The Charm of the Underdetermined in “Maiden in the Mor Lay”

Though glossed versions are readily available, I have appended the text of "Maiden in the Mor Lay." 

     If medieval English poetry had a hit parade, “Maiden in the mor lay” would be near the top.  Since it was first published in 1907 this mysterious poem has enjoyed great popularity and has been frequently reprinted and anthologized. [1]  It survived, as is often the case with such lyrics, by merest chance.  The poem was recorded in a manuscript containing miscellaneous works on a single rectangular vellum page glued into the flyleaf of a codex, one of twelve poems or fragments called the Rawlinson lyrics.  The exact number is uncertain because some verses are apparently first lines only, meant perhaps like a title to remind the reader of a song, or written in written in compressed style to save space.  Among these poems, recorded most likely by whimsical chance, is one of the most well-known and controversial of medieval English lyrics “Maiden in the mor lay.”  The poem’s obscurity, mentioned by virtually all commentators, has not limited its popularity; it is surely one of the most well-known lyrics of its time, and its interpretation has generated a considerable literature.

     The diversity of critical opinion indicates the poem’s beguiling underdetermination.   Often with substantial reason, the “maiden” has been identified with the Virgin Mary, with Mary Magdalene, with a human lover, a deity or water spirit, and ultimately with the Great Mother. [1]  The more polemical researchers claim an exclusive validity for a single interpretation, ignoring the characteristically poetic quality of polysemy.  My own favorite among the range of learned speculations is Peter Dronke’s which combines pre-Christian animism, the maiden a sort of “water-sprite,” and convincingly suggests that the verses were accompanied by a performative routine involving dance and mime.

     My receptivity to Dronke’s reading is primarily determined by my impression of the text and not by research, though it seems plausible.  Though spirits of the type called “nixies” were more common in Continental Germanic territories, pagan festivals were known to be centered at the sites of English wells. [3]  The poem itself, though, must be the most persuasive evidence.  The maiden is unquestionably supernatural.  Her enigmatic passivity and ethereal diet indicate her otherworldly character -- her simple being is represented as portentous.  She need take no action. 

     The question and answer form resembles a catechism as well as indicating the popular origin of the poem.  The speaker is inquiring into a mystery the bottom which may never be seen.  Yet it is unlikely to be the Christian myth operating here.  The Rawlinson lyrics written on the same page seem all to have been secular and this particular one was included in the Bishop of Ossory’s list of “lewd” songs whose lyrics he proposed replacing with more pious Latin verses of his own invention. [4]  Though images such as the rose and the lily certainly have Christian associations, no definitely Christian references or symbols appear in “Maiden in the mor lay.” 

     The mythic figure at the center of the poem is sufficiently underdetermined, in fact, that further details of the situation are unrecoverable.  The maiden is not described, as most romantic love-objects are, in terms of her beauty, nor is she said to be perfect or immaculate as Mary often is.  The reader is left with only a mystery, but it is one many find beguiling.  The cryptic woman at the well carries simultaneous associations woth a number of pre-Christian and Christian figures while never being wholly identified with any.  At the same time she represents far broader semantic territory: the other, the female, the uncontrollable, the marvelous.  In fact, a significant amount of the poem’s original appeal may have been its affording a visionary glimpse, an amazing sight enjoyable because so extraordinary.  If the experience is in part a theophany, it is also akin to the pleasure of a 1950s filmgoer watching aliens in a science fiction movie or a visitor to the curiosities of a carnival side-show. 

     In fact because of the minimal information the poem offers and its continued questioning signaling that the scene is enigmatic even to its narrator, the repetitions and the hypnotic rhymes make all the greater an impression.  The reader or listener is placed in the position of an initiate only part way through the ritual, moved more by wonder than understanding.  Information is lacking, just as it is in life.

     While the complex of woman, water, and welcome vegetation links these late medieval lines to the earth mother goddesses of the Neolithic Age, [5] the passage of time does not merely cause the initial significance to fade, instead, it becomes crowded with new and ever-richer connotations.  The field of meaning grows complex indeed, and its silences and absences can influence reception as much as its explicit content.  The scholarly intention to establish a unitary reading flows contrary to the artistic construction of a web of partial insight in which suggestivity matters more than any conclusion.  If such a problematic vision is then couched in melodious form, rhythmic and rhyming, and performed by skilled professionals to delight an idle hour, it reflects what is perhaps the deepest insight available to mortals.  When presented in an artful and diverting form, it accomplishes thereby the ends of art.  Exhaustive interpretation could only impoverish this song.

