Yes, how about those Corinthians!

It occurs to me that you’ve laid the groundwork for a tale that Hardy might well have written, if he set himself the task.

My notion is that, seeing as how the speaker of the poem is unreliable, and that the only evidence he offers of Judy’s insanity is her (locally unpopular) anti-natalism, we simply don’t know that Judy’s “insane,” and, in fact, have reason to suspect that she’s not. Aberrant and odd she may be, and to her townsfolk a genuine curiosity. But no verbal details in the poem tell us anything about her other than that she thinks it probably better never to have been (given that the world is so stony a shore). Following such protocols as I follow, we can’t say whether she was ever a mother, for example. We know her given name. We know she believes that coming into existence is a harm. And we know that the locals find that belief “mad,” and that they dismiss her by humoring her. (That is, they don’t regard her as a peril.) That’s all we know for sure.

But my protocols aren’t the only ones.

Hope to be up New England way come late August early September.

Yours,
Mark

And how about those Corinthians!

So Herschel had done the work. Of course.

The Karoo, I expect, is not rich in worms, but the veldt, with its Drummer Hodge-infused kopje-crest, should have worms enough to turn the trick for that southern tree.

If I ever knew Dr. Johnson’s cat was called Hodge, I’d forgotten it.

I suppose “Wessex” does relatively little work for TH, in the sense you mean. On the other hand, The Dead Drummer is probably most affecting when read amongst its ten partner poems in the opening section of “Poems of the Past and Present.” They bear on it.

By the way: a happy birthday to you, Henry. The Pirate & I expected to see you on a barstool in the Moon last night, but were bereft. The Immanent Will must have had other plans for you (or for us).

Yours,
Mark

I’d forgotten about this, and the extent of its influence on Brooke. It’s interesting how little work ‘Wessex’ does for Hardy, compared with ‘England’ for Brooke: the idea of home soil sustaining the transplanted stock – native airs and earths circulating in the lifeblood, as it were – is absent here. So the ‘growing into a southern tree’ introduces – in my eyes – a cognitive dissonance, working against the smoothness of the scansion in the final stanza. (Reinforces a dissonance, I should say: isn’t ‘dusty loam’ oxymoronic? Back to the worms. I wonder whether the ‘Green Imperialism’ literature, Richard Grove’s book for example, might not provide some context.) All is alienation. Despite, as you point out, the dead man’s being called Hodge.

The name also of Samuel Johnson’s cat, ‘who shall not be shot’.

John Herschel had naturalized the southern constellations – claimed them for Empire – as far back as the 1830s (from the observatory he set up on the Cape). But news had obviously not filtered through to Hodge.

Henry

I enjoyed working this one up. Lighting upon that old 17th century Dutch narrative about the Cape was a bit of luck. Interesting (though not surprising) to see how much the Cape figured in the histories TH relied on in writing “The Dynasts” (I ought to get round to that someday). Why do we (Americans anyhow) still call The Great War the first “world” war?

Thank you again. I’m looking forward to the book!

Yours,
Mark

Best,
Mark

Take care,
Mark

Do I keep a journal? Yes, but from now on I will also be following your website.

Yes, “a change in punctuation can, in some cases, considerably shift the meaning of a line, and Shelley’s poem is an example (I think)”––or rather, I agree in principle, though not in the case of this particular line, as you will have discerned by the way I read it above. I still have a hard time reading the line as terminating in something other than a fairly ordinary kind of elision “the heart that fed [them].” But I like the way you make the mater controversial: very productive to be sure.

The amount of weight one ought to accord punctuation *as such* in poetry (or prose) written prior to the early 20th century seems a matter rather hard to decide. Sometimes it “signifies,” so to speak, and as often not. Even in manuscripts. Take Dickinson. The sheer ubiquity of her “dashes,” or whatever we ought to call them, and also of her capitalizations, seems to me rather to diminish the significance we ought to attach to any particular instance of the one or the other. The more important point (I think) is to grant at the outset that her habits of punctuation are as heterodox as her syntax and diction and themes often are: there you’ve got it––the whole package. The burden of proof, so far as I can tell anyway, lies with a reader who wishes to demonstrate that the dashes (or other “accidentals”) have local and peculiar significance as against the “general” one I just spoke of. Students often suppose that we ought to attach a good deal of importance to the fact that Dickinson capitalizes this or that word, and all I can say in reply is, “Well, I don’t really think so. Are we to do this with the thousands of other such capitals? And what of the possibility that she’s simply following the old conventions of 18th century typography?” And as for her dashes, I say: “Well, yes, they are unusual, but Dickinson still wrote sentences, and we have to read them as sentences, and the absence of periods, semicolons, etc., doesn’t relieve us of the task.” I’m guessing you more or less agree with me here. Cf. my reading of “The Soul selects her own Society —” within this web-log. There I discuss possible ways of construing, as sentences, the first four lines:

