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<tr><td>The Nature of This

The summer's coming to a close.
The river where we panned for gold
will soon be strewn with broken leaves.
The sego lily and the rose
have quieted. Today it seems
that all the world is gentling.
We have let go of clutching things.
Here we watch the seasons go
and come with a surprising ease.

It isn't that we're growing old.
It isn't that we've bested fear
or that we never wake to know
in spite of love, we die alone.
The air is cool and sweet with change.
Breathe in, it says, and let go.
It is enough to fall in love.
To fall in love and watch the world unfold.

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I like the way this poem uses the "close/gold/know" rhymes and half-rhymes to thread the lines together. It has a bell-like quality, that repetition, that works well with tetrameter lines. The lines tend to such regularity that the three different ones--lines 6 and 15 one syllable short, and 17 longer by a foot--feel unjustified and not quite satisfying. If the differences had been greater, maybe they would have worked better: small differences in meter seem to trouble the ear more than big ones, because they feel just "off" enough to be mistakes and not enough to be deliberate play.

The ending doesn't feel quite justified by what precedes it, either. Seasonal imagery suggests aging, regret for lost youth, not the value of falling in love, and certainly not watching "the world unfold." If there is a connection between the "letting go" theme of stanza one and this very surprising ending, I'm missing it and hope someone will point it out to me.

~Rhina

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Rhina,

I agree with everything you say in your first paragraph on this poem. One of the short lines you point out - "that all the world is gentling" - would be perfect with one more syllable. And perhaps the writer even intended it to be read as "gentle-ing", but it doesn't say that on the page. What a difference such small things make.

As far as the meaning of the poem goes, I am much more rewarded by this poem than you seem to be. This, to me, is one of those "mystical" poems we have been discussing recently on a thread at "Mastery". It is, in fact, very "Chinese" in its approach to nature. I read it as a poem in the sub-genre of nature mysticism. The poem's title also points in this direction: "The Nature of This" - the nature of the great "is" of life. There is also a Zen feeling in such lines as - "We have let go of clutching things". The second of the "Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is to the effect that the world is frustrating or bitter due to trishna, or “grasping” based upon avidya (“ignorance”). The last two lines of the first stanza:

Here we watch the seasons go
and come with a surprising ease.

puts me in mind of a couplet from the Buddhist poem the Zenrin Kushu, which goes:


Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself

The next movement of the poem is slightly vague, but gives me a sense that, essentially, there is no reason for this state of being. No formal, objective reason for the speaker to be in this situation, which is again in keeping with Zen doctrine that enlightenment entails "nothing special", life goes on as it did, apparently with no change, but with what a deep and subtle difference.

The last movement of the poem, to my reading, is masterful, and rises to the ranks of the best poems posted on the "Mystical" thread.


The air is cool and sweet with change.
Breathe in, it says, and let go.
It is enough to fall in love.
To fall in love and watch the world unfold.

This surrender of the self, and immersion of consciousness in Nature, is, to me, and obviously to this poet, precisely to "fall in love". Attention to the world is love for the world. I don't think we should automatically assume human objects when we hear the word "love". Trees and birds and rivers may be loved with as much passion and reward as any romantic affair. And as the world is watched and loved, it "unfolds", moment by moment, just as the poem says. Here is how a Zen-flavoured haiku speaks of that same love:


Wind subsiding, the flowers still fall;
Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens.

All in all, this poem is certainly one of my favourites on this board at the moment. For sheer joy of being (although the Ray poem is up there as well) this poem is outstanding. And apart from the short-line jolts, the the rest of the poem sounds fine.

Rhina, I don't know if all this will change your view of the poem - often such a reading acts like an explained joke. You get the point, but not the belly-laugh. But I hope it helps.


------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited November 26, 2004).]

Rhina,

I agree that the connection between 'letting go' and the surrender implicit in the notion of 'falling in love' isn't clearly made. There is also I feel overuse of abstractions in st 2.

