Throw Yourself Like Seed

Vincent Van Gogh

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is 
abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own
field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

Miguel de Unamuno
Translated by Robert Bly

Only a certain amount of introspection and inward looking is beneficial. After a point it becomes as the poet says, “giving food to that final pain”, it becomes a trap, a “net”, a paralyzing agent. Here the poet calls us to move, to give, to shake off our sluggishness – to be fully alive is to openly embrace the work of living. “Throw yourself like a seed as you walk”, isn’t that the way they used to plant fields of grain? Imagine if walking though life you throw your energy and personality and imagination and love into the world around you, like the man in the painting scattering the seed onto the ground. The line, “Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself” gives me pause. What is that he’s saying? Does he mean give it all? Don’t be careful to hold something in reserve, because what you give multiplies and expands? What an amazing thought.

I Now Become Myself

David Gauld

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before—"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

That “now I become myself” is a declaration of intent. It’s as if the speaker has come to a point where she is no longer willing to run in fear, or rush in pursuit, or imitate anyone else. She has chosen to stand still, “rooted by love”. “My work, my love, my time, my face…growing like a plant”. “In this single hour I live all of myself and do not move…” How different a place this is from Derek Mahon’s “Heraclitus on Rivers” from back in April. That speaker was standing in the ever-changing river, this one is rooted in the earth. Rooted and growing. It reminds me of Ephesians 6:13 where life is described as a battle for which we put our armour on, piece by piece, “and having done all, to stand.” To be here, to stand still. And my favorite line, "So all the poem is, can give, grows in me to become the song." What is this song that grows in us? I suppose we will have to wait and see.