Winter Into Spring, Part Seven: "Mystery, Unresting, Taciturn"

Lo and behold: yesterday I saw the first crocuses of the year.  Purple and yellow they were, on a sunny patch of ground facing westward.  They seem a trifle premature in this week's freezing weather.  And tonight the snow has begun to fall.  Ah, but what do I know?

There is ever a mystery to all this, isn't there?  And our ability to put names to it, to "explain" it -- in the language of Science -- means nothing.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "February Afternoon"

                         The Wood

I walked a nut-wood's gloom.  And overhead
A pigeon's wing beat on the hidden boughs,
And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin
Late winter leaves with trickling sound.  Across
My narrow path I saw the carrier ants
Burdened with little pieces of bright straw.
These things I heard and saw, with senses fine
For all the little traffic of the wood,
While everywhere, above me, underfoot,
And haunting every avenue of leaves,
Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.
          .          .          .          .          .
And haunting the lucidities of life
That are my daily beauty, moves a theme
Beating along my undiscovered mind.

John Drinkwater, Loyalties (1919).  The ellipses are in the original.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I tend to be skeptical of the primacy of Science in our modern world, and the claims that are made for it in the name of "progress."  (See, for example:  Wittgenstein and "Progress"; Edmund Blunden and  "Progress"; R. S. Thomas and "Progress.")  I should be clear that I am not opposed to the practice of science that leads to cures for diseases, efficient plumbing, and The Wonders of the Internet.

But I am opposed to the utopian belief (which is what it is: a belief -- no different than any sincerely-held religious belief) that Science, by "explaining" all, will ameliorate our ills, improve our lives, and, ultimately, bring us to the gates of Paradise.  Alas (for true believers), scientific "explanation" leaves one tiny thing out of account:  the human soul -- individual, indissoluble, and inexplicable.  As it happens, this tiny omission invalidates the whole utopian project.  For which we can all be grateful.  Oh, well, back to the drawing board . . .

John Aldridge, "Bridge, February" (1963)

               In the Conservatory

A bird's nest lined with leaves and moss
Kept here through the winter . . .
                  Spring come, I find among leaf-mould
A brown mouse -- the tail an unlikely flourish --
Modelling the letter 'C'
As if it stood for Comfort,
Though it lay there fixed and cold.

Clive Wilmer, The Times Literary Supplement (December 8, 2006).

John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

Winter Into Spring, Part Six: "Now First Known"

In addition to their intrinsic beauty, the bare trees of late winter offer an opportunity for the discovery of birds' nests.  This thought brings to mind Edward Thomas, who was a great searcher for, and lover of, nests.

In a marvelous coincidence, Thomas met Paul Nash in the spring of 1916 at Hare Hall Camp, where Thomas was serving as a map-reading instructor. On May 21, he wrote to Robert Frost:  "I was with a young artist named Paul Nash who has just joined us as a map reader.  He is a change from the 2 schoolmasters I see most of. . . . He is wonderful at finding birds' nests." Edward Thomas, Selected Letters (edited by R. George Thomas) (Oxford University Press 1995), page 126.

It is lovely (and poignant) to think of Thomas and Nash going for walks together in the countryside during their time off, discovering nests.

Paul Nash, "The Orchard" (c. 1914)

                         Birds' Nests

The summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them:  low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark.

Since there's no need of eyes to see them with
I cannot help a little shame
That I missed most, even at eye's level, till
The leaves blew off and made the seeing no game.

'Tis a light pang.  I like to see the nests
Still in their places, now first known,
At home and by far roads.  Boys knew them not,
Whatever jays and squirrels may have done.

And most I like the winter nest deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into:
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel-nuts,
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

Paul Nash, "Oxenbridge Pond" (1927-1928)

W. H. Davies and Edward Thomas were friends.  Thomas supported Davies financially when he was impoverished, even though Thomas and his family were themselves always struggling to make ends meet.

               Killed in Action
             (Edward Thomas)

Happy the man whose home is still
     In Nature's green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
     That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.

