Detail, title page of the second edition (1915). Partly visible is the seal of the University of Toronto, where this copy resides.
“At the Draper’s” appeared first in the Saturday Review for 16 May 1914, under the title: “How he looked in at the draper’s. . .”
When Thomas Hardy prepared Satires of Circumstance: Lyrics and Reveries With Miscellaneous Pieces, later the same year, he added the poem to a suite of twelve short lyrics published, in the Fortnightly Review for April 1911, under the title “Satires of Circumstance.” In fact, “At the Draper’s” was among four poems Hardy added to the original twelve, from which he omitted one, for a total, now, of fifteen, lodged in the middle of the 1914 volume under a heading that gave (again) the book its title: “Satires of Circumstance in Fifteen Glimpses.”
For the Wessex Edition of his collected works (issued in 1919), Hardy relocated the fifteen poems, placing them at the end of the volume. They’d proved something of an embarrassment to him. Their mordant wit courts (or anyway can satisfy) misanthropy. Certain reviewers had (with justice, given how the book is titled) dwelt on the sequence unduly, to the exclusion of (say) the great elegiac poems Hardy wrote after his first wife, Emma, died on 27 November 1912. That the Great War began just before the book was published likely didn’t help. Such comedy as this sequence entails was eclipsed by circumstances both personal and national.
I reprint here “At the Draper’s,” the twelfth of the fifteen satires, as a lesson in rhyme.
From the second edition of Satires of Circumstance (1915).
A draper, of course, deals in fabrics; “the draper’s” is a clothing store. In many of the fifteen “glimpses” that constitute this bitter suite of poems, a man or a woman is observed unwittingly, so “circumstanced” as to highlight his or her vanity, spite, avarice, philandering, etc. And so it is here. A husband nearing his death—from consumption, perhaps, given all the coughing—chances to walk into the draper’s just as his wife is picking out cloth for her mourning dress. (Had he been trailing her? What was he there to do?) The wife doesn’t notice him. The husband overhears the draper’s unseemly sales-chatter, about the latest fashions in widowhood, and so on. He turns round and leaves. He might have said nothing. But of course he can’t keep mum.
“I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,
—-But you did not perceive me.
Well, when they deliver what you were shown
—-I shall know nothing of it, believe me!”
He shall know nothing of it because, by God, he’ll be dead when she calls for delivery. Then the husband coughs and coughs, and though he’s doubtless pallid, the wife goes pale. As well she should. One of the poem’s little ironies: how mortifying it is to be caught basking in widowhood! Read more…
“Mad Judy”
Detail. Second American edition (Harper and Brothers).
Thomas Hardy placed “Mad Judy” among a section of Poems of the Past and Present (1902) sub-titled “Miscellaneous Poems.” It had appeared nowhere else previously.
In a preface to the book, Hardy writes:
Of the subject-matter of this volume which is in other than narrative form, much is dramatic or impersonative even where not explicitly so. Moreover, that portion which may be regarded as individual comprises a series of feelings and fancies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances, and at various dates.
No clear boundary separates “dramatic” poems from those in which the poet “impersonates” a character. Under the heading “dramatic” may fall such varied things as “The Colonel’s Soliloquy“; “The Going of the Battery: Wives’ Lament“; “The Souls of the Slain,” in which the unquiet spirits of dead soldiers address their (also dead) commander; “By the Earth’s Corpse,” in which Time and God query one another; “Winter in Durnover Field,” an ingenious, bleak triolet that puts a rook, a pigeon, and a starling in conversation—with stage directions, no less; and “The Ruined Maid,” in which two young women confer (one “ruined,” one aspiring to be). Poems in which Hardy “impersonates” characters include (I think) “Song of the Soldiers’ Wives,” “The Bed-Ridden Peasant to an Unknowing God,” “To Lizbie Brown,” “The Levelled Churchyard” (in which the dead speak), and, of course, “The Respectable Burgher on ‘The Higher Criticism.’”
Poems that bear Hardy’s “individual” stamp, written more or less in propria persona, include “On an Invitation to the United States,” the sequence of poems associated with Hardy’s travels on the Continent in 1897 (“Zermatt: To the Matterhorn,” etc.), “At a Lunar Eclipse,” “The Darkling Thrush,” and so on.
Which among the “individual” poems are better described as “feelings” and which as “fancies” is a matter for debate. But I don’t think Hardy makes a distinction without a difference. No one would call “At a Lunar Eclipse” or “The Darkling Thrush” “fanciful.” But such things as “At a Hasty Wedding,” a wonderfully sardonic triolet, may be.
“Mad Judy” falls among those poems that are “explicitly impersonative,” though that’s not to say Hardy’s “person” isn’t somehow in it. Much of the interest in the poem has to do with whether any of its sentiments are ventriloqual, so to speak. One wonders whether Hardy “throws his voice” when Judy, on hearing of weddings (which imply childbearing), is said to “sigh” and “rock and mutter”: “More / Comers to this stony shore!” How much of her voice is also Hardy’s? Certainly not all of it. But just as surely some.
The speaker of the poem—the figure Hardy “impersonates”—is a hale country villager, unnamed, undistinguished, and therefore representative, I take it. He speaks for “the hamlet.” (I say “he” for the sake of convenience: the sex of the speaker is not made clear and, so far as I can tell, is of no consequence.) Hardy interposes that “speaker” between himself as author/poet and the character who is, ostensibly, the subject of the poem: Mad Judy. This interests me because Judy’s notions are not, insofar as the poem makes them known to us, utterly different from Hardy’s, at least as we may discern them elsewhere in the book. In “To an Unborn Pauper Child,” for example—which (being, as I take it, “individual”) doesn’t compel the reader to dislocate the voice speaking in the poem from the poet’s own.
Judy’s “aberrancy,” her “insanity,” takes a peculiar and definite form. Philosophers would call her an anti-natalist. The view the rustic speaker takes of her is clear: she is insane. So says the hamlet. What view does Hardy invite us to take of Judy, and of the hamlet? And is that view his own? Read more…
“Must come and bide. . .”
Stanza one of the last lyric in Poems of the Past and Present (second edition, London, 1903). The Greek title means: “to the unknown god.”
“Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries.”
— “Oedipus at Colonus,” Sophocles (trans. Sir Richard Jebb)
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Thomas Hardy published “To An Unborn Pauper Child” first in The Academy on 23 November 1901, alongside “Mute Opinion,” “The Bedridden Peasant to an Unknowing God,” and “The Subalterns.” The group appeared under the general heading “Mr. Hardy’s New Poems.” The holograph manuscript Hardy later delivered to his publisher bears in it the alternative (and cancelled) title “To an Unborn Child,” with an epigraph (also cancelled): “She must go to the Union-house to have her baby. —Casterbridge [i.e., Dorchester] Petty Sessions.”
Detail, preface to Poems of the Past and Present (Harper and Brothers, 1902).
Hardy collected the poem in Poems of the Past and Present (1902), the preface to which reads, in part: “[The book] will probably be found . . . to possess little cohesion of thought or harmony of colouring. I do not greatly regret this. Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.” Hardy’s modesty (more apparent than real, I suspect) oughtn’t mislead anyone. He’s out for “a true philosophy of life” (and supposes that poetry might offer one). A careful and charitable reading of his poems (and certainly of The Dynasts) shows that, yes, indeed, he has a philosophy of life (or something like one). A quasi-philosophical vocabulary already underlies the preface, the implications of which are awakened by the Schopenhaurian poem that concludes the volume (about the unknowing “Willer” that makes “life become”). The “phenomena” of life, aptly “recorded” in all their casualties and changes, lead us (or may lead us) to certain assumptions about the “noumena” underlying and “willing” them. “Adjusting” our “impressions,” or “records,” can only falsify those assumptions (Hardy considers himself an empiricist, taking the world as it comes).
About Hardy’s “philosophy” we can say at least this: a strain of anti-natalism certainly runs through it (and may even be its tonic note). Often we find him with the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best.” Hardy goes so far as to make God Himself an anti-natalist, as here, in “By the Earth’s Corpse” (which precedes “To an Unborn Pauper Child” by two pages): “That I made Earth, and life, and man, / It still repenteth me!”
But to the poem:
TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD
——————-I
–Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,
- And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,
- Sleep the long sleep:
- The Doomsters heap
–Travails and teens around us here,
And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.
——————II
–Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,
–And laughters fail, and greetings die:
—–Hopes dwindle; yea,
—–Faiths waste away,
- Affections and enthusiasms numb;
Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.
—————–III
–Had I the ear of wombèd souls
–Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls,
—–And thou wert free
—–To cease, or be,
–Then would I tell thee all I know,
And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?
—————–IV
–Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence
–To theeward fly: to thy locked sense
—–Explain none can
—–Life’s pending plan:
–Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make
Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.
—————–V
–Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot
–Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not
—–One tear, one qualm,
—–Should break the calm.
–But I am weak as thou and bare;
No man can change the common lot to rare.
—————VI
–Must come and bide. And such are we—
–Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary—
—–That I can hope
—–Health, love, friends, scope
–In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!
Hardy read of a pauper woman in the records of the court of petty sessions (in Dorchester); this occasioned the poem. But it soon becomes clear that the poverty into which the woman’s child will be born is not the poem’s chief concern. Hardy would address (if he could) the unborn child of an heiress in the same way. Knock pauperism out of the title and you find no trace of it in the poem. Anyway, the text printed in The Academy has “Had I the circuit of all souls” for “Had I the ear of wombèd souls” (a reading that persisted, though struck out, in the holograph Hardy provided to his publisher when he readied the book for print). Without question, the poem generalizes the argument that it’s better never to have been. One could prefer, I suppose, that the poem never speak of a pauper at all. I can imagine a bad sort of reader—a reader quite innocent of Hardy—supposing that the poem has about it a condescending, eugenic inflection not unknown in early twentieth century writing about pregnant paupers. I mention the possibility only to dismiss it outright.
Hardy begins: “Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently, /And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep.” Of course the child isn’t “hidden”; it is in potentia, like the “hid scent in an unbudded rose” of which John Keats writes in Lamia. Things hidden imply their own discovery, their unfolding, their finding out, their advent; the birth-hour beckons. Hardy address the unborn child by way of the epithet “Heart,” taking the part for the whole. This imparts to the poem a solicitude carried through to the end. The solicitude, in fact, places the poem in an affective register altogether in sympathy with the suffering of which it will speak. It is a very felt thing. Indeed, it is (in its weird way) a lullaby: “sleep the long sleep.”
