Leading Ladies: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry
In the latter half of the 19th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.
Beginnings
Both Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse were born to parents who were travelling players, and both began acting in childhood. Eleonora Duse and her father continued acting after the death of Eleonora’s mother in 1875. In 1879, Eleonora received her first rave reviews for her performances as Ophelia in Hamlet and Elettra in Oreste at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples. She married a fellow actor in 1881 and had a daughter Enrichetta before the two separated.
Although five of her siblings became professional actors, Ellen Terry was initially disillusioned with the theater. At the age of 16 years, she married the painter George Watts who was 30 years her senior. The marriage was unhappy, and Ellen left after a year to live with the architect Edward Godwin, with whom she had two children, Edith and Edward, who later used the fictitious surname, Craig, and who both became renowned theater-directors. Godwin encouraged Terry to act again and she was acclaimed as Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1875, a role that she reprised many times over her career (Holyroyd, 2008, p 102).
Sarah Bernhardt was the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan, and only came to the theater after finishing her education at a convent school. The Duc de Mornay, the half-brother of Napoleoon III and a patron of her mother, suggested that she audition for Le Conservatoire national de musique et de declamation. With his influence she was accepted, and studied there between 1860 and 1862. After leaving the conservatoire she acted at the Odéon theater but her initial roles were not successful. Though she continued to act, her main support over the next decade came from her life as a courtesan. She counted among her many lovers a Marshall of the French army, a Spanish banker, and a Turkish ambassador (Gottlieb, 2010, p 44). She likely had an affair with Victor Hugo when he directed his play Ruy Blas at the Comédie Française in 1872 (Gottleib, 2010, p 61). Though some 40 years her senior Hugo was still susceptible to female charms. Bernhardt had her first major triumph as Maria, Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas, and followed this by an acclaimed Phèdre in Racine’ tragedy in 1874.
The Acting Companies
Bernhardt’s subsequent successes at the Comédie Française allowed her to obtain backers for her own company in 1880. She put on La dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, and then took her company on tour to London and the United States. She had affairs with her leading actors and was briefly married to a Greek diplomat. She attracted the attention of Victorien Sardou who wrote several plays for her, notably Fédora (1882), Théodora (1884), La Tosca (1887) and Cléopâtre (1890). She arranged with Alphonse Mucha to produce magnificent art-deco posters for her shows:
Bernhardt became friends with artists and celebrities: Gustave Doré, the illustrator of Dante, the portraitist Georges Clairin, Edward VII of England when he was Prince of Wales, and Louise Abbéma, an impressionist painter and prominent lesbian. It is unclear how many of her friends were also lovers.
In 1899, the theater built by Baron Haussmann on the Place du Châtelet in Paris was renovated and renamed the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, a name it retained until the German occupation in 1941 when it was called the Théâtre de la Cité because of Bernhardt’s Jewish ancestry (Gottlieb, 2010, p 139).
Duse formed her own acting company in 1885. She had a prolonged affair with Arrigo Boito, who was later to serve as Verdi’s librettist for Otello and Falstaff. Boito provided her with the play Cleopatre, a translation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in 1887. The illustration below shows the competing Cleopatras of Duse and Bernhardt (Rader, 2018, pp 83-84):
In 1895 Duse had an affair with the poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio. He wrote the play La Gioconda (1899) for her. However, later in 1899 when he sent his masterpiece La città morta, based on Ancient Greek tragedies, to her rival Sarah Bernhardt, Duse ended their affair. Nevertheless, she later performed in both this play and in d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) about the tragic love affair between Francesca and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta, as told in Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno.
When Duse toured Russia in 1891, she impressed the young Anton Chekhov. Duse was to become the model for Irina Arkadina in The Seagull (1895). During her tour of Russia, Duse presented Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She was particularly fond of the role: Nora, the name of the heroine, is a diminutive of her own name (Rader, 2018, p 103). She later included other Ibsen plays in her repertoire, and visited the playwright in Oslo in 1904. After 1910, Duse had a long relationship with Lina Poletti, a poet, playwright and open Lesbian, but this was likely no more than friendship (Weaver, 1984, pp 286-290).
In 1878 Henry Irving and Ellen Terry formed a partnership to reopen the Lyceum Theatre in London. For the next 20 years, they acted together to great acclaim. Their repertoire centered on Shakespeare – Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Rome and Juliet, Macbeth, and Much Ado about Nothing – but they also presented other plays – Becket by Tennyson, Olivia by W. G. Wills derived from The Vicar of Wakefield, and King Charles I by William Havard. It is not known whether their relationship extended beyond the theater. Below are woodcuts of Irving and Terry by Terry’s son Edward Craig from about 1895.
Terry kept up a long epistolary relationship with Bernard Shaw, who found her an intelligent and witty correspondent. Despite the many letters, however, they only met occasionally. Terry played Lady Cicely Waynefleete in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1906, one of her last important roles. In 1958 a set of eighteen unsigned love poems to Ellen Terry went on auction. Though attributed to Shaw (Werner, 1980), these poems were probably written by Christabel Marshall, who was Terry’s secretary for several years. Christabel ultimately changed her name to Christopher Marie St John, and became the romantic partner of Terry’s daughter Edy Craig (Holroyd, 2008, pp 321-330).
Portraits
Bernhardt, Duse and Terry were the beauties of their day. They were the subject of glamorous portraits such as Michele Gordigiani’s 1896 portrait of Duse and Georges Clairin’s 1876 portrait of Bernhardt:
The following are portraits of Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra by Georges Rochegrosse (1890), of the young Ellen Terry by her husband George Watts (1864) and of Eleonora Duse by Giovanni Boldini (1895):
Ilya Repin made a striking charcoal sketch of Duse during her tour of Russia in 1891:
Photographs
Nicéphore Niéce took the first photograph in 1822. By the middle of the 19th Century photography had become widespread. Felix Nadar, the first genius of photographic portraiture, produced several images of the young Sarah Bernhardt in the early 1860s.
The following is Adam Begley’s description of the portraits:
Loosely wrapped in a white burnoose, or in a shiny black velvet cloak, both garments voluminous, their folds teasingly suggestive, she leans on a truncated fluted column—a vulgar prop Nadar would have laughed at a decade earlier. It doesn’t matter: the eyes are otherwise occupied, caressing her flawless skin, her calm pensive face, her untamed hair. It’s not just that she appears to be naked under her wrap—the portraits carry an erotic charge that’s complicated and enhanced by the withdrawn, private ex-pression and a whisper of melancholy. The air of mystery is especially strong when she’s wearing the black velvet and looking off to her right, almost in profile; the focus is slightly blurred, her bright eyes distant and enigmatic. Her sole ornament, a cameo earring, less a decoration than an echo in miniature, draws attention to her elfin ear, deliberately exposed and adding to the impression of nakedness. (Begley 2017, p 110)
Richard Howard’s poem Hommage to Nadar – Sarah Bernhardt (2004) celebrates both the photographer and his subject:
Often enough you were naked under the cloak in those days; gentlemen drank and waited, murmuring deprecations
till the cloak dropped and your arms which would dishevel the world – those white serpents, Hugo called them – were exposed,
thin as your legs, thin and white, but rusted here, then here, the rest white and hard . . . Not yet: you have not yet had success on the stage,
and if you were a mother two years back, Maurice never knew his father – did you? A nun, you wanted
to be a nun, and became a sculptor, one craning female torso sent each year to the Salon, ardent clay ladies
in postures of possession. Mortal will is already your mode, undressed, uncombed, probably unwashed –
you are the child he wrote in French for, Oscar who understood your crying need and overheard, just thirty years too late,
the voice of Salome, pure gold bangles on a tin wire pulled to breaking, and of course the wire did break.
You seem to be regarding, on cue but still offstage, in the studio, the resonant hells your talent sanctified
for decades of unbelievers. and taught your century its lesson, dying in La Gloire, your last relâche
attended by a house of fifty thousand: dazed Paris, unforgiving, relented for your farewell tour of duty
which was to doubt if either the Heavenly City or that wan shade of it our dreams have perpetuated
can function, flourish or even form unless it include its opposite, unless in heaven there is hell. Divine Sarah.
The poem mentions that Bernhardt was also a competent sculptor. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French expressly for Bernhardt although she never played the role. La Gloire is likely a late performance in d’Annunzio’s La gloria which had been translated into French. The theatrical term en relâche is used to describe the days when a play is not performed so that the actors can rest. The English idiom is that the theater is “dark.” Bernhardt continued working until a few days before her death. “Fifty thousand” is the estimated number who attended her funeral in 1923.
Terry and Duse were also photographed extensively. The following illustration shows a portrait of Ellen Terry by Julia Margaret Cameron taken in 1864, and a portrait of Eleonora Duse by Edward Steichen taken in 1903. The latter was taken using a soft focus, a style popular at the beginning of the 20th Century but eschewed by later photographers.
Costumes
Bernhardt, Terry and Duse all revelled in their costumes. Those of Ellen Terry were particularly striking. Edward Burne-Jones designed her outfits for Guinevere and Lawrence Alma-Tadema for Imogen. The most memorable of her costumes was the “beetle-dress” that she wore as Lady Macbeth. The gown, designed by Alice Laura Comyns-Carr and made by Ada Cort Nettleship, is embellished with green iridescent beetle wing-cases that shimmer under stage lighting. The dress has recently been restored. The illustration below shows the dress and a painting of Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargeant (1888).
Lithographs
Lithography was invented in 1796 and come to prominence over the following century as a means for producing inexpensive color prints. William Nicholson published a set of Twelve Portraits in 1899: lithographic reproductions of hand-coloured woodcuts. Among those represented was Sarah Bernhardt. Eleonora Duse was included in a second set of portraits which came out in 1902.These portraits are shown below. In 1906 Nicholson produced for the Ellen Terry Jubilee Banquet a lithographic scroll showing all the major roles from her career. The middle section shows Ellen Terry as Lady Teazle from TheSchool for Scandal (1877), Olivia from Olivia (1878), Ophelia from Hamlet (1878), Queen Henrietta Maria from King Charles I by William Havard (1879), and Portia from The Merchant of Venice:
Audio Recordings
In the early years of the 20th Century, it became possible to record the sounds of voices. Both Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt were recorded. Although the recordings are noisy and the studio recordings very different from an actual performance, the listener can get some sense of how they sounded on the stage.
The recording of Ellen Terry giving Portia’s speech about mercy was taken in 1911. The words of the speech follow together with a painting by George Baldry of Terry as Portia in an 1895 production. Terry’s presentation is restrained but convincing:
I could not find any audio recordings of Eleonora Duse. We must content herself with a description by Arthur Symons, the British critic and poet who lived for a while in Italy and who translated several of d’Annunzio’s works:
And then that voice of hers! It can be sweet or harsh, it can laugh or cry, can be menacing or caressing. And how every word tells! Every word comes to you clearly, carrying exactly its meaning: and, somehow along with the words, an emotion, which you may resolve to ignore, but which will seize on you, which will go through and through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, the power to make you feel intensely; and that is precisely the final test of a great dramatic artist. (Symons, 1926, p 99)
The following is an excerpt from a 1910 recording of Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Phèdre. Phèdre the wife of Theseus has fallen passionately in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She confesses her shame and asks him to punish her with death.
In the Words of the Poets.
The young Oscar Wilde was quite taken by Terry’s performance of Portia. The following is his sonnet to the actress. Since I could not find any image of the golden dress, I have paired the sonnet with a portrait of Terry by Forbes-Robertson from about the same time:
Wilde was perhaps even more impressed by Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre. The accompanying photograph was taken by Felix Nadar’s son Paul:
The young playwright Edmond Rostand, author of the wildly successful Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) wrote several plays for Sarah Bernhardt, among them LaSamaritaine (1897), about the Samaritan women who gave up a life of sin to follow Christ, and l’Aiglon (Eaglet, 1900) about the Napoleon’s son. At a celebratory dinner in 1896 he presented a sonnet in praise of Sarah:
The sonnet is mainly remembered for the line Reine de l’Attitude ed Princesse des Gestes. No one could strike a pose as well as Sarah. The following is the death of La Dame aux Camélias, probably from a production in the early 1900s:
In 1907, the American poet Sara Teasdale published four sonnets in honor of Eleonora Duse. The following sonnet about her performance in Francesca da Rimini was set to music by Robert Owen. Below is a performance by soprano Jamie Reimer and pianist Stacie Haneline:
Imaginings
It is difficult for us to understand the effect these actresses had on their audiences. We have some general idea:
Ellen Terry lives on as the eternal girl actress, the symbol of health, youth, and energy, in contrast with Duse, the suffering, mature woman. Between them stands Bernhardt, the creature of passion and power, larger than life and dangerously unpredictable. (Stokes et al, 1988, p 10).
And yet
Whatever audiences perceived in the work of Bernhardt, Terry and Duse, it was clearly something that took them beyond the immediate and into wider, deeper areas of themselves. This special quality is forever inaccessible to us now, since it died with them and with the time in which they lived. It is also something that challenges historical analysis, just as it challenged description by those contemporaries who struggled to express the inexpressible in the restricting language of their reviews and articles. (Stokes et al., 1988, p 11).
So to conclude, I would like to imagine them when they played roles that to me are special. I shall do this in the order of performance. First would be Ellen Terry as Beatrice in the early 1880s. It must have been marvelous to watch her spar with Henry Irving in Much Ado About Nothing.
And then I would have found myself enthralled by the performance of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in the 1890s. She thought of Hamlet much as I do: as a man who is determined to do the right thing, who hesitates not from a weakness of will, but because he needs to be certain before he acts. This is completely different from the idea that Hamlet was someone who just could not make up his mind.
And finally, I would have been transfixed by Eleonora Duse as Hedda Gabler in the first few years of the 20th Century.
References
Begley, A. (2017). The great Nadar: the man behind the camera. Tim Duggan Books (Penguin).
Gottlieb, R. (2010). Sarah: the life of Sarah Bernhardt. Yale University
Holroyd, M. (2008). A strange eventful history: the dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their remarkable families. Chatto & Windus.
Weaver, W. (1984). Duse, a biography. Thames & Hudson.
Werner, J. (1980). Lady, wilt thou love me? Eighteen love poems for Ellen Terry attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Stein and Day.
Friedrich Hölderlin: Little Knowledge but Joy Enough
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets. He was exquisitely sensitive to the beauties of the natural world, and thoroughly enamoured to the glories of Ancient Greece. His verses are strikingly beautiful in their sound, and have been set to music by many composers. As a young man he was very productive, writing poems and the epistolary novel Hyperion (1799). He also made important new translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, in 1806 he lapsed into madness. From 1807 until his death, he lived alone in a room overlooking the Neckar River in Tübingen. He mumbled to himself in many languages, and occasionally wrote brief fragments of verse for visitors, signing them with various pseudonyms and fictitious dates. This posting considers some of his poetry.The text of the poems can been enlarged by clicking on them to get a separate window.
Life
Friedrich Hölderlin was born in 1770 in Lauffen am Neckar a village just south of Heilbronn in the Duchy of Württemberg. (That year also marked the birth of Wordsworth, Beethoven, and Hegel). His father died in 1772 and his mother married Johann Gok and moved to Nürtingen. Hölderlin attended school at the monastery of Denkendorf, and then began studies for the clergy at the monastery of Maulbronn. Founded as a Cistercian monastery in 1147, Maulbronn had become a Lutheran institution after the Reformation. In 1788 Hölderlin began to study theology at the Tübinger Stift (seminary). Among his fellow-students in Tübingen were the philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Hölderlin and most of the Tübingen students were more fascinated by the ideals of the French Revolution (1789) than by the logic of theology. These were revolutionary times: what might be yet possible was replacing what always had been.
The pastel portrait (illustrated above) by Franz Carl Hiemer dates from 1792, when Hölderlin was in his final days as a student. It is the very picture of a young romantic poet: sensuously beautiful, clear-eyed and idealistic. Who could not fall in love with him?
Having decided against a career in the church, Hölderlin found employment as a tutor in the houses of the bourgeoisie. Though he was not a good teacher, these positions allowed him time to write poetry. When serving as tutor in the Gontard household in Frankfurt from 1796 to 1798, Hölderlin fell passionately in love with Susette Gontard (1769-1802), the wife of his employer. Susette returned Hölderlin’s affections. The illustration below shows a small alabaster bust of Susette by Landolin Ohmacht from around 1795.
Dismissed from his position, Hölderlin moved to Homberg, where he attempted to edit a new journal. He continued to write to Susette, and occasionally arranged secret meetings with her. She became immortalized as Diotima, the great love of the hero in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion which was published in two parts in 1797 and 1799.
In January, 1802, Hölderlin accepted a position as tutor in the household of a German consul in Bordeaux, France. Penniless, he traveled to Bordeaux on foot, a distance of over 1000 km. The position did not work out, and he traveled back to Tübingen in May. We do not know what happened to him on the journey. He may have been robbed; he was clearly exhausted by his travel, and he was close to starvation. When he arrived in Stuttgart in June, a friend described him as “an emaciated man, pale as death, long-haired and bearded, wild-looking, habited like a beggar” (Zweig, 1939/2017, p 356). At this time, he was informed that Susette had died. She had contracted German measles from her children Though the children recovered easily, Susette who probably had some underlying lung disorder, perhaps tuberculosis, did not. Hölderlin was devastated.
Despite his despair, Hölderlin was able to complete his translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, when they were published in 1804, these translations were derided as monstrous, and considered the work of a lunatic. For example, in the opening scene of Antigone, the verb kalchainein (from kalche, the purple limpet), which means “to become dark red,” is metaphorically used to describe disturbed thoughts. Hölderlin, directly translated the Greek dēloīs gār ti kalchaínousa’ éposas as du scheinst ein rotes Wort zu färben (“you seem to dye your words red”) rather than decorously translating it as “you appear to be troubled.” His choice of words is strange and exciting (de Campos, 2007; Carson, 2008). Hölderlin’s radical translations have prevailed. Carl Orff used them for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Bertolt Brecht adapted them for his 1948 play Antigone.
Hölderlin’s grief after the death of Susette was overwhelming, and he began his descent into madness. Isaac von Sinclair, a close friend, arranged an undemanding position for him as court librarian in Homberg in 1804. However, in 1805, von Sinclair, who was a fervent supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution, was accused of treason against the Elector of Württemberg, arrested and brought to trial in Stuttgart. Hölderlin was initially considered a co-conspirator, but was soon deemed too mad to stand trial. Ultimately, von Sinclair was found not guilty. The mad Hölderlin left Homberg to return home. However, his mother could not take care of him and in 1806, the poet was admitted to the University Hospital in Tübingen where he was treated by Professor Johann von Autenreith.
In 1807 he was discharged as incurably insane into the care of a carpenter Ernst Zimmer, who took in student boarders. For the next 36 years (one half of his lifetime) Hölderlin lived in the first-floor room in a tower overlooking the Neckar River. His upkeep was supported by a small annuity from the state of Württemberg. The tower had at one time been part of the city’s medieval fortifications but was then merged into the houses on Bursagasse. The following illustration shows the tower as viewed from the Neckar River:
In the 1820s, Hölderlin was visited by a young poet, Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804-1830), who describes his experience visit in his 1830 memoir Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness:
One ponders, wondering whether or not to knock, and feels a sense of uneasiness. After finally knocking, a loud and forceful “Come in!” can be heard. Opening the door, one finds a haggard figure standing in the middle of the room, who bows as deeply as possible and will not stop bestowing compliments, and whose mannerisms would be very graceful were there not something convulsive about them. One admires the profile, the high forehead heavy with thought, the friendly, lovable eyes, extinguished but not soulless; one sees the devastating traces of the mental illness in the cheeks, the mouth, the nose, above the eyes where an oppressive and painful wrinkle has been etched. With regret and sadness, one observes the convulsive movement which sometimes spreads throughout the entire face, forcing his shoulders to jerk and his fingers to twitch. He wears a simple jacket and likes to keep his hands in his pockets. One says a few introductory words which are then received with the most courteous obeisance and a deluge of nonsensical words which confuse the visiting stranger. Gracious as he was and, for the sake of appearance, still is, H. now feels obliged to say something friendly to the guest, to ask him a question. One comprehends a few words of his question, but most of these could not possibly be answered. Nor does Hölderlin in the least expect to be answered. On the contrary, he becomes extremely perplexed if the visitor attempts to follow up a train of thought.
Hölderlin was also visited by other students and tourists. When given paper, Hölderlin would write fragments of verses and give them to his visitors. He would sign these with various pseudonyms, one of the most popular being “Scardanelli.” Some of them would be dated with fictitious dates. On most days Hölderlin would go for walks in the city, but he would not recognize or interact with anyone. He had been given a piano, and would often improvise music for prolonged periods.
We do not know the nature of Hölderlin’s madness William Dilthey (1910) attributed his symptoms to spiritual weariness: “that form of dispersion of spirit produced from enormous exhaustion.” He likened Hölderlin to Robert Schumann. For both, creativity came at too great a cost: they flew too close to the sun. Some writers have concluded that Hölderlin was schizophrenic (Blanchot, 1951; Jakobsen et al, 1980). Others have refrained from any definite diagnosis (Agamben, 2023; Robles, 2020). Horowski (2017) has proposed that his symptoms might have been due to mercury intoxication since von Autenreith treated him with very high does of calomel. However, Hölderlin’s symptoms clearly preceded his treatment in Tübingen. The illustration shows an etching of Hölderlin based on a sketch by J. G. Schreiner in 1826.
Alcaic Verses
Hölderlin’s German odes were composed using Alcaic verses, traditionally believed to have been invented by the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus around 600 BC (Warren, 1996). Stress in Ancient Greek is mainly related to the duration of the vowel sound, whereas stress in both German and English is more complex and can be affected by the duration, pitch and intensity of the syllable, as well as by semantics. Nevertheless, the Alcaic verse form works well in both German and English.
