Poetry: The pathos of things

An economy of means, a sense of stillness and transience, Japanese poetry shares many of the qualities of Old Irish verse. English poetry had much to learn from both traditions. By Seamus Heaney

Saturday November 24, 2007
The Guardian

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. It has even been argued, famously, that poetry is what is lost in translation. But while it is true that poets depend for the most part on the hearth-life and home-sweet-homeness of their native tongue, they also tend to be the Oliver Twists of language, never satisfied with their allotted ration, always asking for more, inclined to feel that enough is not enough but only the start of it, that somewhere there is another word that will be the key to another world.

So when native traditions are rejuvenated by what we now call "the shock of the new", it is often through contact with a foreign culture that the new possibilities suggest themselves. This, after all, is what happened in Japanese poetry at the end of the 19th century, when the so called shintaishi or New-Style Poetry began to be written. The introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse attributes this radical shift of style to the publication in 1882 of a volume of translations of miscellaneous English verse, including excerpts from work by Longfellow, Tennyson, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, and Hamlet. The volume also included experimental poems by the compilers and it was followed seven years later by another such anthology entitled Omokage (Semblances) which again featured translations of work by Shakespeare and several figures from the European Romantic movement including Byron, Goethe and Heine.

I don't know if William Wordsworth was among the Romantic poets translated in those epoch-making anthologies, but Wordsworth is where I want to begin. It seems to me that the scenes which inspired his most characteristic poetry could well have inspired many of the great masters of Japan. The English and Japanese sensibilities respond in similar ways to the natural world, and landscapes which brought out the best in Wordsworth could equally well have provided the setting for a haiku by Basho. Significantly also, the English poet's work abounds in phrases which could be used to describe the general emotional impact of a certain kind of Japanese lyric - as when he speaks of being "an inmate of this active universe", of being taught to feel "the self-sufficing power of solitude" or a something in nature which is "far more deeply interfused", and so on.

What is un-Japanese about Wordsworth, however - and you only need to remember a poem like The Prelude or "Tintern Abbey" to realise it - is the nimbus of introspection and ratiocination which surrounds the physical details of the scene. In this Romantic period, poetry in English typically allows itself greater scope for commentary and elucidation, tending to clarify where Japanese poetry would be content to imply; often eager to point out where Japanese poetry would be happy to sink in; tending to add where the Japanese would subtract.

Consider, for example, the following passage from The Prelude. Words-worth is remembering a schoolboy expedition that he and his companions once made on horseback, a daytrip when they galloped off to visit the ruins of Furness Abbey on the shores of Cumberland. Once there, they absorb the atmosphere of the place, the carved stone effigies of knights and abbots scattered about the roofless chantry, the wind passing overhead and the sound of the sea ebbing and flowing in the background - until it is time for them to go back. Then:

Our steeds remounted, and the summons given,

With whip and spur we by the chantry flew

In uncouth race, and left the cross-legged knight

And the stone abbot, and that single wren

Which one day sang so sweetly in the nave

Of the old church that, though from recent showers

The earth was comfortless, and, touched by faint

Internal breezes, from the roofless walls

The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still

So sweetly mid the gloom the invisible bird

Sang to itself that there I could have made

My dwelling place, and lived forever there,

To hear such music.

The dripping ivy, the roofless walls, the song of a single wren: a Japanese poet is likely to have been content with those elements of the scene. He would have been drawn to the still centre of the moment. The narrative would probably have fallen away, or perhaps have been reported in a brief anecdotal prose interlude. Typically, the moment of pure perception would have been isolated, the psychological and philosophical implications remaining unspoken. What Wordsworth explicitly declares - "I could have ... lived for ever there / To hear such music" the Japanese poet would most likely have suggested by one or two illuminating images.

Still, English poetry would soon enough learn the Japanese lesson. Only a couple of decades after the "new-style poets" of the 1890s brought out their anthologies in Japan, new-style poems began to appear in little publications in London. By the second decade of the 20th century, two Americans had arrived and were producing work that would leave its mark on much of the verse written in English since. Ezra Pound and TS Eliot landed as expatriates, seeking on the one hand to find in Europe the origins of their cultural tradition, and seeking on the other hand to shake that tradition up, revive it and retune it to other registers. It was Pound who produced the work that here concerns us most, when he wrote one of the briefest but most influential poems in his total oeuvre, the well known "In a Station of the Metro". In one stroke, or rather two lines, Pound managed to banish, as it were, his inner Wordsworth, and demonstrated to others that they could do the same.

His famous note about the composition of "In a Station of the Metro" tells how he had attempted to find words for sensations that he had experienced after a unique and mysterious vision of beautiful faces coming and going among the passengers in the Paris métro at Place de la Concorde. "There came an equation ..." Pound wrote, "not in speech, but in little splotches of colour." He had begun by composing a 30-line poem but had destroyed it because it didn't achieve a satisfactory intensity of expression; six months then passed and he wrote one half that length; and a year later he produced what he called a "hokku-like sentence":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

"I dare say it is meaningless," Pound concluded, "unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

The poem is far from meaningless, and it is largely thanks to its existence that readers (and writers) in English have drifted "into a certain vein of thought". Thanks to these 14 words, we are now well attuned to the Japanese effect, the evocation of that precise instant of perception, and are ready to grant such evocation of the instant a self-sufficiency of its own. We don't require any labouring of the point. We are happy if the image sets off its own echoes and associations, if it speaks indirectly, as Issa speaks in his haiku: "A good world - / dew drops fall / by ones by twos."

