NOTABLE AUTHORS OF ASIA

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CONTENTS

I. RABINDRANATH TAGORE

1a. Biography, 21b. The Hungry Stones, 31c. An Analysis: the Hungry Stones, 101d. Baby’s Way, 111e. Poetry Analysis: Baby’s Way, 121f. Where the Mind is Without Fear, 131g. Poetry Analysis: Where the Mind is Without Fear, 14

II. NICOMEDES JOAQUIN

2a. Biography, 162b. Song between Wars, 192c. An Analysis: Song Between Wars, 202d. Six P.M., 212e. Poetry Analysis: Six P.M., 222f. The Summer Solstice, 232g. An Analysis: The Summer Solstice, 35

III. PAZ MARQUEZ-BENITEZ

3a. Biography, 373b. Dead Stars, 383c. An Analysis: Dead Stars, 523d . A Night in the Hills, 53

IV. RUDYARD KIPLING

4a. Biography, 624b. The White Man’s Burden, 634c. Poetry Analysis: The White Man’s Burden,654d. If, 664e. Poetry Analysis: If, 674f. Female of the Species, 704g. Poetry Analysis: Female of the Species, 72

V. KHALIL GIBRAN

5a. Biography, 745b. Love One Another, 755c. Poetry Analysis: Love One Another, 765d. On Children, 785e. Poetry Analysis: On Children, 795f. Khalil Gibran on Love, 80

VI. JOSE GARCIA VILLA

6a. Biography, 826b. The Emperor’s New Sonnet, 84

6c. An Analysis; The Emperor’s New Sonnet, 856d. Lyric 17, 866e. Poetry Analysis: Lyric 17, 876f. Footnote to Youth, 896g. An Analysis: A Footnote to Youth, 92

VII. ANTONIO M. ABAD

7a. Biography, 95

VIII. NORBERTO ROMUALDEZ

8a. Biography, 968b. All Over the World, 978c. An Analysis: All Over the World, 103

IX. GEMINO ABAD

9a. Biography, 1059b. Care of Light, 1079c. A Question of Fidelity, 1099d. How Our Towns Drown9e. Day and Night from Father and Daughter, 1996

X. JOSE CLAUDIO GUERRERO

10a. Biography, 12110b. Essence, 122

XI. LI PO

11a. Biography, 12611b. Drinking Alone, 12811c. Poetry Analysis: Drinking Alone, 12911d. A Vindication, 13211e. Poetry Analysis: A Vindication, 13311f. Autumn River Song, 134 11g. Poetry Analysis: Autumn River Song

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XII. BASHO

12a. Biography, 13712b. A Banana plant in the Autumn Gale, 13912c. Poetry Analysis: Banana Plant in the Autumn Gale, 14012d. Come Let’s Go, 14112e. Poetry Analysis: Come Let’s Go, 14212f. Year’s End, 14312g. Poetry Analysis: Year’s End, 144

XIII. CARLOS ANGELES

13a. Biography, 14613b. Landscape II, 14713c. Poetry Analysis: Landscape II, 14813d. Gabu, 14913e. Poetry Analysis: Gabu, 15013f. The Summer Tree, 15113g. Poetry Analysis: The Summer Tree, 152

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Rabindranath Tagore1861-1941

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Rabindranath Tagore

He was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a

project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India. Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India's spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One], Sonar Tari (1894) [The Golden Boat], Gitanjali (1910) [Song Offerings], Gitimalya (1914) [Wreath of Songs], andBalaka (1916) [The Flight of Cranes]. The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali; and in spite of its title, Gitanjali: Song Offerings(1912), the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. Tagore's major plays are Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber], Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office], Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable], Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall], andRaktakaravi (1926) [Red Oleanders]. He is the author of several volumes of short stories and a number of novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents]. Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.

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The Hungry Stonesby Rabindranath Tagore

MY kinsman and myself were returning to Calcutta from our Puja trip when we met the man in a train. From his dress and bearing we took him at first for an up-country Mahomedan, but we were puzzled as we heard him talk. He discoursed upon all subjects so confidently that you might think the Disposer of All Things consulted him at all times in all that He did. Hitherto we had been perfectly happy, as we did not know that secret and unheard-of forces were at work, that the Russians had advanced close to us, that the English had deep and secret policies, that confusion among the native chiefs had come to a head. But our newly-acquired friend said with a sly smile: "There happen more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are reported in your newspapers." As we had never stirred out of our homes before, the demeanour of the man struck us dumb with wonder. Be the topic ever so trivial, he would quote science, or comment on the Vedas, or repeat quatrains from some Persian poet; and as we had no pretence to a knowledge of science or the Vedas or Persian, our admiration for him went on increasing, and my kinsman, a theosophist, was firmly convinced that our fellow-passenger must have been supernaturally inspired by some strange "magnetism" or "occult power," by an "astral body" or something of that kind. He listened to the tritest saying that fell from the lips of our extraordinary companion with devotional rapture, and secretly took down notes of his conversation. I fancy that the extraordinary man saw this, and was a little pleased with it. When the train reached the junction, we assembled in the waiting-room for the connection. It was then 10 P. M., and as the train, we heard, was likely to be very late, owing to something wrong in the lines, I spread my bed on the table and was about to lie down for a comfortable doze, when the extraordinary person deliberately set about spinning the following yarn. Of course, I could get no sleep that night.

When, owing to a disagreement about some questions of administrative policy, I threw up my post at Junagarh, and entered the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, they appointed me at once, as a strong young man, collector of cotton duties at Barich. Barich is a lovely place. The Susta "chatters over stony ways and babbles on the pebbles," tripping, like a skilful dancing girl, in through the woods below the lonely hills. A flight of 150 steps rises from the river, and above that flight, on the river's brim and at the foot of the hills, there stands a solitary marble palace. Around it there is no habitation of man--the village and the cotton mart of Barich being far off. About 250 years ago the Emperor Mahmud Shah II. had built this lonely palace for his pleasure and luxury. In his days jets of rose-water spurted from its fountains, and on the cold marble floors of its spray-cooled rooms young Persian damsels would sit, their hair dishevelled before bathing, and, splashing their soft naked feet in the clear water of the reservoirs, would sing, to the tune of the guitar, the ghazals of their vineyards. The fountains play no longer; the songs have ceased; no longer do snow-white feet step gracefully on the snowy marble. It is but the vast and solitary quarters of cess-collectors like us, men oppressed with solitude and deprived of the society of women. Now, Karim Khan, the old clerk of my office, warned me repeatedly not to take up my abode there. "Pass the day there, if you like," said he, "but never stay the night." I passed it off with a light laugh. The servants said that they would work till dark, and go away at night. I gave my ready assent. The house had such a bad name that even thieves would not venture near it after dark.

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At first the solitude of the deserted palace weighed upon me like a nightmare. I would stay out, and work hard as long as possible, then return home at night jaded and tired, go to bed and fall asleep. Before a week had passed, the place began to exert a weird fascination upon me. It is difficult to describe or to induce people to believe; but I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice. Perhaps the process had begun as soon as I set my foot in the house, but I distinctly remember the day on which I first was conscious of it. It was the beginning of summer, and the market being dull I had no work to do. A little before sunset I was sitting in an arm-chair near the water's edge below the steps. The Susta had shrunk and sunk low; a broad patch of sand on the other side glowed with the hues of evening; on this side the pebbles at the bottom of the clear shallow waters were glistening. There was not a breath of wind anywhere, and the still air was laden with an oppressive scent from the spicy shrubs growing on the hills close by. As the sun sank behind the hill-tops a long dark curtain fell upon the stage of day, and the intervening hills cut short the time in which light and shade mingle at sunset. I thought of going out for a ride, and was about to get up when I heard a foot-fall on the steps behind. I looked back, but there was no one. As I sat down again, thinking it to be an illusion, I heard many footfalls, as if a large number of persons were rushing down the steps. A strange thrill of delight, slightly tinged with fear, passed through my frame, and though there was not a figure before my eyes, methought I saw a bevy of joyous maidens coming down the steps to bathe in the Susta in that summer evening. Not a sound was in the valley, in the river, or in the palace, to break the silence, but I distinctly heard the maidens' gay and mirthful laugh, like the gurgle of a spring gushing forth in a hundred cascades, as they ran past me, in quick playful pursuit of each other, towards the river, without noticing me at all. As they were invisible to me, so I was, as it were, invisible to them. The river was perfectly calm, but I felt that its still, shallow, and clear waters were stirred suddenly by the splash of many an arm jingling with bracelets, that the girls laughed and dashed and spattered water at one another, that the feet of the fair swimmers tossed the tiny waves up in showers of pearl. I felt a thrill at my heart--I cannot say whether the excitement was due to fear or delight or curiosity. I had a strong desire to see them more clearly, but naught was visible before me; I thought I could catch all that they said if I only strained my ears; but however hard I strained them, I heard nothing but the chirping of the cicadas in the woods. It seemed as if a dark curtain of 250 years was hanging before me, and I would fain lift a corner of it tremblingly and peer through, though the assembly on the other side was completely enveloped in darkness. The oppressive closeness of the evening was broken by a sudden gust of wind, and the still surface of the Susta rippled and curled like the hair of a nymph, and from the woods wrapt in the evening gloom there came forth a simultaneous murmur, as though they were awakening from a black dream. Call it reality or dream, the momentary glimpse of that invisible mirage reflected from a far-off world, 250 years old, vanished in a flash. The mystic forms that brushed past me with their quick unbodied steps, and loud, voiceless laughter, and threw themselves into the river, did not go back wringing their dripping robes as they went. Like fragrance wafted away by the wind they were dispersed by a single breath of the spring. Then I was filled with a lively fear that it was the Muse that had taken advantage of my solitude and possessed me--the witch had evidently come to ruin a poor devil like myself making a living by collecting cotton duties. I decided to have a good dinner--it is the empty

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stomach that all sorts of incurable diseases find an easy prey. I sent for my cook and gave orders for a rich, sumptuous dinner, redolent of spices and ghi. Next morning the whole affair appeared a queer fantasy. With a light heart I put on a sola hat like the sahebs, and drove out to my work. I was to have written my quarterly report that day, and expected to return late; but before it was dark I was strangely drawn to my house--by what I could not say--I felt they were all waiting, and that I should delay no longer. Leaving my report unfinished I rose, put on my sola hat, and startling the dark, shady, desolate path with the rattle of my carriage, I reached the vast silent palace standing on the gloomy skirts of the hills. On the first floor the stairs led to a very spacious hall, its roof stretching wide over ornamental arches resting on three rows of massive pillars, and groaning day and night under the weight of its own intense solitude. The day had just closed, and the lamps had not yet been lighted. As I pushed the door open a great bustle seemed to follow within, as if a throng of people had broken up in confusion, and rushed out through the doors and windows and corridors and verandas and rooms, to make its hurried escape. As I saw no one I stood bewildered, my hair on end in a kind of ecstatic delight, and a faint scent of attar and unguents almost effaced by age lingered in my nostrils. Standing in the darkness of that vast desolate hall between the rows of those ancient pillars, I could hear the gurgle of fountains plashing on the marble floor, a strange tune on the guitar, the jingle of ornaments and the tinkle of anklets, the clang of bells tolling the hours, the distant note of nahabat, the din of the crystal pendants of chandeliers shaken by the breeze, the song of bulbuls from the cages in the corridors, the cackle of storks in the gardens, all creating round me a strange unearthly music. Then I came under such a spell that this intangible, inaccessible, unearthly vision appeared to be the only reality in the world--and all else a mere dream. That I, that is to say, Srijut So-and-so, the eldest son of So-and-so of blessed memory, should be drawing a monthly salary of Rs. 450 by the discharge of my duties as collector of cotton duties, and driving in my dog-cart to my office every day in a short coat and sola hat, appeared to me to be such an astonishingly ludicrous illusion that I burst into a horse-laugh, as I stood in the gloom of that vast silent hall. At that moment my servant entered with a lighted kerosene lamp in his hand. I do not know whether he thought me mad, but it came back to me at once that I was in very deed Srijut So-and-so, son of So-and-so of blessed memory, and that, while our poets, great and small, alone could say whether inside or outside the earth there was a region where unseen fountains perpetually played and fairy guitars, struck by invisible fingers, sent forth an eternal harmony, this at any rate was certain, that I collected duties at the cotton market at Barich, and earned thereby Rs. 450 per mensem as my salary. I laughed in great glee at my curious illusion, as I sat over the newspaper at my camp-table, lighted by the kerosene lamp. After I had finished my paper and eaten my moghlai dinner, I put out the lamp, and lay down on my bed in a small side-room. Through the open window a radiant star, high above the Avalli hills skirted by the darkness of their woods, was gazing intently from millions and millions of miles away in the sky at Mr. Collector lying on a humble camp-bedstead. I wondered and felt amused at the idea, and do not know when I fell asleep or how long I slept; but I suddenly awoke with a start, though I heard no sound and saw no intruder--only the steady bright star on the hilltop had set, and the dim light of the new moon was stealthily entering the room through the open window, as if ashamed of its lntrusion. I saw nobody, but felt as if some one was gently pushing me. As I awoke she said not a word, but beckoned me with her five fingers bedecked with rings to follow her cautiously. I got up noiselessly, and, though not a soul save myself was there in the countless apartments of

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that deserted palace with its slumbering sounds and waking echoes, I feared at every step lest any one should wake up. Most of the rooms of the palace were always kept closed, and I had never entered them. I followed breathless and with silent steps my invisible guide--I cannot now say where. What endless dark and narrow passages, what long corridors, what silent and solemn audience-chambers and close secret cells I crossed! Though I could not see my fair guide, her form was not invisible to my mind's eye,--an Arab girl, her arms, hard and smooth as marble, visible through her loose sleeves, a thin veil falling on her face from the fringe of her cap, and a curved dagger at her waist! Methought that one of the thousand and one Arabian Nights had been wafted to me from the world of romance, and that at the dead of night I was wending my way through the dark narrow alleys of slumbering Bagdad to a trysting-place fraught with peril. At last my fair guide stopped abruptly before a deep blue screen, and seemed to point to something below. There was nothing there, but a sudden dread froze the blood in my heart--methought I saw there on the floor at the foot of the screen a terrible negro eunuch dressed in rich brocade, sitting and dozing with outstretched legs, with a naked sword on his lap. My fair guide lightly tripped over his legs and held up a fringe of the screen. I could catch a glimpse of a part of the room spread with a Persian carpet--some one was sitting inside on a bed--I could not see her, but only caught a glimpse of two exquisite feet in gold-embroidered slippers, hanging out from loose saffron-coloured paijamas and placed idly on the orange-coloured velvet carpet. On one side there was a bluish crystal tray on which a few apples, pears, oranges, and bunches of grapes in plenty, two small cups and a gold-tinted decanter were evidently awaiting the guest. A fragrant intoxicating vapour, issuing from a strange sort of incense that burned within, almost overpowered my senses.As with trembling heart I made an attempt to step across the outstretched legs of the eunuch, he woke up suddenly with a start, and the sword fell from his lap with a sharp clang on the marble floor. A terrific scream made me jump, and I saw I was sitting on that camp-bedstead of mine sweating heavily; and the crescent moon looked pale in the morning light like a weary sleepless patient at dawn; and our crazy Meher Ali was crying out, as is his daily custom, "Stand back! Stand back!!" while he went along the lonely road. Such was the abrupt close of one of my Arabian Nights; but there were yet a thousand nights left.Then followed a great discord between my days and nights. During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity. After nightfall I was caught and overwhelmed in the snare of a strange intoxication. I would then be transformed into some unknown personage of a bygone age, playing my part in unwritten history; and my short English coat and tight breeches did not suit me in the least. With a red velvet cap on my head, loose paijamas, an embroidered vest, a long flowing silk gown, and coloured handkerchiefs scented with attar, I would complete my elaborate toilet, sit on a high-cushioned chair, and replace my cigarette with a many-coiled narghileh filled with rose-water, as if in eager expectation of a strange meeting with the beloved one.I have no power to describe the marvellous incidents that unfolded themselves, as the gloom of the night deepened. I felt as if in the curious apartments of that vast edifice the fragments of a beautiful story, which I could follow for some distance, but of which I could never see the end, flew about in a sudden gust of the vernal breeze. And all the same I would wander from room to room in pursuit of them the whole night long.Amid the eddy of these dream-fragments, amid the smell of henna and the twanging of the guitar, amid the waves of air charged with fragrant spray, I would catch like a flash of lightning

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the momentary glimpse of a fair damsel. She it was who had saffron-coloured paijamas, white ruddy soft feet in gold-embroidered slippers with curved toes, a close-fitting bodice wrought with gold, a red cap, from which a golden frill fell on her snowy brow and cheeks. She had maddened me. In pursuit of her I wandered from room to room, from path to path among the bewildering maze of alleys in the enchanted dreamland of the nether world of sleep.Sometimes in the evening, while arraying myself carefully as a prince of the blood-royal before a large mirror, with a candle burning on either side, I would see a sudden reflection of the Persian beauty by the side of my own. A swift turn of her neck, a quick eager glance of intense passion and pain glowing in her large dark eyes, just a suspicion of speech on her dainty red lips, her figure, fair and slim, crowned with youth like a blossoming creeper, quickly uplifted in her graceful tilting gait, a dazzling flash of pain and craving and esctasy, a smile and a glance and a blaze of jewels and silk, and she melted away. A wild gust of wind, laden with all the fragrance of hills and woods, would put out my light, and I would fling aside my dress and lie down on my bed, my eyes closed and my body thrilling with delight, and there around me in the breeze, amid all the perfume of the woods and hills, floated through the silent gloom many a caress and many a kiss and many a tender touch of hands, and gentle murmurs in my ears, and fragrant breaths on my brow; or a sweetly-perfumed kerchief was wafted again and again on my cheeks. Then slowly a mysterious serpent would twist her stupefying coils about me; and heaving a heavy sigh, I would lapse into insensibility, and then into a profound slumber. One evening I decided to go out on my horse--I do not know who implored me to stay--but I would listen to no entreaties that day. My English hat and coat were resting on a rack, and I was about to take them down when a sudden whirlwind, crested with the sands of the Susta and the dead leaves of the Avalli hills, caught them up, and whirled them round and round, while a loud peal of merry laughter rose higher and higher, striking all the chords of mirth till it died away in the land of sunset. I could not go out for my ride, and the next day I gave up my queer English coat and hat for good. That day again at dead of night I heard the stifled heart-breaking sobs of someone--as if below the bed, below the floor, below the stony foundation of that gigantic palace, from the depths of a dark damp grave, a voice piteously cried and implored me: "Oh, rescue me! Break through these doors of hard illusion, deathlike slumber and fruitless dreams, place me by your side on the saddle, press me to your heart, and, riding through hills and woods and across the river, take me to the warm radiance of your sunny rooms above!" Who am I? Oh, how can I rescue thee? What drowning beauty, what incarnate passion shall I drag to the shore from this wild eddy of dreams? O lovely ethereal apparition! Where didst thou flourish and when? By what cool spring, under the shade of what date-groves, wast thou born--in the lap of what homeless wanderer in the desert? What Bedouin snatched thee from thy mother's arms, an opening bud plucked from a wild creeper, placed thee on a horse swift as lightning, crossed the burning sands, and took thee to the slave-market of what royal city? And there, what officer of the Badshah, seeing the glory of thy bashful blossoming youth, paid for thee in gold, placed thee in a golden palanquin, and offered thee as a present for the seraglio of his master? And O, the history of that place! The music of the sareng, [ A sort of violin.] the jingle of anklets, the occasional flash of daggers and the glowing wine of Shiraz poison, and the piercing flashing glance! What infinite grandeur, what endless servitude! The slave-girls to thy right and left waved the chamar, [chamar: chowrie, yak-tail.] as diamonds flashed from their bracelets; the Badshah, the king of kings, fell on his knees at thy snowy feet in bejewelled shoes, and outside the terrible Abyssinian eunuch, looking like a messenger of death, but clothed like an angel, stood with a naked sword in his hand! Then, O, thou flower of the

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desert, swept away by the blood-stained dazzling ocean of grandeur, with its foam of jealousy, its rocks and shoals of intrigue, on what shore of cruel death wast thou cast, or in what other land more splendid and more cruel? Suddenly at this moment that crazy Meher Ali screamed out: "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!" I opened my eyes and saw that it was already light. My chaprasi came and handed me my letters, and the cook waited with a salam for my orders.

I said: "No, I can stay here no longer." That very day I packed up, and moved to my office. Old Karim Khan smiled a little as he saw me. I felt nettled, but said nothing, and fell to my

work. As evening approached I grew absent-minded; I felt as if I had an appointment to keep; and the work of examining the cotton accounts seemed wholly useless; even the Nizamat [Royalty] of the Nizam did not appear to be of much worth. Whatever belonged to the present, whatever was moving and acting and working for bread seemed trivial, meaningless, and contemptible. I threw my pen down, closed my ledgers, got into my dog-cart, and drove away. I noticed that it stopped of itself at the gate of the marble palace just at the hour of twilight. With quick steps I climbed the stairs, and entered the room. A heavy silence was reigning within. The dark rooms were looking sullen as if they had taken offence. My heart was full of contrition, but there was no one to whom I could lay it bare, or of whom I could ask forgiveness. I wandered about the dark rooms with a vacant mind. I wished I had a guitar to which I could sing to the unknown: "O fire, the poor moth that made a vain effort to fly away has come back to thee! Forgive it but this once, burn its wings and consume it in thy flame!"Suddenly two tear-drops fell from overhead on my brow. Dark masses of clouds overcast the top of the Avalli hills that day. The gloomy the sooty waters of the Susta were waiting in terrible suspense and in an ominous calm. Suddenly land, water, and sky shivered, and a wild tempest-blast rushed howling through the distant pathless woods, showing its lightning-teeth like a raving maniac who had broken his chains. The desolate halls of the palace banged their doors, and moaned in the bitterness of anguish. The servants were all in the office, and there was no one to light the lamps. The night was cloudy and moonless. In the dense gloom within I could distinctly feel that a woman was lying on her face on the carpet below the bed--clasping and tearing her long dishevelled hair with desperate fingers. Blood was trickling down her fair brow, and she was now laughing a hard, harsh, mirthless laugh, now bursting into violent wringing sobs, now rending her bodice and striking at her bare bosom, as the wind roared in through the open window, and the rain poured in torrents and soaked her through and through.All night there was no cessation of the storm or of the passionate cry. I wandered from room to room in the dark, with unavailing sorrow. Whom could I console when no one was by? Whose was this intense agony of sorrow? Whence arose this inconsolable grief? And the mad man cried out: "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!"I saw that the day had dawned, and Meher Ali was going round and round the palace with his usual cry in that dreadful weather. Suddenly it came to me that perhaps he also had once lived in that house, and that, though he had gone mad, he came there every day, and went round and round, fascinated by the weird spell cast by the marble demon.Despite the storm and rain I ran to him and asked: "Ho, Meher Ali, what is false?" The man answered nothing, but pushing me aside went round and round with his frantic cry, like a bird flying fascinated about the jaws of a snake, and made a desperate effort to warn himself by repeating: "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!"

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I ran like a mad man through the pelting rain to my office, and asked Karim Khan: "Tell me the meaning of all this!" What I gathered from that old man was this: That at one time countless unrequited passions and unsatisfied longings and lurid flames of wild blazing pleasure raged within that palace, and that the curse of all the heart-aches and blasted hopes had made its every stone thirsty and hungry, eager to swallow up like a famished ogress any living man who might chance to approach. Not one of those who lived there for three consecutive nights could escape these cruel jaws, save Meher Ali, who had escaped at the cost of his reason.I asked: "Is there no means whatever of my release?" The old man said: "There is only one means, and that is very difficult. I will tell you what it is, but first you must hear the history of a young Persian girl who once lived in that pleasure-dome. A stranger or a more bitterly heart-rending tragedy was never enacted on this earth."

