Argument by Images in Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry”

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of “Sleep and Poetry”; those in brackets to endnotes. 

 

     John Keats is not known as a theoretician, but his early “Sleep and Poetry” provides a programmatic manifesto in defense of his Romantic practice.  Characteristically, he makes a case through images rather than syllogisms.  This is wholly in keeping with Keats’ principle of Negative Capability, perhaps his most significant contribution to literary theory.  The reader who pays regard to the poem’s images from the start will develop the system of correspondences critical to the climactic passage.

     Though the title seems to balance sleep and poetry, the poem in fact is about the latter.  The opening paean to sleep is a feint, introducing the notion of a free imagination and setting up even greater praise for poetry.  After an epigraph from the pseudo-Chaucerian The Floure and the Leafe which in fact describes sleeplessness as distressing and inexplicable, Keats proceeds to identify sleep with a series of images that establish a foundation for his theme.

     First he celebrates the beauties of nature in a conventional catalogue which, for all its predictability (birds, bees, blooms, bowers) includes palpable and specific detail: a “pretty hummer” that “buzzes cheerily,” “a musk-rose, blowing/ In a green island, far from all men’s knowing.”  The primary meaning is at first a simple affirmation of sensuality, but even this significance is complicated by the rose being unknown, presumably because a mentally conceived flower is superior even to the beautiful ones in a real garden.  Similarly, the value of the “nest of nightingales” is heightened by its extreme secrecy analogous to an individual subjectivity. 

     Birdsong also suggests poetry, which leads to the culminating terms of the first rhetorical period’s cluster of images, “Cordelia’s countenance,” and “a high romance,” anticipating the poem’s conclusion by recalling poetic texts rather than natural objects and both implying love, the one paternal and the second romantic.  The poet’s goal, though, lies beyond.  All of pretty these images fall short of sleep’s power to please and shorter yet of the sublimity of the highest poetry.

     Having moved from attractive aspects of nature to images evoking art and human affection, in the second half of the verse paragraph Keats lists images meant to convey the nature of sleep itself.  Having just mentioned literary accounts of passion, Keats now associates sleep with the charms of actual lovers maternal and romantic.  Sleep closes our eyes and sings lullabies as though a loving mother.  Sleep is the “silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses,” a phrase suggesting the lady in bed.  It is a “happy listener” to the upwelling sense of felicity that greets each “new sunrise,” for, at any rate, “all the cheerful eyes.”  This praise is, again, designed to more greatly magnify the glory of poetry once Keats’ entire progression of thought emerges.

     In the next verse paragraph (ll. 19-40) the series of associations from prettiness to love to bliss forms a crescendo that exalts poetry to the level of a numinous experience.  It surpasses the experience of beauty in nature and, indeed, is ineffable, “beyond thought.” (19)  Keats mentions birds, considered intermediaries between the human and the divine, before admitting the inadequacy of language.  “What is it?  And to what shall I compare it?”  For Keats poetry provides access to a “glory” which is a direct experience of reality and thus contains hints at least of Ultimate Reality.  It is “awful, sweet, and holy,” appearing in many guises, sometimes, “fearful,” sometimes “gentle,” yet always “wondrous” and most accurately traceable only in images.  As art is generally oblique in its implications, the truth seems coy, often revealing only “shapes,” “aerial limning,” “faint-heard hymning,” yet such evidence is sufficient “sometimes” to elicit a jubilant reaction from the soul: “rejoice! rejoice!”  This experience of an illuminated sublime is familiar to many besides himself. (41-46)  He cunningly creates a community of the initiated, of all those who “can feel his being glow,” by saying that he will not “insult” his readers by attempting to sketch what they already know from their own lived experience. 

     The sensual delights of the imagination are detailed in the next section (47-84) as the poet contemplates the ascent of his own Parnassus.  “Not yet a glorious denizen” of that realm, he offers the sacrifice of praise as well as, in fantasy, his own death “like a fresh sacrifice” ‘to the great Apollo.”  His approach is marked by the heady intoxication of “o’erwhelming sweets.”  This is for Keats the locus amoenus, the “bowery nook,” the “elysium,” identified with the entire body of poetry, what I like to call “the ocean of words,” for Keats “an eternal book” where everything is “lovely” and nymphs play in the woods.  There he might entertain “imaginings” of all sorts, “vistas of solemn beauty” inspiring him to “write on my tablets all that was permitted,/ All that was for our human senses fitted.”  Mysteriously, only through such fabulating flights of the mind can the individual ”seize” (or understand) “all the events of this wide world.”  Keats then overturns his earlier modesty topoi and anticipates gaining “wings” and a concomitant immortality through his own verse.

     The rush of this grand ambition is then brought up short with the admonition “Stop and consider!  Life is but a day,” followed by a series of images of life’s evanescence: “a fragile dew-drop,” “a poor Indian’s sleep,” turning to the more hopeful “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” concluding with the quite wonderful “a laughing school-boy. Without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.”    With this more sanguine view, Keats returns in lines 96-121 to his poetic ambitions, asking, with a poignance inevitable for those who know the poet’s biography, for ten years to produce his oeuvre.  The thought I enough to return him to the idyllic quasi-Classical scenes that for him suggest the beauties of art in general, often with erotic even orgiastic imagery.  The poet says he will “choose each pleasure that my fancy sees,” “catch the white-handed nymphs,” “woo sweet kisses,” “play with their fingers, “touch their shoulders.”  He imagines in fact a troupe of nymphs all ministering to his comfort, teaching the doves to fan him with its wings, dancing, enticing,

 

till in the bosom of a leafy world

We rest in silence, like the two gems upcurl’d

In the recesses of a pearly shell.

                                               (119-121)

 

This final image with its snug lapidary beauty is a neat formulation of purely aesthetic satisfaction. 

     Yet the poet feels he must, with an act of will, summon up his gravitas and “bid these joys farewell” in pursuit of “a nobler life” that embraces not beauty alone but also the “agonies” and “strife of human hearts.”  This resolution is followed immediately by a vision of an Apollonian heroic charioteer, the embodiment of the poet as redeemer, bringing in his train “shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear,” an entire spectrum of emotion, laughing, weeping, but always beautiful like “a lovely wreath of girls.”  The onward impetus on this lord of poetry is “awfully intent,” implying the dread and delight of his comprehensive view.