Alcaic verses consist of four lines. The first two lines contain 11 syllables, the third 9 syllables and the fourth 10 syllables. The stress pattern was complicated, and could be varied slightly. In the following diagram the stressed syllables are denoted by / and the unstressed by –. Syllables denoted by x could be either stressed or unstressed.
To illustrate this form, we can look at the brief poem Ehmals und Jetzt, shown below with a translation by Michael Hamburger which uses the same alcaic form:
The following shows the stress pattern in the German verse :
The following is a musical setting of the ode by Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959), sung by tenor Holger Falk accompanied by Steffen Schleiermacher on piano.
To the Fates
Greek mythology postulated that human life was controlled by three sisters known as the Fates (Moirai in Greek; Parcae in Latin): Clotho, the spinner, spun the thread from her distaff onto a spindle; Lachesis, the allotter, measured out the destined amount life; and Atropos, the inflexible, cut the thread and ended the life. The following shows an image of the Fates in a tapestry created in 1983 by Patricia Taylor from a 1948 drawing by Henry Moore:
This is Hölderlin’s ode To the Fates. The translation is by Elizabeth Henderson
As the years pass, it would be a blessing to remember that once one had lived as the gods even if only for a short time. One could not ask for more.
The following is a recitation of the poem by Matthias Wiemann and a musical setting by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Aribert Reimann accompanying him on piano.
The Neckar
Hölderlin was born on the banks of the Neckar River. As shown in the map, this river arises in the Black Forest and flows down to join the Rhine River. Many stretches of the river are freely navigable.
The first half of Hölderlin’s poem describes how the river brought him joy and peace. The second half tells how the beauties of the river inspire him to consider what it might be like to visit the wonders of Ancient Greece: Pactolus, a river in Ionia described by Sophocles as a “golden stream;” Smyrna the great coastal city of Western Ionia, now known as Izmir; Ilion, the ancient name for Troy; Sunium on the southernmost point of the Attic peninsula, with its temple of Poseidon; and Olympia, the site of the Olympic Games.
At the time that Hölderlin was writing his poem, it was impossible to visit Greece since it was part of the Ottoman Empire. He could only visit in his imagination. Greece attained independence in 1832, but by then Hölderlin was mad.
Below is the text of the poem with a German translation by James Mitchell, followed by a recitation by Burno Ganz The translation follows the meaning but not the alcaic form of the German poem.
Josef Matthias Hauer composed a set of brief piano pieces based upon lines from Hölderlin’s poems (Barwinek, 2023). The following are two of these pieces deriving from the poem Der Neckar, played by Anna Petrova-Foster:
Deine Wellen umspielten mich Your waves played about me
wo die Meerluft die heißen Ufer kühlt und den Lorbeerwald durchsäuselt where the sea breeze cools the hot shores and rustles through the laurel forest
Hyperion
Hölderlin published his novel Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland in two parts in 1797 and 1799. It consists of a series of letters between Hyperion, a young Greek, to his German friend Bellarmin, with some occasional letters between Hyperion and his beloved Diotima. Epistolary novels were very popular in the 18th Century: Rousseau’s Julia, ou la nouvelle New Héloise (1761), Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) all used the format. Those were the days when those who were literate wrote letters.
Hyperion is short on plot and long in thought. The novel presents a general theory of beauty as the guiding light for harmonious society and of union with nature as the goal of the individual person. Hyperion participates in an insurrection against the Ottoman rule with the rebel Alabanda (modeled on Isaac von Sinclair). Later he almost dies fighting with the Russians against the Turks in the great sea battle of Chesma in 1771. Although the Russians were victorious, the Greeks remained subjugated. Hyperion’s great love Diotima, modeled on Susette Gontard, dies soon afterwards. Hyperion finally retires to live as a hermit in unspoiled nature. His concluding comment is one of reconciliation (Unger, 1984, p 36):
Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt. Versohnung ist mitten im Streit und alles Getrennte findet sich wieder. Es scheiden und kehren im Herzen die Adern und einiges, ewiges, gliihendes Leben is Alles
[The dissonances of the world are like the quarrel of lovers. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife, and all things divided find each other again. The veins depart from and return to the heart, and a unified, eternal, glowing life is All.]
Hyperion’s Schicksalslied occurs after the battle of Chesma (Unger, 1984, p 36). It begins in awe of the gods and ends in despair.
Brahms’ Opus 54 (1871) provides a choral setting of this song. The following are two extracts as performed by the Runfunkchor Berlin conducted by Gijs Leenars with the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester: settings of the first and last verses:
Brahms added a beautiful adagio at the end of the song. Though criticized for trying to attenuate Hyperion’s despair, this movement fits the novel, which ends with a sense of reconciliation.
Fragments from the Tower
Most of the slivers of poetry that have been preserved from Hölderlin’s time in the tower have little meaning. Occasionally there are flashes that recall the aphorism of the younger poet:
Und wenig Wissen, aber der Freude viel Ist Sterblichen gegeben
And little knowledge, but joy enough Is given to mortals. Stuttgart Hölderlin Ausgabe 2.323 translated by Chernoff & Hoover
And some of the poetry from that time is genuinely beautiful. Much of it is in the form of simple rhymed verse, unlike the unrhymed hymns and odes of earlier days. One of his last poems, entitled Aussicht (Perspective), likens human life to the necessary passage of the seasons, a theme that recurs in much of Hölderlin’s poetry. Like much of his late work it is signed “Scardanelli” and dated to the preceding century:
Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben, Wo in die Ferne sich erglänzt die Zeit der Reben, Ist auch dabei des Sommers leer Gefilde, Der Wald erscheint mit seinem dunklen Bilde.
Daß die Natur ergänzt das Bild der Zeiten, Daß die verweilt, sie schnell vorübergleiten, Ist aus Vollkommenheit, des Himmels Höhe glänzet Den Menschen dann, wie Bäume Blüt umkränzet.
24 Mai 1748 Mit Untertänigkeit Scardanelli.
When the life that men live in passes faraway, Into that future season when the vines gleam, And the harvested fields lie empty, Then emerges the dark shadow of the forest.
Nature completes her picture of the seasons, And lingers while they quickly glide away, Out of perfection, and the high heavens then shine On men as if garlanding the trees with blossoms.
24 May 1748 Your humble servant Scardanellli
The above translation is mine. There are few other translations available, but see Agamben (2023, p 289), and Aleksi Barrière for versions in both French and English.
The following is a recitation of the poem by Hanns Zischler:
And a photograph of the actual manuscript of the poem:
Agamben (2023, pp 295-329) considers the various meanings of the phrase wohnend Leben (dwelling life) in the first line of the poem. He relates it to the idea of Christ’s incarnation from John 1:14:
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us …
We live in life for a brief time. Perhaps we come from elsewhere, and return there when we die. Agamben also considers the word “habit,” which comes from the word “inhabit,” which is close to “dwell” in its meaning. In German, the word gewohnt means “usual” or “habitual.” In a life of habit, one is affected by the world but does not try to change it. Such was Hölderlin’s time in the tower.
Stefan Zweig on Hölderlin’s Poetry
Hölderlin created some of our most exalted descriptions of nature and of the gods. His poetry is beautiful to read and to listen to. However, it often lacks the specificity of normal human experience. Hölderlin preferred the eternal to the everyday. His poetry may help us to understand the infinite, but provides little insight into our own finite lives. Stefan Zweig (1939, p 342) noted
Of the “four elements” known to the Greeks – fire, water, air, and earth – Hölderlin’s poetry has but three. There is lacking to it earth, the dark and clinging element, connective and formative, the emblem of plasticity and hardness. His verse is made of fire, the symbol of the ascent heavenward; it is light as air, perpetually athrill like the rustling breeze; it is transparent as water. In it scintillate the colours of the rainbow; it is ever in motion, rising and falling, the unceasing respiration of the creative mind. His poems have no anchorage in experience; they have no ties with the fertile earth; they are homeless and restless, scurrying clouds, sometimes tinged with the red dawn of enthusiasm and sometimes darkened with the shadow of melancholy, sometimes gathering into dense masses from which flash the lightnings and thunders of prophecy. Always they climb towards the zenith, towards the ethereal regions far from solid ground, beyond the immediate range of the senses.
Heidegger and Hölderlin
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher who contributed significantly to the existentialist movement. In Being and Time (1927), he focused on what it means to “be.” This question cannot be solved analytically but requires creative intuition. Thus, Heidegger was led to the idea that poetry determines the world through the words we use to describe it. The word “poetry” derives from the Greek poiesis making.
In his essay Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (1941), Heidegger discussed the meaning of the concluding lines to Hölderlin’s poem Andenken (Remembrance) which dealt with his visit to Bordeaux. The last sentence of the poem reads
Es nehmet aber Und giebt Gedächtniss die See, Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleissig die Augen, Was bliebet aber, stiften die Dichter.
[ But it is the sea That takes and gives remembrance And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, But what is lasting the poets provide. translated by Hamburger, 1998]
Another translation of the last line is “But what remains is founded by the poets.” Heidegger’s interpretation follows:
This line throws light on our question of the essence of poetry. Poetry is a founding by the word and in the word. What is established in this way? What remains. But how can what remains be founded? Is it not that which has always already been present? No! Precisely what remains must be secured against being carried away; the simple must be wrested from the complex, measure must be opposed to excess. What supports and dominates beings as a whole must come into the open. Being must be disclosed, so that beings may appear. . . .
The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become known as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. What endures is never drawn from the transient. What is simple can never be directly derived from the complex. Measure does not lie in excess. We never find the ground in the abyss. Being is never a being. But because being and the essence of things can never be calculated and derived from what is present at hand, they must be freely created, posited, and bestowed. Such free bestowal is a founding.
But when the gods are originally named and the essence of things comes to expression so that the things first shine forth, when this occurs, man’s existence is brought into a firm relation and placed on a ground. The poet’s saying is not only foundation in the sense of a free bestowal, but also in the sense of the firm grounding of human existence on its ground. If we comprehend this essence of poetry, that it is the founding of being in the word, then we can divine something of the truth of that verse which Hölderlin spoke long after he had been taken away into the protection of the night of madness. Heidegger (1941, pp 58-59)
As the Nazis came to power in Germany, Heidegger became an enthusiastic supporter. A major problem in evaluating his philosophy is to determine whether it can be considered independently of his politics. Did his philosophy make him more susceptible to fascism? When one poetically creates an idea of a perfect society, one must be careful to consider the means used to bring it into being.
Hölderlin and Nazi Propaganda
In Hölderlin’s time, the Holy Roman Empire no longer existed. Germany was a ragtag conglomeration of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics and city-states. In many of his poems, Hölderlin yearned for a unified Germany, a country that could carry on the ideas of both ancient Greece and revolutionary France. His patriotism was both fervent and critical: he was upset by the petty bourgeois squabbling of his countrymen. The following is the beginning of his Gesang des Deutschens (Song to the Germans) with a translation form Sharon Krebs:
The following is the last verse from Hölderlin’s Der Tod fürs Vaterland (Death for the Fatherland). It embodies the poet’s dedication to his idealized country:
The last three lines of this verse were engraved on the wall of the Langemarck-Halle, a memorial to the German soldiers who had died in World War I, included in the buildings for the 1936 Olympic Games.
During World War II, the Nazi government arranged for 100,000 copies of a special field edition of Hölderlin’s poetry to be printed and sent to soldiers at the front (Unger, 1988, pp 130-131; Savage, 2008; pp 6-7; Corngold & Waite, 2009). The poetry increased the morale of the soldiers and provided them with an excuse to die for their country.
How could Hölderlin’s poetry be dragooned into military service? As Savage (2008, p 6) asks
How then did the Nazis transform this scarcely militaristic poet, who never took up arms for his country, and spent the last four decades of his life in a state of spiritual benightedness, into a paragon of Prussian masculinity and patriotic self-sacrifice?
Hölderlin was not a proto-fascist. His poetry was popular not because it urged his readers toward the goals of the Nazis, but because it provided a respite from the suffering of the war:
He offered an inner sanctuary to which his readers could retreat to lick their wounds when confronted with the material deprivation, physical danger, and increasingly evident lack od freedom of everyday life under the Third Reich. (Savage, 2008, p 7).
Constantine (1988) remarked
There can be no doubt that Hölderlin was a patriot, but his patriotism was humane and not in the least militaristic. It included also—which is often overlooked—the wish first to achieve a homeland it would be a joy and a privilege to live in, one in which the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity would have been realized. (pp 221-222)
Hölderlin did not really care for politics. He could describe his poetic ideals but he was unable to state how they should be attained. Constantine (1988) remarks that the general tendency of German writers to be concerned with the spiritual rather than the political has been catastrophic:
The disparagement of politics by Germany’s artists and intellectuals left that sphere free for the men of blood and iron to run riot in. (p 222)
Paul Celan
Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Czernowitz, Romania, into a German-speaking Jewish family. His parents died in German concentration camps, and he was forced to work in a labor camp. After the war he made his way to Paris, where he lived until his suicide in 1970.
He wrote poetry in German, his mother tongue, despite the fact that the language had come to embody the evil and the suffering of Nazism. He fractured and distorted the language so that he could find the truth behind the words. Celan visited Tübingen in January (Jänner in dialect), 1961, and felt a great sympathy for Hölderlin, who also wrote in fragments and could not make himself understood. The result was the poem entitled Tübingen, Jänner, 1961
The poem is cryptic, and understanding may be helped by some notes from Joris (Celan, 2020, pp 469-471), and from Felstiner (1995, pp 172-174):
The first lines refer to the Hölderlin’s hymn Der Rhein, which states that the sons of God are the blindest of us all. Seeking to understand heaven may make one unaware of the real world. The poem then directly quotes (though in fractured form) that the source of purity is a mystery. Both Hölderlin and Celan relate the German word rein (pure) with the name of the river.
The next lines describe the tower in which Hölderlin spent the last half of his life: reflected in the Neckar River and circled by gulls.
Then we are introduced the carpenter Ernst Zimmer who was responsible for his basic care and who listened to his words.
The final verse likens Hölderlin to a patriarch or prophet with a beard that glowed. This may be a reference to the story that the face of Moses shone brightly when he came down from Sinai
And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him. And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him. (Exodus 34:29-30)
Although Moses was able to communicate the will of God to his people, the people of the present world cannot understand the words of their prophets or poets. We only hear and incoherent babbling. Pallaksch is a nonsense word that Hölderlin used to mean “yes” or “no,” or simply uttered as an exclamation.
The following is Celan’s poem together with a translation by Pierre Joris and a reading by Bruno Ganz:
Farewell
And so we take our leave of Hölderlin, a poet who described the indescribable to a people who failed to understand him. He was one of the main exemplars of the romantic tradition (de Man, 2012), a movement that considered subjectivity as paramount. He combined the new ideas about nature that began with Rousseau with the ideals of beauty that came from Ancient Greece. The French Revolution led not to a society of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but to the Terror of Robespierre and the wars of Napoleon. Hölderlin’s dream that melding the beauty of Greece to the revolution of France might bring forth a new and harmonious German society came to naught. Madness overtook his person; and a century later madness overtook Germany in the form of fascism. Yet the original dream was vivid and powerful, and it remains so.
Hölderlin’s Poems and Translations
Hölderlin, F. (translated Henderson, E., 1962) Alcaic poems. Oswald Wolff.
Hölderlin, F., & Mörike, E. F. (translated by Middleton, C., 1972). Selected poems. University of Chicago Press.
Hölderlin, F. (translated by Sieburth, R., 1984). Hymns and Fragments. Princeton.
Hölderlin, F. (edited by Santner, E. L., 1990). Hyperion and selected poems. Continuum.
Hölderlin, F. (translated Hamburger, M., 1998). Selected poems and fragments. Penguin Books.
Hölderlin, F. (translated by Chernoff, M., & Hoover, P., 2008). Selected poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. Omnidawn.
Agamben, G. (translated by A. L. Price, 2023). Hölderlin’s madness: chronicle of a dwelling life, 1806-1843. Seagull Books.
Barwinek, B. (2023). Expression in Josef Matthias Hauer’s piano music as exemplified by Klavierstücke mit Überschriften nach Worten von Friedrich Hölderlin Op. 25. Polski Rocznik Muzykologiczny, 21(1), 106–128.
Blanchot, M. (1951, reprinted 1995). Madness par excellence. In M. Holland (Ed.) The Blanchot Reader. (pp 110-128). Blackwells.
de Campos, H. (2007). Holderlin’s red word. In de Campos, H. (edited by A. S. Bessa & O. Cisneros). Novas: selected writings. (pp 327-333). Northwestern University Press.
Celan, P. (translated by Joris, P., 2020). Memory rose into threshold speech: the collected earlier poetry. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Constantine, D. J. (1988). Hölderlin. Clarendon.
Corngold, S., & Waite, G. (2009). A question of responsibility: Nietzsche with Hölderlin at war, 1914–1946. In Wistrich, R. S & Golomb, J. (Eds) Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (pp. 196-214). Princeton University Press.
Dilthey, W. (1910, translated by A. Grugan, reprinted, 1993). Hölderlin and the causes of his madness. Philosophy Today, 37(4), 341–352.
Felstiner, J. (1990). Paul Celan: poet, survivor, Jew. Yale University Press,
Heidegger, M. (1927, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson,1962). Being and time. Blackwell.
Heidegger, M. (1941, translated by Hoeller, K., 2000). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. Humanity Books.
Horowski, R. (2017). The “madness” of Friedrich Hölderlin: an iatrogenic intoxication. Journal of Neural Transmission, 124(6), 761–763.
Jakobson, R., & Lübbe-Grothues, G. Ein Blick auf die Aussicht von Hölderlin. (1980/2010). In Jakobson, R. (ed. Rudy, S.) Selected Writings. Volume III, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (pp. 388–448). De Gruyter. [Part of this essay translated in Jakobson, R., Lübbe-Grothues, G., & Kitron, S. (1980). The language of schizophrenia: Hölderlin’s speech and poetry. Poetics Today, 2(1a), 137–144.]
de Man, P. (2012). Hölderlin and the romantic tradition. Diacritics, 40(1), 100–129. [original lecture 1959]
Warren, R. (1996). Alcaics in exile: W.H. Auden’s “In memory of Sigmund Freud.” Philosophy and Literature, 20(1), 111–121.
Zweig, S. (1939, translated 2017). Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: the struggle with the daemon. Routledge.
Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction
Bridget Riley (1931- ) came to fame in the early 1960s with her striking black-and-white abstract paintings, which were paintings were included in an important exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled The Responsive Eye (1965-66). After her first success, she moved on to colored abstract paintings and prints that infuse the viewer with a sense of movement.
Beginnings
Riley studied art at Goldsmith’s College and the Royal College of Art, but found no clear inspiration until she attended a summer school organized by Harry Thubron and Maurice de Sausmarez in 1959. She became intrigued by the pointillism of Georges Seurat, and made a careful copy of his 1887 painting Le Pont de Courbevoie in order to understand the relations between the colors (Spicer, 2015):
Maurice de Sausmarez
De Sausmarez, a charismatic teacher of art and design, was particularly intrigued by the way in which force and motion could be portrayed graphically. His teachings were presented in his 1964 book Basic Design: The Dynamics of Visual Form. In his introduction to the book (p 16) he summarizes the goal of his teaching:
to examine the rudimentary forces brought into being through graphic marks, dimensional relationships, juxtaposed colours, etc, leaving to the individual’s talent and temperament the terms in which he expresses himself. It is the counterpart to mastering the elementary signs of a language, formation and relationship to create coherences, but, by comparison, the primary forces operating in the act of looking provide us with prodigious subtlety and variety Furthermore visual coherence is more related to our neural and psycho-physiological being than to our processes of intellection. It is for this reason that we cannot describe or define this coherence, we can only acknowledge it when it is experienced through feeling. Optical forces are continuously operative, forces of attraction and repulsion, of expansion and contraction according to the situation of shapes and colours presented to our eyes. As we have already noted, sight is more than the mere optical stimulation of the retina by haphazard light rays, which the mind concurrently organizes into spatial units. It is virtually impossible to perceive units isolated from and unaffected by the context in which they appear. Relationship is inescapable and this makes the act of looking a dynamic experience.
In 1959 he and Riley began an affair, travelling together to Portugal and later to Italy. In Italy they attended an exhibition of Italian Futurism at the Venice Biennale. The following is a painting by Giacomo Balla: Abstract: Speed + Sound (1913):
In his biography of her early life, Moorhouse (2019, pp 200-201) describes how Riley came to her ideas about dynamism in black and white in Venice in 1960
Taking a respite from the day’s summer heat, the two stopped at a café and lingered at their table. Idling in this way, Bridget was greatly taken by the tessellated pattern of black-and-white floor tiles that lay around them. With its abutting squares the rigid geometry of the design caught her eye and she surveyed the arrangement with a half-conscious pleasure. Then, as sometimes happens, without warning the sky quickly became overcast and a torrential downpour ensued. With growing fascination, she watched as the exposed floor pattern was fractured by the beating rain. Consumed by spreading pools of water, the chequerboard design gradually dissolved, the lines and squares dancing in chaotic movement. Transfixed, she observed a firm structure as it became convulsed and then finally trans-formed into its opposite: a pliable, plastic surface that undulated and writhed. Within minutes the mirage had run its course. The sky cleared and, with the return of intense sunlight, the ground dried and the linear structure reappeared. Insignificant in itself, the spectacle had existed only briefly. Yet at some deeper level this optical event made a lasting impression.
Ruth Padel
The poet Ruth Padel described Riley’s experiences in Venice in 1960 in a long poem entitled Butterfly Landing on a Painting by Bridget Riley. The poem, published in Voodoo Shop (2002, pp 43-51), was triggered by a large swallowtail butterfly alighting near her: an “unfolded scrap of animate origami.” The butterfly evoked memories of her recently deceased father, who had been an amateur lepidopterist. Its black and white stipes also brought to mind the early paintings of Bridget Riley. She imagined Riley and de Sausmarez in Venice in 1960 in a section of the poem entitled Rain. The text of the poem is followed by its recitation by the poet.