Just at this moment the coolies announced that the train was coming. So soon? We hurriedly packed up our luggage, as the train steamed in. An English gentleman, apparently just aroused from slumber, was looking out of a first-class carriage endeavouring to read the name of the station. As soon as he caught sight of our fellow-passenger, he cried, "Hallo," and took him into his own compartment. As we got into a second-class carriage, we had no chance of finding out who the man was nor what was the end of his story.I said: "The man evidently took us for fools and imposed upon us out of fun. The story is pure fabrication from start to finish." The discussion that followed ended in a lifelong rupture between my theosophist kinsman and me.

Analysis: The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore

The Hungry Stone is a romantic tale impressing us by bold invention and appealing to that taste for the supernatural. Spectral and mysterious as the atmosphere of the story is, it is

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made to look credible. Tagore affects this with the help of lovely strokes of the brush. Realistic descriptions of nature, little human touches here and there, and interposition of day and night – all these produce an effect of probability on the mind and make us feel the hard earth beneath our feet. Tagore has succeeded in effecting an organic blend between the natural and the supernatural and rousing us up to the sublimity and intangibility of an ethereal terror that enchants rather than repels.

The Hungry Stone truly defines romanticism as ‘strangeness added to beauty’. Here is effusion of beauty. It is sensuous, impassioned and associated with mysterious supernatural powers.

Baby’s Wayby Rudyard Kipling

If baby only wanted to, he could fly up to heaven this moment.It is not for nothing that he does not leave us.

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He loves to rest his head on mother's bosom, and cannot everbear to lose sight of her.Baby know all manner of wise words, though few on earth canunderstand their meaning.It is not for nothing that he never wants to speak.The one thing he wants is to learn mother's words frommother's lips. That is why he looks so innocent.Baby had a heap of gold and pearls, yet he came like a beggaron to this earth.It is not for nothing he came in such a disguise.This dear little naked mendicant pretends to be utterlyhelpless, so that he may beg for mother's wealth of love.Baby was so free from every tie in the land of the tinycrescent moon.It was not for nothing he gave up his freedom.He knows that there is room for endless joy in mother's littlecorner of a heart, and it is sweeter far than liberty to be caughtand pressed in her dear arms.Baby never knew how to cry. He dwelt in the land of perfectbliss.It is not for nothing he has chosen to shed tears.Though with the smile of his dear face he draws mother'syearning heart to him, yet his little cries over tiny troublesweave the double bond of pity and love.

Poetry Analysis: Baby’s Way by Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore wants his readers to see the world from the eyes of a baby. If baby only wanted to, he could fly up to heaven this moment. It is not for nothing that he does

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not leave us. He loves to rest his head on mother's bosom, and cannot ever bear to lose sight of her. His attachment to his mother shows a strong bond between the two. It is only the mother who can shape, mould and bring up the character within the child. The baby knows all manner of wise words, though few on earth can understand their meaning. It is not for nothing that he never wants to speak. It all depends upon his innocent mood. The one thing he wants is to learn mother's words from mother's lips. That is why he looks so innocent. The baby had a heap of gold and pearls up in heaven, yet he came like a beggar on to this earth. It is not for nothing he came in such a disguise. This dear little naked mendicant; given to begging: of or denoting a religious order originally dependent on alms: a beggar; pretends to be utterly helpless, so that he may beg for mother's wealth of love. For the baby there is no wealth like the presence of his mother. The baby was so free from every tie in the land of the tiny crescent moon; the curved sickle shape of the waxing or waning moon: a thing which has the shape of a single curve, especially when broad in the centre and tapering to a point at each end: a street or terrace of houses forming an arc: having the shape of a crescent: growing, increasing, or developing.

Where the Mind is Without Fearby Rudyard Kipling

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

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Where knowledge is freeWhere the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic wallsWhere words come out from the depth of truthWhere tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfectionWhere the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habitWhere the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and actionInto that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Poetry Analysis: Where the Mind is Without Fear Analysis

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Included in the volume called Naibedya, the original poem bears the title ' Prarthana' i.e. prayer. The poem is a prayer to a universal father-figure, presumably, God.

The poet wishes to be awakened to a heaven where the mind can work fearlessly and the spirit can hold its head high, where one can acquire knowledge in all freedom of choice, where the big world of man is not fragmented or restricted to small mutually exclusive compartments, where everybody speaks his/her heart clear, where actions flow in the form of various streams moving from success to success, where petty conventions do not stagnate the course of judgement, where manhood is not pieced, where God himself leads us in all acts, all thoughts, and all sources of delight. We need a strong motivating slap by God to be elevated to that heaven.

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Nicomedes Joaquin1917-2004

Nicomedes “Nick” Joaquin

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Philippine novelist, poet, playwright, biographer, and essayist writing in English, the National Artist for Literature. Joaquin wrote largely about the Spanish colonial period and the diverse heritage of the Filipino people. Often he dealt with the coexistence of 'primitive' and 'civilized' dimensions inside the human psyche. After World War II Joaquin worked as a journalist, gaining fame as a reporter for the Free Press. His most acclaimed play is A Portrait of the Artist As Filipino (1952).

"But there was one house in this street that never became a slum; that resisted the jungle, and resisted it to the very end; fighting stubbornly to keep itself intact, to keep itself individual. It finally took a global war to destroy that house and the three people who fought for it. Though they were destroyed, they were never conquered. They died with their house, and they died with their city-and maybe it’s just as well they did.They could have never survived the destruction of the old Manila..."

Nick Joaquin was born in Paco on Calle Herran, the son of Leocadio Y. Joaquin, a lawyer and a colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a schoolteacher. After three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School, Joaquin dropped out of school to work on Manila’s waterfront and in odd jobs. On his spare time he read widely at the National Library and on his father's library; he died when Joaquin was 13. Joaquin's brother Porfirio (Ping) Joaquin was a jazz pianist and for a period he worked in the same vaudeville as a stage hand.

Joaquin started to write short stories, poems, and essays in 1934. His first poem, a piece about Don Quixote, appeared in 1935 theTribune, where he was employed as a proofreader. The story 'Three Generations', published in the Herald Midweek Magazine in 1940, marked the beginning of a new era for Filipino writing in English. After the Spanish-American war in 1898, English had became the official medium of instruction in the country and virtually all Spanish literature ceased. Since the 1970s, Tagalog strengthened its position as the national literary language alongside English. Together with such writers as Stevan Javellana, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Celso Carunungan, and Kerima Polotan Tuvera, Joaquin influenced the development of the Philippine novel and short story.

Joaquin's essay on the defeat of a Dutch fleet by the Spaniards off the Philippines in 1646 earned him in 1947 a scholarship to study in Hong Kong at the Albert College, founded by the Dominicans. After less than two years, he left the seminary, finding it impossible for him to adjust to rigid rules. In a poem he wrote: "But I am Balthassar, cracked with years and learning, / lost in a world where all gods have died: always and everywhere, I must see a gibbet burning." ('Six P.M.,' Collected Verse, 1987) Joaquin never abandoned the Catholic faith of his parents, and whenever it was possible for him he received the Holy Communion.

Starting as a proofreader at the Philippines Free Press, Joaquin eventually rose to contributing editor and essayist under the pen name 'Quijano de Manila' (Manila Old Timer). As a member of a group of Filipino journalists, he traveled in China in 1966 and met Henry Pu-yi, the last Chinese emperor, who worked as a gardener in the Forbidden Palace. Joaquin's travels to many countries around the world helped him to deepen his insight of his own country. In the essay 'A Heritage in Smallness' he said: "With the population welling, and land values rising, there should be in our cities, an upward thrust in architecture, but we continue to build small, in our timid two-story fashion. Oh, we have excuses. The land is soft: earthquakes are frequent. But Mexico City, for instance, is on far swampier land and Mexico City is not a two-story town. San Francisco and Tokyo are in worse earthquake belts, but San Francisco and Tokyo reach up for the skies. Isn't our architecture another expression of our smallness spirit?"

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Studies for priesthood explain part the Christian setting of Joaquin's stories and constant attention to the spiritual life of his characters. His writing also build a bridge from modern world view to primitive beliefs. When the young Guido in the short story 'The Summer Solstice' (Tropical Gothic, 1972) returns from Europe to his home, he tells Doña Lupeng: "Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there – to see the holiness and the mystery of what is vulgar." Set in the 1850s, this work portrayed the collision between instincts and refined culture. Doña Lupeng first rejects ancient beliefs, but under the spell of the moon, she becomes possessed by the spirit of the Tadtarin cult – she does not want to be loved and respected anymore but adored as the embodiment of the matriarchal powers. 'The Summer Solstice' was later made into a play and filmed in 2001 under the title of Tatarin by Tikoy Aguiluz.

Prose and Poems (1952) was followed by the Barangay Theatre Guild's production of his play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, set on the eve of the Pacific war. The title refers to James Joyce's famous book, not without ironic tone. A Portrait, originally published in Weekly Women's Magazine and first staged in 1955, is considered the most important Filipino play in English. Joaquin focused on a family conflict, in which traditional cultural models are reconciled with individual values. The descendants of Don Lorenzo refuse to sell the masterpiece and a national treasure, 'Retrato del Artista Como Filipino', which he has painted for them. Eventually the daughters Paula and Candida destroy the painting, as an act of liberation. "Yes – we have been born again – not of his flesh but of is spirit," says Candida. Joaquin's source of inspiration was the Guerrero family, which he once described as "a mixture, a very uneasy blend, of religious conservatism and intellectual radicalism." The prize-novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) examined the pressures of the past upon the present. Monson, the ex-revolutionary, hides in Hong Kong, afraid to face the trials of postwar independence. Again Joaquin dealt with the tensions between illusion and reality. The novel won the first Harry Stonehill Award, an yearly grant. Joaquin wrote the work while in the United States and Mexico.

During the reign of Ferdinand Marcos, who had won presidency in 1965, corruption started to fuel opposition to his administration. Joaquin's writings never brought him into conflict with the regime, but when martial law was declared in 1972 Joaquin was subsequently suspended. At a ceremony on Mount Makiling, attended by Imelda Marcos, he spoke of freedom and the artist. He served also as a member of the Philippine Board of Censors for Motion Pictures, passing with his friend Jose A. Quirino all the films they saw. In 1970 Joaquin went on to edit Asia-Philippine Leader. He then became the editor of the Philippine Graphic Magazine and publisher of the Women’s Weekly.

Joaquin's The Aquinos of Tarlac (1983) was a biography of the assassinated presidential candidate Benigno Aquino, who led the opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and was shot dead in the airport when he returned from exile. Three years after his death his widow Corazon Aquino became President of the Philippines. Cave and Shadows (1983) occurs in the period of martial law under Marcos.

For his work Joaquin received several awards. He was widely considered the best postwar author in his country. His essay 'La Naval de Manila' (1943) won in a contest sponsored by the Dominicans; 'Guardia de Honor' was declared the best story of the year in 1949, he received in 1963 the Araw ng Maynila Award, and in 1966 he was conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature, Journalism, and Creative Communication. Joaquin was declared a National Artist in 1976; he was the most anthologized of all Philippine authors. Joaquín died of cardiac arrest on April 29, 2004, in San Juan. He was a family friend of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her biographer. Know for his love of San Miguel beer, Joaquin enjoyed spending time with his friends in the Ermita bar, Cafe Indios Bravos, the National Press Club, or in some other watering hole. He never married. His personal

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library, 3,000 books and his trusty Underwood typewriter, Joaquin donated to the University of Santo Tomas.

Song between Warsby Nick Joaquin

Wombed in the wounds of wargrow golden boys and girls

whose green hearts are

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peacocks perched upon apesand pigs that feed on pearls

or sour grapes.But we are old–we are only

a point, a pausein the earth’s decay–we are

lonelybut no day dies

in the eyes we dare not closelest we flock with flies.

Bankrupt by war,let us mine the honey

that’s ored in udders that arethis lad, that lass,

because they are molten moneyand their bones are cash.Imperial their coin still is

when other currencies areimperilled; when peace

is for every man and womana labyrinth; and war

the bull that’s human.War is the Minotaur

and we are the watersbearing for him to devourthe young, the beautiful–our sons and daughters:

the tax we pay to the Bull.The maze we made they shall

travel,its winding ways unwindand the riddle unravel

till they come to the end ofthe thread:

the labyrinth behindand the Beast ahead.

An Analysis: Song between Wars by Nick Joaquin

In this poem, Nick Joaquin speaks of the costs of war; it is not just the generation that was during the war, but the generation that follows. Joaquin himself has witnessed all of the wars during the 20th century, up until the second Iraq War, and so he has seen the costs of war.

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The generation that comes after the war bears the burden of rebuilding what has been lost, because the generation that began and fought during the war is already too old to do so; hence, Joaquin compares that process to (in paraphrase) mining the next generation (“because they are molten money and their bones are cash”). He then compares the process of war itself to that of the Greek myth of the labyrinth of Minos; the generation that began and fought the war are the waters that wash the next generation onto the shores of Minos, and into the labyrinth; war is the Minotaur that will devour those brought by the waves (the older generation). In the end, he concludes by saying that the older generations create the maze (war), but it is the generations that follow that will have to go through it, but there is no salvation at the end of the maze; only the Beast (another name for the devil), a symbol of how the younger generations will suffer because of the mistakes of the past generations.

Six P.M. by Nick Joaquin 

Trouser at night, grammarian in the morning, ruefully architecting syllables— but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls. I take a place in the bus among people returning 

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to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions burning and women reaping the wash lines as the Angelus tolls. 

But I—where am I bound? My garden, my four walls and you project strange shores upon my yearning: Atlantis? The Caribbeans? Or Cathay? Conductor, do I get off at Sinai? Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow towards the undiscovered world that I roam warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow: conquistador tonight, clock puncher tomorrow.

Six P.M. Analysis

This poem tells us about how the author feels about love. For him, (according to the poem), when it comes to love, all of us are equal. People use his works to get ideas about love, but sometimes, the author himself also gets ideas about love from other people.

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The Summer Solstice by Nick Joaquin

The Moreta’s were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather, whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the three boys already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking all at once.

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“How long you have slept, Mama!”

“We thought you were never getting up!”

“Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”

“Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have I. So be quiet this instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”

Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the immense, intense fever of noon. She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is it you who are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became wild screaming in the stables across the yard. “Oh my God!” she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.

In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the pair of piebald ponies to the coach.

“Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doña Lupeng as she came up.

“But the dust, señora—“

“I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife, eh? Have you been beating her again?”

“Oh no, señora: I have not touched her.”

“Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?”

“I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señora. She is up there.”

When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was shocked.

“What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such a posture! Come, get up at once. You should be ashamed!”

But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted, as if in an effort to understand. Then her face relax her mouth sagged open humorously and, rolling over on her back and spreading out her big soft arms and legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter—the mute mirth jerking in her throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth.

Doña Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly, and seeing that Entoy had followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again. The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes from the laughing woman on the bed, in whose

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nakedness she seemed so to participate that she was ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.

“Tell me, Entoy: has she had been to the Tadtarin?”

“Yes, señora. Last night.”

“But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”

“I could do nothing.”

“Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”

“But now I dare not touch her.”

“Oh, and why not?”

“It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”

“But, man—“

“It is true, señora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do as she pleases. Otherwise, the grain would not grow, the trees would bear no fruit, the rivers would give no fish, and the animals would die.”

“Naku, I did not know your wife was so powerful, Entoy.”

“At such times she is not my wife: she is the wife of the river, she is the wife of the crocodile, she is the wife of the moon.”

“BUT HOW CAN they still believe such things?” demanded Doña Lupeng of her husband as they drove in the open carriage through the pastoral countryside that was the arrabal of Paco in the 1850’s.

Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he intimated that the subject was not a proper one for the children, who were sitting opposite, facing their parents.

Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his moustaches, his eyes closed against the hot light, merely shrugged.

“And you should have seen that Entoy,” continued his wife. “You know how the brute treats her: she cannot say a word but he thrashes her. But this morning he stood as meek as a lamb while she screamed and screamed. He seemed actually in awe of her, do you know—actually afraid of her!”

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“Oh, look, boys—here comes the St. John!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she sprang up in the swaying carriage, propping one hand on her husband’s shoulder wile the other she held up her silk parasol.

And “Here come the men with their St. John!” cried voices up and down the countryside. People in wet clothes dripping with well-water, ditch-water and river-water came running across the hot woods and fields and meadows, brandishing cans of water, wetting each other uproariously, and shouting San Juan! San Juan! as they ran to meet the procession.

Up the road, stirring a cloud of dust, and gaily bedrenched by the crowds gathered along the wayside, a concourse of young men clad only in soggy trousers were carrying aloft an image of the Precursor. Their teeth flashed white in their laughing faces and their hot bodies glowed crimson as they pranced past, shrouded in fiery dust, singing and shouting and waving their arms: the St. John riding swiftly above the sea of dark heads and glittering in the noon sun—a fine, blonde, heroic St. John: very male, very arrogant: the Lord of summer indeed; the Lord of Light and Heat—erect and godly virile above the prone and female earth—while the worshippers danced and the dust thickened and the animals reared and roared and the merciless fires came raining down form the skies—the relentlessly upon field and river and town and winding road, and upon the joyous throng of young men against whose uproar a couple of seminarians in muddy cassocks vainly intoned the hymn of the noon god:

That we, thy servants, in chorus May praise thee, our tongues restore us…

But Doña Lupeng, standing in the stopped carriage, looking very young and elegant in her white frock, under the twirling parasol, stared down on the passing male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent man-smell of their bodies rose all about her—wave upon wave of it—enveloping her, assaulting her senses, till she felt faint with it and pressed a handkerchief to her nose. And as she glanced at her husband and saw with what a smug smile he was watching the revelers, her annoyance deepened. When he bade her sit down because all eyes were turned on her, she pretended not to hear; stood up even straighter, as if to defy those rude creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun.

And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so cocky about? For this arrogance, this pride, this bluff male health of theirs was (she told herself) founded on the impregnable virtue of generations of good women. The boobies were so sure of themselves because they had always been sure of their wives. “All the sisters being virtuous, all the brothers are brave,” thought Doña Lupeng, with a bitterness that rather surprised her. Women had built it up: this poise of the male. Ah, and women could destroy it, too! She recalled, vindictively, this morning’s scene at the stables: Amada naked and screaming in bed whiled from the doorway her lord and master looked on in meek silence. And was it not the mystery of a woman in her flowers that had restored the tongue of that old Hebrew prophet?

“Look, Lupeng, they have all passed now,” Don Paeng was saying, “Do you mean to stand all the way?”

She looked around in surprise and hastily sat down. The children tittered, and the carriage started.

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“Has the heat gone to your head, woman?” asked Don Paeng, smiling. The children burst frankly into laughter.

Their mother colored and hung her head. She was beginning to feel ashamed of the thoughts that had filled her mind. They seemed improper—almost obscene—and the discovery of such depths of wickedness in herself appalled her. She moved closer to her husband to share the parasol with him.

“And did you see our young cousin Guido?” he asked.

“Oh, was he in that crowd?”

“A European education does not seem to have spoiled his taste for country pleasures.”

“I did not see him.”

“He waved and waved.”

“The poor boy. He will feel hurt. But truly, Paeng. I did not see him.”

“Well, that is always a woman’s privilege.”

But when that afternoon, at the grandfather’s, the young Guido presented himself, properly attired and brushed and scented, Doña Lupeng was so charming and gracious with him that he was enchanted and gazed after her all afternoon with enamored eyes.

This was the time when our young men were all going to Europe and bringing back with them, not the Age of Victoria, but the Age of Byron. The young Guido knew nothing of Darwin and evolution; he knew everything about Napoleon and the Revolution. When Doña Lupeng expressed surprise at his presence that morning in the St. John’s crowd, he laughed in her face.

“But I adore these old fiestas of ours! They are so romantic! Last night, do you know, we walked all the way through the woods, I and some boys, to see the procession of the Tadtarin.”

“And was that romantic too?” asked Doña Lupeng.

“It was weird. It made my flesh crawl. All those women in such a mystic frenzy! And she who was the Tadtarin last night—she was a figure right out of a flamenco!”

“I fear to disenchant you, Guido—but that woman happens to be our cook.”

“She is beautiful.”

“Our Amada beautiful? But she is old and fat!”

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“She is beautiful—as that old tree you are leaning on is beautiful,” calmly insisted the young man, mocking her with his eyes.

They were out in the buzzing orchard, among the ripe mangoes; Doña Lupeng seated on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her, and the young man sprawled flat on his belly, gazing up at her, his face moist with sweat. The children were chasing dragonflies. The sun stood still in the west. The long day refused to end. From the house came the sudden roaring laughter of the men playing cards.

“Beautiful! Romantic! Adorable! Are those the only words you learned in Europe?” cried Doña Lupeng, feeling very annoyed with this young man whose eyes adored her one moment and mocked her the next.

“Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there—to see the holiness and the mystery of what is vulgar.”

“And what is so holy and mysterious about—about the Tadtarin, for instance?”

“I do not know. I can only feel it. And it frightens me. Those rituals come to us from the earliest dawn of the world. And the dominant figure is not the male but the female.”

“But they are in honor of St. John.”

“What has your St. John to do with them? Those women worship a more ancient lord. Why, do you know that no man may join those rites unless he first puts on some article of women’s apparel and—“

“And what did you put on, Guido?”

“How sharp you are! Oh, I made such love to a toothless old hag there that she pulled off her stocking for me. And I pulled it on, over my arm, like a glove. How your husband would have despised me!”

“But what on earth does it mean?”

“I think it is to remind us men that once upon a time you women were supreme and we men were the slaves.”

“But surely there have always been kings?”

“Oh, no. The queen came before the king, and the priestess before the priest, and the moon before the sun.”

“The moon?”

“—who is the Lord of the women.”

“Why?”

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“Because the tides of women, like the tides of the sea, are tides of the moon. Because the first blood -But what is the matter, Lupe? Oh, have I offended you?”

“Is this how they talk to decent women in Europe?”

“They do not talk to women, they pray to them—as men did in the dawn of the world.”

“Oh, you are mad! mad!”

“Why are you so afraid, Lupe?”

“I afraid? And of whom? My dear boy, you still have your mother’s milk in your mouth. I only wish you to remember that I am a married woman.”

“I remember that you are a woman, yes. A beautiful woman. And why not? Did you turn into some dreadful monster when you married? Did you stop being a woman? Did you stop being beautiful? Then why should my eyes not tell you what you are—just because you are married?”

“Ah, this is too much now!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she rose to her feet.

“Do not go, I implore you! Have pity on me!”

“No more of your comedy, Guido! And besides—where have those children gone to! I must go after them.”

As she lifted her skirts to walk away, the young man, propping up his elbows, dragged himself forward on the ground and solemnly kissed the tips of her shoes. She stared down in sudden horror, transfixed—and he felt her violent shudder. She backed away slowly, still staring; then turned and fled toward the house.

ON THE WAY home that evening Don Paeng noticed that his wife was in a mood. They were alone in the carriage: the children were staying overnight at their grandfather’s. The heat had not subsided. It was heat without gradations: that knew no twilights and no dawns; that was still there, after the sun had set; that would be there already, before the sun had risen.

“Has young Guido been annoying you?” asked Don Paeng.

“Yes! All afternoon.”

“These young men today—what a disgrace they are! I felt embarrassed as a man to see him following you about with those eyes of a whipped dog.”

She glanced at him coldly. “And was that all you felt, Paeng? embarrassed—as a man?”

“A good husband has constant confidence in the good sense of his wife,” he pronounced grandly, and smiled at her.

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But she drew away; huddled herself in the other corner. “He kissed my feet,” she told him disdainfully, her eyes on his face.

He frowned and made a gesture of distaste. “Do you see? They have the instincts, the style of the canalla! To kiss a woman’s feet, to follow her like a dog, to adore her like a slave –”

“Is it so shameful for a man to adore women?”

“A gentleman loves and respects Woman. The cads and lunatics—they ‘adore’ the women.”

“But maybe we do not want to be loved and respected—but to be adored.”

But when they reached home she did not lie down but wandered listlessly through the empty house. When Don Paeng, having bathed and changed, came down from the bedroom, he found her in the dark parlour seated at the harp and plucking out a tune, still in her white frock and shoes.

“How can you bear those hot clothes, Lupeng? And why the darkness? Order someone to bring light in here.”

