Home

This modest (and, of late, fitful) undertaking owes its name to Edward Thomas.  I expressed my thanks to him (accompanied by the touching elegy "To E. T.: 1917" written by his friend Walter de la Mare) in my first post here: Tuesday, March 9, 2010.  A month later, I posted this comment about "Adlestrop": "No doubt many of us first encountered Edward Thomas by discovering 'Adlestrop' in an anthology.  And many of us recognized upon reading it that something had changed for us.  How so?  This is the best that I can come up with: 'At last.  This is the real thing.'"

I memorized "Adlestrop" on the day I first read it.  Forty years ago? Or is it closer to fifty?  Since that day it has always been with me.  But now and then I still open Thomas' Collected Poems to read it, wanting to see it on the page.  Nothing has changed.

                 Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop --

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

The steam hissed.  Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform.  What I saw

Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (edited by Edna Longley) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 51.  The poem was written on January 8, 1915.  Ibid, page 176.  Thomas had written his first poem a month earlier, on December 3, 1914.  Ibid, page 143.

We've had a surprising string of sunny and warm (even hot) days in this part of the world.  No rain to speak of, and nary a cloud in sight. On a recent afternoon, as I walked beside a meadow that slopes down to the waters of Puget Sound, a ladybug landed on my right forearm. Landed "unwontedly," one might say.  That wonderful way in which the World works.  

I stopped walking, and watched as the visitor investigated my arm. After a few moments, it flew away on its own, its diaphanous wings glittering in the sunlight.  Over a lifetime, it is these unwonted moments we remember, isn't it?

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Kentish Oast"

In one sense, Edward Thomas had found his home in the World from the day he was born.

"So on Tuesday, July 27th [1915] I lunched for the first time with Edward in uniform.  It might have been next year when we were walking in the country that I asked him the question his friends had asked him when he joined up, but I put it differently.  'Do you know what you are fighting for?'  He stopped, and picked up a pinch of earth.  'Literally, for this.'  He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall."

Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford University Press 1958), page 154.

Hence, "Adlestrop."  But there is a great deal more to "Adlestrop." And there is a great deal more to Edward Thomas.  As I was thinking about him lately, this came to mind: "He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."  More on this in a moment.

                      Home

Often I had gone this way before:

But now it seemed I never could be

And never had been anywhere else;

'Twas home; one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory.

They welcomed me.  I had come back

That eve somehow from somewhere far:

The April mist, the chill, the calm,

Meant the same thing familiar 

And pleasant to us, and strange too,

Yet with no bar.

The thrush on the oaktop in the lane

Sang his last song, or last but one;

And as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun

His last; they knew no more than I

The day was done.

Then past his dark white cottage front

A labourer went along, his tread

Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;

And, through the silence, from his shed

The sound of sawing rounded all

That silence said.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 81.  The poem was written on April 17, 1915, four months after "Adlestrop" was written.  Ibid, page 226.  Thomas wrote two other poems titled "Home."  The first was written on February 23, 1915.  Ibid, page 197. (It begins: "Not the end: but there's nothing more."  Ibid, page 64.) The second was written on March 7 and 10, 1916.  Ibid, page 282.  (It begins: "Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and/We had seen nothing fairer than that land."  Ibid, page 113.)

"He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."  An observation bound to catch the attention of melancholic romantics and romantic melancholics. (I'm afraid I shall have to plead guilty to that offense.)  It is the final sentence in Walter Pater's "A Prince of Court Painters," a fictional "imaginary portrait" of the painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) which takes the form of journal entries written over a 20-year period by a woman who knew him.  (Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits (Macmillan 1887), pages 1-48.)  Edward Thomas read Pater's works, and wrote a book about him: Walter Pater: A Critical Study (Martin Secker 1913).  The book contains a short chapter on Imaginary Portraits, but the sentence I have quoted from "A Prince of Court Painters" is not mentioned.

Have no fear: it is not my intention to undertake literary detective work along the lines of, say, "Walter Pater's Influence on the Poetry of  Edward Thomas."  Rather, Pater's sentence simply returned to me on its own as I thought about Thomas, his life, the four poems that appear here, and his poetry as a whole.  I would never wish to be reductive when it comes to Edward Thomas.  More importantly, as I have often noted here in the past: the poems speak for themselves; no interpretation or explication is necessary.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

"It is enough, it would seem, to have been born into this world for a man to desire many things."  (Kenkō (1283-1350), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 1 (translated by Donald Keene), in Keene (editor), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), page 3.)  As a Buddhist monk, Kenkō would have been well-acquainted with the snares of desire in the lives of human beings, and of the need for us to avoid, or to extricate ourselves from, those snares.  On the other hand, desires are innumerable, and come in various forms.  For instance, what of a desire for home?  Aren't most of us in search of home, whatever that may mean? 

                                 The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:

But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval --

Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles -- but nothing at all,

Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,

Could climb down to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 108.  The poem was written from February 4 through February 9, 1916.  Ibid, page 272.

