First Known When Lost

As I noted in my previous post, William Wordsworth is prone to high-flown rhetoric and prolixity. But I am willing to cut him some slack. Why? Because I have always felt that his poetry is animated by a depth of passion one seldom encounters. That passion is the product of a love of the World, and of a love for the miraculous fact of our existence in the World.

Not surprisingly, "love" (meant in this broader sense) is a word that one comes across again and again in Wordsworth's poetry. It is a word that goes to the very heart of what Wordsworth thought of as the vocation of "the Poet":

"He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love."

William Wordsworth, Preface to 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, page xxxvii. The phrase "relationship and love" is curious (and lovely), isn't it? I've never quite figured it out. But that does not stop me from liking it.

Earlier in the Preface, he speaks of "the Poet's art" as being "a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love." Ibid, page xxxiii.

Wordsworth published the Preface at the age of 32. Did his passion wane in his later years? Well, passion does wane, doesn't it? Yet he wrote this at the age of 72:

Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove,
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.

William Wordsworth, Poems (1845).

Dane Maw (1909-1989), "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)

Wordsworth's love is not an abstract, free-floating concept. Through his poetry, it is intimately connected with, and is the product of, the daily miracle of the World around us. This love, if we pay sufficient attention (a daunting task!), is one we all carry within us.

A Night-Piece

The sky is overspread
With a close veil of one continuous cloud
All whitened by the moon, that just appears,
A dim-seen orb, yet chequers not the ground
With any shadow -- plant, or tower, or tree.
At last a pleasant instantaneous light
Startles the musing man whose eyes are bent
To earth. He looks around, the clouds are split
Asunder, and above his head he views
The clear moon and the glory of the heavens.
There in a black-blue vault she sails along
Followed by multitudes of stars, that small,
And bright, and sharp along the gloomy vault
Drive as she drives. How fast they wheel away!
Yet vanish not! The wind is in the trees;
But they are silent. Still they roll along
Immeasurably distant, and the vault
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,
Still deepens its interminable depth.
At length the vision closes, and the mind
Not undisturbed by the deep joy it feels,
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.

William Wordsworth, 1798 manuscript, in Beth Darlington, "Two Early Texts: A Night-Piece and The Discharged Soldier," in Jonathan Wordsworth (editor), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch (Cornell University Press 1970), page 431.

A side-note: as I have noted previously in connection with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's line "The one red leaf, the last of its clan," the journal entries of Wordsworth's sister Dorothy provided, on more than one occasion, the source for poems written by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such is the case with "A Night-Piece." On January 25, 1798, she wrote:

"The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp."

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (Oxford University Press 2002), page 142.

Dane Maw, "Scottish Landscape, Air Dubh"

Like the other Romantic poets, Wordsworth produced his fair share of paeans to the moon and the stars, and to the other wondrous immensities of the Universe. But we mustn't forget that his love is catholic. The minute particulars (to borrow one of William Blake's favorite phrases) are worthy of -- deserve -- our attention.

To a Child
Written in Her Album

Small service is true service while it lasts:
Of humblest Friends, bright Creature! scorn not one:
The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun.

William Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835).

Dane Maw, "Langdale Fells, Westmorland"

In childhood, Christmas is a time of expectation and anticipation. At some point -- ah, when? -- it becomes a time of reminiscence and reflection. But I suppose that sounds a great deal like Life in general, doesn't it?

But one thing has not changed: the lights. Indoors, the lights on the tree, reflected in the ornaments. Outdoors, the brightly-lit houses in the neighborhood. The four white candles of the Swedish angel chimes. A string of bubble lights. Sentimentality? Nostalgia? Yes, of course.

Yuletide in a Younger World

We believed in highdays then,
And could glimpse at night
On Christmas Eve
Imminent oncomings of radiant revel --
Doings of delight: --
Now we have no such sight.

We had eyes for phantoms then,
And at bridge or stile
On Christmas Eve
Clear beheld those countless ones who had crossed it
Cross again in file: --
Such has ceased longwhile!

We liked divination then,
And, as they homeward wound
On Christmas Eve,
We could read men's dreams within them spinning
Even as wheels spin round: --
Now we are blinker-bound.

We heard still small voices then,
And, in the dim serene
Of Christmas Eve,
Caught the far-time tones of fire-filled prophets
Long on earth unseen. . . .
-- Can such ever have been?

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

Ben Nicholson, "1930 (Christmas Night)" (1930)

Back in October, I wrote about Thomas Hardy's humanity, honesty, and sincerity. As fond as we moderns are of irony, we should put it aside when we read the following poem.

I take Hardy at his word. And, with respect to the poem's last two lines, I would do exactly as Hardy says he would do.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).

Harold Bush, "The Christmas Tree" (1933)

Hardy never condescends. He may satirize and skewer the pretensions of those who think too well of themselves. And, although he was acutely sensitive to criticism, both personal and literary, his humility was remarked upon by nearly everyone who met him in person. That and his soft-spokenness. Of course he was ambitious, but I think that in his heart of hearts he always thought of himself as a Dorset countryman.

Christmastide

The rain-shafts splintered on me
As despondently I strode;
The twilight gloomed upon me
And bleared the blank high-road.
Each bush gave forth, when blown on
By gusts in shower and shower,
A sigh, as it were sown on
In handfuls by a sower.

A cheerful voice called, nigh me,
"A merry Christmas, friend!" --
There rose a figure by me,
Walking with townward trend,
A sodden tramp's, who, breaking
Into thin song, bore straight
Ahead, direction taking
Toward the Casuals' gate.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928). "The Casuals' gate" refers to a gate of the Union House in Dorchester. J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 581. "In Hardy's time any 'casual' (pauper or tramp) could apply to the police for a ticket, with which he would be admitted for supper, a bed, and breakfast." Ibid.

A merry Christmas, friends!

Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

Here we are "in the bleak mid-winter." I realize that, by the calendar, winter began just a week ago. But, as a matter of emotion, it feels as though winter begins sometime in mid- to late-November, when the wind whirrs through the empty trees. Or so it seems to me.

But things are not all that bleak. The sun has passed through its lowest arc. The longest night is behind us. Things are afoot in the heavens. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote this in another season, but it seems apt now: "The crooked arm of the old oak tree points upwards to the moon." Dorothy Wordsworth, journal entry for March 24, 1798, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (edited by Pamela Woof) (Oxford University Press 2002), page 150.

"Skating on the K.s' pond last night after eating too much ham. Eight-thirty. Many stars. No moon. Orion's sword and girdle brilliant and all the other constellations whose names I have forgotten or never knew. I am reminded of my youth and its skating ponds, of the ardor for strength, courage, and purpose excited in me then by the starlight. It is nearly the same. My feelings may be less ardent, the stars seem to burn more tenderly these days, but my openmouthed delight in finding them hung above the dark ice is no less."

John Cheever, in Robert Gottlieb (editor), The Journals of John Cheever (Alfred A. Knopf 1991), page 88.

Richard Eurich, "The Frozen Tarn" (1940)

Although I was never much of a skater during my childhood in Minnesota, I can still recall the lakes being turned into skating rinks in the winter. My fondest memories are of those lakes at night: a black expanse overhead; the sound of the slicing skates. (There is another thread in the pattern as well: my maternal grandparents first met while skating on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis.)

So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam'd upon the ice: and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp'd short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 manuscript), Book I, lines 465-489, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Prelude (Oxford University Press 1959), page 28.

"As if the earth had roll'd/With visible motion her diurnal round" brings to mind "roll'd round in earth's diurnal course" from "A slumber did my spirit seal," which was written in the same year as the passage quoted above.

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973)

"Winter Landscape, West Cults, Aberdeen" (1940)

A dome of darkness overhead. Dark depths below. Between the two, skaters curving on a sheet of ice. The poetic possibilities are obvious. (More so than, say, ice-fishing. Although ice-fishing does have its charms.)

The Midnight Skaters

The hop-poles stand in cones,
The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
But not the tallest there, 'tis said,
Could fathom to this pond's black bed.

Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch
Earth's heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.

Edmund Blunden, English Poems (1925).

Ronald George Lampitt (1906-1988), "Skating By Moonlight"

How one takes the following New Year's haiku depends upon one's disposition. I choose to take it in good humor, with a touch of wistfulness.

I intended
Never to grow old, --
But the temple bell sounds!

