A Walk In The Dark Peak

Old Meg she was a Gipsy,

       And liv'd upon the Moors:

Her bed it was the brown heath turf,

       And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,

       Her currants pods o' broom;

Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,

       Her book a churchyard tomb.

Her Brothers were the craggy hills,

       Her Sisters larchen trees —

Alone with her great family

       She liv'd as she did please.

JOHN KEATS Meg Merrilies

Yesterday it took me two hours to drive to the Peak District — England's first National Park and my nearest National Park. In the past it used to take me an hour and a half. Now there seems to be twice as much traffic on the road. But that's progress for you. Well, no, not progress in an a temporal or kinetic sense. More a sort of dubious, materialistic progress — the kind of progress where every family now has not one car, but two, three or four, and the kind of progress where Internet shopping has flooded even the country by-roads with trucks and delivery vehicles to saturation point. In a bid to escape the traffic queues, the noise, the pollution, the CCTV cameras, the adverts, the signage, the street furniture, any old goddam furniture, Wimbledon and the World Cup — I parked my car with relief near Birchen Clough on the Snake Road and tumbled out and down into the cool woodland below. Now I could breathe again, though I could still hear the rumble of lorries and roar of motor bikes coming from the road above . . . 

Here, in Lady Clough, the only 'furniture' was tree trunk, grassy bank and mossy stone...

. . . with the occasional simple and functional (and beautiful) man-made footbridge.

I relaxed, took stock — and realised with a gasp I'd have to gain the heights on the right . . .

But first here's the low-lying river Ashop . . .

. . . and here are some lovely and practical stone sheepfolds . . .

. . . which I passed before taking the steepening path along Fair Brook to the northern edge of the Kinder plateau. This was a magical valley of oak and rowan, heather and bracken, waterfall and rock.

The walking was tough, but the views made it all worthwhile.

The stream dried up when squeezed between ever-narrower and more contorted slabby outcrops . . .

I finally arrived at Fairbrook Naze (note the two ravens in the photo — a happy accident) . . .

. . .  where the moorland prospect was just awe-inspiring. This was the view from my lunchtime picnic spot. Was there ever a better one? A little wild and desolate, perhaps — but, my God, no cars, no litter, no factories, no chimneys, no wind farms, no pylons, no people, no obvious wars and conflicts. And I'd even turned my phone off, so social media were history.  

The gritstone rocks and boulders along this lofty edge had been worn into some fantastical shapes.

Before climbing down to join the Snake Path (which led me, interminably and sometimes soggily, from the source of the river Ashop back to my car), I took one last look back at the high-level, rocky route I'd just traversed . . .

Bright Star (16)

That quintessential romantic, John Keats, wrote a handful of the most exquisite poems to be found anywhere in the whole of English literature: To Autumn, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, On the Grasshopper and the Cricket, La Belle Dame sans Merci, When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be, Ode to a Nightingale.

I recall vividly my first encounter with Keats. I was on a family holiday in the West Country, and my father had given me a 'holiday allowance'. I went straight to the fossil and shell shops which lined the beach front, then to the higgledy-piggledy second-hand bookshops half-hidden in the quaint alleyways of that seaside town. I bought two hardback poetry books, published by Collins: the Selected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Selected Poems of John Keats. Somehow I lost the Tennyson over the years; the Keats I have still (minus its blue dust jacket). It's lying next to me as I write this.

This is probably his last poem, written for Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life. The title of Jane Campion's achingly beautiful film about Keats, Bright Star, was taken from this lovely and poignant sonnet. Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis aged only 25.

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
         Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
         Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
         Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

JOHN KEATS

What Is Beauty?

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness . . . JOHN KEATS Endymion

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is there some objective standard, some Platonic realm of beauty? This is a question which has preoccupied aesthetes and philosophers for centuries.

Don Miguel Ruiz has no doubts: Beauty is just a concept we learned. (The Mastery of Love.)

Natural objects just are — they are neither beautiful nor ugly. These are emotive descriptions accorded to them by the minds of human beings. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful — we can't seem to avoid evaluating things in this way. In fact it's essentially human to do so: we have an in-built sense of ethics and aesthetics, which is useful and necessary to us.

