`Autumn Cleaning'

With a judiciously chosen word a poet can ignite into greatness a work that might otherwise remain thwarted, though still a good enough poem. Take Yeats’ “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). The women of the title were Irish sisters. Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) was a middling poet; Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz (1868-1927), a revolutionary sentenced to death for her role in the 1916 Easter Rising. The sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life but she was released in the general amnesty of 1917 and continued her political activities. By the time of their deaths, Yeats had known them for more than 30 years. Here are the first six lines of the poem:

“The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath…”

The word in question is “shears,” a violently explicit verb, intensified by the line’s emphatically stressed beats. One cuts flowers with shears but here autumn is “raving” like a slasher-film psychotic, not genteelly fashioning a bouquet. Lissadell was the name of the Gore-Booth family home in County Sligo, Yeats’ birthplace. He admires the sisters’ beauty but is contemptuously dismissive of their politics (“some vague Utopia”). The contempt seems even more vitriolic when we remember Constance died in July 1927 and Yeats dates his poem to October of that year. Extending the poet’s logic, one might liken the sisters to such subsequent dilettantes of revolution as Jane Fonda.

I returned to Yeats’ poem while looking for images of autumn in his work. Because of the silk kimonos and his interest in the Noh theater, from Yeats I turned to autumnal haiku. Most that I found on my shelves were, unlike Yeats’ poem, wistful or elegiac, in keeping with the form. From One Man’s Moon (1984), a collection of Cid Corman’s translations, comes this haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

“tomb you also move
my own voice’s lamenting
the autumnal winds”

I’m suspicious of haikus and assume most translations miss their evanescent essence, while those written in English tend to sound abrupt and formulaic. Poets and would-be poets are attracted to the form for its brevity and seeming susceptibility to cleverness, like Japanese limericks without meter or rhyme. Occasionally I read one that seems to work. Here’s Bashō, again by Corman:

“the autumnal coolness
hand and hand paring away
eggplant cucumber”

Yoel Hoffmann compiled Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death (1986) – perhaps the most explicit subtitle in the history of publishing. From it, here’s a jaunty (or desperate) haiku by Bufu, who died in 1792:

“Oh, I don’t care
where autumn clouds
are drifting to.”

Hoffmann tells us of the monk and poet Aki-no-Bo, who met Bashō twice, in 1689 and 1690. He writes:

“At their first meeting the two of them are said to have sat together without exchanging a single word. The second time, Bashō dedicated a poem to the monk:

“No sign
in the cicada’s song
that it will soon be gone”

Finally, Hoffman tells us of Chine, the sister of Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704), a disciple and friend of Bashō. Shortly after Chine’s death, Kyorai aired out her summer clothes, then received a poem from Bashō written in the sister’s memory:

“Airing out the robe
of one who is no more:
autumn cleaning.”

Bashō, a poet as great as Yeats, took a different approach to writing about recently deceased women.