Month: April 2004

“The Selected Poems of Thomas Merton”

Although I hate to admit it, I found myself thinking that “The Selected Poems of Thomas Merton” seemed more “foreign” to me than the Japanese haiku poets I was exploring earlier in the week. Without the aid of Google I would have found it nearly impossible to understand many of the references in Merton’s poems, not only references to historical figures like Federico Lorca but, more often, references to Catholic Saints, Catholic sacraments, or the history of the Catholic Church itself.

I was also a little taken aback by the “dark” elements in Merton’s early poems, though perhaps considering that much of the early poetry was published when Eliot and Pound held sway in the poetic world, that his brother perished in World War II and that his French homeland was overrun by the Germans, Merton’s despair is understandable.

Several of the poems are memorable, but I particularly liked this one devoted to a Spanish poet murdered by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War:

IN MEMORY OF THE SPANISH POET FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Where the white bridge rears up its stamping arches
Proud as a colt across the clatter of the shallow river,
The sharp guitars
Have never forgotten your name.

Only the swordspeech of the cruel strings
Can pierce the minds of those who remain,
Sitting in the eyeless ruins of the house;
The shelter of the broken wall.

A woman has begun to sing:
O music the color of olives?
Her eyes are darker than the deep cathedrals;
Her words come dressed as mourners,
In the gate of her shadowy voice,
Each with a meaning like a sheaf of seven blades!

The spires and high Giraldas, still as nails
Nailed in the four cross roads,
Watch where the song becomes the color of carnations,
And flowers like wounds in the white dust of Spain.

(Under what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca?
What white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?)

In the four quarters of the world, the wind is still,
And wonders at the swordplay of the fierce guitar;
The voice has turned to iron in the naked air,
More loud and more despairing than a ruined tower.

(Under what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca?
What white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?)

Although I’d never heard of the Spanish Poet
Federico Garcia Lorca, a quick search of the internet revealed that this martyr was killed by Franco’s Nationalists and buried in an unmarked grave because intellectuals were considered “dangerous”. (God, how I’d like to be considered “dangerous” by Bush’s minions, though I’m not particularly desirous of being martyred, even at my advanced age.)

The poem itself seems not only a tribute to Lorca and his poetic powers but an acknowledgement of Spain’s “dark” past and sorrowful music, the “swordspeech of the cruel strings” of the Spanish guitar. More interestingly, the martyred poet is compared to Christ’s crucifixion, as nature itself seems transformed into the cross in “The spires and high Giraldas, still as nails/ Nailed in the four cross roads” and Lorca’s poetry becomes a celebration of that martyrdom, “where the song becomes the color of carnations, and flowers like wounds.” In the end, of course, it’s the haunting refrain “(Under what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca?/What white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?) that leaves the reader feeling the senseless tragedy of this murder.

Although an aubade is defined as a ” song, poem, or piece of instrumental music celebrating or greeting the dawn” and an early
poem by Sir William Davenant illustrates the celebratory nature of the poem, Merton’s “Aubade-Harlem seems more like a dirge than a celebration:

AUBADE-HARLEM
(For Baroness C. de Hueck)

Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,
Crucify; against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.
Soon, in the sterile jungles of the waterpipes and ladders,
The bleeding sun, a bird of prey, will terrify the poor,
Who will forget the unbelievable moon.

But in the cells and wards of whiter buildings,
Where the glass dawn is brighter than the knives of surgeons,
Paler than alcohol or ether,
Greyer than guns and shinier than money,
The white men’s wives, like Pilate’s,
Cry in the peril of their frozen dreams:

“Daylight has driven iron spikes,
Into the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet:
Four flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.”

Along the white walls of the clinics and the hospitals
Pilate vanishes with a cry:
They have cut down two hundred Judases,
Hanged by the neck in the opera houses and museums.

Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,
Crucify, against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.

I’m not sure what my attraction to this poem says about me, except perhaps that I am an unrepentant liberal. Here the innocent children of the poor, or perhaps their hopes of a better future, have been crucified, martyred to those who exploit the poor for their own ends. The children’s prayers of a better life, like kites floating upward, have been crucified on the ghetto’s “lines and wires.” Their very imaginations, like the moon, have become a victim of the “bleeding sun, a bird of prey.” Only the wives of the white men, like Pilate’s wife, cry for the poor who can no longer dream.

