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)

A Blade of Grass

I recently read the following haiku by Bashō:

a dragonfly

vainly trying to settle

onto a blade of grass

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 297.

Ueda's book consists of a selection of Bashō's haiku, each followed by excerpts of commentaries on the poem offered by Japanese critics over the years.  Of this haiku, one critic writes: "This looks like a simple descriptive poem, and yet it makes us wonder whether Bashō's eyes were not observing something important in the very heart of nature."  (Ibid, page 297, quoting Momota Sōji (1893-1955).)

True, but a bit of an understatement, R. H. Blyth might say, for he wrote this of Bashō (in comparing him to Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Goethe, and Cervantes, in that order):  "In what point is Bashō equal or superior to these great men?  In his touching the very nerve of life, his unerring knowledge of those moments in time which, put together, make up our real, our eternal life.  He is awake in the world that for almost all men exists as a world of dreams."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page iii.) (Blyth's observation brings Wordsworth's "spots of time" to mind.) Many of you may be skeptical of Blyth's claim.  After all, he devoted much of his life to writing about haiku, and thus was not a disinterested party.  Knowing Blyth, he was likely also exaggerating for effect.  Still, I confess I am not unsympathetic.

But let's leave all that aside.  It is simply a matter of a blade of grass, of a dragonfly.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"Bluebells, Cornflowers, and Rhododendrons" (1945)

About a week later, having decided to travel to the world of W. B. Yeats, I came upon this:

   Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors

What they undertook to do

They brought to pass;

All things hang like a drop of dew

Upon a blade of grass.

W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan 1933).

This poem has its source in Yeats' esoteric philosophical explorations. A daunting world in which to venture.  It tends to leave me befuddled.  However, I have been fond of Yeats from an impressionable age, and I will never cease returning to him.

But, there it was again, out of the blue: "a blade of grass."  Poetry is a wonderful thing, isn't it?  You never know what will happen the next time you open a book of poems.  A week earlier, I had been marveling at a dragonfly and a blade of grass.  Now, suddenly, serendipitously (I hadn't gone looking for "Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors"), there it was: "a blade of grass."

Stanley Spencer, "Peonies" (1939)

Yet, there was one more step to take.  A blade of grass.  A dragonfly. Something was nagging at me.  In poetry, one thing always leads to another.  Ah, yes, a dragonfly:

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 (c. 556-c. 468 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.

One of the joys of poetry is the way in which a poem you have read remains inside of you, waiting patiently.  A poem from 17th century Japan.  A poem written by an Irish poet in the 20th century.  A poem born in Greece 2,500 years ago.

It is all a matter of a blade of grass.  Or of a dragonfly.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Five: Halcyon, Dragonfly, Grasshopper, Cricket, Cicada

It is July, and the sweet peas -- purple-pink, pink-purple, and, now and then, white -- are in bloom on both sides of a path I walk along between two large meadows, one sloping down to Puget Sound, the other bounded on its eastern edge by a long row of big-leaf maples. In the afternoon, the swallows dive and curve and rise across the path as they fly quickly back and forth over the meadows, feeding.  On a day with wind, the dry grass rustles and whispers.  Bird sounds can be heard overhead, and from all corners of the World.

The past few weeks, I have returned to ancient Greek poetry.  (Alas, in translation, I'm afraid.)  As I walk through the meadows, I am apt to fancy that I have returned to that golden land and time, surrounded by small and beneficent gods inhabiting the fields and trees and sky.  Am I in Arcadia?  Ionia?  Attica?  Somewhere in the Cyclades?

Ah voices sweet as honey, ah maiden songs divine,
Faint grow my limbs and fail me!  Would the halcyon's lot were mine!
Wherever the white foam flowers, with my fellow-birds to fly,
Sea-purple bird of the springtime, blithe heart where no cares lie.

Alcman (7th century B.C.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), page 235.

Oh, to abide in Alcman's world of halcyons and flowering white foam! The prevailing modern world-view (a spawn of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment") is reductive and soulless.  Whether one accepts this state of affairs is a matter of choice.  Fortunately, there are alternative paths on which to make one's way through "the vale of Soul-making":

"The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world, the more we may be inclined to regret that he should ever have passed beyond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world about us."

