First Known When Lost

The waning of autumn's magnificence brings sadness with it. But it also provides an annual lesson in how to gracefully accept loss and change. The story is an ancient one: we would not be sad if we had not loved.

Last Week in October

The trees are undressing, and fling in many places --
On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill --
Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces;
A leaf each second so is flung at will,
Here, there, another and another, still and still.

A spider's web has caught one while downcoming,
That stays there dangling when the rest pass on;
Like a suspended criminal hangs he, mumming
In golden garb, while one yet green, high yon,
Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (Macmillan 1925).

A side-note: Hardy's likening of the "dangling" leaf to "a suspended criminal" is not a mere fancy on Hardy's part: he witnessed two public hangings in his teenage years. His second wife Florence's "biography"of him (which is, in fact, an autobiography written by Hardy) contains the following passage:

"One summer morning at Bockhampton, just before he sat down to breakfast, he remembered that a man was to be hanged at eight o'clock at Dorchester. He took up the big brass telescope that had been handed on in the family, and hastened to a hill on the heath a quarter of a mile from the house, whence he looked towards the town. The sun behind his back shone straight on the white stone façade of the gaol, the gallows upon it, and the form of the murderer in white fustian, the executioner and officials in dark clothing, and the crowd below, being invisible at this distance of three miles. At the moment of his placing the glass to his eye the white figure dropped downwards, and the faint note of the town clock struck eight.

"The whole thing had been so sudden that the glass nearly fell from Hardy's hands. He seemed alone on the heath with the hanged man; and he crept homeward wishing he had not been so curious. It was the second and last execution he witnessed, the first having been that of a woman two or three years earlier, when he stood close to the gallows."

Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), pages 32-33.

At another time, Hardy described the hanging of the woman:

"I went there really for a jaunt. The hanging itself did not move me at all. But I sat on after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure (it was a woman) turning slowly round on the rope. And then it began to rain, and then I saw -- they had put a cloth over the face -- how, as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary. A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from the tree. It was curious the two dropping together."

Elliott Felkin, "Days with Thomas Hardy,"Encounter (April 1962) (italics in original), reprinted in Martin Ray (editor), Thomas Hardy Remembered (Ashgate 2007), pages 202-203.

Edward Waite, "The mellow year is hastening to its close" (1896)

Christina Rossetti's poetry is characterized by a continual movement back and forth between loss and faith. What gives this movement its beauty and its emotional resonance is the overarching and underlying love that links the two together. This love is both mortal and Immortal. In her poetry, mortal love is ever threatened by loss.

An October Garden

In my Autumn garden I was fain
To mourn among my scattered roses;
Alas for that last rosebud which uncloses
To Autumn's languid sun and rain
When all the world is on the wane!
Which has not felt the sweet constraint of June,
Nor heard the nightingale in tune.

Broad-faced asters by my garden walk,
You are but coarse compared with roses:
More choice, more dear that rosebud which uncloses
Faint-scented, pinched, upon its stalk,
That least and last which cold winds balk;
A rose it is tho' least and last of all,
A rose to me tho' at the fall.

Christina Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).

I would categorize "An October Garden" as one of Rossetti's secular poems: it is an Elizabethan-sounding contemplation on the transient beauty of the rose, a symbol of love and life and loss. In contrast, she also wrote a large number of devotional poems in which she articulates her belief that religious faith can provide solace for, and can ultimately redeem, the inevitable loss of mortal love and life.

Edward Waite, "Autumn Colouring" (1894)

In her finest poems, Rossetti combines the secular and the religious into something that is uniquely evocative, enigmatic, and beautiful. In her collection A Pageant and Other Poems, "An October Garden" is immediately followed by this:

"Summer Is Ended"

To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose,
Scentless, colourless, this!
Will it ever be thus (who knows?)
Thus with our bliss,
If we wait till the close?

Tho' we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end
Sooner, later, at last,
Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:
An end locked fast,
Bent we cannot re-bend.

Christina Rossetti, Ibid. The source of the title is the Book of Jeremiah 8:20 (King James Version): "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (edited by R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers) (Penguin 2001), page 960.

As in "An October Garden," the fading of a final rose is the ostensible subject of the poem. But "'Summer Is Ended'" operates in an entirely different realm. The second stanza is breathtaking: to my mind, it is one of those rare combinations of feeling, thought, and verbal music that remind us of why we read poetry.

Edward Waite, "The Autumn Road (Mitcham Woods, Surrey)"

For Thomas Hardy, religious consolation is not an option that is available to assuage our losses: we live in a universe of "Crass Casualty" and "purblind Doomsters." ("Hap,"Wessex Poems and Other Verses.)

The Later Autumn

Gone are the lovers, under the bush
Stretched at their ease;
Gone the bees,
Tangling themselves in your hair as they rush
On the line of your track,
Leg-laden, back
With a dip to their hive
In a prepossessed dive.

Toadsmeat is mangy, frosted, and sere;
Apples in grass
Crunch as we pass,
And rot ere the men who make cyder appear.
Couch-fires abound
On fallows around,
And shades far extend
Like lives soon to end.

Spinning leaves join the remains shrunk and brown
Of last year's display
That lie wasting away,
On whose corpses they earlier as scorners gazed down
From their aery green height:
Now in the same plight
They huddle; while yon
A robin looks on.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles.

I'm particularly fond of the robin at the end of the poem. It brings to mind the wonderful birds that appear throughout Hardy's poetry, birds who observe (and often comment upon) the goings on of the World and the antics of its human inhabitants. "Starlings on the Roof." "The Darkling Thrush." Another thrush in "The Reminder." The thrushes, finches, and nightingales in "Proud Songsters." The rook, the starling, and the pigeon in "Winter in Durnover Field." To name but a few.

Hardy's birds signify both timelessness and transience. As does the loss of autumn.

Edward Waite, "Fall of the Year"

As the years pass, I find myself growing fonder of November. I have tended to think of the month as merely the somber denouement of the brilliance of October, with its mix of exhilaration and wistfulness, beauty and loss. November is pitched at a lower key. An end has been reached. Our task seems to be "what to make of a diminished thing." (Robert Frost, "The Oven Bird.")

The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997). The poem was written in the closing years of Stevens's life.

A side-note: long-time (and much-appreciated!) visitors to this location may recognize "The Region November" as my "November poem." I beg your indulgence for our annual visit to the poem: I'm afraid I will never tire of it.

James Paterson, "Moniaive" (1885)

But is November in fact "a diminished thing"? I have been taking my daily walks at dusk. In this part of the world, we are entering into a greyness that will persist, with occasional bright intervals, until spring arrives. Yet the November twilight's combination of grey sky and gold-leaved trees is enchanting. And, thanks to our rain and our mild climate, the grassy meadows remain green, with palls of fallen gold leaves spread beneath the trees. We walk within a shimmering grey-gold-green evening light. Yes, there is a somberness. But, if we have suffered a loss, the loss is not without compensations, nor is it irrevocable.

Others may feel differently. We have all felt and heard the winds of November, and shivered. Well, yes, of course: mortality.

November Eves

November Evenings! Damp and still
They used to cloak Leckhampton hill,
And lie down close on the grey plain,
And dim the dripping window-pane,
And send queer winds like Harlequins
That seized our elms for violins
And struck a note so sharp and low
Even a child could feel the woe.

Now fire chased shadow round the room,
Tables and chairs grew vast in gloom:
We crept about like mice, while Nurse
Sat mending, solemn as a hearse,
And even our unlearned eyes
Half closed with choking memories.

Is it the mist or the dead leaves,
Or the dead men -- November eves?

James Elroy Flecker, in J. C. Squire (editor), The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker (Martin Secker 1916).

James Paterson, "Autumn in Glencairn, Moniaive" (1887)

Stevens is more equivocal than Flecker: the trees in "The Region November" are "saying and saying"something. I suspect that mortality crossed Stevens's mind, but he seems open to other possibilities as well: "A revelation not yet intended."

I am reminded of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut": "The river is fateful,/Like the last one. But there is no ferryman." As is so often the case with Stevens, it is movement that is important: the movement back and forth between our Imagination and the World, a World in which "the mere flowing of the water is a gayety,/Flashing and flashing in the sun." The trees "swaying, swaying, swaying" are part of that World. Charon the ferryman is not present.

Flecker, on the other hand, is quite clear as to what November eves and November winds betoken. As is Thomas Hardy.

A Night in November

I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,
And a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed.

One leaf of them touched my hand,
And I thought that it was you
There stood as you used to stand,
And saying at last you knew!

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses (Macmillan 1922).

Those talking trees again: "And a tree declared to the gloom/Its sorrow that they were shed."

James Paterson, "Borderland" (1896)

There is also this in November: the sliver of yellow sky just above the horizon, beneath the wall of grey clouds, as the sun sets. I saw it earlier this week. Again, the loss we have suffered, the loss that brings us to November, is not without compensations, nor is it irrevocable. That is what the evanescent, luminous sliver of yellow sky says.

There's Nothing Like the Sun

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said --
Or, if I could live long enough, should say --
"There's nothing like the sun that shines today."
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

James Paterson, "The Last Turning, Winter, Moniaive" (1885)

When I was growing up in Minnesota, we used to preserve fallen leaves by ironing them between two sheets of wax paper. Otherwise, a saved leaf was likely to one day crumble to dust in your hands.

I remember searching for the "perfect" leaf to preserve. Oak. Elm. Maple. Birch.

Where have all those wax-encased leaves gone to? In a box or a scrapbook somewhere. But where?

Green thoughts, the feel of pink -- remembered in the mind;
but those spring splendors, like dreams, are gone beyond recall.
The whole village in yellow leaves, I shut the gate, lie down --
once again the year is already deep into fall.

Kashiwagi Jotei (1763-1819) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

The fallen leaves are always reminding us of . . . something. In the grand scheme of things, they whisper to us of transience and mortality. No surprise there. But they get more personal than that. I suspect that most of us could trace a path back into our past leaf by leaf, if we wished.

Do you remember that day in the park, and the leaf that you saved so as to never lose the memory of that moment? Who knows how far back we could go?

A Musician's Wife

Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.

And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren't
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage. Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.

You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.

And always, when I came back to my sister's
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.

Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
Against the shutters. And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again.

