W. M. Spackman’s Fantasyland of Fine Words

 

 

     Perhaps like a good number of others, I had not read W. M. Spackman a month ago.   The welcome reprinting of his work which required support from state and federal arts agencies, a private foundation, and a state university illustrates the need for liberal funding outside the marketplace if the arts are to flourish. 

     Page numbers in parentheses are references to The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  I follow Spackman in not italicizing foreign words.  (He had other uses for italics.)

 

     

     Perhaps I am influenced by having read all of Spackman’s fiction, first novel to posthumous publication, without pause, but I find very little to distinguish one of his characters from another.  Likewise, apart from a few jarring incidents such as the murders in A Presence with Secrets, there is virtually nothing in the way of plot.   Characters end as they began.  Everyone is trying to “be a gent” and go by the rules, but this never impedes their “headlong” hedonism. 

     W. M. Spackman’s readership is limited by the nature of his work.  Both the themes of his stories and the manner of their telling are out of step with current taste, and the reader is fortunate that the Dalkey Archive Press which has the luxury of privileging literary values over those of the marketplace, has reissued his novels.  His unvarying topic is his personas’ enthrallment to their sexuality, yet their subjugation is a sweet one in plots transparently based on wish-fulfillment in which intellectuals or artists, even in middle age, find delectable young things constantly seeking to climb into their beds.  The challenge is to juggle these affairs.  Even apart from their routine adulteries, his heroes (and their ladies) are so sophisticated as to believe in nothing at all.  Far from despairing, they simply sigh and make the best of it while the sun shines.  It seems they all like their creator must have gone to Princeton (he to Oxford as well) and thus know better than the less fortunate. 

     Furthermore, Spackman is a stylist in an age when even poetry is often flatly prosaic.  He developed a unique rhetoric which, while sometimes capable of old-fashioned Ciceronian flights, often takes the form of an extended monologue by one of his many virtually identical characters.  Far from hesitating at what might put off his less learned readers, Spackman liberally sprinkles his text with French, Italian, and Latin. [1]  Ovid in particular returns again and again as an authority on love.  Just as a Renaissance sonneteer employ a few Classical references in the praise of his lady, Spackman’s learning magnifies his homages to the power of love.  He would not, I think, mind my impression that his heroes would likely consider the use of Latin to be highly decorative in itself and a learned lover surely a better one.    

     Spackman delights in epigrams and in parodies recalling the adept use of these forms by Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm not so very long before his own time.  He loves out-of-the-way words, some of which are found in no lexicon but his own.  In general one would consider this sheer delight in language Spackman’s primary appeal were it not that his erotic fascination is so pronounced.  The combination of these factors has set limits to his reputation in spite of high praise from critics and novelists like Edmund Wilson, Stanley Elkin, and John Updike. 

     I can imagine in some future age Spackman scholars discussing his mores rather in the manner of medievalists puzzling over courtly love, “Did anyone ever actually live like this?”  Spackman’s narratives, though, are best considered not as realistic narratives, but as dreams.   More recent psychologists may rightly question Freud’s notion that dreams represent the encoded fulfilment of frustrated desire, yet in the case of this literary dream the principle is quite accurate.  

     In these days the first impediment to appreciating Spackman must surely be is his characters’ attitudes toward sexual morality, though such censure is, of course, entirely non-literary.  The ethics of fictional personae or indeed of their creators can have no place whatever in artistic judgments.  Could one object to the Iliad at the outset because the story concerns heroes disputing over possession of a female slave?  Or, to take a closer analogue, can the masterful Lolita be denied a secular imprimatur due to its central figure’s obsessive pedophilia?  Garbled as the issue may have become in recent years in some academic settings, it can only lead instantly astray.  It is also true as well that for all Spackman’s fascination and expertise with style, any reader of his books is likely to doubt that to the author content is a matter of no significance.

     In fact his stories seem little short of obsessive.  Spackman emphasizes amoral sexuality to the exclusion of most of the rest of human experience and the dominance of the erotic in his sensibility lends a great deal to his characteristic tone, contributing to his themes  and to the beauty, ven, of his work.  Those who might find the values of Spackman’s predatory professors unacceptable even in a work of fiction will have little more to say of him, leaving it to others to examine the uses to which Spackman has put the these dubious mores.  In the flippant tones of Spackman’s characters, “Man’s and his own individuated rut” is neither more nor less than “after all how we had all behaved.” (275)

     Spackman’s erotomania, though, unlike that of others enthusiasts such as Norman Mailer, does not seem to center on orgasm.  He is quite simply lost in utter astonishment at the sight of a naked woman.  The only sexual acts he describes are caresses, physically tracing the same wondrous territory that so enthralls his sight.  Repeatedly he depicts scenes of lovers in bed, the man gazing raptly at the female body in quasi-religious devotion.  Whether such grace descends from the le bon dieu, Bona Dea or the more frequently invoked iddio, it always transfixes the lover.     

     When Johnnie Coates (just the age of Spackman’s son) encounters such an experience in As I Sauntered Out, One Midcentury Morning language nearly fails him.  “How to describe an epiphany! – I felt I had never, till now, even imagined what woman’s loveliness could be – and not just could be, but holy god there before my eyes was!”   “ I adored her with a mixture of wonder and exaltation that amounted to innocence.” (539)

    Yet, though this initiation is in that case displaced onto the next generation, the innocence seems in a way durable indeed.  Spackman’s personae never get over being flabbergasted and instantly subjugated at the sight of a naked woman.  He wishes to relish the wonder.  Reveling in “the sheer physical thereness of you” (519), he can desire nothing more.  ”Let me contemplate you.” (364)   The lover is “dazzled” (429), “stunned,” “transfixed” (395).  He is “ensorcelée,” “spellbound” (411), and the lady’s “sorcery” exercises “its absolute dominion “ (566)  “To see a girl’s body in memory was one thing, and you could endure it, but the dazzling reality of it, tangible and there, and past belief temporarily yours, reduced you to idiocy.” (408)  In bed one can only marvel at “the total sensuality of it” (366), all tingly nerve endings and no ratiocination.  They lay there in great comfort, and they might simply have been mindless.” (367)

     Just as Spackman’s men are always on the lookout for the next lovely “girl,” the women are peering around in search of a “bel homme.”  Given that lasciviousness is entirely mutual, of course, elides the pain and power relationships that ordinarily play an ugly role in sexual adventuring.  The female voice in the middle section of A Presence with Secrets is as taken with Hugh as he eventually comes to be with her.  His first appearance to her is like a vision, “an epiphany, my first-ever sense of Man after Woman, and understanding it!” and feels, as a consequence, “sexy-wild, out of my mind” herself, with “alarm bells going off all through me” to be with her cousin (253-4), though this does not impede her from thinking also of their ill-fated host Alain “Mon Dieu qu’il est beau, the skin of his neck is so white I feel as if I could taste it, and I wondered  what he did for love.” (257)  In A Difference of Design Maria Gostrey says with a bit of annoyance to Sather, “Goodness, I only made love with him two or three times, you can’t be jealous about that!” (406)  Two-thirds of A Difference of Design are narrated by Fabienne, la Comtesse, who reflects on “my lightminded ancestresses and I” skirting the edge, afraid that perhaps the playacting of love may be nothing but “marivaudage.” (343) 

     This sexual enthusiasm is no generational matter.  When Eve in “Declarations of Intent” consults her mother about her love life, the parent is so wrapped up in her own liaison she can scarcely pay any attention to her daughter’s. (524)     In As I Sauntered Out One Midcentury Morning . . . Francesca’s godmother and her friends have no difficulty accepting the younger generation’s amours as to be expected.  

