A Zen Poem and “On Wenlock Edge”: Two Opposite Views of Life __Yu Fong-ying
A Zen poem that is a koan (a riddle) – (Author unknown)
來從萬水千山外, 又向千山萬水歸, 這回自有真消息, 風攬溪林落葉飛.
My translation:
What comes from beyond a thousand seas and a thousand hills,
To beyond a thousand hills and a thousand seas returns.
A plain message such a round tells:
The wind embraces brookside woods and the leaving leaves fly.
The key to the koan is the image presented in the last line. The first two lines situate life within its natural surroundings: hills and seas. Nature is the origin of life and its destination. The third line asserts the significance of the koan which follows. To understand life, it is possible to represent it in an image. And what an image! “The wind embraces (hugs) brookside woods and the leaving leaves fly (dance/ fall).” The salient words are the two action verbs: “embraces” and “fly”. Embracing is bodily contact, warmth, resoluteness; it suggests the desire for possession, intimacy, love-making and connectedness. “Fly” suggests swiftness, avoidance and motion. The two actions speak of cause and effect as well as a contradictory relationship. Life and death hold precisely such relationships.
For me, the poem is an affirmation of life. It sees the life force working in us as something engaging. Contact with this life force is desirable, close, transitory but also consuming. The resultant falling is a dancing albeit a leaving too. It is beautiful. There is a home to go back to.
It is a Buddhist poem, but not un-Christian in its view. A koan is open to interpretations. I submit here my own understanding of it.
On Wenlock Edge, by A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble (1)
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves; (2)
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.(3)
'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger (4)
When Uricon the city stood: (5)
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,(6)
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
Notes:
(1) Wenlock Edge – a limestone escarpment in Shropshire, England
(2) Wrekin – name of the wind
(3) Severn – a river
(4) holt – a wood or wooded hill, a dialect word; hanger – a wood on the side of a steep hill
(5) Uricon – the name for Wenlock Edge in Roman time
(6) yeoman – a man holding a small landed estate; the “English yeoman” is the poet.
In this poem, the central metaphor “gale of life” and “tree of man” depicts the theme of the poem and reveals Housman’s pessimistic view of life. Housman uses an image almost identical to that of the Zen poem: strong wind blowing through a forest. But he says, “the wood’s in trouble” right in the first line. The gale (life force) is negatively described as it “plies the saplings double”, that is, bends and bashes them. And this bashing has been so throughout human history. It is not only the speaker that this troublesome wind is affecting now, but also a Roman soldier back in Roman England when “the old wind in the old anger… threshed another wood”, in other words, all humanity. Gale symbolizes the many emotional and physical worries in life that torture a man until death, such as love, ambition, anger, jealousy. They are like a stormy wind that blows “through woods in riot”, even causing the man to sometimes lose his mind. Housman views life as a journey full of obstacles that hurt a man, but is relieved to know that all these problems will “soon be gone” when the man is gone as well.
Housman uses action verbs: “heaves”, “plies”, “threshed”, “blows so hard” – all suggestive of force and pain. But “embraces” in the Zen poem connotes sweetness and mutual attraction. There, the life force that blows through a person engages him or her. Leaves fall as a result, but they “fly” in their departure. In this context, flying is a dance, patterned and beautiful.
Housman’s poem is un-Christian and pessimistic in that it sees the end of life as the summation of pain. It suggests a continuity of human suffering throughout history. In contrast, the koan suggests a cyclical view of life; one where pain and joy are united.
Appendix: Another Appreciation of On Wenlock Edge, by Lena Lau, September 28, 2011
"On Wenlock Edge" is my favorite poem. To me it has many of the characteristics of good poetry. Its genius is to fix a place--your interpreter did not note that holt and hangar are common nouns while all others on her list are Proper Nouns--separated by two different times; such disparity between unity of place and disunity of time is largely responsible for engendering the theme of the poem, i.e., the universality of human suffering.
There is personification, sustained metaphor, and restraint, which I found particularly moving. Amid the 寫景寫情--the ferocity of the gale bending the saplings double, the only line--and such a beautiful one for me--with reference to himself is none other than that--then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I. An aside almost, or understatement, yet poignant with deliberation. (One can't read this line fast)…
[Lena Lau (nee Chung) was a HKU English Department classmate (1963-66), who lectured on linguistics in Hong Kong University in the nineteen seventies. She died in Toronto in 2012. To her memory I dedicate this brief essay.]