Weldon Kees, in Donald Justice (editor), The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press 1975).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

The trees are nearly empty. The wind and the rain have seen to that. Now is when our companionship with leaves begins in earnest. Call me sentimental (I am unapologetically guilty), accuse me of embracing the Pathetic Fallacy (guilty again), but, as the fallen leaves stroll with me down the street, the wind coming up from behind us, I cannot help but feel that we are in this together.

Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,
I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.
An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.
To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate Ryūwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Chestnut Leaves" (1973)

When it comes to leaves, and their place in our lives, a visit to Robert Frost is a necessity. He knew a thing or two about this topic. In his simple-sly way he says it all.

In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

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

"A crowd, a host, of golden daffodils . . . fluttering and dancing in the breeze." (William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.")

The arc of our life is not complicated: dancing flowers and fallen leaves.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Four Dead Leaves" (1961)

I am writing this at twilight on the north shore of Lake Superior. The water stretches away, like a sea, to the south. Enough sunlight remains to turn the scattered, oval-shaped clouds out over the lake a pinkish-grey, set against a pale blue background. The sky on the far horizon is pinkish-grey as well, with a tinge of yellow. In the distance, small snow squalls move across the lake from north to south, grey curtains of flurries sweeping over the dark water.

Here is how I had thought to begin this post: "The News of the World has been particularly horrifying recently." But then I looked out the window.

Yes, the News of the World has been particularly horrifying recently. Witnessing evil at work is always dispiriting. (Yes, evil. There is no other word for it. And any attempt to "explain" or "contextualize" or "excuse" or "justify" it on theological, historical, political, economic, or any other grounds makes one complicit in the evil.)

I looked out the window and I thought of a gift I came across earlier this week:

An Epitaph upon a Young Married Couple,
Dead and Buried Together

To these, whom Death again did wed,
This grave's their second marriage-bed;
For though the hand of Fate could force,
'Twixt soul and body, a divorce,
It could not sunder man and wife,
'Cause they both lived but one life.
Peace, good reader. Do not weep.
Peace, the lovers are asleep.
They, sweet turtles, folded lie
In the last knot that love could tie.
And though they lie as they were dead,
Their pillow stone, their sheets of lead,
(Pillow hard, and sheets not warm)
Love made the bed; they'll take no harm;
Let them sleep: let them sleep on,
Till this stormy night be gone,
And the eternal morrow dawn;
Then the curtains will be drawn
And they wake into a light,
Whose day shall never die in night.

Richard Crashaw, Delights of the Muses (1648). A side-note: the final line has an alternative reading: "Whose day shall never sleep in night."

Roger Fry, "The Cloister" (1924)

Fortunately for us, evil can never harm Richard Crashaw and his young married couple, for they are imperishable. I harbor no illusions: evil, and its ever-mutating tyrants of a day, will always be with us. But so will Crashaw's "sweet turtles."

Think of it: after nearly four centuries, you and I have just helped to preserve and prolong the beauty of Crashaw's poem and the love of the young married couple. Evil has no say in the matter. The continuity of the human spirit is something that evil can never understand, and can never touch.

Who could have known that, three hundred years after Richard Crashaw, Philip Larkin would come along?

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd --
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber and Faber 1964).

I have talked about "An Arundel Tomb" in a previous post, so I will not discuss its particulars on this occasion. But I do wonder whether Larkin knew of Crashaw's poem. Given his knowledge of English poetry, he likely did. However, I prefer to think that Larkin knew nothing of the "young married couple," the "sweet turtles," and that he independently echoed, and provided his own lovely elaborations upon, Crashaw's theme.

Roger Fry, "La Salle des Caryatides in the Louvre"

Those who traffic in evil are members of the human race, but they know nothing of humanity. They know nothing of love. They cannot conceive of, and thus can never harm, the uncountable and continuous streams of life, seen and unseen, that the rest of us create and perpetuate on a daily basis.

Love Lives Beyond the Tomb

Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew!
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true.

Love lives in sleep,
The happiness of healthy dreams:
Eve's dews may weep,
But love delightful seems.

Tis seen in flowers,
And in the morning's pearly dew;
In earth's green hours,
And in the heaven's eternal blue.

Tis heard in Spring
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,
On angel's wing
Bring love and music to the mind.

And where is voice,
So young, so beautiful, and sweet
As Nature's choice,
Where Spring and lovers meet?

Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.

John Clare, in Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter (editors), John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript (Cobden-Sanderson 1920).

"Peace, good reader."

Roger Fry, "The Church at Ramatuelle" (1922)

While I was in Minnesota last week, I was able to take a walk through a marsh-dotted wood. It was a dun-colored world, a world of (to borrow from Thomas Hardy) "neutral tones." Unseen birds twittered and clucked off in the cattails, or along the floor of the forest. Grey squirrels crossed the path in front of me, going about their preparations for winter.

An autumn evening;
Without a cry,
A crow passes.

Kishū (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 345.

Kishū's haiku captures perfectly and beautifully how the world often makes itself known to us: unexpectedly, and by degrees. But we mustn't think of the crow as a "symbol" or a "metaphor" for the world's gracious appearance in our life. As I have noted here before, we need to stop thinking so much. This whole thinking business is highly overrated.

An autumn evening. A crow passes overhead in silence. That's it. Stop right there.

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

I haven't lived in the land of my birth for nearly fifty years, but the emotional essence of late November days in The Land of 10,000 Lakes still abides within me. Those days can be dark and empty, but there is an undercurrent of expectation.

A Spell Before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Howard Nemerov, The Next Room of the Dream (University of Chicago Press 1962).

And thus the snow came a few times last week -- a lovely and welcome sight. We all want to walk out into it. Everything has changed.

Benjamin Leader, "Autumn in a Surrey Wood" (1902)

I know nothing about how to live. And I possess no wisdom whatsoever. But, if one lives long enough, one eventually discovers that certain truisms are true. One is well advised to pay attention to them. Of course, there are those who think they are superior to these truisms: "I'm more complex and nuanced than that!" No, you are not. You are a human being with a soul. Join the crowd.

As a member of that blessed and miraculous group, here's your first truism: you have no control. Now you can begin to live.

The Consent

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.

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

Benjamin Leader, "A Worcestershire Farm" (1900)

The tendency to think and think and think goes hand in hand with the illusion of control. On an autumn evening, a crow passes silently overhead. A small miracle. We have no say in the matter. Our response should be gratitude.

Fallen leaves
Come flying from elsewhere:
Autumn is ending.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), p. 355.

Fallen leaves arriving from elsewhere. What a wonder.

Benjamin Leader, "November" (1884)

I suspect that, by most people's standards, the speed at which I read poetry is slow and slothful. As I have mentioned here in the past, I intentionally limit myself to one or two poems a day. If a poem is lengthy, it may take me several days to finish it. Thus, for instance, reading Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" will take me at least a week -- at 32 stanzas, four stanzas or so a day seems about right to me.

I am not stating this as a matter of pride, nor am I asking for plaudits. This is simply the way it goes for me. I need to mull things over. I need to listen closely. I need to let a poem sit. I feel that I owe it to the poet and the poem to give them time and extended attention.

For the same reason, I return again and again to the old chestnuts. I never tire of them. Hence, the past few weeks I have been spending time with two of my favorite anthologies: The New Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner, and The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks. The current century is of no interest to me. I prefer to visit dear friends from long ago.

The Coming of Good Luck

So good luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the sun-beams, tickled by degrees.

Robert Herrick, in Christopher Ricks (editor), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press 1999).

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973), "Drambuie, Wester Ross"

In browsing through the two anthologies, it was nice to be reminded how little poetry has to do with current events. Of course, there are exceptions: "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna" (Charles Wolfe), "England in 1819" (Shelley, as self-regarding, disingenuous, and mendacious as ever), "The Convergence of the Twain" (Hardy), "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (Hopkins), for instance. But these are few and far between. The general themes are, as one would expect, Love, Death, the Game of Life, the Beauty of the World.

This makes perfect sense. Who wants poets to write about the passing happenstance of The News of the World? Think of all the wasted emotion and energy some people devote to cultivating, and propounding, what they perceive to be the "correct" political, economic, and social views about what is "wrong" with the World, and how it ought to be fixed. Think of all the utopian chimeras that these same people (left, right, and Martian) preoccupy themselves with on a daily basis. They will never be happy. For them, something will always be wrong with the World, something will always need to be fixed. And they (totalitarians at heart) have appointed themselves to be the fixers. Good luck with that.

I, on the other hand, believe that the World is perfect just as it is. Are human beings perfect? No. Am I perfect? Certainly not. But the misery we create for each other is never going to disappear as the result of somebody concocting a grand theory about How We Should Live. We are best advised to tend to our own soul, while being mindful, and careful, of the souls around us. This is the true subject matter of poetry.

Magna est Veritas

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

Coventry Patmore, in Helen Gardner (editor), The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press 1972).

David Macbeth Sutherland, "The Breakwater, Stonehaven Harbour" (1950)

I am simple-minded. I need to be reminded of certain things over and over again. Although I do not believe that it is the function of poetry to set out to instruct or edify, I do believe that a good poem can embody human truth -- the truth of what it means to make one's way through the World as a unique soul, touching, and touched by, others.

An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

John Masefield, in Christopher Ricks (editor), The Oxford Book of English Verse.

This is the sort of poem that I love to return to often. Eventually, its truth gets through my thick skull, at least temporarily. There are scores like this. Fortunately, the beauty of the poems is always there, regardless of my obtuseness. Thus, returning to them is an everlasting delight.

David Macbeth Sutherland, "Evening in Skye, Loch Carron, Highlands"

Gratitude in the midst of evanescence. This is poetry's ultimate message to us.

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, in Helen Gardner (editor), The New Oxford Book of English Verse. The title of the poem comes from Horace's Odes, Book I, Ode 4, line 15, and may be translated as: "the short span of our life forbids us to indulge in a long-term hope." Ernest Dowson, Collected Poems (edited by R. K. R. Thornton) (University of Birmingham Press 2003), page 225.

Poetry shakes us by the shoulders, gently, and whispers in our ear: Pay attention. Live.

David Macbeth Sutherland, "Plockton from Duncraig" (1967)

As a child growing up in this country, one of the first birds that one is likely to encounter is the robin. Perhaps this is why I retain a particular fondness for them. Call me sentimental, but I think of the successive generations of robins I have shared the World with as lifelong companions: wordless, but not unspoken.

