"The Tree" by Ezra Pound (1882 - 1973)

The Tree

                    I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
                    Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
                    Of Daphne and the laurel bough
                    And that god-feasting couple old
                    That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
                    'Twas not until the gods had been
                    Kindly entreated, and been brought within
                    Unto the hearth of their heart's home
                    That they might do this wonder thing;
                    Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
                    And many a new thing understood
                    That was rank folly to my head before.


This is an early poem by the U.S. poet, Ezra Pound.

Pound was relying on two tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses above all: The myth of Daphne and Apollo and the lovely story of Baucis and Philemon.

The story of Daphne and Apollo is a cautionary tale warning against the danger of pride. Apollo, the god of the Sun, music, poetry, medicine, and more, was also a warrior and divinely skilled at archery. In Ovid's version of the myth, Apollo is inflated with his own power and skill and scoffs at young Eros (Cupid), the son of Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love. Eros uses his arrows to strike men and women in the heart, causing them to fall in love. Caveat! Eros has two types of arrow: those with a gold tip inspire love, and those with a lead tip inspire loathing. Eros has the form of a young boy, and Apollo mocks him, telling him not to play with a man's weapon. To teach Apollo a lesson, Eros shoots him with one of his arrows--a gold-tipped one--and Daphne with another--a lead-tipped arrow. Apollo is consumed by love and pursues Daphne, but in abhorrence she flees. He gains! She flees on desperately, but sees Apollo is gaining on her, and pleads to the gods to save her. Suddenly, she can not run; she is rooted to the spot (this is where the colloquial phrase comes from); her skin is turning to bark; Daphne is metamorphosing into a laurel tree. Apollo can do nothing to stop the transformation, and soon she is entirely a tree. But Apollo still loves her, and uses his healing power to keep her leaves youthful and green year-round. And ever after, the laurel tree is beloved of Apollo and he takes it as his symbol. So much so, that the winners in the Olympic Games in ancient times were rewarded with crowns woven of laurel leaves.

The story of Baucis and Philemon is a lovely tale. Zeus (Jupiter) and Hermes (Mercury) come to Earth and take the form of wandering travelers. They are rejected by all the people in a village they visit except for a poor old couple, Baucis and her husband Philemon (whose name means "loving" or "one who loves"). Although the old couple are very poor, they give all they have to their guests. Zeus and Hermes are touched by the generosity and kindness of the old couple, but determine to destroy the other people of the village with a flood. Which they do. The gods thus having revealed themselves, Baucis and Philemon dedicate themselves to their service as keepers of a temple. Zeus offers them reward for their goodness, but all they ask for is the gift that they might die together, so that neither should live on alone, which Zeus grants--but in his own way. Rather than dying, when their time comes, the two metamorphose into two trees, a linden and an oak, and those two trees grow entwining with each other, their love living on after them.

In Ezra Pound's poem, the poet's persona visits a quiet wood and sees the forest through eyes informed by Ovid's work. The forest is alive with love--both passionate and importunate and patient and abiding. As he sits and observes the forest, he feels the numinous and the real intermingle; he reflects on Nature and love and in his quiet, outward-looking introspection has an epiphany and comes to understand nature and love in ways that had seemed foolish to him before.

Ezra Pound had an ear for lyric beauty, and this poem is a masterpiece. The fluidity of the rhythm, and the cadence of the assonances are exquisite. It expresses a Romantic appreciation of love and pantheistic Nature, and yet at the same time, an American pragmatism and straightforwardness that twine and resolve in one, just as the elm and the oak (he changed the linden to an elm for his poem) twine and resolve into one.

It is a poem about a man unafraid to see what others disdain or fail to grasp, and a man who is willing, like Daphne, Baucis, and Philemon, to be transformed by love and Nature. As in their tales, contrary qualities harmonize within himself, and the poet's persona undergoes a sea-change that leaves him wiser and more at one in his many-mindedness.


Definitions:
"wold"--a high, wild, open area of rolling hills (in England, also called a "moor")
"entreated"--treated (the word usually means to ask, plead
"wonder thing"--wondrous thing
"nathless"--nonetheless
"rank folly"--total foolishness

New International Center Web Site and Facebook Page

The New International Center has a new Web page, and also a new Facebook page.

The original International Center will close for good on Friday. It is a milestone in many people's lives. Lucy Benedikt, for example, has been there from before the beginning--she volunteered before the Center even opened, more than 50 years ago. She is the senior of hundreds of us volunteers.