Yet, also being human, we sometimes get things askew. We tangle and subvert the concept of ethics by committing crimes, by creating totalitarian societies etc. We tangle and subvert the concept of aesthetics by insisting that Leonardo paints more beautifully than a Neolithic cave painter, that person 'x' is more beautiful than person 'y'. We often confuse artistic skill with natural beauty. Artistic skills and their products are variable, but all natural beauty is beautiful and cannot be graded.

Beauty is a concept and a belief. The only difference between the beauty of one person and the beauty of another is the concept of beauty that people have. (The Mastery of Love.) A dandelion is as beautiful as an orchid. A frog is as beautiful as a prince. An old person is as beautiful as a newborn baby. My mother with old-age Alzheimer's was as beautiful as she was as an intelligent young woman. A so-called 'ugly' person is as beautiful as a so-called 'beautiful' person.

Our idea of artistic beauty is relative, and changes with time and according to culture. The classical Greek and Roman idea of beauty is quite different from the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which values incompleteness, impermanence and imperfection.

These are just a few thoughts about beauty which came into my mind this morning. I would love to hear your own thoughts. My own feeling is that the key to it all is semantics: yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but at the same time I think there is definitely beauty per se out there (Michelangelo's David; a snowflake; the basic simplicity and unity of cellular life). It all depends on how you define the word 'beauty', and being clear what you actually mean when you use it.       

First Lines

The first few lines of a poem are important ones. They have to arouse our interest and curiosity so that we want to read on. This introductory line or two may shock, and grab us by the throat; alternatively, it may seduce and captivate us in more subtle and gentle ways.

Some favourite first lines come immediately to mind. How about the stunning start to Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,

When evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table . . .

Like a patient etherised upon a table! This must be one of the most original and daring similes in any poem ever written.

I've always loved the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Keats. Who could resist: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . . or When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past . . . or  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk . . . or Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun . . . 

The opening to Coleridge's Kubla Khan thrilled me from an early age: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree:  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran  / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea . . .

I defy anyone not to read further when Patrick Kavanagh writes: On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I would one day rue . . .

Adrian Mitchell has wonderful, attention-grabbing first lines, including this one from To Whom It May Concern: I was run over by the truth one day . . .

Finally, has anyone composed a more sensational and apocalyptic beginning to a poem than this: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .

These are, of course, the first few lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I would be fascinated to know any of your own favourite poetic first lines . . .

Reasons to Walk The Camino: (2) Negative Capability And The Via Negativa

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. ST JOHN OF THE CROSS

The term 'negative capability' was first coined by the Romantic poet John Keats as a description of a state in which man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Keats turned a seemingly 'negative' state of mind into a 'positive' force, and realised that too much reliance on intellectual logic could imperil another kind of knowledge, which clothed itself itself more mysteriously, more obliquely: mystical knowledge, spiritual knowledge, artistic knowledge, a direct and unfiltered awareness of beauty, the revelations of the heart and the emotions.

Keats was not alone in recognising the potentiality and necessity of doubt. Several centuries before, the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross described a semi-comparable state in his poem, The Dark Night of The Soul. In this poem, Christian union with God comes about only through difficulty and darkness, pain and suffering, doubt and conflict. One also thinks of John Bunyan and his Pilgrim's Progress, and of many Christian saints, mystics and thinkers: Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa and Simone Weil, for example.

The via negativa (or negative theology or apophatic theology) is a theological approach — common to many religions — which attempts to describe God by negation, by describing what God is not rather than what God is. The Middle English poem, The Cloud of Unknowing, advocates the abandonment of all preconceived notions and beliefs about God; it's only from a state of 'unknowingness' that we can ever hope to glimpse the transcendent.

This belief in unbelief, this embracing of doubt and denial, this surrendering to mystery and uncertainty, this discovery of the positive in the negative — is an attitude to life which appeals to me very much. Plato quotes Socrates as saying that the only thing he knows is the fact of his ignorance. Tolstoy writes in War and Peace that the only thing we can know is that we know nothing.

