Every Reader's Byron

 

This is the fourteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

 

 

     Byron was doubtless the best-known poet of his age, a celebrity widely admired and excoriated for his life and opinions as well as for his work.  The young aristocrat had very much the reputation of a bad boy rock star in which extravagant adulation for his work mixed with attacks on his morals and his lack of religion.  His detractors had plenty to criticize.  Byron seems to have felt lustful toward most anything on two legs: women, men, other people’s lovers, his own half-sister, he pursued them all.  A habitual critic of organized religion, he expressed sentiments that sound pantheistic at times, while more often savoring of the intellectual Deism common in his day.  Still, the poet remained haunted by concepts of original sin and predestination that he had imbibed when young. 

     Byron wrote a great deal.  The 1833 collected works amounted to seventeen volumes.  Today, apart from a handful of brief love lyrics, his work is neglected.  In his day not only did poetry sell well, readers enjoyed long verse narratives and closet dramas as much as they did novels.  Byron wrote a good many such substantial pieces.  The defiant, rebellious antiheroes of works like Cain and Manfred which once seemed exciting and outrageous still find readers who value what they believe they see of their author in them.  Though Byron’s version of Don Juan is hilarious, dazzling with wit and verbal inventiveness, a work more liable to the charge of frivolity than that of pedantry, most of its readers are Ph. D. candidates.    

     One of the most familiar of the short and rather conventional love poems popular in Byron‘s day and now is “She Walks in Beauty” the enduring appeal of which is suggested by the fact that a sung version is included in Marianne Faithfull’s forthcoming album.

She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to the tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One ray the more, one shade the less Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o'er her face, Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and o'er that brow So soft, so calm yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow But tell of days in goodness spent A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.

    

     Using a folksy, informal iambic tetrameter line and a reassuring ababab rhyme scheme, Byron opens with a clever and memorable statement, the stronger for its simplicity and so slightly odd that the reader is charmed without knowing just why.  The lady is not said to be beautiful; rather she “walks in beauty,” somewhat like the glow of pure excellence of a divine apparition in Homer or a Victorian spiritualist’s aura. 

     While using a simple and comfortable form, Byron still teases conventional expectations.  The woman he praises does not, as in earlier poets, possess a dazzling radiance, so bright and sunlike as to cause the other stars to vanish.  The poet is an aesthete and appreciates subtlety.  His ideal represents a perfect chiaroscuro, mixing darkness and light in exquisitely designed proportions, far superior to the glare of “gaudy” daytime. 

     The conceit is well-accommodated to his subject as she, contrary to some narrow notions of British beauty, is dark-haired, with “raven tress.”  He is naturally moved to such ingenuity by her “nameless grace,” which, being ineffable, requires a figure of speech.  With a kind of Platonic afflatus at the end of the second stanza, he generalizes her perfect physical beauty into moral excellence.  She is exceedingly “pure,” a literal desideratum for females, all the more perhaps when their masculine admirers feel themselves somewhat corrupt. 

     The final stanza reinforces the point.  Her smile, her “tint,” her very being testify to her virtue, her “days in good ness spent.”  With an immaculate conscience, she must be “at peace with all below” because she possesses “a heart whose love is innocent.”  Surely Byron is here projecting a self-portrait in negative.  The author was, the reader knows, vulnerable to attacks on his sexual morality and very likely experienced mental turmoil arising from a less than innocent love.  He expresses here a dream of an uplifting affection through which one might hope to improve oneself.  The lady in question, biographers tell us, was his cousin’s wife Anne Beatrix Wilmot, and she may have been a woman he did not try to seduce. 

     Like other popular poets such as Amy Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg, Byron was known as much for his public persona as for his writing.  After the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet said, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."  Readers celebrated Byron as a poet who spoke his heart’s truth directly and, as the poem described a journey which in part resembled Byron’s recent travels, most conflated the author and his hero.  Both were considered dissolute, guilty, passionate, and rebellious, and dangerously beautiful.  The opening stanzas offer not the best poetry on the work, but the clearest portrait of the “Byronic hero.” 

