The Sweetness of First Fruits

 

    In April the crocuses appear early, wandering further into the lawn.  Before long they will be rivaled by multi-colored hyacinths and trumpeting daffodils, and I know that soon the pear and apple trees will be spreading petals around the neighborhood in their extravagant springtime display of reproductive energies.  Every year these early manifestations of growth and warmth bring a particular delight,  precious and irreplaceable by the later pleasures of languorous dog days and then fruition’s fulfilment.  We feel a remnant yet of those old regreenings of the world that were greeted with such joy by the medieval poets after suffering the discomfort and privations of winter.    

     First fruits have always held an appeal.  Babies have a charm and a beauty of a sort quite different from that of later life, and, even among fair-minded parents, the first child may retain a special status unavailable to younger siblings.

     For that reason first children have often been considered the most effective offering to deity.  Cain brought “the firstlings of his flock” while Abel brought his grain, and, though the Lord seems to have preferred the younger brother in that primordial sacrifice, blood sacrifices were regularly conducted by the ancient Hebrew-speaking people.  Isaac was a first son with Sarah, and the story of his binding surely implies not only the use of animal offerings but also an earlier practice of human sacrifice.  In later times the “dedication to God” of first-born sons came to mean priesthood (until the establishment of the role of the Levites) though the first-born livestock continued to be ritually killed.  Jehovah did not entirely lose a taste for “first-born sons,” however.  As it happens, I write during Passover, a holiday that celebrates the magical slaughter of the elder sons of the Egyptians and the contrasting survival of the Israelite children.   

     Zeus-worshipping Greeks had similar customs.  In a striking parallel to the story of Abraham, Agamemnon’s first-born daughter Iphigenia was to be sacrificed until, in some versions of the myth, she is replaced by a deer.  The first reaping of wheat and barley made the customary sacrifice to Demeter and Persephone in ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries.  Celebrants at the Thargelia in honor of Apollo and Artemis offered the first loaves after the threshing, though the festival had earlier involved human sacrifice,.  The Christian Greek-speaking authors of the New Testament used the same term as their pagan kin to denote a sacrifice of first fruits (ἀπαρχή) as well as using the word in a figurative sense, speaking for instance of early Greek converts as “Achaia’s first fruits.” 

     The medieval poems celebrating winter’s end often turn then to thoughts of love, and for many people a first love, though usually supplanted, is never replaced.  For them an initial erotic experience is sufficiently momentous that no subsequent love, however profound, can compare.  Quite commonly, an intense flame burns before the altar of that first love though it may be in an obscure side-chapel of the lover’s psyche, unknown perhaps to friends or spouse. 

     In fact, we become dulled to all experience over time.  A toddler will gape open-mouthed at scenes that have become all-but-invisible through familiarity to their elders.  The first bite of a radish, lick of a dog, the epic of an insect creeping along the ground, any sensation can inspire wonder and delight in a fresh and receptive consciousness.  Even during a single meal the first bite of any dish – roasted lamb, seafood risotto, or chocolate mousse – inevitably brings more pleasure than any subsequent taste. 

     Later, one must reach further afield to recapture similarly affecting experiences.  Travel can make one once again a child with no obligation beyond keeping eyes and ears open, relishing the moment.  If Europe comes to seem less exciting, the traveler may move on to North Africa, then Asia, then the wilds of the upper Amazon. 

     As with travel, so with literature.  To be sure, rereading a text has unique rewards as well, but a first encounter with, say, Midsummer Night’s Dream or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” can, even if only partially digested, be intoxicating.  The same principle seems operative for writers as well as readers.  The first exemplars of a fresh tradition often exhibit a power and energy that fades even as later writers develop more sophisticated and perfect variations.  The primordial power of Gilgamesh, set down not so long after the dawn of writing, the melodies of the archaic Greek poets, the songs of the first Troubadours and Minnesingers, the earliest sonneteers, the original Beats, all possess a special appeal which charms in a way that is lost to their followers.

     In the careers of individual poets, the early work sometimes has an extraordinarily internal impetus that may fail in later works.  How many writers have received prestigious awards for mediocre books decades after their really influential volumes in a kind of belated recognition?  While a relationship between youth and creativity is unproven, in part because of the difficulty of measuring the novelty of either a scientific idea or a poem, a number of studies have tended to confirm that major innovation, whether in science, art, or even in business, is likely to be the province of the young. 

