Another Poetry Thread

In the expanded second version of the poem, the Sampo is forged by Ilmarinen, a legendary smith, as a task set by the Mistress of Pohjola in return for her daughter's hand.

"Ilmarinen, worthy brother,
Thou the only skilful blacksmith,
Go and see her wondrous beauty,
See her gold and silver garments,
See her robed in finest raiment,
See her sitting on the rainbow,
Walking on the clouds of purple.
Forge for her the magic Sampo,
Forge the lid in many colors,
Thy reward shall be the virgin,
Thou shalt win this bride of beauty;
Go and bring the lovely maiden
To thy home in Kalevala."

Ilmarinen works for several days at a mighty forge until finally the Sampo is created:

On one side the flour is grinding,
On another salt is making,
On a third is money forging,
And the lid is many-colored.
Well the Sampo grinds when finished,
To and fro the lid in rocking,
Grinds one measure at the day-break,
Grinds a measure fit for eating,
Grinds a second for the market,
Grinds a third one for the store-house.

"In all great cities there are zones which reveal their true character only after dusk. By day they wear a mask, assume a look of amiable good-fellowship that hoodwinks even the astute. (...) But, when the nightmists rise, such places wake to life that is a parody of death; the smiling banks turn livid, dark surfaces grow pale and flicker with funereal gleams, coming with evil glee into their own again. It is the street-lamp that works this transformation. Under the first ray of this nocturnal sun, the nightscape dons its panoply of shadows and a malefic alchemy transmutes the texture of the visible world. The smooth, sleek trunks of the plane-trees seem suddenly transformed to leprous stone, the cobbled pavement grows darkly mottled like the skin of a drowned man, even the river-water burns with a metallic sheen. There is nothing that does not take on a life-foresaken aspect, sloughing off the honest form it had by daylight. Here nature is at her strangest; nothing breathes and nothing grows, yet all her features writhe in odd grimaces -- it is as if the stage were set in preparation for some furtive drama. Under the broken gleams of the lamplight buffeted by the wind, amid the odour of death that hovers on the water, this dark domain of silence and the rats is hospitable only to the thief counting his plunder, apt for the humble orgies of the poor."

The woods were unmoved, like a mask -- heavy, like the closed door of a prison -- they looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence.

"In some ways getting lost was my goal from the start. Growing up in small-town Ontario, where the tallest mountain was a haystack and the broadest horizon a field of corn, I’d felt wilder than the world in all directions. It wasn’t until university that I finally stepped beyond the borders of my home country, finally saw a mountain and a desert in more than pixels or words on a page, and there was no looking back. From then on my greatest joy has been wandering the planet’s rough peripheries with a tent and a backpack full of books. My greatest fear is having to work, heaven forbid, in a cubicle. To avoid this I mostly subsist on instant noodles, and I travel whenever possible by my own two legs, enabling a vagabond life rich in every currency but money."

This is essentially my life's mission statement as excerpted from Lands of Lost Borders, a new essay of mine about wildness, borders, and cycling the Silk Road.

what goes up and up in us.

Before I sit down to write this morning, here's a brief blog post knitting together some favourite quotes from Wittgenstein, Adrienne Rich, and Jack Gilbert on the power and inadequacy of words as deeds, and on what goes up and up in us nevertheless.

***

“Words are deeds,” argued philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Still, “we may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face
of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly
limitless corporate greed,” writes Adrienne Rich. “Yet it has
always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to
ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us
of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of
kinship where all is represented as separation."

Which is why “I crank my heart even so and it turns
over. Ranges high in the sun over continents and eruptions
of mortality, through winds and immensities of rain
falling for miles," says Jack Gilbert. "Until all the world is overcome
by what goes up and up in us, singing and dancing
and throwing down flowers nevertheless..."

***