Friday Photo 2024/25

 

Strand Theater, Market Street, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/25

Song

I had a dove and the sweet dove died;

    And I have thought it died of grieving.

O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,

    With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.

Sweet little red feet! why would you die –

Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?

You lived alone on the forest-tree,

Why, pretty thing, could you not live with me?

I kissed you oft and gave you white peas;

Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

– John Keats

According to the endnotes in my Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats, from which I took this poem, Keats more or less dashed off this little poem while listening to some music (unfortunately, the music in play is not specified). It does have the hallmarks of verse written to be sung: the diction is fairly simple, the rhyme scheme doesn't make you wait to long for the chiming reward, & the picture is made vivid with simple & direct color references: the dove's red feet, the white peas, the green trees.

But the poem, really a dramatic monologue, shows great psychological acuity & subtlety. The suffering of the formerly free dove is made more poignant by the owner's inability to accept that that is its nature: he realizes that the dove was in misery, but his blithe narcissism prevents him from understanding that he was the cause of that misery. The situation is made even more poignant by our seeing it through the lens of the benevolently, cluelessly cruel master (in this it might bring to mind another famous dramatic monologue in verse, Browning's My Last Duchess).

The opening quatrain uses an abab rhyme scheme, & presents the situation: the narrator is consistently, at least in his view, loving; his pet is sweet, & he is bewildered at his loss. He has considered the possibility that sorrow killed the lovely bird, but is mystified as to why the bird should be sad: he himself wove the gentle silken thread that kept the creature captive. Doves have a Biblical resonance; they are the bird of peace, & the sign of heavenly blessing, & the bird that brought Noah the branch that signified the receding of the waters; memorably, they are the ideal of Psalm 55, where the singer cries out "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest": all signifiers of peace & freedom. Even a silken thread, though woven with care by an owner who thinks he is loving, would be inimical to such a creature.

After the opening quatrain, the poem is written in couplets, as if our speaker is unable to stretch things over more than two lines. He is baffled: why would the bird prefer liberty & solitude to . . . well, yes, captivity, but captivity with him? The white peas to me suggest a refined, almost unnatural, diet, &, again, the speaker cannot understand why any creature would prefer the green trees. White suggests innocence & purity, perhaps an imposed innocence & purity, as contrasted with the wild red of the bird's feet & the vivid green of its native habitat. The narrator never does learn to understand, & we can be pretty sure he never will, no matter how many "pretty things" pile up at his own untrammeled feet.

Keats obviously had a fecund imagination, but I wonder if somewhere in his mind the seed for this poem had been planted by Juliet's remarks in the celebrated balcony scene of Romeo & Juliet:

'Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone –

And yet no farther than a wanton's bird,

That lets it hop a little from his hand,

Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,

And with a silken thread plucks it back again,

So loving-jealous of his liberty.

(Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, ll 176 - 81; Romeo's response: "I would I were thy bird"; clearly he is no sweet dove longing for liberty)

Barbara Pym, who often used lines from the English Romantic poets as titles for her novels, wrote one late in her career titled The Sweet Dove Died; it's a brilliant dissection of such a relationship: a well-off, elegant & detached woman has a romantic (though not physical) relationship with a handsome young man, complicated by his more straightforward uncle, a young woman he has a fling with, & then a young man he has an affair with (the young man is an American scholar who quotes the Keats poem, though he has a single thread rather than a silken thread; I don't know if that's a variant reading of the manuscript of a memory slip on Pym's part). The novel is written with Pym's characteristic wit & understanding, but there's something almost cold in its clarity which, to me, sets it apart a bit from her other novels, which tend to be warmer. I recommend them all, cold & warm.

Museum Monday 2024/25

 

detail of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, now at the Art Institute of Chicago

humid nightblue fruit

    What did each do at the door of egress?

    Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

    For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

    For a cat.

    

     What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

    The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

    With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

    Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) to lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably, remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

    Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

    Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Once again, Happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers.

Friday Photo 2024/24

 

stairway, North Beach, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/24

Weeds

    The pigrush, the poverty grass,

The bindweed's stranglehold morning glories,

    The dog-blow and ninety joints –

They ask so little of us to start with,

    Just a crack in the asphalt,

Or a subway grate with an hour of weak light.

    One I know has put down roots

As far as a corpse is buried, its storage stem

    As big as my leg. That one's called

Man-under-ground. That one was my grudge.

    And suddenly now this small

Unlooked for joy. Where did it come from,

    With these pale shoots

And drooping lavender bell? Persistent

    Intruder, whether or not

I want you, you've hidden in the heart's

    Overworked subsoil. Hacked at

Or trampled on, may you divide and spread,

    Just as, all last night,

The wind scattered a milkweed across the sky.

