Haiku and Beauty

I am fond of haiku, and the poetry blog FirstKnownWhenLost has a discussion of Haiku, as translated and interpreted by the scholar RH Blyth.

This spring I once again returned to Blyth's wondrous creation: revisiting old favorites, being reminded of haiku I had once read but had forgotten, and making new discoveries.

A pear tree in bloom:
In the moonlight,
A woman reading a letter.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 323.

A night of stars;
The cherry blossoms are falling
On the water of the rice seedlings.

Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 170.

the blogpost notes the book about Haiku by the author RH Blyth which translates and explains the Haiku.

You can borrow some of these books from Internet Archives, and Blyth's book A History of Haiku Vol One can be found at the Haiku Foundation website.

everything else on the internet news etc seems to be hyperventillating about stuff with a critical eye, so I thought I might try to step back and contemplate beauty and unlike a lot of modern poetry, which seems to be political or so obscure that dunderheads like myself can't understand WTF they are talking about, Haiku paints a picture of beauty in one's head, while taking us outside of our own trivial troubles.

The reason for prayer, silence, or meditation on beauty is not to escape from life's problems, but to be strenghtened and to put things into perspective so we can live in hope when facing the travails of life.

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

This week, Christians celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration, where the thick headed apostles were given a glimpse of Christ's glory. The feast is most important to Orthodox Christians, who stress mystical aspects of the faith, but there is a lesson even for those of us who are practical minded and often forget this part of religion is important also, because it feeds the soul so we have the strenght to hope.

.

There are moments of intimacy, of serenity, of peace, of nearness to God, which everyone has known and wished to prolong. ...

Susanna Wesley had a prayer: "Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in thy presence." The moment of glory does not exist for its own sake; it exists to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before.

 Source: Barclay's bible study. I have the books and the app for this, but you can find it on line here.

It's May

May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poetry Corner

Photo source: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/daffodils-poem-by-william-wordsworth-olga-hamilton.html

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alternative version for geeks:
 

Babies!

Whales have calves,

 Cats have kittens,

 Bears have cubs,

 Bats have bittens,

 Swans have cygnets,

 Seals have puppies,

 But guppies just have little guppies.

by Ogden Nash

Free Speech and Limericks

Peter Hitchens (the liberal brother of the famous athiest/communist writer) has an essay in the UKMail about the decline of free speech in that country and the demonization and even threats to the loyal opposition. Much of it is about local politics, but some of it can apply to many countries, where PC culture is regulating religious speech.

He covers several subject in his essay, and ends it with the scandal of the Bishop of Chichester, who didn't allow a fellow clergyperson accused of abuse to get a proper legal defense and now is in deep dodoo for going along with the kangaroo court instead of seeking the truth.

Again, local politics, of which I know nothing.

However, the article reminds me of the X rated limerick about the Bishop of Chichester.

Well, this is a PG blog, but here is the PG rated version:

A pious young lady of Chichester
Made all the pale saints in their niches stir.
And each morning at matin
Her breast in pink satin
Made the bishop of Chichester's breeches stir.

I found that in an essay about Limericks and similar poems.

The essay includes this factoid:

1225—Saint Thomas Aquinas may have written the first limerick: a prayer in Latin!

huh? Yup. it's true, but the poem wasn't funny. But like a lot of limericks, it was R Rated (and maybe inspired by that time his mama kidnapped him from the cloister and asked a local lovely lady to... well, never mind... this is a PG rated blog.)

Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio
Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,
Caritatis et patientiae,
Humilitatis et obedientiae,
Omniumque virtutum augmentatio. 

More HERE and it has several different translations into English, including this one:

Another Version

by Robin Kay WilloughbyThis limerick’s for purging my sin,
Ousting lust and desire from within,
Which leaves oodles of space
For agape and grace,
Plus humility, virtue, and gin.

and if you go to the link, there are many similar limericks and other short poems for your enjoyment. '



so where are today's jesters? A joke is worth a thousand preaching words.

poetry corner

firstKnownWhenLost blog has a rumination on poetry and art today.

As I have observed here before, the older I get, the simpler Life seems to become.  I'm dumbfounded at the amount of extraneous luggage my mind carried around for years.  All those eventualities that never materialized, good or bad.  Scores of roundabouts and dead-ends, all bound for nowhere.
Yesterday afternoon -- the sky absolutely clear -- I walked through a tunnel of trees, beneath a canopy of interwoven branches.  Overhead, a thousand shades of green, shot through with blue and yellow.  "Life is too short," I thought, "for anything but this."

DavidWarren has an essay on Tea

actually, it is about the classic: The Book of Tea

Now, tea in its modern form — loose tea brewed in a tea pot with a handle and spout — is a development of the Sung Dynasty, centuries later. We tend to assume all progress is improvement, but Chinese scholars did not think that way. As we see in Lu Yu, the old methods were extremely complicated, and required great skills — down to the way the tea was powderized from the cakes, in specially-designed stone mortars, prior to brewing like Japanese matcha. The Japanese tea ceremony is itself derived from older Chinese rituals, which Lu Yu describes, but incompletely. One does not grab at tea, as one grabs at coffee in the morning. Rather it must be given one’s full attention.

the Book of Tea (wikipedia summary) more HERE.




heh. Actually, although Lolo always drank tea (using a tea bag with calimansi, a local citus fruit), I am lazy and tend to drink powdered ice tea...

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Professor Giles' Harvard lectures from the early 1900s about China are now at Librivox, including one on his traslations of Chinese poetry.

text here

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and for us geeks, the really important poetry question of the day:

Did the Dwarves prewrite the "crack the plates" song?

Download of the day

Emily Dickenson's poems at Librivox...

ProjectGutenburg Text HERE.

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as a doctor I always found this one so true...


Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Poetry interlude

It was neither a petal-strewn path
Nor a mountain track that brought me here.
It was neither a blinding blizzard nor blistering sun,
It was neither the dawn chorus nor the curlew’s call,
It was neither the rocky shore nor the open fields,
It was neither the ancient woodlands
Nor the city throngs,
It was neither the boisterous sea
Nor the soughing wind.
No, dear Lord, it was none of these.
For it was love in its wholeness that brought me here
And love and love alone that keeps me here
Where there is shelter and peacefulness,
Light through the night hours
And food for the soul.

3rd Prizewinner in Irish Christian Writers' Fellowship Poetry Competition 2007

Should poetry matter?

A novel about Gerald Manly Hopkins leads the reviewer to quote poetry....

...(there) was the conversation I had while sitting next to a sophisticated lady-poet at a literary lunch. "I've been reading the most amazing book about Gerard Manley Hopkins," I said, "but I can't seem . . ." " That guy!" she answered. "Once he gets his claws in your brain, you're a goner!" Involuntarily, I began, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out like shining from shook foil." But she had already chimed in with "I caught this morning morning's minion, king-/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon." And we went on like that for maybe six or eight more lines each, caught respectively in "God's Grandeur" and "The Windhover," and then stopped, a little flushed and embarrassed. It was like making love with words, and we didn't know each other all that well.