     I confess I find myself rereading the early work more often than later of a sizable list of authors: Ginsberg, Snyder, Bly, Lowell, and Merrill among them.  Those who had once crafted solid striking and beautiful poems later fell (by my lights) into tendentiousness or self-indulgence.  Historically, Wordsworth is an emphatic example of literary decline with age.  Few there are who have read the work of the years of his laureateship without compulsion, while every student has encountered a few early lyrics.  

     This is not to say that everything slides toward devolution.  To be sure, gardens offer rewards in midsummer and fall, transformative love affairs may occur in later life, a gourmet may both refine and broaden tastes as time goes on, we understand poetry more with experience and in general continue to make imaginative discoveries even in later life, and yet none of these facts can steal the fresh bloom of the new, the sprout just pushed through the soil to the warmth of the sun, bedewed in early morning.       

The Fate of Melville’s Pierre

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Evergreen/Grove Press edition of 1957.  (I realize the disadvantage of using an edition other than the best current standard, but I assert my privilege as a blogger outside of academic settings, without a proper library.  For a professional journal, I should certainly take the trouble of using proper references.)

  

     Melville’s Moby Dick would be, I think, America’s greatest novel were it not that the book is so intellectual, so concerned with ideas and so often occupied with the sketching and the artful manipulation of those abstractions.  Huckleberry Finn is undeniably sentimental, its comic effects of the “lower” sort, but this pandering to popular taste, not only brought the author a mass audience; it enabled the book to represent America in a way that Melville, who was busy chasing clouds in the empyrean, never attempted.  While the reading public would have welcomed from him more passably realistic tales of seamen and cannibals like those of his early publications, he turned toward giving them dramas enacted primarily on the stage of the mind.  Yet to Melville ideas had form and scent and texture and among such sensations his passions roamed wild.

     To be sure, some reviewers had praised Moby Dick.  An early British review found the writing “always good, and often admirable,” displaying “fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime.”  Another, while condemning Melville’s “thrusts against revealed religion,” yet found Moby Dick fascinating, full of “flashes of truth” and “profound reflections,” concluding that the book goes “far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction. It is not a mere tale of adventures, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.”  In Harper’s George Ripley lauded the book’s ability to “illustrate the mystery of human life,” calling it a success because of its “richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description,” and adding “that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.”

      Yet the book attracted devastating criticism as well.  Another British critic called it “ill-compounded disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English, a most provoking book to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise… trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.”  A New York publication considered Ahab’s portrayal “a perfect failure,” “and the work itself inartistic,” while, to another reviewer the book excelled in nothing but “examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English,” along with “rhetorical contortions, all his declamatory abuse of society, all his inflated sentiment, and all his insinuating licentiousness” [1]. 

     In the event, Moby Dick was a flop compared with Melville’s earlier books, selling only five hundred copies in the U. K. where it was first published and less than four thousand during Melville’s lifetime.   In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville expresses appreciation for her “flattering” admiration of Moby Dick.  He says he is “amazed” at her reaction, noting that “as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea” (a subject never condemned by his most hostile critics) and promising, with Pierre in mind, that “The next chalice I shall commend will be a rural bowl of milk.”  While the author may have felt that the new novel had greater sales potential, his publisher Richard Bentley was more skeptical.  He wrote Melville saying that he felt that “editorial changes” were “absolutely necessary” to Pierre’s being well-received when published. [2]

     Though he had suggested to Mrs. Hawthorne that the new book would be an appealing pastoral, his reassurance may have been mere politesse.   To his father-in-law he had written defiantly (though with prudent qualifications) “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’.” [3]  He largely succeeded in this ambition, the natural consequences of offering his readers metaphysical speculation and rhetorical fireworks rather than adventure stories.  A popular modern critic notes, “This is arguably the least read work a major author ever wrote” while another flatly declares Pierre “Melville’s worst book.” [4].

     Apart from his distinctive style, Melville also made little compromise with the received ideas of his day in the implications of his themes.  Pierre is subtitled The Ambiguities and, far from laying out a finished world-view, the book presents a vision everywhere compromised and often misleading in which the author’s levels of irony are subtle, even indeterminable.  One theme is certainly a profound skepticism, compounded by an equally radical dialectical tendency. 