      The vision then vanishes, as visions do, the chariot “fled into the light of heaven,” bringing Keats crashing down into “a sense of real things” that “like a muddy stream” he feels may “bring my soul to nothingness.”  He is sustained by the sublime memory of poetry’s potential and muses over the decline of the art in his own age, recalling a Golden Age in which the British muses had no care “than to sing out and comb their wavy hair.”  In another of Keats’ breath-taking images he describes how earlier poets, a “fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony” until their song, a “mighty self of convoluting sound” which gains such immensity that it becomes “huge as a planet” and rotates “eternally around a dizzy void.” (173-177) 

     This grand afflatus comes and goes, however, in the life of the world as well as of the individual.  A summary of the images in the latter portion of the poem will indicate this oscillation between the previously defined poles.  The ordinary aesthetic pleasures are evoked still by the images of pastoralism, most succinctly by the “sweet music” of the “swan’s ebon bill.” (223, 226)  Yet the joy of these immediate delights is curtailed by suffering, mortality, and the great unknown.  For Keats art provides the most effective strategy for coping with an unknowable and often inimical world.    Faced with “the shiftings of the mighty winds that blow/ Hither and thither” (286-7) “the mighty winds,” he finds a route “out the dark mysteries of human souls.” (289)  Through the sort of via negativa not unlike the ancient Skeptics’ and Stoics’ concept of ἐποχή and which Keats called Negative Capability, the poet is capable of not only accepting inability to understand the cosmos, but building insight from that lack.

 

yet there ever rolls                

A vast idea before me, and I glean           

Therefrom my liberty; thence too I’ve seen         

The end and aim of Poesy.

                                                                                          (290-3)

 

Here poetry is named as the only route to a clear enlightened vision.  Yet that “liberty” brings no end to suffering and striving, though the truth be

 

                                             manifest                     

As a large cross, some old cathedral’s crest,        

Lifted to the white clouds.

                                                            (295-297)

 

There remains a kind of existential “ocean dim” “spreads awfully before me” (306-307), presumably made up of ignorance and suffering, irreducible but tolerable through art.   A proper Pegasus, not the neo-Classical “rocking horse” (186) with “might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237) has the power “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247) in spite of “trees uptorn,” (242) etc., bringing “delightful hopes” and “heart-easing” words. (268)

     Keats recognizes the hazards of the visionary’s role, indeed he embraces the Romantic myth of the artist’s likely early death, which proved so poignantly true in his case. 

Ah! rather let me like a madman run       

Over some precipice; let the hot sun       

Melt my Dedalian wings . . .

(301-303)

     This self-dramatizing image embodies an existential crisis with the poet as hero facing a cosmos sufficiently disturbing to drive the persona back to refuge in the sensual beauty which defines the pleasures of the mind, while the poet knows he must accept also the harshness of the world and the limits of his own knowledge.  The mention of myrtle, Aphrodite’s flower (248), represents a resolution in art between the joys and distresses of the world.  The plant, primarily associated with love (and under Christianity with the Virgin), also signified the victor in athletic and poetic competitions (a usage also echoed in the New Testament) [2]

     Keats’ vision of life, abundant and delightful yet inevitably tragic, is rendered livable by imagination, by art.  In the concluding passage, Keats takes his inspiration and comfort from the symbolic elaborations of the art objects he sees about him in Hunt’s cottage.  He restates his earlier description of poetry functioning with insouciant mastery, “’tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237),     

   

            And with these airs come forms of elegance
            Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance,
            Careless, and grand — fingers soft and round
            Parting luxuriant curls; — and the swift bound
            Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
            Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.

(331-336)

 

     The reader is left, then, in the end with what to Keats was most significant: a handful of images: the immediately appealing musk-rose and the nymphs, but also the alarming images of the uprooted trees, the Indian about to go over the waterfall, and the precipice.  The contradiction is then resolved by art, signified in the pearly shell, the cross “huge as a planet,” and the charioteer.

     Keats’ conclusion is a charming and intimate recapitulation with details of the poet’s visit to Leigh Hunt’s cottage on the Vale of Health (in which Shelley and Byron were also guests).  His demonstration of the power of images is here raised to another order by his use of the objets d’art he saw about him [3], selected by Hunt and viewed by Keats as symbolic representation of their values.  Since Keats here plays the role of consumer of art as well as creator, this passage serves as an example of art’s uplifting influence.  

     The images of antiquity represent beauty embodied in art includes nymphs as well as “fauns and satyrs taking aim at swelling apples with a frisky leap.”  Here the poet includes a vision of nature itself, seen as though freshly through the eyes of the artists of the past.  The sexual association of this reverence for nature is clear in language like “the wild thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.”  While the mythological prints on the wall celebrate nature, love, art, and, in particular the art of antiquity, and, by implication, offer a sort of pagan divine service as well, the gap of centuries separating the poet from the Classical era suggests his lack, his longing, his hunger.  The picture of Petrarch and Laura reinforces the same scheme as does the bust of Sappho, each with associations both erotic and artistic.

 

                                             half smiling down

At nothing; just as though the earnest frown

Of over thinking had that moment gone

From off her brow, and left her all alone.

 

Sappho’s peace of mind is imagined to have arrived at the moment that ratiocination, “over thinking” ceased.  Surely Keats sought a similar resolution for himself and his readers.

     While the construction of the value of beauty is the primary theme, Keats’ political ideals support his aesthetic ones.   More than a nationalist icon, the bust of Alfred the Great probably suggested to Keats the king’s support for learning and culture as well as the notion that he advanced constitutional rule.  Kościuszko, to whom Coleridge and Hunt himself had also written sonnets, was a hero in freedom’s cause for the Romantics [4]. 

     With the sight of these meaningful images, Keats is uplifted and declares, “And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay.” (401)  The positive operation of these works of art on the consciousness of the poet anticipates a similar effect of the poem on the reader.  In effect, the author represents himself as having “reprogrammed” his mind through contemplation of both art and nature, and the alteration of consciousness occurs through the developing montage of images alone. 