"But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die/And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost."  As in "Adlestrop" and "Home," a moment is sufficient to find oneself at home.  And, although "desire" is involved, Thomas arrives at home "without search or desert or cost."  As in "Adlestrop": ". . . the express-train drew up there/Unwontedly."  And as in "Home": "I had come back/That eve somehow from somewhere far."  How wonderful to know that one may arrive at home when one least expects it, if only for a moment.  But perhaps this is a better way to put it: how wonderful to know that home may arrive when one least expects it, if only for a moment.

     Bent over by the rain,

The ears of barley

     Make it a narrow path.

Jōsō (1661-1704) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322.  Blyth follows the haiku with this commentary:

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."

Ibid, page 322 (italics in the original text).

Or, another way of looking at it:

"Attachment to the self renders life more opaque.  One moment of complete forgetting and all the screens, one behind the other, become transparent so that you can perceive clarity to its very depths, as far as the eye can see; and at the same time everything becomes weightless.  Thus does the soul truly become a bird."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry in May of 1954, in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), page 1.

George Mackley, "House by a Lane"

"And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring/The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost/With a ghostly gladness." "Gladness."  The word appears again in this poem, written by Thomas three months after he wrote "The Ash Grove":

   I Never Saw That Land Before

I never saw that land before,

And now can never see it again;

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar

Endeared, by gladness and by pain,

Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,

The chickens from the farmsteads, all

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook

With wounds yellow as crocuses

Where yesterday the labourer's hook

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze

That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I neither expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal

I touched then; and if I could sing

What would not even whisper my soul

As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid

Excepting from those like me made

Who answer when such whispers bid.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 120.  The poem was written on May 5, 1916.  Ibid, page 292.

Having said earlier that I would never wish to be reductive when it comes to Edward Thomas, I'm afraid this thought comes to mind: where would his poems be without birds, without trees?  Consider just the four poems appearing here.  In "Adlestrop": a blackbird; "all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire;" willows.  In "Home": two thrushes; an oak; an elm.  In "The Ash Grove": ash trees, of course.  In "I Never Saw that Land Before": "the bare ash trees;" elms.  All of them brought together beautifully in these lines: ". . . and if I could sing/What would not even whisper my soul/As I went on my journeying,//I should use, as the trees and birds did,/A language not to be betrayed."  Try to imagine home without trees or birds.  

This undated entry appears on one of the final pages of the diary kept by Thomas after he arrived in France in January of 1917: "And no more singing for the bird . . ."  (R. George Thomas (editor), The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford University Press 1981), page 194 (ellipses in the original text).)

On April 9, 1917, Edward Thomas died in France on the first day of the Battle of Arras.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Stobo Kirk, Peeblessshire" (1936)

[A final note.  Edward Thomas did not begin to write poetry until the last four years of his life.  But I venture to say that no one in the United Kingdom during his lifetime had a greater knowledge of, and feeling for, first, what the essence of poetry consists of, and, second, what it means to be a poet.  This is, of course, embodied in his own poetry. But his thoughts and feelings on the heart of poetry may also be found in his prose writings.  I find this to be his finest articulation of what poetry is:

"What [poets] say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification.  If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty.  But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for 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 and must always be apparently revolutionary if active, anarchic if passive.  It is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial.  Hence the strangeness and thrill and painful delight of poetry at all times, and the deep response to it of youth and of love; and because love is wild, strange, and full of astonishment, is one reason why poetry deals so much in love, and why all poetry is in a sense love poetry."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), page 86-87.

We should remain mindful of a proviso included by Thomas in the passage above: "if what poets say is true and not feigning." Part of what this means is expressed wonderfully by Kingsley Amis, with Thomas in mind: "How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."(Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology (Hutchinson 1988), page 339.)]

George Mackley, "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

Utilitarianism

Here are the opening lines of a poem to which we shall return in a moment:

I live still, to love still

     Things quiet and unconcerned, --

The lines were written in the twentieth century by an English poet. They are engraved on the poet's tomb, which lies in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk.

James Torrington Bell (1898-1970), "Braes of Downie" (1938)

My daily walk takes me through a wide, treeless meadow which slopes gently upward to the west.  At this time of the year, the wild grasses in the meadow are knee high, even hip high in places.  One wades through green along a narrow dirt path.  If the day is breezy, you are surrounded by swaying, rustling waves of green.  When you reach the top, the view suddenly opens up, and there they are, spread out to the horizon: Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.

"Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest.  Justify rather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may become of the fruit, make sure of the flowers and the leaves. 

     *     *     *     *     *

That the end of life is not action but contemplation -- being as distinct from doing -- a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. . . . To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry.  Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned contemplation.  Their work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts for a little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's existence which no machinery affects."

Walter Pater, "Wordsworth," in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (Macmillan 1889), pages 61-62 (italics in original text).

