In Passing

"Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;/how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101), "On a Boat, Awake at Night.")  One of the pleasures of reading classical Chinese lyric (shih) poetry is coming across lovely and evocative lines such as these.  This happens frequently.  Lines of this sort are not intended to be didactic, edifying, or admonitory.  Instead, they arrive quite naturally, as part and parcel of a contemplative poem that may be about, for instance, the beautiful particulars of the World in any season, parting from a friend, or simply passing through an ordinary day.

Interestingly, one sees the same thing occur in classical Japanese poetry and in the poems of The Greek Anthology.  One also notices that the classical Chinese, Japanese, and Greek lyric forms share a common feature: brevity.  The two predominant Chinese lyric forms are the chüeh-chü (four lines) and the lü-shih (eight lines).  The two basic Japanese lyric forms are the waka (five lines and 31 syllables) and the haiku (three lines and 17 syllables). The poems in The Greek Anthology generally range between two, four, six, or eight lines.  In addition, all of these short forms are governed by strict prosodic requirements.  Does this concision and craft encourage pensive reflection?

My thoughts are prompted by revisiting three poems by Shao Yung (1011-1077).  In his day, he was perhaps best known as a Confucian scholar and philosopher.  Yet he was also a fine poet.

               Arriving in Lo-yang Again

Those years, I was a green-youthed wanderer;

today I come again, a white-haired old man.

From those years to today makes one whole lifetime,

and in between, how many things have had their day and gone!

Shao Yung (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 335.

This poem, and the two poems by Shao Yung which appear below, are all in the chüeh-chü quatrain form.  This form requires rhyming of the second and fourth lines, as well as compliance with the complex rules of tonal parallelism that are an essential element of traditional Chinese lyric poetry.  Ibid, pages 8-11, 373.

Richard Wyndham (1896-1948), "Summer Landscape" (c. 1932)

But, putting aside matters of form and prosody, it is the affecting and redolent character of these poetic reflections that is so beguiling. Although classical Chinese poetry is, of course, the product of a unique ancient culture and of three interacting philosophies (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism), lines such as "Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;/how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?" and "From those years to today makes one whole lifetime,/and in between, how many things have had their day and gone!" do not move us because of their cultural origins or because they may arise out of a certain philosophical system.  Rather, they move us because they are True and Beautiful articulations of what it means to be a human being, and to live in, and to be fated to depart from, a wondrous and mysterious World -- at any time and in any place.

                 Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --

later ages know them merely as a list of names.

Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge

goes on year after year, making the same sound.

Shao Yung (translated by Burton Watson), Ibid, page 336.

Richard Wyndham, "Tickerage Mill" (c. 1939)

This past week Spring began to emerge, in a place where I have become accustomed to see it first arrive: in a group of small bushes beside a pathway that passes through a grove of tall pines.  The bushes are sheltered within the dark, quiet, and windless grove, although sunlight and rain do filter through the deep canopy of pine boughs.  One day this week, in the late afternoon yellow light that angled down through the boughs, I noticed bright green leaf buds shining at the tips of the branches of the bushes.

   Song of the Water Willow in Front of Comfortable Den

In front of Comfortable Den, by a little crooked stream,

New rushes, a delicate willow, turn green year by year.

Before my eyes a procession of good sights pass --

Who says that life is so full of wants?

Shao Yung (translated by Burton Watson), in Kōjirō Yoshikawa, An Introduction to Sung Poetry (translated and edited by Burton Watson) (Harvard University Press 1967), page 83.  Shao Yung, who "lived all his life in semi-seclusion," gave his house the name "An-lo-wo," which may be translated as "Comfortable Den."  Ibid.

Richard Wyndham, "The Medway near Tonbridge" (1936)

How To Live, Part Twenty-Nine: Some Things Never Change

I am easy to please.  Each summer, I take delight in watching the tree tunnels I love further deepen, further interlace, as the boughs extend themselves outwards and upwards.  I notice the empty spaces that remain high up in the green and restless canopy, the sky that remains open, and I wonder how many years will pass before new bridges of leaves arch overhead.  Will I be here to see it happen?  Perhaps not. After all, I am merely an onlooker, passing through.  This is neither a lament nor a complaint.  To be aware that one is part of an ever-changing yet timeless World is a source of serenity.

                      The Truisms

His father gave him a box of truisms

Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;

The truisms remained on the mantelpiece

As wooden as the playbox they had been packed in

Or that other his father skulked inside.

Then he left home, left the truisms behind him

Still on the mantelpiece, met love, met war,

Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal,

Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house

He could not remember seeing before.

And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from

And something told him the way to behave.

He raised his hand and blessed his home;

The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders

And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.

Louis MacNeice, Solstices (Faber and Faber 1961).

As is often the case with MacNeice, there is an undertone of ironic knowingness present in "The Truisms," but I am willing to take the poem at face value.  As I have noted here before, I am quite content to live my life in accordance with certain truisms because, well, they are true.