     Regularly through the poem, the lower levels of inspiration are marked by the Classical images of pastoralism and the higher by divine figures, only to vanish at the summit of aesthetic experience as language becomes unable to bear the theme.  Keats maintains the vigor of his skepticism, proceeding without illusion, with the conviction that the symbolic manipulations of art provide the most potent solace in a fallen world both beautiful and terrifying.  For him the most profound truth is accessible by looking closely, meditating, one might say, on certain images which have their own order and the capacity to program the consciousness, his own and his readers’.  Whereas sleep is a mere temporary escape, like the unmixed sylvan fantasies of pastoralism, Keats seeks to provide an authentic and lasting heart’s-ease in poetry “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247).

 

  

1.   I am reminded of the elusiveness of enlightenment suggested by the Zen Ox-herding pictures. 

 2. See, for instance, Philippians 3 and I Corinthians 9:24.

3.  These works are listed by Sir Sidney Colvin in his John Keats (ch. 3) as Poussin’s “Empire of Flora,” his “Venus and Adonis,” and several, perhaps, of his “Bacchanals;” Stothard’s “Bathers,” “‘Vintage,'” and Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura; and Raphael’s “Poetry,” from the Stanza della Segnatura.

4.  Among the many other poets of the age who wrote in praise of Kościuszko were Henry Francis Cary (“Ode to General Kosciuszko”), Byron (“The Age of Bronze”), Southey (“To A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey”), and Thomas Campbell (“Pleasures Of Hope”).

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

Looking Backward (Bellamy)

     A peculiarly American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class whatsoever.  And this occurs without violence, by a kind of general consensus.  To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism (which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.

     The society Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with no self-interest or partiality or even error.  Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person strives to get the better of his fellow citizens.  To me his proposal that every worker, indeed, every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.  Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego.  Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed strong.  Bellamy’s attacks on “individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted to advancing his vision. 

     Bellamy’s prose is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the barest excuse for a plot.  One or two images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to the new toward the end. 

     Bellamy does share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation.  That tone, which lasted until World War I, smells now like the springtime of the world.  

 

 

The God of Small Things (Roy)

     Roy’s first novel is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly varied pattern of different characters of various ages.  She is a rhetorician of considerable power, willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and substitutions each with at least a plausible significance.  In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs, redundant expressions.  The book has a luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read silently.  Her verbal play and deep sense of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book, for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains far more accessible than even Ulysses.

     The mysterious “double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center.  Their lives are twisted by their family and the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial past.  Passive and inward-turning, stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment, and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.  

     The sexual scenes at the end provide the reader no relief.  One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they offer little solace.  The desperation of Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any chance for redemptive sexuality.  At the book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas of their childhood.  It is, of course, the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that anchor the ego in the everyday.  Much of the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.

     It took twenty years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the meantime.  She is an active campaigner for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world.  I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on these topics.

 

 

Redburn (Melville)

     Contrary to some recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn a piece of hackwork.  He notoriously stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it simply to keep himself in tobacco.   His haste is evident in the padding.  Like a journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes.  The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman.  What exactly is the reader to make of Harry Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before vanishing? 

     Yet Melville’s grander style is always in the background.  The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly.  His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism.  The book’s themes, too, eschew the complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize.  The self-satire by the narrator reflecting with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket is soon tiresome).

     Redburn is worth reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century.  (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.)  It also has hints of the sublimity of which the author was capable.  In itself it is a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.  

One Hundred Poets

Once I started, I could not stop until I set the limit of a hundred.  This list of authors and value judgments is unsystematic, the record of one reader’s reactions after sixty years of reading.  I restrict myself to a few lines of comment.  The writers mentioned below are not necessarily the greatest in my opinion.  The catalogue could have been significantly different.  I may collect a Part Two in the future.  There are plenty of candidates.  May someone someday read an unfamiliar poet on the basis of these insubstantial words. 

 

8^th century B. C. E.  Homer is grand and encyclopedic, an entire culture in a volume.  When read aloud by a someone able to do quantitative vowels, natural stresses, and pitch accents, he sounds like a symphony.

8^th – 7^th century B. C. E. Hesiod unquestionably preserves priceless mythological and historical data.  As a poet he is one of the first to leave words stamped with a distinct individual personality, cranky, anxious,  whistling in the archaic dark.

Circa 630 B. C. E.  Sappho is intense, incandescent.  The reader pleases the tongue by repeating the phrases of her melodious lyrics while recognizing along with the author the prodigious might of Aphrodite. 

ca. 518 B. C. E.  Pindar’s wonderful odes demonstrate the greatest mastery of the use of myth.  Though the only works that survive entire are those written to honor athletic victors, he could have been writing his high-flying associative poetry on any topic.   

84 B. C. E. Catullus, beloved for his enthusiastic eroticism, excels also at vituperation and pure verbal display, and there is never a misplaced syllable.

70 B. C. E.  The immense cultural weight of the Aeneid was intended from its composition, but Vergil’s epic was also repeatedly reinterpreted increasing its semantic density.  The poet’s georgics and eclogues are also fascinating in detail and impressive in impact.

65 B. C. E. Horace, the most craftsmanlike of Latin poets, recognizing the interpenetration of the grand and the mundane, wrote naturally of the gods and of everyday life, and his effortless line was marmoreal.

43 B.C.E.  a favorite of the Middle Ages, Ovid influenced the course of European poetry not only through the mythology he preserved in the artful tales of the Metamorphoses, but in addition he reshaped love poetry with his Ars Amatoria. 

365  Tao Yuanming was the great poet of the “fields and gardens” school, locating nature just outside his door.  His retirement from worldly activity, saying he would not "bow like a servant in return for five pecks of grain" became legendary.

699  An important painter as well as poet, Wang Wei is one of the greatest explicitly Buddhist poets, creating intricate works of art often within the four lined jueju form.

701  The West became fond of Li Bai through Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, embracing him as he was said to have sought to embrace the moon’s reflection.  The Chinese seem to share the view of his as a Romantic and passionate natural poet.

712  Du Fu wrote on an extraordinarily broad range of topics.  He observed nature closely, engaged deeply with the turbulent history of his time, and wrote great-hearted poems of love and friendship.  He seems to me no less passionate for being a highly erudite poet.

8^th century  Through the chance survival of one manuscript, we happen to have the lone substantial Old English epic Beowulf in which the verse forms  native to the language are employed with full vigor in a beautiful and moving poem, with a heart-aching elegaic tone.

