“Weird John Brown”: The Meteor of the War
Dedication of "Battle-Pieces," from the first edition.
I number Herman Melville‘s 1866 volume, Battle-Pieces And Aspects of the War, among the best literary responses to the American Civil War. It’s of course a solid Unionist book, and an abolitionist one, too, as its dedication and contents make clear. Melville dedicates the book not to the 600,000 who died in the war, but “to the memory of the THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND who in the war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers.” The colors are clear. Here, Melville is perhaps not quite so ecumenical as Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, and at Gettysburg. But he echoes Lincoln in the latter address by associating the Union dead with the “fathers,” to whose nation they gave what Lincoln calls a “second birth of freedom.” And yet, notwithstanding the Unionist-Abolitionist convictions that underlie the book—which speaks of America as “the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime“—Melville confesses to a certain bewilderment in the preface, which is at once strange and beautiful:
Melville's preface to "Battle-Pieces"
WITH few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed. The events and incidents of the conflict making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind. The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.
Herman Melville. Photo in the Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
He speaks of the “impulsive” origins of the book, undertaken without reference to “collective arrangement,” but which “naturally” fell into order, as against artfully (he has no designs on his reader). Melville implies that this befits the war itself as an experienced thing, in all its amplitude and disarray, which nonetheless bent toward one consummation. Such themes as he touches on here, we note, are simply those that “chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind” (not “my” mind necessarily, but, it may be, some other, more abstractly conceived and widely dispersed intelligence). He “yields” to “moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” He “yields” “instinctively” (as with the “impulse” already spoken of). He is “unmindful of consistency.” In fact, the book seems to have written itself: “I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.” Battle-Pieces, it turns out, is an exercise in “notation,” not composition. Notation of “contrasted airs” played by the wind, as on an Aeolian harp. Which is ironic, sadly so. Read more…
Cover of the Zephyr Press edition (2001)
On Thursday, August 30, 1962, Robert Frost dined on marinated mushrooms, dark bread, caviar, salt herring, salmon, sturgeon, radishes, tomatoes, beet salad, “small, sweet cucumbers,” Georgian wine, and vodka. This was at the Moscow apartment of K.G. Paustovsky, the Russian novelist, an apartment which, in those days of the Khrushchev “thaw,” gave the visitor a sense of “tranquil, cultured excellence.” Back at the Sovietskaya Hotel, on the other hand, Frost inhabited “a kind of dreary ornateness.” “Mottled marble columns, stolid as elephants legs,” stood in the lobby, and among them the poet encountered overstuffed leather armchairs and “rose-plum” carpets with floral borders on a chocolate background. Behind the “heavy chocolate-colored” door of Room 207, of whose key a maid in a white apron and starched fillet head-band was the custodian, lay a drawing room with French doors, a balcony, more overstuffed armchairs, and a table attended by four more chairs, dark and straight. On the desk sat an inkwell with purple ink and two pens. The bedroom, to the left, contained a large bed with a blanket-in-a-jacket (i.e., a sheet and quilt combined). Beside it, on a table, stood a lamp with an “elaborately rigged green glass shade.” The room had no view, save for the tops of the trees that lined the Leningrad Highway.
Robert Frost in his later years.
Robert Frost didn’t hand these details down to us, of course. Franklin D’Olier Reeve, father of the actor Christopher Reeve, did. He was the specialist in Russian literature who accompanied Frost to the USSR in the summer of 1962. Reeve is a connoisseur. He knows the difference between a pretentious use and an unpretentious use of limestone in a building. His memoir of that strange 1962 journey, Robert Frost in Russia, is everywhere marked by an epicurean sensibility. Which is all the more interesting given that Frost himself had so little of that in him (Lucretian though he may have been). For the politics of the 1962 trip to Russia, read Stewart Udall’s The Myths of August; for a dutiful account of it, the third volume of Lawrance Thompson’s biography. But if you would know what Frost was served for dinner, what he slept under, what color his lampshade was, and what the officious maid wore, turn to Reeve. There is an engaging vividness, here. It is satisfying to think of Frost in all that “dreary ornateness,” sending down for his Spartan breakfast of raw eggs and milk.
That’s not all we look for in Reeve’s book, of course—not by any means. He intends to document what he regards as an especially promising, and later betrayed, moment in the history of the co-evolving intellectual lives of Russia and America. The particular edition of Robert Frost in Russia under discussion here, republished in 2001 by the Zephyr Press, includes a retrospective introduction. I find it telling that Reeve should begin this introduction by revisiting the 85th birthday dinner at which Lionel Trilling declared Frost a “terrifying” poet. Trilling’s speech contributed, Reeve suggests, to the “modernization of Robert Frost.” Thenceforth, he explains, “critics understood that Frost, putatively eclipsed by Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, was not to be set beside guitar-strumming [Carl] Sandburg, booming Vachel Lindsay and timidly patterned Amy Lowell.”
Sarah Palin addressing the Republican National Convention, September 3, 2008.
It is important to Reeve’s purposes that Frost be set alongside the high modernists, who neither strummed, nor boomed, nor patterned timidly. He evokes a time, in the years after the Second World War, when the high culture of the West (even the avant-garde culture of the West) enjoyed an esteem, and was characterized by a seriousness, that would soon be adulterated by “popular” culture—by entertainment. The temper of the new introduction recalls, it may be, a little of Dwight Macdonald, and a little of The Partisan Review. Reeve’s is a sensibility for which philistinism—whether of the sort enforced by Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, or of the sort so richly rewarded by the right wing of the Republican Party between 2000 and the advent of Sarah Palin—is the only truly unforgivable affront.
Wikipedia Commons image illustrating Cold War era economic alliances (created by user San Jose).
That’s why the limestone at the Sovietskaya Hotel bothers him. That’s why he takes care to remind us that, in 2001, “today’s presidents simply don’t read.” It is as if he wants a republic of letters in which, paradoxically, literary figures are also counter-cultural; that is to say, a situation in which the institutional prestige attached to literature inevitably evolves from its being counter-institutional. In this Reeve is, I suspect, rather closer to Pound than to Frost. And the idea leads him to a surprising conclusion. Reeve reminds the reader that in 1958 Frost intervened on Pound’s behalf to get the younger poet released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where he had been confined as incompetent to stand trial for treason. Then he makes his point: “Frost’s role in rehabilitating Pound coincided with similar Russian efforts on behalf of venerable friends and the cultural tradition. People like the poet and critic Kornei Chukovsky, the musician Mstislav Rostropovich, and the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa helped to safeguard the lives and restore the reputations of poets like [Anna] Akhmatova, scholars like Oksman, and novelists like Solzhenitsyn. Despite ideological hostilities and Cold War rhetoric, outstanding intellectuals in both countries were moving toward a common goal.” Read more…
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
One of Crane’s best effects depends on a kind of tonal polyphony that oddly harmonizes what would otherwise be discordant moods. The effect usually suggests the complexity, or the ironic objectivity, of Crane’s point of view. A fine example occurs early in Red Badge of Courage.
After complicated journeyings with many pauses, there had come months of monotonous life in a camp. [Henry Fleming] had had the belief that real war was a series of death struggles with small time in between for sleep and meals; but since the regiment had come to the field the army had done little but sit still and try to keep warm.
He was brought then gradually back to his old ideas. Greeklike struggles would be no more. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
He had grown to regard himself merely as a part of vast blue demonstration. His province was to look out, as far as he could, for his personal comfort. For recreation he could twiddle his thumbs and speculate on the thoughts which must agitate the minds of the generals. Also, he was drilled and drilled and reviewed, and drilled and drilled and reviewed.
From the first edition.
The rhetoric of the first paragraph is uncomplicated. It merely gives us to understand that army life and army myth are not the same. The second paragraph is a repetition, almost verbatim, of an earlier passage describing the content of Henry’s “ideas.” Crane often resorts to repetition of this sort. Here, it suggests (somewhat condescendingly) the poverty of Henry’s mentation, and also its wavering incoherence. Men no longer fight because they are “better”; men no longer fight because they are too “timid”; men no longer fight because they have been educated out of the instinct; men no longer fight because the lords of the land find it unprofitable to allow them to do it. The alternatives in each case exclude one another, and should a single mind contemplate them all simultaneously, it would be an incoherent mind indeed. But as I say, no single mind is before us here. Crane’s mind—the mind of his ironic narrator, if I may speak of a narrator as having a mind—overlaps and circumscribes the more limited mind of his protagonist. I suspect we’re to understand that Henry sees no irony in his “old ideas,” that he regards the pairs of alternatives as in each case live, whereas for Crane the second in each pair pretty clearly undercuts the first, with the final irony being, simply, that timidity, prudence, decency, and altruism are insufficient, even in combination, to moderate an undignified “throat-grappling instinct” in men. The third paragraph quoted revives the uncomplicated mode of the first, with a flourish of repetition in the last sentence registering the tedium of camp life. We are getting a fair picture of the alienation of the common infantryman who learns to regard himself as “part of a vast blue demonstration.”
That much seems to me more or less unremarkable, though fine. The next two paragraphs of the passage, however, are pure Crane:
The only foes [Henry] had seen were some pickets along the river bank. They were a sun-tanned, philosophical lot, who sometimes shot reflectively at the blue pickets. When reproached for this afterward, they usually expressed sorrow, and swore by their gods that the guns had exploded without their permission. The youth, on guard duty one night, conversed across the stream with one of them. He was a slightly ragged man, who spat skillfully between his shoes and possessed a great fund of bland and infantile assurance. The youth liked him personally.
“Yank,” the other had informed him, “yer a right dum good feller.” This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.
Cover, 1895 edition.
Detail. Cover of the Library of Virginia Press re-reprint (1992). It was not uncommon to associate the Old Virginia land-grant families with the Royalist or "Cavalier" partisans during the English Civil Wars (1642-1629). Use of the term in this sense occasionally crops up in accounts of the American Civil War given by Southerners. R. E. Lee, e.g., was cloaked in a kind of aristocratic mystique, such that it was considered bad form to speak ill of him even at the North by the 1890s.
Here, Crane wryly bullies his characters. Notice how he narrates at once from inside and outside his hero’s sensibility, so to speak. Henry might well see the rebel pickets as “sun-tanned,” of course, and perhaps also as “philosophical” in the colloquial sense of “mature” and “steady of nerve.” But Henry would not think of their pot-shots as “reflective”—an adjective motivated by the term “philosophy,” but ironically so, in that the idle shooting is almost certainly thoughtless and cruel. To say that the offending pickets are “reproached” by their targets is to speak as if their musketry is essentially a show of bad form—“barbarously abrupt,” as the difficult breakers are said to be in “The Open Boat.” It might be regarded as such either by (let us say) a cavalier Virginia officer, or by the grunts in his command, though the two parties would resent the sniping for different reasons: the first as a sin against honorable combat, the second as a sin against the fellowship that ought to bind together in solidarity against the conceit of the officer corps the poor grunts on both sides of the skirmish—a solidarity which is, in fact, a theme in this passage.
But what is Crane’s investment in the affair? It is the amused “investment” of an onlooker who sees little sense in the whole display—whether on the grunts’ part or the officers.’ In any case, to speak of “reproaches” and the “expression of sorrow” is ironically to pretend that the business is more dignified and politic than it really is. But that is precisely what the soldiers themselves sometimes do. The youth, for example, appears to believe that his rebel picket possesses an admirable assurance. That is the pretense. But in fact, his “great fund” of assurance is said to be “bland and infantile”—two terms that Henry would neither contemplate nor apply in this situation, their complexity of implication (and their ironic affect) clearly being beyond him. Other readers—W.M. Frohock, for example—have noticed this technique of Crane’s. Crane will often lay into the “free indirect discourse” associated with Fleming—i.e., into language ostensibly originating in, and loosely inhabiting, Fleming’s mind—words and phrases that Fleming himself would neither use nor entirely understand.
From the first edition.
A typical example occurs in this passage: “He had no rifle; he could not fight with his hands, said he resentfully to his plan. Well, rifles could be had for the picking. They were extraordinarily profuse. Also, he continued, it would be a miracle if he found his regiment.” The phrasing of the second sentence (“Well, rifles could be had for the picking”) is conditioned by Henry’s mind, while that of the third, which merely re-states the idea in a sort of whimsically high diction (“They were extraordinarily profuse”), is conditioned by Crane’s. The phrases “said he” and “he continued” disingenuously specify the “habitat” (so to speak) of all these reflections as interior to Henry. But in fact there is, in this passage, a tactically seamless blending of two trains of thought—the character’s and the narrator’s—just as when the adjectives “bland and infantile,” which reflect the view Crane takes, are dropped in to qualify and vitiate the impressive “assurance” Henry credits the Confederate soldier with.