Pater's essay is, I think, one of the finest things ever written about Wordsworth.  But you should take what I say with a grain of salt: as I have said here before, I am a Wordsworthian pantheist (the Wordsworthian-Coleridgean pantheism of 1797 through 1799), so what Pater has to say falls on sympathetic ears.  On the other hand, there are those who find Wordsworth insufferably dull.  That's how these things go.

Eric Hubbard (1892-1957), "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

From within the trees and bushes around the margins of the meadow, the birdsong never ceases.  Now and then you may hear the brief, rapid, hollow knocking of a woodpecker, far off in a dark wood.  You seldom see birds out in the meadow, but, when you do, it is a lovely surprise: a small, lone wanderer unexpectedly hops out of the deep grass beside the path, a few feet in front of you, and then hurries away down the long green tunnel -- as startled as you -- alert, but not greatly alarmed.  

                  Not for Use

A little of Summer spilled over, ran

In splashes of gold on geometry slates.

The grass unstiffened to pressure of sun.

I looked at the melting gates

Where icicles dropped a twinkling rain,

Clusters of shining in early December,

Each window a flaring, effulgent stain.

And easy now to remember

The world's for delight and each of us

Is a joy whether in or out of love.

'No one must ever be used for use,'

Was what I was thinking of.

Elizabeth Jennings, Growing Points (Carcanet 1975).

"Things quiet and unconcerned."  This falling away and paring away of things as the years go by is a welcome development.

Dane Maw (1906-1989), "Langdell Fells, Westmorland"

And now, to return to our English poet.  He was a gentle man who loved cricket and pubs.  He and Thomas Hardy became good friends. He spent more days at the front than any of the other poets of the First World War.  "Yes, I still remember/The whole thing in a way;/Edge and exactitude/Depend on the day."  (Edmund Blunden, "Can You Remember?")  He knew full well the uses to which a human being can be put.  But he never ceased loving the World.

                 Seers

I live still, to love still

          Things quiet and unconcerned, --

                 And many can say this.

                 I watch their bliss,

To these things they have ever returned.

One who has passed beyond

          Sits in my room with me,

But is sitting beside a pond

                 On a fallen tree,

And the pictured water-countenance

Is his day's ample inheritance.

And one died young who passed

          An hour or two away

From war, where windows were glassed

          And kept their kind display,

There he stands rapt, -- the china, the clocks,

Gollywogs, chessmen, postcards, frocks.

Enough it was also for her

          Whose life was toil on toil

If sometimes a wanderer

          Where bracken fronds uncoil,

Or silverweeds in woodways shone

She might regard them one by one.

Edmund Blunden, A Hong Kong House: Poems 1951-1961 (Collins 1962).

He closes his best-known poem with this line: "Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun."

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

Secret Sharers

Here is one way of looking at how we abide in the world:

"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.  Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

Walter Pater, "Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 249.

I thought of Pater's passage after reading this:

                       Man in a Park

One lost in thought of what his life might mean

Sat in a park and watched the children play,

Did nothing, spoke to no one, but all day

Composed his life around the happy scene.

And when the sun went down and keepers came

To lock the gates, and all the voices were

Swept to a distance where no sounds could stir,

This man continued playing his odd game.

Thus, without protest, he went to the gate,

Heard the key turn and shut his eyes until

He felt that he had made the whole place still,

Being content simply to watch and wait.

So one can live, like patterns under glass,

And, like those patterns, not committing harm.

This man continued faithful to his calm,

Watching the children playing on the grass.

But what if someone else should also sit

Beside him on the bench and play the same

Watching and counting, self-preserving game,

Building a world with him no part of it?

If he is truthful to his vision he

Will let the dark intruder push him from 

His place, and in the softly gathering gloom

Add one more note to his philosophy.

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), Recoveries (Andre Deutsch 1964).

Pater's observation is one of the stepping stones that takes him, two paragraphs (and a few more stepping stones) later, to his well-known prescription for how to live: "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, page 251.)  But burning with a gem-like flame is not our concern at the moment, dear readers.  (Mind you, I say that as one who is quite fond of Pater.)

Rather, our concern is how to get through "an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" (to borrow from Walker Percy).  In her own quiet, lovely fashion, Jennings shows us a "mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."  The man in the park may not be a complete stranger to some of us.  I suspect he was not a complete stranger to Jennings.  Like Pater, she goes a step further (but in her own way), and gives us those wonderful, beautiful, and mysterious final eight lines, which seem to be about getting through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. 

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Moniaive" (1885)

An observation by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."  (Thomas Hardy, notebook entry for May 29, 1871, in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978), page 10.)  In saying this, Hardy knew full well that he, too, was a "prosaic man."  (I base this thought on having read accounts of Hardy by those who met him.  Selections of these accounts may be found in Martin Ray (editor), Thomas Hardy Remembered (Ashgate 2007) and James Gibson (editor), Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections (Macmillan 1999).  Both books are delightful.)

Well, we are all prosaic women and men, aren't we?  To think otherwise is self-deception.  Perhaps Elizabeth Jennings' wonderful closing lines are relevant: ". . . and in the softly gathering gloom/Add one more note to his philosophy."  Isn't this a variation upon Hardy's thought?  Are we indeed all strangers to one another?

