Another Birthday

I turned 70 today.  A day like any other day.  Showers in the morning. In the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sky brightened, so I went out for a walk.  It was one of those spring walks during which one is accompanied by birdsong the entire time, with the choristers unseen.

At about 10 o’clock last night this thought occurred to me: “When I wake up tomorrow morning, I will be 70 years old.”  I confess that this realization, as it hit home, did provoke a bit of . . . alarm? wonderment? dread?  But I evaded any attempt to sort out exactly what response the occasion called for.  Instead, I began to bring to mind poems that I hoped might help me to put the situation into perspective.  Of course, this was no doubt another attempt at evasion. But it is what I am accustomed to do.  What follows herein is a journey through the poems that came to mind, as one of them led to another.  (All of them have appeared here before, on various occasions.)

This poem floated up first:

                    On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33.  Ury includes this note to the poem: “The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement.”  Ibid, page 33.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

Given that Walter de la Mare’s poems are often on my mind, it was not surprising that this appeared next:

               Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate’er befall.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 605.  The italics appear in the original text. The poem was first published in de la Mare's O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953), his final volume of poems.  As long-time (and much-appreciated) visitors here may recall, “Now” has appeared here on several occasions.

Stanley Spencer

"Bluebells, Cornflowers and Rhododendrons" (1945)

Perhaps it is the month which led me from “Now" to the next poem, which I have identified in the past as my favorite April poem:

                    Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin Books 2004), page 187.  The poem was first published in Kavanagh’s Weekly on April 19, 1952.  Ibid, page 280.

As always happens, “Wet Evening in April” inevitably sent me to the next poem (the two poems have, for some reason, been linked together in my mind for quite some time):

          Consider the Grass Growing

Consider the grass growing

As it grew last year and the year before,

Cool about the ankles like summer rivers,

When we walked on a May evening through the meadows

To watch the mare that was going to foal.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, page 112.  The poem was first published in The Irish Press on May 21, 1943.  Ibid, page 271.

Stanley Spencer, "Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene" (1947)

What came to mind after Kavanagh’s two poems was not surprising, given what had prompted my escape into poetry last night.

            From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate

Over a London mews -- to contemplate --

Is it the sky above -- the stones below?

     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,

     Or thinking forward to futurity

That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,

Quietly folded are the quiet hands,

Rarely he speaks.

     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,

     So much to spend?

What is it he seeks?

Whate’er he be,

He is become to me

A form of rest.

     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs

     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,

And not unblest. 

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954), page 251.  The poem was written in 1907, the year in which Coleridge died. 

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

This past week I have been visiting one of my favorite books: Burton Watson’s Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets.  Mary Coleridge’s “From My Window” took me to one of my favorite poems in Watson’s book:

                    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 (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 92).  A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning “Chinese poem”) is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

Thus ended last night’s one-poem-leads-to-another excursion, which, as I noted above, was likely an attempt to evade the reality of arriving at the age of 70.  One thing is certain: I have not returned from my (admittedly delightful) excursion with any conclusions, advice, or wisdom.  But I do believe there is a thread or two running through the poems.  Or perhaps, in the end, this turning 70 business is all very straightforward:

     Simply trust:

Do not also the petals flutter down,

     Just like that?

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 363.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

The Wind in the Pines

In this part of the world, the deciduous trees are empty, save for a few leaves fluttering drily on otherwise bare branches.  Gone (at least for now) are the green days of whispering, soughing, and roaring boughs.  Passing through a leafless grove on a windy day, one hears the empty branches clacking and clicking against one another high overhead.  The trunks and large limbs creak and groan, like the masts of a sailing ship in a storm as described in a seafaring tale.

But, ah! -- the wind in the pines is always with us.  

When the wind passes

     in the pines, autumn already

          seems lonely enough --

and then a fulling block echoes

     through Tamakawa Village.  

Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 136.  The poem is a waka (as are the two poems which appear below).  The sound of fulling blocks in the night signifies deep autumn in Japanese poetry (and in turn reflects the influence of Chinese poetry (in which the sound of fulling blocks on an autumn night is often heard) on Japanese poets).  For more on fulling blocks in Japanese and Chinese poetry, please see an earlier post from 2021.

The continuity of Japanese poetry up until the 20th century is a wonderful thing.  A beautiful poem (or an evocative, beautiful image or phrase within a poem) was never forgotten by poets or readers, and its echo might return years or centuries later in a new poem.  The new poem did not identify the source of the echo.  No footnotes were provided.  Nor were they necessary.  Everyone who read the poem, or heard it recited, recognized the echo.  And thus the earlier poem's beauty was preserved, renewed, and brought into a new world.  A long string of resonating echoes developed.  Nothing was lost to Time, or left behind.  Imagine that.

I come so seldom,

and yet how sad in the night

     sounds the wind in the pines.

And she, there beneath the moss --

does she too hear it, endlessly?

Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) (translated by Steven Carter), Ibid, page 153.  The occasion for the writing of the poem was Fujiwara no Shunzei's visit to the grave of his wife.  He spent the night at a nearby Buddhist temple.  Ibid, page 153.

