Pilgrim

by David Whyte

From Amazon:

In his 7th volume of poetry, David Whyte looks at the great questions of human life through the eyes of the pilgrim: someone passing through relatively quickly, someone dependent on friendship, hospitality and help from friends and strangers alike, someone for whom the nature of the destination changes step by as it approaches, and someone who is subject to the vagaries of wind and weather along the way.

The poems in Pilgrim explore themes of departure, shelter, companionship, deep friendship and the necessary transformations of friendship, the struggles at crucial thresholds and the arrivals that always become further departures, offering companionship along the way.

Genres: Poetry, Spirituality

93 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Poet David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The author of seven books of poetry and three books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.

His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership.

An Associate Fellow at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies. In spring of 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Neumann College, Pennsylvania.

In organizational settings, using poetry and thoughtful commentary, he illustrates how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement; qualities needed if we are to respond to today’s call for increased creativity and adaptability in the workplace. He brings a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the nature of individual and organizational change, particularly through his unique perspectives on Conversational Leadership.

Reviews

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished a second volume of David Whyte's poetry. Wow! I'm in love with his style and imagery. One of my favorites in this book is titled "Winter Apple"

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down.

Let the coolness
of autumn
and the breathing,
blowing wind
test its adherence
to endurance,
let the others fall.

Wait longer
than you would,
go against yourself,
find the pale nobility
of quiet that ripening
demands,
watch with patience
as the silhouette emerges
and the leaves fall,
see it become
a solitary roundness
against the greying sky,
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.

So that a full
two months
after you
should have
taken the apple
down,
you hold it in
your closed hand
at last and bite
into the cool
sweetness
spread evenly
through every
single atom
of a pale
and yielding
structure,
so that you taste
on that cold,
grey day,
not only
the after reward
of a patience
remembered,
not only
the summer
sunlight
of a postponed
perfection,
but the sweet,
inward stillness
of the wait itself.

On my 2nd reading of this collection, I really connected with the poem Second Life:
My uncourageous life
doesn't want to go,
doesn't want to speak,
doesn't want to carry on,
wants to make its way
through stealth,
wants to assume
the strange and dubious honor
of not being heard.

My uncourageous life
doesn't want to move,
doesn't even want to stir,
wants to inhabit
a difficult form
of stillness,
to pull everything
into the silence
where the throat strains
but gives no voice.

My uncourageous life
wants to stop
the whole world
and keep it stopped
not only for itself
but for everyone
and everything it knows,
refusing to stir a single inch
until given an exact
and final destination.

This uncourageous
second life wants to win
some undeserved lottery
so that it can finally
bestow a just and final
reward upon itself.

No, this second life
never wants to write
or speak, or cook
or set the table
or welcome guests
or sit up talking
with a stranger
who might accidently
set us travelling again.

This second life
doesn't want
to leave the door,
doesn't want
to take any path
that works its own
sweet way
through mountains,
doesn't want
to follow
the beckoning flow
of a distant river
nor meet
the chance weather
where a pass
takes us
from one discovered
world
to another.

This second life
just wants to lie down;
close its eyes
and tell God
it has a headache.

But my other life
my first life,
the life I admire
and want to follow
looks on and listens
with some wonder,
and even extends
a reassuring hand
for the one holding back,
knowing there can be
no real confrontation
without the need
to turn away
and go back
away from it all,
to have things
be different,
and to close our eyes
until they
are different.

No,
this hidden life,
this first courageous life,
seems to speak
from silence
and in the language
of a knowing,
beautiful heartbreak,
above all
it seems to know
well enough
it will have
to give back
everything received
in any form
and even, sometimes,
as it tells the story
of the way ahead,
laughs out loud
in the knowledge.

This first life seems
sure and steadfast
in knowing
it will come across
the help it needs
at every crucial place
and thus continually
sharpens my sense
of impending
revelation.

