New Explorations Critical Notes

Higher Level Ordinary Level Higher Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2015 2015

2 Higher Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2016 2016

3 Higher Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2017 2017

4 Higher Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2018 2018

5 John Donne Notes and Explorations: Carole Scully

6 new explorations john donne introduction

Introduction likelihood, Donne was fully aware of his uncle’s situation, as he was about 11 years old at the time and still living at home with his mother and stepfather. The quest for certainty Donne’s father had died when Donne was four years old, leaving about John Donne was born in 1572 in Bread Street, London, into a family £3,500 to his wife and six children – a large fortune at the time. About six that was prosperous, educated and, as Catholics, part of an unpopular months later Donne’s mother, still only in her thirties, married Dr John religious minority. He was the third of six children. His father, also Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children. At one time Syminges called John, was a successful merchant and a prominent member of the had been president of the Royal College of Physicians; more significantly, Company of Ironmongers. His mother, Elizabeth, a devout Catholic, he was a Catholic. Donne continued to live, therefore, in a family where was the daughter of John Heywood and the granddaughter of John education was valued, affordable and Catholic. Rastell, both popular writers in their time; even more significantly, she was the grandniece of Sir Thomas More, who had been beheaded by King Education Henry VIII in 1535 because he would not swear the oath accepting Henry Donne was educated at home with his brother Henry for the early as supreme head of the church. More had famously declared on the years of his life. There are strong indications that the boys’ teachers scaffold: ‘I die the King’s good servant, but God’s servant first.’ were Jesuits. In later years Donne wrote of these men: ‘I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted This staunch religious devotion in the face of oppression was very much religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined in evidence in Elizabeth’s family. Two of her brothers, Donne’s uncles, martyrdom.’ This early exposure to religious intensity had a profound became members of the Jesuit order – an extremely dangerous choice of effect on Donne and may partly explain his constant intellectual career, as Jesuits were considered, with some justification, to be the main struggle to find some evidence of certainty in existence. Izaak Walton, leaders of the Catholic revolt against English Protestantism. It was treason, Donne’s first biographer, relates how Donne, at the age of 12, entered punishable by horrific forms of death, to be a Catholic priest or even to the University of Oxford with his younger brother, Henry. By starting help a Catholic priest. One of Donne’s uncles, Jasper, led a secret Jesuit university at a slightly younger age, Catholic boys could finish early; in mission to England between 1581 and 1583; he was caught and sentenced this way they left before taking a degree, as that involved swearing the to death, but this sentence was reduced to imprisonment and exile. There Oath of Supremacy, which declared the English monarch, and not the have been suggestions that the young Donne accompanied his mother Pope, to be head of the church. The boys attended Hart Hall, a college to visit Jasper in the Tower of London, but there is no proof of this. In all with Catholic sympathies, for three years. There are suggestions that they

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then transferred to the other great university town of Cambridge. Even At this point in his life the 20-year-old Donne was living a life that was though he was still unable to take a degree, Donne benefited from this radically different from the one he had learned from his Jesuit teachers time spent in studies and in mixing with the intellectual group that lived and his family. He was Master of the Revels (the title explains his role) around the colleges. for the Christmas celebrations at Lincoln’s Inn. His poetry was circulated, with much praise, among the learned of London. He went to the theatre The world’s pleasures and socialised with fashionable women; he was on the way to becoming At some time in his youth, most probably between 1589 and 1591, Donne a popular celebrity. This may simply have been the natural rebellion of appears to have travelled on the Continent. Travel was very much a a young man against the beliefs of the older generation, or it may have part of a young gentleman’s education at this time. He seems to have been a reaction to seeing his younger brother, Henry, die from the plague been fluent in Italian and Spanish, and in later years he kept a great while imprisoned in Newgate prison for helping a Catholic priest. It could many Spanish books in his library; indeed, at about this time he chose a have been another attempt to find the elusive certainty in life. Whatever Spanish motto for himself, antes muerto que mudado (sooner dead than the reason, Donne gave himself up to living the life of a gentleman about changed). The dramatic nature of this motto expresses the type of young town and expressing his view of the world in bright, clever, sensual poetry: man Donne was, or at least wished to be. An early portrait shows him beautifully dressed, with long, dark, curly hair, his intelligent, educated Put forth, put forth that warm balm-breathing thigh, gaze looking into the future while his hand grasps a sword. He is the Which when next time you in these sheets will smother epitome of the Elizabethan gentleman. Perhaps Donne had discovered, There it must meet another. as so many of us do, that there is a comforting certainty in belonging to a recognisable group. Gradually, he drifted away from the law. In 1596 he joined a band of volunteers, under the leadership of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and In 1592 Donne was admitted to study law at Lincoln’s Inn, London. In this Sir Walter Raleigh, and sailed to Cádiz. He experienced a violent sea he was following the strong family tradition on his mother’s side. However, battle and wrote with grim honesty of the terrible scenes he witnessed: as the student lawyers were from wealthy families, they spent more of ‘They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drowned.’ He returned their time pursuing the pleasures of London life than studying law. A to England briefly, but in 1597 he joined another expedition under the friend of Donne’s from this time, Sir Richard Baker, described him as ‘not command of the Earl of Essex, sailing to the Azores with the aim of dissolute but very neat: a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, capturing the Spanish treasure fleet. a great writer of conceited verses’. 8 new explorations john donne introduction

It was socially acceptable for young men from the upper classes to take fortunes soon improved. In 1598 he was offered a post by the father of part in these expeditions. At the time, relations between England and one of his fellow volunteers to Cádiz and he became private secretary Spain were uneasy. As recently as 1588 English forces had narrowly to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. This was a great defeated the Spanish Armada, more by luck than by design. Queen opportunity for Donne, as he now had steady employment and a clear Elizabeth, though officially disapproving of her subjects’ attacks on connection with an important member of the court. The Lord Keeper Spanish vessels and territories, was perfectly happy to receive a share of presided over the House of Lords and the Court of the Star Chamber, the booty. Certainly the sense of drama and adventure seems to have where religious trials were conducted, and he organised the Court of appealed to Donne, as can be seen in his poetry: Chancery. As was customary, the Lord Keeper lived at York House, so Donne came to live in a large palace with beautiful gardens that swept Here take my picture, though I bid farewell; down to the Thames. He became part of Egerton’s extended family Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. group, which included his 14-year-old niece, Ann More.

The trip to the Azores was not a success, with violent storms battering the There is no doubt that Egerton was very fond of Donne. When his son ships. Donne described the damage vividly: died of his wounds in Dublin Castle while serving with Essex in Ireland, Egerton asked Donne to carry his son’s sword in the funeral procession And from our tattered sails, rags drop down so, at Chester Cathedral. In 1601 he made Donne member of Parliament As from one hanged in chains, a year ago. for one of the boroughs that he controlled. It seemed as if John Donne was destined to play an important role in the world of Elizabethan politics. There is a feeling that Donne may have gone on these voyages hoping to Perhaps he had found his certainty at last. find that elusive certainty he craved, but came home with the realisation that it was not to be found in the role of adventurer.

The world of politics On his return to England, Donne, who by now had largely exhausted his finances, became a rather lowly member of Queen Elizabeth’s court. He was 25 years old, charmingly ambitious, entertainingly educated and had proved his valour on military expeditions. Not surprisingly, his 9 new explorations john donne introduction

The religious difficulty by Egerton, Ann’s uncle, and was for a time imprisoned. Sir George More In all likelihood it was about this time that Donne began to move used his influence to ensure that Donne was unable to find employment towards the Church of England. He had already considerably loosened to support his new wife. Donne, with his customary honesty, summed up his connections with the Catholic Church. In his pursuit of certainty he his situation in six words: ‘John Donne, Ann Donne, Un-done.’ had been drawn to study the religious controversies that abounded at the time, and he seems to have developed the view that the different Luckily, Ann’s cousin, Sir Francis Wolley, offered the couple shelter in religions were simply different representations of the one truth: his home in Surrey. For the next few years Donne struggled to provide for his growing family. By 1608 Ann had given birth to five children. He As women do in divers countries go spent some time assisting Thomas Morton, a chaplain who was fiercely In divers habits, yet are still one kind, anti-Catholic. Indeed, there are some indications that Donne may have So doth, so is religion. collaborated with Morton on a number of writings against the Catholic Church, though his name does not appear on any of them. By taking up the post with Sir Thomas Egerton, Donne in effect committed himself to practising the religion of the court: it would have When Morton was made Dean of Gloucester in 1607, he tried to been impossible for a Catholic to act as a private secretary to one of persuade Donne to take holy orders in the Church of England. Donne’s Queen Elizabeth’s more senior courtiers. There is no doubt that Donne letter of refusal expresses a change in his approach to life. He appears to was fully aware of the opportunity he now had. A man could advance be ashamed of the heady days of his youth: himself at court if he came to the attention of those in power. Donne carried out his duties diligently and enthusiastically. Some irregularities of my life have been visible to some men, and though I have, I thank God, made my Marriage and its consequences peace with Him … yet this, which God knows to be In December 1601, in what could be seen as a foolish and impulsive action so, is not so visible to man, as to free me from their censures and it may be that sacred calling from a or as yet another attempt to find certainty, Donne, now 29 years old, dishonour. eloped with Ann More, who was 17. Ann’s father, Sir George More, was a man known for his violent temper. When the couple finally confessed Donne may have been using his past life as an excuse to avoid taking holy the marriage to him he was furious that his daughter had tied herself to a orders because he was not yet fully convinced of the religious doctrines of penniless private secretary. Donne was instantly dismissed from his post 10 new explorations john donne introduction

the Church of England. Perhaps he still harboured the desire to succeed in The death of his wife Elizabethan politics. Or it could simply have been that Donne was not sure In 1617 Ann died a few days after giving birth to a stillborn child. She whether he could make an adequate living in the religious world to support had borne 12 children in 15 years, seven of whom lived; the eldest was 14, his ever-increasing family. Nevertheless, whatever his motive, these are the the youngest only 12 months. Donne was devastated. Walton describes words of a man who had sought certainty but had yet to find it. how he ‘became crucified to the world … a commensurable grief took as full possession of him as joy had done’. When he wrote a sonnet in her Happily, in 1608 relations between Donne and his father-in-law improved memory, Donne clearly stated that he intended to channel all his passion and Ann finally received her dowry. They were able to move to a small into his life as a cleric and his new religion: house in Mitcham that was, to Donne’s delight, convenient to London and his old friends. Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, There has been a great deal of debate about the nature of Donne’s And her soul early into heaven ravished, relationship with his wife. On the one hand, he seems to have felt Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set. extremely guilty about the way in which their marriage changed her life. He wrote to a friend, describing himself sitting ‘in the noise of three He did indeed become extremely successful in his new religion. In 1625 gamesome children, and by the side of her whom I transplanted into he preached a sermon at the lying in state of King James I, and then a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such another for the new king, Charles I. His sermons were noted for their use honest devices, as giving her my company and discourse’. On the other of striking metaphors. In the ‘Sermon of Valediction’ he challenged his hand, he wanted to escape from the house at Mitcham, calling it a ‘prison’ parishioners to consider their relationship with God in the following terms: and a ‘dungeon’. No man would present a lame horse, a disordered Donne travelled extensively on the Continent with Sir Robert Drury and clock, a torn book to a king … Thy body is thy beast; his family between 1611 and 1612. Ann remained in England with their and wilt thou present that to God, when it is lam’d and tir’d with excess of wantonness? When thy clock seven children. Finally, in 1615, as a result of continual urging from King … is disordered with passions … when thy book … is James I, Donne broke from the Catholic Church when he was ordained torn … wilt thou then present thy self thus defac’d and deacon and priest at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and became a royal mangled to almighty God? chaplain. He quickly became known for his brilliant and moving sermons.

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Donne was by this time deeply ashamed of his youthful adventures, The final quest and he adjusted his life story so that the biography written by his In 1631, having got out of his sick-bed, Donne delivered his last sermon, contemporary, Izaak Walton, largely omits his early years. Nevertheless, entitled ‘Death’s Duell’. He spoke of the interconnection of life and death, he was sympathetic towards the extremes of youth: once again using vivid images to convey his message:

An old man wonders then how an arrow from an eye Wee have a winding sheet in our Mother’s womb, could wound him when he was young, and how love which grows with us from our conception, and wee could make him do those things which he did then. come into the world, bound up in that winding sheet, for wee come to seek a grave. He came to believe that his difficulties in supporting his family were part of God’s plan for him: In a gesture that recalls his youthful fondness for the dramatic, Donne ordered a large carved wooden urn to be brought to his room. He stood And looking back on my past life, I now plainly see on it wrapped in his own shroud while an artist made the life-size sketch it was his hand that prevented me from all temporal that was later used for a stone figure. employment; and that it was his will I should never settle nor thrive till I entered into the ministry. It is generally agreed that had Donne not died when he did, on 31 March 1631, he would have become a bishop. He is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. His sermons were popular because they were filled with a sense of the common humanity of mankind: Donne’s apostasy No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is There has been much debate about Donne’s apostasy (giving up his a piece of the continent, a part of the main … Any religion) and the sincerity of his conversion to the Church of England. man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Perhaps he was motivated by a desire to succeed in a world where mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom Catholics were definitely second-class citizens. There is no doubt that the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. King James greatly influenced his decision to be ordained by refusing to grant him a secular appointment. Or it may have been that his early experiences led him to rebel against the religion that had caused so much distress in his family. Interestingly, his mother, who was always a staunch 12 new explorations john donne introduction

Catholic, came to live with Donne and his family in the Deanery at St for publication, for Donne lived at a time when the writing of poetry Paul’s. Was his change of religion simply another attempt to find that was considered to be the accomplishment of a true gentleman. Rather emotional and intellectual certainty he so badly craved? like mastering fencing, it was a skill that defined a man’s social status. A gentleman wrote to amuse, to impress and even to seduce, but he never Whatever his motivation, Donne’s conversion did not end his quest wrote to publish. Donne circulated his poetry among a select group of for certainty. His sermons may have expressed an unwavering faith in friends and patrons. His point of exhibition and distribution was generally God, but his poetry still trembled with uncertainty. In his final poem, the Mitre, an inn frequented by intellectual gentlemen. He rarely dated ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, Donne begs God for mercy. There is a his work and all too often did not keep copies of the poems he had poignancy in the uncertainty that still haunts his very being after all his written. But although Donne followed the customs of the day in the way years of searching. Yet behind the overwhelming need and the religious he viewed his poetry, he was rigorously individual in the way he wrote. language, there is still the glimmer of the man who, in spite of the terrible uncertainty he could see, lived life with a passion, the man who was made It is ironic that the term ‘metaphysical’, applied so often to Donne’s style Master of the Revels, sailed the seas, married impulsively and preached of writing, was first thrown at him as a term of critical abuse. In 1693, some inspiringly, the man who even at the last could not resist punning on his 60 years after Donne’s death, John Dryden wrote that ‘he affects the own name: metaphysics, not only in his satires, where nature only should reign, but perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore; softnesses of love’. And, having done that, thou hast done, I fear no more. In truth, this passage says more about Dryden’s expectations of poetry than it does about metaphysical poetry, but his use of the word Perhaps he did find his certainty after all. ‘metaphysics’ is important because it captures in one word an essential John Donne and metaphysical poetry aspect of Donne’s poetry: his desire to go beyond the physical confines of existence. When Donne wrote about love he did not list his beloved’s John Donne wrote poetry throughout his life. Whether he was on physical qualities, as was customary with traditional poets; instead, he land, at sea, at court, in prison, Catholic or Protestant, single or married, ignored these ‘softnesses of love’ and told her of the ways in which she Donne wrote poetry. But surprising as it may seem, he did not write 13 new explorations john donne introduction

filled his emotions, his mind and his every waking moment. Donne united Thus, Donne could summarise the essence of Elizabeth Drury’s being the intellect and the emotions in a way that had never been done before. in three words: ‘Her body thought’. As readers, we can react to this As T.S. Eliot put it, ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified statement on an instinctive level. By combining two images that are his sensibility.’ accepted as relating to two distinctly different aspects of human existence, Donne succeeds in communicating a unity of message. The three words, In an effort to communicate this unified experience of thought and and the mental images they carry, amalgamate into a new and complex emotion, Donne made use of the conceit. Conceits, in the form of concept that simultaneously appeals to the intellect, the emotions and the far-fetched comparisons, had long been used in traditional love poetry spirit. There is an instinctive quality to our reaction to Donne’s conceits as a device for emphasising the beauty of the poet’s beloved. But that arises out of this challenging combination, a quality all too often Donne discarded the traditional in favour of his own unique approach. lacking in more logical and expected comparisons. In his writing, Donne Once again, it is a negative interpretation by a critic that provides the released himself from the accepted norms of appropriateness; in our key to what Donne was attempting to do. Samuel Johnson famously reading of his work we should endeavour to do the same. commented that in metaphysical poetry, ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by violence; nature and art are ransacked for To be able to make these connections, the metaphysical poet had to illustrations, comparisons and illusions.’ His use of the words ‘violence’ be finely tuned in every fibre of his being. Here again, those who were and ‘ransacked’, though intended to be a reproach, suggest the suspicious of metaphysical poetry regarded this as a weakness. Johnson uncompromising way in which Donne combined ideas in his poetry. He rather huffily pronounced, ‘The metaphysical poets were men of learning, disregarded convention, both in thought and taste. He can use the image and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.’ In a way, Johnson of a flea in a love poem and urge God to ravish him in a religious one. both hit and missed the point with this statement. The metaphysical Because he was trying to communicate an incredibly complex poets, and Donne in particular, were indeed men who had benefited from experience, Donne used the conceit as a device whereby he could the privilege of education, but instead of simply exhibiting their education connect apparently unconnected images in such a way that the gradual by reproducing skilful copies of what they had previously studied, they uncovering of a connectedness between them conveys both an confronted the very foundations of that education: they questioned the intellectual and an emotional message. T.S. Eliot called it a ‘telescoping of logic they had been taught and tested the substance of the rhetoric they images and multiplied associations’. It is a way of dramatically and rapidly had practised. In this way, Donne takes the framework of the traditional communicating complexity of both feeling and thinking. Petrarchan sonnet and subjects it to the stresses of unexpected conceits;

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he fills the dramatic opening, so long the poet’s comfortable starting point, with a tension of contradiction and rejects the conventionally artificial language and rhythm of poetry for the words of everyday speech and the rhythm that comes from the sense of these words. To be able to do all this, he had to have ‘wit’ – not in the simplistic sense in which we use that word today, but in the words of the critic Josef Lederer, as ‘a brilliant result of long study, a quintessence of deep learning’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge expresses his view in more detail:

Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the most boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it – this is the wit of Donne!

Of course, the fundamental question with Donne is whether his poetry grew out of some inner, inescapable urge that demanded expression or was the calculated posturing of a man who was ambitious for fame and fortune. Did Donne possess a mind that was, in T.S. Eliot’s words, ‘perfectly equipped for its work’ of ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience’? Was this mind tormented by the vision of the uncertainty of existence and forever searching for some evidence of certainty? Do his unconventional conceits and ‘wit’ simply represent the spiritual, intellectual and emotional insecurity that Donne felt throughout his life? Or was his poetry merely a brilliant exercise in self-advertisement, a cynical publicity stunt to attract the applause and admiration of his peers?

15 new explorations john donne the flea

The Flea rejected. Perhaps somewhat at a loss in the face of constant refusal, his eyes wander around the room and suddenly light upon the flea, and Background inspiration strikes. One of the difficulties with Donne’s poetry is that he never made any attempt to keep his poems together or to organise them in chronological The first line appears to be a casual comment on the appearance of a order. Izaak Walton deeply regretted this attitude, commenting that flea. We can imagine how it would catch his lover’s attention, how she Donne’s pieces ‘were loosely, God knows too loosely scattered in his would probably feel rather puzzled at this sudden change of topic. But youth’. Publication did not appeal to Donne, and on the rare occasion the second line quickly undercuts this apparent simplicity. Donne uses when he allowed ‘The Anniversaries’ to be printed he wrote to a friend: the flea to make a very important point to his lover. She is denying him ‘The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print something he wants, but so far he does not specify what it is. anything in verse.’ It was not until 1633, two years after his death, that the first collected edition of Donne’s verse appeared. The order and In the next two lines he returns to his comments on the flea. He describes grouping of the poems was largely a matter of guesswork on the part of how the flea has bitten both himself and his lover, and their blood is now his friends. mixed together in the flea. A basic physicality is suggested in his use of the blood image, which prepares us for the sixth line. Donne’s use of the It has been said that ‘The Flea’ was one of Donne’s most celebrated and word ‘maidenhead’, along with ‘sin’ and ‘shame’, leaves little doubt about most widely known poems while he was alive. Though there is no definite what it is his lover is denying him. evidence to support this, there are indications that it was translated into Dutch. Donne reinforces the connection between himself and the flea in the final three lines of the first stanza. Unlike Donne himself, the flea is able A reading of the poem to enjoy an intimate relationship with this woman, even though it has not Donne opens the poem in a dramatic fashion. He is talking to his lover, gone through the rituals of courtship. The use of the word ‘pampered’ but it is definitely a one-sided conversation. It is almost as if he is lecturing implies a feeling of contentment and satisfaction – two states that Donne her. His use of the image of the flea, though a common poetic device in most certainly does not feel. The suggestion is that he has played the the 17th century, adds to the drama and the tension. There is a feeling wooing game according to the rules and he feels that, in all fairness, his that Donne has already tried a number of arguments and has been lover should play her part in the game.

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It is evident from reading this first stanza that how this poem is and Donne’s. He urges her to remember that the mingling of their blood interpreted, and what reaction we experience to it, depend on how we is intimate and special: it is like their ‘marriage bed’ and their ‘marriage view the tone of the piece. Donne would probably have read this poem temple’. Here again, Donne overstates the situation in a humorous way: aloud to a small group and in this way could have coloured the tone. linking the image of a temple with a flea is patently ridiculous. Donne But our interpretation has to develop as a result of careful reading and races on, carried forward by his own eloquence and perhaps by his lover’s rereading. If we consider Donne to be approaching his lover in a mock- lack of response despite his best efforts. Nevertheless, in the midst of dramatic or charmingly pathetic manner, we can react with amusement; all these theatricals he produces a stunningly vivid image of their blood we can join in the joke that is trembling between Donne and his lady. But within the flea, ‘cloistered in these living walls of jet’. Barely pausing for if we think he is behaving in a thoroughly unpleasant fashion, exerting breath, he launches another argument at his lover. If she is unmoved by considerable emotional blackmail on his lover with his selfish, adolescent his death and that of the flea, then she must be concerned about causing whingeing, we are bound to feel anger and annoyance. Finally, it may be her own suicide and thereby committing a sin to add to that of two that Donne deliberately wove this ambiguity into the poem as a way of murders. adding a sense of danger. He knows he is skating on thin ice, and so do we. In this way he deliberately moves away from the safety of creating Donne uses religious language in this stanza to provide a framework for straightforward amusement and into the perils of humour that challenges his argument. His implication is that he regards physical intimacy with our preconceptions. his lover as something sacred and special, but there is an undercutting awareness of the humorous incompatibility that lies in linking a flea Donne ended the first stanza on an extremely dramatic note, lamenting sucking blood with religion. Though Donne’s lover never speaks, we in mock-heroic terms – evident in the use of the word ‘alas’ – the fact that can clearly visualise her reaction to his arguments in the way that she he and his lover have not experienced physical intimacy. He continues behaves. She may be verbally inactive but she is far from being passive. this approach in the second stanza. His dramatic plea, ‘Oh stay’, asking The third stanza opens with the death of the flea. Donne is horrified by her to not to squash the flea, carries with it a wealth of understated her action. It is ‘cruel and sudden’, perhaps as cruel and sudden as her comedy. In an age when fleas and their destruction were commonplace, rejection of his advances. She has spilled the ‘blood of innocence’. The the drama Donne attaches to this incident can only be interpreted as clear suggestion is that the woman is callous and cruel in her behaviour humorous. He asks that the flea’s life be spared, because in killing it his towards the innocent flea, just as she is with the innocent Donne. This, of lover will destroy the flea’s life and, because it contains their blood, her life course, is obviously ridiculous. Donne is far from innocent in his desires.

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He continues this line of thought, stating that she triumphs in the flea’s Alternatively death because she has proved the arguments that Donne put forward in Samuel Johnson wrote of the metaphysicals, ‘Whatever is improper or the second stanza to be wrong. vicious is produced from nature in pursuit of something new and strange; the writers fail to give delight by their desire to excite admiration.’ At this point it appears that Donne is completely beaten. He gives the impression that his lover has outwitted him, but he is simply lulling This piece may be nothing more than the poetic equivalent of a dirty her into a false sense of security. The last three lines of the poem are joke. It causes a reaction simply because it uses rude images. Donne takes produced with a magician’s flourish. Donne concedes that the woman is an ‘improper’ idea in the belief that he will be able to give it a new slant, absolutely right: she has lost nothing with the death of the flea. But in a purely in an attempt to impress his friends at the Mitre. It is neither ‘new’ breathtaking reversal of the balance of power, he tells her that in exactly nor ‘strange’, nor does it ‘excite admiration’ or ‘delight’. In short, it is the the same way, her yielding to his advances will not cause her to lose her perfect piece to be read in a dimly lit room filled with immature men. honour. He is, in effect, using the well-worn argument that he will respect her in the morning!

Style Donne uses a popular device from 16th-century love poetry as the framework on which to hang his poem. The linking of a male lover with a flea had been used in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian poetry. The image was usually developed along very bawdy lines, with the flea wandering over the woman’s body; the death of the flea at the hands of the woman was regarded as ultimately blissful.

This poem could be viewed as Donne testing the limitations of the device not simply to achieve a humorous effect, but to challenge the conventionality that the device represented.

18 new explorations john donne song: go, and catch a falling star

Song: Go, and catch a falling star mermaid at this time: while it could refer to a beautiful half-woman, half- fish creature, it could also be used to denote a prostitute. The final image Background of ‘envy’s stinging’ has a deeply personal feeling about it. This poem appears to have been written during the time Donne spent at Lincoln’s Inn, when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a Donne is deliberately playing with his reader’s perception of the nature poet. Poetry at this time was one way in which an educated young man of this poem. He alternates between images usually connected with the on the fringes of the court could bring himself to the attention of those in Petrarchan view of love and images that are radically and disturbingly power. opposed to it. He is consciously confusing his reader in order to create tension. All this tension culminates in the final three lines of the stanza, A reading of the poem where Donne uses both the sense of his words and their rhythm in a The first line of this poem has a magical, fairytale quality about it. The most unsettling way. There is real vehemence in his statement about the catching of a ‘falling star’ belongs to the romantic world of handsome lack of success for the ‘honest mind’. Does it reflect the frustrations of an princes and beautiful princesses. Donne deliberately creates specific ambitious young man not yet able to break into the powerful world of the expectations in the reader by using this as his opening line. However, the court? By interrupting the rhythm of the stanza with two lines of only two second line introduces a sense of unease, as it is a much darker image. words, Donne skilfully emphasises this final image. The phrase ‘Get with child’ is brutally unromantic. The mandrake is a plant that people at the time believed had human qualities, such as screaming The second stanza continues this tension but in a slightly different way. when it was uprooted. Though this image, like that of catching a falling Rather than alternate between pleasant traditional images and more star, is meant to represent an impossible task, it is very much the stuff of unpleasant unconventional ones, Donne remains in the world of the nightmares. unpleasant. A series of disquieting images is hurled at the reader: being ‘born to strange sights’, able to see ‘Things invisible’, riding ‘ten thousand The tone changes again with Donne’s rather conventional question about days and nights’, hair turning ‘snow white’ and returning with stories the passing of time. But we return to a darker world of images with the of ‘strange wonders’. It is not accidental that Donne repeats the word question about ‘the Devil’s foot’. The ‘mermaids singing’ could belong to ‘strange’ in this stanza, for it is unsettlingly strange. In a final flourish, the world of falling stars and passing time; however, Donne appears to be Donne ends the stanza with the strangest concept of all: the fact that it deliberately exploiting the ambiguity that existed around the image of the is impossible to find ‘a woman true, and fair’. He has propelled us along

19 new explorations john donne song: go, and catch a falling star

a rollercoaster ride of emotions and we are left gasping at the end of was he drawing attention to the stupidity of the conventional Petrarchan this outburst. Are we speechless from shock at the strength of emotion love poem? Was Donne fighting for women to be treated by men as real underlying his opinion of women? Or has the tension that fills every word human beings? It’s up to you to decide. in the poem become unbearable? Style The tone of the final stanza is more controlled; it is as if Donne has been The listing of impossible tasks was popular in Petrarchan poetry. This use emotionally drained by the first two stanzas. There is a sad vulnerability of hyperbole (an exaggerated statement not meant to be taken literally) and longing in the line ‘If thou find’st one, let me know’, for despite his was a device to emphasise the poet’s devotion to his beloved. best efforts, Donne still yearns for the ‘woman true, and fair’. Quickly he changes his mind, asking not to be told of such a woman, not even There is a strong element of satire in this poem. Broadly speaking, satire if she were living next door to him. Once again, Donne’s bitterness is used to expose and ridicule folly and shallowness. It is frequently driven returns, perhaps even more effective now that it is more understated in its by anger, but it is more refined and sophisticated than an angry outburst. expression. The writer generally expresses a one-sided view of his subject in order to ensure that the satire works. The use of satire suggests that the writer In the last five lines of the poem Donne summarises his attitude to feels superior to those he is satirising, that he can see the folly while others women. He no longer rants and raves: he simply states the fact that even are unaware of it. if a ‘true’ woman were to be found she would inevitably turn ‘false’ in the length of time it would take for a letter to be sent to him while travelling Alternatively to meet her. It is a shocking ending to the poem; or is it? William Hazlitt commented on the metaphysical poets: ‘their chief aim was to make you wonder at the writer, not interest you in the subject’. As with ‘The Flea’, this poem is a mass of unresolved ambiguities. Is This poem could be seen as the work of a self-absorbed man. Donne Donne being serious or not? Is he expressing his real views, his longing was determined to gain notoriety by being outrageous and controversial. for certainty, or is he simply acting out an attitude? Is the ‘me’ in the Though this poem may have been written as the words to a song, it is poem Donne or a persona he has taken on? Did he write this poem as not pleasantly amusing. His images are deliberately disturbing, his views a satire? If he intended it to be a satire, what was he satirising? Was he on women are offensive and his tone is nastily pompous. He may pride satirising women, perhaps as a result of something he experienced? Or himself on having an ‘honest mind’, but on the evidence of this poem it is little wonder that he was unable ‘to advance’. 20 new explorations john donne the sun rising

The Sun Rising king and farm workers, ‘country ants’, set about the harvesting. All these people are governed by something outside themselves: the schoolboys Background by the school day, the apprentices by their work, the courtiers by the Donne made no attempt during his lifetime to date the majority of his whims of the king and the farm workers by the seasons. However, Donne poems, nor to keep them in any kind of order. As very little of his work and his lover are freed from such controls by their love. They have was published and the poems were simply distributed in manuscript form, transcended time itself. we have few indications of when most of the poems were written. In the first printed edition of his poetry, in 1633, the love poems are scattered The second stanza continues this theme of love triumphant. Donne throughout the book. However, in 1635, four years after his death, an challenges the power of the sun with his beams ‘so reverend, and strong’. edition of Donne’s poetry grouped all his love poems together under He states that he could easily blot out these beams by simply shutting his the title ‘Songs and Sonnets’. Generally, later editions have stuck to this eyes. But he will not do this, because he does not want to miss seeing his arrangement because not enough definite information is available to beloved for one instant. Therefore, for him his lover is stronger than the organise them in any other way. sun. This links into the following image, where Donne speaks of her eyes being bright enough to blind the sun. This is a traditional image in love A reading of the poem poetry, but Donne places it in a context where the comparison seems to The opening three lines of this poem are wonderfully dramatic. Donne occur naturally and spontaneously. As in the first stanza, he sweeps from balances straightforward language and natural speech rhythms to vividly the close intimacy of the room to the outside world by his use of vivid create a sense of immediacy. It is as if we are there with him as he vents images. He challenges the sun further by stating that it may spend the his annoyance on the sun. The beams of sun shine in through ‘windows’ day moving across the world, over the evocative ‘Indias of spice and mine’ and ‘curtains’, disturbing Donne and his lover. It is an intrusion into their or shining on kings, but the real, true world will be in this room with the close intimacy, an unwanted reminder that they will not always be able two lovers. In this way, love transcends the confines of space. to exist in this tranquil and contented state. The sun is a reminder to the two lovers of the world outside. Their quietness is emphasised by the In the third stanza Donne draws together this central theme of love frenzied activities, clearly suggested by the rhythm of these lines, of the triumphant. His lover is ‘all states’ and he is ‘all princes’. There is an early morning. In four lines, we see ‘Late schoolboys’ and ‘sour prentices’ irresistible quality about Donne’s enthusiasm, whatever his motivation. reluctantly going on their way, while courtiers scurry around after the Even if he was only driven by the desire to seduce, it is hard not to be

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swept along with him. He is emphatic in his belief that the two lovers Alternatively have everything that matters with them in the room: ‘Nothing else is.’ The critic John Carey considers the ‘vaunting language’ used by Donne The trappings of worldly success, considered so important in the external in this poem to be a clear indication that he did not feel as confident world, are irrelevant in the world of love. The unlimited power wielded by and contented as he said he did. Rather than feeling better than those 16th-century royalty is but an imitation of the lovers’ power; the rewards involved in the court or richer than those who had wealth, Carey feels that of ‘honour’ are simply amusing imitations and wealth is useless. The sun, Donne, who had financial difficulties, was deeply envious of the world of which so rudely wakened them, is pitied by Donne because its movement the rich and powerful. He was desperately ambitious to make his mark is across this external world on its own, whereas Donne and his beloved on the world. Carey’s view is that Donne regards the ‘private world’ he are two people united in a limitless world of love. Momentarily, he has inhabits with his beloved as being only an imitation of the ‘public’ world found some certainty. he so longs to join. No matter how hard he tries to concentrate on the superiority of love, he is ‘irascibly conscious of the rest of the world’s In the final four lines of the poem, Donne slows the rhythm of his words activities’. to underpin the alteration in his emotions. His excited and challenging confidence changes to sympathetic concern for the sun. The sun is old and deserves some respect, particularly from two who have such power. Donne comforts the sun by allowing it to enter into their world, so that in shining on them it will be shining on the true world. Is there a touch of humour in these lines? Could Donne once again be practising the art of humorous seduction?

Style Donne frequently places himself in a dramatic setting in his love poems. Whether he is attempting to seduce his lover, to remain with her or to leave her behind, the reader is brought into the scene at a very important moment. In this poem Donne uses this drama to give new life and energy to the traditional love poetry images of royalty and the sun.

22 new explorations john donne the anniversarie

The Anniversarie In the first stanza the concept of time passing is conveyed by fairly unthreatening images. The idea of ‘kings’, ‘beauties’, ‘wits’ and the Background ‘sun itself’ ageing by a year is not really disturbing: Donne is simply See the background notes for ‘The Sun Rising’. reproducing the usual formula to suggest the passing of time. Similarly, the line ‘Only our love hath no decay’ is a common sentiment expressed A reading of the poem in love poetry. Love has ‘no tomorrow’, nor has it a ‘yesterday’. This is This poem opens on familiar territory, both for the modern reader of all fairly unremarkable. But then we meet the line ‘Running it never runs Donne and for those few of his contemporaries who were privileged to from us away’ and the formulaic safety of the opening eight lines begins read his work in manuscript form. The images of the court and the sun to tremble slightly. What does Donne mean by this line? He must have were part of the traditional formula of Petrarchan love poetry, which felt it was of reasonable importance to use it to interrupt the traditional was popular in Donne’s time. For modern readers who have read some approach he had followed so far. There is a kind of premeditated of Donne’s works, these images are familiar because he uses them intellectualisation in this paradox, a conscious self-awareness that is frequently in his writing. Yet even though these two groups of readers not present in the previous lines. The verb ‘running’ is not one that are separated by more than 400 years, a common sense of expectancy is immediately springs to mind in connection with a love affair, yet Donne stimulated by this opening. Just as Donne’s friends might have glanced obviously chose it carefully. Was it simply so that he could construct this at each other in anticipation of how Donne was going to follow this clever little paradox to amuse both himself and his friends? Or did he beginning, we are also aware that something will happen in the course of deliberately use ‘run’ because it was definitely not part of the vocabulary this poem that will not be totally expected. of the Petrarchan love poem?

However, the first stanza continues in a reasonably conservative way. Donne ends this stanza with a line that is beautifully balanced, both in Donne, having noted that everything from the ‘kings’ to the ‘sun’ has its meaning and its rhythm: ‘But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day’. aged by a year since the lovers first met, states clearly that it is only their Love remains untouched by the ‘destruction’ and ‘decay’ that haunts shared love that is untouched by time. In the face of ‘destruction’ and everything else. ‘decay’, their love ‘keeps his first, last, everlasting day’. The second stanza begins with a graphic image of two bodies in separate graves. The threat of death was very real to the Elizabethans, and this

23 new explorations john donne the anniversarie

would have been a disturbing image, one far removed from the niceties The final stanza opens where the second stanza ends. When the souls of Petrarchan love poetry. The description of the two lovers lying in the of the lovers go up to Heaven they will be ‘thoroughly blessed’ because one grave is not totally comforting. Donne continues the royalty image of their love will be increased by heavenly love. There they will join all the the first stanza with his comparison between the two lovers and ‘princes’. other lovers who have also attained spiritual love, and in this way they will This is an idea that we have met previously with Donne: that mutual love no longer be unique in the way that they are on Earth. However, for the makes two people special, powerful and set apart – rather like royalty but moment they are still here on Earth; they are still ‘kings’ because their even better. However, despite their uniqueness, the two lovers, along with love is true, but they need not fear death. The lovers are safe because ‘other princes’, must inevitably surrender their physical bodies. they can be damaged in only one way: by each other. Their love ensures that they are immune to the passing of time and the horrors of death, It is interesting that there is generally a marked lack of physical details in but ironically, it also makes them profoundly vulnerable to each other. Donne’s poetry: we rarely learn anything about what his lovers look like, Happily, Donne is so confident in the certainty of their love that he even though his love poetry is filled with a sensuous pleasure. Yet here quickly dismisses this possibility. They must simply avoid worrying about he deliberately writes of the ‘eyes’ with their ‘sweet salt tears’ and the ‘True and false fears’ and live a long life together, secure in the protection ‘ears’ that were ‘Oft fed with true oaths’. The first six lines of the second of their shared love. stanza vividly describe the physicality of death because Donne wants us to feel the overwhelming nature of death, so that love’s ability to triumph This poem ends in a way that is far removed from the Petrarchan over it will appear all the more wonderful. For love does triumph. Donne conventions that filled the first stanza. It has travelled from the world declares that their love has transcended the limitations of mere physical of the court to the sun blazing in space, from the darkness of the grave love: it has become a part of their very souls. This spiritual love is able to the light of Heaven. But above all it has declared the power and the to cheat death: the bodies of the lovers may go ‘to their graves’, but certainty of the love that Donne shares with his beloved. the souls will escape to ‘there above’. This was provocative stuff in an age when access to Heaven was being fought over by the Catholic and Style Protestant churches. Both promised eternal life to their followers and Donne’s poems on love are usually classified as lyrics. Though the term damnation to those who rejected them. Yet here is Donne, filled with ‘lyric’ is a rather general one, there are certain characteristics that tend to certainty, saying that love shared between a man and a woman is the way be obvious in a lyrical poem. The 19th-century writer John Ruskin defined to gain entry into Heaven. the lyric as ‘the expression by the poet of his own feelings’. There is an

24 new explorations john donne the anniversarie

undeniable personal quality about the lyric, in that the words are spoken by one person from a personal viewpoint. However, a problem arises regarding exactly who the ‘I’ of lyrical poetry is. The ‘I’ could be the poet himself or it could simply represent a character the poet has created, a persona, to act as a mouthpiece for what he wants to express. Therefore, it is not always clear just how personal ‘lyric’ poems are.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the reality of the love experiences Donne describes in his love poetry. Some have felt that the ‘I’ in these poems is not Donne and that the feelings expressed are no more than the wishful thoughts of a frustrated young man. Others believe that Donne based his poems on actual experiences in his life and that the ‘I’ is very definitely Donne himself. What is undeniable is the fact that when Donne turned to religion he became deeply embarrassed by these poems from his youth.

Alternatively Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented on the metaphysical poets that they ‘sacrificed the heart to the head’. Is this poem a sincere expression of Donne’s belief in the certainty of his love or is it simply an intellectual exercise designed to show just how stale and old-fashioned traditional Petrarchan love poetry had become? Did he write from the heart or did his head make it look as if he was writing from the heart?

25 new explorations john donne sweetest love, i do not go

Sweetest love, I do not go imagining all the dreadful deaths that might happen to him. We can almost see Donne widening his eyes and giving an appealing smile to Background emphasise this little joke. It has been suggested – particularly by Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton – that Donne wrote this poem, together with ‘A Valediction: In an effort to carry this lighter tone into the second stanza, Donne then Forbidding Mourning’, to his wife before he left to travel on the compares himself to the sun. The sun, he tells his beloved, set yesterday Continent in 1611. However, as Donne rarely dated any of his poetry, but was still able to return. He must go away, but he will be back. In a there is no proof to support this view. simple little hyperbole, he tells her that he will be back more speedily than the sun because he has the motivation to return to her. In some manuscripts this poem is in a group entitled ‘Songs which were made to certain airs which were made before’. Several 17th-century The third stanza approaches the main theme of the poem from a slightly manuscripts contain music for this poem, but again there is no proof that different angle. Donne reflects on the ways humankind deals with life Donne ever intended this poem to be sung. experiences. He comments that we tend to accept the good times for what they are, but when it comes to the bad times we tend to exaggerate A reading of the poem how bad they are. He is trying to minimise the ‘bad chance’ of their The poem opens in typical Donne style. It is a moment of drama – we parting in an effort to comfort and reassure his beloved. have stumbled upon two people immersed in an intense conversation. But the drama in this poem is far more understated than in much of However, in the fourth stanza he returns to the intensely personal tone Donne’s other love poetry. There is a sense of true intimacy about the of the opening stanza. In a series of beautifully constructed images and language he uses to express his feelings. He speaks simply and with rhythms he describes just how deeply connected the two lovers are. Her apparent sincerity. There is little evidence of his sparkling wit and tongue- sadness is so real to him that it actually erodes his life force. Her sighs in-cheek humour; he is simply trying to reassure his beloved. In the very diminish the strength of his soul; her tears are like a loss of blood to him. first lines of the poem he emphasises to her that he is not going ‘For Her grief is killing him and he urges her to remember this, to realise that weariness’ of her, nor because he is looking for ‘A fitter love’. He then she is ‘the best of me’. This stanza vibrates with a level of sincerity and uses gentle humour to try to lighten the moment. After all, he says, he an emotional openness that are in marked contrast to some of Donne’s will have to die sometime and he would rather enjoy life than spend it earlier love poetry. There is no sense that Donne is performing or taking

26 new explorations john donne sweetest love, i do not go

up a position in an effort to impress or amuse. For once, it seems that we separation. However, in spite of his best efforts, Donne cannot control are seeing John Donne the man as he really is, filled with the certainty the emotional impact of this moment. His true feelings break through that their love is true. rhyme and rhythm. He cannot hide his own vulnerability. The death that he is suffering in this poem is more real and painful than the one he This emotional intensity sweeps into the final stanza. Donne begs his lover described in ‘The Flea’ because love is no longer a game. not to imagine all the terrible things that could happen to him when they are parted. He admits the possibility of something dreadful occurring, but Alternatively he reminds her that they really have no control over destiny. Once again, ‘In his poems there is often a perfect equilibrium between their exact truth he uses a wonderfully evocative image to convey the depth of his feelings. to mood and feeling and their acute awareness of an audience’ (Barbara For lovers such as they, the ultimate terror of death is simply a turning Everett). Is this poem simply another example of Donne using love as a ‘aside to sleep’. Their true and certain love enables them to triumph over vehicle for his desire to impress his little group of fans? Is he exploiting time and space, and even death itself. his lover, once again using their apparent emotional connection as an opportunity to display his ‘wit’? Style The structure of this poem is deceptively simple. The very appearance of the printed lines on the page implies that this is a poem that should be easily understood, and in many ways it is. Donne uses the simple language of everyday conversation. There are no dramatic exclamations, no witty constructions: just the desire to express sincerity. His occasional movements away from the deeply personal tone (in the second and third stanzas) are not for the purpose of displaying his intellect, but rather are further attempts to relieve the dreadful emotional turmoil the two lovers are experiencing. His use of a light rhythm and a strong rhyme seems to be a deliberate attempt to lighten the intensity of the situation. Similarly, the five eight-line stanzas impose a definite structure on the scene, a structure that is clearly lacking in the reality of the lovers’ imminent

27 new explorations john donne a valediction: forbidding mourning

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning wonderfully special and should not involve others. In light of this intensity it seems odd that he should be advising her to meet their death with ‘No Background tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests’. As we have seen, Izaak Walton links this poem with ‘Sweetest love, I do not go’, suggesting that they were written just before a trip to the The third stanza makes no attempt to resolve this difficulty. Donne Continent in 1611. He comments: ‘I beg leave to tell you, that I have heard seems to deliberately leave the personal and move to the impersonal. He some critics … say, that none of the Greek or Latin poets did equal them.’ comments on the custom, popular since classical times, of viewing natural However, attractive though it may be to connect them to Donne’s life, it occurrences, such as earthquakes, as signs or portents. He sweeps the should be noted that parting or absence from a loved one were traditional focus of the poem up into the skies to see the ‘trepidation of the spheres’, themes in love poetry. the very planets moving. Gradually this image connects with those in the opening two stanzas: the death of ‘virtuous men’, Donne’s desire for the A reading of the poem two lovers to ‘melt’ and now the ‘trepidation of the spheres’. Each of these Donne opens this poem with a vivid image of a deathbed scene. This, images is centred on the idea of movement, movement that is profoundly coupled with the title – ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ – creates important but is nevertheless gentle, quiet and ‘innocent’. the expectation that this poem will be about the death of someone. It is certainly not an unpleasant death, as the ‘virtuous men’ are confident Donne continues his astronomical imagery in the fourth stanza with his of a life after death in Heaven. The atmosphere is one of dignity and reference to ‘sublunary lovers’ love’. This is the type of love that ‘the laity’ composure, with a group of friends present at the gentle passing. experience. It is a narrow, earthbound type of love that is dependent on physical presence, a love that cannot endure ‘Absence’. At this point we The second stanza links into this idea of a quiet withdrawal. Donne begin to realise that Donne is not concerned with death in a physical advises his beloved that they should ‘melt, and make no noise’. At this sense but in an emotional sense. point Donne still seems to be dealing with death in its physical sense. But the following three lines have something odd about them. Donne seems From the fifth stanza on, Donne slowly reveals the reason for his to be suggesting that the two lovers should die peacefully. He emphasises ‘valediction’. He expands on the love he shares with his beloved. It is quite the depth and uniqueness of their love by using such religious phrases unlike that of the ‘sublunary lovers’. It has been ‘refined’, purified, so that as ‘profanation of our joys’ and ‘To tell the laity’. Theirs is a love that is all impurities have been removed. Their love is not confined by physical

28 new explorations john donne a valediction: forbidding mourning

nearness, the presence of ‘eyes, lips, and hands’: they have achieved an roam’ while his beloved is the ‘fixed foot’ that ‘leans, and hearkens after ‘Inter-assured’ love that is founded on connection of the mind rather than it’. They are mutually dependent while being independent. Thus, Donne of the body. They are able to be careless of the physical presence of each can declare that she is the certainty in his life; her ‘firmness’ ensures other because they are so confident in each other. that his direction is true, and it is she to whom he will return, just as the compasses must inevitably meet together, ‘And makes me end, where I The sixth stanza reaffirms the special quality of their love. Donne has begun’. He reassures his beloved that there is no need for her to mourn described it as something close to a religious experience, a moving of this separation, because for them it is no separation at all. planets, a shared emotion without imperfections. Now he draws all these images together to represent theirs as a relationship of ‘two souls’, where Alternatively a parting, reluctant though it is, is nothing more than ‘an expansion’. The In 1837 Henry Hallam wrote of Donne’s poetry, ‘few are good for much; central theme of the poem is revealed. Donne and his beloved must face the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible’. This poem is a separation. He is trying to comfort her, to stop her mourning as if it not only confused, it is also confusing. Donne wanders around the early were a death, for, he tells her, physical separation takes their ‘refined’ love part of the piece in a kind of intellectual haze. Then, in the later part, he and refines it still further, so that they achieve a connection of exquisite pulls out the conceit of the pair of compasses, rather as a bad magician pureness, ‘Like gold to aery thinness beat’. pulls out a bunch of flowers from a hat. There is no real sense to the trick, but it might just impress the audience! These interwoven images of a perfect love are breathtaking, and yet they are not enough for Donne. He has to go beyond the poetically expected to explore a dimension of imagery that is neither expected nor accepted. He takes the concept of ‘connection’ and searches for a way to express it further. In the final three stanzas of the poem he rejects the traditional, the quickly recognised, the easily understood and finds the world of science. For him, the essence of their relationship is captured by the ‘twin compasses’. Just as this instrument of measurement is made up of two metal legs joined at a point, so Donne and his beloved are connected in separation. In Donne’s case he is the ‘foot’ that ‘far doth

29 new explorations john donne the dreame

The Dreame immediately and intensely intimate and, in many ways, even more dramatic. It is as if we have chanced upon Donne at his most open, Background caught him in those unguarded seconds between sleep and wakefulness. The idea of the poet’s beloved appearing to him while he is dreaming The very rhythm and sounds of the words in the first two lines of or daydreaming originated in classical poetry. It was taken up by the poem are filled with an unexpected gentleness and emotional Renaissance poets and became a popular topic. Donald Guss holds the vulnerability. Donne tells his beloved that she acted ‘wisely’ in waking view that Donne was in a direct line of influence from the Renaissance: him. His lack of irritation at being disturbed is in marked contrast to the ‘Donne sometimes expresses dramatic emotions through the gallant last time we saw Donne being awakened, in ‘The Sun Rising’. He speaks conceits of the Petrarchans.’ to his ‘Dear love’ in a quiet and familiar way, welcoming her arrival. His comment that she ‘brok’st not’ his dream, but rather continued it, is A reading of the poem touching in its sincerity. This Donne is certainly not playing at the game As we have seen, Donne’s poetry frequently begins with a moment of of love. He tells her that she is ‘so true’ that she makes ‘dreams truths, drama, where the reader is swept into the piece by a dramatic statement. and fables histories’; she embodies the idealised perfection of the worlds Thus, in ‘The Flea’ we read: of dreams and fairy stories. His invitation to her to ‘Enter these arms’ is a million miles away from his attempt in ‘The Flea’ to entice his lover to Mark but this flea, and mark in this, yield to him. A desire to possess and dominate has given way to a longing How little that which thou deny’st me is … for mutual submission, for them to finish his dream, to ‘act the rest’. Similarly, with ‘Sweetest love, I do not go’: This intense intimacy continues in the second stanza. He tells her that Sweetest love, I do not go, she did not wake him by the noise of her movement, but by the light For weariness of thee of her eyes. Here Donne expresses a common feeling among lovers, And perhaps the most dramatic of all openings, that of ‘The Sun Rising’: where a meeting of eyes can have the power to set hearts fluttering and pulses racing. He is so aware of her that her very presence is enough to Busy old fool, unruly sun … wake him. The level of their closeness becomes even more apparent as However, in ‘The Dreame’ we encounter a slightly different opening the poem continues. Donne tells her that he thought she was ‘an angel’, technique. The theatrical statement gives way to a remark that is adding with a moving vulnerability that he is telling the truth because she

30 new explorations john donne the dreame

‘lov’st truth’. This is not the Donne who used amusing flattery as an aid to an admission of dependence: he needs to experience true love again, he seduction. This relationship is much too serious for anything but the truth; needs to be close to his beloved, he needs to feel that certainty. it is based on the certainty of mutual understanding, emotional empathy and a sharing of thoughts. It is no wonder that Donne uses the religious Metre words ‘angel’ and ‘profane’ in an effort to convey just how special it is. Donne’s approach to metre has been the subject of much debate. Though he frequently employed iambic pentameter (each line having In the final stanza Donne gradually becomes more wakeful. He now five stressed and five unstressed syllables), it is generally agreed that the begins to ‘doubt’. On one level, this doubting is simply a question reading of his poetry is controlled more by the sense of the words than whether his beloved is actually there or not. However, on a deeper level by their metre. Coleridge commented on the poetry of Donne that ‘in it is indicative of the terrible inner doubt that Donne experienced in poems where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so, the all aspects of his life, but particularly when it came to love. Previously, sense must be understood to ascertain the metre’. This view was echoed when he did not truly love he had been able to hide this doubt beneath by Joan Bennett when she wrote, ‘Often the rhythm is as intricate as the sparklingly witty comments. Now that he does love he must lay his soul thought and only reveals itself when the emphasis has been bare. He is embarrassed by his own insecurity, admitting that the strength carefully distributed according to the sense.’ Any personalised of his love is equalled by the strength of his fear. He speaks for all lovers consideration of ‘The Dreame’ should include an analysis of the way who know the wonder of truly loving and the terror that it will all in which Donne links sense and metre to achieve a deceptively natural suddenly disappear. His beloved is as a light in the overwhelming rhythm. darkness, with her ‘lightning’ eyes and her ability to know his heart and his thoughts. She comes into his dream ‘to kindle’, to set him on fire with her Alternatively presence. But even more than that, there is a sense that Donne felt she Mario Praz felt that Donne’s ‘sole preoccupation is with the whole effect’. had come to kindle his very life, to light up the gnawing darkness in his In this poem Donne simply reproduces a popular poetic device so that soul that craved some certainty. he can once again display himself. For him, the ‘whole effect’ of this piece rests on his willingness to be the centre of attention, to describe The poem closes with an expression of the complexity of Donne’s and analyse his emotional viewpoint. To this end he sacrifices coherent emotions. He longs to return to ‘dream that hope again’ with such structure, disciplined metre and intellectual resolution. It is undeniable that intensity that if he cannot do so, he will die. This is more than poetic over- the ‘whole effect’ of this piece is impressive, but it is equally undeniable dramatisation or the role of the charmingly pathetic lover. Instead, it is that it is based on a structure of shifting sands. 31 new explorations john donne batter my heart

Batter my heart frequently expressed embarrassment about his writing. Rather, he wrote poetry because he had no choice but to write poetry. It was his way of Background confronting the worlds that he inhabited. Poetry enabled him to express As always with Donne, the dating of this poem is the subject of much the very turmoil and desires of his soul, and the soul does not exist in debate. Some critics like to view Donne’s poetic output as occurring in phases. two phases, which represent two distinct parts of his life. The first phase is that of his youth and marriage and traces his growth from a young man A reading of the poem desiring adventure and romantic conquests to a mature man who shares a In many ways, this sonnet condenses a number of the aspects of Donne’s deep love with his wife but is profoundly frustrated with his position in life. earlier poetry into a tight, 14-line structure and a rigorous rhyming The second phase is seen as occurring in his later life, after his ordination scheme of abba, abba, cdcdee. It begins with the usual dramatic opening and his wife’s death, when Donne gave himself up to his new religion but – indeed, it is an opening that is spectacularly dramatic. The implied was still tormented by doubt. In this scheme the three sonnets ‘Batter my paradox of the ‘three-personed God’, the representation of the spiritual, heart’, ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ and ‘Thou hast made me’ being called upon to physically ‘batter’ Donne’s heart is both stunning would be seen as belonging to the second phase, while the other seven and shocking. Before we can recover from it, Donne launches us into a list poems under consideration would belong to the first phase. of breathtaking verbs: ‘knock, breathe, shine … rise, and stand, o’erthrow me … bend … break, blow, burn’. We are left gasping by this combination However, this is a rather simplistic view of both Donne’s life and his of action images, the conflict suggested in the paradox ‘that I may rise, poetry. Life is not lived in distinct phases and poetry is more than just and stand, o’erthrow me’ and his clever use of the alliterative b. The first a rhyming diary of day-to-day events. Donne was a highly intelligent quatrain of this sonnet is a challenge not only to God, but also to us, the and complex man who was fully aware of the limitations of the human readers. condition and the profound uncertainty of existence. His life was spent in a continuous search for some evidence of certainty in the many aspects In the second quatrain, Donne sustains this drama and intensity. He of his experience. The world of love and the world of religion were always sweeps us into a wonderful conceit, comparing himself to a ‘usurped present in the world of John Donne, as was the world of poetry. His town’. This combination of images to suggest Donne’s dilemma enables poetry was not written for financial gain, since it was rarely published, us to understand intellectually and to empathise emotionally. It is the nor was it stimulated solely by the desire for notoriety, since Donne metaphysical conceit at its very best. Donne is betrayed by reason, God’s

32 new explorations john donne batter my heart

‘viceroy’, and without this support he is unable to surrender himself totally Finally, driven to the very edge of his emotions, he grasps at a paradox to God. He longs for God, the source of certainty, to dominate him, that is profoundly shocking and deeply disturbing: ‘Nor ever chaste, rather in the way that he hoped his lover might desire his domination in except you ravish me.’ We are left reeling from this image and his total ‘The Flea’. disregard for the conventional ‘niceties’ of expression. Does it represent Donne at his very best or at his very worst? Only you can decide. The final six lines of the sonnet, the sestet, begin with a change in tone, though the content links to the previous quatrain. The city under siege Alternatively was a common image in courtly love poetry for the woman who was A.J. Smith commented on Donne’s poetry: ‘There is a calculated offence reluctant to yield to her lover’s advances. Violence and frenzied activity to decorum in the interests of truth.’ Is this true for ‘Batter my heart’? give way to courtly phrasing and language. Donne declares his intentions Does Donne shock us in order to make us think? Or is it simply that his to God: ‘Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain’. His confession search for new and exciting combinations of ideas sometimes led him into that he is ‘betrothed’ to God’s enemy is filled with the submissiveness lapses of good taste? Is there a place for decorum and good taste in the and reluctance of the courtly lady; it is as if Donne has changed not world of poetry? Or are they only restrictions imposed by those who are only his religion but also his sex. He is trying to communicate his human afraid to think? vulnerability in the face of God’s overwhelming power by drawing on the image of the female figure being overwhelmed by her lover’s passion. It is a subtle and complex combination of images and ideas, a conceit that is both vivid and unsettling.

Donne develops the image in the following line, where he asks God to free him: ‘Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again’. As his sense of fear and panic increases, his imagery begins to intensify. He begs God to ‘Take me to you, imprison me’. He concentrates all his desperation into the paradox: ‘for I | Except you enthral me, never shall be free’.

33 new explorations john donne at the round earth’s imagined corners

At the round earth’s imagined corners in this transition to eternal existence ‘and never taste death’s woe’. This promise of eternal life was a powerful one in an age when death was a real Background presence in everyday life, but to attain it there had to be a complete act See the background notes on ‘Batter my heart’. of faith, and it is this that Donne finds difficult.

A reading of the poem In one sweeping movement, Donne shifts the focus of his sonnet Donne daringly uses a paradox to open this sonnet. His image of the away from the swarming Earth and the crowded heavens to himself. ‘round earth’s imagined corners’ is at once completely illogical, since His concern for the dead – ‘But let them sleep, Lord’ – may sound something round has no corners, and wonderfully descriptive, in that compassionate, but it is founded on purely selfish reasons. Donne asks it conveys a sense of boundless expanse. Indeed, the quatrain creates God to put off the Day of Judgment, quite simply because he is afraid. a scene that is the poetic equivalent of CinemaScope. Rather like the He is afraid that he has so many sins that he has not yet truly repented legendary director Cecil B. de Mille, Donne uses a cast of thousands for them all. He is afraid that he is spiritually unprepared to face the Day to populate his magnificent backdrop. Angels fill the heavens and of Judgment. Since he understands that ‘’Tis late to ask abundance of thy ‘numberless infinities’ of souls go in search of their ‘scattered bodies’. grace’ when he is facing God, he begs God to show him how to repent Behind all this activity, heavenly ‘trumpets’ ring out a clarion call of ‘here on this lowly ground’. triumph. For this is a description of triumph: it represents the triumph over death of those saved by God. On the promised Day of Judgment, the Donne knows that the key to his salvation is repentance, and being souls who have inhabited Heaven may return to their bodies to embark Donne, he is equally aware of the fact that he is finding it difficult to on a life that will stretch to eternity. repent sincerely because he still doubts the certainty of God. He outlines his predicament with an unswerving honesty to God. If God can help him, The second quatrain expands this concept. Donne uses the device of the Donne knows that he will be saved, just as surely as a condemned man ‘list’ to communicate a feeling of multitudes and to emphasise just how will escape execution by the monarch placing his seal upon a document total this triumph over death is. No matter what the cause of death is, of pardon. But in Donne’s case the seal is absolute because it will be whether ‘flood’, ‘fire’, ‘war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies’ or ‘Despair, law, made not of wax but of blood, the blood of God. Perhaps at last Donne chance’, those who believe in God are guaranteed eternal life, while those is beginning to grasp the ultimate certainty, or perhaps he is once again who are alive on the Day of Judgment, provided they believe, can join simply trying to persuade himself that there is a certainty.

34 new explorations john donne at the round earth’s imagined corners

Style Donne’s decision to write some of his poetry in sonnet form placed a number of restrictions on his writing. His poem had to consist of 14 lines, as that is the required length of a sonnet. In addition, the Petrarchan form of the sonnet involved the creation of two parts to the poem, the octet and the sestet. The octet, which comes first, consists of eight lines, the sestet of six lines. A strict rhyming scheme is used to mark the two parts: for the octet abba, abba, for the sestet cdcdee. It is obvious that this rhyming scheme is quite complicated and it requires a lot of effort to ensure that the sense and mood of the sonnet fit into the rhyming scheme successfully.

Generally, the octet describes a situation while the sestet presents a meditation on or a reaction to the octet. The change in rhyme between the octet and the sestet is often mirrored by a similar change in the mood and tone of the poem. The final rhyming couplet, which forms part of the sestet, usually expresses the main theme of the sonnet.

Alternatively ‘Donne elaborates and decorates at the expense of theme, sometimes so far that he displaces it altogether’ (Michael Schmidt). Is this sonnet an uneasy combination of vivid description and confused intellectualisation? Does Donne become carried away by his own creativity to such an extent that he loses his theme completely? Is Donne claiming to be concerned with repentance and spiritual salvation when all the time he is really interested only in his own descriptive powers?

35 new explorations john donne thou hast made me

Thou hast made me of the essence of his emotional and spiritual turmoil. In one line he captures all the anguished questioning that haunts his soul: ‘Thou hast Background made me, and shall thy work decay?’ His lifelong quest for certainty is Religious exploration seems to have played a continuing role in Donne’s distilled into this one devastatingly simple question to God. He has left life. Long before his decision to change his religion, he was concerned behind the intellectual gymnastics that occupied him in his youth. For with forging a personal and independent religious philosophy. This was Donne, those bright, brittle days are past. Now his poetry has a personal perhaps just another aspect of his quest for certainty that arose from his intensity that is uncompromising and unaffected. His description of the uncompromising intellectualisation of the experience of human existence. state of his life is stunning: ‘mine end doth haste’. In an image that is Izaak Walton, probably influenced by Donne himself, characterises both vivid and disturbing, he conveys just what this ‘haste’ is like: ‘I run to Donne’s religious struggle as the central force in his life. But this is really death, and death meets me as fast’. There is an inescapable inevitability only a reflection of Donne’s own desire to minimise the importance of his about this line and a suggestion of a strange intimacy. Rather like two earlier, less religious work. lovers irresistibly drawn together, Donne and Death move towards each other. Donne is completely focused on this inescapable meeting. All Whatever their motivation, Donne’s religious poems convey the intense his previous life fades away in the face of this ultimate moment: ‘all my religious debate that raged not just within his mind, but also within his pleasures are like yesterday’. It is no wonder that Donne’s request to God, very soul. Some critics have suggested that Donne’s approach to this ‘Repair me now’, vibrates with urgency. The time for clever intellectual debate was influenced by the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the tricks is over. founder of the Jesuit order. Given Donne’s early education and his family connections with the Jesuits, it is likely that he was familiar with Loyola’s The second quatrain maintains this intensity. We see Donne poised, work. These exercises encouraged the individual to develop an intensely frozen with terror, between despair and death. The inner vision of his soul personal and emotional relationship with God through ‘conversations’ becomes, for him, a frail rope to cling to in his desperation: ‘I dare not that were founded on inner debate and private reflection. move my dim eyes any way’. But his horror increases as he realises that his ‘feeble flesh doth waste’, that the very hands that grasp this rope, the very A reading of the poem eyes that focus on the safe horizon, are rotting away. His physical self, that The dramatic opening that Donne has used so successfully in all his body that in his youth had seemed to hold the certainty he craved, is now poetry, both secular and religious, becomes in this sonnet an expression a dead weight, putrefying with sin, which drags him down ‘towards hell’.

36 new explorations john donne thou hast made me

There is only one means of escape for Donne: his total faith in God. It is structural confines of the Petrarchan sonnet (14 lines, rhyming scheme, a terrible irony that the man who spent his life searching for certainty in octet and sestet), Donne presents his complex spiritual struggle in a the world outside himself should come to understand that the ultimate language that is both natural and simple. He is able to communicate certainty could only be found within his own soul. The pure existence the agonising dilemma he faces and the real terror in his soul in such a of God is not the answer; it is Donne’s ability to believe in that pure profound way that it comes as something of a shock to realise that he has existence that is the final solution. If he is empowered by God, given the written only 14 lines. strength to focus his ‘dim eyes’ so that he ‘can look’, his state instantly alters. The dead weight melts away and he begins to ‘rise again’. But he Alternatively has to have faith that God will empower him. Donne sways on the brink William Hazlitt commented on the metaphysical poets: ‘The complaint of this leap of faith. Doubt, the weapon of their ‘old subtle foe’, the Devil, so often made, and here repeated, is not of the want of power in these constantly tempts him. Doubt has for him such a terrible attraction that men, but of the waste of it; not of the absence of genius, but the abuse he cannot hold himself focused for even ‘one hour’. In desperation, he of it.’ Is this the truth that lay behind John Donne? He frittered away pleads with God to help him escape. God’s grace will release him from his incisive intellect on glittering verses to entertain the crowd; he used this terrible struggle, the weight dragging him down will fall away and like his literary skills in a calculated attempt to grasp the trappings of wealth a bird he will fly from the clutches of the Devil’s art. God’s grace will draw and power. For him, poetic genius was no more than a convenient tool him onwards and upwards as smoothly and as irresistibly as a magnet of manipulation. It was a way to make life easier. He used his poetry for attracts iron. It is an image of wonderful ease and beautiful certainty. seduction, self-glorification and finally as a shortcut to salvation. Sadly for Donne, who had lived his life driven by the urge to intellectualise and rationalise, the action of a magnet can be scientifically proved, while the redeeming grace of God depends solely on an unscientific and profoundly irrational act of faith.

Style Coleridge wrote of Donne’s poetry, ‘we find the most fantastic out-of- the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English’. This sonnet is a wonderful illustration of this comment. Within the strict

37 new explorations john donne developing a personal response to the poetry of john donne

Developing a personal response to the poetry of John Donne

1. Why do you think John Donne wrote poetry? 2. Was his poetry based on the intellect, on the emotions or on a combination of the two? 3. What does the term ‘metaphysical’ stand for? Can John Donne be classed as a metaphysical poet? 4. What is a conceit? How is it used in Donne’s poetry? Do you feel that the conceit is a successful poetic device? 5. What themes recur in Donne’s poetry? What do they tell you about John Donne himself? Do you think he was a likeable man? 6. How did Donne use traditional poetic devices and structures in his work? 7. What is your reaction to the type of language and rhythms found in Donne’s poetry? Are they appealing to a modern reader? 8. Consider what aspects of Donne’s poetry appeal to you and what aspects you find unappealing. 9. Does the work of John Donne have anything to say to a 21st-century reader? 10. Do you think you will ever return to Donne’s poetry or will you be glad to leave it all behind?

38 new explorations john donne questions

Questions (b) What have all the strange tasks got to do with the theme of the poem? Illustrate your view by close reference to the text. 1. Read ‘The Flea’, then answer the following questions. (c) Answer one of the following questions. (a) (i) What impression of Donne’s attitude to love emerges for you (i) How does the pattern of the lines in this poem emphasise what from your reading of this poem? Donne is saying? Support your view by referring to the words of (ii) Choose two phrases from the poem that especially convey that the poem. impression and comment on your choices. (ii) What is the mood of this poem? Refer closely to the text. (b) (i) Why does Donne introduce the flea into his poem? (iii) What part does rhyme play in this poem? Explain your answer by (ii) How does Donne’s lover react to what he says? Support your reference to the poem. answer by reference to the words of the poem. 3. ‘Donne’s poetry represents an attempt to connect emotions with (c) Answer one of the following questions. mental concepts.’ Discuss this view, supporting your answer by (i) How would you describe Donne’s tone in this poem? What words quotation from or reference to the poems you have studied. or phrases in the poem convey this tone? 4. ‘Donne’s deliberate avoidance of poetic language gives his poetry (ii) Would you write such a poem to a person you loved? Explain a sense of realism.’ In your reading of Donne’s poetry, did you find your view by reference to the words of the poem. this to be true? Support your answer by reference to or quotation from the poems on your course. (iii) Donne seems to have read a great many of his poems aloud to a small group. Choose two lines or phrases from this poem that 5. ‘John Donne: A Personal Response’. Using this title, write an essay you feel would have caused a reaction among the group and on the poetry of Donne, supporting your points by quotation from or explain what that reaction might have been in each case. reference to the poems on your course. 2. Read ‘Song: Go, and catch a falling star’, then answer the following 6. ‘Underlying Donne’s poetry is a unity of experience that is not questions. immediately apparent.’ Discuss this view, supporting your answer by quotation from or reference to the poems you have studied. (a) (i) What do you think is the point of this poem? 7. ‘Donne’s poetry is generally unpleasant and occasionally disgusting.’ (ii) Choose two phrases from the poem that especially convey this Give your response to this point of view, with supporting quotation point to you and comment on your choices. from or reference to the poems on your course. 39 new explorations john donne questions

8. ‘The poetry of Donne is a continuous commentary on the world and on himself.’ In your reading of Donne’s poetry, did you find this to be true? Support your answer by reference to or quotation from the poems you have studied. 9. ‘Though Donne rejected the traditional poetry of his time, he was still greatly influenced by it.’ Discuss this view, supporting your answer by quotation from or reference to the poetry on your course. 10. ‘The tone of Donne’s poetry is often unclear, and as a result the reactions it provokes can be confused.’ Give your response to this point of view, with supporting quotation from or reference to the poems on your course.

40 new explorations john donne bibliography

Bibliography

Bennett, J., Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (2nd edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1953. Carey, J., John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, London: Faber & Faber 1983. Carey, J. (ed.), John Donne: Selected Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998. Everett, B., Donne: A London Poet, London: Oxford University Press 1972. Gardner, H. (ed.), John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall 1962. Garrod, H.W., Poetry and Prose of John Donne, London: Oxford University Press 1972. Hamilton, I., Keepers of the Flame, London: Pimlico 1993. Nutt, J., John Donne: The Poems, London: Macmillan 1999. Schmidt, M., Lives of the Poets, London: Phoenix 1999. Tamblin, R., A Preface to T.S. Eliot, Harlow (Middx): Pearson Education 1988. Walton, I., Walton’s Lives, London: Methuen 1895. Wedgwood, C., Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2nd edition), London: Oxford University Press 1970.

41 John Keats Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

42 new explorations john keats introduction

Introduction: A brief view of a brief life weekly paper that advocated reform both in politics and poetry. It was edited by Leigh Hunt, later to become an influence on Keats’s poetic John Keats was born in Finsbury, near London, on 31 October 1795, the career. eldest child of Thomas Keats, a livery stable keeper (at the Swan and Keats’s father died in a riding accident in 1804. Frances Keats married Hoop Inn), and Frances Jennings Keats. Two brothers, George and again, to William Rawlings, but the marriage was unhappy. The Keats Thomas, were born in 1797 and 1799, respectively, and a sister, Frances children went to live with their grandparents, John and Alice Jennings, at (Fanny), in 1803. A fifth child, Edward, was born in 1801 but died in 1802. Enfield. In 1805 John Jennings died, leaving about £8,000 to the Keats children. This was a substantial sum: £50 was a typical annual wage for a From 1803 to 1811 John and his brothers attended Revd John Clarke’s worker at that time. But the will was complicated and led to legal disputes. school in an old country house at Enfield, London. John Keats was a small boy (he was only five feet tall when he was fully grown), but he In 1810 Frances Keats, who had left William Rawlings some years earlier was athletic and liked sports, and although he had a quick temper he and had begun to drink heavily, returned to look after the children, was generally popular. Clarke’s was a liberal and progressive boarding but she died from tuberculosis in March of that year. Two guardians school that did not allow the ‘fagging’, or flogging, popular at the time. were appointed for the children, one of whom was Richard Abbey, The pupils, who were mostly of middle-class background and destined a tea merchant and respected public figure. Both George and Tom for the professions, received a well-rounded education. They had their later worked for a time as clerks in his office, and apart from four years own garden plots to cultivate, and interest in music and the visual arts was at school, Fanny Keats lived with the Abbeys until she was 21. It was a encouraged as well as the normal study of history, geography, arithmetic, strict household and she was discouraged from visiting her brothers. grammar, French and Latin. Keats received a particularly good classical Abbey proved notoriously mean about money and John Keats had great Latin education. For instance, he was able to compose a prose version difficulty getting funds from his inheritance. of Virgil’s long epic poem, the Aeneid. Classical mythology is used in Keats’s own poetry, particularly in the long narrative poems ‘Endymion’, In 1811 Keats left school to begin an apprenticeship as a surgeon ‘Hyperion’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ and also in ‘Ode on a Grecian with Thomas Hammond. Surgery was at that time the manual side Urn’. Keats was both helped and befriended by the headmaster’s son of the medical profession, involving bone-setting, teeth-pulling and and assistant master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who lent him books such amputations, and was considered socially inferior to becoming a as Spenser’s Faerie Queene. He also introduced him to the Examiner, a physician, which would have entailed expensive university education. 43 new explorations john keats introduction

Keats’s Grandmother Jennings died in 1814, and after some years as an the Elgin Marbles in England) at the British Museum. These were huge apprentice he registered as a student at Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1815, classical sculpture fragments taken by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, from attending lectures in anatomy, physiology and chemistry. the ruins of the Parthenon, with the permission of the Turks after they had conquered Athens. (The return of the Marbles is now being demanded In May 1816 the sonnet ‘O Solitude’ was the first of Keats’s poems to by Greece.) Keats was fascinated by the imagery. The ‘heifer lowing be published – by Hunt, in the Examiner. In June Keats wrote ‘To One at the skies’ in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ may have been suggested by a Who Has Been Long in City Pent’. In July of the same year he qualified procession in one of the Marbles. Keats’s first book, Poems, was published and was licensed to practise as a surgeon and apothecary, but by now in 1817, and though it was favourably received it did not sell well. In April he had developed an aversion to surgery, which was performed without of that year he left London for six months to work on ‘Endymion’. He anaesthetic and in primitive conditions. He devoted more of his time to also met Charles Armitage Brown, a wealthy educated gentleman who writing poetry. His early poems reflected liberal attitudes and a rebellious became a friend and patron. The 4,000-line poem was completed by outlook on life. For instance, he celebrated in verse Hunt’s release from the autumn. It tells the story of Endymion, a typical romantic hero, who prison (Hunt had called the Prince Regent ‘a fat Adonis of forty’, among achieves perfect love and immortality through loving and being loved other things). Some of his poems show a romantic idealisation of women. by the goddess of the moon, Cynthia. There are two main themes, He also formed a strong aversion to Christianity, as a poem of December concerning the search for love and the quest for poetic achievement. The 1816 demonstrates: ‘Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition’. In October opening lines of the poem are famous: 1816 he composed ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. He made a number of important acquaintances and friendships, including Hunt, A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: the editor of the Examiner and a supporter of Romantic poets, especially Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness ... of Shelley, Byron and Keats; Benjamin Haydon, an unsuccessful painter; John Reynolds, a fellow poet with whom he exchanged many letters; and Keats now began to express his ideas on poetry. From his letter to Joseph Severn, a poet and painter, who became a supporter and friend. Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817 we get some idea of the value he placed on the imagination, the importance of feelings and the central In December 1816, ‘Sleep and Poetry’ was written. Keats told Abbey, place of beauty in poetry: who was not best pleased, that he was going to be a poet, not a surgeon. In March 1817 Haydon took Keats to see the Parthenon Marbles (called

44 new explorations john keats introduction

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the In the spring of 1818 Keats wrote ‘Isabella’, a poetic translation of a story Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – from Boccaccio’s Decameron. It is a gruesome story of love and death What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be with an unhappy ending, in which Isabella’s brothers murder her lover, truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have Lorenzo. He appears to her in a dream and tells her where he is buried. the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love, they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty … the She digs up his head, hides it in a pot of basil and weeps over it every day; Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he eventually her brothers find it and take it away and she dies of a broken awoke and found it truth … O for a Life of Sensations heart. rather than of Thoughts! From June to August 1818 Keats toured the Lake District and Scotland In a letter to George and Tom Keats in the following month he talked with Brown. He returned to nurse Tom, who died of his tuberculosis on about the essential attitude or operational mode necessary to be a great 1 December. During this winter of nursing Keats worked on ‘Hyperion’, poet, which he called ‘negative capability’ – that is, ‘when man is capable an epic story from classical mythology featuring the overthrow of the old of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching gods by the young Olympians. Its themes are change, progress and the after fact and reason’. He began to denigrate the current classical tradition victory of youth and beauty. But he abandoned it after Tom’s death and it of correctness. In December he met William Wordsworth and Charles was published unfinished in 1820 as ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’. It was much Lamb at a dinner given by Haydon. He much admired Wordsworth, praised by his contemporaries Byron and Shelley. though the feeling was not reciprocated. In September Keats met Fanny Brawne. She and her mother rented part The sonnet ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’ was written of Wentworth Place, Hampstead, where Keats’s friends Charles and some time in January or February 1818. It deals with three important Maria Dilke lived. She was the great love of his life and they became concerns in his life: love, death and his poetry. In April ‘Endymion’ was engaged in the autumn of 1819. When Keats was dying he wrote to published to hostile reviews, in particular from the influential Blackwood’s Brown: ‘I can bear to die – I cannot bear to leave her.’ Magazine and the Quarterly Review. The year 1819 was an extraordinary one and the most productive of Keats’s career. He was writing mature poems, sometimes dashing them In May, Keats’s brother Tom became ill with tuberculosis. George lost his off at great speed. In January he composed ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, a job and was forced to emigrate to America. long narrative about the carrying off of a young woman by her lover.

45 new explorations john keats introduction

This incorporated the legend of St Agnes, the patron saint of young Nevertheless, they became engaged in the autumn. virgins, which stated that girls would dream of their future husband on 20 Between June and September he worked on ‘Lamia’, a long narrative January, the Eve of St Agnes, provided certain ritual ceremonies were poem and his third attempt at the theme of the sexual encounter carried out. In February he worked on ‘The Eve of St Mark’, an unfinished between mortal man and immortal woman. This union symbolises the poem set in the Middle Ages. In April ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was human being’s desire to perpetuate eternally the moment of passion, the written. experience of love. Here, as in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, the human hero ends up alone and abandoned; Lamia, the enchantress, is forced to Between April and May 1819 the five great odes were written, also known return to her original state of being – a serpent – and Lycius, the lover, as the Spring Odes: ‘Ode to Psyche’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on pines and dies. Of the three such poems, only ‘Endymion’ has a happy a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode to Indolence’. Keats’s ending. poetic reputation today rests chiefly on these, though their power was scarcely noticed when they were written, even by critics like Lamb and Keats then returned to the theme of Hyperion, composing ‘The Fall of Shelley, as the long poem was then in fashion. Hyperion’, which he had to abandon unfinished. He worked on two plays, Otho the Great and King Stephen, which were undertaken because of Keats was deeply in love with Fanny Brawne, as we can see from his financial need: Keats could not get his hands on enough of his inheritance letters, but, paradoxically, he tried to stay away from her, perhaps fearing to enable him to marry Fanny. He talked of going to sea as a ship’s doctor the conflict between the real and the ideal that he deals with in his great in order to make money. With the famous actor Edmund Kean in mind poetry. In June he wrote: for the principal role, Brown and Keats collaborated on Otho the Great, a gothic story of deception, unhappy love and death, involving the family If I were to see you today it would destroy the half of the 10th-century ruler who became Holy Roman Emperor. Drury Lane comfortable sullenness I enjoy at present into Theatre had accepted it, but when Kean left to perform in America they downright perplexities. I love you too much to refused to go ahead with it. In the meantime Keats had begun work on venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a visit, but venturing into a fire … Knowing well that my life King Stephen, another mediaeval play dealing with courage and chivalry, must be passed in fatigue and trouble, I have been but he abandoned it after the disappointment of Otho. endeavouring to wean myself from you …

46 new explorations john keats introduction

‘Bright Star’, the sonnet to Fanny Brawne, dates from this time, as does Though ably nursed by Severn, Keats deteriorated throughout the winter the ode ‘To Autumn’, considered by some critics to be the best of and he died on 23 February 1821, aged 25. He is buried in the Protestant the year’s work. In 1820 Keats’s brother George returned briefly from Cemetery in Rome, having requested as an inscription for his tombstone, America, as he had had a financial setback and needed to raise some ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. money. It is suspected that John Keats put himself further into debt on George’s account.

In February Keats suffered a severe lung haemorrhage, the significance of which was apparent to him, as he wrote to Brown:

I know the colour of that blood; – it is arterial blood; – I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant …

Indeed, it was the beginning of the end. That summer he spent being cared for by, and falling out with, various friends, including Brown and the Hunts, and eventually he ended up in the care of Mrs Brawne and Fanny, who nursed him in their home at Wentworth Place.

In July a volume of his poetry, Poems, 1820, was published, which included ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. The Shelleys invited him to Pisa, and since the doctors were urging him to avoid the English winter, he agreed to go to Italy. But Abbey refused him funds and he was forced to sell the copyright of his poems. In September he set sail, accompanied by his friend Thomas Severn as companion and nurse. After a violent stormy passage and quarantine at Naples they finally reached Rome in November and took rooms at 26 Piazza di Spagna. 47 new explorations john keats to one who has been long in city pent

To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent (or a development or refinement of the first) in the sestet. Here, the octave deals with the happiness experienced by the poet while enjoying Background a summer’s day in the fields and the sestet mourns the passing of that By June 1816 lectures had finished, and as Keats was not on duty in the day. It has a simple, straightforward structure as the speaker moves from hospital as a dresser (a surgeon’s assistant, a post he held while still a an awareness of the beauty of nature, to thoughts of love, to a realisation student), there was some time to study for his Society of Apothecaries that beauty is transient. The mood also follows this pattern, moving from licentiate examination at the end of July. Keats and his roommate would feelings of happiness, to tenderness, to a quiet sadness. take their books into the fields and often swam in the river. But Keats was reading poetry rather than pharmacy, and the sonnet was, according to Imagery George Keats, ‘written in the fields’. It was the first of three linked Miltonic The images are all linked to an extended metaphor of face, which is just sonnets that Keats wrote during June 1816. discernible through the whole sonnet: ‘fair | And open face of heaven’, ‘the smile of the blue firmament’, ‘an ear | Catching the notes of Philomel’, Ideas in the poem ‘an eye | Watching the smiling cloudlet’s bright career’, ‘an angel’s tear’. The happiness brought to human beings by nature; the therapeutic The imagery reflects the joy and sadness of the theme: smiles, music and power of nature for humankind a tear. As one would expect, images of nature are prominent. Urbanisation – the unnatural state of people as city dwellers, pent up, fatigued Music of the language Nature’s power to rejuvenate the city dweller There is a musical quality to the sonnet over and above the reference The healing force of literature – tales of love and languishment to the nightingale. The repeated strands of long vowel sounds give The transience of beauty and happiness (‘he mourns that day so soon it its languidness: the long a of ‘lair’, ‘air’; the long e of ‘ear’, ‘evening’, has glided by’) ‘career’, ‘tear’, ‘clear’, ‘ether’; and the long o of ‘notes’ and ‘mourns’. The enjambment of some lines (splitting a phrase over two lines) – for Form and structure example, ‘fair | And open face of heaven’, ‘lair | Of wavy grass’ – gives A Miltonic sonnet, the poem follows the Petrarchan division into octave the poem a momentum and a rhythm that add to this flowing, relaxed and sestet, with a strict rhyming scheme: abba abba cdcdcd. The main atmosphere. thought is stated in the octave, with a volta, or turn, to the second idea

48 new explorations john keats on first looking into chapman’s homer

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer Language of metaphor The metaphorical language of journey is used to describe the narrator’s Background encounter with various poets (‘travell’d in the realms of gold’, ‘states and In October 1816 Keats visited Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the kingdoms’, ‘western islands’). Images of actual travel and discovery are headmaster of his old school, with whom he had frequently conversed used to convey the rapture of aesthetic discovery. about poetry. Clarke had been lent a rare 1616 folio edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer. They had previously read Homer only in Pope’s Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken neo-classical translation, where the long hexameters of the Greek line had been tailored into elegant couplets. Chapman’s verse was freer and more It is ironic that Chapman’s speaking out ‘loud and bold’ is compared to energetic. Utterly fascinated, they read all night. an experience that induced profound silence. There is also a suggestion in the imagery that the poet too sees his life’s journey as a search and At dawn Keats walked the two miles home, wrote the sonnet (which exploration. This imagery gives the poet a particular romantic appeal: the needed only slight amendments later) and sent it off to Clarke, who had dreamy, bookish speaker identifies with men of action, with people who received it by ten o’clock! It was published by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner push out the frontiers of knowledge and geography. on 1 December 1816. Sensuous language Theme The poem abounds in sound echoes and patterns of repeated letters, The poem is really about the aesthetic thrill of reading poetry, about which give it a rich, sensuous musical quality. Notice, for example, the new worlds opened up and horizons revealed to the reader, and about internal echoes of ‘travell’d – realms’ and ‘breathe – serene’, and also the s the excitement of discovery in general. This is never stated explicitly, but sounds in ‘states and kingdoms seen’. In the sestet, n echoes everywhere: it is communicated through the use of metaphor. Perhaps the young then, when, planet, ken, men, silent, upon, Darien. The sensuous s poet also has some awareness, or at least expectation, of the limitless sounds also abound: skies, swims, stout, stored, Pacific,s urmise, silent. possibilities of his own future stretching out before him. Altogether we find a rich pattern of verbal echoes.

49 new explorations john keats on first looking into chapman’s homer

What it reveals of the young Keats Keats may not have had much time for the neo-classical style of poetry, which he was helping to bring to an end. Ironically, his outlook was backwards rather than forward. As the critical commentator Brian Stone points out, the sonnet demonstrates his profound preference for Renaissance language and thought over those of the 18th century. It also indicates his growing fascination with the world of classical Greek mythology. However, it also shows him fired with excitement for exploration, innovation, risk-taking and living life to the full.

50 new explorations john keats when i have fears that i may cease to be

When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Form Keats’s study of the Shakespearean form evidently influenced this sonnet. The poet’s concerns Notice: The poem deals with three of Keats’s constant concerns: love, death and The three distinct quatrains poetry. The predominant fear is of untimely death. This is expressed in The rhyming scheme a euphemism (‘I may cease to be’) that conveys the absolute finality of The end-stopped lines (for the most part) death, though in a tranquil tone. Death for Keats would mean the end of The syntactic structure (‘when … when … then’ was a favourite what he hopes to achieve. His fear is of not fulfilling his poetic destiny, Shakespearean structure; see Sonnet 12) not employing his ‘teeming brain’, and poetry is about expressing beauty, whether of nature (‘the night’s starr’d face’) or of women. This beauty is The couplet really begins in line 12 (‘then on the shore’) and so softens the a rare and transient visitor (‘fair creature of an hour’), like an apparition epigrammatical nature of the couplet that Keats faulted. granted to the poet but outside his control. The poetic process is also somewhat outside the poet’s control, a mysterious process, a fortuitous gift (‘the magic hand of chance’). There is a typical romantic view of the poet as solitary soul, pensive and operating at the frontiers of experience:

…then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone and think

Love here is more an idealisation of female beauty than a real human encounter. The love object is a transient, unattainable beauty, to be worshipped from a distance, without hope of reciprocation (‘fair creature of an hour’, ‘never look upon thee more’, ‘the fairy power | Of unreflecting love’). Is this not an adolescent perspective on love as unrequited adoration? His fear, then, is that untimely death may interfere with his poetic destiny and his worship of beauty.

51 new explorations john keats la belle dame sans merci

La Belle Dame Sans Merci Background Establishing a biographical rationale for a poem is risky at the best Love, corruption and death of times. Here it is doubly so because the evidence is definitely This is one of three poems by Keats dealing with love between a human circumstantial, but Aileen Ward makes a number of fascinating male and a superhuman female (see also ‘Endymion’ and ‘Lamia’), and comments concerning the background circumstances. Earlier in the only in ‘Endymion’ is there a happy outcome. Here, as in ‘Lamia’, we month of April 1819, Keats had come across a bundle of love letters to are dealing with a female enchantress, this time a murderous one. La his late brother Tom from Amena, a mysterious French acquaintance of Belle Dame is the fatal woman-figure often found in romantic literature Tom’s school friend Charles Wells. There had been a long, sentimental who seduces the knight and fatally weakens him in the act of love. She correspondence between the two, with Wells as intermediary. Tom had is viewed as a ‘demon muse’ by the critic Katherine Wilson. Whether even gone to France in a vain effort to meet her. Now Keats discovered or not she is inspirational, she is certainly fatal. Love is here associated that it had all been a hoax by Wells and was furious at the strain that had with death. Some commentators have wondered if this is an expression been inflicted on his already dying brother. This may not have been the of Keats’s feelings of guilt about love. Robert Graves (in The White conscious inspiration for the poem, but it lends a certain poignancy to the Goddess) took a more complex view and felt that ‘the Belle Dame figure of the pale knight and the theme of love, delusion and betrayal. represented love, death by consumption … and poetry all at once’. Ward also makes the point that Keats himself exhibited a fear of But the knight here did not succeed in resisting: he has been fatally involvement in his own love affair with Fanny Brawne about this time, corrupted and is languishing (‘palely loitering’). So we presume that he writing, ‘Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have was to some degree responsible, to some extent a compliant partner in so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.’ Though he was the seduction. Corruption follows seduction in the world of this poem. enormously drawn to her, writing poetry had a superior claim on him, and he seemed to see the two in opposition. Though the experience of This is another of Keats’s poems to feature the human being in a strange love was the life blood of his poetry, he seemed to shy away from the transitional state. It is as if the knight has been transported beyond the actual. ‘Knowing well that my life must be passed in fatigue and trouble, reality of this life and has visited the underworld, where he encountered I have been endeavouring to wean myself from you,’ he wrote to her in others seduced like himself. He managed to return, but was fatally September of that year. Whether this refers to his personal and financial weakened. circumstances or to his notion of the life of a poet is not clear, but the

52 new explorations john keats la belle dame sans merci

point is that his ambiguity about love and his fear of involvement at that Repetition of phrases time may be reflected in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Dramatic qualities of action and conflict Ballad metre, usually four-line stanzas of 4, 3, 4, 3 stresses. This moved Mediaeval resonances in the poem the story along at a fairly swift pace. Keats has altered this to produce Keats had a particular fascination with the mediaeval, and this is one of a slower and more haunting rhythm. He lengthened the second line the last of the poems in which he used the literature and folklore of the by a foot and shortened the last line by two feet, with a weighty last Middle Ages. foot using a spondee (¯ ¯): Consider the origin of the title. The phrase ‘la belle dame sans merci’ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ comes from the terminology of courtly love and refers to the O what | can ail | thee knight | at arms withholding of the lady’s favours. ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ A characteristic of the mediaeval supernatural ballad was the Alone | and pale | ly loit | ering? seduction of a human being by one of the fairies, who took power ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ˘ ¯ from men by luring them into making love. The sedge | has with | ered from | the Lake Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which was a model for some of Keats’s work, ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ also features an enchantress from the mediaeval world. And no | birds sing! The mediaeval ballad sometimes featured a waste land that could be made green again through the intervention of a virtuous knight. In the last line we are slowed by the concentration of stressed syllables unrelieved by any unstressed ones and also by the placing of the two s The ballad sounds in ‘birds sing’, where we have to pause to enunciate the second The poem exhibits many of the classic characteristics of the ballad form. s. An atmosphere of doom is created both by the weight of the syllables The most common features of ballads are: and by the sibilance. Themes of love, war or death, often exhibited as a supernatural encounter A narrative poem – narration through dialogue Archaic language and phrasing Simplicity of vocabulary

53 new explorations john keats ode to a nightingale

Ode to a Nightingale Perkins also draws attention to the fatality of this symbol. Keats came to associate death with visionary journeys, fantasies and dreams. He viewed The nightingale as symbol the fainting or swooning that precedes the vision as a kind of death. The nightingale has been associated with poetry and with love since Perkins noted the development of this ode from the ‘drowsy numbness’, classical times. In the Middle Ages it was associated with passionate a swoon, as it gathers momentum towards darkness and death, and courtly love, but it also carries connotations of suffering and sadness temporarily accepts it in stanza 6. He asks whether the nightingale – the through the classical myth of Philomela. Philomela was seduced by her immortal bird – is somewhat similar in role to the Belle Dame, ‘luring men brother-in-law, but she and her sister took a terrible revenge and she to fantasy and death’. was punished by being turned into a nightingale; hence the notion that The poem traces the twists and turns, rises and falls of the poet’s creative suffering produces song and poetry. Renaissance English poets used the mood as he explores this symbol and embarks on his imaginative journey myth, as did T.S. Eliot later in ‘The Waste Land’. with the nightingale. We could read the poem as an exploration of the process of creativity, centred on this symbol. Keats uses the nightingale as the central symbol, and one of the main dramatic developments in this poem is the gradual transformation of the A reading of the poem real bird into a symbol of visionary art. David Perkins (in Keats: Twentieth- The ode begins with the poet in a drowsy state, as though sedated. Century Views) feels that the poem can be regarded as ‘the exploration The long vowel sounds (‘aches’, ‘drowsy’, ‘numbness’, ‘pains’) lull us into or testing out of a symbol’. He argues that the nightingale as symbol has sharing that semi-conscious state. This suspension of consciousness the advantage of being a living thing, appealing to the senses, and so it is seems to release the imagination and the poet begins to see the possible to identify with it. The disadvantage is that, unlike the urn, it does nightingale not just as a bird, but as a ‘Dryad of the trees’. He is able to not easily lend itself to being thought of as eternal. But Keats, through a participate imaginatively in the creativity of the bird, and this brings him certain ‘bendy’ logic, attempts to give the song a sort of immortality, or at great happiness. He expresses his feelings in paradoxical terms (aching least a continuity through history, in stanza 7. The nightingale becomes a with pleasure): ‘being too happy in thine happiness, – | That thou … symbol of beauty and the immortality of art, which the poet explores and Singest of summer in full-throated ease’. The repeated s sounds in with which he wishes to identify. that last line, along with the long vowels of the last three words, evoke the sensuousness of the melody and allow the reader to share in the experience of the bird. 54 new explorations john keats ode to a nightingale

To prolong this drowsy, sensuous enjoyment, the poet appeals to wine in sharing in the life of the bird or (b) the poetry he is actually writing. His the second stanza (‘O, for a draught of vintage!’). Wine catches the mood poetic imagination conjures up the natural world of the nightingale and so of his excited imagination as he recalls the rich, sensuous pleasures of its he shares in the ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’. Mediterranean origins (‘the warm South’). In an impressionistic confusion of senses the tastes, touch, smells, sights and sounds of its Mediterranean The fifth stanza recreates the sensuous perfection of this natural world background are conjured up (‘Cool’d a long age’, ‘Tasting of Flora’, through the mingling of the senses of smell, taste, touch and hearing. This ‘Provençal song’, ‘beaded bubbles winking’, ‘purple-stained mouth’). The use of synaesthetic imagery (the production of a mental sense impression nightingale is going to fade away and he wants to fade with it. This is not a of one kind by stimulation of a different sense, as in ‘soft incense’ and fading into drunken stupor, but a journey of the imagination, as intimated ‘embalmed darkness’) evokes the richness of the imagined environment. by the reference to the Hippocrene (the fountain of poetic inspiration). The sensuousness of the experience is also conveyed through the Wine here is the medium of inspiration, the vehicle of imaginative flight, repeated sound patterns in the language used – enabling the poet to continue sharing in the aesthetic life of the bird. This impulse to fade away leads in the third stanza to a recollection of the real And mid-May’s eldest child, world he is leaving, with its suffering, disease and despair (‘Here, where The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. men sit and hear each other groan’). This is probably the lowest point of the poem, when he recalls the transience even of beauty and love: – and also through the repeated m alliteration (‘mid-May’, ‘coming’, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, ‘musk’, ‘murmurous’, ‘summer’), the f repetition (‘full’, ‘flies’), the Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. assonance (‘child’, ‘wine’, ‘flies’) and the repetition of the related m and f sounds. This stanza also demonstrates what David Perkins described This is not a world to inspire poetry (‘Where but to think is to be full of as ‘a vivid assertion of the power of the imagination to see more than sorrow’), where he is thinking, or fully conscious, rather than in the drowsy the sensory eye’. These two stanzas (4 and 5) represent the zenith of state conducive to visions and poetry. So he attempts to escape with even imaginative power, a successful escape on the ‘viewless wings of Poesy’. greater urgency in the fourth stanza (‘Away! away!’). Wine has failed to lift him from the horrors of life. Here, he realises that the only way of escape The poet feels that the only way to prolong the ecstasy is to die at the and of sharing in the happiness of the bird is ‘on the viewless wings of moment of greatest sensual happiness, in stanza 6 (‘Now more than Poesy’. This can be taken in two senses: through (a) an imaginative poetic ever seems it rich to die’). This desire for death is not a negative wish 55 new explorations john keats ode to a nightingale

for extinction but an attempt to make the happiness he knows to be the further fading of the nightingale’s song back through time to the transient last forever (see also ‘Bright Star’). Death is desirable as a insubstantial world of legend, myth and magic. fulfilment of experience and a continuation of it. This has been prepared for through the emphasis on darkness in the previous stanza and by the With this dying of the song, the inspirational creative mood fades. sensuous adjective ‘embalmed’, which means fragrant but also carries ‘Forlorn’, with its onomatopoeic and semantic connotations of desolation connotations of death. But even as the poet suggests it, the rational side and wretchedness, maintains the link with Keats’s magical world of stanza of his consciousness qualifies it. He has merely been ‘half’ in love with 7 and also expresses the poet’s feelings at the fading of inspiration. easeful death and it only ‘seems’ rich to die. So it is decisively rejected as a Together with the allusion to a tolling funeral bell, it recalls the Keats of solution at the end of the stanza: stanza 3, who is bowed down with the suffering of the world (‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow’). We are returned to reality in stanza 8. Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – Poetry cannot achieve a permanent transformation of life (‘Adieu! the To thy high requiem become a sod. fancy cannot cheat so well … deceiving elf’). Yet this is a reality somewhat transformed by the poetic experience: nature has been imbued with the The onomatopoeia of the Germanic word ‘sod’ brings us back to earth nightingale’s song (‘now ’tis buried deep | In the next valley-glades’). The with a realistic bump. Death would not have meant a prolongation of his experience was of great power, yet the poet is in some uncertainty about union with the nightingale. its nature (‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’). Was it a truly visionary experience, an aesthetic experience with the power to transform the But he does find a type of permanence in art. In stanza 7 the nightingale’s everyday, or merely a dream, an illusion? (See the association of dream song as symbol of art is shown to have been present throughout history. with death in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.) Its manifestations are traced back through the Middle Ages, through biblical times to the archetypal world of myth and story, which is also The final stanza leaves Keats with this uncertainty, this niggling doubt Keats’s own romantic world, with its ‘Charm’d magic casements’, ‘perilous about the value of the poetic experience to real life. And he leaves us with seas’ and ‘faery lands’. The song was present both at moments of this uncertainty, an intellectual attitude he regarded as a prerequisite for consequence and of comedy (‘was heard … by emperor and clown’), at the creation of good literature and which he termed ‘negative capability’ moments of human suffering and alienation (‘the sad heart of Ruth’) and – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, throughout Romantic literature. The stanza asserts one of Keats’s main without irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Whatever the theory, the philosophical beliefs: the immortality of art. Yet the stanza also traces 56 new explorations john keats ode to a nightingale

effect is that Keats’s poetry remains anchored to reality. Whatever mental The search for permanence in a world of constant change. It flight his mind makes on the ‘viewless wings of Poesy’, his feet remain on is suggested in stanza 7 that art, as symbolised in the song of the the ground; he maintains a healthy scepticism. nightingale, might provide that immortality and that permanent beauty. Poetic themes Death is seen almost as a desirable fulfilment. Keats momentarily toys An examination of the power of the imagination (‘the viewless with the idea of using death to prolong the moment of ecstasy. wings of Poesy’) and its limitations (‘deceiving elf’). This was an issue that absorbed all Romantic poets. Does the imagination open a door to truth and higher reality – vision – or is it an escape from reality, a waking dream (see ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)? This ode charts the poet’s various attempts to maintain the imaginative inspirational mood engendered by the nightingale’s song. The ephemeral and transient nature of human happiness in contrast to the ever-present reality of suffering. Beauty and love are transient (‘Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, | Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow’). A view of life that is deeply pessimistic. Life is a struggle (‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’), full of disease (‘Where palsy shakes’) and suffering (‘where men sit and hear each other groan’) and it features the tragic death of the young (‘Where youth grows pale’). Beauty and love are transient and despair is the inevitable reaction (‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow | And leaden-eyed despairs’). The desire for an ideal state beyond the misery of the world, a state of beauty and happiness.

57 new explorations john keats ode to a nightingale

Fading back through time Fled is that music Requiem, bell, plaintive anthem Becoming symbol of visionary art Immortality of the song Pouring forth thy soul abroad DEATH IMAGINATION A qualified embrace The viewless wings of Poesy Half in love Song of the nightingale Seems it rich to die Murmurous haunt of flies … Sights and sounds of the imagined world of the The poet’s attempts to maintain the nightingale Provençal song inspirational mood WINE A draught of vintage … Singest of summer in Bacchus and his pards … full-throated ease Here, where men sit …

58 new explorations john keats ode on a grecian urn

Ode on a Grecian Urn (for instance, ‘still’ in line 1 can mean ‘stationary’ or ‘yet’). This proliferation of ambiguity and paradox underlines one of the essential conflicts of the A reading of the poem poem: that of art versus life, permanence versus impermanence. The relationship between art and reality is examined in some detail in this poem. Keats takes up the thought of stanza 7 of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. In the first quatrain of the second stanza the poet is confident that art Aware of the brevity of mortal beauty and of human love, he searches is superior to reality, again expressed in a paradox (‘Heard melodies for some kind of permanence and finds it in the beauty of art. The are sweet, but those unheard | Are sweeter’). One can imagine far advantages and the shortcomings of this immortality conferred by art are sweeter music than anything one has heard. The critic Cedric Watts has discussed in detail in the ode. suggested that behind this section is the Platonic notion of an ideal world of eternal abstract forms of which we find only perishable imitations in this In the first stanza the static artefact is brought to life in a most spectacular world. Only the noblest side of humankind has access to the ideal world, way. In a swift and successful transition, the urn, at first associated with so it is the spirit, not the sensual ear, that hears the music of art. At any quietness and silence, is communicating ‘mad pursuit’, ‘struggle’ and ‘wild rate, art, the creation of the imagination, is superior to real experience ecstasy’ at the end of the stanza. The transition is all the more spectacular because of its eternity (‘nor ever can those trees be bare’, ‘She cannot because of the slow tempo of the opening lines, with the meandering fade’, ‘For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair’). But even here Keats is not enjambment in lines 3 and 4 and again in lines 5, 6 and 7. The slow pace without misgivings. Art is not life, nor even a viable alternative. Art can gives way to the frantic six questions in the final three lines of the stanza. give immortality, certainly, but also immobility and coldness. (Does this prefigure the coldness and death of ‘Cold Pastoral’?) The inherent contradiction in the notion of inanimate art having a living Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss … energy or life of its own is carried in the many paradoxes of the stanza. She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss The urn, itself an ‘unravish’d bride’, portrays a typical classical Grecian erotic ceremony, at first featuring ‘maidens loth’ but quickly turning to And so is conveyed the central flaw of the urn: that the beauty shown ‘mad pursuit’ and ‘wild ecstasy’. The ‘foster-child of silence’ proceeds to and the happiness conveyed are frozen in time and can never achieve convey the music of ‘pipes and timbrels’. This paradox of silent utterance fulfilment. This contradiction is also conveyed through the antithesis in is continued as the silent sylvan historian tells a story that is superior to the syntax (not–but, never–though, yet–though). poetry or rhyme. This ambiguity sometimes extends to individual words

59 new explorations john keats ode on a grecian urn

Yet in the third stanza Keats seems to express unreserved enthusiasm as The fifth stanza retains some slight allusions to the orgiastic excitement he imaginatively enters the life of the urn (‘Ah, happy, happy boughs!’). of earlier verses (‘forest branches and the trodden weed’) and perhaps The urn here has both the warm, panting life of flesh and blood and also in the ambiguous ‘overwrought’, which could refer either to the also the eternity of art, and so is superior to real life (‘For ever panting, nature of the design on the urn or to the excited state of the maidens. But and for ever young’). The portrayal of passion in art is superior to sexual much stronger is the return to an awareness of the urn as mere artefact, passion in real life (‘All breathing human passion far above’) because an inanimate if beautiful object (‘marble men and maidens’, ‘silent form’, it is not followed by disappointment and sorrow (‘That leaves a heart ‘Cold Pastoral’). It is an artefact that ‘dost tease us out of thought’. The high-sorrowful and cloy’d’) or by the illness and suffering inevitable in the ambiguity of this phrase and of the last two lines has given rise to a great changing process of time (‘A burning forehead, and a parching tongue’). deal of critical disagreement. ‘Tease us out of thought’ could refer to the capacity of a work of art to entice us to leave aside logical thought and Many commentators feel that Keats protests too much here (‘happy’ six enter the world of the imagination, progressing to a visionary state of times, ‘for ever’ five times). Is he trying to hypnotise himself into belief in creativity. Or it may merely mean that it puzzles and baffles us. This latter the urn, desperately trying to convince himself of the superiority of art? interpretation would fit in with Cedric Watts’s reading of the two final Brian Stone notes that he always celebrates the dream of a harmonious lines: love relationship rather than the reality of love. The ending of the ode is a statement in character Stanza 4 provides a dramatic contrast, both in content and tone. It is as by the riddling, paradox-loving urn; and one which appropriately concludes this teasing poem … The urn if the poet turned the urn around to examine another panel, a complete is a consolatory ‘friend to man’; but also a mocking, contrast, a religious procession and sacrifice. The tone is much more tantalising one. detached, the rhythm stately. There is a formal dignity to the stanza, as befitting a sacrificial process (‘To what green altar, O mysterious priest’). Is it the poet’s conclusion that the relationship between art and reality is There is a sense of emptiness in the scene. The absence of life in the town mysterious and baffling? emphasises the absence of real life in the urn and further prepares us for a return to the coldness and reality of the next stanza.

60 new explorations john keats ode on a grecian urn

Most critical discussion has centred on the final two lines of stanza 5. In this context, where transience and permanence are There are two main aspects of this debate: the two poles of the argument, truth means that which 1. How should the lines be punctuated and who speaks them? The has lasting value … Keats is saying that beauty is truer than love, pleasure and other forms of value, because present version is punctuated as it was in the collection Poems, 1820, they pass away while beauty can be embodied in a which Keats saw through the press, though the quotation marks lasting quasi-permanent form. are not present in any surviving transcript of the poem. It is generally agreed now that the urn is the speaker both of the aphorism and of the Perhaps Keats intended this ambiguity. He relished the immortality of recommendation to humankind. beauty found in art, but its cold stasis was unsatisfying. He was too much 2. Does the aphorism ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ make sense? Some an advocate of passionate, sensuous living to accept that. So he is left with critics have described it as an over-simplification, a pseudo-statement. this somewhat unsatisfactory symbol of immortality. Yet the urn, emblem T.S. Eliot felt that it was meaningless. But many of these critics also of beauty, conveys some lasting value or truth to humankind. It is a sign of admitted that it brought together the paradoxes and oppositions of eternity in the midst of impermanence (‘when old age shall this generation the poem and is therefore dramatically appropriate at least. But what waste’), an embodiment of beauty in the midst of human woe. The poet is does it really mean? Does it mean that ‘aesthetic perfection [i.e. asserting the importance of art to humankind. beauty] and conceptual truth are identical’ (Watts)? Keats’s letters would lend credence to this. He wrote: Themes An examination of the relationship between art and life. Art, because I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s it is timeless, is superior to life. Art catches the perfection of beauty, affections and the truth of the Imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth … The love and passion and preserves them out of time. Yet art is cold and excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of lifeless and does not answer humanity’s need to feel, to experience, to making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being achieve fulfilment. in close relationship with Beauty and Truth … Natural beauty and love are transient, yet art is there as a sign of beauty and loveliness, which is timeless. But we know from experience that some truths are not beautiful: human Art is a consolation, a friend to humankind, displaying an ideal and cruelty, for example. So what does Keats mean by ‘truth’? Examine demonstrating the continuity of human affairs. Graham Hough’s interpretation:

61 new explorations john keats ode on a grecian urn

Keats seems to champion the visual arts over poetry: ‘Sylvan historian, It is a circular object, suggesting endlessness. who canst thus express | A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme’. It is a three-dimensional, solid, substantial object, readily available for viewing. Some linked thoughts on ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and There is a balanced realism about the symbol; while it may be a sign ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ of eternity, it also carries reminders of mortality (as a funeral Both the nightingale’s song and the urn are manifestations of eternal urn for the ashes of the dead). ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a very beauty, and both are found to be unsatisfactory in some way. The personal experience, told in the first person. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ imagination fails to allow the poet to escape permanently into the world is a more objective poem. We are very much aware that it is an of the nightingale, and the immortalisation of beauty in the Grecian urn is object out there, not just a product of the poet’s imagination. There is not entirely satisfactory because of its frozen immobility. no first-person voice of the poet. Keats expresses doubts in both poems but seems more confident and assured at the end of ‘Ode on a Yet the creative experiences are very different. The nightingale can only Grecian Urn’. be experienced through the imagination and needs to be sustained by the creative mood. It is less substantial than the solid urn, which stands there available for viewing at any time.

The prevailing atmosphere in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of sensuous darkness, a sort of creative twilight zone. The figures on the Grecian urn are always in full view, the atmosphere either of frenzied sensuous excitement or of sombre dignity illuminated by the light of the ‘pious morn’.

As a symbol of immortal art, the urn is more satisfying. Consider: The duration of its existence: it has already survived down through history. It is a record of a much-valued and idealised culture, which it has outlasted. 62 new explorations john keats to autumn

To Autumn We find a similar but opposite pattern in the second stanza. The activities of harvesting are mainly represented through images of stillness and Theme inactivity. In the third stanza the birds, animals and insects are portrayed The poem celebrates the natural abundance of autumn. Certain aspects in active, concrete imagery full of energy and life, yet there are hints of of the season are celebrated in each stanza: the rich fruiting of the transience and death too (‘the small gnats mourn’ and ‘gathering swallows vegetable world (stanza 1), the varied and thrilling musical sounds of the twitter in the skies’). Beneath the simple structure we find something of animals, birds and insects (stanza 3) and the calm, lethargic mood of the Keats’s paradoxical complexity. season, with which human activities and moods are completely in tune (stanza 2). Other critics have noted the logical progress of the poem as it moves slowly through the season: pre-harvest ripeness in the first stanza, Furthermore, Keats celebrates the beauty of the season in the full followed by the harvesting of the second stanza and the post-harvest knowledge that it is transient, part of the changing cycle of life: ‘stubble-plains’ of the third stanza.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? The day provides a further symmetry for the structure of the ode: Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – morning (‘the maturing sun’) in the first stanza, through the activities of While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day the day in the second stanza, to evening (‘the soft-dying day’) in the third stanza. Structure Outwardly at least the poem has a very clear, even symmetrical structure. Personification of autumn Each stanza examines an element of the season: stanza 1, the vegetable Personified autumn is addressed throughout all three stanzas (‘Close world; stanza 2, human activities; stanza 3, animals, birds and insects. bosom-friend of the maturing sun’ in stanza 1, ‘thou hast thy music too’ in The critic Walter Jackson Bate has explored the complexity and tension stanza 3). The autumn of stanzas 1 and 3 is very real, the images concrete, beneath the surface. Each stanza concentrates on a dominant aspect of depicting the actual sights of the season (‘the moss’d cottage-trees’, ‘the autumn but at the same time preserves an element of its opposite. For stubble-plains with rosy hue’, ‘The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft’). example, the theme of the first stanza is ripeness, the maturity of autumn But the second stanza features an elaborate and varied personification fruit, yet growth is still going on (‘to set budding more, | And still more’). of the season as a person engaged in the various activities of harvesting ‘So process is continuing within a context of attained fulfilment’ (Bate). 63 new explorations john keats to autumn

– or not engaged, because three of the four poses depict postures of to burdened gleaner to patient watcher, erotic in her casual inactivity, ‘a kind of beautiful lethargy’, as Brian Stone describes it: abandon to the fume of poppies, intimate of light in ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’, sound asleep or drugged on a furrow, her bosom friendship with the maturing sun, worn by her vigil over the last oozings. or just calmly watching the oozings of the cider press. The only activity is performed in the picture of the gleaner balancing a load on her head Leon Waldoff agrees, seeing autumn as a goddess of fruition and as she crosses a brook. Even that activity is stately and unhurried, the plenty, taking her place with the imaginative figures of the other odes: a balancing tension conveyed by the line bisection of the phrase ‘keep | feminine soul (Psyche), a bird whose mournful song was heard by Ruth, a Steady’. Most critics are agreed that these figures show the human at one mysterious urn and a goddess of melancholy. How do you see it? with the natural world, interacting with calm empathy. A poem of Keats’s mature philosophy Less readily agreed is whether this is a masculine or a feminine Though the great odes have many elements in common, strictly personification. Stone feels that the first figure is feminine, influenced speaking they are not a sequence. Yet we are justified in finding in this perhaps by the languid delicacy of the ‘hair soft-lifted by the winnowing ode a development of thought and tone that indicates a more mature, wind’. The third figure, of the gleaner, he also takes as feminine, as this integrated outlook on life. In this respect ‘To Autumn’ is a fitting work was traditionally performed by women and children. The sleeping culmination to the odes. reaper he takes as male, while the watcher of the cider press could be of either sex, though he sees him as male. His conception is coloured by Gone is the restless searching after beauty in nightingale and Grecian social history. urn; gone the quest for permanence (nightingale and Grecian urn); no more headlong flight and attempts to escape the horrors and suffering of Cedric Watts sees the entire personification as of indeterminate sex, life (nightingale). Past too is the conflict between beauty and transience, though traditionally it has been regarded as masculine. Helen Vendler joy and sorrow, which was partially resolved in ‘Ode on Melancholy’, with views the stanza as a totally feminine personification of autumn: the realisation that melancholy is in everything and is an intrinsic part of Keats’s goddess of autumn, nearer to us than pagan the search for beauty and joy. Here the restlessness has eased, replaced goddesses because, unlike them, she labours in by the fulfilled and lethargic spirit of autumn. The human spirit is at ease the fields and is herself thrashed by the winnowing with the world rather than in flight from it. There is a hint that the eternal wind, varies in her manifestation from careless girl search for perfection might still haunt the poet’s soul (‘Where are the 64 new explorations john keats to autumn

songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?’), but it no longer presents itself Tone with the same desperate need as in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (‘Ah, happy, Readers are generally agreed on the calm tone of this poem. There are no happy, boughs! that cannot shed | Your leaves’). Here thoughts of spring introspective passages, no dramatic debates and hardly any qualifications are pushed aside (‘Think not of them, thou hast thy music too’). And it is such as we find in the other odes. Instead we find a calm assurance, both this acceptance of life as it is, in all its transient beauty, that we find in the in the fruitfulness of the season (stanza 1) and in its value (stanza 3: ‘thou third stanza that exemplifies Keats’s mature philosophy. He is accepting hast thy music too’). The tranquillity and serenity of stanza 2 are obvious. here that maturity, death and regeneration are interconnected. The faint But it is a valediction, a farewell to the season, and the awareness of hints of death in the ‘soft-dying day’, ‘the small gnats mourn’ and the coming winter is felt particularly in the third stanza, as we have seen. Yet ‘light wind’ that ‘dies’ are an integral part of the season that includes ‘the it is not sentimental, saved perhaps by the wealth of apt detail and precise stubble-plains with rosy hue’, the ‘full-grown lambs’ and the ‘gathering description, which give a balanced context for the hints of mourning and swallows’. He is accepting the transient nature of existence, but this no the sense of impending loss (‘in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn | longer takes from his enjoyment. As Leon Waldoff says, ‘Keats gives Among the river sallows’). expression to a keen sense of transience and loss, but it is integrated into an acceptance of a natural process that includes growth as well as decay.’ Imagery As usual, the images assail the whole range of our senses, often This is not to suggest that Keats has suddenly become harshly realistic. simultaneously, in the synaesthetic imagery characteristic of Keats This ode paints an idealised picture of the English countryside, a green (synaesthesia is the fusion of two or more senses in the one image, as in land of plenty, with the pace of life unhurried and humankind in tranquil the tactile-visual ‘touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue’). This allows us to empathy with nature. The poem exhibits a mixture of realism and what experience what is being described in a real, three-dimensional way. Keats Cedric Watts calls ‘consolatory fantasy’. It is as if all this richness just also makes a dominant appeal to one particular sense in each of the three appeared spontaneously. He has chosen to hide the toil, the sweaty stanzas: tactile in stanza 1, visual in stanza 2 and auditory in stanza 3. For labour, the peasant squalor. Would a Marxist critic say this was a dishonest example, in stanza 1 the abundance, the sumptuousness, the ripe plenty poem? At any rate, in choosing the representative features of autumn of autumn is communicated in tactile imagery, in particular through the Keats has exercised an ‘optimistic selectivity’ (Watts). full weighty verbs (‘load’, ‘bend’, ‘fill’, ‘swell the gourd’, ‘plump the hazel shells’, ‘set budding’). The images of the second stanza are visual in the main, personifying autumn in human poses that are relaxed yet alert (in

65 new explorations john keats to autumn

three of the four), communicating, according to Bate, ‘energy caught in second stanza, a calmness perfectly rendered by the sibilant s sounds and repose’ (‘sitting careless on a granary floor, | Thy hair soft-lifted by the the lazy long vowels of ‘watchest the last oozings hours by hours’. The winnowing wind’, ‘by a cyder-press, with patient look’). The critic Ian Jack third stanza plays the music of autumn in its auditory imagery but also suggested that the pictorial details are probably inspired by paintings, but through the actual sounds of the words. For example, the inherent tinge Keats concentrates on realistic detail of actual harvest operations (the of sadness is carried in the long vowels of ‘mourn’, ‘borne’, ‘bourn’. granary, winnowing, a gleaner, a cyder-press). This weight of concrete detailed imagery, combined with apt observation, gives this poem a sense of actuality. This saves it from becoming mere bucolic fancy, even though the details are selective and avoid unpleasant reality, as we saw earlier.

The densely packed nature of the imagery also fosters the sense of actuality. This density often results from the poet’s habit of packing a number of elements, often hyphenated, into a single image (‘close bosom-friend’, ‘moss’d cottage-trees’, ‘a half-reap’d furrow’, ‘the soft- dying day’).

The music of the language Qualities of the season are carried not just by the imagery, but also by the very sounds of the words in dense patterns of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and musical echoes that reverberate throughout the poem. For example, in the first stanza the sensuousness of the season is conveyed through the soft alliterative m sounds of ‘mists’, ‘mellow’, ‘maturing’ and the tacky ‘clammy cells’. The sense of calm fullness comes through the long vowels of ‘trees’, ‘bees’, ‘cease’, while ‘swell’, ‘hazel’, ‘shells’ and ‘kernel’ might suggest bells echoing across the autumn stillness. The onomatopoeic ‘winnowing wind’ gives a lift to the otherwise lethargic

66 new explorations john keats bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art

Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast as been an age in letting you take possession of me; the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal; Thou Art but burnt the Letter as the very next time I saw you I thought you manifested some dislike to me. If you Background should ever feel for Man at the first sight what I did For many years this was considered to be Keats’s last poem, as he wrote for you, I am lost. Yet I should not quarrel with you, but hate myself if such a thing were to happen – only this version of it aboard ship on his final journey to Italy in the autumn I should burst if the thing were not as fine as a Man as of 1820. But earlier and somewhat different versions have turned up you are as a Woman. Perhaps I am too vehement, then and biographers and scholars can now, with some confidence, trace fancy me on my knees, especially when I mention a the composition to late July 1819. The sonnet is a love poem to Fanny part of your Letter which hurt me; you say speaking of Brawne. Aileen Ward links its composition to this letter of 25 July 1819 Mr. Severn ‘but you must be satisfied in knowing that from the poet to his beloved: I admired you much more than your friend.’ My dear love, I cannot believe there ever was or ever could be any thing to admire in me especially as far as sight Sunday Night goes – I cannot be admired, I am not a thing to be My sweet Girl, admired. You are, I love you; all I can bring you is a I hope you did not blame me much for not obeying swooning admiration of your Beauty. I hold that place your request of a Letter on Saturday: we have had four among Men which snubnos’d brunettes with meeting in our small room playing at cards night and morning eyebrows do among women – they are trash to me – leaving me no undisturb’d opportunity to write. Now unless I should find one among them with a fire in her Rice and Martin are gone, I am at liberty. Brown to heart like the one that burns in mine. You absorb me my sorrow confirms the account you give of your ill in spite of myself – you alone: for I look not forward health. You cannot conceive how I ache to be with with any pleasure to what is call’d being settled in you: how I would die for one hour – for what is in the the world; I tremble at domestic cares – yet for you world? I say you cannot conceive; it is impossible you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the should look with such eyes upon me as I have upon happier I would rather die than do so. I have two you: it cannot be. Forgive me if I wander a little this luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness evening, for I have been all day employ’d in a very and the hour of my death. O that I could have abstract Poem and I am in deep love with you – two possession of them both in the same minute. I hate things which must excuse me. I have, believe me, not the world: it batters too much the wings of my self- 67 new explorations john keats bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art

will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your Lake Windermere in June 1818: lips to send me out of it. From no other would I take it. I am indeed astonish’d to find myself so careless of all … the two views we have had of it are of the most charms but yours – remembring as I do the time when noble tenderness – they can never fade away – they even a bit of ribband was a matter of interest with make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, me. What softer words can I find for you after this – poverty and riches; and refine one’s sensual vision what it is I will not read. Nor will I say more here, but into a sort of north star which can never cease to be in a Postscript answer any thing else you may have open lidded and stedfast over the wonders of the great mentioned in your Letter in so many words – for I am Power … distracted with a thousand thoughts. I will imagine you Venus to night and pray, pray, pray to your star He seems to see the attitude of the North Star as the appropriate one for like a Hethen. Your’s ever, fair Star, John Keats poetry: one of calm, detached contemplation.

My seal is mark’d like a family table cloth with my mother’s initial F for Fanny: put between my A reading of the poem Father’s initials. You will soon hear from me again. If we take an autobiographical approach to the sonnet we see it to be My respectful Compts to your Mother. Tell Margaret about the conflicting claims of poetry and love in the life of the poet. I’ll send her a reef of best rocks and tell Sam I will give him my light bay hunter if he will tie the Bishop The octave deals primarily with his poetic preoccupations – the nature hand and foot and pack him in a hamper and send of the ideal attitude for a poet. The star symbolises a perfect state of him down for me to bathe him for his health with a awareness – a calm, contemplating consciousness gazing on the changes Necklace of good snubby stones about his Neck. wrought by nature (‘the moving waters’) and on the quiet, unheralded beauties of nature that had always fascinated him (‘the new soft-fallen Ward feels that all the conflicts expressed in this letter – the passion that mask | Of snow upon the mountains and the moors’). But the ‘creative absorbs him in spite of himself, his fear of ‘domestic cares’ and ‘being loneliness’, which is a characteristic mode of all Romantic poets, he settled in the world’ yet his willingness to face them for her – are resolved rejects categorically (‘Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night’). Human temporarily in the imagery of the sonnet. The image of the ever-wakeful company is preferred above this poetic isolation, and the beauty he North Star unblinkingly contemplating the world can be traced back prefers to contemplate is not that of nature, but the physical body of his further to a letter Keats wrote to his brother Tom, describing a visit to love.

68 new explorations john keats bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art

And it is to the sensuous aspect of love that the sestet is devoted, painting has changed. The stars are no longer watched; they have become the a picture of romantic intimacy that involves sensuous physical closeness watchers. Is this a more benevolent guardianship role for nature? But (‘Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast’) and an awareness of his nature too is found to be less important than love. beloved so intense that he seems almost to share her life breath (‘still to hear her tender-taken breath’). Just as the star stands for permanence, Ideas explored Keats wishes to permanently preserve this experience of love (‘To feel for The importance of the sensuous experience of love, even above ever its soft swell and fall’). This paradoxical attempt to hold the moment, poetry or the contemplation of nature to preserve unchanged real, breathing, sensuous love, is illogical and vain A great need to make this experience permanent but emotionally defensible. It ends in the already invalidated endeavour Steadfastness and unchangeability as the marks of true love to preserve the moment by dying at the pinnacle of happiness (‘Ode on The purity and permanence of nature and its beneficial relationship a Grecian Urn’). The star also symbolises the steadfastness he longed for with humankind in his relationship with Fanny Brawne. He too wishes to be ‘still stedfast, An understanding of the poet as disinterested viewer and lonely still unchangeable’. So once again we have the timeless but ultimately creator unsatisfying perfection of art contrasted with the transient but sensuous enjoyment of real experience. Keats is attempting to have the best of both sides, the permanence and the experience. The excited tone of the sestet, with its enthusiastic verbal repetitions (‘Still, still’, ‘for ever’), suggests that human love is preferable to poetry or art.

Keats always admired the purity of nature, and here we find the tides performing a cleansing religious ritual for the world (‘priestlike task | Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores’). The ‘religious’ aspect of nature is emphasised (‘sleepless eremite’, ‘priestlike task’, ‘pure ablution’). The benevolent relationship of nature to humankind is stressed. Nature purifies. In previous poems the skies were searched for signs of value, of truth (‘huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’). Now the perspective

69 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

Overview of John Keats The foremost poets of this period were: John Dryden (1631–1700) Romantic poetry in context Alexander Pope (1688–1744) The revolution of 1688, which put the Protestant William of Orange and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Mary on the throne of England, put an end to the religious and political conflict of the 17th century and ushered in a century of relative peace and New trends in the Romantic period order that became known as the Augustan Age (because of a perceived Cult of feeling parallel with the golden age of Augustus Caesar). It was also referred to If Augustan poetry was known for its reason (the poet using his rational as the Age of Enlightenment (roughly 1690–1790). and argumentative faculties to guide humankind by the light of reason) and its intellectual style of composition (the use of wit, paradox, irony, While it is always false to generalise, we can say that the following notions bathos and classical and other learned allusions), then Romantic poetry were characteristic of the period. was distinguished by the cult of feeling. For Wordsworth, poetry was ‘the Order – in life, in society and in literature – was considered of vital spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, yet it was not uncontrolled importance. The human being was seen as part of the great chain of – it was ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Wordsworth also felt that life, an established hierarchy that stretched from primitive vegetable the feelings were restrained, of necessity, by the observation of the outer life all the way up to God. It was an era of deep social conservatism. world. For the most part, the English Romantics were more objective than Reason rather than passion was the supreme virtue. The emotions the French. But Shelley said, ‘Poetry is not subject to the control of the were suspect. John Dryden wrote: ‘A man is to be cheated into active powers of the mind, and its birth and recurrence have no necessary Passion, but to be reasoned into Truth.’ connection with consciousness or will’ (Defence of Poetry). Keats wished It was an era of profound scepticism: doubt about people’s ability to for ‘a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts’. For Keats, the necessary reform, change or develop and scepticism about the possibility of frame of mind for writing was the acceptance of things as they are without human progress. This was reflected in the satires of Dryden and trying to rationalise them. This is behind his notion of ‘negative capability’ Pope and in the satirical fables of Jonathan Swift, all emphasising (‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, human failings and corruption and attempting to show humankind the without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’). There was a definite error of its ways. downgrading of reason. Sincerity, sensitivity and self-expression were the key qualities.

70 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

New subject matter Whereas the Augustan poets were content to convey in poetry the outer The poets of the 18th century generally turned to the social environment manifestation of their subjects, the Romantics were trying to convey and to the nature of human beings for their subjects and themes. ‘The the inner essence of things. The sheer power of imagination allows the proper study of mankind is man,’ wrote Alexander Pope. The poets of the poet to share in the life of the subject, as in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘To rationalist age found their inspiration in the world of matter (Dryden and Autumn’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Keats was constantly experiencing Pope in politics, for example). The Romantic poets looked for inspiration the tension between these visionary moments and the real world. to the more mysterious aspects of human experience and to the world of dreams (see ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’). The poet looked inside his own New poetics mind rather than to society as a subject of study. The imaginative and the Because the Romantics were dealing with abstract themes and trying to spiritual were fostered instead of the rational. express the inward essence in concrete terms, the significance of imagery changed. The image was no longer merely decorative, as in Augustan New understanding of the imagination poetry, but became a more complex carrier of meaning, often having Dryden feared the ungoverned imagination, ‘for imagination in a poet is symbolic weight, such as the Grecian urn and the nightingale. a faculty so wild and lawless, that, like a high ranking spaniel it must have dogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment’. He felt that the imagination The regularity and self-control of the rhyming couplet was regarded by should be restrained by the need for rhyme and by the regular discipline the new poets as a straitjacket, producing facile and insincere poetry. of the heroic couplet. Keats belittled the rhyming couplet:

But the Romantics transformed the concept of the imagination, seeing it With a puling infant’s force They swayed upon a rocking horse as a creative force central to the process of poetry. Shelley went so far as and thought it Pegasus. to define poetry as ‘the expression of the imagination’. Wordsworth spoke of poetry as ‘works of imagination and sentiment’. Keats said, ‘I am certain Reacting against the stylised dictum of the Augustans, Wordsworth of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of in particular felt that the language of poetry should be ordinary and Imagination – what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.’ simple: poetry should be written ‘as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men’. He also felt that the poet should write about ‘incidents and situations from common life’, thus we get the 71 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

conversational blank verse of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Keats’s views on poetic The foremost poets of the Romantic period were: diction were different, often favouring the archaic, even the mediaeval William Blake (1757–1827) expression, such as that used in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) For the Romantics the role of the poet in society was different too. Poets Lord Byron (1788–1824) were no longer sarcastic social commentators but were often withdrawn Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) completely from society, more concerned with their own inner vision. John Keats (1795–1821) But because of their belief in the power of the imagination to discover truth, the poet was a very powerful creative force in society. Paradoxically, Though elements of Romanticism are found both before and after, the although the poet was less concerned with social issues, a great claim was high point of the period is generally dated between 1789 (the year Blake’s made for the importance of poetry in society. While Keats hardly ever Songs of Innocence was published) and 1824, when Byron died. dealt with social themes, he made substantial claims for art as a mediator of eternal truth for society: The sensuous verse of Keats Keats’s basic apprehension of the world is through the senses. Joy and ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –’ that is all sorrow are to be tasted (‘strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. his palate fine’, ‘glut thy sorrow’, ‘feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes’). Misery is audible (‘here, where men sit and hear each other The importance of nature groan’). Death is visible (‘youth grows pale’); despair and beauty are For many of the Romantics the varied and overpowering moods of visible (‘leaden-eyed despairs’, ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’). nature provided the occasion for moments of personal revelation or of Seduction is through taste (‘she found me roots of relish sweet | And intense private experience, which replaced the experience of orthodox honey wild and manna dew’). Literature is to be breathed in (‘yet did I religion. For example, Wordsworth felt nature to be a moral guide, a never breathe its pure serene’). Poetry is born of touch (‘the magic hand teacher, a comforter to humankind. Keats did not dwell very much on the of chance’). The spiritual is accessed through sound (‘pipe to the spirit significance and power of nature, but he enjoyed its sensuous aspects, ditties of no tone’). Passion is apprehended in all its wild sensuousness which is particularly evident in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’. (‘for ever warm … for ever panting’).

72 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

Keats delighted particularly in nature, not for its mystical power or Sometimes the senses fuse and mingle in an image. Keats uses this moral influence, as with Wordsworth, but for the sheer enjoyment of its synaesthetic imagery to create the most complete and rounded luxurious life and growth. A sensuous appreciation of nature and of all life sensuous effect possible. We get some fine examples of the working of is one of his main themes. He recreates for us the seductive fascination of this technique in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, where the bird sings in ‘some the nightingale’s song; the sensuous world of the trees inhabited by the melodious plot | Of beechen green’. The fusion of the senses of sound bird; the visual beauty of the Grecian urn; and the tactile awareness as well and sight emphasises that the bird is at one with the location, as the song as the sounds of autumn. Keats is not entirely naive about the negative merges with the undergrowth. Synaesthetic imagery allows the location side of sensual delight. He is aware that excess physical delight can satiate, to be presented with a realism that might rival 3-D in modern cinematic glut the feeling, and so lessen the sensitivity. terms. Consider:

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, But here there is no light, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown.

He is aware that all delight is transitory. Even the physical appetite wanes. Light is blown, aptly describing the flickering light intermittently He is aware, too, of the inherent decay in all things: penetrating through the wind-blown leaves. The use of such imagery to evoke the natural habitat of the nightingale in stanza 5 is much aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. commented on (see page 55). Stanza 2 is also worth examining to see how the images link, providing a chain of sensual effects that achieve a Keats’s sensuous imagery, which he uses liberally, is his way of forward momentum, spiriting the poet ‘away into the forest dim’. The communicating half-glimpsed truths, making the eternal present, trying ‘draught of vintage’ leads to ‘tasting of Flora’. Taste calls up a series of to express the abstract in terms of the concrete, the intangible in terms of pictures: goddess of flowers, fertility (‘country green’); country green the very tangible. Thus, beauty is encapsulated in the visible urn or in the refers perhaps to country dance, to song, to outdoor celebration. tangible fruits of autumn (‘thou shalt remain … a friend to man’, ‘swell the ‘Provençal song’ recalls the warm south, and so back to the taste of wine gourd’). Hints of immortality float to us on the notes of the nightingale and the possibilities for escape into oblivion. The synaesthetic imagery (‘The voice I hear this passing night was heard | In ancient days by aptly evokes the full richness of the pleasures of wine but also the poet’s emperor and clown’). The awareness of transience is mediated in the confused reeling between sensuous pleasure and the need to escape. It is music of autumn (‘and gathering swallows twitter’). as if he is quite overcome by the variety of the world. 73 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

In general, the synaesthetic use of imagery allows the poet to evoke As we have seen, he was not greatly enamoured of the 18th-century use a richness and an immediacy of experience that might not otherwise of the heroic couplet, finding it too constricting in thought and rhyme. be possible. Other critics have felt that it indicates a ‘unified’ vision So he altered it – sometimes using run-on lines instead of end-stopped of the world on the part of the poet. ‘His synaesthetic imagery is an ones, using irregular stresses and sometimes ‘feminine rhymes’ (with an outward manifestation of his intuitive sense of the oneness of things, additional unstressed final syllable). The desired effect was to allow the of the relationship between widely separate and dissimilar phenomena, verse to flow more easily and so carry more complex and deeper ideas of the intimate kinship of man and nature’ (Richard Fogle, in Keats: without the necessity of boxing them securely in couplets. He used this Twentieth-Century Views, edited by Walter Jackson Bate). Keats also form of verse in ‘Endymion’. The sonnet form was little used in the 18th uses the sensuous aspects of language: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, century, but Keats was greatly drawn to it. Over a third of his completed onomatopoeia, and repeated and echoing sound effects; for a detailed poems are sonnets. Most of the early sonnets are autobiographical in study of this examine ‘To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent’, ‘On theme and almost exclusively Petrarchan in form, with an octave, abba First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘To Autumn’, together with abba, and a sestet, cdcdcd or cdecde. Keats observed the formal thought their critical commentaries. structure: main thought or problem stated in the octave, with a volta, or turn, to a new thought or a resolution of the problem in the sestet. ‘On The critic Brian Stone feels that there is evidence that Keats began First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is structured in this form. to control his exuberance as he developed, refining his vocabulary by reducing the number of adjectives and adverbs, strengthening the verse But he also used the Shakespearean form, as in ‘When I Have Fears That by a greater use of verbs and reducing the reliance on melodic words of I May Cease to Be’. This follows the Shakespearean rhyming scheme Latin origin. Would you agree with this assessment? (abab cdcd efef gg), is structured into three separate but linked quatrains and a rhyming couplet and uses end-stopped couplet lines for the most Keats and variety of forms part. But even here Keats is straining at the regularity of the form and he Keats was amazingly versatile and constantly experimental in his approach has the final couplet actually beginning in the middle of the twelfth line, to poetry. We have seen something of the range of poetic genres he ‘deliberately frustrating the epigrammatic tendency inherent in the regular used: long narratives, lyric poems and ballads. During his short career he form’, as Brian Stone says. He returned to the sonnet form again in 1819, experimented with all the chief forms of English poetry, such as heroic prepared to experiment even further. ‘Bright Star’ follows the normal couplets, octosyllabic couplets, ottava rima, the Spenserian stanza, blank Shakespearean rhyming scheme but has the Petrarchan division of octave verse and both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms. 74 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

and sestet, albeit with a distinct rhyming couplet to finish. He wrote to his In the odes, to carry his deep and abstract themes he turned to the sonnet brother George and George’s wife, Georgiana, in May 1819: form as the basis for his experimental stanzas. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ has a Shakespearean quatrain, abab, followed by a Petrarchan sestet, I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet cdecde, for each stanza. The lines are predominantly iambic pentameter, stanza than we have. The legitimate [i.e. Petrarchan] except for the typical experimental gesture – a trimeter for every eighth does not suit the language overwell from the line. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ had regular 10-line stanzas of iambic pouncing rhyme – the other kind [i.e. Shakespearean] appears too elegiac – the couplet at the end of it has pentameters. The large, weighty stanzas of these odes function like seldom a pleasing effect – I do not pretend to have paragraphs, with a main idea that is developed and rounded off at the end succeeded. of each. Yet, as in good prose composition, the end of each also points forward and is linked to the next. For example, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Experiment was not confined to sonnets. He adapted the mediaeval the ‘full-throated ease’ at the end of the first stanza prefigures the ballad for ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. He used three four-stress iambic ‘draught of vintage’ at the start of the second. lines and a shorter final three-stress or two-stress line in each stanza. The last line is rendered particularly slow and heavy because of the There is an even more obvious linkage between stanzas 2 and 3: lack of unstressed syllables. The effect is to build up the unreal, forlorn atmosphere of the poem: ‘And no birds sing’. And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget The ode is a very formal, dignified and heavyweight form of lyric poetry, usually of some length. It is derived from an ancient Greek form that was This weighty stanza form is increased even further in ‘To Autumn’, with its often sung or accompanied by music. Odes were relatively new on the 11-line stanzas, where a couplet has been inserted at lines 9 and 10. They scene in English poetry, Wordsworth’s ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’, are regular lines of iambic pentameters, rhyming abab cdedcce. When written in 1815, being one of the more well-known contemporary ones. taken together with the simplicity of diction, these full, heavy stanzas are Keats maintains the lofty tradition of the ode in the serious tone he perfect for conveying the richness, melody and serenity of the season. employs and in the serious subject matter: the nature of the immortality of art, the transience of beauty, the pain and suffering of life and the ideal Examples of the Spenserian stanza – ottava rima, octosyllabic couplets of love. and blank verse – are to be found in Keats’s other verse. His achievement 75 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

is summed up by Brian Stone: ‘He had decisively broken with the style of In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he inhabits the world of ideal, timeless, perfect the eighteenth century, both metrically and in vocabulary, to achieve a love but simultaneously holds the opposing concept of real live passion new sort of fresh sensuousness and perception.’ (‘She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss’).

Exploration of threshold states in the poetry of Keats In this poem we find the focus shifting between animate and inanimate, In reading Keats we are aware of a certain restlessness, a continuing mortal and eternal, warmth and coldness, as Keats makes constant search for the ideal, a perpetual attempt to reconcile opposites, such as transitions in and out of the urn. Perhaps the most perfect embodiment of the eternal and transient, ideal love and human passion, the perfection of a transitional state is to be found in ‘To Autumn’. The whole season is in art and the misery of real life. This tension results in the poet occupying an transition: matured and yet continuing to grow (stanza 1); harvest activities in-between, transitional or threshold state for many of the key moments in personified as static and immobile (stanza 2); the end of a process already his poems. prefiguring another move (‘the gathering swallows’ of stanza 3).

These threshold states have been described by Cedric Watts as But the most significant threshold state, and one often fancied by Keats, ‘moments or phrases of transition from one mode of being to another’. is that between life and death. Death as the doorway to eternity, to a Watts also notices ‘the ambiguous status of the modes of being on each flawless world of perfect beauty and ideal love, is an ever-present allure side of this threshold’. There are numerous examples of threshold states to the poet, particularly in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’. It is in this selection. We find the knight of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ in present too in ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’, ‘Ode on a this limbo state between dream and waking, between fantasy and reality. Grecian Urn’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. We find the poet experiencing a similar state in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Having inhabited, however briefly, the world of the song, the fantasy We notice that Keats often uses the rhetorical question as a bridge world of magic casements and ‘faery lands forlorn’, he is tolled ‘back from between fantasy and reality (‘O what can ail thee knight at arms?’, ‘Was there to my sole self’. In this poem Keats finds himself straddling both the it a vision, or a waking dream? … Do I wake or sleep?’, ‘Who are these ideal world of beauty (symbolised in the song) and the real world of pain coming to the sacrifice?’). These unanswered questions further blur the and suffering (‘with thee fade away into the forest dim … and quite forget boundaries between states, smoothing the transition. … The weariness, the fever, and the fret’).

76 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

This ability to have a foot in contrasting worlds, to experience different Freudian critics find a pervasive melancholia at the centre of Keats’s states, to hold opposites in the mind simultaneously – also implicit in the work, which they say was influenced by the early death of his father and notion of ‘negative capability’ – is a key feature of the poetry of Keats. It separation from his mother. In Freudian terms, ‘melancholia’ is a kind might be interpreted as confusion or indecisiveness by some, but by many of mourning, except that in mourning the loss is known, whereas with it is seen as a mark of greatness: ‘His house was, most of the time, divided melancholia the loss is unknown. We do find a sense of loss in many of against itself, but his consciousness of the fissure, his unceasing endeavour his poems: mourning for the day in ‘To One Who Has Been Long in City to solve the problem of sense and knowledge, art and humanity, are in Pent’; for lost time and lost love in ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease themselves an index of his stature’ (Douglas Bush, in Keats: Twentieth- to Be’; for lost virtue in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’; mourning for loss of Century Views). the poetic vision that leaves him forlorn in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; and loss of timeless, perfect love in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Leon Waldoff (in A psychoanalytical look at Keats Romanticism: A Critical Reader, edited by W. Duncan) feels that the tone Literary critics of the Freudian school have examined the poetry to of melancholy in the odes arises from this sense of loss, which is really demonstrate how Keats’s works are affected by unconscious fears, desires a longing for a fading immortal and vanished pastoral world. Ironically, and conflicts. We certainly find some conscious fears, such as fear of the quest for permanence through a union with a symbolic presence mortality. But then, Keats was surrounded by death in his own family. We (nightingale, urn, etc.) actually led to a deeper awareness of transience. notice conscious desires, such as the quest for beauty and permanence, and the numerous conflicts the poet consciously presented have been Freudian critics draw attention to the female presence that features in well discussed. all Keats’s major works, arousing powerful but ambiguous feelings in the poet, and it is suggested that Keats wants to reclaim her but has doubts But what of unconscious desires and fears? ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ about her fidelity (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’). Waldoff identifies has been interpreted as exhibiting a fear of sex, which is linked to death the symbols at the centre of each ode as feminine: the personification in that poem, a poem that also presents woman as fatal temptress. Is of autumn has many female qualities, as we have seen; the urn is an this reading substantiated by the relationship between Keats and Fanny ‘unravish’d bride’; even the nightingale is a ‘light-winged Dryad of the Brawne, in which he yearned for her yet often kept her at a distance? trees’ (a female spirit of the woods). Each symbol is immortal in some way, and a sympathetic relationship exists between poet and symbol. Waldoff says the odes represent an ancient longing for restoration and

77 new explorations john keats overview of john keats

reunion as Keats tries to restore the symbolic female presence. The strategy fails with the nightingale and the urn, but at least the nightingale is preserved in the historical and literary imagination (‘emperor and clown’, ‘the sad heart of Ruth’, ‘charm’d magic casements’), while the urn survives as part of the wisdom of humankind.

The many scenes of embracing lovers in Keats’s poems are seen by Freudian critics to represent ‘a persistent longing for merger with a feminine figure or symbol of beauty’ (Waldoff) and this longing is heightened by an internal awareness of separation that the poet has carried with him since childhood. They feel that this was the motivation for the romantic quest on which much of his poetry is based.

78 new explorations john keats a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

A brief overview of poetic preoccupations transience in the scheme of things: he can still enjoy the beauty and themes of nature in spite of its short life (‘To Autumn’) The transience of beauty and love: Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Consider the statements, then return to the individual poems for Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow corroborative references and quotations. (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Also the transience of love: ‘fair creature of an hour’ (‘When I Have The quest for perfection Fears That I May Cease to Be’) The quest for beauty in art (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a The fading of artistic beauty (song of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Grecian Urn’) and in nature (‘To Autumn’) Art stops this mutability, but at a price (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’); The quest for permanence and immortality (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, coldness of artistic immortality ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Bright Star’) Attempts to resolve this dilemma of having to choose either transient The ideal of love, timeless and unchanging (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’); passion or cold immortality (‘Bright Star’) rejected as cold, lifeless; still striving for it (‘Bright Star’) The quest for joy and happiness, the need to escape the misery of the Nature world (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Nature is ever-present in Keats’s poetry: as a backdrop (‘When I The quest for perfection in literature (‘On First Looking into Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Chapman’s Homer’) ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, etc.); in visions (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’); The quest for the perfect poetic attitude, disinterested contemplation as metaphor (‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’); as an image (octave of ‘Bright Star’) for his own poetry (‘granaries’ in ‘When I Have Fears That I May All these quests are found to be in vain Cease to Be’); and once as the central theme (‘To Autumn’) Transience (of beauty, happiness, etc.) The therapeutic power of nature refreshes the city dweller (‘To One The battle with mutability, one of the poet’s chief preoccupations Who Has Been Long in City Pent’) Awareness of personal mutability and impermanence (‘When I Have The sensuous qualities of nature are to be enjoyed (‘Ode to a Fears That I May Cease to Be’) Nightingale’, ‘To Autumn’) The transience of the beauty of nature is mourned (‘To One Who Awareness of the essence of the season, the moods of nature (‘To Has Been Long in City Pent’) but develops into an acceptance of Autumn’) 79 new explorations john keats a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Nature as inspiration, carrying signs of truth: ‘Huge cloudy symbols of The permanence and immortality conferred by art (‘Ode to a a high romance’ (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’) Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) Nature also provides inspiration for the proper approach to poetry The permanence of art versus the transient but fulfilled experience of (‘Bright Star’) life (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) Nature is the proper subject of poetry (‘Bright Star’) The contrast between the imaginary world of poetic joy and the real The poet is seen as a contemplator of nature (‘Bright Star’) world of pain and misery (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Keats idealises the countryside (‘To Autumn’, ‘To One Who Has How art communicates the ideal, the perfect, Platonic: ‘pipe to the Been Long in City Pent’) spirit’ (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) The portrayal of sexual passion in art is superior to real passion (‘Ode Literature, art, creativity on a Grecian Urn’) The healing power of literature (‘To One Who Has Been Long in City The shortcomings of art: it lacks the fulfilment of experience, immortal Pent’) but cold (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) The excitement of poetry (as discovery, as exploration); poetry The visual arts as superior to poetry (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) opens out the world; the effect on the reader (‘On First Looking into Beauty and truth: art as a sign of eternity, an embodiment of beauty; Chapman’s Homer’) art conveys truth (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). The mysterious process of creativity, writing, inspiration: ‘the magic hand of chance’ (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’) Death The exciting, frantic pace of writing (‘When I Have Fears That I May Death as the end of creativity (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’) Cease to Be’) The power of imagination to achieve union with the eternity of art, The allure of death – soft, rich, a luxury, a pleasant sensation, an old to preserve the moment, to arrest beauty in time – but only longing: ‘call’d him soft names’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) temporarily (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Death as a means of preserving the moment of ecstasy, capturing All the odes are concerned with poetry as art – its materials, images, forever moments of supreme happiness; rejected as an unsatisfactory moods of the poet, claims to immortality, etc. (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, solution (‘Ode to a Nightingale’), but tried again (‘Bright Star’) ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘To Autumn’) The linking of love and death (‘Bright Star’); as fatal seduction (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

80 new explorations john keats a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Love The importance of real experience rather than poetic observation The aspect of love generally presented is the sensuous, the passionate (‘Bright Star’) (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Bright Star’); the emotional aspect also The importance of sensuous fulfilment, of living life to the full (‘Ode (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’) on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) The overwhelming desire or need is to immortalise the moment (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Bright Star’) Perception of the poet What important aspects of love are not dealt with? As solitary soul, lonely thinker (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease Is the view of love in the poems somewhat immature? to Be’) This creative loneliness is rejected (‘Bright Star’) View of the human being, view of life The poet’s dilemma: disinterested vision or closer view and experience As exhausted city-dweller (‘To One Who Has Been Long in City of real life (‘Bright Star’) Pent’) The poet as pursuer of beauty (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Yearning for love (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Ode on a Grecian The artist-poet as philosopher, mediator of truth for humankind (‘Ode Urn’, ‘Bright Star’) on a Grecian Urn’) A tragic dupe of love (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’) The poet as escapist (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Life is sickness and misery (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Melancholic mode of the poet: unavoidable, since melancholy results The need of the human being to escape from this grim reality: he tries inevitably from the pursuit of beauty wine, poetry (the imagination), death – all are inadequate in some way Keats’s own excitement at encountering poetry (‘On First Looking (‘Ode to a Nightingale’) into Chapman’s Homer’) The essential condition of humankind is to be in conflict – yearning The excitement and frenzy of writing, the sense of a personal race for perfection, eternity, etc. – but the reality is different (‘Ode to a against time (‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’) Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) The power of the poet’s imagination

Importance of feelings Joy, sorrow, depression, etc. (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Bright Star’, etc.)

81 new explorations john keats developing a personal response to the poetry of john keats

Developing a personal response to the poetry of John Keats

1. What has reading this poet meant for you? What did it add to your understanding of life, of love, of poetry, of the human mind, of human needs, of human limits? 2. Consider the ideas and attitudes found in the poetry. What ideas made you reflect hardest? What attitudes provoked you into thinking? 3. Consider his expression and use of language. What did you find exciting, unusual, pleasing or beautiful? Refer to individual poems, lines or phrases. 4. What did you find unappealing about his poetry? What did you dislike and why? 5. Which form of poetry practised by Keats do you like best? Explain. 6. If you could choose only two poems of his to include in an anthology, which ones would you select? Justify your choice. 7. Do you think Keats should be studied in schools today? Make a case for or against. 8. From reading his poems, what kind of person do you think Keats was? Consider such things as his preoccupations, his attitudes to significant matters such as love and death, and his prevailing moods. 9. What questions relating to his poetry and life would you like to ask him?

82 new explorations john keats questions

Questions 10. W.B. Yeats said of Keats: I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window, 1. ‘The relation of art to human life was one of the main questions that For certainly he sank into his grave consistently preoccupied Keats.’ Discuss. His senses and his heart unsatisfied. 2. ‘The odes taken together can be seen as an investigation of the How do you think the first two lines might apply to Keats? From the imagination’s ability to cope with time and change.’ Discuss. evidence of the poems you have read, do you think the remark of the 3. ‘The quintessentially Keatsian world is one in which the flawed last line is justified? Explain your reasoning. imaginary world of dream and the hard truth of waking reality 11. ‘His sensuous nature, his concern to define the individuating interact.’ Discuss. essence of things (the haecceitas, “thisness”, or what Hopkins was to 4. ‘Keats’s poetry could be summed up as merely sensuous subject call “inscape”), his preoccupation with the kinds of immortality matter in sensuous diction.’ Discuss. attainable through art, his Platonic yearnings and his down-to-earth 5. ‘Sheer versatility with poetic form is an impressive characteristic of scepticism, his death-wish and his sense of humour: all these Keats’s poetry.’ Discuss. coalesced in three of the supreme poems of the language – “Ode 6. ‘There is a sadness at the heart of all Keats’s poetry.’ Discuss this on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”’ (Cedric statement with reference to three or four of the poems you have read. Watts). Examine the three poems mentioned to discover the truth of 7. ‘Tranquillity and serenity lie at the heart of the most profound artistic any two of the qualities listed. response to life’ (Brian Stone). Do you find any sense of tranquillity or serenity in the poetry of Keats? 8. ‘Keats’s imagery shows a quality of delicate and particular observation.’ Discuss. 9. Gerard Manley Hopkins said of Keats, ‘It is impossible not to feel with weariness how his verse is at every turn abandoning itself to unmanly and enervating luxury.’ Would you agree?

83 new explorations john keats bibliography

Bibliography

Bate, W.J. (ed.), Keats: Twentieth-Century Views, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall 1964.

Coote, S., John Keats: A Life, London: Hodder & Stoughton 1995.

Duncan, W. (ed.), Romanticism: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell 1995.

Gittings, R., John Keats, London: Pelican 1968.

Hough, G., The Romantic Poets, London: Hutchinson 1953.

Motion, A., Keats, London: Faber & Faber 1997.

Ridley, M., Keats’s Craftsmanship, London: Methuen 1964.

Stone, B., The Poetry of Keats, London: Penguin 1992.

Ward, A., John Keats: The Making of a Poet, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1986.

Watts, C., A Preface to Keats, London: Longman 1985.

Wilson, K., The Nightingale and the Hawk: A Psychological Study of Keats’s Ode, Allen & Unwin 1964.

84 Emily Dickinson Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

85 new explorations emily dickinson introduction

Introduction with his family to another part of Amherst until 1855, when he managed to buy back the entire house, and Emily lived there for the rest of her life. An enigmatic life The Dickinsons were prominent public figures. Emily’s father, Edward In 1840 Emily was sent to Amherst Academy, a co-educational school Dickinson, was a well-known lawyer with a great interest in education. For offering a wide range of subjects, from classics to modern sciences. a time he was treasurer of Amherst College, which had been founded by The principal of the school, Rev. Edward Hitchcock, was a well-known Emily’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. He served as state senator scientist. Emily developed a particular interest in biology and botany, for Massachusetts, was elected to the US House of Representatives and which may account for the precision of her observations and the was instrumental in bringing the railway to Amherst. He is described prevalence of natural imagery in many of her poems. by Emily’s biographers as a somewhat severe and remote father, an interpretation based on her own letters, though she appears to have loved In 1847 Emily went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for further him and she was devastated when he died. education, but was withdrawn after two terms because of poor health and possibly because of the overpowering religious ethos of the school. The relationship between Emily and her mother, Emily Norcross She had been expressing religious doubts even before she went there. Dickinson, does not appear to have been a very warm one either, as Emily Though she was a believer in God, she remained aloof from the religious mentioned in a letter to her literary guide and friend Thomas Wentworth fervour, in the form of religious revival meetings, sweeping through Higginson: ‘I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you Amherst about this time. hurry when you are troubled.’ In later life, however, she did become closer to her mother. It is worth remembering that the remoteness of parents Life in Amherst was a feature of 19th-century childrearing among the middle and upper When her formal education finished in 1847, Emily Dickinson seems to classes and Emily’s childhood experiences may not have been that much have lived a fairly normal life in Amherst, with some excursions to the out of the ordinary. cities (Boston in 1851, Washington and Philadelphia in 1855). In 1855 her mother, who had been in declining health, became seriously disabled. The family lived in half of the Homestead, an imposing brick house in Emily and her sister Lavinia, with the support of domestic help, took Main Street, Amherst, built by Edward’s father, who occupied the other over the running of the household, and Emily began to develop that half. In 1840 the grandfather sold out and moved away. Edward moved missing relationship with her mother – though with roles reversed, as she

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explained: ‘We were never intimate Mother and Children while she was Emily Dickinson was not short of friends and advisers at this time, our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunnelling and though the relationships, particularly with her women friends, did not when she became our Child, the Affection came.’ always remain untrammelled. The friendship with Susan Gilbert became somewhat strained after a number of years. In 1859 Emily met Kate Scott In those days Emily’s life was ordinary, her behaviour unremarkable. Anthon, a friend of Susan’s, and considered her a close friend until 1866. She went to church, walked her dog, wrote letters, did housework Nor was she devoid of male company. Ben Newton, a law student of her and supported community events. In October 1856 she won a prize father’s, encouraged her reading and was considered by her ‘a gentle, yet for her bread at the local cattle show and served as a member of the grave Preceptor’. Rev. Charles Wadsworth was her spiritual adviser for produce committee during the following year. In her garden she had the many years. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Daily Republican, reputation of having ‘green fingers’. Perhaps it was here that she first saw was a close friend. The names of one or two other young men have been ‘a Bird’ come ‘down the Walk’ or encountered ‘A narrow Fellow in the mentioned by scholars as possible recipients of her affections. After 1862 Grass’ – though that was more likely to have occurred in the Dickinson Thomas Wentworth Higginson became her literary guide and critic. meadow across the street. Judge Otis Lord, a widower, wanted to marry her, and she seems to have cared deeply for him in the early 1880s until his death in 1884. And In 1856 Emily’s older brother, Austin, joined the First Church of Christ, there was the unidentified man addressed as ‘Master’ in her letters and and also that year he married Emily’s closest friend, Susan Gilbert. They poems, whom she loved and who may or may not have been one of the built a house, the Evergreens, next door to the Homestead. This was, acquaintances known to us. at least at first, a place of much gaiety and entertainment, in contrast to the sombre austerity of Emily’s own home. The happiness experienced As to her appearance, it is interesting to note how she described herself by the young people was referred to by Kate Scott Anthon, a mutual when asked by Higginson for a portrait: ‘I had no portrait, now, but am friend, writing to Susan: ‘Those happy visits to your house! Those celestial small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my evenings in the library – The blazing wood fire – Emily – Austin – The eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.’ music – The rampant fun – The inextinguishable laughter, The uproarious spirits of our chosen – our most congenial circle.’ Crisis and withdrawal There seems to have been some kind of emotional crisis in her personal life around 1861–63, the nature of which we can only guess at. The

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speculation is that she may have been rejected by, or may herself have This is an interpretation also strongly urged by Jerusha McCormack, rejected, the man she loved, perhaps the ‘Master’ of the letters and who points to the withdrawal from society of other American writers poems. The scholar Rebecca Patterson has put forward the thesis that of the time, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Emily’s friendships with Susan Gilbert and Kate Scott Anthon were McCormack argues that Dickinson withdrew in order to master life, a lesbian in nature. The psychologist and critic John Cody came to the process akin to Christian asceticism, except that she was not doing it for conclusion that her lover was fictional rather than factual and went on religious reasons. Her poems reflect this inner struggle to understand, to to discuss the question of whether she suffered a nervous breakdown. master and control circumstances, and she finally achieved mastery over He pointed out that certain poems give us a documented description life by rejecting it. of the inner processes experienced in a mental collapse (see ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ and Her behaviour became noticeably more odd and eccentric. She became ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’). In this regard Emily Dickinson is ‘the myth’ of Amherst, a lone woman dressed all in white who didn’t meet seen as the forerunner of modern women writers such as Sylvia Plath, strangers or even visitors, who spoke to friends from behind a half-closed Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, who have dealt specifically with the door or shrouded in shadow at the head of the stairs, though she sent experience of insanity. them in wine or fruit on a tray. She refused to go out. ‘I do not Cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,’ she replied to Higginson’s Though the exact nature and cause of the experience are open to invitation to attend a lecture in Boston in 1869. But he made a trip to speculation and argument, Emily Dickinson seems to have undergone Amherst to see her in August 1870 and has left us (in a letter to his wife) a psychological crisis in her early thirties, which resulted in a great an interesting impression of the poet. outpouring of poetry (an estimated four to five hundred poems in 1862 and 1863) and led to her withdrawal from normal social life. Her I shan’t sit up tonight to write you all about E. D. biographer Richard Sewall goes to some lengths to demonstrate that this dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member withdrawal was gradual, that she continued to see her family and close runs his or her own selves. Yet only saw her. A large friends and that she sent letters and presents and sometimes copies of county lawyer’s house, brown brick, with great trees her poems to friends and acquaintances. He argues that she withdrew to & a garden – I sent up my card. A parlor dark & cool dedicate herself to her poetry. & stiffish, a few books & engravings & an open piano – Malbone [Higginson’s novel] & OD [Out-Door] Papers among other books. 88 new explorations emily dickinson introduction

A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a Scholarly research over the years has dispelled, once little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish and for all, the popular myth of the reclusive nun, hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer – replacing it with a picture of a gifted, if eccentric, with no good feature – in a very plain & exquisitely woman, witty but not pretty, fond of her family, her clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She friends, her books, her plants, and her dog, a woman came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort who in her adolescent years had all the nineteenth- of childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my century desires and expectancies of a healthy girl but introduction’ in a soft frightened breathless childlike who, for whatever reason, never married, who matured voice – & added under her breath Forgive me if I emotionally and intellectually through some crisis am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know in her late twenties, and who had, above all else, a what I say – but she talked soon & thenceforward passion for poetry. continuously – & deferentially – sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her – but readily Background influences recommencing. Manner between Angie Tilton & Mr. Religion Alcott – but thoroughly ingenuous & simple which Puritanism, with its strict religious outlook, was one of the most important they are not & saying many things which you would have thought foolish & I wise – & some things you wd. formative influences on early white American culture. Its doctrines hv. liked. included belief in a severe and righteous God, belief that humankind was essentially evil and that only a tiny minority (the ‘elect’) were destined to In 1883 she visited her dying nephew, Gilbert, next door at the Evergreens be saved, and that individuals could do little about their fate, which was and was ill for months afterwards. When she died, on 15 May 1886, on predetermined by God. This stern philosophy was given expression in a her own instructions her white coffin was carried across the fields to the rigid, everyday way of life. Strict sobriety, honesty and moral uprightness churchyard rather than by the usual route of funeral processions. She was were required in public dealings and a scrupulous examination of found to have left almost two thousand poems and fragments. conscience was practised in private. All of life was seen as a preparation Modern writers on Dickinson tend to play down her oddness and in for the awful Day of Judgment (see ‘I heard a Fly buzz’). general paint a more rounded portrait of her personality. Margaret Freeman has written (in the introduction to Emily Dickinson’s Imagery by Revivalist meetings provided some variation and were a feature of life in Rebecca Patterson): Amherst in the middle of the 19th century. At these, Baptist evangelists preached fiery emotional sermons on repentance and salvation. They taught that the individual, by repenting, could be saved. 89 new explorations emily dickinson introduction

Emily Dickinson was educated in the strict Puritan tradition of her Political agitation time, but even as a young girl she seemed reluctant to commit herself The 1830s and 1840s saw the beginning of the campaign for women’s completely. She wrote in 1846: ‘I have perfect confidence in God and his rights. In 1839 Margaret Fuller organised intellectual discussion groups promises and yet, I know not why, I feel the world holds a prominent place for women in Boston and this continued for some years; in 1845 Fuller’s in my affections.’ Some scholars argue that she could not bring herself influential feminist pamphlet, Women in the Nineteenth Century, was to believe in the harsh doctrine that all those who were not of the ‘elect’ published. were to be damned. Others argue that she had a deep crisis of faith: that her empirical mind, focusing on the world as she experienced it, did not The mid-century saw a flurry of political campaigns: for educational find much evidence of the divine in nature or other areas of life, that she reform, for prison reform, for temperance reform. There was also the very found God remote if not deliberately perverse in not revealing himself divisive campaign for the abolition of slavery, one of the factors that led (see ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’). Denis Donoghue argues that her to the American Civil War (1861–65). Altogether it was a time of social rebellious spirit resisted having to believe in certain truths and refused to ferment and political upheaval. accept the discipline of doctrine. Philosophical and literary milieu At any rate, she seems to have withdrawn from the practice of orthodox Rationalism was a philosophy imported from Europe, from the 18th- Puritanism. Nor was she tempted by the more emotional Revivalists, century era of the Enlightenment. It put great faith in rational thought, the though most of her family experienced a renewal of faith in the late 1840s belief that humankind could be improved through rational thinking and and early 1850s. She retained a belief in God and wrote many poems scientific learning. All problems – social, religious and moral – could be about faith, God, Heaven and immortality. Yet her views were hardly solved and society perfected through rational thought. This philosophy of orthodox. ‘Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray,’ she wrote to human self-sufficiency fit in well with the emerging American state. a relation. Still, many find her songs or poems to be eloquent religious meditations. In general, it is difficult to decipher exactly what her religious In Europe, Rationalism was succeeded by Romanticism. The beliefs were, but she certainly borrowed from her religious culture: themes Romantics rejected reason, arguing that the way to truth was through and metaphors from the Bible and phrases and rhythms from the hymn the imagination and through intuition and feelings. There was great books of Rev. Isaac Watts. She wrote many of her poems in the ‘common emphasis on the power of nature. For some Romantic poets, such as metre’ of the Psalms. Wordsworth, nature revealed the divine. Romanticism also emphasised

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individuality. The rebellious individual was an icon. The American version Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) of Romanticism was known as Transcendentalism. Thoreau described himself as ‘a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot’. He has become famous for Walden, or Life in Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) the Woods (1854), describing a two-year experiment in self-sufficiency Philosopher, poet and founder of the Transcendentalist movement, (1845–47), when he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Emerson was the foremost literary figure of the era. Transcendentalism Pond, Concord. In the book he describes his agricultural experiments, was a quasi-religious concept owing much to the Romantics and in the wildlife, the visitors he had and his neighbours. Thoreau developed particular to Wordsworth’s reverence for nature. Each person’s intuition an appreciation for the simplicity of the Native American way of life, as and imagination led them to truth and to God, without the need for any opposed to the materialism of white America at the time. particular religious practice or set of beliefs. The power of God existed in nature, and the intuitive soul sensed this and so came into contact Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau represent the optimistic, positive face with the divine. Emerson developed this concept in his essay ‘Nature’ in of American letters and exhibit an independence of mind and a self- 1836. His 1841 volume of essays contains ‘Self Reliance’, with its now well- sufficient outlook. known provocative statements: ‘Who so would be a man must be a non conformist’ and ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. His Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Herman Melville (1819–91) 1844 collection of essays contains ‘The Poet’, in which he urges poets to and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) write about America, ‘our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our Hawthorne, Melville and Poe might be taken to represent the pessimistic, fisheries, our Negroes and Indians’. negative outlook in American writing. All of them are preoccupied with evil, sin and the dark side of human nature. Walt Whitman (1819–92) Whitman did just that in Leaves of Grass (1855), a volume of poetry Hawthorne was fascinated by sin, and his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) rooted in the life and characters of America. ‘I have never read his book is an examination of the nature of American Puritanism and the New – but was told that he was disgraceful,’ Dickinson said of his homoerotic England conscience. Dickinson certainly seems to have read his 1851 verses, which shocked many at the time. novel The House of the Seven Gables. Poe, about whom Dickinson confessed not to have read enough, was fascinated by the macabre.

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Dickinson’s reading Was this wide reading a recluse’s substitute for life experience and so a We know from Rebecca Patterson that Emily Dickinson read widely, vital element in the development of Dickinson’s thought and poetry? but particularly incessantly among the 19th-century English writers. Her life experience was not as limited as popular myth would have us The Brontës affected her deeply. She read Middlemarch and became suppose, but what she imbibed from her books and from her work in the fascinated by any biographical information that came to light on George garden was obviously important to her. But she didn’t read to borrow Eliot. She read Dickens, valuing in particular The Old Curiosity Shop and or to compare. Reading was a stimulus for her own thoughts. It wasn’t David Copperfield. The poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert necessarily the great themes or the scope or the technique of a work that Browning were also important to her. To a lesser extent she read the inspired her, but as Denis Donoghue points out, often just a line or a Romantics, particularly Byron. phrase. Little gems set her thinking.

She also read the contemporary American writers, notably Emerson, Her motive in reading other writers, great and small, was not to discover Hawthorne and Thoreau. She read Emerson as a young woman and was the variety and potentiality of the art she shared with them, but rather to attracted by the mystical quality of his poetry. In 1850 she mentions ‘the find there a provocation for her own imagination. Sometimes a phrase gift of Ralph Emerson’s poems – a beautiful copy’ received from her was enough. She was deeply engaged by the Brontës, but on the other friend Ben Newton. Yet in 1857, when Emerson lectured in Amherst and hand the abiding interest of Emily Brontë largely resolved itself in a stayed at the Evergreens with Austin and Sue, Emily did not attend. She magical line, ‘Every existence would exist in Thee’, from ‘No Coward Soul read the local poet Helen Hunt Jackson, who urged her to publish her Is Mine’. The line is quoted three times in letters. own poems. Two thousand poems Dickinson was steeped in the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton, but she Because of Dickinson’s method of arrangement and storage, among also read less ‘elevated’ fare, for example Kavanagh, a popular romantic other factors, it is difficult to be certain about the dating of the poems or novel by Longfellow, which was secretly given to her by her brother, to suggest patterns or to talk about development in her poetry. But we Austin, and created a family rumpus. She also read travel books, popular can identify phases of writing. history and journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly and Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Hers was a wide reading, but it was often indiscriminate.

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The early phase (up to 1858) the title ‘The May-Wine’. In 1862 the Republican printed ‘Safe in Their It is probable that Dickinson had been writing poems since her youth. Alabaster Chambers’. Two more of her poems were published in 1864. What survives of her early work is relatively conventional poetry. Thomas On 15 April 1862 Dickinson replied to an article advising young writers Johnson, editor of the Complete Poems, thought it probable that in about in the Atlantic Monthly, a literary magazine. The article was by Thomas 1858 she culled many of her earlier poems and transcribed those she Wentworth Higginson, an essayist, lecturer and former preacher, who was decided to save. particularly interested in the status of women writers. She included four of her poems, asking his professional opinion, ‘to say if my Verse is alive’. The middle phase (1858–65) Higginson was a very traditional 19th-century critic and took issue with By 1858 she was writing poetry seriously. During this period she the odd and unorthodox qualities of her poetry and for this reason seems investigated themes of love, pain, absence and loss, doubt, despair, to have advised against publication. But he was not insensitive to this mental anguish and other universal themes, and all in sparse poems of remarkable new talent. He recalled much later, in an article of 1891: passionate intensity. Practically all the poems in the present selection are from this phase. The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of Thomas Johnson has described how the poems were handwritten in further knowledge; and with it came the problem ink and stored in packets, each packet consisting of four to six sheets of never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in folded paper held together with thread through the fold. These versions literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of were fair copies or almost final drafts. ‘Of the forty-nine packets, forty- criticism. six appear to include all the verses written between 1858 and 1865, the years of great creativeness.’ The year 1862 seems to have been her most The correspondence continued and grew into friendship, but Higginson productive, with over 350 poems. The packets constitute about two-thirds printed none of her poems during her lifetime. of the total body of her poetry. The late phase (late 1870s and early 1880s) From her entire output of about two thousand poems, only seven were This period contained a good many harsh and ironic verses. printed during her lifetime. In 1861 the Springfield Daily Republican, edited by her friend Samuel Bowles, printed ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ under

93 new explorations emily dickinson introduction

Editions of the poems poems for publication, did not title them and had the habit of binding After Dickinson’s death her sister Lavinia found this great number of poems from different years into the same packet. (There are different poems and set about having them published. She persuaded Mabel handwriting styles in some packets.) Loomis Todd, the wife of a professor at Amherst College, to prepare a selection. Todd, with the help of Higginson, selected 115 poems for In 1970 the Faber & Faber edition was published, in which Johnson publication, but the editors were concerned about Dickinson’s odd style, selected one version of each poem as the probable original. so they ‘standardised’ it, changing rhymes, regularising metre, even altering metaphors and sometimes the arrangement of lines. Poems by Emily Dickinson was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in 1890, to a slightly baffled critical reception but good sales. Further selections were published in 1891 and 1896.

Todd published a selection of Dickinson’s letters in 1894, but a dispute between Lavinia Dickinson and Todd resulted in a division of Emily Dickinson’s unpublished works. The material in Lavinia’s possession went to Susan and eventually to her daughter, Emily’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who issued another volume, The Single Hound, in 1914. This one had relatively few alterations from the originals. The material in Todd’s possession did not see publication until 1945.

In 1955 an authoritative collection of Dickinson’s work was prepared by Thomas Johnson. He issued a three-volume variorum edition (i.e. containing all known versions of each poem), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, published by Harvard University Press. The poems are dated, but as Johnson himself admitted, this is the result of educated guesswork. It is very difficult to be definite, since Dickinson never prepared the

94 new explorations emily dickinson i taste a liquor never brewed

I taste a liquor never brewed ‘liquor never brewed’?). Real and imaginative experiences are compared in this fantasy world: real liquor to ‘Inebriate of Air’. It is a fantasy world Background where reality is stood on its head: lack of self-control is celebrated as A version of this poem was first printed in 1861 in the Springfield virtue (‘Seraphs swing their snowy Hats … To see the little Tippler’); the Republican, edited by Dickinson’s friend Samuel Bowles. But it was drunken speaker seems to have a kind of superiority over the saints (is entitled ‘The May-Wine’, some line endings were altered to get a more there a suggestion that their snowy hats would melt, while he can lean exact rhyme and one line was completely changed. It is doubtful that this against the sun?); the saints are confined, perhaps imprisoned, while the was done with the poet’s consent. drunkard is free; and time seems somehow to have been vanquished while the ‘little Tippler’ drinks on into eternity. A reading of the poem This has been interpreted by some as primarily a nature poem, The humorous voice of Emily Dickinson celebrating the simple home-grown joy of nature, a celebration of endless Comic effects summer. The exuberance of nature is linked with the excitement of poetic As well as the imaginative elements of fantasy, the poem features many inspiration. of the more usual comic effects, such as exaggerated imagery – for example, the metaphor of the flower as tavern and the bee as drunkard: But nature is more the stimulus than the subject of this poem. Nature provides the spur for excitement, good spirits, unrestrained joy. The When ‘Landlords’ turn the drunken Bee Out of the Foxglove’s door – poem is fundamentally a celebration of happiness and unqualified delight. or … the little Tippler This has some of the elements of a Romantic poem, with its sensitivity to leaning against the – Sun – nature and the strong sense of individualism shown by the rebellious speaker. The notion of the bee as tippler is maintained throughout the poem – The element of fantasy reeling, leaning, etc. The ridiculous costumes (‘the snowy Hats’) add to The high spirits of this poem nudge it into the realm of fantasy. Susan the comic effect. The odd juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is Juhasz examines this pronounced element of fantasy in the poem. She also comic (seraphs, saints and the tippler). The alliteration (‘Debauchee comments on the childish air and the quality of make-believe it possesses. of Dew’, ‘Seraphs swing their snowy Hats’) also contributes. The riddle form of the first stanza enhances this atmosphere (what is the 95 new explorations emily dickinson i taste a liquor never brewed

Irony The comic and fantasy elements of Dickinson’s poem render a A deeper humour is achieved through a pervasive sense of irony in the different tone. poem. Given the poet’s Calvinist background, the central metaphor of There’s a good case to be made that this is a conscious literary take-off by the drunkard is amusingly ironic. Her father was a strong advocate of Emily Dickinson and as such is both effective and highly amusing. the Temperance League. Perhaps Dickinson is exercising a delightful rebelliousness! To celebrate the riotous, even scandalous activities of the Here are some fragments of the Emerson poem for comparison. speaker in the common metre of church hymns is amusingly ironic. And Bring me wine, but wine which never grew there are ironies embedded in both imagery and language: the imprisoned In the belly of the grape, saints contrast with the tipsy speaker at large, and also the fact that she uses Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through the vocabulary of nature to deal with its opposite, timelessness. Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffer no savor of the earth to scape. Wit Let its grapes the morn salute From a nocturnal root, We have already noted the paradoxical riddle of the opening. Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; Poem as parody And turns the woe of Night, Juhasz, Miller and Smith (in Comic Power in Emily Dickinson) argue that By its own craft, to a more rich delight. this poem is a witty parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem ‘Bacchus’. Wine which Music is, – Music and wine are one, – Both poems compare poetic vision to the state of intoxication. That I, drinking this, The poems have a similar structure, beginning with a mystical Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; reference to wine, going on to deal with concrete aspects of the world Kings unborn shall walk with me; and finishing with cosmic imagery. And the poor grass shall plot and plan But Emerson’s is a sombre, serious poem, where he forged links What it will do when it is man. Quickened so, will I unlock with Greek mythology and seems to have some affinity with eternal Every crypt of every rock. figures. I thank the joyful juice Dickinson smirks at the sacred and deflates the notion of the serious For all I know; – poet. Winds of remembering Of the ancient being blow, Dickinson’s stance is outside the poem, smiling from a distance. And seeming-solid walls of use Open and flow. 96 new explorations emily dickinson ‘hope’ is the thing with feathers

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers The third stanza introduces something of a more personal experience of hope, with the introduction of the first person by the poet (‘I’ve A reading of the poem heard’). Again, the value of hope in extreme circumstances is featured This is one of Dickinson’s ‘definition’ poems. She is exploring a (‘in the chillest land’, ‘on the strangest Sea’). Its absolute strength, its psychological condition using a concrete analogy or metaphor. She independence and the lack of demands it makes on its host body are has explored hope in other poems, variously describing it as ‘a strange emphasised: invention’, ‘a subtle glutton’ and now ‘the thing with feathers’. Through Yet, never, in Extremity, this bird metaphor she examines the various qualities and characteristics It asked a crumb – of Me. of hope, in so far as they can be described at all.

For Dickinson, hope is an independent gift, a spiritual gift perhaps. It The association of hope with a bird is common enough in religious is delicate and fragile yet strong and indomitable, and this paradoxical symbolism: the Spirit or divine inspiration is often represented as a quality is reflected in the image: dove. Dickinson maintains this spiritual aspect of hope (‘perches in the soul’), but she is also at pains to establish its difference, its strangeness, And sore must be the storm – its absolute otherness in case we accept the bird analogy too literally. That could abash the little Bird It is ‘the thing’ with feathers, a not quite definable quality of spirit. It is undemonstrative, unshowy, a silent presence (‘sings the tune without the The tiny creature is not disconcerted or abashed by anything but the words’). It is permanent, perpetual, always there – a quality emphasised by most dreadful of storms. There is also the suggestion that hope is a Dickinson’s unusual punctuation (‘never stops – at all – ’). That final dash presence not easily defined (‘the thing with feathers’). might be taken to suggest that the process is continuing. Mood Characteristics of sweetness and warmth, very tangible qualities, are Dickinson’s poems are sometimes bleak affairs, examining such painful emphasised in the second stanza. Hope’s indomitable nature and conditions as despair, alienation, mental anguish and unhappy love. But particular value in times of crisis are also stressed (‘And sweetest – in the this is an exceptionally optimistic poem that radiates a mood of buoyant Gale – is heard’). self-confidence: ‘I’ve heard it in the chillest land’. The optimistic tone is reflected too in the reference to music (‘And sings the tune … sweetest 97 new explorations emily dickinson ‘hope’ is the thing with feathers

– in the Gale – is heard’) and warmth (‘That kept so many warm’). The forward motion of the lines, with Dickinson’s strange punctuation, also helps to suggest that this is a continuing state of mind, not just a temporary high point:

And never stops – at all –

Imagery The poem is structured around the central metaphor of the bird as hope, and this is extended to feathers, singing, etc. Many of Dickinson’s most startling metaphors and images consist of abstract and concrete elements yoked together, and we see this here in ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’. It is as if by putting the two unlikely opposites together she is suggesting how extraordinary the virtue of hope is.

98 new explorations emily dickinson there’s a certain slant of light

There’s a certain Slant of light more interested in the powerful effects of light – on the landscape and the speaker – and in its indefinable qualities (‘None may teach it – Any – | A nature poem ’Tis the Seal Despair’) than in any description of the subject itself. At a surface level this is a nature poem attempting to capture some of the essential features of winter: the lifelessness of winter afternoons, the Poem as landscape The critic Judith Farr views this poem as a subtle word painting and slanting sunlight, etc. While the poet dwells on these outer manifestations, explores it as a piece of visual art. She finds that it follows in the American she is also aware that the essence of the season is experienced internally, landscape tradition, linking the sky with the earth. She also finds it in in ‘internal difference, | Where the Meanings, are’. harmony with the artistic ideals of the famous 19th-century art critic John Ruskin, who advocated the creation of ‘the mystery of distance’ in The poem has a particularly narrow focus: a study of the light. The poet’s landscapes and who also praised ‘the unfatigued veracity of eternal light’. view of it is startlingly different. She catches the commonly experienced Do you find a sense of distance in the poem and an eternal significance? painful discomfort of wintry sunlight that ‘oppresses’ but deepens it to Would it be true to say that Dickinson is studying what Ruskin called ‘the ‘Heavenly Hurt’ and ‘imperial affliction’. It becomes a visitation we must spirituality of atmospheric phenomena’, in other words, viewing nature as passively suffer (‘it gives us’ and is ‘Sent us of the Air’). It is not open to a reflection of the divine? any influence or human control (‘None may teach it – Any’), but rather is seen as a teacher who makes the landscape listen. Its power and influence Perhaps, but her conclusions are far from the expected and the orthodox. are reflected not only in that initial presence (‘Shadows – hold their To many 19th-century artists, such as the painter John Constable, for breath’) but also in the after-effect: the landscape is changed (‘like the example, the sky was an affirmation of faith, but to Dickinson it is a sign Distance | On the look of Death’). With startling originality, the light is of despair. The God behind nature in this poem smacks of cruel tyranny. compared to a ‘Seal’, conveying all that artefact’s paradoxical properties The light is ‘an imperial affliction’, a vehicle of ‘Heavenly Hurt’, not a of being uncommunicative yet itself a token of communication. joyous divine revelation but ‘the Seal Despair’. The simile of ‘Cathedral Even more unusually, she sees it as the ‘Seal Despair’, reversing the Tunes’ suggests the solemn weight of religion, particularly when coupled conventional interpretation of light as a sign of hope. with ‘Heft’, with its connotations of heavy lifting. It suggests the ‘difficulty of lifting up the heart’, as Farr puts it; that is, the difficulty of belief, Altogether it is a most unconventional and unexpected view of light, and particularly at this death-time of the year. It is a bleak landscape, devoid a particularly negative one. It is also worth noting that Dickinson seems

99 new explorations emily dickinson there’s a certain slant of light

of any signs of a benign deity. The critic Barton St Armand called it ‘the no relief but ‘a memory of itself, looking now like the face of Death’ most lone of Dickinson’s lone landscapes’. (Donoghue). Donoghue points out that distance and death are frequently linked by Dickinson, especially in the love poems, where the A poem of despair distance of the absent lover is like death. Thus, despair is experienced In searching for the central core of this poem, some critics focus on the here as a sort of death and it leaves its impression even when it lifts. poet’s feeling rather than the natural details and observations. In this reading, despair is seen as the central theme. This despair is brought The speaker feels victimised, hurt, oppressed and afflicted by God. The about as the natural phenomenon, light, loses its orthodox meanings poem is read as an accusation of divine betrayal, that God should allow of illumination, insight and hope and becomes completely alien to the such despair to happen. Certainly the image of God here is far from the speaker. Denis Donoghue points out how Dickinson employs one of conventional one of a caring and just being and seems more akin to the her common poetic techniques to effect this change. She begins with a wanton, vengeful pagan gods of classical times. This despair is occasioned neutral first line (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’), which is then exposed by the poet’s failure to find any comfort in the divine or the natural world. to alien associations ‘until it, too, is tainted and there is nothing left but the alien’. These are associations of oppression, the impossible weight of faith, The poet’s method etc. They are not visible but felt within. ‘Heavenly Hurt’ makes only an Clearly this is not a conventional landscape representation, such as we internal difference (‘Where the Meanings, are’). The feeling experienced might find in realistic visual art. Not only would we have great difficulty by the poet is absolute, all-powerful, unshakable (‘None may teach it – in isolating background, foreground, etc., but there is hardly a single Any’). She groups the feelings and associations together under the seal or concrete image, apart from ‘Cathedral Tunes’, which may have some the sign of despair, which is likened to a divine pestilence, a punishment resonance of real bells, and perhaps the ‘Seal’ image. But any attempt to plague: give the latter a concrete form is quickly dissipated by the accompanying abstract noun, ‘Despair’. An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air – We are conscious, of course, that light is the poet’s chief preoccupation, but the poem lacks a focus or centre of meaning, either in word or This affliction petrifies the landscape, making it appear a dead world in image. Even the subject, light, is not dealt with directly. It is contrasted which the speaker, now alienated from God and nature, is marooned or compared with more readily apprehended experience (‘like the Heft (‘Shadows – hold their breath’). Even when the despair lifts, it leaves 100 new explorations emily dickinson there’s a certain slant of light

| Of Cathedral Tunes’ and ‘like the Distance | On the look of Death’). We are told what it is not (‘None may teach it – Any’) and its effects are listed (‘Landscape listens – | Shadows – hold their breath’). This circuitous approach to the subject means that all the discussion of meaning is on the periphery or borders of the subject, a technique described as ‘negative definition’ by the literary critic Cristanne Miller. Perhaps it was this lack of definition in Dickinson’s imagery and her circuitous approach to the subject that led Mabel Loomis Todd to consider this poem ‘impressionistic’ when she included it in the first edition of Dickinson’s poems in 1890.

Passivity of the speaker The passivity of the speaker is another feature worth noting. We are aware of the powerlessness of the speaker passively experiencing the oppression of the light:

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar

The effect is to further enhance the power of the light. Its unreachable independence, its complete otherness is signalled in ‘None may teach it – Any’.

101 new explorations emily dickinson i felt a funeral, in my brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain It is worth noting that ‘Brain’, ‘Mind’ and ‘Soul’ were interchangeable terms for the 19th-century artist. Indeed, an examination of the manuscript A reading of the poem shows that Dickinson’s first choice for ‘Soul’ in line 10 was ‘Brain’. This This poem describes a psychological state. It depicts a condition of experience of traumatic collapse has both psychological and religious extreme anguish and mental disorder, a situation of psychological connotations. torment where the speaker feels all the oppression and powerlessness of a helpless victim and ultimately collapses. Dickinson uses the structure of a funeral service and funeral imagery to convey her theme: the box, the mourners, the plank, the burial – all Mental breakdown is seen by the poet as akin to losing consciousness. the paraphernalia of a funeral. But this is a most unreal funeral service. The critic Judith Farr views this poem as a ‘mindscape’, which takes as its Normally the funeral is sombre, respectful and caring and the ritual is subject the death of consciousness. Indeed, the narrative is so structured, designed to be comforting. But here the ‘Box’ is crudely impersonal and describing the sensations experienced at different stages on the way to the ritual becomes a nightmare of unstoppable activity, as reflected in the the loss of perception. grammatical structure of the poem (‘till’, ‘when’, ‘till’, ‘then’, ‘again’, ‘then’, ‘then’) and in the imagery of ceaseless activity (‘to and fro’, ‘treading – It begins with ‘I felt’ and finishes with the loss of all sensation, noting on treading’, ‘kept beating – beating’). Even the sounds of the funeral service the way the failure of the various senses and organs of perception. Farr are experienced as activity as well as sound (‘Mourners … treading’, ‘A notes how physiologically accurate this is, corresponding to the stages of Service, like a Drum – | Kept beating’, ‘lift a Box | And creak across my an approaching faint. The dizzy spell is prefaced by a mental numbness Soul | With those same Boots of Lead’, ‘Then Space – began to toll’). (the ‘treading – treading’ of the ‘Boots of Lead’). The ringing in the ears There isn’t a single still moment in the poem except for the marvellous that precedes fainting is conveyed through the synaesthetic imagery image of cosmic alienation in lines 15 and 16. of ‘Then Space – began to toll’. The fainting spell (‘I dropped down, and down’) and the sinking out of consciousness (‘hit a World, at every This unrelenting activity is experienced as oppression by the speaker, plunge’) concludes in the total loss of perception (‘and Finished knowing who is powerless to react and must suffer what is being done to her. As – then –’). Yet the concluding dash might suggest survival of some kind, John Robinson says, she is using the funeral service to define herself as perhaps the continuity of intellect, as Farr suggests, somehow surviving to helpless victim. The sense of victimisation is further enhanced by the fact record the event. that what she suffers is only partially understood by her, though keenly felt

102 new explorations emily dickinson i felt a funeral, in my brain

and heard. The unreal strangeness of the imagery reflects the inscrutable The nature of the solitary soul, adrift in the universe: nature of her sufferings (‘a Service, like a Drum’, ‘all the Heavens were a Bell’). The unique vantage point of the speaker here, as she is being And I, and Silence, some strange Race buried, graphically reinforces this notion of helpless victim. There is an Wrecked, solitary, here – element of gothic horror to this – a conscious victim being buried alive This is a vision of lonely suffering, interpreted by some as the effort of and the sensationalism of ‘creak across my Soul’ and ‘Boots of Lead’. the soul to understand its place in the universe. All this adds to the quality of the mental trauma that is the poem’s main Oppression: the poet as helpless victim, impotent sufferer. theme. Human alienation: the lack of control over the world or one’s fate. The image of the living treated as if they were dead emphasises this Some readers feel that the main focus of this poem is the actual extreme disunion between self and circumstances. experience of death, rather than any metaphorical exploration of psychological death: that the poem enacts approaching death, loss of the senses, etc. and that the experience is given an extra frisson of horror through the speaker’s unique vantage point from the coffin. Do you favour this literal interpretation? Perhaps it smacks too much of gothic sensationalism? Perhaps we can read the poem as addressing the issue of death in both the physical and psychological senses? What insights into death does the poem convey?

Themes An enactment of mental breakdown, a depiction of the intense suffering of psychological disintegration. The loss of order and meaning, intrinsic to breakdown: the sensation of tumbling through space, events have no properly understood cause, senses are confused, space tolls, a plank breaks, etc. A charting of the stages of death, the loss of sensation and perception.

103 new explorations emily dickinson a bird came down the walk

A Bird came down the Walk The playful summer gentleness of butterflies adds a romantic element. The synaesthetic fusion of water, air and light (‘Banks of Noon’) A reading of the poem underlines the perfection of the movement and the lack of disturbance This is a nature poem but one with a difference, as Dickinson urges us to (‘plashless as they swim’). This image has connotations too of youthful look closely at the detail, to explore beneath the surface and apprehend exuberance and joy, of summers spent swimming in the river. something of the essence of this creature – its natural elegance but also its essential oddity and difference. Altogether, the poem celebrates the beauty of creatures and their mastery of the elements, but also their essential wildness. The bird’s crude predatory nature (‘He bit an Angleworm in halves | And ate the fellow, raw’) is combined with a sort of diffidence or politeness Poetic technique (‘And then hopped sidewise to the Wall | To let a Beetle pass’). The more Defamiliarising the familiar obvious creaturely qualities are present: the natural beauty of the ‘Velvet In an effort to get us to look again, to see beneath the accepted, Head’ and the unrolled feathers, the prim, erratic bird-like movements Dickinson gently shocks us into rethinking by ‘defamiliarising’ the familiar. (‘He glanced with rapid eyes | That hurried all around’) and the natural For example, the bird, romantic instrument of song, symbol of poetic caution of a wild creature (‘like frightened Beads’, ‘like one in danger, flight, is shown in all its awful naturalness as a greedy killer (‘ate the fellow, Cautious’). But above all, what is celebrated is the miraculousness of raw’). Even the sound of the word ‘raw’ helps to reinforce the crudeness of flight as the bird blends into the elements, unifying air, water and light, the situation. But at a deeper level Dickinson alters the whole construction displaying its mastery. The first striking metaphor sees the bird compared of reality, as in the final stanza, where the elements fuse together and to a confident, relaxed rower, with the suggestion that the bird’s natural time and space shift dimensions as the bird ‘like a butterfly, swims, sails, element is the air (‘home’). Naturalness is the paramount quality, as the leaps, flies, soars’ (Juhasz, Miller and Smith). These critics use the term comparisons emphasise the grace, elegance, lack of disturbance and ‘transformations’ to describe this technique. perfect blend of creature and medium: Identifying with the subject And rowed him softer home – It is clear that at first Dickinson describes what she sees, though with her own particular slant. But then the speaker enters the picture and becomes Than Oars divide the Ocean, more closely identified with the subject. Cristanne Miller explains how Too silver for a seam – 104 new explorations emily dickinson a bird came down the walk

this identification is achieved through grammar and syntax, in a process she terms ‘syntactic doubling’. Dickinson’s compressed epigrammatical style of writing causes ambiguity, especially when ‘using a single phrase to cover two non-parallel syntactic contexts’ (Miller). For example, the middle line below could refer to either the first or third line:

He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb

The feelings of danger and caution are shared by both speaker and bird. This weakening of the distinction between the self and the other (or speaker and subject) is developed further in the climax of the poem, where the speaker half-creates what she sees and herself shares in the experience.

Humour and wit Juhasz, Miller and Smith examine the comic elements in this poem. The incongruities in the bird’s behaviour are the most obvious expressions of humour: the natural carnivore’s killer instinct exists side by side with a sense of civility and good manners (‘an awareness of social etiquette from the raw worm eater’). Notice the irony of his guilt – the furtive shifting around in case his courteous behaviour is noticed! Juhasz, Miller and Smith also link the deeper transformations already mentioned to the anarchic transformations of cosmic vision, where reality is reconstructed in unaccustomed combinations, thereby producing laughter.

105 new explorations emily dickinson after great pain, a formal feeling comes

After great pain, a formal feeling comes of its properties, such as weight and brittleness. The dead weight of the depression is focused in space and time through the image ‘Hour A reading of the poem of Lead’. The feeling finally finds release in the more gentle but lethal In the familiar Dickinson mode, this poem is a dramatisation of a feeling. analogy of snow, which initiates that final drift towards the death of the The poet explores the effects of pain and grief on mind and body. The senses. For Dickinson, lack of feeling is symbolic of death, and here death resulting state, that of ‘formal feeling’, is the focus of study here, and is easeful, a gentle ‘letting go’. inertia, numbness, disorientation, mechanical activity and finally loss of all feeling are its main manifestations. In essence, the poem deals with the after-effects of human pain: inertia, loss of feeling and a numbness that is like the numbness of death. But in The ‘formal feeling’ is described through a series of analogies: the internal common with some other Dickinson poems, the ending is ambiguous. feeling is communicated through concrete images – of the body, of Because the poem is written in the present tense, we don’t know if the nature and of society. First the body’s manifestations of this feeling are experience is over and the speaker has survived it, or if it is continuing, or transmitted: those of nerves, heart and feet. These all display a stiff if it will be terminal. The final dash might suggest continuity. Either way, formality, a shocked lifelessness. The personified ‘Nerves sit ceremonious, we are left with an awareness of a disembodied voice. like Tombs’ are associated with the formal ceremony of death. For one critic (Susan Juhasz) this image conjured up a picture of polite but Poetic technique essentially inert old women at afternoon tea! The ‘stiff Heart’ has lost all This is a fine example of the ‘analogical method’ sometimes used trace of feeling, has become disoriented under the strain of suffering by Dickinson. She often makes analogies between literal and (‘questions was it He, that bore, | And Yesterday, or Centuries before?’). metaphorical death, but here the internal feeling is called up through a ‘The Feet, mechanical, go round’: this is automatic behaviour, insensitive range of external situations, as explained. to surroundings (‘of Ground, or Air, or Ought’). All these physical Nouns are used as the focus for the effective metaphorical work manifestations display a mindless formality, an absence of real feeling, an (‘Tombs’, ‘stone’, ‘Lead’, ‘Snow’). As David Porter points out, inert indifference brought on by suffering. they ‘provide visual and tactile immediacy to the condition of paralysis brought on by grief’. The ‘formal feeling’ is also communicated through analogies with nature We notice the technical language used to mechanise life and feelings (‘A Quartz contentment’), crystallised like the mineral and sharing some (‘the Feet, mechanical, go round’, ‘a Quartz contentment’).

106 new explorations emily dickinson after great pain, a formal feeling comes

A variety of sound effects contribute to the atmosphere of the poem: alliteration draws attention to the ‘formal feeling’; the echoes of ‘go round – | Of Ground’ in stanza 2 underline the meaningless emptiness of the activity; and the sound of ‘stone’ evokes a painful moan – indeed, the proliferation of long o vowel sounds evokes the numbness and static fatalism of the feeling (‘Tombs’, ‘bore’, ‘before’, ‘stone’, ‘Snow’, ‘go’, ‘round’, ‘Ground’, ‘Hour’). This is a dramatic enactment of feeling, using personification of the nerves and heart and a vivid creation of concrete props to move it towards that inevitable climax.

Points of comparison with ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ Consider these points and decide which ones you think are particularly valid and can be substantiated easily from the texts. Both poems deal with extremes of feeling (anguish, pain, suffering). In both poems, the poet’s projected self-image is one of helpless victim and oppressed, numb being. The speaker seems disconnected from order and meaning. The world of the speaker does not make sense. The speaker suffers mechanised repetition, an endless ritual of activity. The two poems follow the same narrative line: the mechanical activity, the weight of lead, the sense of numbness and the final collapse. The human being exists at an intersection of time and space, but in these poems the connection is somehow missed and the speaker wanders off, lost in the universe.

107 new explorations emily dickinson i heard a fly buzz – when i died

I Heard a Fly buzz – when I died even, just an intimidating encounter to give witness to one’s life and deeds and to acknowledge the awful power of God. A reading of the poem This poem recreates the drama of the deathbed scene from the point of So far the death scene is very much a managed ritual, ordered, controlled, view of the dying or dead person, whose consciousness seems to have orchestrated. She has tidied up all her legal affairs, given away little gifts survived death and can therefore comment on the experience (‘I heard and mementoes to friends (‘willed my Keepsakes’). The legal language a Fly buzz – when I died’). Dickinson focuses on the moment of death. conveys an impersonal atmosphere (‘witnessed’, ‘willed’, ‘Signed away’, She is fascinated by that moment of passage, the transition from life into ‘portion’). This is to be a controlled event. eternity. She is probing the nature of death. ‘What does it feel like to die? The irony, of course, is that a mere fly, a household pest, can disturb she is asking’ (Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson). this most significant moment. The fly is a grotesque intrusion, with its The moment is focused and dramatically prepared for. In the first stanza loudness, its aimlessness (‘uncertain stumbling Buzz’), its associations with it is described as an isolated moment of calm ‘Between the Heaves of corruption and rot and its confusing appearance, which is a fusion of sight Storm’, between the storm of living and ‘the storm of dissolution’, as and sound (‘Blue … Buzz’). The fly has been interpreted in various ways, Judith Farr puts it. for example as a reminder of the disorder and confusion of life. Judith Farr sees in ‘the stupid aimlessness … a suggestion of the puzzlement In the second stanza the family or watchers have got themselves under that is life’. Denis Donoghue suggests that it conveys alienation, that control and are almost holding their breaths for the final moment it represents ‘all the remaining things … which detach themselves from (‘And Breaths were gathering firm | For that last Onset’). This is a bare, the dying’ (‘There interposed a Fly … Between the light – and me … I Calvinistic view of death, recreating the awesome moment when the soul could not see to see’). Perhaps we should consider it in the context of the encounters the power and the majesty of God. ‘That last Onset’ suggests tightly controlled and planned ritual. It disrupts the order, the ritual of the that out of the smoke of the last violent battle of death, the king emerges, awesome moment. Here, this grotesque fly might represent the dying to whom the soul gives witness (‘when the King | Be witnessed – in the person’s loss of control, a final alienation from the puzzling, random, Room’). The encounter with God is a formal moment of recognition and disordered world and a step that leads to the detachment that is death. judgment, reinforced by the legal and religious terminology (‘witnessed’). There are no angels here, no welcoming choirs, no rejoicing, no emotion What is its significance at this juncture, as the soul is waiting for God? It certainly disrupts the solemnity of the moment. Does it go further and 108 new explorations emily dickinson i heard a fly buzz – when i died

suggest that all that is real is the random disordered world and physical the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be chief corruption and that God and eternity are less certain? Beyond the magistrate’s wide-open eyes! presumption on Dickinson’s part that some kind of consciousness survives the storm of death, there is no explicit reference to an afterlife here, no In what ways do you think Dickinson’s treatment of the scene is different comforting glimpse of eternity. We are invited, certainly, to explore the from Hawthorne’s? contrast between the mundane and the divine. In fact, the entire poem is structured on contrasts: the controlled scene versus the uncertainty of Elements of the theme the fly; the dignified silence versus the incessant buzzing; human grieving The poem, as we have seen, is an exploration of the moment of death. versus religious expectation; the corporeal versus the spiritual; and the Consider the following aspects of that theme and re-examine the text for tiny fly versus the majesty of God and the vastness of eternity. Yet this fly any further suggestions it might provide on each. comes to dominate the poem and changes its focus. It steals the limelight An exploration of the fading of consciousness and the senses from the ‘King’, leaves a question mark over the afterlife and shows us the The ritual of final leave-taking reality of death: as a loss of control, a failure of light and a final alienation Death as a dramatic event from the world. The family or community aspect of death The awesome confrontation with God Sources The loss of control Emelie Fitzgibbon feels that Dickinson took the idea of the fly and the The final alienation: the loss of understanding of the world, the failure dying person from Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables. to see any meaning in it There, the villainous governor dies alone sitting in a chair. The point The religious questions raised about the relative significance of the of view of the narration alternates between that of the dying and dead world and the divine governor and the outside narrator, until the fly is discovered: Imagery And there we see a fly – one of your common Dickinson relies on nature for much of her imagery (the storm, the light, houseflies, such as are always buzzing on the the fly). It is her style not to elaborate on images, so the reader must windowpane – which has smelt out Governor explore for possible connotations. Pyncheon, and alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us, is creeping over

109 new explorations emily dickinson i heard a fly buzz – when i died

The storm simile in the first stanza seems to link the room with the wider natural world, which has the effect of giving this single death scene a more universal significance. It may also suggest the inherent violence of death – death as a great storm of individual disintegration.

The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm –

Dickinson identifies light with life and associates the moment of death with the failure of light. The possible significance of the fly has already been discussed. Dickinson’s images are pared down even to single words, reduced to their essentials (‘The Eyes around’, ‘And Breaths were gathering’).

110 new explorations emily dickinson the soul has bandaged moments

The Soul has Bandaged moments that he merely hovered over them, feeling unworthy to kiss. The grotesqueness of the scene is reinforced by the juxtaposition of the Some readings of the poem delicate action (‘Sip’) with the hideous Goblin. Perhaps there is also a hint This is one of the poems that can be read in a variety of ways: as a of guilt as she recollects the delicacy and sensitivity of her lover at the very psychological insight into moods and mind (a ‘mindscape’ as it were), as a moment that she accepts the Goblin’s advances. These images provide sexual statement or as a reflection about creativity. a frightening glimpse into the mind’s darkness. They are images of truly gothic horror, demons from beyond the grave or, in this case, beneath the At the level of psychological exploration, it deals with the different moods consciousness. of the spirit, or ‘Soul’. In this case, great mood changes are evident, swinging between the mental paralysis and deep, shackled depression Stanzas 3 and 4 portray the opposite mood (‘Escape – | When bursting of stanzas 1 and 5 and the sheer elation of stanzas 3 and 4. To modern all the doors’): unrestrained joy, the captive freed from depression, as the psychology, the violence and extreme nature of the change in moods bee ‘Long Dungeoned from his Rose’ enjoys his sensuous liberty. The might suggest manic depression. mood is equated with the joy of Paradise.

In the first stanza the ‘Soul’, or spirit, is portrayed as wounded, damaged, But even this elevation is fragile and dangerous (‘She dances like a needing to be wrapped in self-protective and restraining bandages. In this Bomb’) and it is short lived. The spirit is again weighed down with shackles shattered state the spirit is prey to all sorts of fantasies and nightmares, and staples, like a felon. The cycle of sinking and lifting moods begins this time erotic in nature (‘ghastly Fright … Salute her – with long again, and the knowledge that it is cyclical makes the weight of pain all fingers – | Caress her freezing hair’). Why ‘freezing’? Perhaps with fright, the more poignant (‘the Horror welcomes her, again’). Once again, the suggesting her attitude, frigid with fright? This is a grotesque parody of inappropriate juxtaposition of ‘Horror’ and ‘welcomes’ gives us some love. indication of her confusion and despair.

Sip, Goblin, from the very lips The final line of the poem emphasises the essential loneliness of the The Lover – hovered – o’er – condition, the social stigma attached to mental illness. It is not talked about in public (‘not brayed of Tongue’). The connotations of brash, loud There is something decadent about the image of the Goblin replacing vulgarity in ‘bray’ suggest the discomfort any such talk would bring. her lover, the spectre kissing the lips her lover worshipped so much 111 new explorations emily dickinson the soul has bandaged moments

It has been suggested that this depression may be caused by failure in creativity in a reading of the poem, then perhaps we should consider love and that a main theme of this poem is emotional loss, interrupted ‘communication and the loss of it’ as a suitable umbrella term. We could by brief glimpses of fulfilment in stanzas 3 and 4. There are cogent see the poem as dealing with communication at many levels: at the reasons to justify such a reading. The Soul of the first line is wounded with human sensuous level, at the level of creativity and also at the level of disappointment in love. We have already explored the erotic and sensual mind where imagined horror is one of the mind’s possibilities. nature of her nightmares. The elation too is of a sensual nature, as the bee sucks nectar from the rose and becomes delirious with pleasure. Noon probably symbolises the paradise of earthly love. Altogether, stanzas 3 and 4 paint a picture of sensual fulfilment. And when she is disappointed in love she feels guilty, like a criminal, a ‘Felon led along’, and she can no longer sing. Love’s song no longer soars: there are ‘staples, in the Song’.

Cristanne Miller classified the poem as one of Dickinson’s ‘rape poems’. The caressing figure enjoys complete control over its apparently helpless victim. Sometimes she responds (‘Sip, Goblin’), but she eventually escapes from her tormentors. But there is a suggestion that this is a repeated sequence of events: capture, escape, recapture. This reading views the speaker as sexual victim.

The poem has also been read as a reflection on creativity, the failure of poetic inspiration and the great elation when it is rediscovered. The imprisonment is verbal; the loss is one of words rather than of physical liberty. The ‘plumed feet’ (perhaps of Mercury, messenger of the gods) are shackled, poetic inspiration is imprisoned (‘staples, in the Song’). However, this reading does not take account of the sensual and erotic element of the first two stanzas. If we are to incorporate the issue of

112 new explorations emily dickinson i could bring you jewels – had i a mind to

I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to See the notes and glossary in the book for commentary on this poem.

113 new explorations emily dickinson a narrow fellow in the grass

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Without a tighter breathing And Zero at the Bone – Dickinson and nature Basically, this poem is concerned with Dickinson’s attitude to nature, For Dickinson, nature is to be treated warily. There are times when it is in particular her sense that the natural world was distinctly different. In prudent to keep out of the way. this she differed from Emerson, who thought the entire world, human and non-human, was in harmony and could be known and understood The method of her portrayal of the snake conveys how peculiar, by humankind. Dickinson is much more wary. She professes to have an mysterious and elusive nature is. In format, this is a sort of riddle poem. amicable relationship with nature: The snake is not named, indeed never fully seen, apart from the glimpse of ‘A spotted shaft’. We just get clues to its passage – ‘The Grass divides Several of Nature’s People as with a Comb … And opens further on’. Its purpose or place in the I know, and they know me – scheme of things is beyond the speaker’s comprehension. It just moves I feel for them a transport Of cordiality – through the poem as a series of images. We never learn enough to understand its nature or even identify it. It makes occasional appearances This suggests a polite acquaintance more than any emotional attachment that surprise or frighten. It is altogether outside everyday experience – or real closeness. It displays a somewhat reserved sense of neighbourly totally other. tolerance for the earth’s creatures. But even that does not hold for this particular creature – the ‘narrow Fellow’. Though there is some effort to Her poetic method here reveals her attitude to nature. As Jerusha personalise him – perhaps as a gentleman rider (‘Occasionally rides – | McCormack put it, ‘her method, then, is not deliberately elusive, but You may have met Him’) – and to refer to his likings (‘a Boggy Acre’), the an imitation of the bafflement she herself finds in the obscurity of poet’s basic reaction is one of unease. This shock on meeting is registered natural things and their refusal to confess to significance. They might be in the disjointed, awkward syntax, the faltering words of ‘His notice sudden mastered but they cannot be understood.’ is’. We notice her feeling of threat coming through in the descriptions. Consider, for example, ‘Whip lash’: it captures the speed, agility and wild Imagery unpredictability of the creature, but it also has connotations of sudden There is an element of creative unexpectedness about Dickinson’s threat, injury, pain, lethal strike. At the end of the poem she explicitly imagery, for example in the depiction of the snake as an occasional rider records her fear. She feels threatened to the marrow of her bones: 114 new explorations emily dickinson a narrow fellow in the grass

or the bog as ‘a Floor too cool for Corn’. This is a feature of her poetry in general.

The purpose of some of the imagery here seems to be an attempt to humanise nature (the narrow fellow ‘Occasionally rides’; ‘Nature’s People’) or it is an attempt to domesticate it (‘the Grass divides as with a Comb’). The domestic and the strange are brought together. Again, the natural is viewed in domestic terms, where the bog is seen as ‘a Floor’. Ultimately this attempt to domesticate nature through the imagery fails, and the essential wildness of the snake reasserts itself in the image of ‘Whip lash’, conveying, as we saw, grace and agility but also threat.

Dickinson’s imagery is pared down to its simple essence in an image such as ‘Zero at the Bone’. In a strange configuration of the abstract and the concrete, she succeeds in finding expression for a primal inner terror.

115 new explorations emily dickinson a brief overview of dickinson’s poetry

A brief overview of Dickinson’s poetry the numbness, the lack of any emotion, occurring in the aftermath of suffering and pain. It is ‘an analysis of the absence of feeling in those who Themes and topics have felt too much’ (McCormack). It explores the ‘Hour of Lead’. This is a review of some themes and issues featured in this selection The paralysis of depression is also touched on in ‘The Soul has Bandaged of Dickinson’s poetry. Consider the ideas, then re-examine the moments’. She is very much aware of the social isolation and loneliness of poems mentioned for evidence to substantiate or contradict these the depressed person: ‘These, are not brayed of Tongue’. interpretations.

She deals with extreme mental pressure, with the breaking down of the Mindscapes mind into the emptiness of insanity. Just as some poets are drawn to landscapes for their inspiration, ‘mindscapes’ are Dickinson’s forte. Her most striking pictures are of inside And then a Plank in Reason, broke, the mind; she is primarily a poet of inner states. Consider the following And I dropped down, and down – (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’) aspects of her psychological explorations.

She explores terror and dread and the obscene horrors the mind is Range of moods capable of conjuring up: the ‘ghastly Fright’, the ‘Goblin’, the ‘Horror’ She explores the full emotive range, from elation to deep despair. For of ‘The soul’. There is also a hint of guilt in stanza 2 of ‘The Soul has example, consider the mood of giggling abandonment, the juvenile Bandaged moments’. She has an intimate awareness of the wounded, rebelliousness in ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’. Notice the dangerous damaged spirit. elation of ‘she dances like a Bomb’ (‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’); the balanced, self-confident optimism of ‘I’ve heard it in the chillest land’ A dramatic rendering of mental states and processes (‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’); and the deep, unrelieved religious We are given an immediate, step-by-step view of the development of despair in ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’. these traumatic mental states. It is as if we are watching a psychological drama, but inside the head. Consider the dramatic stages of ‘I felt a Depression Funeral, in my Brain’ or ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’. The use of Dickinson deals frequently with the numbness and the weight of first person narrative, simple, dramatic verbs and staccato phrasing all depression. In ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, she explores contribute to the orchestration of this drama. 116 new explorations emily dickinson a brief overview of dickinson’s poetry

The nature of consciousness Yet she is also aware of how different, how completely other, nature is. At the broadest level, Dickinson was fascinated by the nature of We notice this in a small way in ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, when she is consciousness itself. Two aspects of it, feeling and knowing, are referred shocked by the sudden realisation of his carnivorous nature, his essential to in the exploration of psychic disintegration in ‘I felt a Funeral, in my bird quality: Brain’. She dwells in particular on the loss of consciousness in that poem (‘and Finished knowing – then’) and also in ‘I heard a Fly buzz’. In ‘After He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw. great pain, a formal feeling comes’, consciousness is seen in terms of sensation and its loss: Likewise, the mysteriousness of the ‘narrow Fellow’, his essentially First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – unknowable nature and the ever-present sense of threat he exudes, provokes in her ‘a tighter breathing’. The sunlight in ‘There’s a certain The fragile nature of the mind, the psyche under siege, the Slant of light’ loses its conventional associations and quickly becomes individual as victim totally alien and oppressive. These are other aspects of this theme, hinted at throughout the poems. Which poems do you think best explore these issues? Thus, the human is sometimes cut off from nature, as the poet is from the bird: Nature I offered him a Crumb Admiration for nature And he unrolled his feathers Dickinson’s attitude to nature is quite complex. On the one hand she is (‘A Bird came down the Walk’) full of admiration for the agility, the deftness and the beauty of nature’s creatures. For example, the flight of the bird is awe-inspiring as he In spite of that, nature can be exotic, exciting and full of romantic ‘unrolled his feathers | And rowed him softer home’ in ‘A Bird came down symbolism, as in ‘I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to’. the Walk’. The poet is moved by his beauty: ‘he stirred his Velvet Head’. There is an appreciation of the essential wildness and speed of the snake – ‘Whip lash’ – in ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’. As she says explicitly in that poem, she feels a certain ‘cordiality’ for ‘Nature’s People’.

117 new explorations emily dickinson a brief overview of dickinson’s poetry

Nature as metaphor Romantic love Dickinson uses nature motifs as metaphorical vehicles for her mood: The ‘I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to’ features something of mood of playful drunkenness in ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ is portrayed the exotic and exciting feeling involved in romantic love: the gifts, the in natural terms: ‘Inebriate of Air – am I’. And in a startling departure courtship, the exaggerated claims of ‘Dower itself – for Bobadilo’. Love from the expected, she uses light, stripped of its normal associations and changes the perception, enriches the outlook, as in this colourful world of invested with negative ones, as a medium for conveying her despair in sights and smells. Simple, everyday things, such as the meadow flower, ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’. She also uses natural phenomena in her are viewed in a new light: definition poems as one leg of the comparison. The concrete image from Never a fellow matched this Topaz – nature in ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ is used as a metaphorical And his Emerald Swing – correlative for the abstract virtue. (‘I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to’)

Love Death Hopeless longing Re-enactment of actual death For the most part, this selection of poems deals with the negative aspects Dickinson is fascinated by the deathbed scene, the moment of transition and outcomes of love. Lost love, or the absent lover, features in such from life into death. Consider ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ and study the steps in poems as ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’. The yearning for love is the process: the fading of the light, the alienation or separation of the strong in her poems and this sometimes features as hopeless longing. dying person from the things of life, the negation of order, the growing lack of comprehension of the world. Is there a suggestion that love is always out of reach, that it is an illusion, that we have a great capacity for self-delusion in this respect? Death as alienation from the world Death is not merely a physical or biological process, but an alienation of The effect of lost love the consciousness from the world; see ‘I heard a Fly buzz’. Consider the destructive effects of possible lost love in ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’: depression, nightmares, sick erotic fantasies, guilt A Calvinist picture and so on. Is she saying that the loss of love unbalances? Unbalanced, The Calvinist austerity of death is shown in ‘I heard a Fly buzz’, where the too, is the elation as she ‘swings upon the Hours’. emphasis is on the awesomeness of God as the king and on the last battle

118 new explorations emily dickinson a brief overview of dickinson’s poetry

(‘that last Onset’). It is a comfortless encounter, without a hint of angels Loss or heavenly choirs or any of the trappings of a Catholic cosmology. Nor Dickinson has been described as a poet of loss – lost love, lost sensation, is there any view at all of the afterlife here. Does this suggest a failure of lost sanity. Denis Donoghue said of her: ‘in Emily Dickinson generally, belief on the part of Dickinson? experiences are more intensely apprehended just after their loss’. Which poems would you explore to examine this view of Dickinson? Other aspects of death Other aspects not featured in this selection are the ease, the civility, the The religious ethos of her poems gentleness of it. See also the personification of death as a gentleman in a A view of Heaven carriage in her poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death’. As we saw, Dickinson does not have an orthodox religious view. Heaven is painted as an unrealistic pantomime where ‘Seraphs swing their snowy Technique of the surviving consciousness Hats | And Saints – to windows run’ (‘I taste a liquor never brewed’). The Often the process of death is described by the speaker as if the afterlife here has been naturalised, but to the point of caricature. In a consciousness somehow survived it and could relate the event. This gives display of shocking originality, she manages to ‘send up’ Heaven! us a dual perspective on death: that of the person undergoing it and a more distant, objective view. Religious despair Dickinson also feels the oppression of religion: ‘the Heft | Of Cathedral Metaphorical death Tunes’ (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’). She suffers intensely from the internal Dickinson does not always make a distinction between actual death and scarring (‘Heavenly Hurt’, ‘imperial affliction’). She relates these in a tone of spiritual or mental death. Metaphorically, death is associated with despair, bitter complaint and condemnation that God does not reveal himself through separation and depression. These states of mind are likened to the the world. experience of death, as in ‘the Distance | On the look of Death’ (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’). Burial is equated with mental breakdown in ‘I The awesome Calvinist God felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ and the loss of feeling is described in terms of The final terrifying encounter with God, the king, at ‘that last Onset’ is dying: ‘First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go’ (‘After great pain, one of the most poignant religious moments in this selection of poems. a formal feeling comes’). Indeed, this ‘letting go’ seems a welcome relief. It highlights Dickinson’s view of humankind’s insignificance before the divine, the awesome omnipotence of God and the formal feudal nature of the relationship between God and humanity. 119 new explorations emily dickinson a brief overview of dickinson’s poetry

The human being as victim Perhaps we can see her as dumb, a prisoner of language, unable to be The helplessness of the human being is a motif running through many of creative, ‘With shackles on the plumed feet, | And staples, in the Song’ the poems. We are unable to fulfil desire. Love is out of reach: frustration (‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’). is the lot of the person (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’). Some critics feel that Dickinson deliberately sought out situations of oppression, that ‘she cultivates the apprehension made possible by pain’ Religious oppression (Denis Donoghue). The complete inability of the speaker to affect or influence the light in any way, even to understand it in the orthodox way, leaves one with a feeling Suffering and pain of total impotence against heavenly oppression in ‘There’s a certain Slant Suffering and pain, whether mental or physical, are ever-present in of light’: ‘None may teach it – Any.’ It is ‘Sent us’, ‘Heavenly Hurt’, ‘it gives Dickinson’s poetry. Which poems do you think best exemplify this? us’ – all these suggest the powerlessness of the victim. Alienation The speaker as victim Alienation, from God and nature, is part of the suffering at the heart of A victim of mental frailty Dickinson’s poetry (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’, ‘A narrow Fellow in Examine the breakdown of ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’. Notice the the Grass’). robotic actions, the loss of human sensitivity and of motivation in ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, where ‘The Feet, mechanical, go round.’ The fragile mind is all too evident in ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’, where the speaker is a mental victim, perhaps also a sexual victim (‘too appalled to stir’ or a ‘Felon led along’). In ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ she is captive to her fear of nature, which induces in her ‘a tighter breathing’.

A victim of death She is a victim of death despite her attempts to control it in ‘I heard a Fly buzz’: ‘there interposed a Fly … Between the light – and me’. 120 new explorations emily dickinson some typical modes of operation in dickinson’s poetry

Some typical modes of operation in sunlight, the coldness of winter afternoons, etc. However, the feeling is Dickinson’s poetry never fully comprehended but understood only in terms of its effects (‘when it comes’ and ‘when it goes’). Yet she goes on, questioning and prodding at the meaning of things in an attempt to master their Searching for meaning significance. Many of Dickinson’s poems are struggling to find meaning in the experience being investigated, experiences such as the nature of hope, Some critics refer to the rhetorical quality of Dickinson’s poems. Not the feeling of despair, the experience of breakdown, what it might be like only is she debating with herself, but she is using devices to argue and to die or the essential nature of bird or reptile. Even the structure of some convince us of her position. We might consider the appeal to the reader of the poems makes it clear that what is happening is an investigation, a (in ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’): ‘You may have met Him – did you struggle to name or master the experience. She uses analogies, similes, not’. Helen McNeil speaks of Dickinson’s ‘passionate investigation’ and etc. in an attempt to understand. She attempts to define abstracts in notices how in a typical poem, she takes the reader through a sequence of terms of concrete things (‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ or ‘the rapidly changing images, exploring definitions that quickly break down, or Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs’). The bird’s flight (‘A Bird came veers off into unexpected surmises or more rhetorical investigation before down the Walk’) is explored through the analogy with rowing. Mental ending, frequently, in an open closure. McNeil interprets that final dash as breakdown is examined through the extended metaphor of a funeral a graphic indication that the debate has not finished with the poem. (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’). She is struggling to understand, using analogical terms. Exploring transient states Dickinson is fascinated by moments of change, the in-between condition: Some of the poems are structured as riddles (‘A narrow Fellow in the the point of breakdown (‘And Finished knowing – then’); the moment of Grass’, ‘I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to’). Each of these is a death (‘I could not see to see’); the ‘letting go’ (‘After great pain, a formal circuitous exploration of a phenomenon that is gradually made clearer but feeling comes’). She explores the swiftly changing moods in ‘The Soul has is never fully named. Sometimes things resist being named. Sometimes Bandaged moments’. Examining despair, she focuses on its arrival and what at first appeared simple takes on an alien nature and it becomes departure. impossible for the poet to pin down its meaning accurately. Consider ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ and ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’. In the latter, the feeling of loneliness and hurt is brought out by the analogy with wintry 121 new explorations emily dickinson some typical modes of operation in dickinson’s poetry

When it comes, the Landscape listens – poet takes us through a sequence of images, inside or outside the head, Shadows – hold their breath – exposing us to a series of problems or confused feelings, which mostly When it goes, ’tis like the Distance lead on to a dramatic if sometimes inconclusive ending. This is the basic On the look of Death – structure of story. (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’)

And they are dramatic. They deal with dramatic moments of discovery There is a certain air of indeterminacy about her own attitude in some of and insight (‘A Bird came down the Walk’, ‘A narrow Fellow in the the poems. She is unable to define her experience in ‘There’s a certain Grass’) or they cover a personal crisis (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’, Slant of light’, humorously vacillating in ‘I could bring You Jewels – had I ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’). a mind to’. Despite her ‘transport | Of cordiality’ for nature, she is terrified Even death provides the ingredients for dramatic conflict, with ‘that last by the ‘narrow Fellow’ (‘Zero at the Bone’). John Robinson comments: Onset’, ‘the Heaves of Storm’ and the dying person’s struggle for control. She is a poet of passing away (death is one great Dickinson’s technique of the ‘divided voice’ provides dramatic conflict in form of this), of the elusive and the transient, and the narrative (i.e. the voice actually experiencing, which is separate from the fugitive, of what she called ‘a quality of loss.’ Her the voice outside the experience, the persona that has survived death or great brilliance is with this, and with the ominous, the other event). This is true in particular of ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ and ‘I vague, the threatening, the non-arrival, the not-quite- heard a Fly buzz’. grasped, the not-quite-realised, the missing. Offering a transformed view of the world Which of these qualities do you think applies to the Dickinson poems you Dickinson disrupts and transforms our accepted view of things. ‘She takes have read? Re-examine the poems for supporting evidence. the normalising frames of our world and unhinges them, forcing them askew to make space for a joke, for a different take’ (Juhasz, Miller and Telling dramatic stories Smith). We can see this in ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, where Dickinson For all the elusiveness of her subject matter and the circuitous nature disturbs our ordinary, somewhat clichéd view of nature. This is no sweet of her poetic method, there is a strong narrative structure in many of songbird, but a wild, carnivorous creature: Dickinson’s poems. Most are told in the first person and constructed as reminiscent narratives (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, ‘A Bird came down He bit an Angleworm in halves the Walk’, ‘I heard a Fly buzz’, ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’). The And ate the fellow, raw 122 new explorations emily dickinson some typical modes of operation in dickinson’s poetry

Yet at the same time we are expected to think of him as polite and the sense of emptiness brought on by depression and breakdown. This gentlemanly, as he ‘then hopped sidewise to the Wall | To let a Beetle sensation is likened to the tolling of the death bell and it resounds through pass’. But it is when she begins to describe his flight that we can no longer the speaker’s entire being. So instead of the profound silence one might hold to our orthodox conception of bird or air: expect of emptiness, we find a vibrating universe of sound in which the speaker is equally isolated and, if anything, more oppressed: And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home – As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear. Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam – Except that here, instead of the expected unfeeling state of numbness Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon usually associated with depression, it is a state of hypersensitivity to Leap, plashless as they swim. the entire universe that isolates the speaker. This sense of isolation from humanity is conveyed in that extraordinary image of herself and The elements mingle and the bird rows, leaps, flies, swims. What do the personified silence as a new race of beings in the galaxy: lines actually mean (‘to row him softer home’, ‘Banks of Noon’)? Juhasz, Miller and Smith say: ‘You can see it, you can feel it, you get a shiver of And I, and Silence, some strange Race delight every time you read it – but those lines of poetry do not make Wrecked, solitary, here – literal sense.’ What Dickinson has done is to evoke something outside our experience, creating a new reality, a new construct. As readers, we believe Once again we have entered Dickinson’s new cosmic construct, unreal in it and enjoy it and in a certain sense we understand it, but it is not real. but rendered so convincingly that we have no difficulty inhabiting her Yet we are willing to inhabit her transformed world. transformed world. Where else in the poetry do you find these radical transformations and how are they achieved? She frequently manages to disorient the reader in little ways through her word usage and stylistic devices. She confounds our normal expectations, for example by substituting an abstract word for the expected concrete one. In ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ she uses ‘Space’ instead of the expected ‘bells’ in the line ‘Then Space – began to toll’. But it carries

123 new explorations emily dickinson some typical modes of operation in dickinson’s poetry

In tones of seriousness and humour There is a sense of comic rebelliousness in her caricature of Heaven, The serious tones of Dickinson’s poetry are patently obvious: the strong, where ‘Seraphs swing their snowy Hats,’ etc. And there is a certain confident tone of ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’; the bleak and painful humour to be found in all her quirky, peculiar observations, such as the despair of ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’; the sense of oppression in ‘I felt somewhat contradictory characteristics of the bird, as discussed earlier. a Funeral, in my Brain’ and ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’; and the sheer terror of ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’. Because of the Conciseness peculiarities of her writing style – the punctuation, the truncated episodic Sparseness and economy of word and image are key features of imagery, the pared-down phrases, etc. – we are always conscious that Dickinson’s poetry. For example, consider the preciseness of her these poems are crafted, and there is also an awareness of control and of descriptions in ‘A Bird came down the Walk’. There is hardly a superfluous some distance between the speaker and the feelings portrayed. The tone word until she attempts to understand the nature of flight at the end. is mostly one of controlled emotion, however powerful and painful. Consider also the precise details of the deathbed scene in ‘I heard a Fly buzz’. There is a good deal of humour too, some of it bleak, some of it sheer slapstick. There is the dark, ironic humour of the fly – a mere house pest interrupting, and completely ruining, the solemnity and altering the focus of this most significant ritual. There is the grotesque humour in the figures of ‘ghastly Fright’ and the Goblin in ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’. Perhaps it is more gothic horror than grotesque humour. But as well as the bleak humour we find a strain of literary humour in ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’, which is a parody of Emerson’s ‘Bacchus’. The fun in that poem is driven by sheer exuberance and can be seen in the extremity of metaphor she employs:

When ‘Landlords’ turn the drunken Bee Out of the Foxglove’s door –

124 new explorations emily dickinson the technical elements of dickinson’s style

The technical elements of Dickinson’s style go –’ (‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’), though a combination of commas and consonants can slow a line equally well, as in ‘Wrecked, Punctuation solitary, here –’ (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’). The most idiosyncratic feature of Dickinson’s punctuation is undoubtedly her use of the dash. At first this was viewed as sloppy punctuation, Strategically placed dashes increase the sense of drama in ‘The Soul has indiscriminate, and just another example of her unpreparedness for Bandaged moments’ (‘look at her – | Salute her – with long fingers – | publication. Then it was argued that the dashes had a rhetorical rather Caress her’). The tension of the awful moment is prolonged. The dash is than a grammatical function. Because some of them were sloping in the used to isolate and emphasise when the fly interposes ‘Between the light – original manuscripts it was felt that they might be hints for the pitch of a and me – | And then the Windows failed’. The speaker (‘and me’) is being reading voice. graphically isolated and separated out for death. Altogether, the dash functions as a very versatile form of punctuation. Nowadays readers accept them as a conscious feature of her punctuation and they are seen as fulfilling a function somewhere between a full stop Capitalisation and a comma. It can be argued that a dash represents a long pause, Dickinson’s capitalisation has been a source of much discussion and linking what has gone before and what is to follow. It facilitates continuity questioning. The 18th-century fashion of using capitals for the initial and gives the impression of immediacy, i.e. that these ideas, fears, terrors letter of all nouns had died out. Besides, she did not use a capital for or images are only just being processed by the mind. Reader and speaker every noun. So was her practice just a personal style or did it have a are just now making these explorations and discoveries. purpose? Present-day scholars feel that she used capitals for emphasis, drawing attention to words that carry the weight of the central imagery The dash fulfils a number of functions. The dash at the end of a poem and meaning and so provide a line of emphasis through the poem. As might suggest continuity, that the debate is not finished or that the such, we can view the capitalised words as stepping-stones through the consciousness somehow survives. We see this latter suggestion in ‘I felt a meaning. Funeral, in my Brain’ (‘and Finished knowing – then –’). There is a similar end to ‘I heard a Fly buzz’. The dash affects the pace and rhythm of the line. It is used for very dramatic pausing, deliberately slowing the pace to correlate with the idea, as in ‘First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting

125 new explorations emily dickinson the technical elements of dickinson’s style

David Porter illustrates how this works by examining the first stanza of capitalisation was her way of signposting depth and richness, which ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’: readers must mine for themselves.

There’s a certain Slant of light, Diction: Dickinson’s use of words Winter Afternoons – She uses words in a fairly straightforward way, for the most part That oppresses, like the Heft without allusions or references. Of Cathedral Tunes – Most noticeable is her tendency to mix the simple and the abstract: for example, in ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ we get ‘Funeral’, ‘Slant of light’, ‘Winter Afternoons’, ‘Heft’ and ‘Cathedral Tunes’ carry the ‘Mourners’, ‘Service’, ‘Drum’, ‘Box’, ‘Bell’ and then ‘Being’. ideas in this stanza. The argument is then refined by the word ‘certain’, Probably the most important feature of her use of words is her which denotes something special about the light, while ‘oppresses’ makes reliance on the connotations, associations or suggestions of individual the emotional reaction specific. words to create layers of meaning. We have already considered the connotations of space and toll; another example worth considering ‘Slant of light’ and ‘Winter Afternoons’ give us the visual picture, the is ‘Seal’ in ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’. A seal is a sign, usually of setting. ‘Winter Afternoons’ also carries an emotive significance: authenticity or authority. Ironically, the divine sign here is not emotionally cold, the dead season, emptiness and isolation, lifelessness uplifting (‘the Seal Despair’). It might also suggest a sealing off, that leading to despair. ‘Heft’ and ‘Cathedral Tunes’ form the other part of this state is unalterable, etc. Consider also a ‘Quartz contentment’: this the simile, linking the wintry emotion with a religious weight. In this way, carries associations of coldness, the weight of despair, the immobility the capitalised words carry the visual, emotional and logical burden of the of rock, the glittering brittleness of quartz, etc. stanza. Some critics feel that the capitalisation encourages the reader to scrutinise these words for layers of meaning. Porter also suggests that the visual distinction of words by capital letters She sometimes uses groups of words from a particular professional indicates that the meanings of these words has been enriched – that usage to create an effect. Consider, for example, the legal words in ‘Winter Afternoons’ denotes not only the scene, but a range of sensuous ‘I heard a Fly buzz’: ‘willed’, ‘Keepsakes’, ‘Signed’, ‘portion’, suggestions (coldness, inactivity, whiteness) and also emotional responses ‘Assignable’. They suggest ‘last will and testament’ and accord (apprehension, meditation, isolation). We know that Dickinson relied precisely with the controlled, ordered atmosphere she wishes at her greatly on the connotations of individual words and images; perhaps 126 new explorations emily dickinson the technical elements of dickinson’s style

deathbed. She uses technical language to mechanise life in ‘After Imagery great pain, a formal feeling comes’: ‘mechanical’, ‘go round’, ‘a Emily Dickinson’s poetry is primarily visual. Image follows image in Wooden way’. a technique that might be seen as cinematic nowadays. Consider the One of the most fascinating and original but also exasperating facets sequence of images in ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, ‘I heard a of her diction is the development of a personal vocabulary. Some Fly buzz’, ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’ and ‘A narrow Fellow in of these words, such as ‘Circumference’ and ‘Experiment’, originate the Grass’. from her interest in science at school, but she has endowed them Dickinson thinks in images. They are not ornamental: their function with new, personal meanings. They have taken on some of the is to carry the thought of the poem. Examine the imagery in ‘I felt a significance of a symbol, but unfortunately they do not always Funeral, in my Brain’: the treading mourners and the service have the constancy of a symbol. Take, for example, her use of the ‘like a Drum’ carry the notion of being weighed down, oppressed, word ‘Noon’, whose meaning varies throughout the poems. At times deprived of the ability to act, as does the image of ‘Boots of Lead’. ‘noon’ and ‘night’ are interchangeable for ‘life’ and ‘death’, but ‘noon’ The ‘Box’, or coffin, suggests the confinement, the claustrophobia of has been used to suggest both immortal life and the timelessness of the condition, and also suggests that depression is a sort of mental death. In this selection, ‘noon’ is used to suggest playfulness and death. The imagery of the fourth stanza conveys the isolation of the happy, excited activity in the phrase ‘Banks of Noon’ (‘A Bird speaker in cosmic terms. Again, a funeral image (uniting world and came down the Walk’), but it is also used to suggest passionate mind, concrete and abstract) provides the impetus for the mind’s final love and sensual fulfilment in ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’, plunge into chaos: ‘a Plank in Reason, broke, | And I dropped down, as the escaped bee is free to and down’. She uses similes and metaphors in an attempt to understand Touch Liberty – then know no more, But Noon, and Paradise – by analogy (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’; ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’). The investigation of the feeling of despair through an There is a similar ambiguity and inconstancy in her use of colour. Red analysis of its symbolic correlative, the ‘Slant of light’, was examined in mostly suggests life and blood. Green is the colour of the grave. But the commentary on ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’. there is ambivalence in her usage of blue. It is used for the beloved Many of her most startling metaphors and images consist of abstract and is the colour of the sky (‘inns of Molten Blue’), but it is also used and concrete elements yoked together, such as ‘a Plank in Reason’, negatively in the context of the fly, with the stumbling and failing of ‘Zero at the Bone’, ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’, etc. mind and consciousness for a theme. 127 new explorations emily dickinson the technical elements of dickinson’s style

The metaphor poem ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ resembles a For good examples of this, examine ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ particular kind of didactic metaphor central to the tradition of and ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’, but note that the metre is not always Protestant preaching, indeed to all religious preaching. This was completely regular. known as an emblem and might be a picture or other religious object, from which meaning and a moral were elaborately constructed. The ballad or hymn format suited her, as it satisfied her instinct for Perhaps this is one of the bases for Dickinson’s metaphorical style. economy and it facilitated the tight constructions she was led to by her Many of her images are pared down to a mere phrase, to their barest liking for definition, antithesis and paradox. essential. This economy of imagery leads to a certain cryptic quality and often lends itself to ambiguity. But ambiguity was a conscious ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – feature of her style. The reader is expected to work at these cryptic That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – images, such as ‘Zero at the Bone’, ‘Being, but an Ear’, ‘Banks of And never stops – at all – Noon’, etc. We find a great range and variety of imagery in Dickinson, from There is a slight reminiscence of the hymn in her work, particularly in the the natural to the legal (‘the Nerves sit ceremonious’, ‘the stiff Heart tendency towards epigram and aphorism (‘and sweetest – in the Gale – is questions’), the military (‘that last Onset’), the everyday (tankards, heard’). The strong narrative line in her poems shows a similarity with the boxes, robbers) and the macabre (‘ghastly Fright’). Much of her ballad. But she does not feel bound by a regular metre and displays the imagery comes from the natural world, some comes from her own confidence and originality to vary it. Neither is she completely bound studies (references to geology, geography and biology) and some of by the quatrain format. We find a six-line and an eight-line stanza in it is obtained from her reading: the fly from The House of the Seven ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’ and ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’, Gables and jewels, spices and colours from her reading on respectively. explorations and scientific discoveries.

Altogether we find a flexible approach to metre and stanza, with a strong Form and metre inclination towards the ballad or hymn format that suited her. The majority of Dickinson’s verses are based on the hymn format and the ballad quatrain. They consist of quatrains with alternate lines of eight and six syllables. This was known as common metre in the hymn books.

128 new explorations emily dickinson the technical elements of dickinson’s style

Rhymes and sounds of words Again, we find much flexibility and, some would say, originality in her use of rhymes and sounds of words. Though there is a deliberate intention to rhyme, a good deal of it comes out as off-rhyme or half-rhyme, such as soul – all, storm – warm (‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’), Afternoons – Tunes (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’) and fro – through (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’).

But she is interested in the music of words and manages to alliterate frequently, sometimes with comic results (‘Debauchee of Dew’), The poems resound with internal musical echoes: ‘Mourners to and fro’, ‘Being, but an Ear’ (‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’). She is also conscious of the onomatopoeic value of words in creating atmosphere: ‘creak across my Soul’, ‘Space – began to toll’.

129 new explorations emily dickinson developing a personal response to the poetry of emily dickinson

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Emily Dickinson

1. What issues did Dickinson write about? What insights did she give you into these issues? 2. Which themes, issues or topics did she make you think more deeply about? 3. After reading her poetry, what understanding do you have of her as a person – her preoccupations, interests, longings, fears, etc.? 4. What interested you most about her life and her writing? 5. Choose one poem that affected you deeply or said something important to you and explain what you discovered. 6. What aspects of her particular style of writing appeal to you? Why? 7. In what ways is she different from other poets you have read? 8. What do you think Emily Dickinson’s poetry has to offer to a young person today? Make a case for and also a case against reading her. 9. If you want to read more about her, try The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard Sewall (Harvard University Press, 1974).

130 new explorations emily dickinson questions

Questions 9. ‘Dickinson’s chief fascination is with passing moments and transition states.’ Examine this aspect of her work in light of the poems you have 1. List the main themes that preoccupy Dickinson in this selection of her studied. poetry. Explore, in some detail, her views on any two of these themes. 10. Do you think there is a disturbing tendency towards the macabre in 2. How important is imagery in the poetry of Emily Dickinson? Explore: Dickinson’s poetry? The function of imagery in her poetry 11. ‘Emily Dickinson is a moody poet’ (Denis Donoghue). Would you The patterns you notice agree? Substantiate your views with reference to the text. The sources of the imagery 12. ‘Her main reaction to life experience is one of bafflement.’ Comment The range of the imagery on this in light of the poetry you have read. 3. Examine the depth of meanings provided by the imagery in any 13. Emily Dickinson has ‘a tendency to play up problems as if they were particular poem. mysteries’ (Denis Donoghue). Examine any two poems in light of this 4. List the particular features of style you consider important in her view. poetry and explain the effects of any two features. Refer to the text to 14. Do you find a dramatic quality in Dickinson’s work? Support your substantiate your views. views by reference to at least three poems. 5. ‘Emily Dickinson wrote about landscapes and mindscapes, and both 15. There are two voices in many of Dickinson’s poems: the suffering ‘I’ terrains held pain and terror for her.’ Consider Dickinson’s poetry in and a detached, observing persona who is outside the experience. light of this statement. What is the effect of this on the tone of the poems? Support your 6. ‘Dickinson’s poetry offers us a profound scrutiny of death and loss.’ views with references to at least two poems. Would you agree? Substantiate your views with reference to at least 16. How do you account for the elusive quality of her poetry? Examine two of the poems. both the abstract nature of the themes she investigated and the 7. ‘Desolation, hopelessness and a fierce and frustrated longing arise conciseness of her style. from nearly every page’ (John Cody). Would you agree with this 17. ‘The difficulty in Emily Dickinson’s poetry has to do with the layers of reading of Dickinson’s poetry? meaning she constructs through the multiple connotations of words 8. Dickinson had a well-developed comic vision. Outline what you and images.’ Investigate this aspect of her technique in any two discovered about this often neglected aspect of her poetry. poems you have studied.

131 new explorations emily dickinson questions

18. Would you consider Emily Dickinson to be a religious poet? Explain your reasons with reference to texts. 19. Write about the ‘snapshot brevity’ of any three of her poems you have studied. 20. Examine ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ as a typical Dickinson poem. Consider the experience investigated, the tone of the poem, the use of imagery and metaphor, the concentration of meaning, the dual perspective of the speaking voice and any two features of the poetic format.

132 new explorations emily dickinson bibliograpy

Bibliography Patterson, R., The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1951.

Cody, J., After Great Pain, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press Patterson, R. (ed.), Emily Dickinson’s Imagery, Amherst: University of 1971. Massachusetts Press 1979.

Duncan, D., Emily Dickinson (Writers and Critics Series), Edinburgh: Porter, D., The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry, Cambridge (MA): Oliver and Boyd 1965. Harvard University Press 1966.

Farr, J., The Passion of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge (MA): Harvard Robinson, J., Emily Dickinson (Faber & Faber Student Guides), London: University Press 1992. Faber & Faber 1986.

Fitzgibbon, E., York Notes on Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, Sewall, R., The Life of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge (MA): Harvard London: Longman 1984. University Press 1974.

Johnson, T. (ed.), Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, London: Faber St Armand, B., The Soul’s Society: Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, & Faber 1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984.

Juhasz, S., The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of Tate, A. (ed.), Six American Poets, from Emily Dickinson to the Present: the Mind, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1983. An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1969.

Juhasz, S., Miller, C. and Smith, M., Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, Weisbuch, R., Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, Chicago: University of Chicago Austin: University of Texas 1993. Press 1975. McCormack, J., ‘Dying as an art: The procedures of Emily Dickinson’s poetry’, ATE Journal, no. 7, spring 1977.

McNeil, H., Emily Dickinson (Virago Pioneers), London: Virago 1986.

Miller, C., Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press 1987. 133 Thomas Hardy Notes and Explorations: Bernard Connolly

134 new explorations thomas hardy introduction

Introduction to this novel convinced him to abandon fiction and concentrate on his first love, poetry. Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester. From his father came his love of music and from In 1898, at the age of 58, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, his mother his love of books. He was a solitary, introspective child Wessex Poems. There would be seven further volumes published, who was frequently ill and did not attend school until he was eight the last one, Winter Words, posthumously in 1928. He wrote in a wide years old. Thomas showed an aptitude for languages and was a variety of poetic forms: love poems, ballad poems, animal poems, war very conscientious student, keeping meticulous notebooks. At the (or anti-war) poems, comic and satirical poems, poems about places, age of 16 he left school to become apprenticed to a Dorchester- poems about the seasons and the weather, poems about rural life based architect. In 1862 he travelled to London to continue his and work and poems about family and friends. Emma’s death in 1912 architectural studies. While in London Hardy submitted many poems inspired some of his finest poetry. He was filled with guilt and remorse for publication, but they were invariably rejected. He returned to and recreated their courtship in the romantic Cornwall countryside. Bockhampton in 1869 and began to write fiction. Between 1871 and 1897 Hardy published 14 novels and 40 short stories. His first major Hardy married Florence Dugdale in 1914; he had been close to success, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), allowed him to become her since 1905. He had rejected conventional Christianity in his a full-time writer and to marry. He met Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1870 twenties and had written about the ‘logicless’ nature of the workings when he was working on an architectural project in Cornwall. This of the universe in ‘New Year’s Eve’; he had characterised any god meeting is celebrated in ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’. The couple who existed as being ‘unknowing’ and ‘indifferent’. His agnosticism lived in a series of rented houses and flats in London and Dorset, but was influenced by thinkers such as Darwin, Huxley and Mill. Hardy in 1885 settled at Max Gate in a house built to Hardy’s own design. rejected the ‘optimism’ of Victorian writers like Tennyson, and while The relationship with Emma deteriorated; she felt that Thomas was not revolutionary in his use of poetic forms, he made more extensive her social inferior and she had literary ambitions of her own, while her use of colloquial speech and dialect than his contemporaries. Norman conventional morality was outraged by the subject matter of Hardy’s Paige wrote, ‘For part of Hardy’s profound originality as a poet later fiction. She tried to have Jude the Obscure suppressed by the is that, just as almost any and every word is a potential candidate publisher; in the novel Hardy had referred to marriage as ‘a sordid for admission into his poetic vocabulary, he has no prejudices or contract based on mutual convenience’. The hostile critical reaction inhibitions about what constitutes a proper poetic subject.’ In his later

135 new explorations thomas hardy introduction

years he wrote an autobiography, published in 1928 after his death, in the guise of a biography under the name of his second wife, Florence Emily Hardy. Thomas Hardy was buried in Westminster Abbey but stipulated that his heart should be buried with his first wife, Emma, in Stinford churchyard.

136 new explorations thomas hardy drummer hodge

Drummer Hodge Theme The suffering of the common man who is sent to die in a foreign land A reading of the poem is the major concern of this poem. There is a contrast between the When this poem was first published on 25 November 1899 it was impermanence of human life and the permanence of nature. titled ‘The Dead Drummer’; Hardy subsequently personalised the title. Consider the effect of using the soldier’s name. The horror of Language the death in the Boer War (1899–1902) of a young Casterbridge man The poet achieves a sense of the foreignness of Africa by his use represents the fate of the ordinary man as a victim of human conflict. of Afrikaans vocabulary in a poem that is otherwise marked by the simplicity of its language. There is a direct quality to lines such as The poem opens directly with the unceremonious burial of Drummer ‘They throw in Drummer Hodge ... Uncoffined – just as found’. Three Hodge ‘Uncoffined – just as found’. The South African landscape, six-line stanzas have alternate lines rhyming, reflecting the plainness which is alien to the soldier, is evoked with the use of Afrikaans of the common soldier. vocabulary: ‘kopje-crest’, ‘veldt’. Stanza 2 elaborates on how the drummer ‘Fresh from his Wessex home’ had no understanding of his Imagery African surroundings: he ‘never knew ... The meaning of the broad Drummer Hodge is buried in foreign soil, in surroundings alien to Karoo’ and ‘why uprose ... Strange stars amid the gloam’. his ‘homely Northern breast and brain’. Images such as ‘foreign constellations west’, ‘Strange stars’ and ‘strange-eyed constellations’ Stanza 3 reflects ironically that the plain is ‘unknown’ to Hodge, who emphasise the soldier’s eternal exile. Landscape reinforces the sense now lies as part of it, and it echoes the ‘Uncoffined’ of the opening of an alien land: ‘Young Hodge ... never knew ... The meaning of the lines. Hardy’s sympathy for the common soldier is apparent in ‘His broad Karoo’. The physical environment plays a further symbolic role homely Northern breast and brain | Grow to some Southern tree’. as Hodge becomes part of the African landscape: ‘Yet portion of that There is pathos in the ‘strange-eyed constellations’, which were unknown plain | Will Hodge for ever be’ and ‘His homely Northern unfamiliar to the soldier when he was alive, looking down on him breast and brain | Grow into some Southern tree’. Critics have seen ‘eternally’. Yet Drummer Hodge is given a dignity in the poem that some consolation in the drummer becoming one with nature. Nature contrasts with his undignified, callous burial. and the heavens are permanent, while human life is temporary.

137 new explorations thomas hardy the darkling thrush

The Darkling Thrush Theme Hardy deals with his ‘fervourless’ state of mind and the absence of A reading of the poem ‘Hope’ as he contemplates the end of the 19th century. The thrush This poem’s original title was ‘By the Century’s Deathbed’. The scene represents an animating spirit and ‘blessed Hope’ in nature that described in the first stanza is bleak: ‘When Frost was spectre-gray’ endures despite the harshest environment. Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘The and ‘desolate’. Humans have sought shelter away from the lifeless mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions.’ You might winter landscape. The ‘land’s sharp features’ represent ‘The Century’s consider whether this statement has any relevance to the issues raised corpse’ laid out; the sky is the roof of its tomb and the wind its funeral in the poem. hymn. Growth is stunted: ‘The ancient pulse of germ and birth | Was shrunken hard and dry’. Hardy explicitly links the external scene with Imagery his state of mind, which ‘Seemed fervourless as I’. His depression Death is ever present in the opening two stanzas: ‘Frost was spectre- reflects the gloom of the winter scene, devoid of life. gray’ and ‘The land’s sharp features seemed to be | The Century’s corpse’. Colour is drained from the scene: ‘Winter’s dregs made The focus of the poem shifts as the thrush, ‘In a full-hearted evensong desolate | The weakening eye of day’. The absence of any life force | Of joy illimited’, is entirely at odds with the poet’s mood. This bird’s is suggested symbolically: ‘The ancient pulse of germ and birth | Was joy seems incongruous; it is ‘aged ... frail, gaunt, and small’. Hardy shrunken hard and dry’. could see ‘So little cause for carolings | Of such ecstatic sound’. He surmised that the thrush knew ‘Some blessed Hope ... And I was Hardy makes it clear that the bleak winter scene represents his mood unaware’. It is as if the bird has an intuitive knowledge of spring, but and state of mind: ‘And every spirit upon earth | Seemed fervourless that Hardy foresees nothing save a spiritual winter that gives him no as I’. In total contrast, the thrush ‘Had chosen thus to fling hissoul | grounds for optimism. Upon the growing gloom’. The frail bird is animated by ‘Some blessed Hope’, a spirit that impels it to celebrate life. Thomas Hardy’s sensitive rendering of the thrush displays his natural sympathy for living things, which endures despite his apparently pessimistic perspective on life.

138 new explorations thomas hardy the self-unseeing

The Self-Unseeing Language The poem uses the language of the ballad to depict moments from A reading of the poem the past. Alternate lines rhyme and alliteration adds emphasis and Hardy deals with the inexorable passage of time and the unreflecting momentum. Soft f sounds predominate in the first stanza: ’floor’, attitudes of youth. The first stanza describes the remains of a dance ‘footworn’, ‘former’, ‘feet’. In the final stanza the more forceful d and venue, ‘the ancient floor’. ‘Here was the former door’ introduces b sounds are repeated: ‘Childlike, I danced in a dream’ and ‘Blessings Hardy’s pain and sense of loss with the transferred epithet, ‘Where the emblazoned that day’. The simple diction is heightened briefly in dead feet walked in’. The ruin comes to life in the second stanza with line 10, as the day is celebrated. A colloquial effect is reinforced by the details ‘She sat here in her chair, | Smiling into the fire’ andthe the choice of words in the final two lines. There is a pained simplicity ecstatic playing: ‘He who played stood there, | Bowing it higher and in the exclamation, ‘Yet we were looking away!’ The musical sound higher’. effects inherent in the ballad form are especially appropriate in a poem that evokes music and dance. In the final stanza the poem becomes more reflective, ‘Childlike, I danced in a dream’, and the language is heightened, ‘Blessings emblazoned that day’, as Hardy laments the lost joy of youth. The exclamation mark in the final line emphasises the intensity of his emotion as the poet’s youthful self fails to appreciate the value and rarity of such happiness: ‘Yet we were looking away!’

Imagery A sense of the destruction wrought by time is suggested by the evocative image in line 4, ‘Where the dead feet walked in’. ‘Blessings emblazoned that day’ is a metaphor for a charmed moment when joy animates everything, as ‘Everything glowed with a gleam’. The ‘looking away’ symbolises the absence of self-awareness and self- reflection that come with age and bitter experience.

139 new explorations thomas hardy channel firing

Channel Firing in the ancient sites of ‘Stourton Tower, | And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge’. Humanity’s essential nature has not changed despite A reading of the poem the passing of time. Hardy’s words were especially prescient, coming This poem, which was written in April 1914, is narrated by a dead as they did just months before the calamitous slaughter of the First man who is woken by the boom of the great naval guns protecting World War. the south of England during a practice firing. To the dead man, the report of the guns sounds like ‘the Judgment-day’. The moment is Theme dramatised by the reaction of the dead who ‘sat upright’, the howl of The poem deals with the universal theme of mankind’s enduring hounds and the startled response of mouse, worms and ‘glebe cow’. warlike nature. Human nature is constant in its drive for domination God intervenes to announce, ‘The world is as it used to be’. Mankind’s and vengeance: ‘All nations striving strong to make | Red war yet propensity for violent conduct is unchanged: ‘All nations striving redder’. Guns are perpetually ‘Roaring their readiness to avenge’. strong to make | Red war yet redder’. God’s punishment is not yet Hardy’s view is profoundly pessimistic. It is interesting to note that the at hand – ‘this is not the judgment-hour’ – and ‘For some of them’s God of this poem offers eternal punishment, not redemption: ‘It will a blessed thing ... they’d have to scour | Hell’s floor for so much be warmer when | I blow the trumpet’. threatening’. There is a mocking humour in God’s threat: ‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when | I blow the trumpet’. Imagery Judgment Day is the recurring symbol in the poem, as the firing of The narrator resumes in stanza 7 as the dead discuss, ‘Will the world the guns is mistaken for the end of the world. The effects of war are ever saner be ... than when He sent us under | In our indifferent suggested using colour: ‘Red war yet redder’. The fires of Hell are century!’ The consensus among the deceased is not optimistic: ‘And jokingly referred to, ‘It will be warmer when | I blow the trumpet’, in an many a skeleton shook his head.’ The parson sees the futility of his life image that resonates with the traditional portrayal of Judgment Day. inculcating virtue: ‘Instead of preaching forty year ... I wish I had stuck The personification of the guns, ‘Roaring their readiness to avenge’, to pipes and beer.’ reverberates through the centuries and the historic sites: ‘And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.’ In the final stanza the poem incorporates a wider historical perspective, as the guns that roar their ‘readiness to avenge’ are heard

140 new explorations thomas hardy the convergence of the twain

The Convergence of the Twain There is a change of emphasis in stanza 6 when the role of fate is introduced as ‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’. Background Fate produces ‘a sinister mate ... a Shape of Ice’ with which to punish On 15 April 1912 the SS Titanic sank, with the loss of 1,513 lives, after mankind’s pride (stanza 7). The construction of the iceberg matches colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. Hardy was that of the SS Titanic: ‘in shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg recruited as a member of a sub-committee that organised a ‘Dramatic too’. Sibilant s sounds convey the sinister note of threat (stanza 8). A and Operatic Matinee in aid of the Titanic Disaster Fund’ and metallic image, ‘The intimate welding of their later history’, expresses wrote a poem, later revised and expanded, for recitation as part of a the conjoined destiny of ship and iceberg (stanza 9). Their ‘paths programme at Covent Garden on 24 May 1912. coincident’ are described as ‘being anon twin halves of one august event’ (stanza 10). The malign controlling hand of fate is revealed The poem has an elevated tone appropriate to its subject matter and in the final stanza as ‘the Spinner of theYears | Said “Now!” ’; het is a more ‘public’ poem than much of Hardy’s other work, which is collision happens, and in an image from Plato, ‘consummation comes, highly personal in content and treatment. and jars two hemispheres’.

A reading of the poem It is interesting that in Hardy’s concern to display human vanity, which Stanza 1 opens with the wrecked liner on the seabed far from ‘human fate feels compelled to expose, there is no reference to the suffering vanity, | And the Pride of Life that planned her’. Water flows through of individual people. her compartments: ‘late the pyres | Of her salamandrine fires’ (stanza 2). The fires have been quenched forever. There is obvious irony in Theme the description of ‘The sea-worm’ that ‘crawls – grotesque, slimed, Hardy is concerned with ‘human vanity’ and ‘Pride of Life’, which are dumb, indifferent’ to the mirrors intended to reflect the images of the expressed in the opulent style and the ‘vaingloriousness’ of the ship’s ‘opulent’ passengers on a luxury liner (stanza 3). Dazzling jewels are construction and decoration. The malevolent power of the ‘Immanent now ‘bleared and black and blind’, an exercise in futility, where human Will that stirs and urges everything’ is seen as the determinant of ‘The vanity is mocked by the alliterative b (stanza 4). Fish gape and query intimate welding of their later history’. The Titanic tragedy is seen as ‘this vaingloriousness down here’ (stanza 5). Graham Handley has vindicating the poet’s pessimistic view of the world. referred to the speaking fish as ‘a rare moment of bathos in Hardy’.

141 new explorations thomas hardy the convergence of the twain

Language Hardy uses an elevated tone, as would be adopted in an ode: ‘In a solitude of the sea | Deep from human vanity’. The rigid rhyme scheme is in keeping with such formality, as is the heightened vocabulary: ‘salamandrine’ and ‘This creature of cleaving wing’. Latinate word order is apparent in ‘By paths coincident’ and ‘for the time far and dissociate’. Triplication adds formality: ‘In stature, grace, and hue’. The solemnity of the public occasion is reflected in Hardy’s diction and mode of expression on a major public event commemorating a national tragedy.

142 new explorations thomas hardy under the waterfall

Under the Waterfall Imagery The waterfall is associated with a moment of perfect happiness, A reading of the poem recalling ‘a fugitive day’ that is ‘Fetched back from its thickening The poem celebrates an incident from Hardy’s courtship of Emma shroud of gray’. This recollected moment is compared to a unique Gifford and is set in the Valency Valley, near St Juliot in Cornwall. ‘love-rhyme ... that leaves no smart’ of pain to accompany the The poem is written from the woman’s perspective. bliss. The fall is seen as eternal, ‘a runlet that never ceases’, and is personified as speaking ‘With a hollow boiling voice ... And has It opens dramatically with the speaker describing the memories spoken since hills were turfless peaks’. The weather and scenery are triggered by plunging an arm into a basin of cold water with its ‘sweet described in idyllic terms on the memorable day: ‘a sky | Of blue sharp sense of a fugitive day’. This memory is the only love story that with a leaf-wove awning of green, | In the burn of August’. Basins does not contain a share of sorrow: ‘And real love-rhyme ... that leaves now recall the scene: ‘The basin seems the pool ... leafy patterns of no smart’. The waterfall is situated ‘Over a table of solid rock’ and runs china-ware | The hanging plants that were bathing there.’ An almost into ‘a scoop’ constantly without interruption, ‘The purl of a runlet that sacramental quality is suggested by the metaphor of ‘There lies intact never ceases’. It speaks with ‘a hollow boiling voice’. A second speaker that chalice of ours’ and its presence ‘adds to the rhyme of love’ as the asks the significance of the waterfall for the narrator. The answeris fall is personified: ‘Persistently sung by the fall above’. This perfect that ‘Jammed’ under the stone beneath the waterfall is ‘a drinking- memory of lovers’ bliss endures ‘intact’ and untouched. glass’ that the lovers dropped. An August scene is recalled when the couple ‘sat to dine’ and how the vessel slipped from the narrator’s hand when it was being rinsed. There it has remained: ‘There lies intact that chalice of ours, | And its presence adds to the rhyme of love | Persistently sung by the fall above’. It is an enduring monument to love: ‘No lip has touched it since his and mine | In turns therefrom sipped lovers’ wine.’

143 new explorations thomas hardy the oxen

The Oxen

A reading of the poem The Christmas Eve setting is significant, as Hardy reflects on religious faith and the poet’s doubts in a poignant and nostalgic poem. A homely fireside scene ‘in hearthside ease’ is depicted in the opening stanza as the ‘elder’, a word rich in biblical associations, tells the children a Nativity story. The second stanza describes how as a child, the author visualised the scene in the stable in Bethlehem with total faith and credulity: ‘Nor did it occur ... To doubt they were kneeling then’. Such simple faith is not a feature of the poet’s age: ‘So fair a fancy few would weave | In these years!’ (stanza 3). Nonetheless, Hardy is attracted to such an innocent belief: ‘Yet, I feel’ as his ‘childhood used to know’; he would be ‘Hoping it might be so’. There is a deep sense of loss at the disappearance of childhood certainty, which has been replaced by adult ‘doubt’ and uncertainty. Nostalgia is suggested by the archaic language ‘barton by yonder coomb’, which gives the poem a sense of being rooted in the past.

Imagery The poem’s title refers to oxen kneeling in adoration in a children’s Christmas story. The ‘meek mild creatures’ represent a childlike faith, free from ‘doubt’. It is the adult who doubts ‘they were kneeling then’. To a sceptical adult the story is ‘So fair a fancy’. Hardy’s pained nostalgia is represented by his wish that ‘it might be so’ and his mood, ‘in the gloom’.

144 new explorations thomas hardy during wind and rain

During Wind and Rain The scene described in the third stanza is arguably the happiest, as the people were ‘blithely breakfasting all’ on a summer’s morning. A reading of the poem Details bring this blissful picture to life: ‘With a glimpse of the bay; | Hardy evokes the atmosphere of a family musical evening: ‘They While pet fowl come to the knee’. After the refrain comes the ferocity sing their dearest songs – | He, she, all of them – yea’. Musical sound of ‘And the rotten rose is ript from the wall’, where the alliterating r effects echo in the language, as in the assonance (‘They’, ‘their’, sounds convey the violence of the action. ‘yea’; ‘dearest’, ‘He’, ‘she’;) and the sibilant s sounds, rhyme and sing-song rhythm. Domestic harmony is suggested by ‘Treble and In the final stanza, the family’s affluence and material comfort are tenor and bass, | And one to play’ in the flickering candlelight. The suggested by their move to ‘a high new house’ with their ‘Clocks and rapturous mood is interrupted by the dramatically abrupt exclamation carpets and chairs’; but prosperity and possessions do not protect ‘Ah, no’. The damage inflicted by the inexorable passage of timeis against the progress of time. In the final image, even the details suggested by the refrain ‘the years O!’, with its mournful tones. The engraved on tombstones are eroded by time: ‘Down their carved stanza culminates in the powerful metaphor of the ‘sick leaves’, which names the rain-drop ploughs’. The significance of the poem’s title ironically ‘reel down’, contrasting starkly with the joyful domestic is made explicit in the last line, with its terrible reflection on the scene. ‘Sick’ is a word with many malign connotations and associations impermanence of human life. of illness and decay. Imagery Another happy domestic scene is presented in the second stanza as The poem is constructed around a series of contrasts between the family works cheerfully in the garden, making it attractive, ‘and the happy scenes of domestic life and the succession of images they build a shady seat’. Alliteration suggests the energy of workers: suggesting inevitable decay and impermanence. It is significant that ‘clear the creeping moss ... garden gay’, as does the repetition of ‘And’ the four images are taken from the natural world, suggesting the in lines 11 and 12. The pleasant atmosphere is disrupted by the refrain relentless action of nature: ‘sick leaves’, ‘storm-birds’, ‘rotten rose’, ‘Ah, no’ with a variation emphasising ‘the years, the years’. A sense ‘rain-drop ploughs’. of immediacy is communicated by the imperative ‘See, the white storm-birds wing across!’ The work of the gardeners will inevitably be destroyed by the forces of nature.

145 new explorations thomas hardy afterwards

Afterwards In the penultimate stanza, death is referred to as being ‘stilled’; attention is focused on the night sky, ‘the full-starred heavens’. Hardy A reading of the poem had a lifelong interest in astronomy: ‘such mysteries’. Hardy wrote this poem in 1917, when he was 77 years old. It begins with a roundabout reference to death as the closing of a garden gate The final image suggesting death is most appropriate: ‘my bell of (‘postern’) behind the poet’s life. Hardy uses the beautifully suggestive quittance’, which is heard ‘in the gloom’. The sound reverberates and adjective ‘tremulous’ to highlight the fragility of human existence. The echoes through the landscape affected by the wind: ‘a crossing breeze subtle beauty of leaf veins is evoked in the simile ‘Delicate-filmed as cuts a pause in its outrollings’. Hardy had no faith in an afterlife and new-spun silk’. He wonders if he will be remembered as ‘a man who is resigned to death being the end of existence: ‘He hears it not now’. used to notice such things’. The detachment of the poet’s reflection is There is no mention in the poem of Hardy’s position as a successful emphasised by the slow rhythm of the long lines. writer; rather, he wants to be remembered as a countryman ‘who used to notice such things’ as leaves in May, the prowess of a hawk Hardy maintains his mood in the second stanza, as he uses another alighting and the mysteries of the skies. euphemism for death as the blink of an eyelid, and describes another scene from country life. The ‘dewfall-hawk’ alights in a simile Mood suggesting grace, power and menace, ‘like an eyelid’s soundless blink’. Hardy contemplates his death with remarkable detachment and Hardy does not have a sentimentalised view of nature; he appreciates acceptance using a series of non-threatening circumlocutions for the role of the predator in the scheme of things. He wonders whether death: ‘When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous he will be remembered as an observer of the natural world. stay’. The long lines suggest control and dignity. There is an obvious regard for the countryside and its creatures and a joy in observing the In stanza 3, Hardy uses another euphemism for death: ‘If I pass’. There sights and sounds of nature: ‘a man who used to notice such things’. It is a wonderfully tactile description of the night as ‘mothy and warm’. is significant that there is no sense of self-pity or self-regard from one His concern for ‘innocent creatures’ is apparent, as is a modesty of the world’s most famous men of letters. regarding his effectiveness in protecting them: ‘But he could do little for them; and now he is gone’.

146 new explorations thomas hardy afterwards

Language Hardy uses rhythm to suggest a calm detachment, as can be seen in the 16 syllables of the opening line. The beauty of the summer countryside is evoked in the melodious language of lines 2 and 3 with l, m, n and s sounds echoing. Assonance combines with the alliteration to enhance the verbal music: ‘And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, | Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk’. Hardy’s characteristic use of compound words (associating ideas more closely) is evident here. His acute observation of nature is brought to life sensuously in the tactile description of the night as ‘mothy and warm’. Alliteration conveys elemental power in ‘the wind-warped upland thorn’. Sound reflects sense in the final stanza, as the echoing tolling of the bell with its ‘boom’ pauses in the breeze. The effect of the rhyme scheme is softened by the informality of the direct speech concluding each stanza: ‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

147 new explorations thomas hardy when i set out for lyonnesse

When I set out for Lyonnesse been transformed by the magical and mysterious power of love. The poet has been like the heroes of medieval romances – a knight on a A reading of the poem quest who overcomes difficulties along his journey and wins the love On 7 March 1870 Hardy travelled from his home in Dorset to of his lady. St Juliot in Cornwall on architectural business, and there he met Emma Gifford, who later became his wife. Lyonnesse is a fabled Language kingdom in Cornwall associated with King Arthur and Merlin, the The poem is written in short ballad format with stanzas six lines long, magician. The form of the medieval ballad is used to give this highly rhyming abbaab. Repetition and alliteration are used frequently autobiographical poem a universal resonance. Hardy was a great – ‘wisest wizard’, ‘radiance rare’ – and contribute to the poem’s observer of anniversaries and revisited Cornwall in March 1913 in an characteristic rhythm. Repetition also emphasises key points in each act of atonement after Emma’s death. He recalled the blissful early stanza; the reiteration of line 2 highlights the nature of the journey: days of his marriage before estrangement and disillusionment set in. ‘A hundred miles away’. In stanza 3, the enchanting power of love is This journey proved to be the inspiration for many fine poems. reinforced by the repeated ‘With magic in my eyes’. Simple diction such as ‘lonesomeness’ is blended with archaic vocabulary – ‘durst’, Stanza 1 describes the hero’s journey; he travelled ‘A hundred miles’ ‘bechance’ – to give the poem a historical flavour. The reference to in bad weather: ‘The rime was on the spray’. The narrator is lonely ‘wizard’ evokes the Arthurian legend, as does the melodic name of the as he travels by night: ‘And starlight lit my lonesomeness’. In the place, ‘Lyonnesse’. second stanza there is an air of mystery and enchantment: ‘What would bechance at Lyonnesse ... No prophet durst declare’. The archaic language – ‘durst’, ‘bechance’, ‘sojourn’ – adds to the magical mood suggested by ‘Nor did the wisest wizard guess’. No detail is elaborated, nor is any explanation given of what occurred.

In the final stanza the poet’s mood is transformed: ‘When I came back from Lyonnesse | With magic in my eyes’. There is now an aura associated with the narrator: ‘My radiance rare and fathomless’; he has

148 new explorations thomas hardy an overview of thomas hardy

An overview of Thomas Hardy The inexorable passage of time Time is seen as destructive of human happiness in ‘During Wind and Thomas Hardy writes in a wide range of poetic styles and genres. Rain’: ‘Ah, no; the years O!’ The final line is stark in its pessimism: Traditional short ballad forms such as ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’ ‘Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.’ The transient joy are present, with elegiac poems like ‘Afterwards’ and ‘The Oxen’ and of youth is presented in ‘The Self-Unseeing’, but is not appreciated dramatic pieces like ‘Channel Firing’. The simple diction of ‘The Self- by the young: ‘Blessings emblazoned that day | Yet we were looking Unseeing’ is very different from the elevated rhetorical language of away!’ The inevitability of death is confronted with stoic acceptance ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ and the intensity of ‘The Darkling in ‘Afterwards’: ‘When the Present has latched its postern behind my Thrush’. tremulous stay’. Hardy has no expectation of an afterlife – ‘He hears it not now’ – and in that sense shares the pessimistic world-view of For the purpose of acquiring an overview, it might be useful to reread ‘During Wind and Rain’. the poems in thematic groupings rather than in chronological order. ‘Afterwards’, ‘During Wind and Rain’ and ‘The Self-Unseeing’ deal War; man’s bloodthirsty, violent nature; the ordinary with the inexorable effects of time and the reality of death. man is the victim of war ‘Channel Firing’ and ‘Drummer Hodge’ are anti-war poems; one takes Hardy uses the practice firing of naval guns to explore the age-old a dramatic approach, while the second is elegiac. propensity for war: ‘Roaring their readiness to avenge, | As far inland ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’ and ‘Under the Waterfall’ are love as ... Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge’. At the notion that human poems. nature will ever change, ‘many a skeleton shook his head’. When ‘All ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ deals with fate and human vanity. nations’ make ‘Red war yet redder’ it is the common soldier, the ‘hero’ ‘The Oxen’ is a nostalgic evocation of innocence and faith. of ‘Drummer Hodge’, whose blood must be shed. The treatment of ‘The Darkling Thrush’ is more than just a nature poem; it is a his body as he is thrown ‘Uncoffined – just as found’ is an indictment philosophical questioning of the poet’s outlook at the end of the of the callous indifference shown to the fate of the ordinary man. His 19th century. resting place, far from home, is alien to him as ‘foreign constellations west | Each night above his mound’. Hardy’s sympathy is with the drummer: ‘His homely Northern breast and brain | Grow to some Southern tree’.

149 new explorations thomas hardy an overview of thomas hardy

Love Nostalgia for lost innocence and faith The magical transforming power of love is celebrated in ‘When I set A simple, childlike, religious faith is evoked in ‘The Oxen’: ‘We out for Lyonnesse’: ‘All marked with mute surmise | My radiance rare pictured the meek mild creatures where | They dwelt in their strawy and fathomless ... with magic in my eyes’. The traditional format and pen’. Scepticism and the adult world have changed the poet’s view: language help to universalise the experience and at the same time do ‘So fair a fancy few would weave | In these years!’ Yet there is a not detract from the authenticity of the emotion. Love is celebrated tone of regret, with Hardy ‘Hoping it might be so’. Nostalgia plays a in ‘Under the Waterfall’ as ‘The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day’ is significant role in ‘The Self-Unseeing’, as the poet realises that he did recalled. The idyllic moment of bliss is the only love-song that ‘leaves not appreciate the all-too-brief happiness he glimpsed in his youth: no smart’. A ‘chalice’ as the symbol of love ‘lies intact’, preserving the ‘Childlike, I danced in a dream’. Unfortunately, ‘we were looking away!’ moment – the glass ‘No lip has touched since his and mine | In turns There is deep loss evident in ‘During Wind and Rain’, as vignettes of therefrom sipped lovers’ wine’. The woman’s viewpoint is explored in happy family life are shattered by the series of increasingly powerful this poem, as the man’s was in the previous poem. Two speakers chat images: ‘How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!’ and the very final over household chores: ‘And why does plunging your arm in a bowl ‘Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs’. Human happiness is | Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul’; the ordinary detail is fleeting, as are youth and innocence. juxtaposed with the poetry of ‘its presence adds to the rhyme of love | Persistently sung by the fall above’. Nature and a reflection on the end of the 19th century On one level ‘The Darkling Thrush’ is a poem about a songbird in The operation of fate and human vanity winter, but it is so much more than that. The ‘ecstatic sound’ of the Hardy interprets the Titanic disaster as being the product of ‘human little thrush represents ‘Some blessed Hope’ of which the poet was vanity’ and ‘the Pride of Life that planned her’. This hubris is punished ‘unaware’. Hardy looks on the ‘Century’s corpse’ and sees no grounds by ‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’, as ‘the Spinner for optimism. Like the winter scene described, he feels ‘fervourless’, of the Years’ says ‘Now!’ and ‘consummation comes’. This pessimistic in total contrast to the ‘joy illimited’ of the bird’s song. Hardy gives no world-view is apparent in ‘During Wind and Rain’ and to an extent in definitive answer, but reflects on the meaning of life and the power ‘The Darkling Thrush’. of nature. His concern for ‘innocent creatures’ is also apparent in ‘The Oxen’, with his reference to ‘the meek mild creatures’, and in ‘Afterwards’, with its description ‘When the hedgehog travels furtively

150 new explorations thomas hardy an overview of thomas hardy

over the lawn’. Hardy does not sentimentalise nature; he is aware of in the exploration of reality, and is the first step to the soul’s the predatory prowess of the ‘dewfall-hawk’. betterment.’ Form your own opinion based on the evidence of Music played a significant role in Hardy’s life. He recreates the time the poems you have studied. in his youth when he played the violin (so intensely that he frequently Hardy wrote, ‘I have no philosophy, merely ... a confused heap of burst into tears) in ‘During Wind and Rain’. A family musical evening impressions like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show.’ is lovingly portrayed: ‘They sing their dearest songs – | He, she, all Do you think this is an accurate summary of how Hardy views of them – yea’. Hardy’s language has its verbal music with his blend of the world in the poems you have studied? rhyme, alliteration, sibilance and assonance. Another example of Examine how Hardy’s two literary careers overlap in that he is a master musical sound effects can be found in ‘The Darkling Thrush’, with the storyteller in his poems with an acute ear for common speech. Look assonance and rhyme of ‘At once a voice arose among ... In full- at ‘Under the Waterfall’, ‘The Self-Unseeing’, ‘The Oxen’ and ‘During hearted evensong’. Wind and Rain’. Close observation of nature is another feature of Hardy’s work: ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’ as ‘The May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings’, and ‘some nocturnal darkness mothy and warm’, which has such sensual appeal. A totally different effect is achieved in ‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky | Like strings of broken lyres’. Hardy is an aural as well as a visual poet, as the following three lines from ‘Afterwards’ attest:

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom

Philip Larkin remarked, ‘The dominant emotion in Hardy is sadness.’ Hardy rejected the criticism that his poems were overly pessimistic: ‘What is alleged to be pessimism ... is in truth, only such questionings 151 new explorations thomas hardy developing a personal response to the poetry of thomas hardy

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Thomas Hardy

1. Which poems made the deepest impression on you and why? 2. Which images have stayed in your mind? 3. What are Hardy’s main preoccupations – love, the past, nature, etc.? What did you like or dislike about how he treated these main themes? 4. Look at the variety of poetic language used by Hardy. Identify those features of his style that work well for you. 5. Do any of Hardy’s poems touch on your own life experience? 6. What do you think of Thomas Hardy the man? 7. What is the value of studying Thomas Hardy’s poetry? 8. What have you noticed about the people in Hardy’s poems? How does he feel about them? 9. Think about the places and landscapes Hardy describes. What is his attitude to them? 10. If you had to choose two poems of his to include in an anthology of poetry, which two would you choose? Why?

152 new explorations thomas hardy questions

Questions 11. ‘Thomas Hardy – A Personal Response’. Using the above title, write 1. ‘The poems of Thomas Hardy are sensitive, lyrical creations of an essay on the poetry of Hardy, supporting your points by quotation exquisite concentration, craftsmanship and feeling.’ Discuss, from or reference to the poems on your course. supporting your response with quotation and reference from the 12. ‘Historical events, times past and the passing of time are poems by Thomas Hardy on your course. preoccupations in the poems of Thomas Hardy.’ Consider this 2. ‘What is remarkable about Thomas Hardy is his variety, his range of statement, referring to the poems on your course. poetic forms and subjects.’ Respond to this point of view with supporting quotations or references to the poems on your course. 3. ‘Hardy embraces the permanent truths of life as we know it.’ Comment. 4. In what ways is nostalgia an important element in Hardy’s poetry? 5. ‘Repeatedly, in reading a Hardy poem, we have a sense of intrusion – of gaining access, almost illicitly and improperly, to secret feelings.’ Discuss. 6. ‘Hardy has the quality of relating the particular to the universal, often through strong and sharply observed visual images.’ Consider this statement in light of the poems you have studied. 7. ‘Thomas Hardy is a master of the close-up, writing of the natural scene with informed sensitivity.’ Discuss. 8. How far do you consider Hardy a pessimistic poet? 9. ‘Many of Hardy’s poems reflect, in subject matter and sometimes also in form, different facets of his love of music.’ Discuss this view, supporting your answer by quotation from or reference to the poems by Thomas Hardy on your course. 10. Hardy wrote, ‘The mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions.’ Discuss.

153 new explorations thomas hardy bibliography

Bibliography

Bailey, J.O., The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1970.

Bloom, H., Thomas Hardy (Modern Critical Views), New York: Chelsea House 1999.

Davie, D. and Wilner, C. (eds), With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry, Manchester: Carcanet 1998.

Gibson, J., The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan 1976.

Gittings, R., Young Thomas Hardy and the Older Thomas Hardy, London: Heinemann 1975, 1980.

Kramer, D., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999.

Patil, M., Thomas Hardy the Poet, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers 1997.

Paulin, T., Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, Palgrave, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 1975.

Pinion, F.B., A Commentary on the Poetry of Thomas Hardy, London: Palgrave 1976.

Turner, P.D.L., The Life of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Blackwell 1998. 154 Gerard Manley Hopkins Notes and Explorations: Martin Wallace

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Introduction Hopkins can be a difficult poet. His arrangement of words is sometimes complex and concentrated and his diction and imagery can be Haslemere, Surrey: December 1918. Into the hands of demanding, yet if we just listen to the poems often enough, many a bedridden lady of nearly ninety-eight, twenty years of the difficulties disappear. If the primary purpose of poetry was to a widow, was placed one of the first copies of a small communicate meaning, a poet would be better employed writing in edition of poems written by her eldest son, who had prose. The way in which a poem communicates meaning is what makes been dead for twenty-nine years. (Norman White, it beautiful and worthwhile. Part of the meaning, or truth, of a poem is in Hopkins: A Literary Biography) the beauty, and part of the beauty is in the meaning, just as a song pleases because of its combination of words and music. Norman White’s dramatic opening to his excellent biography of Hopkins draws attention to some of the ironies of the poet’s life and work. The purpose of these notes, therefore, is to provide useful background Hopkins’s devotion to poetry came second only to his devotion to God, information, to provide some guidance through the difficulties of yet he died an unpublished poet. The closest friends who had access to Hopkins’s poetry and to offer some perspectives on the poems. These his poetry while he was alive were dubious about the value of his work. notes are intended as an aid to the development of, not a substitute for, His experimentation with language and prosody were considered too your own personal response. Don’t read on until you have spent time with outrageous for 19th-century readers, yet his centenary was marked by the poems. a multitude of publications acknowledging him as the most important poet of his time. He had a deep faith in God and his mysterious ways, but he could never have imagined that his verse would be familiar to the Family Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first of nine children. He was born on 28 majority of students who now attend the university where he taught and July 1844 into a prosperous middle-class family near London. His father, was sometimes the victim of ridicule. How amazed he would have been Manley Hopkins, was a marine insurance broker who wrote two books on to read Sunday columnists referring to his works with the familiarity that marine insurance, a history of Hawaii (of which he was Consul-General comes from being on the course for the Leaving Certificate! Perhaps the in England), a book on cardinal numbers, an unpublished novel, literary eccentric little priest would have been horrified to find himself ranked criticism, newsletters and three volumes of poetry. He also had a great with the great writers of English poetry, but then again, he held a great interest in architecture, which he passed on to his son; when Gerard was conviction that his poetry was a service to the greater glory of God and 13 his father presented him with a copy of Parker’s Introduction to the that it would eventually find its place. 156 new explorations gerard manley hopkins introduction

Study of Gothic Architecture. Manley Hopkins had an intense dislike Hopkins had won his bet. When Dyne found out about the bet he of priests because of their attempts to convert the people of Hawaii to swooped immediately and decided to punish both gamblers, compelling Catholicism. Hopkins to return the money.

Hopkins’s mother was an affectionate person who loved music and In vain [Hopkins] pointed out that such a decision poetry. Her father had studied medicine with John Keats. Hopkins’s really rewarded the other boy, and only punished him, aunt, Annie, lived with them; she taught Gerard how to draw and paint. who had endured the suffering and exhaustion of the effort. Dyne was obdurate and Gerard … only heaped The family used to take holidays in Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight, where up to himself further punishment. Gerard and his brother would spend much of their time sketching the surrounding landscapes. This anecdote gives a good insight into Hopkins’s stubborn nature, but he strongly disapproved of this rebelliousness in his own personality and felt Education that it should be kept under control. When the family moved to Hampstead in 1854, Gerard’s father decided that he should attend Highgate School as a boarder. It was important One of the junior masters in the school, a clergyman by the name of to belong to the right church and attend the right school if one wished R.W. Dixon, later became a poet and a friend of Hopkins. At the age of to climb the social ladder. At the age of 10 Gerard was quite small and 15 Gerard won the school poetry prize. Two years later one of his poems delicate; he preferred cricket and swimming to more physical activities was published in a periodical, one of the very few poems published in his such as football. He was an excellent student with a lively sense of lifetime. humour; ‘he was full of fun, rippling over with jokes, and chaff, facile with pencil and pen, with rhyming jibe or cartoon’. However, the headmaster, Oxford Dr Dyne, was a whip-loving authoritarian whom Hopkins disliked In 1863 Hopkins was awarded an exhibition (scholarship) to study Classics intensely. at Balliol College, Oxford. From the moment he arrived there, he loved On one occasion Hopkins made a bet of 10 shillings against sixpence (63c Oxford. His quick wit, openness and spontaneity made him many friends, to 2.5c – a lot of pocket money in those days) that he would abstain from one of whom was to be the man who would save his poetry from oblivion liquids for three weeks. His real aim was to show his powers of endurance. and would make the presentation of his poems to Hopkins’s mother 55 When he collapsed in the classroom the truth came out, but not before years later: Robert Bridges. In a letter home, Hopkins wrote: ‘Everything 157 new explorations gerard manley hopkins introduction

is delightful … I have met with much attention and am perfectly The Oxford Movement comfortable. Balliol is the friendliest and snuggest of colleges.’ During his time in Oxford, Hopkins’s personality seemed to change. He became bad-tempered in his relationship with his family. Perhaps he was The artist asserting his independence from them, especially from his overwhelming At this time Hopkins was more interested in painting than in writing. He father. He seemed to lose a good deal of his humour and he began to kept journals containing extremely detailed descriptions of observed become preoccupied with some very serious issues. phenomena: The Oxford Movement was a debate taking place within the Church Round holes are scooped in the rocks smooth and true like turning: they look like the hollow of a vault of England between the liberal ‘Broad Church’ and the Anglo-Catholic or bowl. I saw and sketched … One of them was in the ‘High Church’. Hopkins was attracted at first towards the liberal wing, making: a blade of water played on it and shaping to it which was identified very much with Balliol College, but after a difficult spun off making a bold big white bow coiling its edge period of internal conflict he decided to follow the path of the man who over and splaying into ribs. was to become a kind of spiritual father, John Henry Newman. Newman He was fascinated by the teachings of John Ruskin, whose books had converted to Catholicism and then become a priest (later a cardinal). Modern Painters and The Elements of Drawing advocated an intense Hopkins’s decision to follow the same path was the most momentous concentration on the individuality of natural objects. Drawing was of decision in his short life. Whether this decision was based on theology and secondary importance to seeing and appreciating the subtlety of nature. doctrine or, as Robert Bernard Martin seems to imply, an act of rebellion ‘If leaves are intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur against his father and the ‘upwardly mobile’ life that he had planned for and hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds.’ his son it is difficult to say. Certainly Hopkins’s writings at this time are preoccupied with matters of doctrine. In a letter to a friend he declared Pattern and contrast were important features, according to Ruskin. his conviction in ‘the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Hopkins loved ‘dappled’ things – contrasting colours or variations between Religion without that is sombre, dangerous, illogical.’ He came to doubt light and shade. In his later writing he formulated the ‘law of contrasts’: the historical right of the Church of England to consecrate the Blessed ‘every form and line may be made more striking to the eye by an opponent Sacrament. form or line near them’. The aesthetic principles that would govern his poetry later on were already beginning to take shape in his mind. 158 new explorations gerard manley hopkins introduction

He also showed a remarkable interest in the life of Savonarola, the 15th- Hopkins decided to give up the idea of being a painter because it century Italian ascetic martyr. provoked ‘evil thoughts’. Clearly he feared his own passionate and sensuous nature, which manifested itself later in his poetry; ‘he was in love I must tell you he is the only person in history … with the phenomenal world and aflame with fear of it’ (R.B. Martin). about whom I have a real feeling, and I felt such an enthusiasm about Savonarola that I can conceive what His obsession with sexual temptation and the despondency caused by it it must have been to have been of his followers. I feel this the more because he was followed by the painters, may have been a contributory factor in his decision to become a Catholic architects and other artists of his day, and he is the and a priest: he wished to leave behind that person who had begun to prophet of Christian art, and it is easy to imagine disgust him. That Christmas, he wrote: oneself a painter of his following. To the sight of Him who freed me Even at this stage Hopkins was concerned about the dichotomy, as he From the self that I have been. saw it, between the role of the artist and the role of the priest. Conversion By the time he was in his second year he had become self-denying and ‘A man was shaken loose from his position in the rigid English social ascetic. He sometimes wore a flannel girdle and walked for a while with structure if he became a Catholic’ (R.B. Martin). Hopkins informed his downcast eyes – quite a torture for one who delighted in the observation family of his intentions by letter on 13 October 1865 and on 21 October of natural beauty. He became obsessive about sin and personal purity, he was received into the Catholic Church by his mentor, John Henry keeping detailed accounts of his indiscretions, such as time-wasting Newman. His mother wrote back, ‘O, Gerard, my darling boy, are you and inattention at chapel. Sins of the flesh, involving ‘temptations’ and indeed gone from me?’ Although it was a devastating blow for the family, stolen glances at fellow students, were a great concern to him. We might they did not ostracise him. He, however, distanced himself from them. laugh at his scrupulousness today from our liberal perspective, but such The first they saw of their converted son was the following Christmas, puritanical obsession was commonplace in the 19th century. Purity was when he adopted a somewhat aloof manner with them. associated with sensual deprivation and self-inflicted punishment, which would yield the reward of spiritual ecstasy. With the trauma of his decision behind him, Hopkins got on with the business of preparing for his degree. His double first (first-class honours) meant that, were he still an Anglican, he would probably have received 159 new explorations gerard manley hopkins introduction

a fellowship at one of the Oxford colleges. But he had given up that and Stonyhurst other avenues of success when he made his decision to become a Catholic. On 8 September 1870 Hopkins took his first vows and was sent to Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, an exclusive Jesuit boarding school. It The soldiers of Christ was the first time he lived away from the city and he was immediately When his brother heard that Gerard was to become a Jesuit he entranced by the ‘sublimity’ of the moors and fells. About this time wondered why he could not become an ‘ordinary Catholic’. The Jesuits he began to record detailed descriptions of the natural world. His were regarded as the men of action within the Catholic Church. When preoccupation with the observation of detail drew some attention from a candidate entered the novitiate he faced nine years of rigorous a local workman: ‘Ay, a strange yoong man, crouching down that gate to preparation before ordination – provided he had already completed his stare at some wet sand. A fair natural [simpleton] ’e seemed to us, that Mr primary degree. The perception of Jesuits in England was of devious ’Opkins.’ His disregard for conventional behaviour would become more villains with ‘bland smile, insinuating voice, diplomatic skills, noiseless evident later on in his approach to the writing of poetry. velvet step’. He began to develop some important theories during his time at Unquestioning obedience, self-denial and the ‘suppression of aesthetic Stonyhurst: ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.’ This pleasure’ were demanded, especially within the 19th-century English remark hints at one of the crucial ideas behind Hopkins’s world view, Jesuit regime. There was an obsessive preoccupation with sexual namely that humans and nature are united by the fact that they are both temptation. Novices, allowed one bath per month, were given ‘modesty aspects of the one divine creation. powder’ to make the bath water opaque. Wearing a chain of barbed wire around the legs was an optional extra. It was typical of Hopkins that he During the seven years when Hopkins refrained from writing poetry, his chose the most arduous route to his desired goal. ideas about the composition of poetry and the language he later used were being developed in his mind, so that when they were finally written In 1869 he decided to destroy the poems he had written; it was a decision they had a surprisingly finished quality to them. made without much conviction. In his journal he wrote, ‘This day, I think, I resolved.’ Some time later he simply noted, ‘Slaughter of the innocents.’ Inscape and Duns Scotus Three months later, in a letter to Bridges, he explained, ‘They would One of the ideas that is central to the work of Hopkins features regularly interfere with my state and vocation.’ in his journals around this time. It concerns the notion that everything in

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creation is unique and has its own individuality. Scrupulous observation About this time Hopkins suffered frequently from ill-health and had of an object, idea or person would reveal its ‘inscape’ – its meaning, its a morbid fascination with death. He was also lonely, as he had ceased essence: ‘It is the expression of the inner core of individuality, perceived in corresponding with his father and with his good friend Robert Bridges. moments of insight by an onlooker who is in full harmony with the being he is observing’ (Norman MacKenzie). In 1873 Hopkins was sent to the Jesuit college at Roehampton, near London, to teach Greek and Latin to those who had finished their The part of Hopkins’s personality that had caused him to burn his early novitiate. It had become almost a pattern for Hopkins to lose energy as poems was suspicious of the part that adored the material world so much. the academic year drew to a close; even though his work was not taxing, Surely the spirit is more important than matter, he thought. Hopkins as his energy declined, depression took hold. He expected to spend was unable to reconcile the poet with the priest until he read the work of a second year at Roehampton, but his superior decided to send him Johannes Duns Scotus, a medieval Franciscan theologian. Duns Scotus to St Beuno’s College in Wales, where he would study theology. This argued that the material world is an incarnation of God, a revelation of was Hopkins’s first experience of living in the countryside. St Beuno’s God to humanity through the senses. Hopkins now felt justified in his overlooked the beautiful Elwy Valley, not far from Llanelwy and Rhyl. preoccupation with the beauty of the world because it had a sacramental He developed an immediate affection for the Welsh people and their value – in other words, the beauty of the world brings us closer to God. language, which he studied for a while. His health and state of mind were Therefore, the senses, which could be the stimulus for sin, could also be better than they had been for some time. Later in his life he referred to his the stimulus for religious experience. time in Wales as his ‘salad days’.

Hopkins’s appreciation of nature was so intense that he felt its wounds. ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ When an ash tree was cut down in the college he In December 1875 a ship travelling between Bremen and New York, the heard the sound and looking out and seeing it Deutschland, foundered at the mouth of the Thames. The shipwreck maimed there came at that moment a great pang received substantial coverage in the newspapers because there were and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the claims that the crew of an English boat had watched the disaster happen world destroyed any more. and had made no effort to help. Among the passengers were five Franciscan nuns, exiled from Prussia by Bismarck’s anti-Catholic laws. The Times provided a vivid account of their fate:

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Five German nuns … clasped hands and were drowned I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new together, the chief sister, a gaunt woman 6 ft. high, rhythm which I now realised on paper … To speak calling out loudly and often ‘O Christ, come quickly!’ shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses till the end came. alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be The fact that the nuns died on the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate many light and one strong. Conception, and that they had been made homeless because of their The common rhythm of traditional English poetry is measured in feet religion, sparked an immediate empathy in Hopkins. He felt that he of two or three syllables. Feet of two syllables can be either iambic (an too had been ‘exiled’ as a result of his conversion to Catholicism. He unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, e.g. ‘resígn’) or trochaic identified particularly with the tall nun. In a conversation with his rector (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, e.g. ‘thúnder’). he mentioned how he had been affected by the tragedy. The rector Three-syllable feet can be either anapaestic (unstressed-unstressed- remarked that someone should write a poem to commemorate the nuns. stressed, e.g. ‘brigadíer’) or dactylic (stressed-unstressed-unstressed, e.g. ‘métrical’). This was the moment that ended Hopkins’s seven-year silence as a poet. By the end of the following May (1876), he had completed an ode of Traditionally, English poetry was written in some metrical arrangement 280 lines, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, a poem ‘of tortuous diction involving a fixed number of syllables per line. The sonnet is a good and revolutionary rhythm that had become a glittering and resplendent example: each line consists of 10 syllables, which can be divided into five meditation on the place in the world of suffering’ (R.B. Martin). It was feet, as follows: really an autobiographical poem about the poet’s own tortuous struggle for salvation. That tíme of yéar thou máyst in mé behóld (Shakespeare) He submitted it to the editor of a Jesuit magazine, the Month. The editor could not make sense of the poem, so he consulted another, who This perfectly regular iambic line provides the basic rhythm of the poem. deemed it ‘unreadable’. The poem remained unpublished. The poet will not persist with exactly the same rhythm, because to do so would create a monotonous effect; however, when the rhythm is varied One of the striking innovations of the poem was its use of ‘sprung the basic rhythm is like a drumbeat or a ghost rhythm in the back of the rhythm’. reader’s mind. 162 new explorations gerard manley hopkins introduction

A feature of sprung rhythm is the rejection of the traditional metrical The ‘bright sonnets’ pattern. First, the number of syllables in a line is not fixed. Second, feet With his masterpiece, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and several other need not conform to any iambic, trochaic, anapaestic or dactylic pattern. poems already completed, Hopkins took an even keener delight in the Thirdly, the scansion of a line continues that of the preceding line, so that beautiful natural landscape of the Clwyd Valley, which was overlooked by if one line is a few syllables too long, the next line may be a few syllables St Beuno’s College. However, he had much to occupy him at this time. shorter. In the spring of 1877 he was deep in preparation for his final examinations in moral theology, which, he said, ‘covers the whole of life and to know The purpose of sprung rhythm is more important than a precise technical it it is best to begin by knowing everything, as medicine, law, history, understanding of its mechanics. Hopkins wanted to make poetry more banking’. He found it ‘the most wearisome work’, but as he told his mother like natural speech; he wanted to allow for a more ‘abrupt’ and versatile in a birthday letter, he had managed to write two sonnets, which he was rhythm: sending to her as a present. The second of these was ‘God’s Grandeur’. It is a poem that resonates richly for a modern audience or readership For why if it is forcible in prose to say ‘lashed: rod’, worried by the dangers of global warming and ecological disaster; it has a am I obliged to weaken this in verse, which ought particular relevance to an Ireland that is being ‘developed’ at a frightening to be stronger, not weaker, into ‘lashed birchrod’ or something? pace. One wonders, however, whether modern readers can share the poet’s confidence that comes from a deep-seated faith. ‘After writing this, I held myself free to compose’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ marked the beginning of a remarkable flood of poems. Within two years Hopkins had written approximately a third of his mature poetry. The year 1877 concerns us in particular, for in the space of six months (March to August), despite the fact that he was busy preparing for his exams, Hopkins wrote the first five poems in this selection.