Hardy needn’t tell us that when the babe does “breathe” it will do so first by crying, as if it knew what lay in wait: the “travails” (oppressive labor) and the “teens” (“woes,” “pains,” or, in an archaic sense perhaps more appropriate to the poem, harms inflicted). Note that suffering, here, is neither merited, as through original sin (we are certainly not in a Christian context); nor is it incidental. No, the Doomsters heap our lives with travails and teens. The verb is perfect in its excess. In an earlier, better known poem, “Hap,” Hardy speaks of “Crass Casualty” and “Dicing Time” as “purblind Doomsters” that would “as readily” strew “blisses” about his “pilgrimage as pain.” Purblind or not, the Doomsters in “To an Unborn Child” are of one mind: pain it will be. Read more…
Detail, title page of the 1890 edition.
One Indian Summer day, in 1865, Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived in Williamstown, Massachusetts, “unheralded by even so much as a paragraph in the county newspaper.” So reports Charles Johnson Woodbury (1844-1927), then a student at Williams College. “Mr. Emerson was to lecture the same evening,” Woodbury explains, so “the situation was awkward. But he soon was made aware that the group of students, to whose importunity he had listened in coming, possessed enthusiasm, even if they lacked experience; for at once there was a stir. Within two hours, our most spacious assembly-room, the Methodist meeting-house, was procured. Placards overflowed the regular student bulletin boards, and blistered every available place, even trespassing upon such respected preserves as the chapel, library doors and the fence about the residence of Dr. Hopkins, president.”
That would be Mark Hopkins (1802-87), professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric, ordained minister in the Congregational Church, and president of Williams College from 1836-72. Of whom President James Garfield is reported to have said, at an alumni dinner at Delmonico’s in New York: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”
Charles Woodbury and his schoolmates “rang the college and church bells.” It was an advent. Woodbury was Emerson’s apostle. In 1890 he published his gospel. ”Mr. Emerson always talked slowly,” says Woodbury, “and his words had the trick of impressing themselves which belongs to happy selection, but it was mainly because his speech was so wise and sincere, and came from the depths of his own heart, that it has sunken so deep into mine. From some such cause, and from some such habit of immediate revival, may it not have been that the two contemporary gospel writers [then assumed to be Matthew and Mark] were able to reproduce the words of Jesus?”
After speaking at Williams College, Emerson lectured in North Adams, Pittsfield, and several other towns nearby. Woodbury accompanied him. The acquaintance, on Woodbury’s account, continued for some years more, beyond the time when the young acolyte “achieved a beard.”
Emerson’s journals for autumn 1865 place him in Williamstown on November 14, a Tuesday. “I saw tonight in the Observatory, through Alvan Clark‘s telescope,” he writes, “the Dumb-Bell nebula in the Fox & Goose constellation; the four double starts in Lyra; the double stars of Castor; the 200 stars of the Pleiades; the nebula in (Perseus?).” Emerson is correct; the Little Dumbbell nebula resides in the constellation Perseus. Theodore M. Button, assistant to President Hopkins, was Emerson’s “starshowman.”
Emerson took more pleasure in the observatory than in anything else. “Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. And these mountains give an inestimable worth to Williamstown & Massachusetts. But for the mountains, I don’t quite like the proximity of a college and its noisy students. To enjoy the hills as poet, I prefer simple farmers as neighbors.” Fortunately, while Emerson was looking up, Charles Woodbury, noisy student or not, was writing him down. Talks with Emerson records the acquaintance. I reprint below some of the best things in its opening chapter (most of which concerns the practical side of writing).
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him; that will be better for both. The trouble with most writers is, they spread too thin. The reader is as quick as they; has got there before, and is ready and waiting. A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections. If you can see how the harness fits, he can. But make sure that you see it.
Then you should start with no skeleton or plan. The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for, anyway? Because you have something new to say? It is the test of the universities, and I am glad you have made it yours. We don’t want pulse with no legumes. To make anew and not from others is a grand thing. You can always tell when the thing is new; it speaks for itself. And even among the unlettered, it declares well enough and strong enough. From this is the projection of idioms. But add true, and make sure of this. Without such sanction, no one should write.
Then what is it? Say it! Out with it! Don’t lead up to it! Don’t try to let your hearer down from it. That is to be commonplace. Say it with all the grace and force you can, and stop. Be familiar only with good expressions. Speak in your own natural way. Then, and then only, can you be interesting. Let your treatise be yourself, so your friends will say, ’——wrote that.’
Expression is the main fight. Search unweariedly for that which is exact. Do not be dissuaded. You say, know words etymologically. Yes, pull them apart; see how they are made; and use them only where they fit. Avoid adjectives. Let the noun do the work. The adjective introduces sound, gives an unexpected turn, and so often mars with an unintentional false note. Most fallacies are fallacies of language. Definitions save a deal of debate.
Neither concern yourself about consistency. The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process. Take it for granted the truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves. If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet.
Are your theses given, or do you select? It is well enough rarely for practice to treat on a suggested subject. But such writing is at its origin derived and a peril. Out of your own self should come your theme; and only thus can your genius be your friend. Eloquence, by which I mean a statement so luminous as to render all others unnecessary, is only possible on a self-originated subject.
Don’t run after ideas. Save and nourish them, and you will have all you should entertain. They will come fast enough, and keep you busy.
Reading is closely related to writing. While the mind is plastic there should be care as to its impressions. The new facts should come from nature, fresh, buoyant, inspiring, exact. Later in life, when there is less danger of imitating those traits of expression through which information has been received, facts may be gleaned from a wider field. But now you shall not read these books—pointing—Prescott or Bancroft or Motley. Prescott is a thorough man. Bancroft reads enormously, always understands his subject. Motley is painstaking, but too mechanical. So are they all. Their style slays. Neither of them lifts himself off his feet. They have no lilt in them. You noticed the marble we have just seen? You remember that marble is nothing but crystallized limestone? Well, some writers never get out of the limestone condition. Be airy. Let your characters breathe from you. Walk upon the ground, but not to sink. It is a fine power, this. Some men have it, prominently the French. How it manifests itself in Montaigne, especially Cotton’s translation, and in Urquhart’s ‘Rabelais‘! Grimm almost alone of the Germans has it; [George] Borrow had it; Thoreau had it; and James Wilson—sometimes.
Keep close to realities. Then you accustom yourself to getting facts at first hand. If we could get all our facts so, there would be no necessity for books; but they give us facts, if we know how to use them; they are the granaries of thought as well.
N.B.: Perhaps worth noting is that Robert Frost, at about the time Woodbury’s volume appeared, read William Hickling Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1843); the book provided him matter for his first published poem, “Le Noche Triste.” Frost also retailed President Garfield’s quip about Mark Hopkins, whenever occasion offered; he certainly needn’t have encountered the anecdote in Woodbury’s book. George Bancroft’s multi-volume history of the United States was standard fare when Woodbury was a student. John Lothrop Motley authored a number of books on European and American history and served as Lincoln’s ambassador to the Austrian Empire. Presumably the James Wilson mentioned here is the patriot, polemicist, soldier; the signer and framer of the Constitution; and, later, the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Charles Cotton‘s translation of Montaigne appeared in three volumes (1685-86). Sir Thomas Urquhart published most of his translation Rabelais in 1653; the rest appeared posthumously, with revisions by Peter Anthony Motteux, in 1693. George Borrow (British novelist and author of travelogues) was a contemporary of Emerson.
I put it to anyone that the advice offered above, if well heeded, would produce exactly such prose as Frost himself wrote (e.g., in “The Figure a Poem Makes”): “A little guessing does [the reader] no harm, so I would assist him with no connections. If you can see how the harness fits, he can. But make sure that you see it.”
Drummer Hodge and the Cape of Good Hope
“Drummer Hodge” (1899) may well be the best-known poem (in English, anyway) about the Second Boer War (1899-1902). Thomas Hardy wrote and published it within weeks of the outbreak of fighting. Before reading the poem here, I’ll sketch out the white mischief that brought a homely lad from the west of England to die “uncoffined” on the South African veldt.
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As gathered in “A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first printed from original manuscripts, others now first published in English” (six volumes, London, 1732).
“Night made us return to our crazy ship,” wrote William Ten Rhyne, a native of Deventer, in the Netherlands, late in the 17th century. The ship lay anchored off the Cape of Good Hope; it had weathered the journey badly (in nautical contexts, “crazy” then meant “cracked,” “frail,” “unsound,” etc.). “And as we were returning from the land,” Ten Rhyne continues, “we observed the sea near the rocky shoar almost covered with haddocks; being extremely satisfied we had escaped this without the least danger, as having in full remembrance what happen’d to eight Dutch-men sometime before, who being imploy’d in the pursuit of some sea-horses, were cut to pieces by the natives.”
I do not know when the party of Hottentots—as Europeans called them—cut those eight Dutchmen to pieces for poaching “sea-horses” (which almost certainly meant “hippopotamuses” in 17th century English). But I do know that the killings were a footnote to the Khoikhoi-Dutch Wars fought on the Cape of Good Hope, first in 1659, when the Dutch East India Company arrived, then in 1673, and then again from 1674 to 1677.
Hunting hippos, fishing for haddock; setting up naval stations to resupply ships attached to the Dutch East India Company (whether against scurvy, or for some other purpose); mining gold and diamonds: whatever their enterprise, the Europeans had come to make the Cape their own. The Hottentots, who called themselves the Khoikhoi, resented it.
“The Hippopotamus Hunt” (1617). Peter Paul Rubens. Seized during the Napoleonic Wars, it was later returned to Germany, where it now resides, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
William Ten Rhyne and his party—the name, Wikipedia gives me to understand, is now spelled Willem ten Rhijne—took refuge in their “crazy ship,” as it lay off the coast of the Cape, on October 9, 1673. This dates his expedition to the second of the Khoikhoi-Dutch Wars. What details I know of it derive from An Account of the Cape of Good Hope and the Hottentotes, the Natives of that Country, by William Ten Rhyne, Native of Deventry, Physician in Ordinary, and a Member of the Council of Justice, to the Dutch East India Company (as Englished from the Latin original).
There we learn that the Hottentots call the Dutch “Onkay”; that they manage bows and arrows “with such dexterity that at forty paces” they always “hit the mark”; that they make use of a “hypnotick plant” known, in their language, as “dacha”; that they call thunder “kou” and oxen “boeba”; that, to them, a wolf is an “ouka”; and that lions are “gamma.”
Willem ten Rhijne doesn’t record the native words for “council of justice.” Read more…
“The Convergence of the Twain”: Thomas Hardy’s “Titanic”
“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation” (1841)
* * *
From a water-stained copy (sad tribute!) of Volume XXI of Harper and Brothers' Anniversary Edition of Hardy's complete works.