As we enter another winter together, I worry about them. How will they fare in the cold and the wind and the gloom? But there they are in the garden, flitting about in the trees and bushes, hopping along the paths, going about the business of being robins.

A Robin

Ghost-grey the fall of night,
Ice-bound the lane,
Lone in the dying light
Flits he again;
Lurking where shadows steal,
Perched in his coat of blood,
Man's homestead at his heel,
Death-still the wood.

Odd restless child; it's dark;
All wings are flown
But this one wizard's -- hark!
Stone clapped on stone!
Changeling and solitary,
Secret and sharp and small,
Flits he from tree to tree,
Calling on all.

Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933).

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

De la Mare was writing in England, so his robin is a European robin, not an American robin -- a flycatcher, not a thrush. But I like to think that the two share certain affinities: a charming stolidity, staying power, and a cheerful stoicism.

And they both have their songs and notes. Different songs and notes, of course, but perhaps the underlying message is the same. "Synonyms for joy."

The Robin

Poor bird! I do not envy thee;
Pleas'd in the gentle melody
Of thy own song.
Let crabbed winter silence all
The winged choir; he never shall
Chain up thy tongue:
Poor innocent!
When I would please my self, I look on thee;
And guess some sparks of that felicity,
That self-content.

When the bleak face of winter spreads
The earth, and violates the meads
Of all their pride;
When sapless trees and flowers are fled,
Back to their causes, and lie dead
To all beside:
I see thee set,
Bidding defiance to the bitter air,
Upon a wither'd spray; by cold made bare,
And drooping yet.

There, full in notes, to ravish all
My earth, I wonder what to call
My dullness; when
I hear thee, pretty creature, bring
Thy better odes of praise, and sing,
To puzzle men:
Poor pious elf!
I am instructed by thy harmony,
To sing the time's uncertainty,
Safe in my self.

Poor Redbreast, carol out thy lay,
And teach us mortals what to say.
Here cease the choir
Of ayerie choristers; no more
Mingle your notes; but catch a store
From her sweet lyre;
You are but weak,
Mere summer chanters; you have neither wing
Nor voice, in winter. Pretty Redbreast, sing,
What I would speak.

George Daniel (1616-1657), "Ode XXIII," in Alexander Grosart (editor), The Poems of George Daniel, Volume II (1878) (spelling modernized).

"That self-content." Call me an anthropomorphizer, a practitioner of the Pathetic Fallacy, but "self-content" is one of the traits that I admire in the robin. "A robin with no Christian name ran through/The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew." "All it knew"? Yes, perhaps. But: "I am instructed by thy harmony . . . teach us mortals what to say."

Beryl Sinclair, "Winter, Regent's Park" (1941)

When I was young, we were taught to look for "the first robin of spring." But it has always seemed to me that quite a few of them stick around through the winter. Their red-orange breasts are a welcome sight amidst the dark days, and add to the gaiety should snow arrive. (Although I suppose that a snowfall is not necessarily a cause for celebration in the Robin-World!) Thus, I think of robins not just as harbingers of spring, but as year-long reminders of the constancy and continuity of the World that surrounds us, a World that calls for our attention in even its humblest manifestations.

Winter

Clouded with snow
The bleak winds blow,
And shrill on leafless bough
The robin with its burning breast
Alone sings now.

The rayless sun,
Day's journey done,
Sheds its last ebbing light
On fields in leagues of beauty spread
Unearthly white.

Thick draws the dark,
And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
Floats the white moon.

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems (1912).

Frederick Mitchell, "Greig Close in Winter" (1955)

Poets rhapsodize about nightingales and skylarks. There are those among us who search the woods for cardinals, orioles, bluebirds, and others of bright plumage. But the commonplace, quotidian robin deserves its own paean. Please note that I do not use "commonplace" or "quotidian" in a pejorative sense. After all, both words apply to each and every one of us, although we may like to believe otherwise.

We need to often remind ourselves of this:

Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998).

As I have noted here on more than one occasion, we are all in this together. We each have our offices to perform. Who among us is the humblest? Who among us is of importance? Who knows? None of us is in a position to render judgment.

To Robin Redbreast

Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this:
Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

"Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,/Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush." Not a bad way to spend eternity, communing with robins and thrushes.

John Aldridge, "Winter" (1947)

Some people complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas. Others complain that the season has been appropriated by the tackiest tendencies of "popular culture." These complainers take themselves, and the World, far too seriously.

This is not surprising, for we live in the Age of Mewling. A great number of people are aggrieved or offended by . . . well, nearly everything. "Trigger warnings" and all that. What a sad way to live.

The World is what it is. On a daily basis, we have to pick and choose. Gratitude, not complaint, ought to be the basis for making our choices.

And there is always a larger context.

Christmas Poem

We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through a revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table.
It is told, the story --
We and earth and sun and corn are one.

Now kings and shepherds have come.
A wintered hovel
Hides a glory
Whiter than snowflake or silver or star.

George Mackay Brown, The Wreck of the Archangel (John Murray 1989).

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

Nothing about Christmas offends me. In fact, most everything about the season delights me. I'm happy to hear Bing Crosby sing "White Christmas" for the ten-thousandth time. Likewise Perry Como and "Home for the Holidays" and Andy Williams and "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."

I love the fact that people string lights on their houses. What could be more wonderful than walking at night through a neighborhood that is full of colorful lights? It makes me feel that all is right with the World -- like the sound of lawn mowers in the distance on a sunny Spring afternoon. There is a great deal of truth and beauty in these simple human impulses. Why not festively light up the night at the darkest time of the year?

Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

R. S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies (Bloodaxe Books 1995).

Harold Bush, "The Christmas Tree" (1933)

Yes, there is always a larger context. "We are folded all in a green fable." There is absolutely nothing to complain about.

Maeshowe: Midwinter

Equinox to Hallowmas, darkness
falls like the leaves. The
tree of the sun is stark.

On the loom of winter, shadows
gather in a web; then the
shuttle of St Lucy makes a
pause; a dark weave
fills the loom.

The blackness is solid as a
stone that locks a tomb.
No star shines there.

Then begins the true ceremony of
the sun, when the one
last fleeting solstice flame
is caught up by a
midnight candle.

Children sing under a street
lamp, their voices like
leaves of light.

George Mackay Brown, Following a Lark (John Murray 1996).

Maeshowe (also known as "Maes Howe") is a chambered tomb located on the island of Mainland in the Orkney Islands. It was constructed in 2800 B. C. (or thereabouts). In the twelfth century, it was broken into by Vikings, who left behind runic inscriptions.

The entrance passage to the structure is aligned so that, at the time near and after the winter solstice, the rays of the setting sun shine against the rear wall of the tomb. Yuletide.

"A merry Christmas, friend!"

Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

The other day, as I sat idly musing, it occurred to me that the number of New Years that I have greeted thus far in my life now greatly exceeds the number of New Years that I am likely to greet from here on out. Yes, I know: Lovely thought, that! But this is the sort of thing that happens when one idly muses.

We duly note observations such as these and then continue on. "Death is no different whined at than withstood." (Philip Larkin, "Aubade.") Or something along those lines.

I am reminded of a haiku that I try to revisit each year around this time (and which appeared here a year ago).

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

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

Blyth suggests that Jokun is referring to the Japanese tradition in which, commencing at midnight on New Year's Day, the bells in Buddhist temples are sounded 108 times: once for each of the unhealthy desires that we should strive to rid ourselves of. This makes perfect sense. Despite "implacable fate, and panic at night, and the strumble/Of the hungry river of death," there is always room for improvement while time -- ever tolling, of course -- remains.

We have no choice in the matter, do we? Hence, no whining is allowed. But we ought to remain mindful.

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Stromness Harbour"

The particulars of day-to-day life in the Orkney Islands provide the basis for the poems and prose of George Mackay Brown. But there is nothing parochial about the Orcadian world of which he writes. It stretches from the present back to the arrival of the Vikings, and then disappears into a mysterious (apparently Celtic) pre-history.

It is a time-bound, yet timeless, world. Although most of us have never been there, it is our World.

Gray's Pier

I lay on Gray's pier, a boy
And I caught a score of sillocks one morning

I laboured there, all one summer
And we built the Swan

A June day I brought to my door
Jessie-Ann, she in white

I sang the Barleycorn ballad
Between a Hogmanay star and New Year snow

The Swan haddock-heavy from the west --
Women, cats, gulls!

I saw from the sea window
The March fires on Orphir

I followed, me in black
Jessie-Ann to the kirkyard

I smoke my pipe on Gray's pier now
And listen to the Atlantic

George Mackay Brown, Following a Lark (John Murray 1996).

Gray's Pier is located in Stromness on Mainland, in the Orkney Islands. "Sillocks" are young coalfish. "Hogmanay" is the Scots word for New Year's Eve. Orphir is a parish on Mainland.

Donald Morrison, "Stromness Pier" (1993)

The following poem provides the other half of the Orcadian world. (Although the phrase "the other half" is perhaps too reductive and too simplistic: the "halves" are interwoven and inseparable. Earth and stone and sea and sky.)

Countryman

Come soon. Break from the pure ring of silence,
A swaddled wail

You venture
With jotter and book and pencil to school

An ox man, you turn
Black pages on the hill

Make your vow
To the long white sweetness under blessing and bell

A full harvest,
Utterings of gold at the mill

Old yarns, old malt, near the hearthstone,
A breaking of ice at the well

Be silent, story, soon.
You did not take long to tell

George Mackay Brown, Voyages (Chatto & Windus 1983).

In another poem, Brown writes of "Crossings of net and ploughshare,/Fishbone and crust." ("Black Furrow, Gray Furrow," in Fishermen with Ploughs: A Poem Cycle (Hogarth Press 1971).)

Ian MacInnes, "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

Truth and beauty reside in the particulars of everyday life. "Gray's Pier" and "Countryman" are emblematic of the wondrous way in which George Mackay Brown gives us his Orkney world exactly as it is, in its lovely (and sometimes harsh) particulars, while transforming it into the World in which we all live. And die.

"A mystery abides. We move from silence into silence, and there is a brief stir between, every person's attempt to make a meaning of life and time. Death is certain; it may be that the dust of good men and women lies more richly in the earth than that of the unjust; between the silences they may be touched, however briefly, with the music of the spheres."

George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography (John Murray 1997), page 181.

Gravestone

Suddenly a stone chirped
Bella's goodness,
Faithfulness,
Fruitfulness,
The numbers
Of Bella's beginning and end.
It sang like a harp, the stone!

