Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

by Edward Hirsch

The poem would address an unseen listener, an unseen audience. It does so through the rhetoric of address since the message in the bottle seems to be speaking to the poet alone, or to a muse, a friend, a lover, an abstraction, an object in nature. . . . It seems to be speaking to God or to no one. Rhetoric comes into play here, the radi- cal of presentation, the rhythm of words crea- ting a deep sensation in the reader. Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. It differentiates us; it unites us to the cosmos.

Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said in ABC of Reading. It is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic. I would say with Robert Graves that there is a rhythm of emotions that conditions the musical rhythms, that mental bracing and relaxing which comes to us through our sensuous impressions. It is the emotion — the very rhythm of the emotion — that determines the texture of the sounds.

I like to feel the sea drift, the liturgical cadence of the first stanza of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one sentence and twenty-two lines long. It always carries me away.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting
as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of
briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love
there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,

From the word stronger and
more delicious than any,
From such as now
they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising,
or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears
a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand,
confronting the waves,

I, chanter of pains and joys,
uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

The incantatory power of this is tremendous as the repetitions loosen the intellect for reverie. It seems to me that Whitman creates here the very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind, out of the sea waves and the rocking cradle, out of all the undifferentiated sensations of infancy, out of the myriad memories of childhood, out of all possible experiences the formative event of a boy leaving the safety of his bed and walking the seashore alone, moving “Out,” “Over,” “Down,” “Up,” “From,” exchanging the safety of the indoors for the peril of the outdoors, facing his own vague yearnings and the misty void, mixing his own tears and the salt spray of the ocean, listening to the birds, understanding the language — the calling — of one bird.

He walks the shore on the edge of the world, the edge of the unknown. He has entered the space that Emerson calls “I and the Abyss,” the space of the American sublime.

In this region: out of all potential words, these words alone; out of all potential memories, this memory alone. It is the emerging rhythm itself that creates the Proustian sensation of being in two places at once, “A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, / Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.”

Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth. He splits himself off and moves seamlessly between the third person and the first person. And as the bird chanted to him (“From the memories of the bird that chanted to me”) so he chants to us (“I, chanter of pains and joys”). This is a poem of poetic vocation.

It is telling that Whitman builds to the self-command, “A reminiscence sing.” He memorializes the memory in song. There is an element of lullaby in this poem, the lulling motion of the waves, the consoling sound of the sea. But this is a lullaby that wounds (as García Lorca said about Spanish lullabies), a lullaby of sadness that permeates the very universe itself, a lullaby that moves from chanting to singing. Paul Valary calls the passage from prose to verse, from speech to song, from walking to dancing, “a moment that is at once action and dream.” Whitman creates such a moment here. He would spin an enchantment beyond pain and joy, he would become the poetic shaman who authors that reminiscence for us, who magically summons up the experience in us.

this glorious essay is from here.
the poster at the top is for this.
the image from which that poster was taken is on the other side, and really does not seem to exist outside of the bnf's copy. the bnf, who has also brought us this.

japan, a water-draped nation.
is it any wonder so much art is about fish? and so much rhythm.

the human heart, too, soars

ABOUT LANGUAGE
for Jordan

Damn the rain any- way, she says,
three years old, a hand planted on her hip,
and another held up and out
in the mimic of a gesture
she knows too well --
adult exasperation, peevish,
wild-eyed, and dangerous.
But the mangy stuffed bunny belies it all,
dangling by an ear, a lumpy flourish.

And so again i am warned about language,
my wife having just entered the room
aims a will-you-never-learn look my way
and I'm counting myself lucky. She missed me,
hands to the window, imploring the world,
Jesus Christ, will you look at the fucking rain!

And because this is western Oregon, and the rain
blows endlessly in from the sea, we let her out to play
in the garage, where i peer balefully
into the aged Volvo's gaping maw
and try to force a frozen bolt, that breaks,
my knuckles mashed into
the alternator's fins
bejeweling themselves with
blood and grease.

And what stops my rail against the Swedes,
my invective against car salesmen. my string
of obscenities concerning
the obscenity of money,
is less her softly singing presence there
than my head slamming into the tired, sagging hood.
I'm checking for blood
when i feel her touch my leg.

What tool is this, Daddy? she's asking,
holding a pliers by the business end. Then
what tool is this? Channel locks. And this?
Standard screwdriver, sparkplug socket,
diagonals, crimper, clamp,
ratchet, torque wrench,
deep throw 12-millimeter socket, crescent,
point gauge, black tape, rasp--

but suddenly the rain's slap and spatter
is drowned in the calling of geese,
and I pick her up and rush out, pointing,
headed for the pasture and the clearest view.
And rising from the lake, through rain
and the shambles of late morning fog,

vee after vee of calling Canadas,
ragged at first, then perfect and gray and gone
in the distance. They keep coming and coming,
and pretty soon we're soaked, blinking,
laughing, listening. I tell her they're geese,
they're honking, and she waves and says honk-honk.
She says bye-bye, geese; she says wow; she says Jesus.