Jokun (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 202.

At the turning of the New Year in Japan, the bells of the Buddhist temples are rung 108 times: once for each of the 108 desires that are the cause of our life of suffering. The purpose of the ringing is to bid farewell to those desires.

Josephine Haswell Miller (1890-1975), "The House on the Canal"

As I have noted here in the past, I am not one to draw up New Year's resolutions. But, if I were of a mind to do so, I would choose this each year:

. . . we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, "The Mower,"Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

A lifetime's work. Never finished.

Best wishes for the New Year, dear readers.

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

Any time is a good time to contemplate the fleeting nature of our life. But the beginning of a new year is an especially appropriate time to do so. There is a sense of the slate having been wiped clean (well, as much as it can be), and of a fresh opportunity to fully appreciate the yet-unused moments that lie before us.

I had first thought to write: "Any time is a good time to contemplate the fleeting nature of our soul." But I thought better of it. There is no doubt that life is fleeting. But is that true of the soul?

I realize that, for some moderns, the very idea of the existence of a "soul" is beyond the realm of possibility, and is viewed by them as an outdated superstition of which they have been disabused. I'm afraid that I have not been disabused. Thus, the following poem is not simply a historical curiosity for me. Nor is it anachronistic. And I find it worth a visit at the turning of the year.

Persuasion

"Man's life is like a Sparrow, mighty King!
That -- while at banquet with your Chiefs you sit
Housed near a blazing fire -- is seen to flit
Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering,
Here did it enter; there, on hasty wing,
Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold;
But whence it came we know not, nor behold
Whither it goes. Even such, that transient Thing,
The human Soul; not utterly unknown
While in the Body lodged, her warm abode;
But from what world She came, what woe or weal
On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown;
This mystery if the Stranger can reveal,
His be a welcome cordially bestowed!"

William Wordsworth, in Abbie Findlay Potts, The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition (Yale University Press 1922).

"The Stranger" referred to in line 13 is Paulinus, who, in 601, was sent to England by Pope Gregory I to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. The scene took place during Paulinus's visit to King Edwin of Northumbria in 625 or thereabouts (the date is not certain).

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Mount Yuga in Bizen Province"

The incident upon which Wordsworth's sonnet is based is found in the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731):

"The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed."

A. M. Sellar (translator), Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (G. Bell and Sons 1917), pages 116-117.

In her edition of The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Potts suggests that, based upon certain verbal parallels in his sonnet, Wordsworth likely first encountered Bede's story in The Church History of Britain (1655) by Thomas Fuller (1608-1661). Potts, The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition, page 224. Here is Fuller's version:

"Man's life," said he, "O King, is like unto a little sparrow, which, whilst your majesty is feasting by the fire in your parlor with your royal retinue, flies in at one window, and out at another. Indeed, we see it that short time it remaineth in the house, and then is it well sheltered from wind and weather; but presently it passeth from cold to cold; and whence it came, and whither it goes, we are altogether ignorant. Thus, we can give some account of our soul during its abode in the body, whilst housed and harbored therein; but where it was before, and how it fareth after, is to us altogether unknown. If therefore Paulinus's preaching will certainly inform us herein, he deserveth, in my opinion, to be entertained."

Ibid, page 224.

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Uraga in Sagami Province"

The flight of the sparrow in Bede's chronicle brings to mind the death-bed poem of the Emperor Hadrian (76-138), which begins with the line "animula vagula blandula." The line has been variously translated as: "My little wand'ring sportful Soule" (John Donne, 1611); "My soul, my pleasant soul and witty" (Henry Vaughan, 1652); "Little soul so sleek and smiling" (Stevie Smith, 1966). Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (editors), The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1995), pages 508-509. Very sparrow-like.

The following two translations of the entire poem go together quite well with the sparrow in King Edwin's Northumbrian hall, I think.

Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?
No more, with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Hours of Idleness (1807).

Poor little, pretty, flutt'ring thing,
Must we no longer live together?
And dost thou prune thy trembling wing,
To take thy flight thou know'st not whither?

Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly
Lies all neglected, all forgot:
And pensive, wav'ring, melancholy,
Thou dread'st and hop'st thou know'st not what.

Matthew Prior, Poems on Several Occasions (1709).

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Ishiyakushi"

As for the fate of the soul, this poem, which has appeared here before, is worth revisiting on this occasion.

The Soul's Progress

It enters life it knows not whence; there lies
A mist behind it and a mist before.
It stands between a closed and open door.
It follows hope, yet feeds on memories.
The years are with it, and the years are wise;
It learns the mournful lesson of their lore.
It hears strange voices from an unknown shore,
Voices that will not answer to its cries.

Blindly it treads dim ways that wind and twist;
It sows for knowledge, and it gathers pain;
Stakes all on love, and loses utterly.
Then, going down into the darker mist,
Naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,
It staggers out into eternity.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

There is no mistaking the vital stream that runs from Hadrian through Bede through Wordsworth through Symons. This progression seems absolutely fresh and contemporary to me. It makes modern irony and know-it-allness seem stodgy, old-fashioned, and -- no other word fits -- soulless.

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Snow Falling on a Town"

I have always been fond of sparrows -- those dappled, cheerful, humble creatures. So the thought of the soul as a sparrow passing "from cold to cold" during our flitting, fleeting time on earth is, for me, a lovely and congenial one.

Birds are, in general, well-suited to serve as emblems of the soul, don't you think? Today a huge blue sky suddenly appeared, mottled with high, sunlight-filled swathes of white fish-scale clouds. It could have been a mid-summer's day. I thought of the skylark, that sprite of the upper air.

In the midst of the plain
Sings the skylark,
Free of all things.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 198.

Here is an alternative translation:

above the moor
not attached to anything
a skylark sings

Basho (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 156.

Blyth and Ueda differ most markedly in their translation of the middle phrase of Basho's haiku: "mono ni mo tsukazu." Mono means "thing." In this context, ni means "to" and mo means "even." Tsukazu is a negative form of the verb meaning "to be attached." Hence, the phrase might be translated (extremely roughly) as: "to thing not even attached."

Ueda's translation is, therefore, closer to the literal meaning. Blyth takes more liberties with "free of all things" (including moving the phrase to the end of the haiku). But I think that both interpretations are lovely, and I find it difficult to choose between the two. And I think they both capture the essence of the haiku (which, of course, best remains unspoken).

Bernard Priestman, "Kilnsey Crag, Wharfedale, Yorkshire" (1929)

I'd say that the skylark and the nightingale vie for the honor of the bird most apostrophized by William Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets. (Come to think of it, this may be true of all poets.) Both birds make an appearance in the following poem by Wordsworth. They are not explicitly linked to the human soul. However, when it comes to Romantic poetry, nearly everything is presumed to be, as a matter of course, either an embodiment, or a reflection, of our souls. This is not a criticism, merely an observation.

To a Skylark

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, Volume II (1849).

The poem was composed in 1825. When it was first published in 1827, it contained the following additional stanza after the first stanza:

To the last point of vision, and beyond,
Mount, daring warbler! that love-prompted strain,
('Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond)
Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain:
Yet might'st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing
All independent of the leafy spring.

William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, Volume II (1827).

After 1843, Wordsworth removed the stanza in editions of his Poetical Works. To me, the stanza seems somewhat diffuse, and detracts from the comparison between the skylark and the nightingale, as well as from the "Heaven and Home" theme. I think that the poem is better without it. (However, Wordsworth did make use of the stanza: he inserted it in "A Morning Exercise.")

Samuel Llewellyn, "Sailing at Blakeney" (c. 1938)

Wordsworth's emphasis on the contrast between the skylark's homely nest on the ground and its towering lyrical flights -- the contrast between Home and Heaven -- is also the subject of the following poem, although in a different key.

Lark Descending

A singing firework; the sun's darling;
Hark how creation pleads!
Then silence: see, a small gray bird
That runs among the weeds.

Edmund Blunden, Poems 1930-1940 (Macmillan 1940).

"The lark ascending" is the phrase that we are accustomed to see. (When I see that phrase, I immediately think of Ralph Vaughan Williams's beautiful composition with that title, which was in turn inspired by George Meredith's poem of that name.) Blunden accomplishes a great deal in a small space. If we removed the second line, we would have something that looks and sounds a great deal like a haiku.