Walter Pater, from "Winckelmann," in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), pages 235-236.

Another translation of Alcman's four lines:

No more, O maiden voices, sweet as honey, soft as love is,
No more my limbs sustain me. -- A halcyon on the wing
Flying o'er the foam-flowers, in the halcyon coveys,
Would I were, and knew not care, the sea-blue bird of spring!

Alcman (translated by H. T. Wade-Gery), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 190.

William York MacGregor (1855-1923), "Summer Landscape"

Pater is exactly right:  one of the many evils of the modern world-view is this "contend[ing] for a perfection that . . . discredits the actual world about us."  I couple "perfection" with the modern gospels of Progress and Science.  No room for halcyons, white foam-flowers, and small and kindly gods in that world.  Pantheism is out of the question, beyond the pale.  Wordsworth continually reminds us of what has been lost.  One small instance, in a fragment of verse:

Of unknown modes of being which on earth,
Or in the heavens, or in the heavens and earth
Exist by mighty combinations, bound
Together by a link, and with a soul
Which makes all one.

William Wordsworth, fragment from the Alfoxden Notebook, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume Five (Oxford University Press 1949), pages 340-341.

[A side-note:  one might be surprised, but Pater was actually quite sympathetic with Wordsworth's poetry, and with the view of the World that is embodied in it.  I recommend reading his essay "Wordsworth" in Appreciations (Macmillan 1889).  Among many other fine things, he says this:  "Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest."  Appreciations, page 61.]

But it is time to return to Greece:

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 The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, page 234.

Consider Simonides' poem in the context of another passage from Pater:

"Modern science explains the changes of the natural world by the hypothesis of certain unconscious forces; and the sum of these forces, in their combined action, constitutes the scientific conception of nature.  But, side by side with the growth of this more mechanical conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic, philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental starting-point of which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at work; as if just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there were really circulating some spirit of life, akin to that which makes its energies felt within ourselves"

Walter Pater, from "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone," in Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (Macmillan 1895), page 96.

Pater qualifies his statement:  "as if just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there were really circulating some spirit of life."  (He had been accused of being a pagan based upon the controversial "Conclusion" of The Renaissance.  Perhaps he did not want to fight that battle again.)  Still, the dichotomy he posits is clear: a "mechanical conception" of the World as opposed to "an older and more spiritual" view of the World, a World in which "some spirit of life" circulates.  Again, the choice is ours.

Democritus slept soundly, thanks to me
     Of silver sounds the wingèd minister,
And thanks to him this little grave you see,
     Nigh to Oropus, holds his grasshopper.

Phaennus (3rd century B.C.) (translated by Hugh Macnaghten), in Hugh Macnaghten, Little Masterpieces from the Anthology (Gowans & Gray 1924), page 113.

William York MacGregor, "Oban Bay"

But who am I to judge?  I have never been at home in the modern world, and never will be.  Not surprisingly, this feeling intensifies with age.  One reaches a point where one becomes comfortable with the idea of departing.  In the meantime, I am, and will be, quite content with ancient Greek poets, Walter Pater, and William Wordsworth.  And with all those others who you see pass through here.

Though little be the tombstone, O passer-by, above me,
     Though it lies thus lowly in the dust before your feet,
Give honour to Philaenis, good friend, that she did love me,
     Her once wild thistle-climber, her clamberer in the wheat,
Her cricket, her sweet songster, whom for two years she cherished,
     Loving the sleepy music of my whirring wing.
She has not forgot me:  she gave me, when I perished,
     This tiny tomb in honour of so versatile a thing.

Leonidas of Tarentum (3rd century B.C.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman, page 316.

Another passage from Pater, which is a continuation of the passage quoted immediately above:

"Starting with a hundred instincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual, or Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the unity of a living spirit or person, revealing itself in various degrees to the kindred spirit of the observer, than as a system of mechanical forces.  Such a philosophy is a systematised form of that sort of poetry (we may study it, for instance, either in Shelley or in Wordsworth), which also has its fancies of a spirit of the earth, or of the sky, -- a personal intelligence abiding in them, the existence of which is assumed in every suggestion such poetry makes to us of a sympathy between the ways and aspects of outward nature and the moods of men."

