Littoral

The appearance of Robert Frost's "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" in my previous post got me to thinking about other poems with seaside settings. The comments that I made in my June 5 post about the calming effect of seascapes, and their ability to induce reverie, also come to mind.  Of course, any pleasing natural setting has the capacity to calm us and to lead us into reverie.  But I confess to being partial to the sort of reverie that seaside locations are wont to provoke.

In saying this, I do not intend to scant the particular evocative qualities of, say, mountains or forests or cornfields or streams.  For instance, I have said here before that I would be happy to spend eternity lying beneath the boughs of a tree on a sunny day as the fluttering leaves -- in kaleidoscopic shades of green, shot through with sunlight, set against a blue sky -- whisper and rustle overhead in a soft breeze.  "The wings/Of doves among dim branches far above."  "Noon a purple glow."

Still, the coming-to-the-end-of-things feeling that haunts seasides is unique in its reverie-inducing qualities.  The feeling is equivocal and complex.  You may feel that you have exhausted all possibilities by arriving at the margins of land.  On the other hand, you may feel, as you gaze outward, that the possibilities are endless.  It depends on the day.  It depends on how your life has turned out.

   The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush

Before the first visitor comes the spring
Softening the sharp air of the coast
In time for the first 'invasion.'
Today the place is as it might have been,
Gentle and almost hospitable.  A girl
Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel,
Light-footed, swinging a book-bag,
And the doors that were shut all winter
Against the north wind and the sea mist
Lie open to the street, where one
By one the gulls go window-shopping
And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein
Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong
The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant
Stands at the door as if the world were young,
Watching the first yacht hoist a sail
-- An ideogram on sea-cloud -- and the light
Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;
And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (Viking/The Gallery Press 1991).

Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

My beloved poets of the 1890s seem to have existed in a state of perpetual reverie.  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."  Hence, it is not surprising that, in their poems, we often encounter them sunk in thought in lonely autumn seaside villages or reclining on deep-green hillside swards above deep-blue harbors.  I find this very alluring.

Brittany was the favorite place of escape for Ernest Dowson.  Here is the final stanza of his "In a Breton Cemetery," which has appeared here in the past:

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

But Dieppe, not Brittany, was the quintessential seaside destination of the poets of the Nineties.  It offered them the best of both fin de siècle worlds:  a hint of urban decadence (bars and casinos) in a dreamlike natural landscape consisting of, by turns, fog, blinding sunlight, and mist. All unfolding on the edge of eternity.  With lurid sunsets.

                       Twilight

The pale grey sea crawls stealthily
Up the pale lilac of the beach;
A bluer grey, the waters reach
To where the horizon ends the sea.

Flushed with a tinge of dusky rose,
The clouds, a twilit lavender,
Flood the low sky, and duskier
The mist comes flooding in, and flows

Into the twilight of the land,
And darkness, coming softly down,
Rustles across the fading sand
And folds its arms about the town.

Arthur Symons, Amoris Victima (Leonard Smithers 1897).  According to a note which accompanies the poem in his Collected Works, Symons wrote the poem in Dieppe on August 22, 1895.

As I have observed in the past, no one does this sort of thing better than the Nineties poets.  Of course, they are regarded as quaint and old-fashioned caricatures by moderns, who can only evaluate the past in terms of their own debilitating and distancing irony.  They cannot conceive of the possibility that the poets of the Nineties wrote poetry as if their lives depended on it.

Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

I sometimes imagine myself in my final years.  I see myself living in a small seaside town.  Any town, any sea, any country will do.  Each day I walk slowly along a promenade beside the sea.  The tides go in and out.  Along the promenade, at intervals, are deciduous trees.  Any type will do.  Each year, until the end, I watch the leaves come and go and the tides go in and out.  All possibilities will have been exhausted.  Yet the possibilities will still be endless.

         September in Great Yarmouth

The woodwind whistles down the shore
Piping the stragglers home; the gulls
Snaffle and bolt their final mouthfuls.
Only the youngsters call for more.

Chimneys breathe and beaches empty,
Everyone queues for the inland cold --
Middle-aged parents growing old
And teenage kids becoming twenty.

Now the first few spots of rain
Spatter the sports page in the gutter.
Council workmen stab the litter.
You have sown and reaped; now sow again.

The band packs in, the banners drop,
The ice-cream stiffens in its cone.
The boatman lifts his megaphone:
'Come in, fifteen, your time is up.'

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

Richard Eurich, "Whitby in Wartime"

My daily walk takes me past a large meadow that slopes gently down for a quarter-mile or so to a bluff beside Puget Sound.  The meadow is covered with tall grasses, with a wild rose bush here and there.  At this time of year a single patch of purple-pink and purple-white sweet peas -- a rough circle about 30 or 40 feet in diameter -- is abloom in the center of the meadow, about halfway to the edge of the bluff.  Beyond the meadow the water stretches away to green-blue islands and to the Olympic Mountains.

The world is indeed Paradise.  Which we tend to forget.  I know I do.

                         Requies

O is it death or life
That sounds like something strangely known
In this subsiding out of strife,
This slow sea-monotone?

A sound, scarce heard through sleep,
Murmurous as the August bees
That fill the forest hollows deep
About the roots of trees.

O is it life or death,
O is it hope or memory,
That quiets all things with this breath
Of the eternal sea?

Arthur Symons, Silhouettes (Elkin Matthews and John Lane 1892). Symons wrote the poem in Dieppe on June 20, 1890.  It is part of a six-poem sequence titled "At Dieppe."

Richard Eurich, "Fawley Beach" (1939)

Humanity

The recent Brexit referendum and the ongoing presidential election campaign in the United States have got me to thinking about the politicization of daily life, a subject that I have considered here in the past. But let me be clear at the outset:  this is a non-political blog, and you will not hear any opinions from me on either Brexit or the presidential election. I am not a citizen of the United Kingdom, so Brexit is none of my business. As for the presidential election:  I intend to sit it out.

