What Happens

Early last week, I came across this:

     With the young trout in the valley
A leaf of the dwarf bamboo
     Floats away.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952).

Then, on Friday night, this appeared:

"The Whale followed by Waves -- I would glide down the rivulet of quiet Life, a Trout!"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon 1957), Entry 54 (1795/1796; Gutch Notebook).

Two lovely trout arriving within days of each other.  The World often provides us with beneficences of this sort.  In my seventh decade above ground, approaching an inevitable return to dust, I am not entirely surprised when these gifts are bestowed from out of the blue.  But I never take them for granted, and I am always grateful.

Mere coincidence, some might say.  Not I.  We place ourselves in the way of serendipity, or serendipity finds us, or perhaps both.  Ah, but where does serendipity come from?  I am content to let the inquiry end with that question.  I have no need for an explanation.  Time will tell.  Or it will not.

One thing is certain:  I would be happy to "glide down the rivulet of quiet Life, a Trout," accompanied by a single fallen bamboo leaf.

Edward Waite (1854-1924)

"The Mellow Year Is Hastening To Its Close" (1896)

Here is another gift that arrived unexpectedly last week, before the trout made their appearance:

"Little Daisy -- very late Spring.  March -- Quid si vivat? -- Do all things in Faith.  Never pluck a flower again!"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ibid, Entry 15 (1794/1795; Gutch Notebook). "Quid si vivat?" may be translated as:  "What if it should live?"  Seamus Perry (editor), Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford University Press 2002), page 134.

Coleridge's notebook entry brought this to mind:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail and Other Poems (Strahan 1870).  The poem is untitled.

I am very fond of Tennyson's poem, but I have always regretted that he plucked the flower "out of the crannies."  But I understand the impulse, and I don't hold his plucking against him.  "Never pluck a flower again!"  I wonder if Coleridge kept his resolution.

As one might expect, the plucking, pruning, or cutting of flowers is a topic that has been visited by Japanese haiku poets on more than one occasion. This is perhaps the best-known instance:

     The well-bucket
Having been taken by the morning glory,
     I borrow water.

Chiyo-ni (1703-1775) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume 1 (Hokuseido Press 1963).

Yes, it is usually best to leave well enough alone.  Just walk away.

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Autumn in Glencairn, Moniaive" (1887)

On Thursday, line after line of storms passed through, blown by a strong wind out of the southwest.  In the intervals between rain, the sun appeared, but the wind did not let up.  I took my afternoon walk during one of the blue sky openings.  On the walk, I realized that autumn has indeed peaked: swaths of rattling, tumbling leaves swirled around my feet, then raced away to the north along the road, or curved off into the meadows, which have begun to turn green again with the autumn rain, and are strewn with all shades of yellow and brown and orange.  A beautiful sight in the brilliant afternoon.

Here is something I discovered one morning this past week:

Man's years fall short of a hundred;
a thousand years of worry crowd his heart.
If the day is short and you hate the long night,
why not take the torch and go wandering?
Seek out happiness in season;
who can wait for the coming year?
Fools who cling too fondly to gold
earn no more than posterity's jeers.
Prince Ch'iao, that immortal man --
small hope we have of matching him!

Anonymous (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).

The poem is untitled.  It appears in a collection known as "The Nineteen Old Poems of the Han."  "Han" refers to the Later Han Dynasty, which lasted from 25 A.D. to 220 A.D.  Burton Watson provides this note regarding "Prince Ch'iao" (line 9):  "Wang-tzu Ch'iao or Prince Ch'iao was believed to have become a hsien or immortal spirit."  Ibid, page 102.

Arthur Waley also translated the poem:

The years of a lifetime do not reach a hundred,
Yet they contain a thousand years' sorrow.
When days are short and the dull nights long,
Why not take a lamp and wander forth?
If you want to be happy you must do it now,
There is no waiting till an after-time.
The fool who's loath to spend the wealth he's got
Becomes the laughing-stock of after ages.
It is true that Master Wang became immortal,
But how can we hope to share his lot?