A sudden squall of rain in the piazza. It’s 1960. Venice. The dark girl, knocking back Camparis with her lover (Old enough to be her dad; the centre of everything she is), Has won a prize. She’s twenty-nine, all go, And flirting with Hard Edge Abstractionism. He thinks she’s difficult, and young. They’re splitting up. She doesn’t know.
Together, they’ve explored the Futurists. They tried to visit Gino Severini, Futurism’s founder, but he won’t be seen, he’s Ill. Now she’s drawing on the table, arguing. ‘Shapes that flow Through space destroy the world as you and I Perceive it.’ But her voice is shrill.
He’s playing teacher, lecturing on The inner life of colour. She’s saying, too Loud and wrong, somehow, That losing certainty of line could change Things for a painter, rearrange him, set him free (She still says ‘he’), ‘or whisk Him off to places he never dreamed he’d see.’
You can hear how young — you want to fold her in Your arms, make her slow down — But you love the flinging out: the risk. More Camparis. He forgives The arguing for now; until they’re home. What she’s really up to Is watching how rain turns
All this Renaissance paving — midnight geometry Of star and parallelogram, black granite set rnilkstone from the cold Carrara ridge — To a swirl of snake-skin Runnels. Chaos physics. In herself, only half-aware, she’s marvelling How a thing that seemed so certain
Can in a flash, a moment, fall to bits. She’s no idea This will change the way we see. Rain stops — the flagstones dry — that pristine, seven- Point clarity comes back. But her eyes have taken in How pattern, safe curtain Of the given world, can buckle, go Molten on you, disappear.
Afterwards, she’ll see it everywhere, a witchy spell On pell-mell dying leaves Or zebra crossings over Russell Square, And sloping glass of a Ford Popular’s rear window Where it slippingly reflects The dark-pale-dark of bedrooms in Imperial Hotel. It’ll stay with her, unnoticed, when he’s left.
The next section of Padel’s poem is entitled Kiss:
He’s gone. She can’t believe it, can’t go on. She’s going to give up painting. So she paints Her final canvas, total-turn-off Black. One long Obsidian goodbye. A charcoal-burner’s Smirnoff, The mirror of Loch Ness Reflecting the monster back to its own eye.
But something’s wrong. Those mad Black-body particles don’t sing Her story of despair, the steel and Garnet spindle Of the storm. This black has everything its own sweet way, Where’s the I’d-like-to-kill-you Conflict? Try once more, but this time add
A curve to all that straight. And opposition — White. She paints black first. A grindstone belly Hammering a smaller shape Beneath a snake Of in-betweening light. ‘I feel like this. I hope that you do, too, Black crater. Screw you. Kiss.’
And sees a voodoo flicker, where two worlds nearly touch And miss. That flash, where white Lets black get close, that dagger of not-quite contact, Catspaw panic, quiver on the wheat Field before thunder — There. That’s it. That’s her own self, in paint, Splitting what she was from what she is. As if everything that separates, unites.
The painting Kiss (1961) shows two large black shapes, one straight, one curved, almost coming together. The point of their almost contact is scintillating.
Riley’s affair with de Sausmarez came to an end, but the two remained friends. De Sausmarez wrote the text for the first monograph on Bridget Riley’s work, published in 1970, just after his death. He remarked about the painting Kiss (de Sausmarez, 1970, p 16):
the ‘blink’ or ‘flash’ in the white area where the two massive, sensuous, black shapes nearly touch, and the fractional ‘together and apart’ movement of the straight and curved dividing lines.
A second painting from 1961 awas entitled Movement in Squares:
Optical Art
Riley’s paintings are often considered as representative of Op or Optical Art. Op Art
relies for its effect on certain physiological processes in the eye and brain which we are not normally aware of either in ordinary vision or in looking at other works of art. (Barrett, 1971, p 9)
Typically composed of black-and-white or high contrast colors, the pictures can provide striking sensations of motion, depth, and color. Viktor Vasarely (1906-1997) was one of the early leaders of this field. Some have attributed Op Art effects to visual illusions, although a better term might be simply visual “phenomena” (Wade, 1978), since it is sometimes difficult to determine what is real and what is an illusion. De Sausmarez (1970, p 16) commented on Riley’s understanding:
For Bridget Riley there is no such thing as optical illusion since this would imply the censorship of visual experience by factual measurement. Cobalt blue on a white ground is not the same colour as cobalt blue on a black ground despite the fact that in both instances the pigment may have been squeezed from the same tube labelled ‘cobalt blue.’ For Riley what is visually experienced is the optical reality.
Riley considers the term “perceptual abstraction” to be the best way of characterizing her art (Riley et al 2022).
Movement
Riley soon began to use curves to present contrasts and motion. The following is Arrest 2 (1965):
A more complex color experience is found in Drift 1 (1966):
De Sausmarez (1970, p 92) remarked
A cold tone remains constant over the whole area, while from left to right a warm sequence moving at two rates gives rise to warm/cold contrast, gradually changing to light/dark contrast in the central area and moving away again into warm/cold contrast. Diagonal movements at two different speeds power-fully influence the curving bands flowing from top to bottom. The climax of the tonal sequence and the climax of the curve movements are at variance.
Color and Movement
Over the years, Riley began to concentrate more on the relations between colors, in keeping with her initial interest in the paintings of Seurat. The following is New Day (1988):
Mor recently she has attempted to show movement through the shapes of colors, in keeping with the work of the Futurists. Below is Arcadia 3 (2011):
Conclusion
We can end with some photographs of Riley demonstrating the movement in her painting After Rajasthan, taken by Horst Kurschat in 2013 (MacRitchie et al., 2020, p 22-3)
References
Barrett, C. (1971). An introduction to optical art. Studio Vista.
de Sausmarez, M. (1964). Basic design: the dynamics of visual form. Reinhold.
de Sausmarez, M. (1970). Bridget Riley. Studio Vista.
MacRitchie, L., Hartley, C., Kudielka, R., Tommasini, A., Gubay, R. (2020). Bridget Riley: the complete prints 1962-2020. (Fifth revised and expanded edition. Thames and Hudson.
Moorhouse, P. (2019). Bridget Riley: a very, very person, the early years. Ridinghouse.
Moorhouse, P. (2003). Bridget Riley. Tate Gallery
Padel, R. (2002). Voodoo shop. Chatto & Windus.
Riley, B. (2019). Bridget Riley: dialogues on art (3rd edition.). Bridget Riley Art Foundation.
Riley, B. (edited by R. Kudielka, 2019). The eye’s mind: Bridget Riley, collected writings 1965-2019 (3rd edition.). Bridget Riley Art Foundation.
Wade, N. J. (1978) Op art and visual perception. Perception 7, 21-46.
Wade, N. J. (2003). Movements in art: From Rosso to Riley. Perception, 32(9), 1029–1036.
Words and Music: Schubert and Goethe
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) died young, but not before he was able to compose music that has become justly famous. As well as symphonies, piano works, sacred music, and chamber works, he composed over 600 songs or Lieder. This essay considers a few of his over 70 settings for poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Lifeof Schubert
Schubert was born and died in Vienna. His father, a teacher, recognized his gift for music and arranged for him to obtain a scholarship to the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary), where he received special training from Anton Salieri. After leaving the seminary, Schubert supported himself by teaching at his father’s school, giving music lessons (notably to the daughters of Count Esterházy), and by writing music for the theater and the church. Ultimately, he was able to publish his own works. The etching by Joseph Kupelwieser on the right shows Schubert in 1821. The following illustration shows a watercolor portrait of Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder from 1825:
Schubert developed numerous friends among the nobility, and among the singers and actors who entertained them. Joseph von Spaun, an important patron, hosted many musical evenings for Schubert and his friends. These became known as the “Schubertiades.” The following oil sketch is by Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871). He had attended one of the Schubertiades as a young man and painted this from memory in 1868. Schubert is at the piano and the baritone, Johann Michael Vogl, is singing one of his songs.
Erlkönig
One of Schubert’s earliest songs was a setting for Goethe’s 1782 poem Erlkönig. Goethe adapted the story an old Danish ballad wherein the daughter of the King of the Fairies chases after a man she desires. Goethe’s poemtells the story of how a man rides through the night holding his young son in his arms. The Erlkönig desires the beautiful young boy for his own, and cajoles him to come away with him. Though the boy sees and hears the Erlkönig, his father dismisses his claims as illusions. Finally, the Erlkönig, unable to convince the child to come with him, takes the child by force. The father arrives home. His son is dead.
The poem deals with the mortality of children. Schubert’s mother gave birth to 14 children but only 5 survived infancy. No matter how fast one’s father rode, death claimed most children as his own. The poem also considers the nature of evil and desire: the powerful Erlkönig will have the child, no matter what. Desire triumphs: innocence is no defence.
The poem uses four distinct voices: the narrator, the father, the son, and the Erlkönig, These are shown in different colors in the following text:
Schubert composed his setting for Erlkönig in 1815 (Deutsch catalogue number 328). In 1821 it became his first published piece of music: Opus 1. The song is for one vocalist, but distinguishes the four different voices of the poem through different rhythmic and harmonic characteristics. In addition, the piano provides a fifth part: throughout the song, the right hand repeats in triplets the hoofbeats of the fleeing horse, while the left hand portrays its frantic breathing (Bodley, 2023, pp 166-171; Gorrell, 1993, pp 112-116; Newbould, 1997, pp 57-59). Both singer and accompanist arrive totally exhausted at the ballad’s end. The following shows the score for bars 10 to 21 of the song.
Below are performances by Sarah Walker accompanied on piano by Graham Johnson, and by Thomas Quasthoff accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe led by Claudio Abbado in an arrangement by Max Reger from 1914
Gretchen am Spinnrade
Goethe’s Faust (1808, lines 3374-3414) included a ballad sung by Gretchen (Margarete) who sits at her spinning wheel and thinks about her lover Faust:
Mephistopheles is helping Faust to seduce the young and beautiful Gretchen. Gretchen is in love but feels intense anxiety. She will soon become pregnant and tragedy will ensue. Goethe partially based the story of Gretchen on the life of Susanna Margaretha Brandt, who was seduced, gave birth to an illegitimate child, murdered her child, and was then executed for infanticide in Frankfurt in 1772 (Birkner, 1999).
Schubert’s setting of the song (D 118) was written in 1814 and later published as his Opus 2 in 1821. The piano accompaniment provides the rhythms of the spinning wheel in the right hand and the treadle in the left hand:
The song is a bravura representation of passion and foreboding (Bodley, 2023, pp160-166) The following is a performance by Dawn Upshaw with Richard Goode on piano.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was an early champion of Schubert’s Lieder. In 1835-39, he published piano transcriptions of 12 Schubert Songs (S558). The piano arrangement of Gretchen am Spinnrade (S558/8) includes an extra introduction, some thickening of the chords, and raising the “vocal” pitch by an octave for the last verse. The following is a performance by Idil Birit:
Gesang des Harfners
In Book 2 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister” 1808), Wilhelm searches out the lodgings of an old harpist, named Augustin, and listens to him singing. On the right is an illustration by William Sharp from the Heritage edition of the book. The words of the song are shown below in German and in a literal translation. Below these versions is the wildly poetic translation of Thomas Carlyle for the first English translation of Geothe’s book
Schubert composed several settings for this song. The following version (D 480, 2; 1816), with tenor John Mark Ainsley accompanied by Graham Johnson, is a youthful questioning of theological implications of human suffering. If God is good and merciful, why do we have to suffer? When we make mistakes, why cannot we be forgiven?
A later version (D 480, 3; 1822) presents the song more as tragedy than as question. This setting is performed by baritone Thomas Quasthoff with Charles Spencer on piano.
Mignons Gesang
In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Mignon is a traumatized young girl af 12 or 13 years, who was kidnaped in Italy and brought to Germany to perform with a theater troupe. She communicates only by song and dance. Wilhelm adopts her as his own child. In one of her songs, accompanied by the old harpist, she describes the feeling of longing for something that she cannot attain. The illustration on the right is by William Sharp. The words of her song are given below in German, in a literal English translation, and in a poetic translation by Thomas Carlyle:
The following is a performance of Schubert’s setting of Mignon’s song (D877) by Nancy Argenta accompanied by Melvyn Tan on fortepiano:
Wandrers Nachtlied
Goethe wrote his first Wanderer’s Nightsong in 1776. He had just become a courtier in Weimar and he sent this poem of youthful unrest to Charlotte von Stein, a lady in waiting at the court. The following is the German text and an English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Schubert’s musical setting (D 224, 1815) accentuates the tranquility of the poem’s ending rather than the suffering at its beginning. He changed Erquickung (refreshment) to Entzückung (delight). As Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau remarked (1976, pp 43-44),
Anyone asking for peace in this fashion must have already found it.
The following is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s performance of the song with Jörg Demus on piano
And the illustration below gives the autograph:
Goethe wrote a second Wandrers Nachtlied in 1780 on the wall of a gamekeeper’s lodge where he stayed the night while hiking in the hills just outside of Ilmenau. Goethe visited the same lodge in 1831 just a few months before his death and recognized his writing on the wall. The following is the German text of the poem together with an English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The illustration below shows the poet as a young courtier in 1779 (Georg May) and as a venerated sage in 1828 (Joseph Stieler):
Schubert composed a setting for the poem (D 768) in 1822. At that time, he was 25 years old, younger than Goethe when he wrote the poem (31 years). The music beautifully presents the poet’s yearning for peace. The following is a performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Jörg Demus on piano:
And the following is the song as performed by Kian Soltani on cello accompanied by Aaron Pilsan:
Life and Death
Schubert contracted syphilis in 1822. Over the next few years, despite treatment with mercurials, the disease progressed, and by 1828 had begun to involve the nervous system. In 1829 Schubert developed typhoid fever and this finally caused his death at the age of 31 years (Mckay, 1996, Chapter 12; Bevan 1998). Goethe was troubled throughout his life by a bipolar mood disorder but survived into his eighties (Steinberg & Schönknecht, 2020). Though he was born 48 years before Schubert, he died four years later than the young composer. Death comes when it must and pays no heed to genius.
References
Bevan. P. G. (1998). Adversity: Schubert’s illnesses and their background. In B. Newbould (Ed.) Schubert Studies. (pp. 244–266). Routledge.
Birkner, S. (1999). Goethes Gretchen: das Leben und Sterben der Kindsmörderin Susanna Margaretha Brandt. Insel.
Bodley, L. B. (2023). Schubert: a musical wayfarer. Yale University Press.
Fischer-Dieskau, D. (1971, translated by K. S. Whitton, 1976). Schubert: a biographical study of his songs. Cassell.
von Goethe, J. W. (1796, translated by Thomas Carlyle, 1824, reprinted with illustrations by William Sharp, 1959) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Heritage Press.
von Goethe, J. W. (1808, translated by W. Kaufman, 1961). Faust. Doubleday.
von Goethe, J. W. (translated by Luke, D., 2005). Selected poetry. Penguin.
Gorrell, L. (1993). The nineteenth-century German lied. Amadeus Press.
McKay, E. N. (1996). Franz Schubert: a biography. Oxford University Press.
Newbould, B. (1997). Schubert, the music and the man. University of California Press.
Steinberg, H., & Schönknecht, P. (2020). Goethe: A bipolar personality? Periodicity of affective states in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as reflected by Paul Julius Möbius. Journal of Medical Biography, 28(3), 174–180.
Wilson, A. N. (2024). Goethe: his Faustian life. Bloomsbury Continuum.
Some of the Evil of my Tale: Lawrence of Arabia
In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.
Early Life
Lawrence’s father Sir Thomas Chapman (1846-1919) was a gentleman landowner in Ireland, who had married a vindictively religious wife and fathered four daughters. In the late 1870s he hired a young Scotswoman, Sarah Lawrence, as a governess for his daughters. He soon fell in love with Sarah, who became pregnant and gave birth to a son in 1885. After his wife finally found out, Chapman decided to leave his family and moved with Sarah to Wales, where he assumed her surname for the sake of respectability. In 1888, Thomas Edward, was born. Three more sons were born and in 1896 the “family” settled in Oxford, where Lawrence and his brothers attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
Lawrence read history at Jesus College in Oxford. His honors thesis on the architecture of the Crusader castles (Lawrence, 1910) was based on a 3-month walking tour of Ottoman Syria in the summer of 1909. The main conclusion of the thesis was that Crusader castles followed the principles of European fortifications and did not absorb any influences from local architecture. The illustration below shows Lawrence’s pen-and-ink sketch of the south-east corner of Sahyun castle.
Selim Ahmed
After graduating in 1910, Lawrence joined an archeological expedition to Carchemish to investigate the remains of the Hittite civilization (2nd millennium BCE), staying there until the outbreak of the war in 1914. While in Carchemish he took an intelligent young Arab boy, Selim Ahmed (1896-1918), nicknamed “Dahoum” (dark one), as his apprentice (Sattin, 2014, pp 200-202; Wilson 1989, pp 543-545). Selim nursed him during a severe attack of dysentery in 1911. For the last three years of Lawrence’s time in Syria, the two of them lived together, Lawrence teaching Selim mathematics, English and photography, and Selim helping Lawrence with his Arabic. Their relationship was intense; no one knows whether it remained platonic or became physical. The following paired photographs show Lawrence (left) trying on Selim’s clothes.
In the introductory chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935, pp 39-40) Lawrence recalled a visit in 1912 with Dahoum to the Qasr of Ibn Wardan, a 6th Century Byzantine castle built by Justinian I near Hama in northern Syria (Sattin, 2024, pp 164-165 provides an earlier version of the story).
The common base of the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.
But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
The Canadian poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, wrote a set of poems about T. E. Lawrence. In one she recounts the visit to the Qasr of Ibn Wardani. The poem ends
We call this room the sweetest of them all,
You said.
And I thought: Because there is nothing here.
I knew then that you possessed nothing of me, and I possessed nothing of you, Dahoum. You were wealthy and stuffed with a wondrous nothing that filled the room and everything around.
You looked into my eyes, the windows to my soul, and said that because they were blue You could see right through them, holes in my skull, to the quiet powerful sky beyond.
While he was in Carchemish, Lawrence began writing a book entitled Seven Pillars of Wisdom about the major cities of the Middle East (Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, Constantinople, Damascus, Smyrna, and Medina). The title comes from Proverbs 9:1:
Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars
“Seven” had no specific meaning: it was just considered an auspicious number. Lawrence never completed the book and destroyed the drafts that he had written. He was later to use the title for his memoir of the Arab Revolt.
Soon after the war began, Lawrence enlisted and served in Cairo as an intelligence officer. Dahoum was given a stipend to stay at Carchemish to watch over the archeological site. Their halcyon days in northern Syria came to an end.
Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom to S. A. He never explained who this was but almost everyone now agrees that it was Selim Ahmed (see Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 184-188, for reasoning). The book is prefaced with a poem to S. A. that begins
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house that your eyes might be shining for me When we came.
Dahoum died of typhus in 1918 before the Arab and British forces reached Damascus. Lawrence appears to have found this out in one of his trips behind the enemy lines. The epilogue to Seven Pillars of Wisdom begins
Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia: but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus.
Selim Ahmad was the private passion driving Lawrence as he led the Arab forces in their search for freedom.
The Beginnings of the Arab Revolt
In June, 2016, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, rebelled against Ottoman rule in the Hejaz (the western region of the Arabian Peninsula). By July his forces had captured the holy city of Mecca and the port of Jeddah. However, the Turks repulsed the Arabs when they tried to take Medina. The British hoped that the Arab Revolt would pin down Ottoman troops, and thereby assist the British in their advance into Palestine. In correspondence with Hussein, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, made vague assurances of support for a self-governing Arabia from Palestine to the Indian Ocean and from Aleppo to Aden. The British likely thought that Husein’s revolt would not succeed, and that they would therefore not be required to fulfil their promises. Nevertheless, they sent Captain T. E. Lawrence to be a liaison officer with Hussein in October 1917. He identified Hussein’s son, Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, as the best leader of the Arab forces. Together they gathered together warriors from other tribes, and received supplies from the British in the Red-Sea ports of Yanbu and Weijh.
Faisal suggested that it would be much more comfortable for Lawrence to wear Arab clothes (see photograph on right):
Suddenly Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal’s tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert. Hejris [Faisal’s slave] was pleased, too, and exercised his fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments which had been sent to Feisal lately (was it a hint?) by his great-aunt in Mecca (Lawrence, 1935, p 126).
The following photograph shows the Arab forces at Yanbu with Faisal at the head and Lawrence (in his new white robes) on a camel behind him.
Aqaba
In early 1917, Lawrence convinced Auda Abu Tayeh, known as the “Desert Falcon”, to join the Arab Revolt. Auda was the leader of the Howeitat, a Bedouin tribe in the western part of the Arabian desert. Auda, Sharif Nasr of Syria, Lawrence, and a group of about 50 fighters undertook an arduous journey from Wejh north into the desert. This journey was a clandestine route toward the port of Aqaba. If the Turks noted the Arabian forces, they would likely believe that they were headed further north toward Amman or Damascus. As thy came out of the desert, they attracted many local Arabs to their cause so that their numbers swelled to several hundred. They then turned toward the southwest, crossed the railway and attacked Aqaba. The map below shows the Arab route in purple. The port was impregnable from the sea – the British Royal Navy had unsuccessfully tried to take the city earlier in the war. However, it was not well defended from a land attack. Led by Auda and Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Aqaba in July 2017. The attack on Aqaba was one of the great scenes in David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. For the film, the town was recreated on a beach in Spain:
After the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence and a few Arab companions rode by camel across the Sinai desert to Suez (dotted purple line on the map). He arranged for the British Navy to send money and supplies to Aqaba and to take the prisoners of war back to Egypt.