This first
courageous life
in fact, has already
gone ahead
has nowhere to go
except
out the door
into the clear air
of morning
taking me with it,
nothing to do
except to breathe
while it can,
no way to travel
but with that familiar
pilgrim
movement in the body,
nothing to teach except
to show me
on the long road
how we sometimes
like to walk alone,
open to the silent revelation,
and then stop and gather
and share everything
as dark comes in,
telling the story
of a day's accidental
beauty.

And perhaps
most intriguingly
and most poignantly
and most fearfully of all
and at the very end
of the long road
it has travelled,
it wants to take me
to a high place
from which to see,
with a view looking back
on the way we took
to get there,
so it can have me
understand myself
as witness
and thus
bequeath me
the way ahead,
so it can teach me
how to invent
my own disappearance
so it can lie down at the end
and show me,
even against my will,
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself:
how to find
a way
to die
of generosity.
(pp. 67-73)

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a poignant glimpse into the way of the camino, with its trials and tribulations and memories. It was the perfect book to come home to. Yes, this feeling of longing for the open road and the people who are there no longer - all this is normal. Pilgrim feels much like a "welcome back, and I feel you."

[mayhugh]

The poems in Pilgrim explore themes of departure, shelter, companionship, deep friendship and the necessary transformations of friendship, the struggles at crucial thresholds and the arrivals that always become further departures, offering companionship along the way.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I'm about to write a review to a poem, I'm being reminded of the part: "Understanding Poetry, from Dead Poet's Society"

So, instead of saying how great the poet is because he's juxtaposing this and that, or because he's using this form of writing, or that fancy metaphor, or I don't know what, I'll simply state how I came to this book and why I enjoyed slow reading through it.

I was introduced to David Whyte, through Sam Harris's Waking Up app. The full version (that you can actually get for free if you ask them), contains a section called "Contemplative Action". There David Whyte is reading some of his poems and explains why he wrote each one of them and what he was thinking.

Some of these poems concern the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Having done that Camino, when I heard him read first Finisterre and then Santiago, it really resonated with me and brought back a lot of memories.

This collections contains more poems for the Camino. Anyone who travels or yearns for it, would find a way to fill some of that longing through those pages.

[Joe Hay · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Whyte's wise and melodious voice is always welcome to me, so I enjoyed this. Though it was overall worth a read, I liked some sections more than others.

The "Camino" section is very pretty and memorable, but I found its run-on sentences a bit exhausting. I respect the thematic coherence there, but I just didn't enjoy it 100%. "Finisterre," the aptly-named last poem of the section, deserves special mention.

My favorite part of the book was "Companion," a meditation on the death of John O'Donohue. Really moving, vivid, beautifully realized. I recommend those poems not just for David Whyte fans but also O'Donohue's. Whyte's reflections on grief and death are as profound as anything he's done. It is a friendship to be envied.

As elsewhere with David Whyte, I feel a bit alienated from his observations on Ireland in "The West." Maybe he himself struggles with his connection there and feels alienated himself, hence my response.

This is not as good as "The House of Belonging," but I think that would be very difficult to pull off, and Whyte's poetry is always worth your time.

[Mary Camille Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m trying to define for myself what makes David Whyte’s poetry so evocative and moving. Of course the lovely, lyrical language is part of it. This collection shows a poet at the height of his power, but there’s more to it than that. Somehow Whyte manages in a few words to transport me. A poem can put me in Galicia on the Camino de Santiago, welcomed at the end of the day by “a breath of warmth from a kitchen door, palatial with light and a daughter’s smile,” to Thoor Anu, where I too sit “stunned and numb in the underbelly of the turning world,” or to a new-mown barley field “surprised by the steal and turn of beauty through a working life.” When he shares his grief at the death of a beloved friend with poignant, evolving awareness, I feel “the pained and pilgrim present, as if we still had an arm, each around the other, you in the light and me in the dark …”

Whyte is firmly rooted in the world - in place, weather, friendship - but each poem also has an aura of mystic depth. Maybe it’s that quality that gives me the feeling of rhapsody, that takes me out of myself -- or more deeply in.

[Jen Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love David Whyte. Preferred House of Belonging, but want to come back to this one in a few years.


“no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you had brought
and light their illumined corners; and to read
them as they drifted on the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water's edge, not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.”