(Coincidentally, one of my recent ideas-for-poems that typically take ages to incubate plays on elaborations of the phrase 'letting HERSELF go'. This is/was colloquially applied to older women with negative import, but it can be amusing to ask 'Gog where?' and dream up agreeable fantasy destinations. Sorry for the deviation!)

Dear Anon,

Would suggest reworking st 2 with the aim of substituting something more specific for the 'love'in l 4 and possibly repeating 'let' for emphasis in the last or penultimate line. E.G. 'let yourself love and let the world unfold'. But I'm sure you'll come up with something far better!

Best wishes,
Margaret.

PS Many apologies for misattributing this piece to Carol (purely because her name - as poster - was on the sidebar). This was an unforgiveable lapse as I'd read her introductory spiel and fully support her proposal that poets (when known) should NOT be identified!!
M.

[This message has been edited by Margaret Moore (edited November 26, 2004).]

My reading accords exactly with Mark's. This is the most formal poem I have seen by the most elusive, allusive, practitioner at the DE. I am untroubled by the pentameter (in fact, I am accustomed to far greater liberties from this poet!) And I welcome this discussion, tying as it does to the Mystical thread at Mastery. I suspect Rhina's response to this points to the gulf befween Zen and Taoism on the one hand, and the bride of Christ theme in the West typified by Herbert and the saint Alan so excruciatingly calls Wanda la Cruise!

Margaret, even though my name's beside the poem (and all the poems) I'm not really the poet. I'm just posting them all so the poet remains unidentified till the end.

Carol

I like this poem, which I haven't seen before, a lot and, if the poet is who I think, from Tim's hints, she is usually a hell of a lot too allusive for me. I don't mean I object to that, I don't, but too allusive to need or hope for any help from me. I read it with a lot of pleasure, but I am wary of the expression "in love" which I think may let the poem down, and feel if we can just "love" instead we have still have a rightful place in the world.

I would like to say that I read "gentling" as 3 syllables, because the meter demands it, & I put a stress on "and" in line 15, once again, at the meter's instigation. Further, when read in this manner, the line gains a pleasing cadence effectively mimetic of the way meditation directors speak when leading breathing exercises, etc. Thus I find no metrical glitches in this poem & nothing else, really, to complain about. It's only lovely. (And of course I can guess who wrote it.)

Chris

Carol,
Please see my amended post above for an apology for muddying the waters!
Margaret.

Chris, I am so glad to hear that you read "gentling" as 3 syllables, as I do, too. The problem is the appearance of the word on the page which says "gent-ling". It is just one of those awkward words.

I have no problem with the expression of "love" in this context, especially since it is a "fall in love" which comes after letting go. And that's what happens when you "let go", you "fall". It is entirely consistent with the rest of the poem, and accords with mystical tradition.

A one minute google turned up this quotation from an article on a Catholic website entitled - "Love and the Message of the Mystics".



This poem, for me, gets better and better with each reading.

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited November 26, 2004).]

This poem is one of many where I wish there were some way of indicating rests and pauses in poetry more clearly than the em dash. The lilt of it makes me think of A. E. Houseman's "Is My Team Ploughing?"
If an em dash followed "gentling" I think the poem would read more comfortably.

Rhina I feel that the ending is saying--don't expect more than you have already. You have had the experience of love and the richness of its consequences. I read it as a poem of acceptance. A goodbye to love and life without rancor.
Janet

PS: I've edited back in to say I definitely read "gentling" as two syllables followed by a caesura.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 26, 2004).]

I definitely read gentling with the requisite 3 syllables in the context and the assonance of its secondary stressed syllable with "things." But line 15 is a syllable short and really clunks for me. I could have accepted the pentameter final line to give closure if the other lines were all tet, but with the memory of line 15 so fresh in my mind, instead of closure I finish up with something left over. I suspect that was the intention, but I find it too clever for its own good.