     The poem was written in the elaborate Spenserian form using the archaic language that had been obsolete even for Spenser and had been favored by eighteenth century writers.  In his peculiar archaizing language though with a very modern irony he notes that Harold “ne in virtue's ways did take delight,” but was rather “sore given to revel and ungodly glee.”  His family, though noble had, like Byron’s own, something of a bad reputation.  His dissipation leads, however, to world-weariness.

  

Worse than adversity the Childe befell;

He felt the fulness of satiety:

Then loathed he in his native land to dwell,

Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.

 

 

Though Harold “through Sin's long labyrinth had run,” he feels nonetheless an honorable attachment toward a woman too pure for him.   Since their marriage is impossible due to his inconstancy, he considers “calm domestic peace” to be unavailable to such as him, causing him to settle for “vulgar bliss” in more common arms.

     Though libertine, he feels so sensitively the loss of this ideal wife that he finds himself “sore sick at heart” to the point of suicidal ideation.  

 

 

And from his native land resolv'd to go,

And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;

With pleasure drugg'd, he almost long'd for woe,

And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

  

     Byron’s own case was but little different.  He had several years earlier taken the Grand Tour of Europe customary for upper class youth but in 1816, driven into a sort of exile by a combination of adventurous restless instability and public disapproval of his morals following a scandalous divorce, ending with his death in Greece where he had joined the revolt against the Ottoman overlords.  The poem abounds in travelogue details and political reflections, but occasionally, as in the following three stanzas, pauses for philosophic reflection.

  

   CLXXVIII.

   There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

CLXXIX.

   Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
   Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
   Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
   Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain
   The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
   A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
   When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
   He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

CLXXX.

   His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields
   Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise
   And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
   For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
   Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
   And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
   And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
   His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.

                                                           Canto the Second, CLXXIX-CLXXXI

 

     Harold and his writer and his reader here contemplate the void, figured in nature and most emphatically in  the ocean.  While recognizing the indifference of the cosmos, imagining death as a shipwreck and drowning at sea, he calls out an affirmation: “Roll on!”  The spirit as in ancient tragedy has its victory not in turning suffering aside, but in maintaining one’s composure in accepting it.  Human life is momentary before each sinks to the ocean depths “with a bubbling groan.”  We end all alike “without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”  This is looking at the terms of life straight on, a kind of early nineteenth century Existentialism, oddly thrilling to the poem’s original audience.

     The tone of Don Juan, a wonderful poem to read aloud, is clear at the start.  Byron satirically dedicated the poem to Robert Southey, the same Poet Laureate Lewis Carroll was later to ridicule.

  

 III

You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,

       At being disappointed in your wish

To supersede all warblers here below,

       And be the only Blackbird in the dish;

And then you overstrain yourself, or so,

       And tumble downward like the flying fish

Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,

And fall, for lack of moisture quite a-dry, Bob!

 

 A mischievously disrespectful portrait even for those unfamiliar with the schoolboy slang “dry bob.”  While Southey sought the high tone and gravitas that won him the Laureateship but which are little admired today, Byron deflated him with a modern-sounding counter-cultural ridicule. 

         Don Juan’s education was, as for most upper-class Europeans, thoroughly Classical.

 

41

His classic studies made a little puzzle,

   Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,

Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,

   But never put on pantaloons or bodices;

His reverend tutors had at times a tussle,

   And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,

Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,

For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.

  42

Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him,

   Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample,

Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,

   I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example,

Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn

   Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample:

But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one

Beginning with 'Formosum Pastor Corydon.'

     Here a footnote is useful.  Vergil’s Eclogue II begins Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim  (Corydon, the shepherd, was aflame for the fair Alexis), a line not only erotic but homoerotic.  The fun of the passage is Byron’s quite justified irony in pointing out that Classical literature, given its privileged position in the education of the English ruling class (who would have known Vergil’s poem), was considerably less moralistic than the Established Church of the poet’s day.  The very literature that people regarded as uplifting, civilizing, and refined in fact openly promoted sexual pleasures of a shocking variety.  (I recall the old Loeb Library editions of Greek poetry with facing English translations.  When the content required censorship, the English would become Latin, as though one who could adequately read the Latin was probably highly enough educated to be trusted in reading a smutty joke.)

     Another short piece might be described not as a love poem, but as an anti-love poem.  It was originally contained in a letter to Thomas Moore which describes the occasion of its writing. 

 

 

At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival--that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard,” though I have just turned the corner of twenty-nine.

