{"id":676,"date":"2014-11-24T17:54:11","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T22:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/?p=676"},"modified":"2017-01-08T10:34:28","modified_gmt":"2017-01-08T15:34:28","slug":"cosmos-mariner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/?p=676","title":{"rendered":"Cosmos Mariner"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>

The poet Conrad Aiken was born in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was 11 years old, his father, a respected surgeon, shot his wife and then committed suicide. Trying to distance himself from the experience in the third person, Conrad later recounted his discovery of the bodies:<\/p>\n

[A]fter the desultory early morning quarrel, came the half stifled scream, and then the sound of his father\u2019s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol-shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever. (Aiken, 1952, p 302).<\/p>\n

Aiken was taken into the care of his aunt, Jane Delano Kempton, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later lived with an uncle, William Tillinghast, a college librarian at Harvard. After graduating from Middlesex Preparatory School in Concord, Aiken was admitted to Harvard University in 1907, where he became a friend of T. S. Eliot.<\/p>\n

\"aikenxx\"<\/a>After leaving Harvard in 1912, Aiken decided to devote his life to poetry. Though much more prolific than Eliot, Aiken never achieved his colleague\u2019s popularity. Many of Aiken\u2019s poems are long and discursive. They might perhaps have benefited from an editor like Ezra Pound, who was so effective in separating out the gold in Eliot\u2019s verse (Eliot, 1922\/1971). Aiken published more than 30 volumes of poetry, several novels, many short stories and two autobiographical memoirs. Despite receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and serving as the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, Aiken became \u201cone of the country\u2019s best-known and least-read poets and men of letters\u201d (Butscher, 1988, p xvii).<\/p>\n

Aiken was a frequent reviewer for newspapers and literary magazines, providing critical evaluations of the new modernist poets. He even anonymously reviewed himself:<\/p>\n

It is difficult to place Conrad Aiken in the poetic firmament, so difficult that one sometimes wonders whether he deserves a place there at all \u2026 The musical symbolism, almost obsessionally pursued, develops a melodic line only to be broken in upon by a matter-of-factness which in the context appears only malicious. It is questionable whether this sort of counterpoint of ideas can ever be successful in verse. The unity of effect is jeopardized; the reader is more often perplexed than pleased.\u201d (Aiken, 1958, pp 120-121, quotation is from a review, correctly entitled Schisophrenia<\/em>, initially published in 1917 in the Chicago News<\/em>).<\/p>\n

After spending some time in England, Aiken returned to North America, settling in Brewster in an old Cape Cod farmhouse near Sheepfold Hill. The hill played a prominent role in the poem A Letter from Li Po<\/em> and became the title of Aiken\u2019s subsequent book of poetry). Aiken’s home was described by Wilbur when he visited Aiken for an interview:<\/p>\n

The house, called Forty-one Doors, dates largely from the eighteenth century; a typical old Cape Cod farmhouse, the rooms are small but many, opening in all directions off what must originally have been the most important room, the kitchen. The house is far enough from the center of town to be reasonably quiet even at the height of the summer, and it is close enough to the north Cape shore for easy trips to watch the gulls along the edges of relatively unspoiled inlets. (Wilbur, 1968).<\/p>\n

In 1962 Aiken finally returned to Savannah, where he lived next door to his parents\u2019 former house. He died there in 1973. His gravestone is a bench beside his parents\u2019 grave. His epitaph reads \u201cCosmos Mariner Destination Unknown. Give my Love to the World.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aiken was deeply influenced at Harvard by George Santayana (1863-1952), finding inspiration in his books The Sense of Beauty <\/em>(1896) and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion <\/em>(1900). He took Santayana\u2019s advanced course on the philosopher-poets (Lucretius, Dante and Goethe), lectures that Santayana would later publish as Three Philosophical Poets<\/em> (1910).<\/p>\n

Aiken also became fascinated by Freud\u2019s analysis of the unconscious and interpretation of dreams. He read reports of Freud\u2019s 1909 lectures at Clark University and, despite only having rudimentary German, attempted to understand some of Freud\u2019s books. His autobiographical works Great Circle<\/em> (1933) and Ushant<\/em> (1952) are works of intense personal psychoanalysis. Freud, himself, admired Great Circle<\/em> and kept a copy of it on his desk (Wilbur, 1968).<\/p>\n

