[David Halitsky]

In the course of Tom Jardine's General Talk thread on the importance of poetry, Mark Allinson found it useful to post a poem of Stevens' and I found it useful, in response, to post a poem of Housman's:

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


LOVELIEST OF TREES
By A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

****

Although these pieces do not appear to be "of a piece" thematically, they are nonetheless strikingly similar in certain key respects, of which to me the most fascinating is the use of "behold" and "see" in the final S's of both.

Next most fascinating is how structurally similar the two pieces are - artless "casual" rumination on some natural phenomena and one's self or another's self in relation to these phenomena, followed by a summation focussed not on either of these, but precisely on the perception of the former by the latter.

I therefore thought that posting them together would in and of itself, be an act of "Musing on Mastery".

Best regards to all
David Halitsky



[This message has been edited by David Halitsky (edited March 16, 2005).]

[Roger Slater]

You've lost me, David. I see nothing but superficial similarities here. That one poem uses the word "behold" and the other uses the word "see" scarcely strikes me as a noteworthy serendipity.

[Peter Chipman]

...besides, the Stevens poem, unlike the Housman, is about perception ALL the way through--did you not notice the "regard" in the first tercet and the "behold" in the second? This seems to me a serious impediment to any parallel you're trying to suggest.

-Peter

[David Halitsky]

Roger Slater and Peter Chipman -

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply.

Your replies make me curious whether either of you perceive any relationship between either of the two poems posted above and a poem which Hannah coincidentally posted in a thread at wds-TWB about an entirely different topic.

I have lifted this Charles Wright piece from Hannah's posting, and as she observed in her original post, format may not be properly observed.

Best regards
David Halitsky

Body and Soul II
Charles Wright

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
April, and anything's possible.

Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on
foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth,
the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.

These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.

Every true poem is a spark,
and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April's identical,
celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with.

Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.

Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.




[This message has been edited by David Halitsky (edited March 16, 2005).]