The first instance in the book when Crane deploys the archly pejorative term "yokel." His men are caricatures, not characters.
The effect is to make us always feel that Crane exercises a kind of leverage over against his yokel hero—that he has, so to speak, mirthfully colonized his mind. In any event, we understand, in the longer passage quoted above, the impression the rebel picket makes on Henry, and are also given to understand that he is a little foolish to be so impressed: “`Yank,’ the other had informed him, `yer a right dum good feller.’ This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.” Crane, too, may “regret” war. But not because it has no respect for the dignity of encounters like this one. Crane himself allows for no dignity in them. Henry is a fool for “regretting” war and a fool (a moment before) for not “regretting” it. Crane simply will not let him alone.
Immediately following that passage I’ve been discussing occurs the best part of this, the first chapter of the novel.
Various veterans had told him tales. Some talked of gray, bewhiskered hordes, who were advancing with relentless curses and chewing tobacco with unspeakable valor; tremendous bodies of fierce soldiery who were sweeping along like the Huns. Others spoke of tattered and eternally hungry men who fired despondent powders. “They’ll charge through hell’s fire an’ brimstone t’ git a holt on a haversack, an’ sech stomachs ain’t a’ lastin’ long,” he was told. From the stories, the youth imagined the red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms. Read more…
Which and What is “The Road Not Taken”?
Herbert Read in 1958, Photo by Roloff Beny.
In 1934 Robert Frost‘s eldest daughter Lesley Frost Francis delivered a lecture on the so-called New Movement poetry of the mid-1910s (work done by such writers as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, H.D., and Frost himself while he was in England from 1912-1915). Apparently at her request, Frost wrote her a long letter sketching out his own history of the “movement” and summarizing the aesthetic doctrines of the poets involved. In the letter he refers to the poet and critic Herbert Read, author of Form in Modern Poetry (1932), to whom he attributes “the doctrine of Inner Form”: adherence exclusively to “the form the subject [of the poem] itself takes if left to itself without any considerations of outer form. Everything else,” Frost goes on to explain, “is to have two compulsions, an inner and an outer, a spiritual and a social, an individual and a racial. Everything but poetry according to the Pound-Eliot-Richards-Reed school of art.” Over against this position Frost asserts his own, arguing that everything, even a poem, has “not only formity but conformity.” “I want to be good,” he says, driving the point home, “but that is not enough the state says I have got to be good.” The latter remark succinctly frames Frost’s interest in the general question of motivation, not simply in Herbert Read and his “school.” And in what follows I consider his contribution to the theory of motive and personality in poetry. As I am concerned with it here, a theory of personality in poetry addresses the question of who or what chiefly motivates a work of literary art. Is the controlling discipline (or “compulsion”) in a poem the “inner voice” of the writer, his will to expression? Is it the impersonal agencies either of language, form, society or tradition? Or is it rather a mixture of personal and impersonal motives? If the latter, then what sort of mixture? In considering Frost’s answers to these questions we confront some of the most important matters addressed in his essays and letters on poetics. Thinking about his theories of personality in poetry also helps us place his work more clearly within the context of his modernist contemporaries.
Robert Frost, at about the time he was in England.
“I want to be good but that is not enough the state says I have got to be good”—an elegantly simple statement of a complex problem. With characteristic concision and informality Frost suggests how difficult it is to know where external “compulsion” ends and where “inner” desire begins. The idea is that, at least until the state withers away, we simply cannot speak of pure acts of “goodness.” There’s always an incalculable element of coercion, whether by force or by incentive, since we always act within a texture of constraints and goads ranging from convention to legal imperatives. Frost describes a dialectic of necessity and freedom. Everything has “two compulsions, an inner and an outer, a spiritual and a social, an individual and a racial.” Or: “Every thing has not only formity but conformity.”
Kenneth Burke‘s remarks on a related problem of motivation are illuminating. He is discussing, in A Grammar of Motives, what he calls the “paradox of purity” or of “the absolute”:
Cover of the University of California Press paperback edition.
The question is whether “collective,” external motives exist in antithesis to individual motives, or whether the former “parent” the latter. Of course, Frost deals with the paradox implicit in “collective motivation” more bluntly in saying that he wants to be good, but that is not enough—the state says he must be. Is his virtue enforced by a “collective” will working against his own “inner” form? Or does his inner desire to “be good” itself derive from his engagement in a collective social enterprise? Collective motives—what Frost would call motives of “conformity”—may be described genetically. They exist in harmony with individual motives as their originating principle. Or they may be described contextually. They work in antithesis to strictly personal motives—what Frost would call the motives of “formity.”
Later in the Grammar Burke makes a suggestion that helps bring out the broader implications of Frost’s remarks to his daughter. He asks whether or not, strictly speaking, “action” is compatible with “motivation”:
Jacques Derrida, suave French philosopher & literary critic.
Cover, Northwest University Press edition.
Frost asks a similar question in his letter. Does the motivation to conform exercised on us by social forces actually rob individual actors of their agency? Is it possible, again strictly speaking, to perform a “good” action if virtue is also somehow enforced? Inner and outer motivation may negate rather than complement one another. In the “Afterward” to a second edition of Limited Inc (1988) Jacques Derrida makes much the same point, though in more high-flying diction: “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable.” Where Derrida writes “moral responsibility” I read “self-hood” or “agency” since that is really what we’re talking about. Agency and self-hood are what exceed “calculation” and prediction. Frost, Derrida and Burke address the same basic set of questions. What is the meaning of “agency”? Is it personal? Impersonal? Is it masterable? What are its conditions? Read more…
“The Wife of His Youth”: Charles Chesnutt
Chesnutt, at about age 40.
Charles Chesnutt could not long remain satisfied mining a vein, as he had done in The Conjure Woman (1899), adulterated by what literary historians now call “the plantation myth,” and by the largely white-defined conventions of the “dialect tale.” All this notwithstanding that he had, in The Conjure Woman, quite ingeniously subverted both the plantation myth and its associated conventions. These latter inevitably included a highly artificial dialect put into the mouths of African-American characters. For purposes of ridicule, comedy, etc. And on occasion to portray African-American men and women (and “characters”) sentimentally as the childlike figures white readers so fatuously needed them to be. The “myth” also involved the notion that relations between masters and slaves were paternal and familial. (For a entry in The Era of Casual Fridays on the first story in The Conjure Woman—an entry that also takes up the matter of the “plantation myth”—click here.) No better expression of this myth than Jefferson Davis‘s own, in his benighted (by white-supremacy) Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881). Here, he is reacting to Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation, and also to Lincoln’s decision to field black soldiers—many thousands of them former slaves—in the Union Army:
Photograph of Jefferson Davis. From the Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).
“Let the reader pause for a moment and look calmly at the facts presented in this statement. The forefathers of these negro soldiers were gathered from the torrid plains and malarial swamps of inhospitable Africa. Generally they were bom the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, and, sold by heathen masters, they were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity. There, put to servitude, they were trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service to those to whom their service or labor was due. A strong mutual affection was the natural result of this life-long relation, a feeling best if not only understood by those who have grown from childhood under its influence. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other. The tempter came, like the serpent in Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word of ‘freedom.’ Too many were allured by the uncomprehended and unfulfilled promises, until the highways of these wanderers were marked by corpses of infants and the aged. He put arms in their hands, and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors. What does he boastingly announce? ‘It is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any.’ Ask the bereaved mother, the desolate widow, the sonless aged sire, to whom the bitter cup was presented by those once of their own household. With double anguish they speak of its bitterness. What does the President of the United States further say? ‘According to our political system, as a matter of civil administration, the General Government had no lawful power to effect emancipation in any State.’ And further on, as if with a triumphant gladness, he adds, ‘Thus giving the double advantage of taking so much labor from the insurgent cause, and supplying the places which otherwise must be filled with so many white men.’ A rare mixture of malfeasance with traffic in human life! It is submitted to the judgment of a Christian people how well such a boast befits the President of the United States, a federation of sovereigns under a voluntary compact for specific purposes.”
From the passage in question, in a 1958 reprint of Davis's masterwork.
In this passing-strange fable, slavery blessed the Africans who suffered the Middle Passage. Lincoln emerges as Satan (“the Tempter”) who brought about the Fall of the Edenic ancien regime of the Old South. Africa is “inhospitable” to the slaves, relative, say, to the cotton plantations of Davis’ “hospitable” Mississippi. Slavery bestowed on Africans the great blessing of Christian charity and civilization. The whole enterprise accorded with the African’s natural “servile instincts.” One wonders what Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Frederick Douglass would say to this—but then of course one knows what they actually did say and do. And what of this remark? The slaves’ “strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service to those to whom their service or labor was due. A strong mutual affection was the natural result of this life-long relation, a feeling best if not only understood by those who have grown from childhood under its influence. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other.” Where even to begin? With Davis’s coy abuse of the already appallingly euphemistic language of the Constitution (“those to whom their service or labor was due”)? (He has in mind Article IV Section 2: “No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Of which clause John Jay Chapman rightly says, in his William Lloyd Garrison: “The African slave trade is probably the most brutal organized crime in history. Our fathers did not dare to name it. So of the fugitive-slave law;—the Constitution deals with it in the cruel, quiet way in which monstrous tyranny deals with the fictions of administrative law. . . In an age in which the Inquisition is absolutely dominant, its officials are almost kind. The leaden touch of hypocrisy was thus in the heart of our Constitution.”) Or shall we begin instead with Davis’s inadvertent concession that the South was not some species of “agrarian” society such as Thomas Jefferson may have dreamt on, but a capitalist one (which produced commodities for sale on a world market: indigo, rice, tobacco, cotton)? With the “strong mutual affection” that characterized the relation of Old Massa to the black persons whose “labor,” as the Constitution has it, was “due to him”? Or with that perfect moment of ideological inversion whereby Lincoln and the abolitionists, not slaveholders, “traffic in human life”? Astonishing. Only: not really. Read Karl Marx, from The German Ideology: Read more…
Brief Notes on Stephen Crane’s Prose Style #1
N.B.: This is the first in a series of brief commentaries on the prose style of Stephen Crane.
Any practiced reader of Crane can cite examples of slightly queer or disorienting metaphors in his prose. Consider the famous beginning of “The Open Boat“:
First page, "The Open Boat," edition of 1898.
None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust in points like rocks.
Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.
“Colours” may take on a quietly figurative significance, as the subsidiary, and somewhat archaic, meaning of “aegis” stands off somewhere in the background (as in the phrase “under colour of law”). We are concerned with the “colour” of the sea—with its integrity, its agency, its antagonism, its character, its felt “authority” to decide matters of life and death. To say that all of the men know the colours of the sea is to understate the case, of course. They are sick with knowledge of it. And what’s more, a certain knowingness attaches to the word “knew” as Crane uses it. Their common knowledge of the sea is the basis of the “brotherhood” Crane later speaks of—a notably “manly” camaraderie that allows these men to speak to one another in hints and gestures, in tones of irony, and in the blacker shades of humor.
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
Notice also how Crane gives an account of the ocean—as if contradicting its proverbial breadth—that is positively claustrophobic. His men are hemmed in; they inhabit a world circumscribed by the gunwales of a dingy and the next wave alone. And as for the waves, these are “of the hue of slate,” and appear to the men like jagged points of rock, as if they, in the little boat, were negotiating a mountain pass and not a patch of ocean—an arresting metaphor that paradoxically takes sea for land, water for rocks. Either way the passage goes hard. I should note here that, to my mind and ear anyway, Crane almost conscripts the word “jagged” into playing the role of a verb (pronounced with one syllable). This sort of grammatical boundary-testing is not at all uncommon in his prose. Consider an example from The Red Badge of Courage, where we read the following sentence: “Strange gods were addressed in condemnation of the early hours necessary to correct war.” The phrase “to correct” seems by turns to mean “to conduct war correctly,” or to “put war aright,” or “to admonish war,” and yet can be reduced to none of these; its grammatical ambiguity, its suspension, is precise and perfect (such grammatical ambiguity as there is has to do with whether or not “to correct” is an infinitive, or whether “correct” is an adjective modifying “war”).
