Poems I Journey With 15

Old depiction of Horace

There is much richness in the classics, that is in Latin and classical Greek texts. Unfortunately, I never got to study classical Greek at school, though I did study Latin to Leaving Certificate level. Being reasonably good at languages, I also loved studying the poems of Virgil, Horace and Ovid and so on. Much of what I learned over forty years ago is unfortunately lost somewhere in the recesses of my memory.  Retirement will certainly entice me to reacquaint myself with the Latin language and some of the texts of those old poets. I remember well Horace’s agricultural metaphors and his love for wine. I’m sure the reader of these lines will know that most famous of quotes from his pen, namely “carpe diem” or “seize/pluck the day.”  These few lines from that famous Ode are worth quoting here for the beauty of the language: “Tu ne quaesieris — scire nefas — quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë .... dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” = “Do not ask — it is wrong to know (it is impossible to know) — what end (quem finem) the gods have in store for you or for me, Leuconoë .... while we talk (discuss) envious time flees away: pluck the day, and believe as little as possible in tomorrow!”  I wish I was at home in Latin so that I could translate the verses given on my own. I had to use an on-line dictionary and Google translate and compare to other translations.  Still I enjoyed the activity as I began to remember some of my old Latin skills.

The reason I begin this post with a diversion into an Horatian Ode is that I should like to share a poem from the great Professor, classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936) with you all this evening. He was steeped in all things classical and is reckoned to be one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century. Such poets as those listed above and many others from both Latin and Greek would have influenced my chosen poet.

XXXI

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

Briefest of Commentaries

A.E. Housman

This poem occurs in a collection called A Shropshire Lad and was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down. His colleagues and students were surprised by the emotional depth and vulnerability it revealed in an apparently distant and self-contained man.  This poem is the 31^st poem, its title designated in Roman numerals as XXXI of some 63 poems in the collection.  In the distance, some five miles to the north of Wenlock Edge, is a forested hill, the Wrekin (pronounced REE-kin).

“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/Viroconium, 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.

As a classicist, A.E. Housman is reminded of Roman Britain.  As he views the restlessness of the fleecy trees on Wenlock Edge and on Wrekin hill or mountain he becomes aware of his own restlessness and realises that such discomfort has been part of the human condition for hundreds of years. We are in the province, of course, of what was classically called “pathetic fallacy,” namely the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature. Here “'Tis the old wind in the old anger,” and then we have the recalling or imagining of how a Roman soldier or official might have felt over 1500 years before:

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.

A.E. Housman is moved by the restlessness of the wind in the trees and by his own inner restlessness as part of the human condition. He feels deeply his own continuity with the sympathies and emotions of another human being from more ancient times, especially with how a Roman soldier or official might have felt standing in the same spot as the poet. This is a wonderfully simple but an extraordinarily powerful poem from a very fine poet.

Poems I Journey With 13

A young GM Hopkins at University

Gerard Manley Hopkins was only one month short of his 45th birthday when he died from typhoid fever in Dublin, Ireland in 1889.  He had been employed as a lecturer in classics in the Catholic University of Ireland (the forerunner of University College Dublin) founded by the great Victorian John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1854.  The world-renowned literary critic Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, an expert on the Victorian period deems Hopkins to be "the most original poet" of that time. Such is Hopkins's originality and genius that he may clearly considered as influential as T.S. Eliot in the starting of the modernist movement in poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also quite obvious to poetry readers that G.M. Hopkins's experiments with elliptical phrasing and double meanings, and even quirky conversational rhythms liberated the likes of W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas to give free rein to their freer and peculiarly personal rhythms. Here I'd like to share one of my favourite Hopkins poems with the reader.