Anonymous (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918).

As autumn begins, we may say to it:  "Slow, slow!"  To no avail.  For we always come to this:  "And lo, it is ended."  Next year will be no different. But we mustn't think this will go on forever.  Well, at least not for us.

Edward Waite, "Autumn Colouring" (1894)

At the end of the week, a book whose publication I have been awaiting arrived in the mail:  The Second Seedtime: Notebooks 1980-1994, by Philippe Jaccottet.  In October of 1992, he makes this entry (a poem, a fragment of a possible poem, or prose; in Jaccottet's writing, the dividing lines often blur):

In this way we lived, wearing a coat of leaves;
then it gradually becomes tattered and ragged
but without impoverishing us . . .
Soon we will need only light.

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), The Second Seedtime: Notebooks 1980-1994 (Seagull Books 2017), page 185.  The ellipses appear in the original.

At some point, words must come to an end.  "Leaves already on the walk scattered --"  Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804, Entry 60 (1795/1796; Gutch Notebook).  Coleridge takes his thought no further:  the notebook entry concludes with "--".

     I going,
You remaining, --
     Two autumns.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume 2 (Hokuseido Press 1964).

James Paterson, "Moniaive" (1885)

Immanence

Earlier this week, I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night.  As I came to consciousness, these words floated up:  "out into the phoenix world." Complete nonsense?  The sole remnant of a forgotten dream?  Most likely. But I was intrigued by the phrase.  So please bear with me, dear readers.

Why the word "phoenix"?  I haven't been pondering the myth of the phoenix.  I haven't visited Phoenix, Arizona, for at least ten years, and I have no plans to travel to that fair city.  It has been quite some time since I heard Glen Campbell sing "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."

Nor do I recall seeing the word "phoenix" in anything I have read recently. Yet, might my reading choices account for the unexpected appearance of "out into the phoenix world" in the dead of night?  At the beginning of the week I read Alfred Tennyson's "Ulysses."  The entire poem is wonderful, but these four lines have been preoccupying me:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses," lines 18-21, in Poems (1842).

I have been thinking in particular about the lovely line "I am a part of all that I have met."  Why didn't Tennyson write instead:  "All that I have met is a part of me"?  This would seem to be more "logical."  Thus, one might say:  "I have been to [insert name of place] only once, but it will always be a part of me."  On the other hand, "Ulysses" is a monologue by Ulysses, who is not known for his humility.  The line is immediately preceded by these two lines:  "And drunk delight of battle with my peers,/Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."  Yes, Ulysses did leave "a part" of himself on "the ringing plains of windy Troy," didn't he?  And, thanks to Homer, he haunts the place to this day.  But I do not wish to explicate the line to death. Needless to say, I defer to Tennyson:  the line is perfect as it is.

Did my reading of "Ulysses" give subconscious birth to "out into the phoenix world"?  There is a phoenix-like element of rebirth or regeneration in the poem:  in the end, Ulysses decides to embark on yet another journey in pursuit of a world that for ever "gleams" in the distance:  "Come, my friends./'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."  It is worth noting that the image of an unreachable "gleam" in the distance reappears in "Merlin and the Gleam," a poem written by Tennyson near the end of his life.  The poem concludes with these lines:

O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (Macmillan 1889).

But I do not wish to overreach:  I've never been fond of analyzing dreams for hidden psychological messages, nor do I wish to read too much into riddling phrases that appear from out of the realm of sleep.  Still, if a message arrives from a mysterious place, we ought not to reject it out of hand.

Richard Kaiser (1868-1941), "Landscape (Werratal)" (1939)

Autumn has been making its presence felt in gentle increments since mid-August.  It begins with a slight change in the angle of the light, which also takes on a deeper tinge of yellow.  This is accompanied by the lengthening tree shadows, which move across the streets and paths earlier and earlier in the day.

Recently, while I was out on my daily walk, autumn moved a few steps closer:  the afternoon was sunny, but there was a slight chill in the breeze that came from the west -- a just perceptible undercurrent in the stream of air.  As I strolled north in the sunlight, the left side of my body was in balmy August, while the right side was in cold October.