A new element emerges in the second paragraph of *The Open Boat.” The comparison of bathtub to boat is no doubt funny, pathetically so. Why? Because our relation to water in a bathtub differs so utterly from our relation to it in a storm-tossed boat: the one is recreational or hygienic, the other antagonistic. Also, of course, bathtubs are meant to keep water in, boats to keep it out. So, it’s not just the size of the boat that is the point here, not just the absurd proposition of fitting four men into a bathtub of such commodious size as most men “ought to have” in the late 1890s. The play is more complex.
The waves are described as “most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall.” This language belongs to the parlor, or at least to polite society, where we sometimes meet with forces we call “barbarously abrupt” (rude taxi-cab drivers or shop-clerks, for example, or tourists abroad under some absurd flag of entitlement). It is as if the waves had committed an unpardonable sin against good breeding—as if the waves were exhibiting genuinely uncivilized behavior, damn them. One can well imagine this belief forming a part of the men’s relation to the water. They feel not merely threatened. They feel insulted, indignant.
A page from Lt. Col. Sterling's book illustrating "The Koch Plotter," a device for solving problems in small boat navigation.
Reprint of the original 1916 edition. "Problems" are discussed on no fewer than 22.72% of its pages.
But Crane turns us about yet again in the last sentence quoted above: “Each froth-top,” he says, “was a problem in small-boat navigation.” This understates the matter in a special way. Problems in Small-Boat Navigation might well be the title of a text-book, something assigned for study at the Coast Guard Academy, say. And, lo, a number of books more or less by that title have been published, as the illustrations here attest. To use the language Crane here uses—problems in small boat navigation—puts the relation of men to water in a slightly clinical or “academic” light. With this idea, we are no longer in the game. We are watching a film of it after the fact. We are being debriefed. Read more…
Advertisement for Pears' Soap. 1890s.
Following are some notes on Stephen Crane‘s novella The Monster. I will assume some familiarity with the book, but the plot is easy to summarize. Dr. Trescott, an important figure in Crane’s fictional Whilomville, employs an African-American hostler named Henry Johnson, who has an affectionate relationship with the Trescotts’ young son, Jimmie. When a fire destroys the Trescott house, Henry dashes in to rescue the boy, and manages to reach the rear exit of the house (via the doctor’s laboratory). There he sets the little boy down at the threshold before himself being overcome with the fumes and smoke of the fire, which has now enveloped the lab, with all its beakers of pharmaceutical chemicals, etc. He collapses. The heat of the fire causes the beakers to shatter, and an acid of some sort streams down along the table and falls directly onto Henry’s face, disfiguring him appallingly, and—though by means never made clear—rendering him feeble-minded. Some of the townsfolk accuse Henry of arson, others celebrate him as a hero, and then once the truth emerges—the fire was an accident—the problem around which the novella is built becomes clear. What’s to be done with the newly incapacitated “hero” Henry? What white man will take up his burden? Dr. Trescott manages to save his life. But other town worthies advise him that it would be better—would have been better—simply to let Henry die. Household by household the town ostracizes him and his family, until they alone are left with to handle what used to be called, in the 1890s, “the negro problem.”
Some regard The Monster as an indictment of racism. It will become clear that I find that notion, well, “problematic,” as the English professors say. Others regard it as a satire of small-town pettiness, such as we find in Mark Twain‘s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. I think Crane’s investment isn’t really in moralizing or satire of any kind, but instead in the writing itself—in the prose. (I’d say the same of nearly everything he wrote, and intend this entry in The Era of Casual Fridays to the first in an occasional series devoted to Crane’s style. Well, so much by way of preface.
* * *
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
Often one encounters in Stephen Crane’s prose metaphors that startle and disorient the reader, at times to surreal effect. Here’s a description of the house fire, as it begins, in The Monster, a short novel published in 1899:
A wisp of smoke came from one of the windows at the end of the house and drifted quietly into the branches of a cherry tree. Its companions followed it in slowly increasing numbers, and finally there was a current controlled by invisible banks which poured into the fruit-laden boughs of the cherry tree. It was no more to be noted than if a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys had been climbing a grapevine into the clouds.
Title page, first edition of 1899.
Several things strike me. The first is the comparison of the smoke to water—a confusion of the elements that works by paradox: air, too, can be “poured,” after all. But the truly odd feature of the passage, the feature so characteristic of Crane, is the suggestion in the last sentence: namely, that the progress of the smoke is “no more to be noted than if a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys had been climbing a grapevine into the clouds.” No more to be noted? How are we to understand such a remark? Most observers would “take note” if they saw a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys climbing a grapevine into the clouds, even if they saw it in Crane’s fictional town of Whilomville. To an extent, the metaphor works by visual analogy on the basis of color: a rising column of smoke is compared to a chain of gray monkeys trooping their way up—to a chain of something gray, anyway. But the monkeys and the grapevine are sheer extravagances, as is also the disclaimer that there might be nothing “noteworthy” in the prospect they afford.
This brings me round to what I like to call the technique of narration by inappropriate affect—sometimes used to sound ironic purposes, sometimes not, and sometimes not really “used” at all but simply stumbled into. In The Monster the structure of feelings that might be said to characterize Crane’s narrator often seems oddly out of place. The fire that lies at the center of the novella’s action is for him an occasion for play of a notably whimsical sort. I feel little gravity in the narration. The tone always alerts us to the fact that Crane is an observer, but never, sympathetically speaking, a participant-observer in the scenes he describes. He is a god paring his nails who hardly deigns to notice when a troop of silent gray monkeys climbs a grapevine into the clouds. So, he describes Mrs. Trescott, in her alarm for the safety of her son Jimmie, in language that veers toward ridicule. She is incontinent in her emotions. And Crane—always cool, no matter what the situation—disdains her. She is said to wave her skinny arms about “as if they were two reeds.” He makes a straw woman of her. She is “maniacal.” She “babbles.” She is as much a spectacle as an object of sympathy. Come to that, Crane’s art often works in a region somewhere amid spectacle, ridicule, and sympathy.
The interest of the narrator is more in the fire itself than in anything the fire might destroy. The fire is to him a lovely thing. Little Jimmie Trescott’s room, we are told, “had no smoke in it at all. It was faintly illuminated by a beautiful rosy light reflected circuitously from the flames that were consuming the house. The boy had apparently just been aroused by the noise. He sat in his bed, his lips apart, his eyes wide, while upon his little white-robed figure played caressingly the light from the fire.” The narrator misses not the smallest effect of grace in this tableau. His investment in the scene is essentially that of a connoisseur, as when he reports that Jimmie, having been seized by Henry Johnson, the man who will save him, “let out a gorgeous bawl.” A a bawl to be appreciated, on its own terms, and not simply as a cry of distress. Plainly, the narrator’s interest in the scene stands somewhat apart from the interest the characters themselves take in it. His “affect” is dislocated.
But the best awaits us in Dr. Trescott’s laboratory. “At the entrance to the laboratory,” Crane writes, Henry Johnson and the boy he carries meet “a strange spectacle. The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere. There was one blaze that was precisely the hue of a delicate coral. In another place was a mass that lay merely in phosphorescent inaction like a pile of emeralds. There was an explosion at one side, and suddenly before [Henry] there reared a delicate, trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady. With a quiet smile she blocked his path and doomed him and Jimmie.” Henry is able, in his last exertion, to lay Jimmie down near a window. But he himself collapses onto the floor beneath a table on which sit beakers and jars of various chemicals, one of which seems “to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent. Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snake-like thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson’s upturned face. Afterward the trail of this creature seemed to reek, and amid flames and low explosions drops like red-hot jewels pattered softly down at leisurely intervals.”
Extract from the first edition of the book (1898).
In connection with this remarkable passage, I want to ask a question about point of view that is also a question about the narrator’s mood. What sort of mind could see this particular fire in this particular way? It must be a mind unaffected and unsentimental, a mind capable of seeing in the fire a show of light, color, and form; a mind provisionally indifferent (Olympian, even) to the exquisite suffering the fire causes the men and women immediately touched by it. After all, they are—or so the possessor of such a mind must feel—a little selfish in seeing the fire only in terms of what it can do to them. Doesn’t, and shouldn’t, the fire have a life of its own?
Crane’s manner, if I may say so, allies him with the “high cold star” that looks on the suffering men in “The Open Boat” with such sublime indifference. Crane’s narrator is like the Universe in his best-known poem. When reminded that men exist, the Universe replies that the fact creates in it “no sense of obligation.” Such is the indifferent force with which Crane affiliates himself as a writer, or so the evidence of his cool prose suggests. The Monster may be about a black man, defaced and compelled to live behind a veil. But no one, I think, would find in it any real exception to the general drift of things in a nation that was (as W.E.B. DuBois said) “a little ashamed,” in the 1890s, “at having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes.” This will become much clearer when I consider, in a moment, a passage describing Henry Johnson and his sweetheart Bella Farragut.
Transmission Electron Micrograph of the Ebola Virus.
From the 1916 edition of "Pragmatism." Click on the image for a full-sized view of the passage in question.
William James points out in Pragmatism that, from our point of view, the astonishing “fitness” of the woodpecker’s beak to get at the grubs hiding beneath the bark of a tree appears beautiful and perfect. It seems to argue “design” in the universe of a remarkably harmonious and symbiotic sort. From the point of view of the grubs, of course, it is evidence of something else altogether: a diabolical sort of “design” (if design govern in a thing so small, as Robert Frost puts it). All depends on perspective.
One sometimes hears epidemiologists speak of the “elegance” or “beauty” of a particularly nefarious virus. It is possible to regard ebola zaire, for example, with a certain aesthetic detachment—to regard it as ebola zaire might wish to be regarded. Namely, as a strand of RNA ideally suited to painting a room with human blood. When we think that way we are, finally, interested only in power, only in force. We have, so to speak, transcended merely “human” interests. Crane’s fiction usually tends in precisely this direction. We are in any case—to recur to the novella at hand—well beyond jeremiads about the plight of black folk in the 1890s, and the nuanced interest these jeremiads inevitably take in the more “human” significance of events.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
A Nietzschean detachment, combined with often startlingly incongruous metaphors, is what accounts for the peculiar feeling of disorientation we feel in reading Crane’s most characteristic prose. In The Monster, the fire that disfigures Henry Johnson is described precisely as a fire might like to be described. The fire is done justice to. The fire is flattered. It has good reason to deploy its flames like “flags” “joyfully” waving in the wind, as Crane puts it. No wonder the townspeople look up with eyes that “shine” with “awe,” as Crane says they do. For they, too, are pyrophiliac, and can appreciate a fire. To appreciate it—as theater, as a spectacle, as a thing of force and beauty—is in fact what they came to the Trescott’s burning house to do. They are, so far as their moral investment in the scene is concerned, rather like the narrator himself: indifferent, and, as the story soon permits them to show, for the most part incapable of empathy. They would as soon kill the disfigured Henry Johnson as look at him—if they could do so merely by taking thought. The local boys, as boys will, hurry to the fire as to a circus. They are “deeply moved” by the “whole affair,” and take special pleasure in it (after all, “it was fine to see the gathering of the [fire] companies,” and the lads display an “impish joy” at the sight of the flames). One might write this off as childish insouciance, which is what it is, but the adults are the same. Their eyes “shine with awe” at the spectacle; the men are at their best when describing the affair to their fellows in a theatrical, self-dramatizing way. The whole business takes on, by turns, the holiday air of a parade and the histrionic air of bad melodrama. And lest we ascribe this to a forgivably human weakness for excitement and sensation, Crane soon shows us that the townsfolk care nothing at all for the suffering of Henry Johnson. The judge speaks for them all: “Somehow,” he says, “I think that that poor fellow ought to die.” It is “one of the blunders of virtue,” he suggests, to care for him any longer, because to care for him is a nuisance, an embarrassment. So much for the white man’s burden, which Rudyard Kipling admonished Americans to take up in 1899, the same year The Monster was published. The Monster might well be a satire of the bad faith with which that “burden” was everywhere assumed.
W.E.B. DuBois, Boston, Summer 1907.
Now, clearly Crane invites us to condemn the townspeople for their detachment. They cut Dr. Trescott off when he refuses to turn Henry out to die. They abandon him. No woman comes to his wife’s afternoon teas. His medical practice suffers. But we’re never invited to judge the narrator, and I want to make the implications of this fact clear. The reason we condemn the townsfolk is apparently that, under the circumstances, they ought to be committed to seeing the fire in terms chiefly of what it can do to them, and to their fellows; they ought to be humanists. That is to say, they ought to be humanly self-centered, as the grubs in James’s analogy are self-centered in a grubbish way, for that would mark the beginning of real empathy. No time out to admire the woodpecker’s plumage (i.e., the fire). After all, they are not writers describing imaginary events, as is Crane; they are characters in a story behaving like writers describing imaginary events. That is precisely the moral problem to which Crane’s novella alerts us. At the end of the day, Henry Johnson is not, for the good white people of Whilomville, real. He is not one of their fellows. They see him, if they see him at all, as through a veil of unreality. In fact, Crane has Henry wear a veil, as if anticipating W.E.B. DuBois’s great metaphor in The Souls of Black Folk: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The townsfolk do, in fact, look on Henry, veiled as he is, with “amused contempt and pity.” And it would have been much more convenient (as they let the doctor know) if Henry Johnson had been allowed to die. Read more…
“One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this”: Booker T. and W.E.B
Poet Dudley Randall, with his wife Vivian Randall. From "Today’s Negro-Americans and Their Contributions to Their Country," vol. 2, published in Flint, Michigan, in association with "Ebony Magazine."
Booker T. and W.E.B. (by Dudley Randall)
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook,
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
- Dudley Randall, at work.
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
Booker T. Washington in 1905. Photograph by Harris & Ewing.
With Dudley Randall‘s fine poem in mind, I revisit, here, as does he, an old debate between the Wizard of Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois. I say at the outset that my intention is to understand DuBois’s arguments against Washington’s policies. I do not mean to take sides, or personally to diminish Washington. But it will be clear to any reader of these pages that I find DuBois’s writing uncommonly compelling. The dispute between the two men had many inflections, including social class. But both left incontestably valuable legacies—Washington in Tuskegee University; DuBois in the N.A.A.C.P., both as one of its founders, and as the first editor of its influential magazine, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races; in his untiring antagonism to colonialism, which anticipated so much of what we now call post-colonial studies; and in his many books, without which American literature, historiography, and sociology would alike be impoverished. So, with that for my disclaimer, I begin.
In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the first essay in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois sketches out, in brief, the history of the post-war period for African-Americans. There was the Emancipation itself; then, with passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the granting of citizenship and suffrage; then what DuBois bitterly calls “The Revolution of 1876” (white Southerners called it the “Redemption” of the South from Republican Party rule). With that, the freedmen and their sons and daughters were left to wander, like forsaken Israelites, in a desert somewhere between Pharaoh and an imaginary “America” they could rightly call home.
W. E. B. Du Bois in 1918.
In this “wilderness” appeared before the freedmen, like the Biblical “Pillar of Fire,” what DuBois calls “the ideal of `book learning’; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan.” “Cabalistic” letters, says DuBois, choosing his adjective carefully: the Cabbala is a set of esoteric teachings, handed down by Moses to the Rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud. DuBois is setting up a rather exact sort of allegory in The Souls of Black Folk. “Ten thousand thousand” black Americans are adrift, and two men would be their “Moses”—DuBois with his Cabbala (all the recondite “book learning” of the West), and his political urgency; Washington with his Tuskegee program of “industrial/vocational training,” and his political moderation. The one tends to the “souls” of black folk, the other rather more to their “bodies”—at least as DuBois sees it. I’ll consider this in detail.
The chief underwriters of black educational institutions in the South in the post-Reconstruction period were organizations whose funds came for the most part from Northern capitalists. The money was disbursed largely through two organizations: the Southern Education Board and the General Education Board.
John D. Rockefeller (founder of Standard Oil) in 1885.
As historian David Levering Lewis points out, “a partial roster of the officers and trustees of the S.E.B. was a roll call of the arbiters of the Industrial North and the New South”—railroad money, money from the Wanamaker Department Store fortune, from Wall Street, from Standard Oil, etc.
Standard Oil Refinery No. 1, Cleveland, Ohio, 1899.
The S.E.B. (founded in 1901) and the G.E.B. (1902) disbursed some $176 million to white colleges and universities and some $21 million to black colleges and universities between 1902 and 1930. The directors of the organizations sought reconciliation between North and South, and the development of Southern labor and resources by Northern capital. These goals required that they defer to Southern opinion on what was then called “The Negro Question.” “The rich and dominating North,” DuBois explains in Souls, “was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation.” Booker T. Washington perfectly suited the purposes of “the rich and dominating North” after his ground-breaking 1895 speech at the Exposition in Atlanta, familiarly known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” Bear in mind what he said there: “To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I have said to my own race: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South” (my emphasis). Washington reports in Up From Slavery that “one of the saddest things” he ever saw was a young black man “sitting down in a one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar.” The youth, Washington implied, would be much better off, and much happier, if he practiced a trade instead of studying “big books” with “high sounding names.” To which DuBois dryly retorts in Souls: “One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this.” Well, what Northern capital had to say to it was plain enough. Washington on the merits of studying French grammar was music to their ears. He soon became a salaried field agent for the S.E.B., with the result (among other things) that DuBois’s Atlanta University was ignored by Northern benefactors, while Tuskegee flourished. DuBois later remarked of the period in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn: “The control [of the S.E.B. and G.E.B.] was to be drastic. The Negro intelligentsia was to be suppressed and hammered into conformity.” All of which explains why DuBois’s attack on Washington in The Souls of Black Folk is so utterly devastating, despite the fact that DuBois manages, throughout, to sustain an essentially temperate, even cordial, tone. His iron fist is velvet-gloved.
Segregated drinking fountains, a fixture in the South until 1964-65.
In his 1895 Atlanta speech, Washington agreed to put off demands for real political, civil and labor rights in favor of economic development. “As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past,” Washington said to his white audience, “nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This accession to “social separation” was offered even as the Plessy v. Ferguson case made its way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1896, it would place American apartheid on a Constitutional foundation. The studied “humility” of the address struck DuBois as embarrassing. The concession to “social separation” struck him as reprehensible.
“Good Lord, walk dead still.”
Ben Jonson (portrait by Abrham van Blyenerch).
XI. On Something That Walks Somewhere
At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman: as I near it came,
It made me a great face; I ask’d the name.
“A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood.
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none; and as little ill,
For I will dare none.” Good Lord, walk dead still.
Another fine poem from Ben Jonson‘s 1612 volume Epigrams, modeled in part on Martial‘s great example, and in keeping with the latter as to theme and style: satire, wit, compression, paradox, etc.
Notice first that throughout the poem Jonson uses the neuter pronoun “it.” The impersonal “something” of the title (instead of “someone”) harmonizes with this, as in OED sense 1. a.: “Some unspecified or indeterminate thing (material or immaterial).” Curiously, the OED reports no use of it as a stand-in for a name unknown prior to the 18th century, when we begin to encounter phrases like this: “1764 G. WILLIAMS in Jesse Selwyn & Contemp. I. 295 Lady Something Grey is here. 1779 C’TESS UPPER OSSORY Ibid. IV. 75 Another man has sworn to shoot a Miss Something, n’importe, if she did not run away with him from the Opera.” Yet the OED has it right—I mean, in not fetching in Jonson’s earlier use of the word to denominate a person. The name in question is neither unknown to him nor forgotten. His “something” is clearly pejorative and deployed consistently with the neuter “it” that follows throughout. Jonson neuters his courtier not merely grammatically but in all ways. The “somewhere” of the title must, of course, mean the court. So, why the vagueness? Because the court is an institution whose influence, though located, is ubiquitous? Possibly. Or because the neutered walking dead—such useless men as the one here described—might as well be nowhere, so unspecifiably vague are their distinctions? That seems more likely, though Jonson may simply prefer, for rhetorical reasons, the parallelism that sets “somewhere” against “something.”
Whatever the case, consider the first two and a half lines, which form a single rhetorical/grammatical unit. The line-end commas should not register a pause in reading the poem aloud or silently. Pretty clearly these lines fall out as though enjambed. So I will reprint them again as I hear them said, with vertical lines indicating the slight pauses (or caesuras), which are all medial (i.e., mid-line), not terminal (i.e., line-end). I shall also color-code the parallelisms.
At court I met it | in clothes brave enough
To be a courtier; | and looks grave enough
To seem a statesman.
A kind of genius informs the lines, as to prosody. The lines terminate in repetends, while the “brave”/”grave” internal rhyme harmonizes the first couplet. Jonson makes his distinctions precisely, too, and in ironic parallel: this neutered man “is” a courtier, but merely “seems” a statesman. So neatly parallel are these lines that we feel in them all the paired terms: clothes/looks, brave/grave, be/seem, and, then, well—”enough” is “enough.”
A courtier in his finery: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, courtier to Elizabeth, patron of the arts, painted from an engraving by J. Brown, 1575.
“Brave” here works in OED sense 2, current in the early 17th century: “Finely-dressed; splendid, showy, grand, fine, handsome. (Rare in 18th c.; in 19th c. apparently a literary revival, or adopted from dialect speech.)” “Grave,” the second of the two internal rhymes, will soon take on, in a punning sort of way, a mortuary connotation: “It made me a great face,” we are told, and Jonson “ask’d the name”: “A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood.” “Lord” is not a name, of course. It’s a title, and a role. As the OED has it, the title meant, in early 17th century usage, a man numbered among “the king’s barons, and at length mostly applied to the greater of these (the Great Barons) who personally attended the Great Council, or, from the time of Henry III, were summoned by writ to Parliament; hence, a lord of Parliament, a noble, a peer” (my emphasis). This guy’s a player, as we now say, or ought to be rather than merely seem to be. “Statesmen” must act, and this one declares himself—”cries” himself—to be “buried in flesh and blood,” and so, one supposes, dead to the world of honor.
Jonson implies—so I suppose—that this courtier is a sensualist, even to the point of decadence. (I have in mind the connotations of corruption that hover around the idea of being buried in “flesh and blood,” which is to say in the body.) Our lord remains at court for that reason only, it would seem. Poets in the 17th century often spoke of the soul as in some sense “buried” in the body, or “imprisoned” in or by it. Andrew Marvell comes immediately to mind, in his “Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body,” where the soul has the first word:
Andrew Marvell (portrait, ca. 1655-1660, artist unknown)
O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?
Hands “manacle” the soul, eyes “blind” it, veins and arteries enchain it. Jonson’s “Lord” declares himself entirely given over to the body. Whether and how this troubles him is not quite clear. He “cries” it out, and freely confesses his own incapacity to act on any other basis, or from any other motives, whether for good or ill. The Pauline scriptures stand behind all of this, of course—I mean, this idea of the body as a a kind of prison-house or burial ground for the soul. Bear in mind Romans 7:18-25 (where “inward man” means, roughly, “soul,” or in any case that which stands opposed to “body,” which is here referred to as the “members”): “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” And so it is with Jonson’s neutered courtier: he is a “Lord” buried in “this body of death,” utterly commandeered by its “members,” though, unlike St. Paul, he hardly looks toward being “delivered.” Read more…
Frost, in the mid 1910s.
“The contingent self enjoins us to imagine a life without blaming, a life exempt from the languages of effort and self-control.” —Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1996)
* * *
In poems such as “Putting in the Seed” (reprinted below), Robert Frost takes on a remarkable vigor and fertility. It is as if he would gender “poetic” creativity masculine (and also, I suppose, heterosexual). The same emphases are felt in his 1939 account of “the figure a poem makes,” as has often enough been noticed: “The figure is the same as for love,” he says, meaning it to the full as he follows out a description delicately sexual, both in its imagery and its rhythms. In fact, Lawrance Thompson—Frost’s first major biographer—reports a 1959 conversation with the poet on exactly this theme. “He said he remembered saying to F.S. Flint in England, long ago, that there was something wrong with a writer who couldn’t get into his subject and screw it to a climax: if you were going to find metaphors for the artistic process in the functions of the body, that was the way you ought to do it. He remembered hearing AE (George Russell) say that all poems were love poems, and he could see how that might be said in the sense that Frost made that remark to Flint, but not otherwise.” (You’ll find this, and other remarks like it, reprinted in the notes to The Collected Prose of Robert Frost.) In what follows I’ll pursue these matters in some detail.
“Putting in the Seed,” however obliquely, depends upon an ancient figure: the phallus as a plow—by which I really mean simply male “enterprise”—that makes the land fertile. These analogies between sexual and agricultural affairs date back to the origin of agriculture itself. Only here the deed is done more intimately, more tactfully—by hand. This is a poem of “husbandry,” in every sense of the word.
“Putting in the Seed”
The sonnet, as printed in "Mountain Interval" (1916).