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading these poems out loud is a must, in my opinion. The rhythms are like a hammock swaying into stillness and then starting up again mid-stanza or the next page. There is a beautiful carrying onward with how it all sounds.

There is a delicate balance of emotions within the entire collection. Like wind that doesn’t get through the door and rather looks through the window then leaves.

I think I am hypnotized by this amazing collection. Enjoyed every bit of it. I say go ahead get carried away in these words!

[Kristie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read several "post Camino" books after finishing the Camino Francés earlier this year. None of them helped me integrate my experience -- they were either too concrete or too abstract or too something. But this slim book of poetry helped me immensely. I've read it cover to cover several times, and the way the poems blend together to describe the emotional and spiritual journey of the Camino has helped me to think about my own experience.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems of ascending and descending: One can always find a direction in these poems. The journey can go in any direction, expected or unexpected. Loved these poems. f you think about life's journey, these poems are worthy companions.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, David Whyte never disappoints. In measured cadence and vivid imagery, that circles always both back to where it started and out beyond its imaginings, he reminds me to both go deep within myself and also far out beyond myself.

[Louisa]

picked this up bc camino & whyte’s name sounded familiar and am now wondering why, it wasn’t particularly good? 4.44 is overrated imo, there are some arresting phrases here and there but on the whole it seems rather empty

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meditative walk through an internal landscape a world parallel to the external.

“Go now, before you understand this island and this world and its future only through the small triumph granted by squinting through stone.”

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of David's poetry and books. I usually find it soulful and resonant. Yet, I could not connect with this set of poems. i had to read them multiple times so as to keep my focus.

[elias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry. Didn't connect much with the themes discussed, as it was about the death of a loved one. Will definitely pick another collection by the author.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Santiago - the poem that drew me into Whyte’s poetry. ❤️

[Robert Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like David Whyte, it delivers.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

My true story.

[Eliza]

recommended by Ben! loved this collection of poems about life transitions and searching for meaning.

[Susan K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems I just loved and will reread again and again; while others did not reach me as much

[Yeager St john · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite poems of all time. Santiago nearly brings me to tears. Second Sight, Etruscan Tomb, and Born Again speak to my soul.

I’m so grateful I discovered David Whyte

[BobK21 · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is a primary processional faculty of the imagination within human beings—an imaginal navigating agency—that is able to make meaningful sense of any level of emergent complexity, give you a place to stand at the center of that complexity, and give you a ground from which to step from that complexity into the unfolding horizons of life. To stay close to a felt sense of and personal participation in this faculty as your own most intimate inheritance is incredibly important."  -  David Whyte

David Whyte is a poet who has a uniquely ecological vision of the deep patterns and processes of life. Above all his poetry is rooted in the processes of orienting, navigation, and wayfinding that define us at the deepest levels of who we are as entities that are constantly moving through and mapping territories of every kind imaginable.

This volume of his poetry cuts me very deeply to the heart. He has a TED talk where he goes into further detail about the background and inspiration for some of the poems in this work, and those stories further flesh out the beauty of this work.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've long admired David Whyte, primarily through reading his poems in other works. He's often cited. I've also read quite a few years ago, The Heart Aroused, when I was looking for poetry and soul within work.

I was drawn to this book by its title: Pilgrim. I've read other books that focus on the notion of pilgrimage and the nature of the pilgrim (e.g. David Downie's Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James and Phil Cousineau's The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred) and always found value in them, and of course, there's that lovely line by Yeats, "but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you."

Whyte's book is more abstract on the idea of the pilgrim. In a sense, we are all on this journey, "walking each other home," as Ram Dass has observed. Its various sections cover the actual pilgrim wending his way over terrain to a sacred site (Pilgrim), a specific pilgrimage (Camino), and the things we encounter and realize by venturing beyond our safe space into the wider world (Looking Back), a task that requires courage and acceptance of change, when something within wants to be "Born Again" exactly the same way. There's a tension between familiarity and adventure that the poet acknowledges.

