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)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Eight: Exile

Is the World we live in enchanted or disenchanted?  Happily, we cannot think, or reason, our way to an answer to this question. Moreover, the answer may be beyond words, which is appropriate. The World is mostly reticent.  But, if we pay attention to it, we may receive glimpses, glimmers, inklings. 

And, in the end, the answer we may stumble upon applies only to a single soul: our own.  Still, we may encounter kindred souls in our travels.  What would we do without them?

"What a marvelous time it was when everything was alive, according to human imagination, and humanly alive, in other words inhabited or formed by beings like ourselves; when it was taken as certain that in the deserted woods lived the beautiful Hamadryads and fauns and woodland deities and Pan, etc., and, on entering and seeing everything as solitude, you still believed that everything was inhabited and that Naiads lived in the springs, etc., and embracing a tree you felt it almost palpitating between your hands and believed it was a man or a woman like Cyparissus, etc., and the same with flowers, etc., just as children do."

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (translated by Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom, and Pamela Williams) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013), page 69.

As an unrepentant Wordsworthian pantheist (the Wordsworth of 1797 through 1807) and a lover of the poems in The Greek Anthology, I fully concur with Leopardi's thoughts.  How far we have fallen!  But some may say: "What of Progress?"  Ah, yes, "Progress."  We now find ourselves in the hands of political, scientific, technological, and media "experts."  That seems to be working quite well.

H. S. Merritt, "Woodford Bridge in the Avon Valley" (c. 1942)

I am also wholly in sympathy with Walter de la Mare:

                         Exile

Had the gods loved me I had lain

     Where darnel is, and thorn,

And the wild night-bird's nightlong strain

     Trembles in boughs forlorn.

Nay, but they loved me not; and I

     Must needs a stranger be,

Whose every exiled day gone by

     Aches with their memory.

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems (Constable 1912).

The pang of exile from a lost, ever unreachable world is a thread that runs throughout de la Mare's poetry.  But it never leads to a slighting of the World as we find it.  Nor does it lead to despair, or to lack of love for the beautiful particulars of the World.  Thus: "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." ("Now.")  Or this: "Look thy last on all things lovely,/Every hour." ("Fare Well.")  

And, despite the sadness and the sense of irremediable loss expressed in "Exile," de la Mare still catches glimpses of the lost world in the English countryside:

           Echo 

Seven sweet notes

In the moonlight pale

Warbled a leaf-hidden

Nightingale:

And Echo in hiding

By an old green wall

Under the willows

Sighed back them all.

Walter de la Mare, Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (Faber and Faber 1941).

This brings to mind a lovely poem from The Greek Anthology:

High up the mountain-meadow, Echo with never a tongue

Sings back to each bird in answer the song each bird hath sung.

Satyrus (c. 1st century B.C. - 1st century A.D.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas (editor), Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), page 358.

There is no telling what one might suddenly see out in a field:

                            Flood Water

What saw I -- crouching by that pool of water

     Bright-blue in the flooded grass,

Of ash-white sea-birds the remote resort, and

     April's looking-glass? --

Was it mere image of a dream-dazed eye --

That startled Naiad -- as the train swept by?

Walter de la Mare, Inward Companion: Poems (Faber and Faber 1950).

H. S. Merritt, "Bowerchalke" (c. 1942)

The ironic moderns among us have "progressed" too far to take any of this seriously.  They fancy themselves to be unillusioned and undeceived.  Products of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment."

Leopardi again: "[T]here has never been an age so tainted and corrupted that it did not believe itself to stand at the pinnacle of civilization and social perfection, and to be an example to the other ages, and, in particular, superior in every respect to all past ages, and at the farthest point in space yet traveled by the human spirit." (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, page 395.)  

Enchanted or disenchanted?  Each of us makes a choice in this matter every day.

                       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.

When an August dawn wakes over you,

your atmosphere is potent with their life,

and sometimes a young ethereal figure,

indistinct, in rapid flight,

wings across your hills.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press 1975).

H. S. Merritt, "Wishford, Wylye Valley" (c. 1942)

Significance

A distant, recurring sound on an autumn night.  A human sound, redolent, mysterious, evanescent.