The British had not suggested that Lawrence urge the Arabs to capture Aqaba. Lawrence was acting on his own recognizance. The British likely wanted the Arab Revolt to stay confined to the southern regions of the Hejaz. The victory at Aqaba was crucial to the success of the Arab Revolt. Thenceforth, British could supply the Arabs as they moved northward toward Damascus.
The illustrations below show photographs of a flag bearer at the actual battle of Aqaba, and of Lawrence on his camel after the victory.
After returning to Aqaba from Egypt, Lawrence spent time in Wadi Rum with Faisal, who had come to join the forces of Auda in Aqaba. Wadi Rum was soon to serve as the base for the armored cars that the British supplied to aid the Arabs. The following photographs show the striking granite and sandstone cliffs around the Wadi and a spring that Lawrence found.
Lawrence (1935, p 355) described the spring:
From this rock a silver runlet issued into the sunlight. I looked in to the spout, a little thinner than my wrist, jetting out firmly from a fissure in the roof, and falling with that clean sound into a shallow, frothing pool, behind the step which served as entrance. The walls and roof of the crevice dripped with moisture. Thick ferns and grasses of the finest green made it a paradise just five feet square. Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away.
In Aqaba the Arab factions consolidated into a formidable fighting force. The main leaders of the Arab Revolt are illustrated below (photos from Arab Revolt website):
Asraq
After Aqaba was taken, Lawrence and the Arab forces moved to the north. Beginning in late 1917 Lawrence used the ruins of Qasr al Asraq about 100 km east of Amman as a desert base for attacking the Hejaz Railway and the Turkish troops that tried to keep it open.
The oasis of Asraq had been used since Roman times, though the present ruins date from 1237 CE when ‘Izz ad-Din Aybak built a fortress there using basalt stone. Lawrence was particularly impressed by the huge stone doors in the gatehouse. Though each door weighed more than a ton they still swung shut:
The door was a poised slab of thick basalt, a foot thick, turning on pivots of itself, socketed into threshold and lintel. It took a great effort to start swinging and at the end went shut with a clang and crash which made tremble the west wall of the old castle (Lawrence, 1935, p 436)
Asraq was an oasis that the northern end of the Wadi Sirhan, the ancient trading route between Syria and Dumat-al Jandal in Arabia. Lawrence was fascinated by the site and its relation to the ancient (5th– and 6th Century CE) Syrian kingdoms of Ghassan and Hira:
Then the blue fort on its rock above the rustling palms, with the fresh meadows and shining springs of water, broke on our sight. Of Azrak, as of Rumm, one said ‘Numen inest’. Both were magically haunted: but whereas Rumm was vast and echoing and God-like, Azrak’s unfathomable silence was steeped in knowledge of wandering poets, champions, lost kingdoms, all the crime and chivalry and dead magnificence of Hira and Ghassan. Each stone or blade of it was radiant with half-memory of the luminous, silky Eden, which had passed so long ago. (Lawrence, 1935, p 414).
The following illustration shows some recent photographs from the site:
The following are two of Lawrence’s own photographs from his time in Asraq: one showing the explosion of a mine on the Hejaz Railway near Deraa and one showing the fort at Asraq:
The Incident in Deraa
The crucial episode in Lawrence’s account of the Arab Revolt in Seven Pillars of Wisdom happened in Deraa in late November, 1917. According to Lawrence (1935, Chapter 80), he went there dressed in Arab clothes together with Faris, an elderly Arab, to reconnoiter the approaches to the railway station. He was arrested by a Turkish soldier (who ignored his companion), and taken to the barracks. There he was cleaned up and, in the evening, presented to the Turkish governor (or ‘Bey’), who called him beautiful and fondled him. Lawrence vehemently rejected these advances, and was sent out for a beating to teach him “everything.” After a horrific whipping and a beating that apparently progressed to rape, Lawrence was taken back to the governor, who waved him off as “too torn and bloody for his bed.” After his wounds were treated, Lawrence was left alone. He escaped and made his painful way back to Asraq. The following passages describing his experience in Deraa are from Chapter 80 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935):
To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together. Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in its time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. After the corporal ceased, the men took up, very deliberately, giving me so many, and then an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, and play unspeakably with me. This was repeated often, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. Always for the first of every new series, my head would be pulled round, to see how a hard white ridge, like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke, with a bead of blood where two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterance. …
I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up; and this was true, for next day my right side was dark and lacerated, and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One giggled with amusement. A voice cried, ‘Shame, you’ve killed him’. Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black: while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang. By the bruises perhaps they beat me further: but I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third man rode me astride. It was momently better than more flogging.
Lawrence concluded the account by stating that
the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.
The incident was not mentioned in the early biographies (Thomas, 1924, Graves, 1927) and was omitted from Revolt in the Desert (Lawrence, 1927). Lidell Hart (1934) describes the beating but makes no mention of rape.
Richard Meinertzhagen (1959, pp 31-33) reported a conversation with Lawrence in 1922:
He went on to describe the indecency and degradation he suffered at the hands of the homosexual Turks. He did not intend to publish the true account of this incident as it was too degrading, ‘had penetrated his innermost nature’ and he lived in constant fear that the true facts would be known. He had been seized, stripped and bound; then sodomized by the governor of Deraa, followed by similar treatment by the Governor’s servants. After this revolting behaviour he had been flogged.
Meinertzhagen reported seeing scars on Lawence’s back: Lawrence attributed these wounds to being dragged across barbed wire in a camel accident. Unfortunately, the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s report of his encounter with Lawrence has been questioned (Lockman, 1995).
When putting together the first version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922, Lawrence wrote to his publisher Edward Garnett
If that Deraa incident whose treatment you call severe and serene (the second sounds like a quaint failure to get my impressions across, but I know what you feel) had happened to yourself you would not have recorded it. I have a face of brass perhaps, but I put it into print very reluctantly, last of all the pages I sent to the press. For weeks I wanted to burn it in the manuscript: because I could not tell the story face to face with anyone, and I think I’ll feel sorry, when I next meet you, that you know it. The sort of man I have always mixed with doesn’t so give himself away. (Lawrence, 1938, p 358)
In a later letter to Charlotte Shaw in March 1924, Lawrence wrote
About that night. I shouldn’t tell you. because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect … which wouldn’t. hasn’t, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with — our bodily integrity. Its an unforgivable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents. (Lawrence, 2000, p 70).
What actually happened in Deraa is not known. In the play Ross by Terence Rattigan (1960), the Turkish governor recognizes Lawrence. He instigates the beating in order to break the spirit of the man, something he considers preferable to making him a martyr. Though this is an intriguing speculation, it remains just that.
David Lean’s 1962 movie followed Lawrence’s account but showed only the beating. Jeremy Wilson’s careful and exhaustive biography (1989) accepts that what Lawrence reported actually happened. Other episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom accord reasonably well with the historical record despite occasional exaggerations. For example, the camel ride from Aqaba to Suez was an impressive feat but it actually took longer than Lawrence described.
Lawrence’s recounting of the event in Deraa is overwrought. Some things could not have happened the way they were described. Lawrence could not have seen the effects of the whip on his back. The Bey in Deraa at that time was not known to be a homosexual: according to Lawrence James (1990. p 213), he appears to have been more of a womanizer. Some biographers (Barr, 2008) have therefore speculated that the episode was imagined. Desmond Stewart (1977, p 244) suggested that Lawrence’s report was a “transubstantiation” of a sadomasochistic relationship with Sharif Ali ibn al Hussein, but there is no evidence for this. Aldington (1955) accused Lawrence of exaggerating his military exploits, but still chose to accept that he was tortured and raped at Deraa (see Crawford, 1998, for how Aldington’s book was denigrated by supporters of Lawrence). Korda’s biography Hero (2010) quotes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and comments on the beating and the rape (p 349):
There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident – on the contrary, it seems like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918 and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.
Later in his life, Lawrence submitted himself to ritual beatings as a form of penance (Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 219-254; Simpson, 2008, p 286-299). However, we do not know if this type of activity predated Deraa, or occurred as a result of his experience there. My personal opinion is that Deraa was the beginning of Lawrence’s masochism.
The Deraa episode is so striking that it requires interpretation. That he was tortured and raped during his captivity there makes sense with the strange and broken life that Lawrence was to lead after the war. This was likely why he included it in his book – as explanation and exculpation.
The Road to Damascus
While the Arab forces were harrying the Turks in the inland desert, General Edmund Allenby led British and Commonwealth forces across Sinai and into Palestine. The campaign was a marvel of logistics since the forces had to be constantly supplied with water, food and ammunition through a desert region with no railways. After several major battles with Turkish and German troops, Allenby prevailed and Jerusalem surrendered on December 9, 2017. Two days later, Allenby entered the city through the Jaffa Gate. He came on foot to show appropriate reverence for the holy city. This was the first time that Jerusalem had not been under Muslim rule since 1247.
The following illustration shows a photograph of Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem and a 1918 portrait of the general by James McBey.
In February of 1918 Lowell Thomas, an American journalist met Lawrence in Jerusalem. The two men intrigued each other. On Lawrence’s invitation, Thomas came to Aqaba, bringing with him the camera man Henry Chase. Over the next several months Thomas and Chase reported Lawrence’s exploits in the desert. The film clips and slides later formed the basis for a multimedia show “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia” that toured America and England in the years following the war. The name and the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia” derives mainly from Thomas. Lawrence was ambivalent about his relationship to Thomas (Crawford & Berton, 1996). On the one hand he was fascinated by fame; on the other he wanted anonymity. Lawrence did not mention Thomas in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The illustration below (from Thomas, 1924) shows a photograph of the two of them in Aqaba in March 1918, and Lowell’s portrait of Lawrence in London in 1919.
As the Arab forces grew in strength and experience, they became able to face the Turks in fixed battles as well as guerilla attacks. Their first main encounter was at Tafileh just south of the Dead Sea in January 1918. After multiple attacks, retreats and counter-attacks, the Arabs prevailed. The surviving Turks were pursued toward the railway:
As we turned back it began to snow; and only very late, and by a last effort did we get our hurt men in. The Turkish wounded lay out, and were dead next day. It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war: but no special reproach lay on us for it. We risked our lives in the blizzard (the chill of victory bowing us down) to save our own fellows; and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks. (Lawrence, 1935, p 482)
In September 1918, the Arabs and Turks met at Tafas just north of Deraa. The Turkish troops had just massacred all the inhabitants of the village – men, women and children – as they retreated from Deraa. Tallal, one of the Arabs fighting with Lawrence, was from the village.
Tallal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal; then rode to the upper ground and sat there a while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved near to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. Very slowly Tallal drew his head-cloth about his face; and then he seemed suddenly to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into the mare’s flanks and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy.
It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. We sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his hoofs unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped shooting, and the Turks had stopped. Both armies waited for him; and he rocked on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry, ‘Tallal, Tallal’, twice in a tremendous shout. Instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among the lance points.
Auda looked very cold and grim. ‘God give him mercy; we will take his price.’ He shook his rein and moved slowly after the enemy. We called up the peasants, now drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and that against the retreating column. (Lawrence, 1935, pp 631-632)
On Lawrence’s orders, the Arabs took no prisoners that day. Lawrence had become an instrument of bloody war, and all compassion was lost in the frenzy of revenge.
Damascus finally surrendered on October 1, 2018, The British and Commonwealth troops allowed the Arab forces to enter the city first. The war was won but the politics had only just begun:
We passed to work. Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.
Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s sorry duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the Turkish government. (Lawrence, 1935, p 649)
Faisal arrived a few days after the surrender of Damascus and met with General Allenby:
They were a strange contrast: Feisal, large-eyed, colourless and worn, like a fine dagger; Allenby, gigantic and red and merry, fit representative of the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing round the world. (Lawrence, 1935, p 660)
Lawrence was exhausted. The following photograph shows him in Damascus. Once Feisal had arrived to take over the politics of government, Lawrence asked Allenby for leave to return to London.
Aftermath
With peace came politics. Fromkin’s 1989 book on the creation of the modern Middle East takes as its title, A Peace to End All Peace, a quotation from Lord Wavell who had served under Allenby, and was present at the Paris Peace Talks (1919-20):
After ‘the War to end War’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’
In the Middle East, the politics of power soon came into conflict with the ideals of freedom and justice. In the correspondence between McMahon and Hussein in 1916, the Arabs had been promised an independent state that stretched across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. However, the British had not thought that the Arab Revolt would be successful. They had therefore arranged with France, in an agreement negotiated by the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in 1916, to divide up the Ottoman Empire between them. And in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had also promised the Jews that they could find a “national home” in Palestine. And so, at the Paris Peace Conference (1920), Britain was given a mandate over Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and France was given a similar mandate over Lebanon and Syria.
Arab leaders were granted titular kingships: Faisal bin Al-Hussein in Syria, and Abdullah bin Al-Hussein in Jordan. After Faisal rejected the French claim for a mandate in Syria in 1920, French forces invaded and Faisal was exiled. In 1921, the British arranged for Faisal to become king of Iraq. He remained king until his death in 1933. Abdullah was king of Jordan until his assassination in 1951. The Hashemites continue to this day as the royal family of Jordan. Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi was recognized as the king of Hejaz. His eldest son, Ali bin Al-Hussein, remained in Hejaz as his heir. However, the Hashemites were soon challenged by Ibn Saud (1875-1953), who in 1932 unified most of the Arabian Peninsula into Saudi Arabia.
In the first few years after the war, Lawrence was celebrated as a hero. He and Faisal had their portraits painted by Augustus John in 1919:
Initially, Lawrence enjoyed his new fame. He began to write his memoir of the Arab Revolt, worked in the Foreign Office, served as an adviser to Secretary of State Winston Churchill, and attended the Peace Conferences in Paris. However, he soon became deeply depressed by the ongoing politics. He believed that he had betrayed his Arab friends. He felt guilty and longed for penance and anonymity.
In August, 1922, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a simple aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross. He wrote about the grueling and demeaning period of basic training in The Mint (posthumously published in 1955). The title likened the experience of raw recruits being converted into useful soldiers to the stamping out of coins from blank metal.
After his identity was disclosed, Lawrence changed his alias to T. E. Shaw (likely from his friendship with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw) and enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. He transferred back to the Royal Air Force in 1925 and served until 1935 in various locations. The photograph at the right shows him in 1928 at an air force base in Miranshah in what is now Pakistan, a lonely man in a desolate landscape
In 1923, he had purchased a forester’s cottage (Clouds Hill) in Dorset near the Bovington Camp, where he served in the Tank Corps. Furnished with books and music, the cottage became his refuge. He returned to live there after leaving the Royal Air Force in 1935.
Lawrence continued to write through all these years of anonymity. He put together a limited publication (only 8 copies) of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922. Writing the memoir caused much anxiety and grief. An early version of the book was lost while changing trains at Reading station in 1919, and much of it had to be completely rewritten (Meyers, 1973). The book was not formally published until after his death in 1935. However, Lawrence issued an abbreviated version of the book, Revolt in the Desert, in 1927. He also wrote a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1932. An anthology of the poems he had enjoyed, Minorities (1971), and The Mint (1955) were published posthumously.
The Death of a Hero
Lawrence loved the experience of speed. He bought his first Brough SS100, the fastest production motorcycle in the world, in 1922, and over the years before his death owned six more models of the motorcycle, which he called Boanerges (“son of thunder,’ the name that Christ gave to his disciples, the brothers James and John). The fifth of these motorcycles (1927) is illustrated above. In Chapter 16 of The Mint (written in 1929 but not published until after his death), he describes racing on his motorcycle with an airplane:
Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.
Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.
Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare. Quickly we drew abreast, as the impulse of his dive to my level exhausted itself.
The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests, thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank till its rubber grips goggled under my thighs. Over the first pot-hole Boanerges screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre. Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed. Then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long ruts: it swayed dizzily, wagging its tail for thirty awful yards. Out came the clutch, the engine raced freely: Boa checked and straightened his head with a shake, as a Brough should.
On May 13, 1935, Lawrence had a fatal accident while riding his motorcycle from Bovington Camp to his cottage Clouds Hill. He was not driving at great speed: the inquest found that his motorcycle was in second gear when it crashed, a gear with a top speed of 38 mph. However, Lawrence had suddenly came upon two boys cycling on the narrow road: he braked, skidded, and lost control. He was thrown over the handlebars and his head struck the road. Comatose, he was taken to the hospital at Bovington Camp. Lawence never regained consciousness and died on May 19. Hugh Cairns, a young Australian neurosurgeon from Oxford, came to consult on his case. Later in his life, Cairns investigated the epidemiology of concussion and promoted the use of crash helmets for motorcyclists (Hughes, 2001)
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence was deeply impressed by the power of the desert. In his introductory chapters to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he discussed how the desert had been the source for three of the world’s great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He remarked on the Semitic people (p 39):
Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.
It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on fire. To the thinkers of the town the impulse into Nitria [one of the earliest Christian monastic communities, located in the Egyptian desert] had ever been irresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that in its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them.
The desert provided the context to what happened to Lawrence in Arabia. The faith he sought, fought for, and ultimately lost was freedom. Swedenborg (1789, pp 59-60) had described freedom as the second of the great laws that man lives by:
The first law, that man from sense and perception shall have no other knowledge than that he is endowed with life, but shall still acknowledge that the goods and truths originating in love and faith, which he thinks, wills, speaks, and does, are not from himself but from the Lord, presupposes the second, that man has freedom, and that it is also to appear as his own.
The opening paragraphs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom provide the essence of Lawrence’s story:
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.
As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible – they have lost the world – and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.
Jim Norton provides a reading of these words:
Jeffrey Myers (2016, pp 114-115) summarizes the life of Lawrence and the importance of the events described in Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) is the story of Lawrence’s growth in personal and political awareness. The meaning of the book is determined by the juxtaposition of his psychological needs and the pattern of historical events, by the conflict between the man who acts and the conditions of his action. Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt combined self-discipline with freedom and power, and his devotion to the higher cause of a ‘holy war’ enabled him to define his identity. But for Lawrence this self-discovery was destructive rather than enlightening. He gradually realized that he had been transformed from a man who had once valued each human life and had given himself in the service of freedom, to one who had been caught up in a repellent and fascinating slaughter and had lost his idealism. When he was tortured and raped at Deraa, this insight deepened into the horrible realization that he had achieved sexual pleasure from physical pain.
The Deraa experience completely destroyed his elaborately constructed network of defences and exposed his all-too-human vulnerability, broke his spirit and extinguished the possibilities of creative freedom. This crucial moment — what Erik Erikson calls ‘The Event’, or culmination and turning point of a man’s experience — dramatizes the central opposition of body and will, and forms the core of Seven Pillars as well as of Lawrence’s life.
Lawrence’s post-war career — his political activities, the composition of Seven Pillars, the enlistment in the ranks, the flagellations and even the suicidal motorcycle rides — followed inevitably from the events described in the book.
As a visual summary of his life, we can consider two portrait sketches of Lawrence by Augustus John, one at the height of his fame in 1919 and one from the period of anonymity in 1929
References
Aldington, R. (1955). Lawrence of Arabia: a biographical enquiry. Collins.
Barr, J. (2006). Setting the desert on fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s secret war in Arabia, 1916-18. Bloomsbury.
Crawford, F. D. (1998). Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: a cautionary tale. Southern Illinois University Press.
Crawford, F. D., & Berton, J. A. (1996). How well did Lowell Thomas know Lawrence of Arabia? English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 39(3), 298-318.
Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. W. W. Norton
Fromkin, D. (1989). A peace to end all peace: creating the modern Middle East, 1914-1922. André Deutsch.
Graves, R. (1927). Lawrence and the Arabs. Jonathan Cape.
Hughes, J. T. (2001). Lawrence of Arabia and Hugh Cairns: crash helmets for motorcyclists. Journal of Medical Biography, 9(4), 236–240.
James, L. (1990). The golden warrior: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Knightley, P., & Simpson, C. (1969). The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia. Nelson.
Korda, M. (2010). Hero: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Harper.
Lawrence, T. E. (1910, publicly printed 1936). Crusader castles. Golden Cockerel Press (also reprinted by Folio Society, 2010).
Lawrence, T. E. (1922, edited by Wilson, J., & Wilson, N., 2003). Seven pillars of wisdom: a triumph: the complete 1922 text. Castle Hill.
Lawrence, T. E. (1927). Revolt in the desert. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).
Lawrence, T. E. (1932). The Odyssey of Homer. Oxford University Press.
Lawrence, T. E. (1935). Seven pillars of wisdom, a triumph. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).
Lawrence, T. E. (edited by D, Garnett, 1938). The letters of T. E. Lawrence. Jonathan Cape.
Lawrence, T. E. (1955). The mint: a day-book of the R.A.F. depot between August and December 1922, with later notes by 352087 A/c Ross. Jonathan Cape.
Lawrence, T. E. (1971). Minorities: Good poems by small poets and small poems by good poets. Jonathan Cape.
Lawrence, T. E. (edited by J. Wilson & N. Wilson, 2000). T. E. Lawrence: correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw. Castle Hill Press.
Lean, D. (dir., 1962, DVD 2003). Lawrence of Arabia. Columbia Pictures.
Liddell Hart, B. H. (1934). T. E. Lawrence: in Arabia and after. Jonathan Cape.
Lockman, J. N. (1995). Meinertzhagen’s diary ruse, false entries on T. E. Lawrence. Cornerstone Publications.
MacEwen, G. (1982). The T.E. Lawrence poems. Mosaic Press/Valley Editions.
Meinertzhagen, R. (1959). Middle East diary, 1917-1956. Thomas Yoseloff
Meyers, J. (1973). The revisions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 88(5), 1066–1082.
Meyers, J. (2016). Chapter VIII. T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In Homosexuality and literature: 1890-1930. (pp 114-130). Bloomsbury.
Rattigan, T. (1960). Ross. Hamish Hamilton.
