GEORGE VOLCEANOV
ENGLISH POETRY UP TO 1830
© Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2007 Editură acreditată de Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării prin Consiliul Naţional al Cercetării Ştiinţifice din Învăţământul Superior
Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României VOLCEANOV, GEORGE English poetry up to 1830 / George Volceanov. - Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2007 Bibliogr. ISBN 978-973-725-894-6
821.111.09–I”…/1830”
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UNIVERSITATEA SPIRU HARET FACULTATEA DE LIMBI ŞI LITERATURI STRĂINE
Conf. univ. dr. GEORGE VOLCEANOV
ENGLISH POETRY UP TO 1830
EDITURA FUNDAŢIEI ROMÂNIA DE MÂINE Bucureşti, 2007 3
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CONTENTS
Preface…..................................................................................................
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PART ONE: INTERPRETING POETRY Introduction: Literary History and the Theory of Genres..........……….. What Is Poetry?………………………………………………………… The Language of Poetry ……………………………………………….. Types of Poetry ………………………………………………………... How to Analyze a Poem ……………………………………………….
11 21 25 51 57
PART TWO: ENGLISH POETRY UP TO 1830 Anglo-Saxon Poetry.......................................................................…….. Middle English Literature...................................................................…. The Anonymous Poetry..........................................................….. The Fourteenth Century (Ricardian) Poetry......................................….. William Langland………………………………………………. John Gower…………………………………………………….. The Gawain Poet……………………………………………….. Geoffrey Chaucer...............................................................……... The Renaissance ...............................................................……………... Edmund Spenser...................................................................…… Philip Sidney.........................................................................…… Shakespeare’s (and Marlowe’s) Non-dramatic Poetry................. The Elizabethan World Picture.............................................….... The Seventeenth Century Poetry.............................................…………. John Donne...........................................................................….... Andrew Marvell....................................................................…… John Milton................................................................................... John Dryden..................................................................................
79 88 89 94 94 97 100 105 117 118 122 126 143 144 145 157 164 180 5
The Eighteenth Century Poetry ............................................................... Alexander Pope………………………………………………… The “Pre-romantic” Poets………………………………………….. Edward Young………………………………………………….. James Thomson…………………………………………………. Thomas Gray……………………………………………………. William Collins…………………………………………………. Oliver Goldsmith……………………………………………….. William Cowper………………………………………………… James Macpherson……………………………………………… Thomas Chatterton……………………………………………… An Introduction to English Romanticism............................……………. William Blake…………………………………………………... William Wordsworth............................................................…… Samuel Taylor Coleridge.....................................................……. George Gordon Byron.........................................................……. Percy Bysshe Shelley............................................................…… John Keats............................................................................…….
184 185 190 191 192 195 198 200 203 207 208 210 215 219 224 230 237 248
PART THREE: SURVEY SUPPORT TEXTS.......................………..
259
Bibliography..........................................................................…………..
365
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PREFACE
English Poetry up to 1830 is a textbook specially devised for the senior students majoring in English language and literature at the Spiru Haret University of Bucharest. It is one of the several textbooks aimed at teaching English literature by using a genre-based approach. As such, it is more than a traditional survey of English poetry. The survey proper represents just one third of the content of this book. The other two thirds are elements of literary theory and criticism, and a brief anthology of essential English poems. I use the word “essential” in a double sense: on the one hand they are essential as being great, important poems found in many anthologies of English literature; and, on the other hand, they are texts that the undergraduates must get well acquainted with in order to pass their examination in English poetry up to 1830. What I call the theoretical part of this book (the definition of poetry, the place of poetry among other types of literary writings, the language of poetry, methods of analyzing a poem, etc.) is usually appended by other authors to the end of their books as glossaries of literary terms. I have learnt from experience that young readers almost never have any interest in reading such glossaries. And twentyfirst century undergraduates rarely have a penchant for text analysis. It is much easier for them to download information from some Internet sites than waste their precious time trying to read, and produce their own interpretation of a text. As a teacher of English literature I have always been at war with the students who choose to regurgitate other people’s ideas instead of engaging in a dialogue with the literary text and producing an original response to the studied text. But I have also learnt from experience that well-guided undergraduates, persuaded to read the literary text and to follow some systematic steps, can achieve their 7
own interpretations, thus gaining a well-deserved intellectual independence. This book has been conceived with a view to enabling our undergraduates to cope with poetry, in general, and with any poem, in particular. The mid-section of the book, the survey, provides a selection of information about major English poets, biographical and historical data, critical opinions about important works, famous quotes, etc. This section should not be viewed as the backbone, or main part, of the book. Undergraduates should not memorize biographical data like, say, the year when poet X wrote his first poem. But the information in the survey is important insofar as it is worth knowing that the English Renaissance poets were acquainted with, and imitated, a courtly love tradition introduced by Petrarch; that the later poets, known as the Metaphysical poets, rejected this tradition; that Milton and Blake were greatly interested in Christian mythology, or Shelley was an atheist. Such information may provide useful clues to a student asked to perform the task of analyzing a text by a given poet. It is easier to analyze a poem by Collins or Cowper if one already knows that melancholy is an essential feature of the eighteenth-century poetry; and it is certainly much easier to analyze any nature poem by Wordsworth as long as one knows his definition of poetry as given in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Seven years have passed since I last wrote a survey of English literature for didactic purposes. Things have evolved in literary history and criticism since then. The bibliography of my textbook will clearly indicate my attempt to keep up with the latest developments in the field. I hereby acknowledge my huge indebtedness to all the authors whose books appeared after 1999 and whom I have copiously plundered for the benefit of my students. I hope that this book will turn out to be a useful guide for those who have embarked upon the strenuous path that leads to knowledge and intellectual pleasure, and who will come to appreciate the truth and beauty of English poetry. George Volceanov
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PART ONE
INTERPRETING POETRY
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INTRODUCTION LITERARY HISTORY AND THE THEORY OF GENRES
Many university surveys and textbooks of English poetry have appeared in the past few years. Inevitably, the act of writing a book is always preceded by the act of reading books. Today it is impossible for anyone to claim that writing a book is the result of one’s solitary effort alone. We can no longer pretend we live in ivory towers writing texts that are solely our fancy’s children. Any new text is not just an inter-text, a collage of inherited information, but also a dialogue with various authors, schools, and trends. While writing a book we either endorse or diverge from various arguments advanced by those we have read and are now using as points of reference. In the Preface I have pointed out my indebtedness to several critics, historians, and fellow-academics. I shall outline the method underlying this book in contrast to other books that relate to its topic. The dialogue with other texts does not necessarily imply servile imitation. It may also consist of the rejection of someone else’s method or outlook on a given subject. In a “first argument” included in two recent text-books for undergraduates who study English poetry (Narrative Poetry: The Mythical Mode and Dramatic Poetry: The Mythical Mode, Institutul European, 2001 and 2003, respectively) Professor Sorin Pârvu justly remarks that poetry can be approached from both a historical and a generic viewpoint. However, Professor Pârvu somewhat overconfidently claims that “when history is the reference point the traditional areas into which English literature can be (sub-)divided are”: Old English or Anglo-Saxon Literature (before 1066) Middle English or Medieval Literature (1066-1500) Renaissance or Age of Humanism (1500-1660) 11
Elizabethan Age (1558-1603) Jacobean Age (1602-1625) Caroline Age (1625-1649) Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum (1649-1660) Enlightenment or Age of Reason or Neo-classical Period (1660-1785) Restoration Literature (1660-1700) Augustan Literature (1700-1745) Age of Sensibility (1745-1785) Romanticism (1785-1830) Victorianism (1837-1901) Edwardian Literature (1901-1914) Georgian Period (1910-1936) Modernism (from 1914 onwards) Postmodernism (after World War II) In my opinion, in writing literary histories, or surveys, for that matter, one should not use such categorical statements. In the Introduction to A Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen (2000, second edition 2006) I claimed that “literary history has a selective function”, canons are prone to changes, and “teaching literary history implies a subjective attitude”. Today I still stick to these views. The literary career of Ben Jonson, the first English Poet Laureate, spans three of the historical divisions advanced by Professor Pârvu, namely, the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline ages. Which of these should best accommodate our poet? Given the small confines of this book, conceived as a series of thirteen lectures on English poetry, but also given my extreme subjectivity, I will have to skip Jonson, albeit he has an impressive stature in the history of English literature as a playwright, poet, theorist, and last, but not least, as the first English literary dictator. And in skipping Jonson I will argue that thus I simply make room for equally deserving, or important, poets. That divisions and sub-divisions in literary history are not definitive, but rather flexible (even volatile) notions is proved by the Oxford school of literary history. The Oxford History of English Literature in fifteen volumes advances the following historical divisions: 12
Middle English Literature 1100-1400 Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Verse and Prose Malory and Fifteenth-Century Drama, Lyrics and Ballads Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century English Drama 1485-1585 English Drama 1586-1642: Shakespeare and his Age The Early Seventeenth Century 1600-1660: Jonson, Donne, and Milton Restoration Literature 1660-1700: Dryden, Bunyan, and Pepys The Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740: Swift, Defoe, and Pope The Age of Johnson 1740-1789 The Rise of the Romantics 1789-1815: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Jane Austen English Literature 1815-1832: Scott, Byron, and Keats The Victorian Novel Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose 1832-1890 Writers of the Early Twentieth Century: Hardy to Lawrence A few facts should be remarked upon as regards this periodization. First, there is an obvious gap between the last period covered by the Oxford literary historians and the present day, a gap that, probably, represents “work in progress”. We cannot know for sure whether the scholars appointed to fill out the missing decades will divide those decades into one, two, three, or four ages or periods. Secondly, it is obvious that the Oxford scholars did not lay emphasis on politics (on the rulers’ names) in labelling the various periods dealt with, but chose instead to single out the leading personalities of each century, or of the decades, taken as a temporal unit. Such a view leads to the translation of the “Elizabethan Age” into “Shakespeare and his Age”; Jonson, Donne, and Milton displace the Stuart monarchs, James and Charles, and Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence likewise supplant King Edward VII. In his relatively recent Short Oxford History of English Literature, Andrew Sanders has taken a rather neutral stance and applied the following temporal scheme, which elevates neither political rulers (Victoria and Edward are merely an exception to the 13
rule), nor writers, but strictly sticks to a chronological scheme measured in years, decades, and centuries: Old English Literature Medieval Literature 1066-1510 Renaissance and Reformation: Literature 1510-1620 Revolution and Restoration: Literature 1620-1690 Eighteenth-Century Literature 1690-1780 The Literature of the Romantic Period 1780-1830 High Victorian Literature 1830-1880 Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920 Modernism and its Alternatives: Literature 1920-1945 Post-War and Post-Modern Literature My former teacher of English Literature, Professor Ştefan Stoenescu, when interviewed about the historical, or chronological approach to English poetry, kindly suggested the following periodization of Modern English Poetry: The Renaissance or the Sixteenth Century The Metaphysical Poets and Milton (the Baroque) or the Seventeenth Century Neo-Classicism and New Pastoralism or the Eighteenth Century The Romanticism and Victorianism or the Nineteenth Century Modernism and Post-modernism or the Twentieth Century But Professor Stoenescu also draws our attention to the fact that temporal borders are not rigid. Sometimes different literary schools and trends partly overlap or occur simultaneously. Professor Pârvu’s “second argument” in the aforementioned books reads: “When English Literature is overviewed with disrespect to chronological criteria or rather in terms of genres we have, in the initial stage, a three-term picture: English Poetry – English Drama – English Prose.” His aforementioned books consist of long theoretical introductions, anthologized texts and lots of marginalia, footnotes and comments, historical and theoretical data, etc. All in all, the vast critical apparatus is eclectic and sometimes esoteric rather than userfriendly, and the books’ ultimate end seems to remain occult. I do not find of much help these theoretical introductions insofar as the introduction to the volume of dramatic poetry is actually a survey of 14
narratology, while the introduction to the volume of epic poetry focuses on character as a literary / aesthetic category. The author might have obviously presented things the other way round and chosen the survey of narratology as an introduction to epic poetry (it really would have made more sense) while reserving the theory of literary character to the dramatic poetry. Ever since Ronald S. Crane’s famous essay on Fielding’s Tom Jones we have grown accustomed with the idea that the plot (the backbone of any epic structure) is a temporal synthesis among character, action, and thought. So why should we discuss mainly about character when we speak about epic poetry? As for drama, it is, indeed, not only an imitation of dialogue, as Northrop Frye famously upheld in The Anatomy of Criticism. It is also an imitation of action, and the characters act and think as well. And they do this in space and time. The dramatic and the epic may co-exist in drama: Marlowe (in the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great), Brecht, and even Shakespeare (in the Henry VI trilogy) wrote epic theatre. But should we really focus on narratology and the discussion of issues such as point of view, stream of consciousness, telling and showing, and so on (aspects pertaining to the novel and to fiction, in general) in a book about dramatic poetry? And, in Andrew Gurr’s opinion, the Elizabethan drama poses a special question for students as it may be interpreted in two different ways, depending on the generic approach one chooses. All of the Elizabethan drama may be discussed either as narrative structures, in terms of plot, action, character development, etc., or, as ample dramatic poems, in terms of themes, motifs, symbols, imagery, prosody, etc. My impression is that, notwithstanding their extraordinary coherence and range of information, Professor Pârvu’s two introductions are arbitrary and interchangeable. They provide students with excellent instruments that unfortunately do not fit the purpose of the respective text-books: it is like slicing cucumbers with a fork and eating soup with a knife made of excellent stainless steel. I also find Professor Pârvu’s “either / or” presentation of the two approaches (historical versus generic) to be too trenchant, and in the following pages I shall return to this idea. The generic approach cannot be drastically separated from history. And a historical approach 15
to literature is, after all, concerned with the evolution of literary genres and forms. One cannot write literary history leaving aside the specificity of literary genres. I quote once again from my Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen: “When we come to speak about Elizabethan drama, we shall discuss specific categories such as plot, subplot, character, language, play-within-a play, prologue, etc. Speaking about the development of the eighteenthcentury novel, we shall make use of terms such as point of view, narrative level, telling, showing, implied author, etc.” In that very same book I included a model of analyzing a poem. I do appreciate the impressive range of information provided by Professor Pârvu in his text-books but I also find them baffling, bewildering from his targeted readership’s viewpoint. It is as if one listed the ingredients of various dishes in a cookery book without allowing the readers to learn the secrets of an award-winning chef’s recipes. While Professor Pârvu’s books are haute cuisine, this book purports to pursue more pedestrian ends, in being more accessible and, hopefully, more practical. The practical side of the book resides in its introductory chapters, which tackle the very notion of poetry as a distinct literary type or genre, the language of poetry, elements of prosody, poetic forms, imagery, symbols, and so on. All these are the bricks that contribute to the building of a poem. The logical conclusion, and the cherry on the cake, of these theoretical chapters, will be a chapter dedicated to how students should analyze a poem. All of the books on textual analysis I have read in recent years have glossaries appended at the end. Here I revert the traditional order and choose to discuss first things first, the components, the parts that make up the whole before embarking on the historical survey of poetic forms. A marginal note to Sorin Pârvu’s aforementioned two arguments, “Further arguments”, simply lists the names of Petre Grimm, Iancu Botez, Dragoş Protopopescu, Ana Cartianu, Viorica Dobrovici, Leon Leviţchi, Dan Duţescu, Andrei Bantaş, Ştefan Stoenescu, Ioan Aurel Preda, and Adrian Nicolescu. I really cannot grasp the use of this impressive roll of scholars listed without any further reference whatsoever. As an undergraduate, I myself was lucky to learn indeed “English Poetry – English Drama – English Prose” as taught by three giants of English studies, Professors Preda, Leviţchi, 16
and Stoenescu, but as far as I remember none of them “overviewed English literature with disrespect to chronological criteria” (to use Professor Pârvu’s words). On the contrary, all of them used the chronological or historical approach to literature without belittling or disregarding the importance of the generic approach; conversely, they were genre-focused and still preserved the chronology of the authors discussed as exemplars of the given genre. Professor Leviţchi taught English drama chronologically, insisting on its generic roots, (he focused on Shakespeare, of course) but at the same time he was alert to instilling the knowledge of textual analysis in his students, while Professor Stoenescu taught a chronological course of lectures on the English and the American novel, with introductory lectures consisting of an extraordinary, updated synthesis of the most important achievements in narratology, thus arming his undergraduates with the necessary theoretical equipment for a suitable approach to the novel “as a complex genre”. These theoretical lectures (never published by Professor Stoenescu himself) shared the fate of Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures in that they were decades later reused by an enthusiastic graduate, who drew on them to write some of his own lectures while duly acknowledging their provenance. In a recent personal communication, dated July 30, 2006, Professor Stoenescu clearly stated his viewpoint as regards the generic approach: “The starting point of the generic approach is the poetics of the respective genre. The generic approach focuses on the study of literary forms along the centuries; the ballad, the ode, the elegy, the sonnet, the dramatic monologue etc. etc. etc. can be studied autonomously via their most telling examples, or in relation with the changes in various historical periods, wherein these forms either held a central position, or were quite neglected (due to historical causes). The generic approach invites a comparative treatment across cultures. I used both the generic and historical approach during my teaching career in Bucharest (1964-1987) and I daresay that both perspectives are fertile and may engender stimulating discussions when they come to collide.” That the chronological approach and the generic approach are not mutually incompatible has long been proved. I remember that as a sophomore undergraduate I had to write an examination paper in 17
English literature in which I had to draw a comparison between the ways in which Daniel Defoe and Virginia Woolf handled several narrative categories. The founder of the eighteenth century realistic novel and the modernist user of the stream of consciousness technique were divided by a huge gap in time and narrative techniques, and yet, nothing was impossible for a student when the teacher in charge was Ştefan Stoenescu. History and genre obviously collided in such a topic and yet, as undergraduates, we did survive this examination. I shall cherish forever the memory of the day when, as a thirdyear undergraduate, I had to take my written examination in English poetry. To my colleagues’ surprise, the late Professor Ioan Aurel Preda, after a two-semester course delivered in the form of a survey, demanded that we should analyze and interpret passages from poems by Alexander Pope, John Keats and Robert Browning. Some of my colleagues got the shock of their life; and yet we managed to somehow survive that examination, too. I might say that my experience as both an undergraduate and a teacher of English literature has persuaded me that literary history must not be separated from interpretation. That is why this book combines the diachronic approach (data about the poets’ lives, the poets’ artistic output, and the main literary, cultural, and political trends of various ages) and the generic approach (notions concerning the theory of genre, attempts to define poetry, the specific language and forms of poetry, etc.) as well as elements of literary criticism and textual interpretation. There are two points at issue in the design and purpose of this book. On the one hand, there is a corpus of poets and poems from different ages that the undergraduates are supposed to get familiar with. On the other hand, there is yet another challenge they are faced with: the interpretation of these poems. So, on the one hand, we have a diachronic survey, but, on the other hand, we also aim not only at the traditional interaction between teacher (and text-book) and students, but also at the interaction between the students and the texts (the poems) they are to be confronted with.
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* The very term genre is in itself confusing. Chris Baldick justly warns us that in French it defines a type, species, or class of composition. “A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind.” For Wilfred L. Guerin, genre is, simply, “a literary type: poetry, drama, fiction” (where the latter term refers to “works written in prose”). But Baldick points out that “much of the confusion surrounding the term arises from the fact that it is used simultaneously for the most basic modes of literary art (lyric, narrative, dramatic), for the broadest categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more specialized sub-categories, which are defined according to several different criteria including formal structure.” We use the word genre in his book as signifying poetry as a basic type of genre. This means that poetry, in turn, can be categorized according to its sub-categories or sub-divisions that belong to the lyric, epic, or dramatic mode. Paul Van Tieghem defined genre as “a kind of pattern that shapes thought or fiction” and he regarded the evolution of the literary genres as a struggle between inherited forms and originality, between tradition and individual talent. Speaking of poetry, Van Tieghem listed as genres the epic, the didactic poem, the mock heroic, the elegy, the fable, the eclogue, the descriptive (or landscape) poem, and the dramatic poem. In Northrop Frye’s theory of genres there are “four main genres”: epos or epic (supposing an oral address and an audience), lyric (in which the poet “turns his back on his audience”), drama, and fiction (prose). Speaking about poetry, Frye discusses the following types of poetry: religious or sacred poetry (the psalm and the hymn); the panegyrical ode to a human representative of deity; the poem of community (patriotic verse, work songs, battle songs – as lyrical contrasted with the ballad as epic); the panegyrical funeral ode (the elegy); the epitaph and the elegiac meditations; the complaint (expressing exile, neglect, or protest); the poem of paradox versus the poem of debate (“The Owl and the Nightingale” illustrates the latter type); the carpe diem poem; the riddle; the parable; the pastoral; the medieval love vision; the dithyrambic and rhapsodic forms. A detailed 19
presentation of these poetic forms is the subject-matter of the chapter titled “Types of Poetry”. In his more recent Literary Theory, Jonathan Cullers lays emphasis on the readers’ horizon of expectations in defining the concept of genre. The lyric is defined in terms of a narrator who speaks in the first person; the epic – in terms of a narrator who likewise speaks in the first person but allows his characters to make themselves heard; and drama as a form in which only the voice of the characters can be heard. The Romanian scholar Silvian Iosifescu has produced one of the best approaches to the theory of genres in his acclaimed theoretical book titled Configuraţie şi rezonanţe, in the chapter simply titled “Genres”. Iosifescu surveys the history of genre taxonomies from Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, via the Renaissance (Scaliger and Castelvetro) and the Neo-classicists (Boileau), down to the twentieth century contributions signed Croce, Frye, etc. Iosifescu’s book discusses interesting aspects such as the types of lyrical “I” that speak in poetry and the co-existence of epic and lyric elements in one and the same poetic texts. I hope it is by now clear that this textbook uses the concept of genre so as to draw a line between poetry and other modes of writing. The following chapters will draw further distinction between epic, lyric, and dramatic types within the boundaries of poetry.
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WHAT IS POETRY?
Asked to define poetry, Robert Frost made a famous statement: “Poetry is the kind of thing poets write.” The evasive answer was meant to imply that the nature of poetry does elude simple definitions. In Initiation in Poetry, Professor Pia Brînzeu enumerates several definitions by both lexicographers and poets. The lexicographers’ definitions read as follows: Poetry means “poems collectively; art of writing poems; quality of being poetic; intense beauty or emotional power” (The Penguin English Dictionary, 1969, p. 541). Or, poetry means “1. the art of writing poems; 2. literary work in metrical form, verse; 3. prose with poetic qualities; 4. poetic qualities however manifested; 5. poetic spirit or feeling” (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 1969, p. 1024). Definitions given by writers are more subtle and complex: a. “Poetry is the imaginative expression of strong feeling, usually rhythmical… the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.” (William Wordsworth) b. “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) c. “Poetry is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulation its language on the principle of variety in uniformity.” (Leigh Hunt) d. “Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought.” (Thomas Carlyle) e. “Poetry is the record of the best and the happiest moments of the best and happiest minds.” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) f. “…speech framed… to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.” (Gerald Manley Hopkins). 21
g. “…the rhythmic, inevitably narrative movement from an over-clothed blindness to a naked vision.” (Dylan Thomas) h. “Poetry is the language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said. All poetry, great or small, does this.” (E. A. Robinson) i. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry.” (Emily Dickinson) And here are some other possible definitions given by poets and scholars. For Ezra Pound, great literature, in general, meant “simply language charged with meaning to the utmost degree”, while poetry, in particular, represented “the most concentrated form of verbal expression”. Pound drew his readers’ attention to the fact that in German “dichten, the verb corresponding to the noun Dichtung meaning poetry”, means “to condense”, which points to the very fact of concentration. In an age when “modern” poetry had become for some readers too difficult to understand, Cleanth Brooks wrote an optimistic essay in which he argued in favour of the comprehensibility of poetry. Poetry does communicate something. A poem is “a process of exploration; (…) the poet explores, consolidates, and ‘forms’ the total experience that is the poem.” The poem is “an organic thing” which communicates an experience and a message. In Brooks’s opinion the responsibility for understanding a poem must be split between poet and reader. “The reader must be on the alert for shifts of tone, for ironic statement, for suggestion rather than direct statement. He is further expected to be reasonably well acquainted with the general tradition – literary, political, philosophical, for he is reading a poet who comes at the end of a long tradition and who can hardly be expected to write honesty and with full integrity…” The poet is a maker and a communicator. The reader is his / her addressee. The authors of the exquisite Longman Fields of Vision: Literature in the English Language have recently argued that Robert Frost’s seemingly paradoxical definition points out an essential feature that might help us define poetry: it has a “poetic” language of its own. The contemporary American poet Kenneth Koch provides us with 22
further clues to understanding poetry in his article “The Language of Poetry”. As Koch reminds us, poetry is often regarded as a mystery, and in some respects it is one. No one is quite sure where poetry comes from, no one is quite sure exactly what it is, and no one knows, really, how anyone is able to write it. These statements should not be taken at face value. In fact, they are implicit questions that Koch deals with in due time. The Greeks thought that poetry came from the Muse, but “in our time no one has been able to find her”. Koch likewise refutes the idea of poetry originating from the unconscious, which “is hard to locate”. Koch quotes instead Paul Valéry’s definition of poetry, which is “a language within a language”. There is a “language of poetry” and a poet could be described as “someone who writes in the language of poetry”. “Poetic language” can be defined as “a language in which the sound of the words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also equal to the importance of grammar and syntax”. Poetry, according to Valéry, is both a statement and a song. It has a music of its own. Repetitions, euphony, phonetics, rhythm, rhyme contribute to the poetic character of a text. In Kenneth Koch’s metaphorical explanation, the ordinary everyday language we all speak is like an enormous keyboard, which is the poet’s medium. Koch illustrates this idea using the word / note “horse”: “The word horse can make a reader see, smell, touch, even feel as if riding on a horse. Since it isn’t really a horse it can’t really be ridden or engaged to pull a cart; but it has advantages for the writer that its real-life counterpart lacks. It’s lighter and infinitely more transportable; it can be taken anywhere and put with anything – ‘the horse is in the harbour’; ‘the silence was breathing like a horse’.” Words can be handled this way and the material world they represent can’t be. The language of poetry must be learnt. In order to learn it, one must read poetry. It is a language that has existed for centuries. Keats wrote Endymion when he was twenty-two years old. Endymion is all Keats, but the Keats who wrote the poem is made up partly of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Poets can use what they haven’t invented in order to invent what they want to invent. “Ode to the West Wind” is pure Shelley but without Dante’s terza rima it would be much less so, as it would be without Miltonic phrasing – “Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead.” 23
The new uses are sometimes not perceived, thought to be “the same old thing”, or may be perceived as complete violation of poetry: for example, Ben Jonson and John Donne were accused by contemporaries of writing prose, not poetry; and Robert Frost famously dismissed non-metrical poetry as playing tennis without a net. The American critic Harold Bloom has worked out an unusual view of literary history, based on what he calls the anxiety of influence. Chris Baldick explains it as follows: All poets have a sense of the crushing weight of poetic tradition which they have to resist and challenge in order to make room for their own original vision. Bloom has in mind particularly the mixed feelings of veneration and envy with which the English Romantic poets regarded Milton, as the “father” who had to be displaced by his “sons”. This theory represents the development of poetic tradition as a masculine battle of wills modelled on Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex: the “belated” poet fears the emasculating dominance of the “precursor” poet and seeks to occupy his position of strength through a process of misreading or misprision of the parent-poem in the new poem, which is always a distortion of the original. Thus Shelley’s “Ode to West Wind” is a powerful misreading of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, through which the younger poet seeks to free himself from the hold of his predecessor. Bloom’s theory is expounded in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which he claims that “the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform”. A tentative conclusion of this chapter may suggest that poetry is a writer’s attempt to communicate to others his emotional and intellectual response to his own experiences and to the world that surrounds him. He writes in a dense, specific language, charged with imagery, metaphors and symbols, often in a phonological and syntactic pattern referred to as prosody. Like other languages, the poetic language can be picked up starting anywhere. One can study it or just begin reading. The following chapters will dwell upon the specific constituents of the language of poetry. 24
THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY
We shall begin this chapter with the use of symbols in poetry. A symbol can be defined as an example of what is called the transference of meaning. It is an image or object or action which is charged with meaning beyond its denotative value. Although the term presents difficulty and perhaps should be used with caution and for relatively concrete objects, it is not altogether inaccurate to speak of a character’s being a symbol. In its most sophisticated forms, the symbol tends to become more and more indefinite in its meanings in contrast to the fixed meaning of allegory. Symbol, in the simplest sense, is anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it – usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically; and words are also symbols. In the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, the term denotes a kind of sign that has no natural or resembling connection with its referent, only a conventional one: this is the case with words. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image; that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it: roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols. By definition, symbols are open-ended. A given symbol will evoke different responses in different readers. Many symbolic associations are widely recognised and accepted: the dawn with hope, the serpent with evil, the colour white with innocence, light with knowledge, dark with ignorance. Writers often make use of these cultural or shared symbols. A symbol differs from a metaphor in that its application is left open as an unstated suggestion: thus in the sentence She was a tower 25
of strength, the metaphor ties a concrete image (the “vehicle”: tower) to an identifiable abstract quality (the “tenor”: strength). Similarly, in the systematically extended metaphoric parallels of allegory, the images represent specific meanings: at the beginning of Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman (c. 1380), the tower seen by the dreamer is clearly identified with the quality of Truth, and it has no independent status apart from this function. But the symbolic tower in Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), or that in W. B. Yeats’s collection of poems The Tower (1928), remains mysteriously indeterminate in its possible meanings. It is therefore usually a substantial image in its own right, around which further significances may gather according to differing interpretations. The term symbolism refers to the use of symbols, or to a set of related symbols; however, it is also the name given to an important movement in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century poetry. One of the important features of Romanticism and succeeding phases of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake or Yeats. A well-known early example of this is the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). I shall quote from Michael Ferber’s Dictionary of Literary Symbols excerpts from the entries dedicated to horse ( a term also discussed, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, by Kenneth Koch), mirror and rose. The Romanian readers may also consult Ivan Evseev’s excellent encyclopaedia of cultural signs and symbols listed in the bibliography. HORSE Horses are ubiquitous in literature until recent times. Greek and Roman warriors fight from horse-drawn chariots, knights ride on steeds and do chivalrous deeds (“chivalry” is from Old French chevalerie, from cheval, horse), the cavalry charges enemies or rescues friends (“cavalry” has a similar etymology), and every hero’s horse has a name from Achilles’ horse Xanthos, who speaks (Iliad), to Don Quixote’s “hack” Rosinante. In more recent literature horses (and 26
unicorns) have been the heroes of their own stories: e.g. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. The most common metaphorical horses are those that draw the chariot of the sun, the moon, etc. Probably the most influential symbolic horses are those that Plato describes in his simile for the soul. The soul is a union of three parts, a charioteer (judgment or reason) and two horses, one of which is noble and obedient (honour or mettle), the other base and disobedient (appetite or will) (Phaedrus); the charioteer must learn the difficult art of managing two different steeds (“manage” in its earliest English sense referred only to horses). Whether driving several or riding one, the reason could be disobeyed or overthrown by the wilful, bestial, or irrational part of the soul. So Euripides’ Hippolytus, whose name means something like “horselooser,” is killed when his horses bolt at the sight of a monster, ultimately the doing of Aphrodite, whom Hippolytus had scorned. Marlowe’s enamoured Leander chaffs at the bit: For as a hot, proud horse highly disdains To have his head controlled, but breaks the reins, … so he that loves, The more he is restrained, the worse he fares. (Hero and Leander, 625-29). “Most wretched man,” Spenser writes, “That to affections does the bridle lend!” (Faerie Queene, II.4.34); Guyon learns to resist temptation, “bridling his will” (II.12.53). Milton has the phrase “give the reins to grief,” to let an emotion have its head, as it were (Samson Agonistes, 1671). Jupiter assigns the winds to Aeolus, who knows “when to tighten and when to loosen their reins” (Virgil, Aeneid, 1.63). Shakespeare’s Claudio wonders whether …the body politic be A horse whereon the governor doth ride, Who, newly in the seat, that it may know He can command, lets it straight feel the spur. (Measure for Measure, I.2.159-62) 27
When Richard II submits to Bolingbroke he invokes a mythical precedent of bad horsemanship: Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. (Richard II, III.3.178-79) It is a symbolically charged moment when Bolingbroke rides Richard’s favourite horse (V.5.77-94). The hero of the “western” movies is typically a lone horseman who is at one with an extraordinary horse; his enemies, though they also ride horses, are typically horse-thieves. According to the myth, Pegasus the flying horse, was beloved of the Muses because he created the spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon by stamping the ground with his hooves, after which he flew up to heaven. Propertius calls the Muses the daughters of Pegasus (III.1.19); Dante addresses one of the Muses as Pegasea as he invokes her aid in Paradiso. In the Renaissance the horse became an emblem of the poet’s ambition, a symbol common enough for the ambitious Milton to claim, “above the Olympian hill I soar, / Above the flight of Pegasean wing” (Paradise Lost, VII.3-4). Concerning poetry, Alexander Pope recommends judgement as a balance to wit or imagination: ’Tis more to guide than spur the Muse’s steed; Restrain his Fury, than provoke his speed; The winged Courser, like a generous Horse, Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course” (Essay on Criticism, I.84-87). There is a striking recurrent trope about the Trojan horse, the “wooden horse” by which the Greeks infiltrated and destroyed Troy (Odyssey). Aeschylus calls the Greeks the “young of the horse” (Agamemnon, 825) and Virgil says the horse “bore armed infantry in its heavy womb” (Aeneid, VI.516) – or in Dryden’s translation, the horse was “pregnant with arms”. Dante varies the trope in saying that 28
the horse caused a breach through which “the noble seed of the Romans escaped” (Inferno). MIRROR The symbolism of mirrors depends not only on what things cause the reflection – nature, God, a book, drama – but also on what one sees in them – oneself, the truth, the ideal, illusion. As early as Roman times real mirrors were instruments of vanity or “narcissism” and soon came to stand for it. The myth of Narcissus, indeed, is the first great mirror tale, told in full by Ovid (Metamorphoses, III.339-510). In the Amores Ovid reminds a vain girl that has ruined her hair by constantly curling it with irons; now “you lay aside the mirror with sorrowful hand” (I.14.36). Petrarch calls Laura’s mirror “my adversary” because it has driven him away, and he warns her to remember Narcissus and his fate (Rime, 45); in the next sonnet he blames his miserable state on “those murderous mirrors / which you have tired out by gazing fondly at yourself” (46). Spenser’s proud Lucifera “held a mirror bright, / Wherein her face she often viewed fain, / And in her self-lov’d semblance took delight” (Faerie Queene, I.4.10-12). But we might profit from watching others as potential mirrors. A character in Terence tells a friend “to look at other men’s lives as in a mirror” (Adelphoe, 415-16). Certain people are models or ideals and serve as mirrors for everyone. “Mirror of X” had become a common phrase by Chaucer’s time. In Chaucer one’s lover is the “mirour of goodlihed” (Troilus and Criseyde, II.842); Shakespeare has “mirror of all Christian kings” (Henry V, Prologue to Act II, 5), “mirror of all martial men”” (1 Henry VI, I.4.74), “mirror of all courtesy” (Henry VIII, II.1.53), while Ophelia calls Hamlet “The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (III.1.153); Waller calls Ben Jonson the “Mirror of Poets” (“Upon Ben Jonson”). By extension a book can be a mirror. Jean de Meung says his Romance of the Rose might be called a Mirror of Lovers, “since they will see great benefits in it for them” (10620-22). Hundreds of books, in fact, were titled Mirror of X or Mirror for Y, beginning with Augustine’s Speculum; there have been mirrors of the world, of faith, 29
of astronomy, of alchemy, of sin, of fools, of drunkenness, and for magistrates, all calculated to instruct and admonish. The ancient idea that the arts imitate nature or the world led sometimes to an analogy with a mirror, as in Plato, Republic, 596, d-e. Donatus attributed to Cicero the opinion that comedy is a “mirror of custom” (Commentum Terenti, I.22). Skelton refers to his own play Magnificence: “A myrrour incleryd [made clear] is this interlude, / This life inconstant for to behold and see” (2524-25). Marlowe invites his audience to “View but his picture in this tragic glass”(1 Tamburlaine the Great, Prologue, 7). Hamlet’s speech on acting is justly famous: the end of playing is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her won image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.2.21-24). Shortly after Don Quixote likens a play to a mirror (II.12), he encounters the Knight of the Mirrors, sent by his friends to defeat him and bring him home (II.15). The mirror became a common analogue in neoclassic aesthetic theory, according to which art imitates reality, but even after the Romantic analogue lamp or fountain took hold, the mirror could still be invoked (with a difference); says Shelley: “A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” (Defence of Poetry). With the advent of realism the mirror again assumed a central role: says Stendhal: “a novel is a mirror being carried down a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure heavens to your view; sometimes, the slime in the puddles along the road” (The Red and the Black). Many romances and fairy tales have magic mirrors. Spenser’s Merlin has a “looking glass, right wondrously aguiz’d [fashioned],” which could show everything in the world (Faerie Queene, III.2.180); Britomart’s adventure begins when she sees Artegall in “Venus’ looking glass” (III.1.8). The mirror of Snow White’s stepmother is both a means of magic and a mundane tool of vanity. Lewis Carroll’s Alice begins a tale by stepping Through the Looking-Glass. Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is about a portrait as “the most magical of mirrors” (Chapter 8): it reveals the inner degradation of its subject.
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The mirror as a literary symbol, cliché, metaphor and theme is the subject of my recent book titled The Eye Sees Not Itself but by Reflection: A Study in Shakespeare’s “Catoptrics” And Other Essays. ROSE There were several varieties of rose in the ancient world, as there are hundreds in the modern, but the rose in poetry has always been red (or “rose”) in colour, unless otherwise described. “Red as a rose” is the prime poetic cliché, and poets have used every other term for red to describe it, such as Shakespeare’s “deep vermilion” (Sonnet 98) or the “crimson joy” of Blake’s “Sick Rose”. The rose blooms in the spring, and does not bloom long; the contrast is striking between its youth in the bud and its full-blown maturity, and again between both these phases and its final scattering of petals on the ground, all in the course of a week or two. It is rich in perfume, which seems to emanate from its dense and delicate folds of petals. It is vulnerable to the canker-worm. And it grows on a plant with thorns. All these features have entered into its range of symbolic uses. The rose is “the graceful plant of the Muses,” according to the Anacreontic Ode 55; indeed, Sappho had called the Muses themselves “the roses of Pieria”. So it is only right that the rose has been the favourite flower of poets since antiquity. The most beautiful poems, in fact, were compared to the flower, as when Meleager praises some of Sappho’s as roses (in “The Garland”), a metaphor in keeping with the meaning of the word “anthology,” which is gathering of poetic flowers. Homer does not mention the rose (Greek rhodon), but his favourite epithet for Dawn is “rosy-fingered” (rhododaktylos). (Sappho also liked “rose” compounds, calling the moon “rosy-fingered” and both Dawn and the Graces “rosy-armed”.) The Greek tragedians do not mention the rose, either. But thereafter the rose comes into its own: it is the flower of flowers, their glory, their queen, their quintessence. In Achilles Tatius’ novel (II.1), Leucippe sings a song in praise of the rose: “If Zeus had wished to give the flowers a king, he would have named the rose, for it is the ornament of the world, the glory of plants, the eye of flowers, the blush of the meadow… the agent of Aphrodite.” Another Anacreontic poem (44) goes on in the 31
same vein: “Rose, best of flowers, / rose, darling of the spring, / rose, delight of the gods,” and so on. Goethe theorized that the rose was the highest form of flower. Cowper wrote: “Flowers by that name promiscuously we call, / But one, the rose, the regent of them all” (“Retirement”, 723-24). Almost any flower can represent a girl, but the rose has always stood for the most beautiful, the most beloved – in many languages “Rose” remains a popular given name – and often for one who is notably young, vulnerable, and virginal. Shakespeare’s Laertes, when he sees his sister Ophelia in her madness, cries “O Rose of May!” (Hamlet, IV.5.158), bringing out not only her uniqueness but also the blighting of her brief life. Othello, on the verge of killing Desdemona, thinks of her as a rose which he is about to pluck (Othello, V.2.13-16); Orsino tells Viola, “women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour” (Twelfth Night, II.4.38-39). If red and white roses are distinguished, the red stands for charity or Christian love, the white for virginity. The red rose can also represent Christian martyrdom, red for the love martyrs showed and for the blood they shed. Shelley, writing of atheist martyrs to Christian bigotry, nonetheless preserves the image: “earth has seen / Love’s brightest roses on the scaffold bloom” (Queen Mab, IX.176-77). The rose had been the flower of Aphrodite (Venus) and Dionysus (Bacchus). The Anacreontic Ode 44 begins, “Let us mix the rose of the Loves [plural of Eros] with Dionysus [wine],” and a connection between wine and roses was established that has lasted in common phrases to this day. Horace describes rose petals scattered about in a scene of love-making (I.5.1), and Propertius writes, “I am glad that plenteous Bacchus enchains my mind, / And that I always keep my head in venal roses” (III.5.21-22). The statue of Venus in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale wore “A rose garland, fresh and well smelling” on her head (1961). The rose garden, or “bed of roses,” is the traditional place of love, as in the medieval French allegorical Romance of the Rose (where the lover’s goal is to pluck the rosebud), in Walther von der Vogelweide’s medieval German poem “Under der Linden,” or in Tennisyon’s Maud (I.22). So the transformation of the rose into a symbol of Christian charity or chastity is a good example 32
of the cultural expropriation of pagan culture by the church. As Spenser tells it, God planted the rose in Paradise and then replanted it in earthly stock so women may wear it as symbol “Of chastity and virtue virginal” (Faerie Queene, III.5.52-53; cf. “fresh flowering Maidenhead” in the next stanza). While Adam and Eve slept (before the Fall), according to Milton, “the flowery roof / Showered Roses, which the Morn repaired” (Paradise Lost, IV.772-73). A familiar proverb, repeated in many poems, is “Roses have thorns” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 35) or “never the rose without the thorn” (Herrick, “The Rose”). If you go about plucking roses, gentlemen, you may get pricked. In his famous “Heidenröslein,” Goethe presents a dialogue between a boy and a rose: The boy said, “I shall pick you, Little rose on the heath.” The little rose said, “I shall prick you, So you’ll always think of me.” Ovid combines the carpe diem theme with a reminder of thorns: “While it flowers, use your life; / The thorn is scorned when the rose has fallen” (Fasti, V.353-54). Shakespeare’s Diana alters the image nicely when she tells Bertram, “when you have our roses, / You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves” (All’s Well That Ends Well 4.2.17-18). Blake’s “My Pretty Rose Tree” tells how he forswears a beautiful flower to remain loyal to his rose tree, but nonetheless “my Rose turned away with jealousy: / And her thorns were my only delight.” Thomas Moore’s “Pretty Rose-Tree” is also about promised faithfulness, for “the thorns of thy stem / Are not like them / With which mean wound each other.” In the Christian transfiguration of the rose, of course, the thorns were omitted: Mary, according to St. Ambrose, is a rose without thorns, as Herrick’s “The Rose” tells us. In Paradise, according to Milton, was every sort of flower “and without Thorn the Rose” (Paradise Lost IV.256). The rose is also renowned for its perfume – “And the rose herself has got / Perfume which on earth is not,” as Keats says (“Bards of Passion”) – which lingers on after the flower has blown and fallen; perhaps that underlies its use as a symbol of martyrdom. As 33
Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 54, which is an extended rose simile, “Sweet roses do not so [die to themselves]; / Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.” Another form of rose immortality is oil or attar of rose, known to the Greeks and Persians and probably earlier. The rose has two traditional enemies, both of which are common in poetry: worms and winds. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 95 begins: How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Dost spot the beauty of thy budding name! (“Canker” here means “cankerworm”). The loss of Lycidas, Milton writes, is “As killing as Canker to the Rose” (Lycidas, 45). Herbert likens the Church to a rose, made red by the blood of Christ, and disputes within the church to a worm (“Church-Rents and Schisms”). Perhaps the most resonant use of the canker image is Blake’s “The Sick Rose”: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies through the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: An his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. As for howling storms, Keats writes, “love doth scathe / The gentle heart, as northern blasts do roses” (Endymion I.734-35). In the late nineteenth century was founded the mystical cult of Rosicrucianism, whose central symbols were the rose of perfection or eternity and the cross of time; we may gain the “inconsolable rose,” in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s phrase (in Axël), through suffering and renunciation in this world. Yeats adopts this symbolism in the poems 34
in The Rose and the stories in The Secret Rose: the first poem is addressed “To the Rose upon the Rood [Cross] of Time”. The rose is often associated with the lily, both to express a contrast in colours and to symbolize two usually complementary virtues, love and purity (or virginity): both flowers, of course, are emblems of the Virgin Mary. Tennyson has “My rose of love for ever gone, / My lily of truth and trust” (“The Ancient Sage”, 159-60). Roses and violets are often joined as two flowers of love, both rich in aroma; Keats strikingly assigns the rose to Madeline and the violet to her lover, Porphyro (whose name means “purple”): “Into her dream he melted, as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet” (The Eve of St. Agnes, 320-21). The phrase “under the rose”, more often used in the Latin sub rosa, means “in secret” or “silently”. It was supposed to be a practice in ancient Greece and Rome to swear a council to secrecy by placing a rose overhead during its deliberations. Many council chambers in Europe for that reason have roses sculpted into their ceilings. I shall further list the meaning of other essential literary symbols in the chapter ‘How to Analyze a Poem” when I come to discuss the mythical and archetypal approaches to poetry. * We shall now move on to another essential aspect of poetic language, namely the use of images that contribute to the building of a writer’s or literary work’s specific imagery. Images are equally important for a poet. Images are words or phrases that appeal to our senses. Images represent a stimulation of the imagination through sense experience (note that “image” and “imagination” are cognates). The appeal or stimulus need not come through nouns alone. Visual imagery, the type most familiar to readers at large, appeals to the sense of sight; thus any object that can be seen can be a visual image. Similarly, aural imagery is that which can be heard (“thunderous”). Kinesthetic imagery makes its appeal to the sense of motion and therefore very often introduces a kind of muscular activity; not only words, but prose and verse rhythms can create this 35
effect (as in Browning’s “I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he…”) Other types of imagery that may be perceived are gustatory, tactile, olfactory and thermal, which make their appeals, respectively, to taste (“salty”), touch (“velvety smoothness”), smell (“stench”), and sensitivity to temperature (“scorch”, “frigid”). Some of these tend to overlap, since what stimulates the taste often stimulates the sense of smell, and what can be heard can also suggest motion, and so on. In some writers (notably the French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth century), the various sense experiences may be associated or mingled in such a way as to produce the effect of synesthesia. Imagery is a rather vague critical term covering those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or “concrete” objects, scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition. We use the term imagery to refer to combinations or clusters of images that are used to create a dominant impression. Death, corruption and disease imagery, for example, creates a powerful network in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Writers often develop meaningful patterns in their imagery, and a writer’s choice and arrangement of images is often an important clue to the overall meaning of his work. The imagery of a literary work thus comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental “pictures”, but may appeal to senses other than sight. The term has often been applied particularly to the figurative language used in a work, especially to its metaphors and similes. Images suggesting further meanings and association in ways that go beyond the fairly simple identifications of metaphor and simile are often called symbols. The critical emphasis on imagery in the mid-twentieth century, both in New Criticism and in some influential studies of Shakespeare, tended to glorify the supposed concreteness of literary works by ignoring matters of structure, convention, and abstract argument: thus Shakespeare’s plays were read as clusters or patterns of “thematic imagery” according to the predominance of particular kinds of image (of animals, of disease, etc.), without reference to the action or to the dramatic meaning of characters’ speeches. 36
* The next subchapter is dedicated to the types of metrical feet, types of rhymes and strophic patterns that contribute to the way in which a poet establishes the overall mood of his poem. All these are formal aspects pertaining to prosody. The trochaic foot is made up of trochees (_/_). The trochee, the reverse of the iamb is a two-syllable foot, the first of which is stressed, as in the word “tender”. Lines of verse made up predominantly of trochees are referred to as trochaic verse or trochaics. Regular trochaic lines are quite rare in English, Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) being a celebrated example of their extended use: “Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple…” The iambic foot is made up of iambi (_ _/). The iamb, a foot of two syllables, is the most important unit of English poetry. The iamb has one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as in the word “beyond”. Lines of poetry made up predominantly of iambs are referred to as iambics or as iambic verse. Its most important form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, either rhymed (as in heroic couplets, sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in blank verse: “Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (Tennyson). The eight-syllable iambic tetrameter is another common English line: “Come live with me, and be my love” (Marlowe). The English iambic hexameter or six-stress line is usually referred to as the alexandrine. The dactylic foot is made up of dactyls ( _/_ _ ). The dactyl is a metre associated with Latin poetry. The dactyl has one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in the word “carefully”. Dactylic hexameters were used in Greek and Latin epic poetry, and in the elegiac distich, but dactylic verse is rare in English: Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” uses it, as does Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice”, which begins “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.” One of the most beautiful illustrations of the dactylic foot is probably John Lennon’s celebrated “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, often anthologized in collections of English verse: 37
Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade sky, Someone is calling you answer quite slowly a girl with kaleidoscope eyes; Cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head, Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone. The anapaestic foot is made up of anapaests ( _ _ _/ ). The anapaest is a foot with two short syllables before one long, as in the word “interrupt”. Originally a Greek marching beat, adopted by some Greek and Roman dramatists, the rising rhythm of anapaestic verse has sometimes been used by poets in English to echo energetic movement, notably in Robert Browning’s “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” (1845). Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place. Other poets have used the anapaestic verse for tones of solemn complaint, as in this famous line from Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866): “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.” Lines made up of anapaests alone are rare in English verse, though: more often they are used in combination with other feet. The commonest anapaestic verse form in English, the limerick, usually omits the first syllable in its first, second, and fifth lines. The amphibrachic foot is made up of amphibrachs (_ _/ _). The amphibrach is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables, as in the word “confession”. It was rarely used in classical verse, but may occur in English in combination with other feet. Next, here is a qualitative classification of lines. The run-on line is, in a poem, a line that continues into the following line, without a pause or punctuation, allowing the 38
uninterrupted flow of meaning. It is used to create a sense of forward motion, as in the following quote from Shelley: Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know. (“To a Skylark”) The run-on line is mostly used by English poets in blank verse, but it appears in other verse-forms, too, even in heroic couplets: Keats rejected the eighteenth-century closed couplet by using frequent run-on lines in Endymion (1818), of which the first and fifth lines are end-stopped while the lines in between are run-on lines. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. An end-stopped line ends with a pause, however brief, often indicated by a punctuation mark. In this case the end of a verse line coincides with the completion of a sentence, clause, or other independent unit of syntax. End-stopping, the opposite of run-on line, gives verse lines an appearance of self-contained sense. The endstopped line was favoured especially by Alexander Pope and other eighteenth century poets in English in their heroic couplets, and by the classical French poets in their alexandrines. The amphibious broken lines occur in the plays written in verse; a single line is made up of two or three brief cues uttered by two or several characters. Stichomythia is a form of dramatic dialogue in which two disputing characters answer each other rapidly in alternating single lines, with one character’s replies balancing (and often partially repeating) the other’s utterances. This kind of verbal duel or “cut and thrust” dialogue was practised more in ancient Greek and Roman 39
tragedy than in later drama, although a notable English example occurs in the dialogues between Kate and Petruchio in Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew as well as in many other Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. PETRUCHIO: Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon! KATHARINA: The moon? The sun: it is not moonlight now. PETRUCHIO: I say it is the moon that shines so bright! KATHARINA: I know it is the sun that shines so bright! (V.1.2-5) Poetry can be written either in blank verse or in rhyming lines. We can define blank verse as unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, as in these final lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842): One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Blank verse is a very flexible English verse form which can attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech and allowing smooth enjambment (that is, run-on lines). First used (c. 1540) by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, it soon became both the standard metre for dramatic poetry and a widely used form for narrative and meditative poems. Much of the finest verse in English – by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Stevens – has been written in blank verse. Blank verse should not be confused with free verse, which has no regular metre. Rhymes can be classified according to different criteria. If we take into consideration the place of the final stress in a line, we can refer to lines with a feminine or masculine rhyme. In the case of feminine rhyme the accented syllable is the penultimate or antepenultimate one: “handy” rhyming with “candy”. 40
In the masculine rhyme the final syllable of the line is accented, as in “Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime”. The crossed rhyme has the effect of making the couplet sound like a quatrain rhyming abab, as in Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866): Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods? Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods? The best example of crossed rhymes is provided by Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Here is the opening quatrain of Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. The framing rhymes occur in a quatrain rhyming abba, as in the sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton: With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies! How silently, and with how wane a face! What, may it be that even in heavenly place That busy archer his sharp arrow tries? (Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnet 1) When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent… (John Milton, Sonnet 16)
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The rhyming couplets (aabb) were the favourite rhyme throughout the Restoration (1660-1700) and the first half of the eighteenth century. Andrew Marvell and Alexander Pope (in poetry) and John Dryden (in drama) best illustrate this tendency. A suitable prosodic pattern in poetry, the rhyming couplet does not work well in drama, on the stage, where it turns the speech of characters into artificial, bombastic language. That is why Dryden’s plays are no longer played today, while Shakespeare’s plays, written in blank verse, which imitates colloquial speech, are still widely staged. The lines, either rhyming or written as blank verse, are combined in strophic patterns. We shall briefly refer to the most widely used types of strophes or stanzas. The couplet is a pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length; it is one of the most frequent verse-forms in European poetry. Chaucer established the use of couplets in English, notably in the Canterbury Tales, using rhymed iambic pentameters later known as heroic couplets: a form revived in the seventeenth century by Ben Jonson, Dryden and others, partly as the equivalent in heroic drama of the alexandrine couplets which were the standard verse-form of French drama in that century. Alexander Pope followed Dryden’s use of heroic couplets in non-dramatic verse to become the master of the form, notably in his use of closed couplets. The octosyllabic couplet (of 8-syllable or 4-stress lines) is also commonly found in English verse. A couplet may also stand alone as an epigram, or form part of a larger stanza, or (as in Shakespeare) round off a sonnet or a dramatic scene. The tercet is a unit of three verse lines, usually rhyming either with each other or with neighbouring lines. The three-line stanzas of terza rima and of the villanelle are known as tercets. The sestet of an Italian sonnet is composed of two tercets. The quatrain is a verse stanza of four lines, rhymed or (less often) unrhymed. The quatrain is the most commonly used stanza in English and most modern European languages. Most ballads and many hymns are composed in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines rhyme (abcb or abab); the “heroic quatrain” of iambic pentameters also rhymes abab. A different rhyme scheme (abba) is 42
used in the In Memoriam stanza and some other forms. The rhyming four-line groups that make up the first eight or twelve lines of a sonnet are also known as quatrains. The rhyme-royal is a stanza form consisting of seven 5-stress lines (iambic pentameters) rhyming ababbcc, first used by Chaucer and thus also known as the Chaucerian stanza. Following Chaucer’s use of rhyme-royal in his Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls, and some of the Canterbury Tales, it continued to be an important form of English verse in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, being used by Dunbar, Henryson, Spenser, and Shakespeare (in his Rape of Lucrece, 1594); William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) is a rare example of this use in later periods. The name of this stanza seems to come from its use in The Kingis Quair (c. 1424), a poem uncertainly attributed to King James I of Scotland. The Spenserian stanza is an English poetic stanza of nine iambic lines, the first eight being pentameters while the ninth is a longer line known either as an iambic hexameter or as an alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The stanza is named after Edmund Spenser, who invented it – probably on the basis of the ottava rima stanza – for his long allegorical romance The Faerie Queene (1590-6). It was revived successfully by the younger English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century: Byron used it for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812, 1816), Keats for “The Eve of St Agnes” (1820), and Shelley for The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Adonais (1821). * The next subchapter deals with some of the most important figures of speech which contribute to the “poetic” quality of a text. The simile draws a comparison between two dissimilar elements using the word “like” or “as”, for example “He fought like a tiger” or as in Wordsworth’s line: “I wondered lonely as a cloud”. A very common figure of speech in both prose and verse, simile is more tentative and decorative than metaphor. A lengthy and more elaborate kind of simile, used as a digression in a narrative work, is the epic simile. 43
The metaphor is a comparison of things essentially unlike, drawn without the use of words such as “like” and “as”. Metaphor occurs as an implied analogy, and it consists of two concepts: – the tenor (the subject of the comparison); – the vehicle (the image by which the idea is conveyed). The tenor is always present; the vehicle is usually absent: inT. S. Eliot’s “the yellow fog that rubs its back against the window-pane”, the fog is implicitly compared with a cat; In the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road. Another dictionary definition describes metaphor as a figure of speech in which one thing is spoken of as though it were something else. Unlike a simile, which compares two things using “like” or “as”, a metaphor states the comparison directly. For example, “Life’s but a walking shadow” in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Here is yet another definition: metaphor is, specifically, a comparison of things essentially unlike, drawn without the use of words such as “like” and “as”. (Metaphor occurs when one thing is directly called something else: “John Smith is a snake in the grass”; “Denmark’s a prison”). According to a more elaborate definition, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is a simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer idiomatic phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as “dead” metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back. 44
The epithet is an adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a characteristic quality or attribute of some person or thing. Common in historical titles (Catherine the Great, Ethelred the Unready), “stock” epithets have been used in poetry since Homer. The Homeric epithet is an adjective (usually compound adjective) repeatedly used for the same thing or person: “the wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered Dawn” are famous examples. In the transferred epithet, an adjective appropriate to one noun is attached to another by association: thus in the phrase “sick room” it is not strictly the room that is sick but the person in it. The personification implies giving the attribute of a human being to an animal, object or idea, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line: “Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows”. It is a type of figurative language in which a non-human subject is given human characteristics. “My car has decided to quit on me” is an example of personification from everyday speech. This figure or trope is known in Greek as prosopopoeia. It is common in most ages of poetry, and particularly in the eighteenth century. It has a special function as the basis of allegory. In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors. The apostrophe is a figure of speech in which a character or an abstract quality is directly addressed as if present. It is a rhetorical figure in which the speaker addresses a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object. In classical rhetoric, the term could also denote a speaker’s turning to address a particular member or section of the audience. Apostrophes are found frequently among the speeches of Shakespeare’s characters, as when Elizabeth in Richard III addresses the Tower of London: “Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes, / Whom envy hath immured within your walls.” The figure, usually employed for emotional emphasis, can become ridiculous when misapplied, as in Wordsworth’s line “Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands”. 45
The apostrophe is one of the conventions appropriate to the ode and to the elegy. The poet’s invocation of a muse in epic poetry is a special form of apostrophe. The antithesis is a strong contrast between words, clauses, ideas. In rhetoric it is described as any disposition of words that serves to emphasize a contrast or opposition of ideas, usually by the balancing of connected clauses with parallel grammatical constructions. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the characteristics of Adam and Eve are contrasted by antithesis: For contemplation he and valour formed, The softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she for God in him. Antithesis was cultivated especially by Pope and other eighteenth century poets. It is also a familiar device in prose, as in John Ruskin’s sentence, “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.” The paradox is an apparent contradiction that is nevertheless somehow true; it is a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd, but that expresses a truth (although some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, remaining flatly self-contradictory, e.g. Everything I say is a lie). The paradox is frequently used to express the complexities of life that do not easily lend themselves to simple statement. Paradoxes abound, for example, in the Scriptures: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” Wordsworth’s line “the Child is father of the Man” and Shakespeare’s “the truest poetry is the most feigning” are notable literary examples. Ancient theorists of rhetoric described paradox as a figure of speech, but twentieth century critics have given it a higher importance as a mode of understanding by which poetry challenges our habits of thought. Paradox was cultivated especially by poets of the seventeenth century, often in the verbally compressed form of oxymoron. It is also found in the prose epigram. In a wider sense, the 46
term may also be applied to a person or situation characterized by striking contradictions. A person who utters paradoxes is a paradoxer. John Donne is the great master of paradoxes in English poetry, as in the lines “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!” in one of his “Holy Sonnets”. The figures of repetition are: – epizeuxis, a rhetorical figure by which a word is repeated for emphasis, with no other words intervening: “Words, words, words”; – anadiplosis can be visually represented as (……x / x……); it is a rhetorical figure of repetition in which a word or phrase appears both at the end of one clause, sentence, or stanza, and at the beginning of the next, thus linking the two units, as in the final line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154: “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” – anaphora can be visualized as (x……/ x……); it is a rhetorical figure of repetition in which the same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of) successive lines, clauses, or sentences. Found very often in both verse and prose, it was a device favoured by Dickens and used frequently in the free verse of Walt Whitman. These lines by Emily Dickinson illustrate the device: Mine – by the Right of the White Election! Mine – by the Royal Seal! Mine – by the Sign in the Scarlet prison Bars – cannot conceal! – epistrophe (……x /……x) is a rhetorical figure by which the same word or phrase is repeated at the end of successive clauses, sentences, or lines, as in Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855): The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place, The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place. 47
– chiasmus combines repetition and inversion (……AB / BA……); to put it otherwise, it is a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words (“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure” – Byron), or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas, as in this line from Mary Leapor’s “Essay on Woman” (1751): “Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.” The figure is especially common in eighteenth century English poetry, but it is also found in the prose of all periods. It is named after the Greek letter chi (χ), indicating a “criss-cross” arrangement of terms. The oxymoron is the antithetic use of an epithet (e. g. “deafening silence”; “swiftly walk”). It is a figure of speech that combines two usually contradictory terms in a compressed paradox, as in the word “bittersweet” or the phrase “living death”. Oxymoronic phrases, like Milton’s “Darkness visible”, were especially cultivated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry. Shakespeare has his Romeo utter several such oxymoronic phrases in one speech: Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create; O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep that is not what it is! The nonce-words are lexical inventions by writers or poets such as James Joyce’s “galluph” (meaning “to gallop in triumph”) or “funferal” (“funeral and fun”); they are words invented to be used for a single specific occasion; or old words of which only one occurrence has been found. The asyndeton is a form of verbal compression or the use of juxtaposition with the deliberate omission of connecting words 48
(usually conjunction) between clauses. The most common form is the omission of “and”, leaving only a sequence of phrases linked by commas, as in these sentences from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness: “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.” The most famous example is Julius Caesar’s boast: Veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). Less common is the omission of pronouns, as in W. H. Auden’s early poem “The Watershed”: “two there were / Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand”. Here the relative pronoun “who” is omitted. The polysyndeton is the serial use of prepositions and conjunctions in connecting parts of speech, clauses, or sentences, as in John Keats’s Endymion (1818): “And soon it lightly dipped, and rose, and sank, / And dipped again…” Polysyndeton is the opposite of asyndeton. The aposiopesis is the sudden interruption of speech, an instance of broken syntax graphically represented by a dash or dots. It is a rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly breaks off in the middle of a sentence, leaving the sense unfinished. The device usually suggests strong emotion that makes the speaker unwilling or unable to continue his speech. The common threat “get out, or else…” is an example. Next, here are some variants of metaphors: The kenning is a stereotypically repeated phrase used by the Anglo-Saxon poets as a standard metaphor or as a poetic circumlocution in place of a more familiar word. Examples are “bonehouse” for “body”, and “sea-wood” for “ship”. Chris Baldick discusses, in his dictionary of literary terms, similar metaphoric compounds that appear in colloquial speech, e.g. “fire-water” for “whisky”. A famous Shakespearian example is “the beast with two backs” in Othello, used by Iago for “copulation”. The synecdoche is a form of metaphor in which a part is substituted for a whole, for example, “a suit (i.e. a businessman) entered the room”, or less usually, in which a whole is substituted for a part (as when a policeman is called “the law” or a manager is called 49
“the management”). Usually regarded as a special kind of metonymy, synecdoche occurs frequently in political journalism (e.g. “Moscow” for the Russian government) and sports commentary (e.g. “Liverpool” for one of that city’s football teams), but also has literary uses like Dickens’s habitual play with bodily parts: the character of Mrs Merdle in Little Dorrit is referred to as “the Bosom”. The metonymy is a figure of speech in which the name of one object is replaced by another which is closely associated with it, e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press for journalism, skirt for woman, Mozart for Mozart’s music. A well-known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. the writing is more powerful than warfare). A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym. The conceit is defined by Chris Baldick as “an unusually farfetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings”. Baldick quotes John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as a notable example. John Peck provides a more elaborate definition according to which “the metaphors where comparisons are established between things which seem to have no obvious similarity or connection are called conceits. The term means comparing two very dissimilar things from dissimilar areas of experience.” Interestingly, Peck likewise names Donne as the master of conceits: he mentions the lovers that are compared to candles and flies. Says Peck: “The conceit sums up the kind of double impulse that exists in Donne’s poetry. On the one hand it acknowledges the complex variety of experience, but on the other it reflects the poet’s need to establish connections.” The student’s mastering of the aforementioned aspects specific of poetry (symbols, images, metrical feet, types of rhymes and strophic patterns, as well as the figures of speech) is instrumental in his / her approach to a given poetic text. These aspects are the ABC of text analysis, which is the subject of the last chapter of Part One.
