Poetic Wisdom

Finding answers within, and between, the lines

Seventeenth-century poet and Zen Buddhist Basho was an extraordinary poet whose travel dairies of haibun — a mixture of prose and poetry — are as fresh and heartfelt today as they were four centuries ago.

I met an old friend of mine at Minakuchi, after 20 years of separation

A lively cherry

In full bloom

Between the two lives

Now made one.

It’s been my privilege to read a variety of poetry these last few days. As I’ve travelled, it has arrived in remembered fragments, borrowed books, emails, second-hand tomes, song lyrics.

Poetry’s economy, precision and wisdom never cease to open new vistas. What a prose writer might need 10 pages, or 100, to develop and deliver, a poet can communicate in a few piercing lines.

Part of what makes poetry so compelling is the omnipresent tension between written and unwritten. So much must remain unsaid and every word on the page stands for the thousand roads not taken.

From The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel:

“Something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another.”

Always wavering between doubts of one kind and another — is there a better description for how it feels to navigate the life’s constant, contradictory currents?

Poetry renders sublime what might be merely sentimental in less artful language.

One of my charity shop book finds yesterday was a Penguin Poetry Library edition (£1.49) of Tennyson.

‘But Were I Loved’

But were I loved, as I desire to be,

What is there in the great sphere of the earth,

And range of evil between death and birth,

That I should fear, — If I were loved by thee?

All the inner, all the outer world of pain

Clear Love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine,

As I have heard that, somewhere in the main,

Fresh-water springs come up through bitter brine.

‘Twere joy, not fear, clasped hand-in-hand with thee,

To wait for death — mute — careless of all ills,

Apart upon a mountain, tho’ the surge

Of some new deluge from a thousand hills

Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge

Below us, as far on as eye could see.

The sentiment is timeworn — s/he loves me not — but the deft imagery makes the it dance and sparkle like ‘fresh-water springs’: note the ‘great sphere of the earth’ which is echoed/supplanted by the ‘world of pain’ which is then cleaved just as the spring cuts through the brine.

The ‘surge of some new deluge’ serves as a metaphor both for death and the rush of falling in love: a perfectly coherent contradiction that is instantly less compelling when prosified.

(A contemporary poet expressed this idea with equal acuity: ‘to die by your side/ is such a heavenly way to die’ (‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths)).

Another passed-along treasure I encountered was a Faber Paperback of archy’s life of mehitabel by Don Marquis, pristine apart from a diminutive pencil annotation on the title page: Sheffield, January 1983.

If you haven’t yet the pleasure of acquaintance, archy is literate cockroach, and mehitabel his feline sidekick. archy communicates by jumping from key to key on a typewriter, hence the lack of capitals and punctuation.

The poems are hilarious and slyly poignant; they are also, as the following excerpt shows, Modernist masterpieces in miniature: formally innovative, allusive, playful.

‘the return of archy’

where have i been so long

you ask me

i have been going up

and down like the devil

seeking what i might devour

i am hungry always hungry

and in the end i shall

eat everything

all the world shall come at

last to the multitudinous maws

of insects

a civilization perishes

before the tireless teeth

of little little germs

ha ha i have thrown off the mask

at last

you thought i was only

an archy

but i am more than that

i am anarchy

Thus an American humorist preceded, by several decades, John Lydon’s evergreen punk provocation: I wanna be anarchy.

That’s how it goes, though, with life and with poetry. Attention reveals that threads submerge and surface; they don’t snap.

Poetry offered 17th century haiku masters, 19th century laureates and 20th century magazine columnists the stringent freedom to use the raw material of nature, love, disappointment, scripture, politics and sheer fancy to render fantastic things.

It offers us a mind-and-creativity expanding opportunity to see the world — and ourselves — through new lenses. It offers surprise, challenge and, dare I say, comfort.