     The repeated suggestion that we are unable to know much of anything at all is accompanied by other passages on the apparent meaninglessness of what we might think we know.  These themes appear throughout the novel; a few examples will here suffice.  Thus, the world, at least to Pierre or our narrator, is “inscrutable” (172), a mystery “wholly hopeless of solution” (180), containing “enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim cannot resolve” (195).  Dwelling in “Cretan labyrinths” (245), we encounter “mysteries within mysteries” (200).  Indeed, all that we can see is that we cannot see.  “For as we blind moles can see, man’s life seems but an acting upon mysterious hints” (246).  In theistic terms “Silence is the only Voice of our God” (284).

     Further complicating the unknowability of things is the tendency of feelings, ideas, and impressions to slide into their opposites, their dialectical ambiguity.   Nature itself is ambiguous (16), and we walk in “a haze of ambiguities” (212).  Even a smile is nothing but a “vehicle of ambiguities” (117).  “Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness” (253).  Green signifies both new life and decay (9), sadness is “delicious” (73), Pierre is at once alive and dead (132), there is no distinction between knowing and not-knowing (410), and this world’s incompatibility with God is really correspondence with Him (297).  Such bipolar oppositions recur in every context: the two incompatible paintings of Pierre’s father somehow merge into each other (118), in a mysterious figuration the inmates of a mental hospital convert each other (170), Pierre “is learning to live by rehearsing the part of death” (425).

     In an oddly convoluted sentence the reader is told that the “peculiar” relationship between Pierre and Isabel could scarcely be understood “were there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it, another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.” (312)  Does this not add up to (using the fourteenth century phrase) a “cloud of unknowing”?

     Inscrutable as life may be, Pierre is certain that he is caught up in an inescapable predetermined fate in which “all events” are “the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences” (92).  He directly envisions “those Three Weird Ones” who had woven his immutable life-course (96).  A prisoner of “Fixed Fate” (254), he feels primarily Fate’s cruelty or rather its terrifying indifference.  “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.  Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader on men’s joys and woe.” (148)  Toward the book’s end, the plot is epitomized in the brief formula: Fate made Pierre a “desperado” (468).

     The protagonist, then, feels quite helpless, caught in the tides of destiny which, though they have no regard for human well-being, yet seem always to tilt toward the tragic.  In Pierre “all the ages of the world pass as in a manacled procession,” a continual “mournful mystery” (156).  Fate often seems positively hostile rather than impartial.   Henry A. Murray calls the book a "spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" [5], all the more dramatic a claim since Pierre’s deterioration into what looks very much like madness makes his story seem more a third-person study in psychopathology.  Yet Melville’s own subjectivity was not the only source of his or of Pierre’s pessimism.  His view was theoretically informed by his reading of Schopenhauer (the importance of whom is clear in his extensive notes on the philosopher) and by the Hindu and Buddhist texts both Schopenhauer and Melville’s Transcendentalist friends had read. [6]

     The attitudes represented in the book, however, arrive to the reader already complicated by multiple distancing.  Are the views expressed those of Pierre, of the narrator, of Melville, of everyone with open eyes?  The reader views truth through Pierre’s consciousness further refracted through the problematic prism of words, after filtering yet again through an omniscient narrator capable of piling irony upon irony in a text which repeatedly insists from the outset that knowing another person is impossible.  After all, in the test cases most significant to the protagonist, Pierre doubts both his father and Isabel. 

     Whatever the origins of Pierre’s profound pessimism, likely a compound of temperament, neurosis, and philosophy, his end is self-destruction.  The response of the text, though, is altogether different: a retreat into language, but language animated by a carnivalesque energy of all-but-redemptive vigor.  The sense that tragedy is held at bay or at times ameliorated by aesthetic display is ancient.  The chorus of Oedipus Tyrannos associates the very sight of a beautiful performance with an orderly explicable world.  [6] Whatever ruin encompasses Oedipus, the viewers of the play may feel protected by the poise and indeed the beauty of the lines of poetry. 

     Melville similarly erects a grand rhetorical structure, sufficiently lush to displease some critics.  The language is from the start literary, clearly removed from non-aesthetic uses.  Pierre opens with a scene of pristine countryside, praised for its still perfection which turns then into an altogether conventional love scene, followed by references to other writers.  Cooper is evoked by the description of an upstate New York ancestral estate, Poe by the peculiar incestuous love between Pierre and his mother (and later between him and his supposed sister), and Hawthorne in the references to earlier generations seizing of the land (5, 39).  One unmistakable sign  of literarariness is Pierre, Lucy, and Isabel’s regular use “thou,” much as the Romantics had done, though the word by the  nineteenth century was used only in dialect, in liturgical settings, and among the Society of Friends. 