James-William of Ness
Put a shilling
In the dusty palm of the carver,
Fifty years since.

Wind, snow, sun grainings.

The stone's a whisper now.
Soon
The stone will be silence.

George Mackay Brown, from the sequence "Seal Island Anthology, 1875,"Voyages.

Stanley Cursiter, "Orkney Landscape" (1952)

This is not a political blog. However, I have, on occasion, bemoaned the fact that our world has become overly politicized. Any sort of holier-than-thou posturing or hectoring -- from any direction -- leaves me cold. Life is too short.

All of this is by way of introduction to a poem by Edmund Blunden. To wit: please note that I am definitely not offering the poem as a "political" statement on any "current events." Long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog will likely be aware of my distrust of the modern gods of Progress and Science and political utopianism. You are certainly welcome to read the poem in that context. But, of course, it speaks perfectly well for itself, and certainly needs no gloss from me.

Minority Report

That you have given us others endless means
To modify the dreariness of living,
Machines which even change men to machines;
That you have been most honourable in giving;
That thanks to you we roar through space at speed
Past dreams of wisest science not long since,
And listen in to news we hardly need,
And rumours which might make Horatius wince,
Of modes of sudden death devised by you,
And promising protection against those --
All this and more I know, and what is due
Of praise would offer, couched more fitly in prose.
But such incompetence and such caprice
Clog human nature that, for all your kindness,
Some shun loud-speakers as uncertain peace,
And fear flood-lighting is a form of blindness;
The televisionary world to come,
The petrol-driven world already made,
Appear not to afford these types a crumb
Of comfort. You will win; be not dismayed.
Let those pursue their fantasy, and press
For obsolete illusion, let them seek
Mere moonlight in the last green loneliness;
Your van will be arriving there next week.

Edmund Blunden, An Elegy and Other Poems (Cobden-Sanderson 1937).

We now have our "televisionary world," don't we? Blunden was correct on all counts.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was thinking along similar lines at around the same time that Blunden wrote his poem: "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." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (translated by Peter Winch) (Blackwell 1980), page 7e. The passage was likely written by Wittgenstein in the 1930s.

Richard Eurich, "The Frozen Tarn" (1940)

I suspect that "Minority Report" comes to mind because I continue to be haunted by the lovely lines from George Mackay Brown that appeared in my Christmas Day post:

We are folded all
In a green fable.

George Mackay Brown, from "Christmas Poem,"The Wreck of the Archangel (John Murray 1989).

Edwin Muir, Brown's fellow Orkney Islander, also took a wider, and longer, view of things.

One Foot in Eden

One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world's great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time's handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

Edwin Muir, One Foot in Eden (Faber and Faber 1956).

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

I agree with everything that Blunden says about our "televisionary world." George Mackay Brown expressed similar feelings: "The twentieth century has covered us with a gray wash. Newspapers and cars and television have speeded up the process. It could not be otherwise." George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing (John Murray 1997), page 166. Perhaps this is the world that Muir has in mind when he speaks of "tares" amidst the corn, "famished field and blackened tree," and "beclouded skies."

Still, we ought not to leave it at that. As I have noted here on previous occasions, each succeeding generation is convinced that the World is going to Hell in a handbasket. But is this so? Brown and Muir are aware of -- and have not given up on -- the realm of existence that has nothing whatever to do with Progress, Science, political utopianism, and their attendant evils. In this realm, "building an ever more complicated structure" is of no moment. All such structures come to dust.

Muir reminds us: "Strange blessings never in Paradise/Fall from these beclouded skies." Right here, right now. However bleak things may sometimes seem.

Richard Eurich, "The Rose" (1960)

Wittgenstein is exactly right about Progress: "Typically it constructs." In our time, Progress and Science and political utopianism are devoted to engineering. Devoted to engineering what? "Ideal" societies and "ideal" human beings, of course. A presumptuous and laughable goal. Doomed to failure.

Why doomed? Because the world we live in is, and will always be, "the vale of Soul-making." The human soul is not subject to engineering. Animula vagula blandula. "Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite." "Poor little, pretty, flutt'ring thing." What do social engineers know about the human soul? It is forever beyond their narrow and feeble grasp.

-- I am like a slip of comet,
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender'd
By heady elements, for no man knows:
But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes
And spins her skirts out, while her central star
Shakes its cocooning mists; and so she comes
To fields of light; millions of travelling rays
Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun,
And sucks the light as full as Gideon's fleece:
But then her tether calls her; she falls off,
And as she dwindles shreds her smock of gold
Amidst the sistering planets, till she comes
To single Saturn, last and solitary;
And then goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press 1967). These lines are an untitled fragment, perhaps from a play that Hopkins intended to write. Ibid, page 304.

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

Please bear with me, dear readers. I've been dwelling in China for the past week. In autumn. About 1,200 or so years ago.

Autumn Begins

Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,

summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.

Meng Hao-jan (689-740) (translated by David Hinton), in David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Counterpoint 2002), page 42.

Meng Hao-jan spent most of his life in and around Hsiang-yang (also known as "Xiangyang"), which is in the modern-day province of Hubei. It is a region that was known for its mountains and rivers. Meng Hao-jan's character and poems were an important influence on the four great poets of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907): Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Chu-i. Li Po wrote the following poem about him:

At Yellow Crane Tower Taking Leave of Meng Hao-jan
As He Sets Off for Kuang-Ling

My old friend takes leave of the west at Yellow Crane Tower,
in misty third-month blossoms goes downstream to Yang-chou.
The far-off shape of his lone sail disappears in the blue-green void,
and all I see is the long river flowing to the edge of the sky.

Li Po (701-762) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 211.

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

I suspect that many of us share the urge to now and then visit another place and another time in the company of our favorite poets. Hence, for some accountable reason, I will periodically feel a sudden hankering to visit Brittany with Ernest Dowson, Cornwall with Arthur Symons, Dorset with Thomas Hardy, Japan with Bashō, Alexandria with C. P. Cavafy, et cetera. Escapism? No doubt.

This past week, autumn in ancient China has been calling me.

Alone Beside the Autumn River

All spring, my sorrows grew like lotus leaves.
Now they wither as my autumn sadness grows.

Grief is as long and wide as life.
Watch the autumn river. Listen to it flow.

Li Shang-yin (813-858) (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000), page 202.

The first three lines of the poem may be too morose for some tastes. But they are beautifully morose, don't you think? In any event, the final line redeems all sorrow, sadness, and grief. One of the wonderful features of classical Chinese poetry is that it continually reminds us to direct our attention to the lovely particulars that lie in front of us, at this moment. What is in front of us at this moment puts everything into perspective. Time-bound timelessness.

Duncan Grant, "Charleston Barn" (1942)

Yes, these poetic journeys to strange lands may indeed include an element of escapism, especially if they also involve time travel. After all, who, on occasion, does not wish to abandon one's current place and time? Yet it is usually the case that these excursions, if they are taken in the company of good poets, lead to the proverbial "shock of recognition": Ah! I know that World. We must return to the here and now, but all of these places and times continue to dwell within us, reminding us of the continuity of life and of human experience.

The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chu-i (772-846) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57.

W. G. Poole, "Savernake Forest" (1939)

Thus, autumn in China 1,200 years ago does not seem at all strange to me. Mind you, this has nothing whatsoever to do with any special powers on my part: it is entirely attributable to the honesty, sensitivity, and artistry of the poets. Call it a cliché, but, when I read their poems, their world feels like my world. Another cliché: I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. "True and not feigning." As far as what it means to make one's way through life, nothing has changed over the past twelve centuries.

Lu-lung Village, Autumn

Refusing worldly worries,
I stroll among village strollers.

Pine winds sing, the evening village
smells of grass, autumn in the air.

A lone bird roams down the sky.
Clouds roll across the river.

You want to know my name?
A hill. A tree. An empty drifting boat.

Hsu Hsuan (916-991) (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, page 212.

Roger Fry, "Village in the Valley" (1926)

Given the subject matter of this post, a disclaimer may be appropriate: I am not, at the moment, brooding over mortality. Actually, I am feeling quite cheerful. "There will be dying, there will be dying,/but there is no need to go into that."

Yet, come to think of it, the two are not mutually exclusive, are they? It is possible to be cheerful and, at the same time, to brood over (or at least be mindful of) mortality. In fact, that may be an ideal state of being. But I am not that wise. Hence, this post is simply a matter of one thing leading to another.

To the Passenger

If I lie unburied Sir,
These my Reliques, pray inter.
'Tis religion's part to see
Stones or turfs to cover me.
One word more I had to say;
But it skills not; go your way;
He that wants a burial room
For a Stone, has Heaven his Tomb.

Robert Herrick, Poem 821, Hesperides (1648).

"Passenger" means "passer-by" in this context. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 724. "It skills not" (line 6) means "it doesn't matter." Ibid. I presume that "wants" (line 7) means "lacks" in this context. Herrick italicizes the final line, which, in accordance with his usual practice, signifies a quotation or a paraphrase from a classical source. It has been suggested that the source is Lucan, Pharsalia, 7.819, as quoted (and translated) by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Second Partition, Section 3, Member 5, Subsection 1): "the Canopy of heaven covers him that hath no tomb." Ibid.

Claude Hayes, "Evensong" (1903)

The thought of having Heaven (or the heavens) as one's tomb puts me in mind of the many touching epigrams about the deaths of unfortunate mariners that are contained in The Greek Anthology. Most often, the mariner's comrades, or a stranger who happens upon the washed-up corpse while walking along the shore, are able to bury the mariner and erect a monument to his memory. However, sometimes the seafarer remains for ever lost at sea.

No dust, no paltry marble for his grave
Has Erasippus, but the wide sea wave.
For with his ship he sank. His bones decay --
But where, the cormorant alone can say.

Glaucus (translated by Goldwin Smith), in Henry Wellesley, Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology (1849), page 70.

Here is a prose translation of the epigram:

"Not dust nor the light weight of a stone, but all this sea that thou beholdest is the tomb of Erasippus; for he perished with his ship, and in some unknown place his bones moulder, and the seagulls alone know them to tell."

Glaucus (translated by J. W. Mackail), in J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1906), page 156.

Henry Anthony (1817-1886), "Evensong" (1873)

Wars on distant frontiers are a constant presence in classical Chinese poetry, and the prospect of a lonely death far from home and family is the theme of many poems.

