Companions

I am easy to please.  Mind you, I make no claim to uniqueness of character or to philosophical attainment.  No, any easy-to-pleaseness that I may possess is, I suspect, due in large part to growing old.  I can perhaps trace it back to the day when it occurred to me that, purely as a matter of simple, incontrovertible numerical reckoning, the number of years left to me above ground was now, beyond a doubt, less than the number of years I had already lived.

A thought of this sort tends to focus your attention.  After the initial dismay and wonderment pass ("where did all those years go?"), you may develop a new sense of what is important, what is not.  There is certainly no reason to brood over what is unchangeable:  a boundary has been set.  So be it.  No need to mourn.  At the same time, a feeling of freedom arrives.  And that which is extraneous begins to drop away, day by day.  Vistas open up.  After all, why not live?

                    The Traveler's Moon

A traveler has come from south of the Yangtze;
when he set out, the moon was a mere crescent.
During the long long stages of his journey
three times he saw its clear light rounded.
At dawn he followed a setting moon,
evenings lodged with a moon newly risen.
Who says the moon has no heart?
A thousand long miles it's followed me.
This morning I set out from Wei River Bridge,
by evening had entered the streets of Ch'ang-an.
And now I wonder about the moon --
whose house will that traveler put up at tonight?

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by Burton Watson), in Po Chü-i, Selected Poems (Columbia University Press 2000), page 109.

Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935), "Night" (1904)

Each morning, I read a poem to start the day.  One morning this past week I read "The Traveler's Moon."  After doing so, a Japanese waka came immediately to mind.  Or at least the gist of it.  I went to one of my bookshelves, and found it where I suspected it was.

     Down from the mountain,
The moon
     Accompanied me,
And when I opened the gate,
The moon too entered.

Kotomichi (1798-1868) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 388.

Kotomichi's poem has stayed with me since the day I first read it. How lovely it was to now discover Po Chü-i's poem, and to have the both of them together, paired, for the rest of my life.  At around 8:30 in the morning, my day was already overflowing.  I read no more poems that day.  The two poems deserved to be left alone.  I was content to let them sit.  I am easy to please.

Harald Sohlberg, "Flower Meadow in the North" (1905)

Repose

Today, as I walked beneath a green-canopied tree tunnel, I remembered that the summer solstice will arrive later this week. Despite the vaulting, airy boughs above me, the late afternoon -- grey, windless, still -- felt  somehow stifled and close.  It did not seem as though summer was poised to make a grand and sweeping entrance.

Soon after I emerged from the green light of the trees, the word "susurration" floated up.  I have no idea why.  But, yes, the grey and breathless afternoon was indeed in need of a susurration.

I continued to walk.  A few minutes later, as I neared home, a brief breeze stirred the leaves of a pear tree next to the sidewalk.  Drops of water from an earlier rain shower pattered from the leaves onto my shoulders.  A susurration.

                    Repose

Repose is in simplicities.
Perhaps the mind has leaves like trees
Involving the luxurious sun
And tossed by wind's intricacies,
And finds repose is more than grief
When failing light and falling leaf
Denote that winter has begun.

James Reeves, The Imprisoned Sea (Poetry London 1949).

Charles Kerr (1858-1907), "Carradale"

All is well with the World.  Meanwhile, in this odd and wonderful country of mine, land that I love, there are those who are already in the thrall of next year's presidential election.  Every four years we witness a battle to the death between Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, with the Fate of the Republic at stake.  I have now lived through sixteen of these contests for the Soul and the Destiny of the nation.  I continue to wait for the sky to fall.

As I write this, the robins warble and chatter in the garden outside my window.  The sun will set before they stop for the day.  Tomorrow morning, they will begin again well before it rises.

                                Worlds

Through the pale green forest of tall bracken-stalks,
Whose interwoven fronds, a jade-green sky,
Above me glimmer, infinitely high,
Towards my giant hand a beetle walks
In glistening emerald mail; and as I lie
Watching his progress through huge grassy blades
And over pebble boulders, my own world fades
And shrinks to the vision of a beetle's eye.