"All I have been able to do is to walk and go on walking, remember, glimpse, forget, try again, rediscover, become absorbed.  I have not bent down to inspect the ground like an entomologist or a geologist; I've merely passed by, open to impressions.  I have seen those things which also pass   -- more quickly or, conversely, more slowly than human life.  Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed -- like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world -- I've thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world.  Too much said?  Better to walk on . . ."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 4.  The ellipses appear in the original text.  The book was published in France in 1979 under the title Paysages avec Figures Absentes.

Philippe Jaccottet is now 91 years old.  He was born in Moudon, Switzerland, but he has lived in the town of Grignan in the Rhône-Alpes region of France since 1953.  The prose passage quoted above is characteristic of the quiet, ruminative, and lovingly attentive beauty of Jaccottet's prose and poetry.  Earlier this week, prior to the appearance of "out into the phoenix world," I read the following poem by Jaccottet, which is part of a sequence titled "To Henry Purcell":

Imagine a comet
returning centuries hence
from the kingdom of the dead,
crossing our century tonight
and sowing the same seeds . . .

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon (translator), Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998).  The poem is untitled.  The ellipses appear in the original text.

A comet "returning centuries hence/from the kingdom of the dead" perhaps has something in common with the phoenix, which, according to some traditions, lives 500 years, its successor then arising from its ashes.  Might this be the source of "the phoenix world" of my dream remnant?  There is no way of knowing.  The phrase is probably nothing more than a non sequitur released from the fortune cookie of the mind.

Emanuel Baschny (1876-1932), "Village in the Sun" (1910)

At this time of year our eyes are drawn to the leaves.  On a September afternoon, towards sunset, you look up at a tree and notice that the leaves of a single spray or bough have turned yellow, orange, or red.  There they are, set against a backdrop of deep green.  There is no doubt a scientific explanation for this phenomenon.  There always is.  I prefer to remain ignorant.

At the moment, a meadow that I pass by on my daily walk is full of pink-purple and purple-white sweet peas.  In this part of the world, they usually bloom in July and August, and then dry out before autumn arrives.  Their appearance now may be due to a spell of wet weather we had a few weeks ago.  Whatever the reason, it is delightful to see them fluttering in the slanting, butter-yellow sunlight.

     The Oak

Live thy Life,
     Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
     Living gold;

Summer-rich
     Then; and then
Autumn-changed,
Soberer-hued
     Gold again.

All his leaves
     Fallen at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough,
     Naked strength.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (Macmillan 1889).

The oak's yearly transitions from "living gold" to "summer-rich" green  to "soberer-hued gold" to emptiness do not proceed in lockstep.  Red leaves and blossoming sweet peas exist side-by-side.  The World's beauty is in its fragments, and in their juxtapositions, ever-changing.  "The flecked river,/Which kept flowing and never the same way twice."  (Wallace Stevens, "This Solitude of Cataracts.")  Or:  "the half colors of quarter-things."  (Wallace Stevens, "The Motive for Metaphor.")  We do not live in an all-or-nothing World.  For which we should be grateful.

We live in a World of constant change.  But that change takes place within a cycle of renewal and recurrence.  With the promise of an end for all that is mortal, of course.  There's no getting around that.  But here is something to consider:  "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.4311, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).

Richard Kaiser, "Landscape in Oberbayern" (1939)

What, then, of "out into the phoenix world"?  If I ever receive messages from other realms, I do not expect them to arrive in words.  Thus, when I awoke in the middle of the night, I was only talking to myself.  I suspect that I needed to give myself advice:  "Whatever you are looking for is out there, not in here."

Weight of stones, of thoughts
Dreams and mountains
are not evenly balanced
We inhabit yet another world
Perhaps the one between

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures, page 156.  The poem is untitled.  It is immediately followed by this prose passage:

"This is how I once tried to capture in a poem the feeling that there must be two measures, two orders of measure; because what we experience -- pain or joy -- in a lifetime, or even in a brief moment, we clearly see as unrelated to the millions, the billions of years or miles of science. . . . This feeling of somehow escaping from, or having some essential inner resistance to what can be quantified, could perhaps be the beginning of a hope.