// The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

// Now, it is not possible grammatically to sever the first line from its successors in this stanza, which leads me to the second point I’d make: the grammar is equivocal, in that the stanza admits of several possible readings. We might read the stanza as follows (and here I will print it, for illustrative purposes, in sentence form): 1) “The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door. To her divine majority, present no more.” Or we might read it: 2) “The souls selects her own society, then shuts the door to her divine majority, present no more.” Or: 3) The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door to her divine majority. Present no more.” In examples 1 & 3 “present” is a verb, with the accent on the second syllable; in example 2, it is an adjective, with the accent on the first. So, how to decide? Because if I am to read the poem aloud, I must decide what to do with my voice. Dickinson’s eccentric punctuation, here, as in many another place, leaves more than one possibility open. In this case, however, textual evidence may help us resolve the problem, or even to decide it for good and all. On the manuscript, Dickinson offers two alternative readings in stanza one: “On” for “To” in line three, and “Obtrude” for “Present” in line four. “Obtrude” can only be a verb; its adjective form is “obtrusive.” So, if we take “obtrude” as readily exchangeable with “present”—that is to say, as a live alternative to “present”—then we should read “present” as a verb, not as an adjective. This would seem to exclude possibility #2 above from consideration, for in that sentence “present” is an adjective modifying “Soul,” which is no longer, well, “present” to the world—a sense which, though perfectly consonant with the poem, is grammatically impossible if we take “obtrude” as a genuinely live alternative. If we take into consideration both alternative readings—”On” for “To” and “Obtrude” for “Present”—then I think we are left with little choice but to hold to #1 above. That is to say, if “on” and “obtrude” are allowed somehow to decide the matter, the stanza must work as two sentences of two lines each. Prosody also supports this reading, insofar as the verb “present” is iambic—the poetic foot dominant in the poem—whereas the adjective “present” is trochaic. But of course, Dickinson’s prosody is often as vagrant, with respect to convention, as are her systems of punctuation and capitalization, and as is her thinking. So the matter must be left open, in prospect, even as we must decide the matter one way or another when reading the poem aloud (so that we know, among other things, whether to say “présent” or “presént,” where the diacritical mark indicates stress). //

Here’s the link to the entry: http://wp.me/pEoNE-HM

Anyhow, Patrick, you know as well as anyone (and I say so on the fine evidence of your readings at PoemShape) how much a matter of tact this is. With punctuation as with prosody we can fall into what I’ve only lately (and via a link in a comment to your web-log) learned to call “the enactment fallacy.” Don’t know how I’ve missed that term before, because I’ve always wanted it (or else another) to name a thing I’ve always been highly wary of: the not uncommon abuse, in readings of poetry, of Pope’s suggestion (in the Essay on Criticism) that “sound should seem an echo to the sense.” O, how much tediousness we’ve had to countenance, in writing and in teaching, under that license. The fallacy I have in mind is, of course, the fallacy of suggesting (where inappropriate) that lines or poetry, in their movements & sounds, somehow “enact” what they describe. That’s why I always try, at least, to identity what I prefer to call “significant form” (form that signifies something) from form that is essentially “architectural” (though certainly not without interest as such). I ride that hobby horse in “What I Want as a Teacher of Poetry” (also in the pages of this web-log: you’ll see it at the top of the home page).

Do I want *unquestionably* significant form? Well, I start with George Herbert & take him as my touchstone.

(Or, to take a trivial but funny example, read Thomas Randolph’s poem on the loss of his little finger: when he tells he no longer can count five on that hand, he does it in a tetrameter line––the only tetrameter in an otherwise pentameter context. Easy effect? Yes. Tossed off with the cavalier poise of a fine minor 17th century poet? Of course.)

But all this is no news to you, Patrick, and you’re careful about your business always.

That book about Ben Jonson sounds interesting. I really should get it. Of course he was among the first serious writers to think of himself as authoring books (in ways we recognize readily now). Herbert was another, with The Temple, even if he didn’t live to see it in print.

I close with an example of what I take to be the enactment fallacy, from a widely circulated introduction to twentieth century American poetry (I won’t name names since I quote it with disapproval). I, for my part, would never discuss “Birches” in this way. I cringe a bit reading the following:

// “The next three lines focus not on the transcendent beauty of the scene but on the oppressive weight of the ice:

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break, though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:

// “Here again, Frost makes skilled use of versification to enhance his description: the lines are lengthened (eleven and twelve syllables instead of ten) and they depart radically from the iambic meter of the opening lines. Frost uses sound to make us feel the heaviness of the ice-covered trees in the drawn-out vowels of words like ‘dragged,’ ‘bracken,’ ‘load,’ ‘bowed,’ and ‘low.’ The downward movement of these lines concludes with an evocative simile comparing the trailing branches of the trees to ‘girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads.’” //

Well, well. Really? Do I “feel the heaviness of the ice-covered trees” when RF departs from a more regular iambic line? Nope. I simply do not. I think we have an example here of a “somatic” metaphor wrongly applied to a reading experience.

