ELEGY TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG

Today I want to talk again about a poem by one of my favorite writers, Alfred Edward Housman.  He was, you may recall, a classicist — a professor of Greek and particularly of Latin, and in his poems we often sense the depth that background gives as he mixes the atmosphere of the English town or village with the lingering fragrance of the classic Greco-Roman world of antiquity.  In this poem we shall see also that he uses a mixture of objectivity and metaphor, that is, he speaks of things as they are while also speaking of  things or events in order to mean something else.

Housman was, as I have said before, a poet very much aware of impermanence, and so in that respect his poems are like hokku, which always has as its background the transience of life, the impermanence of all things.

One of his finest poems is this – To an Athlete Dying Young.

I will discuss it stanza by stanza:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Housman is speaking to the athlete, recalling a past day on which the lad won a foot race.  He represented his town and thereby earned it and himself respect, so he was chaired through the market place.  That means the jubilant and proud people sat him on a chair or bench, and lifted him to their shoulders, carrying him through the market place — the real center and heart of the town — to honor him.  And as he was carried shoulder-high in triumph through the streets, the boys and the men cheered, and he was brought in that way to the door — the threshold — of his own home.

Now watch how Housman uses this past incident, bringing it into the present, and using the past realistically and the present metaphorically:

Today, the road all runners come, 
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Now we have come from remembrance of things past to the present.  The athlete — still a lad — has died early, while still a youth.  We are not told why he died, but we know it is just a hard fact.  So today, on the road all runners come, he is again brought home shoulder-high.  Here Housman uses metaphor.  By runners, he is speaking of the “race of life,” the course of life from birth to death.  So all who are alive are runners in this sense.  An old expression used by people near death was, “My race is almost run.”  But this lad has ended his race; he has died.  And now on the road all runners come — the road to the graveyard — he is once more brought home shoulder-high as his coffin is carried on the shoulders of the mourners.  They set him down at his new threshold — the grave — and he makes the transition from being their townsman in life to being a townsman of a “stiller town.”  By that is meant the silence of the cemetery and of death.  Henceforth he will be one of the quiet community of the dead.

Housman now does something we find in other poems of his, which is to speak paradoxically.  He does this through the contrast of telling the athlete that in spite of the sad situation, the boy was smart to die:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose. 

You were smart, he says, to slip away from life “betimes” — meaning “early” here — because the fields of life — by which he means first the athletic fields and by extension the world itself — are places where glory does not stay.  Fame and the praise of the public do not last.  And, he says, though the laurel grows early, it withers more quickly than the rose.  We must not take this literally.  What Housman means is that though one may be crowned with laurel at an early age — the branches of the laurel were traditionally used to crown a victorious athlete in the Greco-Roman world — the laurel (by which he means fame) nonetheless fades more quickly than a real rose drops its petals.  Housman is emphasizing how brief and transient fame and praise are.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Eyes shut by the “shady night” — by death, that is, cannot see the athletic record one has set broken; and to one whose ears are stopped by earth — plugged with the earth of the grave — there is no distinction between cheers and silence.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

What excellent lines those are!  Now, he tells the athlete, you will not swell (increase) the rout (rabble-like crowd) of those who lived beyond the time of their youthful athletic glory.  The athlete, by dying young, will not be one of those men whom renown outran.  ”Whom renown outran” means that their glory and praise reached its end long before the man reached his own end of life.

We all know what he means by this.  There are countless young people who seemingly reach their peak in high school or college — the quarterbacks and the gymnasts and the runners — and then the rest of their lives is a letdown to them; they become menial workers in jobs they hate, and some even become alcoholics or drug addicts, because they cannot get used to the great contrast between their lives in the “glory days” of high school and their dull present lives.  So they are “Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.”  They are now nobodies; people have forgotten them.  The name — that is the fame of the person — has died long before the man himself has died.  This last line — “The name died before the man” – is exquisite, one of those lines that can be applied to countless individuals who, once famous and well-known, have been forgotten.  The common, cruel expression used of such people is “He peaked too early.”  But Housman tells his athlete that he has avoided this sad fate by dying early, when he was still famous and praised and loved by his townsmen.

Because of all this, Housman begins his final words to the departed lad:

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup. 

To the dear boy who is making the transition from the world of the living to the silent world of the dead, Housman says encouragingly that he should let his swift feet now step upon and cross the “sill of shade” — the border that marks off the living from the dead just as a doorsill separates the outside world from the inside world of the home.  And, he adds, do it before the echoes fade — before the shouts of those who cheered you and praised you in life have died away in forgetfulness of you.  And here again Housman speaks metaphorically, not literally:  He tells the lad to hold the cup he won — the award given him for winning the race — up to the low lintel.  By that Housman is again using his past-present analogy — his comparison of the door of the house to the edge of the grave.  The lintel of a door is the beam across the top.  The lintel of a grave is the lid of the coffin.  By this he means that the athlete may die without ever losing his glory; he can hold up his metaphorical award cup in the grave forever, and never lose it as would likely have happened in life when beaten by another, or beaten by the changes of time and the forgetfulness of others.

In this following last stanza Housman so closely mixes the sentiments of the ancient world with British town and village life that the two cannot be separated, and really that is the nature of the whole poem:

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s. 

When the athlete has stepped across the sill separating life from death, when he is in the land of the dead, the other spirits — “the strengthless dead” (which is a concept as old as the ancient world) — will gather about the lad and will see the laurel wreath of victory still unwithered on the curly hair of his head.  In life the laurel crown — meaning victory and fame — is all too brief, shorter even than the quickly-wilting garlands of flowers the village girls weave in spring and summer to wear in their hair.

If this were the only poem Housman had ever written, he would still be famous for it, which is rather paradoxical:  the renown of the dusty professor of Latin has outlived the athletic field victories of all the golden boys who studied under him in England before the Second World War.  But we sense his love of them in this poem.  It is their memorial.

The poem calls to mind the epitaph to a youth attributed to Plato, from the Greek Anthology:

Before you shone as Morning Star among the living;
Now you shine as Evening Star among the dead. 

ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζωοῖσιν Ἑῷος·
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις Ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

It was written for a youth named Aster, meaning “Star.”  The Morning Star was Eosphoros, the “Dawn-bringer”; the Evening Star Hesperos.

David

LOCALIZING POETRY: THE WESTRON WYNDE

There is a short poem that goes back at least to the very early 16th century — the early 1500s.  That is the time of that bane of wives, Henry VIII in England (1491-1547).  The poem is in the standard anthologies, though it is confusing to most readers, who invariably misunderstand it, then move quickly on to the next poem in the collection.

Here it is:

Westron wynde when wylle thow blow
The smalle rayne down can rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed A gayne 

There seems to be no punctuation in the original early manuscript, which sets the verse to music, and as you can see, the spelling is quite old fashioned.

Because of the lack of punctuation, some people interpret the first two lines as asking the Western wind when it will blow, because the small rain is falling; the wind will presumably stop the rain.  I do not agree with that.

Others interpret the first two lines as asking the Western wind when it will blow so that the small rain may rain down.  I am in this latter category, and I will soon tell you why.  But in any case, it is helpful to modernize the spelling and the words a bit before we continue, like this:

Western wind, when will you blow,
That small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

That simplifies matters quite a bit, doesn’t it?  But what is the situation of the writer — why is he wondering when the west wind will blow, and why would he want rain?  I shall tell you.

The west wind was considered to be the gentle wind of spring.   It even has a very old name, Zephyrus.  In Greek mythology, Zefyros — Zephyrus in Latin form — was one of the  four directional winds.  He was the west wind.

In England, where the poem was written, the west wind was thought to bring the spring.  And with it came a gentle, mist-like rain, the “smalle rayne” of the poem.

If we think back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we will recall his description of spring in the southeastern part of England; he speaks of April,

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth   (When Zephyrus also with his sweet breath)
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth  (Has inspired in every wood and heath)
The tendre croppes… (The tender shoots…).

It is then, Chaucer tells us, that people long to go on pilgrimages.  But he also tells us that at this time

Aprille with his shoures soote (April with his sweet showers)
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote… (Has pierced the drought of March to the root….)

We need not understand the “drought of March” as being like the dryness of parched and cracked soil; instead think of it as a time, in the southeastern part of England, when there is little rain — the time of year when there is a “dry spell.”  That is not the case in all of England, but it is the nature of the weather in the region extending roughly from London to Canterbury.  There it rains less in the months of February and March.

That explains why the anonymous writer of Westron Wynde asks when the west wind will blow, so that the small rain may fall, the gentle rain that means spring has once more come, the “shoures soote” (sweet showers) of which Chaucer speaks.

So now we know what our writer is up to.  He is lamenting that the weather is cold and dreary and it is affecting his spirit as well; he is feeling lonely and longing for the person he loves (or she loves, we could also say today).  So he wants spring with its gentle rains to come, the April showers that bring May flowers, and he wants to be comfortably and happily in bed with his beloved again.  So we know they are separated for some reason, and we feel the pain of that separation in his cry for the West wind to blow and bring the spring — the winter has been too long in his heart.  We feel the strength of his desire for spring and his beloved in his ejaculaton “Cryst!” –

Christ, if my love were in my arms…!

Well, then, of course it is a “love” poem.

I hope Westron Wynde will now make more sense to you.  If you look at the image below  – the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli — you will see his depiction of Zephyrus on the left — the winged Westron Wynde of spring, and clinging to him is Aura — the fresh breeze of morning.  Around Zephyrus the roses of spring scatter.

David

THE TRADITIONAL HOKKU CALENDAR WEST AND EAST

 

 

 

As I have written before, in hokku we make use of two calendars:

First, there is the “natural” calendar, which varies depending on where one lives.  For example, in my state spring comes earlier in the lowlands than up in the mountains.

Second, there is the old, traditional calendar, which is very much the same in the West as it was in the Japan where hokku was first created.  In this calendar we use traditional terms such as Imbolc and Candlemas.

Now that we are moving toward the month of February by the “printed” calendar, here is a look ahead to the beginning of the new hokku year according to the old traditional calendar, with its “quarter days” and “cross-quarter” days:

SPRING:
In our “Western” hokku calendar, spring begins with  Candlemas — also called Imbolc — at sunset on  February 1, and continues its celebration on February 2; speaking more generally, spring begins the 1st week of February.
In the Japan of old hokku writers, spring similarly begins on February 4th, and these are its divisions:

Risshun, (立春): February 4 — Spring begins;
Usui (雨水): February 19—Rain water;
Keichitsu(啓蟄): March 5—Insects awake;

The spring Midpoint in our traditional calendar is the Spring Equinox:  March 21 /22.  In the Japanese hokku calendar it was similarly:
Shunbun (春分): March 20— the Spring Equinox, the middle of spring;
Seimei (清明): April 5—Clear and bright;
Kokuu (穀雨): April 20—Grain rain;

Our traditional spring Ends on the evening before May 1st; then comes May 1st, which is May Day (Bealtaine) and the first day of our summer:

SUMMER 
begins for us on:  May Day, May 1st, 1st week in May.  Similarly, for old Japanese hokku writers, summer began thus:

Rikka (立夏): May 5—Summer begins;
Shōman (小満): May 21—Grain sprouts;
Bōshu (芒種): June 6—Grain in ear;

Our summer Midpoint happens on  Midsummer’s Day — the Summer Solstice, June 20 /21.
The old Japanese hokku Midpoint happened on:

Geshi (夏至): June 21—Summer Solstice, the middle of summer.
Shōsho (小暑): July 7—Small heat;
Taisho (大暑): July 23—Great heat;

The End of our summer happens on the Evening before Lammas; then comes Lammas — Harvest Home — Lughnasa, August 1st, 1st week in August.  On Lammas our autumn begins.

AUTUMN/FALL
For us it begins with Lammas — Harvest Home (Lughnasa), August 1st.  1st week in August.
Similarly, for old Japanese hokku writers it took place thus:

Risshū (立秋): August 7—Autumn begins;
Shosho (処暑): August 23—Heat finishes;
Hakuro (白露): September 7—White dew;

Our Midpoint is the Autumn Equinox, September 21/22.
The old Japanese hokku Midpoint was:

Shūbun (秋分): September 23— the Autumn Equinox, the middle of autumn.
Kanro (寒露): October 8—Cold dew;
Sōkō (霜降): October 23—Frost descends;

Our autumn has its End at the Evening before Samhain, November 1st.  1st week in November.  Then on Samhain our winter begins.

WINTER:
Our winter begins with Samhain, November 1st, the 1st week in November.
Similarly, for old Japanese hokku writers, winter began thus:

Rittō (立冬): November 7—Winter begins.
Shōsetsu (小雪): November 22—Small snow;
Taisetsu (大雪): December 7—Great snow;

Our winter Midpoint is Midwinter’s Day — the Winter Solstice — Great Yule, December 21 / 22.
Similarly, the old Japanese Midpoint was:

Tōji (冬至): December, the Winter Solstice — the middle of winter.
Shōkan (小寒): January 5 — Small Cold—also called 寒の入り (Kan no iri) The Entrance of the Cold’
Daikan (大寒): January 20—Great Cold;

Our winter had its End on the evening before Candlemas, February 1st, 1st week in February.
Similarly, as we have seen, for the old Japanese hokku writers, winter ended on February 3rd.

And here for us the cycle begins again with Candlemas (Imbolc) at sunset on February 1st.
For the old writers of Japanese hokku, it began again similarly with Risshun (Beginning of Spring) on February 4th.

Now, what does all this mean to us today?  It means simply that if we follow the old and traditional Western calendar as our hokku calendar, we shall essentially and with only insignificant variation be following the same old calendar by which hokku was written in Japan.  And incidentally, that old Japanese calendar was actually borrowed from the Chinese, so the Japanese hokku calendar was the same as the Calendar used by the old Chinese poets.

So when we use the old and traditional Western calendar, we are, with little variation, following the same general calendar as the ancient poets of China and Japan.  The names vary from place to place, but the times are essentially nearly the same.

David

FAILURE OF TRANSMISSION

I do not have a high opinion of Wikipedia.  In my view, the entries there are often controlled by special interest groups or cliques that skew the information to fit their pet notions.  That, of course, distorts the information for the reader, who, if he or she relies on Wikipedia alone (as many students do), comes away with a concept of a subject that is not entirely correct.

If one reads the Wikipedia entries on the hokku and the haiku, what one gets is largely the viewpoint of members of the modern haiku community, which of course confuses the terms hokku and haiku.  There has been a subtle change in that community in the last five years.  It used to just say that the term hokku is “obsolete,” replaced by haiku; now it says a haiku is a single verse, and a hokku is only the first verse of a linked series.  Both are incorrect, and a student reading an online article that declares either to be correct will be getting false and misleading information.

Here is a re-posting of an article I wrote last year, which gives a brief summary of how western writers first misunderstood the hokku while generally using its correct name, then over time changed to both using the incorrect name for the hokku and misunderstanding it.  To make a long story short, if one wishes to understand the hokku and its principles, one does not ask modern haiku enthusiasts, because they either know little to nothing about the subject or deliberately distort the subject to fit their own    whims.  There are very few who simply recognize the fact that today the hokku and the haiku are two different kinds of verse with different standards and principles, which is the real truth of the matter.

One may write hokku or one may write haiku, but one should not mistake one for the other.

FAILURE OF TRANSMISSION

It is interesting to note that the term haiku did not begin to catch on in the West until the middle of the 1900s.  Prior to that time, when Americans or Europeans spoke of the brief Japanese verse form, they correctly called it either hokku – the specific term for an individual verse — or haikai – the collective term for the wider practice of which the hokku was the most important part.

In 1905 the Frenchman Paul Louis Couchod, writing some verses in imitation of the Japanese, published a book titled Au Fil de l’eau, filled with verses he called haikaï.

Another Frenchman, Fernand Gregh, came up with more imitative verses titled Quatrains in the Form of the Japanese Haikaï. And yet another, Albert de Neville, wrote a collection of verses titled 163 Haikaï and Tanka, Epigrams in the Japanese Manner (I have translated these last two titles).

It is not difficult to see that the term favored in France for the Japanese hokku was the term describing the wider practice, haikai, which was also the term favored by Bashō and the other writers up to the time of Shiki, though of course the opening verse, whether it appeared alone or as the beginning of a verse sequence, was the hokku.  So really either is correct.  That is why today we write hokku, but it still falls within what Bashō termed haikai.  Because we tend to concentrate on the individual verses, we more frequently say hokku than haikai.

These early writers and others in France give us not only what is apparently the first attempt to write the verse form in the West, but also the first examples of how Westerners completely misunderstood the hokku, interpreting it not as itself but as what they thought it was.  That resulted in such peculiar French pseudo-”haikai” as this 1920 attempt by Gilbert de Voisins:

Trois vers et très peu de mots
Pour vous décrire cent choses…
La Nature en bibelots.

Three verses and very few words
To describe to you one hundred things …
Nature in trinkets.

That is as miserable an excuse for hokku as anything one finds in Western “haiku” publications and anthologies of the 1960s.

And Paul Eluard, writing in 1920, presents us with another abomination as “clever” and unlike hokku as anything one is likely to find on today’s avant-garde haiku blogs:

Le vent
Hésitant
Roule une cigarette d’air.

The wind
Hesitating
Rolls a cigarette of air.

When we come to writers in English, we find that in spite of Basil Hall Chamberlain’s title Basho and the Japanese Poetical Epigram (1902), the favored English term for the verse form was hokku, which was precisely the correct term for such an individual verse of Bashō in Japan.

Ezra Pound, for example, called a hokku a hokku:

“The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku.

‘The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.’

This is the substance of a very well-known hokku.” (from Vorticism, 1914)

Pound obviously could not tell good from bad hokku, nor did he really grasp what a hokku was as distinct from Western notions about it.

Amy Lowell wrote Twenty-four Hokku on a Modern Theme (1921).  She did not understand the true nature of the hokku any better than the French or Ezra Pound, as one can see from such mutations as:

Night lies beside me
Chaste and cold as a sharp sword.
It and I alone.

Even Yone Noguchi (1875-1947), though calling what he wrote in English hokku, came up with verses as romanticized and unlike the genuine hokku as anything miscontrived by Americans or Europeans in the early 1900s, such as this 1920 example:

Suppose the stars
Fall and break?—Do they ever sound
Like my own love song?

Noguchi was born in Japan but spent considerable time living in the West and absorbing the “Western” concept of poetry, which was also influencing Japan at that time, and the result, as one sees from his verse, was like trying to genetically cross a dog and a cow.  Noguchi evinces as little understanding of the hokku as any confused Westerner.

It is unfortunate but obvious, then, that though the writers of Europe and America were using the correct terminology for a hokku, they had no genuine understanding of what it was, as their attempts at writing show.  We learn from this that simply calling a verse hokku does not make it hokku. None of these early enthusiasts writing in Western languages really had the foggiest idea how to write a genuine hokku in the tradition of Onitsura and Bashō and the other great writers of Japan prior to Shiki.  But at least they got the terminology right.

So in the first part of the 1900s, Westerners knew the Japanese verse form was hokku as part of haikai, but they failed to understand what a hokku really was.

Imagine, then, how confusing it became when in the mid 1900s the terminology suddenly changed, when what had previously been called the hokku, though greatly misinterpreted, suddenly began being called the “haiku” in the English language.  All the confusions and misperceptions and misunderstandings that had been foisted on the hokku by American and European writers were simply transferred to a “new” anachronistic and historically incorrect term.

But how did the change in terminology come about?

Well, one can blame it partly on the Japanese themselves, who in the first half of the 19th century, being overwhelmed by Western culture and technology, gradually displaced the old term “hokku” with the term introduced by Masaoka Shiki to describe his revised re-interpretation of the hokku form — “haiku.”

As we have seen, early writers in the West used the original and genuine term, hokku, though they had no idea what they were writing about.  The public at large scarcely took notice in any case.  Then in 1932 a Japanese named Asataro Miyamori came out with a large volume in English titled An Anthology of Haiku Ancient and Modern (1932).  Few in the West read it, but those who did were incorrectly introduced to hokku under Shiki’s revisionist term haiku, which had by then become popularized in Japan.

Then the trouble really began in the West.  Harold Henderson came out with his little volume of translated hokku The Bamboo Broom (1934), but also following popular Japanese usage of the time, he too incorrectly called the verses “haiku,” not, as they should have been correctly termed, “hokku.”  And make no mistake.  Almost all the verses Henderson included were really hokku, not haiku.

But what really changed the scene was the work of Reginald Horace (“R. H.”) Blyth, who in works published between 1942 and 1963 consistently used the then-popular term in Japan — “haiku” — to describe what was really hokku.  That is not surprising, because Blyth took up residence in Japan and used the terminology popular in the Japan of his day, but it is nonetheless very unfortunate that he unwittingly contributed to misunderstanding when he worked so diligently to explain what was really “hokku” to the West.

Because Blyth was the most prolific writer on the subject, and also by far the most widely-read and the best, the older and historically-correct term “hokku” was largely displaced in American and British understanding by the newer, inaccurate, anachronistic and revisionist term “haiku.”  This very confusing change of terminology in describing what was already a thoroughly misunderstood verse form in the West only created virtual chaos in the public mind.

The use of “haiku” instead of hokku was enthusiastically supported by such budding groups of Western writers as the Haiku Society of America, who seemed to think that wrongly calling the verses of all pre-Shiki writers “haiku” would somehow make their own peculiar efforts appear to be in the old tradition of Bashō, when in reality they were often simply furthering the misperception of the verse form that had been common in the West since the days of Couchod, of Pound, and of Lowell.  The teaching of “haiku” in the 20th century became the blind leading the blind, and this has continued even into the 21st century, which has only exacerbated the misunderstanding and confusion regarding hokku and haiku.

Now what does all this chaotic history mean for us today?  It means simply that hokku as the verse form written from Onitsura and Bashō in the 17th century up to the end of the 19th century was never really transmitted to the West.  The “starter,” to use a baking term used in making sourdough bread, never “took.”  Instead, hokku was hijacked and distorted and misrepresented by the Western modern haiku groups that began appearing in the middle of the 20th century, and it is still, for the most part, in that lamentable situation today.  The number of persons who understand and practice the old, genuine hokku in English is today very small in comparison to the huge numbers of writers of the haiku in its multitude of variations.  The average writer of haiku has never learned the nature and characteristics and aesthetics of the old hokku, and simply cannot recognize one as distinct from haiku.  That is how thoroughly the public has been misled by the self-made haiku pundits and the haiku societies of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

It is true that genuine hokku may be found in the works of Miyamori, of Henderson, and of Blyth, but even these potential models — in spite of Blyth’s superb commentaries — were re-formed in the Euro-American mind to fit inaccurate Western preconceptions and personal whims.

What did appear in the West as hokku in the early 1900s and as haiku from the 1960s onward was simply a new Western verse form that embodied the Western misunderstandings and misperceptions of the hokku.  Like Chinoiserie and Japanoiserie in art, it was a romanticized and completely inaccurate Western misperception of an Asian aesthetic matter.

That means, essentially, that all those haiku groups and literary publications that began appearing in America and Britain in the 1960s generally had virtually nothing to do with what was written by Basho and Onitsura and other Japanese writers in the two centuries prior to the revisionism of Shiki.  With very few exceptions, none of the vast number of “haiku” writers from the mid-20th century up to the present have any relation to genuine pre-Shiki hokku.

What has happened, however, is that people have simply misinterpreted the fact that modern haiku was inspired by the old hokku as evidence that modern haiku is a continuation of the old hokku.  That is like imagining that humans and chimpanzees are today essentially the same simply because they had a common evolutionary ancestor.  Nonetheless, this gross misperception has been actively and enthusiastically promoted by modern haiku groups.

The haiku is not at all the same as the hokku.  Instead, it developed out of the old hokku through the revisionism of Masaoka Shiki in Japan, near the end of the 19th century.  And it is bizarre, to say the least, that in any modern “history of haiku,” the greater part of text is taken up in describing what is really, historically, hokku – which bears no relationship to modern haiku other than that already described — that the haiku was “loosely inspired,” as one might say, by the outward form of the old hokku.  And that is really the only connection.  Aside from that tenuous link, modern haiku in English and other European languages is actually a new, Western verse form created from misperceptions and misunderstandings of the old hokku.

Those who wish to write hokku, then, will not learn how to do so from reading books put out by those in the modern haiku community, or by reading the endless misinterpretations on modern haiku web sites.  Instead, one must learn hokku quite separate from all that is modern haiku, if one wishes to learn it correctly.  Hokku is not, and never was, haiku, and until one understands that basic fact, one will not be able to understand it or to learn how to practice it.

David

HA-HA!: A QUICK LOOK AT SENRYU

Every now and then I like to mention hokku’s “evil twin,” senryu.

Unlike hokku, senryu does not express a particular season.  Nor does it express Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature.  Instead, senryu points out (with a Nelson Muntz-like “Ha, Ha!”) the quirks of human nature.  It pokes fun at everything.  It tells the truth, but it is often an uncomfortable truth.

Hokku is spiritual and contemplative; senryu is earthy and satirical.  It reminds me of the Shadow in Jungian psychology — the dark underside of human consciousness, all those things people ordinarily keep hidden from sight, things which they themselves are unaware of, but which pop up now and then at the most unexpected times and in embarrassing ways.

Here are a few senryu very loosely translated to make them more accessible in English:

Tending baby,
The lullaby of the father
Is a bit off.

This shows us the difference between mothers and fathers.  The father is in strange and unfamiliar territory, but he does the best he can, trying to sing a lullaby but not in full command of the words or music, which he keeps getting wrong.

A child with candy;
“Let’s play! Let’s play!”
The others say.

This is something that continues from childhood onward, even into the sudden interest old people with money find younger people taking in them.  If he had no candy, the others would not play with the child, and without the money, the old person would be ignored.

With his face
Turned to the blackboard,
The teacher yawns.

He would not dare do this facing his students, who might get the all-too-obvious impression that the subject is boring the teacher as well as the students (which, of course, it is!).

The nurse –
She has come to detest
The girlfriend. 

Senryu, like hokku, often require a certain amount of intuition, of “following the dots” to make the whole picture.  In this one, the nurse has been tending a good-looking young fellow, but his girlfriend keeps visiting him, and of course the nurse, who has formed an attachment to the young man, is jealous.

Storming off
In a huff,
He forgot his hat. 

This is very psychological, and senryu often has as its point the experiencing of psychological states.  In this one the fellow got upset and stormed off in anger, but forgot and left his hat behind.  Now he is faced with how to go back and get it without looking foolish, and it is precisely this state of mind that the senryu intends to evoke, and it is that state of mind that is the point of the verse.

Whenever
She goes to the movies,
She dislikes her husband. 

This, again, requires connecting the dots.  When she goes to the movies, the woman sees appealing men on the screen who have all the attractive qualities her husband seems to lack, so she comes home from the films feeling disappointed and cheated.

He talks about heaven
Like he has been there –
The preacher. 

This is the realm of TV evangelists and other ministers who pretend to knowledge they really do not have “deceiving himself as much as his hearers,” as Blyth comments on the Japanese version of this verse.

You can see from these few examples that the purpose of senryu is very different from that of hokku.  Senryu is very “worldly” in the sense in which religious people use the term — attached to the things of this world — while hokku is not.

David

DAY DARKENS; FORGETTING THE WORDS

Gyōdai wrote:

Day darkens;
Again the snow
Begins to fall.

