“We just stood there and stared for a long
while, because what is there to say?’’
A Washington Post article quotes a
‘thesdan. She’s talking about fireflies
in her yard.
Brad Leithauser says the same thing in
“Hundreds of Fireflies” —
Merely
to watch, and say nothing,gratefully,
is what is best…
The poem’s a mite precious for rough
and tumble UD, but it’s got its moments:
… three, four of them
lighten nightfall of allsolemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—and still they keep
coming.
I like eyes led endlessly astray.
That’s just what it was, last night, as I stood
at the bottom of my half acre wood looking up,
down, and all around at the spots on the
lawn, the trees, the sky. On my arms.
Each arhythmic light a trinket / to entice
some wayward mate. That’s good too.
Arhythmic, with trinket picking up on the
sound of arhythmic. Suggestive too of
the heart’s pulse as it watches fiery pulses
on the bushes. Night-blooming bugs.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:52PM
Firefly symposium!
See if you can guess the author (before searching):
Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s light.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:58PM
Absolutely beautiful, RJO, and I’ve no idea. Sounds a little as though translated…
July 13th, 2009 at 3:00PM
Pound? His translation from something?
Now that I’ve done what you asked and guessed, I’m going to check.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:01PM
Okay, so that’s a bit embarrassing. Both Americans, though…
July 13th, 2009 at 3:04PM
Ralph Waldo Emerson – to save everyone else the trouble.
I sure as hell did not get it.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:36PM
Yes indeed. It’s the epigraph of RWE’s rarely read but very fine essay "Illusions." It was published in 1857, and I think he’s getting nervous about all the evolutionary thinking that’s in the air.
This is as fine a rhetorical peroration as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s perhaps a good image for the place of liberal learning in the age of Twitter:
"The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him alone."
July 14th, 2009 at 12:47AM
Ha! A whole article about how Pound is like Emerson…
http://www.jstor.org/pss/489810