One of my favorite collections is An Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren, a poet and scholar who lived in the 20th century. Van Doren’s collection is an extensive gathering of poems in translation from all over the world, and spanning many hundreds of years. It is a fantastic book to simply dip into, and it’s a reminder that humans have been at the business of poetry for as long as there have been humans at all.

(Trivia note: Van Doren’s son, Charles, would achieve notoriety of his own by being at the center of a big scandal in the 50s involving teevee quiz shows.)

Here we have a poem by Japanese poet Saigyo Hoshi, who lived 1118-1190…meaning he lived nine hundred years ago. That’s a lot of water under the poetic bridge, isn’t it? Saigyo apparently spent a great deal of his life journeying alone throughout Japan, and a love of nature pervades his work.

“Seven Poems”, by Saigyo Hoshi

1.

In my boat that goes
Over manifold salt-ways
Towards the open see
Faintly I hear
The cry of the first wild-goose.

2.

Mingling my prayer
With the clang of the bell
Which woke me from my dreams,
Lo, ten times I have recited the
Honorable Name.

3.

Since I am convinced
That Reality is in no way
Real,
How am I to admit
That dreams are dreams?

4.

Startled
By a single scream
Of the crane which is reposing
On the surface of the swamp,
All the other birds are crying.

5.

Those ships which left
Side by side
The same harbor
Towards an unknown destination
Have rowed away from one another!

6.

Like those boats which are returning
Across the open sea of Ashiya
Where the waves run high,
I think that I too shall pass
Scatheless through the storms of life.

7.

Although I do not know
At all whether anything
Honorable deigns to be there,
Yet in extreme awe
My tears well forth.

—

The third poem here is the one that stands out for me, not just for the simple style of its wisdom, but for the fact that it makes such a stark contrast with the other six. No sharp images or sounds or tactile senses conveyed there–just a single philosophic thought, dropped in the middle of the larger work.

Saigyo repeats that maneuver in the seventh poem, in which he suggests that tears may be the only good response to “extreme awe”. This whole poem feels like meditations interrupted by nature–or are the meditations interrupted at all? Perhaps Saigyo is simply showing that a meditative life will not necessarily be strongly shaped by the non-poetic world, except by way of inspiration.

Poetry, like all art, must reflect and address all matters within the mess we call The Human Condition, which means that poetry can’t only be focused on positive matters or on beauty. Poetry must also look unflinchingly at the awfullest aspects of our character. I own a collection of poems written in response to the Holocaust. Here is one of those poems.

By Peter Porter.

This is a repost, but I’m adding something at the end.

I’ve occasionally seen comment that JRR Tolkien’s poetry in The Lord of the Rings is generally weak, but from my perspective, it’s one of my favorite aspects of the book, and I find myself enjoying the verse in LOTR more each time I read it. My favorite poem in the book is almost certainly the “walking song” that is quoted a number of times throughout, and each time has a variation to reflect the events surrounding it and everything that has happened.

It begins like this, at the end of The Hobbit:

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

This is when Bilbo is about to return home to his beloved Shire, but he is forever changed by the things he has seen beyond his home’s borders. The next time we encounter a version of this poem, Bilbo is striking out again, after giving up the Ring and heading for Rivendell:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Much later we hear it again spoken by Bilbo, when he is starting to age quickly and after the entire adventure and the War of the Ring have ended. Bilbo is old and tired, and the walking song’s symbolism here is obvious:

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Finally there is a haunting variant that Frodo sings, not long before he boards the ship that will bear him, along with the last of the Elves, to the faraway land:

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

Is Tolkien a great poet? I don’t know, and I’m prepared to allow the experts to have their say, but it does seem to me that there’s something to be said for the fact that his verse is still being read, recited, and set to music this many decades after it was written.

UPDATE 4/18/2022:

Just up above I say that I’m prepared to allow the experts to have their say as to Tolkien’s poetic abilities, but you know what? To hell with that!

There’s an odd thing I’ve noticed in my online life the last several years: every few months a whole new discussion of Tolkien arises, and it’s always a depressing one for me because it’s invariably a whole lot of people giving themselves permission to dump all over him and say “It’s OK to not read him! You can find him boring! Just watch the movies, they’re all you need!”