Robert Wrigley

from In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, copyright Robert Wrigley, 1995


.雨だれは月よなりけりかへる雁
amadare wa tsuki yo nari keri kaeru kari

the bright moon in raindrops
from the eaves...
the geese depart

Issa

.行雁や人の心もうはの空
yuku kari ya hito no kokoro mo uwa no sora

traveling geese--
the human heart, too
soars

Issa

.行な雁どっこも茨のうき世ぞや
yuku na kari dokko mo bara no ukiyo zo ya

don't go geese!
everywhere it's a floating world
of sorrow

Issa

Issa uses "floating world" (ukiyo) in the old Buddhist sense: the world is temporary and imperfect. Literally, he advises the geese (or goose) that it's the same imperfect world of "thorns" (bara) everywhere, implying that there's no point in moving on. 1

THE SHORTEST DAY

PREMONITION AT TWILIGHT







The magpie in the Joshua tree
Has come to rest. Darkness collects,







And what I cannot hear or see,
Broken limbs, the curious bird,







Become in darkness darkness too.
I had been going when I heard







The sound of something called the night;
I had been going but I stopped










To see the bird restrain his flight.
The bird in place, the shadows dropped






As if they waited in the light
Before I came for centuries



For something I could never see;






And what it was became itself,
And then the bird, and then the tree;
And then the force behind the breeze
Became at last the whole of me.


Philip Levine

from On The Edge © 1963

orange

Robert Frederick Blum was a leading American painter, etcher and illustrator of the late nineteenth century. After finishing his studies, he moved to Munich, Germany where he lived and worked for a year. Arriving back in New York City in 1879, Blum established a studio, and before long developed a reputation as a major illustrator; his piece on the right is called 'a Japanese daughter,' and was on the cover of Scribners magazine, one of the first American illustrations to be printed in color. Commissioned by various publications, Blum traveled and worked in England, Italy, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium and Japan. He was, in fact, one of the first Americans to visit Japan and the work he produced there from 1890 to 1892 established his reputation.

With its fine atmospheric effects, the art of Robert Blum has often been seen as a major influence upon the development of American Impressionism. As well, in 1880, 1881 and 1885, he lived and worked in Venice where he came into contact with such American artists residing there as Frank Duveneck, Mortimer Menpes, Joseph Pennell and, most importantly, James McNeil Whistler. Many of Blum's etchings from this period explore similar compositional elements to those of Whistler. 1

For Augustus Vincent Tack, perhaps more than and other artist, The Phillips Collection [of American Art] is both spiritual home and permanent memorial. Tack's personal history is inextricably linked with that of the museum and its founder. He counseled Duncan Phillips on purchases and participated in the administration and decoration of the collector’s fledgling museum. With characteristic independence, Phillips purchased and commissioned many works by Tack, quickly becoming his foremost patron. In 1914, Phillips recorded in his journal his first reaction to Tack’s work when he stated, "my earliest acquaintance with the landscapes of Augustus Tack was one of those experiences which mark an epoch in one's own mental development.... some small panel-shaped canvasses--made me more or less catch my breath with delight."

Phillips felt an affinity for Tack's subjective explorations of nature — country fields in twilight, misty skies, and roseate mountaintops — and for his quiet and poetic view of art that suggested a longing for transport into imaginary realms. In his first published writing on Tack in 1916, Phillips seemed awed by the artist's eclectic broad-mindedness, which had prompted his fascination with both Japanese prints and Gothic glass and even "the sensational performances of Picasso." Phillips added that Tack was responsive "to the most startling revolutionary disturbances in the realms of painting and music." Phillips admired Tack’s rare blending of “abstract mysticism and technical innovation,” his passion for color and decorative surface effects, his fascination with Asian art, and his sensitivity to the parallels between music and art, all of which entered into the artist’s abstractions. 2

[to me, tack's abstracts are a really interesting progression; one can still see the influence of the japanese, but breaks it into pieces.]

to mention some old and new japonisme occurrences on the web. i recently bemoaned the fact that i didn't read japanese, and this week it's russian i don't read and wish i did. but as carrie said, pictures aren't in russian. so no matter what languages you speak, check out her blog, and really funny lady's too for some surprising beauties.

and princess haiku has posted a wondrous assortment of japanese chrysanthemum stamps.

the image above, with the woman with her back showing in the mirror (i was going to say 'the woman in the orange kimono') is by american impressionist frank h desch.







the sheet music is illustrated by 'ray,' yet another mystery illustrator. the japanese print with the kitty is from utamaro kitagawa, and lastly, another poiret (don't know who designed the fabric) painted by a e marty.