The Wonderful World of Poetry

Dear Members, Alumni, and Friends of the JSMT:

With the arrival of two poets (listmembers Michaeline and Tiffany) in the James Scholar Media Team this spring, I’ve been thinking about poetry over the last week or so and the manifold ways in which it enriches our lives. Below you will find an essay, a short story, and a poem, all about the enchantment of poetry and why it makes the world a better place for everyone – poets and readers alike! :)

The Greek Poet Hesiod: An Ancient Artist and Agriculturalist

·        Reprinted from Cursus Honorum XIII: 1 (Autumn/Holiday 2013)

·        Text by Rob Chappell, JSMT Advisor

·        Translations of Hesiod by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914) – Public Domain @ http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/index.htm

·        Photo from Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

       The practice of agriculture and the art of poetry are as old as human civilization itself, and many writers of the ancient Mediterranean countries composed works of poetry dealing with agricultural subjects. One of the earliest agricultural poets known to us is Hesiod, a Greek sage who flourished in the eighth century BCE. He is best remembered for two major poems that he composed, the Works and Days and the Theogony (Birth of the Gods).

       The Works and Days is an agricultural almanac in verse, addressed to Hesiod’s brother Perses, who managed their family farm. The poem goes through the cycle of the four seasons, explaining what kind of agricultural work needs to be done at any given time of year. Since Hesiod and his contemporaries lived long before the invention of atomic clocks and desktop calendars, the poet described how to keep track of time by watching the stars:

“When the Pleiades, Atlas' daughters, start to rise, begin your harvest; plough when they go down. For forty days and nights, they hide themselves, and as the year rolls round, appear again when you begin to sharpen sickle-blades; this law holds on the plains and by the sea, and in the mountain valleys, fertile lands far from the swelling sea.”

à Works and Days, Lines 383 ff.

In addition to agricultural advice and astronomical lore, the Works and Days also includes retellings of some famous Greek myths (e.g., “The Five Ages of Humankind” and “Pandora’s Box”), along with witty proverbial sayings, which ensured its popularity among rural and urban audiences alike for centuries to come.

The original Greek text of the opening lines of Hesiod’s Works and Days appears on the left, while a Latin translation of the same is on the right. From an edition of Hesiod’s poems published at Basel, Switzerland, in 1539.

       The Theogony contains traditional stories about the beginning of the world and the origins of various members of the Greek pantheon in a brilliant synthesis of epic mythology and philosophical allegory. The poem opens with the tale of how Hesiod, while still a shepherd, became a poet:

“From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon. … Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice. … One day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon. … They plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.”

à Theogony, Selections from Lines 1-35

       Hesiod’s poems are wonderful food for thought, not only because they are highly edutaining, but also because they show that at an early stage in the development of Western civilization, the arts and the agricultural sciences were very closely linked together in the seamless web of everyday life. Hesiod, the master poet of his age, grew up on his family’s farm, worked as a shepherd, and earned national acclaim as a poet (although he probably didn’t quit his “day job” as a shepherd).

       Across a gulf of 27 centuries, Hesiod presents us with a timely challenge: to “think outside the box” of our individual academic disciplines to create a holistic worldview that satisfies both the mind and the heart.

“The Phoenix Bird”

By Hans Christian Andersen

In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one — the one solitary Phoenix bird. The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg.

The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant’s cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant’s head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and England’s coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymnbook that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindu maid gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix bird, do you not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan’s red beak; on Shakespeare’s shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin’s raven, and whispered in the poet’s ear “Immortality!” and at the minstrels’ feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix bird, do you not know him? He sang to you the Marseillaise, and you kissed the pen that fell from his wing; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance you did turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise — renewed each century — born in flame, ending in flame! Your picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but you yourself often fly around, lonely and disregarded, a myth — “The Phoenix of Arabia.”

In Paradise, when you were born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, you received a kiss, and your right name was given you — your name, Poetry.

“To Homer”

By John Keats

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind; — but then the veil was rent,

For Jove uncurtained Heaven to let thee live,

And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,

And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;

Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,

And precipices show untrodden green,

There is a budding morrow in midnight,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befell

To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

Until next time –

Rob J