The more talking and thinking,
The farther from the truth.
Cutting off all speech, all thought,
There is nowhere that you cannot go.

(Xinxin Ming, R. H. Blyth translation).

An evening breeze;
The water laps against
The heron’s legs.

R. H. Blyth made a very pertinent comment on this verse, a remark precisely in keeping the principles of modern hokku:

“Buson’s intuitions are strong and clear and quick enough to avoid the colouring of his mind by emotion, or its distortion by intellection.”

Blyth is, of course, talking about just what we practice in modern hokku. We write our verses without any “coloring of the mind” — without using them as symbols or metaphors or allegories — presenting them in all their simplicity and purity. And we present them without “thinking” added, which Blyth here terms intellection. That means we do not use hokku to preach, or to advocate political or social change, nor do we use them to make some abstract point.

Of course there will be people who will say, “This is not poetry! It is just an event with nothing added!”

Precisely. That event with nothing added is the point. If you take pleasure in it without all the obvious frills of poetry, without the clever additions of a “poet,” then it is likely you have the kind of mind that appreciates hokku for what it is.

I always say we should not think of hokku as poetry, because if we do, we automatically haul in all the baggage one has grown up associating with poetry in the West. But hokku is nothing like the bulk of Western poetry. In hokku the poetry lies in the event itself, not in anything a poet may say about it.  That is why the writer of hokku must be quick in grasping only that essential event, before the mind begins to add all kinds of thoughts about it, before it begins to decorate it with mental ornaments.

It is always helpful to ask why a particular hokku is effective.  In this one, not only do we have the absence of the coloring of the imagination and the absence of “thinking,” we also have a very straightforward harmony of similarity.  It lies in the movement of the evening breeze combined with the movement of the water lapping against the heron’s legs.  That is all we need when these two elements are united by the heron, who stands in them both.

David

As readers know, the kind of hokku I teach is based on the best of old Japanese hokku, but for practical teaching purposes I sometimes modify them to fit an American environment (and you can do the same for your environment, wherever that may be, whether Australia or Austria or Finland or India or some other locale).

Shiki once wrote a spring verse:

The spring day;
Not a person stirring
In the village.

I would like to change it, however, to make it a more effective hokku by setting it in the season of summer, rewriting it like this:

(Summer)

The hot afternoon;
Not a soul stirring
In the neighborhood.

I hope you feel the improvement made by that change.  But do you know why it is better?

Let’s look again at Shiki’s “spring” version:

The spring day;
Not a person stirring
In the village.

If you are a regular reader here, you will recall that a hokku should manifest the character of a particular season through something happening in it.  The problem with Shiki’s verse is that it is inharmonious.  It first presents us with spring — the time of growing Yang — that is, of freshness, of increasing energy and growth.  But then Shiki tells us that not a person is stirring in the village.  That is contrary to the character of spring, which is increasing activity after the quiet of winter.  That is why Shiki’s verse does not feel right, even though he may actually have seen such a scene.

But remember, a hokku does not show us just any event, but rather an event that manifests the character of the season, and thereby makes us feel its significance.

That is why the change of season is a big improvement.  Let’s look again at the revised version:

The hot afternoon;
Not a soul stirring
In the neighborhood.

First it presents us with the heat of the afternoon — a strong physical sensation.  Then it gives us that heat (Yang) reflected in its opposite — inactivity (Yin).

Summer hokku are generally of two main kinds — harmony of similarity and harmony of opposites.  Harmony of similarity is the putting of two similar things together, like heat (Yang) and movement (Yang).  Harmony of opposites is putting together two things which, though opposite, are nonetheless perceived to be harmonious together.  Think of a warm fire (Yang) in winter (Yin), or dipping your hand into a cool stream (Yin) in the heat of summer (Yang).  Even though they manifest opposites, we naturally feel they go together.

So the revised verse uses harmony of opposites:

The hot afternoon;
Not a soul is stirring
In the neighborhood.

The inactivity of the neighborhood residents is very much in keeping with the heat of the afternoon.  We can say it “negatively reflects” the heat of the afternoon by showing us its opposite, just as drinking a hot cup of herbal tea when it is snowing outside also shows us a harmony of opposites, with one “negatively reflecting” the other (cold outside, heat in the cup of tea).

If you are familiar with R. H. Blyth’s work, you will note that I have borrowed his alliterative combination “soul stirring,” instead of Shiki’s less effective “person.”

Once you begin to understand how and why harmony and unity in hokku are important and why they work, you can easily put them to use in improving your own practice of hokku.

David

One more Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, and then I will move on to something else.  It seems odd to be discussing a poem about autumn, given that it is spring now, but here it is nonetheless.

In this poem, we note something Hopkins frequently does; he talks about Nature, but applies his (Catholic) religion to it, believing that God is revealed in Nature.  William Wordsworth had as his theory of poetry that one should use the words of everyday language, ”and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination.” Hopkins, with his often strange and creative vocabulary, cannot be accused of using only “everyday language,” but he is certainly guilty of throwing  a “coloring of the imagination” (his Catholic religion) over his subject matter (Nature).  I tend to think of it as “smearing God all over Nature.”  It is quite the opposite of the aesthetics of hokku, in which Nature is preferred without any “coloring of the imagination” (you will note that Wordsworth uses the British spelling “colouring,” while I use the American “coloring.”).

But on to the poem, which I shall discuss part by part – Hurrahing in Harvest.  A “hurrah” is a shout, an exclamation of joy and approval, so we could say this means “Rejoicing in the Harvest.”

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

The poet stands looking over the golden fields.  It is the end of summer.  He sees the stooks standing all over the now-harvested fields of grain.  Stooks are sheaves of grain placed upright together in a shape like a teepee.  Hopkins finds them beautiful in a barbarous (“unsophisticated, rough, wild”) way.

Then he looks up to the sky above, and comments,

…what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds!

The “wind-walks” are the sky itself, the open sky, the various routes through which the moving clouds pass as well as the gaps between them.  Hopkins likens the white clouds to smooth and shiny sacks made of silk, remarking on the the beauty of their changes as they drift across the sky.

…has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

He asks himself, has there ever been anything so wild and wilful and wavy as this “meal-drift” that  moulds itself, then melts across the skies?  He is speaking of the shapes and transformations in shape of the clouds.  He likens them to “meal-drift,” that is, to the white dust that drifts in the air and gathers here and there in an old-fashioned mill when grain is being ground into flour.  He likens the clouds to this fine, white powder, and describes it as moulding (American spelling “molding”) itself together into one cloud form, then melting, changing shape, into another form.  Again, he is speaking of the visual transformations of the clouds as they pass across the sky

But now Hopkins brings in religion and begins smearing it over all he sees:

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, 
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

Hopkins walks along, and as he walks he raises his eyes to the clouds and the sky, and simultaneously, he says, he lifts up his heart — his emotions.

This phrase “lift up heart,” would have come easily to Hopkins, because he would have heard it often in the Roman Catholic mass, when, in a preface to the consecration of the host (bread), the old Latin mass ran like this:

Priest: Dominus vobiscum (The Lord be with you).
People: Et cum spiritu tuo (And with your spirit).
Priest: Sursum corda (Lift up [your] hearts).
People: Habemus ad Dominum (We lift them up to the Lord).

So Hopkins lifts up his eyes and his heart to the skies, and looks

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

So he is doing just what the Catholic mass says:  he is lifting up his heart to the Lord (Jesus), whom he finds in the clouds and sky.  He looks at the gloriously beautiful scene of passing clouds in the blue sky in order to “glean our Savior,” that is, to see Jesus in their beauty.  ”To glean” is an old term from grain harvesting.  It meant originally to gather stalks of grain accidentally left behind by the reapers, but here Hopkins uses it to mean “gather.”  He looks at the beauty of the skies at summer’s end to “gather” Jesus, to see him there.  And he fancies that he also sees a response from Jesus in the clouds:

And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

He asks his eyes and his heart what looks (of a person) and what lips (of a person) ever before gave him a rapturous greeting of love in “realer, rounder replies” — in replies more “real” and more “round” (both roundish in shape and round as meaning “full, complete.”  In other words, he sees the clouds in the sky as the replies, the unspoken but real and visible “words” of Jesus to Hopkins, as he gazes up at them.  So Hopkins is not only fantasizing that he is seeing Jesus in the sky and clouds, but he also imagines that he sees Jesus expressing love back to him and speaking to him in the changing shapes of the roundish clouds.

But Hopkins does not stop his imaginings there:

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—

Now Hopkins looks to the low hills, blue in the distance, calling them “azurous hung hills” — hills hung with blue (azure).  He wrote this poem on the 1st of September in the year 1877, on his way home from fishing in the Elwy River in the Vale of Clwyd (pronounced “Clooid”) in Wales, so we may easily picture hills in the distance.  And these bluish hills, Hopkins imagines, are the shoulder of Jesus, who carries the world.  Hopkins sees them thus as majestic, both strong as a stallion (male horse), but also “sweet” — gentle and pleasant — as violets.

One cannot help thinking that Hopkins seeing Jesus in the clouds of the sky as someone giving a “rapturous love’s greeting,” and seeing him in the hills as “strong as a stallion” yet sweet and mild, expresses a thinly-veiled homosexuality, and after all, Hopkins was homosexual by nature.

Hopkins says of the sky, the clouds, the hills,

These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

That is, the beauty of the sky with its passing clouds and the blue hills were things already there before Hopkins paused to notice them.  But before he was there, a beholder was wanting — was lacking.  But when these two things — the scene and its beholder — meet, then the heart suddenly “leaps up” as Wordsworth would say, as though it has wings carrying it upward with wild, beating emotion, and it

...hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Or, as we would say today, the beauty of the scene nearly knocks him off his feet.

David

We may see today’s poem as a mate to that other work, because it deals with the same topic, but in a slightly different way. It has the odd title Carrion Comfort.

We should first make sure we know what is meant by carrion. Put very simply, it means dead and decaying flesh. It has a strong undertone of something very unpleasant, as when we speak of vultures feeding on carrion — on dead animals. Many humans, too, eat dead animals, but tend to avoid any signs of decay in what they eat. That did not stop me from now and then remarking to meal mates, when I was younger, “I see you are eating another slice of dead cow.”

But back to the poem.

Let’s take it, as usual, part by part. I will divide the first stanza into two parts for convenience:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Hopkins, regarding his fits of depression, decides not to give in to them. He calls his deep depression by the capitalized name “Despair,” and he speaks to it. He describes Despair as “carrion comfort,” saying he will not let his mind concentrate on despair, which would be like trying to nourish his soul/mind on foul and decaying flesh. That, he does not feel, would be a true and lasting comfort — only the inferior comfort of surrender.

Further, Hopkins says, he will not untwist the slack last threads of man in himself. By that he means he will not take away the last few strands of manly strength he has in him, even though the thread made from those few strands that remain is “slack,” is loose and seems weak. So Hopkins is saying he will not give up what little strength he has left, he will not give in to despair. His comparison of strength to frayed thread is based upon the making of thread and yarn and rope by twisting many strands of fiber together to make the thread or rope strong. But Hopkins says he has only a few strands left in his frayed thread, and he will not let those untwist and give up what strength is left to him.

He adds,

ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Not only will Hopkins not give up his last strands of strength, but he also refuses, when most wearied, most exhausted by depression, to just give up and cry “I can no more” — I am unable to struggle further. On the contrary, he says, “I can.” He can do something: he can hope, he can wish to the day to come, not only the literal day, but also day used as a metaphor for the light of peace and release as opposed to the dark night of his anguished depression. And, very importantly, Hopkins has the option of NOT choosing “not to be.” He is saying he is still free and strong enough to say he will not choose suicide.

In what follows, we shall see that Hopkins tends to combine his notion of Despair with his notion of God. This is a view of his deity similar to that in parts of the “Old Testament,” the Hebrew Scriptures, in which, as in the Book of Job, God can not only help humans, but can also afflict them terribly with suffering and pain:

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

He speaks to Despair/God, whom he visualizes as a terrible, huge lion-beast. Hopkins asks why God would rudely place and push his world-shaking (“wring-world”) right foot upon him, like the huge, heavy, clawed paw of a lion. And why would God/Despair look at Hopkins’ bruised body (“bones”) with “darksome devouring eyes,” as though he would eat him up? And why would he “fan” (blow against) Hopkins mental pains like windy storms (“turns of tempest”), while Hopkins lies (heaped) there, frantic to avoid those mental pains, and wishing to flee, to escape them?

There are at subtle biblical hints in the background here. The “Lion” image calls to mind Jesus, one of whose titles is “Lion of Judah.” And Hopkins probably had, in the back of his mind, a reference to Psalm 22 as it is in the Catholic Douai version of the Bible, in particular lines 14 and 15:

“They have opened their mouths against me, as a lion ravening and roaring.
I am poured out like water; and all my bones are scattered. My heart is become like wax melting in the midst of my bowels.”

Christians traditionally considered that a prophecy of the suffering of Jesus, and Hopkins likely had it in mind in regard to his own sufferings.

Now Hopkins tries to religiously justify his anguish, his own deep depression, to himself. Why does God make him suffer the pains of depression?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

I cannot help feeling there is something psychologically unhealthy, something masochistic, about Hopkin’s justification of his own sufferings here. He tells himself he suffers

That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

He is saying that God makes him suffer so that he may be cleaned and purified, just as one beats the chaff (seed coverings, etc.) away from stalks of grain after it is harvested, so that the grain might be “sheer and clear.” Hopkins is using “sheer” here in its sense of “pure, unadulterated.” He says God is whipping him with the pains of depression just as grain is beaten in threshing, to clean and purify it.

And what effect does that justification of his own despair have on Hopkins? He says,

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Put into everyday English, it means:

“No, in all that toil, in all that ‘coil’ [meaning here 'disturbance/worry/trouble], it seems that since I ‘kissed the rod,’ or rather the hand holding that rod, see, my heart [mind] has drunk strength [like an animal lapping liquid], has ‘stolen’ [here he means 'cleverly taken'] joy, and would laugh and cheer.

Hopkins is referring to an old expression, to “kiss the hand that holds the rod,” in other words, to be grateful for the punishment that is used to correct one’s behavior. It comes from the days when children would be beaten with a wooden rod, like a willow switch or a stick, when they had “been bad.” “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is another old expression from the time when children were physically whipped (a time which is not past in some places).

Hopkins is saying, then, that he has changed his attitude toward his depression, that instead of raging against it or giving up entirely to despair and killing himself, he has since decided to regard his depression as a purifying punishment from God, a suffering that is actually beneficial to him because it cleanses him, and so he metaphorically kisses the hand of God that punishes him (“holds the rod.”) — he is grateful for his own suffering.

Quite honestly, I doubt that Hopkins really was grateful for his deep sufferings, but he had converted to Catholicism and was a Jesuit, and no doubt felt he had no choice but to either accept his pain as the good will of God, or else to give up and end his life. So this is Hopkins trying to talk himself into believing that his suffering is ultimately good for him, and a sign of God’s love.

Hopkins tells us that with his attitude changed, he now “would cheer.” And so he asks whom he would cheer (or who he would cheer, for those of you who prefer getting rid of the old “whom” form):

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Who does he cheer then? Does he cheer the “hero” (meaning God) whose divine actions (“heaven-handling) threw Hopkins down into despair — God, whose foot metaphorically stepped upon, trampled Hopkins? Or does Hopkins cheer himself, the “me” that fought against Despair/God? Which one is it? Is it each, both of them? He implies by the last line that he cheers everything together — God, who gave him suffering, Hopkins himself, who refuses to give in to his deep despair, and everything that happened on that night, or rather that year of his anguish that is now over (now done darkness), that night when Hopkins (“I wretch”) lay on his bed metaphorically wrestling with despair, with his God.

You will note that Hopkins uses repetition for effect, speaking of the time when he, in his wretchedness, lay

wrestling with (my God!) my God.

The “my God!” in parentheses is to be taken as an exclamation of wonder and awe over the fact that in fighting against the suffering of his depression, Hopkins has come to the realization, “My God! I have been wrestling with my God!” So the meaning of the first “My God!” is like saying “Good grief!” or “Wow!” — “Wow! I was wrestling with God!”

This notion of wrestling with God comes from the story of the patriarch Jacob in Genesis, chapter 32. In that story, a man comes to Jacob by night and wrestles with him. When morning comes, the man asks to be released, but Jacob will not release him until the man blesses him. Jacob realizes that the man is actually God. Knowing that, we see that it is upon this biblical story of a wrestling match with God by night that Hopkins has based his poem. He is saying that “Just as Jacob wrestled with God by night and endured until day, and was blessed, so in my dark struggle with despair I will not give in, because I have really been wrestling with God, and he will bless me.”

Of course Hopkins is just being poetic here, and it is difficult to say to what extent this “kissing the hand that holds the rod” maneuver really brought any comfort to him. But no doubt in his fits of depression he was willing to grasp at anything.

David

Do you know what an aquifer is?

The term comes from two Latin words meaning “water” and “to bear/carry.”  That is descriptive, because an aquifer is a natural underground reservoir of water.

Look at this picture:

That immense blue area, spreading through eight different states in the midwestern United States, is said to be the largest aquifer in the world.  It supplies water for irrigation and water for drinking and other farm and residential uses.

It underlies nearly the whole state of Nebraska, where one of my favorite writers, Loren Eiseley, was born.  It is very important to the agricultural production of the United States.

And it is rapidly disappearing.

It is not vanishing because of global warming.  It is vanishing because it is being heavily overused — an overuse that began only in the 1940s.

Not long ago — only a few decades back — the Ogalalla aquifer had an average depth of about 240 feet.  Now the average depth is 80 feet.

What is the reason?  Humans are pumping the water out much faster than Nature can restore it.  It is said that the time required to restore the aquifer naturally would be some 6,000 years.  At present usage rates,  it is likely that the water in the aquifer will be gone in about 20 to 25 years.  Imagine what that will mean for all the people living in those states, and consequently for the rest of the United States.

The problem is that just as humans seem to be willing to use every last drop of oil in the world rather than conserve, so they are willing to use every last drop of water in the aquifer rather than to seriously limit pumping and to change their lifestyles.

One study* of the problem states,

“Crops that benefit from the aquifer are cotton, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, and wheat. These crops provide the Midwest cattle operations with enormous amounts of feed and account for 40% of the feedlot beef output here in the U.S.“

What that means is that a good part of the water depletion in the Ogallala aquifer is for the purpose of growing crops used in feeding cattle for slaughter — cattle (and pigs) for use as human food.  

Now that is just one more good reason to stop eating animals and become vegetarian or vegan.  And it is a good reason not to wait to do that.

David

*The Ogallala Aquifer
Manjula V. Guru, Agricultural Policy Specialist
Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture

http://shadesofgreenweb.org/dancingflames/EnvSci/Articles/EnvScipdffiles/water/ogallala_aquifer.pdf

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A cloud of blossoms –
Is the bell Ueno?
Asakusa?

Through a cloud of blooming cherry trees, the writer hears the sound of a distant, unseen temple bell.  He wonders if it is coming from a temple in Ueno district?  Or perhaps that in Asakusa?
The point of the hokku lies in the “concealing” mass of fresh spring blossoms combined with the unanswered question.

In contrast to that rather “high-class” hokku, there is an anonymous “low-class” senryu.  You will recall that senryu is satirical verse, the “evil twin” of hokku, and no respecter of persons.  So you will not surprised to find that the same expression used elegantly by Bashō — “a cloud of blossoms” (hana no kumo) — is used for a different “concealing”  purpose here:

To hide
The public restroom –
A cloud of blossoms.

There is also another interesting senryu about cherry blossoms, which I translate loosely here:

The clever wife –
She makes him take the child
To view the blossoms.

The point is that the wife does not trust her husband out by himself, so when he casually remarks that he is going to view the cherry blossoms, she uses her wits and makes him take the kid along, to keep the untrustworthy husband out of “not respectable” establishments.

You may recall that in old hokku, the word “blossoms,” when used without a qualifier, was understood to mean cherry blossoms.

David

To better explain that, we might look at some verses from two widely-separated periods of hokku — that of Matsuo Bashō in the 1600s, and that of Masaoka Shiki, who died in 1902.

What I would like to point out today is that each wrote more than one kind verse in hokku form, and not all of them fit what we continue in modern hokku.

First there is Bashō.  He wrote some verses that are overtly “poetic,” while others are more objective.  Let’s look at some examples.

If held in my hand,
My hot tears would melt it;
Autumn frost.

To understand that verse it is essential to know that Bashō is visiting his old home, and is being shown a lock of his dead mother’s white hair.  That hair is what he says would melt if he took it in his hand.

Now we can see immediately that there is an unreality, a fantasy element to the verse.  Bashō is expressing both his personal sorrow over his mother’s passing and the transience of all things, but he is doing it subjectively by altering reality in his imagination.  We know the grey hair would not be melted by his tears; that is just a poetic exaggeration used to show his sorrow, similar to the kind of thing we find in Western poetry.  We can characterize verses such as this as his “poetic” side taking over.

The very last line — “Autumn frost” — would ordinarily be appropriate to more objective hokku, however here Bashō is not using it entirely objectively.  Instead, he parallels the autumn frost with his mother’s white hair — and autumn frost melts in warmth, while hair does not.  And note that we would NEVER write hokku today that require knowledge of the background — knowledge not included in the verse itself — in order to be understood.  In this verse we must know that Bashō is really speaking of his dead mother’s white hair in order to grasp what the verse is about.  In modern hokku such a verse fails, because a hokku should be able to stand on its own.

Bashō also wrote verses about his personal life, verses which, though more objective, are not good hokku.  For example:

One thing –
My life is light.
A gourd.

Again, this requires some explanation.  It would be clearer if we add a little more to the literal translation:

Owning one thing,
My life is light –
A hollow gourd.

This too is a poetic exaggeration.  Bashō not only owned this gourd, but also his clothing and his writing implements and papers, etc.  But he wants to emphasize that his few possessions make his life easier — lighter — than it would be if he owned a lot of things.  The hollow gourd was used as a container for rice used in cooking, though it could also be used to store liquids.

By the way, those who have seen the recent book Bashō: the Complete Haiku rendered by Jane Reichhold will find this “gourd” verse very misleadingly and inaccurately rendered there, a caution one should keep in mind when reading the rest of her renderings of Bashō.  I do not recommend her book for those who want the “real” Bashō.  A far more reliable translation of Bashō’s hokku is that of David Landis Barnhill, even though his book also uses the anachronistic term “haiku” in its title for what were really hokku.

We find more poetic exaggeration in this rather well-known verse by Bashō:

The sea darkens;
The wild duck’s cry
Is a faint white.

That, again, is the “poetic” mind at work.  Bashō wants to make an interesting contrast between the darkness and the “voice,” the cry of the wild duck that comes out of it.  We want to avoid that kind of manipulation in modern hokku.

Contrast the preceding verses with his best-known verse:

The old pond;
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.

Note the objectivity.  Bashō has stopped talking about himself, has stopped his poetic exaggerating, and has presented us with a hokku that just reflects an event in Nature, in the context of the season — spring.  Even though this verse, according to tradition, was reworked and not experienced just as it is written, it nonetheless reflects the realities of Nature rather than Nature made unrealistic by the “poetic” imagination.  Such verse is the best of Bashō, and that is why it is in keeping with the principles underlying modern hokku.  So again, modern hokku does not include everything ever written as hokku as exemplary, but rather only the best.

If we turn to Masaoka Shiki, we tend to find elements in some of his verses that we found also in Bashō — for example the presence of the personal:

Getting a shave –
On a day when Ueno’s
Bell is misty.