Joseph Kavanagh (1856-1918), "Gipsy Encampment on the Curragh"

A theme begins to emerge, doesn't it? The skylark is earthbound, yet drawn towards the heavens, singing. Perfectly at home in both places, it would seem.

All the long day --
Yet not long enough for the skylark,
Singing, singing.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring, page 195.

Here is another translation:

all this long day
and yet wanting to sing more
a skylark

Basho (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, page 155.

However, when considering the skylark as an emblem of the soul, it is perhaps best to conclude with this, which adds the necessary element of irresolvable mystery that each of us carries with us.

The skylark:
Its voice alone fell,
Leaving nothing behind.

Ampu (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page 165.

Francis Armstrong (1849-1920), "Shap Fells, Westmorland"

In recent years, scenes from past dreams have begun to float into my mind during my waking hours. Not entire dream sequences, but brief snippets: a room, a landscape, a face. When they first arrive, I take these snippets for memories, but I then quickly realize that I am, with no conscious intent to do so, revisiting a dream (or, better: a dream is revisiting me). All of this takes place within the space of a few seconds.

For all I know, this may be a sign of pathology. But I am not looking for an explanation. Nor am I walking around in a fugue state. However, it has prompted me to wonder whether everything we have ever experienced, felt, or thought remains sitting inside us. If that is indeed the case, what prompts these things to float up? Why do some seemingly commonplace incidents continue to haunt us, while major "life events" have no hold upon us?

Chance Pleasures

Smiles from strangers met but once,
On simplest affairs,
When nature welcomed circumstance,
May last us years.
And sunbursts over nameless plains,
Not homes to us, shall gild
Further adventures with the lens
Of life in our home field.

One cannot count nor reckon thus,
Nor tell at the time;
No use to note it down, no use,
When such spells gleam, --
When such winds stir such linden leaves,
Such lamps shine late and pale
Over empty quays, unmeaning waves --
But wait; at length, the spell!

Edmund Blunden, Poems 1930-1940 (Macmillan 1940).

Yes, that's the nub of it: "But wait; at length, the spell!" Which in turn begs the question: why the spell?

Eric Hesketh Hubbard (1892-1957), "Harlech Castle"

I am not suggesting that everything that resides within us is endlessly fascinating. And I am not seeking to follow a winding trail into a dark wood where a revelation lies waiting. (The contemporary proclivity for writing (and reading) self-regarding memoirs of this sort puzzles me.) I am reminded of the title of Philip Larkin's poem about deciding to stop keeping a diary: "Forget What Did." Precisely. All of those Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.

And yet. One of our primary obligations as human beings is to pay attention to what goes on outside us and around us, which is invariably more interesting than what goes on inside us. Which does not mean that we leave ourselves out of account when paying attention. The trick is to not let our overweening sense of self overwhelm the integrity and the beauty of the particulars.

A Short Ode

All things then stood before us
as they were,
Not in comparison,
But each most rare;
The "tree, of many, one,"
The lock of hair,
The weir in the morning sun,
The hill in the darkening air,
Each in its soleness, then and there,
Created one; that one, creation's care.

Edmund Blunden, A Hong Kong House: Poems 1951-1961 (Collins 1962). The quotation in line 5 ("tree, of many, one") comes from William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood": "But there's a tree, of many, one,/A single field which I have look'd upon,/Both of them speak of something that is gone." I presume this reference accounts for Blunden's title (contrasting his ode of ten lines with Wordsworth's of over 200 lines).

Larkin gets it exactly right (I realize that I say this quite often) in the final two stanzas of "Forget What Did":

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).

Eric Hesketh Hubbard, "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

This is where poetry (and painting and music) come in. A beautiful and moving work of art cannot be created unless its creator first pays strict and loving attention. Then, if he or she is skilled, and visited by the Muses, the rest of us can see and feel the World in a way that honors the World's particulars while miraculously -- if only briefly -- giving us the sense that we and the World's particulars are all in this together.

Nocturne

Blue water . . . a clear moon . . .
In the moonlight the white herons are flying.
Listen! Do you hear the girls who gather water-chestnuts?
They are going home in the night, singing.

Li Po (translated by Shigeyoshi Obata), in Shigeyoshi Obata, The Works of Li Po (E. P. Dutton 1922).

Eric Hesketh Hubbard, "Dunluce Castle"

On the one hand, the news of the world counsels us, on a daily basis: Abandon all hope! On the other hand, the modern gods of Science, Progress, and utopian political schemes whisper in our ear: We know the Truth. We have a plan for you. Trust us. Both pieces of advice are falsehoods.

Consider the messengers. The people who deliver these messages have no heart. The individual soul is of no interest to them. The media? Social scientists? Politicians? Those in search of heart and soul need to look elsewhere.

Where, then, should we turn? Well, as one might expect, I'm inclined to suggest that poetry may be a good place to start. It is not the only place, of course. We are in search of that which is "true and not feigning," wherever we can find it.

If we start our search with poetry, we can begin at random. We would soon discover that a poem written during the first century, B. C., in the Roman Empire, a poem written in China during the T'ang Dynasty, a poem written in Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th century, and a poem written in Scotland in the 20th century all say essentially the same thing about how we live.

Ian Fleming (1906-1994), "Fisher Houses, Arbroath" (1949)

Let's start with Horace, addressing his female acquaintance Leuconoe.

Ah do not strive too much to know,
My dear Leuconoe,
What the kind gods design to do
With me and thee.

Ah do not you consult the stars,
Contented bear thy doom,
Rather than thus increase thy fears
For what will come:

Whether they'll give one winter more,
Or else make this thy last;
Which breaks the waves on Tyrrhene shore
With many a blast.

Be wise, and drink; cut off long cares
From thy contracted span,
Nor stretch extensive hopes and fears
Beyond a man:

E'en whilst we speak, the Envious Time
Doth make swift haste away;
Then seize the present, use thy prime,
Nor trust another day.

Horace (translated by Thomas Creech), Odes, Book I, Ode 11, in Thomas Creech, The Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace (1684).

Critical opinion is divided as to whether Horace is providing sage advice to a young friend or wooing a prospective lover. But, whatever his motives, the advice is clear: carpe diem (which Creech translates as "seize the present" rather than the usual "seize the day"), for you may not be here tomorrow.

Ian Fleming, "Window on the Sea" (1965)

The post-Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of society, and in our ever-advancing march into a promised utopian future, is, not surprisingly, accompanied by ignorance of both human nature and history on the part of the true believers. But, should the busybodies wish to educate themselves (an unlikely prospect), they need not look far to discover what they ought to have known from the start: for centuries, poets have been telling us exactly how human nature and history work.

The Ruin of the Capital of Yueh

Hither returned Kou Chien, the King of Yueh, in triumph;
He had destroyed the Kingdom of Wu.
His loyal men came home in brilliance of brocade,
And the women of the court thronged the palace
Like flowers that fill the spring --
Now only a flock of partridges are flying in the twilight.

Li Po (translated by Shigeyoshi Obata), in Shigeyoshi Obata, The Works of Li Po (E. P. Dutton 1922).

The Kingdom of Wu was conquered by the Kingdom of Yueh in the 5th century, B. C. A century later, the Kingdom of Yueh was conquered by the Kingdom of Chu. A century or so later the Kingdom of Chu was conquered by the Qin Dynasty . . . . .

The poem brings to mind a passage from Herodotus:

"For the cities which were formerly great, have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in the olden time. I shall therefore discourse equally of both, convinced that human happiness never continues long in one stay."

Herodotus (translated by George Rawlinson), in George Rawlinson, History of Herodotus, Volume 1, Book I, Section 5 (Fourth Edition 1880), page 148.

Ian Fleming, "Arbroath Harbour" (1952)

Basho wrote the following haiku in 1689, when visiting Hiraizumi, the site of a 12th century battle between two samurai clans.

Ah! Summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors' dreams.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 309.

Ian Fleming, "Arbroath Harbour" (1951)

Finally, Scotland in the 20th century brings us full circle. Kingdoms, dynasties, clans. An individual life. One and the same.

So Many Summers

Beside one loch, a hind's neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one --
Now you'd look very close before you knew
If it's the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

As I have noted in the past, I cannot claim to have gained any wisdom during my years on Earth. I am not qualified to give advice on how to live. But I do know that human nature never changes. And I also know that the World is a paradise just as it is. At this moment.