 

 

 

1.  Appearing first edited by Wilhelm Heuser in Anglia, the poem’s exposure grew immensely when it was included in Kenneth Sisam’s 1921 anthology Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose and in many anthologies and textbooks since.

2.   D. W.  Robertson in “Historical Criticism,” (English Institute Essays 1950, ed. A. S. Downer, 3-31) used the poem as an example of the value of “patristic exegesis” which emphasizes the importance of traditional Christian symbology in medieval literature.  E. Talbot Donaldson (in Speaking of Chaucer, 150-152) criticizes Robertson ‘s “patristic” reading, suggesting a more naturalistic interpretation.  E. M. W. Tillyard preferred to see her as Mary Magdalene, or alternatively as Mary of Egypt (The Secular Lyric in Middle English, 159) and Joseph C. Harris seconded the view in “'Maiden in the mor lay' and the medieval Magdalene tradition,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971): 59-87.  Associations with pagan practices, such as “sacred dances of the ancient nature tradition,” are emphasized by John Speirs in Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (62-64) and by Peter Dronke in The Medieval Lyric, 195-196 and R. A. Waldron, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature, 226.

3.  See, for instance, Charles Read Baskervill, “Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in England,”  Studies in Philology , Jan., 1920, Vol. 17, No. 1, 19-87.  Baskervill cites a monastic fifteenth century source that draws on earlier descriptions of celebrations for St. John's Eve at which “it was customary to feast and drink, to engage in dancing and in base ludi conducive to lechery, to build bonfires, to carry torches through the fields, and to roll flaming wheels down the hill.”  According to Baskervill “Well worship” “played an important part in Anglo-Saxon worship.”  He mentions as well church condemnation of quasi-pagan gatherings held “on the moor” in Durham. (68-69)

4.  See Richard L. Greene, “’The Maid of the Moor' in the Red Book of Ossory,” Speculum Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1952), 504-506.

5.  The literature includes the groundbreaking Mother Right (Mutterrecht) by Johann Jakob Bachofen, the Jungian Erich Neumann’s Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Die große Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen) and Marija Gimbutas’ works.

 

In the mor lay,
Sevenyst fulle
Sevenist fulle.
Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Sevenistes fulle ant a day.
 
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the,
The primerole ant the,
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the violet.
 
Welle was hire dryng:
Wat was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the,
The chelde water of the,
Welle was hire dryng:
What was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the welle spring.
 
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The red rose an te,
The red rose an te,
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The rede rose an te lilie flour.

A Survey of Early Christian Heresies

 

I approach this topic neither as an ecclesiastical historian nor as a theologian, but as a literary critic.  Whether a given human belief is objectively “true,” it is always meaningful as an image, a symbol, a shadowing forth of character and desire.  In the ferment of the early centuries of Christianity, as the new belief supplanted ancient practices, a range of opinion blossomed, fascinating both as speculation and as spectacle.  In the mere listing of the names of heretical schools I find an incantatory power.  A romance, too, lingers about the ghosts of a thousand lost causes.  May this minimal survey summon a whiff of such old and wandering spirits momentarily reanimated, perhaps, by the reader’s sympathetic mind!

 

      Theological essays find few readers today even among believers.  The issues that once aroused fierce passions, energetic contentions, and, at times, persecution and war, seem to make little difference in the contemporary world.  As increasing numbers abandon organized religion altogether, the differences among sects or even belief systems seem less significant than what they share.  An expanded sense of “many mansions” informs the more liberal even among many whose creeds demand exclusivity.  The details of belief that once meant everything now seem all but inconsequential.

     In the Christian church’s early centuries, before the great councils that formed an orthodoxy of settled dogma, great ferment surrounded theological issues.  The word heresy is derived from αἵρεσις, meaning “choice” or “thing chosen,” originally with no anathema attached.  In the beginning before the enforcement of uniformity in the Christian community there was a broad spectrum of views from which to select that most fitting to the devotee’s spiritual needs,  Due to relentless persecution by those espousing majority views, most of the writing by these early heretics have vanished and their views can only be reconstructed with the aid of the hostile arguments of their opponents, most significantly Irenaeus in the second century and Epiphanius two hundred years later. 

