Here’s a small cabinet of philosophical poems for the road—voices arguing with love, faith, solitude, history, and fate. What I love about this mix is its range: Millay’s sharp self-interrogation next to Santayana’s star-guided trust; Hardy’s tender doubt beside Yeats’s apocalyptic vision; Emerson’s cosmic monism, Browning’s earthly kiss; Wordsworth’s ecological conscience, Arnold’s Buddha-lit austerity; Stevens’s cool turns of mind; Borges’s grave mirrors; Longfellow’s marching exhortation, Tolkien’s bright prophecy, and Tilton’s steadying refrain. Taken together, these poems ask one question in many keys: how should a mind live inside a changing world—and what does the heart know that the mind forgets?
Millay argues with love and with herself, charting the mind’s helpless orbit around a single star.
The Philosopher
Edna St. Vincent Millay
And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?
I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?
Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell, —
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?
Santayana says wisdom needs faith’s lantern—the soul’s “invincible surmise”—to step into the dark.
O World, thou choosest not’
By George Santayana
O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Wilcox offers a frank ledger of human company: joy draws a crowd, grief keeps its own counsel.
Solitude
Ella Wilcox
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all,—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.
Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
Hardy remembers a childhood faith so tender he’d still follow it into the winter dark.
The Oxen
Thomas Hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
Yeats hears history unhinge and imagines a rough new myth rising to claim the age.
The second coming
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Emerson’s Brahma speaks from the center where opposites cancel and the One remains.
Brahma
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Browning compresses a whole metaphysics into a kiss: truth and trust distilled to human touch.
Summum Bonum
Robert Browning
All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine,—wonder, wealth, and—how far above them—
Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer than pearl,—
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.
Wordsworth laments our bargain with modern life: we’ve traded wonder for “getting and spending.”
The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth
The World is too much with us us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Arnold’s Buddha-minded counsel: stop bribing the heavens; the key is within.
The Light of Asia or the Great Renunciation
Sir Edwin Arnold
(Three stanzas from a long poem.)
Pray not! the Darkness will not brighten! Ask
Naught from the Silence, for it cannot speak!
Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains!
Ah! Brothers, Sisters! seek
Naught from the helpless gods by gift and hymn,
Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruits and cakes;
Within yourselves deliverance must be sought;
Each man his prison makes. . .
If any teach NIRVANA is to live,
Say unto such they err; not knowing this
Nor what light shines beyond their broken lamps,
Nor lifeless, timeless, bliss.
Berry’s winter koan: divinity might be only a matter of endurance and clarity.
Walking on the River Ice
Wendell Berry
A man could be a god
if the ice wouldn't melt
and he could stand the cold.
Stevens turns motion into a little ritual of flesh and air—life as a dance step.
Life is Motion
Wallace Stevens
In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried,
"Ohoyaho,
Ohoo"...
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air.
And when the wind shifts, Stevens says, it thinks like us—eager, despairing, heavy, human.
The Wind Shifts
Wallace Stevens
This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Th wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.
Borges inventories ruin and change, then confesses the mortal ache of being time’s clay.
Adam Is Your Ashes
Jorge Luis Borges
The sword will die just like the ripening cluster.
The glass is no more fragile than the rock.
All things are their own prophecy of dust.
Iron is rust. The voice, already an echo.
Adam, the youthful father, is your ashes.
The final garden will also be the first.
The nightingale and Pindar both are voices.
The dawn is a reflection of the sunset.
The Mycenaean, his burial mask of gold.
The highest wall, the humiliated ruin.
Urquiza, he whom daggers left behind.
The face that looks upon itself in the mirror
Is not the face of yesterday. The night
Has spent it. Delicate time has molded us.
What joy to be the invulnerable water
That ran assuredly through the parable
Of Heraclitus, or the intricate fire,
But now, on this long day that doesn't end,
I feel irrevocable and alone.
Then he indicts himself for the gravest failure: not to have been happy when given life.
Remorse
Jorge Luis Borges
I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.
My parents bred and bore me for a higher
Faith in the human game of nights and days;
For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.
I let them down. I wasn't happy. My ways
Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave
My mind to the symmetric stubbornness
Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.
They willed me bravery. I wasn't brave.
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.
Longfellow puts brass in the heartbeat: act now, leave footprints, and keep marching.
A Psalm of Life
H.W. Longfellow
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
__Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
__And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
__And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
__Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
__Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
__Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
__And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
__Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
__In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
__Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
__Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
__Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
__We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
__Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
__Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
__Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
__With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
__Learn to labor and to wait.
Tolkien sets a bright riddle of resilience: broken blades, deep roots, and kings returning.
All That is Gold Does Not Glitter
J.R.R. Tolkien
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
Tilton’s parable-ring teaches the steady mercy of time: triumph and sorrow, all passing.
Even This Shall Pass Away
Theodore Tilton
Once in Persia reigned a king,
Who upon his signet ring
Graved a maxim true and wise,
Which, if held before his eyes,
Gave him counsel at a glance
Fit for every change and chance.
Solemn words, and these are they;
“Even this shall pass away.”
Trains of camels through the sand
Brought him gems from Samarcand;
Fleets of galleys through the seas
Brought him pearls to match with these;
But he counted not his gain
Treasures of the mine or main;
“What is wealth?” the king would say;
“Even this shall pass away.”
‘Mid the revels of his court,
At the zenith of his sport,
When the palms of all his guests
Burned with clapping at his jests,
He, amid his figs and wine,
Cried, “O loving friends of mine;
Pleasures come, but do not stay;
‘Even this shall pass away.’”
Lady, fairest ever seen,
Was the bride he crowned the queen.
Pillowed on his marriage bed,
Softly to his soul he said:
“Though no bridegroom ever pressed
Fairer bossom to his breast,
Mortal flesh must come to clay –
Even this shall pass away.”
Fighting on a furious field,
Once a javelin pierced his shield;
Soldiers, with a loud lament,
Bore him bleeding to his tent.
Groaning from his tortured side,
“Pain is hard to bear,” he cried;
“But with patience, day by day,
Even this shall pass away.”
Towering in the public square,
Twenty cubits in the air,
Rose his statue, carved in stone.
Then the king, disguised, unknown,
Stood before his sculptured name,
Musing meekly: “What is fame?
Fame is but a slow decay;
Even this shall pass away.”
Struck with palsy, sore and old,
Waiting at the Gates of Gold,
Said he with his dying breath,
“Life is done, but what is Death?”
Then, in answer to the king,
Fell a sunbeam on his ring,
Showing by a heavenly ray,
“Even this shall pass away.”
Singing oneness!