       Lot 304: Various Books

There are always lives

Left between the leaves

Scattering as I dust

The honeymoon edelweiss

Pressed ferns from prayer-books

Seed lists and hints on puddings

Deprecatory letters from old cousins

Proposing to come for Easter

And always clouded negatives

The ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens:

Fading ephemera of non-events,

Whoever owned it

(Dead or cut adrift or homeless in a home)

Nothing to me, a number, or if a name

Then meaningless,

Yet always as I touch a current flows,

The poles connect, the wards latch into place,

A life extends me --

Love-hate; grief; faith; wonder;

Tenderness.

Joan Barton (1908-1986), The Mistress and Other Poems (The Sonus Press 1972).

Joan Barton wrote poems from an early age, but she did not become well-known as a poet until Philip Larkin chose to include one of her poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (Oxford University Press 1973), which he edited.  With respect to "Lot 304: Various Books," it may be helpful to know that Barton was a bookseller for much of her life.

Charles Holmes (1868-1936), "A Warehouse" (1921)

     A summer shower;

A woman sits alone,

     Gazing outside.

Kikaku (1661-1707) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 67.

What is one to do about "that thick wall of personality"?  Is it possible to abandon, or to escape from, our "own dream of a world"?  I'm not wise enough to provide answers to either of those questions.  I'm afraid the best I can do is to return to these lines, which have appeared here on several occasions over the years: ". . . we should be careful//Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."  (Philip Larkin, "The Mower.")

     The long night;

A light passes along

     Outside the shõji.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn, page 356.

Alfred Parsons (1857-1920), "Meadows by the Avon"

What Matters

In my post of November 30, I mentioned the green fields we are fortunate to have throughout winter in this part of the World. Whether the day is dull grey or bright blue, I never tire of that green. I suppose I am easy to please.  But always grateful, or so I hope.

Earlier this week, the fields came to mind when I happened upon this:

                       Fragrant Grass

Fragrant grass, who knows who planted you,

Already spread in several clumps there by the terrace?

You have no mind to compete with the world --

What need is there for this deep rich green?

Wang An-shih (1021-1086) (translated by Burton Watson), in Kōjirō Yoshikawa, An Introduction to Sung Poetry (translated by Burton Watson) (Harvard University Press 1967), page 97.

John Nash (1893-1977), "Dorset Landscape" (c. 1930)

Today, as the sun descended toward the long dark silhouette of the distant mountain peaks, I watched a million bare twigs and branches turn to gold in the late afternoon light.  At the end of my walk, a thin line of crimson clouds lay along the far horizon.

"Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 249.)  Well, yes, true.  Nonetheless, the World is there.  It is not a chimera.  As Wang An-shih beautifully reminds us.

The green is always with us.  And I grow fonder and fonder of the ever green World with each passing year.  Where would we be without the green?

Happy New Year, dear readers, I wish you all the best.

John Nash, "A Path through Trees" (c. 1915)

Here

Last week I took an afternoon walk on a warm, breezy, cloudless day. At times I paused beneath the trees, looking upward, listening to the leaves.  A thought suddenly occurred to me: it is enough to have been put into this World simply to see blue sky beyond swaying boughs of green leaves on a summer afternoon.  At last, there is nothing to be said, no thoughts worth thinking.

     The River of Rivers in Connecticut

There is a great river this side of Stygia, 

Before one comes to the first black cataracts

And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,

The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,

Flashing and flashing in the sun.  On its banks,

No shadow walks.  The river is fateful,

Like the last one.  But there is no ferryman.

He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances

That tell of it.  The steeple at Farmington

Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,

A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .

Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,

The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 1954), page 533.  

The Collected Poems, Stevens' final volume of poetry, was published on October 1, 1954, the day before he turned seventy-five.  "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" is the penultimate poem in the book. It appears in a section titled The Rock, which contains the poems Stevens wrote after the publication of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950.  Stevens died on August 2, 1955.

I have been visiting Stevens' poetry recently, and at the same time I have been reading poetry written by Sōchō (1448-1532).  Sōchō's poems appear in a journal kept by him from 1522 to 1527, when he was in his seventies.  He was a renga (linked-verse) master, and spent much of his life traveling throughout Japan, participating in renga sessions, during a tumultuous and violent time.  Many of the poems in the journal are hokku, the three-line verse form which constitutes the opening link in a renga.  Hokku evolved into the free-standing poem we now know as haiku.

     Yet gently blows the wind,

and gently fall the leaves

     from the willow trees!

Sōchō (translated by H. Mack Horton), in H. Mack Horton (editor and translator), The Journal of Sōchō (Stanford University Press 2002), page 109.

By happenstance, I have discovered that Sōchō's poems and Stevens' late poems in The Rock go together well.  I am loath to depart from the two septuagenarians.  They are fine companions.

