“Poetry is finer than prose because it gives more concrete truth in the same compass of words. Metaphor, its chief device, is at once the substance of nature and of language. Poetry only does consciously what the primitive races did unconsciously. The chief work . . . of poets especially lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.
— Ernest Fenellosa
On the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
Ernest Fenellosa traveled to Japan in the 19th Century and “discovered” oriental art for the West. He became a minister in the Imperial court of Japan, where he studied Chinese characters and how they operate as both pictures and words. His widow convinced a young American poet, Ezra Pound, to publish his essay on the subject posthumously, which he did before WWI in a collection called Divigations, and this quote is from that essay. Pound, considered by many the inventor of modern poetry in English, regarded Fenellosa’s ideas central to his work. On a purely personal note, Pound died on my 21st birthday, November 1, 1972, when I was performing in my first professional acting job, playing Ensign Pulver in Mr. Roberts at the Firehouse Theatre in Omaha.
This entire work represent my effort, at age 27, to “feel back along the ancient lines of advance” with that natural poet, my grandfather, as my guide.
I.
Silent and unseen, the Gust works its way
Through me to surface to your eye’s light, to
Sing at the doorstep of your ear, beguile
Its way into your heart, slipping through that
Deeper door where, again invisible,
Again inaudible, it may act with
Your own Mute Push to freeze, to heat, to calm,
To stir, perhaps to move again through you
To surface to my eye’s light, sing at the
Porch of my ear, and so enter my heart.
II.1
I dreamed of this: that it was May,
And in the dawning light I lay
As naked as a newborn child;
I opened my eyes, hearing a wild
Cacophony of birds, a heap
Of tiny fowls that frayed my sleep
Through noise and sweetness of their song;
And they appeared to be along
My chamber roof, so packed and mingling
That feathers shamed my tiles for shingling;
They sang each one in its own way
The most ceremonious roundelay
Yet heard by any man, I know.
Though some piped high, and others low,
They sang as one, in such accord
As if singing a single word.
And slowly swelling, like a bloom,
Their matin charged my ringing room
With sympathetic harmony.
Nor instrument nor melody
Had ever been heard half so sweet,
Nor voices matching so complete;
For there were none of them that feigned
To sing, and every singer pained
To find precise and pleasing notes,
Bravely unsparing of their throats.
I opened the window, breathed the air,
My heart soaring above all care,
And joined in with the merry tune,
Yet did not start a single one
From its high perch. We blended well,
So not the finest ear could tell
Where sang the bird, where sang the man;
And thus my minstrel dream began.
Next Section: The Main Body of the Book of the Makar
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1 This is a translation of a section of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Dutchess. Chaucer, the Father of English poetry, was a government official under Henry II, the Norman (and French speaking) king of England. Chaucer could have opted to write in French, but he chose to work with the common people’s language instead.
Pop’s singing, which will be described in the main section below, came as natural to him as bird song.