One familiar with conventional Western poetry is likely to ask, “What does it mean?”  That is a question inappropriate for hokku.  Archibald MacLeish once wrote in his Ars Poetica (“The Art of Poetry”) that a poem “should not mean but be.”  I doubt that MacLeish really understood that statement himself, but it applies to hokku, which does not mean, but only is, just as the darkening of day is, just as the falling snow is.

As I said in my previous posting, what is important in hokku is an experience; seeing the day darken, and with it seeing the snow once more beginning to fall.  That is all.  We need not look for anything we can put into words beyond that.

There is something in the verse, however, that is beyond words, and that is typical of hokku.  In good hokku we always have the feeling that there is a deeper significance, but we cannot — and should not try — to say what that significance is.  That feeling of an unexpressed significance is one of the characteristics of hokku.  It is somewhat like the persistent feeling one gets that there is something he or she is forgetting to do that is important, but one simply cannot remember what it is; the feeling is just there and will not go away.  Similarly, when we read this verse by Gyōdai, we sense a deeper significance that lies just beyond the ability of the intellect to express.  As in Arthur Waley’s translation of a poem by T’ao Ch’ien,

In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail. 

In conventional poetry, words can express everything, if only one uses enough of them.  But hokku recognizes something that lies deeper than thought, deeper than intellection, something words cannot reach, and makes that an essential part of its unique approach to verse.

David

 

THE SOUND OF BRANCHES; the Simplicity of Hokku

There is a hokku by Buson, translated thus by R. H. Blyth:

Snow-break also
Can be heard,
This dark night.

I think many reading the verse without his explanation would fail to understand it, and that is always a problem.  A hokku should be able to stand on its own — to be effective — without a commentary.  If we modify it slightly, I think it will be more accessible:

The sound
Of branches breaking with snow;
The dark night.

Now everyone should be able to get it — to experience it — without any added explanation.

But look how the revised version does what a hokku should do:  It is a manifestation of the season, winter.  It expresses Nature and the place of humans within Nature.  And it does it all very simply, presenting the experience only in sound (the branches breaking under the weight of the snow) and sight (the dark night), and of course the third element that we all feel without it even being mentioned, which is the deep cold of winter.

This is how hokku — the best hokku — differ from what we ordinarily think of as poetry.  Hokku is primarily an experience of the senses, not an intellectual experience.

Notice that the verse — as hokku should be — is divided into two parts, one long, one short.  And the two parts are separated by appropriate punctuation.  I often mention one type of hokku called the standard hokku, which consists of a setting, a subject and an action.  But keep in mind that these are not always strictly separated in a verse.

Let’s look at it again:

The sound
Of branches breaking with snow;
The dark night.

The setting in a hokku is the wider environment in which something occurs.  Here the setting is “the dark night.”  The subject is “the sound of branches,” and the action is “breaking with snow.”  But note that the sound is not really separable from the action — “the sound of branches breaking with snow.”

Some people accustomed to Western poetry might find it difficult to understand how these three lines can be poetry too.  The answer is that the poetry of hokku is in the experience, not in the words, and if the reader experiences being in a dark night in which the sound of branches breaking under the weight of snow is heard, then that reader is experiencing the poetry of hokku, which is something quite different than the English-language poetry to which we are accustomed.

Hokku says only what is necessary, and stops before saying too much.  That is why it is so brief, and why two of its chief characteristics are poverty and simplicity.  By poverty we mean that it is reduced to its bare minimum of elements, just as a life of poverty reduces one to the basics of food, clothing, and shelter.  When the elements are few, we have a greater appreciation for each one; its meaning, its significance, is magnified for us.

Simplicity means that a hokku uses few words and ordinary words, and does not try to impress the reader with verbal pyrotechnics.  Hokku should be as simple as a drink of warm tea from a stoneware mug.

Notice also the contrasts we feel in reading these few words.  We have the darkness of night and the mention of snow, which we know to be white; so there is an inherent contrast.  And we have the background of silence against which the breaking of branches is heard.  There is a sudden and loud crack out in the night, the sound of a branch falling with its load of snow, and then all returns to silence and darkness.

That is why this hokku is very effective, why it “works” as I always say.

David

 

 

THE FALLOW WAY: MIDWINTER’S DAY

Now is the Winter Solstice — Midwinter’s Day — the coming of Great Yule.

This is the time when the Yin energies of the universe — which seemed to our ancestors to overwhelm the earth with dark and cold — suddenly reach the darkest point.  Then  the days, having reached their shortest, come to an apparent standstill.  That is when, in the darkness a tiny, bright spark of Yang appears and slowly grows, gradually bringing back the light and warmth.

Lines from the Judy Collins song “The Fallow Way” illustrate well the feeling of Mindwinter’s Day:

I’ll learn to love the fallow way
When winter draws the valley down
And stills the rivers in their storm
And freezes all the little brooks
Time when our steps slow to the song
Of falling flakes and crackling flames
When silver stars are high and still
Deep in the velvet of the night sky

The crystal time the silence times
I’ll learn to love their quietness
While deep beneath the glistening snow
The black earth dreams of violets
I’ll learn to love the fallow way

I’ll learn to love the fallow way
When all my colors fade to white
And flying birds fold back their wings
Upon my anxious wonderings
The sun has slanted all her rays
Across the vast and harvest plains
My memories mingle in the dawn
I dream a joyful vagabonds

As sure as time, as sure as snow
As sure as moonlight, wind and stars
The fallow time will fall away
The sun will bring an April day
And I will yield to Summer’s way

“Fallow” was a word well known to earlier generations.  It meant to plow a field but not to plant it; to leave it in inactivity; to leave it fallow.  Winter is our natural time of inactivity.  The old hokku writers of Japan called their fallow time “winter seclusion” — the confinement we feel in body and spirit when the bitter cold of winter keeps us indoors.

Yaha wrote such a verse, very appropriate for this time when the nights cease their lengthening and the universe seems, for a moment, to stand still in cold and silence:

The lamp flame
Is round and unmoving;
Winter seclusion.

Glad Yule to everyone, and thanks for your continued reading of my site.

David

FALLING SNOW, WINTER WINDS

Kitō wrote this winter hokku:

As I stand still,
The snow falls even faster;
The evening road.

In the original no “I” is mentioned, but it is inherent.  In English we must write it in order for the verse to make sense and be understood.  So even though in hokku we ordinarily avoid using the words “I,” “me,” and “my,”  it is important to remember that this is a caution, not an absolute rule, and that it is perfectly permissible to use “I,” “me,” and “my” when not doing so is awkward.  And this is one of those cases.

There is something left deliberately vague in this verse.  Does the snow really fall faster when the writer stops in the road, or does it just seem to fall faster because he is paying attention?  This is a question we must not ask, because we are just to remain with the impression the hokku gives us, and not go off into intellectualization, into “thinking.”

A similar situation arises in the hokku by Issa mentioned in my last posting:

The dogs
Obligingly move aside;
The snowy road.

If we go beyond what is happening in the verse and begin to think about why the dogs move aside, and the “status” implications of the verse, and begin to apply it to other analogous situations such as the mistreatment and persecution of the Dalits in India by those who (mistakenly) assume they are somehow better — or think about any other such kind of “status” conflict — then we have gone astray.  In hokku we just stick with the sensory impression and do not go off into thinking.  Otherwise we have the same problem we have with metaphor and simile in hokku (which we do not use):  it divides the mind between two different things.  So use other kinds of poetry and writing to deal with social injustice and with “thinking” matters.  Keep hokku free of all that, and just remain with the sensation — meaning the sensory experience — of the verse, without going on to intellectualize it.

Chora wrote a hokku similar in feeling to that of Kitō;

The windy snow;
It blows all about me
While I stand. 

That is a very effective verse because of its strong sensation.  It is also another good example of when to use “I” in writing.  In this case the “I” is necessary to avoid confusion, and it also does not matter here because the reader becomes the “I”.  So using it here does not create a separation between reader and writer.  In a good hokku, the reader should become one with the experience, and should not feel the writer as a separate person.

There is an interesting verse by Kyokusui:

Shouting at the horse,
The voice too
Becomes the winter storm. 

Notice that we are not told if the one shouting is the writer or another person, because it is unimportant in this case.  There is the same effect whether it is the writer or a person watched by the writer, because the focus is on the shouting voice and the winter storm that suddenly are perceived as one thing.  The shout and the blowing wind merge and unify.

 

David

COLD AND SNOW AND SOCIAL INJUSTICE

If you have been following this site, you know that hokku as I teach it is heavily based on Yin and Yang, the two fundamental opposing yet harmonious forces of the universe.  In the Wheel of the Year,  Spring is when Yang begins to grow; it becomes more and more dominant until it reaches the middle of summer, and then Yin begins to grow within it and the Yang forces weaken through autumn and into winter, which is the most Yin season.  Yin is cold, silence, passivity, absence of life, solitude, stillness.

As students of hokku know, one of its chief characteristics is poverty.  Winter is the season of poverty.  The leaves have fallen from the trees, the plants have withered, the birds have flown south, and cold increases.  It is the time when one is most likely to experience hardship and want.

It is not suprising, then, that winter has always been associated with death.  When the Yang energies of life depart, there is Yin — death.  So from its traditional beginning at the time of the old festival of Samhain — at Halloween — traditional folklore has associated winter with the dead.  That is why, in the Alps, at this time Frau Perchta — Mother Hulda — “Mother Nature” — comes down out of the mountains with the spirits of animals and of the dead to visit the villages.  Of course now it is all represented with masks and costumes, and traditions are mixed — but nonetheless this is Mother Hulda, whose name itself relates to the realm of the dead.  Mother Hulda, if you remember the old fairy tale, creates snow by shaking out her feather bed.  These old traditions and images are ways in which we give form to the meaning of Winter.

And of course, winter is a time of contrasts.  We celebrate the Winter Solstice — Yule — Christmas — as a time of contrasts.  Just when Winter seems to have won, and the days are at their shortest, on the Solstice the winter sun is “reborn” as our ancestors saw it — the spark of Yang that slowly grows as the days again grow longer, and that eventually brings the spring.  So in midwinter we celebrate with feasting and gifts “to drive the cold winter away.”  All of these things feed into our hokku.  In winter our subject matter is either the harmony of similar things — cold, silence, death, etc. — or the harmony of contrasting things:  fire amid the cold, food amid want, light amid darkness.  It is in winter that we are most conscious of the fundamental importance of a source of heat, of blankets, of warm food and clothing.  It makes us very aware of the basics of life, less focused on the “peripherals.”  It is as though all the superficialities of life are stripped away, and we are able to see what lies beneath.

Shiki — who wrote some good hokku near the turn of the 20th century, though he did not identify them as hokkku — wrote this:

The light in the next room
Also goes out;
The cold of night.

That is a clear example of how Yin and Yang are used in hokku.  Light is Yang, darkness is Yin.  So Shiki is showing us how Yang gives way to Yin, and in the Yin darkness and silence that follows, we become aware of the very Yin cold of night.  This is a very lonely and chilly hokku, very much in keeping with winter.  What is Yang (light) departs, and we are left with Yin — cold and darkness, silence and inactivity

Shiki wrote another verse which I will change here to make it more emphatic (and thus better, in my view):

The cold;
No insect flies
To the light. 

We could leave it that way, but it would be even better if we put the part of hokku that I like to call the “realization” at the end, like this:

No insect
Flies to the light;
The cold!

That way the impact of the verse grows, because we realize at the end that no insects are seen around the light because it is so bitterly cold — so cold that even the small point of Yang light is seen in the wider context of the chill of the night.

Yaha wrote a very effective winter hokku:

People’s voices
Passing at midnight;
The cold!

Here again, the “realization” comes at the end.  It is the middle of the night.  The writer lies in bed, unable to sleep.  He hears two people talking as they pass by outside, and as their voices (Yang) fade in the night (growing Yin), he feels the bitter cold (Yin) even more severely.

One of the best verses ever written of snow is this, by Hashin:

No sky, no earth;
Only snow 
Endlessly falling. 

The snow falls so thickly that sky and earth become the same whiteness, and that is all that can be seen no matter where one looks, a snowfall that is visually endless, a white, cold world of downward movement (Yin) and the faint rustle of snowflake on snowflake.

Bashō  wrote a hokku of contrasts that R. H. Blyth deliberately overtranslates in order to show what Bashō meant.  His version is:

How beautiful
The usually hateful crow,
This morn of snow!

While that translation is good for giving those unfamiliar with hokku the intent of the verse, those who are familiar with hokku will find the first line — How beautiful — bothersome and unnecessary, because it says too much.  It tells us what the experienced reader of hokku should intuit without it being said in words.  And that in fact is the way Bashō presented it in the original, like this:

Usually hateful,
The crow too …
The morning of snow.

That seems a bit cryptic, though it is very much what Bashō wrote.  We could rephrase it to make it flow more smoothly in English:

Usually hateful,
Even the crow …
This snowy morning. 

And of course what the experienced reader of hokku will automatically intuit from that is:

Though the crow is usually hateful, even he, on this this morning of snow … (is become a visually striking and pleasing thing to see).

The point of the whole verse is the very strong black-on-white contrast of the verse.  It is precisely the stark, white snow against which the black crow is seen that emphasizes the blackness and the form of the crow and makes him so visually striking (we call this “harmony of contrast”).  Quite a few postings back we saw a similar verse by Shiki:

A red berry,
Spilled on the frost
Of the garden.

Shiki’s verse has red on white.  Bashō’s hokku has black on white.    But Bashō’s hokku is a bit more complex with its “The usually hateful crow,”which adds a sense of transformation absent in the verse by Shiki.

By the way, notice the importance of punctuation in Shiki’s verse:

A red berry,
Spilled on the frost
Of the garden.

Note the comma after berry.  Presented like this, it means, “Here is a red berry; it has been spilled on the frost of the garden.”  That way our eye is first drawn to the bright red berry, and then we see its wider context — the white background that is the frost of the garden.

Issa tended to write very psychological hokku because of his troubled childhood and difficult life.  The problem with this is that we may experience the psychological effects more than just the sensory basics of the verse, as in this example:

The dogs
Obligingly move aside;
The snowy road.

There is a single, snow-covered pathway, and when the dogs coming along it encounter a person going in the opposite direction, they move aside to let him pass.  Blyth translates the verse as:

The dogs
Kindly get out of the way,
In the snowy road.

And Blyth also gives an analysis of the verse that goes right to its core:

“Here is a whole world of feeling, of the lives of human beings who suffer [meaning "allow"] their poor relations [the dogs and other creatures] to dwell amongst them for profit, material and sentimental; and of dogs, who have enough intelligence to know who are [supposedly] the lords of creation.“

I have always found it ultimately a troubling verse because of its overwhelming psychological effect, and one could easily allow it and similar examples to do what hokku should not do, which is to act as “protest”verses for this or that cause.  One thinks immediately of slavery, for example, in which one class of human beings is made to “get out of the way”for another.  Whether the cause for this “moving aside” is social status, lack of wealth, or race, or gender, or any other issue, it demonstrates an attitude that should not exist.  I am appalled, for example, that the caste system still exists in India — that the “Dalits”are still required to “get out of the way”for those of other castes.  It is shocking that this persists in the 21st century. One could go on and on, getting more upset about it, and that is not the result hokku should have.

It does not mean, of course, that a person who writes hokku should ignore social injustice; quite the contrary.  But it does mean that correcting social injustice is not the purpose of hokku, is not the job for which this particular tool was intended.  So remember to stay away from it in writing hokku, but in all other aspects of life oppose social injustice vigorously.

From this digression you may see how “psychological” hokku can turn us aside into things that really have nothing to do with hokku.  That is exactly why we avoid them.  It is not so much this hokku of Issa that gets us in trouble, though it is certainly the catalyst; it is rather the analogies that such a verse will arouse in the mind.  And Issa’s verse is often filled with “psychological”potential analogies, which is why I seldom use his hokku as models.

This is a very tricky point.  The advocates of modern haiku often say that one should be able to write about anything, even slavery or racial prejudice.  We in hokku, however, keep hokku separate from matters that disturb the mind, though we may certainly write about them in other ways.  This avoidance of matters of social injustice in hokku should never be interpreted as a lack of concern for social justice.  It is just that the writer of hokku knows there are other ways to deal with such matters than hokku, other tools that may be used.  But this one tool — hokku — has its own purpose, which is to show us Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, within the context of the seasons.  And it is reserved for that alone.

David

SEEN FROM THE HOKKU MIND

I hope that readers here have begun to realize from my postings that the hokku is quite different from the modern haiku.  In general, a modern haiku is just a verse of some kind written in three lines.  It might have something to do with Nature or it might not; it might have something to do with the seasons or it might not.  Hokku, however, are always about Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, and each hokku expresses a particular season.

In modern haiku we are likely to find verses like:

July -
I woke up
with my headache gone

I actually saw a verse quite like that in a recent book purporting to teach people how to write.   A verse like that is just a statement with no real substance.  It has no depth, and none is added even by mention of the month.  That superficiality is unfortunately characteristic of most modern haiku.

Hokku, however, has the depth of Nature and the seasons if written correctly, the depth of time and change.  The student of hokku gradually learns to expect this and to recognize it, so that even a simple-looking verse, when approached from the hokku perspective, contains more than is on the surface.  For example, here is a slight variation on a Meiji period verse:

The iron windbell
Tinkling and tinkling;
Autumn. 

To understand this verse as hokku rather than haiku, one must realize that the same thing can mean very different things in different seasons.  A windbell in the spring is not the same as a windbell in autumn.  Autumn is a time when the weather worsens, when rain and storms and winds increase.  So the repeated tinkling of the windbell is noticed by the writer precisely because it manifests the nature of autumn.  We feel the coming of something in the constant tinkling, and that something is the increasing decline of the year into coldness and darkness and rain.  We hear autumn in the tinkling of the windbell.

In addition, it is significant that the windbell is of iron.  We may picture it in our minds either as dark and black — a Yin color in keeping with the shortening of the days in autumn — or we may see it as brown and rusty, which also is in keeping with autumn — when things lose their color and decay and age.   Do not forget that one of the pleasures of hokku and one of the things that adds greatly to their feeling of significance is the way elements in a verse  ”reflect” one another in this way.  That, again, is called “internal reflection,” and it is very important to hokku.

It should be obvious from these few remarks that one of the major differences between hokku and modern haiku is that hokku has an

aesthetic framework in which a verse is to be understood and appreciated.  Modern haiku merely has a verse without such a background, which is why so many modern haiku lack a sense of depth and unspoken significance.  A hokku, then, requires a kind of “hokku mind” in the reader, one that recognizes the interrelationship of all things in Nature, one that sees how the elements of a verse work together to manifest the nature of a season.

Those in modern haiku are generally completely unfamiliar with these things, because modern haiku has lost its spiritual roots.  That is why if they notice the presence of internal reflection at all — which is very seldom — they do not know what it is or what it means, and completely misinterpret it in Western poetic terms as “metaphor,” failing to understand its nature and purpose.

David

MORE ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF HOKKU — A REVIEW

A reader has asked me to clarify a few points in this list (borrowed from R. H. Blyth) of the characteristics of hokku.  Though he asked about only three, perhaps it might be helpful to give some explanation of all, for those readers just beginning to learn about hokku:

1.   Willing limitations (hokku is not “all things to all men” and has willingly-accepted standards and boundaries).

Comment:  Hokku has a relatively fixed form.  In English it consists of three lines, each line with an initial capital letter, and the whole fully punctuated.   It is separated into two parts (divided by appropriate punctuation), a longer part and a shorter part.  Further, it is set in a particular season.  But beyond this, hokku limits itself to subjects that do not trouble or disturb the mind, which is why it avoids topics such as war, violence, sex, and  romance.  These limits are willingly accepted by those who practice it, realizing that hokku (unlike modern haiku) is not whatever anyone wants it to be.  It has a definite purpose, and to achieve that, the limitations of hokku are seen as virtues rather than as undesirable boundaries.

2.  Sensationism (a focus on sensory experience).

Comment:  Hokku lays primary importance on experiences of the senses — taste, touch, hearing, smelling, seeing.  It avoids abandoning this concreteness for abstract “thinking,” for adding the comments and ornaments that are common to much of Western poetry.  In short, hokku are about experiencing, not thinking about an experience or analyzing it.

3.  Unsentimental love of Nature.

Comment:  Hokku has as its subject matter Nature and the place of humans in and as a part of Nature.  Nature is not treated unrealistically, nor is it used as a symbol or metaphor for something else.  The writer is always aware that Nature is a process of change — of constant impermanence –and that nothing can be permanently grasped or possessed.

4.  Lack of elegance.

Comment:  Hokku — unlike the old waka poetry of Japan — does not deal merely with subjects thought to be “high” and poetic; instead it shows us the poetry in ordinary things.  An excellent yet paradoxical example of this is Onitsura’s verse:

In the broken pot,
A water plantain –
Slenderly blooming.

Here we have a simple flower blooming in a broken crock.  There is nothing “elegant” about the subject matter, in fact it is filled with a sense of poverty.  And though there is an elegance of simplicity in the way the subject is expressed, hokku avoids any materialistic elegance of status, of elevating “high” subjects above “low.”

5.  Appreciation of imperfection.

Comment:  We have just seen an example of that in Onitsura’s verse.  The broken crock is obviously imperfect.  Imperfection is a characteristic of existence, and hokku is realistic.  It makes a virtue of such imperfections, seeing them as manifestations of the “naturalness” and impermanence found throughout all Nature.

6.  Skillful unskillfulness (appearing to have been easily, naturally written without effort or contrivance).

Comment:  Those who have been reading here for some time know that hokku takes time to learn.  There are many helpful techniques and there are all the basic principles and underlying aesthetics.  And yet when the hokku is written, none of this should show.  The hokku should appear just as spontaneous and natural as a ripe pear falling from the branch, otherwise we are too aware of the writer and are distracted from the experience that hokku should convey.

7.  ”Blessed are the poor” (an emphasis on poverty in experience and phrasing).

Comment:  Poverty is very important in hokku and it means many things.  Essentially it is an appreciation of the simple things in life, the opposite of materialism.  In writing it means that we choose ordinary subjects, but present them seen in a new way.  It also means that in writing we limit ourselves to a certain amount of space, and to simple and ordinary words.  And it means that in hokku we are limited in how much we can say, and, as we have seen, there are limits too on the subject matter.  Hokku thus expresses the sense of the words “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” because it means that in accepting voluntarily such limitations, we avoid materialism and ego, preferring spiritual development.  This poverty is not seen as deprivation, but as the “empty cup” one must have so that something fresh and new may be poured into it.

8.  Combination of the poetic vague and the poetic definite.

Comment:  For Westerners, there is a vagueness built into hokku.  Because of its poverty, it never seems “finished” like a Western poem.  It seems to be saying more than is in it, but what that something is, is never clearly stated.  Instead it must be felt through having the experience of the hokku.  A hokku only gives us a part of the wider whole.  There is always something missing or hidden, because the poverty of hokku lets it only say and include just so much, and nothing beyond.  It is like an old Chinese painting in which we see a landscape with considerable portions hidden by mist.  Here is an example by Kyoroku:

It shows the backs
Of the morning glories –
The autumn wind.

We always see the bright fronts of morning glory blossoms, but the wind of autumn blows them in such a way that we see the pale whitish reverse side.  We feel that there is a significance in this, but we cannot say what it is.  We are just to experience the verse, feel the autumn wind, see the pale “backs” of the morning glories, and have that feeling of unexplained significance — a mixture of the poetic vague and the poetic definite.  The verse is quite definite in what it shows us, but there is a vagueness underlying the whole that should not and cannot be clarified.  We see the indefinite through the definite.  There is more to a hokku than what it reveals, and yet what it shows us includes everything written and unwritten:

It shows the backs
Of the morning glories –
The autumn wind.

9.  Human warmth.

Comment:  Because humans are seen as a part of Nature, the writer of hokku cannot help but see them as included in its impermanence.  Because of that, a compassion arises in the writer.  We know that human life is brief, and filled with sorrows and joys that both are temporary.  This compassion should not be “preachy” and obvious in hokku, but instead we should feel it behind a verse, like feeling the love of a mother pushing her child patiently in a swing — and it extends both to humans and to other creatures, as in this by Bunson:

The Harvest Moon;
In the dark places,
Insect cries.

10.  Avoidance of violence and terror ( hokku are generally peaceful and contemplative).

Comment:  Modern haiku enthusiasts often complain about the limits of hokku, saying that one should be able to use it for “protest verses,” for showing the horrors of war, for all kinds of purposes that really have nothing to do with what hokku is all about.  But hokku — particularly as I teach it — is a contemplative form of verse, meaning it should contribute to peace of mind rather than adding to the stress and worry of modern life.  Hokku shows us the peace behind all of life’s problems, and that is why in writing, it helps to have a peaceful mind.  Hokku is to take us beyond the continual emotional ups and downs and upheavals of life, to give us a little taste of what it means to live without an ego that is constantly fretting and desiring.  So in hokku there are limits to what one can or should do (you can see how this relates to all that has been previously discussed here).  The mind of the writer of hokku should be like a still pond in which the moon is reflected.  It cannot be so if stirred by fears and emotions.  And similarly, it should convey that sense of the peace underlying all the surface disturbances of life to the reader.  That is why we call it a form of contemplative verse — contemplative in the sense of peaceful and meditative, silent and free of ego and open to the experience of Nature.

11.  Dislike of holiness (hokku is very spiritual, but not in any “preachy” or dogmatic  sense).

Comment:  Hokku is a very spiritual kind of verse in that to write it, one must get the ego out of the way — if only temporarily — so that Nature may speak.  The writer should be like a clear mirror, free of the dust of emotions and desires.  When that mirror is wiped clean, Nature can be clearly reflected in it.  Unlike much Western poetry, in which the “poet” is considered important, in hokku the writer as “ego” is seen as an obstacle.  So the hokku writer must put the ego aside, and simply convey an experience of Nature, neither adding his thoughts and comments to it nor ornamenting it.  That of course includes omitting any obvious “preaching” about this or that, which is why when hokku talks about religion, it does so objectively.  One of the worst things a beginning writer of hokku can do is to write a lot of verses filled with obvious references to Zen or Buddhism or Christianity or meditation — filling them up with concepts about religion instead of with concrete experiences.  The spirituality of hokku lies in simply getting the ego out of the way.  That does not mean one cannot include any mention of religion, but that mention should be natural” and never forced or “sermonizing” or obvious.  Issa, who sometimes failed in this, nonetheless gives us an example of a winter verse that is successful:

The Buddha in the fields;
An icicle hangs
From his nose.

Issa means, of course, an image of the Buddha.

12.  Turns a blind eye to grandeur and majesty (like the early Quakers, who refused to remove their hats and used the same second-person pronoun for wealthy and poor, hokku is “no respecter of persons”).

Comment:  Hokku has little use for glory.  In hokku an orchid is not superior to a dandelion, nor is a beautiful young person preferable to one old and wrinkled.  In fact, given the choice, hokku will usually choose the ordinary over the extraordinary, the plain over the conventionally pretty.  In hokku a person with money has no greater value than a beggar in the streets.  In fact the latter is more likely to appear in hokku than the former.

Further, hokku tends to prefer one thing to many — a single flower instead of a huge bouquet, one person alone instead of a crowd.  That is why in old Japanese hokku, even though there is no indication of whether a subject is singular or plural, it is generally understood as singular.  One thing is felt to have more significance than many things.  Of course there are exceptions, but this is the general rule of thumb.

