First Known When Lost

Earlier this week, I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. As I came to consciousness, these words floated up: "out into the phoenix world." Complete nonsense? The sole remnant of a forgotten dream? Most likely. But I was intrigued by the phrase. So please bear with me, dear readers.

Why the word "phoenix"? I haven't been pondering the myth of the phoenix. I haven't visited Phoenix, Arizona, for at least ten years, and I have no plans to travel to that fair city. It has been quite some time since I heard Glen Campbell sing "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."

Nor do I recall seeing the word "phoenix" in anything I have read recently. Yet, might my reading choices account for the unexpected appearance of "out into the phoenix world" in the dead of night? At the beginning of the week I read Alfred Tennyson's "Ulysses." The entire poem is wonderful, but these four lines have been preoccupying me:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses," lines 18-21, in Poems (1842).

I have been thinking in particular about the lovely line "I am a part of all that I have met." Why didn't Tennyson write instead: "All that I have met is a part of me"? This would seem to be more "logical." Thus, one might say: "I have been to [insert name of place] only once, but it will always be a part of me." On the other hand, "Ulysses" is a monologue by Ulysses, who is not known for his humility. The line is immediately preceded by these two lines: "And drunk delight of battle with my peers,/Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." Yes, Ulysses did leave "a part" of himself on "the ringing plains of windy Troy," didn't he? And, thanks to Homer, he haunts the place to this day. But I do not wish to explicate the line to death. Needless to say, I defer to Tennyson: the line is perfect as it is.

Did my reading of "Ulysses" give subconscious birth to "out into the phoenix world"? There is a phoenix-like element of rebirth or regeneration in the poem: in the end, Ulysses decides to embark on yet another journey in pursuit of a world that for ever "gleams" in the distance: "Come, my friends./'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." It is worth noting that the image of an unreachable "gleam" in the distance reappears in "Merlin and the Gleam," a poem written by Tennyson near the end of his life. The poem concludes with these lines:

O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (Macmillan 1889).

But I do not wish to overreach: I've never been fond of analyzing dreams for hidden psychological messages, nor do I wish to read too much into riddling phrases that appear from out of the realm of sleep. Still, if a message arrives from a mysterious place, we ought not to reject it out of hand.

Richard Kaiser (1868-1941), "Landscape (Werratal)" (1939)

Autumn has been making its presence felt in gentle increments since mid-August. It begins with a slight change in the angle of the light, which also takes on a deeper tinge of yellow. This is accompanied by the lengthening tree shadows, which move across the streets and paths earlier and earlier in the day.

Recently, while I was out on my daily walk, autumn moved a few steps closer: the afternoon was sunny, but there was a slight chill in the breeze that came from the west -- a just perceptible undercurrent in the stream of air. As I strolled north in the sunlight, the left side of my body was in balmy August, while the right side was in cold October.

"All I have been able to do is to walk and go on walking, remember, glimpse, forget, try again, rediscover, become absorbed. I have not bent down to inspect the ground like an entomologist or a geologist; I've merely passed by, open to impressions. I have seen those things which also pass -- more quickly or, conversely, more slowly than human life. Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed -- like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world -- I've thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world. Too much said? Better to walk on . . ."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 4. The ellipses appear in the original text. The book was published in France in 1979 under the title Paysages avec Figures Absentes.

Philippe Jaccottet is now 91 years old. He was born in Moudon, Switzerland, but he has lived in the town of Grignan in the Rhône-Alpes region of France since 1953. The prose passage quoted above is characteristic of the quiet, ruminative, and lovingly attentive beauty of Jaccottet's prose and poetry. Earlier this week, prior to the appearance of "out into the phoenix world," I read the following poem by Jaccottet, which is part of a sequence titled "To Henry Purcell":

Imagine a comet
returning centuries hence
from the kingdom of the dead,
crossing our century tonight
and sowing the same seeds . . .

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon (translator), Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998). The poem is untitled. The ellipses appear in the original text.

A comet "returning centuries hence/from the kingdom of the dead" perhaps has something in common with the phoenix, which, according to some traditions, lives 500 years, its successor then arising from its ashes. Might this be the source of "the phoenix world" of my dream remnant? There is no way of knowing. The phrase is probably nothing more than a non sequitur released from the fortune cookie of the mind.

Emanuel Baschny (1876-1932), "Village in the Sun" (1910)

At this time of year our eyes are drawn to the leaves. On a September afternoon, towards sunset, you look up at a tree and notice that the leaves of a single spray or bough have turned yellow, orange, or red. There they are, set against a backdrop of deep green. There is no doubt a scientific explanation for this phenomenon. There always is. I prefer to remain ignorant.

At the moment, a meadow that I pass by on my daily walk is full of pink-purple and purple-white sweet peas. In this part of the world, they usually bloom in July and August, and then dry out before autumn arrives. Their appearance now may be due to a spell of wet weather we had a few weeks ago. Whatever the reason, it is delightful to see them fluttering in the slanting, butter-yellow sunlight.

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed,
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fallen at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough,
Naked strength.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (Macmillan 1889).

The oak's yearly transitions from "living gold" to "summer-rich" green to "soberer-hued gold" to emptiness do not proceed in lockstep. Red leaves and blossoming sweet peas exist side-by-side. The World's beauty is in its fragments, and in their juxtapositions, ever-changing. "The flecked river,/Which kept flowing and never the same way twice." (Wallace Stevens, "This Solitude of Cataracts.") Or: "the half colors of quarter-things." (Wallace Stevens, "The Motive for Metaphor.") We do not live in an all-or-nothing World. For which we should be grateful.

We live in a World of constant change. But that change takes place within a cycle of renewal and recurrence. With the promise of an end for all that is mortal, of course. There's no getting around that. But here is something to consider: "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.4311, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).

Richard Kaiser, "Landscape in Oberbayern" (1939)

What, then, of "out into the phoenix world"? If I ever receive messages from other realms, I do not expect them to arrive in words. Thus, when I awoke in the middle of the night, I was only talking to myself. I suspect that I needed to give myself advice: "Whatever you are looking for is out there, not in here."

Weight of stones, of thoughts
Dreams and mountains
are not evenly balanced
We inhabit yet another world
Perhaps the one between

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures, page 156. The poem is untitled. It is immediately followed by this prose passage:

"This is how I once tried to capture in a poem the feeling that there must be two measures, two orders of measure; because what we experience -- pain or joy -- in a lifetime, or even in a brief moment, we clearly see as unrelated to the millions, the billions of years or miles of science. . . . This feeling of somehow escaping from, or having some essential inner resistance to what can be quantified, could perhaps be the beginning of a hope.

"Of all my uncertainties, the least uncertain (the one least removed from the first glimmers of a belief) is the one given to me by poetic experience: the thought that there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being. But I am incapable of attributing to this unknown, to that, any of the names allotted to it in turn by history."

Philippe Jaccottet, Ibid, pages 156-157. The italics appear in the original text.

Emanuel Baschny, "Before a Thunderstorm" (1913)

On a recent sunny afternoon, as I walked down an avenue of trees, the thought occurred to me: This is enough. What, you may ask, was "enough"? The ever-restless dappled light and shadow on the path before me. The equally restless interwoven leaves and blue sky above me, changing kaleidoscopically in the wind. Intermittent warbling, whistling, and clucking in the meadows and in the woods beyond the meadows. An overall sense of things-as-they-ought-to-be. A feeling of being in the presence of perfection. Yes, all of this was enough.

Majestic panoramas (mountain ranges, seascapes, cloud kingdoms) can arouse similar feelings, but an avenue of trees -- and much, much less (although I am reluctant to use the word "less" when referring to the beautiful particulars of the World) -- can provide us with more than enough upon which to build a life. Consider, for instance, reeds.

Reeds

Sounding even
more mournful
than I'd expected,
an autumn evening wind
tossing in the reed leaves

Saigyō (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 70. The poem is a waka.

Earlier this year, I noted Hilaire Belloc's suggestion in his essay "On Ely" that, in exploring the World, we have the choice of "going outwards and outwards" or of "going inwards and inwards." We may live an "extensive" life or an "intensive" life. As an example of the latter, Belloc opines that you could devote your life to the study of "the religious history of East Rutland" and never reach the end of your explorations. The same can be said of a life spent in contemplation on the beauty of reeds.

Edward Waite (1854-1924)

"The Mellow Year Is Hastening to its Close" (1896)

Belloc does not argue that an "intensive" life is preferable to an "extensive" life, or vice-versa. In fact, he points out that, whichever path we choose, we will never exhaust the possibilities of the World. However, I'm inclined to favor the "going inwards and inwards" approach.

This may simply be a reflection of my current location on the mortality timeline: I have not yet reached the banks of the River Styx, but Charon will be within hailing distance before too long (although I hope to make him wait for quite some time). Hence, exploring the manifestations of Beauty and Truth in a clump of rustling reeds seems to be a reasonable way of passing the time that remains. As opposed to, say, conquering the seven summits.

By the Pool at the Third Rosses

I heard the sighing of the reeds
In the grey pool in the green land,
The sea-wind in the long reeds sighing
Between the green hill and the sand.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
Day after day, night after night;
I heard the whirring wild ducks flying,
I saw the sea-gull's wheeling flight.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
Night after night, day after day,
And I forgot old age, and dying,
And youth that loves, and love's decay.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
At noontide and at evening,
And some old dream I had forgotten
I seemed to be remembering.

I hear the sighing of the reeds:
Is it in vain, is it in vain
That some old peace I had forgotten
Is crying to come back again?

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (Heinemann 1899). The poem was written on September 1, 1896, at Rosses Point, which is located in County Sligo, Ireland. Rosses Point, Rosses Upper, and Rosses Lower are three villages (or townlands) on a peninsula in Sligo Bay. Hence the phrase "the Third Rosses" in the title of the poem.

It is not surprising that one of my beloved wistful poets of the 1890s would be bewitched by "the sighing of the reeds": spring, summer, autumn, or winter, the whispering of the wind in the reeds is the embodiment of wistfulness. This wistfulness edges into melancholy and mournfulness in autumn and winter, as Saigyō's waka demonstrates. (When it comes to these feelings, poets such as Arthur Symons and Saigyō or Ernest Dowson and Bashō have a great deal more in common than one might imagine.)

The repetition of "I heard the sighing of the reeds" at the beginning of the first four stanzas (replicating the never-ending rustling) is lovely, as is the slight variation in the fifth and final stanza: "I hear the sighing of the reeds." Yet I am also fond of something as seemingly simple as this: "In the grey pool in the green land." As I have observed here in the past, the Nineties poets are not everyone's cup of tea, but no one does this sort of thing better than they do.

Edward Waite, "Autumn (Russett Leaves)" (1899)

On the subject of the World's beautiful and wholly sufficient particulars (an avenue of trees, a clump of reeds), one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's poetic philosophical aphorisms comes to mind: "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.44, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) (translated by C. K. Ogden). It is important to consider this statement in conjunction with the two statements which immediately follow it:

"To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole -- a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole -- it is this that is mystical."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.45, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).

The phrase "a limited whole" is not a phrase of disparagement. Rather, it is a description that makes clear that something lies beyond the limited whole. A clump of reeds soughing in the wind is part of the limited whole. Make no mistake: it is sufficient in itself. But there is something more.

The River

Stir not, whisper not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river,

Whose whispering willows,
Whose murmuring reeds
Make silence more still
Than the thought it breeds,

Until thought drops down
From the motionless mind
Like a quiet brown leaf
Without any wind;

It falls on the river
And floats with its flowing,
Unhurrying still
Past caring, past knowing.

Ask not, answer not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river.

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

"The giver of quiet" lies beyond the "limited whole." The same is true of Symons's "some old dream I had forgotten" and "some old peace I had forgotten." But we mustn't forget: in the absence of the "murmuring reeds" and "the sighing of the reeds," we would have no inkling of that something which lies beyond.

Edward Waite, "Fall of the Year"

Who, or what, is "the giver of quiet"? Wittgenstein again: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.522, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness). These thoughts by Philippe Jaccottet, which appeared in my last post, are also apt: "there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being. But I am incapable of attributing to this unknown, to that, any of the names allotted to it in turn by history." Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 157.

Which brings us back to Wittgenstein: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).