"Of all my uncertainties, the least uncertain (the one least removed from the first glimmers of a belief) is the one given to me by poetic experience:  the thought that there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being.  But I am incapable of attributing to this unknown, to that, any of the names allotted to it in turn by history."

Philippe Jaccottet, Ibid, pages 156-157.  The italics appear in the original text.

Emanuel Baschny, "Before a Thunderstorm" (1913)

Calm

What a noisy world we live in!  For instance:  cell phone conversations conducted in public places.  I realize that this topic has by now become a cliché, but I think that it serves as a metaphor for all that is wrong with the Modern World:  not only noise, but also -- in no particular order -- impoliteness, obliviousness, and vacuity.

One would think that an ordinary human being could pass through airport security, sit in the waiting area at the departure gate, and ride a shuttle bus to a parking lot without feeling compelled to carry on a phone conversation in the presence of strangers.  Quite often, that does not seem to be the case. And, thanks to the wonders of technology (Progress!), we have an added attraction:  animated mugging for the video camera during the conversation.  Intimacy.  (An aside:  "All Aboard," a fine poem by Charles Tomlinson on this phenomenon, has appeared here previously.)

I confess:  I am conservative by nature and by choice.  Call me a hypocrite (given, for instance, the technology that I am using at this moment), but I never presume that change is a good thing.  Here is one of my curmudgeonly standards of judgment:  I am skeptical of any technological "innovation" that reduces the time and space available for serenity and reverie.

Calm is the morn without a sound,
     Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
     And only thro' the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
     And on these dews that drench the furze,
     And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain
     That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
     And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
     These leaves that redden to the fall;
     And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
     And waves that sway themselves in rest,
     And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

Alfred Tennyson, Poem XI, In Memoriam (1850).

Lines 15 and 16 are, I think, very moving:  "And in my heart, if calm at all,/If any calm . . ."

Peter Graham, "Wandering Shadows" (1878)

Give technology an inch and it will take a mile.  Technological "advancement" is often sold on the premise that it will be "labor-saving," thus purportedly freeing us up to devote more time and energy to higher human pursuits.  I'd say that this was true of the invention of the wheel.  Is it true of the invention of Twitter or Facebook?

"Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.  Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Paragraph 132 (translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe) (Blackwell 1969).

Aeroplanes.  Radio.  Twitter.  Facebook.

   On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations

You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other, nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves,
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drouth will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last tonight.

Robert Frost, West-Running Brook (1928).

John Glover, "Thirlmere" (c. 1820-1830)

I am not a Luddite.  And I do not intend to repair to a yurt out on the windswept steppes of Mongolia any time soon.  (Besides, I suspect that cell phone service and wireless Internet have preceded me there.)  I am not angry with, nor do I consider myself superior to, those who avail themselves of these dazzling technologies.  I simply wonder:  why?  To what end?  Do we realize what we are giving up?

Technology ("information technology" in particular) promotes hyperactivity and distraction.  In contrast, poetry is born of reverie and concentration, and in turn promotes reverie and concentration in the reader.  The choice is ours.

   The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm.  The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947).

Benjamin Leader, "Glyder Fawr, Snowdon Range" (1881)

Three variations on the theme of calm.  Alfred Tennyson would like us to know about the calm he felt as he awaited the arrival by ship of the body of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died young in Vienna.  Robert Frost would like us to know about the calm that abides in the presence of those dark interstellar spaces that so often haunted him.  "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars . . ."  Wallace Stevens would like us to know about Imagination and Reality, how they can -- no, must -- flit back and forth in a calm world, in a quiet house, if we wish to be truly human.

Cell phones and Twitter and Facebook have nothing to do with any of this.

                                        Alcaic

Out in the deep wood, silence and darkness fall,
down through the wet leaves comes the October mist;
     no sound, but only a blackbird scolding,
          making the mist and the darkness listen.

