First Known When Lost

Another Birthday

2026-04-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

I turned 70 today. A day like any other day. Showers in the morning. In the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sky brightened, so I went out for a walk. It was one of those spring walks during which one is accompanied by birdsong the entire time, with the choristers unseen.

At about 10 o’clock last night this thought occurred to me: “When I wake up tomorrow morning, I will be 70 years old.” I confess that this realization, as it hit home, did provoke a bit of . . . alarm? wonderment? dread? But I evaded any attempt to sort out exactly what response the occasion called for. Instead, I began to bring to mind poems that I hoped might help me to put the situation into perspective. Of course, this was no doubt another attempt at evasion. But it is what I am accustomed to do. What follows herein is a journey through the poems that came to mind, as one of them led to another. (All of them have appeared here before, on various occasions.)

This poem floated up first:

On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed? Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33. Ury includes this note to the poem: “The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement.” Ibid, page 33.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

Given that Walter de la Mare’s poems are often on my mind, it was not surprising that this appeared next:

Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate’er befall.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 605. The italics appear in the original text. The poem was first published in de la Mare's O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953), his final volume of poems. As long-time (and much-appreciated) visitors here may recall, “Now” has appeared here on several occasions.

Stanley Spencer

"Bluebells, Cornflowers and Rhododendrons" (1945)

Perhaps it is the month which led me from “Now" to the next poem, which I have identified in the past as my favorite April poem:

Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin Books 2004), page 187. The poem was first published in Kavanagh’s Weekly on April 19, 1952. Ibid, page 280.

As always happens, “Wet Evening in April” inevitably sent me to the next poem (the two poems have, for some reason, been linked together in my mind for quite some time):

Consider the Grass Growing

Consider the grass growing

As it grew last year and the year before,

Cool about the ankles like summer rivers,

When we walked on a May evening through the meadows

To watch the mare that was going to foal.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, page 112. The poem was first published in The Irish Press on May 21, 1943. Ibid, page 271.

Stanley Spencer, "Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene" (1947)

What came to mind after Kavanagh’s two poems is a poem I have been fond of for years, but which, in its lovely and quiet way, may have been waiting for just this occasion, and whatever may follow.

From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate

Over a London mews -- to contemplate --

Is it the sky above -- the stones below?

Is it remembrance of the years gone by,

Or thinking forward to futurity

That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,

Quietly folded are the quiet hands,

Rarely he speaks.

Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,

So much to spend?

What is it he seeks?

Whate’er he be,

He is become to me

A form of rest.

I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs

A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,

And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954), page 251. The poem was written in 1907, the year in which Coleridge died.

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

This past week I have been visiting one of my favorite books: Burton Watson’s Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets. Mary Coleridge’s “From My Window” took me to one of my favorite poems in Watson’s book:

Aboard a Boat, Listening to Insects

As though delighting, as though grieving, each with its own song --

an idler, listening, finds his ears washed completely clean.

As the boat draws away from grassy banks, they grow more distant,

till the many varied voices become one single voice.

Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767-1837) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 92). A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning “Chinese poem”) is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

Thus ended last night’s one-poem-leads-to-another excursion, which, as I noted above, was likely an attempt to evade the reality of arriving at the age of 70. One thing is certain: I have not returned from my (admittedly delightful) excursion with any conclusions, advice, or wisdom. But I do believe there is a thread or two running through the poems. Or perhaps, in the end, this turning 70 business is all very straightforward:

Simply trust:

Do not also the petals flutter down,

Just like that?

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 363.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

The Wind in the Pines

2026-01-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

In this part of the world, the deciduous trees are empty, save for a few leaves fluttering drily on otherwise bare branches. Gone (at least for now) are the green days of whispering, soughing, and roaring boughs. Passing through a leafless grove on a windy day, one hears the empty branches clacking and clicking against one another high overhead. The trunks and large limbs creak and groan, like the masts of a sailing ship in a storm as described in a seafaring tale.

But, ah! -- the wind in the pines is always with us.

When the wind passes

in the pines, autumn already

seems lonely enough --

and then a fulling block echoes

through Tamakawa Village.

Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 136. The poem is a waka (as are the two poems which appear below). The sound of fulling blocks in the night signifies deep autumn in Japanese poetry (and in turn reflects the influence of Chinese poetry (in which the sound of fulling blocks on an autumn night is often heard) on Japanese poets). For more on fulling blocks in Japanese and Chinese poetry, please see an earlier post from 2021.

The continuity of Japanese poetry up until the 20th century is a wonderful thing. A beautiful poem (or an evocative, beautiful image or phrase within a poem) was never forgotten by poets or readers, and its echo might return years or centuries later in a new poem. The new poem did not identify the source of the echo. No footnotes were provided. Nor were they necessary. Everyone who read the poem, or heard it recited, recognized the echo. And thus the earlier poem's beauty was preserved, renewed, and brought into a new world. A long string of resonating echoes developed. Nothing was lost to Time, or left behind. Imagine that.

I come so seldom,

and yet how sad in the night

sounds the wind in the pines.

And she, there beneath the moss --

does she too hear it, endlessly?

Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) (translated by Steven Carter), Ibid, page 153. The occasion for the writing of the poem was Fujiwara no Shunzei's visit to the grave of his wife. He spent the night at a nearby Buddhist temple. Ibid, page 153.

Saigyō, a friend of Fujiwara no Shunzei, and a reclusive dweller in the countryside for much of his life, wrote this:

Mountain village

where wind makes sad noises

in the pines --

and adding to the loneliness,

the cry of an evening cicada.

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 146. The sound of cicadas (or, alternatively, crickets) in the twilight of late summer or early autumn provides another memorable series of lovely echoes in Japanese poetry. But that requires a post of its own, at another time. As does the cry of quail at evening in the deep grass.

Paul Nash (1889-1946), "Berkshire Downs" (1922)

Of course, I am not suggesting that Japanese poets alone are sensitive to the allure (be it melancholic or soothing) of the wind in the pines. For instance, quite some time ago I discovered this poem in The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, which was compiled in 1912 by the redoubtable Arthur Quiller-Couch:

Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,

And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet, as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

Even we,

Even so.

George Meredith, in Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor), The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford University Press 1912), page 465. The poem was originally published in Meredith's A Reading of Earth (Macmillan 1888). One of those poems which, once read, is not forgotten. (An aside. I have Quiller-Couch's book beside me as I write this, and I notice that my copy bears a Tokyo bookstore's small decorative paper label on the inner flap of the dust-jacket. I often visited the bookstore during two extended stays in Tokyo in 1993 and 2000, and I purchased the book during one of those visits. How time passes. "Overhead, overhead/Rushes life in a race,/As the clouds the clouds chase.")

Meredith's poem captures wonderfully how it feels to stand or sit within a grove of pines. The stillness. The silence. The soft ground surrounding the trunks of the trees. The mull and duff. I remember "mull and duff" from Howard Nemerov's lovely poem "Again": "the nevergreen/Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor." (Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches, Poems 1973-1975 (University of Chicago Press 1975), page 52. "Nevergreen" is a neologism of Nemerov's invention, it would appear.)

"A wind sways the pines." Reading Meredith's opening line, I cannot help but think of this:

The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,

And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,

So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say

On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.

It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated

On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,

The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997), page 472. "The Region November" was not published during Stevens' lifetime. It was likely written in 1954, the year prior to his death. (Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (edited by Milton Bates) (Alfred A. Knopf 1989), page 324.)

Pines are not specifically mentioned in "The Region November," but the "swaying, swaying, swaying" brings to mind the look of pines in the wind, at least for me. And, speaking of echoes of past poems, consider these lines from Stevens' "The Snow Man," published in Harmonium in 1923, thirty years before he wrote "The Region November": "One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow . . . and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind."

John Nash (1893-1977), "Autumn Berkshire" (1951)

The three waka from 11th and 12th century Japan and the poems by Meredith and Stevens suggest that hearing or seeing or feeling the wind in the pines is an occasion of pensive melancholy, with accompanying intimations of mortality. I suspect that many of us might agree. And yet . . .

Last week I came upon a group of busy, chattering sparrows flitting and hopping and pecking in the dry, leaning stalks of wild grass alongside a paved pathway. As I have noted here in the past, I have come to think of the sparrows (and also the robins) as my winter companions. I doubt if they regard me in that fashion. As I came nearer, the entire group flew several yards away onto the lower branches of a tall pine standing alone out in the meadow beside the pathway. They disappeared into the dark boughs, twittering and clucking. How warm, dry, and soft it must be within the depths of that pine. Calm, still, and quiet. Even when the wind blows. A place of shelter, refuge, and rest. Or do those enveloping boughs provide only a brief respite?

The wind in the pines. Over the centuries, the echoes continue in Japanese poetry.

A cool breeze;

The vault of heaven is filled

With the voices of pine trees.

Onitsura (1660-1738) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume One (Hokuseido Press 1963), page 97.

And this:

One learns to bear solitude

from the sound of the pine-wind.

Shōhaku (1443-1527) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, page 319. This two-line verse appears as verse 64 in Minase Sangin Hyakuin ("Three Poets at Minase"), a hundred-verse renga written in 1488, with Shōhaku, Sōgi (1421-1502), and Sōchō (1448-1532) as the contributing poets. Ibid, pages 303-326.

And, finally, this:

Twilight -- the only conversation

on this hill

Is the wind blowing through the pines.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 76. The poem is a waka.

This small gathering of poems about the wind in the pines is but a limited introduction, the product of my inadequate knowledge and memory. It also serves as an admonition to my sleepwalking self: Pay attention. Be grateful.

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946)

"View of the Sussex Weald" (1927)

Postscript. The beautiful particulars of the World may lose their color, wither away. Change or vanish. But the World bestows compensations, dispensations, gifts. A sunset in the distant pines. No wind.

Winter Twilight (Discovery Park, Seattle)

"The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures -- none lives so long as man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity! If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream." Kenkō (1283-1350), Tsurezuregusa (Chapter 7), in Donald Keene (translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Messages

2025-11-09T01:50:00.000-08:00

Where does one begin when it comes to autumn? And where does one begin when it comes to the poetry of autumn? For some unknown reason, these lines by Ezra Pound (a translation of lines written by Li Po in the 8th Century) suddenly arrive, unbidden: "What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,/There is no end of things in the heart." (Ezra Pound, "Exile's Letter," in Cathay (Elkin Mathews 1915), page 22.) (An aside: I first read these lines when I was a sophomore in college, taking a course titled "Yeats, Pound, and Eliot." I was in the midst of falling in love with poetry. Fifty years later, here I am: still in love, still falling in love anew.)

Well, yes, autumn: "There is no end of things in the heart." And thus, each autumn, one returns to what one loves in the season, and in the poetry of the season. As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, I have on more than one occasion described autumn as the season of bittersweet wistfulness and of wistful bittersweetness. What is one to do with such beauty, with its passing, with its loss? But I am merely repeating what each of us already knows, aren't I?

Standing in the Evening

In the yellow dusk I stand alone before the Buddha hall;

pagoda tree blossoms fill the ground, cicadas fill the trees.

Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart,

but something special -- the sadness of these autumn days!

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by Burton Watson), in Po Chü-i, Selected Poems (Burton Watson, editor) (Columbia University Press 2000), page 50. In China, pagoda trees bloom in late summer or early autumn, depending upon the region in which they are located.

Here is another poem by Po Chü-i, one which I visit each year as autumn makes its first appearance.

The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;

Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.

On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;

In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.

Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;

Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.

In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,

The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chü-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57. The poem is written in the eight-line lü-shih ("regulated verse") form, which, in addition to having tonal and rhyming requirements, calls for verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets. (See Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), pages 8-12, 374.)

Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882), "Cheyne Walk, Chelsea" (1870)

Since mid-September, I had been waiting to see my first woolly bear caterpillar of the year. To no avail. I had nearly given up hope. A few weeks ago, out on my afternoon walk, I thought to myself (my walking thoughts are quite mundane): "I guess I won't be seeing any woolly bears this year." Then, after about ten minutes of walking along an asphalt pathway that passes between two large meadows, I saw a small dark shape up ahead of me in the middle of the pathway. I approached, and there it was: a woolly bear crossing from one meadow to the other, heading westward toward the waters of Puget Sound and the setting sun.

I did what I always do in these circumstances (and for which I seek neither credit nor praise, since this is something we all do, I presume): I stood watch in the middle of the pathway to make certain that he or she made a safe passage, unharmed by inattentive walkers or bicyclists. In the focused, single-minded, and, yes, lovable fashion of woolly bears, it successfully crossed the pathway and disappeared into the dry grass of the meadow. And so, as always happens with humans and woolly bears -- who meet only to part -- we each went our destined way.

A wonderful coincidence? A lovely moment of serendipity? So one might say. Prosaically. But I was not content to leave it at that on the afternoon on which the woolly bear and I shared a brief interval of time and space in the World. Nor am I content to leave it at that now. The World sends us messages. Unexpectedly. It is up to each of us to make of them what we will. I had received a message. The message was wordless. And words cannot explain it.

A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō (Twayne Publishers 1970), page 50.

People are few;

A leaf falls here,

Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

The stillness;

A bird walking on the fallen leaves:

The sound of it.

Ryūshi (died 1681) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 365.

The leaf of the paulownia,

With not a breath of wind,

Falls.

Bonchō (died 1714) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 130.

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it. So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen. They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it." (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (italics in the original text).)

Another way of looking at the World's messages:

"Gifts are still occasionally given us, particularly when we have not asked for them, and I cling to the hope of understanding the link between certain of them and our inner life, their meaning in relation to our most persistent dreams." (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 3.)

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "Autumn by the River"

At times, words are not sufficient. Nor are they required. Perhaps (likely?) at the most important times. So says a person who loves poetry. So says a person who has maintained a blog (fitfully) for more than 15 years, relying upon words. A person who returns each autumn -- faithfully and unfailingly -- to the beautiful words of the following poem.

Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).

It all comes back to the leaves, their rising and their falling. While we are here, and after we are gone.

Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues

Long as the whole of time:

A single aimless man

Carries a black garden broom.

He is too far to hear him

Wading through the leaves, down autumn

Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson, 1924-1962 (Phoenix House 1963).

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

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

"In a lifetime how many springs do we see?" This is the final line of "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade," a four-line poem by Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) which has appeared here on several occasions. However, as Po Chü-i observes above in "Standing in the Evening": "Each of the four seasons brings a pang to the heart." Thus, with apologies and gratitude to Su Tung-p'o, I find myself thinking: "In a lifetime how many autumns do we see?" This thought is a product of age, no doubt. Which, I should add, is not a bad thing.

Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate (pronounced ta-tay) Ryuwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990). The poem is in the form of a kanshi, a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, adhering to the strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody.

The following poem provides a lovely and moving complement to Tate Ryuwan's poem:

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371. The poem is untitled.

Autumn. The World. Sending us messages. Gifts, as Philippe Jaccottet would say.

The wind has brought

enough fallen leaves

To make a fire.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens (editor), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 67.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Autumn, Kinnordy" (1936)

Small Things

2025-09-01T00:55:00.000-07:00

One afternoon last week, as I walked along the edge of a grove of pines and maples, I heard a bird's voice up ahead, high in a pine. Not a song or a warble, but two firm, quick calls of the same note, with the sequence repeated three or four times. Then silence. A minute or so later, the two calls were again repeated three or four times, but from another pine, closer this time. The message seemed to be something along the lines of: "I'm here. I'm here." Not an alarm or a warning. Rather, an announcement of sorts (perhaps a greeting?) to any nearby listeners.

I kept walking -- waiting for further calls, and looking up into the trees to see if I could find the source. Then, as I passed beneath the overarching branches of a group of tall bushes, a pileated woodpecker flew down from the left, just ahead of me, and landed on the branch of a bush on my right, at eye level a few yards away. (Please note that I am no expert when it comes to the identification of birds. I knew the name of the bird because I have long had a reliable source: Birds of Discovery Park (prepared by the Seattle Audubon Society and the Seattle parks department), a two-page list of the more than 200 species of birds that inhabit the place where I take most of my walks.)

