First Known When Lost

To state the obvious (and to sound high-falutin' at the same time): a successful work of art is the product of the keen observation of minute particulars transformed by a receptive, contemplative imagination. This thought is prompted by a visit to Thomas Hardy's poetry this past week.

People who met him, and recorded their impressions, nearly always mention two things: his eyes and his quiet, kind, and diffident manner.

"I could scarcely imagine those steady eyes 'in a fine frenzy rolling'; nor would I have expected their calm gaze either to conjure up the beauty of Tess or to read the mind of Napoleon. But if Hardy did not wear his Muse upon his sleeve, there was yet in the very inconspicuousness of his appearance something unobtrusively impressive. This impression deepened as I watched him. The high, broad forehead was very fine; the expression in the initiated, resigned eyes, unforgettable. They looked as if nothing could ever surprise them again. They were sad eyes -- very sad -- but unflinching, as though, after long sorrow, a certain serenity had been arrived at.

It was about four o'clock when [J. M.] Barrie and I arrived at Max Gate, and we sat talking over the tea-table until seven. I had been told that Hardy was the most unassuming, the least pretentious of talkers. He certainly was an uncompetitive talker. He seemed to have no desire to impress, persuade, or even amuse, but just to like uncontentiously to exchange ideas in the simplest possible words. Yet he never said anything that was not to the point, and you could not fail to become more and more aware of his extraordinary perceptivity. 'That man,' Barrie had said of him on our journey down, 'couldn't look out of a window without seeing something that had never been seen before.'"

Cynthia Asquith, "Thomas Hardy at Max Gate," quoted in Martin Ray (editor), Thomas Hardy Remembered (Ashgate 2007), pages 243-244.

Lying Awake

You, Morningtide Star, now are steady-eyed, over the east,
I know it as if I saw you;
You, Beeches, engrave on the sky your thin twigs, even the least;
Had I paper and pencil I'd draw you.

You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew,
I see it as if I were there;
You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew,
The names creeping out everywhere.

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

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941)

"A View of Church Hill from the Mill Pond, Old Swanage, Dorset"

When it comes to Hardy, I am wholeheartedly with Philip Larkin: "may I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show?" Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic," Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 174.

Make that two readers (at least). Larkin wrote those words in 1966. Time has now shown that his final comment holds true for the 20th century as a whole.

"He was a great man, if a sign of that is simplicity and modesty so surprising that they might be childish innocence. . . .[T]he little old man himself, as he entertained us, might have been the youngest and most innocent of us all. He appeared content to talk of the habits of owls, and of the signs of the weather, of local inns and queer characters, and of the strangeness of hearing in Dorchester by wireless telephony the dancers' feet when an orchestra was playing at a London festival. Trivial life interested him. Little things amused him. Little things, you could see, often had for him a significance which a clever listener failed to grasp.
* * *
Hardy, too, had so innocent a guess into people and their motives that sometimes when talking to him you felt this child was as old as humanity and knew all about us, but that he did not attach importance to his knowledge because he did not know he had it. Just by chance, in the drift of the talk, there would be a word by Hardy, not only wide of the mark, but apparently not directed to it. Why did he say it? On the way home, or some weeks later, his comment would be recalled, and with the revealing light on it.
* * *
If our talk gave out, then there were the reflections of the lively fire playing on the face of the old poet, who contemplated the bright logs, his eyebrows raised, his legs stretched out, his hands between his knees. That seamed face lost sight of the visitors for a while, and its nervous interest in the gossip changed to the compassionate look of a man who had brooded for long on the world, but was not sure he had made out what it all meant, or could do it the good he desired for it. It may be true that as a man thinks so is he, and that may be why Hardy's head was satisfying with expected beauty. . . . [W]hen Hardy was in repose his face was that of a seer. There was no doubt then, no need to wonder what special privilege had admitted him to so close a knowledge of his fellows."

H. M. Tomlinson, "One January Morning,"Out of Soundings (1931).

Paying Calls

I went by footpath and by stile
Beyond where bustle ends,
Strayed here a mile and there a mile
And called upon some friends.

On certain ones I had not seen
For years past did I call,
And then on others who had been
The oldest friends of all.

It was the time of midsummer
When they had used to roam;
But now, though tempting was the air,
I found them all at home.

I spoke to one and other of them
By mound and stone and tree
Of things we had done ere days were dim,
But they spoke not to me.

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

Ernest Waterlow (1850-1919), "On the Dorset Coast"

Is each of Hardy's 900-plus poems a masterpiece? Of course not. But each of them tells a truth -- however small, however humble -- about what it means to be a human being and about how we make our way through the world. Call me old-fashioned, but what I find in Hardy's poetry is that rare thing: wisdom combined with compassion.

"Presently I found myself seated near a good log fire. A little white dog lay stretched on the hearthrug. Near the chimney-piece I noticed the portrait of Shelley, and on the top of the bookshelf a small bust of Sir Walter Scott. He came in at last, a little old man (dressed in tweeds after the manner of a country squire) with the same round skull and the same goblin eyebrows and the same eyes keen and alert. What was it that he reminded me of? A night hawk? a falcon owl? for I tell you the eyes that looked out of that century-old skull were of the kind that see in the dark."

Llewelyn Powys, in Edmund Blunden, Thomas Hardy (1941), page 159.

In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"

I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

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

Hardy dated the poem "1915," but it had its genesis in something that Hardy had observed, and felt, 45 years earlier.

"I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred. For instance, the poem entitled 'The Breaking of Nations' contains a feeling that moved me in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, when I chanced to be looking at such an agricultural incident in Cornwall. But I did not write the verses till during the war with Germany of 1914, and onwards. Query: where was that sentiment hiding itself during more than 40 years?"

Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work and Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 408.

"I loved a thing he told about young trees when first planted -- how, the instant their roots came in contact with the ground, they begin to sigh."

William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872-1900 (1931), quoted in Martin Ray (editor), Thomas Hardy Remembered, page 109.

Bernard Priestman, "Wareham Channel, Dorset" (1910)

Those who have departed often return unexpectedly. One then feels ashamed for having failed to properly attend to one's memories of them. This is not a matter of ghosts or of spirits, but of full-bodied presences in the mind's-eye: when they return, they are right there in front of us. Silent.

Last Poem

Stand at the grave's head
Of any common
Man or woman,
Thomas Hardy said,
And in the silence
What they were,
Their life, becomes a poem.

And so with my dead,
As I know them
Now, in his
And her
Long silences;
And wait for, yet a while hence,
My own silence.

F. T. Prince, Collected Poems: 1935-1992 (The Sheep Meadow Press 1993).

Here is the lovely inspiration for Prince's poem:

"The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."

Thomas Hardy, notebook entry for May 29, 1872, in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978).

I'm surprised that Prince uses "common" rather than Hardy's "prosaic": the transition from "prosaic" to "poem" is wonderful. I'd wager that Hardy would have described himself as prosaic. Aren't we all? And "common" as well. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't faced the facts.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

The following passage perhaps provides a roundabout instance of what Hardy has in mind.

Thus did he speak. "I see around me here
Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left."

William Wordsworth, "Book First: The Wanderer," lines 469-474, The Excursion, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume V (Oxford University Press 1949), page 24.

The lines are spoken by "the Wanderer." "The Author" has found him drowsing in the sun, "the shadows of the breezy elms above/Dappling his face." Ibid, lines 440-441. The Excursion is a diffuse poem, with a tendency towards the long-winded, but one of the things that Wordsworth may be getting at is that we all have it in us to live, like the Wanderer, in our own "peculiar nook of earth." But does that nook indeed die with us? Is there "no memorial left" of how we have lived?

Hardy suggests that each of us ("prosaic" though we are), together with our peculiar nook, becomes a poem. It certainly seems that way when the departed return to visit us. A sentimental notion, I concede. But I have no quarrel with sentimentality.

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

I suspect that the subject matter of this post may be traceable to the fact that I have been visiting Thomas Hardy's poetry over the past few weeks. As I have noted in the past, communings with the departed are a matter-of-fact occurrence in Hardy's poetry. Things are seen out of the corner of one's eye. There are tappings on windows and whispers in the boughs of trees. But these signals are never a cause for alarm. Hardy -- sunk in the past as he was -- treats them as commonplaces. Who does not think of the dead? And who's to say they are not thinking of us?

Hardy admired the poetry of Charlotte Mew, and he, along with others, helped procure a Civil List Pension for her when she was in financial straits. The departed are plentiful in her poetry as well.

Here Lies a Prisoner

Leave him: he's quiet enough: and what matter
Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Downie Mill" (1962)

In the end, we all return to silence, don't we?

The Best Thing to Say

The best thing to say is nothing
And that I do not say,
But I will say it, when I lie
In silence all the day.

C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Carcanet 1998).

"The Best Thing to Say" is one of Sisson's harrowing final poems, a selection of which appeared here five years ago. He doesn't present a pretty picture. Thus, it falls upon Thomas Hardy -- the purported "pessimist" -- to provide us with hope. Yes, each of us returns to silence. But we each become a poem.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Braes o' Lundie"

I tend to be surprised by things like a caterpillar deciding to cross a street. Or a hummingbird suddenly appearing to look in at me from the other side of a window. As for life as we human beings lead it, I'm afraid that nothing we do takes me aback any longer. I am saddened, yes. Surprised, no. Not that I claim to possess any wisdom about how to live, mind you. It's just that we have never changed and we never will.

"How unacquainted is that man with the world, and how ridiculous does he appear, that makes a wonder of anything he meets with here?"

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book XII, Section 13, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), page 229.

Here is another translation:

"How ridiculous, and like a stranger is he, who is surprised at anything which happens in life!"

Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742), page 285.