Walter Pater, from "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone," Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, pages 96-97.

Halcyons, dragonflies, grasshoppers, crickets.  And cicadas as well:

        To the Cicada
   From the Greek of an 
     Anacreontic writer

We bless you, cicada,
When out of the tree-tops
Having sipped of the dew
Like a king you are singing;
And indeed you are king of
These meadows around us,
And the woodland's all yours.
Man's dear little neighbour,
And midsummer's envoy,
The Muses all love you,
And Apollo himself does --
He gave you your music.
Age cannot wither you,
Tiny philosopher,
Earth-child, musician;
The world, flesh and devil
Accost you so little,
That you might be a god.

Edmund Blunden, Halfway House (Cobden-Sanderson 1932).

William York MacGregor, "Nethy Bridge"

Gifts

The ways in which beauty places itself in our path are manifold and mysterious.  Early this morning, out of the blue, I received this gift:

"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, For All My Walking:  Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries (Columbia University Press 2003), page 102.

The passage is lovely in itself, but it moves into a deeper dimension when one considers the life of Taneda Santōka.  When he was eleven years old, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in a well.  Santōka watched as her body was pulled from the well.  He attended Waseda University in Tokyo for a year, but was forced to leave due to a drinking problem, which persisted throughout his life. He married, but the marriage ended in divorce.  He entered into a business venture (a sake brewery) with his father, but the business failed.  After he unsuccessfully attempted to commit suicide by standing in front of a train, he was taken in by the head priest of a Zen Buddhist temple.  At the age of 43, he was ordained as a Zen priest.

After serving briefly as the caretaker of a temple, he became a mendicant monk, spending much of the remainder of his life on constant walking journeys throughout Japan, in all seasons -- walking and walking, forever walking.  He survived by begging and by sleeping in cheap inns or, often, out in the open air.  But he maintained a loyal group of friends who came to his aid when times were most difficult.  And, through it all, he wrote haiku -- lovely and moving haiku.  He died in his sleep at the age of 58.

Burton Watson appends the following note to the passage by Santōka quoted above:  "This is the last entry in Santōka's diary, written four days before his death."

Ian Grant (1904-1993), "Cheshire Mill" (1939)

As is usually the case, the arrival of beauty betokens an opening, not a closing.  Thus, Santōka's dragonfly brought this to mind:

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 (556-468 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.

I apologize for repeating myself:  Simonides' poem appeared here last month.  But this is how beauty works:  one thing leads to another.  A dragonfly.  An ancient Greek poet born on the island of Ceos in the Aegean Sea.  A Japanese haiku poet-monk of the 20th century.  And here we are: all of us together at the turning of the year.

Malcolm Midwood Milne (1887-1954), "Barrow Hill" (1939)

As midnight approaches on New Year's Eve in Japan, the bells in Buddhist temples are sounded 108 times:  once for each of the sins and desires that we should seek to rid ourselves of.  At this time each year I am reminded of a haiku:

     I intended
Never to grow old, --
     But the temple bell sounds.

Jokun (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 202.

So it is in this dragonfly World of ours, a World in which each year, each moment, is a gift.

Happy New Year, dear readers.

Dudley Holland (1915-1956), "Winter Morning" (1945)

Poetry

Is the primary office of poetry to remind us of our mortality?  I sometimes think so.  My thought is prompted by my continued meanderings through ancient Greek verse, where one comes across lines such as these:

Alas and alas, when the mallow dead in the garden lies,
Or the pale-green parsley withers, or the lush-curled anise dies,
Yet they rise anew and quicken when spring returns again.
But we the strong, the mighty, the wise, we sons of men,
When we die and the earth is o'er us, ah then how long, how deep,
Unhearing, unawaking, night without end we sleep!

Anonymous (2nd century B. C.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), page 332.  The lines are from "Lament for Bion."  The poem was formerly attributed to Moschus.  However, after it was discovered that Moschus antedated Bion, the poem is now attributed to an unknown poet who may have been a follower of Bion.

Here is an alternative translation of the same lines:

Alas, when mallow in the garden dies,
Or parsley green or crinkled anise dear,
They live again, they rise another year:
But we, the tall, the mighty and the wise,
Once dead, beneath the hollow ground must keep
A long dumb changeless unawakening sleep.

