"In My Seventy-Third November"--the 'habit of frolic'

Broughton, James, 1913-: In My Seventy-Third November [from Packing Up For Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996: James Broughton (1997) , University of Pittsburgh Press ]


Perseverance furthers says the I Ching
but body cells get tired along the way
and cease dividing.
Hard to accept: running at half speed
mistaking targets
being embraced nightly by a backache.


Despite my belief in urgency
and my respect for discipline
I have never learned to train my vaguery
or budget my vagaries.
Though I still consider myself
potent passionate and proliferant
I excel in doodle dawdle and drowse.


Don't blame me for being what I am.
We are all more things than we seem.
I haven't relinquished amazement
nor have I forgotten how to cherish.
If I am staring out the window at nothing
maybe it is something worth looking at.


In spite of my chronic torpor
I cling to the habit of frolic,
I keep signing up for gaiety and grace.
Regardless of my dwindle I know I am loved,
because of my nuttiness I know I am blessed.
Laughter said Victor Hugo is the soap of the gods.
I scrub daily to be dafter hereafter.

( 1986 )
************************
Broughton's poem speaks of the November of one's life--the "damp, drizzly November" in the soul as Melville writes in Moby Dick. Broughton is still able to frolic, to sign up for gaity, to persevere. I appreciate this reminder: the aching back and the mistaken targets have become so peremptory that I rarely leave room for the cherish and the amazement.

AN AFTERNOON WITH WHITMAN—A SHORT SELECTION OF WHITMAN POETRY

AN AFTERNOON WITH WHITMAN—A SHORT SELECTION OF WHITMAN POETRY

[1]

What will be will be well--for what is is well;
To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.

The sky continues beautiful,
The pleasure of men with women shall never be sated, nor the pleasure of
women with men, nor the pleasure from poems;
The domestic joys, the daily housework or business, the building of
houses--these are not phantasms--they have weight, form, location;
Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of them
phantasms;
The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion,
The earth is not an echo--man and his life, and all the things of his life,
are well-considered.

[…]


How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my Soul!
How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!
What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect,
The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids
are perfect;
Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and surely they
yet pass on.

My Soul! if I realise you, I have satisfaction;
Animals and vegetables! if I realise you, I have satisfaction;
Laws of the earth and air! if I realise you, I have satisfaction.

I cannot define my satisfaction, yet it is so;
I cannot define my life, yet it is so.

[…]

I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the
animals!

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and
the cohering is for it;
And all preparation is for it! and identity is for it! and life and death
are altogether for it!

[2]

A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets,
asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same,
All distances of place, however wide,
All distances of time--all inanimate forms,
All Souls--all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in
different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes--the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women--me also;
All nations, colours, barbarisms, civilisations, languages;
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any
globe;
All lives and deaths--all of the past, present, future;
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned, and shall for ever
span them, and compactly hold them

[3]

When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible;
Now it is you, compact, visible, realising my poems, seeking me;
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your loving
comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I am now with you

[4]

The sun and stars that float in the open air;
The apple-shaped earth, and we upon it--surely the drift of them is
something grand!
I do not know what it is, except that it is grand, and that it is
happiness,
And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot,
or reconnoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and
without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

The light and shade, the curious sense of body and identity, the greed that
with perfect complaisance devours all things, the endless pride and
outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows,
The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees, and the wonders that
fill each minute of time for ever,
What have you reckoned them for, camerado?
Have you reckoned them for a trade, or farm-work? or for the profits of a
store?
Or to achieve yourself a position? or to fill a gentleman's leisure, or a
lady's leisure?

Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might be
painted in a picture?
Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?
Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and harmonious
combinations, and the fluids of the air, as subjects for the
savans?
Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?
Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?
Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or agriculture
itself?

Old institutions--these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and the
practice handed along in manufactures--will we rate them so high?
Will we rate our cash and business high?--I have no objection;
I rate them as high as the highest--then a child born of a woman and man I
rate beyond all rate.

Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
I and my soul to range in range of thee.