Peter Levi, Collected Poems 1955-75 (Anvil Press 1984).  A side-note:  the four-line "alcaic" stanza is said to have been invented by the Greek poet Alcaeus, and is often used by Horace in his Odes.

"Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress.'  Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.  Typically it constructs.  It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself.  For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (translated by Peter Winch) (Blackwell 1980), page 7e.

John Glover, "View of Patterdale, Westmorland" (1817)

Humility

A week or so ago, I noticed the annual sign that Spring has arrived in earnest and that Summer is near:  tiny anthills began to emerge along the seams of the sidewalks.  We love Spring for its flowers and its blossoming trees, for its wide skies and its breezes, and for its changeableness.  But, for me at least, there is something reassuring, even touching, in knowing that the ants are once again going about their business.

Yes, I know there is a vast, clamorous World out there.  But, as I have observed on more than one occasion, there is something to be said for appreciating, and cultivating, the commonplace.

                       Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

John Drinkwater, Tides (1917).

We mustn't fall prey to the Pathetic Fallacy, we are told.  But I unabashedly confess that ants are "invested in my mood/With constancy, and peace, and fortitude."  I cannot help myself.  I wait for their reassurance each Spring, and I am comforted when they provide it.

Robert Lillie (1867-1949), "Flower Study, Narcissi"

I have an uneasy feeling that I am about to make a pretentious and annoying Pronouncement About Poetry.  So let me first say that I deplore Pronouncements About Poetry.  That being said, here is my Pronouncement:  one of the benefits of good poetry is that it teaches us humility.

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1869).  The poem is untitled.

William Blake preceded Tennyson:  "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower."  ("Auguries of Innocence.")  In our ironic "modern" world, this sort of thing is regarded as a cliché.  But it's all true, you know.

Robert Lillie, "Part of My Studio Mantel"

For real humility before the wonder of the World, consider this:

                              Morning Glories

By the well side, morning glories I transplanted,
wild tendrils climbing the rail, angling this way and that:
before I know it the well rope's been completely seized --
now I beg water from the house next door.

Rokunyo (1734-1801) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 48.

Rokunyo's poem was likely inspired by the following well-known haiku:

By morning glories
my well bucket's been seized --
borrowing water.

Chiyo-ni (also known as Kaga no Chiyo) (1703-1775) (translated by Burton Watson), Ibid.

Thus, perhaps Chiyo-ni and Rokunyo would not have plucked the flower in the crannied wall.  This is not intended to be a criticism of Tennyson, by the way.  I've plucked a flower or two in my day.  As it turns out, Japanese poets are themselves of two minds about whether flowers ought to be plucked.

     To pluck it is a pity,
To leave it is a pity,
     Ah, this violet!

Naojo (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 380.

     The violet:
Held in the hand,
     Yet more lovely.

Koshu (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 381.

Whether the flower is plucked or not plucked, the underlying lesson is one of humility.

Robert Lillie, "Japanese Anemones"

I know nothing about how to live.  I have no wisdom to impart.  But I have come to learn that truisms are, well, true.  The commonplace World -- the World right there in front of us at this moment -- is all that we need.  Its wonders are inexhaustible.  We owe it our humility.

                 Life Hurries By

Life hurries by, and who can stay
One winged Hour upon her way?
The broken trellis then restore
And train the woodbine round the door.

Walter Savage Landor, Dry Sticks (1858).

Robert Lillie, "The Paisley Shawl"

Oak

From an early age, I have thought of the oak as the exemplar of trees.  I'm not sure why.  I suspect it has something to do with childhood impressions of the shape of its leaf, smoldering piles of its fallen, raked-up leaves on autumn afternoons, and -- those wondrous things -- acorns.

But it may simply be a product of their size and substance: the oaks of my youth in Minnesota were majestic in height and breadth.  They were proverbial pillars of strength throughout the year.  And their lovely leaves and magical acorns added to their allure.  All accomplished without speaking a word.