Anonymous (translated by Gilbert Murray), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 754.  Murray's comma free final line is wonderful.

The passage from "Lament for Bion," though unsparing in its message, arguably has a reassuring aspect to it:  the mallow, the parsley, and the anise will return to blossom again; hence, our fate unfolds within a larger context, which we ought to bear in mind.  As I have noted here in the past, the thought that the seasons will continue to come and go after we have returned to the dust can be a source of equanimity and serenity (or so it is for me, at least).

The epigrams on our mortality in The Greek Anthology tend, on the whole, to withhold consolation.  For instance:

Life is the fool of hope, till one last morning
Sweeps all our schemes away, without a warning.

Julius Polyaenus (1st century A. D.) (translated by Hugh Macnaghten), in Hugh Macnaghten, Little Masterpieces from The Anthology (Gowans & Gray 1924), page 19.

Thomas Mostyn (1864-1930), "Memory's Garden" (1900)

On the other hand, I am perfectly willing to consider an alternative: Is the primary office of poetry to remind us of the joy of living an evanescent life?  Joy.  Not mere happiness (a misused and delusive chimera).  One can be miserable, even in despair, and still experience joy.  "The word 'joy.'  Take the time to think about this word.  I'm surprised that it suddenly comes back to me."  Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry (May of 1979), in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), page 336.

Cool waters tumble, singing as they go
Through appled boughs.  Softly the leaves are dancing.
Down streams a slumber on the drowsy flow,
               My soul entrancing.

Sappho (7th century B. C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, page 210.

Most of Sappho's poetry comes to us in fragments.  Thus, the lines translated by T. F. Higham are all that remain of a poem that has otherwise vanished.  But there is something both apt and affecting in the joy embodied in the beautiful particulars of the fragments.  Such small beauties are what we are most likely to encounter in our day-to-day, quotidian, commonplace life.  (Mind you, as I have noted here in the past, I never use the words "quotidian" or "commonplace" in a pejorative sense.)  "We live in a constellation/Of patches and of pitches."  (Wallace Stevens, "July Mountain.")  Fragmentary, momentary beauty.

Sit all beneath fair leaves of spreading bay,
     And draw sweet water from a timely spring,
And let your breathless limbs, this summer day,
     Rest, in the west wind's airy buffeting.

Anyte (4th century B. C.) (translated by Robert Furness), in Robert Furness, Translations from The Greek Anthology (Jonathan Cape 1931), page 38.

Just as a thread of mortality runs through ancient Greek verse, so does a thread of joy.  An evanescent joy, yes.  Yet a timeless joy as well.  A joy shot through with eternity.

I fear I am wandering too far afield, but consider this:  "If thou shouldst live three thousand years, or as many myriads, yet remember this, that no man loses any other life than that he now lives; and that he now lives no other life than what he is parting with, every instant."  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II, Section 14, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).  Or, looked at from a different angle:  "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.4311, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by C. K. Ogden).

But let us return to the beautiful particulars, and to joy:

                                   Ah, what joy
Can out-joy this -- to reach the land -- and then,
Safe-lodged, with happy drowsing sense to hear
The raindrops pattering on the roof outside!

Sophocles (5th century B. C.) (translated by Walter Headlam), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, page 383.  The lines are from Tympanistae, a play by Sophocles that has been lost, save for a few fragments. Headlam's translation of the lines first appeared in A. C. Pearson (editor), The Fragments of Sophocles, Volume II (Cambridge University Press 1917), page 264.

David Baxter (1876-1954), "Woodland Scene"

In my part of the world, nearly all the leaves have fallen.  Bare branches clack and creak in the wind.  The sun sets earlier and earlier.  Out on a late afternoon walk this week, I felt that the World was a bit diminished.  But, as I emerged out of a dark wood, I suddenly saw the white moon, waxing gibbous, in the pale blue eastern sky.

The thread of mortality and the thread of joy are intertwined.  And wondrously so.  In life and in poetry.

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 (556-468 B. C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, page 234.

Come to think of it, a third alternative now occurs to me:  Is the primary office of poetry to remind us to live each day of our life with gratitude?