Another major influence on Aiken\u2019s life and thinking was his maternal grandfather William James Potter<\/a> (1829-1893), a Unitarian minister and one of the founders of the Free Religious Association. Aiken only met him once when he was four years old, but the kindly old man made a lasting impression. In his memory, their afternoon together became a laying on of hands:<\/p>\n

thee must now and hereafter do my<\/em> thinking for me<\/em>, thee must be the continuance of me, thee will forever, even if intermittently, or only if every so often consciously<\/em>, stand in the ghost of a pulpit, in the ghost of a church, in the ghost of our beloved New Bedford (Aiken, 1952, p 112).<\/p>\n

Aiken kept the two books of Potter\u2019s sermons always with him, and many of their themes recur in his poetry. One of the posthumously published lectures concerned<\/p>\n

Religion as the affirmation of God in human nature; religion as the proclamation of the veritable incarnation of the Eternal Power, with its attributes of intelligence and moral purpose in the human faculties, not by supernatural, exceptional inspiration, but naturally and inherently there in the very substance, fibre, and organism of the faculties themselves; religion as the organized presence, power, and life of God in the human soul. (Potter, 1895, pp 177-178)<\/p>\n

Aiken continued his grandfather\u2019s thinking. He became a poet of the human consciousness, attempting to put into words the divinity evolving within the human mind.<\/p>\n

This post will comment briefly on Aiken\u2019s poem A Letter from Li Po<\/em> (1952). The poem is in 12 sections and takes up 21 pages. I shall consider only the first two sections; any more would exceed the reasonable limits for a post. The complete poem is available at Poemhunter<\/a> and on the Dutch LiPo website<\/a> (together with some Chinese paintings). I am also much indebted to Ian Kluge for his insightful evaluation of the poem \u2013 At Home in Exile: \u201cThe Liquid I\u201d<\/em> \u2013 though this remains unpublished. Other evaluations are listed in at the end of the post. The recordings of Aiken reading the poem are from 1955. They are taken from a vinyl recording now long out of print.<\/p>\n

A Letter from Li Po<\/em> was written in Cape Cod. The opening lines describe the clarity of an autumn afternoon in New England before shifting to the China of Li Po (Li Bai in pinyin romanization), one of the Immortals of the Wine Cup<\/a>. Aiken is invoking his predecessor, trying to understand the process of poetry as it was then and as it is now: the spelling down of meaning on the page, or as he says later in the poem (Section V) transforming \u201call things to a hoop of flame where through tigers of meaning leap:\u201d<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/lipo-aiken-I.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
\nannounces autumn, and the Equinox
\nrolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
\nSomewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
\nlooking for friendship or an old love\u2019s sleeve
\nor writing letters to his children, lost,
\nand to his children\u2019s children, and to us.
\nWhat was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
\nSay that it changed, for better or for worse,
\nsifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
\na slant of witch-light; on the pure text
\na slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
\nfor winecups and more winecups and more words.
\nWhat was his time? Say that it was a change,
\nbut constant as a changing thing may be,
\nfrom chicory\u2019s moon-dark blue down the taut scale
\nto chicory\u2019s tenderest pink, in a pink field
\nsuch as imagination dreams of thought.
\nBut of the heart beneath the winecup moon
\nthe tears that fell beneath the winecup moon
\nfor children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,
\nwhat can we say but that it never ends?
\nEven for us it never ends, only begins.
\nYet to spell down the poem on her page,
\nmargining her phrases, parsing forth
\nthe sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale
\nfrom chicory pink to blue, is to assume
\nLi Po himself: as he before assumed
\nthe poets and the sages who were his.
\nLike him, we too have eaten of the word:
\nwith him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:
\nand write, in rain, a letter to lost children,
\na letter long as time and brief as love.<\/p>\n

Aiken was a master of sounds. Alliterations such as \u201cback blue bays\u201d and \u201csifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk\u201d are entrancing. The repetition of \u201cbeneath the winecup moon\u201d sounds like an incantation. The multiple l-sounds last two lines of this section brings to mind the liquid noise of falling rain.<\/p>\n

