On Poetry and Dwelling

Part Two

(Part One of this essay can be found here)

Dwelling, as I described it in the first half of this essay, is its own kind of action, necessitating its own kind of labor. The purest, and at the same time most efficacious, form this labor takes is in the making of poetry. As technology stands as both the template for, and instrumentality to advance the progress of, the challenging of being, so poetry stands as the purest expression of dwelling, and its most powerful enabler. The poet abides alongside things, contentedly. He does not seek their use; he does not plot their elimination. He sings their being, and in so singing sets his disposition in relation to reality’s disclosure – to receive it in ecstasy. He only seeks to approach things properly, and to draw them near to him in turn, to stay with them, and to preserve their appearance for others to stay with as well.

All of this, of course, implies that the poem emerges from a reverence for what is already there, what is given in the ordinary parameters of human experience. A poem results from dwelling, from a desire to stay alongside things, and preserve them. As Heidegger writes in his essay Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry, “To dwell poetically means to stand in the presence of the gods and to be struck by the essential nearness of things. Existence is poetic in its ground – which means, at the same time, as founded, it is not something earned, but is rather a gift.” Because the language of the poem reveals the existence of things to be something given – to be a gift – it can never constitute an imposition of man’s “mere willing” upon the frame of things. To the contrary, it always starts from an assumption that this frame of things precedes the will that expresses itself in the poem, and which is only summoned under the impressions engendered by this frame of things. The language of the poem can never articulate the challenging of being, because it is in its origins an articulation of a reverence for being. All that language seeks to do is allow things to reveal themselves, so that men can stay alongside them more completely. The saying of the poem is “not just any saying, but that whereby everything first steps into the open.” It is an act of naming, which “first nominates the beings as what they are,” thus enabling men to stay with them in truth.

In this way, dwelling causes the building of poetry. But the built poem in turn is a source of dwelling. It is an everlasting summons to dwell within the fourfold, to return to the essential and transcendent parameters of awareness. Because the poem is a work of language, and because man inhabits being through language, the reverence that is at once proposed and embodied in the poem calls man away from the challenging of being through his political and economic projects, and sets his receptive and preserving disposition towards things once again. In his first naming of things, and in their initial disclosure to his understanding, the language of poetry reveals what is already present in the conditions of understanding for man to abide with, and to care for through all of his works. The word of poetry contains, in germ, the motive for all fruitful courses of action. In this way, as Heidegger writes, “poetry is a founding,” because the things we wish to incorporate in our discourse are only named appropriately by the poem; it is only from the poem that true discourse can emanate. In this way, “poetry is the sustaining ground of history,” because only a people whose first speech is poetic can act fruitfully in the world – which is to say, can create a history. Poetry either exists as the aboriginal and paradigmatic form of speech of a nation, or it does not exist at all. The fact that such a statement will strike the contemporary reader as so preposterous – the fact that the present irrelevance of the art lends no credibility to such a proposition – is only one measure of how far away from dwelling we have strayed. Another measure is the prevalence, since the advent of modernity, of spiritual genealogies which posit an incipient stage of poetic expressivity, that culture must supersede on the way to its own maturity. It was Vico who first formulated such a tale, which has since been echoed, in various ways, by figures like Hegel, Cassirer, and MacIntyre. But to recognize poetry as a cause and effect of dwelling is to understand that the need for its ministrations can never be superseded; that, in fact, the more complex and multifarious the projects which consume a people, the more urgently they require the renovating work of poetry to save them from the perils of those projects.

The saying of the poem is a singing, a singing that springs spontaneously. The propensity to such singing is what the poet finds already there in his own disposition towards things. He encounters things in the world that elicit a kind of wonder and reverence in him, and he finds that these emotions inevitably stir him towards a structured and mellifluous articulation of the things’ presence. He wishes to draw nearer to things by facilitating their disclosure, and he finds that disclosure can only occur through a palpable formal integration – which is to say, a rhythm – preceding their presence there, and subsuming the discrete and particular entities in the world into the encompassing intelligibility of the world, by means of the measure offering the body the first intimation of that intelligibility. Thus the nature of man steps forward in the poem for his first and most fundamental consideration. What the poem discloses is a form of awareness oriented by a relentless drive towards integration, by a transcendental propensity to gather experience into forms and structures not derivable from experience itself. This is man, as he is, made known to himself at first, a creature moved by presence to know, but whose given forms of knowledge always refer to, or invoke, more encompassing patterns of being, so that his drive towards truth arises in him simultaneously, inextricably, instinctively, as a drive towards unity and composition - that is to say, towards beauty. It is this revelation that the poem bestows upon all subsequent reflection, so that no alleged derivation of man’s nature can traduce the free personhood brought to light in the lines of the poem, and attempt to reduce that personhood to the level of a standing reserve.

