This is a chapter from Blyth’s first book, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics.[1]
…
From Aristotle down to Arnold it was considered that a great subject was necessary to the poet. Arnold says that the plot is everything. It is useless for the poet to
imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it.
Wordsworth stands outside this tradition by instinct and by choice. He chooses the aged, the poor, the idiot, the vagrant, but does not endeavour to make them “delightful” at all. “Nothing is inferior or superior, delightful or repugnant, but thinking makes it so.” What becomes, then, of the great subject? The answer is that on the one hand it is a concession to human weakness, which sees the house afire over the way as more thrilling than the flames of the sun, a toothache as more tragic than an earthquake or pestilence. On the other hand, the great subject is in its nature richer if only by mere quantity and mass. The fact that Lear is a King, Hamlet a Prince, Othello a General, and Caesar an Emperor, adds to the tragic force of the action, though intrinsically, to borrow Arnold’s word, they are no more tragic than Jesus the Carpenter’s son. Nevertheless, size is not meaningless. Even Cbuangtse, the arch-absolutist, points out that a cup cannot float in the quantity of water that will support a poppy seed.
But it is the poet, the man, who decides the meaning, the relation of quality to quantity. Thus Paul was converted by a supernatural light from Heaven and the voice of the ascended Christ; Hsiang Yen, by the sound of a stone striking a bamboo.
To return to Wordsworth. Critics have often pointed out his inconsistency of practice and precept in regard to diction, but there are other contradictions more worthy of note. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he has the following notorious sentence:
The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.
‘To throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination”! This is a phrase that must have worked incalculable harm to English poetry during the next century and a half, though it is directly opposed to Wordsworth’s actual practice. Look at the two following extracts and find if you can, “the colouring of the imagination” which is thrown over them:
…No motion has she now, no force;
…She neither hears nor sees;
…Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
…With rocks, and stones, and trees.
These and the following arc the greatest lines Wordsworth ever wrote:
…She died, and left to me
…This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
…The memory of what has been,
…And never more will be.
Wordsworth looks steadily at the object, and this is his greatness, as it is also Shakespeare’s. Again, what an unfortunate phrase, “to make these incidents and situations interesting.” It suggests a cook adding condiments, a little bit of alliteration here, a bit of onomatopoeia there, some personification, a paradox or two, and an unexpected, brilliant last line for the critics to quote. Wordsworth himself not only never does this (or almost never; the Immortality Ode is rather suspicious in places, and though successful, is still a tour de force) but himself says,
…O Reader! had you in your mind
…Such stores as silent thought can bring,
…O gentle Reader! you would find
…A tale in everything,
that is, poetry everywhere. Let us take Michael as an example.
In this poem of four hundred and eighty-two lines, there are five or six lines of what is ordinarily termed poetry, [ ] which might be overlooked, or rather, taken with the rest, by an earnest and careful reader. This so-called poem, then, is a piece of everyday country life, just as Dickens’ novels are descriptions of everyday life and everyday city people. Two hard-working people had a son who was a failure and fled abroad. They died. This is not merely the whole story, there is no account of their despair and grief, not a word of it. Wordsworth avoids what would be called the chances which the story offers to wring the reader’s feelings. Yet we feel the majesty, the dignity of man more than in Hamlet’s most tragic speeches. Othello at his most poetic, Lear at his most pathetic, Macbeth at his most desperate, have not the grandeur of the old shepherd who
……………………..still looked up to sun and cloud,
…And listened to the winds.
Why is this? It is because the true poetic life is the ordinary everyday life.
Of the Chinese poets Po Chii-i and T’ao Yüan-ming understood this fact best of all. Li Po, Tu Fu, and most of the lesser poets of the T’ang dynasty, as represented in the Tóshisen [anthology], are “poetical” poets. The following is Po Chü-li:
I take your poems in my habd and read them beside the candle; The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come. With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark, Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of the boat.[1]
There is great art in the selection of facts presented, but no “colouring of the imagination”; the incidents and situations are chosen “from common life.” This is true also of the first of a series of thirteen poems by T’ao Yüan-ming, entitled Reading the Book of the Seas and Mountains.