What a wonderful sight he or she was: a bright red pointed crest on the top of its head, two thin white stripes on its black face, with the stripes continuing down its neck, and a black-feathered body. I see the woodpeckers a few times a year, but nearly always at a distance: tapping away up in a tree, my eyes drawn to them by the hollow drumming. Seldom do I see them close at hand. After pausing a moment on the branch, it flew away into the sunlight and shadow of the grove.

I have recently been revisiting the poetry of Saigyō. A day or so after my encounter with the woodpecker, I came upon a poem (a waka) I hadn't read in quite some time:

Were we sure of seeing

a moon like this

in existences to come,

who would be sorry

to leave this life?

Saigyō (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 158.

These poems we read and love: we carry them within us. They wait patiently. When the time is right, we find them again, or they return to us. Often serendipitously. Saigyō's poem arrived in such a fashion.

A small thing, my encounter with the woodpecker, but of inestimable value. A value best left unspoken, unarticulated. But not to be forgotten. One of those gifts which -- suddenly, unaccountably -- are bestowed upon us by the World.

Christopher Sanders (1905-1991)

"Sunlight Through a Willow Tree at Kew" (c. 1958)

Small things, never to be forgotten. Seven years ago in May, a hundred or so feet away from the spot where I spent a moment with the woodpecker, I came across a dead mole lying on its back beside the same path. In my post of May 23, 2018, I wrote this about the mole: "He or she was a small, dark-brown thing, about eight inches long, its pinkish-white, fleshy front paws open to the sky. It was those tiny, outspread paws that particularly touched me."

I closed the brief post with this poem, which has appeared here on more than one occasion:

A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,

That so much lived below the ground,

Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,

For you to raise a mound

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (Secker & Warburg 1985), page 63. The poem was originally published in Speak to the Earth (Jonathan Cape 1939).

I find it hard to believe that it has already been seven years since I shared that short time with the mole. As the saying goes (repeated at more frequent intervals as one ages, in my experience): "It seems like only yesterday . . ." Should I let go of my memory of the mole? Am I being "sentimental"? A fair number of moderns (wise, undeceived, and ironic) are wont to scoff at "sentimentality." This is sufficient to convince me to embrace it further.

What?

What dost thou surely know?

What will the truth remain,

When from the world of men thou go

To the unknown again?

What science -- of what hope?

What heart-loved certitude won

From thought shall then for scope

Be thine -- thy thinking done?

Tis said, that even the wise,

When plucking at the sheet,

Have smiled with swift-darkening eyes,

As if in vision fleet

Of some mere flower, or bird,

Seen in dream, or in childhood's play;

And then, without sign or word,

Have turned from the world away.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 290. The poem was originally published in The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

Patrick Symons (1925-1993), "Oak Arch Grey" (1981)

Exchanging glances with a pileated woodpecker. Leaning down to look at a lifeless mole lying open to the huge blue sky. These small things were fated never to be forgotten. But, when it comes to the gifts the World bestows upon us -- its beautiful particulars -- there is no hierarchy. Nothing is quotidian or commonplace if we are attentive and grateful.

The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life; whatever

Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . .

Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never

Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles

Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done

Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed

Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), in Ivor Gurney, Selected Poetry (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996), page 46. The punctuation, and the ellipses (in lines 2 and 9, and between lines 8 and 9), are as they appear in the original typescript. The poem was not published during Gurney's lifetime.

"Hedge sparrow." Yes, I understand. My afternoon walk takes me along a path that passes through the center of a large meadow of tall wild grass. Nearly every day, sparrows suddenly appear out of the grass ahead of me, and hop and skip away down the path. I've come to think of them as companions, but I suspect they don't regard me as such. Still, I harbor the fancy that they are starting to tolerate my presence. Small things, of inestimable value.

Compare and Contrast

The great thinker died

after forty years of poking about

with his little torch

in the dark forest of ideas,

in the bright glare of perception,

leaving a legacy of fourteen books

to the world

where a hen disappeared

into six acres of tall oats

and sauntered unerringly

to the nest with five eggs in it.

Norman MacCaig, in Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2005), page 432.

In the year before his death, Walter de la Mare said to a friend who came to visit him: "My days are getting shorter. But there is more and more magic. More than in all poetry. Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful." (Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth 1993), page 443.)

The world of dew

is the world of dew.

And yet, and yet --

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by Robert Hass), in Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press 1994), page 191. R. H. Blyth provides background to Issa's haiku: "This verse has the prescript, 'Losing a beloved child.' . . . He had already lost two or three children when this baby girl died." (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 433.)

Robert Ball (1918-2009), "Mrs. Barclay's Pond, Harborne" (1949)

Frolic and Detour

2025-08-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Forty-one years on, I retain very little from my three years of law school. Memories of friendships. And of a love. Alas, lost. As for "The Law" itself, only a few scattered phrases remain from all those books and lectures. For instance: "frolic and detour." The concept comes from the law of torts: an employer is not liable for the actions of an employee who engages in activity which is beyond the scope of his or her duties. I have never had occasion to address frolic and detour in the "practice" of law. On the other hand, I habitually engage in frolic and detour when it comes to the reading of poetry.

Recently, I have been spending time in the company of Bashō and Walter de la Mare. As my decades with them have passed, their companionship has become more and more comforting. And essential. Where would I be without them?

Hototogisu --

through a vast bamboo forest

moonlight seeping

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 314.

A hototogisu "is a bird that looks like an English cuckoo, but is smaller and has a sharp, piercing cry." Ibid, page 198. R. H. Blyth describes it as follows: "The hototogisu corresponds more or less to the English cuckoo. The breast of the male is blackish, with white blotches. The breast of the female is white, the inside of the mouth red; it has a crest of hair on the head. . . . From early summer, it sings day and night, and ceases in autumn." R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 161.

Blyth provides this translation of Bashō's haiku:

Moonlight slants through

The vast bamboo grove:

A hototogisu cries.

Ibid, page 161. The Romanized version ("Romaji," to use the Japanese term) of the haiku is: hototogisu/ōtakeyabu wo/moru tsukiyo. Ibid, page 161. Hototogisu means "cuckoo"; ōtakeyabu means "large bamboo grove;" wo is a particle which identifies ōtakeyabu as the object of moru tsukiyo; moru means "to seep;" tsuki means "moon" and yo means "night" (hence, the compound word tsukiyo can mean either "moonlight" or "moonlit night").

A distinctive difference between the two translations of the haiku is that Ueda translates the Japanese word moru as "seeping," whereas Blyth opts for "slants through." As a matter of beauty, I prefer Blyth's "moonlight slants through" to Ueda's "moonlight seeping," but Ueda's translation of moru is arguably more accurate. A second difference is that Blyth states that the hototogisu "cries," whereas Ueda does not. Again, Ueda's translation is arguably more accurate: Bashō gives us only the word hototogisu to commence the haiku, with no accompanying verb. Haiku poets, in stating the name of a particular bird, will quite often leave it up to the reader to infer whether the bird is singing (or chirping, warbling, or silent). (But I should be careful not to overstep my bounds: given my limited experience with Japanese, I am an amateur, with no right to quibble with, much less express opinions on, translations. But it is interesting to consider the choices that different translators make.) In any case, whichever of the two translations one prefers, Bashō's haiku is lovely, affecting, and haunting.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

Thus began a day or so of frolic and detour. Soon after reading Bashō's haiku, I happened upon this:

An echo, perhaps?

From the valley, then the peak --

a cuckoo's call.

Gusai (died 1376) (translated by Steven Carter), in Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 281.

With Walter de la Mare on my mind, Gusai's echoing call of the cuckoo/hototogisu took me further afield (and happily so):

Echo

Seven sweet notes

In the moonlight pale

Warbled a leaf-hidden

Nightingale:

And Echo in hiding

By an old green wall

Under the willows

Sighed back them all.

Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber 1969), page 415. "Echo" was originally published in Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (Faber and Faber 1941). Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes is ostensibly a book of children's verse. However, as all those who love Walter de la Mare's poetry know, one should bear in mind the subtitle to de la Mare's Come Hither, his wonderful anthology of poetry (published in 1923): "A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages."

In 1942, de la Mare's volume of Collected Poems was published, consisting of poems for adults. In 1944, his volume of Collected Rhymes and Verses was published, consisting of poems for children. In the preface to the latter volume, de la Mare writes: "To what degree and in what precise respect the contents of this volume differ from the contents of Collected Poems are little problems which I will not attempt to explore. Somewhere the two streams divide -- and may re-intermingle. Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source. And here, concerning that -- nor will I even venture on an Alas -- silence is best."

A lovely and enlightening statement by de la Mare. Over the years, I have come to make no distinction between his "adult poems" and his "children's verse and rhymes." They indeed "sprang from the same source," and ultimately arrive at the same place: Beauty and Truth.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Boreland Mill, Kirkmichael" (1950)

A hototogisu. Followed by a nightingale. And now the goddess Echo had appeared, drawing me further on:

High up the mountain-meadow, Echo with never a tongue

Sings back to each bird in answer the song each bird hath sung.

Satyrus (1st Century B.C. -- 1st Century A.D.) (translated by F. L. Lucas), in Lucas, Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent & Sons 1951), page 358.

A bit later on my wanderings, this came to mind:

Nought to the far-off Hades but an empty echo cries.

There, mid the dead, is silence. My voice in the darkness dies.

Erinna (mid-4th Century B.C.) (translated by F. Lucas). Ibid, page 279. Erinna is "said to have died at nineteen, but ranked with Sappho by some ancient judgments, though little of her work survives. Her chief poem was a lament, The Distaff, for her dead girl-friend Baucis." Ibid, page 279.

James McIntosh Patrick, "City Garden" (1979)

Finally, my frolic and detour came to an end when the following poem arrived, unaccountably, from somewhere. (Although there is a connection with Walter de la Mare.)

At Common Dawn

At common dawn there is a voice of bird

So sweet, 'tis kin to pain;

For love of earthly life it needs be heard,

And lets not sleep again.

This bird I did one time at midnight hear

In wet November wood

Say to himself his lyric faint and clear

As one at daybreak should.

He ceased; the covert breathed no other sound,

Nor moody answer made;

But all the world at beauty's worship found,

Was waking in the glade.

Vivian Locke Ellis (1878-1950), in Walter de la Mare (editor), Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Constable & Co. 1923), page 360.

[Postscript. Please accept my apologies for the long absence, dear readers. Writing this post, I realized how much I have missed being here. Thank you for your patience.]

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

Suddenly

2025-01-28T00:35:00.000-08:00

Over a lifetime, I have failed to give the moon the attention it deserves. But it is patient and forgiving, despite my faithlessness. Thus, in the first week of this month, as I was out walking at twilight, I happened to glance towards the vanishing sunset, and there it was: a brilliant and pristine white crescent moon, a third of the way up the darkening, but still powder blue, southwestern sky. How shall I describe that whiteness, that thin curve of radiance set amidst pale blue? I'm afraid I have no words. Now, as then, I'm left speechless.

I have been visiting Bashō's haiku in December and January. A few weeks before my encounter with the newly-born crescent moon, I came across this:

Unlike anything

it has been compared to:

the third-day moon.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda (editor), Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 207.

The Japanese phrase for the first phase of the waxing crescent moon is mika no tsuki: "third-day moon." Mika means "third day"; tsuki means "moon"; no is a particle meaning (roughly) "of." Bashō included this headnote to the haiku: "The third day of the month." Ibid. Ueda provides this comment: "Since olden times the crescent moon had been compared to a great many things, including a sickle, a bow, a comb, a boat, and a woman's eyebrow." Ibid. Bashō is absolutely correct: words are not adequate.

As so often happens with poetry, serendipity: a poem appears, and, soon after, the beautiful particulars of the World arrive, echoing it. Or vice versa. In addition, this comes to mind:

Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:

Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,

The lovely in life is the familiar,

And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

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

Dudley Holland (1915-1956), "Winter Morning" (1945)

"The lovely in life is the familiar,/And only the lovelier for continuing strange" is paired in my mind with these lines from de la Mare's "Now," which appears in his final collection of poems: "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." (The italics appear in the original text.) Stumbling across the beauty of the crescent moon early this month brought home the importance of "now": a reproach to my usual state of sleepwalking. And the serene power and charm of that beauty had an element of strangeness to it: the moon seemed impossibly lovely, beyond one's ken.

But there was something else at work as well. The suddenness of that beauty's arrival -- as I absent-mindedly looked skyward -- startled me, took me aback, and leaves me speechless still. Words such as "miraculous" or "revelatory" float to the surface. But I shall restrain myself. Relying on the circumspect William James in his final conclusions on mysticism, I will leave it at this: "higher energies filter in." (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green and Co. 1902), page 519.)

Best to turn to a poem:

The Elm

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

I did not know the reason, nor did she.

But there she stood, and turned, and smiled at me:

A sudden glory had bewitched the child.

The corn at harvest, and a single tree.

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (Duckworth 1938).

Belloc's poem, and the phrase "a sudden glory" in particular, bring this to mind:

Sudden Heaven

All was as it had ever been --

The worn familiar book,

The oak beyond the hawthorn seen,

The misty woodland's look:

The starling perched upon the tree

With his long tress of straw --

When suddenly heaven blazed on me,

And suddenly I saw:

Saw all as it would ever be,

In bliss too great to tell;

Forever safe, forever free,

All bright with miracle:

Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,

The tree beside the door;

And I must die -- but O my shade

Shall dwell there evermore.

Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), in Don King (editor), Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter (Kent State University Press 2018), page 106. The poem was written in 1931. Ibid, page 106

Paul Ayshford Methuen (1886-1974)

"Magnolia Soulangiana at Corsham" (c. 1963)

While I was out on my daily walk last week, a few hundred feet in front of me a dark bird with a wide wingspan flew slowly away, just above a grove of pines beside the road. The bird banked to the left, and settled on a branch near the top of a pine. Given the size of the bird's wings, I suspected, and hoped, that it was a bald eagle. But I couldn't be sure from that distance: it could have been a hawk, an owl, or even a large crow. I assumed it would be gone by the time I reached the pine.

But, when I arrived and looked up, there it was: a bald eagle perched on a high branch, surveying the territory. Encountering a bald eagle is not a rare occurrence in this part of the world, but I never cease to be amazed -- and grateful -- when I cross paths with one of them. I never tire of (or get over) those penetrating, unflinching eyes. Or the sharp curve of that deep-yellow beak, unlike any other hue of yellow. Or the cry that now and then comes from the sky as one of them circles slowly overhead.

Arrival

Not conscious

that you have been seeking

suddenly

you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills

dust free

with no road out

but the one you came in by.

A bird chimes

from a green tree

the hour that is no hour

you know. The river dawdles

to hold a mirror for you

where you may see yourself

as you are, a traveller

with the moon's halo

above him, who has arrived

after long journeying where he

began, catching this

one truth by surprise

that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (Macmillan 1983).

R. S. Thomas' poems can be spare and acerbic, especially when his subject is the modern world. But there is no shortage of beauty. The heart of his poetry is his lifelong attendance upon the silence of God, as he makes his way through our short time in Paradise (Wales, in Thomas' case). At times there is a note of complaint, the merest hint of a doubt. But withal he is patient. He is often rewarded.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

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

Ian Grant (1904-1993), "Cheshire Mill" (1939)

The beautiful particulars of the World often arrive unexpectedly and unaccountably at our doorstep, or we at theirs. Suddenly. There is no planning involved, nor itinerary to be followed. We simply need to pay attention. (So says an inveterate sleepwalker.) And never cease to be grateful.

To a mountain village

at nightfall on a spring day

I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

James Cowie (1886-1956), "Pastoral" (c. 1938)

Autumn Into Winter

2024-12-21T23:58:00.000-08:00

As I have mentioned here in the past, each day I read a poem in the morning and a poem in the evening. This was today's morning poem:

Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate Ryūwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 117. A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning "Chinese poem") is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of Chinese prosody. (For a discussion of kanshi, please see my post of November 2, 2014.)

