Matsushima
O paradise of waters and of isles that gleam,
Dark pines on scarps that flame white in a mirrored sky,
A hundred isles that change like a dissolving dream
From shape to shape for them that with the wind glide by!
Many celestial palaces, gardens of scented song,
Have hearts of men imagined for lost happiness;
But merely around these isles, the live sea streams among
Salt with a pulsing tide, no languid lake’s caress,
To sail and ever sail, with not a sound to feel
In the clean blue, but silence vivid with delight,
A silence winged with rush of the dividing keel,
As if the world’s sorrow and folly had taken flight,
Suspended pale as that faint circle far-away
Of mountain, and remote as ocean’s murmuring miles,
This, only this, for me were paradise to-day,
O paradise of waters, paradise of isles.
****
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” Yes, almost anyone who has ever watched the London Remembrance Sunday commemorations can quote, or misquote, that line from Laurence Binyon’s stately, Sapphic-haunted quatrains, For the Fallen. And that may be all they know. Binyon wrote a number of war poems: these, and much of his other work, have been a casualty of one poem’s massive public success, and faded into occasionally anthologised obscurity. I’d read and admired The Burning of the Leaves, and little else. So I was pleased to find a trail leading east and to discover an interesting little cache of “Japanese” poems by Binyon, Matsushima among them.
The Japanese poems are included in a late work, the 1941 collection The North Star and Other Poems. Binyon wasn’t an Orientalist in the derogatory current sense of the term. His interest in Japan was grounded in professionalism, travel and study. He had a long, distinguished career at the British Museum, specialising in Japanese and Chinese art, and his 1908 monograph, Painting in the Far East, was the first on the subject to have been written in a European language. His studies facilitated the discoveries of younger poets, including Ezra Pound.
Matsushima is an exuberant celebration of place, 16 flowing hexameter lines inspired by the 280 or so pine-clad islands that constitute one of the famous “three views of Japan.” The poem puts the romantic Binyon at the helm, and leaves the sober scholar on the shore.
The first quatrain’s itinerary begins with a stunningly contrasted visual first impression (“Dark pines on scarps that flame white in a mirrored sky”). As the apostrophe to the “paradise of waters and of isles that gleam” develops over the third and fourth lines, the syntax becomes a bit wayward. “For them that with the wind glide by” is a subordinate clause better said than read. It sounds fine, and the impersonality of “them” widens the impressionistic ripples. Their view of the islands may be from the vantage point of travellers on a leisurely boat-trip, or of birds or clouds. Float along with the gaze of the poem, and don’t worry – the syntax here is nowhere as complicated as it is to become.
The next 12 lines bring the poem to its climax and conclusion in a single magnificent sentence. Binyon’s speaker wants simply to tell us that the isles of Matsushima are his idea of absolute paradise. No palaces or gardens imagined by “other’s men’s hearts” as reconstructions of “lost happiness” can compete. This is the romantic view in a nutshell: the rugged and natural bring us nearer to sublimity than the man-made, although “sublimity” is perhaps too big a word. Binyon is not pursuing intimations of the divine in nature. Yet he still seems to be gently arguing with the conventions of paradise as established by the major religions (Swedenborg’s sometimes urban heavens might be implicated, too). Here is a poet in old age, celebrating the Earth and its gorgeousness, strangeness and energy. The sea is especially significant. These waters offer “no languid lake’s caress”. It’s the live, salt tides that thrill him, suggesting a sensibility in common with John Masefield. Above all, this is Binyon’s personal ideal of paradise: it’s how he imagines eternity, (“To sail and ever sail”).
So the reader sets off on the leisurely, winding cruise of an island-dappled sentence, its qualifiers and inversions enough to induce mild seasickness. Hexameters benefit from long, involved sentences, though: such syntax minimises the effect of that distracting jolt, the mid-line caesura. Synaesthetic mismatch adds a sense of delirious abandon: there are those hearts that have imaginations, the “gardens of scented song”, the sounds that may be felt, and a silence almost made visual when described as “vivid”.
Binyon rocks the grammatical boat in his excitement but keeps afloat and finally completes what at first sounds like a round trip, back to the first line. It’s not quite the same, though, and there’s a complication. The last line’s “paradise of isles” may be Matsushima itself, a paradise consisting of islands. It’s also possible that Binyon’s boat is now moored on a specific paradise island, the most paradisaical. Either way, the recapitulation works well.
Critical writing about Binyon’s poetry sometimes has a superior ring. Binyon is no Hopkins, true, but he’s more than a conservative Edwardian versifier. He can be odd and striking. The poems may be fluidly structured within formal limits, unusually sensuous, evocative in sound. Like the waters around the Matsushima islands, they are laced with currents of “live sea”.