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TYPES OF POETRY
This chapter is a glossary of types of poetry that came to be used by English poets along the centuries. Most of them are not “English” inventions but originate either from the Greek and Latin literatures or from other Western cultures. Allegory An allegory is a narrative that has two meanings, one a literal or surface meaning (the story itself) and one a metaphorical meaning (the characters or actions or even the objects of which have a one-toone equivalence with those of the literal narrative). Or, it is a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape – as in public statues of Liberty or Justice. An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system. Allegorical thinking permeated the Christian literature of the Middle Ages, flourishing in the morality plays and in the dream visions of Dante Alighieri and William Langland. Ballad Ballads are short folk songs that tell stories. The oldest recorded ballad in the English language, called Judas, was written down in a late thirteenth-century manuscript. The Celts and AngloSaxon undoubtedly composed ballads but there is no record of these early works. Ballads were very popular throughout the Middle Ages. Many first appeared in written form with the introduction of the printing press in 1476. They flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from 51
the fifteenth century onward. They were printed on sheets of paper about the size of a banknote. Pedlars sold the ballads in the streets singing the songs so that anyone who did not know the melody could learn it. Since the eighteenth century, educated poets outside the folksong tradition – notably Coleridge and Goethe – have written imitations of the popular ballad’s form and style. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) is a celebrated example. Elegy Until the seventeenth century the term “elegy” was used to refer to any poem whose theme was solemn meditation. Since then, it has been applied to poems in which the speaker laments the death of a particular person (a friend or public figure) or the loss of something he valued. In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the metre of a poem alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as elegiac distichs, not to its mood or content: love poems were often included. John Donne, for example, applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in heroic couplets. But since Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), the term in English has denoted a lament, while the adjective “elegiac” has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems. Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using pastoral conventions are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) on the death of Keats and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the third and second centuries BC, evolved a very elaborate series of conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world: pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the muses invoked by the elegist. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life’s transience or its sorrows. In this respect, an eighteenth-century example is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming ABAB, named after its use in Gray’s “Elegy”. 52
9 9 9 9 9 9 9
Epic The epic is one of the earliest literary forms. It consists of a long narrative in elevated style that deals with a great and serious object. The works of Homer and Virgil provide the prototypes in classical literature, while Beowulf and Milton’s Paradise Lost are examples in English literature. Epics generally have the following features: The hero is a figure of great importance; The setting of the poem is ample in scale; The action involves superhuman deeds in battle or a long and difficult journey; The gods or supernatural beings take an interest or active part in the action; There are catalogues of some of the principal characters, introduced in formal detail; The narrator begins by stating his theme and invoking a muse; The narrative starts in medias res, i.e. “in the middle of things”, when the action is at a critical point. Virgil and Milton wrote about the founder of a nation and the human race itself (Aeneas and Adam) in “secondary” or literary epics in imitation of the earlier “primary” or traditional epics of Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, dating from the eighth century BC, are derived from an oral tradition of recitation. Epigram An epigram (from the Greek for “inscription”) is a very short poem which is condensed in content and polished in style. Epigrams often have surprising or witty endings. Originally a form of monumental inscription in ancient Greece, the epigram was developed into a literary form by the poets of the Hellenistic age and by the Roman poet Martial, whose epigrams were often obscenely insulting. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “On a Volunteer Singer” is an epigram: Swans sing before they die T’were no bad thing Should certain people Die before they sing! 53
Idyll An idyll is a short poem describing an incident of country life in terms of idealized innocence and contentment; or any such episode in a poem or prose work. The term is virtually synonymous with pastoral poem, as in Theocritus’ Idylls. Mock Epic A mock heroic (or mock epic) poem imitates the elevated style and conventions (invocations of the Gods, descriptions of armour, battles, extended similes etc.) of the epic genre in dealing with a frivolous or minor subject. The mock heroic has been widely used to satirise social vices such as pretentiousness, hypocrisy, superficiality, etc. The inappropriateness of the grandiose epic style highlights the trivial and senseless nature of the writer’s target, as in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. Ode An ode is an elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or an abstract entity, serious in subject, usually exalted in style and varied or irregular in metre. The first odes were written by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. There are, in fact, two different classical models: Pindar’s Greek choral odes devoted to public praise of athletes, and Horace’s more privately reflective odes in Latin. A version of the ode which imitated the Pindaric ode in style and matter but simplified the stanza pattern became very popular in seventeenth-century England. Abraham Cowley’s “Pindarique Odes” (1656) introduced the fashion of this type of looser irregular ode with varying lengths of strophes. The Romantic poets at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote some of their finest verses in the form of odes, for example John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Odes in which the same form of stanza is repeated regularly are called Horatian odes. In English these include the celebrated odes of John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”. The popularity of the ode continued while the classics formed the basis of English education. By the middle of the Victorian period, however, it was considered old-fashioned and had fallen out of use. 54
Pastoral Pastoral poetry is a highly conventional mode of writing, an ancient literary form which deals with the lives of shepherds, and the idyllic aspects of the rural life in general, and typically draws a contrast between the innocence of a simple life and the corruption of city and especially court life. Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic innocence and idleness. It is an elaborately artificial cult of simplicity and virtuous frugality. Pastorals were first written by the Greek poet Theocritus in the third century BC. He wrote for an urban readership in Alexandria about the shepherds in his native Sicily. His most influential follower, the Roman poet Virgil, wrote eclogues set in the imagined tranquillity of Arcadia. Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) introduced the pastoral into English literature and throughout the Renaissance it was a very popular poetic style. In later centuries there was a reaction against the artificiality of the genre and it fell out of favour. Critics now use the term “pastoral” to refer to any work in which the main character withdraws from ordinary life to a place close to nature where he can gain a new perspective on life. Romance The romance is a form of narrative poetry which developed in the twelfth century in France. It relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting; or, more generally, it shows a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism. It is, hence, characterized by the fanciful, often idealistic treatment of subject matter. The word “romance” refers to the French language which evolved from Latin or “Roman”. The plot of these poems usually centres on a single knight who fights at tournaments, slays dragons and undergoes a series of adventures in order to win the heart of his heroine. Romances introduced and concentrated on the idea of courtly love according to which the lover idealizes and idolizes his beloved, who is usually another man’s wife (marriage among the medieval nobility was usually for economic or political reasons). The lover suffers agonies for his heroine but remains devoted to her and shows his love by adhering to a rigorous code of behaviour both in battles and in his courtly conduct. The Arthurian stories are typical illustrations of the romance. 55
Satire The satire is a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, and society to ridicule and scorn. It deals with external objects and facts. It cannot ridicule a state of mind, a feeling, but something that is obvious, palpable, such as one’s behaviour or deeds; hence, the aim of the satire is to reform, to contribute to the elimination of a particular vice. The satirist has to exaggerate, to distort, to reduce to the absurd his demonstrations for proving in an irrefutable manner what he wants. The tone of the satire may vary from tolerant amusement (Horace) to bitter indignation (Juvenal). The modes of Roman satire, especially the verse satires of Horace and Juvenal, inspired some important imitations by Boileau, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Chaucer and Byron are also worth mentioning among the greatest English satirists. Sonnet The term sonnet comes from the Italian word “sonetto”, which means “little song or sound”. In a sonnet a poet expresses his thoughts and feelings in fourteen lines. The sonnet originated in Italy, where it was popularised by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch. In the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet the first eight lines – the octave – introduce the subject while the last six lines – the sestet – provides a comment and express the personal feelings of the poet. The rhyming scheme is usually ABBA-ABBA-CDC-CDC. The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet after its most famous practitioner) comprises three quatrains and a final couplet rhyming ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG. As a major form of love poetry, the sonnet came to be adopted in Spain, France and England in the sixteenth century and in Germany in the seventeenth century. The standard subject-matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love convention), but in the seventeenth century John Donne extended the sonnet’s scope to religion, while Milton extended it to politics. Although largely neglected in the eighteenth century, the sonnet was revived in the nineteenth century by Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. The essential characteristic of most sonnets is the dynamic interrelationship of their parts – the octave with the sestet or the three quatrains with each other and the final couplet. According to the supporters of New Criticism, with this interrelationship in mind, we see that the sonnet can be a good index to a formalistic reading of poems. 56
HOW TO ANALYZE A POEM
There are numberless methods of analyzing poems and dozens of book on this topic have been issued both in Romania and in the English-speaking countries. I shall list just a few possible methods, or approaches, to encourage the “average girl / boy” to reach an interpretation of their own. Paul O’Flinn, for instances, advocates a four-step approach to the interpretation of poems, regardless of their author, type or topic. The common denominator of the poems analyzed by O’Flinn is that they were all written by Romantic poets. Here are the steps a student should follow in approaching a poem: 1. Read the poem through slowly, at least twice, and look for the main idea or feeling that the poet is trying to get across to you. 2. Read the poem again and see how the main idea or feeling is given precise shape by the choices and combinations of words that express it. 3. Focus on the two or three lines which were conclusive in fixing your sense of the poem’s main idea or feeling. 4. Sum up your impressions of the poem as a whole. John Peck advances a bit more sophisticated, five-step method: 1. Look for a central opposition in the poem (after reading it). 2. Begin to look at the details of the poem as a whole, trying to see how the poet brings the theme to life. 3. Look at another section of the poem, trying to see how the poem is progressing. 4. Look at how the poem concludes. 5. Sum up your sense of the poem as whole, and your sense of the writer so far. 57
Peck dubs his approach “analytic method”. The most interesting of the five steps listed above is step one. It is worth dwelling on the idea of central opposition not only in a poem but in any literary text: in fact, the entire universe seems to exist as an infinite number of binary oppositions. Why shouldn’t the fictional microcosm of a literary text, or a poem, be similarly constructed in terms of oppositions? Says John Peck: “A poem is built on an opposition, and this opposition operates throughout and at every level in a poem. In all writers you will find that one group of images is set against opposing images, this clash enabling the poet to fill out, develop and bring the theme to life in a forceful and memorable way. Your analysis of the poem will therefore come to life as you look at some of these ways in which the poet uses details to develop.” As for step five, John Peck’s advice reads as follows: “At the end of the poem, therefore, in order to move towards a sense of unique qualities of a particular writer, we need to pull back and sum up what we have learnt about the way in which the poem and the poet strike a distinctive note. The most practical approach is to write down a few simple statements saying what you can now say about his writer that you could not have said before looking at this particular poem.” Pia Brînzeu provides a more complex and, in my opinion, more reliable method of analyzing a poem than the aforementioned British scholars. I included it into my previous text-book, A Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen and I will include it here as well, as the feedback from undergraduates on this method was generally positive. 1. The Content of the Poem a) Understand the poem by taking out all the unknown words and looking them up in the dictionary (denotative level). b) State the subject of the poem (it is about…). c) Summarize it in one sentence. Next, develop the sentence into a paragraph and a short essay. d) Discover
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– the familiar elements in the poem and explain why they seem so (because of personal experience, through reading, or contact with other arts). – the unfamiliar elements (the novelty) and analyze if they seem vivid or if they offer a lively imaginative experience. 2. The Theme and Ideational Values of the Poem a) State the theme that is illustrated in the poem. b) Comment if the theme is made explicit by the author or it is left implicit. c) See if there are passages in the poem that are irrelevant or superfluous. d) Describe: – the tone of the poem; – the attitude of the speaker; – the ethical and philosophical values suggested by the poet. 3. The Structure of the Poem a) If the structure of the poem is narrative (epic), make an analysis of its exposition, development, turning point, climax and denouement. b)If the poem is descriptive, discuss the basic pattern and the relationship of the details to the basic pattern. c) If the poem is expository, discuss the feelings and emotions presented (their number, order of presentation, the reasons for their order, etc.) or the ideas presented (their number, etc. etc.). d) If the poem is argumentative, state the thesis and discuss the number and order of arguments, the reasons for this order and the persuasiveness with which the argument is conducted. 4. Prosody and Style a) Identify the meter: – scan the poem; – mark the stressed and unstressed syllables, the division between feet, and indicate the feet and the meter of the poem; b) Sound Pattern. – mark the alliteration, assonance, musical effects; 59
– see the rhyme and stanza pattern: Discuss whether the sound pattern of the poem has any effectiveness at all. c) Imagery. The imagery of the poem should be analyzed in terms that refer to colour, size, shape, movement, sound, touch, taste, smell (all related to perceptions). d) Figures of speech 5. Psychological Values of the Poem a) Follow the emotions and feelings you experience when reading the poem; b) See to what extent you can accept as your own the attitudes and ideas expressed in the poem. Explain why. c) If not, state the reasons why you reject the poet’s experience. In the remaining part of this chapter, I will try to present some “user-friendly” (or student-friendly) methods of textual analysis that complement each other as well as the aforementioned methods, and at the end I will actually present a selection of “textual interpretations” by former undergraduates who attended an optional course in contemporary British poetry some years ago. Why are students so scared of interpreting a text freely, unless because it is, indeed, easier for them to regurgitate ready-made hunks of information taken from books and the Internet than to use their brains? However, there will be always students still eager to voice their own opinions and to make their own value judgments. This book and, particularly, this chapter is dedicated to this breed of undergraduates. In order to interpret a text one must be equipped with at least a modicum of theoretical knowledge. The previous chapters of this book have aimed at providing this modicum of knowledge. Significant Romanian contributions to this topic are Jack Rathbun and Liviu Cotrău’s Two Approaches to Literature (Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti, 1983) and Pia Brînzeu’s Initiation in Poetry (Tipografia Universităţii Timişoara, 1992). But a literary text should not be forced into the Procustean bed of a single method of 60
interpretation. Each and every poem should be interpreted by applying the critical method or approach that best suits it. The following pages speak about the multiplicity of choices one can have in interpreting a poem. In recent years, the American poet and critic Charles Simic has jokingly listed “just a few possible ways” of approaching poetry. As we shall see, a certain critical method or school underlies each of these ways: The poet and no one else writes the poem. The unconscious of the poet writes the poem. All of past poetry writes the poem. Language itself writes the poem. Some higher power, angelic or demonic, writes the poem. The spirit of the times writes the poem. Charles Simic’s definitions, like all poetry, are formulated in an oblique way, inviting the reader to decode their meaning. I shall try to point out what methods Simic hints at in his definitions. “The poet and no one else writes the poem” takes us to the biographical approach articulated in the writings of the nineteenthcentury French critics Sainte-Beuve and Taine. This approach sees the literary work as a reflection of the author’s life. “Self-expression” thus becomes the true function of art. Simic’s first and sixth definitions nearly overlap. Biography cannot be taken outside the “spirit of the age”. Man is, inevitably, the product of the age in which he lives. The social origin and context of an author’s life, his education, beliefs, religion, aspirations, all leave their mark on his literary creation. Neo-Marxism and New Historicism view literary texts as “archival documents” of an age and aim at retrieving the history of social and political allegiances and tensions encoded in them. “Hegemony”, “power”, “centre” and “margin”, “subversion”, “containment” and “consolidation”, “opposition” and “complicity” are some of the terms that make up the critical jargon of such approaches. Simic’s fifth definition invites a Platonic approach, according to which the poets are vessels for divine inspiration; hence the vatic, or prophetic, function of poetry. In this case poetry is viewed as a source 61
of moral instruction, or, in Horace’s words, it is dulce et utile, combining delight and instruction. This approach is interested in detecting the moral values encoded in a literary text. “All of past poetry writes the poem”, hints at the generic approach. When we read a poem, we already know that it is a poem. Any present-day writer is generically conditioned. He can hardly escape the confines and impositions of genres that have been productive for hundreds, or thousands, of years. The best guide for the theory of genres remains Northrop Frye’s classical Anatomy of Criticism. The division of literary works into genres triggers the readers’ specific horizon of expectations. If we read an epic poem written in the third person, we know that we can interpret it in terms of narratology, referring to the narrator, the plot, the characters, the action, the setting, the time scheme, the narrative speed, and other constitutive elements. In the case of a lyrical poem conceived in the first person, we know that we are faced with a lyrical persona, or “mask” (not the poet himself), and we witness a confession that may take the form of a dramatic monologue or an apostrophe (the invocation of a missing character, either a human being or some supernatural force). But a poem may also be written in the second person, in the form of debate, disputation or, simply, dialogue. The person is a key factor in establishing the species (or genre) to which a poem belongs. But there are poems that confine themselves to the presentation of some moral or philosophical ideas, as well as poems that only depict either a slice of landscape/cityscape or just an object. They, in turn, require a suitable approach. In the latter case, of descriptive poetry, a basic step in the interpretation of a poem is the recognition of the symbols and images that underlie its theme. The presence / absence and the prevalence of certain types of imagery are telling clues in reading a poem. Unlike science, poetry explores and reaches truth by relying very much on the first level, the sensorial level, of knowledge. Visual, aural, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, and thermal images may often constitute a point of departure in a text analysis. “The unconscious of the poet writes the poem” takes us to the psychoanalytical approach, on the one hand, and the mythological and archetypal approaches, on the other hand. The psychological approach 62
is not Freud’s invention. Long before him, in the fourth century BC, Aristotle set forth his definition of tragedy as combining the emotions of pity and terror to produce catharsis. Freud’s theory of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego has been applied to many authors and literary texts. The pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the morality principle, which govern the three aforementioned psychic zones, can be applied to the reading of many poems, notwithstanding the fact that the abuses of Freudian theory have contributed to its decline, especially as Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of racial memory and archetypes have gained ground in applications to literary texts. Mythical criticism insists that myths are more than just primitive fictions, illusions, or opinions based on false reasoning. Myths are “visions of reality” embodied in “an articulated structure of symbol or narrative” (George Whaley). Myths are, by nature, collective and communal: they bind a tribe or a nation together in that people’s common psychological and spiritual activities. Philip Wheelwright has defined myth as “the expression of a profound sense of togetherness”. Jung expanded Freud’s theories of the personal unconscious, asserting that beneath this there is a primeval, collective unconscious. Human beings inherit psychic predispositions, a “racial memory”. Jung opposed the Lockean idea that mind is born tabula rasa and claimed that, “like the body, it has its pre-established individual definiteness; namely, forms of behaviour”. The mythforming structural elements are ever-present in the unconscious psyche. Jung calls the manifestations of these elements “motifs”, “primordial images”, or “archetypes.” According to Jung, the archetypes are not just inherited ideas or patterns of thought, but inherited forms of psychic behaviour. One of Jung’s major contributions to archetypal criticism is the theory of individuation as related to those archetypes designated as the shadow, the persona, and the anima. Individuation is a psychological “growing up”, the process of discovering those aspects of one’s self that make one an individual different from other members of the species. It is a process of recognition: as he matures, the individual must consciously recognize the various aspects, unfavourable as well as favourable, of his total self. In Jung’s opinion, neuroses are the results of the person’s failure to confront and to accept some archetypal component of his 63
unconscious. Instead of assimilating this unconscious element to his consciousness, the neurotic individual persists in projecting it upon some other person or object. The shadow, persona, and anima are inherited structural components of the psyche. “Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him.” It is “the dangerous aspect of the unrecognized half of the personality”. The common variant of this archetype is the Devil. The anima is the most complex of Jung’s archetypes. It is “the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life”. Anima is the contrasexual part of man’s psyche, the image of the opposite sex that he carries in both his personal and his collective unconscious. Anima is a kind of mediator between the ego (the conscious will or thinking self) and the unconscious or inner world of the individual. The persona is the obverse of the anima: it mediates between our ego and the external world. The persona is the actor’s mask that we show to the world; it is our social personality. To conclude, in soap operas, the persona, the anima, and the shadow are projected in the characters of the hero, the heroine, and the villain. Here is a list of archetypes and the symbolic meanings with which they tend to be universally associated: WATER: the mystery of creation; birth-death-resurrection; purification and redemption; fertility and growth; the unconscious. The Sea: the Mother of Life; spiritual mystery and infinity; death and rebirth; timelessness and eternity; the unconscious. Rivers: also death and rebirth (baptism); the flowing of time into eternity; transitional phases of the life cycle; incarnations of deities. SUN (standing for fire and sky): creative energy; law in nature; consciousness (thinking, enlightenment, wisdom, spiritual vision); father principle (moon and earth tend to be associated with female or mother principle); passage of time and life. Rising Sun: birth; creation; enlightenment. Setting Sun: death. COLOURS: black (darkness) stands for chaos (mystery, the unknown); death; the unconscious; evil; melancholy. Red: blood, sacrifice; violent passion; disorder. Green: growth; sensation; hope. CIRCLE (sphere, egg): wholeness; unity; God as Infinite; life in primordial form; union of consciousness and the unconscious; the 64
yang-yin of Chinese art and philosophy (combining the male element – consciousness, life, light and heat with the female element, standing for the unconscious, death, darkness and cold). THE ARCHETYPAL WOMAN (including the Jungian anima): a. The Great Mother, Good Mother, Earth Mother: birth, warmth, protection, fertility, growth, abundance; the unconscious. b. The Terrible Mother: the witch, sorceress, siren – associated with fear, danger, and death. c. The Soul-Mate: the princess or ‘beautiful lady’ – incarnation of inspiration and spiritual fulfilment. WIND (and breath): inspiration; conception; soul or spirit. SHIP: microcosm; mankind’s voyage through space and time. GARDEN: paradise; innocence; unspoiled beauty (especially feminine); fertility. DESERT: spiritual aridity; death; nihilism or hopelessness. Students are likely to meet such images in the poems they stumble upon. However, they should be wary before deciding whether a certain image functions as archetype every time it appears in a poem. Archetypes can also appear as motifs. Here is a list of archetypal motifs or patterns: CREATION: this is perhaps the most fundamental of all archetypal motifs; virtually every mythology is built on some account of how the Cosmos, Nature, and Man were brought into existence by some supernatural Being or Beings. IMMORTALITY is another fundamental archetype and generally takes one of two basic narrative forms: a. Escape from Time: the “Return to Paradise”, the state of perfect, timeless bliss enjoyed by man before his tragic Fall into corruption and mortality. b. Mystical Submersion into Cyclical Time: the theme of endless death and regeneration – man achieves a kind of immortality by submitting to the vast, mysterious rhythm of Nature’s eternal cycle, particularly the cycle of the seasons. HERO ARCHETYPES: The Quest: the Hero (Saviour or Deliverer) undertakes some long journey during which he must perform impossible tasks, fight monsters, solve unanswerable riddles, and overcome insurmountable obstacles in order to save the kingdom and perhaps marry the princess. 65
Initiation: the Hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance and immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood. The initiation consists of three stages or phases: 1. separation; 2. transformation; 3. return. Like the Quest, this is a variation of the Death-and-Rebirth archetype. The Sacrificial Scapegoat: the Hero, with whom the welfare of the tribe or nation is identified, must die in order to atone for the people’s sins and restore the land to fruitfulness. Northrop Frye has worked out a sophisticated theory of archetypes: in addition to appearing as images and motifs, archetypes may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types of literature which conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle. Those willing to learn more about the mythological approach to literary analysis should consult Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Fables of Identity. “Language itself writes literature” takes us to the formalistic and structuralist approach to literature. The object of this type of criticism is to find a key to the structure and meaning of the literary work. It takes as granted the fact that such a work is an art form. As such, it leaves aside extra-literary considerations such as biographical and historical facts, sociological phenomena, etc. it proposes that we should narrow our attention to what the literary work says, by first considering how it is said. The formalistic approach is usually associated with the rise of the New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. John Crowe Ransome, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks are some of the leading figures of this critical school. They all insisted upon a work’s containing everything necessary for its interpretation. In other words, they advocated the idea that a literary work is an autonomous, selfsufficient microcosm, whose meaning can be reached without external data. For them, a poem is, first of all, a structure of words. The meaning must be sought in the poem, not outside it. In an analysis of the work’s text, we should move from the smaller to the larger elements that make it up (the words, phrases, sentences, stanzas). A logical first step in explaining the literary work is to see what the words actually mean in their full denotative (literal, dictionary meaning) and connotative (suggestive) value. This is a very important 66
aspect, as many students tent to start “analyzing” a poem without having a clear idea about the literal meaning(s) of each and every word on the page. Another important step is to pinpoint, to identify the words or phrases that we take as a starting point for a further analysis. If we succeed in identifying the key words in a poem, we can try to detect the theme of the poem. The semantics of the key words will point to the main theme(s). I have often warned my students about the dangers of confusing the theme with the summary of a literary work. The theme is by no means a paraphrase or summary, but a general, abstract idea. I have already insisted of the importance of the grammatical person in which a poem is composed. I shall next insist on the importance of verbs and verbal categories. The verbs can provide us with precious interpretive clues: they can express stasis or motion. They can construct a static, frozen microcosm, or a vivid, lively, kinesthetic chain of rapid events. Verbal tenses can help us to decide whether a poem is past-oriented, present-oriented, or future-oriented. We can thus decide whether the poem we analyze is a recollection of past events (anamnesis), a presentation of immediate feelings and emotions, or the anticipation of events to come (promnesis). Another useful step, as we move from one level to another (from vocabulary to morphology, and from morphology to syntax) is to consider the structure of clauses and sentences. Elliptical clauses construct a “world” (a form) that is different from that made up of, say, complex sentences. They may suggest an immediacy of perception, or fatigue, or dullness, and so on. Simple sentences may point out an ordered way of thinking, coherence, preciseness, or lack of sophistication. Complex sentences may point to a penchant for sophistication, or philosophical thinking; or they may suggest mental disturbance, a state of excitement, and so on. Coordination and subordination are also telling clues. The neo-classical poets prefer the nearly syllogistic, logical syntax of coordinated clauses, while the Romantics opt for a more complex texture; Robert Browning is the master of broken syntax, of aposiopesis, expressing hesitation, wavering, unfinished thoughts, which helps us better understand the psyche of his characters in his famous “dramatic monologues”. Back to where we have started from, to the semantics of the text, we can 67
decide whether the poem is made up of abstract or concrete terms; whether the adjectives can be linked to the various types of images listed in a previous chapter; we can decide whether a certain type of imagery is prevalent. An empiric definition of poetry, one I came to work out with my students during classes, after several textual analyses, could be “the recollection of an important event usually retrieved in terms of sensorial experience”. This definition, reached empirically, unwittingly and ironically echoes William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” originating from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. This definition fits past-oriented poems that abound in sensorial imagery. And it also may give students a further hope that poetry can be, after all, defined one way or another. The New Critics claimed that the formalistic approach is a democratic act in that it enables any single reader to work out a personal interpretation of a given literary text. However, they also insisted that the empiric reader should avoid being trapped by what Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt termed the intentional fallacy and the emotional fallacy. The former fallacy refers to what a gross error it is to assume that “my” interpretation and the author’s intention(s) overlap. It is a terrible mistake to start an interpretation by stating “the poet wants to…”, or “it was the poet’s intention to…;” hence, it is better to use introductory statements like “I think”, or “in my opinion”. The latter fallacy refers to the fact that the emotions arising in the reader of a literary work are not necessarily the emotions the author intended to arise. Sometimes the author can be suspected of irony as he can disguise his real feelings while manipulating the emotions of his readership. Hence, we must not take at face value every word in a text; we should rather be cautious and insist on the ambiguity of certain words and phrases that may point to an author’s ambivalent attitude. Another empiric definition of poetry produced by me and my students during a seminar reads: “Poetry, like science, is a means of expressing, a universal truth. The main truth that concerns humanity is the human condition: life and death; loss (at several levels, like loss of identity, loss of hope, loss of youth, loss of the dear and the near)”. 68
It is generally acknowledged that a literary translator must be a good interpreter in so far as all the subsequent commentaries of a work rendered from a source language into a target language depend on the translator’s interpretive efforts. The late Professor Leon Leviţchi produced an impressive Handbook for the Translators of English Literature (Îndrumar pentru traducătorii de literatură engleză) some thirty years ago. This book is still in print and, as an instrument, it is as useful as it was at the time of its first edition. I shall briefly discuss Leon Leviţchi’s contribution to the question of textual interpretation in this very chapter as Professor Leviţchi drew on some of the ideas advanced by the New Critics. For instance, the translator’s first step in evaluating a text to be translated should be, as in the New Critics’ guidelines, the assessment of denotation and connotation. Interpretation without literal translation is impossible. Conversely, translation without interpretation is either an impossible task or a poorly done job. The importance of dictionaries must be emphasized over and over again. Denotation refers to the meanings that the dictionaries ascribe to words. Connotation is whatever is not mentioned about words in dictionaries, it is what words suggest either to an individual or to a community. “Morcov” in Romanian is described by dictionaries as an edible plant with certain distinctive features of its own. This is the denotative level of the word. But any student knows that the same word suggests anxiety when one is faced with a difficult task, say, with an examination. The English word “space shuttle” is defined by dictionaries as a vehicle designed to carry humans to the outer space and transport them on an orbit around planet Earth. But for very many people, especially for Americans, the word contains the suggestion of hazard, death, and disaster in the aftermath of the ill-fated end of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Accentuation is another important aspect that a translator / interpreter should treat with due attention. Some authors emphasize the meaning of their text by introducing certain markers, as if to draw our attention. They choose to use the emphatic “it”, the emphatic “do”, inversions, exclamation marks, series of negations, or series of antonyms, etc. Linguistic repetitions are, probably, the strongest means of accentuation. Phonological repetitions (in the form of rhyme 69
or alliteration), lexical repetitions (which can be classified in various subtypes), and syntactic repetitions do not occur accidentally; they are part of what the New Critics label as how a form transmits its meaning. Modality, which has been defined as “the speaker’s / writer’s attitude toward his utterance / the conveyed information” (Bally, Stubbs), is yet another important factor. We can try to detect whether the prevalent modality in a text is volitive, intellective, or emotive. However, we should bear in mind the New Critics’ warning about the intentional and emotional fallacy. Coherence is another aspect that ought to be taken into consideration. Is an author’s style consistent throughout a text or not? Does it succeed in conveying any meaning at all? How do we cope with oxymoronic phrases? Are they stylistic lapses or deliberate tricks? Shakespeare’s Bottom roars “like a nightingale” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Shelley coins the phrase “swiftly walks”, although “to walk” does not contain the idea of speed in itself, and Eminescu uses a noun in the genitive instead of a noun in the accusative, to announce that you can see a “silver forest”. When any of the aforementioned aspects (denotation, connotation, accentuation, modality, and coherence) prevails, we can refer to it as the stylistic dominant of the respective text. Style is thus essential in discussing the form of the literary work. It is the result of the way in which all previously discussed layers of language combine to produce a meaningful text. * Next, I shall try to stimulate our students’ individual, personal approach to literary texts by reminding them, in passing, how fashionable the reader-response approach has become in the past few decades. Literature has been perceived more and more as the result of interaction between the text (a set of signs waiting to be decoded, a set of signs originally produced by a missing author) and the reader, a person with his / her own psyche, emotions, outlook, experience of life, etc.) Hence, it is no longer the author that matters but the reader. The author is dead or absent, and his survival depends solely on his readership. A text with no reader is a dead text. It is the reader that 70
resuscitates the text, brings it back to life and ascribes it a meaning. Every new generation enriches an old text with new meanings: the text becomes the product of the interaction between the initial author and the successive generations of readers, who, while re-reading it, also rewrite it. In the process of re-reading the text, the reader preserves his anonymity. The author of the text he interprets is not likely to learn about his interpretation. The author, more often than not, is also an anonymous person, who writes for unknown readers. He cannot know or predict who will read his work, or what his readers will think of the respective work. And, perhaps, the best way to stimulate my future undergraduates attending the course on English poetry up to 1830 is to provide some examples of textual interpretation by graduates who once were in their shoes. I shall quote below the full text of Selima Hill’s poem “My First Bra” and the way in which several former undergraduates responded to it. As Selima Hill is a present-day contemporary British poet who has not yet become canonical and is not included in any syllabus, it is clear that the interpretations below were not downloaded from the Internet. Moreover, these interpretations were given during a written examination, as a first-hand response to a previously unknown text. Here is the text of the poem: A big brown bear is knocking at the door: he wants to borrow a dress and matching knickers. The smell of lilac smothers me like wool; beyond the lawns I hear my naked sister crying in the nettles where I threw her: nobody else is having my first bra. 71
Student A wrote the following commentary: “I think that the first poem breathes an overwhelming personal need of possession coming from a sense of frustration. The woman is not willing to respond to the others’ requests anymore, or to share personal experiences, material or moral values. In fact, those she stands up against are men ready to grab whatever she has agreed to give to only one of them, and the image of that bra that she used to wear is the starting point of her awareness. Therefore, she finally understands that her past belongs to her alone, and the bra becomes the symbol of a feeling of comfort, self-confidence, and certainty. The smell of lilac (an olfactory image) brings back memories connected with her first experience as an adult woman. The present depends on her very attitude, on how determined she is, and on how confident in her actions she can be. Written in the first person, the poem takes the form of a confession made in a metaphorical manner. The last two lines, having the function of a conclusion, are the expression of her self-confidence. She has already reached a point in which she can freely cry out her self-determination, without any guilty feeling.” Compare the previous commentary with student B’s interpretation: “The poem is about a woman’s first encounter with her sexuality and about this period in her life presented as a memory. The way in which the woman remembers that period is filled with images of a lost childhood, like the big brown bear, the smell of lilac. These images are mixed with the woman’s discovery of sex, symbolized by the bear asking to borrow a dress and matching knickers. Here the word ‘matching’ has a strong value because it represents a sort of boundary between childhood and adolescence. She stops being indifferent about the way in which she dresses. The fact that the bear is her own impersonation as a child comes to sustain that same idea. The third stanza clears the mystery of the first two and it gives a clue about the time, the moment when the transformation from childhood to adolescence took place. ‘The smell of the lilac’ is the key to unravelling the mystery. The lilac blooms in spring. Here is a subtle comparison between the blooming of nature in spring and a girl’s becoming a woman. The next line is very suggestive because it probably represents the feelings, transformed in memories, which the adolescent back then must have experienced. She may have not felt 72
comfortable or proud of her sexuality, and the comparison with wool and the sensation of smothering are very eloquent in this respect. The fourth and fifth stanzas give us more clues about that period in the girl’s life. The woman no longer looks into the past as a child but already as a grown-up frustrated by her memories. The ‘lawns’ represent the vastness of her memories, and her ‘naked sister’ is herself as she stood and watched her naked body only to discover her first signs of sexuality. The fact that she cries is a proof that she did not accept that part of herself, while the nettles are the feelings she experienced at that time. The last two lines are a return and kind of waking up after recollecting the unpleasant memories. The woman states her uniqueness and her pride of having passed over the most difficult period of a woman’s life. The poem impressed me, indeed, because it is very vivid and intense with feeling.” Student C wrote in a similar vein: “In my opinion, My First Bra is a poem about passing from childhood to adolescence and puberty. The girl is trying to find her identity, to discover her sexuality. She is now somewhere in between, neither a girl, nor yet a woman. I would say she is becoming a woman. The big brown bear knocking at the door represents her childhood, her being a little girl, while the dress and the matching knickers are the symbols of her becoming a woman that is interested in fashion, in being smart. But matching the dress with the knickers proves that she lacks the skill of a lady in matching clothes. She is still a little girl, who thinks there’s no problem in wearing a dress and knickers at the same time. In fact, at a second reading I draw the conclusion that she is playing and the bear is her playmate: she wants the bear to wear those clothes. I think the girl wants to turn into a lady. This is a regular game played by little girls. They wear their mothers’ clothes and shoes, and use their perfumes. The smell of lilac is the smell of a perfume with lilac fragrance. In order to be a real lady, the girl uses perfume, but she is not used to the fragrance, so that she feels it smothers her. The fourth stanza takes us to the present. The adult woman is now thinking about her childhood years. I think that ‘I hear my naked sister / crying in the nettles where I threw her’ refers to the girl she used to be. It is a recollection of those years when she was 73
searching for sexual identity. The bra is a new episode in her life, the first step in her sexual development (…).” Student D wrote: “The first four lines illustrate a sort of fairy-tale, in which the main character is a ‘big brown bear’. The lines are epic, showing the desire of a bear ‘to borrow a dress / and matching knickers’. The other four stanzas are lyrical, and this aspect can be deduced not only from the meaning of the lines, but also from the fact that the poet marked this distinction by inserting a full stop. In these lines the speaking ‘I’ is included, with its variants ‘me’ and ‘my’. The elements used here are taken from nature: ‘the lilac’, ‘the lawns’, ‘the nettles’. Even if the lilac is the symbol of purity and beauty, the poet associates it with the suffocating wool. These two elements, ‘the lilac’ and ‘the wool’ have an opposite meaning, because the former is a spring flower, while the latter is an element that strongly suggests winter. The girl’s sister has to pay for having taken away her ‘first bra’. Using the negative pronoun at the beginning of the last stanza, the poet underlines the importance it has for her heroine.” And here is student E’s interpretation: “The central idea of this poem is the process in which a girl becomes a woman. The ‘door’ is the door opening to adulthood. The girl is coming out of the tomboy stage (she is playing with the bear) and seems to be anxious to become a woman (she dresses her bear with matching clothes as an elegant, fashion-conscious woman). The personification of the bear makes me think that she has already started to have some interest in love and the opposite sex. The olfactory, tactile, and visual images reflect the strong feelings which disturb her to the point of making her throw her little sister outdoors; the little sister (maybe an infant, as she is naked) is seen as a menace to her, as a future rival for capturing the boys’ attention. Childhood is seen as a hard period (‘the nettles’) and, in contrast with it, adulthood appears to be very attractive and promising (‘lawns’). However, the adult woman is jealous of this past moment of her first bra, which still reminds her of her childhood.” Student F voices a similar interpretation of the poem as a metaphor for the transition from one phase of life to another in a female character’s biography: 74
“The poem is about adolescence. It describes the transformation of one’s ‘little sister’ into a young woman. The verbs are in the present tense. They express an action that is taking place at present – the transformation of the girl is continuous. The ‘big brown bear’ is a symbol for adolescence. Adolescence is the age when the little girl becomes aware of the way she looks and is conscious that she must look pretty. So, ‘borrowing a dress and matching knickers’ (probably from her elder sister) is another symbol for this period in a girl’s life. The ‘nettles’ may express the unknown world of womanhood. The girl is thrown into the unknown but she is protected by her elder sister even if she does not know it.” These specimens of first-hand response are partly immature; sometimes they betray their authors’ incoherence or imperfect command of the English language; and yet all these students managed to detect, basically, the same theme: the transition from girlhood to womanhood. These examples of interpretation prove the validity of the New Critics’ axiom according to which a structure of words can convey meaning in a rather precise way. “Rather” leaves room for differences. The overall result of interpretation may be identical with several readers, but each reader is allowed, even entitled, to reach his / her personal conclusion by taking a different path. As we have seen there are many variations in the ways in which the students identified the key words, referred to them as symbols or metaphors, and, finally, decoded their denotative and connotative values. Some students chose to capitalize on the prosodic structure of the poem (the function of stanzas), on the grammatical function of words (verbal tenses, negative pronouns, first person pronouns), on the types of images used by the author. We can easily notice that there are obvious variations in the symbolic meanings ascribed to some of the key words; in fact, each student re-constructed a different story, with different relationships among the participants in that story. These variable results substantiate the validity of Umberto Eco’s theory of opera aperta: a literary work is an open structure liable to numberless interpretations. To put it bluntly, each new reader of a work enriches its meaning with his / her personal interpretive contribution. Interpretations can even contradict one another, as in Shakespearean criticism, where all of the Bard’s texts are sites of struggle among 75
competing literary and ideological interpretations. Selima Hill’s poem did not produce opposite interpretations among my students as regards the identification of its theme. But each student had the opportunity to interact with the text in the absence of the author, relying just on their theoretical instruments, personal experience, and, above all, common sense, and the results of their approach turned out to be quite satisfactory. I shall quote one more interpretation, by student G, who chose a nearly Freudian approach, insisting, like Freud, on the importance of sexuality in an individual’s life: “My First Bra is the poem of a girl entering the adolescence years. The ‘big brown bear’ is the pubic hair; she associates the hair with a bear because in the beginning, in that area, there wasn’t any kind of hair, and now the place is invaded by it. She wants to hide the hair under ‘a dress and matching knickers’, because now she is a teenager and she can look more attractive in the boys’ eyes. She starts to use perfume that smells like lilac, and she uses a lot of it to make herself remarked. She has bought her first bra and her little sister wants to try it on. Angry with her sister, she throws her in the nettles. She is desperately trying to look older and more beautiful. She thinks that the bra, her first bra will take her out of childhood and introduce her to adolescence.” A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are, in real life, my graduate students Tatiana Blaj, Ioana Alexandra Vasile, Andreea Ioana Racariu, Daniela Zariosu-Voinea, Valentina Dumitru-Iacono, Suzana Dumitrescu, and Tatiana Nicoleta Gratie, and I am grateful to them for their unwitting contribution to this course in English poetry.
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PART TWO
ENGLISH POETRY UP TO 1830
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ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
Most literary historians claim that the history of English literature (and poetry) begins with the Anglo-Saxon literature. James Fenton goes against the grain and upholds a different viewpoint. Says Fenton: “I can’t accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learnt like any foreign language. It is somebody else’s poetry.” I shall dismiss Fenton’s harsh judgement and begin the diachronical section of this book with the Anglo-Saxons. Why so? First of all, before their fall in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066, the Anglo-Saxons had managed to reach cultural standards that were much above those of other European countries throughout the centuries of the so-called Dark Ages. Secondly, although much of the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition gave way to continental forms, styles and techniques after 1066, some of its literary repository managed to survive in the later English poetry. For instance, literary historians speak about a revival of the alliterative tradition (specific of Anglo-Saxon poetry) in the fourteenth-century poems of the anonymous, so-called Gawain-poet. Thirdly, even if languages are prone to rapid changes in a given geographical area, the literature produced within that specific area should still be regarded as the cultural heritage of the nation, or ethnic groups, inhabiting the respective area at present. Professor Mihail Diaconescu provides us with the extraordinary scholarly example of an academic devoted to the idea of retrieving the Latin (and even Dacian) layer of Romanian literature written at a time when there was no Romanian people or nation in sight. Like most English literary historians I share the view 79
according to which the study of English literature should begin with Anglo-Saxon poetry; moreover, I should mention here the late Professor Leon Leviţchi’s opinion, according to which English literature started with the Celtic mythology which preceded the AngloSaxon culture and was transmitted orally. And we might go back in time to an even more remote age, if we were to consider the recent findings of scientists, presented in a documentary film broadcast on Discovery Channel, which contended that the Stonehenge megalithic monument is not a Celtic sanctuary but the work of a native British population that had lived there long before the Celtic invasion. * In 410 A. D. the Romans finally withdrew from England. 449 A.D. is the year in which the first Germanic warriors led by the hero Hengest settled down in England. They had been initially asked by the Britons to come and help them in their fight against the invading Scots and Picts who kept attacking them from the North. The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes founded Saxon, Anglian and Jutish small kingdoms. Their language was essentially the same. They all considered themselves part of “Germania” and they had a common set of heroes. The most sophisticated European culture during the nine centuries separating the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from the birth of the Renaissance was that of the Anglo-Saxons. Half of the words used in spoken English are Anglo-Saxon in origin; it was the Anglo-Saxons who turned England into a land of little villages. If the English are stoic, or nostalgic and disposed to melancholy, or have a love of ritual implying a strong conservatism, these are characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxons. The migrating Germanic tribesmen brought with them a code of values typical of a heroic society. Its axis was the bond between a lord and his retainers and its stress was on the importance of physical and moral courage, on the blood feud (corresponding to the Greek and Latin lex talionis), and on loyalty. They were also possessed of an acute sense of fate.
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* About 30,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have survived. The fact that most of it is religious, ecclesiastical, and has been carefully preserved is due to the flourishing Northumbrian monasteries of Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Whitby, the very hub of the Christian world (before the Danish invasions). Religious poetry consisted mainly of translations of Books from the Bible. On the other hand, very few scarcely preserved manuscripts of heroic poems have survived. The Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry is close in mood and purpose to its old Germanic and Scandinavian origin. It belonged to a largely oral culture; it was recited by the scop, the itinerant minstrel. This is proved by the use of stress and alliteration. The blank verses were made up of long, irregular lines, each with at least four stressed syllables and at least three alliterative syllables. Michael Schmidt provides us with an excellent explanation of how the scop fulfilled his artistic mission: “Poets of the seventh and even of the eleventh century composed for recitation, not for the page. Their job was to charm the ear and to keep it charmed, in some instances for hours at a time. They strove for clarity and vividness of sense. They accompanied themselves on musical instruments of various levels of sophistication. The tools of their trade were not the quill, the pen, the biro, nor did they compose on parchment, paper or keyboard. They had memory and accompaniment and they unfolded poems, by means of voice, on the attentive air. It was poetry’s purest ecology. The poems were infinitely reusable, never quite the same twice, because memory added and removed decoration. The audience responded or lost interest at different points and thus collaborated in the unique experience of recitation. The scop was revising every time he re-opened his mouth.” The heroic poems present a pagan world of superstitions, fears, beliefs and ignorance, in which the runes have magic powers, while the stones, the trees and the wells are held in veneration. Nature is generally perceived as a hostile force. It is “a man’s world” in which only the strongest and the fittest survive, a world allowing no room for women. Widsith, consisting of 143 lines, dates from the late seventh or early eighth century. It is the story of a scop, of a “far wanderer”. The scop was a crucial member of a tribe or a society; he was its living 81
memory. His visits from one ruler to the other cover the whole Germanic world and a list of rulers whose lifetimes extend over two hundred years (hence their fictional character). Some heroes mentioned in this poem also appear in Beowulf. They are Huns, Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Danes, Swedes, Angles, Saxons, Langobards etc. This is another proof that the heroes of the Anglo-Saxon poetry were not regional or national, but common to all the Germanic world. Widsith is a primitive combination of historical memories and heroic traditions, a catalogue of rulers comparable with Homer’s catalogue in the Iliad. The poem includes elements of epic and elegy. The kernel of it may be a fourth century poem by a minstrel who visited the Gothic court of Eomenric, who died in 375. To this a subsequent poet or poets added later journeys and genealogies, giving the poem the shape that was passes down to us. According to Michael Schmidt, “given the cryptic, abbreviated quality of certain passages, it is tempting to suggest that the poem represents a kind of prompt-text and that the scop would have filled out the rather skeletal story as he performed”. * Beowulf was composed by an anonymous poet sometime between 680 and 800. The reader is told in 3,182 lines about the rise and fall of a hero, about the three fights against supernatural enemies (a man-eating monster, his mother and a dragon). It is an epic poem concerned with a main plot to which several digressions and allusions are added. They are stories of murder and vengeance supposedly known by the scop’s auditors, episodes in Germanic history and legend (Beowulf is compared to the dragon-slayer Siegemund). Although composed in England, the poem refers to the period of Germanic history long before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The main theme of the poem is the celebration of a great warrior’s deeds. Certain similarities with Homer’s Odyssey reside in the delineation of human characters. The old king Hrothgar, the young hero Wiglaf and Beowulf himself are the three protagonists and the three representatives of different generations who embody and proclaim a pronounced and coherent set of values. In their actions and words, they repeatedly express a belief in the importance of generosity of spirit and a self-awareness that makes them responsible members of 82
the society to which they belong. The generosity of the rulers and the loyalty of the retainers, the solemn boasting of the warriors, the pride in noble heredity, the thirst for fame through the achievement of deeds of courage make up the world of the heroic age. The mood and the atmosphere of the poem is varied, combining moments of slow terror and suspense with elegy. Underlying the poet’s appetite for life is his acute sense of the transitoriness of life: man’s days are numbered and it is a good name that constitutes immortality on earth; the final lines approve of Beowulf’s desire for worldly fame. Few Christian elements such as God’s creation or Cain’s murder of Abel seem to have been added later to a genuinely pagan text. Cyclical in movement, unified by striking contrasts – youth and old age, success and failure, bravery and cowardice – Beowulf mingles dramatic speeches, battle action, elegiac evocation of place and aphoristic comment in the greatest surviving masterpiece of the Old English Literature. There are several excellent translations of Beowulf into modern English and a remarkable translation into Romanian by Leon Leviţchi and Dan Duţescu. The most recent modern English translation is by the Noble Prize laureate Seamus Heaney. Although not very faithful to the original, Heaney’s version has rekindled the British and American students’ interest in one of the ever greatest European epic poems. Another extant heroic poem, The Battle of Maldon, tells the story of Byrhtnoth, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who fought an army of Danish invaders on the bank of the river Blackwater in 991. The poem appears to be the work of a man who had firsthand information about the battle, perhaps from a wounded survivor. Before the battle begins, the poet offers a generalized view of the two armies. Then, the poet’s eye fastens on Byrhtnoth and, after his death, on a succession of individual Anglo-Saxon warriors. Some of them take flight, while others seek to avenge their dead lord or die in the attempt. This narrow concentration of heroic tragedy has been often compared with the twelfth book of the Iliad. The poet successfully achieves the detailed description of the words and efforts of single protagonists. 83
The contrast between the muted landscape and the violent action; the interplay between the cowardice of those who fled and those who stayed; the energetic use of conventional motifs, such as the need for men to take their boasts and stick to them (a tradition that is also found in Beowulf), the brilliant use of direct speech all point to a quite exceptional poet. “The Battle of Brunanburh” describes the defeat of Anlaf, the Norse king of Dublin, and Constantine, King of the Picts and Scots, by Athelstan, King of England, and his brother Eadmund. Conservative in both vocabulary and imagery, this poem is concerned from first to last with king and country; it is one of the first AngloSaxon texts imbued with vigorous nationalism. * The lyric mood in the Anglo-Saxon poetry is almost always the elegiac. The six surviving so-called elegies are poems where the topic itself is loss – loss of a lord, loss of a loved one, the loss of fine buildings fallen into decay. • “Deor (‘s Lament)” presents in 42 lines the complaint of a scop who, after years of service to his lord, has lost his position, being replaced by a rival. Allusions to four legendary events precede the description of his own misfortunes. This is the only surviving Old English poem composed in stanzas with a variable number of lines and with a refrain (“That passed away, this also may”). • “The Wanderer” is the lament of a solitary man, once happy in the service of a loved lord, who now, after the death of his lord, has lost his place in society and has become an outcast in exile, across the icy sea. The wanderer’s best source of comfort lies within himself. Some elements may suggest Christian consolation; it is hard to infer whether the author was a pagan or a Christian poet. The main theme of the poem might be related to the Latin ubi sunt or the favourite medieval “mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?” to be later produced by Villon. • “The Seafarer” was translated into modern English by Ezra Pound. Some critics consider it to be a dialogue, a “for and against” debate between an old sailor and an eager young man willing to take to the sea. Others consider it to be the monologue of an old sailor who mingles regret and self-pity while speaking about the loneliness and 84
hardships of a life at sea, of self-imposed exile, on the one hand, and the fascination and rewards of such a life, on the other hand. Life at sea is equated with the renunciation of worldly pleasures and with the life dedicated to God. The transience of life is visible on the land, but the seafarer – on his symbolic journey – is sailing to eternal bliss. • “The Wife’s Lament” and “The Husband’s Message” are devoid of sufficient frame of reference. One of the very few female characters and speakers in an Anglo-Saxon poem, the wife of an outlawed man complains about her being kept in an earth-cave, the captive of her husband’s relatives. Unlike “TheWanderer”, she is constrained to a single place, but like him her life and identity depend upon a lord whose absence leaves her purposeless and friendless. The second poem has a more optimistic tone, the exiled husband has become a retainer in a foreign country and he hopes to get reunited with his wife. They are among the very few love poems which survived an age of severe religious censorship. • “The Ruin” is the eighth-century poem describing the stone buildings of a ruined city – the Roman Bath. The art of building in stone was unknown in early Anglo-Saxon England and the ruins of Roman towns and roads are referred to as “the work of giants”. The poet is aware that everything man-made will perish. And yet, there is no sense of loss, but rather of admiration and celebrations. It is tempting to read “The Ruin” as anticipating Oliver Goldsmith’s masterpiece, “The Deserted Village”. The main stylistic devices of Old English poetry are: – the lexical repetition; – the syntactic parallelism; – the alliteration; – the kennings, the stereotypical concentrated metaphors: e.g. life = a sea travel; the world = moonlight; the warrior = helm-bearer; the ship = the sea-steed; the sea = the swan-track; the ship’s road; the whale’s path. The religious poetry produced by Northumbrian monks during the seventh and eighth centuries consists of retellings of books and episodes from the Old Testament and it often has a heroic emphasis. 85
Monks used these poems in the course of their missionary work: therefore, it is no wonder that Satan was portrayed as an arrogant and faithless retainer. This period of the Old English Poetry is called “Caedmonian” after Caedmon, a cowherd at the monastery of Whitby, who wrote religious songs in Anglo-Saxon. None are extant, but they are described by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, which contains the Latin version of Caedmon’s first work, a hymn. Caedmon was the very first to apply the Germanic heroic poetic discipline of vocabulary, style, and general technique to Christian matter and story. Thus, he preserved for Christian art the great verbal inheritance of Germanic culture. Bede (673-735), better known as the Venerable Bede, studied, taught and wrote at the monastery of Jarrow. He wrote himself in Latin, but one epigrammatic poem in the vernacular, “Bede’s Death Song”, is also attributed to him. It reads as follows: Before he leaves on his fated journey No man will be so wise that he need not Reflect while time still remains Whether his soul will win delight Or darkness after his death-day. The second phase of Old English Christian poetry is the product of early ninth-century Mercia. The anonymous author of “The Dream of the Rood” presents Christ in Germanic heroic terms as the leader of a warrior band; the Cross is one of His followers and the dreamer. Much of the drama of the first part of the poem derives from the paradox that, in order to be loyal to its Lord, the Cross has to be disloyal and, in fact, to crucify Christ. The tone of the second part of the poem is homiletic. At the end the dreamer speaks of his own life and aspiration. The whole poem is a remarkable fusion of old and new. In its use of the dream vision, so much favoured by medieval poets, and in its prosopopeia (i.e. putting words into the mouth of an inanimate object) it stands alone in Old English poetry, as a work of great originality and passion.
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* Although much the most charming poems in the canon of Old English literature, the ninety-six riddles preserved in the Exeter Book are rarely mentioned by literary historians. The whole body of Old English literature is packed out with mini-riddles, the condensed metaphors known as kennings and already referred to earlier in this lecture. The riddles vary enormously in subject matter and tone. Some are concerned with instruments of war, such as sword and shield and bow and helmet. Others describe ideas and objects associated with the Christian faith (e.g. Creation and Soul and Body). What the riddles reflect above all, though, are not aspects either of the Germanic heroic world or of the Christian faith but simply the everyday life of the working man; they describe household objects, man’s artefacts, natural phenomena, animal life. A few of the riddles are witty and obscene double entendres; their sense of humour is something not to be found anywhere else in Old English literature. Here is an example of a riddle displaying all the subtlety of a Japanese haiku: On the way a miracle: water become bone. * The importance of Anglo-Saxon poetry in the history of English literature has been emphasized over and over again. In the early twentieth century, A. R. Waller still considered the year 657 (when Caedmon is thought to have composed his mystic poem known as “Caedmon’s Hymn”) the beginning of English poetry: “And from those days to our own, in spite of periods of decadence, of apparent death, of great superficial change, the chief constituents of English literature – a reflective spirit, attachment to nature, a certain carelessness of ‘art’, love of home and country and an ever-present consciousness that there are things worth more than death – these have, in the main, continued unaltered.” Waller’s view was endorsed by Stanley Greenfield in the second half of the twentieth century: “Microcosm and macrocosm, ubi sunt, consolation, Trinitarianism – these are but some of the ideas and motifs that Old English literature shares with the works of later writers like Donne, Arnold, Tennyson, and Milton.” Even if these assertions are seemingly far-fetched, the value of Anglo-Saxon poetry is hard to deny. 87
MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
The Norman Conquest put an end to the evolution of AngloSaxon literature. According to F. W. Bateson, “the change from Old to Middle English was rapid and drastic, a linguistic revolution”. A proper historical parallel can be drawn with the similar, though slower, transitions on the Continent from Latin into French, Italian and Spanish. At one end of the process there is what is now a dead language. Fact is that Old English, as standardized in the West-Saxon of Alfred and his successors, possessed a system of genders, caseendings, and verb conjugations almost as elaborate and inflexible as those of classical Latin. A gap appears between the Old English linguistic and cultural ties, which almost collapse under the successive impact of the Scandinavian and the Norman invasions, and the dawn of the so-called Middle-English literature. The Norman conquerors bring to England a distinctive cultural heritage, which gradually supersedes the Anglo-Saxon literary forms and styles. The age of Middle English literature (1066 – approx. 1500) is closely connected to the evolution of French medieval literature both in form and content. The Anglo-Saxon heroic and lyrical poems are replaced by different species such as: • the romance – a chivalrous tale concerned with the psychology of courtly love, with adventures and female characters raised to the status of worshipped idols; Chrétien de Troyes (the twelfth century) offered the most remarkable model; he deals with the concept of honour and the relationship between man and woman as a married couple; with Erec et Enide, the medieval literature is no longer a “man’s world”, the woman acquires an equal status. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, defines romance as a projection of the ideals of the ruling classes. It is an aristocratic 88
genre in which the hero is superior in degree to other men. He usually embarks upon a journey of adventures in which archetypes such as the dragon or the sea-monster recur. Centuries older than the realistic novel, the romance is concerned with psychological archetypes, while the novel deals with social masks; • the allegory becomes the most often employed device in poetry and drama: the personification of vices versus virtues becomes the most frequent topic. The so-called “dream allegory” is a story told in the form of a dream. The most influential model was provided by Roman de la Rose, written by two authors in two distinct stages: 1) Guillaume de Lorris (1227) wrote over 4,000 short couplets dealing with true courtly love; the qualities of the heroine are personified in his work; 2)Jean de Meung (1268-1277) added a sequel of over 22,000 lines. He proved to be clumsy in handling allegory but he had a keen insight into the political, social and religious problems of his age. A realistic poet, he turned his sequel into a satire. The poem was translated all over Europe; • the fabliau is an obscene kind of poetry, overtly dealing with sex and immorality. It reflects the mentality of the rising bourgeoisie. Its realism and humour contrast with the artificial language and atmosphere of the romance; • the ballads, although anonymous and collective, only appear after the Norman Conquest. (No French influences have been traced in this respect). THE ANONYMOUS POETRY In the thirteenth century the anonymous poetry is best illustrated by The Owl and the Nightingale. This fable consisting of 1,800 lines imitating the French octosyllabic couplet has been preserved in two manuscripts. It is a lively dialogue between the two birds, an exchange of mutual insults and recriminations. It combines the features of the French débat (debate) and the bestiary. The author assumes the role of a neutral spectator: each opponent defends its own views. 89
The OWL represents a poet of the religious type, being a representative of the cloister, whereas the NIGHTINGALE is a poet busy with writing love poetry. The poem actually mirrors the conflict between the traditional Anglo-Saxon religious poetry and the modern French lay literature. The language of the poem is not artificial; the words naturally follow the train of thought; and for the first time, the metaphor as a main device is replaced by unexpected similes such as: “you chatter like an Irish priest” (the owl about the nightingale) or “you sing like a hen in the snow” (the nightingale about the owl). * The popular ballads are another kind of anonymous poetry which was to have a great effect on English writing centuries later. The ballads flourish in the fourteenth century England, but the extant texts were preserved in manuscripts or printed texts dating from the sixteenth century. The word “ballad” seems to be derived from the Latin “ballare”, i.e. “to dance”. Towards the end of the Roman Empire the songs known as “ballistes” were in fashion; the Italian poetry of the twelfth century brought forth the “ballata” and the French borrowed it as “balade”; originally, these poems had a lyrical character. The ballads are orally transmitted narrative poems which are not made and sung for the people, but made and sung by the people (i.e. collective authorship is implied). Two facts cannot be established for sure: a) one is the “original” version of a ballad; b) the other is the date when a ballad was composed. Michael Schmidt explains that ballads were originally a minstrel’s job, working to a lord (“minstrel” meaning “a dependent”). In Piers Plowman one monk knows the ballads and rhymes better than his pater noster. Monasteries, for a fee, provided minstrels with fresh or reheated songs and stories, and themselves used them for holy days. Some abbeys and monasteries supported a resident minstrel. Welsh abbeys occasionally sustained a Welsh-language bard and were repositories for the poetry of the Britons. But as the times grew harder minstrels were fired by employers, or grew bored with the court or 90
monastery, or were set loose by military defeat (especially in Scotland and the North). The dissemination of printing dealt them a final blow. Strolling minstrels disappear in Elizabeth’s reign, arrested as vagabonds or displaced by the circulation of “town literature”. For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, broadsheet ballads were a profitable venture for printers. As a rule, the popular ballad appeared after the end of the great migrations on the European continent; it belongs to a settled group and it deals with the affairs of that group. Here are the characteristic features of the English popular ballads: – they have a narrative kernel; – they present a dramatic story; – they display simplicity of vocabulary and grammar; – they are written in iambic meter; – their “ideal” pattern is the 8/6/8/6 quatrain later employed by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, John Lennon and many more; – the events described in the ballads have a local character; – they rarely tell a story from beginning to end – they take us immediately into the story and often open when narrative has turned towards its catastrophe or resolution, hence we know little of the events leading up to the climax; – description is brief and conventional and very little information is given about the characters; – the narrative is impersonal – the narrator tells the story without expressing his personal attitudes or feelings, which means that there is no moral comment on the characters’ behaviour, and the motives behind their actions are largely unexplained; – nature is only mentioned as an external background (unlike in the Romanian popular ballads); – the early ballads have a refrain (burden), i.e. a repeated line or half-line; – the rhythm of the narrative is either (a) lingering, i.e. slow, insisting on significant details and resorting to repetitions, or (b) leaping, i.e. avoiding details and resorting to an abrupt manner of story-telling; 91
– repetitions, interior rhyme and syntactic parallelism are specific devices; – sometimes several ballads were turned into a coherent whole, in an epic poem such as The Gest of Robin Hood. Literary historians have produced several possible classifications of the popular ballads. Here is Furnivall’s classification: a) ballads of domestic relations; b) ballads of superstition; c) humorous ballads; d) ballads of love and death; e) historical ballads; f) ballads of outlawry. David Daiches proposes the following taxonomy: a) themes derived from romances; b)popular class heroes; c) historical events; d) domestic tragedy; e) themes common to international folk song (such a theme closer to our culture is the theme of immuring, recurrent in Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek and Serbo-Croatian folklore). Robert Graves stresses the pagan witchiness of surviving ballads, and he classifies them under four heads: a) festival songs; b) songs to lighten repetitive tasks: spinning, weaving, grinding corn, hoeing, etc; “occupational ballads”; c) sea shanties (songs sung by sailors in the past); d) entertainments to pass an evening. Most recently, Michael Schmidt has advanced two more categories of ballads: the ballads meant to keep in memory historical events which, with the passage of time, are refined to legend, and the savage and satirical ballads that avenge an ill or pillory a wrong-doer. Scurrilous poems and satirical ballads may have led to the first law against libels in 1275, under the title: “Against slanderous reports, or tales to cause discord betwixt king and people”. Later satirists and libellers managed to “publish” their poems to advantage, “although they did not enjoy the many conveniences which modern improvements have afforded for the circulation of public abuse”. One 92
poem, in the time of Henry IV, was stuck on the palace gates while the King and his counsellors were sitting in Parliament. A few years earlier, when Henry V returned after Agincourt, ballads celebrating his deeds were pinned to the gates, but he discouraged this cult of personality. • The Two Sisters is the story of a jealous girl who murders her sister by drowning; the dead body is discovered by a miller who takes it to the king’s harper; the latter strings his harp with the dead girl’s hair and the song played in front of an audience reveals the murder. • Tam Lin is a ballad of metamorphoses and witchcraft. The hero is carried away, bewitched, and he is redeemed when the heroine, following his instructions, holds him tight while he undergoes a series of terrifying transformations. Similar changes occur during a fight between Menelaus and Proteus in Homer’s Odyssey. • Sweet William’s Ghost narrates the return of a dead lover who forces his fiancée to follow him to the Realm of the Dead. • King John and the Bishop is one of the few humorous ballads. • Chevy Chase presents the border fight between Henry Percy of Northumberland and Douglas the Scot. This episode was centuries later described by Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV (I, 1). • Thirty-six ballads were dedicated to the legendary figure of Robin Hood. According to some sources he was a contemporary of King Richard the Lion-Heart; according to others, Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1247) was the real Robin. The ballad-minstrel tradition thrived most and survived longest in Scotland and the Borders. Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” is doing nothing less than warbling a ballad when the poet beholds her single in the field.
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THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY (RICARDIAN) POETRY
The second half of the fourteenth century is also known as Chaucer’s age. Four major names essentially contributed to the development of English poetry during the troublesome reign of Richard II: Langland, Gower, Chaucer and ”the Pearl poet”. With Piers Plowman (1377), Troilus and Criseyde (1385), the Canterbury Tales (1387-94) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1390), English literature suddenly came of age. These four superb poems, each of epic length and achievement, are among the classics of world literature, and they were all written within twenty years of each other. According to some historians, it cannot be a coincidence that this literature belongs to the generation immediately succeeding the repeated waves of Black Death (1348, 1361 and 1369): in a way, the poetry written by the generation of Langland, Chaucer and the Gawain-poet (also known as the Pearl-poet) was the response to the challenge of the Black Death. And they all wrote in an age in which English finally replaced French and Latin, and became the official language. WILLIAM LANGLAND William Langland – called Long Will because he was so tall – is almost anonymous. He may have been born about 1331, in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, or in Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, or in Somerset, Dorset or Devon, where Langland connections exist. Long Will may have received a clerical education at Malvern Priory, where he was perhaps made a clerk or scholar. He was 94
certainly a poeta doctus, and his poem is littered with scholastic digressions and embellishments. William Langland is the author of Piers Plowman, an impressive “dream allegory” dealing with the religious, social and economic problems of his time. Piers Plowman was one of the most popular poems of its time. It survives in over forty manuscripts from the fifteenth century. The work as a whole belongs to a religious idealist genuinely distressed by the social and moral condition of England. The author fights against corruption in the Church, against false religion, criticizes the evils of his age, looking for solutions that might lead to improvement. The first (A) text of Piers Plowman seems to date from 1362, a rather young man’s poem. Shortly afterwards Langland settled in London, in Cornhill, with his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote. In 1376 the second (B) text was begun. It is generally held to be poetically the best. The third (C) text, overlong and over-embellished, was composed between 1392 and 1398. If all three texts are by the same man, the poem was the work of a lifetime. In Piers there is a poet – Lange Wille. If he took minor orders, because he married, he failed to ascend in the church hierarchy. He was poor, earning his keep by “saying prayers for people richer than himself” and copying legal documents. The poem reveals his knowledge of courts, lawyers and legal procedures. A proud man, he is reluctant to defer to lords, ladies and other social superiors unless he feels they merit deference. His “I” is strong and affirmative – one might say “modern” in the way of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis – as compared with Gower’s and Chaucer’s reticences. The first reformer poet, he is visionary but not revolutionary. Calmly, using allegory, he exposes corruptions in church, state and society. He wants people to understand the causes of their suffering and put things right, not to throw the hierarchies down. Piers first appears, well into the poem, as a ploughman, representing the common laity, then metamorphosing into a priest, and finally into a Bishop with Saint Peter and his papal successors. He is exemplary; his developing model of morality inspires love and respect, and indicts those who fail to follow him. 95
Piers Plowman has four parts. First we witness the world of human transactions and meet Piers. Debates and trials are enacted involving, among others, Holy Church and Lady Meed, supported by lesser allegorical figures, especially the Seven Deadly Sins. The first part of the poem ends with a general decision to make a pilgrimage to Saint Truth. Piers the Plowman offers to serve as guide provided the pilgrims first help him to finish harrowing his field. After a few further complications, the poet wakes up. In the second part of the poem he reflects on his vision. Piers returns in the third part, and the poem builds beyond its theological to its spiritual climax, evoking God as man in the Incarnation, Crucifixion and descent into Hell. The final part tells of Christ’s triumph over sin and death, and our triumph through Him and his authority vested in Peter (now Piers). The poem resolves not in triumph but in a determination to seek the exalted Piers, after Holy Church has been besieged by Anti-Christ. Piers Plowman is an enlarged or extended proverb. Piers, the honest yokel, gradually and imperceptibly grows into Do-well, Dobetter and Do-best; he becomes the symbol both of mankind and of Christ. The poet-reader relationship is not that of preacher and congregation so much as a conspiracy of author and audience, who are exploring the nature of reality simultaneously and together. John Trueman alias John Ball, executed in 1381 for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, used a combination of Christian Utopianism, proverbial wisdom and cryptic references to Piers Plowman in a letter to his followers. Langland’s public tone belongs in the sermon tradition, explaining the unfamiliar through the familiar. Chaucer has tales, Gower has legends, Langland has homilies. It is all a question of audience. Verse form sets Langland apart from Chaucer and Gower. So does his direct teaching. He draws on the everyday world but writes of types, not characters. For him, more than for Chaucer, social conduct is spiritual. Though he uses a rich vocabulary drawn from every current and archaic source, Langland does not avail himself of the “improvements” of English. Rather than advance the language, he deliberately makes it old, using the unrhymed alliterative verse of a 96
dying tradition. Yet he gives the impression of being often closer to the daily speech of the people and popular priests of his time than Gower is. And unlike Chaucer or Gower he does not write in the first person. Langland creates an everyman for the men and women who warmed to the Miracle and Mystery plays, pageantry and religious festivals. He pursues general moral truth, not psychology, certainly not the “bourgeois individualism” that begins in Chaucer. He addresses a congregation of like-minded souls, not a single reader, certainly not an assembled court. His poetic constituency is the people at large. The verse accommodates numerous voices, from snatches of the cries of street-vendors and exclamations of the poor to the honeyed words of Lady Meed and the eloquence of moral lawyers. Despite its seeming rusticity, Piers Plowman is in no sense crude. Like Gower, Langland is a moralist who asks us to attend to his matter, not his manner. He seeks to portray not only the world, but the truth; he is a man speaking not to students and professors but to men. JOHN GOWER John Gower was a man of substance. He had his own scriptorium, which is to say that he was a fourteenth-century publisher, employing a team of scribes to copy books and documents for friends and clients. Having written 43,000 lines of verse, he could hardly have been expected to copy it all out a second time whenever a customer or a patron required. He had set up his copying house at St Mary’s. The scribes – French, English, failed students from University, poor clerks – were paid to copy his works and any that his noble or church patrons required. There were probably several scribes in 1380. Some prepared the parchments, pinning and lining them, readying the inks. The scribes themselves worked from a master copy or from the poet’s dictation, in which case several copies could be made at the same time. There was an illuminator who decorated the parchments with colour and – if the final work was intended for a noble patron – gilt. The first and best copy was reserved for the King. Other copies were for lesser patrons who needed books to read aloud to provincial courts and convocations, or privately on long winter nights. 97
John Gower is the author of three poems, each written in a different language (French, Latin and English). This proves the coexistence of various medieval traditions. • Mirour de l’ Omme or Speculum Meditantis was lost for centuries and found only in 1895. • Vox Clamantis is a “dream allegory”, a gloomy picture of violence and disorder; it depicts the general corruption of the age, which finally led to the deposition and murder of King Richard II. • Confessio Amantis is a 33,000 line “dream allegory” in which the time of the action is the usual May morning. Gower used Greek and Latin sources to make up a collection of tales about illustrious lovers. After writing so much in the language of the court (French), and of the church (Latin), he turned to English almost by chance. He had bumped into King Richard II, still “the boy king” but nearing his majority, on the river Thames. The King invited his poet aboard the royal barge and asked him to write “some newe thing” in English. Despite ill-health, the poet promised to oblige “for King Richard’s sake”, to provide “wisdom to the wise.” English was not foreign to poetry. But it was foreign to the great poetae docti, and it is the learned poets whose works survived. All the early poets were learned, but few were talented. Gower was different: he wrote feverishly, under compulsion, and as the work grew in his mind to enormous proportions, he dictated to his scribes. Gower wrote his Confessio for King Richard, but when Richard II proved unworthy, he added allegorical record of royal errors. Poems can die / be killed or neglected – unless the poet refashions and refreshes them. If he learns something new, he has to add it. The aim is to delight, but the purpose is to instruct. Delight without precept is pointless. In the revised version, which he worked on in 1391, Gower mentions Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, and the third version of 1393 is dedicated to the future King, Henry IV. Sir John was rewarded with an ornamental collar and when Henry was in due course crowned Henry IV, he allowed him two pipes of Gascony wine a year. Sir John was thus his laureate and praised him sincerely, not to get patronage – he was a man of means and didn’t need charity or 98
wages – but because he admired his strength. He deserted Richard, who was weak and impressionable. In 1390 – the year after Richard declared he had come of age and took the reins of power in his own hands – Gower completed his book in its first version. His English was accessible rather than ambitious. It is not resonant or inventive like Chaucer’s. The lines are for the most part tetrameter couplets, as in Chaucer’s early poems. It was a traditional French measure. He had learned to handle the form skilfully in French. He only wrote one further poem in English, for Henry IV, around 1399. It was called “In Praise of Peace”. Gower’s success was unprecedented in English. Confessio Amantis was the first English poem to be translated into the languages of the Continent. Long before Caxton printed it in English, Spanish and Portuguese versions existed. Gower is not inventive but efficient, a virtue in a moral writer. But if his work illuminates the mind and temper of his age, it casts only a dim light on the social world that lent them substance: the world he lived in. Gower is a European although his French and Latin poems are forgotten, along with almost all the French and Latin verse of the first six centuries of English poetry. In the end it isn’t Gower’s timeless Latin or fashionable French but his English poem that lives. Gower’s narrative is fluent, but he is preposterous in moralizing all the time and analyzing sin in its various aspects. Gower lacks Chaucer’s vivacity and humour. His love stories are intermingled with digressions on a great variety of subjects. He shares and mirrors the conventional views of his age. Gower’s perfect rhythm and rhyme turn his work into monotonous reading. A skilled poet with a perfect handling of style and an innovator of the English literary language, Gower is dull. He was, nevertheless, praised by his contemporaries. Chaucer called him the “moral Gower” in his dedication to Troilus and Criseyde. Philip Sidney praised him in the sixteenth century and in Ben Jonson’s English Grammar of the seventeenth century, Gower was quoted as an authority more often than any other writer. Shakespeare uses Gower as a stage character in the prologues to Pericles, where he plays the part of the chorus. 99
THE GAWAIN POET The anonymous fourteenth century poet known as the GAWAIN or the PEARL poet is Geoffrey Chaucer’s equal in literary art and talent. His only surviving texts are Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Decades of literary history and criticism have accepted the fact that the anonymous poem Pearl is a gem of English poetry, a work comparable with any of Chaucer’s best poems. Today, historians and critics tend to elevate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by the same anonymous poet, to a similar canonical status. This unknown poet is in some ways the most old-fashioned of Middle English poets, retaining much from the alliterative tradition and northern diction. His radical originality has no followers. The Gawain poet went his own way, and that way was towards English legend and French poetic antecedents. He embarked upon what some critics call “the alliterative revival” and produced in Gawain a work intensely English, older English in language and feeling than Chaucer’s and Gower’s and Langland’s, yet so closely analogous in plot structure and verse form to the French Arthurian romances of the age that the poem has sometimes been thought a translation from a lost French original. Which is it to be: profoundly native, belonging (after the ascendancy of Yorkshire) uniquely to the North West (Cheshire and South Lancashire); or a remarkable translation or transposition? Could so accomplished a poem stand quite alone in English, without antecedent or heir, or has a whole tradition been almost lost, with only Gawain and Pearl by miracle surviving? Could a provincial English poet, with no distinctive sustaining culture, have achieved such work? It is Michael Schmidt who has recently voiced this series of disturbing questions. The poet was born around 1330, probably in Lancashire or Cheshire. His father may have had aristocratic connections; the poet understands the large house and courtly arrangements and romanticizes the grand architecture of the day. He read in French The Romance of the Rose and other fashionable literature and may have been familiar with the medieval version of the Latin classics with their 100
moralizing embroideries. He knew the Bible, too. He was learned, possibly a clerk, probably not a full member of the clergy. The language of Pearl is easier to understand than that of Gawain. It is much closer in sound and texture (though insistently alliterative) to early Chaucer, but plainer and more assured in its faith and its allusions; more complex in prosody and form than anything in Gower, and more compelling in the feelings it evokes. Like Gawain, it is a unique and uniquely beautiful work, but while Gawain tends to epic and romance, Pearl is elegy and consoled lament. Pearl is an elegy of 1,200 lines arranged in twelve-line stanzas; it combines rhyme and alliteration. The poet also employs the catchword (i.e. the first word in the first line of each new stanza is the last word of the previous stanza). The central image is of a man who has lost a priceless pearl in a garden. He falls asleep on the spot where it vanished into a mound of earth. Within this allegorical figuration is another – real – story. The poet laments the loss of a little girl who died before she was two years old. Her name (the Middle French Margarite, derived from the Latin margarita, i.e. pearl, the equivalent of the Romanian mărgăritar) gives the title of the poem. Falling asleep, the man has a vision of her, transformed into a queen of Heaven. The lost daughter appears in the poet’s dream as a shining maiden dressed in white with ornaments of pearl. She is in New Jerusalem, in a land of great beauty, divided from her father by a river. From there she teaches him the lessons of faith and patience, and she lets him glimpse the Holy City. He wants to cross the river, but she warns him that the time has not yet come for him to do this, because the river can only be crossed in death. The girl preaches salvation. She is one of many maidens and, eager to be with her, he throws himself into the stream to swim across – and wakes, recumbent on her grave. “My head upon that hill was laid…” Thus, a matter of personal grief is turned into a religious poem. There is no mention about the mother; this made certain critics wonder whether the lost daughter was a love-child. The poem is at once rooted in the Book of Revelation and in The Romance of the Rose, an allegory and a genuine lament. The fact that the beloved is a child rather than a woman removes the vexed element of courtly eroticism. The clarity of purpose and the innocence 101
of the voice are unprecedented in English poetry. There is a sense of true feeling, and in the unfolding theology a sense of deep and consoling belief. Sir Israel Gollancz a little but not entirely implausibly likens the Gawain poet’s sensibility to Wordsworth’s. But Pearl is more ambitious and perfect than any work that Wordsworth produced. Its complexities, and Gawain’s, might suggest a closer affinity with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Gawain survives in one manuscript only. It is the last of four untitled poems (the first three being the luminous romance which editors have dubbed Pearl, followed by works they call Purity or Cleanness and Patience), preserved in the British Museum and dating from the late fourteenth century. The story draws on Arthurian legend and folklore, the usual mix of heroism, magic and daftness that characterizes the romances. The poet’s tone and intention are hard to determine, it is hard not to assume that the writer was sophisticated and good humoured and perhaps gently parodic in his intentions. In form, the poem combines complex alliterative unrhymed lines with a little coda consisting of a short line (two to four syllables) and a rhymed quatrain. It is misleading to call these irregular components “stanzas”; “verse paragraphs” is closer to the form. In the original manuscript, the paragraphs are not numbered. Divisions within the poem are signalled by large blue initial letters, with red decorations. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance in verse dedicated to King Arthur’s nephew, the embodiment of chivalrous ideals. The general structure of a romance contains three moments in the evolution of the plot: the quest (i.e. the initiation of the hero), the test and the rite of passage (i.e. a major change in his life or status). Gawain is the only hero of the Arthurian romances to become the hero of a whole cycle of romances, eleven in all. The poem has 2,530 lines arranged in variable stanzas, combining long alliterative lines and short rhyming ones. It has been named the jewel of English romance and of medieval literature. Like many medieval romances, Gawain begins by establishing its legitimacy as a history, tracing its narrative back to Troy. 102
A two-paragraph preface reminds us of Troy’s fall, and the legends of the diaspora of the heroes. Here is an extended recount of the plot. Time passes, and eventually in Brutus’ line come Arthur and his knights. The poem’s action begins in the British King’s court. It is New Year. There is dancing and mirth richly brought alive in a feast of descriptive language. The king calls for a high, heroic tale to be told before he will break bread. Suddenly, instead of a tale, a genuine adventure begins: into the party bursts a Green Knight on a green horse, lavishly described in the detail of his richly wrought costume and his features, including his hair that falls to his shoulders, and his beard which “as a bush over his breast hangs”. The Green Knight wears no helmet or halberd, no armour or shield, but bears a bunch of holly in one hand and a huge, hideous axe in the other. He challenges the knights: one of them must deal the first blow to him, on condition that, twelve months later, the knight who accepts the challenge will seek out the Green Knight for a return match, subjecting himself to a counter blow. Arthur’s knights are understandably shocked, so the elderly Arthur, out of a sense of honour, begins to accept the challenge. But Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, the son of Loth, the youngest knight and a popular Arthurian hero, proposes himself. The Green Knight does not flinch: Gawain chops off his head which rolls away from the block. The Green Knight gets to his feet, collects his head, tucks it under his arm and rides off, reiterating the conditions of the challenge as he goes. Gawain honours his pledge and sets out on his journey to the Green Knight’s domain. On Christmas Eve, weary and depressed, he prays for guidance from the Virgin and crosses himself three times. A moated castle appears out of nowhere, among the trees. The parkland is green; curiously, here the season is not winter. This is Bertilak de Hautdesert’s castle, and Gawain is invited to stay for Christmas. He meets the host’s beautiful young wife and the crone who is her chaperone. The celebrations last for three days, after which Gawain plans to seek his foe, using Bertilak’s castle as his pied à terre. He and Bertilak agree that, on each of the three days, while Bertilak goes hunting, Gawain will pursue his own interest at the castle. When 103
Bertilak returns, he will give Gawain the day’s catch, and in return Gawain will give him whatever he has managed to gather at home. Bertilak goes on a wonderful hunt. Gawain stays abed and is visited by the beautiful lady of the house, who tries to seduce him. They exchange a kiss and compliments. In the evening Bertilak presents Gawain with deer, and Gawain gives Bertilak a kiss. They repeat the process the next day. Bertilak hunts for wild boar; Gawain gets two kisses and gives them to his host in the evening. On the third day Bertilak pursues a wily fox. Gawain is lured by the lady of the house. She kisses him thrice but he remains chaste. She at last persuades him at least to accept a token of her esteem, a green lace or garter, which will help protect him from the Green Knight’s powers. That evening Gawain fails to keep his part of the bargain with Bertilak. He gives his host the three kisses but keeps the garter for himself. The next morning he rides off to his rendezvous with magic in the wilderness of the Cheshire Wirral, to the Green Chapel, a kind of cave. The Green Knight materializes with his familiar blade. Gawain prepares to take his blow and kneels down, but as the blade falls he flinches and the Green Knight scorns his cowardice. A second time he is steadfast as a rock, but now it is the Green Knight who misses his mark. On the third attempt the Green Knight nicks him, but the wound is neither deep nor threatening. Gawain has had enough, he has honoured his part of he bargain with the Green Knight. Then the Knight reveals himself as Bertilak in fancy dress. He knows all that has occurred beneath his roof – he planned it all – and chides Gawain for withholding the lace or garter (his punishment was the little wound), but he praises him for having resisted the advances of the lady in paraphrase: “I sent her to assay you, and truly I think you the faultlessest fellow that ever walked upright; as pearls are than white peas of price much more, so is Gawain, in good faith, than other gay knights.” Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s crafty half-sister, contrived the trial to test the hero’s nerve. Gawain goes home wearing what he regards as the badge of his dishonour, the green girdle. He tells his story and the delighted court of the Round Table undertake to wear a green garter in honour of his adventure and success.
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The three literal hunts (timid deer, wild and angry boar, and wily fox) parallel the symbolic hunts (the Lady’s attempts on Gawain’s virtue) which parallel the three attempts with the axe. Its originality of form is superior to Langland’s and its language richer than Gower’s. As the poet Basil Bunting says, the Gawain poet is writing an English poem while the followers of Chaucer and Gower were trying to write French poems in English. GEOFFREY CHAUCER Chaucer is the greatest English poet of medieval times and one of the greatest English poets of all times. As a man, Chaucer knew the ups and downs of life, he experienced both the joys and disappointments of human existence. He led an active life. Compared with Gower, Chaucer belonged to the wider world. He was born around 1340 and survived for sixty years. He died as the century turned, in 1400. In his poetry Chaucer draws a funny figure of himself, a small man, hooded, a little beard, eyes used to gazing to the side – the portrait of an innocuous spy, one might say. Lydgate celebrates him in his Life of the Virgin Mary as one who used to “ammend and correct the wrong traces of my rude pen.” Kind and generous to his younger contemporaries, he had foreign admirers, too. The historian Froissart praised him as a diplomat. Eustache Deschamps wrote a laudatory ballad to him as a translator. In the mid-sixteenth century Lilius Giraldus, the eminent Italian humanist, recognized his accomplishments. Chaucer’s colourful life is as captivating as his poetry. Here is a somewhat abridged and adapted version of Chaucer’s biography reconstructed by Michael Schmidt. Chaucer was born in London. His father, John Chaucer, was citizen and vintner in London, himself son of Robert le Chaucer who was collector of customs on wine. John Chaucer served Lionel, son of Edward III, later Duke of Clarence. Chaucer’s mother, Agnes, outlived John and in 1367 married again. Well placed as the Chaucers were with regard to the court, they remained a merchant family. Despite patronage, Geoffrey was never assimilated into courtly life, nor did he – as Gower did – stand aloof from the world. He was a man of affairs first and a poet after. 105
It is unlikely that he attended university, though he was a member of the Inns of Court. As a young man, some report, he was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. In 1357 he received a suit of livery as a member of Lionel’s household. In his late teens – it was 1359 – he entered military service, was sent to France and taken prisoner near Rennes or Reims. By March 1360 he was freed on payment of a ransom. Some believe that during his captivity he translated part of The Romance of the Rose. Philippa Chaucer, his wife, was awarded an annuity of 10 marks for life in 1366. She was born Roet, daughter of Sir Payn Roet, a Hainault knight, and sister of the third wife of John of Gaunt. This helps explain, if virtue is not enough, Gaunt’s long patronage of the poet and Chaucer’s familiarity with Wycliffe, whom Gaunt (fatefully) patronized as well. The King gave Chaucer an annuity of 20 marks in 1367 as dilectus valettus noster [our beloved valet] and by the end of 1368 he was an esquire. Six years later he was granted a pitcher of wine per day (commuted to a money gift). He rejoined the army, and in 1370 went abroad on public duty of some kind. He must have been successful because other commissions followed. In 1372 he spent a year away, part of it in Genoa, arranging the selection of an English port for the Genoese trade. He went to Florence and perhaps to Padua. Petrarch died in 1374, but it has been suggested that Chaucer was introduced to him in Italy, at the wedding of Violante, daughter of the Duke of Milan, with the Duke of Clarence and that it is not impossible that Boccaccio was also at the party. Back home, Chaucer leased Aldgate gatehouse; he was prospering. Later in the year he was made controller of customs for wools, skins and hides in the Port of London, with an extra £10 pension from John of Gaunt. How did he conduct his duties and manage to write as well? In 1377 he was back on diplomatic business in Flanders and France. He was in France once more when Edward III died and Richard came to the throne in 1378, and then went to Italy, on a mission to Bernabo Visconti. The controllership of petty customs was added to his duties in 1384, and two years later he sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire of Kent. He lived for a time in Kent, where around 1386 he began 106
planning The Canterbury Tales. Then the wheel of fortune began to turn: during Gaunt’s absence in Spain the Duke of Gloucester rose, Gaunt was eclipsed and Chaucer lost his controllership. In 1387, Philippa died. The next year he assigned his pensions and property to someone else, a sign of financial distress. Then in 1389 the Duke of Gloucester fell, Gaunt was reinstated, and Chaucer became clerk of works to the King for two years. He was also a commissioner responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames. He was rising again but it was hard. In 1390 he fell among the same thieves twice in a day and was robbed of public money, but excused from repaying it. In that year and the next he held the forestership of North Petherton Park, Somerset, and in 1394 his pension was refreshed by Richard II. But he remained needy. His third royal patron, Henry IV, added forty marks to the pension Richard had restored. Henry gave him a purple robe trimmed with fur, and he felt secure enough to lease a house in the garden of St Mary’s, Westminster, close by the palace. He enjoyed it briefly. On 25 October 1400 he died and was buried in the Abbey, in the chapel of St Benedict. Poets’ Corner came into being, with Chaucer as cornerstone and first tenant. Chaucer’s literary career has been conventionally divided into three periods: 1. The French period includes the years in which the young poet writes love poems imitating French models. He also endeavours to produce an “augmented” translation of Roman de la Rose, which is left unfinished. The Book of the Duchess or The Death of Blanche (1369) is a narrative poem written in the dream allegory convention. Composed in octosyllables, the poem tells about the vision of the poet who meets a black knight in the wood; the latter laments the death of his beautiful lady. 2. The Italian period marked a great step forward in the poet’s career. During his missions in Italy, Chaucer may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio. From Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, Chaucer learnt (a) the real vigour of poetical genius, (b) an exquisite sense of form and (c) the art of story-telling. • The House of Fame was written under the influence of Divina Commedia. 107
Book I is a discussion on dreams; the poet finds himself in a temple of glass; on its walls the story of Aeneas is engraved. “Then I saw” is the leitmotiv of Book I, reminiscent of Dante’s cliché. Book II tells how a golden eagle seizes the poet and bears him to the House of Fame. The poet is a dull man who must learn what love is and the self-important bird has a didactic tone. Book III presents the House of Fame which is located on a rock of clear ice. The place is furnished with the statues of Homer, Statius, Virgil and Ovid. The Goddess of Fame grants her favour on a crowd of petitioners begging for fame. Then, the poet is taken to the house of Rumours. The conclusion of the poem is that Fame is as important as Love. Chaucer’s novelty in handling the conventional pattern of allegory is his irony and self-irony. • The Parliament of Fowls is a dream allegory written in a seven-line stanza rhyming ababbcc known as rhyme royal. The poem is written in celebration of St. Valentine’s Day. The birds gather at Venus’s temple to choose their mates in accordance with Nature’s rule. Elements of social satire appear in the parallel between various kinds of birds and the representatives of various social strata: the goose embodies the practical bourgeois, while the falcon embodies the proud courtier. • The Legend of Good Women is a collection of nine stories about famous and unhappy ladies. The stories are borrowed from Ovid and Boccaccio. The Prologue explains the punishment inflicted on the poet by Venus for his having written about a faithless woman in Troilus and Criseyde. • Troilus and Criseyde is not the last in chronological order but the most important work of Chaucer’s “Italian period”. It deals with an episode taken from the Greek mythology via Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. The characters are no longer abstract concepts with allegorical function, but psychological entities. The actions and the plot evolve according to their reasons, their desires. That is why Troilus and Criseyde is considered to be the first English psychological novel, and Chaucer is often compared with Shakespeare as a great explorer of man’s psyche. 108
Criseyde is a faithless lover and yet she is aware of her weakness; Troilus evolves from carelessness to fervent love and then to disappointment and self-destruction. The poem was later used by Shakespeare as a source for his Troilus and Cressida. Woman betrayed, woman betraying – are the alternative images of woman Chaucer deals with in The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. The image of woman betrayed was associated with the examples that make up Ovid’s Heroides, the collection of fictional letters supposedly addressed by women of classical story and legend to communicate their anguish and despair to the men who had deceived, deserted or simply neglected them. The Heroides, like other works of Ovid, was read and commented on as a school-text throughout the Middle Ages. (Jonathan Bate justly claims that throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Ovid was the most popular writer in the Western cultures.) The names of Ovid’s heroines became symbols of unhappy love in the writings of the period. But in uneasy contrast to this picture of woman as pathetic victim of male carelessness and duplicity stands the picture of woman as temptress and destroyer of men. The contradictory images of woman betrayed and woman betraying are likewise inherited from Ovid. The first two books of the Latin poet’s Ars Amatoria teach men how to seduce women, and how to hold their affections once won. In the third book, however, Ovid announces his intention to give parallel instruction to women, so that they may go into battle on equal terms with men. To those who might object to his intention, Ovid replies that not all women are bad, citing Penelope, Laodamis, Alcestis, and Evadne as examples of selfless devotion to their husbands. What is more, men deceive women more often than women deceive men. Like Ovid, Chaucer constructs a two-fold type of woman in his works, and The Legend of Good Women, which follows the Heroides’ model in presenting women as betrayed victims, answers the picture of woman as betrayer in Troilus and Criseyde. 3. The English period: The Canterbury Tales Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales follows a pattern known as “frame-story” which had already been used by Boccaccio in his Decameron and which was later used by Margaret of Navarre in her Heptameron, too. At a time when the plot had not yet been discovered 109
as a literary device, the “frame” was a pretext for grouping together several stories. The work is made up of a “general prologue”, in which the characters are introduced to the readers, and of the tales of the pilgrims, preceded by their own prologues, called “lesser prologues”. The English custom of organizing yearly pilgrimages to the tomb of Thomas-a-Beckett (murdered in 1170) in Canterbury suggested to Chaucer a broad plan for his tales. The pilgrims were twenty-nine in number, Chaucer himself being the thirtieth. They met at Tabbard Inn at Southwark quite accidentally. The inn-keeper proposed that each pilgrim should tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and another two stories on the way back; the best one was to receive a square dinner at the expense of the others. Out of the 120 tales planned only twenty-four were written. ▪ In a way, Chaucer is the first modern English creator: he has a special way of handling IRONY, which is definitely a modern feature. His characters are described one by one; the details are those that would strike the eye of a fellow-traveller. The deliberately contrived disorder, giving an air of naturalness and spontaneity, is another proof of Chaucer’s originality. The author as a fellow-pilgrim naively notes what he sees or learns about the others in casual order. It is Chaucer’s assumed naivety as an observer that turns him into a great ironist. Ironic storytelling whose subject is storytelling is, according to Harold Bloom, pretty much Boccaccio’s invention, and the purpose of this breakthrough was to free stories from didacticism and moralism, so that the listener or reader, not the storyteller, became responsible for their use, for good or for ill. Since Chaucer was a greater ironist and even a stronger writer than Boccaccio, his transformation of the Decameron into the Canterbury Tales was a radical one. The image of life as a pilgrimage, not so much to Jerusalem but to judgment, fuses with Chaucer’s organizing principle of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, with 30 pilgrims telling stories as they go. Yet the poem is immensely secular, almost unfailingly ironic. Its narrator is Chaucer himself reduced to a total simplicity: he has zest, endless good nature, believes everything he hears, and has an amazing capacity for admiring even the dreadful qualities displayed by some of his 29 companions. 110
Chaucer revises Boccaccio by seeing that the tale each pilgrim told could tell a tale about its teller. The tales thus fill in some of the gaps left by Chaucer the pilgrim. Chaucer is indeed a great feminist and ironist at the same time. Jill Mann argues that in assigning the tale of Melibee to himself, Chaucer identifies himself with the values it embodies, and with the centrality of woman’s role: Melibee learns from his wife Prudence what “great patience” means: he submits himself to his wife and to patience in one and the same process; his patience must match hers. But Chaucer also allots himself the romance of Sir Thopas, which is interrupted by the Host’s violent protests that he can bear no more of it. Chaucer mildly excuses himself by saying that it is the best poem he knows. This sublimely comic scene is a brilliantly conceived articulation of Chaucer’s relationship to his own poetic creation. “The Poet is the Maker; he is the creator of a cosmos; and Chaucer is the creator of the whole world of his creatures”, wrote G. K. Chesterton back in 1932. But Chaucer does not remain external to his creation, the hidden puppet-master pulling its strings. Instead, he enters it, placing himself on the same fictional level as the other pilgrims: he enters it only to be hooted off the stage by his own literary creations. Chaucer had already experimented two different tones of voice in The Parliament of Fowls. His two voices (i.e. the anonymous voice, the conventional literary man’s voice, on the one hand, and the voice of a vividly present persona calling itself Chaucer, on the other hand) exploit the dramatic effects of the most serious technical limitation of Middle English literature: its dependence on oral recitation. The frontispiece to the Cambridge manuscript of Troilus and Cryseyde shows Chaucer reading the poem to Richard II, the royal family and other members of the English court. Some of the younger courtiers are chatting or flirting, and they do not seem to be paying much attention to what Chaucer is saying. A public reading of any length tends to be monotonous at any time. Chaucer’s brilliant solution of the problem was to include his audience in the narrative by direct appeals to them to confirm or assist his own interpretations. Next, Chaucer complemented his pseudo-chorus of an oral audience by gradually evolving his own pseudo-narrator – well meaning, a little 111
thick in the head, without any personal experience of sexual love, who was and was not Chaucer himself. (Langland, in Piers Plowman, had also exploited the literary convention of the pseudo-narrator that originated in the practice of oral delivery). ▪ Chaucer’s characters belong to almost all the social strata and classes: – the Knight and the Squire represent the nobility; – the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Parson and the Nuns represent the clergy; – the Merchant, the Clerk of Oxford, the Doctor of Physics, the Wife of Bath, the Cook, the Sailor, the Dyer, the Weaver and the Miller represent the middle-class and the townsfolk; – the Sergeant of Law and the Summoner represent the law. All these individuals representing every class from Plowman to Knight recreate the social scene of Chaucer’s age. They are more than a framework: the poet minutely presents their habits of thinking, prejudices, professional bias, familiar ideas, personal idiosyncrasies. Chaucer also gives us a vivid description of the chromatic elements in the garments of various characters: – the Knight is dressed in black and white; – the Squire is dressed in red and white; – the Yeoman is dressed in green and white. The embroideries on the Squire’s shirt resemble a “meadow bright”. Each and every character is a coherent entity: the outer appearance of the characters is in accordance with their inner disposition and with their stories. The characters are portrayed by means of physical details, the language they speak and the content or type of the tale they tell. The Summoner, for instance, has both a very ugly character and a repulsive outer appearance; the Miller has a wart on his nose and on top of that wart he has a tuft of hair. He has a reddish skin and hair and, at his sight, the children usually run away. The Knight is a wise and distinguished man. He praises truth, honour, courtesy, generosity. His romance about Palamon and Arcite was later used as a source by Shakespeare and John Fletcher in their collaborative play The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). 112
The Monk is fat, he likes worldly pleasures, he likes to eat much; he is a man of fashion, his coat is trimmed with fine grey fur, and he has greyhounds swift as birds. Speaking about Chaucer’s characters, Harold Bloom claims that his men and women begin to develop a sense of self-consciousness. The Canterbury Tales anticipates depth psychology in contrast to the moral psychology of the literature written throughout the entire Middle Ages. Bloom goes as far as to claim that without characters like the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner “there would be less life in literature and less literature in life”. The Wife of Bath, Alison is one of Chaucer’s most original contributions to the portraits of the pilgrims. Married five times, she is still exuberant, healthy, enjoying life to the maximum. William Blake considered her the Female Will incarnate. The Wife’s prologue to her tale is a kind of confession, but even more a triumphant defence or apologia. The first word of her prologue is “experience”, which she cites as her authority. To be the widow of five successive husbands, whether six hundred years ago or now, gives a woman a certain aura, as the Wife is well aware. What is awesome about the wife is her endless zest and vitality: sexual, verbal, polemical. Despite her five late husbands she appears to be childless and says nothing about the matter. Her sheer exuberance of being has no literary antecedent and could not be matched until Shakespeare created Falstaff. Both the Wife and Falstaff mockingly echo the learning of Saint Paul from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which he called on Christianity to persist in their vocation. Both Falstaff and the Wife are perseverant characters. The Pardoner who sells indulgences is Chaucer’s greatest masterpiece of character drawing, implying a whole world of moral hypocrisy. Harold Bloom claims that the Pardoner is the prototype of the villain from whom Shakespeare’s Iago (in Othello) and Edmund (in King Lear) descend. Like Iago, the Pardoner combines the gifts of dramatist and storyteller, actor and director; and, again like Iago, the Pardoner is a supreme moral psychologist. The Pardoner, Iago and Edmund cast a spell over their victims. All of them openly proclaim their deceptiveness, but only to us (in the case of Shakespeare’s 113
dramatic characters) or, in the Pardoner’s case, to the Canterbury pilgrims as our surrogates. Chaucer’s irony is best expressed in the portrait of the Prioress. Her portrait is built in sentences going in pairs and the second sentence is always introduced by the conjunction but in a dichotomy of appearance versus essence: – she had a perfect command of French, but not the French of Paris; – she was well-bred, but her good breeding meant that she let no morsel fall from her lips; – she was very piteous, but her pity concerned mice and dogs (not men); – she had a small mouth, but a large forehead; – she was a nun, but her brooch was engraved with the Latin proverb Amor vincit omnia (instead of Labor vincit omnia). Only three characters are treated without any touch of irony, namely: – the Knight, who embodies the highest ideals of chivalry and courtesy; – the Poor Parson, who displays genuine Christian behaviour; – the Plowman, who is an honest, good-hearted, hard-working fellow. According to Jill Mann, in Chaucer’s poetical works woman is at the centre instead of at the periphery and she becomes the norm against which all human behaviour is to be measured. The Canterbury Tales, for all its variety of mode and genre, contains not a single example of the story-type that embodies its ideals in the central figure of a male hero. Instead, the tales that mediate serious ideals are focused on a series of women: Constance, Griselda, Prudence, Cecilia. The male hero enters only in the burlesque form of Sir Thopas, to be unceremoniously dismissed in favour of the tale that celebrates the idealized wisdom of a woman, Chaucer’s tale of Melibee. The twentieth century interest in women as a serious subject makes it possible to acknowledge that they were an equally serious subject for Chaucer throughout his career. The tales go in pairs. The Friar, for instance, tells a story in connection with the corrupt character of the Summoner. Taking the 114
Friar’s story as an offence, the Summoner tells a story about a corrupt Friar. ▪ In the twenty-four tales, Chaucer employed several literary species such as: – the courtly romance (in the Knight’s tale); – the fabliau (in the Miller’s tale and in the Reeve’s tale); – the hagiographic legend of saints’ lives (the Second Nun’s tale and the Prioress’s tale); – the fable (the Nun’s Tale); – the sermon (the Parson’s tale). Jill Mann has recently argued that the “dialogue between text and reader” means that a writer’s work is realized in different forms, not only by each century, but almost by each individual reader and that “this is the relation between text and audience that Chaucer represents in the Canterbury Tales, where the pilgrims react to each story in terms of their personal experience and interests – the Reeve feels personally affronted by a story about a carpenter, the Host wishes his wife was like Griselda or Prudence, the Franklin wishes his son resembled the Squire. The Friar and the Summoner use their stories in the service of mutual aggression; the Pardoner thinks he can use his one to make a fast buck.” Chaucer seems to anticipate the socalled reader-response criticism which lay emphasis on the reader in the triangle author – text – reader. According to Bateson, in a country that suddenly finds itself depopulated, procreation becomes one of the essentials of the society’s survival. That is why the topic to which the pilgrims keep on returning is love and marriage. That is why the General Prologue includes a hymn to the regenerative power of sun and the rebirth of the dead year. Human love thus carries with it remnants of the half-buried pre-Christian fertility cults. As for Chaucer’s characters, William Blake rightly noticed that they “remain forever unaltered”, i.e. prototypes or archetypes. ▪ In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer established the prosodic pattern of decasyllabic couplets, i.e. rhyming iambic pentameters, which was later used by Marlowe in Hero and Leander. ▪ Chaucer’s style can be described as simple, natural, direct, ironic. Chaucer’s self-irony is obvious when the author himself is 115
hushed by the other pilgrims when he wants to tell a story in the form of an epic romance. ▪ Chaucer’s language is extremely rich. He used words from both Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon. This mingling of the two languages led to the birth of modern English. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Chaucer “found the English language brick and left it marble”. Edmund Spenser called him “the English Tityrus” and “the well of English undefiled”. Chaucer made a great step ahead in combining conventional medieval literary patterns and traditions with a profound interest in the men and women of the society of his time. The fact that Chaucer is an evergreen, popular poet is proved by the numerous recent critical studies dedicated to him. And I shall emphasize that these studies keep adding endless interpretations to the poet’s medieval texts. And the fact that Chaucer’s text can produce never ending meanings is yet another proof of his greatness and immortality. Feminist critics have been extremely busy in reshaping Chaucer’s interest in woman. Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1989), Priscilla Martin’s Chaucer’s Women (1991), Jill Mann’s Feminizing Chaucer (1991, 2002), and Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s Chaucer and the Fiction of Gender (1992) set a new trend in Chaucer criticism. And Blackwell, the reputed publishing house in Oxford, issued no less than three major reference books dedicated to Chaucer in a short space of time: Companion to Chaucer edited by Peter Brown (2000), Chaucer (2001) and A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006) edited by Corinne Saunders.