What concerns me is how the politicization of culture and of individual consciousness encourages people to adopt stereotypical, patronizing, and dehumanizing views of those who are on the other side of a political issue. This has been glaringly apparent in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and it has been an ongoing feature of the presidential campaign.

Who among us is in a position to adopt such views?  Do those who hold these views realize that they are in fact dehumanizing themselves in the process?  They have become exactly what the politicians, political "activists," and media oversimplifiers and crisis-mongers want them to be:  political animals.

   Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be --
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost, A Further Range (Henry Holt 1936.)

Be careful before you make any quick judgments on what the poem "means."  Depending upon how you read the poem, you may be a misanthrope or you may be a lover of humanity.  Or both.  Or neither.  In his fine study of Frost's poetry, Tim Kendall says this of the poem:  "This is what I can see happening, the poet tells his reader.  Make of it what you will."  Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost (Yale University Press 2012), page 356.  But this much is certain:  you are standing there on the sand, dear reader, as are we all.

Osmund Caine, "Wedding at Twickenham Parish Church" (1948)

Being politicized leads to evaluating and judging the world and other human beings in terms of classes, categories, and clichés.  Never underestimate the allure of a priori conclusions.  For the politicized, everything appears to be simple and subject to explanation.  Us and them. The enlightened versus the benighted.

All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual human being or with the individual human soul.

                    Balances

Because I see the world poisoned
by cant and brutal self-seeking,
must I be silent about
the useless waterlily, the dunnock's nest
in the hedgeback?

Because I am fifty-six years old
must I love, if I love at all,
only ideas -- not people, but only
the idea of people?

Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?

There are more meanings than those
in text books of economics
and a part of the worst slum
is the moon rising over it
and eyes weeping and
mouths laughing.

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

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (1952)

Each of us has a far better opinion of ourself than we ought to.  That is a given.  A part of human nature.  But, when you add politics to the mix, the opportunities for superciliousness expand exponentially.  Vast territories of grandiosity, oversimplification, and unexamined assumptions lie open for exploration.  And you can be sure that the politicized -- left, right, and center -- will undertake the expedition.

                                                     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).

W. B. Yeats could be as supercilious as they come.  But every once in a while he experienced a moment of clarity.

                                     Paudeen

Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old Paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems (Macmillan 1916).

"A single soul," yes.  Yet something else comes to mind as well.

                           Aboard a Boat, Listening to Insects

As though delighting, as though grieving, each with its own song --
an idler, listening, finds his ears washed completely clean.
As the boat draws away from grassy banks, they grow more distant,
till the many varied voices become one single voice.

Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767-1837) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

George Charlton, "Welsh Chapel" (1950)

I am well aware that there may be those among you who find this disquisition (diatribe?) to be supercilious in its own right.  Apathy and quietism as the world goes up in flames.  I see your point.  Ah, well, we are all in "the vale of Soul-making."  We each choose our own path.

                    Politics

You say a thousand things,
Persuasively,
And with strange passion hotly I agree,
And praise your zest,
And then
A blackbird sings
On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,
Ghostlike, with loaded wain,
Come down the twilit lane
To rest,
And what is all your argument to me?

Oh yes -- I know, I know,
It must be so --
You must devise
Your myriad policies,
For we are little wise,
And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep
Too fast a sleep
Far from the central world's realities.
Yes, we must heed --
For surely you reveal
Life's very heart; surely with flaming zeal
You search our folly and our secret need;
And surely it is wrong
To count my blackbird's song,
My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,
More than a world of dream.

But still
A voice calls from the hill --
I must away --
I cannot hear your argument to-day.

John Drinkwater, Tides (Sidgwick and Jackson 1917).

But life is more than a matter of blackbirds singing and lilacs blooming, isn't it?  Thus, please forgive me as I return once again to some of the best advice that I have come across during my time on earth:

               . . . we should be careful

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

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

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

Twilight

As I have noted here in the past, a few times each year I feel the urge to visit the misty, twilit (at  all hours of the day) world of the poets of the 1890s. There is no telling when this urge will arrive.  It is purely a matter of emotion.  Thus, as summer begins, I find myself immersed in the dreamy, death-haunted, yellow-turning-to-grey world of the fin de siècle.  On this occasion, however, my return is not prompted by free-floating emotion, but by coming across this poem:

               To a Minor Poet of 1899

To leave a verse concerning the sad hour
That awaits us at the limit of the day,
To bind your name to its sorrowful date
Of gold and of vague shade.  That's what you wanted.
With what passion as the day drew to its close
You labored on and on at the strange verse
That, until the universe disperses,
Would confirm the hour of the strange blue!
I do not know if ever you succeeded
Nor, vague elder brother, if you existed,
But I am alone and want oblivion
To restore your fleeting shade to the days
In the supreme already worn-out effort
Of words wherein the evening may yet be.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Charles Tomlinson), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

I suppose that, from the standpoint of "literary criticism" (whatever that is), all of the poets of the Nineties (with the exception of W. B. Yeats) are "minor poets."  But the whole concept of "major" and "minor" poets is useless.  As you have heard me say before, dear readers, it is the poem that is important, not the poet.

Perhaps this is what Borges is trying to tell us, at least in part.  What matters is "the supreme already worn-out effort/Of words wherein the evening may yet be."  Are all of the poems written by "major poets" good? Of course not.  Are all of the poems written by "minor poets" bad?  Of course not.  And so-called "minor poets" have written poems that are as good as the best poems ever written by "major poets."  Using these sorts of labels encourages laziness and discourages expeditions of discovery.

George Reid, "Evening" (1873)

I suspect that some assiduous scholar has tracked down which "minor poet of 1899" Borges had in mind.  The poet may be Argentinian, not English.  I have not looked into that.  Moreover, knowing Borges, it is entirely possible that the "minor poet" is an imaginary poet.