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God’s Grandeur Taking the main interpretation, Hopkins proceeds to illustrate the different ways in which this grandeur manifests itself. Sometimes it ‘will Theme flame out’. This image is in keeping with the imagery in ‘charged’. It Since his time at Oxford, Hopkins was convinced that the world of nature catches our attention in a flash, like a sudden glittering light emanating was, in a sense, the incarnation of God. It is not just that when we look from foil that catches the rays of the sun when it is shaken. At other times at nature we admire his creation: nature is ‘charged’ with the presence its presence dawns upon us slowly, like the oil oozing from the fruit that of God; his presence pulses through everything in the world. Hopkins has been gathered and stored. Hopkins may well have had in mind the would have been familiar with Psalm 71, which states: ‘The whole earth contrast between St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and St shall be filled with his majesty.’ The word ‘filled’ suggests a substance, Augustine’s gradual conversion as recorded in his Confessions. There is but ‘charged’ implies energy: it argues that God is actively present in the a reference to them in stanza 10 of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ that world. supports this interpretation. Hopkins was fascinated by contrast. Here, he contrasts the sudden and the gradual, the dramatic blinding light and the Even though humankind seems oblivious to the sacramental value of slowly evolving realisation. nature, and even though the Industrial Revolution led to widespread pollution and destruction of the landscape, nature is held lovingly in the The position of the word ‘Crushed’ is dramatic; the full stop after it makes hands of the Holy Spirit and will never be diminished. The splendour and it stand out even more. The fact that the syllable is stressed also draws freshness of nature are contrasted throughout the octet with the stale and attention to the word; this is because it is an important word in Hopkins’s sordid influence of humankind. world-picture. Human beings’ free will is in conflict with God’s intention for them. If they are to fulfil their destiny they must submit their will to Development the will of God. They must allow their ‘self-will’ to be crushed so that they The first section of the poem begins with a beautifully direct statement may become an agent of God’s will. In a later poem, ‘The Windhover’, we of the theme of the poem. Apart from the obvious meaning of ‘charged’, will see the same idea expressed in the word ‘buckle’ and we will observe meaning ‘powered’, it can also mean that the people of the world have the same techniques used to draw attention to the word. been given the charge, or responsibility, of looking after this planet. The question seems to interrupt the first quatrain, as if the poet were impatient to complain of people’s lack of interest in God’s plan. The

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link between ‘foil’, ‘oil’ and ‘men’ is not so difficult to make if ‘crushed’ is soil suggests that humankind has exhausted the earth – a prophetic understood as the process whereby everything is subject to the will of image in many ways. Humankind is incapable of noticing the damage God. Humankind neither obeys God’s authority (‘reck his rod’) nor heeds that it has done because it is ‘shod’ – in other words, people wear shoes, his sacrifice for us (rod = rood = cross). Humankind is seen as the rebel, which remove them from the soil and desensitise them. This idea – that ‘wild, wilful and wanton’ (Peter Milward), who will not ‘bend the knee’ in by removing people from their natural environment we deprive them of humble obedience. sensitivity – is very much a Romantic one. (Incidentally, Hopkins had a particular dislike of shoes.) ‘Thus man is punished for his insensitivity to The second quatrain conveys a picture of humankind as bestial creatures, “God’s grandeur” by becoming correspondingly insensitive to the beauty lacking in intelligence and awareness, clumsily obscuring the sparkle of of the natural world’ (Peter Milward). nature with their grubby activities. Life without God is monotonous and dreary. It reminds us of the fate of Adam and Eve when they were evicted The second quatrain is quite depressing. It is even more depressing for a from Paradise and had to learn to labour. The repetition of ‘trod’ conveys modern audience, because we know how much more damage has been the monotony of industrial labour. The dull repetition of the heavy done to the environment since the poem was written. However, this poem monosyllabic verb makes an impressive thud in the ears. It has inevitable is not an eco-warrior’s battle cry, nor is it a cry of despair: it is a religious associations with the treadmill, a byword for monotonous activity. It may poem. Far from wishing to depress, Hopkins’s intention was to confidently even be an echo of Keats’s line in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘No hungry assert that no matter how sinful and stupid humankind may be, the world generations tread thee down’. is safe because the Holy Ghost, like a female bird protecting its fledgling, sits protectively over the world. Why is it that ‘nature is never spent’? It is The result of trade has been to ‘sear’, to scorch nature. It is typical of because the spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, is active in renewing the world. Hopkins’s word-play to move from ‘seared’ to ‘bleared’ and ‘smeared’, It is from him that there comes ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’, all of which convey the idea that humankind’s toil, instead of exercising like a spring that brings fresh water to the surface constantly. Therefore, a respectful dominion over the earth, has damaged and sullied God’s the earth will never be ‘spent’, or exhausted. On the contrary: when one creation. The beautiful masterpiece has been ‘smudged’ and has the smell looks carefully one sees the freshness of new creation ‘deep down [in] of sweat from it. This line is quite clever in its technique: ‘wears’ rhymes things’. Even though the sun sets in the west, it rises again in the east – a with ‘shares’; ‘man’s’ balances the line by appearing in each of the two powerful image of the death and resurrection of Christ. For this reason, clauses to create a pleasant antithesis; and the alliteration and dissonance God’s creation is safe. of ‘smudge’ and ‘smell’ complete the effect. The final image of the bare 165 new explorations gerard manley hopkins god’s grandeur

The exclamations in the last three lines (‘Oh’ and ‘ah’) convey the immediacy of the poet’s excitement as he contemplates with confidence the everlastingness of all things in God’s creation, God’s grandeur.

The poet feels the warmth of the divine breast and glimpses the brightness of the divine wings. This is far from a notional recognition on his part, based on an abstract faith in the presence and providence of God. Rather, it seems to rise, in the climax of this poem, to the level of a mystical experience, as he first feels the warmth of the breast, and then sees – with an ‘ah!’ of ecstatic wonder – the brightness of the wings, at least in a momentary glimpse which is all that this world can afford. (Peter Milward)

Norman White has a different and interesting view on this poem. In the octet, ‘There is a vivid sense of Hopkins’s urgency to communicate his state of perceptual excitement and the qualities of the natural things which have excited him’, but in the sestet, ‘It appears to me as if a different authoritarian voice, representative of tradition, has superimposed an alien framework onto the novel and personal emotions and sights.’ The critic is suggesting that the priest is hijacking the poem from the poet and using the poet’s perceptions to further his religious doctrine. Perhaps White is disappointed that Hopkins is not a Romantic poet instead of a religious poet. But the tension between the two aspects of the poet’s personality is intrinsic to his poetry.

166 new explorations gerard manley hopkins as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Theme Draw Flame The poet argues that everything in creation has its own individuality and unique place in the world (what Duns Scotus called haeccitas, or Background ‘thisness’). Every created object or person has a purpose or mission, that At the end of April 1877 Hopkins was asked to write a poem to is, to be itself (‘Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Christ’). Our commemorate the visit of Father Thomas Burke, a Dominican preacher intuition can perceive Christ in the objects around us and in the actions and well-known advocate of Thomism. Hopkins took his visit as an of humankind (‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places … through the opportunity to reopen the debate between Thomists and Scotists features of men’s faces’). (followers of the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus). The debate between these two philosophies had been lively before the Development 19th century. There were few supporters of Scotus left; Hopkins was The opening line does not engage our thoughts as readily as the opening one of them. He expressed his views on this debate most openly in the lines of the other ‘bright sonnets’, but it may arouse the curiosity of those poem ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, which he wrote at this time. One of who enjoy cryptic crosswords. We have seen in the previous poem how the differences between Aquinas and Scotus is that Aquinas strongly the world is ‘charged’ with God’s grandeur, which ‘will flame out’. Here advocated reason as the means whereby we come to know something, again the poet associates the presence of God in the world with fire. The whereas Scotus believed that we come to know things through intuition, kingfisher and dragonfly reflect the light of the sun and, metaphorically, which involves the whole being, especially the senses, in the process of of God. knowing. The poem asserts the value of the senses and that physical beauty has a moral value. ‘All things therefore are charged with love, are The poet goes on to give examples of everyday actions that are charged with God, and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and characteristic of themselves. If a stone falls over the rim of a circular well take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him’ (Hopkins). Indirectly, it will give off a ringing sound, presumably when it makes contact with he is arguing that poetry is a valid occupation for a priest. Hopkins was the sides of the well. (Note the difference between the bland paraphrase not happy with the poem and did not send it to Bridges. and the vibrant rhythm of Hopkins’s line.) Pluck the string of a musical instrument and it will give off a particular sound; swing a bell and it will emit a characteristic bell sound. Hopkins concludes that ‘each mortal thing’ has its unique presence in the world and displays this unique

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identity. He invents a most unusual verb to express this idea: he declares This sonnet is written in sprung rhythm. As an exercise, compare this that each individual thing ‘selves’, or engages in the act of being itself. The poem with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and notice how frequently individual ‘speaks and spells’ and is ‘Crying’ out what he is. Hopkins’s poem uses stressed syllables.

The content of the octet is summed up in the final line, which asserts the individuality of all things and that all things have a mission to fulfil.

The sestet takes the idea further (‘Í say more’). In the octet the poet concentrates on human experience from a secular point of view: in other words, there is no explicit religious significance in the ideas he expresses. In the sestet, however, he introduces theology, ‘celebrating the unity of God and the world and affirming the divinization of all creatures in Christ’ (Joseph Feeney). The ‘just man justices’. Hopkins again invents a verb – not a particularly attractive one, but one that is full of emphasis and intensity. The second line has a similarly intense and unattractive feel to it. The third line, which has a modicum of style to it, asserts the same point as the previous two lines – that a man is doing God’s will when he is ‘himself’. That entails being a flawed creature, born with original sin, redeemed through baptism by Christ and sharing in Christ’s being; but as John Henry Newman put it, ‘It is his gift to be the creator of his own sufficiency, and to be emphatically self-made.’ In other words, it is the nature of humankind to undertake a journey that can lead it to God or elsewhere. Joseph Mary Plunkett wrote that he saw Christ’s blood ‘upon the rose’; Hopkins sees Christ in ‘men’s faces’ (not in women’s, however!).

168 new explorations gerard manley hopkins spring

Spring of many architectural terms employed by the poet. A wheel window is a circular window whose mullions divide it in the same way that spokes Background divide a wheel. The verb ‘shoot’ adds to the energy of the scene, as does Hopkins spent the Whit weekend holiday (mid-May) walking and writing the tripping alliteration of ‘long and lovely and lush’. poetry in the beautiful Clwyd Valley. Before this he had had a five-day break in Rhyl and was now quite relaxed. May was the month devoted to How did the poet move from weeds to thrush’s eggs? The answer lies in Mary, the Queen of Heaven, for whom he had a special devotion. The the sound of the words: ‘lush’ leads to ‘thrush’. This is a technique often charming poem ‘Spring’ was written during this time. employed by Hopkins, especially in poems where there seems to be a rush of energy, as if one word sprouts from the other. The breathless Theme excitement of the poet is captured in the ellipsis (omission of words): The opening sentence, beautiful in its simplicity, expresses the key idea in ‘Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens’. ‘The omission of “like” saves the the octet. The sestet suggests that spring is a ‘strain’ or a taste of what the phrase from being merely a pretty simile’ (Walford Davies). The eggs are Garden of Eden must have been like before sin deprived humankind of like the heavens, or skies, because they have the same dappled pattern of it. The poem ends with an exhortation to Christ to harvest the innocence blue and white. Hopkins loved the dappled design because of the beauty and beauty of May before corruption takes hold. that he found in contrasting colours and shapes.

Development The song of the thrush echoing through the trees ‘does so rinse and wring | The ear’ – another one of Hopkins’s fascinating and original images. The ‘Spring’ starts with a burgeoning sound, a hyperbole, song in its purity, passing through the ear of the listener, cleanses it as if it which is followed by an ecstatic scene of movements, were rinsed and wrung dry; ‘wring’ is also a pun on ‘ring’. shapes, sounds, textures, and colour. (Norman White) When we come to the word ‘lightnings’ we must recall ‘charged’, ‘flame’ The octet begins with an emphatic statement, which is supported by and ‘fire’ from previous poems. All these words relate to the startling the evidence that follows. When one gets to know a little of Hopkins’s beauty of divine nature – God’s fire. The song of the bird thrills the poet character, it is not surprising that he begins with weeds. For the poet, as if it were an angelic sound. weeds are wild flowers that are all the more attractive for being so natural and uncontrolled, as it were, by humans. The weeds are ‘in wheels’ – one 169 new explorations gerard manley hopkins spring

The bird in the tree leads on to the ‘glassy peartree’, ‘glassy’ because it is before sin and corruption took over. He urges ‘Christ, lord’ to ‘Have, get, radiant in the sunlight, which ‘leaves and blooms’ – the nouns ‘leaf’ and before it cloy, | Before it cloud … and sour with sinning’. He wants Christ ‘bloom’ are used first as verbs and then become nouns and the subject to intervene now, seize the world in its momentary perfect state and (‘they’) of ‘brush’. Such experimentation with language contributes to the preserve it forevermore. It is as if the poet, overwhelmed by the perfect strangeness of Hopkins’s poetry. In the 19th century it would have been beauty of the scene he has just witnessed, cannot bear the thought of regarded as even more strange. The word ‘blooms’ connects to ‘brush’ returning to the real world, with all its imperfections. by alliteration. The tree brushes against the sky, which descends to meet it (‘The descending blue’). Perhaps Hopkins has the painter’s brush in ‘Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy’ seems to be the object of the mind here; he had ambitions to be an artist before he became a priest. verbs ‘cloud’ and ‘sour’. May, because of its associations with the Blessed The ‘richness’ of the blue sky probably refers to the effect created by Virgin, is identified with purity and innocence. This state of innocence is a smattering of white, unthreatening clouds, enough of them to create ‘Most … choice’, or most precious, and ‘Most … worthy’ of being won. ‘O a beautiful dappled effect. The poet’s eyes descend to ground level to maid’s child’ is, of course, Christ. notice the lambs having ‘their fling’. Some years earlier, in his journals, Hopkins wrote, ‘It is as if it were the earth that flung them [the lambs], not The poem is written in standard sonnet form with elements of sprung themselves.’ rhythm.

There is very little to be done with the octet other than to enjoy its sound, colour and movement and the sheer pleasure that can be taken in the physical world.

The sestet becomes more reflective as the poet wonders, ‘What is it all about?’ He has enjoyed the experience of the physical world; now he wishes to meditate on its meaning. Immediately the tone, pace and imagery have changed. Now, at a distance from the wonderful scene in the octet, the poet declares that this is ‘A strain’, like a fleeting snatch of a melody, of the Garden of Eden, of the perfect world that existed

170 new explorations gerard manley hopkins the windhover

The Windhover Development It is very difficult to subdivide the octet. There is no clear division into A week after writing ‘Spring’, at the end of May 1877, Hopkins composed quatrains and there are no end-stopped lines; the whole is fluid, fast ‘The Windhover’. He had already composed four poems that month. moving and graceful, like the bird. For convenience we will take the octet It was his day off; the weather was lovely; he had been successful in his in four segments. examinations and the next one was a long way off. He described this poem as ‘the best thing I ever wrote’. It is also one of his more difficult ‘I caught … Falcon’ poems. The ellipsis in ‘I caught [sight of]’ is very effective. It emphasises the dramatic moment of perception. The poet did not just see a bird: his spirit The kestrel, a kind of falcon, was very common in the Clwyd area and was was arrested by a sudden flash of magnificence. This is the moment when known locally as the windhover, a name that Hopkins thought exotic. It is he perceives the ‘inscape’ of the bird. The word ‘caught’ may also refer to remarkable for its habit of remaining suspended in the air while scanning the artist who ‘catches’ the shape, the movement or the moment of the the ground for its prey. bird’s flight. One of the reasons that Hopkins moved from art to poetry was that he found it impossible to capture movement in a painting or Theme sketch, and it was the energy of movement that fascinated him most. ‘The Windhover’ is perhaps the most complex of Hopkins’s poems in this anthology, but it can be enjoyed on different levels. At one level the The phrase ‘this morning’ adds a tingling freshness to the moment. There poem is about a bird in flight and the poet’s response to its beauty. At a follows a procession of titles, ‘as in some royal proclamation of medieval deeper level the hawk, with its outstretched wings, represents Jesus Christ pageantry’ (Peter Milward). The bird is the ‘minion’, or favourite, of the and the poem is about the relationship between humankind and God. In morning. The French word already adds a certain grace to this creature; essence, the poet believes that the greatest beauty is revealed when we it is the ‘dauphin’, or heir-apparent, to the kingdom of daylight. The subdue our personal ego and ambitions, submit to the will of God and live regal imagery invests the bird with a majestic quality. The capitalisation our lives in a Christ-like manner. of ‘Falcon’ adds to its dignity, as if it were a royal person with a title. The Falcon is ‘dapple-dawn-drawn’, a coined adjective that throws up two possible interpretations: the falcon has been drawn or attracted by the

171 new explorations gerard manley hopkins the windhover

dappled dawn, or it looks as if it has been drawn or sketched against the ‘then off … the big wind’ dappled sky in the background. The dramatic exclamation that concludes with the word ‘ecstasy’ is followed by the even more dramatic elliptical ‘then off’. It is so much more ‘in his riding … ecstasy!’ abrupt and startling than ‘then the bird flew off’. The repetition of ‘off’ The mediaeval chivalric imagery in the first part of the poem seems to and the fluidity of ‘off forth’ add to the energy of the line. The poet uses inspire the comparison of the bird to a horse in a show ring. The bird is the simile of a skater taking a corner to describe the dramatic, energetic, ‘riding’ the ‘rolling level’ – in other words, it is riding the air. Even though yet elegant manner in which the bird suddenly changes direction. The the air is ‘rolling’, the bird remains ‘level’ and ‘steady’ because of its control alliteration of s evokes the sound of the skate against the ice. and poise. The word ‘striding’ suggests the ease and mastery of the bird as it hovers ‘High there’. Then it begins to swivel on the tip of its wing. ‘The hurl and gliding’ conveys two paradoxical qualities of the bird. The The predicate ‘rung upon the rein’ is a technical term of a riding school to verb ‘hurl’ suggests strength, power and vehement effort, while ‘gliding’ describe a horse circling at the end of a rein held by its trainer. In falconry, suggests grace and easeful action. The bird seems to unite these qualities the verb ‘to ring’ means to rise in spirals. Hopkins would have been in its victory over ‘the big wind’. familiar with both terms and would have intended the two meanings. ‘My heart … mastery of the thing’ There is a combination of physical power and intellectual skill in his momentary motionlessness, as From ‘I caught’ to ‘big wind’, the focus has been exclusively on the he hovers in the wind – like an expert trainer pulling magnificence of the bird. The attention now shifts to the poet and his on the rein of a fierce, untamed animal in a ring and heart, which is ‘in hiding’. It is impossible to say with certainty what the forcing it to keep within the limits of the rein he holds. poet intended with this line. Why is his heart ‘in hiding’? Why for ‘a bird’ (Peter Milward) rather than the bird that he has been describing? We can say with a degree of confidence that the poet feels somewhat humbled by the Why does the bird make these movements? For the sheer pleasure of it! majesty of the falcon. He is overwhelmed by admiration for this creature. This bird is being what it is, exulting in its control, power and victory over This bird has the qualities that he lacks: power, self-assurance, grace. the air, exulting in its own self. The bird is a majestic, graceful creature totally in harmony with its environment and its self. The octet concludes with the climactic ‘the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ The word ‘achieve’ is an abbreviation of ‘achievement’, the

172 new explorations gerard manley hopkins the windhover

shorter version adding to the sense of breathless awe as the octet draws As we have seen so often in Hopkins’s poetry, the religious dimension is to a close. The poet spends his time studying and praying, ‘obscure, introduced in the sestet. This is divided into two tercets, which, again for constrained, unsuccessful’, as he said himself. Perhaps he envies the bird convenience, we will subdivide. its sense of purpose and its activity, in contrast to his own lack of it. ‘Brute beauty … Buckle!’ Why does he call it a ‘thing’? Is it not something of an anti-climax after This continues the thought of the previous line with a list of the bird’s such a majestic description? Yes, it is. Hopkins may be reminding us that qualities. Hopkins had great admiration for ‘Brute beauty’, especially this bird is, after all, merely a bird. How much more wonderful then would stallions. For him, beauty and virility were closely connected. a human being be if he or she were to reflect the same sense of activity and purpose! The concepts of ‘valour and act’ are interdependent: courage manifests itself in action, not in contemplation. The word ‘air’ perhaps refers to If we ignore for a moment the dedication of the poem, ‘To Christ our disposition. We speak of someone having an ‘air’, or of ‘airs and graces’. Lord’, we could say that the octet deals with a secular experience; it is a The nouns ‘pride, plume’ (plumage) suggest majesty but also a certain nature poem. vanity, which seems at odds with the clearly admirable qualities of the first half of this line. Suddenly the line is not as simple as it appeared to be. I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the The words ‘here | Buckle’ provide us with the greatest difficulty. We have natural object, that if a man uses ‘symbols’ he must reached the heart of the controversy that surrounds this poem. so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand The word ‘here’ may refer to (a) his heart ‘in hiding’ (b) the bird ‘In his the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a ecstasy’ or (c) the situation as a whole. The verb ‘buckle’ may mean hawk. (Ezra Pound) (a) clasp together (like a belt buckle) (b) come to grips or (c) collapse. Perhaps he wants these qualities to be united in him, like a coat of armour We can enjoy the description of the falcon for what it is, independent of that is buckled on in preparation for doing battle with the forces of evil, the symbolic significance of the bird. just as the bird joins combat with the wind.

173 new explorations gerard manley hopkins the windhover

A more difficult interpretation – and a more likely one – is to take ‘buckle’ of this interpretation is strengthened immeasurably by the three images to mean ‘collapse’. Remember the word ‘crushed’ in ‘God’s Grandeur’ that conclude the poem. and how it was emphasised by being placed at the beginning of a line, succeeded by a full stop and heavily stressed by its position. Here we have The copulative ‘And’ may be (a) simply connecting or (b) consequential, another word with all the same features. that is, meaning ‘and as a result’ (the capitalisation suggests that this interpretation is more appropriate). The word ‘thee’ may refer to (a) his Well may the bird … take pride in its mastery, and heart (b) the bird or (c) Christ. Taking ‘And’ to mean ‘and as a result’ plume itself on its achievement, allowing for its wild of this collapse, the fire (a word that should trigger some measure of and wanton condition. But as for himself he now recognition after we have read the previous poems) that is unleashed recognises a far wider possibility of mastery and achievement open to him as man, even as his human should be ‘a billion | Times told lovelier, more dangerous’. When the nature is far nobler than the animal nature of the bird. self-will is subdued and harnessed in the service of Christ, its power is There is, after all, no need of envy; his is a far higher magnified and more dangerous in effecting change. The phrase ‘O my vocation. Paradoxically, it is to be achieved not by chevalier’ is an address to Christ. The mediaeval chivalric imagery of the mastery, but by service: not by the exertion of physical octet has become more explicit. strength, or even of intellectual skill, in the eyes of an admiring multitude, but by the renunciation of merely natural powers in obedience to a higher, supernatural The last two images describe how something brilliant and wonderful ideal, the service of ‘Christ our Lord’. (Peter Milward) can come from something ordinary or from an apparent collapse. The dull earth (‘sillion’), when ploughed, shines in the sun (or perhaps it is the Our earthly glory must be crushed so that our heavenly glory may be plough that reflects the sun after it emerges from the earth – a symbolic released. The paradox at the centre of this interpretation is the paradox of resurrection). If the poet ‘ploughs’ in the service of God, the light of grace Christ’s mission. The crucifixion of Christ, on a physical level, was a kind will shine forth from his work. of failure; on a spiritual level it was a triumph because it was through the crucifixion that Christ rescued humankind from death. The resurrection The dying embers of a fire, ‘blue-bleak’ in the sense that they appear to could not have taken place without the crucifixion. Likewise, for be losing their heat and brightness, collapse onto the hearth, crack open humankind to realise its glorious destiny it must be crushed physically– it and reveal a beautiful glowing interior. The unglamorous life of the priest, must buckle or bend in the service of God’s will. The argument in favour and the suffering endured in the service of God, will reveal the ‘gold-

174 new explorations gerard manley hopkins the windhover

vermilion’ of divine love. This interpretation is strongly supported by the The sestet may be seen as a conversation with his own heart, arising out of study of Hopkins’s major work, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. the experience described in the octet. He then dedicates this meditation ‘To Christ our Lord’ as a gesture of submission to his will. The poet has in fact seen two aspects of the bird in flight. On one view, its controlling mastery; on another, the bird ‘buckled’, spreadeagled, crucified on the wind. It is that latter moment that is ‘a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous.’ Of course, the martial imagery, the zeal of the new Jesuit, gives other meanings to that word ‘Buckle’: the sense of ‘buckling on armour’, for example, or ‘buckling down’ to a deed. But the deepest emphasis of the sestet is that sense of buckling under stress and being broken. The full meaning, therefore, makes Christ present not only in princely aggrandisement but in the paradox of his suffering on the cross. That is the realisation that explodes in the pain (‘gall’), the spear-wound (‘gash’), and the blood (‘vermilion’) of the final line. (Walford Davies)

Norman White takes a different view:

In the sestet, the constituents of the falcon’s performances are metamorphosed into parts of armour, which the chivalric lord Christ is entreated to buckle on, that he may appear in his glory, the windhover’s qualities being merely one minute, exemplary part of the infinitely greater glory of God (‘Ad maiorem Dei gloriam’). The two images of the last three lines form a magnificent ending.

175 new explorations gerard manley hopkins pied beauty

Pied Beauty ‘Pied Beauty’ seems an innocuous poem, but there may be a hint of defiance in Hopkins’s determination to admire what is ‘counter, original, Background spare, strange’. In July 1877 Hopkins sat an oral examination in dogmatic theology. It did not go well; his passionate advocacy of Scotism did not meet with the Theme favour of the examiners. His low pass marks may have been responsible The opening line expresses the theme of the poem: glory be to God for for the decision not to allow him to complete a fourth year of theology; dappled things – in other words, for contrast, variety, whatever is unusual poor performances in the pulpit may also have been a factor. ‘Much – for these are God’s gifts to us. against my inclination I shall have to leave Wales.’ Before he left he composed the curtal sonnet ‘Pied Beauty’. (A curtal sonnet has 6 + 4 lines Development rather than 8 + 6. It is essentially a shortened sonnet with a very brief coda The simple opening echoes the Jesuit motto, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the end.) (For the greater glory of God); likewise the ending echoes Laus Deo semper (Praise to God always). A student in a Jesuit school would begin Beauty in all its variety of appearances is a central part of the poet’s and conclude his written work with these two mottoes. By framing the vision. In another poem Hopkins argued that mortal beauty, despite its poem thus, the poet makes it a prayer of praise and a meditation on the short-lived nature, serves to keep warm ‘men’s wits to the things that glory of God as seen in his creation. are’; in other words, beauty keeps humankind in touch with the essential goodness of creation. For Hopkins this beauty was to be found in nature, After the general opening statement the poet gives the reader a list of especially in the wild and the wilderness, rather than in art or in the examples of dappled things. Skies are dappled by the effect of white manicured gardens of a stately home. He loved ‘brute’ or ‘barbarous’ clouds against blue like a ‘brinded cow’. The blue and white of the sky are beauty because of its variety and contrasts: ‘Earth’s dapple’, ‘pied’ beauty. like the brown and white of the ‘brinded cow’ in that both are dappled. He believed that contrast helped to bring out the distinctive quality of The phrase ‘couple-colour’ is one of five compound words used in the each object, just as light and dark, day and night, winter and summer poem. It is as if the poet is trying to invent a new language in order to accentuate each other. If Hopkins were alive today he would be dismayed convey his experience of nature in a fresh and exciting way. by the manner in which the media in particular standardise our notions of beauty.

176 new explorations gerard manley hopkins pied beauty

The eye, which has moved from the sky to the meadow, now moves Having provided examples, the poet moves on to a more general view of on to the river. The time spent fishing in the Elwy afforded Hopkins the the subject. He gives a series of descriptive adjectives: all things that stand opportunity to observe the patterns on the various fish. He notices the in contrast with other things are ‘counter’; all things that have a unique dappled appearance of their skin. Beside the river, lying on the ground blend or contrast are ‘original’; all things that one rarely sees are ‘spare’; beneath the trees, are chestnuts. Hopkins invented the word ‘chestnut- and all things that by their rarity are startling are ‘strange’. He likes what is falls’ (from ‘windfalls’, meaning fruit that has fallen from the trees). The eccentric, perhaps because he is eccentric himself. chestnuts that have fallen and opened, exposing the gleaming brown nuts, remind him of fresh coal. The dapple exists between the tan colour of the Whatever is ‘fickle’ is changeable. The adjective ‘freckled’ brings us back husk and the brown kernel. Hopkins’s descriptive phrase is worth revisiting to humankind, just as ‘trádes’ did in the first part of the poem. Humankind to appreciate the concentration of meaning he has achieved: ‘Fresh- shares in this dappled glory. The next line contains a series of contrasts – firecoal chestnut-falls’. ‘swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim’ – referring to time, taste and light, respectively. These contrasts are bound together by alliteration. It is as if Next the eye moves from beneath the tree to the birds on the tree. language itself demonstrates this dappled pattern. He may have chosen finches for their song or perhaps because the word creates alliteration with the rest of the line. The wings of finches – His conclusion is simple: God, whose beauty is not subject to change, chaffinches, bullfinches, goldfinches – have the same contrast in colour. made this wonderful variety, which is subject to change. Earthly beauty is therefore a fleeting glimpse of the eternal beauty of God; therefore we The poet expands the vista to the landscape around St Beuno’s, which is must praise God. like a patchwork quilt: ‘fold’ is used for grazing sheep, ‘fallow’ lies unused and ‘plough’ refers to the land that is sown with crops. The three together The interplay of consonantal sounds, alliteration, rhythm and rhyme form ‘the dappled panoramic inscape of the Vale of Clwyd’. As he looked contributes to the energy of the lines. It is a very simple poem, but the out over the valley he would have seen not only the evidence of agricultural veiled attack on orthodoxy and convention reveals an interesting shift labour, but also some evidence of industrial works from the nearby towns from the perspective of the other poems written in 1877. of Denbigh, Llanelwy and Rhyl. Therefore, the last lines refer to the variety of human activities – agricultural and industrial – and the variety of This poem is similar to ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ in its promotion of the equipment used in these trades (perhaps he is thinking of fishing tackle). philosophy of Duns Scotus and in its concentration on intense detail.

177 new explorations gerard manley hopkins felix randal

Felix Randal Hopkins, it seems, was a man who in his shyness felt enormously awkward when he had to perform any public task. (Joseph Feeney) Background Teacher and curate Bedford Leigh and Liverpool From Wales, Hopkins went to teach in Chesterfield, then back to In October 1879 Hopkins was sent for three months to Bedford Leigh, Stonyhurst. While there he resumed correspondence with Robert between Manchester and Liverpool. He expressed great satisfaction with Bridges and began writing to R.W. Dixon, who had been a junior master his transfer from Oxford to this grimy, red-brick town: at Highgate and who proved an invaluable support to Hopkins in his writing. He moved from Stonyhurst to parish work in a fashionable part of a darksome place, with pits and mills and foundries London, followed by a short time in Bristol and Oxford. The frequency of … I am far more at home with the Lancashire people transfer must have undermined his self-confidence, since it appeared that … The air is charged with smoke as well as damp, but he was unfit for the roles he undertook. the people are hearty.

Back in Oxford, Hopkins was dismayed to find that the beautiful town However, he complained that the workers were ‘too fond of frequenting was becoming a rail hub and business centre and would soon become a the public houses’. manufacturing city. He found that his parishioners didn’t particularly trust converts and the Anglican community didn’t trust Catholics, especially His new parishioners were more welcoming and respectful towards him Jesuits. He found the people ‘stiff, stand-off and depressed’. He himself, than those in Oxford or London had been. The feeling of being accepted of course, was not the most affable of people. brought the best out of him in the pulpit. At St Beuno’s his fellow Jesuits were sometimes reduced to tears of laughter at the awkwardness of his It was probably difficult to warm to the slight, sermons. His comparison of the Church to a cow full of milk with seven somewhat vehement young priest with an effeminate udders – the sacraments, through which grace flowed – went down manner and the disconcerting habit of waving a poorly with the refined ladies of London; the same analogy was received large red handkerchief to punctuate his conversation. more favourably by the simple folk of Bedford Leigh. Even when his Those who persevered, however, found him loveable. (R.B. Martin) sermons became obscure and academic the flock dutifully listened, or slept, but never criticised. Hopkins was now convinced that his calling was

178 new explorations gerard manley hopkins felix randal

to minister to the poor and uneducated. That Christmas he had a short midst of plenty – which plenty they make … England stay at St Beuno’s before moving on to St Francis Xavier’s Church in the has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not heart of Liverpool. reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condition worse.

The population of Liverpool had increased dramatically as a result of the Much later, in another letter, he wrote: Great Famine in Ireland. Thousands of immigrants had settled where the ships landed, flooding the stinking slums with even more unemployed My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my and helpless victims. There were nine priests and 10,000 parishioners. mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of Hopkins’s romantic aspiration to serve the lowest in society was put to the the misery of town life to the poor and more than to test. In letters to A.M. Baillie (an old friend from Oxford) and Dixon, he the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the wrote: degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw. My Liverpool work is very harassing and makes it hard to write … The parish work of Liverpool is very wearying to mind and body and leaves me nothing Despite his romantic admiration for the nobility of the poor, he found the but odds and ends of time … I do not think I can be experience of working in such depressing conditions too much of a strain long here; I have been long nowhere yet. I am brought for his physical and mental well-being. As so often happened when he face to face with the deepest poverty and misery in was unhappy, he fell ill. His poetry suffered too: my district.

There is merit in it [his parish work], but little Muse, He felt an intense sympathy for the poor. In one famous letter to Bridges, and indeed 26 lines is the whole I have writ in more written eight years before his time in Liverpool, he expressed anger at the than half a year. manner in which the rulers of England ignored the plight of the poor: ‘Felix Randal’ was one of two poems composed during this time. It was Horrible to say, in a manner, I am a Communist … It is written about one of his parishioners, a 31-year-old farrier, Felix Spencer, a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary who died on 21 April 1880 from tuberculosis, an illness that was common part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the wherever living conditions were bad.

179 new explorations gerard manley hopkins felix randal

Why did Hopkins change the man’s name from Spencer to Randal? There is another possibility. ‘Rand’ is the Old English word for the boss Perhaps he wished to maintain the man’s anonymity. Since he had no of a shield – often used to represent the shield itself. Perhaps Hopkins immediate intention of publishing his poetry, this seems an unlikely is suggesting that the farrier’s faith acted as a shield when confronted explanation. It is much easier to believe that the name has a special by the terror of dying. As a keen student of etymology, Hopkins would significance. ‘Felix’ is the Latin for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’. Hopkins believed have consciously tried to enrich his poetry by giving words such layered that all human beings are fortunate because they have been saved from meanings. Hell by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. ‘Randal’ is more problematic. A rand is a strip of leather between the shoe and heel. ‘Randal’ rhymes with Theme ‘sandal’, which links with the shoe image in ‘rand’. Hopkins was fond of On a superficial level the poem is about the death of a parishioner. On making such clever word associations. But to what purpose? Just for the a deeper level it is a celebration of his existence. At the deepest level it sake of rhyme? He would never be that casual in his choice of word. A is about the relationship between God and humankind, a celebration of rand-al is a lowly thing, something trodden on, insignificant and unseen, God’s creation. like a farrier in a slum in Everton. This interpretation is not as fanciful as it seems: in another of his poems, ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire’, he Development conveys a similar idea in a similar way: Octet In the first quatrain the physical power of the man is emphasised by This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, the repeated alliteration in the line ‘his mould of man, big-boned and immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. hardy-handsome’. The same technique is used to show the rapid decline in his condition: ‘Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it’. The Once again, the suggestion is that man is an insignificant thing (‘Jack personification of his illness fighting over the physical body of the poor … matchwood’) who is given a glorious destiny (‘immortal diamond’) man, like ravenous animals, gives an awful vividness to the process that through the agency of Christ. Thus, the name ‘Felix Randal’ conveys the destroyed him. paradoxical nature of humankind as insignificant creatures who have been exalted and given everlasting life as a result of the death and resurrection However, it is the reaction of the priest-poet to the news of Randal’s of Christ. The theme of the poem, in a sense, is ‘hidden’ in the title. death that intrigues us: ‘Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? My duty all ended’. Is the tone one of relief that his role as comforter

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is no longer needed? Is he disappointed that his services are no longer could well imagine him being happy to continue with his impoverished required? Perhaps the question mark simply conveys surprise on hearing life, enjoying a few drinks in the local pub and chatting with his neighbours of his death. It is also possible that the blacksmith’s death is an anti-climax, – the simple pleasures that make even the poorest existence tolerable. in that the real moment of significance was before his death. It is difficult Between his curse and his mending there is an untold story of how a to be sure. Hopkins was a relative newcomer to parish work and his man faces up to the inevitable. Hopkins’s ministry and God’s sacraments attitude to it was somewhat ambivalent. He was delighted to be active in brought about a change of heart: he became attuned to God’s will. While the service of God, but he had great doubts about his suitability for the his physical body suffered, his mind ‘mended’. He acquired a ‘heavenlier role. heart’, in the sense that he began to turn his thoughts towards his inevitable destination and made peace with his fate. The short dramatic statement at the beginning of the second quatrain is worthy of note. The image of being ‘broken’ is appropriate, since the man The image of ‘sweet reprieve and ransom’ probably refers to Confession worked with horses. Horses are broken when they are trained to serve and Communion. The sinner is reprieved in the confessional and Christ people’s purpose; now this man has been broken by sickness, perhaps has already paid the ransom for us by suffering on the cross on our behalf. part of God’s purpose. It is noteworthy that the sentence begins with The final line is quaintly colloquial: sure, the man never did much harm to the farrier being ‘broken’ and ends with him being ‘mended’. The word anyone in his life, and may God forgive him if he did. ‘broke’ also emphasises the physicality and sensuousness of Hopkins’s poetry. Such metaphysical cleverness is typical of him. However, there Sestet (first tercet) is something very ordinary about the statement as well. Similarly, the Petrarchan sonnets usually divide into octet and sestet. The sestet comments ‘Being anointed and all’ and ‘Ah well, God rest him all road provides us with a reflection on the situation presented in the octet. The ever he offended’ illustrate the poet’s desire to use the everyday speech change of mood is evident in the first line. The central concern of this of the community in his poetry. section is the reciprocity of the relationship between priest and farrier. In other words, not only did the blacksmith benefit from the priest’s ministry, The second quatrain traces the changes in the farrier’s attitude to his but the priest, too, received grace of a kind from his contact with the sick illness. His first reaction, a very human response, is to curse his misfortune. man. The priest comforted him verbally (‘tongue’) with the word of God; The word ‘impatient’ must be understood in its Latin sense, ‘unable to he soothed his troubled soul by anointing him (‘touch’). In turn, the tears endure’. This man was in no hurry to experience the kingdom of God; one of the farrier evoked an emotional response from the priest. The childlike

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simplicity and vulnerability of this ‘big-boned and hardy-handsome’ man Sprung rhythm moved the heart of the little priest. Hopkins may have had in mind the The length of the lines in this poem ranges between 12 and 19 syllables, biblical advice that ‘unless ye are as little children, ye shall not enter the unlike the typical sonnet line, which has 10. Hopkins doesn’t count the Kingdom of Heaven’. unstressed syllables; the inclusion of a large number of these unstressed syllables adds greatly to the energy of the poem. There are six stresses in Second tercet each line of the poem; this is usually known as an Alexandrine line. In the last three lines the focus changes again. It seems as if the poet is looking back through time to the days when the farrier was in his prime – Diction ‘thy more boisterous years’, ‘powerful amidst peers’ – and how distant the The poem reflects Hopkins’s belief that the language thought of death seemed then: ‘How far from then forethought of’. There of poetry should stay close to ordinary speech is also a sense in which the poet is presenting us with a kind of apotheosis and – equally clearly – his realisation that poetry is not conversation and so can be heightened and or divine glorification: here is the image of the farrier in Heaven enjoying rhetorical without falling into artificiality. These eternal glory. Just as the blacksmith beat the metal into horseshoes, God two principles working together give the poem its has fashioned a new Felix, stronger in heart, brighter in spirit. It was a contrapuntal flavour [contrasting melody]: ‘all road’ painful process. The man suffered and grew spiritually. is a Northernism for ‘in whatever way’ and would not come naturally from Hopkins in propria persona [as his natural way of expressing himself]; it seems Once again the theme of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (the role natural because the poem is saturated with the earthy of suffering in our world) echoes, as it does throughout all Hopkins’s and demotic presence of the smith himself; whereas poetry. The sense of triumph is conveyed by energetic words such as a colloquialism like ‘This seeing the sick’ would be ‘boisterous’, ‘powerful’, ‘great grey drayhorse’, the luminous ‘bright and quite normal in educated speech and does, in fact, battering sandal’ and the rising rhythm of the lines, which convey the tone occur in one of Hopkins’s letters. (John Wain) of triumph. In this way the poet ‘inscapes’ the blacksmith by capturing the life force of this man as well as his glorious destiny. The conclusion of the poem provides us with an image of the resurrected farrier.

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Inversnaid the energetic waters of Inversnaid Falls. This is a simple poem, consisting of three verses that describe the progress of Arklet Water, with its Background peaty-brown waters … through narrow valleys of In August 1881 Hopkins was sent to St Joseph’s Church in Glasgow. From heather and ladder-fern to oak forests, with the there he wrote to Baillie: occasional birch, ash and, hanging over the water, rowan, gradually steepened and quickened. There Though Glasgow is repulsive to live in yet there are were smaller falls and side pools, with froth, foam, alleviations: the streets and buildings are fine and bubbles, and whirls, in rocky basins, before the final, the people lively. The poor Irish, among whom my magnificent, high but broken fall into a larger pool duties lay, are mostly from the North of Ireland … just before it entered Loch Lomond. (Norman White) They are found by all who have to deal with them very attractive; for, though always very drunken and at The fourth verse expresses a heartfelt plea for the preservation of natural present very Fenian, they are warm-hearted and give a far heartier welcome than those of Liverpool. I found environments. myself very much at home with them. Hopkins was not happy with the poem and it remained unseen until after Before leaving Scotland he made a trip to Inversnaid on Loch Lomond, his death. probably inspired by Wordsworth’s poem ‘To a Highland Girl’. There he wrote the poem ‘Inversnaid’, his only composition in the space of a year. Theme The poem celebrates the beauty and inscape of the natural world. The Inversnaid Falls feature prominently in Hopkins’s poem. Stanza 1 The day was dark and partly hid the lake, yet it did not The brown water, high above the lake, rolls over rocks and develops altogether disfigure it but gave a pensive or solemn white foamy patches before it falls noisily into the lake. How much more beauty which left a deep impression on me. evocative and ‘noisy’ the poet’s words are! The adjectives contribute immensely, not only because of the visual images they create but Hopkins often complained that cities seemed to dry him up, physically also because of their sound. This is Hopkins’s only Scottish poem. and spiritually. Imagine, therefore, the pleasure he must have taken from 183 new explorations gerard manley hopkins inversnaid

He succeeds in capturing the flavour of the Glaswegian accent by his bonnet that has been puffed up by the wind. Hopkins is very sensitive to frequent use of l and especially r (together with Scots words like ‘burn’, the contrast between the light-coloured froth and the pitch-black pool. ‘brae’ and ‘bonny’ in later verses). There is also a contrast in sound between the light beat of the first two lines and the heavy, sombre rhythm of the last two lines of the stanza. If you look at particular examples of his choice of adjective you can The words ‘broth’, ‘pitchblack’ and ‘féll-frówning’ and the phrase ‘Despair gain an insight into his attention to detail. The word ‘darksome’ attracts to drowning’ create a somewhat sinister atmosphere. The image is of an and frightens at the same time, emphasising the Romantic credentials eddy or whirlpool that is very dark, which the poet seems to associate with of the poet. The adjective ‘horseback’ is used to qualify ‘brown’. When the descent into Hell. one thinks of ‘horseback brown’ one thinks of a glossy, textured brown that catches the light. But the real merit in the word is not so much its Stanza 3 description of the colour as the association the word has with horses. This So far the movement of the poem has been downwards. In this verse the is not a static brown, it is imbued with the energy associated with horses. attention is drawn upwards to the terrain through which the stream flows. In this way the poet infuses his description of the water with the energy The stream runs through ‘the groins of the braes’, a phrase that perfectly the water displays as it ‘roars’ down into the lake. In the second line his use evokes the rough Highland landscape. It refers to the steep banks of the of alliteration and harsh consonants achieves the same energetic effect. river, which are ‘Degged’, or sprinkled, with dew. The guttural g sounds He has coined another word, ‘rollrock’, to add to this energy. Imagine how are complemented by the b and d sounds to create a cacophonous a Scot would deliver this line! In lines 3 and 4 alliteration combines very melody not unlike the music of the bagpipes. The river now ‘treads’ well with the four stresses of the iambic tetrameter to create a melodic carefully, whereas in the first verse it roared and galloped. The banks effect: are covered in heath and fern, but to make these seem more fearsome he uses the harsh-sounding ‘packs’ and ‘flitches’. The final line is almost coop – comb – fleece – foam Flutes – low – lake – home tranquil by comparison.

Stanza 2 Stanza 4 The froth is described as fawn-coloured. Once again Hopkins has The rhetorical question gives way to a plea on behalf of unspoiled natural chosen a word that (a) creates alliteration with ‘froth’ (b) describes a scenes as the poet takes us from this particular place to a contemplation yellow-brown colour and (c) describes a young deer. This froth is like a of the natural world. Two and a half years earlier, in Oxford, Hopkins had written the germ of an idea for which he had now found a place: 184 new explorations gerard manley hopkins inversnaid

O where is it, the wilderness, de-dum de-dum de-dum’. It is possible for a tetrameter to gain or lose a The wildness of the wilderness? syllable. However, this poem has between seven and 12 syllables per line. Where is it, the wilderness? The extra syllables are unstressed:

The weeds, wetness and wilderness of the scene represent the essential Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads purity of nature, in contrast to the ‘sordid selfishness of man’. The weeds through and wilderness are God’s creation, untouched by human hand, still perfect and therefore sacramental. His plea is for the earth that has no tongue. de-de-dum de-de-dum de-de-dum de-dum.

Yet his plea is not a hopeless one. He looks not to the The influence of Ruskin likelihood of ruin, but to the certainty of resurrection. A glance at the poem by Wordsworth that drew Hopkins to Inversnaid In his poem as a whole there is a structural contrast serves to illustrate the difference between the two poets as well as an between the downward fall of the stream, to the important characteristic of Hopkins’s poetry. drowning of Despair at the end of the second stanza, and the upward rising of the banks on either side, …these grey rocks; that household lawn; sprinkled as they are with bright dew and looking up Those trees, a veil just half withdrawn; to the sky through the branches of the ‘beadbonny This fall of water that doth make ash’. This rising movement culminates in the ‘long A murmur near the silent lake … live’ of the final line, which is not just a ceremonial ‘Viva!’ or an outburst of forced enthusiasm, but the poet’s confession of his faith in eternal life. Thus This is very tame in comparison with Hopkins’s poem. The rocks are just in the end of the poem we may discern theological ‘grey’ and the water makes a ‘murmur’. Hopkins described the Lake poets undertones of Baptism and Resurrection. as ‘faithful but not rich observers of nature’. They were not disciples of (Peter Milward) John Ruskin. In Modern Painters and The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin advocated an almost scientific attention to the observation of detail: ‘If Metre you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.’ His journals illustrate this This poem is written in iambic tetrameter (in imitation of Wordsworth’s way of looking at natural objects: ‘To a Highland Girl’) but with elements of sprung rhythm. Iambic tetrameter normally has four stresses in a line with eight syllables: ‘de-dum 185 new explorations gerard manley hopkins inversnaid

I have particular periods of admiration for particular The attraction of the city is seductive. Socrates said things in Nature; for a certain time I am astonished at that nothing of interest happened outside its city the beauty of a tree, shape, effects etc. walls, and that was two thousand years ago. But city life – the soap opera that never ends – reinforces and There is a page of studies of ash-twigs. Ruskin wrote: strengthens the heresy of humanism, the narcissistic belief that nothing important happens that is not a human interest. Each has a curve and a path to take … and each terminates all its minor branches at its outer City living corrupts: it gives a false sense of priority extremity, so as to form a great outer curve. Choose over environmental hazards. We become inordinately rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things as much as obsessed with personal mortality – especially death possible. from cancer.

His readers were warned to avoid ‘all very neat things’. Is it any wonder When we read ‘Inversnaid’ we cannot avoid thinking of the destruction of that Hopkins would proclaim ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness’? the Amazon rainforests, the extinction of species and the disappearance of our own green fields under a concrete jungle. Gaia: A modern perspective? An English scientist, James Lovelock, put forward the ‘Gaia hypothesis’. In Greek mythology, Gaia was the goddess of the earth. In Lovelock’s theory the earth is a living organism, of which humankind is a part. In a lecture he said:

I sometimes wonder if the loss of soul from science could be the result of sensory deprivation – a consequence of the fact that the majority of us now live in cities. How can you love the living world if you can no longer hear a bird song through the noise of traffic, or smell the sweetness of fresh air? How can we wonder about God and the universe if we never see the stars because of the city lights? 186 new explorations gerard manley hopkins no worst, there is none

No Worst, There Is None 1882–84: Stonyhurst I like my pupils and do not wholly dislike the work, but I fall into or continue in a heavy weary state of Background body and mind in which my go is gone … make no Final vows and Dublin way with what I read, and seem but half a man … I find 1881–82: Roehampton myself so tired or so harassed I fear they [books he When he returned to Roehampton for his tertianship, the final stage of his proposed to write] will never be written. training (1881–82), Hopkins wrote to Bridges that he intended to give up writing poetry for the 10 months leading up to his final vows. This excuse It is clear that Hopkins had more to contend with than a lack of would have been plausible if he had been in the habit of writing, but he inspiration. The listlessness he describes seems to have been frequent and was not. The absence of inspiration and general listlessness he wrote cyclical – perhaps a form of manic depression. The feelings of guilt that about before his death was already a problem for him: ‘I therefore want to accompanied his lack of endeavour served to depress him even further. get things done first, but fear I never shall.’ His Provincial (superior) liked Hopkins but was not sure what to do with Despite the fact that tertianship was like a second novitiate and the him: ‘I am trying him this year in coaching the BAs at Stonyhurst, but with candidates were treated like schoolboys again (Hopkins was now 37), fear and trembling.’ he delighted in the opportunity and time for meditation, prayer and During his two years at Stonyhurst, Hopkins wrote three poems of any seclusion. Significantly, his health was robust during his time there. merit, all concerned with the destruction of beauty. He worried about being moved again: On 15 August 1882, after 14 years of training, Hopkins took his final vows. A week later he left for Stonyhurst, where he would teach Greek, Latin It seems likely that I shall be moved; where I have no notion. But I have long been Fortune’s football and am and a little English to the ‘Philosophers’ – the academic elite who were blowing up the bladder of resolution big and buxom preparing to take their BA. The order was not yet sure how best to use for another kick of her foot. I shall be sorry to leave Gerard Manley Hopkins. Stonyhurst; but go or stay, there is no likelihood of my ever doing anything to last. And I do not know how it is, I have no disease, but I am always tired, always jaded, though work is not heavy, and the impulse to do anything fails me or has in it no continuance. 187 new explorations gerard manley hopkins no worst, there is none

To his surprise, he was not moved that year, and shortly after this letter he 1884–89: Dublin went on holiday with his family. When he returned he became acquainted Hopkins was somewhat apprehensive about the honour that had been with the poet Coventry Patmore. They corresponded frequently and bestowed on him. He would have been even more anxious if he had acted as critics of each other’s poetry. Patmore’s comments on Hopkins’s known the circumstances of his appointment. poetry are worth quoting. The Catholic University, founded by Newman a quarter of a century It seems to me that the thought and feeling of these poems, if expressed without any obscuring novelty of earlier, had been so unsuccessful that the hierarchy was only too happy mode, are such as often to require the whole attention when the Jesuits offered to take over the running of the college. Father to apprehend and digest them; and are therefore William Delany was put in charge of the operation. His chief aim was ‘by of a kind to appeal only to a few. But to the already hook or by crook to put our College in front of Belfast’ – not the loftiest sufficiently arduous character of such poetry you of educational aspirations and one that Hopkins would have found utterly seem to me to have added the difficulty of following distasteful. Father Delany looked to the Jesuit order in England for highly several entirely novel and simultaneous experiments in versification and construction, together with an qualified Jesuits who would raise the academic standards of the college, altogether unprecedented system of alliteration and but the English Provincial was unwilling to lose those men, with the compound words – any one of which novelties would exception of Fr Hopkins. ‘Fr Hopkins is very clever and a good scholar – be startling and productive of distraction from the but I should be doing you no kindness in sending you a man so eccentric.’ poetic matter to be expressed. Delany offered the job to Hopkins, not least because his salary of £400 In a letter to Bridges, Patmore described the effect of Hopkins’s poetry as a year would be available for the running of the college (as Jesuits were ‘of pure gold imbedded in masses of unpracticable quartz’. not allowed to retain their salary or have money). The fact that he was English, and a convert, did not sit well with many of the influential figures At the end of January 1884 Hopkins was invited to become professor of in the clergy, but the appointment was made. Greek and Latin at University College in Dublin and a fellow of the Royal University of Ireland. Hopkins was conscious of the fact that he was once again following in the footsteps of his mentor, John Henry Newman. ‘I have been warmly welcomed and most kindly treated. But Dublin itself is a joyless place … I had fancied it quite different.’

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Indeed, it had been quite different a century earlier, when the aristocratic though admittedly, he drew some of it upon himself. He declared that he Anglo-Irish families presided over one of the finest cities in Europe. By would not examine any topic that he had taught in lecture; this, of course, the time of Hopkins’s arrival they had moved to the suburbs and the rising meant that his lectures were ‘not of much marketable value’ (Humphry Catholic merchant class was putting its stamp on the city. It became as House). His declaration of disappointment at never having seen a naked smoky as London, the Georgian townhouses were devolving rapidly into woman produced a predictable response from his young students – overcrowded tenements and the Liffey provided the chief public sewer. predictable by everyone, perhaps, except Hopkins himself. There is The high death rate was mainly due to poor sanitation and a thriving rat the famous story of how a colleague entered the classroom and found population. At 85–86 St Stephen’s Green, where Hopkins lived with his Hopkins on the flat of his back, being dragged around the room by his fellow Jesuits, two rats were found in the stew-pot in the kitchen. students as he demonstrated how Hector had been dragged around the walls of Troy. Hopkins’s fellow Jesuits found his frequent complaints, his Hopkins had to set and correct six examinations for the whole university Englishness and his eccentricities less than endearing. He was ‘thought by each year – between 1,300 and 1,800 scripts. Of the examinations, he most to be more or less crazy’. wrote: He had one good friend in the community, Robert Curtis, a scholastic who I can not of course say that it is wholly useless, but I was not allowed to take final vows because of his epilepsy. His friendship believe that most of it is and that I bear a burden which was valuable at a time when his other two friends, Dixon and Bridges, were crushes me and does little to help any good end. getting married – a reminder to Hopkins of his own isolated state.

The physical and mental effort he put into these examinations The reason of course why I like men to marry is that a contributed significantly to the deterioration in his state of mind during his single life is a difficult, not altogether a natural life; to time in Dublin. make it easily manageable special provision, such as we [Jesuits] have, is needed, and most people cannot He had to teach about a hundred arts undergraduates, most of whom have this. had a utilitarian attitude to education, seeing it as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Hopkins’s style of teaching was based on the His letters to Bridges became more desperate. He felt that his life was Oxford model, which encouraged students to enquire and to think for wasting away and that there was little enough to show for it. (The average themselves. Not for the first time, Hopkins was subjected to ridicule, lifespan of a Jesuit in the 19th century was 44.)

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1885: The ‘terrible sonnets’ Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I; I wear- I think that my fits of sadness, though they do not y of idle a being but by where wars are rife. affect my judgment, resemble madness … I must I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain Remove. Not but in all removes I can … I have after long silence written two sonnets, which Kind love both give and get. Only what word I am touching: if ever anything was written in blood Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban one of these was. Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began. The ‘terrible sonnets’ or ‘sonnets of desolation’ are completely different from Hopkins’s earlier religious poetry because they are written by one It would seem that this was the first of the sonnets written and was who seemed to believe that God had abandoned him. Whether he had followed by the two in the anthology. undergone a breakdown and had concealed his inner torment from colleagues, it is difficult to know. The poems, however, provide an insight Theme as no other poems do into what St John of the Cross called ‘the dark There is no known limit to suffering. There is no such thing as the night of the soul’. ‘worst’ because the abyss of suffering has never been ‘fathomed’; it is a bottomless pit. One of these sonnets (not included in the anthology) is ‘To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot’. In this poem he laments the fact that he and his Development family have been separated by religion; that he and his nation have also The opening statement is dramatic because of its brevity and its startling been divided by his conversion to Catholicism; and that the division declaration that suffering has no boundary or limit. The poet feels that between him and his Irish colleagues has alienated him further. he has been ‘Pitched’ or thrown beyond the limit of suffering. To make matters worse, he imagines the torments or ‘pangs’ as living creatures To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life capable of giving instruction to the next generation of torments on how to Among strangers. Father and mother dear, inflict even more pain. Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace/my parting, sword and strife. The violent impact of the imagery is strikingly supported by the use of England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife alliteration and monosyllabic words. The suffering is not solely physical, To my creating thought, would neither hear

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however. The word ‘pitch’ is a richly suggestive one: it can refer to sound religious poets of the 17th century, nowhere does one find such daring or colour. In the first instance the impression is created that mental communication between humankind and God. torment manifests itself through a hypersensitivity to noise: in other words, every sound is magnified, as it seems to be when one has a headache. In the second quatrain the poet returns to description. He imagines his With this in mind, the echoing sounds of the first two lines (p and ng) cries of pain, or perhaps cries for help, as a herd of cattle. Imagine for a convey a sense of the aural torment that accompanies mental suffering. moment the lopy, lugubrious appearance of cattle as they trundle home In her poem ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, Emily Dickinson provides to the milking parlour. What characteristics do they share with his cries? magnificent images of the aural dimension to nervous breakdown: Are they pitiful? Helpless? Indistinguishable from each other? No one can declare with authority what Hopkins meant. You are invited to engage And when they all were seated, imaginatively with the poem and arrive at an intelligent conclusion. (To A Service, like a Drum – suggest that the common characteristic between the cries and the cattle is Kept beating – beating – till I thought that they are both covered in mud would not be an intelligent conclusion. My Mind was going numb – There may be no such thing as a right answer, but there are many wrong answers!) ‘Pitch’ can also describe a type of blackness, a colour – or rather, a non- colour – associated with a mood of despair. Hopkins was fascinated ‘Heave’ is an onomatopoeic word; its sound suggests the enormous with words and their possible meanings. He showed great ingenuity in physical effort involved in uttering the cries. ‘Herds-long’ emphasises the using words that had an impact on several levels. Here, one word, ‘pitch’, frequency. They ‘huddle’ together like cattle. If there is one particular appeals to three different senses: touch, hearing and sight. source of grief, it is ‘world-sorrow’. The poet leaves it at that. His concern in this poem is not to deal with the causes of his suffering, but rather to The abrupt change from description to address adds to the drama of the document the experience of suffering. poem. He challenges the Holy Ghost, who is supposed to bring comfort to those who are afflicted by suffering. The accusatory tone is heightened The image of sorrows beating against an anvil emphasises again the aural by the repetition of ‘where’. dimension of suffering. ‘Wince and sing’ is onomatopoeic. The anvil is presumably God’s discipline, and on it lies the poet as a piece of metal. In line 4 he turns to the Blessed Virgin and, again, implies that she has been a neglectful ‘mother’. With the exception of the metaphysical 191 new explorations gerard manley hopkins no worst, there is none

The two verbs [‘wince and sing’], the first with its The ellipsis in the third quatrain is very effective in increasing the intensity sense of human suffering combined with metallic of the statement. Compare it with a prose rendition: ‘Oh, the mind, the vibration, the second with its sense of metallic mind has mountains. It has cliffs of falling that are frightful, sheer, and vibration combined perhaps with human triumph, no-man-fathomed. Those who have never hung there may hold them make the metal suffer as metal under the hammer, and the suffering metal is terribly vivid. We suffer cheaply.’ with the metal under the blow, and we forget that the literal metal does not suffer, that metal and blow are The inversion of the natural word order also serves to create a dramatic figurative. (Yvor Winters) impact. One is reminded of Michael Paul Gallagher’s reference at the Centenary Mass to ‘his wrenching of words into unheard-of collusions, When there comes a respite, a ‘lull’, Fury, the personification of into compressions that echoed his own wrenched self’. When one is punishment – probably a personification of guilt – denies him the suffering mental anguish, one does not worry about correct syntax. opportunity for rest. In classical mythology the Furies were grotesque Hopkins reminds us that if we have never hung by our fingernails from women whose purpose was to torment the sinful. In other words, if the the edge of a cliff with an abyss gaping below, we will not appreciate the poet escapes from the suffering that comes from ‘world-sorrow’, he is set sheer terror involved or, as Hopkins sparingly put it, ‘Hold them cheap | upon by the suffering that comes from within his own conscience. There May who ne’er hung there’. is no ‘lingering’, no respite – no rest for the wicked, as we sometimes glibly say. People cannot survive for long in this mental state; our ‘Durance’ (endurance) cannot ‘deal’ with it. The only refuge is death or, more As one would expect from a Petrarchan sonnet, the tone of the sestet immediately, sleep. Hopkins seems to be grasping at any consolation changes to one of reflection. The image of the mind as dramatic he can find so as to escape from despair. The image he uses is of a landscape, with high mountains and deep ravines, is vivid. It is quite lowly creature crawling under a rock during a whirlwind. The unrelieved common for people to speak of feeling ‘high’ or ‘low’. Life is sometimes bleakness of the poem is emphasised by the fact that the only hope lies described as a ‘valley of tears’ or a ‘rollercoaster ride’. Sometimes one can with the suspension or obliteration of consciousness. The poem is written be ‘on top of the world’. For a manic depressive, the imagery would be in standard sonnet form, with strong sprung rhythm effects. particularly apt. Hopkins’s cyclical moods would have brought him many ‘highs’ and ‘lows’.

192 new explorations gerard manley hopkins i wake and feel the fell of dark

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark The poet makes dramatic use of exclamation and repetition in the second and third lines. The long vowel sounds and dragging repetition No sooner does one read the title than one recognises that this acts as a also contribute to the sense of anguish in ‘What hours, O what black sequel to the previous poem. The only consolation that could be found hoürs’. The address to his own heart serves to emphasise his loneliness in the previous poem was in sleep; now the poet lies awake in the depths and desolation as he waits for dawn to break. The heart is the witness and darkness of the night. that can be trusted: ‘The heart is what rises towards good, shrinks from evil, recognising the good or evil first by some eye of its own’ (Hopkins). ‘Fell’ is another one of those words with several meanings. Darkness is like The ‘sights’ and ‘ways’ undertaken during the night suggest the waking a wild animal whose fell, or hide, the poet feels – an eerie image. Darkness nightmares that he has experienced. is a landscape in whose fell, or mountainous region, the poet wanders. Darkness is a mood whose fell, or cruelty and ruthlessness, torments The opening statement of the second quatrain almost challenges the him. Darkness is a creature whose fell, or blow, strikes the poet. All these reader to dispute the authenticity of his account. It is a curious sentence, readings of the word ‘fell’ combine to create a horrifying impression of yet it adds to the manic quality in the poem. This torment that he is the poet’s experience of darkness. From his experience of daylight in the enduring has not just been the experience of a few hours, it has been previous poem, we know that ‘day’ has its own ‘fell’ qualities. going on for years; in fact, his whole life has been cruel. His cries have been ‘countless’ and like ‘dead letters sent | To dearest him that lives, In his discussion of this poem, F.R. Leavis wrote: alas! away’. It is customary to read ‘him’ as a reference to God; however, it would seem natural for the poet to capitalise the word if this is what This is characteristic Hopkins in its methods of he meant. R.B. Martin has suggested that ‘him’ is a reference to Digby compression and its elimination of all inessential Dolben, a friend from Oxford, for whom Hopkins felt unmanageable words. There is the familiar use of assonance: ‘feel’ emotions. ‘I have written letters without end, without a whiff of answer,’ he becomes ‘fell’, i.e. feeling becomes an obsessing sense wrote regarding his attempts to correspond with Dolben. Not long after, of the overwhelming darkness … and the sequence Dolben died in a drowning accident. ‘night,’ ‘sights,’ ‘lights’ suggest the obsessing horror of the night. Here, and occasionally elsewhere in his poems, Hopkins seems deliberately to blur the dividing line between persons and Deity … as if to indicate the 193 new explorations gerard manley hopkins i wake and feel the fell of dark

difficulty of distinguishing between his feelings for lot. These five sonnets seem to chart an extraordinary mental journey, other men and those for Christ; we are inevitably through profoundest torment and self-disgust to an eventual acceptance reminded of Dolben, who often followed the same of life as it is lived. There is, of course, a possibility that these poems practice in his poems to Gosselin/Christ. are not so much autobiographical as imaginary, some kind of Ignatian (R.B. Martin) exercise, but their rawness and intensity make that an unlikely possibility.

The sestet is astonishing. It divides into two tercets. The poet gives a The melancholy I have all my life been subject to description of himself that seethes with self-disgust. He changed the has become of late years not indeed more intense phrase ‘God’s most deep decree’ to ‘God’s most just decree’, and then in its fits but rather more distributed, constant, and crippling. One, the lightest but a very inconvenient changed it back again. What is the difference? ‘Just decree’ expresses form of it, is daily anxiety about work to be done, confidence that God knows what he is doing, whereas ‘deep decree’ which makes me break off or never finish all that lies suggests that the poet has no understanding of God’s purpose. His outside that work … All impulse fails me: I can give suffering is caused by having to live with himself. He is a vile ‘curse’, a myself no sufficient reason for going on. Nothing sinful, slothful creature who has failed in his mission. It is the nature of comes: I am a eunuch – but it is for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. damnation to have one’s own senses torment one; here the torment is described in physical terms: ‘taste’, ‘scourge’. He declined an invitation to spend that Christmas at home with his family, preferring to stay at Clongowes Wood in the hope that he would write. In the final tercet the ‘Selfyeast of spirit’ may refer to his will, which ‘sours’ However, he did manage to visit his family in the summers of the next two a ‘dull dough’, which may refer to the body. He identifies himself with the years. ‘lost’ in Hell because he feels he has been condemned, but there is the possibility of consolation in the final two words if we take it to mean that, In September 1886 his spirits were so low that he was allowed a holiday unlike those in Hell, he is not condemned for eternity. in Wales with his friend Robert Curtis. These were the happiest two weeks of his time in Dublin. He also loved to escape from Dublin to The fourth sonnet, ‘Carrion Comfort’, was probably written during a Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, where he was a frequent guest of the Cassidy retreat at Clongowes Wood College in Co. Kildare. It strongly suggests family. The suburb (then village) of Donnybrook was a short walk from that Hopkins battled with the thought of suicide. The fifth sonnet, ‘My Dublin and another refuge for Hopkins from the claustrophobic effect of Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On’, reveals his acceptance of his city, colleagues and self. 194 new explorations gerard manley hopkins thou art indeed just lord, if i contend

Thou Art Indeed Just Lord, If I Contend One preparation for St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises is called a ‘composition of person’, in which one is expected to put oneself into the Background mind of another. In this case Hopkins is imagining himself to be the exiled Hopkins began the last New Year of his life at a retreat in Tullabeg, near Jeremiah of the Psalms. There is a dramatic quality in the impression Tullamore. His thoughts were preoccupied with the sense of being tired created that the poet is like an advocate before a judge. The poem begins and useless. formally with the quotation from the Bible, but it quickly loses its formality and the intensity of a real voice bursts through. What is my wretched life? Five wasted years almost have passed in Ireland. I am ashamed of the little Theme I have done, of my waste of time, although my In the poem, Hopkins challenges God in a most humble yet provocative helplessness and weakness is such that I could manner. God may be just, but the poet has justifiable cause for complaint. scarcely do otherwise … All my undertakings miscarry: I am like a straining eunuch. I wish then for death: Why is it that the wicked seem to prosper while those who devote their yet if I died now I should die imperfect, no master of lives to God meet with nothing but obstacles and frustration? It is a myself, and that is the worst failure of all. O my God, universal and timeless complaint. The poem then moves from a concern look down on me. with the prosperity of the wicked, in contrast to his lack of success, to a desperate plea for poetic inspiration, the absence of which is emphasised It was customary for a Jesuit to repeat Justus es, Domine, et rectum by the fruitfulness of the natural world that surrounds him. The first part judicium tuum (You are just, O Lord, and your judgement is right). This of the poem is concerned with morality and justice, the second part with was intended to fortify one’s spirits when life was difficult; it signifies creativity. that the individual accepts his cross and is offering it up to God. These thoughts and feelings evolved into the final poem in the anthology. It Development was written the following St Patrick’s Day, a day on which an Englishman The first quatrain is simply a translation from Jeremiah in the Vulgate might feel particularly isolated in an Ireland that was looking for its (the Latin version of the Bible). It opens the argument in a formal independence. When he sent the poem to Bridges he suggested that it manner. Yet the poet manages to invest some tension in the clipped be read ‘adagio molto’, that is, very slowly and with great stress. monosyllabic diction of the second line and the inversion of natural word order that places the verb ‘end’ at the end of the line instead of after

195 new explorations gerard manley hopkins thou art indeed just lord, if i contend

‘Disappointment’. The polysyllabic word ‘disappointment’ stands out that wakes’. Not only was a eunuch incapable of breeding but he was a from the words that precede it. There is a hint of frustration despite the slave, usually employed in a harem. As an image of frustration, it is most humility of the address to ‘Lord’ and ‘sir’. The poet might well have had in appropriate. The word ‘work’ probably refers to poetic work, but he may mind the ‘sinners’ who surrounded him, rebellious and nationalistic Jesuits also have in mind the academic projects that he never finished; or perhaps – to his way of thinking – deviously and unlawfully plotting against the it applies more generally to anything that would mark his existence. Most government of England. people leave behind children; what will he have to show for his life?

So with me, if I could but get on, if I could but produce One can almost imagine the poet’s voice rising in the second quatrain work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and as he struggles to restrain his anger. The rhetorical use of antithesis in going no further; but it kills me to be time’s eunuch the line ‘Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend’ cleverly illustrates the and never to beget. (Letter to Bridges, September tension that exists between the servant’s loyalty and the feeling that he is 1885) being abused. The final line of the poem is probably inspired by Jeremiah 17, which had The struggle between the two emotions becomes less manageable been the Epistle for the Mass of the previous Sunday: as the poem progresses. The exclamations and run-on lines build up Blessed be the man that trusted in the Lord and the the intensity of the poem. The extra syllable in line 7, the emphatic Lord shall be his confidence. And he shall be as a tree monosyllables and the ‘spill’ of octet into sestet serve to convey the idea that is planted by the waters, that spreadeth out his that his frustration is bursting out of the sonnet straitjacket. ‘Sir’ at the roots towards moisture and it shall not fear when the beginning of the sestet acts almost as a temporary brake on his feelings, heat cometh. but the imperatives ‘See’ and ‘look’ heighten the sense of exasperation again as he points out that even vegetation and birds, which would have The poet now prays for the ‘waters’ that God had promised. been in full flourish in mid-March, can enjoy the fruits of creation while he exerts every sinew without anything to show for it. What is fascinating about this poem is the fact that a man and priest of such great faith can speak so directly to God and become so angry with The image of the eunuch is very powerful, precisely because of its him. Never was the use of the sonnet form, with its highly disciplined sexual association, which is continued in the phrase ‘not breed one work format, more needed to restrain the intensely felt emotions that strain to become wild and irreverent. 196 new explorations gerard manley hopkins thou art indeed just lord, if i contend

It is ironic that he actually left behind quite a monument in the form of his The death column of the Nation made reference to Hopkins’s scholarship poetry. in classics, philology, literature and art but of course made no reference to his poetry, because outside a small coterie of friends, he was unknown as The end a poet. Hopkins had told Bridges that he was content to leave the fate of ‘I am ill today, but no matter for that as my spirits are good,’ Hopkins his poems in the hands of God, but the immediate responsibility lay with mentioned in passing in a letter to Bridges on 29 April 1885. Two days Bridges himself, since he was in possession of them. Bridges, however, later he informed his mother that he thought he had rheumatic fever. was not yet wholly convinced of their quality; he felt they were too strange On 8 May he told her it was ‘a sort of typhoid’. No one else in the house for public tastes. He decided to privately print a small collection for family caught the disease; in fact, there was no typhoid at that time in the and friends, but the idea never materialised. In 1893 he submitted eight of vicinity of St Stephen’s Green. Six days later his family was notified of an the poems for an anthology of 19th-century poetry. A review of the book improvement in his condition. On 5 June he took a turn for the worse in the Manchester Guardian read, ‘Curiosities like the verses of the late and his family was summoned. Having complained virulently over minor Gerard Hopkins should be excluded.’ ailments, Hopkins was ‘the placidest soul in the world’ when faced with terminal illness. In 1909 Katherine Bregy wrote a favourable essay on his poetry in Catholic World; three years later the essay was reprinted in The Poet’s Chantry. His dying words were ‘I am so happy, I am so happy’. Norman White suggests that this exclamation of joy in the face of death was a tradition [His] exceedingly delicate and intricate craftsmanship among the Jesuits rather than a sincere expression of happiness at the – and not less the singularity of his mental processes – must, indeed, produce in many minds an impression prospect of leaving this life and meeting his maker. We will never know of artificiality. Yet … in all the poems of his manhood for certain what Hopkins intended with these words. there is a poignant, even a passionate sincerity … his chances of survival are excellent. The obituary read: ‘1889. On the eighth day of June, the vigil of Pentecost, weakened by a fever, he rested. May he rest in peace. He had Others began to reassess Hopkins’s work in light of Bregy’s comments. a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his In 1916 Bridges included a further six poems in The Spirit of Man, an body.’ He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in a plot reserved for Jesuits. anthology designed to lift spirits during the Great War. The response was very positive. Bridges decided it was time to publish all the poems. The

197 new explorations gerard manley hopkins thou art indeed just lord, if i contend

book, he told A. E. Housman, ‘will be one of the queerest in the world, but it is full of genius and poetic beauty and will find its place’.

Thus, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins came to public knowledge at a time when originality and technical experimentation were becoming fashionable and they found their place.

198 new explorations gerard manley hopkins critical comments on hopkins

Critical comments on Hopkins object’s form and shape, both external and internal, is the same as finding its inscape. One of the reasons Hopkins abandoned the idea of being an Inscape, haeccitas, instress artist was that he found that he could not ‘capture’ the inscape of things in (It is not essential to have an understanding of these concepts to his drawings. appreciate the poetry of Hopkins. If your reading of this section enhances your understanding of the poet’s work, then it is worth reading; otherwise, Instress is the energy of God pulsating through all created things (‘The it is a hindrance.) world is charged with the grandeur of God’). It is a coherent force, coherent because it comes from a single source. He sees the inscape and What you look hard at seems to look hard at you. feels the instress. ‘All things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it.’ When Hopkins was at Oxford he began to explore theories of perception. He copied into his notebook an extract from an essay on Wordsworth by Essentially, what Hopkins was attempting to do with the words ‘instress’ J.C. Shairp: and ‘inscape’ was to provide a theory on the way in which objects, natural or human, create a reaction in the person who is looking at them. He Each scene in nature has in it a power of awakening, in every beholder of sensibility, an impression believed that what he saw was contained in the object rather than a peculiar to itself, such as no other scene can exactly result of his imaginative interpretation of that object. He believed that call up. This may be called the ‘heart’ or ‘character’ of the impact of that object on him was due to the object rather than to that scene. his subjective response to it. ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it In our modern world we are familiar with the idea of each human being was if they had eyes to see it.’ having a unique genetic code. Hopkins’s theory was that everything in God’s creation has its own unique characteristics. If an onlooker As a Jesuit he would have been taught to distinguish between the natural observes an object intensely and has the sensitivity to recognise its unique and the supernatural. Emboldened by the teachings of Duns Scotus, he character, its haeccitas, or ‘this-ness’ – that which makes it itself – the saw the two as one. In his journals he described a bluebell: object will reveal its ‘inscape’ or, if you like, its inner landscape. The observer reaches a point of intimacy with the object so that he feels as if I do not think I have ever seen anything more he is within it, becoming both the observer and the observed. Finding the beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at.

199 new explorations gerard manley hopkins critical comments on hopkins

I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It is strength and When he was at Roehampton, Hopkins became quite emotional over grace, like an ash. the felling of an ash tree. He wrote: ‘I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I (The passage continues with a detailed description of the unique wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.’ characteristics of the bluebell.) Individuality is irreplaceable. Can you imagine, therefore, what Hopkins thought of the Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production This is its inscape. The impact of the bluebell on the poet is its instress. and the reduction of people to cogs in a machine on an assembly line? Even if there is no impact on the viewer, the object still possesses its Can you imagine what he would think of a world where species of animals inscape because it is not dependent on being seen. In other words, in and plants are becoming extinct at a frightening rate? Hopkins’s mind it has an objective reality. There lies behind his theory the Platonic idea that this world is an imperfect reflection of an ideal world Sprung rhythm and that we are sometimes blessed with glimpses of that ideal world. It His prosodic account in terms of Logaoedic Rhythm, was the duty of the artist to give to the work of art that ‘life’ that exists in Counterpoint Rhythm, Sprung Rhythm, Rocking Feet the original subject. The purpose of poetry was to ‘carry the inscape’, or to and Outriders will help no one to read his verse. capture it. (F.R. Leavis)

‘The Windhover’ provides an excellent example of these concepts. The It is important to have a grasp of poetic rhythm, but it is not essential effort to describe the bird goes beyond mere description of its physical to have a detailed understanding of sprung rhythm. Pupils in the past form or appearance (‘wimpling wing’): there is almost a scientific attempt memorised pages of notes on the complexities of it in the misguided to ‘capture’ its movements (‘Of the rolling level underneath him steady notion that it was required for the exam. Poetic rhythm attempts to air’). This, however, is only part of the process. The inner form of the impose regularity on the rhythm of language. For example, a sonnet is bird, its virtues or strengths, are identified (‘Brute beauty and valour normally written in iambic pentameter – that is, it has 10 syllables per line, and act, oh, air, pride, plume’). There is more. The hidden ‘meaning’ or divided into five feet. Each foot consists of two syllables. The standard symbolic significance of the falcon is uncovered in a moment of mystical rhythm of iambic pentameter is de-dum | de-dum | de-dum | de-dum | recognition that Joyce would call an epiphany. T.S. Eliot called it ‘the de-dum – for example, ‘That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold’ intersection of the timeless with time’. It is the moment when the observer (Shakespeare). recognises God’s plan for humankind in the actions of a bird in flight. 200 new explorations gerard manley hopkins critical comments on hopkins

If the whole poem were to be written in exactly the same rhythm, the The stressed syllable may stand on its own or may be accompanied by effect would become extremely monotonous. Therefore, poets vary the any number of slack (unstressed) syllables. combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. In the same poem by Shakespeare, the line ‘Bare ru|ined choirs | where late | the sweet | birds Hopkins summed it up concisely when he wrote, ‘One stress makes one sang’ (dum-dum | de-dum | de-dum | de-dum | dum-dum) startles the foot, no matter how many or how few the syllables.’ reader because it diverges so much from the standard rhythm of the previous lines. In this way a poet can use variations from the standard He employed sprung rhythm because ‘It is the nearest to the rhythm of rhythm to achieve certain effects. In the line above, the frequent stresses prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech.’ He added, ‘My verse make the line seem ‘heavy’, adding to the pathos of the image. is less to be read than heard … It is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.’

Poetic rhythm is ‘an adjustment between a yearning for repetition and One of the most important consequences of allowing any number regularity, and a need to work variations upon them’ (R B. Martin). If there of unstressed syllables in a line is that it generates energy. Unstressed is no regularity, there is no scope for improvisation (‘like playing tennis syllables must be uttered quickly. The more there are in a line, the more without a net’, in the words of Robert Frost). Sprung rhythm is an attempt energetic the line will be. This has a clear value for a poet who sees the to ‘loosen’ the rules further in order to allow the poet greater freedom. world of nature as charged with the energy of God.

By the time Hopkins’s poetry was published, many poets had already Sprung rhythm is used most blatantly in ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ and begun to dispense with regularity and rules anyway; nevertheless, ‘The Windhover’, both of which vibrate with the energy of the natural Hopkins’s revolutionary experiments with rhythm inspired many modern world. poets to be more daring and unconventional in their approach to composition. Of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins wrote, ‘I had I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised (de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum) dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn on paper.’ He called this new rhythm sprung rhythm because it springs Falcon, in naturally. It has the following characteristics: (de-de-dum de-dum de-de-de-dum de-dum de-de) There is a fixed number of feet (rhythmic units) per line. his riding Each foot has one stressed syllable. (de-dum-de)

201 new explorations gerard manley hopkins critical comments on hopkins

‘Felix Randal’ also employs sprung rhythm extensively; other poems but he would seem even to welcome and seek contain elements of it. artistic effect in the consequent confusion; and he will sometimes so arrange such words that a reader looking for a verb may find that he has two or three The complexities of the explanations above can be simplified as follows: ambiguous monosyllables from which to select, and Hopkins believed in the idea of incarnation. Christ was both man and must be in doubt as to which promises best to give God; so, too, the world is a combination of the material and the divine. any meaning that he can ‘welcome; and then, after his Seeing the divine in the world is the same as seeing its inscape. Feeling choice is made, he may be left with some homeless the divine presence is the same as feeling its instress. Sprung rhythm is a monosyllables still on his hands’. (Robert Bridges) poetic device used to reveal the energy of God that pulses through the world. Haeccitas is the uniqueness of every object’s way of revealing God. F.R. Leavis, in a commentary on the passage quoted above, wrote:

On his obscurity A great deal is too readily assumed here: it is possible to put the readers of Hopkins too much at their ease. The blemishes [of Hopkins’s style] … may be called The ‘obscurity’ is … intended. The ‘oddity’ … Hopkins Oddity and Obscurity; and since the first may provoke was aware of; but he felt that too big a price might be laughter when a writer is serious (and this poet is paid for the approval of [traditional readers]. What Dr. always serious), while the latter must prevent him Bridges calls ‘blemishes’ are essential to Hopkins’s from being understood (and this poet has always aim and achievement … He aimed to get out of his something to say), it may be assumed that they were words as much as possible unhampered by the rules not a part of his intention. Here, then, is another of grammar, syntax, and common usage. But to the source of the poet’s obscurity; that in aiming at late Dr. Bridges, as to so many people, these rules condensation he neglects the need that there is for were ends in themselves. care in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. English swarms with words that have … He had positive uses for ambiguity, and he one identical form for substantive [noun], adjective, presumed to expect from the reader prolonged and and verb; and such a word should never be so placed repeated intellectual effort … as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary If we could deceive ourselves into believing that we uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence. Now were reading easily, his purpose would be defeated; our author not only neglects this essential propriety 202 new explorations gerard manley hopkins critical comments on hopkins

for every word in one of his important poems is doing The prescription he gives when warm from reading his verse – ‘take a great deal more work than almost any word in a breath and read it with the ears’ – is a great deal more to the point, and if poem of Robert Bridges. [Ouch!] we add ‘and with the brains and the body’ it suffices.

Hopkins himself said of his poetry: His words and phrases are actions as well as sounds, ideas and images, and must, as I have said, be read No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … but with the body as well as with the eye: that is the force as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music of his concern to be read aloud. (F.R. Leavis) and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape, is what I above The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, bad; it is in the bad sense, ‘subjective’ with no relation pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice to the world to which it appeals … Originality, in other of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot words, is by no means a simple idea in the criticism of have escaped … but take breath and read it with poetry. True originality is merely development. the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse (T.S. Eliot) becomes all right …

I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now [in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’] I realised on paper … I do not say the idea is altogether new … but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of … However, I had to mark the stresses … and a great many more oddnesses could but dismay an editor’s eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine, The Month … They dared not print it … The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.

203 new explorations gerard manley hopkins an overview of gerard manley hopkins

An overview of Gerard Manley Hopkins Relationship between people and God God makes himself known to us through the world of nature and in Themes and issues the faces of people. Nature He is the ‘dearest freshness’ that permeates the natural world. The world of nature pulses with energy because it is charged with the Only through the submission of our own will to the will of God can we grandeur of God. truly reveal our inner beauty. Spring is a glimpse of what the Garden of Eden must have been like. God has given us the gift of natural beauty, with all its variety. Everything in existence has its own unique identity and inscape. It is Humans are insignificant beings who have been rescued from death possible to recognise God’s design in every natural object. and oblivion by the sacrifice by Christ on the cross. The Ruskinian method of observing natural objects in minute detail God’s will is a mystery to us. establishes a way of seeing and consequently a way of relating to the natural object. Style Contrast (dappled things) and variety set off the beauty of things. In order to have a full appreciation of a poet’s work, one must have some Unspoiled nature (the weeds and the wilderness) is a precious sense of how the poet communicates theme. There are two aspects to resource. understanding style: (a) the poetic devices employed by the poet and (b) Humankind’s sinfulness and the Industrial Revolution have made us the effect achieved by the use of these devices. insensitive to the beauty and preciousness of the natural world. It is not as mere musical effects (if such were possible Despite the destructive activities of humankind, the Holy Ghost in poetry) – melody, harmony, counterpoint – that protects and renews the natural world. these devices are important; they are capable of use for expressing complexities of feeling, the movement Suffering and alienation of consciousness, difficult and urgent states of mind. Humankind’s sinfulness brings suffering and toil. (F.R. Leavis) Acceptance of God’s will brings comfort and relief from pain. Spiritual desolation is a bottomless pit of suffering. The worst form of suffering, outside of Hell, is the desolation caused by self-disgust.

204 new explorations gerard manley hopkins an overview of gerard manley hopkins

Summary of poetic devices Exclamations Sprung rhythm Conveys emotional intensity Allows greater freedom Adds dramatic quality Adds energy Is closer to ordinary speech Condensation of meaning Creates obscurity Ellipsis Makes demands on the reader’s concentration Creates a greater concentration of meaning (suffering) Creates intensity Creates energy Colloquialisms Inversion Contributes to originality and freshness of language Makes demands on the reader’s concentration Adds local colour Contributes to originality of expression and freshness of language Allows for dramatic juxtaposition of words, phrases, images Variety of language and imagery Conveys intensity of emotion Provides pleasure Creates energy Emphasises the startling originality of the poet

Alliteration and assonance Onomatopoeia Produces characteristic sound patterns (influenced by the cynghanedd Contributes to the wonderful sound patterns tradition in Welsh literature) Adds energy Links words together Emphasises the aural quality of the poems Creates energy Tension between restrictions of the sonnet form and the poet’s Coined words: Nouns, adjectives, verbs liberal interpretation of it Contributes to originality of expression, freshness of language Points to the central tension in his life and work Creates a greater concentration of meaning Creates the dramatic impact of the unfamiliar 205 new explorations gerard manley hopkins an overview of gerard manley hopkins

Main features of Hopkins’s style Energetic Intense Concentrated in meaning Obscure Tortuous Original Musical Dramatic Oratorical Erudite Demanding

206 new explorations gerard manley hopkins developing a personal response to the poetry of gerard manley hopkins

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

1. What impression of Hopkins the man do you get from his poetry? 2. Is it necessary to admire the author to admire his work? 3. Does the poet’s profound faith make it easier or more difficult for you to relate to his work? 4. If you had the opportunity to interview Hopkins, what questions would you ask him? 5. Does biographical knowledge enhance your enjoyment of Hopkins’s poetry or is it of no significance? 6. What do you like or dislike about the way Hopkins wrote poetry? 7. Do you think the themes of his poetry have relevance in the modern world? 8. Which lines, images or phrases from Hopkins’s poems do you remember most? Explain why they are memorable for you. 9. Put together an argument as to why Hopkins’s poetry should be retained on, or removed from, the Leaving Certificate course.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins International Summer School takes place every year in Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, in the last week of July (see www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org).

207 new explorations gerard manley hopkins questions

Questions 13. ‘Language, rhythm and imagery are forged into an exciting mode of expression in the poetry of Hopkins.’ Discuss. 1. What are the central themes of Hopkins’s poetry? 2. What are the central features of his poetic style? 3. ‘Extremes of emotion, from ecstasy to despair, are what make Hopkins’s poetry so interesting.’ Do you agree? 4. Hopkins has been called ‘the poet of energy’. How does the poet create this energy in his poems? 5. ‘The language of Hopkins’s poetry is vigorous, sensuous and intensely spiritual.’ Discuss. 6. ‘In a Hopkins poem, every word has a stringent part to play in the creation of meaning.’ Discuss. 7. ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.’ Is Hopkins’s poetry too ‘odd’ to be enjoyable? 8. ‘This is a poet who celebrates unique identities and experiences, their meaning and their value.’ Discuss. 9. ‘To be a “devotional poet” is a limitation: a saint limits himself by writing poetry, and a poet who confines himself to even this subject matter is limiting himself too.’ Do you agree? 10. ‘Hopkins’s poetry presents us with a deeply personal and passionate response to the world and its creator.’ Discuss. 11. ‘Complexity of thought and novelty in the use of language sometimes create an apparent obscurity in the poetry of Hopkins.’ Discuss. 12. ‘Hopkins does not allow the brevity of the sonnet form to hinder the expression of his complex themes and he uses its intimacy to give effective expression to all his moods.’ Discuss.

208 new explorations gerard manley hopkins bibliography

Bibliography White, N., Hopkins: A Literary Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992. Davies, W. (ed.), Poetry and Prose: Gerard Manley Hopkins, London: J.M. Dent 1998.

Gardner, W. (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1971.

Hartman, G. (ed.), Twentieth-Century Views: Hopkins, New York: Prentice Hall 1966.

House, H. and Storey, G. (eds), The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, London: Oxford University Press 1959.

Martin, G. and Furbank, P.N. (eds), Twentieth-Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents, Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1975.

Martin, R.B., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, London: Fontana 1992.

Milward, P. and Schoder, R., Landscape and Inscape: Vision and Inspiration in Hopkins’s Poetry, London: Elek 1975.

Studies (annual G.M. Hopkins issues), summer 1995, 1996, 1997.

Sundermeier, M. (ed.), Hopkins Annual, 1992.

Weyand, N. (ed.), Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins, New York: Octagon Books 1969.

209 William Butler Yeats Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

210 new explorations william butler yeats introduction: a literary life

Introduction: A literary life at the Godolphin School, London, 1875–80; the High School, Dublin, William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at number 1 Sandymount 1880–83; and the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, 1884–86. At first Avenue, Dublin, son of John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. John the young Yeats found it difficult to learn to read, and when by the age of Butler Yeats originated from Co. Down, where his father was a Church of seven or eight he still could not distinguish all the letters of the alphabet, Ireland rector and whose father before him had been rector at Drumcliff, his father is reputed to have thrown the reading book at him in a rage. In Co. Sligo. The Butler part of the family name came from an 18th-century later life, Yeats’s spelling continued to be idiosyncratic, supporting the marriage to a relation of the Butlers of Ormonde, one of the oldest later conclusion that he suffered from dyslexia. As it was unlikely that he Anglo-Irish families. That marriage brought with it the more tangible would pass the entrance examination for Trinity College, his father’s old asset of a few hundred acres of land in Co. Kildare, the rents from which university, he was tutored to some extent by his father, who regarded continued to provide a measure of financial support for the family until himself as the young man’s chief mentor, and was therefore largely self- the land had to be sold in 1886. John Butler Yeats had trained as a educated. barrister before his marriage but decided to become an artist instead, and in 1867 the family moved to London so that he could study painting. This Consequently, his acquaintances and readings assumed a significant role was the first move of a peripatetic childhood and youth for the young in his development. Among the people introduced to him by his father William, as the family moved from one house to another in London or was the old Fenian John O’Leary, and this sparked off an interest in between London and Dublin in pursuit of the father’s artistic career, which nationalism, particularly as a subject for poetry. He was also influenced never really became financially viable. William was the eldest surviving by the writings of Douglas Hyde, Katherine Tynan and Samuel Ferguson child, followed by Susan Mary (called Lily), Elizabeth Corbet (called as well as James Clarence Mangan’s versions of Irish poems. But it Lollie) and John Butler (Jack) – all born within six years of each other. was probably the histories and the fiction of Standish O’Grady that Their mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant most impelled Yeats to investigate Irish mythology. At this time he was and shipping family from Co. Sligo, and when John Butler Yeats got into fascinated by the folktales, fairytales and supernatural beliefs found in financial difficulties the family spent a good deal of time there, which the Co. Sligo and Co. Galway, which resulted in the collection Fairy and poet remembered with great affection. Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). He also wanted to reformulate in English the old Irish legends and so recreate Ireland’s lost intellectual and A good deal of Yeats’s childhood and youth was spent in an atmosphere cultural heritage. This found expression in his collection of poetry The of genteel poverty, supported by better-off relatives. He was educated Wanderings of Oisín (1889).

211 new explorations william butler yeats introduction: a literary life

At this time Yeats also began to search for alternative philosophies ‘simple’ people (those who were considered fools), ascetics and women to Christianity, such as Buddhism, magic, spiritualism and astrology. can see beyond modern culture into the world of magical truths. Yeats Influenced to some degree no doubt by his discussions with his friend also believed that Celticism was the remnant of a former world religion, the poet George Russell, he began to explore mysticism and the occult, that the occult is really the remnant of this old religion or magic and often through the practices of esoteric groups and cults. Among these that Ireland is the place where it can best be contacted. Thus, Celticism were the theosophists (through whom he encountered the notorious and the occult are important and connected twin pillars of his poetic Elena Blavatsky), who believed that knowledge of God could be achieved philosophy. through spiritual ecstasy and direct intuition. He also became involved with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian order that During the 1890s Yeats’s poetry developed from simple pastoral poetry practised ritual demonstrations of psychic power, which he joined in 1890. and verses about fairytales to the use of cycles of mythology of Ulster The Golden Dawn was based on the desire for alchemical change – the and the Fianna. He introduced heroes from these tales into his poetry: transformation of people into gods, the possibility of transforming the Cú Chulainn, Méabh, Deirdre and others. He began to use the Celtic world. Yeats became quite dedicated to the practice of magic, believed material in a visionary way to create mystical poetry, which culminated in in the evocation of spirits and indeed was convinced that he himself was a the volume The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). magician. Among the principal beliefs that he subscribed to were that: The borders of our minds are ever shifting and that minds can melt Women were important in Yeats’s life and he had a number of and flow into each other, creating a single entity or ‘Great Mind’. troublesome and tempestuous love affairs. Of all the women he There is a ‘World Soul’ or shared memory in nature. encountered, two were to be most influential: Maud Gonne and Lady The Great Mind can be evoked by symbols, which Yeats introduced Augusta Gregory. The former, whom he met in the late 1880s, was the into poetry in order to access truths. source of passionate romantic involvement and disappointment for him over the succeeding three decades, but she was also the inspiration for He learned a great deal about symbolism from Shelley and Blake. some of his work, such as the play The Countess Kathleen, was a frequent Symbols reveal themselves in a state of trance. He felt that the purpose reference point in his poetry and was the focus for some of his ideas on of rhythm in poetry is to create meditative rhythms in which the mind is nationalism, women in politics, the aesthetic, ageing and others. He first lulled into a state of trance. When poetry is working well it operates like a met Lady Gregory in 1894, and from 1897 onwards her home, Coole mantra or chant, helping us to see past the ordinary. Yeats believed that Park, near Gort, Co. Galway, was a summer refuge from his somewhat

212 new explorations william butler yeats introduction: a literary life

nomadic life. As well as helping him collect folktales, she provided both was adverse reaction to Yeats’s play The Countess Kathleen, and in 1907 psychological and financial support and the opportunity to meet other John Millington Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World sparked writers, such as George Russell, George Bernard Shaw, George Moore off riots in the theatre. Yeats was deeply disillusioned by this lack of and Edward Martyn. Lady Gregory, Yeats and Martyn were the principal understanding and aesthetic appreciation, a feeling that was deepened co-founders of the Irish Literary Theatre. Their manifesto clearly outlines by the controversy over the Hugh Lane proposal. This disillusionment the driving philosophy and ambition of the movement: is reflected in his poetry in The Green Helmet (1910), Responsibilities (1914) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). In contrast, his visit to Italy in We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring 1907 with Lady Gregory and her son, Robert, highlighted the difference of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which between the mob in Ireland and what it had been possible to create whatever be their degree of excellence will be written through aristocratic patronage in Florence and Ravenna. with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience The Easter Rising of 1916 forced Yeats to rethink his view of Irish society, trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe as we see in the poem ‘Easter 1916’. These years ushered in other decisive that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper changes for Yeats. After a final round of marriage proposals to Maud thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us Gonne and then to her adopted daughter, Iseult, he settled into marriage a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, and with Georgina Hyde-Lees on 20 October 1917. The marriage produced without which no new movement in art or literature two children and much-needed domestic stability for Yeats. Whether can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home by chance or design, it also produced the ‘automatic writing’ created by of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been his wife, who, while in a sort of trance, transcribed the words of certain represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We spirit guides or instructors. This seemed to offer a new system of thought are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are to Yeats, incorporating themes of change within a new view of history, weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us. which he developed in his book A Vision (1925). The central idea of his philosophy was that civilisation was about to reverse itself and a new era Eventually this movement led to the founding of the Abbey Theatre, of anti-civilisation was about to be ushered in. The signs of this were Dublin, in 1904, where Yeats was manager from 1904 to 1910. But the everywhere: in mass movements in Europe and in the rise of communism, public did not always appreciate the movement’s artistic vision. There fascism, etc.

213 new explorations william butler yeats introduction: a literary life

Yeats examined change against the backdrop of world history. In his preference for the political model of Renaissance prince–ruler (a model review of history he noticed that certain eras favoured the development that cast the Anglo-Irish gentry in a similar role) and his engagement with of human excellence in art and learning and also produced social harmony theories of eugenics. – Athens of the fifth century bc, Byzantium, the Italian Renaissance – all of which developed political culture and artistic culture and in general This search for solutions, for paradigms of thought and models for living fostered human achievement, creating what Yeats termed ‘unity of being’. continued into the poet’s old age, but it took more conventional forms These eras were separated by 1,000 years, each reaching its peak about in his volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Here we find 500 years after it replaced the previous ‘millennium’. There were two main many elegies – to dead friends, to past times and to other, more unified forces at work: what Yeats called ‘anti-thetical’ energies, which created this eras, such as the 18th century, from which Yeats took his chief model, unity of being, and the opposite force, which he termed ‘primary’ energy. Jonathan Swift, whom he wished to emulate as poet–statesman. Indeed, These two energies grew or waned in their turn over the course of each he was pursuing that ideal in his role as a senator in the new Irish Free millennium. Yeats represented this theory of change by the symbolism State. He devoted much energy to his work in the new senate, which of the gyres, two interpenetrating cones, one primary and the other anti- first sat on 11 December 1922 and of which he was a member until 1928. thetical, each growing or decreasing in strength as the centuries pass. He During 1923, for instance, he spoke 19 times on such subjects as law felt that his own time was now reaching the end of the primary gyre and enforcement, manuscripts, the Lane pictures, film censorship and Irish, that the growing violence on the Continent and in Ireland was an indicator and over the years he continued to contribute on issues such as partition, of its imminent collapse, to be replaced by a new anti-thetical gyre. This divorce and the new coinage. In 1922 the University of Dublin conferred is the philosophical background to the bleak view he took of the current an honorary doctorate on him and he was similarly honoured by the fractious age in the volumes Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and, Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1931 and 1933, respectively. But in particular, The Tower (1928). See in particular his poems ‘The Second the crowning international recognition was the award of the Nobel Prize Coming’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’. for Literature in 1923. This philosophy, which had as its central belief the notion that the times were out of joint and that cataclysmic changes were about to happen, In the late 1920s and early 1930s Yeats experienced a number of health may help to explain Yeats’s flirtation with extreme political philosophies problems and the family began to spend more time in the sunnier regions and movements: for example, his consideration of fascism, his exploration of southern Europe. The house at 82 Merrion Square, Dublin, was sold of the place of violence in politics, his scepticism about democracy and his and exchanged for a flat in Fitzwilliam Square. In 1933 Yeats took himself

214 new explorations william butler yeats introduction: a literary life

out of the city altogether when the family took a long lease on a house, Riversdale, in Rathfarnham, ‘just too far from Dublin to go there without good reason and too far, I hope, for most interviewers and the less determined travelling bores’ (see ‘An Acre of Grass’.) But he continued to write, indeed with renewed vigour, and New Poems was published in 1938. His last public appearance was at the Abbey Theatre in August 1938. He died on 28 January 1939 at Roquebrune in the south of France; in 1948 his body was reinterred, as he had wished, in Drumcliff churchyard in Co. Sligo.

215 new explorations william butler yeats principal volumes of poetry

Principal Volumes of Poetry New Poems (1938) – ‘An Acre of Grass’ Last Poems (1939) – ‘Under Ben Bulben’, ‘Politics’ Poems in this selection The Wanderings of Oisín (1889)

Crossways (1889)

The Rose (1893) – ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)

Responsibilities (1914) – ‘September 1913’

The Wild Swans at Coole (1917; second edition 1919) – ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) – ‘Easter 1916’, ‘The Second Coming’

The Tower (1928) – ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’

The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) – ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, ‘Swift’s Epitaph’

A Full Moon in March (1935)

216 new explorations william butler yeats the lake isle of innisfree

The Lake Isle of Innisfree The hive and the bees suggest the simple sweetness and richness of life as well as providing a natural musical ambience. Altogether the vision is Background one of idyllic rural primitiveness with a hint of the hermit’s ascetic: a life This poem was written in 1888 when Yeats was living in London, where ‘alone in the bee-loud glade’. This is a romantic view of the human being he was unhappy and homesick for Ireland. A somewhat altered version in perfect harmony with nature, at one with its sights and sounds. It is an was first published in the National Observer in December 1890 to alluring picture, sensual even, where the feminised morning is draped in much acclaim; this really was the poem that first made Yeats’s name. veils. But there is also a strange, slightly unreal quality about it. The light is It is included in the collection The Rose (1893). Yeats had been greatly different: noon is a ‘purple glow’. The archaic language in the expression influenced by the vision of self-sufficiency in nature found in Henry of ‘midnight’s all a glimmer’ reinforces the strange, even magical nature of David Thoreau’s book Walden (1854), which his father had read to him, the atmosphere. and he too dreamed of living alone in nature in a quest for wisdom. This was a theme he explored not just in verse, but also in his prose writings, For representative sounds, Yeats chooses the simple, rhythmic, calming an indication of the pervasive autobiographical nature of the quest. For sound of lake water lapping and also the repetitive, rustic sounds of instance, there are close similarities between this poem and the scenario the cricket on the hearth, a common feature of rural stories and tales. in John Sherman, a novel Yeats had written in 1887–88, in which a young Co. Sligo is one of the few places in the country that provides a year- Sligo man who had left home in search of a fortune and is now homesick round habitat for the linnet, a small, unspectacular bird that likes rough in London recalls an island on a lake where he used to pick blackberries. hillsides and uncultivated lands near the sea. With accurate recall, Yeats is He dreams of returning there, building a wooden hut and listening to the celebrating the indigenous wildlife of the area. ripple of the water. His vision of happiness is a romantic one – a simple, unsophisticated Yeats’s vision and quest lifestyle in an unspoiled habitat, surrounded by the sights and music The vision of self-sufficiency in nature obviously pervades this whole of nature. It is a picture full of the rich textures of colour, sound and poem. However unlikely a scene, it shows the poet as rustic woodsman movement, in total contrast to his present environment, that of the cold, and gardener, writing in the first person, actually planning to build a colourless and lifeless ‘pavements grey’. So in one sense the poem can simple, crude dwelling and attempting agricultural self-sufficiency. ‘Clay be read as an expression of Yeats’s romanticised and nostalgic yearning and wattles’ were the traditional rural building materials in centuries past. for his native countryside. But it is also more than this, for it is no frivolous

217 new explorations william butler yeats the lake isle of innisfree

weekend in the woods that he is planning: rather, it is a quest for wisdom, from the obvious repetitions of the end-rhymes in alternate lines, there for deep, eternal truths – an attempt to see into the heart of things. This are subtle musical vowel repetitions throughout the poem. For example, is the sentiment that comes across in the first line. The sound of water, there is a profusion of long i sounds in the first stanza (‘I’, ‘arise’, ‘Nine’, one of the essential elements and a life force, haunts him and seems ‘I’, ‘hive’) and a repetition of long o and a sounds in the final stanza (‘go’, to suggest that only in nature will he find the truths of the heart. The ‘low’, ‘shore’, ‘roadway’, ‘core’ and ‘day’, ‘lake’, ‘pavements’, ‘grey’). The ambiguity about whose heart is in question here further strengthens the repetition, particularly of long broad vowels, gives this a languidness and connection between the poet’s heart and the heart of the earth. This is soporific calmness that belies the tension at the heart of it. a move he feels compelled to make, a compulsion. We can sense the strength of his resolve in the verbs ‘I will arise’ and ‘I shall have’. But the Issues biblical allusions underlying this expose even more complex layers of Among the issues that preoccupy the poet here, we might emphasise: compulsion. The repeated ‘I will arise’ echoes the words of the Prodigal The yearning for self-sufficiency in natural surroundings Son, who has wasted his inheritance, led a profligate few years in exile The search for truth, wisdom and peace and finally resolves to go home: ‘I will arise and go to my father.’ So the The poet’s discontent, which impels him on this quest words of the poem carry great unhappiness, a sense of failure and loss, the loneliness of exile and separation and perhaps even a feeling of guilt or remorse. The phrase ‘always night and day’ could also be a biblical allusion. St Mark’s gospel (5: 5) refers to a man possessed by an evil spirit who was freed from his torment by Christ: ‘Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones.’ This allusion, if intended, hints at a somewhat manic compulsion and mental and spiritual turmoil, or at the very least a great discontent.

The music of the verse The poet’s feelings of unease and discontent and of being driven to take this course of action are hidden by the musical quality of the verse. Apart

218 new explorations william butler yeats september 1913

September 1913 of society, the need for particular kinds of people in a cultured society and the responsibilities of particular classes were issues that had long Background preoccupied Yeats. In 1907, on the death of the old Fenian John O’Leary, This poem was written in September 1913 and was first published on 8 Yeats wrote an essay entitled ‘Poetry and Tradition’ in which he talks September in the Irish Times, where it was entitled ‘Romance in Ireland about the ideals that he and O’Leary had discussed and shared. Though (on reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery)’. It was the primary emphasis in the essay is on poetry and culture, the views included in the volume Responsibilities (1914) under its present title. reflect Yeats’s notions of the ideal society. Three types of men have made all beautiful things: aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because Yeats and politics: Some of his views on society their place in the world puts them above the fear of life; countrymen have At one level of reading this is just a political poem – an angry poetical made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and response to a particular event in which Yeats was passionately involved. so do not fear; and artists have made all the rest, because Providence has Sir Hugh Lane, a wealthy art collector (and Lady Gregory’s nephew), had filled them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, presented a unique collection of modern paintings to the city of Dublin, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleases them. Thus, with the proviso that the city build a suitable gallery to house them. for Yeats, the really important constituents of society were the aristocracy, There were various suggestions for building a gallery, such as one on a country people and artists. bridge over the River Liffey, but the entire project became entangled in increasingly bitter public disputes about the location, the architecture It should not surprise us that Yeats was bitterly disillusioned with the and particularly the cost. Yeats was furious about what seemed a mean- changes in society that were proceeding apace from the end of the spirited, penny-pinching and anti-cultural response to Lane’s generous 19th century and into the 20th: changes in land ownership hastened offer. The opponents of the project drew attention to the poverty and the demise of the aristocracy and a new upper and lower middle class slum living conditions that many Dubliners endured at the time and emerged. Yeats saw only a new Ireland of small shopkeepers, clerks accused the proponents of the gallery of putting art before bread and and traders, and it is at this section of the new society that he directs his also of an elitist arrogance typical of the Ascendancy class. wrath in the poem. In the main he makes two accusations. First, their only preoccupations are making money and practising religion, as he ironically The controversy developed strong overtones of class conflict and set says: ‘For men were born to pray and save’. They are a money-grubbing Yeats thinking about the recent changes in Irish society. The make-up and fearful people, tyrannised by their religion. Yeats is revolted by this

219 new explorations william butler yeats september 1913

combination of materialism and religious serfdom; it is the antithesis of as a solitary figure, often even in opposition to the people. There are his Renaissance model of a cultured society where art and literature are elements of both notions here. There are some hints of their popular valued. Second, these small-minded, self-regarding, blinkered people influence (‘The names that stilled your childish play’) and perhaps also are incapable of understanding the generosity of spirit and the self- in their willing sacrifice (‘all that blood was shed’). But the overwhelming sacrifice that motivated the patriots of old. Lines 25–30 can be read in impression is that of the solitary figure, apart, different: ‘they were of a this way. The selfless patriotism of the heroes of the past would now be different kind’; ‘the wild geese spread | The grey wing upon every tide’; misinterpreted by this unenlightened generation as love-crazed emotion ‘those exiles as they were | In all their loneliness and pain’. And it is this merely to impress a woman: difference that gives them status in the poem. By implication, the present generation lack their qualities of nobility, courage, selflessness and self- You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair sacrifice for an ideal. Has maddened every mother’s son’ Tone The present generation and society are contrasted, most unfavourably, This poem is built on contrast – an extreme, somewhat simplistic with previous generations. It is worth exploring Yeats’s notion of the contrast between a present and a past generation, or what Yeats sees heroic past and his view of the influential figures of romantic Ireland. They as representative figures from these generations. He idolises the heroic were all political rebels, risk-takers who tried and failed gloriously to free past in tones of reverence and awe. There is a suggestion of their strange Ireland. They all were men of action, soldiers who willingly gave liberty power in the ‘names that stilled your childish play’ and in the reference to or life for the cause: ‘They weighed so lightly what they gave’. They were their going ‘about the world like wind’. He empathises with their loneliness hugely energetic, forceful characters: and pain and inevitable fate: ‘But little time had they to pray’:

They have gone about the world like wind, For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, But little time had they to pray And what, God help us, could they save?

In particular, Yeats seems to admire their extraordinary selflessness and His undoubted admiration for their selfless courage is carried in ‘They courage, their almost manic bravery: ‘All that delirium of the brave’. weighed so lightly what they gave’ and in ‘All that delirium of the brave’. Yeats’s thinking accommodated two sometimes conflicting notions of In contrast, the new middle class is lampooned in the caricature of the the heroic: the hero as representative leader of a people and the hero shopkeeper as a kind of subhuman creature, fumbling, shivering and 220 new explorations william butler yeats september 1913

certainly not capable of understanding more noble motives. The tone of savage mockery is often achieved by the use of irony – for example, the perverse irony of ‘What need you, being come to sense’ – or the ironic statement of philosophy, ‘For men were born to pray and save’. The bitter contempt is hammered home through the repetition of ‘For this … for this … for this’. The sneer of disdain rings through these lines.

Altogether, this is a poem exhibiting passionate but contrasting emotions.

Themes and issues Bitter disillusion with recent social changes Contempt for the perceived materialism and religious serfdom of the new middle class of businesspeople Concern for the well-being of a cultured society; concern for its lack of altruistic principles and generosity of spirit A particular view of Irish history as a history of courageous failure in the struggle for independence A nostalgic, romanticised view of Irish history Thoughts on patriotism and the notion of the heroic

221 new explorations william butler yeats the wild swans at coole

The Wild Swans at Coole set him thinking of time, age and immortality, the death of love or the possibility of its being eternal. But this is one instance where a biographical Background approach does not help very much, as the poet orders and alters events This poem was written in 1916 and first published in the Little Review in and ideals to suit an artistic construction rather than any actual reality. 1917 and it is the title poem of the volume The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). When Iseult finally refused him in 1917, he married Georgina Hyde-Lees and bought a tower house, Thoor Ballylee, not far from Coole in Co. This poem is structured as a retrospection by Yeats as he records how his Galway. life has changed since he first stayed at Coole Park during the summer and autumn of 1897 (‘The nineteenth autumn’). It is important to be Themes and issues aware that this is an artistic construction, because in reality his state of This poem, as Yeats’s literary biographer Terence Brown says, ‘sets mind had changed very little. Though he chooses to say that he was more a mood of autumnal introspection’. In a certain sense it is quite a carefree (‘Trod with a lighter tread’) at that earlier period, probably for personal poem, in which Yeats, at 51, unmarried and alone despite many aesthetic purposes and to set up a contrast, he had actually been in a state passionate love affairs, takes stock of his emotional situation. Primarily of mental and nervous exhaustion during that visit in 1897. His love affair he laments the loss of youth, passion and love. He regrets the loss of with Diana Vernon had just ended. He was ‘tortured with sexual desire his carefree youth (‘Trod with a lighter tread’), however inaccurate and disappointed love’, and, as his diaries reveal, ‘It would have been a this nostalgia is. Now his ‘heart is sore’; he is a man broken-hearted, relief to have screamed aloud.’ discontented, emotionally unsatisfied. He no longer has what the swans appear to have – youthful passion. In the summer of 1916, the year the poem was written, Yeats went to France to see Maud Gonne, the great, omnipresent, passionate love Unwearied still, lover by lover … of his life for the previous quarter of a century. Her husband, Major Passion or conquest … Attend upon them still. John MacBride, had been shot for his part in the Easter Rising. She was working as a volunteer nurse with the war wounded and Yeats once He does not have unchanging or constant love, while ‘Their hearts have again proposed marriage to her. On her refusing for the last time he not grown old’. Above all else, the poet seems to resent the loss of contemplated the possibility of marriage with her adopted daughter, passionate love in his life; we cannot mistake this yearning in the many Iseult. Possibly it was this turmoil and the disparity in their ages that references to hearts, lovers, passion and conquests. 222 new explorations william butler yeats the wild swans at coole

The loss of love is just one aspect of Yeats’s general sense of regret here, concentrates our attention on the patterns they establish, patterns that which concerns ageing and the passage of time. Indeed, he seems to have will survive even though they may die. These ‘great broken rings’, the been ambushed by time – ‘The nineteenth autumn has come upon me’ spiral imagery they create, are similar to the gyres or cones of time that – and is forced to accept that ‘All’s changed’. His awareness of this and Yeats saw as the cyclical pattern behind all things, time and eternity. So his resentment are accentuated by the seeming immortality of the swans: there is a hint of the eternal about the spiral imagery the swans establish. ‘Their hearts have not grown old’. By implication, we sense the poet’s In addition, they link the water to the sky, link earth and heaven, and yearning for changelessness, for immortality. so in a way they are both mortal and immortal. The swans provide an exciting, vibrant, multilayered symbolism, but they are also hauntingly and Yet another kind of loss is hinted at here: the possible loss or diminution accurately described as real creatures. The real power and energy of the of the poetic gift, insight or vision. Perhaps that is what he fears at the end movement is evoked by the breathless enjambment of the lines and by of the poem in that final plaintive image: that the poetic sight or vision will the use of sinuous and muscular verbs and adverbs: have deserted him and passed to others. For him, the swans are in some way a manifestation of his poetic vision. We can see that he explores: All suddenly mount The personal loss of youth, passion and love And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. The consequences of ageing The passage of time and the yearning for changelessness and The swan imagery carries great resonances and symbolic value in the immortality poem, but there are also other images that add to the richness of texture. The loss of poetic power and vision – the sense of failure The ‘woodland paths’ can be either the straight paths of the intellect or the winding paths of intuition. Whatever symbolic weight they carry, they Imagery and symbolism are dry here, in keeping with the themes – lack of passion and creativity. The entire poem is structured around the swans, real and symbolic, which The trees, a great symbol of permanence for Yeats, are in the ageing have particular significance because they appear to have defied time cycle of their lives, as is the poet. for the past 19 years. They give the illusion of immortality: ‘Unwearied still … Passion or conquest … attend upon them still’. Our rational mind Three of the four symbolic elements are used in the poem: earth, air tells us that of course they may not be exactly the same swans, but the and water. Only fire is not used – indeed, is conspicuously absent. The poet glosses over and even builds further on this poetic illusion. He suggestion is that this is more than just a poem, that it carries elements 223 new explorations william butler yeats the wild swans at coole

of magical divination. Even the musical image ‘The bell-beat of their The poem moves from the particular to the general and then to wings above my head’ reinforces this sense of the magical. And of course the entirely speculative. Beneath the tranquillity of the imagery, the Yeats believed in and practised magic. Our sense of this is strengthened languidness of language and the sounds of the words, the ideas of the further by an exploration of the degree of patterning in the poem. Notice poem are tightly linked and structured. Notice how images or ideas are how the swans on the lake take to the air and finish by drifting on the still picked up from one stanza to the next, so that the stanzas are chain- water again – creating a perfect round or circular pattern. Consider the linked. The first stanza ends with the enumeration of ‘nine-and-fifty swans’ pattern of antitheses in the poem – between the swans and the speaker and the second stanza takes up the count: and between the poet now and the poet 19 years ago. And as the critic Donald Stauffer points out, the essential pattern is a contrast of moods, The nineteenth autumn has come upon me something experienced only by humans. The essential contrast in the Since I first made my count; poem is that between transient humanity and eternity. Stanzas 2 and 3 are linked by the poet’s looking: ‘I saw … I have looked’. All in all, there is a richness of imagery and symbolism here that can be At the end of stanza 3 he remembers or fancies his carefree ‘lighter tread’ enjoyed and appreciated at many levels. of 19 years earlier. Stanza 4 opens with the still ‘Unwearied’ creatures.

Structure The fifth stanza picks up phonetically on the word ‘still’, and though There is a gradual opening out of both the voice and the vista as semantically different, it provides a phonic linkage. There is of course this poem progresses. Stanza 1 just paints the picture, unemotionally the imagery link too, where swans paddling ‘in the cold | Companionable and accurately, as any ornithologist or naturalist might do. From this streams’ of the fourth stanza are picked up in the fifth stanza as they ‘drift very anchored and particular opening, we go to the poet’s personal on the still water’. reminiscences in the second and third stanzas before moving on to more generalised speculative philosophising in the fourth stanza. The final stanza opens up unanswerable questions, speculating on the future, leaving us with the possibility of a completely empty final scene, a blank canvas. The future is as unclear and ungraspable as that final question – incidentally, the only question in the poem.

224 new explorations william butler yeats an irish airman foresees his death

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death In contrast, the war seemed like an adventure, an ‘impulse of delight’, a ‘tumult in the clouds’. The poem captures the excitement and exhilaration Background felt by many a volunteer. As Ulick O’Connor put it (in The Yeats This poem was one of a number written by the poet for Robert Gregory, Companion, 1990), ‘There can seldom have been a better summing up Lady Gregory’s son, including ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ and ‘In Memory of the sense of elation which the freedom to roam the uncharted skies of Major Robert Gregory’. Yeats saw Gregory as an educated aristocrat brought to the young men of Gregory’s pre-1914 generation.’ and all-round Renaissance man (‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he’). He was also an energetic boxer and hunter and a painter who designed sets for Yet the decision to volunteer was not a heady, emotional one. The poem Yeats’s own plays. The poem was written in 1918 and first published in the stresses the thought and calculation brought to the decision. The concept second edition of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). of balance is repeatedly stressed:

I balanced all, brought all to mind … A reading of the poem In balance with this life, this death. At one obvious level of reading, this is a type of elegy in memory of the dead man. But it is a variation on the form in that it is structured as a He was not carried away by the emotion of enlistment meetings (‘Nor monologue by the dead man rather than the more usual direct lament by public men, nor cheering crowds’). He was not moved by any sense of a poet praising the person’s good qualities and showing how much he is ‘duty’ or patriotism; neither was there conscription in Ireland (‘Nor law, nor missed, and so on. duty bade me fight’). These ‘nor – nor’ negatives of the rejected motives are balanced against the excitement of action. The general picture is of It makes an interesting contribution to war poetry in its attempt to chart a young man who has chosen, after careful consideration, this path of the motivation and psychological state of the volunteer. What strikes one action – almost, indeed, chosen his death. immediately is not just the fatalism – he knows his death is imminent – but the bleakness of his outlook on life, his disenchantment with living, despite This heavy sense of fatalism is most obvious in the opening lines. But his privileged background: there is never a sense in which this fatalism is merely weak surrender or opting out. He accepts his fate and he goes consenting to his death, but The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind more like one of Homer’s heroes. Yeats gives Gregory Homeric stature by allowing him to choose a heroic death, and this gives meaning to 225 new explorations william butler yeats an irish airman foresees his death

an otherwise meaningless conflict. The airman feels none of the great culture as well as a man of action. Yeats had felt that the ‘lonely impulse passions of war, neither patriotic love nor hatred of the foe: of delight’ was what differentiated the artist from others, that the artistic impulse was essentially lonely and solitary. Here we see this artistic impulse Those that I fight I do not hate, motivating a man of action, who is essentially instinctive rather than Those that I guard I do not love intellectual. Yeats felt that the impulse was sometimes hampered in the artist, who often thought too much. The later Yeats began to champion Further, he does not think the war will make a whit of difference to his the non-intellectual hero and the instinctive man; the sportsman and the own countrymen: adventurer are given the status of mythic figures. The airman Gregory is essentially a solitary figure, like other mythic figures created by Yeats, No likely end could bring them loss such as the ‘Fisherman’. Or leave them happier than before.

Some critics read this poem as a classic statement of Anglo-Irishness as But it is the self-sacrificing death, ‘this death’ freely chosen, that raises Yeats saw it. In later life Yeats used to talk about the ‘Anglo-Irish solitude’. the young man above the events of his time and confers particular Is there a sense here of not quite fully belonging to either side, of being significance on him. The awareness of impending death also brings this neither fully committed English nor unreservedly Irish? There is certainly moment of insight, this clearness of vision that allowed him to evaluate his a sense of emotional distance on the part of the subject, both from those past life and contemplate a possible future as a country landowner – all of he guards and those he fights. Though he has an affinity with ‘Kiltartan’s which he rejects for the ‘tumult’ of action. poor’ (‘My countrymen’), he is aware that the war and his involvement in it will have no impact on their lives. In general, the feeling one gets is of As a war poem, this is an interesting, personal, even intimate approach, some detachment from the events in which he participates, and this could charting the thoughts and motivation of this young man. But it has a more be read as a metaphor for ‘Anglo-Irish solitude’. general aspect too. Gregory may be seen as representative of all those young men of talent who were cheated of their promise by the slaughter of the First World War.

We have already mentioned that Yeats saw Gregory as the all-round Renaissance man – in other words, an educated man and person of 226 new explorations william butler yeats easter 1916

Easter 1916 This ambiguity was further complicated by Yeats’s arrogant and scathing dismissal of the current generation of Irish people as ignoble, self-focused, Background materialistic and priest controlled, who were totally incapable of the On Monday, 24 April 1916, a force of about 700 members of the Irish idealism or courage necessary for heroic leadership and personal sacrifice. Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army took over the centre of Dublin He had expressed these views very trenchantly in ‘September 1913’. in a military revolution and held out for six days against the British army. At first the rising did not receive widespread support, but the British The Rising took Yeats by surprise and blew some serious holes in his military authorities regarded it as high treason in a time of war, and the thinking. First, he now had to rethink his public stance and views on subsequent systematic executions of 15 of the leaders between 3 and the new Irish middle class. These people had been prepared to give 12 May brought a wave of public sympathy and created heroes and their lives for an ideal. Yeats had been quite wrong. Second, though he martyrs for the republican cause. Though Yeats’s poem was finished was disgusted, like most people, at the savagery of the executions, he by September 1916 and a number of copies had been printed privately, began to realise that the establishment’s brutality had created martyrs it was not published until October 1920, when it appeared in the New and had transformed ordinary men into patriots with a strange new Statesman. It is included in the volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer unchallengeable power. Perhaps Pearse’s idea of a blood sacrifice (1921). was correct. Yeats had to rethink the place and value of revolutionary determination. Thus, Yeats had to work out how this cataclysmic change The national question: Yeats’s political views had occurred in Irish society – ‘All changed, changed utterly’. Yeats spent a good deal of his time in England during his early life, but he felt that the English understanding of the Irish was stereotypical A reading of the poem and condescending. One of his main ambitions was to help change Though on the surface it may not appear to be a questioning poem, this Ireland’s view of itself through a revival of its unique cultural identity. He work is really an attempt to answer or clarify a great number of questions had denounced the English government of Ireland and his refusal of a that the 1916 Rising stirred up in Yeats’s mind, an attempt to come to knighthood in 1915 was a statement of his political stance. Yet his view did terms with: not prevent him from living there, and indeed he was in England when the How everything had changed. Easter Rising took place. How wrong he had been. How ordinary people had been changed into heroes.

227 new explorations william butler yeats easter 1916

The deep structure of change in society, the mysterious process, a He includes himself (‘they and I’) in this attempt at identification. kind of fate that directed and powered change. (Terence Brown puts it eloquently: ‘It seeks to penetrate beneath the appearance of history He spends the second section looking again at these people he knew, to comprehend the mysteries of destiny.’) as he needs to understand how they have changed. They are still the The place and functioning of revolutionary violence in the process. flawed characters he remembers: Constance Markiewicz wasted her time The change in his own position: how to resolve his own complex and in misplaced volunteer work (‘ignorant good-will’) and became a shrill contradictory feelings towards this violent process. fanatic (‘nights in argument … voice grew shrill’); he thought MacBride was a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ who ‘had done most bitter wrong’ to Yeats faced the diplomatic difficulty of having to recant his views on Maud Gonne and Iseult. These are ordinary, fallible, flawed and unlikely Irish society honestly and generously in the first section of this poem. heroes. Technically he achieved this by structuring the poem as a palinode, or recantation of his opinions in the earlier ‘September 1913’. Recreating the Furthermore, the impression Yeats perceives is not one of energetically drab, unexciting milieu of pre-revolution evenings, the poet acknowledges active heroes, but rather the passive recipients of this mysterious change. his own blindness and failure to engage with these people in any depth: MacDonagh ‘might have won fame in the end’. MacBride ‘has resigned his part | In the casual comedy’. This smacks of an unknown actor I have passed with a nod of the head giving up his part in an inconsequential work. The impression given is of Or polite meaningless words, relatively insignificant lives, out of which MacBride ‘has been changed in Or have lingered a while and said his turn’. Note the passive voice: the change was effected on him rather Polite meaningless words than by something he did, and it happened ‘in his turn’. He waited his turn – perhaps a reference to the executions. Is Yeats saying that it was the He confesses to his own unpleasant, condescending mockery (‘a mocking executions that effected this change, transformed everyone utterly, and tale or a gibe’) and his belief that all the pre-1916 organising was mere gave birth to this ‘terrible beauty’? That it was not due to the nature or any comical posturing: action of heroes? Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn Another aspect of these patriots to which Yeats refers is their feminine qualities. ‘What voice more sweet’ than Constance Gore-Booth’s (in

228 new explorations william butler yeats easter 1916

younger days)? MacDonagh’s thought is ‘daring and sweet’. Even last the opinion becomes so much a part of them that MacBride has his passive side. So there is a sensitivity about these people it is as though a part of their flesh becomes, as it were, that balances their more aggressive and masculine qualities, also referred to. stone, and much of their being passes out of life.

It is this softer, feminine quality in man and woman that is destroyed by In this third stanza Yeats is exploring the dangers of fanatical devotion to fanaticism, something Yeats explores in the third and fourth stanzas. a cause or ideal, and he represents this metaphorically as the conflicting But first it is worth noticing the feminine aspect of the new order. This forces between a stone and a stream. The ‘living stream’ is marvellously utter transformation of the social and historical reality is imagined as evoked. It is a picture of constant change, the flux of natural life and a new birth, but Yeats is so disturbed and confused by it that he can bursting with energy. The seasons are changing ‘Through summer and only describe it in paradoxical terms as a ‘terrible beauty’ – something winter’; the skies change ‘From cloud to tumbling cloud’; all is life and that is partly feminine, aesthetically pleasing, sexually alluring even, but regeneration, as ‘hens to moor-cocks call’. It is full of transient animal and which also carries suggestions of terror and of destructive power. This human appearances, as they slide or plash or dive. And all this activity magnificent image carries all Yeats’s confusions and contradictory feelings happens ‘Minute by minute’. Against this stream of ever-changing energy about the dramatic change. and life is set the unmoving stone, the fanatical heart. It is not difficult to conclude that the weight of the poet’s sentiment is with the ‘living stream’ In the third stanza he explores how change is effected. Only a stone, rather than the unmoving stone. And yet out of this confrontation is born usually taken as a metaphor for the fanatical heart, can change or trouble the ‘terrible beauty’. the course of a stream, and it can achieve this only at a price. The heart will lose its humanness: ‘Too long a sacrifice | Can make a stone of the There is no easy answer to the conflicts posed by the poet, and indeed he heart.’ In the 1909 Journals, Yeats had already written about the effects of seems to weary of the dialogue and of this dialectic in the fourth stanza. political fanaticism on Maud Gonne, in metaphors akin to those used here: Having concluded that prolonged devotion to an ideal is dehumanising – ‘Too long a sacrifice | Can make a stone of the heart’ – he seems to Women, because the main event of their lives has accept the necessity of it and at the same time wishes for an end in that been a giving of themselves, give themselves to an sighing plea: ‘O when may it suffice?’ opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll … They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child and all The first 17 lines of stanza 4 are structured in questions – rhetorical this is done for something other than human life. At questions, or questions that cannot be answered – thereby revealing the 229 new explorations william butler yeats easter 1916

poet’s uncertainties about the validity of the entire process of revolution I write it out in a verse – and change. There is a kind of shocked vulnerability about the poetic MacDonagh and MacBride voice here, a realisation of helplessness as all the doubts flood in with the And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, questions: Are they really dead? Was it necessary if England intended Wherever green is worn, to grant home rule after the war? What if they were just confused and Are changed, changed utterly: bewildered by an excess of patriotism? There is an awareness that some A terrible beauty is born. things cannot be answered, that some of this mysterious dynamic of change cannot be understood – ‘That is Heaven’s part’. And the poet adopts a soothing mother’s voice and persona, murmuring ‘As a mother names her child’.

But then he seems to shake off the uncertain and shocked voice and finds a new assurance for that very definite, confident ending. Why is this? Terence Brown believes it has to do with the magical significance of the poem, deliberately created by Yeats. He suggests that the poem is a ‘numerological artefact’, based on the date when the rising began: 24 April 1916. There are four movements or sections, with the following numbers of lines in each: 16, 24, 16, 24. It is also suggested that Yeats intended this to be a verse of power, a magical recitation, seen in, for example, ‘I number him in the song’; ‘I write it out in a verse’. Certainly there is a surge of powerful assurance in those final lines, whether we read them as a litany of respectful remembrance or an occult incantation:

230 new explorations william butler yeats the second coming

The Second Coming passes from one gyre to its contrary. In history, he believed, this can happen every 2,000 years. Hence the reference to ‘twenty centuries of Background stony sleep’ that preceded the Christian era, which is now waning and This poem was finished in January 1919 against a background of great giving way to a new and anti-thetical era. In its Christian interpretation, political upheaval in Europe: the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian, the ‘Second Coming’ refers to the prediction of the second coming of German and Russian empires and uprisings and revolution in Germany Christ; in Yeats’s occult and magical philosophy it might also refer to the and Russia. The events in Europe are most likely to have prompted the second birth of the Avatar or great anti-thetical spirit, which Yeats and his speculation that ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, but as the poem wife felt certain would be reincarnated as their baby son, whose birth was was not published for 22 months, in the Dial of November 1920, it came imminent. In fact, the child turned out to be a girl, dashing that theory. In to be read as a reaction to the atrocities of the War of Independence this poem the hideous ‘rough beast’ that ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem in Ireland. It is included in the volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer to be born’ is suggestive of the Anti-Christ, that legendary personal (1921). opponent of Christ and his kingdom expected to appear before the end of the world. See, for example, the Book of Revelations (Chapter 13) on Yeats’s occult philosophy and theories of history the portents for the end of the world: Yeats was deeply interested in the patterns of history. He was also And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns engaged in the study and practice of the occult and maintained regular and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns contact with the spirits. These ‘spirit communicators’ helped him develop and a blasphemous name upon its heads. And the a cyclical theory of change in history, which is outlined in A Vision (1925). beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like He used geometrical forms to express abstract ideas, and the concept of a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And gyres, or cones, representing time zones is one of these. In this poem the to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have a reference is to a single gyre or inverted cone, but the full representation mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and of the gyres consists of two interpenetrating cones expanding and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder. Men contracting on a single axis. These represent the contrary forces, always worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority changing, that determine the character of a person or the culture of a to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, particular phase in history. There are particularly significant moments ‘Who is like the beast and who can fight against it?’ both for individuals and in historical time when the dominant influence

231 new explorations william butler yeats the second coming

A reading of the poem there is this confusing circular movement, an out-of-control centrifugal This poem reflects Yeats’s interest in historical change and his real fear force that threatens to send everything spinning away in disorder. In this that civilisation would break down and be replaced by an anti-civilisation chaos, human beings are changing, becoming ignoble and destroying or an era of anarchy. This was sparked off in part by his disgust and innocence: ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’. People either have revulsion at what was happening in European politics and history no convictions at all or are irrationally and passionately committed to around this time (1919). But as we have seen, he was also preoccupied causes; they have become either cynics or fanatics: with patterns in history and immersed himself in the occult, with signs, portents, astrological charts and spirit communicators, and had developed The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. a cyclical theory of change in history, which was represented graphically by the gyre symbol. This poem deals with the turbulence of historical The first stanza embodies this very tension in its structure. Consider how change, but what is particularly exciting is the enormous perspective that the ideas are set up as opposites: falcon – falconer; centre – fall apart; the poet takes. Time is not counted in years or decades but in millennia, indifference – intensity; innocence – anarchy. This polar oppositional and it is this vast perspective that is both exhilarating and terrifying. tension is seen in the terrifying image of the ‘blood-dimmed tide … loosed … innocence is drowned’. This sinister image has connotations of First stanza the great flood and its destruction of the world, but might also suggest a Essentially what is happening here is that Yeats is exploring the break- ruthless cleansing or purging. The repetition of ‘loosed upon’ and ‘loosed’ up of civilisation in metaphorical language. The falcon, that trained bird might suggest a savage wild animal, or at the very least the dogs of war. of prey, ‘cannot hear the falconer’ and is reverting to its wild state. The The circular imagery creates a sense of continuous swirling movement. falconer has also been interpreted as a representation of Christ, so the Look at the repetition of -ing: ‘Turning’, ‘turning’, ‘widening’. There is a image has been read as representing the movement of civilisation away sense of a world out of control, of inevitable disaster. from Christ. This dissipation is happening within the framework of its allotted time span, at a point within the gyre representing the present. It is the force of the imagery that carries the ideas in this stanza. Consider Yeats is bringing a critical philosophical viewpoint to bear on the social the falconry image. This was the pastime of kings and lords, so the image and political structures. He suggests that there is failure at the very heart carries associations of an aristocratic life, civilised living, affluence. We of society, presumably in human beings themselves: ‘Things fall apart; the know how much Yeats valued civilised living. Falconry was a ‘noble’ centre cannot hold’. Instead of clear-sighted vision and forward progress, pastime, requiring skill and patience. Now this trained bird of prey is 232 new explorations william butler yeats the second coming

reverting to its wild state – a metaphor for the destruction of civilised embodies the absolute reverse of the Christian era, which is now drawing living. It would also carry religious overtones and signal the breakdown to its end in the gyre of time. This ‘rough beast’, a nightmare symbol of of ordered religious systems. The falcon has also been interpreted the coming times, signals the end of this era, with its values and order. as symbolic of the active or intellectual mind, so the breakdown of intellectual order might be signalled as well. Either way, the image Again, the image of this ‘rough beast’ carries all the ideas about the suggests dissolution in a number of different spheres and levels. new era. It is a ‘vast image’, overwhelming and troubling. It is a horrific hybrid of human and animal, suggesting unnatural times, such as The second graphic image, of the ‘blood-dimmed tide’, has already been foretold in the Book of Revelations. Its blank gaze suggests no intelligent explored for its layers of suggestiveness. Its general impact is powerful, sight or understanding; indeed, it is as ‘pitiless as the sun’, incapable of both visually and intellectually: innocence is drowned in a sea of blood. empathy or feeling. The qualities it conjures up are gracelessness and This is the ultimate nihilism, a world without justice, reason or order. Note brutishness: ‘moving its slow thighs … Slouches towards Bethlehem Yeats’s emphasis on the ‘ceremony’ of innocence. The rituals of civilised to be born’. The final paradox is explained by the fact that its era has living will also be destroyed, of course. already begun, overlapping with the demise of the Christian era, so it is moving into position to initiate the new age or to be born. The paradox The final image of the stanza, though somewhat ill defined, is a political further emphasises the anti-thetical nature of the coming age: how one, suggesting that fanatical people now have all the influence and are totally contradictory or opposite it is. There is something blasphemously in power. The general impact of the imagery is one of frightening and shocking in the idea of the beast being born at Bethlehem. The nugget of irrational disorder and break-up in life and society. insight gained by the poet out of this horrific vision concerns the nature of time and changing eras. He realises that eras have come and gone before Second stanza and that the advent of the Christian era must have been as troubling to Yeats begins by casting around for a reason for the breakdown of the previous age: civilisation, and the possibility of a second coming, together with the end of the world, suggests itself as the only one great enough to cause … now I know this: ‘Surely the Second Coming is at hand’. But it turns out not to be That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle the Second Coming of Christ as foretold in the Gospels, but rather the emergence of the Anti-Christ that Yeats imagines, an Anti-Christ who

233 new explorations william butler yeats sailing to byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms Background Notice the perspective (‘That’): he has already departed and is looking This poem was written sometime in the autumn of 1926 and is the back, not without a little nostalgic yearning for the sensuality of youth. opening poem in the collection The Tower (1928). The sensual imagery of lovers and the teeming rich life of trees and seas, the athletic vigour of the hyphenated words (‘The salmon-falls, the A reading of the poem mackerel-crowded seas’) and the sensual f and s sounds of ‘Fish, flesh, or Writing for a radio programme in 1931, Yeats outlined some of the fowl’ – all used to describe the cycle of life in the flesh – would strongly preoccupations of his poetry at that time, in particular the spiritual quest suggest that he does not renounce it easily. Indeed, this ambiguity is of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: carried in the paradox of ‘Those dying generations’, with its linking of Now I am trying to write about the state of my soul, death and regeneration. for it is right for an old man to make his soul [an expression meaning to prepare for death], and some The importance of the spirit is re-emphasised in the second stanza as of my thoughts upon that subject I have put into a the poet asserts that it is the soul that gives meaning to a person: ‘An poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. When Irishmen aged man is but a paltry thing … unless | Soul clap its hands and sing’. were illuminating the Book of Kells and making the Art enriches the soul, teaches it to sing: ‘studying | Monuments of its jewelled crosiers of the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation and the source own magnificence’, i.e. works of art inspired by the spirit. Byzantium, as a of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolise the search centre of religion, philosophy and learning and also of a highly formalised for the spiritual life by a journey to that city. art, is the ideal destination for the intellectual and spiritual person. In A Vision (1925), Yeats wrote about the harmoniousness of life in 5th-century This poem is structured, as he says, in the shape of a journey – more of Byzantium: ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since a quest, really – with a tightly argued personal commentary by the poet. in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.’ He The main theme surfaces immediately in the first stanza. With that strong, had visited Ravenna in 1907 and when he composed the third stanza he declamatory opening he renounces the world of the senses for that of the probably had in mind a mosaic on the wall of Sant’Apollinoare Nuova spirit and the intellect, the timeless: showing martyrs being burned in a fire.

234 new explorations william butler yeats sailing to byzantium

Addressing these sages or martyrs directly in the third stanza, he entreats he needs to be embraced, gathered in arms. Ironically, he wants to be them to traverse history in the gyre of time, come to him and teach his gathered into the coherence and timelessness of art – ‘the artifice of soul to sing. He wants them to ‘make’ his soul, as he said, to purify it, eternity’. It is through this transition that he will find immortality. But the separate it from emotions and desires and help it transcend the ageing language carries hints of ambiguity, even about this much-desired goal. physical body: ‘Artifice’ refers primarily to a work of art, but it can also mean ‘artificiality’. Is this the first hint that this great quest might be flawed? Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal Still, he begins the fourth stanza with great confidence that art holds It knows not what it is the answer to the problem of mortality. ‘Once out of nature’ he will be transformed into the perfect work of art and so live on. The golden bird These lines betray a seriously troubled state of mind. Central to the is ageless and incorruptible and will sing the song of the soul. The final conflict is a dualist view of the human being as composed of two radically irony, though, is that the song it sings is about the flux of time, ‘what is different and warring elements: body, and soul or spirit. Yeats values one past, or passing, or to come’. There is no perfect solution after all. element – the soul – imaged as singer and bird, but is filled with self- disgust and loathing for his ageing body, imaged as a dying animal, not Themes and issues even dignified as human, that has entrapped the soul. Discuss these and see if you can justify each from the evidence of the poem. This confusion is evident even in the ambiguity of language here, in, for Yeats in old age is attempting to develop his spiritual side. It is a poem example, ‘sick with desire’. Is he sick because of the desires of the flesh he about the values of the soul as against the world of the senses. cannot shake off or does the desire refer to his spiritual aspiration, which It is an attempt to escape the harsh reality of old age and death continues to elude him? This acute existential conflict has led to a loss of through the immortality of spiritual things and of art. spiritual identity: ‘It knows not what it is’, hence his emotional entreaty to The view of the human being portrayed is that of a fractured, divided the sages to ‘gather me | Into the artifice of eternity’. entity in an uncomfortable state of war between the spiritual and the physical. It is worth exploring the richness of this ordinary language here. By using It is a meditation on the nature of art and its importance to humanity. ‘gather me’ the poet is acknowledging how fragmented and scattered It delivers fine insights into the nature of Byzantine imagination and his condition is and how he needs both direction and comfort; it is as if culture. 235 new explorations william butler yeats sailing to byzantium

Structure might also notice other rhetorical qualities, such as the strong declamatory As befits the theme of conflict, the ideas and images in this poem are opening, the rhetorical plea to the sages or indeed the strong, confident, developed in a series of antinomies, or contrasts. In the very first line, first person voice of the poet all through the poem. These sometimes youth and age are set opposite each other: ‘That is no country for old belie the conflicts and uncertainties at the heart of the work. men’. While youth is imaged in those wonderful scenes of sensuous life in the first stanza, age is realised in the scarecrow image – ‘A tattered coat upon a stick’ – with all its suggestions of fake outward show, a grotesque parody of the human being and the sense of powerlessness and indignity. The body is imaged as a dying animal, while the soul is imaged as a priceless golden bird, singing.

The mortality of life is contrasted with the timelessness of art. The teeming sensuality of Ireland is set against the culture of Byzantium, with its religious ethos (‘holy city’, ‘God’s holy fire’), its reputation for learning and philosophical thought (‘O sages’) and its artistic achievement (‘artifice’, ‘a form as Grecian goldsmiths make | Of hammered gold and gold enamelling’, etc.). These conflicts reflect the internal struggle, the yearnings and the reality within the poetic persona here.

