One Thing Leads To Another

I am in the midst of one of my recurrent avoid-the-news-of-the-world periods.  To steel my resolve, I paid a visit to a favorite poem:

               No Newspapers

Where, to me, is the loss
     Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard;
A butterfly flits across,
     Or a bird;
The moss is growing on the wall,
     I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

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

Stanley Spencer, "Bluebells, Cornflowers and Rhododendrons" (1945)

When it comes to poetry, one thing leads to another.  Thus, after I read "No Newspapers," I realized that I had not visited this poem in quite some time:

A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads its curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is feckless life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.

Stephen Crane, War Is Kind (1899).  The poem is untitled.

Newspapers still survive (barely).  But in their place (how fortunate for us!) we have any number of electronic purveyors of "news."  Of course, other than the technology of distribution, absolutely nothing has changed, has it?  "A court/Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried/By a squalor of honest men."  Exactly.  "A market/ Where wisdom sells its freedom/And melons are crowned by the crowd."  Perfect.  ("Melons are crowned by the crowd" is wonderful.)  "A collection of loud tales/Concentrating eternal stupidities."  Ah, yes.

Stephen Crane bucked me up:  I have abandoned The News of the World altogether.  I am quite certain that something is going on out there, but I have no reason to inquire.

Stanley Spencer, "The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

But it turned out that I was not finished with Mary Coleridge yet.  I was preoccupied with newspapers and their ilk when I came to the poem.  But what stayed with me was the final line:  "I heard the leaf of the poppy fall."

Where would we be without poetic serendipity?  A week or so later, I happened upon this:

     The poppy flowers;
How calmly
     They fall.

Etsujin (1656-1739) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 318.

Imagine those two poems existing independently of each other, going about their beautiful business in their own perfect way.  And then, by sheer accident, they come together.  Their coming together does not change the World.  Events of this sort shall never appear in the daily news.  Which is perfectly fine.

Stanley Spencer, "Peonies" (1939)

Finally, this week, the poppies of Coleridge and Etsujin led to this:

     Stillness:
The sound of the petals
     Sifting down together.

Chora (1729-1780) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 361.

Chora does not specify what sort of petals are falling:  he simply uses the phrase hana no oto.  Hana means "flower" or "blossom"; oto means "sound"; no means "of."  Hence:  "sound of flower" or "sound of blossom."  But the haiku is a Spring haiku, and thus cherry or plum petals are implied.

Do falling petals make a sound?  Perhaps so.  I know that falling snow can whisper.  I have heard it.

Does Chora's poem bring this excursion to an end?  Of course not.  This is how poetry works.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

Repose

During our all-too-brief sojourn on Earth, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate a state of repose and dreamy reverie.  Repose and reverie are valuable in and of themselves.  But they also share a beneficial side-effect:  a person in repose and reverie is wont to leave other people alone.

There are far too many busybodies abroad in the world.  As I have remarked in the past, this is a product of the utopian impulse that has infected humanity in the wake of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment."  The busybodies possess a noisome stream of notions about how we ought to live our lives.

The rest of us just want to be left alone.

                    Repose

Repose is in simplicities.
Perhaps the mind has leaves like trees,
Luxuriant in the sensual sun
And tossed by wind's intricacies,
And finds repose is more than grief
When failing light and falling leaf
Denote that winter has begun.

James Reeves, The Natural Need (1936).

Paul Gauguin, "The Willows" (1889)

For busybodies, everything is an "issue," everything is a problem to be solved.  If you do not agree with them, you become a part of the problem. Rest assured:  within the soul of every soi-disant "progressive" and "activist" there lurks a totalitarian.

My response to busybodies and their agendas (for them, life is a never-ending series of agendas) is simple.

"Think as I think," said a man,
"Or you are abominably wicked,
You are a toad."

And after I had thought of it,
I said:  "I will, then, be a toad."

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895).  The poem is untitled.

Paul Gauguin, "Landscape at Pont-Aven" (1886)

The only "problem" that each of us needs to attend to is the state of our own soul.  I have yet to encounter a person who has earned the right to tell anybody else how to live their life.  What, then, is that sound you hear emanating from busybodies and from their symbiotic overlords and enablers (politicians, social engineers, and media mouthpieces)? Hypocrisy.

