Hi all,
These last few weeks have been a little crazy. Among other things, I spent a fair bit of time working on a few final edits before sending out my book manuscript to a few of the available first book contests. Though it has been a good project for the last year (and some), it was reaching the point of being a continual editing loop, so I needed to get it out of my hair for some time.
Submitting it to contests allows me to set it aside in such a way that I don’t feel pressured to pull it back out and work on it. As a result, I am able to focus on some of my other projects, including some other potentially book-length collections. And having been freed from that project, I find it easier to sit down to write, which is good considering that I have been in quite the dry spell for the last few months.
That all said, this post is likely to be a little shorter than most of my others. In here I want to look at repetition as mantra. The shortness of this post is due to a couple of factors. For one, I think my posts have a tendency to ramble, which I sometimes feel I should address. Secondly, though — and more importantly — I have had an oddly hard time coming up with poems to look at as regards the use of repetition as mantra. Before I get to the poem, though, some notes on mantras.
Mantras are interesting to me. Particularly because of their prevalence. Most obviously, we see them in religions, wisdom traditions, recovery programs, and memorized poems. Okay, maybe the last isn’t quite as widespread as the others, but I still think it important to consider.
Though I am not intimately familiar with all the religions out there or all the wisdom traditions, I am familiar with some of them, and I think they provide wonderful examples for what I mean by “mantra”. Having been raised Christian, I am familiar with that tradition, and I found it to be common to encounter people who would memorize verses in order to be able to reference them later in times of need. This is the purpose of the Bible quotes we see everywhere, most commonly perhaps, Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” Another verse often memorized for similar reasons is Proverbs 4:23: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” Finally, I would be wrong to leave out the oft-repeated The Lord’s Prayer — be it at high school football games or around some people’s tables before meals.
Christians, unsurprisingly, are not at all alone in this. In the Stoic school of philosophy, we see a similar thing happening. The whole of Epictetus’s Enchiridion was meant to function in such a capacity. Translating, literally, to “the little thing you hold in your hand,” the Handbook was meant to be carried and referred to when someone faced struggles. Often, I have repeated to myself the very first lines of the very first chapter: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” This is often chased, in my mind, with the beginning of chapter five: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about the things.” Finally, I think about chapter eight: “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” There are a great number of other passages, but the point is clear, I think. When things get difficult in some way, I often turn to Stoic mantras as a way to remind me that I’m getting worked up over nothing.
Consider, as well, the Serenity Prayer. Same idea, same purpose, different reason.
Poetic lines also function as mantras, at least for me. Time and time again, I have recited lines of a poem in my mind (or even a whole poem!) because it has those mantra-esque properties. Most notable, perhaps, the final lines of Campbell McGrath’s “Storm Valediction” (a favorite poem in so many ways): “… It is hard / in the radiance of this world to live / but we live.” Or, from Ruth Stone’s “Train Ride”: “All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever.” During particularly hard times, I find myself turning to those lines again and again. On the larger scale, I find myself repeating a couple of different poems as mantras as well: James Wright’s “Trying to Pray”, Robert Hayden’s “Ice Storm” and Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats”. Though I would love to include them all here, I won’t for the sake of brevity.
My rather long-winded, and perhaps obvious, point: mantras are everywhere. But while the repetition of lines functions as a mantra in our lives at large, it is also important, I think, to recognize the use of repetition as mantra in poetry. One fantastic example of this is the Greg Brown song (because, let’s be honest, Greg Brown’s lyrics are often wonderfully poetic) “Better Days” which repeats, in the chorus, some variation on the phrase “I’m alright, I’m okay / Though I’d have to say I’ve seen some better days.” With each verse of mounting tension and the recollection of undesirable happenings, the mantra is repeated, and in the end, the final line changes to say “Yeah I’m bound determined to see some better days.”
Looking, then, to traditional poetry, the obvious choice of poem is Dylan Thomas’s famous “Do not go gentle into that good night”. Here it is in full.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The villanelle, of course, is particularly well-suited to the use of mantra. In a way, I see the same thing happening in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”. As such, it seems that the form is particularly well suited to the Thomas poem. It seems so because it feels like we are supposed to take the repeated lines as mantras. Each repetition of the lines reinforces it in our minds, and once the poem is read, we can hardly forget those final lines. This is exactly the capacity in which a good (by which I mean successful) mantra functions.
The Thomas poem also does a brilliant job of showcasing the versatility of such a mantra. It is used to express the rage of others, but also the plea of a son for his father to continue, to not die yet. Wise men and wild men alike “do not go gentle into that good night.” In illustrating this diversity, the mantra expands. A mantra only useful in one particular instance isn’t really that much of a mantra, or that useful of one. On the other hand, one that is applicable to a broad spectrum of things is far more useful — and far more likely to be remembered. Furthermore, it is this exact diversity which makes the poem work. It keeps the repetition from becoming meaningless or cheap. When it can be seen in a new way every time, it maintains its power and spreads beyond the poem. But as soon as its limits are shown, it retracts and becomes bound within the scape of the poem. The power of a mantra is in its lack of conditionality.
Of course, one of the hardest things about writing a poem around a mantra is that it can easily become too grandiose, something that is generally best avoided. If a poem presumes to know all the answers to everything in life, it is lying both to itself and to its readers. The trick, then, to find something big enough to merit repetition, but not so large as to be blatantly false. I don’t presume to have the answers on how to do this, I only know that when it is done well, it imprints on the readers, it remains with them for years, if not decades, to come.
I think that’s all for this week. Many thanks for reading. Take care and stay safe.
- D.C. Leonhardt
Today’s pen and ink pairing: Esterbrook LJ (Fine Lefty Stub) with Waterman Mysterious Blue.
