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Paul Cézanne, 'Mont Sainte-Victoire' (1902-04)

W.B. Yeats's poem 'The Song of the Happy Shepherd' alludes to the mythical paradise of Arcady, a place invested with primal joy and innocence, where the imagination thrived, and which is now proclaimed dead. But unlike the death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, the death of Arcady carries no promise of renewal; rather loss of unity and of vitality. Amidst the sorrow and the dreariress that such a death has brought, the poet can only find solace in his own poetic creation, in words alone; before they too (ironically) become hollow and solipsistic, an inarticulate moan that frustrates poetic expression.

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? — By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie. 

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs — the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

This blog, written under the pen name Maria Karouso, is about literature and the arts and chronicles my attempts to overcome the frustrations of rendering a text into one language or another but also to seek out what Nietzsche calls in his Twilight of the Idols the "trifles that constitute happiness". The blog is primarily about the written word. But in the mind of Greek surrealist artist and poet Nikos Engonopoulos, art and poetry are intertwined. Words are but painted beads placed next to each other as in a string.