– J D McClatchy

Anyone with a garden (or, less grandly & intentionally, a yard) is familiar with this phenomenon: the "weed" – the wild flower, the stubborn strange grasses, the volunteer, the bird-planted, the revenant – that prospers in place of the pampered & often expensive plants we labored to see in their place. Sometimes the results are better than what we intended; other times, the initial beauty deceives. A few years ago a wonderful plant sprang up all over my yard, with lacy green leaves & little cloudlets of white flowers (I assume it was some variant of wild carrot or Queen Anne's Lace; it had that kind of look). I was taken with it & decided to let it bloom wherever it was growing, which was all over. But then seed time came, & the plant turned on me: the seeds were sticky little burrs that got everywhere. When I walked through the yard, I would end up with them all over my arms (& in my arm pits), my hair, my yard gloves, my clothes, my shoes . . . everywhere. I brushed them off until I realized I was just spreading the seeds. The next year, I ruthlessly yanked up any of these plants I saw, even in their early beauty stages. I pulled them up by the dozens. A few still show up, of course, despite my dedicated efforts.

The poet here starts off with some really unattractive-sounding plants, their unwanted wildness contrasting with the regularity of his lines & stanzas. I may know some of these by other names (such is the nature of "weeds"), though I don't recognize most of these names, but then I'm sure they were chosen for sound & connotation: pigrush, poverty grass, bindweed, dog-blow (it's an interesting phenomenon that every dog-related term I can think of in English is an insult of some sort), ninety-joint: they sound mean, low-natured, gross or balky.

But then the mood changes a bit: they ask so little of us. It can be a relief not to have to deal with their needs. Is their self-sufficiency generous or indifferent or powerful or all of those and/or something else? Despite the unappealing names we stick on them, there seems something admirable in their tenacity & self-reliance & independence (& aren't those supposed to be great cultural virtues for Americans?).A crack in the asphalt, a subway grate: the plants aren't even interrupting the visualized flow of some ideal garden here; they're just trying to live (I remember a passage from a long-ago reading of Crime & Punishment, a description of how even the suffering will cling to life, even if they are stuck on a bare rocky ledge: still they cling to life). The poet tells of one weed that has sunk down as far as a corpse is buried: that's presumably a human corpse; the plant finds life amidst our death, & maybe even through our death. This plant's storage stem (a type of root that stores food & other nutrients) is as thick as the poet's leg. Things are getting personal! The comparisons to a man's leg & the vicinity of corpses & the name Man-under-ground & the storage stem all suggest that the plant's vitality is somehow feeding off of our (defunct) bodies. No wonder the poet has a grudge against it. It's doubtful that he managed to defeat it, though: a root that massive is difficult to remove completely, & unless you do that, that plant is returning.

The mood changes more significantly in the second stanza: the poet does not begin by describing the "weed", but by relating how he reacts to it: And suddenly now this small / unlooked for joy. It's not even clear at first that he is, in fact, describing a plant. The line break lends subtle emphasis to unlooked for. Joy is rare & fleeting enough in life, even small joys, so an unlooked-for one is welcome. After the emotion comes its cause: pale shoots / and drooping lavender bell. The plant is still an intruder, but not a fragile beauty, despite its paleness & drooping & pastel shade; it is persistent, not just in showing up where it wasn't planned for but in its insistence on its own existence & loveliness. Where did it come from? The it is emphasized with italics, bringing out the singularity of this particular weed. It refers to this plant, but perhaps also to the unexpected apparition of the plant's loveliness.

The poet is not completely won over (perhaps he's had an experience similar to mine with the lacy beauties): whether or not I want you. He's not ready to give up his plans for his garden, but he does admit the persistent intruder with pale shoots & a delicate bell-flower has worked its way into the heart's / overworked subsoil. Again, the body is linked to the world of nature as shown in the garden; the heart, seat of love, is compared to a garden (gardens are a traditional erotic image in many poetic traditions). And this weed has not just lodged there superficially; it is in the subsoil. The heart is cultivated, even overworked, but still receptive to the surprising bit of joy brought unexpectedly by an unlooked-for & unwanted discovery.

With that, the poet gives the plant his unnecessary blessing to bloom in his garden. Acknowledging the weed's likely future of being hacked at  / or trampled on (it is still an intruder, & hacking & trampling are how people treat weeds), he also wishes it to divide & spread, those two terms balancing the earlier two: dividing is a sort of hacking, a separation (it is also a deliberate process by which gardeners keep their plants healthy; here, it is the plant itself that is keeping itself healthy by division); spreading seems related to trampling: both expand the plant outwards, even if crushed. And most gardeners have had the experience of realizing they were carrying & spreading seeds stuck in the ridges of their work boots.