Merton envisions the innocent children’s sacrifice as synonymous with Jesus’ crucifixion, “Daylight has driven iron spikes/Into the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet:/ Four flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.” For someone who has dedicated himself to Jesus, such an indentification would seem synonymous with dedicating his life to the poor children. Having returned to teaching after serving two years in Vietnam, I can appreciate such a dedication.

A Loophole You Could Drive a Coal Truck Through

Even though I’ve had a hard time getting through Thomas Merton’s poetry, I haven’t been totally loafing around here. Between coloring Easter eggs with Gavin and his mom and walking with Leslie and Kel, I still managed to write an environmental article on the Bush administration’s attempts to revise the Clean Water Act so that mining companies can mine coal more cheaply.

Hass’ Issa

I imagine to readers accustomed to the serious, if not somber, tone of most haiku, Issa’s irreverent sense of humor must come as a delightful surprise. Several of the haiku that Hass offers have such a comic effect. Two of my favorite are:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes

and

No doubt about it,
the mountain cuckoo

is a crybaby.

There are others that seem to have a more serious intent, but accomplish that effect through humor:

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

Although all three sections include excerpts from prose passages, the section on Issa has more than the other sections do. As I’ve said before, I’m not too fond of prose poems, but for some reason, I find the idea of ending a long prose passage with a haiku rather satisfying:

It is a commonplace of life that the greatest pleasure issues ultimately in the greatest grief. Yet why”why is it that this child of mine, who has not tasted half the pleasures that the world has to offer, who ought, by rights, to be as fresh and green as the vigorous young needles of the everlasting pine ” why must she lie here on her deathbed, swollen with blisters, caught in the loathsome clutches of the vile god of smallpox. Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away”a little more each day” like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain.

After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away ” like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow. In our joy we made what we call a “priest in a straw robe.” We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together. Yet our hopes proved in vain. She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever. Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly. For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

The World of dew
is the world of dew
And yet, and yet

I doubt that I would have found this particular haiku moving if I had read it in the context of page after page of haiku, but in this context it is heart-breaking.

Hass’ Buson

As a long admirer of Japanese haiku, I appreciate the way Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa introduces these three artists, particularly the way it tries to show how they relate to each other, both how they are similar, and, more importantly, how they are different. His introductions have certainly helped me to better understand different approaches to haiku.

For instance, Hass contends that “The religious sense in Buson’s art, if that is what it is, comes from his love of Basho’s poetry and of the Ch’an Buddhist poets and painters whome he studied and admired; it’s in his clear-mindedness and in his sense of alive of things and of their presence.”

As he also points out, Buson’s poems “are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper.”

These two observations probably help to explain why I prefer Basho to Buson, because, as I’m discovering more and more, my favorite poems generally have a spiritual element to them, especially it relates that spirituality to nature as in:

Butterfly
sleeping

on the temple bell.

On one level this is certainly a very painterly poem, it’s hard to imagine anything more “painterly” than a butterfly, especially contrasted against a monotone bell, but much of the power of the poem stems from the sense that we, like the butterfly, wait to be awakened by the bell’s knell to our true beauty.

The appeal of the next poem may well be accounted for by love of caligraphy, a form of art I practiced for years until I realized that no matter how much I loved letters and alphabets, I simply lacked the self-discipline and the determination, particularly once I was able to produce a passable work, to continue with calligraphy, especially once I discovered the Mac and Adobe Illustrator.


Calligraphy of geese
against the sky
the moon seals it.

Of course, I’m also fond of the zen-like simplicity of certain Japanese and Chinese paintings, and to the extent that Buson’s captures that simplicity I admire in that art, it’s hard not to love:

Sudden shower–
a flock of sparrows


cling to the grasses.

Of course, as a long-time bird lover, Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” was, after all the first poem I ever memorized, and my favorite Dickinson poems featured robins, it’s easy to see why I would be biased towards this poem. But in one swift bushstroke Buson seemed to capture the essence of sparrows.