Things Ended

Possessed by fear and suspicion,
mind agitated, eyes alarmed,
we desperately invent ways out,
plan how to avoid the inevitable
danger that threatens us so terribly.
Yet we're mistaken, that's not the danger ahead:
the information was false
(or we didn't hear it, or didn't get it right).
Another disaster, one we never imagined,
suddenly, violently, descends upon us,
and finding us unprepared -- there's no time left --
sweeps us away.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1992).

Fairlie Harmar (1876-1945), "The Bridge at Monxton" (1916)

For Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, Do not be surprised is not a justification for pessimism or cynicism. Instead, it goes hand-in-hand with another injunction: carpe diem. (Which we heard about from Horace earlier this year.) And carpe diem is not a justification for licentiousness or hedonism: the Stoics had no time for ignoble behavior.

Still, how many of us can live up to the ideals of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus? I know that I can't.

Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

As they sit there, happily drinking,
their strokes, cancers and so forth are not in their minds.
Indeed, what earthly good would thinking
about the future (which is Death) do? Each summer finds
beer in their hands in big pint glasses.
And so their leisure passes.

Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling
into their thoughts. Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed
screaming for a teddy or a tinkling
musical box, against their will. Each Joe or Fred
wants longer with the life and lasses.
And so their time passes.

Second childhood; and 'Come in, number 80!'
shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.
When you're called you must go, matey,
so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool,
there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . .
And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart, Selected Poems: 1933-1988 (1988). A side-note: Philip Larkin included this poem in the Poetry Supplement anthology that he compiled on behalf of The Poetry Book Society for Christmas of 1974. Now that's something I'm not surprised at: it sounds like a poem that Larkin could have written himself. A second side-note: on men in charge of boating pools calling out one's number, please have a look at Derek Mahon's "September in Great Yarmouth" (which has appeared here previously): "The boatman lifts his megaphone:/'Come in, fifteen, your time is up.'"

It goes without saying (but I will say it anyway): we are all Yorkshiremen in pub gardens.

Fairlie Harmar, "L'Aveyron" (c. 1932)

Yorkshiremen in pub gardens. Or drifting on a peaceful pond, waiting for the boatman to call our number. A perfectly reasonable way to live. We all have something to bear in mind, but not to obsess over. A gentle reminder from the Stoics:

"Manage all your actions and thoughts in such a manner as if you were just going to step into the grave."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), page 21.

A Commuter's Tale

A little late, but still in time
For the end of Z Cars,
After a drink in town with a friend,
On the last lap
The road downhill from the Tube,
Puffing at your pipe, puffing
Too at yourself.

Just at the bend, and almost home,
A -- what? -- a curious behaviour
In the chest, a rush-hour press
And stab of bodies, elbows, feet.

Well, at your age not unheard of
(Nor unread of, every morning),
Yet oddly, no embarrassment
(Must thank the drink for that)
At what portends a sorry solecism,
An exhibition you were brought up
Not to make,
But even some amusement
(Childish, suited to a childish mood)
As you remember:
Your season ticket, it expires today.

D. J. Enright, Sad Ires and Others (Chatto and Windus 1975). Larkin also selected this poem for his 1974 Poetry Supplement Christmas anthology.

Fairlie Harmar, "Garden Gate" (c. 1921)

On the one hand, there is Matthew Arnold the quintessential Victorian of caricature: the school inspector of high-minded sentiments and of strict societal and critical judgments. Culture and Anarchy and all that. Wholly admirable, by the way: he saw what was coming, and he tried to warn us. Well, here we are.

On the other hand, there is Matthew Arnold the poet, who vanished in 1867 or so, twenty-one years before the prosaic Arnold died of a heart attack in Liverpool. I claim no originality in calling attention to this split in his life: a great deal of ink has been spilled trying to account for it.

Who knows what happened? One way of looking at it is that Arnold applied his exacting critical standards to his own poetry and found it wanting. Consider, for instance, something that Arnold wrote in an essay about Wordsworth:

"I remember hearing [Wordsworth] say that 'Goethe's poetry was not inevitable enough.' The remark is striking and true. . . . But Wordsworth's poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him."

Matthew Arnold, "Wordsworth," Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888), page 155.

Benjamin Leader (1831-1923), "A Surrey Sandpit" (1890)

In the end, though, I suspect that the division in Arnold's life is a matter of passion: what is poetry without passion? Except in a few great instances (Hardy, Yeats, Stevens) poetic passion is in the main a matter of youth. (Fortunately, this applies to the writing of poetry, but not to the reading of it.) Perhaps Arnold recognized that he had lost his passion, so he stopped. (An aside: in our times, we confer academic degrees in the writing of poetry, certifying that someone is a poet. How's that for passion?)

But, before he stopped, Arnold wrote poetry that is as passionate (and as inevitable) as anything that has ever been written. For that we should be grateful. We need not dissect his life.

Despondency

The thoughts that rain their steady glow
Like stars on life's cold sea,
Which others know, or say they know --
They never shone for me.

Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit's sky,
But they will not remain;
They light me once, they hurry by,
And never come again.

Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852).

The following poem, which is one of the handful of poems that Arnold wrote after 1867, gets to the heart of his internal struggle.

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel -- below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel -- there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Matthew Arnold, in Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (Longmans 1965). The poem was published in The Cornhill Magazine in November of 1869. Arnold did not include it in any of the collections of his poetry that were published during his lifetime.

Benjamin Leader, "Betws-y-Coed Church" (1863)

The notion of a "central stream" flowing within us -- our true self, untouched -- haunted Arnold.

"Deep suffering is the consciousness of oneself -- no less than deep enjoyment. The disease of the present age is divorce from oneself."

Matthew Arnold, from "The Yale Manuscript," quoted in G. Robert Stange, Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist (Princeton University Press 1967), page 192, footnote 18.

I would only suggest: isn't divorce from oneself the disease of every age? Just a thought.

The stream image first appeared in Arnold's "The Buried Life": "The unregarded river of our life . . . The buried stream." (Lines 39 and 42.) In the same poem, he writes:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us -- to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves.

Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life," lines 45-60, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852).

This prose passage parallels lines 57 through 60 of "The Buried Life":

"We have been on a thousand lines and on each have shown spirit[,] talent[,] even geniality but hardly for an hour between birth and death have we been on our own one natural line, have we been ourselves, have we breathed freely."

Matthew Arnold, from "The Yale Manuscript," quoted in Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (Longmans 1965), page 274.

The influence of Stoic philosophy is evident in Arnold's poetry, and he wrote an admiring essay about Marcus Aurelius. (The essay may be found in his Essays in Criticism, First Series.) One can see why Arnold might find some comfort in the thought of the Stoics. For example, his talk about the difficulty of pursuing "our own line" brings to mind this:

"If, therefore, now that you are near your exit, you quit thought about other things, and honour only that governing and divine part within you, and dread not the ceasing to live, but the not commencing to live according to nature; you will become a man, worthy of that orderly universe which produced you, and will cease to be as a stranger in your own country; both astonished, with what happens every day, as if unexpected; and in anxious suspense about this and t'other thing."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book XII, Section 1, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742), pages 279-280.

Benjamin Leader, "An English Hayfield" (1878)

At times, the passion (there is no other word for it) of Arnold's preoccupation with the fear that he is missing his own life leads to something near despair.

Destiny

Why each is striving, from of old,
To love more deeply than he can?
Still would be true, yet still grows cold?
-- Ask of the Powers that sport with man!

They yoked in him, for endless strife,
A heart of ice, a soul of fire;
And hurled him on the Field of Life,
An aimless unallayed Desire.

Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852).

I am reminded of this: "And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night." ("Dover Beach.") As for "the Powers that sport with man": Thomas Hardy sounds the same note with his "Crass Casualty,""dicing Time," and "purblind Doomsters." ("Hap," in Wessex Poems and Other Verses.)

Pretty dire stuff. We all know the feeling though. But, ah, Matthew (and Thomas), there is another way of looking at things. And how we live our life lies somewhere in between.

Simply trust:
Do not the petals flutter down,
Just like that?

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page 229.

Benjamin Leader, "At Evening Time It Shall Be Light" (1897)

I suspect that my recommending Matthew Arnold's On Translating Homer (a series of lectures he delivered at Oxford in 1860) is not likely to move it to the top of your reading list. I, too, resisted it for years. But I relented after coming across a passage of The Iliad translated by Arnold. He included the passage in one of the lectures in order to illustrate his views on Homeric translation.

Zeus and the Horses of Achilles

And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,
And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom: --
"Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving."

Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer (1861), pages 94-95. The passage appears in Book 17 of The Iliad at lines 509-516.

Zeus gave two immortal horses (Balius and Xanthus) to Peleus as a wedding gift when Peleus married the goddess Thetis. Peleus and Thetis were the parents of Achilles. Peleus in turn gave the horses to Achilles, who took them with him to Troy. Achilles permitted his friend Patroclus to use the horses in the battle that led to Patroclus's death at the hands of Hector.

Algernon Cecil Newton (1880-1968), "The Avenue" (1944)

In On Translating Homer, Arnold compares his translation of the passage with those of George Chapman, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper. Arnold finds that Chapman's version lacks Homer's "nobleness," that Pope's is "too artificial," and that Cowper's is "too slow."

I am not qualified to comment on the niceties of Homeric translation given my lack of Greek, ancient or modern. I hasten to add that Arnold does not claim that his own is the best. Rather, his aim is to identify those distinctive characteristics of Homer that a translator ought to capture. To wit:

"When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author; -- that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble; -- I probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to anybody. Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper and Mr. Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of style and diction, Pope and Mr. Sotheby have failed in rendering him; that for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr. Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them."

Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, pages 9-10.