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THE RENAISSANCE
The fifteenth century, from a literary viewpoint, is dominated by Chaucer’s imitators (such as John Lydgate, still in fashion at the end of the 16th century); by the vogue of the popular ballads; by the development of the medieval drama; by Thomas Malory’s prose romance Morte Darthur; by the activity of William Caxton – the first English printer. The gap between the age of the Ricardian poetry and the golden generation of Elizabethan sonneteers and dramatists is filled in by one hundred and fifty years of almost continuous wars against France and Scotland, of civil wars, uprisings, anarchy, and dynastic changes. Political stability is achieved only during the reign of successive Tudor rulers. The reformation of the church during the reign of Henry VIII, the economic growth and the political stability of the country were followed by military victories against Spain abroad and sheer dictatorship at home, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This is the general background of the flourishing Elizabethan literature, represented by poetry, prose and drama. The first English poet to write a sonnet was Thomas Wyatt in the first half of the sixteenth century; he introduced the Petrarchan sonnet (two abba quatrains and two tercets rhyming cdc cdc or cde cde). Several of Wyatt’s sonnets are actually translations of Petrarch’s sonnets. Petrarch’s sonnets concern themselves with the poet’s devotion to the virtuous and beautiful woman Laura and gave rise to collections of sonnets by other poets all over Europe dedicated to other women or other subjects than love. The first collection of English sonnets dedicated to a single woman was John Soowthern’s Pandora of 1584. But it was Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) which really became the model to be followed. It gave rise to 117
sequences of sonnets by Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and many others. Between Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and 1600, sixteen sequences were published. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Wyatt’s great admirer, soon changed the Petrarchan pattern into three quatrains plus a couplet, which was to be later used by Shakespeare. EDMUND SPENSER Spenser accomplished the synthesis of all Latinist Renaissance and of the French and Italian developments of the last few centuries. He was regarded as the New Poet of a revolutionary age. The strongest influence exerted on the English sonnet was not Petrarch’s influence, but that of his French imitators such as Clément Marot, Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard. The latter was the leader of the so-called “La Pléiade” and claimed the Vlach origin of his ancestors. We know Edmund Spenser as a man less well than we know Sidney; and probably, as a man, he was less worth knowing. His work has, nevertheless, excited a wider and more enduring interest. Spenser started as a poet by rendering du Bellay’s sonnets literally, without rhyme. His first important work, The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) is a collection of twelve eclogues corresponding to the twelve months of the year. (The eclogue is a poem in the form of a pastoral dialogue. Its origin is the Sicilian folk song; the Greek poet Theocritus – who lived in the third century BC – was later imitated by Virgil in his Georgics). Spenser proved to be a great innovator, using 13 verse patterns in his twelve poems, 5 of which (patterns) were his own inventions. Amoretti is Spenser’s collection of 88 love sonnets. His love is called “sweet warrior”, in imitation of Petrarch’s “dolce guerrierra”. In two sonnets he identifies his heroine with the Petrarchan or NeoPlatonic idea of beauty. Spenser’s sonnets also deal with the conceit of immortality through art (Sonnets 27, 75, 79). The sonnet cycle is concluded with Epithalamion, a poem written in celebration of his own wedding, combining beautiful imagery and spiritual joy. The sonnets substantially readjust the Patriarchal model by seeing the mistress not as an unattainable image of perfection, but as a creature reflecting, and sometimes clouding, the glory of her Divine 118
Creator. The sonnets chart the passage of time from the spring of one year to the Lent and Easter of the next (Sonnet 68 opens with a direct address to the risen Christ and ends with a pious reminder to the beloved that “love is the lesson which the Lord us taught”). In some senses Epithalamion can be seen as the climactic celebration of the courtship pursued in the sonnets. Spenser’s other nuptial ode, Prothalamion (1596), written in honour of the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, is both more formal and more public in tone. It commemorates the journey of the noble brides along a nymph-lined rural Thames to “merry London”, but, on observing certain of the sights of the capital, it also sees fit to introduce a personal complaint about “old woes”. In Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1595) although the poetic swain, Colin, adulates the “presence faultless” of the great “shepherdess, that Cynthia hight” (a virginal stand-in for Queen Elizabeth) and although he admires Cynthia’s beauty, power, mercy, and divinity, when he is asked why he has abandoned the court of this paragon he is forced to admit that he has witnessed “enormities” during his stay: Where each one seeks with malice and with strife, To thrust down other into foul disgrace, Himself to raise: and he doth soonest rise That best can handle his deceitful wit, In subtle shifts, and finest slights devise, Either by slandering his well deemed named, Through leasing lewd, and fained forgery. In E. A. J. Honigmann’s opinion the “pleasant Willy” in “The tears of the Muses” and “Aetion” in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” are allusions to Shakespeare, who had come to be considered the leading Elizabethan poet after the printing of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in the previous years. In 1596 Spenser wrote Four Hymns in honour of Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. (The Platonic doctrine had been revived during the Renaissance by Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. It says that one ascends from a specific embodiment 119
of beauty to a contemplation of beauty as an end in itself; the idea is divine and its contemplation is religious.) Spenser speaks in a specifically Christian manner of divine love made manifest by the career on Earth of Christ and of the beauty and wisdom of God which transcends anything visible on Earth. The Faerie Queene, composed between 1589 and 1596, remained an unfinished project. It was an attempt to bring together in one rich pattern a vast set of cultural traditions such as: – medieval allegorical tradition; – medieval romance; – Plato’s and the Italian Neo-Platonic doctrines; – Renaissance Humanism; – Protestant idealism; – Malory’s Morte Darthur; – English history, geography, and folklore; – Elizabethan patriotism and political thought. Spenser’s immediate model was Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the masterpiece of knight–errantry, but the poet also imitated phrases, verbal patterns, and knightly images from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (which he knew in Italian), and he directly borrowed characters, encounters, and incidents, absorptions which would have been taken as laudable examples of intertextuality by a Renaissance audience. Ariosto’s and Tasso’s lengthy, digressive poems are belated monuments to the revival, or possibly, the reinvention of chivalry in Italy. Spenser may have dispensed with Ariosto’s specific references to Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saracens and with the setting of Tasso’s epic at the time of the First Crusade, but, despite the deliberate vagueness of time and place in his own poem, he was to prove himself equally responsive to the themes, codes, and landscapes of medieval chivalric romance. Though Spenser looked back on the past from an essentially Renaissance perspective, and with modern Italian models in mind, his allegory and his language suggest a more immediate response to native literary traditions. Twenty-four books were planned, but only six were completed. The seventh book contains only the first two “Mutability Cantos”. In the “Mutability Cantos” Spenser declared that the gods 120
themselves are subject to change. To the Elizabethans, the gods of the pagan world became great natural forces – forces indeed greater than human – but yet within the jurisdiction, and subject to the rule, of the Goddess of Nature. In his subtle combination of the Ovidian theme of protean change, Spenser drew on the Pythagorean part of the Metamorphoses and on the fifth book of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura to embody a vision which could belong only to his own age. The Faerie Queene is a story of chivalrous adventure in a world of marvels, with a plot slowly moving, with stanzas which are both pictorial and musical. A reading of The Faerie Queene demands a response both to a literal meaning and to a series of allegorical constructions (historical, moral, mystical, socio-political). Spenser himself called The Faerie Queene a “continued allegory or dark conceit”. “The whole poem forms an intricate code that can be deciphered only by turning back to the Platonic mysticism and to religious dogma. However, his aim was to transform abstract, barren philosophy into what his fellow-poet Fulke Greville called “pregnant images of Life”. In other words, Spenser aspired to create a philosophy of life that could be revealed by truthful and persistent participation in the more or less cryptic universe of writing. Book I is an allegory of the relationship between Man and God; Book II – an allegory of the relationship between Man and himself; Book III – an allegory of the relationship between Man and mankind. The allegory is interwoven on several levels – moral, religious and political. The unfinished seventh book was to deal with Constancy, thus paying a tribute to the motto of Queen Elizabeth semper eadem (‘always the same’). The queen herself is identified with Gloriana, the epitome of virtue and wisdom. Spenser further identifies Elizabeth with Astraea, the Virgin Goddess of the Spring, with Cynthia or Diana, the Goddess of chastity, and with Britomart, the martial maiden. The latter identification echoes the 1588 episode in which Elizabeth appeared clad in armour in front of the English troops gathered at Tilbury during the battle against the Spanish armada. Although Spenser had modelled Britomart on a parallel figure in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and adapted her name from that of a character in a poem by Virgil, he was also anxious to suggest to his 121
readers that here was a truly British heroine who had actively assumed the port of Mars. Elizabeth is effectively present in each of the six massive books of The Faerie Queene. She is the “Magnificent Empress” to whom the poem is dedicated (or, rather, “consecrated”); she is Gloriana, “that greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie land”, who is the fount of chivalry, the “flower of grace and chastity”, and the ultimate focus of each of the knightly quests that Spenser sets out to describe; she is the chaste Belphoebe who puts Braggadocchio to flight in Book II and who rescues Amoret from Corflambo in Book IV; above all, her qualities are to be recognized as informing and inspiring the complex expositions of “moral virtue” pursued as the poem develops towards its intended (but unrealized) climax. It is no wonder that recent Neo-Marxist critics have termed Spenser “the Queen’s arse-kissing poet”. Although a remarkable synthesis of Elizabethan culture, The Faerie Queene is considered by David Daiches a “blind alley” of English literature. Its content has never had imitators; however, the Spenserian stanza, more complex than Chaucer’s “rhyme royal” (eight iambic pentameters and an alexandrine rhyming ababbcbcc) was later used by Milton, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and others. Spenser is a unique “moment” in English literature, one that was to influence so deeply the romantic generation starting with Blake and Wordsworth and ending with Byron and Shelley. Spenser is one of the most learned of all English poets who lived in a time when Cambridge was a hot bed of religious controversies. He created English poetic diction, recreated English prosody, and, according to some historians, lifted English from linguistic anarchy. Spenser is the poet of melancholy and joy, almost obsessed by the idea of a golden past. PHILIP SIDNEY Though Spenser was two years older than Sidney, Sidney’s work was done before Spenser had published anything of comparable value. Sidney was the embodiment of the perfect knight and lettered courtier; he knew the Ancients; he spoke French, Italian, and Spanish. He wrote both prose and poetry. 122
In order to better understand the poetry both of Spenser and of Sidney, one should not overlook the impact of dozens of “courtesy books” teaching young people the way to success in life. The most interesting was Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (translated into English in 1561). Among the qualities required of a courtier, along with horsemanship, fencing, dancing and the like, was the ability to write a love song. George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589) is the most elaborate English textbook of this aspect of courtliness. Puttenham’s object was “to make of a rude rimer, a learned and a Courtly Poet”. In Puttenham’s opinion, poetry was a craft, like that of the musician or an accomplishment like that of horsemanship. Sidney was clearly influenced by Castiglione and Puttenham. He became the embodiment of decorum, i.e. the conscious cultivation by the individual of a behaviour appropriate to the nuances of each social occasion. “Style is a garment”, “the image of man”, only as the body is the garment of the soul, said Puttenham: the apparel proclaims the man and does not disguise him; hence, the English sonneteers of the court both adopted and mocked at the clichés of Petrarchan descriptions. Some time between 1577 and 1580 Sidney wrote for his sister a prose romance; an “idle work”, partly written in her presence and partly sent to her sheet by sheet. In 1581 or 1582, as we know from a letter of Fulke Greville’s, he began to re-write it in a more serious spirit and on a much larger scale, but left off in the middle of a sentence in Book III. (Greville later wrote and published Sidney’s first biography.) Arcadia is a prose romance simply intended to amuse the poet’s younger sister, the future Countess of Pembroke. The Arcadia resembles nothing so much as an elaborate Renaissance pleasure-garden, endlessly and symbolically varied with floral knots and mazes, lodges an bowers, topiary and trellis, the familiar and the rare. It swerves as a vital key to the dense interweaving of novelty and tradition in English culture in the late sixteenth century, but the very intensity and scale of its artifice have tended to dispirit those modern readers predisposed to prefer the kinship of the wilder touches of nature to the arts of formal cultivation. 123
Sidney’s Arcadia exhibits the sophistication to which much courtly Elizabethan prose fiction aspired. Although Spenser was an incomparably greater poet, Sidney was the one who wrote better sonnets, because Sidney was a court poet in the full sense, a living part of the life he celebrated, while Spenser described it from the outside. Astrophil and Stella is a collection of 108 sonnets plus various songs dedicated to Penelope Devereux, the sister of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. It speaks about a hopeless love. C. S. Lewis draws our attention to the fact that the first thing to grasp about the sonnet sequence is that it is not a way of telling a story. It is a form which exists for the sake of prolonged lyrical meditation, chiefly on love but relieved from time to time by excursions into public affairs, literary criticism, compliment, or what you will. External events – a quarrel, a parting, an illness, a stolen kiss – are every now and then mentioned to provide themes for the meditation. Scholars draw a distinction between the first thirty-two sonnets and the rest. In Sonnet 33 the “real” (that is, the historical) passion is supposed to begin. The change coincides with the marriage of Penelope Devereux to Lord Rich. In Greek, “astrophil” means star-lover and in Latin “stella” means star. This very difference between the two classical languages from which the names of the lovers are derived suggests the irreconcilable nature of their relationship (comparable with the situation of Ion Barbu’s characters in Riga Crypto şi Lapona Enigel). Sidney acknowledges that he is working in a well-tried Petrarchan tradition, but sometimes he is ironic; unlike Petrarch who, at the end of the cycle, feels as if he has passed through a purifying spiritual experience, Sidney is aware of his failure. While Petrarch’s Laura remains coolly unresponsive, Sidney’s Astrophil somehow still holds to the hope that his Stella might still favour him. Astrophil and Stella is both an extended dialogue with the conventions of the Italian sonneteers and a varied Elizabethan narrative which, by means of a constantly changing viewpoint, considers the developing conflict between private and public obligation. Stella is from the first the un-giving beloved and the generous inspirer of poetry, the object of the poem and the provoker of 124
it, the dumbfounder and the giver of eloquence. The opening sonnet proclaims the ambiguities of the sequence as a whole. In Sonnet 34 the potential confusions and conflicts between public statement and private silence are expressed in the form of an internal dialogue. Although Stella is portrayed as the enabler of poetry, she is also the star, “the only Planet of my light”, who in Sonnet 68 seeks to quench the star-lover’s “noble fire”. Throughout the sequence, the “noble” concerns of a soldier and courtier intrude only to be frustrated by a woman who commands chivalric service and who exercises a sometime whimsical authority over those who willingly give her service. She who elevates by virtue of her heavenly nature also degrades. “That Stella’s star-like authority seems at times to parallel that of the Queen, of whose enigmatic political behaviour Sidney complained in his letters, is scarcely coincidental”, claims C. S. Lewis. Sidney’s sonnets mingle natural tenderness and humour, which plays over the surface of his despair, and the colloquial phrase, giving an impression both of sincerity and control. The nineteenth century critics wrongly thought that all these poets had to be really in love and addressing to a real mistress. In fact, everything was a mere illusion or convention: Sidney’s marriage to Frances Walsingham in 1583, before the Astrophil cycle of sonnets had even been completed, seems to have been a happy one. The Defence of Poesie answers the Puritan objections to imaginative literature. Sidney draws his arguments from the Italian Humanist critics; he also frequently quotes Aristotle and Horace. It is the first attempt in English to build a coherent system of arguments about a) the nature, b) the function, c)the possibilities, d) the future of poetry. Sidney’s own taste is that of a chivalrous, heroic, and romantic person. He thinks “high flying liberty of conceit” proper to a poet. Epic is the “best and most accomplished” (i.e. most perfect) of the kinds. He thinks peace may be hostile to poetry, for it is the companion of camps. Sidney explicitly dissents from the popular Platonic doctrine of Inspiration. He is not a man following a “Movement”. He is the man in whom the “Golden” poetics, as by right, become most fully articulate. 125
Sidney’s defence of poetry contends that where there is no pretence in truth, there can be no imposture: “now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lies”. The poet is the maker of a better, ideal world. Poetry is a better moral teacher than philosophy or history. The lively image created by the poet is contrasted with the dullness of historians and philosophers. Put in highest terms, poetry was inspired, representing eternal truths which might be breathed into the poet by supernatural powers. Decorum, or the right adaptation of means to ends, is a key concept in Sidney’s poetics. “The end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, these skills must serve to bring that forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest.” The chosen subject was the first and principal means towards his end, which was the conversion of the readers’ whole mind. The problem of finding fitting means was however chiefly a problem of style. The three style or modes of writing – high, middle and low – which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages would be appropriate not so much to given subjects as to given intentions. The choice of subject was however the poet’s first step towards presenting his central, or governing, idea. According to Sidney’s theory of form and style, the poet’s purpose is not to create a “golden world” but to “move” his readers. Various forms and styles attain variable degrees of persuasion and “moving”. The Arcadia, Sidney’s long prose romance interspersed with poems and pastoral elegies, his royal entertainment The Lady of May, and his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella all suggest processes of negotiation, persuasion, self-projection, and self-fashioning which inter-relate affairs of state with affairs of the heart. Sidney is as much a statesman and military man as he is a poet. SHAKESPEARE’S (AND MARLOWE’S) NON-DRAMATIC POETRY Shakespeare’s career as a poet starts in 1593, with Venus and Adonis, “the first heir of my invention”, dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton. Written in sixain stanzas (ab ab cc), it combines the influence of the classics, of Italian and of recent French literature. 126
Marlowe and Spenser precede Shakespeare in the handling of classical themes. Spenser borrows Lucretius’s idea of Mutability, of the transience of love and earthly happiness and Ovid’s answer to Mutability, which was Metamorphosis. The gods themselves are subject to change in Spenser’s Mutability Cantos: the ancient gods of the pagan world become to the Elizabethans great natural forces. The Ovidian theme of protean change is also tackled by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare’s debut poem is apparently written as a response to, and in imitation of, Marlowe’s Ovidian romance. Marlowe (1564-1593), the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, took his M. A. in Cambridge. He lived an adventurous life: he was a soldier in the Netherlands, and a secret agent of the English crown. He was murdered for his would-be heretical or atheistic views, at the order of the Privy Council (the Queen’s secret police). Marlowe’s non-dramatic poetry is best represented by his last work, Hero and Leander, often compared with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (exit Marlowe, enter Shakespeare!) and John Keats’s Endymion. Written by a professed mocker and scorner, this Ovidian romance may be regarded as an anti-Spenserian manifesto. The two lovers are human in a way unknown to the earlier writers: they are real-life human beings engaged in the warring of love and discord. Marlowe avoids the presentation of the denouement, but Ovid in Heroides also skips the tragical conclusion. The lovers are included in the circle of comedy: they are both beautiful and absurd, sympathetic yet also ridiculous. In this, as in their battle of wits, they anticipate the lovers of Shakespeare’s comedy. Not only did Shakespeare imitate Marlowe’s poem in Venus and Adonis, but he also repeatedly referred to it in As You Like It, in which Rosalind, Orlando and Phoebe all quote Hero and Leander. Ben Jonson wrote about Marlowe’s “mighty line”. Marlowe’s vigorous verse is the iambic pentameter, the blank verse inherited from Henry Howard. He transformed it from a stiff and monotonous into a flexible and varied meter; he reduced the number of endstopped lines in favour of the run-on lines; he mingled iambic feet 127
with various other feet. Shakespeare and Milton further contributed to the flexibility of the blank verse.) Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis precisely when Christopher Marlowe was composing his poem Hero and Leander. Marlowe’s premature death, in May 1593, prevented him from finishing his poem. Many historians have interpreted the two poems as a friendly literary competition. Their common denominator is Ovid’s influence on both of them. Both Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander were conceived as fashionable exercises in re-writing Ovidian topoi. As a learned University Wit, Marlowe himself had translated Ovid’s Amores and Metamorphoses. In 1990, Jonathan Bate first advanced his historicized view on “certain symptoms of anxiety in Renaissance imitation theory”. Bate claimed that “in fact, Shakespeare’s prime precursor was Ovid”. Francis Meres, the “Harold Bloom”, or “Elizabethan Yale critic” of Shakespeare’s times had pointed out that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’. In 1993, Bate took this argument a step further and argued that for the sixteenth century Western literature Ovid was the equivalent of our days’ Shakespeare: “If you admire a writer, it is quite natural to wonder which writers that writer admired”. At the time, there was no Shakespeare for schoolchildren to study; Shakespeare himself had Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicted an antropomorphic nature where there was a story behind every flower, every tree, almost every stone and stream. The world was peopled with transformed heroes and heroines of Ovidian story. Metamorphosis was, in fact, the answer to the medieval anxieties about Mutability, the transience of love and earthly happiness, the death of the rose, etc. Was Ovid the presiding authority above the siblings’ wouldbe rivalry? Bate’s claim dovetails with Eric Sams’ remark, that “the dramatist drew nine-tenth of his classical mythology from Ovid”. We may wonder whether Shakespeare’s anxiety of imitating Ovid actually stemmed from his tacit competition with Marlowe, the expert on Ovid; or, whether it is just another indicator of Marlowe’s strong influence on Shakespeare’s early writings and readings, as well. The subject-matter of Venus and Adonis is borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book X. The poem is made up of two 128
contrasted halves: the wooing and the hunt. Adonis is compared with a snared bird, a dabchick, a deer, a hunted roe: he is the hunted quarry. Venus is compared with an eagle, a vulture, a wild bird, a falcon: the love-hungry goddess appears as a bird of prey. The lily, the snow, the ivory and the alabaster, all suggesting chilly whiteness, are used as symbols of Adonis’s chastity. Though a goddess, Venus has no supernatural powers: she is as helpless as any country lass to save Adonis or even reach him quickly. She is not even responsible for his metamorphosis into a hyacinth. The pace of Shakespeare’s poem is slower than Marlowe’s, the ornament more elaborate and the comedy not so sustained. The Rape of Lucrece deals with a stock-theme. The subject is more serious. Written in Chaucer’s “rhyme royal”, it is a better exercise, but still an exercise. Lucrece herself is pathetic and beautiful, but not a person. It is a carefully worked out poem, but not the spontaneous work of a genius. As a literary species, The Rape of Lucrece is a complaint. (The complaint was a late medieval form). The combat between Lucrece and Tarquin represents the combat between saint and devil. According to M.C. Bradbrook, the soliloquies of Tarquin are like a first cartoon for the study of Macbeth, while Lucrece anticipates Lavinia, the ravished heroine of Titus Andronicus. The poem clearly shows the idea of tragedy in Shakespeare’s early period: the blind, senseless horror of purely physical outrage. The final part is brought to an abrupt end, briefly summing up the contents presented in the poet’s dedication to the same Earl of Southampton. The long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, are, seemingly, formal rhetorical exercises, one on a mythological, the other on an ancient historical theme. But in 1992, just a few years before his death, England’s then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes worked out an extraordinary mythical interpretation of these two longer poems in his bulky Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Hughes claimed that Shakespeare’s last fourteen plays, starting with All’s Well That Ends Well (1601) are rewritings of the two poems which contain an underlying mythic structure. Like Venus and Lucrece, Shakespeare’s heroines from those plays perform the role of either huntress or game: “The female figure who is the heroine is a constant as Venus / Lucrece.” According to Hughes’ myth of the Equation, the 129
man appears either as the Puritan Adonis, who rejects the heroine’s love or as a Tarquin figure that rapes, kills, or destroys the innocent heroine. Examples of the latter case are Hamlet, who drives Ophelia to madness and suicide, Othello, who murders Desdemona, Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, who likewise has Hermione die of sorrow, and Leonatus Posthumus, in Cymbeline, who is intent on killing his wife. The theme of the Rival Brothers (triggering betrayal, usurpation, or fratricide) complements this mythic pattern of the Equation. The rational being is usurped by the irrational. The myth is obvious in Macbeth and Hamlet, with their regicides, in As You Like It, King Lear, and The Tempest, with their usurpation stories, in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, where former friends and allies become each other’s foes. Says Ted Hughes: “All the plays of the tragic sequence are a ‘proof’, so to speak, of the criminality of that rejection [of love]. In play after play, from every angle, Shakespeare is focusing his stubborn investigation into the nature of that rejection. In the end (…) he brings to court this specific act – the rejection – and calls down the God of Truth to judge it in his words. This means that everything happened, in a sense, within the first poem, Venus and Adonis, where Adonis rejected Venus: I hate not love, but your device in love, That lends embracements unto every stranger. (789-90) What the tragedies dramatize is the inside story of that rejection. Those words are the expressionless face, the dead voice of the superhuman madness that is cancelling the Goddess, wiping her from the universe. From Adonis’s universe, that is. The tragedies then follow as a consequence of these words. They are an unfolding into action, the unrolling of all the thunders, and the arrival on heads and chimneys of all the thunderbolts, released internally, in Heaven, by the silent flash of those words. In that sense, as Adonis speaks, Tarquin rapes Lucrece. When this act of surrender to lust in an act of rape is eventually translated into the suppression of lust in an act of murder, the sexual nature of the act, the sexual charge, remains the same, though the expression of it, obviously, changes from the blind, guilty gratification of an appetite 130
to a true madness (and the extinction of that appetite). And Shakespeare locates the tragedy of this madness in the logical conclusion of the mythic situation. The murder of the Goddess is the murder of the source of life: the destruction of mankind.” Ted Hughes’s argument is developed on more than six hundred pages of erudite excursions into the mythology of several ancient civilizations. Although his demonstration may sometimes appear to be far-fetched, it is ultimately convincing as yet another possible approach to, and interpretation of, Shakespeare’s plays and poems. In an age of excessive Puritanism, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis set the standards for what came to be called erotic literature. Its sixteen editions between 1593 and 1640 stand proof for its extraordinary popularity. The great Shakespeare scholar and editor Stanley Wells has recently called Venus and Adonis “Shakespeare’s succès de scandale” and the sexual allusions in Venus’s elaborate metaphor of the park and the deer explain the poem’s constant success in the seventeenth century: “I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips; and if those be hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. Within this limit is relief enough, Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, To shelter thee from tempest and from rain: Then be my deer, since I am such a park; No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.” (231-40) As for Shakespeare’s superb poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, I.A. Richards described it, during a TV conference given in the United States in 1957, as “the most mysterious poem in English”. Richards was aware that “so strange a poem (…) has engendered curiosity and praise only in recent times”. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American transcendental philosopher, was among the first to attempt an interpretation, however vague: “To unassisted readers it 131
would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his poetic mistress.” Curiously, I. A. Richards seems to have had an extraordinary intuition in his interpretation of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, foreshadowing the recent opinions of New Historicist critics, when he wrote: “This poem, one may well think, is not about (…) remote abstractions but about two people; two people who may be thought to have been ‘the very personifications, the very embodiments’, as we lightly say, of beauty and truth, though they are spoken of in the poem as two birds. That is how the poem feels, no doubt about it. But, as certainly, there is a religious quality in its movement, a feeling in it as though we were being related through it to something far beyond any individuals. This Phoenix and this Turtle have a mythic scale to them, as though through them we were to become participants in something ultimate. All this, however, is so handled that it seems as easy and as natural and as necessary as breathing.” My italics point to Richards’ guess that serious issues were indeed at stake in the poem. Martin Dodsworth has more recently called “The Phoenix and the Turtle” a “weird and wonderful poem”. For each new generation of critics the poem appears to be an enigma that is hard to decode. This mysterious poem has recently triggered several biographical interpretations, which proves that biographical criticism armed with the more sophisticated methods of New Historicism is still worth applying to literary texts. In 1985 E. A. J. Honigmann claimed in Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” that “The Phoenix and the Turtle” is not an obscure poem. It is about Ursula Stanley, the illegitimate but acknowledged daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby, and her bridegroom John Salisbury, who married her in 1586. Honigmann gave the poem a Catholic reading, wherein the Turtle’s sadness was due to the execution of his brother, as a traitor, in the Babbington conspiracy of 1586. The eagle in the poem is the Earl of Derby, an idea suggested by the Derby crest, which represents an eagle carrying a child. On April 18, 2003, John Finnis and Patrick Martin published their groundbreaking essay “Another Turn for the Turtle?” In their opinion, the poem is not about John Salisbury, the dedicatee, but about Ann Line, “a gentlewoman, the only Catholic woman executed in London for religion under Elizabeth”. She was the first of those 132
executed at Tyburn on February 27, 1601, but her husband Roger had died in 1594 or 1595. “Twas not their infirmity” has been decoded as a “willed celibacy within marriage”, a “renunciation, penitentially”. Ann Line was judged a traitor, for having a priest bless candles in her house. On the night of her death, Ann Line was disinterred from the charnel pit by Catholics and reburied. Later clandestine obsequies must have been held in a Worcester chapel: Edward, fourth Earl of Worcester, had been on close terms with Roger Line (whom he had supported until his untimely death in Flanders) and with his widow Ann. Finnis and Martin identify Worcester as “the Eagle”, as he was the only Catholic in high office at Court. His crest was a wyvern, a classical basilisk but with a dragon head, a heraldic creature that though no eagle, both is a “fowl” (two-legged, winged) and (on its legs at least) “Eagle feather’d”. Finnis and Martin’s theory has already been corroborated by several scholars including Richard Wilson and Thomas Rist. Wilson contends that Ann Line’s martyrdom continued to haunt Shakespeare long after her death, down to his last works: “The brilliant decoding of ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ by John Finnis and Patrick Martin (…) as an elegy for the Catholic martyr Ann Line gains inter-textual support from Shakespeare’s apparent return to her martyrdom as one of those ‘high wrongs’ for which he has Prospero forgive his enemies when he struggles with his ‘nobler reason’ against his ‘fury’ and decides that ‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’, towards the end of The Tempest (V. 1. 25-8). For immediately before this turning point, Stephano and Trinculo raid the Duke’s ‘wardrobe’ and discover the ‘frippery’ hanging on a ‘tree’, which distracts them from their conspiracy to assassinate him, so that they make gallows humour out of their chance to ‘steal by line and level’. The entire episode, with its jokes about hangmen, corpses, laundry, and ‘Mistress Line’, baffles the editors. Thanks to the sensational new reading of Shakespeare’s poem, this bizarre antimasque now has a historical context. […] These tragicomic regicides could equally well be the 1605 Plotters who stole relics from Ann’s hanging tree at Tyburn as the priest-hunters who burst in on the Mass she organized, and confiscated her popish ‘frippery’. All that we can be certain of is that, by the time of The Tempest, Shakespeare was 133
dissociating from the violence which still flamed around ‘Mistress Line’ and her ‘phoenix’ memory.” Thomas Rist follows another path in investigating Shakespeare’s connection with Ann Line, proposing a re-reading of the Sonnets, “which recent editors argue Shakespeare continued to revise until 1609. The lines of the Sonnets contain so many puns on ‘lines’. Close consideration of Sonnet 74, however, may suggest how the search might proceed. The narrator of the sonnet confides to its implied recipient that ‘My life hath in this line some interest’ but the sonnet’s theme is – as in ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ – death and its posterity. Specifically, death is figured as ‘that fell arrest / Without all bail’ which, the speaker says, ‘shall carry me away’: it thus assumes the character of an unforgiving law-enforcer considered to threaten the speaker’s life. And we are given a further picture of that law-enforcer: the speaker calls his own dead body ‘The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife’. That death is a law-enforcer who uses a ‘knife’ – particularly in a poem interested in Line – suggests the quarterings at Tyburn. The speaker – whether Shakespeare or a fictional selfpresentation of him – seems thus to anticipate what Catholics such as Line or indeed the younger Southampton considered martyrdom.” All these recent re-readings of “The Phoenix and the Turtle” indicate that Shakespearean texts are sites of oblivion or dormant memory that can still produce unexpected meanings. They may also encourage students to refuse any definitive interpretation of any poem. Each age, each critical method, even each reader may produce endless and refreshing interpretations of one and the same text. * The Sonnets, first published in 1608, were written in the 1590s as a fashionable literary exercise. The 154 sonnets fall into three distinct groups: a) Sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a fair youth, possibly Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Sonnet 126 is actually a douzaine (a twelve-line poem). Sonnets 1-17 are intended to persuade a young man of good birth and good looks to marry, while Sonnets 18-126 celebrate the varying fortunes of the poet’s friendship with the aforementioned young man; 134
b) Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to a mysterious Dark Lady; c) Sonnets 153 and 154 are adaptations of a well-known Greek epigram, the story of Cupid and the loss of his brand. The sonnets have been read time and again for clues about Shakespeare’s life, attempts to link him with this man and that, to pin him down biographically in the shadows of four hundred years ago, and, seeing the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement elsewhere, one understands this tendency to turn the sonnets into data for biography. And here are some examples of biographical speculations attached to the sonnets. Martin Dodsworth’s contention that the stories in the Sonnets are pure fiction has been refuted by Shakespearean biographers for centuries. August Wilhelm von Schlegel was the inventor of the socalled conjectural biography, which re-constructs an author’s life from hints and allusions provided by his texts. In the light of this method, there have been several attempts to establish the identity of the mysterious Dark Lady and of the fair youth in the Sonnets. For those readers who have a penchant for historicist speculations, here are some possible answers to the excruciating questions, “Who was the Dark Lady?”, “Who was the fair youth?” In 1889 Sidney Lee identified Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady. One of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour, she fell pregnant by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke (the late Sir Philip Sidney’s nephew). Her infant died soon after her birth and Pembroke refused to marry her, even though the Queen sent him to the Fleet Prison. Mary Fitton had soft and fair curls, and grey eyes, hence she does not fit Shakespeare’s physical description of the Dark Lady in Sonnet 130. Although G.B. Shaw made her the heroine of his Dark Lady of the Sonnets, today her candidature is dismissed by most Shakespeare biographers. Jane Davenant, the wife of an Oxford innkeeper who became the Mayor of that city, was the mother of Sir William Davenant, England’s second Poet Laureate after Ben Jonson. Davenant was known to be Shakespeare’s godson, but in his later years he boasted that he was actually Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Davenant’s claim is reinforced by a curious work called Willobie his Avisa, or The True Picture of a Modest Maid, a strange mixture of prose and verse 135
published in 1594, and signed with the pseudonym Hadrian Dorrell. The true identity of the pamphlet’s author was Henry Willoughby, a connection by marriage of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire friend Thomas Russel. The pamphlet gave serious offence to somebody with influence, so it was banned and burned before 1600. The obscure allegory enacted in it featured Henrico Willobego, his friend WS, and a beautiful and apparently virtuous woman, who drew to her inn a lot of importunate gallants only to drive them all away, even threatening to murder one of them, a nobleman, rather than permit him to stain her honour. WS is described as “the old player”, while Henrico Willobego quotes proverbs from John Florio’s collection of proverbs, and Florio was actually Henry Wriothesley’s tutor, so… Avisa’s nest is clearly indicated: “See yonder house where hangs the badge of England’s saint”. The tavern kept by the Davenants had the red-cross shield of St George hanging outside its front door. The only piece that does not fit in the puzzle is William Davenant’s birth date: he was born in 1606, while the events in the sonnets point to the early 1590s. Some two or three decades ago, A.L. Rowse made the case for Emilia Lanier, announcing that anyone who disagreed with him was talking “complete rubbish”. Peter Levi vigorously approved this discovery. After all, Emilia Lanier had been the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, and, having fallen pregnant by him, had been married off to Alphonse Lanier, a Court musician. Shakespeare, claims Rowse, “first fell in love with the lady out of pity for the situation she was in”. This is less than mere guesswork; it is nonsense. Rowse’s Shakespeare has an irreproachable character even when he turns out to cuckold a cheated husband. Rowse’s speculations, based mostly on textual conjectures, are highly inconsistent, inasmuch as he repeatedly insists that Shakespeare was a “normal”, heterosexual person, while contemporary witnesses like Simon Forman, the astrologer, made it clear that Emilia Lanier favoured sodomy to satisfy men’s lusts. She reformed during the latter part of her life and turned poetess, and in 1611 she published a long religious poem called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a sort of vindication of the principal female characters in the Bible, from Eve to Virgin Mary. Robert Nye contends that had she been Shakespeare’s mistress, she would have written as a poetess about the love of her life. 136
Both Anthony Burgess and Robert Nye have singled out Lucy Negro, alias Lucy Morgan, as the most plausible candidate to the title of Dark Lady. She kept a brothel in St John Street, Clerkenwell, hence she was known as the Abbess of Clerkenwell, head of the infamous sisterhood of the Black Nuns. From March 1579 to January 1582, while still very young, she had been one of Queen Elisabeth’s most favoured attendants. She was then expelled from Court after the usual fall from grace. This “woman colour’d ill” was a mulatto from the West Indies. In the 1590s she was charged with prostitution, or with “keeping a house of ill repute”. Her friends in high places kept her out of jail on this occasion. Later, in January 1600, she was sentenced to serve a term in the Bridewell, though even then she was spared the usual carting through the streets of London. She died in 1610 – of the pox. This disturbing detail may, then, explain the disillusionment and scepticism that are so manifest in most of Shakespeare’s late comedies, which came to be labelled as “dark comedies” or “problem plays”. Jonathan Bate has recently put forward a new contender to the title of Dark Lady. In his opinion, her “profile”, as a criminal investigator would put it, seems to be that of a married woman in or close to the household of the Earl of Southampton, a woman whom both Southampton and Shakespeare slept with. Bate thinks that an Elizabethan earl of possibly homosexual orientation would be more likely to sleep with a married woman of lower social status because he wanted to score off her husband than because he desired her in herself. “Suppose that the young Earl’s guardian, who wishes to marry him off his will, places an agent in his household in order to report back on the progress of the marriage suit and related affairs. Suppose that the agent is married. To sleep with his wife would be the most delicious revenge for the man’s presumption in reporting intimate matters back to Burghley (Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer).” The agent in Southampton’s household was John Florio, whose presence there accounts for much of Shakespeare’s broad, though very patchy, acquaintance with Italian literature and his slight knowledge of the Italian language. Bate’s Dark Lady, then, is John Florio’s wife, who happens to have been the sister of Samuel Daniel, the sonneteer. Biographical and textual data support Bate’s theory. Florio wrote that in 137
order to be “accounted most fair” a woman should have “black eyes, black brows, black hairs”. Fairness was regarded as synonymous with aristocratic and courtly elevation, darkness with low origins. A dark woman meant a country wench and Miss Daniel was a low-born Somerset lass. She gave birth to four children, the last three of which were born in 1585, 1588, and 1589. In sonnet 143 “Will” compares himself to his mistress’ “neglected child” and Mrs. Florio is the only candidate to have given birth to children at that time. After carefully constructing his theory, Bate is the first critic to view it with objective detachment: “We will never know whether Shakespeare and / or Southampton really slept with Florio’s wife and the sonnets knowingly allude to actual events, or whether the sonnets are knowing imaginings of possible intrigue… we must be denied knowledge of the original bed deeds, because the sonnets are interested not so much in who lies with whom as in paradoxes of eyeing and lying.” The latest biographical speculations belong to Jonathan Gibson, the man who has come to identify the Dark Lady as Mary Wroth. According to Gibson, at least two biographical details corroborate Mary Wroth’s identity as the Dark Lady. She was a sonneteer herself, actually the best poetess of the Elizabethan age. Her poems are included in the academic syllabus of most universities in the USA and forty-six pages of web sites stand proof for the high regard she enjoys these days. Not only was she a talented sonneteer, but she is also known to have been the mistress of the Earl of Pembroke (one of the two most probable candidates to the “fair youth” figure in the Sonnets, alongside Southampton). She bore two illegitimate children to William Herbert and her cycle of sonnets might have been written in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, something not very unusual among sonneteers. Shakespeare’s harem of Dark Ladies gets more and more populous with the passing of time, and the future will certainly present us with further candidates as well as with reassessments of the current biographical theories. The flip side of all these theories is that we shall probably never know whether the Dark Lady was not actually just a synecdoche in the private life of a man fond of all brunettes living in the London of his times. 138
As for the identity of the young man in the sonnets, in the early 1890s Sir Sidney Lee contributed entries to the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) in which he stated categorically that the dedication to the 1609 Quarto “is addressed to Pembroke, disguised under the initials of his family name – William Herbert” and, furthermore, that Shakespeare’s young friend “was doubtless Pembroke himself”. In 1897, the serially issued DNB reached the letter S and, while writing his article on Shakespeare, Lee shifted his allegiance to the other leading candidate for fair youth: the sonnets clearly affirm that the youth is Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. At this point the reader is invited to choose the suitable pronunciation of the Earl’s name. Robert Nye repeatedly insists that it should be pronounced “Rizley”, while Bate claims that, in the nineteenth century, Henry Wriothesley’s descendants said that their name was pronounced “Rosely”. The latter pronunciation would thus explain the symbolism of the “rose”, one of the key words in the sonnets dedicated to the fair youth. * According to Jan Kott, Shakespeare’s sequence of sonnets may be regarded as a drama with four characters and a plot. The dramatis personae are a man (who is the first-person narrator), a young man, a woman and Time. Time as a major theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets is not necessarily an original one. Time and mortality are as old as the first recorded pieces of world literature (from Gilgamesh to Spenser’s “mutability cantos” in the unfinished Book VII of The Faerie Queene). Time is ubiquitous in the Sonnets as it is in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: CRESSIDA: When time is old and hath forgot itself When water drops have worn the stones of Troy And blind oblivion swallowed cities up… (III.2) TROILUS: Injurious time, with a robber’s haste Crams his rich thievery up. (IV.4) 139
In Sonnet 64, each quatrain begins with “When I have seen”, followed by the misdeeds of Time and the obsessive image of Death. Similar thoughts and images coincidentally occur in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci. In Sonnet 71, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead” introduces an increasingly overwhelming atmosphere. It abounds in mutability imagery of a “vile world, with vilest worms”. Andrew Sanders also comments on two thematic subgroups: one encouraging the youth to marry and to procreate (1-17) and one about the threat represented by a rival poet. Procreation is viewed as the only defence against death; life can be perpetuated by means of progenies. Sonnet 3 describes the youth as a son who is the mirror, the repetition, the copy of his parents, a copy annihilating time: Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime. Sonnet 66, once a favourite text of vulgar Marxist criticism in the East-European countries, is nowadays considered crucial for understanding the historical circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and wrote his theatrical masterpieces. The Sonnet is made up of successive images of the wrong way of the world, each comprised in a line beginning with “and”, in an accumulation. The line “Art made tongue-tied by the authority” has become the title of a well-documented study into Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship, written by Janet Clare. This single line is the proof of an artist’s frustration in an age of horrible censorship (and dictatorship). In Sonnet 63 and Sonnet 107, immortality is bestowed upon the beloved: His beauty shall in these black lines be seen And they shall live, and he in them still green. (63) I’ll live in this poor rhyme (…) And thou in this shalt find thy monument…(107) 140
This conceit of immortality, previously employed by Edmund Spenser, is also known as exegi monumentum. Speaking about the sexuality of the sonnets, Andrew Sanders refers to the ambiguous relationship between the narrator, the young man and the Dark Lady, which takes the nature of an emotional triangle. Jan Kott has developed an entire theory of the erotic ambiguity of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The young boy is a type of a female beauty, cf. “thy mother’s glass” (Sonnet 3). The ambiguity consists in choosing either a male or a female partner as a lover. The same ambiguity is detected by Jan Kott in Shakespeare’s early comedies (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice) and in his later socalled romantic comedies (Twelfth Night and As You Like It). It is the ambiguity of the line drawn between friendship and love. The Humanistic Academy of Florence (represented by Pico della Mirandolla and Marsilio Ficino) had proclaimed that eros socraticus, the pure love felt by a male for a male youth, represented the highest form of spiritual affinity. Sonnet 39, with “let us divided live /And that thou teachest how to make one twain”, echoes the Platonic myth of the androgyn, first recorded in Plato’s Banquet. According to this myth, the human beings were originally endowed with four arms, four legs, two faces and two sexes. The gods punished them by separating them into two distinct entities, longing for each other, that is, for completion, reunion, oneness. The same hesitation, dilemma in choosing between a male and a female occurs in Michelangelo’s sonnets. Shakespeare’s sonnets also display the influence of the Renaissance painting, in which the angels have androgynous features, a blending of male and female characteristics; the nymphs have boyish features, while David has a girlish pose and girlish gestures in sculptures by Donatello, Verrocchio and Michelangelo. Here is the description of the youth in Sonnet 20: A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart…(/…) And for a woman were thou first created. 141
In Sonnet 53 the youth is compared with Helen of Troy. In the Dark Lady sequence, Shakespeare questions the use of conventional similes, hyperboles and metaphors, in Sonnet 130. Jan Kott regards Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as alter-egos of the Dark Lady. Most biographers, however, have chosen the faithless Cressida as the dramatic counterpart of the mysterious sonnet-heroine. The dramatic situation in the Sonnets resembles that in Twelfth Night, a comedy of erotic ambiguities, in which Duke Orsino loves Countess Olivia, Olivia loves Cesario (i.e. Viola disguised as a boy, hence the danger of lesbianism), and Viola herself loves Orsino. Within this triangle, Orsino is also attracted by Cesario. In Shakespeare’s age, female parts were performed by actors. Female characters in disguise were actually young actors disguised as women who, in turn, were disguised as boys. In a famous elegy, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the “metaphysical” poet John Donne, advises his beloved not to travel in disguise for fear the Italians might take her for a page and make a pass at her. Worst of all, the narrator is betrayed by both lovers. However, as Andrew Sanders warns us, the Sonnets should not be necessarily read as an autobiographical confession. Shakespeare’s originality is not to be looked up in the themes and imagery of his sonnets. His originality resides in the exploration of a new emotional range: the idea of being torn between two lovers; the oscillation between idealizing and rejecting love. Shakespeare is no longer concerned with the conventions of courtly love, he is rather, interested in the exploration of the psychological inner self. Shakespeare’s Sonnets became the object of serious criticism only in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the editors’ and critics’ opinions were not always favourable. Wordsworth thought Sonnet 116 to be the best but he objected to the sonnets to the Dark Lady, which he found “abominably harsh, obscure and worthless”. Coleridge was more enthusiastic about them, and John Keats, yet another Romantic poet, wrote about Shakespeare as sonneteer, “he has left nothing to say about nothing or anything…” 142
The Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson produced the following paradoxical remark: “Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer than his Plays – which is of course absurd. For it is knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.” In the twentieth century, Robert Graves and Laura Riding were the first editors to expound in detail the wealth of meanings and nuance that the sonnets contain. And William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), emphasizing the countless interpretive possibilities of Sonnet 94, counted no less than “4096 movements of thought” in the poem (and as many interpretations). THE ELIZABETHAN WORLD PICTURE The main idea underlying the Elizabethan world picture is that of order or “degree”. Edmund Spenser views order as opposed to mutability; Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists view order as opposed to chaos. Order was perceived in three different ways. First, it was conceived as “the Great Chain of Being”. This concept derives from Plato’s Timaeus via Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists. In his study The Great Chain of Being Arthur O. Lovejoy was the first to theorize this universal concept which survived from Plato up to the eighteenth century: “no element can be understood or, indeed, be what it is apart from its relation to all the other components of the system to which it belongs”. According to this concept, the whole world was one vast allegory of God’s writing, interlocking and coherent. The links in the chain are displayed on the vertical, in the following order: 1) The angels, despite Copernicus’s revolutionary theories, were regarded as the inhabitants of the heavens as opposed to the sublunary regions. They had a hierarchy of their own, which had been discussed by Dante. Plato and Genesis stated that man could hear the music of the celestial spheres before the Fall. 2) The stars and fortunes. The stars conditioned man’s fortune. Fortune was perceived as a wheel. 3) The four elements: fire, air, water and ground (earth); 4) Man as the result of the four humours corresponding to the four elements: 143
melancholy – earthly phlegm – water choler – fire blood – air Man’s brain contained: – the five senses; – common sense, fancy, memory; – reason (the combination of wit, i.e. understanding, and will). According to this pattern, Shakespeare’s Lear and Othello lack wit, while Hamlet and Macbeth lack will. 5) Animals, plants and minerals. The Great Chain of Being is discussed by Ulysses in his famous speech on “degree” in Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare; it is also referred to by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man. It was minutely depicted in E.M.W. Tillyard’s book The Elizabethan World Picture. Tillyard’s view, much discredited nowadays, promoted the image of Shakespeare as an entirely conventional thinker, whose plays necessarily express the political, moral and philosophical outlook of those who ruled his world. Secondly, the corresponding planes, displayed on the horizontal, connected: – celestial powers to other creations; – macrocosm to body politic (as in Shakespeare’s chronicle plays); – macrocosm to microcosm (as in King Lear); – body politic to microcosm (as in Macbeth). Thirdly, creation was viewed as a dance, the cosmic dance, another metaphor for cosmic order and cosmic harmony. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POETRY At the beginning of the seventeenth century the sonnet is still in flourish due to sonneteers such as Michael Drayton. Sir John Davies illustrates the didactic poem with his famous poem Nosce Teipsum. In Orchestra, another poem by Davies, the dance is the principle of order and pattern in the universe. (Later, Milton will write on divine harmony and the music of the spheres). 144
The satire resorts to Horace and Juvenal as models. John Donne is considered the father of English satire. The “songs” or mellifluous poems, poems written as lyrics were extremely popular. Thomas Campion, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe among others produced such songs. Shakespeare’s plays also contain songs which were in vogue at the time. The first half of the seventeenth century is clearly dominated by the poetry of John Donne and Ben Jonson: their followers came to be labelled as metaphysical versus Cavalier poets. The Cavalier poets defended the monarchy against the Puritans during the reign of Charles I. Their ranks included Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Robert Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling. They saw the ideal gentleman as being a lover, a soldier, a wit, a musician and a poet, and their poetry reflects their rather light-hearted approach to life. Their poems embodied the spirit of the upper classes before the Puritan Commonwealth. They wrote poetry for occasions such as births, marriages, or great parties. They are remembered primarily as the first poets to celebrate the events of everyday life and, as such, are the forerunners of an important tradition in English literature. JOHN DONNE John Donne (1573-1631) is the poet who challenged and broke the supremacy of the Petrarchan tradition. Donne is the first important English satirist whose influence was acknowledged by Dryden and Pope decades later. His ancestors included the famous Thomas More (the author of Utopia) and John Heywood, the most famous dramatist of Queen Mary’s reign (1553-1558) – hence Donne’s Catholic heritage. In 1592, after studies completed in Oxford and Cambridge, Donne becomes a lawyer in London. In 1596 he makes his début as a poet with “The Storm” and “The Calm”, two poems written during a military expedition against Spain. Then he becomes the secretary of the Lord Keeper of the great seal and elopes with Anne More, the lord’s niece. Hard times follow as a consequence of his runaway marriage. Persecuted, he has to earn his living by writing epitaphs, 145
eulogies and letters, continuously looking for patrons. In 1615 his friends finally persuade him to enter the Anglican Church and he becomes famous for his sermons delivered at St. Paul’s Cathedral and abroad. His poems are first collected and published in a volume in 1633, two years after his death. A more detailed biography of the poet poses unexpected and disturbing questions. More is known about Donne, the man, than about any other poet before Milton. He was born a Catholic when Catholics were persecuted as enemies of the state; his marriage cast him out of the world into which he had managed to find an entry; after thirteen years of “exile” from the world, he was ordained in the Church of England and there certainly became at last a pillar of the establishment. Donne was set apart from the world he later tried to join by his Catholic upbringing. His father, John Donne, was a prosperous London merchant, an iron-monger with claims to descent from Welsh gentry. He died in 1576, when Donne was four. Soon after, Donne’s mother married John Syminges, a successful doctor in London. After he died in 1588, she took a third husband, Richard Rainsford, in 1590 or 1591. Donne’s mother came from the heroic wing of English Catholicism. Elizabeth Donne was grandniece of the Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas More. Her father, John Heywood, a writer of interludes and epigrams, went into exile in 1564 rather than make his peace with Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement of the English Church. Two of her brothers, Ellis and Jasper, became Jesuits. Jasper, who led a Jesuit mission to England in the early 1580s, was imprisoned in the Tower and narrowly escaped a hideous martyrdom. After the death of Dr. Syminges, Elizabeth Donne became known as a recusant, and soon after her third marriage she settled with her husband in Antwerp to escape the penalties imposed on Catholics in England. “Did Donne grow up under a reign of terror?” wonders David Reid. In thirty-three years of Elizabeth’s reign after 1570, 250 died for their Catholicism (some from imprisonment rather that execution). Donne’s childhood and youth were certainly marked by a Catholicism that set itself against the religion of the Elizabethan state. For this we have Donne’s own accounting in the Preface to his Pseudo-Martyr. 146
I had longer work to do than many other men; for I was at first to blot out, certain impressions of the Roman religion, and to wrestle both against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was taken; and some anticipations early laid upon my conscience, both by Persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will, and others who by their learning and good life, seemed to me justly to claim an interest for the guiding, and rectifying of mine understanding in these matters. Before Donne went to university, he was educated privately by a tutor. He went to Oxford young and made out that he was even younger than he was by a year, eleven not twelve. This too was to evade the legislation meant to keep Catholics out of higher education: university statutes required that those matriculating at sixteen or older should subscribe not only to the Oath of Supremacy but also to the Thirty-Nine Articles of belief imposed but the Church of England. By entering young and lying about his age, Donne might gain a university education, if not a degree, without renouncing his Catholicism. According to his seventeenth-century biographer Izaak Walton, Donne was transplanted from Oxford to Cambridge at fourteen, and then at seventeen went up to Lincoln’s Inn to study law. While Donne was finding himself as an entertaining companion and fine spirit among those who expected to play a part in the world, he was naturally much occupied with the Catholicism that kept him out of it. A dreadful reminder of that was the death in prison of his younger brother, Henry, in 1593. He had gone up to Oxford with Donne and followed him to the Inns of Court. Henry had been caught harbouring a priest; the priest was executed in the usual vile manner, while Henry died in prison before he was sentenced. In January 1615, Donne was ordained in the Church of England. He took the royal supremacy as a maxim of sound divinity. Preferments followed. He was elected Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621. His literary talents went chiefly into preaching and he took care to have his sermons published. He was an enormously fashionable preacher at court, at the Inns of Court and at St. Paul’s, though it goes without saying that he created his own fashion, one that combined his wit, his power to impress and astonish in words, his theatrical talents, with 147