Mary Jane Girardot (1863-1933), "Evening Glow" (c. 1900)

A Leaf

Spring has peaked.  Summer is near.  Yet earlier this week I found myself pondering the falling of the leaves.  My out-of-season thoughts were prompted by having come across this:

                    Imitation

Far from your own little bough,
Poor little frail little leaf,
Where are you going? -- The wind
Has plucked me from the beech where I was born.
It rises once more, and bears me
In the air from the wood to the fields,
And from the valley up into the hills.
I am a wanderer
For ever:  that is all that I can say.
I go where everything goes,
I go where by nature's law
Wanders the leaf of the rose,
Wanders the leaf of the bay.

Giacomo Leopardi (translated by J. G. Nichols), in Giacomo Leopardi, The Canti, With a Selection of His Prose (Carcanet 1994).  The poem is titled "Imitation" because it is a translation by Leopardi from a poem in French ("La Feuille": "The Leaf") by Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1766-1834).

I consider Leopardi to be the King of Pessimism.  To wit:

"What is life?  The journey of a crippled and sick man walking with a heavy load on his back up steep mountains and through wild, rugged, arduous places, in snow, ice, rain, wind, burning sun, for many days without ever resting night and day to end at a precipice or ditch, in which inevitably he falls."

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino), 4162-4163 (January 17, 1826) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013), page 1809.

Yes, I know:  Whew!  And, mind you, this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.  Leopardi, like Schopenhauer (who, not surprisingly, greatly admired him), ultimately came to the conclusion that, given our fate, we would be better off if we had never been born.  Again:  Whew!  

In light of all this, the life of the ever-wandering leaf in "Imitation" seems like a carefree stroll in the park, doesn't it?

David Bates, "A Beech Wood, Malvern, Worcestershire" (1889)

Leopardi's poem brought to mind one of my favorite poems by Derek Mahon (or by anybody, for that matter), which has appeared here before (in autumn).

                    Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfilment.

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

As I have suggested in the past, one thing leads to another when it comes to poetry.  Perhaps it was Leopardi's line "I go where everything goes" that led me on to "Leaves," with its "dead leaves/On their way to the river."  In any case, I was now sunk deep in autumn, while outside all was green and blue and bright.

John Gardiner Crawford

"Little Burn, Bonskeid" (1980)

Six poems later in Leopardi's The Canti, I found this autumnal reverie:

     Fragment: From the Greek of Simonides

All human things last only a short time;
The old blind man of Chios
Spoke but the simple truth:
As are the lives of leaves,
So are the lives of men.
But few there are who take
Those words to heart; while everyone receives
Unruly hope, the child
Of youth, to live with him.
As long as our first age
Is fresh and blooming still,
The vacant headstrong soul
Will nourish many pleasant dreams, all vain,
Careless of death and age; the healthy man
Has no regard for illness or disease.
But he must be a fool
Who cannot see how rapidly youth flies,
How close the cradle lies
To the funereal fire.
So you who are about
To step into the land
Where Pluto holds his court,
Enjoy, since life is short,
The pleasures hard at hand.

Giacomo Leopardi (translated by J. G. Nichols), in Giacomo Leopardi, The Canti, With a Selection of His Prose.

Coincidentally, I posted a different translation of Simonides's poem last October.  As I noted at the time, the "man of Chios" (line 2) refers to Homer, who was traditionally thought to have been born on Chios, an island in the Aegean Sea in the region known as Ionia.  The lines "As are the lives of leaves/So are the lives of men" echo a passage in Book VI of The Iliad.  The passage was rendered by Alexander Pope as follows:

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now with'ring on the ground:
Another race the foll'wing spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those are passed away.

Here is a modern translation by Robert Fagles:

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again.  And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

Alec Dixon, "Autumn, High Beach, Essex" (1988)

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers may have noticed, I am wont to present a coda to the topic at hand by presenting a brief Chinese or Japanese poem that seems to get to the heart of the matter.  Thus, the following haiku brings our autumnal idyll to a close.

     People are few;
A leaf falls here,
     Falls there.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

What Issa has to say does not supplant what Leopardi or Mahon or Simonides or Homer have to say.  But he provides a lovely distillation that puts everything into perspective.

Come to think of it, here is a final thought by Leopardi:

"His amusement was to count the stars as he walked."