YOU come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
This sonnet, from Mountain Interval (1916), combines features of Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms. To be exact, Frost retains the strong two-part argumentative development of the Italian form, but structures the rhymes of the octet (or first eight lines) in ABAB quatrains approximating, at least somewhat, the English form. As I said, “Putting in the Seed” obviously belongs to that tradition in poetry likening human procreation to “husbandry” and tillage. Frost’s idea—here as elsewhere—seems to be that in making love we align ourselves with the larger seasonal rhythms. The octet of the sonnet sets up the situation. The husband’s out planting, the wife’s in cooking—a customary division of farm labor in those days (i.e., the late 19th and early 20th centuries). The sestet then explores the further reaches of that situation, which are of course already implied and only need be awakened: the “mingling” of seed (beans and peas) with “soft petals,” fresh from their own blown blossoms in the apple orchards, where they’d played their part in pollinating, in making fertile, the trees, but yet are “not so barren quite.” Frost speaks advisedly of their “mingling,” aware, as he would have been, of the older sense of the word, as in O.E.D. 2b: “To intermingle; to mix or join oneself with or among others; to marry, to have sexual intercourse with.” The latter sense especially has its roots in the language of the English Bible, as the O.E.D. makes clear: “1535 Bible (Coverdale) 1 Esdras viii. 70 Both they and their sonnes haue mengled them selues with the daughters of them. 1602 W. FULBECKE Pandectes 78 The people of Sodom and Gomorra voluptuously mingling themselues with the women of the Moabites.” At the “turn” in the sonnet, which occurs at line nine (following the Italian model) the speaking voice rises up out of the colloquial patterns of the first eight lines—”You come to fetch me,” “we’ll see,” and so on—to assume a deeper resonance, in which we hear all of this lore (so to speak) given voice. Read more…
“I did not know until this year that Keats spoke with a cockney accent”: Richard Rodriguez’s Prose
Cover of the Penguin Paperback.
Cover of the Princeton UP paperback I carried through graduate school.
On a friend’s recommendation I lately picked up—that is to say, “1-clicked”—a copy of Richard Rodriguez‘s 2002 book, Brown: the Last Discovery of America. I confess I’d not read Rodriguez since I taught an essay of his to first-year students when I was a graduate student in the 1980s. The essay, from The Hunger of Memory (1982), was in the reader our university assigned in its composition classes. “Unit adoption,” the practice was called. All the T.A.’s worked from it. All these years he has remained for me that essay, that experience, and, of course, a person on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other PBS programs. I think I come to Brown fresh, or relatively so. I will say at the outset that I find its arguments unimpeachable, and that I will not have much to do with them here. Let Mr. Rodriguez sum them up for me, in six sentences from the preface to Brown: “Race is not such a terrible word for me. Maybe because I am skeptical by nature. Maybe because my nature is already mixed. The word race encourages me to remember the influence of eroticism on history. For that is what race memorializes. Within any discussion of race, there lurks the possibility of romance.” I shall abscond with this passage into other precincts soon enough. It rings true.
Today I mean to deal with the prose, which is attic, or baroque, in the estimable Morris Croll‘s sense of those terms—matters I treat at length elsewhere in The Era of Casual Fridays. Some call the style “loose.” Francis Christensen, for example, in his contribution to W. Ross Winterowd‘s Contemporary Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings: “The loose sentence,” he says, “characterized the anti-Ciceronian movement in the seventeenth century. This movement, according to Morris W. Croll, began with Montaigne and Bacon and continued with such men as Donne, Browne, Taylor, Pascal. To Montaigne, its art was the art of being natural; to Pascal, its eloquence was the eloquence that mocks formal eloquence; to Bacon, it presented knowledge so that it could be examined, not so that it must be accepted.” All of this holds for the paragraphs I’m about to examine, though bear in mind that Croll (in the book pictured to the right, above) gives by far the best account of the style in general. I read the following last night, from Chapter One of Brown, “The Triad of Alexis de Tocqueville.” I reprint the whole passage here. Then I will then read through it again, as it comes, sentence by sentence.
The nescience of a book can undermine its clarity, can spoil our pleasure in it. Our age looks for exclusion. And there is a certain gumption missing from our age as a result, and from the literature of our age.
Helen Keller wrote that dust spoiled the feel of things for her. Simone Weil wrote that the music and the pageantry of a Nazi youth parade were viscerally thrilling to her.
Already reading in grammar school there were rooms in my reading life into which I would have been reluctant to admit Frederick Douglass, for I knew in those rooms he was mocked. You must wait here, Mr. Douglass. I made myself the go-between. I must come to the conclusion that the suite of mockery, though refined, though pleasing to me in most ways—a room of Thackeray’s perhaps—retained poisonous vapours of another age, and would not have admitted me. And yet these apartments existed uniquely in my imagination, nowhere else. In books, you say. But books must be reimagined, misunderstood, read. Readers repair to books as men and women to monasteries, none with an identical motive. I was the reader of Thackeray. These rooms, these weathers, these confidences from the dust must burn my ears if they were read out loud. But in my privacy I could regret they could not be revised. I strained to restore them to the conditional. Clouds that might pass. The authors could not know what Frederick Douglass would have taught them. Were they damned? Was the crudeness of their imaginations commensurate with the way they made toast? Were books a sort of limbo, characterized by unchangeability? Books! They were damned, authors, not to know that what they dropped could not be revised.
I did not know until this year that Keats spoke with a cockney accent.
The first paragraph first: “The nescience of a book can undermine its clarity, can spoil our pleasure in it. Our age looks for exclusion. And there is a certain gumption missing from our age as a result, and from the literature of our age.” “Nescience” (as the components of the word imply) means ignorance, as in O.E.D. sense 1. “Absence or lack of knowledge, ignorance; a form or instance of ignorance.” I rarely encounter the word; the O.E.D. calls it rare as Rodriguez uses it here. The point is not that the word is slightly archaic or difficult (it may be the former, but not the latter). The point is that one notices it in the context of this passage, whose diction ranges from the racy (“gumption”) to the broadly urbane (“Our age looks for exclusion”); and whose modes range from colloquy (“In books, you say. But books…”) to exclamation (“Books!”) to questions both closed and open, serious and serio-comic (“Were they damned? Was the crudeness of their imaginations commensurate with the way they made toast?”—about which more later).
But again that first paragraph. Notice how loose its ligatures are. Read more…
“Gut eats all day and lechers all the night, so all his meat he tasteth over twice”: from Ben Jonson to Richard Dawkins.
William, third Earl of Pembroke. Portrait done by an unknown Flemish Artist, 1630.
Today, another of Ben Jonson‘s epigrams, which genre he called, as you’ll see below, “the ripest of his studies.” I begin with the dedicatory note in which that phrase appears. Jonson affixed it to the first edition of his Epigrams (1612):
To the great Example of Honour, and Vertue , the most Noble William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain, &c.
M Y L O R D, While you cannot change your Merit, I dare not change your Title: It [i.e. the Merit] was that made it, and not I. Under which Name, I here offer to your Lordship the ripest of my Studies, my Epigrams; which, though they carry danger in the sound, do not therefore seek your shelter: For, when I made them, I had nothing in my Conscience, to expressing of which I did need a Cypher.
Newgate Prison (which dated from the 13th century) as Jonson knew it. The original building was destroyed in the Great London Fire of 1666.
No unseemly modesty infects Jonson’s claim not to seek Pembroke’s shelter by so dedicating his book. Some years earlier he’d known danger; he handled himself well enough. The crown suppressed his 1597 play The Isle of Dogs, co-written with Thomas Nashe. Elizabeth issued warrants for the arrest of both poets. Jonson wound up in Marshalsea Prison, charged with “Leude and mutynous behavior.” His partner in crime, Nashe, managed to escape. Only a year later, Jonson was again imprisoned, this time in Newgate on charges of manslaughter. He’d killed an actor called Gabriel Spenser in a duel that took place on September 22, 1598. Jonson plead guilty. But he was released by benefit of clergy, which granted leniency to the learned in that sense. All it took was the recitation of a verse or two from the Bible in Latin. Still, his property was confiscated, and he was branded on his left thumb in punishment. He knew what came of offending people at court. But by 1612, Elizabeth was nine years dead. Things had changed. Jonson was not out of favor with James I. His conscience was clean. He needed neither power nor the indirections of “cipher” to protect him. The dedication continues:
Facsimile of the dedicatory page, edition of 1616.
But, if I be fallen into those Times, wherein, for the likeness of Vice, and Facts, every one thinks another’s ill Deeds objected to [i.e., charged against] him; and that in their ignorant and guilty Mouths, the common Voice [i.e., cry] is (for their security), Beware the Poet, confessing, therein, so much love to their Diseases, as they would rather make a Party for them, than be either rid, or told of them: I must expect, at your Lordship’s hand, the protection of Truth, and Liberty, while you are constant to your own Goodness.
The poet as libertarian truth-teller; the poet as doing good by necessary evil. Something in this savors of the by-this-date defunct role of the Fool, a figure given ambiguous license at court to “speak truth to power” (as the saying now goes) when others might not. Examples abound in Shakespeare, as in this exchange between Lear and his Fool (I.iv.146-8):
KING LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
FOOL: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
Jonson’s Epigrams often have this air about them: a cavalier ease with the powerful, Royalist though he was. He calls an ass an ass, a whore a whore, a fool a fool, and is not averse to riddling.† The epigrams “carry danger in their sound.” He plays the Fool in the better sense. And Jonson’s point? That he seeks shelter from Pembroke, if at all, for the common defense of Truth and Liberty, not for the more craven purpose of hiding behind the gown of a Lord. Read more…
I’ve always enjoyed dipping into Ben Jonson’s epigrams, of which the following, “On Court-worm,” is a fine and wicked example. It leads us into interesting enough territory to merit notice here. In the epigrams, Jonson is nothing if not our contemporary.
Ben Jonson (portrait by Abrham van Blyenerch)
XV. On Court-worm.
All men are worms; but this no man. In silk
‘Twas brought to court first wrapt, and white as milk;
Where, afterwards, it grew a butterfly.
Which was a caterpillar: so ’twill die.
First, bear in mind that in Jonson’s day “worm” and “caterpillar” were quasi-synonyms, at least in certain contexts. As, for example, in O.E.D. sense 5. a.: “The larva of an insect; a maggot, grub, or caterpillar, esp. one that feeds on and destroys flesh, fruit, leaves, cereals, textile fabrics, and the like. Also collect. the worm, as a destructive pest.” Doubtless Jonson has these invidious connotations in mind, in this deft satire of a certain sort of courtier. He had also in mind this sense of “butterfly,” current in the 17th century (again I turn to the O.E.D.): “2. fig. a. A vain, gaudily attired person (e.g. a courtier who flutters about the court); a light-headed, inconstant person; a giddy trifler.” But the wit of the epigram has to do with the integrity of the metaphor underlying it, from beginning to end.
Of course, it was proverbial that men were “worms,” or at any rate “food for them.” In fact, to call a man a “worm” in the 16th century and early 17th century was simply to say that he was “mortal,” as in O.E.D. sense 6c: “worm’s or worms’ meat, said of a man’s dead body, or of man as mortal.” Hamlet has the best lines as to this, of course, in 4.iii: Read more…
Robert Frost, Napoleon, Gossip, and the “Thrill of Sincerity”
Frost, at about the time his first book appeared (1913).
Most readers place the often-taught (because ubiquitously-anthologized) “Home Burial” among Frost’s most remarkable achievements in making literary art out of “sentence sounds,” as he called them: in short, the sounds of animated speech, in all its changeable tones (from under- to overstatement; from the subtlest irony to the bluntest sarcasm; anger; surprise; teasing and flirtation; anguish; fear; queryings both closed and open; and so on). I am going to assume some familiarity with the poem in the remarks that follow. (The text is readily available via the link given above.)
Frost composed “Home Burial” in England at precisely the time when he was composing also a remarkable series of letters, dating from mid-1913 to 1915, outlining his interest in what he called, variously, “the abstract vitality of our speech”; or “the sound of sense”; or “the intonation [of the voice] entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence”; or “sound postures”; or “real cave things” in the “cave of the mouth” that “were before words were.” “Home Burial,” in addition to being a poem composed almost entirely out of talk—that is, out of those “real cave things” that inhabit the cave of the mouth—is also in some sense about the possibility of “talk,” about the outer limits of talk. It is a poem about the limits (both moral and sympathetic) of a husband, the father of a dead child, who stands accused not merely of thinking that “the talk is all,” but of living as if it were—even in the face of his own child’s death. (His wife damns him utterly: “If you had any feelings,” she says, “you that dug / With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave…”) The possibilities in this for a vocational parable of some kind are hard to mistake, at least as I see it. Here, I will sketch out, if only tentatively, a few such possibilities.