     The lover’s relationship remains, however, ambiguous.  In “Dialogue at the End of a Pursuit” a woman’s convoluted description of her motive for love indicates in its qualifications and back-turnings a tension that would be absent in purely sybaritic frolics: “Oh sweet but where but in bed am I likely to find out how much I’ve perhaps decided that want to have you discover all the things I can be? Or do I ever?”  

     Of course, among the painful complications ordinarily associated with love affairs is the jealousy of spouses, yet in Spackman as in Andreas Capellanus, adultery is favored.    In A Difference of Design Lewis Bingham’s uncle is said to have remarked over a new prospect, “Absolute dish of a girl.  Married, too,  which is always convenient.”  This may, Bingham admits, “sound a bit lazy – competition only from a husband.”  Yet his uncle had “an entirely humane position . . . even if it looked like a dilemma of egotism . . .it was really an act of humanity.” (381)  The husband, after all, is simply “a character in the unchanging comedy of manners that marriage has been from Classical Antiquity on.” (583)  Adultery is “Women’s happiest birthright and perquisite” (425) and a civilized person can only wonder about “all the fuss there can be about infidelity.” (528) 

     The affairs for all their compulsive energy and all-but-numinous glow are in a way simply passing the time.  Most if his characters seem utterly concerned with careers or children; they find themselves born into the caste of the idle rich and find no more reason to question their destiny than any dhobi wallah.  Even if they hold a lucrative position in a bank, it is less a job than a perquisite of privilege.  Eve’s mother’s lover “doesn’t even go downtown unless a case comes in they think will interest him.” (524)  When asked what he “did,” Bingham responds diffidently.  “He said oh he was pretty much standard fare.  Made money.  Spent it.  Made more.  Tended to spend that too.”  When pressed, he adds that he has a sloop and plays squash. (380)  Of the notorious Uncle John, Sather notes that, though he held a law degree he lived on unearned income. (563)  “Philadelphia rentiers weren’t expected to ‘do’ much of anything.  Except, naturally, behave well in a well-fixed way.  If they saw fit to.” (563)  Though the Wobblies would have called them parasites, they can be disarmingly straightforward.  “What was the use of being born into the privileged classes if one couldn’t have it both ways?” (153)  When in Spackman’s posthumous last book, a few hints seep in suggesting that somewhere some people are concerned with feminism and social justice, his hero, a political commentator, reacts not so much with reactionary attitudes as with total cynicism.   “Political blundering is constant, because an electorate of simpletons cannot elect politicians smart enough to deal with the simpletons who elect them.” (550)  He later writes a provocative essay “Love Makes You Go Whee!” (not a bad text to fit Spackman on a bumper sticker) provoking “an instant feminist outrage” “as good as a contract” in spite of the fact that “I, naturally, hadn’t a drop of anti-Lib blood in my body.  God knows, from kindergarten on I’ve liked girls.”      

     Spackman’s indifference about politics extends to the social structure.  Again and again he concedes the undeserved privilege which his characters enjoy, regarding it as a fact of nature, an order he accepts the way the world works.  Thus they all would claim to be “Properly brought up, is all.  Did as I thought I was being told.  Thought I was supposed to.” (394)  For women as well love is not a “passion,” but rather “a part of the good manners of being a woman,” further explained in the most evasive terms “a way if behaving,” “a style, a procedure, even.” (396)  

     Everyone, of course, learns his or her own “generation’s ground rules,” (566) making sex a simple matter of good manners.  “What kind of cock-eyed heartlessness was this, to girls who’d at least had the good manner to behave as if they wanted me as much as I said I wanted them.” (551)  A second go-round after a “gentlemanly interval” would be right for “any man of sense.” (238)“  Ike Trimmingham summarizes an affair by saying, in poetic form,

  

“Must you go?  As I was brought up one should say,

And as you were brought up to (fuming) expect me to.

                                                                                            (559)

 

The reader will notice that parenthetical word which is all that suggests the strains that often accompany what is meant to be free love.  On the one hand, both man and woman are party to the game, constrained not by traditional morality, but rather by the stronger social code of their set whose members can afford to dedicate themselves to pleasure.  “In the immemorial tribal way, Uncle John left me the essential traditions of tribal comportment, and the tribal opinions and perquisites that established them to start with, as well as more money to maintain them,” and yet, in pursuit of such selfish ends, it is all the more important that the codes be observed.  “In usage there are no substitutions!” (546) 

      In what looks a bit like a defensive maneuver Spackman regularly maintained that content (and the themes it implies) played little role in his work.  He complained about critics who reduced a work of art to “its ‘content’ – the thing’s theme, its ‘ideas,’ its everlasting Meaning.” “Content is not what any decently gifted novelist is chiefly concerned with.”  To him “style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are a lot of hogwash.” [3]  This principle is illustrated in practice by the writers to whom Spackman pays homage: Marivaux, Henry James [4], Wallace Stevens. 

     These claims are surely disingenuous considering the fascination with which Spackman, over the course of his entire career as a writer, explored the joys of lust and the shadows cast on the paradise of the bed by chance, jealousy, even by romance.  He could hardly be indifferent to content having spent his entire career constructing a series of dreams of his own libido’s ego, but his reticence is part of his etiquette.  The jouissance he offers is not really confined to a baroque style, but those with good manners will know not to inquire further. Surely Cicero was a mentor for style, though, apart from being a tiresome moralist, Spackman found his prose like Caesar's far too pedestrian..  Ovid is an explicit influence, both for painstaking art and for erotic enthusiasm.  

     And it is most emphatically true that Spackman delivers style for those who have a taste for it.  From antique rhetoric to Nichols-and-May dialogue he offers verbal goodies for a variety of tastes.  His specific gift is the construction of lengthy branching monologues that are nonetheless architectural for seeming colloquial.

 

      They might meet somewhere like (say) the Closerie des Lilas, a visit of piety, purely classical in feeling, to that monument of so many humane generations, including even Henry James.  And, meeting there, Arabella and he might feel once more the happy weight of the hours, the sheer total days they must in all have spent on the breathless scheduling of when they’d manage to see each other next, be in each other’s arms, what with that insufferable French husband’s comings and goings!  The very Closerie where (ah me) that madcap Celt   of his had once murmured, dreamily sucking a fingertip, “If we had it all to live over again darling Nicholas d’you suppose we’d really go to all this trouble?” and collapsed upon him in helpless laughter, in Arcadian innocence and joy.

     So why not?                                                                                                                       (171)

 

Notice here a characteristic mannerism, the use of italics to indicate an arch tone.  A passage like this, while in fact planned with demanding precision gives the impression of being spontaneous and formless.  A bit after this excerpt, the reader marvels at a sentence that runs very nearly a full page (192-193) and presumably feels at the end like applauding as though for a jazz solo or a singer holding a sustained note. 

     One further example must serve for a great many.

