Wordsworth

Quarter of ten.

Did I detect something pagan about Wordsworth’s poetry which I read this afternoon? It seems to me that being “nature’s priest” is a bit different from the conventional clergyman of Christianity. And I think the “natural piety” idea is exactly what makes me feel good when I absorb his verses. There’s something akin to Goethe here, the exhortation to leave behind the books and everything flat and two dimensional and come outdoors to experience real life that breathes the free air. I believe this is the true spirit of Romantic poetry, the one that rolls through the natural scenery and meets the human eye and ear, where a person perceives and half creates reality, as in “Tintern Abbey.” I keep meaning to read his series The River Duddon, so perhaps I’ll dig it out and pore over it to observe Wordsworth’s grounded style. His writing gives a new understanding of what we call religion or piety, someplace away from the dusty study or monastery. The other book on my list to read again is The Sorrows of Young Werther… 

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Little Poem

Pepsi


If the only emperor is
The Emperor of ice cream,
Then I can show you
Virtues of wild cherry Pepsi
On a mild spring day
Covered by pleasant clouds
In some Pacific suburb
Where one unwonted to smile
Bestows a grin
Of fellow feeling
To a returning face. 

Poem

Envoi


There’s no new thing beneath the sun unless
The Earth goes round the Sun and we confess
The rolling heads of martyrs we may bless
Long after their discoveries’ success.

Opinion of the public is a curse
Obedient to the jingling of its purse
And true mendacious words we still rehearse
Long since the cinders of their gifts disperse.

Away on winged winds they flying go
The flakes of ashes singed and never know
The fruits and fortunes that their works bestow
On human whims, caprices made of dough. 

Clouds; Outdoor School

Quarter after nine.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened up Mallarme to read some, but the vocabulary was far beyond me and it would take a lot more work to interpret a single poem. Also I lamented the fact that my French writing skills have atrophied. I should take a class and brush it up. I might feel younger if I practice the language again and access that bucket in my brain… It’s Saturday and yet the market was doing a good business before nine o’clock. Mostly guys as usual; I saw one woman. I felt kind of glad to get out of there with such a crowd. Then I looked around me at the clouds, walking along the storefront, which appeared almost blue with cold. They dwarfed human cities and human affairs, having about them an inscrutable quality, alien and other. The only thing stranger than clouds by day is clouds at night. Or maybe, to me, the French language itself.

Quarter of eleven.

Gloria and I had breakfast at Carl’s Jr, passing the new high school that now looks quite finished on the exterior. The dark gray brick walls give it an ominous vibe, and the whole place is enormous and intimidating. It’s like Mordor as opposed to the Shire, a wicked thing of mass production and industry, a factory for producing citizens. It’s nothing like the Outdoor School of Tagore a long time ago in India. It isn’t even like my own college where we had poetry classes on the lawn. The personal touch is missing, and nothing much of nature still remains.

An Insight

Quarter of eleven at night.

Saturday’s Child

Through a process of desultory reading and writing I’ve arrived at a few insights about astrology mostly lost to people today. It started with an end note to Verlaine’s Saturnian Poems, saying he chose the title because of the work he had to put into them, as if ordained by Saturn. Then a week or so later, I rifled through Baudelaire and chanced on his poem addressing Sisyphus, whose punishment in hell was the pointless labor of pushing a round boulder up a hill eternally. Baudelaire also prayed for the term of his suffering to be short. I gathered from this the idea that for him, life is pain and suffering. The image of Sisyphus was taken up by Camus in one of his essays. The last thing came to me like an inspiration. Stephen Stills wrote a song, “Everydays,” he gave to Yes to record in 1970. The first verse goes,

Look at the sad goodbyes

Every day’s a killing time

Sun coming up outside

No men are born this time

Saturday’s Child stays home

Nothing to say, so long

In turn, the meaning of Saturday’s Child is revealed by an old nursery rhyme.

Monday’s Child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s Child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s Child is full of woe,

Thursday’s Child has far to go,

Friday’s Child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s Child works hard for his living…

Finally, you only need to make the connection between Saturday and Saturn to make complete sense of the role of hard work in the essence of Saturday’s Child. Saturn in astrological tradition is the tester and taskmaster for those it rules.

A City in the Air

Eleven thirty.

I let Aesop out of his little prison down the hall after my zoom meeting was done and he barked at me to tell me he wanted his milk bones. The white light of day makes the room appear green, a greenness that reminds me of the cover to a book of Robert Frost I once had when I was a student. If it weren’t so cold out, I’d say it was kind of like the springtime with all the blooms and bird activity, and it stays lighter now for longer. The greens also are souvenirs of a serotonin buzz many years ago from taking Prozac. The drug made me feel impulsive and sociable, but also sleepless and finally suicidal, so I had to stop it. 1991 was very long ago and I can sense how much I’ve aged. It isn’t like Goethe anymore, a creed of seize the day. Rather, it’s a time for quiet reflection and study. Still, the green outdoors is a distraction from cerebral things. It is entirely possible to get too comfortable; security can be a trap that keeps you from pursuing happiness.