But I fear that I am leading us into the brambles of abstraction. What ultimately matters is a single clump of reeds. Swaying and sighing in the wind. In medieval Japan, in 19th century Ireland, or anywhere else at any time.

When all the reeds are swaying in the wind
How can you tell which reeds the otters bend?

Michael Longley, Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape 1998).

Edward Waite, "Autumn Colouring" (1894)

A few posts ago, I considered Matthew Arnold's use of the "Sea of Life" metaphor in his poetry. Recently, however, my thoughts have turned to a more homely image of life: a boat adrift on calm waters. I have in mind a wooden rowboat. Or perhaps, even though I am not a sailor, a small wooden sailboat.

Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.

Sami Mansei (8th century) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991).

I prefer this image to that of a three-masted Ship of Life, under full sail, cleaving the stormy waves of Time, et cetera. We all know the inevitable end of such a journey: "As a rule, everyone ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone." (Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by E. F. J. Payne), "Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Vanity of Existence,"Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2 (Oxford University Press 1974; originally published in 1851), page 284.) An oceanic circumnavigation is far too dramatic. I fancy this instead: "a boat amid the ripples, drifting, rocking." (Christina Rossetti, "Pastime.")

Frank Jowett (1879-1943), "In Mevagissey Harbour, Cornwall"

Sami Mansei's boat is "rowing out at break of day," bound for a preordained end. But it is in no hurry, and the scene is suffused with tranquility. There is a great deal to be said for idle drifting, with a bit of occasional rowing. We will arrive when we arrive.

"These men you wander around with -- none will give you any good advice. All they have are petty words, the kind that poison a man. No one understands, no one comprehends -- so who can give any help to anyone else? The clever man wears himself out, the wise man worries. But the man of no ability has nothing he seeks. He eats his fill and wanders idly about. Drifting like an unmoored boat, emptily and idly he wanders along."

Chuang Tzu (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (Columbia University Press 1968), page 354.

Be assured: Chuang Tzu is advising us that "the man of no ability" who "emptily and idly . . . wanders along" -- "drifting like an unmoored boat" -- deserves our approbation, not our condemnation. "The clever man" and "the wise man" have both got it all wrong.

July

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.

Long hours since dawn grew, -- spread, -- and passed on high
And deep below, -- I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008). Thomas wrote the poem in May of 1915. Ibid, page 235.

China in the 4th century B. C., England in 1915, or now: there is no difference.

Walter Goodin, "Bridlington Harbour, East Riding of Yorkshire" (1951)

Chuang Tzu is correct: why aspire to be clever or wise? (Besides, who in their right mind would, or could, claim to be clever or wise?) If it is serenity and contentment that we seek (I see no reason to grasp after "happiness," whatever that may be), idle drifting seems to be the proper course of action. But one mustn't equate idleness with sloth, disinterest, or ennui: it is an active state of being that requires attention, patience, receptivity, and humility. One never knows when a message may arrive.

"Lessons from the world around us: certain localities, certain moments 'incline' us towards them; there seems to be the pressure of a hand, an invisible hand, urging a change of direction (of the footsteps, the gaze, or the thoughts); the hand could also be a breath, like the breath behind leaves, clouds, sailing boats. An insinuation, in an undertone like someone whispering 'look,''listen,' or merely 'wait'. But is there still the time, the patience to wait? And is 'waiting' really the right word?"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Cherry Tree (Le Cerisier) (The Delos Press 1991), pages 13-14.

Stanhope Forbes, "The Inner Harbour: Abbey Slip" (1921)

Given the distractions of the modern world, Jaccottet asks a valid question: "But is there still the time, the patience to wait?" Popular culture, the media, and technology all urge us to pursue ephemeral chimeras at ever-increasing speeds. But each of us has it in us to step into a drifting boat at any moment and to say good-bye to all that (to borrow from Robert Graves). In my experience, this becomes easier as one ages.

Evening

When little lights in little ports come out,
Quivering down through water with the stars,
And all the fishing fleet of slender spars
Range at their moorings, veer with tide about;

When race of wind is stilled and sails are furled,
And underneath our single riding-light
The curve of black-ribbed deck gleams palely white,
And slumbrous waters pool a slumbrous world;

-- Then, and then only, have I thought how sweet
Old age might sink upon a windy youth,
Quiet beneath the riding-light of truth,
Weathered through storms, and gracious in retreat.

Vita Sackville-West, Orchard and Vineyard (John Lane 1921).

"Quiet beneath the riding-light of truth." Well, I doubt that "old age" in itself leads us to the discovery of "the riding-light of truth" (intimations or glimpses of Truth perhaps -- if we pay attention and are lucky). But, as for "gracious in retreat": that is a laudable goal, and one that may be attainable as long as we keep our wits about us.

Frank Jowett, "A Sunlight Harbour"

As one who has no wisdom, and who knows nothing, my musings on being able to idly drift on calm waters are purely aspirational. There may be moments (mere instants) when such a life seems within reach. They immediately vanish.

Yet, we wouldn't wish it otherwise, would we?

Old Crofter

The gate he built last year
hangs by its elbow from the wall.
The oar he shaped this summer
goes through the water with a swirl, a swivel.

The hammer in his great hand
pecks like fowl in the grain.
His haycocks are lopsided.
His lamp stands on the dresser, unlit.

One day the rope he has tied
will slither down the rock
and the boat drift off idly
dwindling away into the Atlantic.

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

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

It has taken me far too long to get it through my thick skull (and into my head and heart) that Keats has been right all along. But better late than never. To wit:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Poems (1820).

One comes across those lines in one's youth, and one is likely to be enraptured. I know I was. Yet (at least in my hopeless case) it takes a lifetime to feel them. Having at last reached that point, I will not brook any of the usual modern cavils: "What is 'truth'? What is 'beauty'? Everything is relative. How can we 'know' anything?" I will have none of that, thank you. Life is too short.

Thus, I will turn to flowers in a field. And stars.

Where innocent bright-eyed daisies are,
With blades of grass between,
Each daisy stands up like a star
Out of a sky of green.

Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872). The poem is untitled.

One need not limit this lovely image to daisies. The subject of the following passage is daucus carota (commonly known as wild carrot or Queen Anne's lace).

"In the shade of tall oak trees in stately array, an airy nave in which you become calmer as soon as you have stepped across the threshold -- as in a big house.
"You then see white spots slightly wavering, seemingly floating, like flecks of foam scattered here and there, and higher than the dark, vague mass of grass. At the same time, equally vaguely, because things thus seen are vague, you think of ghosts hovering in this shadowy light so favorable to uncertain, unlikely forms of life . . .
"Sparse umbels in the shadows, constellations of sorts that are more familiar, less bright, less cold and especially less fixed than those that could seemingly respond to them from above the trees once the day's beautiful veil has been drawn.
"So I have arrived on the threshold of a kind of grass sky on which seemingly hover within arm's reach -- instead of sharp single stars -- fragile little galaxies that are floating, nearly weightless, and white just like milk or like sheep's wool when it stays snagged on gorse in the Breton islands."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), from "Daucus, or Wild Carrot," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 209.

Hans Wilt, "Spring in Wienerwald" (1909)

Rossetti's stars in a sky of green and Jaccottet's galaxies hovering above the dark floor of a grove of oaks are "all ye need to know." No further comment is necessary. It would be the height of folly to say: "Rossetti's poem is lovely because . . ." Nothing can be added by saying: "Jaccottet's passage is wonderful because . . ." One of the besetting illnesses of the modern world is the compulsion to "explain" and "explicate" everything. We don't know when to leave well enough alone.

My acquaintance with the image of flowers as stars began with the following poem.

The Rambler

I do not see the hills around,
Nor mark the tints the copses wear;
I do not note the grassy ground
And constellated daisies there.

I hear not the contralto note
Of cuckoos hid on either hand,
The whirr that shakes the nighthawk's throat
When eve's brown awning hoods the land.

Some say each songster, tree, and mead --
All eloquent of love divine --
Receives their constant careful heed:
Such keen appraisement is not mine.

The tone around me that I hear,
The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,
Are those far back ones missed when near,
And now perceived too late by me!

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).

I cannot recall when I first read the poem. But the phrase "constellated daisies" has always stayed with me. In one sense it is merely a passing image that is used in service of the overall theme of the poem. But, if you spend enough time with Hardy's poems, you come to realize that small images such as these account for a great deal of the wondrousness of his poetry. Over the years, scores of them accumulate within your mind. Unexpectedly and unaccountably, they float up long after you first read them, for who knows what reason. Well, Beauty and Truth, I suppose.

Carl Stolz, "Meadow with Flowers" (1939)

A good poem (or any good work of art) brings us back to the world. It prompts us to take a fresh look at things. This fresh look encompasses both human and natural particulars. These particulars are not always lovely and cheerful -- poetry is not mere escapism -- but, in the hands of a good poet, they bring us into the presence of Beauty and Truth.

"Beauty: scattered like a seed, at the mercy of the winds, the storms, not making a sound, often lost, always destroyed; but still it blossoms haphazardly, here, there, fed by shadows, by the funereal earth, welcomed by profundity. Weightless, fragile, almost invisible, apparently without force, exposed, abandoned, surrendered, obedient -- it binds itself to what is heavy, immobile; and a flower blooms on the mountainside. It is. It persists against noise, against folly, unwavering amidst blood and malediction, in life that cannot be assumed, cannot be lived. Thus the spirit moves in spite of everything, inevitably ridiculous, unrewarded, unconvincing. . . .
"I've said it a hundred times: I am left with almost nothing; but it's like a very narrow gate through which we must pass and nothing indicates that the space beyond it is not as vast as we have imagined. It is only a matter of passing through the gate and of it not swinging shut for ever."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry for March, 1962, in Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), pages 57-59.

This prose passage is followed by an untitled poem:

Let silent grief
At least brood on this last chance
Of light.

Let this utmost misery
Harbour the chance of flowers.

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), Ibid, page 59.

Mind you, the purpose of poetry (and of art in general) is not to edify or to instruct. This is why, for instance, "political poetry" is not poetry. I return to a Buddhist piece of wisdom which has appeared here in the past: we mustn't forget that a good poem (or any good work of art) is merely a finger pointing at the moon.

Tina Blau (1845-1916), "On the Schleissheimerstrasse"

But all this talk of Beauty and Truth, Truth and Beauty, means nothing outside of the larger context: "How to Live. What to Do." (To borrow the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.) Once again, Keats is our guide.

"Call the world if you please 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it)."

John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats (February 14 - May 3, 1819), in Robert Gittings (editor), Letters of John Keats (Oxford University Press 1970), pages 249-250. A side-note: Keats wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in May of 1819, the same month in which the letter was posted. This particular passage was written sometime between April 21 and April 30, 1819.

The phrase "the vale of Soul-making" receives a great deal of attention, and rightfully so. It is a marvelous thing. But the passage that immediately follows the two sentences quoted above deserves our attention as well.

"I say 'Soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence -- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God -- how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this?"

John Keats, Ibid, page 250.

"How, but by the medium of a world like this?" Wonderful. Yet I harbor no illusions: this world contains evil, ugliness, falsity, pain, and sorrow. We experience them every day. But withal it is a world of Beauty and Truth.

A world of flowers and of stars.

Daisies

The stars are everywhere to-night,
Above, beneath me and around;
They fill the sky with powdery light
And glimmer from the night-strewn ground;
For where the folded daisies are
In every one I see a star.

And so I know that when I pass
Where no sun's shadow counts the hours
And where the sky was there is grass
And where the stars were there are flowers,
Through the long night in which I lie
Stars will be shining in my sky.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

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

Autumn simplifies things. It reminds us of that which is elemental and essential in the World, and in our life. This is good, since existence is not as fraught with complication as we think it is.

The prevailing culture tries to convince us that certain things are important, and deserve (nay, require) our attention. Nearly all of these things are of no account, and may be completely disregarded. Thus, for instance, as a native of this fair and wonderful land I am exercising my freedom by ignoring the current presidential election. I have assiduously avoided hearing even a whisper of the goings-on. Of course, I know who the two candidates are (in this day and age, some snippets of information always leak through), but why should I devote a single moment of thought or emotion to either of them?

