Poems I Journey With 23

Who amongst us does not at times wish to return to the more innocent and carefree world of childhood as we remember it, if only to escape the monotony of our daily lives or indeed its many troubles? In other words, nostalgia is no bad thing once it does not become an obsession that prevents us from dealing with problems that must be dealt with in our lives. One dictionary definition of nostalgia describes it as a wistful desire to return in thought or in feeling to a former time in one’s life, and in this sense it is mostly sentimental in thrust.  But we are allowed to be nostalgic and sentimental sometimes surely?

As I sit here writing these thoughts, I am travelling back precisely forty-seven years to the autumn days of 1969 when I was in fourth class primary school. We had a wonderful teacher called Seán Ó Sé (John O’Shea) who was an erudite teacher in most subjects, but who loved poetry and gave all of us an appreciation for its form, metre, rhythm and rhyme. I remember well his beating out the rhythm of any poem, whether in Irish or English, with his “bata mór” or “big stick” which he actually rarely used as he was essentially a kind and caring teacher. He would beat his “bata mór” on his old wooden desk.

Portrait of Thomas Hood

After this brief introduction, let me offer the reader a poem called “I remember, I remember” from the pen of Thomas Hood. For me this poem brings me back into that old classroom when I was just a sensitive little boy of eleven years of age. So, I am unapologetically indulging in nostalgia and sentimentality now, and sure why not!  Thomas Hood(1799 – 1845) was an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. Other poets that were his contemporaries were the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the many other lesser Romantic poets. Obviously Hood would not have been as famous, yet his work was indeed very popular. The poem “I remember, I remember” needs little or no commentary. It is enough to read it and reflect upon it meditatively and if it is sentimental superficially, I believe that it contains a certain deeper truth worth hanging on to. Enjoy, even for the briefest of moments. 

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy. 

Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

This contrast is one that has always confounded me. On the one hand each of us desires clarity and yet there is pretty little of it to be found in this world - at least, of the logical variety. At college we had to read Albert Camus' short book The Myth of Sisyphus for our philosophy class. For Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, or the absurd person, demands clarity or certainty above all, but again there is little or none to be found in the world around him. The sense of the absurd, then, results from the the conflict that is created between human reason that demands clarity and the unreasonable universe that is very unclear indeed.  

I remember many years ago when I was a green young teacher walking into a staff room early one winter's morning to find a colleague named Gerard Smith, one very smart young gentleman, asking me the following question, "Well, Tim, what is it all about?"  What a huge question that was, and I was taken aback to be asked it so early in the morning.  I don't remember what I replied, but I certainly would have said little of worth as I was quite a shy young man then with little confidence. A few years later we were all to learn that poor Gerard had died in America, having taken a career break from school. It as only then that we found out that the poor man had a congenital and fatal heart defect from his youth and that there remained little time on earth for him when he asked his question.  In hindsight, I then understood why he had asked that weighty question.  Again, he would have known that I had a background in theology and philosophy, and he perhaps believed that I could furnish him with some sort of answer to his deep question.

Most religious or spiritual gurus and writers acknowledge the unclarity of the world and the sheer lack of any logical answers. They simply have a different take on things, a much different perspective. Often they even seem to delight in the sheer unclarity of things, and speak about mysticism, wonder and mystery, especially that mystery which the divine is, that mystery that simply cannot be caught in a net of words or in dogmatic phrases no matter how intricate or sublime. There are other ways, apparently of encountering the world, outside the logical. Those who have this perspective are often fond of quoting the words of Blaise Pascal: "Le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point" - "The heart has its reasons which reason itself cannot understand." It is with this background in mind that I now invite the reader to read Louis Macneice's very fine poem called "Entirely:"

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s 

   Yammering fire alarms 

But, as it is, the spears each year go through 

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

I love this poem because of its complete honesty and total authenticity.  The poet does not trot out old pieties or standard traditional phrases that simplify life. Rather, he honestly presents a perspective on life which is all too common and all too realistic - that is, that life is exceedingly complex and often beyond our understanding of it.  In short, the poet admits to being somewhat stumped about the mystery that life faces us with. The theme is clear, and that theme is that there is no ultimate clarity. Camus drove himself wild looking for such clarity.  

In stanza one the poet recounts how we simply cannot "get the hang of it entirely," and even if we could, we simply would not live long enough to figure it out.  When we listen we often only pick up a fraction of what is said.  Indeed, we readers can add in our minds to this that we often do not see the full picture as we are only granted a certain perspective on events, often from an awkward angle. MacNeice hints at religious and spiritual themes when he says that when sometimes we try to "eavesdrop on the great Presences" we scarcely succeed in that endeavour at all.  

"[S]plash of words" and "falling twigs of song" are two powerful images with the second one blending two totally opposite realities - twigs (physical) and song (immaterial). Love is fleeting, not just the romantic idea of it, but its physical reality, as we are not entirely satisfied in our physical experience of it.  The imagery of "spears" reminds us of Shakespeare's line "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and the intended meaning of both is the same, namely a battle image to sum up the misfortunes we encounter in our lives. The "yammering fire alarms" are those that are constantly calling out to warm the citizens of London about the fires consequent on enemy attack.  Those bells "banish the Blue Eyes of Love entirely."

The last stanza is as succinct as the other two and points out that it is ludicrous to approach life in a "black and white" manner as there are too many other colours in between the two that manifest themselves through "a prism of delight and pain." Indeed, even the maps we get are not one hundred per cent clear and logical. They are, rather, more than somewhat unclear as they often manifest themselves in actuality as "a mad weir of tigerish waters."  Then there are times that we merely grow bored of trying to find our way through the maze of unclarity that much of life can be. Whatever our reaction to our situation in life is, we can be fully sure that there is "no road that is right entirely."