Aiken is very precise in his imagery. In the first line he mentions a “bluejay wind.” Bluejays do not always migrate, but they often move southward along the Atlantic seaboard in the fall. Sometimes there are flocks of a hundred or more. They appear as if the northwest wind had just blown them down from Canada.<\/p>\n

\"chicory\"<\/a>Aiken\u2019s description of the petals of the chicory flower changing from \u201cmoon-dark blue\u201d to \u201ctenderest pink\u201d made me aware of colors that I had not previously noticed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As shown in the illustration on the right, the central origin of the blue petals can be a very light pink.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aiken was a philosophical poet and his poetry is very concerned with ideas. In this first section he asks about the inspiration of Li Po: \u201cWhat was his light?\u201d His focuses on the idea that everything changes: \u201cSay that it changed.\u201d The poet, be he Li Po or Conrad Aiken, must somehow determine what is constant in this continual flux. Kluge suggests that the poem<\/p>\n

crystallizes his beliefs about the individual\u2019s beliefs in a Heraclitean universe in which relentless change constantly subverts our sense of identity.<\/p>\n

Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosophers whose writings survive only in fragments quoted by others. His philosophy revolved about the idea of change. Nothing is ever the same: \u201cone cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on\u201d (translation by Davenport, 1995, p. 160). Another fragment is much in keeping with the view of consciousness proposed by Aiken and his grandfather: \u201cNo matter how many ways you try, you cannot find a boundary to consciousness, so deep in every direction does it extend\u201d (p 162)<\/p>\n

How do we deal with this continual change? Poetry is one way. Aiken characterizes the poet as one who has \u201ceaten of the word.\u201d The allusion is primarily to the Christian Eucharist wherein the wafer and the wine are taken by the communicant to represent the body and blood of Christ, who called himself the Word. But the word of Aiken\u2019s poem is actual word as well as philosophical logos.<\/em> The poet experiences the joy of using words to make thoughts more memorable and meaningful. This is the experience of Mark Strand in his poem Eating Poetry <\/em><\/a>(1969, p. 3)<\/p>\n

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
\nThere is no happiness like mine.
\nI have been eating poetry.<\/p>\n

In Aiken’s\u00a0poem, the words come from the exiled Li Po. Late in his life he was banished from the court and made his way toward western China (Waley, 1950). Beyond the gorges of the Yangtze River was a land without the sophisticated pleasures of the court, dotted with occasional temples for meditation and inns for drinking. It was a place for solitude. Li Po remembers his family but realizes his intense loneliness. The second section of the poem considers the state of the individual consciousness:<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/lipo-aiken-II.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas
\nor only that. Nor the pink chicory love,
\ndeep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,
\nin which the dragon of his meaning flew
\nfor friends or children lost, or even
\nfor the beloved horse, for Li Po’s horse:
\nnot these, in the self’s circle so embraced:
\ntoo near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,
\na letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,
\nstoried and stored as the ripe honeycomb
\nwith other faith than this. As of sole pride
\nand holy loneliness, the intrinsic face
\nworn by the always changing shape between
\nend and beginning, birth and death.
\nHow moves that line of daring on the map?
\nWhere was it yesterday, or where this morning
\nwhen thunder struck at seven, and in the bay
\nthe meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,
\nand with them one more Icarus? Where struck
\nthat lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw
\nwrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else?
\nBut somewhere else is always here and now.
\nEach moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:
\neach moment you must die. It was a tree
\nthat this time died for you: it was a rock
\nand with it all its local web of love:
\na chimney, spilling down historic bricks:
\nperhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin’s kites.
\nAnd with them, us. For we must hear and bear
\nthe news from everywhere: the hourly news,
\ninfinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.<\/p>\n

Occasional end-rhymes occur in this section: \u201cblue\u201d and \u201cflew,\u201d \u201cbear\u201d and \u201ceverywhere.\u201d The alliteration persists: \u201ca letter crammed and creviced, crannied full.\u201d Sometimes Aiken juxtaposes words with similar sounds but different meanings: \u201cstoried and stored as the ripe honeycomb.\u201d Dickey (1968, p. 61) calls these effects \u201cverbal jugglery.\u201d Bringing ideas together on the basis of how words sound is an indirect way to force meaning. In this case it works: the letter from Li Po contains the stories that have been stored up in his poems.<\/p>\n