inwardness, a life of prayers and meditation, above all on the themes of death and resurrection. The term “metaphysical” was coined by the Scottish poet Michael Drummond of Hawthornden. It was used pejoratively by Dryden and Samuel Johnson. The latter complained that with Donne, Cowley and the metaphysical poets, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. Later on, it came to define “subtle means of expression” and “complex cosmic vision”. Donne’s metaphysical side is best perceived in his sonnets. Donne’s genius is manifest in various poetic patterns. Wit, logic, equivocation, and dramatic immediacy all contribute to the central concern of Donne’s poetry – the exploration of the individual’s experience of love, morality and the divine. For Donne, the process of examining emotional experience inevitably produces poetry of contradictions. The “truths” Donne’s poetry discovers in its exploration of human experience will be various, sometimes even contradictory, because experience is always in flux. Donne’s persistent concern with change – as both subject and process in hi poems – is not only part of his commitment to the ongoing discovery of truth, which requires an openness to change; it also embodies his personal sense that the universe is profoundly mutable and unstable. Almost everything is in the process of changing. • His five satires, written in deliberately rough couplets, have a colloquial vigour combined with a strain of logical reasoning. They give some vivid glimpses of the London of his age. The Satires express an overwhelming sense of the degeneracy of late-sixteenth-century English society. In attacking this “Age of rusty iron” (Satire 5, line 35), Donne recalls Roman satirists Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, who similarly exposed the corruption of Rome, but he also emulates the biblical prophets moved by religious zeal, who criticized the sinfulness and idolatry of Israel. For all his independent spirit, Donne is here quite conservative, upholding old truths and values in a world that seems to be crumbling. There is a sense of frustration, for the satirist is compelled to expose what is wrong, but feels helpless to “cure these worn maladies” (Satire 3). 148
Coming under scrutiny are the frivolous, materialistic values of his society (1), the legal system (2), religious institutions (3), the court and courtiers (4, I), and the judicial system and structure of rewards in late Elizabethan England (5). The speaker of the Satires embodies qualities that oppose the viciousness of society: he is constant and scholarly (1), devoted to God and spiritual values, earnest and searching rather than complacent (3), preferring the “mean” to either extreme (2), filled with hatred for vice (2) and vicious people in power (5) but moved by pity for humanity (3, 5). He presents himself as virtually alone in condemning the vices of his time – as if he were the last good man in a totally corrupt society. He criticizes not only the vices of his society but also the corruption of its institutions and systems. This opposition to the political establishment reappears in the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets; and the accompanying feeling of isolation is seen in much of Donne’s poetry, where there is little sense of fitting into a community. • Donne’s 20 elegies are poems about love, written in iambic pentameter couplets. Some are cynical, some are simply exercises in wit, while some celebrate a clandestine love with an uncomfortable realism. The Elegies take place less inside Donne’s head than the Songs and Sonnets do. They are more involved in the social world. In contrast to the Satires, with their public and political focus, the Elegies are concerned with the supposedly private sphere of love. In his Elegies, he turns to the example of the Roman poet Ovid, rather than imitating the Petrarchan, courtly love poetry popular during this period. In Donne’s Elegies, as in Ovid, love is very much of the body. The male speakers in these poems often frankly admit their interest in money and sex, and are moved by practicalities, not ideals. “Love’s Progress”, for example, humorously defines the “right true end” (line 2) and means of love in terms that reject the conventional postures of courtly lovers. The goal is sexual intercourse, and the best way to attain it is to take the path of least resistance. Some elegies present women as objects of revulsion and nausea and, for all the Ovidian emphasis on the naturalness of sex, reveal a distaste for the activity. 149
In some poems, women are debased by comparison with animals, water, and land. In other elegies, however, women and women’s bodies are treated as immensely desirable. Elegy XIX, also known as “Going to Bed”, is a clever and lively piece of bawdry, a description of his going to bed with his mistress. Before Donne, in Petrarchan poetry the role of the wooer was defined by convention, but that of the lady had not been developed. It was masculine poetry. The woman’s part was seen from outside, as - the fair warrior who inflicted cruel wounds; - the saint to be worshipped; - the divinity to be appeased; - the relenting mistress to be hymned. The witty seduction poem “Going to Bed” celebrates sexual love and is less cynical than many of the other elegies. But even here we find conflicting valuations of woman and contrary impulses in love: License my roaving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. O my America! My new-found-land My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man’d My Mine of precious stones, My Emperie, How blest I am in this discovering thee. As the male speaker urges his mistress to remove her clothes and inhibition and asks her (like a monarch) to “Licence” his “roaving hands” (line 25) so he can explore her body (his “America! My newfound-land”, line 27) the poem moves between praising the mistress as a source of all riches, joys, even “grace” (line 42), and identifying her with land to be explored and possessed by man. Thus it expresses contradictory views of woman that were part of Renaissance culture in England, where the vogue of courtly love and the presence of a female monarch could glorify a woman as the source of all riches, favour, and grace, but political, legal, economic, and medical conventions and conditions defined woman as inferior and subordinate. America is a big country and the imperializing claim to possess her singly, to man 150
her with one man, is mocked by the vastness the roving hands discover. The poem’s clever ending asserts the speaker’s superiority as the master in love (“To teach thee I am naked first; why then / What needst thou have more covering then a man?” lines 47-8) and insists on what Petrarchan love, with its emphasis on the unattainable woman and unconsummated love, obscures – that the end of courtship is sexual intercourse. Sexual love itself, defined in this poem from the man’s point of view as a process of seduction and conquest, engages and expresses his contrary desires for control and intimacy. In insisting on the importance of sexual love, “Going to Bed’ not only counters Petrarchan poetry but also challenges Renaissance neo-Platonic ideas of love. According to neo-Platonism, the object of love is properly the soul, and the body and senses must be left behind as the lover ascends to the spiritual in the process of loving. In contrast to this philosophy of love, Donne’s glorifies the body and sexual love, which the speaker claims possesses spiritual significance: the unclothing of their bodies is analogous to the soul’s divesting itself on the body in order to enjoy “whole joys” (line 35). This elegy’s celebration of the private experience of sexual love as a supreme source of value marks what is one of the most important concerns of the Songs and Sonnets. The much quoted Elegy XVI humorously comments on the sexual ambiguity of lovers, while Elegy XVII likewise celebrates variety in love. Catherine Belsey, a fervent supporter of feminist studies, has pointed out Donne’s contribution to the refashioning of the relation between man and wife. Donne shares the opinion that the affective family involves marriage based on romantic love and co-operation, in which the woman is viewed as a partner and companion to her husband, “not always like in complexion, nor like in years, nor like in fortunes, nor like in birth, but like in mind, like in disposition, like in the love of God, and of one another”. Achsah Guibbory underlines the variety of Donne’s lyrical masks. The poet adopts different roles and postures – the libertine rake, the devoted and constant lover, the cynic who feels cheated by his experience in love, the despairing sinner fearing damnation, the 151
bold suitor claiming his right to salvation. The poetry expresses radically contradictory views – of women, the body, and love. • Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are by far his most interesting works. David Daiches has pointed out that the opening of these poems captures the reader’s attention, often in the form of a question. Donne’s characteristic method is first the shock, then the ingenuous development of the thought. These poems display the perfect union of passion and logical thinking. The complex development of thought, which is twisted this way and that way, serves to embody rather than to cool the passion. Love in the Songs and Sonnets eliminates the world, whereas in the Elegies social ties make us see love from the outside and usually contribute a rank flavour of Jonsonian comedy as well. The character of the speaker in many of the Elegies is unattractive and the situations in which he is involved are ugly and shameful. Most commentators think that the Elegies were written before Donne’s marriage. Helen Gardner thinks that they circulated in manuscript as a book of elegies. There is a strong Ovidian flavour to the collection. All are written in pentameter couplets (apart from “The Dream”), which would be an English equivalent for Ovid’s elegiac couplets. In the absence of strong evidence for dating or clear distinctions between the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, Helen Gardner made an ambitious attempt to order the poems in a roughly developmental scheme. For her, they are not about actual loves but are essays in love, very loosely related to his life. “A Valediction: of Weeping” combines protective tenderness with intellectual cunning: O more than moon Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere; Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon. Donne’s conceit turns astronomy and geophysics into pure poetry. What fascinates most people in Donne’s poetry is its flair for unstable and contradictory expression (see the definition of conceit as 152
a complex, specific type of metaphor given in the chapter “The Language of Poetry”). Geometry provides him with another famous conceit in “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning”: Such wilt thou to be me who must Like the other foot, obliquely run; The firmness makes my circle just And makes me end where I begun. David Reid contends that “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” was certainly written out of an experience of love, but he cannot say whether it was written to his wife or another woman. In this uncertainty there are still some minimal points that can be made. Most of the Elegies were almost certainly written before Donne’s marriage. It is most unlikely that none of the celebrations of love in the Songs and Sonnets came out of his love for Ann More. Given the pressures on their relationship before marriage, some of the suspicious or mock flippant poems might have been written out of that love too. And the themes of the world well lost and of the lovers’ being a whole world to each other would come very forcibly to mind, as they do for instance in “The Canonization”, after a marriage that was disastrous from a worldly point of view. But, according to David Reid, it is hard to think Donne could work “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” and other Songs and Sonnets celebrating love, up from nothing or as an imaginary alternative to a marriage he found disappointing. It is also hard to think that a poem of bitter resentment like “Love’s Alchemy” was merely a literary exercise. More soberly than in “The Canonization” (see below), Donne talks of the lovers in “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” as if they were a priesthood in charge of religious secrets: “’T were profanation of our joys / To tell the laity our love.” In “The Ecstasy”, “All day the same our postures were, / And we said nothing all the day…”: the lovers, simply by the incredible claim they make of one day’s total immobility, invite us to contrast it with what must have preceded it as well as with what is to come next. 153
In “The Ecstasy” the lovers are adepts in an alchemical or neo-Platonic mystery rather than a Christian one. In what might be the first use of the word “sex” in its modern sense of carnal desire, Donne seems to claim that desire is always driven by something else: This ecstasy doth unperplex, (We said) and tell us what we love, We see by this, it was not sex, We see, we saw not what doth move. A voyeur, who looked on their mutual trance and listened to its rapturous monologue, would himself undergo an alchemical spiritualizing and “part far purer than he came” (28). Donne’s analogies between love and spiritual things assert that the exchange of love between the lovers is something to be adored, both by themselves and by the world. Like the comparison of lovers to princes, the love religion is at the very least a hyperbolical way of talking about love as a sovereign thing. Donne may also in his high moments of desire or defiance have entertained the idea that in love he had approached the source of religion. “The Sun Rising” begins with the lines Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? and ends with the lines Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere. The sun might traditionally suggest warmth, security and order, but with Donne things are different. The poet makes us aware of a kind of chaos in existence. At the beginning love is in competition with the sun, and throughout the poem there is a tension between the 154
two, but at the end the original opposition is resolved or seen in a new light; the sun is made part of the lovers’ scheme of things, a scheme of things which is summed up in the last line when their bed becomes the centre of an ordered universe. The poem is a proof of Donne’s sense of the complex and bewildering nature of existence. The selfconscious artifice of the closing lines of this poem serves to draw attention to the questionable nature of any ordered certainties that mankind might try to create in a bewildering world. At the end of the poem we are left not so much with a sense of love as triumphant, as with a sense of the confusing, complex nature of experience. The surprising juxtapositions in “The Flea”, one of Donne’s most popular poems, were a faithful reflection of a society in which the traditional hierarchies of church and state were in fact in dissolution and in which people were not afraid to believe in the ultimate beneficence of a reversal of values. In David Reid’s reading of “The Canonization” the Phoenix becomes more packed with riddling significance (or wit) if, as Donne would have it, it is made into an emblem of the union of two lovers who together make the perfectly hermaphroditic creature the Phoenix was supposed to be and rise from death in orgasm as the Phoenix from its ashes. The suggestion is that the Christian mystery of the resurrection is more truly and substantially apprehended in the lovers’ acts of love. The poet puts forward himself and his lover and the love they make together as inspirational types of a new and true religion of love and, like the saints and martyrs who suffered on earth for the old one, they mediate between the heaven of love and its worshippers below. In “The Canonization” love is central and all the concerns of the world are dismissed. The poet does not care for ambition; he just wants to be left alone, to devote himself to love. Love is the last word of every stanza and the way the prayer, running through its parallelisms and surging over its syntactic suspensions, comes to ring a last change on “love” sounds too splendidly assertive for parody. Under the cavorting, this says that as far as love and its religion go, the lovers are an ideal pattern. The religious significance given by Donne to sexual love is corroborated by yet another critical interpretation. For Achsah Guibbory, “The Canonization” defends the private world of mutual 155
love against the public world, whose values are represented by the ambitious, materialistic person addressed in the opening lines. The speaker in the poem wittily argues (with a sense of the outrageousness of some of his arguments) that he and his mistress deserve to be canonized as saints. They oppose worldly greed, they have miraculously died and risen “the same” (line 26; i.e., orgasm has not diminished their vigour), they will die as martyrs in a hostile world, and finally their love will provide a “pattern” (line 45) for others. In drawing an extended analogy between religious experience and sexual love, is Donne being humorous? blasphemous? serious? Conflicting possibilities are all suggested in this poem, as Donne examines the potential of human love to provide a redeeming grace. Religious tensions are conspicuous in The Progress of the Soul, a poem of 52 stanzas, each of ten lines. It is a symbolical history of heresy, in which metempsychosis allows the soul of the apple in Eden to get reincarnated in Mahomet, Calvin and, among others, Queen Elizabeth. The poem shows clear Catholic sympathies. Donne’s Divine Poems were written mostly in the last phase of his life, after his wife’s death. The poet searches the right relation with eternity. The question as to which is the true Church is still present. The nineteen Holy Sonnets show the mixture of hope and anguish that characterizes the religious man searching for the right relationship with God, aware both of his own unworthiness and of God’s infinite greatness. In so many of the holy sonnets, reason and intellect are as essential to the poem’s very existence as Donne believed they were to human nature, and yet the poem’s arguments expose the failure or inadequacy of reason either to penetrate the mysteries of faith or to assure Donne of his personal salvation. In the poetry as a whole, an obvious delight with the exercise of reason, wit, and wordplay is crossed by a profound distrust of reason. H. J. Grierson has characterized Donne’s “wit” as a corrective to the lazy thinking of the Elizabethan sonneteers, to their fashioning and refashioning of the same outworn conceits. Donne’s form is the expression of a unique and intense individuality, a complex, 156
imaginative temperament, a swift and subtle intellect, a mind stored with theology, science and jurisprudence. ANDREW MARVELL Marvell (1621-1678) belongs to a different generation. He is actually the last metaphysical poet. He started writing poetry, primarily in Greek and Latin, during his life as a student at Cambridge University, from which he graduated in 1638. from 1642 to 1646 he travelled abroad to France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. When he returned to England he became the the tutor of the twelveyear old Mary Fairfax at her Yorkshire home. It was at this time that Marvell wrote some of his greatest poems. His friend John Milton recommended him for the position of Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State, a post he secured in 1657. In 1659 Marvell was elected member of the parliament for his home town of Hull. He remained in politics for over twenty years, taking part in diplomatic missions to Holland and Russia. He was a Puritan oscillating between Cromwell and the Stuarts. He wrote all of his poetry in rhyming couplets. Marvell succeeded in combining true metaphysical wit with perfect classical grace to a greater degree than any other poet of the century. His poems were published posthumously, in 1681, and the volume appealed to a taste that was already out of fashion. Marvell wrote devotional and love poems, pastorals, elegies, satires, and complimentary verse, and did so in strikingly various literary manners. “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”, his first poem, has an ambivalent tone, praising the victor and the defeated alike. “An Horatian Ode” has been praised for civilized detachment from the passions of its time. Equally, it has been blamed for a balance that is really political inconsequence or a mask for resignation to the rule of force and willingness to accept as ruler whoever could impose order. One effect of the classical colouring of the Ode is to open up English history, with a disturbing defamiliarizing, to a possible view 157
of its events as governed by force or necessity. But Roman and English Civil Wars were in fact very unlike. “An Horatian Ode” calls on Roman analogies in a very confusing way, and, whether that was Marvell’s intention or not, suggests an extraordinarily discordant state of affairs. Instead of a Republic defeated, there is a Republic insurgent. And there are two Caesars, not one, and neither can be like Augustus. One is Charles, head of the old order, not founder of the new, whom Cromwell’s lightning has blasted. The other is Cromwell. The poem opens by characterizing the times in which Cromwell has appeared so momentously with a glance at “the forward Youth”. Marvell is thinking of the ambitious young men of his generation, who would have to turn from love poetry and pastorals and the agreeable recreations of peace to action and war, in which Cromwell had made himself the heroic but disturbing contemporary example. Ambition is a theme that recurs in Marvell’s poetry with surprising insistence. In the “Horatian Ode”, Cromwell fascinates Marvell’s imagination because he is a figure of towering ambition. The poem as a whole is concerned with Cromwell’s rise, but an intensely vivid account of the beheading of Charles occupies the moment “which first assur’d the forced Pow’r” and blights the triumph. Marvell makes of Charles on the scaffold an image of true majesty: He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable Scene, But with his keener Eye The Axe’s edge did try. But Marvell suggests that royalty for Charles is a matter of gesture and image, that for Charles, kingship is a matter of show and theatre. It collapses in the face of the solid facts of Cromwell’s power and political craft. However, Marvell emphasizes King Charles’ dignity on the scaffold. A number of Marvell’s poems are dialogues; two treat the arch-division in our civilization, the division between body and mind. In the early seventeenth century, conventional wisdom split a higher 158
from a lower nature, an immortal part of divine origin from an animal part, physical and decaying, and sided overwhelmingly with the spirit. What is remarkable about Marvell’s “Dialogue between the Soul and Body” is that he does not turn the conventional hierarchy of Soul and Body upside down and take the part of the lower against the higher. Although Marvell’s Body has the last word and more words than the Soul, the Body has not defeated the Soul and their debate is without conclusion. Taking the stock metaphor of the Body as the prison of the Soul, Marvell develops the Body’s parts as tortures: the ear, for instance, as drummer employed to keep the prisoner from sleep. Both the cruelty of the metaphor and the witty violence of the paradox that the ear drum itself deafens convey the Soul’s exasperation. It is not just that the Soul is distracted from spiritual things by the senses; the paradox suggests the inadequacy of the senses to take things in as they really are. The last lines of the poem, however, are not particularly playful but do express the serious complaint of the Body against the Soul: What but a Soul could have the wit To build me up for Sin so fit? So Architects do square and hew, Green Trees that in the forest grew. Sin is a grief of the higher consciousness troubling the Body, and the Body’s resentment at the designs of the Soul imposed upon its natural flourishing comes out particularly in the word “green”. Decidedly, green is Marvell’s favourite colour and he brings it in wherever he can. When he compares Cromwell to a falcon, he cannot resist describing the bough on which he perches as green (“An Horatian Ode”, 1.94). A thought is green in “The Garden”. There is a green night in “Bermudas”. Altogether “green” occurs twenty-five times in the 1681 volume, and that leaves out derivatives like “freeness” and synonyms like “verdant”. Marvell’s affinity for green corresponds with his feeling for vegetation. 159
“Bermudas”, another poem in which Marvell’s political sympathies are obvious, describes the experience of Puritan friends in exile, in the exotic New World. “On a Drop of Dew” begins with the most accurate description of a dew drop on a rose and turns this picture into a symbol of the soul’s relation to earth and to Heaven. The dew drop “Shuns the… blossoms green”, a wilfully mismatching word-choice, even if Marvell meant simply to convey the flourishing of a flower he has already described as purple. Green once again is Marvell’s favourite visual image. “The Garden” has often been compared with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. It was first composed in Latin and then rendered into English. It is a poem full of imaginative intensity. In Marvell’s view, Fair Quiet and Innocence are to be found among the birds and the flowers. The poem begins in its first two stanzas mildly enough with jokes that establish garden retreat as the truly successful and civilized life. The trees themselves wear crowns of oak, bay and palm, which were given to victors in the ancient world. The joke is not just a poetic triumph over successful men of the world. It plays on the notion that the end of action is rest, that even those who disturb peace with their “industrious valour” do so to be at peace at last. There are perhaps gentle hints of death in the “short and narrow verged Shade”. Stanzas III-IV more extravagantly turn the way of the world into the ways of the garden, for there Marvell makes out that his real passion is for plants not women and invents a mock love theology, a parody of Platonic love, to support his unsociable tastes. Marvell makes up a tree-lover’s version of the Platonic ladder of love. The first stage is sensual love. Lovers of women adore a lovely complexion – “red and white”. The lovely complexion for Marvell is green. Ordinary lovers cut their sweet-hearts’ names in the bark of the trees Marvell loves, but he will cut only the names of the trees themselves. Marvell rather lets slip the pretence of dendrophilia at the beginning of stanza IV, saying that the garden is a retreat for wearied lovers of women. But he is showing what he wants to say behind his game: the green world is a solace after the disturbance of sexual passion. 160
And then in the seventh stanza, Marvell enters upon an erotically rampant garden, where fruit-bearing plants make love to him and in their taste, touch and entanglings imitate sexual play. The second stage of Marvell’s spiritual love of the plants comes with the retreat from pleasures of physical love (“pleasures less”) to an ideal love of plants’ beauty. Abstracting the essence of vegetable loveliness by “annihilating” all particulars, Marvell arrives at the idea of what moves him so, “a Green thought in a green Shade”, and then in a minor ecstasy slips out of his body into the tree above. In the eighth stanza, Marvell descends from his ecstasy to make a misogynistic joke about the superiority of the paradisal love of plants to the love of women, a joke that at once passes the matter off lightly and points to the heart of the matter – that his feeling for the garden is a refuge from sexual love. “The Garden” ends by declaring that its amusements have been innocent: “How could such sweet and wholesome Hours / Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!” Marvell’s playfulness in “The Garden” is self-mocking and self-aware. “Upon Appleton House” treats divided feelings about retirement at great length, running through an extraordinary series of Marvellesque caprices and freaks of mind. It rambles, though not without design, from Appleton House to its garden, its meadows, grove and river and finally returns to the house. The walk around the estate takes up the theme of retreat first in its opening complimentary salute to General Fairfax and his retiring ways; then in the episode treating the nunnery, which in true Marvellesque fashion tries to enclose the world by walling it out; in the garden, which excludes the Civil War and yet is drawn up in regiments of flowers; in the grove, where Marvell turns to green shade again; and finally by the river, where he fishes. “Upon Appleton House” is generally classified as a country house poem, of a kind that became very popular in the Civil War period, when country houses were the only centres left where Royalists might imagine that the feudal order held. But Fairfax was not a Royalist. The poem takes on a very singular shape for its genre, combining reverie with celebration of a great house in apparently free form in a way that looks forward to Thomson’s Seasons. 161
Marvell is also the author of memorable love poems such as “The Definition of Love” and “To His Coy Mistress”. “The Definition of Love” defines love by the ideal type. Marvell begins with a proud account of its pedigree: My Love is of a birth as rare As ’tis, for object, strange and high; It was begotten by despair, Upon Impossibility. The ideal is a love that cannot be consummated. It cannot find a place in the world because it is too good for the world; its consummation would mean the end of the world in a “new Convulsion”. “To His Coy Mistress” is a masterpiece of the seventeenth century English poetry. It is a poem of emotion, imagination and subjectivity. The poem is a proposition suggesting sexual intercourse. The suggestion is not coarse, but sophisticated and even philosophical. It is supported by allusions to Greek mythology (Chronos), and the Bible (Noah’s Flood, the conversion of the Jews, which is to happen just before the end of the world, and Joshua’s order that the sun should stand still – Zeus, in Greek mythology, also bids the sun to stand still in order to lengthen his night of love with Alcmene). The poem is metaphysical in its use of shocking, bizarre images, in mingling love and religion. Carpe diem was a common theme with Marvell’s contemporaries. Sensuality is a way of spitting in the face of his grand tormentor and foe, Time. A love poem on the surface, it is also a poem about time. “Devouring Time” can be conquered by the intensity of present passion: “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball” is the image of the sphere, the archetype of primal wholeness and fulfilment. Love transcends the inexorable laws of nature, the laws of decay, death and physical extinction. Once the coy lady’s virginity is torn away, the lovers will have passed “through the iron gates of life”. The birth canal of life and procreation is preferable to the empty vault and to the “deserts of vast eternity”. 162
According to David Reid, Marvell’s relation to his lovers is distant. His love object is “strange and high”, or his coy mistress is addressed as “Lady”. He writes out of deprivation of contact, where Donne assumes a history of intimacy and a distinct love predicament and situation of utterance. Marvell’s coy mistress, is not more vaguely represented than Donne’s mistresses. She is beautiful, a lady and difficult to get into bed. Marvell’s love poem is certainly not unusual in ignoring the fact that she has every reason to be coy in an age before reliable contraception. Reid has recently proposed an entirely new interpretation of “To His Coy Mistress”. In his opinion, this carpe diem poem is not really about a love relation, nor even about Marvell’s lust, but about his feeling for his life in time. In the first section, he entertains the counterfactual hypothesis that his life, luxuriating grossly in vegetable love, might expand to fill most of the world and its history, like Jack’s bean-stalk. We would sit down and think which way To walk, and pass our long Love’s Day. …. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. In the second section, his lifetime and all its agreeable imaginings shrink to a handful of dust in the prospect of death and deserts and vast eternity. And in the last, he imagines that copulation will somehow break out of the time limits of life by violence when, perhaps like a cannonball, he and his love tear their “Pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.” “The poem works better as an anxious, almost hallucinatorily vivid fantasy about life in time than as a seduction poem. The tone in which the woman is addressed is unpleasant. (…) And the violent love-making he proposes has no fondness behind it, only fear of the grave. The woman is not loved or wooed,” is David Reid’s rather gloomy interpretation of “To His Coy Mistress”. The readers of the poem may, however, choose whichever interpretation better suits their taste, temperament or intellect. 163
What one might call the Metaphysical urge to transcend the time limits and space limits of life in the body is certainly present in Marvell, but, except in “A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure” and “On a Drop of Dew”, always rendered ironically, so that it comes over as a psychological extravagance rather than a metaphysical passion. Marvell’s range of sensibility is narrow. His poetry brings in a world of upper-class caroline culture, of gardens and statues, picture galleries, the theatre and masque, the court painter Lely, architecture, domestic and foreign, mosaics, marble tombs and so on. His classical education is obvious, but not pedantically, and a gentleman’s knowledge of the countryside. He has a discerning feeling for music. His acquaintance with the microscope and mathematics is not inelegant. Although Marvell achieves very extravagant effects and enjoys turning the world upside-down as much as Donne, he does not generally do so by means of far-fetched comparisons. In order to make things strange, Marvell uses two analytic devices. The first is the fantastic hypothesis, which allows him to suppose absurdities that reflect on things he is considering. “Had we but World enough and Time” allows him those dilations by which he can stand outside and arrive at the shortness of life. The other device is mathematical description. In “The Definition of Love” and “Eyes and Tears”, the geometry is genuinely analogical. Like Donne’s compasses, the squint and parallel lines in “The Definition of Love” are similes not descriptions (“As Lines so Loves oblique may well / Themselves in every Angle greet”). JOHN MILTON Milton (1608-1674) was given a Christian humanist education from the start; at St. Paul’s school he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew between 1615 and 1625. Here he was taught to apply the classical rhetoric to the analysis of Latin and Greek prose and verse. In 1625 he moved to Cambridge, to study at Christ’s College. In his essays he attacked the scholastic philosophy and the barren disputes to which it gave rise. He also wrote an oratorical essay in 164
Latin on the music of the spheres, influenced by Plato and Pythagoras. Other major influences include Bacon’s philosophy and the English translation of La Semaine by Guillaume du Bartas (and epic dealing with the Genesis). He began his poetic career with verse paraphrases of Psalms and Ovidian Latin elegies. His first original poem written in English was “Ode on the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough”. The infant was his little niece; the poem was a mere literary exercise. In 1628 Milton composed a number of Petrarchan sonnets dedicated to a foreign lady named Emilia. 1629 is the date of his first really important English poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”. It has a remarkably pictorial quality, a combination of brilliant colouring and mingling of realistic and symbolic details comparable with a fifteenth century Italian painting of the Nativity. Milton does not alter the details of the Biblical account, but the feature of the poem which has maintained its accredited significance is its tendency to cause the reader to think closely about the very notion of God’s incarnation, the intersection of the timeless and ineffable with the transient and fragile state of mortality. Structurally the poem is made up of three sections, of roughly equal length. Stanzas 1 to 8 describe the setting of the Nativity, which is characterised by a reduction of light and sound to a bare minimum – the natural world seems respectfully to have suspended its activities. Stanzas 9 to 17 are principally concerned with the angelic choir whose celestial music symbolises the harmony and order which briefly descends upon the world with the birth of Christ. The third section, stanzas 18 to 26, is about the effect of the birth upon the false deities of the pre-Christian world. The music and light which accompany the birth are described in terms of their absence and inaccessibility. They are those things which “Before was never made”; the music “was never by mortal finger struck” (stanza 9). The pure light of God and the music of heaven are indescribable because they are part of the state from which man, when he fell, cut himself off; language, our means of description, incorporates our fallen condition. The most important poems of Milton’s early phase are L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. L’Allegro describes a day in the life of a 165
cheerful man; mythological and pastoral images build up a mood of contented living; it is full of light and movement. The dawn is announced by the skylark’s song. It is a world of ploughmen, milkmaids, mowers, shepherds, agricultural labourers. Il Penseroso deals with a different mood, the mood of contemplation and grave intellectual activity, describing a gloomy room, the midnight lamp of a lonely student in the tower etc. (This intellectual atmosphere has its Romanian counterpart in Eminescu’s Scrisoarea I .) Both L’Allegro and Il Penseroso are written in the octosyllabic couplets which were first used in The Owl and the Nightingale. After the years spent in Cambridge, Milton settled down at Horton, near Windsor. “On Shakespeare” is a brief, eleven-line epigram in heroic couplets, a tribute to the memory and reputation of Shakespeare, which first appeared, anonymously, among the prefatory poems to Shakespeare’s Second Folio of 1632. The fact that Milton had been asked to contribute it testifies to his own growing reputation in literary London. The epigram involves an extended conceit in which Shakespeare’s writings are praised as a far more fitting and enduring tribute to his greatness than a traditional monument “in piled stones”. This device is something of a literary commonplace, dating back to Horace’s “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” (“I have built a monument more lasting than bronze”). While never questioning Shakespeare’s eminence, Milton at one point suggests that his artistry was more inspired and natural than the consequence of intellectual endeavour. In 1634 Milton wrote Comus, a masque staged at the court. It is an aristocratic entertainment composed in the Elizabethan tradition, with detectable echoes from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale, from Jonson, Fletcher, etc. The plot is relatively simple in that the Lady, lost in a wild wood is virtually kidnapped by Comus, a spirit of not-quite demonic but less than creditable status, who transports her to a partly imagined “palace”. She resists his lecherous designs and, with the assistance of her 166
brothers, escapes. The Attendant Spirit functions rather like the narrator in fiction, setting the scene for the audience and withdrawing to allow the principal characters and their exchanges centre stage. At last, the evil is defeated by the good. The dialogue is often accelerated by the use of stichomythia. The theme of Comus is transparent and uncomplicated: Godgiven virtue can resist evil and corruption. It has attained significance as one of Milton’s major, formative works because it subtly engages with issues that are central both to his status as poet and to more recent critical controversies; principally the Fall, freedom of choice and the influence of gender upon both. Lycidas is an elegy dedicated to a priest drowned in the Irish Sea, one of Milton’s former fellow-students at Cambridge. Edward King is turned into the symbol of the young man of promise in any context. Milton’s reference to Orpheus’s death is meant to emphasize that only the good die young. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy. It belongs to a long-established generic tradition characterized by a number of stylistic and structural conventions which enable the reader to recognize it as an heir to such works as Spenser’s “Astrophel”, Moschus’s “Lament for Bion”, Virgil’s “Eclogue X” and Theocritus’s “Idyll I”. In poems written within this tradition the poet typically represents himself as a shepherd mourning the death of a beloved companion whose departure has afflicted the entire natural world with grief. After consigning his sheep to the care of another shepherd and invoking the assistance of the muses of pastoral poetry, he proceeds to sing a dirge to his deceased friend in which he recalls the idyllic days they spent together in the countryside. According to the great eighteenth-century critic Dr. Samuel Johnson, the poem is insincere; it is deliberately impersonal in nature. Fundamentally, Lycidas concerns Milton himself; King is but the excuse for one of Milton’s more personal poems”. At its deepest level, then, Lycidas is about Milton’s anxieties concerning the possibility of his own premature death, akin perhaps to those expressed by John Keats in his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain”. 167
As the poem proceeds, the first person voice is replaced by a third person narrator, and the poem finally turns it into a fictional character whose values and attitudes Milton no longer necessarily shares. Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals grey; He touched the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. This is one of the most extraordinary moments in English poetry. For Milton’s unexpected introduction of a third-person narrator at the end of a first-person poem violates one of the oldest and most fundamental conventions governing a writer’s relationship with his reader: the implicit understanding that the genre of the work will remain constant, that a play will not turn into an epic half-way through, or vice versa. It is as if the self of a dream had suddenly awakened into the self of everyday reality. The elegy and the swain who sang it recede into the distance, and we are left with the sense that we have witnessed a rebirth. Whereas the first 185 lines have been written in irregular stanzas modelled on the Italian canzone, the concluding eight lines are in ottava rima, the major vehicle of the sixteenth-century romantic epic, the stanza of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. As the verse form in which the amorous and military conquests of Roland and Godfrey had been celebrated, the ottava rima naturally invokes the turbulent world of heroic action and romantic love. The concluding stanza of Lycidas thus carries with it a set of values diametrically opposed to those associated with the pastoral as a genre or with Edward King as a character. The course of Milton’s life, it suggests, is about to undergo a drastic change. 168
And so, of course, it did. Rather than remaining in the cloistered calm of Horton, Milton travelled extensively in France and Italy and shortly afterwards plunged into public life in London. Rather than remaining chaste, he soon married Mary Powell. And rather than fulfilling his poetic ambitions, he devoted the next twenty years of his life to establishing himself as one of the principal public champions of the Puritan and Parliamentarian cause. Lycidas is thus a pivotal work in Milton’s career. For the fact is that, with the exception of a few sonnets, Lycidas is the last poem Milton wrote in English for the next twenty years. Not until the dying days of the Commonwealth when he was almost sixty would Milton reassume that part of his identity which he had discarded at the end of Lycidas. In 1638 Milton started on his fifteen-month travel to Europe. His travel to Italy is considered to be one of the great Wanderjahre of literary history, a moment of contact between cultures comparable with the Italian journeys of Erasmus and Goethe. In 1642 Milton got married only to be left by his wife three weeks later; she came back to her husband in 1645, to put her royalist family under his protection. Between 1642 and 1652 Milton wrote mainly pamphlets, treatises and essays. His own experience made him write some essays defending the idea of divorce. In 1652, a crucial year in his biography, Milton completely lost his sight while working as Latin secretary to the parliamentary committee for foreign affairs. His successor in office was Andrew Marvell. During the next ten years Milton produced no important literary piece of work except his memorable Sonnet 23 (1658) dedicated to his dead second wife, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint”. Milton’s blind years were to be the years of his greatest literary achievements. • Paradise Lost, designed between 1663 and 1665, was written (i.e. dictated!) soon after the Great Plague had forced him to leave London. It was first conceived as a drama, then as an epic; it had four successive drafts, the last of which was titled Adam Unparadized. The poem was published in 1667. Paradise Lost is a poetic rendering of the story of the Fall in such a way as to illuminate some of the central paradoxes of the 169
human situation and to illustrate the tragic ambiguity of man as a moral being. The plot develops on four great theatres of action: Heaven, Eden, Hell, and Our familiar world. Milton uses the blank verse and the verse paragraph. The cosmic scenery of the epic and the world of ordinary men in their dayto-day activities are linked by means of epic similes. Paradise Lost shows Milton as a Christian Humanist using all the sources of the European literary tradition that had come down to him – biblical, classical, medieval, Renaissance. Imagery from classical fable, medieval romance, allusions to myths, legends, stories of all kinds, geographical imagery deriving from Milton’s own fascination with the books of travel, biblical history and doctrine, Jewish and Christian learning make up this great synthesis of Western culture. Milton’s synthesis is more successful than Spenser’s because he places his different kinds of knowledge in a logical hierarchy, and never mingles, as Spenser often does, classical myth and biblical story on equal terms. (The description of Eden in Book IV is a fine example of Milton’s use of pagan classical imagery for a clearly defined Christian purpose.) Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, speaking of the genres illustrated by Paradise Lost, considers it to be an epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgil’s Aeneid; it is also an encyclopaedia of literary forms. The panoply of forms includes pastoral: landscape descriptions of Arcadian vistas; pastoral scenes and eclogue-like passages presenting the otium (ease, contentment) of heaven and unfallen Eden; and scenes of light georgic gardening activity. Also, several kinds of lyrics embedded in the epic have received some critical attention: celebratory odes, psalmic hymns of praise and thanks-giving, submerged sonnets, and epithalamium (wedding song), love lyrics (aubade, nocturne, sonnet), laments and complaints. In Andrews Sanders’s interpretation, Milton’s subject was the failure of humankind to live according to divine order and its slow but providential deliverance from the consequences of the Fall. The myth with which he chose to deal, and in which he believed literally, was, like many other parallel myths and folk-tales, an exploration of the 170
moral consequences of disobedience. The discovery of the knowledge of good and evil is neither accidental nor happy. The central “character”, Adam, has no heroic destiny. Through his, and Eve’s corruption all humankind is corrupted and, as both are finally obliged to understand, the spiritual struggle to regain Paradisal equity and equability extends through each generation of their descendants. In a profound sense Adam and Eve fall from the ideal into the human condition. The great theme of the poem is obedience to the behests implicit in the creative order of an omnipotent God. The will of God is imprinted in the harmony of nature, and the disaster of the Fall is as much ecological as it is moral. Despite the temptation presented by the poem itself to see the rebellion of Satan as a heroic gesture of liberation and the Fall of Adam as a species of gallantry towards his wife, Paradise Lost insistently attempts to assert to a reader the ultimate justness of a loving God’s “Eternal Providence”. In vastly elaborating the bald account of Adam’s Fall in the Book of Genesis, Milton extends his viewpoint beyond the acts of Creation and Eden to an imaginative history of how the peccant angels fell from Heaven, how Satan evolved and perfected his scheme to mar Creation, and how God’s promise of redemption will be realized. Milton describes ideal nature, which is neither purely decorative, nor solidly grounded in reality. Book I shows us the fallen angels in Hell beginning to recover from their defeat. Satan rallies the fallen angels after their defeat by God and declares that he will fight against God in every possible way. Satan’s speeches are magnificent and they prove that Milton had grown suspicious of rhetoric as the art of persuasion. These speeches represent the attractiveness of plausible evil. The opening sentence of the poem is sixteen lines long. A fairly favourable image of Satan comes across from the lines. We can almost sympathise with the rebels, who have been flung into a “dreary plain, forlorn and wild”, and there is not only energy but also a kind of bravery in Satan’s words as he refuses to accept defeat. He is, of course, the incarnation of evil and entirely motivated by hate, and in a way his words graphically reveal such shortcomings, but none the less this is someone who leads, speaks to and inspires his forces in terms we can understand. 171
In his speech Satan talks of freedom, and obviously prefers freedom in hell to servitude in heaven. Yet his words can also be viewed from another perspective: he begins by talking about how “We shall be free”, but within these few lines has shifted from this general concern for all his followers and is merely concerned with his own position as the leader who will “reign in hell”. The same double-sided quality is also apparent in the very sound and texture of his words: his words can appear elevated, dignified and heroic, but they can also be judged as empty bombast. At times the manner of his speech almost resembles a salesman’s clever play with words. Satan can appear as heroic, but by making his words specious. Milton can simultaneously show the hollowness of everything Satan represents. As William Blake shrewdly said, “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it”. In Harold Bloom’s opinion, Paradise Lost is magnificent because it is persuasively tragic as well as epic; it is the tragedy of the fall of Lucifer into Satan, though it declines to show us Lucifer, lightbearer and son of the morning, chief of the stars that will fall. We see only the fallen Satan, though we behold Adam and Eve before, at the very moment of, and after the fall. In another sense of the tragic, Paradise Lost is the tragedy of Eve and Adam, who, like Satan, have their inevitably Shakespearian qualities and yet seem somewhat less persuasive representations than Satan, who is granted more of a Shakespearian inner self. Bloom contends that the Miltonic representation of Satan’s ambivalence toward God, like the Freudian account of primal ambivalence, is wholly Shakespearian, founded upon Iago’s ambivalence toward Othello, Macbeth’s toward his won Oedipal ambition, and Hamlet’s toward everything and everyone, himself most of all. Ambivalence, in its Freudian definition, is the essence of all relationships between the superego, that which is above the “I”, and the id or “it”, below the “I”. Mingled and equal affects of love and hatred simultaneously flow back and forth drowning the unhappy ego. In Book II Satan displays traces of true heroism, and yet a self frustrating spite is his dominant emotion. His most impressive heroic terms are just meaningless language. 172
Book III is the least effective part of the poem because of God’s continuous need of logically justifying the necessity of punishment, and hence the episode of the temptation. The a priori idea of justice to be done, of a scapegoat, is inconsistent. Book IV presents Satan’s arrival in Eden. In Book V Milton emphasizes the beauty of prelapsarian simplicity, he is fascinated by innocent nakedness, especially Eve’s. He opposes this attitude to perpetual celibacy and the courtly love tradition. With Milton, the conventional notions of heroism turn out to be diabolical, while conventional attitudes to sex are Puritan. The Garden of Eden is opposed to the Garden of the Rose tradition. Books V and VI present Raphael’s account of the war in Heaven. Book VII presents Raphael’s account of the creation (with imagery borrowed from Genesis, the Psalms, Book of Job, and Plato). In Book VIII Adam tells Raphael of his own experience after his creation. In Book IX Milton lingers on the final moment before the temptation scene. Eve is fooled by the cunning serpent, whose effort is compared to the speech “of some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome”. Eve tastes the forbidden fruit. She then tells Adam the truth. Eve’s sin is disobedience, but also credulity, a paradox reminding us of Othello’s trusting Iago. In this following extract, we see Adam deciding what to do, whether to be loyal to God or whether to stay with and support Eve: Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length First to himself he inward silence broke: “O fairest of Creation, last and best Of all God’s works, Creature in whom excelled Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote! Rather, how hast thou yielded to transgress The strict forbiddance, how to violate The sacred fruit forbidden! Some cursed fraud 173
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown, And me with thee hath ruined; for with thee Certain my resolution is to die: How can I live without thee! how forego Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined, To live again in these wild woods forlorn! Should God create another Eve, and I Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart: no, no! I feel The link of Nature draw me: flesh of flesh, Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.” In a poem that is so often cosmic in its range of reference and so often convoluted in its sentences, there is something strikingly beautiful in the plain simplicity of a line such as “How can I live without thee…” It could even be argued that, in a poem that sets out to justify the ways of God to men, this particular moment in the poem justifies the ways of men to God as it shows that, for Adam, human love is more important than divine love. The heroes’ fall is followed by shame, guilt, disillusion, bitterness and, finally, prayer and repentance. In recent times, critics have reinterpreted the traditionally negative character of Satan. John Carey, for instance, insists on Satan’s depth psychology and points out that he, too, is capable of human emotions. When Satan first sets eyes on Adam and Eve in Eden he is stricken with wonder at the human pair – not spirits, he perceives, yet “little inferior” to heavenly spirits – and feels, or says he feels, an inclination to love them. They are creatures whom my thoughts pursue With wonder, and could love, so lively shines In them Divine resemblance. (IV.362-4)
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Satan’s reason for feeling he could love Adam and Eve – that they look so like God – naturally surprises the reader, as we have been led to suppose it is God Satan hates. When he sees Eve in Eden, Satan is so enraptured by her beauty that he becomes momentarily good (9.460-79). He is deprived of his “fierce intent” as he watches her, “abstracted” from his own evil: and for the time remained Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge. (IX.464-6) The passage seems to indicate that Satan’s natural tendency, when caught unawares, is to love. Beauty and delight are his natural element. Hatred is an effort of his will. This could be seen as making him either more, or less, sympathetic. Book X shows Michael narrating the future history of the world to Adam. Among others things, Cain’s murder is mentioned. Adam and Eve leave their former Paradise with quiet confidence, to face a world of work and endeavour, and mutual help. The newly established procession of the seasons and the idea of labour give meaning and dignity to human life. Dennis Danielson draws the readers’ attention to the way in which Milton focuses on a whole series of questions about the Fall story: how can we talk about the Fall when there really were two falls, Adam’s and Eve’s? How can we talk about Adam being tempted by Satan when Satan tempted only Eve? What motivations operated in each of their falls? How did it come about that they were tempted separately? Was Eve’s fall inevitable? Once Eve had fallen, was Adam’s fall inevitable? If they were ignorant of good and evil, how could they have been expected to avoid evil? If God knew they were going to be tempted, could he not have forewarned them? Why would the serpent have wanted to have Adam and Eve disobey God anyhow? These and many other questions which Genesis leaves in the background are brought by Milton’s detailed narrative into the 175
foreground where their answers can be inspected for both literary and doctrinal coherence. Says Harold Bloom: “As a Protestant prophet, indeed the Protestant poet, Milton would be very unhappy that Paradise Lost now reads like the most powerful science-fiction (…) what makes Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakespearian tragedy, Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy.” The “woman question” in Milton will never be decided; good poems never end, as Diane K. McColley has put it. Milton was radical in making Eve an ardent caretaker of the natural world, a passionate, sensuous, and pure erotic partner, a spontaneous composer of exquisite lyric and narrative poetry, a participant in numerous kinds of conversation including political debate, and the leader in peacemaking after the Fall. He was probably more serious about the relations of the sexes, more careful of their resonances, and more hopeful of their happiness and holiness than any other poet of his or perhaps any other time. He was radical in his insistence on women’s spiritual completeness, responsibility, and fitness for “all rational delight” and in his celebration of erotic bliss in the morning of Creation. Perhaps no one else has depicted sexual happiness at once so lavishly and so purely. His loving portrait of Eve, not excusing her sin on any grounds, certainly not incapacity, but portraying her as a person of delightful mind as well as beautiful form, honour as well as charm, sanctitude as well as radiant looks and graceful gestures, moral searching as well as artistic creativity, political combativeness as well as sweet compliance, asperity as well as gentleness, and a capacity for repentance and forgiveness as well as rash default, raises her immeasurably above other Eves of art and story. Anthony Burgess contends that Milton created a highly artificial language and blank verse. His sentences are long, like Latin sentences; he inverts the order of words, like a Latin author, and he talks about “elephants endorsed with towers” instead of “elephants with towers on their back”. However, the subject of the poem obviously justifies such a poetic diction. Paradise Regained (1671), a poem in four books, presents the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. In Book I, Satan first appears in the likeness of an “aged man in rural weeds”. Unlike Eve, Jesus has 176
the advantage of knowing who Satan is. Satan resorts to rhetoric, to oratory, while Christ’s language is quiet, precise. At the beginning of the poem, Jesus, newly baptized in the Jordan, walks out into the desert in deep thought, reviewing the course of his life. He recollects his first delighted boyhood reading in Scripture and then a further reading, after Mary has told him how at his birth the angels proclaimed him Messiah. What he knows of himself is what has been revealed in the Old Testament. When Satan comes to the contest with him, he comes straight from a council of the fallen angels called after the baptism, at which he reported that when Jesus rose out of the Jordan a voice from heaven was heard to say, “This is my son beloved, in him am pleased” (I.85). Book II deals with temptation through luxury, riches and sensuality. Having rejected the first temptation to turn stones into bread, in Book II of Paradise regained, after forty days in the wilderness, Jesus for the first time is conscious of hunger as he prepares to sleep. Satan takes advantage of Jesus’s drama to bring on the banquet that concludes the temptation to appetite. The banquet scene is a Miltonic invention, not suggested by any of the Gospels. Book III presents temptation through fame, glory and power. In Book IV Satan evokes the civilization of Greece and Rome. Jesus rejects public life. Private life is identified with virtue. In Paradise Regained Satan quotes Scripture in his own cause and the Son responds with interpretations that wrest Scripture back from him again. Milton constructs a dramatic conflict by opposing to Satan’s literal but worldly reading of the biblical theme of messiahship an evolving higher reading of the theme by the Son. Satan, who apparently has read through the Hebrew Bible with an inquiring but cold eye, makes an adversarial or ironic use of scriptural quotations, seeking to persuade the Son that they define the Messiah as an earthly king, for on that basis Jesus might betray the spiritual values in Holy Writ. Jesus replies with an inspired reading of scriptural quotations to defeat Satan’s strategy; he not only eludes entrapment, he enunciates the true meaning of messiahship by his truer hermeneutic.
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The poem is dramatic rather than epic. Its psychological conflict is reminiscent of the “psychomachia” tradition (see the morality plays, Marlowe’s Faustus, etc.). Milton’s last great poem, Samson Agonistes (1671), dramatizes a biblical episode taking Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound and Oedipus at Colonus as models. Dialogues, monologues, comments by the chorus, the final reported account of the hero’s death in pulling down the temple, all those details make up a dramatic poem. The myth, the story of Samson is located principally in the Old Testament, specifically Judges XII-XVI. Milton’s dramatic poem generally follows the biblical account, with a number of changes. In the Bible, Delilah is Samson’s mistress. Milton makes her his wife, presumably to emphasise the intensity of their relationship. Also, the biblical Samson is presented as a folklorish giant with no special claim to intellect while Milton’s figure continually reflects upon and scrutinises his past, his condition and his future. Along with the biblical legend, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus both have tragic-heroic figures respectively imprisoned and blinded. The opening 330 lines are an exchange between Samson and the “Chorus of Danites” which inform us of his past and current state. He is, or rather, was, a military hero of the Jewish people (the Chorus is comprised of lamenting Jews). He was betrayed by his wife Delilah, who belonged to the tribe with whom the Jews were at war, the Philistines. They, as a result, captured him and cut off the hair upon which his God-given strength depended; next he was blinded and cast into imprisonment and slavery. The exchange between Samson and the Chorus is interrupted by the arrival of his father, Manoa (332). Manoa proposes that a ransom be paid to secure his release (483) (this is Milton’s invention and not the part of the biblical account). Samson responds that, while the suggestion is tempting, he is aware that his punishment is just. He betrayed the secret of his strength to his wife, not because of love but because he responded vainly to her flattery and was willingly entrapped by her physical charms (521-40). He feels that he deserves his humiliating plight. 178
His next visitor is Delilah herself (724), who supports his father’s proposal, and seeks his forgiveness in return for the alleviation of his sufferings (733-818). Samson replies that, while he cannot pardon himself, her crime is still more unpardonable (819-42, 871-902, 928-50). The third visitor is Harapha (1076), the Philistine giant, who comes to mock and taunt him. Strengthened by his exchanges with his father and Delilah, Samson resists Harapha’s verbal assaults with discourses that emphasise his own sense of tragic certainty, and Harapha departs “somewhat crestfallen”. Finally, an Officer from the Philistine court arrives (1308) and summons Samson to perform feats of strength before them. He departs with the Officer (1426) and the poem ends with the Chorus and Manoa being informed by a Messenger from the court of what has happened (1596-1660): Samson has rooted up the two pillars which supported the building in which he was supposed to perform, bringing down the roof and killing himself and the assembled dignitaries. As Joan S. Bennett argues, as a tragic hero, Samson is not constructed nor held up as an exemplar for reader to emulate. In place of heaven, hell, paradise, or even the wilderness, the drama shows us a familiar world: of family (parent, lover, wife); of friendship (colleagues, countrymen); of conventional beliefs and values (religious, societal, political); of glimpses of human intersection with the divine. It is the world of personal discovery and of commitment to an individual life’s meaning; of exhilaration in the achievement of goals against the odds; of betrayal and abandonment; of personal failure and despair; of deep guilt, of the struggle for religious faith, of liberation, of the purest individual freedom within the confines of history. The blind Milton has been identified with the blind Samson. Milton again attacks the courtly love tradition, according to which the man was regarded as “love’s prisoner”. Despite the voices of several famous detractors, such as Voltaire or Dr. Samuel Johnson, Milton’s work stands as one of the ever greatest achievements of English poetry.
