Every Reader’s Tennyson

  

     This is the sixteenth of a series of Every Reader’s Poets, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important English 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.

     Tennyson’s poetry is readily available on line, but for the reader’s convenience I have here appended the poems I discuss.

 

 

     Every poem, indeed, every utterance, is a combination of familiar and novel elements.  We relish some poets for their idiosyncratic sensibilities, thrillingly contrasting with the reader’s more normative reactions.  Among the writers prized for seeing the world in a way dramatically different from others are Blake in the English tradition and Rimbaud in the French.  At the same time other writers, some equally gifted, excel at representing received opinions so precisely that they become culture bearers for a generation.  Though the description does not hold in every particular, Vergil in antiquity, Trollope in fiction, and Longfellow in the United States may be found toward the conventional side of the spectrum.

     Alfred, Lord Tennyson is an author of this latter sort.  Though unsuccessful in his first ventures as an author, at the age of thirty-three his new volume of Poems was well-received and a mere eight years later he was named Poet Laureate, a position he held longer than any of his predecessors, from 1850 until 1892, long enough to be considered an institution.  Gerard Manley Hopkins was bothered by a “vulgarity” in his work which allowed him to achieve a “vogue” but not “ascendancy.”  Tennyson was more popular with Queen Victoria and other rear-guard aristocrats as well as among the middle-class book-buying public.  Enough of a genuine celebrity during his life to find himself pestered by poetry-loving tourists, his funeral in Westminster Abbey (where one may yet visit his grave) attracted over ten thousand applicants for the thousand seats assigned to the general public, while a great many more citizens clustered outside.  The invited mourners included scholars like Benjamin Jowett and numerous dukes, marquis, and bishops.  It is difficult to imagine such a fuss over any poet’s death today.  In The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, that museum of words, Tennyson is given more pages than any other writer with the single exception of William Shakespeare.

     With time his sentiments came to seem overdrawn, his attitudes conformist, and the fantasy of medievalism with which he had captivated the public in his Idylls of the King and other works became passé.  With the arrival of free verse in the twentieth century, fewer readers appreciated Tennyson’s mastery of meters, though he was perhaps the most skillful prosodist since Pope.  Even his successor to the dignity of the laureateship, Alfred Austin, himself an indifferent poet, while obliged to concede that “the present age, taken in the lump, likes Mr. Tennyson’s poetry,” found him third-rate.  His reputation never has recovered. 

     Perhaps the best illustration of his successful use of conventional opinion is the non-partisan if unthinking patriotism of his best-known poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (the text is appended), which celebrates the valor of the British soldiers in the Crimean War who, as the result of an erroneous order, attempted an impossible objective and were cut to pieces.  This simple sentiment so appealed to British nationalism (and to American as well) that the poem soon found a place in school curricula and memorial assemblies.  Its brevity, repetitions, and jangling rhymes make it as digestible as a nursery rhyme.

     The reader needs know no history.  The soldiers are exemplary citizens specifically because they obey without reflection. 

 

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Because such dedication is an ideal of all ruling classes in every time and place, the poem sheds little light on the author’s attitudes or the specific historical circumstances of the war, yet this generic quality is what makes it so instantly understandable to all and so comforting to the fellow-countrymen of the fallen.    

     Tennyson was often far more subtle.  He reflected the changes in taste as British culture shifted from feudalism to capitalism and the Victorian world-view was shaken not only by Marx, but also by Darwin and the scientific study of the Bible and of non-Christian scriptures.  Thus Tennyson, while in a sense as laureate the official propagandist for the regime (and found himself writing works such as “A Welcome to Alexandra” for the Queen Dowager upon her return from overseas) was in fact in politics a mild liberal a bit in advance of his more backward compatriots and in religion somewhat slippery, tending in the end toward the broadest opinions, even beyond the borders of Christianity.  The tensions generated by his uncertainty are often evident and modern readers are likely to identify with his Angst and his ambiguity more than with the pose of confident and conservative opinion that won him renown during his life. 

     One of Tennyson’s most lovely lyrics, “Tears, Idle Tears” (text appended) articulates such a dialectic while at the same time appealing to nineteenth century sentimentality.  Ambivalence is foregrounded even in the title.  The “tears” expressing a pathetic emotion are checked by the qualifier “idle,” posing the poem’s question – “I know not what they mean” – at the outset.  They are the age-old tears inspired by mortality and the passing of time, familiar poetic themes since Gilgamesh.  Such tears “rise in the heart” when contemplating “the happy Autumn-fields” and “thinking of the days that are no more.”  The naming of the season means belatedness and the approach of death, yet the scene is nonetheless “happy.”

     Rather than eliding this tension, Tennyson develops the contradiction in extraordinary images.  The thoughts of the past, though dwelling on the departed are still “fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,” while at the same time “sad as the last” beam of daylight.  The days gone by are “sad” since they are not recoverable, and the distress they inspire is heightened because they remain “fresh,” as powerful in the memory as they had been at first. 
     Tennyson then constructs the most precise and telling image of this contradiction.  The “freshness” of memory is now figured as morning birdsong light, but heard by “dying ears.”  With cinematic power the poet depicts the sickroom during sunrise as the light slowly increases.  In the face of the collision of life and death, he can only muse in wonder “so sad, so strange.”  

     Tennyson seeks to resolve his anxiety by embracing the unity of the opposite ends of the bipolar opposition.  In the penultimate stanza all the images have this compound character.  The summer is “dark,” the moment teeters between night and day, the ears and eyes are “dying” yet alert, the casement displays both light and shade.  The poet can only sigh and repeat in wonder “so sad, so strange.”

     After two stanzas detailing the deathbed scene, the poem concludes with the romantic application of regret, the shock of reaching out in embrace only to find one’s lover a phantom due to death or faithlessness or simply the inexorable passage of time.  Even love, it seems, is inescapably “Death in Life” due to the transient character of all experience.  Just as life is bound always death, joy cannot be without pain, and all love necessarily entails loss.  Tennyson here offers a more nuanced if less popular attitude than simply portraying love as the saving grace of life.  Christianity plays no role.

     Tennyson walks the same fine line between the popular appeal which tends toward saying all is well and the darker intuitions of his soul in "In Memoriam A.H.H.," an elegy for his dear friend Arthur Hallam  (Canto LIII is appended).  Though the book-length poem enjoyed immense popularity (an appeal that eludes any book of poetry today) including the approval of Queen Victoria who said she was “soothed & pleased” by the poem during her mourning for Albert, it contains much distressed agnosticism.  The beginning and ending, though, adopt a pose of orthodoxy.  The first lines address the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” and conclusion confidently imagines that his deceased friend lives now in God.

 

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

 

     Yet between these expressions of conventional religiosity, Tennyson concedes the impact of the science of his day which seemed to contradict a literal reading of the Bible: evolution, geological history, Higher Criticism as well as his own internal crises of belief.  Similarly on the smaller scale, canto LIII walks the ridgepole between belief and disbelief. 

     All the rhetoric is deeply ambiguous.  Beginning with a cry of the lyric pathos “Oh,” the poet says “yet,” that is, in spite of evidence to the contrary, we “trust,” since we cannot know, that “somehow” “good will the final goal of ill.”  The statement could hardly be more conflicted.  The poet is so confounded that he must in the end throw up his hands and give up, declaring “we know not anything” and comparing himself to an infant who can only cry. 

       Philosophically, of course, Tennyson was striving to attain an unlikely position, to imagine that in some way hidden from human view, every pain serves a beneficent end.  He represented a good many other middlebrow British citizens who were comforted by his platitudes, cleaving always to the accepted standards of the day.  Tennyson in fact embodied his Zeitgeist so well specifically because remained superficially loyal to accepted opinion despite being troubled by religious doubts that would not have occurred in an age of hegemonic faith and by sympathy for political reform tendencies that were aimed at ending feudalism and softening capitalism. 