Saigyō, a friend of Fujiwara no Shunzei, and a reclusive dweller in the countryside for much of his life, wrote this: 

Mountain village

where wind makes sad noises

in the pines --

and adding to the loneliness,

the cry of an evening cicada.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 146.  The sound of cicadas (or, alternatively, crickets) in the twilight of late summer or early autumn provides another memorable series of lovely echoes in Japanese poetry.  But that requires a post of its own, at another time.  As does the cry of quail at evening in the deep grass.

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

Of course, I am not suggesting that Japanese poets alone are sensitive to the allure (be it melancholic or soothing) of the wind in the pines.  For instance, quite some time ago I discovered this poem in The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, which was compiled in 1912 by the redoubtable Arthur Quiller-Couch:

      Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,

        And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet, as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

        And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

        Even we,

        Even so.

George Meredith, in Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor), The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford University Press 1912), page 465.  The poem was originally published in Meredith's A Reading of Earth (Macmillan 1888).  One of those poems which, once read, is not forgotten.  (An aside.  I have Quiller-Couch's book beside me as I write this, and I notice that my copy bears a Tokyo bookstore's small decorative paper label on the inner flap of the dust-jacket.  I often visited the bookstore during two extended stays in Tokyo in 1993 and 2000, and I purchased the book during one of those visits.  How time passes.  "Overhead, overhead/Rushes life in a race,/As the clouds the clouds chase.")

Meredith's poem captures wonderfully how it feels to stand or sit within a grove of pines.  The stillness.  The silence.  The soft ground surrounding the trunks of the trees.  The mull and duff.  I remember "mull and duff" from Howard Nemerov's lovely poem "Again": "the nevergreen/Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor."  (Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches, Poems 1973-1975 (University of Chicago Press 1975), page 52.  "Nevergreen" is a neologism of Nemerov's invention, it would appear.)

"A wind sways the pines."  Reading Meredith's opening line, I cannot help but think of this:

            The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,

And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,

So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say

On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.

It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated

On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,

The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997), page 472.  "The Region November" was not published during Stevens' lifetime.  It was likely written in 1954, the year prior to his death.  (Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (edited by Milton Bates) (Alfred A. Knopf 1989), page 324.)

Pines are not specifically mentioned in "The Region November," but the "swaying, swaying, swaying" brings to mind the look of pines in the wind, at least for me.  And, speaking of echoes of past poems, consider these lines from Stevens' "The Snow Man," published in Harmonium in 1923, thirty years before he wrote "The Region November": "One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow . . . and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind."               

John Nash (1893-1977), "Autumn Berkshire" (1951)

The three waka from 11th and 12th century Japan and the poems by Meredith and Stevens suggest that hearing or seeing or feeling the wind in the pines is an occasion of pensive melancholy, with accompanying intimations of mortality.  I suspect that many of us might agree.  And yet . . .

Last week I came upon a group of busy, chattering sparrows flitting and hopping and pecking in the dry, leaning stalks of wild grass alongside a paved pathway.  As I have noted here in the past, I have come to think of the sparrows (and also the robins) as my winter companions.  I doubt if they regard me in that fashion.  As I came nearer, the entire group flew several yards away onto the lower branches of a tall pine standing alone out in the meadow beside the pathway.  They disappeared into the dark boughs, twittering and clucking.  How warm, dry, and soft it must be within the depths of that pine.  Calm, still, and quiet.  Even when the wind blows.  A place of shelter, refuge, and rest.  Or do those enveloping boughs provide only a brief respite?

The wind in the pines.  Over the centuries, the echoes continue in Japanese poetry. 

     A cool breeze;

The vault of heaven is filled

     With the voices of pine trees.

Onitsura (1660-1738) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume One (Hokuseido Press 1963), page 97.

And this:

One learns to bear solitude 

     from the sound of the pine-wind. 

Shōhaku (1443-1527) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, page 319.  This two-line verse appears as verse 64 in Minase Sangin Hyakuin ("Three Poets at Minase"), a hundred-verse renga written in 1488, with Shōhaku, Sōgi (1421-1502), and Sōchō (1448-1532) as the contributing poets.  Ibid, pages 303-326.

And, finally, this:

Twilight -- the only conversation

     on this hill

Is the wind blowing through the pines.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 76.  The poem is a waka.

This small gathering of poems about the wind in the pines is but a limited introduction, the product of my inadequate knowledge and memory.  It also serves as an admonition to my sleepwalking self: Pay attention.  Be grateful.

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946)

"View of the Sussex Weald" (1927)

Postscript.  The beautiful particulars of the World may lose their color, wither away.  Change or vanish.  But the World bestows compensations, dispensations, gifts.  A sunset in the distant pines.  No wind.