 

Whether from world-weariness, ennui, or a recurring hangover, the poet is not inclined to carouse.   His body has been abused by intemperance in both drink and sex during Carnival; he must rest. 

 

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

 

      Yet he did not remain an “invalid” long.  Returning to the bottle and the delights of love, he was an athlete of hedonism who could not slow down until he burned himself out.  His affairs in Europe would fill a soap opera.  People magazine would have covered him extensively.  Greece still remembers his gallant participation in their war for independence.  Strikingly modern in his adversarial relation to social propriety, he confronted the absurdity of life with realism and high spirits, which would have counted for little except that, in addition, he was one of the best versifiers of the Romantics.

Frances Trollope: The Triumph of Snobbery

 

 

I used the 1949 Borzoi edition edited by Donald Smalley with excellent introduction, notes, and index.  How nice to see such a volume from a trade publisher!  Parenthetical notes provide page references to this edition, some of these providing the source for several successive quotations.  For the convenience of those with other editions, I append a list of the page numbers cited in parentheses matched to the chapters in which each quotation may be found.

 

     Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) fed British curiosity about the United States.  Her book sold well, ameliorating for a time her chronic financial straits.  She shared with her predecessor Capt. Basil Hall who had published Travels in North America in 1829 and her follower Capt. Frederick Marryat whose Diary in America appeared in 1839 a satirical view, mingling more or less informative descriptions with lampoons of American behavior calculated to flatter Old World readers.    

     Trollope deployed modesty tropes to deny her ambition to do anything beyond a journalistic recording what was before her eyes.  How could a lady like herself be expected to critique economics or even to write a professionally florid rhetoric?  Though this pose is faux naïf considering her constant wry irony and arch commentary, she did sketch recognizable features of American life which have little changed since her day. 

     She repeatedly stresses Americans’ obsession with money, noting how pursuit of wealth is the universal goal and the sole index of success.  She showily deplores this single-minded fascination with money which leads naturally to a philistine indifference to the arts.  She readily concedes American “activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculations, handicraft, and enterprise, which promise a profitable pecuniary result.”  An Englishman who had long lived in the United States tells her he never heard an American conversation which did not include the word “DOLLAR” (her capitalization).  “This sordid object,” she goes on, “must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind,” which she proceeds to prove by examples Yankee sharp dealing.  (301)   

     A critic might note that much of the world is likewise chasing after prosperity, but for Mrs. Trollope life in the United States was next to unendurable, though she spent more than three years in this country.  According to her, much of the landscape was literally under a miasma, resulting in chronic “ague and fever.” (33)  Cincinnati in particular she found “far from healthy.” (84)  Walking in woodlands, she finds not beauty but “congeries of leaves that have been rotting since the flood” which “infect the air.” (42)  She describes small farmers as living in barbaric isolation like Polyphemus suffering material want and a total lack of social relations, all of which they accept gladly simply in order to avoid ever saying, “God save the king!” (49-50)  “Never,” she says, has she seen “human nature reduced so low.” (21)

     Whether rural Americans were in fact different from peasants in any part of the world is surely questionable.  However, Trollope did accurately identify two central contradictions at the base of this country: the treatment of native peoples and of Africans and their descendants.  She refers to Indian policy as “base, cruel, and most oppressive,” “treacherous and false almost beyond belief” (221) and denounces the “avarice and intemperance of the white men” in dealing with the aboriginal tribes. (330)

     On the issue of slavery, she had come to America considering this “peculiar institution,” as Calhoun called it,  “essentially wrong,” (186) a sentiment she shared with many of her fellow-countrymen since the United Kingdom had turned from being the greatest engine of the slave trade to its greatest opponent.  Treating people as chattel, she realized, “strikes painfully against every feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity.” (246)  Anti-slavery motifs are prominent as well in her novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836).