Ian Fleming, "Fisherman's Window"

I am troubled by the extent to which contemporary society and culture have become politicized. In particular, I am concerned that the standard of judgment for thoughts, words, and deeds has become a political one. Political agendas have absolutely nothing to do with what is true, or with what is right or wrong.

This is why I am highly suspicious of politicians, social and political "activists," and their media mouthpieces. They believe (honestly or disingenuously -- I leave it to you to decide) that they know what is best for the rest of us. Perhaps I am being unfair, but I have always had the feeling that an incipient totalitarian lurks within the soul of every soi-disant "activist."

Smuggler

Watch him when he opens
his bulging words -- justice,
fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visas, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light.

Nobody with such luggage
has nothing to declare.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

"Peace, peace, peace." Exactly. It is worth noting that MacCaig wrote this poem in June of 1964. Think of how "bulging words" have proliferated over the past half-century.

Josephine Haswell Miller (1890-1975), "The Shepherd"

People are free to believe what they wish to believe, and I respect their right to do so. (As long as belief does not turn into the coercion of, or the commission of violence upon, non-believers.) But I do object to the infiltration of political beliefs (for that is what they are: beliefs, not truths) into the words that we use to describe human life, and into the language that we use to describe the way in which the individual soul makes its way in the World.

To use an old-fashioned -- but wonderful -- word: when it comes to how we live our life, and the state of our soul, political discourse and political judgments are "humbug."

The Pier

Only a placid sea, and
A pier where no boat comes,
But people stand at the end
And spit into the water,
Dimpling it, and watch a dog
That chins and churns back to land.

I had come here to see
Humbug embark, deported,
Protected from the crowd.
But he has not come today.
And anyway there is no boat
To take him. And no one cares.
So Humbug still walks our land
On stilts, is still looked up to.

W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems (Secker & Warburg 1941).

Josephine Haswell Miller, "Memories of the Sea" (1936)

The "activists" think they have a hook: none of us wishes to appear apathetic about the many ills of the world. Shouldn't we all be "compassionate,""concerned," and "engaged" in the way that they would like us to be? In a word: "No."

Balances

Because I see the world poisoned
by cant and brutal self-seeking,
must I be silent about
the useless waterlily, the dunnock's nest
in the hedgeback?

Because I am fifty-six years old
must I love, if I love at all,
only ideas -- not people, but only
the idea of people?

Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?

There are more meanings than those
in text books of economics
and a part of the worst slum
is the moon rising over it
and eyes weeping and
mouths laughing.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen MacCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

Josephine Haswell Miller, "Studio Window" (1934)

A few days ago, I came across this poem by Saigyo (1118-1190):

At that time
on my pillow
under roots of mugwort,
then too may these insects
cheer me with friendly notes.

Saigyo (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991). The poem is a waka: five lines, with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7 in the original Japanese.

The poem is preceded by an introductory note: "Written when he was feeling very downcast and discouraged and heard a cricket singing close to his pillow." (Translated by Burton Watson.) Watson provides an explanatory gloss to the poem : "Saigyo is imagining the time when he will be in his grave." Ibid, page 129.

The poem brings to mind Thomas Hardy's many poems about our life underground after death: the conversations that are for ever taking place down there among the denizens, most of whom seem quite content. Transformed (to use a typical Hardy word), yes, but still active and voluble. It is pleasant to think that, as we lie amidst the mugwort roots, we may hear the sound of singing crickets.

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937), "The Mill, Weston Turville" (1936)

The poem also brings to mind a haiku by Issa (1763-1828):

Grasshopper!
Be the keeper of the grave-yard
When I die.

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

Another pleasant thought, in my opinion. It is not yet their season, but the sound of grasshoppers and crickets in the tall grasses is an essential part of much of the year, particularly the long afternoons and evenings of summer. To use Saigyo's characterization, they provide friendly company (am I falling prey to the Pathetic Fallacy?), signaling their presence from somewhere off in the fields.

Alexander Jamieson, "The Old Moat, Weston Turville" (1930)

This may perhaps be the most famous cricket poem in Japanese literature:

How piteous!
Beneath the helmet
Chirps a cricket.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 79.

Here is an alternative translation:

How piteous!
Under the helmet
a cricket.

Basho (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1992), page 265.

The writing of the haiku was prompted by Basho's visit to Tada Shrine in Komatsu (a city in west-central Honshu, on the Sea of Japan) in September of 1689. Basho "saw the helmet of Saito Sanemori, an aged warrior killed in a battle fought at nearby Shinohara. Lest his enemies would know he was an old man, Sanemori had gone to war with his hair dyed. After the battle, his severed head was examined by an enemy general named Higuchi Jiro, who cried out, 'How piteous!'" Ibid, page 265. The helmet may still be viewed at the shrine.

The last line of the haiku is a single word: kirigirisu (cricket). Hence, Ueda's translation is literally correct, and "chirps" is an interpolation by Blyth. However, given the nature of the Japanese language, Blyth's interpolation is not without authority. A scholar of Basho writes:

"There have been three different readings. (1) A cricket was actually chirping under the helmet. (2) The poet did not actually hear the cricket but imagined it was chirping when Sanemori was killed. (3) It does not matter whether the cricket was actually chirping at the time. Each reading has its merit, but I can most readily accept the first one."

Iwata Kuro (1891-1969) (translated by Makoto Ueda), Ibid, page 266.

I'm not sure that this degree of explication is necessary (or helpful). I like the thought of a lone cricket chirping beneath the helmet on one of those hot, humid September days in Japan, as Basho looked on.

Alexander Jamieson, "Our Pond" (1937)

And how can we visit the subject of crickets and grasshoppers without bringing in Keats?

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead.
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead --
That is the grasshopper's. He takes the lead
In summer luxury; he has never done
With his delights, for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

John Keats, Poems (1817).

Do I have the capacity to weave a web that encompasses Saigyo, Issa, Basho, and Keats, and that ties them all together across the centuries? Alas, no. But here's a preliminary thought: "The poetry of earth is never dead. . . . The poetry of earth is ceasing never." Yes. Whether we are above ground or below, the crickets and the grasshoppers will never still their song.

Alexander Jamieson, "The Old Mill, Weston Turville" (1927)

I came across this poem a week or so ago and it keeps returning to me.

Were we sure of seeing
a moon like this
in existences to come,
who would be sorry
to leave this life?

Saigyo (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 158. The poem is a waka: five lines, with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7 in the original Japanese.

Most poetry is, explicitly or implicitly, a meditation upon our mortality, and upon the transience of all that surrounds us. A few poets add something along these lines: "Death is the mother of beauty." To wit: our existence is fleeting, but this contingency has the virtue of bestowing a bittersweet loveliness upon all that we behold (provided that we remember to pay attention). Saigyo's poem falls within this tradition. This is not surprising: he was a Buddhist monk, and thus was steeped in the doctrine of impermanence.

But what makes this poem wonderful (and I am mindful of not wishing to destroy it through explication) is the way in which Saigyo's meditation on the passing beauty of this life is placed within another dimension entirely: the possibility of "existences to come." Yet it is important to note that this possibility is qualified; it is not used to provide false comfort: "were we sure of seeing." Mystery remains.

Richard Eurich, "Snow Shower over Skyreholme" (1973)

"Existences to come." A phrase likely to raise eyebrows among those who have boarded the Science and Progress express. I have written previously of enchanted and disenchanted worlds, so I will not repeat that discussion here. Suffice it to say that some see humanity's time on earth as the story of a quest for "knowledge" and "rational" explanations, and of an escape from "superstition." That disenchanted world has certainly turned out to be a resounding success, hasn't it?

I realize that I can be accused of reactionary romanticizing, but I prefer this:

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say: "I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory."
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship.

Anonymous (translated by Gilbert Murray), in Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, "Critical Appendix on the Orphic Tablets" (written by Gilbert Murray) (Cambridge University Press 1908), pages 659-660.

These lines were inscribed in Greek on a paper-thin gold tablet that was discovered in Petelia in southern Italy. The tablet is believed to date from 300 to 200 B. C. "The tablet had been rolled up and placed in a hexagonal cylinder hanging from a delicate gold chain and doubtless worn by the dead person as an amulet." Ibid, page 573, footnote 1.