     Amid the confusing proliferation of beliefs during this period, several common areas of controversy emerged.  Gnostics at first questioned the authority of the god of the Hebrew scriptures.  The everlasting punishments of hell remained a minority opinion for centuries.  For half a millennium and more clerics debated the enigmatic concept of the Trinity and, in particular, the exact nature of Christ.

    Most dramatically transgressing the orthodoxy that eventually coalesced were the sects labeled Gnostic.  Some were associated with Judaism, some with Christianity, and some with paganism, yet the common name may be justified by certain characteristics.  In the gnostic view, more dualistic than Christianity, the material world is inherently sinful, the creation not of the Supreme Being but of a demiurge.   The devotee’s goal is enlightenment and passions are considered obstacles to knowledge rather than sins.  Neoplatonism contributed substantially to gnostic cosmologies and the movement tended to veer (like Tibetan Buddhism) toward the esoteric and the mystical, including the construction of layers of mystical beings between humanity and the true god.

     Among the gnostic peculiarities was a particular interest in Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, who was regarded as a forerunner of Christ and was made a model of wisdom and a culture hero, responsible, according to Josephus, for many inventions and discoveries.  The gnostics were prone to the elaboration of complex cosmological schemes unsupported by Hebrew scripture.  In the Apocryphon of John attributed to the apostle (2^nd c. C.E.) Ultimate Reality is the Monad, an utterly transcendent deity, who produces as a “first thought” an Aeon, or emanation of the divine, a female (or sometimes androgynous) entity called Barbelo.  A series of further Aeons are then created, one of whom, Sophia of Epinoia (“wisdom of thought or insight”) goes rogue, creating a demiurge called Yaltabaoth without the Monad’s oversight.  Sophia realizes the transgressive character of Yaltabaoth and conceals its existence, thus causing the created world to be ignorant of its source the Monad. 

     Related sects propounded a variety of such creative systems.  The Archontics and Borborites imagined eight archon-governed heavens; the seventh ruled by Sabaoth, the Hebrew god whom they depicted as an ass or a hog.  According to Epiphanius they used menstrual blood and semen in their eucharist. 

     The significance of similar trends in early Christian thought is apparent in the fact that the gnostic theologian Valentinus was, according to Tertullian, at one time considered for the position of bishop.   His numerous followers opposed the efforts of their opponents to expel them from Christian communities.  Valentinus claimed to be transmitting an esoteric doctrine that had passed from Paul the Apostle through Theudas to him.  Valentinus described the Aeons and emanations and the world’s fall through the action of Sophia, importing Platonic terms to distinguish spiritual and material worlds. 

     The Gospel of Truth is a Valentinian apocryphal text that attributes the creation to the Aeons and characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as Error’s attempt to maintain ignorance.  The book also contains an exposition of the esoteric name of Christ, an example of the numerology and esoteric analysis of letters that became common in later Gnosticism.  The Marcosians, for instance, built on earlier Hebrew and Pythagorean systems to investigate the mystic meaning of numbers, using, in particular, the method of isopsephy, adding the figures associated with the letters of a word to get a significant sum.  A student of Valentinus named Colarbasus maintained that study of the esoteric implications of the Greek alphabet could reveal all truth. 

     Basilides led another second century gnostic cult which is said to have followed the Pythagoreans (and more distant Hindus and Buddhists) in proposing metempsychosis.  Like other gnostics Basilides considered that salvation was a matter of knowledge rather than faith, and that souls advanced through a series of lives.  Thus his followers thought that Christian martyrs were simply working out the bad karma of an earlier life and were thus unworthy of praise.   

    Similar ideas were also circulating under the name of Marcion of Sinope, a second century evangelist who claimed to be the transmitter of the doctrines of St. Paul whom he considered the only true apostle.  Having been taught by a certain Cerdo, a follower of Simon Magus (who was himself said to fly).  Marcion, too, distinguished a supreme being associated with Christ’s unbounded love from a lesser creator called Yahweh by the Jews ruling the temporal world.  Marcion produced a book, the Antitheses, which sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of the two by contrasting parallel passages of Hebrew and Greek scriptures.  For him Christ was fully divine and his appearance before people was an illusion, a view called Docetism.  For a considerable time Marcionite congregations spread and flourished, for a time rivaling the orthodox.

