Poetry about Dukkha

[rblumberg]

Friends,

I am teaching a class on "The Buddha's Path to Awakening" (http://dharmastudy.org/syllabus-the-buddhas-path-to-awakening/); it's a ten-week class, covering the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and each week I post a set of readings. This coming week we will be discussing the Buddha's first Noble Truth, "Here is dukkha", and I've posted, along with passages regarding dukkha from the Pali Canon (http://dharmastudy.org/essays/the-pali-canon/), several English poems that seem to me to fairly represent the idea of dukkha: Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli", Hopkins' "Spring and Fall", the passage from Blake's "Milton" that begins "Ah, weak and wide astray....", Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell".

Here's the definition I've provided for dukkha in the Dhamma Cheatsheet (http://dharmastudy.org/documents/cheatsheet.pdf) I've prepared for the class:


Literally, pain or suffering. More broadly, all that is unsatisfactory in the world: multiplicity, complexity, ambiguity, impermanence. Craving–for one ultimate truth, for a simple answer, for it to be one thing or the other, for pleasure to go on forever and discomfort to end right now–turns dukkha into Dukkha.

If anyone can suggest additional poems that would work in this context, preferably relatively short and preferably with web links, I'd be most grateful.

With regard,

Richard

[Paulclem]

What about Larkin's Mr Bleaney? It's not suffering in the overt sense of the word, but has a downbeat fatalism about it - as well as the death of Mr Bleaney. There's a pervading sense of dissatisfaction.

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4793

[rblumberg]

Thanks. I'd read a fair amount of Larkin, but never this. It's grim, to be sure, but a little more time/place/social class related than I'm looking for. You get the impression reading this that the bleakness in Mr. Bleaney's life was the result of his particular poverty and rigid cast of mind - too much about Mr. Bleaney and not enough about our human condition.

The poems I came up with are now posted: http://dharmastudy.org/awakening/readings/class03.html

Thanks again.

With regard,

Richard