     Tennyson found an effective escape from the disquiet induced by modernity’s ambiguities other than seconding received opinion.  He ornamented his bourgeois practicality with gay ribands of aristocratic glamor by recalling a mythic past.  A good number of his most popular works developed the idealized picture of the Middle Ages now known as Medievalism that inspired pre-Raphaelite painting, Gothic Revival architecture, research into balladry, and, for Tennyson, poems like The Idylls of the King and such shorter pieces as “The Lady of Shalott.”  Bedivere’s lament over the dying Arthur in “Morte d’Arthur” expresses nostalgia for a lost world where everything made sense and fostered excellence.  The Round Table is here explicitly an image for the fallen world, tangled with sin since the expulsion from Eden, further degraded by the collapse of chivalric values, and, in the poet’s own time, sullied by the physical and spiritual pollution of industrial capitalism.  While propriety forbids direct protest, one may, perhaps sentimentally, but also with effective elegance, allude to more blessed earlier times.    

 

       Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

 

The taste for this sort of thing has not quite vanished, it has merely reached an epigone in phenomena like Game of Thrones, so-called Renaissance Faires, The Society for Creative Anachronism, and over-priced restaurants where one may dine while people play at sword-fighting. 

     Tennyson was a major poet in a sense now extinct.  Mass audiences read lengthy works and cried and sighed and smiled.  Tennyson was the favorite of a demographic which in today’s time prefers television and films and reads no poetry at all. His mastery of meters was widely appreciated in viva voce readings and he both expressed the experience of millions and, in turn, influenced them, embodying the culture of his day.  If contemporary Americans find less beauty in his verse, perhaps that means that we have the more to learn from him.    

 

 

 

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

 

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

 

Flash’d all their sabres bare,

Flash’d as they turn’d in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

 

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

 

 

 

 

Tears, Idle Tears

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

         Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

 

         Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

 

         Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

 

 

In Memoriam, A. H. H., Canto LIII

 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

⁠Will be the final goal of ill,

⁠To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

 

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

⁠That not one life shall be destroy'd,

⁠Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

 

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

⁠That not a moth with vain desire

⁠Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

 

Behold!;

⁠I can but trust that good shall fall

⁠At last—far off—at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

 

So runs my dream: but what am I?

⁠An infant crying in the night:

⁠An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Every Reader's Browning

  

     This is the sixteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     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. 

     Though poems by Browning are easily available online, I have appended the few I discuss that are not found in the text.

 

      Robert Browning was probably the chief contender with Alfred, Lord Tennyson for leading Victorian poet.  While Tennyson’s mastery of sound and his willing acceptance of the role of English national poet, often repeating received ideas, brought him immense prestige, Browning developed along a more idiosyncratic path to reach a comparable level of influence.  A Marxist-minded critic of the old school might, without going far wrong, suggest that the nobleman who held the laureateship was the choice of the old order and that Browning, whose political views were decidedly progressive, represented the more enlightened portion of the bourgeoisie.  

     Neither has fared well in popular taste in the years since though each has yet his devotees.  Tennyson’s influence was prolonged by his use in school curriculums until a generation or so ago.  Many of us can recall making our way through Idylls of the King and “In Memoriam.”  Meanwhile, except for a few popular anthology pieces, Browning has fallen into deeper obscurity, due in part to his fondness for long narrative poems of a sort rare today.  Most of the lengthy twentieth-century poems (The Cantos, Paterson, A) are bricolage, pasting together this and that and are in general read only by the literati, whereas Browning wrote what amounted to popular novels in verse beginning with Pauline and Paracelsus, and continuing through Sordello and The Ring and the Book.   

    Perhaps the easiest avenue of approach to Browning is to look at a poem that was once a parlor favorite, read aloud in middle class homes, and then studied in schools, before falling into neglect, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”  The basis for the poem’s popularity is clear.  Its appeal is largely on its surface, in the jangling rhymes and the insistent beat of anapestic horse-hooves.  The poem’s dominant effect is in its sound which recalls the pleasures of nursery rhymes, and perhaps for some present-day readers, early experiences with Noyes’ “The Highwayman” or the likes of Vachel Lindsay and Robert Service.  In such a poem the reader is entitled to forget about meaning. 