This is not a political statement, for I have no interest in politics. Nor am I denigrating those who find the election important. I expect that some of you who are reading this are appalled at my disinterest. Please be assured that this is not a matter of me feeling superior to those citizens who participate in the process. You will have to take me on my word that I am neither supercilious nor cynical. But, for me, it is a very simple proposition: why should I let either of those people into my life in any way, shape, or form?

Look outside. The leaves are falling.

People are few;
A leaf falls here,
Falls there.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido 1952), page 364.

Earlier this week, after a two-day spell of rain, the sky cleared in the late afternoon. Cast upon the damp and dark paths, fallen leaves (brown, orange, and yellow in all their variations) glittered, lit by the declining sun.

"The small yellow acacia leaves lie on the dark earth like immobile glimmers, mute, lighted mirrors."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry for October, 1975, in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-79 (Seagull Books 2013), page 268.

John Milne Donald, "Autumn Leaves" (1863)

The haiku that appear in this post are ones that I visit each autumn. Although I have been returning to them for years, and by now know them by heart, they remain fresh. The comparison is inexact (works of art being one step removed from the particulars of the World), but the thought occurs to me: are the leaves of autumn any less brilliant, any less beautiful, because we have seen them before?

Blown from the west,
fallen leaves gather
in the east.

Buson (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass (editor), The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 91.

The grass of lawns and of fields in parks, having been browned by the summer sun, is turning green again with the arrival of the autumn rains. Palls of bright leaves are spread across deep green. Soon only the grass will remain.

"How the yellow, pink or purple leaves released suddenly, one by one, at almost regular intervals, falling silently and serenely, magnify the light. We are not capable of this."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry for November, 1978, in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-79, page 329.

Alexander Docharty, "An Autumn Day" (1917)

This past week, on two separate occasions, I watched caterpillars (one black and tan; one black) cross the path in front of me. I felt charmed and grateful for having encountered them. Moreover, they served as a reminder that I am always in need of: Pay attention!

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

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

Caterpillars and human beings: each of us in the midst of our own singular journey, crossing a brief, bright space from one dark wood to another.

Am I oversimplifying? Anthropomorphizing? Sentimentalizing? If you spend time with the haiku of the masters (Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki), you will soon become intimately acquainted with the lives and fates of fireflies, cicadas, spiders, fleas, mosquitoes, flies, caterpillars, and butterflies (to name but a few). You will come to realize that, in this existence of ours, notions of oversimplification, anthropomorphization, and sentimentality are beside the point. You will learn to banish modern irony from your life.

"Autumn trees: as if covered with yellow and white butterflies."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), notebook entry for October, 1975, in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-79, page 268.

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

From a caterpillar in autumn to a butterfly in spring. Is this what autumn's poignant mix of sadness and exhilaration is telling us?

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

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

How does one incorporate this sort of perspective into one's own life? A difficult task. But think of this, for instance: the seasons will continue to come and go long after we have returned to dust. This can be a calming realization.

The grasses of the garden,
They fall,
And lie as they fall.

Ryōkan (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 366.

Wistfulness amid beauty. Is this a unique autumn state of mind? I used to think so, but now I'm not so sure. This seems to be the way the World works. For which we should be grateful.

"This unexpected gift of a tree brightened by the low sun at the end of autumn, as when a candle is lit in a darkening room."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), from "Notes from the Ravine," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 343.

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

The wistful exhilaration of autumn is all about the passage of time, isn't it? Yes, I realize that I am stating the obvious. Moreover, you may well say: "But isn't everything about the passage of time?" You will get no argument from me.

Wistful exhilaration ought to be something we feel every day -- every moment, as a matter of fact. Consider this: "Manage all your actions and thoughts in such a manner as if you were just going to step into the grave." Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1701). This bit of advice is not morbid, nor is it intended to engender panic or a sense of impending doom. And it is not a recommendation to embark upon a course of carpe diem hedonism. Rather, it is an instance of practical and ethical Stoic wisdom: the present moment is all that each of us ever has; how do we intend to act?

The awareness of time passed and of time passing is present, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every poem that Thomas Hardy wrote. As one might expect, this is particularly true of those poems of his which are set in autumn.

The Upper Birch-Leaves

Warm yellowy-green
In the blue serene,
How they skip and sway
On this autumn day!
They cannot know
What has happened below, --
That their boughs down there
Are already quite bare,
That their own will be
When a week has passed, --
For they jig as in glee
To this very last.

But no; there lies
At times in their tune
A note that cries
What at first I fear
I did not hear:
"O we remember
At each wind's hollo --
Though life holds yet --
We go hence soon,
For 'tis November;
-- But that you follow
You may forget!"

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

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

"But that you follow/You may forget!" Hardy and Marcus Aurelius are of the same mind. Yet, we mustn't go through life thinking of time as the ticking of a clock. Life went on perfectly well for millennia in the absence of clocks. The earth's "diurnal course" and its seasonal round sufficed. Eventually, bells began sounding from steeples and towers. Music in the air. Perhaps we should have left it at that.

Clock

We had the sun, stars, shadows.
Today
In Greta's house, a box
Of numbers and wheels
And cleek-cleek, click-clock, that insect
Eating time at the wall.

George Mackay Brown, from "Seal Island Anthology, 1875," in Voyages (Chatto & Windus 1983).

"Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is." Ludwig Wittgenstein chose this as the "motto" for Philosophical Investigations. (The sentence appears in a play written by Johann Nestroy (1801-1862). A discussion of Wittgenstein's use of the quotation may be found in David Stern, "Nestroy, Augustine, and the Opening of the Philosophical Investigations," in Rudolf Haller and Klaus Puhl (editors), Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy: A Reassessment After 50 Years (2002).)

In his own words, Wittgenstein says this about progress: "Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress.' Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features." Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by Peter Winch), Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press 1980), page 7.

So, yes, clocks represent "progress." Of a sort. I am haunted by thoughts of "time-saving devices" and of "multitasking." Progress?

Empty Room

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

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

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

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

Yesterday afternoon, in the declining sunlight, I walked to the north beside a row of big-leaf maples, now emptied of leaves. Each day the sun is setting further and further into the southwest. The shadows of the bare branches of the maples stretched 50 yards or so to the northeast across a green expanse of grass. The yellow, orange, and brown leaves that had departed from the maples were strewn across the sward.

The shadows of the empty branches were covered with fallen leaves. One could imagine that the leaves had been reunited with the trees.

Autumn in King's Hintock Park

Here by the baring bough
Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
Springtime deceives, --
I, an old woman now,
Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue
Raking up leaves,
Lords' ladies pass in view,
Until one heaves
Sighs at life's russet hue,
Raking up leaves!

Just as my shape you see
Raking up leaves,
I saw, when fresh and free,
Those memory weaves
Into grey ghosts by me,
Raking up leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high --
Earth never grieves! --
Will not, when missed am I
Raking up leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).

"Earth never grieves!" This is a cry of joy, not of despair. Hence: "New leaves will dance on high." As I have noted here in the past, the thought that the seasons will continue to come and go long after each of us has turned to dust can be a comforting one -- a source of serenity.

James McIntosh Patrick, "White Poplar, Carse of Gowrie"

In this part of the world, we received a record amount of rainfall in October. It was a month of puddles. On those days when the sun briefly emerged, the puddles were a wonderful gift. Fallen leaves floated on the still water. The endless blue sky and the empty branches of trees filled the spaces between the drifting leaves. There it lay: the entire World.

It is deep midnight:
The River of Heaven
Has changed its place.

Ransetsu (1653-1707) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 366. "The River of Heaven" (ama-no-gawa) is the beautiful Japanese name for what we, in English, call "the Milky Way."

The River of Heaven turns above us. Leaves fall at our feet. Everything is in its place. The World is perfect just as it is.

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

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 413.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)

As I mentioned in a recent post, I did my best to completely ignore the presidential election. I also chose not to vote in it: I do not consider it my civic duty to cast a vote for the least unappealing candidate in a given election. So I sat this one out.

However, I have been paying attention to the reactions of those who are not happy with the result of the election. Their reactions are remarkably similar to the reactions of those who were not happy with the Brexit vote. I expressed my feelings on this subject in a post I made on June 29 titled "Humanity." Please bear with me, dear readers, but I feel compelled to restate those feelings at this time by reposting some of my thoughts:

"What concerns me is how the politicization of culture and of individual consciousness encourages people to adopt stereotypical, patronizing, and dehumanizing views of those who are on the other side of a political issue. This has been glaringly apparent in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and it has been an ongoing feature of the presidential campaign.

"Who among us is in a position to adopt such views? Do those who hold these views realize that they are in fact dehumanizing themselves in the process? They have become exactly what the politicians, political 'activists,' and media oversimplifiers and crisis-mongers want them to be: political animals."

"Being politicized leads to evaluating and judging the world and other human beings in terms of classes, categories, and clichés. Never underestimate the allure of a priori conclusions. For the politicized, everything appears to be simple and subject to explanation. Us and them. The enlightened versus the benighted.

"All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual human being or with the individual human soul."

Thus concludes the homily for the day (and my unseemly quoting of myself, for which I apologize).

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be --
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

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

Make no mistake: each of us is standing there on the sand. "There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,/A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry."

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

On the morning after Election Day, I stepped out into the garden. Birds were chirping. Squirrels were busy gathering seeds and nuts for the coming winter. The World was still here. My beautiful and wonderful country was still here. Nothing had changed.

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

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

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

This week, I returned to the following poem:

From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

What led me back to the poem? I suspect that I needed relief from the overwrought reaction (in some quarters) to the presidential election. There are those who believe the End of the World is at hand. Of course, if the other candidate had been elected, there would have been an overwrought reaction (in some quarters) from those on the other side, some of whom would have believed the End of the World was at hand.

I can see why the elderly gentleman in Coleridge's poem beckoned to me.

Alexander Sillars Burns (1911-1987), "Afternoon, Wester Ross"

Alternatively, I may have been subconsciously called back to the poem by this, which I had come across a day or so earlier:

"Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru) (Ignatius Press 2009), pages 46-47. The text of the book is based upon a lecture delivered by Pieper in Bonn in 1947.

Can one maintain "a receptive attitude of mind" if one's life is bound up with politics? I have my doubts. The reprehensible stereotyping engaged in, and the bigotry and sense of superiority displayed by, those on the losing end of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election demonstrate how a preoccupation with politics can destroy one's sense of fellow feeling and humanity. But I will leave that topic alone, having visited it in my previous post.

As for silence: the culture of politics is nothing if not noisy, isn't it? "Those who do not remain silent do not hear." Yes, exactly.

How Sordid Is This Crowded Life

How sordid is this crowded life, its spite
And envy, the unkindness brought to light:
It makes me think of those great modest hearts
That spend their quiet lives in lonely parts,
In deserts, hills and woods; and pass away
Judged by a few, or none, from day to day.
And O that I were free enough to dwell
In their great spaces for a while; until
The dream-like life of such a solitude
Has forced my tongue to cry 'Hallo!' aloud --
To make an echo from the silence give
My voice back with the knowledge that I live.

W. H. Davies, The Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (Jonathan Cape 1942).

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

Yesterday evening I was walking south beside a meadow as the sun neared the ridgeline of the Olympic Mountains. In a few minutes it would vanish. The sky overhead and to the west was clear, but grey-purple clouds, shot through with orange and pink, lay along the horizons to the south, east, and north. The deep-blue waters of Puget Sound were darkening.

I noticed a wordless calling sound -- a bleat of sorts -- coming from behind me, up in the sky. It grew louder. I soon realized that the sound was the honking of a flock of geese. I stopped and waited for them. They passed directly overhead -- three or four dozen Canadian geese in a ragged, shifting V-formation, all of them honking.

I have been hearing that sound for more than half a century. Autumn is not autumn without it. Continuity and certainty within ceaseless change.

Thoughts on T'ien-chin Bridge

The countless great lords and statesmen of past regimes --
later ages know them merely as a list of names.
Only the water under T'ien-chin Bridge
goes on year after year, making the same sound.

Shao Yung (1011-1077) (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 336.

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

I will always prefer wild geese to politicians ("a list of names"). But I shan't attempt to impose this preference on others. For me, politics is the destroyer of repose, reflection, and tranquility. I understand that others may feel differently. So it goes in this "vale of Soul-making."

"[T]here is also a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course."