9^th century  For a time I was a Hanshan evangelist, giving out copies of Gary Snyder’s translations of this brilliant contemplative who wrote in the most colloquial dialect. 

1071  William IX, Duke of Aquitaine was a major lord whose work is the earliest in the Troubadour lineage.  His poems range from courtly love and piety to what looks like raucous locker room fooling, but all are artful.

early 12th century  Among the troubadours, Jaufre Rudel is unique for the intensity of his devotion to an absent lover. 

1135  Bernart de Ventadorn brought troubadour lyric to a classic perfection, displaying in his cansos the full range of convention of the genre, though freely manipulated to represent a range of themes.

ca. 1170  Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, conveyed to the German language the profound mystery of the Arthurian stories, as well as writing lyric songs and other narratives.

ca. 1170  Walther von der Vogelweide was the most celebrated of the Minnesingers, composer of a substantial body of love songs and political verses

12^th century  One of the three great epic romances of the Middle Ages, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Iseult ascends the heights and plumbs the depths of love and fate and god and power with rare insight and beauty.

ca. 1200  The Nibelungenlied draws monumental archetypal power from early Germanic myth, with its archaic story, seemingly straight from the backbrain, still potent in Wagner’s revisions. 

1265  In his grand encyclopedic epic of the afterlife and for his refined love poems Dante used the vernacular with no loss of gravitas.

ca. 1332  Piers Plowman in its several forms is William Langland’s only known wok, a great elaborate symbolic dream, filled with lively images and righteous sentiments criticizing religious and secular powers

ca. 1330  Writing in French, Latin, and English, John Gower maintained a cultivated eloquence in the tetrameters of his grand narrative compilation The Lover’s Confession. 

1340  Geoffrey Chaucer is a monument, able to pull off every sort of effect from sublimity to comedy to pathos to the delectation of pure beauty.  Out loud the Middle English is for the most part not only soon comprehensible, but melodious.

circa 1373  John Lydgate wrote many volumes of somewhat irregular verse, much of it retellings and compilations, also including love allegory (the occasionally luminous Temple of Glas) and translations. 

Late 14^th century  The Pearl Poet wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of most bewitching Arthurian romances, as well as the deeply moving Pearl and the rather sensational Cleanness, and the more pedestrian Patience.

ca. 1431  The most celebrated exemplar of the criminal poet François Villon wrote moving celebrations of life and plaints on aging and mortality using a grand idiosyncratic rhetoric.  Villon also composed lyrics in the street slang of the underworld. 

ca. 1460 William Dunbar, one of the “Scottish Chaucerians,” wrote courtly entertainments, allegories, and satire with extravagant language, energetic if unoriginal in a century when much of the greatest British writing was done in Scots.

ca. 1463  Puttenham called him "rude rayling rimer," but John Skelton’s greatest appeal today is his use of native English words, his free way with meter and a voice with a great deal of character, whether speaking on personal or public topics.

 1503  Thomas Wyatt is highly musical while retaining in his language the sense of the spoken word.  He is capable of love poetry of haunting and delicate beauty that nonetheless sounds like a natural voice.

1517  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s sonnets are none the worse for being among the first in English.  He was also a pioneer in blank verse, using it for his translation of portions of the Aeneid. 

1552  Like Sidney a courtier poet, Walter Raleigh led a tumultuous life (in the end he, like Surrey, was executed) during which he found time to write beautiful poems, many of them occasional, nonetheless polished for using “plain style” language.

1552  Outstanding in pastorals and sonnets, author of an excellent elegy and a masterful epithalamion,  Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is unique, a magnificent allegorical romance epic employing powerful mythic patterns in occasionally archaic language.  A poet’s poet. 

1564  Apart from displaying a mastery of rhetoric in the grad style of his plays, Christopher Marlowe wrote some unforgettable lyrics, the epyllion Hero and Leander, and a good translation of Ovid.

1572  John Donne’s lines are always fresh, if often rough in sound.  He plumbs the heights, sensual and spiritual, and what he made of the mingling of the two and preached great sermons.

1591  A master of light-spun lyric and the English poet most identified with the carpe diem sentiment,  Robert Herrick wrote charmingly of “brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,” but also of religious experience.  

1593  George Herbert, a dedicated priest by vocation, on the page harnessed the novel energy of the Metaphysical conceit to write some of the most muscular and concrete and authentic English poems on spiritual themes. 

1595  A painstaking craftsman influenced by both Jonson and Donne, Thomas Carew wrote intensely sensuous love poetry, including “A Rapture,” one of the most erotic poems in English.  

1613  The most baroque of the Metaphysicals, Richard Crashaw wrote from a devotional, almost mystical, sensibility.  His poems such as those concerning Teresa of Avila do not shrink fro m sensual and emotional express=ions of religiosity.

1618  Abraham Cowley had plenty of wit and learning, wrote Metaphysical-style love poems, but his distinctive form was the excited Pindaric ode.  

1621  Andrew Marvell kept a steady hand on his couplets in love, occasional and topographical poems.  His dizzying “Horatian Ode” on Cromwell shows that passionate political poetry can be subtle. 

1631  He needs a considerable number of footnotes today, but John Dryden was a master versifier and a first-rate translator

1636  Thomas Traherne ardently mystical poetry reflects a profound experience of god and nature that resists formulation in language.  His prose poetry in Centuries of Meditation opens his inner life to readers.

1647  It is true that John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester wrote the most obscene poetry until the twentieth century, but it is also true that he was immensely witty, writing about the complexities of love and expressing a wholly cynical, quite modern-sounding vision.

1685 John Gay wrote not only the memorable Beggar’s Opera, but a broad variety of poetry in other genres, including pastorals and fables, all of it witty, cynical, and always open to innovation.

1688  Pope has immense technical skills.  His masterful manipulation of sound values and syntax in the heroic couplet is dazzling.  He has as well a greater soul than some readers realize.

1700  Author of strong blank verse, including the affecting forward-looking nature poem The Seasons as well as the unlikely backward glance of The Castle of Indolence, a Spenserian allegory, James Thomson also wrote the words to “Rule Britannia.”

1716  Thomas Gray, known for a single work, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” wrote as well some stirring Pindaric odes.  Though Wordsworth singled him out as exponent of an outdated style, he clearly anticipates Romanticism.