Joshua Anderson Hague (1850-1916), "Landscape in North Wales"

Given the clamor of catastrophe and crisis we human beings are so fond of (2020 is no different than any other year in the history of humanity in this regard), an awareness of the World's continuity is not a bad thing.  It's not as if the World hasn't seen it all before.  Each of us has seen it all before as well, unless we haven't been awake.  

"Whoever lives two or three generations feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times.  As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished."

Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by E. F. J. Payne), "Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World," in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 2 (1851; Oxford University Press 1974), page 299.

            Crofter

Last thing at night

he steps outside to breathe

the smell of winter.

The stars, so shy in summer,

glare down

from a huge emptiness.

In a huge silence he listens

for small sounds.  His eyes

are filled with friendliness.

What's history to him?

He's an emblem of it

in its pure state.

And proves it.  He goes inside.

The door closes and the light

dies in the window.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2005).

Joshua Anderson Hague, "Late Autumn"

In January of 2019, I wrote here about the falling of a nearby big-leaf maple in a winter storm.  Yesterday afternoon, I walked past the space it once occupied.  I still feel the loss.  But its companions remain, and I know that in time the emptiness of the air will be filled.

                 Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --

later ages know them merely as a list of names.

Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge

goes on year after year,  making the same sound.

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 336.

Joshua Anderson Hague, "Haymaking"

Time

Please accept my apologies for the silence, dear readers:  I have been on a two-week road trip, from which I have now returned.  I can report that all is well in this beautiful country:  spacious skies, purple mountain majesties, fruited plains, an ocean white with foam.  And, on top of all that, how can one not love a country that has seen fit to establish a James Dean Memorial Junction?  (Where California 46, curving away toward the live oak-dotted hills, the sea, and the sunset, meets California 41.)

Purely by happenstance, my trip included a visit to the university from which I graduated 40 years ago this year:  a campus located on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, in Santa Barbara.  I had no madeleine moment.  However, I did idly muse:  Which is better (or worse):  to say that 40 years have passed or to say that four decades have passed?  

                    Arriving in Lo-yang Again

Those years, I was a green-youthed wanderer;
today I come again, a white-haired old man.
From those years to today makes one whole lifetime,
and in between, how many things have had their day and gone!

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 335.

Robert Fowler (1853-1926), "Knaresborough"

Four decades, forty years:  six of one, half a dozen of the other.  Time is what it is.  But the mere fact of that much distance is enough to give one pause.  Yet there are no grounds for regret or lamentation. After all, I am here to see that distance:  something that ought not to be taken for granted.  Gratitude is the appropriate response.

Still, passing through that changed yet unchanged place, I did wonder about a now-vanished young wight, all melancholy and expectation.  What has become of him?

Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;
For he is like to something I remember
A great while since, a long, long time ago.

John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, Act IV, Scene 3 (1628), in Iris Origo, The Vagabond Path (Chatto & Windus 1972), page 239.

William MacGeorge (1861-1931), "A Summer Day on the Solway"

When I arrived home yesterday, I could smell the lilacs (white and pale purple) in the garden as I got out of the car.  On my walk this afternoon, I discovered that, while I was away, spring arrived here in earnest.  "Yet still the unresting castles thresh/In fullgrown thickness every May./Last year is dead, they seem to say,/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."  Forty years, four decades.  Gone.  Ever-present.

             Ah! Sun-flower

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), in David Erdman (editor), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (University of California Press 1982).

Fred Stead (1863-1940), "River at Bingley, Yorkshire"

Detachment

This week, I returned to the following poem:

            From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

What led me back to the poem?  I suspect that I needed relief from the overwrought reaction (in some quarters) to the presidential election.  There are those who believe the End of the World is at hand.  Of course, if the other candidate had been elected, there would have been an overwrought reaction (in some quarters) from those on the other side, some of whom would have believed the End of the World was at hand.

I can see why the elderly gentleman in Coleridge's poem beckoned to me.

Alexander Sillars Burns (1911-1987), "Afternoon, Wester Ross"

Alternatively, I may have been subconsciously called back to the poem by this, which I had come across a day or so earlier:

"Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality:  only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.  Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed.  For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru) (Ignatius Press 2009), pages 46-47.  The text of the book is based upon a lecture delivered by Pieper in Bonn in 1947.

Can one maintain "a receptive attitude of mind" if one's life is bound up with politics?  I have my doubts.  The reprehensible stereotyping engaged in, and the bigotry and sense of superiority displayed by, those on the losing end of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election demonstrate how a preoccupation with politics can destroy one's sense of fellow feeling and humanity.  But I will leave that topic alone, having visited it in my previous post.

As for silence:  the culture of politics is nothing if not noisy, isn't it?  "Those who do not remain silent do not hear."  Yes, exactly.