13.  Unobtrusive good taste.

Comment:  Good taste in hokku is seen in the absence of things that disturb the mind, as well as in the absence of catering to mass taste.  It is seen in the poverty of hokku, as well as in its peaceful, contemplative atmosphere.  And it is seen in the writer’s selection of elements included in a verse, which nonetheless must appear natural and spontaneous, even if it took the writer weeks to get it “just right.”  Above all, good taste is seen in the selflessness of the writer, in his (or her) getting out of the way and allowing Nature to speak through a simple experience of the senses, set in the context of the seasons.  All of the principles of hokku contribute toward this sense of unobtrusive good taste.

14.  A still, small voice.

Comment:  Hokku is not grand.  It is not loud.  It is not obtrusive.  It appears almost too brief to be worthwhile.  And yet it is in that very brevity and poverty and simplicity that we find the whole universe expressed in a falling leaf, in an ocean-smoothed pebble, in a crow on a withered branch at evening.  Where much of Western poetry is “in your face” and advancing, hokku is quiet and retiring, like Wordsworth’s “violet by a mossy stone, half-hidden from the eye.”   Because it does not try to be “all things to all men,” it is easily overlooked and undervalued, like a still, small voice.  But those of you who recognize the biblical allusion in that will know that its smallness does not mean it is to be underestimated.

And yet, as Blyth correctly says, hokku “is not much in little, but enough in little.”

To those in modern haiku, the poverty of hokku and its voluntary willingness to limit itself was never enough.  But that is the way of materialism, never to be satisfied, never to pause to realize that “enough” can be of greater value, ultimately, than “much.”  Haiku is always looking for more, always wanting something new and different and more modern.  Hokku, however, is quite satisfied with its own poverty and simplicity, making a virtue of the very things that for others are defects.

I hope these brief explanations help to give a better understanding of characteristics of hokku.  It is important to realize that these are not applied in practice like ingredients in a recipe — a pinch of poverty, a teaspoon of human warmth — but are rather to be regarded as overall characteristics, part of the “atmosphere” and aesthetics of hokku that give it is distinctive nature.

David

THE WIND OF AUTUMN

Sometimes I like to take an old hokku and modify it to make it fit an American environment:

An abandoned house;
The wind of autumn
Over the bare floor. 

This is a “harmony of similarity” hokku, in which we feel the relationship of the various elements that reflect one another — the principle called “internal reflection.”

Autumn is the time when the Yang life forces recede.  We see that in nature, with the dying of plants and the trees losing their leaves.  In this verse it manifests in the empty house — the house from which life has departed.  And we see it in the bare floor, over which now only the autumn wind moves.  It all gives us a spare and rather lonely feeling, which is often the case with autumn hokku.

In the original of this verse by Teiga, the house was a brushwood hut and the floor tatami mats.

 

David

FALLING GINGKO LEAVES

Ginko biloba

When I was a small boy, I was fascinated the first time I saw the leaves of the gingko tree, so remarkably different from the leaves of all other trees.

They fascinated me even more when I learned that the gingko is a very ancient tree, with fossils going back millions of years.  Gingkos were once widespread, and are found fossilized even here in the Pacific Northwest.  But over time their range shrank more and more, until finally they were growing only in central China — the source for the gingko trees we know today.

There is an autumn hokku by Michihiko (1755-1818)

No other tree nearby,
The falling leaves
Of the gingko. 

The point of this verse is that the gingko in autumn, with its fan-shaped leaves that turn bright yellow, is a rather glorious sight.  And because there are no other autumn leaves from other trees nearby, the sight of a bright yellow gingo in fall, its leaves scattering, is all the more impressive.

.

David

A POEM IS NOT ALWAYS POETRY: MELVILLE’S MONODY

There are some noted writers who, to be quite blunt, were better at other kinds of writing than at poetry.  Thoreau is one of these, as is the fellow I want to discuss today, Herman Melville, the author of the awesome and dark Moby-Dick.

Herman Melville

Melville was hindered in his poetry by the style so prevalent in the 19th century, which was overly florid in the manner we describe as “Victorian.”  The poets we generally remember from this time are those that broke free of that style to a considerable extent, notably Walt Whitman.

That Melville was not one of these poetic escapees is seen in Monody, his ode of lamentation:

To have known him, to have loved him
   After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
   And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal –
Ease me, a little ease, my song!

By wintry hills his hermit-mound
   The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
   Beneath the fir-tree’s crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
   That hid the shyest grape. 

Quite honestly, if this had not been written by Herman Melville, it would probably today be completely forgotten.

What is it about?  Obviously his affection for another man.  I will not go into the nature of that affection, but we can see it was deep enough to move him to write the poem.  Just who was the man?  Scholars speculate that it was likely Nathaniel Hawthorne, a good-looking and talented fellow.  Those who want to look into this possibility might like to go to this site:

http://www.steamthing.com/2010/08/melvilles-monody-probably-for-hawthorne.html

If the object of Melville’s affection was Hawthorne, that makes the poem even more of historical interest, though it does nothing to improve it as poetry, and that is my real subject now.

 After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
   And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal –
Ease me, a little ease, my song!

What we can determine from the poem itself is that Melville had long been lonely, then met a fellow he really liked, someone who eased his loneliness.  But they seem to have had a falling out, for which Melville gives each party equal responsibility.  And the death of the other man makes any reconciliation impossible.  Death, here personified, has closed the matter, has “set his seal.”  Melville is very saddened by all of this, which is why he hopes that writing this poem will help to ease the pain; and so he cries, “Ease me, a little ease, my song!“

This first part of the poem is autobiographical, while the second part is mostly descriptive:

By wintry hills his hermit-mound
   The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
   Beneath the fir-tree’s crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
   That hid the shyest grape.

Melville uses Victorian funeral language.  The grave of the man is presented as isolated, a “hermit-mound” that is “draped” — ornamented and covered by snow drifts, as a coffin or a tomb might be draped with cloths at a funeral.  There the snow-bird flits “houseless” (how else, we might ask, was a snow-bird to flit?), “beneath the fir-tree’s crape.”  By his use of crape, more commonly spelled crepe, Melville refers to the dark cloths used not only in funeral wreaths but also for women’s dresses worn to funerals and for mourning, as well as the black crepe ribbons worn on arms and on men’s hats as a sign of mourning, and the crepe ribbon placed upon the outside of a door to indicate that someone dear to those within had died.  That is why even today, people who are gloomy and always predicting the worst are termed “crepe hangers.”  So here the grave of the dead is draped with snowdrifts and the dark boughs of the firs overhead provide the funereal crepe.

The last line seems to be a kind of hidden reference to the specific man of whom Melville was writing, and its connection with a reference in another one of his poems — Clarel — is an element that leads many scholars to think that man was Hawthorne.  In any case,  the icy “cloistral vine” seems to refer to the secluded place where the man lived or was buried (a cloister is a monastery, to be “cloistered” is to be enclosed and separated from the world), and the “shyest grape” to the man himself, who was shy like Nathaniel Hawthorne, and so possibly was Hawthorne himself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is something very outdated for us in this rather unpleasant mixture of autobiography, nature, and funereal accoutrements, and some obvious awkwardness in such expressions as “And houseless there the snowbird flits.”  It reminds me of those old “mourning pictures” that were once painted or sewn, showing a sad figure standing beside an urn-topped tomb among rather depressing foliage.

It all only confirms the feeling that had Melville not written the poem, we would never have heard of it.  So again, today it is more of historic than poetic interest — something of concern to students of Melville’s life and writings, but not of much interest to anyone else.

David

WIDENING COMMUNICATION: INTERLANGUAGES

As regular readers here know, I watch the site statistics.  Because of that, I have long been concerned that many people who do not have English as their first language are obviously trying to read this site, but with varying levels of success.  Many others, of course, cannot read English at all, so the Hokku site is a closed book to them.

I have always wanted to open this site — and the teachings of hokku — to as many people as I could, but it is neither possible or practical to post in every language.

Lately I have been exploring the possibilities of “inter-languages,” of created languages that act as a bridge between those with different native languages.  Interlanguages are “new” created languages, generally using a natural vocabulary but often simplifying the complexities of grammar commonly found in every natural language.

My first attempts have been:

1.  To find an interlanguage that would enable speakers of Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, etc.) to read my postings.  One interlanguage stood out right away, because it not only has a very simple grammar but also a very large, Latin-based vocabulary.   And further, it sounds very much like a natural language.  So for this purpose I have chosen Interlingua.  I am in the process of learning it, so what I post in Interlingua will no doubt be imperfect at first, with mistakes — but I hope it will nonetheless be understandable to speakers of Romance languages.

2.  My second search has been more difficult.  I have long wanted to communicate with the very large numbers of speakers of various Slavic languages, which, like the Romance languages, have the same origin but have developed differently over time.   I am still exploring this possibility.

It is rather amazing to me that in the 21st century, with instant world-wide communication, there is still no accepted world-wide interlanguage.  By default — partly due to economic and cultural reasons — English has filled that purpose to some extent.  But English is rather difficult and time-consuming to learn for speakers of some languages, so it is by no means understood everywhere and by all.

There was once an attempt to make an earlier constructed language — Esperanto — a functioning world interlanguage, but its usage has always been very limited, and lately it seems to have fallen even further out of use.  Its vocabulary — unlike those of Interlingua and the more practical attempts at a Slavic interlanguage — is too mixed for general immediate comprehension among any language group, so I see no significant advantage at present in using Esperanto for my purposes.

In looking at various interlanguages, my purpose is not to advocate for this or that “world language,” whether natural or created.  It would be great if everyone in the world could speak easily and directly to everyone else, but that is not the situation at present.  So it is left to each of us to communicate with speakers of other languages as best we can.  That is why it seems to me that the use of interlanguages here might be a good way to at least widen the range of communication.

Even if I am able to write — over time — in Interlingua and an inter-Slavic language, that will still limit my range to those speaking Romance and Slavic languages — in addition, of course, to those already able to read English.  That leaves a great many languages uncovered, and for that I am sorry; there seems no solution to that problem at present.  One does what one can.

I hope, at least, that by using Interlingua and possibly eventually an inter-Slavic language as well, I may at least make the principles and practice of hokku known to many more speakers of Romance languages as well as to many speakers of Slavic languages.  This is, of course, all an experiment, so we shall see how it goes.  It will all take time.

What the future will bring remains to be seen — whether English will become even more of a “world” language, or whether some other solution to the problem of inter-language communication will arise.

David

BASIC HOKKU PRINCIPLES: HARMONY OF SIMILARITY

THIS IS A BILINGUAL POSTING IN ENGLISH AND INTERLINGUA
ISTE ES UN ARTICULO BILINGUE IN INTERLINGUA E IN ANGLESE

Il ha un hokku interessante del comenciamento de autumno:

Le autumno comencia;
Depost un banio,
Le lassitude. 

Iste nos monstra harmonia de similaritate.  In le autumno, le energias de Natura se cambia; le energia Yang (active) decresce, e le energia Yin (passive) cresce.

Proque in iste hokku le autor — Taigi — nos relate que le autumno comencia, e anque que depost del banio ille se senta lasse?  Iste es simple quando nos apprehende le principio del harmonia de similaritate.

in le autumno, le energias del Natura decresce; depost del banio, le energia del corpore de Taigi anque decresce — ita, harmonia de similaritate.

Quando nos apprehende tal cosas, nos pote e scribe e comprehende hokku.  Assi scriber hokku no es como scriber le haiku; le hokku require plus del scriptor, e anque plus del lector.

Si tu pote comprehende lo que io scribe in Interlingua, dice me lo, si il tu place.

 English Version

There is an interesting hokku about the beginning of autumn:

Autumn begins;
The feeling of weakness
After the bath.

This shows us harmony of similarity.  In autumn, the energies of Nature change.  The Yang (active) energy decreases, the Yin (passive) energy grows.

Why does the author of this hokku — Taigi — tell us that autumn is beginning, and also that after the bath he feels weak?  This is simple when we understand the principle of harmony of similarity.

In the autumn, the energy of Nature decreases.   After the bath, the energy of the body of Taigi also decreases.  Thus, harmony of similarity.

When we understand such things, we can write and understand hokku.  So to write hokku is not like writing the haiku; the hokku requires more of the writer, and also more of the reader.

David

QUE ES LE HOKKU VERMENTE?

Que es le hokku vermente?

Le hokku como nos lo scrive hodie es un verso de tres lineas.  Illo nos mostra le natura de un station de anno per pauc parolas:

Illo es vetule
Ab le dia de su creation;
Le espaventaaves.

Nyōfu

Isto es un verso de le autumno, que exprime le diminution de le energias de le vita que occurre in iste tempo de anno.

Pote tu leger lo que io scribe qui?  Io spera que si.  Io apprende Interlingua, ma io es novicio.

What is all this?  Well, for some time I have noticed people from many countries translating the Hokku site via online translators.  It is not possible for me to post in every language, but I hope to expand the number of people who can read here — gradually — by learning Interlingua, which is a kind of simplified language for communicating with those familiar with a language descended from Latin — a “romance” language (meaning “roman-ish”).  If I can manage to learn enough Interlingua, I will be able to post both in English and Interlingua gradually, which will open the possibilites of reading this site to those with a background in any of a number of languages — Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Romansch, and Catalan at least.  That would expand the range of this site quite a bit.

We shall see how it goes.  I have a lot of learning to do before I can write in Interlingua correctly and proficiently, so do not expect it to happen immediately.

If you would like to learn more about Interlingua, go to:

http://www.interlingua.us/pakupaku/index.php?page=Interlinguaforanglos

There are also many other Interlingua sites on the Internet, such as:

http://www.interlingua.com/

David

 

Fallen Zelkovia Leaves

LOVE FALSE AND TRUE: W. B. YEATS AND PIERRE RONSARD

William Butler Yeats is a poet one likes in part, deplores in part.  He can give us interesting and pleasant lines, but all he writes is not woven of the same good thread — his poetry is unequal.

A good example is his well-known poem When You Are Old:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

That is how it begins.  The lines are musical, though romantic and somewhat sentimental in their melancholy.  But you would not know, if someone did not tell you, that Yeats has borrowed these lines from the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) who wrote in his Sonnets pour Hélène, (1587):

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant :
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle.

When you are very old, in the evening, by the candle [light],
Seated beside the fire, unwinding [yarn] and spinning [thread],
Speak, sing my verses, and be amazed:
“Ronsard celebrated me in the time when I was beautiful.”

We need not follow Ronsard further in detail, because his poem tends to “cleverness” in the second verse, in which he says no half-sleeping servant would not wake at the sound of Ronsard’s name, to praise the lady’s immortal name (made immortal by himself, of course); but he continues the third thus:

Je seray sous la terre et fantaume sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos :
Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :
Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie.

I shall be beneath the ground and a phantom without bones;
In the shadows of myrtle I shall take my rest:
You shall be squatting by the hearth,

Regretting my love and your proud disdain;
Live, if you believe me, not waiting for tomorrow:
Gather today the roses of life.

In short, it is a rather superficial, earthy poem telling the lady that if she does not give him the romantic attention he deserves now, while she is young and beautiful, she will regret it when she is old and no longer so.

Ronsard’s poem is essentially the same in its message as that of the slightly later English poet Robert Herrick, who advised pretty young ladies in the beginning of his poem:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Herrick ended it with:

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For, having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.

Herrick was a bit more practical than Ronsard in advising the pretty young things to marry, telling them that if they missed their early chance, they would likely end up old maids — would “forever tarry.”

But back to Yeats, who, while he obviously based the first part of his poem on Ronsard, nonetheless  in the second verse takes his own road, changing the nature of the poem:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

He tells the lady that many people had loved her gracefulness and her beauty, whether that love was “real” or not.  But one man — and here of course the one man is Yeats — loved her pilgrim soul — her adventuresome nature, her openness to new experiences — her “spirit,” as we would say, and loved also her changing moods over time: her face as it changed with the moment and with the years.  He is really saying that while others loved her only for her beauty, he loved her for her “soul.”

We can see that Yeats exhibits in these first two verses a love more serious and real than that of Ronsard — not just a “You’d better get me while you are pretty and can, because you won’t be pretty for long.”

Up to now, the Yeats poem has been simple and rather beautiful.  But I have always felt that in the last verse he loses his focus, loses his clarity, and lets meaning fall apart as the poem degenerates into pseudo-poetic blather:

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmer a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The first line is fine, but the disaster comes in the second line, when Yeats personifies Love — indicated by the capital letter — and anthropomorphizes it:

…how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

It is this personification of love, this poetic abstraction that spoils the poem.  He jumps from talking about someone who really loved her — something concrete — into something abstract and scattered.  If he had told us that the young man who loved her had fled, if he had left her– his love unrequited — and had gone to live in the mountains, hiding his sorrowing face beneath a crowd of stars — that would have been fine.  But it is the unpleasant mixture of the first two straightforward verses with the personification and fogginess of the last that has always spoiled the poem for me.  No doubt others are more forgiving.

By the way, the photo chosen to head this posting is the lovely Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938).  She was an extraordinary person, and if anyone had beauty and moments of glad grace, combined with the sorrows of her changing face, and a wonderful pilgrim soul, it was she.  If you want to know more about her “and be amazed,” as Ronsard says, go to this site:

http://www.tkinter.smig.net/QueenMarie/index.htm

David

JOHN KEATS AND HOKKU?

Do you remember the key to writing and understanding hokku?

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING HOKKU IS TO REALIZE THAT WHATEVER MANIFESTS THE NATURE OF THE SEASON IS APPROPRIATE TO THAT SEASON, AND WHAT DOES NOT MANIFEST THE NATURE OF THE SEASON IS NOT APPROPRIATE.

There is a poem by John Keats titled La Belle Dame sans Merci — “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.”  It is a romantic poem, but it is not the poem as a whole that I want to speak of now — only these lines:

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

In fact we can omit the first two lines, because I want to concentrate on the last part:

The sedge has withered from the lake, 
And no birds sing.

The significance of these lines in relation to hokku — in fact to contemplative Nature verse in general — is that they manifest the character of late autumn very well.

First, we can look at them in terms of Yin and Yang.  Autumn is a time of increasing Yin.  Yin means the passive element, the cold, the retiring, the weakening, the waning, the quiet.  We see that easily in these lines:

The sedge has withered from the lake…

That shows us how Autumn is the time when Yang energies are draining out of visible Nature, “returning to the root,” as the old saying goes.  It shows us the waning of the life forces.

And no birds sing…

The air is silent, quiet.  That shows us the absence of the Yang forces of life and energy.

We could take those two lines and make another little poem of them about late autumn:

The sky is chill,
The trees all bare;
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing. 

Or we could make a hokku:

The sedge
Has withered from the lake;
No bird sings. 

The important thing is that we are manifesting the character of the season, of late autumn.  Both of our new verses do that, even though only the second is hokku.  To understand how that works, here is a brief review of the importance of Yin and Yang in hokku, and, as I have said, in all contemplative Nature verse:

In terms of Yin and Yang — the passive and active elements — spring is growing Yang; summer is maximum Yang; autumn is growing Yin; and winter is maximum Yin.  That is not just some clever little bit of Asian philosophy, it is an expression of the relationships that govern all of Nature.  In the day, morning is growing Yang (declining Yin); noon is maximum Yang; afternoon and evening are declining Yang (growing Yin), and the middle of night is maximum Yin.  In human life, childhood and youth are growing Yang; maturity is maximum Yang; then the life forces begin to decline in growing Yin; and finally, old age leads to death, maximum Yin.

In Nature, when one thing reaches its maximum, it turns into its opposite, just as when noon is reached, Yang is at its maximum; and then it begins to change into its opposite, and gives way to growing Yin.

Summer, then, is extremely Yang.  That is manifested in its heat.  Winter is extremely Yin, manifested in its coldness.  Spring is growing Yang, so in spring coldness weakens and warmth grows.  Autumn is growing Yin, so in autumn heat weakens and coldness grows.  The same applies to moisture, which is Yin.  In spring, moisture gradually declines until the heat of summer replaces the showers of spring; and in autumn the Yin moisture begins returning, until in winter the cold rains come, and then snow and frost.

Consider all of this carefully.  We already know that certain subjects are not appropriate for hokku, for example things that disturb the mind, such as war, violence, sex and romance — and things that take us away from Nature, such as modern technology.  But what most people fail to realize is that out of all the many things that leaves us for writing hokku, not everything is appropriate to every season.

Now let’s return to the original excerpt from La Belle Dame sans Merci, and we will see that even Keats had some understanding — intuitively — of the effects of Yin and Yang and the season:

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
Alone and palely loitering? 
The sedge has withered from the lake, 
And no birds sing.

Well, of course we would not want the first line in Nature verse — it is from the Romantic school of poetry — but nonetheless we can see the effect of the whole in combination with the significant last two lines.

“What can ail thee, knight-at-arms?”  That is in keeping with the declining Yang of the season.  It shows us that the knight is weakened, not in his full health and strength.

“Alone and palely loitering…”  The paleness of the knight and his inactivity show us the draining of the Yang energies again — and his aloneness shows us the sense of solitude that is so much a part of autumn.

Of course Keats did not write hokku, and Nature verse was not his intent here either — but we can see that he had the intuition and the materials — just not the incentive.  He had other goals in this poem.

Nonetheless, this brief look at an excerpt from Keats can teach us a lot about how to write autumn hokku — verses that manifest the character of the season.

David

AUTUMN DEEPENS

I have been writing about hokku for so many years that I now find myself repeating the same verses — the very best verses — and leaving the rather dull ones alone.

Some people mistakenly think that all of the old “classic” Japanese hokku must be wonderful, but that is simply not true.  Even in reading old anthologies one notices that some verses stand out and are very pleasing and effective while others are just “there” and do not do much if anything for the reader.

That is the case, too, with our own English “classic” anthology, the finest, the volumes of R. H. Blyth.  Even though Blyth chose the  best of the old hokku to translate into English, there are among his selected verses some that are far better than the rest; so much better, in fact, that it does not matter if all the rest are ignored.

One very good verse by Taigi shows us the nature of autumn very well.  It is obvious on reading it that the old myth about hokku always being about a single moment’s experience is false.  Some hokku cover a substantial length of time, and that is the case with this verse, in which we see the progress of autumn, or as the old hokku phrase has it, the deepening of autumn:

Sweeping them up,
Then not sweeping them up –
The falling leaves. 

The best hokku show us the character of a season through what it manifests, in this case the falling leaves of autumn.  When the leaves first begin to fall, we go out with our rake or broom and we begin sweeping them up.  We do this day after day, but each day more leaves fall.  Finally there comes a time when we go out and realize that so many leaves are falling, so many are blowing into the yard or garden from all around, that it is pointless to continue sweeping.  We feel that we are overwhelmed with autumn, and let the leaves fall and lie where they are.

In just eleven words this hokku shows us the great change of autumn, the increasing of the yin force as autumn ages and deepens toward winter.

We see the increasing of the yin force also in this verse by Ryōkan, originally considered a winter verse, but appropriate to late autumn here:

Garden weeds;
They fall,
And lie as they fall.

One has to know that this is a verse of (as we treat it here) the autumn, because then we will see the garden plants as dry, lifeless stalks, brown and discolored by the rain of the season.  Eventually they just fall, and lie just as they fall.  That is the nature of things in autumn.

The original says kusa – a term that encompasses both grasses and other plants.  It is usually translated as “grasses,” and we could do that in our verse here if we wish.  But our gardens are not the same as those in Japan, and in the Fall here, they become gradually overgrown with weeds, and then the weeds die, leaving their stalks to age and fall.

We could also change the verse in any way we wish, for example, in a home flower garden:

Dead lily stalks;
They fall,
and lie as they fall. 

Or we can move it to the fields:

Scarecrows;
They fall,
And lie just as they fall.

That shows us the neglect of things as they die and decay in autumn.

Do not be surprised that I change and “play around” with old hokku.  They are not museum pieces that must sit forever untouched behind protective shields.  Instead they become a part of our own hokku practice, teaching us various aspects of writing and helping us to deepen our own practice of hokku.

That is why when we read old hokku, we must take them out of a Japanese context and make them thoroughly American or Welsh or Australian or Austrian or whatever our cultural environment happens to be.  There is nothing so likely to kill hokku as a living verse form than to keep it in a “Japanese” cultural context, unless one happens to be writing fresh hokku in Japan.  If we are writing it elsewhere — in the United States, for example — we must make it meaningful for where we are.  And we must use it in whatever way works best to help us create new hokku appropriate to our season and place.

David

HOPKINS: GOLDENGROVE UNLEAVING

Some lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins are an aesthetic pleasure just to repeat mentally or audibly:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?


Those words come, of course, from his well-known poem Spring and Fall: to a young child.  The title prepares us for the poem by telling us that it is addressed to a child, who we know from the first word of the work is named Margaret.  Hopkins speaks to this little girl in his thoughts.

It is not a difficult poem in its overall meaning, though one must step carefully in some lines through Hopkins’ sometimes convoluted language.

To aid in understanding the poem, I will separate it into sections.  Let’s begin:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Margaret is grieving — is sad — about “Goldengrove unleaving” — about a grove of trees, that we picture as golden with autumn because of its name, losing its leaves  (un-leaving), as happens in autumn.  So Margaret, who is very young, is sad to see the leaves falling, the beauty of the grove gradually fading.

Those first lines tell us why the poem is called Spring and Fall; Margaret, the little girl, is Spring.  She is in childhood, the springtime of life; Goldengrove, with its falling leaves, is Fall.  By using the two elements in this way, Hopkins is setting up the reader for the rest of the poem, in which we shall find that Fall is also equated with the autumn of life — life’s dissolution.

Hopkins continues in his questioning:

Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

The poet is surprised that Margaret, with her young, fresh, child’s thoughts, can be so concerned for the leaves of Nature, as concerned as though they were “things of man,” human possessions, as though she were losing something that belonged to her.  

He tells her that will change:

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

As she and her emotions grow older, she will not be so affected by such a sight; her heart will “come to such sights colder,” with less emotional involvement.  That will happen “by and by,” as she ages, and eventually she will be so little affected by the falling leaves that she will not spare even a sigh,  ”though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,” that is, even though whole worlds of forests with fading leaves (wanwood:  wan = faded, wood = forests) should lie accumulating on the ground.  ”Leafmeal,” as Hopkins uses it here, is a very interesting term, formed by using the Old English word mael, meaning a “measure” of something.  When used as a suffix, it means something is happening “measure by measure,” that is, gradually, like saying a field  of grain was cleared “sheafmeal,” that is, “sheaf by sheaf.”  So here Hopkins is saying that all the autumn forests lie “leafmeal,” that is, falling and piling up leaf by leaf, countless scattered leaves.  ”Meal” of course also means grain ground fine — as in “cornmeal,” — so we have an undertone in this word of the leaves gradually falling apart as they decay — transforming from leaves to soil.

And yet you wíll weep & know why.

Though Margaret will gradually lose her sensitivity to the sight of forests losing their leaves, she nonetheless will weep — she will continue to experience that sadness of loss that formerly had been associated with falling leaves — and she will then know why.  Here Hopkins begins to tell us the “why”:

Now no matter, child, the name: 
Sorrow’s springs are the same.

He tells Margaret that it does not matter what the “name” is — what reason you give for your sadness, whether it is sorrow from leaves falling, or from losing a friend, or from anything else — “sorrow’s springs are the same.”  All sorrow springs from the same source — it originates in the same thing — it happens for the same reason.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed 

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed: 

What neither Margaret’s mouth nor yet her mind — her thoughts — had yet expressed, her heart was nonetheless already feeling, and that was because on a deeper level, the reason had been “ghost-guessed”; her “ghost” — meaning her spirit — already knew  the reason.  It had already determined the cause — the source from which her sorrow for the falling leaves had come, as well as the source of all sorrow that was to come to her.  And in the last two lines, Hopkins reveals what it is that her spirit already knew, what it was that caused her to grieve for the falling of leaves in “Goldengrove”:

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for. 