1721  William Collins used all the devices of neo-Classicism including artificial epithets and an adherence to what he considered ancient models, yet his passionate enthusiasm quickened the form of the ode, and he anticipated the Romantics in love for nature, ruins, and the exotic.

1722  The author of the most extraordinary visionary poem of his century Christopher Smart also wrote more conventional magnificently modulated religious poems, fine fables, and some surprisingly elegant courtly love flirtations.

1731  An inspired nature poet, William Cowper was once exceedingly popular, due in part to his hymns and other religious poetry and his anti-slavery agitation.  He mastered many forms, but not his own habitual depression.

1754  George Crabbe retained a neo-Classical line, but employed it to tell tales of people in modest spheres of life.  While his couplets are in detail unremarkable, his focus on ordinary provincial life is itself an imaginative breakthrough.

1757  Blake is intoxicating because of his visionary mysticism, a rare example of thought rather than poetic technique underlying greatness.  Blake’s rhythm and forms are often elementary, but his ideas sublime.

1770  With his long loose composition expressing a rhapsodic reimagining of ancient Greek culture, Friedrich Hölderlin shaped German Romanticism.

1770  William Wordsworth moved poetry forward, contributing some memorable lines, some sublime passages, and a great many forgettable lines. 

1772  Samuel Taylor Coleridge not only collaborated on the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads in which his contribution foreshadowed Poe with his use of the exotic and fantastic; he excelled also at writing discursive “conversation poems” and seminal criticism.

1772  Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) a formative figure of German Romanticism, sought cosmic harmony through poetry.  His “magical idealist” vision informs his passion for love and the night.  

1788  Lord Byron wrote a few very pretty lyrics, but his strong work is in longer compositions such as the dramatic and picturesque Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the grandly comic Don Juan.  He conctributed incidentally a good deal to the modern idea of the poet.

1793  John Clare, son of an agricultural laborer, wrote some of the most remarkable 19^th century poetry, including wonderful nature descriptions and, in his madness, some equally marvelous lyrics.

1795  An outstanding image-maker, John Keats charms as well with his earnest and passionate affect and his belief in Poesy. 

1809  Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is more popular in France than in his native land, but it has always attracted me, primarily through sound.  “Ulalume,” for instance, has always been my favorite, though to Huxley it is “too poetical,” “a carapace of jeweled sound.”

1809  Alfred, Lord Tennyson was such an exemplary Poet Laureate that his posthumous reputation has suffered from his conventionality and his sheer volume of work.  Nonetheless, one of the most capable versifier ever, with a sharp dramatic sense.  

1812  Browning excels at images, conversation, and drama.  He wrote verse as comfortably  as prose, though today’s readers prefer to consume his work in smaller portions than his long poems.

1819  Like it or not, Walt Whitman is our grandpa and our national prophet.  It may be more true of Whitman than of Shakespeare that he might well have blotted a thousand lines, but we would not risk missing his lists, his glorious energy, his very extravagance.

1821  Charles Baudelaire contributed heavily to the modern notion of the artist as counter-cultural with his transgressive ideas couched in what appear to be Parnassian verse forms.

1830  With wit, precision, and buoyant spirit, Emily Dickinson worked out her states of mind, including unforgettable lightning flashes of insight, in unassuming stanzas often using common meter.

1837  Swinburne is a master of sound, but he has little else to sustain the reader.  His washed-out hedonism covers everything, his use of antiquity in particular. 

1842 Equally subtle in sound and image, Stéphane Mallarmé’s lyrics inspired subsequent poetic moves.  More even than most, his work defies translation.

1844  Gerard Manley Hopkins composed the most innovative and melodious poetry, managing to capture in dramatic imagery his startling experience of the divine.

1854  The bad boy punk who fragmented consciousness and poetry in a single act before leaving Europe and art, Arthur Rimbaud pioneered a collage technique of imagery.  For all his wildness the poet’s tender heart is perceptible and dear. 

1859  A. E. Housman, apart from being one of the preeminent Classicists of his age, wrote of love in limpid verses in A Shropshire Lad, quite rightly  set to music by a number of composers.

1865  William Butler Yeats, for all his cranky notions, is certainly one of the greatest poets of recent times.  From his early Romantic fogginess, through the mastery of his middle rhetoric to the gnomic pronouncements of Crazy Jane, Yeats excels in every style.

1871  Though better-known for his fiction, Stephen Crane’s spare intellectual poetry expressing a sort of late 19^th century existentialism in non-declamatory free verse still deserves readers.

1875  Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems are mystical and passionate, yet grounded in concrete images and in revaluations of Classical myth for the twentieth century.

1885  In Ezra Pound one finds the very finest free verse melodies and the most palpable images.  Though at times cranky and pedantic, he can make the reader weak in the knees with the beauty of his line.    

1879  Wallace Stevens builds with the essential materials of poetry: a love of the texture of words and of sharp and suggestive images.  He is perhaps the foremost English language Symbolist.

1887  A careful syllable-counter, Marianne Moore’s poetry has a delightful delicate dry beauty, demonstrating the aesthetics of restraint.  Passion and politics flow beneath the surface.

1888  A great critic as well as poet, T. S. Eliot, the  dominant Modernist for decades, may have been consciously conservative, but he was neurotic and innovative enough to represent the twentieth century and to alter the way people read and write poetry.   

1894  Ever so popular at his death in 1962, but little thought of these days, e. e. cummings, for all his Greenwich Village posing and sometimes unpleasant politics, wrote lovely, well-crafted lyrics, though readers are well-advised to ignore two out of three of his typographical idiosyncrasies.

1899  Hart Crane, America’s own symbolist, using what he called “the logic of metaphor,” crafted rock solid Modernist poetry lit with suffering and vision.

 

The list concludes with the end of the nineteenth century.  I might add the bare names of more or less contemporary poets whose work I particularly admire:  John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Dylan Thomas.

The Ankle Bracelet: An Ancient Tamil Narrative

 

 

     Every visitor to Parnassus looking up and beyond catches a glimpse of misty mountains, whole ranges in fact fading into the distance promising glories too great for a lifetime, while the trekker hears that further yet beyond are fabled range upon range rarely entered even by the footloose.  Who can know the languages to appreciate the Persian Shahnameh, the Kievan Rus Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the Malinke Epic of Sundiata, or the Epic of Siri, in Tulu language from old Mysore?   Yet even a glance or a day-stroll into these unknown realms is salutary for the reader who wishes to come to know literature in general.