I have read "Autumn Ends" several times in the past, but I hadn't revisited it recently. This morning, I came upon it while browsing through Watson's anthology, which is one of my favorite books. After reading the poem, it occurred to me: isn't today the day of the winter solstice, or was it yesterday, or is it tomorrow? I checked: it is indeed today. Reading poetry tends to put one in the way of serendipity.

But, beyond this nice bit of happenstance, I realized that, with each passing year, "Autumn Ends" seems more and more apt. Something along these lines: "In a lifetime, how many springs do we see?" (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.") Or this: "the years just flow by like a broken-down dam." (John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery.") Ah, well, no help for it.

John Milne Donald (1819-1866), "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

As I am wont to say: "In poetry, one thing leads to another." Thus, not surprisingly, my favorite autumn poem came to mind soon after I read "Autumn Ends" this morning. The poem usually appears here each autumn, but this year it makes its appearance on the first day of winter.

Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment.

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975), page 3.

It is lovely to find "rustling" leaves in both "Autumn Ends" and "Leaves." It is those rustling leaves that follow us on our autumn walks -- dogging our footsteps -- that capture the heart of autumn. And Mahon takes things a beautiful step further: "It is autumn, and dead leaves/On their way to the river/Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road."

George Vicat Cole (1833-1893), "Autumn Morning" (1891)

Today I went for my daily late afternoon walk, both poems still on my mind. After intermittent rain, often heavy, in the morning, the sky overhead and to the west was clearing: a mix of blue, gold, pink, and orange. The sun was on its way to disappearing beyond the waters of Puget Sound, beyond the Olympic Mountains, off into the Pacific. Not a bad way to bring autumn to a close, to enter winter.

The ground remains strewn with all of those rustling leaves. But the sparrows, our companions throughout the winter, were lively, sporting in the remaining sunlight. Of course, they know what the fallen rustling leaves are telling us. But they go on being their sparrow selves.

After seeing them twittering and flitting in the bushes and on the green meadow grass, I thought of this:

The Bamboo Sparrow

Doesn't peck up millet from the government storehouse,

Doesn't bore holes through the master's house;

It dwells a lifetime in the mountain groves

And roosts at nightfall on a branch of bamboo.

Gido Shūshin (1325-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1992), page 68. "The Bamboo Sparrow," like "Autumn Ends," is a kanshi.

Alexander Docharty (1862-1940), "An Autumn Day" (1917)

I returned from my walk. I have not yet read my poem for the evening. However -- again, one poem leading to another -- I thought of this tonight:

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 (1902-1961), Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001), page 86.

Rustling leaves. Sparrows. Autumn into winter. The river.

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

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

Journey

2024-10-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

The swallows have departed. The tall, dry meadow grass rustles in the nearly empty air. Now and then a sparrow suddenly flutters up from beside the path, then flies off toward the trees surrounding the field. Ghostly white tufts of thistle seed float past, rising and falling.

Swallows Flown

Whence comes that small continuous silence

Haunting the livelong day?

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

Had vanished -- could not stay?

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

None of this comes as a surprise. Still, every year there is a pang. Something along these lines: "Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --/in a lifetime how many springs do we see?" (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.") A time comes when you realize with certainty that the seasons you have seen far outnumber the seasons that remain to you. This is not a bad thing to take to heart.

The Last Swallow

The robin whistles again. Day's arches narrow,

Tender and quiet skies lighten the withering flowers.

The dark of winter must come. . . . But that tiny arrow,

Circuiting high in the blue -- the year's last swallow,

Knows where the coast of far mysterious sun-wild Africa lours.

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

Alfred Thornton (1863-1939)

"Hill Farm, Painswick, Gloucestershire"

The dragonflies seem to have vanished as well. I remember an afternoon this past summer when I stood in the middle of a field as the swallows climbed and dived and swerved and skimmed just above the tops of the green meadow grasses. On that day, the dragonflies were also out in the field, and they and the swallows circled around me. Please bear with me, but, as I stood there, I couldn't help but think of this: "At the still point of the turning world." (T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton.") (Fortunately, it can't be helped: certain of the poems we loved when we were young never leave us, do they? They remain within us always, waiting.)

Being but man, forbear to say

Beyond to-night what thing shall be,

And date no man's felicity.

For know, all things

Make briefer stay

Than dragonflies, whose slender wings

Hover, and whip away.

Simonides (556-467 B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 234.

A few years after coming across Simonides' dragonflies, I happened upon this, and the two are now forever linked:

"October 6, 1940. Late in the season as it is, a dragonfly has appeared and is flying around me. Keep on flying as long as you can -- your flying days will soon be over."

Taneda Santōka (1882-1940) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries (Columbia University Press 2003), page 102. Watson provides this note to the passage: "This is the last entry in Santōka's diary, written four days before his death." Ibid, page 102.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "The Pant Valley, Summer" (1960)

Whenever the topic at hand is the evanescence of the beautiful particulars of the World, it seems that Edward Thomas hovers over my shoulder. And often, as in the case of this post, he is in the company of his friend, Walter de la Mare. I don't know what I would do without the two of them.

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, The Annotated Collected Poems (Edna Longley, editor) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 131.

Swifts and swallows go well together. Antic sprites that frolic and then vanish.

Alfred Thornton, "The Upper Severn"

A thought by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "Earth never grieves!" ("Autumn in King's Hintock Park," in Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).) One can find comfort and equanimity in the thought that, once our short time in the World is over, the seasons will continue to come and go without us, with their generations of leaves and birds and clouds.

At Night on a Journey

Bell-sounds night after night -- falling on whose ears?

The traveler's dream: forty years pass in an instant:

Sitting up by shutters under the pines, I forget "I" --

Clouds issue from the peaks, the moon courses the heavens.

Ryūshū Shūtaku (1308-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 59. Ury includes this note to the poem: "The second line refers to a Chinese folktale that became popular in Japan. A man who has come to the capital to seek his fortune lies down for a nap and experiences in dream all the vicissitudes of a long, glorious but ultimately tragic official career; awaking, he discovers that no more time has passed than it has taken for his supper of yellow millet to cook." Ibid, page 59.

When I walk down an avenue of trees on a sunny day, my attention is usually focused upward, on the leaves turning in the wind, set against blue and gold. But one afternoon this past summer my eyes were drawn to the swaying shadows of branches on the asphalt pathway before me. A beautiful, ever-changing world of its own, replicating in its own fashion the beautiful, ever-changing world overhead. After a few moments passed, I noticed down on the sunlit pathway the small but distinct shadow of a butterfly that was balancing out on the shadow of the far tip of one of the moving branches. As I watched, the shadow of the butterfly flew away. I looked up, but I saw no butterfly in the sky.

On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed? Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), Ibid, page 33. Ury includes this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement." Ibid, page 33.

John Aldridge, "Stubble Field, Thaxted" (1968)

Home

2024-08-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop --

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home

Often I had gone this way before:

But now it seemed I never could be

And never had been anywhere else;

'Twas home; one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory.

They welcomed me. I had come back

That eve somehow from somewhere far:

The April mist, the chill, the calm,

Meant the same thing familiar

And pleasant to us, and strange too,

Yet with no bar.

The thrush on the oaktop in the lane

Sang his last song, or last but one;

And as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun

His last; they knew no more than I

The day was done.

Then past his dark white cottage front

A labourer went along, his tread

Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;

And, through the silence, from his shed

The sound of sawing rounded all

That silence said.

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

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

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

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

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

The Ash Grove

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

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

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

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

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

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

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

Could climb down to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

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

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

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

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

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

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

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

Bent over by the rain,

The ears of barley

Make it a narrow path.

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

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

Or, another way of looking at it:

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

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

George Mackley, "House by a Lane"

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

I Never Saw That Land Before

I never saw that land before,

And now can never see it again;

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar

Endeared, by gladness and by pain,

Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,

The chickens from the farmsteads, all

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook

With wounds yellow as crocuses

Where yesterday the labourer's hook

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze

That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I neither expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal

I touched then; and if I could sing

What would not even whisper my soul

As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid

Excepting from those like me made

Who answer when such whispers bid.

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

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

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

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

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Stobo Kirk, Peeblessshire" (1936)

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

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

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

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

George Mackley, "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

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

2024-06-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

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

Tilling the field;

From the temple among the trees,

The funeral bell tolls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring

I never noticed, till I saw today

How budding birches stand in their green spray

And bracken like a snake from earth upheaves,

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

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

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

A small bit of serendipity in the larger scheme of things, one might say. But one might also say that seven lines of poetry (three lines from Japan in the 18th century; four lines from England in the 20th century) may go some way to articulating, with beauty, what it means to spend our short time here in Paradise. "Gifts are still occasionally given us, particularly when we have not asked for them, and I cling to the hope of understanding the link between certain of them and our inner life, their meaning in relation to our most persistent dreams." (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 3.)

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

"If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures -- none lives so long as man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity! If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream."

Kenkō (1283-1350) Tsurezuregusa (Chapter 7), in Donald Keene (translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8. Keene provides this note to "Adashino": "Adashino was the name of a graveyard, apparently situated northwest of Kyoto. The word adashi (impermanence), contained in the place name, accounted for the frequent use of Adashino in poetry as a symbol of impermanence. The dew is also often used with that meaning." Ibid, page 8. Keene also provides a note to "Toribeyama": "Toribeyama is still the chief graveyard of Kyoto. Mention of smoke suggests that bodies were cremated there." Ibid, page 8.

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

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

Even on a small island,

A man tilling the field,

A lark singing above it.

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

Followed by this (another haiku by Buson):

Tilling the field:

The cloud that never moved

Is gone.

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

And, finally, Buson again:

Tilling the field:

The man who asked the way

Has disappeared.

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

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

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

"Remember what an Atom your Person stands for in respect of the Universe, what a Minute of unmeasurable Time comes to your share, and what a small Concern you are in the Empire of Fate!" (Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book V, Section 24, in Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus: His Conversation with Himself (1701), page 78.) "The Empire of Fate" is a wonderful touch by Collier. Even more piquant is this: "Manage all your Actions and Thoughts in such a Manner as if you were just going to step into the Grave." (Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, Ibid, page 21.)

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

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

Walking in Beech Leaves

I tread on many autumns here

But with no pride,

For at the leaf-fall of each year

I also died.

This is last autumn, crisp and brown,

That my knees feel;

But through how many years sinks down

My sullen heel.

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

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

The Nest

Four blue stones in this thrush's nest

I leave, content to make the best

Of turquoise, lapis lazuli

Or for that matter of the whole blue sky.

Andrew Young, Ibid, page 54.

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

A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,

That so much lived below the ground,

Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,

For you to raise a mound

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

Andrew Young, Ibid, page 63.

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

William Birch (1895-1968)

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

Current Events

2024-03-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

On a recent afternoon walk, I heard an unseen owl call from somewhere off in the forest: "Hoo-hoo . . . hoo-hoo." This seemed to be a gentle inquiry, a tentative "How do you do?" After about ten seconds of silence, a crow -- also unseen, but from another part of the forest -- replied emphatically: "Caw-caw-caw." The meaning of this response seemed less clear. Was it a warning, a threat? But this is unfair to the crow: perhaps it was merely a corvine way of saying "Pleased to meet you."

The conversation repeated itself in the same fashion as I walked on. "Hoo-hoo . . . hoo-hoo." Brief silence. "Caw-caw-caw." Quite civilized, I concluded. The exchange had not come to an end as I passed out of earshot. I had developed a fondness for both of them. For their part, they were likely unaware of my existence. I take no offense at this. The three of us were just passing through the World on an afternoon near the end of winter. We crossed paths and continued on our separate ways. But I now think of the title of a poem by Robert Frost: "For Once, Then, Something."

Crofter

Last thing at night

he steps outside to breathe

the smell of winter.

The stars, so shy in summer,

glare down

from a huge emptiness.

In a huge silence he listens

for small sounds. His eyes

are filled with friendliness.

What's history to him?

He's an emblem of it

in its pure state.

And proves it. He goes inside.

The door closes and the light

dies in the window.

Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (edited by Ewen McCaig) (Polygon 2005), page 452.

MacCaig's "Crofter" always brings to mind this:

The Shepherd's Hut

Now when I could not find the road

Unless beside it also flowed

This cobbled beck that through the night,

Breaking on stones, makes its own light,

Where blackness in the starlit sky

Is all I know a mountain by,

A shepherd little thinks how far

His lamp is shining like a star.

Andrew Young, The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (edited by Edward Lowbury and Alison Young) (Secker & Warburg 1985), page 65.

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

My daily walk takes me through the grounds of what was once a post of the United States Army, an important embarkation point for troops bound for the Pacific during the Second World War. The post has long since been converted into a city park. But a number of large wooden buildings constructed early in the last century have been preserved. They have been painted a pleasing pale yellow, with white trim on the windows, doors, and eaves. They stand here and there amidst the meadows and trees, beside the wide concrete paths that wind through the grounds of the former post.

On a sunny day this week, as I walked through a budding grove of trees, a distant yet clear solo saxophone rendition of "The Girl from Ipanema" wafted through the air. I knew the source: over the past few months, a lone saxophonist has been practicing on the front porch of one of the buildings, which is set back on a lawn, surrounded by big-leaf maple trees. This was the first time I had heard him play a song all the way through.

The Just

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

He who is grateful for the existence of music.

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.

Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.

The potter, contemplating a color and a form.

The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.

A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.

He who strokes a sleeping animal.

He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.

He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.

He who prefers others to be right.

These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999), page 449.

"The Girl from Ipanema." A fine choice of music by the saxophonist. I was alive when the song became a hit in this country in 1964. Sixty years ago. Imagine that. At this point, as a member of the Baby Boom Generation, I feel compelled to observe that, when it comes to music, I lived through a charmed time. Or am I being "sentimental"? (A state of being which some sophisticated moderns find unacceptable. I've often wondered why this is so.)

But I did not engage in this internal back-and-forth as "The Girl from Ipanema" arrived unexpectedly on the breeze, passing through the warm sunlight and the boughs of the trees on its way, a few days before the beginning of Spring. I simply received a wonderful gift.

Shinto

When sorrow lays us low

for a second we are saved

by humble windfalls

of mindfulness or memory:

the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,

that face given back to us by a dream,

the first jasmine of November,

the endless yearning of the compass,

a book we thought was lost,

the throb of a hexameter,

the slight key that opens a house to us,

the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,

the former name of a street,

the colors of a map,

an unforeseen etymology,

the smoothness of a filed fingernail,

the date we were looking for,

the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,

a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities

travel secretly throughout the earth.

Those modest gods touch us --

touch us and move on.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Hoyt Rogers), Ibid, page 451.

John Nash, "The Lake, Little Horkesley Hall" (c. 1958)

A conversation between an owl and a crow. A song from sixty years ago, borne on the wind. As I have often said here in the past: in this World in which our time is short, we should pay attention and, above all, be grateful.

Message Taken

On a day of almost no wind,

today,

I saw two leaves falling almost, not quite,

perpendicularly -- which

seemed natural.

When I got closer, I saw

the leaves on the tree were

slanted by that wind, were pointing

towards those that had fallen.

When I got closer than that, I saw

the leaves on the tree

were trembling.

And that seemed natural too.

Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig, page 245.

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

At the Turning of the Year

2024-01-01T03:10:00.000-08:00

Solely by happenstance, this observation surfaced out of my memory during the past week: "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." An unexpected message for the New Year? And who might be the source of this thought? Perhaps Schopenhauer or Leopardi, those cheerful, happy-go-lucky characters? Or, further back in time, should we look to Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius? And what of the poets? For instance, one might imagine Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, or R. S. Thomas arriving at such a conclusion. (Although I do think that all three of them have been unfairly and inaccurately caricatured as hopeless pessimists.)

