Cynthia Reeves, “Decaying Tree,” 1977

Sonnet 73
By William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

My life has not fallen into the yellow leaf or the bare tree, the dim hour after sunset, or the dying fire, but at my back I hear time’s Formula One hurrying near.

*****

I first came across the following lines by Ovid in Ernst Robert Curtius’s great European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. I think of them often:

Quid numeras annos? Vixi maturior annis: 
Acta senem faciunt: haec numerandi tibi. 
     Ovid, Consolatio ad Liviam

Why dost thou number years? I have lived to a riper age than years can show.
’Tis deeds make old: these must thou number.
     Loeb translation

Why do you count the years? I’ve lived more ripely than my years. 
Experiences make the man old: those you must number.  

*****

Shakespeare graciously wrote this year’s birthday poem, but I have occasionally written my own.

After Life’s Middle

Trees hang lower,
into the river, dipping
golden and scarlet manes.
Brighter than last year, I think--
maybe the brightest ever.

It’s good that things get better.
The Eno runs red and yellow
as I wade in waist deep,
out of the easy shallows:
was water ever wetter?
     Redheaded Stepchild (Spring 2013); Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)

As I age, I do have the sense of some things, important things, getting better, especially what might be called wisdom in all its forms--self-acceptance, tolerance of others, reconciliation with God. As Yeats writes, "Delighted to be but wise, / For men improve with the years." But Yeats is not satisfied with the loss of youth--"O would that we had met / When I had my burning youth!" The sense of regret for lost powers and energy varies, but is never far absent. But being less self-absorbed I have been able to enter in a modest way into the struggles and occasional triumphs of others--young refugees, an often homeless man, aspiring young poets. 

*****

Song
First written for my 51st birthday

Another year has passed. 
Let it not be my last. 

Now comes my seventy-third. 
Let it not be my worst. 

Let everything have tongue--
each cone on the pine tree hung--

and every tongue a voice
that all things may rejoice

in their particular song
if I cannot stay long.  

​Cynthia Reeves, “October Landscape,” mid-1960s

vi

they flutter again
leaves in the river
flowing by

*****

My son and I used to sit on the exposed roots of a sycamore and cool our feet in the Eno River. Sometimes one of us would slide out a long limb stretching over the river. I liked to watch the leaves come downstream and flutter as they entered the riffling shoal beside the tree, sometimes to reemerge and sometimes to go under for good. When the light was favorable, we could see the little fish at the edge of the riffle searching the current for edible tidbits carried downstream. The current wasn’t very strong; the fish hovered in place with an occasional movement of tail fin and pectoral fins and probably many adjustments too fine for my uneducated eye to notice. Behind us were the ruins of a mill and millrace. Once or twice, in a pool formed by curving roots of the tree, we saw two or three small water snakes. It was a good place to observe, a good place to think, a good place to let the mind quietly wander.

******

as I doze
on sycamore roots
the water snakes play


An imagined scene:

full moon
water snakes swimming
in circles of light

*****

I found that walking through the woods, especially along the river, was a good place to ponder the choices I'd made and those I had to make. Considering deeply the path to take in the Eno River State Park was unnecessary—the paths were all loops and ended up where they started. But as I walked or stopped to let the flowing river still my mind, my thoughts would often go back over the week and then farther back, considering happy moments and unpleasant moments, coming to terms with successes and failures and sometimes picturing what a happier life in the future might look like.

The speaker in Frost’ s “The Road Not Taken” considers which road to take—not loops, because he does not expect to return to the spot: “knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”

The speaker says at first that the roads are about equally traveled: “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” but later he concludes he “took the road less traveled by.” Perhaps he cannot know the path is less traveled until he chooses it and sees how few make the same choice. Or perhaps he looks at it that way because it fits his self-understanding, for example, as a nonconformist who chooses to go it alone or as a failure who ends in unwished for solitude. 

Update: A reader of the blog noted that the traveler is projecting what he will think "ages and ages hence." Frost was surprised at how seriously his readers took the poem. He thought it a kind of high fooling, and perhaps the fooling occurs when the poem switches to a future perspective: today the traveler takes a path not significantly different than the alternative, yet in the distant future (he predicts) he will see the chosen path as "less traveled by." The choice becomes significant only in retrospect. From wisdom or self-deception? The path that was not chosen receives the honor of the title. One traveler cannot take both paths. "What ifs" abound: would it have turned out differently if I'd taken the other way? 