Good-bye to all that.  I shall join Ernest Dowson in Brittany.

                                      Breton Afternoon

Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats through the sun-stained           air,
On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long and heard
Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer,
And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird.

On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush me and repose,
And the world fades into a dream and a spell is cast on me;
And what was all the strife about, for the myrtle or the rose,
And why have I wept for a white girl's paleness passing ivory!

Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a land alone, apart,
In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of life and death,
Here will I lie while the clouds fly by and delve an hole where my heart
May sleep deep down with the gorse above and red, red earth beneath.

Sleep and be quiet for an afternoon, till the rose-white angelus
Softly steals my way from the village under the hill:
Mother of God, O Misericord, look down in pity on us,
The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak ourselves such ill.

Ernest Dowson, Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899).

Paul Gauguin, "The Wooden Gate" (1889)

In due time, of course, we shall attain our ultimate repose and reverie.  A busybody-free bourne.

                 In a Breton Cemetery

They sleep well here,
     These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days
     In fierce Atlantic ways;
And found not there,
     Beneath the long curled wave,
     So quiet a grave.

And they sleep well
     These peasant-folk, who told their lives away,
     From day to market-day,
As one should tell,
     With patient industry,
     Some sad old rosary.

And now night falls,
     Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post,
     A poor worn ghost,
This quiet pasture calls;
     And dear dead people with pale hands
     Beckon me to their lands.

Ernest Dowson, Ibid.

Paul Gauguin, "Haymaking in Brittany" (1888)

"The Noise Is More Than Ever It Has Been Before"

Periodically, I vow to tune out the babbling media world in which we live. (Hypocritically disregarding the fact that, as I type these words, I am, after a fashion (in a tiny way), participating in that world.)  And, periodically, my vow is soon broken.  Which does not stop me from (hypocritically) decrying this state of affairs.

                  The Trade

The language fades.  The noise is more
Than ever it has been before,
But all the words grow pale and thin
For lack of sense has done them in.

What wonder, when it is for pay
Millions are spoken every day?
It is the number, not the sense
That brings the speakers pounds and pence.

The words are stretched across the air
Vast distances from here to there,
Or there to here:  it does not matter
So long as there is media chatter.

Turn up the sound and let there be
No talking between you and me:
What passes now for human speech
Must come from somewhere out of reach.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

                          Louisa Puller, "Haymill, Downton Gorge" (1941)

Near the end of the 19th century, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote poetry that was bewildering and ahead of its time.  The poems are untitled.  It feels as though one has stumbled into the middle of a conversation or a story. What one hears may be portentous, or merely trivial.  But the poetry is (for me, at least) oddly alluring (in small doses).  Much of it seems prescient. Or, put another way, timeless.

Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth.

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895).

                     Louisa Puller, "The Railway Station at Tetbury" (1942)

"No Newspapers"; Or, "Melons Are Crowned By The Crowd"

Although the following two poems are about newspapers, I have no particular axe to grind when it comes to that particular form of news reporting.  Rather, the topic at hand is "news" -- whether delivered via newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet.

Let me be clear:  I  do not claim to maintain an Olympian distance from "news."  On the contrary, I bring this topic up because I am often troubled by my concern with "news," and by my habit of letting it work itself into my life.  In addition, I have recently been thinking about Thomas Hardy's poem "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'" -- "only a man harrowing clods," etc. -- and the perspective that we ought to put on things.

First, Mary Coleridge (1861-1907):

          No Newspapers

Where, to me, is the loss
   Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard;
A butterfly flits across,
   Or a bird;
The moss is growing on the wall,
   I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

Collected Poems (edited by Theresa Whistler) (1954). 

Yes, sentimental and Victorian.  Well, then, if it is vitriol that you want, let us proceed to Stephen Crane:

A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads its curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is feckless life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.

The Poems of Stephen Crane (edited by Joseph Katz) (1966).

            Luis Melendez (1716-1780), "Still Life with Melon and Pears"