Sattin, A. (2015). The young T. E. Lawrence. W. W. Norton & Company.
Simpson, A. R. B. (2008). Another life: Lawrence after Arabia. Spellmount.
Stewart, D. (1977). T. E. Lawrence. Hamish Hamilton.
Swedenborg, E. (1760, posthumously published, 1789, anonymously translated, 1867). The Athanasian Creed. New Jerusalem.
Thomas, L. (1924). With Lawrence in Arabia. Century Co.
Wilson, J. (1989). Lawrence of Arabia: the authorised biography of T.E. Lawrence. Heinemann.
Knowledge of Good and Evil
According to the book of Genesis, Yahweh created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden of Eden. He commanded them on pain of death not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Eve was convinced by the Serpent to eat of the tree, and she in turn convinced Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. The interpretation of this myth has led to the Christian idea that humanity is forever tainted by “Original Sin,” and that our only hope for immortality is through the sacrifice of Christ which offers redemption from sin and entry into eternity to those who believe in him. The concept of Original Sin has become dangerously ingrained in Christian thinking, and needs reworking,
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
The book of Genesis contains two narratives of the creation. In the second (Genesis 2:4-25), attributed to a writer/editor called J (Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990), Yahweh created Adam by breathing into a lump of earth, and placed him in a garden in Eden. He then grew the trees of the garden:
And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 9)
Yahweh enjoined Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis 2: 16-17)
J then tells how God created Eve as a companion for Adam, and narrates the story of man’s fall from innocence (Genesis 3: 1-24). Eve was asked by the Serpent whether she and Adam must not eat from any of the trees of Eden:
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. (Genesis 3: 2-3)
The Serpent convinces her that eating of the Tree of Knowledge would actually open her eyes to the divine knowledge of good and evil. The interaction between Eve and the Serpent is the subject of many paintings, among which is the tempera painting of William Blake (1800) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This and the subsequent illustrations are derived from the Blake Archive:
Eve ate the fruit and gave some to Adam who likewise ate. Yahweh quickly realized how Adam and Eve had disobeyed him.
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24)
The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is depicted in an 1808 watercolor by William Blake which was to illustrate the ending of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). In this telling of the story, the archangel Michael leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise:
For now, too nigh The Arch-Angel stood; and, from the other hill To their fixed station, all in bright array The Cherubim descended; on the ground Gliding meteorous, as evening-mist Risen from a river o’er the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the labourer’s heel Homeward returning. High in front advanced, The brandished sword of God before them blazed, Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat, And vapour as the Libyan air adust, Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat In either hand the hastening Angel caught Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the subjected plain; then disappeared. They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.
Though Milton’s words portray the gravity of what has happened to Adam and Eve, they are also touched with hope. They had each other; their eyes were open; they could learn to survive; perhaps they might even thrive. The world was all before them.
The story of Adam and Eve and how they disobeyed Yahweh’s commandment not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been retold again and again in the years since it was first written down in Judeo-Christian scripture (Greenblatt, 2017). In the Christian world it led to the idea of “Original Sin” (Boyce, 2015): because of the transgression of Adam and Eve, all human beings are doomed to die, unless they accept Christ as their savior.
One or Two Trees?
Yahweh’s prohibition and Eve’s words to the Serpent suggest that there is only one special tree in the garden: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. One is therefore tempted to re-examine the first mention of the two trees. The conjunction between them may be translated both as “and” and as “that is to say”. Thus, the Tree of Life, may just be another name for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Genesis 2:9 might read
the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, that is to say, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
However, when Yahweh condemned Adam and Eve for their transgression, he did so lest they also partake of the Tree of Life and become immortal. Those supporting the existence of only one special tree in Eden have suggested that perhaps the word translated as “also” might actually mean “again.” The issues about one or two trees have been discussed by Makowiecki (2021) and Zevelt (2013, Chapter 7).
My preferred interpretation is that there is only one special tree, that eating of that tree opens the mind to knowledge, and that, if our knowledge becomes great enough, we might somehow become immortal.
Good and Evil
The phrase “good and evil” needs two important explications. The first is that it is an example of a merism, “a figure of speech in which opposite extremes imply everything between them” (Robinson, 2024, p 77). When we say that we searched “high and low” we mean that we searched everywhere. The Bible makes frequent use of the device: the expression “heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) includes everything between; “evening and morning” (Genesis 1:5) means the whole day (including afternoon and night); “alpha and omega” (Revelations 22: 13) means the complete alphabet of existence. Thus, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of all knowledge characterized by the extremes of good and evil.
The second point of explication concerns the word translated as “evil.” The original Hebrew word can mean both “bad” and “evil” (Kass, 2003, p 63, see also Speiser, 1964, and Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990). Both are value judgements. However, we often conceive of “evil” as pain and suffering that is intentionally rather than naturally caused. Thus, though murder is considered evil, an earthquake is not. However, this distinction becomes fuzzy if we believe the natural world to be controlled by divine intentions. Arnold (2008, p 64) points out that God created both good and evil. In the words of God proclaimed through his prophet Isaiah:
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. (Isaiah, 45: 7)
According to our definitions of “evil” and “bad,” knowledge of good and bad could then refer to everything, whereas knowledge of good and evil is primarily concerned with moral judgements (Hartmann, 2002, Chapter V; Laird, 2014, Chapter V). I much prefer to interpret the story of Eden in the latter sense. A moral judgement combines an assessment of what we perceive with a decision about what we should do in the light of the predicted consequences. Morality requires a consciousness of a self that can control one’s actions, or in religious terms, a soul that has free will. The very act of disobeying is an exercise of such free will.
When the eyes or Adam and Eve were opened by the knowledge of good and evil, the first thing that they noted was their shame at being naked. This combines self-consciousness with the idea that one should not unnecessarily incite the lust of others.
Kass (2004, p 68) sums up his discussion of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad:
The knowledge prohibited is autonomous knowledge of how to live, found in or procured from one’s own garden (nature), based on human experience of the visible world. The opposite of obedience, it is the kind of knowledge that is implicit in the act of violating a prohibition, indeed, in any act of choosing for oneself.
He goes on to say that this knowledge may not be sufficient for us to behave as we should. We also require rules such as the Ten Commandments to instruct us how to live:
But this autonomous knowledge of good and bad is not true knowledge of good and bad; human beings on their own will not find true knowledge of how to live. This must be supplied by what is later called revelation.
I find myself agreeing with his initial statements and disagreeing with those that follow. The commandments were not miraculously revealed to us by Moses: that story is as mythical as the story of Eden. Rather these rules were proposed on the basis of how human beings had learned to live with each other.
Original Sin
Though it is not directly discussed in the Bible, Talmudic and Christian interpretations of the disobedience of Adam and Eve led to the idea that all their descendants were afflicted with their Original Sin and that this explains our mortality and our suffering (Boyce, 2015; Greenblatt, 2017, Chapters 5 and 6; Zevit, 2013, Chapter 1). The apostle Paul wrote
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned (Romans 5: 12)
Paul proclaimed that Christ died to save us from this fate, and that belief in him can lead to eternal life. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) was the great champion of Original Sin. He argued against the teachings of an English theologian Pelagius (354-413 CE), who proposed that human beings are not born innately sinful, but rather free to choose between good and evil:
Day by day, hour by hour, we have to reach decisions; and in each decision, we can choose good or evil. The freedom to choose makes us like God: if we choose evil, that freedom becomes a curse; if we choose good, it becomes our greatest blessing.
When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they were exercising their freedom of choice … Before eating the fruit they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit they acquired this knowledge, and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom: by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions. (both quotations from Pelagius are in Boyce, 2015, p 15)
The story of Eden can thus be interpreted as Adam and Eve deciding not to remain in blissful innocence. They could have stayed in the garden, obeyed Yahweh’s commandment and led a life of simplicity and comfort. Instead, by eating of the tree of knowledge they gained insight into the complexities of a life independent of Yahweh’s care, a life wherein they made their own decisions rather than just accepting what Yahweh commanded. Their act of disobedience was an assertion of their freedom.
However, Augustine prevailed over Pelagius. At the Synod of Carthage (418CE), Original Sin became one of the essential doctrines of the Christian Church (Denzinger, 2012, p 223). This was unfortunate. Thinking of humanity as being free to choose, as being able to learn to do what is good, is far more productive than simply considering humanity as doomed to die.
Freedom to Choose
The story of Adam and Eve is not a realistic story of human origins. However, myths often contain true ideas about human nature. During our evolution, human beings gained a special kind of knowledge. We became conscious of ourselves as beings able to decide freely among possible actions on the basis of the good or evil these actions might entail. We also learned that with freedom comes responsibility. We must not act just for our own good for also for the good of others.
On this note I would like to conclude with a third image from the work of William Blake: Rose Albion (1795). We do not know exactly what Blake was depicting. A common interpretation is that the image represents man (or more specifically, England) freed from the shackles of materialism. It might also represent the more general idea of humanity as free to choose.
References
Alter, Robert. (2004). The five books of Moses: a translation with commentary. W.W. Norton & Co.
Arnold, B. T. (2009). Genesis. Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge Bible Commentary).
Boyce, J. (2015). Born bad: original sin and the making of the Western world. Counterpoint Press.
Denzinger, H. (2012). Compendium of creeds, definitions, and declarations on matters of faith and morals (P. Hünermann, H. Hoping, R. L. Fastiggi, & A. E. Nash, Eds.; 43rd ed.). Ignatius Press.
Greenblatt, S. (2017). The rise and fall of Adam and Eve. W.W. Norton & Company.
Hartmann, N. (1932, reprinted 2002) Moral Phenomena. Transaction Publishers.
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Laird, J. (2014). A study in moral theory. Routledge.
Makowiecki, M. (2021). Untangled branches: the Edenic tree(s) and the multivocal WAW. Journal of Theological Studies, 71(2), 441–457.
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Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian
Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian
Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.
Failing the Examinations
Du Fu (Tu Fu in the Wades Gilles transliteration system, the family name likely deriving from the name of a pear tree) was born in 712 CE near Luoyang, the eastern capital of the Tang Dynasty (Hung, 1952; Owen, 1981). The following map (adapted from Young, 2008, and Collet and Cheng, 2014) shows places of importance in his life:
Du Fu’s father was a minor official. His mother appears to have died during his childhood, and Du Fu was raised by his stepmother and an aunt. Du Fu studied hard, but in 735 CE he failed the jenshi (advanced scholar) examinations. No one knows why: politics and spite may have played their part. He spent the next few years with his father who was then stationed in Yanzhou,
Du Fu met Li Bai (700-762 CE) in 744 CE. Despite the difference in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. However, they were only able to meet occasionally, their lives being separated by politics and war.
Du Fu attempted the jenshi examinations again in 746, and was again rejected. Nevertheless, he was able to obtain a minor position in the imperial civil service in Chang’an. This allowed him to marry and raise a small family.
Taishan
We can begin our examination of Du Fu’s poetry with one of the early poems written during his time in Yanzhou: Gazing on the Peak (737 CE). The peak is Taishan (exalted mountain), located in Northeastern China. Taishan is one of the Five Great Mountains (Wuyue) of ancient China. Today one can reach the summit by climbing up some 7000 steps (see illustration on the right), but in Du Fu’s time the climb would have been more difficult. The following is the poem in printed Chinese characters (Hànzì) and in Pinyin transliteration:
The poem is in the lǜshī (regulated verse) form which requires eight lines (four couplets), with each line containing the same number of characters: 5- or 7-character lǜshī are the most common. Each line is separated into phrases, with a 5-character line composed of an initial 2-character phrase and a final 3-character phrase. The last words of each couplet rhyme. Rhyme in Chinese is based on the vowel sound. Within the lines there were complex rules for the tonality of the sounds (Zong Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 8; Wai-lim Yip, 1997, pp 171-221). These rules do not always carry over to the way the characters are pronounced in modern Chinese. The following is a reading of the poem in Mandarin (from Librivox).
Chinese poetry is directed at both the ear and the eye, and fine calligraphy enhances the appreciations of a poem. Ding Qian has written out Du Fu’s Wàng yuè in beautiful cursive script (going from top down and from left to right):
The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 2):
gaze/behold mountain
Daizong (ancient name for Taishan) then like what Qi Lu (regions near Taishan) green/blue never end create change concentrate divine beauty Yin Yang (Taoist concepts of dark and light) cleave dusk dawn heave chest birth layer cloud burst eye enter return bird soon when reach extreme summit one glance all mountain small.
And this is the English translation of Stephen Owen (2008, poem 1.2):
Gazing on the Peak
And what then is Daizong like? — over Qi and Lu, green unending. Creation compacted spirit splendors here, Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn. Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud; splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering. Someday may I climb up to its highest summit, with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are
The interpretation of the poem requires some knowledge of its allusions. In the fourth line, Du Fu is referring to the taijitu symbol of Taoism (illustrated on the right) that contrasts the principles of yin (dark, female, moon) and yang (light, male, sun). Du Fu proposes that Taishan divides the world into two ways of looking. Some have suggested that the taijitu symbol originally represented the dark (north) side and the light (south) side of a mountain, and this idea fits easily with the poem.
All translators have had difficulty with the third couplet (reviewed by Hsieh, 1994). My feeling is that Du Fu is noticing layers of clouds at the mountain’s upper reaches – the chest if one considers the mountain like a human body – and birds swooping around the peaks – where the eye sockets of the body would be. However, it is also possible that Du Fu is breathing heavily from the climb and that his eyes are surprised by the birds. Perhaps both meanings are valid, with Du Fu and the mountain becoming one. Du Fu may have been experiencing the meditative state of Chan Buddhism, with a mind was “wide-open and interfused with this mountain landscape, no distinction between subjective and objective” (Hinton, 2019, p 6). One might also consider Du Fu’s mental state: at the time he wrote this poem he had just failed the jenshi exams. This might have caused some breast-beating and tears, as well as his final resolve to climb the mountain and see how small all his problems actually were.
The last couplet refers to Mencius’ description of the visit of Confucius to Taishan (Mengzi VIIA:24):
He ascended the Tai Mountain, and all beneath the heavens appeared to him small. So he who has contemplated the sea, finds it difficult to think anything of other waters, and he who has wandered in the gate of the sage, finds it difficult to think anything of the words of others.
Zhang’s Hermitage
During his time in Yanzhou Du Fu visited a hermit named Zhang near the Stonegate Mountain, one of the lesser peaks near Taishan. Zhang was likely a follower of the new Chan Buddhism, which promoted meditation as a means to empty the mind of suffering and allow the universal life force to permeate one’s being. Buddhism first came to China during the Han dynasty (206BCE – 220CE). Since many of the concepts of Buddhism were similar to those of Taoism, the new religion spread quickly (Hinton, 2020). A type of Buddhism that stressed the role of meditation began to develop in the 6th Century CE, and called itself chan, a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyana (meditation). In later years this would lead to the Zen Buddhism of Japan. There are many allusions to Buddhism and especially to Chan ideas in Du Fu’s poetry (Rouzer, 2020; Zhang, 2018)
Du Fu reportedly wrote the following poem on one of the walls of Zhang’s hermitage. The poem is a seven-character lǜshī. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 1.4) and in pinyin:
The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 22):
inscribe Zhang family recluse house
spring mountain absence friend alone you search chop tree crack crack mountain again mystery creek pathway remnant cold pass ice snow stone gate slant sun reach forest place no desire night know gold silver breath/spirit far injure morning see deer deer wander ride burgeon dark thus confuse leave place facing you suspect this drift empty boat.
And this is a translation by Kenneth Rexroth (1956):
Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage
It is Spring in the mountains. I come alone seeking you. The sound of chopping wood echos Between the silent peaks. The streams are still icy. There is snow on the trail. At sunset I reach your grove In the stony mountain pass. You want nothing, although at night You can see the aura of gold And silver ore all around you. You have learned to be gentle As the mountain deer you have tamed. The way back forgotten, hidden Away, I become like you, An empty boat, floating, adrift.
Notable in the poem is the idea of wú (third character) which can be translated as “absence, nothing, not” (Hinton, 2019, p 24) This is an essential concept of Chan Buddhism – the emptying of the mind so that it can become a receptacle for true awareness. The third and fourth characters of the first line might be simply translated as “alone (without a friend),” but one might also venture “with absence as a companion” or “with an empty mind.” This fits with the image of the empty boat at the end of the poem.
Zheng Qian, a drinking companion of Li Bai and Du Fu, suggested the idea of combining poetry, painting and calligraphy. The Emperor was impressed and called the combination sānjué (three perfections) (Sullivan, 1974). Li Bai and Du Fu likely tried their hand at painting and calligraphy but no versions of their sānjué efforts have survived. The Ming painter and calligrapher Wang Shimin (1592–1680 CE) illustrated the second couplet of Du Fu’s poem from Zhang’s hermitage in his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts now at the Palace Museum in Beijing.
The An Lushan Rebellion
Toward the end 755 CE, An Lushan, a general on the northern frontier rebelled against the empire and captured the garrison town of Fanyang (or Jicheng) located in what is now part of Beijing. Within a month the rebels captured Luoyang. The emperor and much of his court fled Chang’an, travelling through the Qinling Mountains to find sanctuary in the province of Shu. The city of Chang’an fell to the rebels in the middle of 756 CE.
Below is shown a painting of Emperor Ming-Huang’s Flight to Shu. Though attributed to the Tang painter Li Zhaodao (675-758 CE), this was actually painted in his style several hundred years later during the Song Dynasty. Shu is the ancient name for what is now known as Sichuan province. This masterpiece of early Chinese painting is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two enlargements are included: the emperor with his red coat is shown at the lower right; at the lower left advance members of his entourage begin climbing the mountain paths.
The rebellion lasted for eight long years. The northern part of the country was devastated. Death from either war or famine was widespread. Censuses before and after the rebellion suggested a death toll of some 36 million people, making it one of the worst catastrophes in human history. However, most scholars now doubt these numbers and consider the death toll as closer to 13 million. Nevertheless, it was a murderous time.
Moonlit Night
At the beginning of the rebellion, Du Fu managed to get his family to safety in the northern town of Fuzhou, but he was himself held captive in Chang’an. Fortunately, he was not considered important enough to be executed, and he finally managed to escape in 757 CE. The following shows a poem from 756 CE in characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.18), pinyin transcription, and character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):
The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:
Vikam Seth (1997) translated the poem keeping the Chinese rhyme scheme: the last character rhymes for all four couplets:
Moonlit Night
In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill With sadness for my children, who can’t think Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still. Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist. In the clear light her white arms sense the chill. When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears, Leaning together on our window-sill?
Alec Roth wrote a suite of songs based on Vikam Seth’s translations of Du Fu. The following is his setting for Moonlit Night with tenor Mark Padmore:
David Young (2008) provides a free-verse translation:
Tonight in this same moonlight my wife is alone at her window in Fuzhou I can hardly bear to think of my children too young to understand why I can’t come to them her hair must be damp from the mist her arms cold jade in the moonlight when will we stand together by those slack curtains while the moonlight dries the tear-streaks on our faces?
The poem may have been written or at least conceived during the celebration of the full moon in the autumn. Families customarily viewed the moon together and Du Fu imagines his wife viewing the moon alone. The mention of the wife’s chamber in the second line may refer to either her actual bedroom or metonymically to herself as the inmost room in Du Fu’s heart (Hawkes, 1967). David Young (2008) remarks that this may be “the first Chinese poem to address romantic sentiments to a wife,” instead of a colleague or a courtesan.
David Hawkes (1967) notes the parallelism of the third couplet:
Spring View (or Spring Landscape), the most famous poem written by Du Fu in Chang’an during the rebellion, tells how nature persists despite the ravages of effects of war and time. Subjective emotions and objective reality become one. The character wàng (view, landscape) can mean both the act of perceiving or what is actually perceived. In addition, it can sometimes mean the present scene or what is to be expected in the future (much like the English word “prospect”). The illustration below shows the text in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.25), in pinyin and in a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hawkes, 1967, Alexander, 2008, and Zong-Qi Cai, 2008):
The following is a reading of the poem from the website associated with How to Read Chinese Poetry (ZongQi-Cai, 2008, poem 8.1):
The next illustration shows the poem as written by three calligraphers. All versions read from top down and from right to left. On the left is standard script by Anita Wang; on the right the calligraphy by Lii Shiuh Lou is gently cursive. At the bottom the calligraphy by an anonymous calligrapher is unrestrained: it accentuates the root of the growing grass (8th character) and the radicals that compose the character for regret/hate (16th character) fly apart.
The following are two translations, the first by David Hinton, which uses an English line of a constant length to approximate the Chinese 5-character line (2020a):
The country in ruins, rivers and mountains continue. The city grows lush with spring.
Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.
Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,
and worry’s thinned my hair to such white confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.
A second translation, with preservation of the rhyme scheme and phrasal structure, is by Keith Holyoak (2015)
The state is in ruin; yet mountains and rivers endure. In city gardens weeds run riot this spring.
These dark times move flowers to sprinkle tears; the separations send startled birds on the wing.
For three months now the beacon fires have burned; a letter from home would mean more than anything.
I’ve pulled out so many of my white hairs too few are left to hold my hatpin in!
The second couplet has been interpreted in different ways. Most translations (including the two just quoted) consider it as representing nature’s lament for the evil times. For example, Hawkes (1967) suggests that “nature is grieving in sympathy with the beholder at the ills which beset him.” However, Michael Yang (2016) proposes that “In times of adversity, nature may simply be downright uncaring and unfriendly, thereby adding to the woes of mankind.” He translates the couplet
Mourning the times, I weep at the sight of flowers; Hating separation, I find the sound of birds startling.
The last two lines of the poem refer the hair-style of the Tang Dynasty: men wore their hair in a topknot, and their hats were “anchored to their heads with a large hatpin which passed through the topknot of hair” (Hawkes, 1967). Most interpreters have been struck by the difference between the solemn anguish of the poem’s first six lines, and the self-mockery of the final couplet (Hawkes, 1967, p 46; Chou, 1995, p 115). This juxtaposition of the tragic and the pitiable accentuates the poet’s bewilderment.