In the absence of a name, I would like to share two poems published in 1899 by my favorite poets of the Nineties:  Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson.  I believe that the poems capture the twilit atmosphere evoked by Borges in his poem:  "the sad hour/That awaits us at the limit of the day," the "sorrowful date/Of gold and of vague shade" and "the hour of the strange blue."  Symons and Dowson knew them well.

          On Inishmaan
           (Isles of Aran)

In the twilight of the year,
Here, about these twilight ways,
When the grey moth night drew near,
Fluttering on a faint flying,
I would linger out the day's
Delicate and moth-grey dying.

Grey, and faint with sleep, the sea
Should enfold me, and release
Some old peace to dwell with me.
I would quiet the long crying
Of my heart with mournful peace,
The grey sea's, in its low sighing.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (Heinemann 1899).

"The grey moth night" has stayed with me since I first read the poem years ago.  When I come across four words such as these, I am reminded why I love poetry.  Beauty may be just around the corner.  And it will accompany you for the rest of your life.

Charles Napier Hemy, "Evening Grey" (1868)

In the following poem, Derek Mahon evokes the preoccupation (or is it infatuation?) with death that is so prevalent in the poetry of the 1890s. Mahon's tone may seem a bit dismissive, but, overall, I think he feels an affinity with the poets.  This is more apparent in his later poem "Remembering the '90s," which appears in The Yellow Book (The Gallery Press 1997), a collection that borrows its name from the iconic quarterly magazine of the fin de siècle.

             The Poets of the Nineties

Slowly, with the important carelessness
Of your kind, each spirit-sculptured face
Appears before me, eyes
Bleak from discoveries.

I had almost forgotten you had been,
So jealous was I of my skin
And the world with me.  How
Goes it with you now?

Did death and its transitions disappoint you,
And the worms you so looked forward to?
Perhaps you found that you had to queue
For a ticket into hell,
Despite your sprays of laurel.

You were all children in your helpless wisdom,
Retiring loud-mouths who would not be dumb --
Frustrated rural clergymen
Nobody would ordain.

Then ask no favour of reincarnation,
No yearning after the booze and whores --
For you, if anyone,
Have played your part
In holding nature up to art . . .

Be content to sprawl in your upland meadows,
Hair and boy-mouths stuck with flowers --
And rest assured, the day
Will be all sunlight, and the night
A dutiful spectrum of stars.

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

When the poem was first published in Mahon's Night-Crossing (Oxford University Press 1968), it was titled "Dowson and Company."  The lines "Be content to sprawl in your upland meadows,/Hair and boy-mouths stuck with flowers" bring to mind Dowson's "Breton Afternoon," which begins with this stanza:

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

The fascination with "death and its transitions" noted by Mahon is reminiscent of the third stanza of "Breton Afternoon":

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

(A side-note:  Mahon writes of his own visit to Breton in a lovely four-poem sequence titled "Breton Walks," which may be found in Poems 1962-1978.)

Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "The Mill in the Valley" (1892)

Ernest Dowson's final volume of verse was published in 1899.  He died the following year at the age of 32.  The volume closes with this poem:

                            A Last Word

Let us go hence:  the night is now at hand;
     The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
     And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
     Laughter or tears, for we have only known
     Surpassing vanity:  vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
     To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
     Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands!  O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

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

Dowson wrote what is perhaps the quintessential poem of the Nineties: "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam," which has appeared here on more than one occasion.  The poem ends with these lines:

     Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
     Within a dream.

It has always been thus.  The poets of the Nineties have said these things as well as they have ever been said.  There is nothing new under the sun, but we need poets to tell us these things in their own fashion, whatever their time and wherever their place.  To return to Borges:  "the supreme already worn-out effort/Of words wherein the evening may yet be."  "Worn-out?"  I wonder.  Restated, perhaps.  And timeless.

That man's life is but a dream --
is what we now come to know.

Its house abandoned,
the garden has become home
     to butterflies.

Sōgi (1421-1502) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991).

Allan Gwynne-Jones, "Spring Evening, Froxfield" (1922)

How To Live, Part Twenty-Six: Dwelling

We live in a noisy world.  The noise comes both from outside and from inside.  All we need is a little peace and quiet.  A universal sentiment, don't you think?

Fortunately, we have it in our power to shut out the noise.  Right at this moment.  To cite but one example:  pay no attention to the News of the World.  It is easily done.  Turning off the internal noise is much more difficult.  Often, at the start of my daily walk, I say to myself:  "No thinking."  I inevitably fail.

T'ao Yüan-ming (whose nom de plume was "T'ao Ch'ien," meaning, roughly, "the Recluse") left his position in government to live in the countryside.  His was not a life of comfortable retreat:  he worked as a farmer and had a large family.  His poetry reflects a sense of contentment and tranquility, with occasional bumps in the road (the inevitable consequence of making one's living as a farmer).

I built my hut in a place where people live,
and yet there's no clatter of carriage or horse.
You ask me how that could be?
With a mind remote, the region too grows distant.
I pick chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge,
see the southern mountain, calm and still.
The mountain air is beautiful at close of day,
birds on the wing coming home together.
In all this there's some principle of truth,
but try to define it and you forget the words.

T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).  The poem is untitled.

The truths that one finds in poetry are not limited to a particular place or time.  A conversation between T'ao Ch'ien, a Chinese poet of the 4th and 5th centuries, and Walter de la Mare, an English poet of the 20th century, may, I hope, demonstrate the universality of poetic truth.  Think of de la Mare's poems in this post as both a counterpoint to, and an echo of, T'ao Ch'ien's poem.

                         Days and Moments

The drowsy earth, craving the quiet of night,
Turns her green shoulder from the sun's last ray;
Less than a moment in her solar flight
Now seems, alas! thou fleeting one, life's happiest day.

