John Burnside, “Scotlandwell,” from “An Essay Concerning Light”

John Burnside

In the letter which follows I look, as I do so often in these letters, at a single poem, John Burnside’s first poem in the series “An Essay Concerning Light.”   But I found myself dissatisfied when I finished.  For what if Burnside’s assertion in this poem is wrong, what if he is not the final word on the subject of being and non-being?   So often we, at our best, struggle to understand what a poet is telling us of important truths of his or her existence.  But what if that truth stands in opposition to others, and the others are more important to us?  I do not always get to that question, but it tugged at me after I had written about Burnside’s great poem.  So, if you want to quit reading at the end of my focus on “Scotlandwell,” do so.  What succeeds that focus on the poem is a larger discussion of the claims of the world we live in versus the claims of the void.  Skip that ‘larger discussion’ if you wish, as I am not at all sure that what I think about larger issues is something you need spend time on.

An Essay Concerning Light

          John Burnside

 O nobly-born, listen.  Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality.  Recognise it.  O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.

 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz

 I Scotlandwell 

All summer long, I waited for the night
to drive out in the unexpected gold
of beechwoods, and those lighted homesteads, set
like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,

catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs
and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard
as one flesh, heads
like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;

light from the houses television blue,
a constant flicker, like the run of thought
that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems
to kindle us, and make us plausible:

creatures of habit, ready to click
into motion. All summer long,
I knew it had something to do
with looking again, how something behind the light

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on things
is always visible, a muddled patina
of age and colour, twinned with light or shade
and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.

           A friend suggested I read the poems of John Burnside, a contemporary Scots poet.  I looked up his poems on the web – doable, nowadays – and was greatly impressed.  Burnside is a ‘nature poet’ of our day, a poet who does not push at the edges of language as much as he pushes us to think, to see clearly what is before us and around us, to rethink what we take so much for granted that we don’t ‘see’ it at all.

          One poem in particular, “Scotlandwell” from “An Essay Concerning Light” impressed me.   I have been re-reading it, and sending it to some friends, for a few weeks now.  It is a remarkable poem.  And it says something other than I first thought, and that is a boon: Poetry can push our boundaries, make us aware of things outside our normal habits of thought.  One of the reasons, I think why we need poems.

          A few words of context before we plunge into the poem.  One, it is the first of a series of five poems about ‘light,’ a series prefaced by the passage from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  All five poems are about death, and about how dying is in actuality, as the Buddhist text says, a dying into the light.  This is not what I believe – I believe death is a great darkness, and great nothingness – but pushing one’s consciousness to encounter and embrace new ideas is, well, one of the functions of poetry.  So bravo for John Burnside.  The whole series, the “Essay,” was published in the London Review of Books, and can be found here.

          Two, Scotlandwell is an actual place, a small village in rural Scotland.  In the middle of Scotland, not too far from the sea, but definitely landlocked, in  Kinross-shire.   It is the site of a holy well, used since Roman times, which was thought to cure disease, and so became site of pilgrimages before it fell into disuse.  I don’t think its history is particularly relevant to the poem; its rural setting is, however, as we will see as we go through the poem. 

          Here is the first stanza:

All summer long, I waited for the night
to drive out in the unexpected gold
of beechwoods, and those lighted homesteads, set
like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,

The poem begins as the speaker waits for darkness to begin his drive into the countryside.  There is an ambiguity – to ‘drive out’ can mean to expel – so that we anticipate that the night will ‘drive out’ the things of the day.  No, we quickly understand, the speaker is going to drive out into the rural scene on a country road.  (That night may drive out something is a possibility which will recur as we near the end of the poem!)

          That gold is unexpected both because it is evening, when all is darkened, and because beech trees have leaves that are dark green.  Though the leaves are not green in autumn, when the (dying) leaves turn color, and in the case of beech trees, turn a brilliant yellow.  They are so yellow that on the evening drive they appear, ‘unexpected,’ in gold before the driver’s eyes.

          There is another light, a bluish glow that which emanates from the homes he passes on this drive.  The simile is homely but apt: The lights from these homes are like ‘kindling,’ not the full blaze but the precursor which initiates it.  The dark is not seamless, but has ‘crease-lines,’ the small flares punctuating it from time to time as houses appear along the dark road.  But hold on to that ‘kindling,’ for while it seems to indicate a small flame, which is what the lights emanating from windows look like, it also points toward a start to the knowledge which will emerge as the poem progresses.

catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs
and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard
as one flesh, heads
like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;

 The sentence continues into the second stanza.  (There are only two sentences in this poem; commas and a semi-colon and a colon qualify things, and the sentence-break occurs only in the fourth stanza, in the middle of a line in the midst of that stanza.)  While driving, he not only sees the golden beeches, but the animals in the yards of the houses he passes.  Dogs and cattle, seeming like sources of light (‘lanterns’) but illuminated by the light coming from the houses.  “Huddled” and “sleepless,” the animals are somehow “mustered all once” to bear testimony to the light.  They ‘sway,’ moving modestly back and forth, “full of muddled light.”