Here is another translation of the inscription:

You will find to the left of the house of Hades a wellspring,
and by the side of this standing a white cypress.
You must not even go close to this wellspring; but also
you will find another spring that comes from the lake of Memory
cold water running, and there are those who stand guard before it.
You shall say: "I am a child of earth and the starry heavens,
but my generation is of the sky. You yourselves know this.
But I am dry with thirst and am dying. Give me then quickly
the water that runs cold out of the lake of Memory."
And they themselves will give you to drink from the sacred water,
and afterward you shall be lord among the rest of the heroes.

Anonymous (translated by Richmond Lattimore), in Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (University of Chicago Press 1955).

Richard Eurich, "The Rose" (1960)

The following passage is written by Gilbert Murray, and appears in a discussion of the plays of Euripides. However, I think that the thoughts expressed stand on their own outside of that context.

"Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life. These things are Gods or forms of God: not fabulous immortal men, but 'Things which Are,' things utterly non-human and non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity."

Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897), page 272.

A crucial element missing from the modern "rational" worldview is humility: we think we know -- or will eventually know -- everything. (Whether this "knowledge" has anything to do with our life or our soul is another matter, of course.)

From the Latin (but not so pagan)

Blessed is he that has come to the heart of the world and is humble.
He shall stand alone; and beneath
His feet are implacable fate, and panic at night, and the strumble
Of the hungry river of death.

Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (1938).

Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

As I walked through the backyard a few days ago, it was full of twitterings and snatches of song. Sparrows, chickadees, robins, starlings? I'm no expert on these ornithological matters. Besides, as is their wont, they were shy, and thus hidden.

In my younger years, I was on the lookout for bedizened birds: cardinals, orioles, tanagers, and the like. But now I am fond of these workaday companions, who are with us always. Think of the generations of them that have accompanied us through our lives! There is little in life that is constant, or that can be relied upon, but this humble, comforting chorus has never ceased.

Winter Garden

The dunnock in the hedge -- is he fearful
or fastidious? His eyes are fixed on the bird table
where five free-for-all sparrows
peck in a shower bath of crumbs.

A mouse zigzags
among the frozen raspberry canes,
going nowhere elaborately.

Three apple trees look as if they'd get on rehearsing
as Macbeth's witches
if they had the energy.

And, only seven hours old,
the day begins to die.

-- The sparrows have gone, telling everybody, and the dunnock
is giving us all
a lesson in table manners.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

John Nash, "Winter Scene, Buckinghamshire" (1920)

As a rule, Japanese waka and haiku poets do not traffic in "symbols,""metaphors," or "allegories." They simply report what is going on in the World around us. All this thinking that we do is highly overrated.

If they didn't sing
we'd just take them
for deeper-hued leaves --
the flocks of greenfinches
feeding on willow buds.

Saigyo (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991).

Now, I acknowledge that it certainly took some thinking on Saigyo's part to compose this poem. But the thinking went into figuring out how to present this beautiful piece of the World to us with the least amount of interference and elaboration. Lest we destroy Saigyo's lovely report on experience, we must resist mightily such thoughts as: "The flocks of greenfinches symbolize . . ." Or, worse: "The meaning of this waka is . . ." No. We must stop all that. Saigyo has given us the World. That is enough.

John Nash, "Winter Scene"

When it comes to birds, I suppose that anthropomorphism is always a danger (the Pathetic Fallacy, sentimentality, et cetera). But is this really a danger? If we don't see ourselves out there in the World, then where do we see ourselves? In the mirror? In the phantasies, phantasms, and frauds of popular culture?

Family of Long-tailed Tits

Their twittering isn't avant-garde
or confessional or aleatory.
It doesn't quote other birds
or utter manifestos telling them
how to sing.

It's congruent with their way of flying,
for that, too,
is a sweetest, softest twittering
to the eye.

The clumsy, clever human
bumbles about in the space
between his actions and his words.
No congruence there.

He listens with envy
while their song flirts
from one twig of silence
to another one.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

In some quarters, starlings are viewed as pests, particularly when they congregate in massive flocks. And there is no doubt that they can make quite a racket, even in small groups. But if you watch them as they go about their daily business, they can become quite endearing.

I have no illusions. As I watch a small flock of starlings flit from place to place in the neighborhood, or in a park, I realize that they are driven by hunger and skittishness. The constant activity is a matter of survival. But, as I say, there is something endearing and beguiling about this intensely preoccupied, antic, ever-chattering community.

Starlings

Can you keep it so,
cool tree, making a blue cage
for an obstreperous population? --
for a congregation of mediaeval scholars
quarrelling in several languages? --
for busybodies marketing
in the bazaar of green leaves? --
for clockwork fossils that can't be still even
when the Spring runs down?

No tree, no blue cage can contain
that restlessness. They whirr off
and sow themselves in a scattered handful
on the grass -- and are
bustling monks
tilling their green precincts.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

As I mentioned in my previous post, birds are apt candidates for anthropomorphization, and Norman MacCaig does this quite well. "Bustling monks/tilling their green precincts" is wonderful.

Charles Napier Hemy, "Pilchards" (1897)

Thomas Hardy has no reservations whatsoever when it comes to this sort of thing. Monologues by, and conversations between, non-human creatures are a common occurrence in his poetry. I suspect that some Modernists may find this to be old-fashioned, quaint, "sentimental," or otherwise objectionable on aesthetic grounds: not "serious" poetry, in other words.

Here's a test. Which would you prefer? To read a poem by Thomas Hardy in which birds carry on a casual conversation (or, to cite another example, a poem in which a dog converses with his deceased former owner, recently buried beneath the turf)? Or would you prefer to read something by James Joyce? Well, I think you know my answer. Talking birds win hands down.

Winter in Durnover Field

Scene. -- A wide stretch of fallow ground recently
sown with wheat, and frozen to iron hardness. Three
large birds walking about thereon, and wistfully eyeing
the surface. Wind keen from north-east: sky a dull grey.

Rook. -- Throughout the field I find no grain;
The cruel frost encrusts the cornland!
Starling. -- Aye: patient pecking now is vain
Throughout the field, I find . . .
Rook. -- No grain!
Pigeon. -- Nor will be, comrade, till it rain,
Or genial thawings loose the lorn land
Throughout the field.
Rook. -- I find no grain:
The cruel frost encrusts the cornland!

Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).

The poem is a triolet. Thus, the first, fourth, and seventh lines are the same, as are the second line and the last line. This in turn means that the opening and closing couplets are identical.

Charles Napier Hemy, "Trout in the Eel Reeve" (1890)

The following poem demonstrates that, although Hardy is being playful when it comes to his bird conversations, he is not, in doing so, sacrificing the ability to create an affecting scene.

Starlings on the Roof

"No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the spot,
And others are coming who knew them not.

"If you listen anon, with an ear intent,
The voices, you'll find, will be different
From the well-known ones of those who went."

"Why did they go? Their tones so bland
Were quite familiar to our band;
The comers we shall not understand."

"They look for a new life, rich and strange;
They do not know that, let them range
Wherever they may, they will get no change.

"They will drag their house-gear ever so far
In their search for a home no miseries mar;
They will find that as they were they are,

"That every hearth has a ghost, alack,
And can be but the scene of a bivouac
Till they move their last -- no care to pack!"

Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces (1914).

I would suggest that the fact that this conversation is between two starlings -- rather than between two humans standing on the sidewalk -- actually heightens the poem's impact, brings home more deeply the universal human plight that is the subject of the poem. But I may certainly be wrong.

Charles Napier Hemy, "Evening Gray" (1868)

In order to live well, we must come to terms with the fact of our own mortality. Easier said than done, of course. I can blithely write "come to terms with," which perhaps gives the impression that I know what I'm talking about -- that I know how to thread this needle. But I can assure you that I know nothing whatsoever.

Earlier this week I spent half a day in a hospital for a routine diagnostic procedure. The pre-procedure process involved lying alone on a gurney in a patient room after having an IV tube inserted in my arm. I was told that I would have to wait twenty minutes for the procedure room to become available. The lights were off. I was quite relaxed. But, as I looked up at the ceiling tiles and listened to the conversations taking place at the nurse's station, a thought occurred to me (a paraphrase): "This is how my days may end. Dusty ceiling tiles and strangers in conversation, day and night, out in an unseen hallway."

Here is a happier thought.