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

Robin Tanner, "The Gamekeeper's Cottage" (1928)

T'ao Ch'ien possessed deep knowledge of Taoism.  Hence, it is not surprising that the final two lines of his poem are reminiscent of Lao Tzu's well-known statement from the Tao te Ching (as translated by Arthur Waley):  "Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know." Here is another translation of T'ao Ch'ien's poem:

I have built my cottage amid the realm of men
But I hear no din of horses or carriages.
You might ask, "How is this possible?"
A remote heart creates its own hermitage!
Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge,
I perceive the Southern Mountain in the distance.
Marvelous is the mountain air at sunset!
The flitting birds return home in pairs,
In these things is the essence of truth --
I wish to explain but have lost the words.

T'ao Ch'ien (translated by Angela Jung Palandri), in Angela Jung Palandri, "The Taoist Vision: A Study of T'ao Yüan-ming's Nature Poetry," Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 15 (1988).

Some truths cannot be put into words.  These truths are usually the most important truths.  "Forget[ting] the words" or "los[ing] the words" is not necessarily a bad thing:  it may be a sign that you have learned something important.  An observation by Ludwig Wittgenstein (which has appeared here on more than one occasion) complements Lao Tzu and T'ao Ch'ien quite well:  "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness), Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

                                      Solitude

     Space beyond space:  stars needling into night:
     Through rack, above, I gaze from Earth below --
Spinning in unintelligible quiet beneath
     A moonlit drift of cloudlets, still as snow.

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

Robin Tanner, "June" (1946)

The fourth line of T'ao Ch'ien's poem contains the Chinese character xin. The same character is known as kokoro in Japanese.  The character is a wonderful one:  in both Chinese and Japanese it can mean "heart," but it can also mean "mind."  It can also carry connotations of "spirit," "soul," or "core," which seems appropriate:  heart-mind; mind-heart.  That evanescent and ungraspable thing.  Animula vagula blandula.

Burton Watson elects to translate xin as "mind," as does David Hinton in the following translation of the poem.  Palandri, on the other hand, translates xin as "heart."  Arthur Waley, who produced the first translation of this poem into English (which appears at the end of this post), also elects to use "heart."  This division of opinion suggests that we have no word in English to match the beauty, implication, and subtlety of xin (or kokoro).

I live here in a village house without
all that racket horses and carts stir up,

and you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself

a distant place.  Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off:  air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home.  All this means something,

something absolute:  whenever I start
to explain it, I forget words altogether.

T'ao Ch'ien (translated by David Hinton), in David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Counterpoint 2002).

                            Unforeseen

Darkness had fallen.  I opened the door:
And lo, a stranger in the empty room --
A marvel of moonlight upon wall and floor . . .
The quiet of mercy?  Or the hush of doom?

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

Robin Tanner, "Martin's Hovel" (1927)

"Admirable is a person who has nothing that hampers his mind."  Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (Twayne 1970), page 118.  And why not this as well, given our consideration of xin and kokoro:  "Admirable is a person who has nothing that hampers his heart."  Perhaps this is what T'ao Ch'ien is getting at in line 4:  "a mind remote" (Watson); "a remote heart" (Palandri); "the mind dwells apart" (Hinton).  And, from Arthur Waley in the translation below:  "a heart that is distant."

I built my hut in a zone of human habitation,
Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach.
Would you know how that is possible?
A heart that is distant creates a wilderness round it.
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.

T'ao Ch'ien (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918).

This remoteness or distance of heart or mind is not a matter of coldness, indifference, or self-absorption.  It is a matter of the mind or the heart not being hampered or stifled by the noise of the World, and by the noise that comes from within our ever-buzzing brain.  "Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?" Chuang Tzu (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (Columbia University Press 1964), page 140.

                                      Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:
Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,
The lovely in life is the familiar,
And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

Robin Tanner, "The Wicket Gate" (1977)

Other Worlds

Apart from my first eleven years, I have spent my life along salt-water shores:  the Pacific Ocean, Puget Sound (an appendage of the Pacific), and the Andaman Sea (for two years).  Hence, I have gotten used to having a body of water at my shoulder.  Mind you, I am not suggesting that this is a superior way to live.  For me, it is simply a matter of happenstance, and something that I have grown accustomed to.

Still, one cannot underestimate the calming effect of having an expanse of water to look out on, whether it be bright blue and glittering, iron grey, or any of the infinite variations in between.  The sight has lightened my soul on innumerable occasions.  "Given my heart/A change of mood/And saved some part/Of a day I had rued," as Robert Frost wrote of a different landscape.

"The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one's dreams, to all one's speculations. . . . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm; neither calm nor storm breaks the rhythm, only hastens or holds it back for a moment."

Arthur Symons, "In a Northern Bay," Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (1918), page 296.

Yet there is, withal, an abiding otherness to the sea.

          The Tuft of Kelp

All dripping in tangles green,
     Cast up by a lonely sea
If purer for that, O Weed,
     Bitterer, too, are ye?

Herman Melville, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888).

I have often encountered tufts of kelp along the strand, high and dry amid the flotsam and jetsam, and they do have a strange and otherworldly aspect to them.  They emanate a sense of loneliness that goes beyond being out of their element.

John Brett, "The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs" (1871)

The sea's impassive face may induce serenity and reverie, but that impassivity is a mask:  upon it and below it lie strangeness and mystery. Arthur Symons speaks of the sea as a mirror of the sky, but I think of the sea and the sky as parallel and complementary unfathomable worlds whose depths we can never plumb.  We mustn't be seduced or misled by Science, which is always willing to provide us with "explanations" that tell us nothing.  Scientists possess no knowledge that can touch the secrets of the sea and the sky.

                        By the Sea

Why does the sea moan evermore?
     Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
It frets against the boundary shore;
     All earth's full rivers cannot fill
     The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

Sheer miracles of loveliness
     Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
Anemones, salt, passionless,
     Blow flower-like; just enough alive
     To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
     Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
All fair alike, yet all unlike,
     Are born without a pang, and die
     Without a pang, and so pass by.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1875).  Rossetti uses the word "blow" (lines 9 and 10) in its common pre-20th century sense:  "to blossom."