             In Early Autumn, Alone at Night

The leaves of the paulownia move in the cool breeze;

The neighbour's fulling mallet sends out the voice of autumn.

I turn and sleep beneath the eaves;

Waking, the moonlight is half across my couch.  

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 179.

Another translation of the poem:

            Early Autumn, Alone at Night

Parasol tree by the well, cold leaves stirring;

nearby fulling mallets that speak an autumn sound:

I sleep alone facing the eaves,

wake to find moonlight over half the bed.

Po Chü-i (translated by Burton Watson), in Po Chü-i, Selected Poems (edited and translated by Burton Watson) (Columbia University Press 2000), page 7.

The sound of fulling mallets (or, as they are also called, "fulling blocks") in the night signifies autumn in traditional Chinese poems. "It was customary in the autumn to pound cloth in the process known as fulling to make it suitable for use in winter clothes."  (Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 176.) Often, the sound is made by women who are preparing cloth for use in the winter clothes of their lovers or husbands, who are away in the army, anticipating a winter campaign.

A small thing?  Perhaps.  But it gives one pause.  "A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), from "Blazon in Green and White," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 53.)

Claude Hayes (1852-1922), "Evensong" (1903)

Given the considerable influence of Chinese poetry (particularly the poetry of the T'ang dynasty) on Japanese poetry, fulling blocks are also a common presence in Japanese poems (both waka and haiku) of autumn.  (In Japan, Po Chü-i was the most popular T'ang dynasty poet.  Thus, it is likely that the poem which appears above was well known to Japanese poets.)  The Japanese word for fulling blocks is kinuta. "Kinuta, a wooden mallet and block used to full cloth in the autumn. In poetry, the sound of fulling was associated with the loneliness of a woman left waiting for a traveling husband." (Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 136.)

          Fulling Block

When the wind passes

     in the pines, autumn already

          seems lonely enough —

and then a fulling block echoes

     through Tamakawa Village.

Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129) (translated by Steven Carter), Ibid, page 136.

The poem above is a waka, but the theme appears in haiku as well. For instance:

     Walking along the narrow path,

Listening to the far-off

     Fulling block.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Winter-Autumn, page 32.

Buson is chronologically the second of the four traditional great haiku poets: he follows Bashō, and precedes Issa.  The fourth of the greats is Shiki, who wrote this:

     In one house,

A voice of weeping,

     The sound of the fulling block.

Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 34.

A disembodied sound from somewhere out in the night.  Yet there is a slender human thread.  One pays attention.

     Unheard, these two days,

The fulling block

     Of my neighbour.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 336.

George Clausen (1852-1944), "The Village Green at Night"

The World consists of slender threads, doesn't it?  Earlier this week, I saw two sparrows bathing in a puddle, in the morning sun.  I couldn't help but feel they were the first sign of Spring.  Yesterday I noticed that buds have appeared on a row of pear trees in front of a nearby house.  The blue herons have returned to their nests high in the tall pines beside the Ship Canal.  And soon the crocuses will begin to emerge.  "From now on, listening only to the flowers' counsel, antecedent to all knowledge . . ."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry in September, 1983 (ellipses in the original text), in Philippe Jaccottet, The Second Seedtime: Notebooks 1980-1994 (Seagull Books 2017), page 57.)

Why should little things be blamed?

Little things for grace are famed;

Love, the winged and the wild,

Love is but a little child.

Anonymous (translated by Thomas Percival Rogers), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (John Murray 1849), page 259.

Slender threads.  Little things.  They all add up.

     The clear voice 

Of the fulling block echoes up

     To the Northern Stars.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, p. 31.

Thomas Train (1890-1978), "Headlights"

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"

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)

Passing. Past. Perennial.

The time has come, dear readers, to return to my "April poem."  It is part of a group which includes my May poem ("The Trees" by Philip Larkin), my August poem ("A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" by Wallace Stevens), and my November poem ("The Region November" by Stevens), each of which reappears here annually at its appointed time.  I beg your indulgence for asking you to accompany me on these pilgrimages.  Think of them as stepping stones across the year.

                    Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2004).  The poem was first published in Kavanagh's Weekly on April 19, 1952.

A small and beautiful thing.  The less said, the better.