The Thatched Cottage
Disillusioned by the war and by the politics of vengeance that followed, Du Fu and his family retired to a thatched cottage in Chengdu, where he lived from 759-765. A replica of this cottage has been built there in a park celebrating both Du Fu and Chinese Poetry:
Many of the poems that Du Fu wrote in Chengdu celebrated the simple joys of nature. He often used isolated quatrains to find parallels between his emotions and the world around him. This brief form called juéjù (curtailed lines) was widely used by his colleagues Li Bai (701–762) and Wang Wei (699–759). The form consists of two couplets juxtaposed in meaning and rhyming across their last character (Wong, 1970; Zong-Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 10). The following poem (Owen, 2008, poem 9.63) describing willow-catkins (illustrated on the right) and sleeping ducks gives a deep feeling of peace. These are the Chinese characters and pinyin transcription followed by the character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):
grain path poplar/willow blossom pave white carpet little stream lotus leaves pile green money bamboo shoot root sprout no person see sand on duckling beside mother sleep
The following translation is by Burton Watson (2002):
Willow fluff along the path spreads a white carpet; lotus leaves dot the stream, plating it with green coins. By bamboo roots, tender shoots where no one sees them; on the sand, baby ducks asleep beside their mother.
Shui Chien-Tung provided the following calligraphy for the poem (Cooper, 1973). He used aspects of the ancient scripts (circles, curves and dots) in some of the characters to give a sense of simplicity and timelessness. The illustration shows the calligraphy of the poem on the left and the evolution of the characters yáng (willow, poplar) and fú (duck) on the right.
Another quatrain from Chengdu describes a night scene on the river. The following shows the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 13.61), in pinyin, and in a character-by-character translation (mine):
This is the translation by J. P. Seaton (Seaton & Cryer, 1987):
The River moves, moon travels rock, Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers. The bird perches, knows the ancient Tao Sails go: They can’t know where.
As the river flows by, the moon’s reflection slowly travels across the rocks near the shore. The water reflects the clouds between the lilies. A bird on a branch understands the nature of the universe. A boat passes, going home we know not where.
The poem conveys a sense of the complexity of the world where reflections and reality intermingle, a desire to understand the meaning of our life, and a fear that time is passing and we do not know where it will take us. All this in twenty characters. Such concision is extremely difficult in English. An attempt:
River and rocks reflect the moon and clouds amid the lilies resting birds understand the way sails pass seeking home somewhere.
The following shows a painting by Huang Yon-hou to illustrate the poem. This was used as the frontispiece (and cover) of the book Bright Moon, Perching Bird (Seaton & Cryer, 1987). On the right is calligraphy of the poem by Mo Ji-yu.
Above the Gorges
In 765 CE Du Fu and his family left Chengdu and travelled eastward on the Yangtze River. The region of Luoyang had been recently recovered by imperial forces and Du Fu was perhaps trying to return home (Hung, 1952). He stayed for a while in Kuizhou (present day Baidicheng) at the beginning of the Three Gorges (Qutang, Wu and Xiing).
While there Du Fu wrote a series of meditations called Autumn Thoughts (or more literally Stirred by Autumn). This is the second of these poems in Chinese characters and in pinyin:
A character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008) is:
Kui prefecture lonely wall set sun slant Every rely north dipper gaze capital city Hear ape real fall three sound tear Sent mission vain follow eight month raft Picture ministry incense stove apart hidden pillow Mountain tower white battlements hide sad reed-whistle Ask look stone on [Chinese wisteria] moon Already reflect islet before rushes reeds flowers
The following is Stephen Owen’s translation (Owen, 2008 poem 17.27):
On Kuizhou’s lonely walls setting sunlight slants, then always I trust the North Dipper to lead my gaze to the capital. Listening to gibbons I really shed tears at their third cry, accepting my mission I pointlessly follow the eighth-month raft. The censer in the ministry with portraits eludes the pillow where I lie, ill towers’ white-plastered battlements hide the sad reed pipes. Just look there at the moon, in wisteria on the rock, it has already cast its light by sandbars on flowers of the reeds.
The poem is striking in the difference between the first three couplets and the last. At the beginning of the poem Du Fu is feeling regret that he is not in Chang’an which is located due north of Kuizhou (in the direction of the Big Dipper which points to the North Star). Owen notes that “There was an old rhyme that a traveler in the gorges would shed tears when the gibbons cried out three times.” The eighth month raft may refer to another old story about a vessel that came every eight months and took a man up to the Milky Way. Owen commented on the third couplet that “The “muralled ministry” is where were located the commemorative portraits of officers, civil and military, who had done exceptional service to the dynasty.” Incense was burned when petitions were presented. The final couplet disregards all the preceding nostalgia and simply appreciates the beauty of the moment.
The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated this final couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts.
Later in Kuizhou, Du Fu entertained a librarian named Li who was returning north to take up an appointment in Chang’an. The following is the beginning of a poem (Owen, 2008, poem 19.34) describing Li’s departure in Chinese characters and in pinyin:
A character-by-character translation is:
blue/green curtain white boat/raft Yizhou arrive Wu gorge autumn waves heaven/sky earth/ground turn (around) stone/rock leave/exit fall listen maple leaf down scull/oar swing carry point chrysanthemum flower open/blume
The following is Stephen Owen’s translation:
When the white barge with green curtains came from Yizhou, with autumn billows in the Wu Gorges, heaven and earth were turning. Where rocks came out, from below you listened to the leaves of maples falling, as the sweep moved back and forth you pointed behind to chrysanthemums in bloom.
The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated the second couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts. The painting shows the bright red leaves of the maples. In front of the riverside house one can see the multicolored chrysanthemums that Li is pointing to. Harmony exists between the wild and the cultivated.
On the River
After his sojourn in Kuizhou, Du Fu and his family continued their journey down the Yangtze River. However, the poet was ill and was unable to make it beyond Tanzhou (now Changsha) where he died in 770 CE. No one knows where he is buried. In the 1960’s radical students dug up a grave purported to be his to “eliminate the remaining poison of feudalism,” but found the grave empty.
One of Du Fu’s last poems was Night Thoughts While Travelling. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 14.63) and in pinyin (Alexander, 2008):
The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:
Holyoak (2015) provides a rhymed translation:
The fine grass by the riverbank stirs in the breeze; the tall mast in the night is a lonely sliver.
Stars hang all across the vast plain; the moon bobs in the flow of the great river.
My poetry has not made a name for me; now age and sickness have cost me the post I was given.
Drifting, drifting, what do I resemble? A lone gull lost between earth and heaven.
Kenneth Rexroth (1956) translates the poem in free verse:
Night Thoughts While Travelling
A light breeze rustles the reeds Along the river banks. The Mast of my lonely boat soars Into the night. Stars blossom Over the vast desert of Waters. Moonlight flows on the Surging river. My poems have Made me famous but I grow Old, ill and tired, blown hither And yon; I am like a gull Lost between heaven and earth.
The following shows the poem in calligraphy with three styles. On the left the poem is written in clerical script, in the center in regular script and on the right is unrestrained cursive script. All examples were taken from Chinese sites selling calligraphy.
Changing Times
During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) the role of literature, and poetry in particular, in society changed dramatically (Owen, 2011):
In the 650s, literature was centered almost entirely in the imperial court; by the end of the era literature had become the possession of an educated elite, who might serve in government, but whose cultural life was primarily outside the court.
During Du Fu’s lifetime, poetry became no longer a part of the ancient traditions; rather it began to be concerned with the present and with the personal. Lucas Bender (2021) describes the traditional role of poetry in a society following the precepts of Confucianism:
Most people … would be incapable on their own of adequately conceptualizing the world or perfectly responding to its contingency, and therefore needed to rely on the models left by sages and worthies. Many of these models were embodied in texts, including literary texts, which could thus offer an arena for ethical activity. Poetry, for example, was understood to offer models of cognition, feeling, and commitment that would ineluctably shape readers’ understanding of and responses to their own circumstances. One way of being a good person, therefore, involved reading good poetry and writing more of it, thereby propagating the normative models of the tradition in one’s own time and transmitting them to the future. (p 317)
Du Fu found himself bewildered by the state of the world. He sought to convey this confusion rather than explain it:
Du Fu doubts the possibility of indefinitely applicable moral categories. The conceptual tools by which we make moral judgments, he suggests, are always inherited from a past that can – and, in a world as various and changeable as ours has proven to be, often will – diverge from the exigencies of the present. As a result, not only are our values unlikely to be either universal or timeless; more important, if we pay careful attention to the details of our experience, they are unlikely to work unproblematically even here and now. (Bender, 2021, p 319)
The complexity of Du Fu’s poetry – the difficulty in understanding some of his juxtapositions – becomes a challenge. The past provides no help in the interpretation. We must figure out for themselves what relates the mountain, the clouds and the poet’s breathing in the first poem we considered. And in the last poem we must try to locate for ourselves the place of the gull between heaven and earth.
References
Alexander, M. (2008). A little book of Du Fu. Mark Alexander. (Much of the material in the book is available on Chinese Poems website).
Bender, L. R. (2021). Du Fu transforms: tradition and ethics amid societal collapse. Harvard University Asia Center.
Chan, J. W. (2018). Du Fu: the poet as historian. In Zong-Qi Cai. (Ed.) How to read Chinese poetry in context: poetic culture from antiquity through the Tang. (pp 236-247). Columbia University Press.
Chou, E. S. (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: literary greatness and cultural context. Cambridge University Press.
Collet, H., & Cheng, W. (2014). Tu Fu: Dieux et diables pleurant, poèmes. Moundarren.
Cooper, A. R. V. (1973). Li Po and Tu Fu. Penguin Books.
Egan, R. (2020). Ming-Qing paintings inscribed with Du Fu’s poetic lines. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp 129-142). Hong Kong University Press
Hawkes, D. (1967 revised and reprinted, 2016). A little primer of Tu Fu. New York Review of Books.
Hinton, D. (1989, expanded and revised 2020a). The selected poems of Tu Fu. New Directions.
Hinton, D. (2019). Awakened cosmos: the mind of classical Chinese poetry. Shambhala.
Hinton, D. (2020b). China root: Taoism, Ch’an, and original Zen. Shambhala
Holyoak, K. (2015). Facing the moon: poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Oyster River Press.
Hsieh, D. (1994). Du Fu’s “Gazing at the Mountain.” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 16, 1–18.
Hung, W. (1952, reprinted 2014). Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press
Owen, S. (1981). Tu Fu. In S. Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang. (pp 183-224). Yale University.
Owen, S. (2010). The cultural Tang (650–1020). In Chang, K. S., & Owen, S. (Eds). The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1, pp. 286–380). Cambridge University Press.
Owen, S., (edited by P. W. Kroll & D. X. Warner, 2016). The poetry of Du Fu. (6 volumes). De Gruyter. (Available to download in pdf format.)
Rexroth, K. (1956). One hundred poems from the Chinese. New Directions.
Rouzer, P. (2020). Refuges and refugees: how Du Fu writes Buddhism. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp. 75-92). Hong Kong University Press.
Seaton, J. P., & Cryer, J. (with calligraphy by Mo Ji-yu, and painting by Huang Yon-hou, 1987). Bright moon, perching bird: poems of Li Po and Tu Fu. Wesleyan University Press.
Seth, V. (1997). Three Chinese poets: translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Phoenis.
Sullivan, M. (1974). The three perfections: Chinese painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Thames and Hudson.
Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). (2020). Reading Du Fu: nine views. Hong Kong University Press.
Zhang, Y. (2018). On 10 Chan-Buddhism images in the poetry of Du Fu. Studies in Chinese Religions, 4(3), 318–340.
Wai-lim Yip. (1997). Chinese Poetry, Duke University Press.
Watson, B. (2002). The selected poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press.
Wong, S. S. (1970) The quatrains (Chüeh-Chü 絕句) of Tu Fu. Monumenta Serica, 29, 142-162
Yang, M. V. (2016). Man and nature: a study of Du Fu’s poetry. Monumenta Serica, 50, 315-336.
Young, D. (2008). Du Fu: a life in poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.
Zong-Qi Cai (2008). How to read Chinese poetry: a guided anthology. Columbia University Press. (audio files are available at website).
Basho’s Journey to the North
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), one of the most famous poets of Japan, was a master of the haiku, a poetic form in which an abundance of meaning is concentrated into a paucity of syllables. Basho travelled widely in Japan, writing about t his experiences in a fascinating mixture of prose and poetry. In 1689 he undertook his longest journey: from Edo into the far north of Japan, a region known as Oku. His record of that journey is known as Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the North).
Life of the Poet
Basho was born in Ueno in 1644 as Matsuo Kinsaku. As a young man, he served Todo Yoshitada, the local Samurai lord, and gained from him a passion for poetry. After the death of his master in 1666, Basho left Ueno. No one knows where he went or what he did for the next few years. Tradition suggests that he studied poetry, philosophy and calligraphy, perhaps in Kyoto (Ueda, 1970). The illustration on the right is a detail from a portrait of Basho by Yosa Buson (1716-1784).
In 1672, he published The Seashell Game, an anthology of haiku by various poets, together with his personal commentary. Later that year Basho moved to Edo (modern Tokyo) as a professional poet, organizing poetry sessions, reviewing the work of others, judging poetry contests, and providing commentaries on classic poems (Carter, 1997).
In 1680 Basho retired to a small hut in a rustic area of Edo. A disciple planted a small Japanese banana tree (Musa basjoo) beside his hut, and the poet henceforth assumed the name Matsuo Basho. The tree typically rises to about 2 meters and has a crown of broad leaves each up to 2 meters in length. These fronds are easily torn by the winds (see illustration on the right). Basho felt that he shared both the sensitivity and the resilience of the tree. The following is a poem by Basho about his tree:
Basho nowaki-shite
tarai ni ame o
kiku yo kana
The banana tree is blasted in the storm,
I listen all night to the leaking
raindrops in a basin
(trans. Toshiharu Oseko, 1990)
The alliteration of the k-sounds at the end of the poem suggests the recurring drops from the leaking roof.
In his new home, Basho practiced Zen Buddhism with the monk Butcho, who lived nearby, and studied painting with another neighbor, Morikawa Kyoriku (1656-1715). He lived by himself, likening himself to a crow on a bare branch (Carter, 1997). On the right is a painting by Morikawa Kyoriku with calligraphy by Basho. Both artists celebrate the poet’s newfound solitude.
kare eda ni
karasu no tomarikeri
aki no kure
On a bare branch
a crow settled down
autumn evening
(trans. Jane Reichhold, 2008)
Basho soon began to travel through the different regions of Japan, recording his journeys in prose and poetry. Most of the poems were in the haiku format.
The Evolution of Haiku
Medieval Japanese poetry (waka) was largely based on a 31-syllable format consisting of 5 sections of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. By themselves these lines could be a tanka poem. Linking together many sections was the basis of renga poetry (Carter, 1991; Ueda 1991). A single poet could write a long renga by himself, or several poets could get together to create the succeeding sections of the poem. In the 16th Century a style of haikai no renga evolved, using common and often comic subjects, light-hearted puns and rhymes. As a professional poet, Basho would have arranged renga sessions wherein different poets would interact, one proposing a hokku of 5-7-5 syllables and the next capping this with the waki of 7-7 syllables. After 1680 Basho isolated the initial hokku, and imbued it with greater seriousness. In later years this format became known as haiku.
A haiku is characterized by its 5-7-5 syllabic structure. In general, a haiku contains two contrasting ideas often separated by a kireji or cutting word. Usually, the haiku contains some reference to the season of the year (kigo).
Basho wrote the following haiku after observing the falling yellow petals of Japanese roses (yamabuki) close to a waterfall near Yoshino Mountain south of Kyoto. The flowers are illustrated on the left. The painting below is once again by Morikawa Kyoriku and the calligraphy by Basho. The cursive calligraphy is beautiful but only interpretable by experts.
horo horo to
yamabuki chiru ka
taki no oto
quietly quietly petal by petal
yellow mountain roses fall kerria roses at fall
sound of the rapids the sounding waters
(trans. Makoto Ueda, 1991) (trans. Andrew Fitzsimons, 2022)
Toshiharu Oseko provides the following translation and notes:
In quiet succession,
The yellow flowers of Kerria fall
To the sound of the waterfall
horo-horo-to: an onomatopoeic word (adv.) describing flower-petals are falling down quietly here and there in succession. This word has a delicate poetic sound exactly matched with this scene even with the visual image so vivid yamabuki: a Japanese rose, Kerria japonica
chiru: to fall ka: an exclamatory particle taki: a waterfall oto: a sound
The cutting word is the particle ka. The seasonal reference is to the late spring time when the yamabuki blossoms fall.
Translating haiku can follow different principles. One can maintain the same syllabic structure (as in the Fitzsimons translation), but this is often difficult. Furthermore, the translator must choose between providing as much context as possible (as in the Oseko version) or being as concise as the original (as in the Ueda version).
This poem has evoked extensive commentary (Ueda, 1991). The following is from Handa:
As the poet trod a shady path by the river, he saw petals of mountain roses fluttering down. That instant he awoke to the sound of the rapids, to which he had paid no attention before. In brief, I wish to interpret the poem as presenting a shift of the senses: the vision of falling petals causing the poet to shift his awareness to the sound of the rapids.
The Lure of Oku
From 1882 until the end of his life, Basho travelled to various regions to Japan, hoping to find himself in what he saw, and to describe what he found in poetry. Beginning in the spring of 1689 he undertook a journey to Oku, the northern regions of Japan, together with his companion Sora. They covered a distance of some 1500 miles over a period of 156 days, almost all of it on foot. The painting on the right by Morikawa Kyoriku shows Basho and Sora as they set out on their journey.
Basho published a record of his journey in Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku). The word Oku has been variously translated as: the north, the deep north, the interior, the hinterland, and the heart. Keene (1996) remarks that Oku was
the general name for the provinces at the northern end of the island of Honshu. Oku also means “interior” or “inner recesses,” and this meaning would also be appropriate, both geographically, indicating that Basho’s travels would take him to the inner recesses of the country, and metaphorically, suggesting that his journey was to an inner world, probably the world of haiku poetry. We shall never know which of these meanings Basho intended; perhaps he meant all of them.
Japanese is typically written using both ideographs (kanji) and a syllabic alphabet (hiragana). The following illustration shows the kanji for oku on the left. It contains the radicals for “remote,” “rice,” and “great.” Since this kanji is uncommon, the title of the book is typically written using hiragana script, except for the final term michi (road, path), which is expressed in kanji. This ideograph for michi is the same as that for do (way, teaching), which derives from the Chinese dao, the way of Daoism. A brief discussion of the differentiation of michi and do is available on the web. The latter is used in words that describe the study of judo (gentle way) or shado (calligraphy). Basho was clearly aware of the two meanings of the kanji. The illustration also shows the title in full kanji, and in semi-cursive (Miyata Masayaki) and cursive (unknown calligrapher) scripts. On the right are the kanji for Matsuo Basho.
The following illustration shows a map of the central part of Japan with an outline of Basho’s journey, beginning in Edo and ending in Ogaki.
The painting below is by Yusa Buson (1716-1784), a painter and haiku poet, who produced a illustrated copy of Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi. It shows Basho and Sora taking leave of their friends as they set out on their journey.
Days and Months
Basho began Oku no Hosomichi with a brief comment on the passage of time and his need to travel:
Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that-pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind — filled with a strong desire to wander. (translated by Noboyuki Yuasa, 1966)
The following illustration shows the beginning of the book in Basho’s own calligraphy, from a scroll that was discovered in 1996. The text is read from top to bottom and from right to left.
The initial characters of the book can be translated as the “sun” and the “moon” instead of “days” and “months.” Ideographs are intrinsically metaphorical. Another translation of the opening lines is therefore:
The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. From the earliest times there have always been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by wind-blown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering. (Hamill, 1998)
The opening words of the book allude to a poem by the 8th-Century Chinese poet Li Bai which states that the “sun and moon are wayfarers down the generations” (Carter 2020, p 97). Basho was as much a wanderer as Li Bai, who spent much of his life in exile in the hinterland of China.
Willow Trees
Basho visited briefly the great Tokugawa monuments in Nikko, but was more concerned with simpler things. Near Ashino, Basho stopped by a willow tree (yanagi) that had been made famous by the 12th-Century Japanese poet Saigyo. Basho sat for the whole day beneath the willow branches, watching as the peasants planted rice in a paddy field. The illustration is by Miyata Masayuki:
ta ichimai
uete tachisaru
yanagi kana
They sowed a whole field
and only then did I leave
Saigyo’s willow tree
(trans. Donald Keene, 1996)
Near the end of his trip Basho stayed for a night at a Buddhist temple near Daishoji. In the morning, he swept away the fallen willow leaves before leaving, a small recompense for the monks’ hospitality. Again, the illustration is by Miyata Masayuki:
niwa haki-te
ide-baya tera ni
chiru yanagi
I’ll sweep the garden
before I leave – in the temple
the willow leaves fall
(trans. Donald Keene, 1996)
Matsushima
In the bay of Matsushima are hundreds of small rocky islands topped by weathered pine trees (matsu, pine, and shima, island). Basho was entranced by the view. On the right of the following illustration is a representation of the bay by Miyata Masayuki. On the left are a photograph of one of the islands, and a photograph of me talking to an effigy of Basho outside a tea-house in Matsushima.
Basho described the bay:
And so many islands!—tall ones looming into the heavens, low ones crawling over the waves. Some have two layers, others three; appearing separate from the left, connected to the right. One island carries another on its back, others seem to embrace, like parents or grandparents with their young. The pines are of the richest green, their branches molded by salt spray into natural shapes that seem as if man-made. So fine is the beauty of the scene that one envisions a woman just finished applying her makeup, or a landscape crafted by Oyamazumi [the god of the mountains – yama] in the age of the mighty gods. To capture with the brush the work of Heaven’s creation—why, no one could do it, not with paint, not with words (translation Carter, 2020).