Within that forest world of twilight green
Ambushed with unknown perils, one endless day
I travel down the beetle-trail between
Huge glossy boles through green infinity . . .
Till flashes a glimpse of blue sea through the bracken asway,
And my world is again a tumult of windy sea.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Neighbours (Macmillan 1920).

William Lamond (1857-1924), "A Coastal Village"

Once

A four-line poem written in China in the Fourth or Fifth Century A.D. Perhaps a song.  The poet is unknown.

I heard my love was going to Yang-chow
And went with him as far as Ch'u Hill.
For a moment, when you held me fast in your outstretched arms
I thought the river stood still and did not flow.

Anonymous (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, Chinese Poems (George Allen and Unwin 1946).

Long-time readers of this blog may recall my two essential poetic principles (i. e., truisms that no doubt try your patience by now).  The first:  It is the individual poem that matters, not the poet.  And, begging your forbearance, the second:  Explanation and explication are the death of poetry.

A poem such as this is timeless and eternal.  It comes from China and from the universe.  Of its Beauty and Truth, nothing more need be said.

Thomas Hennell (1903-1945)

"The Guest House, Cerne Abbas" (1940)

Nothing more need be said.  But, if we are lucky, those four lines may cause us to catch our breath:  Ah, yes, I know, I know, I know.  

                      While You Slept

You never knew what I saw while you slept.
We drove up a wide green stone-filled valley.
Around us were empty heather mountains.
A white river curved quickly beside us.
I thought to wake you when I saw the cairn --
A granite pillar of that country's past --
But I let you sleep without that history.
You did, however, travel through that place:
I can tell you that your eyes were at rest
As the momentous world moved beyond you,
And that you breathed in peace that quarter hour.
We seldom know what is irreplaceable.
You sang old songs for me, then fell asleep.
I worried about what you were missing.
But you missed nothing.  And I was the one who slept.

sip (Glen Coe, Scotland, c. 1986).

Thomas Hennell, "The Beech Avenue, Lasham" (1941)

Bourne

"Bourne" is one of my favorite words.  I discussed it in a post back in June of 2013, and returned to it again in October of 2017.  The original sense of the word was "a boundary (between fields, etc.)" or "a bound, a limit."  Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II (Second Edition 1989).  However, thanks to Shakespeare, the word took on another sense:  "The limit or terminus of a race, journey, or course; the ultimate point aimed at, or to which anything tends; destination, goal."  Ibid.  The OED states:  "The modern use [is] due to Shakespeare, and in a large number of cases directly alluding to the passage in Hamlet."  Ibid.  The passage referred to appears in Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy:  "But that the dread of something after death,/The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns, puzzles the will."

As I noted back in 2013, I first encountered "bourne" in this poem by Christina Rossetti:

                 The Bourne

Underneath the growing grass,
     Underneath the living flowers,
     Deeper than the sound of showers:
     There we shall not count the hours
By the shadows as they pass.

Youth and health will be but vain,
     Beauty reckoned of no worth:
     There a very little girth
     Can hold round what once the earth
Seemed too narrow to contain.

Christina Rossetti, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (Macmillan 1866).  No "dread of something after death" here.  Nor anything that "puzzles the will."  Which is quite characteristic of Rossetti.

I later came upon this, which I also included in my 2013 post:

                         The Bourne

Rebellious heart, why still regret so much
A destiny which all that's mortal shares?
Surely the solace of the grave is such
That there naught matters; and, there, no one cares?

Nor faith, nor love, nor dread, nor closest friend
Can from this nearing bourne your footfall keep:
But there even conflict with your self shall end,
And every grief be reconciled in Sleep.

Walter de la Mare, O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953).  De la Mare was fond of Rossetti's poetry.  Perhaps his poem is a conscious or unconscious echo of Rossetti's poem.  The feeling is certainly similar:  "solace," not "dread."  And, "Sleep."

