The One Page Poetry Circle will meet February 11 at St. Agnes Library (NYPL) to discuss Poetry and the Law.
Poetry and the Law would at first appear to be disparate entities. The editors of a recent collection of poetry, Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, assert in their introduction that there is a place for poetry in legal studies, a place for legal themes in poetry, and that lawyers would benefit from such exposure.
When the distinguished eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone retired from the law, he began “The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse,” with these words:
As by some tyrant’s stern command,
A wretch forsakes his native land,
In foreign climes condemn’d to roam
An endless exile from his home;
Pensive he treads the destined way,
And dreads to go; nor dares to stay;
Till on some neighbouring mountains’ brow
He stops, and turns his eyes below;
There, melting at the well-known view,
Drops a last tear, and bids adieu:
so I, thus doom’d from thee to part,
Gay queen of Fancy, and of art,
Reluctant move, with doubtful mind,
Oft stop, and often look behind.
Others have not looked at the legal system so fondly. In “Justice,” Langston Hughes describes a completely different view:
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Aside from our judicial system there are other kinds of laws as well. Rudyard Kipling explored the law of the jungle in his poem by the same name:
Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
We look forward to your comments about these or other poems that speak of law.
One Page Poetry Circle 
This gives me an opportunity to browse through my poetry collection to check out poets who are likely to have written about some aspect of the law, or law-related topics. The lines that immediately popped into my head on this topic are these two lines from William Stafford’s poem, “Thinking for Berky:”
We live in an occupied country, misunderstood;
Justice will take us millions of intricate moves.
And the opening lines from William Blake’s “London:”
I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
Regarding the use of the word “justice” in Stafford’s poem: in an ideal legal system, justice should be the natural consequence of fair and impartially applied law to human affairs. However, since laws are made and applied by people with biases and subjective opinions, justice is not always the outcome of legal proceedings. Justice, like beauty, is often what is in the eye of each particular beholder.
Larry, the two poems you quote from show such different ideas of law. “Thinking for Berky” seems to consider justice as a chess match made of “intricate moves.” William Blake, in “London,” suggests the difference between the “charter’d” street and river and the human element. What Blake sees on the street fills him with horror for the sadness of war, of poverty, of pox.
The poem I immediately think of, in relation to poetry and law, is W. H. Auden’s “Law, Like Love”:
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.
Like love we don’t know where or why,
Like love we can’t compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.
This poem begins with the certainty of the law for various people. For the gardener, it is the sun because the sun is necessary for growth. Yet the different people see the law differently. But the last stanza changes the tone of the poem and makes it personal and rather sad.
If I may present a short poem (haiku) in a foreign language (word-for-word translation and English version both by Makoto Ueda):
shirauo | ya | kuroki | me | wo | aku | nori | no | ami
whitefish | : | black | eye | [acc.] | open | law | ‘ | net
whitefish
opening their black eyes
in the net of the Law
–Basho, trans. Makoto Ueda
note: ‘nori’ is a homonym in Japanese. It is the pronunciation of the character for ‘seaweed’. It is also the pronunciation of a character that means ‘rule’ or ‘law’.
note: whitefish (aka whitebait) are about an inch long, semi-translucent, with large black eyes.
Religions have ‘laws’. In this haiku, Basho is referring to Buddhist Law; in this case the Law of Dharma.This is one of the few haiku in which Basho explicitly references Buddhism.
The haiku is supposed to have been written on a painting of the Chinese Zen Buddhist monk Hsien-Tzu (J. Kensu), whose name can be translated as Master Shrimp.
According to Ueda (from his book, “Basho and His Interpreters”):
“Master Shrimp was a Chinese Zen monk of the Five Dynasties period, who was so nicknamed because he lived on shrimps he caught in a nearby river. Zen artists have portrayed him standing in a stream and catching shrimps with a net.”
Here are a couple of comments from Ueda’s book:
“What the monk caught in his net were shrimps. But Basho changed them to whitefish, and therein likes his haikai art. He said, ‘opening their black eyes’ because black eyes are such a distinctive feature of whitefish. The phrase has implications of Buddhist enlightenment.” — Rohan
“An ordinary Buddhist monk would never catch a fish or any other living creature. But Master Shrimp’s viewpoint was that it did not matter whether or not one caught fish. The net that catches and kills life can be thought of as the net of Buddha’s Law as well. Here, lovely whitefish are caught in the monk’s net and have opened their black eyes [opening one’s eyes implies enlightenment]. They are not outside the Law that saves all lives. Conveying such a meaning, the poem completes the portrait well.” — Abe Y.
One of the things that Robert Aitken in his book A Zen Wave, says about this haiku is:
“Law is not a very popular subject in poetry, but Basho uses it with its Buddhist implications of Dharma…” Aitken also points out that ” ‘the net of the law,’ . . . captures prawns, whitebait, and us all.”
So it does.
Larry, thank you for this Haiku on our theme of Poetry and the Law. You’ve pointed us to another aspect of “law” and broadened our subject. I enjoyed reading the background on it and the observations by you and others. While it has only one line, its meaning makes it much bigger. Look for our recap in a week or so to see what others brought for Poetry and the Law.