The most poignant (for me) segment of the book is "Companion," a series of six poems that deal with the death of a friend, the weight and heft of that experience, and all the accompanying feelings in the immediate presence of the departed one and in afterward reflections on the relationship and its loss. Nothing is specific in these poems, or in many of the others. We don't know who died, his age, how he died, where. We don't even know much about the friendship between the poet (narrative voice) and the "companion." Was he a companion on pilgrimage, for example? But by remaining abstract, these poems are a surface on which the reader can reflect their own losses of a friend, a companion.

If I have one issue with Whyte, it's that some of these poems are so vague and abstract, so interior and personal to the writer, that making sense of them for oneself is challenging. An additional issue for me is the relative lack of punctuation, so that there are long run-on sentences of thoughts with no sense of where the breaks are meant to be. Having said that, these stylistic features almost require a very slow rereading and consideration of multiple meanings within the same phrases.

I'll be reading The House of Belonging next to see what that yields and whether or not the same observations pertain.

Update ... it bears rereading, and I did.

[Lionheart Words · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking for someone to put words on an experience that feels private but is actually universal? David Whyte is your dude. This collection was my least favorite of the ones I’ve read, but there were a few heavy-hitters in here. Ones that gave me chills because - how did this Irish guy living in the Pacific Northwest transport himself into the deep recesses of my brain and transform the jumbled up fragments into art?

I recommend this book to anyone who has had the realization that they no longer had to keep their eyes and ears averted from the place that could save them. Doing that is scary, and takes courage, and feels lonely and isolating. But you were never alone. There was me and David Whyte and maybe 500 or 5000 other poets walking alongside you, knowing what they know, and knowing what you know. I also recommend it to anyone who loves poetry.

“But the miracle had come simply
from allowing yourself to know
that you had found it, that this time
someone walking out into the clear air
from far inside you had decided not to walk
past it anymore; the miracle had come
at the roadside in the kneeling to drink
and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed
and the memory you held and the realization
that in this silence you no longer had to keep
your eyes and ears averted from the place
that could save you, that you had been given
the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden
pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking
with her bent back, her bowed head
and her careful explanations.”

[Christopher Sanderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know why I didn't know of David Whyte before, it's not as though he hides his light under a bushel, and him being a Yorkshire poet, I surely should have come across him.

I guess that from the introduction it is fairly clear I am going to rave about this exceptional person, not that he would say himself to be exceptional, just that he is lucky to have been to exceptional places, and to have met exceptional people.

This is poetry which bathes you, and charges at you, at one and the same time; they are words to rush along with, they are stories to fall in love with, they are words to read time and again, and then to go hear him talking, talking and repeating his own words, time after time.

I am not a religious person, but I could be, or at least I could strengthen my faith in humanity, simply by joining David, on his many insightful journeys.

I was late in finding this poet, but boy o boy it is definitely better late than never. Read him, listen to him, follow him, you will not be disappointed.

Christopher 2016

[Alexandra Darion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first poetry book and I actually liked it a lot surprisingly. I read a couple since and this one is the benchmark that they have not met.

[Pat Loughery · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could only carry around one book of poetry the rest of my life, this would be it. (If I could count Whyte's friend To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings in another category). I read this collection and went on to devour everything I could from Whyte.

The twin subjects are pilgrimage (especially on the Camino in Spain) and eulogies for O'Donohue. Both opened my heart and wooed me.

[Alison Whiteman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know anything about Whyte's writing until I attended a workshop on Bainbridge Island at The Island Wood School. The presence of David, his work and the musicians who accompany him to various settings is quite magical. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to meet someone who can give voice to the experience of living.

These are poems one will read once and then again and ultimately one doesn't keep count of how many times the poem has been read.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see myself as a pilgrim in this life and so this collection of poems by David Whyte has instant appeal for me. With titles such as 'Pilgrim', 'Traveller', 'Camino' and 'Finistere' I couldn't resist reading this contemporary poet. He lives on the Pacific coast of NW America but draws on his homes from the past in Yorkshire, Wales and Ireland.
'The heart's / a close-in horizon / that holds all distance / but gives / no explanation / to the tidal scour / of life........'