Dear reader, I fear that I may be transporting you, against your will, to a stuffy lecture-hall in nineteenth-century Oxford, dust-motes swirling in the sleep-inducing afternoon sunlight that seeps through the high windows. So you'll have to take my word for it: there is a great deal to be learned about Homer, and about the art of translation, from Arnold's lectures.

Whatever one feels about Arnold's opinions, we must remember that he is motivated by admiration and love:

"For Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky."

Matthew Arnold, Ibid, page 104.

Algernon Cecil Newton, "A Gleam of Sunlight" (1966)

But enough of that. It is the weeping immortal horses and Zeus's apostrophe on the sorrows of humanity that bring me here. Given his keen sense of the antique world (he seems to dwell simultaneously in the present and in a vanished past -- though not vanished at all for him), together with his instinct for emotionally revelatory moments, it comes as no surprise that C. P. Cavafy would fasten upon this particular scene in The Iliad.

The Horses of Achilles

When they saw Patroklos dead
-- so brave and strong, so young --
the horses of Achilles began to weep;
their immortal nature was upset deeply
by this work of death they had to look at.
They reared their heads, tossed their long manes,
beat the ground with their hooves, and mourned
Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed,
now mere flesh only, his spirit gone,
defenseless, without breath,
turned back from life to the great Nothingness.

Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry.
"At the wedding of Peleus," he said,
"I should not have acted so thoughtlessly.
Better if we hadn't given you as a gift,
my unhappy horses. What business did you have down there,
among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate.
You are free of death, you will not get old,
yet ephemeral disasters torment you.
Men have caught you up in their misery."
But it was for the eternal disaster of death
that those two gallant horses shed their tears.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1992).

Cavafy's poem closely parallels Homer's text, but it is not intended to be merely a translation. There is -- I'm sorry that I cannot come up with a better description -- a Cavafian feel to it (which is evident even in an English translation of Cavafy's modern Greek interpretation of Homer's ancient Greek).

Algernon Cecil Newton, "Moor Scene with Rock Face" (1910)

I confess that what interests me in The Iliad are the eddies and the asides to the main action, not the battles and the oratory, not the "epic" storytelling. Perhaps this shows that I don't correctly appreciate Homer.

"He that's well tinctur'd with philosophy needs but a short receipt: a common cordial will keep up such a man's spirits, and expel the cold from his heart. A verse or two out of Homer will serve for a hint, and do his business. Let the poet speak.

Men are like leaves in verdure and decay,
As Spring supplies what Autumn blows away,
So mortals fade, and flourish in their turns.

You see how slenderly humane felicity is put together, your children are but leaves upon the matter, a little blast may take them from you. The freshest laurels wither apace, and the echoes of fame are soon silenced; and which has some comfort, so is censure and reproach too. All these matters like leaves have their Spring for growing, then a puff of wind sends them packing, and quickly after the wood is new furnish'd again."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book X, Section 34, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), page 199 (italics in original).

The source of the passage from Homer is Book 6 of The Iliad. These lines were the subject of a post last October, in which I included translations by Pope and Cowper. I was delighted to discover Marcus Aurelius putting the lines to use in such a lovely fashion.

I am certainly no Marcus Aurelius, but I do understand how this aspect of Homer appeals to him. It is the small, simple things that matter. In Homer, as in all else.

Algernon Cecil Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

I am, as the saying goes, "a dog person." But I have been extremely fond of quite a few cats in my time. For instance, there is George, the orange cat who lives down the block. Three or four evenings a week he strolls through the back garden at around seven o'clock, feigning (or is he feigning?) indifference. If his presence is not noticed and acknowledged, he will quietly sit outside the French doors, staring inside, until he is duly greeted for the evening. After a brief conversation, he will go his way, leaving no promises in his wake.

Thus, it is not an either/or matter for me. I am unashamedly sentimental about the dogs and cats I have known. Anthropomorphism bothers me not when it comes to these wonderful beings. And I am perplexed by, and wary of, anyone who expresses indifference to them.

As W. H. Auden suggests, each occupies a distinctive place in our lives.

Dog The single creature leads a partial life,
Man by his mind, and by his nose the hound;
He needs the deep emotions I can give,
I scent in him a vaster hunting ground.

Cats Like calls to like, to share is to relieve
And sympathy the root bears love the flower;
He feels in us, and we in him perceive
A common passion for the lonely hour.

Cats We move in our apartness and our pride
About the decent dwellings he has made:
Dog In all his walks I follow at his side,
His faithful servant and his loving shade.

W. H. Auden, Poem V in "Ten Songs,"Collected Poems (Random House 1976). The poem is untitled. It was written in 1939.

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

The contemplative detachment of cats is one of their attractive characteristics. Again, whether this is feigned or not, I am not able to say. While dogs are certainly capable of contemplation, detachment is not one of their strong suits.

Imagine the word "dog" substituted for "cat" in the following haiku. It just doesn't feel right.

The peony;
A silver cat;
A golden butterfly.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 295.

Likewise, a dog wouldn't fit in a tableau such as this.

The Cat and the Sea

It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.

R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper (Rupert Hart-Davis 1958).

Philip Connard (1875-1958), "Jane, Evelyn, James and Helen" (1913)

There comes a time in each of our lives when we turn to our faithful companion, feline or canine, and say something along the lines of: "Well, at least you love me." Or: "Well, at least you understand me." And your companion will look directly into your eyes and say, wordlessly: "Of course I do."

The Cat Says --

The Cat says,
And so say I,
Love is a winter fire,
And a summer lawn.
Love is a sharp claw,
Love is a pricked ear,
Love is a strong wind blowing at night
And a light sleep without fear.

I say,
And the Cat says too,
Love is a warm plumage
And a scented wine.
Love is a mackerel sky,
Love is the moon in a well,
Love is a feather the midnight owl lets fall,
And all oceans in a shell.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, New Collected Poems (edited by Claire Harman) (Fyfield Books/Carcanet 2008).

Some among us may find this sort of thing preposterous, sentimental, childlike. Not I. I suppose one's views depend upon how many dogs and cats one has been acquainted with. I'm reminded of something that Arthur Symons wrote about his dog Api: "It is enough to say that the eyes would be human, if human beings could concentrate so much of themselves into their eyes."

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Lady with Cat"

This last part is difficult, for the memories of past companions come rushing. "At first we seek to forget sorrow, to drown it in noise or oblivion; but gradually it comes back and takes hold of us and becomes our guest. Unbidden, we accept it, and recollection sits down with it by our hearth, an old friend." Arthur Symons, "For Api,"Collected Works, Poems: Volume Three (1924).

Yes, so one hopes, but still . . .

Parting from a Cat

Whoever says farewell,
Has, for acquaintance, Death:
Small death, maybe, but still
Of all things dreaded most.
Yesterday I lost
An old, exacting friend
Who for ten years had haunted
My labours like a ghost,
Making my days enchanted
With feline airs and fancies.
Time, no doubt, will send
Some solace; and I know
Memory enhances
The half-companionship
Which is the most that can
Exist between cat and man.
But even so, I mourn
With a miniature grief
That won't relax its grip
Whichever way I turn,
Seeking to forget
My unimportant pet,
And that all life is brief.

Richard Church, The Inheritors: Poems 1948-1955 (Heinemann 1957).

Edward Bawden, "Roses and Rue" (1986)

As I have observed here before, the older I get, the simpler Life seems to become. I'm dumbfounded at the amount of extraneous luggage my mind carried around for years. All those eventualities that never materialized, good or bad. Scores of roundabouts and dead-ends, all bound for nowhere.

Yesterday afternoon -- the sky absolutely clear -- I walked through a tunnel of trees, beneath a canopy of interwoven branches. Overhead, a thousand shades of green, shot through with blue and yellow. "Life is too short," I thought, "for anything but this."

Cosmic trivia
we all are, but none of us
are unessential.

W. H. Auden, from "Shorts I,"Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (Random House 1972).

In the early 1960s, Auden began to write short poems in imitation of haiku: seventeen syllables in three lines. He usually, but not always, used the traditional number of syllables per line: 5-7-5. The poems by Auden in this post are all in this form. Auden's "haiku" tend to be more philosophical and less imagistic than traditional haiku. But he captures well the coy, oblique directness of the form. No "symbols" or "metaphors" or "allegories," mind you. But depth upon depth of implication.

Reading Auden's short poems, I began to think of Robert Herrick, and then of Basho.

Upon Prew His Maid

In this little urn is laid
Prewdence Baldwin (once my maid)
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides, Poem 782 (1648). A side-note: Herrick was fond of his maid Prewdence (or Prudence), and wrote several poems about her. This "epitaph" was actually written, with affection, while she was alive. In fact, she outlived Herrick by four years.

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 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page 26.

Christopher Sanders, "Sunlight through a Willow Tree at Kew" (1958)

All of us are walking the same paths, aren't we? Just as each human being has been doing for millennia. No wonder that a poet from the 20th-century and two poets from the 17th-century sometimes seem to echo each other.

Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.

W. H. Auden, from "Marginalia,"City Without Walls and Other Poems (Random House 1969). An aside: this is one of the "haiku" in which Auden uses the requisite 17 syllables, but alters the syllable count in each line to a non-traditional 5-5-7.

After Autumn, Winter

Die ere long I'm sure, I shall;
After leaves, the tree must fall.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides Poem 1058.

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

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 288.

Alfred Munnings (1878-1959), "Willows at Flatford, Suffolk"

Each "modern" era's self-flattering belief that it embodies the cutting-edge of humanity's "progress" is quaint and risible. As I have noted on more than one occasion: "Progress? What progress?" I suspect that your experience is similar to mine: if you turn on the television after the latest outrage has occurred somewhere in the world, a panel of "experts" will be expressing incredulity at the atrocity, and will be debating (with shock on their faces) how this sort of thing can be "explained" given the advanced state of enlightenment in which we now live.