Winter Twilight (Discovery Park, Seattle)

"The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.  Consider living creatures -- none lives so long as man.  The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn.  What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity!  If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream."  Kenkō (1283-1350), Tsurezuregusa (Chapter 7), in Donald Keene (translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Messages

Where does one begin when it comes to autumn?  And where does one begin when it comes to the poetry of autumn?  For some unknown reason, these lines by Ezra Pound (a translation of lines written by Li Po in the 8th Century) suddenly arrive, unbidden: "What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,/There is no end of things in the heart."  (Ezra Pound, "Exile's Letter," in Cathay (Elkin Mathews 1915), page 22.)  (An aside: I first read these lines when I was a sophomore in college, taking a course titled "Yeats, Pound, and Eliot."  I was in the midst of falling in love with poetry. Fifty years later, here I am: still in love, still falling in love anew.)

Well, yes, autumn: "There is no end of things in the heart."  And thus, each autumn, one returns to what one loves in the season, and in the poetry of the season.  As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, I have on more than one occasion described autumn as the season of bittersweet wistfulness and of wistful bittersweetness.  What is one to do with such beauty, with its passing, with its loss?  But I am merely repeating what each of us already knows, aren't I?

                         Standing in the Evening

In the yellow dusk I stand alone before the Buddha hall;

pagoda tree blossoms fill the ground, cicadas fill the trees.

Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart,

but something special -- the sadness of these autumn days!

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by Burton Watson), in Po Chü-i, Selected Poems (Burton Watson, editor) (Columbia University Press 2000), page 50.  In China, pagoda trees bloom in late summer or early autumn, depending upon the region in which they are located.

Here is another poem by Po Chü-i, one which I visit each year as autumn makes its first appearance.

                            The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;

Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.

On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;

In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.

Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;

Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.

In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,

The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chü-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57.  The poem is written in the eight-line lü-shih ("regulated verse") form, which, in addition to having tonal and rhyming requirements, calls for verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets. (See Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), pages 8-12, 374.)

Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882), "Cheyne Walk, Chelsea" (1870)

Since mid-September, I had been waiting to see my first woolly bear caterpillar of the year.  To no avail.  I had nearly given up hope.  A few weeks ago, out on my afternoon walk, I thought to myself (my walking thoughts are quite mundane): "I guess I won't be seeing any woolly bears this year."  Then, after about ten minutes of walking along an asphalt pathway that passes between two large meadows, I saw a small dark shape up ahead of me in the middle of the pathway. I approached, and there it was: a woolly bear crossing from one meadow to the other, heading westward toward the waters of Puget Sound and the setting sun.

I did what I always do in these circumstances (and for which I seek neither credit nor praise, since this is something we all do, I presume): I stood watch in the middle of the pathway to make certain that he or she made a safe passage, unharmed by inattentive walkers or bicyclists.  In the focused, single-minded, and, yes, lovable fashion of woolly bears, it successfully crossed the pathway and disappeared into the dry grass of the meadow.  And so, as always happens with humans and woolly bears -- who meet only to part -- we each went our destined way.

A wonderful coincidence?  A lovely moment of serendipity?  So one might say.  Prosaically.  But I was not content to leave it at that on the afternoon on which the woolly bear and I shared a brief interval of time and space in the World.  Nor am I content to leave it at that now. The World sends us messages.  Unexpectedly.  It is up to each of us to make of them what we will.  I had received a message.  The message was wordless.  And words cannot explain it. 

A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō (Twayne Publishers 1970), page 50.

     People are few;

A leaf falls here,

     Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

     The stillness;

A bird walking on the fallen leaves:

     The sound of it.

Ryūshi (died 1681) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 365.

     The leaf of the paulownia,

With not a breath of wind,

     Falls.

Bonchō (died 1714) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 130.

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (italics in the original text).)

Another way of looking at the World's messages:

"Gifts are still occasionally given us, particularly when we have not asked for them, and I cling to the hope of understanding the link between certain of them and our inner life, their meaning in relation to our most persistent dreams."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 3.)

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "Autumn by the River"

At times, words are not sufficient.  Nor are they required.  Perhaps (likely?) at the most important times.  So says a person who loves poetry.  So says a person who has maintained a blog (fitfully) for more than 15 years, relying upon words.  A person who returns each autumn -- faithfully and unfailingly -- to the beautiful words of the following poem.

                 Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice 

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).

"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 (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book V, Section 24, in Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus: His Conversations with Himself (1701), page 78.)

It all comes back to the leaves, their rising and their falling.  While we are here, and after we are gone.

                    Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues

Long as the whole of time:

A single aimless man

Carries a black garden broom.

He is too far to hear him

Wading through the leaves, down autumn

Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson, 1924-1962 (Phoenix House 1963).

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

"In a lifetime how many springs do we see?"  This is the final line of "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade," a four-line poem by Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) which has appeared here on several occasions. However, as Po Chü-i observes above in "Standing in the Evening": "Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart."  Thus, with apologies and gratitude to Su Tung-p'o, I find myself thinking: "In a lifetime how many autumns do we see?"  This thought is a product of age, no doubt.  Which, I should add, is not a bad thing.

                                   Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate (pronounced ta-tay) Ryuwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).  The poem is in the form of a kanshi, a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, adhering to the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

The following poem provides a lovely and moving complement to Tate Ryuwan's poem:

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371.  The poem is untitled.

