God is in a tree

Old Irish poems about nature praised and translated a lot. They admired the exceptional purity of their diction. It seems that the very freshness and clarity of the original world of virgin forests, rivers and bird trifles have been imprinted in this poetry. Reading, we now and then tremble from the injections of pleasure, which is difficult to express in words. Perhaps the phrase of the Wordsworth "Surprised by Joy" ("caught by joy") is closest to conveys the combination of surprise and beauty that they give us, for example, these eight short lines captured in the memory of generations:

There, in the bushes,
Small Ptah
Shchebetta:
Twoja tail
Fast wave,
Take off and - ah! -
Above the sucker
Black thrush!

With its laconicism and imagery, this art can rightly compare with Hokka. The frog basso, flopping into the Japanese puddle in the seventeenth century, produced no more sonorous and long echo in time than this yurkh Irish thrush, cleared the throat on the shores of Loch Laha (1) .

No less compressed and expressively a poem that begins in the Irish Scel Lem Duib . Each word in it has the brightness and weight of a drop of rain that sparkled on a branch of trin. Flann O'Brien was right, who spoke of the "calligraphic clarity" of ancient Irish lyrics. Feel how the icy breath of the northern winter enters us along with these brief lines:

Here you have the news:
Cry is coming;
Witing in the BREG
The platoon beats.

With a roar in Debr
a deer rushes;
The light is crushed
The day fades.

Heather Redan,
Dick wind;
In the thick of the clouds
Goose scream.

In the nests of birds
there are more to have;
In the fords ice:
Here is the news for you.

I can only name a few examples in English poetry, when the words convey the cold and chills of winter just as piercing: this is the medieval poem "Haivein and the Green Knight", "King of Lear" by Shakespeare da "Thomas Gardi". In the famous line: "A cold wind flies on the thorny, a real trembling of naked human flesh is concluded; But such sensitivity is rare in English poets. After the Norman conquest, it seems that the temperature of English poetry as a whole increased under the influence of a warm front, which came from the Mediterranean Sea. Irish literature has not experienced such an influence, and the early Irish lyrics with spring -free vision and transparency captured sensations that we will not find in any other language. No wonder Kuno Meyer, the first researcher and translator of many Celtic texts, wrote: "These poems occupy a unique place in world literature. The ability to love, observe and describe nature in its smallest and greatest manifestations was not given to any people as early as the Celts."

On the sidelines of the Ninth century manuscripts from the Saint-Gall monastery in Switzerland, we find another example of this subtle sensation of nature, seen through Christianity with the eye of the eye of the Celtic monk:

I am glad of the fence of the forest;
The thrush is whistling for foliage;
Above my notebook
The noise of the branches and the homon of the nests.

And a cuckoo in a cloud
The forest wakes up in the distance;
God, what a grace -
So write in the shade of wood!

In this poem, which is usually called the "monk writing in the forest", we see how the author’s imagination eats from two different sources. On the one hand, this is Pagus , the pagan element of the forest with its mysterious and restless life, on the other hand, a varying notebook, Christian disciplina , a religious sense of duty, subordinating to itself the sensory octen of nature. The author is a hermit monk and at the same time a scribe of books; The hermitage tradition of the early Irish church gave rise to such a phenomenon as the ancient Irish lyrics of nature. Moreover, P.G. Genri in his scientific and fascinating book "Early English and Celtic Lyrics" traces the connection between laudatory poetry and another - the opposite and the anti -directional, which we can call the repentant. Both kind of poetry feed on the experience of monastic life, simple and ascetic, and the experiences of the ascetic find a way out in repentant verses, and the direct contact of the hermit with the ever -changing nature - in the more cheerful lyrics of the seasons.