“There is no one, they have all gone to see the Tadtarin.”

“A pack of loafers we are feeding!”

She had risen and gone to the window. He approached and stood behind her, grasped her elbows and, stooping, kissed the nape of her neck. But she stood still, not responding, and he released her sulkily. She turned around to face him.

“Listen, Paeng. I want to see it, too. The Tadtarin, I mean. I have not seen it since I was a little girl. And tonight is the last night.”

“You must be crazy! Only low people go there. And I thought you had a headache?” He was still sulking.

“But I want to go! My head aches worse in the house. For a favor, Paeng.”

“I told you: No! go and take those clothes off. But, woman, whatever has got into you!” he strode off to the table, opened the box of cigars, took one, banged the lid shut, bit off an end of the cigar, and glared about for a light.

She was still standing by the window and her chin was up.

“Very well, if you do want to come, do not come—but I am going.”

“I warn you, Lupe; do not provoke me!”

“I will go with Amada. Entoy can take us. You cannot forbid me, Paeng. There is nothing wrong with it. I am not a child.”

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But standing very straight in her white frock, her eyes shining in the dark and her chin thrust up, she looked so young, so fragile, that his heart was touched. He sighed, smiled ruefully, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, the heat ahs touched you in the head, Lupeng. And since you are so set on it—very well, let us go. Come, have the coach ordered!”

The cult of the Tadtarin is celebrated on three days: the feast of St. John and the two preceding days. On the first night, a young girl heads the procession; on the second, a mature woman; and on the third, a very old woman who dies and comes to life again. In these processions, as in those of Pakil and Obando, everyone dances.

Around the tiny plaza in front of the barrio chapel, quite a stream of carriages was flowing leisurely. The Moretas were constantly being hailed from the other vehicles. The plaza itself and the sidewalks were filled with chattering, strolling, profusely sweating people. More people were crowded on the balconies and windows of the houses. The moon had not yet risen; the black night smoldered; in the windless sky the lightning’s abruptly branching fire seemed the nerves of the tortured air made visible.

“Here they come now!” cried the people on the balconies.

And “Here come the women with their St. John!” cried the people on the sidewalks, surging forth on the street. The carriages halted and their occupants descended. The plaza rang with the shouts of people and the neighing of horses—and with another keener sound: a sound as of sea-waves steadily rolling nearer. The crowd parted, and up the street came the prancing, screaming, writhing women, their eyes wild, black shawls flying around their shoulders, and their long hair streaming and covered with leaves and flowers. But the Tadtarin, a small old woman with white hair, walked with calm dignity in the midst of the female tumult, a wand in one hand, a bunch of seedling in the other. Behind her, a group of girls bore aloft a little black image of the Baptist—a crude, primitive, grotesque image, its big-eyed head too big for its puny naked torso, bobbing and swaying above the hysterical female horde and looking at once so comical and so pathetic that Don Paeng, watching with his wife on the sidewalk, was outraged. The image seemed to be crying for help, to be struggling to escape—a St. John indeed in the hands of the Herodias; a doomed captive these witches were subjecting first to their derision; a gross and brutal caricature of his sex.

Don Paeng flushed hotly: he felt that all those women had personally insulted him. He turned to his wife, to take her away—but she was watching greedily, taut and breathless, her head thrust forward and her eyes bulging, the teeth bared in the slack mouth, and the sweat gleaning on her face. Don Paeng was horrified. He grasped her arm—but just then a flash of lightning blazed and the screaming women fell silent: the Tadtarin was about to die.

The old woman closed her eyes and bowed her head and sank slowly to her knees. A pallet was brought and set on the ground and she was laid in it and her face covered with a shroud. Her hands still clutched the wand and the seedlings. The women drew away, leaving her in a

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cleared space. They covered their heads with their black shawls and began wailing softly, unhumanly—a hushed, animal keening.

Overhead the sky was brightening, silver light defined the rooftops. When the moon rose and flooded with hot brilliance the moveless crowded square, the black-shawled women stopped wailing and a girl approached and unshrouded the Tadtarin, who opened her eyes and sat up, her face lifted to the moonlight. She rose to her feet and extended the wand and the seedlings and the women joined in a mighty shout. They pulled off and waved their shawls and whirled and began dancing again—laughing and dancing with such joyous exciting abandon that the people in the square and on the sidewalk, and even those on the balconies, were soon laughing and dancing, too. Girls broke away from their parents and wives from their husbands to join in the orgy.

“Come, let us go now,” said Don Paeng to his wife. She was shaking with fascination; tears trembled on her lashes; but she nodded meekly and allowed herself to be led away. But suddenly she pulled free from his grasp, darted off, and ran into the crowd of dancing women.

She flung her hands to her hair and whirled and her hair came undone. Then, planting her arms akimbo, she began to trip a nimble measure, an indistinctive folk-movement. She tossed her head back and her arched throat bloomed whitely. Her eyes brimmed with moonlight, and her mouth with laughter.

Don Paeng ran after her, shouting her name, but she laughed and shook her head and darted deeper into the dense maze of procession, which was moving again, towards the chapel. He followed her, shouting; she eluded him, laughing—and through the thick of the female horde they lost and found and lost each other again—she, dancing and he pursuing—till, carried along by the tide, they were both swallowed up into the hot, packed, turbulent darkness of the chapel. Inside poured the entire procession, and Don Paeng, finding himself trapped tight among milling female bodies, struggled with sudden panic to fight his way out. Angry voices rose all about him in the stifling darkness.

“Hoy you are crushing my feet!”

“And let go of my shawl, my shawl!”

“Stop pushing, shameless one, or I kick you!”

“Let me pass, let me pass, you harlots!” cried Don Paeng.

“Abah, it is a man!”

“How dare he come in here?”

“Break his head!”

“Throw the animal out!”

”Throw him out! Throw him out!” shrieked the voices, and Don Paeng found himself surrounded by a swarm of gleaming eyes.

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Terror possessed him and he struck out savagely with both fists, with all his strength—but they closed in as savagely: solid walls of flesh that crushed upon him and pinned his arms helpless, while unseen hands struck and struck his face, and ravaged his hair and clothes, and clawed at his flesh, as—kicked and buffeted, his eyes blind and his torn mouth salty with blood—he was pushed down, down to his knees, and half-shoved, half-dragged to the doorway and rolled out to the street. He picked himself up at once and walked away with a dignity that forbade the crowd gathered outside to laugh or to pity. Entoy came running to meet him.

“But what has happened to you, Don Paeng?”

“Nothing. Where is the coach?”

“Just over there, sir. But you are wounded in the face!”

“No, these are only scratches. Go and get the señora. We are going home.”

When she entered the coach and saw his bruised face and torn clothing, she smiled coolly.

“What a sight you are, man! What have you done with yourself?”

And when he did not answer: “Why, have they pulled out his tongue too?” she wondered aloud.

AND WHEN THEY are home and stood facing each other in the bedroom, she was still as light-hearted.

“What are you going to do, Rafael?”

“I am going to give you a whipping.”

“But why?”

“Because you have behaved tonight like a lewd woman.”

“How I behaved tonight is what I am. If you call that lewd, then I was always a lewd woman and a whipping will not change me—though you whipped me till I died.”

“I want this madness to die in you.”

“No, you want me to pay for your bruises.”

He flushed darkly. “How can you say that, Lupe?”

“Because it is true. You have been whipped by the women and now you think to avenge yourself by whipping me.”

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His shoulders sagged and his face dulled. “If you can think that of me –”

“You could think me a lewd woman!”

“Oh, how do I know what to think of you? I was sure I knew you as I knew myself. But now you are as distant and strange to me as a female Turk in Africa.”

“Yet you would dare whip me –”

“Because I love you, because I respect you.”

“And because if you ceased to respect me you would cease to respect yourself?”

“Ah, I did not say that!”

“Then why not say it? It is true. And you want to say it, you want to say it!”

But he struggled against her power. “Why should I want to?” he demanded peevishly.

“Because, either you must say it—or you must whip me,” she taunted.

Her eyes were upon him and the shameful fear that had unmanned him in the dark chapel possessed him again. His legs had turned to water; it was a monstrous agony to remain standing.

But she was waiting for him to speak, forcing him to speak.

“No, I cannot whip you!” he confessed miserably.

“Then say it! Say it!” she cried, pounding her clenched fists together. “Why suffer and suffer? And in the end you would only submit.”

But he still struggled stubbornly. “Is it not enough that you have me helpless? Is it not enough that I feel what you want me feel?”

But she shook her head furiously. “Until you have said to me, there can be no peace between us.”

He was exhausted at last; he sank heavily to his knees, breathing hard and streaming with sweat, his fine body curiously diminished now in its ravaged apparel.

“I adore you, Lupe,” he said tonelessly.

She strained forward avidly, “What? What did you say?” she screamed.

And he, in his dead voice: “That I adore you. That I adore you. That I worship you. That the air you breathe and the ground you tread is so holy to me. That I am your dog, your slave...”

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But it was still not enough. Her fists were still clenched, and she cried: “Then come, crawl on the floor, and kiss my feet!”

Without moment’s hesitation, he sprawled down flat and, working his arms and legs, gaspingly clawed his way across the floor, like a great agonized lizard, the woman steadily backing away as he approached, her eyes watching him avidly, her nostrils dilating, till behind her loomed the open window, the huge glittering moon, the rapid flashes of lightning. she stopped, panting, and leaned against the sill. He lay exhausted at her feet, his face flat on the floor.

She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot. He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and grasped the white foot and kiss it savagely - kissed the step, the sole, the frail ankle - while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the whole windowsill her body and her loose hair streaming out the window - streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat burned with the immense intense fever of noon.

An Analysis: Summer Solstice Analysis

"Summer Solstice" is a short story that has received recognition both critical and praising. Written by Nick Joaquin, the story takes place in 1850s Philippines during the festival days of St. John. There is a pro-woman feel to the story, which has garnered a lot of debate and attention considering the setting is in a time where women must be submissive. In this

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analysis, learn about the setting, the themes and symbolism that this short and interesting story incarnates.

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Paz Marquez- Benitez1894- 1983

Paz Marquez- Benitez

Paz Marquez- Benitez (1894- 1983) was born in 1894 in Lucena City, Quezon, Marquez - Benítez authored the first Filipino modern English-language short story, Dead Stars, published in the Philippine Herald in 1925. Born into the prominent Marquez family of Quezon province, she was among the first generation of Filipinos trained in the American education system which used English as the medium of instruction. She graduated

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high school in Tayabas High School (now, Quezon National High School) and college from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1912. She was a member of the first freshman class of the University of the Philippines, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1912. Two years after graduation, she married UP College of Education Dean Francisco Benítez, with whom she had four children. Márquez-Benítez later became a teacher at the University of the Philippines, who taught short-story writing and had become an influential figure to many Filipino writers in the English language, such as Loreto Paras-Sulit, Paz M. Latorena, Arturo Belleza Rotor, Bienvenido N. Santos and Francisco Arcellana. The annually held Paz Marquez-Benitez Lectures in the Philippines honors her memory by focusing on the contribution of Filipino women writers to Philippine Literature in the English language. Though she only had one more published short story after “Dead Stars” entitled "A Night In The Hills", she made her mark in Philippine literature because her work is considered the first modern Philippine short story. For Marquez-Benitez, writing was a life-long occupation. In 1919 she founded "Woman's Home Journal", the first women's magazine in the country. Also in the same year, she and other six women who were prominent members of Manila's social elites, namely Clara Aragon, Concepcion Aragon, Francisca Tirona Benitez, Carolina Ocampo Palma, Mercedes Rivera, and Socorro Marquez Zaballero, founded the Philippine Women's College (now Philippine Women's University). "Filipino Love Stories", reportedly the first anthology of Philippine stories in English by Filipinos, was compiled in 1928 by Marquez-Benitez from the works of her students. When her husband died in 1951, she took over as editor of the Philippine Journal of Education at UP. She held the editorial post for over two decades.In 1995, her daughter, Virginia Benitez-Licuanan wrote her biography, "Paz Marquez-Benitez: One Woman's Life, Letters, and Writings."

Dead Starsby Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

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"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."

Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."

"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.

"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"

"In love? With whom?"

"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"

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Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.

He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--

One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.

A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.

He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.

To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."

"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

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"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"

He laughed with her.

"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help."

"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"

"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."

Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.

He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.

On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.

Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."

He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."

She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.

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That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.

It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"

"No; youth--its spirit--"

"Are you so old?"

"And heart's desire."

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?

"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."

"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.

"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"

"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."

"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."

"I could study you all my life and still not find it."

"So long?"

"I should like to."

Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.

Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.

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After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.

Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.

When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.

"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.

"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."

There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.

"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."

"The last? Why?"

"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."

He noted an evasive quality in the answer.

"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"

"If you are, you never look it."

"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."

"But--"

"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.

"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.

She waited.

"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely

"Who? I?"

"Oh, no!"

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"You said I am calm and placid."

"That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.

"I should like to see your home town."

"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes."

That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him.

"Nothing? There is you."

"Oh, me? But I am here."

"I will not go, of course, until you are there."

"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"

"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."

She laughed.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."

"Could I find that?"

"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"I'll inquire about--"

"What?"

"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."

"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."

"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"

"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.

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"Exactly."

"It must be ugly."

"Always?"

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned gold.

"No, of course you are right."

"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.

"I am going home."

The end of an impossible dream!

"When?" after a long silence.

"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home."

She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."

"Can't I come to say good-bye?"

"Oh, you don't need to!"

"No, but I want to."

"There is no time."

The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.

"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."

"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."

"Old things?"

"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.

Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."

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II

ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento,now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.

Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.

The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.

The line moved on.

Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.

Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.

The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.

At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.

A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.

Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into step with the girl.

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"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled.

"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."

"Oh, is the Judge going?"

"Yes."

The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.

"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."

Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.

"For what?"

"For your approaching wedding."

Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?

"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she continued.

He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.

"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly

"When they are of friends, yes."

"Would you come if I asked you?"

"When is it going to be?"

"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.

"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.

"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"

"Why not?"

"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"

"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.

"Then I ask you."

"Then I will be there."

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The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.

"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?"

"No!"

"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation."

"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.

"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"

"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."

"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."

"Doesn't it--interest you?"

"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."

Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.

Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.

He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control.

She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.

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"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad."

What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?

"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.

"But do you approve?"

"Of what?"

"What she did."

"No," indifferently.

"Well?"

He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily wicked."

"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."

"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."

"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.

"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.

"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?

"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say." Her voice trembled.

Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?

"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--"

49

"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."

Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?

"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a plea?

"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.

The last word had been said.

III

AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.

He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.

Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.

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The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidentewas there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.

"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"

"What abogado?" someone irately asked.

That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.

It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house."

Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So thepresidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."

San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.

Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.

How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelasmaking scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.

How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.

A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.

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Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.

"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.

"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"

"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.

"Won't you come up?"

He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.

She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.

Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.

The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.

So that was all over.

An Analysis: Dead Stars

Dead Stars is one of the best Philippine short stories that has already tested time and generations. It has endured decades of changing ideals and trends, but the fact still remains that it’s one of those stories that everyone can still relate to, from teenagers who are just beginning to be interested in the opposite sex, to those people who have already loved and lost it.

52

A Night in the Hills

HOW Gerardo Luna came by his dream no one could have told, not even he. He was a salesman in a jewelry store on Rosario street and had been little else. His job he had inherited from his father, one might say; for his father before him had leaned behind the self-same counter, also solicitous, also short-sighted and thin of hair.

After office hours, if he was tired, he took the street car to his home in Intramuros. If he was feeling well, he walked; not frequent¬ly, however, for he was frail of constitution and not

53

unduly thrifty. The stairs of his house were narrow and dark and rank with charac¬teristic odors from a Chinese sari-sari store which occupied part of the ground floor.

He would sit down to a supper which savored strongly of Chinese cooking. He was a fastidious eater. He liked to have the courses spread out where he could survey them all. He would sample each and daintily pick out his favorite portions—the wing tips, the liver, the brains from the chicken course, the tail-end from the fish. He ate appreciatively, but rarely with much appetite. After supper he spent quite a time picking his teeth meditatively, thinking of this and that. On the verge of dozing he would perhaps think of the forest.

For his dream concerned the forest. He wanted to go to the forest. He had wanted to go ever since he could remember. The forest was beautiful. Straight-growing trees. Clear streams. A mountain brook which he might follow back to its source up among the clouds. Perhaps the thought that most charmed and enslaved him was of seeing the image of the forest in the water. He would see the infinitely far blue of the sky in the clear stream, as in his childhood, when playing in his father’s azotea, he saw in the water-jars an image of the sky and of the pomelo tree that bent over the railing, also to look at the sky in the jars.

Only once did he speak of this dream of his. One day, Ambo the gatherer of orchids came up from the provinces to buy some cheap ear-rings for his wife’s store. He had proudly told Gerardo that the orchid season had been good and had netted him over a thousand pesos. Then he talked to him of orchids and where they were to be found and also of the trees that he knew as he knew the palm of his hand. He spoke of sleeping in the forest, of living there for weeks at a time. Gerardo had listened with his prominent eyes staring and with thrills coursing through his spare body. At home he told his wife about the conversation, and she was interested in the business aspect of it.

“It would be nice to go with him once,” he ventured hopefully.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but I doubt if he would let you in on his business.”

“No,” he sounded apologetically. “But just to have the experience, to be out.”

“Out?” doubtfully.

“To be out of doors, in the hills,” he said precipitately.

“Why? That would be just courting discomfort and even sickness. And for nothing.”

He was silent.

He never mentioned the dream again. It was a sensitive, well-mannered dream which nevertheless grew in its quiet way. It lived under Gerardo Luna’s pigeon chest and filled it with something, not warm or sweet, but cool and green and murmurous with waters.

He was under forty. One of these days when he least expected it the dream would come true. How, he did not know. It seemed so unlikely that he would deliberately contrive things so as to make the dream a fact. That would he very difficult.

Then his wife died.

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And now, at last, he was to see the forest. For Ambo had come once more, this time with tales of newly opened public land up on a forest plateau where he had been gathering orchids. If Gerardo was interested—he seemed to be—they would go out and locate a good piece. Gerardo was interested—not exactly in land, but Ambo need not be told.

He had big false teeth that did not quite fit into his gums. When he was excited, as he was now, he spluttered and stammered and his teeth got in the way of his words.

“I am leaving town tomorrow morning.” he informed Sotera. “Will—”

“Leaving town? Where are you going?”

“S-someone is inviting me to look at some land in Laguna.”

“Land? What are you going to do with land?”

That question had never occurred to him.

“Why,” he stammered, “Ra-raise something, I-I suppose.”

“How can you raise anything! You don’t know anything about it. You haven’t even seen a carabao!”

“Don’t exaggerate, Ate. You know that is not true.”

“Hitched to a carreton, yes; but hitched to a plow—”

“Never mind!” said Gerardo patiently. “I just want to leave you my keys tomorrow and ask you to look after the house.”

“Who is this man you are going with?”

“Ambo, who came to the store to buy some cheap jewelry. His wife has a little business in jewels. He suggested that I—g-go with him.”

He found himself then putting the thing as matter-of-factly and plausibly as he could. He emphasized the immense possibilities of land and waxed eloquently over the idea that land was the only form of wealth that could not he carried away.

“Why, whatever happens, your land will be there. Nothing can possibly take it away. You may lose one crop, two, three. Que importe! The land will still he there.”

Sotera said coldly, “I do not see any sense in it. How can you think of land when a pawnshop is so much more profitable? Think! People coming to you to urge you to accept their business. There’s Peregrina. She would make the right partner for you, the right wife. Why don’t you decide?”

“If I marry her, I’ll keep a pawnshop—no, if I keep a pawnshop I’ll marry her,” he said hurriedly.

He knew quite without vanity that Peregrina would take him the minute he proposed. But he could not propose. Not now that he had visions of himself completely made over, ranging the

55

forest at will, knowing it thoroughly as Ambo knew it, fearless, free. No, not Peregrina for him! Not even for his own sake, much less Sotera’s.

Sotera was Ate Tere to him through a devious reckoning of rela¬tionship that was not without ingenuity. For Gerardo Luna was a younger brother to the former mistress of Sotera’s also younger brother, and it was to Sotera’s credit that when her brother died after a death-bed marriage she took Gerardo under her wings and married him off to a poor relation who took good care of him and submitted his problem as well as her own to Sotera’s competent management. Now that Gerardo was a widower she intended to repeat the good office and provide him with another poor relation guaranteed to look after his physical and economic well-being and, in addition, guaranteed to stay healthy and not die on him. “Marrying to play nurse to your wife,” was certainly not Sotera’s idea of a worthwhile marriage.

This time, however, he was not so tractable. He never openly opposed her plans, but he would not commit himself. Not that he failed to realize the disadvantages of widowerhood. How much more comfortable it would be to give up resisting, marry good, fat Peregri¬na, and be taken care of until he died for she would surely outlive him.

But he could not, he must not. Uncomfortable though he was, he still looked on his widowerhood as something not fortuitous, but a feat triumphantly achieved. The thought of another marriage was to shed his wings, was to feel himself in a small, warm room, while overhead someone shut down on him an opening that gave him the sky.

So to the hills he went with the gatherer of orchids.

AMONG the foothills noon found them. He was weary and wet with sweat.

“Can’t we get water?” he asked dispiritedly.

“We are coming to water,” said Ambo. “We shall be there in ten minutes.”

Up a huge scorched log Ambo clambered, the party following. Along it they edged precariously to avoid the charred twigs and branches that strewed the ground. Here and there a wisp of smoke still curled feebly out of the ashes.

“A new kaingin,” said Ambo. “The owner will be around, I suppose. He will not be going home before the end of the week. Too far.”

A little farther they came upon the owner, a young man with a cheerful face streaked and smudged from his work. He stood looking at them, his two hands resting on the shaft of his axe.

“Where are you going?” he asked quietly and casually. All these people were casual and quiet.

“Looking at some land,” said Ambo. “Mang Gerardo is from Manila. We are going to sleep up there.”

He looked at Gerardo Luna curiously and reviewed the two por¬ters and their load. An admiring look slowly appeared in his likeable eyes.

56

“There is a spring around here, isn’t there? Or is it dried up?”

“No, there is still water in it. Very little but good.”

They clambered over logs and stumps down a flight of steps cut into the side of the hill. At the foot sheltered by an overhanging fern-covered rock was what at first seemed only a wetness. The young man squatted before it and lifted off a mat of leaves from a tiny little pool. Taking his tin cup he cleared the surface by trailing the bottom of the cup on it. Then he scooped up some of the water. It was cool and clear, with an indescribable tang of leaf and rock. It seemed the very essence of the hills.

He sat with the young man on a fallen log and talked with him. The young man said that he was a high school graduate, that he had taught school for a while and had laid aside some money with which he had bought this land. Then he had got married, and as soon as he could manage it he would build a home here near this spring. His voice was peaceful and even. Gerardo suddenly heard his own voice and was embarrassed. He lowered his tone and tried to capture the other’s quiet.

That house would be like those he had seen on the way—brown, and in time flecked with gray. The surroundings would be stripped bare. There would be san franciscos around it and probably beer bottles stuck in the ground. In the evening the burning leaves in the yard would send a pleasant odor of smoke through the two rooms, driving away the mosquitoes, then wandering out-doors again into the forest. At night the red fire in the kitchen would glow through the door of the batalan and would be visible in the forest,

The forest was there, near enough for his upturned eyes to reach. The way was steep, the path rising ruthlessly from the clearing in an almost straight course. His eyes were wistful, and he sighed tremulously. The student followed his gaze upward.

Then he said, “It must take money to live in Manila. If I had the capital I would have gone into business in Manila.”

“Why?” Gerardo was surprised.

“Why—because the money is there, and if one wishes to fish he must go where the fishes are. However,” he continued slowly after a silence, “it is not likely that I shall ever do that. Well, this little place is all right.”

They left the high school graduate standing on the clearing, his weight resting on one foot, his eyes following them as they toiled up the perpendicular path. At the top of the climb Gerardo sat on the ground and looked down on the green fields far below, the lake in the distance, the clearings on the hill sides, and then on the diminishing figure of the high school graduate now busily hacking away, making the most of the remaining hours of day-light. Perched above them all, he felt an exhilaration in his painfully drumming chest.