     I came upon the Shilappadikakaram (The Ankle Bracelet) [1] in a chance encounter, as a remaindered volume of which I was entirely ignorant, knowing of Tamil only that it was spoken in the south of India and in Sri Lanka.  Upon the most superficial inquiry I learned that this poem, dated to about the fifth century C. E. is only one of Tamil’s “Five Great Epics.”  These epics in turn were a portion of the vast literary compendium known as The Eighteen Greater Texts which included as well the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls.  Then follow the so-called Eighteen Lesser Texts as well as countless other works, and we are still in the period in which Beowulf had yet to find its written form.  

     The poems deep roots in orality and performance are most evident in the recurring formulae.  Kannaki (at age eleven) ”had the graces of a golden liana” (4).  She is not, however, unique, as a few lines later we encounter a whole troupe (5) “lithe as golden lianas.”  A reader may tire of hearing of all the lovely women wearing “shining bracelets,” with “collyrium-painted” eyes, putting musk in their hair and patterns of sandalwood paste on their breasts.  King Shenguttuvan is called “the king, whose army is invincible,” the king, before whom all lances tremble” and “the king, whose army, vast as the ocean.” [2] The use of such conventional phrases and epithets occurs throughout. 

     These set phrases define significant elements of culture, beginning with the view of beauty for women and power for monarchs as the most prominent signs of excellence.  Yet, just as Homeric set formulae define practices of sacrifice and of hospitality, the Tamil poem sets forth expected standards of behavior.  For instance, Kannaki complains of Kovalan’s death as though her grief results from her inability to perform the ordinary practices of her day, saying, “In my husband’s absence, I could not distribute presents to good men, honor Brahmins, welcome saintly monks, or receive friends, as is done in all noble homes.” (107)  Here the final words make it clear that she is simply detailing what was expected of all respectable people. 

     In the most general sense the patterns of language construct a particular ambiance setting the tone of the story rather like a production designer might do for a film.  In the Shilappadikaram a luxurious, richly woven tapestry of aestheticism underlies every scene.   When vassals approach Shenguttuvan, the list of their tribute goes on for ten lines, including millet, garlic, “creepers in bloom,” tigers, lions, elephants, “deer with their fawns,” wildcats, and “sweet-spoken parrots.” (156)  The mere length of the list is an index to the king’s might.

     Preparation for the feast of Indra, the most regal of deities, in Puhār is grandly magnificent, recalling descriptions of tournaments in medieval European romances.  The viewing stands are “studded with emeralds and brilliants, and had pillars of coral.”  Elaborate embroideries are hung about as well as elephant tusks, and strings of pearls.  Gold vases are set out and “metal lamps shaped like girls” along with “golden flags, feather fans, scented paste, and fragrant flower festoons.”  A “thousand and eight kings” bring “on their heads “jars filled with the sacred water, scented with fresh pollen.” (22-3)  Such passages may be considered like cinematic special effects, simulating for all the most spectacular scenes in a manner reminiscent of extravagant film scenes from Intolerance to Ben-Hur.

     The splendor of such displays is matched by the poet’s reveling in sensual experience in less public scenes.  The description of the music to accompany Madhāvi’s performance is so technical and precise, it could only have been written for connoisseurs.  The description of the dancer’s dressing to please Kovalan alone implies a taste for opulence.  She washes her hair with “oil mixed with ten kinds of astringents, five spices, and a blend of thirty-two pungent herbs.  She dried it in the smoke of incense and anointed each tress with heavy musk paste.”  Madhavi proceeds to adorn herself with foot make-up and a fabulous array of jewelry -- gold, coral, and gemstones – until “within her elaborate love-chamber, she offered Kovalan pleasures ever renewed.”  (28-9)

     In fact the most intense and consistent notes of the poem’s sensuality are sexual.  Kovalan is identified with Kama, the personification of desire as well as Krishna, the lover of Radha and the gopis. [3]  Their relations are clothed in hyperbolic rhetoric implying that she derives her beauty from the gods.  “The limbless god of love gave up his bow to make your dark eyebrows  -. . . Shiva lost his crow n when the moon became your pale forehead . . .Indra their king gave up his double-trident thunderbolt, that you waist might be wrought from its steel . . . Murugan, six-faced god of War, gave up his fiery arrowheads so that your long eyes with their blood-red inner corners might frighten away the dark clouds of your hair.”  (7)  “On the bed, strewn with broken garlands, the lovers spent sweet, pleasure-filled days in close embrace.” (8)  In European literature this pinnacle of exalted jouissance is approached perhaps by Gottfried’s Tristan and Iseult during their first night together on shipboard.    

    In springtime “the celebrated god of Love, with Spring, his gracious friend, ruled the fertile Tamil land,” heralded by spring’s “messenger, the south wind,” and “the cuckoo, bugler of the great army of Eros.” (46-7)  “The breeze gently caressed many a lotus-eyed woman lying voluptuously against the strong chest of her lord.” (16)  And, later: “A soft breeze from the hills wafted the odor of wild and garden jasmine, of mayilai, of blue water lilies, and of the aphrodisiac purple lotus . . .” (23)  That seductive wind, like Europe’s west wind Zephyr, signals the annual resurrection of nature with the violent associations of the “army” image for the moment subdued.  Yet the readers will find that this pair of lovers, like Tristan and Isolde, is headed for disaster.   What had seemed an idealized love is followed by immense suffering -- his infidelity, his death, and the general destruction that follows.  One is impossible without the other.  Just as in the world at large, life and death, joy and pain, are inextricably linked.

     For the ecstasy of lovers like Kovalan and Kannaki is inevitably fractured by anxiety and ultimately by death.  Indeed the eroticism of the Shilappadikakaram is profoundly problematized from the start.  The lyric sequences that divide the narrative are, for the most part songs of love but they are far from untroubled.  In what Danielou titles an “Ode to the Kaveri” the river is figured as a “fish-eyed beauty” who is asked not to lament if the monarch “courts” “the lovely Ganges or “marries” the Virgin of the southern tip of the subcontinent, the Kanya Kumari.  The servant girl then sings of the distress caused by deceptive seducers who take advantage of their mistresses.  This reminder of duplicity is succeeded by a song that warns that Death might be concealed “in a young girl’s form.” The motif is repeated with “cruel Death, disguised as a young girl,” 

 

 . . .conches from the sea,

bruised by the shameless waves,

Are thrown upon the beach and crash

Upon sand-castles that our girls have built.  (34)

 

 

The motif of the ruined sand-castles returns, explicitly identified as sexual assault.