But how does all this relate to the Camino? Surely we follow the Camino in order to learn, to achieve a goal, to put our lives in order? Well, perhaps. But the truth is rather less obvious, less clearly structured than this. In fact I've come to realise that the Camino — like life itself — is a via negativa, a path unwinding as much in darkness as it is in the intense light of the Spanish sun. (My poem Camino Fever contains the line How dark the soul in the dead of night! But how bright the morning sun!) There are bandits as well as angels along the way. There's bitter loneliness as well as unexpected, sweet companionship. And some days it feels as if you're taking one step forward, then two steps back. The Camino's lessons, answers and revelations — if lessons, answers and revelations there are — leak out slowly, if at all, and often only many years or decades after the Camino is done (though, of course, the Camino is never finished; it goes on for ever).

I have walked several Caminos through France and Spain — the route from Geneva, the route from Le Puy, the Arles route, the Vía de la Plata, the French Way — and I've walked some sections twice. I've also trekked round the south-west coast of England, and followed many other short and long-distance paths in Britain and Europe, which may be considered pilgrimages of sorts. (Though 'pilgrimage' is a loose term, like many terms. 'Pilgrimage' can mean different things to different people, as can the terms 'path', 'destination', 'illumination', 'revelation', 'transcendence' and 'Camino' itself. These notions are open to differing meanings, emphases and interpretations, and we can colour them with our own personal subtleties, and that's good, because words and ideas are fluid and malleable, and the truth seeps out through the cracks within them and the spaces between them, and in their combinations and juxtapositions, and in their poetry.)

These long walks and pilgrimages have become lodged in my being for ever. They define part of who I am, and I ponder them often, and their significance. But their significance is far from clear, and their meaning reveals itself only sporadically, like occasional pinpricks of light in a darkened sky. The following are just a few of the thoughts and questions I ponder.

Recently I began a pilgrimage to Rome, but returned home after a few days suffering from fatigue, aches and pains, deafness and a punishingly heavy backpack. Did I learn nothing from my other Caminos? Or will I perhaps learn more than I've ever done before from this abortive Camino?

Why did I feel such an overwhelming sense of anticlimax when I reached Santiago for the first time? 

How can I reconcile these two conflicting images in my mind: the happy pilgrim approaching Santiago and the recent tragic train crash near Santiago? 

Why do I embrace those Camino micro-friendships when they offer themselves, but soon tire of the proximity (often a much-too-close proximity in dormitories!) of other pilgrims, and long for my own company again, despite the omnipresent threat of loneliness and isolation? 

Why do journeys turn into exaggerated epics when recalling them to oneself afterwards, or recounting them to others? Why does one forget about the long stretches of boredom, of depression, of suffering? Do our memories ever recall anything accurately? (I suspect not.)

Why did I decide to walk the Camino, and why am I always compelled to go back? (Most people think I am crazy. You've walked across Spain three times? Why?)

Questions, questions . . . and there are more, many more, because questions like these are endless and eternal, and probably unanswerable, and asking them is part of what makes us human. I don't really know why I've walked the Camino, or why I go back, nor will I ever be able to grasp the Camino's full significance, nor will I ever be able grasp the full significance of anything (for only God can do that, only God in his or her or its ineffability and 'unknowingness').

Let us be content to remain, if we can, in a state of uncertainty, mystery and doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. For perhaps only in this negative-positive way can we attain an inkling, a brief flash of the truth.

Positive Negative

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. PICASSO

One perverse pleasure of art is the pleasure of being lost, in the sense of being confused or in the dark. KATHRYN SCHULZ

Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness. KATHRYN SCHULZ

In the last chapter of her book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error Kathryn Schulz riffs fascinatingly on the close productive relationship betwen error and art. Victorian art and literature focused on recreating the world with as much verisimilitude as possible. But the aftermath of World War I and the arrival of modernism changed all that. At its most extreme, culture had become anarchy, and anarchy culture. Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who founded Dadaism, urged his fellow artists: Let us try for once not to be right.