  

-- Though at dinner, and this, again, they had on that terasse of his hotel, the summer dusk already deepening into night over the fading gardens off into the black leaves of the lindens beyond, so that the massed flaming of a hundred candles, table by damask’d table, made it as if a low pavilion of light without walls had been built out under those vaults of darkness; or again, it could have been a lighted proscenium stood out there, set for the staging of a play, and the actors there, and in that sift brilliance, above the crystal and silver of the tables, the eyes of actresses would be like jewels as they looked at you – at dinner then Maria was exploring consequences. 

                                                                                                           (405-406)

 

 The sentence picks up with the accelerating chugs of phrases set off with commas before launching in to a set-piece description of a restaurant as a theater stage, most appropriate for characters to whom all that they do is play-acting.  Marriage is, after all, in Spackman’s world an “unchanging comedy of manners” (583) and love in general a “Restoration comedy.” (396)

 

     In phrases and shorter passages as well, showy cadenced, often periodic, rhetoric fills every page of Spackman’s work and provides surely the basis for the admiration of those among his readers who enjoy the play of language.  Contrary to the recent trends in literature favoring the vernacular, Spackman likes his English rhythmic to the point of self-consciousness with the syntax twisting and halting and weaving about like tropical vines. 

     Just as his characters savor even the most casual affairs (as well as more profound fleshly revelations), Spackman’s pleasure in words embraces mere pastimes and he is drawn to what others might shun as affectation.  Thus the prolonged three-syllable pronunciation of Malachi or the two syllable “dar ling”in Heyday and the idiosyncratic apostrophe in “damn’” for “damned” can only be called mannerisms.  Even odder, Nicholas’ in Armful of Warm Girl says “dammy” for “damn me” which sounds positively seventeenth century.  The flowers of French, Italian, and Latin often ornament his prose with Ovid the most frequent visitor to his novels.  Hugh Tatnall’s use of iddio for god vitiates the term, its foreignness suggesting ironic unbelief and the less-used form of the word his fondness for the subtly odd.  His classicism extends to the somewhat silly, as in his characters’ use of Boeotian to mean stupid or boorish.  He loves out-of-the-way words and sometimes introduces those which occur in no dictionary but his own such as psychagonist (275) and anulnerous (209).  At least these like their author come from good families, from good classical roots. 

     There is indeed something of the smart-aleck undergraduate intellectual about him, in verbal taste as well as in the pursuit of love.  Spackman is sufficiently lavish in his use of epigrams that his characters remark on it.  “He’s just constantly tossing off these wildly unexpected sardonic epigrams off Lisa, he just impromptu made up that phrase ‘as un-American as good apple pie.’” (205)  Discussing the end of an affair, after quoting Catullus and then Ovid, Jock suggests they “call for an over-priced Clos de Bèze and be done with it. “  The Comtesse responds “’But men recover,’ I said.  ‘All you need is someone to indulge you if you’re simple-minded.  Or over-indulge you, if you’re not,’ and he said lightly, ‘Oh, epigrams,’ and signaled the sommelier.” (360-361)

     Spackman’s characters often share with their author a Quaker background, useful as a piquant contrast to their current way of life.  The sudden introduction of a quaint saying using thee and thou throws their revels into high contrast.  The primary meaning of this heritage is that it constitutes, like an ancestral estate, ironic bona fides for membership in Philadelphia’s elite.

     He delights in a broad variety of witty parodies: of Ovid (193), of a cantata libretto (190), a madrigal (168), and, a special favorite, blues in dialect (32, 105, 146). [5]  If he is not titillating the brain with a display of the most refined cleverness or his erogenous zones with a willing partner, he rouses the taste buds (in imagination at least) with the most extravagant menus.  Fond of cooking rather elaborate meals myself, I have difficulty believing a twentieth century American ever ate such lavish spreads, even when provided with a cook.  Here is what Spackman is pleased to call “a minor meal.”  Note how he begins slowly with plates indeed simple, though dignified with French names, but then he mounts like fireworks when he reaches the crêpes.  “A crème de concombre soup, suprême  de volaille,  and a salad to glisten in the noon light, with a little farcie to keep body and soul together, glazed crêpes actually and very pretty with their glossy little crests of sliced and lozenged truffles” and for dessert a “bavarois with kirsch-soaked strawberries piled round in crimson dunes,” and “a Montrachet flashing green and gold in its ice.” (176)  Those dunes of liqueur-laden berries are not simply the end of a nice dinner; they are part of the topography of an appetitive world.  [6]

     What Spackman’s characters want they call “catnip.”  [7]  The use of this term suggests at once the instinctual basis of their desire and its superficiality.  Catnip, after all, may cause a pet to perform entertaining antics, but it is not associated with long-lasting pleasure or deep feelings.  In the same way, the people in these novels make a habit of snickering, particularly when contemplating their sexual adventures. [8]  “The sheer libertine faithlessness of all this had so amused him that he opened his eyes snickering.” (246)

    Perhaps the shallowness of the experience implied by these words is illuminated by another of Spackman’s verbal leitmotifs, the word “marauder.”  His characters are always worried that they may stray into bad taste by presuming too much of their lovers.  Yet they can say that love is finally self-love and the fact is universal and no less desirable for that fact.  “Wasn’t it a matter of amour propre? – if you weren’t in love what was wrong with you!” (396)   When everyone readily admits that they are simply seeking amusement, their aestheticism will often tend toward a supercilious edge – it is no wonder that readers are reminded of Ronald Firbank as well as Henry James and Nabokov – that reveals a solipsistic absorption, a core self-interest about which no one need feel guilty since it is shared with everyone, or, at least, everyone who counts, doubtless mostly Princetonians.  There is a sort of existential bravery, even heroism, in those who carry on with such honest fervor in a world where they are in the end alone and helpless, whose culture offers only hypocrisy for values.  Spackman in fact confounded some of his fans with his claim in a postscript to Heyday that the book is basically “an elegy upon the immemorial loneliness of man.”  He sounds almost existential. 

     The “paravent” that makes the hotelier in Arles “much relieved” serves only the interest of propriety (389).  While it is unnecessary as a physical screen, it is useful as an improvisation to preserve a façade of decency that all parties know is pretense.   Thus, while no one involved really believes in the wickedness of non-marital sexuality, all maintain their respectability by acting as if they do, that is, embracing the dissimulation of an outworn moral code in the interest of social harmony.  The elaborate dance of interests between man and woman in Spackman is complicated by this tension between human behavior and the social codes that allow people to live in large groups.  The fact that his characters seem to have no responsibilities allows him to focus entirely on the management of libido. 

     Spackman boasts the considerable virtue of being highly entertaining.  His effervescent wit and his musical rhetoric guarantee rewards on every page.  His themes and characters might annoy some readers and even incense a few, but they are on the mark for everyone who has been struck dumb with desire or who has had the fortune to see a theophany in a lover.  One might dream with Spackman and Hugh Tatnall of a place where “The air was full of angels.” (281)  The cult of self-interest among his women and men alike is recognizable even to those who may have felt a stirring of altruism now and then, and his cynicism in general is a useful corrosive against idées reçues.  His style is a delight, plotted out to the sound of every syllable in a way that is rare in recent years, though it may be de trop for those like his Quaker forebears, suspicious of luxury.  For the rest of us his work is a rare and delightful  confection.

  

 

 

1. Spackman studied French and Italian literature at Princeton and read the classics at Oxford’s Balliol College.

2.  Given Spackman’s fondness for Marivaux, it may be that he in fact favors “marivaudage,” even defined as the quality of being precious or affected in writing.