I’m not going to go into a full defense of Tolkien here, but I will note that it has lately occurred to me that Tolkien wasn’t just one of my gateway writers for the fantasy genre, but he was my gateway writer for poetry, as well. His books teem with poetry, and the way he uses that poetry is amazingly diverse. In the first chapters of The Hobbit you encounter humorous verse:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates—
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
Pour the milk on the pantry floor!
Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!
Splash the wine on every door!

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you’ve finished if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!

And epic poetry that helps to set the stage for the story to come.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

This use of poetry continues in The Lord of the Rings: there is sad poetry for the death of a companion, and there are tales of times gone by, and there is even a long song sung in a tavern that filled me with delight when I realized that Tolkien had actually incorporated into his epic book an enlarged version of the classic old nursery rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle”:

There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
One night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he runs his bow,
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
Now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps a little dog
that is mighty fond of jokes;
When there’s good cheer among the guests,
He cocks an ear at all the jests
and laughs until he chokes.

They also keep a hornéd cow
as proud as any queen;
But music turns her head like ale,
And makes her wave her tufted tail
and dance upon the green.

And O! the rows of silver dishes
and the store of silver spoons!
For Sunday there’s a special pair,
And these they polish up with care
on Saturday afternoons.

The Man in the Moon was drinking deep,
and the cat began to wail;
A dish and a spoon on the table danced,
The cow in the garden madly pranced,
and the little dog chased his tail.

The Man in the Moon took another mug,
and then rolled beneath his chair;
And there he dozed and dreamed of ale,
Till in the sky the stars were pale,
and dawn was in the air.

Then the ostler said to his tipsy cat;
‘The white horses of the Moon,
They neigh and champ their silver bits;
But their master’s been and drowned his wits,
and the Sun’ll be rising soon!’

So the cat on his fiddle played hey-diddle-diddle,
a jig that would wake the dead:
He squeaked and sawed and quickened the tune,
While the landlord shook the Man in the Moon:’
‘It’s after three!’ he said.

They rolled the Man slowly up the hill
and bundled him into the Moon,
While the horses galloped up in rear,
And the cow came capering like a deer,
and a dish ran up with a spoon.

Now quicker the fiddle went deedle-dum-diddle;
the dog began to roar,
The cow and the horses stood on their heads;
The guests all bounded from their beds
and danced upon the floor.

With a ping and a long the fiddle-strings broke!
the cow jumped over the Moon,
And the little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Saturday dish went off at a run
with the silver Sunday spoon.

The round Moon rolled behind the hill,
as the Sun raised up her head.
She hardly believed her fiery eyes:
For though it was day, to her surprise
they all went back to bed!

My poetic life would be very different without JRR Tolkien. That’s not something I would expect of an unskilled poet.

The North Sea is a place I’ve never seen, but the connotations I have of it are a deep sea of cold, gray waters. The North Sea is the body across which the Vikings came on their voyages of plunder, and now the North Sea is dotted with oil derricks that drill for precious fuel. It is, by every account I know, not an easy sea to live around or to love. This may be unfair, but it’s the North Sea I “know”.

All our impressions of larger places, or entire regions, or seas, are grounded in how we experience them, if at all, from specific spots. Someone who lives in Chicago will probably have a much different sense of Lake Michigan than someone who lives on Beaver Island, at that lake’s far end.

Poet Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) writes here about the North Sea as experienced from Carnoustie, a town on Scotland’s eastern coast, northeast of Edinburgh. The photo above I found by searching Flickr’s map; that is the North Sea from Carnoustie. I wonder if that’s the kind of thing Stevenson had in mind in writing this poem.

“North Sea off Carnoustie”, by Anne Stevenson

for Jean Rubens

You know it by the northern look of the shore,
by the salt-worried faces,
by an absence of trees, and an abundance of lighthouses.
It’s a serious ocean.