John Mitchell (1862-1922), "The Waterfoot, Carradale" (1921)

As I noted here a few years ago, I feel a sense of serenity when I contemplate the fact that the seasons will continue to come and go long after I have turned to dust.

Since late March I have been spending time with the poems in The Greek Anthology.  Recently, I came across this:

The world is fleeting; all things pass away;
Or is it we that pass and they that stay?

Lucian (120-200 A. D.) (translated by Walter Leaf), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938).

In one of his notebooks, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes:

"The quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains before St Peter's, waterfalls/God! -- Change without loss -- change by a perpetual growth, that [at] once constitutes & annihilates change.  [T]he past, & the future included in the Present//oh! it is aweful."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, notebook entry (April or May, 1806) in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2: 1804-1808 (Pantheon Books 1961), Entry 2832.

The italics and the slashes appear in the original text.  Given that Coleridge was in Italy at the time the entry was made, "the fountains before St Peter's" likely refers to the fountains in St Peter's Square in Rome.  Coleridge's use of the spelling "aweful" was not uncommon in his time.  The spelling provides a reminder that "awful" means "awe-inspiring," with one sense being "solemnly impressive; sublimely majestic."  Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition 1989).  Of course, in our age the word usually means "causing dread; terrible, dreadful, appalling."  Ibid.  I am inclined to think that Coleridge was using "aweful" in the former sense.  But this is only a guess.

For me, "Wet Evening in April" embodies a feeling of permanence in the midst of unceasing change.  I know the melancholy of which Kavanagh speaks.  We all do.  As have all those who have come before us.  As will all those who will come after as.  The birds singing in the wet trees on an April evening accompany us all.

John Lawson (1868-1909), "An Ayrshire Stream" (1893)

But melancholy is not the whole of it.  For instance, when it comes to the birds of April, and of spring, we should remember Ben Jonson's translation of a fragment of Sappho:  "The dear good angel of the spring,/The nightingale."  (Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd, Act II, Scene VI, in H. T. Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (John Lane 1907), page 96.)

Kavanagh knows this as well.  Thus, he brings us from April into May:

       Consider the Grass Growing

Consider the grass growing
As it grew last year and the year before,
Cool about the ankles like summer rivers,
When we walked on a May evening through the meadows
To watch the mare that was going to foal.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems.  The poem was first published in The Irish Press on May 21, 1943.

"Consider the grass growing/As it grew last year and the year before."  Never-ending, with us or without us.

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

Absence

My favorite poems from The Greek Anthology are the epitaphs and the elegies.  The best of them combine graceful, noble simplicity with deeply-felt, but restrained, emotion.  E. K. Chambers's poem in memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, which appeared in my previous post, prompted me to return to this lovely poem by Callimachus:

Their Crethis, with her prattle and her play,
The girls of Samos often miss to-day:
Their loved workmate, with flow of merry speech,
Here sleeps the sleep that comes to all and each.

Callimachus (c. 310 B.C. - c. 240 B. C.) (translated by A. H. Bullen), in      A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (Sidgwick & Jackson 1921).

This four-line poem accomplishes something remarkable in a brief space: it captures the essence of Crethis, of the personality which made her belovèd among her friends; it articulates, in a non-histrionic fashion, the grief of those friends upon losing her; and, finally, it places all of this within a context which embraces each of us, and which reminds us of a reality, often avoided, that we all must come to terms with, sooner or later.

Crethis, young prattler, full of graceful play,
Vainly the maids of Samos seek all day;
Cheerfullest workmate; ever talking; -- she
Sleeps here, -- that sleep, from which none born can flee.

Callimachus (translated by "F. H."), in The Classical Journal, Volume XXXIII (March and June, 1826), page 9.

Because I have no knowledge of Greek, I am not qualified to opine on the accuracy and fitness of the three translations that appear here.  I will only note that, despite the differences in the English words chosen by each of the translators, the emotional tenor of all three versions is quite consistent: we feel the charming vivacity of Crethis, and we also feel the aching and breathless sense of absence when a bright life is cut short.

The Samian maidens oft regret their friend,
     Sweet Crethis, full of play and cheer,
     Whose gossip lightened toil.  But here
She sleeps the sleep they all will sleep at end.