                                  . . . . a male sea rapes

The sandy castles that we girls construct,

And eyes, sharp as spears, on full-moon faces,

shed bitterest regret’s too tardy tears.      (41)

 

     The Shilappadikakaram is traditionally attributed to a ruler turned Jain monk Ilango Adigal whose name is first mentioned in a prologue appended to the poem considerably after its first appearance.  However that may be, though the poem includes many Hindu (and some Buddhist) references, its primary orientation seems to be a syncretistic Jainism.  The depiction in the poem of a simultaneously creative and destructive love recalls the Jain teaching of a sort of profound skepticism associated with the many-sidedness doctrine, suggesting the vulnerability of a single view.  In a broader sense, it also recalls the frequent representation of Hindu deities in forms multiplying in bipolar oppositions: a beneficent and a malevolent aspect, a male and female form.  Not only are both genuine; they are in a real sense identical, two sides of the same experience.  The human sensations of joy and suffering do not exist from a higher perspective. 

     In my admittedly uninformed reading of South Asian literature, this poem leads on the one hand toward the other Tamil writings to capture a fuller vision of India’s deep south.  On the other it suggests parallels with other cultural manifestations in that vast country such as with the marvelous erotic carvings of Khajuraho.  The Shilappadikakaram is, however, in itself, and read with little aid other than the minimal introduction provided by Danielou, a lovely poem, achingly lyrical, representing a rounded view of the joy and suffering of human experience.  The paradoxes of the poem are the paradoxes of life.   

 

 

 

1.      1.  So-called in Alain Danielou’s though Silappatikāram is more commonly used today.  The photographs Danielou’s partner Raymond Burnier took of the temples in Khajuraho did much to publicize the site.  The translator’s expertise in Indian music as well as languages and his literary sensibilities produced a useful and readable edition, though R. Parthasarathy's 1993 English translation is more scholarly and, as it was reprinted in 2004 by Penguin Books, more easily available.

 

2.      2.  See pages 4 and 5 for the phrases associated with female beauty and pages 161, 166, and 167 for praise of the king.

 

3.      3.  See pages 9 and 106.  According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (Fourth Adhyya, Fourth Brahmana), human beings are made of desire. 

Misunderstandings of Travel [Waugh, Byron, Chatwin]

 

 

     Incidents of my own experience which are illustrative of the general principle here may be found inter alia in the following posts: “Hitchhiking in Algeria” (September 2010), “A Reading in Kathmandu” (November 2009), “Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria” (March 2011), “Festival in Ogwa” [Nigeria](January 2011), “Sacred Space as Sideshow” [Prague] (February 2010).

 

 

     The fine savor of travel often involves the pleasant acquisition of new knowledge.  Away from home one cannot avoid learning about other people’s history, art, cuisine, politics, and taste, in short, the wide variety of ways to be human.  All travel encourages receptive senses, even a stroll around the town next door, but the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open, and the more new data the traveler will process. 

     There is no smooth transition from naivete to cosmopolitan sophistication.  The traveler is in the position of a small child and feels a similar exhilaration and frustration born of occupying a world largely mysterious, learning daily, but with codes only sketchily known, A necessary concomitant of spending time in such realms of half-knowledge, of speculation and outright mystery, is that a good share of one’s conclusions prove more or less wrong, while others can never be satisfactorily tested and must remain hypothetical, and a good share of the world remains cryptic.  

     With or without guides and translators, the strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and values and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding magnifies the irreducible distance between one consciousness and another.  The tolerance and acceptance a drifter must adopt when stranded in a tropical village where the road ends are perhaps the basis for the only workable attitude toward life, considering that everyone is always dealing with insufficient information.  Submission is sometimes all that one has. 

     Whereas earlier travel writers had emphasized the picturesque or the sublime in landscape or dramatic history or exotic in folkways, the great twentieth century English travel writers – Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Bruce Chatwin – excelled at capturing the absurd, the accidental, the inexplicable in the center of the everyday.  Each presents the persona of a well-meaning innocent, cast about by circumstances, observing unstable chains of cause and effect which seem puzzling, inscrutable, and generally faintly hostile.   One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, the acquisition of which allows new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes.  It not uncommonly happens that a complementary view will not supplant one’s preconception, but rather will come to seem equally true or will simply cast an experience as inexplicable. 

     A few examples may clarify this distinctly modern vision which focuses specifically on what is not seen, what is unknown.  Evelyn Waugh’s Labels (1930) describes a show he attended in Port Said, Egypt. 

 

Attendants were going about selling nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles . . . the doctor warned me that if I smoked one of these I would be bound to catch some frightful disease; I did so, however, without ill effects . . . we found ourselves in the middle of a hugely popular comic turn: two Egyptians in European costume were doing cross-talk . . . It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was very much the same as an English music hall turn . . . their place was taken by a very pretty little white girl in a ballet dress: she cannot have been more than ten or twelve years old; she danced a Charleston . . . Then there were some Japanese jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn done by the whole company . . . After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared.  First he thrust a dozen or so knitting-needles through his cheeks . . . It was while he was doing this that a fight began . . . The man on my right, a grave Egyptian with a knowledge of English, with whom I had had some conversation, suddenly stood up, and leaning across all three of us, struck down with his umbrella a resounding blow on top of one of the fighting heads . . . “What is the fight about –” I asked him.  “Fight?” he said, “Who has been fighting?”

 

The opening act of Egyptians mimicking Europeans suggests an unbridged cultural divide, yet the rest of the vaudeville seems ambitiously transnational, the sort of broad entertainment that might amuse anyone anywhere.  But just as the spectacle seems intelligible, the fight and then its resolution both occur without the slightest cause.  Then the “grave Egyptian” denies that it occurred at all.  Waugh (and his reader) can only look on in bemusement, murmuring perhaps with Puck “What fools these mortals be!” 

