Notes on Poetry and Weather

It occurred to me driving in today that one could probably write a rather grand essay on poetry and weather, maybe even on the poetics of weather.

Exhibit A would probably be the haiku, and the way the genre is specifically tied to the seasons. The haiku captures transience, fleeting moments, and nothing is more transient than the weather. The paradox—and challenge—of haiku is to make transience permanent. We could say that all poetry—all literature—does this, but the haiku is so resolutely attuned to the ephemeral that it constitutes a special case.

So already I find myself thinking about time. To write about weather may be to write about time.

Pound said poetry is news that stays news, but nothing, seemingly, is more irrelevant than yesterday’s weather. Haiku is tied not just to weather, but to the seasons. The seasons, which are regular and cyclical, impose order on the weather. Because seasons follow a recurring pattern, and since this pattern has remained part of human experience for centuries, haiku can let us experience weather sub species aeternitas.

The moon, in its different phases, reflected in water, makes a lovely trope for the passage of time, for shimmering transience. And there is the haiku ur-image “falling petals, swirling leaves.” I’m drawing on Hass, who is very good on transience and the haiku.

Googling Basho I turn up one I don’t know:

The banana tree
blown by winds pours raindrops
into the bucket

A moment's weather. Is it still raining, or just after the storm? Was the bucket placed there to catch the raindrops or is it just there by accident? Perhaps the banana tree is like us, buffeted by the storm but gathering precious water.

And here’s another new one for me:

Winter showers
even the monkey searches
for a raincoat.

That one needs no comment. One of the things I like about haiku is that they are often funny. Here it’s a comedy of weather, of weathering.

The theme of poetry and weather is closely bound up, of course, with the genre “nature poetry,” and also pastoral (as a subset). One thinks immediately of all the soft breezes and scudding clouds in romantic poetry, and of poets themselves wandering lonely as clouds.

But weather can trope in various ways. The Aeolian harp is a primal image for poetry, and in this case the breeze is the muse—what blows through one in the inspiration (intake of breath) that is the source of poetry.

And I think of William Carlos Williams’s “Against the Weather” essay, where weather seems to be something like history, the often hostile environment against which the poet has to hunker down in order to get the job done. And then there is Stevens’s “major weather.”

For Oppen, sailing is a central image for the writing of poetry, and here again the wind is what makes things go.

And Oppen’s “approached the window / as if to see “what was really going on.” That’s an attempt to get out of a stuffy room on a rainy day, to project oneself outside into the world.

The author of “Defining the Wind” rhapsodizes about the gorgeousness and precision of the Beaufort wind scale. See the modern version at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale.

The weather is an image of the world itself, in its dynamic aspect, and of the ways it soothes or buffets us. You can’t step into the same weather twice.

A nice figure for the relation of subject and object, since the weather is so palpably an element we are in.

So poetics of weather and poetics of mind come together as the interpenetration of inside and outside, the commingling of subject and object.