Book Review: "Pilgrim" by David Whyte

Pilgrim (2014)
David Whyte (1955)
95 pages

Although I occasionally pick up books of poetry, I’ve generally found that I struggle to connect with them. Most likely it’s a personal failing – an insufficient patience perhaps, or a too strong desire for directness. But too often they have felt to me like an incomprehensible slog.

And yet.

Sometimes serendipity has struck, and my world has been exploded by a particular poem – or perhaps just a stanza – that I’ve stumble across, and that feels like a revelation. One of the earliest times I recall this happening was years ago, when I came across these lines from William Wordsworth’s Odes: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood: 

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Words that can define a life.

Since discovering that poem, I’ve occasionally had similar experiences with other poetry I’ve encountered. This happened most recently last fall when, on a podcast episode of the program On Being, I heard the poet David Whyte recite and discuss several of his poems. The podcast was from an event called the On Being Gathering, and Whyte had been invited to both open and close the proceedings with his poetry.  Listening to his presentation that day, time seemed to stop; it was breath-taking, his words speaking directly to my heart.


Among the works he chose to read were a few from his book Pilgrim. In that collection he explores the idea that we pass through life as pilgrims, on a lifelong journey during which we seek – whether dimly or concretely acknowledged – to create a comprehensible meaning for our lives.

The book opens with two poems that focus directly on the idea of life as a path along which we journey with a mixture of hope and expectation, never sure what we will discover and learn next. In Traveller he writes that we, as pilgrims, see and understand ourselves

only in looking back,
always 
just about
to find
a home,
always a
hairsbreadth
from
arrival,
always about
to find
the arms
that will never
fall away (6)  

For Whyte the primary interest clearly lies in the mysteries present in the path itself, not in in the destination.

The next group of poems in the book come under the heading Camino, and relate to one of the most famous pilgrimages in the world, the Camino de Santiago, which passes from east to west through northern Spain, ending in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. These poems highlight experiences of walking the path of that pilgrim’s trail, including Refuge, Rest, and Night Traveller, but through them Whyte identifies important aspects of our path through life. Thus, in the poem Santiago he observes the uncertainty fundamental to any journey, any life:

the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took our promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way.” (22)

In the profoundly moving poems of this section, Whyte captures the beauty and heartbreak that come with creating our path through life.  

The half-dozen poems of the section titled Companion explore the wonder and complexity of our relationships with those who accompany us along parts of our journey through life. These poems speak of brief loves that leave a lasting and beautiful mark, as well as the numbing grief of losing a dear friend, as in Requiem in which the narrator drives away from a funeral

still stunned
and immobile
at the thought of you
there
and the quiet rested
nobility of your form
left alone to sleep forever. (31) 

Beautiful images of western Ireland – green fields and mountains giving way at cliff edges to the Atlantic Ocean – fill the poems of the section The West. As Whyte writes in Thoor Anu, such encounters with the awe-inspiring mysteries of nature can have lasting impact, causing

an elemental undoing
you’d carry with you

in the city street
or the plane ride home (48) 

This section also includes a wonderful poem built upon snatches of conversation between two men at a local pub in western Ireland, with Whyte filling in the imagined details behind the kinship he witnesses in what he has heard.

So come and see me, calling out whatever you want,
calling me whatever you want, eeijit, brother, friend, you know
I have known you forever and you have known nothing

since you were born without knowing me.
I have loved you like another self since you were
the youngest thing when I use to put my arm around you

to nurse you home, the knees broken and the world
fallen in, the pushed bicycle a moving, clacking ruin,
and you leaning again me, as you still must now (57)

A lovely paean to an unbreakable bond of siblings. 

Finally, in a section titled Looking Back, Whyte seems to reflect on memories from the path he took to the poems in the book. Thus, in Winter Apple, he describes the simple yet profound image of an apple left on a tree to fully ripen, and so to

let winter come
and the first frost threaten,
and then wake
one morning
to see the breath
of winter
has haloed
its redness
with light (86)

Thus he examines the blessings that come from having the patience to let a thing fully mature, as he surely seems to have done with the many poems in this collection.

Filled with transcendent revelations about all we encounter on our path through life, Whyte’s slim volume of poetry in Pilgrim encourages us to look up from our daily lives and realize again with awe the beauty and mystery in our relationships and in the world around us. It makes clear too, the importance of recognizing both the profound responsibility we have for creating our life’s path, as well as the many uncertainties that are an inherent part of doing so.

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Other reviews / information:

A wonderful CD of Whyte reading poems from Pilgrim is available. It includes most of the poems in the book, as well as some discussion about their origins and their meaning for him. When reading them he often repeats one or more lines, thereby inserting an emphasis at certain points that gives them even more depth and power. Whyte has an engaging and subtly powerful voice that speaks, as I wrote above, directly to the heart.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf