the other, isn't it?

                        Samuel Palmer, "The White Cloud" (c. 1833-1834)

A lonely four-mat hut --
All day no one in sight.
Alone, sitting beneath the window,
Only the continual sound of falling leaves.

Ryokan (translated by John Stevens), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryokan (1977).

                            Samuel Palmer, "The Harvest Moon" (c. 1833)

"The Salt Wind": Two Poems

Eugene Lee-Hamilton's "Soulac" (which appeared in my previous post) contains the lines:  ". . . as the salt winds sweep/The restless hillocks of ill-bladed sand."  "Salt winds" reminded me of a poem by Norman MacCaig that contains the phrase "salt wind."  MacCaig's poem, like "Soulac," is about the passing of time, but the perspective is different.  Although aging and mortality are acknowledged, there is a lovely recognition of the life that accompanies them.

        Old Poet

The alder tree
shrivelled by the salt wind
has lived so long
it has carried and sheltered
its own weight
of nests.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                          Samuel Palmer, "A Farm in Kent" (c. 1826-1832)

There is something to be said for brevity and directness (bearing in mind that they do not preclude depth and implication and suggestiveness).  The Chinese and Japanese poets come to mind.  In fact, "Old Poet" sounds as though it could have been written by, say, Wang Wei or Ryokan.  We should also remember, for example, that Edward Thomas wrote a number of fine four-line and eight-line poems.

Thom Gunn, in an excellent essay on the poetry of Thomas Hardy, makes an observation that merits thinking about in connection with brevity and directness.  Gunn notes approvingly the absence of "rhetoric" in Hardy's poetry, contrasting it with "the strain of all that rhetorical striving" in Yeats's poetry.  Gunn writes:  "Rhetoric is a form of pretence, of making something appear bigger or more important than you know it is."  Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," The Occasions of Poetry (North Point Press 1985), pages 104-105.

As one might expect, poems that are brief and direct tend to be short on rhetoric.  "Old Poet" is, I think, a wonderful example of a great deal being accomplished in a small space, without rhetoric.

                                 John Nash, "Wintry Evening, a Pond"

Lists, Part Six: "The Candle A Saint"

I confess that the following list by Frank Ormsby leaves me a bit perplexed. But, no matter:  the poem sounds lovely and, in addition, provides a good piece of advice.

                    Under the Stairs

Look in the dark alcove under the stairs:
a paintbrush steeped in turpentine, its hairs

softening for use; rat-poison in a jar;
bent spoons for prising lids; a spare fire-bar;

the shaft of a broom; a tyre; assorted nails;
a store of candles for when the light fails.

Frank Ormsby, A Store of Candles (1977).

                              Samuel Palmer, "The Lonely Tower" (1879)

Wallace Stevens was fond of candles.  For instance, consider this:  what would the night be -- in fact, what would the whole of the universe be -- without a candle?  Your own particular candle.  Keeping "a store of candles" is indeed a wise idea.

                      The Candle a Saint

Green is the night, green kindled and apparelled.
It is she that walks among astronomers.

She strides above the rabbit and the cat,
Like a noble figure, out of the sky,

Moving among the sleepers, the men,
Those that lie chanting green is the night.

Green is the night and out of madness woven,
The self-same madness of the astronomers

And of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,
The topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,

That sees above them, that sees rise up above them,
The noble figure, the essential shadow,

Moving and being, the image at its source,
The abstract, the archaic queen.  Green is the night.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

For more on "the topaz rabbit and the emerald cat," you may wish to visit Stevens's "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," where you will be introduced to a "fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk" and a rabbit "that fills the four corners of night."

                             Samuel Palmer, "The Weary Ploughman" (1858)

How To Live, Part Twelve: "If One's Heart Is Broken Twenty Times A Day . . ."

At times, the sadness of Ivor Gurney's poetry makes me wince.  His pain is so palpable that I sometimes feel like turning away.  But it is crucial to recognize that his poetry is not the sort of trivial and self-regarding "confessional" poetry that we moderns have come to know.

In particular, although there can be a note of complaint in Gurney's poetry, I rarely sense self-pity (a noisome staple of "confessional" poetry). Through all of his sorrow and his pain, Gurney behaves like an adult.  There is something to be learned from this.

                                    Daily

If one's heart is broken twenty times a day,
What easier thing than to fling the bits away,
But still one gathers fragments, and looks for wire,
Or patches it up like some old bicycle tire.