     Melville feels free to insert bravura rhetorical set-pieces at liberty, among them the paean to love (45), address to a tree (55), address to “ye Invisibles” (150), the Memnon stone story (190), and the dream-vision of Enceladus (476).  The voice of Plotinus Plinlimmon whose very name trumpets his imaginary nature, intrudes with his lectures on “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (292).  Allusions beyond the opening tribute to American literature include mentions of Spenser (6), Dante (236), the Laccoön (257), Shelley (476, 480, 489), as well as language evoking Shakespeare (269, 444). 

     The introduction of Pierre’s celebrity as an author which has seemed a deformation to many readers is yet another way for Melville to insist on the literariness of his own text as well as allowing him to gripe about the contradictions of writing for a popular audience.  Any access to the reality of lived experience is mediated though still by a highly problematic transformation in to words.  Plain speaking will not do.  According to Pierre the quality of experience requires an “irregular sort of writing” (32) which justifies his persistence in his idiosyncrasy: “I write precisely as I please” (341).  Even granted such freedom novelists in general are said to be capable of nothing but “false, inverted attempts at systematising eternally unsystematisable elements” (198).  While Pierre finds Isabel’s “mystic” guitar-playing enthralling, it remains “eternally incapable of being translated into words” (393).  

     Yet, in spite of its limitations, the narrator assures the reader that “poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life” (191).  In the end, whether art can make Truth accessible or not, no one can deny that it is a distracting amusement, serving thus a value more profound than it seems.  “It us pleasant to chat; for it passes the time ere we go to our beds” (361).

     In one of the immense, interwoven, periodic flights of verbiage that periodically rise from the page, in a sentence running fifteen lines, “swayed” both by “the profound events that had lately befallen him” and by his need to raise some cash, Pierre proclaims his intention to write a book (394).  The combination of sublime and mercenary motives reminds the reader that the narrator’s earlier claim that he might, at least on occasion, “drop all irony” (358) is itself richly ironic.

     Pierre is a text made up of texts.  Art, which for some seems a means of penetrating appearances to a deeper reality, here is simply another mediation, a further refraction, a heightening of ambiguity, the nearest approach to reality, though profoundly insufficient.  Paradoxically, it is precisely because poetry can lie, that it can also speak the truth. 

     Pierre hurtles into an abyss opened through his own idealism, a sort of nineteenth century Don Quixote, a belated believer in ethics and in truth whose lofty values lead him astray, while other Americans grab for the main chance.  Poor Pierre is clinging to an apparently hostile deity as he is washed away in Fate’s flood.  The whole drama is enacted on a darkened stage on which the actors cannot quite make each other out and the audience is as often as not misled.  Once the tragic trajectory of the story-line is clear, the reader finds it at once agonizing and uplifting, resembling in a way grand opera, as Pierre sings lovely songs that mark his own ruin.  The verbal show as the hero collapses toward disaster sustains the reader who, lofted into imagination, walks in an elaborate and formal garden of language, the one controllable element in life.  If Pierre marches on to his own destruction, he does it on a pathway marked on every side with water-courses drawn from subterranean wells and fountains spouting from dolphins and mermen and ewers held by nymphs, accompanied by the soundtrack of a string quartet.  Should the stroller gazes at the sky, feux d'artifice blossom there.  The stage at the end of Pierre remains littered with corpses, but the scene has grandeur.  The final horror is mitigated if not denied by the masterful glory of the author’s language.  To adopt a more modest figure, whistling in the dark is whistling still.

 

   

1.  London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851; London John Bull, October 25, 1851; George Ripley, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December, 1851; Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25 1851; William Young, New York Albion, November 22, 1851; New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January, 1852; available online at https://bookmarks.reviews/the-original-1851-reviews-of-moby-dick/.

 

2.  Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Richard Bentley, p. 151n; to Sophia Hawthorne, page 146. In this letter to his publisher, Melville suggests that the book might best be published anonymously or under a pseudonym.

 

3.   Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Lemuel Shaw, p.92.  

 

3.  The first phrase is from Richard H. Brodhead, “The Book That Ruined Melville,” New York Times, January 7, 1996; the second from Darrel Abel, Democratic Voices and Vistas: American Literature from Emerson to Lanier, p. 412.