God's Grandeur (1877, written when the poet was 33)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod

And for all this nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black west went

Oh ,morning at the brown brink eastward, springs -

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Commentary:

Rev Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

I don't want to mar the appreciation of this sonnet by superfluous or simplistic comment. However, some thoughts and reflections are demanded by this beautifully sublime text.  On the surface we will notice that it is written in the form of the Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet - that is a poem in fourteen lines that consists of an octave (eight lines) with the rhyming scheme abbaabba and a sestet (six lines) that has the possibility of either being written in one of two rhyme schemes - either cdecde or cdcdcd. The sestet above is the latter of these two schemes. However, Hopkins does more, much more, that is, he experiments with many interesting sounds within that external superficial scheme.  We note that the metre here is not that of "sprung rhythm" for which Hopkins is so famous, but he does vary greatly the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet. In that context, we notice the run-on lines between the end word "oil" of the third and the beginning word of the next line that is very dramatic and startling, namely "Crushed."  And the next nine monosyllabic words in that very line after the disyllabic, namely Why do men then now not reck his rod? are nothing short of wonderfully unique and sonorous in sound and tone.  They are all stressed syllables, one after another and highlight the urgency of Hopkins question represented in those words. I relish reading them aloud as all readers of poetry should. Like many of my teachers over the years in the area of poetry, I firmly believe the poems are written more for the ear than for the eye. In like manner, the next line contains the heavy falling rhythm of the repeated words "have trod" that come after the quick lilt of the polysyllabic "generations."  This technique recreates the sound of plodding steps in a striking onomatopoeia.

God's sustaining power over the universe is alive with an electric power that passes constantly like a live current through its many natural manifestations. The reader can trace this potent image of God's on-going support of nature through the poem in his own time.  The image of the olive press is also magnificently and startlingly potent.  This reader especially loves the lines:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell

because they capture for me the smelliness and dirtiness of our daily toil and thereby portray our struggle with our animality, fragility and mortality all imaged forth so powerfully in simple and direct everyday words. I also delight in Hopkins's portrayal of humankind's alienation from its spiritual and natural roots in the soil from which indeed he himself has sprung.  The very leather of his shoes or boots cuts him off from his oneness or unity with the very clay or soil of that earth :

nor can foot feel, being shod. 

In short, this poem reflects Gerard Manley Hopkins's conviction that the physical world  around us is like a book written by God, in which any attentive reader can detect the signs of a benevolent and caring God who protects and sustains that world like a great guardian angel:

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 74

Poem 74

If you realize that all things change,

there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren't afraid of dying,

there is nothing you can't achieve.

Trying to control the future

is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.

When you handle the master carpenter's tools,

chances are that you'll cut your hand.

Commentary

ST Augustine defined time as the measure of change.  John Henry Cardinal Newman stated that to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  Change is of the very essence of things.  This is a very old philosophy dating back to the sixth century B.C., the time of Heraclitus at least.  So it isn't hard to believe that the Tao Te Ching from the fourth century B.C. should preach something similar. 

Indeed, there is nothing we can really hold onto in the world, even though the lessons of our ego is such: that we can hold on to things.  Not alone does our ego insist on holding onto things, it also insists on getting more and more things, on expanding the human grasp on things.  Nations do the same as the historical rise of nationalism and two world wars have taught us.  Yet, we still haven't learnt the lessons of history.  Every generation has to learn its lessons the hard way, it would appear.  When I was growing up my father used to quote an old proverb: "There are no pockets in a shroud" or sometimes he used to put it even simpler still, "You cannot take it with you."  We spend a lifetime building up ourselves (i) getting a good education, (ii) being successful at our jobs or professions, (iii) reading a family, (iv) stocking our brains/minds with the highest of cultural acquisitions and yet all these things in the end will fade from our grasp.  All religions and all spiritualities worth their salt teach this wisdom.  Yet, it should not be used to frighten us from living.  It should be used like the Buddhists do, learn to live life all the fully, with deeper values.  They do this through meditating on how transient are the things of this world and by realising deep within that everything changes and we change too within those changes.  When I was a student of the Latin language our teacher used to quote Ovid who declared:  "Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis."  It translates: "The times change and we change with them."  We cannot even bring all our learning, all our well-stocked minds with us either.  We simply disappear when we die.  Perhaps we may linger in the memories of those who love us, those who are still left alive after us.