Soon they entered the dim forest.

Here was the trail that once was followed by the galleon traders when, to outwit those that lay in wait for them, they landed the treasure on the eastern shores of Luzon, and, crossing the Cordillera on this secret trail, brought it to Laguna. A trail centuries old. Stalwart adventurers, imperious and fearless, treasure coveted by others as imperious and fearless,

57

carriers bent beneath burden almost too great to bear—stuff of ancient splendors and ancient griefs.

ON his bed of twigs and small branches, under a roughly contrived roof Gerardo lay down that evening after automatically crossing himself. He shifted around until at last he settled into a comfortable hollow. The fire was burning brightly, fed occasionally with dead branches that the men had collected into a pile. Ambo and the porters were sitting on the black oilcloth that had served them for a dining table. They sat with their arms hugging their knees and talked together in peaceable tones punctuated with brief laughter. From where he lay Gerardo Luna could feel the warmth of the fire on his face.

He was drifting into deeply contented slumber, lulled by the even tones of his companions. Voices out-doors had a strange quality. They blended with the wind, and, on its waves, flowed gently around and past one who listened. In the haze of new sleep he thought he was listening not to human voices, but to something more elemental. A warm sea on level stretches of beach. Or, if he had ever known such a thing, raindrops on the bamboos.

He awoke uneasily after an hour or two. The men were still talking, but intermittently. The fire was not so bright nor so warm.

Ambo was saying:

“Gather more firewood. We must keep the fire burning all night. You may sleep. I shall wake up once in a while to put on more wood.”

Gerardo was reassured. The thought that he would have to sleep in the dark not knowing whether snakes were crawling towards him was intolerable. He settled once more into light slumber.

The men talked on. They did not sing as boatmen would have done while paddling their bancas in the dark. Perhaps only sea-folk sang and hill-folk kept silence. For sea-folk bear no burdens to weigh them down to the earth. Into whatever wilderness of remote sea their wanderer’s hearts may urge them, they may load their treasures in sturdy craft, pull at the oar or invoke the wind, and raise their voices in song. The depths of ocean beneath, the height of sky above, and between, a song floating out on the darkness. A song in the hills would only add to the lonesomeness a hundredfold.

He woke up again feeling that the little twigs underneath him had suddenly acquired uncomfortable proportions. Surely when he lay down they were almost unnoticeable. He raised himself on his elbow and carefully scrutinized his mat for snakes. He shook his blanket out and once more eased himself into a new and smoother corner. The men were now absolutely quiet, except for their snoring. The fire was burning low. Ambo evidently had failed to wake up in time to feed it.

He thought of getting up to attend to the fire, but hesitated. He lay listening to the forest and sensing the darkness. How vast that darkness! Mile upon mile of it all around. Lost somewhere in it, a little flicker, a little warmth.

He got up. He found his limbs stiff and his muscles sore. He ¬could not straighten his back without discomfort. He went out of the tent and carefully arranged two small logs on the fire. The air was chilly. He looked about him at the sleeping men huddled together and doubled up

58

for warmth. He looked toward his tent, fit¬fully lighted by the fire that was now crackling and rising higher. And at last his gaze lifted to look into the forest. Straight white trunks gleaming dimly in the darkness. The startling glimmer of a firefly. Outside of the circle of the fire was the measureless unknown, hostile now, he felt. Or was it he who was hostile? This fire was the only protection, the only thing that isolated this little strip of space and made it shelter for defenseless man. Let the fire go out and the unknown would roll in and engulf them all in darkness. He hastily placed four more logs on the fire and retreated to his tent.

He could not sleep. He felt absolutely alone. Aloneness was like hunger in that it drove away sleep.

He remembered his wife. He had a fleeting thought of God. Then he remembered his wife again. Probably not his wife as her¬self, as a definite personality, but merely as a companion and a minis¬terer to his comfort. Not his wife, but a wife. His mind recreated a scene which had no reason at all for persisting as a memory. There was very little to it. He had waked one midnight to find his wife sit¬ting up in the bed they shared. She had on her flannel camisa de chino, always more or less dingy, and she was telling her beads. “What are you doing?” he had asked. “I forgot to say my prayers,” she had answered.

He was oppressed by nostalgia. And because he did not know what it was he wanted his longing became keener. Not for his wife, nor for his life in the city. Not for his parents nor even for his lost childhood. What was there in these that could provoke anything remotely resembling this regret? What was not within the life span could not be memories. Something more remote even than race memory. His longing went farther back, to some age in Paradise maybe when the soul of man was limitless and unshackled: when it embraced the infinite and did not hunger because it had the inexhaustible at its command.

When he woke again the fire was smoldering. But there was a light in the forest, an eerie light. It was diffused and cold. He wondered what it was. There were noises now where before had seemed only the silence itself. There were a continuous trilling, strange night-calls and a peculiar, soft clinking which recurred at regular intervals. Forest noises. There was the noise, too, of nearby waters.

One of the men woke up and said something to another who was also evidently awake, Gerardo called out.

“What noise is that?”

“Which noise?”

“That queer, ringing noise.”

“That? That’s caused by tree worms, I have been told.”

He had a sudden vision of long, strong worms drumming with their heads on the barks of trees.

“The other noise is the worm noise,” corrected Ambo. “That hissing. That noise you are talking about is made by crickets.”

“What is that light?” he presently asked.

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“That is the moon,” said Ambo.

“The moon!” Gerardo exclaimed and fell silent. He would never understand the forest.

Later he asked, “Where is that water that I hear?”

“A little farther and lower, I did not wish to camp there because of the leeches. At daylight we shall stop there, if you wish.”

When he awoke again it was to find the dawn invading the forest. He knew the feel of the dawn from the many misas de gallo that he had gone to on December mornings. The approach of day-light gave him a feeling of relief. And he was saddened.

He sat quietly on a flat stone with his legs in the water and looked around. He was still sore all over. His neck ached, his back hurt, his joints troubled him. He sat there, his wet shirt tightly plastered over his meager form and wondered confusedly about many things. The sky showed overhead through the rift in the trees. The sun looked through that opening on the rushing water. The sky was high and blue. It was as it always had been in his dreams, beau¬tiful as he had always thought it would be. But he would never come back. This little corner of the earth hidden in the hills would never again be before his gaze.

He looked up again at the blue sky and thought of God. God for him was always up in the sky. Only the God he thought of now was not the God he had always known. This God he was thinking of was another God. He was wondering if when man died and moved on to another life he would not find there the things he missed and so wished to have. He had a deep certainty that that would be so, that after his mortal life was over and we came against that obstruc¬tion called death, our lives, like a stream that runs up against a dam, would still flow on, in courses fuller and smoother. This must be so. He had a feeling, almost an instinct, that he was not wrong. And a Being, all wise and compassionate, would enable us to remedy our frustrations and heartaches.

HE went straight to Sotera’s to get the key to his house. In the half light of the stairs he met Peregrina, who in the solicitous expression of her eyes saw the dust on his face, his hands, and his hair, saw the unkempt air of the whole of him. He muttered something polite and hurried up stairs, self-consciousness hampering his feet. Peregrina, quite without embarrassment, turned and climbed the stairs after him.

On his way out with the keys in his hand he saw her at the head of the stairs anxiously lingering. He stopped and considered her thoughtfully.

“Pereg, as soon as I get these clothes off I shall come to ask you a question that is very—very important to me.”

As she smiled eagerly but uncertainly into his face, he heard a jangling in his hand. He felt, queerly, that something was closing above his hand, and that whoever was closing it, was rattling the keys.

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Rudyard Kipling1865-1936

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Rudyard Kipling’s Biography

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, but educated in England at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford. In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly. Kipling was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works, in particular Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888), collections of short stories with roughly and affectionately drawn soldier portraits. His Barrack Room Ballads (1892) were written for, as much as about, the common soldier. In 1894 appeared his Jungle Book, which became a children's classic all over the world.Kim (1901), the story of Kimball O'Hara and his adventures in the Himalayas, is perhaps his most felicitous work. Other works include The Second Jungle Book (1895), The Seven Seas (1896), Captains Courageous (1897), The Day's Work (1898), Stalky and Co. (1899), Just So Stories (1902),Trafficks and Discoveries (1904), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Actions and Reactions (1909),Debits and Credits (1926), Thy Servant a Dog (1930), and Limits and Renewals (1932). During the First World War Kipling wrote some propaganda books. His collected poems appeared in 1933.

Kipling was the recipient of many honorary degrees and other awards. In 1926 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, which only Scott, Meredith, and Hardy had been awarded before him.

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The White Man's Burdenby Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden--Send forth the best ye breed--

Go, bind your sons to exileTo serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,On fluttered folk and wild--

Your new-caught sullen peoples,Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terrorAnd check the show of pride;By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain,To seek another's profit

And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--The savage wars of peace--Fill full the mouth of Famine,And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen follyBring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--No iron rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper--The tale of common things.The ports ye shall not enter,The roads ye shall not tread,

Go, make them with your livingAnd mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden,And reap his old reward--

The blame of those ye betterThe hate of those ye guard--The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--"Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--

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Ye dare not stoop to less--Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness.By all ye will or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,The silent sullen peoples

Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden!Have done with childish days--

The lightly-proffered laurel,The easy ungrudged praise:

Comes now, to search your manhoodThrough all the thankless years,

Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,The judgment of your peers.

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Poetry Analysis: The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling

A straightforward analysis of the poem may conclude that Kipling presents a Eurocentric view of the world, in which non-European cultures are seen as childlike and demonic. This view proposes that white people consequently have an obligation to rule over, and encourage the cultural development of, people from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds until they can take their place in the world by fully adopting Western ways. The term "the white man's burden" can be interpreted simply as racist, or taken as a metaphor for a condescending view of non-Western national culture and economic traditions, identified as a sense of European ascendancy which has been called "cultural imperialism". A parallel can also be drawn with the philanthropic view, common in Kipling's formative years, that the rich have a moral duty and obligation to help the poor "better" themselves whether the poor want the help or not. Within a historical context, the poem makes clear the prevalent attitudes that allowed colonialism to proceed. Although a belief in the "virtues of empire" was wide-spread at the time, there were also many dissenters; the publication of the poem caused a flurry of arguments from both sides, most notably from Mark Twain and Henry James. Much of Kipling's other writing does suggest that he genuinely believed in the "beneficent role" which the introduction of Western ideas could play in lifting non-Western peoples out of "poverty and ignorance." Lines 3-5, and other parts of the poem suggest that it is not just the native people who are enslaved, but also the "functionaries of empire," who are caught in colonial service. This theme may also be contrasted with the Christian missionary movement, which was also quite active at the time in Africa, India, and other British and European colonies (e.g. the Christian and Missionary Alliance). Some commentators point to Kipling's history of satirical writing, and suggest that "The White Man's Burden" is in fact meant to satirically undermine imperialism.

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Ifby Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too:If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,Or being hated don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same:.

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spokenTwisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winningsAnd risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings,And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinewTo serve your turn long after they are gone,And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

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Poetry Analysis: If by Rudyard Kipling

Amongst the most famous poems written in the English language is Rudyard Kipling's ever popular piece "if." It seems to have entered into the public's general consciousness in ways that other poems have not come close to. The timeless appeal of the passing down of knowledge and wisdom from father to son is immediately recognised and appreciated by an audience all too familiar with the joys and pitfalls of parenthood. The poem is touching in its sincerity and is full of humility and warmth which has been appreciated by millions since it was first written in 1895.

The power of self-confidence within the first four lines of the poem takes on an air equivalent to that of Socrates it his detachment from criticism:

If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too,

Here is the real measure of individuality and self-worth the power to reject bitterness in the face of other people's wrath. The overwhelming reference to "you" or "your" which is used seven times within these four lines really has the affect of breaking out of the poem and speaking to the reader directly. There is a Jesus-like forgiveness within the last line of forgiving your foes, it is a higher understanding of how the world works, it grasps at the truth of human nature and makes "allowance" at the folly of others, not for their sake, but for your own. Patience as a virtue and the correct way to speak and feel is of interest in the next four lines:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

Here patience is both taken as patience with others and with the world at large. True understanding is patience, and with dealing with others in the correct manner. The negativity of "hate" and "lying" are rejected absolutely by those who would seek to view the ways of the world from an open philosophic way of thinking. At the close of the poem the narrator warns though against the error of arrogance with such self-confidence and wisdom. It is hard to ignore the conservative message that is evident within the whole of the next stanza:

If you can dream-and not make dreams your master,If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

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Once again the words are noble enough, at the start the narrator praises dreams and longings but warns against becoming blinded with those wants. Interestingly, the knowledge of the god-like narrator warns against the personified (note the capitalisation) "Triumph and Disaster" realising both of them as "impostors," or of little importance in the grand scheme of things. The last two lines could be read somewhat as a conservative message (knowing the authors politics) with the idea of continuation and hard work in adversity, of course it is always dangerous to attach the author with the poem in such a way, though it remains positive and uplifting.This idea is also continued within the next lines:

If you can make one heap of all your winningsAnd risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginningsAnd never breath a word about your loss;

The attitude of never giving up and working hard certainly could be readas an element of the conservative methodology, however the determinationand message of striving is there for all to adhere to regardless ofpolitical vision. It is also much more than the method of a continuationin the face of adversity, it is about the way this is done and neverbreathing "a word about your loss" shows the utmost element ofself-dignity. Of course the message of the poem throughout is also holding the tensionthat will be finally released within the last line. The poem isessentially and extended sentence with the object only released at theend. Before this however there is more tension and dignity to bewound-up within the message of the poem in the next stanza:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,If all men count with you, but none too much;

Of importance in this section is the message of not becoming corrupted by the machinations of status, the individual not placing importance above anyone else, but showing ultimate humility. Obviously "Kings" is contrasted with "common" in order to cover all the strata of society in the same way as "foes" and "friends" is within the next line. The argument of treating a foe with the same humility as a friend and not allowing them to hurt you falls back to the self-confidence factor at the start of the poem.In the last section of the poem the tension built-up throughout is finally released:

If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The last line is also the realisation of the passing down of knowledge and wisdom from father to son, and it is the first time that we as readers realise that the poem is not directly addressed to them, but to a younger figure. This gives the poem an extra element of humility,

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and as readers we unconsciously care for this younger child and hope he prospers under such guidance, as we do ourselves. Overall in the poem there is much truth and wisdom within these motivational words that seems tap into a core within the reader, expanding virtue and knowledge. True words are often softly spoken and the gentleness and confidence whichmeet the reader in the lines of the poem come across both reverent andadmirable. The obvious humanity which Kipling breached within the wholepoem stirs within the reader thoughts of a higher nature than the pettiness that surrounds daily life, it is just a shame that most people don't act upon the meaning carried within the Kipling's verse, for then we could truly ask "what if?"

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Female of the Speciesby Rudyard Kipling

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

When Nag, the wayside cobra, hears the careless foot of man,He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can,But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws -'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the others tale -The female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

Man, a bear in most relations, worm and savage otherwise,Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise;Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a factTo its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act. 

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.Mirth obscene diverts his anger; Doubt and Pity oft perplexHim in dealing with an issue - to the scandal of the Sex! 

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frameProves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,The female of the species must be deadlier than the male. 

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breastMay not deal in doubt or pity - must not swerve for fact or jest.These be purely male diversions - not in these her honor dwells -She, the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else! 

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her greatAs the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate;And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claimHer right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same. 

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She is wedded to convictions - in default of grosser ties;Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him, who denies!He will meet no cool discussion, but the instant, white-hot wildWakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child. 

Unprovoked and awful charges - even so the she-bear fights;Speech that drips, corrodes and poisons - even so the cobra bites;Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw,And the victim writhes with anguish - like the Jesuit with the squaw! 

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to conferWith his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for herWhere, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring handsTo some God of abstract justice - which no woman understands. 

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave himMust command but may not govern; shall enthrall but not enslave him.And She knows, because She warns him and Her instincts never fail,That the female of Her species is more deadly than the male!

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Poetry Analysis: The Female of the Species

In thirteen quatrains of iambic heptameter rhymed aabb with occasional lines beginning with anapests, Rudyard Kipling in 1911 produced a charming, mock serious poem about the difference between the genders. Six of the stanzas conclude with minor variations that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Stanza one describes a Himalayan who scares off a male bear with a shout but the female bear ignores the shout and tears the man limb from limb. Stanza two shows the male cobra avoiding a confrontation with man while its mate does not. The third example given is the early Jesuit missionaries preaching to the American Indian tribes. They asked for deliverance from the "vengeance of the squaws" who were a threat more dangerous than the male Hurons or Choctaws. Rather than thirteen bloody examples of man being slaughtered by woman, Kipling's sly humor renders his message exaggeratedly whimsical. Her actual "tooth and nail" are mentioned only in the first stanza. In the middle stanzas the poet focuses on how the male's "mirth . . . diverts his anger", and how "Doubt and Pity oft perplex/ Him in dealing with an issue."

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue. armed and engined for the same,And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breastMay not deal in doubt or pity - must not swerve for fact or jest.

These be purely male diversions - not in these her honour dwells.She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

In other words, for Mother and Mistress "that Law" is kill or be killed. There is no room for doubt and pity. Instead she is "wedded to convictions" and has mo interest in "suave discussion." In the last three stanzas, the modern woman is equated with she-bear, lady cobra, and Indian squaw of stanzas one, two and three. Her role as wife and mother overrides Conscience and makes her incapable of understanding Abstract Justice. Thus she may "command" but is lacking the sense of compromis that would enable her to govern. She acts on instinct and so is more deadly than the male. Clearly Mr. Kipling has not been affected by late twentieth century feminism on the subject of commanding versus governing, but if he shows signs of male chauvinism, it is tempered by his admitted thralldom.

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Khalil Gibran1883-1931

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Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran, Gibran also spelled Jibran, Khalil also spelled Kahlil, Arabic name in full Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān   (born Jan. 6, 1883, Bsharrī, Lebanon—died April 10, 1931, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Lebanese American philosophical essayist, novelist, poet, and artist. Having received his primary education in Beirut, Gibran immigrated with his parents to Boston in 1895. He returned to Lebanon in 1898 and studied in Beirut, where he excelled in the Arabic language. On his return to Boston in 1903, he published his first literary essays; in 1907 he met Mary Haskell, who was to be his benefactor all his life and who made it possible for him to study art in Paris. In 1912Gibran settled in New York City and devoted himself to writing literary

essays and short stories, both in Arabic and in English, and to painting. Gibran’s literary and artistic output is highly romantic in outlook and was influenced by the Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake. His writings in both languages, which deal with such themes as love, death, nature, and a longing for the homeland, are full of lyrical outpourings and are expressive of Gibran’s deeply religious and mystic nature. Gibran’s principal works in Arabic are: ʿArāʾ-is al-Murūj (1910; Nymphs of the Valley); Damʿah wa Ibtisāmah (1914; A Tear and a Smile); Al-Arwāḥ al-Mutamarridah (1920; Spirits Rebellious); Al-Ajniḥah al-Mutakassirah (1922; The Broken Wings); Al-Awasif (1923; “The Storms”); and Al-Mawākib (1923; The Procession), poems. His principal works in English are The Madman (1918), The Forerunner (1920), The Prophet (1923), Sand and Foam (1926), and Jesus, theSon of Man (1928).

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Love One Anotherby Khalil Gibran

“You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”

Poetry analysis: Love One Another, by Khalil Gibran

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In this poetic insight Gibran recognizes the blessed sanctity of martial love but also the unique importance of the individual life and spirit.  He begins simply with the commandment of “love one another” and makes no argument for the validity and import of such a statement.  The ability to love is man’s greatest aspect and should be put to use. He goes on to clarify the meaning of this instruction.  He tells his audience not to make a “bond of love”.  A bond is rigid and inflexible.  Gibran understands the nature of psychology, human growth and development.  Mankind should not stand still and remain a statue, unchangeable from the day of marriage but learn, adapt, challenge and discover.  If two people try to define their love and feeling towards one another and hold it in a constant state, the bonds of love will break as it is in human nature to change and be influence by day to day passage.Instead Gibran recommends that love and union be seen as the sea.  Water rushes in and moulds to the shape of any container, it is constantly in motion and flux, like emotions.  Whatever troubles or happenstance awaits a relationship, water and thus love can adapt to the new shapes and situations.  In this way marriage can be durable. The “cup” and the “bread” of the second stanza refer to potential and character.  Loving one another means supporting and encouraging one another.  It means lending strength when one is feeling weak, comfort when one is in distress and in general filling that person’s life with good feelings and moments.  This makes them feel like a full vessel, as if they are carrying something that is cherished and of significance.  Food and drink, the bread and the cup, are essential to survival and metaphorical for the emotional reservoirs that we need to draw from throughout life.  However, the cups and loaves are different as two people are different and no matter how alike, two people need different things to fill them.  Two lives can complement one another but never replace the need of having two separate identities.  Trying to change and become so alike as to form one being dismisses the different aspects in the soul and personality that drew the two together to begin with. Also in logical terms if two people drink from one cup or eat one loaf of bread then they will have half as much sustenance, life and life experience than two times that amount. The third stanza reaffirms this saying that man and wife should love and rejoice in one another’s company but not spend so much time together that they achieve and learn nothing on their own.  Again, thinking about the bond of love, if you can imagine two people handcuffed together it would take twice as long to move any obstacles from a path as they are so consumed with how to do the task together their individual strengths are going to waste. Man needs more than merely the feeling of love but also freedom and imagination that stokes the flames instead of stifling them by never adding more fuel to the fire in the form of ambitions and physical needs for the body and mind. Gibran says to by all means give your heart, your devotion and affection to another but the need to live is more important than the need to love as without life there can be no love.  So keep your heart in your own chest because the chest of your partner is different and should be so and cannot provide enough blood for two hearts.  You have to take care of yourself before you have any hope of being strong enough to care for another. He says to “stand together”, to walk hand in hand on the journey but four feet are needed to support the weight.  He uses the two must worshipped and mysterious ideas of religion, the temple pillars and nature, the oak and cypress to show how two people can grow and develop close to one another but not too close.  If you want to live life to the full and grow to the heights of a tall pillar or tree, you can’t burden each other by blocking any of the light, the different interests and knowledge that allow your partner to become the person they are

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supposed to be and who you love them for being.  Trees need to sprawl, to sink roots and have clear skies, two trees, and note these trees are identified as different, one an oak, the other a cypress, cannot inhabit the exact same piece of ground. In conclusion Gibran is being very sensible and declaring that individuals need to remain individual, do their own things, have time to themselves to discover what will help and encourage them in their pursuits.  One person is lonely so why focus on an invasive unity that reduces two amazing and complex individuals back into one lonely being.  When people are single they spend enough time with themselves and arguing and fighting with yourself will never give a new opinion and perspective to further your journey.  It’s about respect and communion, a unity without uniformity.

On Childrenby Khalil Gibran

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Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your childrenas living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Poetry analysis: On Children, by Khalil Gibran

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Throughout 'The Prophet', Kahlil Gibran manages to bring together great insight into how life works (or should, at any rate) and truly beautiful language. And he makes the two seem mutually indispensible. Which is why he appeals to me intellectually as well as aesthetically. He is a master of analogies and his texts have many that are apt and natural - that of the archer in this poem is close to perfection. In "On Children" by Kahlil Gibran, the speaker emphasizes how parents can not control the desires of their children. Children will think and act for themselves and must have the freedom to grow. Gibran uses figurative language that describes children as living in the "house" of tomorrow. This demonstrates how important children are as members of the future of the world. Gibran also uses metaphors, such as calling parents the "bows" that help the "arrows", or children, reach their destinations and goals.

Kahlil Gibran on Love

When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep.