The “blight man was born for” is aging and death.  All sorrow springs, Hopkins says, from the first unconscious knowledge, which the “ghost” or spirit within us knows, that everything that is born — whether leaves or trees or humans — will someday die.  And that is why he tells the little girl that it is not the falling of the leaves  she is mourning, on that autumn day in her childhood; it is her own mortality:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

So you see, it is not a difficult poem, once one becomes accustomed to Hopkins’ liking for archaic terms and convoluted phrasing.

I have to add, however, that as much as I like certain lines of the poem and the poem itself, there are two things that trouble:  the first is leaving the reader to somewhat laboriously unravel the “Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed” lines, which are not very poetic in their complexity; the second is the constant feeling that the last two lines, “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for,” should read instead,

It is the blight that man was born for, 
It is Margaret you mourn for. 

Without the added that, the line seems ever out of beat, out of step, out of measure, “verses out of rhythm, couplets out of rhyme” as the old Simon and Garfunkel song goes.  It just sounds better and reads better with that added.

David

LEARNING FROM THE AUTUMN MOON

When we think of the Fall — of Autumn — we think of colored leaves, falling leaves, and of the moon.  We look at the autumn moon for a few moments, and then we move on with our lives, unless we happen to be sitting with someone else, engaged in intermittent conversation, looking repeatedly at the bright moon.

When old hokku was written, there was a seasonal practice of looking at the moon — of moon viewing.  Bashō  wrote a hokku about it.

Clouds now-then people give-rest; moon viewing.

Now when I talk about hokku here, I do not want to do so as though I am brushing the dust off old fossils in a museum.  I discuss it only so that readers may learn how to write NEW and original hokku.  Otherwise there is little point in repeating this or that old hokku over and over.  So the literal version of this verse does us little good unless we can see how to put it into English.  We can be very literalistic, which is how one should be in emphasizing the original verse, like this:

Clouds now and then
Give people a rest;
Moon-viewing.

But my purpose here is to bring these old verses into today, as well as into the English language, so I would begin to play with it:

Passing clouds
Give us a rest;
Moon viewing. 

But I do not want to stop there, because long-time readers here will recall the old principle of hokku that one thing generally has more significance than many.  Here is what happens when we apply it to this verse:

A passing cloud
Gives us a rest;
Moon viewing.

It is a small change, but it makes a significant difference.  I hope you can feel that in the “revised” version.  If we say “passing clouds,” it widens the time expanse of the hokku.  In the first version, it covers the time of several clouds passing in front of the moon; in the second version, our focus is right on one cloud passing in front of the moon, right on what is happening now.

Not all hokku have this strong focus on the present, but those that do are often improved by it.  

Now you can easily see that the “single cloud” version is different from the original by Bashō, which covers a wider time expanse.  Some people may protest the revised version  because it is not exactly “what Bashō said.”  But that leads us to another principle of hokku — that it is a living thing, not a fossil in a museum.  

We are meant not only to enjoy old hokku, but to learn from them, so that hokku may remain a living practice.  And we can only do that by making them our own, or even by improving them.  Bashō was not infallible in his writing, and he wrote literally hundreds of verses that are not really memorable.  So we are perfectly free — particularly in teaching how to write hokku today — to change old hokku, whether to localize them (make them more American, or British, or Welsh, or whatever), or to improve them.  

In hokku as I teach it, we use the best of old hokku as models.  But as our practice develops, we must treat these models like clay that can be molded into new forms and into completely new verses.  As long as we keep to the principles and spirit of the old hokku, our new verses will be hokku as well.  We should not treat these old hokku like pieces of delicate porcelain that we are afraid to wash or carry for fear of “breaking” them.  

If you look in the archives here, you will find many old postings on hokku that tell you how to write it.  Generally in using the old verses, I have been rather literal, so that readers might see just how old hokku were constructed.  Now I am going to begin a new phase of instruction here, in which we learn to be more comfortable with our relation to the old verses.  I may often still tell you exactly how they were phrased in their old (Japanese) versions.  But in addition, I will put more emphasis on making them into hokku of today, so that they become even more useful to us in writing a hokku appropriate both to the English language and to our locale (which in my case is American), and to the modern world.

That does not mean I shall violate any of the basic principles of the old hokku — that would make a verse no longer hokku.  For example, being part of the modern world does not mean that our verses should reverse the old hokku omission of incompatible “technology,” because hokku today is still an important testimony to the vital importance of Nature and the natural environment that gives us life.  It simply means that we are learning to relax a bit in our hokku practice, to become more free in how we look at an event and depict it in our writing.  

That means, for example, that whereas old hokku generally had only a single internal break represented in English by internal punctuation, we are perfectly free to widen that punctuation and use it twice internally, if it makes a better verse.

Bashō wrote another “moon viewing” verse:

Bright moon; children lined-up temple verandah

The “bright moon” is a Japanese conventional term for the full moon of Autumn,   So Bashō is telling us:

The autumn moon;
Children lined-up
On the temple verandah. 

But we don’t have to leave it like that.  We can make it:

The Harvest Moon;
Children sitting in a row
On the front porch.

 We can even change “front porch” to “front steps” if we wish:

The Harvest Moon;
Children sitting in a row
On the front steps.

Or, given that we mark every hokku with its season, and will know it is an autumn verse, we can make it:

The full moon;
Children sitting in a row
On the garage roof.  

Or we can change “full moon” back to “Harvest Moon”:

The Harvest Moon;
Children sitting in a row
On the garage roof.

Or, recalling again the principle that one thing often has more significance than many, we can also create an alternate version:

The Harvest Moon;
A little boy sitting
On the garage roof. 

And of course we can make the little boy a little girl if we wish.  The possibilities for change are endless, and feeling free to make those changes is part of how we learn to write hokku.

And notice that in the last version, the reader is required to make a small, intuitive leap:  Harvest Moon + little boy sitting on garage roof = Little boy gazing at the Harvest Moon.  Such intuitive leaps should be very natural and easy for those schooled in hokku aesthetics.  They should be as simple as stepping from stone to stone when crossing a stream, and should not require any straining of the imagination.  That was not always the case with old hokku, and that is something modern hokku corrects.

So again, what this all means is that we should not treat the old hokku used as models here as inviolate objects; we should instead play with them, re-arrange them, use them as jumping-off points for our own exploration of the world and of hokku as we express the seasonal manifestions of Nature, and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature.

 

David 

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: EXPRESSING SELF-NATURE

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I would like to return to Gerard Manley Hopkins, that impressionist in language whose poems are verbally fascinating even while difficult.

Today’s Hopkins poem, in spite of its seeming complexity, nonetheless has a very simple message, as we shall see upon unravelling its seeming tangles.  It is called:

AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE, DRAGONFLIES DRAW FLAME

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
   As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
   Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

   Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
   Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 
Crying What I do is me: for that I came. 

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

I feel like beginning with the old biblical phrase, “Which is, being interpreted….”  It often seems that is what one does with Hopkins, a translating from Hopkinsese into ordinary English.  Let’s begin, bit by bit:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

Just as kingfishers reflect the bright daylight (“catch fire”) by their irridescent blue feathers, dragonflies also catch and reflect the sunlight as the color red (“flame”).  Thus Hopkins begins with the sense of sight:  kingfishers reflect the light as irridescent blue; dragonflies (at least some of them) reflect the light as red.

Now Hopkins moves from sight to sound:

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells /Stones ring; 

If a stone or pebble is thrown or dropped or falls over the rim of a round well (from which people used to get their water), it will “ring,” meaning it will make a sound not only if it strikes other stones or bricks in the well lining as it falls, but it will also “ring” (Hopkins uses the term loosely” by striking the water with a resounding “Plop!”

So just as kingfishers reflect light as blue irridescence, and just as dragonflies reflect light as a flame-red color, in the same manner stones make a distinctive sound if dropped into a well.  And Hopkins continues by saying that also in the same manner,

 …like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s /Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Just as each “tucked” (in its seldom-used sense of “plucked,” “pulled”) string makes its sound (“tells”), each bell, hanging on its support, when swung back and forth in its bow-like arc, will create a sound (“find’s tongue,” too,  as a man’s tongue or language enables a man to speak) that it sends out near and far through the air — to “fling” the sound ” abroad.  Now Hopkins carries his “just as” illustrations even farther:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
   Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 

Each mortal thing — each thing that passes away and dies, of which the prime example here is mankind — does the very same one thing.  It “deals out that being indoors each one dwells.”  That rather difficult, telegraphic sentence is Hopkinsese for “Every living thing does the same thing as the kingfishers, the dragonflies, a dropped stone, a plucked string  and the bells:  It manifests its being — its particular character — in a specific way.  It gives out (‘deals out’) that which is (‘dwells’) inside (‘being indoors’) of each person.  It reveals and bespeaks the nature of that person.”  It “selves” — which we can think of as a verb here.

A kingfisher “selves” (expresses its nature) by reflecting an irridescent blue light; a dragonfly “selves” by reflecting a red color; a stone dropped in a well “selves” by the sound it makes  And every mortal thing — every human in particular, also “selves” (expresses its individual nature) — it “goes itself.”  A bell goes “bongggggg,” and a human also goes….well, we shall see what Hopkins has to say about that.

But for now, each mortal, living thing expresses its self-nature.  ”Myself it speaks and spells.”  In its individual expression, it says and spells out clearly, “This is myself; this is what I am.”

And now Hopkins begins bringing us to his real point, the point of the poem as a whole.  First we were told that each individual thing bespeaks or expresses its own nature in one way or another.   Now Hopkins goes even farther:

I say more:  the just man justices;

Let’s put this in very simple terms.  Existence is not a noun, it is a verb.  Nothing can “be” without also manifesting in some way, and that manifesting is an action, it is a verb.  So a cow “cows,” a leaf “leafs” rain “rains.”  So in the same way, it is the nature of a just man to “justice,” to express his just nature, his uprightness, his honesty, through his very being.  He gives off justice — “justness” just as a kingfisher gives off irridescence or a dragonfly a red color or a stone its “plop” into water or a bell its “bong.”

Furthermore, a just man “keeps grace,” he manifests grace, which means not only attractiveness and charm, but also has religious overtones here, because we know Hopkins became a Jesuit.  So grace here means also “The divine influence which operates in men to regenerate and sanctify,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.  

Hopkins is telling us that the just man “justices,” he manifests his inward justness, his inward honesty, and that keeps all of his “goings” — his activities and being — graceful — grace-full — in both the sense of attractiveness in his being and manner, but also manifesting the influence of the divine.  

Hopkins tells us that such a man “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Christ.”  This is the Christian notion that when a man is filled with divine influence, he manifests the divine, which for Hopkins is Christ.  He is “Christly” — Christ-like in his being and activities.  He “puts on Christ,” as is said in the New Testament.

Hopkins expands on that thought:

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
   To the Father through the features of men’s faces. 

Wherever a man is just and honest and manifests the influence of the divine,  Hopkins says, Christ is in that man, Christ acts in that man.  That is how Christ can “play in ten thousand places,” can act in ten thousand (just a number to indicate a great many) men who manifest him.  And so in such men Christ is seen “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”  Such a Christ-manifesting man becomes lovely in his appearance and motions, so that when one looks in his eyes, one sees “Christ” though the eyes are the eyes of each individual man.  And that, Hopkins says, is “lovely to the Father”  meaning lovely to God — who sees it through the features of men’s faces.  Christ appears to other men and to God through the features and actions of Christ-like, “just” men.

The Quakers would say that such a just man is showing the “Inward Light” through his outer life and being.

One gets the point Hopkins wanted to make, though when one explains it in such detail it seems rather heavy-handed, which is why it sounds much better in poetry than in prose.

The essence of the poem is that each thing and each creature manifests its own distinctive self-nature.  The self-nature of a just man, Hopkins believed, was that of Christ, though it appears in the arms and legs and eyes of humans.  

We may think that Hopkins stretched logic a bit, but nonetheless the basic truth is there — that each person will express the kind of person he or she is — whether good or bad or indifferent — through his or her actions and being.  Hopkins presents it to us in Christian terms, speaking of “Christ” and “God,” but it is still true without those terms and in a non-Christian context.

Put in that way, it seems rather self-evident.  That is why some may feel that there is more poetry in the words Hopkins uses in this poem than in the point made by those words.  Is it worth all the work necessary to decipher Hopkins’ odd phrasings and use of language?  That is up to the individual.

David

THOMAS HARDY ON AGING: I LOOK INTO MY GLASS

The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy

Yesterday I happened upon an obituary for the younger brother of someone I knew many years ago.  It had a photo.  When I last saw him, he was a good-looking boy of about 13 years.  It was a shock to see what time (and I suspect smoking) had done to him.

Thomas Hardy wrote a sad poem about aging.  It is not like the TV commercials that tell older people their golden years have come, that life is just going to get better and better.   Instead it is a very realistic look at aging and a lonely life.  Let’s examine it part by part:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”

One may think of this as spoken by a man or a woman, but given that it was written by a man, that is the course we shall follow.

Hardy says he looks “into my glass,” meaning his “looking glass,” an old term for a mirror.  And when he looks into the mirror, he sees what all old people see — his “wasting skin.”  ”Wasting” here means just what happens to the skin as one ages — it dries and wrinkles and discolors, it loses its fresh appearance, and it is obvious that it has lost its strength and youth.  Its former smoothness and tautness is gone.   The term reminds us of a “wasting disease,” one that gradually consumes the body and its tissues.  So Hardy looks in a mirror and sees in his aging skin and features that he is subject, as  Buddhism would say, to sickness, to old age,  and to death.

By “Would God it came to pass,” he means “I really wish it had happened that….”  People once used expressions like this, and sometimes still do, such as “I wish to God I had studied for that exam!”  But why does he wish his heart had shrunk too?

When Hardy speaks of his heart, he is actually talking about his emotions — about his ability to love and to be hurt.  It was once thought (and we still speak of it that way) that the heart was where the human emotions were centered in the body.  That is why we hear people say, “She was heartbroken when her boyfriend left her.”  So Hardy is saying that he wishes his emotions — his capacity to love and be hurt — had shrunk as thin as his skin — had weakened and lost strength like the skin of his face and neck in the mirror.  But why?  He tells us:

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

He wishes his emotions had weakened so that he, “undistrest,” meaning without distress — without mental suffering — could ”lonely wait” his endless rest.  By this he means that he could wait alone for death (“endless rest”) to come, without being hurt so much by the people who formerly seemed to like or love him, but who now ignore him, “by hearts grown cold to me.”  If his ability to “feel” had shrunk like his skin, the coldness of other people would not hurt him as it obviously does.

This is a common complaint of the old.  Not only are their friends and relatives dying, but also the living people around them — often younger — find old people no longer interesting, so they begin to ignore them, to make excuses for why they have not visited or called.  Loneliness is one of the most difficult parts of aging.  And sometimes that is as true for people who have children as for those who do not.

In keeping with this, I recently heard a few clever words that are often all too true.  A man said,

“When I was in my teens, I used to worry constantly about what other people were thinking of me.  Then when I got past 40, I began not to worry so much what other people thought of me.  Now that I am in my 60s, I realize that nobody thinks of me at all.”   There is an old song with the line, “Nobody loves you when you’re old and grey.”  Gay people have their own version: “Nobody loves you when you’re old and gay.”

Both mean the same thing.  When youth and good looks or beauty pass — when you are no longer a possibility for romance, which depends so much on youth and appearance — people lose interest.  As people get older, they gradually become first insignificant and then increasingly invisible to the young.  They often simply do not matter any more.

Hardy was obviously very hurt by all of this, and that is why he wrote:

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

He continues:

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Time, of course, is what ages us and steals our youth.  Hardy sees time as a negative force — a force that to make him miserable,  ”part steals, part lets abide.”  The part it steals is of course the freshness and youthfulness of his face and body, which is now looking shrunken and wrinkled; and the part it “lets abide” — allows to remain — is Hardy’s ability to feel strong emotion and to be deeply hurt by the indifference and coldness of other people toward him.

It is precisely this continuing ability to be hurt and made very unhappy by others that “shakes this fragile frame” (meaning his weakening, aging body) “at eve, with throbbings of noontide.”

Hardy is using “eve” (evening) in a dual sense; he means by it both the “evening” of life — old age — which comes before the “night” of death” — and he means, I think, the evening of the day, when one is often alone with one’s thoughts and emotions.  It is at this time — in the evening of life and in the evening of each day — that Hardy’s fragile, aging body shakes with sorrow and weeping, with the “throbbings of noontide,” meaning the emotions of the height of one’s life that do not weaken and shrink as one grows older; so while the skin wrinkles and loses its vigor, the emotions, Hardy says, unfortunately and definitely do not.  That is why he is left hurt and shaking with weeping and alone in the evening of his life, in the evening of the day.

It is a simple poem, but very powerful and representative of the feelings of countless lonely, elderly people.  It is definitely what I call an “old man’s poem,” or an “old woman’s poem.”  And it is brutally honest.

It is hard for young people to grasp the reality of such a poem, because inherently — like Dylan Thomas in Fern Hill — young people feel the world is theirs, that they will live forever.  Intellectually they know that is not true, but they do not yet realize and fully grasp the fact.  That is why aging is such a shock to many people.  And in a culture in which youth and beauty are so glorified, we have the sad picture of people trying to stave off or deny the inevitable — plastic surgeries, hair dyes, and endless other processes or products intended to mask the realities of life and time.

The problem for the young in understanding this poem, then, is not so much in understanding it intellectually, which can be easily aided by explanations such as I have given here.  The problem lies, rather, in their difficulty in feeling how deeply true it is, because it expresses one of the fundamental realities of life — that everything is transient, that ultimately there is nothing to hold onto, neither person nor object, that there is no material,  unchanging island in a sea of change.  A young person who realizes that is mature beyond his or her years.  But generally it is something the young do not wish to think about.

David

THE WHEEL OF THE YEAR

Every year I like to post this article again to mark that time when one feels the change in the air that marks the beginning of summer’s wane into autumn.  It is a day when one palpably feels that suddenly the energies of the season have weakened, that the active Yang energy of summer has begun to give way to the growing Yin energies that will take us first into Autumn, then Winter.  It happens at different times in different places.  I never know ahead of time on what day in August it will come here, but I certainly felt it this morning.  The Wheel of the Year has turned; the decline into Fall has begun.

In her bittersweet children’s book Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt writes:

 

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.  The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn.”

It is the way of Yin and Yang — whenever one reaches its maximum, it begins to turn into its opposite.  And that is where we are now in the turning wheel of the year.  The hot and bright summer having reached its peak — “the top of the live-long year” — the days have now begun, almost imperceptibly, their decline into autumn — the time of growing Yin.

This is when the hokku of Kyoroku comes to mind,

August;
First on the ears of millet –
The autumn wind.

We stand looking out on a field of millet still in the quiet midst of August.  Suddenly a cool wind, almost a mere hint of wind, stirs the heavy seed heads that bend in a gentle wave.  And we suddenly realize that it is the wind of autumn, and summer is ending.

What a world of significance in that verse!

That is the subtlety of  hokku.  We express all of Nature in a single, small thing-event.  And in expressing Nature, we express our own nature as well.

You will find that I repeat certain things again and again, and one of those things is the importance of harmony and unity in a hokku.  In this verse the maturity of the summer matches the maturity of the ears of millet, and suddenly we see a manifestation of this aging — the first sign of decline, the first coolness of the wind that speaks of autumn.

When I say the wind “speaks of autumn,” I mean that in hokku, when the writer gets out of the way, removing the ego from the verse, Nature is able to speak, sometimes in the wind, or the water, or the rain, or any number of things.

Returning to harmony, here is a hokku I wrote:

The tall tree
Cut up in a heap;
Summer’s end.

When you read it, see it, feel it.  Can you sense the harmony of elements, the ending of summer, the formerly tall and green and growing tree all cut up into a drying heap of wood?  Can you feel the change in it, the transience that is inseparable from existence?

That transience is an essential element of hokku.  It is what makes Babbitt’s book so filled with that mixture of near sadness and almost lonely wistfulness that the Japanese called sabishisa. It is the knowledge that nothing in life is permanent, everything changes, nothing abides, that all of existence is in constant movement and transformation from one state to another, endlessly being born, growing, dying, changing.  It manifests in the withering of a leaf and in the eons of evolution that have carried life through ceaseless transformations, as Loren Eiseley reminds us in his book The Immense Journey:

“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”

We find the same feeling in Marcel Pagnol’s comments that sum up the ending of his childhood in Le Château de ma Mère — My Mother’s Castle:

“Le temps passe, et il fait tourner la roue de la vie comme l’eau celle des moulins.”

“Time passes, and it turns the wheel of life as water does that of a mill.”

And he finished with these words:

“Telle est la vie des hommes.  Quelques joies, très vite effacées par d’inoubliables chagrins.  Il n’est pas nécessaire de le dire aux enfants.”

“Such is the life of man — a few joys, very quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows.  It is not necessary to tell that to the children.”

So now we must prepare ourselves, as summer is coming to an end, for the arrival of autumn, a season filled with the sense of things passing and aging and changing, and thus filled with the spirit of hokku.

 

David

 

 

WHAT IS COMING UP HERE

We have reached the beginning of August.

Some of you may be wondering what is to come on this site.  Well, a few of you got a preview of a future article on same-gender-attracted poets and their relation to the rest of poetry.  And I will probably be talking about hokku a bit more before the summer ends.

I watch the daily statistics closely to see what visitors here are seeking.  I have noticed that a great many of you frequently use the analyses of individual poems.  The postings on Dylan Thomas, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, etc., have been very frequently viewed.  That means many of you enjoy reading discussions of this or that old poem.  So I will no doubt continue such analyses in the future, because I enjoy them as well, and it is a good way to learn about our Western poetry traditions.

Sometimes I see that a person is brought to my site by looking for the meaning of a particular line or phrase in a poem.  When I note that, I often go back and add a bit to an article to cover what that person is hoping to find, if it is not already there.  So seeing what visitors here are looking for is a great help to me in deciding what to include in a posting.

That means readers of this site are welcome to request that I discuss a particular poem if they wish.  If you would like me to write about a certain poem, just send a message to me as a comment.  On this site comments are not made public, so that is a good way to get in touch with me.  I am always interested in what readers of my site hope to find here.  I cannot promise to discuss absolutely everything suggested, but I shall try to do what I can.

Writers of hokku and those interested in hokku are welcome to make suggestions for discussion topics on that subject as well.

So that is just a brief look at what you will likely find on this site in the near future.  I hope all readers are having a pleasant summer (or winter, if you are in the southern hemisphere!).

David

ADELSTROP: Significant Simplicity

There are some poems that seem initially lightweight, but nonetheless remain in the mind because that hasty impression is wrong.  In fact the first somewhat negative judgment may be just the reflection of a cultural prejudice that a poem must be about something very significant or important.  But perhaps it is simply that our society has an odd and somewhat distorted idea of what is significant and important.  We see that, for example, in the ongoing destruction of our natural environment, carried on in full knowledge of the likely disastrous results.

Imagine a memory — perhaps little more than a minute in its origin — that remains with you for some inexplicable reason.  That is what we find in the poem I discuss today, written by (Philip) Edward Thomas, who lived from 1878 to 1917;  not a great many years, but long enough to give us this poem.

To appreciate it, we must think back to what in some respects was a quieter time — the year 1914, to be precise — but a time in which life nonetheless was changing rapidly from what it had been.  The writer is on a train — a steam train in those days — that made an unaccustomed (“unwonted”) stop, and out the window on one side was the signboard of the station:

ADELSTROP

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 was left and no one came
On the bare platform.  What I saw
Was Adelstrop — 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. 

For some reason unexplained, the express train made an unexpected stop at a station in the Cotswolds, the low, rolling hills of Gloucestershire.

The steam hissed.  Someone cleared his throat.
No one was left and no one came
On the bare platform.  What I saw
Was Adelstrop — only the name…

The steam is of course the steam of the train engine.  We are left, for the moment, in what seems to be an interval in time.  A passenger takes advantage of the pause to clear his throat.  Out on the platform no one exits the train, or boards it.  The station is bare.  And the writer, in this interval of emptiness, sees the signboard giving the name of the place — Adelstrop.

But notice how he does not stop even for moment with that image of large letters on the signboard, but adds to it immediately — linking to the next stanza without even a mark of punctuation separating –

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.

He sees willow trees and spires of willow-herb — which we call fireweed in America, but to Thomas it is “willow-herb” because its long, narrow, pointed leaves look like those of willow trees; and he sees meadowsweet, with its tufts of creamy-white flowers that bloom from June onward.  And he sees haycocks in the fields — conical mounds of hay left to dry in the warm sunlight so that when they have lost their moisture, they may be carried in wagons to the barns and stored there as food for the beasts in winter.

Note how Thomas is able to appreciate the beauty of such things, calling them

No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

This stillness of plants and clouds and haycocks reflects that of the bare station platform, but adds to it a warmth and a life that has its own simple beauty, as lovely, yet as beautiful in their loneliness –”no whit less still and lonely fair” — as the scattered small clouds in the blue sky over the fields (“no whit” means “not even the least bit).”

 And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. 

In that interval at Adelstrop — that time that seems out of time — the song of  a blackbird is heard nearby, and Thomas hears the sound as the closest of  – he notices it now — a great many, singing birds farther off, yet all around, whose multitudinous songs grow fainter and less distinct as they extend into great distance.  And Thomas realizes he is hearing, behind and around the nearby blackbird,

 …all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. 

This is really a love poem to a moment past, made all the more poignant by our knowing that Edward Thomas died in France on the 9th of April, 1917.

If we were to approach Adelstrop very chronologically, we might say that the emptiness of the station has nothing at all to do with the war and the resulting absence of men — and indeed there is nothing in the poem to say it did.  Thomas noted in his journal a stop at Adelstrop on the 23rd of June, 1914; slightly over a month later, on July 28th, the First World War began.   The poem, however, was not published until 1917, at which time it was very easy to read into it the absence of men gone off to war.   And it seems to have actually been written after the start of the war, in January of 1915.  So this is one of those cases in which it is best to just go with what the poet himself offers — an empty station platform — without assuming reasons for it other than those the poem itself offers:  that it was a hot afternoon; that it was an “unwonted” stop of the train.   But it is inevitable that a reader noting the time of actual writing will see the poem against the background of an England very much at war, very much under great stress, and that makes the peaceful interlude at Adelstrop, with its evocation of the British countryside in its plants and trees and singing birds beneath a blue sky dotted with small clouds all the more meaningful.  To me, Adelstrop is a look through a train window at the peace of pre-war England — England before the great upheaval that took the flower of its youth.

Thomas was born in England the son of Welsh parents, and the Welsh, as everyone should know, love poetry and song.  The remarkable accomplishment of Thomas, in this verse, is to recognize the significance of what to most would have been an insignificant moment in an insignificant place, a mere unexpected stop on the way to matters of importance.

Thomas preserves for us the signboard, the empty platform, the hissing of the train, the blooming flowers nearby, the haycocks in the field, the little clouds scattered in the blue sky, and the chorus of birds heard from a single blackbird nearby to all the birds of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.  And he has made, oddly enough, the sound of an anonymous passenger clearing his throat into timeless poetry, with all the rest.

It is not seeing what others see that makes a poet, but rather seeing the significance in  what others see and think of no importance.