In a recent post I mentioned de la Mare's wonderful anthology Behold, This Dreamer!  One of the sections of the book is titled "The Bourne," and includes an excerpt from William Drummond of Hawthornden's prose work A Cypress Grove (1623):  "Life is a Journey in a dusty Way, the furthest Rest is Death."  Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer! (Faber and Faber 1939), page 424.  The section also includes Rossetti's "Up-Hill," which begins:  "Does the road wind up-hill all the way?/Yes, to the very end," and which concludes: "Will there be beds for me and all who seek?/Yea, beds for all who come."  Ibid, pages 426-427.

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

My return to "bourne" at this time is occasioned by coming across this passage from John Ruskin last week:

"In the old quiet days of England, which I can but just remember, when it was possible to eat one's dinner without receiving a telegram, and when one might sometimes pass a whole day without hearing the least bit of news, remaining content with the information one had received up to that time of life -- in that benumbed and senseless period, little as you may now be able to fancy it, though nobody could be violently carried about in iron boxes, many people took what they called walks, and enjoyed them.  And quite within access, in that torpid manner, from my own home -- within access also through pleasant fields and picturesque lanes -- there used to be a pastoral valley called the valley of the Stream, or Bourne, of the Raven.  This word Bourne has, as you probably know, two meanings in old English, of which only one, that of limit or end to be reached -- the Bourne from which no traveller returns -- has remained, and that only in poetical use, to our time.  But the more frequent meaning of it in early English was that of a small gently flowing, but quite brightly flowing stream; and when you find the names of villages ending with that word -- Ashbourne, Sittingbourne, or, as in an instance with which we are all now much too familiar, Tichbourne -- it always means that the village stood beside a streamlet."

John Ruskin, manuscript of lecture ("The Bird of Calm") delivered on January 13, 1872, in Woolwich, in The Works of John Ruskin (edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn), Volume XXII (1906), page 239 (footnote 1).

One of the wondrous things about reading Ruskin is that you never know what is around the corner.  This may seem like a truism:  after all, do we ever know what any writer will say next?  But in Ruskin the degree of surprise is enhanced due, first, to his passion for all the particulars of the World and, second, to the universe-wide range of his mind, which may at any moment alight anywhere.  Hence, when I was not expecting it, out of the blue comes a delightful disquisition on "bourne."

The OED gives us this definition of "bourne" as a stream:  "A small stream, a brook; often applied (in this spelling) to the winter bournes or winter torrents of the chalk downs.  Applied to northern streams it is usually spelt 'burn'."  Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II (Second Edition 1989).  However, I prefer Ruskin's lovelier definition:  "a small gently flowing, but quite brightly flowing stream."  "The valley of the . . . Bourne of the Raven."

[A side-note:  I entirely sympathize with the cranky commentary in the first sentence of the quoted passage.  Ruskin was, in general, not pleased with the modern world as it existed in the Nineteenth Century.  One can only imagine how cranky he would be today.  I find his crankiness endearing.  And right on the mark.]

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

I have been dwelling in Victorian England the past few weeks.  In addition to reading Ruskin, I have been visiting some of my favorite poems from that period.  Around the time I encountered Ruskin's discussion of "bourne," I had returned to this:

        Heaven-Haven
   A nun takes the veil

     I have desired to go
          Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
     And a few lilies blow.

     And I have asked to be
          Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press 1967).  "Blow" (line 4) is used in the sense of "to blossom; to bloom."

Does Christina Rossetti haunt this poem as she may haunt de la Mare's poem?  "The Bourne" could not have been a direct influence, since it was published in 1866, after Hopkins wrote his first draft of "Heaven-Haven" (which was originally titled "Rest") in 1864.  But he greatly admired her poetry, and, of course, they shared the same strong faith (although Hopkins's was more fraught).  "Rest" is a word that one comes across quite often in Rossetti's poetry.  In a March 5, 1872, letter to his mother, Hopkins wrote of Rossetti:  "the simple beauty of her work cannot be matched."  R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips (editors), The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volume I: Correspondence 1852-1881 (Oxford University Press 2013), page 216.