Though Basho was too overcome by Matsushima’s beauty to write a poem, Sora composed:
Matsushima ya
tsuru ni mi wo kare
hototogisu
In Matsushima
you’ll need the wings of a crane
little cuckoo
(trans. Sam Hamill, 1998)
The poem is cryptic: the idea is that the tiny cuckoo would need to borrow the huge wings of the crane to comprehend the beauty of the scene.
Basho later wrote a poem about Matsushima though this was not included in Oku no Hosomichi.
shimajima ya
chiji ni kudakite
natsu no umi
Islands and islands
a thousand pieces shattered
on the summer sea
(trans. Andrew Fitzsimons, 2022)
Hiraizumi
From Matsushima, Basho journeyed north to the site where Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the great Samurai warrior, had been defeated in 1189 CE by the army of his brother. Yoshitsune retired to the castle of Koromogawa to commit seppuku (ritual suicide). Outside on the bridge, his companion Benkei prevented his enemies from interfering. After failing to best him in single-handed combat, the attackers killed him with arrows. Benkei died but his body remained standing, and it was a long time before anyone could gather enough courage to cross the bridge. The castle was razed to the ground: nothing remains.
Basho remembered a poem of the 8th-Century Chinese poet Du Fu who wrote a poem entitled Spring View about the wars and rebellions of his day. It begins:
The country ravaged, mountains and rivers remain
in spring at the fortress, the grasses and bushes grow thick
(translation by Carter, 2020)
Basho composed his haiku in homage to both Yoshitsune and Du Fu. The illustrations on the right is by Miyata Masayuki.
natsukusa ya
tsuwamono-domo ga
yume no ato
Only summer grass grows
Where ancient warriors
Used to dream
(trans. Toshiharu Oseko, 1990)
The following provides a recording of the poem in both Japanese and English. This and all subsequent readings in this post are by Takashi Sudo. The English translation he is using is by Hiroaki Sato (1996).
Fleas and Lice
The accommodations where Basho and Sora stayed were often far from luxurious. At Shitomae the guests and the horses were under one roof:
nomi shirami
uma no shitosuru
makuramoto
Fleas and lice
a horse pissing
next to my pillow
(trans. David Young, 2013)
The word for piss, shito, puns with the place name.
Yamadera
In the middle of summer, Basho visited Ryushakuji, also known as Yamadera (mountain temple). The temples of this Buddhist complex are located on the side of a mountain, linked together by some 1000 stone steps. The mountain is covered with pines and the place is renowned for its tranquility. Basho found that the cry of a cicada intensified the silence.
shizukasa ya
iwa ni shimi-iru
semi no koe
Quietness
seeping into the rocks,
the cicada’s voice
(trans Hiroaki Sato, 1996)
The upper part of the following illustration shows the topmost temple of the complex. Below is a photograph of votive buddhas on the hillside, and an impression of the temple steps by Miyata Masyuki.
Western Sunset
After spending some time in the region of the Dewa Sanzan (Three Mountains of Dewa), Basho came down to Sagata where the Mogami River empties into the Sea of Japan. The illustration on the right is by Miyata Masayuki>
atsuki hi o
umi ni iretari
Mogamigawa
Pouring the hot sun
into the sea,
the Mogami River
(trans. Hiroaki Sato, 1996)
Sea and Stars
One night near Niigata Basho compared the rough seas with the serenity of the stars:
araumi ya
Sado ni yokotau
Amanogawa
The turbulent sea
unfurling over Sado
the River of Stars
(trans. Andrew Fitzsimons, 2022)
Amanogawa (Heaven’s River) is the Japanese term for the Milky Way.
Bush Clover and Moon
One night in late summer, Basho and Sora spent the night in an inn near Ichiburi. Two prostitutes were staying in an adjacent room. From listening to their conversation, Basho discovered that they had repented of their life and were journeying to the Ise Shrine to seek redemption. He wrote the following haiku:
Hitotsu-ya ni
yujo mo ne-tari
hagi to tsuki.
At the same inn Under the same roof
play women are also sleeping prostitutes are also sleeping
bush clover and the moon bush clover and the moon
(trans. Robert Aiken, 1978) (trans. Toshiharu Oseko, 1990)
Bush clover (Lespedeza japonica) is a bushy plant with multiple blue-pink flowers on slender branches that trail downward from the center.
Since this is probably the most famous haiku in the book, it is worth considering the notes from Toshiharu Oseko (lightly edited):
hitotsu: one, ya = ie = uchi: a house, ni: in, at hitotsu-ya ni: (1) under the same roof (2) in a solitary house. The basic meaning in this poem is 1, but it also has a faint image of 2. yujo: a prostitute mo: a particle for an addition and stress ne: from neru, to sleep, lie down, go to bed. This word refers not only to the people, but also to a bush clover indirectly. -tari: aux. v. for perfect and progressive perfect, but my interpretation is that the women (and probably Sora also) are already sleeping, but Basho is still awake looking at the moon over the bush clover hagi: a bush clover, Lespedeza. When a bush clover droops down, it is often expressed as neru, lying down. Hence it could be possible to take the bush clover as a euphemistic metaphor of a prostitute.
The upper left section of the following illustration shows branches of the bush clover and a close-up of its flower. The upper right shows Miyata Masayuki’s representation of the prostitutes. The lower part of the illustration shows a Japanese silk-painting of bush clover and moon on a set of sliding doors from the 19th Century.
The haiku has been extensively discussed. Ueda (1991) quotes from Koseki:
The bush clover stands for the courtesans, the moon for Basho. The bright moon in the sky and the delicate, lovely bush clover are friendly with, yet keep a certain distance from, each other. Basho and the courtesans associated with each other in a similar way as they shared the same lodging.
Basho kept his distance both because of his asceticism, and also because he leaned toward the homosexual in his longings (Leupp, 1997).
However, the moon might also represent the heavens looking down on the transient life of human beings. Sin and redemption, beauty and mortality, are of little import sub specie aeternitatis
In 1943, scholars found Sora’s diary of the journey to Oku. This confirms most of the details of Basho’s book, which was put together a few years after the journey had been completed. However, it makes no mention of the episode with the prostitutes, and some have suggested that Basho’s account was therefore fiction rather than fact. Perhaps only the dream of a tired traveler.
Last Years
Basho’s journey to Oku came to an end in Ogaki. He spent several months there and in the environs of Kyoto before returning to Edo where he put together his memory and notes of the journey to form Oku no Hosomichi. He undertook several other shorter journeys over the next few years, finally falling ill and dying in Osaka in 1694 (Ueda, 1970; Kikaku, 2006).
One of his last haiku was:
Tabi ni yan-de
yume wa kare-no o
kake-meguru
Ill on a journey,
my dreams still wandering round
over withered fields.
(trans. Toshiharu Oseko, 1990)
Basho was buried according tohis request near Minamoto no Yoshinaka, a famous Samurai general from the 12th Century. In one of the Noh plays, Kanehira, the spirits of the general and his companion wander around after death seeking rest.
Translations of Oku no hosomichi
Carter, S. (2020). Bashō: Travel writings. Hackett.
Hamill, S. (2000). Narrow Road to the Interior and other writings. Shambhala
Keene, D. (illustrated by M. Miyata, M., 1996). Oku no hosomichi. Kodansha International.
Korman, C., & Kamaike Susumu. (illustrated by Hayakawa Ikutada, 1968). Back roads to far towns. Grossman Publishers.
Nobuyki Yuasa. (1966). The narrow road to the Deep North: and other travel sketches. Penguin.
Sato, Hiroaki. (1996). Bashō’s Narrow Road: spring and autumn passages: Narrow Road to the Interior and the renga sequence A Farewell Gift to Sora. Stone Bridge Press.
Collections of Basho’s Haiku
Reichhold, J. (illustrated by Shiro Tsujimura, 2013). Basho: the complete haiku. Kodansha USA.
Fitzsimons, A. (2022). Basho: the complete haiku of Matsuo Basho. University of California Press.
Toshiharu Oseko (1990 and 1996). Basho’s haiku: literal translations for those who wish to read the original Japanese text, with grammatical analysis and explanatory notes. Volume I and Volume II. Toshiharu Oseko
Ueda, M. (1991). Bashō and his interpreters: selected hokku with commentary. Stanford University Press.
Young, D. (2103) Moon woke me up nine times: selected haiku of Basho. Alfred A. Knopf
General References
Aitken, R. (1978). A Zen wave: Bashō’s haiku & Zen. Weatherhill.
Blyth, R. H. (1949). Haiku: Volume I Eastern culture. Hokuseido (reprinted 1981, Heian International).
Carter, S. D. (1991). Traditional Japanese poetry: an anthology. Stanford University Press.
Carter, S. (1997). On a bare branch: Bashō and the haikai profession. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 117 (1), 57–69.
Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th Century BCE. He described a set of paradoxes to prove that space and time are continuous and cannot be divided into discrete parts. The most famous of these are the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, which purportedly shows that Achilles could never catch up with the much slower Tortoise, and the Paradox of the Arrow, which shows that an arrow in flight is always stationary.
Life of Zeno
Very little is known about the life of Zeno of Elea (Palmer, 2021). Elea, modern-day Velia, was a settlement on the southwest coast of Italy, founded in 540 BCE by Greeks from Phocaea, an Ionian city on the western coast of Anatolia. The Phocians were experienced sailors who had also established colonies in Catalonia and Marseille. The Persian invasion of the Ionian cities drove most of the Phocians toward their colonies, which together with other Greek settlements formed an extensive empire called Magna Grecia. Roman ruins, including the Porta Rosa and a theater have been excavated in Velia:
Zeno was born in about 495 BCE. He became a student of the philosopher Parmenides (?515-?440 BCE), who believed in the universal unity of being: all is one, unchanging, without beginning or end. Parmenides and Zeno may have visited Athens when Socrates was a young man, though this is uncertain. Plato’s describes their interaction in his dialogue Parmenides (~370 BCE), but Plato had not yet been born when the meeting supposedly took place. Zeno may have died under torture following his rebellion against a tyrant, though the variable accounts of his death are perhaps more fantasy than history. The Capitoline Museum in Rome has a Hellenistic statue (2nd Century BCE, illustrated on the right) which is traditionally considered a representation of Zeno. His face suggests both skepticism and humor.
A Book of Paradoxes
Zeno wrote a book of forty paradoxes to defend the philosophy of Parmenides (Dowden, 2023). Unfortunately, the book did not survive and all we know about its contents are brief references in later writings by authors who may not have understood Zeno’s thinking. A paradox is a logical argument that leads to a conclusion at odds with (para, beside or beyond) accepted opinion (dox) (Strobach, 2013). A paradox may be used to demonstrate that accepted opinion is wrong, or at least open to contradictory interpretation. However, the usual intent of a paradox is to show that the premises of the argument must be incorrect since the conclusion is so obviously impossible. This is a variant of the reductio ad absurdum. Any paradox therefore presents us with a choice:
either the conclusion is not really unacceptable, or else the starting point, or the reasoning, has some non-obvious flaw. (Sainsbury, 2009, p 3)
One problem with Zeno’s paradoxes is that we do not know how to interpret them because we do not know how he intended them to be used. The following paragraphs will consider the two most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes from the point of view of modern science and mathematics.
Achilles and the Tortoise
The original paradox appears to be have involved two runners one faster than the other. Their identification with Achilles and the Tortoise occurred later. In a race the speedy Achilles is attempting to pass a slow Tortoise, who has been given a head start. In order to catch up with the tortoise Achilles must first reach the point where the turtle began the race (t0). However, by then (t1) the tortoise has already moved ahead, albeit by a smaller distance than Achilles has traversed. Achilles must then reach the point to which the Tortoise had advanced. He can cover this extra distance by t2 but again the Tortoise has already moved ahead. Achilles continues to reach the point to which the Tortoise has advanced only to find that the Tortoise has already moved further on. Achilles can therefore never pass the Tortoise. The first three episodes of this infinite train are shown below. For ease of illustration, Achilles is made to run about 4 times faster than the Tortoise:
The paradox basically proposes that the time taken by Achilles to catch up with the Tortoise is composed of an infinite number of intervals. Even though the later intervals may become vanishingly small, an infinite number of intervals would take an infinite amount of time. Modern mathematics, however, has shown that infinite series like that of Achilles and the Tortoise can have a finite sum. An infinite geometric series of the form
sums to a finite amount 1/(1-z) if the absolute value of z is less than 1. For the example that we have been using the value of z is 1/4, i.e., the ratio of the velocities between Tortoise and Achilles. The sum of the series is thus 4/3.
This is demonstrated through the following equations. The sum of the series (T) is equal to the time taken to cover the distance of the Tortoise’s head start (for simplicity this is made equal to 1) plus the time taken to cover the distance that the Tortoise has covered in the meantime (equal to 1/4 since for our illustration Achilles travels 4 times faster than the Tortoise) plus 1/16 for the next abortive catch-up, and so on to infinity (…). The equations demonstrate that the sum of the series equals 4/3.
The paradox can also be solved using algebraic equations. One can assume Achilles catches up with the Tortoise at a time T after travelling a distance D. The equation for Achilles is
D = T*Va where Va is the known velocity of Achilles
And for the Tortoise is
D = T*Vt+ H where H is the distance of the head start and Vt is the velocity of the Tortoise
Combining the two equations we have
T*Va= T*Vt+ H
Thence
T = H / (Va – Vt)
In our example Vtis 1/4 of Va
T = H / (3/4*Va)
Or 4/3 the time that it takes Achilles to travel the distance of the Tortoise’s head start.
These calculations can be represented graphically with distance plotted on the horizontal axis and time on the vertical axis:
A simple mathematical view of Zeno’s paradox is to set the frame of reference to the moving Tortoise and to calculate the speed of Achilles relative to this reference. In our example, the speed of Achilles relative to the Turtle is 3. This is 3/4 the speed of Achilles relative to the absolute reference and thus it will take Achilles 4/3 the time to catch up with the Tortoise.
These mathematical approaches allow us to understand the movements of Achilles and the Tortoise, to determine where they will be as time passes, and to calculate when Achilles will finally pass the Tortoise. However, they do not really resolve the paradox as presented by Zeno. If space and time are infinitely divisible into points and instants, it will take Achilles an infinite number of acts to catch up with the Tortoise, and an infinite number of acts will take forever (Black, 1970).
We do not know Zeno’s original intent in formulating his paradoxes of motion. He probably did not wish to prove that motion is impossible, and that our perception of moving things is illusory. Rather, he likely wanted to prove that space and time are continuous and cannot be divided into discrete points and instants. This would be in keeping with the monism of his teacher Parmenides. Bertrand Russell (1926, p 174) stated that
The conclusion that Zeno wishes us to draw is that plurality is a delusion and that spaces and times are really indivisible.
However, Russell goes on to propose that space and time may be infinitely divisible if we properly understand infinity.
Zeno’s Arrow
At any instant of time a flying arrow will occupy a space equal to its own size and therefore show no evidence of movement. Its flight is therefore a succession of rests. While it is moving, the arrow is always stationary.
Zeno had not observed an arrow at an instant of time: he could only imagine it. Modern high-speed photography can record moving objects at an instant of time. If the exposure time is very small, they appear unblurred, or completely stationary. The observer cannot tell that the object is moving from its instantaneous appearance. The first person to record motion using high-speed photography was Eadweard Muybridge (1840-1904). The following set of photographs of a running man were likely taken in the 1870s and printed in 1887.
The development of the stroboscope which could present brief flashes of bright light allowed photographers such as Harold Edgerton (1903-1990), also known as “Papa Flash,” to examine very rapidly moving objects. The following photograph from the 1950s shows a moving bullet “caught” at two instants by two stroboscopic flashes separated by only a brief time (probably of the order of 50 microseconds).
At first glance, modern science apparently confirms the conclusion Zeno’s Arrow Paradox: at any instant of time a moving arrow, man or bullet is stationary. However, just because something looks stationary does not mean that it does not have velocity. The trajectory of the arrow can be represented by two functions denoting its horizontal (x) and vertical (y) position:
The parabolic trajectory is determined by the initial velocity (V0) of the arrow as it is released from the bow, the angle (θ) at which it is released, its initial height above the ground (y0), and downward acceleration caused by gravity (g). The following diagram shows a sample trajectory, together with views of the arrow at four instants of time. Note that the formulae do not consider the (very small) effects of friction and treat the horizontal velocity of the arrow as constant. The horizontal axis can therefore also represent time.
The invention of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz allowed us to calculate the velocity of a moving object at any instant in time. If the distance travelled can be represented by a function (f), the velocity at any instant (t) can be calculated by seeing how far the object travels in a tiny period of time (Δt)
The limit as Δt approaches zero – the derivative of the function – is the object’s instantaneous velocity. At any instant of time the object shows no evidence of movement, but it still has velocity. Though it appears stationary, it still moves.
The calculus allows us to calculate the velocity of the arrow at any instant (Reeder 2015). However, Zeno’s paradox calls into question the idea of discrete instants in time. Motion is continuous; it is not a succession of stationary positions. William James (1910, p. 157):
Zeno’s arguments were meant to show, not that motion could not really take place, but that it could not truly be conceived as taking place by the successive occupancy of points. If a flying arrow occupies at each point of time a determinate point of space, its motion becomes nothing but a sum of rests, for it exists not, out of any point; and in the point it doesn’t move. Motion cannot truly occur as thus discretely constituted.
Time and Space
Zeno’s paradoxes have been discussed extensively (Dowden, 2013; Grünbaum, 1967; Huggett, 2018; McLaughlin, 1994; Sainsbury, 2009; Salmon, 1970; Strobach, 2013). Most writers suggest that modern mathematics can handle the paradoxes: infinite series may sum to a finite amount and instantaneous velocities can be assessed with the infinitesimal calculus.
However, the nature of time and space remain imperfectly understood. A particular problem involves what might be considered the smoothness of these dimensions. Achilles does not run through an infinite set of decreasing distances to catch up with the Tortoise. Rather he runs smoothly and quickly passes the Tortoise. The arrow does not move from one stationary position to the next as if it were in a movie flickering at a slow frame-rate. The arrow moves smoothly from the bow to the target.
Modern conceptions of space and time propose that they are not absolute (e.g., Rovelli, 2018; Markosian et al., 2018). The fabric of space and time can be altered by gravity. A large mass like our sun will distort the adjacent space. Light travelling near such a mass will be deflected by the resultant curvature. A large mass also alters time, which passes more rapidly the closer one is to the mass. It is difficult to understand how such elastic dimensions can be represented by discrete points. The effects of gravity are illustrated in the following diagram, where the four-dimensional fabric of space is shown as a 2-dimensional mesh:
Time’s Arrow
Although we often consider our universe as existing in four dimensions, the dimension of time is distinct from the three spatial dimensions. Though we can move back and forth in space, we can only move forward in time.
Studies of statistical mechanics demonstrated that the state of a system can be described by the organization of its components. With the passage of time, this state can only change towards increasing disorder. In the formulation of Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) of this disorder was called “entropy” (Greek en, in + trope, change). Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) considered entropy in terms of statistical mechanics. He described entropy (S) in terms of the number (Ω) of possible microstates (organizations of its molecular components) that could result in a system’s macrostate (temperature, pressure, volume, density, etc.). His formulation of entropy, and of the second law of thermodynamics (with the passage of time entropy can only increase) are:
where ln is the natural logarithm and kBis Boltzmann’s constant.
The concept of entropy led Arthur Eddington to propose the idea of “Time’s Arrow:”
Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone. I shall use the phrase “time’s arrow” to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space. (Eddington, 1927, p 67.)
Unlike Zeno’s Arrow which is concerned with the nature of motion in time, Eddington’s arrow is concerned with the nature of time itself.
The Graveyard by the Sea
In 1922, Paul Valéry wrote a long poem Le Cimetière Marin about time and mortality. Its setting is a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea at Sète in Southern France:
At the poem’s climax, Valéry calls on Zeno.:
Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Êlée! M’as-tu percé de cette flèche ailée Qui vibre, vole, et qui ne vole pas! Le son m’enfante et la flèche me tue! Ah! le soleil . . . Quelle ombre de tortue Pour l’âme, Achille immobile à grands pas!
;Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno, Have you then pierced me with your feathered arrow That hums and flies, yet does not fly! The sounding Shaft gives me life, the arrow kills. Oh, sun! — Oh, what a tortoise-shadow to outrun My soul, Achilles’ giant stride left standing! (translation by C. Day-Lewis, 1950)
Zeno, Zeno, the cruel, Elean Zeno! You’ve truly fixed me with that feathered arrow Which quivers as it flies and never moves! The sound begets me and the arrow kills! Ah, sun! . . . What a tortoise shadow for the soul, Achilles motionless in his giant stride! (translation of David Paul, 1971)
(I have included two translations, one by Day-Lewis which maintains the rhyme scheme and a more literal version by Paul.)
Valéry’s imagery is complex, it melds Time’s Arrow with Zeno’s paradoxes of the Arrow and of Achilles and the Tortoise. Time will proceed to death and disorder before we can ever attain eternity.
Valéry does not leave usstumbling unsuccessfully after the Tortoise. His poem ends with an invocation to live completely in the life we have no matter that it leads to death.
Le vent se lève! . . . Il faut tenter de vivre! L’air immense ouvre et referme mon livre, La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs! Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies! Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux réjouies Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live! The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking. (Day-Lewis)
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live! Hie immense air opens and shuts my book, A wave dares burst in powder over the rocks. Pages, whirl away in a dazzling riot! And break, waves, rejoicing, break that quiet Roof where foraging sails dipped their beaks! (Paul)
The last line of the poem alludes to its opening where Valéry likened the boats sailing on the sea to doves moving on an immense roof. That quiet roof – the sea – represents the eternity that we live not long enough to understand.