Papini gave the most deep interpretation of Whitman’s poetry and spiritual significance that I’m aware of—‘WALT WHITMAN, Written à propos of L. Gamberale's version of the Leaves of Grass: Foglie di erba, Palermo, 1908’. Here are given a few lines from this Papini analysis.

‘And though Walt Whitman was never enrolled among the members of any church, we may count him without hesitation among the disciples and the followers of Christ.
Even less can one question the depth of his religious understanding.’
[Papini]


‘My love for Whitman is too deep. His poetry is not such that it can be reduced to a coherent system and subjected to dialectic criticism. Whitman's soul is as vast as the world, as all-enfolding as God. It includes everything —joy and grief, body and spirit, liberty and discipline, pride and humility, God and the blade of grass. One must accept it as one accepts the universe, without regard for the cleavages that men have made in the world.
But Whitman's soul is not merely a gigantic lake of love. It is composed of qualities, sentiments, passions that may inspire men, excite them to action, to life, render them saner, stronger, purer, better. Men who do not feel, as they read Whitman, that the flame of life grows broader and shines more brilliantly, as if it were carried into a better air, who are not conscious of an intense regret that it was not for them to know and embrace the author of certain of these songs, who are shocked by the coarseness, the violence, the shamelessness, the energy of the poems, and would have the man calmer and more refined, more prudent and less rough— such men understand Whitman not at all, will never understand him, and are not worthy to understand him.
Whitman is a good plebeian who sings unashamed all the things of the world.’
[Papini]

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Variations On Nothing


That negligible bit of sand which slides
Without a sound and settles in the hourglass,
And the fleeting impressions on the fleshy-pink,
The perishable fleshy-pink, of a cloud...

Then a hand that turns over the hourglass,
The going back for flowing back, of sand,
The quiet silvering of a cloud
In the first few lead-gray seconds of dawn...

The hand in shadow turned the hourglass,
And the negligible bit of sand which slides
And is silent, is the only thing now heard,
And, being heard, doesn't vanish in the dark.

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Umberto Saba

Poetry

It’s as if for a man battered by the wind,
blinded by snow—all around him an arctic
inferno pummels the city—
a door opens along a wall.

He goes in. He finds again a living kindness,
the sweetness of a warm corner. A forgotten
name places a kiss on
cheerful faces that he has not seen
except obscurely in menacing dreams.
He returns
to the street, and the street, too, is not the same.
Fine weather has come back, busy hands
break up the ice, the blue reappears
in the sky and in his heart. And he thinks
that every extreme of evil foretells a good.

Dino Campana

Autumn Garden
Dino Campana

To the ghostly garden,
To the laurels mute
On the greening garlands,
To the autumnal land
Now a conclusive salute!
Up arid lawn
Parched harshly in the final sun
Struggles a roar,
Where hoarse life is crying afar:
Crying to the dying sun
That lets the flowers the bleed alone.
A brass band saws the air
with playing: from sands of gold
the river’s gone: It’s quiet where
Bedazzling statues that the bridgehead held
Are turned away: there’s nothing anymore.
And silence like a chorus from the deep,
Soft and grand,
Soars, yearning, to the terrace where I stand:
And in the palpable laurel,
The languorous laurel whose acrid colors pierce,
Where statues in glum sunset loom, immortal,
She is present, and appears.

Liu Zongyuan

An Early Morning Reading Buddhist Works With Zhao At His Temple
Liu Zongyuan

In a cold well's water I clean my teeth.
I dust my clothes. I purify my mind.
Then, with slow leaves turning in my book,
I head to the eastern shelter. I recite.

This true fount of thought is gone from the world's mind
And mankind falls to trickery and fables.
But I would have words give way to bare meaning,
And my nature bear forth fruit.

Calm in the courtyard, with Dao and priests at peace,
The climbing moss colors bamboo,
The sun descends the mist,
The pines are young, green and bathed afresh.
Here, gone from me are speech, characters and all things
But the joy of sheer, single unison.