Sweet sister death

 Sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.

- David Jones, "In Parenthesis", on the Battle of the Somme

Plus ca change

 Whereas so much of the terminology of medieval history and criticism is the invention of the eighteenth century, the terminology of troubadour poetry is wholly contemporary. The worldly, witty, and self-conscious verse was discussed and evaluated by its practitioners and their circles. Poets wrote verses criticizing and satirizing each other and theorizing about their own poetry. Literary controversy developed, with songs exchanged like challenges. Should poetry be clear and accessible, easy to understand, and social in nature (trobar leu), as in the verses of Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimon de Miraval, or should it be personal, allusive, and difficult, making use of colored words with overtones and nuances, like the poetry of Arnaut Daniel (trobar clus)? Macabru boasted that he had written poems he himself could not understand.

- from The Knight in History, 56. 

Before pleasure has a chance

Analysis and understanding heighten appreciation. Sometimes, however, they obtrude: trying to force knowledge before pleasure has a chance. Pointing this out is not sentimental or anti-intellectual; on the contrary, the goal should be to encourage intellectual precision by putting it in a stringent, fitting relation to the actual experience of the poem. Well-meaning teaching can muddle that process by leaving out the experience. 

- Robert Pinsky, from Essential Pleasures, 4. 

Method?

Prince Wen Hui's cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmered
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like "The Mulberry Grove,"
Like ancient harmonies!

"Good work!" the Prince exclaimed,
"Your method is faultless!"
"Method?" said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
"What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!

"When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.

"But now I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

"There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!

"True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.

"Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away."

Prince Wen Hui said,
"This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!"

- Chuang Tzu, 369 - 286 BC, as quoted in Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn

The possibility of poetry

Theoretically - and, indeed, empirically - a case can be made that there ought to be more first-class poets at the present than in earlier centuries. There are, after all, many more people, and more of them receive an education that could expose them to the possibility of poetry. There are all those workshops, throughout the country, which every year award diplomas to a new cohort of MFAs, among whom some significant percentage should have what it takes.

Whether or not workshops are, in fact, the most fertile grounds for the breeding of good poetry, I think that the twentieth century has produced a bumper crop of excellent to world-class poets in America[...] But [...] I think the great preponderance of the best poetry was written before our present laureate (Rita Dove, born in 1952) had indited her first poem to paper.

And for this simple reason - that the workshops, which have a monopoly on the training of poets, encourage indolence, incompetence, smugness and - most perniciously - that sense of victimization and special entitlement that poets have now come to share with other artists who depend on government or institutional patronage to sustain their art, pay their salaries, and provide free vacations.

[Furthermore, by ignoring canonical poetry in these workshops], at a time when Theory has taken over graduate English departments, where it was once possible to study poetry in a serious way [...] justice is done while at the same time drastically simplifying the curriculum. Why bother with dead white males when there are so many living poets who share Levinson's sense of the world they so systematically misrepresented?

In this devaluation of the past, academic theorists offer aid and comfort to the indolence of the workshops, where the poetry that is studied is, by and large, the poetry that is written there....[Yet], in the absence of critical standards, all poets are equal. [...And] what better way to compensate for the demands of Organic Chemistry that to twang the lyre?

I do believe there is a remedy and that is the disestablishment of the poetry workshops as an academic institution. The art of poetry is poorly served by its bureaucratization, and only the trade is advanced. I will even venture a prophecy (which is the prerogative of poets, if not of critics) - that they will, in my own lifetime, self-destruct. Not because of Jesse Helms, or his like, mandates a holy war against the poets funded by the NEA, but because students, wiser than their teachers, choose other electives.

- from "The Castle of Indolence," Thomas Disch

Far and near and low and louder

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes
And then the clash of fallen horseman and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you.
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

- "The Valley of the Black Pig," W.B. Yeats, 1895

On the idle hill of summer
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

- from A Shropshire Lad, No. 35, A.E. Housman, 1895.

The fifth of August, 1942

"The Book of Yolek"

Wir haben ein Gesetz
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben. 

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.

- Anthony Hecht. The quote at the beginning is John 19:7 - "We have a law, and according to the law he shall die."

So much needless fear and sorrow

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is offered only once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way
with exactly the same kisses.

One day, perhaps, some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

- Wisława Szymborska, "Nothing Twice"

All that is human in me

Well - one at least is safe. One shelter'd hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.
Yes - thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening, and at night retire secure
To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarm'd;
For I have gain'd thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And, when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

- William Cowper (1731 - 1800), "My Pet Hare"

Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation

"When we see...the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man created, we can hardly avoid being filled with...a moral sadness, a revolt of good will - if indeed it has any place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest nations and finest exemplars of virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness."

- Georg Hegel, Reason in History, 1837

Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong,
Think rather, - call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.

Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.

Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime
foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation -
Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?

- A.E. Housman, 1896

A most intimate uprooting

"To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savouring of death, the spilling of one's own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: that most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves."

- Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1921.

Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying
Wafer and wine to the human wound, we laid
Ourselves to cure ourselves down: I'm afraid
Our vestments wanted, but Francis' friends were crying
In the nave of pines, sun-satisfied, and flying
Subtle as angels about the barricade
Boughs made over us, deep in a bed half made
Needle-soft, half the sea of our simultaneous dying.

'Death is the mother of beauty.' Awry no leaf
Shivering with delight, we die to be well...
Careless with sleepy love, so long unloving.
What if our convalescence must be brief
As we are, the matin meet the passing bell?...
About our pines our sister, wind, is moving.

- John Berryman

To an Unborn Pauper Child

 I

Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,
And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,
Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here,
And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.
II
Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,
And laughters fail, and greetings die:
Hopes dwindle; yea,
Faiths waste away,
Affections and enthusiasms numb:
Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.
III
Had I the ear of wombèd souls
Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls,
And thou wert free
To cease, or be,
Then would I tell thee all I know,
And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?
IV
Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence
To theeward fly: to thy locked sense
Explain none can
Life’s pending plan:
Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make
Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.
V
Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot
Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not
One tear, one qualm,
Should break the calm.
But I am weak as thou and bare;
No man can change the common lot to rare.
VI
Must come and bide. And such are we—
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary—
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou wilt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!

-  Thomas Hardy

Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines
     And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet, as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

     And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

     Even we,

     Even so.

- George Meredith, 1870.

Dan de Lion