Finally, the title is a most apt and succinct summary of the poem, that is, that we can never be totally sure entirely. I find this a comforting poem in the down periods of my life as I begin to be less hard on myself as a result of the wisdom garnered here. After all, we will never get everything right entirely. Not even the commentary on this poem.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 80

Poem 80

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Commentary

This poem is certainly one we moderns would not understand as we live in a global village where the whole world has become our home. We can travel anywhere, now that air travel has become relatively cheap and within almost everyone's capacity.  Very few of us in the Western world do not go abroad for holidays or business or whatever.  Indeed, should we not wish to travel somewhere physically we can even journey there virtually by way of cinema or the Internet, both of which can bring us anywhere we wish imaginatively.  And the imagination and reality are next-door neighbours in a sense. 

As a man of 58 years who was born in a small rural Irish town in 1958 and who experienced at least for a few years pre-television era in that country setting, I would have an inkling of what the poet in the above poem is getting at.  I well remember a young friend's parents having bought their first tv set as RTE, the Irish public broadcaster began life on the 31st of December 1961.  They must have bought it soon enough thereafter, so I would have been about 4 years of age at the time. The TV ushered in the New Ireland, as from then on the global visited in a virtual and imaginative sense the sitting rooms of all the homes in Ireland. Therefore, I can slightly understand the above poem.  Now, we must remember that the Tao Te Ching was written roughly around the sixth century BCE in a very rural and primitive setting so the values of a small community would have been the prevailing ones: working in the fields, ploughing, planting seeds, watering the crops, going to the market, harvesting, participating in  the local gatherings, chatting and conversing.  Everything would have revolved around the extended family or clan, and then around the local tribe or community. The home and the community and the values asssociated with both would have been the origins of the only values known to anyone.  Therefore, it is against this background that we have to understand the above poem.

The above poem presents us with the ideal, indeed with the idyll.  It is purely romantic and is filled with Utopian sentiments.  No such place on earth could possible exist.  However, when we remember that it is a poem, that it was written so long ago and that as a poem it should not be taken literally. Bearing all this is mind, we may then read it and meditate upon it and see what wisdom we might learn from it.

One lesson is that of valuing our lives, valuing our experiences of life in the now, valuing simply being.  We are all so busy rushing to succeed, make more money, get a better job, travel to more countries, gain more wealth, acquire X, Y or Z new item that we often forget that it is the simple things in life that really make us happy like those mentioned in the poem: (i) enjoying our workaday life, (ii) getting in touch with nature, (iii) gardening, (iv) building up and enjoying our homes, (v) enjoying simple but good meals with our families and friends, (vi) supporting all the events that take place in the community, and (vii) happily growing old listening to the sounds of what naturally occurs in nature.

These are obviously extremely romantic and Utopian ideas, but the poem hints that we may experience an intimation of that blessed state by being more mindful and attuned to living in the now.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 67

Poem 67

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.

Others call it lofty but impractical.

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

And to those who put it into practice,

this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:

simplicity, patience, compassion.

These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and in thoughts,

you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Commentary

Like many other readers of these reflections, I have long loved reading biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and collections of letters by way of getting an insight into the meaning or purpose of life, or at least another angle on things anyway. Obviously, there are many other ways to make sense of human existence from forging relationships, designing and creating things, going on journeys and so on. Stanza 1 above puts these introductory thoughts wonderfully into perspective, especially in the two lines:

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

Indeed, the opening lines of my commentary could be dismissed as being nonsense from a certain practical, down-to-earth realism that sees no meaning at all in life outside surviving it.  However, if you have been reading these reflections, you don't belong to that grouping. There have been many great books throughout history that have explored the meaning of life, and perhaps one of the best early ones must surely be the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo which were written between 397 - 400 A.D.  There have literally been hundreds of thousands if not millions of them written since.

The second stanza comes to the point swiftly by making three succinct points about what is important in the spiritual life:

(i) Even in the business world, experts recommend that complex issues must be turned into, or at least explained in, the simplest terms.  As a teacher, one must often attempt to break down complex stuff into as simple terms as one possibly can within reason.  Study methods recommend Spider diagrams and Mind Maps to give order or skeletons or bones to complex bodies of material. So simplicity makes sense.  In meditation, life is broken down or reduced to the very simplicity of sitting in the Now of things, of concentration on the simplicity of the very act of breathing.  In most religious traditions, the breath of life is its very essence.  The Old Testament speaks about the Lord of life or God himself breathing the breath of life into the mythical first human beings. Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama bear witness to a simplicity in their approach to living despite the official structures that could make them captives of the system.

(ii) Patience is a great virtue and one only learns it slowly by practice.  After all, as the great Aristotle put it, we become better persons through practice.  In other words, we become more virtuous through education and habit.  Patience is a virtue that lies between the two vices of (a) sloth (deficient vice) and (b) reckless impatience (excessive vice.)  As a parent, nurse or teacher, one must learn to be very patient in how we interact with our children, patients or students respectively.  However, from experience, patience does pay off, but again it is a virtue that can live with a certain level of incompletion, imperfection and disorder. A perfectionist will find it very hard to be patient with others.

(iii) The third virtue recommended by our Taoist poet is that of compassion.  Compassion is at the very heart of all religions and spiritualities worth their salt.  The Dalai Lama puts it succinctly thus: "Compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to be happy."  Again, one must have compassion for oneself as well as for others.