Recently I read a brief discussion by Sally Thomas regarding the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. The discussion takes place in the shadow of “The Road Not Taken.” When the two met, Thomas was considering suicide. Frost helped him turn his creativity and emotions into poetry. But poetry did not cure his depression or self-doubt. He continued to question constantly the value of his life; he was, in Sally Thomas’s words, “tortured by the conviction that his life had been good for nothing.”

The two men met not long before the outbreak of the First World War. “The Road Not Taken” was published in 1915. When Frost, now back in America, shared the poem with his friend, Thomas was shaken. He took the poem far more seriously than Frost intended—he apparently took the “sigh” as a reflection on his choices. His understanding of the poem helped form his resolution to go to war. It also damaged his friendship with Frost.

For the role of “The Road Not Taken” in Thomas’s decision to enlist and its impact on his friendship with Frost, see the excellent essay by Matthew Hollis. As a solution to his need for meaning and resolution, Thomas chose to join the army and then go overseas. He was killed in the Battle of Arras in 1917.

In light of the discussion, I reread some favorite poems by Edward Thomas.

“As the Team's Head Brass” was written in late May 1916 (Hibberd and Onions, The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War). By then, Thomas had enlisted and he had already decided to apply for service overseas (because of his age, he could have stayed in England), but in the poem he is struggling with the decision.

The first speaker in the excerpt is a farmer ploughing a field. At the end of the row he stops to talk to the poet:

     ‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
     ‘If I could only come back again, I should.
     I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
     A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
     I should want nothing more ...'

The poem represents various paths in life—the lovers who disappear into the woods at the beginning of the poem and emerge from the woods near its end; the men from the farmer’s village who have gone to war, some to perish, including one of his mates that worked the farm; the farmer himself who has remained on the land; the poet who does or does not choose to join up. 

Later, when Thomas was waiting to be deployed overseas, he wrote in “Lights Out”:

     There is not any book
     Or face of dearest look
     That I would not turn from now
     To go into the unknown
     I must enter, and leave, alone,
         I know not how.

Thousands went the same way, freely chosen or not, but it must have been a lonely road.

*****

“The Road Not Taken” is a foil to a trope in Western literature. In the parable known as “The Choice of Hercules” (attributed to Prodicus and passed down by Xenophon), Hercules comes to a crossroads and must choose between the path of virtue, with its hardship and honor, and the path of pleasure. The choice before Frost’s traveler is not defined with this clarity, yet it is significant. It “made all the difference,” if we read the poem without irony, though we are not given to understand the difference.

In an eight-line French poem by Rilke, different paths run between two meadows, but they offer no meaningful choice: paradoxically, they seem to veer away from their goal and so go nowhere. Before them is nothing but what’s ahead, space and time, often without a moral or existential significance:

     Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part
     entre deux prés,
     que l’on dirait avec art
     de leur but détournés,

     chemins qui souvent n’ont
     devant eux rien d’autre en face
     que le pur espace
     et la saison.


     Paths that lead nowhere
     between two meadows
     but seem like artful detours 
     away from their goal,

     paths often with nothing
     before them but what’s ahead,
     nothing but pure space
     and the season.

*****

This painting by Cynthia Reeves (“Autumn Path,” 1980) suggests a way into a dense green that may not be a path at all unless someone decides to walk that way:

My path in life increasingly resembles the journey described in John Henry Newman’s hymn:   

     Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom, 
     Lead Thou me on;
     The night is dark, and I am far from home,
     Lead Thou me on;
     Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
     The distant scene; one step enough for me.

Posted 29 October 2024; updated 30 October 2024

​Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC

It’s the season of political stress and sometimes anger. People are apparently predicting and even calling for violence if the election doesn’t go their way. I hope we can be gracious in defeat, magnanimous in victory.

In search of reassurance, I opened David Ferry’s translation of Horace’s ode and came upon ode 16 of Book 1. The theme is anger—personal rather than political, but still apropos for this moment. In his youth Horace had written an iambic lampoon of a mother and daughter. He now renounces the lampoon and his “raging and reckless” anger that tore a friendship apart.

If we have let political rancor destroy friendships and estrange family members, it’s time to make amends. The effects of rage can be catastrophic. In Ferry’s rendition, nothing “Can shake the soul as human anger shakes it”:  “the rage of Atreus ... brought / Thyestes to the feast where he ate his children.” And Horace does not forget the political: “Rage thrills in the heart of the victor as he drives / His jubilant plow over the rubble of cities.”

I have posted three translations below. I hope you enjoy.