     Yet her attitude toward the monstrous institution is ambivalent, consistently muted and often undercut by her own words.  She makes light of her own sentimental sympathy for the first slave she encounters, musing “How very childish does ignorance make us!  and how very ignorant we are upon almost every subject, when hear-say evidence is all we can get!” (9)  Presumably with little experience of the treatment of field workers, she declares that “the condition of domestic slaves . . . does not appear to be bad.” Their owners often give them “much kindly attention.”  Not only are they “tolerably well fed, and decently clothed,” “rarely exposed to the lash, and . . . carefully nursed in sickness,” they receive these benefits in spite of the fact that their mode of living “seems a matter of great indifference to them.” (245) 

     She praises the “sedulous attention” with which underlings look after her in slave states, (185) making a dramatic contrast her experience of free American hired help whom she finds impossible, “poor wretches” tormented as by “a sore, angry, and wakeful pride.”  She concluded that her servant was miserable because she had “heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women, too.” (53-4)

     Thus the root of America’s problems is, for Trollope no mystery.  She traces all of the country’s ills, its deficiencies in the arts and education, its vulgarity, so repulsive to her finer sensibilities, to the democratic form of government.  In her view “common sense” revolts at the “mischievous sophistry,” that “false and futile axiom” “all men are created equal.”  For this fatal national foundation she blames Thomas Jefferson whom she rightly labels a hypocrite for his keeping slaves (and with them engendering children). (71)  His “hollow and unsound” doctrines “would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.” (316)

     However, her political point is misleading.  In fact her fundamental criticism is less political than social and aesthetic, though the causes are mingled since for her Americans’ disagreeable manners arise from their ill-advised system of government. 

     In part of course Trollope’s attitudes are national ones, arising from British pride and suggesting the superiority often claimed for Europe over the young country, reinforced by British rivalries in the Revolution and the War of 1812.  Her argument for a stratified, even a semi-feudal, society is one that many, including some Americans, would have made in her era.  The issue of democratic reform was certainly much discussed in the United Kingdom. The Reform bill of 1832 had expanded the franchise by fifty percent, but, as a net worth of £10 remained a requirement, more than four-fifths of the male population still could not vote, and agitation continued, sometimes violently repressed.   Those favoring more progressive political ideas often looked across the Atlantic, while those defending the status quo found negative examples in the same place. 

     While hers may have seemed the voice of the ordinary respectable Briton, her own class status was more unstable than her readers probably suspected.  The daughter of a clergyman, she had been well-educated and made a middle-class marriage to a barrister, yet she was never wealthy, and, when her husband proved a failure both in his law practice and his attempts to farm some leased property, the family found themselves in serious financial straits.  More than once they were evicted, with sheriff’s agents dragging their belongings to the street.  Following the American sojourn, the Trollopes moved permanently to the Continent to escape debt collectors and imprisonment.

     Frances Trollope soon realized that she would be more likely than her husband to generate a decent income, and her residence in the United States was part of a scheme to launch a business on the Western frontier.  Though the shop did not last long, her book turned out to be her salvation, proving so popular that she was able to continue writing and in  fact to support herself with her pen, eventually publishing something like a hundred volumes and in her later years enjoying a prominent position among the English expatriates in Florence. 

     Frances Trollope, though, disclaimed political theory.  “I am in no way competent to judge the political institutions of America, and, if I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a women, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.”  (47)  Nonetheless, she thought a tour of the United States would be enough to cure any English radical of sedition.  (44)

     With such decidedly anti-democratic attitudes, she seems an unlikely emigrant, but she arrived under the influence of Frances Wright and, less directly, Robert Owen, whose principles were nothing short of radical.  Her horror at the sight of the ramshackle Nashoba Commune (which she had referred to as Miss Wright’s “estate” [14]) arose not from Wright’s egalitarian ideals which entailed utopian socialism, free love, and rejection of Christianity, but the “desolation” (27) and lack of fresh food.  Apart from the expectation of making money by establishing a business on the Western frontier, she had liked the idea that her children could be educated at her friend’s school free of charge.  Though she ridicules Owen and others associated with the New Harmony Commune such as William Maclure and Mme. Fretageot (10) and found even her dear friend Frances Wright in the wilds of America to have nothing whatever in common with “the Miss Wright I had known and admired in London and Paris” (27), she seemed to feel no reservations about casting her lot with them. 