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And when his wings enfold you yield to him,Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.And when he speaks to you believe in him,Though his voice may shatter your dreamsas the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.He threshes you to make you naked.He sifts you to free you from your husks.He grinds you to whiteness.He kneads you until you are pliant;And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.To know the pain of too much tenderness.To be wounded by your own understanding of love;And to bleed willingly and joyfully.To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;To return home at eventide with gratitude;And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

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Jose Garcia Villa1908-1997

Jose Garcia Villa

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Poet, critic, short story writer, and painter, Jose Garcia Villa was a consummate artist in poetry and in person as well. At parties given him by friends and admirers whenever he came home for a brief visit, things memorable usually happened. Take that scene many years ago at the home of the late Federico Mangahas, a close friend of Villa's. The poet, resplendent in his shiny attire, his belt an ordinary knotted cow's rope, stood at a corner talking with a young woman. Someone in the crowd remarked: "What's the idea wearing a belt like that?" No answer. Only the faint laughter of a woman was heard. Or was it a giggle perhaps? Then there was one evening, with few people around, when he sat down Buddha-like on a semi-marble bench under Dalupan Hall at UE waiting for somebody. That was the year he came home from America to receive a doctor's degree, honoris causa, from FEU. Somebody asked: "What are you doing?" He looked up slowly and answered bemused: "I am just catching up trying to be immoral." Sounded something like that. There was only murmuring among the crowd. They were not sure whether the man was joking or serious. They were awed to learn that he was the famed Jose Garcia Villa. What did the people remember? The Buddha-like posture? Or what he said?That was Villa the artist. There's something about his person or what he does or says that makes people gravitate toward him. Stare at him or listen to him. Villa is the undisputed Filipino supremo of the practitioners of the "artsakists." His followers have diminished in number but are still considerable.Villa was born in Singalong, Manila, on 05 August 1908. His parents were Simeon Villa, personal physician of revolutionary general Emilio Aguinaldo, and Guia Garcia. He graduated from the UP High School in 1925 and enrolled in the pre-med course. He didn't enjoy working on cadavers and so he switched to pre-law, which he didn't like either. A short biography prepared by the Foreign Service Institute said Villa was first interested in painting but turned to writing after reading Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." Meanwhile, he devoted a good part of his time writing short stories and poems. Soon he started exerting his leadership among the UP writers.His ideas on literature were provocative. He stirred strong feelings. He was thought too individualistic. He published his series of erotic poems, "Man Songs" in 1929. It was too bold for the staid UP administrators, who summarily suspended Villa from the university. He was even fined P70 for "obscenity" by the Manila Court of First Instance. With the P1,000 he won as a prize from the Philippines Free Press for his "Mir-i-Nisa," adjudged the best short story that year (1929), he migrated to the United States. He enrolled at the University of New Mexico where he edited and published a mimeographed literary magazine he founded: Clay. Several young American writers who eventually became famous contributed. Villa wrote several short stories published in prestigious American magazines and anthologies.Here is a partial list of his published books:

Philippine Short Stories, best 25 stories of 1928 (1929) Footnote to Youth, short stories (1933) Many Voices, poems (1939) Poems (1941) Have Come Am Here, poems ((1941) Selected Poems and New (1942) A Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry (1962)

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Through the sponsorship of Conrad Aiken, noted American poet and critic, Villa was granted the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing. He was also awarded $1,000 for "outstanding work in American literature." He won first prize in poetry at the UP Golden Jubilee Literary Contests (1958) and was conferred the degree Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, by FEU (1959); the Pro Patria Award for literature (1961); Heritage Awards for literature, for poetry and short stories (1962); and National Artist Award for Literature (1973). On 07 February 1997, Jose Garcia Villa died at a New York hospital, two days after he was found unconscious in his apartment. He was 88.The Department of Foreign Affairs said Villa, popularly known as the "comma poet," died at 12:37 a.m. (New York time) of "cerebral stroke and multilobar pneumonia" at the St. Vincent Hospital in Greenwich. He is survived by his two sons, Randy and Lance, and three grandchildren.Interment was scheduled on Feb. 10 in New York, the DFA said. It added that Villa had expressed the wish to be buried wearing a barong. Though he lived in New York for 67 years, he remained happily a Filipino citizen.

The Emperor’s New Sonnet by Jose Garcia Villa

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The Emperor’s New Sonnet by Jose Garcia Villa: An Analysis

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On normal circumstances, one would go through a poem line per line in analyzing one, and see how every line would contribute to the overall meaning. However, the poem to be tackled has no meter, no extended metaphors, no symbolisms, nor any text whatsoever. All we are banking on is its title, which alludes to the popular children’s story "The Emperor’s New Clothes", which was written by Hans Christian Anderson.

The story is an attack on snobbery and pretension, and makes fun of people who do not have their own say on what is beautiful and tend to rely on other people’s judgments before making their own. It tells its readers that sometimes, we need to view things as innocent as a child would so that we could plainly see what true beauty is, free from all social conditioning that often warps their perspective on things.

With this in mind, let us now tackle the poem by Jose Garcia Villa, which has no words at all. What we have here is something that tells readers that it is a poem, although in reality, there really is nothing. There is no beautiful weaving of words, and it seems like the poet is mocking the reader by telling them to accept the blankness as poetry, in the same way that the weavers the emperor in the story hired expects him to accept his invisible suit as one of the most beautiful in the world.

In all objectivity, there really is no poem in The Emperor’s New Sonnet, although it calls itself one. Although there are literary critics and intellectuals who can extract some meaning from the blankness, there would undoubtedly be that child in us that wants to shout out that this is not a poem, and that it is only a blank page.

We can probably borrow the moral lesson in the story and put it into the context of this poem. There are probably times when, like the characters in the story, we have felt the need to convince ourselves that a work of art is beautiful, just because some ruling body deemed it so, even though we ourselves did not genuinely appreciate it. There must have been some time when you came across some abstract painting and thought that it was something a child could have done, and yet you just kept mum about it, because it was supposedly created by a world-class painter. Or a time when an artsy-fartsy friend asked you what you thought about this foreign film you totally found boring, and answered that it was nice. Or a time in English class where you were forced to nod and say that you liked a certain short story, even though you did not understand a single thing from it.

Lyric 17by Jose Garcia Villa

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First, a poem must be magical, Then musical as sea gull. 

It must be a brightness moving And hold secret a bird's flowering. 

It must be slender as a bell, And it must hold fire as well. 

It must have the wisdom of bows And it must kneel like a rose. 

It must be able to hear The luminance of dove and deer. 

It must be able to hide What it seeks, like a bride. 

And over all I would like to hover God, smiling from the poem's cover.

Poetry Analysis: Lyric 17 by Jose Garcia Villa

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Villa's lyrical and exquisitely crafted poem, "Lyric 17" (Villa, 1942), can serve as the basis for discussing his techniques of poetry. Although the poet did not set out to achieve this end, he does so, gracefully and economically. As you shall see, this beautiful poem leads to a unique definition of what a poem should be.In a taped interview, Villa provided an explication of this poem. Of the first two lines,

First, a poem must be magicalThen musical as a sea-gull.

Villa said, "These lines mean exactly what they say: That a poem must have magic, and it must be musical."Interviewer: "What meaning would you ascribe to the next lines?"

It must be a brightness movingAnd hold secret a bird's flowering.

Villa explained, "There are some brightnesses which are stationary and static, but a poem, like a bird, must fly. This is the difference between prose and poetry. Prose is flatfooted and stationary; poetry soars, flies like a bird. The stationary bird, when first seen, appears like a rosebud. When it begins to fly, it opens up and spreads its wings and blooms like a flower."The interviewer asked him to explain the images in the fifth and sixth lines,

It must be slender as a bellAnd it must hold fire as well.

To these lines, Villa responded, "A poem is economical; it's slender as a bell, it has no adipose tissue; it's lean and clean. Poorly written poems should, of necessity, go on a diet, to rid themselves of excess verbiage and adjectives. And by 'fire' in the next line, I simply mean that a poem must have a spirit."

"I have always found the next lines difficult to comprehend," the interviewer con-fessed:

It must have the wisdom of bowsAnd it must kneel like a rose.

"You must remember," Villa said, "some lines and some poems cannot be explained. But let me try. I am speaking of the archer's bow. A good bow is one that knows when to shoot, and one that directs the arrow to its mark. Just as a good poem, it never goes astray. To 'kneel like a rose' is a metaphor for humility. All fine people are humble and a poem should also be humble, however beautiful it is."For the seventh and eighth lines,

It must be able to hearThe luminance of dove and deer.

"There's a good man behind every fine poem. A good poet is usually a good person. 'Luminance' naturally means brightness. When I see a good face, it's a good face and I

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respond. When I see a bad face, it is the face full of crime, even though he doesn't proclaim his crime. His face proclaims it out loud.""In other words," the interviewer asked, "the poet knows things instinctively?""Yes, naturally," Villa answered.And for the meaning of the next couplet, the interviewer prodded Villa to discuss,

It must be able to hideWhat it seeks, like a bride.

Villa, without hesitation, began, "A poem must not explicitly state meaning. The reader is supposed to sense it out, feel it. The language itself doesn't tell you, but the substructure behind that language is the real meaning. It is not explicit and declarative. That's why when I say, 'It must have the wisdom of bows,' you must guess at what I mean, and children love to guess at meaning. That's why they love riddles. I used to love riddles as a child."The final couplet of this rather unorthodox sonnet,

And over all I would like to hoverGod, smiling from the poem's cover.

is possibly one of the most beautiful ever written. "The last line has a masterfully dramatic effect. At the same time, this couplet is, to me (the interviewer), the most mystifying one in the poem," the interviewer commented. Villa nodded and offered this explanation: "When you see a blessed creature, God shines and hovers over that saintly creature. The poem itself creates a God-hood, and the poem radiates Godness. At the same time, God is hovering over it, acknowledging the Godness radiating from the poem, itself, which embodies the spirituality existing in a poem and, at the same time, radiates it to others."Indeed, there is a Godness to this poem; and there is a God-hood within this poet. Poet Richard Eberhardt understood this, too, evidenced in a review of Villa's work in which he states:

A pure, startling, and resounding body of poetry, informed with so much legerity and fire, remarkably consistent in its devotion to spiritual reality. The subject matter is formidable, the

author a God-driven poet. He arrives at peaks without showing the strenuous effort of climbing; the personal is lost in a blaze of linguistic glories.... (Eberhardt, 1958)

The poet concludes that reading poetry might be compared to enjoying riddles, and that children enjoy solving riddles. Since poetry is neither explicit nor declarative, children must be taught through sheer joy to sense out and feel the meaning. Is there not much of this that goes on when we are "sensing" or drawing conclusions, or making an inference? Perhaps we should become more concerned about providing children with joyous language experiences that will enable them to better understand poetry.

Footnote to Youth

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by Jose Garcia Villa

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was silent hard-working farmer who chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodong's grandmother. I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him. The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short colorless worm marched blindly to Dodong's foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to look where it fell, but thought of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young any more. Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong looked at it without interests. Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry, Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip already was dark-these meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a man--he was a man. Dodong felt insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue. Thinking himself a man grown Dodong felt he could do anything. He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face and small black eyes and straightglossy hair. How desirable she was to him. She made him dream even during the day. Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he had come, then marched obliquely to a creek. Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass. The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool. It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar. Dodong ate fish and rice, but didnot partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the remainder for his parents. Dodong's mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash them. She walked with slow careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework alone. His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to let the town dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if he had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father. Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had to say, and

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over which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still black temples of his father. His father looked old now. "I am going to marry Teang," Dodong said.His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and cruel, and Dodong wished his father would suck that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because his father kept looking at him without uttering anything. 

"I will marry Teang," Dodong repeated. "I will marry Teang." His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat. "I asked her last night to marry me and she said...yes. I want your permission. I... want... it...." There was impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness. "Must you marry, Dodong?" Dodong resented his father's questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got confused. "You are very young, Dodong." "I'm... seventeen." "That's very young to get married at." "I... I want to marry...Teang's good girl." "Tell your mother," his father said. "You tell her, tatay." "Dodong, you tell your inay." "You tell her." "All right, Dodong." "You will let me marry Teang?" 

"Son, if that is your wish... of course..." There was a strange helpless light in his father's eyes. Dodong did not read it, too absorbed was he in himself. Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while he even felt sorry for him about the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young dream.... Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was damp. He was still like a tree and his thoughts were confused. His mother had told him not to leave the house, but he had left. He had wanted to get out of it without clear reason at all. He was afraid, he felt. Afraid of the house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang. Teang was giving birth in the house; she gave screams that chilled his blood. He did not want her to scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He began to wonder madly if the process of childbirth was really painful. Some women, when they gave birth, did not cry. In a few moments he would be a father. "Father, father," he whispered the word with awe, with strangeness. He was young, he realized now, contradicting himself of nine months comfortable... "Your son," people would soon be telling him. "Your son, Dodong." Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw horse with his feet close together. He looked at his callused toes. Suppose he had ten children... What made him think that? What was the matter with him? God! He heard his mother's voice from the house: "Come up, Dodong. It is over." Of a sudden he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow he was ashamed to his mother of his youthful paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if he had taken something no properly his. He dropped his eyes and pretended to dust dirt off his kundiman shorts. "Dodong," his mother called again. "Dodong." He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother. "It is a boy," his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up. 

Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents' eyes seemed to pierce him through and he felt limp. He wanted to hide from them, to run away. "Dodong, you come up. You come up," he mother said. Dodong did not want to come

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up and stayed in the sun. "Dodong. Dodong." "I'll... come up." Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps slowly. His heart pounded mercilessly in him. Within, he avoided his parents eyes. He walked ahead of them so that they should not see his face. He felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying. His eyes smarted and his chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go back to the yard. He wanted somebody to punish him. His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently. "Son," his father said. And his mother: "Dodong..." How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong. "Teang?" Dodong said. "She's sleeping. But you go in..." His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl wife, asleep on the papag with her black hair soft around her face. He did not want her to look that pale... Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips, but again that feeling of embarrassment came over him and before his parents he did not want to be demonstrative. The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heart it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly. He could not control the swelling of happiness in him. You give him to me. You give him to me," Dodong said. * * * Blas was not Dodong's child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came along. Dodong did not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the coming of children could not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes. Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if she was young. There was interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children. She cried sometimes, wishing she had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing him to dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by nine years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was childless until now. She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not either. That was a better lot. But she loved Dodong... Dodong whom life had made ugly. One night, as he lay beside his wife, he roe and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired and querulous. He wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He w anted to be wise about many things. One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth's dreams. Why it must be so. 

Why one was forsaken... after Love. Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must be so to make Youth. Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a little wisdom but was denied it. * * * When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard Blas's steps, for he could not sleep well of nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark and lie down softly. Blas was restless on his mat and could not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not sleep. Blas said he could not sleep. "You better go to sleep. It is late," Dodong said. Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice. Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep. "Itay ...," Blas called softly. Dodong stirred and asked him what was it. "I am going to marry Tena. 

She accepted me tonight." Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving. "Itay, you think it over." Dodong lay silent. "I love Tena and... I want her." Dodong rose f ROM his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and white. "You want to marry Tena," Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very young. The life that would follow marriage would be heard...

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"Yes." "Must you marry?" Blas's voice stilled with resentment. "I will marry Tena." Dodong kept silent, hurt. "You have objections, Itay?" Blas asked acridly. "Son... n-none..." (But truly, God, I don't want Blas to marry yet... not yet. I don't want Blas to marry yet....) But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph... now. Love must triumph... now. Afterwards... it will be life. As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong... and then Life. Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him. 

Analysis of Footnote to Youth

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In Jose Garica Villa's Footnote to Youth, he tackles the responsibilities and realities that come with marriage and the family life. In it, he narrates the story of Dodong, wherein we are introduced to Dodong when he is seventeen and seeking to marry his love Teang. He is problematic over how he intends to talk to his father about marrying Teang, going over the possible responses his father would give, and at the same time convincing himself that he is old enough to handle the responsibility. On his way home, he makes a stop to relieve himself. The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish, earthy smell. Many slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. The appearance of the worms and the occurrence of one worm crawling over Dodong's foot is of great importance to the story, as it serves as a revealing of Dodong's character and future. A short colorless worm marched blindly towards Dodong's foot and crawled clammily.

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Antonio M. Abad1894-1970

Antonio Martinez Abad

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Antonio Abad was born to Hermogena Y. Kabigting and Atanacio S. Abad on August 13, 1886 in San Isidro, Nueva Ecija. Educated in San Isidro and Manila, Abad took the third grade civil service test in 1905 and qualified for the position of clerk at the bureau of Public Works. In 1908, he took the second grade civil service test and was promoted to the position of the chief clerk at the Bureau of Public Works in Pasig, Rizal in 1910. From 1911 to 1920, he was the chief clerk at the bureau’s office in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija. In 1928, he returned to Manila and tried to establish a career in local politics, but failed. Later, he pursued his studies at the Philippine School of Commerce. In 1939, he passed the first grade civil service test. In 1945, he was appointed head of the Senate’s disbursement and property division. On September 30, 1952, he retired from government service. Abad’s true vocation was writing, with Philippine history and biography as his major concerns. He was first acknowledged as a writer when the Sulong Ikalaya, an organization devoted to literature, gave him an award in 1910. After this initial recognition, he continued to reap honors for his writings, such as “Kasaysayan ng Nueva Ecija,” which appeared in Muling Pagsilang, a Tagalog publication. His “Hatinggabi,” which appeared in Liwayway, won a 125- peso prize from the Kapisanang Balintawak in 1915. In 1910, Abad published a novel, entitled Wakas ng Palad. Tagalog publications such as Ang Mithi and Taliba produced excerpts from his Diksionaryong Ingles-Tagalog. He contributed essays and literary pieces to Ang Demokrasya, Renacimiento Filipino and Ang Bayan. Writing under the pseudonyms of “Abakada,” “Batang Katipunan,” “Akasia,” and “Matang Pusa,” Abad constantly espoused the cause of national freedom and sovereignty. Abad joined several organizations, such as Samahang Mananagalog and Dilang Guinto. He served as secretary of the Aklatang Bayan. He indulged his interests in old coins and stamps as a member of the Philippine Numismatic and Antiquarian Society and the Philippine Philatelic Association. He was also a member of the Philippine Historical Association. Abad had 13 children by his first wife, Socorro Lugod. In December 1958, he married Leticia Palad, a native of Floridablanca, Pampanga. They had one son. On June 19, 1961, President Carlos P. Garcia presented Abad the Rizal Pro Patria Award in recognition of his invaluable contribution to national literature. Abad died on October 8, 1964.

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Norberto Romualdez1875 - 1941

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Norberto Romuáldez y López 

Norberto Romuáldez y López (June 6, 1875 - November 4, 1941) (often referred to as Norberto Romuáldez, Sr. to distinguish him from his son with the same name) was a Philippine writer, politician, jurist, and statesman. He was the first Lopez-Romuáldez to attain national prominence, and is deemed the "Father of the Law on the National Language".[1] He was the eldest son of Doña Trinidad Lopez- Romualdez, the Romualdez grand matriarch, and uncle ofImelda Romualdez Marcos, the daughter of his youngest brother Vicente Orestes Lopez Romualdez. Born to the prominent Lopez clan of Leyete (originally from Granada in the Andalusian region of Spain), he is the grand son of Spanish friar and silversmithDon Francisco Lopez. Romuáldez grew up in Leyte, where the Lopez family owned vast coconut and abaca plantations, and first achieved status as a writer in the Waray-Waray language. His first Waray zarzuela was An Pagtabang ni San Miguel (The Aid of Saint Michael). In 1908, Romuáldez wrote Bisayan Grammar and Notes on Bisayan Rhetoric and Poetic and Filipino Dialectology, a treatise on the grammar of the Waray-Waray language. The following year (1909) he founded the Sanghiran san Binisaya ha Samar ug Leyte (Academy of the Visayan Language of Samar and Leyte) for the purpose of promoting and intellectualizing Waray-Waray. Romuáldez was also fluent in other languages like Spanish, English, and Cebuano. Romuáldez served as an Associate Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court during the American Period. He was also a participant in the 1934-1935 Constitutional Convention which resulted in the 1935 Constitution for the Philippine Commonwealth.Romuáldez died in 1941 after an undisclosed illness.

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ALL OVER THE WORLDby Vicente Rivera, Jr.

ONE evening in August 1941, I came out of a late movie to a silent, cold night. I shivered a little as I stood for a moment in the narrow street, looking up at the distant sky, alive with stars. I stood there, letting the night wind seep through me, and listening. The street was empty, the houses on the street dim—with the kind of ghostly dimness that seems to embrace sleeping houses. I had always liked empty streets in the night; I had always stopped for a while in these streets listening for something I did not quite know what. Perhaps for low, soft cries that empty streets and sleeping houses seem to share in the night. I lived in an old, nearly crumbling apartment house just across the street from the moviehouse. From the street, I could see into the open courtyard, around which rooms for the tenants, mostly a whole family to a single room, were ranged. My room, like all the other rooms on the groundfloor, opened on this court. Three other boys, my cousins, shared the room with me. As I turned into the courtyard from the street, I noticed that the light over our study-table, which stood on the corridor outside our room, was still burning. Earlier in the evening after supper, I had taken out my books to study, but I went to a movie instead. I must have forgotten to turn off the light; apparently, the boys had forgotten, too.I went around the low screen that partitioned off our “study” and there was a girl reading at the table. We looked at each other, startled. I had never seen her before. She was about eleven years old, and she wore a faded blue dress. She had long, straight hair falling to her shoulders. She was reading my copy of Greek Myths. The eyes she had turned to me were wide, darkened a little by apprehension. For a long time neither of us said anything. She was a delicately pretty girl with a fine, smooth. pale olive skin that shone richly in the yellow light. Her nose was straight, small and finely molded. Her lips, full and red, were fixed and tense. And there was something else about her. Something lonely? something lost?“I know,” I said, “I like stories, too. I read anything good I find lying around. Have you been reading long?”“Yes,” she said. not looking at me now. She got up slowly, closing the book. “I’m sorry.”“Don’t you want to read anymore? I asked her, trying to smile, trying to make her feel that everything was all right.“No.” she said, “thank you.” “Oh, yes,” I said, picking up the book. “It’s late. You ought to be in bed. But, you can take this along.”She hesitated, hanging back, then shyly she took the book, brought it to her side. She looked down at her feet uncertain as to where to turn.“You live here?” I asked her.“Yes.”“What room?”She turned her face and nodded towards the far corner, across the courtyard, to a little room near the communal kitchen. It was the room occupied by the janitor: a small square room with no windows except for a transom above the door.“You live with Mang Lucio?”“He’s my uncle.”“How long have you been here? I haven’t seen you before, have I?”“I’ve always been here. I’ve seen you.”“Oh. Well, good night—your name?”