By the way, and on another head, J. Bate’s edition of John Clare isn’t bad, I think, and it’s cheap.

Still, it is essential to consult the Powell & Robinson multi-volume edition (done for Oxford UP), if one is interested in understanding the extraordinary textual problems Clare’s manuscripts present (Bate discusses this in his biography of the poet, too).

Alas, the full Robinson & Powell edition costs several hundred bucks.

It is. A change in punctuation can, in some cases, considerably shift the meaning of a line, and Shelley’s poem is an example (I think). The first time I started analysing poems for the blog, I would just copy and paste the poem for another site. I don’t know if my experience is representative, but I find that 9 poems out of ten (taken from the web) have missing punctuation, missing words, and even missing lines! So I almost didn’t catch myself when I started pondering why Frost wrote iambic tetrameter in the midst of blank verse. After that near humiliation, I began consulting printed text. Then I examined a couple of Donne’s sonnets. Lo and behold, the editors (Norton Edition) left out crucial punctuation and elision! Fortunately, I have a two volume Oxford edition of Donne’s poems that is about as close to the originals as I can find (and faithfully reports on any variants). I’ve really gotten so that I’d almost rather see the manuscript. Seeing to what degree “editors” alter texts (and meaning) with nary a footnote was a real eye opener. That said, knowing this just adds to the joy of the hunt.

As to John Clare, I don’t have a good edition of his poetry. If there is, it’s probably out of my price range.

//If the late 16th- & early 17th-century had anything like “standards” or protocols” as to spelling & punctuation, we might fall back on those as at least one available “background” against which to assess contemporary texts of his poems, but the period had none.//

I’ve been reading, off and one, Joseph Lowenstien’s book “Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship”. He goes some way toward identifying the new, at the time, idea of authorial integrity. My impression remains that individual 16th & 17th century poets established their own standards and were fairly consistent.

//Maybe we can keep it up and gather all of what’s known (as to textual matters) that bears on “Ozymandias” in the two things we’ve done about the sonnet.//

I’d love to. If I find out anything new, I’ll let you know. I *am* familiar with the controversy surrounding Lathem’s text. Similarly, Faggen’s edition of Robert Frost’s Notebooks was all but crucified by William Logan [Our Savage Art, p. 300]. Logan’s critique set me back on my heels. Every once in a while I get the stuffing knocked out of me – humbled – watching Logan dismantle Faggan was one of those times. Logan must have had access to Frost’s manuscripts but, even so, his erudition was deadly.

Well, as a sometime textual scholar myself, I can say this for good variorum editions: they ought to (anyway) lay before the reader all the evidence available at the time the edition was published. You or I may quibble with what the editor chooses to favor in the text of the poem as rendered on the page, but the editor will have given us the evidence (in notes or back-matter) necessary to quibble with him.

Interesting matter, though, isn’t it?––punctuation in printed texts that predate “modern” (by which I mean 20th century, and for that matter, post-1930 or so) opinion about such things as “accidentals,” rationale’s for “copy-text,” etc., standards of punctuation.

John Clare! Now, there’s a poet whose manuscripts are a nightmare for any editor (for his first editors, too).

There is a certain sense in which post-typewriter readers (some of them anyway) attach more significance to punctuation, layout, etc, than did pre-typewriter writers. (I’m using “typewriter” as a kind of “shorthand,” let’s say––funny how these old techniques & technologies so readily become figurative.) Once writing was mechanized at the personal level (so to speak), things changed a bit. Ideas as to these matters also alter as ideas about genius, “authority,” and so on alter (for poets as well as for scholars).

Donne is an interesting case given that (and correct me here: haven’t looked into the matter in a long while) almost none of his poems survive in autograph manuscripts. If the late 16th- & early 17th-century had anything like “standards” or protocols” as to spelling & punctuation, we might fall back on those as at least one available “background” against which to assess contemporary texts of his poems, but the period had none.

Another interesting problem: editing such things as Frost’s lectures from the only surviving sources (audio recordings); or, in certain other cases (cf. the notes to “Education By Poetry” in my edition of the Collected Prose), texts where punctuation is supplied by other hands in physical documents on which RF himself then went to work with his fountain pen. RF relied on several typists during his working life. Post-1938 he often dictated letters & drafts of essays. Did he dictate punctuation while so doing? The record is silent.

You probably know the controversies that rightly surround Lathem’s edition of RF’s poetry (where punctuation was changed in hundreds of instances).

Why am I mentioning all this? It’s early in the morning & my thoughts are a cloud & the whole business is interesting & I thank you for bringing it into this string of “comments.”

Maybe we can keep it up and gather all of what’s known (as to textual matters) that bears on “Ozymandias” in the two things we’ve done about the sonnet.