Thomas Hardy first published “The Convergence of the Twain” in the program printed for a “Dramatic and Operatic Matineé in Aid of the ‘Titanic’ Disaster Fund,” held at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on May 14, 1912 (at two o’clock, to be precise). In fact, he served as a member of the committee that organized the event. The R.M.S. Titanic had, of course, sunk one month earlier on April 15. “The Convergence of the Twain” next appeared in The Fortnightly Review in June. It was then printed in a special limited edition—prepared by the American bibliophile & author George Barr McCutcheon, as Hardy’s editor, Samuel Hynes, notes—in August 1912. Hardy collected the poem in his 1914 volume Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries. Ever since, it has found safe harbor in all the usual anthologies, though what the poem itself harbors remains stranger than many of us are willing to concede—stranger both in its phrasings and in its thought. We should find this poem a little astonishing.
—————I
—–In a solitude of the sea
—–Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
—————II
—–Steel chambers, late the pyres
—–Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
—————III
—–Over the mirrors meant
—–To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
—————IV
—–Jewels in joy designed
—–To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
———-V
—–Dim moon-eyed fishes near
—–Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” . . .
———-VI
—–Well: while was fashioning
—–This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
———-VII
—–Prepared a sinister mate
—–For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
———-VIII
—–And as the smart ship grew
—–In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
———-IX
—–Alien they seemed to be;
—–No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
———-X
—–Or sign that they were bent
—–By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
———-XI
—–Till the Spinner of the Years
—–Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
I suspect that few people, in 1912, spoke of the Titanic and the iceberg as having “converged” (as who should say, “You see, this big steamship and this giant iceberg just sort of converged“). Hardy starts with a title that re-describes the wreck in such a way as to nudge us toward the supposition underlying the poem: this was something other than a mere accident. He sees in the meeting of ship and iceberg an appalling fitness. And not simply a “convergence,” but, as Hardy later says, a “mating” (as if by things espoused)—indeed, a “consummation.” Set aside, for the moment, the sexual connotations awakened, in that word, by the metaphor of “mating.” (The poem may or may not control these.) “Consummation” denotes (as the OED tells us) the perfection or completion of an act; a fitting or inevitable outcome.†
An “accident” the wreck of the Titanic may have been, but Hardy chooses to see it, as the first stanzas of the poem indicate, as a representative accident (to borrow a useful phrase from Kenneth Burke). That is to say, the accident was not thoroughly “accidental.” Human vanity and pride brought it on: this is precisely the sort of trouble men are always getting themselves into (such is the implication); it is “characteristic” of us. Or else the “Immanent Will” that stirs and urges everything brought it on (more about that quasi-Schopenhaurian term later). Or maybe the Spinner of the Years—say, Clotho, one of the Fates—brought it on. God forbid we should regard the affair as nothing but a sorry, senseless botch, or as the product of mere human “error.” Hardy declines to adhere to any single context for “interpreting” the event (Christian, philosophical, pagan-fatalistic). But he just as surely declines to avoid “interpreting” it—framing it up, as he does, in his three differing vocabularies. The wreck simply must have been a thing somehow ordained, by whatever agency. So intelligible an event was it, in fact, that Hardy had already composed his poem some two or three weeks after the ship went down. He was as ready for the R.M.S. Titanic as the iceberg itself.
Thomas Hardy
Of course, the inclination to find “meaning” in the casualties of our lives is as eminently human as vanity and pride. This poem is an instance of that inclination. Insofar as this is the case, it’s appropriate to the occasion (i.e., to the “Dramatic and Operatic Matineé in Aid of the ‘Titanic’ Disaster Fund”). But given that the poem chastens us, humbles us (if for nothing else than for our pride and vanity), it must have struck some, in May 1912, as very cold comfort. Norman Page, in his Oxford Reader’s Companion to Thomas Hardy, makes a similar point: “The human loss and suffering involved [in the wreck] earn scarcely a mention, and here Hardy’s treatment of the theme must have been curiously out of line with the response of the majority. For him the sinking becomes a grim and ironic lesson in the vanity of human wishes.” Page goes so far as to suggest that Hardy “appropriates” the event, thereby making it “his own”: “the specificity and topicality [shrink] in relation to the poem’s philosophical framework. One can only wonder,” Page drily observes, “what the audience at Covent Garden made of it.” Cold comfort, as I say.
Anyhow, as things go in proper tragedies, so go they in “The Convergence of the Twain”: the all-too-human protagonists get what they deserve. And the poem affords the right kind of reader a weird catharsis—an uncanny sort of satisfaction that I will account for later. Few survivors of the wreck would have reckoned it an “august event” (where “august” means “inspiring mingled reverence and admiration,” as the OED has it; or “impressing the emotions or imagination as magnificent; majestic, stately, sublime, solemnly grand; venerable, revered”). But Hardy does so reckon it, and he expects the right kind of reader to do the same. The general scheme of things is self-correcting: vanity begets humility; vanity humbles itself. All is bleakly right with the world. I don’t consider any of this a failure of taste on Hardy’s part. One is impressed, instead, with the insignificance of human affairs; we are buffeted about by forces unthinkably immense. Read more…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Too feckless or busy (or both) to keep house here lately, I’ll simply copy out a few remarks Ralph Waldo Emerson set down in his journals in the summer of 1866:
America should affirm & establish that in no instance should the guns go in advance of the perfect right. You shall not make coups d’etat, & afterwards explain & pay, but shall proceed like William Penn, or whatever other Christian or humane person who treats with the Indian or foreigner on principles of honest trade & mutual advantage. Let us wait a thousand years for the Sandwich islands before we seize them by violence.
Captain James Cook, in his attempt to find the northwest passage, lit upon what he called the “Sandwich Islands” in January 1778. Some 16th century Spanish maps feature what may be the same islands, but Cook gave them the name by which they were known, to speakers of English, in Emerson’s day. The islands are, of course, Hawai’i. The Russians, the French, and the British all had their stake in the archipelago during the first half of the 19th century. How long did America wait for the Sandwich Islands? Not a thousand years, as per Emerson; instead, nine.
I refer to the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875. The major signatories to that treaty were King Kalākaua of Hawai’i, United States Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, and President Ulysses S. Grant. The treaty opened markets in the United States to Hawaiian sugar (American sugar growers duly arrived). The treaty also granted, to the United States, the land later used to build a naval station called Pearl Harbor.
When King Kalākaua died in San Francisco in 1891, his sister, Queen Lili’uokalani, assumed the throne. Prompted, in part, by a native Hawaiian political party named Hui Kalai’aina, she undertook the drafting of a new constitution. This would have restored certain rights alienated by the so-called Bayonet Constitution of 1887, which had disenfranchised Asian inhabitants of the islands.
I am looking all of this up, needless to say. What I don’t need to go to a book (or to the Web) to recall is that the United States didn’t fancy the Queen’s move, and didn’t, as Emerson would have it, “proceed like William Penn.”
In 1893, white inhabitants of the islands formed a Committee of Safety, as these things are often called; and in came the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marines. The Queen abdicated, if “abdication” may encompass an action more or less involuntary. The Committee of Safety and its allies established the Provisional Government of Hawai’i. This entity controlled the islands for a year until, in 1894, the U.S. Congress passed the Newlands Resolution (named for Nevada Congressman Francis Griffith Newlands). That resolution annexed the Territory of Hawaii to the United States. And so affairs remained—with the exception of a 4-year interregnum of martial law during the Pacific War—until Hawaii came into the union as a state in 1959.
We made our coup d’etat and, afterwards, explained and paid.
I note also another entry Emerson made in his journals, this time in 1847: “I hate vulnerable people,” it reads. The man certainly had his facets.
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N.B.: I paste in below an image, available at Wikipedia, of a letter protesting annexation, addressed to President William McKinley and signed by fifty members of the Hawai’ian Patriotic League.
Petition Against Annexation, addressed to President McKinley.
A Night at the Movies in Newt Gingrich’s America (ca. 1994-98)
Newt Gingrich. Caricature by David Levine, New York Review of Books, March 23, 1995.
N.B.: I wrote the following in the mid-1990s, shortly after Newt Gingrich, brandishing his Contract With America, led Congressional Republicans to victory in the mid-term elections of 1994. I never did anything with it. Writing about movies and politics is strictly avocational with me. And then Gingrich’s ouster in 1998 seemed somehow to have placed an expiration date on most of what I had to say. And so this foray into the movies and Gingrichite politics has lain, these intervening sixteen years, on successive floppy-disks and hard-drives, following me through ever-newer computers, from PCs to iMacs, and from the Michigan to Kyoto. I now consign it to The Cloud, for what interest it may bear, as a relic, in this new season of Gingrich. I am less persuaded now than I was in 1998 that, in the sentences that close this visit to Hollywood, I had gotten my prognostications wrong.
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JUST CAUSE, JUNIOR, AND “THE CONTRACT WITH AMERICA“
What are the specific political relations between the New Right and the entertainment industry? The question is intriguing in light of attacks lodged in the 1990s from the Right against the industry, as when Bob Dole condemns Hollywood and corporate entities like Time Warner for inculcating counter-cultural, corrupt values, or when Dan Quayle complains that popular media reflect liberal habits of mind.
Kenneth Burke
But the Right’s patent hostility to the entertainment industry obscures certain latent political and ideological affiliations that bring the two together. Nowhere are these affiliations better exhibited than in Ivan Reitman‘s Junior (released in November 1994) and Arne Glimcher‘s Just Cause (released in February 1995). Taken together, these two popular films ingeniously “advance” (if I may put it that way) the twin agenda of the Republican Right: Law & Order and Family Values. They constitute (and reflect) an assault on American liberalism. And they do it in an engaging fashion that perhaps helps us understand the political temper of the electorate circa 1995. Junior and Just Cause set up a “frame for accepting” (as Kenneth Burke would say) the fundamental arguments of the Gingrichite Contract With America. They help us understand, to my mind anyway, why that Contract initially met with such remarkable popular success.
1. Law & Order, or “Natural” Anti-Liberalism: Just Cause
Poster, issued in 1995.
Just Cause represents violent crime in such a way that we are not encouraged to alter the “social” conditions that give rise to it. The film abstracts criminal behavior from its social context and places it instead in a context of “natural” pathology where, we are meant to concede, our only recourse is incarceration. This sounds like the sort of talk we hear from the Right about Law & Order, and that’s precisely what it is: an abdication of “social” responsibility. On this view, the criminal justice system ought chiefly to punish criminals rather than reform or rehabilitate them. (Systematic crime “prevention” is an enterprise that the New Right by now regards as thoroughly quixotic.) Just Cause harmonizes perfectly with the “Taking Back Our Streets Act” of the Contract With America, with its calls for cuts in “social spending”—as Gingrich derisively says—the better to fund construction of prisons.† But first, the plot of the movie. Read more…
Some Notes on “Ozymandias”
As printed in "Rosalind and Helen; a Modern Eclogue and Other Poems" (London: 1819). Click on the image to enlarge it. The notes are worth reading.
Percy Bysshe Shelley published his “Ozymandias” in The Examiner, edited by his friend Leigh Hunt, on January 11, 1818 (#524 of the journal). It appeared under the pen-name “Glirastes.” His friend Horace Smith published a sonnet on the same theme in The Examiner for February 1, 1818 (reprinted below). The following passage from Diodorus Siculus‘s Library of History (1.47) provided a source (there may have been others) for the poets:
Ten stades from the first tombs, [Hecataeus of Abdera] says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of the king known as Osymandyas. At its entrance there is a pylon, constructed of variegated stone, two plethra in breadth and forty-five cubits high; passing through this one enters a rectangular peristyle, built of stone, four plethra long on each side; it is supported, in place of pillars, by monolithic figures sixteen cubits high, wrought in the ancient manner as to shape; and the entire ceiling, which is two fathoms wide, consists of a single stone, which is highly decorated with stars on a blue field. Beyond this peristyle there is yet another entrance and pylon, in every respect like the one mentioned before, save that it is more richly wrought with every manner of relief; beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the largest of any in Egypt, the foot measuring over seven cubits, while the other two at the knees of this, the one on the right and the other on the left, daughter and mother respectively, are smaller than the one first mentioned. And it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: ‘King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.’ There is also another statue of his mother standing alone, a monolith twenty cubits high, and it has three diadems on its head, signifying that she was both daughter and wife and mother of a king.
C. H. Oldfather prepared the foregoing translation for the Loeb Classical Library‘s 1933 edition of Diodorus (fl. 60-30 B.C.E.). He points out in a note that Diodorus relies, here, on an account given by Hecataeus of Abdera, a historian of the early third century B.C.E., and the author of an Aigyptiaka. “What Diodorus gives,” Oldfather indicates, “is no more than a paraphrase, not a quotation, of Hecataeus.” I do not know what translation Shelley read, or if he read it instead in the Greek (unlikely), or if he knew it by reputation. In Sites of exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, the Egyptologist Adriana Corrado points out that “Diodorus’s enthusiastic account of Ozymandias, who was clearly based on Rameses II, had been well-known since Poggio Bracciolini‘s Latin translation of 1472 (further popularised by Serlio in Book III of his treatise on architecture, which adds much on Egypt, including the 1530′s observations of the future Cardinal, Marco Grimani). In all versions, including Baldelli’s 1574 Italian version, the statement (presumably once in hieroglyphs) was printed in uppercase and highlighted: ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, if anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass/see my works.’ Belzoni says that Frederik Ludvig Norden saw Abu Simbel [the site of two temples built by Ramses II in southern Egypt] but it is usually thought to have been discovered in 1813.”
Whatever the case, here’s Shelley’s sonnet on Ramses II/Ozymandias:
Percy Bysshe Shelley, portrait by Alfred Clint. 1819. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This week, anyway, I find myself convinced that few other sonnets open with such a fine shot as this one: “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said . . .” Full stop. Caesura in the first position of line two (uncommon in sonnets). Only the word “antique” rises, and it hardly, above the conversational, so clean and direct in its address is Shelley’s diction. He uses “antique” in the sense one associates with such lines as these: “The famous warriors of the anticke world” (Edmund Spenser: the Amoretti), and “The Senatours of th’ antique Rome” (Shakespeare: “Prologue” to act five of Henry the Fifth). “Antique” may strike our ears as a strange bit of diction here, but it certainly would not have so struck Shelley’s ears, or those of his readers. Shelley opens the sonnet right there on the lapel-seizing plane, so to speak, and he holds to it through to the end. Of the 111 words in the sonnet, 87 are monosyllabic: 78%. The verbs are for the most part dynamic or transitive or both. Only “stand,” “lies,” “remains,” “tell,” “appear,” “remains” and “stretch” are stative (as I believe the grammarians say). And the sonnet nicely makes dynamic what otherwise would function as a stative verb: “despair.” We were always to have looked on Ozymandias’s works and despaired; such was his sneering brag, as Shelley renders it. But his works long ago reached their expiration date; in short, their capacity to inspire despair had duration; it fell away. The Shelleyan irony is that the “mighty” may yet “despair” when looking on Ozymandias’s now un-seeable “works,” brought into the theater of the imagination by this sonnet—and despair not because they can’t hope to match either Ozymandias’s works or Shelley’s, but because their own “works,” whatever they may be, will wind up a colossal wreck (unlike Shelley’s, needless to say). So let’s call “despair,” here, stative and dynamic: it no longer works on us; and yet it does its work on us (at least it should). The events of recent days in the sands of Libya bear it all out. Read more…
“Buried above ground”: Notes on a Poem by William Cowper
Portrait of William Cowper (1731-1800), by Lemuel Francis Abbott (c. 1760 – 1802). Date: 1792. Oil on canvas. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Cowper’s Tirocinium (1784) proves that he formed a low opinion of English public schools.† The severity of his judgment upon institutions where religious instruction was scanty and temptations to vice abounded is explicable without supposing that he was himself unhappy.
—Dictionary of National Biography‡
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William Cowper (1731-1800) (pronounced “Cooper”), born at Berkhampstead, was the son of the clergymen John Cowper and Anne Donne. Anne died early, while giving birth to Cowper’s brother John, whereupon William was sent to a school administered by one Dr. Pitman at Market Street, Hertfordshire. There, by his own (at times excruciating) report, in a posthumously published Memoir, Cowper suffered at the hands of a regular terror of a bully, who was, fortunately, later expelled. The poet-to-be suffered troubles with his eyes, relief from which he attributed not to treatment by the oculist he sought but instead to an attack of small-pox. At the age of ten, he entered Westminster School, a “public school,” as the English style them, and, enjoying the company of several of his mates, he became adept, as he later put it, “in the infernal art of lying”—which is to say, misleading his schoolmasters with excuses for work undone. He was handy with a cricket bat, good on the pitch, and had a knack for writing verse in Latin. At the age of eighteen Cowper left to read for the law with a solicitor called Chapman, but took, it would seem, a livelier interest in his own uncle’s daughters, with whom (again by his own report) he passed a good many hours “giggling and making giggle” with his friend Edward Thurlow (1731-1806), later Lord Chancellor of Great Britain under no fewer than four Prime Ministers. Cowper, notwithstanding his casual engagement with the law, was called to the bar on June 14, 1754. Here, as the Dictionary of National Biography has it, Cowper “was seized with an ominous depression of spirits during the early part of his residence in chambers. He found some consolation in reading George Herbert‘s poems, but laid them aside on the advice of a relation, who thought that they stimulated his morbid feelings,” which had already become quite apparent. “After a year’s misery,” continues the DNB, “he sought relief in religious exercises. He was advised to make a visit of some months to Southampton, where he made yachting excursions with Sir Thomas Hesketh. One day he felt a sudden relief. Hereupon he burnt the prayers which he had composed, and long afterwards reproached himself with having misinterpreted a providential acceptance of his petitions into a mere effect of the change of air and scene.” Here arose the “morbid” pattern of penitence and scathing self-reproach that would sound the awful leitmotif in Cowper’s long life. One notices, in this episode, Cowper’s tendency to assume that Providence took a peculiar interest in him—a matter less unusual in character (many Christians think this way) than in intensity: it was as if God were singling him out for special notice.
There followed the death of his father; the usual, thwarted love-affair; the diddling in law, while preferring a life of letters; the fading fortunes and uncertain patronage; and then the first of his great crises, in 1763. I find the account given in the DNB of the latter episode quite charming in style and give it whole here:
His cousin, Major Cowper, claimed the right of appointment to the joint offices of reading clerk and clerk of the committees, and to the less valuable office of clerk of the journals of the House of Lords. Both appointments became vacant in 1763, the latter by the death of the incumbent, which Cowper reproached himself for having desired.
With alarming grandiosity, mingled with conviction of his own depravity, Cowper, as he states in his own Memoir, convinced himself that his desire for the office had by some means brought about, or at any rate hastened, the incumbent’s death. The DNB continues:
Major Cowper offered the most valuable to Cowper, intending the other for a Mr. Arnold. Cowper accepted, but was so overcome by subsequent reflections upon his own incapacity that he persuaded his cousin to give the more valuable place to Arnold and the less valuable to himself. Meanwhile the right of appointment was disputed. Cowper was told that the ground would have to be fought by inches and that he would have to stand an examination into his own fitness at the bar of the House of Lords. He made some attempts to secure the necessary experience of his duties by attending the office; but the anxiety threw him into a nervous fever. A visit to Margate in the summer did something for his spirits. On returning to town in October he resumed attendance at the office. The anticipated examination unnerved him. An accidental talk
—and here, be it noted, our DNB biographer relies, again, on Cowper’s own account in his Memoir—
directed his thoughts to suicide. He bought a bottle of laudanum; but after several attempts to drink it, frustrated by accident or sudden revulsion of feeling, he threw it out of the window. He went to the river to drown himself, and turned back at sight of a porter waiting on the bank. The day before that fixed for his examination he made a determined attempt to hang himself with a garter. On a third attempt the garter broke just in time to save his life. He now sent for Major Cowper, who saw at once that all thoughts of the appointment must be abandoned. Cowper remained in his chambers, where the symptoms of a violent attack of madness rapidly developed themselves. Cowper’s delusions took a religious colouring. He was convinced that he was damned. He consulted Martin Madan, his cousin. Madan gave him spiritual advice. His brother came to see him, and was present during a crisis, in which he felt as though a violent blow had struck his brain ‘without touching the skull.’ The brother consulted the family, and Cowper was taken in December 1763 to a private madhouse, kept by Dr. Nathaniel Cotton at St. Albans. A copy of sapphics written in the interval gives a terrible description of his state of mind.
“Cowper’s religious terrors,” the DNB concludes, “were obviously the effect and not the cause of the madness, of which his earlier attack had been symptomatic.” In any case, the poem in question, indeed in Sapphics, engages me here:
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution:—
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.