And we have known those days, when we
     Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;
When you and I, with thoughtful mind,
     Would help a bird to hide her nest,
For fear of other hands less kind.

But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
     War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
     The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.

W. H. Davies, Forty New Poems (1918).

Paul Nash, "Behind the Inn" (1919-1922)

Winter Into Spring, Part Five: Trees

In a recent post, I noted that, with the coming of spring, I would miss the bare trees of winter.  This feeling returned to me yesterday as I walked beside a long row of empty trees that were creaking and clacking in the wind.  I looked up into the branches -- blue sky overhead -- and, as we all have done, marveled at the beautiful intricacy that is visible only after the leaves have gone.

There is, no doubt, a scientific explanation for this intricacy.  There always is, isn't there?  However, I prefer Ludwig Wittgenstein:  "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness), Proposition 6.44.

Or, less gnomically, John Ruskin:  "If human life be cast among trees at all, the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity."  Modern Painters, Volume V (1860), Chapter 1, Section 4.

David Chatterton, "Devon Scene" (1942)

                          Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one's own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One's Being deceptively armored,
One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word --
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also -- though there has never been
A critical tree -- about the nature of things.

Howard Nemerov, Mirrors and Windows (1958).

"Poems or people are rarely so lovely" (line 14) is an allusion to the opening lines of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees":  "I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree."

Francis Dodd, "Spring in the Suburbs" (1925)

Winter Into Spring, Part Four: "Winter In Spring"

As I have mentioned before, I am fond of the poets of the 1890s.  When it comes to describing the natural world, they tend to insert themselves -- and their dream-laden, death-haunted melancholy -- into that world.  Which is fine with me.  A little bit of dream-laden, death-haunted melancholy is good for the soul from time to time.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Winter in Angus" (1935)

                  Winter in Spring

Winter is over, and the ache of the year
Quieted into rest;
The torn boughs heal, and the time of the leaf is near,
And the time of the nest.

The poor man shivers less by his little hearth,
He will warm his hands in the sun;
He thinks there may be friendliness in the earth
Now the winter is done.

Winter is over, I see the gentle and strange
And irresistible spring:
Where is it I carry winter, that I feel no change
In anything?

Arthur Symons, The Fool of the World and Other Poems (1906).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Arbirlot Mill, near Arbroath"

"Where is it I carry winter, that I feel no change/In anything?"  Well, perhaps a clue lies here:

                   The Soul's Progress

It enters life it knows not whence; there lies
A mist behind it and a mist before.
It stands between a closed and open door.
It follows hope, yet feeds on memories.
The years are with it, and the years are wise;
It learns the mournful lesson of their lore.
It hears strange voices from an unknown shore,
Voices that will not answer to its cries.

Blindly it treads dim ways that wind and twist;
It sows for knowledge, and it gathers pain;
Stakes all on love, and loses utterly.
Then, going down into the darker mist,
Naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,
It staggers out into eternity.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

Yes, I know: Whew!  But I wouldn't say that Symons's vision is uniquely bleak.  For instance, Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy came to similar conclusions, so he is in good company.  Bear in mind:  such a vision doesn't render the World and our existence any less wondrous.  In fact, it may heighten our appreciation for what we have stumbled into . . . until we disappear back into the mist.

James McIntosh Patrick, "The Ettrick Shepherd" (1936)

Winter Into Spring, Part Three: "Thaw"

Edward Thomas wrote four four-line poems:  "In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)," "The Cherry Trees," "When he should laugh," and "Thaw."  "Thaw," as one might expect, fits well with my recent theme of Winter Into Spring.

                                              John Nash, "Winter Scene"

                              Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

In her comment to the poem, Edna Longley notes that the phrase "delicate as flower of grass" was also used by Thomas in a prose piece titled "Flowers of Frost":  "The beeches that were yesterday a brood of giantesses are now insubstantial and as delicate as flowers of grass."  Ibid, page 285.