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JOHN DRYDEN After Ben Jonson and William Davenant, Dryden (1631-1700) was the third poet laureate of English letters. He was a prose writer, essayist, theorist, translator, dramatist and poet. Although the least original of all great English poets, Dryden became an influential model for the eighteenth century, being much praised by Dr. Samuel Johnson. • Dryden the Theorist is mostly remembered for his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668). It is written in the form of a debate on the nature of poetic drama and the respective merits of classical, modern French, Elizabethan and Restoration plays. Dryden’s own views are expressed via Neander’s cues, Neander being one of the three characters participating in the debate. In Dryden’s opinion, a play is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours and the changes of fortunes to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind”. Dryden defends the English plays against the French ones: liveliness is better than cold formality; he praises the “variety and copiousness” of the English plays as opposed to the “barrenness of the French plots” and defends “variety, if well ordered”. • Dryden the Dramatist is the author of about 30 plays. As a playwright, he was deeply influenced by the French theatre, by Corneille, Racine and, especially, Hardy. He wrote his early comedies in prose mingled with rare instances of blank verse. Later on he started writing tragicomedies in heroic couplets, a prosodic pattern previously employed by William Davenant and George Etheredge. This did not prove to be a very happy idea, because it tended to operate against rather than in favour of theatrical illusion, shutting up the sense within fixed limits, imparting to dialogue a didactic rather than dramatic colouring. It ended up in conventionalism and artificiality. Dryden then started writing his so-called heroic plays. Their plot has an exotic setting and they are written in heroic couplets because they follow and imitate Ariosto’s heroic romance with its supermen and superwomen. They are characterized by an exaggerated fancy in the realm of certain emotions and an exuberant use of 180
language, a lack of any notion of verisimilitude. They are brilliant baroque artefacts, today regarded as a fact of literary history. Their characters are placed in almost impossible situations, amid incidents which are as extravagant as their emotions. The heroic play is designed to celebrate heroic virtues such as valour and love; all these conventions and the monotonous use of rhyme result in what we call rant. Dryden’s lack of originality made him borrow subjects from Madeleine de Scudéry (famous for her Le Grand Cyrus) and her brother Georges. Aureng Zebe, The Conquest of Granada, The Indian Queen, The Indian Emperor or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards best illustrate Dryden’s ludicrous heroic tragedies. The epilogue to The Conquest of Granada declares Dryden superior to all his predecessors in wit and power of diction. Dryden was bitterly attacked and mocked in Buckingham’s famous burlesque The Rehearsal (1670). Dryden also refashioned and rewrote Shakespeare’s plays The Tempest (with Davenant), Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra. Dryden’s version of the latter is titled All for Love. The theme of Shakespeare’s play is narrowed down to and concentrated on the conflict between love and honour, thus simplifying the heroes’ psychology. Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida is subtitled Truth Found Too Late. Cressida remains faithful to Troilus and she prefers rather to commit suicide than to betray her love. The didactic tone of the play is enhanced by Dryden’s royalist sympathies and Ulysses closes the play with a less than subtle advice: “Let subjects learn obedience to their kings”. Dryden as a dramatist is mostly remembered for his Marriage à la Mode, a comedy of manners modelled on the Spanish comedies of intrigue, combining Jonsonian humours, wit and immorality. It presents the implications of the Restoration attitude to sex, marriage, honour, virtue and society in a situation in which A’s wife is B’s mistress and B’s fiancée is A’s mistress. Dryden’s work as a dramatist purified and clarified his own style by teaching him precision in the use of words. In and by drama he learnt the art of political oratory and debate, and later he was to make superb use of the heroic couplet in his satirical poems. 181
• Dryden the Poet was appointed poet laureate (in succession to Davenant) in 1668; he was also appointed historiographer royal after he had published Annus Mirabilis (1667). It is the account of the “wonderful year” which came to know a four-day naval battle with the Dutch and the Great Fire of London. It is made up of 304 quatrains in alternate rhymes. The mood of the poem is patriotic and encomiastic. In the poem it is the King’s policies that serve to defeat the Dutch in war and the King’s prayers that persuade Heaven to quell the flames. In 1679 Dryden was brutally assaulted by the Earl of Rochester’s hirelings for supposedly being involved in the composition of an anti-Rochester pamphlet. In 1681 Dryden wrote his best work, Absalom and Achitophel. It is a satire mixing serious intent with pleasant manner, in the vein of Lucian’s Dialogues or Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae. The political satire is veiled under the transparent guise of one of the most familiar episodes of the Old Testament, namely Absalom’s rebellion against David at Achitophel’s urge. In Dryden’s satire Absalom points to Monmouth, the king’s natural son; David stands for Charles II and Achitophel is Shaftesbury, Monmouth’s supporter and adviser. It is a party poem, one designed to please friends by advancing their cause and to provoke enemies by ridiculing theirs. “The true end of Satyre”, he wrote in his preliminary declaration to his reader, “is the amendment of Vices by correction”; the satirist himself is a physician prescribing “harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease”, a disease affecting the body politic. Shaftesbury / Achitophel is cast as the Satanic tempter of the honourably gullible Monmouth / Absalom; he holds out the prospect of personal glory and public salvation, and he flatters the young man with perverted biblical images pregnant with a sense of a divine mission. The poem, as Andrew Sanders observes, has relatively little “plot” in the strict sense of the term, is structured around a series of vivid arguments and apologies. It closes with a reasoned affirmation of intent from the “Godlike” David, part a regretful denunciation, part a defence of royal prerogative, part a restatement of an ideal of constitutional balance. It is presented as a second Restoration with the 182
King’s position approved, in late baroque pictorial fashion, by an assenting God and a thundering firmament. The satirical narrative is not complete; the poem was to lead up to the trial and conviction of the rebel. Dryden’s enemies (Buckingham among others) are ridiculed with sarcasm. The Medal (1682), written at the King’s suggestion, was another attack directed against Shaftesbury’s hypocrisy. Mac Flecknoe, written in the same year, is a short satirical poem against Thomas Shadwell, Shaftesbury’s literary supporter. It is a purely personal satire in motive and design, anticipating Pope’s personal attacks in The Dunciad. One of history’s many ironies is that in 1688, on their accession to the throne of England, King William and Queen Mary appointed Shadwell poet laureate long before Dryden’s death. Religio Laici (1683) is a poem summing up Dryden’s views, who wanted to know where in the matter of religion he stood. In 1686 he became a Roman Catholic. In the preface of Religio Laici Dryden describes himself as one who is “naturally inclin’d to Scepticism in Philosophy” though one inclined to submit his theological opinions “to my Mother Church”. The poem sees the Church of England as serenely fostering “Common quiet” in the face of attacks from Deists, Dissenters, and Papists and it blends within the form of a verse-epistle theological proposition with satirical exposition. Its striking opening image of human reason as a dim moon lighting the benighted soul is developed into an attack on those Deists who reject the Scripturally based teachings of Christianity. As it proceeds, the poem also attempts to demolish both Roman Catholic claims to infallible omniscience and the Puritan faith in individual inspiration, but it ultimately begs the vital question of religious authority. The Hind and the Panther is Dryden’s longest production in verse, written after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1685. It is a fable. It is a wordy and unworthy tribute to his new-found religious security, an allegorical defence of James II’s attempts to achieve official toleration for Catholics in a predominantly Anglican culture and an attempt to prove the validity of Catholic claims to universal authority. It takes the form of a beast fable in which Quakers appear as hares, Presbyterians as wolves, Romans as hinds, and 183
Anglicans as panthers. It is obliged to resort to the absurdity of a good natured conversation about the mysteries of religion in which a hind actually attempts to persuade a panther, and to the incongruity of casting the Christian God as the nature god, Pan. Allegorical only in its mise en scéne and list of characters, the poem lacks verisimilitude, with the animals indulging in theological controversy and Biblical criticism. • Dryden the Translator was a hard-working man who had to earn his living by translating classical poets. No longer a favourite court-poet, Dryden published the complete translation of Persius and Juvenal as well as Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneis. The Trojan hero on the title-page of the latter volume resembled King William’s face with his hooked nose, in an attempt to placate the king. Dryden also translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses and fragments from Homer’s Iliad (without Chapman’s excellence). Apart from his translations and his libretto for Henry Purcell’s extravagant “Dramatick Opera” King Arthur, or The British Worthy (1691), two late lyric poems – A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687, and Alexander’s Feast; or the Power fo Musique. An Ode, in Honour of St Cecilia’s Day (1697) – proved of particularly fruitful impact on the eighteenth century. Both poems contributed to the fashion for the irregular stanzas and verse paragraphs of the “Cowleyan” Ode. A critic of imitators and plagiaries (see his opinion on Jonson), Dryden could not go beyond the limits of being an imitator himself. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY Literary historians usually divide the span of the eighteenth century into three major periods: 1) The early eighteenth century or the age of Swift and Pope, lasting from 1700, the year of Dryden’s death, to 1744-1745, the years when Pope and Swift died. This period was characterized by neoclassical attitudes in poetry and prose, represented by aristocratic courtliness, restraint and dignity, urbanity, conversational ease, gentility, symmetry, artifice, a taste for general effects, critical spirit and rationalism; 184
2) The mid-eighteenth century or the age of Samuel Johnson, lasting from 1744-1745 to 1789, the year of the French Revolution. It was characterized by both a survival of classicism and a romantic revolt against old traditions; 3) The late eighteenth century or the beginnings of Romanticism, between 1789 and 1800, a period characterized by an accentuation of sentimental and melodramatic elements. More recent approaches no longer tackle the eighteenth century poetry as two distinct, separate trends, opposing neoclassical rationalism to pre-romantic sentimentalism. There is also a tendency of reassessing the classical poets’ indebtedness to ancient models. It is true, indeed, that their works abound in references to Homer and Horace; the latter was the most fashionable, most translated and retranslated ancient author of the Augustan age. The Augustan neo-classicists were adepts of the principle according to which Art mirrors Nature, hence Nature must be followed and imitated in their works. The meaning of Nature differs from one author to another, but it is generally interpreted as the Universe governed by laws, wherein the microcosm of this mechanical order is represented by man. Therefore, imitating Nature means revealing the eternal truth residing in various individual manifestations of man. It also implies a constant quest for harmony in life and art. Longinus, the famous author of On the Sublime, was frequently referred to as well: he was one of Alexander Pope’s favourite authors; like Longinus, Pope believed that order must be accompanied by creative genius. ALEXANDER POPE Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was born in London, the only son of a cloth merchant. At the age of twelve he suffered from tuberculosis of the bone, which left him deformed and sickly for the rest of his life. Because his family was Catholic he could not attend public schools or go to university, so he was largely self-educated. From a very early age he showed a gift for writing. 185
Alexander Pope, the most important English neoclassicist poet of the eighteenth century started his literary career by imitating Chaucer and the ancients. One of Pope’s most demanding poems is Essay on Criticism (1711), in which he tries to explain the history of literary criticism, the importance of the classics, the doctrine of mimesis, the reason why English poetry has developed the way it has, and the relationship between writing and reading. The poem opens in a casual way: “’Tis hard to say, if greater Want or Skill / Appear in Writing or in Judging ill.” The whole poem remains similarly accessible even as it explores complex issues. Part of the poem’s accomplishment is in the very ease and friendliness with which it approaches complexity. The poem is not important for its originality; every thought in it is a commonplace. It summarizes the literary doctrines accepted by the best, the most cultivated minds of the age. It is, thus, less worth reading for its general ideas than for its illustrations of them. Pope tells us that to read poetry for the sound not for the sense is like going to church not for the doctrine but for the music; that Nature is the best guide of the judgement; that the poet must be skilful in his choice of words: ’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense (…) When Ajax strives, some rock’s vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow. Pope wrote Windsor-Forest (1713) shortly before The Peace Treaty was signed in the wake of the seven-year War of Spanish Succession, in an age of intense nationalism. The poem is written in celebration of peace. It partly echoes Virgil’s Georgics in the fluidity of its structure: it moves between passages of natural description, patriotic emotion, practical rural advance and solitary meditation. The poem soberly acknowledges that the achievements of civilization are founded in past bloodshed. Like Virgil, Pope was writing in the aftermath of a long period of war. The poem’s optimistic vision of a new Pax Britannicum is qualified by a sense of the unending nature of human aggression, which can be redirected, but never eradicated. 186
Christine Gerrard argues that in writing this poem, Pope also drew heavily on the seventeenth-century royalist topographic poem – Edmund Waller’s On St. James’s Park and John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill. In maturity, Pope developed a dark vision of the literary marketplace as a barbarian invasion of the precincts of elite culture. In The Dunciad of 1728-29, and with greater intensity in the revised and enlarged work of 1742-43, the struggle between the purveyors of lowbrow, popular, and irrational culture such as the Dunciad’s new “hero”, Colley Cibber, and those who wish to prevent their infiltration into respectable vicinities, is represented as a struggle over cultural territory. One part of the city of London is set against another, as the “Smithfield muses” migrate westward toward St. James’s Palace and Westminster. The opening lines of The Dunciad and the footnote through which Pope satirizes the scholarly endeavours of journeymaneditors might illustrate, in Brean Hammond’s opinion, “Pope’s creation of a geographical myth that locates an army of scribblers, hacks, and dunces in a rectangle of London bounded by Covent Garden and St. Mary le Strand in the west, up to Hockley in the Hole and Bedlam in the north and northeast, and back down to Billingsgate on the eastern Thames”. Pope creates a fiction according to which London has developed a mad, militant and mercenary publishing industry whose collective endeavours will put out the lights of civilization. Hammond draws the paradoxical conclusion that “however powerful Pope’s indictment of popular culture, however successful his representation of Colley Cibber the playwright, actor, and theatrical impresario as a symbol of marketed, degraded entertainment, The Dunciad is finally as much a celebration of metropolitan energy as it is a critique of it”. An Essay on Man (1733-1734) summarizes philosophical speculations of the age. It expresses the rationalistic and deistic trends of an age in which man was placed in the centre of the Universe. Pope’s famous line “The proper study of mankind is man” sums up this view. The structure of the poem presents a picture of man in relation to his universe, to the God created chain of being, ‘a mighty maze! but not without a plan’. 187
The poem is made up of four epistles. Epistle I praises Reason as the particular attribute that separates Man from other animals, and the faculty by which he can understand his true position in Nature. Epistle II is concerned with Man’s abilities, weaknesses, emotions and his nature. Man is depicted as involved in a moral conflict between Reason and Passion. Epistle III presents Man integrated in the chain that binds all things to one another in an interdependent society. In Epistle IV, having considered Man in relation to (I) the Universe, (II) his individuality and (III) society, the poet turns to a study of Man in terms of happiness. His conclusion is that virtue alone can lead to happiness. George S. Fraser has pointed out that An Essay on Man is a theodicy, a work that takes it for granted that there is a God, at once powerful and benevolent. (A parallel might be drawn, in this respect, between Pope’s poem and Dryden’s Religio Laici). Pope also distinguished himself as a capable translator of Homer’s epics and as a less competent editor of Shakespeare’s work. When Lewis Theobald promptly attacked him in his Shakespeare Restored, Pope’s reply was The Dunciad, a satire on literary hacks which established Pope as one of the most venomously witty writers in literature. Today, Pope is mostly remembered for his mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712). It brings into focus a grotesque incident: it tells the story of Lord Petre, who stole away a lock from the hair of the beautiful Arabella Fermor. The poem combines the features of satire with those of parody. The aim of a satire is to ridicule and to criticize contemptible persons or facts. Satire is made up of two elements: wit or humour and object of attack. Parody may be defined as a clash between form and content. The very title of the poem establishes the opposition between the trivial subject-matter and the elevated language, the “high” style to be employed. It mimics and parodies the title of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. According to Linda Hutcheon, only parodies of what is either highly regarded or highly popular can ever work. Parody as a mixture of “reverence and irreverence” depends on recognition and 188
repetition of approved cultural definitions and traditions introduced into a new context. Pope parodies the works of great poets such as Homer, Vergil, Milton and Dryden. The use of the heroic couplet emphasizes the majestic tone superimposed on the trivial topic. Juxtaposing the conventional with the colloquial is the main stylistic device in any parody. A trivial social quarrel becomes a second Trojan War. The poem takes the form of a point-by-point miniature version of the Iliad. In Pope, Belinda’s description, with the “heroine” sitting in front of her dressing-table mirror parodies the scenes in which Homer’s heroes arm themselves for battle. Lord Petre prays to Love, builds an altar of French novels, lights it with torches made of love-letters, and sacrifices upon it the souvenirs of previous love-affairs. The feasting and ritual libations made to the gods in Homer reappear in The Rape of the Lock as ritual chocolate-and coffee-drinking. Pope’s “Amazons” fight with their peculiar weapons, their fans, silk dresses and corsetwhalebones. A fashionable drawing-room is turned into a battlefield. The language of the poem recalls the epic models continuously, but scriptural allusions also occur now and then (Belinda is compared to creative divinity during her game of cards: “Let spades be trumps!”) Besides the comic effects derived from parody, the value of Pope’s poem resides in its satirical genius. The Rape of the Lock is ultimately a social satire, it discloses the falsehood of social conventions and exposes the false values of an age in which female beauty is used as a weapon, while reputation is a fortress worth defending. The poem reconstructs the world of fashion in the eighteenth century, the ladies’ sophisticated fashion, the walks along the banks of the Thames, the atmosphere of the coffee-houses, the favourite sources of entertainment. A fervent supporter of the neo-classic principles defined by Boileau (clarity, order, reason, wit and balance), Pope endeavoured to attain perfection throughout his life. Alexander Pope was the most celebrated poet of the early part of the eighteenth century. In the second half of the century he fell out of favour, as tastes began to change and his sophisticated poetry was considered to lack feeling. He did not appeal to readers again until the 189
beginning of the twentieth century, when once more his wit and technical ability found an appreciative public. THE “PRE-ROMANTIC” POETS Poetry from Pope’s death in 1744 to the early publications of the first generation of Romantic poets in the 1790s has occasionally been defined according to its immediate past, by calling it “postAugustan”, but more often according to the future, by calling it “preRomantic”. Northrop Frye labelled this period as the “Age of Sensibility” rather than define transitionally “as a period of reaction against Pope and anticipation of Wordsworth”. As Jennifer Keith has justly pointed out, while the label “Poetry of Sensibility” has gained some currency among specialists, “pre-Romanticism” continues to be used for this poetry, especially by non-specialists. Keith emphasizes the idea that the label “pre-Romanticism” is seriously misleading to characterize the poems and objectives of late-eighteenth-century poetry. To see later-eighteenth-century poetry as “pre-Romantic” has often meant to see it as not Romantic enough. Many critics of the term “pre-Romanticism” have found the label absurd in that it anticipates a future that the “pre-Romantic” writers could not have known. In the evolutionary narrative that favours the “pre-Romantic” label, poetry reaches the aesthetic heights of pure poetry with the Romantics after a miniature dark ages, what T. B. Macaulay called the “most deplorable part” of English literary history – the decades that precede the Romantics. Such an age gave birth, in Harold Bloom’s words, to “doomed poets, victims of circumstance of their own false dawn of sensibility.” Anxieties about the place and capacity of the poet after Pope’s death appear in the dream the mid-century poet William Collins reportedly told his schoolmate William Smith, a dream that had left the poet “particularly depressed and melancholy.” According to Smith, Collins dreamt he had climbed a “lofty tree” and nearing the top, “a great branch upon which he had got, failed with him, and let him fall to the ground.” Collins explained Smith that “The Tree was the Tree of Poetry.” This dream serves as a paradigm of several 190
features of mid- and late-eighteenth century poetry: (1) the poet is isolated and, at least psychologically, wounded or debilitated; (2) the poetic faculty has been compromised by its loss of connection with Nature, seen here to no longer provide a system or place for the poet (in earlier eighteenth century poetry, the poetic faculty would consist in imitation of Nature, seen as an ordering system); (3) the poet’s fall from near the top of the tree suggests a failure at sublimity, one of the dominant aesthetic values in mid- and later-eighteenth century poetry; and (4) the Tree of Poetry reflects anxieties that the poet himself will vanish from a place in literary history. EDWARD YOUNG Edward Young (1683-1765) is famous for his long didactic poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-1745), generally known as Night Thoughts. It was inspired by the death of his wife. Written in blank verse, it is made up of 10, 000 lines that build up an atmosphere of profound sadness. This somber and melancholy poem made him a leading figure in the socalled “graveyard school” of English poets and exerted a serious influence on the more morbid aspects of Romanticism. The dramatic scenery of Young’s poems (the pervading darkness enveloping the moors, the leafy bushes, the shadows of the night sliding among the rocks and cliffs) precedes the romantic treatment of landscape. The eighteenth century descriptive poetry seems to have evolved from Milton’s Il Penseroso, as Louis Cazamian points out. Young’s poems present the poet’s sensibility as it is, thus denying rationality, objectivity, order; they are written on impulse and reveal the poet’s inner life, his subjective thoughts and feelings. Still, Young does not innovate the form of his poems, too: he closely sticks to the strict rules of composition established by his classical predecessors. His novelty resides in intensity of feeling; his cosmic vision echoes Milton’s epic. Young employs the metaphysical rather than the social as corollary for depression. In Night Thoughts he speaks at the outset 191
about his “wrecked desponding thought” (I, 10), only to move promptly to the nature of God and of man: How poor, how rich, how abject, how August, How complicate, how wonderful is man! (I, 67-68) His poem constitutes an extended argument against suicide and an exploration of metaphysical possibilities. JAMES THOMSON The Scottish poet James Thomson (1700-1748), author of the famous ode “Rule, Britannia”, announces a major change in English poetry. His most popular poetic work, The Seasons, preludes the Romantic Movement. In achieving impressive descriptive passages, Thomson relies on his senses in perceiving the beauty of the surrounding universe. In 1730 The Seasons first appeared in its full (although not yet final) four-book form. Its subscribers were rewarded with a lavish, illustrated quarto edition that embodies its claims to Miltonic stature. For Thomson, Nature holds the same innate grandeur as the mysteries of Christian revelation held for Milton, including similar potential for the restoration of poetry from its fallen state. The desire for a new poetry of nature feeds upon the lack Thomson perceives in contemporary writing. In his Preface to Winter (1726), he urges, “Let poetry once more be restored to her ancient truth and purity; let her be inspired from heaven, and in return her incense ascend thither; let her exchange her low, venal, trifling subjects for such as are fair, useful, and magnificent; and let her execute these so as to please, instruct, surprise, and astonish; and then of the necessity the most ignorance and prejudice shall be struck dumb, and poets yet become the delight and wonder of mankind.” This Miltonic vision of poetry as centred on inspiration and sublimity is, according to David B. Morris what seems absent in the Age of Pope. James Thomson happily associated himself with Milton, whom he considered his direct forerunner. Thomson learned from Milton how words or phrasal units can be reordered and juxtaposed so 192
as to elicit their full significance. Thomson’s exercises in the sublime restage the power of nature so as to leave the reader in terror, admiration, and awe. They have the moral purpose of reminding us of our vulnerability. Yet they remain vignettes, episodes of disorder subsumed within the larger order of the poem as a whole, a poem which finds nature, ultimately, to be providentially ordered to produce peace, plenty, and prosperity. For Thomson, as well as Cowper, “God made the country,” and made it to bless man. Nature in the eighteenth century holds an inseparable connection with religion and religious feeling, so that the desire for nature is often inseparable from the desire for God. Thomson depicted nature even in its most violent moods as the handiwork of God. God is ubiquitous for Thomson, who, in Spring, writes how “though concealed, to every purer eye / The informing Author in his works appear” (859-60). For Thomson, natural order, discovered by empirical observation and the exercise of reason, reflected in Miltonic blank verse, disclosed a rational, impersonal, designer God. In The Seasons (which were finally completed in 1740), Thomson “observed” the English estates of his politician-patrons, viewing them as places in which God’s designing order was reflected in landscape, and in the characters of those shaped by that landscape. Propriety, endurance, and a patriotic concern for the country as a whole (rather than any one faction) were shown to grow naturally from the land. In Hagley Park, nature prepared Thomson’s Whig patron, Lord Lyttelton to be a statesman. Sheltered by the “solemn Oaks”, Lyttelon is nurtured in a natural and political nursery. Nature fosters his paternalistic view: seeing “villages embosom’d soft in Trees” (Spring, 953) from his own hilltop, he will be naturally inclined to protect his land and those who live in it. Tim Fulford contends that it is no accident that Thomson shows Lyttelton patriotic politics to emerge from his feelings for a view. Throughout The Seasons, prospects seen from hilltops show the land laid out before its lord. Thomson gives his patrons commanding views of their estates to emphasize – to them and to his other readers – the extent of their authority and responsibility. These views, however, have a symbolic function as well, that of confirming the landowner’s right to political power. Landowners were supposedly free of self193
interest, and so were free to consider the nation’s interests with detachment. Thus, The Seasons turns the viewing of landscape into a confirmation of the landed classes’ right to power. Thomson’s five-book Liberty (1735-36) traced the course of liberty from Greece and Rome down to her “excellent establishment in Great Britain”, but it also showed how easily national freedom could be lost and civilization decline. Liberty failed to win the same audience as Thomson’s earlier The Seasons. In 1740, Thomson’s “Rule Britannia” was first performed. It was a rapid success because it made the correspondence between English nature and character. The symbol of “the native oak” works directly on the emotion, giving prejudices about British resilience and naval power that resemble the strength of the native tree. The poem naturalizes patriotism, disguising its arguments as facts of British nature. It became wildly popular: Nelson’s sailors sang it before the Battle of Trafalgar and it was still being taught to schoolboys in the 1930s. According to Tim Fulford, “Thomson made from the landscape a nationalist and imperialist ideology with which the Britons are still living, even if, with empire lost and loyalties in question, many are now increasingly uneasy with it”. Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) best exploited Edmund Spenser’s poetic tradition. It began as a few stanza “in the way of raillery” on himself and his friends, but grew into a two-canto exploration of poetry’s delights and responsibilities. In the first canto all the richness of Spenserian description is lavished on the castle and its pampered guests. But Thomson leaves direct imitation and creates a spell of his own. If the first canto recognizes how Spenser’s imagination can create a world of alluring artifice, then the second canto challenges that world by turning toward Spenser the moralist (the “sage and serious” poet whom Milton admired). With a sudden change of mood, Thomson introduces the “Knight of Arts and Industry”, a venerable figure who combines in himself “all the Powers of Head and Heart” (II, 77). The knight is determined to destroy the castle with its “soul-enfeebling” corruptions and is helped by a Bard who sings a rousing song on the importance of public virtue and “Godlike Reason” accompanied by his “British Harp”. The Bard declares that a literary tradition can play a part in building a civilized 194
society. Both need energy and ambition to save the tradition established by Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser. Thomson’s message is that a thriving and morally healthy country needs a national poetry and must cultivate the conditions for its encouragement. But Spenser’s position is more ambiguous than the aforementioned list suggests. In his two-part poem Thomson draws out of The Faerie Queene both its pleasurable magic and its spiritual and moral dimension – its poison and its power to heal. As David Fairer points out, The Castle of Indolence combines the world of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss with that of its destroyer, Sir Guyon (Temperance). Thomson understands the complexity of his source and employs Spenser the moralist to challenge Spenser the enchanter. THOMAS GRAY Thomas Gray (1716-1771) was born in London to a prosperous middle-class family. Educated first at Eton, he went on to Cambridge, where he became friends with Horace Walpole, the son of the Prime Minister. From 1739 to 1741 he travelled around Europe with Walpole, but while in Italy, the two quarrelled and Gray returned home alone. That same year his father and his friend Richard West died, and Gray returned to live for a time with his mother in the small village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire. While there he wrote several poems. After this period of reclusion he returned to Cambridge, where he graduated in Law in 1743 and was reconciled with Walpole. He was then appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, where he died in 1771. Gray’s work, though classical in form, foreshadows the Romantic Movement. He was a meticulous craftsman and left a few poems, mostly odes, and the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Elegy Written in Country Churchyard (1751) was in an earlier state called “Stanza’s [sic] Wrote in a Country Churchyard”. The final poem, though called an “Elegy”, creates a world that characterizes the construction of sublime odes. In its beginning it makes reference to the characteristic description of evening and in its conclusion it introduces the imagined figure of the autobiographical poet. 195
The Elegy begins at the time when day turns into night and thus describes the changes in nature and in the rural work tasks. The sight of the churchyard cemetery leads to the poet’s imaginary vision of the lives no longer lived. The poet knows none of the buried dead and makes no reference to the particularities of their activities, only to the merit of their sustained inconsequence. The poem is not about the lives lived or unlived, but about the need for memorialization. Gray is not concerned with the way in which members of the hamlet actually lived, suffered, or succeeded, but with the way the poet imagines them. For Ralph Cohen, the Elegy “envisions the imagined world as uncontroversial, as different from the actual world. But the dying need memorials in order to become part of a future imagination. They leave tokens for others to imagine what their world was. The poem is about the poet who not only memorializes the unhonoured dead, but who in his own death urges the reader not to inquire about his life. Rather, the reader should ponder the peace of the future world; the hope of the dead poet is to lie in ‘the bosom of his Father and his God’.” As opposed to the eighteenth-century landscape poetry, in his Elegy the poet does not sit above, but stands in, the landscape. This observation belongs to Tim Fulford, who also notices that the poet has no position of security, and his detachment from the deeds of others does not shield him from his own insights. He sees that nature is too indifferent to human concerns to leave the viewer feeling powerful. Although it seems at first to memorialize the dead in its “darkness” and “solemn stillness”, nature has, in fact, its own rhythms of renewal, which grimly mock the finality of the grave. The contemplative poet learns of a double loss: death severs human connection and the link that man creates for himself with nature. Morning will break, swallows will twitter, woods will grow, without the men who invested them with meaning. “Annals” and elegies as this one, which remember the dead, can only be the fragile subjective texts of human memory, unsupported by the world beyond the writer. In this most profound of poems, what remains is an impression of the fallibility of all human endeavours in face of a Nature that seems, in its indifference, to have become Death incarnate. After this, the only reliable elegist who is himself beyond nature – God: 196
No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God. (125-28) The idea of Time inevitably passing and of the transience of life is not Gray’s invention. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Melancholy Jaques have already tackled the image of man facing his cruel fate, his inescapable end. Gray leaves no room for grandiloquence; his words are musical, his syntax often most unusual. He has the same classical concern with perfection of form as Pope. The line “The ploughman homeward plods his weary way” is said to have caused Gray hours of trouble in polishing it. He carefully avoids a melodramatic tone. Gray’s poem inaugurated a long series of “graveyard” poems in the European literature. Gray’s repetitive “No more” became “Nevermore” in Poe’s famous “The Raven”. Detectable echoes can still be traced in present-day English poems such as Charles Tomlinson’s “The Churchyard Wall”. Thomas Gray’s “The Bard” (1757) was a medieval prophet for his Welsh people. Standing on a “haughty” rock, invoking the “mountains,” he mourns the conquest of his culture and its warrior poets, by the English. He is wild, like the Welsh landscape by which he is inspired and which sponsors his visionary verse. Yet ultimately the landscape offers him no place to stand, colonized by the English as it is now. At the poem’s end the bard commits suicide, casting himself into his sublime landscape: He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height Deep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night. (143-44) Gray’s poem is, according to Tim Fulford, “elegiac rather than confrontational”. Gray as a representative of the eighteenth century poetry of melancholy sometimes has a depressive tone of internal grievance. Unlike the many poets who claim their tender feelings for others, Gray’s persona suffers from a sense of isolation and alienation. The 197
thematic statement epitomizing the note of his personal verse comes from the painful “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West”: “My lonely Anguish melts no Heart, but mine” (7). The morning smiles in vain at the sonnet’s opening; the speaker weeps in vain at its end: community is a fantasy for happier men. But Gray figures the sense of community also as an obligation he cannot fulfil. “Feeling for others, capacity for love” are, in Patricia Meyer Spacks’s opinion, the main qualities of Gray’s poems, articulating the sentiments of “a solitary fly”, as the insects label the speaker in “Ode on the Spring” (44). WILLIAM COLLINS William Collins (1721-1759) achieved a remarkable synthesis between traditional and original elements. Like Gray and Young, Collins remained faithful to neo-classical patterns, writing eclogues and Pindaric odes. And yet, the range of themes in his poems (the medieval past, the popular superstitions, the supernatural, the exotic scenery) anticipates the world and sensibility of the romantic poets. His poems mingle neoclassical vocabulary with a modern subtlety of feeling. William Collins’s descriptive and allegoric odes were experiments in creating a kind of poetry that moved from natural description – too often rooted in the clichés derived from classical poetry – to a poetry that dealt with changes in nature and human passions. Ralph Cohen explains the popularity of odes in the eighteenth centuries as an outcome of several factors. The ode as a poetic kind was marked by radical shifts of persons, of subjects, of passions. In one respect it arose as an answer to the satirical poetry and its moralizing conclusions. In another the turn to the ode was to produce a poetry that while dealing with the association of ideas and feelings nevertheless possessed a unity. The ode included innumerable among incidents and subjects. The ode writers included in their odes references and quotes from and allusions to the poetry of earlier writers. This was not a new procedure. Dryden had noted the practice of Ben Jonson in including quotations from the ancients in his works, and Pope and Thomson continued the procedure. But the ode writers 198
used it to demonstrate their learning and to establish a fictive British poetic tradition and progress. In his “Ode to Evening” Collins took a subject often handled by his predecessors in descriptive poems about night or landscape and converted it to a poem about the contesting forces within nature, the enduring stability of evening during the ever changing cycle of the seasons. Converting evening into a muse, “chaste Eve,” Collins made his ode into a poem about the soothing power of poetry. In wind or rain, in the cycle of the seasons, the poet celebrated the gentle influence of evening in its gradual transformation into night. The aspect of “chaste Eve” endures even through the violence of winter. The odes of the 1740s are often poems about poetry and the poet. Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” begins with a reference to Spenser, who is viewed as the founder of a poetic school: As once, if not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard, (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blessed)… (1-4) Collins connects the creation of poetry with God’s creation of the world (23-40). “Fancy” or “imagination” creates a poetry that derives from the very sources of language and religious devotion. The significance of this claim was to restore the ode as the highest and most original poetic kind. In his “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry” he writes of the need to preserve the poetic legends of the highlands: Proceed, in forceful sound and colours bold The native legends of thy land rehearse; To such adapt thy lyre and suit thy powerful verse. In Andrew Sanders’s opinion, this “rag-bag of a poem remains a fascinating experiment in opening up the range, style, and reference of contemporary poetry”. 199
OLIVER GOLDSMITH Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) was born in the west of Ireland, the son of a poor clergyman. He entered Trinity College in Dublin as a scholarship student and had to accept a series of menial jobs, including selling street ballads and waiting tables, to finance his studies. In 1750 he tried to enter the church, but his request for ordination was refused. He went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and then spent a few months at the Dutch university of Leyden before setting off on a journey which took him to France, Switzerland and Italy. He made a meagre living playing Irish tunes on the flute, and often depended on food distributed at convent gates to survive. In 1756 he arrived destitute in London, where he unsuccessfully attempted a career in medicine. He found work as a hack writer, reviewer and translator and worked for several periodicals. Oliver Goldsmith was a many-sided talent. Although he wrote most of his works under pressure, in perpetual need of money, Goldsmith brought major contributions to several literary genres, being, in this respect, the opposite of Dryden. Goldsmith’s essays, originally published as Chinese Letters, were later collected in a volume entitled The Citizen of the World (1762). The “myth of the foreigner”, a device previously employed by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels and Montesquieu in Léttres persannes, is just a pretext for satirizing the English manners of his age. His humour and criticism have often been compared with Voltaire’s. Goldsmith is also remembered as the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most important eighteenth-century English novels. It is a first person narrative, a domestic novel combining sentimentalism and realism. The novel displays a mixture of optimism and faith in man’s intrinsic goodness on the one hand and humour, irony, sarcasm on the other hand. Primrose, the vicar is a gentle, kindhearted, naive, idealistic day-dreamer; he is a so-called Quixotic character, resembling Fielding’s Parson Adams (Joseph Andrews), Sterne’s Uncle Toby (Tristram Shandy) and Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick (The Pickwick Papers). Goldsmith’s most important play, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), is an extremely complex comedy based on qui pro quo and 200
imbroglio, but dealing with serious social aspects. It is an obvious attack against the sentimental literature and against the French “comédie larmoyante” of the age. The timid lover cured of his shyness by a “stooping” girl disguised as a maid takes us back to Ben Jonson’s comedy of humours. The wit of the dialogue reminds us of Congreve, but, all in all, Goldsmith is an honest moralist and the play is one of the evergreens of the English comedy of manners. As a poet, Goldsmith is mostly remembered for The Deserted Village (1770), a melancholy poem dedicated to rural England. It is a protest against the effects of the industrial revolution and the policy of enclosures. In her discussion of Oliver Goldsmith’s two longest poems, The Traveller and The Deserted Village as typical examples of the eighteenth century poetry of sensibility, Patricia Meyer Spacks describes his poetry as “often verging on sentimental excess yet energized by an anger that directs itself explicitly toward actualities of contemporary social organization”. Both poems describe existing social realities. And both openly express intense anger at what the speaker sees. In The Traveller, the speaker explicitly calls attention to his own rage: Calm is my soul, nor apt to rise in arms, Except when fast approaching danger warms: But when contending chiefs blockade the throne, Contracting regal power to stretch their own, ……………………………………………….. Fear, pity, justice, indignation start, Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart. (379-82, 389-90) The fact of “indignation” itself provides evidence for the extremity of the political situation here deplored. Sympathy and sensibility provide the impetus for the traveller’s observations: he wanders around Europe thinking about the situation of the people he meets and judging governments by their effects on the populace. And sympathy is imagined as reciprocal. The speaker fancies the 201
consequences of depopulation. The “pensive exile” (419) presumably sympathizes with the poet’s anger at the decline of British freedom and justice: he, after all, is himself a victim of this decline. But exile and traveller alike find themselves alike unable to improve on a destructive political situation. The poem concludes by rejecting the final relevance of the political and insisting that “Our own felicity we make or find” (432), quite independently of governments. The presence of anger in the account of political realities reminds the reader that the potential energies of sensibility include the aggressive, in the sense that self-aggression is reduced to self-expression. The Deserted Village combines the attack on “luxury” with a more personal, melancholic sense of loss. Goldsmith portrays an organic rural community, in harmony with nature being destroyed by avarice. Socially radical in one respect, Goldsmith is nostalgically conservative in another. The community whose destruction is mourned is an idealized idyll, a city-dweller’s fantasy, a utopia in which rural innocence equals bucolic ignorance. Thus he pictures the village parson impressing his congregation: Words of learned length, and thundering sounds, Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around, And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew. (215-18) Despite its repeated references to the narrator’s emotional state, the poem does not make his anger a personal matter. Instead, the poem conveys anger through fierce imagery: the nation as prostitute, decked out “In all the glaring impotence of dress” (294); the kingdom inflated by luxury, grown to “sickly greatness” (389) and converted by intemperance into “A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe” (392). Such images convey the disgust and outrage appropriate in a patriot’s response to his country’s decline. As a man of feeling, he experiences the horror of what has happened. He perceives political actuality in concrete and specific terms and relates the fates of individual people to the situation of the country at large. Thus a few lines after elaborating the metaphor of the nation as prostitute, he describes a country girl in a situation of sexual degradation, huddling in cold and 202
rain at her betrayer’s gate. Her sexual corruption appears a direct consequence of the country’s decline, the harsh reality that lies beneath apparent prosperity and luxury. When the speaker of The Deserted Village claims, toward the end of the poem, to “see the rural virtues leave the land” (398), specifying a list of personal domestic traits and adding to the list “sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid” (407), he earns his visionary extravagance by the loving specificity with which he has portrayed domestic virtue in action, in his nostalgic evocation. Such specificity details the objects of his sensitivity and the mode of his sensitivity’s operation. Because he has demonstrated the nature of “Contended toil, and hospitable care, / And kind connubial tenderness” (403-4) and dramatized his response to them, he can now imagine them in overtly fanciful ways. He consolidates his right to his fancies by making sympathetic feeling the substance of poetry. WILLIAM COWPER The poet’s failure and suffering are common thematic features of late-eighteenth-century poetry, but this failure ought not to be interpreted as the failure of the poems themselves. Critics often associate the sufferings of one of the better-known poets of this period, William Cowper (1731-1800), with his particular burden of self. A Calvinist, Cowper believed he faced eternal damnation, convinced that he was the unique case of a creature whom God at first elected for salvation and subsequently doomed to perdition. Writing for Cowper was, in Jennifer Keith’s opinion, a temporary therapy for driving away this crushing consciousness of irrevocable damnation. His wounds, which often reappear in even his most light-hearted poetry, are everlasting and metaphysical; painfully, Cowper repeats his allegiance to a God that has forsaken him. In Olney Hymns (1779), God works in the lives of men through nature, which displays his love in its beauty and his wrath in its sublimity. Believing himself damned after an earlier suicide attempt, Cowper makes nature a pathetic drama, in which the reprobate yearns for signs of a love that he does not believe will intervene to save him. 203
New in Cowper’s blank verse is a simplicity of diction designed to render observed details as plainly as possible. Diction of this kind illuminates his most influential poem The Task, a Poem, in Six Books (1785), an epic-length meditation on themes including the merits of the sofa, the cultivation of cucumbers, Great Britain’s avaricious imperialism, man’s place in society, the poet’s withdrawal from the world, and the beauty of nature: The night was winter in his roughest mood, The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon, Upon the southern side of the slant hills, And where the woods fence off the northern blast, The season smiles, resigning all its rage, And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue Without a cloud, and white without a speck The dazzling splendour of the scene below. (VI.57-64) Some of his best and most striking lines show the poet as a wounded deer: I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charged when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. There was I found by one who had himself Been hurt by th’ archers. In his side he bore And in his hands and feet the cruel scars, With gentle force soliciting the darts He drew them forth, and heal’d and bade me live. (III.108-16) The poet’s wounds lead him to Christ’s, but instead of attaining a joyful salvation, the poet is healed only to retreat in a posture of submission. Cowper’s humility seems imitated by his seamless, unobtrusive, blank verse. 204
For Cowper a relation to Nature is always subsumed by a relation to God: he instructs the reader to acquaint himself with God. Such an acquaintance, however, remains extra-textual, not to be justified, as the Romantics would do, through representing transcendence. As foundations for poetic values and authority, Cowper’s Christian humility and wounds do not correspond to either Augustan or Romantic notions of poetic competence. Cowper’s wounds are keen because of his sensibility; alive to wounds that never heal, the poet of sensibility fails to master himself. Unlike Cowper, who remained at the mercy of external forces, the Romantic poets had sensibility contained by, or subordinated to, other values, such as the imagination or the sublime. In The Task Cowper gave the most striking and forceful expression to the later eighteenth-century orthodoxy that rural living was ethically superior to urban living. Cowper’s verse sums up a powerful strand of eighteenth-century thinking that represents the town as the locus of luxury, which destroys the moral fibre of those who inhabit it. Cowper values solitude above society, the country above the city, the private above the public, the meditative and conversational poetic forms above the declamatory and satirical forms. If nature keeps a path for Cowper, it is a path of self-discovery. Wordsworth and Coleridge were to tread, quite deliberately, in his footsteps, for, as Tim Fulford argues, Cowper’s “pacing out of time and space allowed the Romantic self to be articulated. It remains contemporary.” And yet, even though a poet of sensibility, Cowper frequently returns to public concerns. The sense of isolation and alienation he conveys in his image of himself as wounded deer receives fuller expression in his explicit criticism of his country – for the specific nature of its capitalism as well as of its military exploits. Valuing the associations of human beings based on feeling, he deplores alliances of self-interest. Thus he criticizes the “merchants” that “build factories with blood / Conducting trade at sword’s point” (The Task, VI.676, 682-83). Cowper stands up against social triviality, public degradation, and political corruption. The poem ends in a rare utterance of self-satisfaction, with the speaker describing himself as a quiet man, treading “the secret path of life” (VI.956), attracting no 205
notice, yet doing good to others. First he claims the conventional virtues of “sympathy”. The poet is a generous being ready to soothe sorrows, to comfort and help through his “works” (VI.963-66). Gradually he develops a tone of contempt toward the “sensual world” (978) that surrounds him, complaining about the superficiality of that world, which judges by the eye instead of conscience and heart. His rage increases as he suggests the prevalence of vice throughout society: Though well perfum’d and elegantly dress’d, Like an unburied carcase trick’d with flow’rs, Is but a garnish’d nuisance. (VI.991-93) Cowper’s God is an angry God. The man formed in His image can explain an emotion that may make him uncomfortable by imagining it as a pale reflection of divine wrath, directed at objects of which God would disapprove. Cowper as a poet of sensibility reflects about his own anger as well as his own benevolence and claims to consider both forms of service – to his country, his fellow human beings, and finally his God. William Cowper powerfully articulated the gentlemanly reaction against poetry that presented nature as the property of the great. Cowper criticized the rage for landscape-gardening and mocked the ambitions of the aristocracy. He also traversed the landscape on foot, exchanging the commanding height of the hilltop for the secure retreats of valleys, copses and sunken lanes. Like Gray, he turned retirement into a moral stance, from which he could both satirize the activity of the city and ponder the ambiguities of his own position, neither a “peasant: nor a squire”. Unlike Gray, however, Cowper found in the landscape an emotional home, a place of reassurance capable of holding his depressive and suicidal tendencies at bay. Cowper’s poetry of personal suffering claimed more intense and more permanent misery than Gray ever professed. When the speaker imagines himself metaphorically as drowning or literally as damned, he asserts metaphysical rather than only social isolation. Yet the fundamental definition of suffering remains, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, the same: “Anguish consists in separation from one’s 206
kind. Insistence on this point marks much of the poetry of sensibility and differentiates it from the Byronic stance that would become familiar in the next century. The Romantic version of isolation might allege the pain it entails, but as a poetic topic or stance solitude came to function more importantly as a sign of specialness, of the Romantic hero’s superiority to his kind.” At the end of his life Cowper was to imagine himself at sea. In “The Castaway” (1799) he pictures his own death. It is a lonely death, in which he finds not a saviour across the sea, but the depths of despair. The poet, like the man lost overboard, drowns alone and unredeemed: No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone, When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone; But I, beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. (61-66) Cowper’s cry of anguish is as powerful as any in English poetry. It is all the more so because it remains unspoken, implicit in the imagined events occurring in an unforgiving nature. JAMES MACPHERSON The Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796) gained much attention due to his alleged translations of ancient Gaelic epic poems. Influenced by Gray, Macpherson tried to reconstruct the Scottish past. The success of his first volume, Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands (1760), encouraged him to publish two further volumes, containing the epic poems in prose – Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), ascribed to Ossian, a third-century legendary Gaelic bard. Although exposed as a hoax, these works stimulated the imaginations of two generations of romantic writers throughout Europe. The mystery of a remote world, the atmosphere of misty shores and windy forests and stormy nights exerted a major influence not on literature alone, but on painting as well. 207
In fact, he had added to and improved upon the oral poetry had collected. His Fingal was more a creation of the new vogue for Celtic primitivism than a remnant of the ancient past. Macpherson’s Scots warriors are primitive poets: they endow their lives with greatness by comparing themselves with the sublime nature in which they live. New in their primitiveness, Macpherson’s ancient poets made rural imagery the sign of authenticity. To sing of nature like a bard was to be the desirable opposite to the polite and urban man-of-letters. Macpherson, a university scholar like Gray, was no radical. In bringing his antiquarian research to poetic life, he was not “endorsing a revival of clan politics but was searching for an escape from English nature and from the nature of Englishness” (Tim Fulford). A massive success across Europe and America until well into the nineteenth century, it made the Highlands fashionable, as the landscape through which valour, honour, and heroism could be articulated. THOMAS CHATTERTON Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) produced poems in a pseudomedieval style that were supposedly written in the fifteenth century; their would-be author was the imaginary monk Thomas Rowley. Chatterton claimed to have transcribed the works of Rowley which he found in a room of the old Bristol cathedral, where he had spent much time as a child. In fact, he forged the manuscripts, preferring to mask his role as poet with that of a transcriber of the past. His contemporaries debated whether Chatterton was an antiquarian recovering lost texts from a fifteenth century secular priest, Thomas Rowley, or a forger. Thomas Gray soon exposed this hoax. Chatterton expected a better reception of his work posing as a modern-day copyist of a fifteenth century manuscript than as a patronless, poor teenager distributing these antique visions under his own name. Paradoxically, the more these works were forgeries, the more original they were. Chatterton’s language is singularly isolated and isolating. Unlike conventional eighteenth-century poetic diction, which uses a 208
vocabulary shared by a readership, even if an elite one, Chatterton’s Rowleyan diction has no existing community that shares its language. Chatterton committed suicide before he was eighteen of age and he became a hero to the later generation of Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats in England, and Alfred de Vigny in France regarded the defeated poet as an idealist at odds with the society of his age. CONCLUSIONS: 1) The shift from rationalism to sentimentalism, from neoclassicism to pre-Romanticism and Romanticism is not an abrupt but a gradual process. The specific elements of both trends did coexist for a while in the works of major eighteenth century poets. 2) The eighteenth century “pre-Romantic” poets established poetic patterns to be later followed not only by the English Romantic poets, but by the entire Europe. 3) Certain dominant features of the Romantic attitude can be already traced in the eighteenth-century poetry: – the rediscovery and exploration of historical past; – the return to mythology and folklore; – the attraction exerted by exotic, richly coloured worlds; – love of the wild and picturesque nature.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
Traditionally, literary histories used to define Romanticism as a historical period starting in 1790 and ending about 1830 or 1840. This assumption is no longer accepted by academics nowadays. Drummond Bone is just one of the many critics who have raised the question: “is Romanticism the name of a historical entity, or merely a word that became an idea and has now outlived its usefulness?” The Romanian critic Bogdan Ştefănescu has recently answered this question in a brilliant doctoral thesis dedicated to the problem of “the critics’ vacillation between understanding Romanticism as a historically (and geographically) bound phenomenon or as a perennial mode, a trans-historical forma mentis (a creative prototype, and archetypal pattern)”. The interpretation of Romanticism as a fictional mode or a forma mentis takes us to the earlier conclusion drawn by René Wellek: “In a sense, Romanticism is the revival of something old, but it is a revival with a difference; these ideas were translated into terms acceptable to men who had undergone the experience of the Enlightenment”. It is in the light of these assertions that we can better understand the meaning of Shakespeare’s “romantic” comedies or the “Romanticism” of literary works belonging to even more remote ages. As a perennial mode, Romanticism “haunts the history of Western culture long after its alleged death in the 1850s” (to quote Bogdan Ştefănescu), while for Harold Bloom Romanticism never ends reverberating through history to the present day. It seems that English Romanticism has been the subject of far more extensive and theoretical critical strife than any other national Romanticism. 210
Arthur O. Lovejoy, in “On the Discrimination of Romanticism” (1924) upheld the idea that the movement in Germany alone “has the indisputable right to be called Romanticism, since it invented the term for its own use”; he called the other similar European movements a “plurality of romanticisms”; English Romanticism consisted in fact of several “romanticisms”, often mixing essentially antithetic ideas. Byron attacked the Lake Poets in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and Canto I of Don Juan. Southey denounced the “Satanic School” of poetry (i.e. Byron); Shelley attacked Wordsworth and Coleridge; Keats rejected Wordsworth; even Coleridge ended up by contradicting the theoretical ideas promoted by Wordsworth; the younger generation also had different likes and dislikes: while Byron started his career by imitating Pope, Keats clearly condemned the neoclassical school of the eighteenth century. Lovejoy declared that the word “romantic” has come “to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing”. Lovejoy was challenging the very ontological status of Romanticism. For him, there seems to be no one feature shared by all Romanticists. Paul O’Flinn has recently argued that the term Romanticism should not be conflated with the so-called commercial pink literature or with excessive sentimentalism. O’Flinn has also colourfully shown that Romanticism is a notion that covers a complex and heterogeneous reality: “There are two ideas that it is essential to hold on to from the start. The first is that you need to think of Romantic literature not as escapist in the way the term ‘Romantic’ sometimes suggests, but as literature that tries passionately to come to terms with the modern world as it emerges through a series of wrenching changes. And secondly you have to be aware that, because those changes affected men and women, working class and middle class, north and south and so on in different ways, what we get in the literature of the period is a range of competing, arguing, contending voices rather than a series of common assumptions that all share and that can be neatly summarised. Let us look at these two claims in a bit more detail. First, then, ‘Romantic’. Say the word and what do you think of? Something dreamy and remote – impossibly idealised versions of 211
love, perhaps, vaguely glimpsed through Barbara Cartland’s veils while violins scrape somewhere in the background. Or, if you move a bit closer to easily available notions of Romantic literature, the term still carries much the same connotations: the first thing that comes to mind maybe is an unfortunate picture of Keats looking a wistful wimp or Wordsworth maundering on about daffodils; Shelley flits past with too much hair but not much practical skill when it comes to paying the bills; over there lies Coleridge, stoned out of his mind, while in the corner Blake is talking to the fairies. Against these superficial images we need to place some facts. In 1795 Coleridge lectured against the Government’s war policy and was the target of Government spying. In 1798 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were driven out of Alfoxden because of the neighbours’ suspicions of their radical politics. In 1804 Blake was put on trial for sedition and avoided a long prison sentence because of the common sense of an English jury rather than the compassion of the English judiciary. In 1813 it seems that a Government spy tried to murder Shelley. In 1824 Byron died in exile in Missolonghi while fighting for Greek independence. What those incidents (and the list could be considerably extended) suggest is a group of men and women who were certainly not ‘Romantic’ in any escapist or trivial sense but who on the contrary challenged dominant contemporary values and chose to use their pens not to doodle prettily in the margins of life but to probe and dissect at the heart of things. And they did it to the profound annoyance of the authorities, not to mention most contemporary reviewers and readers of poetry. It is this brave thinking and writing that makes Romantic literature still exciting reading, and it is reading that is all the more powerful because it speaks about a world that we not only recognise but also still inhabit. The major Romantic poets were a diverse group of individuals. Keats was born over a livery stable, the Swan and Hoop, in north London, whereas Shelley was born on the family estate at Field Place, Warnham, in Sussex. Byron was a Cambridge graduate, whereas Blake never went to school. Coleridge was a life-long Christian, whereas Keats was an atheist. Byron was an aristocrat, 212
whereas Keats was sometimes sneered at as a Cockney. Blake was in lodgings in Soho at a time when Shelley was lodging at a palace in Pisa. The government that tried Blake for sedition was the same government that appointed Wordsworth Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.” There is no coherent Romantic “programme”, nor a conscious sense of belonging to a “movement” and yet the poets writing between 1790 and 1840 share a great number of common features making up a peculiar unity of mode and feeling in a diversity of individual attitudes and biases. The “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a joint-venture collection of poetry produced by Wordsworth and Coleridge, brings about interesting critical ideas. The primary purpose of the authors was to reform poetry by rejecting the “artificial” literature of the previous century. Poetry should rely on “a selection of language really used by men” and its preferable subject matter should be “the humble and rustic life”. The authors rejected the notion of “poetic diction”; poetry was defined as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. They also rejected the purely selfish, rational and unimaginative way of looking at life displayed by their forerunners. Poetry was not necessarily metre, rhythm and poetic diction, but subjective feelings emerging from one’s experience. An attempt to define the Romantic attitude might include the following features and themes: 1. the rediscovery and exploration of the historical past (either the glamorous Middle Ages or ancient Greece). Some poets took refuge in a supposedly glorious past; others, like Byron and Shelley tried to extract from it human potentials able to change their world; the Middle Ages, with its stories of knights and damsels in distress, had a special appeal. Old literary forms such as ballads, with their magical atmosphere and haunting settings, became popular. The historical novel was one of the most appreciated forms of fiction of the period; 2. the attraction exerted by the Orient with its exotic and richly coloured world rather than the wisdom assigned to it by the eighteenth century; 3. the conviction that a less advanced stage of culture, even a savage condition, breeds greater happiness than modern society; 213
4. the idea of progress, the belief in a more glorious tomorrow, in continuous improvement (suggested by the social revolutions); 5. humanitarianism and democracy are supported by the belief in the equality and inherent worth of every man as well as the hostility to monarchical authority and established institutions; 6. originality definitely replaces the fashion of imitations and original compositions are considered to be the only valuable works; 7. confessionalism: verse, notes, diaries, correspondence stand proof for the poets’ interest in self-analysis. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, claims: “the most of what I have written concerns myself personally” (Wordsworth and Shelley also share this concern); 8. fundamental antipathy of the artist to his times: the Romantic writer goes his own way against the conventions of his time – he is a protester, a discontented type; 9. love of the wild and the picturesque in external and human nature. The wild inner and outer nature were opposite sides of the same coin, the devastating spectacles of Nature corresponding to the poet’s tormented soul; 10. diversitarianism, i.e. the loss of cultural centrality. The doctrine of diversity had Romantic roots: its twentieth century counterpart is the concept of multi-culturalism; 11. the cult of childhood; the neo-classicists believed that children had savage instincts that needed to be civilised: children were important because, through social training, they could become sophisticated adults who contributed to society. The Romantics, on the contrary, saw the children as pure and uncorrupted. They believed that children were close to God, had powerful and creative imagination and could be “the father of the Man” (Wordsworth). 12. the striving for the infinite and the preference for cosmic visions; 13. the deep longing for wholeness and a painful search for answers concerning ontological problems; 14. a deep feeling of Nature associated with the exaltation of the simplicity of everyday life; 15. the love of beauty and its relation to truth; 16. the cultivation of solitude etc. 214
The birth of English Romanticism is considered to be the publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their ideal was to form a Naturalistic and Imaginative School of Poetry. (Nature and Imagination are key words in any approach to Romanticism). This dual purpose was to be illustrated in two ways: Coleridge was to deal with fantastic themes of legend and romances in such a way as to produce upon the reader the impression of detailed reality; Wordsworth was to treat subjects of common homely life so imaginatively as to give them the charm of romance. WILLIAM BLAKE William Blake was born in London in 1757, where he was raised in a state of economic hardship and received very little formal education. He showed early signs of artistic talent and, at the age of fourteen, became an apprentice in an engraver’s shop, where he worked and learned the craft for seven years. The year 1783 marked the beginning of a period of great creativity in Blake’s life. He published his first volume of poetry, Poetical Sketches, and invented a new method of printing, which he called “illuminated printing”, a mixture of engraving and painting which he claimed his dead brother Robert had revealed to him in a dream. In 1789 he engraved and published his first great literary work, Songs of Innocence, followed in 1794 by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Experience. His output was outstanding: he made hand-coloured engravings for both his own poems and other authors. However, his books were not printed and circulated in sufficient numbers to make his work profitable. His disappointment and this lack of recognition led Blake to depression which verged on insanity. This gloomy period lasted seven years, from 1810 to 1817. He lived in a dirty studio, completely alienated from the material world and claiming that visions of angels, spirits, prophets and devils were inspiring his work. After 1818 Blake stopped writing poetry but continued to produce engravings, including the illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he left uncompleted at his death in 1827. He was buried in a common grave in relative obscurity. 215
As Andrew Sanders points out, Blake’s works, if studied in their original configurations, interrelate image and text. The text does not simply follow a picture, nor does a picture solely represent a text; both demand interpretative and speculative readings. The Songs of Innocence frequently suggest challenges to and corruptions of the innocent state; children are afraid of the dark, brute beasts threaten lambs, slavery imprisons the negro and a vile trade the little chimney-sweep. The “wisdom” of the old is generally equated with oppression in the Songs of Experience, poems with a far greater satirical, even sarcastic, edge. Parents, nurses, priests, and the calculating force of human reason serve to limit and confine what once was innocent. In “London” the very shape of the city, with its “charter’d” streets and river, marks its inhabitants with signs of weakness and woe and the “mindforg’d manacles” tyrannize and terrorize its poor. Dreams have turned to nightmare. No longer the London of the massive church-building program commenced in the 1670 and supervised by Sir Christopher Wren, of the clubs, coffee houses, polite periodicals, pleasure gardens, and places of public display, Blake’s city suggests the effects of industrialization and the drift of people into the cramped concentrations of the urban ghetto. Its focus is not merely the discomfort, but the excruciating misery of being poor in a city the population of which, by 1801, had grown to 900,000. Blake’s proclamation of liberty takes many forms in his later mythological work, generally known as the Prophetic Books. The figure of Urizen, the bearded representative of a negative God of “thou shalt nots”, functions as the prime oppressor in The First Book of Urizen (1794). The fragmentary The Book of Los (1795) traces the indignant rebellion against Urizen by the energetic Los, but it is Orc, the lawless embodiment of revolution, who is seen as both rebel and oppressor. In America: A Prophecy (1793) Orc precipitates the action as the incarnate spirit of the revolutions in America and France; in its sequel, Europe: A Prophecy, Orc’s mother, Enitharmon, both breeds revolution and checks it as a queenly repressor and stagnator who is ultimately dismayed by her son’s descent into “the vineyards of red France”. Blake’s “prophecies” have been subject to much critical 216
interpretation, contortion, and distortion; they remain, however, singular, fascinating, elusive, and at times infuriating works. Blake’s cosmological system is defined in The Four Zoas mainly, the most esoteric poem from the long cycle of epic poetry widely known today as The Prophetic Books. According to Blake, existence precedes creation, which is mainly a fall from eternity. Existence is identified in Blake with the supreme principle, the Perfect Unity, which “Cannot Exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, / The Universal Man, to Whom be Glory Evermore. Amen.” The basis of Blake’s cosmogonical theories is the conception about the four Zoas, the “Starry Eternals”, “the living beings”; this idea might originate from Ezekiel’s vision or that experienced by St. John in his Revelation. These “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man”(The Four Zoas, I, 6); the first Zoa is Tharmas, “the Parent power”, who is in the West; the second one is Urizen, “Prince of Light”, who is in the South and shall want to become God, thus his world or sphere becoming a ruin. The third Zoa is Luvah, “the Prince of Love”, and he is in the East; he will steal Urizen’s “Horses of Light”, as if reiterating Michael’s fight with Lucifer, as a result of which Michael took the torch of Light that Lucifer was holding, the first Light, the most troubling revelation of God’s Face, hence the name “Angel of the Presence”. The last Zoa is Urthona, “the keeper of heav’n’s gates”(FZ, IV, 42), he is also the most enigmatic of them all, and he is in the North. After the Fall Urthona becomes Los, i.e. time, as Blake himself explains in Milton, and he still remains “the Watchman of Eternity”. Each Zoa has an emanation or feminine counterpart as a result of the progressive division from within Creation: Tharmas – Enion, Urizen – Ahania, Luvah – Vala, Los – Enitharmon. Tharmas is God of the Waters, the one who rules over the Waters. The infinite in Milton is the creational whole and not only the visible infinite universe; it refers to all the levels of conscience and the corresponding ontological planes through which the voyage of the traveller through eternity goes. The beings of the Earth are in the middle of the Earth-Vortex, they live at a constant level of conscience, which also makes human experience possible. In Blake, the macro-, 217
micro-universe relationship is always complete, everything is interdependent, interrelated, interfused, so that the journey through the universe of inward conscience, through the vortices-planes of conscience, is also a journey through the macro-universe, it is actually the key by means of which a conscience can enter other universesplanes of conscience, which explains the romantic poet’s notorious formula: ”all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is Within,/In your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.”(Jerusalem, 71, 18-19) The external creation is the mirror-the symbol-the trace of man’s within. Blake always explores the universe of consciousness and its relativity as opposed to the absoluteness of the world of eternity. In the human body the four Zoas are the four main physical eternal senses which have become the four elements (Jerusalem, 36, 31-32): Tharmas – the Tongue, Urizen – the Eyes, Luvah – the Nostrils, Urthona – the Ears (Jerusalem, 98, 16-18), they are “the four Rivers of the Water of Life”, they are the gates of the soul opening towards manifestation. Thus, as man is created in the image and after the likeness of God, the four Zoas are reflections of the divine aspects: Tharmas is the Voice of the Father who speaks to the Son; Urthona is the Son who hears the Father and fulfils the Father’s Will, thus making the Voice of the Father heard in the temporal manifestation (Los). This fact explains why Urthona is in the North and is described as being solid, earth; he is a corner stone, the Word-the Logos, the peak of reality, the Logos of the Father. Blake actually says that Jesus is the image and likeness of Los (Jerusalem, 96, 7), and the consequence thereof is that here we have the idea of a patibilis deus – a God who suffers with his Creation the whole drama of Creation. Urthona is therefore the Son. Urizen stands in front of the Trinity (Tharmas-Urthona-Luvah). By falling, he loses his divine attribute (holding the uncreated light), thus becoming the master of the physical world, of the stars, and so he enters the world of time. Luvah is the Ghost of life of all beings; the name resembles phonologically the Hebrew ruah (ghost of life). Luvah is represented as being invisible, and he is related to a golden age of mankind.
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Those eager to learn more about Blake’s esoteric cosmogony may find further information in Mihai Stroe’s critical works listed in the bibliography. As the poem Milton (1804) suggests, Blake identifies himself both with the author of Paradise Lost and with the angels, both fallen and unfallen, who figure in Milton’s narrative. It is Blake who, assuming a diabolic voice, declares in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3) that Milton was “a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in a little town in the Lake District in the north-west of England. When he was just eight years old his mother died, and he also lost his father five years later. The children were separated and raised by guardians. In 1787 Wordsworth entered Cambridge, but he was not particularly interested in his studies. While still a university student he went on a three-month walking tour of France, the Swiss Alps and Italy, and was greatly impressed by the beauty of the landscape. When he finished his degree he returned to France for a year and became a passionate supporter of the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. Financial problems, however, forced him to return to England, where he went to live with his sister Dorothy in a small village in Dorset. In 1793 he published his first two books of verse, which received little notice from either the critics or the public but the Lyrical Ballads, first issued in 1798, turned out to be a milestone not only in his literary career alone but in the history of English poetry. Wordsworth’s poems have been traditionally considered to fall into four groups: 1. chiefly narrative poems, in the early naturalistic method of the Lyrical Ballads; 2. the great imaginative Odes, the Sonnets, shorter narrative poems; 3. his long reflective and descriptive poems in blank verse: The Prelude (9,000 lines) and The Excursion; 219
4. the poems of his later period, marked by classic austerity of style, inspired by Vergil and Milton and dedicated to National Independence and Liberty. For Wordsworth, poetry is no longer mimesis but the representation of the world filtered through the eyes and the soul of the poet. The universe is no longer perceived as a mechanical but as an organic entity. Wordsworth is neither Christian, deist, nor rationalist. He is best described as a Pantheist, one who identifies the natural universe with God, and thus denies that God is over everything or possesses a distinct “personality”. The immanence of the divine in Nature confers it a sacramental dimension as God is perceived to be present everywhere in the world. Hence, the Romantic communion between man and Nature, and the Romantic poet’s conviction that the book of Nature could serve as man’s best teacher. Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language derives from his deeper nature-philosophy. Although made up mostly of simple words, Wordsworth’s poetry is rich in emotions and epiphanies (those sudden revelations significant for the human being). There are two main versions of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The first is that of 1800 (the 1798 edition of the poems had been prefaced simply by an Advertisement) and the second that of 1802, which is the basis of Wordsworth’s final version of 1805. The main difference between the two versions is the addition in the 1802 text of the passage which discusses the question “What is a Poet?”. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, originating “from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Such a recollection of emotions is “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, in which the poet recreates the splendour of a crowd of daffodils beside a lake. The principal object of Poetry is, according to Wordsworth, to make the incidents of common life interesting. The purpose of Poetry is “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature”. Wordsworth insisted that he wished to adopt the very language of men, to bring his language “near to the language of men”. In Wordsworth’s opinion, some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be “strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.” 220
Wordsworth also tried to answer “what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?” The Poet is, in Wordsworth’s phrasing, “a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” The Poet has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events. The Poet is different from other men not in kind but in degree. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men. The Poet describes and imitates passions. Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men. The Poet is a kind of translator. For Wordsworth, poetry is “the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.” Wordsworth’s conclusion is that the end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure. Nature is ubiquitous in most of Wordsworth’s poems. In the sonnet “It Is a Beauteous Evening Calm and Free”, the poet records the sudden perception of a thunder signalling to the world that the “mighty being” is awake. “Tintern Abbey” moves from a process of telling or listening implied by a poem such as “The Thorn” (with its insistent interplay of personal experience, speculation, and hearsay) into introspection and meditation. In “Tintern Abbey”, the poetic narrator is emotionally stirred by his return after five years to the banks of the river Wye. Both a nature poem and a poem on man’s mind, “Tintern Abbey” records the movement of the poet’s mind in time. The poet considers the three important stages in the development of his mind, from childhood, when nature is approached through senses (Nature being presented in terms of growth, of organic life, all “colours” and “greenness”) to adolescence, when the approach is passionate (Nature being perceived as a “presence”, a “motion and a spirit”) and to maturity (when the 221
poet transcends the human, the transient, the evil, and has the privilege of experiencing Nature’s eternal principles of kindness and joy, when Nature becomes a moral guide, impressing with beauty and feeding with lofty thoughts). In “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth offers a self-justifying explanation of his partial retreat from politics. Here it is the sensations of remembered natural scenery, “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”, that bring “tranquil restoration” to a once troubled soul, and the recall of the “still, sad music of humanity” that makes for a chastening and subduing of restlessness. The intensity of his expressed love of nature and its teachings seems to preclude other perceptions, particularly those related to the acute class division inherent in urban industrialization, in the related depopulation of the countryside, or, most pressingly, in the explosion of social questioning presented by the French Revolution. In “The Idiot Boy” the human feelings are simple: neighbourliness, mother-love, the boy’s elation, anxiety, and relief. The circumstances are slight, and have no consequences. The whole occurs within a setting which is pure delight – to be alone on the hills, moonlight, and the owls calling, all isolated and intensified by the reduction of the boy to a mere existence. In this poem, and the pleasure of it is the imaginative solution of natural solution of natural emotions in natural surroundings – the “music of humanity” and the music of nature in one strain. In “Nutting”, Wordsworth recollects a boyhood episode, when, after picking hazelnuts, he suddenly realized he had plundered the place and sinned against Nature. Wordsworth’s fundamental feeling is the joy stirred by Nature and the deep sadness caused by the human condition, of “what man has made of man”. “The child is father of the man” has been a favourite line of several generations of psychoanalysts but in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” children are regarded as repositories of virtue and even wisdom. The poet touches the Romantic obsessive theme of Nature’s eternity and man’s transience; he expresses the particular feelings or emotional experiences, the vividness and splendour associated with natural objects during childhood, and the loss of capacity to see all these things when you 222
grow up. The child is the “mighty prophet” who retains a feeling of Nature’s wholeness, while adulthood suggests a “palsied age”, a “prison-house”, a “thought of grief”. The Prelude, or the Growth of a Poet’s Mind, a vast poem written in blank verse, is perhaps the most convincing illustration of the idea that with Wordsworth a journey in space is the cause for a deeply felt journey through life. The Prelude is made up of fourteen books in which the author traced the psychology of his mind and heart, marking the “spots” of time and the dearest spaces which registered his poetic growth. Wordsworth the pupil, Wordsworth the student at Cambridge, Wordsworth the adult living in London, Wordsworth the tourist in the Alps are recollected via various autobiographical incidents and yet, it is the poet’s philosophy, his vision concerning the relationship between man and the infinite that makes up the bulk of The Prelude: the incidents are mere illustrations of his philosophy. The Prelude might be best defined as a psychological study of childhood’s perceptions and a poetic quest for creative powers. Wordsworth enriched the language of poetry by bringing into use many words regarded as too humble for such an honour. He showed the beauty of common things and humble lives and opened men’s eyes to a new and unsuspected world of beauty lying round them. The distinctive feature of his innovation remains simplicity. He used less symbols than the other Romantic poets. His language is his own, his natural descriptions are fresh and immediate; he is a poet of the particular scene, not the general abstract image. Wordsworth wanted poetry to stay on the ground and extract thrills from the commonplace. As Coleridge said, it was when he forgot his theories that Wordsworth wrote best – when, as a competent and complete artist, he has all his faculties and experiences converge in one creative act. He is one of the greatest formative and inspiring influences of modern English poetry. And yet he is unequal in his works. Shelley accused him of being a deserter from the Cause of Humanity; Browning later renewed this charge; some of his early poems were regarded as silly etc.
