Two English-language and a Burmese-language poem about ‘time’ written 150 years apart

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Two English-language and a Burmese-language poem about ‘time’ written 150 years apart

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Two English-language and a Burmese-language poem about ‘time’ written 150 years apart

On the occasion, I am reminded of three poems written in the last 150 years about ‘Time’ and its inexorable march (so to speak) in human affairs and about the human condition. Two poems were written in English and one in Burmese. A reproduction of two English-language poems follows with commentaries. Between the two English poems and commentaries, a translation of a Burmese poem is provided with comments. A third poem is written in English by another Myanmar poet. It is reproduced with commentary.   In presenting and commenting on these three poems, a few juxtapositions by cross-referencing the themes of the three poems are made.

A Lament by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792-8 July 1822) was a renowned British poet. His biography and his ‘A Lament’ poem can be easily downloaded from the World Wide Web.

QUOTE
A Lament
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before
When will you return the glory of your prime?
No more- Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with
Delight
No more-Oh, never more!

UNQUOTE
There is a fair number of interpretations and comments on Shelley’s poem, which was composed, perhaps, in the year 1821. After Shelley’s death, his widow Mary Shelley (30 August 1797-1 February 1851) published The Lament posthumously in 1824.
The first stylistic usage that this writer notices is the use of the word O (without an immediate exclamation mark, albeit later it follows with O world! O Life! O Time!) at the beginning of the first stanza.
The end of the first and second stanzas ends with identical phrases No more-Oh, never more! (Note that it is Oh, not O!)
Online sources state that ‘O’ is for direct address for solemn expressions and ‘Oh’ is a ‘common expression’ of surprise, fear or realization’. Hence, in ‘A Lament’, Shelley used the expressions ‘O’ and ‘Oh’ appropriately, compellingly, and effectively. Commentators state that it was one of Shelley’s most ‘despairing’ poems. One commented that in The Lament, there was no ‘cyclical’ renewal like in other romantic poetry: the loss is permanent, joy has fled and will not return.
I would briefly comment on the second line of the first stanza of the poem ‘… On whose last steps I climb. The Lament was composed by Shelley, apparently, in the year 1821. Just about a year later, Shelley died by drowning in Italy. By writing ‘on whose last steps I climb’, did the poet have a premonition of his pending death within a year or so?
The poem is about loss and non-retrieval loss, for that matter. ‘Oh, no more, never more’ is repeated twice in this short poem. But this dilettante is minded to perhaps overinterpret(?) by postulating that it can have Theravada Buddhist connotations too. Emphatically, I do not mean that Shelley intended to incorporate Buddhist notions or parts of his poem that embodied or displayed Buddhist notions.
In the United Kingdom, the Pali Text Society, which translated the Theravada Buddhist texts from the Pali language, the lingua franca of Buddhist South-east Asia, into English,  was established in 1881, sixty years after Shelley composed The Lament poem.  Shelley could not have been aware of the Buddhist concept of life-cycles, viz. that sentient beings have to go through the loop of samsara (‘cycles of births and deaths’). The Buddhist summum bonum (‘the highest good’) is the non-return, not being reborn:  to adapt a phrase from  Shelley’s poem,  it connotes indeed it wishes for ‘no more future lives’.  Ostensibly, almost obviously, Shelley’s ‘no more!’ ‘Oh, never more!’ is, as the title of the poem indicates, a lament and a longing for ‘a joy [that] has taken flight’ and the frustrated query:  ‘when will return the glory of your prime?’.
On the contrary, a Buddhist concept of ‘no more, never more’ would be not to experience again (in future lives) the human condition, indeed the samsaric human predicament of the round-and-round of future births. No more samsaric round of births! In one sense or in one philosophical slant, Shelley’s poem can perhaps be stated as ‘non-Buddhistic’. Shelley wrote ‘Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with Delight’. That phrase indicates Shelley’s attachments to worldly things, and he implicitly, indeed almost explicitly wished to return, to be ‘forever more’ (not ‘no more’) so that ‘the glory of your prime’ will return and ‘the joy will not take flight’. That, one submits, does not conform with and may be contrary to the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment and a Buddhist aspiration for non-becoming.
The poem can also be seen from the perspective of the movement, so to speak, of the phenomenon or phenomena of Time. The lament of Shelley on the non-reversibility of time can also be seen in a shorter poem in Burmese simply titled ‘Time’ by Burmese poet Tin Moe.