Callimachus (translated by Edward Cook), in Edward Cook, "The Charm of The Greek Anthology," More Literary Recreations (Macmillan 1919), page 317.

Algernon Cecil Newton (1880-1968), "The Avenue" (1944)

"All poetry is in a sense love-poetry."  Edward Thomas makes this suggestion at the end of a paragraph in which, discussing the unique power of poetry, he states:  "If what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death. . . [Poetry] is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial."  Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), pages 86-87.

I think that these are wonderful, and true, observations.  But might it not also be said that all poems are elegies?  This may be a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other:  an elegy is an expression of love (a greater or a lesser love, depending upon the nature of the relationship between the elegist and the departed).  There are various types and degrees of love, and the potential objects of our love are innumerable.  But what all love has in common is this:  the belovèd may leave us.  Hence, love poems.  Hence, elegies.  Edward Thomas again:  "First known when lost."

                           The Evening Star
     in memory of Catherine Mercer, 1994-96

The day we buried your two years and two months
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,

The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram
Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000).  In a note, Longley explains that "dayligone" (line 4) is a "Scots (or Ulster Scots)" word which means "twilight, dusk."  Ibid, page 68.

"The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram" likely refers to a two-line fragment by Sappho, which may be translated into prose as follows: "Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother."  Sappho (translated by Henry Thornton Wharton), in Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho:  Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (David Stott 1887), page 131.

In Greek mythology, Hesperus (Venus) is the evening star.  Lord Byron adapts Sappho's lines, and links them to Hesperus, in Book III, Stanza 107, of Don Juan:

O Hesperus!  thou bringest all good things --
     Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
     The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
     Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.

A. E. Housman also incorporates the spirit of Sappho's lines (and Hesperus) into the third stanza of "Epithalamium":

     Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings
All desired and timely things.
All whom morning sends to roam,
Hesper loves to lead them home.
Home return who him behold,
Child to mother, sheep to fold,
Bird to nest from wandering wide:
Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

A. E. Housman, Last Poems (Grant Richards 1922).

Algernon Cecil Newton, "The House by the Canal" (1945)

One  afternoon this past week, a heavy rain squall passed through about fifteen minutes before I headed out for my daily walk.  My course took me through a long avenue of trees.  By then, the sky had mostly cleared, and the green fields and bare trees glowed in the sunshine.

Wide puddles left by the just-departed storm ran continuously along both sides of the asphalt lane down which I walked.  As I have noted here in the past, to see the World reflected in a puddle, however small, is a wondrous thing.  But this was a replicated World of an entirely different magnitude: for two hundred yards or so the blue sky, the passing white clouds, and the intricate empty branches of the trees accompanied me, reflected in two bright ribbons of water.

As I walked, paused to gaze, and then walked on again, I was aware of the evanescence of the clear and brilliant World laid out at my feet.  Ripples, moving in tiny waves from south to north, occasionally disturbed the surface of the water as the wind gusted.  The blue sky and the white clouds and the tree branches reappeared when the wind subsided.  This bright and haunting World came to an end when the lane came to an end.  I could hear the rain water slowly gurgling into the storm drains.

"It is a commonplace of life that the greatest pleasure issues ultimately in the greatest grief.  Yet why -- why is it that this child of mine, who has not tasted half the pleasures that the world has to offer, who ought, by rights, to be as fresh and green as the vigorous young needles of the everlasting pine -- why must she lie here on her deathbed, swollen with blisters, caught in the loathsome clutches of the vile god of smallpox.  Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away -- a little more each day -- like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain.

"After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away -- like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow.  In our joy we made what we call a 'priest in a straw robe.'  We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together.  Yet our hopes proved to be vain.  She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever.

"Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly.  For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall.  Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

                              The world of dew
                         is the world of dew.
                              And yet, and yet -- "

Kobayashi Issa (prose translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa; haiku translated by Robert Hass), from A Year of My Life (1819), in Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), pages 227-228.

Visiting his daughter's grave a month after her death, Issa wrote this haiku:

Wind of autumn!
And the scarlet flowers are there
That she loved to pluck.

Kobayashi Issa (translated by Lewis Mackenzie), in Lewis Mackenzie, The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa (John Murray 1957), page 100.

Here is another translation of the same haiku:

The red flower
you always wanted to pick --
now this autumn wind.