It is obviously objective even though Shiki is writing about himself; the flaw in it is that it is also awkward and rather pointless; we don’t feel any real connection between Shiki getting a shave and the bell standing in mist.  We learn from this that objectivity without deeper significance can be boring.  Shiki never quite learned that simply recording an event objectively, whether personal or impersonal, does not of itself make good verse.  That is why some of his verses tend to be very flat and two-dimensional, like a picture in a book.

A better verse is one he wrote in 1896:

The old garden;
Emptying the hot water bottle
Beneath the moon.

That is more connected to Nature because we feel a connection between the transparent water and the moon.  It would be better, however, if it were not a hot water bottle being emptied, but simply a water bottle:

The old garden;
Emptying a water bottle
Beneath the moon.

That way we do not have the word “hot” which is in conflict with the Yin character of the moon; removing it makes a greater harmony between the Yin water sparkling as it is emptied in the moonlight, and the moon itself.

Shiki also wrote:

Spring rain;
Umbrellas all uneven
In the ferry boat.

We see the ferry boat in the spring rain, its passengers all holding opened umbrellas at different heights.  We also feel the connection, though it is very obvious, between the spring rain and the umbrellas.  So there is a unity in this verse not found in his “being shaved” verse.

Put very bluntly, there was never a period when all hokku were equally good.  Only a minority of Bashō’s hokku are still worth reading, and all through the years from Bashō up to Shiki we find hokku that are too “poetic,” too “personal,” and some with the same thing we find in Shiki — verses that are objective but lack any depth or sense of deeper significance.

That is why, again, in modern hokku we use only the best of old hokku as models, and keep only the deeper principles of these as standards for writing new hokku.

When you read the older posts in the archive here, you will see what those deeper principles are — harmony, unity, reflection of the character of a season, and of course a sense of poverty, simplicity, and selflessness combined with the feeling of transience that has always been a part of hokku at its best.

David

Ryūboku ya  taburi-taburi to   haru no kawa

Translating it is a bit tricky, partly because the first word, ryūboku, means here “a piece of drifting wood”; then comes a description of the manner of its floating, and finally we have the wider setting, haru no kawa, “spring’s river” — the spring river.  Given all that we need to include, one can hardly do better than Blyth’s rendering:

A piece of wood,
Bobbity, bobbity, floating down
The spring river.

I would alter it slightly, keeping the slight intuitive leap required by the original, and more of its brevity:

A piece of wood
Floating bobbity, bobbity;
The spring river.

I have kept Blyth’s very fitting “bobbity, bobbity.”

What is striking about Blyth and this verse is that he intuitively understood the principle of Yang and Yin in hokku, though he never mentions it.  He says merely that what Meisetsu saw “is the piece of wood in its relation to spring, its restless tranquillity.”  Blyth adds that “In any other season it would have no meaning.”

That is precisely in keeping with hokku as I teach it.  The strength of this verse lies in the bobbing, active motion of the piece of wood on the ripples and dips of the spring river, a motion expressing Yang energy as it manifests in the liveliness of spring, which is the season of growing Yang.  That is precisely why the “restless tranquility” of the bobbing piece of wood would, as Blyth correctly stated, have no meaning in any other season.

By “no meaning” in any other season, Blyth meant that the bobbing energy of the floating peace of wood on the river is in harmony with the active energy of spring.  In summer, when the Yang energy is much steadier and stronger, it would not have the same meaning, in fact it would lose its harmony with the setting, and the same could be said for the declining Yang of autumn and the strong Yin of winter.

This is a very subtle point, and that Blyth grasped it without ever openly discussing the principle behind it shows his remarkably intuitive understanding of the aesthetics of hokku.

Those who are regular readers here will recall past discussions of the principle of harmony in hokku, as well as of the principle of Yin and Yang.  You may also have noted that this verse is a “standard,” hokku, meaning it has a setting, a subject, and an action.

A piece of wood
Floating bobbity, bobbity;
The spring river.

The setting is the wider environment in which something takes place.  Here it is “the spring river.”

The subject within that setting is what the poem is “about.”  Here it is
“a piece of wood.”

The action is movement or change.  Here it is “floating bobbity, bobbity.”

David

The answer to that, of course, is that hokku is all of the above; it is  ”Nature” and “season” and “time” verse, but these things are not separate.  The seasons are a part of Nature, Nature is a part of the seasons, and of course everything happens within time, and there is nothing more natural than that.

Perhaps the mistake that led to the odd notion that hokku is not “Nature verse” arose from a misunderstanding of what we mean by Nature —  that by Nature in hokku we mean only the natural world at its wildest and most unspoiled, untouched by human hands.  But Nature is everywhere, though of course more readily obvious in some places than in others.  There is Nature in the back yard, there is Nature in the vacant lot, there is Nature in the countryside fields and forests, and there is Nature in relatively untouched wilderness.

There is even Nature in the fern sprout pushing its way out between the bricks or cracked concrete of a city building or sidewalk, though of course in concrete and asphalt cities we must look actively for Nature, something not necessary in semi-rural and rural settings.

One can write hokku about any degree of the presence of the natural world, from old-growth forests many miles from the nearest human habitation to the hedgerows and fields of farming areas, to what is happening in one’s neighborhood or flower or vegetable garden.  One seldom finds hokku about “wild wilderness” simply because most people do not spend a great deal of time there.  But of course those who do may write hokku about it.

As for hokku being “time verse,” well, it was always that.  Transience is a fundamental aesthetic principle of hokku — the fact that all things are constantly transforming, arising and disappearing, whether it be a mayfly on a spring day or a mountain range in Australia worn down by aeons of weathering.  As the old hymn has it,

Change and decay in all around I see….

That inevitable sense of transience and the passage of time and things in hokku is something it inherited from its spiritual roots, from Buddhism and from Daoism.

The problem then, in this misleading notion that hokku is “time verse” and not “Nature verse,” is that those holding that view are like the blind men examining the elephant; each knows a part, but none sees the whole.  In hokku, Nature and the seasons and time are not separate things, but rather different aspects of the same reality.

The realm of hokku has seldom been untouched wilderness simply because most people do not generally experience Nature as untouched wilderness.  The majority experience it with some human influence.  Even Henry David Thoreau, America’s most famous “Nature” writer, is best known for his book Walden, which is named for Walden Pond, where he lived from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847.  And how does he first describe it?

“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts….”

Living on a pond in Concord, a mile from a neighbor, is hardly the unspoiled wilds of Patagonia.  A teacher I once had used to say that Thoreau was never far from the sound of the Emersons’ dinner bell.  That in no way diminishes his great contribution; it just approaches it realistically and without romantic illusions.

The Nature of hokku, historically, is more like Thoreau’s rural Walden than William Cullen Bryant’s

…continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound
Save his own dashings….  [from Thanatopsis]

So hokku, traditionally, has been more the Shire than the Misty Mountains, more Walden Pond than trackless wilderness.  its realm was “Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature,” but usually manifesting as something intermediate, something between, on the one hand, the technological modern city that seemingly attempts to wipe out all traces of Nature, and on the other, untrammelled wilderness.

We see that intermediate realm in this spring verse by Shōha:

The wagon nears;
A butterfly flits up 
From the grasses.

David

How does one tell a senryu from a hokku?  First, senryu does not have a seasonal setting. Second, while hokku deals with Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, senryu deals instead with the quirks of human psychology, usually in a satirical way that highlights human foolishness.  I often say that senryu is the “evil twin” of hokku.

Here is an example:

The new bridge opens;
Timidly they dirty it
With their footsteps.

To understand this, one must know that it was written in the pre-automobile era of wooden bridges, not the concrete and asphalt kind we know today.  So the point of the senryu is that it is opening day for a newly-constructed bridge.  The wooden bridge is all fresh and clean and newly-finished wood.  The first people to cross it do so hesitantly, timidly, because they sense there is something not quite right in dirtying the new bridge.  The foolishness of this lies in the fact that bridges are made for walking.

Many of us feel the same odd sense that there is something not quite right in violating what is fresh and new.  For example, I know of someone whose old slippers were completely worn out, but when new ones were delivered, he hesitated to wear them “because they are new.”  It is the story of the wooden bridge all over again.

The point to remember in this is that while hokku deals in subtle states of mind created by experiencing events in Nature, in the context of a particular season, senryu is really only interested in poking fun at the quirks of human psychology.

That is very evident in another old senryu about someone who relies on another for food and shelter:

It is uncomfortable to eat,
And painful not to eat;
The dependent.

There were and are countless family (and some non-family) situations in which this happens.  The brother who has no job and lives in the house of his sister and brother-in-law, for example, feels this when all are sitting around the dinner table.   He is not comfortable in putting all the food he would like to eat on his own plate, and yet when he does not do so, he suffers at the sense of lack.

Writing senryu requires a different kind of mindset than that for writing hokku.  One cannot help feeling that there is always something a little “mean” about the writer of senryu.  Nonetheless, in reading them we frequently recognize the psychological peculiarites of ourselves and our friends, of humans in general.

David

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
Shone round him o’er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form.

The flames rolled on–he would not go
Without his Father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

Now such poems are generally considered very dated and “old-fashioned” and, to use an expressive American term, rather “corny.”  You may even have heard the satire on the beginning of “Casabianca”:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Eating peanuts by the peck.
The deck grew hotter,
His feet got toasted;
But he kept on eating – 
He liked ‘em roasted.

The “roasted” is of course referring to the peanuts the boy is eating.

All of this is just a lead-in to a narrative poem from 1912 that has held its interest over the years.  It is in most of the standard anthologies.  But it differs from other narrative poems in that it is a story not fully told, but only hinted at, and the effectiveness of the poem lies in its combination of the incomplete narrative with a very poetic use of words to create a mysterious atmosphere.  So it is the atmosphere thus created that keeps this poem popular and interesting.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was written by the British poet Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), who created many poems (like this one) that are works of romantic fantasy, intended to delight by creating a mood.  Today’s poem, which I shall discuss in parts, is called

THE LISTENERS

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret, 
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

The poem begins with a mystery.  We are shown a traveller,  but we do not know who he is, or where he is from, or why he has come.  This immediately creates a questioning in the  mind of the reader that continues throughout the poem; but, as we shall see, it is a question that is never answered.  The poet increases the sense of mystery by setting the event at night, in the moonlight.  The Traveller knocks on the door of a house (we are not told whose it is or where exactly it is) that seems abandoned.  The only response to his knock is a bird that flies up out of a turret on the house.  But there is no human response.  It is so quiet that we hear the Traveller’s horse chomping on the grass “of the forest’s ferny floor.”  That just adds to the mystery — a house in a forest?  Is the house beginning to be overgrown by weeds and trees?

But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.

Notice the importance given what is NOT there in the poem:
No one descends — comes downstairs — to the Traveller.
No one looks out over a window sill (the ledge at the bottom of a window), now overgrown by leaves, into the Traveller’s grey eyes.

The Traveller stands there in the silence, puzzled by the absence of a response.

But now we find what the poem is really about.  It is a ghost story:

But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call. 

There are beings in the silent, moonlit house, but they are not the living; they are phantoms — ghosts — spirits of the dead.  The poet tells us there is a “host,” a large number of them.  And they listen in the quiet shadows, pierced here and there by moonlight, to the Traveller’s “voice from the world of men,” that is, to a voice from the world of the living.  The dead hear the voice of the living Traveller, as they throng the dark stairway with faint moonbeams falling on it, the stairway that goes down to an empty hall.  They listen in the “air stirred and shaken” by the “lonely Traveller’s call.”  The noise of his knocking and the sound of his call disturb the deathly silence in the house.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even 
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.

In the silence, in the absence of any answer to his loud knocking or to his call, the Traveller somehow senses there are beings inside the house, but that there is something strange and uncanny about them.  He can feel their presence, even though all is so still that the only motion and sound he notices is that of his horse still biting off and chewing the dark grasses.

The voice of the Traveller reverberates loudly in the stillness as he raises his head and calls out to whoever — whatever — is inside,  asks the strange residents to “Tell them I came,” to tell them “That I kept my word.”  Obviously there is a much larger unspoken story here, and the poet is giving us only a hint of it, which makes it all the more mysterious.

Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake 
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:

The listeners — the phantoms in the house, make not the slightest motion or response, even though every word the traveller speaks echoes his words through the shadows of the house, words from “the one man left awake.”  That means “the one man left alive.”  Left alive?  One left alive of many now dead?  What is the larger tale the poet is not telling us?  Why is the Traveller the only one left alive?  What is his connection to this house and those who once lived there? Why do ghosts — and so many of them — remain in the abandoned house?

All we have are these unanswered questions, the silence, the moonlight.

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

The Traveller realizes there is nothing more he can do.  He had tried to fulfill some important, past promise, for some unexplained purpose, but the response is only silence.  Too much time has passed.  But the phantoms inside the shadowed house, are aware of everything.  They hear his foot touch the stirrup of the horse when he mounts it to leave.  They hear the sound of the iron horsehoes on stone cobbles as the horse turns to go with its rider.  And the phantoms hear

…how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

The alliteration — the repeated “s” sounds — are like a last whisper, replaced by the heavy silence that surges back like a wave to replace the temporary disturbance, when the last sound of the horse’s pounding hoofs fades away.

The overall effect of the poem is to make us deeply feel a rather “spooky” but nonetheless strangely beautiful mystery in all this.  Who is the Traveller?  What promise had he made, and to whom, and why?  And what happened in the intervening years, leaving only ghosts within an abandoned and decaying house in a forest?  None of this is explained, and it leaves us wondering in the silent moonlight, which is exactly what the poet intended, and why the poem is so successful that it is still read today.

As you can see, there is not a great deal to this poem, nothing really profound or intellectual.  There is nothing difficult to understand.  It is just a mood, an atmosphere, a “poem of the imagination,” and the poet’s chief tool in creating that atmosphere is his lack of explanation, his refusal to tell us more.  It is a poem created out of shadows and moonbeams and spider webs, a word picture of deep silence and stillness troubled only momentarily by sound and movement, like a small pebble tossed into a quiet, dark well.

It is not surprising that Walter de la Mare, in addition to his poetry, wrote a few ghost stories, though nothing much remembered today.  But if you like an occasional movie with a shivers-up-the-spine feeling somewhat similar to this poem, you would probably enjoy the film “The Others,” which came out in 2001.

David

There is, for example, this spring verse by Buson:

Osoki hi no   tsumorite tōki   mukashi kana
Long day ‘s accumulating far   past         kana

The long days
Accumulate;
The distant past.

The point of the verse is this:

In spring one notices the lengthening of days, which seem all the longer now that the short days of winter are past.  As these spring days follow one another, each longer than the preceding, one begins to feel the length of the passing of time.  It makes the past, the “old days,” seem ever more distant.

The primary feeling of this hokku is a recognition of the relentless passage of time, which continually carries us away from the past and onward into the unknown future.  Did you notice that the second line — just one word in English — is visually shorter than the three words of the first line?  Yet if we say it in our minds it sounds very long, and adds to the sense of time passing slowly.

Blyth, rightly, I think, thought the poem in its literal form a bit too much for Westerners unfamiliar with hokku to grasp, so he elaborated it in his version, to bring out the sense of time slowly passing, yet the past constantly receding from us:

Slow days passing, accumulating, –
How distant they are,
The things of the past!

His use of “passing, accumulating” emphasizes the feeling of the slowness of the day that one gets with the lengthening of days in spring, and it increases the sense of time accumulating like dust in an attic, burying the past ever deeper.  He also lengthens in words the mention of the past (“How distant they are, / The things of the past!), where Buson has merely “The distant past.”  That lengthening also gives us the feeling inherent in the verse that the past — even the recent past — is gradually moving farther and farther away.

This is not hokku at its best, and if it were not for the sense of the length of the spring days, this hokku would be too “thoughty” for a verse form that excels in sensation and tends to avoid too much “thinking.”

Shiki, paradoxically, has a more concrete, if obvious, verse:

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sunahama ni   ashiato nagaki   haruhi kana
Sandy-beach on  footsteps long   spring-day kana

On the sandy beach,
A long line of footsteps;
The spring day.

The length of the spring day is reflected in the length of the line of footsteps that parallel the surf and extend beyond the range of sight.  I have chosen to use “long” to modify the footsteps, which is a more subtle way of expressing the length of the spring day for those familiar with hokku.

Blyth, however, chose to use “long” to modify the spring day in his version, making the point of the verse more obvious to Westerners, but less subtle:

On the sandy beach,
Footprints:
Long is the spring day.

In both, however, the emphasis is on the feeling of the feeling of the slowness of time one gets as the days of spring lengthen.

If you wonder why Blyth sometimes tends to make his hokku translations more detailed than they are in the originals, it is because his purpose in writing was to introduce Westerners not only to hokku (which, unfortunately, he called “haiku” in his day), but also to the very different (from Western verse) aesthetic sense behind hokku.

Sadly, Westerners usually just read the verses in Blyth’s books and seem to have ignored or glossed over his important explanations of the aesthetics behind them.   That failure contributed to the confusion that arose in the so-called “haiku movement,” which began in the West in the 1960s — a confusion and disarray that continues to this day, because the Western haiku movement never learned the aesthetic principles necessary for continuing the practice of hokku in the modern world.  That is why “haiku” today is generally something quite unlike hokku, even though often superficially similar in outward appearance.

David

I am currently in the process of having my last book, A Time of Ghosts, formatted as an ebook, which should make it available much more inexpensively than the previously printed edition (it is currently out of print).  I hope the process goes well, and if it does, it should be available soon.  I will keep you posted.

Here is a preview chapter.

It is copyrighted, so if you want to use any of it elsewhere, please ask first.

CHAPTER ONE:  THE HOUSE OF SORROWS

I was born in the doorway between two worlds. The old China — the China of emperors and mandarins, of bound feet and marvels — had long been dying but was not yet dead. The new China — its coming anticipated with both hope and fear — was not yet born.

It happened in the great house of many rooms that the Emperor himself had given my grandfather many years before — a place where only the faintest of curtains separated the living and the dead.

My first memory is of ghosts. I was three or four years old. Near sunset on a spring day I went alone into my parents’ bedroom to use the chamber pot. As I sat there, a sudden chill filled the air, and I was seized by a mingled sensation of emptiness and loneliness. At the same time I felt someone watching me from behind, though my back was to the wall. I turned my head to the right and looked over my shoulder at the surface of whitewashed brick.

Out of the flat wall popped two figures in the flowing garments of a hundred years before. They passed behind me, floating half-in, half-out of the wall, in total silence. I jerked my head to the left as they reached that side. Yes, there were two of them. They were facing the wall now, and the one nearest reached back and out toward me, gesturing and grasping like a woman urging a hesitant child to take her hand and follow.

I screamed in horror and ran from the room shrieking and weeping. My family pretended not to believe me. My aunt, in spite of my terror, led me back into the room, where nothing was visible but two large, black spiders on the wall. “See there!” she laughed, “Only two harmless spiders, and you imagined that they were strange creatures!” But there was uneasiness in her forced ridicule. Though I was only a small child, I was not timid. Spiders did not scare me. And I knew it was not spiders that I had seen.

I soon fell ill with a burning fever, and a drastic change came over me. I often lost consciousness, but conscious or unconscious, my mouth muttered on and on in a voice not mine — a voice with the depth and vocabulary of an adult.

My father was beside himself, and took me to a well-known Chinese doctor who had studied Western medicine. Trained in the science of Europe, he examined me carefully but found no reason for the mysterious fever. Finally he admitted that he had never seen anything like it, and could do nothing. He did, however, refer my father to an odd individual schooled in traditional Chinese herbal medicine. And he told my parents that he had verified the Herb Doctor’s trustworthiness in the following way: He visited him as an ordinary patient complaining of illness, and requested an examination and a prescription. The Herb Doctor performed a thorough check, and declared his system to be in harmonious balance with nothing wrong. The Western-trained doctor, however, demanded a prescription for his “illness.” The Herb Doctor refused. The patient then requested a re-examination, but the result was the same — nothing was wrong, and no prescription was given. On further insistence, a third examination was performed, and still nothing was found amiss, and the Herb Doctor absolutely refused to prescribe for a non-existent problem.

Had the herbalist been a fake or unreliable, he would have taken up brush and ink to write a prescription, and would have charged a sizable fee. It would have been an easy thing to do at the urging of an irritated patient. But he was tested three times and preserved his honesty. That is why the “Western” doctor felt confident in recommending him to my parents.

I was quickly taken to the Herb Doctor’s modest home, where he received his patients. His name was Ch’ing Yu Chou, and he was striking and unusual in appearance. He wore the robes of a Chinese scholar, yet in a careless manner. The backs of his shoes had been pushed down through slipping them on and off repeatedly, until they flattened permanently and flapped like slippers when he walked.

By conventional standards his face was ugly — the skin dark and heavily wrinkled, the jowls and chin sagging like those of a dog. His head was pointed and bald, except for a few wisps of hair that clung to the edges. His two front teeth were unusually long, and set amid an unpleasant assortment of neglected and discolored neighbors. That remarkable head perched atop an extremely skinny body.

He examined me intently. My fever, he concluded, was the result of the terror of my experience. My soul had flown from the body, and a ghost had taken its place. That explained the strange adult voice and words coming from the small mouth of a child. It was time for the treatment. He reached out a clawed hand with nails some three inches long, and dipping an extended nail first into one small bottle and removing some powder, then into another from which he extracted a different powder, he prepared a mixture that he folded into a small paper packet. He said it was to be administered with the milk of a human, obtained from a woman who sold her own for such purpose.

The unusual medicine was fed to me while I was unconscious, still gabbling on in a man’s voice. As I lay writhing, head filled with nightmares, I suddenly screamed loudly. At that moment the invading presence left me and I felt the intense heat of the fever rapidly dissipated by a refreshing coolness that spread slowly throughout my body. The strange doctor had cured me. My father was so overwhelmed with gratitude that he gave Ch’ing Yu Chou, the odd Herb Doctor, a permanent dwelling in our family mansion, and with it financial support and friendship for life.

* * *

Mine was not the first strange experience in that great house. My grandfather was a military general of Manchu warrior lineage. He had a violent temper, yet could be kind and softhearted. Strongly built, with broad shoulders and heavy eyebrows, he wore the traditional robe and round cap, and his long, braided pigtail hung down behind as was customary in the latter days of the Ch’ing Dynasty. His mansion, in which I spent my childhood, was a large, white-plastered brick structure with a tiled roof. It lay on the Pearl River in the northern part of the city of Canton.

I have said that the Emperor gave it to him, and though officially true, it is not the whole truth. It really came to him through the wiles of the evil old Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, the real ruler of China, whose hands were stained with the blood of many.

At that time my grandfather was part of the aristocracy in the north of China. The Imperial Court of those days was a nightmarish drama of greed and lust for power, and Tzu Hsi, like a wicked puppeteer, held strings connected to all the secret places of the Forbidden City in Peking. Even the emperor Kuang Hsu danced at her will, and when his mouth moved it was the wishes of Tzu Hsi that were heard.

My grandfather had no stomach for her black designs, and she knew it. The Empress sniffed the air constantly for the slightest whiff of revolt, and feared that my grandfather owed his allegiance more to the puppet Emperor than to her. Consequently she contrived to remove him a safe distance from the capitol. He was informed that for “years of loyalty to the Emperor” he was to be given a fine mansion in the city of Canton, far in the South.

An imperial gift could not be refused, so there was no choice but to leave Peking. Tzu Hsi thus succeeded in banishing my grandfather under the guise of imperial benevolence, but her evil plans for him did not end there. Something far more sinister was to come — the mansion. There was something very wrong with it.

My grandfather soon heard fragments of a grim story. When given to my family, the house had lain empty for some two years. Previously it had been the residence of a high official who had initially supported the wicked Dowager Empress in her plot to keep her son, the Emperor, weak and subservient. But for some reason the former owner changed allegiance, and was quickly perceived as a threat to Tzu Hsi’s power.