Given the “significant simplicity” of Adelstrop, perhaps we should not be surprised to learn that Edward Thomas used to go on long walks with a visitor to England at that time, the poet Robert Frost, and that Frost was a significant factor in Thomas taking up the writing of poetry.

David

OVER THE SEA TO SKYE

Constantine Cavafy has a poem called simply Ithaka, one of his historical pieces in which advice is given to a traveller setting out on the journey to Ithaka — and the advice is “Hope that the road is long.” The point of the poem is that what is gained from a journey is in the voyaging, not in the arriving — and that when one does arrive as an old man (or woman, we may add) — one may find the goal achieved to be less than what was gained in the traveling to achieve it.

Of course this is a metaphor for the journey of life. You will find the poem here:

http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=74&cat=1

In his Verginibus Puerisque, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote,

“Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

Stevenson is the author of a poem of the category I like to call an “old man’s poem,” though of course there are “old woman’s poems” as well. In it he looks back on youth. It is a pleasant poem to read, full of the freshness of youth, and one can almost see and feel the prow of the swift boat breaking the waves into salt spray — glittering drops of sunlight.

The islands mentioned — Skye, Mull, Rum, and Eigg — are all in the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland.

OVER THE SEA TO SKYE

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Mull was astern, Rum on the port,
Eigg on the starboard bow;
Glory of youth glowed in his soul:
Where is that glory now?

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye

Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone!
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that’s gone!

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

There is another poem — not by Stevenson — that also has the words “Over the Sea to Skye,” but it is about the escape of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in Scottish history, and that one is not quite so interesting for my purposes here.

David

CONSTANTINE CAVAFY: Icons of Memory

Previously I mentioned the sense of transience one finds in the poems of Constantine Cavafy.  Most of his life has certainly disappeared from notice.  One has the feeling only of passing years, boring in their obvious externals — he worked as a clerk of the Ministry of Public Works Irrigation Office — and of a secret life fed largely, as he grew older, by fantasy and memory.  But fantasy is illusion and memory fades.

Cavafy’s verse is often beautiful in its simplicity, yet that simplicity is not the cut-marble purity found in the ancient Greek Anthology.  It is instead, more hellenistic than hellene, because an undertone of decline and decay pervades it –and Cavafy does seem to have been — in spirit — a hellenist reborn.

He writes much about brief affairs that remain in  his mind only as bittersweet icons of memory before which he continually lights candles; but again, memory fades, and that mere fact becomes a part of one of his most affecting poems, in which we see time eroding even recollection until almost nothing is left.  Here is his poem Makriά — Eyes:

I’d like to speak about that memory…
but it no longer comes — there’s almost nothing left,
for it is far, off in my time of youth.
Skin as if made of jasmine…
that August — it was August — in the evening.
I just recall the eyes; they were — I think– a blue;
Ah, yes — a sapphire blue.

Here it is transliterated, so you may see the sound patterns we lose in translation:

Thάthela aftί tίn mnίmi na tin po…
Ma  έtsi esvίsthi pia…san tίpote then apomέni
yiatί makriά, sta prόta efivikά mou khroniά kίtai.
Thέrma san kamomέno  αpό iαsemί…
Εkίni τοu Avgούsτοu — Av’gοusτοs ίtan; — ί vradiά
Μόlis thimούmαi pia ta mάtia· ίsαn, thαrrό, maviά…
A nαi, mαviά; έnα sαpfίrinο mαvί.

The effectiveness of the poem lies precisely in showing us the fading of a beautiful memory until almost nothing is left, until little remains of the image but the impression of the jasmine whiteness of skin and the blue of the eyes — but even the latter requires effort to recall, which Cavafy shows us by his hesitant pauses.

Reading such verses — and Cavafy has more like this — is like watching the varnish on freshly-painted portraits darken and obscure the features over time; but with Cavafy, even the canvas that supports the images is disintegrating.  Yet he treasures even these decaying fragments.

There is another poem that seems to go naturally with this one.  I will just translate this time.  It is called “Grey“:

Looking at an opal — half grey –
I recalled two beautiful grey eyes
I saw some twenty years before.

For one month we did love
and then he left; I think to Smyrna,
to find work; I never saw him more.

They’ll have grown ugly — if he lives — those grey eyes;
 and spoiled would be that beautiful face.
My memory, keep them as they were.
And memory, bring back what you are able of that love of mine,
whatever you are able, bring back to me tonight. 

There is something very sad in all this, and that sorrow of aging — of loss of beauty, and its inevitable decay — pervades the poetry of Cavafy.

David

IONIKON: Constantine Cavafy and the Historical Imagination

There is an old Italian saying that the translator is a traitor.  That can at times be true, if a translation is manipulative and unfaithful to the original, but in general it is not true.  A translation is not an effort to betray, but rather an effort to wipe the dirt from a window, so that we may see — even if sight is distorted by bubbles and flaws in the windowpane — from one language or culture into another.  The more different the patterns of thought in one language are from another, the more difficult it is to translate faithfully.

Today I would like to discuss a poem by Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), who wrote in Greek but lived in Alexandria, in Egypt.  He is not a poet one finds in college anthologies generally, because first, he did not write in English, and second, many of his poems have to do with same-gender attraction and relationships, which is something only recently dealt with openly as our societal attitudes have become more tolerant and understanding.

A peculiarity of Cavafy is that he often writes the poetic equivalent of historical fiction; he puts himself into the minds and times of people long dead, often people who lived in the period and culture known as “hellenistic,” when — after the conquests of Alexander the Great — Greek culture and language and thought spread over a very wide area.

Cavafy’s verses deal also — either openly or by implication — with what I would call the “Christian Revolution,” — the rise of Christianity in the Mediterranean region with all the mixed good and evil that implies:  the joining of the new religion with the power and authority of the state, its astonishing intolerance of other ways of belief and thought, and how it caused the dying out of the pre-Christian world all around the Mediterranean Sea.

When we translate Cavafy into English, we get the meaning; but as is very common and unavoidable in translation, we lose the sound, and sound is a very great part of poetry.  So that loss is the distortion caused by the old and wavy glass in our window of view, but we should be glad that we can nonetheless see a good deal of Cavafy’s poem through translation, in spite of that.  The one I discuss today is called Ionikon;  that is sometimes translated simply as “Ionia,” or “To Ionia,” or “Song of Ionia.”  Ionia, in ancient times, was a Greek-speaking cultural region in the western part of what today is Turkey.

Here, first,  is Cavafy’s Ionikon in transliterated Greek, so that you may see the sound patterns we shall inevitably miss in English translation.  I have indicated accented syllables:

Yiatί ta spάsame t’ agάlmatά ton,
yiatί tous thiόxamen ap’ tous naούs ton,
thiόlou then pέthanan yi’ aftό i theί.
O yi tis Ionίas, sέna agapoύn akόmi,
sέna i psikhέs ton enthimoύntai akόmi.
San ximerόni epάno sou proί avgoustiάtiko
tin atmosfaίra sou pernά sfrίgos ap’ tin zoί ton.
kai kάpot’ aitherί efivikί morfί,
aόristi, me thiάva grίgoro,
epάno apό tous lόfous sou pernά.

We may translate it like this:

IONIKON

Because we smashed their images –
Because we cast them from their temples –
It does not mean the gods no longer live. 
O land of Ionia, they love you still; 
You enliven their souls still;
And when an August morn dawns upon you
Your atmosphere turns vibrant with the vigor of their lives;
And sometimes an etheric, youthful form,
Indefinite in moving swiftly by,
Will pass above the summits of your hills. 

And what does this mean?  Well, it is rather a grander equivalent of “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”  Cavafy is saying that even though the people of Ionia have changed their faith — even though they have smashed the statues of the gods and have expelled the gods from their shrines –nonetheless the gods have not stopped loving the Ionian land; that sometimes, in the still of an August dawn, one may catch sight of an airy, youthful figure –indistinct and moving so swiftly as to almost be unseen — passing above the summits of the Ionian hills.

That figure, hazy and uncertain, is of course a god in youthful and immortal form — barely visible to the mortal eye, yet so full of divine energy the air is vibrant with his passing.  Cavafy does not identify the youthful passer-by, but it is likely the god Hermes, the swift messenger of the gods — Hermes, god of athletes and of herds, of roads and travelling, who is also the guide of the soul into the afterlife.  One of the forms he took — for the gods can change their forms at will — is that of a handsome, youthful athlete.

Ionikon is actually the final revision of an earlier poem that was titled first “Remembrance” or “Memory,” and later “Thessaly.”  The earlier version begins by telling the reader that the gods do not die; it is the beliefs of the mortal mob that die.  This was expressed in more refined and suggestive form in the final version, Ionikon.

Seen in its overall context, one has the feeling the poem was written by a fellow of rather noble spirit — still quite pre-Christian and “pagan” at heart — who has watched the fickleness of humans and their changes of allegiance, and who still prefers the old ways.  Cavafy himself seems to have been Greek Orthodox nominally and in general practice, but he had the ability to put himself completely into other minds in other times, and that is what he seems to be doing here.  The earlier, anonymous writer into whose mind Cavafy puts himself in Ionikon is saying that the attitudes of mere mortals — those lesser than gods — may change with time and fickleness, but the gods themselves are immortal and do not change, nor are they dependent upon human constancy of faith; the gods have their own lives and affairs that continue on a much greater time scale than the human.

In spite of the frequent sensuality one finds in many of Cavafy’s other poems, underlying them all is a sense of time and transience and loss.  His fondness for writing himself into far earlier times and minds only adds to that sense of constant change, and of our final inability as mortal, aging humans to hold on to anything, no matter how much desired or loved.  It is this profound sense of transience that the poems of Cavafy share with hokku, no matter how dissimilar the two kinds of verse are in other ways.

Cavafy’s odd ability to think himself into another time and person is one of the chief characteristics of his work, and his facility in so doing makes his “historical” poems seem very real.

Here is the poem Ionikon in its original Greek, for those who may wish to see it:

Γιατί τα σπάσαμε τ’ αγάλματά των
γιατί τους διώξαμεν απ’ τους ναούς των,
διόλου δεν πέθαναν γι’ αυτό οι θεοί.
Ω γη της Ιωνίας, σένα αγαπούν ακόμη,
σένα η ψυχές των ενθυμούνται ακόμη.
Σαν ξημερώνει επάνω σου πρωί αυγουστιάτικο
την ατμοσφαίρα σου περνά σφρίγος απ’ την ζωή των·
και κάποτ’ αιθερία εφηβική μορφή,
αόριστη, με διάβα γρήγορο,
επάνω από τους λόφους σου περνά.

The very best site on the Internet at present for those who wish to read more of Cavafy is the Official Web Site of the Cavafy Archive.  You will find it in both Greek and English:

Greek:  http://www.kavafis.gr/poems/list.asp?cat=1
English:  http://www.cavafy.com/poems/list.asp?cat=3

David

WHEN IN THE HIDDEN DAYS

One of my early verses:

When, in the hidden days,
The whirlpools silver-swirled within the water,
Michael walked and climbed among the creeping ivy
Green beside the river deep;
He smiled and softly whispered in the shadow-sunny –
The water snails were black, and strange as sleep.
Great leaves grew red upon his crayon paper,
And wet-dry stones came home to live with him;
Then all the world was light, and all things living,
Through the days before the sun grew dim.

I suppose that is my equivalent of Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and the Fern Hill of Dylan Thomas.

David

 

SWEET BROTHER, IF I DO NOT SLEEP

It is doubtful if anyone short of Pope John XXIII did as much for the public image of the Catholic Church in the latter half of the 20th century as did the convert writer Thomas Merton.

Looking back on that period, one realizes that Merton had his own public image as literary ascetic.  But the then-private reality was that he had problems with alcohol, problems with romance, problems with his ecclesiastical “superiors,” and, paradoxically, some rather major problems with basic Catholic doctrine — most of which he seems to cheerfully ignore or leap over in his popular (and somewhat bowdlerized) autobiography The Seven Story Mountain.

 Suffice it to say that the Thomas Merton one saw in the writings of the 20th century is not the Thomas Merton of the revealing biographies of the 21st.

All of this is just a lead-in to the subject of “religious” poetry.  It is a category that, for appreciation, requires one to put one’s own belief system, or absence of belief system, on hold.  

What is probably Merton’s finest composition is an overtly religious poem on the death of his brother in war.  To appreciate it requires that we put on, for the moment, the odd notion that the intentional privations and self-denials of the living can benefit the dead.

Merton begins in excellent form:

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

All very good so far, both rhythmic and effective in simple imagery.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Also good — no straying from the theme of concern.

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed–
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.

With that, Merton introduces an awkward note, and the segment is not quite up to what preceded it.

When all the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.

With that, unfortunately, Merton has lost the grace of his beginning completely, and simplicity becomes simplisticism in the rhythm and message of those unpleasing sing-song lines.  One wishes the quatrain had been omitted before publication — but too late.

Fortunately, Merton does not continue on this downhill course, but returns once more to the grace of the beginning:

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.

With those lines we are again back to the smooth-flowing speech of the beginning, the theme of the dead benefitting from the sacrifices of others — a kind of Catholic version of the Buddhist “transfer of merits,” but through asceticism rather than active good deeds.

Of course non-Christians find all this talk of Christ a bit nonessential, which is why, to appreciate the poem, one must put one’s own beliefs aside  to understand the spirit behind the work — the desire to benefit the departed, to see our suffering and the suffering of others — the world’s suffering — in a larger context.  It is only by doing so that we can feel the beauty of these lines:

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:

Wreckage and death, smoke and ruins — very effective in evoking the suffering of war.  Add these to the simple images of flowers, water, bread, willows, and tears, and one has a very good poem indeed — with the exception of that awkward quatrain, which seems foreign and inserted and out of place in the ascetic simplicity of the rest.

Merton is saying to his brother, “Through my asceticism and self-denial, I wish to buy you comfort and peace and rest.”  Thus the notion of “buying” in the verse, and the equation of tears and money.

We need not go into just how “ascetic” Merton’s own life in fact proved to have been on close examination, because we would be disappointed.  Suffice it to say that the impression given by the poem does not fit the reality of his condition.  We should just go with the spirit of the moment and expression of sincere love for a lost brother that we find in the poem.  If we were to judge the worth of poems by the lives of the poets who wrote them, we would find precious little left in the history of literature to appreciate.

The other great English-language “religious” poet of Catholicism — also a convert, and an even more unhappy one –  is of course Gerard Manley Hopkins, and we can only say of him that as a poet, a greater than Merton is here.  Still, we find some similarity in the imagery of the beginning of Merton’s verse when placed beside the simplicity of Hopkins’ Heaven Haven:

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.

The poem bears the superscription “A nun takes the veil”

One would like to think that Hopkins himself found the simple peace and satisfaction expressed in the verse, but his biography tells us otherwise.  Again we have the contrast between poetic idealism and harsh reality.

A WAY OF SAYING IT: WHAT POETRY IS AND IS NOT

We reach and strain with our thoughts, trying to grasp what poetry is, trying to somehow distinguish it from all that is not poetry, but without success.  Then we come across something as simple as this statement by A. E. Housman:

“Poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it.”

And it is as though the sun has risen, dispelling the darkness; because that is exactly what poetry is.  It does not lie in the thing said, however significant it may be.  It lies, rather, in how that thing is said.

All of the traditional paraphernalia of poetry, whether rhyme, rhythm, alliteration or assonance, are merely means to this end — saying the thing in a way that makes it poetry.  Their use, of course, is no guarantee at all that the result will be poetry, but we know that they are used with poetry as the goal.

Prose, we may say then, is the reverse; it is not so much how a thing is said as what is said.  It is meaning that is important and the key element.  

We should not misunderstand this and think that poetry has no meaning, but rather that what meaning it carries is molded to the manner in which it is presented, however important the meaning may be — if it is to be poetry.  

We may separate the meaning from the poem by explaining it in ordinary, everyday English, but by doing so we cause the meaning to lose its poetry.  If that were not so, we would all constantly be speaking poetry.

 So poetry is a way of saying something, a special way, and there are various tools and manners that may be used in so speaking — again like rhyme and measure and rhythm, alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), but not all of these tools are essential for writing a poem.  It all comes back to a way of saying something.

We may go on to remark that obviously, then, poetry is not ordinary, everyday speech, which concentrates more on just saying a thing than on how that thing is said.  Poetry is the changing of one’s common speech pattern to say a thing in a way that makes it more pleasing or interesting or effective, or all three combined.

Sometimes the line between poetry and ordinary speech may seem blurred at first, but with a little reflection it is recognized nonetheless.  When W. H. Auden wrote his poem September 1, 1939, he was talking about the outbreak of World War II, the invasion of Poland by German forces — and he was seemingly conversational in doing so; we see, however, that this would not have been his everyday speech — not the way he ordered a meal, nor the way he talked to a friend.  And it is that little change that makes all the difference in transforming something from prose to poetry:  

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade;
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. 

 We find the end rhymes — dives / lives, bright / night, afraid /decade.  And we find “odd” ways of saying things, such as

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth…

Eliminate the rhyme, however, say instead that people all over the world are angry and afraid, and the poetry dissolves — vanishes into prose.  

We tend to think that poetry is cut up into lines (and it usually is), while prose is divided into paragraphs.  But actually poetry and prose are somewhat like human gender behavior, which shades from one extreme to the other.  Some men are very stereotypically masculine; others are very stereotypically feminine; but between the two poles are found all the people who fall somewhere between.  In the change from prose to poetry, as in human gender roles, we find a graduated scale.  Some poets border on prose, but never fall completely into it, or they would not be poets.  There is still something to their way of saying the thing that is recognizable as poetry.

But the matter is a little more complex.  Even in prose, people often do not write as they commonly speak.  They leave little things out; they use “big” Latin or Greek-based words, instead of plain and simple Anglo-Saxon; they say things more concisely, and perhaps more effectively.  There is a vast difference in even so small a matter as an invitation to dinner:

1.  Do you wanna have dinner with me tomorrow?
2.  Your presence is requested at a dinner honoring the accomplishments of H. N. Featherwood.

And then there is poetry:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table; 

One comes to recognize and to distinguish poetry from the other two kinds of speech, the ordinary and the formal.  What one must be wary of is prose that is disguised as poetry by being divided into lines in imitation of poetry.  Some people who write this way think they are writing poetry, and some critics are deceived into thinking the same.  But those who realize that poetry is not just dividing prose into lines on a page, but rather is a way of saying something that is different both from ordinary and formal speech, will not be fooled.

Some would-be poems include the bare minimum of the special way of saying something that is poetry, and sometimes not even that.  We should not confuse that kind of writing with the “conversational” yet quite poetic manner of Walt Whitman in his Shut Not Your Doors:

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves
       yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page. 

But, you may say, no one talks like that!  And I reply that you have grasped the point.  No one talks as Walt Whitman wrote in poetry.  You may think they do for a few words or a line, but the poetry will out.

The same may be said for Robert Frost, another sometimes even more “conversational” poet.  Look at the beginning of his Birches, where he fools us into thinking that we are just listening to the rambling conversation of some New England ruralite, and it is only gradually as we read on, and feel the rhythm, and begin to sense his increasingly revealing way of speaking, that we become aware that what seemed to begin as conversation was actually just the path into poetry:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that.  Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain.  They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust –
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. 

When reading Frost, one often has the feeling of being tricked into submitting to some sort of peculiar farmer’s incantation, because what seems ordinary speech at first increasingly weaves a charm of words, as though Frost were a kind of New England shaman chanting away, putting a folksy spell upon us, as in his After Apple-Picking:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 

This incantatory nature of his writing is one of the most pleasing things about Frost.  And again, it is a way of saying it; it is poetry.

So we know, in theory, what poetry is and what it is not.  But that does not mean we have defined poetry.  We must still be able to distinguish between poetry and mere verse — between what is genuinely poetic and what just uses some of the tools of poetry but does not succeed in being poetic.  For that we can only return to another statement of Housman: that poetry is known by its effect on us.  But here we are back again at the beginning, reduced to saying that “good” poetry is a matter of opinion and taste formed by education and experience.

David

 

 

DRUMMER HODGE: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

Thomas Hardy — yes, the same man who wrote Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and those other famous novels of Britain — wrote a very meaningful poem about the Boer War (1899-1902).  In that war the British (and men from British possessions) fought against the people of Dutch ancestry in parts of what is now South Africa — against the people called the Boers (boer is Dutch for “farmer”).  

Hardy had news of a drummer killed in that war, a young fellow — probably a boy, really — who was from Dorchester, in the region of south England that Hardy wrote about in his novels under its old name, Wessex (“West-Saxony”).  Drummers in that war might be as young as 13 or 14, getting into the military by lying about their age.

Here is the poem:

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
  Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
  That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
  Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
  Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
  The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
  Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
  Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
  Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
  His stars eternally.

It is a very sad and lonely poem, bringing to mind the useless suffering and futility of war.  Let’s look more closely, part by part:

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
  Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
  That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
  Each night above his mound.

It is, of course, a rough and hasty military burial — not even, we may say, respectful; just throwing the young body into a hole dug in the ground, with no coffin at all — the body just as it was found in the field.

His landmark — that is, the physical feature of the landscape by which one might roughly identify where the grave lies — is just a kopje-crest, meaning one of those hillocks, often consisting of or surmounted by large, bare rocks and stones, that rise here and there above the veldt, the level fields that stretch into the distance.  A kopje (pronounced “cop-yuh”) means literally a “little head,” but it is just one of those often stony, isolated hillocks one sees in movies of Africa, with a lion lounging atop one of its big boulders.  ”That breaks the veldt around” means the the kopje rises up above and interrupts the flatness of the surrounding land.

We know already that this “Drummer Hodge” is, as we would say, still “just a kid,” likely no more than 17 and possibly not even that.  And we really do not know what his name was.  Yes, Hodge is a genuine family surname, but in the England of Hardy’s time it was also used as a nickname for any country boy or man — “that farm kid.”  When the newspapers asked “what Hodge was saying” on a particular matter, they meant the views of the average British man from the agricultural countryside.

So really Drummer Hodge is anonymous, just one of those farm boys who enlisted for the illusion of military glory.  It is paradoxical that in the film The History Boys,  an enthusiastic teacher — “Mr. Hector” — says of Hodge in this poem, “the important thing is that he has a name,” and he proceeds to tell his student how it was at this period of history that ordinary soldiers began to be remembered by name, commemorated on war monuments.  It is a poignant and effective scene in the film, but the part about Hodge having a name is an error, which writer Alan Bennet later recognized and acknowledged.  Hodge actually is, in this poem, an “unknown soldier,” though of course we know he was a Wessex country boy.

 Hardy emphasizes, partly by his use of Afrikaans (South African Dutch dialect) terms such as kopje, veldt, and so on, the “foreignness” of the resting place of Drummer Hodge, how alien it all was to him.  

Above the mound of his grave, “foreign” constellations west each night.  Here west is a verb meaning “to move toward the West, to set in the West.”  So Hardy is really saying that strange constellations (star patterns) unfamiliar to Hodge would move and set each night in the wide sky above the little mound where his grave lay in the vast veldt.

The next segment of the poem repeats and emphasizes some of the elements of the first part:

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
  Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
  The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
  Strange stars amid the gloam.

Hardy tells us that young “Hodge,” fresh from the Wessex countryside, never even had the time get to know and understand his alien surroundings in Africa — the Karoo (broad, dry plateau land), the Bush (the wild, uncultivated lands away from the towns) — and the dusty loam, the dry soil of southern Africa.  And Hodge never had the time, before he was killed, to learn why strange stars — stars he did not recognize — rose in the sky each night “amid the gloam,” meaning in the time after the sun had set, when the stars come out.

Now all of this is significant in Hardy’s transmission to the reader of just how alien his African surroundings were to this Wessex boy, who, being a farm lad, would have been well familiar with the soil, the trees, the hedgerows, and the constellations above southern England.  He was sent off to die in an alien land quite “foreign” to him, from soil to sky.

Paradoxically, Hardy tells us…

Yet portion of that unknown plain
  Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
  Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
  His stars eternally.

Hodge, buried in the dry, alien soil of Africa, now becomes part of that soil.  His “homely” breast and brain will be absorbed by the roots of some strange African tree.  And “strange-eyed” constellations reign his stars eternally,” means that the unfamiliar (“strange-eyed”) stars overhead that dominate the sky in patterns unknown to Wessex will be those over Hodge’s grave forever.  He will never again see England, but will become part of the soil and growth of Africa, lost forever in that alien land.

There is something remarkably like this near the end of My Mother’s Castle, the autobiographical account of the French author Marcel Pagnol, who talks about the sad death of his young country friend Lili des Bellons, who knew every leaf and bird and trail of his home hills, yet who similarly was killed in land that was foreign to him, a dark northern forest in the First World War:  

“In 1917, a bullet striking full on cut short his young life, and he fell in the rain upon tufts of cold plants whose names he did not know.”

Again, in the film The History Boys, the student discussing Hardy’s poem remarks that there is a parallel between 

Yet portion of that unknown plain
  Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
  Grow to some Southern tree…

and “golden boy” Rupert Brooke’s poem The Soldier:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Brooke (1887 – 1915) — who joined the British navy, died of the effects of a sequence of illnesses that ended with blood poisoning, and was buried on the island of Skyros, in Greece, not living to see his third decade of life. 

In the previously-mentioned film, “Mr. Hector” replies perceptively to the student, saying of the two poems that “It is the same thought,” but adds that Hardy’s is the better, because it is “more down to earth…quite literally, down to earth.”  And it is, though both poems are very good.  In Brooke, the young man buried remains something alien in that foreign soil — “a richer dust concealed.” But Hardy is more the realist:  

Yet portion of that unknown plain
  Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
  Grow to some Southern tree…

Drummer Hodge becomes absorbed into that alien environment, becomes as much a part of it as the kopje and the “Southern tree” that grows from his remains.  Quite literally, as Mr. Hector says, “down to earth.”

We should note the use of the word “homely” here.  It does not mean “plain and unattractive in appearance,” but it does mean unsophisticated and we may say, “as one would find him at his home.”  It is not negative, but just reflects his “country boy” nature — open and simple, direct and unpolished.

It really is a very striking poem, not filled with the reflected glory of Brooke, but with the acceptance of hard things as they are that we find in Hardy’s novels, which is one of the reasons why he is one of the few novelists I can read and take seriously, along with John Steinbeck.  

The “aftereffect” of Drummer Hodge is somewhat like that of these lines from William Wordsworth’s A Slumber did my Spirit Seal:

No motion has she now, no force;
   She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
   With rocks and stones and trees.

But with “Hodge” they are alien rocks, alien trees, alien earth and sky – and he gradually becomes one with them, as the days, months, and years pass ceaselessly on.

David

HOUSMAN’S EASTER HYMN

In the previous posting I discussed the profound sense of insecurity and alienation expressed in Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.  Now I would like to look at another poem by Alfred Edward Housman, his Easter Hymn.  In it the poet addresses Jesus directly:

EASTER HYMN

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

 But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

The poem might easily be titled The Agnostic’s Easter.  In it Housman expresses the matter in two opposing “ifs.”  

In the first part he tells Jesus that if he is merely dead and buried in his garden tomb, unaware that his mission failed, unaware that his life and death not only did not destroy hate but sometimes even fanned its flames, then Housman wishes him a peaceful eternal sleep.

But if, on the other hand, Jesus was resurrected from the tomb as many say in Christianity, and has ascended to heaven and assumed power, Housman asks him to remember his suffering on earth, and — it is implied — to consider the suffering of humanity, and to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.  ”Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.”  