Kobayashi Issa (translated by Sam Hamill), in Kobayashi Issa, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku (translated by Sam Hamill) (Shambhala 1997), page 78.

Algernon Cecil Newton, "Landscape"

A lovely thought by William Cowper comes to mind:

"But it is a sort of April weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."

William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (January 3, 1787), in James King and Charles Ryskamp (editors), The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791 (Oxford University Press 1982), pages 5-6.

Yüan Chen (779-831) wrote a series of poems after the death of his wife. This is one of them.

          Bamboo Mat

I cannot bear to put away
the bamboo sleeping mat --

that first night I brought you home,
I watched you roll it out.

Yüan Chen (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000), page 191.

It is often the small things that matter, and that are not forgotten, as long as we remain here.  But they are not small things at all, are they?

Algernon Cecil Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

Earth, Lie Lightly

"Earth, lie lightly."  What a lovely request.  Much more evocative than, say, "rest in peace."  But it is not a phrase that one is apt to encounter first-hand in our times.  Which is a pity.  It is the cumulative tiny losses of such graceful touches that ultimately take their toll on the decency, seemliness, and nobility of civilization, not the day-to-day events of politics or economics, which are nothing but passing distractions.

"Earth, lie lightly."  One is likely to come across this gentle supplication (and variations upon it) in English poetry written prior to the 20th century. For instance, it is found in several translations of poems from The Greek Anthology.

Take to thy bosom, gentle earth, a swain
     With much hard labour in thy service worn.
He set the vines that clothe yon ample plain,
     And he these olives that the vale adorn.
He fill'd with grain the glebe; the rills he led
     Through this green herbage, and those fruitful bowers.
Thou, therefore, earth! lie lightly on his head,
     His hoary head, and deck his grave with flowers.

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

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

Too sentimental?  Too quaint?  Too old-fashioned?  It depends upon what sort of world you wish to live in.  One can, of course, take the ironic, hard-boiled "modern" approach and say that this sort of thing simply won't do anymore:  we have moved beyond it, we are now more knowing.

Ah, yes, have a look around you at the current state of the world.  What a wonderful place our superior knowingness and our irony have created for us!  I prefer this:

Full oft, of old, the islands changed their name,
And took new titles from some heir of fame:
Then dread not ye the wrath of gods above,
But change your own, and be the Isles of Love;
For Love's own name and shape the infant bore
Whom late we buried on your sandy shore.
Break softly there, thou never-weary wave,
And earth, lie light upon his little grave!

Crinagoras (translated by John William Burgon), Ibid.

Stanley Spencer, "The Roundabout" (1923)

Mind you, I am not suggesting that the essential humanity that one finds in The Greek Anthology has vanished from the world.  The love, hate, joy, sorrow, beauty, and transience of the ancients are ours as well.  Being human has always been a matter of life and death.

                            Life and Death

The two old, simple problems ever intertwined,
Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled.
By each successive age insoluble, pass'd on,
To ours to-day -- and we pass on the same.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).

"Insoluble."  Yet, it is entirely possible that the acceptance of this insolubility may be the only solution we need in order to pass our days in tranquility.  In any case, solution or no solution, we each have a choice to make:  shall we live in an enchanted world or a disenchanted world?

Earth, lightly press Ausigenes, for he,
Mother, ne'er set a heavy foot on thee.

Meleager (translated by John Besly), Anthologia Polyglotta.

Stanley Spencer, "Garden at Whitehouse, Northern Ireland" (1952)

Yes, we ought to tread softly.  As I have done here on more than one occasion in the past, I can only repeat Philip Larkin's lovely advice:

                . . . we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, "The Mower," Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

A task for a lifetime, never completed.  And, if we are fortunate, a kind soul will request on our behalf, when we have vanished:  "Earth, lie lightly."

Lay a garland on my hearse
     Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear,
     Say I diëd true.

My Love was false, but I was firm
     From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lay
     Lightly, gently, earth.

John Fletcher, from The Maid's Tragedy (1622), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (William Sloane 1949).

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)          

Resting Place

Given the subject matter of this post, a disclaimer may be appropriate:  I am not, at the moment, brooding over mortality.  Actually, I am feeling quite cheerful.  "There will be dying, there will be dying,/but there is no need to go into that."