Andrew McCallum, "Oak Trees in Sherwood Forest" (1877)

Spare the parent of acorns, good wood-cutter, spare!
     Let the time-honour'd Fir feel the weight of your stroke,
The many-stalk'd thorn, or Acanthus worn bare,
     Pine, Arbutus, Ilex -- but touch not the Oak!
Far hence be your axe, for our grandams have sung
How the Oaks are the mothers from whom we all sprung.

Zonas (translated by J. H. Merivale), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849).

Here is a prose rendering of the epigram:

"Oh labourer!  Fear to cut down the mother of acorns; spare her!  Let the aged pine be destroyed, or the fir, or yonder paliurus, or the ilex, or the dry arbutus.  But let your axe be far from the oak-tree.  For our forefathers have told us that our first mothers were oaks."

Zonas (translated by Robert Bland), in Robert Bland (editor), Collections from The Greek Anthology (1813).

Stephen McKenna, "An English Oak Tree" (1981)

In the following poem, A. H. Bullen provides us with a chronological catalogue of the oak's legendary attributes -- together with reminders of humanity's less-than-noble relationship with the noble tree.

                                 The Oak

"Dodona's oaks were through the world renown'd."
Their riddling answers oft did men confound.

"Our Dryads were to mortals ever good."
Your Druid altars smoked with human blood.

"We saved your second Charles from dread mishap."
King David's son you caught in deadly trap.

"In oaken pulpit parsons preach'd and pray'd."
From oaken gibbet poor folk swung and sway'd.

"Rare banquets on oak-board were richly spread."
Oak-coffins were the revellers' last bed.

"Who carried Drake through strange uncharted seas?"
Be all your faults forgot, heroic trees!

A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (1921).

Martin Snape (1853-1930)

"The Oldest Oak in the Greenwood"

On a more encouraging note, we have this from Tennyson:

     The Oak

Live thy Life,
     Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
     Living gold;

Summer-rich
     Then; and then
Autumn-changed,
Soberer-hued
     Gold again.

All his leaves
     Fallen at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough,
     Naked strength.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (1889).

"Bright in spring,/Living gold" brings to mind "Nature's first green is gold,/Her hardest hue to hold."  The two poems are variations on the same theme, aren't they?

I like the fact that, unlike a great deal of Tennyson's poetry, "The Oak" is not prolix, ponderous, or sonorous.  The poem's brevity and simplicity may reflect the fact that he wrote it in his eightieth year.  It is worth noting that Tennyson said of the poem that it could be described as "clean cut like a Greek epigram."  Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, Volume II (1897), page 366.  I think that lines 6 through 8 are particularly nice:  a line consisting of "Then; and then" is quite striking in a poem of that period.

Gerald Dewsbury, "Sycamore and Oak" (1992)

A Single Flower

As I was out walking this week, I noticed a single flower growing in a seam of the sidewalk.  It had five yellow petals, and was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter.  I searched, but I could not find any similar flowers nearby.

The world around us contains innumerable small dispensations of this sort, doesn't it?

Imagine this:  for the brief time that it blooms, that tiny yellow flower stands at the center of the surface of our spinning globe.  The flower is the mid-point:  everything else on Earth flows up to it and away from it.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Hyacinth Bulbs" (1966)

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1870).  Tennyson left the poem untitled.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Five Variegated Ivy Leaves" (1960)

Four-Line Poems, Part Five: "The Lovely In Life Is The Familiar"

I try my best to avoid the news of the world.  But this past week the word "Cyprus" has been insinuating itself into my consciousness.  It seems that something is happening there which ought to concern me.

I have never been to Cyprus.  I'm certain that it is a lovely land, and that the Cypriots are lovely people.  There it sits, a sun-bathed jewel in the blue Mediterranean, just offshore from the fabled lands that Herodotus wrote of long ago:  Phoenicia, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia.