Both directions of poetry are represented in a living and dramatic form in the dialogs of St. Patrick, condemning the old heroic way of Irish life, and an oysin, an unreasonable natural person. While Patrick praises monastic life, prayers and chants, Oysin lists the noisy and full -blooded joys of phenians, hunting and battles. In Ireland, starting from the thirteenth century, a thoroughly developed genre of poetry of the place has developed. Description of the mountains, valleys and lakes in a nostalgic and romantic way, often connected with the complaints of the exile - a typical feature of Celtic poetics. I chose one poem of this genre: praising by the oysin of Ben -Balben Mountain (its original, “present”, the name - Benn Gulbain), partially chose because it is one of the early mentions of that mountain that occupies such a dominant place in the landscape of Skiho and inseparable from the poetry of W. B. Yates in the imagination of the modern reader.

Benn Gulbain is now not the same
Gloomy and dull, like death,
And, it happened from those heights
It was marvelous to see!

Lobster of deer through the bushes,
The wheezing of dogs and the cry of fishing
You knew a lot of strong
About the mountain of great battles!

Grouting in the evenings,
Gomon nests on wood,
it was marvelous in the morning
Listen to the singing of the first pts.

See the war of young people
Brave phenians of forests,
And on their bindings -
Combat fermented dogs.

To feel the cold of the night dew
What lay on the slope of the mountain,
hear fox yelting,
The lonely cry of the eagle.

Or sitting on a stump
Listen to the Drozd song ...
Patrick! Filled a century that a day
It was marvelous to live then.

Scientists can interpret this poem as an elegy, and, indeed, there is a certain detachment in it, as it were, a haze of time, removing it from the object of description and approaching today's perception. But at the first stage of the monastery poetry, which began six to seven centuries earlier, by no means crying on the lost, but pure joy, towering their eyes and heart, was the emotional content of poems. This poetry brings us closer to the first days of creation, to the time when Adam gave the name to plants and animals. The following several stanzas, embedded in the mouth of the Connem hermit of Marban, who lived in the seventh century: can be cited as an example:

TIS IMPOSED -
My prayer
Forest house;
oak is branched,
Domested -
My watchman.

Good apples
scarlet, oblast -
in the heap of paradise;
Many is sinless
Tear with Oreshin
harvest.

From Krinitsa
The current flows
(fresh, student!);
cherry wild,
strawberries
The red slope is red.

Veliy hare
It crawls out
from the bush;
Lani jump
In the meadow -
Lepota!

Goats roam
Without fear
near the stream;
badger
Strips
Friends to me.

And what
Sovers everywhere -
Sit down, feast! -
How many juicy
Groundings, potions,
Bright jets!

Bee honey
From Duplin
(God's thing!);
Mushrooms in the forests,
And in the lakes
Horses and bream.

So she goes on, this hermitan Rhapsody, full of primitive energy of the Druid grove. The word "druid", of course, causes in life the world is more ancient, dark and denser than the world of early Irish Christianity, although some scientists argue that Filid , this official poet of the historical period, only continued the role of the Druid, the poet-ghrezer of the archaic era. I really like such an idea, because the “druid” sits from the word Doire , an oak grove, and thus the poet is connected with the sacraments that took place in this grove, and his imagination is with the pagan element of the forest, rather with Oisin than with the Holy Patrick.

And here I turn to the name of my essay: "God in the tree." Poetry is always deeper than any statement. The secret power connecting words together is a certain mental energy, difficult to perceive, primitive and only vaguely recognized by both the poet and his listeners. Say, in the context of the monastery worldview, God is the Head of Life, the Creator of all the things, the god of the Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But there is another god - hiding in a tree, intangible, but nevertheless strong, not the one described in Christian books, and the other is unknown and mysterious. Ian Finles in his “introduction to Celtic art” notes that only after the conquest of the Gauls of the Romans and the transformation of their country into the imperial province of the Gallic and Celtic gods acquired similarities with living men and women, before these deities remained shrouded into impenetrable shells of stones and trees - in the guise inherent in objects of nature. Indeed, when you think about superstitious fear and veneration, until recently surrounding magical trin in Irish villages, about pilgrimages, which are now being committed to ancient holy sources, all doubts in the reality of Finley’s statements will immediately disappear. I suppose that the early Irish poetry of nature fought with a deep unconscious connection with the mysteries of the forest, with the "tree", as if it did not declare its commitment to the new religion of Christ. In the end, there is no reason why the literature does not preserve the same traces of old beliefs that Gothic architecture has preserved throughout Europe in the form of those decorations of church roofs that historians call “green men” or “deciduous heads” - human faces intertwined with leaves, stoons and branches.