Yet the struggle is smoothed over by the grace and elegance of the language used. There is a regular pattern of end-rhymes or sometimes half-rhymes which gives the verses a musical ease. Yeats also uses a rhythmic phrasing, often grouping in lists of three, which has magical significance as well as producing a rhythmic rise and fall: ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl’, ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’, ‘unless | Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing’, ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’. We

236 new explorations william butler yeats the stare’s nest by my window

The Stare’s Nest by My Window of adversity’. So in section V, when a band of Irregulars calls to his door, he experiences a certain envy of the men of action. Perhaps it is the Background: From ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ graphic details of that war in section VI that led to a reappraisal. The ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ is quite a lengthy poem, structured terrifying vision of the nightmarish destruction of civilisation in section VII in seven sections. Apart from the first section, composed in England in throws him back to thinking on his own role as poet in his isolated tower. 1921, it was written in Ireland during the Civil War of 1922–23 and was first published in the Dell in January 1923. It is included in the volume The Yeats wrote the following description of the genesis and context of Tower (1928). section VI:

I was in my Galway house during the first months In the poem as a whole, Yeats explores aspects of the Anglo-Irish of civil war, the railway bridges blown up and the Ascendancy tradition: its origins and heritage and his own sense of sharing roads blocked with stones and trees. For the first in the values of that tradition, particularly those of continuity, culture week there were no newspapers, no reliable news, and family line. Conflict was a necessary element of that planter culture, we did not know who had won nor who had lost, and and now he is brought face to face with the violence of the Civil War even after newspapers came, one never knew what and must re-evaluate his own role in the continuing tradition of history. was happening on the other side of the hill or of the line of trees. Ford cars passed the house from time Images of houses and building provide one of the unifying metaphors and to time with coffins standing upon end between the themes throughout this poem. Yeats acknowledges the violence out of seats, and sometimes at night we heard an explosion, which the great Anglo-Irish culture was built: and once by day saw the smoke made by the burning of a great neighbouring house. Men must have Some violent bitter man, some powerful man lived so through many tumultuous centuries. One Called architect and artist in, that they, felt an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty The sweetness that all longed for night and day. of nature. A stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole beside my window and I made these verses out of the feeling of the moment … His own house in Co. Galway, Thoor Ballylee, was originally a defensive [here he quoted from ‘The bees build in the crevices’ 15th-century tower. He proudly acknowledges that conflict is part of his to ‘Yet no clear fact to be discerned: come build in tradition; he wishes that his descendants will also find ‘befitting emblems 237 new explorations william butler yeats the stare’s nest by my window

the empty house of the stare.’] … That is only the and creative force, as opposed to the destructive forces round about. beginning but it runs on in the same mood. Presently They bring sweetness, healing and the richness of life. These may also be a strange thing happened. I began to smell honey a classical allusion to Porphyry’s bees, who visited the world to perform in places where honey could not be, at the end of a tasks for the gods. Thus, the bees could be seen as a manifestation of the stone passage or at some windy turn of the road, and it came always with certain thoughts. When I got divine in the world. Whether they evoked for Yeats the simple beauty back to Dublin I was with angry people who argued of nature or carried more complex connotations, his plea to them is a over everything or were eager to know the exact facts: desperate, plaintive cry. That cry for healing and for natural regeneration in the midst of the mood that makes realistic drama. of life echoes through that repeated refrain at the end of each stanza, (From The Bounty of Sweden) culminating in the final direct personal address, ‘O honey-bees’. There is honest emotion here. But this is more than simply a reaction to a A reading of the poem specific event. Taken in the context of the poem as a whole, we could At one level, this poem is an attempt to balance the horrors of war with read this section as a metaphor for Yeats’s own life situation and that of the healing sweetness and regenerative power of nature. As Yeats himself his traditional class, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The tower house, once saw it, ‘Men must have lived so through many tumultuous centuries. One a fortified planter house, used as a place of both safety and dominance, felt an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to is now a place of ‘loosening masonry’; the structures of that colonial past lose all sense of the beauty of nature.’ The brutality of war is graphically are crumbling. The Yeats’ isolation in the tower during that particular represented here: fortnight is symptomatic of the isolation and uncertain future of the entire minority but once-powerful class: Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty The onomatopoeic sound of ‘trundled’ carries suggestions of some primitive war machine or evokes the tumbrels and savage excess of the This is not just physical imprisonment but a mental segregation, a way French Revolution. There is none of the traditional respect for a dead of viewing themselves as different, distinct and separate – a cultivated enemy here, but rather the ferocity of civil war enmity in the indignity with isolation. which the dead solder was treated – ‘trundled … in his blood’. The bees are evoked as an antidote to this savagery. They may symbolise patience

238 new explorations william butler yeats the stare’s nest by my window

The key has been turned from the inside. The physical barriers of stone or Imagery wood accord with the mental barriers created by class and outlook, so that Images of houses and buildings dominate this poem, but they are either we are acutely aware of how introverted and cut off the poet is. Yet there abandoned, like the house of stone, or destroyed by violence (‘a house is a hint in the first stanza that some sweetness can come with the ending burned’), or are gradually crumbling away in time (‘loosening masonry’, of his self-isolation: ‘My wall is loosening’). They are symbols of a way of life being destroyed or else they are isolating and self-imprisoning: My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. We are closed in, the key is turned On our uncertainty Or is this just a vain hope? Any building done is for a destructive and disorderly purpose: ‘A In the final stanza he faces up to the illusions on which his philosophy is barricade of stone or of wood’. The poet’s plea, while romantic and based and which are explored in the rest of the poem: that sweetness positive in outlook, is rather pathetic in the context. Only the bees and and beauty might grow out of bitter and violent conquest, that conflict birds may build where the once-powerful colonising class raised great and a life of adversity could be a glorious thing. These are the fantasies edifices. that sustain his class outlook and for which he now indicts himself. The consequence has been not beauty, but self-brutalisation: ‘The heart’s grown brutal from the fare’. He strips away any delusions of superiority or righteousness as he admits that negative emotions are strongest:

More substance in our enmities Than in our love

It is as if the violence outside has forced him to confront the past violence of his own class in an honest moment of shared guilt. This is a critical moment of bleak insight, yet one that he attempts to balance with the final plea – ‘O honey-bees’ – a plea for sweetness and healing at a time of pain, for order in a time of chaos. 239 new explorations william butler yeats in memory of eva gore-booth and con markiewicz

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con in courtesy, appealed to Yeats and he considered Eva and Con along Markiewicz with Maud Gonne as betraying something precious and feminine.’ Yeats’s idea of beauty is linked to the feminine. The image of feminine beauty he creates here is exotic. The ‘silk kimonos’ give a hint of Eastern Background mysteriousness, while the comparison with a gazelle suggests both a This poem was written in the autumn of 1927, was first published in 1929 natural elegance and a certain wild, unknowable quality. And the two and is included in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Constance sisters are a decorative part of the Big House scene, a house that is Markiewicz had died in August 1927, her sister Eva the previous year. elegant, imposing, a symbol of Anglo-Irish achievement and cultured A reading of the poem way of life. It is primarily this image and what it symbolised that Yeats is nostalgic for: it is not the people he missed in the first instance, but the This is one of Yeats’s poems of age, the reverie of an old man addressing house and the cultured dinner-table conversation! the now-dead companions of his youth: ‘Dear shadows’. It is very much a retrospective piece, viewing life from the perspective of the end. Many a time I think to seek Yeats avoids sentimentality, opting instead for retrospective judgments, One or the other out and speak assessing the significance of their lives. He felt that they had wasted their Of that old Georgian mansion, mix lives. He dismisses Constance Markiewicz’s years of political agitation for Pictures of the mind, recall socialist and republican ideals as dragging out ‘lonely years’ – ‘Conspiring That table and the talk of youth among the ignorant’ – while Eva’s social and women’s suffrage work is merely ‘Some vague Utopia’. Yeats’s negative retrospective judgments are not so much the bitter rantings of an old man, but rather what he saw as a failure to fulfil an To understand this harsh condemnation of what to us seem idealistic and inherited role in society. committed lives, we need to take the poet’s value system into account. His view was that the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class, with its wealth and But this has some of the more usual features of an age poem – the great houses, had a duty to set an example of gracious and cultured contrast of youth and age. The ‘Two girls in silk kimonos … one a gazelle’ living; this was its value for society. As the critic Alasdair MacRae says, become ‘withered old and skeleton-gaunt’. It is interesting that old bodies ‘The graciousness of accustomed affluence, the unostentatiousness are rarely beautiful for Yeats: he is repelled and disgusted by physical of inherited furnishings and family traditions, what he saw culminating ageing. We are made aware of the ravages of time very early on in the

240 new explorations william butler yeats in memory of eva gore-booth and con markiewicz

poem, right after the first four lines of that beautiful limpid opening, and it in political agitation and he seems quite excited by the possibility of comes as quite a shocking contrast: the great final ‘conflagration’. This is communicated by the energy and repetition of strong verbs (strike, strike, climb, run) and by the repetition But a raving autumn shears of phrases (‘strike a match’). Blossom from the summer’s wreath Themes and issues Autumn is ‘raving’, mad, hysterical, out of control, and the sharp-edged What is a worthwhile way to live life? onomatopoeic sound of ‘shears’ conveys its deadly potential. Even The vagaries of life, the imperfection summer carries the seeds of death in its ‘wreath’. Is it all vanity? What is the point of it all? The real enemy is time Out of this retrospection, Yeats attempts to distil a certain wisdom about Contrasting youth and age life. He sets down this philosophy in the second stanza. In a more kindly address to the ‘Dear shadows’, he presumes they now agree with him Rhymes and rhythms about the vanity of all causes and all zeal, irrespective of rightness: Though Yeats imposes a quatrain rhyming scheme, abba, on the poem, he does not structure the thought in quatrains, apart from the first four All the folly of a fight lines. The first stanza, for instance, is structured periodically in groups of 4, With a common wrong or right. 5, 4, 7. Thus, the thought structure provides a sort of counter-rhythm to the rhyming structure and gives it a conversational naturalness. Second, he knows that the great quarrel is with time, destroyer of innocence and beauty. He reflects on the vanity of it all, as it will end in a This naturalness is emphasised by the use of off-rhymes rather than full great apocalyptic ‘conflagration’ that will consume not just all they’ve built rhymes, for example south – both, wreath – death, ignorant – gaunt, – great houses or mere gazebos – but all the anguished decisions of their recall – gazelle. Some could argue that the imperfect rhyme befits the lives. All is vanity before the end. theme – the imperfections of life. The rhythmic quality of the language is achieved partly through repetitions: repetitions of phrases such as ‘And Tone bid me strike a match’, but more obviously with the repetition of the At times he manages to be gently nostalgic, such as at the beginning and well-known refrain ‘Two girls’. However, the tone of the second repetition end of the first stanza, but he can be very censorious about lives wasted 241 new explorations william butler yeats in memory of eva gore-booth and con markiewicz

differs markedly from the first because of the context, where it now carries all the bleak irony and the disappointment of hindsight.

Structure The structure of this poem is almost unnoticed, so deftly is it done. It opens with ‘The light of evening’, proceeds to the darkness of ‘Dear shadows’ and erupts again into the final apocalyptic inferno of the end of time. It begins with youth and ends with death; it opens with the great house of Lissadell and ends with a fragile ‘gazebo’.

242 new explorations william butler yeats swift’s epitaph

Swift’s Epitaph Here is laid the body of JONATHAN SWIFT, doctor of sacred theology, Background dean of this cathedral church, Begun in 1929 and finished in September 1930, this was first published where savage indignation in Dublin Magazine in the winter of 1931. It is included in the volume can no longer The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). The poem is essentially a rend his heart. translation, with some alterations, of the Latin epitaph on Jonathan Swift’s Go, traveller, memorial in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin: and imitate, if you can, an earnest and dedicated Hic depositum est Corpus champion of liberty. JONATHAN SWIFTS.T.D. He died on the nineteenth day of October Hujus Ecclesiae Cathedralis AD 1745, in the year of his age 78. Decani, Ubi saeva Indignatio Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Ulterius Poet, political pamphleteer and satirist, he was the author of such famous Cor lacerare nequit. works as The Drapier’s Letters, A Modest Proposal, A Tale of a Tub and Abi Viator Gulliver’s Travels. Politically conservative, Swift voiced the concerns and Et imitare, si poteris, values of Protestant Ireland with an independence of spirit and a courage Strenuum pro virili that Yeats admired greatly. Swift’s writing made him enemies on all sides, Libertatis vindicatorem. but this isolation endeared him even further to Yeats, who often spoke Obiit 19o Die Mensis Octobris admiringly of ‘Anglo-Irish solitude’. Yeats thought of Swift as a heroic A.D. 1745. Anno Aetatis 78o. figure, an artist-philosopher who despite the conflicts of his personal life served liberty by speaking out in his writings and freeing the artist from the tyranny of the mob. He ranked Swift together with Berkeley, Goldsmith and Burke as one of the intellectual founders of the Anglo- Irish tradition.

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Yeats’s play The Words upon the Window Pane (1930) explores some of the conflicts of Swift’s life.

A free translation Among the chief interests of the Yeats poem is the significance of the changes he made. For instance, ‘Swift has sailed into his rest’ is much more confident, energetic and vigorous than the original. It sounds more like a victorious progress, while being at the same time a gentle and graceful journey. There are also clearer overtones of a spiritual afterlife – ‘his rest’ – where the original merely notes the depositing of the body.

He retains the famous reference to ‘saeva Indignatio’ (savage indignation), which was the driving force of Swift’s satirical work, and the reference to his capacity for empathy and for being affected by the injustices and miseries he encountered (‘Cannot lacerate his breast’). The challenge to the observer is stronger than in the original – to imitate him ‘if you dare’ rather than ‘if you can’. And the traveller is described as ‘World-besotted’, worldly, lacking in spiritual values and outlook. The implication may be to enhance, by contrast, the unworldly qualities of Swift (which would be somewhat at variance with the facts). Yeats also retains the epithet noting Swift’s defence of liberty, a philosophy they shared.

In general it might be said that Yeats has nudged the epitaph more in the direction of a eulogy. In addition, there is more transparent emotion and admiration in the Yeats version.

244 new explorations william butler yeats an acre of grass

An Acre of Grass Real creativity needs something more, like mystical insight, and that comes only through passionate endeavour or frenzy. Hence his prayer, Background ‘Grant me an old man’s frenzy’. That frenzy or madness produced This poem was written in November 1936 and first published in New insight and truth for King Lear at the end of his life, and mystical visions, Poems (1938). which some interpret as madness, produced the beautiful wisdom of William Blake’s poetry. Even at the end of his life, Yeats knows the huge A reading of the poem transforming energy necessary to forge new insights and truths, and he This poem is quite a remarkable response to old age and thoughts of faces up to it: ‘Myself must I remake’. What courage for a person in his death. The first stanza captures the shrinkage of an old person’s physical seventies! world in the twilight years. With the ebbing of physical strength, his world is reduced to the gardens of his house, ‘An acre of green grass | For air Yeats had been reading Nietzsche’s The Dawn of Day, about people of and exercise’. The final two lines of the stanza are a marvellous evocation genius who can distance themselves from character and temperament of the stillness, isolation and sense of emptiness that can be experienced and rise above the weight of personality like a winged creature. Yeats at night by the wakeful elderly, a feeling carried in part by the broad vowel had used Nietzsche’s ideas to develop his theory of the Mask: he felt the rhymes ‘house – mouse’: need to continually transform himself. And this is the ideology driving this poem – the need for transformation in order to achieve new insights Midnight, an old house and truths. The poet must discard the persona of dignified old man and Where nothing stirs but a mouse. remake himself as a wild, mad, prophet-like figure, such as Timon or He could easily resign himself to restfulness and silence: ‘My temptation is Lear or Blake, and that will bring the searing vision, the ‘eagle mind’ ‘That quiet.’ But this old man, this poet, needs to write, to continue to find new can pierce the clouds’. This is a poet’s fighting response to old age and truths, and he knows that neither a ‘loose imagination’ – an imagination approaching death. It may remind us of Dylan Thomas’s later ‘Rage, rage that is not disciplined by the structure of writing – nor any ordinary against the dying of the light’. observation of everyday occurrences will deliver up any significant truths:

Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make truth known. 245 new explorations william butler yeats an acre of grass

Themes and issues Explore the following ideas and expand on each with reference to what you find in the poem. A response to ageing: Refusing to accept a quiet retirement; summoning reserves of energy to continue working; aware of the huge demands, yet praying for the chance. The process of creativity: The ordinary imagination processing or milling everyday events is not sufficient; a frenzy or madness is necessary in order to see things differently or see into things; the after- truths or insights are all-consuming; the power of that insight can ‘pierce the clouds’ and ‘Shake the dead’. The poet’s need for continued transformation: Is it comfortable being a poet? Is it worth it?

246 new explorations william butler yeats politics

Politics simplicity of the language, give the impression that this is lightweight verse. But as with all good satire, we are lulled into a false sense of security A reading of the poem until the final punch is thrown. We know that Yeats had intended that the volume Last Poems should end with ‘Politics’. It is suggested that it was written as an answer to an article that had praised Yeats for his public language but suggested that he should use it more on political subjects. If so, then this is written as a mocking, ironic, tongue-in-cheek response. The speaker affects the pose of a distracted lover who is too preoccupied with the woman to give any attention to the political chaos of European politics of the mid-1930s: Franco, Mussolini, etc. He is little concerned for these earth-shattering events, dismissing them casually in a throwaway comment:

And maybe what they say is true Of war and war’s alarms

We can almost see the shrug of indifference.

But the mask of the dispassionate observer slips in the final two lines as his passionate yearning breaks through and we realise that the ‘she’ is probably Caitlín Ní Uallacháin – Ireland. Thus, we understand Yeats’s mocking response to those who have not understood one of his major poetical preoccupations.

The regularity of the four-stress lines alternating with three-stress lines and the simplicity of alternative end-line rhymes, together with the

247 new explorations william butler yeats from ‘under ben bulben’: sections v and vi from ‘Under Ben Bulben’: Sections V and VI pseudo-science of improving the human race through selective breeding). Yeats had joined the Eugenics Society in London in 1936 Background and became interested in research on intelligence testing. During The final draft of this poem is dated 4 September 1938, about five 1938 he worked on a verse tract on this topic, published as On months before the poet’s death. Parts of it were published in 1939. the Boiler (1939). Convinced that eugenics was crucial to the future of civilisation, he wrote: ‘Sooner or later we must limit the families of Some acquaintance with the poem as a whole is necessary for an the unintelligent classes and if our government cannot send them understanding of the context of sections V and VI. It is recommended doctor and clinic it must, till it gets tired of it, send monk and that you read through all six sections. confession box.’ Section VI of ‘Under Ben Bulben’ rounds his life to its close and moves ‘Under Ben Bulben’ can be seen as Yeats’s poetic testimony, an from the mythologies associated with the top of Ben Bulben to the elegy for himself, defining his convictions and the poetical and social real earth at its foot, in Drumcliff churchyard. philosophies that motivated his life’s work. Section I incorporates the two main belief systems that informed his A reading of the poem poetry: the occult philosophy and folk beliefs and traditions. Section V Section II features another aspect of his belief system: reincarnation. This is Yeats’s advice to Irish poets concerning the model or tradition they Section III suggests that poetic insight is born out of moments of should follow, and the model he recommends is a new, composite one violence; that violence and conflict can be invigorating. attempting to fuse together two cultural traditions, those of peasant and Section IV outlines what he considers to be the great tradition aristocratic cultures: in art, from Pythagoras through Egyptian and Greek sculpture to Sing the peasantry, and then Michelangelo’s Renaissance. Hard-riding country gentlemen In Sections IV and V Yeats urges all artists, poets, painters and sculptors to do their work in this great tradition of art, to promote the The former is the Irish tradition of folk and fairytales and fantastical necessary heroic images that nourish civilisation. Specifically, he had mythology; the latter is the Anglo-Irish cultural tradition, which Yeats in mind the forms of the perfected human body as the necessary traced back to the ‘other days’ referred to, the 18th century and the poetic inspiration, a concept linked to his ideas on eugenics (the intellectual contribution of Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith and Burke. He 248 new explorations william butler yeats from ‘under ben bulben’: sections v and vi

valued this tradition for its spirit of free enquiry, its sense of order and churchyard, panning by the church and the ancient cross until it finishes the example of gracious living it produced in Georgian mansions and with a close-up of the epitaph cut in limestone. The effect is of a closing fine estates. To this fusion he adds the religious tradition as worthy of down of Yeats’s life, a narrowing in to death. Many of the important celebration (‘The holiness of monks’), followed immediately by ‘Porter- elements of Yeats’s life are here: the mythology and folklore associated drinkers’ randy laughter’, which rather devalues the former. Perhaps it’s with Ben Bulben; the sense of ancestry, family and continuity provided meant to be ironic. The Irish nobility are worthy of celebration, even by the rector; and the continuity of cultural tradition in the ‘ancient though they ‘were beaten into the clay | Through seven heroic centuries’. Cross’. No ostentatious marble tomb or conventional, tired phrases are Thus, heroic defeat is a fitting subject. permitted, but rather a piece of indigenous material, local stone, to carry his epitaph. This is a curiously impersonal epitaph, neither celebrating But once again Yeats scorns the present generation. Physically they the person’s virtues nor asking remembrance or recommending the soul do not conform to the traditional model of aesthetic beauty (‘All to God: rather, it is a stark piece of advice that the challenges of life and out of shape from toe to top’). With an arrogance derived from the death should not be taken too seriously but should be regarded with reprehensible theories of eugenics, he scorns their low intelligence and a certain detachment. It is his final summation, that all the great issues inferior lineage: merely come to this.

Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds.

That arrogant tone continues, ending in that triumphant note – ‘Still the indomitable Irishry’. The trouble with this poem is that it is so ‘well made’ – the rhythms of the language, the regular metre, the alliterative repetitions, the graphically grotesque imagery, etc. – that it can distract us from the seriously questionable class and racist attitudes.

Section VI This section is beautifully structured, like a film shot. Opening with a long shot of the mountain, the camera draws back and focuses on the 249 new explorations william butler yeats overview of themes and issues

Overview of themes and issues Aesthetic values and the place of art in society (‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Under Ben Bulben’) On each point, return to the poem for reference and further exploration. The yearnings for order and the fear of anarchy (‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘The Second Coming’) Yeats and the national question His views on the proper contribution of women to society (‘In Among the issues explored by the poet under this heading are: Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, ‘Easter 1916’) The heroic past; patriots are risk-takers, rebels, self-sacrificing idealists who are capable of all that ‘delirium of the brave’ (‘September 1913’) Theories of history, time and change How heroes are created, how ordinary people are changed (‘Easter His notion of thousand-year eras, gyres, etc. (‘The Second Coming’) 1916’) The world and people in constant change and flux (‘The Second The place of violence in the process of political change; the paradox Coming’, ‘Easter 1916’) of the ‘terrible beauty’ (‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Meditations in Personal ageing, the transience of humanity (‘The Wild Swans at Time of Civil War’) Coole’, ‘An Acre of Grass’) The place of ‘fanaticism’ and the human effects of it – the ‘stone of The yearning for changelessness and immortality (‘The Wild Swans at the heart’ (‘Easter 1916’, ‘September 1913’, ‘In Memory of Eva Gore- Coole’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’) Booth and Con Markiewicz’) The timelessness of art, or the possibility of it (‘Sailing to Byzantium’) The force of political passion (‘Easter 1916’, ‘Politics’) Conflicts at the centre of the human being Yeats’s notions of the ideal society The conflict between physical desires and spiritual aspirations (‘Sailing The vital contribution that both the aristocracy and artists make to Byzantium’) to society; the importance of the Anglo-Irish tradition in Irish society The quest for aesthetic satisfaction (‘Sailing to Byzantium’). (‘September 1913’, ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con The search for wisdom and peace, which is not satisfied here (‘The Markiewicz’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Swift’s Epitaph’, Lake Isle of Innisfree’) ‘Under Ben Bulben’) A persistent sense of loss or failure; loss of youth and passion (‘The His contempt for the new middle class and the new materialism Wild Swans at Coole’); the loss of poetic vision and insight (‘An Acre (‘September 1913’) of Grass’)

250 new explorations william butler yeats developing a personal response to the poetry of w.b. yeats

Developing a personal response to the poetry of W.B. Yeats

1. Select the poem by Yeats that made the greatest impact on you and write about your reaction to it. 2. What issues raised by the poet did you think significant? 3. On reading this selection, what did you find surprising or interesting? 4. What impressions of Yeats as a person did you form? 5. What questions would you like to ask him? 6. Do you think it important for Irish pupils to study Yeats? 7. What do you find difficult about the poetry of Yeats? 8. What do you like about his poetry?

251 new explorations william butler yeats questions

Questions

1. Select any major theme explored by Yeats and outline his treatment of it. 2. Review critically any poem by Yeats that you considered interesting. 3. ‘Yeats displayed great reverence for the past but little respect for his own time.’ Consider the truth of this statement in light of the poems you have examined. 4. ‘W.B. Yeats explored complex issues of national identity with great honesty.’ Discuss. 5. Having read his poetry, what do you think Yeats chiefly valued in life? 6. ‘Yeats’s poetry is fuelled by conflict – conflict between past and present, youth and age, mind and body.’ Explore this view of his poetry.

252 new explorations william butler yeats bibliography

Bibliography Jeffares, A.N., W.B. Yeats: A New Biography, London: Hutchinson 1988. Jeffares, A.N. (ed.), Yeats’s Poems, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989. Brown, T., The Life of W.B. Yeats, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1999. Jeffares, A.N. and MacBride White, A. (eds), The Gonne–Yeats Letters, Cullingford, E.B., Yeats: Poems, 1919–1935 (Casebook Series), 1893–1938, London: Hutchinson 1992. Basingstoke: Macmillan 1984. Kelly, J. (ed.), The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats (three vols), Oxford: Cullingford, E.B., Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, Cambridge: Clarendon Press 1986, 1997, 1994. Cambridge University Press 1993. Kinahan, F., Yeats, Folklore and Occultism, Boston: Unwin Hyman 1988. Donoghue, D. (ed.), W.B. Yeats: Memoirs, London: Macmillan 1972. MacRae, A., W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995. Ellman, R., The Identity of Yeats, London: Faber & Faber 1968. Martin, A., W.B. Yeats, Gerrards Cross (Bucks): Colin Smythe 1983. Ellman, R., Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979. Smith, S., W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990. Foster, R.F., W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997. Tuohy, F., Yeats, London: Macmillan 1976.

Harwood, J., Olivia Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats, Basingstoke: Macmillan Yeats, W.B., A Vision [1925], London: Macmillan 1937. 1989. Yeats, W.B., Autobiographies: Memoirs and Reflections, London: Hone, J., W.B. Yeats, Harmondsworth (Middx): Pelican Books 1971. Macmillan 1955.

Jeffares, A.N., W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet, London: Routledge and Kegan Yeats, W.B., Mythologies, London: Macmillan 1959. Paul 1966. Yeats, W.B., Essays and Introductions, New York: Macmillan 1961. Jeffares, A.N., W.B. Yeats: The Poems, London: Edward Arnold 1979.

253 Robert Frost Notes and Explorations: Marie Dunne

254 new explorations robert frost introduction

Introduction hay and apple-picking – was done by hand. He wrote his poems at night. Many years later he recalled his favourite activities as ‘mowing with a A literary life scythe, chopping with an axe, and writing with a pen’. Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on 26 March 1874. He was a sickly child and received his early education at home. Though pampered A working life by his protective mother, he was often harshly disciplined by his violent Neither farming nor poetry earned Frost enough money to support and drunken father. In 1885 his father died following a long illness, leaving his wife and four children, so at the age of 32 he was forced to seek his family penniless. Robert moved with his younger sister, Jeannie, and regular paid employment. A pastor of the First Congregational Church his mother to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his grandparents lived. His suggested to him that he should apply for a vacancy at Pinkerton mother found employment in nearby schools and the two children began Academy in Derry Village. A trustee of the academy told him he would their formal education in her class. be employed if one of his poems were read at the banquet of the Men’s League of the Congregational Church. Frost submitted ‘The Tuft of Robert entered Lawrence High School in 1888. He chose the classical Flowers’. It was well received and secured him the position. He taught curriculum: Latin, Greek, ancient and European history and mathematics. English, Latin, history and geometry, coached the debating team, advised During his final year he fell in love with a classmate, Elinor White. They the school newspaper and assisted with athletics. Exhausted by his married on 19 December 1895, when he was 21 and she was 23. After workload, he moved from the academy in 1911 and became a lecturer in finishing secondary school Frost went to Dartmouth College, but he the teacher training college in New Hampshire. left in 1893, halfway through his first year. He taught his mother’s senior class for several months until the term ended, then took a variety of low- A literary education paid jobs in a woollen mill, as a rural schoolteacher and as a newspaper Frost devoted his free time to reading the major poets. He studied their reporter. In September 1897 Frost entered Harvard University, but again diction, their imagery and their formal techniques in order to perfect his left without a degree. own writing. His work was heavily influenced by his classical education. The concise language, concentrated images and clarity of thought in When he returned home he was encouraged by his doctor to become a his poems reflect this training, while his knowledge of strict classical farmer in order to improve his health. He lived on small farms at first in metre allowed him to write with confidence in traditional forms. Biblical New Hampshire and later in Vermont where the work – mowing, making references reflect his early scripture studies. Other influences on his

255 new explorations robert frost introduction

work include Shakespeare, the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats and deadly. Acknowledging this, Frost once said, ‘There’s plenty to be and Shelley) and the Victorian poets (Hardy, Kipling and Browning). He dark about, you know. It’s full of darkness.’ followed the principles laid down in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ concerning the language, people, places and events appropriate First publications to poetry. Like Wordsworth, he relied on incidents from ‘common life’ For a long time Frost had difficulty finding a publisher. Partly as a result of and discovered in them ‘the primary laws of our nature’. He agreed with this the Frost family decided to emigrate from America to England in 1912 Wordsworth that these events should be described in ‘language really and they settled at Beaconsfield, near London. Frost arranged his lyrical used by men’. poems in book form and then sought a publisher.

In his own poems he attempted to reproduce as accurately as possible The collection called A Boy’s Will appeared in April 1913; his second book, the tone and modulations of the spoken word. ‘Wordsworth was right,’ North of Boston, came out a year later. The books were widely praised he commented, ‘in trying to reproduce in his poetry not only the words and Frost was quickly introduced into literary circles in London, where he … actually used in common speech … but their sound.’ He believed that met W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. He was very pleased when Yeats told rhymes should be unforced and natural, although, unlike many of his Pound that A Boy’s Will was ‘the best thing that had come out of America contemporaries, he refused to abandon the rules of poetry to achieve for some time’. A Boy’s Will introduces the natural elements Frost would this effect. ‘The most important thing about a poem … is how wilfully, use in many future poems: stars, clouds, leaves, pools, brooks, flowers gracefully, naturally, entertainingly and beautifully its rhymes are,’ he and birds. North of Boston, written between 1905 and 1913, saw a shift wrote in 1939. He wanted the rhythm in his verse to spring from the of emphasis from man as a solitary creature to man as a social being. tension that occurs when a strong rhythmic pattern based on iambic Though he called it ‘This Book of People’, many characters in North of metre is played against the irregularity of ordinary speech. He repeatedly Boston experience a deep sense of loneliness. With his second publication stressed the importance of the living voice, ‘the rise and fall, the stressed Frost clearly indicated that, like the English poet Thomas Hardy, he would pauses and little hurries, of spoken language’, and insisted that the tone concentrate on the regional. of voice added to the meaning of words in the poems. Frost found modernist poetry unappealing and wrote instead about preindustrial Frost is a New England poet. His previous experiences in low-paid values, rural life and nature. Yet there is nothing sentimental in his work: jobs and on farms gave him an intimate knowledge of ordinary people the world portrayed in his poetry can be bleak, lonely, chilled, blighted living ordinary lives. His work expresses the value he placed on rural life, practical experience and the independence of the individual. 256 new explorations robert frost introduction

Return to America baby girl. Irma, his third daughter, suffered from mental illness and, like Frost returned to America after the outbreak of the First World War, Lesley, blamed all her problems on Frost. where he wrote his next book, Mountain Interval, which contains some of his best-known poems, including ‘Birches’, ‘Out, Out—’ and ‘The Road Despite this turmoil, Frost produced A Further Range in 1936; it contains Not Taken’. His characteristic themes of isolation, fear, sudden violence ‘Provide, Provide’ and ‘Design’. Here he displays his technical skills. Within and death are all apparent here. The favourable reviews Mountain Interval this volume there is satire and comedy, the lyric, ballad, epigram, historical received strengthened Frost’s reputation. He bought a farm in New narrative and dramatic monologue. Teaching, public appearances, Hampshire and supported his family by teaching, readings and lectures as interviews and readings kept him busy until tragedy struck again. On 20 well as royalties from his books. March 1938, Elinor died from a heart attack. Unable to cope with her death, Frost left the funeral arrangements to Lesley; in a stormy scene In January 1917 he was made professor of English at Amherst College, she accused him of ruining her mother’s life. Irma became permanently Massachusetts. By 1920 he could afford to move to Vermont and estranged from him and his only surviving son, Carol, succumbed to deep devote himself to writing poetry and apple-farming. Following his fourth depression. Frost was deeply upset. He turned to his friend, secretary publication, New Hampshire (1923), Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. and manager, Kay Morrison, for consolation. Disturbed by his mother’s He received the award four times in all: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. His death and troubled by his father’s relationship with Kay, worried by his fifth volume of poems, West-Running Brook, containing ‘Spring Pools’ wife’s illness, a lack of money and the belief that he was a failure, Carol and ‘Acquainted with the Night’, came out in 1928. committed suicide in 1940.

Sadly, Frost’s personal life was as unhappy as his public life was successful. Frost looked to poetry to save him from despair. Many of his new poems His sister Jeannie was committed to a mental hospital, where she were written for Kay, expressing his love for her. A Witness Tree (1942) remained until her death in 1929. His wife’s health began to deteriorate won him his fourth Pulitzer Prize. His eighth volume, Steeple Bush, was rapidly. His eldest daughter, Lesley, who had dropped out of university published in May 1947 and is dedicated to his six grandchildren. Having and divorced her husband, angrily blamed her father for her problems. held academic positions already in the University of Michigan, Harvard His favourite child, Marjorie, had a nervous breakdown and by 1930 University and Dartmouth College, Frost returned to Amherst College developed tuberculosis; she died in 1934, aged 29, leaving a husband and from 1949 to 1963.

257 new explorations robert frost introduction

The final years In his final years Frost enjoyed public acclaim. He travelled as a celebrated visitor to Brazil, Peru, England, Israel, Greece, Russia and Ireland. He paid his first visit to Dublin in 1928, when he spent five pleasant days in the company of his friends, the writers Pádraic Colum and George Russell. Colum and Russell took him to a reception where he met Yeats once again. He returned to Ireland in June 1957 to receive an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland, presented by the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, who was chancellor of the university.

In 1961 he was invited to recite ‘The Gift Outright’ at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, watched on television by 60 million people. On his eighty-eighth birthday, in 1962, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal; in the same year he published his final volume, In the Clearing. On 29 January 1963, two months before his eighty-ninth birthday, Frost died in a Boston hospital.

258 new explorations robert frost the tuft of flowers

The Tuft of Flowers In the final movement the poet examines the effect of this discovery. The flowers connect the mower and the narrator, who sees in them a ‘message A reading of the poem from the dawn’. Through the power of the imagination he is transported ‘The Tuft of Flowers’ introduces the themes that dominate much of back through time to the early morning, when the birds sang as the scythe Frost’s poetry. These themes, developed as the narrative unfolds, include cut through the tall grasses. The speaker recognises in the mower ‘a spirit the passage of time, loneliness, communication and the power of the kindred to my own’ and can reach out across time and space to touch the imagination. The use of a first person narrator makes the poem a more thoughts of the absent labourer. This connection forces the speaker to immediate and realistic experience; the reader is drawn into the poet’s revise his earlier opinion that humans are destined to be lonely and alone. world and explores the themes ‘as with his aid’. Now he can confidently declare: ‘Men work together … Whether they work together or apart.’ The poem opens with the narrator setting out to turn the cut grass so that it will dry in the sun. In a scene reminiscent of the Romantic era, the The turning points in the poem are indicated by the use of the word ‘but’. speaker is depicted as a figure of isolation in the landscape. He searches The speaker, who has eagerly sought the companionship of the mower, in vain for the mower, ‘But he had gone his way, the grass all mown’. The comes to the sad realisation that ‘he had gone his way, the grass all mown, narrator sadly concludes that loneliness is intrinsic to the human condition, | And I must be, as he had been – alone.’ Almost immediately he is joined whether people ‘work together or apart’. This marks the end of the first by another creature: movement of the poem. But as I said it, swift there passes me by On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly The second movement begins with the arrival of the butterfly, which, like the speaker, is searching for something it cannot find. It flutters in He makes to turn away from the butterfly, confusion around the withered flowers on the ground and then returns to the poet, who prepares to continue with his work. The butterfly, however, But he turned first, and led my eye to look draws his attention to the tuft of flowers beside the stream. This leads At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook us into the third movement. Unlike the other flowers, these have been spared by the mower because he loved them. He left them to flourish on The narrator’s mood undergoes a significant change as a result: ‘But the bank ‘from sheer morning gladness’. glad with him, I worked as with his aid’. A form of communication exists 259 new explorations robert frost the tuft of flowers

between the mower and the speaker and the poem now ends with the consoling thought that ‘Men work together … Whether they work together or apart’.

Imagery The central image in the poem is the tuft of flowers called butterfly weed; Frost describes it as a ‘leaping tongue of bloom’. The key word here is ‘tongue’, for the flowers ‘speak’ to him, bringing him a ‘message from the dawn’. They enable him to hear the wakening birds and the whispering scythe. This message permits the speaker to commune imaginatively with the mower and hold ‘brotherly speech’ with him. The mower with his long scythe is suggestive of the Grim Reaper. He cuts the grass and possesses the power to kill the flowers or to spare them. He comes and goes silently and is never seen by mortal eyes. His power over life and death is contrasted with the helplessness of the butterfly ‘on tremulous wing’. (Frost returned to the image of the flower, the moth and death in a later poem, ‘Design’.) The mower should not be seen solely as a symbol of death: he is at the same time a farm labourer and a spiritual companion for the speaker, one with whom the speaker can communicate ‘from the heart’.

260 new explorations robert frost mending wall

Mending Wall The annual wall-repairing ritual occurs in the spring. Ironically, the narrator and his neighbour work together to maintain the boundary that separates Background them; they are unified by their divisions. It seems as if a magic formula This poem appeared in North of Boston (1914). During a reading, Frost is required to keep the stones in place. At first it is like a game. A more explained that wall-mending was an occupation he used to follow. His serious note is introduced when the need for the wall is questioned. neighbour was very particular every spring about repairing the boundary Unable to provide a rational argument, the neighbour falls back on the on their land. Frost never ceased to be amazed by the damage done to proverb ‘Good fences make good neighbors’. The narrator mischievously the wall during the winter; it reminded him of the line in St Matthew’s challenges this assumption. Borders wall things in as well as blocking gospel, ‘There shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not things out. They cause offence – a pun on the word ‘fence’. According to be thrown down.’ folklore, elves do not like walls or closed gates, but the speaker does not suggest this to his dourly practical neighbour: ‘I’d rather | He said it for A reading of the poem himself’. In a note to the original edition of North of Boston, Frost stated that ‘Mending Wall’ considers the beliefs that separate men and takes up The narrator wants the neighbour to reject the division, even the theme where ‘The Tuft of Flowers’ laid it down. There are two imaginatively, for himself. He describes the man as ‘an old-stone savage characters in the poem, the narrator and his neighbour, who see the wall armed’. Not only is he working with stones but his attitudes are primitive, in very different ways. They are brought together to repair the damaged his beliefs have not evolved. He is as territorial as his Stone Age ancestors. boundary in the spring. He is armed not simply with stones but with dangerous, inflexible attitudes. His attitudes are unenlightened: ‘He moves in darkness’. The The poem opens on a mysterious note: some unidentified force exists neighbour, as dark and prickly as his pine trees, refuses to change sides. that dislikes walls. The soft s sounds capture the sensation of the silently He sticks doggedly to ‘his father’s saying’, repeating the proverb as swelling ground that dislodges the stones. The broad vowels mimic proudly as if he had coined the phrase himself. the shape of the rounded boulders that roll off the wall, leaving O- and U-shaped gaps behind. Frost distinguishes between these unexplained Balance Frost always claimed he was not ‘taking sides’ in ‘Mending Wall’: ‘I’ve gaps and those caused by the hunters. Of the gaps that he means, ‘No played exactly fair in it. Twice I say, “Good fences” and twice “Something one has seen them made or heard them made’.

261 new explorations robert frost mending wall

there is”.’ The tension between these two opposites is played out in the Boundaries are often political in nature. In a discussion on ‘Mending Wall’ poem. With clear boundaries, each knows where his limits are, where Frost once exclaimed, ‘You can make it national or international.’ Read in he stands and what confines him; without a wall there is confusion and this way, the neighbours can be seen as representing different nationalities misunderstanding. Distance, like differences, can be good. This is one or cultures, separate yet co-existing peacefully, learning to respect each reason why the narrator informs the neighbour about the gaps, even other’s differences and co-operating to uphold them. though he later challenges him about the need to rebuild the wall. The psychological differences between the two men are perhaps the The ‘balancing act’ Frost achieves between the arguments in the poem is most striking. The narrator seems more open to change, more willing to mirrored in the image of the fallen stones: challenge accepted practices (‘Why do they make good neighbors?’), more humorous (‘Spring is the mischief in me’) and more imaginative (‘I To each the boulders have fallen to each… could say “Elves” to him’) than his conservative neighbour. The narrator We have to use a spell to make them balance realises that sometimes ‘we do not need the wall’, but this notion meets with firm resistance: ‘He will not go behind his father’s saying’. His Frost presents strong arguments on both sides. However, it is slightly neighbour is a traditionalist and stands behind received wisdom with the disingenuous for him to claim that there is complete impartiality in the same tenacity as he stands behind the stone wall. poem. The ‘something’ that dislodges the boulders and swells the ground beneath the wall is, of course, frost heaving. Structure The poem moves through three stages. The first phase is largely Themes descriptive. Frost distinguishes between the gaps in the wall, those Frost explained that ‘Mending Wall’ is about boundaries. These created by the unseen force and those made by hunters. In the second boundaries can be physical, political and psychological. The physical phase he introduces the neighbour and explains how the two men work boundary in the poem is the stone wall. The two men repair the wall, to rebuild the wall. In the third and final phase he contrasts the attitudes working together to maintain their divisions: of the men. The narrator is portrayed as mischievous, imaginative, progressive and questioning, while the neighbour is depicted as ‘an old- … we meet to walk the line stone savage armed’, conservative, lacking originality, staid, accepting and And set the wall between us once again. repetitive.

262 new explorations robert frost after apple-picking

After Apple-Picking loaded. The repeated sound patterns in the language used capture the sensuousness of the experience: A reading of the poem There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, ‘After Apple-Picking’ is a complex poem. At a surface level it can be Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. read as a nature poem, like Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ – a celebration of the natural abundance of the harvest. At the same time it dwells on Art cannot permanently transform life; the visionary state cannot be the languor of the weary harvester and can be compared to ‘Ode to a sustained for long. Frost accepts the transitory nature of the experience. Nightingale’, with its lethargic mood and sensuous imagery. At a deeper Like the sheet of ice, ‘It melted, and I let it fall and break’. The creative level it can be read as a study of the creative process. effort has left him physically and mentally exhausted:

The orchard is described at the outset. The harvest is over. The air, heavy … I am overtired with the scent of mature apples, has a sensual, almost narcotic effect on Of the great harvest I myself desired. the apple-picker. The long vowel sounds, the irregular rhyming scheme, the slow tempo and incantatory rhythm suggest that the repetitive work The creative mood disappears and he slips into sleep, long, dark and has lulled him into a semi-conscious state. (The word ‘sleep’ appears six deep, as experienced by the hibernating woodchuck, ‘Or just some times in the poem.) The speaker, like Keats in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, human sleep’. He has climbed down from the visionary heights, like the sinks into a drowsy numbness. This suspension of consciousness releases boy in ‘Birches’, and returned to earth. his imagination. He enters a visionary state conducive to artistic creativity: Ways of seeing … I am drowsing off. Sight and insight are important issues in ‘After Apple-Picking’. In I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight the opening scene the speaker looks upwards towards Heaven and I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough downwards to the barrel. This reflects the main movement in the poem: the ascent towards the visionary heights and the gradual descent to In this dream-like state he evokes the sensuousness of the harvest. He can normality. The focus slips and becomes blurred when the speaker smell the ‘scent of apples’, see ‘Magnified apples appear and disappear’, drowses off. He enters a semi-conscious state, neither awake nor asleep. feel ‘the ladder sway’ and hear the ‘rumbling sound’ of the fruit as it is Paradoxically, this releases his imagination and frees it from its sense- 263 new explorations robert frost after apple-picking

bound limitations. He now sees in a new way. The familiar becomes weariness. It It seems he is too tired to vary his vocabulary and maintain strange, transformed in a visionary world by his imagination. In this the discipline of a strict rhyming pattern. The lethargic mood is reinforced state his perspective changes and his perceptions intensify. The focus through the use of long vowels and the slow, irregular rhythm. He enters is sharpened and magnified. Even the smallest details on the apple are a dream-like state, yet it is not without a feeling of unease. He is overtired visible: ‘And every fleck of russet showing clear’. and cannot escape the sensations of the day’s work. There are moments of tension when he remembers the care required to prevent the fruit from In his heightened state of consciousness he is doubly aware of every falling: sensation: For all My instep arch not only keeps the ache, That struck the earth, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap This in turn leads to new insights and understanding: As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble The languid mood is re-established in the final lines, where the speaker This sleep of mine ... approaches complete loss of consciousness:

Finally, exhausted physically and mentally, he sinks into a long, natural The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his sleep, his eyes closed, and he sees no more. Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. Mood The poem describes the drift from consciousness to unconsciousness. The calm, peaceful mood in the opening lines is replaced by a sense of physical and mental exhaustion as the speaker becomes increasingly vague (‘there may be’, ‘upon some bough’, ‘two or three’). The breakdown of the rhyming scheme and the repetition (‘sleep’ is mentioned six times, ‘apple’ or ‘apples’ seven times, ‘I’ 16 times) reflect his

264 new explorations robert frost birches

Birches tempted from his chores by the trees. He imagines this boy to be independent and resourceful, someone who ‘could play alone’. The boy A reading of the poem challenges authority. He defiantly subdues his father’s trees until ‘not one The poem begins with a description of the birches bending against a was left | For him to conquer’. background of upright trees. Their movement inspires an imaginative response in the speaker: ‘I like to think some boy’s been swinging them’. He flings outward, feet first, and rebelliously kicks his way to his These opening lines establish the tripartite structure of the poem: first destination. With practice, he combines caution with daring. Skilfully, there is the description of the trees, then there is the account of the young like an artist, he learns the importance of maintaining his poise until he boy climbing the birches and finally there is the speaker’s response to this reaches his point of departure, then he launches himself with carefree imagined scene. abandon through the air until he returns to earth. Similarly, a poet learns with practice ‘over and over again’ to take the ‘stiffness’ from his verse The speaker describes the effect of the winter storms on the birches. He until he has mastered the poetic technique. A good poet, like a good notes the noise they make as the ice-coated branches ‘click’, ‘crack’ and climber, must not launch out too soon but keep his poise and then, when ‘craze’. The hard cr sounds capture the tapping of the frozen twigs. The the poem is completed, return to the prosaic world. thaw causes them to shed their icy coverings. These ‘crystal shells’ litter the ground so thickly that it seems like ‘the inner dome of heaven had In the third section the speaker recalls that he was once a ‘swinger of fallen’. This is a reference to medieval cosmology, which depicted the birches’. Now, when weary and troubled, he longs to recapture the earth surrounded by crystal shells that held the sun, moon and stars in freedom he knew in his youth. He would like to remove himself from the orbit. Shelley alluded to the same image in ‘Adonais’. The great weight world for a short time and then return to begin afresh. This is not a death of ice bows down the trees. They never recover their original position but wish – ‘May no fate wilfully misunderstand me … and snatch me away | grow with their trunks arched and their branches trailing the ground. In a Not to return’ – nor does he wish to escape from reality. ‘Birches’, Frost striking image, Frost compares them to girls, heads bent, drying their long asserted, ‘is not an escape poem. Anyone can see the difference between hair in the sun. escape and retreat, and “Birches” is a retreat poem.’ The speaker dreams of a temporary withdrawal from his worries. He describes this process as The speaker departs from pure description to speculate about the cause climbing towards, but never reaching, Heaven. He wishes to be set down of the trees’ movement. He visualises a boy, alone in a natural setting, gently again. Leaving and returning are both pleasant experiences. This

265 new explorations robert frost birches

leads him to conclude that ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’

Balance Frost’s preoccupation with balance is evident from the opening line, where the birches ‘bend to left and right’. The boy carefully climbs the trees until he is halfway between Heaven and Earth. He maintains his poise, ‘not launching out too soon’, and then at the right moment he kicks his way down through the air to the ground. Like the boy, the speaker in the poem wishes to get away and return. He believes in ‘going and coming back’. Frost balances the images in his poem: the sunlight and the ice, the straight trees and bent birches, the climbing boy and the ‘girls on hands and knees’, the black branches and snow-white trunk, Heaven and Earth, air and ground. The need to achieve a measure of balance or equilibrium is an underlying concern in much of Frost’s poetry, including ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘After Apple-Picking’.

Language The language in the poem is, for the most part, simple and colloquial. Frost addresses the reader directly (‘Often you must have seen them’, ‘You’d think’, ‘When your face burns’). The conversational tone creates an intimacy between the poet and the reader (‘But I was going to say’, ‘I’d like to get away’). Using the language of ordinary people is a hallmark of Frost’s work. He contrasted this flat, almost prosaic speech with formal patterns such as ‘So was I once myself a swinger of birches. | And so I dream of going back to be’ or the impersonal: ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’ 266 new explorations robert frost ‘out, out—’

‘Out, Out—’ life-supporting purposes of cooking and heating. However, the saw has the power to destroy as well as create. It reduces the wood to dust. The Background reader is reminded of the description of the body’s decay after death: ‘Out, Out—’ is based on an event that took place in Bethlehem, New ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust’. This image anticipates Hampshire, in March 1910. Raymond Fitzgerald, the son of Frost’s friend, the fatal accident that will occur later in the poem. The mechanical noises, was cutting wood with a chainsaw when he accidentally hit the loose evocative of predatory animals and rattlesnakes, are suggestive of danger pulley and lacerated his hand. A doctor was called, but the young man and death. The machine, a ‘buzz saw’ (chainsaw), sounds like swarms of died of shock. The incident made a deep impression on Frost. He wrote angry, stinging and biting insects. the poem between 1915 and 1916. These threatening images are contrasted immediately with the tranquil A reading of the poem beauty of the natural world, as represented by the Vermont mountains. The title of the poem is taken from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. When The effect is to heighten the menace of the saw. Significantly, the whole Macbeth is told of his wife’s death he responds: scene is enacted against the background of the setting sun. The fading light foreshadows the darkness that is shortly to fall upon the boy. As Out, out, brief candle! the sun sets, the brief candle of his existence will also be extinguished. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player His sister, homely in her apron, announces that supper is ready. Like the That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, stove-logs, supper is life-sustaining. With cruel irony, the saw takes its And then is heard no more cue, leaps to devour the boy’s hand and bites into the flesh. The biblical overtones here of the Last Supper, flesh and blood, point towards the boy This poem, like Macbeth’s speech, emphasises the brevity of human as an innocent victim, needlessly sacrificed, as the bystanders look on. In a existence. The boy is depicted as a tragic hero, destined by forces beyond double irony it appears as if he held out his hand to the saw: his control to meet an untimely and pointless death. The title may also refer to the blood flowing from the mutilated hand and the departure of He must have given the hand. However it was, life from the body. Neither refused the meeting.

The poem opens suddenly with the snarling machine cutting wood The tragic hero always contributes to his own downfall. Betrayed by the into sweet-smelling logs. The ‘stove-length’ logs will be burned for the embrace, he realises his fate: 267 new explorations robert frost ‘out, out—’

Don’t let him cut my hand off – away: ‘Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.’ The full stop refuses to The doctor, when he comes. admit any continuation of life or hope. The brisk, matter-of-fact attitude is summed up in the brief line ‘No more to build on there’. The return to The doctor, a figure traditionally associated with restoration and healing, normality is indicated in the full-length closing line. unwittingly assists the malign forces operating against the young man, putting him in ‘the dark of ether’. The boy dies. The final image of Tone the living turning away from the corpse draws attention to the cold There are many shifts of tone throughout the poem. The anger evident indifference operating in the universe that Frost frequently stressed in his in the opening line subsides into calmness with the descriptions of work. Their attitude appears to concur with Shakespeare’s conclusion that the ‘Sweet-scented’ logs and the peaceful sunset over the Vermont life is indeed a tale ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’: mountains, only to return with double force as the saw ‘snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled’. Sentence structure The opening lines are long, flowing and descriptive lines that set the The narrator wistfully comments: scene. The lines shorten when the accident occurs; this quickens the pace of the poem and heightens the tension. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy And then – the watcher at his pulse took fright. No-one believed. They listened at his heart. Unfortunately he continues with the work, and when the accident happens his reaction, ironically, is to laugh with shock. Fear and horror The use of pauses and exclamation marks adds to the drama and further succeed rapidly as the terror-stricken boy pleads pathetically with his sister increases the tension. not to allow the doctor to amputate his hand. The irony here is that the doctor can save neither his hand nor his life. The coldly factual statement ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off – ‘and that ended it’ prevents any suggestion of sentimentality from The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ entering the poem. ‘Out, Out—’ ends on a bitter note:

The multiple caesuras at the end slow down the pace in order to echo … And they, since they with three little words the last three heartbeats as the boy’s life ebbs Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. 268 new explorations robert frost the road not taken

The Road Not Taken A reading of the poem This poem suggests vast thematic issues through a simple narrative. The Background speaker stands in an autumnal wood at a point where two roads run off in When asked to list his likes and dislikes, Frost included ‘The Road Not different directions. Reluctantly he is forced to make a choice about which Taken’ as his favourite poem. It was written for his friend Edward Thomas, one he will take. Both roads seem ‘about the same’, so the focus is on killed in the First World War. In the film Voices and Visions, Frost stated the decision made and its consequences. The traveller cannot see where that the poem was in part a gentle satire on Thomas’s inability to make the first path will lead, as it bends in the undergrowth, so he chooses the decisions: ‘No matter which way he went he was always sorry he didn’t other. The grounds for his choice are unclear. While he states that this go the other way. And he could go on like that until eternity.’ One day road had ‘the better claim, | Because it was grassy and wanted wear’, he Frost said to Thomas, ‘No matter which road you take, you’ll always goes on to admit that they were ‘really about the same, | And both that sigh, and wish you’d taken another.’ It seemed to Frost that there was morning equally lay’ covered in leaves. He keeps the first ‘for another day’, a fundamental human dilemma here that could provide material for a knowing there is a finality inherent in his choice, and doubts he will ever poem. return. He conveys the sense of momentous, life-changing decisions in the final stanza when he predicts that in the future the speaker will look In May 1915, before the poem was published, Frost revealed that back on this moment ‘with a sigh’. He knows he will regret losing the the dilemma was his own as well as that of his friend. He went on to opportunity to investigate the other option. The choice he has made has acknowledge that he had always taken the less practical, more poetic serious consequences for him: way: ‘Every time I have taken the way it almost seemed as if I ought not to take, I have been justified somehow by the result.’ The poem was I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. also partly inspired by an unnerving experience Frost had in 1912. While walking towards two lonely crossroads after a winter snowstorm he met a Imagery figure approaching him who seemed to be his double – ‘my own image’. Frost uses imagery in an almost symbolic way to carry the meaning in the The figure came up to him and passed silently by while Frost ‘stood in poem. The two roads in the yellow wood represent two different journeys wonderment’ at ‘this other self’. ‘The Road Not Taken’ was published in through life. The narrator describes himself as a traveller who must the Atlantic Monthly in 1915 and in Mountain Interval. choose which path to follow. One road bends in the undergrowth, making

269 new explorations robert frost the road not taken

it impossible to see where it will lead, just as in life no one can foretell with certainty the outcome of a decision or what one’s future will be like. Frost describes the woods as ‘yellow’ and the roads as covered ‘In leaves no step had trodden black’. This suggests an autumn scene. Autumn is sometimes used in poetry to suggest maturity. The decision is being made at a time when the speaker is sufficiently experienced and wise to realise the implications of his choice; he knows ‘how way leads on to way’. When he chooses, there is no turning back. He finally decides to take the road ‘less traveled by’ and this changes his life completely.

270 new explorations robert frost spring pools

Spring Pools Imagery Frost uses nature images to elicit a range of responses in the reader. The Background scene itself generates conflicting emotions. The tranquil setting, the still This poem was written in 1925 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Frost lived pool mirroring the spring sky, the flowers and bare trees inspire awe at the while teaching at the university there. One spring evening, as he sat alone beauty of the natural world. Yet it is a very cold scene, where the shivering by a blazing fire, lonely and homesick, he thought of Vermont and New flowers and chill water communicate a feeling of unease and fear. Hampshire, and the images that came into his mind prompted him to write ‘Spring Pools’. The poem is influenced by the Romantic lyric ‘To The trees are a powerful and threatening presence in the poem. The Jane: The Recollection’ by Shelley and ‘Ballad of Ladies of Olden Times’ warning that they should ‘think twice’ before they annihilate the pools and by Villons, which includes the line ‘But where are the snows of yesteryear?’ flowers reminds the reader that they are subject to an even more powerful force, which is time, the relentless destroyer. A reading of the poem The title of this poem suggests fresh growth and renewal in the natural The reversed adjectives and nouns in the ‘flowery waters and these watery world when warm spring days return. The scene described in the first flowers’ evoke their frail beauty, yet the flowers feed on the pools and stanza, however, is bleak and wintry. The clear pools mirror the sky the pools were fed by the meltwaters from the snows destroyed ‘only through the bare, leafless branches. In this icy-cold world the flowers yesterday’. This final image of the brevity of existence does not permit a and water ‘chill and shiver’ as if aware that their existence will be brief hopeful reading of the poem. and they will soon perish. The pools will be absorbed by the roots of the trees, which will use the water to produce their dark leaves. The leaves will Rhyme and rhythms overshadow the flowers, denying them the sunlight they need to survive. A slow, steady pace is achieved through the use of long vowels, regular iambic pentameter and a strict rhyming scheme, aabcbc. This suits the The second stanza emphasises the power of the great summer woods, solemn tone of the poem: whose immense strength can easily obliterate the still pools and the delicate flowers. Yet the dark trees are vulnerable, like the ‘flowery waters ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ These pools that, though in forests, still reflect and these watery flowers’. The pools were formed from the melted winter

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ snows, only to be destroyed by the trees. The trees themselves will be The total sky almost without defect’ destroyed by time. 271 new explorations robert frost spring pools

The lines are long and sometimes run into each other in a conversational Natural beauty manner. Each of the stanzas is constructed around a single sentence. In The natural world is filled with beauty. This beauty should not blind us to the second stanza the lines flow almost without interruption, indicating the the forces operating within it, nor shield us from the darkness that exists in relentless processes operating in the natural world. nature.

Themes ‘Spring Pools’ is more than a simple nature poem. It explores a number of themes found elsewhere in Frost’s work.

Natural creation and destruction The natural world destroys in order to create, and whatever is created is destined to be destroyed again. The snows melt into pools; pools water the flowers and both are annihilated by the trees to produce foliage; and the foliage will in its turn be killed by the winter snows. The cycle of creation and destruction is incessant, inevitable and inescapable.

Indifference in the natural world The natural world is an indifferent place. The seasons follow one another inexorably, producing and destroying: the winter snows, spring pools and summer woods. Nothing is spared and existence is brief.

A bleak view of life Time dominates creation. The massive trees, the small flowers, the deep snows and shallow pools are all doomed to destruction. The weak and strong alike will be swept away.

272 new explorations robert frost acquainted with the night

Acquainted with the Night clock’ – the moon, or perhaps a real clock – which marks the passage of time. This clock fails to offer guidance or comfort to those who look upon A reading of the poem its face: it proclaims merely that ‘the time was neither wrong nor right’. This is one of Frost’s darkest poems, where the mood is predominantly sombre, the tone unmistakably solemn. It expresses an overwhelming In this short poem Frost explores his recurrent themes. He refers to sense of anxiety, isolation and despair. The recurrence of the word darkness, isolation, the passage of time, sorrow, indifference and an ‘acquainted’ is an allusion to the passage in the Old Testament where the absence of communication between people. It is important to note, prophet Isaiah predicts the coming of one ‘despised and rejected by men, however, that the poem is set in the past. He writes that though he has a man of sorrows … acquainted with grief’. ‘walked’, ‘outwalked’, ‘looked’, ‘passed by’, ‘dropped my eyes’, ‘stood still and stopped the sound of feet’, he has not escaped the night; instead, While the speaker is presented as a solitary figure walking at night he has undergone his ordeal alone (‘I’ is repeated seven times in 14 lines), through the city, the poem can be read as a psychological journey, where coped with it and survived: ‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’ the townscape is coloured by the mental state of the speaker himself. The scenes portrayed are mental projections, reflecting the mood of Form the narrator. The world is covered in darkness and unrelieved gloom. ‘Acquainted with the Night’ is a meditative lyric composed in stanzas of The incessant rain is indicative of his depression as he travels through terza rima. This form consists of linked groups of three rhymes following the blackness beyond hope and comfort, symbolised by the reassuring the pattern aba, bcb, cdc, ded and so on. Frost was familiar with terza rima city lights. In this ‘saddest’ of places he shuns human contact, refusing from his reading of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Like Shelley’s ode, communication with any who might enquire. Jealously guarding his this poem ends with a rhyming couplet. privacy, ‘unwilling to explain’, he retreats into his own silent world. Imagery The silence is punctured by a distant impersonal cry. The cry is The poem is carefully crafted with images of darkness and rain ‘interrupted’, hinting at possible violence, repression and suffering. The overshadowing the first stanza, creating the bleak atmosphere that is anonymity and impersonal nature of the incident deepens the fearful sustained throughout. The images of light serve only to intensify the mood of the speaker. Yet he is not in immediate danger: the cry comes gloom. The city lights are distant, while the ‘luminary clock’ stands at an from far away, another street. These events occur beneath the ‘luminary ‘unearthly height … against the sky’. The second stanza is preoccupied

273 new explorations robert frost acquainted with the night

with seeing and not seeing: ‘looked’, ‘watchman’, ‘dropped my eyes’. The sounds accentuate the silences of the third stanza, reinforcing his isolation. The clock in the fourth stanza emphasises the impersonal nature of the world. The repetition of the opening line in the rhyming couplet is a reminder of the speaker’s harrowing experience.

274 new explorations robert frost design

Design is a ‘design of darkness’ woven into the very fabric of the universe. In the final line, however, a second possibility is proposed. The design, if one A reading of the poem exists, may not affect ‘a thing so small’; nature may be subject to a series The title refers to the idea that there is a design underlying the universe of random incidents governed by chance. and that the one who created this design is a benign god. The concept, common in many religions, is supported by passages in the Bible. The The critic Lionel Trilling pointed out that Frost’s poetry does not offer poem challenges this belief, forcing the reader to face the dark side of the reassurances or affirmations of traditional beliefs; instead, it presents the natural world and to confront the possibility that either evil is built into the terrible actualities of life. Randall Jarrell also commented on the bleakness universe as part of the design or there is no governing design in the first of Frost’s vision, noting that his poems ‘begin with a flat and terrible place. reproduction of evil in the world and end by saying: it’s so, and there’s nothing you can do about it’. If we accept and submit to the evil that In the poem, the normally blue flower and black spider have mutated into befalls us, it should not be because of a religious acceptance that it is all an unnatural colour for them: they are both white. White, the colour of for the best, but simply because we, like the moth, are helpless to change innocence and purity, is here associated with treachery and death. The the world. ‘Design’ offers little or no consolation to the reader. unsuspecting moth is lured by the heal-all, a medicinal flower, into the clutches of the predatory spider. The plump, well-fed spider is ‘dimpled’; Form the coupling of this word with a spider creates a sense of evil triumphing ‘Design’ is a perfectly executed sonnet composed of 14 lines divided into over its hapless victim. The bloated, gloating spider has wrapped the an octet and a sestet. The octet is largely descriptive, with little comment. moth in silken threads, thereby preserving the body so as to eat it later. The sestet poses a series of questions raised by the scene described in the The shroud-like case resembles a ‘piece of rigid satin cloth’. Here the octet. The rhyming scheme is abba, abba, acaa, cc. satin-like threads are woven into a sachet to cover the stiffened moth. Imagery In the sestet Frost considers what malignant force corrupted the ‘innocent’ Frost presents the reader with two contrasting sets of images. The first blue heal-all, making it white, what evil brought the albino spider to the consists of the spider, the blighted flower, the witches’ broth and death. very spot where it could ensnare the defenceless moth and what ‘steered’ The poet deliberately juxtaposes these images with beautiful and delicate the helpless creature to its ghastly end. One possible answer is that there objects – white satin, snowdrops, froth and a paper kite – to contrast

275 new explorations robert frost design

their innocent appearance with their deadly nature. The spider, plump and white, gorged, glutinous and murderous, has conspired with the blighted heal-all to kill the unsuspecting moth. The flower, moth and spider together form a horrific tableau representing death and disease. They appear to be the nauseating ingredients of a foul brew, prepared to begin the ‘morning right’ (a play on the word ‘rite’). The scene, therefore, rehearses a daily ritual that casts an evil spell upon the universe. The effect is to ‘appall’ and to force the reader to examine the forces governing life and death.

276 new explorations robert frost provide, provide

Provide, Provide The effect of time Time destroys the ‘picture pride of Hollywood’, turning her into a ‘witch … A reading of the poem the withered hag’. It also impoverishes her; she must now ‘wash the steps In this poem the old woman washing the steps was once a young and with pail and rag’ to survive. Her fate is typical of many ‘great and good’. beautiful actress in Hollywood. She did not realise that she would age, Youthful success is soon eroded by time. The end is always hard unless so she failed to provide for the future. Fallen on hard times, she is now one learns to provide for old age. reduced to being a charwoman. According to Frost, the opening lines The importance of independence were inspired by a strike of cleaning women at Harvard College. The Frost admired those who could stand alone and fend for themselves. A poet suggests a number of ways of avoiding this woman’s fate. One could central theme in the poem is that one should take control of one’s own die young, or, if destined to live a long time, become rich. He observes destiny rather than be at the mercy of others. One should provide for satirically: oneself through accumulating wealth (‘Make the whole stock exchange If need be occupy a throne, your own!’), power (‘If need be occupy a throne’), knowledge (‘Some have Where nobody can call you crone. relied on what they knew’) or friendship.

The rich and powerful always inspire respect, no matter how old. Some Old age people rely on their intellectual abilities for security, others on fidelity Old age is seen as disfiguring, transforming beauty into ugliness. It is and loyalty. To escape degrading poverty in later life it is better to buy described as a descent, a going down into loneliness and misery. The friendship than to have no friends at all. Frost strongly urges the reader old are subject to degrading poverty and derision. No memory of past to ‘Provide, provide!’ At public readings he usually added, ‘Or somebody successes can console them for their present plight or prevent ‘the end else’ll provide for you! And how’ll you like that?’ He urges readers to avoid from being hard’. hardship and the need to buy friends by providing for themselves. Imagery Themes The poem is structured around contrasting images of youth and old age, beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty. These support the central This poem, written in seven triplets, deals with some of Frost’s major theme: that youth and beauty eventually succumb to the ravages of time, themes. and only those who provide for themselves will survive with dignity. 277 new explorations robert frost provide, provide

Frost uses images of witches, hags and crones to portray impoverished old age. These are contrasted with images of attractive, successful women. Frost chose Hollywood to represent a place where dreams and fantasies are brought to life. Dreams cannot survive in the real world; harsh reality explodes myths and fantasies. The screen goddess, the centre of attention, is now ignored as she scrubs the steps. But such hardships can be avoided. Political power and material wealth, symbolised by the throne and the stock exchange, are two ways of resisting the indignities of old age. Intellectual status, loyalty and ‘boughten friendship’ are means of surviving, ways of keeping ‘the end from being hard’.

278 new explorations robert frost an overview of robert frost

An overview of Robert Frost The Romantics subscribed to Wordsworth’s belief that poets should ‘choose incidents and situations from common life’ and write Background influences about them in ‘language really spoken by men’ who belong to ‘humble Frost studied the classics, had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and and rustic life’. was well read in European and American literature. The Romantic and Wordsworth insisted the poet should use ‘a certain colouring of Victorian poets played an important role in shaping his poetic theory. imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’. Romantic poetry (1798–1832) The poet’s visionary imagination rises above his limited, sense- Romantic poetry was written against a background of social, political, bound understanding and enables him to see things in a new way. The economic and religious change, not unlike the changes experienced by Romantics displayed a keen interest in visionary states of American society from the middle of the 19th century onwards. Frost consciousness, dreams, nightmares and heightened or distorted was drawn towards aspects of their poetry when formulating his own perceptions. distinctive poetic style. Romantic poetry is concerned with mystery and magic, folklore and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, among other Romantic superstition. The role of the imagination is related to the importance poets, believed that poetry should express the poet’s own mind, of instinct, intuition and the emotions or the ‘heart’ as the source of imagination and feelings. His emotions, thoughts and experiences poetry, even though the ‘heart’ may be tempered by the ‘head’, the should form the central subject of his work. logical and rational faculty. According to Coleridge, ‘Deep thinking The lyric, written in the first person, became the preferred Romantic is attainable only by a man of deep feeling.’ The capacity to imagine form. The ‘I’ is often the poet himself, not a persona created by permits the poet to enter a higher visionary state and regenerate the the poet. world. The natural scene, accurately observed, is the primary poetic subject. Nature is not described for its own sake but as a thought-provoking Important Romantic poets: stimulus for the poet, leading him to some insight or revelation. William Blake (1757–1827) Romantic nature poems are usually meditative poems. The landscape William Wordsworth (1770–1850) is sometimes personified or imbued with human life. There is a Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) reaction against a purely scientific view of nature. Humans are George Byron (1788–1824) depicted as isolated figures in the landscape. 279 new explorations robert frost an overview of robert frost

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) American writers John Keats (1795–1821) Frost was familiar with the works of such American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Walt Whitman (1819–92) and Henry David Thoreau Victorian poetry (1817–62). Frost studied Victorian poetry in great detail. He cited Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning among his favourite poets. Three features of this Emerson was a philosopher and poet. He founded the Transcendentalist poetry made a particular impression on him: movement, which revered nature, and, like Frost, had been influenced The use of traditional forms, such as the sonnet by the Romantic movement. He encouraged writers and poets to make The revival of the narrative poem, prosaic in style and casually ordinary life the subject matter of their works. colloquial in tone An abiding awareness of time and its effect on humans Walt Whitman produced Leaves of Grass in 1855. This volume contained poems that were distinctly American in their setting and subject matter. Robert Browning (1812–89) Thoreau wrote extensively about his experiments in self-sufficiency. The Browning turned the dramatic monologue into a major art form. Many of concept of the individual struggling to survive in rural America appealed his best-known poems are dramatic monologues. Frost saw the potential to Frost. of this form for his own work. Browning experimented with diction and syntax, creating a harshly discordant style in some poems. Frost was Poetry and the historical tradition intrigued by the possibilities of playing discordant sounds off one another Poets are part of a wider literary community and their works belong to in a poem. the historical tradition. Each poet can look back at the works of previous poets while at the same time providing new material for the next Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) generation. Frost believed the works of earlier poets provided a treasury In his poetry, as in his novels, Hardy shows natural forces shaping human of images and ideas available to all writers. He drew on the ideas and destiny. He portrays his characters at the mercy of indifferent forces, images, disguising and subtly altering his allusions, thereby enriching and victims of fate in a world governed by chance. Like Frost, Hardy did not deepening his poetry. The Bible, the classics, Shakespeare, metaphysical believe in a universe ruled by a benevolent god. Frost felt Hardy came poetry, Romantic poetry, Emerson, Victorian poetry, popular ballads, closest to his own perception of life. even nursery rhymes provided him with material for his poetry. 280 new explorations robert frost an overview of robert frost

Some themes and issues symbolic status. Loneliness can be seen as a human condition. Efforts to The natural world communicate effectively are at best difficult (‘The Tuft of Flowers’) and Frost was a keen observer of the natural world. Plants, insects, frequently fail (‘Mending Wall’), are sometimes rebuffed (‘Acquainted geographical features and the seasons have their place in his poetry. with the Night’) and can have unforeseen consequences (‘Out, Out—). Creatures: dimpled spiders, trapped moths, bewildered butterflies Plants: butterfly weed, blue or white heal-all, yellow leaves, dark pines, Frost shared with Emerson and Thoreau the belief that individuality apple trees, birches, russet apples, summer forests and the independence of the individual were very important. Frost in The physical world: spring pools, winter snows, the sky, brooks, particular felt that people should stand alone and make their own choices. Vermont mountains Note the repetition of ‘I’ in his poems. The seasons: autumn and winter are the dominant seasons, with falling leaves, bare trees, snow, ice, chill winds and rain The role of fate and chance Frost is far less affirmative about the universe than the American The natural world is rarely described for its own sake or as a background Transcendentalists. Looking at nature, they discerned a benign creator, against which the action of the poem takes place. Instead, nature leads whereas he saw ‘no expression, nothing to express’. In Frost’s world, God the poet to an insight or revelation. Often a comparison emerges is either hostile or indifferent to the plight of helpless creatures, who, between the natural scene and the psyche, what Frost called ‘inner and like humans, are victims of fate or chance. His poetry records an ever- outer weather’. present, underlying darkness that erupts in a random manner with tragic consequences. Frost’s descriptions of nature are not sentimental. He describes a world that is bleak, empty and cold, where creatures suffer in silence and Mutability – the effect of time on people and nature humans feel isolated. His natural world contains blight, darkness and Time is perceived as being destructive: death and therefore can be threatening, hostile or indifferent. Yesterday’s flowers wither Winter snows melt, spring pools are drained by trees, trees lose their Isolation and communication leaves in autumn Humans are depicted as figures of isolation in the landscape. Not only The boy dies at the end of the day are they isolated but they represent loneliness, and thereby acquire Time destroys beauty and impoverishes the elderly

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The effect of time can be overcome to some extent by the power of Frost used repetition for effect, to emphasise and to add to the musical memories and the imagination (‘The Tuft of Flowers’). quality of his verse. He described sound in the poem as ‘the gold in the ore’ and added that ‘the object in writing poetry is to make all poems The role of the imagination sound as different as possible from each other’. The imagination enables the poet to see the world in a new way. In brief, intense moments he may enter a higher visionary state. This allows him Rhyme to regenerate his imaginative and creative capability and provides him Unlike many American poets in the 20th century, Frost upheld formal with fresh insights and new inspiration for his poetry. This state cannot be poetic values during the modernist era, when formal practices were sustained for long, however, and he must return to the real world. widely abandoned. He emphasised the importance of rhyme and metrical variety, observed traditional forms and developed his technical skills. He Style and technique: Some points could claim without fear of contradiction that ‘I am one of the notable Language craftsmen of my time’. His poetry is written so that the rhyming ‘will not From his study of Hardy’s writing, Frost learned how to achieve simplicity seem the tiniest bit strained’. He used terza rima, end-of-line rhymes, full in poetry through the use of a few well-chosen words. He made a and half-rhyme. He also wrote in blank verse. conscious effort to use ordinary language in his poems and captured the full range of human emotions, from joy to sorrow and from exaltation Verse forms to fear, through the use of plain, monosyllabic speech. He stressed the Frost used a wide variety of verse forms, including the sonnet, dramatic importance of colloquial language, as it was appropriate to the subject monologue, narrative and lyric. His preferred metre was based on the matter in his verse and made his poetry accessible to a wide audience. strict or loose iambic, as it echoed ordinary speech. The verse derives Frost played the colloquial rhythms against the formal patterns of line its energy from the tension that evolves when a rhythmic pattern based and verse and constrained them within traditional forms, such as the on strict or loose iambic metre is set against the irregular variations of sonnet or dramatic monologue. The plain diction, natural speech rhythms colloquial speech. and simplicity of images contrive to make the poems seem natural and unplanned. Imagery The imagery in Frost’s poems is deceptively simple. There are images from the natural and the human worlds. Some are everyday and ordinary,

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some are grotesque and macabre. In a number of poems, such as ‘Spring Dramatic stories Pools’, the imagery carries the meaning. Frost uses precise details to A strong narrative structure is apparent in many of Frost’s poems. The recreate the colour, texture and sounds of the world within the poem. This narrator takes the reader through a series of events and actions which lead makes his poetry richly sensuous. Yet using the same technique, he can to a dramatic conclusion. These events are often thought-provoking or paint a cold, bleak scene that is chillingly realistic. His use of similes and provide an insight into life. metaphors creates layers of meaning in his poems. In ‘Mending Walls’, for example, the wall can be understood to be something that unites or ‘The figure a poem makes’ divides, something that should be maintained or cast down. It can be The following is an essay by Frost, published as an introduction to The physical, political, cultural or psychological. Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939.

Tone Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of The tone of voice used is vital to the meaning in Frost’s poems. His our day. Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry poetry displays a great range of tone and it may vary considerably within we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then a particular poem. It can be precise and matter of fact, sympathetic, sad, it will go hard if we can’t in practice. Our lives for relieved, strong and confident, despairing, humorous, dark and ironic, it. Granted no-one but a humanist much cares how wistful or weary. sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we First person narrative make the discovery that the object in writing poetry Frost frequently used the first person for his narrative. The reader is is to make all poems sound as different as possible permitted a glimpse into the speaker’s life at a specific moment, often from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, during a crisis. The use of the first person creates a feeling of reliability: consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, the reader is given a first-hand account of an event and trusts the metre are not enough. We need the help of context – meaning – subject matter. That is the greatest help accuracy of the narrator. The authenticity of the story is never doubted in towards variety. All that can be done with words is ‘Out, Out—’, for example. soon told. So also with metres – particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many

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were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life – not at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in though unforeseen was predestined from the first poetry as merely one more art of having something image of the original mood – and indeed from the to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all because deeper and from wider experience. if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound and sad – the happy-sad blend of the drinking song. to being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, For me the initial delight is in the surprise of giving way to undirected associations and kicking remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I ourselves from one chance suggestion to another am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialised in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. Just glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps in such a straightness as metre, so the second mystery growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose is how a poem can have wildness and at the same seem always those I was unaware of and so made no time a subject that shall be fulfilled. note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell experience ahead of us to pave the future with against how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same across it for somewhere. The line will have the more as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes Modern instruments of precision are being used to 284 new explorations robert frost an overview of robert frost

make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much days. I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, school boy may be defined as one who can tell you in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than what he knows in the order in which he learned it. seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for from some previous order in time and space into a the reader. For it to be that there must have been the new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to greatest freedom of the material to move about in it it of the old place where it was organic. More than and to establish relations in it regardless of time and once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. been the originality it was mistaken for by its young We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for we are not free to stay away from them till we are my country. For myself the originality need be no sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of may be worked over once it is in being, but may not my material – the condition of body and mind now be worried into being. Its most precious quality will and then to summon aptly from the vast chaos of all I remain its having run itself and carried away the poet have lived through. with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never Scholars and artists thrown together are often lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both surprise as it went. work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self- 285 new explorations robert frost questions

Questions 10. ‘Frost’s poems are strangely beautiful, unbearably bleak.’ Consider this statement, referring to at least four poems in your answer. 1. ‘The human being, lonely, helpless, and in crisis, is the main concern in 11. ‘Sound is the gold in the ore.’ Examine the importance of sound in much of Frost’s poetry.’ Discuss this statement with reference to Frost’s poetry. three or more poems you have read. 12. ‘A wide range of tone and mood is found in Frost’s poetry.’ Discuss, 2. ‘Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.’ Consider Frost’s referring to at least four poems in your answer. poetry in light of this statement. 3. ‘Frost’s poems are a celebration of the ordinary.’ Discuss this opinion with reference to three or more poems you have read. 4. ‘The local and the universal are seamlessly woven together in the poetry of Robert Frost.’ Is this statement justified? Explain your answer, referring to four poems by Frost. 5. ‘Frost’s poetry depicts the world as dark, dangerous and ultimately indifferent.’ Discuss this statement with suitable reference to the poems on your course. 6. ‘Natural images are used to convey human emotions and moods in the poems of Robert Frost.’ Examine four poems by Frost in light of this statement. 7. ‘Frost takes a pessimistic view of life, unrelieved by any gleam of hope.’ Discuss. 8. ‘Frost’s poems are deeply sensual.’ Comment on Frost’s use of language and imagery in light of this statement, referring to at least four poems you have studied. 9. ‘Universal truths plainly expressed are a feature of Frost’s poetry.’ Discuss.

286 new explorations robert frost bibliography

Bibliography Thompson, L., Robert Frost, vol. 2: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1970.

Baym, N., et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of American Literature, New van Doren, M., ‘Robert Frost’s America’, in Atlantic Monthly, June 1951, York: Norton 1994. pp. 32–4.

Cook, R., Robert Frost: A Living Voice, Amherst (MA): University of Wordsworth, W., Preface to Lyrical Ballads, London: Arch 1802. Massachusetts Press 1974.

Cook, R., ‘Robert Frost’s asides on his poetry’, in E. Cady and L. Budd (eds), On Frost: The Best from American Literature, Durham (NC): Duke University Press 1991.

Frost, R., ‘The figure a poem makes’, in The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, Harcourt 1939.

Jarrell, R., ‘The other Frost’ and ‘To the Laodiceans’, in Poetry and the Age, New York: Knopf 1955.

Meyers, J., Robert Frost: A Biography, London: Constable 1996.

Pritchard, W.H., Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, New York: Oxford University Press 1984.

Thompson, L. (ed.), Robert Frost: Selected Letters, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1964.

Thompson, L., Robert Frost, vol. 1: The Early Years, 1874–1915, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1966.

287 T.S. Eliot Notes and Explorations: Seán Scully

288 new explorations t.s. eliot timeline

Timeline

September 26, 1888 Thomas Stearns Eliot is born in St Louis, Missouri. 1921–22 London correspondent for The Dial.

1906–09 Undergraduate at Harvard. Becomes interested 1922–39 Founder and editor of The Criterion. in the symbolists and Laforgue. 1922 ‘The Waste Land’. Eliot wins Dial Award for The 1909–10 Graduate student at Harvard. Studies in France Waste Land. London correspondent for Revue and Germany. ‘Prufrock’ is completed but not Française. published. 1925 Senior position with publisher Faber & Faber. 1911–14 Graduate student at Harvard. Begins work on the philosophy of Francis Herbert Bradley. 1927 Eliot is confirmed in the Church of England and becomes a British citizen. 1914–15 Study in Germany stopped by war. Moves to Oxford. Short satiric poems. ‘Prufrock’ is 1927–30 Ariel Poems. published in Chicago, June 1915. Marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, July 1915. 1940–42 ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’.

1915 Eliot moves to London. 1943 ‘The Four Quartets’.

1915–16 Teaching and doing book reviews in London. 1947 Death of Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Bradley thesis is finished. after long illness.

1915–19 Eliot has many different jobs, including teaching, 1948 King George VI awards the Order of Merit to T.S. bank clerk and assistant editor of the literary Eliot. Eliot is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. magazine Egoist. 1957 Marries Valerie Fletcher. June 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations is published. 1958 The Elder Statesman. 1917–20 Works in Lloyd’s Bank. Many editorials and reviews. Writing of French poems, quatrain 4 January 1965 T.S. Eliot dies. poems. 289 new explorations t.s. eliot the love song of j. alfred prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The passage is from Dante’s Inferno, XXVII, lines 61–6, in which Guido de Montefeltro, tortured in hell for the sin of fraud, is willing to expose Title himself to Dante because he believes that the poet can never return from This is perhaps one of Eliot’s most striking titles, yet the poem is neither a the pit of hell to the world. In Eliot’s poem, too, the speaker tells of himself song nor a traditional, conventional expression of love. Neither is J. Alfred because he feels his audience is also trapped in a hell of its own making. Prufrock a conventional name for a love poet. It is more evocative of a This is so since he is speaking to himself. respectable small-town businessman. (In fact, there was a furniture dealer The use of the extract from Dante’s Inferno also suggests that the love named Prufrock in St Louis when Eliot lived there.) song is not sung in the real world, but in a ‘hell’ that is the consequence of The name can be seen as mock-heroic, if not comically ridiculous, in being divided between passion and timidity. the circumstances of the poem. Indeed, ‘Prufrockian’ has entered the A reading of the poem language as an adjective indicative of a kind of archaic idealism that is Lines 1–12 paralysed by self-consciousness. The rather self-conscious ‘J.’ before Most critics agree that the ‘you and I’ of the first line are two sides of the Alfred recalls Mark Twain’s distrust of men who ‘part their names in the same personality, the ego and alter ego, as it were. Thus, the poem is middle’. an interior monologue, an exposure of the self to the self. However, the Overall, the incongruity of associations between the two halves of the title reader is, of course, free to think that it is he who is being addressed, as prepares us for the tension developed in the poem. the self he addresses may be in all of us.

Epigraph At any rate, the character Prufrock is struggling with the idea of asking A literal translation of the epigraph reads: the ‘overwhelming question’ of line 10. The poem opens with a command to accompany him, presumably to the room of line 13. However, the air If I thought that my answer were to one who might ever of decisiveness collapses immediately with the simile of describing the return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but evening (line 3). This image may be quite striking but it does not give us since no one ever did return from this depth alive, if what an immediate visual image. Rather, it reveals a great deal about Prufrock’s I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer you. psychological state. He is helpless: ‘etherised’.

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The setting of these opening lines is evening or twilight – a sort of halfway The subject of their conversation, Michelangelo, is the great sculptor period, neither night nor day. This enhances the theme of indecision. of heroic figures. This is a figure to whose magnanimity and greatness The description of what appears to be the seedy side of the city in the Prufrock could not possibly aspire. So how could the women find him next four lines is presented in a series of quite sordid images. They may (Prufrock) interesting, even if their knowledge is limited and their talk indicate the pointlessness of Prufrock’s search. His emotional numbness pretentious? Prufrock is a most unheroic figure. would appear to have led him to unsatisfactory, sordid sexual relations in the past, in ‘one-night cheap hotels’. The image of the ‘sawdust Lines 15–22 restaurants with oyster-shells’ suggests the vulgarity of these encounters There is a fusion of imagery here. The fog that surrounds the house while also introducing sea imagery, which is a feature of the poem. (presumably the house that contains the room) is described in terms of a cat. This essentially metaphysical concept suggests the theme of These seedy retreats show the tiresome, weary nature of city life. The unfulfilled promise. This is seen in particular by the fact that the action streets are compared to ‘a tedious argument | Of insidious intent’. Thus, leads to sleep. Cats, it must be noted, have been traditionally associated Prufrock’s encounters and perhaps life itself are seen as mechanical and with sexuality and thus much of the imagery here may also suggest repetitive and characteristic of an inner sickness. Such an area and such a unsatisfied desire. lifestyle naturally lead to ‘an overwhelming question’. The image of the fog serves another purpose. It may convey blurred Prufrock is unwilling to face this question. It remains isolated and hidden consciousness or vision, a constant theme in Eliot’s poetry. Thus, on within and the ‘you’ is told not to ask. Thus, we are beginning to see the a wider note, through the imagery of the poem and the character of depiction of a melancholic character who cannot satisfy his desires. Prufrock, Eliot is speaking of the degenerated vision and soul of humanity in the 20th century. Lines 13–14 This room would appear to be Prufrock’s destination. The women are Lines 23–34 satirised and seen as quite pretentious. Their ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ as Time is one of the important themes not only of this poem, but of Eliot’s they ‘come and go’ is made to seem quite trivial and empty headed. This poetry generally. Prufrock takes great comfort in time, repeating rather is suggested by the jingling rhythm and rhyme. hypnotically, ‘there will be time’. There will be time to ‘prepare a face’ against the exposure of the true self, or to ‘prepare a face’ to make small

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talk over ‘a toast and tea’, and to ‘murder and create’ reputations or His doubts are expressed in obvious hyperbole – ‘Do I dare | Disturb the characters in a gossipy fashion, perhaps. This unexciting prospect, with universe?’ How could he possibly disturb the universe? The possibility its mundane ‘works and days of hands’, merely leads him back to the may lie in the immediate sense of the ‘universe’ of his own world or in question, which he puts off because of his timidity and hesitancy. The his realisation that even trivial human actions may have immeasurable sarcasm of lines 32–3 emphasises the avoidance of decision. The play on consequences. This self-conscious awareness precludes his taking any the words ‘vision’ and ‘revision’ adds further emphasis to this. And all this decisive action. Emotionally at least, Prufrock is impotent. anxiety and procrastination don’t lead to some momentous event, but merely to taking ‘toast and tea’. The element of mock-heroic is clear. Lines 49–54 Prufrock puts forward the first of three arguments against deciding the Lines 35–6 ‘overwhelming question’. Again, Prufrock is hesitant to act due to the The repetition of lines 13–14 here underscores the tediousness of the limitations of his inner self. He lacks self-confidence due to the sterility women’s talk. It also further emphasises Prufrock’s limitations and how and meaninglessness of his life, which is merely an endless round of he is inhibited and perhaps intimidated by so-called social discourse. It, ‘evenings, mornings, afternoons’. The line ‘I have measured out my life together with the reference to Hamlet later, represents the greatness of with coffee spoons’ not only epitomises the repetitive tedium of his the past in contrast to the modern world. everyday existence, but may also suggest a desire to escape the pain of living via the use of a stimulant. Lines 37–48 Here, Prufrock speculates on the women’s view of his physical self. The How could he, Prufrock, challenge the meaninglessness of such a life? ‘prepared face’ is no protection against the pitiless gaze of the women. Such a challenge would be presumptuous. The time for decisive action may be at hand, yet he wonders if he dares. He fears a rebuff and even if he retreats – ‘turn back and descend the Lines 55–61 stair’ – he may still seem absurd. He is aware of his unheroic appearance. His second argument is presented here. He is afraid of being classified He is growing bald and ‘his arms and legs are thin’. He dresses well – and stereotyped ‘in a formulated phrase’ by the perhaps contemptuous albeit in a very conventional manner – possibly to compensate for these looks of the women. He recoils from the absolute horror of being pinned physical shortcomings, and indeed his attractive clothes may be part of his down and dissected like an insect in some biological experiment. He has mask – his need to make an appearance. a phobia of being restricted, linked perhaps to a fear of emasculation. So

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how could a man with such fears risk, or presume, exposing himself to Again, the imagery suggests he is a passive observer, not an active further ridicule? The image of the ‘butt-end’ of a cigarette to which he participant. Failure to address the overwhelming question leads, as in line compares his life suggests further self-disgust. 10, to a trailing off into silence indicated by the three dots.

Lines 62–9 This section ends with his wish to be something like a crab. This sea His third argument against deciding the ‘overwhelming question’ is imagery, in fact, is reduced to ‘claws’. Thus, Prufrock seems to wish to presented here. He cannot ask the question because he is simultaneously dehumanise himself completely, to become a thing of pure action without attracted to and revolted by the physicality of women. self-awareness – living, yet mentally inanimate; to be in a place where he can survive in the depths and yet avoid the pain of living. Obviously this is The ideal perfection of ‘Arms that are braceleted and white and bare’ the very opposite of Prufrock’s true situation. develops into the physicality of ‘(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)’. The sense of the ideal becoming real reflects him being Lines 75–86 overwhelmed at the prospect of turning desire into action. This section must be seen as a form of reverie. It is also the turning point of the poem. Having previously seen the fog as a cat (lines 15–22), The altered but effectively repeated question of ‘And should I then Prufrock now sees the afternoon as such. All the tensions up to now presume?’, reflecting his insecurity, suggests an apparent increase in are resolved, not in action but in images of inaction and weakness. The tension towards a sense of impending climax. Yet he cannot conceive any afternoon/evening/cat ‘sleeps’, ‘malingers’, ‘Stretched on the floor’. The formula for his proposal: ‘And how should I begin?’ sense of being etherised (line 3) is recalled. The triviality of Prufrock’s existence is seen in the mock-heroic rhyming of ‘ices’ and ‘crisis’. This Lines 70–4 prepares us for Prufrock’s efforts to put himself in a heroic perspective. Prufrock offers a possible preface or preamble to his question. He wonders However, his greater sense of personal inadequacy won’t permit him to if he should mention that he is aware of a different type of world from sustain the comparison with St John the Baptist. The ironic discrepancy that known by the women in the room – the seedy world of lines 4–9 between John the Baptist and Prufrock is heightened by the self-mockery are recalled in the imagery here. This awareness may be his justification of ‘(grown slightly bald)’. Prufrock’s head would simply look absurd. He for asking the question. He knows more, but the fact that he poses the is aware of this and immediately denies the possibility of heroic status for preamble in the form of a question suggests uncertainty as to its relevance. himself: ‘I am no prophet’ (line 83). The continuation of this line can be

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read as ‘it doesn’t really matter’ or ‘I’m not important’. Either way it is an The fact that these lines are repeated shows the extent of his fear. Two acknowledgement of his own inadequacy. references in this section suggest that Prufrock continues to compare himself to those of heroic status. The final image in this section is of the eternal Footman. This is death personified. Even death is laughing at him, but the image also suggests Line 94 is a reference to Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, that the servants of the polite society hosts whom he visits do not take in which the poet urges his beloved to enjoy immediate sexual union him seriously. He feels he is the butt of their jokes. To both death and the with him as a sort of victory over time. Prufrock’s inaction is the antithesis ridicule of servants, the profound and the trivial, Prufrock admits his fear. of this. Both men by the name of Lazarus in the Gospels were figures It is too late for him to act. Fear is his reality. of triumph over death: one, the brother of Martha and Mary, by being recalled to life by Jesus; the other, a poor man, by gaining Heaven – Lines 87–110 unlike the rich man, Dives. Prufrock fears that even the most profound Prufrock’s speculation on whether forcing the crisis – asking the knowledge may be decorously, but casually, rejected. ‘overwhelming question’ – would have been worthwhile reads like an excuse for inaction. He is rationalising his failure. Essentially, Prufrock’s fear here is of never being able to connect emotionally with another person. The gulf between human beings’ He names again the trivial aspects of his polite environment, recalling inner selves cannot be bridged. This has him cry out in frustration: ‘It earlier lines (49–51, 79). However, now the ‘you and I’ of line 1 are very is impossible to say just what I mean!’ The possibility of the insensitive much part of the trivia of this environment. They are ‘Among the comprehension of the other exposes his own sensitivity. It is ‘as if a magic porcelain, among some talk of you and me’. Perhaps he cannot accept lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen’. Thus, throughout this that any significant action can take place in this type of environment. He section women again appear as catalysts to Prufrock’s inadequacy and is afraid of being misunderstood. What would he do if his ‘overwhelming inferiority. question’ should meet with an offhand rejection like: Lines 111–19 … ‘That is not what I meant at all. Here, Prufrock settles for a less than heroic version of himself. He That is not it, at all.’ recognises that any further heroic action would be absurd. He may have something in common with Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, for he too was indecisive, but any direct identification would be ridiculous. 294 new explorations t.s. eliot the love song of j. alfred prufrock

Rather, he sees himself as a Polonius figure – an advisor to kings – or The mermaids of line 124 symbolise a sort of idealised erotic beauty even a lesser person. The theatrical imagery of lines 111–19 suggests a bit similar to the arms in line 63. But Prufrock realises that this is only a player. Prufrock has become consciously unheroic. In lines 112–18 he is fantasy, a dream. He has been deluding himself. His realisation of this is quite self-deprecating, eventually reducing himself to the level of a wise expressed in the simple bathos of line 125: ‘I do not think that they will sing Fool: a passage that begins with ‘Hamlet’ ends with ‘the Fool’. to me.’ Yet delusions are hard to let go and he asserts the existence of the mermaids, of the erotic ideal, in a defiant final cry (lines 129–31). However, with the capitalisation of ‘the Fool’ there is the possibility that Prufrock does not see himself as any old fool, but perhaps akin to the Fool But perhaps he has ‘lingered in the chambers’ of his world of ideal in Shakespeare’s King Lear – a wise fool who utters uncomfortable truths relationships and heroic actions for too long. The dream is unattainable. that powerful people would prefer not to hear. Maybe this is Prufrock’s The use of ‘we’ here is not just the ‘you and I’ of line 1, but also the final fantasy. universal plural. All of us can get lost in our reveries, until we are called to reality by other human voices – a reality where ‘we drown’. All struggle is Lines 120–31 ended and we accept the death of our inner selves. A world-weariness introduces this section. This in effect becomes a process of dying, until ‘we drown’ in the last line. He does, however, Language, tone and mood make a decision in line 121 – to ‘wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’. The irony inherent in the title has already been described. It is the self- The triviality of the decision, in contrast to the ‘overwhelming question’, irony of Laforgue, adapted to a dreadful seriousness. The poem is a suggests his resignation to a trivial existence. This decision is followed by tragic comedy; the epitaph sets the mood. The lyricism of the opening two further trivial questions, which underscore the point. Parting his hair is appropriate to a love song, but it collapses almost immediately in the may hide his bald spot. Eating a peach may be the riskiest behaviour he simile of line 3. The simile is quite comically inappropriate for a love song will ever again indulge in. but is tragically appropriate for the hapless Prufrock and his situation.

This hopeless, empty existence has him resort to the beach. Sea imagery The repetition of ‘Let us go’ suggests that he is already faltering. The throughout the poem (lines 7, 73–4) has suggested some alternative sibilant sounds that dominate the opening sequence underscore the lifestyle – some hope of avoiding the pain of consciousness. seedy imagery and the sense of being ‘etherised’. This is continued into the simile of ‘like a tedious argument’. These sounds, combined with the

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rhyming couplets, do give a lyrical or musical effect but also enhance the ‘sprawling’, ‘pinned’, ‘wriggling’ – suggest not only the fear of individual sense of ennui. The dramatic pause indicated by the three dots in line 10 inadequacy, but also a sense of being a victim. emphasises Prufrock’s tragic flow and reinforces the bathos. This bathos is further felt in the jingling rhythm and rhyme of lines 13–14: ‘In the room His self-contempt, and possibly anger, are seen in the mixture of sibilant the women come and go | Talking of Michelangelo.’ and cacophonous consonants in lines 73–4:

The fog/cat passage (lines 15–22) is also dominated by sibilant sounds I should have been a pair of ragged claws that enhance the tone. These sounds are in contrast with the more Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. cacophonous lines (23–34) that follow. The fog/cat metaphor is in effect a metaphysical conceit. It is a flight of fancy, a sort of jeu d’esprit. Adding The ridiculous rhyming of ‘ices’ and ‘crisis’ (lines 79–80) has already been to the sensual sibilant sounds is the use of the letter l, often seen as the alluded to for its mock-heroic, satiric effect. The same effect is achieved liquid letter, enhancing the sinuous movement of the fog. with the rhyming of ‘flicker’ and ‘snicker’ in lines 84 and 85. The pathetic admission of: The solemn incantatory tone of lines 23–34, echoing the Old Testament I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter; speaker in Ecclesiastes, contributes to the mock-heroic element of the I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker poem, which is further added to by the pun on ‘revisions’ (lines 33 and 48). Unlike the contrasts in the Book of Ecclesiastes, the opposing forces here is reduced to a snort of mockery with the word ‘snicker’.’ do not show a sense of balance or equilibrium, but add to the confusion. The repetition of lines 13–14, which are in danger of becoming a refrain, The note of tragic satire is also in the bathetic joke on his ‘head (grown emphasises the sterility and shallowness of the modern human condition, slightly bald)’ and the prophetic Biblical echoes of: as mentioned above. … ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, The constant repetition of rhetorical questions is a feature of the next Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ – several sections: ‘Do I dare?’, ‘So how should I presume?’, ‘And how should I begin?’ These suggest a tone of uncertainty and underscore The broad vowels here remind us of one crying in the wilderness and the sense of inaction. The dominant verbs of lines 56–61 – ‘formulated’, being ignored.

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The tone changes in the last section. Now that he acknowledges that ‘It He feels inferior, inadequate and inhibited. is impossible to say just what I mean’ and the ‘overwhelming question’ is He fears rejection. gone, the poem settles down to a lyricism that merely flickered earlier. He is both attracted to and threatened by women. The use of alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in lines 126–31 both Women fall short of his idealised vision. intensifies the description and underscores the tone and mood: He cannot find a language in which to express himself. He indulges in escapist fantasies to avoid despair. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves He is indecisive, self-contemptuous and sees himself as a victim. Combing the white hair of the waves blown back He is in a ‘hell’ – the consequence of being divided between passion When the wind blows the water white and black. and timidity – his tragic flaw. He is a sensitive man in a psychological impasse. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown He is an ageing romantic, incapable of action. Till human voices wake us, and we drown. He is tormented by unsatisfied desire. He is a comic figure made tragic by his acute self-awareness. The reference to Prince Hamlet does not seem pedantic, given the The poem gives us not only the thoughts and feelings of Prufrock, but tone of this section. The rather comic bewilderment of ‘Shall I part my also the actual experience of his feeling and thinking. hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’ helps to raise our sympathy for him. Thus, both the ‘serious’ references and the mocking tone serve to Prufrock’s problems with language emphasise the comic-tragedy of Prufrock’s situation. Much of the meaning of the poem arises from its form: the digressions, hesitations and references all suggest Prufrock’s inability Overall, the poem is quite fragmented, full of quickly changing to express himself. images – aural, visual and tactile – presented in a cinematic, stream of Language regularly fails him. The first section never arrives at the consciousness style, reflecting both his character and situation. question. Prufrock struggles with his own inarticulateness – ‘Shall I say?’, ‘It is The character of Prufrock impossible to say just what I mean!’ He is consciously unheroic. The failure of his love song is also a failure to find a language in which He is melancholic and contemplative. to express himself.

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The fragments that make up the poem are essentially a collection of potential poems, which collapse because Prufrock cannot express his ‘overwhelming question’. He is not included in the mermaids’ song. Human voices suffocate and drown him.

Main themes Indecision Confronting the difficulty of action Time Emotional impotence The obduracy of language Superficiality and emptiness The hidden and isolated inner self The limitations of the real world Dying – spiritually, mentally, physically – death in life The movement in the mind

Main images Sordid, seedy city life Fog/cat The room of pseudo-gentility Sea imagery – shells, crab, mermaids Cultural imagery – Michelangelo, John the Baptist, Lazarus, Hamlet Hair, clothes Coffee, tea, cakes and ices

298 new explorations t.s. eliot preludes

Preludes and tactile images abound – ‘smell of steaks’, ‘burnt-out’, ‘smoky’, ‘grimy’, ‘withered leaves about your feet’, the showers ‘wrap’ and ‘beat’ – leaving Background a sense of staleness and decay. This is compounded by the image of ‘Preludes’ present us with urban scenes where what is seen reflects a cramped apartments in ‘passageways’. ‘The burnt-out ends of smoky particular state of mind. For the deeply disillusioned young poet, they days’ is a visual image that reminds us of Prufrock’s ‘butt-ends of my days illustrate the ugliness, decline, emptiness and boredom of modern life. and ways’ and also evokes a sense of weariness and disgust. Adjectives such as ‘withered’, ‘broken’, ‘lonely’ and ‘vacant’ suggest the decay and The city here is effectively the same as that described by Prufrock in isolation of city life, while the insistent beating of the rain adds to the the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is a sordid world of deadening misery. The visual image of the uncomfortable and impatient cab-horse monotony and empty routine. The time-sets of the poem – evening, completes the picture of dreariness. morning, night and day – reinforce the feeling of tedious monotony. The title ‘Preludes’ can be seen as a reference to this sequence of evening, The isolated last line of this section – ‘And then the lighting of the lamps’ morning, night and day. They are a ‘prelude’ to more sameness in the – suggests that something dramatic might be about to happen, but purposeless cycle of life. nothing does. The opening words ‘And then’ are not a prelude to drama, but rather a closing in of the night. ‘Preludes’ could also point to the musical or lyrical effects in the poems. As is usual with Eliot, the poetry here is fragmented, full of quickly Thus, the imagery of the section evokes the speaker’s mood. The reader changing images – visual, aural, tactile and olfactory – in what is often can imagine him trudging home through the wet misery of a winter’s described as a cinematic style. In what is essentially also a stream of evening, surrounded by withered leaves and discarded newspapers and consciousness style, Eliot takes us on a journey through the senses and inhaling the burnt and musty smells of his living quarters. What else could the minds of his observers. he be but depressed by it all? The feeling of a numb, aimless struggle in an ugly, sterile environment suggests a mood of spiritual and mental A reading of the poem decay. Section I The ‘winter evening’ is personified as it ‘settles down’ in a way reminiscent of the fog/cat in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Olfactory images

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Section II is suggesting that behind all the mad masquerade of activity there is a Like ‘evening’ in the first section, ‘morning’ is personified. It is as if the paralysis of the metaphysical, as people’s lives are constituted solely by monotonous time-sets were living an independent life from the actors in their mundane masquerades. this tedious drama of life. Section III Olfactory and tactile images – ‘smells of beer’, ‘sawdust-trampled The third section illustrates physical inaction as a woman (the ‘you’ of the street’, ‘muddy feet that press’, ‘coffee-stands’ – again suggest a sense poem) struggles to wake and sluggishly prepares to get out of bed, where of staleness and decay. Words such as ‘trampled’ and ‘press’ add to the during the night she fitfully dozed. Her uncomfortable, sleepless night is mood of oppressiveness. Individual life is submerged in the city and by caught in the verbs of the first three lines – ‘tossed’, ‘lay’, ‘waited’, ‘dozed’, the onward march of time and what emerges is a mass conformity and ‘watched’. She is trapped between sleep and wakefulness, which allows her uniformity: imagination to wander randomly:

One thinks of all the hands … revealing That are raising dingy shades The thousand sordid images In a thousand furnished rooms. Of which your soul was constituted

This sense of sameness and monotony is also suggested by ‘all its muddy Thus, her paralysis, just like the city’s, is also a paralysis of the feet that press | To early coffee-stands’. metaphysical. She is quite inert, apart from throwing the blanket from her bed. Eliot regularly depersonalises the character of individuals to show the mechanical nature of their lives. Here, people are reduced to ‘hands’ and As is typical of Eliot, we are again presented with a character’s state ‘feet’, invoking something living yet spiritually inanimate. Life has become of mind. The woman cannot sleep and when she dozes, her semi- an enslavement to pressure – the pressure of time, crowds and gulped- conscious mind projects, like a film on a screen, her interior self, which down coffee. ‘flickered against the ceiling’. These ‘sordid’ images reflect not only her degradation, but are symbolic of the degenerated consciousness and For Eliot, this morning rush to work is a masquerade. It is an act put on spirit of mankind in the 20th century. As a projection of the 20th century, by all the ‘feet’ and ‘hands’ to give their lives some meaning. The poet she is more passive and vulgar than the woman in ‘A Game of Chess’. 300 new explorations t.s. eliot preludes

When morning arrived, its light ‘crept up between the shutters’, almost Eliot again dehumanises and depersonalises individuals to show the as if it were an unwelcome intruder, while the sparrows are stripped of mechanical nature of city life – ‘trampled … feet’, ‘short square fingers’, all beauty by being heard ‘in the gutters’. Her vision of the street is not ‘and eyes’. Their daily routine consists of ‘newspapers’ and ‘pipes’ and being clarified. It is again blurred – a vision that is hardly understood. Both ‘Assured of certain certainties’. Thus, the human reality of the street reveals woman and street appear earthbound – she is supine in bed while the itself as neither conscious nor aware of its own insecurities and sordid personified street is ‘trampled’ in both sections II and IV. dilapidation. The poet sees these people as living lives of drudgery, whose ‘conscience’ has been ‘blackened’. This is a valueless, dreary society, which The feeling of degradation and disgust is continued in the last four lines is now menacingly seen as being ‘Impatient to assume the world’. of this section. Eliot again depersonalises the character of the woman to portray this. She is dehumanised into bodily parts – ‘hair’, ‘feet’, ‘hands’ – In one of those abrupt shifts for which he is famous, Eliot suddenly reveals to evoke the image of a living person who is spiritually inanimate, just as himself in a moving, pathos-filled quatrain: in section II. The sense of disgust is more intense here, however. Her hair is artificially curled with paper, her feet are unhealthily ‘yellow’ and her I am moved by fancies that are curled hands are ‘soiled’. This is quite unlike the meticulous image of Prufrock Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle in the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He may be ridiculous, but she is Infinitely suffering thing. repulsive. The capacity for spiritual growth is non-existent.

What saves the poet from being swamped by his disgust for modern life is Section IV his clinging to a belief in ‘some infinitely gentle | Infinitely suffering thing’. The final section in this poetic sequence reveals the speaker more fully. This is perhaps indicating his move towards Christianity as a source of Like the woman in section III whose soul’s images are ‘flickered against order and veneration. the ceiling’, his soul is also mirrored upwards. But the skies on which it is stretched are not attractive. They ‘fade behind a city block’. Indeed, However, in an equally abrupt shift he returns to cynicism and encourages the image is rather tortured – ‘His soul [is] stretched tight’, reflecting the us to laugh at, and not sympathise with, the human condition: ‘Wipe tension and strain of urban life. The passing of the hours – ‘At four and your hand across your mouth, and laugh’. The emptiness in life and the five and six o’clock’ – merely reflects the tense tedium and emptiness of struggle for survival are suggested in a simile that underscores the horrific his existence. drudgery of deprivation: 301 new explorations t.s. eliot preludes

The worlds revolve like ancient women The winter evening settles down Gathering fuel in vacant lots. With smell of steaks in passageways.

The process of dying, which is prevalent among most, if not all, of the Thus, in keeping with the musical note of its title, the poet uses lyrical characters in Eliot’s poetry, is dramatically evident here too. devices to emphasise his themes and underscore imagery and mood. While section I is generally composed of end-stopped lines, section II is Language and mood composed of lines that run on. This use of enjambment serves to convey Lyrical devices are common throughout. The monotonous metre of a sense of movement – the movement of ‘muddy feet’ on a ‘trampled the first section emphasises the drudgery and oppression of these mean street’. It also emphasises the pressure of time. The use of synecdoche, streets. Most lines have four iambic stresses, while the others have two. in which a part is substituted for the whole, has been alluded to earlier This is in keeping with the image of trampling feet in sections II and IV for the way in which it depersonalises individuals and emphasises and, matched by the inexorable flow of time, emphasises the general monotonous conformity: weariness of moods. One thinks of all the hands The emphatic rhymes equally convey the sense of oppression. This That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms. is particularly the case with the rhyming couplets: ‘wraps – scraps’ and ‘stamps – lamps’. While Eliot favoured vers libre, he does use rhyme to draw attention to or satirise a situation, as we saw in section I. The rhyming of ‘consciousness’ The insistent beating of the rain is further emphasised by the use of with ‘press’ and ‘masquerades’ with ‘shades’ underscores the theme of alliteration – ‘The showers beat | On broken blinds’ – while the impatience pretence, the desire to put on an act to give life some meaning. It also of the horse is intensified by alliteration and the strong iambic rhythm: intensifies the mood of oppression. ‘And at the corner of the street | A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps’.

Overall in section III there is a strong sense of contrast between the Earlier in Section I, the use of alliteration and consonance furthers the descriptions of movement and the sense of spiritual paralysis. The sense of decay and staleness. The use of sibilant s sounds is particularly essentially passive nature of the verbs used at the beginning of this section effective in this: reflects the woman’s supine state and degenerated consciousness. 302 new explorations t.s. eliot preludes

The repetition of ‘And’, which introduces three lines, intensifies the Main images experience of dull monotony, while the almost onomatopoeic effect of The street the rhyming couplet, ‘shutters – gutters’, reflects the lack of lyricism in the The woman perceived sound of the sparrows. The result is particularly satiric. Food and drink Body parts The monotonous metre evident in the earlier part of section IV The detritus of the street emphasises the drudgery and oppression of this city’s life, just as in section Masquerades I. The movement of these first nine lines underscores the repetitive Rapidly changing images – visual, oral, tactile, olfactory – cinematic routine. They go on and on. The abrupt shift from the third to the first style person in line 48 dramatises the poet’s revelation of himself and his feelings. The strong iambic metre is also relaxed, suggesting a sense of release from tension and strain. The sense of pathos inherent in these lines is lost in another abrupt shift in the last three lines to a mood of deep cynicism. The simile is intensified by the word choice – ‘ancient’, ‘vacant’ – and the slowing down of the rhythm.

Main themes Incessant toil and suffering The decay and isolation of 20th-century life Time Death in life Life is mundane, monotonous, repetitive, mechanical Paralysis of the soul/consciousness A journey through the mind and senses

303 new explorations t.s. eliot aunt helen

Aunt Helen Lines 4 and 5 have a satiric edge that is devastating in its implications. The ‘silence at her end of the street’ is what is expected out of respect for the Background dead person. However, the ‘silence in heaven’ conveys the full contempt This is one of those poems in which Eliot outlines his impressions of of the poet for Aunt Helen’s self-serving lifestyle. Faced with this, Heaven genteel society in Boston, the inner circle of which he was introduced has nothing to say. Eliot’s contempt is not surprising when one considers to through his uncle. What the philosopher Santayana referred to as how he was raised in a religious environment that promoted unselfish its cultural deadness and smug righteousness left this society open to service to the wider community’s needs. satire. In this poem Eliot comments on its manners and mores while also suggesting the emotional and spiritual shallowness behind its conventional The observance of conventions that indicate respect for the dead is also beliefs and culture. Aunt Helen is a symbol of a world that ought to seen in line 6: ‘The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his be mocked. Eliot himself called it a world ‘quite uncivilised, but refined feet –’. However, the dash at the end of the line is almost a challenge to beyond the point of civilisation’. the reader to see the gesture as one of rejection. The reader is reminded of Christ’s advice to followers concerning those who reject his and their A reading of poem values – to shake the dust of their towns from their sandals. The deadpan The poem is written in the imagist style. The satiric meaning of the poem, sarcasm of line 7 – ‘He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred therefore, has to be inferred from the few concise detailed images. The before’ – reduces the death of this privileged lady to the commonplace. personal note of the first line is quickly dropped in favour of Eliot’s usual Aunt Helen’s death is being dismissed as ‘this sort of thing’. Her decorous device of the detached observer. The banal tone borders on that of a but distorted sense of values is seen in the next line: ‘The dogs were newspaper reporter as a series of apparently objective details are given. handsomely provided for’. She lived ‘in a small house’ – a large one would have been vulgar. ‘Near a fashionable square’ further suggests a genteel refinement. Living in The implied criticism of such values controls our response to line 9, which the square would be too ostentatious. The rather contrived and archaic- evokes laughter rather than sympathy. Perhaps the poet is also implying sounding line 3 conveys the fastidious nature of Miss Helen Slingsby and that her values don’t survive her any longer than the life of a parrot. The her self-contained little world: ‘Cared for by servants to the number of lifeless, artificial, materialistic world in which she lived is seen in ‘The four’. Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece’, and when we read that the servants resort to behaviour that Aunt Helen would not have

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tolerated, disregarding both her property and her values, laughter entirely The reader could not be blamed for believing initially that this poem is a replaces sympathy. The servants’ behaviour is not a perversion of ancient sonnet. It has the general appearance of one. However, if it does then Eliot values, but a release from their artificial confines. However, even though is perhaps mocking the attitudes and expectations of the reader, for this is we do laugh at and reject Aunt Helen’s self-centred values, we are also a very distorted ‘sonnet’, being 13 lines long, with little rhyme and varying left with a slight sense of distaste at the vulgarity of the final lines. Satire rhythm patterns. Thus, this distortion may reflect not only Aunt Helen’s has not entirely reversed our sense of pathos. You may wish to compare distorted values but the reader’s also. Satire works in a number of ways. Miss Helen Slingsby with the portrayal of women in ‘A Game of Chess’ and in ‘Preludes’. The contrast between the behaviour of the footman and housemaid and that of Aunt Helen might also be said to add to the humour and Language and tone introduces a slightly risqué, if not entirely vulgar element. The flat, banal tone has been alluded to already. This banal style of narration undermines the seriousness with which Aunt Helen viewed Finally, Eliot the dramatist is very much in evidence in this poem. Apart herself and the trivialities that surrounded her. from his ability to create a comic type with a few strokes of his pen, he has also created a time and place and most especially, perhaps, he has However, the reader might declare the ultimate tone of the narrator mimicked the pompous tone of Aunt Helen. Thus, quite ordinary words to be quite serious and reject its apparent levity. But as F.R. Leavis and phrases, such as ‘a fashionable square’ and ‘this sort of thing’, echo the has pointed out, ‘It is as necessary to revise the traditional idea of the bourgeois speech of Miss Helen Slingsby. distinction between seriousness and levity in approaching this poetry as in approaching the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century.’ The reader will have to decide whether Aunt Helen’s life was a tragedy or a comedy. A few random rhymes do little but emphasise the overall absence of lyricism, thus reflecting the general dullness of Aunt Helen’s life. Indeed, Main themes some lines read almost as prose, particularly lines 6 and 7. This adds to the Criticism of cultural deadness and self-righteousness sense of boredom and staleness. Emotional and spiritual shallowness Distorted values Time

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Main images Silence The undertaker The dog and the parrot The Dresden clock The servants

306 new explorations t.s. eliot a game of chess

A Game of Chess The title of the poem is taken from a play by Thomas Middleton (1580– 1627), where the action is played out like moves in a game of chess. This A reading of the poem play is a political satire that created a furore at the time and which Eliot ‘A Game of Chess’ is section II of Eliot’s best-known long poem, ‘The has described as ‘a perfect piece of literary political art’. Middleton’s Waste Land’. This was first published in 1922 and quickly and enduringly greatest tragedy, Women Beware Women, is also in Eliot’s mind here. In became synonymous with the poet himself. this play a young woman is raped while her mother, downstairs and quite unaware of what is happening, plays a game of chess. The allusion to the Just like the full poem, ‘A Game of Chess’ can be read on the level of a rape of Philomel by Tereus, as told in Greek legend, is symbolised later in narrative or in its more complicated form, when an understanding of the the poem. All of this is related to the principal theme of the section: the many references helps to universalise the themes and issues. This use of theme of lust without love. The opening lines place a woman in a room references concurs with Eliot’s belief, expressed in an essay published in that has been described as full of ‘splendid clutter’. This room, or more 1919 called ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, that literary tradition does precisely, a rich lady’s boudoir, is surrounded by symbols of our cultural not just belong to the past but should be used by the poet to express heritage. The extreme lavishness of the boudoir is stressed by evoking himself more completely. This allows Eliot to overtly contrast the marvels the opulence of legendary queens like Cleopatra, Cassiopeia, Dido and of the past with the squalid nature of the present. ‘A Game of Chess’ is Philomel. an example of this, where the first 34 lines describe, amongst other things, past grandeur, while the rest of the poem depicts the present. These opening lines also reflect Enoborbus’s description of Cleopatra’s ceremonial barge in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra is ‘A Game of Chess’ describes the stunting effects of improperly famous for her love affairs with powerful Roman generals such as Julius directed love or of lust confused with love. The poem is constructed Caesar and Mark Antony. However, Eliot substitutes ‘chair’ for ‘barge’, as an apparent contrast between the class, wealth and education of the thus evoking the Andromeda legend and the story of Cassiopeia, which characters in the first part and the lower-class female characters in a pub are also ‘waste land’ tales. Lavish wealth is suggested by ‘burnished at closing time. A closer reading will suggest that the differences are throne’, ‘marble’ and ‘golden’. The carved Cupidons on the glass superficial in comparison with the fundamental similarities. standards suggest possible shameful love affairs.

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The ‘sevenbranched candelabra’ (line 6) adds to the richness of the early Christian times was a symbol of diligence in love, and the word room while evoking further historical and cultural references. The seven- ‘framed’ prepares us for the pictorial representation of the Philomel story. branched candelabra suggests the Jewish Menorah, which in turn reflects Even as he introduces the story, Eliot reinforces the theme and tone a religious sanctuary and the laying waste of much of Judaic culture over with a reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The picture was like a window the centuries. The candelabra may also be a reference to the constellation opening upon a ‘sylvan scene’, but this sylvan scene is the one that lay of the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades), which is next to the Cassiopeia before Satan when he first arrived at the Garden of Eden. Thus, sexual constellation. Thus, the richness of description also becomes a richness corruption is introduced in a deceptively beautiful scene. ‘The change of reference. This superabundance of rich visual details continues. There of Philomel’ is a euphemism for what really happens – the violent rape are glittering jewels, ‘satin cases’, ‘ivory and coloured glass’. However, the of this girl. The reader is troubled by such violence occurring in such a greater the accumulation, the greater the confusion in the reader and the beautiful place. The story of Philomel, which Eliot takes from Ovid’s less sure we are of what we are seeing or sensing. The woman’s perfumes Metamorphoses, is continued in lines 24–7. The barbarity of the sexual are ‘strange’ and ‘synthetic’ and they ‘lurked’ in her vials, suggesting violence done to Philomel by King Tereus of Thrace (who was married to something illicit or at least decadent. Words such as ‘unstoppered’ and Philomel’s sister, Procne) is compounded by the cutting off of her tongue. ‘unguent’ add to the sense of decadence, as does a phrase like ‘drowned Zeus, the king of the gods, took pity on Philomel and turned her into a the sense in odours’, and thus the reader also is left ‘troubled, confused’. nightingale – the ‘nightingale’ of line 24. This classic tragic story is given ‘The air | That freshened from the window’ doesn’t really freshen the further voice in this room of the present. The theme of rape, the most room, but stirs the odours into ‘fattening the prolonged candle-flames’. immoral and improperly directed love/lust, forces us to react and to see Thus, the sense of a stifling, decadent sensuality, or indeed sexuality, is its significance in the ‘present’ of the poem. further enhanced. The ‘laquearia’, which is a panelled ceiling, also holds a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid, to the scene in Carthage where Queen Dido The violated Philomel, her tongue cut out, still manages to express her gives a banquet for her beloved Aeneas, who eventually deserts her. This sorrow in inviolable voice when, as the nightingale, she fills all the desert reinforces the theme of misplaced love. with song. Perhaps this expresses Eliot’s own wish to fill the waste land, or desert, with song. However, this may not be possible, for even the The patterns on the ceiling continue the notion of almost divine sound of the nightingale – the ‘Jug Jug’ of line 27 was a conventional decadence. The colours are rich, the scale is huge and the associations Elizabethan method of expressing birdsong – becomes merely salacious are deliberate. The ‘sea-wood’ can be linked with the dolphin, which in in the modern world ‘to dirty ears’. The move in line 26 from the past

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tense ‘cried’ to the present tense of ‘pursues’ underscores this more imperatives. The answers of the protagonist indicate that his is as prurient perspective. desperate a situation as hers. However, his is a calmer, more resigned despair. He may be in a psychological Hell (‘rats’ alley’), but he is aware Lines 28–31 return to a description of the room. The other decorations, of alternatives. He quotes from Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘Those are pearls presumably outlining scenes from our cultural inheritance, are dismissed that were his eyes.’ This suggests the possibility of transformation. Indeed, as ‘withered stumps of time’. The poet is scornful of those who possess in The Tempest two lovers play a game of chess that may be linked with but do not appreciate such riches. This further suggests modern people’s genuine love. failure to come to terms with this same cultural inheritance. Ironically, these ‘stumps of time’ no longer speak to us despite being ‘told upon the However, the sardonic counter-perspective immediately intrudes with walls’. Perhaps the ‘stumps of time’ may also evoke Philomel’s stump of a ‘that Shakespeherian Rag’ of line 52, an American hit tune of 1912. In this tongue. context, the words ‘elegant’ and ‘intelligent’ deny both true elegance and true intelligence and perhaps the possibility of finding the true nature of The image of the woman brushing her hair in lines 32–4 suggests a either in this room with these people, despite the grandeur of the room nervous person under considerable emotional strain. The rather surreal itself. The overall sense of purposelessness is reinforced by the woman’s image of her hair glowing into words suggests her hypersensitivity and final questions and the answers to them. Water, which is normally a life- her tense speech, while ‘savagely still’ suggests a truly neurotic silence. giving symbol, is without potency here. In fact, it must be avoided by Lines 35–62 are made up of a dialogue between this woman and a using a closed car. male protagonist. The lines between the quotation marks represent the woman’s words. The man’s are not given quotation marks. Perhaps he is The pub scene, apparently set in a working-class urban area from the silent, his answers to her questions being unspoken thoughts. Thus, the tone of the narrative, opens in line 63. Much of the essential nature episode is not, perhaps, a full dialogue, but rather just an exchange of of this scene is its vocalness. We, the readers, have the experience of sorts, indicating an emotional and communicative stalemate. eavesdropping on a barside monologue. The speaker of the narrative is a woman. The difference in class between her and the woman of the earlier While the staccato rhythm of the woman’s utterances reveals her lines is quite apparent. There is a sense of immediacy in the setting, with nervous tension, the substance suggests her state of purposelessness. the woman recounting a dialogue between herself and another woman, The dialogue, if it is one, pivots around aimless questions and nervous Lil, some time earlier. The barman’s words, in capitals, break into the

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narrative, contributing meanings to the narrative not recognised by its The narrative is not concluded. It is disrupted by closing time and there is narrator. the suggestion of the speaker leaving the pub (line 94). Time is running out for the characters in the narrative, reinforced by the urgent, constant The theme of the past haunting the present is again immediately calling of ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’. Their farewells fade into the identifiable, as are those of sterility, lust without love, spiritual/emotional Shakespearian final line, drawing us back to one of those ‘stumps of time’ illness and emptiness, intimations of mortality and the role of women. The – Ophelia’s madness and her drowning. This reference adds a sense of sense of a waste land is acute: not the waste of war’s destruction, but the dignity to the narrative while also universalising the themes of misplaced emotional and spiritual sterility of modern man. love and destruction.

In a society where appearance means everything, Lil is told to smarten Language, tone and mood herself up for her husband Albert, who is returning from war. Lil is Eliot’s poetry is essentially dramatic – from conflict to characterisation, criticised for looking old before her time (line 80). Indeed, Albert had from action to dialogue, from plot to imagery. The student may be well criticised her some time earlier, presumably when he was on leave, and advised to search for examples of these dramatic elements. had given her money to get a new set of teeth. However, she had used the money to procure an abortion (line 83). The sympathy of the narrator The language in ‘A Game of Chess’ both reflects and is part of the essential lies with Albert – the ‘poor Albert’ of line 71 who will want ‘a good time’ drama of the poem. The diction and syntax of the first section reflect after his four years in the army. Albert may even ‘make off’ with those who the description of the room. Thus, words used to describe the ‘props’ will give him a good time if Lil doesn’t. of the dramatic setting could well describe the style too – words such as ‘burnished’, ‘synthetic’ or ‘rich profusion’. Archaic and artificial-sounding Lil, meanwhile, is told to smarten up, that she ‘ought to be ashamed … to words such as ‘Cupidon’, ‘unguent’ and ‘laquearia’ add to this sense of an look so antique’ and that she is ‘a proper fool’. Little sympathy is had for her urgent, forced style. Overall, the feeling is one of claustrophobia, a sense of nearly dying in pregnancy (line 84) and a fatalistic attitude is held towards being trapped, or ‘prolonged’, in this gorgeous, cluttered room. The long the sexual demands of her husband (lines 87–8). The vulgar insensitivity of sentences add to this feeling. (The first sentence is nine lines long.) Similarly, it all can be compared to the fate of Philomel in the first section, while the the various subordinate clauses within these long sentences contribute to use of the word ‘antique’ also reminds us of the imagery of the first section. the sense of being ‘troubled, confused’. The lavish opulence of the room In this outline of Lil’s life, social satire is in effect evoking sympathy. and the language in which it is described thus create a feeling of unease.

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In the same way there is a glut of active verbs and participles from lines man, but also suggests that this vacancy reverberates in her mind as well. 14 to 34, almost hypnotising the reader and stifling a response. At times, An emotional stalemate is the result. however, the language is wonderfully economic. ‘Sad light’ and ‘And still she cried, and still the world pursues’ beautifully combine both description The unnatural rhythm of the woman’s speech, with its deadening, and emotion. However, on other occasions the deliberate literariness of repetitive, nervous questioning, is counterpointed by the smooth rhythm the lines hides the brutal reality. This is the case with the description of the of the quotation from Shakespeare’s Tempest in line 49. However, the rape of Philomel. The rather lofty, Miltonic tone of ‘Above the antique irony here is further compounded by the vulgar ragtime rhythm of ‘that mantel was displayed | As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene’ Shakespeherian Rag’. The diction and syntax of the speaker in the pub tends to obscure what is actually happening in the picture. scene is essentially that of the urban English working class. In tone it is an abrupt shift from that of the woman in the room. The word ‘said’ is The euphemisms used, ‘The change of Philomel’ and ‘So rudely forced’, repeated some 15 times in a gossipy fashion. This not only realistically tend to lessen the enormity of the sexual violence. Thus, the sense of reflects the rhythms and patterns of speech of the working class, but also sexual decadence is evoked. The poet’s scornful reaction to such opulent adds a certain prayer-like intonation. decadence is seen in lines 28–9: The barman’s sonorous ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’ both breaks And other withered stumps of time, into and breaks up the speaker’s narrative, adding levels of meaning Were told upon the walls … not intended by the speaker. Its repetition contributes to the urgency of the narrative, even introducing a comic, quasi-apocalyptic tone. The The cold brevity of these lines is in sharp contrast to the aureate earlier quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which ends the passage, has descriptions. This economy of expression continues in line 30: ‘Leaned Ophelia’s lingering farewell reminding us that the time is indeed out of out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed’. Here, the strained repetitiveness joint. Ophelia’s words, which rise out of the mêlée of farewells in lines of the line prepares us for the strained emotions of the woman introduced 94–5, enhance the pathos of these people’s lives and remind us again that in line 35, while the word ‘enclosed’ confirms for us the claustrophobia of the past does indeed haunt the present and that music may be made out the room. The woman’s speech reflects her neurotic state. The repetition of suffering. of one word from earlier on in the line at the end of three of the lines – ‘Speak.’ ‘What?’ ‘Think.’ – emphasises the neurotic state. The repetition of ‘nothing’ in lines 44–50 reflects not only the emotional vacancy of the 311 new explorations t.s. eliot a game of chess

Main themes The marvels of the past contrast with the squalid nature of the present The past haunts the present The stunting effect of improperly directed love/lust Lust without love Sexual corruption may be deceptively beautiful The desire to fill the waste land with song Modern people’s failure to come to terms with their cultural heritage The emotional strain of modern life Sense of purposelessness in modern life Intimations of mortality

Main images Opulent luxury of the room Rape of Philomel Nervous gestures of the woman The story of Lil and Albert The landlord crying ‘time’

312 new explorations t.s. eliot journey of the magi

Journey of the Magi companions now find strange. He longs for death now so that he can achieve new life. This is the first of the Ariel poems, a set of poems which beginning in 1927, the year in which Eliot joined the Anglican church, were published The poem can be seen as an analogy of Eliot’s own agonising spiritual by Faber & Faber as a sort of Christmas card. Both this poem and ‘A journey. The quest for a new spiritual life involves rejecting the old life Song for Simeon’ (1928) refer specifically to the birth of Christ. The Magi with its many attractions. Thus, the birth also includes a death – the death were the three wise men or kings – commonly, but not scripturally, known of the old way of life. Such a journey involves doubt, regrets and lack of as Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior – who journeyed from the east to pay conviction. Maybe ‘this was all folly’. This tone of uncertainty leads us homage to the newly born baby Jesus, according to the gospel of St to appreciate that rather than asserting his beliefs, Eliot is expressing his Matthew 11: 1–12. However, Eliot’s inspiration comes not from this well- willingness to believe, which is his present spiritual condition. known gospel story alone, but also from a sermon preached by Lancelot Andrews, Bishop in Winchester, on Christmas Day 1622, which Eliot Themes and issues quotes in his ‘Selected Essays’. The first five lines of the poem are a direct The poem is a dramatic monologue in which the magus, the narrator, quotation from this sermon by Lancelot Andrews. tells of his and his companions’ experiences in their journey to the birth of Christ. The opening five lines are an abbreviation of Andrews’s sermon, The poem is essentially a dramatic monologue spoken by one of the as mentioned above, which Eliot includes as part of the magus’s narration. Magi, who is now an old man recalling and reminiscing about the journey he and his companions made to witness a birth. Thus, the poem The journey undertaken is one from death to life. It begins in ‘The very is concerned with a quest and those travelling must traverse a type of dead of winter’. The hardships endured represent the sacrifice the Magi waste land to reach the promised land. The Magis’ journey is challenging, must make in order to achieve new birth. Also, before there is a birth painful and difficult. It involved giving up old comforts, certainties and there must be a death of the old life. beliefs so that it became a ‘Hard and bitter agony for us’. Reaching their destination doesn’t lead to any great sense of achievement or celebration. The hardships undergone include not only the weather and trouble with Instead, the narrator is unsure of the significance of what he has seen: their camels, but also major regrets for what is left behind: ‘The summer ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’. The narrator remains disturbed and palaces … the silken girls bringing sherbet’. These real attractions cannot bewildered as he returns to the ‘old dispensation’, which he and his be easily overcome.

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Exactly how tough the journey was is seen in the sequence from line 11 to to ask the right question. While he is convinced that it was significant line 16. The increasing torment outlined in the matter-of-fact, descriptive – ‘And I would do it again’ – and is anxious that no part of his narrative statements here is made all the more effective by the repetition of ‘And’. should be overlooked – ‘but set down | This set down | This’ – the Birth The hostility of various communities, symbolic of a disbelieving world, doesn’t seem to have been what he expected. He ‘had thought they [birth leads them ‘to travel all night’. Adding to their discomfort is the realisation and death] were different’, but ‘this Birth was … like Death, our death’. that the hostile unbelievers may be right – ‘That this was all folly’. The Magi return to their kingdoms but feel alienated among their own people. They must continue to live amidst the old way of life – ‘the old The next section, beginning at line 21, seems at first to confirm the death dispensation’ – while not believing in it. So their Birth remains a bitter to life theme. It is ‘dawn’, there is ‘a temperate valley’ and ‘a running agony while they wait for ‘another death’. Another death is required – the stream and a water-mill beating the darkness’ – all of which can be seen magus’s own, or perhaps Christ’s – before he can enter a new life. as birth images. However, ambiguity and uncertainty quickly return. The ‘three trees’ are reminders of the Crucifixion of Christ, as are the ‘Six Imagery and symbolism hands … dicing for pieces of silver’. These, coupled with the negativity The whole poem is structured around a journey, both real and symbolic. of the horse galloping away, ‘the empty wine-skins’ and ‘no information’, The journey as recalled by the magus is one from death to birth, the can be seen as furthering the theme of death. However, they may also imagery of which suggests the inner struggles of the narrator and his suggest the interrelation between death and birth. Christ’s incarnation companions. The journey begins at ‘the worst time of the year’, with leads inexorably to his Crucifixion, just as his Crucifixion leads to eternal ‘The ways deep and the weather sharp’, and ends in ‘a temperate valley life. Ambiguity can also be seen in what should be the joyful climax of the … smelling of vegetation’. The symbolic movement from death to life journey and confirmation of belief. However, this is not so. The intense is clear. Paradoxically, however, there is also a movement from life to anticipation and anxiety of ‘not a moment too soon’ is immediately death. Here, ‘The summer palaces … And the silken girls bringing sherbet’ followed by the uncertain reticence of ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’. represent the old life. The travellers make their way through a waste land No description of the birth or the one who was born is given. of ‘cities hostile and the towns unfriendly’, until in the valley there is a symbolic death of the old life as an ‘old white horse galloped away’. Some This sense of uncertainty turns to a degree of confusion in the last section critics have seen references to the Fisher King myth in the journey and its as the magus tries to work out the meaning of what he saw. Maybe like symbols. the knight meeting the Fisher King in the Holy Grail legend, he has failed

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The second stanza contains a series of death and birth images. ‘Dawn’, Then the camel men cursing and grumbling ‘temperate valley’ and ‘vegetation’ can be seen as birth images, while And running away, and wanting their liquor and water is universally acknowledged as symbolising life. However, a flowing women river or stream is also a traditional poetic symbol of the passing of time. The action of the ‘water-mill’ can be seen as beating the darkness of time. The emphasis here falls into a natural pattern of speech and voice If the ‘water-mill’ represents Christ, then ‘darkness’ could represent death, inflection. The prayer-like, incantatory tone also befits both the speaker which Christ conquers by the Resurrection. On the other hand, the water- and the theme. The strong repetition of ‘And’ in the first two sections mill could represent the superior forces of those in the world who put reflects this. Overall, the purposefully ambiguous symbols and images Christ to death. There then follow a series of images foreshadowing the introduce a tone of uncertainty. The opening paraphrased uncertainty well-known imagery surrounding Christ’s death. The ‘three trees on the of Lancelot Andrews’s sermon sets the tone of desolation and the bitter low sky’ reflect the three crosses on the Hill of Calvary. The ‘hands dicing’ environment of the first stanza. The quotation also serves a second suggest the Roman soldiers dicing for Christ’s clothes and the ‘pieces purpose for Eliot: it incorporates the poem into a particular tradition. of silver’ remind us of the 30 pieces of silver that Judas was paid for his Thus, it serves a similar function to the quotation from Dante at the treachery. beginning of ‘Prufrock’ and is part of his efforts to create a synthesis between past and present. The ‘white horse’ can be seen as an ambiguous image. It may symbolise the life-giving, triumphant Christ of the Book of Revelations (VI: 2, 19: 11). The remainder of the first stanza is quite vitriolic in tone, as the magus However, as the horse is said to be ‘old’ and since it ‘galloped away’, it may criticises both his predicament and his previous life. This criticism is also represent the collapse of paganism, ‘the old dispensation’ of line 41. coupled with a tone of regret:

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, Language and tone And the silken girls bringing sherbet. As befits a dramatic monologue, the language reflects not only natural speech patterns, which catch the rhythms of speech, but also a The sensual, sibilant s sounds of these lines underscore what is being particular voice – the voice of the magus, at times both reminiscent and regretted. A tone of contempt can be seen in the ever-expanding complaining: criticism of the remainder of the first stanza.

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The second stanza suggests a tone of nostalgia as the magus remembers his arrival at ‘a temperate valley’. The last three lines of this stanza culminate in an understatement: ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’. The word ‘satisfactory’ reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty of the Magis’ reaction. Perhaps they are not completely aware of its relevance. The word is given particular emphasis by the expression in parentheses preceding it and by its irregularity with the set rhythm of the line. This tone of uncertainty is continued in the next stanza and develops into a tone of anxiety and of urgency: ‘but set down | This set down | This’. The dislocation and repetition of these lines emphasise this residual tone of uncertainty and urgency. The run-on line ‘this Birth was | Hard and bitter agony for us’ creates a similar tone of anxiety and perhaps even self-pity. The poem ends in a conditioned statement, ‘I should be glad of another death’, perhaps expressing a tone of resignation.

Main themes The Birth of Jesus Christ A quest/journey as an analogy of spiritual searching Lack of conviction/uncertainty/alienation Birth entails death The need for suffering in order to attain a new birth

Main images A journey A waste land of ‘cities hostile’ Death and birth images Biblical images 316 new explorations t.s. eliot iii. usk

III. Usk instructed: ‘Do not suddenly break … or | Hope to find … do not spell’. We are being told not to seek images such as ‘The white hart’, ‘the white Background well’, the ‘lance’. These are evocative of the classical Arthurian/Celtic This is one of Eliot’s five ‘Landscape’ poems, three of which are based in legends. As such, they are also evocative of the countryside. Thus, Eliot is America, one in Wales and one in Scotland. This poem resulted from a suggesting that in such a landscape we should not conjure up the past or 10-day holiday taken by Eliot in Wales in 1935. In keeping with the term any notion of romantic fantasy. He dismisses this as ‘Old enchantments’. ‘landscape’, the poem is a suggestive or evocative sketch in which the He tells us to ‘Let them sleep’. As a sort of second thought he allows us poet can be seen as an artist/painter. Like the other ‘Landscape’ poems, to ‘ “Gently dip, but not too deep” ’. However, having been instructed this poem consists of scenes and perceptions of deep significance in the against something, we are now instructed towards something. Our development of Eliot’s thinking. In particular, the ‘Landscape’ poems relationship with the landscape should not be escapist or full of romantic are definitive pointers in terms of Eliot’s developing religious and poetic fantasy, but should be such as to lead us towards the spiritual. sensibilities, which are further explored in the ‘Four Quartets’. In this sense, although listed under Minor Poems, there is nothing minor about In a prayer-like incantation, he tells us to ‘Lift your eyes’. We are being the significance of these poems. Indeed, taken as a sequence of five sent on a more active spiritual journey – a pilgrimage – ‘Where the roads poems, we can see that Eliot is again evoking drama here, as he did dip and where the roads rise’. We are to seek ‘The hermit’s chapel, the in ‘The Waste Land’ and in the individual quartets of ‘Four Quartets’. pilgrim’s prayer’, which although conventional images of the spiritual will The sequence of five is in keeping with the number of acts required by not be found in any conventional setting, but ‘Where the grey light meets Aristotle for tragic drama. Shakespeare also adhered to this. Thus, both the green air’. A spiritual home will be found in something that is neither ‘Usk’ and ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ can be seen as two acts in a drama human nor animal. Indeed, it may not be found in the natural landscape outlining the relationship between human beings and the natural world. at all, but in the eternal continuum of light and space, i.e. ‘Where the grey As number III, Usk marks a climax in the sequence. light meets the green air’.

A reading of the poem There is a note of hope here that is not found in ‘The Love Song of J. ‘Usk’ is a pastoral poem in both senses of the word, i.e. it is descriptive Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Preludes’ or ‘A Game of Chess’. It echoes that tiny of the countryside and is also spiritually instructive. The opening of the note of hope that is found in ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and marks a shift poem is abrupt, sudden and in the imperative mood. The reader is being towards a spiritual solution for Eliot in the face of life’s difficulties.

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Language invigoration. ‘White’ is bright, while ‘grey light’ evokes images of a chill, The language suggests a certain sense of detachment on the part of the bracing wind, and ‘green’ is traditionally seen as a natural, soothing colour. poet. The poem reads as advice to others from someone who has already The sense of peace is also evoked by the choice of individual words such reached a conclusion or discovered a position with which he is happy. as ‘sleep’, ‘gently’, ‘dip’ and ‘prayer’. Even though this is a description of a place, the poet is not part of the place. This can be seen as a type of metaphysical detachment. Main themes A pastoral poem in both senses The negative imperatives and the cacophonous alliterative sounds Avoid the ‘Old enchantments’ of the first line introduce us to the poet’s attitudes towards the ‘Old Seek the spiritual enchantments’. These same imperatives also evoke that sense of self- A journey assured, commanding authority we associate with metaphysical poets such as the 17th-century poet John Donne. In keeping with this robust Main images style, the rhythm is quick and irregular. This lively, almost bounding style Medieval romantic fantasies – ‘hart’, ‘well’, ‘lance’ is furthered by the use of alliteration and repetition in many of the lines. The road The rhythm, like the road, dips and rises. The use of enjambment, or run- ‘The hermit’s chapel’ on lines, in the second part of the poem in particular and the quite intense ‘Grey light’, ‘green air’ rhyme also add to the sense of insistent energy. The incantatory tones of some of the imperatives have been alluded to already. In fact, the tone of the whole poem can be found in the three dimeter lines:

Hope to find … Lift your eyes … Seek only there …

The dramatic exhortational tone of an Old Testament prophet is clear and in keeping with one aspect of the pastoral theme. Finally, the choice of colours in this landscape ‘painting’ suggests both a sense of peace and 318 new explorations t.s. eliot iv. rannoch, by glencoe

IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe Erosion is the norm here – ‘Substance crumbles’; everything is suspended ‘in the thin air’ of the inexorable movement of time – ‘Moon cold or moon Background hot’. This psychological topography allows no means of escape. ‘The ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ is the fourth in the five-poem sequence, road winds’ without apparent purpose. Instead we are offered a journey ‘Landscapes’ (see the introduction on ‘Usk’ on page 318.) through ‘Listlessness’, ‘Languor’ and ‘Clamour’. The sense of direction and invigorating movement evident in ‘Usk’ is totally absent here. We are stuck A reading of the poem in the wretchedness of history and its endless cycles: ‘ancient war’, ‘broken The poem explores the relationship between human beings and the steel’, ‘confused wrong’. These are the relics of embattled lives, before natural world. Like ‘Usk’, it is a pastoral in the sense of being both a which the only appropriate response is silence. These old rivalries will not be description of the countryside and also containing a message. It may resolved because ‘Memory is strong | Beyond the bone’. In this landscape suggest elements of a pastoral elegy to some readers. of memory where ‘Pride snapped’, the ‘Shadow of pride is long’. In ‘the long pass’ of a lifetime, there will be no resolution, no reconciliation – ‘No In many ways this poem is a stripping away of the idyllic, idealised Golden concurrence of bone’. This is because even though pride is humiliated Age pastoral to reveal a landscape of famine and war. The poem opens (‘snapped’), it holds onto its shadow. Unlike ‘Usk’, this poem offers no with two death-in-life images: ‘the crow starves’ and ‘the patient stag | religious perspective, no sense of hope and direction between life and death Breeds for the rifle’. They are the distressing results of the capacity of – only a sense of ‘betweenness’, where we are biologically fated to evoke old humans to condition the landscape. This is a barren landscape full of rivalries. They are of the bone and ‘Beyond the bone’. death. Here, all creatures feel constricted and oppressed: Living in a state of betweenness, the rational aspect of ourselves is lost … Between the soft moor amidst the ‘Clamour of confused wrong’, almost indifferent to suffering, And the soft sky, scarcely room including our own. As is common in Eliot’s poetry, the human in its non- To leap or soar… rational state is symbolised in animal imagery. Here the human is seen as ‘the crow’ and ‘the patient stag’ awaiting their fate. They are as unable to The softness here is not of ease or comfort, but a reflection of the sense understand what they had been reduced to as the inhabitants of the city of oppression. Sky and moor practically meet. If all relationships need street in ‘Preludes’. The existentialist awareness and its agony are to be space and time, then failure is inevitable here due to a distinct lack of found in the speakers and the readers of these poems. space. This landscape is a burden. 319 new explorations t.s. eliot iv. rannoch, by glencoe

The tragedy of ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ may be alleviated by the hope We are also presented with an anagram as a type of rhyme, i.e. ‘moor’ of ‘Usk’. However, ‘Usk’ is not a solution but an indication of the journey and ‘room’. The ‘moor’ turns on itself to become ‘room’, emphasising the that must be taken. But ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ is the tragedy that may constriction and oppression and becoming an analogy for the retracing prevent ‘Usk’. and restating of grievances in a closed system of confused wrongs and strong memories. Language This is a dysfunctional landscape and the poet’s use of language reflects Main themes that. The end-of-line neatness of strong rhyme and natural pauses in ‘Usk’ Death in life is absent. Instead we are presented with a rather discordant structure. A Time line or lines run on, only to finish abruptly in the middle of the next line. Humans’ impact on the natural world There is an emphasis on alliteration, in keeping with Eliot’s admiration of War, destruction and erosion medieval English. Unresolved rivalries

However, this does nothing to even out or smooth the lines. Rather, Main images the effect is insistent, if not altogether frenzied when combined with The crow and the stag the stutter-like rhythm. This nervous, stutter-like effect is added to by Moor and sky actual close word repetition. All of this creates an unease and a tension Winding road in the reader. Rhyme, where it does exist, is internal or slightly off, e.g. Images of war ‘wrong’, ‘strong’, ‘long’ and ‘sour’, ‘war’. Again, this adds to the sense of a Bone discordant structure.

The sense of constriction explored in the imagery of the first four lines is also present in the language. In the second sentence – ‘Between the soft moor | And the soft sky, scarcely room | To leap or soar’ – there appears to be no room for a main verb.

320 new explorations t.s. eliot east coker iv.

East Coker IV. A reading of the poem The poem, written for Good Friday 1940, sees Eliot at his most Background symbolic and a reading of the poem is, in effect, an interpretation of This short piece is part of ‘East Coker’, the second of ‘The Four Quartets’. this symbolism. The poem is a metaphysical one, structured around ‘The Four Quartets’ is seen by many critics as the most important work metaphysical conceits and paradoxes similar to those which may be found of Eliot’s career. Helen Gardner has called them Eliot’s masterpiece. The in the poetry of the 17th-century poet John Donne. It lies in the tradition new forms and ideas he experimented with in the ‘Landscape’ poems of 17th-century devotional verse, such as that of Donne, Herbert and (‘Usk’, ‘Rannoch’) are developed fully in ‘The Four Quartets’. Vaughan.