     Indeed, there is little to grasp beyond the music of the verse.  The poem lacks the nationalistic motive of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which shares its thumping tetrameters.  Browning noted that he had had no historic event in mind (which has not stopped scholars from making suggestions).  The speaker is characterized only by his energetic and dutiful riding; even in the triumphant conclusion he steps aside to yield the spotlight to Roland, the faithful horse.  Likewise, the other riders, Dirk and Joris, are without specific qualities.  Their progress is marked by the names of towns which, while they make a plausible route for the reader who chooses to investigate, are not described at all.   The action proceeds by couplets with virtually no enjambement (when one line syntactically flows into the next).  Browning’s stanza divisions seem artificial and unnecessary.  One need only sit back and enjoy the ride, reading aloud if possible, even alone in a room.  Here is one part of the foundation of poetry: the melodies of words, beautiful for their own sake. 

     Such sound effects govern also Browning’s retelling of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” likely to be familiar to American readers, even those who are unaware of the author’s name.    

 

      Rats!

They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,

   And bit the babies in the cradles,

And eat the cheeses out of the vats,

   And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women's chats

      By drowning their speaking

      With shrieking and squeaking

In fifty different sharps and flats.

 

These lines are not only musical; they also include concrete detail to fully create the scene while ending in a witty final line.  This sounds like a song from a Broadway show, but the cleverness of “light verse” has lost respect these days and barely survives in the literary scene. 

     The form most closely identified with Browning is the dramatic monologue.  A persona, often historical, but always clearly distinguished from the author, speaks.  The form is suited to oral performance and allows for as much subtle and complex characterization as a first-person short story.  Browning’s most popular poem of this sort is “My Last Duchess.”  The tone is altogether different from “How They Brought the Good News.”  Browning uses couplets here as well, but rather than the more rapid tetrameters, he lengthens the line a foot into longer, more thoughtful pentameters, often enjambed to create a tone of thoughtful musing.

     Much like a dramatic speech in a play or conversation in a short story in verse, Browning’s Duke of Ferrara is characterized by his own words.  The language situates the reader in the exotic environment of Renaissance Italy, celebrated for artistic achievement but also the scene of murderous intrigues.  While showing his home to a relation of his new fiancée, the duke’s arrogance emerges unmistakably and the reader (and perhaps the new in-law) realizes that he killed his “last duchess.”  With rich irony, the duke describes how, despite his condescension in making her the “gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name,” she persisted in expressing “a heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,” exciting his proud jealousy.  The experience of reading the poem consists in the reader’s catching one hint after another of the speaker’s narcissism and his violent potential and thrilling with the mounting implications of danger (similar perhaps to the pleasure of watching an Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show).

      The Ring and the Book, on the other hand, at some twenty thousand lines, more resembles a Masterpiece Theater series, and we may imagine Browning’s admirers binge-reading another sensational Italian Renaissance story.  His expansive retelling from multiple points of view (a technique used by a good many Victorian novelists – familiar examples include Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) -- is primarily a murder mystery, but, at the conclusion, he reflects on the unique power of art.  

  

So, British Public, who may like me yet,

(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence

Of many which whatever lives should teach:

This lesson, that our human speech is naught,

Our human testimony false, our fame

And human estimation words and wind.

Why take the artistic way to prove so much?

Because, it is the glory and good of Art,

That Art remains the one way possible

Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.

How look a brother in the face and say

“Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind,

“Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length,

“And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”

Say this as silverly as tongue can troll—

The anger of the man may be endured,

The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him

Are not so bad to bear—but here’s the plague

That all this trouble comes of telling truth,

Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,

Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,

Nor recognisable by whom it left—

While falsehood would have done the work of truth.

But Art, —wherein man nowise speaks to men,

Only to mankind, — Art may tell a truth

Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,

Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.