It is a bold poem, and in it Housman is essentially saying, “I do not believe you are still alive and in heaven, and not just lying for some two thousand years in a tomb in the Near East, but if by chance you are living and up there, then look down at the sufferings of humanity (that of the poet included) and please help us.”

The unspoken result of the poem is, interestingly, the same conclusion reached by Arnold in Dover Beach:  no help is coming, and we are out here on our own in the universe, and must get by as best we can.  Housman made his “prayer,” and no help came in reply.  So one is left with the conclusion that of the two “ifs” in the poem, the first was the correct one.

That is why, again, there is a kind of underlying bitter humor in the poem, which makes the title Easter Hymn all the more meaningful.  It is not surprising, then, that Housman is said to have once described his own position as that of a “High-church atheist,” meaning that while culturally he had been influenced by the traditional Anglicanism of England in which so many were raised, intellectually he could not accept the notion of a “God” as the term was understood in Christianity.

That, of course, was a controversial position in his time, which accounts for his Easter Hymn being left unpublished until after his death in 1936, appearing among his Manuscript Poems published in 1955.

The poetic attitude of Housman is expressed briefly and succinctly in the preface he attached to the publication of his book More Poems:

They say my verse is sad; no wonder;
Its narrow measure spans
Tears of eternity and sorrow,
Not mine, but man’s. 

This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.

That is why the poems of Housman appeal so readily and effectively to us today.  He understood human suffering and the transience of life, and he speaks to us still.

What does he mean by writing his poems for “all ill-treated fellows, unborn and unbegot”?  He means all those who were, at the time he wrote this verse, not yet born nor even yet conceived.  And by saying the poem is “for them to read when they’re in trouble and I am not,” he means his poems are for those like him, who will have his poems in the future to read when they are in trouble, but Housman will by then be long dead and beyond all his troubles — “and I am not.”

 

David

 

 

THE RECEDING TIDE: ARNOLD’S DOVER BEACH

Michael Schmidt calls Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach “the greatest single poem of the Victorian period.”  Greatness in poetry is a matter of personal taste, but one can say that probably no single poem so eloquently expresses the growing spiritual discomfort of the time. Arnold was born the day before Christmas in 1822; Dover Beach was likely written in 1851, after his marriage.  That means he wrote it when about 29 years old.

It would be easy to suppose that Dover Beach came in reaction to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which shook the foundations of Christendom, but actually that book was not published until 1859, some eight years after the poem was written.   Yet Dover Beach was not actually published until 1867, eight years after Darwin’s revolutionary book appeared, and by then the feelings of uncertainty and alienation expressed in Dover Beach had become even more widespread due to the immense public controversy over human evolution, which many felt to be in direct conflict with the biblical teaching of creation.  For some the loss of belief in creation as recorded in Genesis was the loss of belief in Christianity in general. That is why for readers at the time of the poem’s publication, Dover Beach bespoke the decay of faith that came with the ever -increasing proofs that the biblical account was simply wrong.  And if one could not trust the biblical account of creation, logical thought ran, who knew what, if any, of the remainder of its accounts were trustworthy, including the Resurrection?

One must keep in mind that even before Darwin, there was a growing gap in the public mind between the nature of the physical world as pictured in the Bible and the nature of the physical world as it was being revealed by the discoveries of science in the early to mid 19th century, particularly the revelations of the growing science of geology and the rising attention paid to fossils and their implications — including the first scientifically-described dinosaur — Megalosaurus — named in 1824 — astonishing creatures nowhere named or revealed in the books of the Bible.

We may say, then, that the crux of the matter is that previously, people had looked to the Bible to explain matters; but in the first half of the 19th century, they had begun to turn instead to science and to related inventions.  And the discoveries of science were often not easy to harmonize with the Bible.

This is, of course, a simplification.  Many still held to literalistic views of the Bible, others modified their views to fit new scientific discoveries while not losing their overall faith in Christianity.  But to others the writing on the wall was plain to read, and today, looking backward, we can see that in the first half of the 19th century, serious cracks were appearing in the edifice of Christian belief that would lead to its even more rapid crumbling in the latter half of the 2oth century.

So Dover Beach has great meaning even today, with the increasing abandonment of Christianity in Europe (and more gradually in America as well).

The meaning we today assign to Dover Beach, then, telescopes the changes of the 19th century into an overall loss of faith in the dictates of clergyman and Bible; and without that faith, many felt the ground slipping away from beneath their feet.  Many found science and invention an inadequate replacement.  Such people were left with that abandoned “we are entirely on our own now” feeling — that sense of being placed between the loss of the presumed certainties of Christianity and the disturbing revelations of science — that Dover Beach best expresses.

Now let’s take a look at the poem:

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;–on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

Let’s look at the poem part by part:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;–on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

We may assume that the poet is standing at an open window in the British seaport of Dover, which is situated just across the English Channel from France, which lies only about 21-22 miles across the Strait of Dover, that portion of the Channel that separates Dover in England from Calais in France.

We do not yet realize it, as the poem begins, but the poet is already speaking to another person.  We may assume, historically, that it is his wife; they spent their honeymoon in Dover.   Of course by extension, it is really the reader.

So Arnold begins by saying that the sea is calm tonight; the tide is full — meaning the sea is at its highest in the tidal cycle — high tide as opposed to low tide.  He tells us the moon lies fair upon the straits, meaning the moon is shining its light down and is reflected beautifully upon the waters in the Dover Strait.

Arnold sees a light gleam and then vanish in darkness off where he knows the French Coast lies — probably the appearing -vanishing light of a lighthouse on that far shore.  The cliffs of England — the famous White Cliffs of Dover — stand glimmering in the moonlight and rise vast and high at the edge of the water.  They are white chalk cliffs, composed largely of calcium carbonate formed from the fossil skeletons of countless one-celled sea creatures.  Arnold began by telling us “the sea is calm,” and now says the white cliffs stand “out in the tranquil bay.”  That repetition adds to the sense of peace.

And now Arnold issues his invitation to the unseen person with him:  ”Come to the window; sweet is the night-air.”  And then comes a sudden change in the poem, with the word “only”:

Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Having told us all is peace and beauty, now he adds an “except,” by beginning his next sentence with the word “Only….”

He points out this exception by drawing attention to the line of white spray where the waves of the ocean meet the shore, “where the sea meets the moon-blanched land.”  ”Moon-blanch’d” means turned whitish in appearance by the moonlight.

 ”Listen!” he urges:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Arnold’s companion (and we, of course) now hear the sound made by the sea as the incoming waves roll and cast the pebbles landward atop other pebbles, and then the retreating wave pulls and rolls them out seaward again, countless pebbles grating together.  So we know this is not a sandy beach, but rather a “shingle” beach, one made of rocks and pebbles.  We hear the grating roar of pebbles grinding on pebbles all along that line where sea and land meet.  We hear it cease and begin again with each arriving wave as it rolls and casts its pebbles “up the high strand,” meaning up the higher beach.  This pushing and pulling of the waves upon the pebbles at the water line creates a “tremulous cadence” — meaning the rising and falling beat caused by the slow, repetitive sound of the sea and its pebbles, cast forward and pulled back.

These grating pebbles and waves with their repetitive cadence “bring the eternal note of sadness in.”  Arnold tells us that in spite of the beauty and tranquility of the night and the sea and the cliffs, the sound of the pebbles grating in the waves brings in that eternal feeling of sadness, which here manifests as sound –an eternal note that lies behind all the fleeting “sound” of happiness and peace.

Arnold’s next remarks add the depth of centuries, of time past, to what he has already said:

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,

Sophocles (496-406 B.C.  was an ancient Greek writer of tragedies.  Arnold tells us that the tragedian heard the same eternal note of sadness that he hears in the waves at Dover, only Sophocles heard it long before on the Aegean Sea, which lies between Greece and Turkey.  It brought to Socrates’ mind the turbid (dark, filled with sediment, in turmoil) ebb and flow (increase and decrease) of human misery.

If Arnold had something definite from the works of Sophocles in mind, it may have been these lines from a chorus in his work Antigone:

For others, once
the gods have rocked a house to its foundations
the ruin will never cease, cresting on and on
from one generation on throughout the race—
like a great mounting tide
driven on by savage northern gales,
surging over the dead black depths
roiling up from the bottom dark heaves of sand
and the headlands, taking the storm’s onslaught full-force,
roar, and the low moaning
echoes on and on
(Chorus 656-666, translated by Fagles)

We need not be too literal about that, however.  The important matter is that Arnold is saying that the same sadness he hears in the waves of the the Strait of Dover in the 19th century was heard many centuries before by the tragedian Sophocles in the waves of the Aegean Sea against its shore, and Arnold feels it gave Sophocles the impulse to thought in writing.

“We find also in the sound a thought,” Arnold says, meaning that it inspires a thought in him, as it did in Sophocles; and then he tells us what particular thought it inspires in him at Dover.

He makes an analogy:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Just as the tide is full tonight, he says, so the Sea of Faith was once full, meaning that life was once filled with religious faith (by which, of course, he means the Christian faith).  That Sea of Faith once encircled the world (Arnold means primarily the British/European world) like a shining belt (he uses the old term for a belt or sash, “girdle”).

“But now,” he says, “I only hear its long, withdrawing roar.”  He perceives that the Sea of Faith is receding, pulling away, from the world just as the water of high tide will gradually ebb away from the Dover shore.  He knows the tide at Dover will recede, and already he senses the Sea of Faith ebbing, its tide going out.  He “hears” it retreating, “to the breath of the night wind,” meaning that he sees faith fading away like the tide receding on the shore below him in the night, as the cool wind of night blows.  By combining this recession of faith with the coolness of the night wind (remember that the night air was previously “sweet?”) he makes the air of night, which formerly had seemed fresh and tranquil, into a kind of cold darkness stealing over the world with the loss of faith.  Faith is disappearing “down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.”  By “shingles,” again Arnold means shingle beaches — beaches of rocks and pebbles rather than sand.  That gives us a picture of bleakness and harshness as faith pulls away from the world, its receding tide leaving behind only dreariness and emptiness and naked, rocky shoreline — the world as Arnold perceived it to be without religious faith.

And now Arnold gives us the emotion that comes to him as a result of this picture of the loss of faith in the world:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

He tells the person with him, “Let us at least be true and faithful to one another, because we have nothing else upon which to rely now.”  The world that seems to be a land of dreams, so varied and so new, is now really — Arnold feels — just an illusion.  Now that faith is gone, we see it as it is without that faith.  It has no joy, no love, no light, no certainty, no peace, no help for pain.  It is as though we find ourselves in the darkness on a plain (“darkling plain”) swept with the confused alarms (calls to arms, urgings to battle, warning sounds) of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies come together violently and and clash in battle by night.

So in essence, Arnold is saying:

The night is beautiful and tranquil here on the Strait of Dover, with the moonlight shining on water and land, and a light appearing and  disappearing far off on the coast of France.  Come to the window, because the night air is sweet.

Except, look down there where the waves of the sea meet the land.  I hear the pebbles carried forward and pulled back by the waves; I hear the pebbles grating on one another, creating a dull roar.  Sophocles heard the same sound centuries ago on the shore of the Aegean sea, and the sound evokes an eternal sadness.  It makes me think of an analogy:

Just as the tide is full tonight, so the Sea of Faith was once full — people had a belief on which to base their lives and thoughts.  But now that belief is fading and disappearing.  I can sense it disappearing just as the tide turns, and as it recedes, the waves pull back from the shore below me, retreating into the darkness, leaving only harshness and bare “reality” behind.

Oh, my love, let us at least be true and faithful to each other, because there is no other refuge left to us in this world, which seems to offer so much but really offers only illusions; and we are left here alone in the darkness and conflict, just as if we were on a plain in the dark of night, filled with the noises and cries of battle while all around us ignorant armies clash.

Of course such a simple summary has none of the poetry of the poem itself!

I should add that there is an interpretation of the following lines that makes no sense to me:

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Again and again you will see it stated on the Internet that the words “But now I only hear” really mean, “But now I alone hear.”  I do not think that is a defensible interpretation.  The clear sense of the phrasing means essentially, “Once the Sea of Faith was full, but now I hear only its withdrawal from the world, like the sea pulling away from the shore into the darkness.”  To state that Arnold means “I alone hear” would mean that he was the only one in the middle of the 19th century who perceived or felt that faith was beginning to disappear from the world, and historically we know that to be untrue; so I do not think that is a likely thing for Arnold to assert.  One should stick to the plain meaning of the language here, in my view, without needlessly confusing the matter.

As for the “ignorant armies” clashing by night, it is possible that Arnold borrowed this notion from an ancient historical account by Thucydides of the Battle of Epipolae, where Athenians and Syracusans fought one another in the confusing darkness.  Arnold, of course, applies it to human conflict and confusion in the darkness left by the retreat of the bright “Sea of Faith”– human dissension in general, in a world that seems to have lost its meaning.

I will not discuss the poetic techniques used by Arnold at present, because I offer his poem as a lead-in to a simpler work by Alfred Edward Housman for this Easter weekend.  That article will come soon.

David

POETRY, VERSE, PLASTIC FLOWERS AND INTELLECTUALISM

When it comes to the evaluation and criticism of poetry, all is opinion and personal taste.  Taste, it is true, can be developed, but who can say that a man’s liking for a painting of waterlilies by Monet is any more sincere than the liking of some people for plastic or silk flowers?  

I have always had a great deal of difficulty in trying to initiate people into the appreciation of the hokku as opposed to modern haiku, precisely because of that difference in taste.  To me the preference for modern haiku is akin to those who are still on the plastic flowers level, but in spite of that one must recognize that people will like what they will like, and even the old Latin saying tells us that there is no arguing about taste.

Nonetheless, people will argue.  And of course people will criticize, whether the work in dispute is a painting or a poem.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully and adequately defined poetry.  Alfred Edward Housman made a useful distinction between poetry and verse:  he said that the former is literature, the latter is not.  So William Blake may present us with poetry, while Hallmark is likely to give us only verse.

As for the nature of poetry, Housman fell back upon his version of the common saying of the uneducated buyer of antiques:  ”I don’t know anything about it, but I know what I like.”  Housman, however, put it this way when asked for a definition:

“I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.”

And that is indeed how most of us recognize what we call poetry — because of its effects on us.  Yet that leaves us back where we started:  individual ability to recognize poetry is a matter of education and taste.  Generations were moved by Trees, written by Joyce Kilmer, verse that to me is unquestionably on the “plastic flowers” level, and unbearable to read.

So there are differences in taste, and these differences are largely a matter of personal preference and education.  An unsophisticated taste in verse will leave one liking Trees.  An educated taste will find it appalling.  That is just one of the realities of life.  We may say that one who dislikes Trees has good taste while one who likes it has bad, yet that again is just a matter of personal taste and personal opinion.  It simply means that to us, “good” taste means educated and experienced taste, while “bad” taste means uneducated and inexperienced.

That is why I look on the bulk of modern haiku as simply bad taste.  I have had the benefit of knowing what hokku once was, and can recognize that modern haiku is just a mutated offshoot, the distorted creation, largely, of mid-20th century would-be poets who misperceived and misunderstood the nature of the hokku, and so created the “haiku” according to their own misconceptions.  If I had not had that education and experience, however, I might likely hold a different and less “advanced” view.

Housman tells us that poetry is not dependent upon meaning; that in fact there is much writing that is poetic yet devoid of real meaning.  And indeed, he tells us, some of the most poetic writers — among them William Blake — were actually mad to a greater or lesser degree.

I have to say that Housman is correct.  There are some works that have the logic of bedlam, yet are very poetic, such as the lines from Xanadu, 

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

We should not be surprised to learn that Xanadu is forever unfinished because Coleridge, while writing down the poem, which had come to him in an opium dream, was interrupted by the arrival of a visitor, and the remainder was forgotten.  It is mad poetry, but poetry nonetheless, and that is why it persists in finding a place in college anthologies.  

Not all that appears in such anthologies is poetry, however.  Some of it is merely prose disguised as poetry, and that can be said of a good part of what has been written in the 20th century.  There is, for example, a good deal of attention given to the “rediscovered” verses of Lynette Roberts, but quite honestly I can find hardly more poetry in some of her writing than in a waiter’s description of the lunch menu, for example the beginning of her Poem from Llanybri:

If you come my way that is … 
Between now and then, I will offer you 
A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank 
The valley tips of garlic red with dew 
Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank 
In the village when you come. At noon-day 
I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl 
Served with a ‘lover’s’ spoon and a chopped spray 
Of leeks or savori fach, not used now,
In the old way you’ll understand…

Yes, it has some Welsh terms like “cawl” (a kind of Welsh version of Irish stew) and “fach” (meaning small), and mention of the Welsh “lover’s spoon,” but in my view that hardly qualifies it for the acclaim it presently receives.  So even though I have a weakness for things Welsh, I cannot, using Housman’s criterion, recognize “Llanybri” as poetry because of the absence of symptoms evoked by it.  So for me, it is merely verse.

Much of what has been written as poetry in the 20th century onward remains for me merely verse.  It has become too intellectualized, too consciously clever, too conventionally “poetic” according to what fashion at present considers poetry to be.  And the real poetry has been lost in the process.

What passes for poetry these days is little advanced from what it was in Louis Macneice:  a kind of over-intellectualized verbal assembly that seems to come from too much association with other “poets,” who encourage each other unhealthily into more and more writing with less and less poetry in it, for example these lines from Snow by Macneice:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.  I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

All intellectualism, no poetry.  Macneice only talks about the “drunkenness of things,” but Coleridge, in Xanadu, gives it to us directly and unmediated.  

All too often, modern would-be poets think that merely dividing prose into the lineation of poetry makes poetry.  It does not.  Yet this kind of pseudo-poetry, found often in the writings of Gary Snyder and many others, in my view, has even made its way into present-day college anthologies.  One can only hope that young poets will remain uninfluenced by their example, but so far that does not seem to be the case.  More and more genuine poetry has given way in English-language writing to mere lineated prose or  surrealistic constructions of words used in odd ways.

One may bemoan what has become of poetry, but then poetry has a very limited space in modern life.  It has become largely the province of those who want to think of themselves as poets or as poetic, a very ingrown little society that appears to be securely walled off from the rest of the world.  Would-be poets seem to write for, and be read by, other would-be poets.  That means a particular negative trend, if found in poetry journals and anthologies, can grow and overwhelm a period of writing like a tsunami.  It seems we are at present the victims of such a flood of bad taste in the “world of poetry,” and we can only hope that a recovery and reconstruction will come soon.

That, however, requires education.  It requires experience.  It requires stepping out of the limited and limiting circle of present-day poetry, so that the individual may rediscover what Housman found to be true –that poetry is recognized by its effect on us.  But there are effects and effects, and all too many people seem to have lost or forgotten the symptoms created by genuine poetry, and are settling for mere intellectualism and peer approval.  Both are death to poetry.

But again, that is personal taste and opinion.  So I encourage readers not to think they must like a poem simply because it is printed in a college anthology, or dislike a poem because it finds no place in such a work.  Educate your taste.  Experience poetry from all periods and of all kinds.  Do not rely merely on the opinions of “authorities” for your taste in poetry.  Take them into account if you will, but do not accept them uncritically.  

David

TO SEE THE CHERRY HUNG WITH SNOW

I have always been very fond of the poetry of Alfred Edward Housman.  He is not a verbal fireworks poet like Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins.  He is more straightforward, with a sense of transience remarkably like that of the Japanese hokku writers.

Housman told the truth.  Unlike Mary Carolyn Davies, who tells us that “pain rusts to beauty,” Housman had a more realistic view of things.  He would not say that like iron, pain rusts to beauty.  He would say that as the blade of a knife is dulled by time and wear, so the sorrows of life may be dulled by the passage of  days and years.  In his poem The Rain it Streams on Stone and Hillock, he says to someone who has died,

Tomorrow I shall miss you less,
And ache of heart and heaviness
Are things that time should cure.

And he adds,
 
Oh soon enough will pine to nought
Remembrance and the faithful thought
That sits the grave beside.

But the dulling of sorrow by time does not lessen the pain of the human condition:
 
But oh, my man, the house is fallen
That none can build again;
My man, how full of joy and woe
Your mother bore you years ago
To-night to lie in the rain.

So Housman knows life; he knows the brevity of youth; he knows that what is will alter, whether it be joy or pain.  And that leads us to one of his best-known poems, Loveliest of Trees:
 
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

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

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

First, let’s go though the poem part by part, so that we may be certain we understand the poet’s phrasing and vocabulary:
 
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Housman tells us the cherry is the loveliest of trees; the cherry trees stand all along the woodland road, and they are covered in (“wearing”) white (white blossoms) for Eastertide.  White, for those who have lost touch with religious custom, was associated with Easter.  ”Eastertide” means here Easter time — the time of year when Easter happens. “Tide” is an old word meaning “time.”  

Many Americans misunderstand “woodland ride” as meaning that Housman must have been astride a horse or sitting in a carriage, but in British usage, a woodland ride was just a rural road, a reasonably wide and worn pathway through a wood.  It comes from the days before cars, when a path broad enough for horse riding was called a “ride.”  But riding is not actually intended by the term.  So we may assume that the poet is walking leisurely and thoughtfully along a woodland road where many lovely cherry trees are in bloom at Easter time.

Next, Housman does something surprising in poetry: he talks mathematics, and his mathematics are based on what to “church folk” in those days was common knowledge gleaned from the Bible, from Psalm 90:10:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

So Housman reckons,

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

Housman (or rather the young man speaking through Housman) tells us that out of his life, out of his threescore (a score is twenty, so threescore is sixty) years plus ten years, meaning out of the seventy years allotted to him for his lifespan, twenty will not come again.  So we know he is a young man in his twentieth year, a young man of twenty.  For him, those twenty years are “past” — at least almost — and will never come again.  Subtract those twenty (a score) years from the seventy years of a man’s lifespan, and that leaves our fresh young man only fifty years of life.  He tells, us, with bittersweet good humor,
 
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Realizing that he only has fifty more years in which to live, our young man, who obviously loves things of beauty, knows nonetheless that they are transient, impermanent, as he himself is.  So he tells us that the fifty springs he has ahead of him are little enough time (“little room”) in which to look at such lovely things as the blossoms of spring; therefore he is going to take the time to walk through the woodlands while the cherries are covered in white bloom, to “see the cherry hung with snow” (the “snow,” of course, is the white blossoms). 

There is a rather odd misunderstanding of the last line of the poem flitting about on the Internet, asserting that by “to see the cherry hung with snow,” Housman meant he would not only go in spring to see the blossoms, but also in winter to see snow on the cherry trees.  It should be obvious, however, that he was simply using a descriptive metaphor:  snow = white blossoms.  How do we know this?  First from the poem itself:

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

The first line tells us: “And since to look at things in bloom….”  Winter snow is not “things in bloom,” and that is obviously the subject.  We may add that a cherry tree in winter does not hold snow on its bare limbs luxuriantly, as an evergreen tree does.  So a cherry in winter is not a stunning sight like a cherry covered with spring bloom.

This kind of mistaken literalism reminds me of a rather ill-prepared teacher I once knew, who thought that the lines from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus referring to Helen of Troy  – “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” — meant that Helen’s face was as ugly as though it had been used to launch a thousand ships.  Yes, there are such teachers, who probably should never have become such.

We may also turn to lesser poems for similar usage — first to  Robert Bridges for the blossoms = snow equation, in his poem Spring Goeth All in White:

Spring goeth all in white,
   Crowned with milk-white may:
In fleecy flocks of light
   O’er heaven the white clouds stray:

White butterflies in the air:
   White daisies prank the ground:
The cherry and hoary pear
   Scatter their snow around.

“Milk-white may” in the first line means white hawthorn blossoms.  ”Prank” in the sixth line means “adorn,” “decorate,” “ornament.”

We may also take a quick look at the first lines of Springtime in Cookham Dean, by Cecil Roberts:

How marvellous and fair a thing
It is to see an English Spring,
He cannot know who has not seen
The cherry trees at Cookham Dean,
who has not seen the blossom lie
Like snowdrifts ‘gainst a cloudless sky
And found the beauty of the way
Through woodlands odorous with may…. 

But back to Housman.  There is, as I said, a kind of bittersweet humor in this verse.  One might call the poem a young man’s “apology for his use of time,” his response to someone accusing him of “slacking.”  But Housman knew that what would really be wasted was the all-too-brief beauty of the cherry trees in blossom along the woodland road (the woodland ride), and so knowing that life is brief, he gives us this little argument for appreciating things of beauty, for seizing the day, complete with the mathematics to back it up.  

Housman was a classicist, a scholar of Greek and particularly a professor of Latin.  One might therefore think him dry as dust, all endless conjugations and grammar and “Mr. Arbuthnot, please translate line three on page 37,” but obviously he had poetry in his soul and he understood the brevity of life and the sweetness of spring.

There is an odd kinship between this poem and Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  But we have the feeling that the latter is a mature man’s poem, while Loveliest of Trees is a young man’s poem.

David

RUST, PAIN, BEAUTY AND TIME

I like to respond, when it is practical and possible, to what I notice people are coming here to find.  Some of them, no doubt, are literature students in high school or college; others are perhaps just curious.  So when my “statistics” page shows me that several people have come looking, for example, for the meaning of the words “pain rusts into beauty,” from a poem by Mary Carolyn Davies, I like to provide what they want.  

I mentioned the poem in an earlier posting.  But here it is on its own:

Iron, left in the rain
And fog and dew,
With rust is covered. — Pain
Rusts into beauty too.
I know full well that this is so:
I had a heartbreak long ago.

It is not a perfect poem.  It has its “loopholes,” and we can see that the writer is generalizing and not really telling us the whole truth of the matter, but nonetheless she has her point.

What I mean is this:  she tells us that iron when exposed to water, whether as rain, fog, or dew, will oxidize.  The surface will chemically alter to iron oxide, which is rust.  That is the foundation of the poem.  The flaw in the foundation is that she is looking at the process from only one point of view, that of the aesthete — the person looking for beauty.  Rust is beautiful to some people, those who overlook that it is also often harmful.  Any farmer knows that rusting machinery is slowly being destroyed from without.  Iron that rusts is iron changing, decaying.

It is upon this process of change and decay that the poet builds her conclusion, which comes in the the lines that follow:

Pain
Rusts into beauty too.
I know full well that this is so:
I had a heartbreak long ago. 

Davies tells us that just as iron (which seems hard and permanent and unyielding) rusts, similarly pain rusts into beauty.  Notice, however, that she did not actually tell us in the first part of the poem that iron rusts into beauty; she just assumes that everyone will hold that view, which is the aesthetic point of view but certainly not the universal view.  So we may say that her premise is flawed, and upon this premise she bases what is also the implied flawed conclusion:  that all pain rusts to beauty, and that is simply not true.

But how does she know that pain rusts to beauty?  She tells us it is because she had a heartbreak long ago.  What that heartbreak was she does not reveal, but we may assume (correctly or not) that it was unrequited love for a young man.  Over time she just remembers the beauty of her love and not the hours and days and weeks of tears and misery — the way an old woman looks back on the crushes of her schoolgirl days.

But there are many kinds of heartbreak, and time does not turn all of them to beauty; it merely dulls the memory, if one is fortunate.  There are some cases of heartbreak that never rust to beauty.  That is the fundamental flaw in this poem, a failing which makes us feel that the poet is using hyperbole — exaggeration — to make her case.  She is being “poetically selective.”