In keeping with the musical title, the structure of the ‘Quartets’ is The ‘wounded surgeon’ is Jesus Christ, whose suffering and death on symphonic and thus extraordinarily complex – a complexity which need the Cross, and whose subsequent Resurrection, ensured mankind’s not trouble the student here. redemption. The ‘wounded surgeon’ will cure the soul of its sickness: ‘the distempered part’. The surgeon’s knife, ‘the steel’, which operates, or Time is again one of the central themes, in particular its constant change ‘questions’, is God’s love. This is in keeping with St John of the Cross’s in contrast with unchanging eternity. The philosophical considerations of ‘the dark night of the soul’. the contrast between the real and the ideal, the human and the spiritual, explored in his earlier poetry, are again evident here. The soul is not unaware of God’s love operating on it. It feels ‘The sharp compassion of the healer’s art’. The oxymoron that is ‘sharp compassion’ ‘East Coker’ takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, from suggests the idea of a necessary evil, i.e. in order to be cured the soul which Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America. ‘East Coker’ is concerned must suffer first. Suffering is a means of grace. This is ‘the enigma of the with the place of mankind in the natural order of things and with the fever chart’. A physical evil can be seen as a spiritual good. Thus, the notion of renewal. This theme of rebirth, which is also found in ‘Journey metaphysical paradox is ‘resolved’. of the Magi’, is part of the spiritual progress of the soul. The soul must yield itself to God’s hands and die in order to be born again. Indeed, the The beginning of the second verse continues this notion of suffering soul must first suffer in order to be capable of responding fully to God’s as a means of grace: ‘Our only health is the disease’. The conceit of a love. St John of the Cross calls this ‘the dark night of the soul’. The saint’s hospital is continued with the image of ‘the dying nurse’. ‘The dying nurse’ writing on this has influenced Eliot here. 321 new explorations t.s. eliot east coker iv.

is the Church – ‘dying’ in the sense of the common fate of mankind. If to be warmed, then I must freeze The Church’s role is not to placate or please us, but to remind us firstly And quake in frigid purgatorial fires of ‘Adam’s curse’, which is never-ending toil and suffering, similar to the The essence of a breaking cold/hot fever, the body shivering and vision of mankind’s daily life in ‘Preludes’. The Church’s second role is to sweating as it rids itself of disease, is achieved here. Eliot calls the flames remind us that ‘to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’, meaning of purgation roses, the symbol of both human and divine love. Roses and that it is only through the fullest suffering that we can be fully cleansed or thorns are also the emblem of martyrdom. Thus, suffering is seen as the cleared of our sickness/evil. basis of the cure – a thorough penitential suffering.

The hospital conceit is continued in the third stanza. ‘The whole earth The fifth stanza opens with an image of the ‘wounded surgeon’ again. It is is our hospital’ in the sense that it is here that we can learn the value of Jesus Christ on the Cross, whose suffering leads to our Redemption. The suffering and can be cured of our sickness. The ‘ruined millionaire’ is image also evokes the Eucharist, the central act of worship for Christians. Adam, whose endowment brought sin into the world – Adam’s sin is It may also evoke the need for suffering in ourselves so that we too will Original Sin in Christian belief. The ‘paternal care’ is that of God, under be cured. The image of flesh and blood is continued in the next two lines whose care we would be privileged to die if we do well as ‘patients’ in in Eliot’s criticism of our blindness. We like to think that there is no need this world. The word ‘prevents’ is used in its 17th-century sense, meaning for humility and penance with our ideas of our own importance – ‘we are to go before us with spiritual guidance. God will help us by guiding us sound, substantial flesh and blood’. towards repentance. The second and modern meaning of ‘prevents’, that is, to stop or frustrate, is also appropriate. God stops our lives everywhere The adjectives ‘sound, substantial’ suggest that we rely too much on the through death. physical, the materialistic. However, Eliot recognises that behind our materialism, we innately acknowledge our need for repentance and the The notion of cure is continued in the fourth stanza. The cure is a fever grace of God. This is why ‘we call this Friday good’. one – because ‘to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’, as stated in the second stanza. The purgation, or cure, must move from a purgation Language of the flesh, burning away all the sickness and impurities of the flesh, until In this poem Eliot has revived the metaphysical poem. He uses many of it ascends to a purgation of the mind: the features we associate with the 17th-century poetry of Donne, Herbert and Vaughan. In line with metaphysical poetry there is a strong sense of

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argument throughout the poem. The argument, as outlined above, is The meaning of symbols used is explored above. However, the student that we need to reject the demands of the body and achieve redemption should be aware that symbolism is as much a use of language as it is through curing its ills. Pain and suffering are means towards achieving an exploration of meaning. Such usage invigorates both language and redemptive grace or enlightenment. meaning. Similarly, Eliot’s precision of language adds depth to the meaning of both individual words and the poem as a whole. His use of the This argument is presented throughout a series of metaphysical word ‘prevents’ in the third stanza is an example of this. paradoxes: The ‘wounded surgeon’ will cure us Examples of metaphysical wit are seen in the last stanza in the evocative ‘sharp compassion’ fused imagery of the first two lines in particular. Eliot ‘reinvented’ the ‘the enigma of the fever chart’ alliterated four-stress line commonly found in medieval English. This ‘Our only health is the disease’ poem generally follows that pattern, with quite strong medial pauses, e.g. ‘to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’ ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel’ or ‘Beneath the bleeding hands ‘if we do well, we shall | Die’ we feel’. ‘If to be warmed, then I must freeze’ ‘frigid purgatorial fires’ However, this kind of verse can become monotonous. Eliot’s genius was ‘in spite of that, we call this Friday good’ to apply the pattern with sufficient flexibility to avoid monotonous rigidity. W.B. Yeats once said that rhythm in poetry should be used ‘to prolong Many of these are examples of what is known as metaphysical wit, which the moment of contemplation’. Perhaps we can say this of both the is renowned for its clever but serious, incisive, challenging and intelligent rhythm and the strong, definite rhyme patterns in this poem. puns and paradoxes. The wit of the last stanza in particular removes any sense of emotional religiosity and serves to intensify the devotional mood. Main themes A conceit is an elaborate, sustained comparison. These were much used The idea of necessary evil – a physical evil may be a spiritual good by the 17th-century metaphysical poets. In keeping with this, Eliot uses Suffering as a means of attaining grace/redemption conceits in this poem. The ‘wounded surgeon’ is an example, as are seeing The purgation of evil the earth as a hospital and the notion of the fever cure. The caring love of God Growth towards a new life

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Main images The wounded surgeon Conceit of a hospital The nurse The ruined millionaire – Adam Play of opposites – ‘frigid fires’ The Cross The Eucharist

324 new explorations t.s. eliot an overview of t.s. eliot

An overview of T.S. Eliot flattered rather than educated. Eliot’s achievement, in both his poetry and his critical essays, was in founding new criteria of judgment on what Not even the most learned critic has said that Eliot’s poetry makes constitutes poetry. easy reading, yet of all 20th-century poets he is perhaps the most rewarding. No other poet has better expressed the social condition and Similar revolutions were happening in the other arts. James Joyce psychological state of modern man. revolutionised prose writing, as did Pablo Picasso with painting and Igor Stravinsky with music. The First World War (1914–18) also helped. At first While Eliot’s poetry can be read with pleasure at first sight, a full poetry was used for propaganda. Rupert Brooke’s saccharine war sonnets understanding will not come immediately. This is because quite often, were enthusiastically received. However, as the war dragged on public instead of the regular evocative images other poets use, Eliot presents perception was forced to change as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon us with a series of literary and historical references. Eliot himself insisted wrote of the revolting horrors of war. Owen insisted that poetry need that the reader must be prepared to answer the call for knowledge which not be beautiful, but it must be truthful. One aspect of the revolution poetry demands. Indeed, if the reader does persevere, then he/she will be that Eliot effected was the introduction to English of a style of poetry rewarded with a use of symbolism and allusion and an experimentation that is known as symbolism. When he arrived at Oxford in 1914, Eliot with the language and form of poetry, which deepen and intensify the brought with him a deep love and admiration for the French 19th-century experience of reading it. He/she will feel what Eliot himself called the symbolist poets, including Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue. Eliot’s ‘direct shock of poetic intensity’. debt to these poets is extensive, from diction to creative remodelling of subject matter, from tone to phrasing. Influences and the Modern Movement The Modern Movement effected a revolution in English literature Eliot adapted from Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) the poetical possibilities between 1910 and 1930. As the leading poet in the movement, Eliot of addressing ‘the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis’. brought about the break from the poetic tradition of the 19th century. Examples of these are seen in ‘Preludes’ and in ‘The Love Song of Apart from some notable exceptions, such as Hopkins and Hardy, J. Alfred Prufrock’. From Laforgue (1860–87) he adopted a tone of poetry in English had become degenerate in both taste and theme. mocking irony and despair. Eliot said he owed more to Laforgue ‘than It appealed to the imperialist prejudices of a smug, self-complacent to any poet in any language’. Laforgue was a technical innovator. He audience convinced of its own superiority in just about everything. Poetry pioneered vers libre, or free verse, which Eliot also adopted. Vers libre is

325 new explorations t.s. eliot an overview of t.s. eliot

verse freed from rigid, conventional forms of regular rhyme and rhythm. poet expressed ‘deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of Instead, Laforgue, and Eliot, use odd or irregular rhyme with varying exaltation’. The presence of Dante in Eliot’s verse extends beyond the rhythms to enhance both the theme and tone of the verse. Examples of epigraph in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to a recreation of these can be found throughout Eliot’s poetry. the whole experience of his verse. The hell or purgatory in which both Prufrock and the women in ‘A Game of Chess’ live reflects this. Laforgue also developed a sort of dramatic monologue, or stream of consciousness or interior monologue, as it is better known. Eliot adapted Eliot first met Ezra Pound in 1915, another great American poet and critic, this method too, as can be seen in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ who subsequently had a profound influence on Eliot’s development both and ‘Journey of the Magi’. However, Eliot developed the method to a as a poet and as a literary critic. It was through Pound that Eliot came further degree in the distancing and the self-mockery of the dramatic to be influenced by the so-called imagist school of poetry. Imagism personae of his poems. promoted the use of common speech in poetry, a complete freedom in subject choice, accuracy, concentration and precise description. The Eliot also admired many of the 17th-century English poets, seeing in them reader need only look at ‘Preludes’, ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ or ‘Aunt the emotional intensity and intellectual precision he found in the French Helen’ to see how true all of this is of Eliot’s poetry. symbolists. Eliot saw a similarity between the 17th and 20th centuries in that both centuries experienced the disintegration of old traditions and Themes the arrival of new learning. He particularly admired those who came to Eliot lived in a period that saw the disintegration of old traditions and be known as the metaphysical poets and felt that John Donne was closer beliefs and the arrival of new learning and new experiences. As a poet, he to him in spirit than most other English poets. Eliot shares with Donne had to find a different way of addressing the new. Pound’s famous phrase an often robust style, with colloquial language mingling with intellectual ‘make it new’ was a rallying cry to those who wished to tackle themes language. Like Donne, Eliot’s poems contain a sense of argument, relevant to their own experience. For Eliot, this was as much a recovery unexpected juxtapositions and eclectic references, demanding an of a lost tradition in poetry as it was a revolution. Thus, we find in Eliot’s intelligent attention from the reader. Even a cursory glance at ‘A Game poetry a contemplation of the past and an examination of the new in of Chess’ or ‘The Four Quartets’ will confirm this. However, it was the relation to the past. ‘Journey of the Magi’ is one such poem. Italian poet Dante (1265–1321) who was the greatest influence on Eliot. He saw Dante as greater even than Shakespeare, believing the Italian

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While Eliot made poetry new, it didn’t mean that he approved of His conversion to Anglicanism was also a consolation to him during the everything that was new in contemporary life. On the contrary, he nightmare that was his first marriage. This too was a living death. His believed that much in modern life was a betrayal of civilised values. His marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood may explain the most persistent poetry is full of his sense of disgust for urban society. ‘The Love Song of personal theme underlying Eliot’s poetry, i.e. the sexual, whose erotic J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Preludes’ are two such poems. For Eliot, modern note is as often as not linked with regret, disappointment, frustration and urban life is an emotional and cultural waste land, a world of thoughtless longing. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ explores this theme most self-gratification and deadening purposelessness. The modern city is a strongly. At the centre of Prufrock’s purgatory is a confusion between symbol of the nightmare of human decadence. This view is explored in love and sexual gratification. Prufrock is both attracted to and repulsed by particular in ‘Preludes’ and ‘A Game of Chess’. women. The theme of appearance and reality, or the real and the ideal, is explored in Prufrock’s love song, where his fear of women who ‘fix you in This particular notion of meaningless existence expands into the wider a formulated phrase’ is contrasted with his idealised vision of womanhood theme of death-in-life and life-in-death. Twentieth-century man may as ‘sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown’. Eliot’s portrayal of be condemned to a living death, but redemption can be achieved. women is said to be critically and tortuously realistic, reflecting his attitude For Eliot this is the answer to how we should live: that is, we need to towards human relationships in general. The girl in ‘Preludes’ is physically die to the old life in order to be born into the new. Humanity needs to repulsive, and while the woman in the first part of ‘A Game of Chess’ journey in search of its spiritual well-being. This may involve suffering, may be attractive, she is an emotional wreck. The second part of ‘A but the cure is at hand. ‘Journey of the Magi’, ‘Usk’ and ‘East Coker IV.’ Game of Chess’ explores the tragedy resulting from casual relationships. explore these themes. To redeem itself and construct a new life for itself, Miss Helen Slingsby in ‘Aunt Helen’ is his ‘maiden aunt’ whose social humanity must face a painful readjustment of its values and attitudes. foibles suggest a fastidious but repressed character and whose mores are Death accompanies a new birth. Joy follows. Much of the above reflects flamboyantly rejected by the behaviour of the footman and maid after Eliot’s own spiritual journey and his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. her death. For Eliot, though, it is only the beauty of divine love that makes Anglicanism, or more particularly Anglo-Catholicism, appealed to his sense of all human relationships. In ‘Preludes’ he declares: need for orthodox theological dogma and for an emotional, mystical spirituality. I am moved by fancies … The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

327 new explorations t.s. eliot an overview of t.s. eliot

‘Journey of the Magi’ can also be seen as an exploration of divine love or something that had become so much a part of the later Romantics. as a struggle to understand the Incarnation of Christ, that moment when Under French influence and his admiration for 17th-century English poets, divine love made itself manifest. Eliot trawled widely to ensure an intellectual sharpness and an emotional intensity in his poems. This theme of divine love is made all the more clear in ‘East Coker IV.’, where Christ himself is seen as suffering and dying in order to be reborn. Much of the meaning and the power of Eliot’s poetry lie in his use of Divine love is linked inextricably with the theme of a journey through images and symbols. Sordid, seedy images of city life appear again and suffering to a rebirth. again, from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to ‘Preludes’ to ‘A Game of Chess’. Even in ‘Journey of the Magi’, cities are seen as ‘hostile’. The Incarnation took place in a moment of time, a moment when Such use of significant imagery becomes, with repetition, a symbol. historical time and the timelessness of God’s eternity met. Eliot’s It evokes particular ideas and emotions. This is in keeping with Eliot’s exploration of time is central to his poems. It is part of his effort to make rather notorious view that poetry communicates before it is understood. sense of life. This is seen in ‘Journey of the Magi’. Thus, the suggestiveness of imagery and symbolism become part of the excitement of discovery when reading Eliot’s poetry. Similarly, journeys, In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ time is seen as inexorably a street or a road are common images throughout Eliot’s poetry. These repetitive, a process that leads ultimately to decay. In ‘Preludes’ time is a are seen in ‘Journey of the Magi’, ‘Preludes’, ‘Usk’ and ‘Rannoch, by burden whose rhythmic patterns beat out the tedium of urban life. Time Glencoe’, for example. These images also become symbolic, evoking destroys Aunt Helen’s passion for order and restraint, while the result of Eliot’s search or quest for meaning in life, culminating in his achievement man’s behaviour in times past is seen in ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’, where of a satisfactory religious perspective. both man and animals are stuck in the wretchedness of history. However, individual images can also be symbolic. For example, Eliot Imagery, symbolism and allusion uses animal imagery to reflect the human in its non-thinking, non-rational While all of the above are dealt with in specific detail in the discussion state, hence the use of the crab image/symbol in ‘The Love Song of J. of the individual poems, a few general points may be useful too. Eliot’s Alfred Prufrock’. The ‘crow’ and ‘the patient stag’ play similar roles in use of imagery is eclectic, that is, he drew inspiration from a wide tableau ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’. of human experience and did not limit himself to nature as a source,

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Similarly, Eliot’s use of body parts as images, as in ‘Preludes’, ‘The Love work and places Prufrock in an urban Hell. His allusions universalise his Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘A Game of Chess’, becomes symbolic themes and the situations in which his characters’ personae exist. of the depersonalisation, stereotyping and conformity of modern urban society. Sometimes his allusions come in the form of more indirect quotation, as in his reference in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to Andrew Similarly too, the images of clocks and the references to time, from ‘Aunt Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, or in his references to Hamlet and Helen’ to ‘Preludes’ to ‘A Game of Chess’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Lazarus. Direct quotation of Shakespeare also takes place in ‘A Game of Alfred Prufrock’, can become a symbol of individual transience and the Chess’, while indirectly Thomas Middleton, Virgil and Milton are alluded urgency for renewal. to. All such references and allusions help to build up the picture that tells us some universal truth. The detailed notes on each poem explain the The student should be particularly aware of Eliot’s abrupt transitions in significance of these allusions and references. imagery and of his use of images other than visual ones. ‘Preludes’, for example, explores aural, tactile and olfactory images in quickly changing, Verse structure cinematic-style sequences. In keeping with the French symbolists’ vers libre, or free verse, Eliot broke with the regular forms and structures of his immediate predecessors. The Eliot is the most erudite of poets. He was widely read in everything from suggestiveness of his imagery and symbols demanded that the structures literature to history, from psychology to anthropology and philosophy. of his verse should be equally suggestive. This is in keeping with his passion not only for self-discovery, but also for discovering the nature of 20th-century man. Hence, his use of allusion is If Eliot’s imagery often consists of abrupt transitions, so does his verse his way of exploring intellectual traditions and expressing himself more structure. The structure often reflects both themes and imagery. Thus, precisely. the irregular juxtaposition of lines of different length in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ reflects the agitated nature of Prufrock, while the In this way, his use of allusion is not just an ostentatious reference to regularity of lines 23–34 reflects the incantatory tone of the lines. Similarly, literary history, for example, but is a way of making a tradition alive the short lines 34–5 in ‘Journey of the Magi’ reflect the anxiety of the again while also focusing the present situation in that tradition. Thus, his magus that no part of his narrative should be overlooked. epigraph in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ both recalls Dante’s

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Eliot also composes his lines to suggest the natural speech patterns and Prufrock’s life but gives a symphonic effect. The heavy stressed rhythm rhythms of contemporary speech. This is particularly true of the pub of the ‘Preludes’ suggests the fatigue of the city’s inhabitants, while the scene that opens in line 63 of ‘A Game of Chess’. The direct speech lyrical sibilant s sounds of lines 9 and 10 of ‘Journey of the Magi’ evoke rhythms of the female narrator give a sense of immediacy to the tone and the sensuality of the life being left behind. The robust rhythm of ‘Usk’ themes. Eliot introduces colloquialisms and even slang into these speech suggests the invigorating landscape and underscores the commanding patterns. The lines do indeed reflect speech patterns, but they also satisfy authority of the imperative verbs. The musicality of ‘East Coker IV’ has a metrical pattern. At times Eliot repeats particular words and phrases to been referred to already. give a prayer-like or incantatory tone. This may also effect a reflective mood. This is seen in ‘Journey of the Magi’ with the strong repetition of Eliot – a dramatic poet ‘And’. The strained repetitiveness of lines in ‘A Game of Chess’ and in As can be seen in his poems, Eliot excels in creating characters whose ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ reflects the nervous tension of the situations reflect the universal condition of man. Eliot’s greatest verse speakers. drama is, without doubt, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, but many of his poems are verse dramas in themselves. The use of internal monologue, Rhyme is used for particular effects in Eliot’s poetry. The jingling rhyme or stream of consciousness speech, is a particularly effective device in of the couplet referring to Michelangelo in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred creating drama in verse. Prufrock’ reflects the shallowness of the women and the mock-heroic tone. Rhyme is used in the ‘Preludes’ to create a lyrical effect in keeping ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has all the elements of drama. The with its title. Both the rhythm and rhyme used in ‘East Coker IV’ are main character is in conflict within himself and with society in general. In ‘reinventions’ of medieval English verse, which W.B. Yeats believed his monologue he develops his conflict and demonstrates his character helped ‘to prolong the moment of contemplation’. while also creating both the characters and speech of others. Characters are placed in particular times and places where the drama unfolds. A Eliot’s interest in music is seen not only in many of the titles of his poems plot, or storyline, is developed and comes to a conclusion. The reader (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Preludes’, ‘The Four Quartets’) (or audience) becomes interested in the fate of this character – one but in the very structures of the poems and his use of language. Some who reflects the reader’s own predicament, perhaps. Overall, dialogue is of the verses of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ are composed of either direct or implied, advancing the plot and enhancing the reader’s single sentences, whose repetitiveness not only reflects the tedium of understanding of the character. In this way, ‘Aunt Helen’, ‘Preludes’, ‘A

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Game of Chess’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’ are also verse dramas. The pub scene in ‘A Game of Chess’ is a dramatic reflection of the world in miniature. The student may enjoy reading it out loud in an appropriate accent.

Many of Eliot’s poems are ‘spoken’ by created personae or else detached observers. The latter, as in ‘Preludes’, has been called a cinematic style. For the student interested in film these may prove especially rewarding. It may also be worth noting how many of Eliot’s characters are grotesque in the literary sense. In Prufrock, Miss Helen Slingsby and the women in ‘A Game of Chess’, Eliot has created characters as memorable as those of Shakespeare or Dickens.

331 new explorations t.s. eliot questions

Questions

1. Write a personal response to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Support your response by reference to the poetry of Eliot that you have studied. 2. ‘The poetry of T.S. Eliot appeals to modern readers for various reasons.’ Write an introduction to Eliot’s poetry in which you suggest what these reasons might be. 3. Imagine you have been asked to give a reading of T.S. Eliot’s poetry to your class. What poems would you choose and why would you choose them? 4. Suppose someone told you that he/she found T.S. Eliot’s poetry too obscure. Write a response to this person in which you outline your understanding of Eliot’s poetry. 5. What impression did the poetry of T.S. Eliot make on you as a reader? In your answer you may wish to address the following: Your sense of the poet’s personality His major themes The poet’s use of imagery and language The poem/poems that appealed to you most 6. ‘Eliot’s major achievement is as a verse dramatist.’ Write out a speech you would make to your class on the above topic.

332 new explorations t.s. eliot bibliography

Bibliography

Braybrooke, N. (ed.), T.S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday, London: Garnstone Press 1958.

Donoghue, D., Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, Yale University Press 2000.

Gardner, H., The Art of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber & Faber 1985.

Herbert, M., T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems, York Notes: Longman York Press 1982.

Leavis, F.R., New Bearings in English Poetry: Pelican Books 1972.

Moody, A.D. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994.

Press, J., The Chequer’d Shade: Reflections on Obscurity in Poetry, London: Oxford University Press 1963.

Southam, B.C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber & Faber 1968.

Steed, C.K., The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot, Pelican Books 1967.

333 Elizabeth Bishop Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

334 new explorations elizabeth bishop introduction

Introduction Scotia childhood were essentially positive and she had great affection for her maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles in this small agricultural A literary life village. Elizabeth Bishop was born on 8 February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her parents, William Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer (the In 1927 she went to Walnut Hill School for girls, a boarding school in family name was variously spelled Bulmer, with a silent l, and Boomer), Natick, Massachusetts. From 1930 to 1934 she attended Vassar College, were both of Canadian origin. an exclusive private university in Poughkeepsie, New York, where her fees were paid at first by the Bishop family and then by the income Her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother never from a legacy left by her father. She graduated in English literature recovered from the shock and for the next five years was in and out of but also studied Greek and music, and she always retained a particular mental hospitals, moving between Boston, Worcester and her hometown appreciation for Renaissance lyric poetry and for the works of Gerard of Great Village in Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1916 Gertrude Bulmer’s Manley Hopkins. It was at Vassar that she first began to publish stories insanity was diagnosed as permanent and she was institutionalised and and poems in national magazines and where she met the poet Marianne separated from her daughter, whom she was never to see again. She Moore, who became an important influence on her career as a poet and died in 1934. Elizabeth was reared for the most part by the Boomer with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence. grandparents in Great Village, with occasional long stays with the wealthy It was also at Vassar that she formed her first lesbian relationship, and Bishop household in Worcester, which she did not enjoy. As a child she here too, by her own admission, that her lifelong problem with alcohol suffered severe lung illnesses, often having to spend almost entire winters addiction began. in bed, reading. Chronic asthma became a problem for her all her life. Between 1935 and 1938 she made a number of trips to Europe, travelling She describes her early days in Nova Scotia from a child’s point of view to England, Ireland, France, North Africa, Spain and Italy in the company in the autobiographical short story ‘In the Village’. The elegy ‘First Death of her friends Louise Crane and Margaret Miller, the latter losing an in Nova Scotia’ also draws on some childhood memories. ‘Sestina’ evokes arm in a road accident on the trip. Bishop dedicated the poem ‘Quai the sadness of this period. These and snippets from unpublished poems d’Orléans’ to Miller. and papers point to an unsatisfactory relationship with an ill and transient mother. Yet in spite of these difficulties her recollections of her Nova

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In 1939 she moved to Key West, Florida, a place she had fallen in love and Maria Carlota Costellar de Macedo Soares. She was fascinated by with over the previous years. ‘The Fish’ reflects her enjoyment of the sport the country and by Lota Soares, with whom she began a relationship that of fishing at that time. She and Louise Crane bought a house there, now was to last until Soares’s death in 1967. They lived in a new house in the called the Elizabeth Bishop House. Later she lived with Marjorie Carr luxurious Brazilian countryside at Petrópolis. ‘Questions of Travel’ and Stevens, to whom ‘Anaphora’ was dedicated posthumously after Stevens’s ‘The Armadillo’ reflect this period of her life. death in 1959. Key West became a sort of refuge and base for Bishop over the next 15 years. A Cold Spring, her second volume of poetry, was published in 1955. It contains ‘The Bight’, ‘At the Fishhouses’ and ‘The Prodigal’. In 1945 she won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award. In 1946 her first book of poetry, North and South, was published and was well received by In 1956 she won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1957 The Diary of Helena Morley critics. ‘The Fish’ is among its 30 poems. At this time she met and began a was published. This was a translation by Bishop of the diary of a girl aged lifelong friendship and correspondence with the poet Robert Lowell. between 13 and 15 who lived in the Brazilian village of Diamantina in the 1890s. In 1965 Questions of Travel, her third volume, was published. In 1948 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1949–50 she was Among this selection, as well as the title poem, are ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, supervising its stock of in Nova Scotia’ and ‘Filling Station’. poetry, acquiring new works and providing opinions and advice. The income from this work was important to her, as she had dedicated herself In 1966–67 she was poet in residence at the University of Washington exclusively to her poetry, at which she was a slow and often erratic worker. in Seattle, where she met Suzanne Bowen, who became her secretary, human caretaker and, after Soares’s death, lover. They lived in San The years 1945 to 1951, when her life was centred on New York, were Francisco (1968–69), where Bishop found the new culture bewildering, very unsettled. She felt under extreme pressure in a very competitive and then in Brazil until the tempestuous ending of the relationship in 1970. literary circle and drank heavily. ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Prodigal’ reflect this dissolute period of her life. In 1947 she began receiving medical support In 1969 Complete Poems was published. In 1970 Bishop won the National for her chronic depression, asthma and alcoholism. In 1951 she left for Book Award for Poetry. She was appointed poet in residence at Harvard South America on the first stage of a trip around the world. She stopped University, where she taught advanced verse writing and studies in first in Brazil, where she went to visit her old acquaintances Mary Morse modern poetry for her first year and, later, poets and their letters. She

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described herself as ‘a scared elderly amateur prof’. It was here she met Alice Methfessel, an administrative assistant who became her minder and companion for the rest of her life. She began to do a good many public readings of her poetry to make a living, as she had not been able to get much of her money out of Brazil. She continued to teach courses for the remainder of her years, though she found the work draining and it interfered with her already slow production of poetry. But she needed the money to maintain her style of life and to travel.

In the summer of 1972 she went on a cruise through Scandinavia to the Soviet Union. From 1973 to 1977 she secured a four-year contract from Harvard to teach a term each year, until her retirement in May 1977. She continued to do public readings, punctuated by spells in hospital necessitated by asthma, alcohol and depression. She managed to visit Mexico in 1975 and went on a trip to Europe in 1976.

In 1976 Geography III was published. This slim volume includes ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘The Moose’. The poems in this volume show a new, more directly personal style and a return to her past and her sense of self in search of themes. Competing with failing health, including a bleeding hiatus hernia, she continued her usual round of readings, travel and some writing. She died suddenly of a brain aneurysm on 6 October 1979.

337 new explorations elizabeth bishop the fish

The Fish the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder Background like a big peony. In the late 1930s, Bishop discovered Florida and a love of fishing. Based on real fishing experiences, her notebooks of the time show images and Minue descriptions and calculated use of detail are a feature of Bishop’s line fragments that were later developed in ‘The Fish’. She worked on poetry. This is how she apprehends the world and comes to grips with the poem during the winter of 1939 and sent a finished draft to Marianne experience: through aesthetic recreation. Detail is important as a basis for Moore in January 1940, and the poem was first published in the Partisan understanding. Review in March 1940. It is included in her first published collection of 1946, North and South. Bishop recreates the fish in minute detail. This is how she ‘interiorises’ it, comprehends it. At first she domesticates it in the imagery, making The speaker: The I and the eye it familiar by linking it to details of faded everyday living (he is ‘homely’, The poem is narrated in the first person, so we get to meet the poet – the ‘brown skin hung in strips | like ancient wallpaper’, ‘shapes like full-blown ‘I’ in the poem – directly, as we do in quite a few of Bishop’s poems. This roses’, ‘rags of green weed’). Yet something of its essential wildness, the gives the experience of the poem an immediacy and an intimacy for the otherness of its creative being, is retained in some of the descriptions: reader. But while the reader may feel closely involved in the drama, there is a hint that the speaker herself is something of an outsider, not a native – the frightening gills, of the place, the inhabitant of a ‘rented boat’. Perhaps this lends a certain fresh and crisp with blood, objectivity to the drama and the description of it. that can cut so badly –

We are also introduced here to the famous Bishop ‘eye’, which sees both This is also rendered in war imagery: the beautiful and the grimy and which describes not only surface detail … from his lower lip … but even imagines the interior: grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line … Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering

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But perhaps the most crucial moment in the poet’s comprehension of the I always tell the truth in my poems. With ‘The Fish’, fish is when she examines the eyes: that’s exactly how it happened. It was in Key West, and I did catch it, just as the poem says. That was in 1938. which were far larger than mine Oh, but I did change one thing: the poem says he but shallower, and yellowed, had five hooks hanging from his mouth, but actually the irises backed and packed he only had three. Sometimes a poem makes its own with tarnished tinfoil demands. But I always try to stick as much as possible seen through the lenses to what really happened when I describe something in of old scratched isinglass. a poem.

The detail is recreated poetically, using all the echoes and sound effects We notice that even as she is asserting the absolute integrity of her eye of alliteration and assonance reminiscent of a Hopkins ‘inscaping’, and the accuracy of the descriptive process, she is also aware of the recreating in words the essence of the thing observed (‘shallower’, creative demands of the poetic process. The poem is an accurate record, ‘yellowed’, ‘backed and packed’, ‘tarnished tinfoil’). The detailed recreation but only up to a point. leads to the poet’s realisation that these eyes are unresponsive: the fish is oblivious to her; there is no real sentient contact between human and A dramatic poem animal: The critic Willard Spiegelman, reflecting on the dramatic quality of Bishop’s poetry, said, ‘We do not normally think of Bishop as a They shifted a little, but not poet of struggle; the tension in her poems is mostly internalised, and to return my stare. confrontations, when they occur, are between the self, travelling, moving or simply seeing, and the landscape it experiences.’ This is particularly There is no question here of humankind’s heroic struggle against applicable to this poem. The first and last lines (‘I caught a tremendous Nature, such as we find in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The fish’ and ‘And I let the fish go’) frame this drama. There is little external experience is not glorified or mythologised, but rather rendered as she conflict, though there are hints of military antagonism and danger from saw it. She is reported as saying to her students (quoted by Wesley the fish. The confrontation framed by these lines is mainly internal. Wehr):

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So why does she release the fish? Was it because of the lack of heroic where oil had spread a rainbow struggle? around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, He didn’t fight. … until everything He hadn’t fought at all. was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

Does the lack of contact in the eyes disappoint her? Or does she release him out of respect for his history of previous successful encounters, a record emblazoned on his lip (‘a five-haired beard of wisdom | trailing from his aching jaw’)? Perhaps these are part of the decision, but the real moment of truth occurs because of the sudden appearance of the accidental industrial rainbow when the bilge oil gleams in the sun (‘where oil had spread a rainbow | around the rusted engine’). Fortuitous as this may be – a grim parody of natural beauty, an ironic comment on humankind’s relationship with nature – it provides the poet with a moment of aesthetic unity with the grandeur of the world, and everything is transformed (‘everything | was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!’). It is a moment of revelation, in which this new image of the fish colours the environment and alters her relationship with nature. No longer antagonistic or confrontational, she has metaphorically tamed, recreated and understood the fish.

The ending of the poem is very similar to a Wordsworth nature poem such as ‘The Daffodils’: the hypnotic vision (‘I stared and stared’), the wealth accruing to the viewer (‘victory filled up | the little rented boat’) and feelings of inspiration and joy through creating a connection with the world, a world that has been transformed by the vision, this moment of epiphany: 340 new explorations elizabeth bishop the bight

The Bight the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible. One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire one could probably hear it turning to marimba music. Background ‘The Bight’ was probably written in early 1948. In a letter to Robert Lowell To Bishop, the world of the bay seems predominantly mechanical – not dated January of that year, Bishop tells of the excavations at Garrison just the dredge at work, but ‘Pelicans crash … like pickaxes’, ‘man-of- Bight, Key West. ‘The water looks like blue gas – the harbor is always a war birds’ have ‘tails like scissors’ and ‘glinting like little plowshares, | the mess here, junky little boats are piled up, some hung with sponges and blue-gray shark tails’. There is even a hint that the scene is dangerous, always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane – it potentially explosive (‘the pilings dry as matches’ and the water ‘the reminds me a little of my desk’ (Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and color of the gas flame’). The helpless, ineffectual aspect of creatures and the Memory of It). She wrote to Lowell again the following month, saying things is displayed (pelicans ‘rarely coming up with anything to show for that she was trying to finish two poems about Key West, ‘and then I hope it’, boats ‘stove in, | and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be’). Altogether I won’t have to write about the place any more’. a detailed picture is presented of life chugging along in the midst of disorder and ineffectuality. Bishop’s idiosyncratic descriptions This is a typical example of the poet’s technique of description, minutely View of the world detailed and accurate yet coloured in a personal way, either by her wit or Bishop’s world here is a tired, run-down, worn-out one, her view by the view implicit in the imagery. The extraordinary quality of the water completely unromantic. It is a world of mechanical reactions, of trained is emphasised by the poet wittily turning the accepted view of things on responses: its head. It is made to look strange, so that we look at it afresh: The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in Absorbing, rather than being absorbed, with the obliging air of retrievers the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything.

There may be routine, but there is little sense of spirit, of wholeness or of She presents the water to us through a number of sense perspectives: perspective in the picture. The usual mechanical, monotonous pulse of touch, sight, smell and sound: life goes on (‘Click. Click. Goes the dredge’), but against a background of ‘untidy activity’, ‘unanswered letters’, ‘old correspondences’ and a general 341 new explorations elizabeth bishop the bight

lack of cohesion. This atmosphere is created, at least partly, by the Does she identify with the ‘frowsy sponge boats’, the ‘little white boats’ disparate nature of the imagery: picture follows unconnected picture, and piled up against each other or the wrecked ones ‘not yet salvaged’? there is no sense of any linkage or pattern (water, dredge, birds, frowsy Perhaps she is celebrating the survival against the storms of many small sponge boats, fence of sharks’ tails for the Chinese-restaurant trade, little craft, as much of her own life was spent at the mercy of the tides of white boats stove in, and again the dredge). Yet the prevailing attitude is alcoholism and depression. It is difficult not to read ‘awful but cheerful’ as one of stoicism: life goes on, ‘awful but cheerful’. a personal statement.

A personal poem? The subtitle, ‘On my birthday’, colours the entire poem. Despite the absence of the first person voice, the subtitle forces us to acknowledge the shadowy presence of the poet, like the ghost at the feast. Why does she mark her birthday in this unusual way, viewing this particular scene? What special significance does the scene have for her?

It has been suggested that the ‘disorder and latent violence in the vehicles convey the disorder in Elizabeth’s mind’ (Millier) as she thinks about her own life. ‘Thirty-seven and far from heaven’, she noted. The comparison between the confusion in the bay and the clutter of her own desk, as recorded in her letter to Lowell, together with the extraordinary simile or conceit of the ‘little white boats … like torn-open, unanswered letters’, would indicate a high degree of personal meaning in the poem, even though the description of the bay has been universalised. Indeed, often in Bishop’s poems, private significance is revealed out of apparently objective description.

342 new explorations elizabeth bishop at the fishhouses

At the Fishhouses lobster pots, and masts, scattered | among the wild jagged rocks, | is of an apparent translucence’) or to bring decay and ruin (‘an ancient wooden Background capstan … where the ironwork has rusted’). Humankind is surrounded Elizabeth Bishop travelled to Nova Scotia in the summer of 1946. It has by the sea and dwarfed by it. One has the sense of the sea as some been suggested that she undertook the trip in order to be out of the way forbidding power encircling humanity (‘element bearable to no mortal’), when her first collection, North and South, was published. At any rate, it indeed indifferent to humanity’s fate, as suggested in the incantatory was her first visit to Great Village in 15 years. She had spent the previous evocation of the tides: two years undergoing counselling, trying to understand the origins of … the same sea, the same, her alcoholism and bouts of depression. Now she was returning to her slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones physical origins, the scenes of her less-than-idyllic childhood.

Yet the sea provides that crucial moment of epiphany for the poet, when From her notebook entries of the time we know that the trip was she gains insight into the nature of knowledge: that it is temporal and disturbing, but it gave rise to a number of poems. ‘At the Fishhouses’ was transient: published in the New Yorker on 9 August 1947. our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Subject matter and themes This poem could be read as a meditation on the significance of the sea The poet’s method and its influence on humanity and landscape. The poem is set at the The speaker slowly draws us into the picture in the opening sequence, convergence of sea and shore and at a place of important interaction with vivid details of sight (the ‘old man … a dark purple-brown’, the between humankind and the sea. Human enterprise depends on the sea description of the fish-houses: ‘All is silver’), sense (‘a cold evening’, ‘The and is subservient to it. Symbolically, the ‘cleated gangplanks’ lead up out air smells’) and sound (the talk, the presumed sounds of wheelbarrow of the water to the storerooms, but the ‘long ramp’ also descends into and scraping). The specific detail augments this sense of realism in the water, ‘down and down’. This symbiotic relationship is also alluded to the opening (‘five fishhouses’, ‘steeply peaked roofs’, ‘narrow, cleated in the ‘talk of the decline in the population | and of codfish and herring’. gangplanks’, etc.). The present tense of the narrative gives it immediacy. The sea’s influence permeates and colours everything, having the power to transform magically (‘All is silver: … the silver of the benches, | the

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The reader is invited to share in the speaker’s ‘total immersion’ in both the But it finally manages to build to that rhythmic incantation of the climax uncomfortable reality (‘it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water’) and (‘indifferently swinging above the stones’). the mesmeric fantasy (‘If you should dip your hand in … your hand would burn | as if the water were a transmutation of fire’). This stop-start method employed in the narrative is also used by Bishop in the rhythm of the language in order to control the emotion in the Once again the poet uses detail as a way of possessing. Only by poem. She uses the metre as well as the repetition of words and phrases describing and imagining the mysterious movements and powers of the (anaphora) to convey the hypnotic power of the sea: sea does the speaker win some control over them. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, Through total immersion and conjuring up, she finally wins some slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, insight and understanding. Her method, as usual, is a combination of above the stones, and then the world. straightforward description and poetic imagining. In the latter, she often transforms the scene or the object in the retelling: she deliberately makes But she breaks this atmosphere with the everyday language of the it strange in order to force us to see it afresh (‘your hand would burn | as conditional clause (‘If you should dip your hand in’). The flow of the if the water were a transmutation of fire | that feeds on stones and burns verse builds again and is again brought down to earth by ‘If you tasted it, with a dark gray flame’). it would first taste bitter’ before it is allowed to build to that intense and rhythmic conclusion. The process of winning through to her final visionary insight is marked by fits and starts, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of achieving any kind The visionary insight experienced by the poet of self-knowledge. The poetic contemplation of the silvering of the This entire poem is devoted to the strange and inexplicable power of the landscape is interrupted by the mundane conversation on population sea, a subject revealing Bishop’s romantic impulses. The sea in this poem decline. The renewed contemplation of the sea in the third section (‘Cold takes on qualities of the other elements, particularly air and fire, thereby dark deep’) is interrupted by the humorous episode with the seal: establishing itself as the primal force in nature. More significantly for the poet, the sea is equated with knowledge, and it is the realisation of this, … He was interested in music; achieved gradually through her total immersion and recreation process of like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. poetry, that forms the climax of the poem. 344 new explorations elizabeth bishop at the fishhouses

Knowledge is broken down into its elements (‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’). Could these epithets be translated as disturbing, preserving, transparent, ever-changing and outside our control? The description of knowledge might be read as a view of human knowledge in general, but it is difficult not to also read it as personal. The reference to its darker side, as well as to its objectivity and transparency, could be seen as a personal note in view of Bishop’s psychological search and journey back to the roots of her depression and alcohol problems. The nature of the knowledge in the poem is overtly sexual, with maternal overtones:

drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

This hard, forbidding maternal image might be taken as a reference to her unsatisfactory relationship with her mother and to the human and genetic knowledge derived from her. This knowledge is temporal and transient, no lasting inheritance, but rather ‘flowing, and flown’ – quite a bleak view of life, with its suggestion of the isolated individual, unconnected to the past, at the mercy of the tide.

345 new explorations elizabeth bishop the prodigal

The Prodigal There is enormous human understanding in this poem. Despite the physical dirt of odour and ordure, the heart can still lift to the religious Background impulse (‘the lantern – like the sun, going away – | laid on the mud a pacing Elizabeth Bishop said that this poem originated from her thoughts aureole’) or thrill to the romantic beauty of nature (‘the sunrise glazed the when one of her aunt’s stepsons offered her a drink of rum in the pigsty barnyard mud with red; | the burning puddles seemed to reassure’). In fact, at about nine o’clock in the morning during her trip to Nova Scotia in the prodigal seems to retain a particularly benign relationship with nature, 1946. Perhaps that was the final spark that engendered the poem, but appreciating the delicacy of even these animals (‘Light-lashed … a cheerful the theme could never have been far from her thoughts, as she herself stare’) and maintaining a comfortable domesticity between animal and struggled with alcoholism all her life. human (‘The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored’). Nature here is a bringer of wisdom. The bats’ ‘uncertain staggering flight’ is the spur to his About the time of her thirty-eighth birthday, on 8 February 1949, she fell self-awareness, his moment of ‘shuddering insights’, and so his eventual into a deep trough of depression. In an effort to rally out of it she went on turning back. a holiday to Haiti, from where she wrote to Marianne Moore to say that she had finished some poems, including ‘The Prodigal’. Ironically, on her The poem is depressingly realistic in its evocation of filth and human return from Haiti she went into a long and heavy drinking bout. abasement:

even to the sow that always ate her young – ‘The Prodigal’ was published in the New Yorker on 13 March 1951. till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.

Theme and development But it is noble and uplifting in its awareness of the spark of soul that still This poem deals with the exile of the alcoholic. Like all good poetry, flickers even in the most abject circumstances. it functions at the level of the individual in the narrative but also at a universal level, exploring the metaphorical exile of alcoholism: the Form isolation, the skulking, the deception and hiding, the lack of control, The poem is structured as two sonnets of a rather loose nature. They each aspirations rather than action. (Where do these feature in this poem?) have the requisite 14 lines and the first one maintains the conventional octave– sestet division, but the rhyming schemes are eccentric, if not absent altogether. The rhythm is a mixture of iambic pentameter and four-stress lines. 346 new explorations elizabeth bishop questions of travel

Questions of Travel in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. Background Bishop goes deeper than the postcard façade in order to acknowledge In 1951 Bishop left for an intended journey around the world, travelling the limitations of our knowledge and understanding of a foreign culture: via South America. But she stopped off in Brazil, where she remained, with brief intervals, for the next 15 years or so. This poem reflects her To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, fascination with travel and with Brazil in particular. ‘Questions of Travel’ is inexplicable and impenetrable the title poem of her third volume of poetry, published in 1965, though it had been worked on for a good while before that. There are at least seven She really doesn’t expect it all to add up in the visitor’s mind (‘to have earlier drafts in existence. pondered, | blurr’dly and inconclusively’).

Some observations on themes Even more basically, Bishop examines and questions the very need to This is a travel poem with a difference. True, it features the expected travel. Partly motivated by a traveller’s exhaustion (‘Think of the long trip descriptions of the unusual and the exotic, as Bishop views, with a home’), she rises above this to engage the question at a philosophical traveller’s curiosity, ‘the crowded streams’, ‘the trees … like noble level: pantomimists, robed in pink’, ‘the sad, two-noted, wooden tune | of disparate wooden clogs’, the ‘music of the fat brown bird’, the ‘bamboo What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life church of Jesuit baroque’, the ‘calligraphy of songbirds’ cages’ and the in our bodies, we are determined to rush silence after rain – all the elements of a superior imaginative letter home. to see the sun the other way around?

Her observations are given a particularly temporal significance as they are Is it lack of imagination? she wonders. She presents the idea as a made against the great dwarfing background of the ages of time. But it is philosophical debate between movement and travel (‘Should we have a time that, with typical Bishop quirkiness, has a disorderly aspect: stayed at home and thought of here?’ and ‘could Pascal have been not entirely right | about just sitting quietly in one’s room?’). She seems to – For if those streaks … attribute the travel urge to the human need to achieve our dreams: aren’t waterfalls yet,

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Oh, must we dream our dreams scale of the scene, giving it an aura of sadness (‘those streaks, those mile- and have them, too? long, shiny, tearstains’). Then, shockingly, we are invited to this upside- down view of the mountains: The conclusion of her musings, expressed at the end of the poem, is that the human being is not absolutely free to choose: the necessity for the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, travel is often forced upon a person (‘the choice is never wide and never slime-hung and barnacled. free’). She seems to see travel or homelessness as part of the condition of humankind (‘Should we have stayed at home, | wherever that may be?’). She has domesticated them by reference to human machinery, yet allowed them to retain their strangeness by the imagery associations with Setting the secret depths of the earth. The setting is the interior, away from the coast, the more usual scene of Bishop’s conflicts. But even here she is ever-mindful of the sea and her The poem is structured as a dramatic monologue, a dialogue with herself, geographical mind frame continues to make connections (‘the crowded which is an appropriate form given the philosophical approach to the streams | hurry too rapidly down to the sea’), as if the sea is associated subject. Having asked if it would not have been better to stay at home, with oblivion and annihilation, and even the beauty here is threatened and she proceeds, by a series of negative questions, to reach that indefinite transient. conclusion.

Poetic method The poem is written in free verse. Flashes of humour sparkle here and She uses the now familiar method of combining precise observation with there as a welcome relief from the gentle complaining and insistent her idiosyncratic descriptions, where objects are made to look entirely questioning. We notice the comparison of equatorial rain with politicians’ strange so that we view them in a new light. She draws the reader in with speeches (‘two hours of unrelenting oratory | and then a sudden golden detail and then challenges us visually to look hard and understand. silence’).

And have we room We can see this at work in the first section of the poem. Using all the for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? conventional poetic devices of alliteration, assonance and sibilance, she recreates the fluid continuity of the waterfalls as they ‘spill over the sides Should this be read as a genuinely Romantic urge or as a sardonic swipe in soft slow-motion’. With graphic, clever imagery she evokes the gigantic at acquisitive and sentimental tourists? 348 new explorations elizabeth bishop the armadillo

The Armadillo that comes and goes, like hearts’). Humankind aspires to the beautiful and to a religious spirit but is unthinking, and the consequences of our actions Background bring destruction on human beings and the environment, threatening the This poem was published in the New Yorker on 22 June 1957 and falls balance of nature. among the later of the first batch of poems about Brazil that Bishop published. She had been working on various components of it – imagery, So it is really an ecological outlook of Bishop’s that is at play here. Lacking etc. – for a number of months, if not years. The fire balloons, the a religious outlook on life, what is the big question for humanity? It must armadillo, the owls and the rabbit feature in her letters of the previous be how we best preserve for the future what exists here. One of the year. options is to return to a world that existed before man began to impose his egotistical will on it, to try to recover childhood’s innocence, structure Dedication to Robert Lowell and security. It might be suggested that this is what Bishop is attempting Lowell had said that his famous poem ‘Skunk Hour’ was indebted to ‘The in ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ and ‘Sestina’, but here all she can do is Armadillo’, so when she finally published it, Bishop dedicated her poem make an uncertain gesture of defiance, as in the last stanza. to him. But there may be more significance than just personal sentiment in the dedication, as Lowell had become a conscientious objector to the Poetic method Second World War when the Allies fire-bombed German cities. The The usual detailed observation is evident, accurately catching, for gesture of defiance of destruction from the skies finds an echo in the last example, the frantic movement of the owls or the stance of the stanza of the poem. armadillo. Sometimes the descriptions are poetic (‘It splattered like an egg of fire’). A philosophical reading of the poem Bishop’s eye is that of the observer rather than the expert (‘the What view of humanity informs this poem? Does the poet see humankind pale green one,’ she says of a star). Rather like ‘the fat brown bird’ of as deliberately destructive? No; but unthinking and primitive, yes. The ‘Questions of Travel’, this creates an easy familiarity with the reader. balloons are a manifestation of primitive worship. They are also illegal and She is adept at leisurely, detailed portraiture, as when describing the dangerous. But they are beautiful and romantic, likened to hearts, stars balloons that take up the first five stanzas. But she is also good at swift and planets, with the planets developed as the main association in the drawing that catches the essential image – of the armadillo, for poem. There is also a hint of the fickleness of the human heart (‘light | example: ‘a glistening armadillo left the scene, | rose-flecked, head down, tail down’. 349 new explorations elizabeth bishop the armadillo

But she is no longer able to dupe herself into believing that her as not to allow the reader to become lost in the lyrical music, stopping descriptions are accurate. She does realise that she has recreated the momentum of the verse. A detailed study of the first four stanzas the scene poetically: ‘Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!’ In this final stanza will show how this operates. Stanzas 1 and 2 have a regular metrical she stands outside the poem, reflecting on the poetic process and pattern: lines 1, 2 and 4 are all of three stresses, with the five-stress on the opposition of her two modes: accurate description versus poetic third line emphasising the descriptions of the balloons – their frailty, recreation in order to understand. beauty and flashing romanticism. Then stanzas 3 and 4 change to varying three-stress and four-stress lines. Even in the first two regular Tone: How Bishop controls feelings stanzas there are irregularities. For example, the first sentence of The last stanza provides what is for Bishop a most unusual emotional stanza 1 ends in the third line, so the sense is against the flow of the outburst. The critical cry ‘Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!’ can be read as metre. The abab rhyme of the first stanza changes in the second. The aimed at the poetic method but also at the fire balloons’ imitation of the rest of the poem has three-stress and four-stress lines, but they vary destructiveness of war. The gesture of defiance is vulnerable, for all its from stanza to stanza. Technically, the overall effect is to arrest posturing (‘weak’, ‘ignorant’). It is little better than a hopeless, passionate, any flow or musical momentum that might allow the verse to become vain gesture, which further emphasises the poet’s emotional involvement: sentimental. By using metre and other technical strategies to draw back from … a weak mailed fist moments of emotional intensity, just at the point where a Romantic clenched ignorant against the sky! poet would let it flow. Stanzas 6 to 9 provide a good example of this. In particular, the flow and enjambment from the end of stanza 6 to 7 This is an unusual outburst from Bishop, whose poetry is tightly controlled conjure up the fright of the owls: even when dealing with an emotive subject. This technical control over her verse keeps it from sentimentality and gives it ‘an elegant, muted, … We saw the pair modernist quality’, as Penelope Laurans put it (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom). Laurans examines in of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white detail how the poet shapes the reader’s response to this beautiful and stained bright pink underneath, until cruel event: they shrieked up out of sight. By a factual presentation, as we have seen. By metrical variation – in other words, continually changing rhythm so 350 new explorations elizabeth bishop the armadillo

But this moment of intensity is broken up by a change in the metre from tetrameter to irregular three-, four- or five-stress lines. We also find single-unit end-stopped lines, which break the flow:

The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.

The poet now focuses on the detailed description of the animals – the armadillo and the baby rabbit. We are caught up in this and brought back to reality.

351 new explorations elizabeth bishop sestina

Sestina A psychological reading of the poem The poem deals with memories of childhood uncertainty, loss and a Background pervasive sense of sorrow. Interesting psychological readings of the poem Four poems from Questions of Travel – ‘Manners’, ‘Sunday 4 a.m.’, have been offered by Helen Vendler (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ and ‘Sestina’ – deal with Bishop’s return to Views, edited by Harold Bloom), among others. Her reading focuses her origins. ‘Sestina’ (originally entitled ‘Early Sorrow’) works on all the on tears as the strange and crucial component of this childhood collage. significant elements of her childhood. The poem probably evokes the The grandmother hides her tears. The child senses the unshed tears and time and atmosphere after her mother’s last departure from Great Village displaces them elsewhere: in the kettle, the rain, the teacup. The child to the mental hospital. It also reflects a great deal of thinking and reading must translate the tears she has felt, so she transfers them to the ‘man with about child psychology. In reality, despite the privations and tensions buttons like tears’. reflected in the poem, Elizabeth Bishop always maintained that she was happy in Great Village. The absence of parents is the cause of all these tears. By the end of the poem, in the tercet that draws together all the essential elements, tears The sestina form are planted, or sorrow implanted, in the child’s life cycle. A sestina is a poem of six stanzas of six lines each, in which the line endings of the first stanza are repeated, but in different order, in the other The drawing of the house also attracts the interest of psychologists. five. The poem concludes with an envoy, which is a short address to the Its rigid form is taken to represent the insecurity of the young child’s reader (or the person to whom the poem is addressed). So the elements makeshift home, her path and flowerbed seen as an attempt to here are house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac and tears and they are domesticate and put her own stamp on it and so give her some tenuous rearranged in the other stanzas like a sort of moving collage. grasp on security. Helen Vendler asserts, ‘The blank center stands for the definitive presence of the unnatural in the child’s domestic experience.’ Some of the elements carry greater symbolic weight, such as the almanac, Of all things, one’s house should not be inscrutable, otherwise there is which has been construed as representing the poet’s lifelong anxiety a great void at the centre of one’s life. This becomes one of Elizabeth about the passing of time. The house is a pictorial representation of her Bishop’s recurring themes: that nothing is more enigmatic than the heart childhood and the little Marvel stove seems to provide a counterbalance of the domestic scene. of domesticity, heat and comfort. 352 new explorations elizabeth bishop sestina

The tercet achieves a resolution of sorts, offering a more balanced view of the human condition. It asserts that grief, song, the marvellous and the inscrutable are present together, perhaps necessarily, in life. But we are left with the impression that the inscrutable, the strange, is the most powerful element in human development.

353 new explorations elizabeth bishop first death in nova scotia

First Death in Nova Scotia The child has difficulty coping with the difference of death, so the ‘reality hold’ slips. The familiar becomes unreal, the bird is alive again, just Background uncommunicative (he ‘kept his own counsel | on his white, frozen lake’). Apart from her short story ‘In the Village’, this poem is one of the few There is an effort to make the unfamiliar – death – real in the child’s published memoirs of Bishop’s childhood. It is also the only time her terms, with surreal consequences: mother is featured in a published poem. The elegy is based on an actual Arthur’s coffin was funeral, probably in 1914, of a cousin named Frank. ‘First Death in Nova a little frosted cake. Scotia’ was published in the New Yorker on 10 March 1962.

The adults also cope with death by participating in a sort of fantasy: Point of view This is another of Bishop’s poems in which she attempts to recover her ‘Come,’ said my mother, childhood. With an astute and sensitive psychological understanding, ‘Come and say good-bye she is very successful at recreating the consciousness of a child and to your little cousin Arthur.’ establishing the point of view of the very young. The child fantasises that the ‘cold, cold parlor’ is the territory of Jack Frost She manages to suggest the feelings of confusion through the blurring of and that the royal couple have ‘invited Arthur to be | the smallest page at colour distinctions. Red and white, the national colours, seem to permeate court’. The child has created a fantasy world in which reality and fantasy, the entire scene, or at least colour the meaning of it. As well as being the present, past and future, and the national colours all fuse together. But the colours of the national flag, they become the colours of little Arthur, of strain of credibility is too great and doubt begins to enter her head. The the dead bird, of the royal robes and even of the coffin timbers. The child doubt is not an adult doubt about Arthur’s ultimate destiny, but, in typical has held on to just one set of familiar colours. child fashion, a doubt about the means of transport:

Also, the child’s memory seizes and holds objects (the chromographs, But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, the stuffed loon, the lily of the valley). The child’s memory recalls desires, with his eyes shut up so tight desires for objects (‘His breast … caressable’, ‘his eyes were red glass, | and the roads deep in snow? much to be desired’).

354 new explorations elizabeth bishop first death in nova scotia

The use of the child’s point of view has allowed a very dispassionate treatment of death. Emotion does not get in the way and the entire focus is on the unknowable strangeness of death.

Themes and issues Memories of childhood: If this poem can be taken to reflect Bishop’s recollections of childhood as a whole, then it is a bleak view. It encompasses death, both of people and creatures; a confused inability to comprehend the reality of the world; a world lacking in warmth or the normal human comforts of childhood (‘cold, cold parlor’, ‘marble-topped table’); a world devoid of emotion; and a shadowy mother figure who is associated with the rituals of death rather than any maternal comfort. A child’s first exposure to death and her attempts to comprehend it (‘domesticate’ it, in Bishop’s terms). Death – its unknowable strangeness. A secular view of death (Arthur goes to court rather than Heaven!) – yet not completely secular, as it recognises another reality beyond this. The frailty of life (‘he was all white, like a doll | that hadn’t been painted yet’).

355 new explorations elizabeth bishop filling station

Filling Station The poem searches for answers, for reasons why things are so, for some harmony or coherence at the heart of this grimy scene. The answer A celebration of the ordinary appears in the last stanza, where there are indications of an anonymous Many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems show a fascination with the exotic – domestic presence: with travel, with the mysterious forces in nature and with the extremes of Somebody embroidered the doily. human experience – but she is also a poet of the ordinary, the everyday, Somebody waters the plant the mundane and banal. She is interested in both the extraordinary and the ordinary. For Bishop, domesticity is the greatest good, and establishing domestic tranquillity is what gives meaning to life. She has elevated this into a The scene we are introduced to at the beginning of this poem is not just philosophy of life in place of a religious outlook. Indeed, this last stanza the antithesis of beauty, it is unmitigated grot: ‘oil-soaked, oil-permeated’, has been read as a parody of the great theological Argument from ‘crushed and grease-| impregnated wickerwork’, ‘a dirty dog’, etc. What Design, used as an indication of the existence of God. Bishop does is focus her well-known curiosity on this everyday dull scene and probe its uniqueness and mystery. She finds its meaning through her In Bishop’s ‘theology’, is the Great Designer feminine? Certainly we usual poetic method: accumulation of detail and a probing beneath the could argue that the world of work described here operates on the male surface of the seen. principle. The ‘several quick and saucy | and greasy sons’ and even the ‘big hirsute begonia’ all evoke a male world of inelegant, rude and crude The domestic gives meaning to life health. In contrast, the domesticity is achieved mainly through the female What is revealed as the details pile up is evidence of domesticity, even in principle (‘Embroidered in daisy stitch | with marguerites, I think’) and it is this greasy, grimy world of oil and toil: the flower, the ‘taboret | (part of this principle that provides order and coherence and meaning (‘arranges the set)’, the embroidered doily; even the dirty dog is ‘quite comfy’. In a the rows of cans’) and is a proof of love (‘Somebody loves us all’). parody of metaphysical questioning, Tone Why the extraneous plant? Why the taboret? There are some complicated and subtle shifts of tone throughout this Why, oh why, the doily? poem. From the somewhat offhand tone of the opening line (‘Oh, but it is dirty!’), the poet first takes refuge in descriptive detail. Some critics have 356 new explorations elizabeth bishop filling station

read the beginning of the poem as condescending (‘little filling station’, ‘all quite thoroughly dirty’). The flashes of wit may give some credence to that interpretation (‘Be careful with that match!’ and the comic books ‘of certain color’).

But the poet is gradually drawn into the scene and becomes involved. The stance of detached observer no longer provides complete protection for her. She is engaged intellectually at first (‘Why, oh why, the doily?’), and as she uncovers what gives coherence and meaning to the scene, an emotional empathy is revealed (‘Somebody loves us all’). Perhaps this is as much a cri de coeur of personal need as it is an observation. But the wit saves the poem from any hint of sentimentality:

Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe.

Could we describe the tone of the poem as wryly affectionate? Or do you read the tone of the ending as bemused, as the poet is left contemplating the final irony that love is a row of oil cans?

357 new explorations elizabeth bishop in the waiting room

In the Waiting Room … What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: A reading of the poem my voice, in my mouth. This poem depicts a traumatic moment of awareness in the child’s development. It occurs when the young girl first experiences the The conflicting claims of self and of the world are cleverly conveyed separateness of her own identity and simultaneously becomes aware by Bishop through a constantly changing inside–outside perspective of the strangeness of the world of which she is a part. She fails to find a maintained throughout the poem. At first we are in Worcester but outside satisfactory, intelligible relationship between her now conscious ‘self’ and the room, then inside the room (‘sat’) while it grows dark outside. Next this ‘other’ world, a failure so emotional for her that it causes a momentary we are back in the waiting room while the aunt is further inside. The child loss of consciousness, a temporary retreat into that black abyss. looks inside a volcano but outside the cannibals and the naked women. The cry (‘from inside, | came an oh! of pain’) first drives the child inside At the beginning of the poem the child sees the world as safe, domestic, herself (‘my voice, in my mouth’). This sends her into a fainting dive familiar: the world of her aunt, a waiting room, overcoats, lamps and (‘I – we – were falling, falling’), until she is driven right off the world, and magazines. But the magazines expose her to the primal power of the the perspective changes radically to a view from space (‘cold, blue-black earth, volcanic passion erupting out of control, the primitive destructive space’). urges of humans (cannibalism) and the barbarous decorations of the naked women. Clearly this newly revealed primitive and exotic world These radical changes in perspective – from the people in the waiting is frighteningly ‘other’ to the child and she can comprehend it only by room to inside herself, to the African women, from inside to outside the domesticating it through a household simile: waiting room and the world, from ‘I’ to ‘them’ and back again – convey the child’s confused apprehension of this widening world and bring on the black, naked women with necks fainting spell. wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. It is in this atmosphere of shifting perspectives that she asserts her The unfamiliarity of this broader world is shocking to the child (‘Their individuality, naming herself for the first time in a poem (‘you are an I, | breasts were horrifying’), yet it is a world she shares, as she empathises you are an Elizabeth’), yet immediately the claims of the ‘other’ world are with her aunt’s cry of pain: manifest (‘you are one of them’). She has great difficulty integrating the 358 new explorations elizabeth bishop in the waiting room

recently discovered elements of this world, unifying the exotic and the moral responsibility. She herself has dated the onset of many of her own familiar, the naked women with the aunt and the people in the waiting most important attitudes from the age of six or seven, including a feeling room in the familiar trousers and skirts and boots. She has even greater of strangeness or alienation from the world. She also dates the beginnings difficulty accepting any kind of personal unity with this other world, of her feminist philosophy from that age. particularly at a time when she feels most alone, having just discovered herself: Elizabeth Bishop and consciousness of sex roles ‘In the Waiting Room’ describes the poet’s first encounter with What similarities – consciousness of sex roles. Through the magazine the child learns, boots, hands, the family voice though perhaps at a sub-rational level, that women practise mutilations I felt in my throat, or even on themselves and their babies to make them more sexually attractive. the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts – They themselves perpetuate their role as sex objects, encourage this held us all together vanity, accept this type of slavery. Aunt Consuelo’s ‘oh! of pain’ suggests or made us all just one? the weakness and vulnerability of women. Bishop identifies with women’s pain, yet her attitude to women is somewhat ambivalent. While she Even though the fainting spell passes, the moment of visionary insight identifies with the cry, she is disparaging about the woman’s weakness: fades and the child is relocated in actual time and place and the issue is not resolved (‘The War was on’). This war is both political and personal even then I knew she was for the child. Outside, the world is hostile (‘night and slush and cold’) and a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, her uneasy relationship with it continues. but wasn’t.

These twin realisations of being an individual and yet somehow being She recoils in horror from female sexuality, from ‘those awful hanging uneasily connected to this strange and varied world form the central breasts’. This ambivalence about the value of femininity affected her wisdom of this poem, what her biographer Brett Millier has described as view of herself and her sexual orientation and gave rise to a complicated ‘the simultaneous realisation of selfhood and the awful otherness of the treatment of questions of sex roles in her poetry. inevitable world’. It is interesting that Bishop chooses the age of seven to mark this onset of adult awareness, an age traditionally seen as initiating

359 new explorations elizabeth bishop in the waiting room

Poetic style: Some comments Penelope Laurans (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom) demonstrates in her scanning of some passages, Bishop A private poem deliberately varies the metre to prevent a lyrical build-up that might invite ‘In the Waiting Room’ is somewhat unusual in that it is such a self- an emotional investment by the reader. Instead, the reader is forced to contained poem. Usually in Bishop’s poems the private experience think and reflect, in this example on the word ‘stranger’, which is stressed described mushrooms into a universal truth. While we might draw some both by its placement and by the metre: universal conclusions about childhood and the development of self- ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ awareness, the truths this poem essentially conveys reflect idiosyncratic I knew | that nothing | stranger Bishop attitudes to life: the estrangement, the pain, the confusions of life, ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ the view of woman, etc. had ever | happened, | that nothing ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ Descriptive accuracy stranger | could ever | happen. The fabled truth of Bishop’s descriptions lets her down here. Research The less usual amphibrach foot (˘ ¯ ˘) creates a certain ponderousness, has shown that there are no naked people in the National Geographic of which forces the reader to reflect on, rather than be caught up in, the February 1918 and Osa and Martin Johnson had not yet become famous experience. at that time. For once, her realism is a product of poetic licence. At another key moment, the variation of feet is used to create the effect Use of metre of puzzlement: The poem is written in very short, sometimes two-stress but more often ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ three-stress lines. Trimeters are quite a limiting line formation, not often How – | I didn’t | know any used for the communication of complicated ideas or deep emotions ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ (though Yeats manages to convey deep irony and anger through the word for it | – how ‘un | likely’ … regular thumping trimeter beat of ‘The Fisherman’). Bishop’s use of ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ trimeters here is probably deliberate, to limit the reader’s emotional How had I | come to | be here engagement with the poem. Not that the poem is devoid of emotional Again, the effect is to limit the emotional appeal. Bishop uses her impact: the moments of revelation are intensely felt. But as the critic technical skills to keep the reader at bay, at a safe distance. 360 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

An overview of Elizabeth Bishop There is a strong tension between the need to return to childhood and the need to escape from that childhood (‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘At The purpose of this section is to assist the reader in forming an overview the Fishhouses’, ‘The Moose’); she even returns in dreams in a poem of the poet’s work. For this reason, the material is structured as a series of called ‘The Moose’. Perhaps this is based on the notion of childhood ‘thinking points’, grouped under general headings. These cover the poet’s as the completion of the self and the poems are a search for the self? main preoccupations and methods, but they are not exhaustive. Neither We know that Bishop attended counselling to find the origins of her are they carved in stone, to be memorised: they should be altered, added alcoholism and depression, yet her reconstructions of childhood do to or deleted as the reader makes his or her own notes. not seem to function as Freudian psychoanalytical therapy. She doesn’t seem to alter her direction or attitudes as a result of drawing These thinking points should send the reader back to the poems to her past into the conscious, though she does seem to find a deal of reflect, reassess, find supporting quotations, etc. comfort and a greater acceptance in later poem, ‘The Moose’. She is not trying to apportion blame or be forgiving or sympathetic. Themes of Bishop’s poetry In general she seems neutral and detached (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘Sestina’). She also deals with the end of childhood and the awakening to Childhood adulthood (‘In the Waiting Room’). Many of Bishop’s poems have their roots in childhood memories, and indeed are based on her own childhood (‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’). Her life was her subject matter The perspective is mostly that of adult reminiscence (‘Sestina’, ‘In the Bishop was ‘a poet of deep subjectivity’, as Harold Bloom said. She wrote Waiting Room’), but occasionally the child’s viewpoint is used (‘First out of her own experience, dealing with such topics as: Death in Nova Scotia’). Her incompleteness (‘Sestina’, ‘In the Waiting Room’) The lessons of childhood are chiefly about pain and loss (‘Sestina’, Her disordered life and depression (‘The Bight’) ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’) and about Alcoholism (‘The Prodigal’) alienation from the world (‘In the Waiting Room’), but there is also the Her childhood – of loss, sorrow and tears (‘Sestina’) comfort of grandparents (‘Sestina’). Absence of parents (‘Sestina’), balanced by grandparents’ sympathy and support (‘Sestina’)

361 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

Achieving adulthood and the confusion of that (‘In the Waiting Bishop has an eye for the exotic and the unusual (‘Questions of Room’) Travel’, ‘The Armadillo’), but also for the ordinary (‘Filling Station’) Travel, her wanderlust (‘Questions of Travel’) She dwells on the difficulty of ever really knowing another culture Her favourite places (‘At the Fishhouses’) (‘Questions of Travel’), but this did not prevent her from trying Even her hobbies, such as fishing (‘The Fish’) Travel and journeying can be seen as a metaphor for the discovery of truth in some poems (‘Questions of Travel’) The poet and travel Could this preoccupation with travel be seen as exile from the self? As her own wanderings show, she was a restless spirit, constantly on the move: Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil, Europe, New York, San Bishop and the natural world Francisco, Harvard Nature is central to her poetry, either as an active element central to Many of the places she visited (Nova Scotia, the Straits of Magellan, the experience of the poem or by making an intrusion into the the Amazon Estuary, Key West, Florida) stand at the boundary domestic scene (in a minority of poems such as ‘Filling Station’, between land and sea. There is a tension between land and sea in her ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’). poems (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’), with the sea An ecological world view is at the core of her philosophy – viewed as a strange, indifferent, encircling power (‘At the replacing religion, some would say (‘The Armadillo’). Her view of Fishhouses’). Perhaps this is a metaphor for the conflict between the humankind’s relationship with nature involves a dialectical process of artist and life. Quite a few of her poems are set at this juncture interdependence rather than humankind dominating or subjugating between land and sea (‘The Fish’, ‘The Bight’, ‘At the Fishhouses’) nature. We see both extremes in the poems: humankind’s She seemed to be fascinated by geographical extremities: straits, destructiveness (‘The Armadillo’) but also the achievement of a peninsulas, wharves; mountains, jungle, outback (‘Questions comfortable domesticity with nature, even at the primitive animal level of Travel’, ‘The Armadillo’, ‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘The Bight’). Perhaps (‘The Prodigal’). she was attracted to the near-isolation of these places. They are The experience of really looking at and encountering the natural is almost isolated in her poems. One critic viewed these as the sensual central to her poetic process (‘The Fish’, ‘Questions of Travel’). organs of a living earth, ‘fingers of water or land that are the sensory Our ability to understand the natural is sometimes limited, yet there receptors of a large mass’. The poet is seen as making sensuous are great moments of awe and insight in our encounters with the contact with the living earth otherworldly spirit of nature (‘The Fish’).

362 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

Bishop is always aware of the sheer beauty of nature (‘The Bight’, Bishop’s philosophy as revealed in the poems ‘Questions of Travel’, ‘The Armadillo’). This is tied in with her fascination with travel and her interest in the Bishop’s is a secular (non-religious) world view: there is no sense of exotic (‘The Armadillo’, ‘Questions of Travel’). ultimate purpose, and in this she relates to modernist American poets She attempts to domesticate the strangeness of nature through like Frost and Stevens. language and description. Hers is very much a here-and-now, existential philosophy: the Consider some points already discussed, such as how geographical experience is everything. There is some sense of tradition or linear extremes fascinate her, her beloved places and the significance of movement in her life view, but tradition is just an accumulation of journeys for her. experience. The transience of knowledge (‘At the Fishhouses’) and the limits to our knowing (‘Questions of Travel’) contribute to The domestic and the strange this outlook. The importance of the domestic is also a central ground in her poetry. Her ecological outlook is at the basis of her philosophy, as we Domesticity is one of the unifying principles of life. It gives meaning to have seen: humankind in dialectical action with nature, discovering, our existence (‘Filling Station’). encountering, not domineering (‘The Fish’). The comfort of people, of domestic affections, is important (‘Filling She demonstrates the importance of the domestic (‘Filling Station’). Station’, ‘Sestina’). Her view of the human being is as fractured and incomplete (‘Chemin Yet the heart of the domestic scene can sometimes be enigmatic. de Fer’). This duality has been described by Anne Newman (in This strangeness, even at the centre of the domestic, is a powerful Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom) element in human life (‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the as follows: ‘She sees the ideal and the real, permanence and decay, Waiting Room’). One can be ambushed by the strange at any time, affirmation and denial in both man and nature’; a sort of ‘fractured but even in the security of the domestic scene (‘In the Waiting Room’). balanced’ view of humanity. Examine ‘Filling Station’ and ‘In the The process of domesticating is a central activity of humanity: Waiting Room’ for signs of this. domesticating the land, domesticating affections, domesticating the A person may not always be entirely free to choose her location non-human world. (‘Questions of Travel’), yet she can make a choice about how her life is spent. Life is not totally determined (‘The Prodigal’).

363 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

The bleaker side of life is often stressed – the pain, loss and trauma ‘Sestina’) and dressmaking and map colouring in other poems, all indicate (‘The Prodigal’, ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting a strong feminine point of view in her poetry. Other critics have argued Room’) – yet she is not without humour (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Filling that her rhetoric is completely asexual, that the poet’s persona is neutral, Station’). that the Bishop ‘I’ is the eye of the traveller or the child recapturing an She believes we need to experience our dreams (‘Questions of innocence that avoids sex roles altogether, an asexual self that frees her Travel’). from any sex-determined role. Examine ‘Questions of Travel’ and ‘First Is the overall view of humankind that of the eternal traveller, Death in Nova Scotia’ in this regard. journeying? And is the journey all? Would you agree with Jerome Mazzaro’s view (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited We have already encountered something of her treatment of her own by Harold Bloom): ‘Like Baudelaire’s voyagers she seems instead to sexuality and her attitude as a child to female sexuality (‘In the Waiting be accepting the conditions of voyaging as the process of a life Room’). She also deals with sexuality in other poems, such as ‘Crusoe in which itself will arrive meaninglessly at death with perhaps a few England’, ‘Santarém’, ‘Exchanging Hats’ and ‘Pink Dog’. poems as a dividend’? She expresses the unknowable strangeness of death (‘First Death in Bishop’s links to the Romantics Nova Scotia’). The following are some of the distinguishing features of Romanticism. Yet there is a sort of heroism evident in her poems. Many of the Consider Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in light of some or all of these poems feature a crisis or conflict of some sort, with which the narrator statements. deals courageously, often learning in the process (‘The Fish’, ‘In the Romanticism stressed the importance of the solitary individual voice, Waiting Room’). often in rebellion against tradition and social conventions. The subjective vision is of great value in society. Bishop and women’s writing In place of orthodox religious values, the individual looks for value and Are you conscious of the femininity of the speaker in Bishop’s poems? guidance in intense private experience. Some critics have argued that the importance of the domestic principle in Nature often provides such intense experience, hence the notion of her philosophy (‘Filling Station’) and the attitudes of care and sympathy in nature as the great teacher and moral guide. the poems (for the fish, the prodigal, the animals and birds) and even the occupational metaphors, for example of housemaking (‘Filling Station’,

364 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

Romanticism can show a divided view of the individual. The individual She was happiest using free verse (‘Questions of Travel’, ‘The Bight’, is often pulled in opposite directions – for example, solitariness versus ‘At the Fishhouses’, etc.). sociability, lonely pursuit of an ideal versus community fellowship. It is anti-rational. Feelings, instinctive responses, unconscious wisdom Her descriptions and passionate living are valued more than rational thought. The surface of a Bishop poem is often deceptively simple. Dreams and drug-enhanced experiences are especially valued. A favourite technique is ‘making the familiar strange’ (‘The Bight’, Children, primitive people, outcasts, even the odd eccentric figure are ‘Questions of Travel’). regarded as having special insight and wisdom. Her detailed descriptions function as repossession or domestication of ‘Bishop explored typical Romantic themes, such as problems of the object by the artist. This is how she gradually apprehends her isolation, loss and the desire for union beyond the self.’ Explore her subject: through the accumulation of detail (‘The Fish’). poetry in light of this statement. Bishop often insisted on the truth of her descriptions, but the reality It has been said that Bishop’s practice of poetry follows Wordsworth’s is more complex than that. Her descriptions are both recreation and advice that poetry should embody controlled passion, should deal creation, creating veracity but also using poetic licence (‘The with powerful feelings but with the restraint of hindsight: ‘spontaneous Armadillo’; also ‘In the Waiting Room’). overflow of powerful feelings’, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Her similes and metaphors are often surprising, like conceits. They can Would you agree? be both exciting and exact. Examine ‘At the Fishhouses’ as a great Romantic poem. Control of feeling Style and technique Many of her poems deal with emotive subjects (‘In the Waiting Variety of verse forms Room’). Though she was not often attracted to formal patterns, a variety of There is an element of spontaneity and naturalness in the tone. verse forms is found in Bishop’s poetry: sonnet, sestina, villanelle, etc. Consider the opening of ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘Filling Station’. (‘The Prodigal’, ‘Sestina’). ‘The sense of the mind actively encountering reality, giving off the She used a variety of metres, but often favoured trimeter lines (‘The impression of involved immediate discovery, is one of Bishop’s links to Armadillo’). This sometimes resulted in those long, thin poems. the Romantics,’ as the critic Penelope Laurans put it.

365 new explorations elizabeth bishop an overview of elizabeth bishop

Yet spontaneity and feelings are firmly controlled by technique, in particular by variation of metre (see the critical commentary on ‘The Armadillo’, among others). ‘It is sometimes assumed that the cool surfaces of Bishop’s poems reveal their lack of emotional depth; in fact Bishop often uses such reticence as a strategy to make a deeper, more complex emotional appeal to the reader’ (Penelope Laurans). (Examine ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ and their critical commentaries.) The matter-of-fact tone avoids sentimentality. The use of understatement controls feeling (‘In the Waiting Room’).

The absence of moralising Her dislike of didacticism is well documented. She disliked ‘modern religiosity and moral superiority’ and so she avoids overt moralising in her poems. The scenes offer up their wisdom gradually, as the descriptions help us to understand the object or place (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’).

Bishop as a dramatic poet Consider: Scenes of conflict or danger Moments of dramatic encounter Dramatic monologue structure in many of the poems

366 new explorations elizabeth bishop developing a personal response to the poetry of elizabeth bishop

Developing a personal response to the 11. Why should we read Bishop? Attempt to convince another pupil of poetry of Elizabeth Bishop the importance of her poetry in a letter, speech or other form. 12. What questions would you like to ask her about her poetry?

1. Which poems made the deepest impression on you? Why? 2. Which passages would you wish to read and reread? Why? 3. In the selection you have read, what were the principal issues that preoccupied the poet? What did you like or dislike about the way she treated these issues? 4. Did you find that reading Bishop gave you any insights into human beings or the world? What did you discover? 5. From your reading of the poems, what impression did you form about the personality of the poet herself? What do you think made her happy or sad? What did she enjoy or fear? What values or beliefs did she have? Or is it difficult to answer these questions? If so, what does that tell you about the voice of the poet in these poems? 6. Think about the landscapes and places that attracted her. What do they suggest about the poet and poetry? 7. Think about the people featured in her poetry. What do you notice about them? 8. Describe your overall response to reading her poetry: did you find her voice disturbing, frightening, challenging, enlightening, comforting, or something else? Refer to particular poems or passages to illustrate your conclusions. 9. What do you like or dislike about the style of her poetry? 10. Do you find her poetry different in any way from other poetry you have read? Explain. 367 new explorations elizabeth bishop questions

Questions 10. ‘Bishop has the oddest way of describing things; she sometimes makes the ordinary appear strange.’ Explore the effects of this 1. ‘The human being at a moment of crisis is the central concern of technique in at least two of the poems you have studied. much of Bishop’s poetry.’ Discuss this statement with reference 11. ‘We find a distinct lack of emotion in Bishop’s poetry.’ (a) How does to two or more poems you have read. she achieve this? (b) Is it always true of her poetry? Explain. 2. The child’s relationship with the world is a major theme in Bishop’s 12. ‘Man, for her, appears as a figure in a landscape, flawed, helpless, poetry. What aspects of this theme do you find developed in the tragic, but capable also of love and even of happiness’ (Anne poems? Stevenson). Discuss this aspect of Bishop’s poetry with reference to 3. ‘Bishop’s poems may be set in particular places, but the discoveries the poems you have studied. made are universal.’ Discuss this statement with reference to any two poems. 4. ‘The real focus of Bishop’s poetry is inside herself. Her poems are primarily psychological explorations.’ Discuss. 5. ‘The view of the poet that comes across from these poems is of an isolated eccentric who nevertheless has a keen interest in human beings.’ Discuss. 6. ‘A keen eye for detail and a fascination with the ordinary are distinguishing features of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry.’ Discuss. 7. ‘A deep sense of interior anguish lies at the heart of many of her poems.’ Discuss this view with reference to at least four of the poems you have read. 8. ‘She is a poet who lives in a painter’s world in which shapes and colours are enormously significant’ (Anne Stevenson). Discuss with reference to a selection of her poems. 9. ‘For all the unhappiness of the themes she deals with, we often find a note of humour, even of fun, in Bishop’s poems.’ Discuss.

368 new explorations elizabeth bishop bibliography

Bibliography Stevenson, A., Elizabeth Bishop, New York: Twayne 1966. Wehr, W., ‘Elizabeth Bishop: Conversations and class notes’, Antioch Bishop, E. Complete Poems, London: Chatto & Windus 1991. Review, no. 39, summer 1981.

Bishop, E. The Collected Prose (Robert Giroux, editor), London: Chatto & Windus 1994.

Bishop, E. One Art: The Selected Letters (Robert Giroux, editor), London: Chatto & Windus 1994.

Bishop, E. Exchanging Hats: Paintings (William Benton, editor), Manchester: Carcanet 1997.

Bloom, H. (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House 1985.

Harrison, V., Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993.

McCabe, S., Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press 1994.

Millier, B., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.

Spiegelman, W., ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s natural heroism’, Centennial Review, no. 22, winter 1978, reprinted in Bloom, H. (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House 1985.

369 Philip Larkin Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

370 new explorations philip larkin introduction

Introduction Leicester. There he me Monica Jones, a lecturer in the English Department, with whom he began a relationship that was to last on and off for the rest of Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, the son of Sydney Larkin, the his life. In 1947 his second novel, A Girl in Winter, was published. city treasurer, and Eva Larkin. He attended King Henry VIII High School, where he was an avid reader and had some poems and humorous prose In 1950 Larkin went to Belfast to become sub-librarian at Queen’s printed in the school magazine. University. He enjoyed living in Belfast, where he wrote fluently. In 1951 he had 20 of his early poems privately printed in a pamphlet entitled XX From 1940 he studied English at St John’s College, Oxford. He is Poems. They include ‘Wedding-Wind’ and ‘At Grass’, both included in his remembered as a shy, introverted person with a speech impediment. He later volume, The Less Deceived. was a prominent member of the university Jazz Club and the English Society. As it was wartime, Larkin expected to be called up but he failed His emotional life had become a bit of a tangle. He developed his medical and so managed to spend a full three years at Oxford. Among relationships with Patsy Strang and also with Winifred Arnott, who worked his contemporaries were John Wain and Kingsley Amis. In 1943 he was in the library, and Monica Jones came to visit. awarded a first-class degree in English language and literature and he had three poems included in Oxford Poetry, 1942–43. His volume of poetry The Less Deceived was published in 1955. This includes the poem ‘Toads’, a protest against the daily grind of work. That From 1943 to 1946 he was the librarian at Wellington in Shropshire, where same year, Larkin was appointed librarian at the University of Hull Library, he reorganised the library and managed to write a good deal. It was here later to become the Brynmor Jones Library. (Going for the interview, that he first became involved in a relationship with Ruth Bowman. Larkin feared that the board would have seen his poem as representative of his attitude to his job.) With brief absences, he spent the rest of his life in In 1945 some of his poems were included in the anthology Poetry from this position. He met Maeve Brennan here. Oxford in Wartime. Larkin’s first collection, The North Ship, was published the same year. The Whitsun Weddings was published in 1964 and the following year Larkin was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. All That Jazz, Larkin’s first novel, Jill, was published in 1946. In September of that year a selection of his jazz reviews, was published in 1970. In 1970–71 he was a he took up a position as assistant librarian at the University College of Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

371 new explorations philip larkin introduction

In 1973 he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse and High Windows was published the following year. Larkin bought his first house, beside the university, where he lived until his death. In 1982 Monica Jones became ill and Larkin brought her to live at his home.

Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–82, was published in 1983. In 1984 Larkin refused the offer of being made Poet Laureate. He died of cancer on 2 December 1985. ­

372 new explorations philip larkin wedding-wind

Wedding-Wind role (‘Yet seeing nothing’). This confusion is balanced by the romantic images of candlelight and wind, and any disgruntlement is dissipated by Background her obvious happiness at the end of the stanza and her need to share it ‘Wedding-Wind’ was completed on 26 September 1946, just after with the rest of creation. Larkin moved from Wellington to University College, Leicester. He was leaving behind a love affair with Ruth Bowman, which had become Her joyous mood continues in the second stanza, even in the context of uncomfortable partly because of Larkin’s feelings about marriage, which the unromantic, mundane details of the countrywoman’s working day: he viewed as a trap. Yet he was in love with her. ‘Wedding-Wind’ is one of ‘chipped pail to the chicken-run’, ‘apron and the hanging cloths on the a group of poems he wrote during September and October 1946 dealing line’. The wind seems to embody her joy, carrying it forth on the wind’s with his confused feelings on leaving her. They include ‘The Dedicated’, imaginary hunt ‘through clouds and forests’. It is as if she is at one with the ‘Traumere’, ‘To a Very Slow Air’ and ‘And the Wave Sings Because It Is fulfilment of nature: Moving’. … Shall I be let to sleep ‘Wedding-Wind’ was first printed in the privately published XX Poems in Now this perpetual morning shares my bed? 1951 and was included in The Less Deceived in 1955. Larkin is trying to find an image to carry the woman’s feelings of sexual Viewpoint fulfilment, happiness and joy, and he finds it in storm, wind and flooding. This dramatic monologue is spoken in the voice of a young woman on The passion of nature, its wild energy and the life-giving floods of ‘all- the morning after her wedding. This is an unusual stance for Larkin, as he generous waters’ mediate the woman’s emotions to the reader. But she is rarely creates speakers who are not male and in the same social situation also aware of the fragile nature of her happiness (‘like a thread | Carrying as himself. Yet it is a fairly perceptive interpretation of that viewpoint. In beads’). the first stanza he explores the woman’s uncertainty in her new situation, her feelings of being an outsider. She resents being left alone, however Larkin wrote many and varied poems to women. They are usually briefly (‘he must go and shut it’). She is unsure of herself, feeling ‘Stupid structured as addresses to the woman and written in a relaxed and familiar in candlelight’, no longer certain of her identity (‘Seeing my face in the tone. But here, in this early poem, his strategy is different. He attempts twisted candlestick’), metaphorically blind in her new surroundings and to speak from the woman’s point of view, ‘boldly identifying himself with

373 new explorations philip larkin wedding-wind

a female centre of consciousness’, as James Booth says. Booth feels that Themes the result is somewhat artificial. In particular, he feels that the second Sexual fulfilment and happiness stanza is inadequate when the ‘external images of nature are forced to do A woman’s natural joy in her new love duty for internal emotional insights’. The empathy between the woman and nature: nature reflects her mood Do you think Larkin’s adoption of the female point of view is successful, A hint of the fragile nature of human happiness that this dramatised empathy works? Examine the insights revealed, judge how well they are communicated and evaluate their significance.

A positive view of love and marriage? Is this one of those rare Larkin moments offering an unqualified positive view of love and marriage? The ending does seem to suggest that love cannot be dried up, even by death:

Can even death dry up These new delighted lakes …

But the very mention of death introduces the idea that all this joy is limited and finite. So in spite of the exuberant romantic imagery, the wild energy of passionate nature, the unbridled joy and the sense of fulfilment, there are hints of love’s fragile nature. We see this particularly in the image of ‘a thread | Carrying beads’. As always with Larkin, the happiness is qualified. In his biography of Larkin, Andrew Motion suggests that the rhetorical technique at the conclusion of the poem is camouflage: ‘The final lines endeavour to annihilate his usual objections to happiness in a blaze of rhetorical questions.’

374 new explorations philip larkin at grass

At Grass cry | Hanging unhushed’, ‘Do memories plague their ears like flies?’). He goes on with a sense of humour, ‘They shake their heads.’ But of course it is Background also a naturalistic horse gesture from these beautifully evoked animals that ‘At Grass’, dated 3 January 1950, was printed in XX Poems (1951) ‘stand at ease’ or ‘gallop for what must be joy’ as they wait until ‘the groom, and included in The Less Deceived (1955). Andrew Motion traces the and the groom’s boy, | With bridles in the evening come’. biographical background of the poem. The poet’s father had died in 1948 and Larkin moved with his mother to Leicester. He found living with his But this is not just a romantic chocolate box scene. There are some mother very difficult, and though he and Ruth Bowman had become ominous details that trouble this notion of bucolic bliss, even in the first engaged in 1948, the relationship was going stale. In contrast, his friends, stanza. Why are they sheltering in the ‘cold shade’? And does that phrase such as the Amises, seemed to be happy and prospering. The poem was carry associations of death, as it does in classical mythology? The s sounds written during the Christmas holiday after he had seen a film about the of ‘shade’, ‘shelter’ and ‘distresses’ create an uneasy effect. That the wind retired years of a racehorse called Brown Jack. ‘distresses’ tail and mane further reinforces the notion that this is not an idyllically happy scene. The coldness and the dusk and these other details From the evidence of Larkin’s working notebook it seems that the idea suggest the coming of death. This then becomes a poem about the end of personal failure preoccupied him at this time. Perhaps the poem can of life. be seen to embody a statement about success and failure, albeit about outliving one’s successes. Fame and glory are seen here from a different It is a retrospective look at life. Fame, competition, success and the perspective. moments of drama and glory are viewed in perspective from the point of view of the end. These successes are not downgraded because of Levels of meaning approaching death: they are valued and celebrated (‘their names live’, At one level this is a naturalistic description of retired racehorses in a field ‘Two dozen distances sufficed | To fable them’, etc.). But as one critic at evening. The movements of these highly strung animals are realistically assessed, ‘These worldly successes are put in the context of a full life described, caught by the tense, uneasy rhythm of the language: ‘one and viewed somewhat hazily and dispassionately from the standpoint crops grass … moves about … The other … to look on … stands … again’. of the end.’ Thus, the poem portrays a controlled celebration of life. They are endowed with a certain pathos because the poet wonders if, like Achievements are celebrated but realistically seen in context. Note the humans, they remember their days of glory, the thrill of winning (‘the long irony of ‘not a fieldglass sees them home’.

375 new explorations philip larkin at grass

There is a sense too that the poet is trying, though not fully succeeding, to Readings of the poem understand the meaning of it all – the meaning of life. The speaker seems It is a measure of the depth and richness of this poem that critics have to be always at a distance, either attempting to make out the scene or else interpreted it in widely divergent ways. Here are some of them; examine attempting to attribute motive. There is the physical distance (‘The eye can each in light of your own reading of the poem. hardly pick them out’, ‘the cold shade’); the metaphysical or mental distance, A traditional pastoral poem, nostalgic in tone, ‘elegant and where the poet does not quite understand but attempts to attribute motive unpretentious and rather beautiful in its gentle way’ (A. Alvarez). We (‘The other seeming to look on’, ‘gallop for what must be joy’); and finally have touched on this reading above. there is a time distance (‘fifteen years ago, perhaps’, ‘faint afternoons’). The A philosophical poem about life (see Andrew Motion’s views above). overall effect of this is to blur the focus a little, introducing a note of hazy ‘A post-imperial poem’ (Blake Morrison). Morrison says the poem uncertainty, a slight bewilderment about the meaning of it all. expresses feelings of loss and regret, such as might have been felt by the British people around 1950, when the poem was written. But can Thus the philosophy that underpins the poem is that life is to be enjoyed the horses be seen as symbols of empire? and success celebrated, but that the ultimate meaning or purpose is none Tom Paulin says the poem shows Larkin’s conservative approach to too clear. Andrew Motion feels that ‘ “At Grass” manages to suggest deep literature and his class prejudice: that (a) Larkin affects or attempts to take on a classical style – for instance, in the use of ‘cold shade’, with admiration for human lives well-lived and safely over.’ He thinks that Larkin’s its classical connotations, and in the description of the horses as retired feelings of regret and disappointment, which produced the poem, are generals, ‘emblems of the heroic’ – and that (b) the reference to transformed into appreciation: ‘It is an envious poem which shows no trace grooms shows Larkin’s support of the British class system. What of envy’s corrosions.’ Do you understand what he means by this statement is your reaction to this reading? and would you agree with it? James Booth says, ‘If an ideological subtext could be detected in “At Grass” it would not be one of imperial nostalgia, but of animal welfare’, Themes relating it to other poems in which Larkin shows an intense A celebration of life from the standpoint of the end identification with the plight of animals, such as ‘Myxomatosis’ and The struggle to find significance and meaning in life ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. Booth also points out that The gentleness and naturalness of death Larkin left a legacy to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in his will. Do these readings provide some insight for your own interpretation of the poem? 376 new explorations philip larkin church going

Church Going touch a particular stone’). Or will the places return to nature, to ‘Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky’? Background This poem was written in stages between 24 April and 28 July 1954. It In the fifth stanza he speculates on the last user of this church. Will it was first published in the Spectator and attracted considerable notice for be some architect with a specialist interest in churches (‘and know what Larkin. It was included in the volume The Less Deceived (1955). rood-lofts were’), or an antique dealer (‘Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’), or a religious romantic searching for a Christmas atmosphere Development of thought in the poem (‘Or Christmas-addict’)? Perhaps it will be a committed unbeliever, like The poem follows a fairly common progression for a Larkin poem. The the poet (‘Bored, uninformed’), who is nevertheless drawn to this cross- poet as speaker first describes in great detail an event he experienced. shaped place because The description then gives way to a reflection or a philosophical analysis … it held unspilt of the occurrence. Thus, the poem proceeds from the particular to the So long and equably what since is found general, from concrete details to abstract reflection. Only in separation – marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built It begins with the poet’s casual visit to a church, where he describes the This special shell? furnishing in some detail: matting, seats, stone, books, flowers, font, roof, lectern. For his narrative he cultivates a tone of studied superiority, more In an interview with Ian Hamilton, Larkin makes plain that what he values like the dismissive attitude of a pompous schoolboy: ‘some brass and stuff about the church is not religion, but ritual, the marking of important | Up at the holy end’. stages or events in a life:

After his dismissive attitude and cynical actions of the first two stanzas Of course the poem is about going to church, not religion – I tried to suggest this by the title – and the (‘I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence’), he falls to thinking about the union of the important stages of human life – birth, function of churches in our atheistic society. Perhaps a few will be selected marriage and death – that going to church represents; as museums while the rest are allowed to fall into ruin (‘A few cathedrals and my own feeling that when they are dispersed into chronically on show’). Perhaps they will become places of superstition the registry office and the crematorium, chapel life and dread (‘after dark, will dubious women come | To make their children will become thinner in consequence.

377 new explorations philip larkin church going

He dismisses the church building as a vulgarly decorated barn (‘accoutred The colloquial language used by the speaker in the first two stanzas frowsty barn’). Nevertheless, he is pleased to be there because it is a (‘there’s nothing going on’, ‘some brass and stuff | Up at the holy end’, ‘serious’ place, where human compulsions are catered for and given ‘God knows how long’) suggests an ordinary fellow with a dismissive form and recognition through religious doctrine and ceremony (‘all our attitude to all the trappings of religion. This is reinforced by the mocking compulsions meet, | Are recognised, and robed as destinies. | And that self-image (‘Hatless, I take off | My cycle-clips in awkward reverence’) and much never can be obsolete’). Religious yearnings, immortal longings, by the writer’s actions (‘I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence’). This is awareness of the transcendent and such attitudes associated with a the flippant and dismissive voice of the unbeliever or the bored tourist. religious philosophy will become diluted into just being considered There are hints of a tougher, more cynical attitude in the ironic ambiguity ‘serious’, rather than religious, for post-religious humankind: of the title, which is hardly about church-going in the accepted sense. And what of the ‘Here endeth’ response? Does he intend it to echo the Since someone will forever be surprising demise of the church as well as the lesson? A hunger in himself to be more serious But there are faint echoes too of a more serious attitude behind the Indeed, post-religious humanity will become so distant from a religious dismissive mask. It is an ‘unignorable silence’. Also, there is a slight hint culture that the church will take on the insubstantiality and faintness of of seriousness through the buffoonery of the hatless speaker taking folklore: ‘this ground, | Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise off his bicycle clips ‘in awkward reverence’, and it is this more serious in’. Religion will fade back into its primitive beginnings, where instead of a tone that begins to predominate from the third stanza onwards as the sophisticated theology it will just have some vague association with special style of the poem changes from narrative to reflective monologue. The places such as burial grounds, ‘ground … to grow wise in, | If only that so cynical performing persona of the first two stanzas gives way to a slightly many dead lie round’. bewildered, lost speaker, out of touch with his surroundings (‘Yet stop I did … much at a loss like this, | Wondering what to look for; wondering’). Voices and attitudes of the poet This less superior voice even invites the reader into his speculations This poem is communicated as a first person narrative, yet this single (‘When churches fall completely out of use | What we shall turn them into voice of the poet adopts various tones throughout: flippant, cynical, … Shall we avoid them’). And it is this serious voice that speculates on the dismissive, ironic and serious by turns. final end of post-religious society:

378 new explorations philip larkin church going

But superstition, like belief, must die, J.R. Watson said ‘that religion offers explanations of the metaphysical And what remains when disbelief has gone? elements surrounding physical life’. Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky Andrew Motion views the poem as ‘the speaker without faith, trying to recover the comfort it used to give’. Yet there are still hints of the bored, cynical persona in the ‘cathedrals James Booth talks about the ‘unflinching scepticism’ of ‘Church chronically on show’. The cynicism is emphasised by the alliteration. We Going’. can hear it too in the humour of ‘let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep’ and in the pun of ‘dubious’ women (it can mean ‘disreputable’ or ‘inclined In an interview with Ian Hamilton, Larkin himself said: to doubt’), or in the ‘Christmas-addict’ image and the other final viewers of stanza 5. Following the serious consideration of the function of the It is of course an entirely secular poem. I was a bit church throughout history in stanza 6 (‘held unspilt’), the cynical voice irritated by an American who insisted to me it was a snarls through again in the deflationary description that believers might religious poem. It isn’t religious at all. Religion surely find offensive: ‘this accoutred frowsty barn’. means that the affairs of this world are under divine surveillance, and so on, and I go to some pains to point out that I don’t bother about that kind of thing, The final stanza is mainly in a serious voice, indeed a very forceful, that I’m deliberately ignorant of it – ‘up at the holy confident voice that emphasises its points through the repeated end,’ for instance. Ah no, it’s a great religious poem: he alliterations: ‘recognised … robed’, ‘Since someone … surprising’, ‘hunger knows better than me – trust the tale and not the teller, in himself’. In the main, there are alternating voices and tones – of the and all that stuff. dismissive atheist and of the serious philosopher. The variety makes for a rich and complex poem. What do you think? What exactly is the speaker’s attitude to religion? Could this be considered a religious poem in any sense? What exactly is A religious or an atheistic view? Larkin looking for from the church? Is there any indication that people can Perhaps it is the very complexity and variety of tone that has led to so fill the gap left by God? many diametrically opposed readings of this poem. Some critics see it as a religious poem: ‘The whole tone of the poem expresses doubts about the Do you think it could be argued that the speaker in this poem goes validity of atheism’ (R.N. Parkinson). from an attitude of mocking ‘half-belief’ (agnosticism perhaps?) in the first stanza to regarding religion as mere superstition at the beginning of 379 new explorations philip larkin church going

stanza 4? This superstition hardens into disbelief and strict secularism by Humour the end of stanza 4, which in turn gives way to an acknowledgment in the It is not without humour. Notice the irony of the title and of the ‘Here last two stanzas that the church answers deep human needs, the hunger endeth’ episode and the pun of ‘dubious women’. What other evidence of ‘to be more serious’. Do you think he sees the church as fulfilling a social humour do you notice? and psychological function rather than a religious one? Setting Themes The setting is bleak, as befits the outlook, empty of people for the The function of churches in an age of unbelief most part: empty church, barren ruin. People are either superstitious or A poem charting the stages in the breakdown of faith: scepticism eccentric, needy and unfulfilled in some way (the ‘Christmas-addict’, the (stanza 1), to superstition (stanza 4), to disbelief (stanza 4) and antique hunter). the return to nature The human need to be ‘serious’ or philosophical at certain times in life Stanza form The need for ritual and ceremony at certain watershed points in life: For the stanza form he uses a weighty nine-line stanza with a reasonably birth, marriage, death, etc. regular rhyming scheme, sometimes with off-rhymes and half-rhymes (usually ababcdece). Technique Dramatic monologue As befits a poem on this topic, it is structured as a debate with himself. It is a debate of much subtlety, as he changes tack and shifts the tone continuously.

Rhetorical questions We get some indication of the persistent nature of this interior dialogue through the use of rhetorical questions, particularly in stanzas 3, 4 and 5: ‘what … if … or … or … what … who … yet … but’, etc.

380 new explorations philip larkin an arundel tomb

An Arundel Tomb From the first stanza we discover that ‘Side by side’ they ‘lie in stone’, frozen in their pose perhaps but nevertheless still persisting, despite the Background ‘faces blurred’ by time. This forms a fairly solid statement of permanence. Christmas 1955 was marked by illness for Larkin. First his mother fell ill The detail that affects Larkin most strongly – ‘His hand withdrawn, with some unidentified problem, which worried Larkin, but as soon as she holding her hand’ – is a forceful image asserting the survival of romantic began to improve he himself fell ill with a suspected stomach ulcer. Tests love over death. showed nothing, but before going back to work in January 1956 Larkin and Monica Jones went for a short holiday to the south coast of England. But we are also aware, even in the first four stanzas, of many words and They visited the cathedral at Chichester and viewed the pre-baroque phrases that seem to qualify or undermine this assertion of permanence. monument to the Earl and Countess of Arundel. The faces are ‘blurred’, the habits ‘vaguely shown’, the hand detail has been ‘commissioned’ and perhaps doesn’t reflect genuine emotion, ‘The Because of health worries, Larkin had been brooding on death and air would change’. Yet in spite of these hints of decay and change, Larkin mortality. In this poem, which he finished in February 1956, he is searching still courageously insists, ‘Rigidly they | Persisted, linked, through lengths for some kind of permanence, exploring the possibility that love might and breadths | Of time’. Their stone effigies have survived, after a fashion, survive death and time. But there is no easy answer to the problem of so in a sense they have transcended death. mutability. In the poem, while permanence of a sort is achieved by the couple (frozen in stone, holding hands), Larkin does not feel that the truth At the level of intellect and in an almost metaphysically witty way, Larkin of their love survives (the detail of the hands was a later addition when the makes a fair attempt to convince himself and us. But at the level of image monument was being repaired). The poem shows Larkin’s usual doubts the whole weight of that fifth stanza emphasises the changing seasons: about permanent relationships, about happiness and about the survival of … Snow fell, undated. Light love. Each summer thronged the glass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same ‘What will survive of us is love’ Bone-riddled ground. The poem displays Larkin’s typically equivocal attitude to the possibility of permanent love and happiness. The synaesthetic imagery here (expressing something heard in visual terms – ‘bright | Litter of birdcalls strewed’) and the use of ‘Litter’ to 381 new explorations philip larkin an arundel tomb

describe the music suggest the scattered richness of life, generously Poems on a similar theme spread for the enjoyment of the living. These energetic sensations of life Many well-known poems deal with the same theme. One of the early contrast poignantly with the ‘Bone-riddled ground’ and the cold stone influences on Larkin was the poetry of Thomas Hardy. You might like to effigies. There are also the ‘endless altered people’, like a metaphorical compare this poem with Hardy’s ‘During Wind and Rain’ and decide if tide, ‘Washing at their identity’. All this nullifies the notion of permanence. you find Larkin’s tone softer than the bleak, uncompromising atheism of Hardy. The lovers are even losing the dignity of their position in the sixth stanza, a situation emphasised by the alliteration of ‘helpless in the hollow’. They More closely connected in theme are Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and are defenceless against the ‘smoke in slow suspended skeins’ (perhaps Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Keats explores the notion that the lovers’ of war or pollution), their part in history dismissed as a mere ‘scrap’. But passion could survive in the pastoral scene depicted in the urn, frozen in worse than all this, their truth is now questioned, or at least the truth of art even more perfectly than in real life. Yeats’s answer to mortality was to their effigy, the truth that survives in art. (Ironically, as Larkin discovered, step out of nature into art and take the form of a golden bird on a bough the feature of the joined hands was not in the original monument but is in a Byzantine mosaic, and so sing on through the ages. But neither poet part of the restoration carried out in the 1840s to repair damage to the found adequate answers. Keats’s lovers were cold and immobile, and tomb done during the Restoration and Civil War.) So this hand motif, ironically, Yeats’s bird sang about Time. not historically accurate, makes a public proclamation (‘final blazon’) they hardly meant. Where is the survival of true love here? Larkin is forced to Themes acknowledge this as a mere pious hope, an impossible romantic ideal: A poem about vain human hopes that love might transcend death ‘prove | Our almost-instinct almost true’. The uncertainty is emphasised (‘Rigidly they | Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths | by the repeated use of the qualifier ‘almost’. Of time’, ‘Our almost-instinct … is love’). Instead, what is borne in on us is the fragile nature of human effort, Thus, the pathetic assertion of the final line is not convincing in the happiness and love (they are ‘helpless in the hollow’, their contribution context. The weight of this poem is towards the failure of love to a mere ‘scrap of history’). transcend mortality, despite our hopes. It is yet another poem depicting Even monuments cannot preserve the memory. the ‘almost’ aspect of human nature: what ought to be but what is not. Yet • Here time erodes the effigies (‘faces blurred’, ‘habits vaguely shown’). another poet is forced to accept the finality of death and the futility of our fervent hopes that love might transcend it. 382 new explorations philip larkin an arundel tomb

• See Shakespeare on this theme. Tone • Ironically, even the fading effigy is inaccurate (‘The stone fidelity | In the opening verse the tone is that of a tourist, a neutral observer of They hardly meant’). some sort (‘that faint hint of the absurd – | The little dogs under their The poem deals obliquely with various aspects of death. feet’). It becomes more personal at the end of the second stanza, with the Contradictory nature of thinking about it in terms of ‘life after’ – the introduction of the speaker’s shocked reaction and the use of the word ‘supine stationary voyage’. The paradox here illustrates our confused ‘tender’. It becomes the tone of a sympathetic neutral observer as he thoughts on death and afterlife. attempts to see their point of view (‘They would not think’, ‘They would not The coldness of death, associated with the coldness of stone. guess’). The denial of expectations: this is what facing the unknown means (‘They would not think to lie so long’, ‘They would not guess’). His sympathy becomes more pronounced in the penultimate stanza as he The loss of identity in death (‘up the paths … Washing at their realises their helplessness and insignificance. He manages real pathos here. identity’). The personal involvement with this theme is signalled in the final stanza by The lack of any control (‘helpless in the hollow’). the use of ‘our’ and ‘us’, as the truth of the Arundels is found to be a general The final undignified scattering: death makes human debris (the human truth. There is a certain wistfulness, a ‘wish it were otherwise’ tone in ‘Bone-riddled ground’). His treatment of death is quite personal. He the ‘almost-instinct almost true’ and in the pathetic final line. deals honestly and intimately with what might be experienced by the Earl and Countess of Arundel. He does not employ the great Technique rhetorical arguments we are accustomed to from Shakespeare’s Structure of the poem sonnets. The tone is fairly low key – no great flights of rhetoric – and is The poem begins with a description of an event and leads on to generalised all the more effective for that. reflection. A bleak view of life: human beings are helpless in the face of death and time. Our vain hope that love might transcend this cycle is a Structure of stanzas mere ‘almost-instinct almost true’. Love can exist only inadequately For the most part, the stanzas are weighted towards the end, like a complex in cold effigy. Truth is compromised. But we continue to make periodic sentence. They keep the main point to the end: for example, see pathetic assertions, such as ‘What will survive of us is love’. stanzas 1 and 2. This is a good narrative technique for building up a sense of drama.

383 new explorations philip larkin an arundel tomb

Rhyming scheme This follows a rigid pattern, abbcac, which might lead to a certain jingly facileness, as in the first stanza, but for his use of off-rhymes to break it up, such as ‘breadths – paths’ in stanza 5 and ‘prove – love’ in the final stanza.

Metre The metre is mostly iambic tetrameter. There is considerable use of enjambment to encourage flow. He even runs verses into each other: look at the enjambment of stanzas 5 and 6, which creates the sense of the ceaseless flow of time.

Imagery The imagery is spare enough, yet effective. Imagery associated with death ranges from the expected monument and ‘Bone-riddled ground’ to the empathetic ‘helpless in the hollow’ and the paradoxical ‘supine stationary voyage’. The metaphor of the tide of history is not exactly original. The synaesthetic imagery of light and birdsong to evoke life is effective.

384 new explorations philip larkin the whitsun weddings

The Whitsun Weddings His attention is first caught by young women ‘grinning and pomaded’, ‘In parodies of fashion’, and then extended to others (fathers, mothers, Structure uncles), described as caricatures for the most part: ‘fathers with broad This poem is structured as a journey: indeed, it recalls a real journey taken belts’, ‘mothers loud and fat’, ‘An uncle shouting smut’. The tone here is by the poet. The central metaphor is that of a journey, and the loose very disparaging; the eye is that of the cynical observer sneering at these narrative style, like that of a short story, is particularly appropriate to the pathetic, unsophisticated attempts at fashion (‘the perms, | The nylon subject of travel. gloves and jewellery-substitutes’). But the poet is lured closer, and by stanzas 5 and 6 he is tentatively identifying with characters and attempting The poem communicates all the sensations, rhythms and impetus of a to understand their thoughts (‘children frowned | At something dull,’ real journey. The sense of escape in the first stanza (‘all sense | Of being ‘fathers had never known | Success so huge and wholly farcical’). in a hurry gone’) gives way to the leisurely meandering of stanzas 2 and 3 (‘A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept’). This is followed by The gradual lowering of his cynical guard, this drawing closer to and the more alert observations of stanzas 4 and 5 (‘Struck, I leant | More identifying with his subject matter, is noticeable too in the person of the promptly out next time’). The sense of new urgency discovered in the speaking voice used. The early stanzas use the first person singular for latter half of stanza 6 (‘Free at last, | And loaded … We hurried’) builds up the most part (‘I was late’, ‘I didn’t notice’, ‘I leant | More promptly out’). to that unexpected climax in the final stanza. This journey ends, as many The first person plural is then interspersed in the telling, until it has taken do, with a feeling of release (‘somewhere becoming rain’). The romantic over completely by the final stanza (‘There we were aimed’, ‘we raced’, excitement and exhilaration of travel is well caught in the structure and ‘We slowed again’). The strident egocentric ‘I’ has given way to the more movement of the stanzas. empathetic ‘we’.

Larkin the observer: The tone of the poem This train journey carries significance for Larkin. This ‘frail | Travelling Larkin, as usual, is the detached, disinterested observer, only gradually coincidence’ allows the poet to be linked temporarily with the rituals of becoming interested in the significance of the scene. Unconnected common humanity, to share vicariously in the marriage celebrations and images of urban and rural England flash by (‘Wide farms went by’, ‘A excitements, even to appreciate the power and attraction of marriage hothouse flashed uniquely’, ‘acres of dismantled cars’), which the poet (‘what it held | Stood ready to be loosed with all the power | That being hardly takes in (‘At first, I didn’t notice’, ‘And went on reading’). changed can give’).

385 new explorations philip larkin the whitsun weddings

But Larkin’s enthusiasm for anything is rarely unqualified. He is aware awe-inspiringly dangerous (‘girls … stared | At a religious wounding’), that Cupid’s arrow wounds as well as energises: one can fall in love or fall depending on the viewer. wounded. One senses that he is relieved at the end that the arrows have missed him, that the drama has moved on elsewhere (‘Sent out of sight, But the most prominent attitude is one of conflicting feelings, found in somewhere becoming rain’). The tone changes from that of disinterested the paradoxical simile ‘The women … like a happy funeral’ and in the final and even cynical observer to one of empathy, understanding, even simile, ‘like an arrow-shower | Sent out of sight’. Some critics have felt that perhaps of admiration, yet he still maintains a sense of distance and a all the poet’s paradoxical thoughts and feelings about love are gathered in clear-headed awareness that marriage is not for him. that spectacular image (Cupid wounds as well as inspires: Larkin admires the couples but he will not join them), which Larkin himself said was Themes inspired by the arrows fired by the English soldiers in the Laurence Olivier Larkin and marriage film of Henry V. They may be Cupid’s arrows here, but they still cause Marriage is probably the main theme that interested Larkin in the poem. suffering. Andrew Motion interprets as follows: We encounter a variety of ideas and attitudes on the subject of love and marriage. At first he found the weddings to be a somewhat grotesque But while he admires the train-load of just married couples, he knows he cannot join them. Alone in his spectacle: ‘grinning and pomaded, girls | In parodies of fashion’, ‘The carriage, sealed behind his window, he is conscious of fathers with broad belts under their suits’, ‘The lemons, mauves, and olive- loss but appreciative of his singleness. As he prepares ochres that | Marked off the girls unreally from the rest’. He is stressing to watch them disappear, he reminds himself that the the difference, the unreality, the out-of-placeness and the cringe-making arrow-shower of love wounds as well as inspires. factors involved (‘An uncle shouting smut’). In the final two stanzas Larkin has discarded his sneering, cynical mask. He definitely finds the ceremonious aspect off-putting, better suited to Does he envy their romantic closeness as they ‘watched the landscape, mocking observation from behind a window than personal experience. sitting side by side’? He is aware of the preciousness of the moment, Cleverly, he also presents it from the point of view of the guests, and ‘this hour’, and of the power of that romantic journey. This is conveyed their view of weddings is not unreservedly positive and is even sometimes through the movement and energy of the last stanza (‘we raced across’, paradoxical. Hints of possible disaster flow from ‘Waving goodbye | ‘what it held | Stood ready to be loosed’, ‘We slowed again’, ‘brakes took To something that survived it’. It is betimes boring (‘something dull’) or hold, there swelled’). There is a sense here of energy barely restrained, which finally bursts out ‘like an arrow-shower’. 386 new explorations philip larkin the whitsun weddings

Larkin has recorded many aspects of the theme of love and marriage of industrial froth’, ‘reek of buttoned carriage-cloth’, ‘acres of dismantled with admiration: the excitement and spectacle, the romantic journey, cars’) mingle uncomfortably with the traditional romantic, chocolate box the dangers (‘wounding’) and the sensual energy. His more cynical nature imagery (‘Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’). Perhaps examination of the humdrum reality of marriage can be found in ‘Self’s the new multicultural society is best caught in that image seen by the the Man’; it is worth contrasting the two poems. newlyweds:

In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin also touches on a broader aspect – An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, of marriage ritual. He considers it within the broad weave of human And someone running up to bowl – relationships – fathers, mothers, uncles, children, girl friends, etc. – each seeing the wedding from a very personal perspective. Fathers enjoy the Here, modern society, symbolised by the media and industry, is united success but find it farcical, while women are more closely involved, sharing with the traditional in a flashing train window image, a new unity fused in the dangerous secret. Children are bored, uncles smutty and girl friends by coincidence. Larkin chronicles customs, but they are disappearing overawed (‘stared | At a religious wounding’). customs for the most part: here the Whit weddings, and in ‘Church Going’ the disappearance of religious practice. ‘An Arundel Tomb’ also Larkin sees marriage against this background of disparate and often depicts a vanished England. Is he seeking to preserve what is vanishing? conflicting views. Is he marvelling that unity could come from such He certainly does not approach this in any nostalgic way, for he is always human fragmentation or merely hinting that it is impossible? Certainly it the unbeliever, the detached observer, the cynical tourist. But it must be is possible to see the weddings as a symbol of the unity of humanity. The remembered that the rituals and customs he writes about are those that coincidence of all of them on the same train, sharing this hour, speeding give meaning and significance to ordinary events, and he always comes to towards the same destination, is a powerful image of human harmony. admit this. And so it is with his chronicling of the Whit weddings.

Larkin as chronicler of things English What interests Larkin is always the interpretation, the significance of In his time, Larkin was considered by many as a spokesman for England, these customs: religious practice in ‘Church Going’, marriage in ‘The a sort of unofficial poet laureate of modern Englishness. The modern Whitsun Weddings’. The descriptive first sections of these poems are England he depicts in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is not exactly a Utopia. closely observed and humorously narrated, but his imagination really The sights and smells of industrial society (‘smelt the fish-dock’, ‘floatings takes fire and the poems come alive when he begins to speculate on the significance of the customs. 387 new explorations philip larkin the whitsun weddings

Larkin usually chronicles from a safe vantage point: from behind the train Technique: How the structure of the stanzas and the window, from behind the mask of a ‘yob’ tourist (‘Church Going’), from rhythms of the language communicate meaning behind the historian’s learning (‘An Arundel Tomb’). There is often a Larkin uses great 10-line stanzas, like heavy railway carriages, to transport medium of some sort between the poet and his subject, which gives us an this. Large but not ungainly, they are streamlined by a regular rhyming interesting, ever-shifting perspective on the society he examines. scheme: abab cdecde. The metre is often iambic pentameter, a good storytelling vehicle, matching the rhythm of the train: What do you think he is saying about modern society in these poems (‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’)? ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ A slow | and stopp|ing curve | southwards | we kept Imagery ˘¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ Larkin has an accurate eye for detail, whether he is dealing with people A hot|house flashed | unique|ly: hedg|es dipped (‘girls, gripping their handbags tighter’), animals or things (‘short- shadowed cattle’, ‘A hothouse flashed uniquely’). His technique is to But there is great variety. Notice the short, two-stress second line in saturate us with these disparate images. None is developed and no single each stanza; perhaps it recalls in metre the interrupted rhythm of the one is particularly significant on its own, but taken together, the whole train, stopping at all the stations. The rhythm of the sentences within the collage has meaning: the fusion in rural and urban England of modern stanzas is more important to the overall sense of the poem. He employs industry and the traditional bucolic, the grotesque spectacle of weddings very long sentences, often spread sinuously over six or seven lines, and and the new energy of the romantic journey. This technique gives a lively the result is that the reader is carried along at speed, as on a train journey. cinematic richness to the poem. Not only is enjambment the norm within stanzas, but from stanza 3 onwards, each stanza runs into the following one, producing this effect of There are some startling and unexpected similes, as jarring at first as headlong movement. metaphysical conceits, such as the description of London’s ‘postal districts packed like squares of wheat’. And there is the central metaphor of journey, If we examine a stanza or two in detail, we can see how the rhythms of which holds the poem together and leads to that spectacular final simile: his language help to communicate the meaning. After the conversational the arrow of love. This provides a unity, direction and impetus that carry the opening in the first stanza (‘I was late getting away’), the structure of the reader through at increasing speed and with growing excitement. next complex sentence – with its negative Latinate construction (‘Not till 388 new explorations philip larkin the whitsun weddings

… Did’), repeated long vowels (‘all … all … all’), and the device of altering they are weighted and emphasised. natural word order to hold ‘gone’ to the end of the sentence – suggests This energy – ‘ready to be loosed’ – is first reined back (‘We slowed one long breath expelled with relief (‘all … all … gone’). The sense of again … the tightened brakes took hold’) but cannot be contained and relief here is obvious in the rhythms of the sentence. The speaker is still finally erupts in the arrow image (‘there swelled … like an arrow-shower’). conscious of the rushing train, communicated by the verbs ‘ran’ and The seesaw effect of energy and control and, finally, release is achieved ‘crossed’ and the short, staccato clauses: ‘We ran | Behind the backs of through the rhythms of the language: structure of sentences, phrasing, houses, crossed a street … smelt the fish-dock.’ But this headlong rush placing of words in the line, etc. The structure of the stanza serves the is slowed by the archaic word ‘thence’, strategically placed at the end of meaning well for Larkin. the line to slow us with its soft, sibilant sounds. We are then assuaged by the gentle i and e vowel sounds, the odd long a and the regular iambic pentameter of the final two lines:

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ The riv|er’s lev|el drift|ing breadth | began,

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ Where sky | and Lin|colnshire | and wa|ter meet.

Through the rhymes and sounds of the language, Larkin slows us down, relaxes us for the journey. But he can also do the opposite: energise us and excite us through the rhythms of language. Examine the final stanza. The sense of direction is established in the first image – ‘There we were aimed’ – which also prepares us for the final arrow simile. The sensation of speed is conveyed through that long, breathless sentence stretched over seven lines. The lines run into each other (enjambment), preventing pauses at line ends; any breaths come in the centre of the line. There is an awareness of barely contained energy, partly achieved by the strategic placing of the words ‘held’ and ‘power’ at the ends of lines 5 and 6, where 389 new explorations philip larkin mcmxiv

MCMXIV and Leaving the gardens tidy Background The poem was begun in November 1958 and finished on 17 May 1960. It Their patience, good humour and sense of order contrast poignantly with the was included in the volume The Whitsun Weddings (1964). war backdrop.

Themes Larkin expresses his theme overtly in the fourth stanza: The preoccupying issues are difficult enough to pin down here. Is it a war poem with a difference, a poem of social comment about early 20th- Never such innocence, Never before or since century society or primarily a poem about the human spirit?

He is conscious too of the vanity of human endeavour and the fragile beauty The poem features lines of volunteers, seen as in a faded photograph, of human happiness (‘marriages | Lasting a little while longer’). Even nature enlisting for the First World War. But war is only an incidental backdrop seems indifferent to humanity’s struggle (‘And the countryside … over’). here. Apart from a brief allusion to a sense of history and a possible hint of patriotic feeling (‘fields | Shadowing Domesday lines’), it is not a It might also be read as a poem with a social theme. One critic read the poem conventional war poem. What it really celebrates is human idealism and as dealing with the leisurely and poetic sense of unity in Edwardian society. the naïve innocence of people. With deep irony, the volunteers are shown There is a feeling of leisure in the second stanza, with its ‘shut shops’, ‘children at play | Called after kings and queens’ and ‘the pubs | Wide open all day’. But Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside this is far from a nostalgic look at pre-war society. The archaic nature of this The Oval or Villa Park lifestyle is stressed in the details (‘archaic faces’, ‘farthings and sovereigns’). The inequity of the social order is noticed (‘differently-dressed servants | and With tiny rooms in huge houses’).

Grinning as if it were all Against a backdrop of war, social inequity and the indifference of nature, the An August Bank Holiday lark idealism of humankind shines forth. But is this real or is it just a myth Larkin celebrates? 390 new explorations philip larkin mcmxiv

Technique The poem is constructed as a collage of pictures and scenes, representative details creating a general impression and carrying the poet’s theme.

Tone There is a certain distance between the poet and his subject: the distance in contemplating an old, faded photograph; the barrier of long time. Also, the poet maintains his usual sense of irony (‘Bank Holiday lark’), but he is not quite the detached observer. His admiration for their innocence shows through in the simplicity of the language –

Never such innocence, Never before or since

– and he achieves a certain pathos in the last lines (‘the men | Leaving the gardens tidy’). His sympathy for their fragile situation comes across.

391 new explorations philip larkin ambulances

Ambulances The dying person is anonymous and sexless (‘something’, ‘it’); death is a process of dissolution (‘what cohered in it across | The years … At Background last begin to loosen’) and final isolation (‘Unreachable inside a room’). This poem was completed on 10 January 1961 and included in The Whitsun Larkin’s view of death is unrelieved by any religious belief. It is chilling in its Weddings (1964). In one of life’s little ironies, Larkin himself collapsed and ordinariness – a modern, urban view of death from the imagination of an was rushed to hospital by ambulance some five or six weeks afterwards. isolated city-dweller. Despite numerous tests, the cause of his collapse remained undiagnosed; his biographer Andrew Motion feels the cause of his blackouts may Imagery have been psychological – that he was no longer able to deal with the No tombs, funeral carriages or Grim Reapers are found here. Rather, complications of his relationships with Maeve Brennan and Monica Jones. the imagery is taken from mundane urban living: ambulances, streets, traffic, children, women, rooms. Sparse, bare and colourless, these props A reading of the poem create the perfect undistinguished stage setting for Larkin’s death drama: This poem features Larkin’s examination of death. He uses ambulances as the carrying away, the stowing, the loosening of all bonds, the dulling to a sort of symbol for it, a vehicle metaphor to carry the various ideas and distance all we are. nuances. In this way he can stress the very personal, private nature of death (‘Closed like confessionals’) and also the impersonal and mechanical aspect Tone of it (‘giving back | None of the glances they absorb’). It is everywhere (‘All There is a certain light-heartedness about the witty first stanza (‘giving streets in time are visited’). The euphemism ‘visited’ makes it even more back | None of the glances they absorb’, ‘All streets in time are visited’) alarming. No one is safe (‘children … women coming from the shops’). The and there is an effort at a bleak pun in the fourth (‘deadened air’), but ordinariness of the latter image is particularly chilling. Death is terrifying mostly this is a very detached view of death. Notice the unemotional, (‘A wild white face’) and has the power to alarm even the passers-by (‘Poor impersonal tone of ‘it is carried in and stowed’, ‘sudden shut of loss | soul, | They whisper at their own distress’). For Larkin it is the great truth Round something nearly at an end’. ‘The exchange of love’ is a rather (‘So permanent and blank and true’), the answer to the question of the clinical style of reference for affection, friendship and love. This clinically meaning of life (‘the solving emptiness | That lies just under all we do’). It is detached tone renders the poem even bleaker. an atheistic view of death and a particularly bleak view of existence.

392 new explorations philip larkin ambulances

Rhyme and rhythms The verse is constructed in fairly regular iambic tetrameters with a strict rhyming scheme, abcbca. There are some off-rhymes in the first and in the final stanzas, which give it an air of naturalness (‘absorb – kerb’, ‘room – come’). Lines and even stanzas are run into each other, which helps the verse to sound more conversational.

Larkin manipulates the syntax in the final stanza, deliberately clouding the meaning to simulate the process of dissolution. Before the distortion it might have read ‘To lie far from the exchange of love, | unreachable inside a room | [Which] the traffic parts to let go by.’ Once again, the rhythms of language have been made to serve the meaning and overall effect.

393 new explorations philip larkin the trees

The Trees The trees are almost personified in this poem. They are hesitant communicators (‘Like something almost being said’), exhibiting Background melancholic emotions (‘Their greenness is a kind of grief’), yet they put This poem was dated 2 June 1967. It was written during a period of up a performance in public (‘Their yearly trick of looking new’), and relatively high productivity for Larkin, when he completed four poems finally they are purveyors of hope (‘Last year is dead … Begin afresh, in the next five months, all to be included in the volume High Windows, afresh, afresh’). This positive note is reinforced by the ‘unresting castles’ published in 1974. metaphor, with its connotations of permanence and strength.

A reading of the poem Tone This lyric describes the cyclical rebirth of nature and its effect on Larkin’s usual gloom is evident in the first stanza. Is he the only poet who the poet. The emerging leaves stir uncertain emotions in the writer could find grief in greenness? Even spring stirs ambiguous emotions in his (‘Like something almost being said’), in this case feelings more akin to soul: ‘a kind of grief’. Is there a hint of jealousy in his slightly sarcastic swipe melancholy than the expected joy (‘Their greenness is a kind of grief’). at ‘Their yearly trick of looking new’?

Paradoxically, the emergence of new life sets the poet thinking of human The third stanza is more positive in tone, with its repeated emphasis mortality in the second stanza (‘Is it that they are born again | And we on a fresh start. But even this is qualified by the very ambiguity of the grow old?’). Does he resent the trees’ ability to re-emerge, dismissively communication ‘they seem to say’. described as a ‘yearly trick’? Yet some enthusiasm for the fresh new life and energy has reasserted itself by the third stanza (‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’).

Imagery Larkin sometimes uses nature images to convey human emotions and feelings. Here, the spring trees call up conflicting emotions: enthusiasm for life and grief at the brevity of it.

394 new explorations philip larkin the explosion

The Explosion Larkin is recording how fragile humankind is in the face of blind fate. There is a heavy sense of foreboding about this poem (‘Shadows pointed Background towards the pithead’). They seem impelled ‘Through the tall gates This poem, dated 5 January 1970, was probably inspired by a television standing open’. Is man a mere pawn of fate, innocently, happily trooping documentary on the mining industry that Larkin watched with his mother towards his destruction? during the Christmas holidays of 1969. The literary influence on it is most likely D.H. Lawrence, with his descriptions of mining villages. Larkin had If not completely indifferent, nature seems at best to register the human read Lawrence avidly in earlier years. The poem is included in the volume disaster only for a moment (‘cows | Stopped chewing for a second; sun, High Windows (1974). | Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed’). Yet it is also nature that produces the hope in this poem, with that poignant image of the unbroken eggs. Themes The human nest or community might be devastated, but the natural This is a narrative poem about an industrial catastrophe in a mining one survives. The wives too provide a continuity. Is woman a symbol village, a pithead explosion resulting in the deaths of many men of all of survival for Larkin? Certainly, life goes on in this poem and there is a ages from that community. The catastrophe is dealt with obliquely: no powerful sense of continuity, as in ‘The Trees’. details of the carnage, horror or pain are recorded; rather, it is almost euphemistically described: Imagery There is a graphic evocation of the mining village, achieved through a At noon, there came a tremor; cows wealth of realistic detail: ‘pitboots’, ‘pipe-smoke’, ‘beards and moleskins’ Stopped chewing for a second; sun, – all details of human accoutrements. Through this imagery, the living, Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed. breathing reality is conjured up.

Indeed, it is all the more powerful for that. Death is seen here as Romanticised images of nature (rabbits, larks’ eggs, etc.) suggest the unexpected, coming literally out of the sun. Death is unfair, indiscriminate innocent preoccupations of children. But nature’s other face is also hinted (‘Fathers, brothers’). at (‘In the sun the slagheap slept’). The alliteration emphasises the ugly, amorphous mass and there is a hint of possible threatening activity from the sleeping giant. But the image we are left with is that of the unbroken

395 new explorations philip larkin the explosion

eggs, which become a symbol of survival and continuity at the end of the Metre poem. The metre is mainly non-rhyming trochaic tetrameter:

Religious imagery and scriptural allusions (‘The dead … sitting in God’s ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ house’, ‘Plain as lettering in the chapels’) give the poem a broader scope Shadows | pointed | towards the | pithead: and a cosmic significance. We are made to see humankind against the ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ broad tapestry of heaven and earth and man becomes a heavenly being One chased | after | rabbits; | lost them; (‘Gold as on a coin, or walking | Somehow from the sun’). ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ Fathers, | brothers, | nicknames, | laughter, Tone On the surface it appears to be a neutrally descriptive poem, merely Trochaic metre has been used to give an easy sing-song lilt to children’s logging details. Indeed, the pace of the rhythm rolling along somewhat narrative poetry, for example by Longfellow in ‘Hiawatha’. In ‘The monotonously would reinforce this impression. The speaker is at pains to Explosion’ the gently lulling monotony of this metre hides the awful keep his distance and remain uninvolved: ‘It was said’ and ‘Wives saw’. He reality of the subject. This is a further bleak irony in the poem – that it is avoids personal comment. a tragedy told in childish rhythms. Larkin claimed he was not aware he was using a metre similar to Longfellow’s, yet it is very effective and is Yet that discipline seems to break down in the last line, where the pathos maintained until the final line, which serves to further emphasise that line of that final image of the unbroken eggs and the ironic contrast with the and so add to the emotion. shattered community releases all that held-back emotion. It is easy then to feel Larkin’s empathy for that village. The emotion is all the more powerful for having been bottled up.

396 new explorations philip larkin cut grass

Cut Grass Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Background Larkin himself felt that the imagery might be overdone. In a letter to In the late 1960s Larkin became increasingly bitter, argumentative and Monica Jones after the poem was completed (1 August 1971), he wrote: right wing in his social and political attitudes. He was particularly virulent in his views on the Labour Party government, trade unions, liberal prison Its trouble is that it’s ‘music’, i.e. pointless crap … regimes, immigration and indeed the state of England generally. This About line 6 I hear a kind of wonderful Elgar rhythm gave rise to a good deal of bitter poetry, but this sourness does not seem music take over, for which the words are just an to have pervaded his every waking moment, as he was capable of writing excuse … Do you see what I mean? There is a point the elegant and delicate lyric ‘Cut Grass’ on 3 June 1971. at which the logical sense of the poem ceases to be added to, and it continues only as a succession of images. I like it all right but for once I’m not a good Theme judge. This graceful lyric deals with a common enough theme: the cycle of life in nature. But it approaches this topic with great immediacy and not a Do you agree with his reservations about the imagery? Comment. Do little drama. The poet marks how death can coexist with beauty in the you see what he means about the wonderful rhythm? Explain. freshness of a June day. Grass is cut to make hay, and ‘long the death | It dies in the white hours | Of young-leafed June’. The poem emphasises Rhythm and rhyme the frailty of life, but this is more than balanced by the rich, abundant Despite the short lines of irregular metre, a slow, elegant pace is achieved, beauty of nature (‘hedges snowlike strewn’), with its medicinal power mainly though the use of long vowels. For example: (‘Queen Anne’s lace’) and elegant energy (‘high-builded cloud | Moving at summer’s pace’). ¯ ¯ ¯ Mown stalks exhale Imagery ¯ ¯ The fairly obvious natural imagery of flowers, hedges and clouds has been Long, long … freshened in a personal way by Larkin (‘Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace’). It is reinvigorated by a dramatic personification:

397 new explorations philip larkin cut grass

He uses alliteration for musical effect: ‘Brief is the breath’, ‘snowlike strewn’, ‘Lost lanes of … lace’. This augments the music of the regular abab rhyme of each stanza.

Tone Is there a certain wistfulness about the poet’s contemplation of short-lived beauty? The grass is ‘frail’, the breath ‘brief’. The inappropriateness of any notion of death in the ‘white hours | Of young-leafed June’ indicates some sadness. This wistfulness is carried on the sounds of the words, as we saw.

398 new explorations philip larkin a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

A brief overview of poetic preoccupations Numbers and parasols: outside, Squadrons of empty cars, and heat, and themes And littered grass … (‘At Grass’) Consider these statements, then return to the individual poems for evidence to corroborate or rebut them. Make notes for yourself, together His vision of society encompasses both the industrial and the pastoral, with quotations and references. the romantic and the modern: see ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, where the dismantled cars exist cheek by jowl with romantic England, ‘Where Larkin’s awareness of modern society sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’. This inclusive modern vision is When asked if writers should be concerned with political and social summed up in the view from the train window: issues, Larkin said, ‘The imagination is not the servant of the intellect and social conscience.’ But while his poetry may not be directly motivated – An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, by specific social themes, Larkin was always alert to social behaviour and And someone running up to bowl … many important aspects of modern society are reflected in his poems. Modern industrial society, with its human carnage and mechanical The society Larkin writes out of is a post-religious one (see ‘Church debris (‘The Explosion’: on unsafe working conditions; also Going’, which can be read as charting the stages in the breakdown of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: ‘industrial froth’, ‘acres of dismantled cars’), faith from scepticism to superstition to disbelief). recorded in all its grimy unloveliness. The function of churches in an age of unbelief is considered: they The bleakness of urban living: traffic, accidents, frightened people supply ceremonies that provide unity in our lives and mark significant (‘Ambulances’). points, places where ‘all our compulsions meet, | Are recognised, and The random nature of social bonds: the ‘random blend | Of families robed as destinies’ (‘Church Going’). and fashions’ (‘Ambulances’); the juxtaposition of families with In place of the comfort of religion, Larkin seeks consolation in rituals fashions serves to undermine and devalue the concept of family. and social ceremony (‘Church Going’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, The vanity and empty glitter of our fashionable functions: ‘MCMXIV’). Faith in the potential of the individual replaces religious faith (see ‘Church Going’: ‘A hunger in himself to be more serious’; human idealism in ‘MCMXIV’).

399 new explorations philip larkin a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Conflicting qualities of humankind, destructiveness of war vs. human … what it held idealism and naïveté: ‘Never such innocence’, ‘Grinning as if it were all Stood ready to be loosed with all the power | An August Bank Holiday lark’ (‘MCMXIV’). That being changed can give. (‘The Whitsun Weddings’) Love and marriage Yet marriage is not for him (‘The Whitsun Weddings’). In general, Larkin yearns for the ideal of love as a solution to human Complete happiness in love is never achieved for Larkin: there is an isolation. untruth at the heart of the love statement in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ He toys with the vain hope that love might transcend death to prove and love is qualified, as the speaker is still sad that she cannot share Our almost-instinct almost true: her happiness in ‘Wedding-Wind’. What will survive of us is love. (‘An Arundel Tomb’) Death Larkin is obsessed with the passage of time (‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Yet he is aware of the fragile nature of human happiness and love: Trees’, ‘Cut Grass’). ‘helpless in the hollow’, ‘scrap of history’ (‘An Arundel Tomb’); He neither makes a heroic attempt to defeat time, as Keats and ‘The thousands of marriages | Lasting a little while longer’ Shakespeare do, nor takes refuge in stoical acceptance, like Hardy. He (‘MCMXIV’); and also in ‘Wedding-Wind’, where the speaker is aware records the different faces of death and finds the odd crumb of of how fragile her joy is – ‘like a thread | Carrying beads’. comfort along the way. He deals with sexual fulfilment, happiness and joy from the woman’s Death is seen as the culmination of life (‘At Grass’). point of view: the naturalness of it, the animal satisfactions, ‘Our The naturalness and gentleness of death (‘At Grass’). kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters’ (‘Wedding-Wind’). Yet the essential aloneness of it: ‘And not a fieldglass sees them home’ Admiration for the fresh love of newly married couples, appreciation (‘At Grass’). of sexual energy: The bleaker side of death; note the capricious nature of death (‘children strewn on steps or road, | Or women coming from the shops’); it is impersonal, alarming, the final loosening of all bonds, utterly comfortless (‘So permanent and blank and true’ – ‘Ambulances’). 400 new explorations philip larkin a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Death is wanton and uncaringly decimates a community (‘The … A bright Explosion’). Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Larkin sees death as the meaning of life: ‘the solving emptiness | That Bone-riddled ground. (‘An Arundel Tomb’) lies just under all we do’ (‘Ambulances’). Nature somehow dilutes the bleakness of death; the cyclical nature Nature is the only constant, the only survivor, outlasting many of life and death in the seasons offers some hope (‘Begin afresh, institutions, ideas, etc: afresh, afresh’ – ‘The Trees’). Death in nature is beautiful, by contrast; death and beauty exist side And what remains when disbelief has gone? by side: Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky (‘Church Going’) It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June Nature exists side by side with industrial society, forming a new order, With chestnut flowers a new reality (‘The Whitsun Weddings’). (‘Cut Grass’) Nature imagery is used by Larkin to express human emotion: ‘perpetual morning shares my bed’, ‘all-generous waters’ (‘Wedding- Nature Wind’). The critic Edna Longley draws attention to the pattern that Larkin is habitually conscious of nature in his poetry. In this selection all the richest moments ‘of release and blossoming in Larkin’s poetry is there any poem, apart from ‘Ambulances’, where nature does not … seem to demand natural imagery for their expression’ (see provide the backdrop (‘At Grass’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, etc.) or central ‘Wedding-Wind’ and the end of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’). imagery (‘The Trees’, etc.), if not the main theme itself? Death is acceptable, less threatening, natural in the context of the The restorative power of nature: see ‘The Trees’ and ‘The Explosion’; seasons (‘At Grass’, ‘The Trees’, ‘Cut Grass’). nature provides a symbol of continuity and new life: ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’ (‘The Trees’). The poetic process Alternatively, nature can be indifferent to humankind: ‘And the Larkin’s own poetic process involved exploring an event or countryside not caring’ (‘MCMXIV’); the seasons roll on irrespective phenomenon through detailed description, which led on to reflection of humankind and its preoccupations: or analysis and finally revealed a truth or an insight (‘Church Going’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘The Trees’). 401 new explorations philip larkin a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Introspection and self-image • ‘A tenderly nursed sense of defeat’ (Charles Tomlinson). ‘Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself,’ Larkin • Andrew Motion says that Larkin has done a lot to create the image of once said in a newspaper interview. himself as ‘a Parnassian Ron Glum’. Sometimes he indulges in direct introspection, as in the poem ‘Toads’, Examine the main areas of disillusionment in his life: where he exhibits a deep sense of self-disgust and thinks of himself • The lack of religious faith, which means that he does not have the as ‘a sack of meal upon two sticks’; and ‘something sufficiently comfort of that absolute in his life (‘Church Going’). toad-like squats in me too’. • His atheistic view of the end of life is given full expression in all its But he also shows a lighter, self-mocking attitude (‘Church Going’). bleakness in ‘Ambulances’ (‘the solving emptiness | That lies just under Larkin as a loner, an isolate viewing life from a train window: see ‘The all we do’). Whitsun Weddings’, where he appreciates love and marriage but • The drudgery of work (‘Toads’); the pointlessness of the struggle and decides that it is not for him. Is there a sense of relief at being a the irony of all the effort (‘not a fieldglass sees them home’ – ‘At bystander? Grass’). Yet he has a desperate need for love to survive (‘An Arundel Tomb’) We also find that his perpetual awareness of death colours all his and a desperate need for hope (‘The Trees’). attempts to celebrate life. For example, ‘At Grass’ celebrates the Examine other aspects of the poet’s personality and attitude to life as success of life, but it is a life that is over. Even the celebration of revealed in the poems, such as: nature’s beauty and abundant growth is qualified by the presence of • His pessimistic outlook and constant sense of disillusionment death (‘Cut Grass’). • His agnosticism and lack of any religious comfort Is there a reluctance on his part ever to acknowledge total happiness? • The constant brooding on death, which limited his expectation of life In ‘Wedding-Wind’, even here the woman has a little lingering sadness • His interest in natural and social rituals, perhaps as an alternative to that she cannot share her happiness. religion In ‘An Arundel Tomb’, the manifestation of love that has, in a way, survived time is essentially flawed. Larkin’s philosophy Is there a somewhat cynical view of life that is fostered by the Many critics find a sense of deep disillusionment and pessimism in detached voice of the poet, by his remote stance and reluctance to be Larkin’s poetry: involved (‘Church Going’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’)? • ‘The saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’ (Eric Homberger).

402 new explorations philip larkin a brief overview of poetic preoccupations and themes

Yet all is not unrelieved gloom: • The natural cycle brings hope of renewal – ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’ (‘The Trees’). • Human idealism and innocence are celebrated (‘MCMXIV’). • There is a yearning for hope (‘An Arundel Tomb’). Larkin himself denied that he was a completely pessimistic poet: ‘The impulse for producing a poem is never negative; the most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done.’ From your reading of his poems, would you agree?

403 new explorations philip larkin elements of larkin’s style

Elements of Larkin’s style Style of language He employs a variety of styles of language. We find poetic language, Dramatic monologue metaphorical and descriptive, in many of the poems, for instance in ‘An Many of Larkin’s poems (more than half of this selection) are cast in the Arundel Tomb’, ‘MCMXIV’, ‘The Trees’ and in ‘Cut Grass’ in particular, dramatic monologue form. This results in a discussion, dialogue-type but it is employed in all the poems at times. But there are also many style of poem, albeit one conducted inside the poet’s head. It produces an examples of ordinary colloquial language. This style is also used for immediate, dramatic type of poem where we follow the ins and outs of the moments of quiet immediacy (‘That Whitsun, I was late getting away’) or poet’s thoughts as the argument develops. for his cynical persona (‘some brass and stuff | Up at the holy end’).

This internal polemic is often obvious in the vocabulary and syntax of the Symbolism poem. See ‘Church Going’, where all the hypotheses, possibilities and He sometimes uses symbolism to express a truth, often at key moments niggling doubts of the poet’s thoughts are signalled by the use of ‘what’, (the end of ‘At Grass’, the end of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’). Sometimes ‘if’, ‘or’, ‘or’, ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘yet’, ‘but’, etc. These rhetorical questions are a it is overused to carry interior feelings and complex emotions, as in common feature of Larkin’s poetry (see the end of ‘Wedding-Wind’) and ‘Wedding-Wind’. Very often natural imagery is employed in this the means by which he arrives at truth in his poems. symbolism, as if only the power of nature can bring the thought, notion or feeling to birth and consciousness. Voice of the poet Many of the poems are written in the first person. This would usually Settings lend an openness and an intimacy to a poem, but Larkin protects himself Natural settings feature in the poems: landscapes, fields, etc. (‘At Grass’, from exposure by assuming a persona or cultivating a personality for ‘The Trees’, ‘Cut Grass’). These settings produce quite positive and this voice. He might assume the persona of a bored and sceptical tourist uplifting poems, poems of some satisfaction and limited hope. Empty (‘Church Going’) or a knowledgeable historian (‘An Arundel Tomb’) or churches, ruined monuments and graveyards figure as settings for bleaker that of a cynical traveller (‘The Whitsun Weddings’). Usually the voice is reflections on post-Christian society, mutability, time and transience. disinterested, distant at first, only gradually assuming an interest. Some of Modern urban settings, such as ambulances and trains, give fleeting views the poems are written in the third person, where he can achieve an even of city people, scattered glimpses of life. greater sense of distance from his subject (‘At Grass’). The woman’s voice he assumes in ‘Wedding-Wind’ is quite different. 404 new explorations philip larkin elements of larkin’s style

People in his poems Arundel Tomb’ and ‘Ambulances’ and the trochaic tetrameter of ‘The In general we encounter brief sketches or glimpses of people in his Explosion’, and study the different effects of each. Rhyme and sounds poetry, but rarely do we get any profound portraiture or exploration of an of words are employed for specific effects. (See the details in the critical individual. We catch glimpses of old, frightened, stressed or threatened commentaries on the individual poems.) people (‘Ambulances’). We meet caricatures to be sneered at: louts, ‘ruin- bibber’, ‘Christmas-addict’, etc. (‘Church Going’). There are generic lists The Movement of human beings: fathers, brothers, wives, men leaving the garden tidy, In the 1950s Larkin was associated with a style of English poetry that dark-clothed children at play (‘MCMXIV’, ‘The Explosion’). Again, all are came to be known as the Movement. The group included Donald Davie, fleeting glimpses. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright and Elizabeth Jennings. Larkin became the most eminent poet of this Larkin features quite a few lovers: the bride in ‘Wedding-Wind’, the many group, if group it was. He himself doubted the existence of any coherent couples in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and the earl and countess in ‘An movement. This notion that there was a new style of poetry emerging Arundel Tomb’. But the treatment is rarely deep enough to create real was first launched in an article by J.D. Scott, who coined the term, in the people, though there is some attempt to get inside the thinking of the earl Spectator in October 1954: and countess (but they are safely dead!) and, more successfully, the bride in ‘Wedding-Wind’. The Movement as well as being anti-phoney is anti-wet; sceptical; robust; ironic; prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, In general, people are treated superficially, seen as generic examples, threatened world, which doesn’t look, anyway, as if it’s caricatured and sneered at or used as symbols. His most benign treatment going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of of people occurs in ‘MCMXIV’ and ‘The Explosion’; ironically, both these young English writers. communities are threatened with disintegration. For the most part their work was anti-romantic in style, plain speaking and Technical variety pragmatic. It was characterised by a tone of irony and self-doubt and a Explore the variety of stanza form he uses, from the heavy eight- to 10- search for completely honest feelings. The ordinariness of the poet was line stanzas of ‘Church Going’ to the three-line stanzas of ‘The Explosion’. central to their outlook, which was highly ironic, given the fact that many Examine the variety of metres, such as the iambic tetrameter of ‘An of them worked in universities.