Elizabeth

'Elizabeth the Beloved' --
So much says the stone,
That is all with weather defaced,
With moss overgrown.

But if to husband or child,
Brother or sire, most dear
Is past deciphering;
This only is clear:

That once she was beloved,
Was Elizabeth,
And now is beloved no longer,
If it be not of Death.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Time Importuned (1928).

"Once she was beloved,/Was Elizabeth" is a lovely turn of phrase. "And now is beloved no longer,/If it be not of Death" sounds like something that Edward Thomas might have written (and which, like Warner, he would have used to end a poem). In fact, Warner wrote a poem in memory of Thomas, so there may be a subconscious influence at work.

William Holman Hunt, "Our English Coasts ('Strayed Sheep')" (1852)

If one wishes to "come to terms with" one's mortality, graveyards are preferable to hospitals as places to collect one's thoughts on the matter.

The Old Graveyard at Hauppauge

In Adam's fall we sinned all,
and fell out of Paradise
into mankind -- this body of salt
and gathering of the waters,
birth, work, and wedding garment.

But now we are at rest . . .
Aletta and Phebe Almira,
and Augusta Brunce, and the MacCrones . . .
lying in the earth, looking up
at the clouds and drifting trees.

Louis Simpson, Caviare at the Funeral (1980).

Some may feel that the final two lines are an exercise in wishful thinking. But isn't our entire life an exercise in wishful thinking? I'd say that a possible definition of "human being" is: "the creature that engages in wishful thinking."

In the wake of the so-called Enlightenment, reason and rationalism are presumed to trump emotion and intuition. However, when it comes to how to live (and how to die), a belief in the primacy of reason and rationalism (and in their noisome spawn, "Progress") is just as much an exercise in wishful thinking as is the thought (a lovely one, by the way) that those who have departed are "lying in the earth, looking up/at the clouds and drifting trees." Reason and rationalism have nothing to do with what is humanly true.

David Roberts, "Wrth y Bedd" (c. 1950)

In attempting to "come to terms with" my mortality, I prefer to leave reason and rationalism out of account. The fact of our death, and the way in which we live our life in light of that unchangeable fact, is a matter of emotion, intuition, and imagination, not of ratiocination and logic.

For instance, the following poem is, on its face, irrational. How can someone speak from the grave? How can a wood-dove mourn? Yet the poem makes perfect sense to me.

Not long I lived, but long enough to know my mind
And gain my wish -- a grave buried among these trees,
Where if the wood-dove on my taciturn headstone
Perch for a brief mourning I shall think it enough.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Boxwood (1960). The poem is untitled.

Fortunately for us, reason and rationalism have absolutely nothing to do with the essence of poetry. I agree with Edward Thomas: the criterion for judging whether certain words placed in a certain order qualify as poetry is whether what the poet says "is true and not feigning." Humanly true.

John Everett Millais, "The Vale of Rest" (1859)

This past week I saw the first daffodils of the year, and, beside them, the first crocuses. Over the weekend, a couple of neighbors mowed their lawns. (The hum of lawnmowers in the distance on a sunny day is an emblem of the stability and endurance of civilized life.) But I wonder if, this early in the year, the flowers and the mowers are a bit optimistic.

Yet, as I have noted before, the turning of the seasons is a matter of emotion, not of equinoxes and solstices, or of dates on the calendar. For me, autumn begins sometime in late August or early September. And spring begins sometime in late February or early March. As I have suggested in the past, these seasonal transitions have something to do with the cast of the light, the wind, bird-song, and the scent of the earth (the list is not exhaustive). Not to mention internal weather.

In any event, I am delighted by these confident harbingers. Which makes me wonder why the following poems by Robert Herrick come to mind. Yes, the poems concern daffodils and tree blossoms, but Herrick's focus is elsewhere.

Divination by a Daffodil

When a daffodil I see,
Hanging down his head t'wards me,
Guess I may, what I must be:
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buryed.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

With one exception, I have modernized the spelling. I hesitated to do so, since the spelling in the original 1648 edition is "daffadill," which I think is lovely. However, I have retained "buryed" in the final line, since it is necessary for the metre (i.e., "bury-ed" rather than our modern "buried").

Stanley Spencer, "Hoe Garden Nursery" (1955)

Here again, Herrick considers daffodils as portents.

To Daffodils

Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or any thing.
We die,
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew
Ne'r to be found again.

Robert Herrick, Ibid.

I fear that placing these two poems beside one another may misrepresent Herrick, for it perhaps gives the impression that he could not look at spring flowers without thinking of our mortality. In fact, one of the charms of Hesperides is that poems such as these alternate, in nearly equal measure, with poems that are joyous, humorous, satirical, or ribald.

Herrick's subject matter is the world entire, which he makes clear in "The Argument of His Book" (which I have posted previously): "I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers . . . I write of youth, of love, and have access/By these, to sing of cleanly-wantonness . . . I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)/Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all."

Stanley Spencer, "View from Cookham Bridge" (1936)

I also noticed a plum tree blossoming this week. It, like the daffodils and the mowers, seems overly optimistic. But who am I to second-guess a tree?

To Blossoms

Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?
Your date is not so past;
But you may stay yet here a while,
To blush and gently smile;
And go at last.

What, were ye born to be
An hour or half's delight;
And so to bid goodnight?
'Twas pity Nature brought ye forth
Merely to show your worth,
And lose you quite.

But you are lovely leaves, where we
May read how soon things have
Their end, though ne'r so brave:
And after they have shown their pride,
Like you a while: They glide
Into the grave.

Robert Herrick, Ibid.

What makes Herrick so attractive, even in poems confronting our ultimate fate, is his unquenchable good nature. This presiding spirit accounts for the empathy and loveliness with which he documents our lives from birth to death, highlighting the minute particulars, both good and ill, that we all share.

The final stanza of "To Blossoms" is a fine example of Herrick at his best: clear-sighted, not mincing words, but withal tender and beautiful. "Lovely leaves" indeed. And, yes: "They glide into the grave."

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

The following poems share a common image: a solitary gleam of light amid the darkness of night. I am not clever enough to tie the poems together through explicative sleight of hand. However, now that I see them here beside one another, I realize how well each poem reflects the distinctive sensibility, and preoccupations, of its maker. Of course, this is a truism. All poetry embodies the unique personality of its creator, doesn't it? But, in our age, I'm not so sure that this is as true as it once was. People now obtain academic degrees in the writing of poetry. This is not the sort of thing that encourages individuality.

The Lantern Out of Doors

Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend
There, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press 1967).

Hopkins was a Jesuit. Thus, the resolution of this poem comes as no great surprise. However, I have the sense that Hopkins's religious convictions were the outcome of a tempestuous, hard-won struggle. This introduces a human element into his poetry that is sometimes lacking in purely "religious" or "devotional" verse. This is evident in the first eleven lines of the sonnet. The repetition of "death or distance" is lovely. His use of "out of sight is out of mind" is devastating, yet full of empathy and rueful truth. He knows full well that he too is a solitary lantern-bearer. As are we all.

Albert Goodwin (1845-1932), "The Tower of London" (1897)

It is a matter of perennial academic dispute as to whether Wordsworth succeeded in his avowed intention to write poetry in "language near to the language of men" that is free of "poetic diction." There is no denying that, particularly in his longer poems, the results were mixed.

Still, I think that he succeeded more often than he is given credit for, and this success goes far beyond the well-known anthology pieces. This becomes clearer to me the deeper I delve into his poetry, which always reveals new, delightful surprises. For instance, I recently came across this untitled sonnet.

Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp
Sullenly glaring through sepulchral damp,
So burns yon Taper 'mid a black recess
Of mountains, silent, dreary, motionless:
The lake below reflects it not; the sky
Muffled in clouds, affords no company
To mitigate and cheer its loneliness.
Yet, round the body of that joyless Thing
Which sends so far its melancholy light,
Perhaps are seated in domestic ring
A gay society with faces bright,
Conversing, reading, laughing; -- or they sing,
While hearts and voices in the song unite.

William Wordsworth, Poems (1815).

One might well say: how can a poem that begins with the lines "Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress/Of a bedimming sleep" be written in language that is "near to the language of men"? Well, keep reading. The language is heightened, yes, but I'd say that this is the sort of syntax and tone that Wordsworth had in mind when he made his aesthetic pronouncements. I find it preferable to the often purple rhetoric of, for instance, Keats, Shelley, and Byron.