     How Sordid Is This Crowded Life

How sordid is this crowded life, its spite
And envy, the unkindness brought to light:
It makes me think of those great modest hearts
That spend their quiet lives in lonely parts,
In deserts, hills and woods; and pass away
Judged by a few, or none, from day to day.
And O that I were free enough to dwell
In their great spaces for a while; until
The dream-like life of such a solitude
Has forced my tongue to cry 'Hallo!' aloud --
To make an echo from the silence give
My voice back with the knowledge that I live.

W. H. Davies, The Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (Jonathan Cape 1942).

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

Yesterday evening I was walking south beside a meadow as the sun neared the ridgeline of the Olympic Mountains.  In a few minutes it would vanish.  The sky overhead and to the west was clear, but grey-purple clouds, shot through with orange and pink, lay along the horizons to the south, east, and north.  The deep-blue waters of Puget Sound were darkening.

I noticed a wordless calling sound -- a bleat of sorts -- coming from behind me, up in the sky.  It grew louder.  I soon realized that the sound was the honking of a flock of geese.  I stopped and waited for them.  They passed directly overhead -- three or four dozen Canadian geese in a ragged, shifting V-formation, all of them honking.

I have been hearing that sound for more than half a century.  Autumn is not autumn without it.  Continuity and certainty within ceaseless change.

                    Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --
later ages know them merely as a list of names.
Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge
goes on year after year, making the same sound.

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 336.

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973), "Drambuie, Wester Ross"

I will always prefer wild geese to politicians ("a list of names").  But I shan't attempt to impose this preference on others.  For me, politics is the destroyer of repose, reflection, and tranquility.  I understand that others may feel differently.  So it goes in this "vale of Soul-making."

"[T]here is also a certain serenity in leisure.  That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru), page 47.

I am not fond of the assumption of certainty that accompanies political discourse.  So many utopian master plans!  All of them based upon classes, categories, and caricatures.  All of them chimerical.  All of them leaving individual human beings and individual human souls out of account.

                      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).

With respect to the final two lines of the poem, it is important to remember that de la Mare considered childhood to be a charmed and magical time, the loss of which is to be regretted.

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), "Harvesting in Galloway"

Evanescence

I cannot claim to have gained any wisdom during my time on earth.  The most I have done is to recognize (vaguely) the truth of certain truisms.  And even that recognition is fitful, here and then gone.

There is one thing I do know:  "All is vanity."  This is as good a starting point as any on the journey to here-today-gone-tomorrow wisdom.  The world needs fewer people who are full of themselves.  A utopian dream, of course.  For starters, we will never be free of heads of state and politicians, will we?  Moreover, I suppose that Twitter and Facebook are here to stay. (As are blogs!)  And please don't get me started on what are called, unironically, "smartphones."  "Selfie."  End of discussion.

Although it has appeared here before, the following statement (epigram? prose poem?) by Czeslaw Milosz is always worth revisiting.

                                                 Learning

To believe you are magnificent.  And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.  Enough labor for one human life.

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998).

Albert Goodwin (1845-1932), "Lincoln" (1902)

To live in a way that embodies this sort of realization is indeed the work of a lifetime, never finished.  One would think that autumn would be enough to convince us of our evanescence.  Or rivers.

                  Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --
later ages know them merely as a list of names.
Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge
goes on year after year, making the same sound.

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

Albert Goodwin, "View on the Canal, Dort" (1882)

It comes in fits and starts, but, as one ages, it is possible to develop the habit of letting things go.  We carry with us a certain amount of dross that has accumulated over the years.  A great deal of that dross is bound up with vanity.  Mind you, I harbor no illusions that I will ever be free of vanity. Can we attain the repose of rivers?  Unlikely.  But weigh that attempt, quixotic though it may seem, against accepting the wares that the Modern World has to offer.

          The River

Stir not, whisper not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river,

Whose whispering willows,
Whose murmuring reeds
Make silence more still
Than the thought it breeds,

Until thought drops down
From the motionless mind
Like a quiet brown leaf
Without any wind;

It falls on the river
And floats with its flowing,
Unhurrying still
Past caring, past knowing.

Ask not, answer not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river.

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

Albert Goodwin, "The Friars, Aylesford, Maidstone"

Will an ongoing meditation upon rivers cure us of vanity?  No.  But rivers are like the congregation of a dozen or so robins that I saw this afternoon, chattering and bobbing on a path that runs beside a meadow as the sun descended.  A gentle -- but insistent -- reminder that we need to get outside of ourselves.

                         River

Remember for me the river,
Flowing wide and cold, from beyond Sugar Island,
Still and smooth, breathing sweetness
Into still air, moving under its surface
With all the power of creation.

Remember for me the scent of sweet-grass
In Ojibway baskets,
Of meadow turf, alive with insects.

Remember for me
Who will not be able to remember.
Remember the river.

Janet Lewis, in R. L. Barth (editor), The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (Swallow Press 2000).

Albert Goodwin, "Durham Cathedral" (1910)