Autumn.  The World.  Sending us messages.  Gifts, as Philippe Jaccottet would say.  

The wind has brought

     enough fallen leaves

To make a fire.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 67.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Autumn, Kinnordy" (1936)

Small Things

One afternoon last week, as I walked along the edge of a grove of pines and maples, I heard a bird's voice up ahead, high in a pine.  Not a song or a warble, but two firm, quick calls of the same note, with the sequence repeated three or four times.  Then silence.  A minute or so later, the two calls were again repeated three or four times, but from another pine, closer this time.  The message seemed to be something along the lines of: "I'm here. I'm here."  Not an alarm or a warning.  Rather, an announcement of sorts (perhaps a greeting?) to any nearby listeners.

I kept walking -- waiting for further calls, and looking up into the trees to see if I could find the source.  Then, as I passed beneath the overarching branches of a group of tall bushes, a pileated woodpecker flew down from the left, just ahead of me, and landed on the branch of a bush on my right, at eye level a few yards away.  (Please note that I am no expert when it comes to the identification of birds.  I knew the name of the bird because I have long had a reliable source: Birds of Discovery Park (prepared by the Seattle Audubon Society and the Seattle parks department), a two-page list of the more than 200 species of birds that inhabit the place where I take most of my walks.)

What a wonderful sight he or she was: a bright red pointed crest on the top of its head, two thin white stripes on its black face, with the stripes continuing down its neck, and a black-feathered body.  I see the woodpeckers a few times a year, but nearly always at a distance: tapping away up in a tree, my eyes drawn to them by the hollow drumming.  Seldom do I see them close at hand.  After pausing a moment on the branch, it flew away into the sunlight and shadow of the grove.  

I have recently been revisiting the poetry of Saigyō.  A day or so after my encounter with the woodpecker, I came upon a poem (a waka) I hadn't read in quite some time:

Were we sure of seeing

a moon like this

in existences to come,

who would be sorry

to leave this life?

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 158.

These poems we read and love: we carry them within us.  They wait patiently.  When the time is right, we find them again, or they return to us.  Often serendipitously.  Saigyō's poem arrived in such a fashion. 

A small thing, my encounter with the woodpecker, but of inestimable value.  A value best left unspoken, unarticulated.  But not to be forgotten.  One of those gifts which -- suddenly, unaccountably -- are bestowed upon us by the World.

Christopher Sanders (1905-1991)

"Sunlight Through a Willow Tree at Kew" (c. 1958)

Small things, never to be forgotten.  Seven years ago in May, a hundred or so feet away from the spot where I spent a moment with the woodpecker, I came across a dead mole lying on its back beside the same path.  In my post of May 23, 2018, I wrote this about the mole: "He or she was a small, dark-brown thing, about eight inches long, its pinkish-white, fleshy front paws open to the sky.  It was those tiny, outspread paws that particularly touched me."

I closed the brief post with this poem, which has appeared here on more than one occasion:

               A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,

That so much lived below the ground,

Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,

For you to raise a mound 

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (Secker & Warburg 1985), page 63.  The poem was originally published in Speak to the Earth (Jonathan Cape 1939).

I find it hard to believe that it has already been seven years since I shared that short time with the mole.  As the saying goes (repeated at more frequent intervals as one ages, in my experience): "It seems like only yesterday . . ."  Should I let go of my memory of the mole?  Am I being "sentimental"?  A fair number of moderns (wise, undeceived, and ironic) are wont to scoff at "sentimentality."  This is sufficient to convince me to embrace it further.

                  What?

What dost thou surely know?

What will the truth remain,

When from the world of men thou go

To the unknown again?

What science -- of what hope?

What heart-loved certitude won

From thought shall then for scope

Be thine -- thy thinking done?

Tis said, that even the wise,

When plucking at the sheet,

Have smiled with swift-darkening eyes,

As if in vision fleet

Of some mere flower, or bird,

Seen in dream, or in childhood's play;

And then, without sign or word,

Have turned from the world away.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 290.  The poem was originally published in The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

Patrick Symons (1925-1993), "Oak Arch Grey" (1981)

Exchanging glances with a pileated woodpecker.  Leaning down to look at a lifeless mole lying open to the huge blue sky.  These small things were fated never to be forgotten.  But, when it comes to the gifts the World bestows upon us -- its beautiful particulars -- there is no hierarchy.  Nothing is quotidian or commonplace if we are attentive and grateful.

                         The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life; whatever

Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . . 

Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never

Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles

Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done

Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed

Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), in Ivor Gurney, Selected Poetry (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996), page 46.  The punctuation, and the ellipses (in lines 2 and 9, and between lines 8 and 9), are as they appear in the original typescript.  The poem was not published during Gurney's lifetime.

"Hedge sparrow."  Yes, I understand.  My afternoon walk takes me along a path that passes through the center of a large meadow of tall wild grass.  Nearly every day, sparrows suddenly appear out of the grass ahead of me, and hop and skip away down the path.  I've come to think of them as companions, but I suspect they don't regard me as such.  Still, I harbor the fancy that they are starting to tolerate my presence.  Small things, of inestimable value.