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the youngest of ten children. When his father died he was sent away to a London charity school for children of the clergy. He was an avid reader and a bright student. In 1791 he went to Cambridge, but he suddenly interrupted his education to enlist in a regiment of light dragoons. Later he was re-admitted into Cambridge, where he met the radical poet Robert Southey, whose sympathetic views on the French Revolution he shared. Together they planned the foundation of an egalitarian utopian community in New England. The project was abandoned but the two friends collaborated on a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge left Cambridge without a degree and, almost on impulse, married Southey’s fiancée’s sister. The marriage, which produced four children, was a failure: the couple lived apart for most of their lives. Coleridge met Wordsworth at some point between August and late September 1795 when the former’s political commitment was at its height and his denunciation of monarchy and aristocracy at its most fiery. For the next ten years the opinion of both worked cooperatively, coinciding initially in a revolutionary enthusiasm for change in society and literature and later in a compensatingly ready response to a nature charged with the glory and power of God. Whereas Coleridge helped Wordsworth to articulate his ideas, to examine their implications, and to explore unfamiliar intellectual territory (including a rejection of Godwinism), Wordsworth seems to have exhilarated Coleridge. In the period of their closest association, from the midsummer of 1797 to the end of 1798, Coleridge composed much of his best work, including the conversation poems “This Limetree bower my Prison” and “Frost at Midnight” and his two great visionary poems, “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”. W. L. Renwick has drawn the following comparison between the two great poets: “Coleridge has the erudition, wide reading in philosophies, and critical disciplines learned in a strict school and based on classical precedent; Wordsworth the brooding insight, the direct approach, the 224
firm grasp of basic realities that supported his independence. Power was in each, mutually recognized, and equal power, so that neither could dominate and neither sink into discipleship. Together, their power was multiplied like that of opposed blocks in a tackle; when they separated, each was incomplete.” Coleridge, the confirmed opium eater, is regarded nowadays not only as the poet of illusion and mysticism or the poet of the supernatural, but also as one of the greatest English literary critics of all times, due to works such as Lectures on Shakespeare and Biographia Literaria. In Chapter XIII of the latter work he explains his viewpoint regarding imagination (the creative force of mind) versus fancy (which depends mostly on memory). “The Eolian Harp”, written in August 1795, traces a speculative transition from a pantheistic awareness of “Life within us and abroad / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul” to an expression of a firmer Christian faith that inwardly feels the presence of the “Incomprehensible”. “Frost at Midnight” radically leaps backwards from present contentment to painful schoolboy memories of displacement and loneliness. The contrast of town and country, of rural companionship and urban isolation, is reinforced by a further leap, this time forward to the prospect of the poet’s growing son blessed by Nature’s benevolence. However, Coleridge’s essential contribution to the Romantic movement lies in a return to the magical and mysterious. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge wanted poetry to fly into the regions of the marvellous and choose themes that, though fantastic, should be acceptable through “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”. Coleridge’s three great poems – “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” – are coloured with the mysterious and the supernatural. Coleridge is considered the first Romantic who transformed the reader into a traveller journeying in an unknown space. His poems haunt the reader because of their rich connotations which make the decoding more complex and more varied. Each poem offers a crux, a text constructed on several layers of meaning. 225
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was conceived as a joint enterprise, but once the unimaginable motion began only one wit could continue it. Wordsworth supplied a suggestion and a few lines: his main contribution was his habitual assumption that a piece of a work once begun would be carried through. When Coleridge was alone or disturbed by unhappy relations with other men, his endurance was unequal to his wit, and “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” remained unfinished. However, the greatness of these poems lies in their being free exercises of the imagination working in a medium of clear concrete images. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is summarized by Anthony Burgess as follows: “The Ancient Mariner kills an albatross and is forthwith tormented with the most frightening visions and visitations, all of which are presented in the style and metre of the old ballads, but with far greater imagination and astonishing imagery”. Despite its metrical and verbal debts to the simplicity of the traditional ballad form, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is distinctly in Coleridge’s manner. A more complex reading of the poem might decode it as a voyage leading to self-knowledge and self-discovery, both literally and figuratively, but it is also a psychodrama concerned with the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure, the arbitrary “murderer” of an albatross which, we are told, appears trough the fog “as if it had been a Christian soul”. The curse and the haunted ship suggest that redemption can only be attained through deep suffering. (The same motif will be later employed by the German composer Richard Wagner in The Flying Dutchman). The poem defeats precise definition. The Mariner’s experience is tangled and often bewildering; he is not a pilgrim who measures himself by definable spiritual milestones or who encounters and progressively overcomes obstacles; he is, rather, an outcast who witnesses an invisible action which interpenetrates the physical world. Despite its framework of Catholic Christian faith and ritual, the Mariner appears to discover a series of meanings concerning the interdependency of life, not merely the consequences of breaking taboos. It would be possible to argue, according to John Peck, that the purpose of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is moral. There is a positive idea of turning to God and putting one’s faith in God. The 226
problem with such a coherent reading of the poem, however, is that it seems to sweep out of existence all the possibly disturbing elements in the poem. They offer a strong sense of the dark mystery of existence; the simple concept of Christian prayer does not, in the overall context of this poem, outweigh and banish those disturbing forces. Coleridge uses symbols: the way in which he uses the sea, the sun and all the surrounding references creates a sense of unfathomable mysteries. A more detailed analysis of the same poem might reveal the fact that it is a complex metaphor of the poet’s fate. The poem abounds in metaphors which all seem to focus towards one great image: that of the inner pain of choosing or of having been chosen by the creative powers. It is a kind of misological metaphor, as Kant called it, of hatred against intellect. Thus, the poem turns out to be a cry against the self-pain-inducing loneliness considered as a primordial sin which must be punished. “Kubla Khan”, written in the summer of 1797, derives much of its exotic imagery from Coleridge’s wide reading of mythology, history, and comparative religion. The poem famously remains “a fragment”, because, as the poet explains in his prefatory note, he wrote it down immediately after waking from “a profound sleep, at least of the external senses” in which he had composed “two to three hundred lines” but was interrupted by a caller,” “a person on business from Porlock”. This “Vision in a Dream” remains a riddle, a pattern of vivid definitions amid a general lack of definition, expressed with a rhythmic forward drive which suggests a mind taken over by a process of semi-automatic composition. Like “Christabel”, it is a dream-poem written in trance. It goes to the fabulous Orient for its theme (the creative, strange power of imagination) and presents the vision of an exotic, unearthly world which is, actually, the lost paradise. “Kubla Khan” is a fantastic invocation of a “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”: a microcosm where both body and spirit may coexist in happiness. What makes “Kubla Khan” so exciting is the way in which it deploys its symbols and the way in which it uses poetic structure. The symbols suggest a dark and mysterious world: they seem to plunge into a concealed world, including the world of the unconscious mind. It is all a step further on from the Romantic poets’ use of imagery: 227
imagery can suggest the diffuseness and diversity of experience but it all seems within the sphere of a knowable world. Symbolism suggests the unfathomable, the unmappable, and the unconscious. Yet at times Coleridge seems to be getting possession of that world, as if his poetic structure can contain and explain it. This is most evident when the poem becomes most incantatory or musical, as if Coleridge were finding an answer in the shape and sound and movement of poetry. Coleridge’s third visionary “Gothic” poem, “Christabel”, was originally intended to be included in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads but was excluded partly because of Wordsworth’s distaste for its strangeness and partly because of Coleridge’s own “indolence” in leaving the poem yet another substantial fragment. In Andrew Sanders’s opinion it is in many ways a complement to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, not simply because it too echoes the style of old ballads, but because it appears to link the nature of Christabel’s experience of the powers of life and death to that of the Mariner. “Christabel”, with its flexible metre anticipating Gerard Manley Hopkins, but also reminding us of pre-Chaucerian rhythms, is a Gothic ballad full of the mystery of evil. The poem is concerned with the attempted penetration of Christabel’s psyche by the daemonic force represented by Geraldine (Geraldine, the beautiful daughter of Roland, has her body inhabited by an evil spirit), but it also allows for a balancing contrast of two powerful aspects of nature, the sympathetic and the energetic, and for a symbolic investigation of what Coleridge later called “the terra incognita of our nature”. Christabel meets Geraldine in the forest and although the latter discloses her evil qualities in subtle ways, Christabel cannot bring herself to tell the truth. Geraldine’s eyes betray the presence of the devil within her: it is a nightmare situation and a nightmare poem, touched with the glamour of old castles and medieval remoteness. The poem might be interpreted as a journey leading to knowledge (see Christabel’s route: the castle yard – the stairs – the room – the bed) and as the metamorphosis of the self into the “other”. “Dejection: An Ode”, written in April 1802, opens with an epigraph from, and a reference to, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. It is the last and most despondent of Coleridge’s conversation poems, marked as it is by an acknowledged failure of response to the 228
phenomena of nature and by an expression of the decay of an imaginative joy fed by “outward forms”. The poet’s former “shaping spirit of Imagination”, suspended by various “afflictions”, seems to be no longer subject to external stimuli: the alternative inspiration, a recognition of inward vision, remains as yet a dim positive to set against a series of negatives. The “shaping spirit” of “Dejection” manifests itself throughout Biographia Literaria as the unifying power of imagination. Biographia Literaria (1817) is a loosely shaped, digressive series of meditations on poetry, poets and, above all, the nature of the poetic imagination. Its complex philosophy draws both from Coleridge’s fruitful relationship with Wordsworth and from a wide range of European thinkers; it is both original and plagiaristic, prophetic an profoundly indebted to tradition, at once a personal apologia and a public discourse on metaphysics. Coleridge’s statements do not always agree to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, but Coleridge writes much late, in 1817, at a time when his main interest lies in philosophy. The most influential attempts at definition concern the distinction which Coleridge carefully draws in the thirteenth chapter between “Fancy”, which merely assembles and juxtaposes images and impressions without fusing them, and “Imagination”, which actively moulds, transforms, and strives to bring into unity what it perceives. What Coleridge sees as the “primary Imagination” is, moreover, nothing less than “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”, a reflection of the working mind of the Creator himself. It is, however, through a discussion of the “vital” “secondary Imagination” that he most develops the contrast with Fancy for here he describes the mind creatively perceiving, growing, selecting, and shaping the stimuli of nature into new wholes. Coleridge’s Gothic elements strongly influenced the poetry of later poets, most notably that of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, Annabel Lee). Leon Leviţchi upheld the idea of Eminescu’s indebtedness to Coleridge (according to him, Eminescu must have read Coleridge during his stay in Berlin); this opinion was rejected by Ştefan Avădanei in Eminescu şi poezia engleză. 229
Coleridge remains the author of vast unfinished projects in poetry, philosophy and criticism. Thomas Carlyle characterized Coleridge as “a hundred horse-power steam-engine stuck in the mud and with the boiler burst”. Charles Lamb considered Coleridge “a damaged archangel”. He inaugurated the habit of writing under the influence of opium (later pursued by Rimbaud, Huxley, etc.) and had he lived in the twentieth century, he might have become a cultural hero of the underground artistic movement illustrated by Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, etc. GEORGE GORDON BYRON George Gordon Lord Byron was born in London in 1788. His parents had been living in France while hiding from their creditors, but just before Byron’s birth his mother returned to England. His father stayed on in France, where he died three years later, possibly committing suicide. Byron was born lame and limped all of his life. He was educated at Harrow and then at Cambridge. If William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were in revolt against the poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, Byron and his followers, called by Robert Southey the Satanic School, went much further. They were in revolt against English society, against English religion and against the English monarchical system of government. An avid reader of the classics, especially poetry, Byron wrote and published in 1807 his first work, Hours of Idleness, a collection of sentimental poems. The critics were not impressed and Byron replied to his detractors with a famous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a verse satire written in somewhat old-fashioned rhyming couplets, suggests a poet at odds with the present, with its literary innovators (such as “turgid” Coleridge and “simple” Wordsworth) as much as with the conservative literary establishment, which he identified with the dogmatic Edinburgh reviewers. Irony is a key word in reading Byron: if man’s stern struggle to achieve immortality is marked by metaphors or symbols, it seems 230
that the other side of the coin is mocked at through irony and all its accessories: “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song”, proclaims the young Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Byron was regarded as the Weltschmertz poet. He gained his reputation after extended travels to Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, when he published in quick succession a number of dazzling but hastily written verse romances with their plot located in the Levant. The poems have plenty of variety of scenery; their weakness lies in their lack of variety in characters. Two rather theatrical personages are, under different names, repeated over and over again: a hero and a heroine. The typical Byronic hero is a man “of one virtue but a thousand crimes”; he has a melancholy look, a pale brow, an irresistible charm for ladies, and generally has no friend, but a dog. In each tale there is a Byronic heroine, too – a woman – sensual, devoted, loving, faithful unto death. Byron’s least effective poetry may be “modern”, theatrical, and extravagant, but his best work is generally rooted in an established satiric tradition in which, as he himself acknowledges, it was better to err with Pope than to shine in the company of the contemporary writers that he despised and often deliberately undervalued. His poetry is not bent on the description or contemplation of nature, but it rather has its roots in public life and recent history, in British politics and in the feverish European nationalisms stirred by the French Revolution. It ranges in its geographical settings from Russia to the Mediterranean, from Portugal to the Levant, and it moves easily between different modes of telling and feeling, from the self-explorative to the polemic, from the melancholic to the comic, from the mock-heroic to the passionately amorous, from the song to the epic. Byron the libertarian and Byron the libertine readily assumed the public role of a commentator on his times because he both relished his fame and enjoyed the later Romantic pose of being at odds with established society. His role-playing, both in his convoluted private life and in his poetry, had a profound impact on his fellow-artists throughout Europe, and the sullen, restless “Byronic” hero took on an international currency as if all societies had universally conspired to complicate his destiny. 231
Unlike Shelley, who sincerely believed in the perfectibility of the mankind, Byron was the only English Romantic poet who presented his contemporary world as “falling apart”, as disintegrating into small pieces which could not cohere into a whole. That is why his poems do not deal with mankind’s future, but rather seem to be concerned with himself. If this contention were true, Childe Harold, Cain, the Corsair, the Giaour, Manfred, Mazeppa and Don Juan would all be facets of one and the same personality: Byron’s personality. The appearance of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812 gave Byron an immediate celebrity, or, as he famously remarked, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous”. Childe Harold offers a view of the western Mediterranean scarred by war and of the “sad relic” of Greece decaying under Ottoman misrule, but it also introduces as a central observer and participant a splenetic aristocratic exile, “Sick at heart” and suffering strange pangs “as if the memory of some deadly feud / Or disappointed passion lurk’d below”. The memories of feuds and passions in the poem were as much historical and public as they were present and private. Byron’s meeting Shelley in Switzerland and reading Goethe’s Faustus led to the creation of a Faustian dramatic poem, Manfred, while the Italian sojourn and Pulci’s influence account for Don Juan, the long comic narrative poem mocking at everything the English held sacred; it is still considered the greatest English satire in verse. Byron’s neo-classical sympathies may be examined in certain of his dramas. He himself described Manfred (1817), which was begun while he was working on the third canto of Childe Harold, as a work “of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind”, and he considered it “not a drama properly – but a dialogue”. Manfred himself is the only important human character, for the Spirits of the Earth and Air, which speak choral verse which reminds us of Shelley, have much more important roles than the Hunter or the Abbot. The subject of the drama is the last days in the life of a man who has discovered by his own experience that “the Tree of knowledge is not that of life”. He is haunted by the sense of having destroyed his sister Astarte, whom he has passionately loved. Although he dies unrepentant, he is not dragged off to Hell: instead he proclaims that it 232
is “not so difficult to die”. While Manfred owes a good deal to the story of Faust, its deepest sources of inspiration were Byron’s love for his half-sister Augusta and the profound impression made on him by the Alps. Byron’s hero is daring, proud and selfish. His fierce passions and actions destroy both the human being he loves and himself. Manfred is doomed to die of too much loneliness and corrosive inner anxiety. However, he prefers death to nothingness. Manfred, like Cain, is endowed with a profound thirst for knowledge and a certain philosophical and psychological depth. Manfred sees heaven and hell as purely internal states. Unlike the Giaour or the Corsair, other typical Byronic heroes, who find relief in passion or fight, Manfred realizes that there is no room for him and his higher aspirations. Tired and vanquished, he does not try to struggle against social injustice but lets himself be tortured by human nothingness. And yet, Manfred’s isolation is not a melancholy, static frame of mind: it is filled with the tragic tension rooted in his awareness of the clash between his infinite spiritual powers and their mortal frame. Manfred rejects any compromises, particularly the acceptance of his mortality, and this makes him so isolated in the gallery of Byron’s heroes. In Beppo we find satire as well as joking. The fact that Beppo is “A Venetian Story” does not prevent Byron from glancing satirically at English life. With a fine impartiality he satirizes England for being different from Italy and Italy for having something, after all, in common with England. Byron seems to have realized that he had made an important discovery. “If Beppo pleases, you shall have more in a year or two in the same mood”, he wrote in April 1818; and when Shelley heard a reading of part of Don Juan later in the year he described it as “a thing in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better”. In spite of his references to “the regularity of my design” and his claim that “My poem’s epic, and is meant to be / Divided in twelve books” it is clear that he started without any definite idea of how he would finish. It is difficult to decide what Byron’s object was as he wrote the poem. It is clear that he wished épater les bourgeois, less clear whether he had any further objective. 233
Don Juan is an exception among Byron’s heroes. Don Juan introduces a new kind of central character, one who is at once more passive and more vivacious. The scheme of Don Juan allows for colloquy and polyphony, the voice of the often cynically droll narrator being the dominant one. Byron’s narrator casts himself as relaxed and speculative, digressive and discursive – “never straining hard to versify, / I rattle on exactly as I’d talk / With anybody in a ride or walk” (Canto XV, 19). The ease of telling is matched by the hero’s indeterminate peripateticism (the term is proposed by Andrew Sanders), an often disrupted, circuitous wandering across the Mediterranean world ending in a movement northwards to the Russia of Catherine the Great and finally westwards to the amorously frivolous world of aristocratic London society from which Byron had attempted to distance himself. Juan’s adventures and misadventures, and the narrator’s worldly-wise commentary on them, serve to debunk a series of received ideas and perceptions ranging from the supposed glory of war and heroism to fidelity in love and oriental exoticism. Byron is also undermining the myth of a picturesque and educative journey across Europe, the Romantic idea of a splendidly benevolent, fostering nature, and the Rousseauistic faith in basic human goodness. The poem veers easily, and often comically, between extremes of suffering and luxury, hunger and excess, longing and satiety, ignorance and knowingness, shifting appearance and an equally shifting reality. Both the art and the artfulness of the narrator are frequently concealed under a pretence of purposelessness and self-deprecation. Don Juan wanders in space through years and centuries, judging everything with an ironical detachment. He has been not just once compared to the wise Fool in King Lear. His power of generalizing originates in his experience, in his life lived among his fellows. He opposes the ruin and disorder of England to the beauty and glory of Greece. Don Juan’s visit to England, which results in some of the most pointed satire in the poem, gives Byron a chance to commend hypocrisy: “Be hypocritical, be cautious, be / Not what you seem, but always what you see...” 234
He addresses the English public directly, in these words: “You are not a moral people, and you know it, / Without the aid of too sincere a poet.” The most audacious parts of the poem are its digressions. Although the digressions sometimes swamp the main narrative, as in Canto III, they are so essential to Byron’s intention that the beginnings of the cantos are bound to remind us of Fielding, who was clearly in Byron’s mind as he wrote his “comic epic poem in verse”; but at times we are reminded even more unmistakably of Sterne. Byron reminds us of Sterne in his alternations between gaiety and gravity, in the confidential tone in which he discusses his book with the reader, debating points of literary criticism and morality, in the apparent shapelessness of his plot, and in the mischievous way in which he stands things on their heads and is determined to cheat the reader of the expected “stock response”. Like Sterne, Byron presents himself as a broad-minded philosopher who has seen farther than the common run of mankind. Juanism has something in common with Shandyism and in many ways Don Juan, a poem unfinished and unfinishable, stands to the tradition of English poetry as Tristram Shandy stands to that of the English novel. In Don Juan’s speeches, which make up all the cantos of the poem, the truth is always concealed behind an ironical veil; all contemporary evils are cynically distorted under this ironical guise. Don Juan is perhaps “not strictly a Romantic poem at all: there is too much laughter in it, too much of the sharp edge of social criticism”, says Anthony Burgess. The use of “the language of every day” in Beppo and Don Juan has nothing to do with the theories of Wordsworth: Byron’s use of familiar diction is that of an aristocratic writer conversant with classical literature and the English poets of the early eighteenth century. He is aware of the different “levels of style”, and is deliberately choosing to “wander with pedestrian Muses”. Falsehood, cowardice, smallness are bitterly attacked; women and marriage, governments and politicians, poets and their works, wars, great military men, religion, God himself, and all his angels are mercilessly mocked. 235
Byron’s irony is different from that of his neoclassical predecessors Dryden and Pope. Byron takes an eighteenth century artistic device and revolutionizes it: his witty spirit permanently vacillates between the denotative and the connotative level of words, in a “continuous wrestling with words”. The bathos or anticlimax is one of Byron’s favourite figures of speech: highly philosophical reflections are immediately followed by personal reflections, the idyllic atmosphere of a scene is often brought to an abrupt end by some unexpected intrusion, one topic is suddenly dropped and replaced by another. In Byron’s self-centred poetry, Nature is no longer a distinct topic as in Wordsworth’s poems. It appears closely knit with love and Time. And yet, Nature’s beauty appears in highly emotional, genuine descriptions, in images such as “loud roar of torrents”, “black pines”, “lofty fountains” and “transparent lakes”, “rosy ocean, vast and bright” and “glittering sea”. If with the other Romantics the interest fell more on ideas such as the creative process, imagination, the poet and his creations etc., with Byron the richest study was on love. Whole passages in Hebrew Melodies and whole cantos in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Don Juan are concerned with this feeling in its multifarious aspects: love for a woman, love for friends, love for liberty (freedom and independence), love of nature etc. Byron did not try to create a deformed image of erotic love. The gamut of emotions, fears and stirrings was subtly presented. Byron seems to have studied two intense moments of erotic experience: the void left in one’s soul following a passionate experience and the painful realization of the deeper solitude in two. The Haidée episode in Don Juan is the most touching presentation of two youthful beings falling in love with each other. The gradual stages leading to the moment “where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move” are depicted with candour and this “first love” prolonged in Nature, with “the silent ocean, and the starlight bay, / The twilight glow” attending on the lovers, is the only ecstatic union in Byron’s whole creation. Byron’s heroines in Oriental Tales (Gulnare, Leila, Zuleika) belong to the same pattern as Haidée. They are kind-hearted, pretty, 236
loving, dutiful to their beloved man. They are the women who can “restore” and “soothe” the men’s tortured souls. Ian Jack, in discussing the similarities between Byron’s biographical person and the Byronic heroes, has reached the following conclusion: “Of all the differences between Don Juan and Childe Harold perhaps the most important lies in the presentation of their heroes, and this is closely related to the style in which the two poems are written. Although some details in Don Juan’s life may be paralleled in Byron’s own, he is not a self-projection in the sense in which Childe Harold is: as a consequence he is presented with a detachment and irony which are not to be found in the earlier poem. The fundamental difference between the two poems is that Byron has moved from a world in which the passions are presented ‘straight’ to one in which the predominant spirit is that of satiric comedy. As a consequence, while it might be said that there are in Childe Harold no other people, apart from the hero himself, Don Juan is almost as full of human beings as the Canterbury Tales.” Byron is not a great Nature poet, but a great satirist; he was not a deep thinker; his anti-social attitude made himself become a comic figure; and yet – his influence on the continent was second to none. Byronism became the fashionable pose throughout the nineteenth century: Alfred de Musset, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Lenau, Lermontov, and many more acknowledged Byron’s strong influence. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Shelley, like Byron, spent his short life in revolt; he was a rebel and also a would-be reformer (he refused to take sugar in his tea on the ground that “sugar was produced by slave labour”). Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 into a prosperous aristocratic family. He was educated at Oxford where his political and philosophical readings led him to co-write a dissertation, The Necessity of Atheism, the first open profession of atheism to be printed in England, for which the Oxford authorities expelled him in 1811. Shelley’s father demanded a public retraction of the pamphlet, but Shelley refused and instead eloped to Scotland with the sixteen237
year-old daughter of a coffee house owner. This caused a permanent break with his family. The couple spent some time in Ireland, where Shelley got involved in promoting political rights for Catholics. He returned to Wales, where he tried to set up a commune of “like spirits”. During this period he wrote pamphlets promoting “free love” and condemning, among other things, royalty, meat-eating and religion. In 1813, at twenty-one, he published his first major poem Queen Mab, a long philosophical poem in which he professes himself an atheist, a vegetarian, an opponent of existing marriage laws, a republican, an advocate of universal love. Queen Mab (originally mentioned by Mercutio in a famous cue of Romeo and Juliet), the Fairy Queen, leads the soul of the poet through the world. She reveals to him the past and the present with all their wicked forms of government, religion and social tyranny. But at the same time she forecasts a future full of hope and happiness. The influence of Rousseau and Godwin is obvious here as well as in his longer narrative poems which also take up the theme of revolt (The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, Hellas). Shelley upheld that Monarchy, Christianity and Marriage should be abolished. In The Revolt of Islam (1818), Shelley advocates women’s rights and the emancipation of women, while in Hellas he hymns the Greek rising against the Turkish rule. The poem opens with a canto of perplexed and obscure allegory, radically different (as Shelley acknowledged) from the remaining cantos. In the poem as he originally wrote it (as Laon and Cythna) the lovers, who are the main characters, are brother and sister, so that their love is incestuous. “It was my object”, he wrote in the original preface, “to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend”. His aim was to “accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has a tendency to promote”. Shelley’s second wife was the daughter of William Godwin, Rousseau’s apostle in England, and she sympathized with his radical ideas. Shelley’s political thought, informed as it is with experimental scientific theory and with the social ideas of his father-in-law Godwin, elucidates more than simply an opposition of liberty and tyranny; it 238
explores future possibilities and not past defeats and, in attempting to adduce the nature of egalitarianism, it moves beyond the general disillusion resultant from the defeat of the ideals of the French Revolution. According to Andrew Sanders, the radicalism, which led Shelley with an almost adolescent enthusiasm to espouse a whole range of worthy causes from Irish nationalism to vegetarianism, was more than simply a reaction against the conservative triumphalism which marked post-Napoleonic Europe and more than an instinctive rejection of the restrictive political, religious, and moral formulae of his aristocratic English background; it was at once the root and the fruit of his intellectual idealism. Disillusioned with Britain, in debt and suffering from illhealth, Shelley moved with his family to Italy, where he wrote the deeply melancholic Stanzas Written in Dejection and Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama in four acts. But notwithstanding his melancholy Shelley also presented his positive philosophy of the indestructibility of beauty (The Sensitive Plant) and of the power of love (Epipsychidion). Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude again presented the poet’s self-portrait, a youth seeking and seeking in vain an ideal embodiment of earthly love. Alastor is a meditation on the grandeur and misery of the life of a man of genius and on the grandeur and misery of solitude. Shelley’s encounter with Byron led to the composition of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. During his final years spent in Italy (he died at the age of 30), he got acquainted with the works of Tasso, Ariosto and Petrarch. In the preface to a much greater work than The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley acknowledges “a passion for reforming the world” but denies that he dedicates his poems “solely to the direct enforcement of reform” or considers them “as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. He goes on: “My purpose has… been… to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.” Prometheus Unbound, a drama inspired by Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, is not a drama properly, being rather a series of 239
splendid chants in praise of democracy than a picture of action and passion. Prometheus represents Humanity freed at last by the Revolution from the rule of tyrants. To some extent the characterization of Prometheus derives from the figure of Milton’s Satan, whom Shelley, like Blake, saw as “a moral being… far superior to his God”, but his is essentially a heroic struggle concerned with more than self-vindication. Prometheus is seen battling against despair and arbitrary tyranny, and his achievement is presented as a liberation of both body and spirit and as a heightened state of consciousness which implies a wider liberation from enemies which are both internal and external. As Mary Shelley pointed out, Prometheus Unbound is “a more idealized image of the same subject” as The Revolt of Islam. Whereas Laon strives to bring freedom (primarily political and social freedom) to one particular State, Prometheus brings Freedom in the deepest and most comprehensive sense to the whole of mankind. Just as Laon is separated from his lover Cythna for most of the action, so Prometheus is separated from the more passive Asia. Prometheus and Asia are more ethereal than Laon and Cythna because they are not human beings but Titans, and they end (fittingly) in a more ethereal form of paradise. They are Aeschylean figures far transcending mere humanity: while Laon is concerned in the highest sense with politics, Prometheus is involved in a drama which is rather metaphysical than political. In Aeschylus, Jupiter and Prometheus are reconciled, the latter buying his release from torment by disclosing the secret that is essential to Jupiter’s safety. To Shelley, Prometheus meant very much what Christ means for Christians, “The saviour and the strength of suffering man” (I.817). The drama ends with the triumph of Prometheus over Jupiter. The past history of the struggle is narrated in retrospective speeches. Although it is often said that the action takes place in the mind of Prometheus, in a sense, his spiritual victory occurs before the play opens, or at the very beginning. Act I closes with the promise that the Hour of “Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace” is on the way. In Act II, Asia awaits his coming, in a distant Eastern valley. Her conversation with 240
Demogorgon (who stands for Eternity: “Demand no direr name”, he warns her) fills in the metaphysical background of the myth as Shelley interprets it. In the beginning there were Heaven and Earth, and Light and Love. Then Saturn came to reign. Saturn’s child Jupiter succeeds him, to whom Prometheus gives wisdom “which is strength”, with one law only, “Let man be free”. Tyrant-like, Jupiter violates this law, and man becomes the victim of tyranny. Prometheus responds by awakening “the legioned hopes” and sending Love to mankind, and all the other good and beautiful things – thought, speech, the arts, civilization: … Cities then Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds, and the azure aether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen. (II. IV.94-97) Jupiter then chains Prometheus to the rock in the Caucasus where we see him. Jupiter is evil, but he is not the origin of evil: that is inexpressible, though one may use the words “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change” (II.4.119). At the beginning of Act III Jupiter is rejoicing. He has gained all that he wished, except that “The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, / Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach” (III.1.4-5). At this point Jupiter himself is overthrown. Demogorgon tells him that no tyrant like himself will ever arise again, while a Spirit of Earth describes the change that has come over everything. The downfall of Jupiter is the downfall of tyranny of every kind. It is true that mankind is not exempt “From chance, and death, and mutability” (III.4.201). With the summary overthrow of Jupiter at the beginning of Act III, and the reunion of the unchained Prometheus with Asia, the final act of the drama is given over to lyrical celebration; the triumph of the revolution is marked by the triumph of song. Prometheus Unbound was originally written in three acts. Some months later Shelley thought that a fourth act should be added, “a sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with 241
regard to Prometheus”. The fourth act, which is much the most lyrical part of the whole work, contains some magnificent verse; but it is more obscure than the rest of the drama, and it is by no means evident that it forms a fitting conclusion to the first three acts. Shelley’s best drama, still actable nowadays, is The Cenci, a realistic tragedy based on an Italian crime committed in Rome in 1599. The plot tells how the beautiful and noble-minded Beatrice Cenci is driven by the monstrous cruelty and diabolical wickedness of her father, Old Count Cenci, to conspire with her stepmother and brothers for the murder of their common tyrant. Shelley altered the real story to suit his own prejudices against the Papal Church. Peter Bell the Third and The Mask of Anarchy are Shelleyan variations on the satirical and each makes its own treaty with the satirical impulse. Its concerns range from Wordsworth and Coleridge, to London, to paper money, to Peterloo, to the evil of a religion that takes as a central article of its creed the notion of damnation, and to the proper relationship between the sexes. When Wordsworth is represented as comically reverent in his dealings with Nature, daring to do no more than touch “the hem of Nature’s shift”, his timidity is laughed at with the kind of hearty masculinity that one associates with Fielding. “Tempt not again my deepest bliss”, says Nature. Burns makes an appearance as a sort of poetic Tom Jones next to whom Wordsworth is revealed as a Blifil, a quotation from Boccaccio flamboyantly transforms the moon from an emblem of virginity into an emblem of sexual promise endlessly renewed and at the last, Wordsworth is categorised with schoolboy relish, as “a male prude”, that is a male embodiment of an unpleasant and female type. Shelley clung to the still conventional view of Wordsworth as a poet who had sold his principles for a pension, as a poet who had once found his deepest imaginative sympathies with the poor and dispossessed and now grounded his self-esteem on his occupation of a house with a “genteel drive” neatly laid with “sifted gravel”. Peter Bell the Third is critical of Wordsworth but not without admiration and not without generosity; on the whole, it is written more in sorrow than in anger, and its indignation is good-tempered and based on genuine respect for Wordsworth and his achievements: 242
Yet his was individual mind, And new created all he saw In a new manner, and refined Those new creations, and combined Them, by a master-spirit’s law. (303-7) There is much in Peter Bell the Third which is amusing, colloquially vigorous and sharply to the point. For example: Hell is a city much like London – A populous and a smoky city; There are all sorts of people undone, And there is little or no fun done; Small justice shown, and still less pity… There is a Chancery Court; a King; A manufacturing mob; a set Of thieves who by themselves are sent Similar thieves to represent; An army; and a public debt. (11.147-51; 162-6) Shelley may be amused by some of the most ridiculous aspects of Wordsworth’s behaviour but he is more pained than amused by the older poet’s acceptance of a Government post (or a situation in the Devil’s employment, as he translates it in Peter Bell the Third). For Richard Cronin, Shelley’s laughter in Peter Bell is more generous and less personally vindictive than that of Byron in Don Juan; but Byron’s laughter can still be accepted so long as its final effect is not to blot out our faith in human nature. For Shelley hope was a solemn duty which we owe alike to ourselves and to the world. It was a moral commitment as well as a psychological and religious intimation. This commitment may help to explain both the function of the satirical elements in The Mask of Anarchy and its moral and narrative structure. 243
Shelley’s concern is to see how the fallen world can be redeemed, to imagine, if he can, how beautiful an order can spring from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos. In “A Satire on Satire” he rejects a satire which is purely negative, just as in the sonnet “To Laughter” he rejects a laughter which is purely cynical. By accepting the hell which is imposed on him, man can perpetuate it and confirm its reality: by questioning it, he can discover that the apparent hell is only the product of a certain mode of perception and not an inalienable reality of the human condition. In The Mask of Anarchy the poet stands up against the apparently inexorable progress of Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy and their allies and substitutes another movement, endeavours to find a structure for hope even from so unpromising a beginning. Adonais (1821), Shelley’s elegiac tribute to the dead Keats, reveals a mature mysticism, a serene philosophy of life which denies death and affirms the immortality of the human soul. The poem pursues the idea of the poet as a hero, here triumphant even in the face of death and “awakened from the dream of life”. If Keats / Adonais is “one with Nature” and has become “transmitted effluence” which cannot die “so long as fire outlives the parent spark”, the earth-bound survivor yearns, almost suicidally, for a part in the same lifetranscending immortality. Adonais does not tell us much about Keats as an individual, and what it does tell us is misleading. Shelley exaggerates the importance of the unfavourable reviews, portraying the reviewers as wolves, obscene ravens, and vultures who have hunted down a wounded deer. For Shelley, Keats is a type and a symbol, “the great genius whom envy and ingratitude scourged out of the world”. Adonais is essentially a passionate cry of protest against the oppressors of mankind. It is one of the most carefully written of Shelley’s poems. Since Keats had been treated with injustice during his lifetime, Shelley was particularly anxious to do him honour after his death. In this poem, Shelley’s over-luxurious imagery, generally his greatest fault, is kept in check by the subject. The play Hellas (1821) begins with a chorus of Greek Captive Women singing ambiguous lullabies to the sleeping Sultan in Istanbul. 244
After the lullabies comes a rousing though relatively uncomplicated chorus about the progress of Freedom from Greece, through the Italian city-states, to modern protestant nations (“Florence, Albion, Switzerland”, 63), and thence to America and the rest of Europe, and so back to Greece: a geographical as well as temporal cycle. The next striking idea is provided by the description of Ahasuerus, the ancient Jewish visionary, whose character is described to Mahmud by Hassan in a memorable passage. “Death’s scroll” (1079) in the final chorus, is only black and white, a writing of fixed oppositions. And the rest of this chorus explains how the fixity is constituted: by the alternation of good and evil, freedom and slavery, love and hate”, which is summed up in the movement from a renewed Golden Age (1090) to the possibility that this will be followed, as before, by the return of evil. Edward Larrissy conjectures that the identity of Ahasuerus in Book of Esther makes him that Xerxes who figures in Aeschylus’s Persae, which is, of course, the chief model for Hellas. As Xerxes to the ancient Greeks, so Mahmud to the modern; as the ghost of Darius to Xerxes, so the Phantom of Mahomet II to Mahmud. Shelley’s Ahasuerus thus comprises the opposites of master and slave: as a Jew, given the name of a Persian ruler of the Jews who, in the book of Esther turns out to be fairly enlightened despot; and as one who has perhaps been Xerxes (what has Ahasuerus not been?) offering advice to one who is, in effect, a second Xerxes. Ahasuerus contains the whole history of the world hitherto: he has been master; he has been slave; and now, escaping from these hateful contraries, he possesses that affinity with process, with the disseminations of selfdelighting thought, which is the only hope of achieving another Hellas. However, it is as the lyrical poet of Nature that Shelley makes the greatest appeal. He has the same sensitivity as Wordsworth, and perhaps a far greater melodic power. Like Wordsworth, Shelley had no humour. He held comedy in poetry to be a crime. To Wordsworth Nature was the voice of God, but Shelley desired to be made one with Nature. In “Ode to the West Wind” the poet cries “Be thou me, impetuous one!” In his Odes Shelley endeavours to look beyond the visible, as he feels attracted by the various processes hidden within the 245
frame of the One. In “Ode to the West Wind”, the natural effects caused by the wind underlie a cyclical process of death and rebirth: what is lasting and durable wells up again in spring. The wind becomes a symbol, the carrier of knowledge (“the seeds and the leaves”) from one generation to another. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”, the final line brings a note of fear, of anxiety into the serene space of the poem. The same idea of perpetual metamorphosis is evident in “The Cloud”, too. The temporal transformations and progress are measured not by the clock but by the natural phenomena of days and years. The cloud’s various transformations, with the cloud speaking, are presented in a materialistic way: “I bring fresh showers… / I sift the snow… / I rest…”. But the cloud also has a symbolic value, it stands for Shelley’s conception about eternity versus transience, about cosmic immortality versus human evanescence. In “Ode to Heaven”, the “Chorus of Spirits” provides a threefold definition of Heaven: the embodiment of eternity and constancy, “the mind’s first chamber” and the evanescence of a dew drop. Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” is undoubtedly amongst the best-known of all his poems. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
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It is a simple moral. The tyrant’s affirmation of his omnipotence, sneeringly arrogant and contemptuous of its human cost, has been ironized by time. The scene reported by the traveller gives the lie unanswerably to the boast on the pedestal; moreover, the scene most tellingly inverts the claims of the legend, “Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!”. Ozymandias’s message to posterity has ended up articulating just exactly the opposite to what was intended. “With a Guitar. To Jane”, written in the same tetrameter as Prospero’s epilogue in The Tempest, is a kind of second epilogue to Shakespeare’s romance play, from Ariel’s point of view. Jane is Miranda, her husband Edward Williams is Ferdinand, and Shelley himself, Ariel. The poem lightly and touchingly mediates Shelley’s admiration for Jane through the fantasy of Ariel being silently and unrequitedly in love with Miranda. Art – the music of the guitar which is metonymic of the poem itself – offers the ideal or intellectual form of nature. Jonathan Bate suggests that Shelley’s poem foreshadows the late-twentieth-century eco-criticism. The price of art is the destruction of a living tree. You can’t have music without dead wood; you can’t have poetry without paper. That the tree died in sleep and felt no pain implies that a tree might be killed while awake and feel pain. Culture is created by enslaving nature. In his essay A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821 and published only posthumously in 1840) Shelley confidently proclaims the essentially social function of poetry and the prophetic role of the poet. His assertions, like Sir Philip Sidney’s before him, are large, even at times outrageous, but his examination of the idea of political improvement as a criterion of literary value and his idea of poetry as a liberator of the individual moral sense carry considerable intellectual force. The argument of the Defence opens with the development of a distinction between the workings of the reason and the imagination, with the imagination seen as the synthesizer and the unifier which finds its highest expression in poetry. Shelley dismisses as “a vulgar error” the distinction between poets and prose writers, and proceeds to dissolve divisions between poets, philosophers, and philosophic historians. Thus Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton emerge as “philosophers of the very loftiest power” and Plato and Bacon, Herodotus and Plutarch are placed amongst the poets. Essentially, the 247
essay seeks to demonstrate that poetry prefigures other modes of thought and anticipates the formulation of a social morality. Poetry enhances life, it exalts beauty, it transmutes all it touches, and it tells the truth by stripping “the veil of familiarity from the world” and laying bare “the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.” The poet is priest and prophet to a world which can move beyond religion and magic; he is an “unacknowledged legislator” for a future society which will learn to live without the restrictions of law; he is, above all, the liberator and the explorer. Shelley’s projection of the poet as hero, as the leader and representative society, is more than veiled self-aggrandizement, it is a reasonable assertion of the irrational power of the imagination against a purely utilitarian view of art. Throughout Shelley’s work we find a technical mastery of both traditional forms such as the Spenserian stanza (in Adonais), blank verse (in Alastor), couplets, Dante’s terza rima and innovative prosodic patterns; his eloquence and music stand unmatched among the English poets of the time. Shelley is best in his briefer and simpler lyrics. Key words in the approach to his works are the democratic dreams inspired by “the sacred name of Rousseau” and the Revolution; faith in man; humanitarianism; his longing for ideal beauty. Matthew Arnold characterized Shelley the man and his work as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. JOHN KEATS John Keats was the most talented English Romantic poet. His work seems, at least at first sight, richer and more colourful than that of his predecessors’. In one of his letters he confessed: “Imagination is my Monastery and I am its Monk”. For Keats, Beauty is necessarily Truth and Truth is Beauty. Beauty’s truth lies in love, love is true only when imagination is at work and then it is equated with a blissful mood which is the attribute of “poesy”. To enjoy such a blissful mood means to know.
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When one contemplates Keats’s life one is struck not only by its sad brevity but by the extraordinary and triumphant fullness of its achievement. John Keats was born in London, where his father was the manager of a large livery stable. His early life was marked by a series of personal tragedies: his father was killed in an accident when he was eight years old, his mother died when he was fourteen and one of his younger brothers died in infancy. He received relatively little formal education and at age sixteen he became an apprentice to an apothecary-surgeon. His first attempts at writing poetry date from the years of his apprenticeship and include “Imitation of Spenser”, a homage to the Elizabethan poet he greatly admired. In 1816 Keats obtained a licence to practise apothecary, but abandoned the profession for poetry. He became friends with Shelley and in March 1817 his first book of poems was published. Despite frequent and persistent periods of illness, Keats dedicated himself to writing, and in what is often referred to as the Great Year (1819) he produced some of his finest works, including his five great odes. Keats’s health was now in a critical state and Shelley asked him to join him in Pisa. He did not accept Shelley’s invitation but did decide to move to Italy, where he hoped the warmer climate would improve his condition. Before leaving, he managed to publish a third volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. In 1820 he settled in Rome, where he died in February 1821 at the age of twenty-five. John Keats, ever sensitive to criticism and ever open to the influence of other poets, both living and dead, was also extraordinarily able to assimilate and then to transform both criticism and influence. His development as a poet was rapid, particular, and individual and it was articulated in the bursts of energetic self-critical analysis in his letters. Keats’s background and education denied him both the social advantages and the ready recourse to classical models shared by those contemporaries to whose work he most readily turned (though not always favourably) – Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott, Byron, and Shelley. 249
He was extremely well read and his letters record a series of new, excited, and critical impressions formed by his explorations of English seventeenth-century drama, of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, of Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso (whose Italian he was beginning to master towards the end of his life) and, above, all, of Shakespeare. It is to the example of Shakespeare that he habitually refers in his letters when he seeks to demonstrate a sudden insight into the nature of poetic creation, notably in 1817 in his definition of what he styles “Negative Capability” (“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”). Keats’s heroes were patriot champions of popular freedom: King Alfred, William Tell, Robert Burns, Robin Hood, or the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciusko. The beginning of Book III of Endymion was considered a “Jacobinical apostrophe” by the Tory government. Endymion is, however, more than that. It is also the tale of a shepherd on Mount Latmos, living, under Zeus’ spell, an everlasting youth. The first pangs of love make Endymion wonder about life and true happiness; the poem records the stages of a descent from a) the external life to the inner world of Endymion’s soul; b) from Endymion’s self to his deeper self. The hero embarks upon a journey and pursuit metaphorically rendered by the image of net and labyrinth. Night registers all the changes by means of which the young man is spiritualized. The poem abounds in architectural and visual imagery, in animal and vegetal imagery, which underlie the hero’s quest aiming at self-knowledge and harmonious integration into Nature. Endymion becomes the poet’s alter-ego in his search for Beauty in life. In Endymion Keats’s consistent ambition to move beyond the lyrical to the narrative and the epic finds its first significant expression, but it is an experiment with which he had evidently become restless before he had completed it. The strengths of the poem are most often occasional and lie chiefly in the introduction of the lyrical hymns and songs which enhance the meandering narrative line. The poem is elusive in its return to suggestions of sickness, death, and penitence. 250
Hyperion, an unfinished romance in three books is, through the images it uses, complementary to Endymion. If Endymion has become immortal through spiritualized love, absolute knowledge makes a god of the poet: “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me”. Lamia, a poetic romance in two parts, may stand as the symbol of imagination contrasted to reason. In demonology a ‘lamia’ was a monster in a woman’s shape. Lamia, the serpent, persuades Apollo to transform her back into a woman. Next, she lures the young Lycius and dares him to happiness through love. Lycius abandons cold rationalism in order to reach ‘blissful mood’, but his unnamed bride turns out to be just an illusion, a cold symbol who finally has to die. In “The Eve of St Agnes” erotic love associated with storm results in unexpected effects. Here Keats tells the story of Madeline and her lover Porphyro. The action takes place on St Agnes’ Eve, when maidens have visions of their lovers or future husbands. Madeline is preparing to go to bed when Porphyro arrives at her house; his family and Madeline’s are enemies and it is therefore dangerous for him to be there. The story is very similar to that in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, an old nurse, Angela, is his friend, and she conceals him in Madeline’s bedroom. In the middle of the night he joins Madeline, and early next morning they leave together. St Agnes’ Eve – ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold. When Keats refers to the limping hare, he prepares us for seeing Madeline as a vulnerable young woman in a harsh world, and also, in more general terms, touches on the frailty of any concept of happiness or love in such a world. The poem is not just the story of Madeline and Porphyro but a broader consideration of the concept of love in a world where death and consideration of the concept of love in a world where death and killing exist. (In a wonderful example of twentieth century 251
intertextuality, the English novelist David Lodge took over the episode of Porphyro’s secret entrance to Madeline’s bedroom in one of the funniest scenes of his celebrated campus novel Small World.) Many critics consider Keats’s odes to be the best poetic pieces of his brief career. The more succinct “Ode on Melancholy” opens with a rejection of traditional and gloomy aids to reflection and moves to an exploration of the interrelationship of the sensations of joy and sorrow. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the urn seems to represent a world of pastoral innocence, where the brute force of the ordinary world has been eliminated. There is just a nod towards the more uncomfortable side of experience in the word “unravish’d” in the first line: it provides a reminder that in the real world things change whereas on the vase nothing changes. As in “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats sets the real world against an imagined other world, an alternative world where everything seems happy and uncomplicated. The perception of the transience of beauty triggers the speculations derived from the contemplation of the two scenes which decorate the imagined Attic vase, one showing bucolic lovers, the other a pagan sacrifice. Both scenes are frozen and silent, images taken out of time and rendered eternal only by the intervention of art. The image of the sacrifice, in particular, has, according to Andrew Sanders, something of the sculptural patterning and spatial imagination of Poussin: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets forevermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
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The poem allows for the high compensations offered by art, but its vocabulary steadily suggests the loss, even the desolation, entailed in the “teasing” process of contemplating eternity. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats again asserts his creed: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” Permanence – transience, immortality – mortality, urn – scenes are the antitheses the poem is built on. “Ode to a Nightingale” takes as its subject the local presence of a nightingale, and the contrast of the “full-throated ease” of its singing with the aching “numbness” of the human observer, the rapt and meditative poet. The ode progresses through a series of precisely delicate evocations of opposed moods and ways of seeing, some elated, some depressed, but each serving to return the narrator to his “sole self” and to his awareness of the temporary nature of the release from the unrelieved contemplation of temporal suffering which the bird’s song has offered. The nightingale in “Ode to a Nightingale” undergoes a dramatic change in its gradual transformation from a bird alive in the sky to a symbol of imaginative art. Poetry is equated in stanzas IV and V with the poet’s imaginary participation in the nightingale’s song. And yet, for man the only way to achieve a similar ecstatic mood and to render it eternal is to die. Death here is not extinction but the eager wish to make a transient state of happiness become eternal. In his analysis of “Ode to a Nightingale”, John Peck arrives at the following conclusions: 1.Keats deals with the pain of reality and how desirable it would be to escape to a happier world. 2.What is so attractive about Keats’s poetry is the vivid way in which he can create a picture of a world of the senses. 3.Keats’s poem is not escapist, however. There is a clear way in which reality in his verse intermingles with and disrupts the perfect vision. 4.This makes for an interesting instability in the poem, so that we are presented with a dream world but never lose sight of the real world. In “Ode to Psyche” the poet creates a delightful “sanctuary” (the world of imagination) in honour of Psyche the goddess (the 253
human soul in love), who will be forever worshipped by her priest (the poet). The latest of the odes, “To Autumn”, was written in September 1819. Here the tensions, oppositions, and conflicting emotions are diminished amid a series of dense impressions of a season whose bounty contains both fulfilment and incipient decay, both an intensification of life and an inevitable, but natural, process of ageing and dying. “To Autumn” is only on the surface a descriptive poem; the stillness (“stationing”, to quote Keats) and the rich variety of details conceal the signs of an on-going process, as if there were no winter to follow. The obsession with Time is characteristic of the three central Odes, dedicated to the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, and Melancholy. It is not to be found in the last and most triumphant of them all, “To Autumn”. No melancholy throws its shadow over this poem of fruition and acceptance. Autumn had always been a season that had meant a great deal to Keats, as may be seen by tracing the earlier allusions in his poems; and it was always the achievement of autumn that appealed to him, rather than the fact that it heralds winter and death. Whereas Shelley, in the “Ode to the West Wind”, regards autumn as the forerunner of death, and rises to hope only by contemplating the resurgence of spring that lies beyond, Keats remains wholly in the present. One of the secrets of the remarkable success of his ode “To Autumn” is perhaps that the poet himself makes no appearance. One would have expected him to have made some reference to the parallel between the season and the corresponding period in a man’s life. He does nothing of the kind. Nor does he explicitly contrast the recurrence and therefore, in a sense, the immortality of the season and its sights and occupations with the transitoriness of human life, as he does with the song of the nightingale. Like a painter he loses himself in the contemplation of what he is describing. It is a paradox of genius that the ode “To Autumn”, almost the last poem that he was ever to write, is written in a peaceable and healthy spirit. Keats was not only an explicit supporter of humanitarian principles. He was a great admirer of Milton, Shakespeare and 254
Chapman, and Spenserian influences are also detectable in his romance tale-poems; “The Eve of St. Agnes” is written in Spenserian stanzas. * GENERAL CONCLUSION: After this brief survey of the works of the greatest English Romantic poets one may find the definition of Romanticism to be as elusive as it appeared in the general introduction to this chapter. However, the student in English literature might opt as well for Wellek’s definition of Romanticism: a loose conceptual congeries (i.e. mass) organized around three dominant terms: Imagination, Nature, Symbol (or Myth). The Creative Imagination of the poet supplied the Romantic reader with material out of which he could elaborate or explore his own inner subjective world. Nature was a mirror in which the Imagination saw itself reflected. Since the Imagination was private and asocial if not antisocial, the Nature it found itself looking at was necessarily wild nature. And since the Imagination cannot formulate logical propositions, its message to the Romantic reader had to be oblique. The images of wild nature and their relationship to the poet carried with them obscure symbolic significances of universal interest. The symbolical language was a device for asking questions and not one for recording answers. The most frequent word in Blake’s “The Tiger” is the interrogative what, while both Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” end on a question. F. W. Bateson defines Romanticism in social terms, as “a new class, the middle-class intelligentsia, in the process of discovering its identity. The medium of discovery was linguistic”. Finally, Herbert M. Schueller, in Romanticism Reconsidered (1962) provides us with a synthetic and conclusive definition of Romanticism as “the tendency to break the confines, the rules, the limits, to go beyond that which has been crystallized”.