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, 280 (October 16, 1820), page 185.

Further perspective.

John Inchbold, "A Study, in March" (1855)

A Lost World, Part Four: Antiquity

Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 - c. 468 B. C.) is best known as the author of the inscription that appeared on the monument to the Spartans that was erected after the battle of Thermopylae.  The inscription was recorded by Herodotus:

Go, stranger, and to Lacedaemon tell
That here, obeying her behests, we fell.

George Rawlinson (translator), The History of Herodotus, Volume IV (1860), Book VII, Section 228, page 180.  The inscription has traditionally been ascribed to Simonides, although there has been scholarly debate on this point.

I am fond of this translation:

Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

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

This sort of restraint -- a restraint charged with unspoken emotion -- is largely absent from the modern world.  I do not wish to romanticize the ancient world:  it was a harsh and brutal place.  But there is a seemliness and a sense of proportion at work that are mostly missing in our own time.

Edward William Cooke

"Scheveningen Pincks Off the Coast of Yarmouth" (1864)

In the late 1890s, a marble block with a two-line inscription carved into it was discovered on the Greek island of Salamis, which gave its name to the culminating naval battle of the Greek-Persian Wars.  The Corinthians who died in the battle were buried on Salamis.  Here is the inscription, which has been attributed to Simonides:

O stranger, once we dwelt in Corinth blest with fountains;
Now the isle of Ajax holds our bones.

Simonides, quoted in Dio Chrysostom, The Thirty-Seventh, or Corinthian, Discourse, in H. Lamar Crosby (translator), Dio Chrysostom, Volume IV (Harvard University Press 1946).

Here is an alternative, sparer, translation.

Friend, we once were alive in the harbor city of Korinth.
Now the island city of Salamis is our grave.

Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (University of Chicago Press 1955).

Edward William Cooke

"A Dutch Galliot Aground on a Sandbank on the Biesbosch" (1878)

In Book I of De Divinatione, Cicero tells the following story of Simonides:

"[Simonides] once saw the dead body of some unknown man lying exposed and buried it.  Later, when he had it in mind to go on board a ship, he was warned in a vision by the person to whom he had given burial not to do so and that if he did he would perish in a shipwreck.  Therefore he turned back and all the others who sailed were lost."

Cicero, in William Armistead Falconer (translator), Cicero: De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione (Harvard University Press 1923).

William Wordsworth, who admired the poetry of Simonides, wrote the following untitled sonnet about the incident related by Cicero.

I find it written of Simonides
That travelling in strange countries once he found
A corpse that lay expos'd upon the ground,
For which, with pains, he caused due obsequies
To be performed, and paid all holy fees.
Soon after, this man's Ghost unto him came
And told him not to sail as was his aim,
On board a ship then ready for the seas.
Simonides, admonished by the ghost,
Remained behind; the ship the following day
Set sail, was wrecked, and all on board were lost.
Thus was the tenderest Poet that could be,
Who sang in ancient Greece his moving lay,
Saved out of many by his piety.

William Wordsworth, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume Three (Oxford University Press 1954).  The poem was first published on October 10, 1803, in The Morning Post.

Edward William Cooke

"Venetian Fishing Craft Caught in a 'Borasca'" (1873)

As I have noted on a previous occasion, the fate of unfortunate mariners was a common subject of the Greek poetry of antiquity.  The following lovely poem by Callimachus has appeared here before, but it is worth revisiting at this time due to its resemblance to the story of Simonides and the abandoned corpse.

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).

Given the role of the sea in the life of the Greeks, it is not surprising that Simonides wrote a number of poems about the misfortunes of seafarers. This is an inscription for a cenotaph.

O cloud-capt Geraneia, rock unblest!
Would thou hadst reared far hence thy haughty crest,
By Tanais wild, or wastes where Ister flows;
Nor looked on Sciron from thy silent snows!
A cold, cold corpse he lies beneath the wave,
This tomb speaks, tenantless, his ocean grave.

Simonides (translated by Robert Bland), in J. H. Merivale (editor), Collections from The Greek Anthology (1833).  Mount Geraneia is located on the Isthmus of Corinth.  Tanais was a Greek colony located on the far northeastern corner of the Sea of Azov, on the banks of the River Don.  Ister was the Greek name for the Danube.  Sciron (also spelled "Sceiron") probably refers to the Sceironian Rocks, a rugged region on the Isthmus of Corinth.