 

4.  Introduction, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, 1949.

 

5.  Among the many studies that explore the influence of Asian thought on Melville are Daniel Herman, Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick; Hemant Balvantrao Kulkarni, Moby-Dick, a Hindu avatar: a study of Hindu myth and thought in Moby-Dick; and Mark Backus, “Call Thee Ishmael” in Sophia Philosophia 1, iii.  For Schopenhauer, see melvillesmarginalia.org, edited by Peter Norberg and Steven Olsen-Smith.

 

6.  Lines 893-896 in Jebb’s translation: “For if such deeds [showing arrogance or disrespect to the gods] are held in honor, why should we join in the sacred dance?”

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!

Mimnermus on Old Age

 Greek texts follow my translations.

 

      I was long unsympathetic to the lanky elegaics of Mimnermus.  Of the bits that have survived the centuries, many lament the ills of old age with what even when I was young struck me as shameless and misleading agism.  Surely, thought an idealist wisp within, every age must have its own beauty and satisfaction.  I was not attracted by grumping about old age, though Shakespeare, of course, was as dark when he depicted the aged as “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

    Apart from this theme Mimnermus seems to have written a heroic piece in the Homeric style on Smyrna’s resistance to Gyges and the Lydians, and his fragments reveal a few aphoristic lines, while in antiquity his chief reputation was as a love poet.  His fellow elegist Propertius commented that “in amore” Mimnermus outdoes Homer. [1]  An entire book of love lyrics titled Nanno after a flute girl (or αὐλητρίς) of his acquaintance was known in antiquity.  Though the bulk of the poet’s work has vanished in the dust-bins of the past, what survives testifies, if only in contrast, to an intense love of life, a profoundly secular world-affirming attitude that makes the decay of the physical body all the more catastrophic.

     Today’s taste would have doubtless preferred those erotic verses, but due perhaps to an old-fashioned taste for moralizing, most for what we can read of Mimnermus’ extant remains reflects on the disaster of old age, the deteriorated state of the text now mirroring that of the aged.  Today we are cushioned from the ravages of our later years by eyeglasses, hearing aids, medication for cholesterol and hypertension, and our culture so emphasizes self-affirmation that the pains of aging are in part obscured until not long before the inevitable conclusion.  But the one who long avoids the direct gaze of what Mimnermus called “dread old age” is likely to be unprepared when the ambush marking one’s last chapter begins to unfold.  The poet’s words must surely strike me differently now as I move into the second half of my eighth decade than they would have done, had I translated him in my twenties, though just how I can scarcely tell. 

 

 

1.

Oh, where is life and joy sans golden Aphrodite?

I’d die if I no longer cared for love!

Romantic plots and tender gifts and then the bed!

Such things, the very bloom of youth, are fine

to men and women both.  Then comes on dread old age,

which places ugly evils on a man,

for always hateful cares do press about his heart

(nor can he still delight in warm sun’s rays).

He frightens little children, the women turn away.

For all god made old age a time of pain.

 

 

2. 

We’re like the leaves that sprout in flowery spring;

we see them spread so fast beneath the sun.

Like them our blossom-time is short,

we nothing know from gods of good or bad.

Dark doom is standing always at our side,

who offers on the one hand wretched age

and on the other death.  The fruit of youth

is brief as when sun warms once again

the earth, and when the prime has passed one by,

it’s better to be dead than to still live,

for many evils come to us, sometimes the family falls,

and one must suffer all the ills of want.

A man may long for children and have none.

His one desire denied, he goes below.

To everyone Zeus sends a swarm of pain. 

 

 

3. 

The onetime fairest when his time is past

gets neither love nor fame from his own sons. [2]

 

 

4.

Tithonus got from Zeus old age that will

not end, a fate more grievous far than death.

 

 

5. 

A flood of sudden sweat pours down my limbs

I shake to see my generation age.

Our youth – so sweet and fine – would it were long!

 But short-lived as a dream Is youth, and age

unsightly, painful, hangs above our heads.

Unloved, disgusting, old men  are forgot.

The old lack praise and beauty, soon they are unknown,

unhonored, vile, and soon forgot as well.  

The old will see both sight and thinking fade.

 

 

6.