The answer is: "None of the above." Instead, as a member of the baby boom generation (born during the first term of the Eisenhower administration), I am proud to report that Jim Morrison and The Doors permanently planted this unforgettable line in my brain around 1970 or so. The source (as many of you no doubt already know) is "Roadhouse Blues" from the album (which is what we called those circular vinyl artifacts back then) Morrison Hotel. And a fine album it was, and remains. But, have no fear, I don't intend to embark upon one of those by now tiresome baby boomer paeans to the wondrous music of my youth. (Well, it was wondrous.)

I will, however, say this: "After all, it's true. The future's uncertain and the end is always near. And, although it is a truism -- the substance of which has been repeated many times in many ways over many centuries -- there is a certain frisson in having it suddenly arrive near the end of "Roadhouse Blues." You never know in what guise Beauty and Truth will present themselves. Be grateful for small and unexpected gifts."

Having listened to "Roadhouse Blues" numerous times this past week, I found myself remembering a lovely poem (which has appeared here in the past):

Garramor Bay

Now the long wave unfolded falls from the West,

The sandbirds run upon twittering, twinkling feet:

Life is perilous, poised on the lip of a wave,

And the weed that lay yesterday here is clean gone.

O visitor, fugitive creature, thing of a tide,

Make music, my heart, before the long silence.

L. A. G. Strong, Northern Light (Victor Gollancz 1930).

Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935), "Flower Meadow in the North" (1905)

"Garramor Bay" in turn led me to this (which has also appeared here on more than one occasion):

Out There

Do they ever meet out there,

The dolphins I counted,

The otter I wait for?

I should have spent my life

Listening to the waves.

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

"Roadhouse Blues," followed by "Garramor Bay," followed by "Out There": such has been the turning of the year for me.

Happy New Year, dear readers!

Richard Eurich (1903-1992), "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

Christmastide

2023-12-25T01:25:00.000-08:00

At Christmas, I turn to Thomas Hardy. (As well as to George Mackay Brown (for instance, "Christmas Poem": "We are folded all/In a green fable . . .") and R. S. Thomas (a bit astringent, as one might expect, but lovely; for instance, "Blind Noel": "Yet there is always room/on the heart for another/snowflake to reveal a pattern").) When it comes to Hardy, I invariably visit this:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

"Now they are all on their knees,"

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,"

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (Macmillan 1917). A "barton" is a farmyard. The poem was first published in The Times on December 24, 1915. (J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 370.)

At some point in his life, Hardy lost his faith. But he wrote "The Oxen" without irony. This may be difficult for most irony-afflicted moderns to believe (in the unlikely event they should ever come across the poem). But I take Hardy at his word. And I would do as he says he would do.

Edmund Blunden writes this of "The Oxen":

"Like so many of his poems, this one sprang from lonely musing on scenes of the past and their application to the present. . . . The picture is one to delight us still in troubled times. A quiet Christmas Eve almost a hundred years ago, in a Dorset cottage, by firelight, and an old man, unaware of anything remarkable in his talk, says that the cattle in the shed are on their knees now. Everyone agrees silently. A boy looks especially attentive. The years run by, and there is the attentive boy Hardy himself grown an old man, realizing the universal appeal in that local superstition, the reviving life in it."

Edmund Blunden, Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1941), page 153.

Blunden was a friend of Hardy's, and was quite fond of him. One senses respect, but also a bit of skepticism, in his discussion of "The Oxen." Given Blunden's experiences in the trenches during the First World War, and the date on which the poem was published, this is understandable. But, again, I take Hardy on his word.

"Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life." (Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (Heinemann 1897), page 272.)

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), "1930 (Christmas Night)" (1930)

In writing of his admiration for Hardy's poetry, Thom Gunn notes that, in reading the poetry, he has a "feeling of contact with an honest man who will never lie to me." (Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," in The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (North Point Press 1985), page 105.) Kingsley Amis says something uncannily similar about Edward Thomas: "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 (Arena 1989), page 339.) I completely agree with what Amis says of Edward Thomas, and I believe it is true of Thomas Hardy as well.

These comments about poetic honesty are complemented quite well by this fine observation about Hardy and his poetry by F. L. Lucas: "He deliberately took for his subjects the commonest and most natural feelings; but by an unfamiliar side, and with that insight which only sensitiveness and sympathy can possess. This sympathy is important; for, as I have said, if truthfulness is one main feature of Hardy's work, its compassion is another." (F. L. Lucas, Ten Victorian Poets (Cambridge University Press 1940), page 192.)

All of this leads us in a roundabout way back to Hardy's Christmas poetry, which is where we ought to be:

Christmastide

The rain-shafts splintered on me

As despondently I strode;

The twilight gloomed upon me

And bleared the blank high-road.

Each bush gave forth, when blown on

By gusts in shower and shower,

A sigh, as it were sown on

In handfuls by a sower.

A cheerful voice called, nigh me,

"A merry Christmas, friend!" --

There rose a figure by me,

Walking with townward trend,

A sodden tramp's, who, breaking

Into thin song, bore straight

Ahead, direction taking

Toward the Casuals' gate.

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

With that (and with a grateful thank you to Thomas Hardy): "A merry Christmas, friend!"

Robin Tanner (1904-1988) "Christmas" (1929)

No Grieving

2023-11-28T02:35:00.000-08:00

Most of the leaves have fallen. One day last week -- a proverbial "brilliant autumn day" -- I walked past a grove of big-leaf maples bordering a small glade. The ground beneath the maples was covered with red, russet, and yellow leaves. There was no wind. Now and then, a few of the remaining leaves drifted down. Each one made a soft tick as it landed on the dry, deep leaf-carpet.

People are few;

A leaf falls here,

Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

A single leaf falls in a sunlight-pierced, shadowed grove, joining its predecessors. I cannot help but return to the lines from Yeats which appeared in my most recent post: ". . . and the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom." (W. B. Yeats, "Ephemera.") There is something to be said for waning autumn.

Leaves falling,

Lie one on another;

The rain beats on the rain.

Gyōdai (1732-1793) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 365.

The haiku by Issa and Gyōdai are statements of fact. Lovely statements of fact. Records of two evanescent moments made by two evanescent human beings. But there is much more afoot. "The real nature of each thing, and more so, of all things, is a poetical one. . . . Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all." (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page x.)

And this:

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was that he or she had loved for many years without knowing it. So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen. They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."

R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (the italics are in the original text).

In noting that Issa's and Gyōdai's haiku are "statements of fact," I am not suggesting that the poems are emotionless observations, devoid of feeling. Any fine haiku is an embodiment of kokoro, a Japanese word (based on the Chinese character for the Chinese word xin) which can mean "heart," "mind," or "spirit" or, in certain contexts, all three of them at once: heart-mind-spirit. Thus, the distinctive melancholy of autumn inhabits both of the two haiku: that combination of heartbreaking beauty and resigned acceptance each of us knows so well.

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937)

"The Old Mill, Weston Turville" (1927)

Autumn's particular form of melancholy is, not surprisingly, present in my favorite autumnal poem by Thomas Hardy. As is so often the case (at least for me) when reading Hardy's poetry, the poem contains a line which, once encountered, stays with you for a lifetime.

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). Hardy added the subscript "1901" at the bottom of the poem. The date may be put into context by Hardy's comment on the poem in a letter he wrote to a friend in December of 1906: "I happened to be walking, or cycling, through [the park] years ago, when the incident occurred on which the verses are based." (J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 207.)

"Earth never grieves!" This is the line that has stayed with me for several decades. Years after having first come across it, I was delighted to discover this passage in a letter written by Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, his long-time companion: "Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line." (Philip Larkin, letter to Monica Jones (January 29, 1958), in Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica (edited by Anthony Thwaite) (Faber and Faber 2010), page 235.) I also heartily agree with another comment made by Larkin relating to Hardy (which has appeared here on more than one occasion): "[M]ay I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show?" (Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic" (1966), in Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 174.) Larkin's comment was correct at the time he wrote it in 1966. It remains correct.

[A side-note. Hardy's comment on the source of "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" brings to mind a statement attributed to him in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (a biography which was ascribed to his wife, Florence Hardy, when it was first published, but which was actually written mostly by Hardy): "I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred." (Thomas Hardy and Florence Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 408.) These lines from one of Hardy's poems come to mind: "O the regrettings infinite/When the night-processions flit/Through the mind!" (Thomas Hardy, "The Peace-Offering.") We each have our own "regrettings infinite" and flitting "night-processions," don't we?

A poem about Hardy by Siegfried Sassoon, who often visited Hardy at his home in Dorset, provides an evocative glimpse of Hardy and his haunting, ever-present past.

At Max Gate

Old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair,

Courteous to visiting acquaintance chatted

With unaloof alertness while he patted

The sheep dog whose society he preferred.

He wore an air of never having heard

That there was much that needed putting right.

Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn't there.

Good care was taken to keep him out of sight.

Head propped on hand, he sat with me alone,

Silent, the log fire flickering on his face.

Here was the seer whose words the world had known.

Someone had taken Mr. Hardy's place.

Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems: 1908-1956 (Faber and Faber 1961). "Max Gate" was the name of Hardy's home in Dorchester. The younger poets of Hardy's time often tended to make their way to Hardy in his later years. For instance, in addition to Sassoon, Walter de la Mare and Edmund Blunden became his friends, and were invited for visits. Like Sassoon, both of them wrote poems about Hardy.]

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "A City Garden" (1940)

"Earth never grieves!" As for us, there is no escape from grief and grieving, is there? This is neither a complaint nor a lament. Grief and grieving are part and parcel of the beauty of the World. What can one do? Continue to pay attention to the beautiful particulars of the World. Above all else, remain grateful.

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371. The poem is untitled.

"Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!" One can only hope to find the equanimity of Hsin Ch'i-chi. Or the equanimity (and the beauty and truth) of this:

"Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring -- these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as 'Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered' or 'On being prevented from visiting the blossoms' inferior to those on 'Seeing the blossoms'? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, 'This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms. There is nothing worth seeing now.'

"In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting. Does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms? The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house -- such a man truly knows what love means."

Kenkō (1283-1350) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 137, in Donald Keene (editor), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 115 and 118.

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Moniaive" (1885)

After all my long-windedness, I find myself returning once again to my favorite poem of autumn. (For which I beg the forbearance of long-time -- and much-appreciated! -- readers of this blog.)

Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfilment

Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).

Come to think of it, "Leaves" has something to say about grieving, equanimity, and beauty.

As does this:

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.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979)

"Burdens Farm, with Melbury Beacon" (1943)

Birdlife

2023-10-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

Has any poet written as many beautiful and memorable lines as Yeats? I confess that I am biased by circumstances. I discovered the poetry of Yeats at an impressionable age: in my sophomore year of college, in a course titled "Yeats, Pound, and Eliot." I was smitten from the start. Imagine a melancholic, romantic lad, 19 years of age, reading this: "A pity beyond all telling/Is hid in the heart of love." ("The Pity of Love.") Or this: "And bending down beside the glowing bars,/Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled/And paced upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars." ("When You Are Old.") Or this: "She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;/But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears." ("Down by the Salley Gardens.") Or this: "I have spread my dreams under your feet;/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." ("He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.") Prior to taking the course, I had a fitful interest in poetry. But, when I came upon Yeats, that was it: my life changed.

As I have noted here in the past, I am fondest of the fin de siècle Yeats, the Yeats of the Celtic Twilight. This no doubt suggests that I have failed to progress emotionally over the past five decades. The "critical consensus" favors middle and late Yeats: the "mature" Yeats. But I don't find these sorts of critical assessments to be helpful. (Am I to look askance at "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" because Yeats wrote it at the age of 25?) There is great beauty to be found in all of Yeats -- early, middle, or late. Best to just read the poems.

Thinking of poems by Yeats set in autumn, this comes first to mind: "Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,/And over the mice in the barley sheaves . . ." ("The Falling of the Leaves.") And then this: "The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once/A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;/Autumn was over him . . ." ("Ephemera.") These two poems appear beside each other in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, which was published in 1889, the heart of Yeats's Celtic Twilight period.

Still, despite my fondness for the younger Yeats, I am more than willing to concede that, when it comes to his autumn poems, this (from his middle years) is the finest:

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole (Macmillan 1919).

As I asked at the outset: has any poet written as many beautiful and memorable lines as Yeats? Each stanza of "The Wild Swans at Coole" has lines that one is unlikely to forget, having read them but once.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998)

"Stobo Kirk, Peeblesshire" (1936)

The autumn mood is the autumn mood at all times and in all places. Thus, reading "The trees are in their autumn beauty,/The woodland paths are dry," I think of this, from China in the Ninth Century, during the great T'ang Dynasty period of poetry:

The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;

Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.

On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;

In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.

Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;

Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.

In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,

The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chü-i (772-846) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57. The poem is written in the eight-line lü-shih ("regulated verse") form, which, in addition to having tonal and rhyming requirements, calls for verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets. (See Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), pages 8-12, 374.)

Waley's More Translations from the Chinese and Yeats's collection The Wild Swans at Coole were both published in 1919. It is lovely to think that the two of them may have been working on "The Cranes" and "The Wild Swans at Coole" during the same period of time. Po Chü-i had written "The Cranes" ten centuries earlier. Twilight. Bright leaves. Dry paths. Swans and cranes. Nothing had changed. Nothing has changed.

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

In February of 1694, Matsuo Bashō wrote to a friend in Ueno (the town in which Bashō had been born and raised): "I feel my end is drawing near." (Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 370.) In June of that year, he made the long journey from Edo (now known as Tokyo) to Ueno (which is located near Kyoto). In November, Bashō was still in Ueno, staying in a small cottage located behind his brother's house. On November 13, he wrote this haiku:

Along this road

Goes no one,

This autumn eve.

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 342. Bashō included this headnote to the haiku: "Expressing how I feel." (Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters, page 406.) The Japanese word which Blyth translates as "eve" is kure. Kure can mean "sunset," "dusk," or "evening;" it can also mean "end" or "close." Hence, the final line of the haiku has sometimes been translated as, for instance, "the end of autumn" or "autumn's close."

On the same day, Bashō wrote this:

this autumn

why am I aging so?

to the clouds, a bird

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters, page 407. The poem is prefaced by this headnote: "A wanderer's thought." (Ibid, page 407.) Bashō does not identify the type of bird.

Swans and cranes. And, finally: "to the clouds, a bird." Autumn.

[A postscript. Bashō died on November 25. This is his final haiku:

on a journey, ailing --

my dreams roam about

on a withered moor

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), Ibid, page 413.]

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

September

2023-09-26T00:35:00.003-07:00

Once again, September. The past few weeks, the afternoons have sometimes been as warm as midsummer. But the leaves -- ah, the leaves: green going to gold, and to brown, amber, orange, and red. Fallen, falling, ready to fall. Before long, they will "Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road." (Derek Mahon, "Leaves.") Not quite yet. And where have the swallows gone?

Speaking of Derek Mahon, I recently realized that I have been remiss: it has been a few years since we last visited my favorite September poem.

September in Great Yarmouth

The woodwind whistles down the shore

Piping the stragglers home; the gulls

Snaffle and bolt their final mouthfuls.

Only the youngsters call for more.

Chimneys breathe and beaches empty,

Everyone queues for the inland cold --

Middle-aged parents growing old

And teenage kids becoming twenty.

Now the first few spots of rain

Spatter the sports page in the gutter.

Council workmen stab the litter.

You have sown and reaped; now sow again.

The band packs in, the banners drop,

The ice-cream stiffens in its cone.

The boatman lifts his megaphone:

'Come in, fifteen, your time is up.'

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

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "The River" (c. 1924)

Late September, and the green leaves still outnumber those that have turned. As the boughs sway in a breeze, one hears a susurration, a sea-sound, not a rattling. On a clear day, leaf-shadows and patches of sunlight continue to revolve on the ground, kaleidoscopic, unceasing.

But yesterday afternoon I noticed dry yellow leaves gathering in the gutters as I walked through what was otherwise a green tunnel of trees. A group of three maples I have come to know as the earliest heralds of autumn began their transformation at the beginning of the month: the highest boughs and the leaves out at the tips of the lower branches are scarlet; only a dwindling inner core of summer green remains. "Now it is September and the web is woven./The web is woven and you have to wear it." (Wallace Stevens, "The Dwarf.")