In any event, although "bourne" does not appear in the poem, its sense as used by Rossetti and de la Mare fits well here:  a place of arrival, the end of a journey.  The hope, faith, and serenity of the poem never fail to move me.

Fred Stead (1863-1949), "River at Bingley, Yorkshire"

Lilacs And Azaleas And Ant Hills

I have returned to the shores of Puget Sound after my visit to the shores of the Pacific, and I find myself in a burgeoned and burgeoning green World, a leafy Paradise.  But that is not all:  as ever, mid-May is the time of lilacs and azaleas and ant hills.  This is only a partial inventory, of course.  "World is crazier and more of it than we think,/Incorrigibly plural."  (Louis MacNeice, "Snow.")

The lilacs and the azaleas are lovely, but it is the ant hills that are dearest to my heart.  The never-failing punctuality of those intent beings annually impresses and moves me.  Yes, yes, I am quite aware of the dangers of anthropomorphization.  But the sight of the humble yet brave sand mounds rising in the seams of the sidewalks right on schedule each May provokes tender feelings, and I cannot help but feel that we and the ants are companions in this journey of ours. Which means that I can be accused of sentimentality as well, I suppose.  So be it.  An anthropomorphizing sentimentalist I am.

I do know this:  long after I have returned to the dust, the ant hills will continue to rise each May.  I find this comforting, a source of serenity and equanimity.

   Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River

The evening river is level and motionless --
The spring colours just open to their full.
Suddenly a wave carries the moon away
And the tidal water comes with its freight of stars.

Yang-ti (Seventh Century) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918).

Fairlie Harmar (1876-1945), "L'Aveyron" (c. 1932)

Landscapes

As was the case around this time last year, a thousand-mile road trip has brought me to the shores of the Pacific on the Central Coast of California.  I have once again left the James Dean Memorial Junction (the fateful crossing of California 46 and California 41 out in the middle of a windy, dusty high plain) behind me.  From where I am staying, nothing but water lies between the edge of the continent and a point somewhere on the coastline of Honshu.  Small flocks of pelicans fly leisurely up and down the shoreline from morning until evening.  Inland, the slopes of the still spring-green hills -- usually dotted with live oaks (less so as one travels east) -- are covered in places with patches of purple, blue, orange, or yellow wildflower blossoms.

"As for our waking traffic with the world-at-large -- and how infinitesimal a fraction of that is solely ours -- what a medley this appears to be:  loose, chancey, piecemeal, formless.  From birthday to death-day we continue to collect and weave together the materials of our minute private universe, as a bird builds its nest, and out of a myriad heterogeneous scraps we give it a certain shape and coherence, wherein to lay our treasured brittle eggs.  But how little life itself respects the rational, adapts itself to our convenience, discloses its aim, explains the rules -- despite the fact that every thread of it that is ours is weaving itself into a gossamer fabric thinner even than dreamed-of moonshine, which we call the Past; and which, when in recollection we attempt to record and arrange it and to give it something of a pattern, we shall call autobiography. Nature, inscrutable mistress of her vast household, even although man assumes himself to be her fairy godchild, shows him a fickle favouritism, destroys him if he ignores her, and is indulgent only if he obeys to the last iota her every edict, her every whim.  She is; she perpetuates herself; as if she herself were bemused and in a dream -- with her seasons and her weather, her greenery and stars and her multitudes; creating, destroying, never at rest."

Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer! (Faber and Faber 1939), page 67.

The First of May, 2019

Ah, the conundrum of what books to bring along on a journey! Anthologies are always good choices.  Hence, I have with me Behold, This Dreamer!  But calling de la Mare's wonderful compendium an anthology does not do it justice.  The volume's full title has a classic English 17th or 18th century feel to it:  Behold, This Dreamer!  Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects.  "Kindred Subjects," indeed.  In fact, de la Mare's subjects include the whole of the World and all of Life.  Nothing lies outside the book's borders.

               Rotation

Even the owls are lyrical
     When the moon's right,
And we have no patience with the stars
     On a dusty night.