          What does that last phrase mean?  I think the animals, seen crowded (“herds-long” says Gerard Manley Hopkins in quite another context, who in that poem also uses the word ‘huddle’) in the yard, reflect – and reveal – the light, not pristine as it would be from a source but “muddled” as they reveal a light that is at several removes from the ‘light’ that Burnside is seeking.  “Muddled” – mixed up with things, disordered, unclear as to the light’s source.

light from the houses television blue,
a constant flicker, like the run of thought
that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems
to kindle us, and make us plausible:

           Several things are going on in this stanza, and perhaps we can keep them separate.  The light in these night-encountered houses comes from the televisions flickering within them: “television blue,/ a constant flicker.”  Television, in this reading of the stanza, “keeps us from ourselves.”  It certainly does: escape, retreat from self-awareness and self-knowledge.  Though I watch it, often, it does not lead in the direction of encounters with myself or even my surroundings.  Television is an escape.  There is even a “click” in the ensuing stanza, calling to mind that we use the zapper to turn on the television and to change channels. 

           As we proceed in considering the television inside the houses, “It seems/ to kindle us, and make us plausible.” We live within and from what we see on television.  I speak with an old friend on Zoom once a month, and he always refers to what he saw on MSNBC or CNN: his television watching defines him and his interests.   As Allen Ginsberg wrote so trenchantly, part cruelty and part hilarious satire in his great poem, “America,”  “I'm addressing you./ Are you going to let your emotional life be run by/Time Magazine?”  We are kindled and made plausible by our viewership.  Ouch.

           There is that word again, “kindled.”  For this is what “kindling” does.  (A truism, but worth stating.)  Television’s blue flicker flame lights us up – keeping us from any ‘true’ knowledge of ourselves.  But it is also what enlightens us, although it is a false enlightenment in both reality and in the view of this poem; it gives energy and a [false] sense of ‘reality’ to our lives.

           I said a two paragraphs ago that we have to keep the things going on in this stanza, separate.  Poems can say two things at once.  They are not exemplars of logic, or of direct statement.  That is another reason we need poems, for life is not as simple as logic, coming to us in binary oppositions: either/or, black/white. In our lives we can see or feel several things at once.  Thus,  this stanza refers not only to television, but to our thoughts.  Let’s revisit that simile:

                      like the run of thought
that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems
to kindle us, and make us plausible:

Here, in the simile, it is not television that keeps us from ourselves, but thought.  How can that be?  For Burnside, here, thinking is not awareness: It keeps us from a quiet, unassertive awareness of who we are and what we are about.  Thinking is the intellectual’s television, forestalling awareness and yet making us excited (“kindling”) and making us seem – to ourselves – as if we are actual sentient beings.  “Plausible.”

           I know.  Not what you wanted to hear.  Here is Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself,” challenging the intellectuals (myself included) among us:

 Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

           We, especially English teachers like myself, think we have learned so much about poems, and our environs, and the universe.  Yet Burnside and Whitman want to take that knowing away from us.  Listen to what Whitman says next, for Burnside hears it clearly: “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”

           Burnside is after something larger than what we ‘think’ in our “run of thought.”  We “are creatures of habit,” ready always to use the zapper to click onto another channel, and likewise  to let one thought run into the next, ever ready, always raveling onward without ever considering the ground from which thought emerges. 

creatures of habit, ready to click
into motion. All summer long,
I knew it had something to do
with looking again, how something behind the light

Ah, there it is, appearing as the second sentence commences.  All summer his awareness was being kindled.  He was stumbling toward the recognition that there is something behind, beyond the light that we see, be it daylight or the light of golden beeches or the light reflected by the heads of huddled beasts or the light of televisions, or even the light of reason.  It has to do “with looking again.”   For there is “something behind the light….”  Something that

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on thing
is always visible, a muddled patina
of age and colour, twinned with light or shade
and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.

 Huddled/muddled resonates.  So does the epigraph from “not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour” and “a muddle patina/of age and colour.”