An aside: Wordsworth's poem brings to mind the following poem, which I have never been able to make head or tail of. But it sounds lovely.

Valley Candle

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

Albert Goodwin, "Salisbury"

Masaoka Shiki died of tuberculosis at the age of 34. He is traditionally, along with Basho, Buson, and Issa, regarded as one of the four great masters of haiku. Given Shiki's early death, there is an inevitable tendency to read his tragic fate back into his poetry. However, although there is no doubt that his long illness (his tuberculosis began when he was 21) influenced how he viewed the world, he -- like any good haiku poet -- was primarily concerned with scrupulously recording what he saw. But, as is the case with the poems by Hopkins and Wordsworth, Shiki's distinctive sensibility is evident in the following haiku.

A lantern
Entered a house
On the withered moor.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 283.

A side-note: there is a time-honored tradition of basing haiku upon the phrase "withered moor" ("kareno" in Japanese). The most famous occurrence of the phrase is in what is usually identified as Basho's final poem:

Ill on a journey;
My dreams wander
Over a withered moor.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 288.

Albert Goodwin, "Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire" (1910)

What is love? I haven't a clue. I'd like to think that I have experienced it. But who really knows?

Call me a coward, but I tend to think that love is one of those experiences that are so intimately bound up with the essence of being human that they can only be lived, and any attempt to "explain" or "define" them is doomed to failure. The nature of the soul, the notion of beauty, and the experience of death fall into the same category.

I am thus tempted to fall back upon my old standby in situations of this sort: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness) (1921). Of course, Wittgenstein is only repeating what Taoist and Buddhist philosophers stated centuries ago. And what they say is true, you know. (Contrary to what purveyors of Science would have you believe, all of this explaining we moderns engage in gets us nowhere.)

Claughton Pellew-Harvey, "View from the Studio" (1930)

Still, I believe that the subject of love can be approached aslant, which is where poetry comes in. Hence, for example, I recently came across the following poems by Robert Herrick.

Love, What It Is

Love is a circle that doth restless move
In the same sweet eternity of love.

Robert Herrick, Poem 29, Hesperides (1648).

Herrick's most recent editors suggest that the source of the poem is a traditional proverb. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 519. They also cite two lines from a masque by Ben Jonson titled "Love's Welcome at Bolsover" as a possible source: "Love is a circle, both the first and last/Of all our actions." Ibid. Finally, they reference a passage from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: "[Love is] circulus a bono in bonum, a round circle still from good to good; for love is the beginner and end of all our actions." Ibid.

I next encountered this, in which "from good to good" (coincidentally or not) makes an appearance:

Upon Love

Love is a Circle, and an Endless Sphere;
From good to good, revolving here, and there.

Robert Herrick, Poem 839, Hesperides.

This helps to illuminate "Love, What It Is." To some extent. Both poems sound lovely, and feel as though they have the ring of truth. After encountering them, I came across a third poem by Herrick which brings things together.

Of Love

How Love came in, I do not know,
Whether by th'eye, or ear, or no:
Or whether with the soul it came
(At first) infused with the same:
Whether in part 'tis here or there,
Or, like the soul, whole every where:
This troubles me: but I as well
As any other, this can tell;
That when from hence she does depart,
The out-let then is from the heart.

Robert Herrick, Poem 73, Hesperides.

"This troubles me" is marvelous. And this is wonderful: "Or whether with the soul it came/(At first) infused with the same." As is this: "like the soul, whole every where." In this context, love as a circle, love as "an Endless Sphere," and love as a "sweet eternity" make perfect sense. The final two lines are lovely, and bring us back to earth.

W. G. Poole, "Plant Against a Winter Landscape" (1938)

However, I do not wish to be reductive. (And I do not think that Herrick is being reductive. He simply provides us with beautiful possibilities.) Defining love destroys it. As I say, it is best approached tangentially, at an oblique angle.

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves, Poems (1927).

Few poems capture love's heart-pang and its internal airiness (that catch of the breath) as well as this.

Duncan Grant, "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Yes and no, experience teaches us. But I do think that the feeling of an absence -- of a lack -- is another way of approaching love aslant. Absence brings home what fullness is. Or something like that.

Only the moon
high in the sky
as an empty reminder --
but if, looking at it, we just remember,
our two hearts may meet.

Saigyo (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991). The poem is an untitled waka (five lines, with a syllable count in Japanese of 5-7-5-7-7). It is prefaced by this note: "When I was in retirement in a distant place, I sent this to someone in the capital around the time when there was a moon." Ibid, page 123.

The Land with Wind in the Leaves

Distance cannot remove me from that place.
I stand half a world away and here it is:
A green sway and roar -- blue, vast, open
And refusing always to let me depart.

Yorkshire 1987 -- Tokyo 1992

sip (Tokyo/Seattle 1992).

Richard Eurich (1903-1992), "The Window"

As I have noted on previous occasions, each generation believes that the World is going to Hell in a handbasket. How could it be otherwise? Whether it arrives via a footsore messenger, a sailing ship in port from distant lands, telegraph, television, or the Internet, the News of the World is not, and has never been, calculated to inspire confidence in the goodwill and beneficence of humanity.

Thus, when I launch into one of my periodic rants about Modernity (Science, Progress, the media, politicians, et cetera), I ought to know better. Yes, of course: the World is going to Hell in a handbasket. But this has never been the fault of current events, which are invariably horrendous and dispiriting. Nor is it the fault of the makeshift (and risible) political, economic, and scientific nostrums that are developed in each generation in order to "explain" and "correct" all that is wrong with the World. Rather, this has always been a matter of False Gods versus Eternal Verities.

Still, I must confess to believing this: when it comes to the balance between Eternal Verities and False Gods, there has been a grievous wrong-turning.

On a Vulgar Error

No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly? They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

C. S. Lewis, Poems (1964).

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

The False Gods usually have the upper hand: their superficial appeal and their promise of immediate gratification are alluring. The Eternal Verities are, on the other hand, sober and tradition-bound. Old-fashioned. Sentimental. Boring.

You may have noticed that I have not attempted to define the False Gods and the Eternal Verities. Although I have no illusions about human nature, I persist in believing that most of us know the difference between the real and the feigned, the true and the false. In the final scene of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Artur Sammler stands beside the body of his nephew Elya Gruner, which lies on a gurney in an autopsy room in the bowels of a hospital. In "a mental whisper," Sammler speaks the final words of the novel:

"At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet -- through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding -- he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (Viking Press 1970).

Existence

Clearly this stupid world doesn't inspire
anything now but an intense antipathy,
an urge to vanish and be done with it;
you hardly dare pick up a newspaper.

Perhaps we should go back to the old home
where our ancestors lived under the eye
of heaven, and find the curious harmony
that sanctified their lives from womb to tomb.

It's some kind of faith for which we yearn,
some gentle web of close dependencies
transcending and containing our existence.
We can no longer live so far from the eternal.

Michel Houellebecq (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Echo's Grove (The Gallery Press 2013).

Charles Cundall, "Temeside, Ludlow" (1923)

A poem that Mahon wrote long before he translated Houellebecq's poem seems apt.

Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide with Me.'

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (The Gallery Press 1999).

Lisbeth Jane Brand (1907-1970), "Winter"

The Eternal Verities are, well, eternal. Call them revenants, but they are always there. Let me be clear: I have only a vague notion of what they are. I remain in thrall to the False Gods. But the choice is ever ours. Perhaps abstention is the first step.

The Valley Wind

Living in retirement beyond the World,
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And stuff my window with roots and ferns.
My spirit is tuned to the Spring-season;
At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart.
Thus imitating cosmic changes
My cottage becomes a Universe.

Lu Yun (4th century A. D.) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918).

Remember, and take heart: "They ain't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it." Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952).

Charles Frederick Dawson, "Accrington From My Window" (1932)

The magnolias are blossoming. As are the cherries and plums and pears. "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . ." But more on that in a moment.

The following ode by Horace begins as a paean to spring. But, as is often the case, Horace uses a precisely-observed opening scene as a prelude to a wide-ranging meditation on the human condition. This is what makes him so lovable, and his poetry so beguiling and delightful: who knows where he will take us next?