Damn’d below Judas: more abhorr’d than he was,
Who, for a few pence, sold his holy master.
Twice betray’d, Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her everhungry mouths all
Bolted against me.
Hard lot! Encompass’d with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
Fall’n, and if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s:
Him, the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent, quick and howling, to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.
That first stanza is Old Testament stuff, or worse. I’m not sure it doesn’t court some kind of blasphemy. Read more…
“Untroubling and untroubled”: Notes on a poem by John Clare
The Blue Bell Inn. Clare lived in the cottage next door. Photo by "uplandswolf" (at Flickr).
The following anthology piece laid hold of me when I encountered it, some decades ago now, in Arthur Quiller-Couch‘s Oxford Book of English Verse. It’s by John Clare, of course, born into poverty in 1793 in Helpstone, a village named as if somehow for the purpose of bringing about, in the ripeness of time, such a poet as him.
Clare’s father was on parish relief, and his twin sister died in infancy. At age seven Clare was “put to keep sheep and geese,” in the inimitable prose of The Dictionary of National Biography, “where he learnt old songs from ‘Granny Bains,’ the village cowherd.” In about 1808 (here the DNB equivocates) Clare took employment as “an outdoor servant” with Francis Gregory, “landlord of the ‘Blue Bell’” in Helpstone. (I find, on inquiry, that the Blue Bell remains open for business to this day, at #10 Woodgate, Helpston, as it is now spelled, in Peterborough.) Here Clare had the first of his unfortunate love affairs (with a young lass named Mary Joyce), but, what’s more important, began reading James Thomson’s The Seasons.
Detail, introduction to "Poems descriptive of Rural Life..."
His next job, as “under-gardener at Burghley Park, seat of the Marquis of Exeter,” as the DNB tells us, put him in “bad company, who taught him to drink and whose brutality induced him to run away after eleven months.” The pronoun “whose,” I take it, refers to the bad company, not to the Marquess of Exeter. A stint in the local militia amounted to nothing, nor did “another luckless love affair,” and the now-journeyman poet returned in poverty to his father, “joined some gipsies for a time” (again, our DNB), and eventually took a job at a limekiln. He courted one Martha Turner, but her parents “objected to Clare’s poverty, and his suit languished,” and, adding insult to injury, he “was soon discharged by his employer [at the limekiln] for wasting his time in scribbling.” But wasted time it certainly wasn’t and, on January 16, 1820, the firm of Taylor & Hessey published Poems, descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant. The introduction made much of the latter fact: “though Poets in this country have seldom been fortunate men, yet he is, perhaps, the least favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of friends, of any that ever existed.” Clare’s poverty sold him, and, his suit now no longer languishing, he married Martha “Patty” Turner on March 16, 1820. The DNB takes care to inform us that “their first child was born a month later.” It seems “that Clare’s fidelity had wavered.” Jonathan Bate‘s biography makes clear that it wavered often enough to occasion considerable worry that gossip might tarnish Clare’s reputation—as it had tarnished Robert Burns‘s—on entering the literary world with his forthcoming Poems. But nonetheless he proved “a good husband and father,” reports the DNB, at least until began the troubles of which the poem printed below is so unforgettable a record.
Clare’s mental illness first manifested itself publicly when “a decided fit of insanity showed itself during a performance of The Merchant of Venice,” as the DNB phrases it. In their edition of the poems (done for Oxford), Eric Robinson and David Powell report that “the nature of Clare’s illness has never satisfactorily been established. There seem to have been epileptiform incidents in his early life, experiences during his visits to London which suggest a shaky hold upon reality, confusion about his relationship to Mary Joyce, nightmares, some bouts of heavy drinking, and the suggestion, by Clare himself, that he might have been venereally infected.” Robinson and Powell continue: “The account of Clare’s escape from [the asylum at] High Beach,” where he was first confined, and whence he returned to Helpstone, “is a strange mixture of dream-world, literary reminiscence, and realistic reporting. There are the first recorded signs that Clare is not sure of his own identity. Is he Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Queen Victoria’s father, or just a battered piece of flotsam? Clare himself is not sure. The two major undertakings of this period,” the editors point out, “are ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Don Juan,’ names which suggest still another persona for Clare”—that is to say, Lord Byron. Both poems are in fact “concerned with Clare’s struggle to know who he is.” After making his way back to Helpstone, where he stayed awhile, both vexed and vexing, he was (voluntarily) confined to the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death. (Incidentally, the asylum is now called St. Andrew’s Hospital and contains a ward named for Clare.)
But now the text of the poem known to us simply as “I Am”:
John Clare, as painted by William Hilton in 1820, the year his first volume of poetry appeared. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Clare read the Bible when a child, and, while in the asylum where he wrote these lines, he composed also verse paraphrases of several books of the Bible, including Job and Exodus. I doubt whether we can entirely rule out some possible echo of Exodus 3:13-14 in that first “iamb” of the poem: “And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” But I’m no more certain what to make of such an allusion, if allusion it is, than Clare is sure of what to make of himself. Who knows but that something of the tautological self-involution of “I am that I am” bears on the poem, with a slightly bitter tang of irony? Clare is “the self-consumer of [his] woes,” after all. He is what he is, which is—well, none can say “what” he is, and none “cares.” That initial “I am,” with its un-predicated copulative grammar, opens the poem up with pained wonder.
And isn’t there something a bit queer in that second line? Read more…
Discoveries, etc.
An intersection in New Jersey. From the masthead of "College Hill Review."
A quick note today to acknowledge the new number of The College Hill Review, an excellent on-line quarterly edited by James Barsczc (et al).
At the top of the page you’ll find a wonderful bit of work by the poet Mark Scott (author of Tactile Values and A Bedroom Occupation: Love Elegies): “Discoveries,” a collection of epigrams and observations whose title recalls, of course, Ben Jonson‘s Timber; or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter.
I reprint here one passage from Scott’s “Discoveries,” the better to give you its savor:
“Emerson is a superficial writer. ‘In skating over thin ice,’ he says, ‘our safety is in our speed. We live amid surfaces, and the art of life is to skate well on them.’ This is the foundation of transcendentalism: that Emerson liked to watch boys skate on the Concord River.”
Take a look at the whole of the issue.
Kinds of Rhyme: “She Walks in Beauty,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Base Details,” & “Blighters”
George Gordon Lord Byron. 1824 portrait by Thomas Philipps (1770-1845).
A relatively short bit today, illustrating a few kinds of rhyme, including (for starters) “conjunctive” and “disjunctive” rhymes. Those terms are not, so far as I know, in common use. But they serve a good enough turn. (I dropped “disjunctive rhyme” into Google Books and, as of this writing, came up with two results; “conjunctive rhyme” also yields only two.) I aim to deal here largely with disjunctive (or ironic) rhymes. But for purposes of contrast I think it best to start with a fine example, one of the best I know, of conjunctive rhymes.
Following is Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” several rhymes in which have always seemed to me ideally “conjunctive”—by which I mean that the rhymes harmonize and affiliate words not in sound merely but in sense also. Rhymes like these don’t simply hold the lines and stanzas together; they exceed “infrastructural” purposes, so to speak. They signify; they’re a significant feature of the poem’s meaning, all the more so as they work on us in ways equally auditory and rational.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
"Walk," in one of its senses, from the Oxford English Dictionary; click for a larger image.
I’ll concern myself chiefly with rhyming, but some brief discussion of the theme and “argument” of the lyric is called for, given that the rhymes complement (and complete) both.
Certainly no beauty myself, I have nonetheless “walked in beauty”; any time I wish, I may take the bus round to Ryoanji or Ginkakuji (two temples here in Kyoto) and do that.
But Byron’s lady isn’t out for beauty. She possesses it such that every footfall she takes “walks” her more deeply “in” it. Here we have a case where the sometimes-equivocal nature of English prepositions (in this case “in”) does good work. She inhabits beauty, whether “walking” or not (it’s no question of her having a lovely gait, though doubtless she does). Beauty hangs about her like an atmosphere as she moves, or, to be more precise, like a climate (or “clime”). But given the long and curious history of “walk” in English—see the note at the end of this entry, quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary—I think more is a-foot, here, than a stroll. The moral emphases brought out in the second and third stanzas—having to do with “grace,” “goodness,” and “innocence,” lest anyone suppose Byron to have his eye only on the woman’s physical beauty;—as I say, these moral emphases bring out in “walk” a more vocational sense of the word (as in idioms speaking of what “walk of life” one moves in). Scriptural precedents come to mind, owing to the muted religiosity of the last twelve lines. The O.E.D. tells us (see the image above): “Chiefly after biblical usage: to pass one’s life; to conduct oneself, behave (well, badly, wisely, unwisely, etc.). Often with reference to a metaphorical ‘path’ or ‘way.’” As in these examples, from Tyndale‘s translation of the Bible: “1526 Bible (Tyndale) Luke i. 6 Booth‥walked [Gk. πορευόμενοι] in all the lawes and ordinacions of the lorde. 1530 Bible (Tyndale) Gen. To walke with god is to lyve godly and to walke in his commaundementes.” Byron’s lady “walks in beauty” in these vocational senses, too (not merely in some “atmospheric” sense). Beauty is her calling. She goes about her walk of life in all innocence and purity; her beauty is not of the flesh alone. Byron takes care to distinguish her “winning” charms from those that might, in a lesser woman, a more worldly woman, be turned to cunning (her smiles “tell of days in goodness spent,” not of days spent in coy flirtation, say). Read more…
What are days for?
Philip Larkin, photograph by Fay Godwin.
Philip Larkin wrote the following poem—as his editor Anthony Thwaite tells us—on August 3, 1953. He later collected it in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), where it appears between “Take One Home for the Kiddies” and “MCMXIV.”
“Days”
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
A simple enough beginning, such as might open a conversation with a child, or such as a child might say in opening a conversation. “What are days for?” The answer to the query comes in the fifth line. Days, it seems, “are to be happy in.” A typical reader of Larkin might well reply in turn: Says who? Days are also to be anxious in, to be angry in, to be lovesick in (or sick of love in), to be bored in, to be bereft and sad in, and so on. Larkin’s own poems are my register, here. Days are to be happy in! Set aside, for the moment, the question begged here: Why should “days”—the diurnal cycles that mark out our threescore years and ten—have any “purpose” at all but those we give them anyway? Set that aside, and the answer (“Days are to be happy in”), as with the query it answers, certainly does (as I say) sound like something one might say to a child (or on a greeting card posted for birthdays). What are days for? Why, my sweet, they are to happy in! This is the proposition against which, even as we find it laid out in these lines, the poem (with its ingenious barbs) somehow works. Read more…
Cover, Ralph Pite's biography of Hardy.