In this way the poem becomes a vehicle of dwelling. It brings to light that which is contained in the aboriginal orientation of man for him to abide with, that which teaches him to “fear himself, and love all humankind.” It is the quintessence and begetter of chih, summoning a man to stay contentedly alongside the reverence, the piety, and the humanity that beckoned its measure, and that beckons to the listener in turn by means of that measure. The harmony, the integrated experience, which he aims at in every one of his actions as a king or a kinsman is first proposed to his understanding as the over-arching end of movement by the poem, and then preserved forever after as the measure of each action. To acknowledge the truth of the poem is to necessarily accept the demand that all conduct assume the form of renovation, that all movements by which we propel ourselves forward through life return us again to the harmony of our first speech. Already man finds himself in the poem embedded within the fourfold, moved in his body by its rhythms towards an intimation of patterns not wholly immanent, preserving forever his vision of the things he encounters as he passes over the earth. Here is no cause for a challenging or defiance of the self, no cause to set himself at war with his own nature. Here is enough for him to live at peace.

The Book of Odes, which presents to us King Wen as a paragon of chih, presents to us his founding of the state of Zhou as the quintessential work of poetic building, of dwelling. “This king Wen, / Watchfully and reverently, /With entire intelligence served God, /And so secured the great blessing.” Watching from within the fourfold, reverently acknowledging the existent parameters of his own awareness, he sets his mind to the work. The piety of which he is an exemplar reveals itself as a deliberate and peaceful acquiescence to the determinate conditions of human thought and action.

The plain of Zhou looked beautiful and rich,
With its violets and sowthistles [sweet] as dumplings.
There he began with consulting [his followers];
There he sang to the tortoise-shell, [and divined].
The responses were - there to stay, and then;
And they proceeded there to build their houses.

The beauty and fecundity of the plain, given to the people as a feature of the land itself, elicits the words of the song, and the song itself beckons the people to abide alongside the bounty of the plain. Only then do they build their houses in Zhou, once they have committed themselves to dwelling there. But it is the poem, by bringing out into the open the worthiness of the land to stay with, that begets that commitment. Under its influence, the dwelling of the people of Zhou causes their building, and that building is a testament to the conditions of awareness determining the nature of their dwelling: “They set up the court gate; /And the court gate stood grand. / They reared the great altar [to the Spirits of the land], /From which all great movements should proceed.” The court is erected to acknowledge the organized – which is to say, formed – manner in which they must dwell; the altar erected to acknowledge the divinely oriented nature of the acts they must carry out there. Note that all movements proceed from the altar, from the place laid down as a monument to their dwelling, thus transforming all actions of the people of Zhou into exertions towards renovation.

It is King Wen’s merit to direct this building in conformity with the dwelling that preceded his people, that had been given to his people. His chih was an abiding with the land, as he found it fruitful, and with his own person, as he found it admirable. He did not set his people to any projects in Zhou. He did not set them at war with the land, which he only sought to improve, nor with their ancestors, whom he only sought to reverence. “He conformed to the example of his ancestors, /And their Spirits had no occasion for complaint.” The challenging of time and space that is at the heart of modernity was entirely absent from Wen’s founding work. What was there instead was the poem, a singing and thus a memorializing of the building that resulted from the people’s dwelling, and had as its origin and purpose the enduring establishment of that dwelling:

He repaired the walls along the [old] moat :
His establishing himself in Feng was according to [the pattern of his forefathers],
It was not that he was in haste to gratify his wishes; -
It was to show the filial duty which had come down to him.
A sovereign true was [our] royal prince!

It was the poem that first beckoned the people to stay and abide in Zhou, because of the goodness of the land they found there, and it is the poem that perpetuates the memory of the king who both exemplified and promoted that staying, so that generation after generation can be summoned back to his example. He built the altar at which the people gathered, and from which they went forth to their work, so that in all their actions they might renovate the state. The Odes commemorate his person, and disclose his model for the consideration of their audience, so that the possibility of dwelling will always be present to men.

It was just such an abiding, under the watchfulness of just such a lord, that Ben Jonson sought to commemorate in his famous manor poem, “To Penshurst.” Here, it is the Kentish countryside that supplies the physical and temporal conditions of awareness into which the lord emerges, and which he is tasked with preserving in all that he builds. The abundance and fecundity of the earth (“The early cherry, with the later plum, / Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come”) and its hidden population of dryads, muses, and sylvans (“Thy Mount, to which the dryads do resort, / Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made / Beneath the broad beech and the chestnut shade”), constitute the essential and transcendent parameters of existence at Penshurst, what is already given by the land for the lord to build upon. He inherits a plentiful plot which his ancestors have inhabited for several generations, and in all that he does he is called upon to honor that place and that history.

The merit of the lord, then, lies in his honoring what is already present in the land and in himself, and refusing to offer a challenge to either. The contrast is drawn at the poem’s opening and conclusion between the modest construction of Penshurst, and the ostentatious construction of rival manor houses, those “proud, ambitious heaps” that were “built to envious show” with “polished pillars or a roof of gold.” Such edifices are the fruit of their lords’ projects, of their desire to challenge the land upon which they build, and are thus “grudged at” by those imposed upon by their elaborate manufacture. But the building of Penshurst involved no such imposition, and therefore, no resentment: “though thy walls be of the country stone, / They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; / There’s none that dwell about them wish them down.”