     Jewish texts prior to a few hundred years B. C. E. promise no afterlife; the strongest hints of such a notion are in Daniel, a book atypical in language and content.  Many early Christians expected the Apocalypse to overtake the world at any moment, rendering any individual death incidental, but passages such as “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46) clearly anticipate individual judgement resulting in rewards or retribution.   According to a recent study (Bart Ehrman’s Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife), the idea of heaven and hell, absent in mainstream Jewish thought in which body and soul were identified and the end of one implied the end of the other, actually derived from Greek influence.  

     The fact is that belief in eternal punishment after death was a minority opinion in early Christianity.  For influential theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa hell was a temporary purgation which purified the soul prior to its entry into heaven.  Of the six major schools of thought in early Christianity, four (those centered in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, and Edessa) were universalist, that is, they believed in the ultimate salvation of every soul.  This belief was founded on passages such as “For the Lord will not cast off for ever” (Lamentations 3:31) and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22)  The dogma of a permanent hell did not appear until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and universalism is not condemned until the Second Council of Constantinople in 533 C. E.   Belief in universal salvation (or apokatastasis) persisted, for instance in the work of St. Isaac the Syrian during the 7^th century and never really vanished in spite of the church’s opposition, resulting in the nineteenth century founding of the American Universalist Church. 

     The most tangled and perplexing disputes arose over the character of the Trinity and in particular the nature of Christ.  Those defending what came to be orthodox interpretations had to confront two paradoxes: first, the claim that Christianity is monotheistic while recognizing three divine persons, and, second, the claim that Christ is both god and human at the same time.  A great range of interpretations sought to make sense of this unique and ungainly concept.  A good many gods had been thought to appear in human form while remaining fully gods, a sort of disguise that in Christianity became the heresy of Docetism, the notion that Christ on earth was a sort of illusion, only appearing to be like other people while in fact omnipotent and unlimited.  On the other hand, the Audians thought that not Christ alone but god himself had a physical human form and thus were also called Anthropomorphites. 

     The problems of this complex of conundrums were evaded by those called Monarchianists who urged the sole power of God the Father.  Some asserted an Adoptionist view (also called psilanthropist), claiming that Christ was a virtuous mortal who had been selected by God as his agent.  Among these were the vegetarian Ebionites and the Valentinian gnostics who followed Theodotus’ teaching that, while Christ was born of a virgin, he had received the Holy Spirit only at the time of his baptism and had become wholly divine only upon his resurrection.    Other Monarchianists favored the Modalism of Sabellius who argued that God was a single person and that the three “persons” are in fact only three “modes,” aspects or roles of one agent.  As this view maintains Christ’s total divinity, he cannot have suffered or died as people do. 

     The most influential heretic who privileged God the Father over Christ was Arius, a writer from Cyrenaica (today Libya) who thought that Christ had not always existed and does not share the essence or nature of God the Father but is instead one of his works.  This group itself split into a more moderate faction, sometimes labeled semi-Arians, that described Christ’s nature as “similar” to God the Father or “homoiousian” and those who maintained that there was no likeness, the Anomoeans (also called Heterousians).  Varieties of Arianism were adopted by the Germanic tribes and persisted until the late seventh century. 

     In the fourth century Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople argued against the divinity of the Holy Spirit, saying that it had been created by the Son.  The supporters of this view were called Pneumatomachi, “those who battle the spirit” in the Hellespont area and Tropici in Egypt. 

     Monophysites for whom Christ had only a single divine nature lasted far longer, indeed into the present day (as the Miaphysites of the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches).    So-called “real” Monophysites adhered to the teaching of Eutyches of Constantinople that Christ’s unitary nature combined human and divine, but the divine so dominated as to absorb or transmute the human element.  Some, favoring the view of Severus the Great that while Christ’s body was corruptible, he nonetheless had a single nature, were known as “verbal” Monophysites.  Endless regional political relationships as well as philosophical hair-splitting resulted in the Acephali, the Agnoetae, the Aphthartodocetae, the Apollinarians.  In the sixth century Monophysitism dominated the eastern empire under the patronage of Justinian’s wife Theodora though the emperor himself was a Chalcedonian. 