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (translated by Alexander Dru), page 47.

I am not fond of the assumption of certainty that accompanies political discourse. So many utopian master plans! All of them based upon classes, categories, and caricatures. All of them chimerical. All of them leaving individual human beings and individual human souls out of account.

A Recluse

Here lies (where all at peace may be)
A lover of mere privacy.
Graces and gifts were his; now none
Will keep him from oblivion;
How well they served his hidden ends
Ask those who knew him best, his friends.

He is dead; but even among the quick
This world was never his candlestick.
He envied none; he was content
With self-inflicted banishment.
'Let your light shine!' was never his way:
What then remains but, Welladay!

And yet his very silence proved
How much he valued what he loved.
There peered from his hazed, hazel eyes
A self in solitude made wise;
As if within the heart may be
All the soul needs for company:
And, having that in safety there,
Finds its reflection everywhere.

Life's tempests must have waxed and waned:
The deep beneath at peace remained.
Full tides that silent well may be
Mark of no less profound a sea.
Age proved his blessing. It had given
The all that earth implies of heaven;
And found an old man reconciled
To die, as he had lived, a child.

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

With respect to the final two lines of the poem, it is important to remember that de la Mare considered childhood to be a charmed and magical time, the loss of which is to be regretted.

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), "Harvesting in Galloway"

The sight of a solitary bird crossing the sky is a common occurrence in Chinese poetry. These lone birds are seldom the main subject of the poem. Rather, they pass through in a single line of verse: a few brushstrokes in a larger landscape.

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 (BOA Editions 2000), page 212.

One of the distinctive (and beautiful) features of Chinese poetry, particularly poems in the chüeh-chü (quatrain) form and in the lü-shih (eight-line, regulated verse) form, is its immediacy: we share a moment in time with the poet. The World unfolds in the present tense. But this immediacy mustn't be mistaken for extemporaneous artlessness: the prosodic elements of Chinese poetry are strict and demanding.

Thus, the lü-shih form requires (1) the same number of characters per line (five or seven), (2) tonal parallelism, (3) a single rhyme (appearing at the end of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth lines), and (4) verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets of the poem. The chüeh-chü form requires (1) the same number of characters per line (five or seven), (2) tonal parallelism, and (3) a single rhyme (appearing at the end of the second and fourth lines). The rules of tonal parallelism may be generally described as follows:

"In principal they decree that a single line shall not have more than two, or at the very most three, syllables or words in succession that belong to the same tonal category, and that in the second line of a couplet the words in key positions shall be opposite in tone to the corresponding words in the first line of the couplet. This latter results in the second line of the couplet producing, in terms of tone, a mirror image of the first line."

Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 10.

These formal characteristics cannot be replicated in English translations. This is not to say that good translations cannot capture the spirit of the originals. Accomplished translators (for instance, Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, and Sam Hamill) have produced lovely versions of Chinese poems. But it is important to bear in mind that the apparent spontaneity of the poems is the product of great artistic effort.

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

The immediacy of traditional Chinese poetry causes the thousand or so years that separate us from the poets to instantly vanish. My own experience confirms this marvelous timelessness: the following poem by Tu Fu was written more than twelve centuries ago, but I see essentially the same scene each autumn when, in the early evening, I look across the waters of Puget Sound to the Olympic Mountains rising in the west.

Watching the Distances

I watch the limitless distance of autumn,
the far-off dark rising up in layers

where icy waters merge with the frozen sky
and the city is blurred with mist.

Last leaves are torn into flight by winds,
and sunless, distant peaks fade fast.

A lone crane flops home at dusk.
The trees are full of crows.

Tu Fu (712-770) (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 140.

A single difference distinguishes Tu Fu's 8th century China from 21st century Seattle: Tu Fu sees a lone crane flying home at dusk; I see a lone great blue heron flying at dusk towards its nest high in a cedar. And, yes, there are often crows in the trees.

"He who sees things present, has seen all things which either have been from eternity, or shall be to eternity; for all are of the like nature, and similar."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, Section 37, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).

Here is a lovely alternative translation of the same passage:

"He that has taken a view of the present age, has seen as much as if he had began with the World, and gone to the end on't; for all things are of a kind, and of a colour."

Jeremy Collier (translator), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus: His Conversation with Himself (1701).

John Haswell (1855-1925), "Whitnash Church"

I am not suggesting that this quality of immediacy is unique to Chinese poetry. It is found in many good English poems. ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,""Lying Awake" (Thomas Hardy), and "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" come immediately to mind, but there are hundreds of others.) And immediacy is arguably the defining feature of haiku: existence and the World embodied in a singular image -- a 17-syllable moment of enlightenment rendered in the present tense. Still, there is a certain serene matter-of-factness underlaid with deep emotion in Chinese poetry that, for me at least, sets it apart from all other forms of verse.

Watching a Lonely Wild Goose at Nightfall

There are few stars north of the Milky Way.
One wild goose calls, "Where am I going?"

If he'd known he'd lose his flock,
he would have begun his journey alone.

Hsiao Kang (503-551) (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 62.

Wild geese, like lone birds, appear frequently in Chinese poetry. As one might expect, they tend to bring a sense of longing and wistfulness into a poem (all of that endless journeying). But we should resist the temptation to turn them into "symbols,""metaphors," or "allegories." They are there because they are there: a part of the World. Yet every part of the World, wherever and whenever it appears, means something, doesn't it?

Allan Gwynne-Jones, "Spring Evening, Froxfield" (1922)

The World is by turns breathtakingly immense and breathtakingly tiny. So it is with our life. One afternoon last week I looked up into the sky: yellow-bordered white clouds, lit from behind by the setting sun, set against endless pale-blue; clouds and sky seen through the black, twisted, empty branches of a row of tall maples. I suddenly felt a comforting, welcoming, reassuring immensity. This was not something I put into words; I felt it.

Night Thoughts While Traveling

Thin grass bends on the breezy shore,
and the tall mast seems lonely in my boat.

Stars ride low across the wide plain,
and the moon is tossed by the Yangtze.

What is fame and literary status --
the old and infirm should leave office.

Adrift, drifting: what is left for the lone gull
adrift between earth and heaven.

Tu Fu (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 166.

One day this week, as I walked down a wide path within a wood, I noticed the leaves of several types of trees spread out on the ground before me. The leaves did not lay in piles. Instead, they had landed apart on the path, several inches of empty space between each of them. They separately gleamed on the ground in the dim light of dusk. I thought of them as planets and stars in a small universe. Unique and irreplaceable, each of them.

A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;
stark mast, a lone night boat:
stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;
the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.
Fame -- how can my writings win me that?
Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.
Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?
Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, page 233.

Charles Dawson, "Accrington from My Window" (1932)

I often walk past a small meadow of wild grasses that ends in a forest of evergreens and deciduous trees. At this time of year, it is a tawny, brown, and russet world, save for the dark green pines and cedars in the distance, rising above the bare branches of the other trees.

On a grey and windless day, the meadow appears to be lifeless. Everything has come to an end. Or so it would seem. One afternoon this past week I stood beside the still and silent grasses, beneath a dull sky, and entertained just such thoughts. Then, suddenly, I realized how wrong I was: I felt all at once the vitality that emanated from the meadow, and from everything around me.

Yet, we must give the seasons, and the feelings they evoke in us, their due. The late autumn emotions that I felt on the edge of the meadow are to be expected. "The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing." (Robert Frost, "The Oven Bird.") Diminished, yes, but not dead.

A Dirge

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo's calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples' dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1875).

Herbert Hughes-Stanton (1870-1937), "The Mill in the Valley" (1892)

I am not given to imagining that the beautiful particulars of the World are whispering in my ear. Still, the seemingly lifeless end-of-autumn meadow that I stood beside was neither reticent nor impassive. They did not occur to me at the time, but two thoughts now come to mind. "One feels the life of that which gives life as it is." (Wallace Stevens, "The Course of a Particular.") "The infinite is the breath that animates us." (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), page 37.)

And there is this: "Days are where we live." (Philip Larkin, "Days.") Seasons are where we live as well. No wonder that each of us is likely to have a particular season (or a short passage within a season) that quickens our senses and our emotions.

But it is difficult to choose, isn't it? I have observed here in the past that I would be willing to spend eternity lying on the grass beneath a tree in midsummer, looking up at the ever-changing kaleidoscope of blue, green, and yellow overhead, listening to the never-ending rustling of leaves. But I can also imagine spending a perfectly acceptable eternity lying beneath the same tree in spring, autumn, or winter.

Let me die in spring
under the blossoming trees,
let it be around
that full moon
of Kisaragi month.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 40.

Watson appends this note to the poem:

"Kisaragi is the Japanese name for the second month of the lunar year. Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have died on the fifteenth day of the second month. Saigyō fulfilled the wish expressed in his poem in a striking manner by dying on the sixteenth day of the second month of 1190, a feat that greatly impressed the people of his time, who were familiar with this poem."

Burton Watson, Ibid, page 40.

Here is an alternative translation of the poem:

This is what I want:
to die in the springtime,
beneath the blossoms --
midway through the Second Month,
when the moon is at the full.

Saigyō (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 165.

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

I am an extremely slow learner. Thus, as I begin my daily afternoon walk, I often caution myself: "Look, but don't look for anything." This is a corollary to another important principle: "Don't think." (As I have stated here on more than one occasion: thinking is highly overrated.) Of course, I invariably fail to heed both of these internal admonitions.

We require only two things as we set off into the World: receptivity and gratitude. We are reminded of this on a daily basis by the seasons, whose losses are always accompanied by compensations. Each year I am saddened as the last of the leaves disappear from the trees in autumn. But, when I see the bare branches against the winter sky, I realize that I have lost nothing.

Elegy

We carved our names
in a courtyard near the river

when you were the youngest
of all our guests.

But you will never see
bright spring again,

or the beautiful apricot
blossoms that flutter past

the open temple door.

Chang Chi (768-830) (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000), page 177.

Losses and compensations. Do they balance each other out?

In Obitum M S, X° Maij, 1614

May! Be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,
Nor Flora's pride!
In thee all flowers and roses spring,
Mine only died.

William Browne of Tavistock (c. 1591-c. 1645), in Gordon Goodwin (editor), The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock, Volume II (Lawrence & Bullen 1894), page 289.

I am not in a position to second-guess William Browne's grief at his loss. But I do think of compensations. "The beautiful apricot blossoms that flutter past the open temple door."

Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "Mons" (1918)

In early June of 1801, Kobayashi Issa returned to his birthplace, the mountain village of Kashiwabara (in modern-day Nagano Prefecture), to care for his ailing father, who died less than a month later. During this time, Issa maintained a journal, to which he gave the title Chichi no Shūen Nikki ("Journal of My Father's Last Days"). He gives this account of his father's death on a July morning:

"The night moved brightly into dawn, and about six o'clock, as though he had fallen into a deep sleep, Father breathed his last.

"I took hold of his empty, pitiful body. Would that this was all a dream from which I might soon awake! But dream or reality, I felt as though I was wandering in darkness without a lamp, on this cold dawn in this fleeting world.

"The impermanent spring flowers are seduced and scattered by the wind; this ignorant world's autumn moon is surrounded and hidden by clouds. The world knows -- need I repeat it? --, 'That which lives must perish; that which is joined together will certainly fall apart.' And although this is the road that all must travel eventually, I was foolish enough not to believe that my own father could go as soon as yesterday or today."

Issa (translated by Robert Huey), in Robert Huey, "Journal of My Father's Last Days: Issa's Chichi no Shūen Nikki,"Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 39, Number 1 (Spring 1984), pages 49-50.

Issa concludes the journal with this haiku:

If Father were here,
We'd be looking out at dawn
Across these wide green hills.

Issa (translated by Robert Huey), Ibid, page 54.

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

One sunny afternoon this past summer, as I walked beneath a big-leaf maple, I was struck by the thought that we live in a World in which everything is in motion. The thought was prompted by the sight of the leaves of the tree moving in the breeze. Not the swaying of the boughs, not the rustling of sprays of leaves. What I saw -- for only an instant -- was each of the thousands of leaves fluttering in the wind.

What took me aback was a sudden recognition that each of the leaves was unique and uniquely alive. It is easy to say: The leaves fluttered. But such a statement omits a great deal.