‘Time’ by Tin Moe
Tin Moe (19 November 1933-22 January 2007) was a Burmese poet. During his lifetime, he composed well over a thousand poems in Burmese. He composed his last poem on the night of 21 January 2007 in his daughter Moe Cho Thin’s house in Baldwin Park, near  Los Angeles, in the United States. Around 20 hours after he composed his last poem, he passed away at a tea shop near one of his daughters’ houses on 22 January 2007. He has been in exile mainly in Belgium and the United States since 1999.  I am not aware of any other translation of Tin Moe’s ‘Time’ poem.

QUOTE
Time
By Tin Moe
Translated by Myint Zan
though one tries to hide away
from it
it arrives in one’s hiding place
taking my energy and strength
to whither?

Composed on 12 March 1966
Translated on 12 March 2026, sixty years to the day after Tin Moe composed the poem.

UNQUOTE
The poem,  first published in 1966, is not quite  ‘A  Lament’ which Shelley searingly and passionately composed about 145 years earlier in the year 1821. It does have a twinge of a lament, though that perhaps is not an overarching theme. It does indicate or reflect the movement, the inexorable march of time, as indicated in the opening paragraph. The poet tries to hide from the sweep of time, which inevitably arrives in one’s hiding place, sapping one’s energy and strength.  The poem relays the message that one cannot hide from the ageing process.   Tin Moe was 32 years old when he composed his ‘Time’ poem. Shelley was twenty-nine when he wrote The Lament. While Shelley lamented about the non-return of ‘the glory of your prime’ which moved ‘his faint heart with grief but with Delight’, Tin Moe pondered whether his ‘energy and strength’ has gone.  Have they gradually, slowly ‘wither away’? That leads to the next poem written in English by another Burmese poet, which, in part, deals with the movement of time.

‘Grass on the Hill’ poem by Myat  Lin
The late Burmese poet Kenneth Ba Sein, who died around October 1980, was from 1966 to 1976 the ‘Sunday Supplement’ Editor of the now defunct English language daily The Guardian (Rangoon). The Sunday Supplement published poems, occasionally short stories and articles. Many Sundays saw the English poems composed by Kenneth Ba Sein in his real name and sometimes under the pseudonym  Myat Lin. The following poem appeared in the December 1974 issue of the now also defunct  Guardian magazine (separate publication from that of the newspaper).

QUOTE
Grass On The Hill
by Myat Lin

While time stood still
in doubts and fears
grass grew on the hill
dripping silent tears

When time moved once again
the hill landslided
the grass crinkled with pain
browned and dried:

That seared patch was once a green spot
now with brown mimosa overgrown
moans O winds, I’m touch-me-not
tell passers-by to leave me alone.

UNQUOTE
I searched the World Wide Web to see if the poem is reproduced there. I could not find it.

Myat Lin was perhaps in his early to mid-fifties when he composed the poem. It was published eight years after Tin Moe’s poem and about 150 years after the first publication of Shelley’s The Lament.  Perhaps it has more connotations with Tin Moe’s ‘Time’ poem than Shelley’s. All three poems used the word ‘Time’, but Myat  Lin’s poem, like that of Shelley,  has despair as its theme. Shelley’s poem is more passionate than Myat Lin’s. Myat Lin ends his poem with a plea, ‘tell passers-by to leave me alone’. Shelley ends his poem with a lament and negative affirmation, ‘No more-Oh, never more!’ Both Tin Moe’s and Myat Lin’s poems lament the movement of time: ‘When time moved once again’, wrote Myat Lin; Tin Moe wrote that his strength and energy (as a result of his being unable to hide from ‘Time’) have gone.  Though tinged with just a touch of sadness, maybe regret, Tin Moe’s poem leans somewhat towards the whimsical. In contrast, the use of the words ‘doubts’, ‘fears’, ‘tears’ and emotional as well as physical ‘pain’, at least metaphorically, makes Myat Lin’s poem a searing one (slightly paraphrasing the phrase ‘seared patch’ in Myat Lin’s poem). The ‘seared patch’ as well as ‘brown mimosa overgrown’ are used both as similes (ravages of time as ‘seared patch’ and overgrown ‘brown mimosa’) as well as metaphors. The great American poet  Robert Frost (26 March 1874-29 January 1963) stated that ‘Poetry begins with delight and ends in wisdom’. Both confirming and moving away (somewhat) from the Frostian wisdom (so to speak), yours truly would state that all three poems, in their own ways and with varying degrees and permutations, display wisdom, albeit not necessarily only ‘in the end’. They may also display poetic  ‘delight’ (‘Delight’ as used by Shelley in his poem), but that delight might also be tinged with, indeed suffused by, an existential sorrow.

gnlm