April being the ‘cruellest month’, I tried to launch the month with ‘The Wasteland’. I read a few lines, soon something came up, and since then, I’ve been in and out of the poem. As always. Now that I think about it, very few moments have seen me read one of Eliot’s poems in a straight-line fashion. Always from here and there, wherever the eye lands. Always fragments. Fragments at times stuck in different parts of my mind coming up unbeckoned, summing up a moment at times. Living my life through second hand phrases. If one were to live through a poet’s phrases, makes sense to stock up on some. ‘Four Quartets’ seems to be a good place to stock up, Prufrock floats to the surface often but The Wasteland is not something I get yet, but hopefully, over time, I’ll understand it more.
April saw me reading Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. And then ‘Paradise Regained'. And in between a host of poems from here and there. But it takes a while for things to be absorbed such that they show up unbeckoned. It is all an active effort initially. One has to read them a few times. Read them aloud maybe. Or read them for the favourite bits. Or wear them out, get to know them well. Get familiar. Almost make them your own.
At the moment, this seeks to be settling in from Paradise Lost:
"The mind is its own place, and in itselfReading Paradise Lost makes me want to read more of the poetic dramas, and long poems, preferably aloud, in a play-act fashion, entering the character or the narrator – God or Satan or Adam or Eve. Now, hoping to get into one of those Shakespearean characters. A line-up on my to-read list already. May May see some of those play-acts.
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same"
But the big treat this month was discovering Haikus.
It was Calvino with his essay on Japanese Gardens, and how he thinks that the gardens mirrored Japanese Haikus, that made me look up Haikus. And since then, I have a few pages open everywhere - on the phone, on the comp, which take me down the Haiku garden.
They need to be admired, like flowers, which are in full bloom in April where I live. Almost every tree laden with scores of blooms, branches drooping, overwhelmed, flowers all over the footpaths and grassy patches. And one can’t walk there without thinking of Yeats’ “I have spread my dreams under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”. Every gaze presents an eyeful of flowers. Every few steps one needs to stop to admire one of those open-faced beauties closely. You look at their perfection, their tender curving opening blossoming and even as they blossom, the edges of the petals already turning dark, already dying. You stand there enchanted until the business of living pulls you out, you run to catch-up, just until the next flower that beckons and tugs at something in you, and you stop and stare again.So it goes with Haikus. They take a moment of your attention. But they grab it like those flowers. And once read, they keep playing around in your thought space for a bit, until again, the practical business of living draws your attention elsewhere.
Haiku is a Japanese poetry style, short verse in three lines, with a fixed number of syllables in each. From Wikipedia - the chief idea is ‘cutting’ or juxtaposition of two ideas/ images and a cutting word between them. But I can access Haikus only in translation. And I realise some of their colour is lost in translation, still, even though faded, they are a joy to behold.
One of my favourite ones is a haiku about haiku:
“A haiku is like a finger pointing to the moon.The idea of this haiku, of simplicity, of letting the content shine, of this desire for unadorned kernel of things, this idea and the haiku seem to have found some place inside and they keep rising to the surface now and again. This longing for simple truth and beauty, that perhaps sits inside all of us, when sees its reflection in these flowers or these haikus, rejoices, claps for recognition, and in their small, blossomy way, make the moment and the day memorable.
If the finger is bejeweled, we no longer see the moon.”
(Matsuo Basho)
I now keep these haikus around in stumbly places. When I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I come across those open haiku pages, it is like flowers on my day's path. And who is not glad to see flowers on their path?
And as if so many flowers were not enough, yesterday, I walked into Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (a string of Quatrains, which is a verse in four lines; translated from Persian). A long and winding road that led me there, but the last link was AA Milne’s note on Autumn and something about a book of verses and bread and thou. And I looked up and found this dreamy paradise:
XIIWhat delights me is that Omar Khayyam wrote these lines some 900 years ago, but the paradise held in that thought appeals even in this day and age, almost a millennium away. The unadorned kernel, the true and the beautiful shines through and tugs at you wherever found. Here, reflected in flowers, in haikus, and in quatrains.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!
Although I did rip through the verses like they were bread (another fragment – “I had a love I ripped through like it was bread.”, from a poem by Amy Woolard ), like Haikus, these verses cannot be consumed all in one go. Need to be strewn around. Then one day, on a grey, dreary road, it appears, like one perfect red autumn leaf, lifting up the road and the moment to something heavenly.
Amongst other things, I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ for the last few days. The book seems to belongs here in this post with all the poems. Prose, but each paragraph a new scene. As if each of those reminiscing moments were a poem. Poems in prose. Like those flowers, each paragraph needs to be stared at, to hold each image for a while longer. And I should perhaps write about the book once I finish reading it, but just see how Rhoda thinks of wandering down a poem:
“Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk's shiny surface. I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light.”
Pretty much what I would like to do too.
April seems to inspire quite a few poems. Although my hemisphere bathes in autumn light, most April poems spell spring. (One of my favourite ones is EE Cummings: and april's where we are). As the sun sets and April bows, draws its curtains and wraps itself up to hide away somewhere in memories next to some of those poetic phrases, here's another one from Cummings,
Paris;this April sunset completely utters
utters serenely silently a cathedral
before whose upward lean magnificent face
the streets turn young with rain,
spiral acres of bloated rose
coiled within cobalt miles of sky
yield to and heed
the mauve
of twilight(who slenderly descends,
daintily carrying in her eyes the dangerous first stars)
people move love hurry in a gently
arriving gloom and
see!(the new moon
fills abruptly with sudden silver
these torn pockets of lame and begging colour)while
there and here the lithe indolent *******
Night,argues
with certain houses