I taught my first class at the International Center in December of 1985, the year I came to New York City from Connecticut. My last class ever at the International Center in New York was last night, April 17, 2012. We stopped on a line from my favorite poet to teach, "The Dry Salvages" from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I used to stop by the International Center to see my buddy Vladimir Malukoff, who used to be Program Director there. (My tenure at the Center is now more ancient than I was when I started.) Staff and volunteers used to ask me to teach, and I always declined, thinking that teaching wasn't for me. One particular day, a member of the staff asked me yet again if I would volunteer. I asked, "Can I teach a literature class?" She shrugged and said, "Whatever you would like." I said, "OK. She asked me when I could start, and I replied, "A week from Friday."

The first poem I taught was "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. I had one or two people the first class. But I proceeded the way I have since, word by word, discussing definitions, meaning, context, history, culture, whatever comes to mind as we go. It was a success.

Since "Fern Hill", I have done many poems in my classes. And books: For ten years, we chugged through Ulysses by James Joyce. Three hours, every Saturday, word by word; digression; background; questions. It was slow going, and in those years we only got about 280 pages in. But some of my best moments as a teacher were during Ulysses. (I started the book a few weeks after my daughter was born. She was born on Bloomsday. When she was little, we used to refer to Ulysses as her "birthday book". She will be 18 on Bloomsday this year.) The Hobbit. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould. About 30 of the Cantos by Ezra Pound. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (three times each, over the years). On Saturday afternoons now, we are reading The Wind in the Willows, which has been a joyous find for several people. How can one not love Mole and Rat? Probably my greatest success is the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The current exigetical journey through Four Quartets is the third time I've traversed it at the International Center. We started with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and proceeded through "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", "Preludes", and "The Wasteland." What else? Short poems by William Carlos Williams. What else? I can't recall right now; so many.

My philosophy of teaching is to not dumb down to people because they are learning. Their English is still limited, but their minds are not. Language is a tool for the day-to-day, but there is no pleasure in that; why not teach by means of the most interesting ideas and the richest use of language? Poetry as text! I didn't want to teach the same things that others were doing when I started. "The...pen...is...on...the...table." Or the newspaper, or magazines. I felt I had a gift to bring words to life and to teach at the same time. So I used literature as the text. And people get to appreciate, feel, delight in, and learn from literature that they might not have the confidence to approach on their own. I remember one Japanese woman telling me she had been told sternly by her U.S.-born son that she could not read Ulysses because it is too difficult. Ha! She loved Poldy and the cat.

And my approach works. I was the first to teach English this way at the Center. Then others started doing it. Now there are others, and my students glow when they tell me the classics they have read in the other classes. Sometimes, they know the works from translation in their own country, sometimes it is new to them. But there is a feeling of pride and satisfaction that they have read and felt and understood such a book in their laboriously studied new language.

The moment when we reached the end of the fourth chapter of Ulysses (Calypso) and Adam Wroblewsky, who had come to the U.S. as a refuge with no English, read the last two words, "Poor Dignam", and suddenly understood them and gasped out loud in the class at the beauty and meaning of the words was perhaps the moment that validated these 25 years. So long as my brain is my own, I will remember and treasure that moment.

There have been many bad times, many strange, there have been days when it just seemed pointless. But through it all, poetry and sharing poetry has been my compass and my tether keeping me somewhat bound to my self. And the International Center has been my center as well.

Irish Theatre and Literature

There will be a series of free readings of poems put on by the Fallen Angel Theatre Company. These are staged readings: Actors will be on the stage, but reading from scripts, rather than performing from memory and they will not be in costume or moving about the stage.

This will be a wonderful opportunity to hear first-class Irish actors and actresses performing in English for free, and I highly recommend that any of you with an interest in literature take advantage of this wonderful series to attend and enjoy.

The readings will be at the Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue on the south (downtown) side of the street.

The next event will be on Monday, April 30, 2012: The play is Airswimming by Charlotte Jones, and information about it can be seen at Fallen Angel Theatre Company's Web page.

The Irish-American Writers and Artists Salon

There is a "salon" for Irish-American writers and artists here in New York City. On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, there will be a performance that will include, among others, the incomparable Aedin Moloney reading the final part of the last chapter of Irish writer James Joyce's masterpiece, the novel Ulysses. Aedin is the best reader of poetry I have ever heard, and her performances are transcendent. I hope that some of you will be able to attend.

I won't be able to be there until late, because that evening is also the last time I will ever meet my class at the International Center, where I have been volunteering since 1985. (I would also invite all of you to my last class!)