The stars on the pond;
Again the winter shower
Ruffles the water.

Sora (1648-1710) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 223.

Stars and leaves. Ever in motion. Uncountable. But each one sovereign and irreplaceable.

Patrick Symons, "Oak Arch Grey (Wimbledon Common)" (1981)

One thing always leads to another in the World in which we live. From leaves to stars to winter showers to the ruffling water of a pond to . . .

Distances

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

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

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

The Chinese character for "heart" is xin. The same character is used in the Japanese language, and is known as kokoro. As I have noted here in the past, the character is a wonderful one: in both Chinese and Japanese it can mean "heart," but it can also mean "mind." It can also carry connotations of "spirit,""soul," or "core." (For an interesting discussion of the various manifestations of xin in the Chinese language and in the culture of China, please see Jing Li, Christer Ericsson, and Mikael Quennerstedt, "The Meaning of the Chinese Cultural Keyword Xin,"Journal of Languages and Culture, Volume 4, Number 5 (2013).)

In Jaccottet's poem, it is "the heart" that "flies from tree to bird,/from bird to distant star,/from star to love." This is a lovely thought. But it becomes even lovelier when one thinks of xin and kokoro: it is an indivisible compound of heart, soul, spirit, and mind that flies from leaf to star to bird to . . .

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

The motion of the World is a motion of imminence, immanence, and emanation. It is a motion of the present moment. It has nothing to do with change or transformation. Our human mortality does not enter into it. In fact, human beings do not enter into it. We are ever prone to analyze, categorize, and explain the World in terms of ourselves. But the World can get along quite well without us, thank you.

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions; as the ponderous
Deflations of distance; or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf 1923).

Of course, we humans are here. I do not deny that. But our first duty to the World is to leave well enough alone.

The World is aquiver. This is what I belatedly discovered on that summer afternoon when, in my usual slow-witted fashion, I at long last noticed the singularity of each leaf's movement in the wind.

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

Wallace Stevens, Ibid.

Stephen McKenna, "Foliage" (1983)

I do not make New Year's resolutions. Instead, on New Year's Eve I have gotten in the habit of reading the following two haiku.

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, page 202. In Japan, the bells of Buddhist temples are rung 108 times at the turning of the year as a reminder of the 108 sins and desires that we should seek to rid ourselves of.

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

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 290.

A small field, yes, but inexhaustible. More than enough beauty for one lifetime.

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

I have spent a fair portion of the new year in the 17th century. My sojourn began when I returned to one of my favorite anthologies: Norman Ault's Seventeenth Century Lyrics. Browsing through it, I came upon this:

The Retreat

Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back, at that short space
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A sev'ral sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
Oh, how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence the enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm trees;
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), in Norman Ault (editor), Seventeenth Century Lyrics (William Sloane Second Edition, 1950); originally published in Silex Scintillans, Part I (1650).

"Sev'ral" (line 18) means "individual,""different," or "separate and distinct." Robert Herrick uses the word in this sense in his lovely two-line poem "Dreams": "Here we are all, by day; by night we're hurl'd/By dreams, each one, into a sev'ral world." "Stay" (line 27) means "delay" in this context.

"Bright shoots of everlastingness" is wonderful, and is not likely to be forgotten once encountered. "A white, celestial thought" is lovely. But I am also fond of: "Some men a forward motion love,/But I by backward steps would move." Wise counsel, I think.

Not surprisingly, "The Retreat" puts many in mind of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." For a time (particularly in the 19th century), it was believed that Wordsworth had been directly influenced by "The Retreat," as well as by other poems by Vaughan with a similar theme. However, this conclusion is questionable. Still, even though there may not be a direct influence at work, the similarity of feeling and thought in the two poets is at times remarkable. (For an interesting discussion of this topic, please see Helen McMaster, "Vaughan and Wordsworth,"The Review of English Studies, Volume 11, Number 43 (1935), pages 313-325.)

Roland Pitchforth (1895-1982), "Bainbridge" (1928)

After reading "The Retreat," the following poem by Thomas Traherne, another 17th century poet, came to mind. It has appeared here before, but it is always worth a revisit.

The Salutation

These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
This panting heart wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye been? Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my new-made tongue?

When silent I
So many thousand thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I, smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears, perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

I that so long
Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Such eyes and objects, on the ground to meet.

New burnished joys
Which finest gold and pearl excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs of boys,
In which a soul doth dwell:
Their organizëd joints and azure veins
More wealth include than the dead world contains.

From dust I rise,
And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes
A gift from God I take:
The earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,
The sun and stars are mine; if these I prize.

A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glory see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me:
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), in H. I. Bell (editor), Traherne's Poems of Felicity (University of Oxford Press 1910).

In contrast with Vaughan's backward-glancing soul, Traherne's blithe soul is content -- nay, delighted -- to be abroad in the World. But then, Traherne is writing from the perspective of childhood, in the absence of experience. Traherne's use of "strange" (as well as of "stranger" and "strangest") in the final stanza is lovely. I am reminded of Vaughan's quotation, in one of his prose works (a translation of Johannes Nierembergius), of an unnamed "divine": "Excellent is that advice of the divine: To live a stranger unto life." Henry Vaughan, Flores Solitudinis (1654).

Reading "The Salutation" and "The Retreat," I am compelled to report, dear readers, that the 17th century is a nobler, more gracious and graceful, and altogether more civilized place than the world we inhabit today. Yes, I know: those moderns who believe in the gods of Progress, Science, and political and social utopianism will howl in disagreement. They will say: "For centuries, humanity has been ridding itself of its ignorant and superstitious ways. We in the modern world have arrived at the apex of human progress and enlightenment." Well, no.

Roland Pitchforth, "Hebden, Yorkshire"

At this point, with the soul's wayfaring under consideration, I can hear two of my beloved poets of the fin de siècle calling to me. Hence, please bear with me as we spend a brief idyll (a wistful and melancholic idyll, I concede) in the 1890s.

The Soul's Progress

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

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

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (Macmillan 1889).

Yes, the poets of the Nineties had a different view of things than Vaughan, Traherne, and the other poets of the 17th century. Although melancholy is not absent from 17th century poetry, the fin de siècle poets made an art of evoking and cataloguing it. As I have stated here on more than one occasion, I am not ashamed to say that I am quite willing to surrender myself to them.

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, Verses (Leonard Smithers 1896). The title of the poem is taken from Book I, Ode 1, of Horace's Odes. It 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) (Birmingham University Press 2003), page 225.

The correspondences between the two poems are wonderful. Ah, the fate of the soul! In Symons's view, "there lies/A mist behind it and a mist before," and, in time, "naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,/It staggers out into eternity." ("Into the darker mist," mind you.) Dowson takes (perhaps) a marginally more hopeful view of the soul's journey: "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

But, for all of the differences between Symons and Vaughan, Dowson and Traherne, we mustn't forget this: for each of them the soul is real, and we owe it our attention.

Roland Pitchforth, "Burnsall" (1925)

In our time, the word "soul" is viewed in much the same way as the word "evil": both words make most moderns nervous. Not me. This is one of the reasons why the 17th century seems congenial to me, as does the fin de siècle world of Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. Vaughan, Traherne, Symons, and Dowson can speak of the soul without doubt and without irony. Why should it be otherwise?

There was a time when a person could as a matter of course address his or her own soul. This was not necessarily a product of religious fervor, nor was it a sign of madness. It was simply the way of the world.

For instance, the Emperor Hadrian (76-138) did so in what is purported to be his death-bed poem, which begins with the phrase animula vagula blandula. John Donne, another poet of the 17th century, translated the opening two lines of Hadrian's poem as follows:

My little wandering sportful soul,
Guest and companion of my body.

John Donne, in E. K. Chambers (editor), The Poems of John Donne (Lawrence and Bullen 1896).

Henry Vaughan translated the entire poem:

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The guest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor jests wilt thou afford me more.

Henry Vaughan, The Mount of Olives: Or, Solitary Devotions (1652).

We live in an age of technological miracles. But a great deal of what it means to be human has gone missing.

Roland Pitchforth, "Cottage, Bainbridge" (1928)

Given the mystery of our own souls, we ought to be respectful of the souls of the strangers who share our time on earth. Hence, a poet takes a risk when he or she presents us with a portrait of one of those strangers. The dangers of presumption, condescension, oversimplification, and caricature are obvious. Yet, if done with sensitivity and empathy, such portraits can tell us something about our own soul and the souls of our fellows, all wandering and unknowable, all with much in common.

Tinker's Wife

I saw her amid the dunghill debris
Looking for things
Such as an old pair of shoes or gaiters.
She was a young woman,
A tinker's wife.
Her face had streaks of care
Like wires across it,
But she was supple
As a young goat
On a windy hill.

She searched on the dunghill debris,
Tripping gingerly
Over tin canisters
And sharp-broken
Dinner plates.

Patrick Kavanagh, Ploughman and Other Poems (Macmillan 1936).

In "Tinker's Wife," Kavanagh tells us what he has seen. Some of us will find the poem to be sensitive and empathetic. I do. Others, particularly thoroughly ironic moderns, may feel that Kavanagh has moved past empathy into pity, and past sensitivity into sentimentality. This is of no moment to me, for I have no objection to either pity or sentimentality, if they are grounded in a feeling of kinship with the souls in whose company we are passing through life.

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

The utopian, inhuman worlds of politics and social science are concerned with groups and categories, not with individual human beings. Thus, many of those who are unhappy with the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election have reacted in a way that reveals a great deal (none of it good) about how they view their fellow human beings: they see caricatures and stereotypes, not individual souls. What the unhappy fail to realize is that, by objectifying others, they are at the same time objectifying themselves, and have in turn transformed themselves into caricatures and stereotypes. This is what happens when one becomes politicized.

Good poets and artists, on the other hand, are concerned with individual human souls. Which is not to say that they are saviors or saints. Nor are they out to edify us. Rather, they simply ask us to look at the beautiful particulars of the World. Those particulars may at times cause us to catch our breath in sadness and, yes, in pity. But this is life, not theory.

A Stranger

Her face was like sad things: was like the lights
Of a great city, seen from far off fields,
Or seen from sea: sad things, as are the fires
Lit in a land of furnaces by night:
Sad things, as are the reaches of a stream
Flowing beneath a golden moon alone.
And her clear voice, full of remembrances,
Came like faint music down the distant air.
As though she had a spirit of dead joy
About her, looked the sorrow of her ways:
If light there be, the dark hills are to climb
First: and if calm, far over the long sea.
Fallen from all the world apart she seemed,
Into a silence and a memory.
What had the thin hands done, that now they strained
Together in such passion? And those eyes,
What saw they long ago, that now they dreamed
Along the busy streets, blind but to dreams?
Her white lips mocked the world, and all therein:
She had known more than this; she wanted not
This, who had known the past so great a thing.
Moving about our ways, herself she moved
In things done, years remembered, places gone.
Lonely, amid the living crowds, as dead,
She walked with wonderful and sad regard:
With us, her passing image: but herself
Far over the dark hills and the long sea.

Lionel Johnson, Ireland, with Other Poems (Elkin Mathews 1897).

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (1952)

I am fond of robins. I grow even fonder of them in winter, when they gather together in flocks. I was delighted this past week when, on a sunny afternoon, I saw a large group of them (50 or so) spread out over a newly-mown meadow. They were a companionable lot, chirping and clucking their leisurely way across the green field in the golden light. A few sparrows had worked their way into the strolling congregation. The robins had no objection.

I was once again reminded: we never know what the World will bestow upon us. With that in mind, we should be attentive, receptive, and -- above all -- grateful for the abiding mystery of it all.

Commuter

Deaf and dumb lovers in a misty dawn
On an open station platform in the Dordogne
Watched each other's hands and faces,
Making shapes with their fingers, tapping their palms
Then stopped and smiled and threw themselves
Open-mouthed into each other's arms

While the rest of us waited, standing beside our cases.
When it arrived she left him and climbed on the train
Her face like dawn because of their conversation.
She suddenly turned, grabbed his neck in the crook of her arm,
Gave him the bones of her head, the bones of her body, violently,
Then climbed on again alone. Her face hardened
In seconds as the train moved away from her island.
Tight lipped she looked around for a seat on the sea.