Here is an epitaph.

A land not thine hath shed its dust o'er thee,
A fated wanderer o'er the Pontic sea:
No joys for thee of sweet regretted home;
To sea-girt Chios thou didst never come.

Simonides (translated by Robert Bland), Ibid.  The Pontic Sea was the Greek name for the Black Sea.  Chios is an island in the Aegean Sea near the coast of Turkey.

Edward William Cooke, "Off the Port of Havre" (1840)

Leaves

The Greek Anthology is, to a great degree, a chronicle of "change and chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All"), woven through with a gentle and stoic thread of admonition:  Live well.  But be ever aware of That which awaits us all.  In other words, it is the perfect volume to peruse during the heart of autumn.  Doing so this week, I came upon this:

All human things are subject to decay;
And well the man of Chios tuned his lay,
"Like leaves on trees the race of man is found."
Yet few receive the melancholy sound,
Or in their breasts imprint this solemn truth;
For hope is near to all, but most to youth.
Hope's vernal season leads the laughing hours,
And strews o'er every path the fairest flowers.
To cloud the scene no distant mists appear,
Age moves no thought, and death awakes no fear.
Ah, how unmindful is the giddy crowd
Of the small span to youth and life allow'd!
Ye who reflect, the short-lived good employ,
And while the power remains, indulge your joy.

Simonides (translated by J. H. Merivale), in Robert Bland (editor), Collections from The Greek Anthology, and from the Pastoral, Elegiac, and Dramatic Poets of Greece (1813), page 185.

This sort of poem or epigram appears again and again in The Greek Anthology.  I readily confess that I cannot get enough of such things.  Mere truisms?  Yes, of course!  And wonderfully so.

James Torrington Bell (1898-1970), "Landscape"

The third line of Merivale's translation of Simonides' poem is taken from Alexander Pope's translation of Book VI of The Iliad.  "The man of Chios" (line 2) is Homer, who, by tradition, was thought to have been born on Chios, an island in the Aegean Sea in the region once known as Ionia. Which brings to mind (please pardon the digression) these lines from C. P. Cavafy's lovely poem "Ionic": "That we've broken their statues,/that we've driven them out of their temples,/doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead./O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,/their souls still keep your memory."  (Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.)

Here is Pope's line in context:

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now with'ring on the ground:
Another race the foll'wing spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those are past away.

Here are the same lines of Homer as rendered by William Cowper:

For, as the leaves, such is the race of man.
The wind shakes down the leaves, the budding grove
Soon teems with others, and in spring they grow.
So pass mankind.  One generation meets
Its destined period, and a new succeeds.

James Sheard (1866-1921), "The Pride of Autumn"

All of this leads me inevitably to one of my favorite poems by Thomas Hardy, a poem that calls to me each year.  The poem has appeared here before, but, as long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers know, we need to circle back now and then to see how these things look in a new light.

   Autumn in King's Hintock Park

Here by the baring bough
     Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
     Springtime deceives, --
I, an old woman now,
     Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue
     Raking up leaves,
Lords' ladies pass in view,
     Until one heaves
Sighs at life's russet hue,
     Raking up leaves!

Just as my shape you see
     Raking up leaves,
I saw, when fresh and free,
     Those memory weaves
Into grey ghosts by me,
     Raking up leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
     Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high --
     Earth never grieves! --
Will not, when missed am I
     Raking up leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).

I wonder:  did Hardy have Homer in mind when he wrote this?  Part of me hopes that he did not.  I love the thought of these two great poets arriving at the same place on their own, centuries apart.

Among the many beauties of the poem, this, in particular, always moves me:  "Earth never grieves!"

Andrew McCallum, "Oak Trees in Sherwood Forest" (1877)

I will close with two down-to-earth codas to this seasonal, generational, and cosmic falling and rising, rising and falling.

     Blowing from the west,
Fallen leaves gather
     In the east.

Yosa Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido 1952), page 362.

     People are few;
A leaf falls here,
     Falls there.

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 364.

James Bateman, "Lulington Church" (1939)