The Crossing

September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.

Howard Nemerov, Gnomes & Occasions (University of Chicago Press 1973).

John Lawson (1868-1909), "An Ayrshire Stream" (1893)

I have a vague notion of what occurs when "the ecliptic and equator cross." Something to do with the movement of spheres, I suspect. But I'm reminded of my oft-repeated first principle of poetry: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry. Here is a wider principle I have adopted at this moment: Explanation and explication are the death of enchantment. The enchantment of the World, of course. Mind you, I accept the existence of the ecliptic and the equator. This is not an anti-scientific manifesto. I simply prefer, for instance, a single butterfly or a single leaf, with no explanations attached.

In a headnote to a haiku, Bashō (1644-1694) writes: "As we look calmly, we see everything is content with itself." (Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 153.) The haiku is: "Playing in the blossoms/a horsefly . . . don't eat it,/friendly sparrows!" (Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), Ibid, page 153.) Ueda provides this annotation: "The headnote is a sentence that often appears in Taoist classics, although Bashō probably took it from a poem by the Confucian philosopher Ch'eng Ming-tao." (Ibid, p. 153.)

Bashō's headnote brings to mind a notebook entry written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "September 1 -- the beards of Thistle & dandelions flying above the lonely mountains like life, & I saw them thro' the Trees skimming the lake like Swallows --." (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon 1957), Notebook Entry 799 (September 1, 1800). The text is as it appears in the notebook.)

All of which leads us to a single leaf:

Threshold

When in still air and still in summertime

A leaf has had enough of this, it seems

To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage

Its drifting in detachment down the road.

Howard Nemerov, Gnomes & Occasions.

A single leaf. Or a single butterfly. No explanations required, or necessary.

A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (Twayne 1970), page 50.

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941)

"A View of Church Hill from the Mill Pond, Old Swanage" (1931)

[A coda. "The boatman" calling in someone out on the water whose "time is up" in Derek Mahon's "September in Great Yarmouth" makes an appearance in another poem:

Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

As they sit there, happily drinking,

their strokes, cancers, and so forth are not in their minds.

Indeed, what earthly good would thinking

about the future (which is Death) do? Each summer finds

beer in their hands in big pint glasses.

And so their leisure passes.

Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling

into their thoughts. Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed

screaming for a teddy or a tinkling

musical box, against their will. Each Joe or Fred

wants longer with the life and lasses.

And so their time passes.

Second childhood; and 'Come in, number 80!'

shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.

When you're called you must go, matey,

so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool,

there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . .

And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart, in Philip Larkin (editor), Poetry Supplement Compiled by Philip Larkin for the Poetry Book Society (Poetry Book Society 1974). Ewart and Larkin were friends. The poem has a Larkinesque feel to it, doesn't it? It's not surprising that Larkin chose to include it in the Poetry Book Society's annual Christmas anthology.

But I like to think that if Larkin had written the poem he would have softened it a bit, and made beautifully clear that we are all Yorkshiremen in pub gardens, each in our own way. He likely would have done so in the final stanza: one long, lovely sentence hedged with one or two qualifications and perhaps containing a reversal -- but absolutely, humanly true. He is not the misanthropic, dour caricature he is often incorrectly made out to be by the inattentive. For example: "Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives." (Philip Larkin, "Afternoons.") Or: "As they wend away/A voice is heard singing/Of Kitty, or Katy,/As if the name meant once/All love, all beauty." (Philip Larkin, "Dublinesque.") And this: "we should be careful//Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time." (Philip Larkin, "The Mower.")

For some reason, I find myself reminded of a poem by Su Tung-p'o. It is a poem of spring, and thus may seem out of season. But the final line is apt in any season, and at any time, in any place.

Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade

Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green --

when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.

Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --

in a lifetime how many springs do we see?

Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Copper Canyon Press 1994), page 68.

In a lifetime, how many Septembers do we see?]

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937)

"Halton Lake, Wendover, Buckinghamshire"

Life and Art. Art and Life.

2023-08-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

One morning this week, as I walked along a shadowy but sun-dappled path through a grove of trees, I came upon a single golden pine needle hovering vertically in mid-air, at eye-level, above the path. The needle was suspended on a single gossamer thread. Unmoving, it captured the angled morning sunlight of late August.

I walked on. A few minutes later, I remembered this (which has appeared here in the past):

On Something Observed

Torn remains of a cobweb,

one strand dangling down --

a stray petal fluttering by

has been tangled, caught in its skein,

all day to dance and turn,

never once resting --

elsewhere in my garden,

no breeze stirs.

Kokan Shiren (1278-1346) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Japanese Literature in Chinese, Volume II: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Later Period (Columbia University Press 1976), page 27. Kokan Shiren was a Zen Buddhist monk.

So goes our brief stay in Paradise.

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

One Thing Leads To Another, Part One: Bells

2023-07-31T01:50:00.000-07:00

As I am wont to do several times a year, I recently returned to the poetry of Walter de la Mare. At the beginning of last week, I revisited an old favorite:

The Bells

Shadow and light both strove to be

The eight bell-ringers' company,

As with his gliding rope in hand,

Counting his changes, each did stand;

While rang and trembled every stone,

To music by the bell-mouths blown:

Till the bright clouds that towered on high

Seemed to re-echo cry with cry.

Still swang the clappers to and fro,

When, in the far-spread fields below,

I saw a ploughman with his team

Lift to the bells and fix on them

His distant eyes, as if he would

Drink in the utmost sound he could;

While near him sat his children three,

And in the green grass placidly

Played undistracted on: as if

What music earthly bells might give

Could only faintly stir their dream,

And stillness make more lovely seem.

Soon night hid horses, children, all,

In sleep deep and ambrosial.

Yet, yet, it seemed, from star to star,

Welling now near, now faint and far,

Those echoing bells rang on in dream,

And stillness made even lovelier seem.

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

As is often the case in de la Mare's poetry, the poem is an evocation of Beauty, coupled with a meditation upon how each moment of Beauty we experience can continue to resonate -- and remain -- in our lives in ways we can never anticipate. This coarse description of the poem is the sort of thing I always counsel against. To wit: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry. I should follow my own advice. Best to read the poem, keep silent, and rejoice in the particulars.

For instance, consider the repetition of the "dream"/"seem" rhymes in lines 19 and 20 and in lines 25 and 26, with the accompanying repetition of line 20 ("And stillness make more lovely seem") -- with slight modifications -- in line 26 ("And stillness made even lovelier seem"). And, of course, where would we be without de la Mare's fondness for the word "lovely"? "Look thy last on all things lovely,/Every hour." ("Fare Well.") "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." ("Now.") The "modernists" of de la Mare's day and the moderns of our own day (with their own fondness for supercilious irony) have no use for a word such as "lovely." No surprise there.

Bertram Priestman (1868-1951), "Suffolk Water Meadows" (1906)

Philippe Jaccottet died on February 24, 2021 at the age of 95. On March 4 of that year, his two final works were published in France: an essay (although "essay" seems too prosaic a word) (La Clarté Notre-Dame) and a collection of poems (Le Dernier Livre de Madrigaux). The two works have been translated into English by John Taylor and have been published together in a single volume. I ordered a copy of the book, and it arrived last Friday.

That evening I started to read La Clarté Notre-Dame. It begins:

"Note dated 19 September 2012: 'This spring, don't forget the little vesper bell of La Clarté Notre-Dame, which sounds incredibly clear in the vast, grey, silent landscape -- truly like a kind of speech, call or reminder, a pure, weightless, fragile, yet crystal-clear tinkling -- in the grey distance of the air.'

"(Indeed, this: I must keep it alive like a bird in the palm of my hand, preserved for a flight that is still possible if one is not too clumsy, or too weary, or if the distrust of words doesn't prevail over it.)"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), in Philippe Jaccottet, 'La Clarté Notre-Dame' and 'The Last Book of the Madrigals' (Seagull Books 2022), page 5. The italics appear in the original text.

After this two-sentence introduction, Jaccottet continues:

"On a day perhaps at the end of winter (after checking it was 4th of March, thus about a year ago), while walking with friends and barely talking in a vast landscape heading down a gentle slope to a remote valley, under a grey sky, and it's another kind of greyness that predominates in such a season in these otherwise empty fields where no one is working yet, where we're the only ones walking, with no haste and no other goal than getting some fresh air.

* * * * * *

"Up until then, nothing particularly strange, or that might have moved us. At best, perhaps, a kind of prelude to something we didn't know. Until the little vesper bell of La Clarté Notre-Dame Convent, which we still couldn't see at the bottom of the valley, began to ring far below us, at the heart of all this almost-dull greyness. I then said to myself, reacting in a way that was both intense and confusing (and so many times in similar moments I'd been forced to bring together the two epithets), that I'd never heard a tinkling -- prolonged, almost persistent, repeated several times -- as pure in its weightlessness, in its extreme fragility, as genuinely crystalline. . . . Yet which I couldn't listen to as if it were a kind of speech -- emerging from some mouth. . . . A tinkling so crystalline that it seemed, as it appeared, oddly, almost tender. . . . Ah, this was obviously something that resisted grasping, defied language, like so many other seeming messages from afar -- and this frail tinkling lasted, persisted, truly like an appeal, or a reminder . . ."

Ibid, pages 5-7. The italics and ellipses appear in the original text.

Reading the passages above, I am reminded of this: "A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught." (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), "Blazon in Green and White," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 53.)

Bertram Priestman, "The Sun-Veiled Hills of Wharfedale" (1917)

Having the vesper bell of the convent of La Clarté Notre-Dame arrive unexpectedly just a few days after reading "The Bells" was a nice bit of serendipity. I know nothing about how to live, and I possess no wisdom, but age has taught me that, when it comes to Beauty, one thing leads to another. Whether this happens by chance, or by placing oneself in the way of Beauty, or by a combination of both, I don't know. But I do know that, when the stepping stones of Beauty appear, one ought to follow their path.

Thus, the bells of the English countryside and a vesper bell chiming from a valley in France set me to thinking about the sound of bells. Eventually, again by way of Walter de la Mare -- this time through Come Hither, his wonderful anthology of poetry -- this came to mind:

Against Oblivion

Cities drowned in olden time

Keep, they say, a magic chime

Rolling up from far below

When the moon-led waters flow.

So within me, ocean deep,

Lies a sunken world asleep.

Lest its bells forget to ring,

Memory! set the tide a-swing!

Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), in Walter de la Mare (editor), Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Constable 1923), page 214. In Come Hither, de la Mare gives the poem the title "Cities Drowned." However, when the poem was originally published, Newbolt titled it "Against Oblivion." (Henry Newbolt, Songs of Memory and Hope (John Murray 1909), page 50.) Newbolt and de la Mare were close friends, and Newbolt encouraged de la Mare when he embarked upon his literary career. "Against Oblivion" in fact sounds like something de la Mare himself could have written.

"Against Oblivion" is the penultimate poem in the section of Come Hither titled "Dance, Music and Bells." I proceeded to the poem which follows it:

The Bell-man

From noise of Scare-fires rest ye free,

From Murders -- Benedicite.

From all mischances, that may fright

Your pleasing slumbers in the night:

Mercie secure ye all, and keep

The Goblin from ye, while ye sleep.

Past one aclock, and almost two,

My Masters all, Good day to you!

Robert Herrick, in Walter de la Mare (editor), Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, page 215. "Benedicite" is "an expletive of good omen, used after the mention of some evil word or thing." (Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 611 (quoting the Reverend Charles Percival Phinn).) The Reverend Phinn (who died in 1906) was an indefatigable and thorough annotator of Herrick's poetry. His annotations were never published, but were preserved in the margins of his copy of Herrick's poems. (Ibid, Volume I, page 432.) The annotations have been praised, and relied upon, by modern editors of Herrick's poetry.

Herrick's poem provided another stepping stone, leading once again to Walter de la Mare:

Then

Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty,

A hundred years ago,

All through the night with lantern bright

The Watch trudged to and fro.

And little boys tucked snug abed

Would wake from dreams to hear --

'Two o' the morning by the clock,

And the stars a-shining clear!'

Or, when across the chimney-tops

Screamed shrill a North-East gale,

A faint and shaken voice would shout,

'Three! -- and a storm of hail!'

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

Bertram Priestman, "Wooded Hillside" (1910)

One thing leads to another: from the bells of sunken cities and of night watchmen my thoughts turned, for no apparent reason, to the sound of bells in Japanese poetry. A set of two haiku written by Issa (1763-1828) provided the next stepping stones.

The evening cool;

Not knowing the bell

Is tolling our life away.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume III: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 124.

The evening cool;

Knowing the bell

Is tolling our life away.

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 125.

Of the "four masters" of haiku (the other three being Bashō, Buson, and Shiki), Issa is the most down-to-earth and playful, and is by turns tragic and comic. Commenting on the two haiku, R. H. Blyth writes: "only the enlightened man knows, as part of his hearing the bell, as part of every breath he draws, as part of the coolness, that all is fleeting and evanescent." (Ibid, page 125; the italics appear in the original text.) But who would presume to describe himself or herself as "enlightened"? We know, but we don't know, isn't that the case? It depends on the moment.

I can't imagine that Walter de la Mare would have ever referred to himself as being "enlightened." But he was well aware "that all is fleeting and evanescent." Two days prior to his death, he "wrote to a friend of the midsummer leaf and blossom: 'One looks at it partly with amazed delight and partly with anticipatory regret at its transitoriness'." (Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth 1993), page 445 and page 459 (footnote 13).) De la Mare's comment in the letter articulates the essence of much of his poetry.

Issa's complementary and provocative haiku were not the stopping point. At a certain stage in your life, you learn to be patient and wait for things to float up. In time, two beloved treasures arrived.

The first treasure:

A quiet bell sounds --

and reveals a village

waiting for the moon.

Sōgi (1421-1502) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University 1987), page 96. The poem is a link in a renga hyakuin (a sequence of one hundred linked verses). Renga consist of alternating three-line and two-line verses (links). The three-line verses/links in renga were the precursors of what eventually became a new poetic form: free-standing haiku.

The second treasure:

To a mountain village

at nightfall on a spring day

I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134. The poem is a waka.

Both of these poems have appeared here before (the latter on several occasions). They are two of my favorite poems. They speak for themselves.

The sound of bells. Yes, when it comes to Beauty, one thing leads to another.

Bertram Priestman, "The Great Green Hills of Yorkshire" (1913)

Haiku

2023-06-30T02:40:00.000-07:00

Over the past two months I have spent much of my reading time moving back and forth within the Spring volume of R. H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku. The set has been with me for more than 40 years. I bought it in a used bookstore in Seattle when I was attending law school. I had discovered Blyth's haiku translations a few years earlier, but finding copies of Haiku to purchase in those pre-internet days was difficult: the four volumes had been published in small quantities in Tokyo between 1949 and 1952, and thus were scarce. I was surprised and delighted to finally come across a lovely full set as I idly browsed one afternoon in the Asian literature section of one of my favorite bookstores. The back endpaper of Volume I (Eastern Culture) still bears the bookseller's pencilled notation: "$65 for 4 volumes." In my law student days, $65 was an exorbitant sum to spend on a book purchase, but I felt I had no choice. Now, four decades later, the volumes sit beside me as I write this.

Given the number of times I have posted haiku translated by him, I suspect that the name "R. H. Blyth" appears in First Known When Lost more often than any other name. Blyth, who was born in England in 1898 and died in Japan in 1964, was a remarkable man, with wide-ranging interests (which included, in addition to haiku, Zen Buddhism, and English poetry, a passion for the music of Bach). He travelled to Seoul in 1924 to teach in a Japanese-operated university, and then moved to Japan in 1940, where he taught in various schools and universities. By the time he moved to Japan, he had learned both Japanese and Chinese, and had made his first attempts at translating Japanese and Chinese poetry. He had also begun to study and practice Zen Buddhism.

