"With Rue My Heart Is Laden"

 

The older I get, the more the poems of A.E. Houseman speak to me.  Heading this post is a portion of one of them which speaks all too loudly.

In a way, my regard for them is unsurprising.  The poems involve loss, death, memory, regret; the stuff of life now, or a good part of it.  There's none of the sang-froid one can find in Horace or Wallace Stevens, though. With Horace, there was an acknowledgement of loss and the inevitability of death, but this served as an invitation to enjoy the life we live.  Stevens' poems seem to evoke a chilly resignation to and acceptance of that inevitability as simply what we have--a part of the real, the world, we're part of, which may become art, and thereby something of value.  Houseman's evocation of them is raw, but summoned through spare, simple language which is itself raw in a sense, and can leave one feeling raw.

I despise regret and remorse because they seem completely futile.  More than anything else I can think of, they epitomize what Stoicism and practical wisdom warn against--disturbing yourself over matters outside your control.  There's nothing more beyond our control than what took place in the past.  At best, we can correct or mitigate or errors or missteps.  More accurately, I hate myself for feeling regret and remorse, when they serve no purpose but self-torment.  But feel them I do, and the feeling is strong, sometimes.

In waking life regret is a passing concern and can be overwhelmed like so much else by the rush of the simple, insignificant things of life.  But in dreams regret and loss are experienced directly.  They can be the dream, in fact.  Sometimes the dream reflects and involves useless efforts to make things as they should gave been, to be what you should have been.  The worst dreams can be those in which you struggle, uselessly, to be with someone you wish to be with but cannot be with, now or ever.  Such dreams evoke regret which will outlive the dream.  It lingers.

Some of Houseman's poems describe this kind of regret in a very powerful way, and do so in stark language without embellishment, though sometimes by implication, which in his case may have been necessary given the prejudices of that time.  But the regret expressed is nonetheless unfiltered as if in a dream.  And lingers.

"Let Be Be Finale of Seem"

These are famous words from a famous poem.  No doubt they've been explained already by many, or at least analyzed; perhaps even by the poet himself.  Wallace Stevens was a poet who wrote of poetry.  Perhaps the lawyer in him, or the student of Santayana that he was, still within him, compelled him to be a critic as well as an artist.  I will give them my own interpretation, though.

The sunset is a kind of finale, though not one as final as death.  It's the finale of a day, which may indeed be remorseful as A.E. Housman wrote but need not be.  Remorse is understandable at the end of a day, or a life, to one who is thinking at the end of one or the other, because it's not uncommon to feel remorse for what was done or was not done which could have or should have been done.  Humans being what they are chances are excellent that they should have or could have done something and that something they did was wrong.

What seems to be isn't necessarily what is.  To be is to exist.  What exists may seem not to exist.  You get the picture (or at least you get what the picture seems to be).

"Let be be finale of seem."  Let the end of our efforts to determine what seems to be, be?  Let what seems to be, to us, be?  Or, let it be, in the sense of give it up, forget about it?  Give it up, this tendency we have to distinguish appearance from reality, to insist on a thing-in-itself that we cannot know?  Give up the belief that what seems to be reality isn't really reality (the really real)?

I'm impatient with metaphysical and ontological concerns, i.e. the issue of Being and, that other favorite, Nothingness.  That may be a failing on my part.  I'm unconcerned with questions regarding what it is, in all cases, to be or not to be (was Shakespeare having a bit of fun with philosophers when he wrote this speech of Hamlet?  I find myself hoping so).  The fact that we make mistakes sometimes leaves me unimpressed.  It hardly seems grounds on which to question all we interact with naturally, by living, with considerable success, much less envision some kind of place apart from the world on which all truth and beauty depends.

So, I would interpret Stevens as saying that what is, is in the end what seems to us to be.  In the end of the day, in the end of us, you and me.  Let it be so.

"Things Merely Are" is the title of a book by Simon Critchley about philosophy in the poems of Wallace Stevens.  It seems a less than hopeful phrase, but it's an assertion that renders a good deal of speculative philosophy superfluous.  And, if that was what Stevens was attempting to say, in his poetry, it's something few other poets have said, I think.  Yet there's unquestionably beauty in his poetry, just as there is unquestionably beauty in things of all kinds.

Consider sunset, especially as pictured above.  The sunset merely is, of course, but though we don't cause the Earth to revolve or the sun to exist it is what it seems to be to us, the end of a day, and though it can seem to be, to us, a splendid end or a dismal, dull one, it's nonetheless an end of something.

We're edging into Autumn, now, and in that part of our Great Republic in which I live the leaves will turn glorious and then wither and fall.  Crops will be harvested, vegetation of all kinds will stop growing, weather will turn cold.  As we've known since ancient times, we wither and die like other things in the world do.  But some of the most striking sunsets I've ever see have been winter sunsets, when the world seems, and is, dead.  Those sunsets merely are as our deaths merely are.