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).]
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