P. J. Kavanagh, Edward Thomas in Heaven (Chatto & Windus 1974).

Stanhope Forbes, "The Harbour Window" (1910)

At the beginning of 1694, the final year of his life, Bashō was living in Tokyo (then known as Edo). His health was poor. In April of the previous year, his beloved nephew Tōin, who Bashō had taken into his home and cared for, had died of tuberculosis. In the same year, he had "begun to look after a woman named Jutei and her three children, although, except for one of the children, they lived separately from him. Surviving records are vague on Jutei's identity, but they suggest Bashō had had some kind of close relationship with her in his young days. Her children, however, do not seem to have been fathered by Bashō." Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 348.

Sensing that his death was approaching, on June 3, 1694, Bashō set off on a journey to Ueno (his hometown), which is located approximately 350 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. He intended to see his relatives and friends for the last time. He arrived on June 20. Late in July, while still in Ueno, he learned that Jutei had died suddenly in Tokyo. Bashō never returned to Tokyo. He died in Osaka on November 28.

At the news of the nun Jutei's death

never think of yourself
as someone who did not count --
festival of the souls

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), Ibid, page 393.

The Japanese word for "festival of the souls" is tamamatsuri. "Tamamatsuri, more commonly known as urabon (the bon festival), is an annual Buddhist rite at which each family offers prayers to the souls of its ancestors. In Bashō's time it was held for four days, beginning on the thirteenth of the lunar seventh month. In 1694, that day was September 2."Ibid, page 393.

What a beautiful thing Bashō has given us. I hesitate to say anything more, but these lines just came to mind:

There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

W. B. Yeats, "Paudeen,"Responsibilities and Other Poems (Macmillan 1916).

Stanley Spencer, "The Roundabout" (1923)

On the subject of beauty, this is as good a place as any to begin:

"A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), from "Blazon in Green and White" ("Blason Vert et Blanc"), in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 53.

On a late afternoon this past week I walked between two meadows. The meadow on my left, the parade ground of a former army post, was open and expansive. It has been mown recently, and the winter rains have turned it deep green. On my right, a broad field of brown and gray wild grasses sloped down to the bluffs above Puget Sound.

The afternoon was windless and quiet. The declining sun was hidden behind a flat layer of motionless grey clouds out over the Sound, stretching away to the Olympic Mountains in the west. Throughout my walk, my eyes kept returning to a glowing patch of pale yellow in the center of the cloud blanket, above, and dimly reflected in, the dark water below.

As I gazed at the patch yet again, I suddenly heard behind and above me a tiny creaking of wings. A dozen or so sparrows soon flew over me with the sound of a soft rush of wind. And those lovely creaking wings. I lost sight of the sparrows as they disappeared into the woods up ahead.

Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph --
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

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

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

A sparrow flying overhead is entirely and exactly what it is: a sparrow flying overhead. And yet . . .

"It is possible that beauty is born when the finite and the infinite become visible at the same time, that is to say, when we see forms but recognize that they do not express everything, that they do not stand only for themselves, that they leave room for the intangible."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Tess Lewis), in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), page 38.

One needn't be a mystic or an eremite in order to sense that we live in a World of immanence: that, although each of the particulars of the World is wholly sufficient in and of itself, each of those particulars contains a hint of something that lies behind it and beyond it. Something "intangible," to use Jaccottet's word. Those who have been thoroughly modernized are wont to grow nervous at talk of a World of immanence. This is perfectly fine. I am not out to convert anyone to my sense of the World. We each feel what we feel, and there is no accounting for it.

The One

Green, blue, yellow and red --
God is down in the swamps and marshes,
Sensational as April and almost incred-
ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked;
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris -- but mostly anonymous performers,
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (Longmans 1960).

Malcolm Midwood Milne, "Barrow Hill" (1939)

Patrick Kavanagh tells us that "God is down in the swamps and marshes." Any talk of immanence tends to provoke our human tendency to put a name to things. Speaking solely for myself, I do not find this necessary. However, I have no objection whatsoever to Kavanagh (or anybody else) finding God in "a cut-away bog." I think it is a beautiful thought, and it is entirely plausible.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

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

Hopkins's vision of immanence is an ecstatic vision, and this is reflected in the extravagance of his language. So unique is his vision that he felt compelled to invent the terms "inscape" and "instress" to articulate his sense of immanence. "Inscape" may be described as "the 'individually-distinctive' inner essence or 'pattern' of a thing (an object, whether a tree, a flower, or a sonnet; a person; a scene)." Lesley Higgins (editor), The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks (Oxford University Press 2015), page 1, footnote 1 (quoting Hopkins). "Instress" is "the force emanating from or expressed by the object, which the sensitive viewer can apprehend." Ibid. (For an introduction to the concepts of "inscape" and "instress," please see W. H. Gardner, "Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Inscape,"Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Number 33 (October 1969), pages 1-16.)

With "inscape" and "instress" in mind, lines such as "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/Deals out that being indoors each one dwells,""Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells," and "Crying What I do is me: for that I came" become less obscure. But Hopkins's vision of immanence is perhaps best expressed in "Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces" and "Christ plays in ten thousand places." With respect to the phrase "ten thousand places," it is worth noting that the formulation "the ten thousand things" is used in Buddhism and Taoism to describe the variousness of the World, and is often found in Chinese and Japanese poetry. Hopkins's Christ of "ten thousand places" is, of course, Catholic (Jesuitical, and seasoned with the thoughts of Duns Scotus and of the Greek philosophers). Yet, as I suggested above, a World of immanence transcends both the names we place on things and our human systems of thought.

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

Any hint of immanence is a matter of the passing moment: evanescent, and vanishing even as we sense it.

"All I have been able to do is to walk and go on walking, remember, glimpse, forget, try again, rediscover, become absorbed. I have not bent down to inspect the ground like an entomologist or a geologist; I've merely passed by, open to impressions. I have seen those things which also pass -- more quickly or, conversely, more slowly than human life. Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed -- like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world -- I've thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world. Too much said? Better to walk on . . ."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Paysages avec Figures Absentes) (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 4. The ellipses appear in the original text.

How could it be otherwise? Why would we want it otherwise? This is how we receive our gifts.

First Known When Lost

I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone, -- the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.

It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,

And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel make some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary, rises there.

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

James Torrington Bell, "Braes of Downie" (1938)

A certain segment of the American population has worked itself into quite a tizzy over our new political state of affairs. How can I tell? The old standby clichés are being paraded on a daily basis. "Hitler"! "Nazi"! "Fascism"! And we mustn't forget: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"! "Orwellian"! (Because this is high volume outrage, exclamation marks are mandatory.)

Words such as these empty our culture of all reason and reasonableness. I am tempted to embark upon a rant at this point, but I have no desire to add to the clamor. Instead, the words of Marcus Aurelius come to mind:

"Say thus to thyself every morning: today I may have to do with some intermeddler in other men's affairs, with an ungrateful man; an insolent, or a crafty, or an envious, or an unsociable selfish man. These bad qualities have befallen them through their ignorance of what things are truly good or evil. But I have fully comprehended the nature of good, as only what is beautiful and honourable; and of evil, that it is always deformed and shameful; and the nature of those persons too who mistake their aim; that they are my kinsmen, by partaking, not of the same blood or seed, but of the same intelligent divine part; and that I cannot be hurt by any of them, since none of them can involve me in anything dishonourable or deformed.

"I cannot be angry at my kinsmen, or hate them. We were formed by nature for mutual assistance, as the two feet, the hands, the eyelids, the upper and lower rows of teeth. Opposition to each other is contrary to nature: All anger and aversion is an opposition."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II, Section 1, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742), pages 62-63.

Our time here is short. Were we placed here to repeat meaningless clichés?

Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.

Sami Mansei (early 8th century) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 51.

William Ratcliffe, "Cottage Interior" (1920)

Please do not read any political partisanship into these thoughts, dear reader. As I mentioned in my post of November 11, I did not vote in the presidential election. Moreover, as I have stated here on more than one occasion, this is not a political blog. But I have often commented on the destruction of the human by the politicization of people's lives. Hence: the shouting of contentless clichés in the streets and through the electronic air.

A thought by Epictetus:

"That which gives men disquiet, and makes their lives miserable, is not the nature of things as they really are, but the notions and opinions which they form to themselves concerning them."

Epictetus, The Enchiridion, Section 5, in George Stanhope (translator), Epictetus, His Morals, with Simplicius, His Comment (Fifth Edition, 1741), page 60.

The politicization of culture and of human beings involves the creation of competing fictitious versions of reality. This contrived way of viewing the world persuades the politicized that their lives are defined, even validated, by the political beliefs they espouse. In a politicized world of empty words, where does the individual human soul fit in? It doesn't.

One cannot be sure of living
even until the evening.

In the dim dawn light
I watch the waves in the wake
of a departing boat.

Shinkei (1406-1475) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, page 291.

Anthony Eyton, "A Kitchen Range" (1984)

As I have noted here in the past, I am quite content to live my life in accordance with certain truisms. Why? Because they are true. Here is a truism by which I try to live (failing every day): The best way to effect change is through individual acts of kindness and decency.

"Spend your time no longer in discoursing on what are the qualities of the good man, but in actually being such."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book X, Section 16, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, page 243.

Most of us know these things. Human beings have known them for millennia. But we are diverted by trifles. The identity of the President of the United States is a trifle, as is the identity of the Prime Minister of X, the Premier of Y, and the Emperor of Z. Another truism: Life is too short for trifles of this sort.

Over waves now at peace --
a boat seen rowing away.

Sōgi (1421-1502) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, page 318.

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

Earlier this week I saw the first crocuses of the year: white and purple (three white inner petals; three pale purple outer petals) set within deep green leaves. Daffodil stalks have begun to emerge from the earth, and the furred buds on the tips of the magnolia branches are growing larger.

All of this activity takes place within the low-angled golden sunlight of late February and early March, the counterpart of the slanting sunlight of late August and early September. The light of Paradise. A World aglow, in which all colors take on deeper and richer hues. This is particularly true of the meadows and the lawns, which are heartbreakingly and wistfully green.

For now, I am here,
but can one trust the future?
No, not in a world
that teaches us its ways
with the morning glory.

Izumi Shikibu (c. 970 - c. 1030) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 120.

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

The joy of arrival and the sadness of departure. At all times, and in every season, this is what the World teaches us. It is the story of our life, isn't it?

Each spring, I am delighted to come upon the first crocuses. Implicit in this delight (but unstated) is the knowledge that this arrival betokens an eventual departure. But seeing the crocuses is never an occasion for sinking into a melancholy meditation on mortality. Quite the opposite.

And so it goes with each of the beautiful particulars of the World.

Betty Corrigall lived on the island of Hoy in Orkney in the 18th century. When she was in her late twenties, she was abandoned by her lover after becoming pregnant. She committed suicide. Given the circumstances of her death, a kirkyard burial was not permitted. She was buried in an unmarked grave out on the moor. In the early 1930s, her coffin was discovered by peat diggers. In 1949, a visiting American minister performed a burial service for her. A white marker was placed on her grave in 1976. It reads: "Here Lies Betty Corrigall."

George Mackay Brown wrote a short story about her, an imaginative rendering of the final months of her life. The story begins with an introductory paragraph:

"In the moorland of the island of Hoy in Orkney, right on the boundary that separates the two parishes of Voes (Walls) and North Hoy, a gravestone and fence have recently been erected by some islanders. Underneath lay, peat-preserved for well over a century, the body of a young woman who had obviously committed suicide. Only her name survives: Betty Corrigall."

George Mackay Brown, "Betty Corrigall", in Northern Lights: A Poet's Sources (edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray) (John Murray 1999), page 225.

Brown also wrote a poem about her.

Betty Corrigall

The girl buried in the moor

Child
in the blue scarf of wind
begin to dance

Girl
in the yellow coat of sun
ripeness is here

Woman
in the gray sheet of water
steep your griefs

Queen
lie robed from looms of earth
Persephone

George Mackay Brown, Ibid, page 231.

It is said that Betty Corrigall's body, having been interred in peat, was well-preserved when it was discovered. "And while that generation of islanders withered slowly into death, one after another, and after death rotted more urgently until they achieved the cleanness of skeletons, the deep peat moss kept the body of Betty Corrigall uncorrupted; though stained and darkened with the essences that had preserved it." George Mackay Brown, "Betty Corrigall,"Ibid, page 230. Persephone in Orkney: queen of the underworld and goddess of spring.