He was still residing in Japan when the Second World War began. As was the case with all foreign residents who were citizens of nations at war with Japan, he was confined in an internment camp throughout the War. After the War ended, he served as a "counselor" to the Imperial Household, and, in that role, provided advice to General Douglas MacArthur during the occupation period. He also began to act as a private tutor to the Crown Prince (and future Emperor), Akihito. He was well-known and respected in Japan in the pre-War period for his knowledge of, and admiration for, Japanese culture. This respect deepened as a result of the wise and practical advice he provided to MacArthur and other occupation officials during the post-War period. His advice was driven by his love for Japan: his goal was to help protect and preserve the Japanese cultural heritage. [This outline of Blyth's life is based upon the excellent biographical "Introduction" in Norman Waddell's Poetry and Zen: Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth (Shambhala 2022), pages 1-51. The book is an invaluable collection, and I highly recommend it.]

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

"The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham" (1936)

All of this is by way of introduction to Blyth's Haiku. As you have likely deduced, dear readers, I am not in the least neutral about Haiku. I sometimes wonder whether my judgment about it is clouded by having encountered it at a relatively young age: am I still caught up in a youthful romantic daydream? But I have discovered over the years that others have been equally entranced by the four volumes.

For instance, a few years ago I came across this notebook entry by Philippe Jaccottet, written in 1960 (when he was 35): "R. H. Blyth's Haiku, essential. . . . I could quote pages. While reading these four volumes, it occurred to me more than once that they contained, of all the words I have ever managed to decipher, those closest to the truth." (Philippe Jaccottet (notebook entry, August of 1960) (translated by Tess Lewis), in Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-1979 (Seagull Books 2013), pages 52-53.) I was astounded and gratified to happen upon these comments by Jaccottet. He articulates (far better than I can) exactly how I have felt when reading Haiku over the past forty or so years.

This spring I once again returned to Blyth's wondrous creation: revisiting old favorites, being reminded of haiku I had once read but had forgotten, and making new discoveries.

A pear tree in bloom:

In the moonlight,

A woman reading a letter.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 323.

A night of stars;

The cherry blossoms are falling

On the water of the rice seedlings.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 170. Please bear with me: this haiku appeared in my post of May 24, but I think it goes well with Buson's pear tree haiku, so I repeat myself. It has long been one of my favorite haiku: three lovely images in succession, and a fourth unstated image -- the stars reflected in the water, floating on the dark surface with the cherry blossom petals, both amidst the green shoots of the rice seedlings.

The cherry blossoms blooming,

Those I remember

All far away.

Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 348.

How many, many things

They call to mind,

These cherry blossoms!

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 347.

Further thoughts by Philippe Jaccottet on haiku:

"Japanese haiku masters, who grasp in passing a shimmer in its impermanence and consider the frailest things to have the greatest value and the most power, are not mystics. You could not imagine calling them 'ardent,' or even that they climbed mountain peaks. They remind me more of those servants, in André Dhôtel's The Man of the Lumber Mill, who suddenly see the pure gleam of a garden reflected in the silverware or crystal glasses that they are cleaning."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), "Notes from the Ravine," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 303.

Stanley Spencer, "Landscape in North Wales" (1938)

The three seasonal volumes of Haiku (Volume II: Spring; Volume III: Summer-Autumn; Volume IV: Autumn-Winter) consist of collections of haiku organized according to general seasonal categories that are used in all three volumes: "The Season," "Sky and Elements," "Fields and Mountains," "Gods and Buddhas," "Human Affairs," "Birds and Beasts," and "Trees and Flowers." In addition, within each of the general categories, Blyth collects haiku based upon their particular seasonal word or phrase. Thus, for example, in the "Trees and Flowers" chapter of the Spring volume there are groups of haiku relating to cherry blossoms, plum blossoms, pear blossoms, willow trees, camellias, "grasses of spring," and ten other seasonal words or phrases. The result of Blyth's knowledge and labor is astonishing, and a gift to us all: Spring consists of 382 pages; usually, at least two to three haiku (often more) appear on each page; hence, the volume likely contains more than a thousand haiku.

The sheer volume may seem forbidding, but it is not. Or so it seems to me. Something that Philip Larkin wrote about Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems applies to how I feel about Blyth's Haiku: "may I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter." (Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic," in Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 174.) (An aside: I completely agree with Larkin's assessment of Hardy's Collected Poems as well.)

To return, then, to spring:

The soft breeze,

And in the green of a thousand hills,

A single temple.

Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring, page 100.

In the midst of the plain

Sings the skylark,

Free of all things.

Bashō (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 198.

The sea of spring,

Rising and falling,

All the day long.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 135.

The lights are lit

On the islands far and near:

The spring sea.

Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 135.

Tilling the field;

From the temple among the trees,

The funeral bell tolls.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 161.

Tilling the field:

The man who asked the way

Has disappeared.

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

Stanley Spencer, "Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene" (1947)

To repeat Philippe Jaccottet's thoughts about Blyth's Haiku: "While reading these four volumes, it occurred to me more than once that they contained, of all the words I have ever managed to decipher, those closest to the truth." Blyth has brought these words to us. Something that Jaccottet wrote at another time, but not about Blyth, and not about haiku, also comes to mind:

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

Simply trust:

Do not also the petals flutter down,

Just like that?

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring, page 363.

Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

Presences

2023-05-24T02:10:00.001-07:00

It is that time of year once again: I step out the front door, walk for an hour or so, and return, all the while accompanied by birdsong (occasionally punctuated by a crow's caw-caw-caw from off in the distance, or from directly above -- out of the blue). In the meadows, solitary birds now and then fly up out of the wild grass or hop down a path, voiceless. But the surrounding woods are full of unseen, unceasing choristers.

For Their Own Sake

Come down to the woods where the buds burst

Into fragrances, where the leaves make havoc

Of cloudy skies. Listen to birds

Obeying their instincts but also singing

For singing's sake. By the same token

Let us be silent for silence's sake,

Watching the buds, hearing the break

Free of fledgelings, the branches swinging

The sun, and never a word need be spoken.

Elizabeth Jennings, Consequently I Rejoice (Carcanet 1977).

This comes to mind: "the calm oblivious tendencies/Of Nature." (William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book I ("The Wanderer"), lines 963-964 (1814).) One of those gnomic utterances found so often in the younger Wordsworth (of whom I am fond, although I recognize that others may find him tiresome). "Oblivious" has always given me pause. For instance, how does one reconcile it with immanence? One can lose one's way in trying to unravel the euphoria and contradictions of the marvelous Wordsworthian-Coleridgean pantheism that emerged in 1797, and flourished for a few charmed years.

Jennings' poem suggests a reasonable approach: "oblivious" or not, the beautiful particulars of the World are enough in themselves, "for their own sake." Her final words are exactly right: ". . . and never a word need be spoken." For another perspective, we can turn to a lovely poem that has appeared here on more than one occasion: a different note, but in the same neighborhood.

Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are

Moral, or that the fixture of a star

Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees

Have wisdom in their windless silences.

Yet these are things invested in my mood

With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,

That in my troubled season I can cry

Upon the wide composure of the sky,

And envy fields, and wish that I might be

As little daunted as a star or tree.

John Drinkwater, Tides (Sidgwick & Jackson 1917).

Winter over, the robins no longer gather in flocks. Leaving a meadow and passing through a dark grove of pines, one hears them singing high overhead, each in its own tree.

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

On a breezy day, the new deep-green grass in the meadows turns silver as it sways and flows in the morning or afternoon sunlight. And the sound of the rising and falling and threshing silver-green waves, how does one describe that? A rustling? A whispering? A sighing? A soughing? A susurration? All of the above. But words ultimately fail, don't they? Elizabeth Jennings is correct: ". . . and never a word need be spoken." You simply have to be there. No words are necessary. No words are sufficient.

My favorite poem of May is Philip Larkin's "The Trees," to which I owe "threshing" in the paragraph immediately above. The source is the poem's final stanza: "Yet still the unresting castles thresh/In fullgrown thickness every May./Last year is dead, they seem to say,/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." (Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).) However, when it comes to the grass of the meadows in May, I return each year to this:

Consider the Grass Growing

Consider the grass growing

As it grew last year and the year before,

Cool about the ankles like summer rivers,

When we walked on a May evening through the meadows

To watch the mare that was going to foal.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2005). The poem was first published in The Irish Press on May 21, 1943. Ibid, page 271.

May is an effulgent yet wistful month. It does not have the wistful bittersweetness, or the bittersweet wistfulness, of, say, September or October: Spring continues to burgeon. But the fallen cherry, plum, and magnolia petals lay scattered on the sidewalks, strewn across the grass. On the other hand, along the paths and in the glades five-petaled pink wild roses (called the "Nootka rose" in this part of the world) and purple lupines are in bloom. The "unresting castles" soon will be in their "fullgrown thickness" of green. Ah, yes: "The paradise of Flowers' and Butterflies' Spirits." (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon 1957), Notebook Entry 1736 (December 1803).)

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, Collected Poems. By splitting "incredible" in lines three and four, Kavanagh is able to contrive a sonnet. (And the rhyming of "marshes" and "catharsis" in lines two and four is no mean feat either.) "The One" was written during Kavanagh's ecstatic "Canal Bank period" of 1955 through 1958, which was prompted by his survival after a brush with lung cancer (with accompanying surgery) in March and April of 1955. Ibid, page 284. The poem was first published in the journal Nonplus in October of 1959. Ibid, page 286.

Anne Isabella Brooke (1916-2002)

"Wharfedale From Above Bolton Abbey" (c. 1954)

"All things around us are asking for our apprehension, working for our enlightenment. But our thoughts are of folly. What is worse, every day, and many times in the day, we are enlightened, we are Buddha, a poet, -- but do not know it, and remain an ordinary man. For our sake haiku isolate, as far as it is possible, significance from the mere brute fact or circumstance. It is a single finger pointing to the moon. If you say it is only a finger, and often not a very beautiful one at that, this is so. If the hand is beautiful and bejeweled, we may forget what it is pointing at. Recording a conversation with Blake, [Henry] Crabb Robinson gives us an example of the indifference, or rather the cowardice, of average human nature, in its failure to recognize truth, poetry, when confronted with it in its unornamented form; the lines he quotes from Wordsworth are a "haiku." 'I had been in the habit, when reading this marvellous Ode to friends, to omit one or two passages, especially that beginning,

But there's a Tree, of many, one,

A single field

That I have looked upon,

lest I should be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain precisely what I admired. Not that I acknowledged this to be a fair test. But with Blake I could fear nothing of the kind. And it was this very stanza which threw him almost into a hysterical rapture'."

R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume III: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), pages i-ii. The passage quoted by Blyth from Henry Crabb Robinson's papers may be found in Arthur Symons, William Blake (Archibald Constable and Company 1907), pages 296-297 ("Extracts from the Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson"). The "Ode" referred to by Crabb Robinson is "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."

Of course, Blyth's intention is to make a case for the unique beauty and power of haiku. This was, in fact, his mission in life. In my humble opinion, Blyth is entirely correct in his assessment of the Beauty and Truth that may be found in the best haiku, and of the ability of haiku to provide enlightenment (regardless of whether or not such enlightenment occurs within the context of Buddhism). However, as Blyth suggests in this passage (and as he makes clear throughout his writings), the best poetry, in all places and at all times, "is a single finger pointing to the moon." Thus, his observations on haiku are intertwined with references to, and comparisons with, English poetry and Chinese poetry in particular, and world literature and philosophy in general. This catholic approach is one of the features which (again, in my humble opinion) makes his works so interesting, provocative, and, yes, wise, and gives them such charm.

All of which leads me (lengthily) to this:

Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate'er befall.

Walter de la Mare, O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953).

"Now" perfectly complements the observations made by Blyth in the passage quoted above. "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." Consider this from Blyth: "All things around us are asking for our apprehension, working for our enlightenment." Or this: "every day, and many times in the day, we are enlightened, we are Buddha, a poet, -- but do not know it, and remain an ordinary man." As I noted above, although Blyth is making a case for the beauty and power of haiku, his observations are arguably applicable to all of the best poetry (although I certainly agree that haiku does have a special beauty and power that is the product of a unique and wonderful culture and language).

Leonard Pike (1887-1959), "The Chasing Shadows"

Who knows why we are here in this "paradise of Flowers' and Butterflies' Spirits." During the short time we have, we should pay attention, and -- above all -- be grateful. Speaking for myself, I fail each day. But the poets daily remind me to attend to the World.

Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:

Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,

The lovely in life is the familiar,

And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

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

One sometimes feels at a loss. But then you happen upon something like this:

A night of stars;

The cherry blossoms are falling

On the water of the rice seedlings.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 170.

And the reflections of the stars float with the fallen cherry petals on the water, among the rice seedlings.

Herbert Hughes-Stanton (1870-1937)

"The Mill in the Valley" (1892)

Peace and Quiet

2023-04-05T03:00:00.000-07:00

All I ask for in life is peace and quiet, accompanied by an occasional fugitive encounter with Beauty and Truth. How does one go about pursuing these elusive will-o'-the-wisps? I have no wisdom to impart on this score. What do I know? I go for a daily walk in the green and blue and parti-colored World. Each day I read one or two poems. I try to pay attention. Above all, I try to be grateful. But failure is an everyday occurrence.

This course of action is no doubt simplistic and unambitious (and, some might argue, solipsistic). But I have wise and reliable guides. This entails looking backwards. How presumptuous and narrow-minded it is to imagine that we inhabitants of the contemporary world know more about life than those who have preceded us. Everything we need to know about how to live can be found in the past. We moderns have nothing to add.

From early days I have been at odds with the world;

My instinctive love is hills and mountains.

By mischance I fell into the dusty net

And was thirteen years away from home.

The migrant bird longs for its native grove.

The fish in the pond recalls the former depths.

Now I have cleared some land to the south of town;

Simplicity intact, I have returned to farm.

The land I own amounts to a couple of acres.

The thatched-roof house has four or five rooms.

Elms and willows shade the eaves in back,

Peach and plum stretch out before the hall.

Distant villages are lost in haze,

Above the houses smoke hangs in the air.

A dog is barking somewhere in a hidden lane,

A cock crows from the top of a mulberry tree.

My home remains unsoiled by worldly dust;

Within bare rooms I have my peace of mind.

For long I was a prisoner in a cage,

And now I have my freedom back again.

T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) (translated by James Hightower), in James Hightower, The Poetry of T'ao Ch'ien (Oxford University Press 1970), page 50. The poem (which is untitled) is the first poem in a five-poem sequence titled "Returning to the Farm to Dwell." Ibid, page 50.

"Thirteen years away from home" refers to T'ao Ch'ien's career as a government official, a position he qualified for by passing a rigorous series of civil service examinations (which required extensive knowledge of, and the ability to skillfully write, poetry). (I described these examinations, as well as the typical course of a governmental career in China, in a previous post.) It is fortunate that T'ao Ch'ien escaped "the dusty net" of the world. He is arguably the finest Chinese lyrical (shih) poet prior to the well-known poets of the T'ang Dynasty three to four centuries later (Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Po Chü-i, and Han-shan). But he is perhaps equally revered in China for the decision he made to abandon his bureaucratic career in order to return to the country to become a farmer. He was not a wealthy gentleman-farmer. He farmed to make a living, and he and his family suffered failed crops and the loss of a home to fire. The vicissitudes and joys of this life are documented in his poems, and, although occasional misgivings and laments may be found in the poetry, he remained true to his commitment.

Of course, poets at all times and in all places have longed for what T'ao Ch'ien longed for in Fourth and Fifth Century China: to be free of "the dusty net" and of "worldly dust."

Happy were he could finish forth his fate

In some unhaunted desert, most obscure

From all societies, from love and hate

Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;

Then wake again, and give God ever praise,

Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;

In contemplation spending all his days,

And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;

Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,

Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566-1601), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics, From the Original Texts (Longmans, Green and Co. 1928), page 270. Alas, I fear that Devereux never found his "unhaunted desert": his short and tempestuous life ended with a beheading for a plot against Queen Elizabeth I. But perhaps he at least now lies "where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush."