Do poets live in a simpler world?

A signpost points him out his road:
But names no place,
Numbers no distance.

W. H. Auden, from "Symmetries and Asymmetries,"About the House (Random House 1965).

Man's Dying-Place Uncertain

Man knows where first he ships himself; but he
Never can tell, where shall his landing be.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides, Poem 468.

Along this road
Goes no one,
This autumn eve.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture, page 179.

Robert Ball, "Mrs Barclay's Pond, Harborne" (1949)

Looking at the poems that appear in this post, I notice that there is no shortage of musing over our mortality. But how could it be otherwise? Poetry, unlike "progress," is about the individual human soul. The soul, unless distracted by the noise around it, is concerned with Love and Death. "All poetry is in a sense love-poetry." So says Edward Thomas. But I would respectfully and deferentially add this: elegiac love-poetry.

What is Death? A Life
disintegrating into
smaller simpler ones.

W. H. Auden, from "Shorts I,"Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems.

On Himself

Some parts may perish; die thou canst not all:
The most of thee shall scape the funeral.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides, Poem 554.

A clear waterfall;
Into the ripples
Fall green pine needles.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 90.

Thomas Corsan Morton (1859-1928), "Sunny Woodlands"

Gentle readers, Time's winged chariot has brought us to August, which calls for a visit to my August poem. As long-time visitors may remember, I make it a practice to annually visit my April poem (Patrick Kavanagh's "Wet Evening in April"), my May poem (Philip Larkin's "The Trees"), my August poem, and my November poem (Wallace Stevens's "The Region November"). Please humor me: I like the familiarity of these stepping stones that await me across the year. I'm slow on the uptake and I need reminding of where I have been and where I am going.

Journeying through the world, --
To and fro, to and fro,
Harrowing the small field.

Basho (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 290.

I'm content to harrow my small field.

Josephine Haswell Miller (1890-1975), "Studio Window" (1934)

Here is another way of looking at it: are any of us the same person we were a year ago? Who knows what revisiting a poem might reveal? Thus, each year I beg your indulgence as we revisit a rabbit in August, "the most peaceful month."

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

I've lived with this poem for 35 years or so, but I am not able to "explain" it. I once made a feeble attempt at "explanation," which may be found here, for anyone who is interested. But I confess: the first time I saw the title, I was certain I would love the poem. And that's how it turned out.

There's no accounting for these things, is there? At a different level, I feel much the same way about, for instance, Glen Campbell singing "Wichita Lineman," circa 1968. Some things find their way to you and just stay with you. But there is a single thread that winds through them all.

I acknowledge that some of you may regard the poem as nonsense, as a trifle. I completely understand that reaction. But I would gently suggest -- without twisting your arm -- that you give it time, let it revolve in your mind for a while. Come to think of it, that goes for "Wichita Lineman" as well.

Josephine Haswell Miller, "Winter Afternoon"

The following poem features a more down-to-earth rabbit. It is a compendium of the lineaments of rabbit-hood. Or so it seems.

The Rabbit's Advice

I have been away too long.
Some of you think I am only a nursery tale,
One which you've grown out of.
Or perhaps you saw a movie and laughed at my ears
But rather envied my carrot.
I must tell you that I exist.

I'm a puff of wool leaping across a field,
Quick to all noises,
Smelling my burrow of safety.
I am easily frightened. A bird
Is tame compared to me.
Perhaps you have seen my fat white cousin who sits,
Constantly twitching his nose,
Behind bars in a hutch at the end of a garden.
If not, imagine those nights when you lie awake
Afraid to turn over, afraid
Of night and dawn and sleep.
Terror is what I am made
Of partly, partly of speed.

But I am a figure of fun.
I have no dignity
Which means I am never free.
So, when you are frightened or being teased, think of
My twitching whiskers, my absurd white puff of a tail,
Of all that I mean by 'me'
And my ludicrous craving for love.

Elizabeth Jennings, After the Ark (Oxford University Press 1978).

Jennings admired the poetry of Wallace Stevens (although I am not suggesting that "The Rabbit's Advice" owes anything to "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"). The following poem by her sheds some light on what Stevens was generally up to.

Wonder
(Homage to Wallace Stevens)

Wonder exerts itself now as the sky
Holds back a crescent moon, contains the stars.
So we are painters of a yesterday
Cold and decisive. We are feverish
With meditations of a Winter Law
Though Spring was brandished at us for a day.

Citizens of climate we depend
Not on the comfortable clock, the warm
Cry of a morning song, but on the shape
Of hope, the heralding imagination,
The sanguine making and the lonely rites
We exercise in space we leave alone.

Prophets may preside and they will choose
Clouds for a throne. The background to their speech
Will be those fiery peaks a painter gives
As a composer shares an interval,
As poet pauses, holding sound away
From wood, as worshippers draw back from gods.

Elizabeth Jennings, Growing Points (Carcanet 1975).

Stevens's characteristic vocabulary appears throughout the poem. "Meditation" and "imagination" are his talismans. "Winter Law" (line 5) may refer to "The Snow Man" (although winter is a recurring presence throughout Stevens's poetry). "Citizens of climate" (line 7) echoes Stevens's poem "The Poems of Our Climate." The lines "The sanguine making and the lonely rites/We exercise in space we leave alone" apply to the poetry of Stevens as a whole, but they also provide a clue as to what is happening in "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" in particular: "You sit with your head like a carving in space."

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

As I have observed in the past, Stevens believed that the constant interplay between Imagination and Reality is the essential human activity. There is, however, a risk of coldness and abstraction in acting upon this belief. Stevens seemed to realize this in his final years. Consider the opening lines of "First Warmth": "I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life/As a questioner about reality,//A countryman of all the bones in the world?"

Still, in a poem that was published one year prior to his death, Stevens returns to his great theme.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954), in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America 1997).

The poem feels like a restatement and a reaffirmation of "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts." We are the rabbit: "The whole of the wideness of night is for you,/A self that touches all edges." And we are the interior paramour: "We make a dwelling in the evening air,/In which being there together is enough."

Perhaps these are abstractions, but, if so, they are deeply felt, profoundly moving abstractions. Think of what is at stake here: "We collect ourselves,/Out of all the indifferences, into one thing." What could be more human?

Josephine Haswell Miller, "The House on the Canal"

I am one of those who tends to believe that the World is going to Hell in a handbasket. Some of you may share the same view. But, as I have noted in this space in the past, we need to maintain perspective on our feelings: after all, the World has always been going to Hell in a handbasket.

I have no doubt that, if one had surveyed the denizens of, say, classical Athens in its Golden Age, Alexandria at the apex of Hellenistic civilization, China in the T'ang Dynasty, or Italy in the quattrocento, a sizable portion of the populace would have said: "The World is going to Hell in a handbasket." Or some variation thereof.

So, yes, the World is for ever in a state of decay when it comes to culture, morality, and basic human decency. It has always been thus. Still, certain human beings -- at every time and in every place -- will feel that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful have been submerged in a wave of decadence and thoughtlessness. But, as it turns out, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful always survive by a slender margin.

Poseidonians

The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only a few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1992).

Poseidonia, which is also known as Paestum (its later Latin name), is located on the Italian coast, south of Salerno. Three magnificent Greek temples remain on its site.

Cavafy includes the following epigraph to the poem:

"(We behave like) the Poseidonians in the Tyrrhenian Gulf, who although of Greek origin, became barbarized as Tyrrhenians or Romans and changed their speech and the customs of their ancestors. But they observe one Greek festival even to this day; during this they gather together and call up from memory their ancient names and customs, and then, lamenting loudly to each other and weeping, they go away."

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), Ibid. Cavafy identifies the source of the passage as "Athenaios [Athenaeus], Deipnosophistai, Book 14, 31A (632)."

Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "Welsh Hills near Barmouth" (1918)

And yet, even if this going-to-Hell-in-a-handbasket feeling is timeless, I cannot escape the sense -- as suggested by "Poseidonians" -- that something is uniquely missing in the "modern" age. There is an absence. There is a lack. Matthew Arnold's lines come to mind: "The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled." ("Dover Beach.") Arnold no doubt had Christianity in mind, but we should not limit ourselves: the gods have disappeared from the woods, the vales, the meadows, and the watery shores.

In his edition of Cavafy's Collected Poems, translator Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that it was Cavafy's reading of an essay by John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) which led him to his epigraph to "Poseidonians." C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Daniel Mendelsohn) (Alfred A. Knopf 2009), pages 523-524. Symonds includes the following translation of the passage in his essay:

"'We do the same,' said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies, 'as the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrehenian Gulf. It befell them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterly barbarised, changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering their language, together with their customs. Yet they still observe one Hellenic festival, when they meet together and call to remembrance their old names and bygone institutions; and having lamented one to the other, and shed bitter tears, they afterwards depart to their own homes. Even thus a few of us also, now that our theatres have been barbarised, and this art of music has gone to ruin and vulgarity, meet together and remember what once music was.'"

John Addington Symonds, "Amalfi, Paestum, Capri," in Sketches and Studies in Italy (1879), page 13. Symonds cites "Athenaeus, xiv.632" as the source of his translation.

After quoting the passage, Symonds continues:

"This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned, and how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark indifferent stream of time. The Aristoxenus, who wrote it, was a pupil of the Peripatetic School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar with the vicissitudes of Magna Graecia. The study of music was his chief preoccupation; and he used this episode in the agony of an enslaved Greek city, to point his own conservative disgust for innovations in an art of which we have no knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenus have perished, and the fragment I have quoted is imbedded in the gossip of Egyptian Athenaeus.