The Empress, who seemed to know everything whispered in the shadows, struck quickly and violently. The official was executed in Peking, and all his family in Canton –relatives, children, even servants — were given the “imperial favor” of dying at the hands of soldiers or of committing suicide as the soldiers watched.

The mansion became a scene of unspeakable gruesomeness as soldiers stabbed weeping women and children, while other unfortunates fell on their own knives, hanged themselves, or jumped to their deaths down the deep well in the inner garden. That was the house of suffering and sorrow that Tzu Hsi gave smilingly to my father, knowing he had no choice but to accept.

On the day my grandfather came to officially claim the mansion, he was borne in a palanquin carried by four men. A fearsome guard with a sword led the way. At the rear came ten others, carrying household possessions.

When the procession reached the outer gate, Grandfather got out of the palanquin and prepared to ceremonially enter the house as its new master. But he took only a few steps and halted in amazement. There on the road in front of the gate was a sewer grating, and on the curbstone beside it sat two uncanny creatures, like shrunken, shriveled old men, with outsized heads on tiny bodies with unnaturally small limbs. They were no more than two and one-half feet tall. Each had a palm leaf in his hand, and with these they waved my grandfather away, as if saying “Go back! Go back! Go back!” Even stranger, he found that only he could see them.

When he recovered his composure he addressed them politely, asking leave to pass. Still they motioned him away. Finally he lost patience and pushed forward. It was as though he walked into an invisible wall. He stumbled and fell, hurting his leg. But he was, as I have said, a man of violent temper and a general, and not to be dissuaded from his path, not even by big-headed ghosts. He managed somehow to get to his feet and awkwardly limped into the house, thus completing the ceremony of ownership.

When he came to the mansion a second time, the strange creatures again blocked his path, waving him away. Having already had his pride offended, he drew a large scimitar and struck at them. He succeeded only in damaging the valuable weapon, which also had been a gift from the Emperor. To harm an imperial gift was considered exceedingly shameful, and presaged ill fortune.

Grandfather, however, being headstrong and proud, was so furious and wrought-up that he planned a great defiance of the ghosts. He bought strings of big firecrackers and brought them on his third visit. There sat the strange, wizened creatures, waving him away. He hesitated not a moment, but lit the long strings of firecrackers and threw them directly at the ghosts. There was a great volley of sharp explosions, and my grandfather walked through the smoke and smell of burnt gunpowder and entered the house in triumph.

That night he fell ill. And as he slipped into an uneasy sleep, he had a peculiar dream. The creatures from the curbstone before the gate appeared to him, saying they had tried repeatedly to warn him away from the evil house. But not only had he ignored them, he had insulted them. So now they were departing, leaving him to his fate — his son would not live to carry on his name.

The illness never completely left my grandfather. At first he tried to forget the troubling dream, but disturbing events called it repeatedly to mind. His son — the Little Master — was only some four years old when odd things began to happen around him. Servants often heard him playing with someone, yet when they checked he was always alone. As he grew older they frequently heard him talking to another as he studied, but when they peeked in, no one was there but the Little Master.

Such strange happenings played so on the mind of my grandfather that he would not leave the child alone within the house, and when they went out he was always near the boy and always carried a sword. And then Grandfather ordered the well in the inner garden filled in. Too many strange sounds had been heard coming from it — weird voices, mutterings, whispering, singing, and sighing.

Time passed, but my grandfather did not relax his vigilance. The boy, now thirteen years old, practiced martial arts daily with a sword he kept hung high on a nail. One day after practice he went to return the weapon to its place. He had to stand on a stool to reach it.

There are two versions of what happened next. One says that as he reached up to hang the sword he slipped, and the nail-head, which somehow had become sharp, caught his hand and tore the skin as he fell. The other account, told by the servant who witnessed the event, says that as the boy stretched his arm up to hang his sword, a hand reached out of the wall, grabbed the lad’s wrist, and pulled his palm onto the sharp nail. The servant screamed and reached for the boy, but the Little Master slipped off the stool, the nail ripping his hand open as he fell.

It little matters which version is more accurate. The wound became terribly infected and the boy soon died of tetanus. My grandfather’s dark dream proved true. In spite of his great sorrow, my grandfather remained defiant. The ghosts dared to take his son? Then he would have another! And so within two years he adopted a young boy born to my aunt as his own.

* * *

A Chinese proverb states that no matter how great a family may be, its wealth will not outlast three generations. The life of the Herb Doctor, Ch’ing Yu Chou, who took up residence in our mansion, exemplified that.

He was born into a family of Manchu origin, descendants of the strongly-built warrior people who rode into China on horses and took the reins of power centuries before, initiating the Ch’ing Dynasty. For three generations his family had produced big, strong sons who became generals, military killers. The third-generation general, like those before him, was powerful and imperious, and had taken many lives. But when he produced an heir, the child was born premature and weak. And though the man had many wives, no more children were born to him.

So the aging general watched with concern as the sickly boy grew into his teens. Each year it became more obvious that the son had neither the strength nor the inclination for a general’s life. The old father found himself thinking about his own life. Looking back over the years that lay behind him like withered petals, what had his wealth and power really gained for him? Once he began such thinking, he could not stop. With growing uneasiness he recalled the men he had killed with his fierce strength, and he looked again at his gentle son. What would become of the boy in this vicious world?

At that moment something changed deeply and completely in the old general. He decided to abandon his riches and authority for the tattered robes of a Buddhist monk. He would live out his remaining days in a quiet monastery, where he hoped to find peace both in this life and the next. He gave his son in adoption to a Buddhist family and set out for a distant temple. There he had his head shaved and exchanged his fine silk garments for the coarse robes of a follower of the Enlightened One.

He had taken careful thought beforehand for his son’s future, making arrangements for his education in the art of herbal medicine at another temple so that the boy would have a vocation and could make his own way in the world.  His son thus began learning as a child the skills that would later save my life.

As the gentle, quiet boy grew into a young man, he found that he liked the peace and tranquility of monastic life. He thought to become a monk. The master of the temple, however, had long watched him closely, and told him plainly that he was not of the right material. The master had rightly discerned that the general’s son was homosexual, and consequently that it would not be good for him to live shut up in a community of men, any more than it would be advisable for a young heterosexual monk to live in a community of nuns. So though the young man liked the quiet, pious life of the monastery, he could no longer remain there.

Nonetheless, when he returned to the “World of Dust,” he lived in it much like a monk. In his childhood he had been surrounded by wealth and possessions. In the monastery he learned to do without. Now he was poor. But material things held no attraction for him, and he led a very simple life. His food, like that of monks, was vegetarian.

It seemed that none of the pride and aggressiveness of former generations lived on in him. If someone stepped on his foot, it was he who apologized. His behavior was like that of the third son in the old proverb:

A father asked each of his three sons what he would do if someone were to spit in his face. The first son replied, “I would say, ‘Please don’t do it. If you do it again I will fight.’” The second son answered, “I would take out a cloth and wipe the spit from my face.” But the third son replied, “I would just forget about it and let the spit dry on my face.”

The father did not approve the first answer because it revealed that the son took offense and was aggressive. He did not entirely approve the second answer because wiping away the spit showed that it was regarded as offensive. He approved the third son’s reply because it showed that no offense was felt and even the spit was not seen as repulsive. And that is how the Herb Doctor lived his life and conducted himself in human affairs.

Though he paid little attention to the condition of his clothing and did not bathe as often as some might have thought proper, he kept the Buddhist shrine in his room immaculately clean. There were always a few fresh flowers before the images of Shakyamuni and Kuan Yin. Shakyamuni is the historical Buddha who appeared in India. Kuan Yin is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, whose name means “The One Who Hears the Cries of the World.” Sometimes the flowers were gifts from grateful patients (he charged nothing for treatment, but accepted whatever was freely given); sometimes they were simple wild flowers he happened upon in his wanderings.

He spent much time in continuous repetition of the name of the Buddha Amitabha, noting each repetition by slipping another of the one hundred and eight beads on the string through his fingers. Often he sat lost for hours in meditation, his feet resting on his thighs in the lotus posture. It must have been restful and invigorating, because in our home he was always the latest to sleep and the earliest to rise.

Strange to say, he did have a wife. She was a girl who had been bought for him when he was young. She was given the chance to marry another when he went to study in the temple, but chose not to, and when he returned to the world they were married — a marriage never physically consummated.

* * *

Before the Herb Doctor could take up residence with us, there was still the matter of the house. Life could never be peaceful in a place so infested with tormented and malicious spirits. So he made ready to cleanse it and expel the ghosts.

First he went to the front of our dwelling. There he placed two sharp swords, which hung threateningly across the entrance. Then he moved to the center of the mansion, where on the house-post he suspended an old bag with a drawstring about its opening. Next he wrote many copies of a Taoist talismanic symbol. These he hung on all the walls. After that he cut up a great deal of paper into life-sized images of soldiers. Then he brushed a poem onto paper in black, fluid characters:

Unfair things have a reason;
If there is debt, a loaner exists.
Far, far away is Heaven;
So deep, deep, is Hell.
Your spirit may go wherever it will,
But trouble not the innocent.

And then he wrote another:

Good to good,
Bad to bad;
High is high,
Low is low;
Each returns to its origin.

He had everyone leave the house, being sure to close all the bedroom doors tightly. We watched as he seated himself in an open space in the garden, mumbling and mumbling incantation-like words.  As he muttered on and on, it seemed to my astonished eyes that the paper soldiers rose and stood vigilantly beside him.

All this took place on a calm and beautiful night. We were silent as he burned the papers on which he had written the poems. As they caught flame and flared up, I was jolted and frightened by a sudden crash of thunder. The quiet night turned almost instantly into a storm, and as rain began to pelt down there was a continuous, growling roll of thunder.

The Herb Doctor took a long, horsetail-like whisk, and with it he passed around the house, flicking the long hairs to and fro as he chanted. The spiritual force he created was so compelling that the evil spirits were driven to the entrance like leaves blown before the wind. There they met the swords. The gentler ghosts were pulled helplessly into the open bag on the central house-post. The Herb Doctor took the bag and pulled the drawstring tight. As he did so the thunder and rain ceased, and the night was tranquil again. A servant later told us that he saw blood on the swords across the house entrance. The doctor took the bag away, and we did not ask what became of it.

His final act on that strange night was to tell my grandparents that on the following day, they were to call Buddhist monks and nuns to the house. His instructions were followed, and for three days the air in the old mansion was filled with the chanting of sutras and dharanis to aid the tormented spirits in the other world.

Nine paper bridges were constructed and burned during the intoning of the texts to provide passage out of the nine levels of Hell. Paper money, clothes, and palanquins were burned as the monks and nuns prayed for the release of the suffering ghosts.

Now what is one to make of all this? I can only say that it did happen. I witnessed it, as did the others in the family. We can be modern and scientific and say that the ritual was performed for its psychological effect on us all. One may believe what one likes. But the fact is that from the night of the uncanny storm, all the strange sounds and apparitions within the house ceased, and one could feel that its unhealthy atmosphere had passed away. The living were now the only residents in the old mansion.

There is much more that one could say of the remarkable Ch’ing Yu Chou. I have called him the Herb Doctor for simplicity’s sake, though that was but one of his many skills. He was adept at calligraphy, music, poetry, and was in particular a great scholar of the I Ching, the Book of Changes, in which all that can happen in this world is set forth in the symbolic forms of trigrams and hexagrams. One who learns their transformations and mutations can accurately predict the future, though to do this is far more difficult than Western books on the subject would lead one to believe.

All the Herb Doctor’s learning was pervaded by a deeply Buddhist piety. This had a strong influence on my father, who was very impressed by his new-found friend’s freedom from bondage to self-importance and material possessions. The Herb Doctor treated life and its sorrows and joys as a temporary, passing show to which one should no more become attached than any sensible person would cling to the illusory images moving across a movie screen. One could see from his life that he had realized the significance of the old Chinese tale of the man who got what he wanted. This is the story in brief:

A poor man had just put his rice over the fire to cook when a sage appeared at his door. The two sat down and talked. “What would you like your life to be?” the sage asked. The poor man pondered, then replied that he could think of nothing more glorious than to be wealthy and powerful, surrounded by beautiful women. As he talked on, he suddenly found himself in completely different circumstances. The walls of his ramshackle hut faded and vanished, and he forgot all his years of poverty and discovered that he had become rich.

As time passed his wealth and power grew ever greater, and he experienced all the delights that money, authority, and possessions can bring. But as the years fell away, though it seemed that he had everything a man could want, still something seemed to be missing. He felt himself growing old. His body began to weaken, his senses lost their sharpness. Former delights could no longer please, and for newer pleasures he seemed pressed to find the strength.

Finally, as death drew inescapably near, he suddenly awoke in his own hut to the smell of rice cooked to perfection. He realized that it had all been a dream. All the years of his extravagant life — all the feelings, desires, and joys — everything had taken place during the time it took a pot of rice to cook.

Years later, after the Communists took control of China, my father worried about the uncertain future. He sadly warned the Herb Doctor that he was not sure he would be able to support him much longer. The old doctor was not the least disturbed. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Soon I shall have the means to support myself.” And it happened just that way. He was called by the Communists to become a professor of herbal medicine at the university.

I recall how my father once laughingly mentioned something the Herb Doctor had told him:

“Do you know what he said?” my father chuckled, “He told me that when he dies he will have a fine coffin and eight thousand people will attend his funeral!” He laughed again. “Actually, I think I will have to buy his coffin for him when the time comes!”

But things turned out precisely as the Herb Doctor predicted. He knew in advance the day of his death, just as very developed Buddhists are said to. And when that day came, he bathed and prepared himself and died quietly. And because he had become a very well known and highly respected university professor, eight thousand mourners attended his funeral.

And further, when this strange, kindly, self-effacing old man who had done so much good for me and for others was cremated, he had a final surprise for us. In his ashes were found sarira, the hard stone-like objects left behind when the bodies of great saints are burned.

*

Copyright David Coomler & Ruby Tang

It is, of course, a spring verse.  In the original (romanized) it is:

Shimajima ni   hi wo tomoshi-keri   haru no umi
Island-island on / lights wo lit have-been / spring ‘s sea

Translated very literally, it would be:

On every island,
Lights have been lit;
The spring sea.

Blyth, in his translation, actually improved the verse by changing “every island” to “islands far and near,” thereby adding visual depth, even though Shiki says nothing about “far and near.”  Blyth’s version:

The lights are lit
On the islands far and near:
The spring sea.

Blyth also permits a bit of ambiguity between completed action and progressive action.  Does Blyth’s The lights are lit mean “The lights have been lit and are burning?”  Or does it mean “The lights are being lit”?

I suspect Blyth’s answer would have been “Yes.”  He would include both meanings, leaving it to the reader to choose.

The original, however, indicates a completed action, so without taking liberties, I would probably translate it as

On every island
Lights have been lit;
The spring sea.

I would not say the effect, even though closer to the original, is better than Blyth’s rendering, however.  If I wanted to put it into English with Blyth’s improvement, I would make it

Lights being lit
On islands far and near;
The spring sea.

That gives us a progression similar to what we experience in Blyth’s version, letting us see all the scattered islands, and tiny lights appearing and multiplying in the dusk throughout the whole vista.

I often say that Shiki really did little to hokku except to forbid it being used as the beginning of a linked sequence, and to advocate a more superficial style; yet even in his aesthetics in practice, one can find traces of what preceded his “reforms.”  In this verse we can see that the action does fit spring, even though Shiki may not himself have consciously realized the implications of what he was writing, as he tried so publicly to leave old traditions behind.

In any case, seen as hokku, the verse would indicate the growing Yang energies of spring, because even though the verse takes place at dusk, which is a Yin time of day, we see the appearance and gradual spread and multiplication of dots of light (increasing Yang) on each island in the growing darkness.  So the appearing and spreading points of light are in harmony with the gradual increase of Yang energies in spring.

The  setting of the verse also shows us the importance of season on the effect of a hokku.  Shiki made it:

Haru no umi — The spring sea.

The verse would have quite a different effect if set in other seasons.

David

One cannot help pondering that when reading the poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(1821-1873), particularly his And Change with Hurried Hand.  He is not as “poetic” a writer as those generally found in the standard anthologies, and I would be surprised if most of you have even heard his name.  He has that “Victorian” sound in his verse, but with a touch of wildness to it.  I will discuss it in parts, but we may begin by saying that Tuckerman looks at the landscape surrounding him and realizes how greatly it has changed.  Imagine how astounded he would be to see what has become of this country in our much later time!

And change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;

He tells us that change has all too quickly altered the landscape.  The trees — the forest — that once was there is gone; there is no more hunter’s trail, no animal path along which to lay traps, and the evergreen-filled swamps that once were there are gone, dried up as their trees were lost to fire; whether by “burning over,” or whether the trees were cut for fireplaces, he does not tell us.  But we know that many swamps –like the Limberlost in Indiana (once covering some 13,000 acres) were lost because their trees were cut for lumber, and others were deliberately burned over and drained.  It has taken many generations for humans to begin to appreciate the need for natural wetlands.

Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk.  In golden umbrage shut,
The Indian river runs, Quonectacut! 

He tries to imagine the place as it once was:  the hills golden and red and brown with vast autumn forests; wild doves in the trees, wild deer stepping along their trails.  And through banks shaded by trees golden with autumn runs the river as it was — an Indian (Native American) river with an Indian name — Quonectacut.  This is the Connecticut river that rises near the Canadian border, and flows south through New England and through Tuckerman’s own Massachusetts, emptying eventually into Long Island Sound. But to the original inhabitants it was Quonectacut — “The Long River.”

Tuckerman continues imagining the landscape as it was:

Here, but a lifetime back, where falls tonight
Behind the curtained pane a sheltered light
On buds of rose or vase of violet
Aloft upon the marble mantel set,
Here in the f0rest-heart, hung blackening
The wolfbait on the bush beside the spring. 

“But a lifetime back” — Only a human lifetime before, there was no house with its marble-mantled fireplace. its “Victorian” furnishings and its curtained windows letting in a few rays of light to shine upon rose buds or violets set in vase atop the mantle.    Instead of the house, there was only the deep, shadowed heart of the ancient forest, and among the trees a spring beside which stood a bush holding bait (meat) to catch or poison wolves — an odd and unpleasant, but effective, way of conveying in words the wildness of the land at that time.

The speed of change that once seemed rapid to Tuckerman has now gained a dizzying pace, requiring constant adjustment on the part of humans who once saw little change in centuries.

I sometimes think what an amazing place North America must have been when Europeans first happened upon it.  Seemingly endless woodlands and grasslands, great herds of bison, flights of birds that would darken the sky in passing.

The Salinas Valley, about which John Steinbeck wrote so eloquently in the beginning of his novel East of Eden, holds some of the finest agricultural land in the West.  Now, however, its water table has been polluted with artificial fertilizer nitrates, and each year more and more of the valley is covered in housing developments and shopping malls.

It is appalling to read what humans are doing to the earth for money.  Radioactive pollution of water, air and soil from nuclear energy, and now fracking, which shatters subsurface rocks and disturbs and pollutes the water table to toxic levels.  One could go on and on.  But the really sad thing is that humans continue to behave as though consumerism is not an ever-increasing self-destructive spiral, and they continue to treat the natural world, in our oil and gas addicted society, as if it is merely something to be utilized and turned into cash by any means possible, and not the very source of our existence and our only means of survival.

David

We might also note that a strong theme in both Dowson and Dylan Thomas was a focus on youth as a golden time from which they did not really want to part.  Carl Jung, the Swiss psychotherapist, developed the theory of the Puer Aeternus, the “eternal child,” — we might also think of it as “perpetual child” — a man who cannot quite make the psychological transition from childhood to genuine adulthood, and consequently lives life in a reckless and often dangerous way, and frequently dies young as a consequence.  Such people behave as though they are invulnerable.

A classic example in literature, according to Jung’s student Marie-Louise von Franz, is the character of the Little Prince,  in the the popular story of the same name by  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — an author and adventurer who also drank too much and took too many risks, and again died rather young, at age 44.

I had my own experience of a Puer Aeternus in a young man I met many years ago. I recall how together we went to see Crater Lake, in Oregon, which is a very deep and  blue lake in the caldera of an ancient volcano.  There was a protective wall marking off the viewing area at the high edge of the crater, but this young fellow climbed over the wall and walked some distance down a slope of loose rubble just above a sheer drop of several hundred feet into the caldera.  When I saw him climbing over the wall onto that unstable and slippery edge, it made me extremely uncomfortable, and I urged him again and again to come back, but he refused; he had to go peek over, closer to the very edge.  Fortunately he survived that day, and managed to climb back to safety (but only after he had done as he wished) without falling to his death.  But this risky behavior, I gradually found as I got to know him better, manifested in other ways in his life as well, and within about three years he was dead.  I always think of him whenever I hear the term Puer Aeternus.

This poem by Ernest Dowson shows us a view of life through the eyes of such a person.  It is titled in French: La Jeunesse N’a Qu’un Temps.  It means literally, “Youth Has But One Time.”  In other words, youth only happens once, never to be repeated.  That is the constant refrain of this poem:

Swiftly passes youth away
Night is coming, fades the day,
All things turn to sombre grey

This reminds one of the beginning of the poem by Lorenzo de’ Medici:

How beautiful is youth
Which nonetheless is fleeting…

Notice how Dowson sees nothing between the time of youth and the time of death.  Youth quickly passes, only to be replaced by the end of day (the end of life) and death (All things turn to sombre grey).

Pass the cup and drink, friends, deep
Roses upon roses heap,
Soon it will be time to sleep.

This is precisely the attitude of the “Eternal Child”;  youth is short and already passing, so, as is said in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 15:32, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (Soon it will be time to sleep).  And we know what this life of excess did for and to Dowson.

Man, poor man, is born to die,
Love and all things fair will fly;
Fill the cup and drain it dry.

This is the same “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die” sentiment, and it is repeated in the next two stanzas:

Make ye merry, while ye may;
Snatch the sweetness of the day,
Pluck life’s pleasures while they stay.

When our youth has taken flight,
When the day is lost in night,
There can be no more delight.

Then comes the last stanza, a rather black and bleak drinking toast:

Here’s a glass to memory
Here’s to death and vanity,
Here’s a glass to you and me.

The memory of youth and happiness, the anticipation of death, the realization that all of life seems pointless and vain, and that all of this applies “to you and me” — such hopelessness is the despairing attitude of the perpetual child, the Puer Aeternus, who like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up — but who, unlike Peter Pan, has to try to live in the real world, but cannot adjust.

It is a sad tale, and a caution that we should learn to recognize that there is life after youth.  If one does not learn this in good time, it is all too easy to fall into the hedonistic and fatalistic trap that caught Dowson and has similarly caught many other sensitive young people who have trouble making the transition from youth to adulthood.

David

The seasons are essential to hokku, one of its defining characteristics.  Every hokku is set in a particular season, whether it is an old Japanese hokku or a new English-language hokku.

The difference in method between old and new is this:

In old Japanese hokku, season was indicated by a “season word” that automatically indicated a particular seasonal setting.  Unfortunately, this system, over time, became very artificial and cumbersome, requiring elaborately long lists of words and the seasons they indicate, as well as years of study on the part of writers and educated readers, in order to use and understand those words correctly.

In modern English-language hokku, we keep the all-important connection of a hokku with a particular season, but we no longer use long lists of often artificial-seeming season words.  Instead, each hokku is marked with the season in which it is written.  Then when it is shared with others or published, that seasonal categorization goes along with it.