     Though the Sabellians, Monarchians and Pneumatomachoi considered the orthodox Trinitarians to be in fact “Tritheists,” believing in three gods (a view common among Muslims and Jews today), at the Council of Chalcedon the Homoousians, those for whom God and Christ had the same essence, won the day, defeating Monophysitism, Modalism, Arianism, and Homoiousianism, and defining acceptable belief on the issue until the Reformation.

     This unsystematic overview omits more than it contains.  There were those who welcomed new prophets, for instance, such as the followers of Montanus and his female sybils, called Cataphrygians, whose activities included ecstatic gatherings.  The Ascitae, for instance, danced around burst wine-skins, recalling practices of Pentecostals, Shakers, and Hasidim. 

     Outsiders of all sorts are often accused of antinomianism and especially with sexual transgressions, Such claims are often made with little or no evidence, yet unconventional sexual practices (sometimes exploitative) are common among cults.  Moderns will never know, for instance whether the Nicolaitians (who are actually mentioned in the Christian testament) indeed practiced promiscuity.  Epiphanius may have been maligning Deacon Nicolas when he quoted him as saying "Unless one copulates every day, he cannot have eternal life." Did the Carpocratians and the Phibionites also practice free love?  Today the  truth is obscure, impossibly jumbled with polemical propaganda. 

     The corpus of pseudepigrapha has increased significantly even in the last century.  The Gospel of Thomas, in which Christ dances with his followers like Krishna with the gopis, had long attracted attention.    The Gospel of Mary, a second century text, narrates the exchanges of a certain Mary, variously identified as the Mother of Christ, as Christ’s sister, and as Mary Magdelene, with skeptical disciples including Peter and Andrew.  In the Sethian gnostic Gospel of Judas it appears Judas is the sole confidant of Christ to whom he conveys an esoteric message: that liberation is not enabled by his death which, like animal sacrifice and the “cannibalistic” Eucharist, is abhorrent to a benevolent deity, but is rather available within each soul through contemplative practices.   

     Many have seen a kind of philosophia perennis underlying religious traditions in widely separated  parts of the world, particularly in the records of mystics.  Yet spiritual experience is not independent of individual sensibility and even taste.  Each heretical opinion reflects not so much a hermeneutic approach to scriptural authority as a style of approach to the holy.

     The gnostics begin with revulsion, conceiving of the creation as a thing of evil, gone wrong from the start, requiring the most rigorous efforts to overcome while promising a potential reward in the end of enlightenment.   The Aeons and the rest of the imagined cosmic machinery seem like baroque, over-elaborate decoration similar to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dreaming up nine orders of angels or the fourteen  worlds of the Puranas and the Atharva Veda. 

     Clearly those who reject the notion that eternal punishment awaits the unrighteous after death are motivated by their loving kindness, which cannot conceive of an utterly punitive deity.

     The Christological disputes arise from subjective spiritual experience.  In Christianity the equivalent of enlightenment is to locate in oneself what George Fox called “that of God in every man.”  Some, such as Meister Eckhart, find at times what feels like a total identification.  For others the divine remains largely Other, to be propitiated with prescribed ceremony.  These opposed extremes allow as well countless intermediate positions. 

     Enforcement of orthodoxy has mercifully become far less common than it once was, yet the living ferment of religious experience within Christianity at any rate seems torpid today, focused mainly on political issues of ethics.  The breadth of spiritual choice, meanwhile, has enlarged with the popularity of New Age and exotic beliefs, and the earnest adoption of other people’s rituals.  Perhaps the most reasonable of arguments for the existence of god, the argument from desire, maintains that since all people everywhere seek god, it would be absurd if no such thing exists.  Yet the splitting of sects in every tradition indicates that a conviction of Ultimate Reality is only a beginning of a definition, not of the divine in itself, but of the individual’s spiritual desire.    

The Appeal of the New York Times’ “Metropolitan Diary”

 

     Many readers of the Sunday New York Times, myself among them, pause among the stories of war, corruption, and fabulous real estate prices to enjoy the “Metropolitan Diary” which presents anecdotes submitted by readers accompanied by loose and casual drawings.  For those who eschew comic strips, it is an amusement, but, like all entertainments, it has meaning.  An examination of a single day’s “Diary” demonstrates a striking regularity of theme while suggesting a basis for its long-lived popularity. 