Before I’m struck with illness and with pain,

I hope at sixty death might catch me up. [3]

 

 

  

 

1.  “Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero/ carmina mansuetus lenia quaerit Amor.” Propertius 1.9 (11-12)

 

2.  Harsh as this sounds, Mimnermus could to point to today’s nursing homes as evidence of parental abandonment. 

 

3. Solon responded to this, proposing that eighty might be a better maximum age.  See Diogenes Laertius i. 60.

 

 

 

 

 

texts and sources:

 

 

1.  from Stobaues’ Anthology, CURFRAG.tlg-0255.1

 

τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης,

τεθναίην ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι,

κρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή,

οἷ᾽ ἥβης ἄνθ εα γίγνεται ἁρπαλέα

5ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξίν: ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸν ἐπέλθῃ

γῆρας, ὅ τ᾽ αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ κακὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ,

αἰεί μιν φρένας ἀμφὶ κακαὶ τείρουσι μέριμναι,

οὐδ᾽ αὐγὰς προσορῶν τέρπεται ἠελίου,

ἀλλ᾽ ἐχθρὸς μὲν παισίν, ἀτίμαστος δὲ γυναιξίν,

10οὕτως ἄργαλέον γῆρας ἔθηκε θεός.

 

 

2.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.2

 

ἡμεῖς δ᾽ οἷά τε φύλλα φύει πολυανθέος ὥρῃ

ἔαρος, ὅτ᾽ αἶψ᾽ αὐγῇς αὔξεται ἠελίου,

τοῖς ἴκελοι πήχυιον ἐπὶ χρόνον ἄνθεσιν ἥβης

τερπόμεθα πρὸς θεῶν εἰδότες οὔτε κακὸν

5οὔτ᾽ ἀγαθόν: κῆρες δὲ παρεστήκασι μέλαιναι,

ἡ μὲν ἔχουσα τέλος γήραος ἀργαλέου,

ἡ δ᾽ ἑτέρη θανάτοιο: μίνυνθα δὲ γίγνεται ἥβης

καρπός, ὅσον τ᾽ ἐπὶ γῆν κίδναται ἠέλιος:

αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δὴ τοῦτο τέλος παραμείψεται ὥρης,

10αὐτίκα δὴ τεθνάναι βέλτιον ἢ βίοτος:

πολλὰ γὰρ ἐν θυμῷ κακὰ γίγνεται: ἄλλοτε οἶκος

τρυχοῦται, πενίης δ᾽ ἔργ᾽ ὀδυνηρὰ πέλει:

ἄλλος δ᾽ αὖ παίδων ἐπιδεύεται, ὧν τε μάλιστα

ἱμείρων κατὰ γῆς ἔρχεται εἰς Ἀΐδην:

15ἄλλον νοῦσος ἔχει θυμοφθόρος: οὐδέ τίς ἐστιν

ἀνθρώπων ᾧ Ζεὺς μὴ κακὰ πολλὰ διδῷ.

 

 

3.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.3

 

τὸ πρὶν ἐὼν κάλλιστος, ἐπὴν παραμείψεται ὥρη,

οὐδὲ πατὴρ παισὶν τίμιος οὔτε φίλος.

 

 

4.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.4

 

Τιθωνῷ μὲν ἔδωκεν ἔχειν κακὸν ἄφθιτον ὁ Ζεὺς

γῆρας, ὃ καὶ θανάτου ῥίγιον ἀργαλέου.

 

 

5.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.5

 

[αὐτίκα μοι κατὰ μὲν χροιὴν ῥέει ἄσπετος ἱδρώς,

πτοιῶμαι δ᾽ ἐσορῶν ἄνθος ὁμηλικίης

τερπνὸν ὁμῶς καὶ καλόν, ἐπεὶ πλέον ὤφελεν εἶναι:

ἀλλ᾽ ὀλιγοχρόνιος γίγνεται ὥσπερ ὄναρ

5ἥβη τιμήεσσα: τὸ δ᾽ ἀργαλέον καὶ ἄμορφον

γῆρας ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς αὐτίχ᾽ ὑπερκρέμαται

ἐχθρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ ἄτιμον, ὅ τ᾽ ἄγνωστον τιθεῖ ἄνδρα,

βλάπτει δ᾽ ὀφθαλμοὺς καὶ νόον ἀμφιχυθέν.

 

 

6.  from Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers CURFRAG.tlg-0255.11

 

αἲ γὰρ ἄτερ νούσων τε καὶ ἀργαλέων μελεδωνῶν

ἑξηκονταέτη μοῖρα κίχοι θανάτου.

The Use of Convention in “The Floure and the Leafe”

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses are line numbers. 