These green little men reminded me of another character, closely interwoven with the forest, who lived and slept on trees, gathered edible herbs and beeing from the spring: I, of course, mean the crazy Suin, the hero of the famous cycle of poems, simultaneously the enemy and hostage of the monastery tradition. According to legend, Suini was one of the local Irish leaders (kings), whom the saint Ronan cursed and turned into a half -man -half -child, doomed to lead a nomadic, homeless life in the forest, until he was returned to the human appearance with the monks of St. Mouling Church, which wrote down his history and composed of his poem. One of these poems is undoubtedly connected with archaic tree, but it gained its final literary form in later times. This is the so -called "song about the trees of Ireland", a grateful anthem of a generous abundance of nature and another evidence of how the trees were surrounded in the imagination of the ancient Celts.

Oak, you are the bitch out
Further, above all;
You, hazel, thin.
Strongly your nut.

You, fluffy alder,
kind people of the shelter,
non -sound and soft
There are no spikes in you.

You have a prickly Turn,
Berries are sweet;
You, Uherukha, poor food,
thicker by the river.

Clover glue, you will draw
both cows and bees;
Strawberries, you will grow
Where it is bright.

Apple tree, they shake you
Everyone who is not lazy
How beautiful you are in the forest
On the May marvelous day.

About rosehip, you are cruel,
you like to see blood,
Fuck you your claw
To stick my flesh.

TIS TISHED, you are graves
strict guardian guard;
Poyshchi is curly, you wrapped
The old forest trunk.

Ostrosolist, from the wind shield,
You are stronger than the wall;
Slender ash is growing for us
Spears for war.

You, birch, all trees
Lighter and brighter,
You overshadow the queen
your charm.

Sorry for you, Osina, sorry:
How you are trembling
how they want to break into the distance
Round sheets!

But the old oak threatens me,
Mashuchi with his hand:
something I do not love him,
something is not like that ...

This is the only one of the numerous monologues of the crazy suini, which completely grows from the plant-derivative world as a continuation of its natural ornament; It costs one of dozens of similar poems written from the sixth to the sixteenth century and testifying to tree -freeness as a source of poetic inspiration.

I brought here only a small handful of poems. Those who wish to meet deeper with the Irish lyrics can get a lot of benefits and pleasure, turning, for example, to the work of Kuno Meyer, Richard Murphy and Frank O'Connor or to the poetic anthologies of John Montegu and Brendan Kennelli. I limited myself to only a few poems that had the most powerful and long -term influence on my imagination, and tried to figure out what was the matter.

I want to finish a short memory that, as it seems to me, is a direct attitude towards what we are talking about, and a kind of small discovery or epiphany that came to me. I visited - already eleven years ago - in the old monastery chapel (oratorios) on the Dingl Peninsula in the county of Derry. Folded dry of gray limestone, in size it is no more than the usual stack of peat. Inside, in a stone twilight, I wanted to bother with crowding and some oppressive sensation, kneel down, as generations of monks, praying for salvation, and the redemption of their sins were lowered. I suddenly felt on my shoulders the whole burden of Christianity with his harsh, unplaced attitude towards myself, with the pathos of self -repaid, humility of the burly human flesh and daring spirit.

But when I left the cold stone womb, I went out in the sun again and saw the dazzling shine of grass and sea, I felt such a sudden rise in the spirit, such an irresistible thirst for happiness that the monks must have experienced this threshold again and again many centuries before me. This need of praise is a feeling of peace as light, as illumination, and is the core of ancient Irish poetry of nature - that makes it such a unique part of our heritage.

Note:

1. Loch -Lih - the ancient name of the Belfast Bay.