Today, a glance at a familiar anthology piece by Thomas Hardy: “Neutral Tones.” I’m not certain we usually do justice to one feature of the poem: namely, the fact that it tells us that “love deceives.” This distinction might (or might not) seem a matter of great consequence, but I will take it seriously (some may say absurdly seriously). Consider how often bitter love-poems authored by men imply, or state outright, that not so much “love” as woman “deceives.” The poetry of the English Renaissance, of course, takes woman as the very type of inconstancy; it rests on a foundation of happy misogyny. Hardy’s up to something different—something I believe his biographers, in pinning the poem to this young woman or that with whom we know Hardy to have been involved (his cousin Tryphena Sparks, for example), have perhaps led us to miss.
Ralph Pite, in Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life, does rather well with what biographical matter may be brought to bear. “As Hardy’s home receded from him [while he lived in London],” Pite notes, his ideas about women and courtship changed somewhat. “The virginal,” Pite suggests, seemed to Hardy “more and more like the unsophisticated.” For these reasons, Pite surmises, the aforementioned Tryphena, a likely early love of Hardy’s, “became linked” in the poet’s mind “with feelings of claustrophobia,” by which I believe Pite to mean something like (or including) provinciality. Essentially, Pite continues, “Hardy started to judge her more. He looked at her with London eyes and she seemed far less special than before. Now she appeared ‘but one / Of the common crowd.’” This line, Pite continues, is from “‘At Waking,’ a poem written in Weymouth in 1869. It is an anguished piece, as powerful as anything Hardy had written before, in which he confronts the bleak experience of ‘waking’ up from a dream to find everything prosaic and plain. He was to have the same experience again, many times. On this occasion, it is love that becomes illusory and Tryphena does seem to be secretly referred to.”
And there’s more. Tryphena, Pite explains, “was becoming ‘a blank’ to [Hardy]—not just valueless and not wicked or deceitful (there’s no sense of Hardy’s being jilted here); instead Tryphena has somehow become meaningless to him, empty and ungraspable. Try as he might, resist it as he might, nothing could halt the dream’s decline. Other poems from this period—such as ‘The Dawn After the Dance‘ and ‘In the Vaulted Way‘—are variants on the same essential situation, confirming that Hardy went through some change of heart, which he could scarcely account for himself, still less explain satisfactorily to anyone else. ‘A Waking’ is closest in feeling, however, to the desolation expressed in his earlier poem ‘Neutral Tones,’ and out of these experiences Hardy later wrote with extraordinary insight about the way that love could mysteriously disappear—how lovers could be abandoned by love itself.” That last turn of phrase (my emphasis) bears all the insight. Love has its own agency: it comes over us, takes us up; and it just as often abandons us, quite without regard to such petty things as our private expectations and aspirations. Is that so, as Hardy sees it? Is Pite correct? In what sense? And how does such an insight, if insight it is, illuminate (say) “Neutral Tones”? The text of the poem:
Title page of the volume in which "Neutral Tones" was first collected.
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Joshua Reynolds' 1772 portrait of Johnson.
Samuel Johnson says of the witches’ wicked incantations in Macbeth (IV.i) that “it is observable that Shakespeare, on this great occasion, which involves the fate of a king, multiplies all the circumstances of horror. The babe, whose finger is used, must be strangled in its birth; the grease must not only be human, but must have dropped from a gibbet, the gibbet of a murderer; and even the sow, whose blood is used, must have offended nature by devouring her own farrow.”
Something similar might be said of how thoroughgoing Hardy is, in “Neutral Tones,” with the imagery and phrasing of abjection. The scene must be barrenest winter, of course. The sky should be not merely pallid, but pallid as with fear, having not simply been cursed but “God-curst.” The leaves must be “few” in number (poverty even here!), and, of course, from an “ash”—with the available figurative extension into the gray “ashes” of a desire now utterly extinct. The sod must be “starving.” The riddles must be “tedious.” And above all, that “smile” must be “the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die”—and, moreover, must be complemented by a “grin” that crosses it “like an ominous bird a-wing.” Could any poet “multiply” the circumstances of bitterness more fully? The poem, it seems, touches every possible ramification of the matter, such that I find it hard, at times, to keep my mind fixed on its argument, as I may call it, rather than on the sheer feat of its achieved, appalling—almost comically so—extravagance. Who could possibly outdo Hardy here? “The deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die”! Many a poet must have envied Hardy that line. Read more…
God’s “unweeting way”; a few notes on Hardy.
Thomas Hardy
With this entry I miss the New Year by a month or so. But laggard that I am, what excuse?—all the more given that Thomas Hardy collected the following poem first in Times’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).
“Now that the miscellany is brought together,” Hardy writes in his brief preface, “some lack of concord in pieces written at widely severed dates, and in contrasting moods and circumstances, will be obvious enough. This I cannot help, but the sense of disconnection, particularly in respect of those lyrics penned in the first person, will be immaterial when it is borne in mind that they are to be regarded, in the main, as dramatic monologues by different characters.” He continues, with customary modesty: “As a whole they will, I hope, take the reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward.” The “forward” movement—”even if not far”—in the poem under discussion here interests me. Hardy lays his pen upon that hinge, so to speak, that swings from a 19th century dispensation to a post-Darwinian 20th one. And he does it at the hinge of the year.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
- From a 1919 reprint of “Time’s Laughingstocks.”
“I have finished another year,” said God,
“In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.”
“And what’s the good of it?” I said,
“What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?
“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
This tabernacle groan’—
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!”
Then he: “My labours—logicless—
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
“Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!”
He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year’s Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.
—1906.
Any reader of Hardy’s poetry knows how conversant he is with God, and with the stars and the dead for that matter. In this poem, God has the first word, gratified, as he is, at having logged in yet another year:
“I have finished another year,” said God,
“In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.”
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, gazing on Yorick's skull.
We have emblematic colors for the seasons, winter on through autumn: grey, green, white, and brown—and for the latter, dead leaves as well, “strewn” “upon the sod” as with workmanlike deliberation. But best in this first stanza is the penultimate line, where God speaks of himself as having ”sealed up the worm within the clod,” where “clod” means what it does in O.E.D. sense 3a: “A lump of earth or clay adhering together.” The “worm”: so nicely resonant in English poetry, particularly of the Renaissance, as a token of death and decay. Bear in mind Shakespeare’s fine understatement, as given to Rosalind in reply to Orlando, her suitor, in As You Like It (IV.i.1876ff.): “No, faith, The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dash’d out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have liv’d many a fair year, though Hero had turn’d nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drown’d; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was—Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Or, better still, Hamlet‘s apt rejoinder to Claudius (IV.iii.2731ff.):
Claudius. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet. At supper.
Claudius. At supper? Where?
Hamlet. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
We are deep in O.E.D. sense 6c for “worm”: “worm’s or worms’ meat, said of a man’s dead body, or of man as mortal.” Would that God had really “sealed” the damned creature up “within the clod”; he is rather too busy about his office. Read more…
Our Highest Liveliness (Frost, Burke, Derrida, Foucault, et al)
Robert Frost, at about the age of 40.
The academy has generated a good deal of heat but still relatively little light in its discussion of “personality” in poetry, 30 years notwithstanding. We might do better by engaging more general problems of literary “authority,” about which, as it happens, Robert Frost is quite illuminating. We needn’t confine ourselves to Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, though that is what we’ve tended to do. (Of course, Richard Poirier is the exception here, as in a few other ways.)
Frost has much to contribute to still-contemporary debates—these didn’t all end, or shouldn’t have anyway in the 1980s and 1990s—over the meaning and constitution of “authorship.” But in this respect his work has been utterly overlooked. As who should expect otherwise? I’ll take a look here at certain similarities among writings by Frost, Derrida, Kenneth Burke, and Foucault that bear variously on the matter of “authorship.” I set Frost’s remarks on the subject in this context in order to show that his concerns are really perennial. (We now hear mumblings coming out of such journals as PMLA of a “return to literature,” or of the re-birth of the author that Barthes declared “dead” so many years ago, in whatever sense.) And into the bargain Foucault’s work helps us see how, in thinking about his own writing, Frost often relies, in an intriguing fashion, on what we used to speak of (after Foucault’s manner) as the “author-function.” Such is the diction of bureaucracy—which is part of Foucault’s point in so phrasing it. But I really mean to trace out the path by which Frost diverged from the kind of thinking (and prose) we associate with Derrida and Foucault. Along this divergent path, Frost’s more immediate connection to Burke, Dewey and Emerson become clear. One more remark before getting on with it all. Because I’m writing more about a concept in Frost’s writings (“authorship”) than about any single work, and because Frost nowhere considers this concept at length, I’ll draw together a number of passages from lectures, essays, letters, and poems, the better to arrive at a composite sense of his thinking about “authorship.” Read more…
Compassion is a very untenable ground: Thoreau’s Dead Horse
Daguerreotype of Henry David Thoreau (1856).
Toward the end of Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden falls this remarkable passage:
Title page, first edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.
“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.”
“Compassion is a very untenable ground,” Thoreau says. “It must be expeditious.” “Expedite,” from the Latin “expedere,” literally means: to remove the fetters from a person’s ankles, where the morpheme “ped-” of course has to do with feet (hence its antonym, “impede”). From this we have, for “expedite,” Oxford English Dictionary sense 1: “To clear of difficulties; to clear up (confusion); to facilitate (action or movement); to disentangle, untie (a knot).” Why must our “compassion” be expeditious, which is to say quick and fleet? Because it always stands on “untenable grounds,” grounds which cannot be held (“tenable” deriving from the Latin “tenere,” or “to hold”). To compassionate, as the now disused verb has it, is to “suffer with” (com-, or “with” + pati-, or “suffer,” from which root we have also the word “patience,” e.g.). I go into such nervous detail for good reason. Thoreau is up to his usual verbal excavations in this passage, as also with “stereotyped.” The word belongs to the technology of printing, of course, as in O.E.D. sense 1 for “stereotype” (noun): “The method or process of printing in which a solid plate or type-metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type, is used for printing from instead of the forme itself.” From which we get the figurative extensions more familiar to most readers (O.E.D. senses 3a-b): “Something continued or constantly repeated without change; a stereotyped phrase, formula, etc.; stereotyped diction or usage. A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type.”
But let us speak of the earth’s tonic appetite for dead horses, and of good cheer and carrion. Read more…
Who is the Emperor of Ice Cream?
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Image from the Bettmann Archive.