So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,

Beyond mere imagery on the wall, —

So, note by note, bring music from your mind,

Deeper than ever the Andante dived, —

So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,

Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

                             (The Ring and the Book 831-863) 

 

     For Browning art was the means to intersubjectivity, a verbal technology that can accurately reflect individual vision while making one mind accessible to others.  Browning had been attacked for obscurity, leading him to write to a friend that while “I never designedly tried to puzzle people,” he also “never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man.”  Here he considers the likely response to teaching the “British Public” a “lesson, that our human speech is naught,/ Our human testimony false, our fame/ And human estimation words and wind.”  Thus he uses words to demonstrate that words are inherently and necessarily misleading, and his words are sufficiently artful that the reader accepts a proposition that might be rejected if stated as an outright claim.  Though Browning thinks he possesses the truth, in order to pass it on, he must disguise it, and working “obliquely,” reach a reader who would never be otherwise receptive. 

     The poet never doubts that he has access to a reality “Deeper than ever the Andante dived” with the power not only to bring the reader beauty (“suffice the eye”) but also truth (“save the soul beside”).  Many of his readers came to agree, and Browning did live to enjoy the reputation of a sage.  In his later years, Browning was considered an important thinker as well as a great poet.  In his own lifetime the Browning Society of London was organized to study and discuss his work and within twenty years, hundreds of such groups were meeting.

     Many even of those who do not read poetry have heard of Browning’s relationship to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as a great love story, and, unlike many literary men, he was, by all appearances, both passionate and monogamous.   Her sonnets (such as “How do I love thee?/ Let me count the ways.”) seem likewise to be that rare sort of love poem that celebrates marital joy.  Many have taken the opening words in her husband’s “Rabbi ben Ezra” -- “Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be”) – in the same way.  Though Browning is best known for long narrative poems, for dramatic monologues, and the quality of his thought, he was sometimes moved by a pure lyric impulse inspired by love.

 

            Meeting at Night

 

I

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

 

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

      The darkness heightens the sense of intimacy as the speaker crosses a living ocean where waves are “fiery ringlets” to an imagination lit by the expectation of love.  The reader need hardly to be inclined to Freudian analysis to find the details suggestive as the boat’s prow pushes on through water and sand on the way over a “warm sea-scented beach” to an erotic encounter.  The actual encounter is suggested by vivid yet oblique detail: a tap, a scratch, a match, a low voice, our greatest pleasures are represented implicit in by these things more powerfully than by a direct description of love-making.  After these indirections, the concluding line has all the more power with its simple and straightforward celebration.

     Robert Browning may remind the modern reader of the central role poets held not so long ago in English-speaking society.  For millions Browning was an entertainer, the author of best-sellers which people read aloud in small gatherings for their amusement and which were widely discussed in the popular press.  Like grand opera and great novels but also like street ballads, tv mini-series, and country music, his works concerned sex and violence, sometimes presented almost luridly.  Yet his readers also looked to him for wisdom, and the fruits of his thought were considered to be authenticated by his poetic skill, as though a writer is necessarily expert in any topic other than writing.  Poets do not generally occupy the foreground of cultural life in today’s America, but, while reading Browning’s work, one may play being a Victorian and discover if a poet may in the twenty-first century be yet at once a guru, a source of wisdom, and, at the same time, an entertainment, a pleasing way of passing the time.

     While some of Browning’s works are ponderously swollen and his syntax is at times tangled, in many of his well-known poems he is perfectly accessible and will strike even a modern as thoughtful and talented.  Though the popular stereotype depicts “the Victorian Age” as pompous and moralistic, a familiarity with Browning can usefully complicate the picture.  As a poet at a time when works of poetry were consumed by large general audiences, he was a star in a way impossible today. 

  

 Pied Piper

 

I

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

‘Good speed!'’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

 

II

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;

I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,

Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.

 

III

'Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near

Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;

At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;

At Düffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be;

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,

So, Joris broke silence with, ‘Yet there is time!'’

 

IV

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,

And against him the cattle stood black every one,

To stare through the mist at us galloping past,

And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,

With resolute shoulders, each hutting away

The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray:

 

V

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back

For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;

And one eye's black intelligence, - ever that glance

O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!