The poem so far has dealt with the ground, & what's underneath it; in the last two lines, it takes flight into the sky. First the way is prepared by the introduction of the metaphor: Just as, all last night. . . . Night prepares us for a dreamlike vision: The wind scattered a milkweed across the sky. On one level, this is a factual statement of the natural process by which some weeds are spread: the wind blows the light seeds through the air. But of course they aren't blown "across the sky"; they cover only a bit of territory, fairly low down in the atmosphere, before they fall to earth. What the phrasing gives us is a wonderful evocation of the seeds of this weed, the milkweed, as a kind of starry Milky Way spread & suspended dazzlingly overhead. The seeds of this unwanted plant become a generous celebration of the powerful glories of Nature itself.

The title is Weeds, not A Particular Weed I Happened to Like: the poet is suggesting, perhaps, a revised way of looking at the aesthetic imposition on & forcing of Nature that constitutes "a garden", into a broader acceptance of the strange byways & serendipitous discoveries of the living world.

I took this from Garden Poems, selected & edited by John Hollander, part of the excellent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series.

Museum Monday 2024/24

 

detail of The Descending Geese of the Koto Bridge (Kotoji no Rakugan), from the series Eight Parlor Views (Zashiki hakkei) by Suzuki Harunobu, currently on display at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as part of their special exhibit Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World

Friday Photo 2024/23

 

Market Street, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/23

Upon Her Voice

Let but thy voice engender with the string,

And Angels will be borne, while thou dost sing.

– Robert Herrick

Length is an interesting phenomenon in poetry: often the long form, the epic, is rated the highest achievement of the art form, just as novels are often valued over short stories, but the lightning flash of a brief poem has its own art & its own fascination & power. Some poets naturally gravitate towards the brief (I can't imagine that any admirer of Emily Dickinson ever wished that she had attempted an epic). Herrick was one of those; his witty, sensuous, observational poems are mostly short & all the more memorable for it.

In this poem, two lines tell us all, though the title, which is sort of a line of its own, announces the subject (just as epics have a statement of subject & theme at the opening ("Arms & the man I sing"), so do briefer poems, if only to save time by pointing our minds in the right direction). The poet is speaking to a woman; she is not singing, but he hopes she will be; he must have heard her in the past, because he knows what delights to expect. There is a flirtatious undercurrent here, as he pleads with her to sing; it is not her voice alone, but her voice united with "the string" (a lute or violin or some such instrument) – not just united, but engendered. Engender means not only "to make people have a particular feeling or make a situation start to exist" – that is, her voice, united with an instrument, will create something new, something worth waiting for – but also to procreate, to beget – that is, art is generated by something akin to a sexual relationship, in which two procreators produce an independent, third, living being. (As Iago says, "My muse labors, & thus is she delivered".)

What sort of child is being produced? We find out in the second line: no squalling earthly babes, but angels. And not just one, but many; an abundance of heavenly messengers. Angels traditionally are shown hymning praise to God, often depicted in art with harps & other instruments. They also put us in mind of the music of the spheres that was supposed to result from the exquisite mathematical circling of the planets. The voice united with the string will remove us from this mundane reality to a higher existence.

And the angels are borne: the primary meaning of that word is carried (just as the sound vibrations we call music are carried to us through the air), but there is also the underlying pun, continuing the procreative theme, of given birth. The music floats, but is also rooted in our basic physical, as well as spiritual, urges.

Yet this glorious moment is as brief as this poem: it lasts only while thou dost sing (note the use of the intimate form thou; this word often strikes us as formal, because it is archaic, but it was once a living word in English, the equivalent of the intimate French tu). Given the sexual subtext to the poem, it's difficult not to see a glance here at the briefness of orgasm as well as the briefness of spiritual exaltation: a reminder that we are a complex mixture of the animal & the angelic. Herrick, perhaps most famous for the line Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, here pleads with an unidentified but crucial woman to produce, through the unlikely union of voice & string, a moment of earthly ecstasy.

Given the frequently saucy nature of Herrick's poetry, editions from the more decorous decades between his lifetime (he died in 1674) & the late twentieth century were frequently heavily edited & difficult to come by, so a complete edition of his poetry was one of the books I kept an eye out for. Oxford University Press published a wonderful two-volume set, but it's quite expensive. But several years ago, during yet another difficult period, on top of all my other difficulties, I had to help arrange a ridiculous offsite for a ridiculous group at my then job (which was also ridiculous). I vowed to myself that if I managed to make it through the week of the offsite without strangling one or more people, I would buy The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, without even waiting for one of OUP's occasional sales. Reader, that carrot kept this donkey on track & out of jail. Buying expensive books of poetry: preventing violence for untold years!

Museum Monday 2024/23

 

detail of Standing Crowned Buddha with Four Scenes of his Life, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco