536 Philosophy poems

Those strokes which mates in mirth do give do seem to be but light, Although sometime they leave a sign seems grievous to the sight. He that is void of any friend, him company to keep, Walks in a world of wilderness, full fraught with dangers deep. Each lover knoweth what he likes and what he doth desire, But seld, or never, doth he know what thing he should require. Affection fond deceives the wise and love makes men such noddies That to their selves they seem as dead yet live in other bodies. Ask nothing of thy neighbour that thou wouldst not let him have: Nor say him nay of that which thou wouldst get if thou didst crave. Two eyes, two ears, and but one tongue Dame Nature hath us framed That we might see and hear much more than should with tongue be named. Seek not each man to please, for that is more than God bids do: Please thou the best, and neuer care, what wicked say thereto.

Whose table is that, left on three legs? If there’s been a mistake, it may be in assuming less vulnerability as one fills the vase— whose buoyant comfort exaggerates at the sight of his own proffered, sympathetic hand, striking him so clean in comparison gloved white, magician—for a sec he even sees the calla lily’s furl in the gesture of voilà!

What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we any concern. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher & loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing, its shade deepens further his crimson smock.Tenebrosus: that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood that the obscured world only seems to us somehow even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s, displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats & wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week, someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch. It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion. The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then, to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes, an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him. A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark & wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs, driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother & the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief, to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again? Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home, waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school, I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent & unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other, there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible & impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort. It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself— breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots, peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board, making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves. Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night, the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been. Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off, hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks. In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest

Some see a dove And think Pigeon Others see pigeons And think Dove Some know that all pigeons are doves Some angry as if pigeons were not doves But the city lover knows And I try to reconstruct The tattoo on one of your many branches The more arms the more power I think of you, O pale tattoo All pigeons, all doves You friendly cliff-dwellers

Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul Has the weight of a swallow, what less Has the weight of a sip? You equal This riddle, unposed in your dish As a hand at rest in a lap. Held to, You hold back what can't be Prevented, what's no more palatable For that: the unfine; formerly, our future.

For knowledge, says the Old Sage, add; for wisdom, subtract. My head in a surgeon’s chair, checking Lao Tsu’s math as these teeth I barely knew I had (mumbled of as wisdom) introduced themselves—rude party guests—right as they had to go, their pinched

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —

To map the consequences of regardless, of underestimate, Of feverish faith, of the mechanical modernism of your false terrain. As if Port Sulphur remained nominal, its slick globules merely figurative Between territories of wait and wetlands of trust. To etch the shallow-water horizon— a techno-utopian tribute To shrimp estuaries, bird rookeries, oyster bays, To tube worms & sea turtles. To watercolor these pelican grasses, Oxidized, unapologetic executive marshes, roseated spoonbills. For you who longed to smear concentric circles, To have trusted you with longitude and latitude, To blur this sargassum border between mourning, Fighting, and willful denying of objects and subjects. As if Generations of fishermen, scaling orders of magnitude, Navigated oily streaks of miles in a legend of inches, Skeletal, ghostly swarms of now-opaque, milky jellyfish. As if to bury the blowout, rescind the rig. To fortify, to intone. If naming were not violence,to witness an active verb: Top kill, junk shot, top hat, dance dance revolution. These wayward scripts a frontier province palimpsest. Offshore yet another beacon, another account. Explosive violet iridescent.

from Book I, Introduction Man’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense, that tho’ she guide his highest flight heav’nward, and teach him dignity morals manners and human comfort, she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell. Not without alliance of the animal senses hath she any miracle: Lov’st thou in the blithe hour of April dawns—nay marvelest thou not—to hear the ravishing music that the small birdës make in garden or woodland, rapturously heralding the break of day; when the first lark on high hath warn’d the vigilant robin already of the sun’s approach, and he on slender pipe calleth the nesting tribes to awake and fill and thrill their myriad-warbling throats praising life’s God, untill the blisful revel grow in wild profusion unfeign’d to such a hymn as man hath never in temple or grove pour’d to the Lord of heav’n? Hast thou then thought that all this ravishing music, that stirreth so thy heart, making thee dream of things illimitable unsearchable and of heavenly import, is but a light disturbance of the atoms of air, whose jostling ripples, gather’d within the ear, are tuned to resonant scale, and thence by the enthron’d mind received on the spiral stairway of her audience chamber as heralds of high spiritual significance? and that without thine ear, sound would hav no report. Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee any better melody in the April woods at dawn than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake o’night in his comfortless attic, might perchance be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch? Now since the thoughtless birds not only act and enjoy this music, but to their offspring teach it with care, handing on those small folk-songs from father to son in such faithful tradition that they are familiar unchanging to the changeful generations of men— and year by year, listening to himself the nightingale as amorous of his art as of his brooding mate practiseth every phrase of his espousal lay, and still provoketh envy of the lesser songsters with the same notes that woke poetic eloquence alike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats— see then how deeply seated is the urgence whereto Bach and Mozart obey’d, or those other minstrels who pioneer’d for us on the marches of heav’n and paid no heed to wars that swept the world around, nor in their homes wer more troubled by cannon-roar than late the small birds wer, that nested and carol’d upon the devastated battlefields of France. Birds are of all animals the nearest to men for that they take delight in both music and dance, and gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life wer the earlier artists: moreover in their airy flight (which in its swiftness symboleth man’s soaring thought) they hav no rival but man, and easily surpass in their free voyaging his most desperate daring, altho’ he hath fed and sped his ocean-ships with fire; and now, disturbing me as I write, I hear on high his roaring airplanes, and idly raising my head see them there; like a migratory flock of birds that rustle southward from the cold fall of the year in order’d phalanx—so the thin-rankt squadrons ply, til sound and sight failing me they are lost in the clouds. ..... Time eateth away at many an old delusion, yet with civilization delusions make head; the thicket of the people wil take furtiv fire from irresponsible catchwords of live ideas, sudden as a gorse-bush from the smouldering end of any loiterer’s match-splint, which, unless trodden out afore it spredd, or quell’d with wieldy threshing-rods wil burn ten years of planting with all last year’s ricks and blacken a countryside. ’Tis like enough that men ignorant of fire and poison should be precondemn’d to sudden deaths and burnings, but ’tis mightily to the reproach of Reason that she cannot save nor guide the herd; that minds who else wer fit to rule must win to power by flattery and pretence, and so by spiritual dishonesty in their flurried reign confirm the disrepute of all authority— but only in sackcloth can the Muse speak of such things. from Book II. Selfhood The Spartan General Brasidas, the strenuous man, who earn’d historic favour from his conquer’d foe, once caught a mouse foraging in his messbasket among the figs, but when it bit him let it go, praising its show of fight in words that Plutarch judged worth treasuring; and since I redd the story at school unto this hour I hav never thought of Brasidas and cannot hear his name, but that I straightway see a table and an arm’d man smiling with hand outstretch’d above a little mouse that is scampering away. Why should this thing so hold me? and why do I welcome now the tiny beast, that hath come running up to me as if here in my cantos he had spied a crevice, and counting on my friendship would make it his home? ’Tis such a pictur as must by mere beauty of fitness convince natural feeling with added comfort. The soldier seeth the instinct of Selfhood in the mouse to be the same impulse that maketh virtue in him. For Brasidas held that courage ennobleth man, and from unworth redeemeth, and that folk who shrink from ventur of battle in self-defence are thereby doom’d to slavery and extinction: and so this mouse, albeit its little teeth had done him a petty hurt, deserved liberty for its courage, and found grace in man. ..... What is Beauty? saith my sufferings then.—I answer the lover and poet in my loose alexandrines: Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences, the quality of appearances that thru’ the sense wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man: And Art, as it createth new forms of beauty, awakeneth new ideas that advance the spirit in the life of Reason to the wisdom of God. But highest Art must be as rare as nativ faculty is and her surprise of magic winneth favor of men more than her inspiration: most are led away by fairseeming pretences, which being wrought for gain pursue the ephemeral fashion that assureth it; and their thin influences are of the same low grade as the unaccomplish’d forms; their poverty is exposed when they would stake their charm on ethic excellence; for then weak simulations of virtues appear, such as convention approveth, but not Virtue itself, tho’ not void of all good: and (as I read) ’twas this that Benvenuto intended, saying that not only Virtue was memorable but things so truly done that they wer like to Virtue; and thus prefaced his book, thinking to justify both himself and his works. The authority of Reason therefor relieth at last hereon—that her discernment of spiritual things, the ideas of Beauty, is her conscience of instinct upgrown in her (as she unto conscience of all upgrew from lower to higher) to conscience of Beauty judging itself by its own beauteous judgment. from Book III. Breed How was November’s melancholy endear’d to me in the effigy of plowteams following and recrossing patiently the desolat landscape from dawn to dusk, as the slow-creeping ripple of their single furrow submerged the sodden litter of summer’s festival! They are fled, those gracious teams; high on the headland now squatted, a roaring engin toweth to itself a beam of bolted shares, that glideth to and fro combing the stubbled glebe: and agriculture here, blotting out with such daub so rich a pictur of grace, hath lost as much of beauty as it hath saved in toil. Again where reapers, bending to the ripen’d corn, were wont to scythe in rank and step with measured stroke, a shark-tooth’d chariot rampeth biting a broad way, and, jerking its high swindging arms around in the air, swoopeth the swath. Yet this queer Pterodactyl is well, that in the sinister torpor of the blazing day clicketeth in heartless mockery of swoon and sweat, as ’twer the salamandrine voice of all parch’d things: and the dry grasshopper wondering knoweth his God. from Book IV, Ethick Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God and Angel of his Presence thru’ all creation, fashioning her new love-realm in the mind of man, attempteth every mortal child with influences of her divine supremacy ... ev’n as in a plant when the sap mounteth secretly and its wintry stalk breaketh out in the prolific miracle of Spring, or as the red blood floodeth into a beating heart to build the animal body comely and strong; so she in her transcendant rivalry would flush his spirit with pleasurable ichor of heaven: and where she hath found responsiv faculty in some richly favour’d soul— L’anima vaga delle cose belle, as saith the Florentine,—she wil inaugurate her feast of dedication, and even in thatt earliest onset, when yet infant Desire hath neither goal nor clue to fix the dream, ev’n then, altho’ it graspeth nought and passeth in its airy vision away, and dieth out of remembrance, ’tis in its earnest of life and dawn of bliss purer and hath less of earthly tinge than any other after-attainment of the understanding: for all man’s knowledge kenneth also of toil and flaw and even his noblest works, tho’ they illume the dark with individual consummation, are cast upon by the irrelevant black shadows of time and fate. ..... Repudiation of pleasur is a reason’d folly of imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate or decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life, whereon all function whatsoever in man is based. Consider how this mortal sensibility hath a wide jurisdiction of range in all degrees, from mountainous gravity to imperceptible faintest tenuities:—The imponderable fragrance of my window-jasmin, that from her starry cup of red-stemm’d ivory invadeth my being, as she floateth it forth, and wantoning unabash’d asserteth her idea in the omnipotent blaze of the tormented sun-ball, checquering the grey wall with shadow-tracery of her shapely fronds; this frail unique spice of perfumery, in which she holdeth monopoly by royal licence of Nature, is but one of a thousand angelic species, original beauties that win conscience in man: a like marvel hangeth o’er the rosebed, and where the honeysuckle escapeth in serpentine sprays from its dark-cloister’d clamber thru’ the old holly-bush, spreading its joybunches to finger at the sky in revel above rivalry. Legion is their name; Lily-of-the-vale, Violet, Verbena, Mignonette, Hyacinth, Heliotrope, Sweet-briar, Pinks and Peas, Lilac and Wallflower, or such white and purple blooms that sleep i’ the sun, and their heavy perfumes withhold to mingle their heart’s incense with the wonder-dreams, love-laden prayers and reveries that steal forth from earth, under the dome of night: and tho’ these blossomy breaths, that hav presumed the title of their gay genitors, enter but singly into our neighboring sense, that hath no panorama, yet the mind’s eye is not blind unto their multitudinous presences:—I know that if odour wer visible as color is, I’d see the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds, with such warfare of hues as a painter might choose to show his sunset sky or a forest aflame; while o’er the country-side the wide clover-pastures and the beanfields of June would wear a mantle, thick as when in late October, at the drooping of day the dark grey mist arising blotteth out the land with ghostly shroud. Now these and such-like influences of tender specialty must not—so fine they be— fall in neglect and all their loveliness be lost, being to the soul deep springs of happiness, and full of lovingkindness to the natural man, who is apt kindly to judge of good by comfortable effect. Thus all men ever hav judged the wholesomness of food from the comfort of body ensuing thereupon, whereby all animals retrieve their proper diet; but if when in discomfort ’tis for pleasant hope of health restored we swallow nauseous medicines, so mystics use asceticism, yea, and no man readier than they to assert eventual happiness to justify their conduct. Whence it is not strange (for so scientific minds in search of truth digest assimilable hypotheses) they should extend their pragmatism, and from their happiness deduce the very existence and the natur of God, and take religious consolation for the ground of faith: as if the pleasur of life wer the sign-manual of Nature when she set her hand to her covenant. But man, vain of his Reason and thinking more to assure its independence, wil disclaim complicity with human emotion; and regarding his Mother deemeth it dutiful and nobler in honesty coldly to criticize than purblindly to love; and in pride of this quarrel he hath been led in the end to make distinction of kind 'twixt Pleasur and Happiness; observing truly enough how one may hav pleasure and yet miss happiness; but this warpeth the sense and common use of speech, since all tongues in the world call children and silly folk happy and sometimes ev’n brutes. The name of happiness is but a wider term for the unalloy’d conditions of the Pleasur of Life, attendant on all function, and not to be deny’d to th’ soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature spiritual is by definition unnatural.