In this careless fashion has opened for us, as it were, a little window on a grief now buried in the oblivion of a hundred generations. After reading his words one May morning, beneath the pediment of Paestum's noblest ruin, I could not refrain from thinking that if the spirits of those captive Hellenes were to revisit their old habitations, they would change their note of wailing into a thin ghostly paean, when they found that Romans and Lucanians had passed away, that Christians and Saracens had left alike no trace behind, while the houses of their own dawn-facing deities were still abiding in the pride of immemorial strength.

Who knows whether buffalo-driver or bandit may not ere now have seen processions of these Poseidonian phantoms, bearing laurels and chaunting hymns on the spot where once they fell each on the other's neck to weep? Gathering his cloak around him and cowering closer to his fire of sticks, the night-watcher in those empty colonnades may have mistaken the Hellenic outlines of his shadowy visitants for fevered dreams, and the melody of their evanished music for the whistling of night winds or the cry of owls."

John Addington Symonds, Ibid, pages 13-14.

Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "Chateau Gaillard, Les Andelys" (1907)

At this juncture, a poem that has been posted here previously deserves a return visit.

Ionic

That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure,
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems.

Cavafy does something lovely here: it is the gods, not the humans, who are bereft; it is the gods who mourn the loss of their beloved Ionia (and, by extension, the loss of the Ionian people).

Think of it: who would choose to disenchant their life and their world? Let me introduce you to the so-called Age of Enlightenment (also known as, believe it or not, the Age of Reason). And let me introduce you as well to your new gods: "Science" and "Progress."

Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "The Mill in the Valley" (1892)

A disenchanted world is a world without mystery. What could be more mysterious than the human soul? Will any of us go to the grave, or return to the dust, having solved that mystery?

An enchanted world is one in which the gods are every bit as mysterious as our souls. When they visit us, they do not claim to be the bearers of Truth. But they are humanly truthful.

Shinto

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us --
touch us and move on.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Hoyt Rogers), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Herbert Hughes-Stantion, "Villeneuve les Avignon" (1921)

As I am wont to do, I was recently contemplating the obvious: where would the loveliness of the world be without all of its variations on blue? And for me, any consideration of blue begins and ends with the sky. Isn't the blue of the sky the standard by which we judge all beauty?

What could be purer? Or more serene? What could hold more mystery, while at the same time providing the calm assurance that all is well? It is hard to turn away from. Closing the door on it seems a betrayal. But there it remains, impassive and perfect. It is not going anywhere.

This Loafer

In a sun-crazed orchard
Busy with blossomings
This loafer, unaware of
What toil or weather brings,
Lumpish sleeps -- a chrysalis
Waiting, no doubt, for wings.

And when he does get active,
It's not for business -- no
Bee-lines to thyme and heather,
No earnest to-and-fro
Of thrushes: pure caprice tells him
Where and how to go.

All he can ever do
Is to be entrancing,
So that a child may think,
Upon a chalk-blue chancing,
"Today was special. I met
A piece of the sky dancing."

C. Day Lewis, The Room and Other Poems (Jonathan Cape 1965).

Harald Sohlberg, "Night" (1904)

A brief aside before we proceed further into blue: C. Day Lewis's description of the butterfly's way of moving through the world is reminiscent of a poem by Robert Graves that has appeared here before.

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has -- who knows so well as I? --
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves, Poems 1926-1930 (1931).

As much as we may admire the single-minded and diligent bees of the world, isn't it the butterflies that charm us?

I am reminded of the Emperor Hadrian's death-bed description of his soul: animula vagula blandula. "My little wand'ring sportful Soul." (John Donne, 1611.) "Poor little, pretty, fluttering thing." (Matthew Prior, 1709.) "Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite." (Lord Byron, 1806.) A butterfly making its way, this way and that, around a garden.

Henry Moore, "Catspaws Off the Land" (1885)

"A piece of the sky dancing" naturally leads to "sky-flakes":

Blue-Butterfly Day

It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

Flowers that fly and flakes of the sky lead in turn to this lovely thought:

A flower unknown
To bird and butterfly, --
The sky of autumn.

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

Francis Dodd, "Ely" (1926)

It all comes back to the sky, doesn't it? But perhaps my opening paean was too simplistic. Robert Frost is infinitely more canny (and eloquent) about these things than I can ever hope to be. He understands the seductiveness of the sky, but . . .

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) --
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

Frost has a point. I ought not to get too carried away. The sky -- perfect, but impassive -- is no place to dwell. Our world is one of butterflies and birds and flowers. As he says in "Birches": "Earth's the right place for love."

John Brett, "Britannia's Realm" (1880)

So let us, then, keep the blue of the sky in perspective. Yes, there are times when we look up into it and say: I wish this moment could last for ever. Yet, here is Frost again in "Birches": "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it and begin over." Our world is one of fragmentary blue. But not any the less lovely for that.

L'Oiseau Bleu

The lake lay blue below the hill.
O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

Still, I persist in thinking that the blue of the sky remains the standard by which we judge all else. Where would the infinite, ever-changing blues of the water be without it? And what of the trees -- green, or gold and red, or empty -- that stand before it?

The Nest

Four blue stones in this thrush's nest
I leave, content to make the best
Of turquoise, lapis lazuli
Or for that matter of the whole blue sky.

Andrew Young, in Leonard Clark (editor), The Collected Poems of Andrew Young (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

Now I hear the water and the trees say: Ah, but where would the blue of the sky be without us?

Gerald Dewsbury, "Sycamore and Oak" (1992)

When it comes to this business of growing old, I have no advice to give. This is the first time I've done it, so what do I know? I presume that, like life in general, nothing will go as planned. And I already know the end of the story. What remains is the filling in of an undetermined amount of blank space.

I do know that wisdom is not guaranteed. I question the notion that wisdom comes with age. I suspect that it is more the case that the opportunities for folly decrease with age.

I also know that I am going to try my best not to be querulous. Yes, above all, I do not wish to be querulous.

Animal Tranquillity and Decay

The little hedgerow birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression: every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. -- He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels.

William Wordsworth, Poems (1815).

The poem was first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, under the title "Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch." When originally published, the poem closed with these six additional lines:

I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital."

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798).

I think that Wordsworth was wise to remove these lines from his final version of the poem. Taking the lines out transforms the poem from an anecdote -- albeit an affecting one -- into a universal meditation on how we make our way through the world.

David Birch (1895-1968), "Morning in June, the Vale of Dedham, Essex"

A parent will sometimes say to a misbehaving child: "Act your age!" The same advice seems apt as we grow old. We ought not to mistake senescence for juvenescence.

Po Chu-i wrote the following poem at the age of 70.

A Dream of Mountaineering

At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys --
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body -- both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking -- both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts --
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.

Po Chu-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918).

In my country, our candidates for President are sometimes in their sixties or seventies. Don't they have something better to do with themselves at that age? They ought to be attending to their souls, not displaying narcissistic megalomania.

My advice to all such candidates, left, right, or Martian: "Act your age!" Haven't they read Wang Wei? "In the sunset years of my life, all I desire is quietude;/The ten thousand affairs of this world no longer involve my heart." But who am I to judge? The souls of politicians are beyond my ken. I only know that politicians are among the ten thousand affairs of this world that no longer involve my heart.

Malcolm Midwood Milne (1887-1954), "Barrow Hill" (1939)

Po Chu-i's suggestion that aging involves a balance is a good one. No more mountaineering perhaps. But, if we are fortunate, "the soul is still strong." Just as one ought not to be querulous, one ought not to be funereal. After all, the World outside is going to go on being its beautiful and wondrous self, regardless of whether we are young or old.

The Rapids

Grieve must my heart. Age hastens by.
No longing can stay Time's torrent now.
Once would the sun in eastern sky
Pause on the solemn mountain's brow.
Rare flowers he still to bloom may bring,
But day approaches evening;
And ah, how swift their withering!

The birds, that used to sing, sang then
As if in an eternal day;
Ev'n sweeter yet their grace notes, when
Farewell . . . farewell is theirs to say.
Yet, as a thorn its drop of dew
Treasures in shadow, crystal clear,
All that I loved I love anew,
Now parting draweth near.

Walter de la Mare, The Burning-Glass and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1945).

As de la Mare suggests, we are entitled to some wistfulness. The prospect of loss always involves wistfulness. But, if one lives well -- a big if -- our love of the World will never wane. Mind you, I don't claim to have "lived well." Who could ever say that? Each day is a battle against outer distraction and inner sloth. We need the World to bring us to our senses.

Alex Kirk (1872-1950)

"Cranborne Chase, Dorset, a View towards Horton Tower" (1935)

We ought to keep our wits about us. The culture we live in encourages us to worship the false god of Eternal Youth. Aging provides us with the opportunity to let this false god go. Just as we should let vanity and self-importance go. Easier said than done, of course. A lifetime job.

A bourne awaits us. I'm not suggesting that we rush towards it. Dawdling is perfectly fine. But we should remain mindful of where we are bound.

Things to Come

The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight
Precedes me on the road down which I go;
And should I turn and run, he would pursue me:
This is the man whom I must get to know.

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (Heinemann 1964).

Eric Hesketh Hubbard (1892-1957), "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

It was a clear, windy autumn morning on the western shore of the Isle of Skye. I paused. The person I was with continued walking through a green field toward the ruins of a grey stone tower that stood on the edge of a cliff. Beyond her, the waters of the Little Minch were brilliant blue and white-capped, stretching to the Outer Hebrides in the distance. There was no one else around.

As the moment unfolded, I knew that it was perfect. At the same instant, I felt a sudden awareness of the passing of time. This awareness came in the form of a catch of breath. It was immediately followed by a longing, a longing for I knew not what. The wind buffeted in my ears. I continued walking.