Ch'i-yü-ko

Man -- pitiful insect,
out the gate with fears of death in his breast,
a corpse fallen in narrow valleys,
white bones that no one gathers up.

Anonymous (circa 6th to 7th century) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (Columbia University Press 1971), page 63. The meaning of the phrase "Ch'i-yü-ko" is "uncertain." Ibid, page 62. The poem "was written to be sung." Ibid.

Classical Greek and Chinese poetry share a surface matter-of-factness and simplicity that is underlaid by, and intertwined with, great emotion. There is a dignity, seemliness, and reticence to this combination that makes the poetry extremely moving. This may explain why the long-dead Greek and Chinese poets seem to be speaking directly to us, and for us. We moderns are not so articulate, nor are we so wise. We have forgotten a great deal.

James Webb, "A Bit of Sussex" (1877)

As I have remarked in the past, one of the wonderful things about reading poetry is how one poem can become a stepping stone to another. The final line of the following poem has stayed with me for years. I thought of it after I read Herrick's lines "He that wants a burial room/For a stone, has Heaven his Tomb."

A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?

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

"Buried within the blue vault of the air." Well, what can you say about that? Nothing need be said, but I will say something anyway: this is why we read poetry.

James Northbourne, "Evening" (1913)

In this context, I cannot help but think of one of my favorite poems. It has appeared here on more than one occasion, but its final two lines are particularly apt.

Happy were he could finish forth his fate
In some unhaunted desert, most obscure
From all societies, from love and hate
Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;
Then wake again, and give God ever praise,
Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;
In contemplation spending all his days,
And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,
Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949).

When all is said and done, being untombed is not necessarily a fate to be dreaded. The thought of being "buried within the blue vault of the air" does not trouble me. If only cormorants or seagulls know where my bones lie, I have no objection. A resting place "where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush" sounds peaceful and lovely. Like most everything, it is all a matter of perspective. There are other considerations.

On Himself

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

Robert Herrick, Poem 554, Hesperides (1648). "Scape" appears in the original. The final line may be an echo of Horace (Odes, Book III, Ode 30): "I shall not all die, and a large part of me will escape the Goddess of Death." Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II, page 675.

Henry Anthony, "A Country Churchyard"

There is nothing like a vast winter night sky to remind you of your place in the universe. Such a vista might seem companionable during the December holiday season, when the neighborhood houses are decorated with colorful lights, and bright, bedecked Christmas trees can be seen in nearly every living room window. The immensity and the depth of silence of that canopy seem manageable under those circumstances. But the night sky tells a different story at the deep end of January.

A Winter Night

It was a chilly winter's night;
And frost was glitt'ring on the ground,
And evening stars were twinkling bright;
And from the gloomy plain around
Came no sound,
But where, within the wood-girt tower,
The churchbell slowly struck the hour;

As if that all of human birth
Had risen to the final day,
And soaring from the worn-out earth
Were called in hurry and dismay,
Far away;
And I alone of all mankind
Were left in loneliness behind.

William Barnes, Poems, Partly of Rural Life, in National English (1846).

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Snow Falling on a Town"

However, we ought not to get too carried away with these dark-of-night contemplations. An apostrophe on the "metaphysical" or "existential" loneliness of humanity in a mute and empty cosmos would be barren and abstract. Rather, a clear winter night -- starry, vast, and eternally cold -- is simply a salutary reminder of how puny each of us is. That's it. Well, yes, loneliness does enter into it. But it is the homely, small-scale, and individual soul-loneliness that we all experience on a daily basis. "When the night-processions flit/Through the mind." That sort of thing. With a sharper, chillier edge.

The Hounds

Far off a lonely hound
Telling his loneliness all round
To the dark woods, dark hills, and darker sea;

And, answering, the sound
Of that yet lonelier sea-hound
Telling his loneliness to the solitary stars.

Hearing, the kennelled hound
Some neighbourhood and comfort found,
And slept beneath the comfortless high stars.

But that wild sea-hound
Unkennelled, called all night all round --
The unneighboured and uncomforted cold sea.

John Freeman, Stone Trees and Other Poems (Selwyn and Blount 1916).

I can sometimes hear sea lions barking in the night down along the shores of Puget Sound. Are they "telling [their] loneliness all round" or "to the solitary stars"? I find their voices to be comforting.

Harald Sohlberg, "Winter Night in the Mountains" (1918-1924)

When it comes to the silence and the emptiness of the universe, R. S. Thomas is the poet to go to. Thomas's life-long waiting and waiting for a single whisper from something out there -- God, of course -- is perhaps the key theme of his poetry. An odd thing to say of someone who was an Anglican priest, isn't it? Did he ever hear the whisper? I don't know. But his waiting and listening led to the creation of a great many beautiful poems.

The Other

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village, that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

R. S. Thomas, Destinations (Celandine Press 1985).

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Uraga in Sagami Province"

Now, having just said that R. S. Thomas "is the poet to go to" when it comes to the silence and the emptiness of the universe, what am I to do with Robert Frost? An amendment is in order: R. S. Thomas and Robert Frost are the poets to go to when it comes to the silence and the emptiness of the universe.

I've never had the sense that Frost is waiting upon God, however. His intimate knowledge of silence and emptiness -- the universe's and his own -- is wholly personal. Or so it seems to me. "Acquainted with the Night." This acquaintance is not necessarily comforting. "Harrowing" is the word that comes to mind.

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (Henry Holt 1936).

Harald Sohlberg, "Winter Night in the Mountains" (1911-1914)

In 1802, Dorothy and William Wordsworth were living at Grasmere in the Lake District. Dorothy's journal entry for April 29 of that year contains this passage:

"We then went to John's Grove, sate a while at first. Afterwards William lay, and I lay in the trench under the fence -- he with his eyes shut and listening to the waterfalls and the birds. There was no one waterfall above another -- it was a sound of waters in the air -- the voice of the air. William heard me breathing and rustling now and then but we both lay still, and unseen by one another -- he thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that one's dear friends were near."

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (edited by Pamela Woof) (Oxford University Press 2002), page 92 (italics in original).

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), "Melrose Abbey" (1953)

The poetic conceit that death is akin to a peaceful sleep is an ancient one, as is its converse: that sleep is a peaceful rehearsal for death. I suspect that some moderns among us feel that these conceits are clichés that ought to be dispensed with. Not I. Clichés nearly always have an element of human truth in them. They ought to be cultivated and preserved.

These chairs they have no words to utter,
No fire is in the grate to stir or flutter,
The ceiling and floor are mute as a stone,
My chamber is hush'd and still,
And I am alone,
Happy and alone.

Oh who would be afraid of life,
The passion the sorrow and the strife,
When he may be
Shelter'd so easily?
May lie in peace on his bed
Happy as they who are dead.

Half an hour afterwards
I have thoughts that are fed by the sun.
The things which I see
Are welcome to me,
Welcome every one:
I do not wish to lie
Dead, dead,
Dead without any company;
Here alone on my bed,
With thoughts that are fed by the sun,
And hopes that are welcome every one,
Happy am I.

O Life, there is about thee
A deep delicious peace,
I would not be without thee,
Stay, oh stay!
Yet be thou ever as now,
Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death,
Be but thou ever as now,
Peace, peace, peace.

William Wordsworth, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume Four (Oxford University Press 1947).

The poem is untitled. It was not published during Wordsworth's lifetime. It was apparently composed in April of 1802, prior to the incident described by Dorothy in her April 29 journal entry. This time frame is suggested by the following passage in her entry for April 22, which describes a walk taken that day by her, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

"A fine mild morning -- we walked into Easedale. The sun shone. . . . The waters were high for there had been a great quantity of rain in the night. . . I then went to the single holly behind that single rock in the field and sate upon the grass till they came from the waterfall. I saw them there and heard William flinging stones into the river whose roaring was loud even where I was. When they returned William was repeating the poem 'I have thoughts that are fed by the sun.' It had been called to his mind by the dying away of the stunning of the waterfall when he came behind a stone."

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, page 89.

"I have thoughts that are fed by the sun" is a wonderful line. It is worth remembering that Wordsworth had written the first four stanzas of what later came to be known as "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," as well as "My heart leaps up when I behold," just a few weeks earlier, in the final days of March. It was clearly a charmed time. "I have thoughts that are fed by the sun" seems to perfectly describe what Wordsworth was experiencing during this period.

Adam Bruce Thomson, "Harvesting in Galloway"

As one who is fond of napping, reverie, daydreaming, and the border between waking and sleeping, Wordsworth's meditation on peace and quiet makes perfect sense to me. Of course, I fully realize that there are practical considerations: we do need to get out of bed at some point.

In doing so, perhaps we should seek an equilibrium between "thoughts that are fed by the sun" and "sweetness and breath with the quiet of death." You'll not find me zip-lining through the canopy of a rain forest or across a deep desert gorge any time soon. But there are ways of going about this that encourage reverie, and that may enable us to attain "peace, peace, peace," even if only momentarily.

Llananno

I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me. But as a gesture
of independence of the speeding
traffic I am a part
of, I stop the car,
turn down the narrow path
to the river, and enter
the church with its clear reflection
beside it.
There are few services
now; the screen has nothing
to hide. Face to face
with no intermediary
between me and God, and only the water's
quiet insistence on a time
older than man, I keep my eyes
open and am not dazzled,
so delicately does the light enter
my soul from the serene presence
that waits for me till I come next.

R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit (Macmillan 1975).

Adam Bruce Thomson, "Park and Ruined Abbey" (1961)

If we attend to him, Ivor Gurney continually reminds us that we have it in us to find havens of peace under any circumstances. Given the difficulties and sorrows of his troubled life, Gurney's ability to fashion these havens serves as a humbling example to the rest of us. Somehow, he seems to have been able to recover -- if only for a short while -- "thoughts that are fed by the sun" and, with them, some small measure of peace.

The poems that preserve these moments are extremely touching, for we come to them with a sense of (acknowledging that we can never truly know) what he went through to reach these brief respites of serenity. The feeling of hard-won tranquility in these poems is palpable, and moving. Reading them, I can only hope that, at times, he found his long-sought peace.

The Shelter from the Storm

And meantime fearing snow the flocks are brought in,
They are in the barn where stone tiles and wood shelter
From the harm shield; where the rosy-faced farmer's daughter
Goes to visit them.