…It is early summer: grass is rank, plants grow wildly,
…And the trees round my house are in full leaf.
…The birds rejoice in their nests here,
…And I too love my dwelling-place as dearly as they.
…I have ploughed my fields and sown them:
…Now at last, I have time to sit at home and read my books!
…The lanes are too narrow for fine carriages,
…And even my old friends are often turned back.
…Contentedly I pour out my wine,
…And partake of the lettuce grown in my own garden.
…Borne on a soft eastern wind,
…Light showers come.
…Unrolling the Book of the Seas and Mountains,
…I read the story of the King of Chou:
…Gazing at sky and earth while yet we live–
…How otherwise shall we take our pleasure here?[2]
In Li Po the subject and treatment is always romantic; the famous Crows at Twilight is typical:
…Athwart the yellow clouds of sunset, seeking their nests
…under the city wall,
…The crows fly homeward. Caw! Caw! Caw! they cry
…among the branches. .
…At her loom sits weaving silk brocade, one like the
…Lady of Ch’inch’uan:
…Their voices come to her through the window with its
…curtains misty-blue.
…She stays the shuttle; grieving, she thinks of her far-
…distant lord:
…In the lonely, empty room, her tears fall like rain.
Li Po had mystical leanings all his life, but especially in his youth and old age. In the poem Answering a Question in the Mountains be says,
…I am asked why I live in the green mountains;
…I smile but reply not, for my heart is at rest.
…The flowing waters carry the image of the peach
…blossoms far, far away:
…There is an earth, there is a heaven, unknown to men.
Compare this with Obata’s translation in Li Po the Chinese Poet
…Why do I live among the green mountains?
…I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene:
…It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
…The peach trees are in flower and the water flows on ….
[ ] When we come to Japanese poetry, which means Bashô, we find “Poetry is everyday life” in its purest form. Bashô could and did write “poetical” poetry of the highest order. Scattered throughout this book will be found a great number of this kind of poem; here are a few more:
…The sea darkens:
…Voices of the wild ducks
…Are dim and white.
…The autumn tempest!
…It blows along
…Even wild boars!
…The summer rains through the ages
…Have left undimmed then,
…The Hall of Gold.
…I heard the unblown flute
…In the deep summer shadows
…Of the Temple of Suma.
This remarkable poem with its similarity to Keats’
…Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
…Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
…Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
…Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone
had a not dissimilar origin and background. Bashô visited Sumadera in the summer and saw there the flute Atsumori used to play in the castle before his death. In his heart he heard its thin melancholy notes. There is the same thought in the following:
…Kirishigure Fujio minu hi zo omoshiroki
…Veil’d from sight today
…In misty showers:
…Still, Mt. Fuji!
…Ishiyma no ishi yori shiroshi aki no kaze
…Whiter than the stones
…Of the Stony Mountain,
…The wind of autumn!
…Koenimina nakishimaute ya semi no kara
…The shell of a cicada:
…It sang itself
…Utterly away.
…Samidareni kakurenu mono ya Setanohashi
…The summer rains:
…All things hidden
…But the long bridge of Seta.
But where Bashô is at his greatest is where he seems most insignificant; the neck of a firefly, hailstones in the sun, the chirp of an insect, muddy melons, leeks, a dead leaf, — these are full of interest, meaning, value, that is, poetry, but not as symbols of the Infinite, not as types of Eternity, but in themselves. Their meaning is just as direct, as clear, as unmistakable, as complete and perfect, as devoid of reference to other things, as dipping the hand suddenly into boiling water. The mind is roused as with the sound of a trumpet. When you read one of the following it is just like opening a door and being confronted by a tiger. It is like suddenly seeing the joke of something. It is like being unexpectedly reprieved from the sentence of death.
…Asagiri ni yogorete suzushi uri no tsuchi
…The melons look cool,
…Flecked with mud
…From the morning dew.