The other surprising thing about the way the poem ends is the time sequence. Falling in love (as opposed to being in love) is immediate, something happening right now, not something the couple did seasons ago. The sense of immediacy is borne out by the cool sweet air of change, of letting go, of watching the world unfold. So just when this lazy reader was prepared for a couple's serene acceptance of the end of their summer, I find them falling in love, a mid-life romance between two people who have already seen quite a bit of the world unfold. The poem is delightful--if you'd just add a beat to line 15!

Carol

Carol
I read "let go" as spondees or whatever you want to call them. They emphasise the meaning and break the poem at that point in order to do so.
Janet

Breathe IN, it SAYS, and LET GO.

Yes, Janet. I read that line exactly as you do.

Carol,

I still don't feel that it is necessary to attribute the "fall in love" to a love "between" the couple, but to both of them falling together into the realm of love, which is the state of meditaive attention to the world.

------------------
Mark Allinson

Sure it's a spondee, Janet, and I accent the same words you do. A spondee's a 2-syllable foot with more-or-less equal stress on both syllables (though some theorists consider the term irrelevant for metrical classification because they argue that one syllable or the other always dominates slightly). But whether you call it a spondee or an iamb or a trochee, it's still got only one beat. The line's trimeter. I have no doubt this was done intentionally, just don't think it works. Line 6, on the other hand, reads perfectly naturally to me as tetrameter, and I'm willing to bet the writer intended it as tetrameter.

Carol

Carol
I actually like the effect of the and LET GO, but would it balance better for you if the "and" were omitted?
I wish that besides spondee there were a poetic equivalent of a breve. That's how I really read it. I remember we had this conversation once before and you explained to me that poetry didn't have that facility like music and I said I know, then it's jolly well time it did. Let's invent it ;)
Janet

No, don't get rid of the and, linger on it. The cadence is lovely that way.

Chris

Chris,
I think so too.
Janet

Janet, there are such animals as monosyllabic feet in poetry just as in music; a natural or induced caesura replaces the unstressed syllable. (It can't replace the stressed one, obviously, because stress must fall on a sound, not a pause.) But monosyllabic feet aren't found in the middle of a stock phrase like "let go." For example, here's a 4-beat line in all monosyllables: Beathe! Breathe! Run! Go! Four feet, four beats. There is no question that "Breathe in, it says, and let go." has three beats rather than four beats. The question is whether the 3-beat line works or not. It works for you and Chris and Mark, but it doesn't work for me. It would be a simple line to fix, and I am sure the writer could have done so if s/he wanted, so I assume s/he chose to make it short for some poetic purpose. But to me intentional doesn't equate to successful. I suspect a lot of metrical mistakes are committed intentionally. The challenge the poet faces is to sell what is in his head to his reader.

Dwelling on the phrase itself, I come back to what initially bothered me about the ending besides the missing beat; that is, the sense. I had reasoned my logic nit away by concluding that the characters were just now falling in love, or just now falling in love all over again, just now learning to let go. But the octave states that they've already "let go of clutching things" as a part of the aging and maturing process. So what are they clutching onto now that they need to be encouraged to let go of? Everything in the poem up to this point has indicated that they have already learned to relax and go with the flow, so what is the cool sweet air of change and the letting go all about?

Carol

Carol, my answer would be that the first "let go" of the poem concerns "things".

We have let go of clutching things.

The concluding octave is a more profound "let go", involving the entire process of life, including death. And this total surrender to the process is a type of "falling in love".


It isn't that we're growing old.
It isn't that we've bested fear
or that we never wake to know
in spite of love, we die alone.
The air is cool and sweet with change.
Breathe in, it says, and let go.
It is enough to fall in love.
To fall in love and watch the world unfold.

There is no end to the "letting go" - it not something done once and for all, but a continuous process.

Ultimately, the last and hardest thing to be let go of, is the process of letting go itself.

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited November 27, 2004).]

Mark, and Carol,
I read it like that too.
I have reached that stage of life shared with another and recognise the undertow.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 28, 2004).]

I love this beautiful artefact.
This is the essence of the poem, I think:

'Today it seems
that all the world is gentling.
We have let go of clutching things.'

"It is enough to fall in love."