3.  Quoted by Steven Moore in his Afterword, p. 632 from Spackman’s essays “An Ex Parte for Comedy,” “Undeath of the Novel,” and “A Time Was Had by All.”   For Nabokov, one of his favorite writers, obsessive content is likewise paired with a gorgeously elaborate prose style. 

4.  Indeed A Difference of Design is (for one thing) a rewriting of James’s The Ambassadors.  

5.  The whimsical painting title (284) is in the same mood.   

6.  They are sufficiently potent in Spackman’s imagination that they reappear in the next novel, still crimson.  This meal consists of “a fresh-caught Loire salmon flown in from Nantes,” “cool cheeses, the crimson dunes of wild strawberries on their paillasses of bright leaves, the torrone mole they left untouched.”  (224-225)

7.  On 408, 433, 517, 530.

8.  See pages 342, 408, 433, 517, 530.

Wang Wei

 

     I write here as a reader of English translations of Tang poetry.  I have always felt altogether at home among these poems so distant in time and language.  To reflect the experience of those like myself who have not mastered the Chinese, I quote from a number of the translators I have read over the years.  Each, of course, offers a unique Wang Wei.  See on this same site “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei” for multiple takes on the same quatrain, including a couple of my own.

     The poems translated by Wu Fu-ning is from Robert Payne’s The White Pony, those by Burton Watson from in Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second tom the Twelfth Century, Pauline Yu’s from Pauline Yu in The Poetry of Wang Wei

 

    Among the classic poets of the Tang Dynasty Wang Wei exemplifies the gentleman-poet of his day, somewhat as Sir Philip Sidney did for his.  Successful in his examinations, Wang served as a government official as well as writing poetry, but then, in later life, withdrew to a contemplative retirement (not to a hermitage but to his country estate).  In visual art he is regarded as a founder of the Southern School, called literati painting, known for free calligraphic strokes.  [1]  

     He excelled in the paired couplets of five or seven syllable lines called jueju [2], a highly demanding form requiring a set syllabic count for each line, rhymed abcb. [3]  Apart from these demands, the jueju must also conform to certain  prescribed tonal patterns (thus its name “regulated verse”) [4].   A caesura is expected and tonal as well as semantic parallelism is admired, particularly in the middle lines of a quatrain.  Furthermore, this poetry of scholars was replete with allusions and subtler associations reminding readers of earlier verses.  Imagery likewise observed a set of conventions, with Images were often meant to suggest conventional meanings (such as the plaintain for physical frailty and the moon in the water for unreality).  [5]

     In this form the genteel might display wit, imagination, and ingenuity and gain recognition among those of their own class, as their work could only be appreciated only by those sharing a similar education.  These highly sophisticated poetic texts, in an ironic reversal, appeared to many Western readers unfamiliar with the Chinese originals to be direct impressionistic sketches of a natural scene.  The immense influence of Ezra Pound and his edited version of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry [6] encouraged the view that Chinese poetry mirrors ordinary consciousness by emphasizing visual perception.  Thus Fenollosa maintained that Chinese poetry embodies a “simple poetic outlook on life” by presenting the reader with “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”  In sum he claimed that “Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure.”   “The Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.”

    Though Fenollosa’s pioneering account is now largely rejected by Chinese scholars, Pound’s promotion of his ideas fertilized the Imagist movement and subsequent developments through Objectivism, Beat, and Deep Image poetry.  The fact that very few translators have even attempted to preserve the Chinese rhyme patterns, though similar patterns are common in English, has aided this misapprehension.  The use of free verse by many reinforces the impression that Chinese poetry is an immediate record of experience.  As a non-specialist reader of Chinese poetry in translation unable to appreciate the subtleties of pitch patterns and allusions, I continue to consume a poet like Wang Wei while much of his art remains inaccessible to me.  The immense growth in accessible information in English concerning Chinese literary history has enabled deeper readings of the images though still without broadening the appreciation to other elements of the writing.   Indeed, just as African sculpture almost entirely shorn of its meaning in context enriched European art in the early twentieth century, Chinese poetry refreshed English writing with little attention to the vast and learned tradition that underlay it.  Some of the most influential translators, such as Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth, had very sketchy knowledge of the language. 

 

Morning

 

The peach blossom is redder because rain fell overnight,

The willows are greener in the morning mist.

The fallen petals are not yet swept away by servants.

Birds sing.  The guest on the hill is asleep.

                                     trans. Li Fu-ning 

 

     This poem might pass for a journal entry simply recording the data observed by an early riser.  In this case it might seem a simple appreciation of the beauties of nature, flowers and greenery amid the melodious calls of birds.  A fructifying rain descends like grace.  Those who have no eye for beauty may still be asleep, but the author has included the reader in his delectation of the scene.

     This appreciation of nature is, however, perfectly consistent with Daoist and Buddhist belief.  With this in mind, the “fallen petals” may be a reminder of the transience of this world, and the sleeper may be a soul caught yet in delusion.  These associations are not dependent on association with earlier poems, but peach blossoms have, since the Book of Odes, been a symbol of love, its red blossoms suggesting human passion as well as the returning vitality of springtime.  Yet, the willow suggests for the Chinese the longing resulting from the separation from a loved one (as in Li Bai’s “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang”) and the mention of “fallen petals” seems surely a momento mori.  The willow  connotes separation while the singing of the birds is a testament to the continuing delight of nature, implying that the properly attuned human consciousness will sing as well.  Yet here the observer, the “guest,” is asleep, unaware of the grand machinery of creation and destruction evident on every side.

     The fact that one may read the lyric as a direct observation of the scene, a verbal cinema verité, and simultaneously as a highly allusive and philosophical rumination constitutes the strength of Wang Wei in common with other poets of his tradition.  The poems may be rewarding regardless of the reader’s degree of sophistication.  They offer a comprehensive and wise-sounding world view while holding all philosophical questions in suspension, an attitude the Pyrrhonian skeptics called ἐποχή. 

  

Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance

 

I didn’t know where the temple was,

pushing mile on mile among cloudy peaks;

old trees, peopleless paths,

deep mountains, somewhere a bell.

Brook voices choke over craggy boulders,

sun rays turn cold in the green pines.

At dusk by the bend of a deserted pond,

a monk in meditation, taming poison dragons.

                            trans. Burton Watson 

     Again, it is quite possible to read this poem as a simple record of a trek, wandering the hills in search of a remote monastery.  Yet it is also an image of a life-pilgrim restlessly in quest of enlightenment.  The harsh rocks, the chill, the close of day all conspire to suggest the suffering of this life that motivates the poet’s quest.  While the monastery bell in the distance and then the sight of the monk in meditation place liberation at a remove from the speaker, it is nonetheless in view. 

     Just as in “Morning” Wang has managed to be precisely and concretely immediate and at the same time applicable to all humanity.  The facts that the paths are “peopleless” and the pond is “deserted” imply the high isolation of the spiritual striver.  Scholars have differed over just which passage describing poisonous dragons Wang had in mind, but it scarcely matters as it is clear that they represent such hindrances as desires and illusions.   If not full-fledged bodhi he has at any rate gained the equipoise to confront suffering with open eyes and go on living, confident that release is as much a part of the scheme of things as enslavement to passion.