Bicycle tires fare hardly on roads, but the heart
Has an easier time than rubber, they sheathe a cart
With iron, so lumbering and slow my mind must be made,
To bother the heart and to teach things and learn it its trade.

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

"Daily" was originally published in the January, 1924, issue of The London Mercury under the title "Old Tale."  Whether "Old Tale" was Gurney's own first title, or whether it was invented by J. C. Squire, the editor of The London Mercury, I do not know.  Part of me prefers "Old Tale" over "Daily."

                                 Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

Late MacNeice Revisited: "A Hand Beckons To All The Life My Days Allow"

In a previous post, I suggested that Louis MacNeice regained his poetic form in the collections published between 1957 (his fiftieth year) and 1963 (the year of his death).  That post featured poems from Visitations, which was published in 1957.  The following poem is from Solstices, which came out in 1961.

The title of the poem has its source in the first two lines of Canto I of Dante's Inferno:  "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura."  One translation (out of hundreds):  "Midway in the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood."

                              Selva Oscura

A house can be haunted by those who were never there
If there was where they were missed.  Returning to such
Is it worse if you miss the same or another or none?
The haunting anyway is too much.
You have to leave the house to clear the air.

A life can be haunted by what it never was
If that were merely glimpsed.  Lost in the maze
That means yourself and never out of the wood
These days, though lost, will be all your days;
Life, if you leave it, must be left for good.

And yet for good can be also where I am,
Stumbling among dark tree-trunks, should I meet
One sudden shaft of light from the hidden sky
Or, finding bluebells bathe my feet,
Know that the world, though more, is also I.

Perhaps suddenly too I strike a clearing and see
Some unknown house -- or was it mine? -- but now
It welcomes whom I miss in welcoming me;
The door swings open and a hand
Beckons to all the life my days allow.

Louis MacNeice, Solstices (1961).

                               Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

How To Live, Part Three: "A Single Grain Of Rice Falling -- Into The Great Barn"

The Chinese poets of the T'ang Dynasty are a great source of wisdom.  Seamus Heaney writes, in a poem about reading the poetry of Han Shan:  ". . . enviable stuff,/Unfussy and believable."  ("Squarings XXXVII" in Seeing Things.)  The wisdom of the T'ang poets is of particular value in a time of media and political hysteria.  In recent days, I have been reminded of lines from Patrick Kavanagh's "Leave Them Alone":  "Newspaper bedlamites who raised/Each day the devil's howl."  Kavanagh concludes:

The whole hysterical passing show
The hour apotheosised
Into a cul-de-sac will go
And be not even despised.

Here is Po Chu-i (as translated by Arthur Waley) on How to Live with perspective and humility (which are both, I fear, in short supply):

          Climbing the Ling Ying Terrace and Looking North

Mounting on high I begin to realize the smallness of Man's Domain;
Gazing into distance I begin to know the vanity of the Carnal World.
I turn my head and hurry home -- back to the Court and Market,
A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn.

                 Samuel Palmer, "The Sleeping Shepherd" (c. 1831-1832)

Life Explained, Part Nine: "Entirely"

The poetry of Louis MacNeice can be very witty.  But something serious is usually lurking nearby.  Here, for instance, is an Explanation of Life that is witty, but . . .   

                           Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
   It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
   And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
   Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
   Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
   In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city's
   Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
   Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
   Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
   And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
   A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
   Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
   Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice, Plant and Phantom (1941).

                       Samuel Palmer, "The Magic Apple Tree" (1830)

"Autumn Day": Two Versions Of Rilke

In keeping with the autumnal turn that this month's posts have taken, Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Herbsttag" ("Autumn Day") came to mind.  When it comes to Rilke, I rely upon translators.  The poem has likely been translated into English dozens of times.  I am familiar with the following two versions.

                            Autumn Day

Lord:  it is time.  The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of  Rainer Maria Rilke (1982).

                           Samuel Palmer, "The Bright Cloud" (1834)

                            Autumn Day

Lord, it is time.  The summer was too long.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now,
and through the meadows let the winds throng.

Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
give them further two more summer days
to bring about perfection and to raise
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will establish none,
whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters,
wander up and down the barren paths
the parks expose when leaves are blown.

Translated by William Gass in Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999).

                         Samuel Palmer, "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)