*****

A free verse translation from Pantheon Poets :

A lovely mother’s lovelier daughter,
you can put an end to my libelous iambics
however you want: burn them if you like,
or throw them in the Adriatic.

Not Cybele, nor the Delphic presence
in Apollo’s inmost shrine, nor Bacchus either,
nor the Corybantes clashing their brass cymbals,
can strike such a blow to their priests’ sanity

as dark fits of anger, which neither swords
forged from Norican steel, nor the sea and its shipwrecks,
nor raging fire, nor Jupiter himself, thundering down
with a fearful crash, will deter.

They say that Prometheus was forced to snip
a piece from all the other species and add it
to our primaeval human clay, and put
the violence of a lion into our human temper.

With grim destruction, anger
smashed down Thyestes, and was
at the root of high cities
perishing down to their foundations,

and an arrogant army running the enemy’s plough
over their walls. Calm your fears: In my happy youth, I too
was tried by the burning passion of my heart,
and it set me, raging and reckless, to composing iambics.

But my aim now is to change grimness to gentleness,
provided, since I have recanted
those offensive poems, that you
will be my friend and give me back my heart.

*****

from Horace. The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace. John Conington (1825-1869). trans. London. George Bell and Sons. 1882.

O lovelier than the lovely dame
That bore you, sentence as you please
Those scurril verses, be it flame
Your vengeance craves, or Hadrian seas.

Not Cybele, nor he that haunts
Rich Pytho, worse the brain confounds,
Not Bacchus, nor the Corybants
Clash their loud gongs with fiercer sounds

Than savage wrath; nor sword nor spear
Appals it, no, nor ocean's frown,
Nor ravening fire, nor Jupiter
In hideous ruin crashing down.

Prometheus, forced, they say, to add
To his prime clay some favourite part
From every kind, took lion mad,
And lodged its gall in man's poor heart.

'Twas wrath that laid Thyestes low;
'Tis wrath that oft destruction calls
On cities, and invites the foe
To drive his plough o'er ruin'd walls.

Then calm your spirit; I can tell
How once, when youth in all my veins
Was glowing, blind with rage, I fell
On friend and foe in ribald strains.

Come, let me change my sour for sweet,
And smile complacent as before:
Hear me my palinode repeat,
And give me back your heart once more.

*****

From James Michie (1927 - 2007), The Odes of Horace (Washington Square Press, 1965):

O lovely mother’s still more lovely daughter,
Those scurrilous iambics I once penned
Dispose of any way you want to: send
Them up in fire or down in deep-sea water.

Nor Pythian Phoebus when his priestess trembles
With inspiration in the inner shrine,
Not Phrygian Cybele, not the god of wine
Not the wild Corybants’ shrill-clashing cymbals

Master the soul like bitter rage, which even
Fierce flame or Noric steel cannot deter,
Or the ship-wrecking sea, or Jupiter
Himself plunging in thunder from high heaven.

Prometheus, forced to take from every creature
Some element to add to the first clay
From which he made Man, grafted, so they say,
The ravening lion’s violence to our nature.

Rage laid Thyestes’ race in grim prostration;
Rage is the clear cause why each tall-towered town
That history tells of was brought toppling down
In ruins, and the arrogant conquering nation

Printed the plough whose walls once marked a city,
Do not be angry, then. It was the sweet
Madness of youth that drove me in the heat
Of indignation to dash off that witty

Lampoon. But now my verses shall be changed from
Nasty to nice, if only you’ll be friends,
Accept this recantation as amends,
And give me back the heart I’ve been estranged from. 

Cynthia Reeves, “Bright Day – Swamp Maple Pattern,” mid-1960’s

In my youth, when I began wandering the woods by myself, one of the things I noticed after a rain was the little pools collected in the cups of fallen leaves. Each pool reflects the sky, the main reason for my attraction.

v

rain cupped
in a sycamore leaf
the wind sips and flies

Seeing the reflection of the sky in water is an ordinary experience, possibly a banal image in poetry, but it was an image I could not abandon in my years of trying to write haiku.

after the shower
an inch of puddle
holding the sky

the sky looks
into a curled up leaf
to see itself

river
carries the weight of the sky
and still it moves

morning after rain
the sky
in its blue housedress

Want to touch the sky?
Slip off your shoes
wade into the river

sky
passing through me
like surprise
—Inspired by Philippe Jaccottet

heavy rain
road smudged with sky
night with day

November day
sky and pond
both the same gray
—Imitation of Basho

abandoned house
broken glass
multiplies the sky
—Inspired by a quotation or paraphrase of Chekhov seen on the web: “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

The ambition of such poems is captured in the first four lines of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

*****

Wind and rain are usually benign; at least we who live in temperate climbs tend to think so. But like every natural force they can destroy human life and property. The southeastern US would be quite different without hurricanes to fill aquifers and shape the landscape.