     Such experiences, both the direct sensual ones and the contemplative speculations, may indeed be quite solitary, even private records of subjective consciousness, but, as a court poet with some duties similar to those of British Poets Laureate, he wrote public verses in praise of the rulers.  Unlike the fulsome rhetoric of seventeenth and eighteenth century European dedications, Wang is elegant and oblique in his compliments.

  

Written at the Prince’s Command on the

Emperor’s Having Lent to

the Prince of Qi as a Retreat from Summer Heat

 

The emperor’s son bids farewell to the distant Red Phoenix 

        Turret:

An imperial edict has lent the faraway palace of blue-green 

        mist.

Outside the window vaporous clouds cling to our clothes;

With curtains rolled, streams and mountains come into the 

        mirror.

Below the woods the water’s noise resounds over talk and 

        laughter;

Between the peaks colors of trees obscure houses and 

        dwellings.

An immortal’s home would not perforce be finer than this 

        abode:

Need we play the pipes, looking toward the azure sky?

                                                 trans. Pauline Yu 

  

     Though explicitly written at royal command and including the obligatory glorification of the imperial family who enjoy accommodations equal to the immortals’, the poem’s real focus is the rewards of a retreat in the mountains.  Clouds and mist that surround the Jiucheng Palace not only cool the climate, they suggest as well its remoteness from the urban court and create an air of obscure mystery.  The outdoors and indoors mingle both visually as “streams and mountains come into the mirror” and audibly with the resounding “water’s noise.”  The “houses and dwellings” that mark a mundane human presence are obscured (though, unlike those strenuously pursuing enlightenment, the courtiers talk and laugh).

     The concluding lines certainly praise the emperor and his son, placing them on a level with the immortals.  The reference to Wangzi Qiao, a crown prince under Zhou Ling Wang, associates the current royal line with semi-divine antecedents.   Prince Qiao, called Jin, played pipes (and imitated phoenix cries), as he wandered the mountains. Ultimately, he mounted a crane and ascended to heaven. [7]  While complimenting his social superiors and thus assenting to the worldly order, Wang implies that removal from the distractions of the city are likely to prove beneficial for all.  The fine-spun fancy about a legendary prince signifies the spiritual uplift all might gain, even those who never ride a bird to the sky.

      On the other side of the social spectrum, Wang’s “Six Casually Written Poems” concern those who pay no heed to wealth or prestige, the sort of enlightened eccentrics far more commonly admired in Asia than in the West.  For them poverty naturally accompanies a life lived with integrity, but this need not preclude joy. 

  

One of Six Casually Written Poems

 

In a farmhouse lives an old man

With drooping white hair, in his humble retreat.

Sometimes when finished with chores in the fields,

He summons his neighbors with a jug of wine.

Noisily beneath the thatched eaves

They sit around and then stand up again.

Coarse woolen clothes are not too mean for him

And garden sunflower seeds delicacy enough indeed.

If he stirs, it’s just to bring up sons and grandsons;

He has never once gone to the city market.

The Five Emperors and Three Kings

Since ancient times have been called Sons of Heaven.

Compare using arms with polite abdication—

Which way is right after all?

If wishes gained make up happiness,

How then can a rustic farm be scorned?

For now I’ll set my mind at ease and go,

And travel on ‘til all my teeth are gone.

                                         trans., Pauline Yu 

One thinks of the penultimate poem of the Dàodé Jīng in which such an isolated life is seen as ideal.

 

Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them.

I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords (instead of the written characters).

They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.

There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.                                               

                                                             trans. James Legge 

 

 Similar sentiments are, of course, available to Westerners more conveniently from Vergil and Horace.  The general idea is that, not military skills, but agriculture is the essential human activity. And that those engaged in cultivation of the land have a more satisfying, a saner and wiser life than those who engage in politics, war, and commerce.  The other poems in this series include one the “crazy man,” Lu Tong, who pretended to be mad to avoid serving an unjust lord, one expressing the longing to retreat from a man still entangled in affairs, another on the poet Tao Qian who preferred drinking to his bureaucratic post, on eon the “husband of the girl from Chao” who drinks and gambles without regard for worldly reputation, and concludes with the touching poem of Wang on his old age, “too lazy to write poems,/ I have old age as my sole companion.”

      One of Wang Wei’s quatrains exemplifies his method in brief. 

  

Deer Park

 

Empty hills, no one in sight,

only the sound of someone talking;

late sunlight enters the deep wood,

shining over the green moss again. 

trans. Burton Watson [8]

 

      The Deer Park in Sarnath near Varanasi is the site of the Buddha’s first sermon following his enlightenment.   The “emptiness” of the first word is a Buddhist term (kong in Chinese, in Sanskrit śūnyatā), here instantly qualified by a vague “sound of someone talking,” though that may be understood as the voice of the poem itself.  The sunlight filters to the forest floor illuminating the moss “again,” implying the cyclic recurrence, reminding the reader of “the great return” which occurs with death.  

     The Chinese poets, far more frequently than those in Europe, pay tribute to the importance of friendship.  Poems on the occasion of parting are common.  Among the most affecting Tang poems are those describing the separation of men who had been close, often on the occasion of one receiving an official appointment in another region of the vast empire.  The pain of parting is then an illustration of the inevitable suffering that life entails, though a testament as well to the warmth of their relationship. 

  

Farewell to Senior Officer Yang

Going to Office in Guozhou

 

Baoxie Valley will not hold a carriage:

Where then will you be going?

A bird’s path for a thousand miles,

And gibbons’ cries all hours of the day.

By the official bridge, travelers offer wine;

Amid mountain trees, a shrine to the Young Maid.

After parting we will share the bright moon:

You should hear the cuckoo’s call.

trans., Pauline Yu 

 

The wildness and presumably the hazards of the journey are suggested by the reference to a narrow gorge, making travel difficult.  “A bird’s path,” after all, is no path at all.  The poet suggests that “for a thousand miles” his friend will be lost in nature.  The mention of sacrifices of wine is another reminder of the dangers of the trip.  The mention of the shrine to the daughter of Zhang Lu, the military leader who, despite his Daoist insight (as a “Celestial Master”) and reputation for humane wisdom, saw much of his family executed for political revenge and himself brought to surrender to Cao Cao, reminds the reader of the tumultuous turns of the wheel of fortune. 

     In a phrase that sounds like it comes from a love poem the concluding couplet with grace and poignance suggests that even in separation “we will share the bright moon.”   The call of the cuckoo became a conventional motif in poems of parting as it was imagined to resemble the words “It’s better to return” (bu ru guiqu)

 

      Perhaps this sample is sufficient to indicate the principal characteristics of Wang’s style and the basis for his appeal.  I and many others have felt such sympathy with him, Bai Juy, and others among ithese old poets?  For me the appeal is the direct recording of experience which, though seeming almost like improvisation, hints at intimations of a universal order, a Dao implied in all the phenomena that swirl about us, a finger on the pulse of the universe independent of revelation.   One need not translate culturally specific mythological terms into philosophic equivalents.  The Tang masters present moments of consciousness, compounded as they are of sense experience and the mind’s treatment of those data, but shaped in their expression by all the poems that went before.  Western lyric tradition is not far removed from the formulation attributed to the “Great Shun” by Liu Xie “Poetry is the expression of sentiments,” [9] but it is Daoist and Buddhist world-views that color the Chinese poets’ emotional reactions in a way rare in the West. [10]  Poets like Wang Wei seem easily assimilable because their concerns are our own.    