However, I confess that I cannot muster any concern for the liquidity of Cyprus.  For as long as I can remember (five-odd decades), I've been hearing that the world is on the verge of economic calamity.  But, as far as I can tell, economic history boils down to this:  "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

I know next to nothing about how to live.  I cannot claim to have gained any wisdom during my time on Earth.  But I have a sense that life is not as complicated as we make it out to be.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Cottage, Bainbridge" (1928)

                                   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 (1938).

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Hebden, Yorkshire"

Of course, our appreciation of the lovely familiars in life may be enhanced if we bear certain things in mind.

               Waiting

          'Waiting to . . .'
          'Who is?'
          'We are . . .
     Was that the night-owl's cry?'
'I heard not.  But see!  the evening star;
And listen! -- the ocean's solacing sigh.'
'You mean the surf at the harbour bar?'
          'What did you say?'
          'Oh, "waiting".'
          '"Waiting? " --
          Waiting what for?'
               'To die.'

Walter de la Mare, Ibid.

The reference to the sound of "the surf at the harbour bar" in line 7 brings to mind two other poems that have death as their subject:  Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" ("may there be no moaning of the bar") and Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" ("though the harbour bar be moaning").

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Bainbridge" (1928)

"Crossing The Bar"

Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" (which appeared in my previous post) revolves around the image (and sound) of the "moaning" of "the harbour bar."  According to Christopher Ricks, who has edited Alfred Tennyson's poetry, Tennyson owned a copy of Kingsley's Andromeda and Other Poems (1858), in which "The Three Fishers" appeared.  Christopher Ricks (editor), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (1989), page 665.  Further, Tennyson's wife Emily noted in her journal that he read some of Kingsley's poems to her in 1858.  Ibid.

Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" in October of 1889 when crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight.  Although the poem was prompted by that journey, Kingsley's "Though the harbour bar be moaning" may have been hovering somewhere in the back of his mind as well.

              Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Silver Estuary" (c. 1925)

            Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
     And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
     When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
     Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
     Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
     And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
     When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
     The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crost the bar.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (1889).

Commentators on the poem usually link "bourne" in line 13 to Hamlet's description of death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns."  Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, 79-80. Coincidentally, Christina Rossetti wrote a poem titled "The Bourne," which I have previously posted here.  The poem was published in 1866, but I am not suggesting that it influenced Tennyson, merely noting another use of the word in Victorian poetry.

Commentators also suggest that "face to face" in line 15 may be an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13.12:  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."

                                  Christopher Nevinson, "Saint-Malo"

"Fisher-Folk"

The first stanza of Ernest Dowson's "In a Breton Cemetery," which comments upon the harsh life of Breton "fisher-folk," puts me in mind of a poem by Arthur Symons, Dowson's fellow Nineties poet.  Symons's best-known poems are set in the usual urban Decadent haunts: London, Paris, Venice, et cetera.  But Symons also spent a fair amount of time in out-of-the-way seaside towns in England, Wales, and Ireland, and these places find their way into a number of his poems.  (With the requisite twilit, grey-tinted melancholia and world-weariness of the Decadents still intact, of course.)

                            Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

          The Fisher's Widow

The boats go out and the boats come in
Under the wintry sky;
And the rain and foam are white in the wind,
And the white gulls cry.

She sees the sea when the wind is wild
Swept by the windy rain;
And her heart's a-weary of sea and land
As the long days wane.

She sees the torn sails fly in the foam,
Broad on the skyline grey;
And the boats go out and the boats come in,
But there's one away.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

                                        Richard Eurich, "P.Z. 576" (1974)

I like the recurrence of "the boats go out and the boats come in":  as with the movement of the tide.  The alliteration throughout the poem seems to embody the sound and the motion of the sea as well:  "wintry sky;/ . . . white in the wind,/And the white gulls cry."  And:  "She sees the sea when the wind is wild/Swept by the windy rain."  

I wonder about line 8: "As the long days wane."  The source would seem to be Tennyson's well-known lines in "Ulysses":  "The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep/Moans round with many voices."  Symons, like most Victorian poets, was brought up on Tennyson's verse.  Was this a conscious or an unconscious borrowing?  I suspect that it was done in homage to Tennyson, but that is just a guess.

                                   Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)