That was long ago, and I was young. But the autumn morning on Skye was not my first encounter with this peculiar sort of longing, nor was it the last.

The moment returned to me this week after I read this:

I am in Kyoto,
Yet at the voice of the hototogisu,
Longing for Kyoto.

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 175.

"The hototogisu corresponds more or less to the English cuckoo. The breast of the male is blackish, with white blotches. The breast of the female is white, the inside of the mouth red; it has a crest of hair on the head. . . . From early summer, it sings day and night, and ceases in autumn."

Ibid, page 161.

John Nash (1893-1977), "Dorset Landscape" (1930)

Here is an alternative translation:

Even in Kyoto --
hearing the cuckoo's cry --
I long for Kyoto.

Bashō (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass (editor), The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 11.

The original Japanese is simple (on the surface):

kyō nite mo
kyō natsukashi ya
hototogisu

Kyō is an earlier name for Kyoto; nite is "in;"mo is "even;"natsukashi is "long-for;"ya is a particle of emphasis (similar to "!" in English, but less emphatic; there is a softer aesthetic element to it); hototogisu is "cuckoo." Note that there is no reference to the cuckoo's "voice" or "cry": those are interpolations made by Blyth and Hass.

The following translation perhaps captures best the deep simplicity of the original:

even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto --
a hototogisu

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 294.

John Nash, "The Barn, Wormingford" (1954)

The standard interpretation of Bashō's haiku is that the Kyoto that is longed for is the old, vanished Kyoto. Thus, Blyth writes: "Bashō is at this moment living in Kyoto, but at the sound of the voice of the hototogisu a wave of yearning flows over him for the past, the Kyoto of dead and gone poets of old." Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn, page 175.

Perhaps. But I wonder if the "longing" of which Bashō writes is the sort of longing that I experienced for a moment on the Isle of Skye. A Japanese commenter on the haiku articulates what I am trying to get at: "Somehow we tend to feel nostalgic in early summer, when hototogisu cry. At times we get homesick, too, while in our own home." Nunami Keion (1877-1927) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, page 294.

"At times we get homesick, too, while in our own home." Exactly.

Nostalgia for the Present

At that very instant:
Oh, what I would not give for the joy
of being at your side in Iceland
inside the great unmoving daytime
and of sharing this now
the way one shares music
or the taste of fruit.
At that very instant
the man was at her side in Iceland.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alan Trueblood), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Borges's phrase hits the nail on the head: "Nostalgia for the Present."

A longing for the present in the present. Which makes no sense, of course. But it happens.

John Nash, "A Gloucestershire Landscape" (1914)

There is a dreamlike quality to this experience. But, at the same time, the present moment -- and everything that surrounds you at that moment -- is crystal clear and luminous. You will never be more wide awake.

Abersoch

There was that headland, asleep on the sea,
The air full of thunder and the far air
Brittle with lightning; there was that girl
Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,
And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest
On the calm tide. There were people going
About their business, while the storm grew
Louder and nearer and did not break.

Why do I remember these few things,
That were rumours of life, not life itself
That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?
Was it just that the girl smiled,
Though not at me, and the men smoking
Had the look of those who have come safely home?

R. S. Thomas, Tares (Rupert Hart-Davis 1961).

John Nash, "Mill Building, Boxted" (1962)

As I have observed here in the past, the turning of the seasons is a matter of emotion and of sensory impressions. The seasons come to our hearts when they come, regardless of equinoxes and solstices, or of dates on the calendar.

Last week, I received the first hint that autumn was imminent. As I walked towards a favorite tree, I noticed a single spray of bright red leaves amidst its uppermost boughs. Then, just as I passed into the tree's shadow, a lone red leaf fluttered down in front of me and landed at my feet. This was a lovely and gentle signal.

This week, autumn arrived in earnest. As I passed through a meadow on my afternoon walk, a row of trees on my left, a sudden breeze crossed the field from the west. There was no mistaking the underlying chill -- however subtle -- in that breeze. Autumn had arrived.

Even in a person
most times indifferent
to things around him
they waken feelings --
the first winds of autumn.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watston, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 67.

In the original Japanese, the word that Burton Watson translates as "feelings" is kokoro. Kokoro is a wonderful word which means both "heart, feelings" and "mind, mentality." Kodansha's Romanized Japanese-English Dictionary (Kodansha 1993), page 263. I like to think of it as an amalgam: something along the lines of "heart-mind-soul."

Note that Saigyō uses kokoro, not a value-laden word such as "sadness" or "happiness." Kokoro is perfect, for it covers any and all of the emotions that may arise when we feel the first winds of autumn.

George Vicat Cole, "Iffley Mill" (1884)

The image of Robert Frost as a kindly, homily-spinning nature poet is by now a cliché. It is an image that Frost worked hard to create, probably to throw us off track. In fact, Nature and the Universe are often indifferent, and sometimes even threatening, in Frost's poetry.

Now Close the Windows

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will (1913).

I've never known quite what to make of this poem. It appears to be set in autumn, just before the onset of winter: is there something foreboding in that prospect that makes the speaker want to shut out Nature? On the other hand, the speaker only desires Nature to be silent: he remains willing to "see all wind-stirred." There is something beautiful in seeing the trees "silently toss," isn't there? Is Frost telling us that we ought to keep all of our senses awake to what is around us? At this point I feel myself venturing close to "explanation" and "explication," the death of poetry. Time to stop.

Trevor Makinson, "Maryhill Goods Yard"

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am very fond of the Poets of the Nineties, particularly Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. Their dreamy world of wistful longing is one that I am willing to dwell in for days at a time.

Although the Poets of the Nineties are certainly not "nature poets," they are quite good at teasing out the emotional implications of those parts of Nature that are dear to their hearts: twilight, mists, autumn, birds twittering in the shadows, the sound of a stream flowing in the distance, wind . . .

The Lovers of the Wind

Can any man be quiet in his soul
And love the wind? Men love the sea, the hills:
The bright sea drags them under, and the hills
Beckon them up into the deadly air;
They have sharp joys, and a sure end of them.
But he who loves the wind is like a man
Who loves a ghost, and by a loveliness
Ever unseen is haunted, and he sees
No dewdrop shaken from a blade of grass,
No handle lifted, yet she comes and goes,
And breathes beside him. And the man, because
Something, he knows, is nearer than his breath
To bodily life, and nearer to himself
Than his own soul, loves with exceeding fear.
And so is every man that loves the wind.
How shall a man be quiet in his soul
When a more restless spirit than a bird's
Cries to him, and his heart answers the cry?
Therefore have fear, all ye who love the wind.
There is no promise in the voice of the wind,
It is a seeking and a pleading voice
That wanders asking in an unknown tongue
Infinite unimaginable things.
Shall not the lovers of the wind become
Even as the wind is, gatherers of the dust,
Hunters of the impossible, like men
Who go by night into the woods with nets
To snare the shadow of the moon in pools?

Arthur Symons, The Fool of the World and Other Poems (1906).

I realize that this sort of thing is not everybody's cup of tea. But I think it is a wonderful poem. It is the sort of poem that only a poet of the Nineties could write. I love the repetitions (a characteristic Nineties technique): "Can any man be quiet in his soul;""How shall a man be quiet in his soul." And: "he who loves the wind;""every man that loves the wind;""all ye who love the wind;""the lovers of the wind." I love the fact that Symons uses the word "soul" three times. It is a crucial word in Nineties poetry. And what a lovely image at the end: "like men/Who go by night into the woods with nets/To snare the shadow of the moon in pools." Yes, there is something in the poetry of the Nineties that cannot be found anywhere else.

Walter Goodin, "The River Beverley" (1938)

A return to spareness is in order as we consider autumn, and what follows.

To the Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

This poem provides a good counterpoint to Saigyō's poem. Stevens was not one to talk openly of "feelings." At first thought, I would not associate the word "kokoro" with Stevens's poetry: it is a pretty cerebral business. Yet I think my first thought does Stevens a disservice: he has a different way of bringing "feelings" and emotions into his poetry. But they are there.

Thomas Train (1890-1978), "Headlights"

The goal of the purveyors of popular culture is to steal Time from us. Popular culture is always about the pursuit of the newest and the latest chimera. It loathes quiet space and reverie. Hence the freneticism we see around us. Mind you, it has always been this way. Modern technology merely speeds up the proliferation and demise of the distractions provided to us by the thieves of Time.

Space was holy to
pilgrims of old, till the plane
stopped all that nonsense.

W. H. Auden, from "Shorts I,"Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1972).

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979) "The Cottage Window"

Let me be clear: I do not claim to view popular culture from an Olympian height. I am definitely not above it all. How could I be? I was born in the United States of America in the middle of the 1950s. It has been a non-stop carnival of distraction since my arrival during the first term of the Eisenhower Administration.

I have no complaints. I have the ability to choose. And I am in no position to adopt an ironic, superior attitude to what goes on in this land, as long as no one is harmed in the process.

At some point, however, one wants to get off the Tilt-A-Whirl.

In willow shade
where clear water flows
by the wayside --
"Just a while!" I said
as I stopped to rest.

Saigyō (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 61.

William Ratcliffe, "Cottage Interior" (1920)

"Space was holy to pilgrims of old." Auden seems to have had physical space in mind -- the distances we travel. But I think the notion of temporal space is apt as well.

We have to be jealous of the temporal space that we are allotted, for, in the end, it is all that we have. Popular culture abhors a vacuum. I would humbly suggest that this is where poetry and art come in. Poets and artists create a space -- an arrested, timeless moment -- that then becomes available to all of us. But, with all that is going on around us, it requires an act of will to inhabit that moment.

One Almost Might

Wouldn't you say,
Wouldn't you say: one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment's hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-
Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);
Might take up life and lay it on one's palm
And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,
Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and
Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one's hand . . .