And then you ponder the difference between green pastures and ash gray pavements littered with cigarette butts. Where do we go from here?

Quarter of one.

It’s doable to be young at heart. Not to spit in the wind and give up your dream of paradise. They say poverty sucks, but poetry will never desert the pauper. It is there if you look for it, like the kingdom of God. It dwells within you.

Keats

Nine PM.

The news from my sister was not good. Funny how the sun can shine on a crap day, or a day of mixed tidings. I retired for a nap not at all confident that things were peachy for my family, then had dreams about my late parents. Before that, I thought maybe I ought to visit church again this Sunday, because this will be the only family left to me when my siblings are gone.

I’m not sure why I picked Keats to read this afternoon, and I saw that scholars disagree on whether he took transcendence seriously: Stillinger says he does, while Bromwich takes the contrary view that this world is good enough for Keats. What a strange disagreement. I don’t know who has the stronger case, but I tend to favor Jack Stillinger’s opinion only because I learned it in school long ago. I put aside the introduction and began reading Endymion again to let the poetry speak for itself. I got as far as his sister leading him away to a bower to fall asleep in after the worship ritual to the forest god Pan. I remember that Diana appears to him and they make love: so how can this not be transcendence? It’s the same issue as happens in “Nightingale.” Already with thee! tender is the night… Does poetry have the power to unify us with the Ideal? If Keats didn’t believe so, then Baudelaire and Mallarme wouldn’t have taken up the concern. Then what is Romanticism really about? Maybe it’s an American foible to take everything literally, even matters of spirituality. It’s hard to tell from an armchair. 

Under the Atlantic

Nine thirty PM.

A bit ago I remembered my love for Chris Squire’s bass with Yes, back when I bought every Yes record I could get my hands on. This was forty years ago and I was in high school. The band did beautiful work: creative, artistic, and poetic. I want to say that their lyrical inspiration came from Romantic and Victorian poetry, particularly Blake and maybe Tennyson; but I can find no hard evidence of such influences. Nobody seems to know about Jon Anderson’s reading habits along these lines, though I imagine that every young English student was exposed to the classics. So all my guesswork on it is fruitless at least for now… Sometimes I think that, for the sheer quality of the poetry, no one can compete with Alfred, Lord Tennyson. You can see it in a short lyric like “The Eagle,” especially the last line: “Like a thunderbolt he falls.” If I were to dedicate myself to poetry writing, I’d want to be like Tennyson, even though I’m American and he was English. Indeed, such an ambition is probably absurd… 

Sleepers

Quarter of seven.

I see no light on the horizon so far this morning even though the store opened at six o’clock. Often it’s hard to have faith in our present and future but we have to continue as if nothing were wrong.

Quarter after nine.

I slept in for a while. Last night I read a little known poem called “The Sleepers” by Whitman. It’s good but rather strange, though it contains truth that most people wouldn’t acknowledge, particularly Christian people or anyone who doesn’t like Freud. I enjoyed it, actually. The poem is honest and goes very deep into human experience. I’m not sure exactly when he composed it but it had to be after 1855 and before 1892. It seems the time was right for Freud at the turn of the last century, though he was preceded also by Henry James. I don’t know where the quote comes from, but when I took Shakespeare I heard something about being awakened by the secret police at four in the morning, and how awful this idea was.

Soon I have to face the music of another day, go to the store and see who tried to call me on the phone. It’s a merciless world but thank goodness for our poets.

The Letter Needn’t Kill

I’ve just been reading Walt Whitman tonight, and I see how he would disagree with my attitudes where I talked about people and the moon. He sees the most ordinary things to be no less grand than the greater things. Everything to him is significant— kind of the way Hindus perceive life and reality. But also it was William Blake who spoke of seeing infinity in a grain of sand. Even as I write, I notice how I tend to define and limit the things I describe, putting them in tiny boxes, suffocating them. Whitman doesn’t do this in his poetry. And if I try analyzing it then I’ll probably kill it because that’s what dissection does to every subject and everything under the sun. Somehow his poetry promotes life rather than snuffing it or etherizing it on a table. Thus I wonder what is his secret. And it reminds me of Eiseley’s policy of description instead of analysis. It’s like taking a photograph and not shooting it down as a hunter does… I will benefit by reading a lot more than I have been lately.