Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

Hope in the Darkness

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Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. (from “September 1, 1939”)

This is one of my favorite snippets of W. H. Auden‘s poetry.  I interpret “the Just” to be those who feel just, one might even say “justified”, those who are at peace with themselves and their Source and can communicate openly with other likeminded souls.  The same “negation and despair” besets these people that besets the rest of the human race, but these persons have found the grace to communicate openly.  And when they do so, they “cast an affirming flame.”

Life is so flimsy

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We are here for but a brief moment. We cling to a flimsy; it will give way, as is the way of flimsy, and we will return to the Real.

As John Masefield put it, “Like a lame donkey, lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade and let the real be.” I would merely capitalize the “R” on his “real”.

The Hamlet Syndrome

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I love Shakespeare. I think he is the profoundest individual I have ever come across, demonstrating more insight into the human imagination and heart than anyone else has even approached. And of his work, I prefer the tragedies and especially Hamlet.

Hamlet was a very depressed young man who was stymied by indecision. This indecisiveness stemmed from obsessive thinking, a thoughtfulness which he noted, “if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” Shakespeare valued thoughtfulness but realized that being lost in thought was as much a problem as being incapable of thought.

In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he concluded “thus conscience (i.e. “consciousnessness”) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great kith and kin, in this regard, their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Shakespeare realized that excessive “self-awareness” was merely a ruse, an escape from the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind of life. He realized I’m sure, that self-awareness was critical in life but needed to be balanced with a willingness to plunge head-long into the fury of life, to make a commitment in action.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness has given rise in the past few decades to the clinical conception, the “Hamlet Syndrome”, describing young men…usually they are young men…who are similarly stymied and incapable of taking the plunge into life.

And I close with a relevant observation from W. B. Yeats:

God, guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone…

Or perhaps, from an anonymous source:

The centipede was happy quiet
Until a toad in fun, said,
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Paean to Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry is one of my favorite contemporary poets. He is a farmer and a poet as well as a retired professor from the University of Kentucky. His love of nature enriches his poetry. Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

To the Holy Spirit

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken
By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

I also highly recommend “The Peace of Wild Things” which you can find on the internet with a Google search. I recently answered a friend’s question, “How would you define grace” with the quotation of this poem. And I love his poem entitled “Marriage” which describes the torture of intimate relationship— “it is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever.”

Paean to Ignorance

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I really believe in ignorance!  I guess I watched too much of Hogan’s Heroes and remember the wisdom of Sergeant Schultz, “I know nothing, nothing, nothing.”  I remember a wonderful pastor from my youth who would quip, “If ignorance was bliss, we would all be blistered.”

Yes, I’m intelligent, well educated, erudite as heck!  I can throw 35 cent words around for nickle ideas like anyone.  But, to quote the observation of Paul, the “wisdom of this world is come to nought.”  We don’t know jack!  For, words are but means to an end, they lead us to the truth, they lead us to the precipice of Truth,  but we can never cross over and apprehend the truth in a definitive fashion.  The Truth only glimmers our way and then only on occasion.  For example, one such “glimmering” was the life of Jesus.  And in the course of my life I have seen a “glimmer” or two but admittedly nothing that matches the Light that Jesus brought into the world.  And the “glimmerings” that I have been privy too have never been cognitive;  they have been the Light of Christ manifested in the life of other persons, some of them not card-carrying, born-again, USDA certified “Christians.”

So, let’s get ignorant today and hear a primordial word.

For example, Gerard Manley Hopkins noted in The Habit of Perfection:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From where all surrenders come
Which alone makes you eloquent.

And then there is William Butler Yeats who wrote:

Throughout all the lying days of my youth
I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.
Now may I wither into the Truth.

Pithy, annoying truth

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I want to share two short, pithy poems this morning.   Poets are so adept at stinging us with truth, sometimes very sharply and sometimes just annoyingly.  It was one of the ancient Greek luminaries, Socrates I think, who likened his role to that of a gadfly who would befuddle and annoy the populace.

Here are two such offerings from the past century:

QUERY
By E. L. Mayo

I died and three lemons
Arranged assymetrically
Took my place. Just why
Did you select that moment to comment on
The sweetness of my disposition?

 

A MAN SAID TO THE UNIVERSE
By Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Failure is More Important than Success

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“Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.” (E. L. Mayo)

I’ve always been captivated by this poem though I’m not for sure I understand it.  I just intuitively know that it conveys great wisdom and wisdom is always complicated, paradoxical, and convoluted.

Failure is necessary as it counters our obsession with “success.”  Oh, we need success and our species has been very “successful” in so many respects.  We have created so much stuff and have made our life so much easier, perhaps too easy in ways.  Auden noted, “We have made our lives safer than we can bear.”  But it is the failures that humble us and teach us that there is more to life than “stuff”.  These “failures” can show us a qualitative intelligence that allows us to see the graciousness of life and without this insight the “structure of the universe” is quite “bony.”

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.

“We’re not getting out of this thing alive”

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Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, discoursed on death from the viewpoint of a biologist. He noted, “At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable.  We like to think…we can avoid the problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter.”

We have the notion that, “Oh, well. We can figure this out and get beyond it. It just won’t happen to me.”  We are guilty of what Ernest Becker called the Denial of Death. In his book with that title, he argued that that civilization was organized for the purpose of denying our mortality, that it is a complicated contrivance designed merely for burying our head in the sand regarding our eventual demise, our eventual return to the dust from which we are created.  (I like Hamlet’s bemused observations about us being merely worm food.)

So, what do we do with this problem?  Well, we wrestle with it as best as we can.  Here, in my daily perambulations, you get some glimpse of one person’s doubt and insecurities…and hope…regarding this issue.  A key source of hope for me has been to realize that death is merely part of life and that death is an issue that can be addressed before the actual physical death.  By that I mean that we can die before we die, that the real issue in our fear of death is the fear of the ego’s death, and that we can let the ego die long before our physical death.   Irvin Yalom argued decades ago that those who fear death fear life and only through the death of their ego can they embrace life and live life to the fullest.

James Hillman had a relevant belief re suicide. He was a Jungian therapist and he shared in Suicide and the Soul re one client who was suicidal. He told the client…and I paraphrase…”So you want to die.  You come to me and I will help you die. But, you have to promise me that in the meantime you will not physically harm yourself.”  Hillman believed that the suicidal impulse was often a misguided impulse from the heart, that the wish to die, if handled delicately and with spiritual guidance, could be the doorway to eternal life.