Love is dull with the mood wrong,
     And age may outsing youth,
For there is no measuring a song,
     Nor counting upon truth.

All's well, and then a flood of loss
     Surges upon delight,
While the rose buds upon the cross,
     And the blind have sight.

Morning wisdom vanishes,
     And dusk brings dread
That stalwart sleep banishes
     Ere primes are said.

He who is sure, has all to learn;
     Who fears, but fears in vain?
For never a day does the year turn,
     But it shall turn again.

John Drinkwater, in Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer!, page 656.  The poem was originally published in Drinkwater's Summer Harvest: Poems 1924-1933 (Sidgwick & Jackson 1933).

The First of May, 2019

A few days ago, while strolling on the Pismo Beach pier, I passed an elderly gentleman sitting on a bench in the sun, strumming a guitar and singing:  "Oh, sweet darling, you get the best of my love . . ."  I suspect this elderly gentleman and I hail from the same vanished time and place.  Having spent the years from 1967 through 1978 (aged 11 through 22) along the southern and central California coast, a song such as this has a certain evocative quality for me.  There comes a time in one's life when entire eras return in an instant, exactly as they were, with all emotions intact.  This can be a mixed blessing.  But, of course, being here to experience the blessing, mixed or not, is, in and of itself, the greatest blessing of all.

Look downward in the silent pool:
The weeds cling to the ground they love;
They live so quietly, are so cool;
They do not need to think, or move.

Look down in the unconscious mind:
There everything is quiet too
And deep and cool, and you will find
Calm growth and nothing hard to do,
And nothing that need trouble you.

Harold Monro, in Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer!, page 549.  The poem was originally published in Monro's Real Property (The Poetry Bookshop 1922) as the fifth poem in a sequence titled "The Silent Pool."

The First of May, 2019

Petals

On a grey, cool morning earlier this week I ran a few errands.  My drive home took me along a street that runs straight up a hill for a quarter-mile or so.  I noticed that, a few blocks ahead, the gutters on both sides of the street were white.  Water reflecting the grey sky? Cement or sand washed down to the street from a home construction site?  Neither.  The gutters were filled with white petals.  The cherry trees lining the sidewalks on either side of the street were nearly empty of blossoms.

A brief sigh of wistfulness passed through me.  But I did not hear or feel "the strumble/Of the hungry river of death."  (Hilaire Belloc, "From the Latin (but not so pagan.")  The sight of the petals was too beautiful for that.  We live in a World in which, each spring, the gutters of the streets are filled with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms.

               The Drift of Petals

Firm-footed, small, she thrust my pram
its endless uphill, downhill way,
intent on country air.

I can recall our sheltering
beneath a hawthorn in a lane,
a dark cloud dowsed the sky.

And as we watched the slanting drops
a drift of petals settled on
my buttoned coverlet.

A wide road now that lane, with cars;
the hedges rooted out; the fields,
on either side, built-up.

And of that moment what survives
in these numb syllables, except
an old man's gratitude?

John Hewitt, Time Enough: Poems New and Revised (Blackstaff Press 1976).

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Roofing a New House"

Later in the week, I walked past two large Yoshino cherry trees that stand in the front yard of a nearby house.  The boughs of the trees extend over the sidewalk, creating a white-blossomed canopy at this time each year.  The sidewalk is now covered with a carpet of petals. We live in a World in which, each spring, we can fill our cupped hands with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms.

               Fallen Blossoms on the Eastern Hills

Cherry blossoms filling the ground, sunset filling my eyes:
blossoms vanished, spring old, I feel the passing years.
When blossoms were at their finest I neglected to call.
The blossoms did not betray me.  I betrayed the blossoms.

Ishikawa Jōzan (1583-1672) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "From My Studio" (1959)

The camellia bushes along the north side of the house -- one with pink blossoms, one with white blossoms -- bloomed late this year, likely due to a winter that was longer, colder, and snowier than usual. But their petals are now falling, fallen, as well.  The squirrels scamper over them.

A few years ago, a pair of doves nested in one of the bushes.  In the mornings, I could hear their soft coos outside the window.  I miss their company.  But who knows what may happen?  Spring has hardly begun.