Along marram-scarred, sandbitten margins
wired roofs straggle out to where
a cold little holiday fair
has floated in and pitched itself
safely near the prairie of the golf course.
Coloured lights are sunk deep into the solid wind,
but all they’ve caught is a pair of lovers
and three silly boys.
Everyone else has a dog.
Or a room to get to.

The smells are of fish and of sewage and cut grass.
Oystercatchers, doubtful of habitation,
clamour ‘weep, weep, weep’ as they fuss over
scummy black rocks the tide leaves for them.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

But there in your stony and windswept garden
a blackbird is confirming the grip of the land.
‘You, you,’ he murmurs, dark purple in his voice.

And now in far quarters of the horizon
lighthouses are awake, sending messages–
invitations to the landlocked,
warnings to the experienced,
but to anyone returning home from the planet ocean,
candles in the windows of a safe earth.

1977

From The Oxford Book of The Sea.

(image credit)

The other day, I posted two poems about cats. In comments, a fine reader asks: Are you familiar with the Hamlet Soliloquy done from the point of view of a cat?

I had to admit that I was not, so off to Google I went, and I found it! Apparently this comes from a book called Poetry For Cats, The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse, by Henry Beard. I will have to add that to my Books To Seek Out list! For now, here are the existential thoughts of Hamlet’s cat.

To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether ’tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,
Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock’s bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal’s opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there’s the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household’s petty plagues,
The cook’s well-practiced kicks, the butler’s broom,
The infant’s careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear,
Or strays trespassing from a neighbor’s yard,
But that the dread of our unheeded cries
And scratches at a barricaded door
No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
And makes us rather bear our humans’ faults
Than run away to unguessed miseries?
Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
And thus the bristling hair of resolution
Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
We pause upon the threshold of decision.

If you’re familiar with the state of affairs at the end of Hamlet (spoiler: a good bit of the cast is dead on the stage floor when the curtain comes down), you may wonder just how Hamlet’s cat would respond. Well, it’s a cat. A recent comic by Sarah Andersen probably illustrates perfectly what Hamlet’s cat would do:

(Full comic, contrasting “cat people” with “dog people”, here.)

If you’ve seen the movie Dead Poets Society, you remember that the movie quotes a bunch of poems throughout its running time. It quotes few in their entirety, and most are either quoted for dramatic effect or to basically provide poetic slogans for Mr. Keating’s agenda of raising young freethinkers or whatever. (I’m not a fan of the movie, to be honest.)

Of the poems quoted for dramatic effect, one always stuck with me because it contrasts wildly with most of the film’s remaining poetry. It’s about a man who hates his wife, and in the stanza read aloud by one of the characters, the final rhyme is “He cut her bloody throat.”

Well, I got to curious about that, so I did a little Googling, and I found it: a ballad called “The Ballad of William Bloat”, and it’s a pretty grim little ditty, as you’ll find out below. It also features an odd bit of Irish patriotism, which is strange in a poem that’s essentially a bit of light verse about domestic violence….

“The Ballad of William Bloat”, by Raymond Calvert.

In a mean abode on the Shankill Road
Lived a man named William Bloat;
He had a wife, the curse of his life,
Who continually got on his goat.
So one day at dawn, with her nightdress on
He cut her bloody throat.

With a razor gash he settled her hash
Oh never was crime so quick
But the drip drip drip on the pillowslip
Of her lifeblood made him sick.
And the pool of gore on the bedroom floor
Grew clotted and cold and thick.

And yet he was glad he had done what he had
When she lay there stiff and still
But a sudden awe of the angry law
Struck his heart with an icy chill.
So to finish the fun so well begun
He resolved himself to kill.

He took the sheet from the wife’s coul’ feet
And twisted it into a rope
And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf,
‘Twas an easy end, let’s hope.
In the face of death with his latest breath
He solemnly cursed the Pope.

But the strangest turn to the whole concern
Is only just beginning.
He went to Hell but his wife got well
And is still alive and sinning.
For the razor blade was German made
But the sheet was Belfast linen.

So the German knife was up to the task of slicing her throat open, but the Belfast linen? Why, that stuff is strong enough to…well.  You know.