…Nebuk shiroku arai-tatetaru samusa kama
…Just washed,
…How chill
…The white leeks!
…Ishiyama no ishi ni tabashiru arare kana
…The hail-stones
…Glance off the rocks
…Of the Stony Mountain.
…Hiru mireba kubisuji akaki hotaru kana.
…By day-light
…The firefly has
…A neck of red.
…Matsatake ya shirana ko no ha o hebari-tsuku
…On the mushroom
…Is stuck the leaf
…Of some unknown tree.
…Fuku tabi ni cho no inaora yanagi kana
…With every gust of wind,
…The butterfly changes its place
…On the willow.
Naturally, when the distinction between the poetical and unpoetical subject disappears (to attain this state is the true practical aim of a poet) foul is fair and fair is foul, to the pure all things are pure, nothing is unclean.
…Tebana kamu oto sae ume no nioi kana
…The sound of someone
…Blowing his nose with his hand;
…The scent of the plum flowers!
The sound of the nose-blowing, the scent of the flowers, which is more beautiful? The first may remind us of a long-lost, beloved friend; the second, of the death of a child who fell from the bough of a plum-tree. Beethoven may have got the motif of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony from some one’s blowing his nose. Underneath all our prejudices for and against things, we must be free of them. This same freedom from the idea of dignity, that there are vessels of honour and vessels of. dishonour, is shown in the following, full of life and truth:
…Uguisu ya mochi ni fun suru en no saki
…Look! the dried rice cakes
…At the end of the verandah
…The uguisu is pooping on them!
More certainly than many things written in the Gospels, Christ went to the lavatory. This action was no less holy and no more symbolical than the breaking of bread and drinking wine at the Last Supper. Wherever bread is eaten, Christ’s body is broken. Wherever wine is drunk, His blood is shed. But because of the hardness of our hearts we are taught to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, Buddha’s birth day, the Commemoration of Entering into Nirvana, the Day of His Enlightenment; These symbols are only crutches to our weakness, milk for babes. For,
Every day is a good day,
as [Yün Men] said, every day is the best day, every moment is the best moment, and thus,
Your everyday mind — that is the Way!
From morning to night, walking, eating, sleeping, praying, living, dying,
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,
and again,
Whether therefore ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.
One eye on the work, and one eye on God, one eye on the object, the finite, and the other on the Infinite — this is not the meaning. “With all thy might” equals “the glory of God,” for as Blake says,
Energy is Eternal Delight
The distinction between ideal and real, man and God, individual and universal, poetry and matter of fact, ordinary life and religion — it is this illusory distinction that Zen seeks to break down. There is a saying attributed to Christ:
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
This has a fine eloquence, but leaves the mind unillumined and uninspired. The things of Caesar are the things of God. Sweeping a room, Caesar’s room, is sweeping God’s room. There is a thrilling story told of Stevenson in this connection. At Pitlochry, in 1881, when he saw a dog being ill-treated, he at once interposed, and when the owner resented his interference and told him, “It’s not your dog,” he cried out, “It’s God’s dog, and I’m here to protect it!”
In English literature the best examples of the kind of poetry which takes its material from the apparently trivial or disgusting, are Shakespeare’s songs for example,
…When icicles hang by the wall,
…And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
…And Tom bears logs into the hall,
…And milk comes frozen home in pail,
…When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
…Then nightly sings the staring owl,
…To-whit! To-who! — a merry note,
…While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
…When all aloud the wind doth blow,
…And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
…And birds sit brooding in the snow,
…Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
…When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
…Then nightly sings the staring owl,
…Tu-whit! Tu-who! — a merry note,
…While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
The last line, the refrain, is particularly noteworthy, because it is an epitome of “natural” poetry, of the whole truth in art, where selection and arrangement is everything and the material indifferent, because all equally good and useful. Look at another example from Martin Chuzzlewit
‘I think, young woman,’ said Mrs. Gamp to the asisstant chamber maid, in a tone expressive of weakness, ‘that I could pick a little bit of pickled salmon, with a nice little sprig of fennel, and a sprinkling of white pepper. I takes new bread, my dear, with jest a little pat of fresh butter, and a mossel of cheese. In case there should be such a thing as a cowcumber in the ‘ous, will you be so kind as to bring it for I’m rather partial to ’em, and they does a world of good in a sick room. If they draws the Brighton Old Tipper here, I takes that ale at night, my love; it bein’ considered wakeful by the doctors. And whatever you do, young woman, don’t bring more than a shilling’s-worth of gin and water-warm when I rings the bell a second time; for that is always my allowance, and I never takes a drop beyond!’