Paul Nash (1889-1946), "Berkshire Downs" (1922)

The evidence suggests that Stevens devoted a great deal of time to the arrangement of the poems that appear in The Rock.  He selected this as the opening poem:

                    An Old Man Asleep

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth -- your thoughts, your feelings,

Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,

The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, page 501.

I am reluctant to venture beyond the words of Stevens' poems. Far too much ink has already been spilled by the Wallace Stevens academic-industrial complex.  What could I possibly add?  Alas, how can I resist?  First, "An Old Man Asleep" is lovely, which is all that matters.  The words and their sound.  Second, "the two worlds" ("the self and the earth") are something to bear in mind when reading any poem by Stevens.  Third, and wonderfully, a beautiful particular: "The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R."  Again, best to leave beauty as it is, and the words as they are, without comment. Yet one should be aware of the lovely and important place that rivers occupy in Stevens' poetry. "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" is probably my favorite Stevens poem, but it has close competitors, one of which is "This Solitude of Cataracts": "He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,/Which kept flowing and never the same way twice . . ."

With respect to "the drowsy motion of the river R" -- "an unnamed flowing" -- and its "gayety," "propelling force," and fatefulness, this may be worth considering:

"At all times some things are hastening to come into being, and others to be no more; and of that which is coming to be, some part is already extinct.  Flux and transformation are forever renewing the world, as the ever-flowing stream of time makes boundless eternity forever young.  So in this torrent, in which one can find no place to stand, which of the things that go rushing past should one value at any great price?  It is as though one began to lose one's heart to a little sparrow flitting by, and no sooner has one done so than it has vanished from sight."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Robin Hard), Meditations, Book VI, Section 15 (Oxford University Press 2011), page 48.

That's enough of that.  A few words from Sōchō are in order:

     A morning glory --

like dreams or dew, the flower

     blooms but a moment.

Sōchō (translated by H. Mack Horton), in H. Mack Horton (editor and translator), The Journal of Sōchō, page 108.

Paul Nash, "Behind the Inn" (1922)

"It is enough to have been put into this World simply to see blue sky beyond swaying boughs of green leaves on a summer afternoon." So it seemed to me for a moment as I stood beneath a tree last week. Ah, merely a passing fancy.  A hasty, ill-considered conclusion. Pretentious and overly-dramatic as well.  There is much more to life than blue sky and green leaves, isn't there?

A few days later, something written by Walter Pater came to mind: "He has been a sick man all his life.  He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."  (Walter Pater, "A Prince of Court Painters," in Imaginary Portraits (Macmillan 1887), page 48.)  But of course.

And yet there is the final poem in The Rock, which is also the final poem in The Collected Poems.  As is the case with "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (which immediately precedes it) and "An Old Man Asleep," Stevens placed it where it is with intent.

   Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird's cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow . . .

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep's faded papier-mâché . . .

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry -- it was 

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away.  It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, page 534.

This time I will stay silent, and defer to Sōchō:

     In the moon's clear light

all mundane desires

     are but a path of dreams.

Sōchō (translated by H. Mack Horton), in H. Mack Horton (editor and translator), The Journal of Sōchō, page 29.

Paul Nash, "Oxenbridge Pond" (1928)

Two Worlds

A politicized culture (or, more properly, "culture") inevitably tends toward puritanism: the elect and the impure.  Ever-recurring, the latest iteration of the self-anointed is upon us.  O, Tychon, god of small things, god of the humble, please grant us relief.

Earlier this week, revisiting The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (948 wonderful pages), I discovered this:

                           Arrogance

I saw bleak Arrogance, with brows of brass,

Clad nape to sole in shimmering foil of lead,

Stark down his nose he stared; a crown of glass

Aping the rainbow, on his tilted head.

His very presence drained the vital air;

He sate erect -- stone-cold, self-crucified;

On either side of him an empty chair;

And sawdust trickled from his wounded side.

Walter de la Mare, The Burning-Glass and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1945).

A thought from Walter Pater comes to mind:

"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.  Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 249.

"Each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." The temptation is great to conclude that one is wise and virtuous.  A comforting delusion.

                                           Learning

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

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998), page 60.

Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935)

"Harvesting, Forest of Birse, Aberdeenshire" (1900)

The trees are still mostly full, still mostly green.  Yesterday afternoon, in a gusty wind, their boughs tossed and roared.  The day was clear and brilliant, and dappled light and shadow turned and turned on the ground.  It could have been a summer day.  But, at intervals, lines of fallen leaves rushed along the sidewalks and the streets, carried away by the wind.

What has become of the two woolly bear caterpillars who appeared in my last post?  I encountered two more of the lovely, endearing creatures last week.  Like their companions, they were crossing a path, headed off toward the trees, full of intent, going about their appointed business.  As for humanity, we always have been, and always will be, a scold-ridden species, confused and grasping, forever meddling, never content.  Best to keep one's own counsel.  A woolly bear caterpillar.  "Everything Is Going To Be All Right."

         Mute Opinion

                    I

I traversed a dominion

Whose spokesmen spake out strong

Their purpose and opinion

Through pulpit, press, and song.