Reference
Black, M. (1970). Achilles and the tortoise. In W. C. Salmon (Ed.). Zeno’s paradoxes. (pp. 67-81). Bobbs-Merrill.
Dowden, B. (accessed 2023) Zeno’s paradoxes. InternetEncyclopedia of Philosophy
Sainsbury, R. M. (2009). Paradoxes (3rd edition). Cambridge University Press.
Salmon, W. C. (1970). Zeno’s paradoxes. Bobbs-Merrill.
Strobach, N. (2013). Zeno’s Paradoxes. In H. Dyke & A. Bardon (Eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (pp. 30–46). John Wiley & Sons
Valéry, P. (translated by C. Day-Lewis, 1946). Le Cimetière marin / The graveyard by the sea. M. Secker & Warburg.
Valéry, P. (translated by D. Paul and edited by J. R. Lawler, 1971). Collected works of Paul Valery. Volume 1. Poems. Princeton University Press.
Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California’s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel Point using rocks from the shore. From 1920 to 1924 he built by himself the adjacent Hawk Tower. Jeffers became famous soon after the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924. This book and those that followed included both long narratives and shorter lyrics. His epics were bloody and tragic; his verse was free and passionate. Underlying his poems was an austere philosophy of “inhumanism.” This compared the transience of humanity to the persistence of the natural world, and proposed that we should detach ourselves from the passions of mankind and simply celebrate the beauty of the universe. Over the next decade, Jeffers published extensively and in 1932 his photograph graced the cover of Time. After World War II, his outrage at the death and destruction that occurred during the war and the severity of his inhumanist philosophy led to controversy and obscurity. In more recent years, the environmental movement has found inspiration in his love of the natural world and his anger about how humanity has despoiled it.
Early Life
John Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a Professor of Ancient Languages at the Western Theological Seminary. It was his father’s second marriage, and his son’s middle name, which he preferred, was in honor of the first wife, who had died five years earlier. Robinson Jeffers attended private schools in Pittsburgh, and then in Germany and Switzerland. He was a bright student and by the time he was 16 he was fluent in Latin, Greek, French and German. In 1903, his father turned 65 years old and retired to live in Los Angeles.
After graduating from Occidental College in 1905, Jeffers was unsure of what he wanted to do.. He studied languages at the University of Southern California for a year, but then switched to Medicine. After 3 years, he decided that he did not wish to be a physician and began studies in Forestry at the University of Seattle. He found the curriculum too business-oriented and quit, returning to Los Angeles in 1910.
While at the University of Southern California in 1906, Jeffers met Una Call Kuster (1884-1950) who was also studying languages (Greenan, 1988). At the age of 18 years, she had married Edward Kuster, a rich lawyer and socialite, but wished to complete her education before having a family. Over the years Robinson and Una become fast friends and then passionate lovers. By 1910, their affair became widely known, and divorce proceedings were initiated. These events may have contributed to Jeffers’s moving to Seattle to study forestry. The following illustration shows photographs from 1911 (adapted from Karman, 1913).
After the divorce was finalized in 1913, Robinson and Una were married. Their first two years together were marked by grief. A daughter was born in early 1914 but only lived a day. The couple then moved to Carmel, a small village just south of the Monterey peninsula, to be alone together. Then Robinson’s father died in December, 1914.
In 1912, Jeffers had published at his own expense a book of poems – Flagons and Apples. Of the 500 copies printed, 480 were remaindered and sold to a second-hand bookstore. Now in Carmel, inspired by the Big Sur country just south of the village, Jeffers put together a new book of poems – The Californians – that was published by Macmillan in 1916. This book contained poems of many forms and lengths, most using classical rhythms and rhyme-schemes.
Twin boys – Garth and Donnan – were born in 1916, and the Jeffers slowly settled into their life at Carmel. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Jeffers attempted to join the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps but his application was rejected because he was already 30 years old and responsible for a new family. Jeffers attempted to write a long poem about the war but it came to nothing. In 1920 he submitted some new poems to Macmillan, but The Californians had not sold well and the publisher rejected his submission (Zaller, 1991).
Tor House and Hawk Tower
In 1919 Jeffers purchased land out on Carmel Point, a raised area jutting out into the ocean just south of Carmel Beach. Here Jeffers helped a stonemason to build Tor House using the rocks and boulders on the point and the adjacent beach. The name comes from the Gaelic word for hill or rocky outcrop. After the house was finished, Jeffers built the adjacent Hawk Tower by himself over several years. The following photographs by Morley Baer show views of the house and tower (from the land and from the sea) as it was in 1964 (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001 At that time everything was still open to the sea; now other houses encroach upon the site.
Working on the house and the tower freed up Jeffers’s mind and released his creative impulses. Jeffers stopped using rhyme, and decided to write with natural rhythms in the style of Walt Whitman. Line length became a structuring device for his new poems, which often used alternating long and short lines (Hymes, 1991). The long lines have a grandeur but make the poems difficult to print upon either page or screen. In the books he was to publish in this style, the longer lines are broken in two. For this posting some of the poems will be printed in a smaller font than the rest of the text. These new characteristics are present his poem about Tor House (published in 1928):
If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils. Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years: It is the granite knoll on the granite And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel River-valley, these four will remain In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little; You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from Before the poles changed; and Orion in December Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge. Come in the morning you will see white gulls Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon Their dance-companion, a ghost walking By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world. My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind With the mad wings and the day moon. (CP I, 408)
(The references for this and for subsequent poems in this posting are to Jeffers’s Collected Poems edited by Tim Hunt).
Tamar
Jeffers’s first collection of poems after moving to Tor House – Tamar and Other Poems (1924), published at his own expense – was written in his new free verse. The epic poem Tamar tells the tragedy of a family living at Point Lobos just south of Carmel. The tale has biblical echoes in the stories of Tamar who seduced her father-in-law Judah (Genesis 38), and of her namesake Tamar, the daughter of King David, who was raped by her step-brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13). The following is a summary of Jeffers’s poem (from Karman, 2015, pp 55-56);
Tamar … tells the story of the doomed Cauldwells who live in an isolated home on Point Lobos, south of Carmel. The head of the house is David Cauldwell, an old, broken-down man who frequently quotes the Bible. Two children, a son named Lee and a daughter Tamar, live with him, along with his demented sister Jinny, and Stella Moreland, the sister of his dead wife Lily. The action of the story, set around the time of America’s entry into World War I, concerns Tamar’s incestuous relationship with her brother, an ensuing pregnancy, and her seduction of an unloved suitor to snare a respectable father for the child. Through her Aunt Stella, a medium for the dead, Tamar learns that her father had an incestuous relationship with his sister Helen, which makes her behavior seem more like the simple repetition of a family pattern instead of the singular act of a bounds-breaking free spirit. In the process of coming to terms with this knowledge, Tamar dances naked in a trance-induced frenzy on the seashore, where she is violated by the ghosts of Indians who once lived on Point Lobos, and where she speaks with the ghost of her Aunt Helen, her father’s sister-lover. As Tamar’s mind sickens, she thinks of ways to destroy her family, especially after learning that her brother, seeking adventure, plans to enlist and leave home. The end comes in a wild conflagration. On the eve of her brother’s departure, with her benighted suitor at hand, Tamar orchestrates an explosion of jealous rage. As her brother pulls a knife and stabs her suitor, Tamar’s Aunt Jinny sets the house on fire. Floors break, walls fall, and everyone perishes in the flames.
Jeffers tells his convoluted story of incest and murder in an epic style, and intersperses the events with quieter descriptions of the California Coast. This combination of the lurid and the lyrical makes for uneasy reading. Not a poem for the faint of heart, it was the first of many long narratives that Jeffers was to write over the next decades.
The book also contains many short poems describing the beauty of the California Coast, such as Divinely Superfluous Beauty:
The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals, Over and under the ocean… Divinely superfluous beauty Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow And hills tower, waves fall. The incredible beauty of joy Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too Be joined, there is not a maiden Burns and thirsts for love More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings Weave like a web in the air Divinely superfluous beauty.(CP I, 4)
Jeffers also began to consider the transience of humanity in a universe that lasts for ever in such poems as To the Stone-Cutters (recorded by Jeffers in 1941):
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. (CP I, 5)
Big Sur
The California coast south of Carmel and north of San Simeon is known as the Big Sur – a name deriving from the Spanish el sur grande (the big south), which is how the Spanish settlers on the Monterey Peninsula referred to the region. Here the Santa Lucia mountains rise directly from the sea. Edward Weston (1886-1958) took many striking photographs of this coastline, and in 1938 moved his studio to Carmel. Below are Weston’s photographs from 1929 and 1938.
The poetry of Robinson Jeffers celebrated the beauty of Big Sur. The following is a poem about Garapata Beach where Soberanes (or Sovranes) Creek empties into the Pacific – The Place for No Story (1932). When introducing the poem in a reading in 1941 Jeffers remarked about the title:
These eleven lines are called “The Place for No Story,” because the coast here, its pure and simple grandeur, seemed to me too beautiful to be the scene of any narrative of mine. (Jeffers, 1956)
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek; No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin Over rock shaped like flame; The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence; A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; And the gray air haunted with hawks: This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable Human presence here could do anything But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP II, 157)
The following it is a 1964 photograph of the beach by Morley Baer (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001). Barely visible in the photograph are hawks, haunting the sky above the further slopes:
The poem is “an evocation of the sublime” (Zaller, 2012, p 171). Yet it differs from Wordsworth’s sublime. It is not the participation of the individual human consciousness in something universal:
…a sense sublime, Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. (Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798)
For Jeffers, the sublime is totally independent of any human interaction. It is something to be wondered at but not participated in.
Fame
After Tamar, Jeffers became very successful, publishing a book every year or two. Like Tamar, these books contained both long narratives and short lyrics. His poetic style – the long lines and the free rhythms – did not change. The narrative poems continued to be full of sex and violence – like penny-dreadfuls updated to the 20th Century and translated into poetry. Jeffers, however, had tapped some current in the American soul.
The shorter poems continued to be more approachable. The following is Hawk and Rock (1935). Robert Hass (1987) was to use this as the title poem for a later collection of Jeffers’s shorter lyrics.
Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes.
This gray rock, standing tall On the headland, where the sea-wind Lets no tree grow,
Earthquake-proved, and signatured By ages of storms: on its peak A falcon has perched.
I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon’s Realist eyes and act Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud. (CP II, 416)
The poem proclaims Jeffers outlook on life – a combination of fierce consciousness and disinterestedness, bright power and dark peace. The following shows the final lines in Jeffers’s handwriting (from an inscription in a book gifted to a friend).
Jeffers’s photograph made the cover of Time in 1932. (It was not until 1950 that the magazine awarded a cover portrait to either Robert Frost or T. S. Eliot.) In 1938, Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume of over 600 pages. The following are photographs of Jeffers taken by Edward Weston during the height of his fame – the middle image is from the cover of Time:
Inhumanism
Jeffers had received a modern scientific education and understood the import of evolutionary theory and recent findings in astronomy upon our place in the world and in time. He realized that the human species might develop further, but would ultimately become extinct, the universe then continuing to exist without any further contribution from mankind. Nevertheless, he gloried in the heart-breaking beauty of the natural world. He described this “religious feeling” in his 1941 talk to the Library of Congress (Jeffers, 1956, pp 23-24):
It is the feeling … I will say the certitude … that the world, the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be love and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.
But these moments are evanescent. The beauty of the world will outlast us. The following are the lines that end his 1926 poem Credo:
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. (CP I, 239)
Jeffers view of beauty was that it was part of nature and would outlast the perceiver. An opposing view is that beauty is in the mind, and that human beings have evolved to find the world they live in beautiful. Such a development facilitates human survival: if we cherish the world, we will reap its bounty.
Jeffers’s philosophy was more specifically described in the preface to his 1947 book The Double Axe (the original version of which is included in his 2001 Selected Poetry edited by Tim Hunt):
It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies has realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.
Jeffers contrasted his ideas to Renaissance Humanism, which, though he preferred it to the preceding Scholastic Theology, he felt improperly placed Man at the center of the universe. The Renaissance took to heart wisdom of philosophers such as Protagoras of Abdera who proposed that “Man is the measure of all things” and doubted the existence of the gods: “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.” (Bonazzi, 2020). Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola focussed on the man rather than on God. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he proclaimed that “There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than Man” (Forbes, 1942).
Jeffers called his philosophy “inhumanism” to distinguish it from the humanism of the Renaissance (Carpenter, 1981). As Nafis-Sahely (2016) has remarked, the philosophy “might have fared better under a different name.” Perhaps, for example, “naturalism.” The first meaning suggested by the word “inhumanism” is “brutality.” Jeffers’s inhumanism is an austere and detached view of the world. It has many similarities to stoicism (Lioi, 2025): we live our life as best we can; we pass away and the world persists. In his 1941 talk, Jeffers (1956, p 28) related his inhumanism to the main tenets of Christianity:
It seems to me, analogously, that the whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human things, let him regard them objectively, as a small part of the great music. Certainly humanity has claims, on all of us; we can best fulfill them by keeping our emotional sanity; and this by seeing beyond and around the human race. This is far from humanism; but it is, in fact, the Christian attitude: … to love God with all one’s heart and soul, and one’s neighbor as one’s self — as much as that, but as little as that.
Jeffers was enthusiastic in his love of nature, but far more detached in his love of neighbor. Although he wrote in the style of Walt Whitman, he lacked that poet’s intense love of his fellow man.
One of the clearest poetic descriptions of inhumanism is in final section of the late poem De Rerum Virtute or (On the Nature of Virtue) (1954, discussed extensively by Chapman, 2002):
One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men; The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful? These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore, With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind, And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream— But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest, Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful? Nor the great skies over the earth? The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it. (CP III, 403)
The Double Axe
Jeffers was thoroughly dismayed by World War II and believed that the United States should never have entered the fighting. His pacifism was accentuated by the fact that his son Garth was serving in the US forces. Donnan had been excused because of a heart murmur. Jeffers could not see any difference between the sides – he thought that Churchill and Roosevelt were as guilty as Hitler and Mussolini.
In 1948 Jeffers published his first collection of poems since Pearl Harbor – The Double Axe. The The title poem was composed of two parts: TheLove and the Hate and The Inhumanist. In the first part a young soldier killed in the Pacific Campaign wills his decaying body to return home to the family ranch in the Big Sur and confront his father:
Did you And your old buddies decide what the war’s about? I came to ask. You were all for it, you know; And keeping safe away from it, so to speak, maybe you see Reasons that we who only die in it can’t, (CP III, 222)
The second part of the poem occurs years later on the same Big Sur ranch. Its caretaker (and possessor of the double-bit axe) looks after the homestead as various refugees from a nuclear war arrive. After a snowfall the old man addresses his axe to repudiate the humanism of the Renaissance:
Man is no measure of anything. Truly it is yours to hack, snow’s to be white, mine to admire; Each cat mind her own kitten: that is our morals. But wait till the moon comes up the snow-tops, And you’ll sing Holy. (CP III, 264)
Jeffers’s politics and philosophy did not appeal to a people that considered the war they had just won as righteous. The publisher convinced Jeffers to withdraw some of his most virulent anti-war poems (Shebl, 1976) and added a disclaimer to the book in a “Publisher’s Note”:
Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume.
The reviews were scathing. From then on, Jeffers was no longer an acclaimed poet. He lived out the rest of his life in Carmel in relative obscurity. He continued to publish occasionally but critics disparaged his work even while admitting its importantance. The following is from a review of his posthumously published last poems:
Surely he provides us with plenty to carp about: his oracular moralizing, his cruel and thoroughly repellent sexuality, his dreadful lapses of taste when he seems simply to throw back his head and howl, his slovenly diction, the eternal sameness of his themes, the amorphous sprawl of his poems on the page. The sheer power and drama of some of Jeffers’ writing, however, still carries the day despite everything, and this is not so much because of the presence of the Truth that Jeffers believes he has got hold of but because of what might be called the embodiment of that Truth: Jeffers’ gorgeous panorama of big imagery, his galaxies, suns, seas, cliffs, continents, mountains, rivers, flocks of birds, gigantic schools of fish, and so on. His Truth is hard to swallow try looking at your children and drawing comfort from Jeffers’ “inhumanism”—but one cannot shake off Jeffers’ vision as one can the carefully prepared surprises of many of the neatly packaged stanzas we call “good poems”; it is too deeply disturbing and too powerfully stated. (Dickey, 1964).
In the late 60s the escalation of the Vietnam War led to the involvement and death of US troops. Jeffers’s passionate pacificism became more understandable, and his poetry underwent some rehabilitation and republication (Nolte, 1978).
The Environmental Movement
Another important development affecting the reputation of Robinson Jeffers was the birth of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. As well as pointing out the severe problems that result from our misuse of the environment, the movement also published books showing the beauty of unspoiled nature. A major example of this was the book Not Man Apart (Adams et al, 1964) which combined photographs of the Big Sur Coast with lines from Robinson Jeffers.
Karman (2015) remarks about Jeffers attitude to man’s place in nature:
Jeffers’ experience of deep time added a vatic amplitude to his verse, and a sharp moral edge. He spoke repeatedly about the destruction of Earth’s environment, warning, shrilly at times, of the effects of overpopulation, pollution, and the exploitation of natural resources.
Quigley (2002) places Jeffers in a direct line between Thoreau (1817-1862) and later authors such as Edward Abbey (1927-1989) and Gary Snyder (1930- ) in the development of modern environmentalism. Of these writers, Jeffers was the most critical of how man has misused the world, and perhaps the most pessimistic. However, Abbey, Snyder and other writers have taken to heart his criticisms and tried to formulate new and better ways for man and nature to interact. Wyatt (1986) has written of the affinity between Jeffers and Snyder, both of whom spent much time building homes to fit in with the natural world. John Elder (1985) discussed Jeffers and nature in the context of how nature and humanity must interact – a process that he terms “culture:”
In learning to find equivalence between mountains, grass, and man, we gain the composure of a larger design. It is not a fixed, symmetrical rose, like Dante’s covering order, but rather a process of tidal exchange, of decay and renewal. Only as we learn to see it in a natural order beyond man’s civilized system may the human waste-land be redeemed and the individual made whole. Conversely, unless the city is restored and human life brought back into physical and spiritual balance, the wilderness beloved of fierce solitaries like Jeffers will inevitably be destroyed. The circuit of mutual dependence between nature and civilization defines my understanding of the word culture: it is a process rather than a product, something that grows rather than being manufactured. And only in poetry is culture fully realized.</p>
In Retrospect
Jeffers wrote some powerful but difficult longer poems and some fine shorter lyrics. I would like to end the posting with one of his early poems – The Excesses of God (1924) – together with the woodcut by Mallette Dean that accompanies the poem in his 1956 book:
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know Our God? For to equal a need Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom Nor the birds without music: There is the great humaneness at the heart of things, The extravagant kindness, the fountain Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise If power and desire were perch-mates.(CP I, 4)
Resources
The website of the Robinson Jeffers Association provides links to many different resources about the poet, including an archive of most of the issues of the journal Jeffers Studies.
References
Adams, A., Jeffers, R., & Brower, D. (1965). Not man apart: Lines from Robinson Jeffers with photographs of the Big Sur Coast. Sierra Club.
Bonazzi, M. (2020). Protagoras. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Carpenter, F. I. (1981). The inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers. Western American Literature, 16(1), 19-25
Chapman, S. (2002). De Rerum Virtute: a critical anatomy. Jeffers Studies, 6(4), 22-35.
Dickey, J. (1964). Review of The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. Poetry, 103(5), 316-324.
Elder, J. (1985). Imagining the Earth: poetry and the vision of nature. University of Illinois Press.
Forbes, E. L. (1942). Of the Dignity of Man: Oration of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Count of Concordia. Journal of the History of Ideas, 3(3), 347-354.
Greenan, E. (1998). Of Una Jeffers. Story Line Press.
Hass, R. (1987). Robinson Jeffers: the poetry and the life. The American Poetry Review. 16(6), 33-41. (a reprint of the introduction to Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers)
Hymes, D. (1991). Jeffers’ artistry of line. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers. (pp. 226-267). University of Delaware Press.
Jeffers, R. (1938). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Random House.
Jeffers, R. (1956). Themes in my poems. Book Club of California.
Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 2001). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Stanford University Press.
Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 1988-2002). The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. (5 volumes). Stanford University Press.
Jeffers, R. (Ed. Karman, J., 2009-2015). The collected letters of Robinson Jeffers: with selected letters of Una Jeffers. (3 volumes) Stanford University Press.
Jeffers, R., Baer, M., & Karman, J. (2001). Stones of the Sur. Stanford University Press.
Karman, J. (2015). Robinson Jeffers: poet and prophet. Stanford University Press.
Lioi, A. (2016). Knocking our heads to pieces against the night: going cosmic with Robinson Jeffers. In Tangney, S. (Ed.) The wild that attracts us: new critical essays on Robinson Jeffers. (pp 117-140). University of New Mexico Press.
Nafis-Sahely, A. (2016). If you believe that you’ll believe anything – Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. Wild Court.
Nolte, W. H. (1978). Robinson Jeffers redivivus. The Georgia Review, 32(2), 429-434.
Quigley, P. (2002) Carrying the weight: Jeffers’s Role in preparing the way for ecocriticism. Jeffers Studies, 6(4), 46-68.
Shebl, J. M. (1976). In this wild water: the suppressed poems of Robinson Jeffers. Ward Ritchie Press.
Wyatt, D. (1986). Jeffers, Snyder, and the ended world. In The Fall into Eden. (pp. 174–205). Cambridge University Press.
Zaller, R. (1991). Robinson Jeffers, American poetry and a thousand years. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers. (pp. 29-43). University of Delaware Press.
Zaller, R. (2012). Robinson Jeffers and the American sublime. Stanford University Press.
Beginnings