I think readers of Wallace Stevens‘s lyric “The Emperor of Ice Cream” often miss the full significance of the line: “Let be be finale of seem.” And by way of glossing it I here offer, in a sense, a “vocational” reading of the poem. Which is of course only one possible reading of it. Others I may attend to later, while holding what follows in essay, so to speak—on trial.
“Finale” belongs to the concert hall, or the theater. The sentence in which it appears is a kind of motto for the end-game: act five, the drawing of the curtain on a play. As in Oxford English Dictionary senses 1-3: “The last movement of a symphony, sonata, concerto, or other instrumental composition. The last scene or closing part of a drama or any other public entertainment. The conclusion, end; the final catastrophe. Also transf,” as in fact it is transferred into another context here: the poem describes a funeral, an end of the merely apparent “seeming” that any life somehow always is (a life, in the larger sense, being a thing we have to “get up”). Whether there’s any catastrophe in this old woman’s funeral I leave it to those who read these pages to decide. But the poem’s queer, playful mode—its affective register—doesn’t strike me as involving anything particularly catastrophic, or even anything much to be regretted. There’s a chill at the heart of it, such that with a little rock salt and a churn one might well get a pint of ice cream out of it.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
A cast-off dresser identified by the Flickr photographer (one Ashur) as of deal. This one lacks more than a few glass knobs.
In low-rent American settings like the one depicted here, “finale” (when pronounced) often follows “grand”: the metaphor is theatrical, as I suggested, or as is plain to any reader I should say. But in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” the “finale” is not at all “grand.” Among the props are flowers “in last month’s newspapers.” Why not last week’s, or yesterday’s? Must we fetch the papers up from a dusty heap? (That little detail always strikes me as adding to the slightly absurd pathos of the poem, though at least the papers aren’t last year’s.) And then there is that cheap “dresser of deal,” missing a few of its glass knobs. “Deal” in this context means, as our O.E.D. has it: “1. a. A slice sawn from a log of timber (now always of fir or pine), and usually understood to be more than seven inches wide, and not more than three thick; a plank or board of pine or fir-wood.In the timber trade, in Great Britain, a deal is understood to be 9 inches wide, not more than 3 inches thick, and at least 6 feet long. If shorter, it is a deal-end; if not more than 7 inches wide, it is a batten. In N. America, the standard deal (to which other sizes are reduced in computation) is 12 feet long, 11 inches wide, and 2½ inches thick. By carpenters, deal of half this thickness (1 ¼inches) is called whole deal; of half the latter, slit deal.” More detail than we need for present purposes, perhaps. But deal furniture is often veneer (though not always), as when sheets of oak or maple are laid over the plain pine. This would entail another kind of seeming. But whatever the case, here, our deal dresser, lacking its three glass knobs, is already well on its way to disintegration; it registers (a little sadly) one more plea for an end to fiction, to seeming. (N.B.: On a whim I set about to find a deal dresser via Google Images and was led to the old outcast you see pictured to the above left. The snow and the green siding place this somewhere in the American Midwest of my imagination. Ohio? Michigan?)
Eleanor Cook has pointed out several Shakespearean echoes in “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Let me tentatively add another. Behind “The Emperor” (very faintly) is a passage from the “finale” of Macbeth, at least insofar as that tragedy marks what is surely the best known use in English poetry of the metaphor of life-as-a-play:
Orson Welles as Macbeth.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“Let be be finale of seem” is essentially Macbeth’s line, as the dark woods of Birnam, full of animus, encroach. That Macbeth ever supposed himself master of his own destiny at all was catastrophic error, a veer off into a “seeming” life in which not he, but the three Weird Sisters, took Scotland by the scruff of its neck. Macbeth had thought he was a player, as we Americans now say, but in fact he was, simply, a “player.” Or perhaps we should think of Sir Walter Raleigh’s fine quatrain, whose sardonic humor sorts well with Stevens’s little elegy:
Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun
Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Only we dye in earnest, that’s no Jest.
Who knows but that all lives aren’t merely apparent, merely exercises in “seeming,” or what you will? (Renaissance England loved the trope, and that fact alone makes it pass current with me.) In any event, if not a Scottish king, then at least the “Emperor” of Ice Cream “speaks” in Stevens’s poem. The locutions are recognizably imperial, and savor a little of the decree: “Call the roller of big cigars,” “bid him whip,” “Let the wenches dawdle,” “Take from the dresser of deal,” and so on—all spoken in the indulgent, slightly condescending imperatives of majesty, and in a tone quite outside (or above) the key we might associate with a wake. If you would look for an emperor here you’ll not find one; but if you listen for one, you will. “Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear.” Well, OK. So be it. The decree stands. Read more…
“A Mass of Morbid Melancholy and Apology”
William James
N.B.: Today I borrow shamelessly from the fine model Ian Wolcott sets up in his Marginalia series at The New Pslamanazar.
Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?—or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology?
One might suppose “sinking” an effortless enterprise. It asks of us only inaction. But as to this “sinking,” well, sometimes how hard it is to rise to the occasion. Which is, of course, what I suppose James to mean.
“Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert…” —Emerson, “Experience”
* * *
“Talking in Bed” (with the last poem addressed in these pages) appears in Philip Larkin‘s 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings. The title speaks of couplings, and the title poem, as any reader of it knows, fairly crackles with acerbic sparks of the sort we expect from Larkin when he writes about such matters. Here’s the dour, chill heart of it, which I’ll quote but set aside for another occasion for commentary. Save, that is, for three things, of which I can’t not speak: the bleakly perfect touches of that “uncle shouting smut,” “those women [sharing] / The secret [of marriage] like a happy funeral,” and the perfection of the verb “larking” in reference to the porters with the mails.
Cover of the Faber & Faber re-issue.
At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding.
Whitsunday (“white Sunday”) falls on the seventh sabbath after Easter, the Pentecost. Whitsun week—coming, as it does, in full spring—is notable for weddings in England, as (say) June is in the United States. Into this general context, then, established by the title and title-poem of the book, falls “Talking in Bed.” Which does not necessarily have to do with a marriage at all, of course; only with a couple de-coupling.
“Talking In Bed”
Philip Larkin, photograph by Fay Godwin.
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
In speaking of that “emblem of honesty” that a couple “talking” or “lying” in bed together “ought” to constitute, Larkin doubtless has in mind for “emblem” O.E.D. senses 2a and 3a: “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially. Obs.,” and “a picture of an object (or the object itself) serving as a symbolical representation of an abstract quality, an action, state of things, class of persons, etc.” The “easiest” place not merely to talk but to do so honestly ought to be in bed, then, partnered, coupled—in fact, “post-copular,” one inevitably supposes, whether with or without that old cinematically iconic cigarette.
George W. Bush, deplaning after pseudo-flying in to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln off of San Diego, May 1, 2003. An emblem of talking and lying of another sort. So much for Honest Abe.
Whatever the case, the poem has to do, in some sense, with blowing smoke, right there at the outset, with that wily pun: “lying together goes back so far…” Well, yes, back even into antiquity. (Re-read a bit of Catullus or Propertius as to the dubiety of “lying” in bed.) Lying in bed together may well be an “emblem of two people being honest,” but not every sign signifies what (or as) it ought to. Emblems typify by abstracting this or that quality from their real-worldly entanglements anyway. (Cf. “Mission Accomplished” & presidents in cod-piece jumpsuits.)
So, equivocation is our theme, or one of our themes: “lying together,” which in every sense “goes back so far.” How confidential is all this “talking in bed” anyway? And not only how confidential, but how frequent, and for how long: “Yet more and more time passes silently.” Here the grammar has about it some slight equivocation. Is the duration of time that passes silently, or the frequency of it, most in question? That is, do we hear the line as “Yet, more and more, time passes silently” (which would have to do with frequency: the thing happens more often). Or as “Yet, more and more time passes silently” (which would mean that the silences grow longer)? Well, it hardly matters as to general import. Though, if you’re to read the poem aloud, you must decide how to lay your voice into the sentence. I quibble it out here simply to suggest that equivocal matters of all sorts make their way into the bedroom imagined in this poem.
Even the couplings in rhyme are not “true” for the duration of the piece. “Far” has no partner anywhere, and the relatively full rhymes of easiest/honest/unrest run down the page alongside the sight rhyme of silently/sky, the almost full rhyme of horizon/isolation, and the triplet rhyming of the last tercet where the second and third lines involve a kind of quasi-repetend that engages its own semi-negation (in sense): kind/not unkind. The rhyming is irregular, never quite in harmony, or at ease, with itself—as of course is only fitting in a poem on the theme in question here. And who knows but that we ought to score a point or two for Larkin for having written a poem about a slowly de-coupling couple in tercets? Why should he write of this couple in couplets? He makes four threesomes of his coupling conundrum, and gives us three sets of triple rhymes (easiest/honest/unrest, silently/sky/why, & find/kind/unkind). But nothing requires us to make the supposition. I’ll leave it merely as an agreeable possibility, as to his poetics, in this instance. Larkin’s crafty. Read more…
“That vase…”: or, some notes on Philip Larkin
Cover of the Faber & Faber re-issue.
His biographer, Andrew Motion, tells us that Philip Larkin penned the following poem after a visit to his mother’s house in Loughborough, some 2 to 3 hours distant from his own residence in Hull. Anthony Thwaite, editor of Larkin’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1988) dates its composition precisely: 31 December 1958 (indicating that the visit to his mother had been for the holidays). Larkin published the poem in his 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings.
None of these facts is especially pertinent to the poem, however. Its melancholy is so perfectly generalized, most precisely so when its references become strangely poignant in the closing lines, with their imperatives and that terminal two-word demonstrative: “That vase.”
“Home is so Sad”
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Let’s say that house is to home as brain is to mind. No one knows quite what the latter two terms mean, other than that we inhabit them and they “inhabit” us, whether, on the one hand, as some constellation of memories and affect (the good with the bad); or, on the other, as a barrier to getting away from that constellation of memories and affect (the good with the bad); or as a barrier (say) to detaching the affect from the memories. “Home” takes it root in the German word heim, whose negation Sigmund Freud so effectively put into circulation: unheimliche (“un-home-like”), for which term we have, in English, “uncanny.” The experience so named combines the familiar with the strange in such a way as to unsettle us. “Home is so Sad” makes “home” unheimliche, and yet also so utterly familiar. Because, after all, we “can see” perfectly well “how it was,” can’t we? Just look at “that vase,” for example.
