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 is a poem I have been fond of for years, but which, in its lovely and quiet way, may have been waiting for just this occasion, and whatever may follow.

            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"

Home

This modest (and, of late, fitful) undertaking owes its name to Edward Thomas.  I expressed my thanks to him (accompanied by the touching elegy "To E. T.: 1917" written by his friend Walter de la Mare) in my first post here: Tuesday, March 9, 2010.  A month later, I posted this comment about "Adlestrop": "No doubt many of us first encountered Edward Thomas by discovering 'Adlestrop' in an anthology.  And many of us recognized upon reading it that something had changed for us.  How so?  This is the best that I can come up with: 'At last.  This is the real thing.'"

I memorized "Adlestrop" on the day I first read it.  Forty years ago? Or is it closer to fifty?  Since that day it has always been with me.  But now and then I still open Thomas' Collected Poems to read it, wanting to see it on the page.  Nothing has changed.

                 Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop --

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

The steam hissed.  Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform.  What I saw

Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (edited by Edna Longley) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 51.  The poem was written on January 8, 1915.  Ibid, page 176.  Thomas had written his first poem a month earlier, on December 3, 1914.  Ibid, page 143.

We've had a surprising string of sunny and warm (even hot) days in this part of the world.  No rain to speak of, and nary a cloud in sight. On a recent afternoon, as I walked beside a meadow that slopes down to the waters of Puget Sound, a ladybug landed on my right forearm. Landed "unwontedly," one might say.  That wonderful way in which the World works.  

I stopped walking, and watched as the visitor investigated my arm. After a few moments, it flew away on its own, its diaphanous wings glittering in the sunlight.  Over a lifetime, it is these unwonted moments we remember, isn't it?

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Kentish Oast"

In one sense, Edward Thomas had found his home in the World from the day he was born.

"So on Tuesday, July 27th [1915] I lunched for the first time with Edward in uniform.  It might have been next year when we were walking in the country that I asked him the question his friends had asked him when he joined up, but I put it differently.  'Do you know what you are fighting for?'  He stopped, and picked up a pinch of earth.  'Literally, for this.'  He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall."

Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford University Press 1958), page 154.

Hence, "Adlestrop."  But there is a great deal more to "Adlestrop." And there is a great deal more to Edward Thomas.  As I was thinking about him lately, this came to mind: "He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."  More on this in a moment.

                      Home

Often I had gone this way before:

But now it seemed I never could be

And never had been anywhere else;

'Twas home; one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory.

They welcomed me.  I had come back

That eve somehow from somewhere far:

The April mist, the chill, the calm,

Meant the same thing familiar 

And pleasant to us, and strange too,

Yet with no bar.

The thrush on the oaktop in the lane

Sang his last song, or last but one;

And as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun

His last; they knew no more than I

The day was done.

Then past his dark white cottage front

A labourer went along, his tread

Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;

And, through the silence, from his shed

The sound of sawing rounded all

That silence said.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 81.  The poem was written on April 17, 1915, four months after "Adlestrop" was written.  Ibid, page 226.  Thomas wrote two other poems titled "Home."  The first was written on February 23, 1915.  Ibid, page 197. (It begins: "Not the end: but there's nothing more."  Ibid, page 64.) The second was written on March 7 and 10, 1916.  Ibid, page 282.  (It begins: "Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and/We had seen nothing fairer than that land."  Ibid, page 113.)

"He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."  An observation bound to catch the attention of melancholic romantics and romantic melancholics. (I'm afraid I shall have to plead guilty to that offense.)  It is the final sentence in Walter Pater's "A Prince of Court Painters," a fictional "imaginary portrait" of the painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) which takes the form of journal entries written over a 20-year period by a woman who knew him.  (Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits (Macmillan 1887), pages 1-48.)  Edward Thomas read Pater's works, and wrote a book about him: Walter Pater: A Critical Study (Martin Secker 1913).  The book contains a short chapter on Imaginary Portraits, but the sentence I have quoted from "A Prince of Court Painters" is not mentioned.