Hmm. That's true if you're very young or simply youthful, but...if one has to ask whether "growing old" is involved, then one is probably growing old. One may, of course, fall in love while mature, but it's a different animal from falling in love earlier. I think. Whether it's "enough" depends upon a million factors!

Terese

I'm in agreement with the Carol camp on the short line. I can't read it naturally with any significant caesura, and in any case the caesura can't replace a beat. I ask myself what purpose could be served by deliberately missing a beat here, and in this case I can find no sound/sense rationale for it. I'd like it to be that The "sense" of let go is echoed in the "sound" of the line short one beat, but it doesn't work that way for me. In fact, the opposite is happening. We are trying to stress "LET GO" when the act of "letting go" would be more of a sussuration, I think. To wit:

The air is cool and sweet with change.
"Breathe in," it says, "breathe and let go."
It is enough to fall in love.

See how the line begins in emphasis now, and then falls off gently as we let go?

(robt)

It’s a very nice poem on a mystical theme as Mark has said. Congratulations to the author.

But pish and pshaw and a pox on all your metrical hair-splitting! This wretched insistence on foot scansion so often leads to absurdity. If the poem works its effect and sounds good, what on earth does it matter if this line or that is a lone trimeter in a phalanx of tet? And if it does matter, why has nobody made a similar complaint about the single pentameter line at the end? [Edited to say I see Rhina did mention it.]

For what it’s worth, neither of those "controversial" lines gave me the least pause. To me, a tri reading is the natural one for both. Even if I said gentling as GEN-tel-ing (which I don’t) I couldn’t get another beat out of it. GENTelING? Surely not. Or suppose we substituted the word gentle:

The sego lily and the rose
have quieted. Today it seems
that all the world is gentle.

Isn’t the three-beat line there effective? I can’t agree at all that the meter “requires” a fourth beat. And surely if the author thought so, she (?) wouldn’t have relied on an unnatural promotion of -ING to supply it.

The other one I read as breathe IN, it SAYS, and let GO. Trimeter again — and again the sixth line of the stanza. To me those variations are pleasing, like the longer final line, and I assume the author introduced all of them deliberately.

Henry

---------------------------------
http://quince.netpublish.net




[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited November 30, 2004).]

Henry, I think the whole point is whether the irregular lines are pleasing to the ear and mind or not, a subjective call that varies from ear to ear and mind to mind and poem to poem. It is not metrical hair-splitting for me to say that one of those lines bothers me with its missed beat. If the poem "works in effect and sounds good," that's one thing, and apparently it does for you.

As I stated earlier, the long last line might have worked for me if I hadn't been thrown out of the rhythm by the short preceding line. Even that might have worked if the penultimate line hadn't intervened, leaving me with no place to put the other foot down. In short, the variation doesn't work in effect or sound natural for me, and that's what I'm trying to point out.

Carol

If one might be interested in the opinion of a reader whose native language is not English and who has no training in metrical poetry, please let me congratulate the authors of my three favorite poems from this fine selection of 18.

This one comes first on my list.

Congratulations,

Tonia

I read L6 as almost-tetrameter, with a very subtle middle syllable in "gentling," and "ing" just barely--maybe mentally?--promoted. If there were a metronome keeping time in the background, the fourth tick would come eeeever so slightly after the "ing".

Works for me...so Carol must be WRONG! ;)

You know, what I took from this was a rare thing: a seasonal poem about young love in some other season than spring, because young folk do actually fall in love in other seasons and appreciate them for their beauty, not just their handy if somewhat threadbare symbolism.

Looking at autumn as the world unfolding instead of dying is a refreshing thing, and I'll say that having written autumnal poems festooned with all the shrouds and cobwebs I could lay my hands on. In fact, the poet rather carefully has the narrator mention the traditional symbolism and dismiss it item by item as irrelevant to what she or he is feeling at the moment.

Metrically, I'm with Henry. Read aloud, this sounds fine, and the extra length of the final line is deliberate.