If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place, Schulz writes. The idea is not new. One hundred years prior to World War I the Romantic poet John Keats embraced the positive value of the irrational, and of error, doubt and uncertainty, in a letter to his brothers which contained this famous passage: ... and it at once struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

I remember the excitement and sense of personal and literary freedom I felt when first reading this momentous remark by Keats about the importance of Negative Capability, this ringing endorsement of subjectivity. Hey, yes - it was OK to experiment, to be unsure, to get things plain wrong from time to time! In other words, to be a human individual, myopic and fallible. Indeed, only out of doubt, questioning and open-mindedness, out of wrongness, does great art emerge, I firmly believe. If an artist knows the right answer from the start, what need of the artistic quest? Keats's idea led me directly to cubism, expressionism, existentialism; to Picasso, Eliot, Virginia Woolf; to the twentieth century, in short.

Schulz goes on to quote the Candian poet Anne Carson - What we engage in when we do poetry is error - and infers from this that Carson means these things: The first is that poetry is made of words, and, as we've seen, words have error built into them from the get-go. Every syllable is a stepping stone across the gap, an effort to explain something (train tracks, thunder, happiness) by recourse to something it is not (a word). The second is that writing, whether of poetry or of anything else, involves a certain amount of getting it wrong, - an awareness that truth is always on the lam, that the instant you think you've got it pinned down on the page, it shimmers, distorts, wiggles away. Last, but possibly most important, I take her to mean that poetry, like error, startles, unsettles, and defies; it urges us towards new theories about old things.

The Benefits Of Walking (And Getting Lost)

In his book, Walkers, Miles Jebb reminds us exactly why walking is medically good for us:

It stimulates the muscles which assist the heart in circulating the blood, thus increasing the heart's efficiency and decreasing such dangerous things as cholesterol levels, clot formations, blood sugar, and hormone production. Also, through the exercise of the lungs, it improves the oxgenising capacity which, among other things, activates the brain cells. Besides this, it triggers off responses from the nervous system, so releasing tensions and providing an outlet for pent-up emotions. And it slows down the ageing process of bone-demineralisation, particularly in the legs and feet. All these attributes are more than ever important today when most urban people are overstimulated and underactive and grossly neglect their legs, those massive limbs which constitute over a third of normal body weight. Walking is thus the simplest and easiest way of keeping fit; and a brisk walk of around 4 miles an hour consumes about four times as much energy as a slow stroll, and about half as much as a moderate jog or run.

A little further on in the book, Jebb cites George Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who advocates the merits in walking alone, walking by night, and even losing one's way (!) He extols the usefulness of walking in the solution of personal and psychological crises, and of walking as medicine. Trevelyan's Essay On Walking begins like this: I have two doctors, my left leg and my right ...

I particularly like the idea that 'losing one's way' can somehow be beneficial - a good and valuable experience rather than a confusing and stressful one. I've often thought this myself. Indeed, I've been lost more times than I care to mention - not completely lost, but vaguely lost, a wee bit lost. Which, I think, is a rather pleasurable state to be in.

On my walks I'm frequently too lazy to keep looking at a map, and my map reading skills are more basic than refined, should we say. However, as long as you have a general idea where you are, and as long as you are not in a potentially dangerous situation - such as in the high mountains with night or bad weather approaching - being 'lost' for a while can be fun. You can call up all those forgotten, ancestral skills - navigating by the sun, moon, stars, and wind direction, interpreting the lie of the land with the physical senses rather than blindly and uncritically following some pre-prepared route or map. You suddenly become active rather than passive, a little more alive, more finely-tuned to what's going on around you. There's a raw immediacy, a delicious frisson in your interaction with the world which you don't get to the same extent if you stick religiously to a pre-planned route come hell or high water - and then panic if you accidentally stray.

In yesterday's post on Taormina I talked of 'intuitively guessing' my way back from the Virgin of the Rock into town. This kind of experience - when you're not really lost but are relying on instincts and split-second route choices to get you where you want to be - is a really attractive one, I find, and one I relish. Such tempting, serendipitous pathways can lead to secret, unexpected places you might never have found on the map, and you can have a really exciting adventure by following their siren calls.

I'm reminded of John Keats' concept of Negative Capability, which he defines as the state when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Sometimes you just have to suppress the intellect, the rational organising mind, for a while ... and go for a walk ... with only a fuzzy idea about where you are going ...

Contact! Contact!

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. HENRY THOREAU.