And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon

His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on.

 

VI

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, ‘Stay spur!

Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her,

We'll remember at Aix’ - for one heard the quick wheeze

Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,

And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.

 

VII

So, we were left galloping, Joris and I,

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,

'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;

Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,

And ‘Gallop,’ gasped Joris, ‘for Aix is in sight!’

 

VIII

‘How they'll greet us!’ - and all in a moment his roan

Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight

Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,

With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,

And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim.

 

IX

Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,

Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,

Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;

Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,

Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.

 

X

And all I remember is - friends flocking round

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground;

And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,

As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,

Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)

Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.

 

 

My Last Duchess (originally titled “Italy”)

 Ferrara

 

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Every Reader's Hopkins

This is the seventh in my series meant to introduce or reintroduce major poets through presenting a few of their best-known works with some details of their lives but without footnotes.


     Much poetry today in the USA is written in vernacular conversational American English. Recoiling with horror from rhetoric which had long been the science of the artful use of language, writers seek to sound like the guy next door. Those who employ highly stylized, “artificial” language are viewed with suspicion, though more thoroughly dehumanized word collections are acceptable in avant-garde contexts. Yet poetry has always been, among other things, about beautiful, melodious language, artfully distinguished from everyday usage. And few writers could construct verbal music like Gerard Manley Hopkins. His sprung rhythm worked quite wonderfully for him (though imitators fail) and his orthodox Catholicism glitters with sufficient mysticism to make it not just universal but exciting.
     Born to an affluent, educated, and pious High Church Anglican family, Hopkins admired the pre-Raphaelites and studied art. Yet spirituality claimed always his first allegiance. Even in secondary school he pursued experiments in asceticism, on one occasion consuming no drink until he collapsed. While a classics student at Oxford he met Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism, eventually becoming a Jesuit.
     Acceptance of Roman Catholic orthodoxy did not bring him resolution and the study of Ignatian discernment left him still conflicted. His poetry reflects his lifelong ambivalence, passionately embracing life yet feeling that self-denial is inherently superior. This contradiction led him to give up poetry for Lent, to destroy much of his poetry when he was ordained (declaring that he meant to write no more except by order of his superiors, and to ask that his largely unpublished body of work be burned after his death. The contradiction between his delight in the world and his aspiration to leave the physical behind reached crisis in his homosexuality, most clearly expressed in his youthful infatuation with Digby Dolben whom he had met at Eton.
     One concept through which Hopkins sought to harmonize his joyful celebration of the creation with his taste for self-denial was “inscape,” a notion he derived from Duns Scotus' haecceity or “thisness.” Hopkins would have agreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas whose Christ says “Split the stick and I am there” (not to mention Zen practitioners and others to whom a gaze sufficiently deep into any object will lead to the divine).
     In “Pied Beauty,” a shortened (or curtal) sonnet, Hopkins focuses not on the unity but the variety in which he finds the numinous. His afflatus carries the reader with ease through his idiosyncratic syntax and insistent alliteration.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

     Yet his sense of the presence of the divine did not bring Hopkins serenity. Toward the end of his rather short life, he suffered from ill health, his duties that seemed sometimes onerous, and he found himself living in a sort of exile in Dublin. Combined with his lifelong depressive tendency and the fierce inner conflicts in which it manifested, he experienced what since St. John of the Cross has been called “the dark night of the soul.” His “terrible sonnets” or “sonnets of desolation,” dramatize the suffering he felt at his failure to connect with God. He tastes the mood of the damned and confesses the “selfyeast” of original sin. The deity is “away;” his worst “scourge” is simply “to be.”

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.


     Hopkins was doubtless strikingly original, but few today feel as his first editor Robert Bridges did, a need to apologize for the poet’s “Oddity” and “Obscurity.” One need not enter into Hopkin’s elaborately devised and even more meticulously executed ideas on meter, derived in part from his knowledge of Old English and Classical poets, to relish his lines as pure sensual experiences. Stylistically unique they may remain, but their abstruseness generally vanishes with reading out loud while their music is thereby intensified.
     The accent marks in “Spring and Fall” might seem mannered and recherché at first, but they lead the read to such melody that their role is clear to most readers.