Stanley Cursiter (1887-1976), "Orkney Landscape" (1952)

Yesterday afternoon I stood at the entrance to an avenue of trees. The two rows of trees are bare, but beautiful, at this time of year: an endlessly complex network of branches, not a twig out of place, set against the sky. For a moment, I brought to mind how the avenue looks in each of the seasons, and I imagined that I could see an entire year of branches and leaves pass in sequence before my eyes.

We are time-bound, but it is possible to experience timelessness and eternity. "They will endure beyond our vanishing;/And they will never know that we have gone." (Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Stephen Kessler), "Things.") I find comfort in that thought.

The Ring of Brodgar is a stone circle located on the Mainland of Orkney. George Mackay Brown wrote a sequence titled "Brodgar Poems," which consists of 28 short poems, each bearing the number of one of the standing stones in the circle. The sequence begins with a prose introduction:

"The poem sees the work on this Neolithic stone circle as lasting two or three generations at least. 'She who threw marigolds over you . . . is a crone now with cindery breath . . .'

"It may have been a meeting-place, a temple, a hymn to the sun and the stars.

"Even as a civilisation is being established, its history is beginning to crumble. Strange boats from time to time sailed along the horizon, going north and west, threatening the precarious settlements.

"But a circle has no beginning or end. The symbol holds. People in AD 2000 are essentially the same as the stone-breakers and horizon-breakers of 3000 BC."

George Mackay Brown, from "Brodgar Poems" (1992), in Archie Bevan and Brian Murray (editors), The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (John Murray 2005).

"A circle has no beginning or end." We can be acutely -- and heartbreakingly -- aware of the arrival and departure of the World's beautiful particulars, yet still feel a sense of constancy and continuity. Is it possible that nothing ever truly vanishes?

The Eleventh Stone

They say, never such loveliness between the lochs
As that girl.
In the pause between two stones
She became a swan.
She flew from us into sunset and stars.

George Mackay Brown, Ibid.

"The Eleventh Stone" brings this to mind:

The beauty of Xi Shi's countenance -- where is it now?
In the tips of the wild grasses, swaying in spring wind.

Yüan Chen (779-831) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 127.

Ian MacInnes, "Yesnaby" (1979)

Are these ruminations about arrivals and departures, timelessness and eternity, nothing but wishful thinking? Whistling past the graveyard? Perhaps. Yet why eliminate any possibilities?

I harbor no illusions: we live in a crocus and morning glory world. Silence awaits. But is silence the end?

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 "Seal Island Anthology, 1875," in Voyages (Chatto & Windus 1983).

Stanley Cursiter, "A Farm in Orkney" (1952)

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, one of my oft-repeated precepts regarding poetry is this: It is the individual poem that matters, not the poet. Of course, I make no claim of originality for this thought. Thus, for instance, I happened upon the following observation by Rosanjin (a Japanese potter and artist) this past week:

"The sort of person who, when shown a painting, steps up to examine the artist's seal understands nothing about paintings. The same may be said of the sort who immediately asks who painted it."

Rosanjin (1883-1959) (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter), in Sidney Cardozo and Masaaki Hirano, The Art of Rosanjin (Kodansha 1987), page 120.

So it is with poems and poets. Whether a poet is a "major" or a "minor" poet in the estimation of readers or critics is of no moment to me. Likewise, I have no interest in debating which poets are "good,""better," or "best." Do I have favorite poets? Of course. But I never think of them as being in competition with one another. Again, it is the individual poem that matters.

I came to know Mary Coleridge by discovering the following poem in an anthology two or three decades ago (I don't recall the exact year).

               L'Oiseau Bleu

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

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

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

Mary Coleridge was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She was born in 1861, and she died in 1907 at the age of 45. Hence, one might be tempted to describe her as a "Victorian poet." But that would be a mistake. The use of terms such as "Victorian,""Romantic," or "Modernist" is over-simplistic, and often provides an excuse for not reading and appreciating individual poems. I think that "L'Oiseau Bleu" is a lovely poem that happens to have been written in the Victorian era. To me it seems timeless.

William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

"The Festival of St Swithin (The Dovecot)" (1866)

Now, having just pontificated upon the need to focus upon poems rather than poets, I am going to contradict myself (perhaps). To wit: I find it very comforting to spend time in the company of Mary Coleridge. She is thoughtful, sensitive, sensible, and self-effacing. These are qualities that I admire in any poet -- and in any person.

A comment made by Kingsley Amis about Edward Thomas (which has appeared here on more than one occasion) comes to mind:

"How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology (Hutchinson 1988), page 339. For me, Mary Coleridge does this as well.

We never said farewell, nor even looked
Our last upon each other, for no sign
Was made when we the linkèd chain unhooked
And broke the level line.

And here we dwell together, side by side,
Our places fixed for life upon the chart.
Two islands that the roaring seas divide
Are not more far apart.

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge. The poem is untitled.

William Holman Hunt, "The Haunted Manor" (1849)

A thread of unrequited, disappointed, and lost love runs through Coleridge's poetry. It is a hint, not a preoccupation. There is no woe-is-me melancholy or complaint. She was clear-eyed about life.

"It comes to me that what we seem to need we are not given. Joy cannot be born of necessity. There is need of patience and need of peace, but no cry of need will bring joy."

Mary Coleridge, in Edith Sichel (editor), Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge (Constable 1910), pages 277-278.

Death and transience were often on her mind, but, again, not in a melancholy way. She had an enviable perspective on things: "Birthdays now seem to me to be like the lamp-posts along a road when you are nearing the end of a long, dark, delicious drive." Mary Coleridge, in The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge, page 73. Or, consider this:

"Art is an odd thing, isn't it? It's almost the only thing that seems to me to remain unchanged throughout one's life, and it does away with all possibility of hell, and all necessity of heaven. You forget the dead too, and yet you know it is no treason to forget them there. And you forget yourself."

Mary Coleridge, Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, pages 267-268.

Yet she was ever mindful of a larger context as well:

"More and more as life goes on I feel as if one of the big temptations of it were to rest content with negative ease and freedom from worry, and to forget that that's only the body of happiness and not the soul. Looking into the fluffy white heart of an oleander, the other day, a kind of rapture at its uselessness came over me, at the divine heedlessness of anything but glory and beauty at the making of it."

Mary Coleridge, Ibid, page 276.

                            Self-question

Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,
   Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?
Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
   Thou little heart?

Dust art thou, and to dust again returnest,
   A spark of fire within a beating clod.
Should that be infinite for which thou burnest?
   Must it be God?

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge.

William Holman Hunt, "Our English Coasts, 1852" (1852)

Each poem that we read has unknown possibilities within it. We never know where it will lead us. It may very well change our life. I will be forever grateful for having long ago encountered "L'Oiseau Bleu." Without it, I might never have known of Mary Coleridge, and my life would be much diminished.

"When we were out this afternoon, we saw the larks descending to the ground, almost without a flutter of their wings, as if they flew upon their singing. Some people's lives are like that; they progress by harmony rather than movement."

Mary Coleridge, Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, page 229.

She is buried in Grove Road Cemetery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. She and her family were on holiday in Harrogate when she died of complications from surgery for acute appendicitis. The epitaph on her gravestone reads: "Perfect Love."

Some in a child would live, some in a book;
When I am dead let there remain of me
Less than a word -- a little passing look,
Some sign the soul had once, ere she forsook
The form of life to live eternally.

Mary Coleridge, The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge. The poem is untitled.

John Everett Millais (1829-1896), "The Vale of Rest" (1858)

A few months ago, I discovered a lovely and moving poem. I have a little story to tell about how this discovery came about, but the poem itself is entitled to center stage.

'In memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, aged 23.'

The little meadow by the sand,
Where Tamsin lies, is ringed about
With acres of the scented thyme.
The salt wind blows in all that land;
The great clouds pace across the skies;
Rare wanderers from the ferry climb.
One might sleep well enough, no doubt,
Where Tamsin lies.

Tamsin has sunshine now and wind,
And all in life she might not have,
The silence and the utter peace
That tempest-winnowed spirits find
On slopes that front the western wave.
The white gulls circle without cease
O'er Tamsin's grave.

E. K. Chambers, Carmina Argentea (1918).

I suspect that many moderns will find the poem to be too old-fashioned and too sentimental, too unironic, for their tastes. Not I. As I have noted here in the past, I consider sentimentality to be a perfectly acceptable human emotion. Further, I am firmly in favor of anything that is deemed to be "old-fashioned." Moreover, I believe that self-regarding, soulless irony is the bane of our times. In short, I do not consider myself to be a "modern."

I find the poem to be absolutely beautiful.

Ernest Ehlers, "Sea Pinks, Porth Joke, Cornwall, May 1898" (1898)

Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1866-1954) was a civil servant in what was then known as the Board of Education. In addition (and on the side), he was a leading scholar of English literature and, in particular, of the English theatre. His most important works were The Mediaeval Stage (two volumes) and The Elizabethan Stage (four volumes). He also prepared updated editions of several of Shakespeare's plays, the poems of John Donne, and the poems of Henry Vaughan.

In January, I posted two poems by Vaughan. To confirm the text, I consulted Chambers's edition of Vaughan's poems on the Internet Archive. In doing so, I noticed a link to a book by Chambers titled Carmina Argentea. I was not familiar with the book, so I opened the link. I discovered a 32-page pamphlet that was, according to the title page, "Printed for the Author" in 1918. The pamphlet contains poems written by Chambers. He likely distributed copies of the pamphlet to his family and friends.

An "Envoi" at the start of the collection provides context. It begins: "A sorry sheaf of verse to bring/For fifty years of wayfaring/About the waste fields and the sown,/Where harvest of the Muse is grown!" The "Envoi" concludes: ". . . let them rest,/Poor relics of a broken quest." In the United Kingdom of Chambers's time, literate men and women were wont to turn their hand to verse when sufficiently moved, even if the writing of poetry was not their primary vocation. Carmina Argentea ("Silver Poems" or "Silver Songs") preserves twenty-one poems written by Chambers over "fifty years of wayfaring."

I began to read the poems. They consisted of reflections on the city and the country, nature and the turn of the seasons, love and life. All pleasant enough. However, everything suddenly changed when I arrived at page 22, where I came upon 'In memory of Thomasine Trenoweth.' As I read the poem, I immediately realized that this was something of an entirely different order. How did I know? As in all such cases, the signs of being in the presence of beauty were physical and emotional: a catch of breath, a feeling of being gently knocked back in my chair, and, as the poem came to an end, a shaking of the head in wonder and delight (together with, I confess, misty eyes and a lump in the throat).

Robert Borlase Smart, "Cornish Cliffs, Zennor" (1923)

Of course, I was curious about Thomasine Trenoweth, and how she came into the life of E. K. Chambers. My internet researches led me nowhere. I did discover that the poem was given the title "Lelant" (with "In Memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, aged 23" appearing under the title) when it was republished in 1922 in the anthology Poems of To-Day: Second Series. Lelant is a village in Cornwall on the Hayle Estuary, a few miles southeast of St Ives. However, I could find nothing about Chambers's connection with Lelant in particular, or with Cornwall in general: he was born in Berkshire, attended Oxford, spent his working life in London, and retired to a village in Oxfordshire. Cornish locations are mentioned in three other poems collected in Carmina Argentea. Perhaps Chambers took his holidays in Cornwall?

But I have decided that it is best to leave Thomasine Trenoweth a mystery. Chambers's affectionate shortening of her name to "Tamsin" from "Thomasine" tells us something about her. As does: "Tamsin has sunshine now and wind,/And all in life she might not have." And there is this as well: "The silence and the utter peace/That tempest-winnowed spirits find/On slopes that front the western wave." She was a person who once walked through the World. Her departure was an occasion of sadness. But she was not forgotten.

The following haiku by Bashō appeared here earlier this year, and it comes to mind again.

At the news of the nun Jutei's death

never think of yourself
as someone who did not count --
festival of the souls

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 393.