William Stanley Braithewait (1878-1962), from 1906 to 1931, influential literary editor of The Boston Evening Transcript.
What distinguishes a man like the one in “Home Burial”—who stands accused by a grieving and aggrieved wife of “thinking the talk is all,” even unto the point of unfeeling heartlessness—from a man (a poet, say) who concedes, as Frost did in a 1915 letter, that “his conscious interest in people was at first no more than an almost technical interest in their speech”? What distinguishes a man who “thinks the talk is all” from a man (a poet, say) who, above all things, likes his talk “fixed to the page” with all the “body heat” out of it (which is to say, all of the confessional and personal “sincerity” out of it)?
Cover, first American edition (issued by Henry Holt)
A merely “technical interest” in the speech of men and women may, let’s suppose, abstract a man from his fellows—may withdraw him from them at one or two removes. Some such retrospective worry doubtless accounts for the beguiling, apologetic air with which Frost describes this youthful tendency of his in a 1915 letter to William Stanley Braithewait, editor, at the time, of the literary pages of the Boston Evening Transcript. I have in mind not merely his teasing impeachments of himself, as when he reports to the genteel Bostonian, with easy confidence, that A Boy’s Will (1913), his first book, “is an expression of my life for the ten years from eighteen on when I thought I greatly preferred stocks and stones to people.” I have in mind also this utterly engaging confession: Read more…
The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door —
Today, I think I’ll have a go at the veritable heart of the canon—that is, at a poem by Emily Dickinson, of course. Who else?
Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke in late 1846 or early 1847
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —
The poem is numbered 303 in T.H. Johnson’s scheme, and 409 in R.W. Franklin’s; both date it in 1862. Let’s consider the opening line: “The Soul selects her own Society…” The idea is that the “soul” does this because the “body” cannot, or may not, do so as readily: the body is fated by birth, family, sex, class, etc. So a certain liberty is assumed for the “soul,” as against—or so the implication inevitably must go—the “body”; and this “soul,” we should note, is gendered feminine.
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. Read more…
Farewell, dear finger: much I grieve to see how soon mischance hath made a hand of thee.
The seventeenth century was unique in English poetry, as much for its minor as for its major writers. Lyric poets, for the most part anyway, wrote without a view toward the marketplace. And there existed a kind of generally shared idiom, and ease within forms, that hasn’t characterized poetry in English since the Restoration—so far as I’m concerned anyway. I have in mind such poets—lesser lights, most of them—as styled themselves “Sons of Ben” [Jonson], and who produced a body of work as charming in its address, as clean in its diction, as variable in its forms, and as facile and relaxed with a line or a couplet as one might well expect poetry to be. They perfected the Cavalier style. The following poem, by Thomas Randolph, is a splendid little example. The loss of the pinky finger of his left hand in a tavern brawl occasioned it.
As printed in Alastair Fowler's fine anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford UP).
Not much more is known about Randolph than can be contained in an entry in the estimable Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to 1900, published, since 1917, by the Oxford University Press, or in the introductory matter to W.C. Hazlitt‘s edition of Randolph’s works in 1875; or, again, in the introduction to perhaps the only truly “scholarly” edition of Randolph, done by John Jay Parry for Yale and Oxford jointly in 1917. The Internet Archive reports, as of this writing anyway, that some 284 copies of the digitized version of Hazlitt’s edition have been downloaded, while some 3 have of the Parry edition (one of the latter number being, presumably, the copy I myself downloaded while typing these sentences). The library at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where I work, has the Parry edition. But so far as I can tell it was never checked out until this morning (2/10/2010), when I fetched it up myself from the basement only to find that the pages had yet to be cut; which fact afforded me the bookish pleasure of cutting those pages I wished to see, starting with the table of contents.
You will want to know the particulars as to why and how Randolph lost the little finger about which the poem above is written; and I shall take up its structure and theme in due course. But first a bit about his life, which I gather from the aforementioned DNB.
The pin marks Randolph's birthplace, due south of London.
Randolph was born in Hamsey, near Lewes, in Sussex, England in 1605 (his baptism took place on June 15 of that year). He was something of a prodigy and wrote, at the age of nine, in verse, a “History of the Incarnation of Our Saviour.” He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, which granted him a master’s degree in 1632. While still at university he paid call at the Devil Tavern in London, where Ben Jonson was known to hold court, and in reply to a challenge that he order his own quart of sack, plead poverty in “an improvised verse,” whereupon Jonson, in affectionate pity, adopted Randolph as one of his “sons.” After 1632, Sidney Lee, author of the entry in the DNB on Randolph from which I draw these details, reports that the poet “indulged with increasing ardour in the dissipations of London literary life,” pointing out that “in two poems he recounted the loss of a finger in an affray which followed a festive meeting.” His friend Thomas Bancroft, we are told, “lamented that ‘he drank too greedily at the Muse’s spring.’” Lee adds that “creditors harassed him, and his health failed. He was attacked by smallpox, and, after staying with his father in 1634 at Little Houghton, Northamptonshire, he paid a visit to his friend William Stafford of Blatherwick.
A sketch of Randolph, as reproduced from a 17th century edition of his works by William Hazlitt in his.
There he died in March 1635, within three months of his thirtieth birthday, and on the 17th he was buried in the vault of the Stafford family, in an aisle adjoining the parish church.” By this time he had authored a play satirizing university life and celebrating tippling, titled “Aristippus.” (From this source, the DNB reports, Milton borrowed, in “”L’Allegro,” the line “blithe, buxom and debonair.”) Randolph’s play “Jealous Lovers” was acted before Charles I and the Queen in 1632, and published the same year, together with prefatory verses written for a number of his friends. Other accounts exist of the “affray” in which Randolph lost his finger, the most charming among them that of William Winstanley in his Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687): “His extraordinary indulgence to the too liberal converse with the multitude of his applauders, drew him to such an immoderate way of living, that he was seldom out of Gentlemen’s company, and as it often happens that in drinking high quarrels arise, so there chanced some words to pass betwixt Mr. Randolph and another Gentleman, which grew to be so high, that the Gentleman drawing his Sword, and striking at Mr. Randolph, cut off his little finger, whereupon, in an extemporary humour, he instantly made these verses”—that is, the poem printed above, to the details of which I now turn. One doubts its extemporaneity, but then again such ease as this was simply assumed amongst Randolph’s company. But now the poem. (For reasons that will become clear at the end of this entry, I highlight each enjambed, or run-on, line in red.)
Arithmetic nine digits, and no more,
Admits of: then I still have my store.
For what mischance hath ta’en from my left hand,
It seems did only for a cipher stand.
“Digit,” as Randolph knew, is from the Latin “digitus”: finger. Or, as the O.E.D. has it in sense 1: “One of the five terminal divisions of the hand or foot; a finger or toe. a. In ordinary language, a finger. Now only humorous or affected“—or, I hasten to add, medical, as any man knows who has undergone a “digital” examination of the prostate. Read more…
Dante and the Henchman; or, the profession of English
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“All the professions are timid and expectant agencies. The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet the condition of any soul; if of two, if of ten, ’tis a signal success. But he walked to the church without any assurance that he knew the distemper, or could heal it. The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few resources, the same tonic or sedative to this new and peculiar constitution, which he has applied with various success to a hundred men before. If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised. The lawyer advises the client, and tells his story to the jury, and leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much relieved as the client, if it turns out that he has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a brave face on the matter, and, since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice, and given satisfaction to the community; but is only an advocate after all. And so is all life a timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we must, and call it by the best names. We like very well to be praised for our action, but our conscience says, ‘Not unto us.’ ‘Tis little we can do for each other.”
—Emerson, “Considerations By the Way“
Cover of Delbanco's 1997 book, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
“From my colleagues who teach mainly poetry, I understand that even the most sophisticated students still tend to have little idea about prosody and are not quite sure why it should matter. This is not a case a fallen standards. Graduate students are more precociously professional than ever before. But by and large, under the sway of teachers from my own generation, they do not become aspiring professors in the old religious sense of that word: believers, testifiers, witnesses. Lately, I have noticed some signs that this may be beginning to change—hints of a revival of interest in what lifts a style out of the pedestrian and makes it distinguished. If I am right, our students are ahead of us, because my own generation seems permanently marked by the spirit of the 1970s, when literature, which had been celebrated by the ‘New Critics’ in the 1950s as a counter-universe to the spiritually barren world in which they found themselves living, and by the ‘Myth Critics’ in the 1960s as a way of entering the unconscious life, first came to be widely thought of as not a sphere of beauty but an instrument of power.”
—Andrew Delbanco, Required Reading
“Few people can take much pleasure in modern academic literary criticism except its practitioners, who do not mind that an intelligent outsider would surely find it both arcane and depressing. One of the questions such an observer might reasonably but naïvely ask is whether there is a connection between such work and teaching. Isn’t teaching the primary reason why these people have their jobs?”
—Frank Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry
1. Marvell’s Crown of Thorns
Below is a poem by Andrew Marvell called “The Coronet.” It has to do with anyone’s motives for writing, and also, perhaps, with anyone’s motives for reading and teaching—or for that matter, with anyone’s motives for laboring in his chosen vocation. Each of us must find a way to do that without sinning, as Falstaff knew. “The Coronet” is Marvell’s attempt. The poem opens up for me what will be, in the pages that follow, the main debate, which runs along these lines: Is it possible to be compromised, even corrupted, by what we write and read and teach, and by how we write, read, and teach it? Over the course of the last twenty-five years, many in English Departments said it was possible, as we came to suspect that the literary works we had traditionally taught, and the traditional canon itself, were tainted by racism, sexism, and empire—as we came to suspect, as Andrew Delbanco puts it, that literature might be not “a sphere of beauty but an instrument of power.” As for his own vocational ordeal, here is what Marvell had to say:
Andrew Marvell (portait ca. 1655-60, artist unknown)
When for the thorns with which I long, too long,
With many a piercing wound,
My Saviour’s head have crowned,
I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:
Through every garden, every mead,
I gather flow’rs (my fruits are only flow’rs),
Dismantling all the fragrant tow’rs
That once adorned my sheperdess’s head.
And now when I have summed up all my store,
Thinking (so I myself deceive)
So rich a chaplet thence to weave
As never yet the King of Glory wore:
Alas I find the Serpent old
That, twining in his speckled breast,
About the flow’rs disguised does fold,
With wreaths of Fame and Interest.
Ah, foolish Man, that wouldst debase with them,
And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!
But thou who only could’st the Serpent tame,
Either his slipp’ry knots at once untie,
And disentangle all his winding snare:
Or shatter too with him my curious frame:
And let these wither, so that he may die,
Though set with skill and chosen out with care.
That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,
May crown thy Feet, that could not crown thy Head.
In the first line, “for” means “in place of,” or “instead of.” Marvell—we may as well dispense with the fiction of a “speaker”—is making a confession. He has “long, too long” brought to the altar of his poetic vocation a crown of thorns. The reference, of course, is to the many poems he had written, and which he still somehow is writing every time a reader entertains him (these poems are the “garlands” and the “fragrant towers” he soon speaks of). Marvell is saying that the motive of his poems ought properly to be devotional and pious, but that as often as not they crucify instead, through failure of self-abnegation, or through indulgence in worldly affairs (these latter may involve either erotic attachments to a “Shepherdess,” or what he here calls a quest for “Fame and Interest”). Marvell goes so far as to claim that we almost always find entwined, even in our very best work, the “Serpent old.” The “moral” of the poem, then: “Working from impure motives is a sin, and there can be no truly secular work—no occasions when we might relax our vigilance in this matter. We are always responsible, in our vocations, to something higher. Even when we suppose ourselves to be dealing in merely private pleasures, such as Marvell’s engagements with his ‘shepherdess,’ we are always already obligated to the Good and the True. In fact, there can be no merely private sphere in which we can set aside these obligations.” Marvell never published his poems—most of them anyway—and still he felt they committed him, if not to the public then at least to God. He had to come clean. Incidentally, there is a note of Puritan confession about the sinfulness, or ephemeral worldliness, of poetry in the parenthesis “my fruits are only flow’rs.” That is to say, his fruits have not in fact ever really ripened: his works have been arrested at their intermediate stage, so to speak (they are still only flowers; they never carried through to maturity). And by their fruits ye shall know them: What had the poets of England done with their talents since the theaters closed? What had poetry itself ever done for a world well lost? And to move on to more immediate vocational concerns: What had the English Departments that teach poetry—Marvell’s included—ever done to relieve, or at any rate attend to, the world’s injustices? Read more…
“How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?”