405 new explorations philip larkin developing a personal response to the poetry of philip larkin

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Philip Larkin

1. What common poetic issues does Larkin deal with (i.e. themes you have met in other poets)? 2. What new issues does he deal with? Do you think these are important? Why? What insights into these issues did he give you? 3. What view of society and of the world do you get from a reading of Larkin’s poetry? Does this accord in any way with your own view of the world? How is it different? 4. Do you find Larkin to be a forthright and honest voice? Explain. 5. In what senses would you consider Larkin to be a modern poet? 6. If you had to choose only one poem of his for an anthology, which poem would you select and why? 7. Make a case for why we should or should not study Larkin in schools today. 8. What questions about his poetry or his philosophy would you like to ask the poet? 9. What do you like or dislike about the way he writes his poetry? 10. If you would like to read further, try Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber 1988).

406 new explorations philip larkin questions

Questions 10. ‘The image of the poet that comes across is that of a solitary soul on the fringes of society.’ From your reading of his poems, would you 1. ‘An awareness of mortality colours all the poems of Philip Larkin.’ agree with this perception? Consider this statement in light of the poems you have read. 11. ‘Detailed observation of an event, place or phenomenon, followed by 2. ‘In Larkin’s poetry the natural world is beautiful and restorative yet philosophical reflection that yields up the kernel of truth – this is a also vulnerable and transient’ (Andrew Motion). Discuss this aspect of Larkin poem.’ Examine the structure of at least two poems by Larkin Larkin’s poetry. to test the validity of this statement. 3. ‘Despite inhabiting a bleak, post-Christian world, Larkin has a very 12. ‘An effective use of symbolism is essential to the meaning of many a positive view of mankind.’ Discuss this statement with respect to the Larkin poem.’ Explore any two poems from this point of view. poems by Larkin that you have read. 4. ‘Larkin finds it easier to contemplate the past than the future.’ Discuss with reference to the poems you have read. 5. ‘Larkin’s subject matter is largely his own inadequacy’ (Charles Tomlinson). Discuss this reading of Larkin’s poetry. 6. ‘Larkin’s poems feature a constant struggle between opposites, such as between sociability and solitariness, hope and hopelessness, fulfilment and disappointment.’ Discuss. 7. ‘Sadness is the dominant emotion in Philip Larkin’s poetry.’ Would you agree? Substantiate your opinions with reference to the poems. 8. ‘We encounter a great variety of tone in the poetry of Philip Larkin, from the cynical and disillusioned to the wistful and nostalgic.’ Examine the variety of tone you experience in his poetry. 9. ‘The tone of Larkin’s speaking voice is always that of the neutral observer.’ Would you agree?

407 new explorations philip larkin bibliography

Bibliography

Alvarez, A. (ed.), The New Poetry, London: Penguin 1962.

Booth, J., Philip Larkin: Writer, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1992.

Gibson, J. (ed.), Let the Poet Choose, London: Harrap 1973.

Hamilton, I., ‘Four conversations’, London Magazine, vol. 4, no. 6, November 1964.

Larkin, P., Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985 (Anthony Twaite, ed.), London: Faber & Faber 1992.

Morrison, B., The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s, London: Methuen 1986.

Motion, A., Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, London: Faber & Faber 1993.

Rossen, J., Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989.

Swarbrick, A., Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1995.

408 John Montague Notes and Explorations: Carole Scully

409 new explorations john montague introduction

Introduction Unfortunately, when the family were reunited in New York life was still hard for them. John’s mother found it difficult to bond with her new Early life son, and this rejection proved to be a major issue in Montague’s life ‘Brooklyn born, Tyrone-reared, Dublin-educated, constituted a tangle, and writing. When the American stock market collapsed in 1929 John’s a turmoil of contradictory allegiance it would take a lifetime to unravel.’ father, along with many others, lost his job. To make matters worse, his This is how John Montague describes his own life. It is important for us mother became ill with tuberculosis. The family lived in a speakeasy (an to be aware of his life if we are to develop an understanding of his poetry, illegal drinking den) owned by John’s uncle. But when John’s uncle died because Montague’s life is the starting point for his writing. This is not to the decision was made to send John and his two older brothers back to suggest that he writes a poetic diary. Rather, in his poetry he takes his own Northern Ireland while James and Molly remained in New York. ‘tangle’ of experiences and observations and draws out of them lessons and truths that are universally relevant. Thus, by reading Montague’s For the two older boys it was a return to their ‘home’, but for the four- poetry we may also begin to reflect on the ‘tangle’ that lies within each of us. year-old John it was an expedition into the unknown. Later he was to write, ‘Losing a family and a country in one sweep must not have been Montague has described his life as being ‘a burden’ and there is no doubt easy, although for long I suppressed my earlier memories.’ The effects that his early life was a difficult one. He was born on 28 February 1929 of this early disruption on his environment are evident in Montague’s in St Catherine’s Hospital, Brooklyn. His parents had only recently been search for a sense of identity in his writing, where he tries to work out reunited after a separation lasting for three years. This separation had who he is and where he belongs. When the three boys arrived back come about because of his father’s political activities in Northern Ireland. in Co. Tyrone, John was separated from his two brothers. While they Montague’s father, James, had come from a comfortable Catholic family went to live with their maternal grandmother in Fintona, John was taken in Co. Tyrone; however, he had become actively involved in Nationalist to live with his father’s two unmarried sisters in the Montague family activities after the Easter Rising in 1916. When Ireland was partitioned home in Garvaghey. The reasons behind this surprising decision were and Northern Ireland was established, James found it impossible to find complicated. John’s grandmother was an old lady who was reluctant to employment. As a married man with two small sons, James decided that take on the rearing of a small child. Also, his father wanted one of his sons he had no choice but to travel to America, while his wife Molly and the to grow up in the Montague environment. children stayed behind in Co. Tyrone.

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So John lost his last remaining certainty, the presence of the two brothers to take on the responsibility of a young child. Whatever the reason, Molly he had lived with constantly for the first four years of his young life. went to live some eight miles away from her son, in her family home He found himself living with strangers in an unknown house, set in an at Fintona, and they met only occasionally. The trauma of this second unknown landscape far away from the teeming streets of Brooklyn. rejection was a major contributory factor to the little boy developing a stutter, as Montague suggests himself: Education John’s aunts were two kind women, with his Aunt Brigid in particular I have no doubt that the separation from my mother, providing great support for John. They made the sensitive decision to whatever the reasons for the decision, is at the centre of my emotional life, affecting my relationships with let John stay at home for a year before sending him to school. It was women, shadowing my powers of speech … during this time that he began to explore the wide, open landscape of Co. Tyrone and to develop a love and appreciation of nature. This early In ‘The Locket’ Montague traces, with brutal honesty, his boyhood interaction with the natural world was to have a positive influence on attempts to establish some type of relationship with his mother. Montague: not only did it help him to begin to develop a sense of his own identity, but it also provided him with a wealth of experiences. As an His mother was not the only female figure who exerted a negative adult poet, Montague frequently taps into this storehouse of childhood influence on his development. The treatment that John received at the memories to produce the most wonderfully vivid pieces of writing, as in hands of a local teacher, who seemed to dislike the Montague family, may ‘The Trout’ and ‘Killing the Pig’. also have added to his speech difficulties. John was particularly good at reading, and one day he was sent to this teacher to read a passage aloud. Montague has said that the ‘few years from four to eleven’ were ‘a Owing to the content of the passage, a description of a young, naked girl blessing and a healing’. He went to the local school and proved to be dancing under the moon, John became somewhat unsettled. In response, a bright pupil. However, this was not a completely happy time for him. the teacher began to mock him and his accent, which still bore traces When John was seven years old his mother returned home to Co. of his early years in Brooklyn. Indeed, Brooklyn continued to feature in Tyrone, leaving his father in Brooklyn. However, she made no attempt young John’s life, for his father was still living there and would do so until to bring John to live with her. Perhaps she did not want to disrupt John’s he returned to Northern Ireland in 1952, when John was in his twenties. In life by taking him from his aunts’ home, or perhaps she had been so worn his poem ‘The Cage’ Montague confronts his relationship with his father, down by the disappointments of her life in America that she was unable presenting an honest representation of their situation. 411 new explorations john montague introduction

At the age of 11 Montague won a scholarship to St Patrick’s College, be kicked, not examined; the begrudgers ruled.’ However, his connection Armagh. He found it an unhappy experience: ‘Those five years in with this group did have two major effects on his development as a writer. Armagh were the most cramped of my childhood.’ His aunts were He was horrified by the financial poverty and lack of recognition that both hopeful that he might discover a religious vocation. John, however, was Clarke and Kavanagh endured and he worked hard to gain recognition less sure. Although he was impressed by the ceremony and rituals of the and financial support for the two men. As a result, Montague vowed Catholic Church, he found something even more interesting – girls! that he would never rely on poetry for his income. He has stuck to this decision throughout his life and has worked in such areas as journalism In 1946 Montague won a scholarship to attend University College Dublin, and lecturing while continuing to write poetry. In addition, because of where he studied English and History. Initially he found it difficult to his negative experiences as a young poet, Montague has always been settle into college life. Then he noticed that the ‘intellectuals’, a group immensely supportive of other writers, commenting, ‘I would not wish of students who controlled the English Literature Society and a literary anyone to go through what I endured as a young writer.’ magazine, were very popular with ‘the brighter girls, who were often the more pretty’. John decided to become part of this group, and it was here The wider world that he discovered that he ‘might possibly be able to write something By the time Montague had completed his final exams in 1952, gaining like the kind of poetry I admired’. The connection between women and a double First in English and History, he was very frustrated by his life poetry persisted for Montague. In ‘All Legendary Obstacles’ Montague in Ireland. Luckily, he received a scholarship to study in America. This describes his feelings as he waits for his girlfriend to arrive on the train, not only gave him the opportunity to break away from the negativity of while in ‘The Same Gesture’ he considers the nature of the love that he the Dublin poetic scene, it also offered him the chance to escape from and his lover share. the claustrophobic and inward-looking attitude that pervaded Ireland in the 1950s. He had long felt that Ireland was a country that existed on Montague’s involvement with the ‘intellectuals’ led him into the Dublin the fringes of the world. As a schoolboy during the Second World War poetic scene, where he met such poets as Austin Clarke and Patrick he had followed the theatre of wartime actions, conscious that he was Kavanagh. He was hopeful that engaging with this group might help him ‘just a boy living on the edge of a giant historical drama’. In his poem ‘A to develop his writing skills, so that he would be better able to understand Welcoming Party’, Montague expresses his sense of Ireland’s peripheral and shoulder the burden of his life. Disappointingly, Montague found position and the effects that it had on both himself and the Irish people. that ‘The poetic world of Dublin was acrimony and insult: a poem was to He also developed the belief – one that he holds to this day – that for

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his writing to develop to its full potential he must engage with literary A modern form of Northern Irish poetry influences from all over the world. This is not to suggest that he is In his evolution of a poetic style, Montague has consistently had a double rejecting all that is Irish; on the contrary, he feels: ‘The wider an Irishman’s purpose: to develop a personal writing style and to initiate a new form of experience, the more likely he is to understand his native country.’ writing for Northern Irish poetry. Through his writing, he has acted as a kind of trailblazer, or as he describes himself, ‘the missing link of Ulster Montague landed in a very different world in America. He discovered the poetry’ because ‘there had not been a poet of Ulster Catholic background literary world that he had yearned for: ‘a literary world filled with writers since the Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century’. revelling in the creation of living, breathing poetry’. He embraced the opportunity to encounter new ideas and to develop deep friendships with This style rests on two foundations: first, Montague’s awareness of the other writers. His writing blossomed and he began to find some easiness relationship between Ireland’s past and the present; and second, his belief in shouldering the burden of his life. that for poetic progress to occur there must be an investigation and inclusion of influences from the international world of modern poetry. Having met his first wife in America, Montague returned to Ireland for some time before travelling to his wife’s native country, France. There he Through his exploration of the connection between Ireland’s past and met writers such as Samuel Beckett. Indeed, no matter where Montague present, Montague not only contributed to his writing style, but he also has lived, be it in Ireland, America or France, he has always sought added to his own sense of identity. His awareness of his life being related the company of other writers and artists because he sees the ‘idea of to past lives gave him a sense of belonging to a living inheritance that was a fertile community’ as being of great benefit to the creative process. held within the Northern Irish countryside and further eased the burden of Furthermore, by being part of such groups, Montague developed a his living. The danger, as Montague sees it, is that modern life has taken feeling of belonging that has contributed to his sense of identity. Finally, the people away from their land and destroyed their sense of connection it was through these opportunities for open companionship and the to the past: enthusiastic pooling of ideas that Montague constructed and refined his view that writing in the 20th century was a ‘shared adventure’: an The whole landscape a manuscript adventure that both he and Northern Ireland had to become part of. We had lost the skill to read

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In his poetry, Montague frequently tries to highlight and emphasise this of the workings of our own lives and the world that we live in. This connection between the past and the present. In ‘Like dolmens round approach is closely connected to the modernists’ fondness for the lyric my childhood’ he examines his relationship with the past, as represented poem. A lyric poem is one in which the poet seeks to express an individual by the old people and the dolmens, and comes to an understanding state of mind, mood or attitude. Poets usually write from a personal point that they are indeed very much a part of his own being and the present, of view, using the personal pronoun ‘I’ in their writing. Occasionally a poet while in ‘The Wild Dog Rose’ he uses the story of the attempted rape of might create an imaginary character, a persona, to express this personal one woman as a representation of the history of the political relationship point of view. Montague uses the lyric form in many of his poems – for between Ireland and England. For Montague’s view of the past is no example, in ‘The Cage’, ‘All Legendary Obstacles’ and ‘A Welcoming idealised vision: he confronts the violence, the harshness of the struggle Party’ – and he has described how, as a young writer, he modified the and the determined endurance that lie within the past. Allied to this form so that he would be able ‘to express himself in a compressed, more emphasis on the relevance of the past is his drive to incorporate elements direct, yet still clearly lyrical form’. from modern writing, known as modernism, into his own work and Northern Irish literature. From his earliest years in America, Montague Nature developed a close bond with writers who were at the forefront of poetic In modernist writing, nature is used as a trigger to stimulate the experimentation, such as Gary Snyder and William Carlos Williams, and imagination. Unlike Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, modernists he embraced and refined some features of modernist writing in his poetry. are not mainly concerned with trying to recreate the wonder of nature in In order to provide a stylistic context for our consideration of Montague’s words, although they do produce extremely vivid descriptions. Instead, work we will briefly discuss four of these features: the artist-centred view; modernist writers place the emphasis on their imaginative responses nature; imagery; and poetic form and language. to nature. For them, it is the way the individual processes what he/she experiences that is important. We can see this approach in Montague’s The artist-centred view poem ‘Windharp’. As we noted previously, Montague developed his Modernists emphasise the importance of the artist in the creative process. great love of nature when he was a child. For a time he felt a connection In poetry, this means that a poet examines experiences from his own life with the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth. However, Montague and the way in which he responds to his world, with a view to uncovering was uneasy with the way that Wordsworth tended to idealise nature. He the universal truths of life that have a relevance to all people. Therefore, developed a much more honest and uncompromising view of the natural by reading a poem, we, as readers, can come to a deeper understanding world, evident in his imagery in ‘Killing the Pig’ and ‘The Trout’.

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Imagery verse, rhythm and short verse lines, sometimes consisting of only a Modernists use imagery to achieve realisation. Realisation means that the few words, allowed the poet to grapple directly and intensely with the poet conveys more than just the sensory realism of an object. Therefore, essential qualities of his topics and themes. Such a method can be it is not enough for them to do as the Romantics did and appeal to the viewed as a kind of verbal paring back to the very core. In fact, one could reader’s five senses. Modernist poets do use sensory-based images, but compare this approach to the way in which text messaging has caused they also seek to create images that allow the reader to be fully ‘there’ the simplification of spelling and grammar so that we can communicate with the object: to be completely aware of it and to understand clearly the essence of what we want to say as briefly as possible. Modernists use the nature of its being. In addition, because modernist poetry frequently similar methods in their work, as they too alter the type of grammar and uses the artist-centred view, the images that are used in this realisation are language used in poetic expression: make punctuation less rigid; do not connected together by a stream of consciousness. This means that the have lines of poetry necessarily beginning with a capital letter; no longer poet tries to retain the immediacy and the energy of the way his thoughts cluster lines into stanzas; and replace obviously poetic words such as ‘oft’ and feelings blend and merge within him, rather like an internalised lava and ‘hence’ with the everyday vocabulary of real life, as in the phrases lamp. This can prove to be both the pleasure and the pain of modernist ‘the Clark Street I.R.T.’ and ‘work, phone, drive’. Montague summed up poetry. Sometimes the connections between the images mesh and we, as his approach to this abandonment of traditional poetic rules in a typically readers, experience an insightful understanding of the realisation that the succinct phrase: ‘I never strain a line to gain a rhyme.’ This does not imply poet seeks to convey. But there are occasions when, try as we might, the that any less work is put into the writing; rather, that the work goes into links remain unclear and all we are left with is a feeling of bewilderment. different, and what could be regarded as more important, areas. Indeed, Although modernists do accept bewilderment as a valid response, in such John Montague’s work with words has an elegance and finesse that can instances it is often helpful to simply allow the images to float around be achieved only with a great deal of thought and effort. inside your head until the link reveals itself. The modernist poets also took a new approach to the appearance of the Poetic form and language printed poem on the page, and Montague urges a more experimental In an effort to give their realisations an undiluted vividness and approach to layout, commenting: accessibility for the reader, the modernists firmly rejected traditional It is only a habit of mind which makes us expect a poetic forms and language. Rhyme was no longer considered essential; poem to march as docile as a herd of sheep between neither was the rigour of the 14-line sonnet. Instead, blank or unrhymed the fences of white margins. 415 new explorations john montague introduction

Poems such as ‘Killing the Pig’ and ‘The Wild Dog Rose’ are good life and work that it is this same determined, uncompromising honesty examples of his desire to break down the traditional methods of poetic that lies at the heart of his poetry. His exploration of love confronts the presentation. reality rather than the dreams of romantic novels. His writing on nature recognises and accepts the brutality of the survival instinct. His view of Praising the burden the past acknowledges the violence and harshness that are part of it and There is a long distance to be travelled between Montague’s discovery the influences, both positive and negative, that it can have on the present. of ways to ease his view of life as a burden and his development of the He has questioned the accepted traditions of Irish poetry and turned to strength to praise that burden; and yet this is precisely the journey that he worldwide literary influences to develop his own style, which would reflect makes in his poetry. contemporary Ireland while at the same time initiating the rebirth of Northern Irish poetry. We have seen how the young Montague’s search for a sense of identity, to find out who he was and where he belonged, was impaired by a John Montague has spent time travelling and living in France, America number of factors: the disruption of his childhood environment caused by and Ireland, teaching in such universities as Berkeley, UCD and UCC. his early move from America to Ireland; his father’s absence; and, perhaps When he retired from teaching in 1988 he continued with his writing the most significant of all, his mother’s rejection of him. Yet through his and now divides his time between France and Ireland. As the following poetry Montague has found a way to come to terms with all these life passage suggests it seems that Montague has finally succeeded in finding issues. He can now welcome the duality of his American/Irish background the key to ease his sense of burden: as a positive influence on his writing in that it provided him with a unique view. Of the many honours that he has received in America, he wrote: … I approach my future with energy of gratitude: what were once obstacles are becoming miracles, … destiny seems to have decided to give me back my and after years of ploughing rough ground I might lost childhood in America … But … I am grateful to be allowed a period of harvesting. For a rearing can have explored Ireland so intimately. be too drastic, despite Kavanagh’s theory about all art being ‘life squeezed through a repression’ … That dolorous discord, that forlorn note, still calls He can even accept the damaged humanity of his parents because of his but something sustained me through those harsh, muscular determination to view them in an honest and uncompromising uncomprehending years. My amphibian position way. Indeed, it is evident from our consideration of John Montague’s between North and South, my natural complicity in 416 new explorations john montague introduction

three cultures, American, Irish and French, with darts determination towards the goal. So it is with Montague. The refinement aside to Mexico, India, Italy or Canada, should seem and elegance of his poetry are underpinned by a muscularity of focus natural enough in the late twentieth century as man and a determined and powerful honesty. Like Montague, the footballer strives to reconcile local allegiances with the absolute is fully aware of the imminent presence of pain, suffering and defeat in necessity of developing a world consciousness to save us from the abyss. Earthed in Ireland, at ease in the what he is doing, and it is this awareness that makes the commitment of world, weave the strands you are given. both breathtaking, their courage admirable, their engagement with life elemental. Montague once said, ‘But though to understand, however This is why Montague’s poetry is relevant and has something to offer dimly, is to begin to forgive, a writer should never forget.’ It is Montague’s to all those who read it. It tells of the recognition of what it is to feel lost unyielding resolve to understand, to forgive and most importantly of all, and alone in a confusing world; the understanding that this is part of all to never forget the ‘human pain’ involved in living that enables him not human existence; and the determination to accept the reality of one’s merely to manage the burden of his life but to welcome it and, finally, to own living, and from this to discover the strength to praise and celebrate celebrate and praise it. the contribution that each one of us can make to the ebb and flow of humanity. He shows us the tangled strands of his life so that we may see our own tangled life strands and, with him, learn how to ‘weave the strands you are given’.

Seamus Heaney once described John Montague as the ‘whin bush of Irish Poetry’. Although I am most reluctant to disagree with Mr Heaney, I have to say that I find the image of a yellow gorse bush a little too fixed, too statically stoic for Montague. While I was writing this piece on Montague one image kept forcing its way into my mind. It was an image that I initially found surprising, yet one that steadily gained a relevance to my view of him. It was the image of a Gaelic footballer managing the burden of the football with finesse and discipline as he powers towards his opponents, forging his way with an uncompromising strength and

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Killing the Pig The parenthesis (the comment that occurs in brackets in lines 5–10) has a disturbingly conversational tone about it. It is as if we are engaged in The appearance of the poem a chat about the weather. But the sense of horror is increased: not only Montague uses the layout of this poem to increase the impact of the is the pig suffering physically, with an iron hook through the roof of its content. By clustering connected lines together, by separating others and mouth, it is also suffering mentally because it is aware of what the future by a skilful use of punctuation, he controls the pace of reading. As a result, holds: ‘they know the hour has come’. The line ‘they dig in their little we are compelled to linger over certain descriptions, as with lines 5–10, trotters’ emphasises the futility of the pig’s resistance and has a kind of while other lines interrupt the pace in an abrupt manner, as in lines 17–18. black comedy about it. We can visualise the large, fat pig pushing hard on four incongruously small trotters. It would be so much easier if the A reading of the poem pig were co-operative, silently unaware, ‘dumb’ or even happily unaware, Montague opens the poem with two words that are filled with such drama ‘singing’. But this pig behaves in neither of these ways. Suddenly, the that they irresistibly attract attention: ‘The noise.’ The full stop that follows ‘noise’ interrupts our ‘cosy’ conversation. Montague launches into a series the two words forces the reader to a sudden stop, just as the real noise of images in lines 13–16 to convey the nature of the ‘noise’, because halts the farmyard activities. ‘The noise’ can penetrate walls and doors, so ‘no single sound could match it’. Each of the four images has been that even before the pig comes into view, it is the ‘noise’ that signals what condensed, reduced to its very essence, in order to vividly suggest the is about to happen. The natural question that occurs in response to these piercing, unsettling nature of the ‘sound’. It has the qualities of a plane two words is, ‘What noise?’ Montague sets out to convey in vivid images taking off, a lady opera singer hitting a high note, an electric saw cutting the source and quality of the noise that has the power to stop the world in and scrap metal being crushed. All of these sounds are difficult to cope its tracks. with because they push the human sense of hearing to its limits. There is also the suggestion that they are noises that occur as a result of great The image of the source of the noise, a pig being dragged to the exertion. In a similar way, the pig’s squeals represent his ‘high pitched final slaughter, is brutally real. Montague does not shy away from the horror effort’ to resist his slaughter. of the pig’s situation, the ‘iron cleek sunk in the roof | of his mouth’. Once again, a full stop forces the reader to pause, preventing a quick gliding Once again, Montague reinforces the ‘Piercing’ quality of the sound. It is over of this unpleasant description. ‘absolute’ in that it is unconditional and unlimited. The pig puts his whole being into making this noise, so that his squeals fill the surroundings.

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Montague has worked very hard on his realisation of this sound in the are suffused with past deaths. Thus, Montague leads us to thoughts of first 18 lines so that we comprehend both sensually and intellectually the the connections between life and death, construction and destruction and qualities of the ‘noise’. Then, without any warning, the noise stops. the present and the past.

With four words, ‘Then a full stop’, he pivots the poem towards a Structure completely different focus. The sound alters to a brief ‘solid thump’ With this poem, Montague takes the lyric form and gives it a leaner, and then the quietly squeamish squelches of knives at work. Unlike the more concentrated structure. The main concern of the lyric poem is to persistent squealing, these noises occur ‘Swiftly’, until the pig is hung up express an individual state of mind, mood or attitude in order to share the silently ‘shining and eviscerated’. The image of the ‘surgeon’s coat’ in poet’s feelings and thoughts with his reader. Montague certainly does this line 27 at first appears clinical and sterile, but there is something deeply here, but his expression is trimmed of any niceties so that it conveys the disturbing about the bloodied, shining, folded whiteness that it conveys. uncompromising reality of the situation. We encounter images such as ‘an Both the pig’s ‘carcass’ and the ‘surgeon’s coat’ are inextricably linked with iron cleek sunk in the roof | of his mouth’. a detached attitude towards a living body. Mickey Boyle slaughters and butchers the pig with an unemotional efficiency. Similarly, the surgeon In addition, Montague moves away from the standardised length for a line must remain independent from his patients’ humanity while he works in of poetry, instead adjusting the length of his line to reinforce meaning. For order to operate as effectively as possible. instance, when he describes the protracted sound of the electric saw he uses a long line – ‘the brain-chilling persistence of an electric saw’ – whereas In the final five lines of the poem, Montague presents us with an when he writes of the sudden death blow inflicted on the pig, the lines are immensely dramatic image that highlights the themes underlying the much shorter – ‘a solid thump of the mallet | flat between the ears’. piece. The ‘child’, representing innocence and life, is given the pig’s bladder and, in an unthinking acceptance of what has happened, happily Language plays with it. Yet surrounding this lively energy are ‘the walls of the It would be a mistake to think that because Montague uses language farmyard’. The walls that shelter the child and echo his happy shouts are in a lean and condensed form, his writing requires less effort. Similarly, the same walls that were penetrated by the pig’s death squeals. These because he uses the language of everyday conversational speech, one walls have been built to house those who are engaged in the ending of might fall into the trap of underestimating the amount of skill required to life. The child in all his youthfulness lives in the moment, while the walls shape his writing. Consider the following lines:

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they dig in their little trotters, Montague uses alliteration and assonance in an equally effective manner. Indeed, his use of such musical poetic devices not only adds to the depth will not go dumb or singing of sound in the poem, but it also increases the reality of the images. to the slaughter. Simply put, alliteration is where two or more words close together begin with the same letter. Thus, the letter s in the following line suggests the The leanness and apparent simplicity of these lines is deceptive, since sound of the knife slicing into the pig’s flesh: each word carries a wealth of suggestion and meaning. Swiftly the knife seeks the throat Similarly, the use of everyday speech challenges the poet to initiate new word combinations and connections, as with the lines: Assonance is where two or more words close together have the same vowel sound. Thus, the a sound in ‘a solid thump of the mallet | flat But the walls of the farmyard between the ears’ conveys the force and action of the mallet hitting the still hold that scream, are built around it. pig’s head. Onomatopoeia is also present in this quotation with the word ‘thump’, as this is a word that is made up of the sound that is created. By Here, Montague succeeds in conveying his theme by harnessing ordinary using ‘thump’, Montague recreates the hollow sound of the mallet hitting words in an extraordinary sequence. the pig’s head. In this way, Montague appeals to the reader’s sense of hearing as well as sight in order to make the images seem more real and Our appreciation of Montague’s use of language becomes even greater vivid. when we notice his ability to incorporate such poetic devices as metaphor, assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia into such a compact form Perhaps it is in his use of rhythm that Montague’s consummate skill of language. His use of the four metaphors in lines 13–16 is particularly becomes particularly evident. As we have seen, he connects poetic line disciplined, in that each makes a contribution to our understanding of the length to line meaning. This connection is reinforced by his mastery of quality of the pig’s squealing. Rather than losing the point in a cascade of rhythm. Montague is able to control line rhythm without disrupting the metaphors, Montague ensures that there is a clear connection between natural rhythm that suggests everyday speech, as can be seen in the the noise and the four metaphors. following quotation:

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Don’t say they are not intelligent: they know the hour has come and they want none of it; they dig in their little trotters

There is an obvious alteration in rhythm between the first three lines and the fourth line. The fourth line has a much quicker rhythm in order to suggest the pig’s determined resistance and the little steps that he is forced to make. This rhythm helps the reader to ‘feel’ the pig’s legs stiffly stretched, locking his trotters into the ground.

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The Trout expectation. The hunter watches while his prey has no knowledge of the hunter’s existence. But the hunter–prey relationship is deeper than A reading of the poem this in that the hunter almost becomes part of the prey, so focused is From the opening lines of this poem, Montague creates a vivid scene his attention. The hunter feels his identity vanish and is left ‘Savouring that involves his reader directly in the experience that is being described. my own absence’. Again, there is an erotic element in this deep-level We are instantly lying on the bank with him, pushing back the rushes and connection, where the hunter feels his ‘Senses expanding’. sliding our hands gently into the river. His ability to convey this sense of immediacy is one of the key aspects that make Montague’s poetry The third stanza plunges us back into the river again, but this time the so accessible. This is largely due to his ability to construct images that focus is on the hunter stealthily moving to capture the trout. The slight appeal to a number of senses. Thus, in the first four lines we see and feel disturbance caused in the water strokes the trout pleasurably. Again, the the solidity of the riverbank, the papery stalks of the rushes and the cool hunter is totally focused on the prey: ‘I could count every stipple’. But this liquidity of the river water. fascination does change the hunter’s objective. He wants to trap the fish, so he is careful to ‘cast no shadow’, since this would alert the fish to his The image of the trout in lines 5–6 is packed with sensory information. presence. Not only can we see him suspended in a ‘sensual dream’, we can also feel the easy pulse of his relaxation. Montague’s joining of the two words This lack of sympathy on the hunter’s part continues into the final ‘tendril’ and ‘light’ creates a vivid image: ‘tendril’ suggests an almost stanza, where we feel the hunter close his hands around the trout, still erotic sensuality in that it calls up pictures of a slender, smooth shoot of unsuspectingly motionless apart from his erotically ‘lightly pulsing gills’. a plant, like a fine shining curl of soft hair, while ‘light’ suggests a feeling Suddenly, Montague quickens the pace of the poem and the moment of weightlessness, a brightness and a warmth. Montague’s realisation of of capture happens with the shock of ‘I gripped’. It is at this point that the trout enables us to become one with him; we too are held in the ‘fluid Montague’s accomplishment as a poet becomes evident. In the final lines sensual dream’. of the poem he completely reverses the balance of power. Up until now, the hunter has been portrayed as powerful and in control, determined to In the second stanza, Montague sweeps us out of the water and catch the fish irrespective of the effect that this will have on the creature. back onto the bank. We are there with the ‘I’, poised above the trout, But in lines 23–4 the hunter understands what his actions mean for the suspended not in water this time, but in a kind of all-powerful, airy trout. The trout’s ‘terror’ is communicated so vividly that the hunter can

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actually taste it. This tasting reference is extremely effective, since the John Montague has frequently used the image of fishing to illustrate his hunter will eat the fish, but it also suggests his gut-wrenching response view of the act of writing poetry. Thus, this poem could also be seen as an to the fish’s panic. The hunter’s unshakeable desire to trap the fish has examination of the creative process. The effort to capture something that unleashed responses that he never expected, not only in the fish, but also is slippery and difficult to hold, the feeling of being lord of creation, the in himself. obsessive fascination and the shock of finally trapping something that is not quite what was expected could all be applied to an artist’s struggle to Themes create. Once again with Montague, apparent simplicity dissolves to reveal a complexity of thinking. Initially ‘The Trout’ seems to be an extremely Structure vivid description of the capture of a fish, a masterly use of words to In appearance ‘The Trout’ seems to have a more traditional format than ‘paint’ a stunning picture. Gradually, however, the compacted density of ‘Killing the Pig’, having four stanzas of six lines with each line beginning Montague’s imagery creates intellectual connections that go far beyond with a capital letter. However, the lines do not end in a definite rhyme the scene at the centre of the poem. scheme, although there are occasional subtle end-rhymes:

The relationship between the hunter and prey is explored. We feel the And tilt them slowly downstream hunter’s obsessive attentiveness and his sense of power. Similarly, we To where he lay, tendril light, In his fluid sensualdream . experience the trout’s oblivious relaxation. Montague conveys the intense intimacy that the two share. Then he alters the poem’s perspective so that Montague makes other adjustments to the traditional format in order to we confront another aspect of this relationship: the hunter’s loss of control create a more effective vehicle for his thoughts. His use of punctuation in the face of the shock of his prey’s terrified response. departs from the usual end-of-line method. Instead he uses punctuation sparingly to control the rhythm of his lines and to reflect the actual There is a sensual aspect to this relationship. Indeed, it is no accident meaning and movement expressed in his writing. The first stanza has that human pairings are often seen in hunter–prey terms. This balance no punctuation until the fifth line, where commas initiate a brief pause of control, desire, fascination and fear are all present in male–female before moving on to a full stop at the end of the sixth line. This absence relationships. Indeed, there is a heightened level of sensuality in the poem, of punctuation serves to reinforce the smooth continuity of movement with a physical intensity in his use of the senses of sight, touch and taste in the parting of the rushes, the hands sliding into the river and moving that is suggestive of eroticism. 423 new explorations john montague the trout

underwater. The commas cause the reader to pause over the brilliant Montague controls the rhythm of this piece with the skill of a composer. pairing of the words ‘tendril light’ so that the image is absorbed and our In lines 13–14, for example, he uses assonance and rhythm to convey the sense of the trout is heightened. If we compare this first stanza with the hunter’s actions: final one of the poem, the differing effects of his use of punctuation become evident. As the curve of my hands Swung under his body In the fourth stanza the increased punctuation serves to reflect the breathless mixture of excitement and fear, the sudden movements and Similarly, his use of assonance and l sounds in ‘Under the lightly pulsing the shock of the moment. gills’ initiates a rhythm that reflects the fish’s movements.

Language In his use of such poetic devices, Montague is continuing the work that Montague skilfully uses assonance, alliteration and rhythm to cause his was begun in early Irish poetry and rediscovered by Austin Clarke. His reader to feel like a part of the experience. Assonance, where two or more appreciation of the musicality of language and his ability to marry sound, words close together have the same vowel sound, appears in the very first rhythm and meaning enable Montague to realise scenes and experiences line: ‘Flat on the bank I parted’. This repetition of the a sound conveys vibrating with life and reality. the sensation of lying stretched at full length, totally grounded, on the riverbank. Alliteration, where two or more words close together begin with the same letter, is used in an equally effective way, as in the final line of the poem: ‘Taste his terror on my hands’. The t sounds make the reader move his tongue as if to spit out something unpleasant, thereby reinforcing the sensory appreciation of the moment.

In addition, Montague’s use of s and l sounds is particularly successful, as with the papery, dry whispering of the ‘Rushes to ease my hands’ and the smooth liquidity of ‘And tilt them slowly downstream’.

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The Locket tombstones or memorials, as if to indicate that Montague, despite all his adult achievements, feels that this will always sum up his role in life. Finally, A reading of the poem it acts as a kind of emotional distancing mechanism because, unlike the The first two lines of this poem have a nursery rhyme or songlike quality rest of the poem, it highlights the fact that these are not Montague’s about them: words; neither are they his feelings.

Sing a last song There is a definite attempt to create an emotional distance between for the lady who has gone Montague and what he is describing, as with his use of the word ‘cue’, which conjures up images of actors and plays, and also in the apparently The sing-song rhythm of these lines reinforces this impression. throwaway remark ‘my first claim to fame’. Montague seems to be trying Interestingly, Montague has commented that one particular folk song, very hard to minimise his reaction to his mother’s comment. Nevertheless, ‘The Tri-coloured Ribbon’, was in his head when he wrote this poem. despite all his effort, it is his ‘pain’ that comes through. However, it quickly becomes clear that this is no nursery rhyme, no light- hearted ballad. Rather than being a queen or a maid, this lady is in fact a This brittle veneer of glibness continues into the second stanza and hangs much darker character, a ‘fertile source of guilt and pain’. The following on the word ‘Naturally’, as Montague tries desperately to accept and lines are filled with palpable distress and, at the same time, a deliberate justify his mother’s treatment of him as natural. His mother’s longing for attempt to be rather dismissive about that distress: a girl is presented as a valid reason for her behaviour. Yet once again the veneer cracks and we see the damage that lies beneath it. The image of The worst birth in the annals of Brooklyn, the ‘infant curls of brown’ is very moving. It conveys the vulnerability of that was my cue to come on, the baby and is suggestive of the young Montague’s efforts to win his my first claim to fame. mother’s affection by being an attractive baby with a head of brown hair. But it was all in vain, for he had made the ‘double blunder’: the lumbering The line in italics is the phrase that Montague’s mother frequently heaviness of these two words emphasises the weight of the ‘awful sins’ repeated in connection with his birth. His use of italics may be simply to that this small, attractive, vulnerable baby had committed by ‘coming indicate that this is indeed a quotation. But the change in the typeface out, both the wrong sex, | and the wrong way around’. These, then, were has additional effects: it serves to emphasise the phrase in that it stands the ‘sins’ that Montague had committed in his mother’s eyes: he was not out visually from the rest of the poem; it also calls up inscriptions on 425 new explorations john montague the locket

a girl and he was a breech birth, that is, he came bottom first rather than apparent and not real at all. Montague’s reaction to his mother’s ‘giving head first. Clearly the baby had absolutely no control over either of these away’ of him is deeply moving. Rather than withdrawing entirely from her situations, and yet he feels ‘guilt’ and justifies his mother’s reaction with and meeting her rejection with one of his own, he goes to great lengths the phrase ‘Not readily forgiven’. to try to establish some form of relationship with her. He cycles the eight miles to see his mother, knowing full well that if he did not she ‘might Just as the brittle veneer of glibness hung on the word ‘Naturally’ in the never have known’ him. Once there, he cannot expect to be treated as a second stanza, it pivots on the word ‘So’ in the third stanza. ‘So’ suggests son, to be fussed over, asked all those ‘irritating’ questions that mothers a logical, cause-and-effect relationship, that all his previous explanations ask their children because they love them dearly. Instead, Montague has make his mother’s rejection of him perfectly understandable: ‘So you to ‘court’ his mother ‘like a young man’. never nursed me’. It is a simple line, but the heartbreak is clear in his change of address from ‘she’ to ‘you’ for his mother. Montague sweeps His use of the word ‘court’ links back to his use of the word ‘lady’ in line 2 on to another of his mother’s phrases, notably not in italics this time: of the poem: these words are suggestive of courtly love, that is, the type ‘ “when poverty comes through the door | love flies up the chimney” ’. of love that features in the stories about King Arthur and his Knights of Thus, we encounter another excuse offered as a justification for her the Round Table. Films such as A Knight’s Tale and First Knight give some behaviour: being poor had destroyed her capacity to love. This may well idea about the way that courtly love worked. The knight was expected have a degree of truth about it, but it seems immensely sad that the two to woo, or try to win, the lady by giving her gifts or performing heroic quotations that Montague remembers from his mother are so negative. deeds. All his efforts were designed to prove his loyalty and devotion to her. Frequently the knight went through all of this without any real hope In the fourth stanza, Montague maintains this cause-and-effect of the lady returning his devotion. Clearly, this idea of love tells us a great connection by beginning it with the word ‘Then’. However, this poem is deal about Montague’s approach to his mother. He ‘teasingly’ unties her not outlining a scientific procedure, it is the description of a profoundly apron and persuades her to sit ‘drinking by the fire’. But the focus of their affecting series of actions that culminate in the horribly simple line, ‘Then conversation is very definitely on the mother and the ‘wild, young days’ you gave me away’. We can see that with the first lines of the second, of her youth. Montague’s genuine sympathy for his mother is revealed in third and fourth stanzas Montague works hard to clothe an emotionally his recognition of the brief time that she lived a happy and carefree life. charged situation in a quasi-logical sequence. But despite his efforts it Her life quickly deteriorated, until she ‘landed up mournful and chill’. His is evident that, try as he might, Montague knows that this logic is only sympathy is particularly evident in his use of the word ‘wound’ in line 30,

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where he deliberately plays upon the two ways in which this word can be can Montague call this a ‘mysterious blessing’? Surely it is no more than read: wound as in ‘to wind’, meaning ‘to wrap’, and wound as in ‘to injure’. the ultimate lost opportunity, the final rejection out of so many? Yet if we By doing this, Montague increases the layers of suggestion in his writing in relate the locket back to the courtly love imagery that he used previously, order to convey the depth of his mother’s emotional injuries. his attitude begins to make sense. His mother wore the locket ‘always’, in the secret gesture of a woman who wants to cherish and to protect, The sixth stanza captures the moment of his departure to cycle the to hold close and to nurture. For him, it represents the unspoken words eight miles back to his home with his aunts. It is a dramatic snapshot of love that the lady gives to her knight when she presents him with her that vibrates with lost opportunities and damaged souls. Despite all colours before he enters the tournament. It holds the promise that the Montague’s wooing there is no sense of positive warmth from his mother. love that Montague offered was, finally and wondrously, returned. While Instead, she can only signal her emotional response in her customary the lady of the courtly love stories is prevented by the customs of the negative terms: ‘ “Don’t come again,” you say, roughly, | “I start to get time from openly responding, Montague’s mother is trapped within the fond of you, John” ’. Once again, the young Montague responds with ‘cocoon of pain’ that life has wound around her. Thus, for Montague, the a generosity of spirit to yet another rejection, understanding that these locket is indeed a ‘mysterious blessing’. words are simply ‘the harsh logic of a forlorn woman’. At this point in the poem, the reader could be forgiven for believing that Montague Depiction of character has reached the heart of what he is trying to reconcile within himself. Montague has the remarkable ability to convey character vividly by using He has been brutally honest in confronting the nature of his relationship a series of condensed phrases that highlight key personality traits. In this with his mother and seems to have arrived at a point where he can poem, he does not give us any physical description of his mother. The make allowances for her. But Montague’s writing has a muscularity most we learn about her appearance is that she used an apron, she was about it that prevents him from avoiding the true reality of a situation. pretty when she was young and she wore a locket. What Montague does He cannot complete the poem until he has expressed all the aspects of instead is to concentrate on her words and actions. He tells us some of her this problematic relationship. Thus, in the final stanza he tells us how, comments: after his mother’s death, he discovered that she wore ‘an oval locket’. Heartbreakingly, enclosed within this locket, like a precious moment frozen in time, was ‘an old picture’, not of her husband or a lost love from her carefree youth, but ‘of a child in Brooklyn’, Montague himself. So how

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The worst birth in the annals of Brooklyn Themes ‘when poverty comes through the door On a first reading the theme of this poem seems to be Montague’s love flies up the chimney’ relationship with his mother. He tells of her rejection of him, his attempts to win her round, her inability to respond in any major way, and then her ‘Don’t come again,’ … ‘I start to get fond of you, John, death. Finally, after her death, he discovers the locket and he takes this to and then you are up and gone’ be a sign that she did indeed love him.

All these words carry a terrible feeling of negativity. They express the Although this is the main theme of the poem, there are other themes lost hopes of a woman who was deeply wounded by a life that she found that lie alongside it. Montague’s writing often begins with his individual disappointing and painful; who was afraid to unwind her protective but experience of life and then expands outwards to embrace wider issues. imprisoning ‘cocoon of pain’ because she expected more wounds and Thus, a second theme in this poem is that of life having the potential to was ‘resigned to being alone’. Her actions largely reinforce this ‘harsh be a negative force. It can destroy human hopes and batter human hearts logic’. She longs for a girl baby and then cannot accept the baby boy who into a condition in which love and positive human feelings cannot be arrives after a difficult birth. Nowadays such behaviour would be seen as expressed openly. Through this poem, Montague finds it possible to face being indicative of post-natal depression, but in the 1920s this condition and acknowledge this possibility. was unknown. She avoids the emotional and physical contact of nursing her baby. Finally, she gives him away. Then, in later years, when he is no Allied to this is the third theme – that of the dehumanising and brutalising longer a baby and cycles some eight miles to see her, she has to be teased effects that have arisen out of the political situation in Northern and persuaded to spend some time with him. There is the suggestion Ireland. His parents were forced by this turmoil to move to poverty that in allowing Montague to untie her apron she is permitting him some and disappointment in America, which led to the break-up of the small level of closeness and intimacy. But in the final analysis she is utterly Montague family. Thus, the dysfunctional nature of his family reflects the unable to allow him or herself to untie her ‘cocoon of pain’. She speaks dysfunctional nature of the society of Northern Ireland. to him ‘roughly’ and all her behaviour is indicative of ‘a forlorn woman’. The only positive action is, of course, her constant wearing of the locket. Language Her tragedy was that the ‘cocoon of pain’ would not allow her to wear her Montague’s management of rhythm and tone is extremely successful locket openly, nor to display what was in her poor, battered heart. in ‘The Locket’. As we have seen, Montague had the song ‘The Tri-

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coloured Ribbon’ in mind when he wrote this poem and the opening words that she speaks so that they come out in a staccato, broken-up stanza has a strong sing-song rhythm and tone. Try reading the manner. There is a roughness about their tone that hints at a woman who highlighted words louder than the others in the following two lines: has become tougher because of her hard life: a woman who is afraid to be gentle or loving because she has been deeply hurt. This is in marked Sing a last song, contrast to the rhythm and tone of the final stanza. Here, Montague For the lady who has gone discovers that his mother always wore his picture in a locket. The rhythm is much slower than that of his mother’s speech. Montague achieves This not only produces the sing-song effect, it also sounds rather like a this effect by using commas to introduce pauses in the way that we read church bell tolling at the funeral of Montague’s mother. the lines. Similarly, the tone is much gentler. The overall impression is of Montague speaking quietly because he is amazed by what he has Rhythm and tone are part of everyday speech. We each have a particular discovered and because he realises that his mother was not as tough as rhythm in our way of talking: some may have a fast rhythm while others her speech had suggested. are much slower. Our tone changes to match the feeling behind our words. When Montague quotes his mother’s comments, he does not try to shape them into a poetic form; instead, he leaves them with her own distinct rhythm and tone:

‘when poverty comes through the door love flies up the chimney’,

‘Don’t come again,’ … ‘I start to get fond of you, John, And then you are up and gone’

If we listen to these words, we can hear something of what Montague’s mother was really like, just as we heard the bell tolling in the first two lines of the poem. The rhythm of these lines is neither as regular nor as smooth as in lines 1–2. It is as if his mother’s unhappiness is strangling the 429 new explorations john montague the cage

The Cage Again, it is Montague’s use of conversational language that draws us into the poem. It is so easy to read, yet the emotion conveyed by the words A reading of the poem makes it a very moving piece. This is not only because the man himself ‘My father, the least happy | man I have known.’ The opening sentence led such an unfulfilling life, but also because of the way in which his son, of this poem is a perfect example of Montague’s ability to condense Montague, was affected. We read of a man drained of colour by his years a lot of information into a few significant words fastened together in a working underground. There is the suggestion that the physical paleness taut structure. By using simple, straightforward words, Montague makes of his face represents the sucking out of his life force. He is only a white, the poem accessible and easily understood. But it is the way that he half-alive creature, rather like the victim of a vampire. The narrowness and connects the words together that lifts them into the realm of poetry. the pointlessness of his life are conveyed in the following three lines with We meet the first two words ‘My father’ followed by a comma. We tightly packed phrases like ‘the lost years’ and ‘listening to a subway’. What have seen previously how Montague uses punctuation to control the a way to live! rhythm of the poem and the impact of his words. Here, his use of the comma forces the reader to pause, to linger on the idea of Montague’s The tone of the second stanza lifts slightly with Montague’s use of the father. It is as if we are in conversation with Montague and he has said word ‘But’ and the rest of the opening line: ‘But a traditional Irishman’. ‘My father’, then stopped. We have to wait for him to go on, to choose There seems to be some comfort here. The implication of the ‘traditional the words that will sum up this man in an appropriate manner. The wait Irishman’ is of a cheerful, social individual who likes a drink. As we read is worthwhile, because Montague comes out with a character summary down through the second and third stanzas, it seems that Montague’s that is stunningly descriptive despite its brevity: ‘the least happy | man I father fits this preconception. He drinks ‘neat whiskey’ and smiles at his have known’. The phrase says it all, painting a picture of a man who lived neighbours. However, certain words and phrases used in these stanzas life largely in the absence of joy and humour, whose main impact on his suggest that all is not quite as positive as it seems. Montague’s father does son’s existence was that he was ‘the least happy | man’ that Montague not simply leave his work; he is ‘released’. This use of the word ‘released’ is had ever encountered. Interestingly, unlike Montague’s poem on his brilliant in that it suggests his father’s feelings of being trapped, of being relationship with his mother, ‘The Locket’, where he constantly refers to imprisoned by the metal mesh in his ticket box. Like an animal in a zoo he himself using words such as ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’, there is no further use of escapes from his cage, but sadly, he still carries the effects of his captivity ‘I’ until the final stanza of ‘The Cage’. From this point, the poem takes with him into freedom. His drinking is not simply for social purposes; it flight into a series of vivid images that put flesh on this ‘least happy | man’. is driven by the determination to forget, to blot out the memories. The

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terrible and tragic aim of his drinking is described by Montague’s pairing later accidentally killed Odysseus. Montague had just won a scholarship of the two words ‘brute oblivion’. There is an immense feeling of waste in to the US and was soon to leave Ireland, so his comparison calls up the the fact that this reasonless, unthinking forgetfulness is the only condition idea of the father returning as the son leaves. There is also the suggestion that Montague’s father ‘felt at home in’. that the two men, like Odysseus and Telemachus, are somehow destined by fate never to live in the same place. In addition, just as Montague Against this background, the father’s ‘march down the street’ has the uses images from courtly love in ‘The Locket’ to provide an emotional brittle quality of pretence about it. Before going out this man has ‘picked distance from the situation, here he employs images from ancient Greek himself | up’, suggesting not only that he had physically fallen down mythology for the same reason. in a drunken condition, but also that he had been ‘down’ mentally and emotionally. The father’s feelings of a rather pathetic pride are conveyed Yet in the final stanza we see that, once again, Montague’s unyielding by the fact that his neighbourhood is ‘all-white’. It is clearly one of the few determination to confront reality has enabled him to develop a feeling things that he can hang on to: he and his neighbourhood are better than of sympathy for and acceptance of his father as a human being. This those that are non-white. acceptance gives Montague the strength to remember his father as he really was: a vulnerable, ageing man with a ‘bald head’ caged ‘behind | the When Montague’s father finally returned to Tyrone in 1952, the poet was bars of the small booth’ where he worked. His father had indeed been in his twenties. The fourth and fifth stanzas describe a walk that the pair scarred by injuries that he had received in a car accident. But more than took. Montague’s father is at home in this place that he has not seen for that, Montague clearly believes that he was a man whose life had been over 20 years; he remembers the route: it is ‘as though | he had never irreparably damaged, lastingly marked, by forces outside his control: the left’. Sadly, his relationship with his son is not so comfortable. There is no political situation in Northern Ireland. It was this ‘car crash’ with destiny sense of companionship between the two men. In fact, Montague likens that made his father into a ‘ghostly’ shadow of himself and ‘the least them to the ancient Greek father and son, Odysseus and Telemachus. happy | man’ that Montague had ever known. Odysseus left his wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus, to fight in the Trojan War. After Troy had fallen, Odysseus had many adventures Themes and did not return home for 20 years, by which time Telemachus was a Once again, we see Montague beginning with the details of his own young man. When he got home Odysseus sent Telemachus into exile particular life and then expanding into wider issues. The main theme of because he had been warned that he should not trust his son. this poem is the nature of Montague’s relationship with his father. Unfortunately, the warning referred to another of Odysseus’ sons, who 431 new explorations john montague the cage

Montague’s second theme deals with the negative effects of the political A sense of place situation in Northern Ireland. His father, and his relationship with his We have already seen how Montague is able to create vivid images father, are representative of the damage that was caused by the Northern that not only make us see what he is describing, but also enable us to difficulties. His father, like so many other Irishmen, was forced to leave his experience them emotionally and intellectually. This ability is particularly homeland. These men lived lives that that did not make them happy; they evident in ‘The Cage’, with his contrasting descriptions of Brooklyn and lived lives filled with ‘lost years’. They were frequently separated from their Garvaghey. Because Montague uses lean and condensed language, his families for long periods of time and this meant that the effects of the descriptions create a strong impression. First we encounter Brooklyn’s Northern political situation were carried through to the next generation. underground world, where the darkness and artificial lights make the workers pale and the subway trains cause the ground to ‘shudder’. Then Depiction of character we come up into the light of the ‘all-white’ neighbourhood, filled with Montague makes his father just as real as his mother in ‘The Locket’, but the sound of the bells of ‘St. Teresa’s church’. Montague appeals to the he uses different methods to describe him. He gave very few physical senses of sight and hearing to make us ‘feel’ that Brooklyn is a hard world details about his mother, but he tells us quite a lot about how his father filled with noises, metal and people. looked: a pale, bald man who had a scar on his forehead. Also, Montague directly quoted a number of the things that his mother used to say but we Garvaghey, on the other hand, is a much softer, calmer place. There are never hear his father’s voice at all. He seems to be a man who was beaten fields edged with ‘hawthorn on the summer | hedges’ and ‘a bend of the into silence by the life that he led. road | which still sheltered | primroses’. Montague’s father can ‘walk’ rather than ‘march’ here and he does not have to pretend to smile any more. However, Montague does use actions to highlight key personality traits. Again, Montague appeals to the sense of sight; we can ‘see’ the green His father spent years trapped underground ‘listening to a subway’. He fields, the white hawthorn blossom and the yellow of the primroses. As for ‘drank neat whiskey’ and then ‘picked himself | up’. Then he would ‘march sounds, in marked contrast to Brooklyn, there are none: just the quiet of down the street | extending his smile’. His life in Brooklyn was clearly very the summer countryside. unhappy, but he disguised his unhappiness in front of his neighbours. Once back in Ireland, he seemed to be much more at home and more relaxed. He could walk ‘across fields’. It was as if ‘he had never left’.

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Windharp of the wind: the way in which ‘that restless whispering’ of the wind acts on the whole countryside of Ireland and produces a variety of sounds. His The appearance of the poem stream of consciousness then goes on to consider some of these sounds As with ‘Killing the Pig’, it is worthwhile taking a moment to consider and Montague portrays them in a series of images: ‘seeping out of | low the way that this poem appears on the page. It is essentially one long bushes and grass’, ‘wrinkling bog pools’ and ‘scraping tree branches’. sentence that is broken up into lines of three or four words. The result is that the shape of the poem reflects the continuous movement of So far, the connections that he makes are pretty understandable. the wind, rising and falling in gusts. In this way, Montague uses the However, Montague begins to move his realisation of the wind onto a appearance of ‘Windharp’ to contribute to his realisation of the wind. deeper, more personal level with the images that he calls up from line 9: ‘light hunting cloud, | sound hounding sight’. Here, he seems to be using A reading of the poem images from fox-hunting to illustrate an aspect of the wind. Montague Montague’s writing in this poem is marvellously taut and condensed. may be trying to convey the rough-and-tumble connection between light Using lines of only three or four words, he evokes the many aspects of and cloud, sound and sight that exist when the wind blows across the Irish the wind so that we do not merely see, hear and feel the wind, but we landscape. (Remember, the images that the poet uses may have only also understand the essence of its force and energy. ‘Windharp’ is like a partial and personally based correspondence with the original object, an Impressionist painting in that it does not seek to represent the wind and this interpretation need not necessarily be the correct one.) Again, in a factual sense; instead, Montague drives his writing onwards by his he pushes his realisation to even greater personal depths with the next use of a stream of consciousness approach to the images he creates. As image, of ‘a hand ceaselessly | combing and stroking | the landscape’. we considered previously, modernist writers try to reproduce the way in which thoughts develop and connect in a continuous internal processing Montague’s linking of the wind to a hand may seem rather puzzling at of life’s experiences. This approach enables Montague to create his own first, but if we allow the two images to float around inside our heads personal realisation of the wind. In order to communicate this realisation, for a while, the connection begins to reveal itself. The wind acts like a Montague presents a series of analogous images that, within his mind, hand on the landscape in that it suggests a close and intimate form of have a similarity to aspects of the wind that he considers essential. Thus, physical contact. The wind moves on the countryside like a hand involved if we look at the first line of the poem, ‘The sounds of Ireland’, it is clear in combing and stroking, but instead of hair, the hand combs through that Montague is highlighting what he considers to be an essential aspect trees and fields of grain and it strokes grass on the hillsides or water in a

433 new explorations john montague windharp

mountain lake. Again, coming from this combing and stroking imagery, would not exist without the intimate interaction between land and moving the stream of consciousness moves on to the final analogous image: that air. This beauty is not only the concrete beauty of a world in movement, of a mountain pony. With this image, Montague seems to be suggesting it is also the beauty found in the creativity present in this intimate that the wind has a positive effect on the countryside in that it makes the interaction. Thus, a second, less obvious theme is that of Montague landscape gleam just like the glossy coat of the pony. This could mean considering the creative impulse and the part that the Irish environment that the rippling trees, the waving grass and the water all sparkle with plays in this creative impulse. light. Equally, he could be suggesting that the movement caused by the wind brings the countryside to life. It seems to be filled with an energy Language that is absent when the wind is not blowing. There is the feeling that the As noted previously, during his college days Montague became involved landscape of Ireland, like the pony, willingly submits to the wind’s actions in the Dublin poetry scene. He met the poet Austin Clarke and was because they both realise that these actions will be pleasurable and will immensely impressed with Clarke’s efforts to incorporate many of the old make them better than they would have been had the ‘combing and Gaelic poetic devices into his poetry. Old Irish poetry was performed out stroking’ not taken place. loud by bards and so it was extremely musical to the ear. This musicality came from the use of such devices as internal rhyme, assonance and Themes rhythm. In ‘Windharp’, we can see Montague carefully utilising these The most obvious theme in this poem could simply be the realisation of effects to add to his realisation of the wind. For example, he avoids the wind in a vivid and emotionally affective word-painting. However, using end-of-line rhyme in favour of the much more subtle approach of there is another theme interwoven with the condensed, vibrant images internal rhyme: ‘sound hounding sight’. The unexpected appearance of that Montague creates. If we look at these images, we can see that they this internal rhyme contributes to the words rolling easily off the tongue, are all centred on the idea that the wind possesses an energy that has a because the human brain likes and finds pleasure in rhyming words. Of significant and positive effect on the Irish countryside. If we relate this course, there is also assonance here, in that both words have the same concept back to the title of the poem, ‘Windharp’, there is the implication vowel sound of ou. The echoing effect created by Montague’s use of that Montague sees Ireland’s countryside as being like a windharp: just these devices is suggestive of repeated gusts of wind blowing over the as the wind blowing across the windharp’s strings creates beautiful notes, Irish landscape. notes that would not exist without the intimate interaction between the two, so the wind acting on the landscape of Ireland creates a beauty that

434 new explorations john montague windharp

Similarly, Montague handles the rhythm of this poem very skilfully indeed. The rhythm is grounded in the fact that the poem is one long sentence interspersed with commas. This creates a continuous, flowing rhythm that captures the wind’s movement. Within this rhythm Montague introduces other brief rhythms that reflect the imagery, as in ‘that restless whispering’, where the s sounds and the build-up of syllables from one (‘that’) to three (‘whispering’) create a feeling of air moving.

This elegance in Montague’s writing is particularly evident if we make a comparison between the different rhythms used in two lines from this poem:

wrinkling bog pools,

combing and stroking

Both lines consist of only three words, yet the first line has a jagged, edgy rhythm conjuring up ripples on water, while the second line has a soothing rhythm created by the balancing of the two-syllable words, ‘combing’ and ‘stroking’, on either side of the monosyllabic ‘and’.

435 new explorations john monatague all legendary obstacles

All Legendary Obstacles they were based in different colleges in America. Montague’s anxiety and uncertainty, evident in his restless ‘shifting | … from station to bar’, A reading of the poem contrast with the assurance and the certainty of the trains that ‘sail | By’, This poem has a marvellously cinematic opening. It is as though we are unhindered by the heavy rain. Finally, in the third stanza, the train that he sitting in front of a wide cinema screen, watching a camera pan from the has been waiting for ‘All day’ arrives at the station. The time is significant: east coast to the west coast of America. Once again Montague uses his ‘midnight’ conjures up images of intense darkness, a time when the condensed style of writing to create a real sense of place. We can ‘see’ supernatural world is very close to our everyday world. We can imagine the ‘long imaginary plain’ spread out before our eyes, we ‘climb over’ the his girlfriend’s face ‘pale | Above the negro porter’s lamp’, glowing in hugely ‘monstrous ruck of mountains’ and we ‘feel’ the drenching coldness a ghostly manner against the wet blackness of the night. Montague’s of ‘The hissing drift of winter rain’. reaction to her arrival is unexpected. He clearly loves this woman deeply, as he has waited a whole day for her arrival; however, he is ‘too blind with However, in spite of the ‘reality’ of this scene, there are indications in the rain | And doubt to speak’. He can only stretch forward ‘Until our chilled first stanza that the poem is not simply about two lovers separated by bad hands met’. The word ‘chilled’ implies more than simply the coldness weather and a difficult and arduous train journey. Montague inserts two of a wet winter’s night. It conveys a sense of emotional tension and words, ‘legendary’ and ‘imaginary’, into his vivid descriptions that hint at apprehensiveness. Montague feels ‘doubt’ about the situation. But it is the complexity underlying this poem. The word ‘legendary’ establishes not only his hands that are ‘chilled’. The implication is that his girlfriend’s a connection between the poem and the world of myths and legends, hands are also cold – perhaps from exhaustion as a result of her arduous where gods and heroes encounter challenges and ‘monstrous’ ordeals journey or perhaps because she too feels a certain anxiety. The image that are far greater than those of the ordinary, human world. Similarly, of Montague reaching up to clasp her hands is suggestive of him trying ‘imaginary’ evokes a world that is not restricted by what we know and to draw his girlfriend from one world into another. They are both in an expect – a world where anything can happen, and usually does. incapacitated state: he is ‘blind’ and cannot speak, while she is ‘pale’. The meeting of their ‘chilled hands’ suggests the triumph of their hope and In the second stanza Montague moves the focus of the poem down onto their faith in each other because they have bridged the distance that an individual figure: himself. He has spoken about the circumstances in separated them, represented by the gap between the platform and the his life that led to this experience: he was waiting to meet his girlfriend, train. who was later to become his first wife, after a period of separation when

436 new explorations john montague all legendary obstacles

In the final stanza the focus moves onto his girlfriend, with Montague It’s a complicated poem: there’s a lot of water in it, using ‘You’ rather than ‘I’. We learn that she has also had a difficult time, railway trains in it (I lived close to the old ‘El’ when but it is clear that Montague does not know or understand all that she has I was a boy in Brooklyn). But I don’t really want to explicate it, except that the Orpheus myth comes in … endured. This highlights the fact that no matter how much the two love each other, they will always be two separate people and this unchangeable If we take each of the points that Montague mentions, we may well arrive individuality places a limitation on their love. Her difficulties are summed at some better understanding of this ‘complicated poem’. However, as up in the lines ‘You had been travelling for days | With an old lady’. As we was discussed previously, we do need to remember that the connections have seen in ‘The Locket’ and ‘The Cage’, Montague is adept at using established by the imagery of modernist poetry can be quite subtle, since behaviour to reveal character. Here, the ‘old lady’ seems to be rather they arise out of the poet’s personal stream of consciousness. correct and proper in her attitude: like a true lady, she wears gloves and she rubs a ‘neat circle’ on the window. She watches the two lovers ‘Move There is indeed ‘a lot of water’ in ‘All Legendary Obstacles’. From the into the wet darkness’. There is some feeling of optimism about the lovers’ very first stanza the poem vibrates with watery images and echoes to relationship when we read that they are ‘Kissing’, indicating that they are the sounds of water in lines 4–6, 10–12, 15–16 and 22–4. The connection gradually becoming more intimate, that the degree of separation between between love and all this water is not immediately clear. In the first them is slowly being reduced. However, it is not a totally optimistic ending stanza the ‘hissing drift of winter rain’ could be seen as one of the because the final words of the poem tell us that the two lovers are ‘still ‘legendary obstacles’ that the lovers have to overcome before they can unable to speak’. be reunited. Yet if we look at the way that this rain causes the huge rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, to flood, there is the suggestion Theme of ‘Flooding’ in an emotional sense. Rather like early Hollywood films It is evident that Montague is writing about the theme of love in this used crashing waves to imply intensity and intimacy, the rain-filled rivers poem. However, this is no sugary-sweet consideration of a romantic, rushing through the land could be seen as images of the way in which love idealised love. With the same uncompromising honesty that he used to sweeps through the human heart and soul. Thus, as he waits at the station, view his mother and his father, Montague describes the true reality of Montague’s anxious anticipation and his awareness of all that is making his love. And again he clothes this strength of vision with an elegance the lovers’ reunion difficult are underpinned by the overwhelming nature of expression and a finesse of language. In an interview with Dennis of his love for this woman. O’Driscoll, Montague said of this poem:

437 new explorations john montague all legendary obstacles

The image of the ‘water dripping | From great flanged wheels’ has going. In this moment they are happy to focus purely on each other and something of tears being shed about it. The trains that ‘sail | By’ represent on their love, but there is the implication that there could be something disappointment for Montague because they are not the trains that will lurking out there in the ‘wet darkness’ that might threaten their love. deliver his girlfriend to him. We have all waited to meet someone, so we can easily imagine the way in which Montague’s excitement increases with The connection between the images of the trains and the poem’s the sight of each train coming towards the station and then the crashing theme of love is somewhat less ambiguous. On the one hand the trains distress when each train continues by. The ‘great flanged wheels’ shed the symbolise hope and expectation, because it will be a train that will help water as carelessly as they crush Montague’s hopes and expectations of the two lovers to overcome the ‘legendary obstacles’ that face their love. love. Montague knows that his lover will step down to him from a train, so each train is greeted with a surge of his love. However, the trains that do not ‘I was too blind with rain’ is a clearer representation of the connection stop cause him to feel an intense disappointment. In this way they too between water and love. Montague is in such a heightened emotional become another obstacle that has to be overcome. state by the time his girlfriend finally arrives that he is simply unable to function in the normal, expected way: he cannot see properly and he Finally, we must consider the poem’s framework of the classical myth of cannot speak. He is almost paralysed by the power of his feelings. Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was able to sing so sweetly that savage beasts would follow him, the trees would bow down to him and wild In the final stanza we see the two lovers move away ‘into the wet men would become gentle. He fell in love with Eurydice and they were darkness’. There is a positive indication in this movement, in that the married. But one day, while she was trying to escape from the advances water was one of the ‘legendary obstacles’ facing the lovers and they of an unwelcome lover, Eurydice stepped on a snake that bit her and she have now triumphed over it by being reunited. There is a feeling of the died. Orpheus went down into the Underworld to try to recover his wife. ‘wet darkness’ embracing the two, implying that they willingly surrender He played such beautiful music on his lyre and was so brave that Hades, themselves to their love. It also hides them from the watching old lady, the god of the dead, agreed to release Eurydice back up to the world of who seems to be waiting for some act of failure. Thus, it allows their loving the living. Hades set one condition, however: he told Orpheus that he intimacy to be shared in privacy. But there is also a sense of entering must walk towards daylight without looking back to make sure that his into an unknown state. The ‘darkness’ prevents others from watching the wife was following him. Orpheus managed to do this until he had almost two lovers, but equally it prevents the lovers from seeing where they are reached daylight, but then he looked back at Eurydice. Instantly, Eurydice

438 new explorations john montague all legendary obstacles

died again and was taken back down to the Underworld, while Orpheus that this perfection will not last. This is an ambiguity that we probably all returned to the land of the living alone. share about love.

Why, then, should Montague feel that this mythical story was relevant to Interestingly, it seems that there are similarities between the focus of his situation: waiting for his girlfriend at a train station during bad weather? this poem and U2’s song ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. There is the connection that both Montague and Orpheus are creative Perhaps you might like to listen to it and decide for yourself. individuals. There is also the similarity that both couples are in love and separated by formidable obstacles. But Montague may have chosen to locate his poem within the framework of the Orpheus and Eurydice story because it is Orpheus who fails Eurydice, and the incident that leads to their love being put under threat – the snake bite – is caused by a force outside of the lovers’ control. Montague seems to feel anxious about his ability to truly love his girlfriend without letting her down: ‘I was too blind with rain | And doubt to speak’. There is also the suggestion that he is anxious that something outside of their control may happen that will lead to the destruction of their perfect love: ‘Move into the wet darkness | Kissing, still unable to speak’.

What does Montague communicate about the theme of love in this poem? First, he recognises that being in love is not an easy experience. Frequently there are obstacles to that love that have to be overcome and there are forces that may seek to damage or destroy that love. Second, he understands that love has no guarantees about it, no matter how much we might wish that it had. He is anxious that he will somehow fail his girlfriend and the love that they share. On the one hand he is enthralled by and celebrates the perfect love that they share, but on the other hand he fears

439 new explorations john montague the same gesture

The Same Gesture Montague maintains this feeling of orderliness in the following six lines, where he describes their lovemaking as having the elegant ritual of a A reading of the poem religious ‘rite’, or the formalised pattern of movements of ‘court music’. We have already seen the way in which Montague’s poetry possesses Yet in spite of the apparent detachment of these descriptions, the an elegance of expression that is underpinned by a muscularity of focus. emotional impact of the lines is inescapable. The couple achieve an This poem is a particularly good example of both of these qualities. The ‘intimacy of hand | and mind’ that produces a ‘healing’. What the lovers short, poetic line, the sense of order imposed by the five-line stanzas, the share is more than a purely physical release; rather, their physical actions, condensed, everyday language and the exacting honesty of imagery all ‘the shifting of | hands’, enable them to connect in a truly meaningful way. combine to create a masterly piece of writing. The level of their intimacy is expressed in lines 12–15. Montague’s The elegance of the first stanza is evident from the opening words: repetition of words connected with nakedness in these lines ‘There is a secret room | of golden light’. The simple refinement of these communicates the depth and honesty of their relationship. Their words belies the strength of emotion that underpins them. The image nakedness is not simply physical, but also emotional and spiritual. They of this wonderful ‘secret room’ filled with ‘golden light’ inspires us all to are each truly themselves and they are each truly of the other because of remember a place where we, too, felt safe and warm. But it is at this point the complete honesty that lies at the heart of their meetings in this ‘secret that Montague’s muscularity of focus kicks in. He is not content to leave room’. us wallowing in our nostalgic memories; instead, he tells us what happens in this apparently idyllic place: ‘everything – love, violence, | hatred is Yet wonderful as such nakedness is, it cannot last forever, and in the possible’. There is something distinctly shocking about these lines. The fourth and fifth stanzas Montague presents us with a series of vivid and ‘secret room’ is not a haven of calm and tranquillity at all, but somewhere dramatic images that represent the lovers coming out of the ‘secret that is filled with the unrestrained passion of ‘love, violence, | hatred’. room’, with its passionate honesty, and back into the humdrum routine However, with the final line of this stanza, consisting of the three simple of ordinary life. The lovers find themselves obliged to function in the words ‘and, again, love’, Montague skilfully reinstates a feeling of peaceful everyday world. They may no longer share that intense and passionate orderliness. intimacy, but they do still have the memories that they ‘must remember’. These memories are so distinct that they ripple through the lovers’ everyday actions. The simple act of changing the gears in a car becomes

440 new explorations john montague the same gesture

a reminder of the loving movements and the emotional warmth that they that eases the ‘snowbound | heart and flesh’. It is this balance between raw, shared. passionate emotions and an almost religious, ritualised respect for what they share that gives this poem a greater impact. It is interesting to note that There is an elegant sense of closure in the final three lines of the poem, even though this is a deeply personal piece of writing, Montague never uses arising out of the beautiful connection that Montague establishes between ‘I’. His use of ‘we’ is indicative of the shared closeness of their connection. them and the opening two lines: Rhythm and punctuation There is a secret room We have already noted that there is a skilled elegance about Montague’s Of golden light … writing here in the sense that he uses words in a simple yet graceful the same gesture as manner. His use of rhythm and punctuation play a major part in the eased your snowbound creation of this elegance. If we highlight the stressed words in the opening heart and flesh. lines of the poem and read the highlights slightly louder, it is clear that they have a measured and regular rhythm: The ‘golden light’ of the ‘secret room’ has succeeded in thawing out the ‘snowbound | heart and flesh’, just as the sun melts away the ice at midday. There is a secret room In the face of such a magical experience, is it any wonder that the two Of golden light lovers carry the memories of it with them always? Thus, the meaning of these words is underpinned by the rhythm to create Theme an image of a tranquil, calm environment. This is further reinforced by Within this poem Montague explores the theme of love, but it is a very the lack of punctuation, so that the words run smoothly. But Montague specific type of love. It is the love shared by two people in a very particular suddenly destroys this impression in the following lines: environment, ‘a secret room’. The implication is that their relationship has … where to be conducted in secret. It cannot be allowed to expand into the whole everything – love, violence, of their lives and worlds. Perhaps because of the secret and restricted hatred is possible nature of their love, it is very intense. This intensity reveals itself both in the These words deal with passionate, unrestrained emotions, and as a result emotions that they experience within the room, ‘love, violence, | hatred’, Montague deliberately uses a much more irregular rhythm, further broken and in the way that they view their intimacy as ‘a rite | like court music’ up by his use of punctuation.

441 new explorations john montague like dolmens round my childhood

Like dolmens round my childhood choice of words such as ‘defiled’ (meaning ‘polluted’) and ‘Fanged’ make it clear that Maggie is not quite as nice as we thought. She liked to gossip, A reading of the poem but not just the harmless chitchat that we all enjoy. Maggie’s gossip had In the very first line of this poem, Montague establishes the fundamental a nasty and vindictive quality to it because she liked to ‘deride’, or make partnership of images that lies at its heart: the ‘dolmens’ and ‘the old fun of people. However, just as we come to the conclusion that Maggie people’. He then goes on to give a series of vivid and realistic ‘pen Owens was a rather unpleasant person, Montague tells us that her ‘need pictures’ of some of the old people that he remembers. In ‘The Locket’ to deride’ came from the fact that she was ‘lonely’. Maggie Owens and ‘The Cage’ we saw how Montague used a variety of methods to obviously had a caring side, shown by her concern for animals, but her suggest character, including physical description, references to actions ability to be caring towards other people had been twisted and destroyed and behaviour and quoting favourite sayings. He uses a number of these by her terrible loneliness. methods once again in ‘Like dolmens round my childhood’. The Nialls are the subject of the third stanza. We never learn who the The first stanza describes Jamie MacCrystal by means of his behaviour Nialls were, whether they were male or female, brothers or sisters. They and actions. His habit of singing to himself suggests a gentle eccentricity, lived in a beautiful place with ‘heather bells’ and ‘clumps of foxglove’. while his kindness and generosity are shown by his regular gift of a Tragically, the Nialls were unable to appreciate this beauty, as they penny to the young Montague and his feeding of the birds in winter. were blind. All they had to make up for their lack of sight was a ‘Blind Jamie MacCrystal was a nice old man. This makes the description of the Pension and Wireless’. Montague’s description of their ‘Dead eyes’ that terrible incidents that happened after his death all the more shocking, ‘serpent-flickered’ sounds like a child’s view of these old, blind people. when robbers tore his cottage apart looking for money. The only slightly The implication is that as a child he was slightly afraid of them because positive note is the fact that the robbers did not touch poor Jamie of their disability. Nevertheless, he was happy to shelter in their cottage MacCrystal’s dead body. and listen to the crickets chirping until the rain passed. We get the feeling that the Nialls never moved far away from their home: their blindness In the second stanza we meet Maggie Owens. We learn that she ‘was trapped them in a narrow and largely isolated world. Yet there is a feeling surrounded by animals’. This would seem to indicate that she, too, was a of warmth about the open door, which allowed the young Montague to kindly and caring old person. But then Montague tells us that she ‘was a shelter, and the crickets chirping. well of gossip defiled’ and he calls her a ‘Fanged chronicler’. Montague’s

442 new explorations john montague like dolmens round my childhood

Mary Moore, in the fourth stanza, was a much more active person. In the sixth stanza, Montague shifts the focus of the poem onto the She was always out and about tending to her cattle. It is obvious from ‘Curate and doctor’: the only two people who seem to show any interest Montague’s description that Mary was fighting a losing battle to maintain in the old men and women. Whether out of a sense of duty or a genuine her farm. She lived in a ‘crumbling gatehouse’ and her cattle were ‘lean’ concern for the old, these two are willing ‘to attend them’. We see them and lived in a ‘miry stable’. Her life was one of unending hard work struggling to reach the isolated homes, ‘Gulping the mountain air’. and, because of this, Mary Moore became a hard woman filled with However, the doctor and the curate are not simply calling to visit the old ‘fierceness’. However, once again Montague shows us that people are not people; they are going to deal with their dead bodies. Here, Montague always as they appear. This fierce, hardworking lady who constantly wore once again describes the true reality of the situation with uncompromising a ‘Bag-apron and boots’ loved romantic novels. All her longing for love honesty. As the old people largely lived alone, isolated from love and was revealed in her dreams of ‘gypsy love-rites’. Sadly, Montague makes it care, so they died alone, without love and care. Occasionally their bodies clear that Mary Moore never got to fulfil any of these wonderful dreams. are ‘found by neighbours’, but the ‘smokeless hearth’ and the phrase ‘cast in the mould of death’ suggest that the old people were dead for a long Finally, we encounter Billy Eagleson. At first, Billy seems to be quite a time before anyone came to check on them. heroic, independent chap. He is ‘Wild’ and this wildness led to him going against the rules of Northern society by marrying a Catholic servant girl. It is this uncompromising honesty in describing the harshness of the True, he did wait until all his family were dead, so perhaps he was not old people’s lives that Montague carries forward into the final stanza. quite as independent as we first thought. Perhaps he was nothing more His comment ‘Ancient Ireland, indeed!’ is written with the strength and than a lonely old man craving some sort of companionship. Nevertheless, contempt of a man who wants to destroy the idealised view of ‘Ancient because of his marriage he was rejected by his own religion and his wife’s Ireland’ being a perfect world. Instead, Montague wants us to recognise religion. He became an outcast who could be teased and ridiculed by and understand the negative aspects of ‘Ancient Ireland’. It was a society the local gangs of children. His feeble attempts to hit the boys with his where superstition was widespread, where feuds were pursued with ‘flailing blackthorn’ stick make him seem a rather pathetic figure. But in ‘fierceness’, where old people were left to live and die in loneliness and spite of enduring rejection by both Protestants and Catholics, Billy still felt isolation. Once Montague realises this, his attitude towards the old people moved when the ‘Orange drums banged’ and the Loyalist men marched changes: they no longer haunt him in his dreams because he understands in ‘bowler and sash’ declaring their loyalty to the sovereign. that ‘the old people’ have a ‘permanence’ about them. Like the dolmens, the old men and women have a lasting quality in that they are part of

443 new explorations john montague like dolmens round my childhood

Montague’s heritage: they are part of the past world that made him what At times, Montague’s tone echoes with his childhood voice. So when he he is. remembers that Maggie Owens was ‘Reputed a witch’, we hear the voice of a small boy who believes that witches really exist. Similarly, his tone is Theme one of giddy excitement as he describes how the boys ‘danced around’ Montague uses the individual life stories of the old people to illustrate Billy Eagleson shouting ‘To hell with King Billy’. Clearly, most adults the harsh and divided nature of the Northern Ireland society that he grew would not feel like this about such behaviour, so this tone is the voice of up in. He feels that we must recognise that Northern Irish society has its the young boy Montague, who enjoyed youngsters getting away with foundations in the past, in superstition and feuding. It is only by doing this making fun of an adult. In the final stanza his tone is filled with anger and that we can move on to creating a new and more caring community. contempt for the superstition and harshness of the society of ‘Ancient Ireland’. However, it becomes much calmer and more affectionate when The tone of the poem he speaks of ‘the old people’ because he understands the part that they The tone, that is, the emotion or attitude expressed in the poet’s words, played in his development: tends to change quite a lot in this poem. In his descriptions of the old people there is often a mixture of a tone of affection and sympathy I felt their shadows pass with a tone of anger and contempt. Jamie MacCrystal is written about Into that dark permanence of ancient forms. with affection: ‘He tipped me a penny every pension day’. With Maggie Owens and Mary Moore, Montague uses a sympathetic tone as he comes to understand the reasons for their behaviour. Although he is angry and contemptuous about Maggie’s love of ‘gossip defiled’, he understands that it comes from ‘her lonely need to deride’. Similarly, Mary’s ‘fierceness’ is only a pretence to hide her longing for the romance of ‘gypsy love-rites’. In the final stanza he sees the old people as ‘figures of fear and friendliness’ because as a child he may have found some of them frightening, but as an adult he came to regard them as friends because he saw them as lonely and isolated human beings.

444 new explorations john montague the wild dog rose

The Wild Dog Rose that it is her loneliness that makes her drone on, ‘rehearsing the small events of her life’. A reading of the poem Section 1 Section 2 Montague immediately draws his readers into this poem by vividly Montague introduces the important image of ‘the dog rose’ at the describing the journey he makes to visit the ‘Cailleach’, an old woman. beginning of this section. This flower is very different from the other His attention to detail makes his descriptions come alive. We can see plants that we have encountered previously in the poem: the trees twisted the cottage, the misshapen trees and the ‘rank thistles’. We can hear the ‘by the mountain winds’ and ‘the rank thistles | and leathery bracken’. ‘savage, whingeing cries’ of the old woman’s dogs. There is something special about the dog rose because it ‘shines in the hedge’. This could well be because the flowers of the dog rose are either As with the old people in ‘Like dolmens round my childhood’, Montague white or pink, with a pale yellow centre: colours that would stand out places his childhood attitude to the old woman, ‘that terrible figure who against the greens and browns of the other plants. Suddenly, the tone of haunted my childhood’, alongside his adult understanding of her as ‘a the poem changes to one of terror and fear as we hear the old woman’s human being | merely, hurt by event’. Indeed, his use of the Irish word story of her attempted rape by ‘a drunk’. As she struggles with her ‘Cailleach’ sums up his mixed feelings about her, as it can mean ‘an old attacker, the old woman calls on ‘the Blessed Virgin herself | for help’ and woman’ or ‘a witch’. When he first sees the old woman he reverts back finally she does manage to escape from the man. to ‘the terror of a child’. Indeed, she has a rather witchlike appearance, appearing as ‘a moving nest | of shawls and rags’ with a ‘great hooked Section 3 nose’, ‘the staring blue | of the sunken eyes’ and ‘mottled claws’ instead of The image of the ‘dog rose’ occurs once again. It still ‘shines in the hedge’, hands. However, his adult reaction takes over and he is able ‘to greet her but here Montague supplies more details about its appearance. The dog … in friendliness’. rose may seem to be a delicate flower with ‘Petals beaten wide by rain’ and its ‘slender, tangled, arching branch’. Indeed, it even ‘sways slightly’. Montague stands and listens to the old woman speaking. It is clear that However, for the old woman, the dog rose symbolises ‘the Holy Mother she goes on at length about her past. Montague listens patiently because of God and | all she suffered’. This capacity for endurance is represented he understands that the old woman does not have anyone to talk to and by the fact that the dog rose ‘is the only rose without thorns’. Thus, the dog rose is incapable of wounding or causing suffering; it simply persists

445 new explorations john montague the wild dog rose

and withstands. Montague realises that it is these qualities that give the The old woman’s faith in the Blessed Virgin gives her the strength to dog rose a strength, a strength that is suggested by the scent of the resist her attacker. Furthermore, in section 3 the dog rose is described as a flower: ‘the air is strong with the smell | of that weak flower’. Although ‘yellow cup’, conjuring up an image of a golden chalice. Both the Blessed the flower of the dog rose may have a ‘crumbling yellow cup’ and ‘pale Virgin and the chalice symbolise the healing power of faith, the healing bleeding lips | fading to white’ and petals that are ‘bruised’, he understands power that the old woman has experienced. However, the power that what the old woman recognises: that this flower has a power, a power that is suggested by the dog rose and the Blessed Virgin may not be totally resides in each of its ‘heart- | shaped’ petals, a power that resides in the triumphant, as Montague has pointed out: In ‘The Wild Dog Rose’, as figure of the Blessed Virgin, a power that ‘shines in the hedge’, a power she is being almost raped the woman prays to the Blessed Virgin. The that fills a lonely, frightened old woman with the courage to endure in the Blessed Virgin is symbolised for her by the wild dog rose, but the end face of brutality. of the poem describes that as a ‘weak flower’. This is her comfort. The poem doesn’t say that it accepts that comfort, just that she has been able Themes to draw strength from it as people do from whatever they can manage to Montague explains the political aspect to this poem as follows: believe in.

Ireland has often been seen as feminine … and her colonisation has aspects of rape – becoming even more complicated when colonial England became Protestant and Ireland remained Roman Catholic, attached to the medieval ethos of the Virgin Mary.

If we consider the image of the dog rose and the old woman’s endurance and strength within this context, they become symbols of the survival of Ireland. Indeed, in the past the rose was frequently used as a secret code name for Ireland.

In addition, there is a strong religious element to the poem in the connection that is made between the dog rose and ‘the Blessed Virgin’.

446 new explorations john montague a welcoming party

A Welcoming Party to insects in a series of deeply disturbing images. They make ‘Clicking’ noises with ‘what remained of their heels’ and out of ‘nests of bodies A reading of the poem like hatching eggs’ break ‘insectlike hands and legs’. This is the stuff of Montague’s decision to open this poem with a quotation in German nightmares, made all the more dreadful by the inhuman wailing, the serves to create a context for his writing. The use of the German ‘ululation’ filling the air. But this is not a nightmare; it is the reality of a Nazi language signals that this piece is somehow connected to a world beyond concentration camp. Montague’s home in Garvaghey. The nature of the question asked provides a further clue: ‘Wie war das möglich?’ (‘How did this happen?’) In the third stanza Montague echoes the movements of a film camera This is the same question that many used after the 9/11 attack on the by shifting the focus of his descriptions away from panning across the World Trade Center in New York. It is a question that expresses the enormity of the horror to pictures of individual suffering. We see ‘a mouth inability of the human mind and heart to understand something terrible. like a burnt glove’, ragged and blackened by brutality, and ‘upheld hands’ that seek some small, kindly response to their suffering, ‘the small change’ Montague’s first stanza begins to describe the ‘something terrible’ that he of the souls of the watchers. Such images overwhelm both the young encountered. He conveys the setting for his boyhood experience in two Montague and his companions. They simply cannot believe that human brief phrases: ‘That final newsreel’ and ‘at the cinema door’. Once again, life can exist in such dehumanised forms and so they ask ‘Can those bones Montague’s ability to condense the essences of a life experience into a live?’ He realises that up until now, he has lived in a world that is on the few brief words is evident. He moves on to vividly portray the horror of edge of experience. His world is localised and narrow in its outlook and the scene that is shown in the ‘final newsreel of the war’. At this point we restricted in its vision; it is ‘parochial’, a small parish far away from real life. do not need to ask which war; the German question has made it clear that Montague writes of the brutality of World War II. However, in spite of the shock of this realisation, Montague simply cannot absorb the impact of what he has seen. The ‘doves of mercy’ are The phrase ‘Met us at the cinema door’ does more than simply tell unable to soar, not through any hardness or lack of humanity on the part us that Montague was in a cinema. It also conveys a feeling of these of Montague, but simply because the scenes that he witnesses are so horrible images not only filling the darkness of the cinema, but also the completely outside his experience, his ‘parochial brand of innocence’, that minds of those who were watching them. Montague, with his customary he cannot respond to them. Just as we all watched in shock as the Twin uncompromising honesty, likens these half-alive ‘shades’ of human beings Towers collapsed, so Montague is stunned by what he has seen.

447 new explorations john montague a welcoming party

The final stanza of the poem may seem to be rather unfeeling in light However, Montague also addresses the position of 1940s Ireland on of the descriptions that Montague has so vividly portrayed. Yet it is the world stage. As a society struggling to redefine its identity after a filled with his muscular honesty, his determination to represent things as shattering War of Independence and civil war, Ireland was economically they are, not things as we would like them to be. The young Montague impoverished and deeply inward looking. Out of his encounter with the understands that he has witnessed ‘one meaning of total war’. He realises ‘newsreel of the war’, Montague comes to an understanding of Ireland’s that war is much more than coloured flags on a map or heroic deeds and position at the outer regions of world events: ‘To be always at the shared victories. He has seen a glimpse of the wide world that lies beyond periphery of incident’. He also recognises that this isolationism disables his ‘parochial’ one. But once he leaves the cinema, he returns to his own Irish people in that they do not feel part of the greater world. world of the ‘Christian school’, where he runs to ‘belt a football through the air’. He does this because it is all that he can do. He is a young boy Tone who has little experience of life and, rather like a small child running to Montague uses the conversational language of everyday speech to great his parents for comfort, Montague seeks out the safe normality of his effect in this poem, because each familiar word and phrase vibrates with small world. And there is a kind of triumph in this. Just as we went back to a profound intensity of tone. The opening stanza conveys the setting for the normality of our lives after 9/11, so Montague’s return represents the the poem, but then we encounter the line ‘Clicking what remained of their indomitable strength of the human spirit. We know that we will never be heels’. The impact of the words ‘what remained’ is tremendous. Despite quite the same and Montague knows that he will never be quite the same, the matter-of-fact simplicity of the language, the tone is one of shocked but what will continue is the human will to live. horror.

Themes There is a similar effect with the question ‘Can those bones live?’ in the On one level, this poem can be seen as a consideration of the horrors fourth stanza. These four deceptively simple words capture the utter of war: the dehumanised ‘insectlike’ figures represent man’s inhumanity incredulity with which Montague watches the nightmare images. He to man and his capacity for brutality. It traces Montague’s boyhood cannot believe that human life can persist in such dehumanised forms. realisation of the true implications of war: ‘I learnt one meaning of total war’. There is a tone of frustration in the lines ‘To be always at the periphery of incident | Gave my childhood its Irish dimension; drama of unevent’. As he grew older Montague became increasingly resentful of the intellectual

448 new explorations john montague a welcoming party

isolationism that ruled Ireland, and in 1952 he left Ireland with great relief to study in America. When Montague remembers his boyhood reaction to what he had seen, in the final six lines of the poem, his tone changes to one of regret but it is regret tinged with understanding. He knows that his actions of going back to his ‘Christian school’ in order to ‘belt a football through the air’ were totally inadequate and represented a failure on his part. In this way, he allowed the ‘doves of mercy’ to ‘falter’. But the adult Montague can understand that as a young boy, reared in the ‘parochial’ world of 1940s Ireland, he simply did not have the capacity to respond to such images.

The various tones that resonate through this poem reveal it to be the adult Montague’s acknowledgment of the wide-ranging and lasting effects that the ‘newsreel of the war’ had on him. As a young boy he was unable to make this acknowledgment, but now, through his adult acknowledgment, he is able to set ‘the doves of mercy’ flying again.

449 new explorations john montague developing a personal response to the poetry of john montague

Developing a personal response to the 9. John Montague was born in 1929 in America. What can his poetry poetry of John Montague say to young adults living in 21st-century Ireland? 10. What will you remember from your work on John Montague after 1. What is the relationship between Montague’s poetry and his life? you have completed the Leaving Certificate examination? How does his poetry influence his attitude to his life experiences? 2. What themes occur in Montague’s poetry? Are they all relevant to your life or are some more relevant than others? 3. How would you describe the language that Montague uses in his poetry? What is your reaction to the type of language that he uses? 4. In your own words, describe the process of realisation. Did you encounter any realisations in your reading of Montague that you found particularly successful? 5. How do you feel about the stream of consciousness approach to imagery? Did it help or hinder your understanding of what Montague was communicating in his poetry? 6. Does Montague’s approach to the layout and organisation of his poetry excite your interest or would you rather he used more traditional formats? 7. Select four words that you feel describe John Montague’s poetry. In each case, use references from his work to justify your choice. 8. Consider what aspects of Montague’s poetry appeal to you and what aspects you find unappealing.

450 new explorations john montague questions

Questions (a) Which one of the old people in the poem do you feel the most sympathy for? Explain the reasons for your choice. 1. (b) ‘Sometimes they were found by neighbours, Silent keepers of a smokeless hearth, (i) Read ‘The Locket’, then answer the following questions. Suddenly cast in the mould of death.’ (a) How did this poem make you feel? From these lines, what do you understand about the way that the old (b) Describe the kind of relationship that Montague had with his people died? mother. Refer to the poem in your response. (c) How does Montague’s attitude to the old people change in the last (c) What picture do you get of John Montague’s mother from the four lines of the poem? poem? (iv) Answer one of the following. (ii) Answer one of the following. (a) The following list of phrases suggests some of the poet’s attitudes to (a) Do you think that ‘The Locket’ is a good title for this poem? Explain the old people: your answer. He likes them OR He feels sorry for them (b) Imagine that you are making a short film based on this poem. He is afraid of them Choose two scenes and describe the images and music that you Choose the phrase from the above list that is closest to your own would use. reading of the poem. Explain your choice, supporting your view by OR reference to the words of the poem. (c) ‘And still, mysterious blessing, I never knew, until you were gone,’ OR What does Montague discover after his mother has died? Why do (b) Imagine that you are the curate or the doctor in the poem. Describe you think he calls this discovery a ‘mysterious blessing’? how you feel about visiting the old people. (iii) Read ‘Like dolmens round my childhood’, then answer the following OR questions. (c) ‘Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.’ Can you explain the connection between the old people and the dolmens? Do you

451 new explorations john montague questions

think that the poem helps you to understand this connection? Give 10. What impact did the poetry of John Montague make on you as a reasons for your answer. reader? In your answer you might like to consider some of the 3. ‘Introducing John Montague.’ Write out the text of a short following: presentation that you would make to your class group under the Montague’s outlook on life above title. Support your point of view by reference to or quotation His use of language and imagery from the poetry of John Montague that you have studied. The themes of his poems 4. ‘Dear John Montague…’ Write a letter to John Montague telling him how you responded to some of his poems on your course. Support the points you make by detailed reference to your chosen poems. 5. ‘The poetry of John Montague appeals to his readers because we do not simply read it, we feel it physically and emotionally.’ Write an essay in which you discuss this statement, quoting from or referring to his poems to support your discussion. 6. ‘Poetry never deals with the problems of real life.’ Imagine that one of your friends has made this comment to you. Respond to the comment, referring to the poems by John Montague on your course. 7. ‘The unforgettable John Montague.’ You have been asked to submit an article with this title for your school’s poetry magazine. Write out your article, supporting your points by quotations from or references to your chosen poems. 8. ‘John Montague looks at life with honesty and understanding.’ Discuss. Support the points you make by reference to the poetry of Montague that you have studied. 9. ‘John Montague: A poet for the 21st century.’ In response to this statement, write an essay on the poetry of Montague. Support your points by detailed reference to the poems on your course.

452 new explorations john montague bibliography

Bibliography Montague, J., Company: A Chosen Life, London: Duckworth 2001. Murrray, C. (ed.), Irish University Review: Special John Montague, Brown, T., Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Number, 19.1, Spring 1989. 1975. The Arts Show: John Montague, RTÉ, 7 November 1995. Corcoran, N. (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren Books 1992. Quinn, A. (ed.), The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, Dublin: Lilliput 1989. Deane, S., Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980, London: Faber & Faber 1985. Welch, R., The Structure of Process: John Montague’s Poetry, Coleraine: Cranagh Press 1999. Dunn, D., Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, Cheadle: Carcanet Press 1975.

Garratt, R.F., Modern Irish Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press 1986.

Harmon, M. (ed.), Irish Poetry after Yeats, Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1979.

Johnston, D., Irish Poetry after Joyce (2nd edition), Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1997.

Lampe, D. (ed.), Born in Brooklyn: John Montague’s America, New York: White Wine Press 1991.

Lucy, S. (ed.), Irish Poets in English, Cork: The Mercier Press 1973.

Kernowski, F., John Montague, New Jersey: Associated University Presses Inc. 1975.

453 Sylvia Plath Notes and Explorations: Ann Hyland

454 new explorations sylvia plath introduction

Introduction them academically. In the conservative 1940s and 50s, girls were meant to be ‘nice’, that is, genteel, polite and above all, feminine – certainly not Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1932 to ambitious and intellectual, publicly questioning the status quo. There was Aurelia Schober Plath and Otto Plath. Shortly after his son Warren’s birth an all-pervasive pressure to conform to society’s expectations. By the end in 1935, Otto Plath fell ill. His condition was treatable, but he refused to of her secondary school career she had achieved some success as a writer consult a doctor. In 1940, following an operation, he died. Neither of the and artist. A number of her stories had appeared in Seventeen, a popular children attended the funeral. These events had a huge effect on Sylvia’s teenage magazine, while some poems and drawings were published in life. Her father’s illness deprived her of both parents’ attention for much the Christian Science Monitor. She had also been introduced to the works of her early life. His death, which she sometimes saw as suicide because of of authors who were important influences on her writing: D.H. Lawrence, his refusal to seek medical help, left her feeling bereft. She never came to Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats. terms with her grief and anger at his loss, and these feelings resurfaced in her last poems. In 1950 she entered Smith College, Massachusetts, a prestigious women’s university where her academic and writing success continued. At the end Sylvia’s childhood taught her the value of being a ‘good girl’. Her mother’s of her third year, in June 1953, she won a guest editorship with a magazine approval was gained by being quiet, not disturbing her invalid father, for young women, Mademoiselle. This involved living in New York for reading and writing, and doing well in school. This she achieved with little the month. Her work schedule there was demanding and she was also difficulty: remarkably intelligent and very ambitious, she always earned expected to fulfil endless social engagements. The whole experience high grades. Her writing life began early – her first poem was published was exhausting. On her return home to Wellesley she became severely when she was only eight. She was a brilliant pupil in secondary school, depressed. She was treated with electro-convulsive shock therapy, which consistently earning A grades. seems to have been disastrous: far from curing her, it propelled her into a serious suicide attempt. Her life was saved only because her brother Attractive, vivacious and active in school clubs, she led a busy social life. discovered her hidden in the cellar three days after she disappeared. She She worked hard but loved clothes, dancing, music and dating. One entered a psychiatric hospital, where she recovered with the help of a problem that she refers to in her letters to her mother and in her journals sympathetic psychiatrist. This experience formed the basis for her novel was her anxiety to conceal her academic ability from the boys she dated: The Bell Jar, published in 1963. she felt (probably rightly) that her popularity would suffer if she upstaged

455 new explorations sylvia plath introduction

She resumed her studies in Smith College in January 1954, graduating her second book, Ariel, including ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. She herself with first-class honours the following year. She won a Fulbright was amazed at what she was writing: Scholarship to study literature in Cambridge, England, where she met I am … writing like mad – have managed a poem a day Ted Hughes, a young English poet (‘that big, dark, hunky boy, the only before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if one there huge enough for me’). They fell in love and married in June domesticity had choked me. (Letters Home, 12 October 1956. On completing her studies in Cambridge she accepted a teaching 1962) job in her old university, Smith College, and moved to America with her husband for two years. ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ and ‘The Times Are In December she moved to London with her children. To her great joy Tidy’ date from this period. Shortly after the couple returned to London she succeeded in renting a flat where W.B. Yeats had once lived. The in December 1959, her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, winter of 1962–63 was one of the coldest on record in England, which was published. Their daughter, Frieda, was born in April. The following added to the trauma of setting up a new home alone. She had problems year they moved to Devon, a move that increased her workload. She with heating, power failures and getting a telephone. She and the devoted much energy to turning their old manor house into a home and children suffered from severe colds and she had trouble finding a reliable to working the extensive garden that surrounded it in addition to acting as childminder. These difficulties exacerbated her depression. Despite this, her own and her husband’s literary agent and caring for Frieda. she continued writing; ‘Child’ dates from January 1963.

Her son, Nicholas, was born in January 1962. During this time, despite However, her difficult circumstances eventually overwhelmed her. Early her many domestic tasks and the work involved in looking after two on the morning of 11 February she left some milk and food by their beds small children, she was writing. Poems from this period include ‘Morning for the children and sealed the door to their room to ensure their safety. Song’, ‘Finisterre’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Pheasant’, ‘Elm’ and ‘Poppies in July’. She also She then took an overdose of sleeping pills, sealed herself in the kitchen completed The Bell Jar. and gassed herself.

Sylvia and Ted’s relationship had been troubled for some time and they Sylvia Plath’s fame has grown steadily since her death. At first this was separated in August 1962. She remained in Devon, caring for the children mainly because of the dramatic circumstances of her suicide: the fame and writing, but suffered poor health and recurring depression. Yet this she had always longed for became hers for the wrong reasons. However, period saw the flood of creativity that produced the poems that made up the publication of Ariel and the Complete Poems showed that she was

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indeed a poet of genius, whose work deserved recognition for its own And indeed, these Letters Home (published in 1975) and the Journals sake. The facts of Sylvia Plath’s life are easily told. Less simple to assess is (1982) tell a lot about her. They reflect her ‘exaggerated, high-voltage, the mass of material that has been written about her since (and because bigger-than-life personality and imagination’. They show a young woman of) her suicide. She is variously seen as: who thought about everything and longed to live life to its fullest. Here is a tiny sample of her opinions: A brilliant but fragile genius On writing: ‘It is as necessary for the survival of my haughty sanity as An ungrateful daughter who hated her mother bread is to my flesh.’ A loving daughter whose loyalty and affection are reflected in her ‘And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the letters home outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst An over-ambitious manic depressive enemy to creativity is self-doubt.’ A controlling and jealous wife who pushed her husband into a love On herself: ‘I want, I think, to be omniscient … I think I would like to affair call myself “the girl who wanted to be God”.’ A loving wife and mother whose life was destroyed by her husband’s On life: ‘God is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of betrayal laughter and tears? of self-worship and self-loathing? of glory and A virulent feminist whose marriage break-up and suicide expressed disgust?’ her outrage at the ties of domesticity On depression: ‘I have been and am battling depression. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive In fact, it seems that those who write about Sylvia Plath can use her and despairing negative – whichever is running at the moment life story to prove almost anything. One reason for this is that she was dominates my life, floods it.’ married to, and had just separated from, a famous poet who went on On children: ‘Graduate school and travel abroad are not going to be to become poet laureate. Another is the quantity of material she wrote. stymied by any squealing, breast-fed brats.’ Apart from the poems there are many short stories, essays and articles for On being a woman: ‘Learning of the limitations of a woman’s sphere is magazines. She also did radio broadcasts and was the subject of a number no fun at all.’ of interviews. But perhaps most widely quoted – to support points of On marriage: ‘I plan not to step into a part on marrying – but to go on view that can be utterly contradictory – are the journals she kept from her living as an intelligent mature human being, growing and learning as I earliest days almost to the time of her death, and her thousands of letters always have.’ to family and friends. 457 new explorations sylvia plath introduction

‘I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day – spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free.’ On having children: ‘Children might humanise me. But I must rely on them for nothing. Fable of children changing existence and character as absurd as fable of marriage doing it.’ On poetry: ‘A poem can’t take the place of a plum or an apple. But just as painting can re-create, by illusion … so a poem, by its own system of illusions, can set up a rich and apparently living world within its particular limits.’ ‘Technically I like it to be extremely musical and lyrical, with a singing sound.’ On the issues that mattered to her: ‘The hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms – children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places.’ On politics: ‘I do believe I can counteract McCarthy … by living a life of honesty and love … it is in a way serving my religion, which is that of humanism, and a belief in the potential of each man to learn and love and grow.’

Regardless of where people stand on her personality and life, all are agreed on Sylvia Plath’s unique and distinctive voice and on the impact she has had on the poetry of the end of the 20th century. The inscription on her headstone could be read as a metaphor for her life: Even in the midst of fierce flames, the golden lotus may be planted.

458 new explorations sylvia plath black rook in rainy weather

Black Rook in Rainy Weather She doesn’t know what inspiration may surprise her or ‘flare | Suddenly at my elbow’. The black rook in the rain may even shine and force her to Background give it her full attention – ‘seize my senses’. Therefore, she is watchful: ‘If only something would happen!’ Something being such a miracle has happened before. the revelation that transfigures existence; works a miraculous presto-chango upon the mundane mortal One such miracle would be the inspiration to create something world – turning the toads and cockroaches back into extraordinary from her dull surroundings, to ‘Patch together a content | handsome fairy princes. (Journals, April 1953) Of sorts’. She might write, create something wonderful. The ‘mute sky’ may not grant the desired ‘backtalk’, but the speaker knows that ‘Miracles Sylvia Plath was always aware of the need for inspiration to trigger her occur’. Waiting for the muse is like creative impulse: she hoped for a moment of insight, a ‘miracle’, to work a change on the ‘mundane mortal world’, enabling her to create. She wrote The long wait for the angel, ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ at a time when she was finding it a struggle For that rare, random descent. to write, despite her conviction that writing was her life’s work. She is prepared to wait. A reading of the poem The growing acceptance of identity as a writer is one theme. The year Landscape is at the ‘stubborn’ ‘season | Of fatigue’ – late autumn or winter. The Plath’s poetry is often highly subjective, focusing on her inner self, speaker is warily walking, ‘Trekking’ in the rain, when her eye is caught by feelings and thoughts – even when she appears to be writing about the a black rook hunched above her on a twig. Everything around is dull and outside world. She uses her immediate surroundings as a metaphor for low key: bird, rain, ‘spotted leaves’, ‘mute sky’, ‘ruinous landscape’. Despite her feelings and ideas. This is evident in her treatment of landscape. this, the speaker is vaguely expectant: a miracle may occur, a trick of light One critic has described how her poetic landscapes embody associations may ‘hallow’ (make sacred) something as ordinary as a kitchen table or between scene and mood; she calls them ‘psychic landscapes’. She notes chair, causing it to glow with heavenly radiance. The muse or inspiration Plath’s ‘ability to transform realistic objects and scenes into consistent sets may appear as a ‘miracle’, a ‘celestial burning’, transforming what might of metaphors for her thoughts and emotions’. These concrete objects, otherwise be an uneventful life, giving ‘A brief respite from fear | Of total however, are clearly realised (made real) by Plath’s skilful use of language neutrality’. and imagery. 459 new explorations sylvia plath black rook in rainy weather

‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ creates a clear picture: the speaker is out The difference between actual dullness and possible radiance is strongly walking doggedly on a wet day when she sees a black rook hunched on marked. Plath underlines the blackness by her choice of adjectives: wet, a bare tree. Everything around is dull and lifeless: sodden fallen leaves, black, desultory, mute, sceptical, minor, obtuse, wary, dull, ruinous. The the dark, rainy day, the ‘ruinous landscape’. Having set the scene, the verbs, too, convey dispiritedness: hunches, fall, complain, trek, haul, wait. speaker quickly moves to her own fears and limited expectations. She is The repetition of the sound ‘rain’ in line 3 adds to the general bleakness. In hopeful that (with luck, maybe, perhaps) even such a dull scene may be complete contrast to this, the hoped-for change is conveyed in terms of transformed. The cause of this transformation – miracle, descent of an brightness: light, fire, incandescence, radiance, flare, shine. It is linked with angel – would seem to be something that might fire her imagination. the divine: miracle, hallowed, angel.

Essentially, the bleak place is a metaphor for the speaker’s own bleakness. Language Her mood, like the scene, might be suddenly transformed by a sudden The language of ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ includes a mixture of the radiance, a miracle, a flash of inspiration. The mute sky may grant her the colloquial and the formal. Almost slang expressions are used side by side ‘backtalk’ she desires. with archaic words (words that have fallen out of use). Particularly striking are the semi-biblical words: ‘hallowing’, ‘bestowing largesse’, ‘portent’. Themes These contrast strongly with the everyday sound of ‘I can’t honestly Hope – the expectation of a sudden change for the better complain’, ‘With luck’, ‘Of sorts’. In your opinion, what is the effect of this? Despondency – the grim dullness of ‘neutrality’ How convincing do you find the possibility of this miracle? Do you feel Creativity – the miracle of a sudden inspiration that the speaker has already experienced such a moment? Look at her Miracles – the rareness and randomness of life-enhancing moments description of the moment – the words used to describe it. Be aware of of brilliance the many parenthetical statements: ‘Although’, ‘I admit’, ‘may’, ‘it could happen’, ‘With luck’, ‘Of sorts’, ‘If you care to call’. There is certainly no Technique doubt of her wariness. Use of contrast There is a strong contrast between the dullness of the landscape and Throughout Plath’s career she worked painstakingly on technique, the radiant miracle that may occur. The speaker knows that the most rewriting and reworking her poems until they were as close to perfect ‘obtuse object’ – black rook, bleak day, dullness, kitchen chair – can be as she could make them. In earlier poems her attention to technique is transformed by a miracle, a ‘celestial burning’, the descent of an angel. 460 new explorations sylvia plath black rook in rainy weather

sometimes too obvious, almost overshadowing the subject matter or The grouping of stresses slows down the voice, drawing attention to the theme. ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, one of her earlier poems, is the rigidity of the bird and emphasising the bleakness of the scene. carefully crafted. Before reading the comments below, reread it, paying Commenting on ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ in a letter to her mother, attention to rhyme (end-rhyme, half-rhyme), consonance (rhyming Plath criticised its ‘glassy brittleness’. What do you think she might have consonants), assonance, alliteration and rhythm. Note down any patterns meant? you observe.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this poem is the carefully patterned rhyming scheme. There are five end-rhymes, repeated in each stanza: in other words, the rhyming scheme is abcde, abcde, abcde. In every stanza there is also internal rhyme: stiff – twig; arranging – rearranging – rain; desultory – design; table – chair.

The rhythm is also skilfully worked out. Mostly the poet uses three-beat lines, but in each stanza this is broken by a four-beat or (occasionally) a five-beat line. The variation avoids monotony and also gives some interesting effects. Look at the opening lines and notice the effect of the pattern:

˘ ˘ – – ˘ – On the stiff twig up there ˘ – – – – – Hunches a wet black rook ˘ – ˘ ˘ – ˘ – ˘ ˘ – ˘ ˘ ˘ – Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain’

461 new explorations sylvia plath the times are tidy

The Times Are Tidy The ‘stuck record’ of stanza 1 suggests the tendency of the needle on a worn record to go ‘ruh-ruh-ruh’ when it sticks. It may symbolise the social Background boredom and monotony of the time. The ‘watchful cooks’ were probably ‘The Times Are Tidy’ was written in 1958, at the height of the socially, the critics of corrupt political values, who were often dismissed and politically and materially self-satisfied era of President Eisenhower. It was blacklisted. The corruption or (at best) damaging inactivity of politicians a time of complacency, when any challenge to the status quo (the way could therefore continue without being too closely observed, allowing things are) was quickly silenced. The ‘establishment’ – the powerful elite the ‘mayor’s rôtisserie’ to turn around ‘of its own accord’: there was no – viewed change as unnecessary and as a threat to its survival. The smug interference in the continuous political graft and favour-giving. satisfaction of this decade in the United States was all-pervasive. Artists in general suffered under the oppression of a culture that saw anything that Humour and irony differed from the norm as a threat. This was the McCarthy decade, when Plath used humour in all her writings – sometimes light and amusing, those suspected of socialist or communist sympathies were blacklisted. bringing a smile to the reader’s face, but more often black and biting. According to one commentator, in ‘The Times Are Tidy’, Plath uses irony She particularly ridiculed what she found self-important or pompous. Her and humour to: humour is seen in her use of wordplay, entertaining images and sound effects that sometimes echo nursery rhymes or popular jingles. Very often deflate … behaviour she finds questionable. The poem her humour underlined a serious message. focuses on the collapse of moral standards and the all- pervasive addiction to comfort and conformity that so In ‘The Times are Tidy’, the decade of smug comfort (‘cream an inch strongly characterised the 1950s. thick’) and boredom (‘stuck record’) in which she lived is described ironically. No self-respecting hero would want to live in it: there is ‘no Some ideas career’ in adventure; dragons have ‘withered … To leaf-size’. Witches, with The 1950s – the ‘tidy times’ – are contrasted with the very ‘untidy’ times of their magic herbs, love potions and talking cats, have been burnt up. Plath the world of legend, an era when heroes fought dragons and witches cast sets the present age against the world of legend, of fabulous creatures spells and brewed magic potions, risking being burned at the stake for and mythical heroes. their practices.

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The final lines are deeply ironic: the very elements that have thrilled children of all ages have disappeared or been forced out. And yet they ‘are better for it’. Life may be flat, boring, uneventful, ‘a stuck record’, but it is suggested that the ‘cream an inch thick’ is more than compensation for the lost excitement. The imagination is starved and adventure is dead, but life is rich and comfortable, predictable and safe. Plath seems to suggest the ironic question: what else could children (or even adults) want?

Think of the connotations of ‘cream’; note down some of the phrases in which it is used. What point is the poet making here? Do you consider it an apt image with which to conclude this poem?

Themes The political corruption of an era that sees material gain as all that counts The collapse of moral standards in public life, where self-seeking, greed and corruption dominate Self-righteousness – the justification of the status quo because it benefits the elite The death of the spirit of adventure, the failure to challenge the ‘dragon’ of political smugness and corruption, which threaten to suffocate society

463 new explorations sylvia plath morning song

Morning Song the parents feel their safety is shadowed. The mother feels displaced, unimportant. Even though her love helped to create this child, she now Background feels that she is no longer necessary. She compares herself to the cloud Plath wrote ‘Morning Song’ 10 months after the birth of her first child, that brings rain, creating a pool of water – the cloud is momentarily Frieda, on 1 April 1960. She intended it to be the opening poem of a new reflected in the pool before the wind slowly blows it on: ‘slow | Effacement collection called Ariel. The first word of the poem, and therefore of the at the wind’s hand’. This seems to suggest that she is briefly reflected in book, is ‘Love’, setting a warm, positive tone for the collection. It is one her child but is then displaced, effaced. It is as if the mother has nothing of a number of poems she wrote to our about children or motherhood. more to give: the child is autonomous. Her attitude towards performing the duties of motherhood was often ambivalent. She was aware of the repetitiveness of the work involved in However, this troubling idea gives way to the present reality of the child’s caring for babies and the inroads it would make on her time; however, this need of its mother and the mother’s attentiveness to the child. The child’s was the negative side of being a mother: it did not cloud her deep love for ‘moth-breath’ is almost imperceptible, but the mother hears it. At the her children, which is always clear and unequivocal. first cry she ‘stumbles’ from bed, heavy and cow-like in her flowery pink nightdress – a note of self-mockery here. She moves towards the child, A reading of the poem whose open mouth is ‘clean as a cat’s’. This startling image suggests the The opening image creates a warm, loving mood. The speaker addresses delicate pinkness of the child’s mouth. the child directly, affirming that she was conceived in love, set in motion ‘like a fat gold watch’. The tone is tender and humorous. The mother then As morning breaks, the single cry changes to a ‘handful of notes’, echoing recalls the infant’s birth, her first cry establishing her ‘place among the the ‘bald cry’ of stanza 1. The image of the ‘vowels [rising] like balloons’ elements’. suggests the beauty of the sounds and adds a note of playfulness.

The new parents talk of her arrival, magnifying it, but they also feel Imagery threatened by it. The world is a ‘drafty museum’ and this ‘statue’ in its Plath’s images are remarkable for their clarity and unexpectedness. Highly ‘nakedness’ is vulnerable, making them aware of their own vulnerability: concrete, often drawn from ordinary, everyday things, they catch the ‘Shadows our safety’. The ‘bald cry’ brings a change of scene, from reader unawares. The ‘fat gold watch’ of stanza 1 is simple but vivid, witty the intimacy of lines 1–2 to the chilly world – the ‘museum’ – where and unusual. Its marked rhythm is emphatic:

464 new explorations sylvia plath morning song

¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ action, the ‘bald cry | [Taking] its place among the elements’). However, like a fat gold watch. this changes in stanza 2: the world is now cold – ‘a drafty museum’ – and the adults seem dwarfed by the place. Their ‘voices echo’, they are blank The description of the world as a ‘drafty museum’ and new babies as as walls and their safety is threatened. Why? Does the baby’s ‘nakedness’ naked statues is a most unusual image, one that makes the reader think. make them feel more vulnerable? Or perhaps the new arrival reminds It is an image she has used before: it suggests a world that has held on to them that they are now an older generation, facing death? its past, storing events, people, everything that makes up our life – not a very comfortable place, but perhaps not unsafe for the ‘New statue’. The sense of unease becomes even stronger in stanza 3. The speaker Imagery is effective in contrasting the infant’s lightness and delicacy and seems to feel that she has nothing to offer the infant: she is mirrored in the mother’s clumsiness and heaviness: the baby’s ‘moth-breath | Flickers’ the child for a while before being slowly effaced by the passage of time. (notice the lightness of the sounds as well as the delicacy of the image), her ‘clear vowels rise like balloons’. The mother, however, is portrayed as These feelings of dislocation, unimportance and impermanence are homely and a little clumsy: she stumbles ‘cow-heavy’, swathed in a ‘floral quickly dispelled by the present moment, evoked vividly in stanza 4. The … Victorian nightgown’. baby’s gentle breath, the rose-patterned room and the watchful mother in her old-fashioned nightdress create a scene of warmth and intimacy. Imagery is also central to the contrast between the first three stanzas and the last three. There is a conscious development in animation: watch, The remaining stanzas reflect the growing feeling of connectedness statue, walls, mirror and even cloud are inanimate objects, just things, between mother and child: one cry brings her to the child, whose mouth is incapable of independent activity; moth, cat, singer (child) and cow wide open. (mother) are living creatures, capable of acting alone. Can you suggest a reason for the change from inanimate to animate? What is the effect on The dawn breaks to the baby’s clear ‘handful of notes’. Intimacy, love, the reader? joy and pleasure dominate these stanzas. What do you think Plath may be saying here about motherhood? What is your final impression of this Feelings morning song? ‘Morning Song’ evokes a number of moods. There seems to be a placid acceptance in stanza 1 (‘fat gold watch’, the midwife’s matter-of-fact

465 new explorations sylvia plath finisterre

Finisterre Stanza 2 opens with a lovely picture of the small, delicate flowers – ‘trefoils, stars, and bells’ – edging the cliff, almost like embroidery. But the Background lightness is quickly dispelled: such flowers might have been embroidered ‘Finisterre’ (Finistère) is the French name for a region in the west of by ‘fingers … close to death’. This strikes the note for the remainder of the Brittany. It means ‘land’s end’ – the point where land gives way to sea. stanza: death is omnipresent. The mists are described as:

Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea. Plath and nature They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them. Plath wrote many poems that describe a scene or a place (landscape They go up without hope, like sighs. poems). In these she creates a vivid picture of the place described, conveying a strong sense of the atmosphere and mood of the place at a The speaker walks through them and they almost suffocate her: ‘they stuff particular time. She also frequently uses the scene described to draw the my mouth with cotton’ and leave her ‘beaded with tears’. In ‘Black Rook reader into the mood of the speaker. A number of critics have used the in Rainy Weather’, Plath also used nature as a vehicle for feelings. What is term ‘psychic landscapes’ to describe such poems. the impact of this approach?

In ‘Finisterre’, a seemingly ordinary – though wild and remote – place is The monument described in graphic terms that reflect fear, hopelessness and death. The Our Lady of the Shipwrecked, as described in stanza 3, would certainly scene actually becomes secondary to the feelings, despite the speaker’s be one reason why the souls of stanza 2 go up without hope! She is aloof, detailed, realistic descriptions. The rugged black cliffs extend into the sea, self-important and self-absorbed, ‘three times life size, | Her lips sweet which pounds them with explosive force. The comparison with ‘knuckled with divinity’. She strides towards the horizon, in love with the sea. Far and rheumatic’ hands ‘Cramped on nothing’ is striking. This is quickly from ignoring those at her feet, she doesn’t even appear to know of their followed by a series of unusual metaphors for the rocks: ‘faces of the presence. The marble sailor is distraught but gets no attention; the black- drowned’, ‘Leftover soldiers’, ‘messy wars’, hidden ‘grudges’. The poet clad peasant woman appears to feel that directing her prayers to the personifies them, creating a powerful metaphor for anger, destruction and praying sailor may be more effective than trying to establish contact with death. The mood evoked is sinister and grim. Our Lady of the Shipwrecked.

466 new explorations sylvia plath finisterre

The monument described here is of a kind not uncommon in Brittany, postcards, necklaces, toy ladies – add to the feeling of ordinariness. once a deeply religious region: a kneeling figure looking up to an upright It almost seems that in creating such a homely picture, the narrator is figure, which is looking up to heaven. (Think of the popular statues of mocking her own over-reaction to the scene in stanza 1. Our Lady of Lourdes.) What impression do you form of Plath’s response to this monument? Another ironic – and humorous – contrast is that between the ‘toy ladies’ and Our Lady of the Shipwrecked. They are miniature ladies, made from Irony fragile shells – ‘trinkets the sea hides’ – with no claim to anything other There is considerable irony in the description of Our Lady of the than prettiness. She, on the other hand, is gigantic, made from marble Shipwrecked. The statue to whom people pray understands nothing. and is associated with God – ‘lips sweet with divinity’. However, she offers Her love is for the ‘beautiful formlessness of the sea’, the source of the no comfort to those who pray to her, whereas the shell ladies are pretty – shipwrecks she was erected to protect against. She dominates the scene, and available to those who wish to buy them. taking the narrator’s – and therefore the reader’s – attention away from the underlying horrors of the earlier stanzas. The conclusion seems to be deliberately jaunty: ‘These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.’ What is the impact of the tone here? Her pink-tipped cloak, her sweet appearance and her love for the sea seem wildly inappropriate when compared with the doom-laden bay. Imagery And how can she love something that has such hideous secrets and hides The strong visual imagery that is a feature of Plath’s poetry is evident in grudges? Plath is setting up an ironic contrast here. How effective do you ‘Finisterre’. Her ability to create ‘startling, beautiful phrases and lines’ (Ted think this is? Hughes) is rightly celebrated. Here, the promontories of rock are:

… the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic, There is humorous irony in the final stanza in the contrast between the Cramped on nothing. Black chatty peasants, with their commercial stalls, and the ancient grudging Admonitory cliffs rocks of stanza 1. The only reference the stallholders make to the headland is rather offhand: ‘the Bay of the Dead down there’. The name, Dark underwater rocks ‘hide their grudges under the water’. The notion however, alerts the reader to one possible explanation for the gloom that mists ‘bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them’ is a of the opening stanzas. It also conveys how ordinary it is to those who remarkable description of the effect of fog. make their living from tourists. The trinkets on the stall – flapping laces, 467 new explorations sylvia plath finisterre

Can you identify images that you find particularly striking? What is their impact?

Sound effects The poem is written in nine-line stanzas, a heavy, formal structure that is particularly appropriate for conveying the weighty terrors of the opening stanzas. The language too is heavy and forceful, with harsh sounds: ‘admonitory’, ‘knuckled’, ‘gloomy’, ‘dump of rocks’, ‘sea cannons’, ‘budge’, ‘grudges’. Harsh k and g sounds echo through it, as do long vowel sounds: ‘exploding’, ‘faces’, ‘drowned’, ‘gloomy’, ‘old’. The pounding rhythm of these lines echoes the pounding of the cannoning sea.

Contrast this with the lightness of stanza 4. The same nine-line stanza is used, but the effect is quite different. How does the writer achieve this? Look at colour, sound effects, rhythm, line length and use of dialogue.

Themes A rather grim seascape The failure of formal religion to answer people’s needs Hidden unhappiness and hopelessness Fear of the unknown

Concluding note In general, ‘Finisterre’ is a remarkable recreation of a scene and of a mood. The narrator’s progress through the place is reflected in what she sees, hears and feels: sea, sounds, weather, rocks, flowers, monument, stallholders. All of it is coloured by Plath’s unique imagination. 468 new explorations sylvia plath mirror

Mirror loved to look well, enjoyed dating and wanted to marry, have a home and Commentaries on ‘Mirror’ are immensely varied. At one extreme it has have children – but not at the cost of her writing. From early in her life she been described as ‘silly adolescent scribbling which simply informs the returns frequently in her journals to her fear that marriage would oblige reader that Plath is like everyone else, searching the reaches for what her to bury her creative genius in order to attend to the daily round of she really is’ – an unusually dismissive attitude. At the other extreme it housework and baby-minding, which was the lot of most married women is considered to be a wonderfully complex meditation on the conflict in that era: between woman as creative writer and woman in the socially acceptable Will I be a secretary – a self-rationalising housewife, role of wife, homemaker and mother. In between there is a wealth of secretly jealous of my husband’s ability to grow opinions. intellectually & professionally while I am impeded – will I submerge my embarrassing desires & The variety of interpretations shows how ‘Mirror’ touches the life aspirations, refuse to face myself, and go either mad experience of many people. Ironically, the poem has become a mirror or become neurotic? in which each reader sees his or her concerns reflected – making one wonder if this was Plath’s intention. Women writers had an even harder struggle than most: their work was often seen as ‘nice’, a neat accomplishment – but not necessary. These Before you read the following notes it would help you if you were to arrive concerns may have helped to inspire this poem. at your own understanding of what Plath is saying. It might be useful to make notes about your response to the poem as a whole or to individual A reading of the poem images or ideas. The ‘I’ persona of stanza 1 is identified as a mirror only through the title and the named functions. Without the title, this stanza would read like Background a children’s riddle poem. The reader, however, has little difficulty in In her personal life, Sylvia Plath frequently questioned who she was. guessing the identity of ‘I’. How much of the poem would you need to Expectations for a young woman in the late 1950s were limiting: read to identify it? appearance was important, as was marrying suitably and being a good wife, homemaker and mother. For Plath, with her fierce ambition to be Having identified itself as a mirror, it then informs the reader in stanza a successful writer, such a world was deeply threatening. She certainly 2 that it is a lake. The shift in meaning forces the reader to question the

469 new explorations sylvia plath mirror

other elements of the poem. This duality (doubleness) is echoed in many away, escape what she sees or suspects by looking ‘to those liars, the places and adds to the difficulty of giving a definitive reading. candles or the moon’.

Stanza 1 seems clear and unambiguous at first reading. Short, simple The ‘truth’ follows her – ‘I see her back, and reflect it faithfully’ – and her statements set out the precision, truthfulness and objectivity of ‘I’. ‘tears’ and ‘agitation’ are the mirror’s reward. Despite this, she returns: However, these statements raise many questions when examined closely. the truth she finds in the mirror is important to her. ‘Each morning’ in the Why does a mirror need to explain that it is without preconceptions, mirror she sees her face, sees that she has ‘unmisted by … dislike’, ‘not cruel, only truthful’? If it is as objective and exact as it claims, why does it ‘think’ (an inexact statement) that a wall drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman could be ‘part of [its] heart’? Can a mirror have a heart? How does this fit Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. in with its own notion that it is exact? One simple interpretation of this is that she sees her youth drowning Perhaps because of these contradictions and the almost childlike and watches with horror the approach of old age, which she views as certainties, the tone of this stanza is light and breezy. The wittiness of the monstrous, ‘a terrible fish’. riddle format, the precise details, the simplicity and the fast rhythm all add a humorous note. Even the self-importance of the mirror – ‘a little god’ – This raises other questions. Why drowning? This implies suffocation, is amusing, as is the wordplay on ‘I’ and ‘eye’. sudden loss, not the gradual fading of youth. The ‘old woman’ and the ‘terrible fish’ are terrifying – and certainly don’t come from the mirror. The opening statement of the second stanza – ‘Now I am a lake’ – adds They rise up from the murky depths of the lake, the darkness, the reaches a new dimension, causing the reader to revise the first reading of stanza of the woman’s subconscious. 1. Is the mirror choosing an image to describe itself as it is in the mind of the woman who ‘bends over me’? This woman is not just looking at the The frightening truths that rise from the depths are what the woman superficial reflection: she is ‘Searching my reaches for what she really is’. A meets when she searches for ‘what she really is’ – her true identity. This is silver, exact, four-square mirror has no reaches: it is flat, two-dimensional. not the pretty, docile, smiling, youthful woman that society admires: it is It can only reflect back the surface image: there is no depth, no murkiness, something frightening, dark, ugly, terrible – and true. no darkness. Yet the woman sees something there that makes her turn

470 new explorations sylvia plath mirror

Themes In several of Plath’s poems she presents a double image, two sides of a Knowing oneself person: in ‘In Plaster’ (1961), for example, the speaker – the body encased Ageing in plaster, a metaphor here for the inner self – talks about the plaster cast Identity: the double self that she has had to wear and recognises its whiteness, its coldness and Fear its utter dependence on what it encases. When the clean white plaster is The human condition removed this ugly, hairy, old, yellow person within will be revealed, but the Two-sidedness speaker is determined to ‘manage without’ the plaster. In this way, what appears clean, bright and pleasant is in fact only cheap plaster; the true A poem is not necessarily part of the life story of the poet, nor of those self may be ugly – but it is the real self. around her; the ‘I’ persona is not the poet narrating her life experiences. However, those experiences inform the poet’s work; they are the raw I used to think we might make a go of it together – After all it was a kind of marriage, being so close. material from which she shapes her poetry. Therefore, you may find it Now I see it must be one or the other of us. helpful when studying this poem to look back at Plath’s life. She may be a saint and I may be ugly and hairy, But she’ll soon find out that doesn’t matter a bit. Of particular relevance to ‘Mirror’ is the fact that Plath spent many years striving to achieve high ambitions: a consistent ‘alpha’ (A grade) pupil What similarities do you see between this and ‘Mirror’? through school and university, she always strove to give her best. It often appears, though, that she judged her best not just by her own very high Revealing one’s true identity standards, but also by the far more unpredictable standard of winning A committed poet, Plath knew the importance of speaking from the the recognition and approval of others. This was true of her work and heart. But speaking from the heart means saying things others might of her life: she seemed to need constant affirmation of her worth. One not approve of or expressing socially unacceptable feelings. It means consequence of this was a pleasant, smiling appearance, the ‘all-American revealing one’s true identity and risking rejection. ‘Mirror’ could be read as girl’ image – ‘a maddening docility’, according to Robert Lowell, whose an expression of this conflict. writing class she attended – which often concealed so-called negative emotions such as anger, disappointment, resentment, jealousy and hatred. At this time in her life, Plath’s style and subject matter were undergoing a change, which eventually gave birth to her most powerful and

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controversial poems, many of which voice sentiments that a lot of people experience but don’t talk about.

The mirror could be seen as a metaphor for her ‘golden girl’ image – silver, exact, reflecting back what others projected, not creating any controversy. But the lake has hidden depths, and when these are searched, murkiness, darkness, terror and ugliness are revealed – and the demure young lady is drowned. This mirror therefore has a bright side and a dark side, like Plath herself – like all who share the human condition.

472 new explorations sylvia plath pheasant

Pheasant Returning to the present, she captures its appearance in a few graphic words – ‘green and red’, ‘a good shape’, ‘so vivid’, ‘a little cornucopia’, Background ‘brown as a leaf’ – as it ‘unclaps’ its wings and flies up into the elm, where it ‘Pheasant’ is a wonderful evocation of the beauty and vitality of a bird that ‘is easy’. is under threat of death. Read it through a few times just for enjoyment. Get a sense of the speaker’s attitude to the bird (note how this is The narrator feels that she is the trespasser: she disturbed the pheasant as conveyed). Her relationship with ‘you’ also colours the poem; the tension it sunned itself in the narcissi. She turns again to ‘you’, pleading once again generated by the opening lines is sustained to the end and underlined for its life: ‘Let be, let be.’ by the closing plea. Pay particular attention to her use of clear images, precise detail, language, colour and contrast to paint a picture of what she Voice sees now and remembers from last winter. One strength of this poem lies in the personal voice of the narrator. It is as if the reader is looking in on a moment of her life – eavesdropping A reading of the poem on her words to ‘you’. The tone is intimate, immediate. Her plea is clear The opening line is the narrator’s heartfelt plea to ‘you’ not to kill the and unambiguous: ‘Do not kill it.’ Her response to the pheasant is equally pheasant this morning, as he had said he would. The pheasant is pictured immediate: it rings absolutely true; there is no doubting the sincerity of in strong, visual language: the narrator is startled by her admiration. Can you pinpoint how this effect is achieved?

The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing The pheasant is described in a concrete, detailed manner. There is indeed nothing ‘mystical’ about it: it is so vivid, so alive that this alone should Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill. be reason enough to let it be. Plath captures the vividness in a few well- chosen details: movement (jut, pacing, unclaps), colour (dark, green, red, She values it for its sheer beauty, its vitality. The bird seems to her to be brown) and shape (print of its big foot, tail-track). Its very sense of being at home on the hill: ‘simply in its element’. It is kingly: visiting ‘our court’ at home here ‘gives it a kingliness’: it paces the hill, ‘in its element’, visits (possibly a play on the name of Plath’s home, Green Court). Last winter them and settles in the elm where it ‘is easy’, making the narrator feel she it had also visited during snowy weather, leaving its ‘tail-track’ and its large trespasses ‘stupidly’. footprint, which differed from the ‘crosshatch’ of smaller birds.

473 new explorations sylvia plath pheasant

Her statement that ‘it isn’t | As if I thought it had a spirit’ suggests the idea on three-line stanzas, where the first and third lines rhyme. Often the that it does indeed have a spirit, that she feels some mystical connection end-sound of the second line becomes the rhyme of lines 1 and 3 in the with it. Everything she says gives the impression that it has a superior next stanza and so on, creating the sound pattern aba, bcb, cdc, etc. The claim to this place and a right to live. stanzas are therefore interlaced.

Mood This verse form is an effective one for building a narrative: it creates a The pleas that open and close the poem suggest tension between ‘I’ and series of short, interlaced vignettes. In this poem each stanza traces some ‘you’. Her spirited defence of the pheasant is sparked by her recollection aspect of the pheasant’s appearance or its actions, with the grammatical that ‘You said you would kill it this morning’. The abruptness makes the sentence often carrying the thought through the break into the next statement sound like an accusation. stanza. This creates an almost casual flow, despite the formal structure of the poem. These words, and her defensiveness, suggest another scene not described here. Why has ‘you’ threatened to kill the bird? Why are they in conflict Rhyme about it? Do the final words suggest defeat or victory? While there are A glance through the poem will show that terza rima is used consistently, no answers to these questions in the poem, looking at the possibilities can though the rhymes often depend on consonance (rhyming final help you to determine the tone of the poem. consonants) rather than on the more traditional and more obvious end- rhyme. The effect of this muted rhyming pattern is a subtle music, an Themes effect Plath strove to achieve in all her poetry. The singing quality of the Tension poem is helped by her use of assonance and repetition. Again, a quick The rights of wild creatures look at any stanza reveals examples. In stanza 1, for example, there is: The mystery of beauty kill it this morning. Technique … kill it. It startles … still Verse form The verse form of this poem is terza rima, a form that Plath used Can you find other examples? frequently. This is an Italian term meaning ‘third rhyme’ and it is based

474 new explorations sylvia plath pheasant

Rhythm Pay attention to the ‘voice rhythm’ of the lines: the way many lines echo the rhythm of normal speech. While this creates an impression of ease and simplicity, it is in fact a highly skilful achievement, requiring mastery of technique.

Style While Plath’s attention to technique is evident when one studies ‘Pheasant’ closely, it does not stand out or impose itself on the reader. Here, form serves the content: it draws attention to what the poet is saying or adds to the beauty of the poem. It is not simply an end in itself.

Compare this with her technique in earlier poems, such as ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’. Can you explain the difference? A look at the poet’s level of engagement with her topic might be a good starting point.

475 new explorations sylvia plath elm

Elm ‘Elm’ is a complex poem. It is perhaps best to listen attentively to it several times to tune in to its deeply felt emotions, its energy. Try not to Background concentrate too much on understanding or interpreting individual lines Sylvia Plath dedicated ‘Elm’ to her friend Ruth Fainlight, an American or stanzas, but rather, respond to the general effect, the rich images, the poet. sounds, the rhythm and above all, the feelings that infuse it.

This is one of the first poems in which the distinctive voice of Plath’s later A reading of the poem poetry is heard. She always drew on her own experiences for material for The speaker seems to be quoting the words she imagines the elm is her poems, but these late poems reflect a level of intensity not found in directing to her. The elm – speaking as ‘I’ throughout – taunts ‘you’, the ‘Finisterre’ or ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’. They also have a freedom, speaker, the source of the fear released in the poem, for her fear of the a lack of constraint and natural flow quite unlike the careful patterning of unknown. ‘I know the bottom … I do not fear it’, she claims – unlike ‘you’, her earlier poems. who fears it. ‘You’ hear the sea – or perhaps the voice of nothingness, a voice she is familiar with since her madness. Some critics have linked the deep fear and rage expressed in ‘Elm’ with the growing tensions in Plath’s marriage at the time of writing. These ‘You’ foolishly seeks love – a ‘shadow’ that has galloped away. The elm will possibly triggered a renewal of the unresolved grief caused by the loss mimic that galloping sound all night, driving you to near-death: ‘Till your of her father at the age of eight and of the depression that had caused head is a stone, your pillow a little turf’. her to have a nervous breakdown at the age of 20. Part of the treatment for depression at that time was electric shock treatment, most probably The taunting voice of the elm then describes some of the nightmarish the source of the image of scorching, burning filaments used here and in horrors she knows, horrors that suggest a nervy, exhausted state: other poems. The sound of poisons, rain, ‘this big hush’, and its fruit, ‘tin-white, like arsenic’ But it is important to emphasise that while these factors clearly influenced Sunsets – atrocities that scorch ‘to the root’, making its ‘filaments burn Plath’s choice of theme and style, she is not writing about her life. A poem and stand’ is an artistic creation, a work of art, which may be inspired by external The wind, a destructively violent force that leaves nothing unharmed, events but is not a documentary about those events. will ‘tolerate no bystanding’, causing the elm to ‘shriek’

476 new explorations sylvia plath elm

The merciless moon, a symbol of barrenness, whose cruel radiance The elm too seems to feel bereft (or possibly angry?): ‘I agitate my heart’. burns; when freed from the elm, this moon is flat – like a woman who She now changes from the confident, knowing, fearless voice of the early has had ‘radical surgery’. stanzas to a fearful, petrified being, ‘incapable of more knowledge’. This sounds as if she knows at some level what she could learn (does, in fact, The frenzied violence of the verbs – scorch, burn, stand, break up, fly, ‘know the bottom’) but does not want to truly understand. shriek, drag, scathe – eases off in the next stanzas. The elm challenges ‘you’ for releasing the bad dreams that now ‘possess and endow me’. The The cry, the ‘dark thing’, is now a face, ‘So murderous in its strangle of distinction between ‘you’ and the elm – so clear at first – is blurred. ‘You’ branches’, a creature whose ‘snaky acids hiss’ and freeze the will. The elm now seems to inhabit the elm – perhaps it is the dark, fearful side of the is now struggling with ‘isolate, slow faults’, which are self-destructive and elm. potentially fatal: ‘That kill, that kill, that kill’.

The elm turns from external violence to inner terror – a ‘cry’ that Language Plath’s language in this poem is extraordinarily rich. The opening is … flaps out simple and direct: ‘I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. tap-root’. Indeed, many lines in the poem are written in the same simple, unvarnished style: She feels a terrifying ‘dark thing’, with its ‘soft, feathery turnings’, that sleeps in her, something that is also wicked, malignant. These ‘soft, Love is a shadow. feathery turnings’ sound even more sinister than the wild violence of the earlier stanzas. This is rain now, this big hush.

I let her go. I let her go Silent inward terror gives way to a less claustrophobic tone. Looking outwards again, the elm watches ‘Clouds pass and disperse’. They may be I am terrified by this dark thing ‘the faces of love’, and – like the love that went off like a horse in stanza That sleeps in me; 3 – they are irretrievable, gone forever. The taunting voice that earlier mocked ‘you’ for her need for love has changed. Its snaky acids hiss.

477 new explorations sylvia plath elm

It is this directness that strikes the reader most forcibly on a first reading. The elm features in a number of her poems, including ‘Pheasant’ – the The tactile quality that is so often noted in Plath’s poetry is evident here: bird settled in it, ‘easy’. In ‘Elm’, however, there is no ease. Indeed, the words like ‘stone’, ‘turf’, ‘arsenic’, ‘burn and stand’, ‘scathes’ and ‘soft, first draft of this poem opened with the lines ‘She is not easy, she is not feathery turnings’ evoke things we can feel or hear or touch or taste. peaceful’. Every line of the poem contains concrete language – words, phrases and images that pile up to create a vibrant and powerful effect. It is as if each Many of the images used here recur in other Plath poems: sea, horse, sensation, each feeling, each moment described is etched out. This has a moon, scorching, clouds, acid, colours. By reusing the same images powerful impact on the reader; the effect is cumulative, until the final throughout her work, she has created a series of symbols that echo and link up with each other, gaining an additional force from repeated use. … isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill. Themes Like ‘Mirror’, ‘Elm’ has been read and interpreted in innumerable ways. Imagery Some themes are: The ‘stigma of selfhood’ (Plath wrote these words at the top of the While her experience is conveyed through metaphors, first draft of this poem) – the awful fear of being oneself these are not used for their cleverness. The images used are powerful, conveying depth of feeling in Despair and frustration richly evocative terms. Re-examine the images that The paralysis of fear you find most striking. Notice the sparseness of the The loss of love language: many of the statements are simple and Jealousy clear, depending on strong verbs and nouns for their Dissatisfaction impact. The central metaphor, the elm, is drawn from her immediate surroundings. The house in Devon was The threat of madness overshadowed by a giant wych-elm, flanked by two Exhaustion others in a single mass, growing on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound. (Ted Hughes)

478 new explorations sylvia plath elm

Technique rereading it several times will enable you to tap into the energy and the Form powerful emotions that infuse it. The close observance of writing rules – technique or form – sometimes made Plath’s poems seem over-controlled. As her work developed she moved away from such tight control towards a freer style. ‘Elm’ is a good example of her success in overcoming what she herself called a ‘clever, too brittle and glassy tone’, a move that enabled her ‘to speak straight out, and of real experience, not just in metaphorical conceits’. It is remarkably open and intense, reflecting feelings that come from the deepest self.

Rhythm and rhyme Written in tercets (three-line stanzas), this poem flows with the poet’s feelings. There is no attempt at a rhyming scheme. What difference do you think this makes? The lines are free-flowing and varied in length. Can you suggest why this is?

There is, however, consistent use of internal rhyme: assonance, alliteration, repetition. Even in its wildest moments, this poem sings. Commenting on her later poems, Plath said, ‘I speak them to myself … I say them aloud.’ Can you find any evidence of this attention to sound effects in ‘Elm’? Listen to it again and pay close attention to the impact of sound effects, sentence length, one-liners and direct speech.

Note This poem benefits from repeated readings. Trying to make sense of each individual line or stanza will only confuse you. Listening to it and

479 new explorations sylvia plath poppies in july

Poppies in July seems to distress her. It’s not that she is not in pain: she just can’t feel it, which brings its own anguish. A reading of the poem The first part of ‘Poppies in July’ presents the physical appearance of the She turns from the appearance to the hidden properties of the poppies poppies: their intense red colour, the wrinkly petals, their light, flickering in the second part of the poem – their ‘fumes’, their ‘opiates’ (opium is movement in the wind, their ‘Little bloody skirts’. However, the metaphors extracted from the seeds of the white poppy), which can cause sleep, used go well beyond simple description: the poet is indirectly telling a oblivion. She longs for the ‘Dulling and stilling’ state they could induce in story rather than merely describing flowers. her.

First, the poppies are associated with fire – usually a metaphor for The red poppies, a symbol of life, colourful and vivid, could help the vitality or life force in Plath’s poetry. Here, the fire is like ‘hell flames’, speaker to escape into the dull, colourless world of oblivion, away from normally connected with intense pain. However, the speaker does not the exhaustion caused by the intensity of life, by the agony of just being. know whether they hurt her: ‘Do you do no harm?’ They do not burn the She longs for non-being. speaker – or if they do, she doesn’t feel the pain. This suggests a state beyond pain, a sense of numbness. She is exhausted; this may be caused Tone by the sheer vividness of the poppies. There is a strong contrast between the vividness and vitality of the poppies and the dull, lacklustre mood of the speaker. She watches them, They are fully alive, but she is apparently unable to experience life. They sees their ‘flames’, but ‘cannot touch’ them; even though she puts her seem to plunge her into despair at something that is happening to her in ‘hands among the flames’, ‘Nothing burns’. She feels exhausted simply her life. Her pain is underlined by the references to blood: they look like watching them: her mood seems directly opposite to the mood she ‘the skin of a mouth. | A mouth just bloodied’ or ‘Little bloody skirts’. attributes to the poppies.

The flowers are personified, given human characteristics. The ‘I’ persona She gives the impression that she can’t participate in life – can’t bleed, can’t be like the poppies, it seems: she can’t feel their burning, share their can’t sleep, can’t ‘marry a hurt’. These lines suggest the feeling of vitality. She is not fired by any life force or vitality. She can’t bleed: ‘If my desperation that leads her to yearn for oblivion: mouth could marry a hurt like that!’ Even her state of not feeling pain

480 new explorations sylvia plath poppies in july

Dulling and stilling. recreate or suggest a scene in the drama of tensions within her life – a scene involving suspicion, hurt, jealousy and anger. But colorless. Colorless. Reread the three of them together and note how the mood of the Background speaker seems to progress. In ‘Pheasant’ she is quite rational, though ‘Poppies in July’ is one of a series of poems in which the ‘I’ persona turns in fearful for the pheasant. Her plea is logical and ordered and based on very on herself, dealing with some deep-seated grief; she does not disclose the ordinary claims: the beauty of the pheasant, its kingliness, colours, its right source and nature of this, but the feeling is strongly conveyed. She longs to be in this place. At the same time, the reader is aware of her tension for oblivion but does not explain why. However, on reading the poem we right through the poem and of the note of possible surrender in the final get the sense that life itself is too much for her. line: ‘Let be, let be.’