I scarce had means to note there

A large-eyed few, and dumb,

Who thought not as those thought there

That stirred the heat and hum.

                      II

When, grown a Shade, beholding

That land in lifetime trode,

To learn if its unfolding

Fulfilled its clamoured code,

I saw, in web unbroken,

Its history outwrought

Not as the loud had spoken,

But as the mute had thought.

Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (Macmillan 1901).

David MacKay (1853-1904), "Crail at Harvest Time"

"The imperceptible movement of an invisible soul and the enormous sun."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-79 (Seagull Books 2013), page 159.)  There is the world.  And then there is the World.  Where does one reside?

          From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate

Over a London mews -- to contemplate --

Is it the sky above -- the stones below?

     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,

     Or thinking forward to futurity

That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,

Quietly folded are the quiet hands,

Rarely he speaks.

     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,

     So much to spend?

What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,

He is become to me

A form of rest.

     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs

     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,

And not unblest

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

Duncan Cameron (1837-1916), "Harvest Time in Lorne" (1888)

River

The vision of life as the flowing of a river (or a stream, a brook) is a lovely and felicitous one.  Not surprisingly, poets return to the image again and again, in all times and in all places.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am fond of the fragments of blank verse that appear in William Wordsworth's Alfoxden notebook, which he kept from January through March of 1798.  In the notebook, one finds this:

                    They rest upon their oars
Float down the mighty stream of tendency
In a calm mood of holy indolence
A most wise passiveness in which the heart
Lies open and is well content to feel
As nature feels and to receive her shapes
As she has made them.

William Wordsworth, in James Butler (editor), The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar (Cornell University Press 1979), page 115.

"Holy indolence" deserves our attention.  As does "a most wise passiveness," another beguiling combination of words.  However, since our subject at the moment is life as the flowing of a watercourse, we shall have to save our consideration of these lovely combinations for another time.  This brings us to "the mighty stream of tendency."  Wordsworth was quite taken with the phrase.  It first appears in a fragment on the previous page in the Alfoxden notebook:

Some men there are who like insects &c
dart and dart against the mighty
stream of tendency[,] others with
no vulgar sense of their existence
To no vulgar end float calmly
down.

William Wordsworth, Ibid, page 113.

The phrase eventually found its way into Book IX of The Excursion, as part of the "Discourse of the Wanderer":

What more than this, that we thereby should gain
Fresh power to commune with the invisible world,
And hear the mighty stream of tendency
Uttering, for elevation of our thought,
A clear sonorous voice.

William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Book IX, lines 85-89 (edited by Sally Bushell, James Butler, Michael Jaye) (Cornell University Press 2007).

In addition to "the mighty stream of tendency," in an earlier section of The Excursion Wordsworth gives us these lines, spoken by "the Solitary":

                                                         The tenor
Which my life holds, he readily may conceive
Whoe'er hath stood to watch a mountain Brook
In some still passage of its course, and seen,
Within the depths of its capacious breast,
Inverted trees, and rocks, and azure sky;
And, on its glassy surface, specks of foam,
And conglobated bubbles undissolved,
Numerous as stars; that, by their onward lapse,
Betray to sight the motion of the stream,
Else imperceptible; meanwhile, is heard
Perchance, a roar or murmur; and the sound
Though soothing, and the little floating isles
Though beautiful, are both by Nature charged
With the same pensive office; and make known
Through what perplexing labyrinths, abrupt
Precipitations, and untoward straits,
The earth-born wanderer hath passed; and quickly,
That respite o'er, like traverses and toils
Must be again encountered -- Such a stream
Is human Life; and so the Spirit fares
In the best quiet to its course allow'd:
And such is mine, -- save only for a hope
That my particular current soon will reach
The unfathomable gulph, where all is still!

William Wordsworth, Ibid, Book III, lines 974-998.

One either likes this sort of thing in Wordsworth or one does not.  I am among the former.  Walter Pater wrote one of the finest essays on Wordsworth.  Among many other perceptive observations, he notes: "And the mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden within -- the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be tame enough."  (Walter Pater, "Wordsworth," in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (Macmillan 1889), page 39.)

Samuel Birch (1869-1955), "Our Little Stream, Lamorna" (c. 1926)

"Such a stream/Is human Life; and so the Spirit fares/In the best quiet to its course allow'd."  These lines fit well with "the mighty stream of tendency," "holy indolence," and "a most wise passiveness." Once again:

                    They rest upon their oars
Float down the mighty stream of tendency
In a calm mood of holy indolence
A most wise passiveness in which the heart
Lies open and is well content to feel
As nature feels and to receive her shapes
As she has made them.

It is the floating, the "calm mood," the "passiveness," "the best quiet to its course allow'd" that are alluring:  a willing surrender to an unceasing flow.

I return to an entry from a notebook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which has appeared here before:

"The Whale followed by Waves -- I would glide down the rivulet of quiet Life, a Trout!"

Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 54 (1795-1796).  As I noted in my previous post, there was a time when Wordsworth and Coleridge were thinking the same thoughts.  Another way to put it is that they were completing each other's thoughts.  A wonderful time it was.