The snows are gone, and grass returns again,
New leaves adorn the widow trees,
The unswoln streams their narrow banks contain,
And softly roll to quiet seas:

The decent Nymphs with smiling Graces join'd,
Now naked dance i'th' open air,
They dread no blasts, nor fear the wind
That wantons thro' their flowing hair.

The nimble hour that turns the circling year,
And swiftly whirls the pleasing day,
Forewarns thee to be mortal in thy care,
Nor cramp thy life with long delay:

The Spring the Winter, Summer wastes the Spring,
And Summer's beauty's quickly lost,
When drunken Autumn spreads her drooping wing,
And next cold Winter creeps in frost.

The moon, 'tis true, her monthly loss repairs,
She straight renews her borrow'd light;
But when black Death hath turn'd our shining years,
There follows one Eternal Night.

When we shall view the gloomy Stygian shore,
And walk amongst the mighty dead,
Where Tullus, where Aeneas went before,
We shall be dust, and empty shade:

Who knows if stubborn Fate will prove so kind,
And join to this another day?
What e'er is for thy greedy heir design'd,
Will slip his hands, and fly away:

When thou art gone, and Minos' sentence read,
Torquatus, there is no return;
Thy fame, nor all thy learned tongue can plead,
Nor goodness shall unseal the urn:

For chaste Hippolytus Diana strives,
She strives, but ah! she strives in vain;
Nor Theseus' care, and pious force reprieves
His dear Pirithous from his chain.

Horace (translated by Thomas Creech), Odes, Book IV, Ode 7, in Thomas Creech, The Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace (1684). "Unswoln" (line 3) is the spelling as it appears in Creech's original translation.

The ode is addressed to Torquatus (line 30), a member of a well-known Roman family who was a lawyer by profession (hence the reference to "thy learned tongue" in line 31). Tullus Hostilius (line 23) is traditionally identified as the third king of Rome. Minos (line 29) was the judge of the dead in the Underworld. Hippolytus (line 33) was falsely accused by his stepmother Phaedra of attempting to seduce her. He was killed by order of his father Theseus before Diana was able to disclose Phaedra's deception to Theseus. Pirithous (line 36), accompanied by Theseus, went down to the Underworld to claim Persephone as his wife. Theseus was able to escape with the aid of Hercules, but Pirithous remained forever imprisoned.

Lucien Pissarro, "Rade de Bormes" (1923)

Even if A. E. Housman had not been a classical scholar and a professor of Latin, one suspects that Horace's ode was the sort of thing that would catch his fancy, given his temperament. And, sure enough, it did.

"I attended [Housman's] lectures for two years. At five minutes past 11 he used to walk to the desk, open his manuscript, and begin to read. At the end of the hour he folded his papers and left the room. He never looked either at us or at the row of dons in the front. One morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered with blossom, he reached in his lecture Ode 7 in Horace's Fourth Book, 'Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis.' This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance, wit, and sarcasm.

Then for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in quite a different voice said: 'I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry.' Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own. 'That,' he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, 'I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature,' and walked quickly out of the room.

A scholar of Trinity (since killed in the War), who walked with me to our next lecture, expressed in undergraduate style our feeling that we had seen something not really meant for us. 'I felt quite uncomfortable,' he said. 'I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.'"

Mrs. T. W. Pym, Letter to The Times (May 5, 1936), in Richard Gaskin, Horace and Housman (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), page 12.

Lucien Pissarro, "The Dunmow Road from Tilty Wood" (1915)

Here is the translation that Housman read to his students in Cambridge on that May morning in 1914.

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn, with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams:
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

Horace (translated by A. E. Housman), in A. E. Housman, More Poems (1936). "Shaws" (line 1) are groves or thickets of trees. Ancus Marcius (line 15) (whose name Creech omits from his translation) is traditionally identified as the fourth king of Rome.

Lucien Pissarro, "The Thierceville Road, Early Spring" (1893)

We thus come to Housman's "loveliest of trees," which has appeared here before, but which is always worth revisiting at this time of year. Reading it (well, reading any of Housman's poems) in conjunction with Horace's ode, one can understand why the ode provoked such an emotional response in Housman.

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

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

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

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

Housman wrote the poem between May and July of 1895. Archie Burnett (editor), The Poems of A. E. Housman (Oxford University Press 1997), page 320. The date of Housman's translation of Horace's ode is unknown. However, it was first published in a periodical in 1897. Ibid, page 426.

Lucien Pissarro, "The Garden Gate, Epping" (1894)

The smallest things can evoke the essence of a season. Or of a life. This past Sunday, a cloudless day, I was walking on the bluffs above Puget Sound, which glittered in the west. As I walked past a wide green field in which people were flying kites and dogs were frolicking, a strong breeze buffeted my ears. In an instant, that sound brought back the distilled essence of decades of windy Marches, the details of which I have long forgotten.

At that moment, I did not feel "happy" or "sad." Nor did I regret the irrevocable passing of the years, years that had briefly returned, and then vanished again. Instead, I felt an inarticulate sense of calmness and serenity.

Everything Is Going To Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

Samuel Bough, "Shipyard at Dumbarton" (1855)

As I think back now on that windy moment I experienced on Sunday, I am reminded of an anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein:

"When he was about 21 years of age . . . something occurred that had a lasting impact on him. He saw a play in Vienna which was mediocre drama: but there was a scene in which a person whose life had been desperately miserable, and who thought himself about to die, suddenly felt himself to be spoken to in the words, 'Nothing can happen to you!' No matter what occurred in the world, no harm could come to him! Wittgenstein was greatly struck by this thought (as he told me approximately forty years later)."

Norman Malcom, "A Religious Man?" in F. A. Flowers (editor), Portraits of Wittgenstein, Volume 4 (Thoemmes Press 1999), page 192.

This anecdote can be interpreted in any number of ways. Norman Malcolm puts a religious gloss upon it. In the case of the enigmatic and mystical Wittgenstein, who can say? But I have a vague notion of what he was getting at. I think. Or at least I have inklings of the feeling of which he speaks.

Samuel Bough, "Fishing Boats Running into Port: Dysart Harbour" (1854)

These visceral, bone-deep, and crystal-clear distillations of our past are wonderful. Inexplicable and wonderful.

White Cloud

One evening in the blue month of September
we lay at peace beneath an apple bough.
I took her in my arms, my gentle lover,
and held her closely like a dream come true --
while far up in the tranquil summer heaven
there was a cloud, I saw it high and clear;
it was so white and so immense above us
and, as I watched, it was no longer there.

Since then so very many different evenings
have drifted blindly past in the general flow;
perhaps the apple orchards have been flattened,
and if you ask me where the girl is now
I have to admit I really don't remember.
I can imagine what you're going to say
but even her face I truly can't recapture,
I only know I kissed it there that day.

Even the kiss I would have long forgotten
if that one cloud had not been up there too --
I see it and will always see it plainly,
so white and unexpected in the blue.
Perhaps the apple boughs are back in blossom,
maybe she holds a fourth child on her knees;
the cloud, though, hung there for a moment only
and, as I watched, it broke up in the breeze.

Bertolt Brecht (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Echo's Grove (The Gallery Press 2013).

Samuel Bough, "Dunkirk Harbour" (1863)

Brecht's meditation on the quirkiness and the majesty of how our memory works is strikingly paralleled in the following poem, which has appeared here before, but is worth revisiting.

Revaluation

Now I remember nothing of our love
So well as the crushed bracken and the wings
Of doves among dim branches far above --
Strange how the count of time revalues things!

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

We never know what our revenants will turn out to be, do we? A lone white cloud, crushed bracken, the wings of doves among dim branches far above: we each have our own list. What survives out of our thousands of moments of living is a mystery. Which is perfectly fine.

Samuel Bough, "Edinburgh from Leith Roads" (1854)

"Unless, While With Admiring Eye We Gaze, We Also Learn To Love"

Christmastide

Ice And Stars

A New Year

A Sparrow. A Fluttering Thing.

Skylark

Singing In The Night

Partridges At Twilight And Summer Grasses

"Balances"

Crickets And Grasshoppers

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Three: "Blessed Is He That Has Come To The Heart Of The World And Is Humble"

Companions

Starlings

At Rest

Daffodils

Lanterns And Candles

"Love, What It Is"

Abstention

Spring

"Strange How The Count Of Time Revalues Things!"