The copious orchards of the estate symbolize the essential character of the building that results from the lord’s abiding in the land, and abiding with himself. They are the consequence of human artifice and exertion tending to, and improving upon, what nature has already provided. The poem recurrently depicts the intertwining of natural and social patterns at Penshurst: the reaching of the child’s hand for “the blushing apricot and woolly peach,” the “seasoned deer” that unfailingly provides the feast for visiting friends, the “ripe daughters” arriving at the manor carrying “emblem(s) of themselves” in the baskets of fruits they carry, who embody the very same fecundity as the country over which they travel. Their pursuit of generation at the manor (the parents sending them on errands there “would commend (them) this way to husbands”) echoes the unstated generations of ancestors who have occupied that place, enmeshing the lord and his dependents in a determinate pattern of life that is at once biological and cultural. To simply inhabit that pattern, to exist within the fourfold dimensions of the life it delineates, and to do so reflectively, reverently – that alone is enough.

Virtue, as it is exemplified by the lord at Penshurst, is nothing more than a preserving and a reverencing of those patterns. His excellence is not as one who subdues or imposes his will upon the conditions of life he discovers. It is a piety that grows from a satisfaction with all that has been given to him. The generosity that the lord extends to his guests is epitomized in the lavish feasting he provides out of the abundance of the land (“whose liberal board doth flow / With all that hospitality doth know! / Where comes no guest, but is allowed to eat / Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat”). Eating, at Penshurst, is both a biological event – serving the ends of nutrition – and a social one – serving the ends of conviviality, and thus the lord’s generosity holds together in equipoise the orders of the earth and sky, of mortals and immortals. Likewise, his patriarchal care for his children and their upbringing honors the physical relation that he bears to them, as well as the moral and religious parameters of that relation. In generating his offspring, he acculturates the minds that grow in them. His patriarchal duties span and unite the material and spiritual conditions of his existence: “They are and have been taught religion, thence / Their gentler spirits have sucked innocence. / Each morn and even they are taught to pray / With the whole household, and may every day / Read in their virtuous parents noble parts / The mysteries of manners, arms, and arts.” The reference to the “penates” of Penshurst operates as something more than just a classical decoration; it is a symbol of the intergenerational piety from which the merit of the lord and his family derive.

Among the virtues that emanate from that piety, none enables the act of dwelling as fundamentally as that of loyalty. The hierarchical relations of dependence and responsibility are part of the “already there” at Penshurst, and the lord makes no attempt, nor offers grounds for such an attempt on the part of his dependents, to challenge this condition of life either. The very same fealty he and his lady demonstrated towards the king upon his sudden appearance at the manor (“What great I will not say, but sudden cheer / Didst thou then make them”) is returned to them by the country-folk bearing their humble tributes: “all come in, the farmer and the clown, / And no one empty-handed, to salute / Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.” The progressive project of challenging time and its dispositions finds no place here, as the bonds of fealty in which the life of Penshurst are enmeshed abet, and do not obtrude, the flourishing of its inhabitants. But no more does the capitalist project of challenging the physical landscape through the maximization of profit, since the common means of exchange is one of gift: “Here no man tells my cups, nor standing by, / A waiter, doth my gluttony envy, / But gives me what I call, and lets me eat; / He knows below he shall find plenty of meat.”

And it is the presence of the poet himself at the heart of Penshurst – feasting at its board, marveling at the plentifulness of the land, admiring the modesty of the building and its lady both – that culminates the act of dwelling there. Abiding gratefully among all that he finds in the land and its lord, the poet is the one who discerns complete sufficiency in what has been given at Penshurst, and feels complete contentedness to stay there: “all is there, / As if thou then wert mine, or I reigned here; / There’s nothing I can wish, for which I stay.” More importantly, he is the one who brings that sufficiency to light for those who dwell there, whose song brings forth into the open the natural and moral abundance among which they live, and from which they can derive their happiness. He is the one that brings to light the goodness inhering in the various patterns of life already unfolding there, and, crucially, the correspondent disposition towards that goodness inhering in his listeners. By nurturing that disposition towards harmony through his measure, and through his commemoration of the virtue in which it is realized, the poet discloses the transcendent and essential dimensions of awareness in his listeners to themselves, thus making them fit to dwell and desirous to dwell. His poem springs out of his staying, and beckons to others to stay – with the land, with their own nature.

Jonson’s work reveals to us how poetry is both the pattern and the means of dwelling. It is given to us as a testament to the possibility of dwelling, even in our own age, because the “ancient pile” of Penshurst, and the piety of its lord that determined the tenor of life there, stood in its own time as a contrast and a rebuke to the gaudy palaces surrounding it, the “other edifices” that stood as monuments to their masters’ fundamental discontent, and the domineering acts in which it issued. The poem teaches us to appreciate the contrast, and to prefer to such challenging projects the grateful tenor of life preserved at Penshurst, understanding by means of the poem that “(other) lords have built, but (this) lord dwells.”