What that means, in practical use, is that instead of the whole book of season words and their meanings required for old hokku, the writer and reader of modern hokku now only has to know the standard four seasons:  spring, summer, autumn/fall, and winter.  It takes away the artificiality and the cumbersomeness and the years of study necessary for writing and reading old hokku, and makes it all very free and practical, yet it is still completely in keeping with the spirit of old hokku that requires it be connected to a season.

Perhaps you have noticed that generally, when I discuss old hokku here, I mention the seasons to which they belong.  And perhaps you have noticed that I usually discuss spring hokku in the springtime, summer hokku in summer, autumn hokku in autumn, and winter hokku in winter.  That too is a part of the old hokku tradition.  So hokku are to be both written and read in their appropriate seasons.  The only common exception is when out-of-season hokku are used for educational purposes.  The rest of the time we read and write a hokku within its correct season.  The aesthetic principle behind that practice is that it keeps us in harmony with what is happening in Nature.  It also prevents the awkwardness and inappropriateness an aesthetically-educated hokku enthusiast senses on reading an out-of-season verse, the same kind of awkwardness one feels when one sees Christmas lights up in July, or Halloween decorations in the spring.

Our modern practice also, I may add, is often an aid in translating old hokku without awkwardness.  For example, here is a spring hokku by Shōha:

Asa kochi ni   tako uru mise wo  hiraki keri
Morning east-wind at/ kite sell shop wo /open has

If we try to put that in English, we find a problem.  A ko-chi is literally an “east wind.”  But kochi — “east wind” — is also a season word indicating spring.  So under the “old” system we would have to include all of the following as the setting of the hokku in translation:

A morning spring wind

R. H. Blyth, in his translation of Shōha, includes all of that in this order:

A spring breeze this morning:

That makes the first line of the hokku awkwardly long, even though Blyth accurately conveyed the overall meaning (avoiding the literalness of “east wind,” which Western readers would not recognize as a spring season word).

(Photo credit: adhocbot)

In modern English-language hokku, however, our categorization of each hokku avoids that problem, because Shōha’s verse would appear under its seasonal heading, like this:

Spring

The morning breeze;
A shop selling kites
Has opened.

The seasonal indication, which must be included within the old hokku, is instead present as the seasonal categorization preceding the hokku in the new system.

A sequence of several spring hokku by the same or various authors would have the seasonal categorization at the beginning of the sequence, so that readers would know automatically that all the hokku in the sequence are set in spring.

As for the significance of Shōha’s “Morning breeze” hokku, it indicates a unity between Nature and human activity.  It is somewhat the opposite of the “If you build it, they will come” used in the movie Field of Dreams.  In this case, it is, “If the spring wind blows, a kite shop will open.”  It is like “When the weather warms in spring, flowers will bloom.”  The combination of the breeze and the shop opening gives us a feeling of the activity of spring — of the Yang (active) aspect of Nature increasing, as yin (passive) decreases.

David

What do I mean by “level” in hokku?  Put very simply, some verses, however pleasant they may be, are little more than illustrations, “pictures” in words.  In others, however, one has the feeling that there is more going on in the verse than is stated in words.  There is a feeling of hidden “depth.”

Hokku with “depth” were appreciated through most of the history of hokku.  But near the end of the 19th century, with the “reforms” of Shiki, verses became more and more like “pictures,” without depth.  Everything was on the surface, so we speak of such verses as “superficial,” even though they may still be pleasing.

Shiki was a great admirer of the earlier writer Buson, who was a painter as well as a composer of hokku.  But even Buson came up with verses with “depth,” while those of Shiki himself tend to be superficial, to be little more than pleasant illustrations.  I often compare hokku of this kind to those attractive Japanese woodblock prints one finds by Hasui and Yoshida.  It does not mean they are bad, it just means that they lack depth.

Here, for example, is a “spring” verse by Shiki:

Spring rain;
Holding an umbrella,
Looking at picture books in a shop.

You have to picture a man standing just inside one of those old-fashioned, Japanese open-fronted book shops, looking at the books laid out flat on tables as he holds the kind of paper-and-bamboo umbrella that used to be typical of that time and place.  This verse is a “picture,” with not much more in it than that.

If we look at another spring verse of approximately the same late period, we find that even though it is written by someone else, in this case Otsuji, we still get a kind of illustration:

(Photo credit: slworking2)

Spring rain;
Seen between the trees –
A path to the sea.

It is pleasant and quiet and undemanding, and though we may think at first that it too is only an illustration, notice that we at least feel behind it the vastness and power of the (hidden) sea.  So while it is still largely a “picture,” it is less superficial than the verse by Shiki.

Now we can turn to the person Shiki so admired — Buson — who lived in the 18th instead of the 19th-20th century:

Bags of seeds
Becoming soaked;
The spring rain.

To the novice, that might seem to be little different from the other two verses, but really it is worlds apart.  Like them, it is an event in spring, but in this case we sense the power inherent in the bags of seeds, and we know that the spring rain is going to affect them if they are left in it for long; they are going to begin to swell and sprout with abundant new life.  So even without it being said, we feel a kind of hidden power in this verse, something “big” going on that is not even mentioned in the words of the verse.  That unspoken part of a hokku, which is really all the better for being left unspoken, is what gives depth.  In Buson’s verse we really feel the nature and character of spring, which we do not in the other two.

Of course not all hokku are quite that obvious.  In general we can say, however, that older hokku tend to have more depth than verses written after Shiki’s propaganda urged writers to make “sketches from life.”  And of course Shiki liked to call those “new” verses by a different name — “haiku,” even though they were still essentially hokku in form and often in content.

It is useful, then for the student of hokku to look through lots of old hokku, comparing them to see which have a sense of depth, and which are just “pictures” in words, with little beyond that.  The key to determining depth is to look for something unspoken in the hokku, for something beyond what is actually written.  If it is not there, the hokku — like the first example by Shiki, is superficial, no matter how pleasant it may be otherwise.

David

SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, I shall deal with it part by part:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

First, Hopkins tell us that nothing is as beautiful as spring.  It is the time when green weeds shoot up long and lovely and thickly through old wheels — at least that is the simple, straightforward explanation.  Why wheels?  Because Hopkins still lived in the time of the wooden-spoked wheels common on wagons and carriages, and in the countryside around farmyards, it was common to see a large old wheel leaning against an outbuilding or lying on the ground.

An alternative explanation one often reads (found in Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Paul L. Mariani) opines that by “weeds, in wheels,” Hopkins meant the stalks of the plant known as Solomon’s Seal, the flowers of which “hang down at intervals of several inches, bending the stem into an arc so that they ‘look so much like the spokes of a wheel.’”  I have to say that I find this alternative explanation completely unconvincing, because the ordinary Solomon’s Seal, with which gardeners are familiar, looks nothing at all like a wheel, even when bent in its natural arc.

However, I would propose, as a more likely alternative, the rather esoteric possibility that Hopkins could indeed have been referring to the Solomon’s Seal, but not at all the kind (Polygonum multiflorum) interpreters assume, which grows in a sideways arc.  Instead, I would suggest a particular and lesser-known variety of Solomon’s Seal that grows wild in parts of Wales (Hopkins spent considerable time there).   It is Polygonum verticillatum, or  ”Whorled Solomon’s Seal.”  It is an

“Weeds, in wheels” –Whorled Solomon’s Seal / Polygonum verticillatum
Picture by Andrea Moro / Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università di Trieste

unusual kind of Solomon’s Seal that does not grow in an arc, but rather grows upright on a long, straight stalk.  The notable thing about it is that, somewhat like the horsetail rush, the upright stalk has whorls of thin green leaves spaced at intervals along its height, so that it would fit precisely the notion of “weeds, in wheels, that shoot long and lovely and lush,” if one uses the term “weeds” with a bit of poetic license to mean the wild Whorled Solomon’s Seal.  The green whorls would be the “wheels.”  Now obviously, it would be extremely unlikely for anyone reading the poem to make that jump of association, unless he or she were familiar with the wild flora of Wales; there is certainly nothing else in the poem to indicate it.  So one may opt for the more natural-seeming “old wooden wheels” explanation, if one wishes, even though the possibility remains that Hopkins may have really intended a reference to Polygonum verticillatum.

Thrush nest (Photo credit: nottsexminer)

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

A thrush is a small bird.  Its eggs, which one sees in its spring nest in low bushes or in trees, are a bright, turquoise blue (with a few small black speckles); that is why they look like “little low heavens,” that is, they look like the blue sky come down to earth.  The song of the thrush, heard echoing through the forest trees (timber), is so sweet and pure that it seems to cleanse the ears.  Hopkins uses laundry words — “rinse” and wring” to indicate this, but he just means that hearing it has  a “clean” and pure effect on the ear.  Because of that, it’s song seems to strike the ear like lightening, with the surprise of freshness and suddenness.  Note the emphasis on cleanness and purity, which is a major theme of the poem, and a characteristic, in it, of spring.

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness:

By “glassy,” Hopkins means “shiny and glossy.”  the new leaves and the blossoms of the pear tree seem to brush the blue spring sky that forms their background, “the descending blue.”

“All in a rush with richness” — now that winter has passed; suddenly, “all in a rush” the sky becomes a rich, deep blue.

… the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

The spring lambs leaping and playing also have “fair their fling,” their own beautiful time to exult in spring by their gamboling, their playful leaping about.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.

What is all this freshness, the new sap in tree and leaf, the life-giving rush of  similar “juice” in grasses and weeds, all the joy and gladness that spring brings to humans and other creatures?  It is a “strain,” a kind of related descendant, of “earth’s sweet being in the beginning in Eden garden.”  It is all that is left of the purity and sweetness of the “Garden of Eden,” of the earth at the Creation (in traditional Christian teaching), before the Fall of Man (again in Christian teaching) destroyed all that purity and joy.  So Hopkins presents us with Nature in spring as an example of divine purity, But as we shall see, he worries that it is all to be spoiled.

And now we come to the most difficult part of the poem, difficult because Hopkins’ language here is so garbled and obscure in syntax.  We should not blame the reader for this — it is just that Hopkins’ liking for odd phrasings got so out of hand in these last lines that the result is confused obscurity.  As responsible readers, we should not pretend that they are perfectly clear when they obviously are not; nor should we suppose that there is any virtue in such a lack of clarity, which cannot be defended here as a poetic effect, as it can be in other poems by Hopkins.  It is simply a flaw in the poem.  Hopkins was not infallible.

For what it is worth, here is how I untangle it:

—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

If one understands these lines as the poet first speaking to ordinary people, and in the last line speaking to Jesus (Christ), then one would understand it to mean this:

Spring, in all its freshness and life and beauty, offers humans a last trace and remainder of the pure earth before the fall, and consequently it is an aspect of the heavenly, of Christ.  Therefore, Hopkins urges people to have that pure “Christ” essence found in spring, to get it while it is fresh and new, before it changes and loses its appeal.  Get it before it clouds and obscures Christ (lord), before the human tendency to sin sours the innocent minds of girls and boys, and therefore sours Mayday (not only the literal day, but also that pure experience of spring).  And most of all, people should get it before its “fall” from that initial freshness and purity affects their choosing of Christ over sinning (and here Hopkins addresses Jesus — “before it sours THY choice” — before it ruins people’s ability to choose Christ and heaven, — the only choice (in Hopkins’ view) that is “worthy of”  (worth) winning.

So I would loosely paraphrase the last lines like this:

Have, get it, before our sinning makes it go bad,
Before wrong actions and thoughts sour and darken the innocent minds and Mayday for boys and girls –
Above all, Son of the Virgin (maid) Mary, before its souring prevents them from choosing you, the only  choice worth making, the prize worth winning.

That is very much in keeping with Hopkins’ Roman Catholic view of sin and its effects, and May was particularly meaningful to him as the month in which Catholics honor Mary.  But is that interpretation what Hopkins intended?  I think it is close, but in these last lines he has stated his view so confusedly that his precise meaning is likely forever obscured.

There is a slightly different, alternative explanation found in some sources, which treats the last four lines as all being in the “vocative” in relation to Christ, that is, understanding them to be addressing Christ only.  If one follows that interpretation, then it would go like this, in paraphrase:

—O Christ, O lord, have and get this period of freshness and innocence in humans before it goes bad,
Before sinning clouds both  the innocent minds of girls and boys and May Day (both the day and the time of youth);
And most of all, O son of the virgin Mary, get them before sin clouds/affects your choice of them (as your followers), because they are worth your winning them (as Christians).

That latter interpretation seems unlikely and rather forced to me, but I present it here as one found in various sources.

In any case, the obscurity of phrasing that leads to such variations in interpretation should be a good lesson to poets not to let their poetic license get so far out of hand that it makes their writing near incoherent.  The result, in this case, is that the simpler bulk of the poem (excepting the “weeds in wheels” uncertainty) tends to be spoiled by its nearly indecipherable ending.

Hopkins was often good in composition, but not always great, and sometimes made bad choices (in life, as well as in poetry).

David

It is also essential that we look at a segment of a much earlier poem by the English poet  (born in Wales) George Herbert (1593-1633), who ended his work The Size with these lines:

Then close again the seam
Which thou has open’d: do not spread thy robe
In hope of great things.  Call to minde thy dream,
And earthly globe,
On whose meridian was engraven,
These seas are tears, and heav’n the haven.

Herbert’s poem, in essence, advises the ordinary person not to expect material happiness in this world, but rather to accept lack of material things in this life so that there might be spiritual rewards in the next.  He says one should not expect joys both in this world and in heaven, because even God (incarnated as Jesus) “was hungrie (hungry) here” (during his lifetime in this world).

So from Herbert’s poem, we should take the notion that to enjoy the pleasures of heaven one must give up material pleasures and strong joys on this earth.  It is an old concept — “self-denial,” — and it is on that notion that Gerard Manley Hopkins based this, one of his best-known poems.  Hopkins even took the title of his poem from the last line of Herbert’s poem: Heaven-Haven.

Hopkins’ poem has as its preface the words “A nun takes the veil,” meaning a young woman commits herself to a lifetime as a nun, leaving the “world” and its pleasures behind in hope of joy in heaven, just as Herbert had advised.  This world, as written in The Size, is nothing but “seas of tears,” and a person on his or her voyage of life through those seas will only find a quiet haven in heaven.  That is the view common to both poems, that of Herbert and that of Hopkins, based on Herbert.

So now you understand Hopkins’ poem before you have even read it; but let’s take a look nonetheless:

Heaven—Haven 

A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be 
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

 We shall approach it part by part.  

The poem is spoken by the nun who is taking the veil, choosing to spend her life as a “bride of Christ.”  She tells us why she is doing it.  She has decided to “leave this world,” to go “where springs not fail,” which is Hopkinsese for “where springs do not fail.”  In the New Testament, water is a symbol of the spiritual and genuine life.  We understand why springs are mentioned by Hopkins (which were also mentioned earlier in Herbert’s poem) when we look at the words of Jesus to the “woman at the well” in the Gospel attributed to John (13-14):

“Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

So in this material world, the springs from which we drink fail, and do not permanently satisfy.  It is only the “waters of life” — of spirituality — that  do “not fail,” and that is what the woman in Hopkins’ poem is seeking.

She wants to go to “fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,” to a place away from the harsh and painful storms of earthly life, where one is no longer subject to the unpleasant hazards and unhappinesses (hailstones are sometimes rounded, but also can be angular, pyramidal, flat, etc. — “sharp-sided,” or in Hopkinsese, “sharp and sided”).  Thinking of heaven as “fields” is a concept as old as the ancient Greeks, with their Elysian Fields.

“And a few lilies blow.”

(Photo credit: Wikipedia

These words are often misunderstood simply because word usage comes into and goes out of fashion over time.  ”Blow” is the critical word.  Here it is used in the old sense, meaning “to bloom.”  So the woman leaving the world is saying she wants fields where a few lilies bloom.  She is not saying she wants lilies blowing in the wind.  Lilies are old symbols of purity in Christianity, and the fact that the nun says “a few” is an indication of her modesty and “ascetic” expectations.  She does not expect whole fields of them — just a few, which we may think of as modest pleasures of purity and spirituality.

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.

In that stanza Hopkins directly addresses the statement of George Herbert:

“These seas are tears, and heav’n the haven.”

The nun speaking says (remember the hail?) that she has asked to be in a place “where no storms come.”  We should recall the old days of sailing ships, when to be caught in a storm at sea (here the “sea of life”) was dangerous and violent.  At such a time, a ship would seek a haven, a port out of the reach of the violence of the waves.  But our nun is not looking for “any old port in a storm.”  The haven she seeks is heaven, a place where “no storms come.”

It is a place where “the green swell,” meaning the rising and falling waves of the sea of life, are “in the havens dumb.”  ”Dumb” here is used in its old sense of “silent,” and it modifies not “havens,” but rather “the green swells.”  Put into modern English it would be, “Where the green, swelling waves are quiet in the havens.”  In a haven, the great waves found on the sea become small and calm, because the haven is a port, like a bay, that offers a ship protection, a place “out of the swing of the sea,” out of the great motions and upheavals and risings and fallings of the waves on the open sea.

So in essence, “Heaven-Haven” is a brief poem about a nun who “takes the veil” permanently, joining convent life and leaving the temporary pleasures and many pains of the material life behind in hope of the simple and pure and protected joys of the spiritual life, ultimately of heaven.  One cannot, she believes (as Mary told Bernadette in the story of the apparitions at Lourdes), be happy both in this world and the next.  So our nun is giving up this life for her humble hopes of joy in the next life.

Well, that is the religiously romantic view of things, and it is the view Hopkins had as a convert to Catholicism.  He had a rather miserable life after conversion and becoming a Jesuit, and he must have often told himself, when in the depths of depression, that one should not expect to be happy in this world, only in the next.

The poem takes on a rather darker face when seen against the backdrop of Hopkins’ own unhappy religious life, but the poems we read are also affected by our own personal experiences in life.

For me, Heaven-Haven will always remind me of a sunny day in my college years, when I stopped at a Carmelite convent near the sea, just south of what was then a much quieter town, Carmel, in California.  There I interviewed a nun for a project I was doing.  I wanted to know her view of why one would spend one’s life in that way.  She was a calm and very pleasant person, and the location itself was quiet and peaceful.  A short distance to the west of the convent lay a pleasant little sandy bay “out of the swing of the sea,” and the air of the whole region was fragrant with the wild artemisia that scented the coastal lowlands and hills in those warm days.

Thinking of the nuns in that quiet place by the sea, I recall lines from another poem about the 6th-century Celtic saint Govan, who lived as a hermit by the sea in Wales:

St Govan still lies in his cell
But his soul, long since is free,
And one may wonder – and who can tell-
If good St Govan likes Heaven as well
As his cell by that sounding sea?

By the way, George Herbert’s poem The Size also contains an old English proverb that goes back before his time.  In telling people that they should not expect to be happy both in this world and the next, Herbert says,

Wouldst thou both eat thy cake, and have it?

If that phrase puzzles you, it means, “Do you want to both eat your cake and still keep it?”  One obviously cannot do both, and that is why our nun in Heaven-Haven gives up earth for heaven.

David

As regular readers here know, I often “westernize” hokku in translation, though I note the fact to avoid confusion.  So of course it does not bother me in the least that we think of these other plums, rather than of the Japanese apricot, when we read old spring hokku.  Further, what applies to that tree applies also to the plums grown in the West, so for practical and aesthetic purposes it is really advantageous for us to think of “our” kinds of plums instead of what the original hokku technically signified.

Having gotten through all that dull introduction, we are ready to take a look at some spring plum hokku.  The significant thing about the plum in that context is that it is an early bloomer, flowering often when the weather still can be cold and unsettled, in that time of the yearly transition from winter weather to that of early spring.

We see that period of change in a hokku by Buson:

In every nook and corner
The cold lingers;
Plum blossoms.

In the original, “every nook and corner” is really a repetition of the same word — sumi, meaning “corner.”  When used twice (zumi the second time for euphony) as sumizumi, it literally is “corner-corner,” but the “every nook and corner” understanding of the term is what it signifies.

Regular readers here know that spring is a time of increasing Yang energy.  The cold Yin energy of winter is waning, but as Buson tells us here, when the plum begins to bloom, the cold still lingers in all the little shady spots and corners and hollows.  The word I translate here as “lingers” is nokoru in the original, which means “to remain, to be left over or left behind.”

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The blooming of the plum tree of course has a direct relationship to the amount of warmth and light present.  The warmer the air, the more blossoms will pop open.  That is why Ransetsu wrote what I call his “thermometer” hokku:

A plum blossom –
One blossom’s worth
Of warmth.

What I translate as “blossom’s worth” — the word hodo – means “an extent or degree or measure” of something.  So we could be playful, and translate it as

A plum blossom –
One blossom degree
Of warmth.

The concept behind this hokku is the notion that the more plum blossoms open, the higher the temperature of the air and the farther along the advancement of spring.  It shows a unity between the blossoms and the growing warmth, in contrast to our “rational” way of thinking in terms of action (the warming of the air) and consequence (a plum blossom opens), cause and effect.

David

The result, of course, is not reality, but rather an idealized fantasy image.  And such an idealized image was very much in fashion in the mid to late 19th century and on into the very beginning of the 20th.

Today’s poem, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, is actually a brief poem within a story within a narrative poem that is much longer than the extract given here.  The whole work is titled The Princess, and if you have a good deal of time and patience, you might wish to read it.  But this excerpt was written to function as a “separate” poem, even though it is only a small part of the whole work.

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal is not only an excellent example of romanticism in poetry, but it also demonstrates, as I have said before, what a consummate craftsman Tennyson was.  He reminds me of those italian workmen who used to cover whole table tops in carefully shaped and polished semiprecious stones, each so carefully worked that it contributes its part to the picture all the pieces together form.  That is the precision and workmanship we find in Tennyson.

So here is Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Let’s look at it part by part:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: wake thou with me.

The poet is creating a peaceful and beautiful picture of twilight.  That is the “now” of which he speaks, and in that “now” the flowers close, some with crimson petals, some with white.  Tennyson uses “petals” to mean the flower as a whole.  Using a part of something to indicate the whole is a poetic technique called synechdoche (pronounced sin-EK-doh-kee).  The first line should not be read as a sequence, with the crimson petals sleeping first, followed by white petals sleeping, but rather both happen at the same time, in the same “now.”

To paraphrase it simply:
Now the crimson flowers and the white flowers close for the night.
But of course putting it that bluntly does not give the poetic effect Tennyson achieved in his phrasing.

The cypress tree is the first of two “nors,” the poet gives us, presenting the stillness and beauty of the evening in negatives:

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

That, paraphrased in ordinary English, would be:
The wind has gone still, no longer bending the cypress trees in the palace walk.
The goldfish in the porphyry stone basin have gone still and out of sight for the night.

Saying “the gold fin” is again synechdoche, and by saying that we no longer see the light of day flashing gold on the moving fish, Tennyson is giving us a picture both of daylight having gone and of rest and stillness.

So this first part of the poem is telling us this:

Not a breath of wind stirs the tall, slender cypress trees.  And not single shining glitter of light off a fin of the goldfish in the porphyry stone pool can be seen.  Everything is still and silent, and the afterglow of day is disappearing.

Did you notice that Tennyson repeatedly uses one thing to mean many? He says “the crimson petal,” “the white [petal],” “the cypress,” “the gold fin,” and “the firefly,” but he is really speaking of these in the plural. He only uses the singular for poetic effect.