The pursuit of "content" is a recurring theme in Elizabethan poetry (together with love and death). This makes sense: "content" seems to be more attainable, and less transitory, than the fickle, ever-changing chimera of "happiness" (whatever that is).

Were I a king, I could command content.

Were I obscure, unknown should be my cares.

And were I dead, no thoughts should me torment,

Nor words, nor wrongs, nor loves, nor hopes, nor fears.

A doubtful choice, of three things one to crave,

A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), Ibid, page 110.

James Torrington Bell (1892-1970), "Hatton Farm, Inverarity"

Although T'ao Ch'ien was certainly influenced by Taoism, Confucianism, and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism, his decision to escape "the dusty net" was ultimately based upon his own sense of what was right for him, not upon philosophical or religious principles. His reasons are articulated in the poem above, and we should take him at his word, for he was never one to equivocate or dissemble: he had always been "at odds with the world;" he wished to keep his "simplicity intact;" he sought "peace of mind" and "freedom." Near the end of his life, he wrote his own prose "Elegy." In it, he states: "There was little enough reward for my labor, but my mind enjoyed a constant leisure. Content with Heaven and accepting my lot, I have lived out the years of my life. . . . Aware of my destined end, of which one cannot be ignorant, I find no cause for regret in this present transformation. I have lived out my lifespan, and all my life I have desired quiet retirement. Now that I am dying, an old man, what have I left to wish for?" (Translated by James Hightower, in James Hightower, The Poetry of T'ao Ch'ien, page 6.) He returns to these essential themes in nearly every poem he wrote.

Fall chrysanthemums have beautiful colors:

dew still on them, I pick the blossoms,

float them on this drowner of care --

it makes me feel farther than ever from the world.

Though I'm alone as I pour my wine,

when the cup's empty, somehow the jar tips itself.

The sun has set, all moving things stilled;

homing birds hurry to the woods, singing,

and I whistle jauntily by the eastern eaves --

another day I get to live this life.

T'ao Ch'ien (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 136. The poem is untitled. It is the seventh poem in a sequence of twenty poems titled "Drinking Wine." Ibid, page 134. Watson provides this note to the phrase "this drowner of care" in the third line: "Literally, 'the thing for forgetting care,' one of T'ao's terms for wine. The chrysanthemum was believed to have medicinal properties." Ibid, page 136.

As I noted above, those who have preceded us have provided us with all we need to know about how to live. Thus, for instance, approximately two centuries prior to T'ao Ch'ien's time, a Roman emperor wrote this (in Greek, the language of his Stoic teachers):

"A man may any hour he pleases retire into himself; and nowhere will he find a place of more quiet and leisure than in his own soul: especially if he has that furniture within, the view of which immediately gives him the fullest tranquillity. By tranquillity, I mean the most graceful order. Allow yourself continually this retirement, and refresh and renew your self. . . . For the future, then, remember to retire into this little part of yourself. Above all things, keep yourself from distraction, and intense desires. . . . Have these two thoughts ever the readiest in all emergencies: one, that 'the things themselves reach not to the soul, but stand without, still and motionless. All your perturbation comes from inward opinions about them.' The other, that 'all these things presently change, and shall be no more.' Frequently recollect what changes thou hast observed. The world is a continual change; life is opinion."

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

Given the sad and harrowing circumstances of his life, Ivor Gurney was not able to fashion a path to peace and quiet similar to that embodied in the lives and words of T'ao Ch'ien and Marcus Aurelius (who each, it should be said, had their own struggles and doubts). And yet Gurney's poetry comes to mind as I think about the pursuit of peace and quiet, Beauty and Truth. He did pursue them, and he sometimes -- albeit fitfully and briefly -- found them.

Soft rain beats upon my windows

Hardly hammering.

But by the great gusts guessed further off

Up by the bare moor and brambly headland

Heaven and earth make war.

That savage toss of the pine boughs past music

And the roar of the elms. . . .

Here come, in the candle light, soft reminder

Of poetry's truth, while rain beats as softly here

As sleep, or shelter of farms.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996), page 97. The poem is untitled. It was not published during Gurney's lifetime. George Walter provides this note to the text of the poem: "undated manuscript on loose sheet. A typescript version notes that this was 'written at Dartford, probably about 1926 or 1927'." Ibid, page 105. Gurney was confined in the City of London Mental Hospital (known as "Stone House") at Dartford (in Kent) from December of 1922 until his death in December of 1937. The ellipses in line 7 appear in the manuscript.

Knowing what Gurney went through in his life, reading a poem such as this breaks one's heart. The phrase "shelter of farms" in the last line leads naturally to this:

The Shelter from the Storm

And meantime fearing snow the flocks are brought in,

They are in the barn where stone tiles and wood shelter

From the harm shield; where the rosy-faced farmer's daughter

Goes to visit them.

She pats and fondles all her most favourite first.

then after that the shivering and unhappy ones --

Spreads hay, looks up at the noble and gray roof vast

And says 'This will stop storms.'

Her mind is with her books in the low-ceilinged kitchen

Where the twigs blaze. -- and she sees not sheep alone

of the Cotswold, but in the Italian shelters songs repeating

Herdsmen kind, from the blast gone.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems, page 92. George Walter notes that the poem is found in a "group of manuscripts on loose sheets," with some of the sheets "dated September 1926." Ibid, page 105. The punctuation is as it appears in the manuscript. The poem was not published during Gurney's lifetime.

[A side-note: I recommend Kate Kennedy's recent biography of Gurney: Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton University Press 2021). I also recommend Ivor Gurney: The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford University Press), the ongoing multi-volume edition of Gurney's poetry which is being wonderfully presented and edited by Philip Lancaster and Tim Kendall. Volume I: March 1907-December 1918 was published in 2020, and four additional volumes are forthcoming. Gurney deserves this attention.]

James Torrington Bell, "Farmhand Stacking Hay Stooks"

T'ao Ch'ien returns to his chrysanthemums beneath the eastern hedge and to homing birds at dusk in the following serene and simple poem, which captures the essence of the life he sought to live, yet reminds us that, in the end, words are -- quite rightly -- of no use.

I built my hut in a zone of human habitation,

Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach.

Would you know how that is possible?

A heart that is distant creates a wilderness round it.

I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,

Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.

The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;

The flying birds two by two return.

In these things there lies a deep meaning;

Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.

T'ao Ch'ien (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918), page 76. This is the fifth poem in the twenty-poem "Drinking Wine" sequence.

The final two lines of the poem bring to mind a statement by Ludwig Wittgenstein which has appeared here on more than one occasion: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." (Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness), Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).) An alternative translation (by C. K. Ogden) is: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Last week, I came across these words by Petrarch: "a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world." (Petrarch, De Secreto Conflictu Curarum Mearum (often referred to simply as "Secretum"), in William Draper (editor and translator), Petrarch's Secret, or The Soul's Conflict with Passion (Chatto & Windus 1911), page 104.) Secretum is structured as three imaginary dialogues between Petrarch and Saint Augustine. The words quoted above are spoken by Saint Augustine in the second dialogue. A few pages prior to the passage, Petrarch has Saint Augustine say this: "If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me, this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul." Ibid, page 98. Petrarch's words and thoughts (put by him into the mouth of Saint Augustine) are a remarkable echo of the passage from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius which I quoted above.

Heaven-Haven

A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press 1967), page 19. "Blow" (line 4) is used in the now, alas, "archaic" sense of "to bloom."

The wisdom of the past is ever-present and ever-alive, a winding but continuous thread that is there for the finding and tracing, if we so choose.

James Torrington Bell, "Landscape"

Dreams

2023-03-03T01:20:00.000-08:00

Each year I grow fonder of the robins who spend the winter here, gathering into small flocks, making their way across the meadows and through the woodlands. I suspect this fondness is partly a product of aging. Growing up in Minnesota, I was always on the lookout for rarer, more colorful birds: cardinals and Baltimore orioles, for instance. Robins were generally regarded as being lovable, but commonplace, with one exception: in the dark, cold, snowbound, and legendary Minnesota winters of yesteryear we all awaited "the first robin of Spring."

Ah, what an inattentive, distracted, and somnolent life I have lived! The robins stroll and peck and chatter with one another, the flock spread out widely across a bright green field on a sunny late winter afternoon: alone, but together; each one of them catching the slanting yellow light, each one of them unlike anything else in the World. Agleam. I have been fast asleep.

In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,

Under old trees the shadows of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

And if there is

Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing

Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

Over the fields. They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000), page 71. The poem was first published in March of 1923. Ibid, page 121.

"These dreams that take my breath away." More on this anon. But, in the meantime, here is something complementary to put beside "In the Fields":

"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.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), "Little Park, Lyme Regis" (1956)

At times, Charlotte Mew's poetry seems to echo the religious concerns found throughout Christina Rossetti's poetry. However, there is a hesitation, a questioning, in Mew's poems which is seldom present in Rossetti's work (which can perhaps be described as devotional). Thus, "In the Fields" begins with a query to God: "Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?" Mew continues: "And if there is/Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?" What might have seemed a straightforward hymn to Nature and Creation is transformed into something else entirely by those four lovely and remarkable lines. (By the way, "the strange heart of any everlasting thing" deserves a great deal of attention in itself. "Strange heart"? Wonderful.)

But I fear I am wandering too far into the much-to-be-avoided territory of explanation and explication. It is the beguiling beauty of "these dreams that take my breath away" which captures me, and which in turn leads to this:

Do Dreams Lie Deeper?

His dust looks up to the changing sky

Through daisies' eyes;

And when a swallow flies

Only so high

He hears her going by

As daisies do. He does not die

In this brown earth where he was glad enough to lie.

But looking up from that other bed,

"There is something more my own," he said,

"Than hands or feet or this restless head

That must be buried when I am dead.

The Trumpet may wake every other sleeper.

Do dreams lie deeper --?

And what sunrise

When these are shut shall open their little eyes?

They are my children, they have very lovely faces --

And how does one bury the breathless dreams?

They are not of the earth and not of the sea,

They have no friends here but the flakes of the falling snow;

You and I will go down two paces --

Where do they go?"

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, pages 73-74. The poem was first published in The Rambling Sailor (Poetry Bookshop 1929) after Mew's death in 1928.

I confess that I have never known quite what to make of this, other than to say that I love it. I do not propose to pick apart its many wonders. But please compare "Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing/Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?" with this: "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?" One senses the hesitation and questioning that I mentioned above. But, again, it is the beauty which captures me. "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?" As well as this: "Do dreams lie deeper --?" And this: "You and I will go down two paces --/Where do they go?"

Once more, some thoughts by Philippe Jaccottet may be apt, not as a direct commentary on Mew's two poems, but as a kindred exploration of the World:

"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. Can it therefore teach me no lesson -- outside the poetry in which it speaks --, offer me no directive in the way I conduct my life?

"As I reflect on all this I begin to see nonetheless that the poetic experience does give me direction, at least towards a sense of the high; and this is because I am quite naturally led to see poetry as a glimpse of the Highest and to regard it in a sense (and why not?) as it has been regarded from its very beginnings, as a mirror of the heavens."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (The Delos Press/The Menard Press 1997), page 157. The italics appear in the original text.

Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)

"There is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being." In his poetry and prose, Philippe Jaccottet is an eloquent, patient, and painstaking observer of the beautiful particulars of the World, but a key feature of his work is his continual recognition of the ineffable mystery that lies at the heart of the World. Words will always fail us.

Dreams: absolute clarity coupled with evanescence. Gone in an instant, never to be recalled. "These dreams that take my breath away." "And how does one bury the breathless dreams?" Charlotte Mew was onto something. But the mystery remains.

The Sunlit House

White through the gate it gleamed and slept

In shuttered sunshine: the parched garden flowers,

Their fallen petals from the beds unswept,

Like children unloved and ill-kept

Dreamed through the hours.

Two blue hydrangeas by the blistered door, burned brown,

Watched there and no one in the town

Cared to go past it, night or day,

Though why this was they wouldn't say.

But I, the stranger, knew that I must stay,

Pace up the weed-grown paths and down,

Till one afternoon -- there is just a doubt --

But I fancy I heard a tiny shout --

From an upper window a bird flew out --

And I went my way.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems, page 55. The poem was written before July 29, 1913, and was first published in 1921. Ibid, page 117.

Philippe Jaccottet has also written of a garden:

"I should very much like to go beyond these meagre findings, to extract from these scattered signs an entire sentence which would act as a commandment. I cannot. I claimed in the past to be a 'servant of the visible world.' Yet what I do is more like the work of a gardener tending a garden and too often neglecting it: the weeds of time.

"Where are the gods of this garden? I sometimes see my uncertainties as the snowflakes whirled by the wind, stirred, blown upwards, abandoned, or the birds half obeying the wind, half playing with it, and offering us the sight of wings which are sometimes as black as night, sometimes gleaming with the reflection of some strange light.

"(So it would be possible to live without definite hopes, but not without help, with the thought -- so close to certainty -- that if there is a single hope, a single opening for man, it would not be refused to someone who had lived 'beneath this sky.')

"(The highest hope would be that the whole sky were really a gaze.)"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures, page 159.

Gilbert Spencer, "Wooded Landscape"

Kenkō (1283-1350) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 7, in Donald Keene (editor and translator), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 7-8.

Perhaps we should think of this uncertain life as a series of dreams. If we are attentive -- and, above all else, grateful -- these dreams can take our breath away.

To a mountain village

at nightfall on a spring day

I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

All winter long, the robins have charmingly chattered amongst themselves about practical matters (the weather, the search for food, where to spend the night) as they walked and flitted across the meadows. But, at this time of year, by ones and twos they fly up into the bare branches of the bordering trees and begin to sing.

On the Road on a Spring Day

There is no coming, there is no going.

From what quarter departed? Toward what quarter bound?

Pity him! in the midst of his journey, journeying --

Flowers and willows in spring profusion, everywhere fragrance.

Ryūsen Reisai (d. 1365) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992), page 33. Ury provides this note to the poem: "The poem begins with a Zen truism, which is expanded into a personal statement." Ibid, page 33.

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window" (c. 1937)

In Passing

2023-02-05T01:50:00.000-08:00

"Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;/how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?" (Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101), "On a Boat, Awake at Night.") One of the pleasures of reading classical Chinese lyric (shih) poetry is coming across lovely and evocative lines such as these. This happens frequently. Lines of this sort are not intended to be didactic, edifying, or admonitory. Instead, they arrive quite naturally, as part and parcel of a contemplative poem that may be about, for instance, the beautiful particulars of the World in any season, parting from a friend, or simply passing through an ordinary day.

Interestingly, one sees the same thing occur in classical Japanese poetry and in the poems of The Greek Anthology. One also notices that the classical Chinese, Japanese, and Greek lyric forms share a common feature: brevity. The two predominant Chinese lyric forms are the chüeh-chü (four lines) and the lü-shih (eight lines). The two basic Japanese lyric forms are the waka (five lines and 31 syllables) and the haiku (three lines and 17 syllables). The poems in The Greek Anthology generally range between two, four, six, or eight lines. In addition, all of these short forms are governed by strict prosodic requirements. Does this concision and craft encourage pensive reflection?

My thoughts are prompted by revisiting three poems by Shao Yung (1011-1077). In his day, he was perhaps best known as a Confucian scholar and philosopher. Yet he was also a fine poet.

Arriving in Lo-yang Again

Those years, I was a green-youthed wanderer;

today I come again, a white-haired old man.

From those years to today makes one whole lifetime,

and in between, how many things have had their day and gone!

Shao Yung (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 335.

This poem, and the two poems by Shao Yung which appear below, are all in the chüeh-chü quatrain form. This form requires rhyming of the second and fourth lines, as well as compliance with the complex rules of tonal parallelism that are an essential element of traditional Chinese lyric poetry. Ibid, pages 8-11, 373.