      Compare and Contrast

The great thinker died

after forty years of poking about

with his little torch

in the dark forest of ideas,

in the bright glare of perception,

leaving a legacy of fourteen books

to the world

where a hen disappeared

into six acres of tall oats

and sauntered unerringly

to the nest with five eggs in it.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2005), page 432.

In the year before his death, Walter de la Mare said to a friend who came to visit him: "My days are getting shorter.  But there is more and more magic.  More than in all poetry.  Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful."  (Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth 1993), page 443.)

     The world of dew

is the world of dew. 

     And yet, and yet --

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 191.  R. H. Blyth provides background to Issa's haiku: "This verse has the prescript, 'Losing a beloved child.' . . . He had already lost two or three children when this baby girl died."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 433.)

Robert Ball (1918-2009), "Mrs. Barclay's Pond, Harborne" (1949)

Frolic and Detour

Forty-one years on, I retain very little from my three years of law school.  Memories of friendships.  And of a love.  Alas, lost.  As for "The Law" itself, only a few scattered phrases remain from all those books and lectures.  For instance: "frolic and detour."  The concept comes from the law of torts: an employer is not liable for the actions of an employee who engages in activity which is beyond the scope of his or her duties.  I have never had occasion to address frolic and detour in the "practice" of law.  On the other hand, I habitually engage in frolic and detour when it comes to the reading of poetry.

Recently, I have been spending time in the company of Bashō and Walter de la Mare.  As my decades with them have passed, their companionship has become more and more comforting.  And essential.  Where would I be without them?

Hototogisu --

through a vast bamboo forest

moonlight seeping

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 314.

A hototogisu "is a bird that looks like an English cuckoo, but is smaller and has a sharp, piercing cry."  Ibid, page 198.  R. H. Blyth describes it as follows: "The hototogisu corresponds more or less to the English cuckoo.  The breast of the male is blackish, with white blotches.  The breast of the female is white, the inside of the mouth red; it has a crest of hair on the head. . . . From early summer, it sings day and night, and ceases in autumn."  R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 161.

Blyth provides this translation of Bashō's haiku:

     Moonlight slants through

The vast bamboo grove:

     A hototogisu cries.

Ibid, page 161.  The Romanized version ("Romaji," to use the Japanese term) of the haiku is: hototogisu/ōtakeyabu wo/moru tsukiyo.  Ibid, page 161.  Hototogisu means "cuckoo"; ōtakeyabu means "large bamboo grove;" wo is a particle which identifies ōtakeyabu as the object of moru tsukiyo; moru means "to seep;" tsuki means "moon" and yo means "night" (hence, the compound word tsukiyo can mean either "moonlight" or "moonlit night").  

A distinctive difference between the two translations of the haiku is that Ueda translates the Japanese word moru as "seeping," whereas Blyth opts for "slants through."  As a matter of beauty, I prefer Blyth's "moonlight slants through" to Ueda's "moonlight seeping," but Ueda's translation of moru is arguably more accurate.  A second difference is that Blyth states that the hototogisu "cries," whereas Ueda does not.  Again, Ueda's translation is arguably more accurate: Bashō gives us only the word hototogisu to commence the haiku, with no accompanying verb.  Haiku poets, in stating the name of a particular bird, will quite often leave it up to the reader to infer whether the bird is singing (or chirping, warbling, or silent).  (But I should be careful not to overstep my bounds: given my limited experience with Japanese, I am an amateur, with no right to quibble with, much less express opinions on, translations.  But it is interesting to consider the choices that different translators make.) In any case, whichever of the two translations one prefers, Bashō's haiku is lovely, affecting, and haunting.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

Thus began a day or so of frolic and detour.  Soon after reading Bashō's haiku, I happened upon this:

An echo, perhaps?

From the valley, then the peak --

a cuckoo's call.

Gusai (died 1376) (translated by Steven Carter), in Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 281.

With Walter de la Mare on my mind, Gusai's echoing call of the cuckoo/hototogisu took me further afield (and happily so): 

          Echo

Seven sweet notes

In the moonlight pale

Warbled a leaf-hidden

Nightingale:

And Echo in hiding

By an old green wall

Under the willows

Sighed back them all.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 415.  "Echo" was originally published in Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (Faber and Faber 1941).  Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes is ostensibly a book of children's verse. However, as all those who love Walter de la Mare's poetry know, one should bear in mind the subtitle to de la Mare's Come Hither, his wonderful anthology of poetry (published in 1923): "A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages."  

In 1942, de la Mare's volume of Collected Poems was published, consisting of poems for adults.  In 1944, his volume of Collected Rhymes and Verses was published, consisting of poems for children. In the preface to the latter volume, de la Mare writes: "To what degree and in what precise respect the contents of this volume differ from the contents of Collected Poems are little problems which I will not attempt to explore.  Somewhere the two streams divide -- and may re-intermingle.  Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source.  And here, concerning that -- nor will I even venture on an Alas -- silence is best."  