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

When I went out for a walk this past Wednesday afternoon, the sky was a dull grey-white.  I found myself wishing for a brilliant blue sky.  I then realized how misguided I was.  The world is always just what it is, and is perfect just as it is.  Who am I to cavil if it fails to meet my expectations?  I felt ungrateful.

As I walked, I noticed how lovely the deepening green boughs of the trees looked swaying against the grey sky.  The swallows paid the dull sky no mind:  they curved and dived above the tall wild grasses in the meadows, taking their evening meal.  "Sheer miracles of loveliness" indeed surround us on all sides and at all times.

                               The World Below the Brine

The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle,
          openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of
          light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and
          the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to
          the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with
          his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and
          the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,
          breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by
          beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860).

Whitman and Rossetti lived in the 19th century, a time that lacked our access to the technology that now enables us to see in vivid detail the heretofore "unlooked-on bed" of "the world below the brine."  But mere seeing is not the end of the story, is it?  The wonder expressed by Whitman and Rossetti remains, for that wonder is a product of the recognition of the other mysterious beings with whom we share the world.

John Brett, "Britannia's Realm" (1880)

Today, I was given a sunny day, although I had not asked for it.  Beside the path down which I walked, I saw white field daisies, pink-purple sweet peas, and the white blossoms of blackberry bushes.  Puget Sound and the sky were blue on top of blue, merging in the distance.  Which was mirroring which?

"[A]s ecstasy is only possible to one who is conscious of the possibility of despair, so the sea, as it detaches us from the world and our safeguards and our happy forgetfulnesses, and sets us by ourselves, as momentary as the turn of a wave, and mattering hardly more to the universe, gives us, if we will take them, moments of almost elemental joy."

Arthur Symons, "In a Northern Bay," Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands, page 297.

I would respectfully disagree with Symons to this extent:  it is not solely the sea that has the capacity to provide us with "elemental joy."  Nor would I qualify "elemental joy" with "almost."

The message of all these worlds -- earth, water, and sky -- is the same: Never take anything for granted.

     On the sandy beach,
Footprints:
     Long is the spring day.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 48.

John Brett, "The Norman Archipelago (Channel Islands)" (1885)

Choristers And Companions

While out for an afternoon walk this past week, I realized that I often fail to listen to what is going on around me.  My path takes me through meadows and wooded areas in Discovery Park, which, although it is a city park, is akin to a nature reserve.  According to the Seattle Audubon Society, more than 250 species of birds have been seen in the Park, including thrushes, warblers, wrens, swallows, chickadees, goldfinches, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, vireos, and waxwings.  And, of course, robins, sparrows, jays, and crows.

Not surprisingly, therefore, my walks take place amid a chorus of singing, twittering, chirping, chattering, whistling, and warbling.  But too often I am daydreaming, and the music passes me by.

"It was widely rumored that certain persons had heard celestial music coming down from heaven around two o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day.  And they say it has been heard every eighth night since.  Some told me in all seriousness that they actually heard the music at such and such a place on such and such a night.  Others dismissed it as simply a prank played by the wanton wind.  I, for one, was inclined to take the idea seriously, but could neither accept it as completely true or reject it as absolutely impossible.  For heaven and earth are filled with strange and mysterious powers. . . . In any event, I found myself intrigued, and invited a group of my friends to come to my humble cottage on the nineteenth day of March.  We all listened intently, from early evening on, but we heard nothing until the first sunbeams touched the far end of the eastern sky. Then all at once we heard a voice -- we heard music -- coming from the plum tree near my window.
                                     
                                             Only birds
                                        sing the music of heaven
                                             in this world."

Issa (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa), in Nobuyuki Yuasa, A Year of My Life: A Translation of Issa's Oraga Haru (University of California 1972). Oraga Haru was written in 1819.

Robert Ball, "Mrs. Barclay's Pond, Harborne" (1949)

In his poem "Bird-Language" (which has appeared here previously), W. H. Auden speculates that "fear . . . rage, bravado, and lust" may be heard in "the words/Uttered on all sides by birds," but he ultimately concludes that "All other notes that birds employ/Sound like synonyms for joy."  Yes, I concede that all is not sweetness and light in the world of bird communication.  Yet, compared with human communication, all bird conversations (and soliloquies) sound like celestial music to me.  (Save, perhaps, for the cawing of crows and the screeching of jays.)

Call me sentimental, but I am inclined to the view that those unseen choristers -- hidden off in the tall grasses of the meadows or up in the leafy boughs of trees -- are indeed motivated by joy.  Joy and beneficence.

     To the Nightingale, and Robin Red-Breast

When I departed am, ring thou my knell,
Thou pitiful, and pretty Philomel:
And when I'm laid out for a corse, then be
Thou sexton (red-breast) for to cover me.

Robert Herrick, Poem 279, Hesperides (1648).  In the third line, Herrick uses the word "corse" rather than "corpse."

Herrick was wont to revisit his favorite themes.  He was particularly fond of robins.

                 To Robin Red-breast

Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this,
     Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.

Robert Herrick, Poem 50, Ibid.

The image of birds providing kind offices to the dead was a common one in the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan periods.  In the following poem by John Webster, those offices are performed by the robin and the wren.  (In a moment, we shall hear of the wren from Issa.)

                              A Dirge

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.

John Webster, from the play The White Devil (1612).

Michael Garton (1935-2004), "Woodland Clearing"

I am well aware that the notion of birds as heavenly choristers is looked upon askance by modern products of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment." These moderns are equally troubled by the notion of a human soul.  For them, human beings, and human "reason" and "rationality," are the measure of all things.  How odd and how sad it is to constrict humanity, the World, and existence in such a fashion.

I am not in a position to make pronouncements about the existence or non-existence of heaven or of the soul.  Who would presume to do so?  These things are not matters of theology.  Nor are they matters of science. Theology and science both posit a certainty that does not exist.

                              Here Lies a Prisoner

               Leave him:  he's quiet enough:  and what matter
               Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
          that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                              Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).