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“Maria.”“Good night, Maria.”She turned quickly, ran across the courtyard, straight to her room, and closed the door without looking back. I undressed, turned off the light and lay in bed dreaming of far-away things. I was twenty-one and had a job for the first time. The salary was not much and I lived in a house that was slowly coming apart, but life seemed good. And in the evening when the noise of living had died down and you lay safe in bed, you could dream of better times, look back and ahead, and find that life could be gentle—even with the hardness. And afterwards, when the night had grown colder, and suddenly you felt alone in the world, adrift, caught in a current of mystery that came in the hour between sleep and waking, the vaguely frightening loneliness only brought you closer to everything, to the walls and the shadows on the walls, to the other sleeping people in the room, to everything within and beyond this house, this street, this city, everywhere. I met Maria again one early evening, a week later, as I was coming home from the office. I saw her walking ahead of me, slowly, as if she could not be too careful, and with a kind of grownup poise that was somehow touching. But I did not know it was Maria until she stopped and I overtook her.She was wearing a white dress that had been old many months ago. She wore a pair of brown sneakers that had been white once. She had stopped to look at the posters of pictures advertised as “Coming” to our neighborhood theater.“Hello,” I said, trying to sound casual.She smiled at me and looked away quickly. She did not say anything nor did she step away. I felt her shyness, but there was no self-consciousness, none of the tenseness and restraint of the night we first met. I stood beside her, looked at the pictures tacked to a tilted board, and tried whistling a tune.She turned to go, hesitated, and looked at me full in the eyes. There was again that wide-eyed—and sad? —stare. I smiled, feeling a remote desire to comfort her, as if it would do any good, as if it was comfort she needed.“I’ll return your book now,” she said.“You’ve finished it?”“Yes.” We walked down the shadowed street. Magallanes Street in Intramuros, like all the other streets there, was not wide enough, hemmed in by old, mostly unpainted houses, clumsy and unlovely, even in the darkening light of the fading day.We went into the apartment house and I followed her across the court. I stood outside the door which she closed carefully after her. She came out almost immediately and put in my hands the book of Greek myths. She did not look at me as she stood straight and remote.“My name is Felix,” I said. She smiled suddenly. It was a little smile, almost an unfinished smile. But, somehow, it felt special, something given from way deep inside in sincere friendship.I walked away whistling. At the door of my room, I stopped and looked back. Maria was not in sight. Her door was firmly closed. August, 1941, was a warm month. The hangover of summer still permeated the air, specially in Intramuros. But, like some of the days of late summer, there were afternoons when the weather was soft and clear, the sky a watery green, with a shell-like quality to it that almost made you see through and beyond, so that, watching it made you lightheaded.I walked out of the office one day into just such an afternoon. The day had been full of grinding work—like all the other days past. I was tired. I walked slowly, towards the far side of

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the old city, where traffic was not heavy. On the street there were old trees, as old as the walls that enclosed the city. Half-way towards school, I changed my mind and headed for the gate that led out to Bonifacio Drive. I needed stiffer winds, wider skies. I needed all of the afternoon to myself.Maria was sitting on the first bench, as you went up the sloping drive that curved away from the western gate. She saw me before I saw her. When I looked her way, she was already smiling that half-smile of hers, which even so told you all the truth she knew, without your asking.“Hello,” I said. “It’s a small world.”“What?”“I said it’s nice running into you. Do you always come here?”“As often as I can. I go to many places.”“Doesn’t your uncle disapprove?”“No. He’s never around. Besides, he doesn’t mind anything.”“Where do you go?”“Oh, up on the walls. In the gardens up there, near Victoria gate. D’you know?”“I think so. What do you do up there?”“Sit down and—”“And what?”“Nothing. Just sit down.”She fell silent. Something seemed to come between us. She was suddenly far-away. It was like the first night again. I decided to change the subject.“Look,” I said, carefully, “where are your folks?”“You mean, my mother and father?”“Yes. And your brothers and sisters, if any.”“My mother and father are dead. My elder sister is married. She’s in the province. There isn’t anybody else.”“Did you grow up with your uncle?”“I think so.”We were silent again. Maria had answered my questions without embarrassment. almost without emotion, in a cool light voice that had no tone.“Are you in school, Maria?”“Yes.”“What grade?”“Six.”“How d’you like it?”“Oh, I like it.”“I know you like reading.” She had no comment. The afternoon had waned. The breeze from the sea had died down. The last lingering warmth of the sun was now edged with cold. The trees and buildings in the distance seemed to flounder in a red-gold mist. It was a time of day that never failed to carry an enchantment for me. Maria and I sat still together, caught in some spell that made the silence between us right, that made our being together on a bench in the boulevard, man and girl, stranger and stranger, a thing not to be wondered at, as natural and inevitable as the lengthening shadows before the setting sun.Other days came, and soon it was the season of the rain. The city grew dim and gray at the first onslaught of the monsoon. There were no more walks in the sun. I caught a cold.Maria and I had become friends now, though we saw each other infrequently. I became engrossed in my studies. You could not do anything else in a city caught in the rains.

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September came and went.In November, the sun broke through the now ever present clouds, and for three or four days we had bright clear weather. Then, my mind once again began flitting from my desk, to the walls outside the office, to the gardens on the walls and the benches under the trees in the boulevards. Once, while working on a particularly bad copy on the news desk, my mind scattered, the way it sometimes does and, coming together again, went back to that first meeting with Maria. And the remembrance came clear, coming into sharper focus—the electric light, the shadows around us, the stillness. And Maria, with her wide-eyed stare, the lost look in her eyes…  IN December, I had a little fever. On sick leave, I went home to the province. I stayed three days. I felt restless, as if I had strayed and lost contact with myself. I suppose you got that way from being sick,A pouring rain followed our train all the way back to Manila. Outside my window, the landscape was a series of dissolved hills and fields. What is it in the click of the wheels of a train that makes you feel gray inside? What is it in being sick, in lying abed that makes you feel you are awake in a dream, and that you are just an occurrence in the crying grief of streets and houses and people?In December, we had our first air-raid practice. I came home one night through darkened streets, peopled by shadows. There was a ragged look to everything, as if no one and nothing cared any more for appearances.I reached my room just as the siren shrilled. I undressed and got into my old clothes. It was dark, darker than the moment after moon-set. I went out on the corridor and sat in a chair. All around me were movements and voices. anonymous and hushed, even when they laughed.I sat still, afraid and cold.“Is that you. Felix?”“Yes. Maria.”She was standing beside my chair, close to the wall. Her voice was small and disembodied in the darkness. A chill went through me, She said nothing more for a long time.“I don’t like the darkness,” she said.“Oh, come now. When you sleep, you turn the lights off, don’t you?”“It’s not like this darkness,” she said, softly. “It’s all over the world.”We did not speak again until the lights went on. Then she was gone.The war happened not long after.At first, everything was unreal. It was like living on a motion picture screen, with yourself as actor and audience. But the sounds of bombs exploding were real enough, thudding dully against the unready ear. In Intramuros, the people left their homes the first night of the war. Many of them slept in the niches of the old walls the first time they heard the sirens scream in earnest. That evening, I returned home to find the apartment house empty. The janitor was there. My cousin who worked in the army was there. But the rest of the tenants were gone.I asked Mang Lucio, “Maria?” “She’s gone with your aunt to the walls.” he told me. “They will sleep there tonight.”My cousin told me that in the morning we would transfer to Singalong. There was a house available. The only reason he was staying, he said, was because they were unable to move our things. Tomorrow that would be taken care of immediately.“And you, Mang Lucio?”“I don’t know where I could go.”

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We ate canned pork and beans and bread. We slept on the floor, with the lights swathed in black cloth. The house creaked in the night and sent off hollow echoes. We slept uneasily.I woke up early. It was disquieting to wake up to stillness in that house which rang with children’s voices and laughter the whole day everyday. In the kitchen, there were sounds and smells of cooking.“Hello,” I said. It was Maria, frying rice. She turned from the stove and looked at me for a long time. Then, without a word, she turned back to her cooking.“Are you and your uncle going away?” I asked.“I don’t know.”“Did he not tell you?”“No.”“We’re moving to Singalong.”“Yes, I know.” “Well, anyway, I’ll come back tonight. Maybe this afternoon. We’ll not have to say goodbye till then.”She did not say anything. I finished washing and went back to my room. I dressed and went out.At noon, I went to Singalong to eat. All our things were there already, and the folks were busy putting the house in order. As soon as I finished lunch, I went back to the office. There were few vehicles about. Air-raid alerts were frequent. The brightness of the day seemed glaring. The faces of people were all pale and drawn.In the evening, I went back down the familiar street. I was stopped many times by air-raid volunteers. The house was dark. I walked back to the street. I stood for a long time before the house. Something did not want me to go away just yet. A light burst in my face. It was a volunteer.“Do you live here?”“I used to. Up to yesterday. I’m looking for the janitor.”“Why, did you leave something behind?”“Yes, I did. But I think I’ve lost it now.”“Well, you better get along, son. This place, the whole area. has been ordered evacuated. Nobody lives here anymore.”“Yes, I know,” I said. “Nobody.” Ω

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Analysis: All Over the World

Here we have two short stories related to World War II. One happens just before the war begins, the other after it ends. One was written recently, the other more than half a century ago. Both stories were written by people who went through the war, and both are only peripherally about the war.Vicente Rivera, Jr’s “All Over the World” is set in Intramuros, which was a place livable before WWII, turned slum area after the war, and is now livable again. A lonely man befriends a precocious young girl who loves to read books. The advent of the war separates them, as it did many many others from their own friends and relatives. It has a haunting quality that I find bittersweet.Hugh Aaron’s “Under the Mango Tree” happens after the war, in Pampanga, just as the Philippines was getting ready for independence. There is the usual exhilaration among people that comes after a dark period in their history, but hints of renewed social conflict is already in the air. For one brief moment Filipinos can dream of a new nation that accommodated all classes of people. Alas, we know now that it was not to happen. It is within this setting that the characters strive to find who their real selves are.After three years, a more mature Karen Pioquinto is back with a new poem. She is one of the many joys that makes an editor’s work fun. DURING the last couple of years, several developments came about in traditional outlets for Philippine literature. First, Philippine Graphic announced it would close its literary section. That left the disturbing prospect that one magazine, Philippines Free Press, would have a monopoly and exert an undue influence on Philippine literary style. The gods didn’t let it happen, though, because strangely enough, Philippine Graphic continued to publish literary works long after most writers thought it no longer had a literary section. Whether it was intermittently or continuously, I don’t know. (Remember, I see very few copies of Philippine magazines.) However, I am sure they did because they featured one of my short stories—in two parts at that—in the latter part of 2002, long after the announcement. Philippine Graphiceventually closed its literary section, however.Fortunately, Manila Times opened a literary section in its Sunday magazine even before Philippine Graphicclosed its section. I was lucky to have one of my stories featured there right after it opened. One of BPSS’s contributors sent me a copy of that particular issue.Well, guess what? Philippine Graphic’s literary section is back in business with Nick Joaquin back at the helm. I can confirm this because they used another of my short stories—in two parts again—a couple of months ago. It seems that habits and tradition are hard to get rid of.

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Gemino Abad

1939-

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Gemino Abad Biography

The poet and literary critic Gémino H. Abad was born on February 5, 1939 in Sta. Ana, Manila.  At present, he is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of thePhilippines. His current writing and research include “Upon Our Own Ground”, a two- volume historical anthology of short stories in English, 1956- 1972, with critical introduction; “Our Scene So Fair”, a book of critical essays on the poetry in English since 1905 to the mid- 50s, and; “Where No Words break”, a volume of his own poems.

His parents are the noted novelist, playwright and essayist in Sugbuanon and Spanish, Antonio M. Abad, who was at one time Chair of the Department of Spanish in UP, and Jesusa H. Abad, professor of Spanish in UP. He is married to Mercedes A. Rivera, with whom he has five children.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, magna cum laude, from UP on 1963, and has been teaching English literature and creative writing since then in the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature, even after his retirement in 2004. He earned his Master’s degree with honors, 1966, and Ph.D in English, at the University of Chicago under a Rockefeller Fellowship Grant. In 1993, he was appointed University Professor in Literature, the highest academic rank at the University of the Philippines.

In UP, he served as Secretary of the University and the Board of Regents from 1977- 1982; as Vice- President for Academic Affairs, 1987- 1990, and; as Director of Likhaan: the UP Creative Writing Center, 1995- 1998. He was the first holder of the Carlos P. Romulo Professional Chair in Literature from 1982- 1983, and received the UP Outstanding Faculty Award for 1985- 1986. He was also holder of the Irwin Chair for Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, 1993. He received the Chancellor’s Award as Best Office Administrator in 1998 for his management of the UP Creative Writing Center as its Director.

He was a Fellow at the Cambridge Seminar, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 1988; a Fellow in the International Writers Program, University of Iowa, 1990; a Visiting Professor at the Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1991; a Fellow at the Oxford Conference on Teaching Literature Overseas, Corpus Christi College, 1995, and; Exchange Professor in Literature at St. Norbert College Wisconsin, 1998, and at Singapore Management University, 2003; represented the Philippines in the 3rd “Mediterranea International Festival of Literature and the Arts” in Rome, July 2006.

Abad is also a member of the UP Writers Club and founding member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), which puts out the Caracoa (since 1982)- the only poetry journal in English in Asia. He has served as director and member of the teaching staff in numerous Writers Workshops in UP, Siliman/ Dumaguete, MSU- IIT, and San Carlos University/ Cornelio Gaigao Workshop. He is a judge in various literary contests such as the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, Graphic, Free Press, NVM Gonzales Fiction Awards, and Maningning Miclat Literary Awards. He is a speaker/ paper reader in various writers’ national conferences and various international conferences of scholars.

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He was a columnist in The Manila Chronicle, a weekly column called “Exchange”, with NVM Gonzales, Sylvia Ventura and Luning Bonifacio Ira; The Evening Paper, a weekly column “Coming through”, with NVM Gonzales and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo; Musa: The Philippine Literature Magazine, a monthly column called “Vates: Our Poets Speak”, and; Flip, a monthly column “Poet’s Clearing”.

He is cited in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992, as among “poets of note”. He is also included in the Encyclopedia of Post- Colonial Literatures in English, ed. Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly (London: Routledge, 1994) and the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (IX: Philippine Literature, 1994).

His awards include the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature: first prize for poetry in English, 1976 (The Space Between); second prize, 1980 (Counterclockwise); first prize, 1983 (The Outer Clearing), The CCP Award for Poetry: second prize, 1973 (In Another Light), Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for poetry, 1988 (Poems and Parables); for anthology, 1989 (Man of Earth), 1993 (A Native Clearing), 1999 (A Habit of Shores); for personal anthology, 2002 (A Makeshift Sun) and 2005 (In Ordinary Time), Asian Publishers Catholic Authors Award, 1990, Free press Literary Awards: third prize for the short story (Tarang), 1993; first prize for the short story (Introibo), 1997; first prize for the essay (A Day in One’s Life), 1997; second prize for the poem (A Description), 2000, Gawad Pambansang Alagad  ni Balagtas, 1996, for lifetime achievement in poetry and literary criticism, UP Alumni Association Professional Award in Literature, 1997, Ellen F. Fajardo Foundation grant for Excellence in teaching, 2000- 2001, Chancellor’s Award for Best Literary Work, 2002 (A Makeshift Sun), and Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan sa Larangan ng Panitikan, Lungsod ng Maynila, 2004.

Some of his poetry, fiction, critical essays and short stories are Fugitive Emphasis, State of Play, Orion’s Belt and Other Writings, Father and Daughter, Getting Real: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry and Who’s Afraid of Ching Dadufalza?

He edited books like The Likhaan, The Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction, An Edith Tempo Reader, 100 Love Poems: Philippine Love Poetry in English since 1905, Father Poems, Honoring Fathers: An International poetry Anthology, NCAA Ubod Project, The NVM Gonzales Awards Stories and Supreme Court Decisions as Literature. His edited textbooks are The Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English from 1900 to the Present, Frequently Asked Questions on Poetry, and Our People’s Story: Philippine Literature in English.

His syllabi-textbooks include Philippine Literature in English: Poetry, Fiction, and Drama; Greek and roman Literature, and; Introduction to the Writing of Poetry. His index is Index to Filipino Poetry in English, 1905 to 1950.  

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CARE OF LIGHTby Gemino H. Abad

As soon as it gets dark, I turn on the lightsin my old professor’s cottage, and the following

morning before office, turn them off again.With one key I open the iron gate, and with two,the main door. I turn the lamp on in her library,the vigil light for the Sacred Heart on the shelfjutting out a wall; then I switch on the singleelectric bulb outside the kitchen, and last, 

the red and green halogen like Christmas lightsbelow the front eaves.

         I follow strictly her instructions.She loves order in her life, and requires

a similar order in other people’s behavior – a discipline of mind sometimes terrorizedby the haps and hazards of thieving time.

She needs to be always in control,but she’s old now and frail, can hardly walk,

deaf and half-blind, and often ill, so that,having no choice, no housemaid able to endure

her sense for order, she had to leaveand stay at her sister’s place,

                                        finally dependent.In the half-darkness and mustiness now

of her deserted cottage, all its windows closed,her books and papers, once alive with breathof her impetuous quests, are filmed with duston her long working table, awaiting it seemed

her return.                   I think of how a time ago

she’d walk briskly to her early morning class,dressed in style to shame old maids; then callour names as though each had irreplaceable

post in her invincible order of things;and then, her shoulders hunched, teach

with a passion that, before the imperious galeof her questioning, drive us bleating

on the open plain of the world’s sharp winds.                   So; at the day’s end,

I’m her lamplighter on her silent asteroid,among books, papers, rubble of chalk.

I close the gate behind me as I stride out,making sure I hear the lock’s tiny click.

I follow strictly her instructions.Down her street the street lamps cast

my shadow ahead. Crickets in the busheswhirr according to their nature.

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In the same order, the sun too will risetomorrow, and I shall be back.

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A Question of Fidelityby Gemino H. Abad

"I KNOW, Filo I know," Paco told his imaginary self, "in a story it would be a cheap trick, and Nelson would surely deride it." But there it was! could he help it?--on the cab's front door was written, Great is your faithfulness. It caught him up as though it laid a mocking charge at his door, and as his heart tingled, he sensed that it was the last incident, entirely factual, which should illuminate the fiction of his past. But his own life story? "Ye gods!" it was farthest from his mind. And the last incident? why? The first day of the advertisers' conference had just ended and he was only waiting for Bianca at the balcony of Inday's candle shop, idly watching in Baguio's misty dusk the customers that came into the café below, when the cab drove in and stopped to let off someone. A pretty girl, her legs faintly luminous as she slid out, glanced up at him and hurried inside. It was the merest instant, lost at once. "How many such moments in a lifetime, ha Filo?" he gibed, but Filo only stared, wildly considering a moment's impulse… No, Paco didn't think the pretty girl resembled Bianca. Not at all.

Paco was creative director in the Asia-Pacific Ad World, Inc., and Bianca, his assistant, who took charge of the two biggest accounts with the company, Coca-Cola and Philip Morris. For quite a while now, whenever they had their coffee breaks and exchanged notes on the company's business dealings and enjoyed each other's bantering, he sometimes sensed a sweet yearning for her. She was young and alive, nice-smelling, pretty… But he would quickly repress it. "Ye gods, Filo!" he'd inwardly cry, "I'm past fifty and happily married. It's juvenile, your hankering after a lost youth, also called midlife crisis, haha! Bianca in her mid-twenties, could very well be my own daughter, and surely has not a few male friends, much younger, and not-unlikely, has a special affection for one."

In the hazy light from street and café Paco couldn't catch more of the cab's text as it drove away. It was surely from the Old Testament, the Psalms maybe, but surely too, this puzzling now was a distraction, a quick evasion. For some time he had wondered whether he could unravel to himself his own story. Then, perhaps, he might see into his future or, at least, the sort of person that he had become from which events still to happen must inexorably take their form. But what a strange notion, that if he were to contrive now his real life-story, just such a cab's message should happen just as it already has, as a twist to his past's fiction.

Paco smiled to himself. He was in fact, it seemed to him, always living his story, or that of his pathetic "other," Filo. Bianca had promised that she would join him at Inday's. He glanced at his watch, quarter to six. There were many things to talk over, they had agreed, but he wasn't eager to review them just now, he would as usual simply let things happen as they come. Filo would of course insist that he take control, but he knew Filo--at the last moment, he would draw back. No, certain things you just let happen, they take their natural course like the common cold. Sometimes, when you try to have it your way, things become a little perverse, as though they have a will of their own. The important thing is to avoid hurting anyone.

"Are you avoiding me, Paco?" Bianca had asked point-blank while they were having their usual coffee break in the office. "No, of course not, Bai," he had quickly denied. It was a lie, but what choice did he have? She had frowned but did not press. A simple denial was best, for explanations are like clouds, forming and dispersing, the words failing short, or worse,

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aghast to spell out the heart's agenda, embarrassed with its yearning items. There are simply no clear skies in human affairs, and so, how could he even begin to explain to Bianca?

Whenever he mentioned Bianca to his wife Agnes, usually over breakfast when they would relate some events the day before, he sensed that it agitated her although she never let on. An uneasy feeling would come over him, perhaps from the way Agnes looked, as though she had not heard anything, or as though on a sudden her mind were somewhere else, but her eyes would turn sad, as if a light there had been snuffed, and he would feel guilty and vexed at the same time. It would always make him vaguely apprehensive and irritable, her sad look, her silence, as though he had done her wrong, haunting him through his day at the office.

Agnes was the senior partner with four women friends in a law firm that they had put up. She often came home late, and after kissing him, looking up from his papers at his work table, she would quietly enter their teenage son Dylan's room and kiss him, already fast asleep, and later carry the laundry in her arms to the washing machine before she retired for the night. She called it a form of relaxation! She had a remarkable strength of character, managerial, down-to-earth, which often bared his pathetic inadequacy in practical matters, yet capable of gentleness, a rich warmth of affection and intense loyalty, but also to his secret discomfiture a fine, sometimes even caustic moral sense… Surely he had resented it at times,. finding no reasonable excuse, because he tended toward sloth and a happy indifference. Filo was poor refuge, just as well quite hid. O, he loved Agnes, and the future had often seemed bleak without her quiet affection, her cool efficiency…

What could be keeping Bianca? Paco lighted a cigarette. Maybe in a quarter or so, he could take a cab back to Pines Hotel to look for her. He leaned over the balcony and watched the small crowd below in the café's patio. A young man with unkempt hair swirling around his twin cowlicks, in faded jeans with a tear on the right knee, was sitting at one table, tuning his guitar and trying a few chords. A dark frail-looking girl sat close to him, indifferently watching the passersby on the street as she sipped at the straw into her bottle of Coke. The tip of her straw was stained a deep red… "What, Filo?" It was strange that Filo should be perturbed by the stain. "Maybe they're lovers, ha Filo?" he felt a twinge of envy. Maybe there was going to be a performance later, and would she be singing? Four guys were noisily talking and laughing over their bottles of beer and chicharon at another table, and rose as one with a loud cheer, "Rita!" as the pretty girl he was earlier looking at joined them.

A dèjá vu swept Paco to a familiar café, he had met Rita before! among other noisy customers, but as he looked closely at her, he was certain it had never happened. No, it was not possible, however Filo denied it. He looked again. Though the light from street and café struggled with the pervading dusk, Rita's face seemed to glow with a kind of companionable warmth. Just such bright almond eyes, too, and a full sensual mouth... Rita threw her head back and laughed, and Paco could hardly take his eyes off where the little delta between her breasts fairly glowed in the hazy light. Something snakelike too about her as she leaned over the table to touch familiarly an arm or push jestingly at one or the other of the flirtatious guys. "Like a snake, Filo?" however did he, Paco, get that impression? Filo sneered at Paco's recollection. He was only eighteen when he had gone up to Baguio for the first time and proposed to meet the woman caller at Star Café. She too had long dark hair and wore a tight dark red dress which showed her figure to advantage. No, she was not a Chinese mestiza like Rita, but she was not unattractive. Her name, she had told him over the phone, was Zita.

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His parents didn't know at the time that he was attending the YMCA Summer Youth Leadership Conference. It wasn't right, they would have said, to participate in a Protestant fellowship. He went ahead of his friends Nelson and Deomund from UP Los Baños to see the city for himself the day before, enjoy the scenery freely wandering around, even perhaps write ardent verses under the pine trees for Deomund's sister, Celine, without the distraction of endless debates with Nelson on what makes a poem.

At the bus station--was it somewhere near Tutuban? he couldn't quite recall just now--after a hurried lunch, he noticed that his Dangwa ticket bore his lucky number: 7490. Neither could he recall where Nelson had read that 4 was in Chinese mythology the number for Death, but it had always seemed to him a good omen. He sat almost at the edge of his seat during the entire trip because he had an old couple for seatmates, an enormously fat woman with a can of La Perla biscuits on her lap where she would dip from time to time for a nibble, and a small, sickly looking man, obviously her husband, who was quite glum but would sometimes mutter and whine to himself. To keep from failing or pressing against the glum old man whenever the bus made a sharp turn, he would grip hard the bar on the back of the opposite seat across the aisle which had become cluttered with luggage and boxes. He decided the old couple wouldn't be pleasant company for six hours, and pretended to be dozing most of the time while keeping his grip with an outstretched hand on his bar. The fat woman never offered him a biscuit during the entire trip.

"Isbo! Isbo!" the conductor cried before they went up Kennon Road. The bus stopped at a roadside where, as the cloud of dust settled, he could see dark naked boys cavorting like nimble goats over the rocks and diving into the clear waters of a mountain stream that glittered in the sun. A number of passengers, among them the old couple, went down to relieve themselves among the scraggly bushes. It was a painful sight, the fat woman with her husband in tow navigating the cluttered aisle, stepping carefully over the luggage and holding on to the seats or the other passengers, as they made their way to the door. Outside, in the soft wash of five o'clock sunlight, the glum old man had to cling to the fat woman's neck with his left arm as he stood shaking, waited, and then blessed the grass and scatter of shards on the ground.

As the bus climbed the zigzag along the mountain slopes, Paco's ears seemed suddenly to have fallen deaf and then softly popped and filled again with the bus engine's roar and the passengers' incessant chatter. He felt buoyant and free, eagerly awaiting his first sight of Baguio as pine trees raced past the fat woman's dozing head at the window and flushed the cool mountain air with their fresh invigorating scent. His eye caught a waterfall dropping gracefully like a long, serene sheet of shimmering lace down a cliff crowded with desperate trees and shrubs. How he wished, as the sight vanished around a bend, he could get off there awhile to stretch his cramped legs and gaze at the silent marvel of clear mountain water leaping out of the sky! Was it perhaps an American colonial officer who called it Bridal Veil the first time that he climbed up to the site of Baguio from camp to camp on a relay of horses? Who was the bride he thought of--perhaps an Igorot maid, a village chief's peace offering… Paco dismissed his fantasy. Deomund would surely scoff: "So the past romanticizes itself to clear its conscience." When Paco saw the gigantic lion's head carved out of the rock over a cliff's edge, he knew they would he in Baguio soon enough.

They drove past villas and pretty cottages along a ridge amid their lush flowering gardens, a roadside café, a sprawling bungalow displaying its rich stores of woodcraft and woven things--Ah, here at last, thought Paco, the summer capital of government and the rich, the

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Shangri-La of honeymoons. The bus chugged tiredly on a narrow dirt road to its station, on either side a clutter of shanties and ramshackle stores, and ragged children playing among the litter of the poor--a squatter colony among pine trees vanishing down a ravine. Through the tall pines like towers lost in the gathering shadows, Paco glimpsed the dull gold-brown sheen of dome and spires, the Baguio Cathedral in the last light of day.

At the bus station, he asked for directions to Session Road from a boy vendor of strawberries in little rattan baskets. A cab driver offered to take him to Patria Inn, but no, he preferred to walk the distance, breathe the cool pine-scented air, and jostle with the crowd strolling pell-mell down Session Road as the city throbbed to life in the neon flood and blare of music and hubbub of trade and fellowship. He was in no hurry to get to his inn. His luggage was light, which he slung over his shoulder, and despite the long trip, he felt energized by the festive tumult around him. Neither was he hungry; perhaps he might just have a snack before midnight in one of those bars that he had passed. Never had he felt freer, it was as though he had all of life and the world to enjoy at leisure. He was glad when, at the inn, he was given a room that looked out on an empty lot, filled with the debris of a wrecked building but gazing out on Session Road so that, at his window, he caught still the strains of music from the bars and felt the quiet, undemanding companionship of strangers in the streaming crowd.

The phone suddenly rang, startling him. He hadn't told either Deomund or Nelson about Patria Inn. "Hello?" Perhaps someone had dialed the wrong number. "Yes?" A tinny rasp at the other end. "Who is it?" Standing by the large bed, he held the telephone set absently over the lamp at a low side table. "You don't know me," a woman's soft voice, "if you're lonely, I'm at Star Café…" Is it right to just--hang up' now? "Hello?" pretending he didn't quite hear. But she probably sensed his confusion. "Will you come?" So frank and direct a dare, and is he able? A listening silence like a spell. Who is she? "It's okay, I just got in…" at once he felt stupid. "I…" Yes, why shouldn't he just hang up, 'Sorry, ma'am'--a cruel touch! "Oh," a sigh, or so he imagined, "I'll wait, take your time." What lame excuse now? he'd be a silly "country bumpkin," in Nelson's words. "Alright," pretending casualness, a cool indifference. "I'll see you there." He heard a low nervous giggle, as to say perhaps how easily she had won! "Oh, how nice… I like your voice. Call me Zita." She twitters, and he is caught! but she cannot see, he had better have a hold on himself. "I'm Filo," the first name that came to mind "how will I know it's you, Zita?" Ah, what pretense, even the way he made his voice deep and resonant; he felt a tremor of adventurous daring. What will happen now? he had crossed over. "I'm in a red mini, with a white handbag," Zita's voice caught on a light mischievous note, "waiting at the counter by the cashier. Will you really come, Filo?" She was confidently teasing. "Yes," he was surer of himself now, "I'll have a dark-leather jacket on, and a blue cap," both which he didn't have, but he had already formed a plan.

She was indeed sitting at the counter on a high stool near the cashier, her long shapely legs catching the eye at once, and a glass of Coke beside her small white handbag. He dallied just outside Star Café to buy the Manila Times from an old woman vendor before he took a corner table at the foot of a stair where he took cover in the editorial page. Ostensibly reading--"Oh, just coffee, black ha," to the Chinese waiter who hovered above the page--he watched Zita cross her legs and lean her head a little on her left hand which she had placed behind her ear, her long dark hair flowing to the small of her back. She was not unattractive, just about his age, too, and she cut a nice sensuous figure in her red mini. He was glad he hadn't said, "Oh, so sorry, ma'am" and hung up. Something easy and nimble too about her movement as, she reached for her bag and took out a little mirror where she checked her

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face, frowning a little. This is for real, Filo, he thought, he wasn't imagining a temptress in a garden. Perhaps Zita earns her college tuition from tourists and vacationers. But now, what? Zita looked quickly around as she put back the mirror into her bag, then scanned three, four customers as they went in from the crowd of passersby and vendors on the pavement just outside Star Café. She straightened up, looked briefly in his direction where he slid between the movie pages and reached for his cup of coffee. For a split second there, did not her glance catch his eye, his solitariness suddenly suspect, as his hand froze at his cup? She must already have paid her bill, or perhaps, she was a favored customer at the café; pushing aside her empty glass, she spoke to the cashier, slid gracefully from her high stool at the counter, and left him stranded, somehow disconsolate, amid all the movies "Now Showing."

His eyes followed Zita's dark red form and quickly lost her in the crowd. But Filo still pursued her, calling her name. How he filled Paco with distaste. The milling crowd on Session Road suddenly seemed cheerless and indifferent. Passing by a bar called Melody, he thought a snack would feel like gravel in his mouth. Zita? probably his own fiction. Couldn't he just have walked casually up to her, confidently touch her arm on the counter, say "I'm Filo"… Now she was only an imaginary garden, and Filo the only live toad there, he could croak all night! He went up to his room and stripped to mock Filo in the bathroom mirror. Filo only hovers at the edge of critical moments, but does not live. At heart perhaps, give him breath and space for action, a schemer, and like all schemers, slinks away as the moment rises to its accomplishment. Ah, he was thoroughly punished for his empty daring.

"O, Paco, how long were you waiting?" He started at Bianca's cheery voice as she tapped lightly his elbow on the balcony's railing. She looked pretty and elegant in her plaid skirt, sky blue blouse, and a silken scarf around her throat. Paco was glad he hadn't gone back to the hotel to look for her. She always seemed to bring exhilaration to his accustomed solitude where Filo, he imagined, would just sulk in a shallow pond, his dreams awash in lichen. It was what drew him to her, not simply that hey enjoyed their imagination together in creating images and texts for their clients, it always seemed as though they were opening up worlds where they could be quite free, basking in their fantastic light; no, not only the free rein to their imagination, but her vitality, which seemed to sharpen a sad knowledge, long denied, that he had missed those tricky and delicious moments with women in his youth's dry and desolate solitariness; Bianca's was a kind of wild electric vibrancy which often expressed itself in youthful mischief, when she'd slice into his seriousness with some witty gibe or even play a trick or two on his projects, deliberately confounding the mathematics in some corner of the budget (but she always found a clever way for him to notice the absurd error).

"I'm so sorry, Paco, I had to help the girls run photocopies…" "It's okay, Bai, I was just watching Rita." "Rita?" Bianca's eyes squinted with mock envy. "It's a secret." He wanted to see surprise on her face. "Oh… you were dreaming!" she jeered blithely. "Look there… but keep your voice down. There, with those boisterous crooks. She's very pretty, no?" "So… you were dreaming." She looked at him, smiling, and he laughed. It was so characteristic of Bianca, scoring at once and taking charge, while he let things be, considering most as indifferent, and content to be left alone or merely jest and banter. "O, but I was also thinking, how do you steal an image from that scene for a Coca-Cola commercial?" "Right," she taunted, "how do you rouse a cliché?" "Maybe you'd like to look around in the shop?" "No, let's go somewhere else." "Neutron's?" Bianca nodded. "The evening's so cool, Paco, let's enjoy it and walk."

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They took the spiral stairs down to the café. As they passed Rita's table, Bianca glanced at her, the way a woman swiftly appraises another, it always mystified Paco why women seem instinctively driven to it. As they rounded a corner of the street, she asked, "Did you just invent that name for her?" "No, I heard those guys call her Rita," "She's pretty," she concluded, "with a mole on her lip which makes her a chatterbox." Paco couldn't help but laugh, "Such a serious charge, Bai!"

As they turned another corner, they could see through the dark cascade of pine trees down a winding street, dimly lighted Burnham Park and its small glimmering lake, now quite deserted. Neutron's was a private cozy café on a hill that overlooked it. Only a few customers were quietly conversing at small round tables. Seeming to flow and tingle like a brook in air were soft strains played by a pianist behind a trellis of flowering plants. They took a table in an alcove and ordered drinks, creme de menthe for Bianca and vodka tonic for himself.

"Well, you start it, Bai," as they waited for their drinks, "you said we have things to talk over." "Okay," fingering her scarf around her throat, "you just seem a little distant these days. Is there something… wrong?" "Really?" but Paco knew it was coming, Bianca was always forthright, "it may just be something that worries me… in the family, you know." He lighted a cigarette. Bianca seemed to study him a while. "Dylan is asthmatic. But we've been to an acupuncturist, I think it'll cure the kid."

Paco considered his white lie. It would be indelicate to involve Agnes; besides, his impression of her odd silences on Bianca might really be quite spurious. He remembered Dylan's first attack of asthma a month back. The poor kid barged crying into their bedroom, breathing heavily. "It's alright, son," he tried to comfort him as he got out of bed and placed his arm around his son's shoulder, "you can sleep with us"--as Dylan used to when he was little. But he felt helpless before his son's anguish and could only wish it were his own affliction. Agnes went to the medicine cabinet and set up the respirator. She took off Dylan's shirt and rubbed some ointment on his chest as he lay in bed, gasping for breath. Through all that, leaning on the headboard, he kept gently tapping his son's shoulder as to tame his drowning, and as he watched mother and son, he felt a wave of tenderness toward Agnes…

"Acupuncture?" Bianca broke into his thoughts. "Yes," he pulled himself up, "Dr. Jesus Santiago, he's getting to be quite famous. He trained in China, I'm told, after Harvard medical school." "I sure hope, Paco, your son gets well soon. Can acupuncture treat insomnia, do you think?" "O, I should think so, but I'll ask next time we visit."

They fell silent awhile as a waitress in a light green uniform came with their drinks. She looked at Paco with a querying smile, Would that be all? and he waved her away, "Just ice water, please, and an ashtray, ha."

He looked earnestly at Bianca. "I think I need to be sure about something." "What?" teasing. "Does it bother you, Bai, when people talk, I mean, seeing how were often together, they'd be gossiping soon enough." "O, I would just ignore it, gossips are so empty-headed." "Trouble is," swirling the ice in his drink, "they don't know how else to fill up." "Too bad," shaking her head. "Well, as for me, I'd actually be pleased," said Paco, chuckling and looking slyly at her. "I think it would sort of improve my reputation." "Meaning?" her eyes lighted up mocking. "That there's danger in my character," Paco pursued quizzically, but half-serious, "not all milk of kindness, you know; it has a dark side." "So has everyone, but then," laughing, "as to that sleazy fame you want, you'd be using me." "Gads, I thought you said you wouldn't

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mind the whole town talking." "Now I do, because--why do you want a double?" "The dark side needs light." "Paco, you're being melodramatic. Are you writing a story?"

She was close. Filo, it occurred to him, was not quite man at his best--Paco smiled over his drink--no, yet deeper than he knew himself, with quite a pagan notion of sexuality. If Eve, he'd darkly say, were the first woman, then woman is life's very source, and man must connect with her or be less than human; man is the parasite, drawing his vigor, his machismo, from that source, her sex. Gads! how Filo's silly notions carry him away. He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.

"Am I writing a: story?" he echoed. "Actually, at lnday's, I was thinking that." On a sudden he remembered the near fatal accident with Agnes two weeks back that he had told Bianca about, and a strange intuition swept through his mind, a sense that for one deeply troubled and in denial, something just happens or erupts as though to express the unnamed distress. But how really stupid of him then! as their old Ford stalled on a slope along Krus na Ligas on their way to a reunion of friends, how could he have let go of the handbrake!

"Did you write stories before, Paco?" "No… I only recalled just now that near accident with our car." "Ah, that was terrible…" Bianca waved her hand as though to ward off an imminent tragedy.

But Paco couldn't shake off his memory. It wasn't so much the terror of that moment that shook him, but an immense feeling afterwards of sadness, as though for the first time in his life he knew emptiness if he should lose Agnes. But what stark mindlessness! When their Ford stalled, he had put the hand brake on, gone out of the car, and walked to a mechanic's shop they had just passed. What luck, he had told himself, for he knew little about cars, and Agnes would sometimes reprove him for not reading the car's manual. The mechanic told him to release the hand brake, or so he thought he heard, and he did like an idiot! opened the car door as he stood on the street and released the brake. Of course the car slid down, rolling backward without direction, and desperately trying to seize it by its side, he fell on the road where he barely had time and space to duck as the open door swung past his head. He picked himself up and scurried after the runaway car, unmindful of vehicles driving past up and down on either side of the slope. All this time Agnes froze on the front seat, she told him afterwards that she closed her eyes when she saw a truck down the slope, and thought he would surely go under its wheels.

"Hello?" Bianca shook his hand. "Oh, sorry, Bai… I got distracted." The same feeling swept through him, a great inexplicable sadness, sweet to the soul as it suffered the sudden rush of memory and in a flash seemed to have at last fathomed a great mystery. Oh, a tired truism. it certainly is, how each day's familiarity blinds one, and the easy companionship devours the ardor of feeling, and one takes the affection freely given, and takes it, like the air one breathes without having to take thought. Filo could be cynical about all that, and stand back and jeer, but right now, now, as he remembered how the Ford caught on a tree stump where it would have plunged into the squatter's shanties across the shallow ditch, the sudden tide of sadness was suffering almost more than he could bear so that his tears seemed to well up where he stood shamed upon a crumbling strand of his life's own time.

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"Paco… is anything wrong? You look…" Bianca gently pressed his hand. "It's alright, I…" Maybe this vodka, suggested itself; no, he must not lie again. He felt strangely pure with the sudden resolve, a new wholeness seemed to surge through him. How could he in his heart return to Agnes if he didn't face up his feeling for Bianca, make a clean breast of it, and let go? Now was the moment he had sensed at Inday's candle shop. "Have I told you about Zita?" "You mean Rita?" "No… it was my first time in Baguio…" "Ah, yes, that woman who called you at Patria Inn, you played a heartless trick on her!" "I was only eighteen, and I think frightened. Nothing really happened there, but maybe it struck me then… about sex and women, you know." Ah, there was no help for Filo now, so daring in dream, who wouldn't think of jumping like Basho's frog! "What?" she looked mockingly at him. "There's that need… maybe we guys joke no end about it to sort of make light of it." Bianca shook her head, smiling. "Oh, you're just thinking it, Paco, intellectualizing it. It's the normal thing, but," laughing softly, "it's just to start things." He laughed with her, but the moment had come, although he had a vague sense of its rashness. "I meant to tell you, Bai… I'm quite drawn to you, but…" But it isn't right, oh, he shouldn't have so foolishly blurted, what need to be so honest?

Bianca looked startled, and the mocking glint in her eyes blinked out. "I know, Bai, it's crazy." She was silent a long time. "But if the feeling is honest?" It was almost a whisper. "Oh, it's honest, Bianca," was all he could say as he stared at his drink. Couldn't he have found another way without hurt to be open and plain? He felt oppressed by a feeling that he had transgressed a silence between them where their light heartedness with one another had seemed perfectly natural.

"Paco," Bianca placed her hand gently on his. She sounded distant and looked beautiful and sad and inaccessible. I'm sorry, Bai, it's crazy of me, let it go, he wanted to say. "Maybe, Paco, it's really just Zita--like you have to make it up to her." She let her hand stay on his.

Was she just saying it? But, Yes, he thought bitterly, it might be Zita, for she had become a creature of his disappointed memory; but also, No, for it was rather with having to be honest with Bianca, by a hurtful bridge of poor words, that he had crossed over a darkness. He looked at her as though across a great distance, "You may be right, Bai…" he said, and pressed her hand. What words more? I'm sorry, Bai… anything more would seem to mock the silence that he had in foolhardiness transgressed. She smiled at him and released his hand.

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HOW OUR TOWNS DROWNby Gemino H. Abad

How in the downpour our towns drown,

downstream of doom to sea we are returned,

houses and pigs in ceaseless procession

as skies boom and fall thundering spears

to beat down all curses and tears to tide -

among seaweed and driftwood and water hyacinths,

prayer-wreaths for the dead and the drowned,

downstream of doom to sea we are returned.

Tottering over manholes, shivering in the blast

of a blind monsoon, its hollow howl

the rolling dreariness of our emptied hills,

our feet doubt their ground where streets

vanish in the gorge of swill and slime -

to flood at last we are flotsam and scum,

houses and pigs in ceaseless procession.

And rushing past our brethren, those lovelorn

cats and cockroaches, amid floating roofs,

lumbering cadavers of cherished scrap,

our naked brats scamper and gambol

over their scavenged loot of murky things,

tires and handbags and bottles and shoes,

as skies boom and fall thundering spears

on Cherry Hill slumping down its slope,

and shoveling homes in one boulder swoop

- landfill of families in moaning mud!

so sudden, their screams no echoes bear,

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abducted to questioning rage of memory

by what “state of calamity” or “act of God”

to beat down all curses and tears to tide.

Antipolo to Pangasinan the earth rivers

and shoves down Pinatubo’s renegade ooze

to our paddies swelling to ocean of muck

and fish ponds collapsing to swamp -

for bridges are down, and mountains too far,

to flee and shelter from the water’s gore

among seaweed and driftwood and water hyacinths,

what word, what route? What water world

for breathing space, the floors of our dreams

but shiver their fittings and leak their gloom.

Clutch of seaweed for hair,

driftwood for limbs, hyacinths for a cloak,

what new indigene, only survivor to offer

prayer-wreaths for the dead and the drowned?

Requiescat in pace, … vitam aeternam,

so cradle the infant, swaddled in rubble grime,

just now excavated and no mother to hush

its lost wail, no father, no sibling -

surely now their wreck is deaf to cranes

or fingers digging, to what end any change

how in the downpour our towns drown.

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Day and Night, from Father and Daughter, 1996

During the day I am divided

and eaten. There are pieces of me

which are snatched by common needs,

devoured by strange hungers.

I am dispersed,

and myself I do not know.

I become the world’s property,

of those whose words hurt and those

whose silence borrows speech from me.

My own path may have other aims,

but they wander into other people’s dreams,

and sometimes, they cross frontiers

where skies heave like mountains

being born.

Given everywhere and taking all,

I am purely spent -

both gifts and their bright wrappings

set aside and forgotten.

Then at night my dream gathers

my pieces like minnows in a stream,

and I am returned to myself

where my words sleep and cannot shape

thoughts to unravel me.

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Jose Claudio Guerrero

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Jose Claudio Guerrero

A painter of abstraction, Jose Guerrero was born in Granada, Spain but spent most of his career in New York City where he was an active easel painter and from 1962 to 1965 was a teacher at the New School of Social Research. From 1940 to 1944, he studied at the Escuela Superior Bellas Artes San Fernando in Madrid, Spain and then spent two years enrolled in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Among his exhibition venues were the Whitney Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Guggenheim Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Source: Peter Hastings

Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art

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ESSENCEby Jose Claudio B. Guerrero

WE had just finished lunch in a small café along Katipunan Road. Two cups of steamy brew enveloped our table in a delicious aroma.

"So where did you meet?" I asked my friend Patrick as he put down his coffee cup.

"In the Faculty Center in UP."

"Again? How come you meet a lot of guys there? I'm always there and nothing ever happens."

Patrick pointed to his face and smiled.

"Che!" I replied laughing. But I knew that it was true. Patrick was not really that good looking, but he had this sexy air about him. And he had fair skin which is, for most Filipinos, a prerequisite for beauty. I looked at the mirror behind him and saw my dark, emaciated reflection.

"So anyway, I was washing my face in the ground floor washroom when in comes this really cute guy. I've seen him on campus a few times before. So anyway, he goes and takes a leak," Patrick paused. "You know those FC urinals, right?"

I nodded. "No partitions."

Patrick took another sip from his cup and continued. "So anyway, this guy sees me checking him out. To my surprise, he turns to me, giving me full view of him in all his glory and smiles. I smile back. And," Patrick took a deep breath, "the rest is for me alone to know." He ended by dabbing the sides of his napkin to his mouth.

I knew pressing Patrick for more details would shut him up just like that so I let it pass. I could wheedle out all the details later. "So what's his name?"

"Carlo."

I raised an eyebrow and gave Patrick my you've-got-to-be-kidding look. He laughed and nodded in agreement.

"Yes it's another Carlo. It's always Carlo, or Paolo, or Mike, or Jay--"

"So what name did you use?" I asked, cutting him short.

"My favorite, Paolo." We both laughed. "Enough of me. Tell me about yourself. It's been what, a month since we've talked?"

"More like three weeks," I answered as I motioned to a waiter for the cake menu.

"Oh no. You're ordering cake."

"Why?"

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"You order cake when you're depressed."

"No I don't. And anyway, I'm not depressed this time." The waiter arrived with the cake menu. After giving our orders, Patrick continued pressing me for news.

"I told you, I lead a boring life."

"I'm sure," answered Patrick mischievously. "So how's your Chinese boyfriend?"

Patrick's question caught me off-guard as I sipped from my cup. I snorted and felt coffee go up my nose. We both started laughing. "He's not Chinese," I answered when I had recovered. "He's Korean. And he's not my boyfriend, excuse me. I'm his tutor."

"I'm sure," said Patrick needling me. "And what are you tutoring him in?"

"English."

"I'm sure. Oh good, here's the cake."

As I dug my fork into my cake's rich cream cheese, I happened to look at the mirror and saw the café doors open. A dumpy, fair-skinned guy walked in. "Oh my God." I froze.

Patrick saw the expression on my face and looked around for what caused it. Finding it, he said, "Don't tell me you're still crazy over Mark."

"No I'm not. It's just that, well…"

"Well what?" asked Patrick, his eyes suddenly alive with curiosity.

"It's…you know," I answered. My eyes told him the rest.

"No," he answered not wanting to believe it.

I smiled.

"When?"

"Two weeks ago."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"You're always busy."

"Well I'm not busy anymore. Tell me everything." Patrick leaned over to me forgetting all about his cake. "It's not everyday your best friend loses his virginity."

"It happened two weeks ago. Our teacher dismissed us early so I was walking in the AS parking lot looking for my driver. It was already dark and only a few cars were left. Well, one of the cars was his. He smiled at me and asked me what time it was," I paused and took a bite from my cake.

"And?"

"And what happened next is for me alone to know." I replied mimicking him.

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"Fuck. Don't do this to me. Tell me. I have to know. I won't be able to sleep," Patrick begged. Noticing his unused fork, he grabbed it. "Tell me or I'll stab you with this." Just then Mark passed so he hurriedly lowered his fork. "He looks conscious. Maybe he suspects you've told me."

I just smiled.