A lovely and enlightening statement by de la Mare.  Over the years, I have come to make no distinction between his "adult poems" and his "children's verse and rhymes."  They indeed "sprang from the same source," and ultimately arrive at the same place: Beauty and Truth.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Boreland Mill, Kirkmichael" (1950)

A hototogisu.  Followed by a nightingale.  And now the goddess Echo had appeared, drawing me further on:

High up the mountain-meadow, Echo with never a tongue

Sings back to each bird in answer the song each bird hath sung.

Satyrus (1st Century B.C. -- 1st Century A.D.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent & Sons 1951), page 358.

A bit later on my wanderings, this came to mind:

Nought to the far-off Hades but an empty echo cries.

There, mid the dead, is silence.  My voice in the darkness dies.

Erinna (mid-4th Century B.C.) (translated by F. Lucas).   Ibid, page 279.  Erinna is "said to have died at nineteen, but ranked with Sappho by some ancient judgments, though little of her work survives.  Her chief poem was a lament, The Distaff, for her dead girl-friend Baucis."  Ibid, page 279.

James McIntosh Patrick, "City Garden" (1979)

Finally, my frolic and detour came to an end when the following poem arrived, unaccountably, from somewhere.  (Although there is a connection with Walter de la Mare.)

               At Common Dawn

At common dawn there is a voice of bird

So sweet, 'tis kin to pain;

For love of earthly life it needs be heard,

And lets not sleep again.

This bird I did one time at midnight hear

In wet November wood

Say to himself his lyric faint and clear

As one at daybreak should.

He ceased; the covert breathed no other sound,

Nor moody answer made;

But all the world at beauty's worship found,

Was waking in the glade.

Vivian Locke Ellis (1878-1950), in Walter de la Mare (editor), Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Constable & Co. 1923), page 360.

[Postscript.  Please accept my apologies for the long absence, dear readers.  Writing this post, I realized how much I have missed being here.  Thank you for your patience.]

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

Suddenly

Over a lifetime, I have failed to give the moon the attention it deserves.  But it is patient and forgiving, despite my faithlessness. Thus, in the first week of this month, as I was out walking at twilight, I happened to glance towards the vanishing sunset, and there it was: a brilliant and pristine white crescent moon, a third of the way up the darkening, but still powder blue, southwestern sky.  How shall I describe that whiteness, that thin curve of radiance set amidst pale blue?  I'm afraid I have no words.  Now, as then, I'm left speechless.

I have been visiting Bashō's haiku in December and January.  A few weeks before my encounter with the newly-born crescent moon, I came across this:

Unlike anything

it has been compared to:

the third-day moon.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda (editor), Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 207.  

The Japanese phrase for the first phase of the waxing crescent moon is mika no tsuki: "third-day moon."  Mika means "third day"; tsuki means "moon"; no is a particle meaning (roughly) "of."  Bashō included this headnote to the haiku: "The third day of the month." Ibid.  Ueda provides this comment: "Since olden times the crescent moon had been compared to a great many things, including a sickle, a bow, a comb, a boat, and a woman's eyebrow."  Ibid.  Bashō is absolutely correct: words are not adequate.

As so often happens with poetry, serendipity: a poem appears, and, soon after, the beautiful particulars of the World arrive, echoing it. Or vice versa.  In addition, this comes to mind:

                                     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).

Dudley Holland (1915-1956), "Winter Morning" (1945)

"The lovely in life is the familiar,/And only the lovelier for continuing strange" is paired in my mind with these lines from de la Mare's "Now," which appears in his final collection of poems: "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." (The italics appear in the original text.)  Stumbling across the beauty of the crescent moon early this month brought home the importance of "now": a reproach to my usual state of sleepwalking.  And the serene power and charm of that beauty had an element of strangeness to it: the moon seemed impossibly lovely, beyond one's ken.

But there was something else at work as well.  The suddenness of that beauty's arrival -- as I absent-mindedly looked skyward -- startled me, took me aback, and leaves me speechless still.  Words such as "miraculous" or "revelatory" float to the surface.  But I shall restrain myself.  Relying on the circumspect William James in his final conclusions on mysticism, I will leave it at this: "higher energies filter in."  (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green and Co. 1902), page 519.)

Best to turn to a poem:

                         The Elm

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

I did not know the reason, nor did she.

But there she stood, and turned, and smiled at me:

A sudden glory had bewitched the child.

The corn at harvest, and a single tree.

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (Duckworth 1938).

Belloc's poem, and the phrase "a sudden glory" in particular, bring this to mind:

       Sudden Heaven

All was as it had ever been --

The worn familiar book,

The oak beyond the hawthorn seen,

The misty woodland's look:

The starling perched upon the tree

With his long tress of straw --

When suddenly heaven blazed on me,

And suddenly I saw:

Saw all as it would ever be,

In bliss too great to tell;

Forever safe, forever free,

All bright with miracle:

Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,

The tree beside the door;

And I must die -- but O my shade

Shall dwell there evermore.

Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), in Don King (editor), Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter (Kent State University Press 2018), page 106.  The poem was written in 1931.  Ibid, page 106

Paul Ayshford Methuen (1886-1974)

"Magnolia Soulangiana at Corsham" (c. 1963)

While I was out on my daily walk last week, a few hundred feet in front of me a dark bird with a wide wingspan flew slowly away, just above a grove of pines beside the road.  The bird banked to the left, and settled on a branch near the top of a pine.  Given the size of the bird's wings, I suspected, and hoped, that it was a bald eagle.  But I couldn't be sure from that distance: it could have been a hawk, an owl, or even a large crow.  I assumed it would be gone by the time I reached the pine. 

But, when I arrived and looked up, there it was: a bald eagle perched on a high branch, surveying the territory.  Encountering a bald eagle is not a rare occurrence in this part of the world, but I never cease to be amazed -- and grateful -- when I cross paths with one of them. I never tire of (or get over) those penetrating, unflinching eyes.  Or the sharp curve of that deep-yellow beak, unlike any other hue of yellow. Or the cry that now and then comes from the sky as one of them circles slowly overhead.

               Arrival

Not conscious

       that you have been seeking

              suddenly

       you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills

              dust free

       with no road out

but the one you came in by.

              A bird chimes

       from a green tree

the hour that is no hour

       you know.  The river dawdles

to hold a mirror for you

where you may see yourself

       as you are, a traveller

               with the moon's halo

       above him, who has arrived

       after long journeying where he

               began, catching this

       one truth by surprise

that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (Macmillan 1983).

R. S. Thomas' poems can be spare and acerbic, especially when his subject is the modern world.  But there is no shortage of beauty.  The heart of his poetry is his lifelong attendance upon the silence of God, as he makes his way through our short time in Paradise (Wales, in Thomas' case).  At times there is a note of complaint, the merest hint of a doubt.  But withal he is patient.  He is often rewarded.

               The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it.  I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past.  It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit (Macmillan 1975).

Ian Grant (1904-1993), "Cheshire Mill" (1939)

The beautiful particulars of the World often arrive unexpectedly and unaccountably at our doorstep, or we at theirs.  Suddenly.  There is no planning involved, nor itinerary to be followed.  We simply need to pay attention.  (So says an inveterate sleepwalker.)  And never cease to be grateful.

To a mountain village

   at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

   from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

James Cowie (1886-1956), "Pastoral" (c. 1938)

Autumn Into Winter

As I have mentioned here in the past, each day I read a poem in the morning and a poem in the evening.  This was today's morning poem:

                                   Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate Ryūwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 117.  A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning "Chinese poem") is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of Chinese prosody.  (For a discussion of kanshi, please see my post of November 2, 2014.)  

I have read "Autumn Ends" several times in the past, but I hadn't revisited it recently.  This morning, I came upon it while browsing through Watson's anthology, which is one of my favorite books.  After reading the poem, it occurred to me: isn't today the day of the winter solstice, or was it yesterday, or is it tomorrow?  I checked: it is indeed today.  Reading poetry tends to put one in the way of serendipity.

But, beyond this nice bit of happenstance, I realized that, with each passing year, "Autumn Ends" seems more and more apt.  Something along these lines: "In a lifetime, how many springs do we see?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  Or this: "the years just flow by like a broken-down dam."  (John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery.")  Ah, well, no help for it.

John Milne Donald (1819-1866), "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

As I am wont to say: "In poetry, one thing leads to another."  Thus, not surprisingly, my favorite autumn poem came to mind soon after I read "Autumn Ends" this morning.  The poem usually appears here each autumn, but this year it makes its appearance on the first day of winter.

                   Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife 

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975), page 3.

It is lovely to find "rustling" leaves in both "Autumn Ends" and "Leaves."  It is those rustling leaves that follow us on our autumn walks -- dogging our footsteps -- that capture the heart of autumn.  And Mahon takes things a beautiful step further: "It is autumn, and dead leaves/On their way to the river/Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road."

George Vicat Cole (1833-1893), "Autumn Morning" (1891)

Today I went for my daily late afternoon walk, both poems still on my mind.  After intermittent rain, often heavy, in the morning, the sky overhead and to the west was clearing: a mix of blue, gold, pink, and orange.  The sun was on its way to disappearing beyond the waters of Puget Sound, beyond the Olympic Mountains, off into the Pacific.  Not a bad way to bring autumn to a close, to enter winter.

The ground remains strewn with all of those rustling leaves.  But the sparrows, our companions throughout the winter, were lively, sporting in the remaining sunlight.  Of course, they know what the fallen rustling leaves are telling us.  But they go on being their sparrow selves.

After seeing them twittering and flitting in the bushes and on the green meadow grass, I thought of this:

                        The Bamboo Sparrow

Doesn't peck up millet from the government storehouse,

Doesn't bore holes through the master's house;

It dwells a lifetime in the mountain groves

And roosts at nightfall on a branch of bamboo.

Gido Shūshin (1325-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1992), page 68.  "The Bamboo Sparrow," like "Autumn Ends," is a kanshi.