To explain the Zen, the religion, the poetry of this would be as difficult as to explain the humour of it: you either see it or not. Mrs. Gamp would be a match for any of the Ancient Worthies such as Rinzai, Obaku, or [Yun Men], because she is herself, she is true to herself and therefore not false to anything; she cannot be defeated by God, Nature, Circumstance, or their vice-regents, those who live by Zen. Mrs. Gamp is not divided from the pickled salmon or the bottle which she asks may be left
‘on the chimiey-piece, and let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged’,
as other people are by their notions of what is refined and vulgar, the distinction of material and spiritual. From this comes the gusto that is the hall-mark of Zen, of abundant life. Look at one more of Mrs. Gamp’s speeches, flattering the undertaker’s wife with eternal youth:
‘There are some happy creeturs,’ Mrs. Gamp observed, ‘as time runs back’ards with, and you are one, Mrs. Mould: not that he need do nothing except use you in his most owldacious way for years to come, I’m sure; for young you are and will be. I says to Mrs. Harris,’ Mrs. Gamp continued, ‘only t’other day; the last Monday evening fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projias of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris when she says to me, ‘Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp sets marks upon us all.’ Say not the words Mrs. Harris if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case. Mrs. Mould,’ I says, making so free, I will confess, as use the name’ (she curtseyed here) ‘is one of them that goes agen the obserwation straight; and never, Mrs. Harris, whilst I’ve a drop of breath to draw, will I set by, and not stand up, don’t think it.’
Compare the words of this dirty, drunken, ghoulish, self-seeking, garrulous, greedy creature, with those of the refined, educated, idealistic poet W.B.Yeats:
…Though leaves are many the root is one;
…Through all the lying days of my youth
…I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
…Now I may wither into the truth.
Which of the two has more life, more gµts, more Zen? Whose view of old age and death is truer, those people who talk about
Reality as a number of great eggs laid by the Phoenix and that these eggs turn inside out perpetually without breaking the shell.[3]
or those who like Mrs. Gamp and Falstaff and Gargantua, say with Dr. Johnson,
I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.
We eat hypocritically, wive in shame and stealth, talk of ideals, fritter our half-lives away. Mrs. Gamp shows us up, but we laugh to hide our feelings from ourselves; we laugh, as Byron said, that we may not weep. It is worth noting, by the way, that she comes into the story after about 400 pages; not as an afterthought, but, like life itself, when it happens. She grew as naturally out of Dickens’ soul, as a yellow crocus comes out of the black earth in spring.
To return to Shakespeare. One of bis songs,
…Full fathom five thy father lies,
…Of bis bones are coral made;
…Those are pearls that were his eyes:
…Nothing of him that doth fade,
…But doth suffer a sea-change
…Into somet’1ing rich and strange.
…Sea-nymph, hourly ring his knell:
…Ding-dong.
…Hark! now I hear them,–
…Ding, dong, bell.
is compared by Charles Lamb to a song of Webster’s:
…Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
…Since o’er sbady groves they hover,
…And with leaves and flowers do cover
…The friendless bodies of unburied men;
…Call unto his funeral dole
…The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole
…To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
…And (when gay tombs are robb’d) sustain no harm;
…But keep the wolf far then , that’s foe to men,
…For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.
Lamb says of them,
As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element it contemplates.