     If her class pride served her poorly in Nashoba where she rebelled against a diet of corn bread and rain water (28), it likewise proved her undoing in Cincinnati.   Without going into the details that biographers have recorded, it is sufficient here to say that she stumbled from one project to another, meaning to earn her living by her taste.  She became involved with the Western Museum, an institution that mixed natural history exhibits with side show attractions, becoming a key figure in designing one of its more popular exhibits, a room-size view of Hell populated by wax figures of the damned.  This show ran for twenty-five years, often the prime support of the Museum.  Another exhibit that appealed to the taste of the town was the “Invisible Girl,” voiced by her son Henry, posing as a spirit who would speak to paying visitors.  Located at the end of a spooky corridor, the “Invisible Girl” supported the Museum for decades. 

     Saying that Cincinnati needed a dome, Trollope invested her family’s limited resources in constructing on Third Street an exotic edifice which included Moorish and Egyptian decoration as well as a dome.  In a city where livestock ran in the streets, e she meant to establish a cultural center with a coffeehouse, an “elegant Saloon” for refreshments, a bar room, an exhibition gallery, and a ballroom, as well as a bazaar for upscale goods.  Perhaps she was not as sharp a trader as she describes Americans as being, but her entrepreneurial effort was unsuccessful, and the establishment closed.  She continued to try to make her artistic judgement marketable.  She staged musical and dramatic events, always thinking that she could be the missionary, bringing fashion and beauty to a benighted region.

     As with others clinging to gentility by their fingertips, for Trollope social forms became exceedingly important.  All she had was her education, her wit, her taste and refinement which she emphasizes at every opportunity.  To her democracy’s worst sin is its ugliness.  Her recoil from her crude surroundings is the sign of her superiority.  Ignoring the brutal lives of English workers at the time, she is horrified at their American cousins.  To her it is the “higher” human wants (45) which cannot be satisfied in the United States due to the people’s “lack of refinement.” (47).   It is civilized leisure that she looks for in vain.  “I never saw people who lived so much without amusement as the Cinncinatians”; it is a “triste little town,” (74) she says, deploying her French as evidence of her own cultivation.   She wonders encounters a German woman who laments, “They do not love music.  Oh no!  and they never amuse themselves, -- no, and their hearts are not warm . . .they have no ease.” (266)  She wonders how, in such a barbaric place, taste might ever be formed.  “How can a correct and polished style, even of speaking, be acquired?” (328)  Alas, she concludes Americans have certainly “not the same besoin of being amused.” (339)

     Her fundamental objections are matters of taste.  She attacks America for its want of “polish” (46) and “chivalry,” “the unbought grace of life.” (257)  Though an American can satisfy animal wants “profusely” and “at a very easy rate,” “there is no charm, no grace.”  “I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.”  (45) 

     With almost shocking ease, she looks past the monstrous historical inequities to conclude that the single most offensive aspect of American life is the men’s “incessant, remorseless” use of chewing tobacco.  (16)  To her the habitual use of this “loathsome herb” has literally deformed the faces of Americans’ lips, lending them a “remarkable peculiarity.” (234)  Adding to the Americans’ grotesque appearance is the sprawling posture in which they dispose themselves over chairs and other furniture, sitting in “the most unseemly attitudes” (226) even in settings where greater gentility might be expected such as the theater or even the Congress. 

     When her fellow passengers on a riverboat are not “gambling and wrangling,” (17) they eat dinner with a “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth with a pocket knife.” (18-19)  She finds her  steamboat accommodations worse than “the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs.” (16)

     Just as the problem with democracy in her view is not so much that it is unworkable or unjust as that it produces ugliness.  Similarly, she is horrified at fundamentalist religious practices, describing with horror, revivals, camp meetings, and prayer sessions in private homes.  She finds the religious enthusiasm he observes in America to be “frightful” (80) and “detestable” (81).  A service makes her “sick with horror” (172).  To her the guarantee of respectability offered by a national church more than compensates for any loss of freedom of conscience.  She simply finds American spirituality to be in poor taste.     

     For a good portion of her career Frances Trollope might have seemed a prisoner of her class identity, stubbornly looking for something in the United States that the country did not offer.  Everywhere she looked, the sights of the Western frontier disgusted her.  She was attracted to a life-style she could often not afford and, while ridiculing the taste of Cincinnatians who could not appreciate true works of art, she nonetheless curated shows of hokey magic and wax figures to try to turn a profit.  Yet her snobbery triumphed in the end.  It was specifically her distaste for the rough raw life she saw around her that made her Domestic Manners of the Americans a best-seller, and launched her on a very productive and sufficiently profitable writing career and landed her eventually where she had always wanted to be, in a fashionable set of her fellow-countrymen in the prestigious and highly artistic city of Florence. 