                Black and White

A blackbird flew to a hawthorn bush
and brushed a flutter of petals down;
they tumbled and turned like a flurry of snow
and settled slow on the waiting stone.

And, if that blackbird, all summer through,
could sing so long as there's light to see,
he would never fling a song as bright
as that lyric flight from the hawthorn tree.

John Hewitt, The Chinese Fluteplayer (1974).

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

Spring

Each spring arrives in its own fashion.  The day before the equinox, we unexpectedly had a day of nearly 80-degree, sunny weather.  The World took this as a sign, and spring appeared overnight, right on schedule.

Now, above us, we have cherry, plum, pear, and magnolia blossoms. At our shoulders we have camellia blooms.  And at our feet we have -- joining the previously-arrived crocuses -- daffodils, hyacinths, and a few early tulips.  This is only a partial inventory.  As for the trees: they are still biding their time, although their branches are tipped with green leaf-buds, at the ready.

          Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade

Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green --
when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.
Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --
in a lifetime how many springs do we see?

Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Copper Canyon Press 1994), page 68.

"Snowy boughs."  The confusion of spring fruit tree blossoms with snow-filled branches is a venerable poetic conceit, isn't it?

For instance:

                    The Cherry Trees

Under pure skies of April blue I stood,
Where, in wild beauty, cherries were in blow;
And, as sweet fancy willed, see there I could
Boughs thick with blossom, or inch-deep in snow.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).  De la Mare uses the word "blow" (line 2) in a sense that is now, alas, considered archaic:  "to blossom; to bloom."

This also comes to mind:

                    Nailsworth Hill

The Moon, that peeped as she came up,
     Is clear on top, with all her light;
She rests her chin on Nailsworth Hill,
     And, where she looks, the World is white.

White with her light -- or is it Frost,
     Or is it Snow her eyes have seen;
Or is it Cherry blossom there,
     Where no such trees have ever been?

W. H. Davies, The Loneliest Mountain and Other Poems (Jonathan Cape 1939).

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Glamis Village in April"

The blossom-snow confusion leads many of us to return to a poem we visit each spring.  Mere habit, perhaps.  Or ritual.  But, consider this: we are not who we were last spring, are we?  We have no way of knowing how the poem will make us feel this spring.  There is something to be said for habit and ritual in the midst of a feckless world.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, Poem II (Kegan Paul 1896).

"To see the cherry hung with snow."  For some of us, this line is the embodiment of spring.  The novelist J. L. Carr (A Month in the Country) served as the headmaster of a primary school in Kettering, Northamptonshire, for fifteen years.  Through the streets of Kettering, "under the cherry trees, Carr would march his entire school in the spring, all chanting, 'Loveliest of trees . . .'"  (Byron Rogers, The Last Englishman: The Life of J. L. Carr (Aurum Press 2003), page 153.)

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

So, dear readers, here we are again:  at the intersection of Beauty and Evanescence, in the land of bittersweet wistfulness and wistful bittersweetness.  Also known as Life.

"In a lifetime how many springs do we see?"  Su Tung-p'o wrote that line in 1077.  Eight centuries later, in 1895, A. E. Housman wrote: "And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room,/About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow."  The good poets, in all times and in all places, know what is humanly important, know where our attention should be directed. Human nature was the same in China in 1077 and in England in 1895.  And wherever you are at this moment.

                              Spring Night

Spring night -- one hour worth a thousand gold coins;
clear scent of flowers, shadowy moon.
Songs and flutes upstairs -- threads of sound;
in the garden, a swing, where night is deep and still.

Su Tung-p'o (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-P'o, page 19.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)

Poetry

At 7:45 this evening I sat in a chair, reading a poem by W. B. Yeats. As I looked to the left out the front window, I could see the last light of the day -- pale pink-blue, with an undertone of yellow -- above the silhouettes of the Olympic Mountains to the west.  The waters of Puget Sound, which had been dotted with sailboats in the morning and afternoon (the first race of the season), were still and empty, save for a single freighter leaving port, headed north.  Bound where?