Yet, come to think of it, the two are not mutually exclusive, are they?  It is possible to be cheerful and, at the same time, to brood over (or at least be mindful of) mortality.  In fact, that may be an ideal state of being.  But I am not that wise.  Hence, this post is simply a matter of one thing leading to another.

          To the Passenger

If I lie unburied Sir,
These my Reliques, pray inter.
'Tis religion's part to see
Stones or turfs to cover me.
One word more I had to say;
But it skills not; go your way;
He that wants a burial room
For a Stone, has Heaven his Tomb.

Robert Herrick, Poem 821, Hesperides (1648).

"Passenger" means "passer-by" in this context.  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 724.  "It skills not" (line 6) means "it doesn't matter."  Ibid.  I presume that "wants" (line 7) means "lacks" in this context.  Herrick italicizes the final line, which, in accordance with his usual practice, signifies a quotation or a paraphrase from a classical source.  It has been suggested that the source is Lucan, Pharsalia, 7.819, as quoted (and translated) by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Second Partition, Section 3, Member 5, Subsection 1):  "the Canopy of heaven covers him that hath no tomb."  Ibid.

Claude Hayes, "Evensong" (1903)

The thought of having Heaven (or the heavens) as one's tomb puts me in mind of the many touching epigrams about the deaths of unfortunate mariners that are contained in The Greek Anthology.  Most often, the mariner's comrades, or a stranger who happens upon the washed-up corpse while walking along the shore, are able to bury the mariner and erect a monument to his memory.  However, sometimes the seafarer remains for ever lost at sea.

No dust, no paltry marble for his grave
Has Erasippus, but the wide sea wave.
For with his ship he sank.  His bones decay --
But where, the cormorant alone can say.

Glaucus (translated by Goldwin Smith), in Henry Wellesley, Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology (1849), page 70.

Here is a prose translation of the epigram:

"Not dust nor the light weight of a stone, but all this sea that thou beholdest is the tomb of Erasippus; for he perished with his ship, and in some unknown place his bones moulder, and the seagulls alone know them to tell."

Glaucus (translated by J. W. Mackail), in J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1906), page 156.

Henry Anthony (1817-1886), "Evensong" (1873)

Wars on distant frontiers are a constant presence in classical Chinese poetry, and the prospect of a lonely death far from home and family is the theme of many poems.

                         Ch'i-yü-ko

Man -- pitiful insect,
out the gate with fears of death in his breast,
a corpse fallen in narrow valleys,
white bones that no one gathers up.

Anonymous (circa 6th to 7th century) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (Columbia University Press 1971), page 63.  The meaning of the phrase "Ch'i-yü-ko" is "uncertain."  Ibid, page 62.  The poem "was written to be sung."  Ibid.

Classical Greek and Chinese poetry share a surface matter-of-factness and simplicity that is underlaid by, and intertwined with, great emotion.  There is a dignity, seemliness, and reticence to this combination that makes the poetry extremely moving.  This may explain why the long-dead Greek and Chinese poets seem to be speaking directly to us, and for us.  We moderns are not so articulate, nor are we so wise.  We have forgotten a great deal.

James Webb, "A Bit of Sussex" (1877)

As I have remarked in the past, one of the wonderful things about reading poetry is how one poem can become a stepping stone to another.  The final line of the following poem has stayed with me for years.  I thought of it after I read Herrick's lines "He that wants a burial room/For a stone, has Heaven his Tomb."

                    A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?

Andrew Young, in Leonard Clark (editor), The Collected Poems of Andrew Young (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

"Buried within the blue vault of the air."  Well, what can you say about that? Nothing need be said, but I will say something anyway:  this is why we read poetry.

James Northbourne, "Evening" (1913)

In this context, I cannot help but think of one of my favorite poems.  It has appeared here on more than one occasion, but its final two lines are particularly apt.

Happy were he could finish forth his fate
     In some unhaunted desert, most obscure
From all societies, from love and hate
     Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;
Then wake again, and give God ever praise,
     Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;
In contemplation spending all his days,
     And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,
Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949).