Richard Wyndham (1896-1948), "Summer Landscape" (c. 1932)

But, putting aside matters of form and prosody, it is the affecting and redolent character of these poetic reflections that is so beguiling. Although classical Chinese poetry is, of course, the product of a unique ancient culture and of three interacting philosophies (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism), lines such as "Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;/how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?" and "From those years to today makes one whole lifetime,/and in between, how many things have had their day and gone!" do not move us because of their cultural origins or because they may arise out of a certain philosophical system. Rather, they move us because they are True and Beautiful articulations of what it means to be a human being, and to live in, and to be fated to depart from, a wondrous and mysterious World -- at any time and in any place.

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 (translated by Burton Watson), Ibid, page 336.

Richard Wyndham, "Tickerage Mill" (c. 1939)

This past week Spring began to emerge, in a place where I have become accustomed to see it first arrive: in a group of small bushes beside a pathway that passes through a grove of tall pines. The bushes are sheltered within the dark, quiet, and windless grove, although sunlight and rain do filter through the deep canopy of pine boughs. One day this week, in the late afternoon yellow light that angled down through the boughs, I noticed bright green leaf buds shining at the tips of the branches of the bushes.

Song of the Water Willow in Front of Comfortable Den

In front of Comfortable Den, by a little crooked stream,

New rushes, a delicate willow, turn green year by year.

Before my eyes a procession of good sights pass --

Who says that life is so full of wants?

Shao Yung (translated by Burton Watson), in Kōjirō Yoshikawa, An Introduction to Sung Poetry (translated and edited by Burton Watson) (Harvard University Press 1967), page 83. Shao Yung, who "lived all his life in semi-seclusion," gave his house the name "An-lo-wo," which may be translated as "Comfortable Den." Ibid.

Richard Wyndham, "The Medway near Tonbridge" (1936)

How to Live, Part Thirty-Two: River

2023-01-16T01:10:00.000-08:00

Human nature being what it is, the world has always been, and will always be, beset with utopian busybodies who have taken leave of their senses. (As ever, I draw a strict distinction between the lower-case "world" in which we find ourselves by historical circumstance, and the upper-case "World" of Beauty, Truth, and Immanence. More on this crucial distinction anon.) I trust, dear readers, that you know of whom I speak: the new Puritans who, imagining themselves to have attained the highest stage of enlightenment, now presume to re-educate the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

Because I am in the autumn (or is it, perhaps, winter?) of my life, I should be able to view this state of affairs from an Olympian height, having seen it all before -- to wit, yet another case study in human pathology and folly ("extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds"). Still, I confess that there are times when the effrontery, ignorance, bad faith, and mean-spiritedness of it all tries my patience. When this happens, one can always turn to poetry for perspective.

Leave Them Alone

There's nothing happening that you hate

That's really worthwhile slamming;

Be patient. If you only wait

You'll see time gently damning

Newspaper bedlamites who raised

Each day the devil's howl,

Versifiers who had seized

The poet's begging bowl.

The whole hysterical passing show

The hour apotheosized

Into a cul-de-sac will go

And be not even despised.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2005), page 158. The poem was first published in May of 1950. Ibid, page 277.

But is Kavanagh being too sanguine? A poem by another Irish poet is worth considering as well.

The Pier

Only a placid sea, and

A pier where no boat comes,

But people stand at the end

And spit into the water,

Dimpling it, and watch a dog

That chins and churns back to land.

I had come here to see

Humbug embark, deported,

Protected from the crowd.

But he has not come today.

And anyway there is no boat

To take him. And no one cares.

So Humbug still walks our land

On stilts, is still looked up to.

W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems (Secker & Warburg 1941), page 10.

Yes, I'm afraid that Humbug will always be with us. On the other hand, leaving the purveyors of Humbug alone is sound advice. This is where the "World" versus "world" distinction comes in.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "The Ettrick Shepherd" (1936)

W. H. Auden devoted a great deal of attention to the Humbug that walks the modern world on stilts. This attention was always present in his poems, but it took a turn in the 1940s, as he moved away from the political preoccupations of his younger years, with religion taking on more importance in both his life and poetry. I don't intend to undertake an examination of Auden's complex views on the state in which humanity found itself in the 20th century. However, I do think that many of the poems he wrote in the latter half of his life (particularly in the 1950s) can help us to place into perspective the antics (or is "depredations" the better word?) of our current clan of self-anointed saviors and inquisitors.

The History of Truth

In that ago when being was believing,

Truth was the most of many credibles,

More first, more always, than a bat-winged lion,

A fish-tailed dog or eagle-headed fish,

The least like mortals, doubted by their deaths.

Truth was their model as they strove to build

A world of lasting objects to believe in,

Without believing earthernware and legend,

Archway and song, were truthful or untruthful:

The Truth was there already to be true.

This while when, practical like paper-dishes,

Truth is convertible to kilowatts,

Our last to do by is an anti-model,

Some untruth anyone can give the lie to,

A nothing no one need believe is there.

W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume II: 1940-1973 (edited by Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press 2022), pages 485-486. The poem was likely written in 1958. Ibid, page 987. Auden preferred "the uncommon alternative form 'earthernware' [line 8] to 'earthenware'." Ibid.

An earlier poem by Auden complements "The History of Truth" quite well:

The Chimeras

Absence of heart -- as in public buildings,

Absence of mind -- as in public speeches,

Absence of worth -- as in goods intended for the public,

Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined

On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow,

Not a scrap is left, not even his name.

Indescribable -- being neither this nor that,

Uncountable -- being any number,

Unreal -- being anything but what they are,

And ugly customers for someone to encounter,

It is our fault entirely if we do;

They cannot touch us; it is we who will touch them.

Curious from wantonness -- to see what they are like,

Cruel from fear -- to put a stop to them,

Incredulous from conceit -- to prove they cannot be,

We prod or kick or measure and are lost:

The stronger we are the sooner all is over;

It is our strength with which they gobble us up.

If someone, being chaste, brave, humble,

Get by them safely, he is still in danger,

With pity remembering what once they were,

Of turning back to help them. Don't.

What they were once was what they would not be;

Not liking what they are not is what now they are.

No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking,

And do not let your goodness self-deceive you:

It is good that they are but not that they are thus.

W. H. Auden, Ibid, pages 375-376. The poem was written in 1950 in Forio, on the island of Ischia. Ibid, p. 934. [As I have mentioned in the past, one of my two fundamental poetical principles is: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry. But I sometimes violate that principle. Hence, for anyone who may be interested, I recommend James F. G. Weldon's article "The Infernal Present: Auden's Use of Inferno III in 'The Chimeras,'" which appears in Quaderni d'italianistica, Volume V, No. 1 (1984), pages 97-109. Weldon persuasively argues that "The Chimeras" echoes Canto III of Dante's Inferno in both text and theme.]

James McIntosh Patrick, "Winter in Angus" (1935)

What, then, is one to do? As Auden suggests, we should "walk on, keep on walking." The chimeras -- having nothing to do with Truth (or with Beauty) -- are best left to their fate. As a baby boomer who grew up with the music of the Sixties and Seventies, these lines come to mind:

It was then that I knew I'd had enough,

Burned my credit card for fuel,

Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand.

With the one-way ticket to the land of truth

And my suitcase in my hand,

How I lost my friends I still don't understand.

Neil Young, "Thrasher," from Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Rust Never Sleeps (1979).

The hermetic life does have a certain appeal. In my daydreams I can imagine nothing better than to spend my remaining days in a seacoast town or mountain village in Japan, watching the seasons come and go. But burning one's credit cards for fuel and leaving the pavement behind is not a practical alternative. Nor do I have the fortitude to become an eremite.

But, most importantly, isn't what a hermit longingly seeks right in front of us at this moment?

On the day after New Year's Day, I was startled to come upon a woolly bear caterpillar making its way across the pathway down which I walked. In the grey light of the January afternoon its black and dark burnt-orange colors were striking -- seeming more vivid and more beautiful than usual, given the circumstances. Because the pathway is frequented by both walkers and bicyclists, I picked the traveller up (it immediately rolled itself into a protective ball) and laid it among some fallen leaves beside the trunk of a nearby tree. (As I have noted here in the past, I am not seeking credit for this: it is something we all do.) Woolly bears hibernate over the winter, so I wondered why it was out for a stroll at this time of year. But what do I know?

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), page 86.

"This calm-flowing river." A woolly bear caterpillar unexpectedly appears, bright and beautiful, in the midst of winter. The chimeras are nowhere to be found. Therein lies the distinction between the World and the world.

The River

And the cobbled water

Of the stream with the trout's indelible

Shadows that winter

Has not erased -- I walk it

Again under a clean

Sky with the fish, speckled like thrushes,

Silently singing among the weed's

Branches.

I bring the heart

Not the mind to the interpretation

Of their music, letting the stream

Comb me, feeling it fresh

In my veins, revisiting the sources

That are as near now

As on the morning I set out from them.

R. S. Thomas, H'm (Macmillan 1972), page 23.

James Mcintosh Patrick, "An Exmoor Farm" (1938)

One afternoon last week I walked down a different path, through a narrow meadow bordered on both sides by groves of pine trees. My bird companions in winter are small flocks of chattering robins and sparrows who make their accustomed rounds throughout the day. But the meadow and trees were silent as I walked. Suddenly, a single dove flew out of a bush to my left, landed on the path in front of me, hopped along the path for a few feet, and then flew off into the meadow.

In the depths of night --

The sound of the river flowing on,

And the moonlight

Shining clear above the village

Of Mizuno in Yamashiro.

Tonna (1289-1372) (translated by Robert Brower and Steven Carter), in Robert Brower and Steven Carter, Conversations with Shōtetsu (Shōtetsu Monogatari) (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1992), page 120.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Arbirlot Mill, Near Arbroath"

Beauty

2022-12-22T03:30:00.001-08:00

" . . . like a dove/That slants unswerving to its home and love."

Earlier this week, about an hour before sunset, I was out for a walk, my attention drawn to the sky in the west. The waters of Puget Sound were a dark slate-grey, with a slight undertone of purple. Beyond the Sound, on the horizon, the Olympic Mountains stood in a row. The sky to the east was mostly clear. But directly overhead was the leading edge of a layer of cloud which extended across the water, ending in a long straight line above the mountains.

The descending sun was hidden. Yet a glowing path of yellow sky ran from north to south between the silhouette of the mountain range and the far dark edge of the cloud layer. That band of changing golden light -- soon to vanish -- demanded one's attention: what would come of it between now and sunset?

I kept walking, looking to the west. The twilit road passed through a meadow, a scattering of trees on either side. Suddenly, just ahead of me, an owl glided quickly and silently downward from left to right above the road, landing in a nearly leafless tree out in the meadow, beside a grove of pines.

Last week, I read this:

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, The Annotated Collected Poems (edited by Edna Longley) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 58. Thomas wrote the poem on January 21, 1915. Ibid, page 186.

Ethelbert White (1891-1972), "Edge of the Village" (1924)

Edward Thomas' life story tends to draw attention away from his poetry. This is not surprising. Born to be a poet, he married at a young age, left Oxford without taking a degree, and became a prolific writer of prose in order to support his family. He was beset with melancholy, misery, and dejection. Then, in the autumn of 1913, came the fated and wondrous meeting with Robert Frost. This friendship, coupled with the beginning of war in 1914 and his subsequent enlistment, led to a poetic flowering which lasted just over two years (the first of his poems was written on December 3, 1914; the final poem was written on January 13, 1917). The tragic end -- which cannot help but be in the back of our minds as we read his poems -- came at Arras in France on April 9, 1917.

Yes, the short arc of his life is compelling and moving. But it is the 140 or so poems he wrote during those two charmed years that deserve our attention. "I may as well write poetry. Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?" So he wrote in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon on August 2, 1914. (Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford University Press 1958), page 81.) We are fortunate that he began "at 36 in the shade." For he is in his poetry, and we are the better for it. "Beauty" is a perfect instance. The first ten lines are a harrowing and accurate account of who he was. And yet the final eight lines (which begin with the wonderful turn at "This heart . . .") are an affecting, lovely, and equally accurate account of who he was. He never dissembles or postures in his poetry.

Kingsley Amis (who was not easy to please) recognized this quality: "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.) Amis' comment is reminiscent of something which Thom Gunn wrote of Thomas Hardy: "And we never for a moment doubt that Hardy means what he says. . . . [Y]ou never feel, even in Hardy's most boring and ridiculous poetry, that he is pretending -- he is never rhetorical. And there are not many poets of whom this can be said. . . . Much of what sustains me through the flatter parts of the Collected Poems is this feeling of contact with an honest man who will never lie to me." (Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," in Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (North Point Press 1985), pages 104-105.) I believe that Gunn's comments apply equally well to Edward Thomas. (It is not surprising to discover that Hardy admired Thomas' poetry, which he became aware of only after Thomas' death.)

As it happens, Amis' comment is in fact an echo of Thomas' own words about what it means to be a poet:

"Here, I think, in [John Clare's] 'Love lives beyond the tomb,' in this unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings, is some reason for us to believe that poets are not merely writing figuratively when they say, 'My love is like a red, red rose,' that they are to be taken more literally than they commonly are, that they do not invent or 'make things up' as grown people do when they condescend to a child's game. What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification. If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty. But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death."

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

Ethelbert White, "The Farm by the Brook" (1929)

"What are days for?/Days are where we live. . . . Where can we live but days?" (Philip Larkin, "Days.") "For the days are long --/From the first milk van/To the last shout in the night,/An eternity." (Derek Mahon, "Dream Days.") Here is a further thought for consideration: days are where beauty dwells. "Beauty is there."

Eleanor Farjeon writes that Thomas' "secret self pined for beauty." (Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, page 41.) Yet, as Larkin perceptively observes: "What a strange talent his was: the poetry of almost infinitely-qualified states of mind." (Philip Larkin, letter to Andrew Motion (May 16, 1979), in Anthony Thwaite (editor), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (Faber and Faber 1992), page 599.) These two characteristics often appear together in Thomas' poems.

But perhaps this gets to the heart of the matter for Thomas (and indeed for us as well):

"I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination -- What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -- whether it existed before or not -- for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love[:] they are all[,] in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty."

John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817), in Robert Gittings (editor), Letters of John Keats (Oxford University Press 1970), pages 36-37.

As one might expect, Thomas was aware of the passage from Keats' letter. He wrote a literary biography of Keats. In a chapter titled "Keats and His Friends," Thomas mentions Benjamin Bailey, and then notes: "It was in a letter to Bailey that Keats said he was certain of nothing but 'the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of imagination'." (Edward Thomas, Keats (T. C. & E. C. Jack 1916), page 30.)

The Ash Grove

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

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

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

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

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

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

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

Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

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

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

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

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

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

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

Ethelbert White, "Landscape with Cows and a Punt"

We all pine for beauty, don't we? But, as Thomas reminds us in so many of his poems, beauty is not beauty without qualifications, without the contingency of evanescence. Perhaps evanescence is at the heart of beauty -- is its essence. "A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught." (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), "Blazon in Green and White," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 53.)

Over the Hills

Often and often it came back again

To mind, the day I passed the horizon ridge

To a new country, the path I had to find

By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge,

The pack of scarlet clouds running across

The harvest evening that seemed endless then

And after, and the inn where all were kind,

All were strangers. I did not know my loss

Till one day twelve months later suddenly

I leaned upon my spade and saw it all,

Though far beyond the sky-line. It became

Almost a habit through the year for me

To lean and see it and think to do the same

Again for two days and a night. Recall

Was vain: no more could the restless brook

Ever turn back and climb the waterfall

To the lake that rests and stirs not in its nook,

As in the hollow of the collar-bone

Under the mountain's head of rush and stone.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 52. Thomas wrote the poem on January 9, 1915, the day after he wrote "Adelstrop," and twelve days before he wrote "Beauty." Ibid, pages 176, 179, and 186.

Would that Edward Thomas had begun writing poetry earlier in his life. Would that he had not died at so young an age. How many more days in which he came upon beauty might he have given us in his poetry? But we should be grateful for what he was able to give us from the days he spent in the countryside of England and Wales.

Ethelbert White, "Landscape"