Modern Kicks: how to hold the axe to make its handle

To Lu Chi

(author of the Wen Fu, or Prose Poem
on the Art of Letters, A.D. 302)

Old sir, I think of you in this tardy spring,
Think of you for, maybe, no better reason
Than that the apple branches in the orchard
Bear snow, not blossoms, and that this somehow
Seems oddly Chinese. I too, when I walk
Around the orchard, pretending to be a poet
Walking around the orchard, feel Chinese,
A silken figure on a silken screen
Who tries out with his eye the apple branches,
The last year’s shriveled apples capped with snow,
The hungry birds. And then I think of you.

Though many centuries of dust, to which
We both belong, your quiet voice is clear
About the difficulties and delights
Of writing well, which are, it seems, always
The same and generally unfashionable.
In all the many times I have read your poem,
Or treatise, where the art of letters turns
To the inspection of itself—the theme
(I take your phrase) of how to hold the axe
To make its handle—your words have not failed
To move me with their justice and their strength,
Their manner gentle as their substance is
Fastidious and severe. You frighten me
When you describe the dangers of our course,
And then you bring, by precept and example,
Assurance that a reach of mastery,
Some still, reed-hidden and reflective stream
Where the heron fishes in his own image,
Always exists. I have a sight of you,
Your robes tucked in your belt, standing
Fishing that stream, where it is always dawn
With a mist beginning to be burned away
By the lonely sun. And soon you will turn back
To breakfast and the waking of the world
Where the contending war lords and the lords
Of money pay to form the public taste
For their derivative sonorities;
But yet that pure and hidden reach remains.

Lu Chi, it’s said the world has changed, and that
Is doubtless something which is always said
(Though now to justify, and not in scorn)—
Yet I should think that on our common theme
That sort of change has never mattered much.
In letters as in many other trades
The active man and the contemplative
May both engage and both in different ways
Succeed. The alphabet, the gift of god
Or of the gods (and modern as we are,
We have no better theory yet) was not
Devised to one use only, but to all
The work that human wit could find for it;
Is honorably employed in government
And all techniques; without it, nothing. Yet
The active man, because he is active,
Expropriates as if by natural right
The common ground to his singular use,
And spits on everything he cannot use;
Not knowing, or not caring, that to use
Means also to use up. So I have read,
In works by sages of the active side,
And heard them say, that poetry is dead.
This ancient paragon and type of arts,
They say, was magic when the world began,
And when the old magicians died in scorn
Among the ruins of unsuccessful spells,
Their childish children, living in the dawn
Of intellect and conscience, said those spells
(Which could not move a mountain or a mouse
In a real world) for courage and consolation,
Making those holy places in their hearts
Not masonry nor magic made elsewhere.
But now, in the objective, brazen light
Shed by the sciences, they say, the arts,
And poetry first, considered as their trunk,
The nearest to the root, and bearing branches
Aloft with flower and fruit, and spreading seed
To all societies, must wither away
By supersession in nature and all hearts.
So in our day wisdom cries out in the streets
And some men regard her. And in your day,
Lu Chi? We know these theories, which are not new,
And know the sort of man these theories
Produce, intelligent and serviceable
So long as he can see his language as
Coin of the realm, backed up by church and state,
Each word referring to a thing, each thing
Nicely denominated by a word—
A good mind at its best, a trifle dry . . .
But in bad times, when the word of command
Fails to command, and when the word for bread
Dries and grows mouldy, he is, of all men,
The likeliest to panic as he sits
In his bomb shelter and commissions war songs
From active poets with aggressive views.
Nor on the day when all civilisation
Quite visibly and audibly collapses,
When Paris burns as merrily as Sodom,
When London looks like Hell, or Hiroshima,
Not even then will this man of his own
Free choice consult those who consult the source—
Who by then, in any case, can do nothing.
Meanwhile, in riches, insolence and honor
Pride is twisting his tongue. What an old joke!
These things, Lu Chi, cannot have changed so much.

What then? Nothing but this, old sir: continue.
And to the active man, if he should ask
(If he should bother asking) Why? say nothing.
And to the thinker, if he should ask us once
Instead of telling us, again say nothing,
But look into the clear and mirroring stream
Where images remain although the water
Passes away. Neither action nor thought,
Only the concentration of our speech
In fineness and in strength (your axe again),
Till it can carry, in those other minds,
A nobler action and a purer thought.

So much I gather from your poem: continue,
And now the sun shines on the apple trees,
The melting snow glitters with a great wealth,
The waxwings, drunk on last year’s rotten apples,
Move through the branches, uttering pretty cries,
While portly grosbeaks, because they do not drink
That applejack, chatter with indignation.
How fine the Chinese day! delicate, jeweled,
Exactly spaced, peaceably tense with life.
I shall pretend to be a poet all
This afternoon, a Chinese poet, and
My marvelous words must bring the springtime in
And the great tree of speech to flower
Between the two realms of heaven and earth. So now
Goodbye, Lu Chi, and thank you for your poem.

--Howard Nemerov