The 98th anniversary of my father’s birth was on Sunday, October 20. When I was a kid, he showed me the high water mark on buildings in the New River valley. One building I remember was on a gentle slope about 80 feet from the river. Its foundation was probably 10-12 feet above the river’s usual level; the water mark from the ’40 Flood was at or above the top of the first floor, probably 18-20’ feet above the river’s normal level. My first cousin once-removed, who has lived all her life in Ashe County, told me that that only bridge over the New River to survive the that flood was the bridge on US 221 near Bob Huffman’s Store, now the New River Outfitters. (My cousin and her husband once owned the store.) The bridge was built in the 1920s or early 1930s and was only recently replaced.

The other great flood that people talked about when I was a kid, the flood of 1916, occurred ten years before my father was born. In Wilkes County, it destroyed railway bridges and wrecked at least one locomotive. It destroyed the flume that brought logs from the upper Yadkin River valley down to Wilkesboro and North Wilkesboro. We used to live on a farm in Wilkes where a 12’ or 15’ deep gulch near the bottom of a holler was said by the landowner to have been gouged out by the ’16 Flood. We have seen from Helene how a mighty storm can suddenly change the landscape—terrifying if you are caught up in it, but fifty years later children will play on the transformed land and they will assume it has always been as it is just then, kind, stable, and beautiful. ​

*****

I spent Saturday and Sunday (Oct 19 and Oct 20) in Clinton, South Carolina, helping remove trees felled by Helene. In parts of the town, the streets are lined with large heaps of tree trunks and limbs, so we were hardly the first to help out.

We had two teams with a total of around 22 men, women, and youth, all members of our congregation (ward) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Saints in Raleigh, along with some relations and friends.

I’ve never used a chainsaw and I’m a little old to start, so I was a “puller,” pulling limbs cut by the team’s sawyers and carrying or dragging them to the road for someone—the city, county, or FEMA perhaps—to pick up.

Sometimes the teams worked on projects separately, sometimes together. We worked on several massive oaks and hickories, some too large for us to remove entirely. But we made things better. We removed the limb of a tree that had pieced through the roof of an outbuilding and then we tarped the roof. We removed the limbs of a tree resting on a family’s car. We jumpstarted the car and moved it away from the tree. We removed piece by piece the top of a tree that had broken two sections of a chain link fence.

This area was not devastated like much of western NC, but full recovery will take a long time. Many houses still have trees resting on their roofs. Power has not been restored to everyone.

Here's a picture of the primary team I worked with:

Cynthia Reeves, "Black Pool," early 1960s

I used to walk along the Eno River in Durham County two or three times a week. One day in late fall, when most of the leaves had fallen, I saw a fawn in the river trying to climb onto the bank. It would begin to climb, see me, and slip back into the river. After I saw it happen twice, I realized I needed to move away as quickly as possible.
 
iv
rising water
the fawn cannot climb
the riverbank

Cynthia Reeves, "Autumn," 1971

A few years ago, I published a book of micro-poems and short poems, Night Weather, illustrated by Katie Nordt LaRosa. (The book is still available directly from me at a quite reasonable price; email me at [email protected] for more information.) With Katie’s help, I later developed a second edition, with more poems and illustrations. We created an ebook with music by Xenberg, but I couldn’t get it to reliably play on different devices, so I reluctantly shelved the project.

Beginning with Fall, the book follows the seasons, with a poem for each week (each season has 13 weeks). Except for the final week’s poem, these poems are numbered. In the middle of each season a titled poem marks the cross-quarter day. A titled poem falls between each season, a sort of resting place. Two poems mark the end of winter and the middle of the book; the poem on the back cover serves as the poem separating summer and fall.

Given the deadly torrential rains from the recent hurricanes, the title of this section, Fall Rains, is painfully appropriate. Beginning with today’s poem for the third week of fall, over the next year I will post a poem each week, with a title poem to mark the season’s halfway point and two more to mark its end. I will use the illustrations by Katie LaRose and paintings by my great aunt, Cynthia Reeves.

iii.

wet with rain
shirts on the clothesline
drying twice