"Spring, Of All Seasons Most Gratuitous"

One might expect a poem about spring by Philip Larkin to perhaps be a bit mordant.  Perhaps.  After all, one of Larkin's favorite quips about himself was:  "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." Interview with The Observer (1979), in Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1982), page 47. However, bear in mind (as I have noted before) that Larkin was wont to play up his alleged dourness for literary critics and journalists in order to throw them off track.

But we who love Larkin's poetry find his mordancy cheering.  (Of course, this may be due to the fact that we are ourselves mordant.)  Unless he is writing about hospitals or nursing homes or ambulances, I usually finish any poem of his with a smile on my face.  This is either because (1) the poem is lovely, or (2) it tells a marvelous truth about how we live.  Actually, in most cases, both (1) and (2) are true of any poem written by Larkin.

Duncan Grant, "The Doorway" (1929)

                            Spring

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (The Marvell Press 1955).

Larkin wrote his sonnet in May of 1950:  a happy-go-lucky (but "pursed-up") youth of 27.  How can you not love someone who describes himself as "an indigestible sterility"?  (A nice line of pentameter, that.)

Duncan Grant, "Garden Path in Spring" (1944)

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)

"When March Blows"

Ivor Gurney was extremely sensitive to changes in the world around him, be it the weather or the seasons.  Of course, one could argue that any "nature poet" (e.g., Edward Thomas, Andrew Young, John Clare, William Wordsworth) necessarily possesses such a sensitivity.  But in Gurney this sensitivity was particularly acute.

As I have noted before, I am reluctant to attribute Gurney's qualities as a poet to his sometimes precarious mental condition.  It would be unfair to him to suggest that his sensitivity was a product of that condition.  At the risk of sounding romantic, I think that Gurney can be likened to Vincent van Gogh:  the sensuous presence of the world -- everything in it -- was so deeply felt by both of them that they were constantly at risk of being overwhelmed (both physically and mentally).  It would be a disservice to them to describe their sensitivity as a pathology.  Perhaps we are the ones who need to catch up with them.

Enslin Du Plessis, "Cotswold Landscape" (1942)

                        When March Blows

When March blows, and Monday's linen is shown
On the goose berry bushes, and the worried washer alone
Fights at the soaked stuff, meres and the rutted pools
Mirror the wool-pack clouds, and shine clearer than jewels

And the children throw stones in them, spoil mirrors and clouds
The worry of washing over; the worry of foods,
Brings tea-time; March quietens as the trouble dies.
The washing is brought in under wind-swept clear skies.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

John Singer Sargent, "La Biancheria" (1910)

The subject of the washing drying in the wind brings to mind a lovely poem by Andrew Young.  The poem has appeared here before, but it is worth revisiting.

           The Shepherd's Hut

The smear of blue peat smoke
That staggered on the wind and broke,
The only sign of life,
Where was the shepherd's wife,
Who left those flapping clothes to dry,
Taking no thought for her family?
For, as they bellied out
And limbs took shape and waved about,
I thought, She little knows
That ghosts are trying on her children's clothes.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

James McIntosh Patrick, "A City Garden" (1940)

Four-Line Poems, Part Four: Doves And Memory

In my previous post in this series, I blithely claimed that the essence of the experience of love (found and/or lost) could be captured in a four-line poem.  (As if I would know what love is!)  I offered as an example F. T. Prince's "The Wind in the Tree."  The following poem by Patrick MacDonogh is another example of what I am trying to get at.

Arthur Henry Andrews (1906-1966), "Montmartre, Paris"

                      Revaluation

Now I remember nothing of our love
So well as the crushed bracken and the wings
Of doves among dim branches far above --
Strange how the count of time revalues things!

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

The poem says something about our lives and our memories that goes beyond the bittersweet pang of vanished love.  Out of the hundreds of thousands of minutes that we have lived, the few moments that stay with us are often of a dream-like clarity.  In this clarity, certain emotion-freighted sensory details remain forever unchanged.  And, for an instant -- whether we like it or not -- it can all come rushing back.

Arthur Henry Andrews, "Rome"

MacDonogh's poem brings to mind the following poem by Norman MacCaig.  I'm afraid that I cannot come up with any clever connection between the two.  I was simply thinking of doves and memory.

                     Memory

Over the turbulence of the world
flies the bird that stands for memory.
No bird flies faster than this one,
dearer to me
than the dove was to Noah -- though it brings back
sometimes an olive branch, sometimes
a thorny twig without blossoms.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

Arthur Henry Andrews, "A Farmhouse in Devon"

"The Motion Of The Earth"

Yesterday was one of those gentle-breeze, angled-sunlight, blue-sky days which confirm that Spring is no longer a mere promise.  The world seems wide open and wide awake on such days.  But there is also a scent of close earthiness in the air:  the dirt at our feet is burgeoning as well.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Springtime in Eskdale" (1934)

                 The Motion of the Earth

A day with sky so wide,
So stripped of cloud, so scrubbed, so vacuumed free
Of dust, that you can see
The earth-line as a curve, can watch the blue
Wrap over the edge, looping round and under,
Making you wonder
Whether the dark has anywhere left to hide.
But the world is slipping away; the polished sky
Gives nothing to grip on; clicked from the knuckle
The marble rolls along the gutter of time --
Earth, star and galaxy
Shifting their place in space.
Noon, sunset, clouds, the equably varying weather,
The diffused light, the illusion of blue,
Conceal each hour a different constellation.
All things are new
Over the sun, but we,
Our eyes on our shoes, go staring
At the asphalt, the gravel, the grass at the roadside, the door-
step, the doodles of snails, the crochet of mortar and lime,
Seeking the seeming familiar, though every stride
Takes us a thousand miles from where we were before.