The lesson to us from these few stanzas are to learn to be humble, to declare our ignorance, to say "no" to the blandishments of the ego and to value the dignity of life by living in the present.  That is why the writer advises us not to attempt to control the future.  Such is as foolish as trying to catch the wind or like trying to be a master carpenter with none of the skills.  It would seem that our egos lead us often into false expectations and we simply "cut our hands" with the carpenter's tools.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 65

Poem 65

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Commentary: 

This poem contains sentiments that are found in other religious and spiritual traditions. When one writes about spirituality, no matter from one tradition or another or even from a neutral stance, one will find that certain themes repeat themselves.  Our Taoist poet refers to what is called in the early Christian tradition the "docta ignorantia" or a "learned ignorance." St Augustine of Hippo was the first among the early Fathers of the Church to use this phrase which occurred in one of his sermons.  The full sentence in Augustine's wonderful Latin runs: "Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram."  A translation would run: "There is in us, therefore, a certain learned ignorance, so to speak, but one taught by the Spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity."  In other words when we talk about the divine we are never in a territory which is systematically mapped out.  The only guidelines in this spiritual province would be divine inspiration or divine revelation for St Augustine.  A similar line of thought in traditional Christian theology is that of the "via negativa" where we mortals can only deduce attributes of the Deity by declaring all that an infinite, all-powerful and all-loving Being cannot be. Another term for this approach in the mystical tradition is Negative Theology or more elaborately Apophatic theology that proceeds by describing God by negation, speaking of the Divine only in terms of what He/She is not (apophasis = repudiation or denial) rather than presuming to describe what God is.  It is in such a way that our Taoist poet writes in the first stanza of the above poem:

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

The way of "not-knowing" also fits in nicely with the Socratic tradition of declaring one's ignorance constantly in  any matter before proceeding to learn about it incrementally by research and learning.  To present oneself as the repository of all knowledge is obviously a very egotistical thing to do and a very weak approach to epistemology or any valid theory of knowledge.  Again this Socratic approach is to the fore in the second stanza:

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

In a sense as we grow as human beings we have to unlearn many of the prejudicial opinions and beliefs we have acquired during our early life.  This is the experience of most adults as they grow older and wiser.

All religions and spiritual approaches to life advocate the sufficiency of an ordinary plain life, unencumbered by great riches and power.  In  the end we all end up dead, and dying and death as as natural as living and life.  In pondering the former we learn to appreciate the latter better.  In short, we learn to value our very breath as human beings.  This is the sense I get when reading the final stanza:

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 59

Poem 59

For governing a country well

there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight,

firm like a mountain,

supple like a tree in the wind,

he has no destination in view

and makes use of anything

life happens to bring his way.

Nothing is impossible for him.

Because he has let go,

he can care for the people's welfare

as a mother cares for her child.

Commentary

Bust of Socrates

Let me return to two old chestnuts that I have used many times over in these pages.  The first is my love for what we were taught as one of Socrates' great teachings, namely that the surest starting point is our declaration of ignorance in any matter, and to progress in learning therefrom.  This is what I call the method of Socratic Ignorance.  At college in the late 1970s, I remember reading that once the humble Socrates met a man who was said by many of his contemporaries to be wise, but shortly after having engaged him in conversation, Socrates found that this man had no more wisdom than himself. Further, this supposedly wise man became very angry when Socrates had demonstrated by logic that he was not so wise after all.  Socrates famously concluded that "it seems that I am wiser than he is, to this small extent anyway, that I do not think I know what I do not know." (See Apology 21d)  The second old chestnut to which I have returned equally often in these posts is that of St Augustine who remarked that we progress in our knowledge of truth, especially truth with a capital T, by which he would have meant God, by way of a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." [Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut ita dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu Dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram: There is, therefore, in us a certain, shall I say (so to speak), a learned ignorance, but a learned one of the spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity. My translation.  See Epistle 130, 14, 27).  It is interesting that Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) took the title of his famous book Docta Ignorantia (1440)  from this sentence in St Augustine's magisterial letters.  The whole aim of Nicholas of Cusa, taking his inspiration from St Augustine, is that one can only know who God is, or may be, through a negative theology or a negative way, Apophatic Theology, namely by amassing all the knowledge we have about who or what he is not!]

It must surely be, in this or a similar sense, that our Taoist poet writes above of knowledge of the Tao. Our poet writes that the mark of a wise man is "freedom from his own ideas."  It never surprises me to meet people who are so convinced that they are right with respect to this or that idea, or most certain concerning the motives of this or that person.  After all, ideas and concepts are just that, ideas and concepts. Indeed, opinions, which rate on a much lower scale than those of ideas and concepts, are also heralded by egotists to be almost set in stone.  There has to be room, surely, for movement, or flexibility in our opinions (certainly) and in our ideas and concepts (as often as is logically and practically possible) in order for knowledge to grow on the way to the Truth.  Again, the wise man learns to bend in the wind of opposition, to choose his battles wisely, to smile on opposition and criticism as well as on agreement and praise - hard to do, but very worthwhile practising.  Likewise, everything a wise man encounters, good, bad and indifferent is part of the overall picture of life.  All experiences, good and bad, are metaphorically "grist to the mill."