She pats and fondles all her most favourite first.
Then after that the shivering and unhappy ones --
Spreads hay, looks up at the noble and gray roof vast
And says "This will stop storms."

Her mind is with her books in the low-ceilinged kitchen
Where the twigs blaze. -- and she sees not sheep alone
of the Cotswold, but in the Italian shelters songs repeating
Herdsmen kind, from the blast gone.

Ivor Gurney, in George Walter (editor), Selected Poems (J. M. Dent 1996). The text is as it appears in the original manuscript. The poem was probably written by Gurney in September of 1926, or thereabouts, although this is not certain. Ibid, page 105. It was not published in his lifetime.

The following untitled poem is a lovely companion piece to "The Shelter from the Storm."

Soft rain beats upon my windows
Hardly hammering.
But by the great gusts guessed further off
Up by the bare moor and brambly headland
Heaven and earth make war.

That savage toss of the pine boughs past music
And the roar of the elms. . . .
Here come, in the candle light, soft reminder
Of poetry's truth, while rain beats as softly here
As sleep, or shelter of farms.

Ivor Gurney, Ibid. The poem was likely written by Gurney in 1926 or 1927. Ibid, page 105. It was not published in his lifetime.

Adam Bruce Thomson, "Still Life at a Window" (1944)

As the years accumulate in one's life, the virtues of brevity become more and more apparent. There is something to be said for getting to the point. When it comes to poetic brevity, nothing can compare with the haiku: life and the universe encompassed within 17 syllables. As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog are aware, I am very fond of haiku, and a large number of them have appeared here in the past.

In my humble opinion, the deceptive simplicity of the haiku cannot be replicated in any English verse form. Of course, this has something to do with the differences between the Japanese and English languages: based upon my limited experience with Japanese, I would venture to say that Japanese accomplishes more in fewer words. But there are also cultural factors at work: poets writing in English (wherever they come from) tend to go on and on; in Japan, reticence and concision are highly-valued poetic and aesthetic attributes.

In English verse, the shortest free-standing poems are either quatrains or couplets, and such poems are relatively uncommon. Instead, the classic English verse form (at least until the 20th century) is arguably the 14-line sonnet. A traditional Japanese haiku poet would be bemused and/or appalled at the thought of any poet needing 14 lines (and 140 syllables!) to say what he or she wishes to say.

However, having now pontificated, over-simplified, and grossly over-generalized, I must confess that this post is prompted by two beautiful lines of English verse that I encountered earlier this week:

Language has not the power to speak what love indites:
The Soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

John Clare, in Eric Robinson and David Powell (editors), The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837-1864, Volume II (Oxford University Press 1984).

The two lines are likely a fragment: they appear in the manuscripts written by Clare in the latter years of his life, while he was confined to an asylum. They were not given a title by Clare, nor were they ever published in his lifetime. However, they are set apart as a separate unit in one of Clare's notebooks: they are not an extract from a larger poem. Accordingly, subsequent editors of the manuscripts have published the lines as a free-standing poem.

I will not attempt to "explicate" the lines (I am not qualified to do so in any case), for I do not wish to destroy them. But, to me, the lines demonstrate that a two-line poem in English can be every bit as evocative and ever-expanding as a haiku -- albeit in a different fashion.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "February Afternoon"

Two-line poems in English (i.e., couplet poems) tend to be epigrammatic or aphoristic. In contrast, the distinctive feature of the haiku is its concrete (usually natural) imagery (although such concreteness does not limit its capacity for deep implication, without the need for "symbolism" or "metaphor"). In making this observation, I am not advocating on behalf of one form over the other: they each have their own beauties and charms.

Few Fortunate

Many we are, and yet but few possess
Those fields of everlasting happiness.

Robert Herrick, Poem 470, Hesperides (1648).

Ambition

In Man, ambition is the common'st thing;
Each one, by nature, loves to be a king.

Robert Herrick, Poem 58, Ibid.

In my view, Herrick is the master of the two-line poem in English: no poet has used it more frequently (with the possible exception of Walter Savage Landor), and in such a lovely and telling fashion.

The Covetous Still Captives

Let's live with that small pittance that we have;
Who covets more, is evermore a slave.

Robert Herrick, Poem 607, Ibid.

After Autumn, Winter

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

Robert Herrick, Poem 1058, Ibid.

John Aldridge, "The River Pant near Sculpin's Bridge" (1961)

To once again generalize, in the 20th century the two-line poem began to move away from the neatly tied-up epigrammatic or aphoristic statement (usually in the form of a heroic couplet) into something more emotionally open, and more amenable to the sort of natural images that one finds in haiku. I suspect that this is due both to the general relaxation of poetic forms that has occurred in modern times (a mixed blessing at best, but I will not go into that) and to the influence of the long-delayed introduction of traditional Japanese and Chinese poetry into the English-speaking world at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the last century.

(A side-note: the most common Chinese short-form poem is the chüeh-chü, which consists of a single quatrain rhymed in the second and fourth lines (with an optional rhyme in the first line) and which includes the same number of Chinese characters in each line (5 or 7). The chüeh-chü, like the haiku, is almost always based upon concrete natural images, and, like the haiku, it is capable of deep implications that belie its apparent surface simplicity.)

Here is one of my favorite modern two-line poems.

The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.

Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (Faber and Faber 1987). The poem is untitled.

Michael Longley is, I believe, the master of the short poem in our time. Of course, he has written many fine long poems, but four-line poems occur often in his work, together with a fair number of five- and three-line poems. Given his genius for presenting striking, moving imagery in a concise fashion, it is not surprising that he has written a number of wonderful two-line poems as well.

Night Time

Without moonlight or starlight we forgot about love
As we joined the blind ewe and the unsteady horses.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000).

Love poems, elegies: I am losing my place.
Elegies come between me and your face.

Michael Longley, The Ghost Orchid (Jonathan Cape 1995). The poem is untitled.

John Aldridge, "Bridge, February 1963" (1963)

I will close with something enigmatic which demonstrates the evocative possibilities of modern two-line poems. The following untitled poem was written in French by Philippe Jaccottet. However, by translating the poem into an English heroic couplet (using half rhyme, at least to my ear), Derek Mahon permits us to consider it as an English two-line poem.

(Nothing at all, a footfall on the road,
yet more mysterious than guide or god.)

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

Here is the French text:

(Chose brève, le temps de quelques pas dehors,
mais plus étrange encor que les mages et les dieux.)

Ibid.

I have no idea what the poem means. But I think it is lovely, and I return to it often.

John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

I like to listen to the robins and the sparrows twittering and clucking in the backyard. An ornithologist could no doubt explain to me what each sound means in bird-language. But I am not interested in explanations. The World is reticent, circumspect. It is best to just listen.

The Tomtit

Twilight had fallen, austere and grey,
The ashes of a wasted day,
When, tapping at the window-pane,
My visitor had come again,
To peck late supper at his ease --
A morsel of suspended cheese.

What ancient code, what Morse knew he --
This eager little mystery --
That, as I watched, from lamp-lit room,
Called on some inmate of my heart to come
Out of its shadows -- filled me then
With love, delight, grief, pining, pain,
Scarce less than had he angel been?

Suppose, such countenance as that,
Inhuman, deathless, delicate,
Had gazed this winter moment in --
Eyes of an ardour and beauty no
Star, no Sirius could show!

Well, it were best for such as I
To shun direct divinity;
Yet not stay heedless when I heard
The tip-tap nothings of a tiny bird.

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

Vincent Lines, "The Tithe Barn, Cherhill" (1943)

Birds and insects appear often in Walter de la Mare's poetry. He sometimes uses them as metaphors for human quiddities, but not often. Instead, as in "The Tomtit," he sees them as messengers who remind us of how little we know about the mysteries that accompany our existence. What is the tomtit trying to tell us with its tip-tapping? And what does the clucking and twittering of the robins and the sparrows in the backyard betoken?

The Dove

How often, these hours, have I heard the monotonous crool of a dove --
Voice, low, insistent, obscure, since its nest it has hid in a grove --
Flowers of the linden wherethrough the hosts of the honeybees rove.

And I have been busily idle: no problems; nothing to prove;
No urgent foreboding; but only life's shallow habitual groove:
Then why, if I pause to listen, should the languageless note of a dove
So dark with disquietude seem? And what is it sorrowing of?

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

Vincent Lines, "Church Row, Tonbridge" (1942)

In this context, an observation made by W. H. Auden, who greatly admired de la Mare's poetry, is illuminating:

"[I]mplicit in all his poetry are certain notions of what constitutes the Good Life. Goodness, they seem to say, is rooted in wonder, awe, and reverence for the beauty and strangeness of creation. Wonder itself is not goodness -- de la Mare is not an aesthete -- but it is the only, or the most favourable, soil in which goodness can grow. Those who lose the capacity for wonder may become clever but not intelligent, they may lead moral lives themselves, but they will become insensitive and moralistic towards others."

W. H. Auden, "Introduction to A Choice of de la Mare's Verse," in W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume IV: 1956-1962 (edited by Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press 2010), page 403.

Taking into account Auden's penchant (both in his poetry and his prose) for making sweeping cultural-psychological pronouncements, I do think that his comment gets to the heart of the appeal of de la Mare's poetry. Commentators tend to focus upon the "supernatural,""childlike," or "dreamlike" quality of many of de la Mare's poems (which in turn often leads to a devaluation of his work), but Auden is correct to place "wonder" and "goodness" at the center of de la Mare's view of the world.

The Moth

Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, "Come!"

Lovely in dye and fan,
A-tremble in shimmering grace,
A moth from her winter swoon
Uplifts her face:

Stares from her glamorous eyes;
Wafts her on plumes like mist;
In ecstasy swirls and sways
To her strange tryst.

Walter de la Mare, The Veil and Other Poems (Constable 1921).

Vincent Lines, "Mending the Thatch: A Cottage at Little Avebury" (1942)

Some may find it odd to speak of poetry in terms of its "goodness." Not I. One of de la Mare's poems comes to mind:

Rarities

Beauty, and grace, and wit are rare;
And even intelligence:
But lovelier than hawthorn seen in May,
Or mistletoe berries on Innocent's Day
The face that, open as heaven, doth wear --
With kindness for its sunshine there --
Good nature and good sense.

Walter de la Mare, Inward Companion and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1950).