           I completely misread this final stanza the first few times I read it, taking it the way I wanted it to read.  (I have referred to Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman before.  It insists that we all take shortcuts in our thinking, to enable us to move more quickly, and in doing so we make egregious mistakes.  That was true of me: I had the poem say what I wanted it to say, which is that if we look closely we can see the actuality of things, which gets drowned in the familiar look such things always present to us.  Wrong.  Wrong.)  It is a very difficult stanza.  Let me repeat it, along with the sentence that initiates it:

I knew it had something to do
with looking again, how something behind the light

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on things
is always visible, a muddled patina
of age and colour, twinned with light or shade
and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.

 If we look again, the introductory sentence from the prior stanza informs us, we may be able to see “something . . . [that] had gone unnoticed.”  What we see is not that wonderful patina that colors all the things we see, their “age and colour.”  Not their specific time of being, nor their defining characteristics.  That was how I had originally, wrongly, read the line: if we look closely, we can see along with the appearance of things (“twinned with light and shade”):  the actuality of the thing, its being in the world (of time) and of physicality (its colour). 

                    No.  Burnside says, and I am loathe to acknowledge this, that if we look closely we will see something else, something that gets “drowned” in the familiar look of things.  That something?  The nothingness out of which all things arise, and to which they will eventually return.

           Long ago, in one of the first of these letters, I wrote about a remarkable early poem of Eugenio Montale – a poem not only treasured by Italo Calvino, but by Burnside, who writes about it in his breathtaking book about modern poetry, The Music of Time.  I’ve been reading that book, which is wonderful, in part because he begins with poems I myself treasure and have written about: Montale’s, Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, Ammons’ “Corson’s Inlet.”  (He goes on to consider other poems and poets, Marianne Moore and Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, and has sent me back to re-read them.)  In Montale’s poem, “Perhaps one morning” a man turns around so quickly that he sees that nothing is behind his back.  Nothing.   Nothingness.  Here is what I wrote:

He will turn around quickly, so quickly that he sees something behind him that he has never been quick enough to see before.  He will see what is actually there behind his back.  The experience will be miraculous: he will see the void, which has always been there but never seen.  He will see that just behind what seems to exist is – nothing. …  The speaker’s response is irrational terror.

 Burnside’s poetic speaker is not Montale.  No terror.  The “source” of everything is that nothingness in which it originates, from which it comes, and to which it will return.  The “drowned familiar,” a phrase which greatly troubled me, is the familiar world of everyday (Montale’s speaker returns to that world, of “trees houses hills”) in which the experience of the great nothingness of all things is drowned.  If we return to the epigraph from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the “void [is] the very reality.”

           Where Montale in his poem escapes, without having an alternative to that escaping, to the world we live in, which he identifies as a world of “illusion,” Burnside is willing to acknowledge that behind all we see – if we only look very, very closely – is the nothingness that is the base and origin of all we see before us.  Or, as I said in my earlier essay, quoting a famous poem by Wallace Stevens about a snow-man, a poem Burnside considers at some length in his The Music of Time.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is what is so breathtaking about Burnside’s poem.  Well, apart from his brilliant description of light in the countryside at night, and his brief meditation how how both television and thought give us a ‘plausibility’ and kindle us in our everyday lives.  But let us consider where he ends up: That nothingness is our actual home, our actual reality, though we don’t see that nothingness for we are too caught up with the “muddled patina” of things.

          This is a very Buddhist way of looking at the world, but saying that is a misdirection.   It consigns Burnside and his intense awareness to the category of “Buddhist influences on Western thought.”  Yet as the poem so powerfully reminds us, “thought/…keeps us from ourselves.”  To see, which is what this poem is about, is not to think.  We can see the nothingness.  And, for Burnside, the nothingness is nothing to be terrified of.

          “Scotlandwell.” Is this vision of nothingness the well from which we should drink if we are to be restored to health?  I believe that is what Burnside is telling us in this remarkable poem.

 ……………………………………………

          I thought of ending this letter here.  But we not only read poems, and listen to what they say.  We also respond to them, and we need to understand that just because a poet says something, that doesn’t mean she or he is right.  I have trouble with that: To me, what a good poet says is often so powerful that it crowds out alternative ways of responding to ‘reality.’  Better that, of course, than thinking we know the world, being so comfortable in our outlook that we need not consider alternative ways of looking at the world.  I think I have written enough, in these letters, about how we have to listen to poems, both to hear what and who we are (lest our selves  get hidden in the noise of the everyday, of our all-consuming activity); and to hear what others are, and what we might become.  The world is not, not, the self.  It is large, and the self can grow and change.

           So what are we  to make of the strange ending of this poem, which says that beneath the “bloom” on things, beneath the “patina” – both terms which hint at beauty – there is “something behind the light” which is a great nothingness, a great void?  Perhaps Burnside is right.  Perhaps all that exists is a sort of illusion, and the void is what there is, ultimately: first, last, always.  Should we be terrified of that void, as Montale is?  Should we rage against it, as Dylan Thomas did in the final verses of his famous villanelle?

 Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Or should we, as Burnside appears to do in this poem, accept the void and accept that nothingness is the crucible in which all is formed and to which all belongs? 

           This is a hard philosophy, even if Buddhists everywhere ascribe to it.  To see that beyond the pleasure of yellow beech trees, of autumn, of blooms, is something which casts these ‘pleasures’ in abeyance is a difficult thing to acknowledge.  I am not sure I accept it, but if I am being fully honest, I recognize that at times I graze close to this view of existence.  More often than I care to admit to myself. 

           So much of what we take to be true or desirable is dependent on the accidents of our existence or on our upbringing and experiences.  I thought as I was writing this of a man named Vic Bubas.  He was, long ago, the coach of the Duke University basketball team, back when I was a graduate student at Duke.  He was responsible for bringing the Duke program to national prominence.  Three times his teams were in the Final Four.  In 1964 his team fell in the finals to a UCLA team starring Walt Hazzard,  coached by John Wooden.  In 1963 Duke finished third, a tournament won by Loyola University of Chicago, which started four black players. ( In 1967 the tournament was won by Texas Western, which started five black players.)  (Bubas was, for I looked him up, a great recruiter of white players.  Art Heyman, Jeff Mullins, Bob Verga, Jack Marin, Mike Lewis. I did not fully realize the racial dimensions, and limitations, of Bubas when I looked him up.)

           Why am I dredging up Vic Bubas?  He was a semi-collosus in his time.  Now he is gone, having died in 2018, and is mostly, if not entirely, forgotten. So much fades away.  Time, and death swallow up all things. Yes, that is a truism, but that does not make it any the less true.  We, and all our experiences, exist in time.  But there is something larger than time, the void in which time exists to measure things.  Vic Bubas entered the void, as we all must do.

           And that void is what Burnside sees as the substrate of all things, what is hidden away as we look at the elements of our world and see them “bloom,” see their “patina,” which individuates them and makes them appear before our eyes.

           Burnside sees the void which surrounds us, even more clearly than Shelley did in that famous poem, “Ozymandias,” the chestnut of high school English classes, about a statue that stands in the midst of a desert.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

           That is one way, a powerful way, of seeing the world: it is how I was just telling you we now see Vic Bubas.  The void surrounds us, lies beneath us, swallows us up – and, if we are truthful, was there before ‘we’ existed.  Burnside’s poem tells us this, and in very strong terms.  The void is the pre-condition for what we call reality, and what is there after the ‘real’ dissipates.  For that, I value the poem.

           But I want to lay before you the conclusions to two other poems,  two gorgeous poems.  One is a very late ode by John Keats, “To Autumn;” the other, which I think refers back to it, is the final section of Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.”  Both revel in the glories of this, our physical world.

          Wallace Stevens, in his “Poems of Our Climate,” writes of our intense desire to go back to that physical world: “one would want to escape, come back/ To what had been so long composed.”   This physical world, with its blooms and its patina, with its light and shade, is, I think, what we finally embrace.  At the end of the entire sequence “An Essay Concerning Light” Burnside meditates on what he thinks he would choose to fill his consciousness at the moment of death.  For him, it is this world, even as he is about to step off into the light, the void: 

Me, I would take the back road, out by the loch:
a moorhen in the reeds, the flush of dawn,

and no one behind me, calling, again and again,
go into the light
nobly-born
go into the light.   [bolding mine]

          So here are Keats, first, and then Stevens, in lines about the beauty of the world we live in, the world we can see if we only look closely. I could parse them out for you.  Actually, I couldn’t: They are so rich, so pregnant with the wonders of a world which has lambs and little midges and crickets and birds and mountains and deer, sweet berries ripening, that one can only stand before them in wonder and intone the words.  And think of the richness of the world we inhabit, illusory though it may be.

     Keats is considering the dying world: Autumn, as the world slips toward the dead of winter.   In the Stevens poem, an old woman is meditating on her death, on the surety that she will slip into the void.  The void may be before us, underneath us, beyond us, but as Rilke put it so eloquently, there is still the physical world we live in, “because truly being here is so much.” 

To Autumn [last stanza]

John Keats

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Sunday Morning [last stanza]

Wallace Stevens 

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

        Let me end with Wallace Stevens.  A strange man to me, the executive of a large corporation, politically conservative, I think a bit chilly.  “The greatest poverty is not to live/ In a physical world.” Burnside, in his poem, both accepts that – his poem celebrates the beauty of the night – and challenges it.  His poem makes us think, and think deeply, about what existence is, what illusion is, and what we value.