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PART THREE
SURVEY SUPPORT TEXT
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ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
THE SEAFARER (fragments) The lone call wails above on wing it steels the unarmed soul to start across the waters where the whale sways. God’s visions are to me more vivid than this dead life loaned out on land I know its leasehold will not last. Still three things twist man’s mind until the day his doom is sealed age, illness or some stroke of hate will seize sense from him. So any noble spirit will aspire to earn an everlasting epitaph of praise for good deeds done on earth, bold blows dealt at the Devil and against fell foes before his passing, that posterity delights enjoyed for ever by the brave among the angels may perpetuate. The days of glory have decayed the earth has spilled its splendour there are no captains now, no kings gold givers such as once there were when lordly feats would garner fame and each man lived for utmost laud. Virtue is fallen, visions are faded the weak are left to hold this world worn low. The flower of the field is old the leaf is withered and the laurel sere Throughout this middle isthmus man meets age hoar-headed, bleak of face 259
by former friends forsaken, grieving over scions of lineage long since gone. Life ebbs, the flesh feels less and fails to savour sweet or sour is frail of hand, feeble of mind Though men may bury treasured pelf beside their brother’s born remains and sow his grave with golden goods he goes where gold is worthless. Nor can his sinful soul, quaking before his God call hoarded gold or mortal glory to his aid that Architect is awesome Whose might moves the world Whose hand has fixed the firmament earth’s vaults and vapours. Dull is the man who does not dread the Lord on him will death’s descent be sudden blissful the man that meekly lives on him will heaven benisons bestow. A mind was given man by God to glory in his might. A man should steer a steadfast course be constant, clean and just in judgement a man should curb his love or loathing though flame consume his comrade and fire the funeral pyre for fate is set more surely, God more great, than any man surmise. Come, consider where we have a home, how we can travel to it, how our travail here will lead us to the living well-head and heaven haven of our Lord’s love. Thus let us thank His hallowed name that He has granted us His grace Dominion enduring, the Ancient of Days for all time. Amen. Translated into Modern English by Charles Harrison Wallace 260
DEOR’S LAMENT Weland knew fully affliction and woe, Hero unflinching enduring distress; Had for companionship heart-break and longing, Wintry exile and anguish of soul, When Nithad bound him, the better man, Constrained him with sinewy bonds. That evil ended. So also may this! Nor was brother's death to Beadohild A sorrow as deep as her own sad plight, When she knew the weight of the child in her womb, But little could know what her lot might be. That evil ended. So also may this! Many have heard of the rape of Hild, Of her father’s affection and infinite love, Whose nights were sleepless with sorrow and grief. That evil ended. So also may this! For thirty winters Theodoric held, As many have known, the Maering’s stronghold. That evil ended. So also may this! We have heard of Eormanric’s wolf-like ways, Widely ruling the realm of the Goths; Grim was his menace, and many a man, Weighted with sorrow and presage of woe, Wished that the end of his kingdom were come. That evil ended. So also may this! He who knows sorrow, despoiled of joys, Sits heavy of mood; to his heart it seemeth His measure of misery meeteth no end. Yet well may he think how oft in this world The wise Lord varies His ways to men, Granting wealth and honour to many an earl, To others awarding a burden of woe. And so I can sing of my own sad plight Who long stood high as the Heodenings’ bard, Deor my name, dear to my lord. 261
Mild was my service for many a winter, Kindly my king till Heorrenda came Skilful in song and usurping the land-right Which once my gracious lord granted to me. That evil ended. So also may this! Translated by C. W. Kennedy
BEOWULF (fragments) BEOWULF’S STRUGGLE WITH GRENDEL Out from the marsh, from the foot of misty Hills and bogs, bearing God’s hatred, Grendel came, hoping to kill Anyone he could trap on his trip to high Heorot. He moved quickly through the cloudy night, Up from his swampland, sliding silently Toward that gold-shining hall. He had visited Hrothgar’s Home before, knew the way – But never, before nor after that night, Found Heorot defended so firmly, his reception So harsh. He journeyed, forever joyless, Straight to the door, then snapped it open, Tore its iron fasteners with a touch And rushed angrily over the threshold, He strode quickly across the inlaid Floor, snarling and fierce: his eyes Gleamed in the darkness, burned with a gruesome Light. Then he stopped, seeing the hall Crowded with sleeping warriors, stuffed With rows of young soldiers resting together. And his heart laughed, he relished the sight, Intended to tear the life from those bodies 262
By morning; the monster’s mind was hot With the thought of food and the feasting his belly Would soon know. But fate, that night, intended Grendel to gnaw the broken bones Of his last human supper. Human Eyes were watching his evil steps, Waiting to see his swift hard claws. Grendel snatched at the first Geat He came to, ripped him apart, cut His body to bits with powerful jaws, Drank the blood from his veins and bolted Him down, hands and feet; death And Grendel’s great teeth came together, Snapping life shut. Then he stepped to another Still body, clutched at Beowulf with his claws, Grasped at a strong-hearted wakeful sleeper – And was instantly seized himself, claws Bent back as Beowulf leaned up on one arm. That shepherd of evil, guardian of crime, Knew at once that nowhere on earth Had he met a man whose hands were harder; His mind was flooded with fear – but nothing Could take his talons and himself from that tight Hard grip. Grendel’s one thought was to run From Beowulf, flee back to his marsh and hide there: This was a different Heorot than the hall he had emptied. But Hygelac’s follower remembered his final Boast and, standing erect, stopped The monster’s flight, fastened those claws In his fists till they cracked, clutched Grendel Closer. The infamous killer fought For his freedom, wanting no flesh but retreat, Desiring nothing but escape; his claws Had been caught, he was trapped. That trip to Heorot Was a miserable journey for the writhing monster! The high hall rang, its roof boards swayed, And Danes shook with terror. Down 263
The aisles the battle swept, angry And wild. Heorot trembled, wonderfully Built to withstand the blows, the struggling Great bodies beating at its beautiful walls; Shaped and fastened with iron, inside And out, artfully worked, the building Stood firm. Its benches rattled, fell To the floor, gold-covered boards grating As Grendel and Beowulf battled across them. Hrothgar’s wise men had fashioned Heorot To stand forever; only fire, They had planned, could shatter what such skill had put Together, swallow in hot flames such splendour Of ivory and iron and wood. Suddenly The sounds changed, the Danes started In new terror, cowering in their beds as the terrible Screams of the Almighty’s enemy sang In the darkness, the horrible shrieks of pain And defeat, the tears torn out of Grendel’s Taut throat, hell’s captive caught in the arms Of him who of all the men on earth Was the strongest. Now he discovered – once the afflicter Of men, tormentor of their days – what it meant To feud with Almighty God: Grendel Saw that his strength was deserting him, his claws Bound fast, Hygelac’s brave follower tearing at His hands. The monster’s hatred rose higher, But his power had gone. He twisted in pain, And the bleeding sinews deep in his shoulder Snapped, muscle and bone split And broke. The Battle was over, Beowulf Had been granted new glory: Grendel escaped, But wounded as he was could flee to his den, His miserable hole at the bottom of the marsh, Only to die, to wait for the end Of all his days. And after that bloody 264
Combat the Danes laughed with delight. He who had come to them from across the sea, Bold and strong-minded, had driven affliction Off, purged Heorot clean. He was happy, Now with that night’s fierce work; the Danes Had been served as he’d boasted he’d serve them; Beowulf, A prince of the Geats, had killed Grendel, Ended the grief, the sorrow, the suffering Forced on Hrothgar’s helpless people By a bloodthirsty fiend. No Dane doubted The victory, for the proof, hanging high From the rafters where Beowulf had hung it, was the monster’s Arm, claw and shoulder and all. BEOWULF'S FINAL SPEECH Then Wiglaf went back, anxious To return while Beowulf was alive, to bring him The treasure they’d won together. He ran, Hoping his wounded king, weak And dying, had not left the world too soon. Then he brought their treasure to Beowulf, and found His famous king bloody, gasping For breath. But Wiglaf sprinkled water Over his lord, until the words Deep in his breast broke through and were heard. Beholding the treasure he spoke, haltingly: “For this, this gold, these jewels, I thank Our Father in Heaven, Ruler of the Earth – For all of this, that His grace has given me, Allowed me to bring to my people while breath Still came to my lips. I sold my life For this treasure, and I sold it well. Take What I leave, Wiglaf, lead my people, Help them; my time is gone. Have The brave Geats build me a tomb, 265
When the funeral flames have burned me, and build it Here, at the water’s edge, high On this spit of land, so sailors can see This tower, and remember my name, and call it Beowulf’s tower, and boats in the darkness And mist, crossing the sea, will know it.” Then that brave king gave the golden Necklace from around his throat to Wiglaf, Gave him his gold-covered helmet, and his rings, And his mail shirt, and ordered him to use them well: “You’re the last of all our far-flung family. Fate has swept our race away, Taken warriors in their strength and led them To the death that was waiting. And now I follow them.” The old man’s mouth was silent, spoke No more, had said as much as it could; He would sleep in the fire, soon. His soul Left his flesh, flew to glory. Translated by Burton Raffel MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE (fragments) It happened in the summery heart Of a secret vale’s most hidden part, I heard an Owl and Nightingale Disputing on a mighty scale; Most keen and strenuous the debate, Now gentle, now in furious spate. And each against the other swelled, Each her spleen and ire expelled, Saying the worst of every feature That she could mock in the other creature; 266
Contention was especially strong When each abused the other’s song. The first to speak, the Nightingale, In a corner of the vale Was perched upon a pretty twig Where blossom showed on every sprig And, fast entwined with reeds and sedge, There grew a thick and lovely hedge. She sang her varying tuneful lay, Delighting in that flowering spray. It seemed the melody she made Was on a pipe or harpstring played, That pipe or harp, not living throat, Was shooting forth each pleasant note. Nearby there stood a stump alone, Decayed, with ivy overgrown, And here the Owl had made her den, And here sang out her “hours” to men. The Nightingale surveyed the Owl, And reckoned her opponent foul; Indeed all men declare with right That she’s a hideous, loathsome sight. “Monster!” she cried, “Away! Fly off! Simply to see you’s quite enough To make me lose the urge to sing, You’re such an ugly, evil thing. When you thrust out before my eyes, My tongue is tied, my spirit dies, Because your filthy clamouring Makes me rather spit than sing.” The Owl held back till evening fell: Then, as her heart began to swell, Her breath to catch, her rage to grate, She felt she could no longer wait, And straight away exploded, “How Does this my singing strike you now? D’you think I have no singing skill 267
Merely because I cannot trill? You’re always loading me with blame, Girding at me with mock and shame. If you were off that twig of yours, And I could get you in my claws (And would I could is all my boon), You’d sing a different kind of tune.” ………………………………………… “Hold bard! hold hard!” exclaimed the Owl, “Your style in all is fake and foul. You colour every single word To sound like truth, you lying bird! You round and polish all you say In such an unctuous, specious way That all who turn an car to you Suppose your utterance to be true. Hold bard! you shall be countered yet! Your mighty falsehoods shall be met When they’re exposed, and clearly seen, And all know what a liar you’ve been. You say you sing to all mankind Of blisses they should strive to find, And of the everlasting choir – How strange that such a barefaced liar As you should bluff so openly! D’you think they’ll come so easily To God’s high kingdom? By a song? No, no. They’ll surely find that long And contrite weeping and a plea For pardon for their sins will be The only way to enter in. I therefore say men should begin To weep much rather than to sing If they yearn for heaven’s king. There’s not a single man alive Who’s free of sin; so all should strive 268
With tears and weeping to atone Till all sweet things to sour are grown. I help this process on, God knows: My songs no idiot course propose, But teach the listening Man to yearn And make lament his chief concern. For thus he heeds his mortal state And groans because his sins are great I goad him on, by what I sing, To wail his guilty trespassing. If you dispute this, I reply You sing less well than I can cry. If right takes precedence over wrong, My tears are better than your song. Some men there are, both good and true And pure in spirit through and through, Who notwithstanding yearn to go Because they find this life all woe. Though saved themselves, on earth they see Nothing but pain and misery. They shed harsh tears for others’ woes And pray Christ’s mercy come to those. And thus I help both good and bad; From me a two-fold grace is had. My song helps virtuous men to yearn; I sing when they with longing burn. I help the bad no less, for I In song instruct where sufferings lie. With further blame your plea I twit; For when upon your twig you sit, You lure to fleshly lust and wrong All those who listen to your song. The bass of heaven you quite ignore; You have no voice for such a lore. All your songs of wantonness; In you is found no hotness. Your squeaks no man alive would grant 269
To be a mass priest’s holy chant! But still another charge I lay, Which you must try and talk away. Why don’t you sing in foreign parts? That’s where they need the Lively arm You never sing in Irish lands Nor ever visit Scottish lands. Why can’t the Norsemen hear your lay, Or even men of Galloway? Of singing skill those men have none For any song beneath the sun. Why don’t you sing to priests up there And teach them how to trill the air, And show them by your chirruping How the heavenly angels sing? Just like a useless spring you seem That jets out by a flowing stream, But leaves the neighbouring lowland dry, And gushes off downhill to die. But north and south I make my stand And am well known in every land. Yes, east and West, and far and near I sing my duty loud and clear, Advising men with instant clamour To shun your songs alluring glamour. My song most clearly tells mankind To leave the life of sin behind; I bid them cease from self-deceit, For it is better and more sweet On earth to weep with woe and care Than be the Devil’s friend elsewhere.” By now the Nightingale was cross, Ashamed and rather at a loss, Because the Owl in her harangue Had mocked the place in which she sang – Behind the house among the weed Where men relieve their bodies’ need. 270
But yet she sat and thought it through, For in her heart of hearts she knew That rage destroys wise counselling, As Alfred says, that learned king: “The hated man can’t intercede; The angry man’s not fit to plead.” For wrath stirs up the spirit’s blood With raging surges like a flood, And overpowers the beating mind Until with passion it is blind. The spirit thus loses all its light, Perceiving neither truth nor right. All this, the bird well understood, And waited for a calmer mood. She’d speak much better, feeling quiet Than wrangling in a mood of riot. SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (fragments) (13) “Never fear,” he said, “I’m not fishing for a fight with the beardless children on the benches all about. If I were strapped on steel on a sturdy horse no man here has might to match me. No, I have come to this court for a bit of Christmas fun fitting for Yuletide and New Years with such a fine crowd. Who here in this house thinks he has what it takes, has bold blood and a brash head, and dares to stand his ground, giving stroke for stroke? Here! I shall give him this gilded blade as my gift; this heavy ax shall be his, to handle as he likes. and I shall stand here bare of armour, and brave the first blow. If anyone’s tough enough to try out my game, let him come here quickly and claim his weapon! 271
I give up all rights; he will get it for keeps. I’ll stand like a tree trunk – he can strike at me once, if you’ll grant me the right to give as good as I get in play. But later is soon enough, a full year and a day. Get up, if you think you’re rough, let’s see what you dare to say!” (14) If at first he had stunned them, now they sat stone-still: the whole hall, both high and low. The mounted man moved in his saddle, glared a red glance grimly about, arched his bushy brows, all brilliant and green, his beard waving as he waited for one man to rise, to call or came forward. He coughed loudly, stretched slowly, and straightened to speak. “Hah! They call this King Arthur’s house, a living legend in land after land? Where have your pride and your power gone, your bragging boasts, your big words? The glories and triumphs of the Round Table have toppled at the touch of one man’s words! What? Fainting with fear, when no fight is offered?” He let out a laugh so loud that Arthur winced with shame; the blood shot to his flushed face and churned with rage and raised a storm until their hearts all burned. All king in face and form, he reached that rider, turned, (15)
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and said, “Look here, by heaven! Have you lost your mind? If you want to be mad, I will make you welcome! Nobody I know is bowled over by your big words, so help me God! Hand me that ax – I will grant you the gift you beg me to give!” He leaped lightly up and lifted it from his hand. Then the man dismounted, moving proudly, while Arthur held the ax, both hands on the haft, hefted it sternly, considered his stroke. That burly man bulked big and tall, a head higher than anyone in the house. He stood there hard-faced, stroking his beard, impassively watching as he pulled off his coat, no more moved or dismayed by his mighty swings than anybody would be if somebody brought him a bottle of wine. Gawain, sitting by the queen, could tell the king his mind: “Lord, hear well what I mean, and let this match be mine.” (43) “But Gawain,” that good man graciously asked, “Has some dark deed driven you forth, that you rushed from the royal court? Must you now ride alone when holiday feasts are not wholly done?” “Sir,” he responded, “you have spoken truly: I had to depart on a high and a hasty matter. For I myself am summoned to seek out a place, though I wonder where in the world to find it. I’d not fail to near it by New Year’s morning for all the land in Britain – by the love of God! I have come with questions that require answers – so tell me the truth: has any tale reached you of the Green Chapel, or on what ground it stands, 273
or about its guardian, a green-skinned knight? For I have set myself, by most solemn pledge, to meet this man, though it may go hard. But now the New Year is nearly complete, and if the Lord allows it, I’ll look upon him more gladly – by God’s Son! – than on any good thing. Therefore sir, as you see, I must set out now for I doubt that three days will do for this business and I’d far rather die than be doomed to fail.” Then the lord answered, laughing, “You must linger now! You will get to your goal in good enough time, and can give up guessing on what ground it lies, and can lie abed as late as you wish, and finally set forth the first of the year, yet make it there with morning still mostly left that day – spend till New Years as you please, then rise and ride that way; We’ll guide you there with ease – it’s not two miles away.” (44) Then gaiety filled Gawain, and he gladly laughed. “I must earnestly offer my uttermost thanks! With my goal at hand, I can grant your wish, dwell here a while, and do as you bid me.” “Sit down,” said his host, seizing his arm. “Come, let’s delight in the ladies’ presence!” Thus they made a pleasant party apart by themselves. The lord let out laughs as loud and as merry as a madman, maybe, whose mind was far gone. He called to his company, crying aloud, “You have sworn to serve me however seems best; will you act to honour this oath here and now?” “Certainly, sir,” he said in reply. “While your walls ward me your will is supreme.” 274
He returned: “You are tired, and have travelled far. We all have been wakeful, nor are you well-rested, nor fed quite as fully, I fear, as should be. You must lie in late, and lounge at your ease past morning mass, and make it to breakfast whenever you wish. My wife will eat with you and keep you company till I come again. You stay, but I myself will ride hunting at break of day.” Then Gawain bowed with pride and promised to obey. (48) While the lord found delight in the linden-wood, that good man Gawain had a grand bed where he dozed while daylight dappled the walls and crept through the counterpanes and curtains about him. As he drifted half-dreaming, a delicate noise sounded softly at the door, which suddenly opened. When he heard this he heaved his head from the sheets and pulled a corner of the curtain carefully aside, warily wondering what it might be. It was the lady herself, such a lovely sight, who closed the door carefully and quietly behind her and bent toward the bed. Blushing the fellow lay down and lurked there, looking asleep. Taking step after step, she stole to the bed, caught up the curtain and crawling inside sat down beside him with silent motions. A long while she lingered there to look at him waking. The man lay unmoving for more than a while, for his mind was bemused what to make of this strange situation. It seemed most amazing. But he said to himself, “It would suit far better if I let the lady enlighten me herself.” 275
Then he straightened and stretched and stirring toward her he opened his eyes and acted astounded. Then he crossed himself as if he claimed protection from that sight – her chin and cheeks were sweet, blending red and white; her voice a pleasant treat where small lips smiled delight. (49) “Good morning, Sir Gawain!” she gaily exclaimed. “You’re a sound sleeper! I slipped in unnoticed and you are quite my captive! Unless we come to terms I shall bind you in your bed – of that be quite certain.” Delighted the lady laughed as she teased him. “Good morning, gay lady!” answered Gawain blithely. “Just decide on my sentence; it will suit me nicely. I’m your prisoner completely, and plead for your mercy. It’s my best bet, so I had better take it!” (So he teased her in turn, returning her laughter.) “But at least, lovely lady, allow me one wish: pardon your prisoner, please let him rise; let me be out of bed, in better apparel, and we’ll finish chatting in far greater comfort.” “Certainly not, good sir,” that sweet lady said. “You’ll not budge from your bed: I have better plans. I shall hold you here – and – that other half also – and get to know the knight I’ve so neatly trapped. I know enough after all, to know of Sir Gawain whom all the world worships; every way you ride your courteous character is acclaimed most nobly by lords and by ladies and all living people. And now you are here, and here we’re alone – my lord and his men will be long afield; the servants are sleeping; so are my maidens; I have closed the door, it’s securely locked; 276
and since I have in this house he whom all admire, I shall spend my time in speech I am sure to treasure. My person’s yours, of course, to see you take your pleasure; I am obliged, perforce, to serve you at your leisure.” (50) “In good faith,” said Gawain, “I would gain too much! Though I am hardly he of whom you are speaking – the honour you outline is obviously more than what I am worth – and how well I know it! By God! I’d be glad if it seemed good to you to assign some other service I might do to value and revere you; I’d be very glad.” “In good faith, Sir Gawain!” she gaily replied. “If I prized the prowess that pleases all others so little or so lightly, I’d be less than gracious! There is no lack of ladies who’d love so very much to have one so handsome held as I have you, who’d be so glad to listen as your gracious speech softened their sorrows and soothed all their cares that they would gladly give all the gold they have! But I praise the Prince whose place is in heaven that I have right here what others hope to see by grace!” She’d such a cheerful air who seemed so sweet of face, but he with spotless care answered every case. Translated into Modern English by Paul Deane
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER THE CANTERBURY TALES The General Prologue (fragments) Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury When April with his showers sweet with fruit The drought of March has pierced unto the root And bathed each vein with liquor that has power To generate therein and sire the flower; When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath, Quickened again, in every holt and heath, The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun Into the Ram one half his course has run, And many little birds make melody That sleep through all the night with open eye (So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage) – Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage, And palmers to go seeking out strange strands, To distant shrines well known in sundry lands. And specially from every shire’s end Of England they to Canterbury wend, The holy blessed martyr there to seek Who helped them when they lay so ill and weal. Befell that, in that season, on a day In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay Ready to start upon my pilgrimage To Canterbury, full of devout homage, There came at nightfall to that hostelry Some nine and twenty in a company Of sundry persons who had chanced to fall In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all 278
That toward Canterbury town would ride. The rooms and stables spacious were and wide, And well we there were eased, and of the best. And briefly, when the sun had gone to rest, So had I spoken with them, every one, That I was of their fellowship anon, And made agreement that we’d early rise To take the road, as you I will apprise. But none the less, whilst I have time and space, Before yet farther in this tale I pace, It seems to me accordant with reason To inform you of the state of every one Of all of these, as it appeared to me, And who they were, and what was their degree, And even how arrayed there at the inn; And with a knight thus will I first begin. ………………………………………… THE PRIORESS There was also a nun, a prioress, Who, in her smiling, modest was and coy; Her greatest oath was but “By Saint Eloy!” And she was known as Madam Eglantine. Full well she sang the services divine, Intoning through her nose, becomingly; And fair she spoke her French, and fluently, After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow, For French of Paris was not hers to know. At table she had been well taught withal, And never from her lips let morsels fall, Nor dipped her fingers deep in sauce, but ate With so much care the food upon her plate That never driblet fell upon her breast. In courtesy she had delight and zest. Her upper lip was always wiped so clean That in her cup was no iota seen 279
Of grease, when she had drunk her draught of wine. Becomingly she reached for meat to dine. And certainly delighting in good sport, She was right pleasant, amiable – in short. She was at pains to counterfeit the look Of courtliness, and stately manners took, And would be held worthy of reverence. But, to say something of her moral sense, She was so charitable and piteous That she would weep if she but saw a mouse Caught in a trap, though it were dead or bled. She had some little dogs, too, that she fed On roasted flesh, or milk and fine white bread. But sore she’d weep if one of them were dead, Or if men smote it with a rod to smart: For pity ruled her, and her tender heart. Right decorous her pleated wimple was; Her nose was fine; her eyes were blue as glass; Her mouth was small and therewith soft and red; But certainly she had a fair forehead; It was almost a full span broad, I own, For, truth to tell, she was not undergrown. Neat was her cloak, as I was well aware. Of coral small about her arm she’d bear A string of beads and gauded all with green; And therefrom hung a brooch of golden sheen Whereon there was first written a crowned “A,” And under, Amor vincit omnia. ……………………………………….. THE PARDONER With him there rode a gentle pardoner Of Rouncival, his friend and his compeer; Straight from the court of Rome had journeyed he. Loudly he sang “Come hither, love, to me,” The summoner joining with a burden round; 280
Was never horn of half so great a sound. This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax, But lank it hung as does a strike of flax; In wisps hung down such locks as he’d on head, And with them he his shoulders overspread; But thin they dropped, and stringy, one by one. But as to hood, for sport of it, he’d none, Though it was packed in wallet all the while. It seemed to him he went in latest style, Dishevelled, save for cap, his head all bare. As shiny eyes he had as has a hare. He had a fine veronica sewed to cap. His wallet lay before him in his lap, Stuffed full of pardons brought from Rome all hot. A voice he had that bleated like a goat. No beard had he, nor ever should he have, For smooth his face as he’d just had a shave; I think he was a gelding or a mare. But in his craft, from Berwick unto Ware, Was no such pardoner in any place. For in his bag he had a pillowcase The which, he said, was Our True Lady’s veil: He said he had a piece of the very sail That good Saint Peter had, what time he went Upon the sea, till Jesus changed his bent. He had a latten cross set full of stones, And in a bottle had he some pig’s bones. But with these relics, when he came upon Some simple parson, then this paragon In that one day more money stood to gain Than the poor dupe in two months could attain. And thus, with flattery and suchlike japes, He made the parson and the rest his apes. But yet, to tell the whole truth at the last, He was, in church, a fine ecclesiast. Well could he read a lesson or a story, But best of all he sang an offertory; 281
For well he knew that when that song was sung, Then might he preach, and all with polished tongue To win some silver, as he right well could; Therefore he sang so merrily and so loud. PROLOGUE Now have I told you briefly, in a clause, The state, the array, the number, and the cause Of the assembling of this company In Southwark, at this noble hostelry Known as the Tabard Inn, hard by the Bell. But now the time is come wherein to tell How all we bore ourselves that very night When at the hostelry we did alight. And afterward the story I engage To tell you of our common pilgrimage. But first, I pray you, of your courtesy, You’ll not ascribe it to vulgarity Though I speak plainly of this matter here, Retailing you their words and means of cheer; Nor though I use their very terms, nor lie. For this thing do you know as well as I: When one repeats a tale told by a man, He must report, as nearly as he can, Every least word, if he remember it, However rude it be, or how unfit; Or else he may be telling what’s untrue, Embellishing and fictionizing too. He may not spare, although it were his brother; He must as well say one word as another. Christ spoke right broadly out, in holy writ, And, you know well, there’s nothing low in it. And Plato says, to those able to read: “The word should be the cousin to the deed.” Also, I pray that you’ll forgive it me If I have not set folk, in their degree 282
Here in this tale, by rank as they should stand. My wits are not the best, you’ll understand. Great cheer our host gave to us, every one, And to the supper set us all anon; And served us then with victuals of the best. Strong was the wine and pleasant to each guest. A seemly man our good host was, withal, Fit to have been a marshal in some hall; He was a large man, with protruding eyes, As fine a burgher as in Cheapside lies; Bold in his speech, and wise, and right well taught, And as to manhood, lacking there in naught. Also, he was a very merry man, And after meat, at playing he began, Speaking of mirth among some other things, When all of us had paid our reckonings; And saying thus: “Now masters, verily You are all welcome here, and heartily: For by my truth, and telling you no lie, I have not seen, this year, a company Here in this inn, fitter for sport than now. Fain would I make you happy, knew I how. And of a game have I this moment thought To give you joy, and it shall cost you naught. You go to Canterbury; may God speed And the blest martyr soon requite your meed. And well I know, as you go on your way, You’ll tell good tales and shape yourselves to play; For truly there’s no mirth nor comfort, none, Riding the roads as dumb as is a stone; And therefore will I furnish you a sport, As I just said, to give you some comfort. And if you like it, all, by one assent, And will be ruled by me, of my judgment, And will so do as I’ll proceed to say, Tomorrow, when you ride upon your way, Then, by my father’s spirit, who is dead, 283
If you’re not gay, I’ll give you up my head. Hold up your hands, nor more about it speak.” Our full assenting was not far to seek; We thought there was no reason to think twice, And granted him his way without advice, And bade him tell his verdict just and wise, “Masters,” quoth he, “here now is my advice; But take it not, I pray you, in disdain; This is the point, to put it short and plain, That each of you, beguiling the long day, Shall tell two stories as you wend your way To Canterbury town; and each of you On coming home, shall tell another two, All of adventures he has known befall. And he who plays his part the best of all, That is to say, who tells upon the road Tales of best sense, in most amusing mode, Shall have a supper at the others’ cost Here in this room and sitting by this post, When we come back again from Canterbury. And now, the more to warrant you’ll be merry, I will myself, and gladly, with you ride At my own cost, and I will be your guide. But whosoever shall my rule gainsay Shall pay for all that’s bought along the way. And if you are agreed that it be so, Tell me at once, or if not, tell me no, And I will act accordingly. No more.” This thing was granted, and our oaths we swore, With right glad hearts, and prayed of him, also, That he would take the office, nor forgo The place of governor of all of us, Judging our tales; and by his wisdom thus Arrange that supper at a certain price, We to be ruled, each one, by his advice In things both great and small; by one assent, We stood committed to his government. 284
And thereupon, the wine was fetched anon; We drank, and then to rest went every one, And that without a longer tarrying. Next morning, when the day began to spring, Up rose our host, and acting as our cock, He gathered us together in a flock, And forth we rode, a jog-trot being the pace, Until we reached Saint Thomas’ watering-place. And there our host pulled horse up to a walk, And said: “Now, masters, listen while I talk. You know what you agreed at set of sun. If even-song and morning-song are one, Let’s here decide who first shall tell a tale. And as I hope to drink more wine and ale, Whoso proves rebel to my government Shall pay for all that by the way is spent. Come now, draw cuts, before we farther win, And he that draws the shortest shall begin. Sir knight,” said he, “my master and my lord, You shall draw first as you have pledged your word. Come near,” quoth he, “my lady prioress: And you, sir clerk, put by your bashfulness, Nor ponder more; out hands, flow, every man!” At once to draw a cut each one began, And, to make short the matter, as it was, Whether by chance or whatsoever cause, The truth is, that the cut fell to the knight, At which right happy then was every wight. Thus that his story first of all he’d tell, According to the compact, it befell, As you have heard. Why argue to and fro? And when this good man saw that it was so, Being a wise man and obedient To plighted word, given by free assent, He slid: “Since I must then begin the game, Why, welcome be the cut, and in God’s name! Now let us ride, and hearken what I say.” 285
And at that word we rode forth on our way; And he began to speak, with right good cheer, His tale anon, as it is written here. Here ends the prologue of this book and here begins the first tale, which is the knight’s tale. EDMUND SPENSER AMORETTI SONNET 61 The glorious image of the maker’s beauty, My sovereign saint, the idol of my thought, Dare not henceforth above the bounds of duty T’ accuse of pride, or rashly blame for aught. For being as she is divinely wrought, And of the brood of angels heavenly born; And with the crew of blessed saints upbrought, Each of which did her with their gifts adorn; The bud of joy, the blossom of the morn, The beam of light, whom mortal eyes admire: What reason is it then but she should scorn Base things, that to her love too bold aspire? Such heavenly forms ought rather worshipped be, Than dare be lov’d by men of mean degree. SONNET 69 The famous warriors of the antick world, Used trophies to erect in stately wise: In which they would the records have enrolled, Of their great deeds and valorous emprize. What trophy then shall I most fit devise, In which I may record the memory 286
Of my love’s conquest, peerless beauty’s prize, Adorn’d with honour, love, and chastity. Even this verse vowed to eternity, Shall be thereof immortal monument: And tell her praise to all posterity, That may admire such world’s rare wonderment. The happy purchase of my glorious spoil, Gotten at last with labour and long toil. SONNET 75 One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away; Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. “Vain man,” said she, “thou dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalize, For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise.” “Not so,” quoth I, “let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name; Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
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ASTROPHIL AND STELLA SONNET 1 Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain: Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay, Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows, And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite – “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.” SONNET 7 When Nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes, In colour black why wrapp’d she beams so bright? Would she in beamy black, like painter wise, Frame daintiest lustre, mix’d of shades and light? Or did she else that sober hue devise, In object best to knit and strength our sight, Lest if no veil those brave gleams did disguise, They sun-like should more dazzle than delight? Or would she her miraculous power show, That whereas black seems Beauty’s contrary, She even if black doth make all beauties flow? Both so and thus, she minding Love shoud be Placed ever there, gave him this mourning weed, To honor all their deaths, who for her bleed. SONNET 22 288
In highest way of heav’n the Sun did ride, Progressing then from fair twins’ golden place: Having no scarf of clouds before his face, But shining forth of heat in his chief pride; When some fair ladies by hard promise tied, On horseback met him in his furious race, Yet each prepar’d with fan’s well-shading grace From that foe’s wounds their tender skins to hide. Stella alone with face unarmed march’d. Either to do like him which open shone, Or careless of the wealth because her own: Yet where the hid and meaner beauties parch’d, Her daintiest bare went free; the cause was this, The Sun, which others burn’d, did her but kiss. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE HERO AND LEANDER (fragments) The men of wealthy Sestos every year, (For his sake whom their goddess held so dear, Rose-cheeked Adonis) kept a solemn feast. Thither resorted many a wandering guest To meet their loves. Such as had none at all, Came lovers home from this great festival. For every street like to a firmament Glistered with breathing stars who, where they went, Frighted the melancholy earth which deemed Eternal heaven to burn, for so it seemed, As if another Phaeton had got The guidance of the sun’s rich chariot. But far above the loveliest Hero shined And stole away th’ enchanted gazer’s mind, For like sea nymphs’ enveigling Harmony, So was her beauty to the standers by. 289
Nor that night-wandering, pale, and wat’ry star (When yawning dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits) more overrules the flood Than she the hearts of those that near her stood. Even as, when gaudy nymphs pursue the chase, Wretched Ixion’s shaggy footed race, Incensed with savage heat, gallop amain From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain. So ran the people forth to gaze upon her, And all that viewed her were enamoured on her. And as in fury of a dreadful fight, Their fellows being slain or put to flight, Poor soldiers stand with fear of death dead strooken, So at her presence all surprised and tooken, Await the sentence of her scornful eyes. He whom she favours lives, the other dies. There might you see one sigh, another rage; And some, (their violent passions to assuage) Compile sharp satires, but alas too late, For faithful love will never turn to hate. And many seeing great princes were denied Pin’d as they went, and thinking on her died. On this feast day, O cursed day and hour, Went Hero thorough Sestos from her tower To Venus’ temple, where unhappily As after chanced, they did each other spy. So fair a church as this had Venus none. The walls were of discoloured jasper stone Wherein was Proteus carved, and o’erhead A lively vine of green sea agate spread, Where by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung, And, with the other, wine from grapes out wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was. The town of Sestos called it Venus’ glass. There might you see the gods in sundry shapes 290
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes. For know, that underneath this radiant floor Was Danae’s statue in a brazen tower, Jove slyly stealing from his sister’s bed, To dally with Idalian Ganymede, And for his love Europa bellowing loud, And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud; Blood quaffing Mars heaving the iron net Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set; Love kindling fire to burn such towns as Troy; Sylvanus weeping for the lovely boy That now is turned into a cypress tree, Under whose shade the wood gods love to be. And in the midst a silver altar stood. There Hero, sacrificing turtle’s blood, Vailed to the ground, vailing her eyelids close, And modestly they opened as she rose. Thence flew Love’s arrow with the golden head, And thus Leander was enamoured. Stone still he stood, and evermore he gazed Till with the fire that from his countenance blazed Relenting Hero’s gentle heart was strook. Such force and virtue hath an amorous look. It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is overruled by fate. When two are stripped, long ere the course begin We wish that one should lose, the other win. And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots like in each respect. The reason no man knows; let it suffice What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? He kneeled, but unto her devoutly prayed. Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, “Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;” And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him. 291
He started up, she blushed as one ashamed, Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed. He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled. Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled. These lovers parleyed by the touch of hands; True love is mute, and oft amazed stands. Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled, And night, deep drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid’s day). And now begins Leander to display Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs, and tears, Which like sweet music entered Hero’s ears, And yet at every word she turned aside, And always cut him off as he replied. At last, like to a bold sharp sophister, With cheerful hope thus he accosted her. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SONNETS SONNET 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: 292
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee. SONNET 66 Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And guilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly doctor-like controlling skill, And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. 91 Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, Some in their wealth, some in their bodies’ force, Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill, Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse; And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure, Wherein it finds a joy above the rest: But these particulars are not my measure; All these I better in one general best. Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost, Of more delight than hawks or horses be; And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast: Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take All this away and me most wretched make. 293
116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 130 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
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VENUS AND ADONIS (fragments) Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase; Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn;4 Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-fac’d suitor ’gins to woo him. “Thrice fairer than myself,” thus she began, “The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare,8 Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are; Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, Saith that the world hath ending with thy life. 12 “Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed, And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow; If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know:16 Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses; And being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses: “And yet not cloy thy lips with loath’d satiety, But rather famish them amid their plenty,20 Making them red and pale with fresh variety; Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty: A summer’s day will seem an hour but short, Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.”24 With this she seizeth on his sweating palm, The precedent of pith and livelihood, And, trembling in her passion, calls it balm, Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good:28 Being so enrag’d, desire doth lend her force Courageously to pluck him from his horse. 295
Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein Under her other was the tender boy,32 Who blush’d and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy; She red and hot as coals of glowing fire He red for shame, but frosty in desire. JOHN DONNE A VALEDICTION: OF WEEPING Let me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here, For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth. For thus they be Pregnant of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more; When a tear falls, that thou fall’st which it bore; So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore. On a round ball A workman, that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, all. So doth each tear, Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix’d with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so. O! more than moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere; Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea, what it may do too soon; Let not the wind 296
Example find To do me more harm than it purposeth: Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath, Whoe’er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other’s death. A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING MOURNING As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, “Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.” So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; ’Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears; Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers’ love – Whose soul is sense – cannot admit Of absence, ’cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined, That ourselves know not what it is, Inter-assurèd of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. 297
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’ other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. THE FLEA Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be. Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead; Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two; And this, alas! is more than we would do. O stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, yea, more than married are. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is. Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met, And cloister’d in these living walls of jet. Though use make you apt to kill me, Let not to that self-murder added be, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three. 298
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty be, Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee? Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now. ’Tis true; then learn how false fears be; Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me, Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee. THE SUN RISING Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams so reverend, and strong Why shouldst thou think? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long. If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and to-morrow late tell me, Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”
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She’s all states, and all princes I; Nothing else is; Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus; Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere. THE GOOD-MORROW I wonder by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved? were we not wean’d till then? But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den? ’Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be; If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee. And now good-morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone; Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown; Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres Without sharp north, without declining west? Whatever dies, was not mix’d equally; 300
If our two loves be one, or thou and I Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die. LOVE’S ALCHEMY Some that have deeper digg’d love’s mine than I, Say, where his centric happiness doth lie. I have loved, and got, and told, But should I love, get, tell, till I were old, I should not find that hidden mystery. O ! ’tis imposture all; And as no chemic yet th’ elixir got, But glorifies his pregnant pot, If by the way to him befall Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal, So, lovers dream a rich and long delight, But get a winter-seeming summer’s night. Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day, Shall we for this vain bubble’s shadow pay? Ends love in this, that my man Can be as happy as I can, if he can Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom’s play? That loving wretch that swears, ’Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds, Which he in her angelic finds, Would swear as justly, that he hears, In that day’s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. Hope not for mind in women; at their best, Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess’d. SONNET 10 Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend 301
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to’another due, Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. ANDREW MARVELL THE GARDEN How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their uncessant labours see Crown’d from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow’rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress’ name; 302
Little, alas, they know or heed How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair trees! Wheres’e’er your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wond’rous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide; There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepar’d for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden-state, 303
While man there walk’d without a mate; After a place so pure and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone. How well the skillful gard’ner drew Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new, Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And as it works, th’ industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs! TO HIS COY MISTRESS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness Lady were no crime. We would sit down and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, 304
Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust: The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
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JOHN MILTON PARADISE LOST Book II (fragments) The Argument The consultation begun, Satan debates whether another battle is to be hazarded for the recovery of Heaven: some advise it, others dissuade. A third proposal is preferred, mentioned before by Satan – to search the truth of that prophecy or tradition in Heaven concerning another world, and another kind of creature, equal, or not much inferior, to themselves, about this time to be created. Their doubt who shall be sent on this difficult search: Satan, their chief, undertakes alone the voyage; is honoured and applauded. The council thus ended, the rest betake them several ways and to several imployments, as their inclinations lead them, to entertain the time till Satan’s return. He passes on his journey to Hell-gates; finds them shut, and who sat there to guard them; by whom at length they are opened, and discover to him the great gulf between Hell and Heaven. With what difficulty he passes through, directed by Chaos, the Power of that place, to the sight of this new World which he sought. High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, Satan exalted sat, by merit raised To that bad eminence; and, from despair Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught, His proud imaginations thus displayed: “Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heaven! For, since no deep within her gulf can hold 306
Immortal vigour, though oppressed and fallen, I give not Heaven for lost: from this descent Celestial Virtues rising will appear More glorious and more dread than from no fall, And trust themselves to fear no second fate! Me though just right, and the fixed laws of Heaven, Did first create your leader – next, free choice, With what besides in council or in fight Hath been achieved of merit – yet this loss, Thus far at least recovered, hath much more Established in a safe, unenvied throne, Yielded with full consent. The happier state In Heaven, which follows dignity, might draw Envy from each inferior; but who here Will envy whom the highest place exposes Foremost to stand against the Thunderer’s aim Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share Of endless pain? Where there is, then, no good For which to strive, no strife can grow up there From faction: for none sure will claim in Hell Precedence; none whose portion is so small Of present pain that with ambitious mind Will covet more! With this advantage, then, To union, and firm faith, and firm accord, More than can be in Heaven, we now return To claim our just inheritance of old, Surer to prosper than prosperity Could have assured us; and by what best way, Whether of open war or covert guile, We now debate. Who can advise may speak.” He ceased; and next him Moloch, sceptred king, Stood up – the strongest and the fiercest Spirit That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair. His trust was with the Eternal to be deemed Equal in strength, and rather than be less Cared not to be at all; with that care lost 307
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse, He recked not, and these words thereafter spake: “My sentence is for open war. Of wiles, More unexpert, I boast not: them let those Contrive who need, or when they need; not now. For, while they sit contriving, shall the rest – Millions that stand in arms, and longing wait The signal to ascend – sit lingering here, Heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame, The prison of His tyranny who reigns By our delay? No! let us rather choose, Armed with Hell-flames and fury, all at once O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way, Turning our tortures into horrid arms Against the torturer; when, to meet the noise Of his almighty engine, he shall hear Infernal thunder, and, for lightning, see Black fire and horror shot with equal rage Among his Angels and his throne itself Mixed with Tartarean sulphur and strange fire, His own invented torments. But perhaps The way seems difficult, and steep to scale With upright wing against a higher foe! Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench Of that forgetful lake benumb not still, That in our proper motion we ascend Up to our native seat; descent and fall To us is adverse. Who but felt of late, When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear Insulting, and pursued us through the Deep, With what compulsion and laborious flight We sunk thus low? The ascent is easy, then; The event is feared! Should we again provoke Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find To our destruction, if there be in Hell 308
Fear to be worse destroyed! What can be worse Than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned In this abhorred deep to utter woe; Where pain of unextinguishable fire Must exercise us without hope of end The vassals of his anger, when the scourge Inexorably, and the torturing hour, Calls us to penance? More destroyed than thus, We should be quite abolished, and expire. What fear we then? what doubt we to incense His utmost ire? which, to the highth enraged, Will either quite consume us, and reduce To nothing this essential – happier far Than miserable to have eternal being! – Or, if our substance be indeed Divine, And cannot cease to be, we are at worst On this side nothing; and by proof we feel Our power sufficient to disturb his Heaven, And with perpetual inroads to alarm, Though inaccessible, his fatal Throne: Which, if not victory, is yet revenge.”
JOHN DRYDEN A SONG FOR ST. CECILIA’S DAY, 1687 I From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atoms lay, And could not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 309
In order to their stations leap, And MUSICK’s pow’r obey. From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began; From Harmony to Harmony Through all the compass of the Notes it ran, The Diapason closing full in Man. II What Passion cannot MUSICK raise and quell! When Jubal struck the corded Shell, His list’ning Brethren stood around And wond’ring, on their Faces fell To worship that Celestial Sound. Less than a God they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that Shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What Passion cannot MUSICK raise and quell! III The TRUMPET’s loud Clangor Excites us to Arms With shrill Notes of Anger And mortal Alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund’ring DRUM Cries, hark the Foes come; Charge, Charge, ’tis too late to retreat. IV The soft complaining FLUTE In dying notes discovers The Woes of hopeless Lovers, Whose Dirge is whisper’d by the warbling LUTE.
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V Sharp VIOLINS proclaim Their jealous Pangs, and Desperation, Fury, frantick Indignation, Depth of Pains, and height of Passion, For the fair, disdainful Dame. VI But oh! what Art can teach What human Voice can reach The sacred ORGAN’s praise? Notes inspiring holy Love, Notes that wing their heav’nly ways To mend the Choires above. VII Orpheus could lead the savage race; And Trees unrooted left their place; Sequacious of the Lyre: But bright CECILIA rais’d the wonder high’r; When to her ORGAN, vocal Breath was giv’n An Angel heard, and straight appear’d Mistaking Earth for Heaven. Grand CHORUS As from the pow’r of sacred Lays The Spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator’s praise To all the bless’d above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling Pageant shall devour, The TRUMPET shall be heard on high, The Dead shall live, the Living die, And MUSICK shall untune the Sky.
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AN ODE, ON THE DEATH OF MR. HENRY PURCELL Late Servant to his Majesty, and Organist of the Chapel Royal, and of St. Peter’s Westminster I MARK how the Lark and Linnet Sing, With rival Notes They strain their warbling Throats, To welcome in the Spring. But in the close of Night, When Philomel begins her Heav’nly lay, They cease their mutual spite, Drink in her Music with delight, And list’ning and silent, and silent and list’ning, And list’ning and silent obey. II So ceas’d the rival Crew when Purcell came, They Sung no more, or only Sung his Fame. Struck dumb they all admir’d the God-like Man, The God-like Man, Alas, too soon retir’d, As He too late began. We beg not Hell, our Orpheus to restore, Had He been there, Their Sovereign’s fear Had sent Him back before. The pow’r of Harmony too well they know, He long e’er this had Tun’d their jarring Sphere, And left no Hell below. III The Heav’nly Choir, who heard his Notes from high, Let down the Scale of Music from the Sky: They handed him along, And all the way He taught, and all the way they Sung. Ye Brethren of the Lyre, and tuneful Voice, 312
Lament his Lot: but at your own rejoice. Now live secure and linger out your days, The Gods are pleas’d alone with Purcell’s Lays, Nor know to mend their Choice. ALEXANDER POPE AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM ( Fragments) Some ne’er advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town; They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne’er invent. Some judge of authors’ names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with quality; A constant critic at the great man’s board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my lord. What woeful stuff this madrigal would be In some starv’d hackney sonneteer or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the Wit brightens! how the Style refines! Before his sacred name flies every fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought! The vulgar thus thro’ imitation err, As oft the learn’d by being singular; So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong. So schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damn’d for having too much wit. Some praise at morning what they blame at night, But always think the last opinion right. A Muse by these is like a mistress used, This hour she’s idolized, the next abused; 313
While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, ’Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. Ask them the cause; they’re wiser still they say; And still to-morrow’s wiser than to-day. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons no doubt will think us so. Once shool-divines this zealous isle o’erspread; Who knew most sentences was deepest read. Faith, Gospel, all seem’d made to be disputed, And none has sense enough to be confuted. Scotists and Thomists now in peace remain Amidst their kindred cobwebs in Ducklane. If Faith itself has diff’rent dresses worn, What wonder modes in Wit should take their turn? Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current Folly proves the ready Wit; And authors think their reputation safe, Which lives as long as fools are pleas’d to laugh. Some, valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind: Fondly we think we honour merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate. Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose, In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux: But sense survived when merry jests were past; For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return and bless once more our eyes, New Blackmores and new Milbournes must arise. Nay, should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will Merit as its shade pursue, But like a shadow proves the substance true; For envied Wit, like Sol eclips’d, makes known Th’opposing body’s grossness, not its own. 314
When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But ev’n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day. ESSAY ON MAN (Fragments) EPISTLE I Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of Kings. Let us, since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die, Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot, Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore Of all who blindly creep or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man. I Say first, of God above or Man below What can we reason but from what we know? Of man what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known, ’Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, 315
What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are: But of this frame, the bearings and the ties, The strong connexions, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d thro’; or can a part contains the whole? Is the great chain that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee? EDWARD YOUNG THE COMPLAINT: OR NIGHT THOUGHTS (fragments) By Nature’s law, what may be, may be now; There’s no prerogative in human hours. In human hearts what bolder thought can rise, Than man’s presumption on to-morrow’s dawn? Where is to-morrow? In another world. For numbers this is certain; the reverse Is sure to none; and yet on this perhaps, This peradventure, infamous for lies, As on a rock of adamant we build Our mountain hopes, spin out eternal schemes As we the Fatal Sisters could out-spin, And big with life’s futurities, expire. Not ev’n Philander had bespoke his shroud, Nor had he cause; a warning was deny’d: How many fall as sudden, not as safe! As sudden, though for years admonish’d home. Of human ills the last extreme beware; Beware, Lorenzo, a slow-sudden death. How dreadful that deliberate surprise! Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is push’d out of life. 316
Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene. If not so frequent, would not this be strange? That ’tis so frequent, this is stranger still. Of man’s miraculous mistakes this bears The palm, “That all men are about to live,” For ever on the brink of being born, All pay themselves the compliment to think They, one day, shall not drivel: and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; At least, their own; their future selves applauds; How excellent that life they ne’er will lead! Time lodg’d in their own hands is Folly’s vails; That lodg’d in Fate’s to Wisdom they consign. The thing they can’t but purpose, they postpone. ’Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool, And scarce in human wisdom to do more. All promise is poor dilatory man, And that through every stage; when young, indeed, In full content we sometimes nobly rest, Unanxious for ourselves; and only wish, As duteous sons our fathers were more wise. At thirty man suspects himself a fool, Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves, and re-resolves, then dies the same.
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JAMES THOMSON RULE, BRITANNIA! When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain – “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” The nations, not so blessed as thee, Must in their turns to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies Serves but to root thy native oak. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame; All their attempts to bend thee down Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe and thy renown. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” To thee belongs the rural reign; Thy cities shall with commerce shine; All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” 318
The Muses, still with freedom found, Shall to thy happy coast repair: Blessed isle! with matchless beauty crowned, And manly hearts to guard the fair. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." HYMN ON SOLITUDE Hail, mildly pleasing Solitude, Companion of the wise and good, But from whose holy piercing eye The herd of fools and villains fly. Oh! how I love with thee to walk, And listen to thy whispered talk, Which innocence and truth imparts, And melts the most obdurate hearts. A thousand shapes you wear with ease, And still in every shape you please. Now wrapt in some mysterious dream, A lone philosopher you seem; Now quick from hill to vale you fly, And now you sweep the vaulted sky; A shepherd next, you haunt the plain, And warble forth your oaten strain; A lover now, with all the grace Of that sweet passion in your face; Then, calmed to friendship, you assume The gentle looking Hertford’s bloom, As, with her Musidora, she (Her Musidora fond of thee) Amid the long-withdrawing vale Awakes the rivalled nightingale. Thine is the balmy breath of morn, Just as the dew-bent rose is born; 319
And, while meridian fervours beat, Thine is the woodland dumb retreat; But chief, when evening scenes decay And the faint landscape swims away, Thine is the doubtful soft decline, And that best hour of musing thine. Descending angels bless thy train, Thy virtues of the sage and swain – Plain Innocence, in white arrayed, Before thee lifts her fearless head; Religion’s beams around thee shine And cheer thy glooms with light divine; About thee sports sweet Liberty, And rapt Urania sings to thee. Oh, let me pierce thy secret cell, And in thy deep recesses dwell! Perhaps from Norwood’s oak-clad hill, When Meditation has her fill, I just may cast my careless eyes Where London’s spiry turrets rise, Think of its crimes, its cares, its pain, Then shield me in the woods again. THOMAS GRAY ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain 320
Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, 321
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes, Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind, The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; Along the cool sequester’d vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. 322
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires. For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn. “There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by. “Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love. “One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill, Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he; “The next with dirges due in sad array Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay, Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.” The Epitaph Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth, 323
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heav’n did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear, He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God. WILLIAM COLLINS ODE TO EVENING If ought of Oaten Stop, or Pastoral Song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn Springs, Thy Springs, and dying Gales, O Nymph reserv’d, while now the bright-hair’d Sun Sits in yon western Tent, whose cloudy Skirts, With Brede ethereal wove, O’erhang his wavy Bed: Now Air is hush’d, save where the weak-ey’d Bat, With short shrill Shriek flits by on leathern Wing, Or where the Beetle winds His small but sullen Horn, As oft he rises ’midst the twilight Path, Against the Pilgrim born in heedless Hum: Now teach me, Maid compos’d, To breathe some soften’d Strain, Whose Numbers stealing thro’ thy darkning Vale, May not unseemly with its Stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail Thy genial lov’d Return! For when thy folding Star arising shews His paly Circlet, at his warning Lamp 324
The fragrant Hours, and Elves Who slept in flow’rs the day, And many a Nymph who wreaths her Brows with Sedge, And sheds the fresh’ning Dew, and lovelier still, The Pensive Pleasures sweet Prepare thy shadowy Car. Then lead, calm vot’ress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow’d pile, Or up-land fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam. But when chill blustring Winds, or driving Rain, Forbid my willing Feet, be mine the Hut, That from the Mountain’s Side, Views Wilds, and swelling Floods, And Hamlets brown, and dim-discover’d Spires, And hears their simple Bell, and marks o’er all Thy Dewy Fingers draw The gradual dusky Veil. While Spring shall pour his Show’rs, as oft he wont, And bathe thy breathing Tresses, meekest Eve! While Summer loves to sport, Beneath thy ling’ring Light: While sallow Autumn fills thy Lap with Leaves, Or Winter yelling thro’ the troublous Air, Affrights thy shrinking Train, And rudely rends thy Robes, So long, sure-found beneath the Sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip’d Health, Thy gentlest Influence own, And Hymn thy fav’rite Name!
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OLIVER GOLDSMITH MEMORY O Memory, thou fond deceiver, Still importunate and vain, To former joys recurring ever, And turning all the past to pain: Thou, like the world, th’ oppress’d oppressing, Thy smiles increase the wretch’s woe: And he who wants each other blessing In thee must ever find a foe. AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A MAD DOG Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song, And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long. In Islington there was a man, Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran, Whene’er he went to pray. A kind and gentle heart he had, To comfort friends and foes; The naked every day he clad, When he put on his clothes. And in that town a dog was found, As many dogs there be, Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, And curs of low degree. This dog and man at first were friends; But when a pique began, The dog, to gain his private ends, Went mad, and bit the man. Around from all the neighboring streets The wond’ring neighbors ran, 326
And swore the dog had lost his wits, To bite so good a man. The wound it seem’d both sore and sad To every Christian eye; And while they swore the dog was mad, They swore the man would die. But soon a wonder came to light, That show’d the rogues they lied: The man recover’d of the bite – The dog it was that died. WILLIAM COWPER THE CASTAWAY Obscurest night involv’d the sky, The Atlantic billows roared, When such a destin’d wretch as I, Washing headlong from on board, Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home forever left. No braver chief could Albion boast Than he with whom he went, Nor ever ship left Albion’s coast, With warmer wishes sent. He lov’d them both, but both in vain, Nor him beheld, nor her again. Not long beneath the whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay; Nor soon he felt his strength decline, Or courage die away; But wag’d with death a lasting strife, Supported by despair of life. 327
He shouted: nor his friends had fail’d To check the vessel’s course, But so the furious blast prevail’d, That, pitiless perforce, They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind. Some succour yet they could afford; And, as such storms allow, The cask, the coop, the floated cord, Delay’d not to bestow. But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore, Whate’er they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seem’d, could he Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, in such a sea, Alone could rescue them; Yet bitter felt it still to die Deserted, and his friends so nigh. He long survives, who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld; And so long he, with unspent power, His destiny repell’d; And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried, “Adieu!” At length, his transient respite past, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in every blast, Could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank The stifling wave, and then he sank.
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No poet wept him, but the page Of narrative sincere, That tells his name, his worth, his age, Is wet with Anson’s tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed Alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not, or dream, Descanting on his fate, To give the melancholy theme A more enduring date; But misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another’s case. No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone, When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone; But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. WILLIAM BLAKE LONDON I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
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How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. THE TIGER Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 330
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? THE SICK ROSE O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER A little black thing among the snow, Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe! “Where are thy father & mother? say?” “They are both gone up to the church to pray. “Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil’d among the winter’s snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. “And because I am happy & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King, Who make up a heaven of our misery.”
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THE LAMB Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, & bid thee feed By the stream & o’er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, wooly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb. He is meek, & he is mild; He became a little child. I a child, & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb, God bless thee! Little Lamb, God bless thee! THE LITTLE BOY LOST “Father! father! where are you going? O do not walk so fast. Speak, father, speak to your little boy, Or else I shall be lost.” The night was dark, no father was there; The child was wet with dew; The mire was deep, & the child did weep, And away the vapour flew.
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THE LITTLE BOY FOUND The little boy lost in the lonely fen, Led by the wand’ring light, Began to cry; but God, ever nigh, Appear’d like his father in white. He kissed the child & by the hand led And to his mother brought, Who in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale, Her little boy weeping sought. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. – Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire 333
The Hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: – feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened: – that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, – Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft – In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart – 334
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all. – I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, 335
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed 336
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance – If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence – wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love – oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
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I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee; A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company; I gazed – and gazed – but little thought What wealth to me the show had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
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SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! THE RAINBOW My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my day to be Bound each to each by natural piety.
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE KUBLA KHAN In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure 340
Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. THE EOLIAN HARP Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on my arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o’ergrown With white-flower’d Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatch’d from yon bean-field! and the world so hush’d! 341
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence. And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caress’d, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam’d wing! O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where – Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so fill’d; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-clos’d eye-lids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquility; Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on the subject Lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, 342
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intelletual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallow’d dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. Meek Daughter in the family of Christ! Well hast thou said and holily disprais’d These shapings of the unregenerate mind; Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring. For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that only feels; Who with his saving mercies healed me, A sinful and most miserable man, Wilder’d and dark, and gave me to possess Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour’d Maid! FROST AT MIDNIGHT The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry Came loud – and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. ’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 343
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft, How oft, at school, with most believing mind, Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye Fixed with mick study on my swimming book: Save if the door half opened, and I snatched A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face, Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 344
And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity, doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
GEORGE GORDON BYRON SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to the tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. 345
One ray the more, one shade the less Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o’er her face, Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and o’er that brow So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow But tell of days in goodness spent A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent. STANZAS FOR MUSIC There be none of Beauty’s daughters With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me: When, as if its sound were causing The charmed ocean’s pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull’d winds seem dreaming. And the midnight moon is weaving Her bright chain o’er the deep, Whose breast is gently heaving As an infant’s asleep: So the spirit bows before thee; With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of Summer’s ocean.
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DON JUAN (fragments) Canto IV All this must be reserved for further song; Also our hero’s lot, howe’er unpleasant (Because this Canto has become too long), Must be postponed discreetly for the present; I’m sensible redundancy is wrong, But could not for the muse of me put less in ’t: And now delay the progress of Don Juan, Till what is call’d in Ossian the fifth Juan. Canto V When amatory poets sing their loves In liquid lines mellifluously bland, And pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves, They little think what mischief is in hand; The greater their success the worse it proves, As Ovid’s verse may give to understand; Even Petrarch’s self, if judged with due severity, Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity. I therefore do denounce all amorous writing, Except in such a way as not to attract; Plain – simple – short, and by no means inviting, But with a moral to each error tack’d, Form’d rather for instructing than delighting, And with all passions in their turn attack’d; Now, if my Pegasus should not be shod ill, This poem will become a moral model. * Her first thought was to cut off Juan’s head; Her second, to cut only his – acquaintance; Her third, to ask him where he had been bred; Her fourth, to rally him into repentance; Her fifth, to call her maids and go to bed; Her sixth, to stab herself; her seventh, to sentence 347
The lash to Baba: – but her grand resource Was to sit down again, and cry, of course. * Juan was moved; he had made up his mind To be impaled, or quarter’d as a dish For dogs, or to be slain with pangs refined, Or thrown to lions, or made baits for fish, And thus heroically stood resign’d, Rather than sin – except to his own wish: But all his great preparatives for dying Dissolved like snow before a woman crying. * So he began to stammer some excuses; But words are not enough in such a matter, Although you borrow’d all that e’er the muses Have sung, or even a Dandy’s dandiest chatter, Or all the figures Castlereagh abuses; Just as a languid smile began to flatter His peace was making, but before he ventured Further, old Baba rather briskly enter’d. * First came her damsels, a decorous file, And then his Highness’ eunuchs, black and white; The train might reach a quarter of a mile: His majesty was always so polite As to announce his visits a long while Before he came, especially at night; For being the last wife of the Emperour, She was of course the favorite of the four. His Highness was a man of solemn port, Shawl’d to the nose, and bearded to the eyes, Snatch’d from a prison to preside at court, His lately bowstrung brother caused his rise; He was as good a sovereign of the sort 348
As any mention’d in the histories Of Cantemir, or Knolles, where few shine Save Solyman, the glory of their line. * He saw with his own eyes the moon was round, Was also certain that the earth was square, Because he had journey’d fifty miles, and found No sign that it was circular anywhere; His empire also was without a bound: ’T is true, a little troubled here and there, By rebel pachas, and encroaching giaours, But then they never came to the “Seven Towers;” * His Highness cast around his great black eyes, And looking, as he always look’d, perceived Juan amongst the damsels in disguise, At which he seem’d no whit surprised nor grieved, But just remark’d with air sedate and wise, While still a fluttering sigh Gulbeyaz heaved, “I see you’ve bought another girl; ’t is pity That a mere Christian should be half so pretty.” This compliment, which drew all eyes upon The new-bought virgin, made her blush and shake. Her comrades, also, thought themselves undone: Oh! Mahomet! that his majesty should take Such notice of a giaour, while scarce to one Of them his lips imperial ever spake! There was a general whisper, toss, and wriggle, But etiquette forbade them all to giggle. * Thus far our chronicle; and now we pause, Though not for want of matter; but ’t is time According to the ancient epic laws, 349
To slacken sail, and anchor with our rhyme. Let this fifth canto meet with due applause, The sixth shall have a touch of the sublime; Meanwhile, as Homer sometimes sleeps, perhaps You’ll pardon to my muse a few short naps.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ODE TO THE WEST WIND I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odors plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! II Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aery surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, 350
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 351
V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? THE CLOUD I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night ’tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; 352
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, 353
Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone, And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, – The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.
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TO JANE, WITH A GUITAR Ariel to Miranda: – Take This slave of music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee; And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou, Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy denies itself again And, too intense, is turned to pain. For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life must still pursue Your happiness, for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own. From Prospero’s enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o’er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon In her interlunar swoon Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. When you live again on earth, Like an unseen Star of birth Ariel guides you o’er the sea Of life from your nativity. Many changes have been run Since Ferdinand and you begun Your course of love, and Ariel still Has tracked your steps and served your will. Now in humbler, happier lot, 355
This is all remembered not; And now, alas! the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave – From you he only dares to crave, For his service and his sorrow, A smile today, a song tomorrow. The artist who this idol wrought To echo all harmonious thought, Felled a tree, while on the steep The woods were in their winter sleep, Rocked in that repose divine On the wind-swept Apennine; And dreaming, some of Autumn past, And some of Spring approaching fast, And some of April buds and showers, And some of songs in July bowers, And all of love; and so this tree, – O that such our death may be! – Died in sleep, and felt no pain, To live in happier form again: From which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star, The artist wrought this loved Guitar; And taught it justly to reply To all who question skilfully In language gentle as thine own; Whispering in enamoured tone Sweet oracles of woods and dells, And summer winds in sylvan cells; – For it had learnt all harmonies Of the plains and of the skies, Of the forests and the mountains, And the many-voiced fountains; The clearest echoes of the hills, The softest notes of falling rills, The melodies of birds and bees, 356
The murmuring of summer seas, And pattering rain, and breathing dew, And airs of evening; and it knew That seldom-heard mysterious sound Which, driven on its diurnal round, As it floats through boundless day, Our world enkindles on its way: – All this it knows, but will not tell To those who cannot question well The Spirit that inhabits it; It talks according to the wit Of its companions; and no more Is heard than has been felt before By those who tempt it to betray These secrets of an elder day. But, sweetly as its answers will Flatter hands of perfect skill, It keeps its highest holiest tone For our beloved Jane alone. JOHN KEATS ODE ON A GRECIAN URN Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; 358
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” ODE TO AUTUMN Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers; And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
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Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. ODE ON MELANCHOLY No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. 360
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips; Ay, in the very temple of delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O, what can ail thee, knight-at arms, So haggard and so woe-begone The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow With anguish moist and fever dew, And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful, a faery’s child: Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. 361
I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew, And sure in language strange she said – “I love thee true.” She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild, wild eyes – With kisses four. And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dreamed, ah! woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cried – “La Belle Dame sans Merci Thee hath in thrall!” I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.
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ON SITTING DOWN TO READ KING LEAR ONCE AGAIN O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute, Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit. Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme, When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
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