But I will attend after my class, and I hope that I will bring some of my students with me.

The performance will be at The Cell, a theater at 338 West 23rd Street. The event will begin at 7:00 and continue to about 9:30.

Bloomsday 2012, a Very Special Day!

Colum McCann reading Ulysses on Bloomsday, 2010, at Ulysses Folk House on Stone Street.

The great Irish writer, James Joyce, memorialized a particular day: Thursday, June 16, 1904. His masterpiece, the novel Ulysses, takes place on that day.

The "hero" of Ulysses is Mr. Leopold Bloom, so that date has come to be known as "Bloomsday".

On this year's Bloomsday, there will be readings from Ulysses all over New York City and the world. My favorite events (and the ones I intend to attend) are at Ulysses Folk House, an Irish pub downtown near Stone Street. This event will be hosted this year by the great Irish writer, Colum McCann, the author of Let the Great World Spin and Dancer.

The major event every Bloomsday is at Symphony Space, a theater on Broadway at 95th Street. This event is called Bloomsday on Broadway, and is hosted by Isaiah Sheffer, the host for the excellent radio program on NPR entitled Selected Shorts. (Selected Shorts consists of short stories read by actors or writers. It is a wonderful way to practice your English listening. It is good practice, and a literary pleasure.)

I recommend both these events as wonderful. If you can, attend both!

The Times Notices the Center Is Closing

Please read this article in the New York Times.

The International Center Will Close April 20, 2012

The International Center in New York is going to be closed on April 20, 2012, after more than 50 years of serving the immigrants of the great community of New York City and enriching the lives of many thousands of volunteers.

For me, as for so many others, the International Center has been my home away from home.

I came to New York City in the summer of 1985, for the same reason that many of you have--to have an adventure, to acquire professional experience, and to enter one of the focal points of human culture to experience new things and to learn. Soon after, I befriended a Taiwanese family in my neighborhood in Astoria, and found myself trying to help them to learn English. I had a room-mate from Brazil, and one day I was moved to explicate a poem for him, "Fern Hill" by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. He was moved by its beauty, and I felt a new sense of fulfilment. Before the end of the year I was a volunteer at the International Center, and I taught using poetry as the text rather than a classic language book or the newspaper. The first poem I taught was "Fern Hill". My first students liked my class, and I discovered I loved teaching. Soon I was teaching poetry one night, Alice in Wonderland another night, pronunciation another night. It was a heady time, making friends, meeting the world while in New York City, sharing the literature and language and culture that I loved.

At the the International Center's location in 1985, we had to have classes in offices. We didn't have three beautiful classrooms and a stage as we have now. But we had wonderful staff, volunteers, and members. Eileen Julian had a desk in the room where we read Alice in Wonderland, and I still remember looking up and seeing her smile as I discussed the book. One of the members in my Alice class back in 1986 was someone many of you know: Anna Petelka.

In the years since then, I have changed (my hair had no grey when I started!), members have come and gone, and my life has been intertwined with the International Center in ways I could never have predicted in 1985.

But over the last decade and more, the International Center has degraded. Costs were too high, the leadership less creative, and the board less and less connected to the vision that created the Center in the first place. The Center began to offer fewer and fewer services, began to charge for more services and restrict services, and became increasingly expensive. What had once been a haven for struggling refugees and new immigrants became increasingly expensive. Wonderful, dedicated staff were fired. Space was rented out. Opportunities to act to generate positive change were ignored. When we should have moved, the lease was renewed, instead. Now the Board has decided to close the Center. It is classic! Mismanage and run. (For some, that is the American Way. But not for us!)

We will continue to meet. On April 21, we will meet at the Prêt á Manger on 23rd Street, just down from the International Center at 24 West 23rd Street. I have set up a Meetup page to arrange classes. Please take a look and join!

There is also a new Facebook page named "Friends of the New International Center". Please take a look.

With your help we can be reborn, and better. Wiser. New.

Please join us to begin a new era and help generations to come.

Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888)

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an English poet, and one of the major poets of the Victorian period.

Over the years, I have now and then picked up his poetry and read a little, and then put it down, largely unmoved. The exception to that was his (Shakespearean) sonnet titled "Shakespeare" that I read as a teenager and was moved by.

Recently, however, I pulled my copy of his work off my shelf and was drawn in. What mysterious quantum fluctuations of literary gravity shifted me into sync with his words, I do not know. But it did, and I am agog.