These two passages in turn bring this to mind:

         The River

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Birch, "A Cornish Stream"

All this talk of rivers and of life inevitably brings me to one of my favorite poems.  I beg your forbearance, dear readers, for it has appeared here on three previous occasions.  My only excuse is that I have carried this poem within me for over forty years, and, although I do not think of it daily, I know it is always there.

    The River of Rivers in Connecticut

There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun.  On its banks,

No shadow walks.  The river is fateful,
Like the last one.  But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it.  The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Wallace Stevens,  The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf 1954).

Samuel Birch, "The Stream at Lamorna" (c. 1914)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Six: The Stars, The Planets, And The Wind

On a recent late-summer-declining-into-early-autumn afternoon, as I walked toward a distant big-leaf maple, watching its green boughs swaying high in the cloudless sky, I suddenly felt the same wordless wonder and joy at the mysterious miracle of the World that I felt when I was a child.  The feeling came out of nowhere, and lasted only an instant.  Yet, for that instant, I was who I was fifty or sixty years ago.  Nothing had changed.

Fear not, dear readers!  I do not intend to launch into an apostrophe about how we ought to "see the World through the eyes of a child."  I am simply reporting a fact.  As for reconciling how we experience the World as children with how we experience it as adults, I would refer you to William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."  I cannot hope to improve upon that.

The morning after my fleeting return to childhood, I happened upon this:

                          Escape at Bedtime

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
     Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
     There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
     Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
     And that glittered and winked in the dark.

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
     And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
     Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
     And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
     And the stars going round in my head.

Robert Louis Stevenson,  A Child's Garden of Verses (Longmans, Green 1885).

I am particularly fond of ". . . and the pail by the wall/Would be half full of water and stars."  A friend who read the manuscript of A Child's Garden of Verses at Stevenson's request had proposed a revision to the lines.  Stevenson's response is worth noting:

"For line 12 [Sidney] Colvin suggested . . . 'Twinkled half full' instead of 'Would be half full.'  RLS sharply rejected this:  '"Twinkled" is just the error; to the child the stars appear to be there; any word that suggests illusion is a horror'."

Roger Lewis (editor), The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh University Press 2003), page 364.

Exactly.  The World of the child is one of wonderment and enchantment and mystery.  Anything is possible.

William Miller Frazer (1864-1961), "A West Coast Fishing Village"

Stevenson's poem put me in mind of this:

                 Wanderers

Wide are the meadows of night,
     And daisies are shining there,
Tossing their lovely dews,
     Lustrous and fair;
And through these sweet fields go,
     Wanderers amid the stars --
Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune,
     Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

Attired in their silver, they move,
     And circling, whisper and say,
Fair are the blossoming meads of delight
     Through which we stray.

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (Constable 1913).

As in "Escape at Bedtime," the World of "Wanderers" is an enchanted and enchanting place.  Stevenson's "thousands of millions of stars" have been transformed into daisies shining in "the meadows of night."  A lovely image.  I am reminded of two instances in which the image is reversed:  Thomas Hardy's "constellated daisies" on "the grassy ground" ("The Rambler") and Andrew Young's "The stars are everywhere to-night,/Above, beneath me and around;/They fill the sky with powdery light/And glimmer from the night-strewn ground;/For where the folded daisies are/In every one I see a star" ("Daisies").  (There is never an end to the ways in which poets invite us to see the World, is there?)

But that is not all:  an enchanted and enchanting World is a World of mystery.  "But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,/And the stars going round in my head."  "And through these sweet fields go,/Wanderers amid the stars . . . And circling, whisper and say,/Fair are the blossoming meads of delight/Through which we stray." Where is our place in this World of stars and planets and daisies?  A child's question.  An adult's question.

[A side-note:  I like the fact that de la Mare and Stevenson do not patronize the children for whom they write.  (The same is true of Christina Rossetti.)  I also like the fact that "Escape at Bedtime" and "Wanderers" could be mistaken for "adult poems" if one encountered them outside the context of a book of "children's verse."  (This is true of a great many of the "children's poems" written by de la Mare, Stevenson, and Rossetti.)  Of course, modern ironists might scoff at this latter assertion, but they have ironized themselves out of Beauty and Truth long ago, haven't they?  Alas, there is no hope for them, so knowing and so undeceived.  Their World is disenchanted.]

William Miller Frazer, "East Linton Pastoral Landscape"

A disenchanted World holds no mystery.  Where do we come from and whither do we go?  Once again, this is both a child's question and an adult's question.  Early and late, it is a question one asks in an enchanted World.

               Nobody Knows

Often I've heard the Wind sigh
     By the ivied orchard wall,
Over the leaves in the dark night,
     Breathe a sighing call,
And faint away in the silence,
     While I, in my bed,
Wondered, 'twixt dreaming and waking,
     What it said.

