Today’s Poem: Morning Song of Senlin

On the poet’s birthday, Conrad Aiken’s little old Everyman wakes again

Ernst Ludvig Kirchner, Lützow-Ufer am Morgen, 1929 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Morning Song of Senlin 

by Conrad Aiken 

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!—
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.

There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea . . .
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me . . .

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember god?
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,
He is immense and lonely as a cloud.
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror
To him alone, for him I will comb my hair.
Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!
I will think of you as I descend the stair.

Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.

It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence,
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening,
I am the same, and the same name still I keep.
The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, and tie my tie. 

There are horses neighing on far-off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with rains . . .
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And surprise my soul once more;
The blue air rushes above my ceiling,
There are suns beneath my floor . . .

. . . It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where,
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know . . .

Vine-leaves tap at the window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

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You may remember the sad, brief life of the Elizabethan Chidiock Tichborne, whose “Elegy” appeared as Today’s Poem on February 13. You may also remember that in a 2013 New Yorker essay, “When Words That Shouldn’t Last Last,” the American poet Brad Leithauser had included Tichborne in that company of poets who had written “effectively” one poem. Tichborne, of course, not only effectively but literally wrote one poem, the night before his execution for high treason.  [Note: I am reliably informed that I have been wrong about Chidiock Tichborne. He did not write many poems, but did write one or two others, including this one, to a friend presumed to be his co-conspirator Anthony Babington.] Other, possibly luckier poets lived to write more poems, but to be remembered for only one. John McRae, for example, wrote poems other than “In Flanders Fields,” but in the cultural memory those red poppies obliterate them. 

Likewise, Conrad Aiken (1889–1973), whose birthday we mark today, wrote many poems over the course of a long career. His output encompassed twenty-eight books of poetry between 1914 and 1970, in addition to novels, collections of short stories, and critical studies. Throughout his writing life, though he received the Pulitzer prize in 1930 and a measure of critical acclaim, Aiken was never more than tepidly popular. He once remarked in a letter to Malcolm Cowley that “each new book is panned — but in the background is the implication that all the previous ones were good.” Though thoroughly a modernist, he was, apparently, never quite modern enough in his poetic postures and forms. These days, when Aiken is remembered, as he too often is not, it’s generally for one poem. If one Conrad Aiken poem is going to appear in an anthology, that poem will almost certainly be “Morning Song of Senlin.” 

Conrad Aiken in 1922 (Wikimedia Commons)

It is a memorable poem, a standout section in a longer cycle, “Senlin: A Biography,” which appears in the 1918 collection The Charnel Rose, Senlin’s name, Aiken wrote, means “literally the ‘little old man’ that each of us must become.” Aiken’s Senlin, who sprang into being before his creator turned thirty, might well have shaken hands with a near-exact contemporary, J. Alfred Prufrock, also a young man’s anxious existential creation. In earlier sections of the sequence,  Senlin goes “rustling among the odds and ends of knowledge” and cries out, “I am a house, locked and darkened.” 

Today’s Poem consists of meditative paragraph stanzas, with predominantly but not exclusively pentameter lines and alternating rhymes. A more  metrically regular abab quatrain refrain, its tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, punctuates these longer stanzas. The “song” wanders in its speculations, and one of these refrain stanzas, three tetrameter lines and one trimeter, veers all the way out into the enormity of the cosmos, to speak of “houses hanging above the stars.” But the song calls itself back to earth, repeatedly and finally, by invoking the immediate, concrete particulars of leaves, stones, and birdsong.

From line to line the striking images locate Senlin simultaneously within the safety of his house and, perilously, exposed on the surface of “a swiftly tilting planet” (a phrase later borrowed by the fantasy writer Madeleine L’Engle for the title of the third novel in her Time Quintet). Senlin’s morning, with its paradoxical sensations of intimacy and isolation, beauty and terror, is the twentieth century’s archetypal morning, whose singer believes that he ascends from darkness but does not know where the light will lead him. Still, he will go forth into the world of brightness and shadow, thinking of the “god among the stars” — they are not empty — and “humming a tune I know . . .” 

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