One might examine eternity's cross-section
For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection?

A. S. J. Tessimond, The Walls of Glass (Methuen 1934).

Tessimond's poetry is full of references (both approving and disapproving) to the popular culture of his day, and he worked for a time as a copywriter in the advertising business. He does not hold himself aloof from the modern world, nor does he disparage his fellow denizens. He knows that we are all in this together. As in these two poems, he often reflects in a wistful, affecting fashion about what has gone missing from our lives.

Empty Room

The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists: a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.

But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Ibid.

Anthony Eyton, "A Kitchen Range" (c. 1984)

Looking back at what I have written in this post, I fear that I sound annoyingly haughty or high-minded on the subject of popular culture. But, as I said above, I have no complaints. I am wholly a product of it, it is where I live, and I take the good with the bad. Please take what I have written as an admonition to myself. Something along these lines:

"Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness," I began. "Sticking in the mud. Sleeping at the switch. But sloth has to cover a great deal of despair. Sloth is really a busy condition, hyperactive. This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought -- none of the highest human functions. These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as some philosophers say. They labor because rest terrifies them. The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous. But this calls for unusual strength of soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness. It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances. The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming."

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (Viking 1975), page 306.

Five Minutes

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

Norman Nicholson, The Pot Geranium and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1954).

Harold Jones, "The Black Door" (c. 1935)

A few days ago, when I got into my car, I noticed a tiny, barely visible brown spider hanging by a thread from my rear-view mirror. As I watched, the thread lengthened and the spider swung downward towards the dashboard. It landed, and crawled into an air vent.

"Continually regard the World as one living thing, composed of one substance and one soul. And reflect how all things have relation to its one perception; how it does all things by one impulse; how all things are the joint causes of all that come into being; and how closely they are interwoven and knit together."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 40 (translated by Hastings Crossley), in Hastings Crossley, The Fourth Book of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1882), page 35.

A lantern
Entered a house
On the withered moor.

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

Norman Garstin, "Moulin de la Ville, Quimperlé" (1901)

We live in a politicized world. Those who participate in that world talk and talk and talk. The underlying premise of all this talk is: I am right; you are wrong. It is a world of nursed grievances and perceived injustices. Nursing these grievances and perceiving these injustices enables the politicized to feel better about themselves: Look at me. I am enlightened and concerned. I care.

The politicized world has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual human soul.

Distances

Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Phillipe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998).

The long night;
A light passes along
Outside the shōji.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 356.

Harriet Backer, "By Lamplight" (1890)

A meadow that I pass through on my afternoon walk is dotted with clumps of flowering weeds: purple, yellow, and white. Their names are unknown to me. I am content to remain ignorant. I needn't know their names to think of them as companions.

The names unknown,
But to every weed its flower,
And loveliness.

Sampū (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 123.

As I looked at the flowers this week, it occurred to me that these random galaxies of purple, yellow, and white will remain, returning each year in late summer and early autumn, long after I have turned into dust. This was not an occasion for alarm. Instead, the thought was a restful and comforting one.

"That which remembers and that which is remembered are alike creatures of a day."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 35 (translated by Hastings Crossley), in Hastings Crossley, The Fourth Book of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, page 31.

The light in the next room also
Goes out;
The night is chill.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn, page 328.

Terrick Williams, "Quiet Twilight, Honfleur" (c. 1922)

We are surrounded by, and headed towards, darkness. To me, this darkness has an intimate feel to it. It is not a political or a historical darkness. It cannot be explained by Science. Filling one's life with distractions will not cause the darkness to vanish.

House Fear

Always -- I tell you this they learned --
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

Robert Frost, from "The Hill Wife,"Mountain Interval (1916).

The darkness is not tragic, nor is it romantic. It is not a cause for despair, nor is it a cause for celebration. But it cannot be dispelled.

Because this darkness is intimate, each of us must find our own way of becoming acquainted with it. But we are not companionless. We are all in this together.

Anchored at Night in a Creek

I climbed upon the river embankment, and stood there in the darkness;
The river breeze and frosty air chilled me.
When I turned and looked where the boat lay deep in the creek,
Among the flowers of reed and lespedeza was one point of light.

Po Chu-i (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 334. "Lespedeza" is commonly known as "bush clover." It blooms at this time of year.

Loneliness;
After the fireworks,
A falling star.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 24.

Algernon Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

First and foremost, autumn awakens an impulse to run out into the World before it is too late. Time is passing. And the duration of autumn's beauty is numbered by the leaves on the trees.

But autumn also awakens a contrary impulse: an urge to settle in, to turn inward. Consider the endearing activity of the squirrels at this time of year: when I see them intently scurrying about among the fallen leaves, I think of the long nights that await both them and us. Yes, it is time to make ready a burrow, a nest, a refuge.

This little house
No smaller than the world
Nor I lonely
Dwelling in all that is.

Kathleen Raine, from "Short Poems,"The Oracle in the Heart (Dolmen Press 1980).

But, whether our movement be outward or inward, I suspect that for most of us the emotional tenor of either movement is the same: that pensive, wistful, and bittersweet autumnal feeling that we have come to know so well. It only deepens with the years. But this is not a bad thing. Far from it. Many of us live for autumn.

"They seek retirements in the country, on the sea-coasts, or mountains: you too used to be fond of such things. But this is all from ignorance. A man may any hour he pleases retire into himself; and nowhere will he find a place of more quiet and leisure than in his own soul: especially if he has that furniture within, the view of which immediately gives him the fullest tranquillity. By tranquillity, I mean the most graceful order. Allow yourself continually this retirement, and refresh and renew your self."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, Section 3 (translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor), in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).

Paul Drury, "September" (1928)

As I have noted here on more than one occasion, I see nothing wrong with sentimentality. The default modern posture is irony. The essence of modern irony is self-regarding knowingness and distance from life. Who needs that? I will take sentimentality over irony any day. It is a matter of choosing warmth over coldness.

"The unspeakable blessedness of having a home! Much as my imagination has dwelt upon it for thirty years, I never knew how deep and exquisite a joy could lie in the assurance that one is at home for ever. Again and again I come back upon this thought; nothing but Death can oust me from my abiding place. And Death I would fain learn to regard as a friend, who will but intensify the peace I now relish."

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), page 112.

"A Quiet Normal Life." Isn't this what most of us want? "Here in his house and in his room,/In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked . . ."

Her Room

At first, not breathed on,
Not a leaf or a flower knew you were gone,
Then, one by one,

The little things put away,
The glass tray
Of medicines empty,

The poems still loved
Long after sight failed
With other closed books shelved,

And from your cabinet
Remembrances to one and another friend
Who will forget

How the little owl, the rose-bowl,
The Brig-o' Doone paperweight,
The Japanese tea-set

Lived on their shelf, just here,
So long, and there,
Binding memories together,

Binding your love,
Husband and daughter in an old photograph,
Your woven texture of life

A torn cobweb dusted down,
Swept from the silent room
That was home.

Kathleen Raine, The Oval Portrait and Other Poems (Enitharmon Press 1977).

Robin Tanner, "The Gamekeeper's Cottage" (1928)

The outward and inward movements of autumn take place within a larger context, of course. The seasonal round feels as if it will go on for ever. The wistfulness of autumn is, we know, a prelude to "the bleak mid-winter," which has its own charms, but which will in turn awaken in us thoughts of "the cherry hung with snow." And so it beautifully goes.

There is, though, a deeper theme at work beneath it all.

Words in the Air

The clear air said: 'I was your home once
but other guests have taken your place;
where will you go who liked it here so much?
You looked at me through the thick dust
of the earth, and your eyes were known to me.
You sang sometimes, you even whispered low
to someone else who was often asleep,
you told her the light of the earth
was too pure not to point a direction
which somehow avoided death. You imagined
yourself advancing in that direction;
but now I no longer hear you. What have you done?
Above all, what is your lover going to think?'

And she, his friend, replied through tears of happiness:
'He has changed into the shade that pleased him best.'

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998).

Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

Inhabitants of the air? Yes. There's no getting around that. But, in the meantime, here we are.

My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe;
When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens, One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 43.

Robin Tanner, "Martin's Hovel" (1927)

I am of two minds about the wind of autumn. On the one hand, I long for a windless world in which the brilliant leaves remain where they are, free of change. On the other hand, the autumn wind has its own evocative beauty: the boughs sway as in spring and summer, but the latticework of light and shadow on the ground is different, as is the rustling overhead. Then, in time, come the fallen leaves, rattling along the ground, leading us forward or dogging our steps.

I have no choice in the matter, of course. These thoughts are merely human wishful thinking. The story of our lives. The wind does as it pleases.

This week, however, was the best of both worlds: four days of blue skies, with a steady breeze that cleared the clouds, but which was not strong enough to bring down the leaves, most of which are not yet ready to let go. One might imagine that this could go on for ever.

Swift Beauty

Wind that is in orchards
Playing with apple-trees
Soon will be leagues away
In the old rookeries.

Vaguely it arises,
Swiftly it hurries hence: --
Like sudden beauty
Blown over sense:

Like all unheeded
Beautiful things that pass
Under the leaves of life,
Just touching the grass.

F. W. Harvey, September and Other Poems (Sidgwick and Jackson 1925).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Autumn, Kinnordy" (1936)

Passing through sublimity, autumn brings us to simplicity.

The wind has brought
enough fallen leaves
To make a fire.

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

There is a message in this simplicity, but I shan't be dogmatic about it. I will only say that the messengers from the non-natural world try their best to complicate life, when it is actually very simple. "Everything passes and vanishes;/Everything leaves its trace."

Blowing from the west,
Fallen leaves gather
In the east.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 362.