St Augustine at study - he was a lifelong scholar

Most spiritualities and religions talk about how we handicap ourselves, or how we smother our very light of life - to use another metaphor - by our clinging onto things and even people who are, in the context of time or of eternity, or compared to the infinity of the universe, mere impermanent realities.  Hence spiritualities and religions often ask their followers to let go of their dependencies, their clinging onto this or that or the other obsession. They advise us to "Let go and Let life!" or "Live and Let Live!" or "Let Go and Let God!"  All of these things are hard to do, that is why we must return again and again to our sitting position and attempt to meditate, to arrive at that still pointedness of existence, to the heart of the Tao.  After a while, all becomes so natural, just as natural as a mother caring for her child.  As Fr Richard Rohr so succinctly puts it, in the title of one of his many books, "everything belongs."

Journal of a Soul 15

The Transitoriness of Life

All things are passing.  The twelfth century Persian and Sufi poet, Attar of Nishapur, is reputed to have told his followers the fable of a powerful king who asked the assembled wise men of his court to create a ring that would make him happy when he was sad, and sad when he was happy.  After much deliberation the sages procured for him a simple ring inscribed with the words "This too will pass."  Needless to relate, the ring had the desired effect.

Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 30, 1859, a year before he was inaugurated as president of America, ended his speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society with the words:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Pondering on the transitoriness of life is something that chastens us all too well and all too effectively as Abraham Lincoln so wisely points out.  We poor sad souls often try to make the  achievements of this life somewhat permanent.  Indeed, we possibly need to imagine and to hope that there is meaning in our little lives; that some sort of heaven exists; that there is some comfort even in culture and civilisation which we believe will outlive us for many thousands of years to come.  (And yet civilisations and cultures have come and gone, have ascended to the seeming pinnacle of human achievement only to end in disaster of dusty extinction.)

We try to capture the passing moments in this or that picture or video we may choose to take of special occasions as our families grow up; in this or that picture or video we may choose to take on our holidays in this, that or other exotic or less exotic place which we are wont to visit.  Just recently, I ended up for some reason deleting all the photographs of Italy I had painstakingly taken over the past four or five years.  On reflection, I just did something stupid, having uploaded them to Dropbox.  Be that as it may, the lesson was a good one for me.  I simply cannot hang on to the past, whether I record it on digital camera or video or not.  Those shots were mere images, mere dim representations of life as it passes.  Truly we cannot hang onto our experiences.  The past flits away and the future lies ever beyond us.  The now is all we have.  The NOW.  Let us write it in capitals to emphasise the point.   The first century BC Latin poet Horace was surely correct when he declared in one of his famous Odes which some of us learned at school that we should "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" or "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next."    Or again, I think of poor John Keats, that wonderfully talented poet of the English Romantic Era who perished all too young at age 25 and whose epitaph reads somewhat depressingly:  "Here lies one whose name was writ on water."  He understood all too well the transitoriness of life.  Indeed, he knew he was going to die when he began coughing arterial blood on his pillow some few years before his demise.  (He had also studied medicine before becoming a full time poet)   In other words our little lives are inexorably swallowed up by the great maw of passing time.   

Arranmore cliffs, July 2010 - there from the beginning...

And yet the Easterns are right.  It is our attachments to the things and, indeed, the people of this world that ensnares us, that captivates us, that enchants us, that tricks us into believing in their seeming permanence and imperishability. This was the essential teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, that all our suffering in this world is caused by our attachments to the impermanence or temporariness of everything and everybody around us.  Hence we suffer much and indeed grievously when we lose them to either misfortune or inevitable death.  The Buddhists teach us that meditation on our own dying and death is very effective as it teaches us to value our very living; to value every breath we breathe; to seize the day as Horace so poetically puts it; to live in the freedom of the NOW and not to be enslaved by regrets from the past or fears of the future.

THIS, TOO, WILL PASS!!  

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI!!