Byron Cooper (1850-1933)

"Hayle Estuary, Cornwall (The Shadow of a Cloud)"

In my previous post, I repeated one of my poetic precepts (for which I claim no originality): "It is the individual poem that matters, not the poet." Chambers's poem in memory of Thomasine Trenoweth is a perfect instance of what I had in mind. In his day, no one thought of Chambers as a poet. Yet he was moved by his feelings to preserve in a poem the memory of someone he affectionately referred to as "Tamsin," and to wish her a peaceful sleep. "Parta Quies."

The poem saw the light of day in 1918, surfaced again in 1922, and then essentially disappeared. But the poem -- and Tamsin -- have been there all along. They now return in a new century. This tells us something about the wondrous and patiently circuitous workings of life, art, and the World.

We meet only to part,
Coming and going like white clouds,
Leaving traces so faint
Hardly a soul notices.

Ryōkan (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens, Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryōkan (Shambhala 1996), page 91.

Samuel John Lamorna Birch (1869-1955), "A Cornish Stream"

My favorite poems from The Greek Anthology are the epitaphs and the elegies. The best of them combine graceful, noble simplicity with deeply-felt, but restrained, emotion. E. K. Chambers's poem in memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, which appeared in my previous post, prompted me to return to this lovely poem by Callimachus:

Their Crethis, with her prattle and her play,
The girls of Samos often miss to-day:
Their loved workmate, with flow of merry speech,
Here sleeps the sleep that comes to all and each.

Callimachus (c. 310 B.C. - c. 240 B. C.) (translated by A. H. Bullen), in      A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (Sidgwick & Jackson 1921).

This four-line poem accomplishes something remarkable in a brief space: it captures the essence of Crethis, of the personality which made her belovèd among her friends; it articulates, in a non-histrionic fashion, the grief of those friends upon losing her; and, finally, it places all of this within a context which embraces each of us, and which reminds us of a reality, often avoided, that we all must come to terms with, sooner or later.

Crethis, young prattler, full of graceful play,
Vainly the maids of Samos seek all day;
Cheerfullest workmate; ever talking; -- she
Sleeps here, -- that sleep, from which none born can flee.

Callimachus (translated by "F. H."), in The Classical Journal, Volume XXXIII (March and June, 1826), page 9.

Because I have no knowledge of Greek, I am not qualified to opine on the accuracy and fitness of the three translations that appear here. I will only note that, despite the differences in the English words chosen by each of the translators, the emotional tenor of all three versions is quite consistent: we feel the charming vivacity of Crethis, and we also feel the aching and breathless sense of absence when a bright life is cut short.

The Samian maidens oft regret their friend,
     Sweet Crethis, full of play and cheer,
     Whose gossip lightened toil. But here
She sleeps the sleep they all will sleep at end.

Callimachus (translated by Edward Cook), in Edward Cook, "The Charm of The Greek Anthology,"More Literary Recreations (Macmillan 1919), page 317.

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

"All poetry is in a sense love-poetry." Edward Thomas makes this suggestion at the end of a paragraph in which, discussing the unique power of poetry, he states: "If what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death. . . [Poetry] is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial." Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), pages 86-87.

I think that these are wonderful, and true, observations. But might it not also be said that all poems are elegies? This may be a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other: an elegy is an expression of love (a greater or a lesser love, depending upon the nature of the relationship between the elegist and the departed). There are various types and degrees of love, and the potential objects of our love are innumerable. But what all love has in common is this: the belovèd may leave us. Hence, love poems. Hence, elegies. Edward Thomas again: "First known when lost."

The Evening Star
in memory of Catherine Mercer, 1994-96

The day we buried your two years and two months
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,

The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram
Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000). In a note, Longley explains that "dayligone" (line 4) is a "Scots (or Ulster Scots)" word which means "twilight, dusk." Ibid, page 68.

"The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram" likely refers to a two-line fragment by Sappho, which may be translated into prose as follows: "Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother." Sappho (translated by Henry Thornton Wharton), in Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (David Stott 1887), page 131.

In Greek mythology, Hesperus (Venus) is the evening star. Lord Byron adapts Sappho's lines, and links them to Hesperus, in Book III, Stanza 107, of Don Juan:

O Hesperus! thou bringest all good things --
     Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
     The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
   Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.

A. E. Housman also incorporates the spirit of Sappho's lines (and Hesperus) into the third stanza of "Epithalamium":

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings
All desired and timely things.
All whom morning sends to roam,
Hesper loves to lead them home.
Home return who him behold,
Child to mother, sheep to fold,
Bird to nest from wandering wide:
Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

A. E. Housman, Last Poems (Grant Richards 1922).

Algernon Cecil Newton, "The House by the Canal" (1945)

One afternoon this past week, a heavy rain squall passed through about fifteen minutes before I headed out for my daily walk. My course took me through a long avenue of trees. By then, the sky had mostly cleared, and the green fields and bare trees glowed in the sunshine.

Wide puddles left by the just-departed storm ran continuously along both sides of the asphalt lane down which I walked. As I have noted here in the past, to see the World reflected in a puddle, however small, is a wondrous thing. But this was a replicated World of an entirely different magnitude: for two hundred yards or so the blue sky, the passing white clouds, and the intricate empty branches of the trees accompanied me, reflected in two bright ribbons of water.

As I walked, paused to gaze, and then walked on again, I was aware of the evanescence of the clear and brilliant World laid out at my feet. Ripples, moving in tiny waves from south to north, occasionally disturbed the surface of the water as the wind gusted. The blue sky and the white clouds and the tree branches reappeared when the wind subsided. This bright and haunting World came to an end when the lane came to an end. I could hear the rain water slowly gurgling into the storm drains.

"It is a commonplace of life that the greatest pleasure issues ultimately in the greatest grief. Yet why -- why is it that this child of mine, who has not tasted half the pleasures that the world has to offer, who ought, by rights, to be as fresh and green as the vigorous young needles of the everlasting pine -- why must she lie here on her deathbed, swollen with blisters, caught in the loathsome clutches of the vile god of smallpox. Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away -- a little more each day -- like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain.

"After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away -- like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow. In our joy we made what we call a 'priest in a straw robe.' We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together. Yet our hopes proved to be vain. She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever.

"Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly. For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet -- "

Kobayashi Issa (prose translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa; haiku translated by Robert Hass), from A Year of My Life (1819), in Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), pages 227-228.

Visiting his daughter's grave a month after her death, Issa wrote this haiku:

Wind of autumn!
And the scarlet flowers are there
That she loved to pluck.

Kobayashi Issa (translated by Lewis Mackenzie), in Lewis Mackenzie, The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa (John Murray 1957), page 100.

Here is another translation of the same haiku:

The red flower
you always wanted to pick --
now this autumn wind.

Kobayashi Issa (translated by Sam Hamill), in Kobayashi Issa, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku (translated by Sam Hamill) (Shambhala 1997), page 78.

Algernon Cecil Newton, "Landscape"

A lovely thought by William Cowper comes to mind:

"But it is a sort of April weather life that we lead in this world. A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."

William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (January 3, 1787), in James King and Charles Ryskamp (editors), The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791 (Oxford University Press 1982), pages 5-6.

Yüan Chen (779-831) wrote a series of poems after the death of his wife. This is one of them.

Bamboo Mat

I cannot bear to put away
the bamboo sleeping mat --

that first night I brought you home,
I watched you roll it out.

Yüan Chen (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000), page 191.

It is often the small things that matter, and that are not forgotten, as long as we remain here. But they are not small things at all, are they?

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

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of the death of Edward Thomas at the Battle of Arras. In 1917, April 9 fell on Easter Monday.

Thomas wrote the following poem on April 6, 1915: two days after Easter Sunday. He enlisted three months later.

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

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

At times, Thomas's poetry sounds like an anticipatory, exploratory elegy for himself. Which is not to say that his poetry is "confessional" or self-obsessed. Rather, it is simply the case that he had an elegiac view of the World: he was always aware that he was a small part of a World that is ceaselessly passing and vanishing. He was forever saying farewell.

How at Once

How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift's black bow,
That I would not have that view
Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?

The same year after year --
But with the swift alone.
With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.

Edward Thomas, Ibid.

This is a variation upon "First Known When Lost," which he wrote a year and a half earlier: "I never had noticed it until/'Twas gone . . ."

John Nash (1893-1977), "A Gloucestershire Landscape" (1914)

I suspect that more poems have been written about Edward Thomas than about any other English poet. Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas (compiled by Anne Harvey) (Enitharmon Press 1991) collects 80 poems about him by 69 different poets. As one might expect, the most affecting of these poems were written by those who knew him.

To E. T.: 1917

You sleep too well -- too far away,
For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
How longed-for a peace you have found.

Else, had not death so lured you on,
You would have grieved -- 'twixt joy and fear --
To know how my small loving son
Had wept for you, my dear.

Walter de la Mare, Motley and Other Poems (Constable 1918).

Thomas and de la Mare were close friends. I find this poem to be particularly moving and beautiful because it poignantly conveys, in a short space, both the intense grief felt by de la Mare (and his family) at the loss of Thomas and the essence of Thomas: that combination of melancholy, sensitivity, kindness, charm, and unbridgeable solitariness.

Also quite revealing is this: "had not death so lured you on." De la Mare knew Thomas well.

Out in the Dark

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, -- near,
Yet far, -- and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

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

"Out in the Dark" is Thomas's penultimate poem. He wrote it on Christmas Eve, 1916. He departed for France on January 29, 1917.

John Nash, "Ripe Corn" (1946)

Like many people, I came to know Edward Thomas through "Adlestrop," which I happened upon in an anthology in the early 1980s. "Adlestrop" is wonderful, of course. (It is one of those poems you know by heart after reading it two or three times, without setting out to memorize it.) However, the poem that made me realize I had found an essential companion for life was this:

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

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

As I noted in my March 12 post on E. K. Chambers's poem in memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, the realization that one is in the presence of unforgettable beauty is, for me at least, accompanied by physical and emotional reactions: a catch of breath, a feeling of being gently knocked back in one's chair, and, finally, a shaking of the head in wonder and delight. This is what happened to me the first time I read "The New House." And it still happens each time I read it.

John Nash, "Dorset Landscape" (c. 1930)

When one becomes acquainted with the poetry and prose of Edward Thomas, it is natural to feel affection for him as a person, and to grieve at the tragedy of his death at too young an age. It is thus understandable that a great deal of biographical attention has been paid to him in recent years. However, I fear that a preoccupation with the particulars of his life may carry us away from his writing, which ought to be our primary focus.

It is a difficult balance to strike, for, as John Bayley observes in the following passage, the relationship between Thomas's life and his writing is significant:

"The poet who adds a new world to our experience -- as Auden does, as Larkin does -- is for that reason the kind of poet who really counts. Such a poet is naturally unaware of what he is doing because he is becoming himself in his poetry, his true and involuntary self, not making and remaking himself, by the poetic will, as Yeats did, and as Frost did. Yeats and Frost are great poets of course, but their greatness is of a quite different kind. They do not bring a new sort of poetic world, the world of themselves, involuntarily into being."

John Bayley, "The Self in the Poem," in Jonathan Barker (editor), The Art of Edward Thomas (Poetry Wales Press 1987), page 40.

The intertwining of Thomas's life and poetry, and how that intertwining affects us, is captured in this lovely poem by W. H. Auden.

To E. T.

Those thick walls never shake beneath the rumbling wheel
No scratch of mole nor lisping worm you feel
So surely do those windows seal.

But here and there your music and your words are read
And someone learns what elm and badger said
To you who loved them and are dead.

So when the blackbird tries his cadences anew
There kindles still in eyes you never knew
The light that would have shone in you.

W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928 (edited by Katherine Bucknell) (Princeton University Press 1994). The poem, in Auden's handwriting, is found on "the blank leaf facing the last poem" in Auden's copy of the 1920 edition of Thomas's Collected Poems. Ibid, page 100. It was likely written in the summer of 1925, when Auden was 18 years old. Ibid.

John Nash, "The Cornfield" (1918)

Immanence

Reeds

Adrift

Flowers And Stars

Fallen

Leaves And Clocks

Perspective

Detachment

Timeless

Seasons

Motion

Another Time

Unknowable

Beauty

Boat

Flower

For Mary Coleridge

A Life

Absence

For Edward Thomas