When all is said and done, being untombed is not necessarily a fate to be dreaded.  The thought of being "buried within the blue vault of the air" does not trouble me.  If only cormorants or seagulls know where my bones lie, I have no objection.  A resting place "where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush" sounds peaceful and lovely.  Like most everything, it is all a matter of perspective.  There are other considerations.

                              On Himself

Some parts may perish; die thou canst not all:
The most of thee shall scape the funeral.

Robert Herrick, Poem 554, Hesperides (1648).  "Scape" appears in the original.  The final line may be an echo of Horace (Odes, Book III, Ode 30): "I shall not all die, and a large part of me will escape the Goddess of Death."  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II, page 675.

Henry Anthony, "A Country Churchyard"

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)

Waves And Robins

I am a slow reader.  When I hear someone say they finished reading a novel last week, I am impressed.  All I can say in response is that I read a few poems last week.  In saying this, I don't intend to sound precious or pedantic.  It's simply the ways things have worked out.

As I have suggested before, a poem -- like a painting -- needs time to develop.  In repose.  I have never been one to rush through art museums: looking at too many paintings makes my head spin.  Likewise with poetry: I don't see the point in reading wide swathes of poetry at a time.  One poem per sitting is my rule of thumb -- even for two-line poems.

John Brett

"Golden Prospects, St Catherine's Well, Land's End, Cornwall" (1881)

Reading poetry is a perambulation, not a race.  Thus, for instance, I continue to leisurely work my way through the poems of Walter de la Mare, discovering small gems.

     Never More, Sailor

Never more, Sailor,
Shalt thou be
Tossed on the wind-ridden,
Restless sea.
Its tides may labour;
All the world
Shake 'neath that weight
Of waters hurled:
But its whole shock
Can only stir
Thy dust to a quiet
Even quieter.
Thou mock'st at land
Who now art come
To such a small
And shallow home;
Yet bore the sea
Full many a care
For bones that once
A sailor's were.
And though the grave's
Deep soundlessness
Thy once sea-deafened
Ear distress,
No robin ever
On the deep
Hopped with his song
To haunt thy sleep.

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems (1912).

Of course, countless poems have been written about seafarers coming to rest at last on land, there to spend eternity.  "Home is the sailor, home from sea . . ."  Et cetera.

Ah, yes, but what about this?

No robin ever
On the deep
Hopped with his song
To haunt thy sleep.

I could not read those four lines and then move on straightaway to another poem.  I needed a day or so to let them rest, and quietly revolve, in my mind. I fell to sleep remembering them.  I am certainly not recommending this approach for everyone.  Others are no doubt more industrious, and out for bigger game.  I prefer daydreaming as I wander down by-ways.

John Brett, "Southern Coast of Guernsey" (1875)

If we let poems take their time, detours and diversions may offer themselves up.  De la Mare's sailor home from the sea got me to thinking of the numerous wonderful poems in The Greek Anthology about the sea-side graves of mariners.  For instance:

Though smiling calms should smooth the glassy seas,
Or the light ruffling of the western breeze
Should skim their surface, with no venturous prow
Will I the dreary waste of waters plough.
By sad experience warn'd I tempt no more
The swelling billows and the tempest's roar.

Leonidas (translated by William Shepherd), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849), page 301.

Or:

Hail, shipwreck'd corse!  accuse not from the grave,
     The ocean, but the winds, that wrought thy doom:
They wreck'd thee; while the gentle salt-sea wave
     Bore thee to land, to thy parental tomb.

Julianus (translated by Henry Wellesley), Ibid, page 78.

And:

This is a sailor's, that a peasant's tomb:
'Neath sea and land there lurks one common doom.

Plato (translated by Richard Coxe), Ibid, page 234.

John Brett, "The Land's End, Cornwall" (1880)

And what of that lovely robin, haunting (peacefully) the sleep of the sailor? I was reminded of a wonderful poem by Robert Herrick that appeared here in May.

                 To Robin Red-breast

Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the Wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my Dirge, sweet-warbling Chorister!
For Epitaph, in Foliage, next write this:
     Here, here the Tomb of Robin Herrick is.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

And so a simple poem led to a nice stroll, a stroll during which our frenetic modern world was entirely absent.  Have no fear!  It will still be there when you return.

John Brett, "Forest Cove, Cardigan Bay" (1883)