The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

The fireflies have begun to appear as points of light in the shadows.  The young man who speaks the poem calls on the young woman he loves to “waken” with him, meaning to walk through the beauty of the twilight garden with him — but also to “waken” to what he is telling her through the poem about his love for her.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Instead of using a peacock of the usual colors, Tennyson instead very cleverly offers a white peacock, which is in keeping with the loss of color that comes with the loss of light, when everything goes shades of white, grey, and black.  He tells us that the white peacock lowers its head and of course its long tail feathers, and this drooping is another indication of the rest and quiet of the evening.  And like a ghost whose apparition continues to appear in the gathering darkness, the white peacock continues to glimmer, reflecting the last of the vanishing afterglow of twilight.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

With those lines, Tennyson moves again from setting the atmosphere to the little “love story” within the poem.  ”Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars” is an allusion to an ancient Greek myth.  Danaë was the lovely daughter of a king named Acrisius.  The king was worried by a prophecy given by the oracle of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, who said that said Danaë  would have a son who would kill Acrisius, so to prevent this, the fearful king locked her in a room made of bronze, where no man could reach her.  He did not, however, take into account the lusty ruler of the gods, Zeus, who supernaturally came through the ceiling of the bronze room and fell on  Danaë as a shower of gold.  So Tennyson is telling us that like Danaë, who was open and vulnerable to the shower of gold falling on her, the earth in evening is all open to the sky that is filled with a multitude of stars.  And then Tennyson returns to the “love story” of the poem:

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

As we can tell from the  Danaë allusion, this is a man talking to a woman.  He tells her that like the earth at evening is open and vulnerable to the starry sky, like Danaë open and vulnerable to her lover coming upon her as a shower of gold, even so this unnamed woman, in the still beauty of evening, is open and emotionally vulnerable to him.

Now Tennyson returns to his lovely “now” imagery:

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now a silent shooting star crosses (“slides…on”) the evening sky, leaving a golden trail like the furrow made in the earth by a plow.  And just as the passing meteor leaves a shining trail, so in our young man, his thoughts of the young woman leave a shining trail in his mind.  This is a way of saying that even a thought of her is as beautiful and shining as the trail left by a shooting star.

(Photo credit: gelinh)

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

This is the last of the repeated “nows” of the poem.  Tennyson tells us that the water lily folds up “all her sweetness,” closes its beautiful petals, and slips “into the bosom of the lake,” meaning it slips below the surface of the water.  But notice how Tennyson cleverly uses the term “bosom,” meaning the breast/chest of a human, to signify the lake surface into which the waterlily sinks.  That enables him to move quickly on to his last line, the “point” of the whole poem, in which the young man invites the woman to similarly fold herself against his chest and be embraced by his arms and his love, and be “lost” in him.  He wants her to yield to his love as all things have yielded to the stillness and rest of the twilight.

This was walking a rather narrow line for Victorian England, particularly with the  Danaë simile, but Tennyson got away with it because in the end what the young man wants, at least in the poem, is for the young woman to be silently enfolded in his arms and submerged in his love.  He does not take it beyond that, and so Tennyson managed to give the Victorian period a romantic thrill while avoiding the social censors.

The most important quality of the poem is, of course, its carefully plotted imagery, with all things falling into beautiful rest and quiet; and Tennyson uses all of that to make his “love story” point, which of course is completely tinted with the same beautiful and quiet atmosphere of twilight and a gathering darkness filled with stars.

It is worth noting that everything in this poem is visual, emphasizing the sense of sight.  There is no mention at all of sound.  This absence deepens the sense of stillness and quiet.

Did you notice that the word “me,” preceded by a preposition, ends a line five times throughout the poem?

…with me.
…to me.
…unto me.
…in me.
…in me.

That repetition adds to the lulling effect of the whole, as does the repetition of the words “now” and “nor.”

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal is reminiscent of the much shorter old Japanese waka, which was a poetic form focused only on the beautiful and aesthetically elegant, and often expressed romantic love through lovely, if bittersweet, nature imagery.  The hokku, of course, is quite different in its elimination of romantic love and its more realistic approach that no longer tries to eliminate all that is not conventionally beautiful.  But of course Tennyson’s wish is precisely that — to eliminate all that is not beautiful, to use only the conventionally poetic in painting his word picture of a twilight romance in today’s poem, which was published, by the way, in 1847.  Queen Victoria had been on the British throne for some ten years.

David

Hodie es un belle die primaveral.  Illo me rememora de alcuni lineas ex un poema per
Today is a beautiful spring day.  It reminds me of some lines from a poem by
Lorenzo de’ Medici, in italiano:
Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Italian:

Quant’è bella giovinezza
che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
del doman non c’è certezza.

In le lingua que uso hic como mi lingua seconde (un combination personal de interlingua
In the language which I use here as my second language (a personal combination of Interlingua
e latino moderne), es:
and Latino Moderne), it is:

Com’ es belle juventute
Que se fugi nonobstante!
Qui vole ser allegre, sia:
De deman … null’ certitude.

Lo que significa in anglese es:
What it means in English is:

Lorenzo de’ Medici, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How beautiful is youth,
Which nonetheless is fleeting!
Let who wishes to be happy be so:
Of tomorrow there is no certainty.

Proque soi rememorarate hodie de iste poema?  Proque in hokku, le primavera es in
Why am I reminded today of this poem?  Because in hokku, spring is in 
harmonia con le juventute, e anque con le matino del die.  Le juventute es le primavera
harmony with youth, and also with the morning of the day.  Youth is the springtime
del vita, e le primavera es le juventute del anno.
of life, and spring is the youth of the year.

David

As for the mechanics of the poem, we need only take a quick look at the pattern of rhyming to see how those rhymes influenced his phrases.  I will mark the rhymes here with numbers, each number corresponding to groups of rhyming words.  As you see, there are four rhymes made:

1.  soon, boon, moon, tune (yes, they are not precise rhymes, but close enough for Wordsworth)
2.  powers, ours, hours, flowers
3.  be, lea, sea
4.  outworn, forlorn, horn

The world is too much with us; late and soon (1)
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: (2)
Little we see in Nature that is ours; (2)
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! (1)
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; (1)
The winds that will be howling at all hours, (2)
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;(2)
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; (1)
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be (3)
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (4)
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (3)
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; (4)
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; (3)
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (4)

And now for the meaning:

The world, he tells us, is too much with us.  By “the world,” he means the human world of commerce and industry, of business, of running to and fro to make a living, to buy and sell (getting and spending) at all hours of the day (“late and soon”), of being too involved in such things.  Why?  Because in doing so, we lose and gradually destroy (“lay waste”) what Wordsworth considered to be the important “powers” in humans — the emotional and spiritual side of our nature as opposed to the completely material and rational and “practical.”  We can also think of “getting and spending” as meaning getting our vital energy from Nature, but wasting it in purely material pursuits rather than aesthetic or spiritual pursuits.

The result of this one-sided life is that we lose touch with Nature, we “see little in Nature that is ours,” little that we can relate to and feel as a part of us.  Now we might ask why Wordsworth felt this way, but we need only recall that he was born at just the right (or wrong) time to see the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which turned good parts of England from quiet fields and woods to “dark satanic mills,” as William Blake put it.

Wordsworth tells us “we have given our hearts away,” and he does not mean this in a good way.  We have given our hearts — or emotional being, our wishes and innermost desires — away in exchange for the getting and spending and industry of the human world, which is most evident in city life.  That, the poet remarks, is “a sordid boon,” — a gain (boon) that is felt to be immoral and depressing (sordid).

Wordsworth gives examples of what we have lost:

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

We are, he says, out of harmony — “out of tune” with Nature, with the sea rising and falling in the moonlight with its surface (bosom) bare to the moon, with the wind, whether it howls at times throughout the day and night (“at all hours”) or whether it is silent and still, like flowers that have closed their petals (“sleeping flowers”).  We are out of tune with all these and with the rest of nature — “It moves us not” — it has no emotional effect on us, on our spirits.  We have lost our connection with Nature.

(Photo credit: R. S.)

The poet finds this separation of humans and Nature abnormal and intolerable.  He protests against it:

Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“Great God!” he exclaims — just as we today might say “Good grief!” or something similar — “I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.”  He is thinking back to Greek and Roman antiquity.  He tells us he would rather have been born and nourished (“suckled”) and raised in pagan religion (creed).  He speaks of it as “a creed outworn” because the old Greco-Roman religion, seen as old and no longer adequate by Christians, was replaced by Christianity, which seldom encouraged love of Nature).

If he had been raised as a pagan, he tells us, then he could stand there on the pleasant lea (meadow, grassy area) and see things that would make him less forlorn — less depressed and unhappy:

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Triton Fountain (Photo credit: Dog Company)

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Proteus was an ancient Greek sea god who could change his form.
Triton was also a sea god, the son of Poseidon, and his messenger.  By blowing his conch shell horn he could calm or raise the waves of the sea.

Wordsworth is telling us, then, that he is so weary of the human separation from Nature that he sees and feels around him that he would rather have been raised a pagan.  Then he would be able again to see the power and wonder in Nature, as manifested in the gods that were once felt to be a part of it; he might see the god Proteus rise up from the sea, or perhaps hear the sea god Triton blow on his horn to command the waves.  Nature would once more have force and power and significance, which Wordsworth felt it had largely lost in his day.

Imagine, then, how much worse things are now in our own time, when humans have polluted air and soil and water with toxic chemicals and radiation, and cities and growing populations are forever encroaching on farmlands and forests.

As for the rhyme, Wordsworth obviously stretched things a bit by his simile of winds

 up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

That is one of the pitfalls of rhyme in verse.  It leads all too often to such inadequate or unlikely comparisons, but Wordsworth felt he needed “flowers”; what else was he to rhyme with “powers,” “ours,” and “hours”?  When using rhyme, a poet must be very careful to remain its master rather than its servant.

Be sure, when you read the line

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn,

that you read “wreathed” as two syllables (wreath-ed) instead of the usual one, which is what Wordsworth intended here.  By “wreathed” horn he just means that the horn was ornamented by some kind of garland, in this case perhaps of seaweed.

David

To understand this poem, you must first know that a wood spurge is a wild, green, perennial plant that grows in moist soil in and about the partial shade of woodlands.  The spurge found in southern England is Euphorbia amygdaloides.  It grows to about 32 inches in height.  It is not a striking plant, being largely monotone green, and at its tips it develops a little green “cup” out of which two other, smaller green “cups” sprout — giving us “a cup of three.”  Rossetti writes wood spurge as one word — “woodspurge” — but now it is commonly written as two.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is not, however, a poem about botany, but rather about the stages of grief — the kind of grief one has at the passing of someone very close and dear.  The remarkable thing about this work is the manner in which the writer conveys the depth of this grief to the reader.  As we shall see, he leads us into this gradually.

Here is The Woodspurge:

The wind flapp’d loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walk’d on at the wind’s will, –
I sat now, for the wind was still.

There is an underlying simile here.  The wind “flapp’d loose” — “shaken out.”  This reminds us of a sheet a woman shakes out when hanging laundry, which of course creates gusts of “wind.” But the simile is very weak, so we only feel its effect in the background of the lines, as the poet intended.  It does not overwhelm his purpose.  So in this stanza we first feel the gusts of blowing wind, then the wind going still, as though “shaken out dead” from the trees and the hill — a movement from violent action to stillness and emptiness.  This transition is very important in the poem, but this is revealed only gradually.

The poet tells us that he had walked “at the wind’s will,” that is, walked carried along with the force of the wind, randomly; but now he sits, because the wind has gone still.  We shall realize, as we continue the poem, that this too is a kind of simile giving us two stages of grief, the first gusty and forceful, the second absolutely still and empty.

Between my knees my forehead was,—
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.

The poet describes his posture, sitting with his head dropped between his knees, so that his long hair touched the grasses growing up from the earth.  His lips were drawn tight and firm, and he made no verbal expression of the sorrow we see obvious in his dejected position. His bare ears “heard the day pass,” meaning he sat there, unmoving, for a very long time.

My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flower’d, three cups in one.

His eyes were open, but his field of vision was not wide — with only about ten growing weeds on which he could gaze, could “fix his vision.”  And among those weeds, in the shade, was a wood spurge, with everything on the plant the same monotone light green.  It is the woodspurge that draws his long, unmoving stare.

Up to now, the poet has been completely objective.  He has given us a bare description of his walk in the gusts of wind, of how the wind went still, of how he then sat with his head down and eyes open, and of how his gaze fixed on the wood spurge.  But now he turns to commentary, giving us the point of the poem, his conclusions.

From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom, or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me, –
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

“Perfect grief” is utter, complete grief.  That is the stage the poet reached as the wind went still and he sat down.  Earlier he was blown about and carried here and there by his violent gusts of thought and emotional sorrow, like the blowing wind in which he walked.  But now that wind has gone silent, as have his thoughts and emotions.  All that remains is just the stark, bare, empty, utterly stunning sense of loss, unmixed with thoughts or movement — “perfect grief,” the greatest depth of sorrow.

Now the poet, in looking back on that time, has a realization.  When he was in that profound, silent state of utter sorrow, with his thoughts, like the wind, gone perfectly still and silent, all that remained active were his bare senses, particularly vision.  And in that condition of absolute grief,  all that registered in his mind was his view of the woodspurge and the noticed fact that it had a “cup of three.”  And that objective reality in the emptiness of that time of sorrow will forever express the depth of his grief more accurately than any thoughts or emotions — his total sense of vacant loss, all emotion and thought and movement, internal and external, exhausted.

It is the one thing that deepest stage of grief left to him — not a lesson of wisdom learned,    not a memory of his loss, because thoughts had gone — only

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

This bare sensation, this bare noticing as an expression of deepest grief is what makes Rossetti’s poem remarkable.

David

It is a kind of psychological obsession with another person — an obsession so strong that it gives that other person control over whether the obsessed is happy or unhappy.  It gives one soaring emotional highs and abyssal emotional lows.  It can lead to the most bizarre behavior.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about romance is that it is not voluntary.  One does not consciously choose to be “in love” with another person.  Instead, it is something happening on a largely unconscious level — something that seems to unaccountably happen to a person, the passive victim.

The Greeks and Romans thought of it as being shot by the arrow of Eros, the god of love, who lives on in our modern images of Cupid.  As in the old cartoons, once one is shot with Cupid’s arrow, one no longer has control over one’s feelings, and is led on a wild roller coaster ride of emotion.

To the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the process of falling in love involved the unconscious projection of one’s ideal inner concept of a male or female on another person.  Now that person was unlikely to really possess all of those idealized qualities, but as long as that “outer” person made a good screen onto which the unconscious mind could project those qualities, what the obsessed person saw was not the male or female as he or she actually was, but rather only the projection of the unconscious ideal.

Cupid with a Bow by François Joseph Bosio at the Hermitage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That accounts for all the stupid things people do when “in love.”

The American psychologist Dorothy Tennov — in her book Love and Limerence – the Experience of Being in Love –  had a very sensible approach to the whole matter.  She made a useful distinction between genuine love and what she called “limerence.”  Limerence is what we ordinarily think of as “falling in love,” the obsession with another person that fills our thoughts and forces us through those emotional highs and lows, depending on whether we think our “love” is being sufficiently reciprocated or not.  Real love, however, is something else — something less exciting but far more lasting than limerence, which glows with such a strong flame that it eventually burns itself out, leaving one wondering what he or she previously saw in the other person.

Now one can discuss all of this intellectually; one can warn the young against it, explaining the difference between real, lasting love and the obsession of limerence.  But such explanations are not likely to prevent the occurence of “falling in love,” simply because it is a largely unconscious process.  As Carl Jung wrote, we are not master in our own house.  It is all too easy for unconscious obsession to take control, in spite of the conscious will.

Alfred Edward Housman wrote one of the best-known poems about the first experience of this unconscious obsession with another.  It is called When I was One-and-Twenty:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;

A young man 21 years old hears a wise and experienced older person warning against “falling in love.”  It is better, he is told, to give away one’s money than to give away one’s heart — better, that is, than to allow one’s self to “fall in love” with another, to give them control over one’s emotional state.

“Crowns and pounds and guineas” were units in the British monetary system of Housman’s day (and right up to 1971).  A pound, when a gold coin, was called a sovereign; when paper, it was a pound note or in slang, a “quid.”  A pound consisted of 20 shillings, which in slang were “bob.”  A crown coin (seldom actually used) was five shillings, “five bob.”  A guinea was considered a more “formal” unit, more “gentlemanly,” though it may seem an odd concept.  Works of art, for example, were customarily priced in guineas.  Years ago, when I was quite young, I was in an English town on market day, and was examining some paintings in one of the open-air stalls.  I noticed that the prices were all in “guineas,” which puzzled me; I had seen pence and sixpence and shillings and half crowns and pound notes, but not guineas.  So I asked the young man in charge what that meant.  He promptly and correctly informed me that a guinea was a pound and a shilling (the equivalent of 21 shillings).

Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

Now the wise man, continuing his advice, “ups the ante,” as is said in card playing.  He increases the amount one should be willing to part with before one parts with one’s heart.  Now it is not just crowns and pounds and guineas, but very precious things — pearls and rubies.  This is a way of saying, “Give anything away before you give your heart away to someone.”  In short, do not fall in love.

The advice is “to keep your fancy free,” that is, do not fixate and put all your attention on one person, but keep your mental options open:  continue meeting various people, experience them as individuals, get to know their good and bad points, enjoy being with them and do not be in a hurry to commit yourself.

But our young man is only 21 years old, inexperienced and not yet wise in the ways of the world.  Young people hear the advice to be cautious and slow and patient and careful in avoiding premature relationships with those of the sex to whom one is attracted, but do they take it to heart?  Do they take it seriously enough?

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again, 
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty, 
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Our wise counselor tells the young man that whenever one gives one’s heart to another, that is, whenever one falls in love, there will be consequences.  Giving one’s heart was never done “in vain,” which here means “without results.”  And what are those results, those consequences?

Again, Housman speaks in monetary terms, but this time a different kind of coin — negative emotions.  Falling in love is paid for with “sighs a plenty,” that is, with many sad sighs of remorse.  And one’s heart is “sold for endless rue,” that is, traded for endless regrets.

In the last two lines, we find that our young man did not heed the warning:

And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

What a difference a year can make.  In just that short time, our young man has found by experience that the pain and regret he had been warned would follow “falling in love” were not just vain imaginings.  He has since allowed it to happen; he has fallen in love, and has experienced its pains.  And now he can tell us from his own bitter experience,

And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

First-hand experience is often the best, but also the most bitter teacher.

David

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today I would like to discuss one of her “didactic” poems.  A didactic poem is one that has teaching as its purpose rather than aesthetic pleasure alone.  And what this poem teaches is very important.  It is called Much Madness is Divinest Sense.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails. 
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

To me, the chief application of this poem is to the distinction between the thoughts and beliefs and actions of the masses in contrast to those of the individual.

It is all too common in human history, that when the majority of a society were set on a given course of belief or action, any individual who spoke out against it did so at his or her own risk.

We can trace this lesson back far in human history.  The Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death in Athens for “corrupting the youth” and “impiety.”  His method of reasoned questioning and its results ran contrary, so the authorities held, to the best interests of the people of Athens.

There are countless examples of the persecution of individuals who have held opinions contrary to those of the dominant religion, particularly when that religion had (or has) strong state or political support.

However, many of the great advances of humankind have come about precisely because of individuals who held opinions contrary to those held by the masses in general.  We need only recall Galileo, who found by observation that the traditional view of the earth being the center of the Solar System was quite mistaken; and Charles Darwin, whose investigations revealed unquestionably that all creatures were not created in a few days time a few thousand years previously, but instead had evolved from lower forms of life over eons of time.

Then too, there were those like the Quaker John Woolman, who spoke out very early against the abomination of slavery.  And there were the women who first began speaking for the right of women to vote, and often suffered terribly for it.

One can think of innumerable causes in which individuals stood against the majority, much to the eventual benefit of society.  But for those few who speak out, life can be very difficult.  They are often stigmatized as radical or as mad.  In the Soviet Union and Communist China, one way of treating dissidents has been to remove them from society and shut them away in psychiatric wards, as though they were mental patients.

Dickinson points out in her poem, however, that the madness of such people is often actually the most heavenly of common sense, to the “discerning eye,” that is, to those who can see clearly and rationally, distinguishing what is real from what is merely illusion  and mass opinion.

She tells us further that “much sense” can be “the starkest madness,” that is, what the majority finds sensible and “true” can be the plainest, strongest insanity.

We do not have to look far for examples of that.  Look at the people of Nazi Germany caught up in the idolization of Hitler and his lunacy.  It was very risky to take an individual position then against the position of the masses.  Look at the American South at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and how those who spoke in favor of equal rights did so at peril of their lives.

It still goes on today.  Those holding a view different from that of the masses, particularly in any matter relating to politics or religion, are often stigmatized, stereotyped as “crazy” in order to discredit their ideas and push them out of the public mind and view.  But it is often precisely these individuals, who think for themselves and not by what everyone else is saying and doing, who lead humankind forward in sudden, bold steps.

Individualism in thought has always been, and still is, in some societies, dangerous.  Whether someone is perceived as sane or mad can depend on whether his or her views fit those of the majority or not:

’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.

It is the majority — that is, the beliefs and will of the majority — that prevail, that have the stronger position.  If the majority decides that supposed witches are to be burned and homosexuals put in prison, or women kept isolated and at home, then that is considered “sane” and all opposition madness or impiety.

’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

So, those who want to be accepted, those who don’t want trouble, know which way the wind blows, as did Dickinson:

Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Agree with the masses, with those in social, political or religious power, and you are considered “sane.”  But if you “demur,” if you show reluctance or refusal in going along with the accepted belief or behavior, you suddenly become perceived as dangerous, like someone with severe mental illness, and you are “handled with a chain,” treated accordingly.

“Handled with a chain” takes us back to the evil days when the mentally ill could be placed in asylums and chained.

Take the case of Plympton House Lunatic Asylum, in England:

“In July 1843 a woman who had given birth to a child but five or six weeks before was found to be confined in ‘a straight waistcoat and chained by the arm and leg to a bench’.  Ten curable patients and two idiots were being looked after by a lunatic who was himself kept in chains to prevent him from escaping.  As if that was not bad enough, later that year the lady mentioned above was found to be chained not only by her leg but by another passing around her waist and an iron ring with two hand locks restraining her hands.  In total, two private patients and nineteen paupers were found to be chained to their beds each night at that time.”

Of course Dickinson’s poem applies also to the person in ordinary society who is “different” in opinions and actions, like Dickinson herself, with her seclusion and her “innovative and unorthodox” beliefs and opinions.  It is likely this smaller scale she had in mind, given that no doubt many in her time and place considered her odd, but it applies as well to the greater scale, in which a person who stands against the prevailing beliefs often pays for it dearly.  And yet it is often these same people who have led humans to transcend pettiness and ignorance and irrationality.

That is why freedom of belief (including freedom from belief) and freedom of speech and expression are so critically important to a free and progressive society.  And we should include in that universal freedom of education — the right of anyone, male or female, to learn to read and write, and to be exposed to all kinds of contrary views and opinions in the open marketplace of ideas.  And of course the right to come to one’s own conclusions and personal beliefs, and to express them freely and openly.

David

(Edward Salim Michael)

http://www.meditation-presence.com/en/articles/the-role-of-great-music

Many years ago I knew a fellow — now deceased — who had a lasting effect on my life by introducing me to various works of music that I had not previously known.  I have been grateful for that ever since, and so today I want to take a bit of space here to share with you some of my own favorite titles so that you may explore them at your leisure, at least those with which you are not already familiar.  It is unfortunate that I cannot just present you with the music itself, but you all know how copyright works.  You are likely to find versions of some of them on the Internet that you may listen to for free — or at least brief audio clips to give you an idea of what awaits you.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These are some of the most beautiful pieces of music you are likely to encounter.  Most of them are “classical,” but do not let that deter you, or you will miss some wonderful things.