Norman Nicholson, The Pot Geranium (1954).

The closing lines make the poem a good companion piece to Louis Simpson's "The Foggy Lane," which appeared in my previous post.  To wit: while we should always keep an eye to the ground (Simpson), we mustn't forget that the earth is speeding away beneath our feet (Nicholson).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)

How To Live, Part Twenty: "The Foggy Lane"

There is something to be said for winnowing, for paring down.  The culture around us encourages short attention spans and hyperactive grasping after chimeras.  Don't get me wrong:  I am in no position to judge.  I don't have the strength of character to be an anchorite.  I am easily seduced by chimeras.  "Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree." "Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule."  Or something like that.

But you have to start somewhere.  Thus -- speaking of mud -- it is always a good idea to keep an eye to the ground.  For instance, this week I saw quite a few crocuses (white, yellow, pale purple, deep purple), as well as the first daffodils.

George Charlton, "Well Walk from New End Square" (1930)

          The Foggy Lane

The houses seem to be floating
in the fog, like lights at sea.

Last summer I came here with a man
who spoke of the ancient Scottish poets --
how they would lie blindfolded,
with a stone placed on the belly,
and so compose their panegyrics . . .
while we, being comfortable, find nothing to praise.

Then I came here with a radical
who said that everything is corrupt;
he wanted to live in a pure world.

And a man from an insurance company
who said that I needed "more protection."

Walking in the foggy lane
I try to keep my attention fixed
on the uneven, muddy surface . . .
the pools made by the rain,
and wheel ruts, and wet leaves,
and the rustling of small animals.

Louis Simpson, Adventures of the Letter I (1971).

What Simpson says is nothing more nor less than what the Chinese T'ang Dynasty poets and the Japanese haiku poets have been saying for centuries:  pay attention.   Pay loving attention.

     The spring day closes,
Lingering
     Where there is water.

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 38.

Herbert Victor Tempest (1913-2003), "View of Leicester Museum"

Rain, Part One: "The Ghost Of Old Unhappiness That Cannot Rest"

If you live in this part of the world long enough, you begin to develop an appreciation for the varieties of rain:  fine, yet insistent, mist; day-long and night-long windless grey curtains; late-afternoon squalls of white sheets sweeping across Puget Sound.

In time, you realize that you have discarded your umbrellas in favor of hats and hooded rain-jackets.  And then, in the middle of the night, after many years, you discover that the sound of rain pattering on the window-panes has long been a source of reassurance.

Peter Graham, "A Spate in the Highlands" (1866)

The following poem is from a series that L. A. G. Strong wrote while living on the coast of western Scotland.

          Rain

It is the ghost
Of old unhappiness
That cannot rest,
Though it has long forgotten
Why it sighs.

Lost joy, lost grief --
A tremor on the sea,
A thin, sad rain
Drifting unhappily
To whisper on the shore.

Too soft an air, too sad
For human hearts.
Too soft, too chill a sound
For human ears.

L. A. G. Strong, Northern Light (1930).

The poem is a bit melancholy, but there are times when the unremitting mists and showers -- especially in the short, dark days of winter -- can awaken the feelings he speaks of.

Peter Graham, "Wandering Shadows" (1878)

"His Soul Is With The Saints, I Trust"

Last week, after posting poems by John Masefield and G. K. Chesterton about the leafy fate of two dead knights, I remembered that Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed a poem on the same subject.  After writing the poem, he recited it to a friend, who later repeated it to Walter Scott.  Unbeknownst to Coleridge, Scott used a slightly different version of the final three lines in Ivanhoe, which was published in 1819.  The poem was not published under Coleridge's name until 1834.

Eileen Aldridge, "The Downs near Brighton, East Sussex" (1962)

               The Knight's Tomb

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be? --
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone, -- and the birch in its stead is grown. --
The Knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust; --
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

Ernest Hartley Coleridge (editor), The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press 1912).

Stephen McKenna, "Foliage" (1983)

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who wrote the following untitled poem, was a knight.  In the last two lines, he hauntingly anticipates the poems by Coleridge, Masefield, and Chesterton.

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 (1925).

I say "hauntingly anticipates" for the following reason:  Devereux was beheaded in February of 1601 for alleged treason against Elizabeth I.

Dane Maw, "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)

Four-Line Poems, Part Three: "The Wind In The Tree"

Tens of thousands of poems have been written about love:  found love, lost love, requited love, unrequited love -- love in all of its permutations and guises.  The lovers have aired their emotions in sonnets, canzoni, odes, and other traditional poetic forms, often going to great lengths to articulate that which may be ultimately inexpressible.

However, I respectfully suggest that it may be possible to capture love (momentarily and evanescently) in a four-line poem.

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

               The Wind in the Tree

She has decided that she no longer loves me.
There is nothing to be done.  I long ago
As a child thought the tree sighed 'Do I know
Whether my motion makes the wind that moves me?'

F. T. Prince, Poems (1938).

Stanley Spencer

"Englefield House, Cookham" (1951)

The following is my humble contribution to the genre of the four-line lost love poem.

     The Land with Wind in the Leaves

Distance cannot remove me from that place.
I stand half a world away and here it is:
A green sway and roar -- blue, vast, open
And refusing always to let me depart.

     Yorkshire 1987 -- Tokyo 1992

sip (Tokyo/Seattle 1992).

I wish to strongly emphasize:  it does not, of course, hold a candle to "The Wind in the Tree."  But, to borrow from Louis MacNeice ("Star-gazer"):  "To me if to no one else the [subject] is of some interest."  I wrote the poem before I encountered "The Wind in the Tree."

And that's all I have to say about that.

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