Shakespeare resolves himself into water, Webster into earth, Mrs. Gamp into pickled salmon, Stevenson into a dog, Buddha into a flower, Gu-tei into his own finger, Bashô into a frog.
But in this kind of thing there is a great danger again, of poetry losing contact with facts, and as Mrs. Gamp herself states,
Facts is stubborn things and can’t be drove.
Poetry is not only ordinary life, it is common sense. Georgias Leontinus, quoted by Aristotle, said,
Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious; and a jest which will not bear a serious examination is certainly false wit.
In the same way, poetry and common sense test each other.
…Here, with green Nature all around,
…While that fine bird the skylark sings,
…Who now in such a passion is
…He flies by it and not his wings,
says Davies, and this is true, and the fact is poetry.
Contrast Andrew Young’s March Hares. This could never be countenanced by Zen, because not by common sense; it is not poetry, because it is false.
…I made myself as a tree
…No withered leaf twirling on me;
…No, not a bird that stirred my boughs,
…As looking out from wizard brows
…I watched those lithe and lovely forms
…That raised the leaves in storms.[4]
…I was content enough,
…Watching that serious game of love,
…That happy hunting in the wood,
…Where the pursuer was the more pursued,
…To stand in breathless hush
…With no more life myself than tree or bush.
If you make yourself as a tree, you can’t watch hares. You live the life of a tree, dimly aware of day and night, the passage of the seasons. If you become a tree, you must become a tree and done with it. If you say the above verses mean, “I watched the hares as a tree would watch them if it could do so,” you are only talking like the natural philosopher who asked, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” If you are going to watch hares, you must forget yourself, whether you are “content” or discontented, “breathless” or otherwise. You must forget to compare yourself to a tree, and tell people your brows are “wizard,” whatever that means. You must become a hare and done with it, and the poem that comes out of that experience will be worth reading. This is just like M. Duthuit’s Chinese recipe for painting bamboos:
Draw bamboos for ten years, become a bamboo, then forget all about bamboos when you are drawing.
When Bashô looked at an onion, he saw the onion; when he looked at the Milky Way, he portrayed the Milky Way; when he felt a deep unnamable emotion, he said so. But he did not mix them all up in a vague pantheistic stew or symbolic potpourri. In poetry, as in life itself, distinctness, the individual thing, directness is all-important.
Following the editors of The Genius of Haiku, I’ve appended a short swatch from the preface to Volume I of Blyth’s Haiku on poetry and the dailiness of life. B.D.
xxx
It is because Christ was a poet that men followed and still follow him, not Socrates. Socrates showed us our ignorance. Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; it shows that we are poets in so far as we live at all. Here again is the connection between Zen and haiku, Zen which says,
Your ordinary mind, — that is the Way!
The essential simplicity of haiku and Zen must never be forgotten. The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink. night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things.
Eroshi ni shizu oku mise no haru no kaze
In the shop,
The paper-weights on the picture-books:
The spring wind! — Kitó
When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
We may note in passing that Japanese readers will all have slightly different translations and meanings to give most of these verses. This is both the power and the weakness of haiku. It is a weakness in that we are not quite sure of the meaning of the writer. It is a power in that haiku demand the free poetic life of the reader in parallel with that of the poet. This ‘freedom’ is not that of wild irresponsibility and arbitrary interpretation, but that of the creation of a similar poetic experience to which the haiku points. It corresponds very much in English poetry to the different, the very different way in which people read the same poem.
Editor’s Note:
1 The editors of The Genius of Haiku noted that in Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, “Poetry is Everyday Life” comes before a chapter entitled “Religion is Poetry”: “Blyth does not force the syllogism, ‘Therefore religion is everyday life, and everyday life is religion,’ but this is strongly implied.” The editors then cite one more of Blyth’s formulations:
“the love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of the haiku poets.”
Blyth’s notes for “Poetry is Everyday Life”:
1 Waley’s translation.
2 See Waley for a very different translation.
3 A Vision, by W.B. Yeats
4 Second verse omitted.