                     John Nash, "Winter Scene, Buckinghamshire" (1920)

As I have noted before, Michael Longley is an admirer of Edward Thomas's poetry.  Thus, it may not be merely a coincidence that he has also written a four-line poem titled "Thaw."

                              Thaw

Snow curls into the coalhouse, flecks the coal.
We burn the snow as well in bad weather
As though to spring-clean that darkening hole.
The thaw's a blackbird with one white feather.

Michael Longley, The Echo Gate (1979).

Longley's poem is an excellent companion piece to Thomas's poem:  his poem looks inward; Thomas's poem looks outward.  And "freckled" becomes "flecks."  And the "rooks" turn into "a blackbird."  But the same territory -- be it inward or be it outward -- is explored by both poets.

                       John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

Winter Into Spring, Part Two: "Late Snow"

J. C. Squire (1884-1958) is now known (if at all) as a traditionalist who was opposed to the project of literary "modernism."  Whether that reputation is blameworthy or praiseworthy depends upon what one thinks of "modernism" and its spawn.  But, like most generalizations, the "truth" about Squire is not as straightforward as it seems.

Thus, it should be noted that, as the editor of The London Mercury, he published the poetry of Ivor Gurney in the 1920s, when most other editors had become exasperated with Gurney's eccentricity.  Time has shown that Gurney was as modern as they came in the 1920s.  What's more, the fact that Squire got under T. S. Eliot's skin is, in my view, a good thing.

He also wrote poetry, nearly all of which has disappeared from view. However, every so often he came up with something memorable.  We should always bear in mind that it is the poem, not the poet, that matters.

          Douglas Percy Bliss, "Snow in April, Liberton, Edinburgh" (1924)

                                     Late Snow

The heavy train through the dim country went rolling, rolling,
Interminably passing misty snow-covered plough-land ridges
That merged in the snowy sky; came turning meadows, fences,
Came gullies and passed, and ice-coloured streams under frozen bridges.

Across the travelling landscape evenly drooped and lifted
The telegraph wires, thick ropes of snow in the windless air;
They drooped and paused and lifted again to unseen summits,
Drawing the eyes and soothing them, often, to a drowsy stare.

Singly in the snow the ghosts of trees were softly pencilled,
Fainter and fainter, in distance fading, into nothingness gliding,
But sometimes a crowd of the intricate silver trees of fairyland
Passed, close and intensely clear, the phantom world hiding.

O untroubled these moving mantled miles of shadowless shadows,
And lovely the film of falling flakes, so wayward and slack;
But I thought of many a mother-bird screening her nestlings,
Sitting silent with wide bright eyes, snow on her back.

J. C. Squire, Poems, Second Series (1922).

              Stanislawa de Karlowska, "Snow in Russell Square" (c. 1935)

Winter Into Spring, Part One: "Last Hours"

In my previous post, I noted the imminent arrival of the crocus.  However, as I suggested, perhaps I shouldn't be too impatient.  All in good time.

This shoulder season of winter into spring does have its own attractions. The passing of winter does not possess the same wistfulness quotient as the passing of summer into autumn or of autumn into winter.  Yet, it is a time whose vanishing beauties cannot help but awaken a feeling of regret.

For instance, the sight of bare branches against the sky can be as lovely as the threshing and unresting castles (thank you, Philip Larkin) of spring and summer.  I will miss them.

                                 Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (c. 1959)

                 Last Hours

        A gray day and quiet,
        With slow clouds of gray,
And in dull air a cloud that falls, falls,
                    All day.

        The naked and stiff branches
        Of oak, elm, thorn,
In the cold light are like men aged and
                    Forlorn.

        Only a gray sky,
        Grass, trees, grass again,
And all the air a cloud that drips, drips,
                    All day.

        Lovely the lonely
        Bare trees and green grass --
Lovelier now the last hours of slow winter
                    Slowly pass.

John Freeman, Memories of Childhood and Other Poems (1919).

             Gilbert Spencer, "Burdens Farm with Melbury Beacon" (c. 1943)