How to Walk Through a Poem

New Criticism. New Historicism. Political, biographical, psychoanalytical criticism. There are many ways, many apparatuses to help us as readers to illuminate the text of a poem. The following excerpt from Zen Seeds: Reflections of a Female Priest, by Shundo Aoyama Rōshi, concerns a walk in the Japanese alps. While it does not directly concern the reading of a poem, it can suggest by analogy a good means for walking through one, so to speak: not obsessing on some overriding meaning, but focusing on the sounds, the images, the pleasures along the way. Better yet: the passage affords us quite a bit of pleasure in itself, perhaps in the form of relief from the heat of August—which begins today.

Viewing the Changes of the Seasons as a Whole

It was summertime. I and about twenty of my former tea ceremony pupils from when I had lived in Tokyo gathered at a certain place in the Japanese Alps, in Nagano Prefecture. Carrying only the most necessary tea ceremony utensils, we hiked up to the plateau at the source of the Azusa River and enjoyed an outdoor tea ceremony there. After that we pushed on to Myojin Pond.

It was very refreshing to be walking in the mountains. Even as we hurried along the mountain path, we did not perspire. Our eyes drank in the sight of green that knew nothing of smog. The wind brought us the songs of many kinds of birds. We could see the Azusa River flowing behind the larch and birch trees, with the bright summer sunlight dancing on the crest of each ripple. The pebbles were clearly visible at the bottom of the river. Duckweed quivered in the current. Everything looked as though we could reach out and touch it. Within the shadow of the rocks grew trilliums and rock moss, wet from the river spray. The August sky was clear as far as one could see. White clouds floated by, softening the severe outline of the soaring mountain peaks.

I forgot about Myojin Pond and just enjoyed the scenery as it unfolded, calling out in my joy at the sight of the wild grasses and flowers. Suddenly someone in our group interrupted my reverie: “Aren’t we at Myojin Pond yet? It’s far, isn’t it? I’m already tired out.” Whenever we met a person coming back along the same path, she asked, “How much further is there to go?” It made me recall some lines from Hermann Hesse’s “The Secret Art of Travel”:

To the eyes only looking hurriedly to the goal,

The sweetness of roaming cannot be savored.

Forests and streams and all of the magnificent spectacles

waiting along the way

Remain closed off.

The secret of traveling lies in savoring the things along the way. If you are in a hurry to reach your goal, you miss seeing the forests and the streams and the momentary, unblemished twinkling of the stars. I savored Hesse’s poem anew and thought to myself that it was just the same with life. Enjoying each step of the way means making it a destination in itself. We should have thought of Myojin Pond only as a point on the compass. Our real goal was what lay immediately ahead. In life, we never know what is going to happen. Last year on this mountain peak, local high school students were in serious danger when they were caught in a thunderstorm. Sometimes people fall ill while climbing. If you have a goal like Myojin Pond and strain yourself to reach it, has your whole effort been wasted if you fall by the wayside? No. If we savor each step toward our destination as an experience never to be repeated, then we will have learned a way of walking in which any stopping place is good.

Excerpt from Shundo Aoyama Rōshi's Zen Seeds: Reflections of a Female Priest