"Good nature and good sense" are hard to come by both in life and in art. De la Mare was too self-effacing to ascribe those qualities to himself, but he was aware of their scarcity. None of us are in a position to claim to have them. But, if any poet can be said to have both "good nature and good sense," it is Walter de la Mare.

However, he is no Pangloss or Pollyanna. Having a sense of wonder and aspiring to goodness does not mean that one is not fully aware of the facts of life. Hence, an abiding awareness of our transience is present in nearly every poem that de la Mare wrote. There is no shortage of deaths, graveyards, epitaphs, abandoned churches, empty echoing houses, and ghosts in his poetry.

But his "wonder, awe, and reverence for the beauty and strangeness of creation" places the fact of our mortality squarely at the heart of that "beauty and strangeness." This is, marvelously, attended by a sense of peaceful acceptance. This is where "good nature and good sense" come in. We find no despair in his poetry. Nor do we find bitter and self-regarding irony, that characteristic disease of the modern age. His essential message (as set forth in what are probably his best-known lines) is: "Look thy last on all things lovely,/Every hour."

Unwitting

This evening to my manuscript
Flitted a tiny fly;
At the wet ink sedately sipped,
Then seemed to put the matter by,
Mindless of him who wrote it, and
His scrutinizing eye --
That any consciousness indeed
Its actions could descry! . . .

Silence; and wavering candlelight;
Night; and a starless sky.

Walter de la Mare, Ibid. The ellipses are in the original.

Vincent Lines, "Church Porch and Manor, Avebury" (1942)

The sight of an empty snail shell in the garden or on the sidewalk always saddens me. What fate befell the vanished inhabitant of that husk? "Moving at a snail's pace" will no doubt expose a creature to any number of misadventures. And so the glimmering trail ends.

I realize, dear readers, that those of you who are gardeners may see the snail as a nuisance -- a single-minded engine of destruction. I am also aware that some among you may consider the poems that follow to be instances of the worst sort of sentimental anthropomorphization, egregious examples of the Pathetic Fallacy.

I cannot muster a reasoned response to these potential objections. The best that I can come up with is this: there is no accounting for taste (mine, of course). I came across the first poem a few weeks ago, and it immediately caught my fancy. The three poems that follow it are long-time companions of which I am quite fond. It occurred to me that it would be nice to see all of them together in one place. As the benevolent (I hope!) dictator of this space, I can only beg your indulgence.

Upon the Snail

She goes but softly, but she goeth sure;

She stumbles not as stronger creatures do:

Her journey's shorter, so she may endure

Better than they which do much further go.

She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on

The flower or herb appointed for her food,

The which she quietly doth feed upon,

While others range, and gare, but find no good.

And though she doth but very softly go,

However 'tis not fast, nor slow, but sure;

And certainly they that do travel so,

The prize they do aim at they do procure.

John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls, or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686).

"Gare" (line 8) is glossed by one editor as "stare about." Other editors (primarily in the 19th century) substitute "glare" in its place, apparently presuming that there was a misprint in the original text of 1686. The adjectival form of "gare" means "eager, covetous, desirous of wealth." OED. Given that Bunyan's book of children's poems was intended to edify, I would like to suggest (with absolutely no authority) that it would be nice to think of "gare" as meaning "to look about covetously." Which a wise snail would never do, of course.

Charles Ginner (1878-1952), "Hartland Point from Boscastle" (1941)

It is the combination of self-sufficiency and leisurely, contemplative deliberativeness that makes the snail so beguiling and so sympathetic a character, don't you think?

The Snail

To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all
Together.

Within that house secure he hides,
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
Of weather.

Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting power is such,
He shrinks into his house, with much
Displeasure.

Where'er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chattels none,
Well satisfied to be his own
Whole treasure.

Thus, hermit-like, his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meets one, only feeds
The faster.

Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combin'd)
If, finding it, he fails to find
Its master.

Vincent Bourne (translated by William Cowper), in H. S. Milford (editor), The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper (Oxford University Press 1907).

A side-note: Vincent Bourne (1695-1747) was an Englishman who wrote poetry in Latin. Cowper was a pupil of Bourne's at Westminster School. Later in his life, Cowper translated a number of Bourne's poems, including "The Jackdaw" and "The Thracian," which have appeared here previously.

"Well satisfied to be his own/Whole treasure": yes, that's it, exactly!

Charles Ginner, "The Aqueduct, Bath" (1928)

The subject of my previous post was the role of "wonder" in the poetry of Walter de la Mare. Wonder certainly plays a role in de la Mare's contemplation upon the snail in the following poem. Having said that, I recognize that every good poem, on any subject, to some degree has its source in a poet's wonder at "the beauty and strangeness of creation" (to borrow W. H. Auden's words).

The Snail

All day shut fast in whorled retreat
You slumber where -- no wild bird knows;
While on your rounded roof-tree beat
The petals of the rose.
The grasses sigh above your house;
Through drifts of darkest azure sweep
The sun-motes where the mosses drowse
That soothe your noonday sleep.

But when to ashes in the west
Those sun-fires die; and, silver, slim,
Eve, with the moon upon her breast,
Smiles on the uplands dim;
Then, all your wreathèd house astir,
Horns reared, grim mouth, deliberate pace,
You glide in silken silence where
The feast awaits your grace.

Strange partners, Snail! Then I, abed,
Consign the thick-darked vault to you,
Nor heed what sweetness night may shed
Nor moonshine's slumbrous dew.

Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

The entire poem is lovely, but my favorite lines are these: "While on your rounded roof-tree beat/The petals of the rose." What a beautiful image and thought. It is enough to make you envy a snail's life.

Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (1947)

"Strange partners, Snail!" Yes, you and I and the snail and all else in the World are strange (and beautiful) partners during our short time together on earth. "The divinest blessings are the commonest -- bestowed everywhere." So says Walt Whitman. (Richard Maurice Bucke (editor), Notes and Fragments: Left by Walt Whitman (1899), page 49.)

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

Thom Gunn, My Sad Captains (Faber and Faber 1961).

"The slow passion/to that deliberate progress." Can we speak of a snail's passion? Yes, of course. Why not?

Charles Ginner, "The Punt in the Mill Stream"

"Earth, lie lightly." What a lovely request. Much more evocative than, say, "rest in peace." But it is not a phrase that one is apt to encounter first-hand in our times. Which is a pity. It is the cumulative tiny losses of such graceful touches that ultimately take their toll on the decency, seemliness, and nobility of civilization, not the day-to-day events of politics or economics, which are nothing but passing distractions.

"Earth, lie lightly." One is likely to come across this gentle supplication (and variations upon it) in English poetry written prior to the 20th century. For instance, it is found in several translations of poems from The Greek Anthology.

Take to thy bosom, gentle earth, a swain
With much hard labour in thy service worn.
He set the vines that clothe yon ample plain,
And he these olives that the vale adorn.
He fill'd with grain the glebe; the rills he led
Through this green herbage, and those fruitful bowers.
Thou, therefore, earth! lie lightly on his head,
His hoary head, and deck his grave with flowers.

Anonymous (translated by William Cowper), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology (1849).

Stanley Spencer, "Bluebells, Cornflowers and Rhododendrons" (1945)

Too sentimental? Too quaint? Too old-fashioned? It depends upon what sort of world you wish to live in. One can, of course, take the ironic, hard-boiled "modern" approach and say that this sort of thing simply won't do anymore: we have moved beyond it, we are now more knowing.

Ah, yes, have a look around you at the current state of the world. What a wonderful place our superior knowingness and our irony have created for us! I prefer this:

Full oft, of old, the islands changed their name,
And took new titles from some heir of fame:
Then dread not ye the wrath of gods above,
But change your own, and be the Isles of Love;
For Love's own name and shape the infant bore
Whom late we buried on your sandy shore.
Break softly there, thou never-weary wave,
And earth, lie light upon his little grave!

Crinagoras (translated by John William Burgon), Ibid.

Stanley Spencer, "The Roundabout" (1923)

Mind you, I am not suggesting that the essential humanity that one finds in The Greek Anthology has vanished from the world. The love, hate, joy, sorrow, beauty, and transience of the ancients are ours as well. Being human has always been a matter of life and death.

Life and Death

The two old, simple problems ever intertwined,
Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled.
By each successive age insoluble, pass'd on,
To ours to-day -- and we pass on the same.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).

"Insoluble." Yet, it is entirely possible that the acceptance of this insolubility may be the only solution we need in order to pass our days in tranquility. In any case, solution or no solution, we each have a choice to make: shall we live in an enchanted world or a disenchanted world?

Earth, lightly press Ausigenes, for he,
Mother, ne'er set a heavy foot on thee.

Meleager (translated by John Besly), Anthologia Polyglotta.

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

Yes, we ought to tread softly. As I have done here on more than one occasion in the past, I can only repeat Philip Larkin's lovely advice:

. . . we should be careful

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

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

A task for a lifetime, never completed. And, if we are fortunate, a kind soul will request on our behalf, when we have vanished: "Earth, lie lightly."

Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear,
Say I diëd true.

My Love was false, but I was firm
From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lay
Lightly, gently, earth.

John Fletcher, from The Maid's Tragedy (1622), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (William Sloane 1949).

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

Upon reading the following poem for the first time, my reaction was: "What the heck is that all about?" My next reaction was: "What a strange and wonderful thing!" (The "thing" referred to is the poem, not the object that provides the occasion for the poem. Although, as you will see, that object is a strange and wonderful thing as well.)

The Berg
(A Dream)

I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.
The impact made huge ice-cubes fall
Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck;
But that one avalanche was all --
No other movement save the foundering wreck.

Along the spurs of ridges pale,
Not any slenderest shaft and frail,
A prism over glass-green gorges lone,
Toppled; or lace of traceries fine,
Nor pendant drops in grot or mine
Were jarred, when the stunned ship went down.
Nor sole the gulls in cloud that wheeled
Circling one snow-flanked peak afar,
But nearer fowl the floes that skimmed
And crystal beaches, felt no jar.
No thrill transmitted stirred the lock
Of jack-straw needle-ice at base;
Towers undermined by waves -- the block
Atilt impending -- kept their place.
Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges
Slipt never, when by loftier edges
Through very inertia overthrown,
The impetuous ship in bafflement went down.

Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast,
With mortal damps self-overcast;
Exhaling still thy dankish breath --
Adrift dissolving, bound for death;
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one --
A lumbering lubbard loitering slow,
Impingers rue thee and go down,
Sounding thy precipice below,
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifference of walls.