Continuing my exploration of Richard Mabey's insightful book, Nature Cure, I found this, his belief about wilderness: Truly wild places should be for the wild creatures that live there, and only secondarily to give us revelatory experiences. If we go into them it should be as a privilege, and on the same terms as the creatures that live there, unarmed and on foot. They cannot be treated as convenience habitats, available off-the-peg...

150 years earlier, Thoreau spoke in favour of the tangled fringes of Walden Pond in Walden; Or Life In The Woods; and in Walking And The Wild he wrote: I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of nature.

For Mabey, his renewed appreciation of what he calls the unmanaged energy of nature is a key element in his recovery from depression and breakdown. Thoreau too found release and illumination in his contact with what Mabey describes as nature's membrane, pulsing with interconnected life, busy with communications: Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!

But it isn't only wilderness, or deep woods and dank swamps, that can provide a 'nature cure'. Country walking pure and simple can help sort out emotional and mental problems (Solvitur ambulando, as the Romans put it). And, as Mabey states: The medievals made mass pilgrimages to rustic shrines. John Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, fled to the Mediterranean to find that 'beaker full of the warm South', away from that place 'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.' 'The country, by the gentleness and variety of its landscapes,' wrote the philospher Michel Foucault, 'wins melancholics from their single obsession by taking them away from the places that might revive the memory of their sufferings'.

The Memory Of Belief

He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief... From CLAIRE TOMALIN's biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man.

Hardy's novels were ahead of their time in the way they introduced subjects such as class inequality, sexual passion, and strong, independent women. Because of this he shocked and angered many of the more traditional critics and reviewers. His attacks on institutions like marriage and the Church resulted in the expurgation of his novels (which first came out in serial form) by his publishers - to Hardy's disgust. But he bowed to this, as he was modest and quiet-mannered in character; and, after all, he did want to make a living. Subsequent editions of his works were textually restored in their entirety.

As is the case with many imaginative novelists and artists, Hardy was ambivalent about many things, including religion. But there was no going back to the old certainties of Christian faith after the publication of Darwin's On The Origin Of Species in 1859 (Hardy was 19 years old when this earth-shattering, God-shattering book came out). He did of course know the book, and he had also read Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach - a pivotal poem of the 19th century about the melancholy induced by loss of Faith.

Here is the desolate but beautiful last verse of Matthew Arnold's famous poem (Arnold, poet, critic, essayist and school inspector - his father was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School - was very much a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, as Hardy was himself in some ways):

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The adjective "darkling" purposefully recalls the Romantic use of the same word in Ode To A Nightingale by Keats; and Hardy himself chooses this word in his celebrated poem The Darkling Thrush, which I posted previously.

I remember very well the effect that Dover Beach had on me the 1st time I read it in my teenage years. For me it was a kind of rite of passage poem. Somehow it marked a setting aside of childish things and the beginning of adulthood. One can see quite clearly how this poem points the way to the Existentialist ideas of the next century.

Tracing Shadows

It is with some reluctance that I must finally close The Golden Treasury Of Poetry, the beacon-book of my childhood, and return it to the shelf. But not before quoting 3 last poems. The 1st is another sonnet by John Keats. This sonnet is particularly poignant when we remember that Keats died of tuberculosis at the very young age of 25. In this poem Keats senses he soon will die; and the poem ends with a quiet acceptance.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

There have been a few patches of winter fog lately - fog's more likely here on the alluvial plain of the Trent valley than the snow and deep frost they've been getting further 'up north' - so it seems apposite to include Carl Sandburg's delicate little poem Fog:

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking

over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Last but not least here's Emily Dickinson again:

Certainty

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visted in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

What a masterpiece of concision!

(I meditated on my very favourite Emily Dickinson poem here and here.)

3 Poems

I've been dipping again into The Golden Treasury Of Poetry. 3 poems leaped out at me. The 1st is by Robert Frost and is called The Runaway. It's a good choice for this time of year:

The Runaway

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'

What a word picture Frost paints here! You can just feel the cold, hear the hooves, see the falling snowflakes and the whites of the colt's eyes.

Apart from Shakespeare's, the sonnets of Keats are some of the most perfect sonnets ever written. This sonnet, On The Grasshopper And The Cricket - among other poems by Keats - also appears in The Golden Treasury:

On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Yes, how we yearn for summer during these last endless wintry months!