 

 

 

 

1.  Named by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636), the terms are not really geographical, but rather an analogy to the Northern and Southern forms of Ch’an Buddhism.

2. A type of regulated verse or  jintishi ("modern form poetry").

3. It is a sign of the level of artifice in the form that rhymes might be based on pronunciations no longer current but accessible in a rhyming dictionary. 

4. Guoyu or Mandarin has four tones.  Such tones play a significant role in a great many of the world’s languages (especially in Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian American) 

5.  Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 171.

6.  Published in 1919.  Among Pound’s changes were the suppression of references to Buddhism and to the importance of sound patterns. 

7.  The story appears in the Book of Immortals (Lie xian zhuan).  Jin on the crane’s back is a popular motif for painters.

8.  For a fascinating translation study, see Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese poem is translated.”  I add two more of my own in “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei,” available on this site.

9.  Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chapter VI. 

Every Reader's Wordsworth

 

      This is the fifteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.  The general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.

     Wordsworth’s poetry is readily available on line, but I have included the short lyrics and appended the longer “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality.”

 

 

     After altering the face of poetry with his collaborator Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads and writing poems that English-speaking students continue to find in their textbooks, Wordsworth continued writing for sixty years, producing a quantity of verse rarely read today.  At the age of twenty-four he was a youthful radical (in politics as well as poetry, though not in religion) who declared in a letter, “I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall forever continue,” yet he later subsided into such respectability that he was ultimately named Poet Laureate (after Southey’s thirty-year reign), a post he accepted only after assurances that nothing would be required of him.   He was by then a solid Tory, opposing, for instance, civil rights for Catholics, and objecting to industrialization as a reactionary who imagined an earlier harmonious pre-capitalist agricultural era governed by an unerring national church and benevolent barons.  Browning lamented his defection in “The Lost Leader” writing “Just for a handful of silver he left us/ Just for a riband to stick in his coat.”

     Yet his earlier work not only transformed English poetry, it provided a sort of manifesto with a program for innovation in the preface to Lyrical Ballads.  There he declares his rejection of what had become the standard figures of poetic ornament including conventional “poetic diction” such as “personifications of abstract ideas” and all cliches, “in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets.”  He means to substitute a fresh take on what he observes, saying “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject” and “to adopt the very language of men.”  In contrast to the cerebral pleasures of neo-Classical verse, Wordsworth declares that “the end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure.”  His description of the process for distilling experience into art is the most often quoted line in the essay: “I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

     He thereby exposed himself to critics who, accusing him of being prosaic and raised an “outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language” in his work.  It is a measure of Wordsworth’s success that the difficulty now in reading these poems is not their use of unpoetic language, but rather that what had once been so unfamiliar has come to exemplify a poet’s voice that what had once been jarringly fresh now seems in its turn trite. 

     Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” perhaps the most reprinted of all his works, provides an excellent example not only of the decay of material at one time fresh and exciting but which now seems hackneyed due to the success of the Romantic revolution.  This lyric also illustrates Wordsworth’s notion of how the poetic process grows from raw experience through reflection. 

  

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

Out-did 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 the show to me 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.

 

      The speaker begins as an isolated observing eye, “lonely” and aimless, yet as much a part of the scene as a cloud.  He is suddenly struck by the vision of bright flowers which seem to dance and exult in their own existence.  The glimpse of the beautiful order they represent is then linked to the cosmos by likening them to the stars.  They seem not just beautiful, but “sprightly” and “jocund,” making the poet “gay” in sympathy.  He then recalls the scene later at leisure and the flush of glad emotion returns, a feeling he hopes to approximate in the reader who has sympathetically followed his experience as well.  He calls contemplation “that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude,” as it allows him to recapture his joy, though, of course, some have found only depression “in vacant or in pensive mood.”  For Wordsworth people are good, the world is good, and the daffodils merely a readily accessible entry to that realization.  

     When Lyrical Ballads was already being prepared for printing, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy did a walking tour of a portion of the border between England and Scotland after which he wrote a long poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” with which he was so pleased he included it in the forthcoming volume.  (The text is appended following endnotes.)  This contemplative piece, sometimes called a “conversation poem” as it uses informal language to address a silent listener, has affinities as well to the ode as understood at the time with a three-part division and its lofty and exalted mood.  In it Wordsworth describes the progress of his soul toward sublime beauty and truth through his love of natural scenery and of his sister Dorothy. 

      Organized not in stanzas but in verse paragraphs, the first emphasizes the wild character of the neighborhood with the abbey’s ruins.  In spite of the fact that the Wye valley already in Wordsworth’s day has coal pits and ironworks, for the poet all is natural or very nearly so.  Thus the cultivated orchards “lose themselves/ ‘Mid groves and copses,” and the hedge-rows are “hardly hedge-rows.”  Even the smoke of cottages strikes him as though it might be due to incidental intruders like himself, vagrants or hermits.    

     He enjoys the contemplation of nature, but returns home to savor his memories even more deeply. 

  

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:—

                                                            (26-31)

 

 Apart from recalling the past pleasures he has experienced, the poet feels such rumination is morally beneficial, encouraging “little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love.” (35-36)  Most sublime, however, is a sort of mystic philosophic insight. 

 

another gift,      

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,       

In which the burthen of the mystery,      

In which the heavy and the weary weight              40

Of all this unintelligible world     

Is lighten'd:—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.

                                                         (37-50)

 

     Wordsworth traces the progress of his own appreciation of nature which sprang from a purely sensual joy with its “aching joys” (82) and “dizzy raptures” (83) which now seems “thoughtless” (91).  Upon mature reflection he can discern “the still, sad music of humanity” (93) in what had been simply “an appetite: a feeling and a love” (81).  Though later fiercely loyal to the Church of England, he here approaches pantheism, seeing in natural beauty a “presence” (95) “that rolls through all things” (103).  His mysticism falls short of the certainties of rapture, however. He is beset by “somewhat of a sad perplexity” (61) and must qualify his enthusiasm with such phrases as “if this/ Be but a vain belief,” (51-2).  In spite of the recognition that the senses “half-create” (107) our impressions, he is certain that nature provides

  

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,     

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul    

Of all my moral being.                           (110-112)

 The poem concludes with a tribute to the poet’s sister Dorothy, a significant contributor to his work, in whom as well as in the hills and valleys he can see the glory of nature.  The tone turns then elegiac as he imagines his own death after which he hopes that his memory may provide a service for her soul similar to her presence now for him. 

                                 [with] healing thoughts              

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,   

And these my exhortations!

                                                             (145-147)

 

     Like the brief daffodil lyric “Tintern Abbey” demonstrates the role of poetry in producing “the bliss of solitude” as the appreciation of natural and artistic beauty alike generates a feeling of the sublime.  This was no abstract conviction but for Wordsworth a daily reality.  His friend Thomas DeQuincey who, as a user of opium knew what addiction was, declared that Wordsworth hiked about with a compulsion that resembled the alcoholic’s thirst.      