A companion poem to this one, ‘Poppies in October’, written some In ‘Elm’ the speaker has lost love; it has galloped away and is irretrievable. months later, is quite different in tone. Here, the blazing red of the The anguish experienced is expressed in a series of harsh, brilliant poppies – ‘brighter than sunrise’ – metaphors conveying deep feelings of rage, terror, anguish and finally exhaustion. is a gift A love gift Utterly unasked for. ‘Poppies in July’ reflects that same exhaustion: the vividness and movement of the flowers make the speaker feel exhausted. There is a This underlines the sense that it is not the poppies that generate the sense sense of deep pain: ‘hell flames’, ‘mouth just bloodied’, ‘bloody skirts’. She of grief and hopelessness, the desire for oblivion: it comes from within the longs for oblivion, for non-being. speaker; but it is only temporary.

Comparing three poems ‘Pheasant’, ‘Elm’ and ‘Poppies in July’ were written around the same time (in April and July 1962). In each poem the speaker is engaging in a struggle with some threatening force beyond herself. Each seems to

481 new explorations sylvia plath the arrival of the bee box

The Arrival of the Bee Box it’. Looking through the little grid, she sees only ‘swarmy’ darkness. She considers sending them back or possibly even starving them. These The bee poems considerations don’t sound very convincing, however; she quickly goes on Over one week, in October 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote a cycle of five to wonder how hungry they are and whether they will attack her when she poems, generally called the ‘bee poems’, set in the world of beekeeping. unlocks the box. There are flowers in the garden that should attract them All five are written in five-line stanzas and they form a unit in that they away from her when they fly out. She concludes by apparently deciding move logically through the various phases of beekeeping. to free them tomorrow: ‘The box is only temporary.’

These poems grew from her own experience. Her father’s speciality was Themes bees: he studied them throughout his life and wrote two highly regarded Freedom and repression books on the subject. Given her lifelong obsession with her father, it is not Self-expression surprising that Plath should have found it an interesting topic. Indeed, one Being oneself of her earlier poems was entitled ‘The Bee-Keeper’s Daughter’. Control

After the birth of her son, Plath decided to keep bees and she turned to Metaphor the local beekeepers’ society for help in setting up her hives. Each of the Metaphor is the use of a word or phrase that describes one thing with the poems in the cycle deals with a practical element of beekeeping, drawing purpose of explaining or giving an understanding of something else. In on the poet’s initiation into this skill. But each one is also a metaphor describing the arrival of the bee box and her reactions, Plath explores a for something in life: it is as if through these poems she found a way of number of themes through a series of rich metaphors. defining her identity, coming to terms with elements of life. The bee box The story of the poem The bee box itself is presented as something solid, ordinary: a ‘clean wood The story of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ is straightforward: the narrator box’, ‘Square as a chair’ and very heavy. The language here is direct and has taken delivery of a bee box ordered some time before. She describes wholesome: even the rhyme of ‘square’ and ‘chair’ seems to underline its its appearance and also the appalling noise that comes from it. She homely quality. finds this threatening, but also fascinating: she ‘can’t keep away from

482 new explorations sylvia plath the arrival of the bee box

However, this ordinariness quickly changes. The next line brings in a Plath uses three metaphors to describe the hidden bees, each of them an sinister note, or possibly it is merely humorous: this could be the coffin of image of power and oppression: a midget or a square baby were it not for the noise coming from it. They are like tiny shrunken ‘African hands’, packed ‘for export’: black, clambering – like slaves in a slave-ship. She has power over them: she The box clearly means more to the speaker than a practical way of could free them, but wonders how. transporting bees. It immediately suggests death (‘coffin’) and threat They are like a Roman mob, safe individually but ‘my god, together!’ (‘dangerous’). Discovering that a familiar object is sinister and threatening The exclamation mark (unusual in Plath’s poems) suggests many is truly frightening: it seems to remove the feeling of safety one has possibilities. Not being an autocrat, ‘a Caesar’, she feels she can’t around everyday things. She is fascinated and frightened. It contains, control them. locks in, something she wants to keep in but also wants to release. They are just ‘maniacs’ – thus also locked away, mad, a threat to others unless controlled by someone else. The bee box can be seen as a metaphor for containment, imprisonment or repression. This repression could come from concern for outward Some critics see these as metaphors for the narrator’s voice. If the box is appearances, form, doing the right thing, trying to be what others external appearances, the bees may be seen as the speaker’s inner life, expect, to behave in an acceptable way, saying the correct words, not feelings, real self or core of identity. This true self, her authentic voice, being yourself, denying your true self. This is a form of repression, of is locked in by convention. Her repressed words are ‘a din’, a ‘noise that boxing in something so that others will accept what they think you are. appalls’, ‘unintelligible syllables’, ‘furious Latin’. Suppressed by rigid outer Remembering Plath’s concerns about her life and her art, can you see why form or convention, they are unintelligible, formless and fearsome. this seems an apt interpretation? Her dread of releasing these words and ideas is so great that she wonders The bees about getting rid of them, starving them – ‘I need feed them nothing’ – The sense of something sinister is heightened in stanza 2. The threat but the idea is half-hearted. Can you see anything in the structure of this comes from the contents of the box – the bees, their noise, their clamour, statement that might imply that she doesn’t fully mean it? their apparent anger.

483 new explorations sylvia plath the arrival of the bee box

She fears that she herself may suffer if she releases the bees (or words): Technique Wordplay and sound effects It is the noise that appalls me There are several examples of Plath’s clever wordplay and witty sound effects in this poem: the short i sound of ‘din in it’ combined I have simply ordered a box of maniacs. with the repeated n seems to mimic the bees’ buzzing; the almost I wonder if they would forget me unpronounceable ‘unintelligible syllables’ echoes the meaning of the words. They might ignore me immediately She also uses internal rhyme (square – chair – square – there) and In what way do you think she would be hurt by her own words? By her repetition (grid … grid – dark … dark – black … black). These are own poetry? By releasing her imaginative powers? effective: sometimes they underline a point or highlight a word; always they make the poem sing. Tree The narrator then imagines herself turning into a tree to avoid their anger. The five-line stanza used in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ is similar to that The reference to Daphne connects her (the speaker) with other women used in all five bee poems. There is, however, one difference in this poem: – she is not alone in her fear. The references to the ‘blond’ flowers of the there is an additional single line at the end of the poem: ‘The box is only laburnum and the ‘petticoats of the cherry’ also connect her with women. temporary.’ It is almost as if it has escaped – has been freed – from the form of the poem. How might her silence, her repression of her real self, be echoed in the lives of other women at that time? Note This is a complex and rich poem, one that will benefit from several Interpreting the poem readings. As it is part of a cycle of five poems, reading it together with the This is only one interpretation of this rich metaphorical poem. There are other four may add to your understanding. others: look back at ‘Mirror’ and ‘Elm’. Do you see anything that connects with them? Note the resemblances and the differences. As with many poems, ‘reading in’ one meaning can be simplistic, blocking the way to other possible interpretations and ideas. 484 new explorations sylvia plath child

Child world to anxiety; the conclusion here creates a strong sense of darkness, chilliness. There is a suggestion that she fears threatening forces that may A reading of the poem hurt the child. This simple poem is almost like a lullaby. The mother addresses her child, wanting to fill his eye, ‘the one absolutely beautiful thing’, with wonders. Style The tone at first is clear and bright. She longs to fill his vision with colour, ‘Child’ is written in the three-line stanza form, one that Plath used often in ducks, newness and flowers. He is like a flower-stalk ‘without wrinkle’ or her later poems. It seems particularly appropriate here. The short stanzas a pool that reflects the beauty of the world. However, the tone changes are clear and uncluttered, the rhythm quick and light. Most lines have two in the final stanza; the narrator turns away from the child and his world or three beats, giving the poem an easy, flowing movement. The theme to ‘this troublous | Wringing of hands’. She sees another world that is the are simple: love, childhood joys, motherhood and also fear and anxiety direct opposite of the light and flower-filled world of the child: ‘this dark | about the bleakness that may threaten the child, the ‘troublous | Wringing Ceiling without a star’. of hands’. The language is concrete: the narrator lists simple objects that bring joy to children: colours and ducks, ‘The zoo of the new’, flowers This could perhaps be a reflection of her fears for the child in a world that and water. Her fear is also worded in concrete terms: ‘Wringing of hands’, is often antagonistic to beauty and dangerous for the helpless. It might ‘dark | Ceiling without a star’. Compare this poem in tone, theme and also refer to her own feelings of unhappiness and depression. There is style with ‘Morning Song’. a marked contrast between the joyful, limpid quality of the first three stanzas and the dark, unlit, enclosed space of the last line. What effect does this have on the reader? What is your response to the poem?

Plath and children ‘Child’ is one of a number of poems that Plath wrote about children, in particular her own children and her relationship with them. It is an eloquent love poem, reflecting a strong connection with them and with the world she would like to show to them. However, in most of these poems the poet turns from the tender joy and lightness of her child’s

485 new explorations sylvia plath an overview of the poetry of sylvia plath

An overview of the poetry of Sylvia Plath I am a writer … I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will This is a brief look at the selection of poems by Sylvia Plath that you have make my name …’ (Letters Home, 16 October 1962) studied. The points made here represent one interpretation of her work. It is important that you develop your own response to each poem; where Her husband describes these poems equally glowingly: this differs from the suggestions given here, trust your own judgment. Reread the poem and validate your opinion. Her real self showed itself in her writing … When a real self finds language and manages to speak, it is Background surely a dazzling event. (Ted Hughes, foreword to The Plath wrote incessantly during her short life: poetry, short stories, articles, Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982) essays and one semi-autobiographical novel. Her writings were first published in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; later they appeared Reading Plath’s poems in book form. There is a widespread tendency to interpret Plath’s work as autobiographical, to read her poems as if they tell her life story. While it is She considered poems written before 1956 as ‘juvenilia’. Her first quite obvious – and probably inevitable – that a writer’s life will influence published book, The Colossus, includes only poems written after this what she writes, it is important to understand that poetry is art. Writing date, among them two of the poems you have studied, ‘Black Rook in about this issue, Ted Hughes pointed out that the reader must learn ‘to Rainy Weather’ and ‘The Times Are Tidy’. Her remaining poems were distinguish between a subjective work that was trying to reach an artistic published after her death in three collections: Ariel and Other Poems, form using a real event as its basis, and a documentary of some event that Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. did happen’.

Her last poems are generally seen as Plath’s outstanding achievement. Some critics read her later poems exclusively in light of her suicide. They Here, she truly found her voice, expressing herself in a distinctive, unique argue that she signals her suicide (intentionally or otherwise) in a number style. She was aware of this herself. While writing them, she informed her of her last poems, through various references to despair, rage, loss, mother: separation or death. That is by no means as obvious as these critics claim. Many of these poems are the work of a woman who is coming into her own, recognising her own needs, using her own voice, finding her true

486 new explorations sylvia plath an overview of the poetry of sylvia plath

self. Look back, for example, at ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. This is about What did my fingers do before they held him? facing and releasing the fears that are hidden beneath the surface – not What did my heart do, with its love? about a woman who is contemplating death. However, being a realist, she also reflected the other side of being a It is important to read the poems as they stand. Looking for signs of what mother: the drudgery, the anxieties and the level to which a mother is was to happen afterwards in her life is to predetermine how the poems bound to her child. should be read, not actually attending to the poem itself. I have never seen a thing so clear … It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart Themes and issues The writer’s identity Put on a face and walked into the world. In ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ (1956), one theme is the poet’s identity as a writer. The speaker, surrounded by wintry bleakness, longs for the Both attitudes are seen in ‘Morning Song’. The mother’s life is shadowed miracle that will transform this into something radiant. That miracle is the by the child’s arrival, but is enriched by the joy of love. ‘Child’ also creative impulse, the imagination that will change an otherwise uneventful reflects the simple pleasure she derives from her child; his eye is ‘the one period. For the speaker, this miracle was of vital importance. absolutely beautiful thing’ that she longs to fill with the beauty of the world. But there is also an underlying threat to the child’s safety, which Motherhood distresses her. Plath wrote many poems dealing with all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood at a time when writers, especially poets, rarely touched Identity on such topics. Her best-known work on the theme, ‘Poem for Three Plath frequently returned to the issue of double identity in her writing. Voices’, powerfully evokes the variety of emotions experienced by The subject of her undergraduate dissertation in Smith College was ‘The women around pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood and adoption. Her Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Dostoevsky Novels’. Her interest poems on this theme are remarkable for their lyricism (song-like quality), in what appears on the surface and what is hidden is reflected in ‘Mirror’. depth of feeling and tenderness. Here, the depths hide something frightening and sinister, something the woman would prefer to avoid but cannot escape.

487 new explorations sylvia plath an overview of the poetry of sylvia plath

‘Elm’ also deals with doubleness: the apparent calm of the elm in the Psychic landscapes opening stanzas and the hidden terrors that surface as she talks. While Plath’s descriptions of landscapes and seascapes are striking, the scene is at times simply the backdrop to the mood of the speaker. ‘Black A similar preoccupation is at the heart of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. Rook in Rainy Weather’ is strong in visual detail, but the place does The practical, square box is a simple container: apparently there are not really matter. What comes across as significant is the mood of the no mysteries here. However, it conceals something sinister, but also speaker, the sense of tentative expectancy. The landscape is almost a fascinating. backdrop. In ‘Finisterre’, the place is identified by the title. The landscape is captured in a series of wonderful images. Many of these are personified: Nature cliffs are ‘admonitory’, rocks hide their grudges, the sea wages war and Plath’s abiding interest in the world around her, her interest in nature, mists are without hope. The place assumes an atmosphere that is oddly is reflected in many poems. Her descriptions are remarkable for their human. concrete, precise detail. ‘Finisterre’ paints a graphic picture of the scene before her eyes, Technique conveying the harshness of the sea, the bleakness of the rocks, the Style delicacy of the flowers on the cliff and the effect of the mist. Plath’s style changed considerably during her career, but there are certain ‘ ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ is strong in visual details, accurately features that mark all her work: portraying a scene on a wet, wintry day. Remarkable use of language ‘Her painterly style creates graphic images in ‘Pheasant’: the bird itself, Unusual and striking imagery the flowers, the hill and elm in the background, the earlier scene where Humour the snow was marked with the ‘crosshatch’ footprints of various birds. Through unusual images, ‘Poppies in July’ captures the vivid colour Language and fluid movement of the poppies’ petals. Plath’s ‘crackling verbal energy’ is apparent in her poems’ biting precision ‘Pheasant’ reflects her stance against the destruction of nature, a of word and image. Her writing has been variously praised for its tactile concern that features in many of her poems. quality, power, incisiveness, control, taut originality and luminosity. Joyce Carol Oates observed:

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the final memorable poems [‘Elm’, ‘Poppies in July’ Imagery and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, among others] … Certain images recur in Plath’s poetry, taking on a symbolic meaning that read as if they’ve been chiselled with a fine surgical gains added force through repeated use. implement out of arctic ice. The moon symbolises barrenness, coldness and the negation of life. In ‘Elm’ it is merciless, cruel and barren, associated with pain and In her journals, Plath constantly urges herself to develop a ‘diamond- suffering. edged’, ‘gem-bright’ style. She certainly achieved this. Part of her The mirror often symbolises the hidden alter ego (the ‘other self’), as technique was to reuse certain words in many poems, which thus took in ‘Mirror’. on an almost symbolic meaning: smiles, hooks, element, dissatisfaction, The horse is a symbol of vitality. In ‘Elm’, love gallops off like a horse. vowels, shriek, horse, sea. Blood symbolises vitality, life force and creativity, as in ‘Poppies in July’. In a later poem, Plath states: ‘The blood jet is poetry, | There is ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ is a good example of her earlier control no stopping it’. of language and form. In it, the language is clear and precise, creating a The sea is often associated with undefined menace or hidden threat, series of carefully worked out pictures. as is so graphically evident in ‘Finisterre’.

‘Pheasant’ is a later example of her skilled control of descriptive language. She uses many other images, however, that are not symbolic – images The form here is less dominant and the poet’s feelings are reflected in that add to the vividness and immediacy of what she is describing. One of the personal voice that speaks throughout. The words are simple, the the most distinctive features of her work is her use of metaphors, many of descriptions are vivid and the poem is crystal clear. It is a good example of which are visual. Examples abound: Plath’s descriptive powers at their best. Mists are ‘souls’, which ‘bruise the rocks out of existence’ (‘Finisterre’). The pheasant is ‘brown as a leaf’, a ‘little cornucopia’ (‘Pheasant’). ‘Elm’ shows her powerful response to loss, pain and terror. The feeling of Poppies are ‘little hell flames’, ‘wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a despair, for example, is conveyed through a number of highly charged mouth. | A mouth just bloodied’, ‘Little bloody skirts’ (‘Poppies in nouns and verbs. July’). The bee box is ‘square as a chair’, a midget’s coffin (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).

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Bees are like ‘African hands | Minute and shrunk for export’ (‘The Humour Arrival of the Bee Box’). Plath’s humour runs through her work – sharp and ironic at times, at A life of boring regularity is like a ‘stuck record’ (‘The Times Are other times mocking and black. She uses ironic humour to challenge self- Tidy’). importance, to mock what she found ridiculous and pompous and often The baby’s mouth opens ‘clean as a cat’s’ (‘Morning Song’). to mock herself. Her crying is ‘a handful of notes’, which rise ‘like balloons’ (‘Morning Song’). ‘The Times Are Tidy’ ridicules the politicians and the life of the 1950s. The smug satisfaction of this decade was all-pervasive. Plath ironically Plath attached great importance to colours, often identifying them with contrasts this era with that of dragon-slayers and witches (created by specific attributes. The repeated use of colour to suggest certain qualities myth-makers). The rich cream – wealth and material possessions – is an links her poems to one another, giving added force to her meaning. ironic substitute for adventure and excitement. The inch-thick cream Red signifies vitality, life force: the red poppies are animated, vital, suggests fat cats ‘creaming’ it. unlike the colourless life of the narrator. The pheasant’s vitality is envisaged largely through its vivid colouring. In ‘Finisterre’, the ironic description of the monument shows how remote Green signifies the positive, creativity, life force: the pheasant is red formal religion is from the concerns of ordinary people. The giant statue and green. of Our Lady of the Shipwrecked ignores the plight of the little people Black is associated with death, anger, depression, aggression and at her feet. The introduction of the shell-toy women makes the reader destruction: the black headland that opens ‘Finisterre’ underlines the wonder whether they don’t offer more comfort than their gigantic marble sinister mood. sister. The depressed mood of the speaker in ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ is conveyed through the repetition of black and the dominating In ‘Morning Song’ she uses gentle self-irony, creating an amusing picture presence of the rook. of the mother in the small details given: she stumbles from her bed, cow- Surprisingly, white is also sinister: the white faces of the dead, the like in her flowery nightdress. white mists in ‘Finisterre’. ‘Mirror’ opens with the mirror’s unintentionally comic description of itself, giving the poem an ironic twist.

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Plath’s romanticism The enduring success and greatness of Plath’s work Sylvia Plath was a lyric poet in the Romantic tradition. She wrote poems lies in its universal appeal and in an innovative, effective presentation. Plath was the first writer in that drew on her own experience of life and explored a range of emotions, modern times to write about women with a new from love and joy to terror and despair. Like the Romantics, she looked aggressive confidence and clarity, and the first to inwards rather than outwards; her experience is gauged by what she has integrate this confidence and clarity in a sane, honest lived through. and compassionate vision.

‘Elm’ is perhaps the most striking example of this. It is one of a number of poems she wrote around the same time, expressing agonising emotions. Some of these emotions were quite ‘acceptable’, provided they were not shown too openly: the grief and loneliness expressed in ‘Elm’, for example. However, less acceptable was the intensity with which she voiced them; it was considered over the top, too revealing. She also voiced other, far less ‘acceptable’ feelings (those not talked about in public) here and in other poems: gleeful destructiveness and hatred (‘Daddy’) or intense resentment (‘The Zoo-Keeper’s Wife’).

The writer and critic Joyce Carol Oates sees in these poems the seeds of Plath’s eventual suicide. Her poems have that heartbreaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares; her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her.

Not everyone agrees with this estimate, however. Janice Markey sees Plath’s writings as life-affirming:

491 new explorations sylvia plath developing a personal response to the poetry of sylvia plath

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Sylvia Plath

1. What did you like best about Sylvia Plath’s poems? 2. Choose one poem that you enjoyed and identify what appealed to you about it. 3. In what way is Plath different from the other poets on your course? 4. Plath’s poetry reflects many facets of life. Which of these did you find most interesting? 5. What did you learn about Plath as a person from studying her poetry? 6. Is there anything you particularly like or dislike about her poetry? 7. Are the themes and issues in her poetry relevant to young people today? 8. Plath’s unique and distinctive voice has often been praised. Do you find her voice – her way of writing, of expressing her ideas – unique? 9. Is there any particular image or description that remains with you from reading Plath’s poetry? If so, identify why it impressed you.

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Questions 8. ‘Despite the seriousness of her themes, Plath uses humour to devastating effect at times.’ Discuss this statement, supporting your 1. ‘Sylvia Plath created a language for herself that was utterly and discussion by quotation from or reference to the poems by Plath that startlingly original.’ How true is this statement of the poems by Plath you have studied. that you have studied? 9. ‘Recurring themes of loneliness, separation and pain mark the poetry 2. Discuss Plath’s treatment of nature in her poems. Support your of Sylvia Plath.’ Discuss this statement, supporting your discussion discussion by quotation from or reference to the poems by her by quotation from or reference to the poems by Plath that you have that you have studied. studied. 3. ‘Plath’s poetry is a reflection of the era in which she lived.’ Discuss this 10. ‘The use of brilliant and startling imagery gives a surreal quality to statement, supporting your discussion by quotation from or reference the poems of Sylvia Plath.’ Discuss this statement, supporting your to the poems by Plath that you have studied. discussion by quotation from or reference to the poems by Plath that 4. Write a short essay on the aspects of Sylvia Plath’s poems (content you have studied. or style) that you found most interesting. Support your discussion by reference to or quotation from the poems by Plath that you have studied. 5. ‘Sylvia Plath: A Personal Response’. Using this title, write an essay on the poetry of Plath, supporting your points by quotation from or reference to the poems on your course. 6. ‘Sylvia Plath’s taut language and startling images make her poems unique.’ Discuss this statement, supporting your discussion by quotation from or reference to the poems by Plath that you have studied. 7. ‘Sylvia Plath’s poetry reflects a wide range of emotions.’ Discuss this statement, concentrating on at least two different emotions that are evident in her poetry.

493 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Notes and Explorations: Carole Scully

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Introduction sit back and allow it to pass her by. Instead, life for her is lived alertly and with attention: recognising, registering and reflecting on encounters A variety of passages with people and knowledge. For her, life is the trigger that inspires her to engage in writing her poetry. However, because she has such a rich Like very many Irish people, I grew up with Gaelic and varied life and because she lives it so alertly and with such attention, spoken a good deal at home ... I have also been lucky her poetry is filled with layers of meaning that can prove challenging to in sharing the knowledge of Gaelic literature, music, her reader. Therefore, in order to develop a method for reading and folklore, and history of my parents, my husband and engaging with her poetry as effectively and as meaningfully as possible, mother-in-law, and of many friends and colleagues. we will begin by examining some of the key life encounters with people and knowledge that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin draws on when writing her This comment from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin makes it clear that for her, life unique and thought-provoking poetry. is a world of opportunities for encounters with people and knowledge. It is also evident from reading her poetry that it is from this life, and her many Cork: Architectural images and varied encounters with people and with knowledge, that she draws Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942. She was soon joined by the ideas and images that are explored and expressed in her poetry. her sister Máire in 1944 and her brother Cormac in 1950. Her formative years were spent in Cork, so it is not surprising to find that the city of From the page devoted to her in the Staff Details on the website Cork has had an influence on her poetry. The depth of her feeling for of Trinity College Dublin, where she is a long-standing member of the city was clearly expressed in 1977 when she and the artist Brian Lalor the academic staff, we learn that she has considerable fluency in five collaborated to produce a book of poems and drawings under the title languages: French, Irish, Italian, Latin and Romanian. Furthermore, ‘Cork’ where, as Thomas McCarthy (2007) puts it, she ‘is describing her research interests are listed as literature and folklore, literature of her city with the affection of a daughter’. For McCarthy, many of the the Reformation, Renaissance literature and translation studies. Her settings of her poems are filled with the atmosphere of the ‘landscape she publications include collections of her own poetry; editorships of books knows inside out from observation and highly sensitized, remembered on aspects of early English literature, translation and censorship, and living’. Indeed, McCarthy also suggests that it was her years living in Irish women; and translations of works from Irish, Italian and Romanian Cork and the time that she spent as a student at the historic University into English. Clearly, Ní Chuilleanáin does not live life idly, content to College Cork that stimulated her awareness of architecture. Certainly,

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Ní Chuilleanáin often uses images drawn from the built world, the The language that Ní Chuilleanáin uses in her poems is deceptively world of architecture, in her poems, such as ‘Street’, ‘Fireman’s Lift’ and straightforward and conversational. It appears to use everyday words ‘All for You’. We will discuss this further when we consider her poems in natural arrangements. However, it is only as we explore the meaning individually. behind these words that we gradually come to understand that they have been used as the result of a great deal of thought and revision on Her parents: Language and meaning, folklore Ní Chuilleanáin’s part. Because of this care and effort, her apparently and poetry straightforward and conversational language actually expresses layers of Both of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s parents were clever and talented people meanings. As readers of her work, we should always bear in mind that for and through them she began to encounter much of the knowledge that her, as she explains, ‘the word is never uncomplicated, because the word she would later draw on when writing her poetry. Her father, Cormac Ó itself can be a problem. For example, if it is a word in Irish, people may not Cuilleanáin, was a noted academic who worked as Professor of Irish in understand it: if it is in Latin, it may have acquired meanings, which were UCC. He was particularly interested in languages and he encouraged not its original meanings.’ his three children to develop their language skills. Ní Chuilleanáin has described how, when she was older, her father would write letters to her Through her parents, Ní Chuilleanáin also encountered folklore, that in Irish, English, Latin and French. Interestingly, she has also commented is, the traditional beliefs and stories held by people. Her father was very on the fact that she believes that her bilingual childhood has at times left interested in Irish folklore and Ní Chuilleanáin recalls how he was ‘very her with a sense of uncertainty about her choice of the language and much in touch with certain folklore narrators’ and he ‘collected folklore, words with which to best express her meaning. This sensitivity regarding visiting places where there were folkloric phenomenon, like holy wells’. the relationship between meaning and language has developed into an Knowledge of folklore stories also came to Ní Chuilleanáin from her interest in the process of translating texts from one language to another mother, Eilis Dillon. Along with managing three children and a busy life and the implications that this has for meaning. But more importantly for connected to UCC, Eilis Dillon was a writer. Indeed, Ní Chuilleanáin has our work on her poetry, this sensitivity explains why, in writing her poetry, said that one of the factors that influenced her decision to write poetry she pays particular attention to choosing and developing words, phrases was that her mother was already writing in prose. This was probably a and images that convey her meanings as fully as possible. wise decision, as her mother proved to be a very successful prose writer, writing over 50 books, including both detective stories and historical novels. However, Dillon began her career by writing children’s stories, so

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that, as Ní Chuilleanáin explains, ‘I grew up in the sheltering presence of a begin with a story element. However, this story element does not involve mother who was an inveterate reader of folktales and deviser of stories for a complete narrative that has a beginning, middle and end. It is usually children, I knew the rules of this kind of story early.’ a narrative fragment that is a brief and incomplete story describing an incident. It is significant that Ní Chuilleanáin refers to learning ‘the rules of this kind of story’, since folktales, and their close relations, fairytales and myths, History: Family and society generally follow certain rules in the plots and characters of their stories, Her interest in folktales, fairytales and myths naturally led Ní Chuilleanáin or narratives. For example, the narratives of folktales, fairytales or myths into the world of history. After all, history also tells stories, in this case real usually involve good and evil people. There is a good hero, generally rather than imaginary, communicating knowledge about people and how male, who for various reasons, sometimes involving the evil people, they lived. As she explains, she became fascinated: ‘I think I have been sets out on a quest, or journey, to find something or to complete a task. captivated by history.’ He encounters many challenges during this quest, but he manages to overcome them. He eventually succeeds in his quest or the task that he Her love of history was further strengthened by the involvement of her had to do and frequently wins the love of a beautiful, wealthy or royal family in the struggle to achieve a free and independent Ireland. In an woman. Finally, he defeats the evil people. article in 1995, Ní Chuilleanáin described herself as:

Ní Chuilleanáin often uses images drawn from her knowledge of folklore, A Gaelic-speaking female papist whose direct and fairytale and myth narratives in her poetry because she believes that indirect descendants, men and women, on both sides, the stories that they tell actually represent and communicate important were committed to detaching Ireland from the British truths – ideas that always remain true – about how human beings should Empire ... live their lives in positive and meaningful ways. The idea of a quest or a task features in such poems as ‘The Second Voyage’ and ‘Deaths and Her great-uncle was Joseph Plunkett, one of the leaders of the Easter Engines’. There are also references to the narratives of folktales, fairytales Rising in 1916. As a child, Ní Chuilleanáin learned of the trauma that her and myths in ‘The Second Voyage’ and ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya grandmother had suffered in her life because of her family’s commitment Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009’. In addition, many to Irish freedom: ‘[She] was a sister of Joseph Plunkett, who was shot of her poems have a folktale feeling about them because they often in 1916; her younger brothers were imprisoned and her parents were

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deported to England – it was all terrible.’ Ní Chuilleanáin also remembers sharing past experiences, that is, their family history. Each time a shared how as a young girl, she was aware of the many researchers who came experience is remembered and the memory of it is shared once again, to meet her grandmother, who at that stage was an elderly lady in a this strengthening process takes place, making the family history, and the nursing home, and to record her memories. Such experiences meant that people and places that it involved, more meaningful. We can all recall Ní Chuilleanáin came to regard history not as a list of dates and facts times when the sharing of our family history was begun by someone in our unrelated to the present, but as a narrative involving real people and lived family saying, ‘Do you remember when ...?’ This level of history features in experiences that had a direct influence on the present. ‘The Bend in the Road’.

Her understanding of both the reality of history and of the closeness of Secondly, history can operate at the society level. This involves the history the connection between it and the present was further reinforced by her of the social structure of a society. The term ‘social structure’ refers to father’s stories about his involvement in the Black and Tan War and the the way in which power is divided in a society and the system of rules and Civil War. In a passage that illustrates how such stories made history come customs by which people live in that society. In her poem ‘Kilcash’, Ní alive for her, and also how Ní Chuilleanáin’s alertness and attentiveness Chuilleanáin explores the radical changes in the social structure of Irish to life experiences stimulate her to write poetry, she describes her father society that occurred in Ireland between the 17th and 18th centuries, while telling her about the time when he was ‘running away from the Black and in ‘Translations’ she explores the social structure of the more recent past Tans when he was ... about twenty or twenty-one’. He ‘described to me (the 20th century). These two poems also highlight the fact that for Ní what it felt like running away from his lorry; and he ran into a house and Chuilleanáin, history can refer to the recent past or a much more distant the lorry came and pulled up alongside the house ... He said that he never past. felt so well in his life as when he was running, so I’ve been trying to put that into a poem.’ We will return to this incident again when we consider In addition, ‘Kilcash’ and ‘Translations’ represent Ní Chuilleanáin’s view ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, as it features in this poem. that the history of Irish society influences Irish society in the present. She believes that it is necessary that we, in the present, must be attentive and Because of encounters such as these with people she knew and loved, alert to our history because it is only then that we as a society can move Ní Chuilleanáin came to see history as operating on a number of ‘towards a maturity impossible without some sense of the past’. She levels. Firstly, there is the more personal and family level, where the establishes an implied link between the traumatic effects of the changes family unit, and the individuals who belong to it, are strengthened by in Irish society in the past, described in ‘Kilcash’, and the radical changes

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caused by the Celtic Tiger in, what was at the time of the publication is poetry. I think that is the major part of it.’ However, as she goes on to of this poem, the present. Similarly, in ‘Translations’ she suggests that explain, what is clear is that there was a definite connection between the Irish society in the present must confront the injustices carried out in its social change that was taking place and the emergence of new women past before it can progress. Indeed, the poem ‘Translations’ leads us into poets in Ireland: another area that she draws on when writing her poetry: the position of women in Irish society in the past and the present. It was not by chance that a generation of women writers, of whom I am one, emerged in the 1960s, when

pressures to allow women to have a profession, to Women in Irish society and poetry control their lives, their finances and their fertility were In common with a lot of young women who were leaving school in the mounting, eventually to bring the legislative changes years at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Eiléan of the 1970s. The politicisation of women’s issues Ní Chuilleanáin’s life took a very different direction to the one that her coincided with their poeticising, and they became mother had taken. This time marked the beginning of a process of radical poetic subjects both in Gaelic and English. change in the traditional roles that Irish women occupied in society. Gradually, women began to gain greater access to education and to Later, we will consider how Ní Chuilleanáin explores the position of roles in society that were outside the home. When Ní Chuilleanáin was women in Irish society in her poems ‘Following’ and ‘Translation’. awarded a BA in English and History from UCC in 1962, a master’s degree in 1964 and, following a period of study at Lady Margaret Hall, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry received increasing attention during the Oxford, a Bachelor of Letters in 1968, she was actively participating in a 1960s, and in 1966 she won the Irish Times Award for Poetry for her historically significant time for women in Ireland and for Irish society. poem ‘Ars Poetica’. The year 1966 also marked her appointment to a Junior Lectureship in English, specialising in Renaissance literature, in This change in the social structure of Irish society also marked a change Trinity College Dublin. She has served this college in a variety of positions in the relationship between Irish women and poetry. Women poets, since then, including Head of the Department of English, College Tutor, including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, began to find their voice. It is still not a member of the Postgraduate Advisory Service’s panel of advisors and is entirely clear why there was a lack of women poets in Ireland prior to the now a Fellow Emeritus. 1960s, for as Ní Chuilleanáin acknowledges, ‘I think certain women were publishing and putting on plays, but what they were not writing it seems

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Medieval and Renaissance poetry Youth. This idea of representing abstract human emotions and qualities Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s academic work on Renaissance literature and in concrete ways is very important to developing an understanding of Ní literature from the earlier medieval period allows her to link her fascination Chuilleanáin’s poetry and we will return to it later in our consideration of with history with her focus on language and meaning. Again, she draws her individual poems. on her encounters in these areas in order to convey her meaning more effectively in her poetry. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has also expressed her fondness for the medieval approach to storytelling: ‘I like medieval narrative, the way it goes on, The medieval influence on ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’ is and on, and on, it says “and then, and then, and then, and then”.’ But this immediately obvious from the unfamiliar spellings of the words in the title. should not be taken to mean that she likes loose, long-winded writing. This title is a line taken from a poem written by the late medieval Scottish Rather, what she seems to be referring to is the way in which this style poet William Dunbar. A quest also features in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem. of storytelling used tightly written language constructed with carefully We have already discussed the quest in relation to folktales, fairytales and chosen words and vivid, concrete images to communicate layers of myths, but it also became a widely used element in medieval romance meaning. Kevin Ray describes this as ‘an intricate layering, building, in the literature. Renaissance fashion’.

Medieval romance literature told stories about love. But rather than Indeed, it is Renaissance literature that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin credits with simply describing the knight’s attempts to win the love of a lady, these influencing the manner in which she employs description in her poetry, narratives compared them to the experiences he would encounter while commenting that she shares ‘the strong belief of Renaissance poets ... in he was undertaking a quest. In this way, the story concerning an abstract the power of ... description’. We have referred to this layering of meanings emotion of love was represented in a narrative about the concrete previously in our discussion of language and meaning above and we will experience of a quest. This is known as an allegory. In the course of be addressing it again later when considering her individual poems in his quest, the knight often met real, concrete people who represented more detail. abstract human emotions or qualities. For instance, in one of the best examples of medieval romance literature that still exists today, the French ‘Le Roman de la Rose’, the hero knight meets a person, Sir Mirth, happily dancing around with dancers who include people called Beauty and

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Ireland and Italy The Irish literary scene Although Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry draws on such a wide variety of It is understandable that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin finds the need to take influences and is now popular all over the world, she does admit that it is some time away from Ireland in order to write her poetry because her life very much written from inside, and about, life in Ireland, both in the past is busy, as she encounters the many areas of her interests with alertness and the present: ‘I do write primarily for an Irish audience, which might and attention. One such area is the Irish literary scene. Initially she have certain points of reference, and a certain kind of education.’ This contributed to this with her poetry, as her writing career continued to may well be partly due to her encounters with Irish history, language and flourish through the 1960s and into the 1970s. In 1973, her first collection folklore through her parents and wider family as a child. Also, her life has of poetry, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. largely been lived in Ireland so that her focus is, naturally, on the place Her second collection, Site of Ambush, published in 1975, received a that is her home. similarly positive response and was awarded the Book Publishers’ Ireland Award. The quality of her work continues to be acknowledged and However, Italy also plays a very important part in her life and in her recognised up to the present. writing. To her, Italy is a place where ‘life is much more sensible’. Ní Chuilleanáin first went to Italy with her parents at the age of 12. She spent However, her poetry is not the only contribution that Eiléan Ní more time there in the 1960s when her father, due to ill health, was forced Chuilleanáin has made to the Irish literary scene. In 1975, she, along with to retire and her parents moved to Rome. It is not at all surprising that Macdara Woods, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson, came together Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance, appeals to her because it gives her to produce Cyphers, a literary journal that was named after a black opportunities to develop her interests in history, literature, folk customs, cat, Cypher, which in turn had been named after a series of poems by architecture and languages and for more encounters with people and Macdara Woods. Perhaps there may be some of Cypher’s qualities in the knowledge. Her poem ‘Fireman’s Lift’ draws on one of her memories of cat that features in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya time spent with her mother in Italy. Today, Italy, in the form of a house Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009’. The first edition in Umbria, provides both her and her husband, Macdara Woods, with a of Cyphers consisted of poetry alone, but in subsequent issues prose, place where writing can be done: ‘Macdara likes being there to write ... graphics and translations have been included. Happily, the journal is still in fact I think that I would never manage to write finished poetry without operating today so that, as Ní Chuilleanáin points out, ‘The black cat is in that interval of escaping from Dublin.’ her grave in the back garden ... but her name lives on.’

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Life and death fact that [her] poetry is oblique and obscure’. However, we have already The 1970s also proved important in her personal life as, in 1978, Eiléan Ní begun to develop a method for reading and engaging with her poetry as Chuilleanáin married fellow poet Macdara Woods. They have a son, Niall, effectively and as meaningfully as possible by examining some of the key who is a musician. It is his marriage that is so beautifully celebrated in ‘To life encounters, or engagements, with people and knowledge which she Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September draws on in creating her poetry. We know that in reading her poetry, we 2009’. Here again, we can see how it is her life, filled with her many and will find: varied encounters with people and with knowledge, that provides her Architectural images with the images and ideas that are explored and expressed in her poetry. Deceptively straightforward and conversational language that Indeed, this holds true even when these encounters are emotionally expresses layers of meaning devastating because they involve the loss of loved ones through death. References to folktales, fairytales and myths because Ní Chuilleanáin believes that they represent truths about how best to live life Ní Chuilleanáin’s father, who had suffered from ill health, died in 1970. The idea of a quest looking for something or a task to be completed Sadly, she then experienced the loss of three of her family members A story element in the narrative fragment, that is, a brief and within a period of a few years beginning in 1990: her younger sister, Máire, incomplete description of an incident that often opens her poems died, followed by her stepfather, Vivian Mercier, and then her mother. References to history: personal and family history and the history of Ní Chuilleanáin explains that she addresses death in her poetry because ‘I Irish society feel that I write about these things because I don’t understand them, and Irish history represented as an important influence on the present that because we don’t understand death we keep coming back to it in an effort must be confronted if Irish society is to progress to understand it, to come to terms with it.’ Her determination to live life Women in Irish society, both past and present with alertness and attention means that she must draw on her encounters Influences from Renaissance and medieval literature, particularly with death in writing her poetry, as in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, abstract emotions and qualities represented in concrete ways ‘Deaths and Engines’ and ‘Fireman’s Lift’. Poetry that is written from inside and about Ireland, past and present References to Italy Influences and ideas References to important life experiences: marriage and death Some critics have suggested that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry can be challenging to read and she herself admits that she is ‘very aware of the

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The process of writing poetry: Language and meaning consciousness and an intention on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s part that her – imagery and the persona poetry should facilitate an active engagement on the part of her reader. We can further develop our method for reading and engaging with her poetry as effectively and meaningfully as possible by briefly exploring the For Ní Chuilleanáin, writing a poem begins with waiting: waiting ‘for it process that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin undertakes in order to write a poem. to be really important to me to write this particular poem’. There then She freely admits that writing poetry is ‘something I am impelled to do, follows the first, largely instinctive, writing phase: ‘I have a sense as soon an unshaped fire demanding to be organised into a sequence of words as I get paper in my hand that I am putting words down. I think I have a and images as nearly orderly as I can make them’. The phrase ‘nearly sense whether it’s going to be a tight or a loose one ...’ However, this first orderly’ is significant because it emphasises Ní Chuilleanáin’s belief that phase of writing, once completed, is not the end of the process for her, in poetry, as indeed in life, it is never possible to achieve the perfect order but rather the beginning, as she then subjects the piece to a period of of a complete solution, of something fully learned and understood. For revision: her, there is always and inevitably an unsolvable element of mystery or a puzzling enigma in both. when I am revising, I am usually revising three or four poems at a time. I would go through one and say, ‘I have gone as far as I can with this’, and then stop and In considering her poems individually, we must be prepared to accept that go back and look at another one. in writing a poem she is not attempting to provide an answer or a solution for her readers. When in an interview with Ní Chuilleanáin in 2007 Patricia As she explains, this revision process can be ruthless: ‘There are a few Boyle Haberstroh put it to her that in many of her poems ‘once you get poems that were longer that I revised to a tighter and shorter form.’ to the centre or the core, there is still a kind of mystery’, Ní Chuilleanáin We can see that an important part of this revision process is the effort replied, ‘Oh yes, the centre is never quite there. Or if I know what is at the to tighten and shorten her writing. This is borne out of her awareness, centre, I might well choose not to say it because I don’t think that is worth considered above in the ‘Folklore and poetry’ section, that ‘the word the point.’ In many ways, it is this mystery, or enigma, at their ‘centre’ that is never uncomplicated’: that the relationship between language and gives her poems a haunting quality, so that we are drawn back to reading meaning is a problematic one. Therefore, this tightening and shortening is them again to examine once more the unresolved enigma, and by not a simple reduction in the numbers of words or the lengths of the lines doing this to remain actively engaged with them. Indeed, as will become in a poem, but rather, it is a revisiting, over an extended period of time, of clear from our brief exploration of her poetry-writing process, there is a the relationship between the words that she has chosen and the meaning 503 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin introduction

that she wishes to communicate. She does this in an effort to ensure that later in more detail in relation to the individual poems. Secondly, Ní in each of her poems, this relationship between language and meaning Chuilleanáin consciously uses her imagery to encourage the reader to can be made as ‘uncomplicated’ as possible. It is for this reason that in our actively engage with her poetry: ‘Quite often when I use visual imagery reading of her poetry we need to be constantly alert and to pay careful I am hoping that the reader will think themselves into the poem ...’ attention to every word, phrase and image that she uses because they She is not presenting her imagery to the reader as a passive observer. each contribute to the meaning that she wishes to convey. Instead, as she explains, ‘When I put something in my poetry in terms of “I see something”, I’m inviting the reader to imagine it. Similarly, if I Her revision also involves working on the imagery in the poem. The term put in something tactile, I hope the reader will respond to that ...’ Part ‘imagery’ refers to where the poet uses images that appeal to the reader’s of Ní Chuilleanáin’s careful revision of a poem’s imagery is undertaken senses in order to clarify what he/she wants to express. To communicate a to ensure that this imagery acts as an effective invitation to each reader particular aspect, such as a feeling or an impression, as clearly as possible, to become active in, and to contribute to, an encounter or engagement the poet compares it to an image or a series of images to help the reader with the poem. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has a clear view of the type of to experience and understand this aspect. For this reason, these images encounter or engagement that she expects her poem to stimulate in her are called comparative images. For example, in the poem ‘Following’, Ní reader: Chuilleanáin conveys the distress of the girl when she finds herself unable to keep up with her father in a crowd by using a series of nightmarish What I am trying to do is to suggest, to phrase, to comparative images. Comparative images are not meant to be taken find a way to make it possible for somebody to pick up certain suggestions and to give things like visual literally: the girl in ‘Following’ is not actually in the nightmare, but she clues, colours, light and darkness. Those will come is actually feeling the extreme emotion that Ní Chuilleanáin wants her together for the person, even if they don’t necessarily readers to feel. know the background. They might not be seeing what I am seeing. There are two important features about the way in which Ní Chuilleanáin uses imagery in her poetry. Firstly, drawing on her work on medieval Therefore, as readers of her poetry we must try to remain actively alert to literature, discussed previously in the section ‘Medieval and Renaissance the ‘suggestions’ in her poems and to pay attention to ‘clues’ so that we poetry’, she often uses concrete images to convey abstract emotions, can add ‘colours, light and darkness’ to them. Indeed, Ní Chuilleanáin’s as with the girl’s emotional distress in ‘Following’. This will be discussed frequent use of a non-gendered or vague, undefined persona in her

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poetry is another device that she uses to encourage her reader to become We should not expect to be presented with answers or solutions. active in, and to contribute to, an encounter with one of her poems. A We can expect some mystery or puzzling enigma in her poetry persona is a character that the poet creates and adopts for the purposes because Ní Chuilleanáin considers that there are always elements of of the poem. Although her poetry is very personal in that, as we have mystery and enigma in life. seen, she draws on her many and varied encounters with people and This presence of mystery and enigma at the core of her poems acts to knowledge in each of her poems, Ní Chuilleanáin sometimes avoids encourage us to actively engage with her poems. allowing them to become personalised to her because then her poems We must be alert and pay careful attention to the words and phrases would become records of her experiences and her feelings. As we now that she uses and the meaning that she conveys through them, as they know, she does not want this, because as she has said of her readers, have been produced following a long period of thoughtful revision on ‘They might not be seeing what I am seeing.’ By employing a persona in Ní Chuilleanáin’s part. some of her poems, she is creating a space for her reader to enter into the We should be aware that her process of revision also ensures that her poem. use of comparative images creates imagery that communicates what she wishes to express as clearly as possible, such as abstract emotions The final phase of the poem-writing process involves Ní Chuilleanáin conveyed in concrete images. She does this so that her sensory making the decision ‘to put it away for a month and look at it again when imagery will act as an invitation to us to actively engage with the I’ve forgotten the original impetus ... Then I can see if it makes sense.’ poem. Finally, she arrives at a point where she understands that it is time to end We must also understand that in her poetry Ní Chuilleanáin creates her work on a poem: ‘there is a poem, not the one I expected to write space for us to make an active contribution to our encounters with her when I began ... there may be certainty in our recognition of the finished poems by her use of ‘suggestions’ and ‘clues’ and the persona. poem, but there is also surprise’. Accepting Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s invitation Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry Why, then, should we accept Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s invitation to From our consideration of the process that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin encounter her poetry as actively engaged, alert and attentive readers? undertakes in order to write a poem, we can now complete our The answer to this question can be found in some of the comments that method for reading and engaging with her poetry as effectively and as she has made about her poetry. meaningfully as possible. We know that as readers of her poetry:

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‘I write poems that mean a lot to me but I can’t expect them to mean that Ní Chuilleanáin believes that this is what poetry can do: ‘Poetry offers to other people.’ This sums up the position that Ní Chuilleanáin adopts us the experience of entering meaning by a variety of passages.’ Her as a poet writing poetry. She does not see herself as acting in the role poetry may not offer us ready-made truths, complete answers or perfect of poet as a wise and learned prophet leading and guiding her less wise solutions, but the reading of it does give us the opportunity to create and less learned readers. There is no expectation on her part that her our own meanings for ideas that can help us to decide how best to live meaningful encounters with knowledge and people will be meaningful our lives: ideas such as ‘truth and right’. In addition, by being alert and to her readers. She is not dealing in truths about life that will provide her attentive to these meanings and by putting them into practice in our lives, readers with answers and solutions that will hold true in their lives. we can each create our own integrity. But this can only happen if we are prepared to encounter her poems as actively engaged readers, mindful However, what she does do is locate her poetry on her own personal of the influences that she uses to help her to find her own meanings and values: ‘I would never write a poem without, at some level, relating it to welcoming the space and the opportunity that she so carefully provides in my own ideas about truth and right.’ As a result, her sharing of the many each of her poems for us to be mindful of our own influences and to find and varied life encounters with people and with knowledge, which have our own meanings. become important enough for her to write about as poems, has integrity because in living this life, she tries to be always alert and attentive to what The judges who awarded Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin the prestigious Griffin ‘truth and right’ mean to her. Her alertness about what truth means to Poetry Prize in 2010 described her as ‘This beguiling poet [who] opens her is evident in such descriptions as her flight into the hills away from her many doors into multiple worlds.’ There is no doubt that when we read Ní father’s deathbed in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ and the young girl’s Chuilleanáin’s poetry, we find ourselves invited into worlds that are indeed distress and bewilderment in ‘Following’. In addition, her representations many and varied and made meaningful to her because of her alertness of life as an experience that is joyful and right, as in ‘To Niall Woods and attention to her life and to her poetry. However, once we have and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009’, and accepted her invitation, it is up to each of us to develop our own alertness an experience that is heartbreaking and horrifyingly not right, as in and attention in order to find the right ‘passages’ through these worlds so ‘Translation’, speak of the attention that she gives to right in her life. It is that we can open the door that will lead us into our own world, and to our her sense of the meaning of ‘truth and right’ in her life that enables her to own meanings. find meanings to explore and express in her poetry.

506 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin the bend in the road

The Bend in the Road him to recover. We are also told that the people in the car waited ‘in the shadow of a house’ and saw a tree ‘like a cat’s tail’, and that it was a quiet A reading of the poem place where ‘nothing moved’. However, we are not told the full story ‘The Bend in the Road’ contains a number of key elements that often with all the details, only this fragment of it. The language in these lines feature in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry: is straightforward and conversational, as if we were chatting with the Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. speaker. However, this is not a chat because we do not know who this Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers speaker is. It does not seem to be the poet but rather a persona, that is, a of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the character created and adopted by the poet. This is a very vague persona words and phrases that she uses. – is it male or female? Is it related to the child? This is not the only mystery Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to in these lines: ‘the child’ and ‘they’ are not described, nor is the relationship encourage us to actively engage with the poem. between them. Also, the tone (the emotion in the voice) of these lines is The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in oddly lacking in emotion. It is almost as if the speaker is listing objective concrete images. historical facts. This suggests that the ‘place’, when they stopped there The influence of the past on the present, in this case through a shared for the first time, did not mean anything to the people. It was simply a family history. convenient location to stop at until ‘he was better’. The use of a non-gendered, vague and undefined persona who relates the narrative fragment in an unbiased way and so creates In stanza 2, the persona explains that this incident with the car-sick boy a space for us to enter into the poem and engage in making our own happened in the past, ‘Over twelve years’ ago, and we are now in the meaning. present. During this 12-year period, a number of changes have occurred. References to important life experiences, in this instance the deaths of The people now refer to ‘the place’ as the ‘the place | Where you were loved ones. sick one day on the way to the lake’. This suggests that this place now The idea of nature as a source of calmness and consolation. means something to them because of the shared memory that they have of stopping there. It also means something to them because each time The opening six lines of this poem form the narrative fragment that acts they see this place, they are reminded of the changes that have occurred as a starting point. This narrative fragment concerns an incident when in this 12-year period. The boy is now ‘taller than us’; the ‘tree is taller’ ‘the child’ felt car sick and ‘they’ stopped at a bend in the road to allow and the house is ‘covered in | With green creeper’. The attention that

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they pay to the changes in the tree and the house also indicates that it The final line, line 21, suggests that ‘the place’ has become very has become a place that matters to them. The use of the pronouns ‘you’ meaningful to them because when they stop there in the quiet of nature and ‘us’ suggest that the people are sharing this story together, rather and look at ‘the tree’ and breathe in ‘the air’, they all remember not only like we all do with groups that we belong to, especially the family group. their shared memory of the boy being car sick but also some of their other This shared memory has become part of their shared history and in this shared memories of loved ones who have died. Thus, the connections way it connects the people together. The tone of these lines reflects this between them as a family are strengthened, as are their connections to sense of connection because it is much warmer, emotionally, than in the those who have died, because by stopping in this tranquil place that is part first section. It would also appear that this ‘place’ has become a regular of the world of nature, they can remember their loved ones’ ‘presence’ stopping point for them on their ‘way to the lake’ because they have the when they were alive. In this way their past history as a family influences time to notice the ways in which the ‘house’ and ‘tree’ have changed and their present as a family. how this bend is ‘as silent as ever it was on that day’. Imagery In lines 13–14 of the final stanza of the poem, we seem to be in the The term ‘imagery’ refers to where the poet uses images that appeal stopped car, looking out of the window at a magnificent ‘cumulus to the reader’s senses in order to clarify what he/she wants to express cloud’. However, when we read lines 15–16 it turns out that this cloud is and so make it more meaningful and memorable for the reader. To a comparative image. This is because the persona speaking in the poem communicate a particular aspect, such as an emotion or an impression, as compares the way in which the abstract memories have been ‘softly clearly as possible, the poet compares it to an image or a series of images packed’ inside the minds and hearts of the people in the car to this real, to help the reader to experience and understand this aspect. For this concrete cloud. Lines 17–20 convey to us that these memories are of reason, these images are called comparative images. loved ones who have died in a series of vivid images. Again, the use of the pronoun ‘we’ in line 20 suggests that these memories, like the memory of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin carefully uses the imagery in this poem to help the boy being car sick, have become part of their shared history and so convey her meaning. The most important meaning established by the connect them together and also connect them to the dead people. There imagery in this poem is the connection between the real, concrete car is a genuine tone of regret and sadness in lines 16–20, which indicates that journey and the abstract idea of life. This connection only becomes they all probably belong to the same family group. apparent when we have read the final section of the poem, where the persona thinks about the ways in which shared memories bring people closer together, both those who are living and those who are dead. Once 508 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin the bend in the road

we understand this, we can then see that the car journey in lines 1–12 have already considered how in this poem Ní Chuilleanáin uses the real, can be seen as representing the life of a family as they travel through concrete image of a family car journey to represent the abstract idea of a time together. This is an excellent example of the way in which Eiléan family living life. Ní Chuilleanáin’s language, although apparently straightforward and conversational, conveys layers of meaning. Another example that we mentioned was that of the real, concrete ‘one cumulus cloud’ being used to represent the way abstract memories are As a family, they experience change over the years – they change stored inside human hearts and minds. By making this comparison, Ní physically and the world around them also changes. But the best change Chuilleanáin creates a vivid image that appeals to our senses and this is the way in which they grow closer together and their relationship as a helps us to understand how she imagines memories being stored. It also family unit is strengthened. It is their shared memories of incidents from makes this a very meaningful image, so we are likely to remember it and the past that help to strengthen their family unit. Because of this, it is to think about it. good for the family to stop at times during their life together and to take the time to share their memories. Just like stopping the car at ‘the bend | By choosing a cloud, she appeals to the reader’s sense of touch: we have In the road’ helped the boy to feel better, so sharing memories help the all had the experience of walking through low cloud or misty drizzle, people in the family to feel better as a family. so we can remember how the tiny droplets seemed to dissolve as we moved through them. Similarly, the phrase ‘softly packed like air’ again Making time to remember shared memories also helps the people in the appeals to the sense of touch in that it recalls soft balls of cotton wool or family who are still alive to feel close to their loved ones who are dead. candyfloss, carefully ‘Piled high’. All these images suggest that memories This also strengthens their link as a family. In this way, a family’s past are delicate and fragile and need to be treated with care. In this way, we history can influence its present. are encouraged to actually feel what memories are like, as if we could touch them, and this makes them more meaningful and memorable to us. Abstract emotions and qualities and concrete images The phrase ‘one cumulus cloud | In a perfect sky’ appeals to the sense of In considering the influences that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin draws on when sight, suggesting the colours of blue and white, like a wonderful summer’s writing her poetry, in our exploration of her life and work earlier we day. This reminds us of days like this that we have experienced, usually examined how her interest in medieval literature led her to use the device very happy and special days, so we understand that memories can also be of comparing abstract emotions and qualities, that is, things that we happy and special. cannot touch or feel, such as emotions, to real and concrete objects. We 509 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin to niall woods and xenya ostrovskaia

To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, The influence of the past on the present, in this case through folktales married in Dublin on 9 September 2009 and fairytales. The image of a quest. References to important life experiences – in this instance, a marriage. A reading of the poem Perhaps a reference to history – in this case, family history with the ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 image of the cat. September 2009’ is clearly a poem that is connected to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s family life, as it was written to celebrate her son’s wedding. The opening five lines of this poem read like the beginning of a folktale Because of this we will notice some differences in her approach: or fairytale, as we enter into a world where two people decide to go on Unlike some of her other poems where there is only a fragment of the a ‘journey’ when they ‘both see the same star’, bringing ‘half a loaf’ and a narrative describing an incident with few details, in this poem we have ‘mother’s blessing’ with them. Of course, the poet does not expect us to a full narrative with a beginning, middle and an end to the story, based take this meaning literally. She makes this comparison between her son’s on her hopes for how her son’s marriage will develop. We are also marriage and a ‘journey’, or quest, to convey the idea that the young given specific details, such as her son’s name. couple are setting out on an adventure to find a new life together. This Again unusually, Ní Chuilleanáin does not use a persona, but speaks is a particularly charming use of imagery by Ní Chuilleanáin to describe as herself, the mother of the groom. This is reflected in the genuinely her son and his new wife beginning their married life. These lines establish personal and affectionate tone of this poem. two clear links to two ideas that she wants us to connect to the marriage

of her son and daughter-in-law: the first is to folktales and fairytales and Nevertheless, there are familiar elements here: the second is to the idea of a quest, a common event in folktales and Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers fairytales. of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the words and phrases that she uses. Lines 6–21 are the middle part of the narrative of the poem, as the poet Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to describes what will happen to the couple on their quest, that is, their encourage us to actively engage with the poem. life as a newly married couple. Ní Chuilleanáin admits that they will be References to folktales and fairytales because Ní Chuilleanáin believes journeying into new experiences and leaving their old familiar lives as two that they represent truths about how best to live life. individuals, ‘the places that you knew’, behind. She understands that this

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is rather daunting for the couple, so she reassures them by saying ‘All King of the Cats visiting Ireland and the more widely known story of that you leave behind you will find once more’. It comes as something of Puss in Boots. Given the fact that the poet is writing this poem for a a surprise when, in line 8, she explains to them that ‘You will find it in the happy occasion – the celebration of her son’s wedding – she takes the stories’. opportunity to create an amusing image of the couple owning a very special talking cat with the ability to ‘speak in Irish and Russian’ and to tell This seems to be a strange piece of advice to give to a newlywed couple: stories from Ireland, her son’s birthplace, and from Russia, the birthplace that they should read and listen to folktales and fairytales. However, it is of his new wife. Perhaps this cat may be a reference to a family cat, such based on Ní Chuilleanáin’s belief that although over the centuries such as Cypher, which we mentioned earlier in our introductory consideration tales have become regarded as nothing more than old-fashioned stories of Ní Chuilleanáin’s life and work. If it is, then this cat image can also suitable for children, they actually carry important messages about how be seen as a suggestion of the importance of shared memories that people can live life in the best way. For folktales and fairytales, no matter form a family history, which helps to create a strong family group. We where they originate in the world, always tell stories that examine the encountered this idea previously in our exploration of her poem ‘The differences between types of human behaviour such as good and evil, Bend in the Road’. true love and false love, courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal. By doing this, these tales communicate to those who are listening to them, or The Russian folktale about ‘the firebird’, a bird with wonderfully glowing reading them, which one to choose in order to achieve a life that is lived red, orange and yellow feathers, involves a journey as a prince embarks on well and in a worthwhile way. Because of this, Ní Chuilleanáin believes a quest to find the bird. The adventures or challenges that he experiences that the messages that lie in the narratives of folktales and fairytales from explore the consequences of behaving in good and evil ways. The Irish the past are still relevant to people in the present. folktale about the ‘King of Ireland’s Son’ and his quest as he meets, loses and searches for Fedelma, ‘the Enchanter’s Daughter’, also describes In lines 9–16, Ní Chuilleanáin refers to examples of some of these tales similar adventures faced by the hero. so that those listening to or reading her poem can think about the messages that they carry. There is the ‘sleeping beauty’, a good person It is interesting that Ní Chuilleanáin describes the ‘Book of Ruth’, from imprisoned in sleep because of the curse of an evil fairy, with her ‘talking the Old Testament, as the ‘story the cat does not know’. This may be cat’, representing loyalty, lying ‘Solid beside her feet’. The ‘talking cat’ suggesting that animals, such as the cat, are more directly linked to is a common character in folktales, such as the old Irish story about the the pre-Christian world that produced the original folktales than to the

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relatively more recent world of the Bible. However, what is important Imagery is that this is another story that carries messages about how to live life As we discovered earlier in our introductory consideration of Eiléan Ní well because Ruth is a young widow who, motivated by loyalty to her Chuilleanáin’s life and work, she explains that with her poetry ‘I feel that I mother-in-law, moves to a new country and courageously copes with the write about these things because I don’t understand them’. In this case, it challenges of her new life there. is clear that she fully understands what her son is doing and also what she wishes for the newlyweds in their future. Because of this, there is very little Ní Chuilleanáin’s advice to her son and daughter-in-law is clear: while that is mysterious or enigmatic about this poem. on their quest as a married couple, they should remember the important messages from the folktales and fairytales, first created in the long distant In the first lines of the poem, the imagery that is central to the meaning past, about how they should live their life together in the best way. When of this poem is established: the comparison of the marriage of her son we reach the final line of this poem, it seems natural that we should expect and daughter-in-law to a quest, such as is found in folktales and fairytales. the poet to provide an ending to her story of this young couple’s quest She uses words and phrases that suggest images often found in folktales through married life, and there is indeed one. and fairytales: ‘the same star’, ‘the point of the steeple’, ‘half a loaf’ and ‘mother’s blessing’. This comparison is continued by the imagery in lines If we have been alert and paying attention to what her carefully chosen 9–21. Here, Ní Chuilleanáin describes short scenes from folktales and words tell us about the influences that she has drawn on in the course of fairytales that appeal to our senses of sight, hearing and touch. By doing this poem, then the ending that she produces will come as no surprise. this, she encourages us, her readers, to recall our memories of stories For in each of the folktales that she has mentioned, the quest ends in the such as these and how much they meant to us when we were children. same way: the sleeping beauty is freed by a kiss from a prince who truly As a result, these images become more meaningful to us and more loves her and lives happily ever after; the prince in search of the firebird memorable. By the time we read the final line, we are very much involved meets and marries a beautiful princess and they live happily ever after; in this world of folktales and fairytales and so the poet’s use of the phrase the king of Ireland’s son eventually marries Fedelma and they live happily ‘lived happily ever after’ seems to be the perfect ending to her poem. ever after; while Ruth meets and marries Boaz and according to the poet ‘she lived happily ever after’. And a ‘happily ever after’ is just what Ní Language and meaning Chuilleanáin wishes to be the ending to the quest that her son, Niall, and Earlier in our reading of this poem we noted that we would find a feature her daughter-in-law, Xenya, have begun on their wedding day. that recurs in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, that is, straightforward and

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conversational language that expresses layers of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the words and phrases that she uses. Although we have come to understand that she establishes a clear comparison between the marriage of her son and daughter-in-law and a quest, such as is found in folktales and fairytales, we need to recognise that if we did not read this poem in an alert and attentive manner we might easily miss this meaning that Ní Chuilleanáin wishes to convey to us.

Reading lines 1–5 for the first time, the phrases and images that she uses, ‘the same star’, ‘the point of the steeple’, ‘half a loaf’ and ‘mother’s blessing’, could appear to be a little puzzling, particularly the ‘half a loaf’ and ‘mother’s blessing’. It is only when we read on with alertness, looking out for clues and suggestions, that we discover her reference in line 8 to ‘the stories’. It is this reference that helps us to understand how the phrases and images in lines 1–5 relate to the meaning that she wishes to convey to us. In this way, the layers of meaning that lie under the straightforward and conversational language of lines 1–5 are revealed to us because we have been actively engaged in the poem as readers. And as we discussed previously in our introductory consideration of her life and work, this is exactly what she would like us to do.

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The Second Voyage are mentioned in ‘The Second Voyage’. Odysseus does say that he will stick the oar into the ground but ‘as a tidemark’, that is, a marker to Background show where the tide reached its highest point. In this way, the quest in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin uses Odysseus as the central character in ‘The ‘The Second Voyage’ is driven by Odysseus himself and his personality, Second Voyage’ just as Homer does in ‘The Odyssey’. She also bases the whereas in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, the quest is constantly under the influence poem on one of Odysseus’ adventures originally told by Homer in ‘The of the gods. Odyssey’. However, in her poem Ní Chuilleanáin makes a number of significant changes to Homer’s approach to both. A reading of the poem In our reading of the ‘The Second Voyage’, we encounter a number of Firstly, Ní Chuilleanáin’s writes about Odysseus, as a character, in a key elements that often feature in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry: very different way to that used by Homer and generally by the myths of Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. ancient Greece. Instead of a fast-paced action-type adventure where it is Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers what he does that largely reveals Odysseus’ personality, Ní Chuilleanáin of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the slows down the pace so that we find Odysseus in a moment when he words and phrases that she uses. is resting and thoughtful. Because of this, her poem allows us to share Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to in Odysseus’ private thoughts and emotions so that this moment of encourage us to actively engage with the poem. reflection becomes a moment of revelation where the true personality of Unlike many of her other poems, the persona that features in the private, inner Odysseus is disclosed. ‘The Second Voyage’ is more defined and we learn more about his personality in the course of the poem. Secondly, in Homer’s version of the narrative concerning Tiresias giving The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in advice to Odysseus, Tiresias instructs Odysseus to stick the oar into the concrete images. ground and to offer sacrifices to the god of the sea, Poseidon. Having References to myths, the close relation of folktales and fairytales, done that, Tiresias tells Odysseus that he will be able to return home. which also, for Ní Chuilleanáin, represent truths about how best to live In her poem, Ní Chuilleanáin makes no mention of Tiresias advising life. Odysseus; instead, it seems that Odysseus thinks of this idea himself in The image of a quest. line 16, ‘I know what I’ll do he said’. Also, neither Poseidon nor sacrifices

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An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because Ní ‘simmering sea’. This suggests that there is a level of frustration in his Chuilleanáin considers that there are always elements of mystery and looking down into the sea’s ‘Uncertain depth’, perhaps because all of his enigma in life. This acts to encourage us to actively engage with the anger and aggression have in no way affected this world or brought it poem. under his control.

The narrative fragment in lines 1–7 that acts as a starting point for this Lines 8–15 mark a subtle but significant shift in the focus of the poem. poem offers little detail other than the information that Odysseus is in The language used in lines 8–10 becomes more emotional, with phrases a boat on the sea. Consequently, there is an element of mystery about that seem to come from Odysseus himself, as in ‘If there was a single | what is happening to Odysseus. However, Ní Chuilleanáin does this Streak of decency’. It is as if the omniscient narrator is disappearing in the deliberately as she wants to keep the focus of her poem on Odysseus, the face of the strength of Odysseus’ emotions about the sea. Suddenly, in man and his personality, rather than on the narrative, or story, in which he lines 11–15, the pronouns become more personalised with ‘we’, ‘us’ and is involved. ‘our’. Is Odysseus talking to his crew or to us, the readers? What has also happened in lines 9–15 is that the waves have become ‘they’. There is Indeed, the way in which Ní Chuilleanáin manages the focus of this now a situation that involves two groups that are in opposition to each poem is very important in adding to the dramatic effect of the poem. other: ‘we’, that is, Odysseus and those who he considers to be with him, In lines 1–7, the words seem to be spoken by an omniscient narrator, and ‘they’, that is, the waves and the sea. This has the effect of suddenly that is, a speaker who stands outside the narrative but is able to describe making us recognise that the sea is as much of a character in this poem as everything that is happening, including characters’ thoughts. This is the Odysseus. traditional technique of storytelling used in myths, folktales and fairytales. We seem to be very much in the traditional story context as we are told However, Odysseus and the sea are characters with very different qualities. that Odysseus ‘rested on his oar’, ‘rammed | The oar between their jaws’ If we look back at lines 1–15, the description of Odysseus includes anger, (that is, the waves) and ‘looked down | In the simmering sea’. Although aggression and frustration, but there is also a contemptuous quality not the large, dramatic actions of a hero, these actions do prove to be suggested in his attitude to the sea. He sneers at the sea because he does important in conveying some sense of his personality. His resting on ‘his not consider it to be a worthy adversary. As far as he is concerned the sea oar’ suggests weariness and his action of ramming the oar into the ‘jaws’ is so stupid, like ‘sheep’, that it does not understand the correct rules of of the waves makes it clear that he is angry and aggressive towards the behaviour in these situations. It does not have the ‘decency’ to submit to

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his ‘battering’ and to surrender its independence by allowing Odysseus know nothing about the sea so he will think that the oar is a ‘Winnowing and his kind to name the waves, an act that would indicate that they have fan’, a tool used in farming the land. Odysseus imagines how he will power over the waves and the sea. This attitude is often adopted by those ‘stand still’, something that can be very difficult to do in a boat on the who know that they are dealing with something or someone that they will sea, and ‘plant’ the oar into the ground to become a ‘gatepost or a never be able to control. On the other hand, lines 1–15 link very different hitching-post’. In this way, the oar will become part of the farming world, qualities to the sea. It seems to be full of life and energy, as it is ‘simmering’ a system whereby man dominates the land. Even more significantly, with ‘scribbles of weed’ and ‘slim fishes’. This is a vast, independent world Odysseus declares that the oar will also become ‘a tidemark’, that is, a that is mysterious and enigmatic with ‘Uncertain depth’, and with its own marker showing the highest point that the sea and the waves can reach. rules and codes of behaviour, suggested by shoals of fish that swim in ‘fatal Odysseus imagines a successful end to his land quest as he finally exerts formation’ to their deaths. Clearly, this is a world that Odysseus and ‘his his power over the sea by deciding where the limits of the sea are. In this oar’ do not have any power over. way, the image of Odysseus planting the oar into the ground becomes a real, concrete image of a key element in Odysseus’ personality: his In lines 16–30, the focus of the poem shifts entirely onto Odysseus. The abstract desire to exercise power and domination. Once he has done pronouns become ‘I’ as we follow his thoughts outlining his response to this, Odysseus decides that he will return to ‘organise my house’, another this world. He makes the decision that for his next voyage, ‘The Second concrete image suggestive of his abstract desire to exercise power and Voyage’, he will leave the sea and go on a quest on land, taking the oar domination. It is clear that Odysseus’ imagined land quest is a quest for with him. Significantly, the words that he uses to describe his imagined power, control and domination. land quest are all suggestive of his ability to dominate the landscape, something that he cannot do with the sea. He will ‘face the rising ground In the final section of this poem, lines 31–42, the omniscient narrator and walk away’ and on ‘Over gaps in the hills’. This is a solid world that he returns and we are back in the traditional storytelling framework with imagines moving over at will, unlike the sea, with its ‘simmering’ waves. Odysseus now distant from us again. We are told that he is still in his boat In addition, the land is a world where power can be exercised over water, on the sea that ‘still held him’. This phrase makes it evident that it is the even by birds, ‘Where herons parcel out the miles of stream’. sea that has power over Odysseus and that his only power is that of his control over the oar as an instrument of defence to make the ‘valleys of Odysseus imagines how he will stride across the land with his oar until he the ocean’ beneath him ‘keep their distance’. meets ‘a farmer’ who is his equal in courage. As a farmer, this man will

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Perhaps in another attempt to escape the truth of his situation, Odysseus from the sea, as if the sea was spitting ‘insults’ at him. This interpretation recalls some of the places that he has known on land in lines 35–40. It is implies that he has been broken psychologically and emotionally by his significant that in each of these images there are suggestions that the efforts to gain power over the sea. water does not interfere with activities or movements because it has been brought under some degree of control by man in ‘fountains’ and in a Indeed, the meanings of these two interpretations are layered in such ‘sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle’. In fact, water on the land can a way that they create a skilfully constructed image that conveys how be controlled to such an extent that it can help man by providing ways of every level of Odysseus’ being has been broken by his desire for power. moving around easily on ‘flat lakes’ through ‘rushes’ or on ‘the black canal’ In both interpretations his tears become a concrete image representing as well as to fill ‘Horsetroughs’ to water the animals that man also controls. the abstract reality of his personality: he is a man who craves power, On land, it is not only man who can live his life unrestricted by water, but domination and control and who, if he cannot succeed in gaining such also such creatures as ‘pale swans’ and, most embarrassingly of all for power, is ultimately destroyed by his own feelings of anger, frustration and Odysseus, ‘spiders and frogs’. shame.

It is at this point, in the final two lines of the poem, that Ní Chuilleanáin Themes creates an image that is both striking and dramatic in that it unexpectedly This is a dramatic poem that is packed with vivid and memorable images. reveals the truth about Odysseus’ personality: Odysseus cries. The reason The shifting of the poem’s focus adds to this drama by altering the for his tears is conveyed through the subtle but important link that is degree of connection that we have with the central character, Odysseus. made between the saltiness of Odysseus’ ‘tears’, the saltiness of his ‘sweat’ Initially we are at a distance from Odysseus as the omniscient narrator and the saltiness of the ‘sea’. However, this link can be interpreted in two tells the narrative in a traditional way. Then we find ourselves engaging ways. On the one hand, these lines could be interpreted as meaning that directly with Odysseus himself as we follow his thoughts. The poem ends Odysseus’ face was damp with his salty tears because he was crying from with us back in our distant position as the omniscient narrator returns. This exhaustion caused by his physical effort, indicated by the sweat, to control has the effect of making our close encounter with Odysseus’ thoughts the water. This interpretation suggests that Odysseus has been broken and emotions all the more dramatic. physically by his efforts to gain power over the sea. On the other hand, these lines could be interpreted as meaning that Odysseus’ face was But the question still remains: what is the theme, or central idea, of this damp with his tears that were salty, just like the sea-spray that splashed up poem? We know there is the idea of opposition between two parties in

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this poem, represented by Odysseus and the sea. We also know that interpretations of this poem have suggested that this theme can be there is the idea of the desire to gain and exercise power, control and applied to the ways in which males have historically tried to dominate domination over another. What remains mysterious and enigmatic is the females in many societies. Does Odysseus represent all that is male and life situation into which we should slot these ideas. the sea all that is female? Are the two opposing parties actually men and women? Should we slot these ideas into the conservation situation? Is the theme of this poem that much as we humans, represented by Odysseus, like to Or perhaps there is another situation that you can think of, where this think that we have control over the world of nature, the reality is that the poem will slot in neatly and the theme becomes clear. After all, this is elements of nature, such as the sea, have immense power that ultimately the opportunity that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin offers to us as readers of her man cannot control? At the end of the poem, is Odysseus shedding poetry. tears both for himself and for all human beings as he understands our vulnerability in the face of the immense power that is the world of nature?

Or should we slot it into the self-knowledge situation? In ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer, Odysseus is a hero with a flaw: hubris, as the ancient Greeks termed it. He is man who is proud and arrogantly confident of his abilities. According to the ancient Greek myths, it was flaws like these that led to the downfall of heroes and great men. So are Odysseus’ tears at the end of the poem his downfall: his realisation that his heroic powers are limited – that he is a very small man, with a smaller oar, in a small boat on a big sea? Is the theme of this poem that we should all be mindful of our limitations as human beings?

Or should we slot it into the power and society situation? Is this exploration of the desire for power, control and domination a theme alerting us to the dangers posed by such behaviour to our society? Some

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Street Although ‘Street’ is quite a short poem in that it consists of only 11 lines, it is filled with layers of meaning and an overwhelming feeling of mystery A reading of the poem and puzzling enigma. This feeling of mystery and enigma is largely due ‘Street’ contains a number of the key elements that we have come to to the fact that the narrative fragment in the poem does not offer a great associate with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry: deal of information about the narrative, or story, that the poem is telling. Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. In the course of reading this poem, we learn a little about the beginning Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers and the middle of the narrative, but there is no ending to this story and of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the so we are left with a sense of mystery or the feeling that this poem is words and phrases that she uses. an enigma, a puzzle. In addition, the fact that we learn very little about Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to the two main characters in this poem adds to this sense of mystery and encourage us to actively engage with the poem. enigma. Similarly, the narrator of the poem is a non-gendered, vague and The image of a threshold. In this poem the abstract process of change undefined persona, so this creates a space for us to enter into the poem in a person from one state to another – a transition – is represented by and engage in creating our own meaning. As readers, we find ourselves the concrete images of passing through a doorway, or over a threshold, trying to fill in the gaps in order to reach some understanding of the and climbing up a flight of stairs. meaning of this poem. This has the effect of making the poem linger in The image of a quest, although it is a very short one in this poem. our thoughts as we try out different meanings for the words, alternative An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because connections between these meanings and a selection of possible endings Ní Chuilleanáin believes that there are always elements of mystery for this poem. This is precisely the process that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and enigma in life. likes to stimulate in her readers because it encourages us to actively The inclusion of architectural images such as the street, the ‘lane’, the engage with the poem and to be alert and to pay attention to the words ‘half-open’ door and ‘the stairs’, which position the poem in a world and meanings that we encounter in it. that seems to be solidly familiar and ordinary. The use of a non-gendered, vague and undefined persona who relates Lines 1–2 of this poem seem to fit into the usual form of a standard the narrative fragment in an unbiased way and so creates a space for us introduction to a love story: we are told that a man ‘fell in love with the to enter into the poem and engage in making our own meaning. butcher’s daughter’ as he watched her pass him by in her ‘white trousers’. Women in Irish society. However, lines 3–4 ask us to reassess this view of the poem. The mention

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of ‘a knife’ dangling from ‘her belt’ is the first rather unsettling note. But it Suddenly, we are told that he reaches a ‘half-open’ door. Doorways, or is line 4 – ‘He stared at the dark shining drops on the paving-stones’ – that thresholds, often appear in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry and they are destroys the illusion that this poem is in any way usual or standard. The usually connected to the idea of transition, that is, a process of change ‘dark shining drops’, closely following the ‘knife’, are suggestive of blood, from one state to another in a person. The man is faced with this ‘half- but then her trousers are white and there is no mention of bloodstains open’ door and again, he appears uncertain. Perhaps it is an invitation on them. Perhaps these ‘dark shining drops’ are raindrops, but would to him to enter or perhaps she has just forgotten to close the door fully? she come out into the rain without a coat or umbrella? Then again, if it is There is the feeling that this is an important moment in the man’s life blood, she must have come out into the street, a public place, with a knife – that if he goes through this ‘half-open’ door both he and his life will dripping blood, so she may not be the type of woman who worries about change forever. the rain. In fact, what type of woman is she? Women in Irish society do not tend to become butchers, perhaps due to their innate natures or as a In a wonderfully vivid series of images, Ní Chuilleanáin suddenly shifts the result of social conditioning regarding what roles are considered suitable focus of the poem away from the man and onto what he sees. We see for women. However, women do become veterinary surgeons, so why through his eyes the stairs stretching upwards, ‘brushed and clean’. For Ní not butchers? Ní Chuilleanáin is challenging us to examine and reassess Chuilleanáin, stairs can also represent the process of transition. Again, the accepted words, meanings and roles here. sense is that if the man goes up the stairs he will experience change. We then see the woman’s ‘shoes paired on the bottom step’. It would seem Lines 5–11 do little to settle our thoughts. The man follows ‘the butcher’s that in her private life this woman is, as tradition would expect, a neat and daughter’ down ‘the slanting lane’. This image recalls the idea of a quest tidy housekeeper, somebody who would make a ‘good’ wife. But then we, that often features in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry. The quest in this poem is along with the man, see that each step of this ‘brushed and clean’ stairway over a short distance, but there is the suggestion that it is an important is marked with ‘the red crescent’, a series of curved arcs in red, perhaps event in the man’s life. His following of her suggests that he wants to meet paint, perhaps blood, or perhaps something else altogether, leading her in a more private way, or at least to learn more about her private life. upwards to somewhere that cannot be seen. The final line, ‘Her bare heels In contrast to ‘the butcher’s daughter’ who strides along with a knife at her left, fading to faintest at the top’, seems to be an answer because it tells belt, this man does not seem to be very confident. Traditionally, men are us that the marks of ‘the red crescent’ came from her ‘bare heels’. But this supposed to be confident and in charge, the ones who do the ‘asking out’, is not really an answer, nor does it provide an ending to this story – all yet this man does not make any attempt to speak to the woman. it does is add to the storm of questions. This may be a world that has a

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street, a lane, a door and stairs, all solid and easily understood features, broken away from the rules, the story becomes a mystery or an enigma, a but there is little else about it that is solid and understandable. puzzle that we want to solve but cannot because we do not have any rules to help us. We will never know whether the man goes through the doorway and up the stairs or turns and walks back to the street, and this possibly suggests Similarly, Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of architectural images in this poem – the the theme of this poem. Is the theme of this poem that as we live our street, ‘the slanting lane’, the ‘door … half-open’ and ‘the stairs’ – seems to lives, we may have moments where we understand ourselves and the suggest that this poem is set in the solid, familiar world where we all live people and events around us, but there will always be other moments our daily lives. However, Ní Chuilleanáin introduces elements into the where we encounter mysteries and puzzles about ourselves, other people world of the poem that we would not expect to see in the world of our and events that we can never solve? daily lives. The girl butcher might be unusual, but the ‘knife on a ring at her belt’ as she walks along the street would be very unusual. Similarly, ‘the Mystery and enigma red crescent’ marks that her ‘bare heels left’ on the stairs are strange. She The sense of mystery and puzzling enigma in this poem is increased has taken off her shoes, so are her feet covered in blood? Does she do by the way in which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin creates a feeling of tension her work in her bare feet? Is it blood? It is questions like these that cause and confusion in us, her readers. As we discussed previously in our us to feel a sense of confusion and tension as we struggle to fit these introductory consideration of her life and work, narratives, or stories, elements into the apparently solid and familiar world constructed by the usually follow a set of rules about what happens and to whom. Over time, architectural images in this poem. we become used to these narrative rules being followed, either in the books that we read or in the television programmes or films that we see. Why does Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin create this feeling of mystery and We expect that narratives will develop in a certain way. The opening line enigma in her poem – so that we, her readers, feel confused and puzzled? of this poem – ‘He fell in love with the butcher’s daughter’ – leads us to If we recall the way in which Ní Chuilleanáin would like us to engage expect that this poem will be a narrative about a love story. But when we with her poems, that is, as active readers who are alert and pay attention read lines 3 and 4 and encounter the ‘knife’ and ‘the dark shining drops’, to the language and meaning of her poetry, then the answer becomes we realise that the rules are certainly not being followed in the telling of clear. She creates this feeling of mystery and enigma because she wants this love story. This creates a feeling of tension in us as readers because to stimulate us to think about and question aspects of our world that we we do not know what to expect and we feel confused. Because it has would not normally think about or question: aspects such as the way in

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which we expect narratives to follow rules; the way in which we expect our world to be; the way in which women are expected to follow certain roles in society; and the way in which life, people and events can be mysterious and puzzlingly enigmatic.

522 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin on lacking the killer instinct

On Lacking the Killer Instinct In lines 1–4, we find ourselves transported back into the past, to 1970, standing on a track with the poet looking at a ‘hare, absorbed, sitting A reading of the poem still’. The stillness of the hare connects the world of nature to a sense ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, like ‘Deaths and Engines’, was written of calmness, as in ‘The Bend in the Road’, and is in stark contrast to the at the time of the death of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s father, so there is a poet’s agitated state. We learn that she has ‘fled up into the hills’ away genuinely personal tone underlying this piece. However, there are also from her father’s deathbed in a quest for escape from having to face his familiar elements in this poem: imminent death. Suddenly, this memory is interrupted: the poet’s use of Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. a dash at the end of the line 4 is much more effective in conveying this Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers jolting change than, say, a full stop. of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the words and phrases that she uses. Lines 5–10 bring us into the present as the poet explains that a Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to photograph of a hare in ‘the morning’ newspaper caused her to recall this encourage us to actively engage with the poem. memory of the hare on the track in 1970. Using a few carefully chosen The influence of the past on the present, in this case through a shared words to create a vivid description of the newspaper photograph, Ní family history. Chuilleanáin makes it clear that the hare in this photograph is behaving The image of a quest. very differently to the hare on the track. The photographed hare has References to important life experiences, in this instance the death of ‘fear’ in ‘her bright eye’ because she has almost been caught by two a loved one, her father. ‘greyhounds’, but luckily they have gone ‘tumbling over’ and she is making The idea of the world of nature as a source of calmness and consolation. her escape by running away from them.

As we have seen in our reading of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, she The past memory from 1970 (the narrative fragment in lines 1–4) is often uses a narrative fragment as a starting point for her poems. This connected to the newspaper photograph in the present (lines 5–10) in narrative fragment is sometimes a memory from the past, as in ‘The three ways. Firstly, a hare features in both. Secondly, the imminent death Bend in the Road’, and it often illustrates how the past can influence of her father in the past is linked to the fact that the hare in the present the present. In ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ we meet a more complex clearly came very close to death. Thirdly, the frantic quest to escape version of this relationship between the past and the present. from the arrival of death, suggested by the poet’s flight into the hills in

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the past, is echoed in the hare’s attempt to escape from the greyhounds that in the newspaper photograph, there is one hare which was chased in the present. In the final line of this section (line 10), the poet suggests by two much bigger and more vicious greyhounds, in the same way that that the hare, having had such a narrow escape from the greyhounds and the poet’s father, a young man in his early twenties who was on foot, death, must feel a heightened sense of being alive, that she is invincible, ‘a was chased by an armed ‘lorry-load of soldiers’. In the two situations, the glad power’, because she knows that she has cheated both of them. The hunters or those with ‘the Killer Instinct’, that is, the ‘greyhounds’ and the introduction of the idea of power in the phrase ‘a glad power’ is important ‘soldiers’, seemed to be in the more powerful positions and very likely to and we will return to it later in our reading of this poem. succeed in bringing death to the less powerful ‘hare’ and her father.

One of the ideas that links the past of the 1970s in lines 1–4 to the present But lines 17–29 tell us that the hare and the poet’s father had a quality in lines 5–10 is the idea of running away to escape from death. It is this that enabled them to change this balance of power: they were ‘clever’. idea that also forms the link from lines 5–10 to lines 11–14, where the poet The hare was clever enough to ‘double back’ and it was this unexpected recalls a story that her father had told her about an incident when he ran movement that left the greyhounds ‘tumbling over’, making their power away to escape from death. This story was from her father’s youth and so and ruthlessness ‘absurdly gross’ and turning them, and the rest of it is much further back in time than 1970: it is from 1921. In lines 11–14, she the pack, into nothing more than ‘stupid dogs’ clumsily ‘labouring up’. describes how her father, who was a republican, ran away on a quest for Similarly, Ní Chuilleanáin’s father outwitted the soldiers by darting into ‘an escape from a ‘lorry-load of soldiers’. His capture could well have meant open kitchen door’. This cleverness made the hare and the poet’s father death for him. more powerful than those who have ‘the Killer Instinct’. It gave them the power to escape death and to celebrate being alive: the hare feels ‘a glad Another link between the past in 1970 (lines 1–4) and the present power’ and the poet’s father walks ‘Into a blissful dawn’. (lines 5–10) that we have considered earlier is a hare. It is an image of a hare that also creates a link from the present (lines 5–10) to the past However, it is significant that in lines 29–32 the poet acknowledges that in 1921. This is evident in lines 15–16, where Ní Chuilleanáin compares in her father’s case, the action of running into a house on his quest for her father as a young man running away from the ‘soldiers’ to the ‘hare’ escape may not have been the right option for ‘those that harboured him’. in the newspaper photograph in the present, running away from the Had the soldiers recognised him, they could well have burned down the greyhounds. It is this comparison that brings us back to the idea of ‘power’ house and killed the people who had ‘harboured him’. His cleverness had introduced in line 10. From our reading of the poem so far, we know saved him, but it could have easily meant that a group of innocent people

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would have faced death at the hands of those who had ‘the Killer Instinct’, The poet seems to imply that the greyhounds and the ‘soldiers’, those the ‘soldiers’. The important point here is that sometimes, running away to who have ‘the Killer Instinct’, are also driven by a selfish urge for survival escape death is not the right thing to do. It might be ‘clever’ and it might and self-preservation. involve feeling a sense of power because survival has been grasped out of the jaws of death, but it might not be the right thing for a person to do. But as far as Ní Chuilleanáin is concerned, in the world of people this selfish instinct for survival should be of lesser importance than the codes In the final four lines of the poem, Ní Chuilleanáin, in the present, of right behaviour: that is, such codes as concern for our fellow human recognises that her action of running away from her dying father in 1970 beings, an awareness of our responsibility for others and our loyalty to was not the right thing to do: ‘And I should not | Have run away’. She those whom we love. In the present, through recalling memories from her explains that at that time, what made her go ‘back to the city’ was not family history, she understands why she ran away from her dying father’s the understanding that what she had done was not right, but the calming bedside in 1970: she was afraid and her survival instincts took over, just as influence of the world of nature, represented by the hare ‘sitting still’, into they did with the hare in the photograph and her father as a young man. which her quest for escape had brought her. In 1970, having spent time in Now, she understands that the reasons that should have motivated her to nature, she ‘washed in brown bog water’, an image that is suggestive of a return to her father’s bedside in 1970 were her responsibility for him as a form of baptism. Then, feeling strengthened, she returned to her father’s member of her family and her loyalty to him as a loved one. bedside, carrying the calming image of the hare on the track ‘in her hour of ease’ in her memory to help her to cope with the distressing situation. For Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, being ‘clever’, as a person, involves thinking carefully about the rightness of our actions as we live our lives. It is this However, in the present, because ‘the morning paper’s prize photograph’ type of cleverness that truly transfers power to those who are ‘Lacking the triggered memories from 1970 and 1921, her shared family history, she Killer Instinct’. now understands the reason why she should not have run away from her father’s deathbed. Ní Chuilleanáin recognises that unlike the world The past and the present of animals, where survival is the most important rule of behaviour, in the As we discovered previously in our consideration of Eiléan Ní world of human beings the most important rule is behaving in a way that Chuilleanáin’s life and work, she has a strong sense of the close is right. Therefore, the hare in the photograph is clever because, driven relationship between the past and the present. In ‘On Lacking the Killer by her instinctive and selfish urge for survival, she uses her wits to escape. Instinct’, she conveys the closeness of the past and the present by the

525 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin on lacking the killer instinct

arrangement of the printed words on the page and the abstract meanings of running away from her dying father’s bedside and seeing a hare. This of the words. is then linked to the present by a dash, where the newspaper photograph featuring a hare running away is described. This ends with a comma, If we look at the arrangement of the printed words of this poem on the suggestive of a pause rather than a stop, in line 10. Together, these two page, there are four physical gaps apparent in this arrangement. The experiences – one recalled from the past and one situated in the present – first section that is defined by a gap extends from lines 1–10. This section trigger the connection between the past and the present into action. describes the poet’s memory of running away from her dying father’s bedside in 1970 and the newspaper photograph in the present that This active connection between the past and the present is then sustained triggered this memory. by the poet’s process of remembrance that begins in section 2: with her remembering her father’s story about how he ran away from the ‘soldiers’ There are three further gaps defining four additional sections, but in the more distant past of 1921. This is then linked by the phrase ‘The significantly these three gaps contain two- or four-word phrases that seem hare’ to section 3. It is no accident that it is the words ‘The hare’ that act to act like physical bridges between the sections. In the gap between as a bridge here because Ní Chuilleanáin makes a comparison between section 2 and section 3, there is the phrase ‘The hare’ on line 15. Similarly, her father’s actions in 1921 in section 2 to the hare’s actions in the present in the gap between section 3 and section 4, there is the phrase ‘The lorry in section 3. The concrete, physical appearance of the words ‘The hare’ was growling’ in line 22. Finally, the phrase ‘And I should not’ in line 33 and their abstract meaning in the poem combine to convey the close bridges the gap between section 4 and section 5. These phrases are not relationship between the past and the present. full lines of poetry and they do not fill the gap completely; instead, they create a slender link between the sections. In this way they are concrete, The phrase ‘The lorry was growling’ operates in the same way, physically physical representations of the way in which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin connecting section 3, which describes the hare’s actions in the present, perceives the workings of the past and the present. For her, they are held back to her father’s action in 1921 in section 4 in a way that reflects the together by slender bridges created by memories, remembrance and meaning of the two sections: the hare is chased by the dogs in section 3 recognition. and the phrase ‘The lorry was growling’ both echoes the sounds of the dogs in section 3 and introduces, in a threatening way, the ‘soldiers’ who If we return to look at section 1 from the point of view of meaning, we chased her father in section 4. can see that lines 1–4 are concerned with the poet’s memory from 1970

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Finally, the phrase ‘I should not’ physically bridges the gap between the father’s action of fleeing from his hunters and hiding in a house in 1921 in section 4 and the poet’s own actions of fleeing from his bedside in 1970 in section 5. Ní Chuilleanáin now recognises that both of these actions ‘should not’ have been done.

In this way, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin uses both the concrete, physical arrangement of her printed poem on the page and the abstract meanings that she explores in the poem to produce a masterpiece of poetic communication regarding the way in which human memory, when it is brought into play, operates by creating links or bridges between the fragments of experiences from the past which it contains.

527 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin deaths and engines

Deaths and Engines quest – she was about to arrive in Paris. However, these moments actually marked the start of a quest for her as the mood was suddenly changed by A reading of the poem what she saw through the window of the plane. Lines 4–7 relate how, as As with ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, ‘Deaths and Engines’ was written the plane approached the airport, she caught sight of something that at at the time of the death of Ní Chuilleanáin’s father, so here again there is first appeared to be nothing more than an unremarkable ‘tunnel’ leading a genuinely personal tone underlying the poem. It also contains a number to somewhere in the airport. Suddenly, she realised that it was actually half of the key elements that we have come to associate with Eiléan Ní of a plane, ‘burnt-out’ against the snow. Chuilleanáin’s poetry: Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. The black and white colours suggested by ‘burnt-out’ and ‘snow’ appear Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers again in line 9, where the ‘snow-white runways’ turned into dead ends ‘in of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the the dark’. This creates a striking and rather bleak visual image. Similarly, by words and phrases that she uses. creating an image that appeals to the sense of hearing in lines 10–12, Ní Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to Chuilleanáin is inviting us, her readers, to actually experience this situation. encourage us to actively engage with the poem. Instead of the usual sounds of loudspeakers relaying announcements from The image of a quest. the plane’s captain and people chatting, there was ‘No sound’ apart from The inclusion of architectural images, in this case ‘houses’, an ‘airport’, ‘sighs’ coming from ‘the lonely pilot’. a ‘tunnel’, ‘runways’ and a ‘blind | Alley’, which situate the poem in a world that seems to be solidly familiar and ordinary. Line 13 – ‘The cold of metal wings is contagious’ – echoes back to the coldness suggested by the ‘frozen’ wreckage and the ‘snow’. This The narrative fragment that acts as the starting point for this poem has line could mean that touching the cold metal wings that are part a conversational feeling, with straightforward language and a natural of the wreckage spreads a wave of coldness up through the whole arrangement of words. It is as if we have just met the poet and she is body. However, when we read on through lines 14–19, we encounter describing her arrival at Paris airport. She tells us about the plane coming descriptions of death, an emotionally charged experience. As a result, in to land in ‘Paris airport’ in lines 1–3. The mood of these opening lines is another layer of meaning becomes apparent in the line ‘The cold of metal calm, with no hint of anxiety or excitement. There is the sense that for Ní wings is contagious’. We now recognise that there is also an emotional Chuilleanáin, these moments in the landing plane signalled an end to a aspect to this coldness: the ‘cold of metal wings’, that is, the wreckage,

528 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin deaths and engines

not only affects people physically, but also emotionally. In the poet’s you will need wings of your own’), that it is inevitable, as suggested by case, this emotional effect caused her to think about her father and his the word ‘Cornered’, and that it is final, suggested by the word ‘Breaks’, imminent death. In this way, line 13, by referring back to the wreckage in there is the sense that they are unsatisfactory and unhelpful to Eiléan Ní the narrative fragment and by introducing the idea of death, which is the Chuilleanáin’s quest to understand and to confront, intellectually and central idea in the remainder of the poem, acts as a vivid and effective emotionally, what death means. link between the narrative fragment in lines 1–12 and the thoughts about death in lines 14–33 that were triggered by the sight of this wreckage. The second challenge that she faces is an emotional one in lines 20–25. This challenge is posed by the emotional reluctance that people feel In lines 14–33, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin sets out on an intellectual and about accepting that someone is dying. This drives them to look for emotional quest initiated by her sight of the wreckage, and as the ‘you’ in ‘images of relief’, that is, hopeful signs that the person is not dying or line 14 seems to suggest, is expanded by being connected to her father’s dead. Perhaps influenced by her experiences with her father, these dying. The purpose of her quest is to try to understand and to confront, ‘images of relief’ are very real and dramatic. The much-dreaded ‘Hospital intellectually and emotionally, what death means, and because it is a pyjamas’ are welcomed, as are the ‘screens’, because they show that the quest, she faces some challenges. The first challenge that she faces in person is in a hospital and not in a morgue. The man who is injured ‘with lines 14–19 is an intellectual one, posed by the language and images that a bloody face’ still lives, ‘conversing cheerfully’. But the poet understands are generally used in connection with death. People are often afraid of and acknowledges the truth about such signs: they are only temporary using the actual word ‘death’, so they use language and images that give signs of hope, because eventually they ‘will fail you some time’. death a less frightening meaning. She tries using some of these images in her quest to understand what death means. Death, then, is needing The overall effect of the images that she uses in lines 14–25 to explore the ‘wings’, presumably like an angel, and is being ‘Cornered’ by ‘Time and meaning of death is to suggest that life is a fragile force, while the power life’ that cross like a ‘knife and fork’. This draws on the superstition that of death is ever-present and inevitable. crossing a knife and fork at the end of meal is unlucky and likely to bring death. Death can also be the ‘lifeline in your palm’ breaking and ‘the curve At first, as we begin to read lines 26–33 it appears that Ní Chuilleanáin’s of an aeroplane’s track’ meeting the ‘straight skyline’. Although these quest to try to understand and to confront what death means has led her images do partially confront the real meaning of death by suggesting to accept that death means an experience that must be undertaken alone that it is something that has to be faced alone without any help (‘Soon without any help; an experience that is inevitable; and an experience that

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is final. Lines 26–8 echo this aloneness – ‘You will find yourself alone’ – influence on the present and the future. Surprisingly and wonderfully, and this inevitability and finality – ‘Accelerating down a blind | Alley, too in lines 32–3, the meaning of death as a theme park ride that ends in a late to stop’. It seems that her quest has culminated in a meaning that is shattering dead end becomes a theme park ride that ends in beginnings conveyed in this intensely striking and vivid image of death being like a through the power of love and memory. terrifying theme park ride. Architectural images In the face of such images, it is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of architectural images in ‘Deaths and results of her quest. But line 29 unexpectedly provides a hint of comfort in Engines’ is subtle but nevertheless plays an important part in conveying that this theme park ride with a dead end also involves learning ‘how light the meaning of this poem and in inviting her readers to engage actively your death is’. Worryingly, however, the image in lines 30–1 recalls the with ‘Deaths and Engines’. crashed plane in the narrative fragment, as Ní Chuilleanáin describes how the dead end of death will see ‘You ... scattered like wreckage’ into ‘pieces, The poem opens with the poet describing her plane coming in to land every one a different shape’. At this point, death truly seems to mean a in Paris. The inclusion of the architectural images of the ‘houses’ and theme park ride that ends in a shattering dead end. the ‘airport’ situates this poem in a solidly familiar and ordinary world and invites us to recall the times when we also saw houses from ‘above’ Dramatically, the final two lines of the poem suddenly shift the focus of through the window of a plane about to land. In this way, we begin to the poem away from this image of the inevitability of death and onto two experience the poem rather than simply read the words. The airport also forces that, for Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, are stronger than death: love and introduces the idea of a quest, an important idea in the poem, because it memory. In a graphic and hauntingly beautiful image, the poet describes is a place where many modern quests begin and end. how the ‘pieces, every one a different shape’, do not simply pile up in the ‘blind | Alley’ of death, but instead they ‘spin and lodge in the hearts Ní Chuilleanáin’s reaction to seeing the next architectural image, the | Of all who love you’. In this way, the poet suggests that we each carry ‘tunnel’, from the plane verges on the dismissive: ‘Saw an empty tunnel’. It pieces of our loved ones who have died in our memories. Through the is clear that she finds nothing particularly striking or unusual about it: it is remembering of memories, such as we encountered in ‘The Bend in the simply another built structure to fly above during the landing. However, Road’, those who have died in the past can be brought into the present it is her dismissing of the tunnel that makes her shock when she realises by those who are still living and in this way still have a presence in and an that it is in fact the ‘back half’ of a ‘burnt-out’ plane all the more dramatic.

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This unremarkable tunnel, with its entrance and exit that facilitate movement from one place to another, suddenly becomes the wreckage of an unmoving plane going nowhere because it has been catastrophically stopped. This sense of being stopped is echoed in the ‘snow-white runways’ that end in a wall of darkness in line 9.

The final architectural image in the poem, that of a ‘blind | Alley’ towards which the terrifying theme park ride of death hurtles in line 28, seems to be the ultimate image of being stopped, that is, death. However, as we now know from our work on this poem, it acts to create wonderful beginnings.

531 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin fireman’s lift

Fireman’s Lift Once again, ‘Fireman’s Lift’ features a number of key elements that are familiar in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry: A reading of the poem Her use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin wrote ‘Fireman’s Lift’ as her mother was dying in Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers 1994. As with the two poems that she wrote about her father’s death, ‘On of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the Lacking the Killer Instinct’ and ‘Death and Engines’, there is a genuinely words and phrases that she uses. personal tone underlying this piece. However, the actual emotions Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to expressed in the personal tone of ‘Fireman’s Lift’ are very different to encourage us to actively engage with the poem. those expressed in the poems about her father. The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in concrete images. Ní Chuilleanáin has described this poem as a ‘cheering-up poem’. This The image of a threshold, a point of crossing, which is connected to may seem to be a rather surprising description given the circumstances, the idea of transition, a process of change from one state to another in but there is a touchingly real quality about the odd moments of humour in a person. this poem as they realistically reflect the warmth of the poet’s relationship The inclusion of architectural images, in this case ‘the cupola’, ‘the with her mother. Ní Chuilleanáin has also spoken of the fact that when church’, ‘a roof’, ‘a capital’ and ‘an arch’, which position the poem in a she visited the cathedral in Parma with her parents to view the Correggio world that seems to be solidly familiar and ordinary. fresco for the first time in 1963, her mother did not like the way in The influence of the past on the present, in this case through which the original Romanesque church had been topped off by a huge memories from a shared family history. Renaissance-style dome. So perhaps the humour here incorporates some A reference to an important life experience, in this instance the death of her mother’s negative feelings about the cathedral. of a loved one.

In addition, Ní Chuilleanáin confessed that due to her lack of confidence The narrative fragment from the past, 1963, that provides the starting in her descriptive abilities, she limited her description of Correggio’s point for this poem is characteristically brief regarding the details ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ in the cathedral at Parma in ‘Fireman’s Lift’ surrounding this event: ‘I was standing beside you looking up’ (line 1), to ‘one aspect’ of this magnificent fresco, ‘the way it shows that bodily ‘we stepped | Back’ (lines 8–9) and ‘We saw the work entire’ (line 11). effort and the bodily weight’. We will return to this point later in our As we have previously noted, this is because Ní Chuilleanáin wants to consideration of ‘Fireman’s Lift’. 532 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin fireman’s lift

focus on the particular experience rather than on the narrative, or story, Ní Chuilleanáin puts it, ‘the bodily weight’, as ‘The Virgin’ is ‘Hauled’ surrounding the experience. What is most striking about this memory by ‘Teams of angelic arms’ that are ‘heaving, | Supporting’ her. Clearly recalled from the poet’s past is not the what, where and who of this there is humour in this paradox, based on the contradiction between the incident, but rather the how, that is, how feelings and thoughts were weightless spiritual world and the weighty physical world. Usually pictures affected during the experience. of the Assumption show Mary’s body floating effortlessly upwards and so ignore how difficult it is (what Ní Chuilleanáin describes as ‘that bodily In lines 2–15, the focus of the poem sweeps our eyes up into ‘the effort’) to lift a body that cannot help in the lifting process, and so is a cupola’, where in a series of briefly worded but strikingly vivid images, dead weight. In addition, Ní Chuilleanáin’s comparison of looking up the magnificent fresco is described. But this is not simply a word picture into the dome to looking up into a ‘wide stone petticoat’ adds to this of the painted fresco. In another excellent example of the way in which humorous tone because it is an amusing comparative image. Ní Chuilleanáin represents abstract human emotions and qualities in concrete images, these strikingly vivid concrete images also combine to Lines 16–21 convey how the poet, as a result of her engagement with this convey the abstract emotional response that this fresco evokes in those, fresco, comes to the understanding that the only reason why others are including the poet and her mother, who look up at the painted colours willing to put in the considerable effort required to lift the dead weight in and forms of the ‘Annunciation of the Virgin’. Such lines as ‘and how the a ‘Fireman’s Lift’ is love. This is not a romantic, ‘hearts and flowers’ love. light | Melted and faded bodies’ convey the wonder and awe that she and The imagery that she uses in lines 17–21 appeals to the senses of sight and her mother felt as they were taken on an emotional journey to another, touch so that we experience, through Ní Chuilleanáin’s examples here, far more spiritual and much less solid world. This is a world filled by the the physical strain that a dead weight can exert. It is clear from lines 17–21 sounds of ‘Celestial choirs’ that break through the solid familiarity of the that this love consists of pulling together the strength to take on and bear architecture of the cathedral to let in ‘the fall-out of brightness’. It is a the heavy burden of something or someone completely unable to take on world of ‘mist and shining’, of ‘Melted and faded bodies’, of ‘Loose feet and bear that weight. Because of this love, such lifting becomes not only and elbows and staring eyes’ that float ‘Clear and free as weeds’. This is a like that of a ‘crane’ in that it moves a heavy object, but also like ‘a cradle’ world where physical reality dissolves. because it is filled with the desire to care for whatever or whoever is being lifted. But as well as inspiring this awareness of spiritual insubstantiality in those looking up, the fresco also evokes a sense of solid weightiness, or as

533 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin fireman’s lift

It is this connection between the images of lifting and love that carry very time that a physical body is at the point of changing into a weightless the poem forward, in lines 22–9, into 1994, the present, when Ní spiritual state is also the time when it is at its heaviest because it can no Chuilleanáin’s mother was dying. Here, the ideas of the solidity of this longer support itself. It is this contrast between a state that is an inactive physical world and the insubstantiality of the spiritual world after death ‘weight’ and a state that is without weight, ‘Clear and free’, that Eiléan become interwoven with the condition of the poet’s dying mother. Ní Chuilleanáin conveys so effectively through her use of imagery that In 1994 it is nurses who lift her mother, and as the poet watches their appeals to the senses of sight and touch in this poem. efforts, her memory, recalled from their shared family history, enables her to understand the meaning of what she is witnessing. Ní Chuilleanáin However, as always with Ní Chuilleanáin we are dealing with layers of recognises that like Mary in the fresco, her dying mother is poised on the meaning. There is another interpretation of the threshold idea that threshold between the physical world and the spiritual world. However, to could be seen as being incorporated into this poem. This conveys the make this transition from one to the other is not easy, and consequently poet’s own process of change from one state to another in her emotional it requires loving support that is physical, emotional and spiritual. Ní response to her mother’s dying. She is clearly witnessing what her mother Chuilleanáin understands that is why she, along with the nurses, is there is going through as she comments ‘We saw them | Lifting her’. However, for her mother, ‘Under her weight’, as she, like ‘The Virgin’ in Correggio’s as she watches the nurses lift her mother in what is known as a fireman’s fresco, approaches ‘the edge of the cloud’. lift, the recalled memory of being with her mother in the cathedral of Parma in 1963 enables her to move past the sadness, the horror and The threshold image the pity that she feels at seeing her mother like this in 1994. Thus, she The idea of a threshold, a point of crossing, which is connected to the arrives at a state where she can appreciate the love that is present in idea of transition, a process of change from one state to another in a such situations and also the humour that both she and her mother had person, features in a number of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems. In ‘Street’ discovered in the past as they looked at such a situation in the cathedral’s we saw how the man stood undecided at his threshold, the ‘half-open’ fresco. In this way, her remembrance of a memory from their shared door. In this poem, this threshold idea is conveyed in the image of ‘the family history influences her in the present as she herself is engaged in edge of the cloud’, the point of crossing for Mary in the fresco as she is crossing a threshold. lifted from the physical world into the spiritual one. The poet’s mother is also at this point of crossing, as she is dying. Ní Chuilleanáin recognises that there is a strange paradox that is evident at this crossing point. The

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Translation describe changing words in one language into another language. As we know from our earlier consideration of her life and work, Eiléan Ní Background Chuilleanáin is very aware of the problematic link between language and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin wrote ‘Translation’ for the reburial of 154 women meaning and she recognises that the link between silence and meaning is who, over the previous 100 years, had suffered and died in the harsh even more challenging. conditions that prevailed in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. She also read this poem at the reburial ceremony. For in this poem, by trying to give voices back to women who spent much of their lives in enforced silence, Ní Chuilleanáin was attempting Magdalene laundries were operated by nuns and had as their to translate their silence into meaning and that meaning into language. workers women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, who had Consequently, she was conscious that the words and images that she been committed to these institutions for a variety of questionable used should not in any way change what this silence represented and reasons. They lived and worked, isolated from the outside world, in an communicated about the lives of these women. The words and images environment where their identities and their dignity as human beings were that she does use here are not only the result of her demanding revision destroyed through exploitation and abuse. Many of the women remained process, previously discussed in our consideration of her life and work, in these institutions until they died. Ní Chuilleanáin has explained that in but also of her determination to remain true to what was expressed by writing this poem, she tried to give back to these tragic women the voices Magdalene women in their silence. that had been taken from them for most of their lives. She undertook this task because the survivors and the families of those survivors and of those A change of focus and approach who did not survive ‘are insisting on the stories of these places – their This poem marks a change from the personal or individual focus in loneliness, hardship, and not infrequent cruelty – being told’. the poems that we have considered up to this point. In ‘Translation’, there is a broadening out of this focus so that it explores a situation The title of this poem, ‘Translation’, is particularly appropriate in that that is connected to society. Whereas in previous poems we explored the word ‘translation’ can be used to describe being moved from one the influence of the past on the present through personal or individual place to another, as with the remains of the 154 women that were taken memories drawn from family history, here we will be examining the way in from unmarked graves in a convent graveyard in Dublin and reburied which the past of a society affects its present. in Glasnevin Cemetery. In addition, ‘Translation’ can also be used to

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There is also a change of approach in Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of the there are always elements of mystery and enigma in life. In this poem, narrative fragment, usually employed as the starting point for a poem. however, there is the suggestion that the element of mystery and enigma The narrative fragment in this form is absent from this poem, perhaps surrounding the Magdalene women was caused deliberately by the to represent the fact that the narratives, or even the narrative fragments, operation of an appalling and widespread injustice in Irish society. Just concerning these women were erased in the laundries and in the history of as the narratives of these women were erased, so too were mystery and Irish society. enigma wrapped around what remained of their lives and, in many cases, their deaths. In addition, there is an evident change of approach in her use of two speakers in this poem. The first speaker speaks in lines 1–15, and given A reading of the poem that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin read this poem at the reburial ceremony, it There are some enigmatic or puzzling images and phrases in ‘Translation’, is probable that she is speaking here. The lines that are spoken by the but there are three key aspects that are addressed in this poem: first speaker are as we would expect in one of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems: The dreadful conditions endured by these women during their lives in constructed from straightforward and conversational language that the Magdalene laundries expresses layers of meaning through vivid imagery. There is, however, an The women being deprived of a voice and a place in their Irish society element of mystery and enigma in some of the images employed in these How the Magdalene women have been treated as part of the history lines. The lines that are spoken by the second speaker, a persona, are very of Irish society and what this means for those of us who live in Irish different. Visually, they are reminiscent of words on a gravestone. These society in the present short phrases are powerfully thought provoking because of their very different appearance and also because of the mysterious and enigmatic Firstly, there is the aspect of the dreadful conditions endured by these meanings that they communicate. Are these the words of one of the women during their lives in the Magdalene laundries. This is conveyed reburied Magdalene women who, silent for so long, can now at last speak in a series of briefly worded but dramatically vivid images in lines 3–6 only in a broken language that struggles to communicate meaning? and 10–11. These images describe the dreadful working conditions in the laundries: the bright light, the heat, the steam, the harsh soap and the The third change is in the element of mystery and puzzling enigma that sore hands. They also communicate the way in which the laundries were appears in both sections of this poem. As we have noted previously, their places where self-expression, suggested by the phrase ‘The high relief of appearance in some of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems indicates that for her, a glance’, was eliminated as if it were a stain to be ‘bleached out’. Sadly, in

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these laundries it was only the ‘steam’ that ‘danced’ and ‘giggled’ because from it. In these lines we learn what the phrase ‘evens the score’ means: it had a way of escape down the ‘stone drains’. the women who have been reburied in Glasnevin Cemetery come ‘from every county’, as did all the women in the Magdalene laundries. There Secondly, there is the aspect of the women being deprived of a place are 26 counties in Ireland and up until the late 20th century, each of these and a voice in their Irish society. As line 8 vividly conveys, for these counties had a gap in their history where the Magdalene women should women that meant being dehumanised: the fundamental elements that have been. In this way, the omission of these women and their neglect by give each of us a sense of our own identity as a unique human being the history of Irish society was spread evenly throughout the country. were taken away from them. They were removed from their ‘parents’, and by implication from their families, and their ‘names’ were changed It was not until the late 20th century that this omission and neglect began when they first entered the laundries. This dehumanisation also led to to be rectified. The opening line of the poem – ‘The soil frayed and sifted the taking away of their voice metaphorically, in that they no longer had evens the score’ – refers to the reburial in 1993 of the 154 women in a a role or any power in their society. But in lines 11–13, the literal loss of well-tended grave in Glasnevin Cemetery: the first recognition by Irish voice is conveyed in a horrifyingly dramatic image. Speech, another form society of the existence of these Magdalene women as victims of wholly of self-expression, was strictly controlled in the Magdalene laundries, unacceptable treatment. and much of the lives of these women was spent working hard in silence. Ní Chuilleanáin depicts the terrible emotional and psychological effects In line 7, Ní Chuilleanáin is adamant that what this means for those of us of such deprivation in the ‘one voice’ that rises above the only sounds who live in Irish society in the present is that we have to do all that we can allowed in the laundries: the ‘shuffle’ of the feet of these unfortunate to restore each of these Magdalene women to her own unique humanity women and the hum of the machinery. and to her own individual personhood. Each of them must be helped in their search ‘for their parents, their names’. Similarly, in line 11, we have Thirdly, there is the aspect of how the Magdalene women have been to hear the ‘one voice’ that was never heard before now. For as we know treated as part of the history of Irish society and what this means for those from our previous exploration of her life and work, this is not just the of us who live in Irish society in the present. It is clear from this poem right thing to do, it is also the thing that we as a society must do to move that the history of Irish society has, until recently, not considered these ‘towards a maturity impossible without some sense of the past’. women at all. Lines 2–3 of the poem convey the enormity of the gap that has existed in the history of Irish society because of their omission

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As we discussed in the section ‘A change of focus and of approach’ absent during her first burial in an unmarked grave. Another image of above, a persona, probably one of the Magdalene women who was release can be read into the ‘bunched keys’ that ‘slacken and fall’. reburied, speaks in broken phrases in lines 16–21. There are only six lines in this section of the poem, yet the layers of meaning in each of these six The first image in the final line of the poem – ‘I rise and forget’ – again lines are so complex that they create a degree of mystery and enigma in implies release. It is followed by ‘a cloud over my time’. Perhaps this cloud this section that leaves space for a number of possible interpretations. can be linked to the ‘steam’ in the laundry in line 5 and the ‘steam’ that ‘rises’ in line 15. If so, we could interpret the final line of this poem as an This is one interpretation that can be developed from lines 16–21, image of release into the world of nature: the spirit of the woman, like although it is possible that there are other equally valid interpretations. water vapour, forms a cloud that rises above the society that treated her In lines 16–17, the opening phrases spoken by the woman – ‘Washed so badly, and so released she can ‘forget’ such things. clean of idiom’ and ‘the baked crust | Of words that made my temporary name’ – suggest that through this reburial, this woman has finally been At this point, it is worthwhile recalling one of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s released from the name that was imposed on her when she entered the intentions in writing her poetry: she wants to leave space in her poems so Magdalene laundry. Names such as these were usually religious in origin that we can enter into that space to make our own meanings. Perhaps you and they forced a meaning of what the girl should be like onto her. It was might like to do this with ‘Translation’ now? this enforced meaning about what type of person she was that was like a ‘parasite’ inside her: it ate away at her sense of her own identity.

In lines 18–19 there is another phrase that can be interpreted as representing release: ‘that spell | Lifted’. This release may be connected to the image of her lying ‘in earth sifted to dust’, an image that might suggest that prior to the reburial, research was done during which all the historical details of her life were ‘sifted’, that is, discovered and acknowledged. This sense of release could also be connected to another interpretation of this image: that it represents the level of care in the sifting of the soil for her reburial in Glasnevin Cemetery that was clearly

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Kilcash of living. Thus, the old Anglo-Norman social system ended. The bards were no longer employed by the landowners and many of the poems Background and song lyrics written in the 18th century tell of the difficulties that these The focus of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Kilcash’, like ‘Translation’, is not on unemployed bards experienced and lament the passing of the old way of the individual but on Irish society in the past and the present. ‘Kilcash’ is life. a translation of a poem-song lyric in Irish that probably originated in the 18th century. It was included in her collection of poetry The Girl Who Allegory Married the Reindeer, published in 2001, when Ireland was in the midst Clearly, then, although the original ‘Caoine Cill Chaise’ did lament the of the Celtic Tiger years. Consequently, ‘Kilcash’ should be seen as a death of Margaret Butler, it was more concerned with the consequences comment on the rapid and profound changes that were occurring in Irish of the great social change that Irish society experienced at that time. It is society at that time. this relationship between great social change and the consequences that it creates for Irish society that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin wished to highlight The original Irish poem-song lyric, ‘Caoine Cill Chaise’ (‘A Lament for in publishing this poem during the time of the Celtic Tiger. In this way, Kilcash’), lamented the death, in 1744, of Margaret Butler, Viscountess the consequences of the great social change that are described in ‘Kilcash’ Iveagh, the wife of Colonel Butler of Kilcash, the local landowner. become an allegory for the consequences that could very easily happen, Colonel Butler belonged to one of the Anglo-Norman families who had and some would say did happen, as a result of the Celtic Tiger. taken over control of the lands of Ireland in the 12th century. Over the centuries, these Anglo-Norman landowners became integrated into Irish An allegory is often described as an extended metaphor. Simply put, a society so that they came to be regarded by the Irish people as being metaphor is where you compare one thing to another without using the ‘Irish’. Many of these Anglo-Norman families were very supportive of words ‘like’ or ‘as’: an example of a metaphor is ‘the soldier was a lion in the local community, the Catholic religion and cultural arts, particularly battle’, with the lion acting as a metaphor for the soldier. An allegory is in their patronage of bards, or poets. However, by the time that ‘Caoine an extended metaphor because it tells a narrative, or story, that works Cill Chaise’ was composed, the power of the Anglo-Norman families as a narrative in itself, with characters and settings, but it also conveys had steadily diminished due to the political and military upheaval that messages about abstract ideas. In the introductory consideration of Ní Ireland had experienced over the centuries. New landowners, considered Chuilleanáin’s life and work, consideration was given in the ‘Medieval ‘English’ by the Irish people, came to Ireland and introduced new ways and Renaissance poetry’ section to ‘Le Roman de la Rose’, which is a

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medieval allegory. You may find it helpful to refer back to this section. In of the 1600s, over 12 per cent of Ireland was still covered by forests of the case of ‘Kilcash’, the narrative of the poem concerning the death of broad-leafed trees, but by the beginning of the 1800s this had dropped Margaret Butler, a member of the fading Anglo-Norman families, and to between 1–2%. As this period of rapid deforestation roughly coincided the consequences for her local society is an allegory for Irish society in the with the ending of the Anglo-Norman way of life in Irish society and Celtic Tiger years. the arrival of the new ‘English’ landowners, the two became linked in the collective memory of Irish society at that time. So it is that many of the ‘Kilcash’ was intended to encourage Irish people to become more aware poems and songs composed in the late 1700s and into the 1800s firmly of and more thoughtful about the consequences for Irish society of placed the responsibility for the loss of the forests on the shoulders of the the great social change produced by the Celtic Tiger. In this way, Ní new ‘English’ settlers. Chuilleanáin is using this translation of a poem that described Irish society in the past to influence those who live in the Irish society of the present. Consequently, in the question that opens ‘Kilcash’, the image of the Therefore, although we will be reading words that describe Irish society in ‘woods laid low’ represents the way in which the old Anglo-Norman way the past, Ní Chuilleanáin is encouraging us to apply their meanings to the of life had vanished, along with all the social structures that it involved. Irish society of the present. Lines 2–8 make this clear as they describe how the ‘household’, the ‘lady’ and the close links with religion, ‘Their bell’ and ‘Mass, are gone. Although A reading of the poem this poem laments the death of one individual, Margaret Butler, it is Usually we consider the key elements that are familiar in Eiléan Ní clearly signalled in the opening that it is also lamenting the dramatic loss Chuilleanáin’s poetry that feature in a poem before we engage in a of a way of life that structured Irish society for many centuries. reading of it. However, because ‘Kilcash ‘ is a translation of an already existing poem, the structure, the bard and the images in the poem are In the second stanza, these feelings of fear and uncertainty are increased largely those of the original author. by the disorder that is evident in the estate of the old Anglo-Norman landowner, who is now gone. Line 16 emphasises that the destruction The opening lines of ‘Kilcash’ immediately convey fear and uncertainty: of the social structures established by the Anglo-Norman way of life ‘What will we do now for timber | With the last of the woods laid low –’. included the Catholic religion, as implied by the reference to the dead This image of the loss of ‘the woods’ was significant in the 18th century, bishop (‘The Bishop and the Lady Iveagh!’). The bard paints a picture of when these lines were originally composed in Irish. At the beginning an Irish society that changed radically and fundamentally in that all the

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traditional leaders, both religious and secular, and all the traditional social It is as if many of the greatest fears that haunted centuries of Irish society rules and values were gone. Is it any wonder that the poem is filled with have appallingly become real for the bard and his fellow human beings uncertainty? because of the dramatic changes that have swept through Irish society. In stanza 6, the bard returns to images that convey just how greatly the local In stanzas 3–6, the bard extends his description of the disorder caused society felt the loss of Margaret Butler and, perhaps implied in lines 42–4, by this loss of the old way of life. In stanzas 3 and 4, this disorder spreads the other leaders of Anglo-Norman descent, such as Patrick Sarsfield and out into the section of the world of nature that formerly had been under the ‘Wild Geese’ who left Ireland for Europe. the control of the old Anglo-Norman landowner. This is an interesting connection in that it echoes beliefs from earlier times in the history of In the final stanza, the bard turns to one of the key social structures in the Irish society. The Celts believed that there was a connection between the old way of life, the Catholic religion, and prays to ‘Mary and Jesus’ that leader of a social group and the health of the natural world around them. the second key social structure of the old way of life, the Anglo-Norman If the leader was a good one, then the world of nature flourished; if he system that included the wealthy and caring ‘lady’, as represented by was a bad leader, then the world of nature suffered. Again, the sense of Margaret Butler, will once more be at the heart of Irish society. Then, he what was once ordered falling into a terrifying disorder is evident in these is certain, order will return to Irish society. Is it any wonder that he predicts stanzas. celebrations?

In stanza 5, fear and uncertainty become terror as this disorder affects Language the wider natural world: the weather has changed ‘Mist hangs low’; there Although Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was working with an already existing is a drought ‘streams all run dry’; there is no growth ‘No hazel, no holly poem with ‘Kilcash’, a comparison between her English translation or berry’, just ‘Bare naked rocks and cold’; the few trees that remain are of ‘Caoine Cill Chaise’ and that of Thomas Kinsella’s equally fine ‘leafless’; and the animals and birds once managed by the Butlers for translation reveals that in her images and words, Ní Chuilleanáin brings hunting have ‘gone wild’. This is like the end of the world, and indeed, line an immediacy and vibrancy to her translation of the poem.The following 35 ‘Darkness falls among daylight’ recalls the Vikings’ belief that it was the examples illustrate the differences in approach. dark days of a terrible winter that would signal that the world was about to end.

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Lines 33–6 in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Kilcash’: emotions expressed in words that we, the readers, know and understand. This is a testimony to her skills as a translator, but it is also another Mist hangs low on the branches example of the way in which she builds ‘invitations’ to her readers into her No sunlight can sweep aside, poems. Just as her vivid imagery that appeals to the senses draws readers Darkness falls among daylight And the streams all run dry; in so that her poems become an experience, in ‘Kilcash’ the vibrancy of her carefully constructed language draws readers in so that even in the Thomas Kinsella’s translation of these lines: heady and exciting days of the Celtic Tiger, they would pause and reflect on the consequences of this great social change in Irish society. A mist on the boughs is descending neither daylight or sun can clear. A stain from the sky is descending And the waters receding away.

Thomas Kinsella’s translation has a mythical, fairytale atmosphere, created by the ‘boughs’ and the ‘stain from the sky’. There is a restrained elegance in the way in which the ‘mist’ and the ‘stain’ are ‘descending’ and ‘the waters receding away’. This is a world that is indeed undergoing change, but it is a world that seems to be far away from the real world.

On the other hand, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s world is very real and the change is frighteningly sudden as the ‘Mist hangs low’, the ‘Darkness falls’ and ‘the streams all run dry’. There is immediacy and vibrancy in her lines. This is a world where change has an impact, where one would feel fear and believe that the end of the world is near. It is also a world that is described in the language of everyday speech, making it feel very close to our world. In Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation, change in a society becomes a human experience in that it impacts in real terms on individual people and their 542 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin following

Following The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in concrete images. A layering of focus The image of a quest. With ‘Translation’ and ‘Kilcash’, we saw how the focus of these two An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because poems marked a change from the personal or individual focus used in Ní Chuilleanáin believes that there are always elements of mystery the earlier poems to a broader one that considered society and the way and enigma in life. in which the past of Irish society affects its present. With ‘Following’ we The use of a non-gendered, vague and undefined persona who encounter a focus in which the two are layered together. Much like the relates the narrative fragment in an unbiased way and so creates layering of meanings in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, the focus of this a space for us to enter into the poem and engage in making our own poem initially seems to be on the personal or individual, but as we read meaning. the poem with alertness and attention, a strong sense gradually develops Women in Irish society. that it is also focused on Irish society. This layering of focus produces an effect similar to that which she creates in ‘Kilcash’, where she conveys the Lines 1–7 immediately bring us into the narrative fragment as a girl tries way in which consequences of a great social change become a human to follow her father ‘through the fair’ and meets a number of obstacles. experience that impacts on individual people. However, in ‘Following’ the The link between this image and the image of a quest is obvious, with the impact on the individual comes from the lack of change in Irish society. obstacles representing the challenges that traditionally must be faced on a quest. The first obstacle that she encounters, the ‘beasts packed solid A reading of the poem as books’, is significant because it creates a connection between the size Ní Chuilleanáin employs a number of elements in ‘Following’ that have and bulk of the obstacle that the ‘beasts’ form and ‘books’ shelved closely now become familiar to us: together. This connection will be relevant in discussing the final section of The use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. the poem. An emphasis on size and bulk is also evident in the description Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers of the second obstacle, ‘the dealing men’, who appear to the girl as a of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the ‘block’, a ‘mountain’ and ‘a plumber’s bend’. Both of these obstacles are words and phrases that she uses. ‘slow to give way’ to the girl. The impression created in these lines is Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to that the girl is physically much smaller than the ‘beasts’ and ‘the dealing encourage us to actively engage with the poem. men’ and that she is regarded by both as being of little importance, since

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they do not move out of her way quickly. Understandably, the girl feels turns the fair into a daytime nightmare, with ‘Mouths that roar like the vulnerable in such a situation. noise of the fair day’.

Indeed, it would also appear from the images connected to the girl’s The opening of the final stanza is surprising because of the sudden father in lines 1–7 that he, too, does not seem to regard her as being very change of location and emotions. The girl seems to have succeeded important. Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of ‘snapshots’ of the father’s clothes in her quest to find her father, as she ‘comes to where he is seated’ in ‘a vividly conveys the way in which the girl at times glimpses her father in library’ with ‘whiskey poured out into two glasses’. This seems to be a the crowd. At first, she sees his ‘coat’, then ‘a shirt-cuff’, followed by ‘a much calmer and far more tranquil situation than the one in lines 8–15. handkerchief’ and ‘the hard brim of his hat, skimming along’. The effect In fact, the tranquillity is rather odd, given the fact that this man has left produced is of her father moving rapidly away from her so that the girl his daughter behind him at a busy fair. He shows no sign of anxiety, as becomes more and more isolated in the crowd and feels more and more he is ‘seated’ and has spent his time pouring out two glasses of whiskey. vulnerable. The link that has been established here between the father Perhaps one of the glasses of whiskey is meant for the girl as a gesture and his clothes is also significant, as it appears again in the final section of of comfort from her father, but if it is meant as such a gesture then it is a the poem. rather weak one in the circumstances. It becomes clear that this tranquillity is actually emotional repression. Again, as in the first stanza, the father In lines 8–15, Ní Chuilleanáin communicates the intensity of the girl’s is described through images of his clothes, ‘all finely laundered, | Ironed abstract feelings of isolation and vulnerability by presenting her in a series facings and linings’. The obvious care that the father takes with his clothes of concrete, nightmarish situations. These nightmarish situations are is in stark contrast to his apparent lack of care for his daughter. This conveyed by images that appeal to the senses of sight and touch so that focus on clean, ordered perfection, again an indication of his emotional we actually experience the same feelings and are drawn into the poem. repression, is also evident in the environment where the father obviously We see and feel the scenes as she is described walking at night on a bog feels comfortable: the library has shelves of books organised in an orderly and meeting a ‘dead corpse risen’ or stumbling through tree-trunks that way and is filled with light that ‘is clean’. This section of the poem also transform into trunks of bodies and uneven water-filled bog cuttings indicates that the father and daughter clearly come from a different scattered with ‘Half-choked heads’. These are all scenes that evoke level of society to the crowd at the fair because they have the money to feelings of isolation and vulnerability. We can understand fully why her buy books and such luxury items as handkerchiefs and to have clothes intense emotional reaction to being left behind by her father in the crowd regularly washed and ironed. The implied physical distance between

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the daughter and her father in the library, representing their emotional the ‘white linen’ seems to have been embroidered by the girl for her distance, also contrasts with the willingness of the ‘dealing men’ to be father, one of the few occupations allowed to women in the upper levels squashed together with each other and the ‘beasts’, representing a much of Irish society in the past. There is a touching quality about this image, more relaxed attitude emotionally. as it conveys the girl’s efforts to replace the emotional disconnection that she feels with an emotional connection to her father. It would appear In lines 21–29 it becomes clear that the daughter has not succeeded in that at some point she embroidered a ‘linen’ handkerchief for her father, her quest at all in that she has not found her father in any meaningful way so by doing this, she tried to emotionally connect with him through his because they are still separated by an emotional distance. Ní Chuilleanáin concern for his clothes. Similarly, the ‘three drops’ of ‘her heart’s blood’, uses two concrete images to represent this emotional distance between produced by accidentally pricking her finger with the pointed embroidery the father and daughter, caused by the father’s emotionally repressed needle, become a concrete indication of the love that she wanted to show condition. Firstly, there is the ‘smooth foxed leaf’ that has been ‘hidden’ in her father by making the handkerchief for him. However, the father’s a ‘forest of fine shufflings’. This remarkably effective image, which appeals emotionally repressed condition is once again conveyed by his action of to the senses of sight, touch and hearing, operates on two levels. On one tucking the daughter’s handkerchief embroidered with ‘flowers’ between level, the father’s action of tucking the brown-stained sheet of paper, the the pages of a book. Like the ‘foxed leaf’, it too has been filed away in an ‘foxed leaf’, in between other sheets of paper, represented by the sound orderly manner. that they make (‘fine shufflings’), conveys his concern with order rather than emotions, while on another level, this image is suggestive of a fox The poem ends on a striking but rather enigmatic note with the hiding in a ‘forest’, implying that the father is secretive about his emotions, vivid image of the ‘crushed flowers’ of the daughter’s embroidered that he keeps them ‘hidden’ . This emotional repression can be connected handkerchief that ‘crack | The spine open, push the bindings apart’ of back to the father’s lack of concern for his daughter in the crowded fair the book in which it has been filed. This concrete image dramatically and, possibly, to the second glass of whiskey. represents abstract emotions breaking out of a repressed condition. As the handkerchief was an attempt by the daughter to change her sense of Secondly, there is the image of the ‘square of white linen’ with ‘three emotional dislocation from her father, perhaps this image represents the drops’ of the girl’s ‘heart’s blood’ that has also been put into ‘the emotional strain and tension that she feels as she tries to get around what gatherings’ of ‘a book’. Although it is not clearly stated, this poem feels she perceives as the huge obstacles of his books, like the ‘beasts’ in the as if it is set in Ireland’s past. This image is suggestive of the past in that first section of the poem, and also the obstacle of his clothes so that she

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can locate herself in a loving relationship with her father. Alternatively, Similarly, some critics have suggested that ‘Following’ also acts as a could it be the emotional strain and the tension felt by her father who, representation of women’s vulnerability and lack of power in Irish society long used to repressing his emotions, can only weakly express his in the past. The reluctance of the ‘dealing men’ to move so that the emotional response to his daughter’s gift of love by filing it away with his girl can get through in line 3 and her father’s lack of care for her can beloved books? be interpreted as representing the lower position, relative to men, that women occupied in Irish society in the past. Indeed, there was strong As always with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, there are suggestions and resistance in many areas of Irish society to any attempt to change this clues in ‘Following’ that invite the reader to engage with the poem and social structure to enable women to gain more power in Irish society. It to explore a number of different interpretations. What is perfectly clear was only in 1922 that all Irish women who were over the age of 21 were in this poem, however, is the feeling that we are left with of the haunting given the right to vote in Ireland. sadness that accompanies the presence of such emotional disconnection in human relationships. In order to convey just how destructive, emotionally and psychologically, such an unjust imbalance of power can be to a society, Eiléan Ní Women in Irish society Chuilleanáin condenses this wider social issue down into an individual As we discussed in our earlier introductory consideration of Eiléan Ní and personal experience. As we have seen previously, this is also what Chuilleanáin’s life and work, the 1960s were very significant for her, as she does through her use of vibrant language in ‘Kilcash’. In ‘Following’, she began her academic career and won her first prize for her poetry in the girl experiences her lower position in Irish society in real and physical that decade. This decade was also a time when the role of women in Irish ways and clearly suffers emotionally and psychologically. Significantly, society began to change and when women such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin however, Ní Chuilleanáin does not only represent the destructive were able to participate more fully in Irish society. Consequently, she has emotional and psychological effects suffered by women in the form of written about and spoken of the situation of women in Irish society in the the girl. She also uses the father to show how this unjust imbalance in past and in the present. Her poem ‘Translation’ has been interpreted not power can be emotionally and psychologically destructive for men. The only as an attempt to give a voice back to the Magdalene women, but father’s emotional repression and his inability to relate to his daughter in a also as an example of the way in which women generally were in a more meaningful way represent the ways in which men were also damaged by vulnerable, less powerful position than men in Irish society in the past. this imbalance in power.

546 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin following

As we noted previously, ‘Following’ ends with an enigmatic image of ‘crushed flowers’ cracking the spine of a book ‘open’, perhaps indicating emotional strain and tension. Much of the enigma of this image lies in the question of who was experiencing this emotional strain and tension. Given this consideration of how this poem can be seen to represent the situation of women in Irish society in the past, it would seem that this emotional strain and tension was felt by women and men and, consequently, the Irish society in which they lived. The message to us who live in Irish society in the present is clear.

547 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin all for you

All for You Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to encourage us to actively engage with the poem. Alert and attentive reading The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in ‘All for You’ is a short poem of only 16 lines. However, it vividly creates concrete images. In this case the abstract sense of feeling at home in a sense of being in and moving through a built space. In addition, it is a place is conveyed through the concrete images of movement steeped in an atmosphere of mystery and enigma that is both fascinating around the castle, food and sleep. and deeply irritating in that it remains unsolved. Because of this mystery The image of a quest. and enigma, there are many and varied ways in which this poem can be An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because interpreted. Clearly, the impact that it makes as a poem is far greater Ní Chuilleanáin believes that there are always elements of mystery than its length. It is evident that to achieve such an impact, Eiléan Ní and enigma in life. Chuilleanáin has invested a great deal of time, thought and effort into her The use of a non-gendered, vague and undefined persona who revision process, examined previously in the introductory consideration relates the narrative fragment in an unbiased way and so creates of her life and work. The words that she uses convey meaning, but it is a a space for us to enter into the poem and engage in making our own shifting type of meaning in that there are moments when it seems that meaning. the mystery and enigma of this poem have been solved, but then the The inclusion of architectural images that position the poem in a world next word or phrase dissolves that meaning. This is certainly a poem that that seems to be solidly familiar and ordinary. requires alert and attentive reading. Possibly the influence of the past on the present.

A reading of the poem The creation of the atmosphere of mystery and enigma begins in the Once again, we encounter elements that have become familiar in Eiléan opening lines of the poem. Here, the narrative fragment seems to Ní Chuilleanáin’s work: suggest the end of a quest, as there is a strong feeling that this is an The use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. arrival. However, it is unclear what type of arrival it is, who is doing the Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers arriving and where is being arrived at. The use of the word ‘strange’ to of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the describe the stable in line 1 indicates that this place is unknown to those words and phrases that she uses. who are arriving. The word ‘dismount’ suggests that this poem may be set in the past, when people travelled on horses or perhaps the ‘donkey’

548 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin all for you

in line 2. If it is the donkey, then it is likely that there are only two people castle. The extent of this power is conveyed in the phrase ‘It is for you’: involved in this arrival, since that would be the most that the donkey could the power to give and the power to receive this castle rest entirely with the carry. There is a contrast between these people, vague and insubstantial people who have just arrived. The castle, like the donkey, is under their because we know so little about them, and the donkey, which is more control. There is also a sense of intimacy conveyed in this phrase, so it substantial and real and is obviously familiar with the place, as he ‘walks on’ would appear that there are only two people, the giver and the receiver. into his stable and ‘sticks his head in a manger’. This idea of control and having power could be seen as being further It is this contrast between the donkey’s sense of arriving home and the reinforced in the phrases that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin uses about the castle people who enter a ‘strange stableyard’ that seems to indicate that as the people move around it: ‘their thick ribs part’ and ‘the doors ... Swing the people have not been in this place before. The connection that is wide’. It is as if the place is magically opening up and submitting to the established here between the feeling of being at home and food, as people. There is an increasing sense that the people are feeling more represented in the donkey’s behaviour, is significant, as it reappears again at home in this place as they register the smell of ‘the breath of ovens’ in the second and third stanzas. Also, the fact that the donkey knows what cooking food. For both the donkey and the people, there seem to be to do and the people do not implies that they are arriving in an already two requirements that produce the feeling of being at home: firstly, a established world, with its own routines and customs. habitation, a place that is occupied and slept in – the donkey has its stable and the people have the castle; and secondly, the availability of food, In lines 4–11 it becomes clear that these people are indeed entering into implied by the donkey’s ‘manger’ and the ‘the breath of ovens’ for the an established world. The architectural images of ‘The great staircase of people. the hall’, ‘the vaults’ and the ‘guardroom, chapel, storeroom’ indicate that this ‘world’ is a castle. Indeed, the people do not seem to be surprised by In the final stanza, the people’s power over this world is again emphasised these surroundings, so it would seem that, to them, this is a solidly familiar by the repetition of the phrase ‘It is for you’. The importance of food is and ordinary world. The poet creates a vivid sense of actually physically again conveyed by the poet’s use of images that appeal to the senses of moving through the solidity and vastness of a castle in these lines with smell and sight to describe what seems to be the castle storeroom: ‘the such phrases as the ‘great staircase’ and ‘wind and warp’. It is evident that dry fragrance of tea-chests’ and the sight of the ‘tins shining in ranks’ and unlike the donkey, which only has the power to move as it wants when the ‘the ten-pound jars | Rich with shrivelled fruit’. It is evident that there is riders ‘dismount’, the people have complete power to move about the an abundance of food for the people in this world that is now under their

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power. It is unsurprising, then, that in lines 14–15 there is the suggestion moving from the pocket, once this locking up is done, is a reassuring that this storeroom is a place where they really feel at home, relaxed and reminder of this. The second interpretation does provide a link to the comfortable enough to sleep: ‘Where better to lie down | And sleep’. ‘guardroom’ in line 8, along with the ‘chapel’ and ‘storeroom’, as areas in However, there are two significant implications in the final line of the the castle. In this castle, the sense of feeling at home seems to involve poem, ‘With the key still in your pocket?’, that unsettle this wonderful food and religion, as suggested by the storeroom and the chapel, but picture of arriving in a strange place and increasingly feeling more at also the presence of armed guards to provide defence and, by attack, to home. The first significant implication is that sleep will be especially deep impose the power of those who control the castle on others. because one of the people will have the key, and the second significant implication is the question mark. So there is a link between the question mark, representing uncertainty; the key, a concrete representation of insecurity or security; and the Because it indicates doubt and uncertainty, the question mark suggests ‘guardroom’ indicating the maintenance of security, and the elimination of that the people’s sense of being at home, in control of and having power insecurity, by physical force. This link also connects to lines 10–11, where over this place may not be as secure as is appears. The ‘key’ in the final two vivid images are used to describe the wood burning in the ovens: line is clearly a symbol of the power of ownership and the control that the the ‘rage of brushwood’ and the ‘roots torn out and butchered’. These person who possesses it has over the castle. are violent images, suggestive of both resentful resistance and harsh oppression, ‘torn out and butchered’. It is at this point that the two rather However, the mention of the ‘key’ in the ‘pocket’ can be interpreted in unusual words used at the beginning of this section in lines 4–5 perhaps two ways because of the poet’s use of the word ‘still’. Firstly, if we take the reveal another layer of meaning. The words ‘slouches’ and ‘Sprawling’ word ‘still’ to mean ‘even now’, this line could be interpreted as they have could be seen as conveying a sullen form of passive resistance among explored the castle freely without using the key and won’t need to use it to the inhabitants of this established ‘world’ of the castle. If this is indeed the lock up the castle, as their power is secure. However, if this were so, why people’s situation, is it any wonder that their sense of being at home is form this comment as a question? If they have confidence in their power, rather uneasy? surely it should just be a statement of fact. Secondly, if we take the word ‘still’ to mean ‘not moving’, then this could be interpreted as implying a What, then, is Ní Chuilleanáin inviting us to consider in our alert and feeling of insecurity: the power that they have must be protected and attentive reading of this poem? Is she suggesting that there is a difference defended by locking doors and gates, and the ‘still’ key that will not be in the requirements that animals and human beings need in order to feel

550 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin all for you

at home? After all, the donkey is content with his habitation and food, controlling Ireland that power and control, and a true feeling of being at happy with his home. The people have an excellent habitation and plenty home in a place or a role, are only ever secure when everyone agrees to of food, yet their sense of being at home seems to be uneasy, requiring the arrangement? keys, guards and physical force to sustain it. Perhaps we should consider the circumstances within which this sense of home is being established. There is much that is mysterious and puzzlingly enigmatic about this The castle is an established world and the people who have just arrived poem, from the question of who the arriving people are to whether they are taking control of it. But although they have the power to move around did in fact ‘lie down | And sleep’ on ‘the labelled shelves’ in the storeroom. the castle, there is no one there to greet them and to show them around. But then, as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry reminds us, there is much that There clearly must be castle inhabitants, as the ovens are burning wood. is mysterious and puzzlingly enigmatic not only about the sense of being Are these inhabitants simply doing their work, resentful and feeling ‘the at home in a place, but also about life itself. rage of brushwood’ because of the new arrivals who have taken over power? Is the poet suggesting that a sense of home may seem to come A network of ideas with power, but it will never be secure unless that power is fairly achieved Although Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin uses her customary straightforward and and accepted by the people who live within its range? Is the focus of this conversational language in ‘All for You’, she succeeds in communicating a poem on the individual and personal, with apparently two people arriving number of complex ideas in the poem that act to stimulate us to engage at a castle, or on the wider society and its structures that the people and with the poem as we try to work out their meanings. This process of the castle represent? communication rests on a network of images that underpin this poem. We have seen this linking of images in previous poems, as, for example, What about the fact that this takes place in a castle, a common feature in with the image of the ‘books’ in ‘Following’. However, here it seems to be the Irish landscape for many centuries? Should we relate these questions a particularly complex network, as the following examples indicate. about a sense of home to the past history of Irish society, with its seizures of power and rebellions? Perhaps, once again, Ní Chuilleanáin wants us The first strand of images that we will follow begins in line 1 with the to recognise the influence that our past has on Irish society in the present. images of the ‘the gate’ and the ‘stableyard’. This then links to ‘door’ (line Are these people representative of those who, over the centuries, tried 2); ‘staircase’ and ‘hall’ (line 4); ‘and steps’, ‘vaults’, ‘doors’ and ‘guardroom, to take over control of Ireland, to make it their home through force, chapel, storeroom’ (lines 6–8). This strand, made up of architectural but never really felt secure? Is this a reminder to those who are now images, conveys the impression of an organised and solidly built environment, one that is probably set in the past as it seems to be a castle. 551 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin all for you

The second strand of images also begins in line 1, with ‘we dismount’. This is connected to ‘It is for you’ (line 5); ‘It is for you’ (line 12); ‘lie down | And sleep’ (lines 14–15); and ‘the key still in your pocket’ (line 16). The contrast between this network and the previous one is evident. Whereas the built environment is solid, the people implied in these images are shadowy and ethereal. Does this contrast suggest that the castle is solid and enduring but the people are only temporary?

By following this strand, it becomes apparent that although the sense of the people moving through the inside of the castle is vividly conveyed in lines 4–11, there are no verbs describing the movements that they make to do this, such as ‘walk’ or ‘climb’. It is as if these people are floating, not really connecting with this environment. Is this perhaps another indication that they will only be a temporary fixture in this world?