Spring and Fall
to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

     Though this poem has little of the wondrously inventive descriptive imagery of “Pied Beauty” (apart from “wanwood leafmeal”), it has instead the eloquent elegance and simple profundity of sentiments like this passionate couplet:

Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder.

     And the concluding two lines are sufficiently pregnant that Christianity itself might be largely reconstructed as a commentary. Though Hopkins himself may have felt self-indulgent in his art and insufficiently devout in his spiritual practice, to most readers his work is profoundly satisfying in both its aesthetics and religion. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his racking himself with doubt, his work is outstanding in conveying the jouissance of both the pure beauty of sound and the mystical celebration of the world.

The Problem with Swinburne

     Often the critic can best provide new insight by going contrary to accepted ideas. The Pre-Raphaelites on Renaissance art, Eliot on the Metaphysicals, a variety of modern artists on the primitive each sought to bring new appreciation to undervalued art. Yet naturally quite often the accepted view seems just, and the critic can do no more than offer a muted assent to the common opinions of others. After making my way through the luxurious yet trackless forest of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, I find myself able only to add my bit to the largely negative verdicts of those who preceded me. Perhaps I can provoke a spirited and revealing response from a devotee of the poet.
     Why does the reader of Swinburne's poetry feel a sensation like treading water in a choppy sea? Though impressed with his prosodic virtuosity and his deep classicism, I must agree with all those who have little patience while actually reading him. It is true that he is repetitive and super-literary. His lexicon, though rich in archaic and obscure allusive words, is predominantly composed of general terms: fruit, say, or sea, or heart. Often the narrative, and more often the syntax is confused, dizzied, or intoxicated. Though he is passionate to a fault, his reader does not feel that he is directly describing anything in his lived experience; rather, he constructs a literary code corresponding to his own notoriously stormy consciousness. He creates a spectacle, usually static, which conveys a significant tone. It is for this reason that he resurrected the masque and the mystery play and was prone to symbolism, more often in the old allegorical style than in the underdetermined mode of the most modern French writers of his day.
     He was the metrical virtuoso of his era (after him Auden, but after Auden who?). His mastery of verbal music -- not just meters, but rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other musical patterns -- led Tennyson to say that he was "a reed through which all things blow into music." His rushing anapests, rarely used in recent times in serious poetry, impel the reader forward into the next whirlpool and then to the next. It is true that Swinburne's long poems, and most of them are more or less long, could be either half their length or twice their length with neither loss nor gain. He is a latter day devotee of a sort of literary generosity (or intemperance) for which modern readers have little patience but which medieval critic might have admired as amplificatio or macrologia.
     He has a single theme: the enigma of pleasure/pain, love/aggression, virtue/sin, and, suspicious though readers may be of biographical readings, one is surely correct in linking this obsessive preoccupation with Swinburne's thoroughly kinky sexuality. Whereas the first two polarities retain their significance for contemporary readers, the last -- "virtue/sin" -- has altered in a way that makes Swinburne's agonizing semi-Satanic paganism seem not only old-fashioned, but misleading as well. Even Baudelaire can be annoying with his highly dramatized flirtations with the dark side, and, in the case of someone like Aleister Crowley, the pose becomes unendurable.
     His verse is a spectacle which can hardly bear close examination. Swinburne might have been speaking of his entire oeuvre when he justly commented on his “Ode to Gautier” in an 1872 letter to Lord Morley, noting the danger of “diffuseness and flaccidity” and “a tendency to the dulcet and luscious form of verbosity which has to be guarded against, lest the poem lose its foothold and be swept off its legs, sense and all, down a flood of effeminate and monotonous music, or lost and split in a maze of what I call draggle-tailed melody.” My own specific notes can add nothing and have a depressing sameness resembling that of their source. Swinburne will have to await another champion.