As printed in the three-volume edition of Hardy's Complete Poetical Works, prepared, for Oxford University Press, by Samuel Hynes.
I chanced upon this poem of Thomas Hardy‘s a few weeks ago and have not been able to let it go. I will, after some commentary on its details, couple it, below, with a similar meditation on ancestry, pedigree, and heredity from R.W. Emerson‘s essay “Fate.” Both texts belong to that strain in poetry and prose, written by men, in which, as Shakespeare‘s Coriolanus has it, they “would stand as if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (V.iii). I will, in due course, lay in a sort of rebuttal to this “strain” in the writing of men—from Simone de Beauvoir. But first, “The Pedigree” itself, as a lyric, and as a part of the book in which Hardy first collected it, Moments of Vision (1917).
From the edition of 1917 (London, Macmillan)
Note that the title-poem to this volume, and the first in order, takes up the figure of a mirror, posing four questions of it. This specifies the “moments of vision” with which the book will be concerned: those that render mankind “transparent”; those that make of us “bare-breast spectacles”; those whose “magic” “penetrates like a dart” and “throws our mind back on us, and our heart”; those that, in “the night hours of ache” reveal “tincts we never see” when the “world is awake”; those that “test each mortal” “unaware,” catching his thoughts even unto the last, “foul and fair” alike, but “glassing” it all we know not where—unless in the pages of such a book as Moments of Vision. (N.B: Hardy replaced “Reflecting” in the last line with “Glassing” in later editions of the book.) “The Pedigree” offers Hardy an equally distressing “moment of vision,” in its window/mirror. But before reaching that poem of a family “pedigree” in Moments of Vision we encounter first yet another that bears down on it hard, titled “Heredity.”
As published in the edition of 1917 (London, Macmillan)
Here we have not to do with any particular family pedigree, but with the “family of man,” as we often style it: homo sapiens sapiens. Hardy could not yet know what that “eternal thing in man” is that doesn’t die, even as it expresses itself in fleshy iteration upon fleshy iteration, in generation upon generation of perishing flesh, down the long slide to—well, to where, other than to some likely ultimate extinction, too distant to foresee? (I rather doubt Hardy supposes this animating force would really over-leap “oblivion” to leave the “call to die” forever “unheeded.”) We now call “that eternal thing in man” DNA. And in “Heredity” Hardy curiously anticipates his countryman (and fellow Darwinian) Richard Dawkins, in such books as A River Out of Eden (1995): “The river of my title,” says Dawkins, “is the river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues: a river of abstract instructions for building bodies, not a river of solid bodies themselves. The information”—say, the eternal “family face” of which Hardy speaks, “Projecting trait and trace / Through time to times anon”—”passes through bodies and affects them, but it is not affected by them on its way through.”
Richard Dawkins
This force, by whatever name we call it—”Will,” “Immanent Will,” “the selfish gene,” DNA, etc.;—this force never “heeds the call to die,” even as young Englishmen by the thousands “heeded” the call in 1917, when Moments of Vision appeared. So read this volume at your peril, because, with it, Hardy holds up a mirror before himself and England in 1917, that year of heedless slaughter, and holds it up also for all of us. When the book was published, as Samuel Hynes, editor of The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy (Oxford, 1984) points out, the poet set these thoughts down in his journal: “I do not expect much notice will be taken of these poems: they mortify the human sense of self-importance by showing, or suggesting, that human beings are of no matter or appreciable value in this nonchalant universe.” I assent to the suggestion that human beings are of “no matter” in “this nonchalant universe.” But for me, the question of whether they are of “value” or not remains decisively open, American pragmatist that I am. We may yet enter into what Dawkins calls, in The Selfish Gene, “a conspiracy of doves.” We can always be of “value” to ourselves, and let the “universe” wag as it will (at least until our sun exhausts itself).
Australian gunners in Château Wood, 29 October 1917. Photo by Frank Hurley.
But then I must bear in mind that Moments of Vision appeared in 1917, the year of the Third Battle of Ypres, the general name for that series of engagements running from June to November in which some 600,000 men were killed or wounded (and in which mustard gas was first deployed): not so hard, at that hour, to doubt not merely the “significance” of mankind, but its value also. In any case—and to recur to Hardy’s journal—nonchalant, as it happens, is le mot juste: “Calm and casual; (deliberately) lacking in enthusiasm or interest; indifferent, unconcerned,” as the O.E.D. has it. The word derives, as Hardy perhaps knew and felt when he penned these sentences—and as the O.E.D. explains—from the Old French present participle “nonchaloir, earlier nonchaler: to neglect, despise (late 11th cent.).” Let ten million particular men die on the fields and in the trenches of France. The “family face” of mankind, foul and fair, endures. As to circumstance, especially in time of war, it “despises” the “human span,” or in any case remains, with respect to it, nonchalant. But all of this is preparation. Read more…
“And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
High Windows (Philip Larkin)
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Bonnie MacLean’s poster for "Bill Graham Presents the Yardbirds, the Doors, James Cotton Blues Band, Richie Havens," 1967.
Larkin penned this poem in 1967: the year of the Summer of Love. From it came the title of what would be his last volume of new poetry, High Windows (Faber and Faber, 1974). The volume includes a better-known lyric on a similar theme, “Annus Mirabilis,” with its often-quoted opening lines:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
The diction tells the tale, as it does in the first stanza of “High Windows”: the Pill, freely available contraception, the on-coming Counter-culture—all these things conspired to give us a novel vocabulary in which to discuss “love” (“love” in the full-on sense, that is). We now spoke of “sexual intercourse,” a phrase so wary of euphemism as to court a kind of clinical ugliness. Or else we simply spoke frankly of “fucking.” Read more…
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Image from the Bettmann Archive.
WORLD WITHOUT PECULIARITY
The day is great and strong—
But his father was strong, that lies now
In the poverty of dirt.
Nothing could be more hushed than the way
The moon moves toward the night.
But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.
The red ripeness of round leaves is thick
With the spices of red summer.
But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.
What good is it that the earth is justified,
That it is complete, that it is an end,
That in itself it is enough?
It is the earth itself that is humanity . . .
He is the inhuman son and she,
She is the fateful mother, whom he does not know.
She is the day, the walk of the moon
Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,
He, too, is human and difference disappears
And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,
The hating woman, the meaningless place,
Become a single being, sure and true.
Wallace Stevens first collected this poem in his 1950 volume Auroras of Autumn, the last volume of new lyrics he was ever to publish. (“The Rock” and its associated poems were brought together as a part of Stevens’ 1954 Collected Poems.) Auroras won the National Book Award in March 1951, from which point until his death four years later Stevens at last—how hard to believe now that there were ever the slightest reservations as to the matter, and yet there were;—from which point, at last, as I say, Stevens received the general acclaim his work merited.
The first three stanzas of “World Without Peculiarity”—written in the somewhat reserved and abstract tercets Stevens favored in his later work—parallel one another, of course: something in the intimately “social” world (father, mother, lover) is set over against something in the “natural” world (the day, with its sun; the moon, with its night; the red ripeness and round leaves of summer; and so on). We might suppose the impersonality of the pronouns applied to the father and mother (“that” and “what,” e.g.) to be of little significance—until we reach the latter stanzas of the poem, and realize that Stevens is doing something queer, something counter-intuitive, something quite sad and unnerving, with the idea of “humanity”: “sometimes, / He, too, is human and difference disappears / And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast, / The hating woman, the meaningless place, / Become a single being, sure and true.” Sometimes this happens to the “hating woman,” and to “thing” upon his breast that we know to have been his mother. At all other times no unity holds them (that “single thing”), nothing is “sure,” and nothing “true.” And he is the “inhuman” son of an earth he cannot know, as he puts it. I anticipate myself here a bit, and will attend to the tercets as they fall. But an animosity animates the poem—a perfectly humane sort of resentment, as it happens—notwithstanding its graceful movements, its clean and abstract diction. This deftly managed bitterness is what has always touched me. It confesses well, without confessing—this late lyric of family romance, as hard as it is clear, and lovely in the way it partakes of unspeakable grief. Read more…
Randall Jarrell, photograph by Paul Bishop, 1956.
Cover of the expanded edition currently in print (University of Florida). Originally published in 1953 by Alfred Knopf.
A relatively short entry, for a change, pertaining to one of the most accomplished lyrics Frost ever wrote in blank verse: “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” In Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell, for what it is worth (a great deal), singles this poem out in a short list of lyrics by Frost that everyone ought to know, but that—at the time Jarrell was writing—relatively few people knew, and almost no anthologists had apprehended. I have in mind the following passage from his essay “The Other Frost,” from which I shall quote at length, simply for the good of it: “Besides the Frost that everybody knows,” Jarrell begins, “there is one whom no one even talks about. Everybody knows what the regular Frost is: the one living poet who has written good poems that ordinary readers like without any trouble and understand without any trouble; the conservative editorialist and self-made apothegm-joiner, full of dry wisdom and free, complacent Yankee enterprise; the Farmer-poet—this is an imposing private role perfected for public use, a sort of Olympian Will Rogers out of Tanglewood Tales; and, last or first of all, Frost is the standing, speaking reproach to any other good modern poet: ‘If Frost can write poetry that’s just as easy as Longfellow you can too–you do too.’
William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers (1879–1935), Cherokee-American cowboy, humorist, social commentator, and actor.
It is this ‘easy’ side of Frost that is most attractive to academic readers, who are eager to canonize any modern poet who condemns in example the modern poetry which they condemn in precept; and it is this side that has helped to get him neglected or depreciated by intellectuals–the reader of Eliot or Auden usually dismisses Frost as something inconsequentially good that he knew all about long ago. Ordinary readers think Frost the greatest poet alive, and love some of his best poems almost as much as they love some of his worst ones. He seems to them a sensible, tender, humorous poet who knows all about trees and farms and folks in New England, and still has managed to get an individualistic, fairly optimistic, thoroughly American philosophy out of what he knows; there’s something reassuring about his poetry, they feel–almost like prose. Certainly there’s nothing hard or odd or gloomy about it. These views of Frost, it seems to me, come either from not knowing his poems well enough or from knowing the wrong poems too well. Frost’s best-known poems, with a few exceptions, are not his best poems at all.” “It would be hard,” Jarrell continues, “to make a novel list of Eliot’s best poems, but one can make a list of ten or twelve of Frost’s best poems that is likely to seem to anybody too new [as of 1953, when this essay first appeared] to be true. Nothing I say about these poems can make you see what they are like, or what the Frost that matters most is like; if you read them you will see. ‘The Witch of Coos’ is the best thing of its kind since Chaucer. ‘Home Burial’ and ‘A Servant to Servants’ are two of the most moving and appalling dramatic poems ever written; and how could lyrics be more ingeniously and conclusively merciless than ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’ or ‘Design’? or more grotesquely and subtly and mercilessly disenchanting than the tender ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’? or more unsparingly truthful than ‘Provide, Provide’? And so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily subtle and strange, poems which express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it; and if there were, would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from have seldom been stated with such bare composure.”
I address myself today to “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” described well here, by Jarrell, as at once “grotesquely and subtly and mercilessly disenchanting” and also “tender.” Following is the text. I have color-coded it for purposes explained in the commentary that follows.
“An Old Man’s Winter Night”
As printed in "Mountan Interval" (1916)
ALL out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
Cover of the 1916 edition, published by Henry Holt & Company.
This poem, from Mountain Interval, may concern senility and incompetence. But it is carried off with a virtuoso ease and grace, despite its demanding Miltonic qualities: 8 strong enjambments (highlighted in red) in 28 lines (for a ratio of about 29%). I speak of “Miltonic” qualities, but that’s not exactly correct. Note that second sentence highlighted in blue, the most complex in structure in the poem: a hypotactic affair, a suspended sentence drawn out over 5 and 1/2 lines, with 2 strong enjambments. That much is “Miltonic”: the hypotaxis, the enjambments, the handling of the sentence within the lines. What certainly isn’t Miltonic is the diction, with its faintly dismissive colloquialisms (“such as she was,” “in any case”). The sentence sounds rather like speech, and then again rather does not; the diction is demotic, and the structure complex in the way of things uttered extempore. But there are odd touches that rise above the demotic (“broken moon,” e.g., which means, I suppose, a moon “on the wane,” as is also, of course, the old man). Read more…
“The amusement of the dead––at our errors, or at our wanting to live on. Xmas Day 1890″: Thomas Hardy’s Christmas Verse
Cover of a book well worth the buying. Click on it for a trip to Amazon.com.