Philip Larkin
But before taking larger matters up, I’ll address certain features of the poem’s form. It falls so readily into two five-line stanzas of that most heimliche line (to readers of English poetry): iambic pentameter. And it rhymes, so simply, A-B-A-B-A. The “A” rhymes in stanza one are perfectly conjunctive, by which I mean they bring together words related not by sound merely but by meaning also. From “left” to “bereft” to “theft”: three registers of loss, each one successively a greater violation (abandonment, bereavement, crime). From the perfect rhymes in the first stanza we “move house” (as the British say) ever so slightly into a trio of near-rhymes in the second (as/was/vase).† That’s one kind of dislocation, hinging precisely, here, on the 50th syllable in this 100 syllable poem: “theft.” Notice how well Larkin lays his sentences into these ten lines, from the poverty of that terminal two-word/two-syllable sentence, which is a severe sentence indeed (“That vase”) to the 37-word sentence that begins with “Instead, bereft of anyone to please” and extends on down through that “joyous shot” that’s “fallen so wide” of the mark it should have hit: the way “things ought to be,” so as fully to distinguish home from house, the quaintly affective from the merely architectural. And what variety in the two-stanza house Larkin has built of what used to be this “home”! Taking independent grammatical units for sentences, here they range in length from 2 to 4 to 6 to 7 to 21 to 37 words. Larkin makes his rhymes, conjunctive (in sound and sense) when they ought to be, oblique when they must, without ever allowing a single rhyme to fetch in a word that doesn’t already belong to the conversational, even homely, diction of the poem (and of most all his best poems). “You can see how it was”: the voice knows perfectly well what to do with sentences such as this, even as every obligation to form, throughout the poem, is paid in full. No mortgaging here. Read more…
Would someone raise William Empson from the dead?
One of the Elgin Marbles: A Centaur and a Lapith fighting.
CHRISTMAS IN THE ELGIN ROOM
BRITISH MUSEUM: EARLY LAST CENTURY
“What is the noise that shakes the night,
And seems to soar to the Pole-star height?”
—“Christmas bells,
The watchman tells
Who walks this hall that blears us captives with its blight.”
“And what, then, mean such clangs, so clear?”
“—’Tis said to have been a day of cheer,
And source of grace
To the human race
Long ere their woven sails winged us to exile here.
“We are those whom Christmas overthrew
Some centuries after Pheidias knew
How to shape us
And bedrape us
And to set us in Athena’s temple for men’s view.
“O it is sad now we are sold—
We gods! for Borean people’s gold,
And brought to the gloom
Of this gaunt room
Which sunlight shuns, and sweet Aurore but enters cold.
“For all these bells, would I were still
Radiant as on Athenai‘s Hill.”
—“And I, and I!”
The others sigh,
“Before this Christ was known, and we had men’s good will.”
Thereat old Helios could but nod,
Throbbed, too, the Ilissus River-god,
And the torsos there
Of deities fair,
Whose limbs were shards beneath some Acropolitan clod:
Demeter too, Poseidon hoar,
Persephone, and many more
Of Zeus‘ high breed,—
All loth to heed
What the bells sang that night which shook them to the core.
1905 and 1926.
Section of a frieze from the Elgin Marbles.
Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (1766-1841).
During the first decade of the 19th century, Elgin’s agents removed a large portion of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, transporting them by sea to Britain. The acquisition, if acquisition it can be called, stirred up a controversy, with some of his harshest critics accusing Lord Elgin of looting and vandalism. (Elgin had to sever certain parts of some of the marbles in order to extricate them. Hence the lines above: “the torsos there / Of deities fair, / Whose limbs were shards beneath some Acropolitan clod.”) Parliament ultimately vindicated Elgin, allocating funds to purchase the pieces in 1816, after which they were displayed in the British Museum. One can gather, from reading this poem, some sense of where Hardy stood, I suppose, with respect to Lord Elgin, and with respect as well to the larger business of the British empire, in the discourse of which enterprise this poem registers its queer anecdote. And as for that Borean English “gold”: Elgin paid £75,000 for the marbles, of which he recovered slightly less than half from Parliament.
But today, my question pertains, as I say, to stanza one:
“What is the noise that shakes the night,
And seems to soar to the Pole-star height?”
—“Christmas bells,
The watchman tells
Who walks this hall that blears us captives with its blight.”
What, specifically is the meaning and function of the word “tells” here? The fiction of the poem asks us to imagine the Elgin marbles—or rather, the gods they represent—conversing one with another. A circumstance not unusual in Hardy’s poetry, given that persons speak from beyond the grave, or that a star and a man hold a brief conversation, and that he often inquires into the consciousness of animals. But as I now learn, some readers suppose also that the poem may ask us further to imagine that the watchman “tells” the marbles what the Christmas bells are for and what they signify. After all, what the marbles know of Christmas must come from some source. What is it? In the first line of the poem one of the marbles puts the question, and, in answering, a second speaks of the watchman as “telling”—something. Whereupon one of the more unknowing marbles just as quickly asks what all the fuss is about, which prompts, of course, the explanation. I suspect the location of the “telling” amidst the Q&A is why some readers suppose that what the marbles know must come from a contemporary, English source—in that place where now they stand on display for an onlooking Christian public. But what does our watchman “tell”?
Read more…
Frost, Freud, Nietzsche, Mencken, and “Mending Wall”
Cover, 1985 edition (University of Wisconsin Press)
Richard Poirier writes in A World Elsewhere (1966): “The classic American writers try through style temporarily to free the hero (and the reader) from systems, to free them from the pressures of time, biology, economics, and from the social forces which are ultimately the undoing of American heroes and quite often of their creators.” In a later book, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier essentially excepts Frost from the writers described here, and with that exception I concur. Frost developed a style that could accommodate him to the “social forces” of which he was in some sense an “effect.” He developed a style that could integrate, or establish correspondence between, the imaginative “world” he created and the “real” or “given” world he found himself inhabiting—both as a man and more particularly as a professional poet writing in America in the early decades of the 20th century. He felt no need to find a world elsewhere. Frost struck a compromise between the claims of “difference” and of “correspondence,” as he liked to put it. I take quite seriously his remark in a 1936 talk at the Bread Loaf School of English: “I am so made that I accept almost anything that exists, that really is going—I accept going concerns and I expect everyone to do the same.” Frost’s conservatism (and I don’t speak here of the political sort) finds its roots in sentiments such as these.
Frost’s writing accommodates potentially intransigent, even counter-cultural dispositions while at the same time maintaining an altogether sociable surface. Frost seems to be thinking of this aspect of his work when he writes to Louis Untermeyer in 1917:
Louis Untermeyer, date of photograph unknown. George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).
“You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious.“ This dubiety—I hesitate to say “duplicity”—held a certain fascination for Frost, and I find it symbolized (if I may say so) throughout his work. It reappears, for example, in the dialectic of “conformity” and “formity” he speaks of in a 1934 letter to his daughter Lesley, which is another way to frame the opposition of “formulaic” to “unformulaic” writing. I find it yet again in his parable of Martin Luther in the introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson‘s King Jasper (1935). Surprised, excited, and a little troubled by his sense of his own difference, Luther represents, for Frost, the struggle between heresy (formity) and congregation (conformity), or between the “unformulaic” and the “formulaic.” The same struggle obtains between “going concerns” (formulae) and the innovations or heresies that we are always building into them.
Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking a cigar that was a cigar, 1914.
I am reminded, here, of a passage in Freud‘s Civilization and Its Discontents. The analogy may at first seem unlikely, but Frost and Freud are, I think, confronting similar questions about human experience, and about the motives of creative artists. Freud writes:
The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out on this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion.
Cover of "Civilization and Its Discontents" (in the W.W. Norton edition of 2005).
Frost makes a similar point in “The Constant Symbol” when he acknowledges the necessity of our accession to “the harsher discipline from without,” or when, in the introduction to King Jasper, he warns against the willful and “anxious” cultivation of personal “difference” on the part of creative artists (or religious thinkers). Such remarks are echoed often in Frost’s work. One thinks, for example, of his essay “Caveat Poeta”: “The conventions have to be locked horns with somewhere,” he says. And his acknowledgement of worldly coercions unmistakably recalls the psychology and philosophy of William James, not simply of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. For when Frost and James welcome rather than attempt to refine away the “crudity,” “rawness” and imperfection of the world—to adopt the terms they sometimes use—clearly they reject the alternative that Freud names only to dismiss: “to re-create the world,” building up in its stead “another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated.” In its context, the passage from Freud presents an example of the artistic impulse in extremis; it follows a discussion of the satisfactions, through fantasy and illusion, that works of art afford. As Freud explains, creative art is in part a process of “making oneself independent of the external world by seeking satisfaction in internal, psychical processes.” It is crucial to recall that the “external world,” as Freud earlier points out, includes the sphere of social relations, not simply, or perhaps even chiefly, the pressures of what we call Nature. Read more…
The Root of the Matter: Frederick Douglass’s New World Columbiad
Frederick Douglass, ca. 1860.
Probably the best-known chapter in Frederick Douglass’s 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom is “Covey the Negro Breaker.” This is the first in an astonishing series of chapters chronicling Douglass’s ultimately successful struggle to recreate himself along properly “Columbian,” “New World” lines—a trajectory that would carry him, after a first failed attempt, out of slavery and into the free states and one of more remarkable careers of the 19th century. Douglass will, in this section of the book, be placed in the hands of a “Negro breaker,” whom he must either dominate or be dominated by. He will come of age, entering upon his “manhood,” thereby evading the fate of the perpetual “infancy” that a life in slavery simply is for him (he was 16 years old at the time). He will, at the moment of his deepest despair, be seduced by the “superstitious” and compromising strategies of accommodation evolved by the weaker sort of slave, here represented by Sandy Jenkins—the sort of slave who remains in “infancy,” without the redemptive (and rational) power of the word, of literacy. He will again take up his role as teacher and expounder of the word, with the Columbian Orator—an anthology of orations, many devoted to republican ideals, edited by Caleb Bingham and generally in use as a “reader” in the early 19th century—as his text. He will conspire to escape, and, though the conspiracy fails, he will find himself at last so situated as to make his decisive break for freedom.
Douglass’s achieved self-mastery is registered even in the style of the book, which in these chapters acquires a particularly elegant sort of “literacy.” This fluency figures in My Bondage and My Freedom as his “Columbian” ideal—as the wings that shall bear him away into realms of possibility—and it everywhere distinguishes the highly artful 1855 text from the much more Spartan (and more widely taught) narrative of 1845. Douglass writes with urbanity and humor, with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a satirist’s for the ridiculous. Read more…
