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Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

We don’t spend much time studying the poems of Henry David Thoreau. Considering that I believe him to be the greatest American essayist and thinker of the nineteenth century, I think we should read everything he ever wrote. (At present, I am beginning to read his voluminous Journals.) Here is one of my favorites among his poems:

Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life

Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of summer past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial,—purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.

Hometown Waiting for You

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Bedford, Ohio

Novelist Thomas Wolfe was right: You really can’t go home again. When I graduated from high school in Bedford, Ohio in 1962, most of my graduating class left Cleveland. It was at a time when the population of “The Mistake on the Lake” was plummeting. When I was in grade school, it was the seventh largest city in the United States. A scant few years later, factories and businesses were shutting down at a fearsome rate.

To make things worse, when I returned to Cleveland for a visit, I was promptly infantilized, even after I graduated from an Ivy League College and worked as a computer programmer at System Development Corporation in the late 1960s, I was always remembered as the snot-nosed kid. So be it.

Here is a nifty poem by Joyce Carol Oates on the subject, from a slightly different slant:

Hometown Waiting for You

All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome!
You do look lonely.
No one knows you the way we know you.
And you know us.

Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this?
One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?

Fact is,you couldn’t escape us.
And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home!
Boasting how a scholarship bore you away
like a chariot of the gods except
where you are born, your soul remains.

We all die young here.
Not one of us outlived young here.
Check out obituaries
in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.
Car crash,
overdose.
Gunshot, fire.
Cancers of breast,
ovaries, lung,
colon. Heart
attack, cirrhosis
of liver.
Assault, battery.
Stroke! And—
did I say over-
dose? Car
crash?

Filling up the cemeteries here.
Plastic trash here.
Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here.
Three-quarters of your seventh-
grade class now
in urns, ash and what remains
in red MAGA hats.

Those flashy cars
you’d have given your soul
to ride in,
just once, now
eyeless
rusting hulks
in tall grass.
Those eyes you’d
wished might crawl
upon you like ants,
in graveyards
of broken glass.

Atwater Park where
you’d wept
in obscure shame
and now whatever
his name who’d trampled
your heart, he’s
ash.

Proud as hell
of you though
(we admit)
never read a
goddamn word
you’ve written.

We never forgave you. We hate winners.

Still, it’s not too late.
Did I say overdose?
Why otherwise are you here?

“Being a Ghost”

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Crowd of people with phones

I was reading an old copy of The New York Review of Books from May 23, 2019, when I came across a poem by Robert Pinsky that caught my attention. Pinsky is a former Poet Laureate of the United States who composed one of my favorite poems, “Samurai Song,” which I urge you to read. In the poem below, Pinsky takes on the smartphone zombies our time:

Being a Ghost

When they die I become a ghost
Afloat from room to room as vague
In grief as when I can’t find my keys.

Some say zombies became popular
Just when phones became so smart
We began staring into them entranced.

Alone without my dead to phone
I’m left adrift as when I can’t
Remember a name I know I know.

Shadowy appalled ghost-mind aghast
At the crowd of names stranded alive
Ashore outwaiting my shadowy boat.

The last stanza surely refers to Charon, the boatman to Hades on the River Styx. The fare: One obol.

“I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach”

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The following short poem by William Blake (1757-1827) is not what one would expect. The All Poetry page from which I copied the poem contains an interesting comment, saying that the poem is“Part of Pickering Manuscript; distinguished by blunt depiction of collaborations across moral dichotomies.” That’s an interesting way of putting it.

I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach

I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turn’d up his eyes.
I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek she cries.

As soon as I went an angel came:
He wink’d at the thief
And smil’d at the dame,
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree,
And ’twixt earnest and joke
Enjoy’d the Lady.

Hap

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British Poet and Novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Although most readers know Thomas Hardy as a novelist, do they know that in mid-career he gave up on the novel and concentrated on producing a body of verse that is as great as his prose, as the following poem demonstrates:

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

“A Night of Dark Intent”

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Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I came out to California in 1966 after getting my college degree at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.With Robert Frost, his movement was in the opposite direction: Born in San Francisco, he is best known for the poems he wrote while living in New Hampshire.

I had the good fortune of seeing Frost give a poetry reading at Dartmouth in the last year of his life. Then, years later, Martine and I visited his home in Franconia, New Hampshire in 2005.

The following poem is one of his most un-New-England works:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves hooked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent,
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

“They Shall Storm Your Streets at Last”

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F. L. Lucas is remembered more as a literary critic than as a poet. The amazing thing, though, is how scholarly writers like Lucas can write powerful poems, like the following one:

Beleaguered Cities

Build your houses, build your houses, build your towns,
Fell the woodland, to a gutter turn the brook,
Pave the meadows, pave the meadows, pave the downs,
Plant your bricks and mortar where the grasses shook,
The wind-swept grasses shook.

Build, build your Babels black against the sky –
But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,
The single spy
Of that uncounted host you have outcast;
For with their tiny pennons waving green
They shall storm your streets at last.