 

     Justification of literary valuation is notoriously elusive.  Works rise and fall in the estimation of readers over time based on a number of factors, including the older text’s real or imagined similarity to current writing or to either the critic’s (or the society’s) ideology.  A reader’s perception of beauty may be explained but cannot be proven.  Analysis of fluctuations in the prestige of specific poems and novels is likely to reveal as much or more about readers as about the works in question.

     The history of the reputation of the anonymous fifteenth century poem “The Floure and the Leafe” illustrates a particularly dramatic alteration in status.  Attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer since at least the end of the sixteenth century [1], the poem was highly appreciated for several hundred years.  Dryden lauded it and wrote a modernization, Keats wrote a sonnet in response, and the poem was praised as well as by Hazlitt, Campbell, and others, but, by the middle of the nineteenth century, doubts had begun to appear about its authorship [2] and in 1900 W. W. Skeat not only decisively completed the case for a later and anonymous author (whom he regarded as a woman [3]), but also denigrated the poem in withering terms.  He realized he was going against the grain noting “this poem has so frequently been praised that I feel some diffidence in saying that too much has been made of it” yet he was sufficiently hostile to those who maintained the traditional view to use inverted commas when he called them “critics.” [4]

     The drop in value following the discovery that the poem had not been written by an accepted “great” is, however dramatic, surely not surprising.  The weight which readers give to authority has led to a host of pseudepigrapha, including the ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses and over a hundred texts once falsely attributed to Aristotle, and the art market demonstrates in a clear monetary metric the loss of value when a painting has been shown to be not by a master, but by his school or, worse yet, by a forger.  Yet these decisions are socially rather than aesthetically driven, and have nothing to do with the value of the artwork itself. 

     Shifts in literary taste also influenced the poem’s standing.  Many moderns, in fact, many post-Romantics, would, of course, be put off by a defunct genre like the medieval dream visions.  A superficial view conflates literary convention with lack of imagination and privileges “realism” (as though any collection of marks on a page is a direct representation of lived experience).  At the time when Skeat wrote, a leading edge of literature was realism and an archaic fantasy vision hardly will appeal to one for whom verisimilitude is important. 

     Yet the curious fact is that those who valued the poem prior to Skeat’s comments regularly stressed not its well-wrought artifice but its outstandingly “realistic” descriptions of nature.   In spite of the fact that the language is highly formulaic with most phrases being closely paralleled by antecedents so numerous that no one instance can be seen as the poet’s model, appreciation for “The Floure and the Leafe” was most often based on the poet’s successful representation of a nature that corresponds to lived experience.  Because of Chaucer’s date, early readers also often characterized the poem as simple” and “childlike,” ignoring the poem’s sophistication. 

     Just as Dryden, in an age that favored didacticism found the poem’s moralizing its chief appeal [5] during the Romantic era, when readers prized natural description, they found it in “The Floure and the Leafe.”  For William Hazlitt, one of the most acute critics of the day, Chaucer’s “characteristic excellence, what might be termed gusto” lies in his “descriptions of natural scenery,” so true-to-life that they give “the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground,” and the poem which best exemplifies this outstanding quality is “The Flower and the Leaf.” [6]  Thomas Campbell found in it “fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature.”  The setting of the vision, which seems to moderns so distant from lived experience, is for him “like the recollection of an actual scene.” He comments, “Here is no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment.” [7]  For Keats , reading “this pleasant tale" is an experience that feels natural, like strolling into “a little copse.” [8]

     The principal effect of the conventionality apparently invisible to these earlier readers is that scenes and individuals are highly generic with little specificity.  They are largely interchangeable -- one poet could wander into the locus amoenus of another and scarcely notice the difference, nor would their ladies find much to motivate a choice between the men.  Detail is replaced by superlatives in a pattern so pervasive it requires no exhaustive demonstration.

     Hyperbolic convention appears from the outset with the glorious chariot of Apollo whirling across the sky far above a beautiful scene.  Reverdie is in progress and “every wight/ Of this season wexeth glad and light.” (13-14)  The speaker, ”glad of the season swete” (15) enjoys “heart’s ease.”(20)  She steps out into a very “plesaunt” (36) sight.   Indeed, the poet who devised the entire setting says it “it was more pleasaunt then I coud devise.” (97)  The medlar tree is “the fairest.” (86)  The poet thought herself in Paradise. (115)

 

                         . . . sith the beginning

Of the world was never seen or than

So pleasant a ground of none earthly man.