    

 

 

 

 

The following list identifies the chapter in which each of the cited page numbers is located in the Borzoi edition.

14 II

16 II

17 III

18-19 III

21 III

27 III

33 IV

42 IV

44 V

45 V

46 V

47 V

49-50 V

53-4 VI

71 VII

74 VIII

84 IX

186 XVII

221 XX

226 XX

234 XX

246 XXII

257 XXIII

266 XXV

301 XXVIII

316 XXIX

328 XXIX

330 XXIX

339 XXX

The Appeal of Indeterminacy in the Corpus Christi Carol

 

I append the text of the carol in the form printed in Greene’s anthology A Selection of English Carols.  This is the same version recorded in Richard Hill’s early sixteenth century commonplace book.

  

     Whereas non-aesthetic discourse most often aims at clarity and monosemy, poetry commonly cultivates multiple meanings and, in some cases, glories in obscurity.  Cultivated at times by the Troubadours of trobar clus and the French Symbolists, indeterminate meaning plays a role in all aesthetic texts. In the “Corpus Christi Carol” semantic uncertainty is foregrounded.  R. L. Greene, the editor of the Oxford book of carols noted of it "This carol has been subject to more discussion than any other in the whole canon." [1]  It is hardly necessary to review the scholarly literature to come to this conclusion.  Virtually all who comment on the poem describe it as enigmatic and mysterious, and critics generally make the observation in an appreciative tone.  

     Shorn of allusive associations, the Corpus Christi Carol sketches a melancholy scene portraying types of human suffering.  The chorus, to be sung with each verse, opens with the standard baby-soothing line “lully, lullay” (the source of the word “lullaby”), though no infant is to appear.  Instead the soothing, satisfied sound of the first line is succeeded by a harsh plaint over lost love: “The faucon hath borne my make away.”  The sense of loss and longing is then suddenly transferred to a mysterious tableau: in a hall there is a bed upon which a knight lies bleeding while a woman kneeling at his bedside weeps for him.  It is unclear what relation this pair might have to the persona whose lover had been carried away.  On the poems’ purely emotional register the potential joy of a child evoked in the first line is interrupted, overturned even, by suffering such as love-longing and the pains of mortality both for the dying and for those whom survive.  As such the poem achieves a grand sort of pathos with its elegantly understated yet powerfully suggestive image.  Anyone might be either the suffering knight or the grieving maiden and indeed everyone is both.

     The song, however, concludes with a final couplet which, though it adds what looks like definitive information, in fact only complicates the interpretive challenges of the poem as a whole.  

 

    And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon: 
    Corpus Christi writen theron.

 One might suspect that the explicit Christianity of this conclusion might privilege a reading of the poem as straightforward orthodox piety.  Christ is then figured in the bleeding knight, [2] while the “may” in mourning is Mary.  The nonsense syllables of the chorus “lully, lullay” associate the implied dramatic moment with Christmas (rather than the summertime Corpus Christi) at the outset.  The virgin is rocking the baby Jesus while envisioning the passion with which his life must end.  To some the image signifies not the body of Christ per se but rather the presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread “bleeding” from being dipped in wine.  Of course, the host (derived from hostia = sacrificial victim) is symbolically identical to Christ.

     As though in a palimpsest, behind the Christian images of the song are discernable the patterns of the Fisher King and the Grail Legend, themselves ultimately derived from Celtic mythology.  Meaning has drifted and eroded during the centuries-long transmission of these stories through the adoption of Christianity and the leading actors’ demotion from deities to heroes to supporting actors in a Christian story.  This semantic evolution has caused the Grail theme to acquire a reputation – well-justified in many cases including the Corpus Christi Carol -- for haunting mystery.  The elliptical narrative and the grandly portentous atmosphere of spirituality suggest the aesthetic occult, like Masonic paraphernalia. 

     In R. L. Greene’s ingenious historical interpretation [2] the associations with the Eucharist are the basis for the argument that the carol is a partisan song in which Catherine of Aragon laments the accession of Anne Boleyn and the introduction of the Anglican Church.  Whether this reflects an early sixteenth century understanding is irrelevant to the poem’s reception by most modern readers. 