I had always felt him stilted, a ponderous, mannered Victorian, but without the mawkish plumminess of Tennyson (oh, ga-a-a-rn, that interminable rum-tee-tum of iambic tetrameter that drones unvaryingly through The Idylls of the King like some nightmarish Graham Chapman sketch*)....Oooh, I was wrong. He has a lyrical lightness, a grace that transcends that Empire formality, and a psychological depth in his poetry that delighted me to discover through eyes that had been blind to him before. What is better yet, he flirts with challenging the postures of Victorian propriety.

"Dover Beach" is probably Matthew Arnold's most famous poem. It was most likely composed or begun in 1851, and it was published in 1867, eight years after the publication of the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Some critics see in "Dover Beach" an expression of a rejection of traditional religion and an acceptance of the modern sciences of geology and evolutionary biology. His intellect is not mired in a longing for old, comfortable, and conservative ways, but adopts the new world being revealed by the onward progress of science.

I find it a lovely love poem, and a rich expression of heart and intellect. Its lyrical beauty and complex reflection are moving and involving. I find it a delightful poem. The development of his thought through the poem is a delight, and it has strong, arresting imagery.

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

"Calais Sands" is more clearly a love poem, concerned with the anticipation of the speaker awaiting the arrival by sailing-ship of his love. It is not made clear whether they are lovers or on a honeymoon. I suspect that this ambiguity might have troubled a Victorian reader, and I am glad that it holds that ambiguity. The proprieties be dashed! What matters is love!

"Calais Sands" by Matthew Arnold

The story of the doomed-to-sorrow Arthurian hero, Tristan (or Tristram, as in this case; I also like the Portuguese variation, "Tristão"), has been treated by many, many writers, notably Sir Thomas Malory, Chrétian de Troyes, and the German operatic composer Richard Wagner.

I was smitten by Matthew Arnold's version of the story. He focuses on the triangle in the story--or, rather, the second triangle. The story is that Tristan is entrusted with the job of bringing the fiancée of his uncle, King Mark, king of Cornwall, from Ireland to Cornwall where Isolde (or, as in this version, Iseult) will marry King Mark. But on the way, on a hot day, they drink from a vial that Isolde's mother has given her to be drunk on her wedding-day; that vial contains a love potion. In a rare moment of Medieval sensitivity, the potion is intended to ensure that Isolde will have a happy life with her husband. Alas!

Fleeing King Mark's jealousy and their own forbidden love, Tristan marries a second Isolde, who is distinguished from Isolde of Ireland by the epithet "of the White Hands". So, Tristan is part of a second triangle, that of himself and the two Isoldes. The story of the first triangle, and Tristan's conflict and bitter enmity with King Mark, is a major focus of Sir Thomas Malory's epic telling of the Arthurian legends, La Morte D'Arthur; the story of the second Isolde is of lesser weight in Malory.

But Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" is about the second triangle, and the pain it causes Iseult of the White Hands. The first part is subtitled "TRISTRAM", the second part is subtitled "ISEULT OF IRELAND", and the third part is subtitled "ISEULT OF BRITTANY". I found the third part deeply sensitive to the lesser Iseult, and it moves me. It is subtle and ironic. In an attempt to convince herself that she doesn't care, to distance herself from her own grief, Iseult of the White Hands tells her--and Tristram's--sons the story of Vivian and Merlin; how Vivian, tired of the attentions of the besotted old wizard, bewitches him, imprisoning him in a fairy circle, and leaves him, love forgotten, to live her own life on her own terms. (The fairy circle is a nice touch by Matthew Arnold. Most versions of the story have Merlin imprisoned in a rock or a cave rather like Aladdin's genie.) It is a remarkably feminist poem for a Victorian poet writing in Arthurian mode. It is critical of Tristram's and Iseult's infatuation with each other. The only one who felt true love of the two triangles was Iseult of Britanny, and she was the one left to hold things together. Tristram and Iseult come across as selfish and self-indulgent. Only Iseult of Britanny is nurturing of others, and she is left behind to endure. She seeks to project herself into Vivian's uncaring selfishness, but we know she can't. She will raise the boys and take care of Tristram's dogs, treasure his harp, steward his kingdom, guard his legend; the others have left her with nothing--nothing but memories and fading beauty and responsibility.

Excerpt from Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult"

Youtube Poetry, Read by Me

Just as an aside, I have posted some poetry readings to Youtube. If any of you would enjoy such readings, please take a listen. My Youtube channel is cbooth2004.

For example:

"Sunday Morning", by Wallace Stevens

I enjoy reading aloud, and expect to add a great deal more--and hope people will enjoy it.