                                                          (124-126)

 

     The women of the company of the leaf and men are not only themselves beautiful, they sing beautifully as well and, as if that were not enough, go about draped in gems, fine fabrics, and garlands.  The men and the flower party are much the same.  No attempt is made toward what most readers would mean by “realism.”  Yet such conventional superlatives, far from being limited to allegorical dream visions, are universal; the popularity of the device signifies that it has been found highly useful. 

Though such obviously artificial statements may seem to owe their origin to the mindless replication of prior models, the existence of hyperbole in the rhetorical figures of every nation suggests that they function as more than decorative ornaments.  In certain ways these extravagant statements are more “real” than the kind that passes for objective.

     Most obviously, they represent culturally accepted ideals to which, it is understood, living people only imperfectly aspire.  Achilles can exemplify the impossibly brave and competent warrior portrayed as the noblest among men, as can John Wayne.  Medieval romances have episodes as hyperbolic as any comic book action hero.  The dominant desirable qualities for women are illustrated by the countless surpassingly lovely ladies from Helen through the most recent film star, though there are supplementary models specifically for wives such as Penelope and Griselda.  All cultures transmit their beliefs and values through the symbolic systems of songs, dramas, and visual works.  Hyperbole in art defines very plainly the qualities admired by its makers.

     Furthermore, everyone experiences subjective states of mind which correspond closely to poetry’s immoderate claims.  An individual may really think his daughter is the smartest thing around, his sergeant is the bravest man on earth, and his lover the most beautiful.  Such sentiments seem true to parents, comrades, and lovers.  Art represents the human psyche more accurately than non-aesthetic forms of discourse specifically because it allows representation of the affective states so significant in lived experience. 

     Apart from their value in suggesting such cultural codes and individual passions, the hyperboles of poetry have a ludic value, providing the reader or listener with play and entertainment.  People turn to literature for experiences unobtainable otherwise.   The poster in the library that tells our children “reading is a magic carpet” does not lie.  The pleasure of seeing what is not and never can be is akin to that experienced by the contemporary film viewer watching special effects.  And when the depiction is rendered impossibly lovely, this seductive virtual reality can be dazzling in itself. 

     Finally, just as people in humble circumstances often enjoy reading about celebrities, there is likely some effect resembling sympathetic magic causing the reader to imagine herself as blissful as the fine ladies in a story.  The reader of “The Floure and the Leafe” thinking of a beautiful bower crowded with beautiful people resembles the Depression era movie-goer relishing and not resenting men on the silver screen in high top hats arm-in-arm with women sparkling with jewels.  One can almost imagine the ladies of the flower doing a Busby Berkeley number.

     Whereas the poem’s original readers knew the relevant codes and, far from being put off by the use of convention, they regarded it as prestigious as it connects a current work with the laudable models of the past.   For the original audience the use of convention was appreciated for both entertainment value and thematic function.  Once readers had forgotten the meaning of the old conventions, having traded them for new, the poem lost its appeal.  As it happens, the poem lost the authorial sanction of Chaucer’s name at a time when its conventions were already poorly understood, causing the poem to fall into an undeserved obscurity.

 

 

  

1.  Included in Thomas Speght’s 1598 The Workes of our Antient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer.

 2.  Skeat’s idea of female authorship may have influenced both his dismissal of the poem and later generations’ near-abandonment of it.  Though the author’s identity and gender remain uncertain, the persona of the text is female.  In this essay I shall use feminine pronouns for the unknown writer.

 3.  In his 1778 edition of Chaucer Thomas Tyrwhitt was the first scholar to doubt the attribution.  (Tyrwhitt also edited Chatterton’s Rowley poems with an appendix demonstrating their true authorship.)  In 1868 Henry Bradshaw’s arguments that the poem must be dated after Chaucer’s death were included in Furnivall’s A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  This view was strengthened by Bernhard ten Brink in Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwicklung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (1870). 

 4.  His observation about “critics” appears in Chaucerian and other pieces (1897), lxi, the admission of diffidence from The Chaucer Canon (1900), 139.Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “On Chaucer and Spenser.”

 5.  See his preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.

 6.  in British Poetry, quoted in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, March 1819 p. 474.

7.  Specimens of British Poets, 1819. 

8  “Written On The Blank Space Of A Leaf At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of ‘The Flowre And The Lefe.’”