     The ambiguities are part of the design of the text as it exists today, some the result of the evolution from earlier forms, some as elements of theme, some for style.  The identity of the speaker who has lost a mate is unclear.  Why is the orchard brown?  Why is the knight bleeding?  What is the relation of the knight and the grieving lady?  Many readers have suspected that the final line mentioning Corpus Christi is a late addition aimed at establishing the poem’s orthodoxy.  To what extent does it suggest a Christian antidote to suffering?  And what else might bring an end to the sadness?  How could the speaker regain a lover?  Why does the tense change from past to present continuous with the line “And in that bed ther lith a knight”?

     The effect of this catalogue of questions, which might be might be lengthened almost indefinitely, pointing in a variety of hermeneutic directions, is most prominently to convey a tone of haunting mystery.  As the practice of cults has shown from Pythagoreans and Orphic initiates to Theosophists and present-day adherents of QAnon, the very uncertainty of interpretation enhances a sense of deep if unfathomable significance.   Rather like a grand passage of Beethoven it seems to convey meaning beyond words, but nonetheless of vital importance. 

     The indeterminate meaning has at least one clear implication: there is much we do not know.  If nothing else, the mysterious scene the poem sketches for its hearers represents the ineffable spectacle of that most familiar and unknown of things, everyday reality.  The echoes of Celtic and Christian myth agree in their fundamental paradigm: each presents a convincing picture of a world of suffering familiar to all, embodied in the Fisher King’s wounded father, the bleeding knight and in Christ on the cross.  Each offer as well a solution, figured in Bran’s magic cauldron, the gallantry of Percival and Galahad, the divine person of Jesus, and the eucharistic host in which the god lurks.

     Yet why is the knight suffering?  We know no answer, just as we are baffled by the origin and the meaning of the Holocaust or of our myriad pettier complaints.  What is the outcome for the knight and maid?  For the reader?  Who can say?  A more determinate theme would be a false one.  It is the reader’s own nescience about everyday life reflected on the page and colored with the resonance of the deepest human emotions, given comely form and the pleasing accompaniment of sweet music.  Yet in the end the grace of the poem, the beauty of its melody, seems redemptive, the composed response soothing all souls.  Everyone is the infant being lulled to rest, “lully, lullay.”  If we have nothing else, we have yet beauty.  Here is the source of the song’s charm. 

 

1.     1.  Richard Greene, editor, A Selection of English Carols, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, 230.  Significant variations including additions occur in later versions, including the addition of a thorn at the foot of the bed and a hound lapping the C.  Benjamin Britten’s setting is often featured in holiday concerts.

2.      2.  See R. L. Greene, “The Meaning of the Corpus Christi Carol,” Medium Aevum 29 (1960): 10–21.

3.      3.  Christ is often depicted as a knight in medieval art and literature, in, for instance, the Ancrene Riwle, William Herebert, and Piers Ploughman.  Ephesians 6:13-16 describes the arming of God’s soldier.

 

 

 Lully, lullay, lully, lullay,
The faucon hath borne my make away.
 
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
 
In that orchard ther was an hall
That was hanged with purple and pall.
 
And in that hall there was a bed:
It was hanged with gold so red.
 
And in that bed ther lith a knight,
His woundes bleeding by day and night.
 
By that beddes side ther kneeleth a may,
And she weepeth both night and day.
 
And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon:
Corpus Christi writen theron.

Poems from Planetary Motions

  

 I post primarily prose here, but this month I mark the publication of Planetary Motions by offering a poem from each of the book’s sections along with a few brief and, I trust, superfluous, comments.  For further information, see the listing on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Motions-William-Seaton/dp/B08MS5KNJB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ASZSKJYZS5VG&dchild=1&keywords=planetary+motions&qid=1606054981&sprefix=planetary+mo%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1

 

 

• 1.      Other Scenes

 

 

                        Dia de los Muertos

          On Dia de los Muertos some here choose

          to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,

          and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill

          mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.

          Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt

          and dares the other men to come and fight.

          In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.

          Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.

          Their glance tells me there's nothing more to say.