Alexander Docharty (1862-1940), "An Autumn Day" (1917)

I returned from my walk.  I have not yet read my poem for the evening.  However -- again, one poem leading to another -- I thought of this tonight: 

          The River

Stir not, whisper not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river,

Whose whispering willows,

Whose murmuring reeds

Make silence more still

Than the thought it breeds,

Until thought drops down

From the motionless mind

Like a quiet brown leaf

Without any wind;

It falls on the river

And floats with its flowing,

Unhurrying still

Past caring, past knowing.

Ask not, answer not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river.

Patrick MacDonogh (1902-1961), Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001), page 86.

Rustling leaves.  Sparrows.  Autumn into winter.  The river.

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

Journey

The swallows have departed.  The tall, dry meadow grass rustles in the nearly empty air.  Now and then a sparrow suddenly flutters up from beside the path, then flies off toward the trees surrounding the field.  Ghostly white tufts of thistle seed float past, rising and falling.

                    Swallows Flown

Whence comes that small continuous silence

     Haunting the livelong day?

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

     Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

     Had vanished -- could not stay?

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

None of this comes as a surprise.  Still, every year there is a pang. Something along these lines: "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), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  A time comes when you realize with certainty that the seasons you have seen far outnumber the seasons that remain to you.  This is not a bad thing to take to heart.

                                  The Last Swallow

       The robin whistles again.  Day's arches narrow,

       Tender and quiet skies lighten the withering flowers.

       The dark of winter must come. . . . But that tiny arrow,

       Circuiting high in the blue -- the year's last swallow,

Knows where the coast of far mysterious sun-wild Africa lours.

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

Alfred Thornton (1863-1939)

"Hill Farm, Painswick, Gloucestershire"

The dragonflies seem to have vanished as well.  I remember an afternoon this past summer when I stood in the middle of a field as the swallows climbed and dived and swerved and skimmed just above the tops of the green meadow grasses.  On that day, the dragonflies were also out in the field, and they and the swallows circled around me.  Please bear with me, but, as I stood there, I couldn't help but think of this: "At the still point of the turning world."  (T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton.")  (Fortunately, it can't be helped: certain of the poems we loved when we were young never leave us, do they?  They remain within us always, waiting.)

Being but man, forbear to say

Beyond to-night what thing shall be,

And date no man's felicity.

          For know, all things

          Make briefer stay

Than dragonflies, whose slender wings

     Hover, and whip away.

Simonides (556-467 B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 234.

A few years after coming across Simonides' dragonflies, I happened upon this, and the two are now forever linked:

"October 6, 1940.  Late in the season as it is, a dragonfly has appeared and is flying around me.  Keep on flying as long as you can  -- your flying days will soon be over."

Taneda Santōka (1882-1940) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries (Columbia University Press 2003), page 102. Watson provides this note to the passage: "This is the last entry in Santōka's diary, written four days before his death."  Ibid, page 102.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "The Pant Valley, Summer" (1960)

Whenever the topic at hand is the evanescence of the beautiful particulars of the World, it seems that Edward Thomas hovers over my shoulder.  And often, as in the case of this post, he is in the company of his friend, Walter de la Mare.  I don't know what I would do without the two of them.

          How at Once

How at once should I know,

When stretched in the harvest blue

I saw the swift's black bow,

That I would not have that view

Another day

Until next May

Again it is due?

The same year after year --

But with the swift alone.

With other things I but fear

That they will be over and done

Suddenly 

And I only see

Them to know them gone.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (Edna Longley, editor) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 131.

Swifts and swallows go well together.  Antic sprites that frolic and then vanish.

Alfred Thornton, "The Upper Severn"

A thought by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "Earth never grieves!" ("Autumn in King's Hintock Park," in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).)  One can find comfort and equanimity in the thought that, once our short time in the World is over, the seasons will continue to come and go without us, with their generations of leaves and birds and clouds.

                         At Night on a Journey

Bell-sounds night after night -- falling on whose ears?

The traveler's dream: forty years pass in an instant:

Sitting up by shutters under the pines, I forget "I" --

Clouds issue from the peaks, the moon courses the heavens.

Ryūshū Shūtaku (1308-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 59.  Ury includes this note to the poem: "The second line refers to a Chinese folktale that became popular in Japan. A man who has come to the capital to seek his fortune lies down for a nap and experiences in dream all the vicissitudes of a long, glorious but ultimately tragic official career; awaking, he discovers that no more time has passed than it has taken for his supper of yellow millet to cook."  Ibid, page 59.

When I walk down an avenue of trees on a sunny day, my attention is usually focused upward, on the leaves turning in the wind, set against blue and gold.  But one afternoon this past summer my eyes were drawn to the swaying shadows of branches on the asphalt pathway before me.  A beautiful, ever-changing world of its own, replicating in its own fashion the beautiful, ever-changing world overhead.  After a few moments passed, I noticed down on the sunlit pathway the small but distinct shadow of a butterfly that was balancing out on the shadow of the far tip of one of the moving branches.  As I watched, the shadow of the butterfly flew away.  I looked up, but I saw no butterfly in the sky.

               On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed?  Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), Ibid, page 33. Ury includes this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement."  Ibid, page 33.

John Aldridge, "Stubble Field, Thaxted" (1968)