The poem is essentially a re-stating of the old saying, “Time heals all wounds.”  But there are some wounds that time never heals in this lifetime.  That is the whole truth that the partial truth of this poet is not revealing.  Because of that, we sense that she is not being entirely honest with us.  She does not tell us the whole truth in either her premise or in her conclusion.  Beauty is is in the eye of the beholder, and by no means all people see rust on iron as beautiful, nor does everyone’s pain transform into beauty.  

The poem leaves one feeling that the poet would have made a better case had she said it all differently — if she had noticed a particular instance of iron becoming beautiful through rusting — and that in a particular case of heartbreak, the pain corroded into beauty.  Instead, she has falsely generalized and has told us an untruth in the process.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

I have written earlier about how poetry and music were often historically connected.  Today we think of poetry as apart from music, but in earlier times poetry was often sung or chanted to musical accompaniment.

Music, in relation to poetry, is very interesting.  Music is, in a way like the sense of touch.  one may feel that something is cold or hot or neutral, but one does not know what, precisely, is causing the sensation, unless and until one looks.

Similarly, there are many works of music written about things or on specific themes, but without an added title we would really have no idea what a given work was about.  From the sound of the music we would feel it to be sad or peaceful or happy or forceful, But beyond that we would be lost.

Take for example the lovely work “The Swan,” from Carnival of the Animals, by Saint-Saens.  Knowing it is about a swan, as we listen to it we may see in the mind a swan gliding peacefully across smooth water.  But if it were called something else — something that also fit the peaceful softness of the music — we would likely see that “something else” instead.

A written title, then, adds “eyes” to the sensory-emotional impact of the music — it adds a visual impression.  And if we set words to the music, describing a swan as it glides smoothly along, we make the picture even more definite.

Now let’s reverse the process:  Imagine that we have a poem about a swan.  We can see what is depicted in the poem, but that seeing is somewhat deficient in feeling.  Feeling may not be absent, but we will not realize how deficient it may be until something is added.  Add the music to the words, however, and their effect is magnified many times over — suddenly there is a strongly felt “emotional” aspect to the words that is provided by the musical background.

That, of course, is precisely the reason for a musical score in a movie.  It adds a sensory-emotional context to what is seen on the screen.  Think of some of the most effective scenes from great movies, and you will simultaneously hear in your head the bit of musical soundtrack that went with that scene, whether it is Luke Skywalker standing against the twilight sky near his desert home, thinking of his future, or Scarlett O’Hara vowing she will never be hungry again.  Who, in fact, can even think of Gone With the Wind without hearing that sweeping musical background?

That is the way it is with poetry.  Think of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem:

And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

It is an interesting and effective poem.  It does what Blake intended it to do.  But if you have ever heard it sung by an English choir with the full backing of a thundering pipe organ, you will feel reverberating through all your being that when Blake says,

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

he means business!  And it is no wonder that it was sung by others who similarly meant business, such as the National Union of Womens’ Suffrage societies, who used it as a kind of anthem at certain of their meetings.  And even today it is a kind of unofficial national anthem of England, so effective did it become when set to the stirring music of Hubert Parry.

To say that the effect of Blake’s words becomes enhanced when set to Parry’s music is in no way to belittle Blake.  He was a remarkable poet.  But music adds a depth that is not felt to be missing until one hears a poem set to just the right music.

Think of the lines,

Uncounted diamonds lie in stony caverns,
Unnumbered pearls within the sunlit sea…

They are pleasant enough, but when set by Rimsky-Korsakoff to the tune popularly known as “Song of India,” they become more than they are in themselves, they become absolutely enchanting.  That is the effect good music can have on words.

We must keep in mind, however, that just as good music may enhance a poem, bad music will ruin it.  It is surprising, however, that even mediocre poetry may be elevated by the addition of good music.

 

David

A CAMELLIA FLOWER

A spring hokku by Bashō:

In falling,
It spilled its water –
The camellia flower.

Camellias are flowers of the cold and wet beginning of spring.  As they age, they fall with a “plop.”  This one, in falling, has spilled the rain water that has collected in it when it was still on the bough.

Bashō gives us a simple image of transience, showing us that even in Spring — the time of youth and beginnings — time and aging are already at work.  A sense of transience is always an important element of hokku, which never allow us to forget that all things are changing and impermanent.

This hokku, like all the rest written over the centuries, is not “great poetry.”  Hokku do not try to be either “poetry” (in the conventional understanding) or “great.”  They simply present us with a sensory experience of Nature, set in the context of the seasons, showing us how the season manifests its character in what happens within it.  This camellia flower dropping its water is Spring.

It is when we try to make “poetry” of hokku that we run into trouble.  That has been the unfortunate fate of the 20th century offshoot of hokku, the haiku.  In the West the hokku came to the attention of people brought up on western notions of poetry, people who unconsciously read those Western notions into their experience of hokku, and then re-made it as the haiku, which is a kind of peculiar hybrid of the brevity of the hokku with a substance composed of what people in the West were accustomed to think of as “poetry.”

When that happened, of course, the whole point of the hokku was lost.

David

DECIPHERING HOPKINS: THE WINDHOVER

A friend recently remarked, “I don’t like poems that you have to figure out.”  That friend is not alone.  Most people do not like puzzle-poems that are difficult to understand, that must be deciphered or interpreted, and such poems are a great frustration to many students of English literature.

I recently mentioned two such “difficult” poets:  Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins — the first Welsh, but writing in English, the second having spent some time in Wales and in learning Welsh, but also writing in English.  Both teeter on the edge of indecipherability, but unlike many “noted” poets of the latter half of the 20th century, neither topples over.  It was these later poets — after Thomas and Hopkins — with their seemingly meaningless strings of verbiage that put the public off poetry, so that today poetry — Aside from the works of more straightforward writers like Billy Collins — still is really alive for the general public only in the lyrics of songs for the most part, and few enough of those are worthwhile.

Today I want to talk about Gerard Manley Hopkins, that sad figure with his hidden glories, a man who, I think, lost himself in converting to Roman Catholicism and becoming a Jesuit; it seems to have made his life ever more miserable.  He was one of those remarkably sensitive souls who fall into astounding depths of depression, and his dull, uncreative life as a Jesuit did not help matters.

It is Hopkins who gives us one of the most affecting statements on the abyssal depths of depression and the feeling of hopelessness:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.  Hold them cheap
May who never hung there.  Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep.  Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

He is telling us that the mind has dark abysses that terrify the sensitive soul, that those who have not experienced these depths of depression really have no idea what it is like.  He tells us our small “durance,” the small period in which we last and live, or we can say our “endurance,” cannot cope with such depths of dismalness.  A wretched being so afflicted is served only by a kind of cold comfort amid a whirlwind of negativity, and that poor comfort is that life ends in death, and each day ends in sleep.  Not a great encouragement, and Hopkins, who suffered from terrible depression, obviously found little cheer in it.

When is the last time you heard someone use the word “durance”?  Perhaps never, and Hopkins has a predilection for such out-of-fashion and archaic words, which add to the difficulties of much of his poetry.  We find such obscure terms in one of his most famous poems, one which he thought perhaps his best.  It involves the poet at morning, watching a falcon hovering and swooping high in the sky.  The falcon hovers against a headwind while searching for prey, and when it finds a victim, it may plummet with incredible speed.  Because of its hovering against the wind, it is called a “windhover.”  Here is the poem:

THE WINDHOVER  (To Christ our Lord):

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

“Good grief!” you may be saying.  How is one supposed to understand a poem featuring terms like “minion,” “dauphin,” and “chevalier,” and all of these assembled in odd grammatical phrasing?  Well, perhaps it is not quite so hopeless as it seems at first glance, but one must admit that Hopkins did not write for the masses.  He seems to have been very inward-turned in his notion of an audience for his verse, very ingrown.  But let’s see what we can make of it:

The Windhover

We know what that is now:  a kind of falcon that hovers against the wind, that swings in circles, swoops and dives through the air.

To Christ our Lord

Why the dedication?  Well, obviously Hopkins had become a Jesuit — a “religious” — but there is perhaps more to his dedication than appears at first glance.  We shall examine that possibility later in the poem.  Let’s look at it now, part by part:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a
bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Hopkins is telling us that he saw (“caught”) a windhover in the dappled light of dawn.  He calls him “kingdom of daylight’s dauphin.”  Dauphin is a French term that meant the eldest son of the King of France; here we need regard it only as a title of nobility — like the lord of a domain.  So the windhover, we may say, is “lord of the morning”

He saw the falcon “in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding high there.”  The falcon was riding the gusts of steady air, high in the sky.

Hopkins remarks, “how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy!”   His use of the term “rung” is one with which most people are not familiar, because it is not “rung” as in a bell, but rather “rung” as a term used in falconry, which refers to the bird rising through the air in spirals — circling upward.

Hopkins says the bird “rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing,”  meaning that in his upward circling, he was held in the gyre by the folding — the bending — of his wing, but “wimple” also has the meaning of “meander, turn” — so we can add this layer of meaning to it as well if we wish — that the bird was held in the spiral by turning with his wings.  We often find such uncertainty of interpretation and multiple possibilities of meaning in the rather archaic language Hopkins employs — but we see the overall significance, and that is enough, because Hopkins is not clearly defining what he means, not presenting his images sharply outlined, but rather is using some of the impressionism we found in Dylan Thomas.  That is one reason why his use of grammar is often rather odd, though rhythm also plays a part in that.  He is more concerned about the sound of words and the images they create than in telling us plainly and clearly what he means.  That is the key to understanding Hopkins.

Hopkins tells us that the bird did this upward spiralling “in its ecstasy,” but it is obvious that it is Hopkins, not the falcon, who feels this ecstasy.  He is projecting his admiration, his emotion, onto the windhover.

Then, he says, the bird was “off forth on swing, as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind.”  The bird leaves the upward spiral and hurls himself off in another direction and makes yet another sharp swing in the air, as though the strength of the wind meant nothing at all to him.

The bird throws itself forward into a swing, like the “heel” of a skate sweeps smoothly in a turn — a “bow-bend” on the ice.  Hopkins tells us that the “hurl” — the forward impetus — and the gliding of the bird “rebuffed the big wind,” meaning the falcon showed by skill that it was master, not the wind.

Hopkins is lost in admiration as he secretly watches: “My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”  He is overwhelmed — his heart is stirred — by witnessing the achievement of the falcon, its mastery of the air and wind.

Hopkins sees so many elements impressively combining in the flying falcon: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here buckle!“

In “buckle,” Hopkins uses a term so various in its meanings that he makes the sentence difficult, but he wants another “b” word to go with “brute” and “beauty,” so “buckle” it is.  Different interpreters have different opinions, but I like to think that he is using it in a manner derived from the French boucler, which means “to bulge” “to curl,” “to loop.”  Seen thus, the sentence means  that “brute beauty and valour and  the act of swift turning, the air /wind, the “pride,” of the bird (his natural great ability) and “plume” (his feathers) here buckle!” — meaning that the physical characteristics, strength and skill of the bird combine with the air and wind in his impressive curving turn. We can add to this a secondary level of meaning from the old use of the term “buckle” to indicate things that come together and join, as two groups of men who “buckle” in battle.  So all of these characteristics of bird and air join in the marvelous sweep and turn of the windhover.  We should not be surprised that Hopkins makes us excavate meanings out of his archaic terms — it is one of his peculiarities, and inward-turning people do have their peculiarities.

Now we come to the most difficult part of the poem:

AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Did you notice that Hopkins has been talking of the windhover throughout the poem in the third person, like an “it” or a “he”?  Why, then, does he suddenly shift to speaking of a “thee?”  This is where the odd dedication “To Christ our Lord” comes in.  It seems that in this shift to “thee,” Hopkins shifts his attention from the bird to Christ, whom he addresses directly, calling him “my chevalier.”  That is another term borrowed from French; a chevalier is a knight, one who rides on a cheval — a horse.  We have seen that the windhover rides on the wind.  Now our attention is turned to Christ, who is the “knight” to Hopkins — or better, the “noble rider.”  But whereas the skill — the “glory” of the windhover lies in mastering wing and wind, the skill, the glory of Christ lies revealed in his mastery of Nature (in Hopkins’ religious view) and its acts and changes.  Hopkins has seen it in the remarkable spiralling and turning and swooping of the windhover, and having seen it, he tells Christ,

AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

By “fire” he means “glory,” an old term which means not only fame and laud but also great light, like the “glory hole” of a glass blower’s furnace, through which the intense blazing fire is seen.  He sees the glory of Christ in the glory of Nature and its creatures — specifically here in the windhover.  He sees the fire, the “glory” of Christ in the windhover, and he is more than impressed, knowing that the totality of the glory of Christ is astoundingly more multiplied and impressive, “a billion times told lovelier,” and he feels it so overwhelming as to be dangerous.  There is often a sense of danger associated with something felt to be incredibly holy and powerful.

Hopkins goes on to say that nonetheless, there is nothing remarkable in that — in seeing “glory”  – Christ’s glory — or to put it in wider terms, the glory of God — in the natural world — in the flight of the windhover.  It is not to be wondered at, because something as ordinary as a farmer plodding behind his hand-held, horse-pulled plough down a furrow in the field (a “sillion”) makes the dull metal of the plough shine with light (“fire,” “glory”) as the turning soil polishes it.  And Hopkins adds that even the dark-appearing, blue-bleak coals of a fire in the hearth, when they fall and swell (gall) and break open (gash themselves), reveal an intense gold-vermilion light inside, their “glory”: just as there is a glory hidden in such ordinary things as a plough in the furrow and in apparently dark coals in a fireplace, so the glory of Christ hidden in such a thing as the windhover may reveal itself if one pays attention.

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

What are we to do with a poet who sprinkles his verse with archaic words and odd terms like “sillion,” leaving us to divine and dig for his meaning?  ”Sillion” seems to be a word Hopkins created himself, probably inspired by the French word sillon, which means simply “furrow.”  And actually Hopkins is using it to mean precisely that — a furrow in a field.  For some reason, a few writers after him seem to have misinterpreted it to mean the soil turned by the plow, but when Hopkins says “plow down sillion,” he is simply talking of the passage of the plow down the furrow; and it is clearly the plow that shines in the poem, according to Hopkins, not the turned soil, as some would incorrectly have it.

So Hopkins is deliberately archaic and oddly vague.  He could have just written “plow down furrow,” but obviously that would not have rhymed with “vermilion,” so he employs his peculiar yet somehow effective (if one ignores its obscurity) construction “sillion” instead.  

Surprisingly, even if one does not take the time necessary to decipher Hopkins, one may still derive a great deal of pleasure from his use of repetition of sounds, and from such vivid images as dark coals that “gash gold-vermilion.”  But I hope what I have said here will be of some use to those readers who want to go a bit deeper.

Hopkins’ use of “gall” also has some ambiguity when he speaks of  ”blue-bleak embers” that “fall, gall, and gash themselves gold-vermilion.”  ”Gall” means to swell, but it also can mean “to damage or break the surface,” and in fact Hopkins uses it in this latter sense in his poem St. Alphonsus Rodriguez:

And those strokes that once gashed flesh or galled shield…

Obviously it is this latter meaning that Hopkins intends in St. Alphonsus, and he may well intend it in The Windhover as well, meaning that the falling coals “gall themselves and gash gold-vermilion,” with those terms indicating the abrading and gashing open of the coals, revealing the “gold-vermilion” heat inside as they do so.

It is this ambiguous use of often archaic terms that makes Hopkins somewhat bothersome in interpretation, if not in overall effect.  In fact some interpreters take “buckle” in the poem to indicate the passion of Jesus, “in the V-shaped collapse of his out-pinned arms, when his body buckled under its own weight” (Paul L. Mariani, A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins).  To me such an interpretation is a bit excessive and goes beyond what we actually find in the poem (and it also makes a very strained analogy with the swooping bird), but who is to say that Hopkins might not have had such a thing in mind, with the coals that “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion” indicating the bleeding wounds of Jesus?  Well, it still seems excessive to me, and not indicated in the poem, but we cannot deny that Hopkins adds obscurity rather than clarity to his writing by his use of archaic and imprecise terminology.

We may speculate on what Hopkins might have produced had he not become a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit, if he had not burned his poems when he changed his life, if he had not been subjected to years of depressing, unchallenging work that no doubt added to the weight and physical effects of his depression, but that is pointless.  He has left us a number of poems of varying effectiveness and varying opacity, and we can take pleasure in turning them over in our mind like stones from a quarry, seeing here and there in them the sudden, strange, opalescent shine of gemstone in the matrix, the glory of his mind and creativity.

Hopkins died in 1889, saying on his deathbed that he was happy. His poems were not published until 1918, so Hopkins, like the artist Vincent Van Gogh, died without ever knowing of his fame.  The late date of publication, combined with the remarkably experimental and original nature of his poems, makes people think of Hopkins not as a poet of the 19th century, but rather as one of the “moderns” of the 20th — a century he did not live to see.

David

DYLAN THOMAS: FERN HILL (part II)

In my last posting, I discussed the overall meaning of the Dylan Thomas poem Fern Hill, and I hope readers now find it no longer mystifying.  It is, as I said, about childhood’s end, and how youth passes never to return.  Unfortunately the poem proved rather prophetic for Thomas, who lost himself in alcoholism and died of pneumonia, aged 39.

Today, having already discussed the basic meaning, I would like to take a look at the methods by which Thomas made Fern Hill so effective and memorable in spite of — or rather because of — its impressionistic style.

First, let’s take a look at how important repetition is to it.  Certain words (and forms of a word) are found again and again in the poem, the most common being “green,” which is repeated seven times, and “time” also seven times. Also frequent are “golden,” found four times, and “sun,” four times, and “house” four times.  Then come three repetitions each of “young” and “happy.”  we find “easy” twice; “lovely” twice; “honoured” twice; “light” twice, “moon” twice, and “white” twice.

We also see repetition through use of similar words: “happy”; “gay”;  ”carefree” — and different forms of the same word: “play/playing”; “rode/riding” “sang/singing.”

If we widen our focus, we see families of words related in meaning:  ”light,” “sun,” “shining,” “golden,” and “morning.”  We take our focus even wider, seeing the  repetitive harmony of words indicating beginnings: “morning,” “birth/born,” “Adam and maid,” (first man and woman in Christian myth), “young.”  And we find groups such as “honoured,” “lordly,” “prince,” “famous,” and “praise.”

All such repetitions contribute greatly to the overall effect and to the chief contrast in the poem between “green” — the word of youth and freshness — and “time,” the word and name of youth’s undoing.

Other elements we should notice are the pleasant repetitions in phrasing, for example:

Now as I was young and easy…
And as I was green and carefree…
Oh as I was young and easy…

and

Golden in the mercy of his means…
Golden in the heydays of his eyes…
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means…

and

All the moon long…
All the sun long…
And happy as the heart was long…

and

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days…
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades…

and

In the sun that is young once only…
And the sun grew round that very day…
In the sun born over and over…
In the moon that is always rising…

Added to these is the effect of other internal rhythms, which I pair here by the same enclosing marks:

{Sang} to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sa+bb+ath {rang} /slowly/
In the pe+bb+les of the /holy/streams.

Sang/rang
Sabbath/pebbles
Slowly/holy

One could carry our examination on to the frequent alliteration (repetition of beginning consonant sounds) and consonance (repetition of the same consonant sounds, whether at the beginning or elsewhere in a word) in such lines as;

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman….

and

I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

All of these usages combine to make a remarkable poem that relies for its impressionistic effect on the mixture of repeated sounds, repeated rhythms,  and related images repeated in variations.

We may sum up the poem by saying that it represents the inherent conflict between youth and time represented in the frequency of the words we discover, through it, to be opposite: “green” and “time.”

The poem shows the heedless joy of the boy Thomas, thinking the happy, golden days are eternal, not realizing that Time — personified in the poem — gives the joys of youth only “in the mercy of his means.”

Now what does this key phrase “mercy of his means” signify?  One’s means are the instruments or methods used to achieve one’s ends — the means to an end.  And the end brought about by Time is aging and death and loss of youth and innocence.  The mercy of his (Time’s) means lies in allowing Thomas the boy to spend his happy, youthful days heedless and unaware — for a brief, golden while — of this bitter reality.  In that at least, Time is merciful to him.

That is why Thomas finishes the poem with the painful, overwhelming revelation:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

There it is, the great paradox:  ”Time held me green and dying.”  No matter to Time that Thomas “sang in his chains like the sea.”

So, dear reader, if you grasp the meaning of “Time held me green and dying,” you grasp the poem.  ”Green” is youth and freshness, The childhood of Thomas; but even while he is young and fresh and youthful, Thomas later sees, looking back, that he was already dying — simultaneously green and dying.  It is like the old saying, “Birth is a disease whose prognosis is always fatal.”  It is a theme Thomas repeats in another poem, The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

You should now easily understand those lines, having experienced what Thomas meant through Fern Hill. The same force that drives the sap through the stalk to make the blossom is the force that ages and kills us.  Time holds us green and dying.  It is no accident that we find the word “green” significant in both poems.

“I sang in my chains like the sea.”  What does that mean?  Here we must not be too literal, but must rather get the overall sense of what Thomas wants to convey.  This singing is an expression of the overflowing joy of his youth; his childhood was a song of happiness and rejoicing.  Yet even though his “singing” is as filled with happiness and vitality as the sea is filled with waves and vigor and motion, even though he expresses only great happiness through his being, Time is already killing him — “Killing me softly.”  His “chains” are visible to him only in retrospect, when looking back on his childhood he realizes that he was already chained by the human condition, by inevitable aging and ultimate death.  Earlier he thought he was free; now he realizes he was chained.  He had the illusion of freedom without the reality.  Though young — “green” — he was already dying — “green and dying,” in spite of his happiness in those lost days.

One could spend much more time in analysis and discussion of this poem, but now that you have the key to unlock it, better just to read it, to hear Thomas singing in his chains like the sea.

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

David

CHILDHOOD’S END: DYLAN THOMAS AND FERN HILL

In English there are poets of the intellect, poets who use words and grammar with the precision and coldness of mathematics.  In contrast to these are the impressionists of poetry who use words as an artist uses broad dabs of color, a smear of scarlet for a stalk of flowers.

Among the most impressionistic poets in English are two associated with Wales — first Gerard Manley Hopkins, who studied Welsh at one time, and second Dylan Thomas, who was Welsh though he wrote in English.

Today I want to talk about Thomas.  His verbal impressionism was at its height in the poem Fern Hill. It is one of those works often initially mystifying to the high school or college level reader, a poem that seems to create an atmosphere rather than to convey information.  Many find it difficult to understand.

It is really quite simple, however, once one realizes that Thomas has taken a simple yet profound theme — childhood’s end — and has depicted it impressionistically, using words instead of pigments, repeating them and repeating phrasing and consonantal sounds to build up the overall image.  Thomas once wrote how as a child he fell in love with the sounds of words quite apart from their meaning.  In Fern Hill he combines sound and meaning and melody, not to make a clearly-defined statement, but rather to make his point through the overall impression given by his combination and use of words — his verbal impressionism:

In the following I have emphasized certain words and letters to draw your attention to their repetition, though I have not marked all that might be noted:

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

Thomas is showing us his childhood, when everything was fresh and new, everything green (the color of youth and growth) and golden (the color of light and preciousness) and bright.  He gives it to us in a Welsh rural setting of green and wagons and apples and daisies and barley and light, a time and place in which he felt princely and lordly — as though things were there to serve and please him.  Time was like a kind and doting grandfather, letting Thomas climb “golden in the heydays of his eyes” — in the golden days of youth.  ”Heydays” means here the height of Thomas’ youthful vigor, his youthful “prime.”  He tells us this happened “once below a time” — a play upon “once upon a time,” used by Thomas to indicate his childhood was felt to be in a place “below” time — outside of  it — timeless.  We shall watch this interplay between his illusions and the realities of time.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

In the second stanza, Thomas emphasizes by repetition:  In stanza one he said he was “young and easy.”  In stanza two it becomes “green and carefree.”  Now he repeats Time as a benevolent male figure who let Thomas “play and be golden.”  And he was, he says, “green and golden,” young and fresh and bright and precious.  As he was princeley and lordly in the first stanza, in the second he is “famous” and singing — he is happy in this youthful paradise, in which time seems a kind and merciful figure.  The bawling of calves, the barking of foxes, the ringing of the church bells combine to make a music expressing a world that is peaceful,  joyous and holy — “the sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy streams.”  Keep in mind that the sabbath is a day of rest from labor, and Thomas uses it to indicate a seemingly everlasting tranquility.  We feel the slow passage of green and golden days that seem a part of eternity.  The streams are “holy” because everything in that childhood world is mysteriously “holy.”

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Thomas uses words in unexpected ways, but we understand very clearly what he means when he says “all the sun long” — all the day long — only here the sun becomes a manifestation of time that seems ever-fresh and unending and un-aging.  Of his life at that time, he says, “It was running, it was lovely…it was air and playing,” evoking the great energy and joy of childhood.  Even fire was “green as grass.”

Then came the transition to the peace and forgetfulness of night, a passage like riding into sleep and dreams when, “under the simple stars,” waking consciousness would fade as though “owls were bearing the farm away.”  And again there is the sense of holiness, when “blessed among stables” Thomas would hear, dream-like, the nightjars “all the moon long” (for “all the night long”).

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

Thomas tells us that each morning was like the first morning of Creation.  He would return to waking consciousness and  find the farm, gone during the night, come back “like a wanderer white with dew,” the cock that cries the morning on his shoulder.  Not at all a prosaic statement like, “I woke on the farm and heard the rooster on the fence crowing.”

Again Thomas presents us with images of light and freshness: “It was all shining, /It was Adam and maiden.” That repeats his previous notion that each day was like the first day of Edenic creation.  The sun never aged, but was continually born afresh: “The sun grew round that very day.”

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Hopkins speaks here of “the sun born over and over,” which seems in direct contradiction to his earlier mention of “the sun that is young once only.”  The solution is that by “born over and over” he is referring to the actual individual days of his childhood, while by “the sun that is young once only” he is referring to his childhood as an entire period.  The sun of childhood is “young once only,” and then childhood with its bright, golden light is gone forever.

And notably, in this stanza Thomas introduces the first hint that all is not well.  He repeats his feeling of high status, that he was “honoured among foxes.”  He tells us he was “happy as the heart was long” under the “sun born over and over,” — as the seemingly endless days passed, each one fresh and new — but he tells us, abruptly, that he ran “heedless” — unaware of something of great significance behind it all.  And then he presents us, clearly and simply, with the serpent in the garden, with the discovery that death is, even in Arcadia:

“…nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace…”

“Nothing I cared at my sky-blue trades.”  By those words, Thomas indicates he was occupied with his childish activities and play beneath the blue sky — “at my sky-blue trades.” And so did not heed what was gradually happening.  Like all children, he thought youth and its freshness was eternal, but he has a stunning realization here.  He is to fall out of the apparent grace that was given him, he is to lose Eden.   That is to be repeated with bitter painfulness in the following stanza:

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

By “lamb-white days” he again paints with a broad, impressionistic brush as he did with “sky-blue trades”  Here he indicates the youthfulness, innocence, and purity (“lamb-white” of the days of his childhood.  Thomas realizes that while he ran and played beneath the sun that always seemed reborn, or slept beneath the moon that seemed always rising, it happened eventually that he realized Time was leading him by the hand to the loft and sleep, and that when he woke childhood would have ended, that he would wake not to another day fresh and new and white with dew, but instead would wake to “the farm fled forever from the childless land” — his childhood’s end, the loss of innocence and the knowledge of the real state of things in this transitory world — “Nevermore.”