Christopher Sanders, "Sunlight through a Willow Tree at Kew" (1958)

Sooner or later, one comes to the realization that there are no certainties in life.  Except one.  Our death.  Anyone who tells you otherwise -- theologians, scientists, politicians, social or political "activists" of any stripe -- is dissembling.  They know nothing.

In fact, this uncertainty is a glorious thing.  It is why we turn to poets and artists, poems and paintings.

Will we spend eternity listening to birds carrying on conversations above our graves?  Nobody knows.

     Look!  this lonely grave,
With the wren
     That is always here.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 342.

Fairlie Harmar, "The Bridge at Monxton" (1916)

Homage To Thomas Hardy

I grow fonder and fonder of Thomas Hardy -- both as a person and as a poet -- with each passing year.  Two or three (or more) times a year I find myself in a Hardy mood.  Given that he wrote more than 900 poems, I am happy to realize that I will never exhaust his riches.  Each time I return to his poetry, I enjoy old favorites, rediscover gems that I had forgotten, and come upon surprises that I had somehow overlooked.

For instance, this past week I discovered the following poem.  How had I missed it all these years?

   The Sun's Last Look on the Country Girl
                                (M. H.)

The sun threw down a radiant spot
        On the face in the winding-sheet --
The face it had lit when a babe's in its cot;
And the sun knew not, and the face knew not,
        That soon they would no more meet.

Now that the grave has shut its door,
        And lets not in one ray,
Do they wonder that they meet no more --
That face and its beaming visitor --
        That met so many a day?

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (Macmillan 1922).

"M. H." refers to Mary Hardy, Hardy's sister, who died in November of 1915.  The poem was written in December of that year.  Ten years later, Hardy made the following journal entry:  "December 23.  Mary's birthday. She came into the world . . . and went out . . . and the world is just [the] same . . . not a ripple on the surface left."  Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 464 (ellipses in original).

How like Hardy to notice such a detail and then turn it into something so affecting.  Who but Hardy would have thought to create the lovely relationship between the country girl and the sun?  Too sentimental?  Of course not.  Here is a test:  please read the poem again, and, as you do so, think of someone you have loved who has passed away.

"Such, then, is the tenderness of Thomas Hardy.  I do not know any other English poet who strikes that note of tenderness so firmly and so resonantly.  You must forgive me for using what is called 'emotive language' about his work:  but, when one is deeply touched by a poem, I can see no adequate reason for concealing the fact.
* * * * *
Great poems have been written by immature, flawed, or unbalanced men; but not, I suggest, great personal poetry; for this, ripeness, breadth of mind, charity, honesty are required:  that is why great personal poetry is so rare. It is an exacting medium -- one that will not permit us to feign notable images of virtue.  False humility, egotism, or emotional insincerity cannot be hidden in such poetry:  they disintegrate the poem.  Thomas Hardy's best poems do seem to me to offer us images of virtue; not because he moralises, but because they breathe out the truth and goodness that were in him, inclining our own hearts towards what is lovable in humanity."

C. Day Lewis, The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy: The Wharton Lecture on English Poetry (The British Academy 1951) (italics in original).

William Anstice Brown, "In Purley Meadow, Sherborne, Dorset" (1979)

Day Lewis's use of the word "feign" in the preceding passage reminds me of a wonderful observation by Edward Thomas on the nature of poetry (an observation that has appeared here on more than one occasion):  "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."  Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), page 86.

The phrase "true and not feigning" perfectly describes Thomas Hardy's poetry as a whole, both the well-known old chestnuts ("During Wind and Rain," "The Darkling Thrush," "The Convergence of the Twain," "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'," "The Oxen," for instance) and the lesser-known, out-of-the-way poems that often go unnoticed.  I believe that, in order to appreciate the truth, beauty, compassion, and charm of Hardy's poetry, one needs to become acquainted with the smaller hidden treasures.

               Just the Same

I sat.  It all was past;
Hope never would hail again;
Fair days had ceased at a blast,
The world was a darkened den.

The beauty and dream were gone,
And the halo in which I had hied
So gaily gallantly on
Had suffered blot and died!

I went forth, heedless whither,
In a cloud too black for name:
-- People frisked hither and thither;
The world was just the same.

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses.

"Because he was haunted by Time and transience, because he never saw the commonest thing without a vision of what it once had been, of what it one day would be, in return even the commonest things were lit for him with a gleam of tragic poetry.  He saw things as instinctively in three tenses as in three dimensions.  In this way he widened the domain of poetry till it became for him as wide as life itself, a life intensely sad and yet intensely real.  The comfort that religion failed to give, he found and thought that others might find, not necessarily in writing poetry about this world, but in seeing this world poetically, as anyone with an imagination can. . . . Hardy did not simply make poetry out of life; he made life into poetry.
* * * * *
He deliberately took for his subjects the commonest and most natural feelings; but by an unfamiliar side, and with that insight which only sensitiveness and sympathy can possess.  This sympathy is important; for, as I have said, if truthfulness is one main feature of Hardy's work, its compassion is another."

F. L. Lucas, Ten Victorian Poets (Cambridge University Press 1940).

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941)

"A View of Church Hill from the Mill Pond, Old Swanage, Dorset" (1931)

Ah, the things we see in this world!  Sights that cause us to catch our breath, and that return to haunt us at unexpected times.  Speaking for myself, I can testify to the urge to look away in order to avoid future hauntings.  Thomas Hardy never averted his eyes.

               At a Country Fair

At a bygone Western country fair
I saw a giant led by a dwarf
With a red string like a long thin scarf;
How much he was the stronger there
          The giant seemed unaware.

And then I saw that the giant was blind,
And the dwarf a shrewd-eyed little thing;
The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string
As if he had no independent mind,
          Or will of any kind.

Wherever the dwarf decided to go
At his heels the other trotted meekly,
(Perhaps -- I know not -- reproaching weakly)
Like one Fate bade that it must be so,
          Whether he wished or no.

