Cuckoo

Oh the Cuckoo she’s a pretty bird,
 She singeth as she flies,
She bringeth good tidings,
She telleth no lies.

She sucketh white flowers
For to keep her voice clear,
And the more she singeth cuckoo
The summer draweth near.

Symbols of Transformation

Wm James on the perennial attraction of the cross is echoed in Robert Lowell’s Prayer for the Union Dead -  “he rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to chose life and die.” Lowell would have been familiar with James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.  As the reading runs deeper, sacrifice returns with Jung, seeing the direction of the adult life-energy broadly channelled – canalised - towards rebirth, utilising the unconscious as the ‘creative matrix of the future… establishing a relationship between ego [consciousness] and the unconscious.’ I won’t confound myself offering more.  ‘Nietzsche probably means something of the kind in his poem:

Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the old serpent’s Paradise?
Why hast thou stolen
Into thyself, thyself?

A sick man now,
Sick of the serpent’s poison;
A captive now
Who drew the hardest lot:
Bent double
Working in thine own pit,
Encaved within thyself,
Burrowing into thyself,
Heavy-handed,
Stiff,
A corpse –
Piled with a hundred burdens,
Loaded to death with thyself,
A knower!
Self-knower!
The wise Zarathustra!
You sought the heaviest burden
And found yourself.’

Frederick Nietzsche

Perhaps this brings Pound’s The Return, to mind. And we might find deeper significance if we bear in mind Christ’s last journey through Jerusalem.  Jung concludes his passage on what it is the hero carries – the burden is himself – noting :  ‘As Gerhart Hauptmann says:  “Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word.”

Uneasy

We watch the news with mild concern as work goes down the drain.  No great struggles here, to date, more volunteering anticipated. There’s a new spirit abroad.  Poetry then.  & The weather continues charming.  With the finishing touches still to go on:  Clean Hands, and Watching the Cruisers Below:   this old number has a prior claim on isolation.  More videos to follow.

All we are saying

The League of Poets are producing a giant anthology on peace, widely published and available, my contribution here, slender as it is, charity starts at home:

Helen’s day bed

How calmly she lies among the olive trees
above the bay, on her mattress, 
eyes closed against the tranquil day oblivious
to canopied white fishing boats below
that ply their way through fields of rippled blue,

and all around this drift of velvet butterflies – 

unorganised in midday flight – and lizards in the sun:
an excavator’s drill’s clamour in the valley down
seems further off than it can be.

Somewhere undisturbed, she’s cushioned, sheltered,
brown body bared in quiet calm, Helen
in her peaceful mind sinks in the sand,
warm sand, on the shores of the world.

recondite and red

My poetic year ends with a win in the inaugural free competition from Anglica Tuition Services who, awarding all due respect to the works of Milton and Shakespeare for examples in scansion and wotnot, have sorted out me to the top of their entry heap:  none other mixed precision with delight so well as [my] own Astral Scheme.   A starry meditation.   Ah, sweet! 

I’ll be at charges for a looking glass,
and entertain a score or two of tailors
to study fashions to adorn my body,
since I am crept in favour with myself
I shall maintain it at some small cost. 
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
that I may see my shadow where I pass. 

Norman Cameron

Who is this Shams of Tubriz?

I have the standard American collection of Rumi (Jalaluddin Rumi 13thC) for the spiritual bedrock that he is.  Translated into the idiom some of these poems are a bit hit or miss.  We take what we like, Isherwood’s Bhagavad Gita for instance is my favourite version so far of that illuminating manuscript. And in all the poems before me Rumi shines.  Poetry is somewhat spiritual, what more can I say, Seek and ye shall find?   
Here’s a good-natured, work-a-day version of a piece included in the Shambhala Classics text:

 

 

The Mill, the Stone and the Water

All our desire is a grain of wheat.
Our whole personality is the milling-building.
But this mill grinds without knowing about  it.

The millstone is your heavy body.
What makes the stone turn is your thought-river.
The stone says: I don’t know why we do all this, but the river has knowledge!

If you ask the river, it says,
I don’t know why I flow.
All I know is that a human opened the gate!

And if you ask the person, he says:
All I know, oh gobbler of  bread, is that if this stone
stops going around, there’ll be no bread for your bread-soup!

All this grinding goes on, and no one has any knowledge!
So just be quiet, and one day turn
to God, and say: What is this about bread-making?

(trans Robert Bly)