Have no fear: it is not my intention to undertake literary detective work along the lines of, say, "Walter Pater's Influence on the Poetry of  Edward Thomas."  Rather, Pater's sentence simply returned to me on its own as I thought about Thomas, his life, the four poems that appear here, and his poetry as a whole.  I would never wish to be reductive when it comes to Edward Thomas.  More importantly, as I have often noted here in the past: the poems speak for themselves; no interpretation or explication is necessary.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

"It is enough, it would seem, to have been born into this world for a man to desire many things."  (Kenkō (1283-1350), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 1 (translated by Donald Keene), in Keene (editor), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), page 3.)  As a Buddhist monk, Kenkō would have been well-acquainted with the snares of desire in the lives of human beings, and of the need for us to avoid, or to extricate ourselves from, those snares.  On the other hand, desires are innumerable, and come in various forms.  For instance, what of a desire for home?  Aren't most of us in search of home, whatever that may mean? 

                                 The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:

But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval --

Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles -- but nothing at all,

Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,

Could climb down to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 108.  The poem was written from February 4 through February 9, 1916.  Ibid, page 272.

"But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die/And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost."  As in "Adlestrop" and "Home," a moment is sufficient to find oneself at home.  And, although "desire" is involved, Thomas arrives at home "without search or desert or cost."  As in "Adlestrop": ". . . the express-train drew up there/Unwontedly."  And as in "Home": "I had come back/That eve somehow from somewhere far."  How wonderful to know that one may arrive at home when one least expects it, if only for a moment.  But perhaps this is a better way to put it: how wonderful to know that home may arrive when one least expects it, if only for a moment.

     Bent over by the rain,

The ears of barley

     Make it a narrow path.

Jōsō (1661-1704) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322.  Blyth follows the haiku with this commentary:

"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."

Ibid, page 322 (italics in the original text).

Or, another way of looking at it:

"Attachment to the self renders life more opaque.  One moment of complete forgetting and all the screens, one behind the other, become transparent so that you can perceive clarity to its very depths, as far as the eye can see; and at the same time everything becomes weightless.  Thus does the soul truly become a bird."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry in May of 1954, in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), page 1.

George Mackley, "House by a Lane"

"And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring/The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost/With a ghostly gladness." "Gladness."  The word appears again in this poem, written by Thomas three months after he wrote "The Ash Grove":

   I Never Saw That Land Before

I never saw that land before,

And now can never see it again;

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar

Endeared, by gladness and by pain,

Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,

The chickens from the farmsteads, all

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook

With wounds yellow as crocuses

Where yesterday the labourer's hook

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze

That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I neither expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal

I touched then; and if I could sing

What would not even whisper my soul

As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid

Excepting from those like me made

Who answer when such whispers bid.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 120.  The poem was written on May 5, 1916.  Ibid, page 292.

Having said earlier that I would never wish to be reductive when it comes to Edward Thomas, I'm afraid this thought comes to mind: where would his poems be without birds, without trees?  Consider just the four poems appearing here.  In "Adlestrop": a blackbird; "all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire;" willows.  In "Home": two thrushes; an oak; an elm.  In "The Ash Grove": ash trees, of course.  In "I Never Saw that Land Before": "the bare ash trees;" elms.  All of them brought together beautifully in these lines: ". . . and if I could sing/What would not even whisper my soul/As I went on my journeying,//I should use, as the trees and birds did,/A language not to be betrayed."  Try to imagine home without trees or birds.  

This undated entry appears on one of the final pages of the diary kept by Thomas after he arrived in France in January of 1917: "And no more singing for the bird . . ."  (R. George Thomas (editor), The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford University Press 1981), page 194 (ellipses in the original text).)

On April 9, 1917, Edward Thomas died in France on the first day of the Battle of Arras.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Stobo Kirk, Peeblessshire" (1936)

[A final note.  Edward Thomas did not begin to write poetry until the last four years of his life.  But I venture to say that no one in the United Kingdom during his lifetime had a greater knowledge of, and feeling for, first, what the essence of poetry consists of, and, second, what it means to be a poet.  This is, of course, embodied in his own poetry. But his thoughts and feelings on the heart of poetry may also be found in his prose writings.  I find this to be his finest articulation of what poetry is:

"What [poets] say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification.  If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty.  But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death.  Poetry is and must always be apparently revolutionary if active, anarchic if passive.  It is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial.  Hence the strangeness and thrill and painful delight of poetry at all times, and the deep response to it of youth and of love; and because love is wild, strange, and full of astonishment, is one reason why poetry deals so much in love, and why all poetry is in a sense love poetry."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), page 86-87.

We should remain mindful of a proviso included by Thomas in the passage above: "if what poets say is true and not feigning." Part of what this means is expressed wonderfully by Kingsley Amis, with Thomas in mind: "How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."(Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology (Hutchinson 1988), page 339.)]

George Mackley, "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

One Thing Leads to Another, Part Two: Two Poems on a Spring Day

Each morning, I read a poem.  A long-time habit.  I began a recent spring day with this:

     Tilling the field;

From the temple among the trees,

     The funeral bell tolls.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 161.

In his four-volume Haiku, R. H. Blyth collects haiku relating to each season into chapters based upon general categories (e.g., "Sky and Elements"; "Fields and Mountains"; "Human Affairs"; "Birds and Beasts"; "Trees and Flowers").  Within each category, the haiku are in turn organized by specific subjects.  This description sounds much more rigid than how things play out in practice.  Blyth translates hundreds of haiku, but he does not simply provide an anthology. Rather, as I have noted here in the past, Blyth's journey through haiku is accompanied by a wide-ranging and impressionistic (yet learned and thorough) running commentary.  The entire World, past and present, is open to examination and contemplation.  Therein lies the beauty and charm of Blyth's achievement.

Making the journey in the company of the World's beautiful particulars makes perfect sense.  Say, for instance: willows; skylarks; cicadas (semi in Japanese); the River of Heaven (what is called in English "the Milky Way").  ("River of Heaven" is one way of translating the Japanese phrase ama no gawa.  Ama means "the heavens" or "the sky"; no is a particle corresponding to "of"; gawa is the euphonic version of the word kawa, which  means "river."  After coming across ama no gawa years ago, I no longer had need for "the Milky Way.")

On the morning in question, I had decided to return to the haiku collected by Blyth in a section titled "Tilling the Field" in the "Human Affairs" chapter of his Spring volume.  I did not go specifically in search of Buson's haiku, but I know it well.  One of those poems that is not likely to be forgotten, once it has come into your life.  A lovely way to start the day.

Samuel Birch (1869-1955), "Nancledra: Old Cornish Village" (1931)

I am a creature of habit: in addition to reading a poem each morning, I read one in the evening.  I have returned to the poetry of Andrew Young of late, having been away from it for too long a time.  On the day that I read Buson's "tilling the field" haiku in the morning, I came upon this in the evening:

                         Spring

I never noticed, till I saw today

How budding birches stand in their green spray

And bracken like a snake from earth upheaves,

How many in this wood are last year's leaves.

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (Secker & Warburg 1985), page 127.

As was the case with Buson's haiku, I hadn't gone in search of "Spring."  But, suddenly, there they were: two poems on the same theme (or so it seems to me) arriving on the same day.  A matter of mere happenstance.  But evidence, perhaps, that there are indeed benefits to growing old.  Sometimes (as long as memory remains intact), the poems that have accumulated within us over the years find their way to each other.  Where do they reside in the meantime? In the mind, in the heart, in the soul?  All of the above.

A small bit of serendipity in the larger scheme of things, one might say.  But one might also say that seven lines of poetry (three lines from Japan in the 18th century; four lines from England in the 20th century) may go some way to articulating, with beauty, what it means to spend our short time here in Paradise.  "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.)

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "Blackmoor Vale" (1931)

"If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!  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.  Keene provides this note to "Adashino": "Adashino was the name of a graveyard, apparently situated northwest of Kyoto.  The word adashi (impermanence), contained in the place name, accounted for the frequent use of Adashino in poetry as a symbol of impermanence. The dew is also often used with that meaning."  Ibid, page 8.  Keene also provides a note to "Toribeyama": "Toribeyama is still the chief graveyard of Kyoto.  Mention of smoke suggests that bodies were cremated there."  Ibid, page 8.

I have certainly made quite a leap based upon two short poems, haven't I?  But they do go together well.  Daily consideration of our evanescence is always a good thing.  Who knows?  It may lead to equanimity and gratitude.  Dread or melancholy will get us nowhere.

In any case, as I have noted here in the past, when it comes to Beauty, one thing leads to another.  Hence, after encountering Buson's haiku, I followed its path, coming first to this:

     Even on a small island,

A man tilling the field,

     A lark singing above it.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring, page 199.

Followed by this (another haiku by Buson):

     Tilling the field:

The cloud that never moved

     Is gone.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 167.

And, finally, Buson again:

     Tilling the field:

The man who asked the way

     Has disappeared.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 165.

Long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall my fundamental poetic principle: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry.  Thus, no doubt wrenching his words completely out of context, I turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."  (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuiness).)

Roger Fry (1866-1934), "Village in the Valley" (1926)

"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 Conversation with Himself (1701), page 78.)  "The Empire of Fate" is a wonderful touch by Collier.  Even more piquant is this: "Manage all your Actions and Thoughts in such a Manner as if you were just going to step into the Grave."  (Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, Ibid, page 21.)

[A side-note: Collier's translation of the Meditations has been criticized for its lack of strict fidelity to the original text.  However, his late 17th century/early 18th century prose style is marvelous. In a review of George Long's now-standard 19th century translation of the Meditations, Matthew Arnold chides Long for being "a great deal too hard" on Collier.  (Matthew Arnold, "Marcus Aurelius," in Essays in Criticism (Macmillan 1865), page 275.)  Arnold contends that Collier's translation "deserves respect for its genuine spirit and vigour, the spirit and vigour of the age of Dryden.  Jeremy Collier too, like Mr. Long, regarded in Marcus Aurelius the living moralist, and not the dead classic; and his warmth of feeling gave to his style an impetuosity and rhythm which from Mr. Long's style (I do not blame it on that account) are absent."  (Ibid, pages 275-276.)  I usually rely upon the 1742 translation by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (a product of the Scottish Enlightenment).  However, I agree with Arnold's view, and often turn to Collier's version in order to enjoy (to use Arnold's phrase) "its genuine spirit and vigour."]

Just as one thing led to another when it came to Buson's "tilling the field" haiku, Andrew Young's "Spring" led me to several other poems by Young.  First, I remembered this:

     Walking in Beech Leaves

I tread on many autumns here

     But with no pride,

For at the leaf-fall of each year

     I also died.

This is last autumn, crisp and brown,

     That my knees feel;

But through how many years sinks down

     My sullen heel.

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young, page 53.

But, beyond the lingering dead leaves of vanished years, I thought next of this:

                    The Nest

Four blue stones in this thrush's nest

I leave, content to make the best

Of turquoise, lapis lazuli

Or for that matter of the whole blue sky.

Andrew Young, Ibid, page 54.

And, as always, I soon found my way to this, my favorite among Young's poems:

               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, Ibid, page 63.

Yes, when it comes to Beauty, one thing leads to another.  I think of something written by Kenkō: "A certain hermit once said, 'There is one thing that even I, who have no worldly entanglements, would be sorry to give up, the beauty of the sky.'  I can understand why he should have felt that way."  (Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 20, in Donald Keene (translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, page 22.)  The sky: blue, grey, mottled with white clouds, or otherwise.  "Manage all your Actions and Thoughts in such a Manner as if you were just going to step into the Grave."  "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty."

William Birch (1895-1968)

"Morning in June, the Vale of Dedham, Essex"