The list I am placing here is largely the kind of music I generally prefer, which means, on the whole, tranquil and relaxing.  There is a time and place for other kinds of music, but this list contains some of the works for which I am most grateful, and that is why I want to share them with you.  I will add more titles gradually to this list, so it will grow over time, and you may check this posting now and then to see what has been added.  And if you have a favorite piece of “quiet” music that I have not included, feel free to let me know.

So here we begin, not in any particular order.  Please let me me know if you find it of interest or helpful.

MUSIC LIST

Vaughan Williams, Ralph:  The Lark Ascending
Vaughan Williams, Ralph:  Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis
Vaughan Williams, Ralph:  Fantasia on Greensleeves
Vaughan Williams, Ralph:  Five Variations of Dives and Lazarus

Tárrega, Francisco: Memories Of The Alhambra (Recuerdos de la Alhambra)
Grieg, Edvard:  Solvejg’s Song (from the Peer Gynt Suite, #1)
Grieg, Edvard:   Ase’s Death (from the Peer Gynt Suite, #1)
Grieg, Edvard:  Morning Mood (from the Peer Gynt Suite, #1)
Grieg, Edvard:  To Spring (An Den Frühling, Opus 43/6)
Grieg, Edvard:  Last Spring (Våren, from Two Elegiac Melodies, Op. 34)

Smetana, Bedrich:  Vltava (from Ma Vlast – this one gets a bit loud)
Villa-Lobos, Heitor:  Bachianas Brasileiras #5 (Aria)
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr (Peter):  Andante Cantabile (from String Quartet #1  in D, Opus 11-2)
Anonymous Welsh:  Suo Gan (a Welsh lullaby)
Strauss, Richard:  Im Abendrot (“At Sunset,” from Four Last Songs)
Strauss, Richard:  Beim Schlafengehen (“On Going to Sleep,” from Four Last Songs)
Schumann, Robert:  Of Strange Lands and People (from Scenes of Childhood, Opus 15)
Schumann, Robert:  : Träumerei (Opus 15, # 7 in F major)
Schubert Franz:  ”Ständchen” (D 957)

Erik Satie:  Three Gymnopédies
Fauré, Gabriel:  Sanctus (from his Requiem — gets a bit loud briefly)
Fauré, Gabriel: Sicilienne
Fauré, Gabriel:  Pie Jesus (from his Requiem)
Fauré, Gabriel:  Pavane, Opus 50 (Pour une Infante Défunte)
Picker, Tobias:  Old and Lost Rivers (amazing that this is not better known)
Saint-Saëns, Camille:  The Swan (from Carnival of the Animals)

Mozart, W. Amadeus:  Ave Verum Corpus (KV 618)
Coulais, Bruno:  Caresse sur l’ocean
Coulais, Bruno:  La Nuit

Rachmaninov, Sergei:  Adagio Sostenuto, from Piano Concerto #2 in C minor
Rachmaninov, Sergei:  Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43, Variation #18
Rachmaninov, Sergei:  Vocalise, from Songs, Opus 34-14

Allegri, Gregorio:  Miserere
Mahler, Gustav:  Adagietto from Symphony #5 in C minor
Debussy, Claude:  Girl with the Flaxen Hair (La fille aux cheveux de lin) Préludes, Book I, #8
Debussy, Claude:  Claire de Lune (Moonlight), from Suite bergamasque
Debussy, Claude:  Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Brahms, Johannes:  Waltz in A flat major, Opus 39
Borodin, Alexander:  Notturno Andante, from String Quartet #2 in D
Borodin, Alexander:  Maidens’ Dance; Polovtsian Dances, from Prince Igor
Barber, Samuel:  Adagio for Strings, Opus 11
Albinoni, Tomaso:  Adagio, from Oboe Concerto in D minor, Opus 9/2
Albinoni, Tomaso:  Adagio in G Minor
Delibes, Léo:  Viens, Mallika (Flower Duet) from Lakme
Dvořák, Antonín:  Songs my Mother Taught Me, from Zigeunermelodien, Opus 55, B 104
Dvořák, Antonín:  Largo, Symphony #9 in E minor, Opus 95 “From the New World”
Elgar, Edward  Adagio Moderato from Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85
Josquin Des Prez: Tu solus qui facis mirabilia
Godard, Benjamin: Idylle
Khachaturian, Aram:  Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite
Ungar, Jay: Ashokan Farewell

David

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We should not be surprised that he titled his poem in Latin; this was in the days, after all, when a knowledge of Latin was considered indispensable to a good education.  So that is why students of English poetry find themselves faced with these Latin words at the head of the poem:

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

It means, essentially, that the brief (brevis) sum (summa) of life (vitae) forbids/prevents (vetat) us (nos) beginning (incohare) a long (longam) hope (spem).  But we can think of it  as meaning simply:

The Shortness of Life Forbids Us Long Hopes

The phrase comes from lines in Ode 1.4, by the Roman poet Horace (65-8 b.c.e.):

pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas       
regnumque turris. o beate Sesti,
vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam;

“Still pallid Death is knocking at the hovels of paupers
And the towers of kings.  O happy Sestius,
The short span of life forbids us undertaking long hopes.”

But now to the poem:

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

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

Yesterday I discussed Wenlock Edge, by A. E. Housman, in which he tells us that the emotional gale of human life soon wears itself out from its own force and disappears.  Dowson is similarly speaking of the brevity of human emotions.  Weeping and laughter, love and desire and hate, he says, do not last long, and he thinks they end with death (“passing the gate”).

In like manner, he tells us, the days of pleasure and happiness, which he poetically terms “the days of wine and roses,” are not long either.  And as for our short life, it is like a path seen coming out of a mist, then disappearing into that same mist.

It is a variation on an old simile.  The Venerable Bede tells the story of the comment of an advisor to King Edwin of Northumberland:

“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thains and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.”

But Bede’s simile is more bleak and far less beautiful than Dowson’s “path out of mist” metaphor, which has more the flavor of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s lines:

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.             What is life?  A frenzy.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,           What is life?  An illusion,
una sombra, una ficción,                    A shadow, a fiction,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:             And its greatest good is small.
que toda la vida es sueño,                  For all of life is a dream,
y los sueños, sueños son.                    And dreams are dreams.

Dowson’s metaphor reminds me also of a hokku I once wrote from experience, with his poem not at all in mind, and without metaphor:

The river;
It flows out of and into
The fog.

Dowson’s poem is undeniably beautiful:

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

Happiness is brief, life is short and vague and a mystery, but in reading those lines by Dowson we must say that, as R. H. Blyth once remarked, put that way, it doesn’t sound too bad.

Dowson did have a sense for the poetic phrase.  Many who have never read his poem know the words “the days of wine and roses,” which were used for the title of a movie about a descent into alcoholism.  And it is from another poem by Dowson (Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae) that the words come which gave the title to Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the famous film of the Civil War, Gone With the Wind:

I have forgot much, Cynara!  gone with the wind,
Flung rose, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind…

One writer calls Ernest Dowson “The incarnation of dissipation and decadence,” which combined with the sad beauty of today’s poem, brings to mind the rather indelicate expression that a rose may grow out of a manure pile — the “pile” in this case being Dowson’s decadent and deadly habits.  For him, the combination of an excessive lifestyle and alcoholism with his tuberculosis proved quickly fatal.  He died a few months beyond his 32nd year.

David

WENLOCK EDGE  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is not a difficult poem, but we shall need to make sure we understand Housman’s vocabulary in order to comprehend the poem easily.  As usual, I shall take the poem part by part:

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; 
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

We are in the county of Shropshire, England.  To the south is a large escarpment — a sudden, sharp upward slant of the land that rises to some height above us, and runs for some 16 miles across the countryside.  Its ancient limestone slope is covered in leafy forest.  This is Wenlock Edge.  In the distance to the north is a forested hill, the Wrekin.

The writer tells us the wood on Wenlock Edge is “in trouble”  meaning it is disturbed, agitated and stormy.  A great wind has come up.  If we look to the Wrekin, the forest on it is tossing in the same wind.  Housman terms the wood on the Wrekin “his [its] forest fleece,” because the wood covers the hill like the fleece on a sheep.  And it “heaves” — the countless branches bending in the wind seem, when seen from a distance, to rise and fall like waves on a green sea.  The gale — the very strong wind — bends (“plies”) the saplings — the slender, flexible young trees — double, bends them nearly to the ground.  And the countless leaves blown away by the awesome force of the gale fall like snow on the waters of the Severn River, which winds between the two heights.   Housman is giving us a scene filled with natural power and motion.

’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

The writer, having presented us with an event in the present, now expresses the thoughts it arouses in him.  He tells us the gale once blew like that through “holt and hanger” in a much earlier time.  ”Holt” is an old Germanic word (and English, with its Anglo-Saxon ancestry, is a Germanic language) for a wood, a forested area.  ”Hanger” also comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term; it means a wood on a slope, like the forest on Wenlock Edge.  The wind blew through those woods “when Uricon the city stood.”  He is taking us back to Roman Britain — Britain after the Romans had invaded and settled there.  His “Uricon” was the Roman city Viriconium, also called Uriconium, which lay where the present day town of Wroxeter lies, several miles west of the Wrekin.  It was the fourth largest Roman City in ancient Britain.

The writer muses that the same strong wind “in the old anger,” (meaning aroused and violent) that now blows on Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin, then blew on the earlier woods of the region when Uricon was a thriving city in Roman Britain.  He speaks of the wind in the old days having “threshed another wood.”  ”Threshed” is an agricultural term used for beating ripe grain from stalks.  So, to repeat, Housman means that the same wind he sees blowing the forests of Shropshire also beat on the woods that grew there in Roman times.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

Just as the narrator now stares at the woods bending and waving in the strong wind, in ancient times a Roman would stand there watching the gale-blown woods of that earlier period.  And, the writer opines, the two men — the ancient Roman and the modern British yeoman (here it means a farmer who owns his own land) — are much the same, bodies warmed by human blood, minds troubled by the same human concerns and emotions.

The writer expands on this similarity of old Roman and modern Briton:

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

There — in early Britain — the “gale of life,” the powerful force of life and emotion, blew strongly (“high) through the Roman like a wind blowing through woods “in riot,” that is, with violence and great disturbance.  And now the same, overwhelming force blows through the writer himself.   Housman likens a man under the force of his own internal, powerful emotions and desires to a tree blown by a gale:

The tree of man was never quiet.

And again, the likening of ancient and modern:

Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The hopes, fears, sufferings and sorrows of humans are the same, whether in ancient times or today, whether in Roman Britain or modern Britain, or anywhere else on earth.

And now he brings us back to the present, to the blowing wind and the agitated trees, for his summation of the matter:

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon. 

As early as the Chinese book the Tao De Jing, it was said that a violent wind does not last the morning.  Our writer tells us that the wind he watches is so violent it will soon be gone.  We must know that he is also speaking here of the strong wind of human life and emotion — it blows so strongly that it too will soon be gone.  We should keep in mind here that Housman is giving us an equation:  wind = the force of life.  We see this made clear in the final two lines:

Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

And similarly, by extension, our narrator and his troubles will soon be ashes as well.  Nothing lasts, whether it be wind, or trees, or leaves, or sorrow, or joy, or human life.

If we were to express this poem very simply it would be this:

A violent wind is agitating the trees.
The same violent wind I see blowing the woods was seen by a Roman in early Roman Britain.
That Roman and I share the same human blood and human emotions.
Humans are like trees blown in the wind of emotion and desire.
Wind = the force of life and emotion in humans.
A violent wind will not last long.
Human life and emotions do not last long.
As the ancient Roman and his troubles are now nothing but ashes, so shall I and all my troubles be.

Of course Housman’s poetic way of saying it is far more pleasing to read than this kind of prosaic explanation.

David

Morning light;
Melting frost
Drips from the trees.

Hiberno:

Lumine matinal;
Gelo disgelante
Ab le arbores gutta.

How quickly time passes!  Already more than half of January is gone, and in less than two weeks we shall be at Candlemas — Imbolc — again.  In the Old Calendar that is the traditional beginning of spring, in spite of cold, of frost or snow.

This morning everything was white with frost — bare trees, grass, roads.  And then came the light of morning, revealing the transience that lies behind everything in our lives.

David

Lupos ululante
Omnes insimul;
Le vespere nivee.

By Jōsō:

Wolves howling
All together;
The snowy evening.

In hokku habemus harmonia de similaritate, ma anque harmonia de contrasto.  Iste verso per Jōsō nobis mostra le harmonia de contrasto.  Como?

In hokku we have harmony of similarity, but also harmony of constrast.  This verse by Jōsō shows us harmony of contrast.  How?

Prime, iste es un hokku del hiberno; le hiberno es Yin.
Secunde, le vespere es un Yin tempore del die.
Tertie, le nive es anque Yin.

First, this is a hokku of winter; the winter is Yin.
Second, evening is a Yin time of day.
Third, the snow is also Yin.

Ma in medio de tote de iste Yin, videmus le lupos, qui son multe Yang.  E le lupos ululanten, e le sono de lor critos es anque Yang.

But amid all this Yin, we see the wolves, who are very Yang.  And the wolves howl, and the sound of their cries is also Yang.

Quando usamus harmonio de similaritate, nos accentuamos le character Yin del hiberno.  Le vespere e le nive — siente ambes Yin — nobis mostran similaritate.  Ma quando usamus harmonio de contrasto, nos exprimemus como le Yang accentua le Yin, e simultaneemente, le Yang accentua le Yin.  

When we use harmony of similarity, we accentuate the Yin character of winter.  The evening and the snow — both being Yin — show us similarity.  But when we use harmony of contrast, we express how Yang accentuates Yin, and simultaneously, Yang accentuates Yin.

In le frigor nivee e le obscuritate crescente del vespere, le Yang ululante de le lupos es, in consequentia, plus impressionante.

In the snowy cold and growing darkness of the evening, the Yang howling of the wolves is, in consequence, more striking.

David

In campo e monte
Nihil mova;
Le matino nivee.

Iste verso nobis mostra le character Yin del hiberno (movimento es Yang, immobilitate es Yin). Videmus anque le Yin de hiberno in le nive que copera le campos e montes (le nive frigide es anque Yin).

In iste hokku trovamus le silentio e frigor que si ben exprimen le natura del hiberno.

(Iste es un experimento.  Si tu eres un parlator de un lingua romance, potes leger lo?)

*

One of the best winter hokku is this, by Chiyo-ni:

In field and mountain
Nothing moves;
The snowy morning.

This verse shows us the Yin character of winter (movement is Yang, stillness is Yin).  We see also the Yin of winter in the snow that covers the fields and mountains (the cold snow is also Yin).

In this hokku we find the silence and cold that so well express the nature of winter.

David

(As you can see, I am still experimenting with an auxiliary language that might enable more people to read this site.  I began some time ago with Interlingua, and have adopted some modifications to it from David Stark’s “Latino Moderne,” which seems to loosen it up a bit and give it greater poetic possibilities.  Of course I am a novice at this, so bear with me.

The poem is generally known by its first line, No Worst, There is None.  It is one of the “dark night of the soul” poems written by Hopkins in his fits of depression.

I will discuss it part by part:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

There is nothing worse than this, Hopkins laments.

This pain is “pitched past pitch of grief,” meaning it is considerably beyond the point of grief.  To “pitch” means to fix or place something on a scale of degree, like the “pitch” of a note in music.  It also means to “throw” so we have an undertone in this of an emotional scale that casts one into a painful intensity far beyond that of ordinary grief.

Further, the waves of emotional pain, having been “schooled at forepangs,” that is, seemingly having learned from lesser pains that preceded them, will consequently be even more painful, will “wilder wring.”  ”Wring” here has the sense of a tight, painful squeezing or twisting, in the old sense of “wringing” someone’s neck, like wringing water from a wet cloth.  So in this beginning Hopkins is complaining that the anguish of his mental pain is far beyond that of ordinary grief, that each new wave of pain is worse than what preceded it, and it has reached the point of mental anguish where it could not be worse.

He cries out in the terms of his adopted Catholic religion.  ”Comforter,” he asks, using an old term for the Holy Spirit,” “where is your comforting?”  And to Mary, a significant figure in Catholicism to whom much prayer was made, he says, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”  He bemoans the fact that the Comforter does not comfort, that Mary gives no relief.  His prayers for easing of his sorrow seem to achieve nothing, because the pain just continues even worse than before.

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’

His cries of pain heave, meaning they rise up like waves on  the sea, and they do so “herds-long,” that is, like a multitude of cries that stretch out far in time, as though the cries were in “herds” like countless cattle.  But they “huddle in a main, a chief woe,” that is, they focus in one main pain, one major sorrow.  What is it?

Hopkins tells us that the chief focus of his anguish is “world-sorrow,” the same pain that is called in German Weltschmerz, that is, “the pain of the world,” the sorrow of simply existing in a world of suffering and and transience.  If you read the earlier posting here on his poem Spring and Fall (“Margaret, are you grieving…”), then you will know that to Hopkins this “world-sorrow” is inherent in the human condition, that we live in a universe where nothing lasts, and no joy is secure or permanent.

He tells us that his cries of sorrow

…on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’

That is, his laments come from the anguish of being “on an age-old anvil,” of being hammered repeatedly like iron on an anvil, and that anvil is, again, the human condition and its accompanying sorrows of birth, illness, death, and impermanence, as old as humanity itself.  Hammered by these blows of life, Hopkins jerks back from the repeated pains, crying out — wincing and “singing,” though we must not take this singing as anything pleasant, more a crying out like the ring of iron struck by a hammer on an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop.

Hopkins adds that this pain nonetheless will “Lull, then leave off.”  it will reach its peak of pain, then it will quiet, will stop (“leave off”), at least for a time.  It is as though in its fury, the pain cannot hesitate, (“no lingering,”) but must be “fell” (piercing and intensely painful), because “force” (short for “perforce” here, meaning “of necessity”) it must be brief.  So we see that these fits of depression, as intensely painful as they are, come and go.  But when they come, Hopkins is indeed in abyssal anguish over them, lamenting and crying out for relief.

Then he tells us that this pain comes, in reality, from within the individual, from within the human mind:

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 — the “lull” of which he speaks — 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.

David

In the Hokku Calendar, the Winter Solstice is the point at which the Yin force reaches its maximum — Yin being cold and dark and still. But as you will recall from previous postings here, when either Yin or Yang reaches its maximum, a tiny seed of the other appears within it, and will begin to grow.

What that means is that Midwinter is the time when the forces of Yin not only reach their maximum, but because of that, they also begin the long transformation into their opposite, Yang, which is warm and bright and active. So just as Midsummer’s Day is the height of Yang, it is also the point at which it begins to give way to Yin, leading into autumn and winter. And Midwinter’s Day is the height of Yin, but it is also the time at which it begins to give way to that tiny spark of Yang within it, that will take us to spring and summer. And so the Wheel of the Year continues to turn.

For our ancestors, Midwinter’s Day was the time in which to celebrate the “rebirth” of the sun — that time when the sun, which had been declining in course across the sky, would pause, then begin to rise progressively higher in its arc again. So though it is the shortest day of the year, with the longest night, it is also the beginning of the return of the light and warmth, and that was a cause for rejoicing.

So, however you may celebrate the Midwinter Festival or whatever you may call it, happy Yuletide to all of my readers.

And please do not forget the words of the old Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol:

“We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.”

So if you find yourself fortunate enough to have abundance, please remember those who do not this Yuletide.  Bring a bright, warm spark of happiness into someone’s life.  Whatever your circumstances, do your best to be a light in darkness to others.

Glad Yule!

David

Illustration by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(I posted this some three years ago)

Winter, as I have written earlier, is the most austere season of the year. Because of that, it is a time when contrasts have great significance — warmth amid cold, food amid hunger, shelter amid none, movement amid stillness, light amid darkness, sound amid silence.

Such contrast is at the root of the famous line from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

“…a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.“

That is not just the Yuletide season; it is winter. That is why the joy of the holidays has such great significance against the background of winter. I do not think that those who celebrate the great Midwinter Festival — call it Yule or call it Christmas or something else — in countries where the air is warm and there is plenty and abundance in Nature in the month of December, can ever really feel or express the great significance that the holiday has in places where the month is filled with cold, with frost, with snow and ice.

That is because it is the great contrast with the cold and scarcity that gives Yuletide its particular significance –

“… a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.”

Some people make the mistake of thinking that if one celebrates Yule, the “non-Christian” aspect of the holiday, one must forget about everything associated with Christmas. There are even those who feel that people who call the holiday Christmas should not be allowed to wish others, who may not call it by the same name, “Merry Christmas.” The world is becoming too bound by such “politically-correct” rules.

My feeling is that such an attitude is quite contrary to the spirit of the season. As I have said, I celebrate the holiday as Great Yule, the Midwinter Festival, the Winter Solstice, but when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I wish the same back to them, because underneath it all we are celebrating the same thing: The season when the light is reborn out of the darkness of winter, the season of hope and joy and of realizing our common humanity. To Christians this is expressed in the birth of a miraculous, bright infant who brings peace and joy to the world in the midst of winter. That is essentially the same as for those who celebrate Yule, the time when the days have reached their shortest, when darkness has spread to its greatest length, and then suddenly at the Solstice there is a change, and once again light returns with the promise of another eventual spring. And of course there is even more to it than that, feelings and experiences that touch the deepest parts of our nature.

So when I see a nativity scene, I see a symbol. Yes, for some people it can mean a narrow, dogmatic, exclusive attitude, but it should not mean that for us. The practice of hokku goes beyond a dogmatic attitude toward life. That is why I always emphasize that the spirituality of hokku is a non-dogmatic spirituality. It goes beyond beliefs and relies on personal experience.

So when, at the end of A Christmas Carol, we find the words of Tiny Tim repeated,

“God Bless Us, Every One!”

we need not be literal theists to share in the spirit of that exclamation. We may understand the term “God” to mean numerous different things, and many of us may not use that term at all for what we understand the phrase to mean. But we can certainly share in the spirit of wishing well to all, even while knowing that we live in a world filled with illness and want and violence and death. Yuletide takes us — at least for a time — beyond that to a deeper realm in which, as Julian of Norwich wrote,

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And there is something helpful and healing in just having the thought in one’s mind, whether we put it in the words of Tiny Tim or in that of Buddhism:

May all beings be happy; may all beings be peaceful; may all beings be liberated.

That is the sentiment at the deepest level of the holiday, whether one calls it Yuletide or Christmas or simply the Winter Solstice. However we may keep it and whatever we may call it, such a sentiment, if it penetrates deeply into our being, turns us into individuals more like the altered Scrooge, who after his time “among the spirits” became one of whom it was said,

“… that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!“

We should never confuse this keeping of the festival well with commercialism, though of course that is what it has become in our time, when people have lost touch with the deeper things of life. It is up to us to find within ourselves what it means to keep the Yuletide season well. It is a part of our spiritual journey.

David

Autumn ends;
Even the crows
Are silent.

David

The narrow path
Not quite buried;
Fallen leaves.

Where I am it would be very much up to date, because the leaves are falling heavily now in the cooling air.  In old Japan it would have been a winter verse, but according to the hokku calendar it is the beginning of winter now.  Autumn ended with Halloween.

Old hokku had a sometimes not very accurate distinction between verses about colored leaves, which were autumn verses, and those about fallen leaves, which were winter verses.  Here in the West we go by what is happening where we are.  So for us, both verses about colored leaves and fallen leaves may come under the autumn heading or the winter heading.  We are not so rigid as old hokku sometimes tended to become, and we pay close attention to what is actually happening in Nature in a given season.  That helps to keep us from falling into the artificiality that began to afflict old hokku over time.  It helps to keep our verse fresh and new.