"I know some guys who are like that. Once something has happened between you, they suddenly feel awkward when you're around. Eventually you end up avoiding each other." Patrick studied his cake for a while then started eating. After some time he spoke up. "I'm so happy for you," he said smiling as he grabbed my hand and shook it warmly. "I remember all those times we sat here eating cake and talking about your to-die-for classmate Mark. Mark and his cologne, Mark and his new cologne, Mark and his crew cut, Mark and his burnt-out cigarette butt." He considered for a moment and then said, "Boy, am I glad those days are over." He laughed. I smiled.

"Is it really true that you took puffs from his cigarette butt?"

My ears went red and I nodded. "Whatever he touches, he leaves an essence. When I take a puff from his cigarette butt, our essences meld. We become one," I hastened to explain. "It's like we've shared something. Like a bond."

Patrick gave me a pitying look. "At least you don't have to do that anymore."

I smiled and mashed the blueberries on my plate.

We finished our cakes as we updated each other with what has happened to our high school barkada. As we waited for our change, Mark stood up to leave and finally noticed us. He smiled and went out. Patrick pinched me as I smiled back, my ears burning.

PATRICK dropped me off at the Faculty Center after lunch and rushed to the theater for rehearsal. Having thirty minutes to waste before my next class, I decided to go to the FC washroom and tidy up.

The faint scent of detergent, cigarette smoke, and stale urine greeted me as I opened the door. As I expected, the washroom was deserted. I stood in front of the mirror and took out tissue from my bag. As I dabbed moistened tissue on my face, the washroom door opened and a woody cologne scent wafted in.

It was Mark. He went straight to the urinals. I pretended not to notice him. When he finished peeing, he joined me by the mirror, washed his hands, and then straightened his shirt collar. As he looked at his reflection, he saw me watching him and smiled, "It's you again." I smiled back and offered him a tissue. He declined and left.

When the door closed, I hurried to the urinal. I unbuttoned my fly and peed. I looked down and watched my pale yellow fluid join his, a bit darker and frothy against the white porcelain. As I watched the fluids mix, their colors getting more and more difficult to distinguish until finally no difference could be seen, a warm pleasurable sensation from within me slowly surged, growing more and more powerful, until finally shudders of ecstasy racked my still untouched body.

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Li Po701-762

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Li Po ( Li Bai)

Li Bai's birthplace is Chu, Kazakhstan. Another candidate is Suiye in Central Asia (near modern-day Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan). However his family had originally dwelt in what is now southeastern Gansu , and later moved to Jiangyou, near modern Chengdu in Sichuan province, when he was five years old. At the age of ten, his formal education started. Among various schools of classical Chinese philosophies, Taoism was the deepest influence, as demonstrated by his compositions. In 720, he was interviewed by Governor Su Ting, who considered him a genius. Though he expressed the wish to become an official, he could not be bothered to sit for the Chinese civil service examination. Perhaps he considered taking the examination below his dignity. Instead,

beginning at age twenty-five, he travelled around China, enjoying liquor and leading a carefree life: very much contrary to the prevailing ideas of a proper Confucian gentleman. His personality fascinated the aristocrats and common people alike, and he was introduced to the Emperor Xuanzong around 742. 

In 725, when he was twenty-five years old, Li Bai sailed down the Yangtze River all the way to Weiyang (Yangzhou) and Jinling (Nanjing). During the first year of his trip, he met celebrities and gave away much of his wealth to needy friends. He then turned back to central southern China, met Xu Yushi, the retired prime minister, married his daughter, and settled down in Anlu, Hubei. 

In 730, Li Bai stayed in the Zhongnan Mountain near the capital Chang'an (Xi'an), and tried but failed to secure a position. He sailed down the Yellow River, stopped by Luoyang, and visited Taiyuan before going home. 

In 740, he moved to Shangdong. In 742, he traveled to Zhejiang and befriended a Taoist priest. The same year, he traveled with his friend to the capital. Poet He Zhizhang called Li Bai "the god dismissed from the Heaven" after their initial meeting, and thus the epithet of "the Poem-God". Consequently, he was interviewed by the emperor (Li Longji, but commonly known by his posthumous title Xuanzong), who personally prepared soup for him, and gave him a post at the Hanlin Academy, which served to provide scholarly expertise and poetry for the Emperor. When the emperor ordered Li Bai to the palace, he was drunk, but he improvised on the spot and produced fascinating love poems alluding to the romance between the emperor and Yang Guifei, the favorite concubine. Once, Li Bai was drunk and asked Gao Lishi, the most powerful eunuch in the palace, to take off his boots in front of the emperor. Gao was offended and managed to persuade Yang Guifei to stop the emperor from naming Li Bai for a prominent position. Li Bai gave up hope thereafter and resigned from the academy. 

Thereafter he wandered throughout China for the rest of his life. He met Du Fu in the autumn of 744, and again the following year. These were the only occasions on which they met, but the friendship remained particularly important for the starstruck Du Fu (a dozen of his poems to or about Li Bai survive, compared to only one by Li Bai to Du Fu). At the time of the An Lushan Rebellion he became involved in a subsidiary revolt against the Emperor, although the extent to which this was voluntary is unclear. The failure of the rebellion resulted

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in his exile to Yelang. He was pardoned before the exile journey was complete. 

Finally, Daizong named Li Bai the Registrar of the Left Commandant's office in 762. When the imperial edict arrived in Dangtu, Anhui, Li Bai was already dead. According to legend, he was drowned attempting to embrace the moon's reflection in a river. In reality, Li Bai committed suicide as evidenced by his farewell poem.

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Drinking Aloneby Li Po

I take my wine jug out among the flowersto drink alone, without friends.

I raise my cup to entice the moon.That, and my shadow, makes us three.

But the moon doesn't drink,and my shadow silently follows.

I will travel with moon and shadow,happy to the end of spring.

When I sing, the moon dances.When I dance, my shadow dances, too.

We share life’s joys when sober.Drunk, each goes a separate way.Constant friends, although we wander,we'll meet again in the Milky Way.

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Poetry analysis: Drinking Alone by Li Po

“Drinking Alone with The Moon” encompasses several of the characteristics that define Li Po. As a devotee to nature, wine, solitude and humor, Li Po reveals much of himself in this poem. Thus the importance of this poem to understanding his other works and ancient Taoism is apparent.

“From a pot of wine among the flowersI drank alone. There was no one with me -“

This statement I would take very literally. This poem shows a progression from realistic into the imaginative and from sober state to drunk. The flow of this poem tells more of a story than just setting and looking at the moon while drinking wine. Notice the slight change in tone of the next lines:

“Till raising my cup, I ask the bright moonTo bring me my shadow and make us three.”

Now we start to see Li Po’s imaginative wit and the involvement of the wine in this scheme. He does not seem to be drunk yet, but he certainly expects to be, in fact drunkenness is his goal. His playful treatment of nature at this point is unmistakable. He asks the moon to give him his shadow? This is an unrealistic request, but as a poet I must appreciate the metaphor and the use of words. This is what makes Li Po one of the most celebrated poets of Chinese history. Does he expect this of the moon? Of course not, he is insinuating the moon as a companion and partner in this quest for the surreal. For Li Po this would be perfectly natural as all things are mutual in Taoism.

“Alas, the moon was unable to drinkAnd my shadow tagged me vacantly;”

These lines punctuate the inference I have made in the previous paragraph. He jokingly offers the moon a drink which it cannot take. When the shadow doesn’t show Li Po doesn’t seem to say it is not existent. Instead, it seems to have “tagged” him, which means that it is attaching itself to him but is unseen. What wonderful wit and communal spirit. The elements of nature are not seen as without spirit in East Asian cultures, especially in ancient culture.

“But still for a while I had these friends”

The three friends here refer to Li Po, the moon, and his shadow.  I think by this time Li Po is starting to feel tipsy at the very least. Wine did have a very special place in Li Po’s life and writing. He often depended on it to enhance his poetry.

“To cheer me through the end of spring....”

This line brings us back to his solitude. He must have expected that he would remain alone until the end of spring. He expects to remain cheerful as a part of the “three friends.” This indicates that he is able to entertain himself in solitude. He lets his imagination go the more inebriated he becomes. This is indicated in the following lines.

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I will make note of the “…” after the word spring. It may be that a portion of the poem is missing here and the translator wanted to indicate this. It may simply be they felt the need to indicate something not complete. Li Po wrote other poems by the same title similar to this. My guess is that he was probably developing the same poem, but in the time since his death, it may be difficult to know which meant to be the finished product.

“I sang. The moon encouraged meI danced. My shadow tumbled after.”

I love the picture this presents. We have to imagine a drunk dancing and singing to the moon. The image of his shadow tumbling behind him makes me wonder if he wasn’t falling down drunk by now. The word tumble could also simply be a word used as movements in dance.

“As long as I knew, we were born companions.And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.”

This gives a bit of forlorn quality toward the end of this poem. He is admittedly drunk. However the first line is more finished by the second than separate in my estimation. Li Po indicates a oneness with himself, the moon and his shadow. This is interesting and somewhat unique to Chinese or Asian literature. Your shadow is always with you whether you see it or not. The moon is a personal companion. They were “born” to be together is a way of saying it never leaves him even when he no longer sees it.  It also indicates that Li Po is living the life he was destined for since birth.

I’m wondering if “I was drunk” is an indication that he has reached a point of being close to passing out drunk. He indicates the loss of the moon and shadow because of over drinking. Of course, drunk seems to me where he was aiming, but as anyone who has ever been in the state knows the drunker you become the more brooding you can get. These lines also lead into the last two which are the aim of drinking so much and reaching his state of becoming philosophical.

Li Po as with many poets of the time was a philosopher. He felt that wine aided in reaching this state of understanding and becoming one with what was around him.

“....Shall goodwill ever be secure?I watch the long road of the River of Stars.”

The translator of these lines indicates that there is something prior to the word ‘Shall’. This is also a question. We don’t know what may or may not have been in that space but the question would seem out of place in this poem if we did not know that something was leading to it. His query is now directed at the heavens and heavenly bodies of the moon and stars as indicated by the next line. Li Po is reaching that state which allows him to simply observe and try to answer the important questions in life. Or, is he questioning if he will reach that oneness.

Goodwill is something we often consider a human characteristic. Li Po had been treated unfairly by others. I don’t see him as really feeling sorry for himself but possibly questioning

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the character of people. He may also be asking for the goodwill of the natural elements to help him find that unity with all that is around him.

”I watch the long road of the River of Stars”

Finally the last lines indicate that he is getting there. He is visualizing a path ‘river’ through the stars. Could the heavens have shown him the way, this would explain the seeming dual meaning of ‘long road’ and ‘River of Stars.’ this line is essential to his Taoist philosophy. Man is to harmonize and be one with nature not fight it. Question it but not act. The ideal is to be an observer. The “River of Stars” is a way of placing himself within the scheme of the heavens

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A Vindicationby Li Po

If heaven loved not the wine,A Wine Star would not be in heaven;If earth loved not the wine,The Wine Spring would not be on the earth.Since heaven and earth love the wine,Need a tippling mortal be ashamed?The transparent wine, I hear,Has the soothing virtue of a sage,While the turgid is rich, they say,As the fertile mind of the wise.Both the sage and the wise were drinkers,Why seek for peers among gods and goblins?Three cups open the grand door to bliss;Take a jugful, the universe is yours.Such is the rapture of the wine,That the sober shall never inherit.

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Poetry Analysis: A Vindication by Li Po

This poem can be divided into six parts. Part 1 (lines 1-2) gives a question and a responded to it comparing the stars to the wine. Part 2 (lines 3-4) Describes the wine with earth comparing the two. Part 3 (lines 5-7) Describes the wine in the speakers opinion that has some spiritual meaning to it. Part 4 (lines 8-10) Brings in the sage and the drinkers as first characters in the poem, describing their actions and sharing the same actions as of drinking. Part 5 ( lines 11-13) brings in the gods and the goblings as characters being said in the poem, part of this poem to me describes the opening of getting drunk which is the doors opening to bliss. Part 6 ( lines 14-16) Describes how drinkers i would say have the chance to take the bottle and drink as much as they want but people  who trying to get sober don’t have that chance.

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Autumn River Song by Li Po

 The moon shimmers in green water.White herons fly through the moonlight.

The young man hears a girl gathering water-chestnuts:into the night, singing, they paddle home together.

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Poetry Analysis: Autumn River Song by Li Po

This poem can be divided into two parts.  Part 1 (lines 1-2) describes a nature scene at night time.  Part 2 (lines3-5) adds two characters: a young man and a girl.  The simplicity of their actions in this nature scene creates a calming effect on the reader.  It invites the reader to reflect on the beauty of youth and nature through the use of nature imagery, such as "moon shivers"  and "green water" in verse 1, and "white herons" in the "moonlight."

 

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Matsuo Basho1644 – 1694

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Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694)

Bashō was born Matsuo Kinsaku around 1644, somewhere near Ueno in Iga Province. His father may have been a low-ranking samurai, which would have promised Bashō a career in the military but not much chance of a notable life. It was traditionally claimed by biographers that he worked in the kitchens. However, as a child Bashō became a servant to Tōdō Yoshitada, who shared with Bashō a love for haikai no renga, a form of cooperative poetry composition. The sequences were opened with a verse in the 5-7-5 mora format; this verse was named a hokku, and would later be renamed haiku when presented as stand-alone works. The hokku would be followed by a related 7-7 addition by another poet. Both Bashō and Yoshitada gave themselves haigō, or haikai pen names; Bashō's was Sōbō, which was simply the on'yomi reading of his samurai name of Matsuo Munefusa. In 1662 the first extant poem by Bashō was published; in 1664 two of his hokku were printed in a compilation, and in 1665 Bashō and Yoshitada composed a one-hundred-verse renku with some acquaintances. 

Yoshitada's sudden death in 1666 brought Bashō's peaceful life as a servant to an end. No records of this time remain, but it is believed that Bashō gave up the possibility of samurai status and left home. Biographers have proposed various reasons and destinations, including the possibility of an affair between Bashō and a Shinto miko named Jutei, which is unlikely to be true. Bashō's own references to this time are vague; he recalled that "at one time I coveted an official post with a tenure of land", and that "there was a time when I was fascinated with the ways of homosexual love", but there is no indication whether he was referring to real obsessions or even fictional ones. He was uncertain whether to become a full-time poet; by his own account, "the alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless". His indecision may have been influenced by the then still relatively low status of renga and haikai no renga as more social activities than serious artistic endeavors. In any case, his poems continued to be published in anthologies in 1667, 1669, and 1671, and he published his own compilation of work by him and other authors of the Teitoku School, Seashell Game, in 1672. In about the spring of that year he moved to Edo, to further his study of poetry. 

On his return to Edo in the winter of 1691, Bashō lived in his third bashō hut, again provided by his disciples. This time, he was not alone; he took in a nephew and his female friend, Jutei, who were both recovering from illness. He had a great many visitors. Bashō's grave in Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture 

Bashō continued to be uneasy. He wrote to a friend that "disturbed by others, I have no peace of mind". He made a living from teaching and appearances at haikai parties until late August of 1693, when he shut the gate to his bashō hut and refused to see anybody for a month. Finally, he relented after adopting the principle of karumi or "lightness", a semi-Buddhist philosophy of greeting the mundane world rather than separating himself from it. Bashō left Edo for the last time in the summer of 1694, spending time in Ueno and Kyoto before his arrival in Osaka. He became sick with a stomach illness and died peacefully, surrounded by his disciples. Although he did not compose any formal death poem on his

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deathbed the following, being the last poem recorded during his final illness, is generally accepted as his poem of farewell: tabi ni yande / yume wa kareno wo / kake meguru /falling sick on a journey / my dream goes wandering / over a field of dried grass

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A Banana Plant in the Autumn Galeby Basho

A banana plant in the autumn gale --I listen to the dripping of rainInto a basin at night.

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Poetry Interpretation: A Banana Plant in the Autumn Gale

Basho took his name from the Japanese word for "banana tree." He was given a gift of a banana tree by a student and the poet immediately identified with it: the way the small tree stood there with its large, soft, fragile leaves.

So, in this haiku, when Basho writes of "A banana plant in the autumn gale" he is writing about himself, so open to everything amidst the harsh, swirling activity of the world around him.

Then the next two lines switch to an internal awareness, the quiet "dripping of rain." Despite the torrent outside, Basho is in meditation, patiently observing the gathering of the raindrops "into a basin."

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Come, let's goby Basho

Come, let's gosnow-viewingtill we're buried.

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Poetry Analysis: Come, Let’s go by Basho

Snow appears in the sacred poetry of many traditions, particularly the Buddhist poetry of East Asia. It can imply a few things, depending on the context.

When the difficulties and coldness and enforced internalization of winter are emphasized, snow can represent the struggles of spiritual practice that precede the spiritual awakening of spring.

When the silence that settles upon the world in snow is emphasized, it can represent the perfect stillness of mind that occurs in true meditation.

When the quality of covering or engulfing all things in a uniform whiteness is highlighted, snow is a metaphorical reference to the light that shines through everything, the light one perceives when the mind awakens.

This haiku by Basho can carry variations of all of these meanings, but especially the last one.

Notice the joke in these lines: By viewing the snow we become buried in it -- and that is what Basho is really inviting us to do. With a lot of snow (and a dash of wit), Basho is saying that by viewing something deeply, we become what we view. Seeing the universal radiance, we become the radiance. Hearing the silence, we become the silence. Witness the eternal, and we become consumed by it, buried by it, the egoistic separate sense of self becomes lost in the blanket of white that covers everything, making all of existence one. Viewing the snow, we become buried in it, we become one with the snow-covered world. 

Year's end

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by Basho

Year's end,all cornersof this floating world, swept.

Poetry Analysis: Year’s End by Basho

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That final word -- "swept" -- you almost trip over it with its abrupt stop. 

"Swept" can imply several things, such as a ritual year-end cleaning, everything put in its place and ready for the new activity of the new year. But one would like to imagine Basho is speaking on a deeper level, suggesting the Buddhist realization that everything is fundamentally empty, free, "swept" clean of thing-ness. When perceived deeply, the entire world reveals itself to be a fluid, "floating" phenomenon of becoming and interconnection. No object is truly solid or stable in solitary existence, other than in relationship to perception. The outer world is found to be a symbolic game of the mind. At the heart of everything is a pure, still, blissful spaciousness, pregnant with awareness; but it is only through the activity of the mind that anything is born into the appearance of form. 

At "year's end," at mind's end, when the surface consciousness rests and its projections cease, the weight of things are "swept" away, leaving us standing in an amazing world that "floats" and dances upon open sky.

Reading this haiku, one don't pick up the broom; he/she set it down. All corners, they're already swept. Or one may just go through the motion of sweeping for the simple delight of movement. 

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Carlos A. Angeles

Carlos Angeles

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Born on May 25, 1921 in Tacloban City, Leyte, the poet Carlos A. Angeles graduated from Rizal High 1938 and went on to study at various universities, first in pre-medicine and next pre-law. He had one semester at Ateneo de Manila, two at UP in 1941 (where he became a member of the UP Writers' Club), and one quarter at Central Luzon Colleges. He did not return to school after World War II, but he led an impressive career as chief of the Philippine bureau of International News Service from 1950 to 1958, guest of the US State Department on a Smith-Mundt leader grant, press assistant under the Garcia administration, and public relations manager of PanAm Airlines from 1958 to 1980. He also served in the board of directors of International PEN, Philippine chapter.

In 1964, the same year that poetry was first considered in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, Angeles' collection of poems, A Stun of Jewels(Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1963), received first prize in the prestigious contest. Comprised of 47 poems and dedicated to Angeles' wife, A Stun of Jewelsalso won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.Angeles has been living in the USA since 1978. Married to Concepcion Reynoso, he has seven children and 18 grandchildren, all residing in the States.

LANDSCAPE IIby:Carlos A. Angeles

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Sun in the knifed horizon bleeds the sky,Spilling a peacock stain upon the sands,Across some murdered rocks refused to die.It is your absence touches my sad handsBlinded like flags in the wreck of air.

And catacombs of cloud enshroud the coolAnd calm involvement of the darkened plains,The stunted mourners here: and here, a fullAnd universal tenderness which drainsThe sucked and golden breath of sky comes bare.

Now, while the dark basins the void of space,Some sudden crickets, ambushing me near,Discover vowels of your whispered faceAnd subtly cry. I touch your absence hereRemembering the speechless of your hair.

Poetry Analysis: Landscape II by Carlos Angeles

This man is so deep in grief that even the beauty of a sunset makes his heart (and therefore the sky) bleed, nature in daylight is of no comfort, the clouds mourn, too, he cannot

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breath, etc. It is only in darkness that he finds comfort (hears the voice, sees the face of his loved one in the sound of the crickets), is able to remember and, feel her presence and cry (too shameful perhaps to cry in daylight and therefore suffocated by the "golden breath of sky".

GABUby Carlos Angeles

The battering restlessness of the sea

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Insists a tidal fury upon the beachAt Gabu, and its pure consistencyHavocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the daylong bashing of its heartAgainst the seascape where, for miles around,Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones partAnd drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and deadAnd neutral where the sea has beached its brine,Where the spilt salt of its heart lies spreadAmong the dark habiliments of Time.The vital splendor misses.  For here, hereAt Gabu where the ageless tide recursAll things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.

Poetry Analysis: Gabu by Carlos Angeles

Gabu is a place in Ilocos Norte. It is near Pagudpod. Often, when typhoon occurs, large tidal waves go rampant, even affecting Pagudpod itself. These tidal waves devastate the life

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forms (animals and plants) and even the structures in that place. The 2nd line reflects the sadness of people in times of despair. The color represented in the 3rd line is actually a description of sadness due to death and suffering as life can cease due to these waves. The 4th line describes that the calamity is strong and it may happen again and again.  Lastly, the last line tells that the sea would really find its way to tell us about the status of people living in that place.

The Summer Treeby Carlos Angeles

The copper sun that scalds the April boughs

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Of summer, from the noon’s burst cauldron, there,In concentrates of fury, hardly knowsThe pertinence of patience the trees bear,Who, with their metal branches, scour the airFor rumors of impending May to floodTheir throbbing thirst, or, to defy despairThe stirring breeze makes vocable and loud.

All summer long the bare trees stands and wait While roots probe deepest for a hoard of siltAnd see page- till, silver in the sky, the lateRains pour at last, hard where the treetops tilt.

Poetry Analysis: The Summer Tree by Carlos Angeles

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The poem wrote of trees’ predicaments during the summer, how trees would bear the furious heat of the season, how trees would “scour the air for rumors of impending May to flood their throbbing thirst,” and how trees would “stand and wait… (for) the late rains to pour at last.”

Man can be likened to the trees spoken of in the poem in the negative sense that there is a nature in man that just waits for blessings to shower down upon him. A proportion of humanity today chooses to be beggars to others and I mean not only the typical beggar in the street, there is a beggar in all of us, the part that wishes for the easiest way out of a dilemma, one that would not have us expending too much labor for the accomplishment of a deed.

Indolence comes easily to most of us, that’s why game shows that offer the trouble-free million is favored by most people than sweating out the hard-to-get peso. The Ultra Stampede was indeed a tragedy, not only for the deaths, but also for the depraved way that the poverty of the masses are being perverted and manipulated to rake in top ratings for a TV game show. It is sick the way that poverty is being commercialized, what TV game shows are propagating is the thought that poverty can be magically done away with just by simply joining a game, it shies away from the root of poverty in society and numbs the people from their suffering.

The poem also captures the desperation of man, that man could be reduced to in utility when the odds are against him. In a positive sense, the poem sends the message that even through the drought of life, man can still do something no matter how desperate in order to survive. The literal beggars of society, the one that most people scorn and steer clear of on the streets are hardened survivors of the torturous social order that all of us are born into. They do what they can just to live another day and that in itself is a great feat.

Beggars have had to develop thick skins in order to endure the jeers and taunts said of them for being parasites and being shameless. But, beggars that they are, they have no other recourse to follow since the door to a decent living is closed to them, it is rather difficult for beggars to find an opportunity of work for there is a stereotype imposed on them.

Begging will prevail even in the most modern and richest of societies, there will always be a class in society that will remain in the direst of straits so long as social stratification and the class war is maintained.

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