Herman Melville, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888).

Long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog are aware by now of one of my fundamental tenets: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry. Hence, I do not intend to engage in any metaphysical, theological, or psychological speculations about what "The Berg" may "symbolize." Melville's works (including, in particular, that book about a whale) have been subjected to far too much symbol-mongering. Sometimes an iceberg is just an iceberg. And sometimes a whale is just a whale. More or less.

However, the lovely particulars certainly deserve our attention. For instance, my favorite words in the poem are these: "Hard Berg (methought)." The capitalization of "Berg" is a fine touch. And I love the parenthetical "methought." "Hard Berg": now what is that supposed to mean?

(An aside: Melville's use of capitalized words is a topic in itself. Consider the following passage from Chapter 112 ("The Blacksmith") of Moby-Dick: "but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.")

I also like the repetition and the echoing of "the infatuate ship went down" (line 5), "the stunned ship went down" (line 15), and "the impetuous ship in bafflement went down" (line 27). "Infatuate,""stunned," and "impetuous": what are we to make of those word choices? And there is this intriguing final echo: "Impingers rue thee and go down" (line 34). "Impingers" is something to mull over.

Finally, there is the pure sound of it. "Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges/Slipt never." Or this: "Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one --/A lumbering lubbard loitering slow." (Such a comical description of such a portentous, menacing object.)

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

I presume that it is not mere happenstance that Melville elected to place the following poem immediately after "The Berg" in John Marr and Other Sailors.

The Enviable Isles

Through storms you reach them and from storms are free.
Afar descried, the foremost drear in hue,
But, nearer, green; and, on the marge, the sea
Makes thunder low and mist of rainbowed dew.

But, inland, where the sleep that folds the hills
A dreamier sleep, the trance of God, instills --
On uplands hazed, in wandering airs aswoon,
Slow-swaying palms salute love's cypress tree
Adown in vale where pebbly runlets croon
A song to lull all sorrow and all glee.

Sweet-fern and moss in many a glade are here,
Where, strown in flocks, what cheek-flushed myriads lie
Dimpling in dream -- unconscious slumberers mere,
While billows endless round the beaches die.

Herman Melville, Ibid.

Melville apparently intended to use the poem in a prose and verse narrative he tentatively titled "Rammon." However, he never completed the larger work. Howard Vincent (editor), Collected Poems of Herman Melville (Packard and Company 1947), pages 472-473. In a surviving prose fragment, Rammon, "the unrobust child of Solomon's old age," develops an interest in Buddhism. Rammon meets Tardi, a merchant who has travelled in Asia, and asks him what he knows of Buddhism: "Fable me, then, those Enviable Isles." Ibid, page 416. The poem constitutes Tardi's response. The description of the Isles seems to be a blending of Melville's memories of the time he spent in the South Seas in his younger years and of a vision of Nirvana.

Samuel Bough, "Dunkirk Harbour" (1863)

What, then, is our destination? The "hard Berg"? "The Enviable Isles"? Or is it, perhaps, both?

Thinking about Melville's poems, another possibility occurred to me. This option is offered to us by an Anglican vicar from Dean Prior, Devon.

The White Island: or Place of the Blest

In this world (the Isle of Dreams)
While we sit by sorrow's streams,
Tears and terrors are our themes
Reciting:

But when once from hence we fly,
More and more approaching nigh
Unto young Eternity
Uniting:

In that whiter Island, where
Things are evermore sincere;
Candor here, and lustre there
Delighting:

There no monstrous fancies shall
Out of hell an horror call,
To create (or cause at all)
Affrighting.

There in calm and cooling sleep
We our eyes shall never steep;
But eternal watch shall keep,
Attending

Pleasures, such as shall pursue
Me immortaliz'd, and you;
And fresh joys, as never too
Have ending.

Robert Herrick, His Noble Numbers: or, His Pious Pieces (1647).

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

In John Marr and Other Sailors, "The Berg," as noted above, immediately precedes "The Enviable Isles," which is the penultimate poem in the volume. "The Enviable Isles" is in turn followed by a closing sequence titled "Pebbles," which consists of seven short poems. "The Sea" is the unifying element of the sequence -- "the old implacable Sea" (Poem V), "the inhuman Sea" (Poem VII). The all-encompassing Sea?

Here is Poem II of "Pebbles":

Old are the creeds, but stale the schools,
Revamped as the mode may veer,
But Orm from the schools to the beaches strays,
And, finding a Conch hoar with time, he delays
And reverent lifts it to ear.
That Voice, pitched in far monotone,
Shall it swerve? shall it deviate ever?
The Seas have inspired it, and Truth --
Truth, varying from sameness never.

Herman Melville, from "Pebbles," John Marr and Other Sailors. A note: commentators suggest that "Orm" (line 3) is an allusion to a 12th-century monk who wrote a manuscript in Middle English verse consisting of homilies intended to explain biblical texts. The manuscript is titled the "Ormulum" (after its maker).

Melville's thoughts bring to mind a poem that was written by Walt Whitman in 1888 -- the same year in which John Marr and Other Sailors was published. Melville and Whitman were nearly exact contemporaries: both were born in 1819; Melville died in 1891; Whitman died in 1892. It is marvelous to think of those two extraordinary American characters passing side-by-side through nearly the whole of the century.

The Calming Thought of All

That coursing on, whate'er men's speculations,
Amid the changing schools, theologies, philosophies,
Amid the bawling presentations new and old,
The round earth's silent vital laws, facts, modes continue.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).

Perhaps, after all, destinations do not matter.

Samuel Bough, "Shipyard at Dumbarton" (1855)

It is always a pleasure to encounter a poet who harbors no doubts about the existence of the human soul, and who writes about it without skepticism and without irony. This is one of the reasons why I am fond of the poetry of Walt Whitman.

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1881).

The progression of the final line is lovely, isn't it? "Night, sleep, death and the stars." In thinking about the aptness of that progression, it is well to remember that, in Whitman's view, we have nothing to fear from death. To wit:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

Walt Whitman, from Section 7 of "Song of Myself,"Ibid. "I hasten to inform him or her" is wonderful, as is the certainty of "and I know it."

Or, consider this:

Gliding o'er All

Gliding o'er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul -- not life alone,
Death, many deaths I'll sing.

Walt Whitman, Ibid.

William Shackleton, "The Mackerel Nets" (1913)

Whitman turns up in unexpected places on the other side of the Atlantic. Here, for instance, is Gerard Manley Hopkins writing to Robert Bridges in 1882:

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges (October 18-19, 1882), in R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips (editors), The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volume II: Correspondence 1882-1889 (Oxford University Press 2013), pages 542-543.

As a product of Victorian England who had converted to Catholicism and then become a Jesuit, Hopkins was pretty much obliged to refer to Whitman as "a very great scoundrel." But I don't think his heart was in it.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

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

"The Starlight Night" was written in 1877. I do not know whether Hopkins was aware of Whitman's poetry at that time. (His first reference to Whitman in his correspondence appears in a letter to Robert Bridges dated January 30, 1879.) However, the octave of the sonnet (rampant exclamation marks and all) sounds like something that Whitman could have written, had he ever taken it upon himself to write a sonnet. As for the sestet: well, Walt Whitman was never a Jesuit, but I believe he would understand, and respect, Hopkins's devotion and passion.

Phyllis James (1911-1973), "New Walk at Night, Leicester"

I am not suggesting that Hopkins's poetic technique or themes were directly influenced by Whitman. (For one, Hopkins was preoccupied with technical matters of prosody that would have been of no interest to Whitman.) Rather, I think that Hopkins and Whitman were both mystics at heart, and shared an emotional bond that was based upon their deep-felt sense of the capaciousness and timelessness of the human soul as it makes its way through a wondrous universe.

This in turn brings us to Ivor Gurney, a mystic as well, who was influenced by both of them, but particularly by Whitman.

To Long Island First

To Long Island first with my tortured verse,
Remember how on a Gloucester book-stall one morning
I saw, brown 'Leaves of Grass' after long hesitation
(For fourpence to me was bankruptcy then or worse).
I bought, what since in book or mind about the dawning
On Roman Cotswold, Roman Artois war stations;
Severn and Buckingham, London after night wanderings,
Has served me, friend or Master on many occasions,
Of weariness, or gloriousness or delight.
At first to puzzle, then grow past all traditions
To be Master unquestioned -- a book that brings the clear
Spirit of him that wrote, to the thought again here.
If I have not known Long Island none has --
Brooklyn is my own City, Manhattan the right of me,
Camden and Idaho -- and all New England's
Two-fold love of honour, honour and comely grace.
If blood to blood can speak or the spirit has inspiring,
Let me claim place there also -- Briton I am also Hers,
And Roman, have more than Virgil for meditations.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

A key phrase in Gurney's poem articulates how I see Whitman's influence at work in both Gurney and Hopkins: "a book that brings the clear/Spirit of him that wrote, to the thought again here." It was "the clear spirit" of Whitman that moved both Hopkins and Gurney.

This spirit is manifested in the cascading rushes of images and in the catalogues and lists that are characteristic of all three poets. Hopkins's "The Starlight Night" is but one example. Another instance is this poem from Gurney (which has appeared here on more than one occasion, but which is always worth revisiting):

The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life whatever
Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . .
Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never
Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles
Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done
Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight
Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed
Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Trefoil . . . . . hedge sparrow . . . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ibid. All of the ellipses appear in the original manuscript.

In fact, "The Escape" serves well as a description of the essential forces that are at work throughout the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, and Gurney: "the increasing of life,""the seeing of small trifles/Real, beautiful,""freeing spirit that stifles/Under ingratitude's weight," and "the moving or breaking to sight/Of a thing hidden under by custom." Most importantly, all of these activities end in "delight." If not, why write poetry?

Merlyn Evans, "Window by Night" (1955)

But the last word should go to Walt Whitman, with a return to souls and stars.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (1865).

Harald Sohlberg, "Flower Meadow in the North" (1905)

"When All The World Is On The Wane"

"The Region November"

Leaves, Again

Perspective, Part Sixteen: Continuity

Acceptance

Poetry

Robins

Yuletide

Time

Paradise

Autumn Interlude

Resting Place

A Winter Night

Peace

Two Lines

Wonder

Life Explained, Part Thirty-Three: Snail

Earth, Lie Lightly

Destinations

Souls And Stars