Rose, I read line 6 as tetrameter, no almost about it. Line 15 is the only trimeter line.

Carol

Another vote with Harry and Kevin. I like this mystical, musical poem very much; my ear has only one problem with it, and I am particularly fond of the way the meter and line length vary at the end - a closing flair that works very well for me.

I would, however, be happier with an extra syllable in L15: Breathe in it says, and then let go.

I believe that the writer (and I have my guess) has a superb, rhythmical ear, but is not a metric fundamentalist; and that the poem deserves to be listened to, not defined and mirco-parsed into submission.

Michael Cantor

Sorry, Carol, for arguing with you about the wrong thing. I saw the talk about "gentling" and got it muddled in my mind with your comment about L15. Speaking of which (nice segue, eh? ;) I vote to leave as is. So what if a syllable's been let go...it encourages a slight pause, which seems fitting there.

I know the authors of course, from the return addys on the emails, and I would not have identified this as being from this author, Reeser maybe. Alan and I read this closely aboard the boat. It lacks the shape shifting quality of her usual short, het met lines, and it lacks the charge she so often brings to her zany, zenni images. But I am pleased to see her extending herself into so regular a tetrameter, and I think it is only a matter of time before she has many more arrows in her quiver, the most important of which is to be able to deploy strict form when the matter calls for it.

I'm afraid this poem is not very good. All the usual poetic things in there (save for panning for gold).

This is, gasp, a greeting card effort.

My personal apologies to the author.

I'm afraid "gasp" as an expression of fey dismay is very badly overused. It comes from cartoons, originally.

Maggie,
Mastery lies, not in novelty, but in skill. The diatonic scale lives for "Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer" and Chopin. The real skill is being able to tell them apart.
Janet

Maggie,

Gasp!!

To translate: If you don't like it, you don't know what you're talking about.

Ka Pow!

Sometimes poems are ironed to death by form; as much music is lost by too much attention as not enough.

Bang!

MEHope--

Huh!?

Maggie, I believe, was criticizing the content and metaphors, not the form.

A poem about panning for gold can be done well or badly, in formal verse or free, and given the incredible number of words which rhyme with gold, I think the ironing complaint is pretty silly. Especially since you can put any word you like in the middle of a line and not rhyme on it too.

This is a well done poem that plays against the standard symbolism of autumn, and I like it in particular for that.

No, I must really gasp. Because, unbeknownst to you I am not someone very well liked here at the Able Muse except by a few people who shall remain nameless. When I gasp, I am saying, "Oh, here it comes Meg. They'll be after you for disagreeing with the consensus."

I should be used to that by now but in reality, I never really will be.

And by the way, I've messaged you Rhina and I hope you take the time to hear what I have to say in the context of your comments and my own. I hate to bother you but I can see that you are somewhat dismayed regarding the level of my criticisms.

I hate to pop this one back up, but wanted to quickly thank all those who commented to it. Special thanks to Mark who articulated my deeper intentions so clearly I'd begun to wonder if he'd written the poem. I was also delighted by the interpretations proffered by Janet, Carol, David, Henry, Kevin, and others. All reported various readings that I'd hoped were peripherally available in this poem, and it's really good to know they were visible to some. Because I do tend to write in a kind of weird mist, it's always really helpful to know what people are seeing and what's being obscured. Many thanks to Tonia, Chris, Michael, Margaret, Oliver, Robt, Terese, Henry, Rose, David, Tim, and of course Rhina for good words, smart suggestions, and such honest replies.

I also feel I should confess that this poem did see print this year. I hadn't seen where only-unpublished-poems need apply, but a couple of days ago I heard someone say they hadn't submitted because their better poems had already been published this year. Ever since, I've been feeling a need to come clean on this. I apologize if I've violated an unspoken rule, or the spirit of the event.

I'm also horrified to report that L15, which gave some of you metrical/musical difficulties, read in an earlier draft,

Breathe in, it says, and let go of.


I know. I am ashamed.

Thanks again to the whole lot of you for all the attention paid to this. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated more than you know.

wendy