This hokku, like many, requires a leap of intuition from the reader.  In good hokku such leaps are easy if one keeps in mind that there is always some relationship between the shorter and longer parts of a hokku (short and long are separated by the “cutting” punctuation).  In this verse we know that what is meant by the first part is that the narrow path is nearly but not yet entirely buried in fallen leaves; that is clear from the second part.  Some hokku require greater leaps of intuition, but if that leap becomes too great, a hokku fails.  Hokku should always be clear and quickly intuited.  For one schooled in the principles of hokku aesthetics, that is one mark distinguishing good hokku from bad.

David

I have always had the feeling, when autumn has arrived, that it is time to begin reading Tolkien’s works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  And that in spite of the fact that the first book in the series, The Hobbit, begins its adventure “one fine morning, just before May.”

Then I realized that it is the “journey” aspect of the story that connects it to autumn, which in hokku is a time of journeys and migrations.  The birds begin flying southward overhead, as cold weather arrives.   In the old days, Native Americans would be coming out of the high mountains to avoid the harshness of winter there, going down to winter in the lowlands.  In the winter, the high mountains of Europe were considered the abode of spirits, which is the origin of the Germanic custom of the Perchtenlauf, when the mountain spirits come down into the villages and show themselves to the people.  I will talk more about that when winter comes.

We see the connection between autumn and travel in verses such as Issa’s

The autumn evening;
A traveling man
Mending his clothes.

The original says “a traveling man’s sewing” (harishigoto) but that is too vague for English.  What we see is a poor man on a journey, pausing at an inn in the evening, taking advantage of the time off his feet to mend his worn clothes.

This is a very good verse because it combines the sense of migration that is a part of autumn with the sense of the passage of time, which we feel in his worn clothes that need mending.  The passage of time — aging — is very much a part of the feeling of autumn.  In addition, the hokku exhibits the sense of poverty that has always been such a significant part of hokku.  And there is also that hokku sense of loneliness  of — “aloneness” — in the verse; the man has no one to mend his clothes for him, so he does it himself.

Of course spring too is a time for journeys, but they have a different feeling than those of autumn.  Spring is a returning, a growing.  Autumn is a leaving, a diminishing.  That is why it leads us gradually into the silence and inwardness and hibernation of winter.

By the old hokku calendar, autumn is already past.  By the new calendar, it is coming gradually to an end.  I hope that all of you may find a secure place as autumn ends where you are, and the chill silence of winter begins.

David

In previous postings we have seen the ups and downs of the “religious” life of Gerard Manley Hopkins displayed in his verse.  You will recall that he was a convert to Catholicism who became a Jesuit, then spent a good part of his life suffering from depression.  We see his “ups” in poems such as Pied Beauty and The Windhover, and the “downs” in others like the dark I Wake to Feel the Fell of Night and in the one we look at today, which is titled Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord, If I Contend.

It takes its title from the first verse of the biblical book of Jeremiah, chapter 12, as recorded in the Latin Vulgate:

Iustus quidem tu es Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen iusta loquar ad te: quare via impiorum prosperatur; bene est omnibus qui praevaricantur et inique agunt?

In the Douai-Rheims translation used by Catholics in Hopkins’ day, that would be:

Thou indeed, O Lord, art just, if I plead with thee, but yet I will speak what is just to thee: Why doth the way of the wicked prosper: why is it well with all them that transgress, and do wickedly?

Where the Douai has “plead,” Hopkins prefers “contend”:

Issa wrote:

Withered pampas grass;
“Now once there was
an old witch….”

That verse does not come off quite the same in English, because of the term “pampas grass” that we must use for what Issa knew as susuki — a kind of wild, grassy plant with a whitish-silver tall plume that is found on the uncultivated fields and hills of Japan.  It is Miscanthus sinensis, whereas what we know as pampas grass in the West and use as a tall ornamental is Cortaderia selloana.  And also, the word “pampas” tends to remind us of Argentina, which leads us astray.  The plumes at the top of susuki are thinner than those of the pampas grass we know, and they give a picturesque look to pathways through the Japanese hills, particularly in the late autumn.

As a late autumn verse, this hokku fits very well with our Halloween.  The withered grasses set the stage with a certain atmosphere, and then we hear the voice of the old granny (well, it has to be an old granny, doesn’t it?)  begin a scary story.

The point of the verse for English speakers is the feeling it creates in us — the late autumn feeling combined with that slightly “spooky” feeling of the beginning of a scary story.

It is unfortunate that we must know all about susuki in order to “see” this verse correctly.  There is really no way to transfer it to English without transferring the setting to something “Western,” and that inevitably changes the verse.

We could say,

Withered cornfields;
“Now once there was
An old witch….”

That does not, however, have the “wild” implications that susuki has, where we see it growing along a pathway in the hills, perhaps with a rising moon in the background.

We could also say,

Withered grasses;
“Now once there was
An old witch….”

That is getting there, but still does not have quite the same effect.

We could try,

Withered fields;
“Now once there was
An old witch….”

There are lots of possibilities, but none convey the original just right.  So this one I will just leave it with “pampas grass” and the necessary explanation.

I cannot resist throwing in an image of the Russian witch, Baba Yaga, as visualized by Ivan Bilibin.

Halloween is near, and with it comes the end of autumn by the old calendar.  I was working today on readying one of my books for (I hope) eventual availability as an inexpensive e-book.  I happened to be going through a chapter that seemed appropriate for this coming holiday, which used to be considered the time of year when the veil between life and death grew thin.  So here it is — a little preview for those who have not read the now out-of-print paper version.

You will need to know that the excerpt is from the book A Time of Ghosts, which I co-wrote with my long-time physician and friend, Dr. Hok-Pang Tang, now deceased.  The book presents his life in China before and during the horrible days of the so-called “Great Cultural Revolution.”  It is not fiction.  In this chapter he, a young “political” outcast, finds himself adrift in Beijing, without shelter.  I hope you find it of interest.

THE EMPTY HOUSE

            It was near midnight.  Everything in Beijing was strange to me.  I had no idea where to go.

           There were many armed police along the roads, though officially there was no curfew.  I had to watch out for them.  I recalled the advice someone had once given me:  “You must put yourself in the policeman’s position and see how he would look at you.”  I did that, and realized I was certain to draw attention.  As a wanderer in the middle of the night with a backpack and a southern accent, I would look very suspicious. I needed to find shelter quickly to avoid being arrested.

            The working-class dormitory area did not seem to offer any hope, so I caught a bus for another area of the city.  I tried to look out the windows, but it was so dark outside that even with an occasional street light I could see nothing.

            Suddenly a bright glare ahead of the bus caught my eye.  Something was burning at the side of the road.  As the bus passed, it was as though time slowed down.  I could see Red Guards looting a family home in the eerie light of a bonfire.  There was an old man kneeling on the ground with a black board around his neck.  Red Guards were loading furniture and belongings into two trucks parked outside the house.  One held a whip.  Another threw books into the fire.

            As the horrible scene receded into the black night, an idea came to me.  I could find a looted home that had been sealed up, and take shelter there.  Most plundered homes were occupied as soon as the inhabitants had been expelled, but there were certain ones that people avoided – those with a reputation for being dangerous — risky – unfortunate; houses in which someone had committed suicide or had been murdered by Red Guards.  People were superstitious and wanted nothing to do with such places.  They felt that the spirits of those whose lives were cut short might remain in the house with unfinished business, and would trouble anyone who moved in.

            Those who did dare to occupy them were generally involved in something illegal or immoral, so they had a guilty conscience that magnified any supposed oddity.  Then too, people exiled from a house might return secretly in the night to retrieve hidden valuables, and might fight or kill anyone found standing in their way.  Such a mysterious death would never be solved, and people would say that a ghost had returned for revenge. 

            Thus in every city there were sealed and abandoned homes where no one would stay.  If I could find such a house, it would be safe and secure, as long as no one saw me enter.  I decided to try.

            I got off the bus.  The street was almost empty.  I walked a few blocks, and eventually came upon a very old house with its door sealed with crossed strips of paper forming a large X.  It took up a lot of land.  The original owners must have been quite wealthy.  Unlike most traditional houses, this one had a slight Western influence in the presence of a second story.  The front of the house was pasted over with old newspapers on which revolutionary slogans had been hurriedly written, along with the criminal history of the expelled residents.  Papers covered the windows as well.

            On the front door was a notice marked with the seal of a Red Guard station.  On it was written, “PROHIBITED TO ENTER; VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.”

            The notice did not intimidate me, but I wanted a less obvious entry, so I walked about the house looking for another way to get in.  I saw that on the second floor there was an open window, and a pottery pipe some sixteen feet in height drained the roof.  It was very easy to climb up the pipe to the second story.  When I got there, I walked across the clay-tiled roof to the open window.  I then removed some tiles from the gable, and used the spaces thus opened as handholds, as I kicked the window wide open and swung myself in through it.

            I was in a large room — apparently the master bedroom.  Sheets and clothes lay on the floor.  A table and chair were overturned.  It looked like the aftermath of a robbery.  There was a bad smell of something decaying, and spider webs were everywhere, so that with each step they clung to my face and arms and legs.

            I had my flashlight in my pack — but worried that it might be noticed from outside, I covered it with a handkerchief to make the light weaker.  Even so, it was little help, and all the junk on the floor tripped me up as I walked, and I nearly fell in the darkness.

            The wooden floor was strewn with rat droppings, and torn up here and there where Red Guards had searched for hidden valuables.  There was one piece of furniture, a wooden dresser that had proved too heavy to move, so they had beaten it to ruin.

            I wanted to go through the entire house to make sure no one was there, but it was so difficult to walk about through all the debris in the darkness that I gave up.  I just cleared out a corner where I could recline and rest.

            I had become like a rabbit or a deer, always alert for a hunter, so I dared not lie down completely.  I put my backpack against the wall, and sitting down and reclining against it, I closed my eyes to rest a while.  I kept telling myself not to go to sleep completely.  I wondered if I had done right in coming here, but recalled that in Russian spy fiction stories, the most dangerous place often proved to be the most secure.

            I relaxed my muscles and moved slightly to make myself more comfortable.  At once I heard a strange sound, a very regular “dop — dop — dop.”  It seemed to be someone taking footsteps with the intention of being heard.  I was immediately alert; it might be Red Guards coming in to get me.  Perhaps I had been seen entering.

            I remembered my military instructor saying that if you don’t move in the dark, the enemy will not discover you.  So I lay down on my stomach, held my breath, and watched the door to the stairs, holding a broken chair leg in my hand as a weapon and waiting for the guy to come up.

            No one appeared.  A few minutes passed, and the house returned to silence.  I still dared not stand up.  I crawled to the window and looked out, pondering whether I could survive a quick jump from the window in case of danger.  Then I thought again of the footsteps.           

            I recalled the ghosts I had seen as a child, but I had seen none since.  I thought of the old house in the countryside where people had hanged themselves and drank pesticide.  It had a strange atmosphere and odd things happened there, but I had been trained in Western medicine and had grown skeptical.

            And then I remembered my mother telling me what to do if I were to encounter a ghost.  “An honest, sincere gentleman does not fear ghosts,” she said.  “They will leave you alone if you concentrate all your energy in your eyes and look at the ghost.  Don’t be afraid and don’t run away, no matter how terrible or frightening it may seem.  You must stand there and use all your energy and stare at it directly.  If you do that, it will gradually disappear.  Then you will find that only your heart and mind have created the terrible thing — just your own mistake.”  My mother’s advice seemed a little contradictory to me, however, because though at times she appeared skeptical, at other times she would say things like, “The Yang world is much more powerful.  The Yin world is hidden and weak, and only manifests in the dark of night.  It will disappear with the dawn.  Moreover, even among ghosts there are some good, some bad.  The good may help you out, but even an evil ghost, if you keep your energy concentrated on him and are not afraid, will retreat.”

            I do not know where my mother got her theories.  My old granny, however, had been a firm believer in mysterious things.  When I was a child, she always had me wear one very expensive piece of jade.  It was very green and shining, and according to Granny it had a spirit.  If the owner of such a stone were lucky and healthy, the jade would become a very deep and brilliant green.  But if the master were ill, or dogged by ill fortune, the beautiful color would decay and disappear, and the jade would become dark and dull.  But the oddest thing was that if the master met with some unexpected accident or illness, that jade would counteract the bad influence, and as a result it would crack and lose all its green color, and the master would then escape the disaster.

            Such a thing actually happened to my nephew.  He fell from the third floor, which might have killed him, but he was not harmed at all.  Instead his jade was broken.  Such a remarkable “spirit stone” was very costly, and it might take $10,000 to obtain one.  The Chinese wear them for protection, just as Christians wear a cross or crucifix.  But such a stone of quality should have a very advanced Buddhist monk pronounce a blessing on it.  After that consecration it can protect from the hauntings of spirits and demons. 

            I enjoyed such tales, but thought that the chief value of such a stone was psychological.  I had not had mine since the Red Guards took it from me when our house was looted.

            Pondering all these things, I began to feel fear rising in me.  Who knows what bad fortune the people who lived here might have had?  Perhaps they, too, were exiled to some remote labor camp, or perhaps they committed suicide or died here. 

            Dim moonlight came through the open window and cast shadows of broken furniture on the floor.  I thought of the odd “dop — dop” sound that I had interpreted as footsteps.  There must be something to have caused it.  I hoped it was only a cat or a mouse. 

            Given the choice of being arrested for walking the streets outside, or of encountering a ghost, I preferred the ghost.  A ghost seemed easier to escape.

            I listened carefully as the minutes passed.  I heard a crunching sound like someone stepping on dry leaves.  Then the house was silent again.

            I told myself it was just nerves.  I was in a very old, very dark, empty house.  It was natural to be uneasy.  In spite of the odd sounds, no one came and nothing happened.  Eventually I became very sleepy, and seemed to doze off and wake again.

            All at once everything changed.  The whole room transformed.  All the damaged furniture and the mess on the floor disappeared, and in its place was a lovely, tidy bedroom with a young lady sitting on the edge of the bed.  I could see tears running silently down her cheeks.  She was feeding a small child.

            Abruptly came the sound of steps downstairs again, and the lady and her bedroom vanished, and I was back with the broken furniture in the darkness.  I must have been dreaming.  But the noise downstairs was not my imagination.

            Unable to control my curiosity, I very carefully and quietly crept to the stairs, and slowly descended into the lower room.  There, in the dim moonlight, I saw a young teenage boy totally absorbed in trying to crack nuts.  He was so intently concentrated on the matter that he did not notice me as I slipped quietly up to him.

            Suddenly he looked up, saw me, and shrank back quickly in fear, drawing a knife from his waist and holding it toward me threateningly.  We looked at each other in the silent, ghostly moonlight, neither moving.

            He was perhaps fifteen, and very thin.  His hair was tangled and filthy, his face smeared with dirt, his clothes stained and torn.  He was definitely not a Red Guard, just a homeless kid.  Even with the knife in his hand I felt no threat at all.

            I opened my backpack and took out a small bar of chocolate and held it toward him.  He reacted like a timid animal, desiring it, but fearing to take it.  So I tossed it to him.  He caught it, but continued to watch me cautiously.  I looked about the room and saw he was alone, so I sat down and relaxed my guard.

            That calmed him.  He lowered his knife, then shoved it back in his waistband, and ripped the paper off the chocolate, consuming the bar in what seemed only a moment.  He must have been very hungry.  Then he tried to pass me a handful of broken walnut shells and meat mixed together.  From that simple gesture I could tell that he was really a good guy who understood politeness and sharing.  Even in moonlight I could see that his hand was filthy, but I did not want to refuse his gesture of friendliness, so I took what was in it.

            I asked, like an adult to a child, “Why aren’t you home in bed?  Why did you come here in the middle of the night?”

            I could tell that my question made him uncomfortable, and regretted asking.  It was stupid of me.  Obviously he had no home.  I tried to open the conversation anew.  Instead of criticizing, I began praising him as a brave young man.  I deliberately did not call him a kid.  “You are so brave, staying here by yourself in this big house alone.  Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?  I feel a little afraid.  It scared me when I heard you down here.”

            Then he opened up.

            “Even if you are afraid, there’s nowhere else to go.  After a while you get used to it, and then you aren’t afraid any more.  There are some things a guy’s forced to do.”

            His words seemed mature beyond his years, and there was sadness in them.

            “Where is your family?” I asked.

            “They were all exiled.”

            “Oh.  Well, we are in the same boat.  My family was exiled to the countryside too.  But why didn’t you follow them?”

            “Before the exile my family had nothing to eat, so I started going all over the city begging for food.  One day I begged some money and bought some sweet potatoes and brought them home for my family.  But when I got there, they were gone.  I don’t know where they were taken.  I lost track of them.  So I just became homeless and lived where I could.”

            “How long have you been staying here?”

            “A few weeks now.”

            “Is there anybody else who comes here?”

            “Yah, but they are always afraid.  They just stayed a couple of days and left.”

            “Why did they leave?”

            “‘Cause they were afraid.”

            “What of?”

            They said they had seen a ghost here.  But I never saw it.”

            “What kind of ghost?”

            “According to some homeless guys, this house’s owner was the head of a small paper-making shop that made paper for Chinese paintings.  It was a family business.  But they had to hire workers, so they were considered “factory owners.”  In the Great Cultural Revolution the man was criticized because his shop provided materials to artists who made anti-Communist pictures.  Because he sold the paper, they said he was a criminal.  Their three-generation family business, the shop, all the equipment, everything was destroyed.  Without the shop they lost all their money and had nothing to live on.

            “When the Red Guards were tearing up the shop, the son, who was an adult, risked his life to fight them.  They beat him to death with a wooden staff.  The old man and his wife watched them kill their son.  Then they hanged themselves.  Finally, only the daughter-in-law and one grandchild were left in this house.  She took some sort of chemical used to make paper and poisoned herself and her child.

            “Since then a lot of people have stayed here, but they either get sick or injured or have bad nightmares.  They always see the young woman and her child in their dreams, but I never saw them.  I never saw anything unusual happen here, except sometimes when I fall asleep, it seems like somebody is putting a blanket on me.  But if I wake up, nobody is there.  Mostly I just sleep all night, though, and don’t wake up until morning.”

            I thought that whatever spirit remained there, it must be kind and gentle to take care of this boy.  It did not surprise me that he saw nothing while others did.  People who can see ghosts are either born with a “Yin” eye, or they have a poor fate, or they are ill or close to death.

            We talked on quietly about this and that, and soon, because of our common woes, we were like old friends.  Eventually he began yawning, and we stopped.  He soon lay back and closed his eyes.  I looked at him sleeping there in the moonlight.  He was just an innocent little kid.  I wished I could help him, but I could not even help myself. 

            I began to feel sleepy.  The moment my eyes closed, I saw again a young woman in white garments printed with tiny flowers.  Beside her was a lovely little child.  They stood at the top of the stairs looking down at me, motionless and silent.  I felt suddenly overwhelmed by sadness, and did not want to see them more.  I struggled to stand up, but my body felt heavy and would not move, and I felt as weary and drained as if I had been exercising all day.

            At that moment I remembered my old granny, and the Herb Doctor who cured my childhood illness.  During the Japanese air bombardment of Canton, my grandma always repeated the words, “Save from suffering, save from disaster, Bodhisattva Kuan Yin.”  In suffering or danger, Buddhists always called on the Compassionate Bodhisattva.  And the Herb Doctor taught me another mantra to repeat for help in time of great need, but that was a long time ago, and I had forgotten it.  In school the Communists taught me that such things were just superstition.  But my granny’s words were deep in my mind and unforgettable, so now I blurted out, “Save from suffering, save from disaster, Bodhisattva Kuan Yin!  Save from suffering, save from disaster, Bodhisattva Kuan Yin!” 

            No sooner had I done so than the woman picked up the child and slowly began to float away from the stairs and grow faint, like smoke blown on the wind.

            I felt a sudden pang of guilt.  I did not want to hurt her or her child, so I stopped repeating the prayer.  I felt so sorry for them.  My family was broken, yet we survived.  Her family was broken, and all were dead.

            The moment I fell silent, the young woman and her child came drifting back to the stairs in a wavering motion, like a butterfly in flight.  She looked directly at me with inexpressible sorrow, as though begging, imploring.  I remembered my mother saying that to stare strongly at a ghost would make it disappear, so I fixed my gaze on her and concentrated.  Suddenly she tossed a small, white rectangle toward me.

            I awoke abruptly, and had no wish to sleep again.  Though still very tired, I got no rest in that unfortunate house.  Usually when I could not sleep, I would read.  But there would be no books in that place.  No doubt all had been burned or taken away.  But even as I thought that, the faint light before dawn entered the window and fell on a small white book right beside me on the floor.  I picked it up and was disappointed.  It was just a collection of Mao’s writings.  Everybody hated it, because it had to be carried on one’s person all the time to avoid criticism.  No matter that there was a paper shortage and kids had no paper for homework, and people had no toilet paper — all resources had to be put into printing endless copies of this book.  Nonetheless, I grabbed it and opened it.  As I did so, a couple of slips of paper dropped out onto the floor.  I picked them up, and saw that they were a letter, which read:

            “Dear Papa and Mama,

            I do not know if this letter will ever reach you.  But if you see this paper, it means I have already left this world.  People say that only after you raise your own children and watch them grow up do you become sensitive, and feel how your parents worked hard to raise you.  And then you appreciate what they did for you.

            I left you to come here and study, marry, and have a daughter to build up my own family.  But I completely forgot to care about you, and did not fulfill the duties of a daughter to return gratitude for your raising and supporting me.  So I always felt guilty.  But I did not want to make you sad.

            Don’t feel sorry for me, because I can meet my husband in the other world, and we will be together again.  I don’t wish for our child to live in this very cruel and feelingless world.  She would only suffer more.  She won’t grow up.  Hard luck destroyed her life too early.

            I chose to marry Ga Kei.  He was the owner of a manufactory.  I knew when I married him that our future would be dim, but I ignorantly and childishly thought that pure and sincere love could overcome everything.  I underestimated how cruel and heartless human beings could be.

            So I don’t miss anything in this world.  I am only sorry that I did not accept my responsibility to take care of you both.  Please forgive me.  Don’t be sorry.  I’ll be in another world where there is no suffering, no blood and tears, no hatred, no cruel political struggles.

            Originally I wanted to send my girl to both of you to take care of, but unfortunately she had such great fear when her grandma, grandpa, and father died, that she has had a mental breakdown.  That would just add to your burden.  If she could grow up, she would just have the burden of her mother committing suicide and using her life to protest the Communist Party.  So at the last moment I decided that I brought her into this unfortunate, cruel world, and I will take her out of it.”

            The letter broke off suddenly, and appeared to have been written in hesitating segments.  It had no end, and there had been no chance to send it.

            It was so sad.  Perhaps her parents did not even know she was no longer in this world.

            Just then the morning sun broke into the room.  The boy was still asleep.  I went to open a window on the main floor so I could slip out of the house.  I had one leg outside and was halfway through, but my backpack strap got stuck on something on the inside sill.  I tried to loosen it, but nothing seemed to work.  Worried that someone might see me, I jumped back inside the house to release the strap from whatever had caught it.  I was surprised to find that it had stuck on just one small nail.  But when I tried to release the strap, the nail just went in deeper and snagged it tighter.  Finally I ran out of patience and gave a big tug that shook the wall as well — and suddenly out from behind a framed picture a paper fell.  I was surprised to see the picture still hanging until I noticed it was Chairman Mao.  Someone must have hidden the paper behind it in a hurry, thinking it a good place because of the veneration in which the image was generally held.

            I picked the paper up and got a great shock.  It was an empty envelope addressed to Canton — to my home town.  It was all very strange.  I took the two sheets of the unfinished letter I had found, and put them in the addressed envelope and sealed it.  Then I went to jump out the window again, but suddenly the front door banged open.  Perhaps it was only a breeze from the window, or perhaps the lonely spirits were now free to leave, the last task accomplished.

