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.