At that moment, to my right, beyond the window that faces the back garden, a robin began to sing.  The garden, in the shadow of the house, was already dark.  Yet the robin -- somewhere in a cherry tree or an apple tree (I could not see him or her) -- sang and sang.

As the robin sang, I read this poem:

   Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors

What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan 1933).

Poetry.

Giffard Lenfestey (1872-1943), "Evening, the Stream"

How Little We Know

Ah, what bundles of quirks and tics, impulses and imaginings, hopes and delusions, we are.  In short, individual human souls.  Abiding for a brief time in "the vale of Soul-making."

On the other hand, we live in a politicized culture in which a predominant tendency is to place people into groups based upon various characteristics.  This taxonomization of human souls proceeds apace.  History tells us something about where this sort of thing leads, but I shall refrain from commenting further.

A haiku by Masaoka Shiki comes to mind:

   After I'm Dead

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems (Columbia University Press 1997), page 63.

Shiki wrote the poem in the autumn of 1897.  He had contracted tuberculosis in 1889, and had been in nearly constant pain since that time.  He died in 1902 at the age of thirty-four.  He did indeed love to eat persimmons.  And he did indeed love haiku.  In 2009, the Japanese postal system issued a stamp with an illustration of two persimmons hanging on a branch, accompanied by one of Shiki's best-known haiku:

   Stopping at a Teashop
      at Hōryū-ji Temple

I eat a persimmon
and a bell starts booming --
Hōryū-ji.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 42.

I am wholly in favor of placing oneself into categories such as "persimmon eater" or "lover of haiku."  Or "rain gazer."

Evening shower --
and gazing out into it,
a woman alone.

Kikaku (1661-1707) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 377.

Or "snow watcher."  Two centuries after Kikaku wrote his haiku, Shiki wrote this:

From a rear window
in the falling snow
a woman's face looks out.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 22.

Helen Johnstone (1888-1931), "Tolbooth Close"

Back in early December, I wrote about the robins that gather here in small flocks in winter.  I have grown increasingly fond of them.  For now, they still congregate in flocks, but, when spring arrives, I expect to see them pair off into couples.  On a sunny afternoon earlier this week, I saw a group of them spread out across a wide field of grass (green from the winter rain), feeding.  The robin world seems a simple world, but I'm sure it is not.  Yet, on that warm, nearly-spring day, they seemed at peace in their robin lives.

          Once Seen, and No More

Thousands each day pass by, which we,
Once past and gone, no more shall see.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides, Poem 671, in Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press 2013).

As I walked beside the flock, I focused my attention on one of the robins.  I believe it was a female, because her breast feathers were a paler orange.  She made her way across the field with her companions, slowly but steadily, pecking the ground, occasionally lifting her head to look around, hopping forwards and sideways, chattering now and then.  I thought of the spark of Life she was.  I suddenly realized that she was this robin, not a robin.  There was nothing else like her in the world.

               The Railway Junction

From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.

How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there's none,
Nor traveller to be seen --

Where late there was a throng.  And now,
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.

But not their way:  the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,

That fair one, too, discreetly veiled --
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
Or shores, ere night is spent.

I nothing know why thus we met --
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except --
The evening growing late --

That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas?

Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

Catriona Barnett (1934-1972), Untitled

Rain gazers.  Persimmon eaters.  Snow watchers.  Haiku lovers.

The crocuses have now arrived in earnest.  A bit late due to an unusually cold winter.  They border the sidewalks in the neighborhood:  dark purple; white; deep yellow; pale purple streaked with white.  After I'm dead, tell them I waited each year for the crocuses.  And watched the flocks of robins in the winter.

   Written on Seeing the Garden Pines in the Rain
                    on the Morning of May 21st

Pine needles,
each needle strung with its
drop of bright dew,
forming, then falling,
falling, then forming again.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 104.  Shiki wrote the poem in 1900.

Mary McCrossan (1865-1934), "Umbrellas and Barges, Venice"