            I hurried out through the front door and left that sad and lonely house.  I gladly inhaled the fresh morning air of the street.  A few bicycles were on the road — people pedaling off to work.  Early buses were already moving.

            I held the letter in my hand and looked for a post office or mailbox.  Then a very peculiar thing happened, as strange as all that had come before.  I raised my eyes, and there, walking directly toward me, was a mailman in uniform.  I stopped him and asked if he would send the letter for me.  He took it, and we parted.

            It seemed then that something was finished — that I had done the one thing set for me to do there.

 *

(Copyright David Coomler and Ruby Tang)

Ochiba ochikasanarite ame ame wo utsu

Falling-leaves fall-pile up rain rain wo beats

Leaves fall
And pile up;
Rain beats on rain.

R. H. Blyth translated it in a particularly appealing way, because of the consonance (repetition) of the letter “l”:

Leaves falling,
Lie on one another;
The rain beats on the rain.

In such a verse there is no writer apparent to obstruct the reader’s experience of the falling leaves and the cold beating of the rain.  It really gives us a clear feeling of the season, a strong visual and auditory sensation, and that is characteristic of good hokku.

It reminds one a bit of the lines from A. E. Housman:

The rain, it streams on stone and hillock,
The boot clings to the clay.

There is, in both, a sense of ending and finality — in one the autumn ending, in the other a life ended.

Near and far –
The sound of water,
The falling leaves.

(Variation on an old hokku by Bashō)

As all regular readers here know, a hokku is a sensory event set in the context of a particular season.  That is basic knowledge.  But did you ever ask yourself why?  What, after all, is the point of recording sensory, season-related events as hokku?

This matter is very significant in getting to the root of what hokku is all about, yet it is very simple.  Hokku have to do with the creation of very subtle states of mind in the reader.  The operative word here is subtle.  That is why hokku are not “war” verses, not “romance” verses, not “protest” verses, not “social commentary” verses.  And it is also why hokku has a deep connection with a meditative life, such as one finds in (traditional) Zen or Ch’an Buddhism, as well as with the kind of attitude toward life found in Transcendentalism, as in the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

Now what do we mean by “subtle states of mind”?  You already know.  You have just perhaps never heard it put that way before.

Here is an example.  When you read the words in this title of the old classic children’s book, they automatically create a “subtle state of mind” that you may not have consciously noticed, but were aware of nonetheless — subtly aware:

The Wind in the Willows

Just those words, with nothing added, arouse a certain nearly-indefinable sensation in us.  We see the willows, we see the wind blowing through the branches, and we may even feel the wind against our arms or faces.  But beyond that, there is a distinct, definite feeling created in our minds — a “subtle state of mind” that is aroused by the willows and the wind in them.

We can modulate that effect — change it — by putting it in the context of a season.  Look how different the “subtle sensations” are that doing so creates:

Spring — the wind in the willows

Summer — the wind in the willows.

Autumn — the wind in the willows.

Winter — the wind in the willows.

What a contrast between the fresh wind of spring through the young leaves, and the cold, biting wind of winter through the bare branches!

To appreciate such verse, one must be able to appreciate simple, understated things.  There is nothing grand here.  Hokku does not strive to be beautiful or conventionally poetic.  It merely records a sensory event in the context of a season, and that creates its own “poetry” in the mind of the reader.

In modern hokku we do not write the actual season name into every verse.  But we do label every verse with the season, so we know its context, and that enables us to experience it.

Of course in the “wind in the willows” examples, I have not put them in the form of a hokku, but we can see the relationship between those examples and real hokku if we look, for example, at this verse by Ryūshi:

Stillness;
The sound of a bird
Walking on fallen leaves.

In old Japan that would have been a “winter” verse;  but it could also be an autumn verse,  depending on how we label it, and there would be a difference in feeling between the two, as we see if we add the season “label” to each:

(Autumn)

Stillness;
The sound of a bird
Walking on fallen leaves

(Winter)

Stillness;
The sound of a bird
Walking on fallen leaves.

Just by changing the season, we make it a different hokku, a different verse.  Yes, the words are still precisely the same, but the seasonal context makes a significant change in the subtle state of mind evoked.  It is not that one is “better” than the other, but rather that each has its own effect.

That is what hokku does.  It creates subtle states of mind in the reader by recording a sensory (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) event in its seasonal context.  And that is the “poetry” of hokku — not in the words, but as it appears in the mind of the reader.  For that to happen, however, and to have its full effect, the reader must be the kind of person who is open and appreciative of such subtle states of mind.

That is one reason why, as I often say, hokku is not for everyone because everyone is not for hokku.

David

In old hokku (which was Japanese), this became too systematized, so that if one wrote about frogs, it was automatically assumed that such a verse was a “spring” verse.  But in modern hokku, a frog verse can be for any season in which a frog appears.  For us in the temperate zone, that would be in spring, summer, or early autumn.

Ordinarily we do not write or read hokku that are out of season, but an exception is made for general instruction, and that is why today, on a very chilly and wet day in autumn, I am going to briefly discuss a couple of “frog” hokku.

The kind of language used in writing Japanese hokku was telegraphic, which means a translation of such a verse is often likely to come out longer in English.  Here is an example by Wakyu:

Hitotsu tobu   oto ni mina tobu   kawazu kana

That literally reads, “One jumps sound at, all jump; frogs….“

Put into ordinary English, we would say,

At the sound of one jumping, they all jump; frogs.

But of course in English that is not as clear as we would like it, because English tends to be more definite than Japanese.  We would want it to say,

“At the sound of one frog jumping in, they all jump in; frogs.” That way it is clear that they are not jumping on land, but jumping into water.

R. H. Blyth translated the verse very much like that, only he took the very last word — “frogs” — and moved it into the main body of the verse, like this:

At the sound of one jumping in,
All the frogs
Jumped in.

That comes out top-heavy and a bit awkward visually, though it makes sense and is clear. That kind of out-of balance verse often results from trying to translate everything in an original into English.  But we could achieve essentially the same thing and gain the brevity so helpful in hokku by leaving out the word oto — “sound,” like this:

Frogs;
When one jumps in,
They all jump. 

That is better balanced, and it is very close to the sense of the original without being overly long.

We could do the same for another “frog” hokku (by Ryōto) that Blyth places right after that one in his anthology.  In the original, it is:

Hashi wateru hito ni shizumaru kawazu kana

Bridge cross person at quieten frogs kana

Blyth again makes it too top-heavy in his translation.  That is acceptable when one is trying to  convey the meaning of the original, which was what Blyth was doing and doing well, but it is not good in writing hokku in Engish.  Blyth has:

Someone passed over the bridge,
And all the frogs
Were quiet.

An additional problem is that the translation reads a little to much like a single run-on sentence. We could achieve the same effect by putting it into better form:

Crossing the bridge;
All the frogs
Go silent.

There are multiple ways of translating the same verse, and multiple ways of writing such hokku in English.  The trick is not to go too far, not to try to put too much into a verse.  Keep it simple and direct.  Did you notice in that last verse that even though the first line looks considerably longer than the other two, it is still only three words, just like the second line?

Just an additional remark, and that will be it for now.  You probably saw the untranslated word kana at the end of each Japanese hokku.  The Japanese used it as a kind of meditative pause at the end, but they also, quite honestly, often used it just to pad out the required seventeen phonetic units standard in Japanese hokku.  In English, punctuation does the trick when a sense of pause is needed, but actually in many cases it does not need to be reflected in the translation at all, given that in so many cases it is just “filler.”

David

To grasp the meaning of this poem one must know two things: first, the speaker is a man who has grown old; second, he is dealing with the inner conflict that old people often have.  Their minds — their sense of self — feel to them no different than when they were young, but when they look in the mirror, the body of course is very different.  So in this poem the poet thinks, “Why not give this mind a body that does not age, an artificial body?”  Of course it is a concept that has occurred to many science fiction writers, but Yeats approaches the problem in a way that is not quite so modern in its technology, as we shall see.  I will take the poem part by part, as usual.

As it begins, the poet has already made a sea voyage.  He has sailed from Ireland (which we can here take in a wider sense as the world of youth and sensuality) and he has arrived in Byzantium (Constantinople), the great city (now Istanbul) that was the capitol of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire, which fell to the invading Islamic Turks on May 29, 1453.  For Yeats, vanished Byzantium with its skilled arts was an ideal city of the intellectual.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now we know from these facts that the poem is a fantasy, because Byzantium as city or as empire has not existed for centuries.  But in this poem we are meant to concentrate on the contrast of body versus “soul,” which is used here as a synonym for the mind, the intellect.  And this poem itself is largely a poem of the intellect, a fantasy that takes place in the mind:

Let’s begin:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

The poet says “that is no country for old men.”  He is speaking of the place he has already left, which as said earlier, is first Ireland, but also in a wider sense the sensual world of the young, which is a world of impermanence; it does not last.  It is a country of “the young in one another’s arms,” that is, of romantic lovers, which of course leads to procreation, the giving of birth, the continual being born, growing old, and dying that characterizes our sensual world.  It is a land of birds singing in trees, but those, the poet tells us, are only “dying generations,” their singing lives are short, their death soon.  He points us to the “salmon-falls,” the salmon jumping the falls to return to upstream pools to spawn and die; he gives us the image of “mackerel-crowded seas” in which we see only more reproduction and quick death in multitudes.

The poet summarizes this part of the poem dealing with continuous birth, reproduction and death by saying,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

So he tells us that whether it is fish (salmon, mackerel), flesh (young lovers in one another’s arms) or fowl (the birds in the trees), all summer long all creatures “commend” having sex, which leads to birth, which leads to death — the whole round of endless birth and death in our world.  ”Commend” is used here to mean that they draw our attention to and urge one to follow their pattern, as in the Oxford English Dictionary definition:  ”To present as worthy of favourable acceptance, regard, consideration, attention, or notice; to direct attention to, as worthy of notice or regard; to recommend.”

So all of this sensual world of creatures being created through sex, being born, aging, and dying is frustrating to our aging speaker.  He tells us,

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Everyone and every creature is so wrapped up in sex and romance and reproduction (“that sensual music”), in being born and dying — all things of the flesh, of the body — that they neglect the mind, they have no use for the minds of old men whose bodies are no longer sensual or interesting, no matter how fine those minds may be.  We may also think of such “monuments of unageing intellect” as being what is created by such minds.

Given this profound sense of alienation that the old poet feels in this world of sex, romance, sensuality, birth and death, he tells us:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,

He feels not only alienated but completely unappreciated in his old age.  ”An old man,” he tells us, is only a “paltry” (insignificant, contemptible) thing, like a worn out old coat (the body) hanging on a stick (the skeletal frame),

unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

That, the poet tells us, is the only thing that saves an old man from being insignificant — if his soul, his intellect, claps its hands and sings, by which he means unless it creates, as a writer writes novels, as a poet composes poems, as an artist paints or sculpts – that is the singing of the intellect (not the brief singing of sensual, mortal birds) — the creation of “monuments of unageing intellect.”  And the more the body — the “mortal dress” — ages (tatters), the more the mind should sing (be emphasized, be creative).

But where does an old man learn to do this?  He tells us:

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

The soul learns to sing, that is, learns to create, by studying the products of other such minds, “monuments of its [the mind's] own magnificence,” that is, monuments by and to the creative mind.

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

For that reason, the poet tells us, he has left the sensual world and has sailed away to what here is used as a symbol of the ideal environment of the mind and intellect — “the holy city of Byzantium.”  Of course, as already noted, this voyage is only a fantasy of the mind — but that is what this poem is — a fantasy of the mind.

Now in Byzantium, the poet calls on the wise men of Byzantium, the “sages.”

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

He calls on these sages, whom he views as standing in the holy fire of God (the direct influence of supreme Intellect) like saints standing amid the golden color of Byzantine mosaics on a wall.  He tells them to come to him from that fire of the mind, to “perne (turn) in a gyre (circle),” that is, to surround him in a turning, spiralling circle, and become the “singing masters” that will teach the aging poet’s “soul” (his mind/intellect) to sing, that is, to create works of the mind.  To Yeats, the spiralling motion of a gyre was representative of the soul (see the excerpts at the end of this article).

But the poet wants even more; he wants to get rid of all traces of his aging body, all traces of the sensual world he has left:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

He wants the sages of Byzantium to “consume” (cause to disappear) his heart (his emotions) away, because it is sick with desire (with the desires of the sensual world that an old man can no longer enjoy or fulfill), and “fastened to a dying animal,” that is, his emotions are tied to his aging, tattered, mortal body that is (like all created things) subject to death.  He wants to be “gathered into the artifice of eternity,” that is, made immortal by being given an artificial body that will house his mind forever.

Then he foresees what that new life will be like:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,

Once he is free of the emotions and free of his aging body, he will not take his new body from any “natural” thing, that is, not from any flesh and blood creature of the sensual world subject to the same emotions, aging and death;

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Once free of emotions and the aging, dying body, the poet will have his intellect, his mind, placed in an artificial body, one such as the Greek goldsmiths formed in Byzantium out of hammered gold and enamel (melted, colored glass used as surface ornament) to amuse a drowsy emperor.  This part of the poem, Yeats himself once explained, came from his reading:

“I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang“

So the poet wants his mortal body and emotions removed, and he wants his mind housed in an artificial body, like a shining golden, artificial bird in the palace of an emperor at Byzantium, a bird that sings on and on (creates perpetually), never aging, never dying; a bird that sings

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

That is, it sings of the past, the present, and the future — eternity.

So that is the poem.  Again, it is just a fantasy created by an old man (Yeats wrote it at age 63, which in his day was considered older than we think it to be now) who can no longer participate in the sensual romance of youth, and so turns to a fantasy of his mind taken from his aging body and put into an artificial body, so that it can go on creating works of the intellect forever, untroubled by human sensuality and emotion.

The flaw in his poetic plan, of course, is that in reality rather than fantasy, even artificial birds wear out.  We learned that as children by reading Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Nightingale.  There is no such escape of the mind from the senses, from aging, from death, not through any material body, though authors of science fiction keep working on the notion.

We should take this poem for what it is, the expression of an old man’s conflict between an aging body and a mind that still seems young and potentially creative, even though the old tend to become gradually more and more insignificant and invisible to the young, and consequently often feel they would like to get away to some refuge where they are again respected and considered significant and useful. Old people really do begin to feel that our world is the world of the young, and that it is “no country for old men.”  That is perhaps even more true today, with the magazine and television cultural emphasis on youth, beauty, and vitality, than it was in Yeat’s time.

This poem always reminds me of an aging college professor walking through a university campus, seeing the young people sitting and nuzzling one another or playing their guitars and laughing, going about the usual pursuits of the young.  I used to call my local university “the land of perpetual youth,” because its inhabitants were always young and never grew old (of course because they were replaced by new young students every year). But the same, of course, was not true of their instructors remaining year after aging year, many of whom could have written a poem such as this, had they the skill.  Many of them no doubt sailed to their own Byzantiums by devoting their old age to study and writing, locked away in their studies or a quiet corner of the university library, trying to enter into the “artifice of eternity” through their publications.

By the way, if you noticed that I write “aging” while Yeats writes “unageing,” it is the difference between American (aging) and British (ageing) spellings.

That will give you what you need to understand this poem, so you may stop here.  But if you would like a bit more background on the fascination Byzantium had for Yeats, he wrote in his book A Vision:

“I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia [537 c.e.] and closed the Academy of Plato [529 c.e.]. I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to princes and clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body.

I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers — though not, it may be, poets, for language had been the instrument of controversy and must have grown abstract — spoke to the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books. were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter and that the vision of a whole people. They could copy out of old Gospel books those pictures that seemed as sacred as the text, and yet weave all into a vast design, the work of many that seemed the work of one, that made building, picture, patterns, metal-work of rail and lamp, seem but a single image, and this vision, this proclamation of their invisible master, had the Greek nobility, Satan always the still half divine Serpent, never the horned scarecrow of the didactic Middle Ages.”

In the same work, Yeats wrote on the nature of the “gyre” and excerpts enable us to see that he considered the gyre representative of the soul, which is no doubt why, in the poem, he tells the sages of Byzantium to perne (turn) in a gyre (circular, spiral motion):

“Swedenborg wrote occasionally of gyrations, especially in his “Spiritual Diary,” and in “The Principia” where the physical universe is described as built up by the spiral movement of points, and by vortexes which were combinations of these; but very obscurely except where describing the physical universe. perhaps because he was compelled as he thought to keep silent upon all that concerned Fate.  I remember that certain Irish countrymen whom I questioned some twenty years ago had seen Spirits departing from them in an ascending gyre….“

“Line and plane are combined in a gyre, and as one tendency or the other must be always the stronger, the gyre is always expandng or contracting.  For simplicity the representation of a gyre is drawn as a cone.  Sometimes this cone represents the individual soul, and that soul’s history — these things are inseparable — sometimes general life.  When general life, we give to its narrow end, to its unexpanded gyre, the name of Anima Hominis [the Soul/Spirit of Man] and to its broad end, or its expanded gyre, Anima Mundi [the Soul/Spirit of the World].

David

Such as poem is The Starlight Night.

In it, as in some of his other poems such as The Windhover, Hopkins mixes Nature with aspects of his adopted religion, Roman Catholicism.  He often uses the former (Nature) as an introduction to the latter (religion).

Without careful reading, this poem would quickly dissolve into incoherency after its simple beginning.  And even with care, as we shall see, there are some ambiguities in interpretation.  But let’s give it a try nonetheless.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Hopkins urges the reader to look up at the stars in the night sky.  He compares the stars to living beings of fire, to “fire-folk” sitting in the air.   And he likens the groupings and clusters of stars to “bright boroughs,” that is, to star towns, and to “circle-citadels,” to fortresses within the circle of the night sky, like the fortress refuge within or above an old town in medieval and renaissance times.  We might also understand “circle-citadels” to refer to the circular dots of light in the sky that are stars.

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

There are two possible interpretations of that. The first is to understand it as referring to the sky, seeing it as having dim woods (dark areas)  and “grey lawns” (the “Milky Way”).  The second interpretation, which perhaps makes more sense, is to understand it as viewing the stars from different locations — from within a dim wood where the trees are bare, so the stars may be seen among the dark night branches as “diamond delves,” (diamond caves or hollows, from an old meaning of “delve”) and as “elves’-eyes” (bright, sparkling eyes of supernatural creatures).  Also as stars viewed from grey (all colors turn grey or black at night) lawns where “quickgold” lies, meaning that golden stars (a likeness here to “quicksilver”) lie upon (above) the night lawn like shining, fluid gold.  Neither interpretation comes off perfectly, and we may see this as a flaw in Hopkins’ communication of meaning.

Wind-beat whitebeam!  airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!  

Hopkins gives us more metaphors for stars:  he tells us they are “wind-beat whitebeam!”  A whitebeam is a tree that has clusters of little white blossoms in the spring, so a “wind-beat” whitebeam is one that scatters its white blossoms (i.e. stars) in the wind.  He also likens them to another English tree, to white poplars (“abeles”) “set on flare,” that is, with branches set alight with burning stars like torches.  He further likens the stars to “flake-doves,” that is, to flakes of scattered light like bright, white doves that scatter into the air when startled in a farmyard.

Ah, well!  it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

The starry skies described in the poem are “a purchase” — something to be bought — as well as “a prize”  something won as an achievement, something to be highly valued.

The first part of the poem is designed to draw the attention of the reader to the stars and their glittering, sparkling beauty.  Hopkins is like a man selling his wares in a marketplace; he first shouts out to catch your attention and fix it on what he is selling (stars, in this case), and then he urges you to buy and tells you the price:

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

With that line we realize that the long beginning of the poem was just an introduction, a sales pitch for selling his religious notions.  This will be elaborated as we continue.  Having shown us the wonders of the stars in the night sky, Hopkins tells us we should then “buy,” should “bid,” meaning to offer a price for the stars.  And what is the price?

It is prayer; it is patience; it is alms (money or goods given to the poor); it is vows (to perform this or that religious and/or moral act).  In short, it is a religious life that will enable one to purchase the starry sky.  That is the price.

Now this is an odd notion.  Why would one want to purchase the stars in the night sky?  Before he tells us, Hopkins returns to his colorful sales pitch, directing our attention back to the stars:

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
  Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

By “mess” here, Hopkins means a quantity, a large number (of stars), like white blossoms on the boughs of fruit trees in an orchard in May.  Then he likens the starry sky to sallows (willow trees) in early March that “bloom” with their catkins that release a golden dust like yellow flour (meal) — a comparison to the stars dusted like willow pollen across the sky.

Now we come to the point of the whole thing, and are told at last what Hopkins is selling:

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks.  This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
  Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

All of the bright stars in the sky, which Hopkins has compared to fire-folk, to bright boroughs, to circle citadels, to diamond caves and elves eyes, to quickgold, to blossoming or fiery trees, to doves, to willow pollen, all of these comprise, to Hopkins, a structure, a building.  Hopkins likens it to a barn, and inside the doors of that barn (“withindoors”) are housed the shocks, meaning here the bundles of cut grain.  This is an old Christian symbol for human souls, who are to be harvested into heaven as in the old Protestant hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves.”  So we see that Hopkins views the starry sky as the great heavenly barn in which redeemed souls are housed, and not only souls.  He goes on to tell us,

This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
  Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

Hopkins takes his likening of the starry sky to a heavenly barn one more step; he compares it to a “piece-bright paling,” a barrier (like a fence or palisade), a wall of bright stars pieced together (each star a “piece”) that “shuts” (encloses) Christ in his home, that is, in heaven —  the great barn of heaven; and with him are his mother Mary (very important in Catholic teaching as an intercessor for humans) and “all his hallows,” meaning all of the saints of Christ.  ”Hallows” (“holy ones”) is an old term for saints, which is why we have All Hallows Eve, the evening before the day on which all saints are celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church — the origin of our modern festival name “Halloween.”

Christ himself is the “spouse,” which is a notion derived from the New Testament, in which the Church and those in it are the “bride of Christ.”  It is also a term significant in monasticism, because nuns are considered to be married to Christ as their spouse.

The appeal of this poem lies in its colorful imagery and alliteration — “fire folk,” “diamond delves,” etc., rather than in its overall meaning, which takes a great deal of effort to extract.  That difficulty and its spotty ambiguity make this one of Hopkins’ less successful efforts as a whole, which is why people tend to remember the clear and bright parts of the poem — like the first two lines — and forget the rest.

I have compared this poem to a sales pitch for Hopkins’ adopted Roman Catholic religious views (he was a convert), but given his introversion and persistent state of depression after his conversion, one is left with the feeling that the person Hopkins was really trying to sell on these religious views was himself.

David

The morning sun;
Already it penetrates
The autumn willows.

This is another of those verses in which meaning requires knowing the principles of hokku.  We might think it is just about the morning sun seeming to be up early (“already”), or the writer’s having risen from bed a bit late, but that is not the case.  The important factor here is the stated season, autumn.  That tells someone educated in hokku that there is a significant relationship between the sunlight and the willow trees.

(Photo credit: markhig)

Put simply, the writer sees how quickly autumn is progressing.  The leaves of the willows have been falling for days, opening gaps between the branches through which — he suddenly notices — the morning sun shines.

That is the point of the verse — transience, impermanence, how everything in Nature (including us) is constantly changing.  Just a short time ago the willows were a mass of yellow leaves, but already so many have fallen that the morning sunlight penetrates the trees.

Here in the United States, we are more likely to think of other kinds of leafy trees in such a circumstance, but the verse would be effective even if we generalized it to

The morning sun;
Already it penetrates
The autumn trees.

In that case, we would again use our “hokku sense” to recognize that these are hardwood trees losing their leaves, not evergreens — and again the tipoff would lie in the word “autumn.”

David