And Thomas finishes with the lines that almost bring tears to one’s eyes, the realization that he had been foolish and naive, that even while he was young and happy and seemed to be the favored child of Time, it was not so.  I shall not add any emphatic marks to these last lines, because in them you will see the key points of the poem all brought together in the final truth:  that even while he was young and fresh and happy and heedless and rejoicing, Time held him captive and dying, in spite of his freshness, joy and innocence that seemed as free and flowing as the sounding sea:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Those last three lines are engraved on a stone in Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, Wales, near Thomas’ childhood home.

“Dylan,” by the way, is a Welsh name correctly pronounced “Dullan,” but Thomas preferred the English pronunciation of his first name, with the “y” like the “i” in “still.”

As for the title and setting of the poem, it is interesting (but not essential) to know that though Thomas lived as a child in the city of Swansea, Wales, he spent considerable time in his youth with relatives who lived in a farmhouse near the village of Llangain, in Carmarthenshire, Wales.  The name of that farm was “Fernhill.”

David

RICHARD WRIGHT: THE WRONG PATH TAKEN

In my previous posting I skimmed over the topic of Richard Wright and his attempts at writing what he called “haiku.”  Here I shall add just a bit to what was already said.

In my view Wright’s “haiku” are useful in demonstrating clearly how Western writers misperceived and misunderstood the hokku from their very first exposure, seeing it through the distorting lens of their Western preconceptions about poetry and poets. Consequently his “haiku,” represented by the volume Haiku: This Other World (Arcade Publishing, 1998) demonstrate how the Japanese hokku, written for centuries, became the “haiku” through its rather confused introduction to the West.

First of all, what is a hokku?  It is a short verse — in three lines in English, though generally one line in Japanese — expressing Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, in the context of the seasons.  It consists of two parts — a longer and a shorter — separated in English by appropriate punctuation.

Richard Wright was exposed to the hokku through the writings of Reginald Horace Blyth, who presented numerous translations of old hokku in his Haiku series, though he obviously and unfortunately used the anachronistic terminology of Shiki common in the Japan of his day.  Nonetheless, the larger part of what Blyth translated and commented upon was hokku, not the revisionistic and conservative “haiku” of Shiki, though Shiki was included in Blyth’s work.

It is important to repeat that when Richard Wright was exposed to the hokku (and conservative haiku) translations of Blyth, he unconsciously mixed what he was seeing with what he already knew of Western poetry, assuming parallels that existed only in his mind.  Consequently when Wright began to compose his own “haiku,” they were heavily influenced by what he was conditioned to think poetry should be, and so he did not see the hokku or the conservative haiku for what it really was.

The result, in the work of Wright and many other self-taught novice writers of the “new” haiku in the mid-20th century, was a hybrid verse that mixed the brief form of the hokku with what was often largely traditional “Western” poetic content.  That is the very simple means by which haiku got off on the wrong foot in the West and continues to misstep awkwardly to this day.

Wright’s “haiku” fall along a graduated scale ranging from verses that — by accident more than anything — may qualify as actual hokku, to verses that hybridize the two (hokku and Western poetry) in varying degrees, to verses that are entirely brief Western poems in substance, with only the brevity of the hokku remaining.

Here, for example, is a Wright “haiku” that has become entirely a Western poem in content, retaining only the shortness of the hokku and nothing of its substance:

Each ebbing sea wave
Makes pebbles glare at the moon,
Then fall back to sleep.

What Wright is really saying is that the successive waves of the withdrawing tide wet pebbles that first reflect back the bright moonlight (glare), then cease to reflect (sleep) as they again lose their watery shine.  But it is the way he says it that is the problem.  As a verse, it does exactly what hokku should not do, which is to mix the fantasy of the writer with reality.  In reality pebbles do not “glare,” nor do they sleep.  Such heavy use of what Wordsworth called the “coloring of the imagination” is, however, very characteristic of Western poetry, which is often heavily fantasy-imagination-based.

Another example of Western fantasy in Wright’s “haiku” is this:

Clutching from the trees,
Thick creepers are strangling clouds
In the lake’s bosom.

No Japanese writer of hokku would have written such a thing.  Again it is just Wright, representative of countless writers of Western “haiku,” smearing his imagination over reality, creating a brief Western poem, but not really a haiku as Shiki knew it, and certainly not a hokku.  Wright seems to have found it very difficult to just let things be as they are:

Every sandgrain
Of the vast sunlit desert
Hears the snake crawling.

Well, no it does not.  Sand grains do not hear.  But Wright must add what he thinks is his poetic imagination to the real poetry of Nature, and in doing so he repeatedly spoils a great many of his “haiku.”

A final example, and an extreme one, of Wright’s failure to understand that in hokku (and in “Shiki” haiku), reality should not be obscured by the writer’s fantasy:

What giant spider spun
That gleaming web of fire-escapes
On wet tenements?

Sadly, one repeatedly encounters such “fantasy” verses in the Wright anthology.  They are the result of an inherent preconception that reality in itself is not “poetic” enough, and must be enhanced by the addition of the writer’s “poetic” imagination.  It is a notion that is death to hokku, but very common in modern Western haiku — a hybrid verse form with little left in it of the hokku or the conservative haiku.

Wright did not understand that a hokku should be a manifestation of a season — something expressing the character of a season.  His use of obvious season, then, seems haphazard.  He assumed, as was and remains common among Western writers of “haiku,” that a haiku is simply an event.  He did not realize that such an event must have a deeply-felt unspoken significance, and so he wrote numbers of verses that leave the reader feeling “So what?”  Here is one of many:

In the July sun,
Three birds flew into a nest;
Only two came out.

Wright’s use of the season here in the word “July” is pointless, because the verse does not express the season.  It is just a random event, a random assemblage of elements.  It does not have the focus and coherence of a real hokku.

Wright sometimes falls victim to the pseudo-profundity syndrome that afflicted so many early Western writers of “haiku,” who thought they should make their verses “Zen-like.”  The result is verses such as:

Six cows are grazing;
The seventh stands near a fence
Staring into space.

Another:

The ocean in June:
Inhaling and exhaling
But never speaking.

And another example of pseudo-profundity:

A cathedral bell
Dimming the river water
In the autumn dusk.

As mentioned in my previous posting on Wright, he wrote many verses that are simply obvious variations on old Japanese hokku, verses recognized by anyone with a knowledge of the traditional hokku repertoire:

Among these “imitations” are:

In a dank basement
A rotting sack of barley
Swells with sprouting grain

That is based on a Japanese original about bags of seeds wetted by spring rain.

The large numbers of people visiting my site hoping to find something about Richard Wright and his “haiku” will likely be disappointed to read that in my view, Wright never really understood the hokku or the “Shiki” haiku, and consequently his work, when viewed in the context of hokku and of conservative haiku, does not go beyond the experimental student stage.  That he is so often used as an exemplar of “haiku” by teachers in elementary and high schools simply demonstrates that those teachers do not really understand what Wright was doing — and not doing.   And because they lack a background in hokku and an historical understanding of the origins of the Western “haiku,” they are unable to evaluate him objectively, and so spread this misevaluation of his verses among their students.

Wright’s “haiku,” falls between two stools, as the Germans say:  it is neither hokku nor “Shiki” haiku, nor is it for the most part even good as Western poetry.  Like much of modern haiku, it is an odd aberration, a reaching for something that Wright, lacking the technical and aesthetic knowledge, was not able to attain, though one nonetheless sees in his attempts a potential that was to remain unfulfilled.  That is due to his failure to understand the aesthetic point behind both the hokku and the “Shiki” haiku, and so he replaced it with a false point derived from what he already knew of Western poetry — something also characteristic of the great bulk of modern haiku, which follows in a similarly confused and erratic tradition.

I know that many people may have questions or uncertainties about all of this, whether they voice them or not.  So if readers have any questions or comments on what I have said about Wright’s “haiku,” just click on the “Comment” box and send me a message.  If you ask me to make it public, it will be done.  If you prefer that it remains private, just tell me so and it will not appear on this site.  By doing this, I am simultaneously conducting an informal survey on whether readers would like their comments here made public or not.  Up to now they have been kept private, but I like to poll readers now and then to discover whether preferences have changed.

David

WRIGHT OR WRONG?

The automatic statistics of this site tell me that frequently people come here hoping to see something illuminating about the “haiku” of Richard Wright — just why I am not certain, given that this site favors hokku and generally considers “haiku” only a mutant degeneration of it.

Nonetheless, I suppose those visitors, given their frequency, should go away with something, so here are a few words about Richard Wright and his “haiku.”

The primary book for Wright’s verses is Haiku: This Other World, Arcade Publishing, 1998.  It oddly combines an anthology of his “haiku” with a considerable amount of historical information about what is really Japanese hokku, much of which does almost nothing to illuminate Wright’s verses.

The reason is, of course, that anyone reading the book from an historical perspective discovers very quickly that Wright had the same difficulties and followed essentially the same course as almost all those whose verses were written under the influence of R. H. Blyth’s works titled Haiku, works which were really largely about hokku.

In short, Wright followed the standard pattern of reading Blyth and then writing his own verses based upon a distorted Western view of the Blyth translations created by unconsciously mixing one’s own Western preconceptions about poetry with the brevity of the hokku.

Wright’s “haiku” can be divided largely into what are essentially brief “Western” poems; poems written as variations or studies on Japanese hokku translated by Blyth; poems written in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, which Wright somehow concluded was “standard” for his haiku in English; verses written in a 5-5-5 syllabic pattern; and verses written in an uneven syllabic pattern.

By examining a few of them, we get a very good picture of the whole of his work:

There are verses that are simply images:

Heaps of black cherries
Glittering with drops of rain
In the evening sun.

(One wonders if that was influenced by Williams’ “red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens”).

The very first verse in the book is this:

I am nobody.
A red sinking sun
Took my name away.

It is not a hokku, so we shall have to put it in that vast and vague category of poems that look superficially like hokku but are not — ‘haiku.’  It is too personal, too “me” oriented for hokku.  Essentially it is a brief modern Western poem, not a hokku nor even a “Shiki” haiku.  Structurally it consists of three lines, each of which has precisely five syllables.

We will find a great many of Wright’s verses are like this.  And that tells us a great deal about Wright’s approach to verse — first and foremost, again, that like many in the second half of the 20th century, he unconsciously mixed Western notions of poetry with the brevity of the hokku.

Like most beginners in hokku, we find among Wright’s verses the usual, obviously Issa-inspired examples using the technique I call “talk to the animals”:

Make up your mind, snail!
You are half inside your house
And halfway out!

There is no real value in such verses, but one may suppose that through them Wright was experimenting, trying to find his way.  He obviously read a lot of Blyth, but of course as I often lament, Blyth left no clear and specific instructions for writing the hokku in English, and all too often readers could not extract the principles of writing the hokku in English from the matrix in which Blyth left them embedded in his writings, valuable as those writings are.  So it is no surprise that Wright was left looking about for a path.

Sometimes he detours into what looks like Issa-flavored senryu rather than hokku:

“Shut up you crickets!
How can I hear what my wife
Is saying to me?”

None of the verses given up to this point are hokku, nor are they worthwhile as “Western” verses in general.  But that does not mean Wright’s attempts at haiku are without value.  It just means that we have to sift the better examples out of all the inferior verses.

We find, for example, this:

A summer barnyard;
Swishing tails of twenty cows
Twitching at the flies.

That is hokku.  It is set in a season.  It has Nature as its focus.  And it is in two parts, a longer and a shorter.  Wright seems to have fixated on the predilection of that time for sequences of 5-7-5 syllables as the “right” standard for his verses, which led to a bit of padding, but nonetheless this verse qualifies as a real hokku, and even more importantly, it works as a hokku.   We could improve its form a bit, like this:

A summer barnyard;
The tails of twenty cows
Swishing flies.

But even leaving it as it is, Wright’s verse qualifies as hokku.

One frequently wants to re-write his verses, to free them from the cage of 5-7-5, as in this example:

On winter mornings
The candle shows faint markings
Of the teeth of rats.

The hokku perception is obviously there, but again Wright’s reading of Blyth failed to provide him with the necessary technique that would have enabled him to reduce this  5-7-5 wordiness to its essentials, which we might do thus:

Faint marks
Of rat teeth on the candle;
The winter morning.

Here and there we find verses that essentially repeat an old Japanese hokku, for example Wright’s

The webs of spiders
Sticking to my face
In the dusty woods.

That is just a run-on rephrasing of Buson’s

Spider webs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

And we note of course that Wright has returned here to his 5-5-5 syllable phrasing.

We find other Wright verses all too obviously based upon old hokku, but in doing so we may recall that such variations on old verses are a good way for beginners to learn.  Wright wrote:

Just enough of light
In this lofty autumn sky
To turn the lake black.

That is a variation upon Bashō’s

Cold rain –
Enough to blacken the stubble
In the fields.

Another Wright verse is obviously influenced by Shiki:

That abandoned house,
With its yard of fallen leaves
In the setting sun.

A Shiki predecessor was:

A dog asleep
At the door of the empty house;
Falling willow leaves.

So we can see that Wright was heavily influenced by the material Blyth provided, even at times too obviously influenced by it.

One sees this influence repeatedly, sometimes for the worse, sometimes — as in this example, for the better:

Wright’s verse:

Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.

One cannot but think that was inspired by Seibi’s  Japanese original:

Swatting flies,
I begin to think
Of Killing them all.
 
In Blyth’s version it is:

Killing flies,
I begin to wish
To annihilate them all.

Exactly the same feeling of starting small and feeling the urge to carry a matter to extremes.

The more one reads Wright’s “haiku,” the more one has the feeling that here was a man with the poetic sensibility to write excellent hokku, but because of the lack of suitable instruction he spent much too long in the early student phase, becoming mired there.  He never grasped sufficiently the importance of separating the two parts of a verse, nor of learning the underlying aesthetics.  So we can repeat a quick analysis:  Some of his verses are mere images; some are variations on old Japanese verses translated by Blyth; some are “modern” free verse poems with the brevity but not the substance of hokku or of Shiki’s “haiku.”

Sometimes Wright tries to be too “clever,” which is a failing of modern haiku in general, with its heavy emphasis on Western poetic notions:

In an old woodshed
The long points of icicles
Are sharpening the wind.

At times he strives too obviously and artificially for effect:

To see the spring sky,
A doll in a store window
Leans far to one side.

One could spend a great deal of time commenting on each verse in the book, looking for obvious antecedents in Blyth, noting where Wright, like almost the entire Western “haiku” movement, went wrong in unconsciously substituting his own preconceptions for the inherent aesthetics and techniques of the hokku and of the Shiki “haiku.”  Such an effort would be very enlightening in showing just how and how thoroughly Western haiku went astray in the middle of the 20th century, but it would also be rather disappointing and futile in that it is too late to correct Wright’s misperceptions and missteps, too late to give him the guidance he needed to rise to the level of old Japanese hokku instead of falling into common misunderstandings.

That is, fortunately, not the case with those still writing today.  But the problem in this case is finding those with the potential poetic intuition of a Richard Wright who are also humble enough to be willing to start over and do hokku the right way.

A great deal more could be said about the “haiku” of Richard Wright, and perhaps I shall have more to say when time permits.  But for now I shall only repeat that reading Wright’s “haiku” leaves one with the disappointing feeling of a potential unfulfilled due to lack of informed guidance, the same feeling one gets on reading the better examples of present day writers of “haiku,” who never quite understand what they are doing or why, and who consequently are always walking but never getting anywhere.

David

THE THING IT IS AND THE THING IT ISN’T

Long-time readers here will recall that I have discussed the issue of metaphor and simile and their relation (if any) to hokku.  I have pointed out that what readers — even presumably scholarly readers — find as metaphor in hokku is often generally the more prevalent practice of the principle of internal reflection, misinterpreted as metaphor.  I have also said that though metaphor is not entirely absent from old hokku, the best verses did not use it.

There is a great deal to be said about metaphor and simile, which have a long history in English literature and have been so often used that they seem a poetic crutch for which the laboring poet automatically reaches when in difficulty, and from this sentence alone one can see how common their use has become; I have just used a metaphor myself.

There are, then, times when a metaphor or simile may be helpful in prose or in poetry (though not in hokku), yet one feels, like Ogden Nash in his poem Very Like a Whale, that both are used to excess.  He tells us, half in jest, half serious:

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else….
That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;
They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison.
How about the man who wrote,
Her little feet stole in and out like mice beneath her petticoat?
Wouldn’t anybody but a poet think twice
Before stating that his girl’s feet were mice?
Then they always say things like that after a winter storm
The snow is a white blanket.  Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a
six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of
unpoetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

I have said in previous articles that simile in poetry — saying one thing is like another — draws the mind in two directions by presenting it with two different images.  To say, for example, that the rising crescent moon is like a ship of silver sailing up on the blue sea of heaven, detracts from the moon and the sky as they are, and brings in the image of a ship and of a sea, and the mind must combine these into a new image created by the original “real” image and its overlay.

That does not mean metaphors and similes are good or bad; it simply means, as I have said before, that one must use the right tool for the right task.  In hokku we keep a very strong focus of the mind, for which simile and metaphor act merely as a distraction.  In other kinds of poetry — well, we shall see.

There is much more to be said about metaphor and simile, but I will delay that for when I have more time.  So expect this brief posting to grow longer in the next few days.  I would like readers, meanwhile, to read the excerpt from the Nash poem and to think about the place (is there one, legitimately?) of metaphor and simile in poetry, and to a lesser extent, in prose.

It is worth considering, in the interim, how hokku generally goes for what Nash calls the “unpoetical blanket material,” which is one of the great contrasts between hokku and conventional poetry.  In fact the great discovery of people like Bashō was to find the poetry in such “unpoetical blanket material,” which is one of the things that makes hokku so unlike what people generally think of as poetry.

David

ARSENIC-SMEARED HAIKU

I often say that modern haiku, for all practical purposes, began in the middle of the 20th century as a result of the misunderstanding and misperception of the hokku by Western writers and academics.  They saw the hokku through the spectacles of what they already knew about Western poetry (particularly avant-garde poetry of the first half of the century) and notions of what it meant to be a poet, and that prevented them from seeing the hokku as it really was.

The consequence was that when Westerners began to write (and, unfortunately, to teach) their own interpretations of the hokku — which they called “haiku,” following Shiki’s neologism — what they created generally had little in common with the old hokku practiced from Bashō up to and including the “haiku” of Shiki except brevity.

In other words, modern haiku in English is the result of all the haiku journals and anthologies and books written in the latter half of the 20th century, not the result of a careful study of the old hokku or even the first “Shiki” haiku.  It is a new Western verse form, not a continuation of the old hokku.

That means, for all practical purposes, that most of what would-be writers of “haiku” were reading in the 20th century — such as William Higginson’s Haiku Handbook – presented what was really — in my view — largely just the creation of the authors, and did not really represent the essentials of the old hokku or even of Shiki’s new “haiku.”

Of course it is obvious to historians that awareness of the hokku did not begin in the middle of the 20th century, but roughly half a century earlier, when the Western poets known as the Imagists were influenced by what they saw of the hokku in translation.  But they, too, misperceived the nature of the hokku, and their verses influenced by it are no more hokku than the Chinoiserie of 18th-century England is “real” Chinese art.

Here, for example, is an early (c. 1908) “Imagist” poem by Edward Storer, written, like the modern hokku, in three lines.  But there the similarities end:

Image

Forsaken lovers,
burning to a chaste white moon,
Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought.

This is simply the fantasy of the writer working overtime.  If we remember that the hokku expresses Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, set in the context of the seasons, we can see there is really nothing in this poem that is like the hokku except its brief, three-line form.  The content is entirely “Western poetry.”

Though the Imagists were influenced by the hokku, they completely misunderstood it; and that of course was repeated by those who actually began the modern haiku in earnest in the middle of the 20th century.

When we look at the early “pre-modern” Western poems influenced by Western misperception of the hokku, we can see precisely where the Western “poets” went wrong.  They did not understand the purpose of the hokku; they did not understand its seasonal context; they did not even understand its long-short structure.  They saw only that it was a brief presentation of an “image” of some kind, and so they proceeded to write verses such as these, by Ezra Pound.  I will present them here under my own headings:

Playing at being “Asian”:

O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
(titled “Fan-piece: For her Imperial Lord)

Writing simile:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
(titled Alba)

Imposing inner fantasy on the outer object:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(titled “In a Station of the Metro)

Of this latter verse, Pound wrote,

“In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

In other words, Pound was speaking of the outward object (the faces in the Metro) transformed into an inner, subjective image (petals on a wet, black bough).  This has nothing to do with hokku, nor with the first “Shiki” haiku, which were hokku in all but name.

William Higginson completely misunderstood what Pound was doing; he wrote of this verse,

“…by revising the poem Pound turned an otherwise sentimental metaphor into a genuine haiku … This is a haiku that Shiki would have been proud to write.” (The Haiku Handbook)

In my view, it is precisely such gross misperceptions and misrepresentations of the hokku and the “Shiki” haiku by Higginson and other writers in the latter half of the 20th century that led them to create a “modern haiku” quite unlike the old hokku, and quite unlike the “Shiki” haiku.

But here is another Ezra Pound verse:

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
(titled L’Art, 1910)

This is what we might call a “color” verse, with an added comment by the poet.  Aside from the added comment at the end, it is essentially just a word-painting of color combinations.  And that, of course, takes us immediately to a very similar poem by William Carlos Williams, which again consists in essence of an assemblage of colors:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Where Pound puts his added (and superfluous) comment at the end of his verse, Williams puts his similarly superfluous comment at the beginning of the color composition to give the verse a pseudo-profundity.

Pound’s verse is simply the assemblage of green on white with strawberry red; Williams’ verse is simply the assemblage of red (enhanced by the rainwater) and white.  Yes, it is a red wheelbarrow, and yes, they are white chickens, but the objects are simply the vehicles for the transmission of color, as in the verse by Pound, in which his “Let us feast our eyes” is simply an attempt to tell the reader that his poem is all about color juxtapositions (plus the oddity of a “feast” including a poisonous pigment).

Williams’ poem is, for all practical purposes, a word-painting of colors, red and white.  Pound’s verse is also a word-painting of colors, arsenic green, white, and strawberry red.

We may recall at this point that Masaoka Shiki wrote a haiku about the falling of a red berry on the frost of the garden.  That verse is also a study in color (red on white), and seen thus it is outwardly similar to the red and white juxtaposition of Williams, with his red wheelbarrow and his white chickens.  But in this, Shiki’s hokku is atypical, though it still expresses a thing-event in the context of a season, which is not at all what the “wheelbarrow” poem of Williams does.  The principle behind them is quite different, and it was the failure to grasp this essential difference between the hokku and Western poetry that led to the rise of a modern haiku that has far more in common with Western notions of poetry and poets than it has or ever had with the old hokku or even with the “Shiki” haiku, which was still generally hokku in all but name.

And finally, if one looks at the “wheelbarrow” poem of Williams, it becomes obvious where the anti-capital letter, anti-punctuation tendency so prevalent in modern haiku originated.  It is just a relic of an experiment that was once considered “modern” — in the first half of the 20th century.

David

TO EVERY THING THERE IS A SEASON

Unlike most other kinds of verse, the hokku is linked with the season in which it is written.  In fact one can say truthfully that whatever the obvious subject of a hokku, the real subject is the season in which it is written, and the “obvious” subject is just a manifestation of that season.

This reflects the spiritual roots of hokku and the view that things are not isolated phenomena, but are interconnected in  innumerable ways.  So interconnected, in fact, that an object or an event cannot exist in isolation, but only as a part of the Whole.  So when Bashō writes of a frog jumping into an old pond, this is as a manifestation of and expression of the season of spring.  If one does not know that, one does not know the entire verse.  And most Westerners do not know that, because the seasonal connection is lost in transmission.

In old hokku, however, there was really only one way to know definitely the season of a given verse, and that was to have memorized a long and detailed glossary of recognized “season words,” called kigo 季語 (ki = season, go = ) in Japanese.  If a given topic was not to be found in such accepted lists, it was simply not a subject for a verse.  And to recognize the season of any verse and to write within the system required minimally six years or more of diligent study and familiarity before one could begin to use the “season word” technique with any facility.

Further, if one had not memorized the long list of acceptable words and their appropriate seasons, one had to refer to a glossary of season words in order to identify the season of any given hokku.  Such a lengthy glossary was called a saijiki 歳時記 (sai = year, ji = time, ki =  record), which we can simply call a “season book.”  The season book listed the accepted kidai 季題 (ki = season, dai = subject) and as a subcategory for each season subject, the kigo, the season words, rather like a theme and variations.

All of this, of course, meant that the writing of old hokku was no simple matter.  In fact passing time only brought increasing complexity to this system, and in addition, for all practical purposes, it limited the range of one’s subject matter to the accepted themes and season words.  If one read a verse without recognizing the season inherent in it, one was obviously neither ready to read hokku nor to write it.

To those of us writing hokku today this seems like an unreasonable and intolerable burden, and though it had its advantages, they were far outweighed by its complexities.  It is perhaps somewhat surprising, then, that Masaoka Shiki continued this season word system after his much-publicized re-packaging of the hokku as his “haiku.”

In modern haiku, which as readers here know I consider largely a degeneration and distortion of the hokku, there are two approaches to season.  The great majority of writers simply ignore it, having divorced the modern haiku from season entirely.  A lesser number attempt to re-create the bulky season word system in a Western context, and there are actually those who are busy compiling new “season books” in English, which given the geographical, climatic, and biological complexity of the United States alone, is a somewhat eccentric undertaking.  And of course attempting to establish such a complex season word system in the West merely revives all of its associated problems, one of the most obvious of which is that no one outside the little group of writers using one of these new “season books” will have the slightest idea what the season of many of the poems written under it represent, because the general public  will not be part of the tiny “in group” using a given “season word” book.

Modern hokku, by great contrast, solves the matter of seasonal association of a verse in a remarkably simple, practical, and straightforward manner.  By doing so it maintains the virtues of the traditional seasonal connection of old hokku without the needless and rather pointless complexities and eccentricities of creating new “Western” season words and season books.

The modern hokku system is simply to mark each verse with the season in which it is written.  A writer will categorize all of his or her hokku by these seasonal markings into the categories of “Spring,” “Summer,”  ”Autumn” (or “Fall”), and “Winter.”  When a verse is shared or published, the seasonal categorization goes with it.  It is such an eminently useful and practical and productive system that writers should immediately see its superiority to the old “season words” system.

As we have seen, the real subject of every hokku is its season.  The four-word seasonal categorization system simply utilizes this fact.  So if one were to use Bashō’s hokku as an example, it would appear like this when written:

SPRING

The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of water.

And of course if it were to appear in an anthology, all “Spring” verses would appear under that initial heading, and the same procedure would follow with Summer, Autumn, and Winter categories.

Somewhat astonishingly, this reduces the thousands of season words necessary to reading and writing hokku with any comprehension under the old system to simply four — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — and these function simply as headings for a single verse or for an anthology of verses.

Thus in one fell swoop modern hokku demolishes and improves upon the season word system that caused so much needless complexity in old hokku and that continues to be pointlessly revived with its needless complexities in some segments of modern haiku.  Yet in doing so it does not abandon the essence of the matter — it retains firmly and with great practicality the indissoluble link between hokku and the seasons.  That has always been the practice in modern hokku in English:  To preserve the essence of old hokku at its best, without being slavishly literal in its transmission.  That is why modern hokku in English can be thoroughly American or British or Australian or Indian, etc., without abandoning the genuine essentials of hokku, and without any need for maintaining any of the culturally-limited baggage that potentially so hinders the verse form in its transmission from one culture to another and very different culture.

David