Nobody knows what the wind is,
     Under the height of the sky,
Where the hosts of the stars keep far away house
     And its wave sweeps by --
Just a great wave of the air,
     Tossing the leaves in its sea,
And foaming under the eaves of the roof
     That covers me.

And so we live under deep water,
     All of us, beasts and men,
And our bodies are buried down under the sand,
     When we go again;
And leave, like the fishes, our shells,
     And float on the Wind and away,
To where, o'er the marvellous tides of the air,
     Burns day.

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes.

Is this a poem for children or a poem for adults?  A passage from another context comes to mind:

"Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren.  The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation."

Walter Pater, from "Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 250.

I would suggest that we may substitute "poetry" for "philosophy" in Pater's sentence.  Whether "Nobody Knows" is a "children's poem" or an "adult's poem" is thus of no moment.

William Miller Frazer, "Morning, Newburgh-on-Tay"

"Escape at Bedtime," "Wanderers," and "Nobody Knows" carry us off into the vast and unknowable cosmic mystery of the World.  This is a fine thing.  Now and then.  But most of our life consists of making it through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon (to borrow from Walker Percy).  Yet the quotidian (not a pejorative term) is a vast and unknowable mystery as well, isn't it?

The World is as it was when we were children.  It is still here in all of its enchantment and mystery, in all of its beautiful particulars.  How we experienced the World as a child may sometimes return to us in evanescent moments of clarity, shot through with emotion.  This is a wonderful occurrence.  Like the sudden return of how it felt to fall in love for the first time.  The heart catches in the throat.  Ah, that was it!  But there is no going back.

This is no cause for sadness or despair.  Our daily task is to be attentive, receptive, and, above all, grateful.  An enchanted or a disenchanted World?  The choice is ours.

                        Boy's Song

I walked as a boy by evergreen hedges
And glancingly fingered their leaves as I passed;
Pictures in colour rose fluttering from them
Complete with accurate field notes of song.

I listened delighted to easy lessons
In a high summer school of brilliant birds --
If this were learning I wanted to be
A scholar of evergreen hedges for ever!

Clifford Dyment (1914-1971), Collected Poems (J. M. Dent 1970).

William Miller Frazer, "A Lincolnshire Fen"

Three Thoughts

One evening this past week, after sundown, I sat beside an open window that looks on to the back garden, reading Wordsworth's "Louisa: After Accompanying Her on a Mountain Excursion."  I soon heard, from a few blocks away, a live band begin to play.  A birthday party?  A wedding reception?  Simply a summer soirée?

I read and I listened.  I discovered that the band was playing mostly Top 40 songs from the 1970s:  my high school and college years.  I was compelled to pay closer attention, for part of my life was being played back to me.  I bid farewell to Louisa.  The sound came and went on the breeze:  it took me 30 seconds or so to recognize each song after it began.  "Take It Easy."  Of course.  "Blue Bayou" (via Linda Ronstadt, I presume, not Roy Orbison).  Steve Miller's "Jungle Love."  And so on.

Later in the evening came a moment of inspiration from whoever was selecting the songs for the band's playlist:  "Amie" by Pure Prairie League.  What a wonderful surprise.  I always loved that song, but I hadn't thought of it for years.  The World is forever bestowing unbidden gifts upon us.

Earlier in the week, while browsing in F. L. Lucas's Greek Poetry for Everyman, I came upon this:

Of the Gods and these other matters none knows the verity --
No man that lived before us, no man that yet shall be.
However full-perfected the system he hath made,
Its maker knoweth nothing.  With fancy all's o'erlaid.

Xenophanes (c. 570 - c. 478 B.C.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), p. 257.

A fine thought.  Beware of the architects, and the bearers, of systems. We are all ignorant.  The sooner we acknowledge our ignorance, the better.

Bertram Priestman (1868-1951), "Wooded Hillside" (1910)

I have spent most of this month with ancient Greek poets, Walter Pater, and William Wordsworth.  This was not a plan, just a happy accident.  I am finding they go well together.  A day or so after reading the four lines by Xenophanes, I read this:

"He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."

Walter Pater, from "A Prince of Court Painters," Imaginary Portraits (Macmillan 1890), page 48.

Another fine thought.  A lovely thought.  Or so it seems to me.  A thought that some may feel the force of.  Others, not.  That's how these things go.

Bertram Priestman, "Suffolk Water Meadows" (1906)

Awaiting me at the end of the week was this:

Treat well the living.  Dead men are but dust
And shadow:  our nothingness to nothing goes.

Euripides (translator unknown), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 460.  The lines are from Meleager, a play of which only fragments exist.

A third fine thought.  The lines brought Philip Larkin to mind:

. . . we should be careful

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

Philip Larkin, "The Mower," in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber/The Marvell Press 1988).

Those are the three thoughts that came my way this week.  I feel fortunate they found me.

One more thought:  the hydrangeas in this part of the world seem unusually brilliant this year.  The blue takes your breath away.  I wonder:  has this always been the case?  Have I been asleep all these years?

Bertram Priestman, "Wareham Channel, Dorset" (1910)

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"