     There are multifarious trail-heads through the semantic field of unknowing in this incident.  Waugh, for instance, mentions his use of a public water-pipe in spite of being warned by a doctor.  He does not apparently even consider if the advice may be sound, or what the threatened disease may be, except that it is likely to be “frightful.”  Here the foreign setting allows Waugh to express the feeling many have, even in a semi-scientific society, that health is a matter of fate.  One hazards on forward until felled.  And by surviving unharmed to tell his story, the author becomes a sort of comic hero, turning the tragic emotions of pity and fear on their heads as all is well for the moment at any rate.  The reader feels blessed like the impetuous traveler and can reflect with some composure on that strange scene, the ever-varied procession  of humanity. 

     In The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron describes a Turkoman encampment in northern Afghanistan.  As the men are working somewhere else, the women all flee, while their dogs attack.  Once the dogs are subdued, the following scene occurs.

 

 I approached a mother and two children.  They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby.  Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight.  Her face was screwed up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I had been meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence.  The two old witches chuckled at the scene.  But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that.  He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby on its lip.

 

     The reader relishes Byron’s image of the lady of stately mien delicately setting her infant “behind a wattle screen” that she might free her limbs to express herself, undeterred by the fact that she is not understood.  He reacts with the lovely understatement of the faux innocent observer, saying he senses a subtle “something” in her “tone’ that made him “uncomfortable” when she is charging like a knight, apparently raging and hopping in hostility.

     The guide introduces another twist.  In contrast to the woman’s wary defensiveness before an outsider he is a slavish adherent of his partial and distorted notion of European ways.  One would, I think, have to look a long time in London before spotting another such rubied snuff-box even among the dandies.  He is like the cartoon savage in a loincloth and a top hat.  If this individual is not as world-wise as he may fancy himself, the reader may naturally turn to questioning the admittedly shaky authority of the writer, perhaps even of his own vision.

     In Byron’s anecdote the narrator, his guide, and most of the women in the camp are uneasy, cautious and defensive, unsure what their encounter may.  One might well understand Byron’s uncertainty about how to behave in an unfamiliar situation, the general anxiety about the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger, and Andkhoi’s distress at seeing his employers treated disrespectfully.  The most unaccountable actions are performed by the “woman with magnificent carriage” who is as well the only decisive individual on the scene.  Here is figured the unbridgeable gap that separates each consciousness from all others, regardless of culture.  Just why does Byron feel the discomfort he attributes to his in some sense “meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence”?  Is it in any way related to his appreciation of her figure?

     Bruce Chatwin‘s experience during a coup in Benin was nothing short of Kafkaesque.  After being swept off the street “for your own proper protection,” he is denounced as a mercenary by a corporal with bad breath.

 

     He held up my fountain pen.  “What?”

     “A pen,” I said.

     What for?”

     “To write with.”

     “A gun?”

     “Not a gun.”

     “Yes, a gun!”

    

His bad cop interrogator is then replaced by a comparatively urbane functionary who seeks to reassure his prisoner, saying “Calm yourself, monsieur.  You do not understand.  In his country one understands nothing,” before marching him back to his cell.  Eventually a sort of hearing on his case is held.

 

A young zealot started mouthing anti-capitalist formulae until he was silenced by the colonel in charge.  The colonel then asked a few perfunctory questions, wearily apologized for the inconvenience, signed my pass, and hoped I would continue to enjoy my holiday in the People’s Republic.

      Chatwin’s story may be read as a cautionary warning against the blindness induced by ideology.  The willful unknowing produced by the desire to toe the government line allows a man to see a fountain pen yet call it a gun.  Yet the man who releases hum seems to subscribe to the exact same way of thinking and yet casually releases him.  The reader is willing to believe that the writer might have been arbitrarily killed.  Why did things turn out as they did?  No one knows.  Would there be any difference at all between the putative Marxism of this ruling party and a Western-allied dictator, or a third who cultivates a simple cult of personality? 

     In each of these incidents the observer is European and the scene before him is distinctly Other (though the pattern occurs as well, of course, in the observations of cultivated non-European writers) [2].  This sets in motion a peculiar dialectic in which on the one hand the writer implies the ethnocentric notion that other cultures are inscrutable, ridiculous, or childish.  At the same time the attitude confesses parochial ignorance since every custom must have a reason.  The implications spread from that point indefinitely: one side is more rich and powerful, yet the other may possess some greater wisdom, the one is on home ground and thus secure, the visitor at a loss, and so on into the speculative night.   All this from some unexceptional not-knowing.

     But in the most general terms, the author in each of these scenes does not know what to make of the spectacle before his eyes, so what is the reader to think?  Chatwin’s persecutor perhaps could see a weapon in a fountain pen, but why did Waughs’s interlocutor say he saw no fight?  In order to more placidly enjoy his evening out?  In Byron’s story the same events cause the “old witches” to laugh, the young woman to rage in fury, and the writer to scratch his head.  Does a “real” meaning exist?

     The Pyrrhonic skeptics of late antiquity felt that they could make use of such uncertainty and achieve peace of mind through acknowledging their ignorance, leading first to silence, but then to serenity and perhaps even to pleasure. [1]  Followers of the meditative via negativa such as the pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing have conjured deity out of purest no-thought.   And Bloom would make mis-reading a source of creative change. 

     The twentieth century offered new renditions of this paradoxical enlightening darkness.  In Sartre’s Nausea (1938) Roquentin reflects on the roots of a chestnut tree.  His experience is confined to the present moment, and he concludes “faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence . . . That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.”  A few years later in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus provided another memorable illumination sparked by ignorance.

 

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

 

     This metaphysical occlusion of meaning is only the broadest initial reading of such misunderstandings of travel.  Whether such reflections are recorded in a journal or a book or whether they simply vanish like sparkles of sunlight on a stream, the trip will eventually end.  The traveler may then return with a livelier sense of the extent to which we all are finding our way about the darkness whether in our own home or in Timbuktu.  With the right spirit we can enjoy our bumbling as a kind of sport or gallant act in defiance of the unknown and make as much of our not-knowing as our knowing.  What more is there to travel?  What more to reading?  To life?

 

 

 

1.      1.  See Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 14.

2.      2.  Recognizing the utility of the outside perspective, in the eighteenth century a series of books by Europeans in the pose of non-Europeans were published including Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres d’une Turque à Paris (1730), d'Argens’ Lettres chinoises (1741), Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), Beckford’s Vathek, and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759).