Li Po\u2019s horse is a reference to a story that the Emperor had rewarded the poet with one of his finest horses (Waley, 1950, p. 63). With his banishment. Li Po had been deprived of family, court and horse. He was left with only consciousness and poetry.<\/p>\n

His state was one of \u201csole pride and holy loneliness.\u201d Despite the love of others, experience ultimately comes down to the individual consciousness, which must make sense of an ever-changing, ever-dying world. Aiken characterizes this process using an image from the war \u2013 the lines upon a map marking the advances of an army: \u201cHow moves that line of daring on the map?\u201d<\/p>\n

Though limited to one person\u2019s mind, the human consciousness can partake of all things \u2013 \u201cthe news from everywhere.\u201d We are part and parcel of everything we have experienced.<\/p>\n

\"quaker<\/a>I have commented briefly on only the first two sections of the poem. Later sections tell us further stories of Li Po and his poems. Comparisons are made to Aiken\u2019s experience in Cape Cod. The last section takes place in the\u00a0South Yarmouth\u00a0Quaker Graveyard <\/a>where one of Aiken\u2019s ancestors, Cousin Abiel Akin (in the old spelling) is buried. Abiel saw the same stars as Li Po described in his poems many years before. Human consciousness continues even though the individual dies. The poem concludes with the idea that the creative consciousness can understand the changes we experience and overcome the idea of death. From the graveyard Aiken writes<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/lipo-aiken-XII-ending.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

In this small mute democracy of stones
\nis it Abiel or Li Po who lies
\nand lends us against death our speech?
\nThey are the same, and it is both who teach.
\nThe poets and the prophecies are ours:
\nand these are with us as we turn, in turn,
\nthe leaves of love that fill the Book of Change.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bibliography\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aiken, C. (1952). Ushant: An essay<\/em>. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.<\/p>\n

Aiken, C. (1955). A letter from Li Po: and other poems<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Aiken, C. (1958). Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen poems<\/em>. New York: Sagamore Press.<\/p>\n

Aiken, C. (1958). A reviewer’s ABC: Collected criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the present.<\/em> New York: Meridian Books.<\/p>\n

Aiken, C. (1970). Collected poems<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Butscher, E. (1988). Conrad Aiken, poet of White Horse Vale. Athens<\/em>: University of Georgia Press.<\/p>\n

Davenport, G. (1995). 7 Greeks<\/em>. New York: New Directions<\/p>\n

Dickey, J. (1968). Babel to Byzantium: Poets & poetry now<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/p>\n

Eliot, T.S. (1922\/1971) The Wasteland: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, edited by Valerie Eliot<\/em>. London: Faber & Faber<\/p>\n

Kellaway, R. A. Conrad Aiken: Unitarian Prodigy Poet<\/em>, 1889-1973<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kluge, I. (2009). Conrad Aiken\u2019s philosophy of consciousness<\/em>. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris.<\/p>\n

Marten, H. (1988). The art of knowing: The poetry and prose of Conrad Aiken<\/em>. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.<\/p>\n

Martin, J. (1962). Conrad Aiken: A life of his art<\/em>. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n

Potter, W. J. (1895, edited by F. E. Abbot). Lectures and sermons<\/em>.<\/a> Boston: George Ellis.<\/p>\n

Spivey, T. R., & Waterman, A. E. (1989). Conrad Aiken: A priest of consciousness<\/em>. New York: AMS Press.<\/p>\n

Strand, M. (1969). Reasons for moving: Poems<\/em>. New York: Atheneum.<\/p>\n

Waley, A. (1950). The poetry and career of Li Po, 701-762 A.D<\/em>. London: G. Allen and Unwin.<\/p>\n

Wilbur, R. H. (1959). The Song of Consciousness: Conrad Aiken’s Poetry. Northwest Review<\/em>, 2, 49-54.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poet Conrad Aiken was born in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was 11 years old, his father, a respected surgeon, shot his wife and then committed suicide. Trying to distance himself from the experience in the third person, Conrad later recounted his discovery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":92,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,5,9],"tags":[24,25],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-philosophy","category-poetry","category-religion","tag-conrad-aiken","tag-li-po"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1396,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/1396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}