It is Christmas yet again—the thing will not yet stop coming—and I bethought myself to gather together here, on this day, a number of poems on the theme by Thomas Hardy. Anyone who has visited The Era of Casual Fridays knows that Hardy turns up often enough in these (web) pages. I, at any rate, cannot get over him, nor want to, so congenial do I find his turn of mind. The entry that follows shall take the form of a proper commonplace book, with a few annotations offered along the way, for what service they may be.
“The amusement of the dead—at our errors, or at our wanting to live on. Xmas Day 1890.” —from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter’ Notebook, edited by Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford, 2009).
I just picked up a copy of the latter volume, which makes for very good reading. It is a curious document: scattered fragments of poems, observations, ideas for poems or plays, scraps of verse or bits from the papers that Hardy found of interest. Above I set down a Christmas observation, which lays out my coordinates today. But I will provide here one other item from the Poetical Matter notebook, unrelated to Christmas, before getting on with the poetry—for no better reason, I suppose, than that it so typifies, for me, Thomas Hardy: “Tragic drama. Farmer has horse on wh. he wins steeplechases. Backs him heavily for moonlight ride. Horse does not win. Owner at night in stable treats him cruelly. Another man enters, strikes farmer for his cruelty & kills him, leaving him lying beside the horse. Man hanged. (Dec 1890).” I like this for its gravity, its irony, its hatred of cruelty to animals, and for a certain intimation that leaves me certain Hardy thought the man was hanged unjustly.
Boer guerrillas during the Second Boer War (photographer unknown).
A CHRISTMAS GHOST-STORY
South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?
Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”
Christmas-eve 1899.
This poem concerns the Boer War of 1899-1902, the so-called Second Anglo-Boer War. Durban, of course, is a city in South Africa, the second largest city, at present anyway. Canopus, our Wikipedians tell us, “is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Carina and Argo Navis, and the second brightest star in the night-time sky, after Sirius. Since Canopus is so far south in the sky, it never rises in mid- or far-northern latitudes; in theory the northern limit of visibility is latitude 37°18′ north.” In short, the star is not visible from this dead soldier’s native England, estranging him all the more on this weird Christmas Day: a mouldering soldier, not a birth. An un-Holy Ghost-story.
CHRISTMAS IN THE ELGIN ROOM:
BRITISH MUSEUM: EARLY LAST CENTURY
Metope from the Elgin marbles depicting a Centaur and a Lapith fighting.
“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.
Statuary from the east pediment of the Parthenon. Part of the collection of Parthenon Marbles on display at the British Museum in London.
“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.
The reference here is to the so-called Elgin Marbles, sometimes also called the Parthenon Marbles. Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799–1803, quite dubiously obtained permission from the Ottoman authorities to remove the pieces mentioned in the above poem from Greece, and during the first decade or so of the 19th century, Elgin’s agents removed a large portion of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, transporting them by sea to Britain, where the acquisition, if acquisition it can be called, stirred up a bit of controversy, with some of his harshest critics accusing Lord Elgin of looting and vandalism. The Parliament ultimately vindicated Elgin, and allocated funds to purchase the pieces in 1816, afterward placing them on display 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 a queer anecdote. Read more…
The Rose Family
Some examples of the "rose family."
“The Rose Family”
The rose is a rose
And was always a rose
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose
And the pear is and so’s
The plum I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You of course are a rose,
But were always a rose.
Frost collected “The Rose Family” first in his 1928 volume, West-Running Brook. The title of the poem tells us at once what it is to be about—affiliation, let’s say, in O.E.D. sense 2. d.: “Relationship, esp. as perceived within a group of similar things thought to have derived from a common source: AFFINITY. Chiefly Philol.” And likely also—though subsidiarily—in O.E.D. sense 3, chiefly in its figurative extension: “The fixing of the paternity of a child. Also fig. The fathering of a thing upon any one; and, the assignment of anything to its origin.”
These are all matters of concern to a poet for any number of reasons, all of which, as it so happens, are engaged in “The Rose Family”: prosody (affiliations derived from rhyme and meter); metaphor (similitude in dissimilitude: i.e., affiliation, or “family” resemblance); families and the making of them (this is a love poem, after all); allusion, i.e., the grafting of one text into another (at least, if the oft-made assumption that Frost alludes to Gertrude Stein in this poem is, in fact, true); and, yes, botany. I’ll address first “affiliations” prosodic and more or less poetical, and then get to the harder stuff—the botany.
It would be difficult to imagine a more closely “affiliated” set of lines than these: 10 lines, 1 rhyme sound. And of the rhymes, 6 are in fact repetends: “rose.” As for the meter, the lines fall neatly into a two-stress meter of some sort, though the syllables vary in number from 5 (lines one and six) to 6 (all the others). It is possible to read “dear” in line 7 as two syllables, in which case 8 of 10 lines would be 6-syllable, two-stress lines. We might as well call the meter a loose sort of “anapestic dimeter” and have done with it, allowing for our two 5-syllable lines to bear, with ease, their trochaic substitutions in the initial positions, and a few other such minor variations. So much for the jargon of prosody, then.
What, next, of the possibility that Frost wishes to call to mind, by allusion, Gertrude Stein’s most famous line in print? “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” Stein writes in “Sacred Emily,” a playfully experimental poem collected in Geography and Plays (1922). Here it is not clear, is not supposed to be clear, whether that initial “Rose” is a name or not. The Wikipedians—and here the sound of the entry suggests to my mind a genuine scholar of Stein—tell us this:
Detail, from "Sacred Emily," as it appeared in the edition of 1922.
“Gertrude Stein’s repetitive language can be said to refer to the changing quality of language in time and history. She herself said to an audience at Oxford University that the statement referred to the fact that when the Romantics used the word ‘rose’ it had a direct relationship to an actual rose. For later periods in literature this would no longer be true. The eras following romanticism, notably the modern era, use the word rose to refer to the actual rose, yet they also imply, through the use of the word, the archetypal elements of the romantic era.” Frost may well have his wink at Stein in “The Rose Family.” But he does something with the old Romantic equations that the Romantics seldom (if ever) did: deal, and very strictly at that, as we shall see, in botany.
Again, our Wikipedians: "Isaac Newton's analysis of escape velocity. Projectiles A and B fall back to earth. Projectile C achieves a circular orbit, D an elliptical one. Projectile E escapes."
By which I mean he achieves (as does Stein in her different way) his escape velocity from whatever orbits the Romantic poets put the word “rose” into. A thing well worth the doing, I should add. So let us leave the question as to whether Frost “affiliates” his enterprise in “The Rose Family” with Stein’s in “Sacred Emily” unanswered. I am fairly sure he doesn’t have the poem proper in mind; I doubt he ever read it. But of Stein’s dictum he could hardly have been unaware. It was a shot heard round the world, such that she herself couldn’t achieve escape velocity from it (she would use it in a number of other texts, and speak of it often in public—precisely because people often asked her about it).
Now, Frost rarely writes in triplet meters (such as anapests), and when he does the result is striking: in this case striking for its whimsy. Because soon enough we find that he is messing with us again, “rumpling our brains,” as he liked to say in his later years.
I will put my finger on the real mischief: namely, the possibility that the two statements “The apple’s a rose” and “You, of course, are a rose” might differ much less in kind than we—or anyway, many non-pragmatic scientists—suppose. Read more…
Cold War Frost
Nikita Khrushchev, 28 June 1963, photo by Peter Heinz Junge.
Frost, in his later years.
On October 15, 1962 United States intelligence discovered that Nikita Khrushchev, at the invitation of Fidel Castro, had built ballistic missile sites in Cuba. It was a fact the Soviet premier had somehow neglected to mention to Robert Frost during their ninety-minute conference, which took place some six weeks earlier in Gagra, Georgia, a Russian resort on the Black Sea. Their conversation was to have been on the theme—or so Frost had hoped beforehand—of a new and “magnanimous” rivalry between the two superpowers. The eighty-eight year old poet had traveled to the U.S.S.R. under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State as part of a program of cultural exchange, and, as his talk about “magnanimous rivalry” suggested, he apparently had high ambitions that the New Frontier/Khrushchev era might be one characterized by what, in his inaugural poem for John F. Kennedy, he had called a “golden age of poetry and power.”
Kennedy had himself issued the invitation to his literary friend and political booster to go to Russia. But he was considerably more than chagrined at the results when the aging Frost addressed reporters sent to greet him on his return at New York’s Idlewild Airport. Khrushchev, Frost announced, had claimed Americans “were too liberal to fight.” So much for magnanimity. Read more…
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke in late 1846 or early 1847
Dare you see a Soul at the “White Heat”?
Then crouch within the door -
Red – is the Fire’s common tint -
But when the quickened Ore
Has sated Flame’s conditions,
She quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze -
Least Village, boasts it’s Blacksmith
Whose Anvil’s even ring
Stands symbol for the finer Forge
That soundless tugs – within -
Refining these impatient Ores
With Hammer, and with Blaze
Until the Designated Light
Repudiate the Forge -
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
First, a few preliminaries—the data, the given. Thomas Johnson numbers this poem 365, while R.W. Franklin numbers it 401; both however date the poem ca. 1862, with Franklin dating it more precisely in the summer of that year, when Dickinson prepared a fair copy of the poem, apparently for the purposes of sending it to someone enclosed with a letter; this copy, however, she retained. We can be fairly sure that she did send a copy to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, though that copy is now lost. It also appears in Fascicle 20, as reprinted above. Readers of the 1955 Johnson edition know it in a slightly different form, where the first line reads as follows: “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?”; and where for “quickened” we read “vivid,” and for “sated” “vanquished,” and for “She” (in line 6) “It”; and where the poem is given with no stanza breaks. This is the fair copy manuscript referred to already. Below are images from the Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 1981), and the text as rendered with the variations just described.
From Fascicle 20
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door—
Red—is the Fire’s common tint—
But when the vivid Ore
Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,
It quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze.
Least Village has its Blacksmith
Whose Anvil’s even ring
Stands symbol for the finer Forge
That soundless tugs—within—
Refining these impatient Ores
With Hammer, and with Blaze
Until the Designated Light
Repudiate the Forge—
From Fascicle 20.
In his “reading” edition of the poems, Franklin follows this latter text, but inserts the stanza breaks found in the Fascicle. His reasons are clear: he regards “vivid,” “vanquished” and “It,” as later emendations by Dickinson, as surely they appear to be on the evidence of the images reproduced here from Franklin’s edition of The Manuscript Books. Higginson published the poem in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1891, giving it the title “The White Heat.” He altered line 6 to read “Its quivering substance plays,” so as to regularize meter and rhyme, and altering “ring” in line 10 to “din” so as, again, to make the rhyme “full,” rather than “near.” And in this form it appeared in the Poems of 1891, edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. So much for preliminaries, which I retail here largely to lay before you such niceties as an editor of the poem must attend to. Many of Dickinson’s poems more or less demand that the reader be at once editor and reader anyhow.
Clearly, a single metaphor underlies the whole of the poem, take it in whatever text you will, the vehicle of which is smithery: white heat, fire, ore, flame, forge, blacksmiths, anvils, hammers, and so on. To the question “What is the tenor of this vehicle?”—well, the first line tells us: someone is dying, and we are invited to gaze in upon a deathbed scene, if we “dare.” A Soul has reached “the white heat,” and is preparing for its deliverance from the Forge of the body it had inhabited for, oh, its three-score years and ten. And we are told further—as if this were not clear enough—that the blacksmith’s shop and forge in even the smallest of villages “stands symbol” for the refinement of the Soul for this deliverance. I say “deliverance” from the forge. But of course is not that, really; the Soul, brought to a white heat, “repudiates” the forge. In the old days, husbands were said (according to the O.E.D.) to “repudiate” their wives in divorce; and in any case, the word literally means “to cast off,” with the added idea that you hold
St. Paul, by El Greco, ca. 1608-1614.
in contempt what you cast off. There is a Pauline drift to this, as for example in the book of Romans 7:18: “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” Now there’s a repudiation of the body if ever I laid eyes on one. And the agony, the antagonism, even unto the point of “warring,” that Paul lays out between flesh and spirit finds its analogue in the poem in the hammer and anvil, and perhaps also in the fire. But is this poem really “Christian” in its bearings? I do not think so. Read more…