     The feature is so well-edited that any day’s column would serve as an adequate sample.  For yesterday, May 8, the stories might be summarized as follows. 

 

1.  The non-Hispanic writer listens to Latin music, leading his building super to ask if he speaks Spanish.  He does not.  Later, when a Puccini aria is playing in his apartment, the immigrant super begins singing along in Italian.

2.  In a nostalgic reminiscence of youth, the writer recalls a trip to Brighton Beach with a friend where they encountered a man with bared buttocks who explained that he had a rash.  The bit concludes “And that is my Brighton Beach memoir!”

3.  The writer observes two children play rock-paper-scissors from opposite sides of a subway platform.

4.  A renter kept awake by partying sounds from a park across the street finally makes a noise complaint, only to find that the bureaucrat who answered the telephone is a neighbor, also annoyed by the noise.

5.  The writer buys a pint of ice cream, intending to eat it on the street.  He asks for a plastic spoon and the clerk says he has none, but then a security guard not only points them out, but suggests the customer take two. 

 

The original text is available at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html.

 

     Every one of these stories focuses on unrelated people suddenly forming a transient bond across barriers of several sorts.  In the first the tenant and the superintendent discover their common love of opera.  In the second two girls interact with a man with whom they would ordinarily not speak and value the memory years later.  (This is the only example that stretches the use of the word “bond” in my definition of the theme.  The ambivalent sexuality of the experience – doubtless an unattractive, somewhat disturbing man, yet in a way fascinating – distinguishes this story.)  The charming impromptu friendship of the children in the subway, the common interests of the people troubled by street noise, and the security guard’s solicitous interest that the customer enjoy his treat all fit the same pattern.  In each case the tale involves a breakthrough of sympathy in what might seen the anonymity of the big city.  A person who might have felt solitary a moment before becomes suddenly a sharer in a common humanity.  These stories are like fairy tales, approaching a kind of sympathetic magic in which their telling can create a sense of a responsive and sympathetic environment whether such a thing exists in reality or not.

     The links among the characters are the stronger for their base in appetite: ice cream, Italian opera, a day in the sun, pure play, and rest (balanced here against revelry).  In the slightly non-conforming story, the writer indicates her fondness for Broadway with a reference to Neil Simon.  In desire we can know we will surely find our fellows, and the Times reader can easily identify with a narrator who likes premium ice cream and live theater.  Our wishes are our weaknesses as well, and enable comedy, so all these stories whatever the voice, have the same indulgent, mildly self-mocking humorous air.    

     The lead actors are entirely passive.  Everything unfolds before them like an aleatory spectacle.  The super spontaneously began singing, the sun-bather sunning, the children playing, the city worker on the noise beat could not have been expected to be in the same spot as the caller, and the guilty pleasure of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s awakens a friendly response.  In no case was the story-teller seeking human contact, and, in fact, the publication of the piece is an example of contemporary forms of simulated human contact providing the illusion of community.  (The internet offers a great deal more.)

     The myth, if one may style it so, is not merely that the great imposing indifferent city is actually alive with people more like yourself than you had imagined.  Part of making this proposition emphatic is to imagine class strata as insignificant.  Readers of the Times are surely likely to be among the socially and economically elite compared to readers of the Post and the Daily News.  In spite of the fact that the tenant and the ice cream fancier are presumably more affluent and educated than the super and the guard, they are united by their pleasures. 

     The fanciful wish-fulfillment character of these scenes is suggested by the fact that two of the five are presented in retrospect, as experiences of childhood.  The children in the subway present a similar pre-adult ideal. 

     “Metropolitan Diary” favors stories that explicitly refer to New York City circumstances: a building superintendent, bodegas with visible guards, the subway, immigrants, and street noises.  New Yorkers notoriously consider simply living in the city to be a daily achievement.  They take pride in the difficulties and expenses of their home in a mirror image of the suburbanites who are pleased to be rid of the very same big city problems. 

     Yet in “Metropolitan Diary” the challenges of impossible rents, homeless sufferers, and very real street crime can play no role.  Within the column New York City appears in idealized form.  Just as pastoral conventions elide the rougher realities of life in the countryside, this feature weekly presents readers with an idyllic city in which all contradictions are elided and serendipity awaits around every corner.   

 

 

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!