By ones, by twos, ripples pulsed out from the image poem, so it was inevitable, especially given Pound's capacities as an operator on the literary scene, that the new Japanese effect should be integrated into the history of poetry in English as "The imagist Movement". Moreover, once the aesthetic procedure was named it was to a certain extent tamed, and like any other domesticated species, it began to breed and be taken for granted in its new setting - as in this other early example of the genre by TE Hulme:

Old houses were scaffolding once

And workmen whistling.

Neither Pound's poem nor Hulme's obeys the formal rules of the Japanese; the syllable count of 5-7-5 is neglected and the "seasonal" word is missing, but the sense of evanescence, of the transitoriness of things, of the stillness behind things into which they eventually pass, this essential quality is nevertheless present.

It might even be said that with the writing of these early image-based poems and with the formulation of the principles of imagism, the concept of mono no aware enters the English language, both in theory and in practice. Mono no aware is defined in a glossary of Japanese artistic terms as a literary and artistic ideal cultivated in the Heian period. Literally meaning "pathos of things", it usually refers to sadness or melancholy arising from a deep empathic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifested in nature, human life or a work of art.

For curiosity, I went through the recently published New Penguin Book of English Verse in search of this effect in pre-imagist periods, but didn't discover anything. This is not to say, of course, that poetry in English is unaware or unexpressive of the underlife of feelings or the melancholy of things: since Anglo-Saxon times the elegiac mood has been a constant of the poetic literature. It's just that the means of expression are different. In 1869, for example, Matthew Arnold wrote this brief, untitled poem:

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel - below the stream,

As light, of what we think we feel - there flows

With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

The central stream of what we feel indeed.

What the haiku/imagist form can do is to reach down into that noiseless, strong, obscure, deep central stream and give both poet and reader a sense of epiphany. It's worth noticing indeed that the word "epiphany" becomes available as a literary term around about the time when Pound is coining the term "imagism", James Joyce being the one who was responsible for this new extension and application of its meaning. In their different ways, Pound and Joyce felt a need to extend the alphabet of expressiveness, and found a way to articulate what TS Eliot would call "the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" - a thing which was also for Eliot inherent in certain "images": "I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images and cling."

In the years since these early developments, the haiku form and the generally Japanese effect have been a constant feature of poetry in English. The names of Basho and Issa and Buson have found their way into our discourse to the extent that we in Ireland have learnt to recognise something Japanese in the earliest lyrics of the native tradition. The hermit poets who wrote in Old Irish in the little monasteries were also masters of the precise and suggestive:

Int én bec

ro léc feit

do rinn guip

glanbuidi:

fo-ceird fáid

ós Loch Laíg

Ion do chraíb

chairdbuidi.

- 9th century Irish

The small bird

let a chirp

from its beak:

I heard

woodnotes, whingold, sudden:

the Lagan blackbird.

The economy of means, the sense of a huge encircling stillness, of swiftness and transience all at once, these qualities recall equally the traditional haiku and the 20th century imagist poem, and this single example will have to stand for many other lyrics that could be cited from the Old Irish canon.

Another quality which the Old Irish poet shares with his Japanese counterpart is a quality we might call "this worldness" - both are as alert as hunters to their physical surroundings - and yet there is also a strong sense of another world within this "this worldness", one to which poetic expression promises access. In each case, it's as if the poet is caught between the delights of the contingent and the invitations of the transcendent, yet by registering as precisely and poignantly as possible his consciousness of this middle state he manages to effect what Matthew Arnold would have called "a criticism of life". So you could argue that there is a direct line running from the startle of recognition in the work of the early Christian hermit as he renders the whole strangeness of the blackbird's song to the "tinkle of china / And tea into china" as Derek Mahon contrasts the exquisite manners of those attending the snow party (in his poem of that name) with the savagery of contemporary European wars, including those being waged in Ireland "in the service of barbarous kings". Mahon's poem, one of the most durable written in the late 20th century, constitutes in effect a proof of the contention by his friend Michael Longley - that other Hiberno-Japanese master - that the opposite of war is not peace but civilisation.

Yet Japanese poetry is not all snow parties and snow water. One of its most attractive features is the folk form known as senryu, more humorous and robust than the haiku, more down to earth and insinuating, and again you could make interesting juxtapositions of senryu, with the Old Irish triads - or with brief merry poems by Iain Crichton Smith written first in Scots Gaelic and translated into English as "Gaelic Stories", or with Paul Muldoon's "Hopewell Haiku", or Michael Hartnett's "Inchicore Haiku" or Cathal Ó Searcaigh's glosses from Gortahork.

So while it is true that our sense of the Japanese effect was heightened by Ezra Pound's Imagism, it's also fair to say that from the start there has been a certain resemblance between vernacular Irish and traditional Japanese ways of looking at things. And it can be further said that in the course of the 20th century, as empires and ideologies contended for supremacy, and atrocities were committed on a scale unprecedented in human history, poets became desperately aware of the dangers of rhetoric and abstraction. In these circumstances, the poet's duty to be truthful became more and more imperative, and as it did, the chastity and reticence of Japanese poetry grew more and more attractive. Its closeness to common experience and its acknowledgement of mystery, its sensitivity to lacrimae rerum, to the grievous aspects of human experience, have made it a permanent and ever more valuable resource to which other literatures can turn.

· This reading was given at the Lafcadio Hearn lecture in 2000 and is included in Our Shared Japan, edited by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods, published by Dedalus, price £30.

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