 

 

This is Guatemala where Gallo is best-known as a beer (not wine) brand.  The nervous scroungy free-running dogs of developing countries well suggest the tone of life in poor neighborhoods.  In this setting the universal theme of mortality is colored by the traveler’s knowledge of pre-Columbian human sacrifice, brutal colonialism, and the barbaric violence of decades-long civil unrest. 

 

 

 

• 2.      Divagations

 

 

I hurtle through the light and dark by trees

that reach and strive indifferent to my course,

by rocks with memories back before the flood,

each facet marking some old painful break,

eruption, gash, reshuffle. Read there, see

tomorrow far more live and clear

than ever sortilege, astrology,

or hepatoscopy could claim: beat grass

and withered weeds, a sudden bird, and wind

that envies leaves of shrubs and, homeless, sighs. 

 

 

I meant to suggest that the most common sights are surely more beautiful, remarkable, and significant than divination or magic.  The scene before the eyes is always a gaze at the morphing flow of phenomena.  Sometimes even the wise wind sounds sad.

 

 

 

• 3.      Appetites

 

Feast

 

O be for me an oyster raw,

unfathomable: inside the shell

a lopped but answering tongue,

and be for me an onion soup,

so thick and savory-sweet.

O be for me a leg of lamb,

as rich and strong as scrubby hills,

and be for me a Brussels sprout,

compact and layered like a late quartet.

O surely you’re my bread

and fit me like inhaled air.

Do be for me tonight a custard flan

so melting to the tongue

               with caramel atop

it brings an end to words.

 

 

Or as Bessie Smith sang, “Give me lots of candy, honey, love is grand.”

 

 

• 4.      Songs

 

 

Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp

through the golden filigree of printemps.

Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light

that ravish the soul at the very first sight,

confusing their victims, occluding their might.

Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.

These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune

of garnet greens and things unseen,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.

 

 

My goal in these songs is to turn the focus from content to the melody of words, a quality often neglected in contemporary poetry.  I think of Keats describing Negative Capability, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  In another letter he spoke of “the 'burden of the Mystery.'”  Just listen; no understanding needed.

 

 

 

• 5.      Momento Mori

 

 

Dead trees in the forked arms

of their fellows that followed,

knot-eyes wide with utter unbelief

like comrades in war unable

to believe their trench-mates gone.

The forest floor has generations

layered like old Troy, but back and back

to time’s get-go and each supports

the next till in the ultimate sub-basement

the elevator operator lifts one wry eye,

the door slides, the secret’s out

and all distinctions fade.

Then everything relaxes, all lets go,

no longer any gap from one to one,

the manic dance may pause --

so brief! -- between exhale/inhale,

before time’s arrow like

some god of locomotives,

blows a lonely whistle

and speeds on down the line

as though the terminus

               must hold that counter

where one can sit

               and ask one’s heart’s desire --

so well worth racing toward!

 

 

In what I like to think is a reinforcement of theme, several of the images here are fading from the general imagination.  The locomotive had more powerful associations in the era of steam, and elevator operators are now rare birds, building a muted strain of nostalgia into the story. 

 

 

• 6.      Lama Swine Toil

 

 

The Lama’s Parable of the Not-OK Corral              

              

He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town

on the far frontier of metaphysics.

His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.

The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest

received ideas.

The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise

suggestions,

but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.

At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was his

enemy,

his brother, his mirror-image.

(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street

at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,

her foot like his poised seeking the next step,

and neither could help it at all.)

The sweat dripped down his cheek.

The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,

leaning from second-story windows,

and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,

covered him from every angle.

The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons

when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes in

1969. 

Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the cosmos, deep

and unmistakable,

“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you

covered.”

And he knew the jig was finally up.

 

 

 

Another apocalyptic anticipation like the last, here employing the “Old West” set that once proved hospitable to many of this country’s myths, a redeemed Spahn Movie Ranch of the mind, maybe, artificial, playful and beneficent. 

 

 

• 7.      Translations

 

 

Horace, Odes I, 11

 

Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know

what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.

Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough

it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years

or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea

come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;

don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time

runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.

 

It is almost the last shred of the once-sizable fund of Horatian maxims that all educated European people used to carry about – carpe diem.  Ecclesiastes said the same.  Horace is one of the greatest of poets, though I fear he loses a very great deal in translation.