Is it a matter of "what to make of a diminished thing"? (Robert Frost, "The Oven Bird.") Perhaps. But here is another way of looking at it: "Now I can see certain simplicities/In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,/And say over the certain simplicities." (Howard Nemerov, "A Spell before Winter.")

James McIntosh Patrick, "Wellbank, Rossie Priory"

On the road to simplicity, one departs from the Land of Know-It-Alls and the Kingdom of Opinions. Ah, what a relief that is! No more explanations, no more agendas, no more hectoring. No more "news." A wondrously unknowable world.

Nobody Knows

Often I've heard the Wind sigh
By the ivied orchard wall,
Over the leaves in the dark night,
Breathe a sighing call,
And faint away in the silence,
While I, in my bed,
Wondered, 'twixt dreaming and waking,
What it said.

Nobody knows what the Wind is,
Under the height of the sky,
Where the hosts of the stars keep far away house
And its wave sweeps by --
Just a great wave of the air,
Tossing the leaves in its sea,
And foaming under the eaves of the roof
That covers me.

And so we live under deep water,
All of us, beasts and men,
And our bodies are buried down under the sand,
When we go again;
And leave, like the fishes, our shells,
And float on the Wind and away,
To where, o'er the marvellous tides of the air,
Burns day.

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913).

"Nobody Knows" appears in one of Walter de la Mare's collections of "children's verse." But de la Mare's poems for children are like Christina Rossetti's "nursery rhymes": they are ostensibly directed at an audience of children, but the wisdom of the poems belies this seeming limitation.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing thro'.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Stobo Kirk, Peeblesshire" (1936)

And, yes, what is autumn without a visit to mortality? We all know what lies at the heart of the season's sublimity, what gives the wind and the leaves their wistful and bittersweet beauty. Autumn is, after all, life itself, presented to us for a few breathtaking days that rush away as we try to hold on to them.

"Undertake each action as one aware he may next moment depart out of life."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).

Here is an alternative, perhaps more piquant, translation:

"Manage all your actions and thoughts in such a manner as if you were just going to step into the grave."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Ibid, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702).

What is autumn saying? The same thing that the World is saying: Pay attention. Live.

The autumn wind is blowing;
We are alive and can see each other,
You and I.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 413.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Byroad near Kingoodie" (1962)

Autumn is always the same: each year we make the same outward and inward passage. The quickening rise to brilliance. The inevitable denouement (which is known from the start). Bittersweet and pensive wistfulness. Wistful and bittersweet pensiveness. Pensive and wistful bittersweetness. We know autumn well. Or so it seems.

Autumn is never the same: you are not who you were last autumn. And who was the person who passed through that long-vanished autumn, x years ago? That never-to-be-forgotten autumn? Only a few wispy revenants remain.

On Inishmaan
(Isles of Aran)

In the twilight of the year,
Here, about these twilight ways,
When the grey moth night drew near,
Fluttering on a faint flying,
I would linger out the day's
Delicate and moth-grey dying.

Grey, and faint with sleep, the sea
Should enfold me, and release
Some old peace to dwell with me.
I would quiet the long crying
Of my heart with mournful peace,
The grey sea's, in its low sighing.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

Samuel Palmer, "The Weald of Kent" (c. 1833)

"The twilight of the year." Perfect. But, as Symons suggests, for all of the loss that attends it, autumn -- like twilight -- can be a source of peace. Yet it is a peculiar sort of peace: a combination of exhilaration and sadness, the two of them changing places from moment to moment or, quite often, present together at the same time.

Into the Twilight

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

I confess that I love this sort of thing. Unashamedly, unapologetically, and without irony. What a wrong turning the 20th century was.

Samuel Palmer, "The Harvest Moon" (c. 1833)

Yeats, Symons, and the other poets of the Nineties are in their element when it comes to twilight and autumn. Hence, as one might expect, autumn twilight brings them to the very heart of the matter: shadows, fleeting gleams, hopeless love, lost love, murmuring waters, mist, dreams, desires, the moon-washed sea . . .

Autumn Twilight

The long September evening dies
In mist along the fields and lanes;
Only a few faint stars surprise
The lingering twilight as it wanes.

Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes,
Grown pensive now with evening,
See, lingering as the twilight wanes,
Lover with lover wandering.

Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895).

Like Yeats, I would love to live in a "grey twilight" world. Like Symons, I would love to "linger out the day's/Delicate and moth-grey dying." Is this quaint daydreaming, mere escapism? It depends upon what one thinks of the 21st century.

Samuel Palmer, "The Timber Wain" (c. 1833)

Yeats wrote the following poem on the other side of the fin de siècle. Does it reveal him as having moved beyond the twilight world of the Nineties and its ofttimes autumnal mood?

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

W. B. Yeats, The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).

Yeats is implying that a poem such as "Into the Twilight" involved some youthful "lying," some aesthetic "sway[ing]" of "leaves and flowers in the sun." Yes, that poem, and many like it, were indeed a product of their time.

But what of "the root is one"? I'm not at all certain that the ever-increasing rhetoric and self-dramatization of Yeats's later poetry brought him any closer to that root. I think that, at their best, the poets of the Nineties are exactly right about "the root": twilight and autumn (and, of course, autumn twilight) are indeed at the heart of the matter. Withering into the truth.

Poetry and art do not "progress." Has modern art "progressed" beyond Samuel Palmer? Has contemporary poetry "progressed" beyond the poetry of the Nineties?

Samuel Palmer, "The Gleaning Field" (c. 1833)

I was born in Minnesota, and I spent the first eleven years of my life there. Looking back, I think of those years as a vanished deciduous world, a world of oaks and elms and birches and maples.

This week I am in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I have no connections with this part of the country, but I feel that I have returned to my lost deciduous world. Nostalgia? Sentimentality? Of course. I always choose nostalgia and sentimentality over modern irony.

In this fair country, the Blue Ridge Parkway in autumn is among the fairest of the fair. A 400-mile ribbon of road running up near the sky, it alternates between leafy tunnels and breathtaking vistas (a cliché, but no other phrase suffices).

Postscript

As life improved, their poems
Grew sadder and sadder. Was there oil
For the machine? It was
The vinegar in the poets' cup.

The tins marched to the music
Of the conveyor belt. A billion
Mouths opened. Production,
Production, the wheels

Whistled. Among the forests
Of metal the one human
Sound was the lament of
The poets for deciduous language.

R. S. Thomas, H'm (Macmillan 1972).

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

I resolved to travel light on this trip. I brought only two pocket-size books of poetry, both anthologies: The Faber Book of Reflective Verse (Faber and Faber 1984), compiled by Geoffrey Grigson, and Zen Poems (Everyman's Library 1999), compiled by Peter Harris. Earlier this week, I came across this in the former:

Perplex'd with trifles thro' the vale of life,
Man strives 'gainst man, without a cause for strife;
Armies embattled meet, and thousands bleed,
For some vile spot, which cannot fifty feed.
Squirrels for nuts contend, and, wrong or right,
For the world's empire, kings ambitious fight,
What odds? -- to us 'tis all the self-same thing,
A Nut, a World, a Squirrel, and a King.

Charles Churchill, from "Night: An Epistle to Robert Lloyd" (1761).

Yesterday I walked through the woods of the North Carolina Arboretum, which lies beside the Blue Ridge Parkway, just south of Asheville. As I have noted here in the past, I admire those who can rattle off the common names, as well as the Latin binomial names, of flora and fauna. I am usually content to remain ignorant, and to simply look. But, in my deciduous mood, I stopped to read the tree identification markers that are posted at intervals along the trails.

Yes, "a Nut, a World, a Squirrel, and a King." The message of the Kings (who come in various guises) and of their Worlds (calculated to distract) is, in essence, this: "Sell your repose." Yet, all around us, uncountable and everlasting, offering the real message, are these (to name but a few):

Black oak, white oak, bitternut hickory,
Mockernut hickory, hemlock, white pine,
Chestnut oak, Virginia pine, black cherry,
Red maple, sourwood, tuliptree.

Alexander Docharty, "An Autumn Day" (c. 1917)

As I walked through the Arboretum, I could hear the sound of acorns dropping to the ground. Squirrels and their nuts. But I didn't think of Charles Churchill's lines. There was no striving or contending. It was only the deciduous world being itself, going about its annual, timeless business.

The Dependencies

This morning, between two branches of a tree
Beside the door, epeira once again
Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.
I test his early-warning system and
It works, he scrambles forth in sable with
The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows
The meaning of. And I remember now
How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came
Back as they do about this time each year,
Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings
Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud.
Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south,
And then the geese will go, and then one day
The little garden birds will not be here.
See how many leaves already have
Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too.
Change is continuous on the seamless web,
Yet moments come like this one, when you feel
Upon your heart a signal to attend
The definite announcement of an end
Where one thing ceases and another starts;
When like the spider waiting on the web
You know the intricate dependencies
Spreading in secret through the fabric vast
Of heaven and earth, sending their messages
Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds,
The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches (University of Chicago Press 1975).

John Milne Donald, "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

Standing at one of the "overlooks" on the Blue Ridge Parkway beneath infinite blue, with millions of green, gold, and red trees stretching off for hundreds of miles in every direction, one's best course of action is to keep silent.

Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It's like an echo
resounding through the mountains
and off into the empty sky.

Ryōkan (translated by Steven Carter), in Peter Harris (editor), Zen Poems (Everyman's Library 1999).

George Vicat Cole, "Autumn Morning" (1891)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Graham, "Wandering Shadows" (1878)

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

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

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

Aeroplanes. Radio. Twitter. Facebook.

On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations

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

Robert Frost, West-Running Brook (1928).

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

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

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

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947).

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

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

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

Alcaic

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

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

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

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

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

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