     Wordsworth continued pursuing the sublime afflatus he considered essential to the highest poetry, but which he also required for peace of mind.  In his great “Ode,” subtitled “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” he provoked criticism with his Romantic revaluation of childhood.  Instead of considering children as imperfect adults, slowly perfecting the skills and gathering the experience that bring wisdom, Wordsworth maintains that they are at first “apparell'd in celestial light.” (4)  Having lost “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” he laments that “the things which I have seen I now can see no more.” (9)  Though the poet may recapture sparks of the old numinous glory, he feels that “there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.” (18)

     While the poet can infer a grand cosmic affirmation in the birds’ “joyous song” and the prancing of lambs (19-20), he is himself struck by a thought of grief due to the uniquely adult human quality of self-doubt and then rescued by “a timely utterance” (22-23).   Though the signs he describes are of the natural world, it is significant that his release from anxiety is enabled not by a sight, but by an utterance, surely the same remedy he had earlier found, not the natural world alone (which would have been sufficient in childhood) but in poetic contemplation.  While the Shepherd-Boy (36) is intuitively in harmony with the “jollity” at the symbolic “heart of May,” (31-32), the conviction that “all the earth is gay,” (29) the poet, though uplifted by the natural scene, yet feels a painful loss, a gap between his sometimes “sullen” (43) mood and the “fulness” of the “bliss” (42) of the “blessèd creatures” (37) around him.  He plaintively asks,

 

            Whither is fled the visionary gleam?       

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

                                                                      (57-58)

  

     Though the child comes with a sort of perfect intuitive wisdom from God (66) into this imperfect world, the loss of vision begins immediately and progresses into maturity.  With wonderful memorable phrases Wordsworth maintains that we begin “not in entire forgetfulness” (63) but “trailing clouds of glory” (65).  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” (59) as “the prison-house” (68) of ordinary fallen consciousness forms about the youth until the grown “Man” perceives that his original inspired vision has died away.  (76)

     One could scarcely challenge rationalist neo-Classical attitudes more directly than by this claim of infant enlightenment.  Just as the Romantic sensibility celebrates uncultivated landscapes, it privileges the uneducated, the child, the poor, the primitive over observers whose very sophistication has caused them to lose sight of the most important realities.  This reversal of values is familiar today in, for instance, the assumption that oral cultures such as pre-Columbian Native Americans possess knowledge lost to mainstream culture. 

    For Wordsworth the adult is an “Inmate” (83) who, distracted by earthly pleasures, has forgotten “that imperial palace whence he came.” (85)  From “new-born blisses” (86) an individual turns to the business of life; the “little actor” (103) learns a role by “endless imitation,” (108) while losing touch with his or her own original nature. 

     The poet erupts then in excited praise for the young child who for him is “the best philosopher,” (111) still in touch with “the eternal mind,” (114) a “mighty prophet,” and a “seer blest.” (115)  He finds it ironic that the young are typically eager to grow up, to accept “the inevitable yoke” (129) at the cost of “blessedness.” (130)  As a consequence they find themselves “toiling” (117) their entire lives to recover that divine light. 

     At this juncture, for the first time, Wordsworth points to the basis of his anxiety: mortality.  For the child he claims “Immortality” (119) is constantly present, unquestioned, giving a sense “of heaven-born freedom” (127) while his elders are “in darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.” (118)  He gains “benediction” (139) by recalling his childhood though he claims that it is not “delight and liberty” (141) or “new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast” (143) that that he recalls which is most important to him, but rather a certain elusive but powerful mysterium tremendum.  

  

those obstinate questionings      

    Of sense and outward things, 

    Fallings from us, vanishings;    

    Blank misgivings of a Creature              

Moving about in worlds not realized,                         

High instincts before which our mortal Nature    

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised

(146-152)

 

 In this sense of “the eternal Silence (160), he finds the “fountain-light of all our day,” the “master-light of all our seeing.” (156-157)  The memory of that revelatory insight enables vision in maturity.

 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea            

        Which brought us hither,     

    Can in a moment travel thither,                        

And see the children sport upon the shore,         

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.    

                                                                           (168-172)

 

     With this lovely image the poet becomes elated, crying “Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!” (173)  As he cannot entirely recapture the “splendour in the grass,” or “glory in the flower,” (183), he must make do with “strength in what remains behind” (185) through cultivation of “the philosophic mind” that “looks through death.” (190-191)  Though he has “relinquish'd” the “delight” the child experiences, it has been replaced with the “more habitual” (196-197) if “sober” (202) view that acknowledges mortality. (203)  While his vision is chastened by experience, nature remains the portal through which he may re-experience the transports of his childhood.  "To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." (207- 208)

     Though the poet maintains that a philosophic acceptance has replaced the unthinking ecstasy he attributes to children, this adult vision seems both mysterious and emotionally darker.   Neither the quasi-pantheism some of his early work implies or the orthodox Anglicanism he came to defend would wholly answer his timor mortis.  He remains troubled as he must get by on hints, half-remembered sensations, “intimations.”  Not only the “joys,” but also the “fears” (206) of the human heart inform his perspective. 

     Death is also the problem in Wordsworth’s five “Lucy” poems in which a beloved, variously identified with a lover, perhaps Mary Hutchinson, with his sister Dorothy, or with the poet’s inspiration.   These lyrics, written in simple language and using ballad meter, seek to reconcile in simpler terms the coexistence of death of love and beauty.

  

Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known

 

 

Strange fits of passion have I known:

And I will dare to tell,

But in the lover’s ear alone,

What once to me befell.

 

When she I loved looked every day

Fresh as a rose in June,

I to her cottage bent my way,

Beneath an evening-moon.

 

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,

All over the wide lea;

With quickening pace my horse drew nigh

Those paths so dear to me.

 

And now we reached the orchard-plot;

And, as we climbed the hill,

The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot

Came near, and nearer still.

 

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,

Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!

And all the while my eye I kept

On the descending moon.

 

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopped:

When down behind the cottage roof,

At once, the bright moon dropped.

 

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a Lover’s head!

“O mercy!” to myself I cried,

“If Lucy should be dead!”

 

      The poem opens by seizing the reader’s attention with the announcement of the theme as “strange fits of passion” which he will “dare to tell” only to fellow lovers.  It is almost like a supermarket tabloid promising juicy stories inside.  This tease lends an edge to the otherwise commonplace opening scene of the lover traveling one evening to visit his beloved who, he tells us, “looked every day” “fresh as a rose in June.”  As he rides on, the moon is sinking to the horizon behind her cottage.  While observing it, he falls into a waking “sweet” dream.  As the moon with apparent suddenness drops out of sight, he emerges from his reverie with what he calls a “fond and wayward” thought that causes him to cry out “’O mercy! . . .if Lucy should be dead!’”  The identification with the bloom of nature with which he started has altered with the recognition that, just as the moon goes through its cycles, every person, however beloved, must die.  To experience the joys of love, one must make oneself vulnerable to the pain of loss. 

     Yet why is this “strange,” a thought one must “dare” to reveal?  Surely the realization of mortality and the changes brought by time may for some sharpen love.  All the pleasures of this life are seasoned with the knowledge that they are ephemeral.  The point is often made in ancient Greek lyrics and in the words of the preacher who said one should “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity.”  However, for Wordsworth the thought of death is worrisome enough that he tries to trivialize it, calling it first “strange” and then “fond and wayward.”  “Fond” is certainly may be, since it is natural to be anxious about the well-being of loved ones.  The adjective “wayward,” though, implies that the consciousness of mortality is a random and irrelevant thought to the lover.  The poem’s conclusion indicates that it is not, however, easily dismissed.      

     This and the other Lucy poems are among the most anthologized of Wordsworth’s lyrics and probably shape many people’s notion of what poetry is.  While few may glance at even the first of the eight thousand lines of The Prelude, the poet’s spiritual autobiography, a great many have found a measure of truth and beauty in his short poems

     His influence is not limited to people’s remembering his daffodils or his Lucy from school days.  In many significant ways, the Romantic revolution has not ended.  Many moderns assent to Romantic assumptions when they think intuition and emotion more meaningful than ratiocination or consider traditional tribal people to possess insights lost to the civilized world.  Even the preference for wild countryside over tended gardens is a Romantic choice.  High-flown language remains suspect, and much poetry today uses highly colloquial language without fear of a reaction like that of the reviewer of Lyrical Ballads who attacked Wordsworth’s “perverted taste for simplicity.”  Even for many who have not read him at all, Wordsworth and his contemporaries set new standards or taste and ideas that not only persist but have come to be the standard against which newer poets have rebelled.  Aware that his poems were “materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed,” Wordsworth asked that his reader “in judging these Poems . . . decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others.”  In fact, rather than replacing literary convention with a simple sincerity, a directness that need not be interpretation, he constructed a lasting alternative code, a new form of beauty.

 

 

 

 

Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour

July 13, 1798.

 

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 sweet inland murmur.*—Once again       

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 

Which 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             10

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,         

Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,    

Among the woods and copses lose themselves,  

Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb      

The wild green landscape. 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 wreathes of smoke 

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,           

With some uncertain notice, as might seem,        20

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,       

Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire         

The hermit sits alone.

 

                                     Though absent long,             

These forms of beauty 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                     30

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,        

As may have had no 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              40

Of all this unintelligible world     

Is lighten'd:—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.                             50

 

                                                If this              

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,     

In darkness, and amid the many shapes 

Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir              

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,             

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,           

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee  

O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood             

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

 

And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd though[t,]      

With many recognitions dim and faint,          60

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,    70

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   80

An appetite: a feeling and a love,             

That had no need of a remoter charm,   

By thought supplied, or 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              90

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes     

The still, sad music of humanity,

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,     100

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 recognize     

In nature and the language of the sense,              

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,  110

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       120

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

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,    

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,   130

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all          

The dreary intercourse of daily life,         

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb    

Our chearful 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          140

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        150

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.   160

 

 

 

 

Ode

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

 

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,     

    The earth, and every common sight,   

            To me did seem  

    Apparell'd in celestial light,     

The glory and the freshness of a dream.         

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—   

        Turn wheresoe'er I may,      

            By night or day,   

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.      

 

        The rainbow comes and goes,                                10

        And lovely is the rose;          

        The moon doth with delight              

    Look round her when the heavens are bare;    

        Waters on a starry night      

        Are beautiful and fair;            

    The sunshine is a glorious birth;           

    But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.        

 

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,     

    And while the young lambs bound                            20

        As to the tabor's sound,       

To me alone there came a thought of grief:         

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,        

        And I again am strong:         

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;             

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;   

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,             

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,  

        And all the earth is gay;       

            Land and sea                                                        30

    Give themselves up to jollity, 

      And with the heart of May    

    Doth every beast keep holiday;—        

          Thou Child of Joy, 

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy         

    Shepherd-boy!             

 

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call           

    Ye to each other make; I see  

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;         

    My heart is at your festival,                                   40

      My head hath its coronal,     

The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.         

        O evil day! if I were sullen   

        While Earth herself is adorning,        

            This sweet May-morning,  

        And the children are culling

            On every side,     

        In a thousand valleys far and wide, 

        Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,   

And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:—       50

        I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!            

        —But there's a tree, of many, one, 

A single field which I have look'd upon,  

Both of them speak of something that is gone:   

          The pansy at my feet          

          Doth the same tale repeat:              

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?       

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?           

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,               60

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,        

          And cometh from afar:      

        Not in entire forgetfulness, 

        And not in utter nakedness,               

But trailing clouds of glory do we come   

        From God, who is our home:             

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!        

Shades of the prison-house begin to close           

        Upon the growing Boy,        

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,       70

        He sees it in his joy;              

The Youth, who daily farther from the east          

    Must travel, still is Nature's priest,      

      And by the vision splendid     

      Is on his way attended;          

At length the Man perceives it die away,              

And fade into the light of common day. 

 

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;       

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,         

And, even with something of a mother's mind,      80

        And no unworthy aim,         

    The homely nurse doth all she can      

To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,          

    Forget the glories he hath known,       

And that imperial palace whence he came.          

 

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,     

A six years' darling of a pigmy size!          

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,    

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, 

With light upon him from his father's eyes!            90

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,              

Some fragment from his dream of human life,    

Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;          

    A wedding or a festival,           

    A mourning or a funeral;            

        And this hath now his heart,             

    And unto this he frames his song:        

        Then will he fit his tongue   

To dialogues of business, love, or strife; 

        But it will not be long                                        100

        Ere this be thrown aside,     

        And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part;            

Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'    

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,            

That Life brings with her in her equipage;             

        As if his whole vocation       

        Were endless imitation.       

 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie         

        Thy soul's immensity;                                       110

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep           

Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,   

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—               

        Mighty prophet! Seer blest!              

        On whom those truths do rest,        

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,              

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;         

Thou, over whom thy Immortality            

Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,            120

A presence which is not to be put by;     

          To whom the grave             

Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight      

        Of day or the warm light,    

A place of thought where we in waiting lie;         

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might            

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,  

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,   

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?           130

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, 

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,              

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! 

 

        O joy! that in our embers    

        Is something that doth live,

        That nature yet remembers

        What was so fugitive!           

The thought of our past years in me doth breed 

Perpetual benediction: not indeed           

For that which is most worthy to be blest—             140

Delight and liberty, the simple creed       

Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,   

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—     

        Not for these I raise              

        The song of thanks and praise;         

    But for those obstinate questionings   

    Of sense and outward things, 

    Fallings from us, vanishings;    

    Blank misgivings of a Creature              

Moving about in worlds not realized,                          150

High instincts before which our mortal Nature    

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

        But for those first affections,            

        Those shadowy recollections,           

      Which, be they what they may,          

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;  

  Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make    

Our noisy years seem moments in the being       

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,                 160

            To perish never:  

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, 

            Nor Man nor Boy,             

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,             

Can utterly abolish or destroy!   

    Hence in a season of calm weather     

        Though inland far we be,    

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea            

        Which brought us hither,     

    Can in a moment travel thither,                          170

And see the children sport upon the shore,         

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.    

 

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!       

        And let the young lambs bound        

        As to the tabor's sound!      

We in thought will join your throng,        

      Ye that pipe and ye that play,             

      Ye that through your hearts to-day   

      Feel the gladness of the May!             

What though the radiance which was once so bright   180

Be now for ever taken from my sight,     

    Though nothing can bring back the hour           

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

      We will grieve not, rather find            

      Strength in what remains behind;      

      In the primal sympathy          

      Which having been must ever be;      

      In the soothing thoughts that spring 

      Out of human suffering;        

      In the faith that looks through death,               190

In years that bring the philosophic mind.              

 

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,             

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;          

I only have relinquish'd one delight         

To live beneath your more habitual sway.            

I love the brooks which down their channels fret,             

Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;     

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day         

            Is lovely yet;                                                   200

The clouds that gather round the setting sun      

Do take a sober colouring from an eye   

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;          

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.          

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,      

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,        

To me the meanest flower that blows can give   

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.