Finally, there's this short, succinct poem by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Frog-celebrities of Celebrity Big Brother, please take note...

Beauty Is Truth

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms...

The opening lines of Endymion by JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

A Gift From The Gods

Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line/Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine... BOB DYLAN Shelter From The Storm from Blood On The Tracks

The natural world so readily accessed but so difficult to really touch in spirit... JOHN HEE from his blog Walkabout In The UK

For days now I've been pondering John Hee's line. Of course he's right. Despite the split infinitive! We can buy the right gear, the right maps. We can plan our route. We can walk to pretty places. We can even walk to desolate, wild and remote places. We can watch wildlife. But to 'touch in spirit'? That is a different order of things. Perhaps we can only hope for those occasional mystic moments which come at us from out of the blue, overwhelm us momentarily when we're least expecting it. I experienced some of those moments in Galicia. Beautiful Galicia! This was the best landscape since the Pyrenees. I 'crossed the line' just before O'Cebreiro. There was a marker stone. The seasons reversed. I walked from winter into autumn.

I suppose Galicia's a bit like Celtic Cornwall or Brittany, but bigger, hillier and more wooded. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous all the way to Tricastela and on to Sarria, Ferrerios and Portomarin. The weather continued to be good - sun on the tops and mist in the valleys. I walked in a dreamlike state. My feet followed the twisting paths and tracks easily and automatically. Climbing hills seemed effortless. My conscious mind - my rational, route-finding mind - switched off, and I absorbed the stillness, the silence, the beauty of my surroundings. By that I mean beauty in the Keatsian sense of beauty is truth.

Beauty walks a razor's edge. It's difficult to touch in spirit. But when you touch it, it's genuinely a gift from the gods.

Negative Capability

After considering Keats yesterday, and his poem To Autumn, my mind now turns to his letters. In a famous letter dated Sunday 21 December 1817 he invents the term "Negative Capability": ...that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...

This idea, this state, appeals to me a lot.

The Tao Te Ching says of the hollow space inside a cup or of the empty spaces in a house or room: Without their nothingness they would be nothing.

St John of the Cross writes about The Dark Night of the Soul, the state into which he plunged when he could no longer feel God's presence, and prayer could no longer inspire him.

The Via Negativa of mystical theology approaches God from a position of ignorance rather than one of knowledge.

Perhaps not-knowing is a necessary state of mind for learning.

Mellow Fruitfulness

Of course there's really no such thing as the end of one season and the beginning of the next. The seasons, like the stages of our lives, merge imperceptibly one into the other. This said, autumn, or fall as they say in America, will be with us before we know it. Next Sunday 23 September marks the autumnal equinox - the culmination of harvest, and a time when day and night, light and dark, are equal. John Keats wrote one of my very favourite poems about autumn. I learnt this poem, along with many others, for school English lessons. Memorizing poetry off by heart was the norm in the English grammar schools of the 1960s. This was a chore at the time - but now I'm very glad I did it. Like piano lessons. But perhaps not like cross-country running. Anyway, here's the poem:

To Autumn

Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er brimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I really enjoyed typing that out. The feel and sound of the words, as I keyed them and repeated them to myself, transported me back 40 years, rather like the taste of Proust's madeleine cake. Keats paints such a vivid and sensual word-picture that you can almost see, hear, smell and taste the autumn.

First Post, First Step

Keats did it, Coleridge did it, Shelley did it and Hazlitt did it. Thomas De Quincey did it eating opium and Robert Louis Stevenson did it with a donkey. George Borrow did it in Hungary and Romania and Spain and Wales. Bill Bryson did it in the Appalachians and Patrick Leigh Fermor did it on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube. Wainwright did it in the North Country, Edward Thomas did it in the South Country and Wordsworth did it all over the place - A favourite pleasure hath it been with me - sometimes with his sister Dorothy. Hilaire Belloc did it on the way to Rome and Shirley MacLaine did it destined for Santiago de Compostela. John Hillaby did it on country paths and byways and Ian Botham did it for charity on tarmac roads. Spud Talbot-Ponsonby did it beside the coast and Hamish Brown did it over the high hills of Scotland. What did they all do? They went for a walk...