Various sights in various climes
I have seen, and more I may see yet,
But that sight never shall I forget,
And have thought it the sorriest of pantomimes,
          If once, a hundred times!

Thomas Hardy,  Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (Macmillan 1917).

What are we to make of this poem?  Is it merely another example of Hardy the purported pessimist?  No, this is simply Hardy doing what he always does:  reporting what he sees.  What is the poem "about"?  Long-time readers of this blog will know my response:  explanation and explication are the death of poetry.

The most you will get from me is this:  the poem is about seeing a sight that forever haunts you.  Does such an experience change the world?  No.  Why should it?  Does such an experience change your soul?  We each have to answer that question for ourselves.

Eric Bray, "Allington, Dorset, from Victoria Grove" (1975)

The following passage by David Cecil articulates far better than I can what draws me to Hardy.  Cecil's remarks about Hardy are remarkably similar to those of C. Day Lewis and F. L. Lucas.  They all have their source, I think, in a great love for the man.

"His poems bear the recognisible stamp of his personality, simple, sublime, lovable.  Here we come to the central secret of the spell he casts.  It compels us because it brings us into immediate contact with a spirit that commands our hearts as well as our admiration.  It combines a special charm, a special nobility.  The charm unites unexpectedly the naïve and the sensitive.  Hardy addresses us directly, unreservedly, unselfconsciously; yet he is not unsubtle or imperceptive.  On the contrary he shows himself exquisitely appreciative of delicate shades of feeling and of fleeting nuances of beauty.  Similarly his nobility of nature fuses tenderness and integrity. His integrity is absolute.  He faces life at its darkest, he is vigilant never to soften or to sentimentalise; yet he never strikes a note of hardness or brutality.  His courage in facing hard facts is equalled by his capacity to pity and sympathise."

David Cecil, "The Hardy Mood," in F. B. Pinion (editor), Thomas Hardy and the Modern World (Thomas Hardy Society 1974).

Thomas Hardy is a human being (a lovable, sensitive, compassionate human being) speaking directly and without guile to other human beings. He is unfailingly honest.  This means that the truths he tells you will be both beautiful and harrowing by turns (or at the same time).  But he will never lie to you.  He knows that we are all in this together.  And he knows that our time is short.

   The Comet at Yalbury or Yell'ham

                              I
It bends far over Yell'ham Plain,
        And we, from Yell'ham Height,
Stand and regard its fiery train,
        So soon to swim from sight.

                             II
It will return long years hence, when
        As now its strange swift shine
Will fall on Yell'ham; but not then
        On face of mine or thine.

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

"May.  In an orchard at Closeworth.  Cowslips under trees.  A light proceeds from them, as from Chinese lanterns or glow-worms."

Thomas Hardy, journal entry for May, 1876, in Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 112.

Alfred Egerton Cooper (1883-1974), "Dorset Landscape"

Change

I am easily pleased.  In that spirit, I come to you with my annual May report:  the ants have emerged from their winter hibernation and are going about their business again.  "What is of more interest to you, the American presidential election or the ants erecting mounds of particolored grains of sand in the seams of sidewalks on a sunny afternoon in May?"  My response to that question is obvious.

                         Change

Ah, there is no abiding!
     Signs from heaven are sent,
Over the grass the wind went gliding,
     And the green grass grew silver as he went.

Ah, there is no remaining!
     Ever the tide of ocean ebbs and flows,
Over the blue sea goes the wind complaining,
     And the blue sea turns emerald as he goes.

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

The ants, in their antic and endearing fashion, remind me that there is constancy within change.  But I harbor no illusions:  this constancy is a qualified constancy.  Each year I am greeting a new generation of ants, not old acquaintances.  As for me, I am simply on a different schedule.  We are all walking in a straight line towards eventual dust.  This is not cause for alarm or sadness or brooding.  It is just something that we need to get used to, and accept.

"Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted.  Matter is in a perpetual flux; change is always, and everywhere, at work, it strikes through causes, and effects, and leaves nothing fixed, and permanent.  And then how very near the two vast gulphs of time, the past, and the future, stand together!  Now upon the whole, is not that man a blockhead that thinks these momentary things big enough either to make him proud, or uneasy?

Remember what an atom your person stands for in respect of the universe, what a minute of unmeasurable time comes to your share, and what a small concern you are in the Empire of Fate!"

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book V, Sections 23 and 24, in Jeremy Collier (translator), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702).

Bertram Priestman, "The Sun-Veiled Hills of Wharfedale" (1917)

"What a small concern you are in the Empire of Fate!"  Yes, most of our life is a matter of getting over ourselves, isn't it?  Of course, we never truly get over ourselves.  (Perhaps mystics and saints do.  But I'm not sure about that.)  The best we can hope for is to gain perspective, bit by bit:  to recognize the contingency and the fragility of every breath we take.

                            Garramor Bay

Now the long wave unfolded falls from the West,
The sandbirds run upon twittering, twinkling feet:
Life is perilous, poised on the lip of a wave,
And the weed that lay yesterday here is clean gone.

O visitor, fugitive creature, thing of a tide,
Make music, my heart, before the long silence.

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

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

I am very lucky.  When I go out for my afternoon walk, I can, on the one hand, watch the wonderful progress of rising anthills in the seams of sidewalks.  On the other hand, I can turn a corner and see, to the west, the snow-covered Olympic Mountains towering beyond the blue and glittering expanse of Puget Sound.  We live our lives between these anthills and peaks.

Yesterday, I watched a single white sail move across the waters of the Sound from south to north, now in the sunlight, now in the shadow of a passing cloud.

                    Times Go By Turns

The loppèd tree in time may grow again,
Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;
The sorriest wight may find release of pain,
The driest soil suck in some moistening shower;
Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.

The sea of fortune doth not ever flow,
She draws her favours to the lowest ebb;
Her tides hath equal times to come and go,
Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web;
No joy so great but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard but may in fine amend.

Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring,
No endless night, yet not eternal day;
The saddest birds a season find to sing,
The roughest storm a calm may soon allay:
Thus, with succeeding turns, God tempereth all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.

A chance may win that by mischance was lost;
The net that holds no great, takes little fish;
In some things all, in all things none are crossed;
Few all they need, but none have all they wish.
Unmeddled joys here to no man befall;
Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.

Robert Southwell (1561-1595), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (Sloane 1949).

Bertram Priestman, "The Great Green Hills of Yorkshire" (1913)

These things the poets and the ancient philosophers tell us about "change and chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All") are regarded by many moderns as mere "truisms."  As if the modern world had advanced beyond them in all of its supposed knowingness and sophistication.  As for me, I am quite content to live by truisms.  They are, after all, true.

     Tilling the field:
The man who asked the way
     Has disappeared.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 165.

Life is not a matter of metaphysical speculation or of theory.  Science, politics, economics, and other modern (and utopian) preoccupations are of no relevance whatsoever in our soul's contingent world.  It is all beautifully simple.  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

     When I looked back,
The man who passed
     Was lost in the mist.

Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 85.

Bertram Priestman, "Kilnsey Crag, Wharfedale, Yorkshire" (1929)

Walking

The azaleas and the rhododendrons are in full bloom in my neighborhood. There are dozens of varieties on display, none of which I know by name. No matter:  the colors leave you speechless.  As I walked among them yesterday afternoon -- a sunny day, the scent of newly-mown grass in the air -- the meaning of life suddenly became clear to me:  our souls are placed upon the earth in order to watch the trees and flowers bloom each spring.

It makes perfect sense.  Consider the alternatives.  Have our souls been quickened so that we may watch television news shows on a daily basis?  Is the purpose of our existence to vote in elections?  Having emerged from eternity, and sensing that our time here is short, should we make a beeline to the nearest shopping mall?

                       Walking

To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
          Else may the silent feet,
                    Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good,
          Nor joy nor glory meet.

Ev'n carts and wheels their place do change,
But cannot see, though very strange
          The glory that is by:
                    Dead puppets may
Move in the bright and glorious day,
          Yet not behold the sky.

And are not men than they more blind,
Who having eyes yet never find
          The bliss in which they move?
                    Like statues dead
They up and down are carried,
          Yet neither see nor love.

To walk is by a thought to go,
To move in spirit to and fro,
          To mind the good we see,
                    To taste the sweet,
Observing all the things we meet
          How choice and rich they be.

To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey,
          Admire each pretty flow'r
                    With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
          The marks of his great pow'r.

To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
          To cull the dew that lies
                    On ev'ry blade,
From every blossom, till we lade
          Our minds, as they their thighs.

Observe those rich and glorious things,
The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs,
          The fructifying sun;
                    To note from far
The rising of each twinkling star
          For us his race to run.

A little child these well perceives,
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,
          May rich as kings be thought:
                    But there's a sight
Which perfect manhood may delight
          To which we shall be brought.

While in those pleasant paths we talk
'Tis that towards which at last we walk;
          For we may by degrees
                    Wisely proceed
Pleasures of love and praise to heed,
          From viewing herbs and trees.

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), in H. I. Bell (editor), Traherne's Poems of Felicity (Oxford University Press 1910).  I have modernized the spelling. The italicized words are in the original.

William Dyce (1806-1864), "Sketch of a Doorway with a Water Barrel"

At the heart of A. E. Housman's poetry is an unassuageable grief.  For this reason, there are those who feel that his poetry is "gloomy," or that it lacks "variety."  I respectfully disagree.  By the time we reach a certain age (that age differs in each of us), the themes that govern our mind, heart, and soul can be counted on the fingers of a hand (or less).

Bashō is, I think, correct:

     Journeying through the world, --
To and fro, to and fro,
     Harrowing the small field.

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 290.

Harrowing one's own small field is an excellent way to spend a life.  There are too many busybodies abroad in the world, most of whom seem compelled to tell us how we ought to live our lives, while their own fields are full of brambles and tares.

Is Housman's grief attributable to unrequited love?  Or does it reflect a preoccupation with our mortality?  Neither?  Both?  It doesn't matter. Whether we want to or not, and whether we are aware of it or not, we each develop our own philosophy of life.

I find nothing wrong with Housman's view of existence.  He is harrowing his field.  Moreover, we must be careful not to be too reductive.  If one sees only "gloom" in Housman's poetry, then one has not looked closely enough.  He could enjoy a walk in spring as much as any of us.

When green buds hang in the elm like dust
     And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must
     And drink of life again.
Forth I must by hedgerow bowers
     To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo-flowers
     Are lying about the world.

A. E. Housman, Poem IX, More Poems (Jonathan Cape 1936).

Albert Rutherston, "The Pump, Nash End" (1931)

Have no fear, gentle readers, I do not intend to turn this blog into "The Diary of My Hip Replacement."  But I must say that my recent foray into medical technology has given me a renewed appreciation of the simple wonder of being able to walk, without pain, among rhododendrons and azaleas on a spring afternoon.  I say this as someone who has, in the past, expressed skepticism about the modern gods of Progress and Science.  The technological products of Science and Progress can indeed be blessings. Blogs?  Yes!  Hip replacements?  Yes!  "Selfies"?  No.

Where does one draw the line in this technology business?  I don't know.  I suspect that it has something to do with whether -- like poetry, like art in general -- a particular product of technology brings us a renewed gratitude for the world around us, and for the human beings who inhabit that world. One step at a time.

          The Stepping Stones

I have my yellow boots on to walk
Across the shires where I hide
Away from my true people and all
I can't put easily into my life.

So you will see I am stepping on
The stones between the runnels getting
Nowhere nowhere.  It is almost
Embarrassing to be alive alone.

Take my hand and pull me over from
The last stone on to the moss and
The three celandines.  Now my dear
Let us go home across the shires.

W. S. Graham, Collected Poems, 1942-1977 (Faber and Faber 1979).

Harold Jones, "The Black Door" (1935)