Build your houses, build your houses, build your slums,
Drive your drains where once the rabbits used to lurk,
Let there be no song there save the wind that hums
Through the idle wires while dumb men tramp to work,
Tramp to their idle work,
Silent the siege; none notes it; yet one day
Men from your walls shall watch the woods once more
Close round their prey.

Build, build the ramparts of your giant town;
Yet they shall crumble to the dust before
The battering thistle-down.

“The Relief of Emptiness”

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Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

I have always admired Joyce Carol Oates for being that most rare thing: a prolific writer of quality. Currently, I am reading one of her psychological mysteries, Jack of Spades, about a mystery writer with two personas, one of them destructive. The question arose: Did Joyce ever write any poetry? Upon checking, I found the following sobering poem about everyday life:

Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money

Mid-morning Monday she is staring
peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard
she wears flannel bedroom slippers
she is sipping coffee
she is thinking—
—gazing at the weedy bumpy yard
at the faces beginning to take shape
in the wavy mud
in the linoleum
where floorboards assert themselves

Women whose lives are food
breaking eggs with care
scraping garbage from the plates
unpacking groceries hand over hand

Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front
tough plastic with detachable lids
Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7
Friday the shopping mall open till 9
bags of groceries unpacked
hand over certain hand

Men whose lives are money
time-and-a-half Saturdays
the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home
unfolded Monday morning

Women whose lives are food
because they are not punch-carded
because they are unclocked
sighing glad to be alone
staring into the yard, mid-morning
mid-week
by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten

There are long evenings
panel discussions on abortions, fashions, meaningful work
there are love scenes where people mouth passions
sprightly, handsome, silly, manic
in close-ups revealed ageless
the women whose lives are food
the men whose lives are money
fidget as these strangers embrace and weep and mis-
understand and forgive and die and weep and embrace
and the viewers stare and fidget and sigh and
begin yawning around 10:30
never made it past midnight, even on Saturdays,
watching their braven selves perform

Where are the promised revelations?
Why have they been shown so many times?
Long-limbed children a thousand miles to the west
hitch-hiking in spring, burnt bronze in summer
thumbs nagging
eyes pleading
Give us a ride, huh? Give us a ride?

and when they return nothing is changed
the linoleum looks older
the Hawaiian Chicken is new
the girls wash their hair more often
the boys skip over the puddles
in the GM parking lot
no one eyes them with envy

their mothers stoop
the oven doors settle with a thump
the dishes are rinsed and stacked and
by mid-morning the house is quiet
it is raining out back
or not raining
the relief of emptiness rains
simple, terrible, routine
at peace

“Today Is Cold and Hard”

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Prague in the Winter, Early 1900s

Franz Kafka is not know for his poetry, though he did write two poems in a 1903 letter to a school friend named Oskar Pollak. They were found by Christina Hennemann and quoted in a website called The High Window. Below is one of the two poems, entitled “Cold and Hard”:

Cold and Hard

Today is cold and hard.
The clouds freeze.
The winds are tugging ropes.
The people freeze.
The footsteps sound metallic
On ore-bearing stones,
And the eyes look –
Wide white lakes.

In the old town stand
Small bright Christmas cottages,
Their colourful windows look out
Onto the snow-covered square.
In the moonlight a silent man
Walks into the snow,
His big shadow is blown
along the cottages by the wind.

People who cross dark bridges,
past saints
with dim little lights.

Clouds that drift across the grey sky
past churches
with twilight towers.
One who leans against the ashlar parapet
and looks into the evening water,
hands on old stones.

It’s not Kafka’s best work, but it is interesting to see him work in a different literary medium.

“The Vanity of Success”

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Laozi (aka Lao Tzu and Lao Tse)

However you pronounce his name, Laozi is one the world’s greatest thinkers. Born in 571 BC or sometimes thought to be in the 4th century BCE, or whenever, and died whenever, Laozi may in fact never have existed; yet he is a great author.

I have been reading Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2023) with great pleasure. There is something about Chinese poetry—even in English translation—that hits me where I live. And Red Pine (alias Bill Porter) is a superb translator. His explanatory notes are revealing: He says that even Chinese scholars have a difficult time and have to rely on explanatory notes dated in the centuries after the poems were written.

Here is an excerpt from Laozi’s The Way and Its Power (aka Daodejing aka Tao Te Ching) on the subject of striving:

Instead of poring in more
better stop while you can
making it sharper
won’t help it last longer
rooms full of treasure
can never be safe
the vanity of success
invites its own failure
when your work is done retire
this is the Way of Heaven

Around 130 AD, the Chinese sage Heshanggong wrote the following note about this passage:

Excessive wealth and desire wearies and harms the spirit. The rich should help the poor, and the powerful should aid the oppressed. If, instead, they flaunt their riches and power, they are sure to suffer disaster. Once the sun reaches the zenith, it descends. Once the moon becomes full, it wanes. Creatures flourish then wither. Joy turns to sorrow. When your work is done, if you do not step down, you will meet with harm. This is the Way of Heaven.

This is very old and powerful wisdom. But does anyone listen? Not in today’s world.