552 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin lucina schynning in silence of the nicht

Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht Chuilleanáin’s poem. However, in Dunbar’s poem he had a dream-vision while asleep that helped to change his emotions, whereas with the speaker Background in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem there is no dream-vision, but there is nature. The title of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’ is a line taken from a poem written by a Scottish poet, William In addition, this poem was written around the time that Eiléan Ní Dunbar, who was born in the late 14th century and worked in the court Chuilleanáin’s father died in 1970. She also seems to draw on this in of James IV of Scotland. Also, lines 1–2 of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem are ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’ because there is an image a modern English translation of this line and another line from Dunbar’s described in the final lines of the poem that we will recognise, as we have poem. met it before in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’: the image of the hare ‘sitting still | In the middle of the track’. As we know from our exploration In his poem, Dunbar explains how he was very depressed one night of ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, Ní Chuilleanáin saw this hare at the because he was unable to obtain a benefice, that is, a secure, paid position time that her father was dying. in the Church. When he finally fell asleep, he had a dream-vision where Dame Fortune came to him and told him that he would get a benefice. A reading of the poem However, she did say that this would not happen until a seemingly In ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’ we encounter an almost impossible incident had occurred: an abbot, the head of a monastery, overwhelming density of vivid, dramatic and frequently enigmatic images covering himself with eagle’s feathers and flying in the air. She then that stimulate our senses and provoke our thoughts. However, we also linked this apparently impossible incident to events connected to the recognise some of the elements that we have become familiar with in the appearance of the Antichrist, with destruction and fire, just before the course of our exploration of her poems: Second Coming of Christ. When he woke up, Dunbar felt more positive. The use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. This is actually meant to be an amusing poem, because in it Dunbar Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers is making fun of a man he dislikes, who did try to fly off the walls of a of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the Scottish castle. words and phrases that she uses. Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to This sequence of feeling depressed and negative emotions, falling asleep encourage us to actively engage with the poem. and waking up, then feeling more positive is also evident in Eiléan Ní

553 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin lucina schynning in silence of the nicht

The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in the environment in which it takes place: ‘in a ruin’, lit by a ‘candle’, with concrete images. the wind blowing in through ‘the crazed window’. This brings a medieval The image of a quest. quality to the surroundings, and perhaps this is appropriate since from An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because the references to it in the opening lines of the poem, it would appear Ní Chuilleanáin believes that there are always elements of mystery that the book being read was William Dunbar’s medieval work. The ‘ruin’ and enigma in life. could also represent the idea that the place where she is reading was The inclusion of architectural images. old and dilapidated. Is there a link here between the book and the ruin, The idea of the world of nature as a source of calmness and suggesting that the book contains knowledge that is also old, dilapidated consolation. and therefore not able to improve the speaker’s emotional state? The ‘ruin’ certainly does seem to represent a feeling of confinement, of being The ‘I’ in this poem has been interpreted in two ways: as the poet speaking penned in. through a persona or alternatively as the poet speaking as herself. Thus, the ‘I’ could represent her use of a non-gendered, vague and undefined Whether it is because of her reading or because of some unconnected persona who tells the narrative fragment to create a space for us to enter reason – perhaps the death of the poet’s father – it is evident that the into the poem to make our own meaning and interpretation. However, we speaker is not happy in her reading. Her abstract negative and depressed do know that the final image of the poem, featuring the hare on the track, emotions are conveyed through a series of concrete images that appeal is connected to the time when her father was dying. Perhaps this indicates to our senses so that we can also experience them. There is the smell that the ‘I’ is the poet speaking as herself. Or perhaps it is a combination of the ‘sour’ candle and the touch of the cold air ‘Blowing in the crazed of both in that it is not wholly a persona or the poet but a blend of the window’. In addition, there is the lack of anything that might prove two? You might like to make your own decision about this. comforting, such as ‘roast meat or music | Strong drink’. The use of the word ‘crazed’ introduces layers of meaning in that ‘crazed’ can mean ‘to Lines 1–7 open the poem with a series of dramatic and vivid images. As be made insane’. Is this window a concrete image for her intense abstract has been noted, lines 1–2 are modern English translations of two lines feelings that are almost driving her mad? But ‘crazed’ can also mean from William Dunbar’s poem. They do, however, create an atmosphere ‘marked with fine surface cracks’, so is this image simply explaining why of stillness and quietness. As we read on, we learn that the speaker has the air is blowing in? Perhaps it is both. The final line suggests a change been reading a ‘book’. This seemingly usual activity is made unusual by in the speaker’s emotions as she feels the ‘Moonlight on my head’. The

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use of the word ‘clear’ reinforces this idea that her negative and depressed emotions, such as those that would be felt in response to a ‘plague’ of emotional condition, represented by the ‘rain’, is beginning to improve. mice and beetles? Lines 15–16 also convey occurrences that would create Again, this line conveys layered meanings. It could also be the speaker negative and depressed feelings, with the ‘pale faces’ and ‘disease’. But simply telling us that she feels negative and depressed emotions because happily, this is all behind her. she has been unable to go out for three days due to the rain. Lines 17–20 convey the increasingly positive emotions that the speaker In lines 8–11, this sense of increasingly positive emotions is again conveyed is experiencing. She feels ‘relaxed’. She also feels ‘amazed’, and lines through a concrete image that appeals to the senses: the almost 18–20 create a striking concrete image to convey how this amazement baptismal scene of washing in ‘cold water; it was orange’ that appeals to felt to her. It was as if she was one of the ‘mosaic beasts’ on the floor of a the senses of touch and sight. This image of the water seems to act as a chapel which only saw the ‘sky growing’ for the first time when Cromwell link that draws the world of nature into the ‘ruin’, because as the speaker destroyed the roof of the church. It is clear that for the ‘beasts’, the sleeps, bats fly around her room and when she awakes she sees sheep. chapel represented confinement, being penned in away from the world It is significant that these creatures from the world of nature seem to of nature, represented by ‘the sky’. This echoes the sense of confinement contribute to the fact that she ‘slept safely’. that the speaker felt in the ‘ruin’ in lines 1–6.

The speaker awakes with her abstract depressed and negative emotions The final stanza of the poem contains images that create a wonderful ‘Behind’ her. Again, this is conveyed by the use of concrete images. celebration of the world of nature and its power to evoke positive She no longer feels oppressed by ‘the waves of darkness’. The image emotions in those who go out into it. These images contrast sharply with of the ‘mice, plague of beetles | Crawling out of the spines of books’ the architectural images of the ‘ruin’ and the chapel that convey a sense is nightmarish and could be seen as suggesting the intensity of her of confinement, of being penned in filled with negative emotions, away emotional state: when she was depressed and negative, she felt as if she from nature. There is also the suggestion that the speaker is on a quest was in a nightmare. But there are layers of meaning here again. This may in these lines. However, this is a very special quest in that she does not be a reference to spontaneous generation: the medieval and Renaissance face any challenges. Instead, in keeping with nature’s power to evoke belief that life could suddenly appear from sources that were not parents, positive emotions, she is ‘embraced’ by ‘Sheepdogs’, ‘the grasshopper’ eggs or seeds, such as mud or books. If we accept this meaning, does and the ‘lark and bee’. These all contribute to her positive feelings to such this then suggest another link, as in line 3, between books and negative an extent that the ‘hedges of high thorn’, perhaps a negative image, are

555 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin lucina schynning in silence of the nicht

ignored as she focuses on ‘the hare, absorbed, sitting still | In the middle of the track’. We have met this hare before in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, where Ní Chuilleanáin carries this image in her memory as she returns to her dying father’s bedside. It is also a source of positive emotions here. In the final line of the poem, it is clear that the speaker has reached the end of her quest: she hears the ‘chirp of the stream running’. The use of the word ‘chirp’ says all that needs to be said about her emotions now.

Nature and positive feelings Nature appears as a positive force in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry. As we have seen in ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’, it is being able to get out into nature that enables the speaker to put her negative emotions behind her and to develop positive ones. Nature has a similarly positive effect in ‘The Bend in the Road’, where the memories of loved ones who have died are recalled close to nature; in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, where the poet returns to her dying father’s bedside strengthened by her time in nature; and in ‘Translation’, where it could be suggested that the Magdalene woman is absorbed into the world of nature and finds peace at last.

556 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin ideas and images in eiléan ní chuilleanáin’s poetry

Ideas and images in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The representation of abstract human emotions and qualities in poetry concrete images. An element of mystery and puzzling enigma in the poem because Ní Chuilleanáin believes that there are always elements of mystery Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has said of her poetry: and enigma in life. The exception to this is ‘To Niall Woods and I find that American poets, particularly, are very Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009’, where programmatic. They set out to write twenty-five we learn a lot of detail about the narrative. poems about this or that. Mine would not be like that. I have a definite feeling that each poem will stand up The influence of the past on the present on its own ... when I am revising, I am usually revising ‘The Bend in the Road’: family memory three or four poems at a time ... Probably images carry ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 from one to another. September 2009’: folktales and fairytales ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’: family memory Ní Chuilleanáin seems to have a strong sense that her poems are not held ‘Fireman’s Lift’: family memory together by themes, but that each poem is a separate piece exploring ‘Translation’: past and present society aspects of her many and varied encounters with people and knowledge. ‘Kilcash’: past and present society Therefore, the list below groups the poems that we have considered according to the ideas and the images that they share. The image of a quest ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 The following elements will not be included in this list as they occur in all September 2009’ her poems: ‘The Second Voyage’ The use of a narrative fragment as a starting point for the poem. ‘Street’ Straightforward and conversational language that expresses layers ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ of meaning, requiring us to be alert and to pay careful attention to the ‘Deaths and Engines’ words and phrases that she uses. ‘Following’ Vivid imagery to communicate what she wishes to express and to ‘All for You’ encourage us to actively engage with the poem. ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’ 557 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin ideas and images in eiléan ní chuilleanáin’s poetry

Non-gendered vague persona Architectural images ‘The Bend in the Road’ ‘Street’ ‘Street’ ‘Deaths and Engines’ ‘Translation’ ‘Fireman’s Lift’ ‘Following’ ‘All for You’ ‘All for You’ ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’

The poet speaking as herself The image of a threshold ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 ‘Street’ September 2009’ ‘Fireman’s Lift’ ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ ‘Deaths and Engines’ Women in Irish society ‘Fireman’s Lift’ ‘Street’ ‘Translation’ Important life experiences ‘Following’ ‘The Bend in the Road’: deaths of loved ones ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 This is not an exhaustive list, as depending on your interpretation of a September 2009’: a wedding poem you may make additions or changes to this list. ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’: death of a loved one ‘Fireman’s Lift’: death of a loved one

Nature as a source of calmness and consolation ‘The Bend in the Road’ ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ ‘Translation’ ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’

558 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin questions

Questions (b) Imagine that you are a friend of the man in this poem. You see him standing at the threshold and he explains what has happened to you. 1. Read ‘The Bend in the Road’ and answer the following questions. What advice would you give him about whether or not he should (a) Do you think that this is a happy or a sad poem? Explain your answer. go in the door and up the stairs? Write a piece explaining the advice that you would give him. (b) Comment on the bold word in one of the following lines: (c) Suggest a new title for this poem. Give reasons for your suggestion, ‘A tall tree like a cat’s tail waited too.’ supporting them by reference to the poem. ‘This is the place of their presence: in the tree, in the air.’ (c) Imagine that you are the boy in the car. Read lines 1–6, then describe the incident from your point of view. 4. ‘In her poetry Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin offers her readers an invitation to engage actively with her poetry that is hard to resist.’ Give your response to the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in light of 2. Read ‘To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 this statement. Support your points with suitable reference to the September 2009’ and answer the following questions. poems on your course. (a) Which is your favourite section in this poem? Explain why you like it.

(b) Do you think that this is a good title for the poem? Why? 5. ‘Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s language is deceptively straightforward and (c) Which of the following statements suggest the poet’s attitude to her conversational and an alert and attentive reader will see layers of son and daughter-in-law: meaning in her poetry.’ Do you agree with this assessment of her She feels sorry for them poetry? Write a response, supporting your points with the aid of She is fascinated by them suitable reference to the poems on your course. She is happy for them Explain the reasons for your choice. 6. ‘Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin once commented on poetry, “The last line is the most important ... it allows you suddenly to see the poem as a 3. Read ‘Street’ and answer the following questions. whole.” ’ Do you think this comment can be applied to her own (a) Imagine you are to make a short film of ‘Street’. Describe the sound poetry? Support your answer with suitable reference to the poetry on effects, music and images that you would use. your course.

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7. ‘The poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin often presents us with a non- gendered, vague and undefined persona and a mysterious and enigmatic world.’ Write a response to the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in light of this statement, supporting your points with suitable reference to the poems on your course. 8. ‘For Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin the past is always influencing the present, both in the lives of individuals and in society.’ To what extent do you agree or disagree with this assessment of her poetry? Support your points with reference to the poetry on your course. 9. ‘Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Women in Irish Society.’ You have been asked by your local radio station to give a talk on the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Write out the text of the talk that you would deliver in response to the above title. Support your points by reference to the poetry on your course. 10. ‘For Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, many of life’s experiences can be seen as a quest.’ Write your response to this statement, supporting your answer with suitable reference to the poetry on your course.

560 new explorations eiléan ní chuilleanáin bibliography

Bibliography Gilsenan Nordin, I., ‘The weight of words: An interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 28, no. 2–vol. 29, Allen, N.,‘ ‘‘Each page lies open to the version of every other” ’: History in no. 1, fall 2002-spring 2003. the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, Gilsenan Nordin, I., Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, A Contemporary Irish spring-summer 2007. Poet, Lewiston (NY): Edwin Mellen Press 2008.

Boyle Haberstroh, P., ‘An interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, The Gonzalez, A.G. (ed.), Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Westport: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 1994. Greenwood Press 1999.

Boyle Haberstroh, P., ‘The architectural metaphor in the poetry of Eiléan Grennan, E., Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring-summer 2007. Omaha: Creighton University Press 1999.

Boyle Haberstroh, P. and Ní Chuilleanáin, E., ‘Interview with Eiléan Ní McCarthy, T. ‘ ‘‘We could be in any city’ ’’: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring-summer 2007. Cork’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring-summer 2007.

Clutterbuck, C. ‘Good faith in religion and art: The later poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, E. ‘Acts and monuments of an unelected nation: The Ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring-summer cailleach writes about the Renaissance’, Southern Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 2007. 1995. de Petris, C., ‘Italian dialogues: An interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Ní Chuilleanáin, E., ‘Vivian Mercier’, New Hibernia, vol. 8, no. 4, 2004. Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring-summer 2007. Ní Chuilleanáin, E. (ed.), Irish Women: Image and Achievement, Dublin: Faragó, B., ‘ ‘‘Alcove in the wind’’ ’: silence and space in Eiléan Ní Arlen House 1985. Chuilleanáin’s poetry’, Irish University Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring- Ray, K., ‘Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Eire-Ireland, vol. 31, no. 1 & summer 2007. 2, spring-summer 1999. Gilsenan Nordin, I., ‘ ‘‘And | a green leaf of language comes twisting out of her mouth’’ ’: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and the quest theme’, Irish University Review, vol. 31, no. 2, autumn-winter 2001.

561 Eavan Boland Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

562 new explorations eavan boland introduction

Introduction The poet feels that artists throughout the centuries have ignored the real lives of women: A literary life Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her mother was the painter I think of what great art removes: Frances Kelly and her father was the diplomat Frederick Boland, whose Hazard and death, the future and the past, career moves resulted in her roving childhood and youth. From the age This woman’s secret history and her loves … of six to 12 she lived in London, then in New York for a number of years, returning to Dublin when she was 14. In general, this volume is in the mainstream of the Irish political–romantic poetic tradition, with its themes of exile (‘The Flight of the Earls’) and She was educated at Holy Child Convent, Killiney, County Dublin, then political martyrdom (‘A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail’); poems about Irish went on to Trinity College, first as a student and later as a lecturer in poets (‘Yeats in Civil War’ and ‘After the Irish of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’); the English department. After a few years she embarked on a career as and the retelling of legends (‘Three Songs for a Legend’ and ‘The a literary journalist with the Irish Times and she also presented a regular Winning of Etain’). But her outlook was soon to change, under pressure poetry programme for RTÉ Radio. of the unfolding political situation.

New Territory Religious and political antagonism in Northern Ireland exploded into New Territory, her first book of poetry, published in 1967, contains the violence from 1969 onwards. Few people were unmoved or unaffected early poems, written between the ages of 17 and 22, which were critically by this. The violence spread southwards with the bombing of Dublin and acknowledged at the time as talented, well-crafted work. Among its main Monaghan in May 1974. Eavan Boland conducted a series of interviews concerns, this volume showed a preoccupation with the role of the poet in in the Irish Times with Northern writers concerning their views on the pieces such as ‘The Poets’ and ‘New Territory’. It also contained the first situation, its effects on the work of the writer and the function of art in a of her poems about paintings and so introduced what was to become an time of violence. In a seminal article on 7 June 1974 entitled ‘The Weasel’s important theme of Boland’s work: the stereotyped view of women in art Tooth’, she questioned the whole notion of cultural unity and accused and literature. ‘From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin’ shows a Irish writing, influenced by Yeats, of fostering lethal fantasies for political peasant woman, defined by love and domestic duties, ‘her eyes mixed | activists: Between love and market’.

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Let us be rid at last of any longing for cultural unity in War Horse’, both a private and a political poem, brings a vivid personal a country whose most precious contribution may be awareness of destruction and war to leafy Dublin suburbia. precisely its insight into the anguish of disunity … For there is, and at last I recognise it, no unity whatsoever The feminine vision and view of the world is also a force in this volume. in this culture of ours. And even more important, I recognise that there is no need whatsoever for such a In ‘The Famine Road’, Boland equates the callous official lack of unity. If we search for it we will, at a crucial moment, understanding of the famine victims with the offhand, male medical be mutilating with fantasy once again the very force attitude meted out to a contemporary woman suffering from sterility. we should be liberating with reality: our one strength Racial suffering is equated with female suffering. In ‘Suburban Woman’ as writers, the individual voice, speaking in tones and ‘Ode to Suburbia’ she deals with the daily grind of the housewife and of outcry, vengeance, bitterness even, against our disunity but speaking, for all that, with a cool tough the conflict between a woman’s traditional role and her identity as a poet acceptance of it. and creative artist:

The War Horse Her kitchen blind down – a white flag – the day’s assault over, now she will shrug a hundred small Boland’s second volume of poetry, The War Horse, published in surrenders off as images still born, unwritten 1975, reflects her concerns with violence and conflict in both private metaphors, blank pages; and on this territory, and community life. She deals with many types of conflict: the Irish– blindfold, we meet at last, veterans of a defeat no English struggle, worrying families and the conflict between lovers. truce will heal, no formula prevent breaking out fresh The development of this theme ranges from a recognition of the killer again. Again the print of twigs stalking her pillow will begin a new day and all her victims then – hopes instinct inherent in all nature, however domesticated (‘Prisoners’), to a unreprieved, hours taken hostage will newly wake, consideration of notorious historical public moments of conflict and death while I, on a new page will watch, like town and (‘The Famine Road’, ‘The Greek Experience’ and ‘Child of Our Time’, country, word, thought look for ascendancy, poise, which was written after the Dublin bombings of 1974) and the archetypal retreat, leaving each line maimed, my forces used. deadly conflict of fathers and sons (‘The Hanging Judge’ and ‘A Soldier’s Son’). The latter poem, in which a father kills his own son, has been read Defeated we survive, we two, housed together in my compromise, my craft – who are of one another the as ‘an image of a society at war with its own inheritance and future’. ‘The first draft.

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By this time Boland had married and moved from her city flat and literary His are a sculptor’s hands: they summon form from lifestyle to the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, where she was rearing her two the void, they bring me to myself again. daughters. These poems and others such as ‘The Other Woman’ and I am a new woman. ‘Child of Our Time’ reflect an attempt to find and bring together her identity as wife, Irishwoman, poet and mother with her life in the suburbs. ‘Solitary’ suggests that only a woman knows the real sensual rhythms of her own body. ‘Tirade for the Mimic Muse’ and ‘Witching’ undermine the In this volume there are also some beautiful and honest personal poems accepted conventional image of woman. ‘Tirade’ in particular deflates the on family, love and friendship – ‘Sisters’, ‘The Laws of Love’ and ‘The traditional male-created image of the muse as a beautiful girl, choosing Botanic Gardens’ – all demonstrating peaceful alternatives to conflict. instead to deal with the less picturesque reality:

I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout. In Her Own Image So here you are fumed in candle-stink In 1976 she began to work simultaneously on her next two volumes of Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass. poetry, In Her Own Image, published in 1980, and Night Feed, published How you arch and pout in it! in 1982. In Her Own Image deals with individual private female identity, How you poach your face in it! ‘woman’s secret history’. The poems explore taboo issues: anorexia, Anyone would think you were a whore – An ageing out-of-work kind-hearted tart. infanticide, mastectomy, menstruation, masturbation and domestic I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: violence. Here is a cry to look at the reality of woman, her sexuality, Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse – desires, feelings of degradation and failure to be understood. Our Muse of Mimic Art. ‘Anorexia’ explores female suffering; ‘Mastectomy’ and ‘In His Own Image’ explore feelings of degradation and see the female body as the These are angry poems, featuring degraded states of women in a sort object of man’s desire and of his need to control and shape: of antilyric verse, yet they goad the reader into considering the reality of woman, not the image. He splits my lip with his fist, shadows my eye with a blow, knuckles my neck to its proper angle. What a perfectionist! Night Feed If In Her Own Image featured the dark side of ‘woman’s secret history’, Night Feed features the suburban, domestic and maternal: the ordinary,

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traditional, everyday aspects of woman’s identity. The main sequence Earth wakes. of poems, ‘Domestic Interior, 1–11’, focuses on the close bond between You go back to sleep. mother and child and explores the intensity of that maternal experience. It The feed is ended. Worms turn. includes the now familiar ‘Night Feed’: Stars go in. Even the moon is losing face. This is dawn. Poplars stilt for dawn Believe me And we begin This is your season, little daughter. The long fall from grace. The moment daisies open, I tuck you in. The hour mercurial rainwater Makes a mirror for sparrows. It’s time we drowned our sorrows. Also in this volume is a group of poems examining artistic images of I tiptoe in. women: ‘Degas Laundresses’, ‘Woman Posing’, ‘On Renoir’s The Grape I lift you up Pickers’ and ‘Domestic Interior’. These women are either defined in Wriggling relation to their work in field or kitchen or else are putting on a false, In your rosy, zipped sleeper. decorative pose, fulfilling the stereotyped image man created for them. Yes, this is the hour Woman’s perceived need to comply with this idealised image of timeless For the early bird and me When finder is keeper. beauty is satirised in such pieces as ‘The Woman Turns Herself into a I crook the bottle. Bush’, ‘The Woman Changes Her Skin’ and ‘A Ballad of Beauty and How you suckle! Time’. In this last poem, plastic surgery is under the poet’s satirical knife: This is the best I can be, Housewife A chin he had re-worked, a face he had re-made. To this nursery He slit and tucked and cut. Where you hold on, Then straightened from his blade. Dear life. ‘A tuck, a hem,’ he said – A silt of milk. ‘I only seam the line, The last suck. I only mend the dress. And now your eyes are open, It wouldn’t do for you: your quarrel’s with the weave. Birth-coloured and offended. The best I achieve is just a stitch in time.’ 566 new explorations eavan boland introduction

These fake images of woman and romanticised stereotypes are set by what we forget, against the real defining moments in a woman’s history in the ‘Domestic by what we never will be – Interiors’ sequence. On the one hand, Boland is saying that it is these star-gazers, fire-eaters. family relationships that are real and important, that identity can be found It’s our alibi among the washing machines and children’s toys in suburbia. But she is for all time: also protesting that traditionally, a woman has not had a choice about this. as far as history goes She has been imprisoned at hearth and home and so kept to the margins we were never of society, removed from the centre of historymaking and power. Boland on the scene of the crime. So when the king’s head seeks a more equitable balance between ‘hearth and history’. gored its basket – grim harvest – Our way of life we were gristing bread has hardly changed or getting the recipe since a wheel first for a good soup whetted a knife. to appetise Maybe flame our gossip … (from ‘It’s a Woman’s World’) burns more greedily, and wheels are steadier but we’re the same The Journey who milestone Boland’s fifth collection, The Journey, was published in 1982 and our lives republished in The Journey and Other Poems in 1986. Prominent among with oversights – its many and complex themes is the quest for identity: the poet’s national living by the lights identity, suburban identity, feminist identity and identity as mother and of the loaf left by the cash register, wife. Childhood memories in England and the feeling of being different the washing powder in such poems as ‘I Remember’, ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ and paid for and wrapped, ‘Fond Memory’ provoked a consciousness of the poet’s own nation and the wash left wet: how language defines a person: like most historic peoples we are defined

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… the teacher in the London convent who when I waters of the wharf produced ‘I amn’t’ in the classroom turned and said mingling the immigrant – ‘you’re not in Ireland now.’ (‘An Irish Childhood in guttural with the vowels England: 1951’) of homesickness who neither knows nor cares that This consciousness of language as part of one’s identity prevails a new language is a kind of scar throughout the volume. Yet her relationship with her history and the and heals after a while women of history is not an easy one, and she resists going back to it in into a passable imitation ‘Mise Éire’. She finds the grim reality of Irish women in history, soldiers’ of what went before. whores or helpless immigrants, difficult to confront: Yet these are the real women of the past, not those images created by No. I won’t go back. many previous male poets, who idealised women and moulded them into My roots are brutal: metaphors of national sentiment and so created mythic national female I am the woman – a sloven’s mix figures. of silk at the wrists, a sort of dove-strut Outside History in the precincts of the garrison – Outside History (1990), Boland’s sixth volume, is divided into three who practises sections: ‘Object Lessons’, ‘Outside History: A Sequence’ and ‘Distances’. the quick frictions, The object lessons, in the main, are what woman has learned about the rictus of delight and gets cambric for it, life. Some poems, such as ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’ rice-coloured silks. and ‘The River’, reflect on the puzzling, almost inexplicable relationship I am the woman between men and women and on their different perspectives on the world in the gansy-coat (‘Mountain Time’). Couples growing apart and breaking up are the focus on board the ‘Mary Belle’, of ‘Object Lessons’. We are made to feel in this sequence how fragile and in the huddling cold, holding her half-dead baby to her transient all human interaction is, particularly in ‘We Were Neutral in the as the wind shifts East War’ and ‘Mountain Time’. and North over the dirty 568 new explorations eavan boland introduction

…darkness will be only what is left of a mouth after was passed on from father to son, to the father kissing or a hand laced in a hand … (‘Mountain Time’) of the next son; is an aptitude The female speaker senses that she is not regarded as significant, that she for injuring earth while inferring it in curves and surfaces; is marginalised, forced to the sidelines and excluded from the centre of is this cold potency which has come, happening history in ‘We Were Neutral in the War’: by time and chance, into my hands. (from ‘Bright-Cut Irish Silver’) Your husband frowns at dinner, has no time for the baby who has learned to crease three Boland’s response to being marginalised as a woman poet is to explore fingers and wave ‘day-day.’ This is serious, he says. This could be what we all feared. alternative history: You pierce a sequin with a needle. You slide it down single-knotted thread So much that matters, so much that is powerful and until it lies with all the others in frail in human affairs seems to me, increasingly, to a puzzle of brightness. Then another and another one. happen outside history: away from the texts and symmetries of an accepted expression. And, for that very reason, at a great risk of being edited out of the The female voices in these poems resemble ‘The Shadow Doll’, a mere final account. (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, winter replica of a bride, a protected image locked in a vacuum. But the speaker 1990) is a poet, with her own recognised space, metaphorically represented as a room, and she reaches out to other women writers, trying to imagine ‘the Boland feels that significance is also to be found in the margins of life, that rooms of other women poets’. She knows that the literary and creative the unrecorded history of individuals is important too. It is this alternative world has been male dominated, but the gift has passed into her hands. history that is the focus of the central section of the volume Outside History. In it she explores her own history, but this operates at both a I take it down personal and a universal level. Her own history can be read as a metaphor from time to time, to feel the smooth path of silver for the unrecorded female history of the nation. She explores her own meet the cicatrice of skill. personal history as a developing writer and poet. She is the young These scars, I tell myself, are learned. immature poet in ‘The Achill Woman’ who does not fully comprehend This gift for wounding an artery of rock 569 new explorations eavan boland introduction

the significance of what she has experienced. She attempts to understand out of myth into history I move to be her developing self and to make connections between her present part of that ordeal … persona as a woman poet and her student past in ‘A False Spring’. She is forging an identity as a woman poet in ‘The Making of an Irish Goddess’ The third section, ‘Distances’, focuses mostly on the past – the distant and she is the suburban woman seeking to re-establish contact with her past of her childhood memories and the more recent past of occasional natural and cultural roots in ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’. She moments of insight. finds real significance in moments of human experience, not in symbolic happening, in ‘We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History’. These memories are connected to the present, as if the poet is at last achieving a kind of quiet wholeness in her life. She is linked to the past, She feels trapped by time, and as a woman she is alienated from the to family, to moments of love and insight, even to the future, in ‘What male-dominated version of history in ‘An Old Steel Engraving’. She feels Love Intended’, where she imagines herself coming back like a ghost to a powerless and unable to influence history in ‘We Are Always Too Late’. radically altered suburb.

Many of the poems record a sense of incompleteness, such as ‘A False In a Time of Violence Spring’, which records the failure to find again her younger, student In a Time of Violence, Boland’s seventh collection, was published in 1994. self and integrate that phase of her life with the embodied now. The It is divided into three sections, the first of which is entitled ‘Writing in a lost cultural heritage, passed from mother to daughter but forgotten, is Time of Violence’. The poems in this section touch on specific national recorded in ‘What We Lost’. and historical issues and events, such as the Famine (‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’ and ‘March 1, 1847. By the First Post’), agrarian There is a keen sense of displacement in the poems. The au pair girls in ‘In violence and the Peep o’ Day Boys (‘The Death of Reason’), the Easter Exile’ signify displaced woman, isolated by the barriers of language and by Rising (‘The Dolls Museum in Dublin’), 19th-century women emigrants age and cultural differences. In the sequence we see Boland attempting (‘In a Bad Light’) and language and nationality (‘Beautiful Speech’). to recover a sense of belonging and completeness by making connections Each is examined from an interesting and unusual angle, such as the with her personal history and her cultural history, but also by shedding the unsympathetic and insensitive view of the Famine from a woman of the myth and the stereotyped image: ascendancy class in ‘March 1, 1847. By the First Post’.

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Many of the meditations are inspired by a visit to a museum or an of water and my sense of growing older’. This section concludes with exhibition. For example, the dress in a museum in St Louis featuring the four poems examining the unsatisfactory portrayal of women in myth, work of Irish dressmakers sparked off thoughts of women’s servitude in art and literature. The idealised images and the stereotypes are false and exile in the 19th century (‘In a Bad Light’). But each event is recreated with suffocating. authentic realism and each tale narrated with sympathy and affection. The poems offer fresh insights into old history as the poet focuses on the She appeals for realism and release in ‘A Woman Painted on a Leaf’: human experience behind these historical artefacts. This is not death. It is the terrible The poems in the second section, ‘Legends’, focus for the most part suspension of life. I want a poem on women as mothers. The fierce protectiveness and the maternal side I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. of women are portrayed in poems such as ‘This Moment’ and ‘The Pomegranate’. Woman as mother is playing an age-old role and has Object Lessons universal significance. The ageing woman features in ‘Moths’, ‘The Water Her prose collection, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet Clock’ and ‘Legends’. Some of the poems stretch back to the poet’s in Our Time, appeared in 1995. In autobiographical mode, Boland traces own mother and grandmother through remembrance of a particular skill her own development as a woman poet, recounts her search as a woman (‘The Parcel’) or a link with an heirloom (‘Lava Cameo’). Some, such as for some kind of arrangement with the male-dominated concept of the ‘Legends’, establish continuity with the next generation: nation and reviews the status of women in poetry and history.

Our children are our legends. You are mine. You have my name. My hair was once like yours. And the world is less bitter to me because you will re-tell the story.

The main work of the third section is the title poem, ‘Anna Liffey’. In the words of the author, it is ‘about a river and a woman, about the destiny

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The War Horse Could we read this poem as reflecting a Southern view of the Northern conflict – a middle-class, slightly nationalist Southern view? The speaker Themes and issues feels threatened by the ‘casual | Iron of his shoes’, vulnerable, with ‘Only The poem stems from an encounter with a roving horse and also a rose’ to form ‘a mere | Line of defence against him’, and afterwards the excerpt from Object Lessons (page 508–2), which occurred, breathes a sigh of relief that this only partly understood phenomenon is coincidentally, during an upsurge of disruption and violence in Northern gone: Ireland. The poet’s response is a metaphor poem with political overtones. But we, we are safe, our unformed fear The horse became the poetic incarnation of all those statistics of violence Of fierce commitment gone and death that were pouring nightly from the television screens.

Lack of interest in this intrusive violence is at first feigned by the speaker. The poem operates on a number of levels of significance. At an Others pretend he isn’t there, ‘use the subterfuge | Of curtains’. Yet for all immediate level it confronts the issue of violence. We notice the seeming that danger and disruption, the speaker faintly admires the beast: casualness of it, the arbitrary nature of this violence: ‘the clip, clop, casual | Iron of his shoes as he stamps death | Like a mint on the innocent coinage I lift the window, watch the ambling feather of earth’. The treatment of the violence may be metaphorical, yet there Of hock and fetlock is an awareness of the reality of death and wanton injury, which is carried in the imagery. The beheaded crocus is ‘one of the screamless dead’, the She is also slow to blame him: ‘No great harm is done. | Only a leaf of our uprooted vegetation ‘Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated’, and the laurel hedge is torn’. But most significantly of all, at the end of the poem eaten leaf merely ‘Of distant interest like a maimed limb’. The ungainly he stirs her race memory (‘my blood is still | With atavism’) of colonial and often directionless nature of violence is suggested in the motion of injustice, English aggression and the cycle of failed rebellions: the animal as he ‘stumbles on like a rumour of war’. The overtones of the language become more overtly political as the poem proceeds: the rose is Of burned countryside, illicit braid: ‘expendable … a volunteer’, while ‘atavism’, ‘cause’ and ‘betrayed’ are the A cause ruined before, a world betrayed. verbal coinage of revolutionary groups. The speaker’s attitude to the animal is a complex one and is perhaps contradictory at times, incorporating fear, resentment and relief but

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also furtive admiration. Examine what Boland has to say about political Features and style poetry in the extract from Object Lessons below. Thus, on another level Versification the poem demonstrates how history impinges on the domestic and the The poem is composed in open rhyming couplets. Unlike closed artistic, which are frail in comparison. We are made aware, forcefully, of couplets, the sense here often runs from one couplet to the next. This how fragile the domestic is. Boland herself has described the tension in gives a flowing rhythm and fluid energy to the verse, which might be the poem as that of ‘force against formality’. The race memory of fighting said to reflect the unpredictable energy and purpose of the horse. For against imposed order is conjured up by the modern parallel of conflict example, the sequence of lines from ‘I lift the window’ to ‘his snuffling in a suburban garden, where wild nature reasserts itself over humankind’s head | Down’, ending two couplets further on, must be read in one breath attempts to tame it. And the speaker can empathise. The rebel is not far and might suggest the animal’s forward momentum. Following that, the beneath the surface of the psyche, despite the suburban veneer. speaker’s short gasp of relief (‘He is gone’) makes an effective contrast and also highlight’s Boland’s use of rhythm for effect. ‘The War Horse’ is among the first of Boland’s poems of the suburbs. The irony is that suburbia was really designed as slumberland, but even in The rhyming is casual, composed of half-rhymes and off-rhymes for the safe, leafy, middle-class dormer territory, the ‘rumour of war … stumbles most part: death – earth, fear – care, limb – climb, huge – subterfuge, down our short street’, awakening age-old conflicts. Boland is legitimising street – wait, etc. This offhand casualness accords well with the beast’s suburbia as a place of real experience and insight, a fit location and casual destruction. subject matter for poetry. Sound effects ‘The War Horse’ is a private ‘coming to awareness’ of public violence, This poet is not deaf to the music of language. Everywhere there are an intimate ‘thoughts inside the head’ reflection on the theme. In this it echoes and internal rhymes: ‘hock – fetlock’, ‘Blown from growth’, differs from the more public scrutiny of violence in ‘The Famine Road’ ‘fear | Of fierce’, etc. The alliteration of ‘stumbles down our short and ‘Child of Our Time’. street’ emphasises the ungainly movement in the confined space. The unobtrusive musical assonance of ‘Then to breathe relief lean’, with its These notions concerning the influence of history, the relationship long e sounds, effectively conveys the speaker’s sense of release, of between art and society and the search for meaning in suburbia become escape. important and frequently examined issues in Boland’s poetry.

573 new explorations eavan boland the war horse

Sound effects are an integral part of the animal portraiture here. The It was also our first winter in the suburb. The weather onomatopoeia of ‘breath hissing’ and ‘snuffling head’ conveys the was cold; the road was half finished. Each morning the threatening unfamiliarity of this beast that has invaded the suburban fields on the Dublin hills appeared as slates of frost. At night the street lamps were too few. And the road garden. itself ran out in a gloom of icy mud and builders’ huts.

Imagery One evening, at the time of the news, I came into the The poet employs vivid graphic visual imagery, whether to convey front room with a cup of coffee in my hand. I heard fearsome destructive power (‘Iron of his shoes … stamps death’) or something at the front door. I set down the coffee, switched on the light and went to open the door. beauty (‘ambling feather | Of hock and fetlock’). Similes and metaphors are often striking and unusual: the torn leaf is ‘Of distant interest like a A large, dappled head – a surreal dismemberment in maimed limb’; the broken crocus is ‘one of the screamless dead’. These the dusk – swayed low on the doorstep, then attached comparisons are disturbing and have a nightmarish quality, which brings itself back to a clumsy horse and clattered away. to consciousness the suppressed terrors that have been unleashed in the I went out and stood under the street lamp. I saw speaker by this violent visitation. its hindquarters retreating, smudged by mist and darkness. I watched it disappear around a corner. The lamp above me hissed and flickered and finally came Altogether, the imagery and the language are vigorous and muscular, as on fully. befits the scene: ‘stamps death | Like a mint’. Notice also the violence of the verbs: stamps, smashed, uprooted, stumble, etc. There was an explanation. It was almost certainly a traveller’s horse with some memory of our road as Boland’s recollections on the origins and significance a travelling site and our gardens as fields where it of the poem had grazed only recently. The memory withstood the surprises of its return, but not for long. It came back This extract is taken from Boland’s prose collection, Object Lessons four or five times. (1995) (Chapter 8): It was the early seventies, a time of violence in Each time, as it was startled into retreat, its huge Northern Ireland. Our front room was a rectangle hooves did damage. Crocus bulbs were uprooted. with white walls, hardly any furniture and a small Hedge seedlings were dragged up. Grass seeds were television chanting deaths and statistics at teatime. churned out of their place. 574 new explorations eavan boland the war horse

Some months later I began to write a poem. I called it It hardly matters. The point is that to write in that ‘The War Horse’. Its argument was gathered around cursive and approved script can seem, for the unwary the oppositions of force and formality. Of an intrusion poet, a blessed lifting of the solitude and scepticism of nature – the horse – menacing the decorous of the poet’s life. Images are easily set down; a music reductions of nature which were the gardens. And of of argument is suddenly revealed. Then a difficult the failure of language to describe such violence and pursuit becomes a swift movement. And finally resist it. the poem takes on a glamour of meaning against a background of public interest. I wrote the poem slowly, adding each couplet with care. I was twenty-six years of age. At first, when it was Historically – in the epic, in the elegy – this has been finished, I looked at it with pleasure and wonder. It an enrichment. But in a country like Ireland, with encompassed a real event. It entered a place in my life a nationalist tradition, there are real dangers. In and moved beyond it. I was young enough to craft and my poem the horse, the hills behind it – these were want nothing more. private emblems which almost immediately took on a communal reference against a background of Gradually I changed my mind, although I never communal suffering. In a time of violence it would be disowned the poem. all too easy to write another poem, and another. To make a construct where the difficult ‘I’ of perception In fact, my doubts were less about it than about my became the easier ‘we’ of subtle claim. Where an own first sense of its completeness. The poem had unearned power would be allowed by a public drawn me easily into the charm and strength of an engagement. apparently public stance. It had dramatised for me what I already suspected: that one part of the poem in In such a poem the poet would be the subject. The every generation is ready to be communally written. object might be a horse, a distance, a human suffering. To put it another way, there is a poem in each time It hardly mattered. The public authorisation would that waits to be set down and is therefore instantly give such sanction to the poet and the object would recognisable once it has been. It may contain not just be silent. It would be silenced. The subject sentiments of outrage or details of an occasion. It would be all-powerful. may invite a general reaction to some particular circumstance. It may appeal to anger or invite a At that point I saw [that] in Ireland, with its national common purpose. traditions, its bardic past, the confusion between the 575 new explorations eavan boland the war horse

political poem and the public poem was a dangerous young woman who had left the assured identity of and inviting motif. It encouraged the subject of the a city and its poetic customs and who had started poem to be a representative and the object to be on a life which had no place in them. I had seen and ornamental. In such a relation, the dangerous and weighed and struggled with the meaning of the private registers of feeling of the true political poem horse, the dark night, the sounds of death from the would be truly lost. At the very moment when they television. I had been far less able to evaluate my own were most needed. hand on a light switch, my own form backlit under a spluttering street light against the raw neighbourhood And yet I had come out of the Irish tradition as a poet. of a suburb. And yet without one evaluation the other I had opened the books, read the poems, believed was incomplete. the rhetoric when I was young. Writing the political poem seemed to me almost a franchise of the Irish I would learn that it was far more difficult to make poet, an inherited privilege. I would come to see that myself the political subject of my own poems than it was more and less than that, that like other parts to see the metaphoric possibilities in front of me of the poet’s life, it would involve more of solitary in a suburban dusk. The difficulty was a disguised scruple than communal eloquence. And yet one blessing. It warned me away from facile definitions. thing remained steady: I continued to believe that a The more I looked at the political poem, the more I reading of the energy and virtue of any tradition can saw how easy it was to make the claim and miss the be made by looking at the political poem in its time. connections. And I wanted to find them. At who writes it and why. At who can speak in the half-light between event and perception without their voices becoming shadows as Aeneas’s rivals did in the underworld of the Sixth Book.

In that winter twilight, seeing the large, unruly horse scrape the crocus bulbs up in his hooves, making my own connections between power and order, I had ventured on my first political poem. I had seen my first political image. I had even understood the difficulties of writing it. What I had not realised was that I myself was a politic within the Irish poem: a 576 new explorations eavan boland the famine road

The Famine Road misunderstood: ‘Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones | these Irish’. The woman in the monologue is a mere faceless statistic (‘one out of every A reading of the poem ten’). Neither are treated rationally (‘could | they not … suck | April Boland is drawing parallels between certain aspects of the famine hailstones for water and for food?’). The cruel indifference of these experience and the experience of woman today. The famine road, symbol people’s treatment is linked to the nonchalant lack of medical explanation of purposeless, thwarted lives, is equated with female sterility. She sees (‘anything may have caused it, spores … one sees | day after day these the supercilious treatment of the suffering people as akin to the unfeeling mysteries’). Both groups are different, physically or mentally segregated, arrogance meted out to the childless woman: condemned to an isolated life or death:

You never will, never you know They know it and walk clear. He has become but take it well woman, grow a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although your garden, keep house, good-bye. he shares it with some there…

Barren, never to know the load Boland feels that being a woman gives her a unique perspective on Irish of his child in you, what is your body history, as she elaborated in response to the question, ‘What does being now if not a famine road? Irish mean to you?’ Boland links this oppression and humiliation of the sterile woman with Apart from the fact that it connects me with a that of the famine people. Their blood too is wasted (‘could | they not past, I find it a perspective on my womanhood as blood their knuckles on rock’). This image is an impotent echo of that well. Womanhood and Irishness are metaphors for one another. There are resonances of humiliation, authoritative gesture of Trevelyan’s (‘Trevelyan’s | seal blooded the deal oppression and silence in both of them and I think table’) as they too put their seal on their work. you can understand one better by experiencing the other. (From the interview in Sleeping with Monsters) The following bleak, humorous image conveys their humiliations, showing the primitive state to which they were reduced: ‘cunning as housewives, If we explore the poem’s comparison in detail, we find that both the each eyed – | as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock’. Both woman Irish in history and women in society are generalised about and so and famine people are silent sufferers. Disenfranchised, they are allowed

577 new explorations eavan boland the famine road

to make no contribution. The superior discussion is carried on above their heads and is quite dismissive: ‘Might it be safe, | Colonel, to give them roads’ and ‘grow | your garden, keep house, good-bye’.

The lack of understanding, the unfeeling treatment, the callous oppression, the silent suffering, the feelings of humiliation, of uselessness, the pointlessness of it all, the sense of failure – these are the links between womanhood and Irishness in this poem.

578 new explorations eavan boland child of our time

Child of Our Time The elegy finishes in a prayer that adult society will learn from this horror, expressed in the paradox ‘And living, learn, must learn from you, dead’ Background and so construct a better method of social interaction so that the death The poem was inspired by a press photograph showing a firefighter will not have been in vain (‘find for your sake whose life our idle | Talk carrying a dead child out of the wreckage of the Dublin bombings in May has cost, a new language’). The poem is also a searing condemnation of 1974. violence. Society stands accused (‘our times have robbed your cradle’) of this barbarous irrationality (‘your unreasoned end’, ‘the discord of your A reading of the poem murder’). The only hope is that society would awaken to the reality of First and foremost, this is an elegy for the untimely death of a child. It its actions and that the child might ‘Sleep in a world your final sleep has bemoans the senselessness and irrationality of the child’s slaughter in an woken’. act of public violence: The poem could also be read as a comment on the failure of This song, which takes from your final cry communication. The entire poem is couched in language terminology. Its tune, from you unreasoned end its reason, It is a ‘lullaby’, a ‘song’, inspired by a ‘final cry’, a ‘tune’ with ‘rhythms’. In Its rhythm from the discord of your murder the second stanza, loss is expressed in terms of language deprivation and childrearing is seen in terms of fostering language: ‘rhymes for your In the second stanza, the keen sense of loss is encouraged by the waking’, etc. The only way forward from this conflict and violence is mournful litany of the literary rituals of childhood, naming again the described as ‘a new language’. associations of intimate moments, the rituals around sleeping and waking: Thus, the failure of language is associated with death and destruction. With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep, But language is the only bulwark against chaos, and this is the positive Names for the animals you took to bed, Tales to distract, legends to protect message of this bleak poem. Poetry, the most artistic expression of language, can be created out of this pain – this ‘tune’ from ‘your final cry’. This sense of loss is compounded by guilt in that it is the adults who It signals a victory of order over chaos, reason ‘from your unreasoned should have been the guardians and guides of the child: ‘We who should end’, rhythm from ‘discord’. It offers a chance to rebuild broken images have known how to instruct’. and visualise a better society.

579 new explorations eavan boland child of our time

Feelings A delicate balance of emotions is achieved in this poem. The brutal reality of the killing is never denied and the fact of death is faced squarely, as in ‘And living, learn, must learn from you, dead’, where the placing of the last word in the line gives it finality and emphasis. But the references to death are sometimes veiled in poetic terms – ‘your final cry’ and ‘your final sleep’ – or they are intellectualised, as in ‘the discord of your murder’. Here, the aspect of death dwelt on is its discordance, its out-of-tuneness, the disharmony of death. Or the child’s broken body is rendered as ‘your broken | Image’. The inversion of the natural order of life and death, in the killing of a child, is expressed in the paradoxes ‘from your final cry | Its tune’, ‘from your unreasoned end its reason’ and ‘Its rhythm from the discord of your murder’. Consideration of this death is poeticised or intellectualised to some degree.

But this is no anodyne reaction. Feelings of grief, loss, guilt and resolution to learn a better way are all conveyed. Yet there is a delicacy and gentleness to the mourning, made all the more poignant by the fact that the poem is a sort of final lullaby, so the slightly euphemistic treatment is appropriate. Death is a kind of sleep: ‘Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken’. Altogether, the poem seems to be an interesting combination of dirge and lullaby.

580 new explorations eavan boland the black lace fan my mother gave me

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me it, ‘a sign not for triumph and acquisition but for suffering itself’ (Object Lessons). It becomes a symbol of pain rather than an erotic sign. Still, in A reading of the poem nature it retains its sensual overtone, ‘the whole, full, flirtatious span of The poem focuses on courtship and deals with the messy and sometimes it.’ So it carries these contradictory associations, reflecting the real-life enigmatic relationship between the sexes. Just as the blackbird engages complexity of the love relationship, not some stereotyped romantic in its courtship ritual, human lovers also participate in a sort of courting image. dance: It is an unusual love poem in other ways too. There is no clear perception … She was always early. of the lovers, no clear recollection of the emotions, no detail of the He was late. That evening he was later … moment: She ordered more coffee. She stood up. And no way to know what happened then – The staccato rhythms of the verse here, created by the short sentences, none at all – unless, of course, you improvise draw attention to a choreographed sequence of movements as a ritual to be played out. There is evidence too of disharmony, never the perfect It is an oblique love poem that focuses on the love token that has lost entry together but rather of fretting and bad timing. If the weather much of its particular significance, yet is somehow still linked (by means is a barometer of the emotions, then the indications are of a stormy of the blackbird) to their perennial courtship in nature. Its most positive relationship, oppressive and explosive: ‘stifling’, ‘A starless drought made statement is to assert the eternity of courtship, of love gestures. It makes the nights stormy’, ‘the distance smelled of rain and lightning’, ‘An airless no claims about eternal memories or the triumph of love against time, but dusk before thunder’. rather the opposite, as the particulars of the emotional encounter are lost, eroded by time. Time erodes significance and even cherished keepsakes The fan is seen as a symbol of courtship, both with humans and in nature. lose their importance. There is also emphasis on the darker undertones of It is a thing of beauty associated with sensual allure, a romantic symbol. love, the tempests and the suffering. And so it functions here, but it also has darker associations of plunder and violation. The tortoiseshell has been pillaged from its natural habitat, Imagery and symbolism killed off, and ‘keeps … an inference of its violation’. As Boland herself saw The style of communication in this poem is somewhat oblique. Nothing is actually said; rather, we gradually come to apprehend the nuances and 581 new explorations eavan boland the black lace fan my mother gave me

feelings. The core of meaning is communicated through the connotations History and memory fail us in the search for truth: we are forced to of the images and symbols, and these images manage to transmit invent. something of the complexity of the emotions and relations. Yet nature remains flirtatious always.

The fan itself, as the poet has mentioned, is not just an erotic object but also carries some notion of the violations of love, ‘through the pain and plunder of its past, so the symbol deepens the understanding of love in the poem. The parallel image of the blackbird’s wing restores some of the sensuality to the love symbol.

The tempestuous nature of the relationship is suggested in the weather imagery, as the atmosphere parallels the emotion: ‘An airless dusk before thunder’. It is interesting too that all the references are to dusk or night, not the romantic kind but ‘A starless drought’. The poem explores the darkness of the emotions more than the starry insights of love.

Some ideas in the poem The love relationship is mysterious, inaccessible to outsiders and to history. The sensual courtship gestures in a love affair are universal, common to humans and nature. But here the symbol of courtship is not just an erotic object, but also a sign of pain. What remains are the gestures; the particular emotions are forgotten, eroded by time.

582 new explorations eavan boland the shadow doll

The Shadow Doll Views of woman The false image versus the reality: the pure, asexual creature of ‘airless A reading of the poem glamour’ is set against the emotional and physical turmoil of the This poem has similarities with ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave reality. Me’ in that it too uses a symbol to tease out some truths about the Oppressed woman is emphasised: woman confined, repressed, under image of woman and the nature of the male–female relationship. We are glass, under vows, locked in. offered the bride’s perspective, a female insight on the wedding, which is portrayed in all its turmoil, an occasion to be survived. Imagery The imagery mediates the theme very effectively. The delicacy of Boland uses the symbol of the doll to highlight the discrepancy between ‘blooms from the ivory tulle’ and the ‘shell-tone spray of seed pearls’ helps the image of woman, particularly 19th-century woman, and the less create the notion of frail beauty, elegant if bloodless. The unreality is glamorous reality. The manufactured image is elegant, in virginal white reinforced by the flowers (‘less than real | stephanotis’). The colours (ivory (‘blooms from the ivory tulle’, ‘oyster gleam’, etc.), a model of discretion and oyster) also help to create this lifeless perfection. and sensitivity, devoid of sexual appetites (‘discreet about | visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts’), certainly too polite to talk about these taboo And of course the symbolism of the doll, which is a mere replica, subjects. The reality is that of real-life emotional woman (‘feeling | satin underlines the falsity of this image of woman. Both the glass dome and rise and fall with the vows’) and nervous repetition of vows amid the the locked case carry, in their different ways, suggestions of oppression, chaotic clutter of wedding preparations. secrets to be locked away and a lack of true freedom.

There may even be a slight envy of the doll’s calmness, yet somehow the fevered reality is more appealing than the ‘airless glamour’ that is ‘less than real’, like the stephanotis. However, speaker and doll share a sense of confinement: the doll ‘Under glass, under wraps’, the speaker restrained by vows and, like the suitcase, pressed down and locked.

583 new explorations eavan boland white hawthorn in the west of ireland

White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland Contrast this enthusiasm with the minimalist staccato phrases of lines 3 and 4: ‘I left behind suburban gardens. | Lawnmowers. Small talk.’ The A reading of the poem hawthorn is associated with supernatural forces, primitive beliefs, the This is one of a group of poems from the volume Outside History, in strange sub-rational powers of the earth. The power underneath the which the poet is attempting to ‘make connections’ with her world – to ordinary, benign face of nature fascinates the poet here. Like hawthorn, establish continuity in her personal life, family traditions and lore, to find a water has a gentle fluency combined with enormous power (‘able | to working relationship with her cultural history and, here, to re-establish the re-define land’), a power that is usually veiled under the river’s more usual age-old connection with the natural world. appearance of a recreational amenity or a landscape bearing for lost travellers. Nature dominates all human exchange – ‘the only language In this poem she is going back to nature, fleeing ‘suburban gardens. | spoken in those parts’. Lawnmowers. Small talk.’ This toy-house neatness and inconsequential chatter of suburbia is contrasted with the wild, uncultivated beauty, the Themes primitiveness and the naturalness of life in the west: The poem contrasts two ways of life: the ‘cultivated’ suburban versus the natural primitiveness of life in the country. Under low skies, past splashes of coltsfoot, The superiority of the natural is proclaimed, with its excitement and I assumed energy. the hard shyness of Atlantic light This is an ‘earth poem’, exploring the power beneath the ordinary face and the superstitious aura of hawthorn. of nature, the hidden sub-rational depths. It might also be read as a symbolic journey of the deracinated poet, She identifies immediately with the naturalness and is at home with the the suburban dweller, searching for her real roots – her roots earth. Her enthusiasm is communicated in the energetic rhythms of the understood in both a geographical and a metaphysical sense. She is language, the flowing, run-on lines: searching for a place and also for a philosophy. The undefined time of year, the ‘season between seasons’, seems to highlight the poet’s sense All I wanted then was to fill my arms with of ‘out-of-placeness’, her unsettled state of mind. sharp flowers, to seem, from a distance, to be part of that ivory, downhill rush. But I knew …

584 new explorations eavan boland outside history

Outside History It is necessary to choose between the two outlooks. Boland has chosen to move ‘out of myth into history’, to be part of the real pain and suffering A reading of the poem of life. Only now does she begin to experience the real torment of lives Boland rebelled against the mythicisation of Irish history: the songs, endured by countless people throughout the years. In a nightmarish, the ballads, the female icons of the nation, the romantic images. Myth Armageddon-type image suggestive of famine disaster (‘roads clotted as obscures the reality, manipulates history. It is outside real lived history, a | firmaments with the dead’), she invites us in to comfort all the dying in remote, unchanging image, a false construct. history, real history:

How slowly they die Here, Boland, as a poet, rejects myth in favour of real history as the as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear. proper authority for her poetry and her idea of nation. The stars are symbolic of outsiders, remote and unreal, ‘whose light happened | The critic Jody Allen-Randolph has described it as follows: ‘In a moment thousands of years before | our pain did’. Paradoxically, though they of power and dignity, the dead are finally allowed to die, however slowly appear unchanging and are symbols of eternity, their illumination is and painfully, as both poet and audience move in to whisper the rite of thousands of years out of date when it reaches us. Ironically, it is the contrition. Their deaths are not manipulated to serve any cause beyond light that is an illusion: the darkness is real. The stars’ unrelenting, cold, their suffering which survives in the poem as a moment of collective grief.’ hard wintry light is shown in direct contrast to human vulnerability (‘our It is a final laying to rest of the nationalist dead. But it is too late (‘And we pain’). The alternative to this remote, unchanging mythical framework for are too late. We are always too late’). This melancholic ending echoes viewing life is the vantage point of human history, with its real suffering an awareness of the suffering caused by this mythical view of history and and mortality: realises that it cannot be undone fully.

… Under them remains a place where you found you were human, and

a landscape in which you know you are mortal.

585 new explorations eavan boland this moment

This Moment A woman leans down to catch a child who has run into her arms this moment. A reading of the poem At one level this is a simple nature lyric celebrating the moment of dusk This stanza is emphasised by having the only significant activity in the in the suburbs. The scene is filled with the usual furniture of a suburban poem: ‘leans’, ‘to catch’, ‘run’. With that activity, ‘this moment’ has arrived. evening: darkening trees, lighted windows, stars, moths, rinds, children and The moment celebrated is maternal, a physical demonstration of the mothers calling them in. It is a romantic evocation of suburban twilight, bond between mother and child, with all its connotation of love, security creating an atmosphere of calm, of continuing growth, ripeness and natural and protection. abundance: ‘One window is yellow as butter … Moths flutter. | Apples sweeten in the dark.’ Boland is celebrating the ordinary, having discovered The fact that this is happening everywhere, in suburbs all over the world, that even banal suburban routines can stimulate the poetic in her. gives it a universal significance and lends a mythic quality to the gesture. The woman in the poem is connected to all women in history who must Yet for all its outward ordinariness, there is a hint of the mysterious: have performed a similar action.

Things are getting ready to happen So the poem is about dusk, a moment of transition in nature, but it is also out of sight. about a universal moment in woman’s experience: the confirmation of maternal love. This might refer simply to nature’s continuing growth in the secrecy of night (‘Apples sweeten in the dark’) or to some deeper significance of this scene. Ideas in the poem The ordinary beauty and richness of nature at the mysterious hour of Notice that the really significant part of the moment is the reuniting dusk of mother and child. There is a subtle dramatic build-up to this, with The suburbs can be poetic intimations that something is being held back slightly: ‘Things are getting Significant moments are moments of human encounter ready | to happen … But not yet.’ The intervening images serve to A woman sharing in the universal experience of motherhood heighten the wait for the finally revealed moment:

586 new explorations eavan boland love

Love spellbound, and he was allowed to leave with her on condition that he did not look back. But: Background He halts. Eurydice, his own is now on the lip of ‘Love’ is one of a sequence of poems entitled ‘Legends’ that explores Daylight. Alas! he forgot. His purpose broke. He looked back. parallels between ancient myths and modern life. In some of the poems, His labour was lost, the pact that he had made with the merciless king such as ‘Love’ and ‘The Pomegranate’, the exploration of myth is used Annulled. Three times did thunder peal over the pool of Avernus to deepen an understanding of woman as mother. Other poems explore ‘Who,’ she cried, ‘has doomed me to misery, who has doomed us?’ themes of faithfulness, the creation of images of love, the fragility of all Thus she spoke: and at once from his sight, like a wisp of smoke Thinned into air, was gone. life, etc. In general, the point being made is that legends, myths and such Wildly he grasped at shadows, waiting to say much more, stories highlight the similarity of human experience throughout the ages But she did not see him; nor would the ferryman of the Inferno and show a line of continuity from present days to ancient past. Let him again cross the fen that lay between them.

Towards the end of the sequence, Boland examines the end of this The story goes on to chart the months of weeping and mourning suffered continuum line, her own family history, when she is prompted by personal by Orpheus, wandering through caves and forests, where his sorrow touched memories or significant objects, such as an heirloom brooch or other even the wild animals and the trees. Boland uses the myth as a framework keepsake. for exploring ideas of love and loss and the impossibility of recovering the passionate intensity of first love. In classical Greek and Roman mythology a number of the stories feature visits by the living to the underworld, Hades, the kingdom of the dead. So Layers of meaning ‘the hero’ who ‘crossed on his way to hell’ might be the hero Odysseus, As with many of Boland’s poems, this has a number of layers of significance. At who conjured up the spirits of his dead companions by offering sacrifice one level it is a love poem in which the speaker reflects on her present loving on the banks of the River Ocean. But it is even more likely that the relationship with her husband but still yearns for the intensity of their early love, speaker refers to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale of the when they first lived in this American town with their young family many years anguished separation of ardent lovers found in Virgil’s fourth ‘Georgic’. before. But the speaker’s thoughts are drawn continually to classical myths Orpheus went down into Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice, who and legends in which she finds experiences parallel to her own. She uses these had been killed by a snake bite. His songs to her on his lyre had held all mythical allusions to explore the infant’s brush with death, the nature of her 587 new explorations eavan boland love

relationship with her husband and her female consciousness and role. edges gilded’. The love she speaks of in the present tense is described in She identifies with the female voice in the myth, thereby establishing the terms of language – love seen as communication: continuity and importance of the female experience throughout the ages. This is a poem about love, about family, about female experience and We love each other still … we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly. about the centrality of myth to our lives.

Yet a problem is hinted at here. We have less than perfect The poem has a number of overlapping timeframes: present, recent past communication: and ancient time. But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me. Themes and issues You walk away and I cannot follow. Love Different facets of love are touched on in this poem. The passion and The underlying mythical allusions augment this sense of failure, as they delicacy of first physical love is most keenly registered: all deal with separation and loss and the creation of insufferable barriers between lovers. Thus, the love between speaker and husband here carries … And we discovered there connotations of failure, of unheard words. love had the feather and muscle of wings and had come to live with us, She also deals with love in a family context, amid kitchen tables and a brother of fire and air. threatened tragedy: The bird metaphor conveys the elemental nature, the naturalness, the We had two infant children one of whom strength and grace of love. Indeed, there is an almost nostalgic yearning was touched by death in this town for the intensity of this early love: ‘Will we ever live so intensely again?’, and spared etc. With great honesty she admits her need to cast her lover in a heroic mould, to see the beloved as hero. Here she is creating myths, This is the quiet familial love of the suffering mother who can only watch manufacturing an image of love and lover, a classical hero in suburban and wait. America: ‘I see you as a hero in a text’, ‘with snow on the shoulders of your coat | and a car passing with its headlights on … the image blazing and the

588 new explorations eavan boland love

The significance of myth and legend The female voice Human affairs are seen in the long tradition of history, even prehistory The secondary role of woman is much in evidence here, yielding and mythology. Love, death, pain and separation are the universal human precedence and importance to the male hero, viewing her partner as experience. The poet uses mythical allusions to create an awareness of a ‘hero in a text’, etc. She is silent, voiceless, but longing ‘to cry out the the continuity of human experiences and to deepen an understanding of epic question | my dear companion’. She is the unheard voice of woman some of them. For example, the threatened loss of her child is explored throughout myth and history: ‘But the words are shadows and you cannot through a parallel myth. The sense of loss, the separation of death, the hear me.’ awful failure of communication and the waste of life’s opportunities are all evoked by reference to myth. Even her role as mother here is essentially powerless in the face of the threatened death of her infant. She adopts a passive, stoical attitude, as if … and when the hero life and death are completely in the hands of fate. The child ‘was touched was hailed by his comrades in hell by death … and spared … Our child is healed.’ Perhaps this episode could their mouths opened and their voices failed and be seen as referring back to an earlier theme of Boland’s in ‘The Journey’: there is no knowing what they would have asked about a life they had shared and lost. the fears of women with sick children.

Is the effect of this to distance and lessen the mother’s anguish? Overall, the poet is asserting the universality of female experience, whether it be in ancient Greece and Rome or modern America, on The experience of love is seen in the heroic terms of myth and legend, the banks of the mythical River Styx or a bridge over the Iowa River. as we have seen: ‘I see you as a hero in a text’, etc. It is as if the ordinary, By identifying with female voices of myth, and particularly with that of everyday reality of love is insufficient and there is a need for the heroic, the abandoned Eurydice in the last lines (‘You walk away and I cannot the superhuman, the extraordinary quality of myth in human lives. She follow’), she again registers the powerlessness of women. imagines the hero-husband edged with an aura like a god of mythology, though it is merely the effect of car headlights behind him – ‘the image Imagery blazing and the edges gilded’. But perhaps the most significant aspect of The poem opens and closes with images of darkness and shadow. The myth is that it allows the speaker to tap into female experience and the prevailing darkness and Stygian gloom of the first stanza (‘Dark falls … universal female voice. Dusk has hidden the bridge … hell’) recurs in the final lines (‘words are

589 new explorations eavan boland love

shadows’). The poem is bracketed by gloom, which qualifies and balances the enthusiasm of the love theme. In contrast to this darkness, the hero is silhouetted in light (‘the image blazing and the edges gilded’), so we get a primal contrast of colours, reflecting love and death, good and evil. Family love and life are mediated in images of ordinary domesticity: an ‘old apartment’, a ‘kitchen’, ‘an Amish table’, ‘a view’. References to speech and dumbness abound. Death is pictured as voicelessness, love as plain speaking, and the failure of love as a failure of speech.

Perhaps the most exciting metaphor is that of love as a bird, communicating the natural energy and beauty of the emotion (‘love had the feather and muscle of wings’).

Form The poem is written in loose, non-rhyming stanzas, in which the natural rhythms of speech are employed to carry the reminiscences and the personal narrative. Might it be significant that the stanzas gradually diminish in size? The first three are of six or seven lines, then one of five lines, three stanzas of four lines, and finally a two-line stanza to finish. Might this mirror the diminishing scope of love as treated in the poem?

590 new explorations eavan boland the pomegranate

The Pomegranate worthwhile experience, an enrichment, to move in and out of the different worlds and time zones through ‘such | beautiful rifts in time’. A reading of the poem This poem deals with the value of myth to life, with the universal truth of The poem also explores the relationship between mother and daughter. legend. The poet explores this theme by recalling the interlinking of life It paints a picture of intimate moments, as the mother views the teenage and legend in her own experience. clutter with eyes of love:

my child asleep beside her teen magazines, She first encountered this particular legend when she was a child in exile her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. in London, ‘a city of fogs and strange consonants’. The story of separation and confinement in an alien world must have resonated powerfully with The poet shares with Ceres that fierce maternal protectiveness. Moving her own experience then. Another facet of the legend’s theme, the through the ‘beautiful rift in time’, the images of Persephone and her own mother’s anguish for her lost child, struck a chord with the poet at a later daughter fuse and the poet’s maternal instinct is to warn and protect the stage in her life, when she ‘walked out in a summer twilight | searching for child then and the child now: my daughter at bed-time’. She also takes to heart one of the myth’s bitter truths: the ravages of time and the seasons on nature and humankind: … I could warn her. There is still a chance. The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured. But I was Ceres then and I knew The suburb has cars and cable television. winter was in store for every leaf The veiled stars are above ground. on every tree on that road. It is another world. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. Yet she realises that the girl must experience the truth of the legend for herself, must be free to experience the temptation (‘the papery flushed The legend assists the poet in understanding her daughter. Insights so skin in her hand’), to make mistakes, to suffer pain. If the mother protects gained vary from the startlingly banal fact that ‘a child can be | hungry’ her too much, the wisdom of the legend (‘the gift’) will mean little: ‘If I to the deeper understanding that she must allow her daughter space, defer the grief I will diminish the gift.’ And what better inheritance can a the freedom to grow up: ‘I will say nothing.’ The stories of legend are mother bequeath than the eternal wisdom of myth and legend? archetypal and run parallel to human experience in all ages, and it is a 591 new explorations eavan boland the pomegranate

… But what else Much of the imagery is of darkness, twilight, the underworld, etc.: ‘hell’, can a mother give her daughter but such ‘the crackling dusk of | the underworld’, ‘a city of fogs’, ‘twilight’, ‘It is beautiful rifts in time? winter | and the stars are hidden’, and ‘The road is flint-coloured’. This motif of darkness is associated with both the legend and the poet’s Issues raised in the poem present experience and creates a somewhat bleak atmosphere. But it is a The value of myth to life: how legend embodies universal truth, fitting setting for the poet’s anxiety and the pain she suffers in conferring conveys vital understanding and illuminates the present freedom on her daughter. The modern bedroom, if not ‘the place of The relationship between mother and daughter: the intensity of death’ as in the legend, is still ‘full of unshed tears’. the bond, the fierce protectiveness, but also an awareness of the independence of the child and her need to experience life, truth, love and passion for herself

Imagery Some images are used in a symbolic way. The pomegranate, for instance, has mythological significance, a fruit sacred to the underworld, drawing those who eat it down into darkness. Here it fulfils a similar function, with overtones, perhaps, of sexual temptation:

... She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips.

Does the uncut fruit also have connotations of the temptation and loss in the Garden of Eden? Is the mother attempting to protect her daughter from the griefs associated with sexuality?

592 new explorations eavan boland overview of the issues in this selection of boland’s poetry

Overview of the issues in this selection of So it was with me. For this very reason, early on as a poet, certainly in my twenties, I realised that the Boland’s poetry Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to me. I would not have been able Boland’s view of Irish history and the idea of nation to articulate it at that point, but at some preliminary Boland deals with the reality of Irish history, the familiar story of level I already knew that the anguish and power of that woman’s gesture on Achill, with its suggestive oppression, defeat and death (‘The Famine Road’). The sense of hinterland of pain, were not something I could predict national identity that comes across from ‘The Famine Road’ speaks of or rely on in Irish poetry. There were glimpses here victimisation, being downtrodden and living out pointless lives: and there; sometimes more than that. But all too often, see also the suffering in ‘Outside History’. when I was searching for such an inclusion, what I Opposed to that view is the male-created myth, involving heroic found was a rhetoric of imagery which alienated me: a struggle, battle and glorious defeat: see the image of the dying patriot fusion of the national and the feminine which seemed to simplify both. It was not a comfortable realisation. immortalised by art in ‘An Old Steel Engraving’. The woman poet There was nothing clear-cut about my feelings. I had feels excluded from that cultural tradition – ‘One of us who turns tribal ambivalences and doubts, and even then I had away’. an uneasy sense of the conflict which awaited me. Boland resists this mythicisation of history and instead insists on the On the one hand, I knew that as a poet I could not necessity of confronting the reality, facing the unburied dead of easily do without the idea of a nation. Poetry in every time draws on that reserve. On the other, I could not history and laying them to rest (‘Outside History’). as a woman accept the nation formulated for me by She shows concern for the unrecorded history, for the significance of Irish poetry and its traditions. At one point it even lives lived on the margins of history, away from the centre of power, looked to me as if the whole thing might be made far from the limelight of action. She mourns the forgotten lives in up of irreconcilable differences. At the very least it ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’. seemed to me that I was likely to remain an outsider In her prose writings, Boland explores the idea of nation and the in my own national literature, cut off from its archive, at a distance from its energy. Unless, that is, I could difficulties it produces for her as a woman poet. repossess it. This proposal is about that conflict and that repossession and about the fact that repossession itself is not a static or single act. Indeed, the argument which describes it may itself be no more than a part of it. 593 new explorations eavan boland overview of the issues in this selection of boland’s poetry

Violence in society Boland often challenges the image of woman in mythology (as well as ‘The War Horse’ explores suburban, middle-class attitudes to political in art and literature), particularly when it shows woman as violence. It is really a psychological exploration of the theme marginalised, silenced or subservient to her husband the hero, as in ‘how we respond to violence’. ‘Love’. Race memory and the old antagonisms to English colonial rule still History is laced with myths. The unreality, the coldness and the exist just beneath the surface (‘The War Horse’). distance of myth from real lives is symbolised in the stars of ‘Outside The real human consequences of political violence are portrayed in History’. ‘Child of Our Time’. The poet acts as a conscience of our society here. The experience of being a woman Violence is seen as the result of a failure of language, an inability to Boland’s strong feminine perspective lends an extra dimension of insight communicate (‘Child of Our Time’). to all her themes. But she also considers specific issues relating to the portrayal and the treatment of women. The significance of myth The image versus the reality: ‘The Shadow Doll’ explores that false In one sense, myth is seen to play a positive and enabling role, even image of woman, specifically 19th-century woman, but it has universal in modern life. It gives the poet a framework for exploring relevance. The image is one of elegance, dignified control of human truths such as themes of love and death (‘Love’). The wisdom emotions (‘an airless glamour’) and suppressed sexuality of myths enables her to deal sensitively with her growing daughter (‘discreet about | visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts’). Women are (‘The Pomegranate’). Mythical stories demonstrate the universality forced to conform to a false image, repressed, metaphorically of human experience. The poet sometimes feels part of this enclosed in glass, locked away. tradition by doing ordinary things and so shares in the long history of The image of woman in art, literature and mythology is often idealised woman’s experience and becomes a part of myth or universal truth or stereotyped. The mythological allusions in ‘Love’ conjure up an (‘This Moment’). image of woman as powerless and silent, yearning in vain for a heroic But created images can be false, limiting and confining. Idealised or love. mythicised images of woman are fixed in time, unable to love, breed, The sufferings of woman are equated with the oppression of the sweat or grow old (see ‘Time and Violence’). nation (‘The Famine Road’).

594 new explorations eavan boland overview of the issues in this selection of boland’s poetry

The traditional role of woman is validated in such poems as ‘This Moment’, which show woman as mother. That maternal gesture of The trouble was [that] these images did good service catching the child in her arms is the key to the poem. The as ornaments. In fact, they had a wide acceptance as ornaments by readers of Irish poetry. Women in protectiveness of mothers features in ‘The Pomegranate’ and her such poems were frequently referred to approvingly wisdom is displayed in allowing the daughter the freedom to learn for as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and herself. simplified women seemed a corruption. For they were Woman as lover features in ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave not decorations, they were not ornaments. However Me’ and ‘Love’. distorted these images, they had their roots in a suffered truth. What had happened? How had the Suburban woman features in many of the poems, e.g. ‘The War women of our past – the women of a long struggle and Horse’ and ‘This Moment’. a terrible survival – undergone such a transformation? The puzzling relationship between men and women features in ‘The How had they suffered Irish history and rooted Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’: the mistimings, the tempests themselves in the speech and memory of the Achill of love, the sensual allure. Love diminishes in time, like the importance woman, only to reemerge in Irish poetry as fictive of the fan. This makes an interesting alternative view to the blinkered queens and national sibyls? one of idyllic romance. The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I Boland challenges the patriarchal tradition of Irish poetry. In Object became. The wrath and grief of Irish history seemed Lessons she elaborated on her objections to the images of woman in to me, as it did to many, one of our true possessions. literature: Women were part of that wrath, had endured that grief. It seemed to me a species of human insult that The majority of Irish male poets depended on women at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should as motifs in their poetry. They moved easily, deftly, as become elements of style rather than aspects of truth. if by right among images of women in which I did not believe and of which I could not approve. The women Ageing in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised In the later poems, such as ‘The Pomegranate’, Boland is conscious, in a to emblematic status. This was especially true where personal sense, of the ageing process. the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture. 595 new explorations eavan boland overview of the issues in this selection of boland’s poetry

Representation in art In other poems, Boland is particularly concerned with the representation of women in painting.

Striving for truth In all the areas explored – history, art and love – Boland is striving for truth and searching out the reality rather than the glittering image.

Poetry in the suburbs A good deal of her poetry is set in the suburbs, a setting not traditionally associated with poetic aspiration. The fragile nature of the beauty and order created in the suburbs is brought out in ‘The War Horse’. The toy house neatness of suburbia is no match for the wild, elemental attractions of nature in ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’. In the later poems we encounter a romantic evocation of a suburban twilight (‘This Moment’). Nature has colonised the suburbs (‘Stars rise. | Moths flutter’ and ‘One window is yellow as butter’). But the real bleakness of the suburban street is not hidden: ‘The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured’ (‘The Pomegranate’).

596 new explorations eavan boland developing a personal response to the poetry of eavan boland

Developing a personal response to the poetry of Eavan Boland

Think about the following points and make notes for yourself or discuss them in groups. 1. Which of Boland’s poems do you particularly like? 2. On reading Boland, what were the main issues the poems raised for you? 3. What settings, colours and moods do you associate with Boland’s poetry? 4. What general understanding of the poet did you form? What is important in her life? How does she see herself? Is she a happy or a sad person? etc. 5. Did reading her poetry add anything to your understanding of Irish history? What, and in which poems? 6. Consider her thoughts on the treatment of women in society and in history. Do you think she makes an important contribution to feminist thinking? 7. What insights did she give you into suburban life? 8. Would you consider her a radical poet? Explain your views. 9. Why do you think we should read her poetry? 10. What aspects of Boland’s poetry strike a chord with you: particular themes, settings, point of view on the world, the images she creates, the feeling and tones in the poems? What appeals to you?

597 new explorations eavan boland questions

Questions 10. ‘Finding significant moments of human experience is the goal of much of Boland’s poetry.’ Discuss this statement with reference to at 1. Outline three significant issues dealt with in the poetry of Eavan least three poems. Boland. Explore in detail the poet’s treatment of any one of these issues. 2. Do you find the poet’s view of Irish history particularly bleak? Comment. 3. ‘The attempt to shed the constricting husk of myth and enter the nightmare of history is an important theme in Boland’s poetry’ (R. Smith). Discuss. 4. ‘Boland’s poetry shows a consciousness of the sustaining power of cultural heritage, whether through primitive Irish superstition or classical mythology.’ Discuss this statement in light of the poems you have read. 5. ‘Boland’s poetry shows how idealised images of women need to be set beside the reality.’ Discuss. 6. ‘While she takes a feminist line, maternity and suburbia feature prominently in Boland’s poetry.’ Consider this statement in light of at least two poems you have read. 7. ‘The relationship between mother and daughter is an important preoccupation in Boland’s’ poetry.’ Discuss, with reference to at least two of the poems you have read. 8. ‘Boland is always conscious of the natural context in which human events occur.’ Consider Boland as a nature poet. 9. ‘Boland’s imagination thrives in the shadows.’ Would you agree?

598 new explorations eavan boland bibliography

Bibliography McGuinness, A., ‘Hearth and history: Poetry by contemporary Irish women poets’ in Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Allen-Randolph, J., ‘Écriture féminine and the authorship of self in Eavan Irish Literature (Irish Literary Studies, 31), edited by Michael Kenneally, Boland’s In Her Own Image’, Colby Quarterly, vol. 27, 1991, 48–59. Gerrards Cross (Bucks): Colin Smythe 1988, 197–220.

Allen-Randolph, J., ‘Private worlds, public realities: Eavan Boland’s poetry, Meaney, G., ‘Sex and nation: Women in Irish culture and politics’ in A 1967–1990’, Irish University Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 1993, 5–22. Dozen Lips, Dublin: Attic Press 1994, 188–204.

Boyle Haberstroh, P., Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Ní Chuilleanáin, E. (ed.), Irish Women: Image and Achievement, Dublin: Women Poets, Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press 1996, 59–92. Arlen House 1985.

Dawe, G., ‘The suburban night: Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan and Thomas Roche, A. and Allen-Randolph, J. (eds), Irish University Review Special McCarthy’ in Against Piety: Essays in Irish Poetry, Belfast: Lagan Press Issue: Eavan Boland, vol. 23, no. 1, spring–summer 1993. 1995, 169–93. Ward, M., ‘The missing sex: Putting women into Irish history’ in A Dozen Denman, P., ‘Ways of saying: Boland, Carson, McGuckian’ in Poetry Lips, Dublin: Attic Press 1994, 205–24. in Contemporary Irish Literature (Irish Literary Studies, 43), edited by Michael Kenneally, Gerrards Cross (Bucks): Colin Smythe 1995, 158–73.

Kiberd, D., Inventing Ireland, London: Jonathan Cape 1995.

Longley, E., ‘From Cathleen to anorexia:The breakdown of Irelands’ in A Dozen Lips, Dublin: Attic Press 1994, 162, 187.

Mahoney, R., Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age, New York: Houghton Mifflin 1993.

Matthews, S., Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation: The Evolving Debate, 1969 to the Present, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1997.

599 Paul Durcan Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

600 new explorations paul durcan introduction

Introduction Among his many volumes of poetry are the following: O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), The Berlin Wall Café (1985), Going Home to Paul Durcan was born in Dublin to parents from County Mayo: John Russia (1987), Daddy, Daddy (1990), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil Durcan, barrister and judge, and Sheila MacBride Durcan, solicitor. He (1999), The Laughter of Mothers (2007) and Praise in Which I Live and was raised between Dublin and Turlough, County Mayo, where his aunt Move and Have My Being (2012). A selection of his work, Life Is a Dream: ran a pub. 40 Years Reading Poems 1967–2007, was published in 2009.

He began to study law and economics in UCD but left in 1964. For a Paul Durcan has won many awards for his poetry, including the Patrick number of years he lived between London, Barcelona and Dublin. When Kavanagh Award, the Irish American Cultural Institute Poetry Award, he worked for the North Thames Gas Board in London he used to visit the Heinemann Award and the Whitbread Poetry Award for Daddy, the Tate Gallery at lunchtime to view the paintings of Francis Bacon in Daddy. particular.

He married Nessa O’Neill. They settled in Cork in 1970 and have two daughters. She worked as a teacher in a prison and he completed a degree in archaeology and medieval history at UCC. The marriage ended in 1984.

Durcan has travelled widely, as the titles of his volumes demonstrate. He has been writer in residence in universities, including the University of Ulster and Trinity College Dublin. He has collaborated with artists and musicians. He was commissioned to write poetry in response to paintings by the National Gallery of Ireland (Crazy About Women, 1991) and by the National Gallery, London (Give Me Your Hand, 1994). He held the Irish Chair of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. As a performing poet, he is known for the mesmeric quality of his readings.

601 new explorations paul durcan nessa

Nessa I’d have lain in the grass with her all my life With Nessa A reading of the poem This is an autobiographical poem about the poet’s first meeting with This simple rustic image of love carries all the sense of genuine Nessa O’Neill, to whom he was later married. It attempts to recreate the commitment without any of the public social displays of engagements, experience of falling in love. He may be falling, but it is she who takes the weddings, etc. It is also worth noting that the whirlpool is personalised in initiative in a meeting that is highly charged with sexual suggestiveness: this stanza; he recognises that she is the whirlpool: ‘She was a whirlpool, she was a whirlpool’. She took me by the index finger And dropped me in her well. The growing personalisation and the deepening of involvement continues in the final stanza. Up to this Nessa has been addressed in the distant third He obviously falls for her, as is reported in the refrain of the first two person – ‘I met her’, ‘she fell down’, ‘she was a whirlpool’. But in the final stanzas: stanza she is addressed directly and personally with caring endearments – ‘O Nessa my dear’. He pleads with her to stay with him: And that was a whirlpool, that was a whirlpool, And I very nearly drowned. Will you stay with me on the rocks? Will you come for me into the Irish Sea The metaphor of the whirlpool catches the confusion of swirling emotions And for me let your red hair down? and thoughts he eventually abandons himself to: ‘And I hopped into the Irish Sea’. At one level this is a personal sensual statement in language that reminds one of a ballad. But the references to the Irish Sea and letting her red The third stanza explicitly mentions falling. It also moves on from the hair down could be read as giving Nessa an almost cultural, mythical frantic movement of the first two stanzas (hopping and dropping) to a still significance with other famous Irish female figures. The final appeal to image of them lying side by side and to that serious, reflective moment happiness ever after has connotations of American romantic films: when he recognises the depth of his feelings:

602 new explorations paul durcan nessa

And then we will ride into Dublin City The refrain changes over the poem; here is the last stanza: In a taxi-cab wrapped up in dust. O he was a lone one, Is there a suggestion here that he is aware of the fragile nature of this Fol dol the di do romantic moment after all if he thinks of it as a screen image? However Yet he lived happily one reads it, it is clear that he is submerged in love: ‘And I am very nearly I tell you. drowned’. Perhaps Durcan is paying tribute to Kavanagh. The slight alterations to the refrain over the course of the poem carry the story of the relationship as it is personalised and deepened. Indeed, there In terms of imagery, this is a highly visual, even cinematic poem. The is an echo of Patrick Kavanagh here, who was a friend at this time and was whirlpool image carries the maelstrom of emotions that is love, but it is quite influential on Durcan’s poetry. Kavanagh also used the changing an image that changes subtly but significantly as the poem progresses in refrain not just as a musical feature, but also to carry and develop ideas. order to carry the developing story. A succession of unexplained concrete This is the first stanza of Kavanagh’s poem ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin images flicker across the screen of this poem, carrying the narrative in a Town’: visual mode – the index finger, the well, the pants, the sea, the field, the rocks, the sea, the red hair and finally that taxi-cab. Just as in a film, the If ever you go to Dublin town images carry the narrative as much as the dialogue/commentary does. In a hundred years or so Inquire for me in Baggot Street The sea is a recurring image in Durcan’s poetry. Images of water generally And what I was like to know. – sea, rivers, rain – occur often. He finds water therapeutic and a positive O he was a queer one, force, as he said in an interview in the Irish Times (10 February 1990): ‘To Fol dol the di do, me everything that is good is water connected or based, even attitudes to He was a queer one life, glowing into things … I’m a fish between the lines.’ Water is associated I tell you. with baptism and with birth, so it is connected with new life and new beginnings, and here with new love.

603 new explorations paul durcan nessa

It is worth reading this romantic love poem in conjunction with ‘ ‘‘Windfall”, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’, which records the later stages of the relationship and finally, the end of the marriage.

604 new explorations paul durcan the girl with the keys to pearse’s cottage

The Girl with the Keys to Pearse’s Cottage daughter’s proudly mortal face’. In language that has echoes of the traditional Irish lament for the departing exile, Durcan records his own A reading of the poem sorrow at her necessary departure: At one level this is a poem about a teenager’s infatuation with a girl he O Cáit Killann, O Cáit Killann, met when he was 16. She had a dark beauty and an easy smile: ‘Her dark You have gone with your keys from your own native hair was darker because her smile was so bright’. He found her physically place. alluring as she Cáit Killann is a real girl, but she is also many an Irish girl of the 1960s, used linger on the sill of a window; indeed of Irish history. Thus, this is also a political poem. Pearse’s Cottage Hands by her side and brown legs akimbo was a political shrine to one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 rebellion against British colonial Watching her from a distance, from ‘below in the field’, he used to sit in rule. The Spartan simplicity of the early 20th-century rural dwelling is the rushes and compile ‘poems of passion for Cáit Killann’. recorded, as is the sense of peace experienced by Durcan:

There is a sense of distance about her. She is observed from afar. In the I recall two windows and cosmic peace poem there is no record of them actually speaking. She is at a distance Of bare brown rooms and on whitewashed walls from the world of Connemara, as if she doesn’t understand it or indeed belong, as she sat ‘Looking toward our strange world wide-eyed’. And of But it shows signs of neglect when seen up close – ‘I recall wet thatch course, she will not belong and shortly will be at an even greater distance: and peeling jambs’, just as the hopes and dreams of that first Provisional Government in 1916 to ‘pursue the happiness and prosperity of the Our world was strange because it had no future; whole nation, cherishing all the children of the nation equally’ have also She was America-bound at summer’s end. fallen into neglect. It is painfully ironic that Cáit Killann, the girl with the keys to Pearse’s Cottage, metaphorically the keeper of his memory Despite her bright smile there was a sorrow in her eyes that marked and his dreams and one of the children of his nation, will be forced to her out: ‘El Greco eyes blaze black’. Yet she was real, not a figure of emigrate for a livelihood ‘at summer’s end’. Durcan is keenly aware of the myth, and the poet celebrates her rural, working-class family origins and contradictions involved in ostensibly venerating the founding fathers and the proud reality of her mortal existence: ‘your Connemara postman’s 605 new explorations paul durcan the girl with the keys to pearse’s cottage

yet failing to fulfil their ambitions for the children of the nation almost 50 years later. Underlying this poem is a layer of criticism of the political hypocrisy and double-think that Durcan felt was prevalent in Irish society.

606 new explorations paul durcan the difficulty that is marriage

The Difficulty That Is Marriage substitute (‘changeling’) for the perfection of Eternal Life, but he would prefer to live with her than ‘exchange my troubles for a changeless A reading of the poem kingdom’. This is his dilemma; his decision is this compromise. He would This is a poem about the difficulties of marriage, but it is also a love prefer to be with her and be troubled than to have an untroubled life poem. Altogether it is an interesting, deep and thoughtful look at the without her. These are weighty thoughts for a sleepless night. complexities of marriage. On the other hand, his feelings for and thoughts about her are clear and As the title says, the poem does deal with the difficulties of marriage. The unambiguous, as he says, ‘How was it I was so lucky to have ever met depth and pervasive nature of disagreement is laid out clearly in the first you?’ He addresses her as ‘my sleeping friend’, which implies a close social line in a precise, emotionless, almost mathematical formulation – ‘We and emotional supportive relationship. His view of her is balanced. He disagree to disagree, we divide, we differ’. doesn’t worship her blindly, but neither does he think that she has any faults: We can discern the differences in their personalities as they lie in bed. She But I do not put you on a pedestal or throne; is ‘faraway curled up in sleep’. In an almost feline image, like a sleeping cat, You must have your faults but I do not see them. she is tranquil in sleep, separate and distant, self-sufficient, content. He, on the other hand, is wide awake, worrying at ideas, evaluating himself, Twice he asserts that he wishes to live with her forever and concludes that questioning: ‘I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question marks’. living with her would be his ideal Eternal Life: ‘If it were with you, I should live for ever.’ The artistic formulation of this image (‘array the ceiling’, ‘mosaic of question marks’) attempts to hide or soften the trauma of self-questioning So the difficulty or dilemma that is marriage is that they disagree but doesn’t really succeed as he carries on relentlessly: ‘I have my troubles constantly, yet despite this he wishes to spend his life with her. This is the and I shall always have them’ (probably a reference to the depression difficulty with all marriages (as the title implies) – how to accommodate he suffered from and has written openly about; see the poem ‘Sport’). difference, whether in the form of disagreements, personality differences, He explores his philosophy of life, which is a spiritual one: ‘I am no brave etc. pagan proud of my mortality’. He also refers to ‘this changeling earth’. From a religious perspective, life on earth is an imperfect form or poor

607 new explorations paul durcan the difficulty that is marriage

A comparison with ‘Nessa’ may serve to clarify an understanding of this poem. ‘Nessa’ is madly energetic, sexy, zany, humorous and full of impetuousness. What they have in common is emotional transparency and honesty. But this poem is more rational, more contemplative, indeed, more spiritual. Perhaps they should both be seen as marking different stages in a relationship. ‘Nessa’ catches the uncontrollable, headlong excitement of falling in love. ‘The Difficulty That Is Marriage’ explores the everyday, ordinary, more mature stage of the relationship and provides a more realistic yet still hopeful account.

This is neither a standard love poem nor a standard sonnet, but the openness, honesty and insight that Durcan brings to his writing about family life and marriage was new to Irish poetry of the time.

608 new explorations paul durcan wife who smashed television gets jail

Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail put her boot through the screen … and smashed in the television’. He portrays himself as most reasonable, the one who is discommoded by all A reading of the poem this: ‘I had to bring the kids round to my mother’s place’. He introduces Durcan is known for his provocative titles. Consider some of the other the irrelevance about his mother’s liking for Kojak, probably to suggest, such titles he has used: ‘Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin’, ‘The obliquely, that if the grandmothers of Ireland were fond of Kojak, there Head Transplant’, ‘The Married Man Who Fell in Love with a Semi-State couldn’t be much wrong with it. This is a clever manipulation of the Body’ and ‘The Woman Who Keeps Her Breasts in the Back Garden’. incident to show himself as the wronged party. To give his account added Many of them read like the more lurid and exaggerated headlines of veracity, he is able to give the exact time of the incident; he can even tabloid newspapers and their main purpose is to catch readers’ attention. quote the words of Kojak! His corroborating evidence is linked to a police This poem is structured as a piece of court report journalism, much of it in detective, albeit a fictional one. How surreal is that? But it is also very the form of direct quotation from the husband’s evidence (which includes humorous. the reported speech of his wife) and also the judge’s verdict statement. The wife’s reported speech is exaggerated to appear ludicrous and daft: It is obviously a spoof, a parody of a courtroom scene. The humour … I didn’t get married to a television comes from the cleverly crafted writing, particularly in the way the style And I don’t see why my kid’s or anybody else’s kids of the speeches are made to resemble real courtroom dialogue while the Should have a television for a father or mother content of the speeches and the situation itself are edging towards the absurd. This disconnection is at the heart of the comedy. She finishes by making a sensible point about the need for real communication and shared family activity: The husband is careful to use the most obsequious form of court address, ‘my Lord’, every time he speaks to the judge. He cleverly, if We’d be much better off all down in the pub talking ungrammatically, tries to paint himself in the best possible light: ‘Me Or playing bar-billiards – and the kids were peaceably watching Kojak’. Notice that he is careful to introduce the term ‘peaceably’. In contrast, through the imagery and But the judge completely misses the point, saying ‘wives who preferred language he uses, the husband portrays the wife as unreasonable, violent bar-billiards to family television ... Were a threat to the family’. Again, the and aggressive: ‘she marched into the living room and declared … She’d humour in the judge’s speech comes from the disconnection between

609 new explorations paul durcan wife who smashed television gets jail

the pretentious or serious-sounding phrases and the actual sense of the The husband can quote Kojak verbatim. Also, TV has replaced a good content, which is nonsense. We expect to hear phrases from a judgment deal of human interaction and active family engagement in sports and such as ‘threat to the family’ or to hear the family described as ‘the basic other activities. Carried to extremes, this is now regarded as a serious issue unit of the society’, as these convey the establishment’s conservative in the healthy development of individuals and families. Durcan is casting social philosophy. But in the particular combinations used, they constitute a keen critical eye over social developments in Ireland at the time. Behind utterly hilarious nonsense: ‘As indeed the television itself could be said to the humour is a moralist promoting family values. be the basic unit of the family’. Ironically, he doesn’t seem to realise that he is breaking up the basic unit of the family by sending the mother to jail!

The judiciary is the target of Durcan’s lethal satire here. In a patriarchal system the judge is completely taken in by the husband’s manipulation and doesn’t give due consideration to the serious point made by the wife. The pretentious language he uses is revealed as utter nonsense. His arrogance is clear: ‘Leave to appeal was refused.’ The power of the state, even over family, is absolute. This judge identifies with the new Irish nation, as indicated by the use of the Irish version of his name. The judiciary, as the oppressive arm of a conservative Irish state system, is a favourite bête noire of Durcan’s. At one level this is personal, as he had a difficult relationship with his father, who was a judge, but he also feels that the political system of the state stifles the free expression of individuals and enforces conformism.

Behind the fun is a piece of serious social criticism. The growing availability of early social media such as television in the 1960s and 1970s in Ireland brought American popular culture to Irish people and it had a significant impact. American expressions entered the everyday language.

610 new explorations paul durcan parents

Parents ‘locked out of their own home’. If she looked up she would see ‘Their mouths open’. Is this in awe of this new life or in confusion? ‘Their A reading of the poem foreheads’ are ‘furrowed’. Does this suggest worry or are they merely Caring for a newborn child is both a beautiful and a scary experience. thinking, processing information about her and this entirely new situation? Merely to hold such a tiny person is scary. Because communication is ‘Through the night, stranded, they stare’. ‘Stranded’ suggests that they primitive and basic, parents are extra vigilant, constantly checking on the have no option but to be there, such is the strength of the parent/child child even when he or she is asleep. Durcan is attempting to articulate the bond. But to remain through the night is extreme, an indication of the strangeness of this experience of a new independent life in the house, for intensity of their feelings. the parents and also for the child. To do this, he makes it more strange still; he exaggerates the barriers between parents and child. He uses the If she looked up through the sea she would see ‘Pursed-up orifices of sea metaphor to constitute this barrier. She is under the sea and they are fearful fish’, a grotesque and frightening image. The world must be above it. This is not a totally unconnected leap of the imagination, as very strange and indeed frightening to a new child. Sometimes they get the child has had a type of fish-like existence in the womb. He uses this frightened by an unaccustomed face; it is referred to as ‘making strange’. metaphor to explore the different perspectives of parents and child, as ‘Their big ears are fins behind glass’ – it is as if she sees the parents as viewed from above and beneath the water: ‘A child’s face is a drowned fish in a tank, an upside down view of the world. There is much paediatric face’. truth in the distorted view described here, as babies do not develop clear, focused vision for many months. Not only is her vision distorted, but her This dramatic opening line, shocking because of its suggestions of death vocal communication is not effective either, as her plaintive dream calls rather than new life, sets the scene for the notion of the strangeness of indicate: this experience. First shock over, it does have an element of truth, as the And in her sleep she is calling out to them child has come from the sea of the womb. Father, Father Mother, Mother Let’s first consider the experience from the parents’ perspective, as the But they cannot hear her title of the poem directs us. They feel ‘Estranged from her’. She was inside one of them, now she is outside both, a separate being, uncommunicative The poem attempts to convey the strangeness of having and being a in sleep. They cannot reach her, cannot access her. It is as if they are newborn child. The inability to communicate is a major factor in this 611 new explorations paul durcan parents

experience; the parents feel themselves excluded from her world and she has a distorted view of theirs. The central metaphor of the sea as a barrier to sound and vision – imaginative, original in the context and somewhat distressing – is central to creating this experience.

This is a most unusual poem but one that carries real insights into the helplessness of parents as they look at their sleeping child.

612 new explorations paul durcan en famille, 1979

En Famille, 1979

A reading of the poem Despite its brevity, this epigrammatic poem manages to convey a great depth of feeling about the poet’s bleak memory of childhood. It concerns childhood in the family setting, ‘en famille’, yet the images used are of school, which suggests how he feels about his family childhood.

It is a ‘dark’ school, so no bright interesting ideas, no illumination there, no sense of fun or enjoyment, not a happy place. Usually in a school life is highly organised, controlled, regulated. Students are forced to engage with a set curriculum over which they have no control. It is not a place to chill out, relax or be yourself, ‘where tiny is tiny, and massive is massive’. This carries connotations of feeling insignificant, vulnerable, threatened, kept down, even frightened. It is certainly not a place where he felt fostered and encouraged. Altogether, the memory is of a bleak, controlled family environment where he felt insignificant and under threat.

But this could be read in other ways. What do you think?

613 new explorations paul durcan madman

Madman

A reading of the poem At a certain stage of young people’s lives, parents are often felt to be a source of embarrassment to them. While local eccentric or even more ‘individual’ adults can be viewed dispassionately or with amusement, the perceived eccentricities of one’s own parents can make one squirm with self-consciousness. But the term ‘madman’ is at the extreme end of the scale and gives us a clue about the depth of the writer’s feelings. However, the humorous formulation of the epigram lightens this somewhat. How do you read it?

614 new explorations paul durcan ‘windfall’, 8 parnell hill, cork

‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork though he is aware of the violence in the city and the financial inequality in the country: A reading of the poem Having a home of your own can give to a family In the first section (lines 1–37), Durcan outlines the importance of this A chance in a lifetime to transcend death. home to him and how he feels about it: how privileged and lucky he is; the creative impulse of the view; the perfect family atmosphere it enables; the This is an enormous claim to make. Perhaps he means that it gives a tranquillity it enables him to experience despite the inequalities in society; sense of identity not just to a family, but also to generations of that and how it is a lifeline for a family: family. Future members will have a sense of their origins, their áit dúchais – who and where they are from. Home gives a sense of family I felt elected, steeped, sovereign to be able to say – I am going home. identity that lives on. Certainly the sense of place has been important in his conceptualisation of home in this first section. He has included a He feels privileged, made independent, but most important of all, lucky great deal of detail on this, whether it be the view from the window, the (‘steeped’). That’s why they named their home ‘Windfall’, in contrast to character of the city (‘as intimate and homicidal as a Little Marseille’) or the neighbours, who named theirs as religious tributes or for romantic the significance of the neighbours’ house names. aspirations. It was, for him, a dream come true – ‘Dreaming that life is a dream which is real’. The views foster the creative impulse. The power The second section (lines 38–75) also opens with a focus on the sense of station and the car assembly work may not be what inspired Cézanne, but place – on the commercial aspect of the river and the airport but also on nevertheless, ‘The industrial vista was my Mont Sainte-Victoire’. the romantic, natural beauty of the scene:

Skylines drifting in and out of skylines in the cloudy His family make the perfect, relaxed picture: valley; Firelight at dusk, and city lights While my children sat on my knees watching TV Their mother, my wife, reclined on the couch But the view swiftly pulls back to the living room and the family. This section is mainly about family and family history; there is a sense that The tranquillity he feels is similar to that experienced by Buddhist monks in their meditation ‘In lotus monasteries high up in the Hindu Kush’, even 615 new explorations paul durcan ‘windfall’, 8 parnell hill, cork

family consists of generations. The poet is poring over family photograph In which climbing the walls is as natural albums that record his history: As making love on the stairs

A room wallpapered in books and family photograph Here. the adults don’t answer the phone: albums Chronicling the adventures and metamorphoses of Initiating, instead, a yet more subversive kiss – family life A kiss they have perhaps never attempted before –

His life has been chronicled, almost always as part of family: a photograph It is a place where the children are as safe and supported as in the womb: of his baptism with Mammy, excursions in Ireland and the UK with Granny, a group photo in First Infants, holidays in France with Mammy Our children swam about our home and Daddy, seaside holidays in Ireland, trips to Irish sites of historical As if it was their private sea, interest, and finally back to France, where, probably independent of Their own unique symbiotic fluid Of which their parents also partook. family, he visits cultural sites and is seen weeping at Auvers, possibly at the grave of Vincent van Gogh. His was a well-travelled, cultured childhood These children are not reared to be inhibited, as, through the banisters, and youth, recorded in family photos. All this reminiscing happens in the context of his current family: The pyjama-clad children solemnly watching Their parents at play, jumping up and down in My children looking over my shoulder, exhilarated as support I was, Their mother presiding at our ritual from a distance – The far side of the hearthrug, diffidently, proudly. He concludes that ‘The most subversive unit in society is the human family’. In the uninhibited privacy of the home, the family can overturn or In the third section (lines 76–101) the aspect of the home that is ignore the accepted social conventions of the time and so achieve a sense explored is that of an uninhibited place, a private space of freedom from of freedom that is psychologically liberating and more healthy for people. conventions: He has already made specific reference to the psychological complexity of family life earlier in this section:

616 new explorations paul durcan ‘windfall’, 8 parnell hill, cork

Sifting the sands underneath the surfaces of But then with good reason conversations, I was put out of my home: The marine insect life of the family psyche. By a keen wind felled.

In this development of the sea metaphor, the nuances of conversations He is now the windfall, dropped from the tree. There is no rationale, no are compared to marine insect life, tiny but vital to the health of the whole explanation apart from the admission ‘with good reason’. The focus is system. Durcan’s use of sea imagery is varied and complex. Here, the entirely on the effect of this on the speaker. The sense of homelessness sea is as life-supporting as the womb. The home is a sea of symbiotic is conveyed by the many references to ‘homeless’, ‘without a home’, (amniotic?) fluid for children and parents, nurturing and supporting. ‘homesick’, ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’. All these register the shock of separation, Indeed, home is equated with the sea – ‘A home of your own – or a sea of which is rendered most poignantly in the line ‘To be homesick knowing your own’. that there is no home to go home to’. Instead, we find images of furtive movement around cheap hotels – ‘Moonlighting, escaping … Hostels, The fourth section (lines 102–13) consists of a litany or ritual chant of all centres, one-night hotels’. He uses the windfall metaphor again to convey the common phrases we use in referring to home. These are chanted in his inability to control his life: a type of religious litany of praise. Durcan is listing the many aspects of home: as a place of safety, a comforting space (lines 102, 113); it provides Homeless in Dublin, a sense of place and locates a family (103); a daily link back to family Blown about the suburban streets at evening (104, 111, 112); a place of commitment (105); the place we are drawn to (106, 108, 109); too long a separation is unhealthy (107); and a place of He is haunted by the romantic image of family round the fire, glimpsed happiness, perhaps romance (110). The entire voice collage is really a through the windows as he wanders by, an outsider – ‘Peering in the hymn to home, where Durcan consciously uses Catholic liturgical prayer windows of other people’s homes’. For a moment, this is given a universal form to emphasise the sacredness of the space and the concept. perspective as he makes reference to the significance of family fire to all cultures and classes: ‘Apache or Cherokee or Bourgeoisie’. His complete The sudden, catastrophic loss of all this comes in three bare, spare lines at aloneness is registered in that final, personal, unanswered mayday call: the beginning of the next section: Windfall to Windfall – can you hear me? Windfall to Windfall …

617 new explorations paul durcan ‘windfall’, 8 parnell hill, cork

He is now the windfall, calling home and finding only silence. The last where there are no women and children is a very line is an echo from previous family life in which the children are being empty house. reassured and home was a place of security and refuge: ‘We’re almost home, pet, don’t worry anymore, we’re almost home.’ The raw emotion As we saw, the poem ‘Windfall’ explores many aspects of home and here, the sense of loss and longing and loneliness, is painful to read. We family life: the traditional, the personal, even the subversive. It also deals can appreciate the truth of Durcan’s comment about this poem in an with the pain of loss for him when the marriage ended. Durcan is writing interview for the Sunday Independent on 18 October 2009: ‘That poem is about intimate family life; his work is transparent and personal. Despite a recollection of all that they gave and all that they were to me. I left this the personal focus of the work we still get flashes of social criticism, one poem out of other selections because at the time I just couldn’t face the of Durcan’s trademarks. The three prevailing metaphors and images that hurt and the pain of it.’ echo through the work are taken from the natural elements of fire, water and wind. In that interview he also spoke about the ending of the marriage, but he has no simple answer for it. ‘Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about our marriage. Though our marriage ended at the beginning of 1984, when I’m talking to myself, which is what I mainly do, I put the breakdown of our marriage down to my stupidity. I was simply plain stupid and not mature enough as a human being or as a young man. Ever since Sarah and Siabhra were humans, I could see that they were infinitely more mature than I was … Even now, I see myself making the wrong choices. I don’t know what it is. It ranges from ridiculous, naïve, to culpable.’

In an earlier interview in 1986, in the Irish Times, Durcan is quoted as saying:

I will rue for the rest of my life the fact that I put my work before my family … Poetry is an incredibly isolated activity … Heaven is other people: a house

618 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in convent inferno

Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno … round the base of the great patriotic pebble of O’Donovan Rossa, Knelt tableaus of punk girls and punk boys. A reading of the poem Part I This pejorative sideswipe at our revolutionary heroes (it does actually look Part I of the poem is structured as a dramatic monologue by one of like a giant pebble) is the first indication that we are hearing a strikingly the nuns, in which the account of the tragedy is interspersed with individual voice here. But she is much more interested in the punks. reminiscences on significant issues and moments in her life. The narrative She displays not only human sympathy for them, but deep insight that style resembles a cinematic technique. Throughout the poem there are sees past ‘the martial garb | And the dyed hair-dos and the nappy pins’ frequent changes of shot and location. Scenes from the distant past are (body piercing). She realises that they are actually really conventional, in cut into recent experience as in a film montage and the entire narrative is the sense that they adhere strictly to the conventional punk dress code. linked by stream of consciousness connections. Whereas many people would have found their appearance threatening, she realises that they are actually vulnerable and weak in that they need The first section of part I (lines 1–62) is really an introduction in which the the group identity: ‘Clinging to warpaint and to uniforms and to one main themes and issues of the poem are presented. We are introduced to another’. So already we know the speaker as a perceptive and individual the city environment of the convent, the nuns’ philosophy of life (i.e. the voice. rationale for religious vocation), their attitude to death, the physical frailty of the old nuns in the dormitory and, as a passing thought, how they We trust her imaginative logic as she asserts ‘I knew it was myself who would cope in the event of a fire. was the ultimate drop-out’. As a nun, she has no home of her own (a vagabond) and she rejects the conventional way of life (so she is We are first introduced to the location and environment of the convent: subversive). We are introduced here to the concept of a religious St Stephen’s Green, Dublin city centre. We see it through the eyes of the vocation as a radical life choice as she says: nun as she is ‘scurrying’ to mass in the Carmelite Church in Clarendon Street, off Grafton Street: To opt out of the world and to Choose such exotic loneliness, Such terrestrial abandonment

619 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in convent inferno

This radical, exotic choice didn’t lead to an exciting lifestyle, but rather Scuttling about our dorm, wheezing, shrieking, to the banal bric-a-brac of ordinary daily routines, as she wryly refers to a croaking, ‘lifetime of bicycle lamps … of umbrellas drying out in the kitchens’. With In our yellowy corsets, wonky suspenders, strung-out garters appealing honesty, she admits that she was terrified of her ‘other-worldly’ choice – ‘Appalled by my own nerve … My apocalyptic enthusiasm’. At With the now-expected humour she thinks of them as an aviary, a cage the end of this first section of the poem she is more specific about the of old birds: ‘we were as eerie an aviary as you’d find’. Their oddness is human cost of her religious vocation – no intimate physical and emotional emphasised in the schooner metaphor. It is humorous in a somewhat life, no children, no home of her own: surreal way – that vision of the old nuns living at the top of the mast, For we had done the weirdest thing a woman can do – crawling out on the yardarms: Surrendered the marvellous passions of girlhood … Never to know the love of a man or a woman; Sleeping up there was like sleeping at the top of the Never to have children of our own; mast Never to have a home of our own Of a nineteenth-century schooner, and in the daytime We old nuns were the ones who crawled out on the yardarms They have given up these elements of human love and comfort to To stitch and sew the rigging and the canvas. devote themselves to a spiritual ideal, to bring a broader ‘other-worldly’ perspective on life and on death. This religious ideal is centred on Christ. Durcan uses this extreme metaphor, like a metaphysical conceit, to show The human aspect of God is emphasised here: ‘To follow a young man’. how out-of-the-ordinary they actually were. It is not without irony, and she is aware of it (‘would you believe it’), that they are giving up young men in order to dedicate themselves to ‘a young It is interesting to explore how the cinematic montage technique works man … Who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine’. The speaker has in this section (the way shots are selected and cut in) and built on stream outlined the ideals, dilemmas and paradoxes of a religious vocation in a of consciousness connections. It begins with her admission that she was voice replete with sympathy, insight and flashes of humour. no fool, that she knew what a ‘weird bird’ she was. We begin with ‘weird birds’ (‘as eerie an aviary’) → old nuns in their worn-out underwear → the We are also introduced to the old nuns in all their physical frailty and aged dream of a fire in the night (and connection to a happy death) → back to dishabille in the dormitory up under the roof of the convent: the high-up dormitory → the schooner metaphor, with nuns crawling out 620 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in convent inferno

on the yardarms → weird birds → oddballs → Christniks → and so back Any of us would have given our right arm to their philosophy of life as an explanation of their religious vocation. To have been his nun – darning his socks, cooking his These images not only carry an exciting visual variety, but also a richness meals, Making his bed, doing his washing and ironing. of thought about the lives of these old nuns – their frailty, their isolation, their odd way of life and how passionately dedicated they were to their These were no female liberationists. Child-like in their hero worship, ideals. they would be delighted to do menial work. Also in the context of their lifestyle, a brief seaside holiday provided ‘one of the gayest days of my For the first time, we are introduced to their philosophy of death. On the life’. Their excitement was palpable, as if they were boarding school pupils possibility of a fire, the speaker had thought: of a former era, unexpectedly released for a day at the beach:

We’d not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Fancy that! There we were fluttering up and down the beach, It seemed too good to be true: Scampering hither and thither in our starched Happy death vouchsafed only to the few. bathing-costumes.

They welcomed death and didn’t fear it because they had absolute belief On the very night of the fire, she tells of her school-girl naughtiness in in the afterlife. skipping bathroom in order to get more time to read:

The rest of part I explores these two themes in more depth – the nuns’ I skipped bathroom so that I could hop straight into way of life and religious philosophy and, increasingly as the poem bed progresses, their acceptance and philosophy of death. And get in a bit of a read before lights out

The simplicity of their worldly ambition is evident from the Cardinal We see the entirely human trait of managing to focus on relatively Mindszenty episode: insignificant things: the cost of the book, now to be lost in the flames and never to be returned to ‘the brother-in-law’s married niece’. As she observes, in humour tinged with sarcasm:

621 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in the convent inferno

Indeed a book today is almost worth buying for its And it was this religious faith that governed how they accepted their price, deaths. She maintains a wonderful equanimity in the face of her sudden, Its price frequently being more remarkable than its unexpected death: contents. Isn’t it a marvellous thing how your hour comes Durcan has certainly done enough to communicate the joyous, When you least expect it? When you lose a thing, sometimes juvenile, sometimes scatty but always human qualities of these Not to know about it until it actually happens? nuns, so her prayer has the ring of truth: ‘God have mercy on our whirring souls’. With Christian conviction, she sees death as a freeing up (of the spirit):

This human wildness co-exists with their religious view of life and the How, in so many ways, losing things is such a refreshing experience, world. Thinking over the day out at the seaside, she develops her Giving you a sense of freedom you’ve not often ecological theology: experienced?

… that Christ is the ocean At other times this calm acceptance becomes more emotional and Forever rising and falling on the world’s shore. changes into a joyful welcoming of death, even bordering on the fanatical:

The nuns were always conscious of their religious mission – how each Burning to death in the arms of Christ – was, in a sense, a ‘Mother of God’, bringing Christ alive to people on the O Christ, Christ, come quickly, quickly – streets: And: Each of us in our own tiny, frail, furtive way Was a Mother of God, mothering forth illegitimate Only instead of scampering into the waves of the sea, Christs Now we were scampering into the flames of the fire. In the street life of Dublin city.

622 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in convent inferno

Also: rational thought in this traumatic situation. For the final lines of part I, the poem makes a transition to a solemn memorial naming of the nuns who Now tonight in the convent Christ is the fire in whose lost their lives. It ends with their request to be remembered ‘for the frisky waves girls that [they] were’, which brings us back to the ‘happy memory’ of the We are doomed but delighted to drown. subtitle.

This fanatical fervour is most troubling and disturbing in the last section Part II of part I. She views her death as sharing in Christ’s sacrifice, which is Part II of the poem is after the fire. This part takes the not quite real, commemorated in the Eucharist: dream-like sequences to new heights of unreality, with Jesus preaching on Grafton Street (the most expensive street of consumerism), and the The strange Eucharist of my death – To be eaten alive by fire and smoke. six nuns who died creeping out at night from under the bandstand in St I clasped the dragon to my breast Stephen’s Green, where they had been hiding. Perhaps that marvellous And stroked his red-hot ears. creation, the small aged punk who has ditched her punk gear for mourning black, is an incarnation of the narrator? At any rate, this is a But this suggests a passionate embrace of the fire, going far beyond mere space uninhibited by the laws of time or place or state of being – a state acceptance of death. of afterlife?

The first half of this section reads like a surreal nightmare sequence. As In the first section, an episode from the life of Christ in the Gospels is mothers, they are giving birth to their own deaths – perhaps delivering transposed and applied to modern times. Just as in the Gospel story themselves to Heaven? Doctors and midwives go about ‘In gowns of where Jesus was deeply touched by the faith of the centurion, he appears smoke and gloves of fire’. A strangely dressed Christ, ‘like an Orthodox to praise the faith displayed in this narrative. Israel, in the Gospel story, patriarch in his dressing gown, | Flew up and down the dormitory, has been replaced here by New York City, which has a significant Jewish splashing water on our souls’. population and houses the American centre of commerce, Wall Street. Is Durcan making a point about the need for religious values in an age of Is this a deliberate undermining of their religious beliefs? Perhaps its rampant consumerism? The followers of Jesus have been modernised purpose is to communicate the confusion, the horror, the disintegration of too, into unlikely groups of teenagers and dicemen. The nuns choose the

623 new explorations paul durcan six nuns die in convent inferno

Fountain of the Three Fates for their prayer meeting. This is ironic, as in Durcan uses bird imagery in connection with the nuns on a number of mythology it is the Fates who decide a person’s destiny and cut the life occasions: ‘as eerie an aviary’ is both apt and clever for their dormitory thread. It is recorded that the nuns recited the Angus Dei as if it was an residence high up under the roof (as an eagle’s eyrie). In the midst of anthem for aid (‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have the fire, the bird imagery achieves sufficient complexity to suggest their mercy on us’). In fact, what they recite are the words of the centurion in transformation to angels: ‘Fluttering about in our tight, gold bodices, | the Gospel story, which display his extraordinary faith in Jesus. Beating our wings in vain’ and Christ ‘Flew up and down the dormitory’.

The main focus of part II is on religious faith, so we might read the As usual, the sea imagery is nurturing on the nuns’ holiday. Christ is the extraordinary happenings here as quite in keeping with that theme. The ocean. Fire and water coalesce in that metaphor that communicated the narrative technique used is one of the most interesting textual aspects nuns’ complex and paradoxical attitude to death: of the poem. The dramatic monologue flits swiftly across different times and many locations, alternating between realistic scenes and the highly Christ is the fire in whose waves We are doomed but delighted to drown. imagined and varying in atmosphere from humorous and witty to what at times verges on the macabre. We saw how closely the technique Even in this context the sea aspect of the metaphor manages to suggest resembles a cinematic montage, tracing the stream of consciousness links happiness. in one example. You can trace this through other passages too.

The poem also includes a number of startling, unlikely images that strain Another significant textual feature, also quite cinematic, is the visual reality but are effective for their purpose. One such image is the schooner clarity and memorable detail of some of the imagery. There is the image (already discussed) that illustrates just how out-of-the-ordinary the description of the punks in the first section (already discussed); the less nuns are. Others are disturbing, even macabre, such as the images of the exotic but equally memorable ‘lifetime of umbrellas drying out in the fire dragon that she clasps as a lover to her breast. But it does illustrate kitchens’; the ‘fluttering’ and ‘scampering’ of the nuns in their ‘starched that extreme view of death. Another is the birthing image – the nuns ‘all bathing-costumes’ at the seaside; or the ‘small, agèd, emaciated, female giving birth to [their] deaths’, with attendant doctors and midwives ‘In punk’ who was ‘grieving like an alley cat’, an image that resonates both gowns of smoke and gloves of fire’. Whether banal or surreal, we cannot visually and aurally. dispute the range and imaginative force of the images in the poem.

624 new explorations paul durcan sport

Sport We need to be aware that the relationship is described only from the son’s perspective, so we get only one side of it, but from his perspective the A reading of the poem relationship was not a very healthy one. He doesn’t feel that his father had At one level this is a poem about a football match, albeit not an everyday much faith or confidence in his abilities: one, but at a deeper level it is about the relationship between a father and There were not many fields son. In which you had hopes for me But sport was one of them. Sport is a common language for males, with a shared vocabulary about physical prowess, skill, competitiveness and winning. It is a subject that This devastating lack of parental confidence produces increased anxiety men can safely be emotional and openly passionate about. The speaker in the son: can certainly talk the talk, mentioning ‘spectacular saves’, ‘Diving full stretch’, ‘to turn | A certain goal’, ‘Leaping high to tip another … Over the I was fearful I would let down bar’. He describes motivation as: Not only my team but you.

That will to die The desire to win his father’s approval outweighs everything else about That is as essential to sportsmen as to artists. the game:

However, the father doesn’t seem to have much small talk, even about More than anybody it was you sport. His response is the minimal ‘Well played, son’. In what nowadays I wanted to mesmerise would be considered a very formal encounter, he shook hands with his son. The speaker colours the exchange negatively by the comment There is an unhealthy degree of the need for affirmation in evidence here, ‘Sniffing your approval’. However, he does acknowledge that his father probably caused by the lack of affirmation in the first place, so a vicious recognised his achievement: ‘In your eyes I had achieved something at cycle develops. It seems that this is the single moment of praise that he last’. The telling phrase is ‘at last’, suggesting that everything before had remembers getting: been a failure in the father’s eyes.

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Seldom if ever again in your eyes Was I to rise to these heights.

It would appear that the father’s minimalist approach to conversation after the game was a missed opportunity for supportive discussion. But this needs to be considered in the culture of its time, the mid-1960s, when for many in Ireland fatherhood was still primarily about providing home, funding and guidance. Love was expressed in that way rather than in any emotional articulation.

However, it is true that, for many reasons, Paul Durcan did have a poor relationship with his father, which is chronicled in the volume Daddy, Daddy. For example, as a young man he was committed to a mental hospital against his will, which he didn’t see the need for and much resented. Indeed, the image of the mentally ill patients here is quite negative – huge, wild-looking men with ‘gapped teeth, red faces | Oily, frizzy hair, bushy eyebrows’. Or else they were capable of shocking, gratuitous violence, like the alcoholic solicitor who castrated his best friend but had no memory of it. These pen pictures may be verging on caricature and may be deliberately shocking, but they do provide the context and background for this encounter between father and son and go some way towards explaining the relationship.

626 new explorations paul durcan father’s day, 21 june 1992

Father’s Day, 21 June 1992 most power in this situation, as he says ‘I decided not to argue the toss. I kissed her goodbye.’ A reading of the poem Father’s Day, traditionally held in Ireland on the third Sunday in June, Overall, the tone of this section is humorous. It is a piece of well-written celebrates fatherhood, male parenting and the influence of fathers in farce, with a serious point at its core. The comic tension is created by the society. Against this idealistic backdrop, Durcan explores the more time element at first: the waiting taxi, the Cork train and the argument mundane reality of Father’s Day and fatherhood for the speaker in he cannot win. And then there is the huge axe, ‘all four-and-a-half feet of this poem. The introductory picture we get is of a very disorganised, it’, ‘leaning up against the wall behind the settee’. This has been planned harassed man in a frantic last-minute scramble to catch the Dublin– already! She hands him the bare axe to carry on the train. There is no Cork train, ‘Dashing up and down the stairs, searching my pockets’. It attempt to disguise it: ‘not even a token hanky | Tied in a bow round its was in the middle of this chaos that ‘She told me that her sister in Cork head’. This is great visual comedy. wanted a loan of the axe’. The conversation that ensues is a model of the exercise of power. First he looks for clarification of what seems an The tone shifts abruptly in the second section as the speaker indulges unreasonable request: ‘You mean that you want me to bring her down in serious and painful introspection about their relationship. It is not that the axe?’ She replies, appearing diffident, but holding her ground: ‘Yes, there is a particular crisis, just that, as he himself puts it, ‘she does not if you wouldn’t mind, that is –’. He blusters, ‘She could borrow a simple love me | As much as she used to’. He is aware that she will be glad of saw.’ Then she shifts the source of the request to her sister, but it is still the space to herself for two weeks; he thinks she may regard his sexual there, uncompromised: ‘She said she’d like the axe.’ Game over! He is advances as coarse and he is conscious of his unsophisticated eating embarrassed by the spectacle of the waiting taxi: habits:

Two weeks of not having to look up from her plate ‘OK. There is a Blue Cabs Taxi ticking over outside And behold me eating spaghetti with a knife and fork. And the whole world inspecting it, I’ll bring her down the axe.’ He also confronts the real issue, which is the strain of being on their own now that their children have left home and they are in a different The tone of the last line is left to our own reading – an angry bad loser or configuration of family. The sense of emptiness is caught in the long vowels resigned submission? But there is absolutely no doubt about who has the of the plaintive statement: ‘Our daughters are all grown up and gone away.’ 627 new explorations paul durcan father’s day, 21 june 1992

As if he cannot bear to dwell on this, his thoughts switch swiftly back to The swift changes of tone that Durcan manages is one of the most the comic memory of the settee snapping shut on his pregnant wife. interesting technical features of this poem. It is rather like a change of And so the equilibrium is restored and he can put his public, coping face key in a musical score. We saw how this works in the dialogue of the first back on again: ‘But not a bother on her. I nearly died.’ The aspect of section and it is most noticeable in the shift between seriousness and fatherhood shown here is that of an introspective man feeling guilty that humour at the ends of the other sections. The effect is to create a more the romantic sparkle has gone out of their lives and feeling the emptiness complex and rounded picture of the father in the poem. left by their grown-up daughters.

The comic vein is continued in the final section with a scene of squirming embarrassment. Imagine yourself as the passenger sitting opposite this stranger carrying a huge axe who insists on telling you about the intimacies of his relationship and his guilt at the realisation that his wife doesn’t love him as she used to. Then he utters the unintelligible ‘Cúl an tSúdaire’ at you, which you don’t realise is the Irish for Portarlington, the station you are at. Time to leave the carriage! Here we have father as eccentric, perhaps madman, but in reality he is a sad man who feels abandoned:

All the green fields running away from us, All our daughters grown up and gone away.

All in all, despite the comedy, this is a fairly sombre vision of Father’s Day and middle-aged fatherhood. We see a hassled, put-upon man who feels guilty that the romance has gone out of his relationship, talks intimately to strangers on the train and feels lonely and abandoned. But every now and then he manages to fix the joking, coping mask back on his face.

628 new explorations paul durcan the arnolfini marriage

The Arnolfini Marriage in, as seen in the mirror, or a gesture of dismissal. Durcan’s poem is a personal response, incorporating what the painting says to him. It is a A reading of the poem dialogue with the picture. The poem and the painting are connected. It Paul Durcan has always been interested in the arts and many of these would make little sense to read the poem on its own and yet, when read in media have had an influence on the style of his poetry. Two separate the context of the painting, it must stand as a coherent work. volumes of his poetry consist of his poetic responses to paintings: Crazy We are the Arnolfinis. About Women (1991), poems about paintings in the National Gallery of Do not think you may invade Ireland, and Give Me Your Hand (1994), about paintings in the National Our privacy because you may not. Gallery, London. ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ is from this latter volume. This is the tone-setting statement for the entire poem. It exudes Durcan’s view of the connection between poetry and the arts is clearly set superiority, hauteur, even arrogance. They say ‘We are the Arnolfinis’, out in a letter to critic Kathleen McCracken published in the Irish Review presuming this is the only information needed; everyone should know (no. 7, autumn 1989): them. There is a singular decisiveness about the flow of the statement, culminating in that definite refusal, ‘you may not’. Durcan definitely I think I regard it as axiomatic that poetry has to interprets the man’s gesture as ‘talk to the hand’! This sense of superiority be fundamentally cinematic and photographic and painterly as well as musical. I see no ultimate and power is evident right through the poem, even in the stance: ‘We are distinction between the different ‘arts’ and I feel most standing to our portrait’. They have commissioned and are in control of at home in those moments, times, experiences when the portrait and have given specific directions to meet their requirements: several or all of them come together or work together. ‘we have faith in the artist | To do justice to’. One of these requirements is ‘To do justice to our life as a reflection’. A reflection of what? Do This is a painting about which there has been much critical debate and they mean a reflection of the importance, wealth, power, success of the little agreement on – for example, the identity of the sitters; whether this Arnolfini family or clan? The painting itself is a reflection. Perhaps there is a portrait of a marriage or a betrothal or even a memorial portrait of is even a pun on the mirror reflection here. Whatever the nuances, they a deceased wife; whether the woman is pregnant or merely holding up are inherently self-regarding and have a very high opinion of themselves. her gown; about the significance of the bed in the living quarters; and Even the little terrier sniffs ‘The minutiae of our magnitude’ – their whether the man’s hand signal is a gesture of welcome to those coming greatness or importance. They feel superior to most people in their 629 new explorations paul durcan the arnolfini marriage

perfect union, the ‘we’ – ‘Most people are in no position to say “we” ’. The poet’s response is just to cut the attempted dialogue right there. He They presume other people do not have this completeness. They feel employs one of the best-known lines in daily usage from RTÉ radio and unique in their perfection. They even challenge the poet about the quality television of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – ‘We will pause now for the Angelus’. of his life: This introduced a pause in programmes while the Angelus bell was rung, creating a time for private prayer. It signalled a break in transmission of Are you? Who eat alone? Sleep alone? programmes, creating a space for thought. And at dawn cycle to work With an Alsatian shepherd dog tied to your He ends cryptically with: handlebars?

Here you have it: In another of Durcan’s highly imaginative, reality-stretching moments, this The two halves of the coconut. arrogant challenge is flung through time and space and across different media, attempting a dialogue between painting and poet. He is saying ‘over to us’, the readers. The coconut, being spherical, two symmetrical halves, could suggest perfection. Does it refer to the Durcan definitely reads this as a marriage portrait, hence the choice of perfection in the picture or the relationship between picture and poet title for the poem out of the number of possible titles of the painting. (the two different arts) or the encounter between a viewer and a picture? Their new ‘plurality’ is very important to them. They are ‘a man and Perhaps it is appropriate that there are some unanswered questions about a woman saying “we” ’. The other aspects they require to be shown the poem, as there are about the painting. include ‘domesticity’ and ‘barefootedness’. Despite the stated need for privacy, this degree of intimacy is permitted to be seen in a domestic It is true that Durcan produces a unique, personal and thought-provoking setting, without their shoes. This goes some little way towards balancing response to this painting. You could explore the details and features of out the hauteur they show. But they are most insistent that their fertility the painting for yourself in order to understand the selections he made. is recorded. They consider this ‘The most erotic portrait ever made’, You could also research and discuss the details you find interesting and presumably a reference to the pregnancy and also to ‘our bed | As being write your own response to the painting. our most necessary furniture’. This overriding need to be portrayed as fertile, adding another layer to the ‘plurality’, makes nonsense of the privacy demand. The fertility adds to their sense of superiority. 630 new explorations paul durcan rosie joyce

Rosie Joyce ‘A baby girl was born at 3.33 p.m. Weighing 7 and a ½ lbs in Holles Street. Tough work, all well.’ A reading of the poem This lyrical poem is an ode of joy to the birth of the poet’s granddaughter, The account is succinct, factual and in language that has a no nonsense, Rosie Joyce. It is narrative in structure, with the writer vividly recalling almost unemotional tone, in contrasts with the writer’s own excitement. all the details, both the aesthetically beautiful and the banal, of the long The section concludes with the reality of the birth. journey he makes from west to east, from Achill to the maternity hospital in Holles Street, Dublin. The style is casual, like that of a detailed diary Section II begins with the rebirth of the land, the birth of summer, as the record. writer records by name all the flora of the landscape he passes through, a catalogue of natural colour and beauty that reflects his mood. He is The writer’s excitement at the imminent event is palpable in section I. If delighted to make the epic journey: nothing else, the exclamation marks give it away. Nature seems to reflect the event; even the sun seems to be born through the clouds: ‘a hot sun I rode the waters and the roads of Ireland, pushed through the clouds | And you were born!’ Her name is repeated Rosie, to be with you, seashell at my ear! with joy. The energy of the journey and his own excitement is caught in the repetition of phrases: ‘To drive such side-roads, such main roads, such Here is that water and sea image again at a time of great joy and new life. ramps, such roundabouts’. The great event has coloured and rendered even the banalities of country roads worth recording. There is also a In this section also, the birth is placed in the context of family history, the spiritual or religious element to the journey. He refers to the birth as her genetic and psychological genealogy. The current journey recalls for the ‘Incarnation Day’. There is specific mention of Croagh Patrick, so he is writer the many journeys he made in the company of his father: placing this child into a specific spiritual cultural history. He slowed down also, as across the River Shannon The climax of the section comes in a text message, as befits a poem of We crashed, rattled, bounced on a Bailey bridge; modern Ireland: Daddy relishing his role as Moses, Enunciating the name of the Great Divide Between the East and the West!

631 new explorations paul durcan rosie joyce

His father had a view of Ireland as divided east from west. They were They discuss philosopher John Moriarty’s autobiography, a rather unusual crossing the Shannon, as the Israelites led by Moses crossed the Red Sea, way of celebrating the birth. There is an oblique reference to wetting escaping from slavery in Egypt. The writer, however, delights in the great the baby’s head, i.e. having a drink to celebrate the birth: ‘We wet our variety and differences in the country; for him, there is no such thing as a foreheads in John Moriarty’s autobiography’. uniform Ireland. The power of nature always ensures such diversity: The poem concludes with a prayer of thanksgiving to God for Rosie’s There are higher powers than politics descent to earth. This is a poem celebrating all new life – human, natural, And these we call wildflowers or, geologically, people. psychological. It welcomes Rosie into her family, into her place (the roads, rivers, flowers and townlands of Ireland) and into her spiritual The other birth celebrated in this section is the birth of new energy and environment. It is a most comprehensive welcome and a poem of hope for the writer, the lifting of his depression. The birth of Rosie has unclouded joy. made his day, just as another such text of hope gave birth to the term ‘daymaker’ (see the note in the ‘Explorations’ section in the book):

But you saved my life. For three years I had been subsisting in the slums of despair, Unable to distinguish one day from the next.

The return journey, in section III, is less frantic, more sober. In Charlestown, he has time to stop and speak to a farmer he knows who comes from Curry. Here, as elsewhere in Durcan’s poetry, we see the validation and celebration of place as he details the names of townlands and villages and even houses. The meeting begins with a certain shy awkwardness, more unusual for the writer than the exuberance of this poem up to now: ‘He crouches in his car, I waver in the street’. But it is still a joyful meeting: ‘we exchange lullabies of expectancy’.

632 new explorations paul durcan ireland 2002

Ireland 2002

A reading of the poem Throughout his poetry, Durcan looks with a keen eye and sharp critical intellect on the values, myths and inequalities of Irish society. The critic Erik Martiny said of him, ‘the poet conceives of himself as an attentive chronicler of the fluctuating mentalities of his nation’.

In this humorous but perceptive epigram, he is highlighting recent changes in attitude and practice in Irish society. The poem highlights the growing affluence of Celtic Tiger Ireland, when regular holidays abroad were common. But it also points to the cultural and economic link with America, where generations of Irish people have made their homes. No longer considered a foreign land of exile, it is now seen as the fifth province. Affluence and affordable travel have enabled this mind shift.

Durcan is pushing the poetic boundaries here. Social commentary, in casual conversational style, is considered a proper subject for poetry and can provide valuable insights into how we ‘live and move and have our being’.

633 new explorations paul durcan the macbride dynasty

The MacBride Dynasty House to be shown off to ‘great-aunt Maud’, who is introduced snidely as ‘the servant of the Queen’, a reference to the title of her autobiography. A reading of the poem She is introduced also as Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the figure she played in The word ‘dynasty’ refers to a line of hereditary rulers. It has connotations the Yeats/Gregory drama, who is the embodiment of Ireland. Certainly, of power and domination. The suggestion here is that the MacBrides, she is portrayed as an Irish grande dame, if not quite queen. She acts like who were Durcan’s maternal family, thought of themselves as people of royalty, ‘keen as ever to receive admirers’, as it is cynically put, with the consequence and importance. Such families have a tendency to close suggestion that she is open only to admirers: ‘MacLiammóir | Had been ranks and defend their reputations and honour against outsiders. And so kneeling at her bedside reciting Yeats to her’. There is also that formal it is here. approach and grand entrance to the bedroom:

Cousin Séan and his wife Kid led the way up the The popular image of Maud Gonne is that of youthful beauty, feminist, stairs, actress, Irish nationalist revolutionary and inspiration for some of W.B. Séan opening the door and announcing my mother. Yeats’s poems. However, this is a very different portrait of her, an intimate personal view from some members of the MacBride family, in particular Of course the young boy lets the show down; frightened by the look of Paul Durcan’s mother. The relationship was complex, as Maud Gonne, the old woman, he flees. The portrait of her in old age may be realistic but though separated, had not been divorced from Major John MacBride. it is cruel; she is compared to a reptile with claws and lizard eyes: She was Seán MacBride’s mother and so was still part of the dynasty: And Maud leaned forward, sticking out her claws For dynastic reasons we would tolerate Maud, To embrace me, her lizards of eyes darting about But we would always see through her. In the rubble of the ruins of her beautiful face.

This is what the poem is about: seeing through Maud Gonne. This is a tense moment of embarrassment somewhat lessened for the mother because of her lack of respect for Maud, as the writer puts it It is obvious from the opening lines that this visit has all the ingredients for humorously: high drama. His mother is cast as a vengeful goddess ‘Spitting dynastic as well as motherly pride’. The young boy is brought out to Roebuck

634 new explorations paul durcan the macbride dynasty

Mummy was a little but not totally mortified: She had never liked Maud Gonne because of Maud’s Betrayal of her husband, Mummy’s Uncle John

There follows a most benign and flattering portrait of Major John –

Major John, most ordinary of men, most Humorous, courageous of soldiers, The pride of our family

This is in sharp contrast to the portrait of Gonne, so different that it is obvious to the reader that dynastic loyalties are in play here. Each portrait in its different way shows the effects of family bias. Perhaps it is this aspect of family Durcan wishes to draw our critical attention to – the ‘closed ranks’ partiality, the taking of sides, the internal ‘Spitting’. It is interesting that Maud is not the only one displaying an air of superiority. Mummy extends her love only to those she considers worthy:

Maud Gonne was a disloyal wife And, therefore, not worthy of Mummy’s love.

The power play within family is held up to critical view in this poem.

As a portrait of Maud Gonne, it is an antidote to the popular icon view of her. Perhaps Durcan considers her another official state myth that needed to be unmasked.

635 Ordinary Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2015 2015 Contributors: John Fahy, Carole Scully, Bernard Connolly, Marie Dunne, Ann Hyland, Sean Scully and Martin Wallace.

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637 Ordinary Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2016 2016

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639 Ordinary Level Poets prescribed for examination in 2017 2017

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641 Ordinary Level Marge Piercy Will we work together? Poets prescribed for examination in 2018 2018 Penelope Shuttle Zoo Morning David Wheatley Chronicle William Carlos Williams This is just to say… Macdara Woods Fire and Snow and Carnevale Enda Wyley Poems for Breakfast

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643 George Herbert

The Collar He misses the good things in life, the pleasures of good food and wine (‘wine’ and ‘corn’), which have been replaced by anguish and unhappiness (‘sighs’ and ‘tears’). This last year A reading of the poem in particular has been fruitless, lacking in any achievement. The violence carried in the This poem could be read in three sections: lines 1–16, 17–32 and 33–6. The highly sounds of the words ‘blasted’ and ‘wasted’ carry the sense of devastation he feels. emotional first section, in which the poet rages against the religious way of life, is Is the year only lost to me? introduced by that violent dramatic opening action: Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? I struck the board, and cry’d, ‘No more; All wasted? I will abroad!

Symbolic crowns of bay leaves and garlands (wreaths of flowers) figure in classical He imagines the freedom and fullness of the life he could otherwise have. Images of the literature and history and were given for great achievement in politics or sport. The depth wind and road suggest this freedom. The phrase ‘as large as store’ means plentiful. He of his despair here is communicated in the multiple short questioning phrases that sound resents being restricted by religion, a slave to the will of God: ‘Shall I be still in suit?’ The like sobs. This marks the lowest point, or nadir, of the poem. priest feels that he has not achieved much (‘no harvest’). Instead, his life is bleeding away, an image that recalls the Crucifixion: In the next section (lines 17–32), the poet is less emotional as he tries to reason with himself, to convince himself that all is not lost, that he can break free. He tries to reassure Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood himself that there is still richness in life and that he can reach for it:

644 new explorations george herbert the collar

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, The concluding four lines show a dramatic turnaround, the utter collapse And thou hast hands. of his rebellion as he feels the comforting presence of God calling to him as a kind father. He responds and the relationship is restored to what it This will be a double pleasure: to abandon his life of sighs and also to find was before: ‘And I replied, My Lord’. enjoyment. He urges himself to abandon his comfortless life of moral reasoning about the proper way to live (‘cold dispute’). This religious life Themes and issues is imagined as both a cage and a rope, to confine him, to bind him to laws In this religious poem, the author complains about the lack of satisfaction that are just the product of his own insignificant thoughts: or any noticeable achievement in his life as an Anglican priest. The depth of anguish leads him to think about rebelling and attempting to Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee find happiness outside the religious life. Thus, dealing with perceived Good cable, to enforce and draw, lack of freedom and with career frustration is one major issue. This is And be thy law a very personal poem which could be read as spiritual autobiography. Given Herbert’s earlier ambitions for a glittering career at court or in the But a rope of sands is easily broken, as he tries to convince himself that he administration of the country, he must have found life as a priest difficult. can easily break free. He recovers a strong sense of purpose for this: ‘I will abroad’. No longer will he allow himself to be made fearful by death and Herbert writes here from an orthodox religious position, from the the prospect of God’s judgement: standpoint of one who has belief and faith. Yet he does not turn out pious Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears. religious platitudes. Instead, with total honesty he lets us intimately share the real anguish of his soul. A private religious poem, this was not written Furthermore, he now expresses a degree of contempt for anyone who for purposes of preaching. The sheer vehemence of his feelings testifies does not attempt to break free. Such a person deserves to be a servant: to his honesty and the range and diversity of those feelings reveal the real confusion of his state of mind. He can be rebellious and defiant (‘I struck He that forbears the board’), self-pitying (‘No flowers, no garlands gay’), adventurous (‘I To suit and serve his need, will abroad’, ‘My lines and life are free’) and finally subservient and humble Deserves his load. (‘And replied, My Lord’).

645 new explorations george herbert the collar

This poem provides a glimpse into Herbert’s spiritual journey, his Language and imagery development as he responds to doubts, setbacks and challenges. Indeed, In contrast to a great many metaphysical poems, the language Herbert the image of journey is central to the entire poem (‘free as the road’). uses is quite ordinary, language which would have been in everyday use at the time. There is a strand of priestly imagery: the collar, which could be a The views of God in the poem are the conventional ones of father and clerical collar or a restraining collar that a prisoner might have to wear; the lord. The main contrast in the poem positions the restless, ranting human board, which could be a table or the altar; the bread (‘corn’) and wine of being against the calm kindness of God. The relationship between the the Eucharist; and the thorns and blood of the Crucifixion. This imagery, individual and God is a central issue in the poem – a relationship that goes which is natural to the theme, is subtle, often hinted at rather than boldly through periods of restlessness, frustration, even rebellion and concludes presented, and capable of carrying more than one level of meaning. as calm acceptance. The other strand of imagery is from everyday life experience: the windy Dramatic qualities road of the traveller, fruit and flowers, blight, and ropes and cables. This The poem is structured as a dramatic dialogue as the poet argues with last group carries the most interesting image of the poem – the rope himself about his situation. The theme is inherently dramatic – the conflict of sands. This clever, imaginative image, or conceit, carries a range of between his own will and the will of God. The opening is dramatic in associations and ideas, some contradictory. The rope, which is not really tone and gesture, as is the closure, in a different way. The varieties of a rope capable of tying up anything, might suggest that the link between tone, from angry to subservient, contribute to the dramatic effect, as the individual and God is easily broken. This is heavily ironic in light of does the endless questioning. The very structure of the poem suggests Herbert’s rant against the confinement of religion. It makes a serious point drama. There are seven or eight different line lengths and at least as about faith and the relationship between the individual and God, but it is many different rhyme patterns. All of this speaks of confusion. Thus, the also witty, amusing and contradictory and very much in the metaphysical structure of the poem deliberately embodies the dramatic confusions in tradition of clever use of language. the poet’s mind. This is known as a hieroglyph – when the structure of the poem reflects the meaning and ideas.

646 John Milton

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent Imagery Light is used in the poem to represent the faculty of sight, ‘day-labour’ means the work A reading of the poem potential of a sighted person and ‘light deny’d’ refers to the condition of blindness. In the octet of this sonnet, Milton reflects on his blindness and how his disability affects Financial terminology is used to illustrate the Parable of the Talents. Milton speaks of his his performance of what God expects of him. Milton opens by describing his blindness in light being ‘spent’ and a ‘Talent ... Lodg’d with me ... and present | My true account’. The terms of light and money: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’. He uses ‘Talent’ in the power and majesty of God is suggested by ‘his State | Is Kingly’. This omnipotent figure dual sense of a unit of money (referring to the Parable of the Talents) and as a faculty does not require ‘man’s work’; acceptance of his will is described as ‘his milde yoak’. or sense. In essence, the octet asks, ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d’ – does God expect the same productivity from him as would be expected from a fully sighted person?

In the sextet, ‘Patience’ answers ‘That murmur’ of complaint: ‘God doth not need | Either man’s work or his own gifts’. Acceptance of God’s will is seen as the path to salvation: ‘who best | Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best’. The majestic creator – ‘his State | Is Kingly’ – has a multitude of servants who are constantly in motion to do his bidding: ‘Thousands at his bidding speed … without rest’. Milton’s consolation is stated in the final line: ‘They also serve who only stand and waite’. Christian resignation in the face of the will of God helps Milton to deal with his scrupulous conscience.

647 Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias The syntax is quite involved here and makes understanding less immediate. In line 8, ‘hand’ refers to the sculptor’s hand and ‘the heart that fed’ refers to the king’s heart, A reading of the poem which gave life and energy to all this in the first place. Shelley uses this technique of ‘Ozymandias’ explores a common theme of Romantic poetry: the passing of all human synecdoche (where a part stands for the whole) to reinforce the sculptor’s excellence at creations, the vanity of the works of humankind and thus the pointlessness of life. recording the king’s inner emotions. Hand captures heart. The pedestal also survives, Perhaps it is also sneering at the arrogance of rulers – a favourite theme of Shelley’s. ironically still proclaiming its message of arrogant superiority (‘Look on my works, ye There is a hint here too of the relative superiority of art over life (in that it lasts slightly Mighty, and despair!’). longer). In fact, it is mainly by the use of irony right through the poem that Shelley reinforces his Unusually for a sonnet, this poem is structured as a narrative. It tells the story of a traveller theme of the vanity of human endeavour. For example, the once great civilisation is now who returned from visiting the remains of an ancient civilisation and described what he a desert and even its precise name is no longer used (‘an antique land’). The haughty saw. The place has been reconquered by the desert and all that remains as an indication superiority of the king, while still visible in the sculpture, is nevertheless shattered (‘Half of a once-great power are the ruins of an enormous statue – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs sunk, a shattered visage’). The fact that all that remains of a civilisation renowned for of stone’ and some pieces of its shattered face. Yet the shattered head still preserves the its architecture and art is this grotesque piece of statuary (‘Two vast and trunkless legs’) king’s features, particularly the expression of arrogance and of unchallengeable authority adds a further twist to the irony. It is now disparagingly referred to as ‘that colossal wreck’. (‘frown, | And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’). This shows the perceptiveness The inscription on the pedestal is also deeply ironic, as time has made the king’s boast a of the sculptor, who managed to capture the king’s emotions or passions in the stone (‘its hollow one. sculptor well those passions read | Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things’).

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The final statement, through sound and image, reinforces the theme: we see that the works of humans are merely a disfiguring, decaying wreck spoiling the serene emptiness of the natural landscape. The insignificance of human civilisation when compared with the vastness of time is caught in that beautiful image of rolling desert sands stretching as far as the eye can see and back through history. The long vowel sounds reinforce this sense of the emptiness of time: decay, boundless, bare, lone, far away.

As a sonnet This poem has been highly praised by critics, who suggest that it displays the best features of sonnet form. Its simplicity is often remarked on. It has a single idea and one simple point to make. The language is simple yet effective (Think of the ‘sneer of cold command’). The only change from octave to sestet is a deepening of the tone of irony with the reference to the king’s foolish boast. The epigrammatical summary in the final lines reinforces the theme visually and definitively, as we expect from a good final couplet.

The sonnet is structured as a narrative, so the run-on lines are entirely appropriate, with the first long sentence holding the atmosphere of the story. Subsequently, the dramatic effect of the single short sentence is all the greater: ‘Nothing beside remains.’ We hardly notice that the rhyming scheme is slightly irregular, with some off-rhymes (stone – frown, appear – despair) and an unusual rhyming scheme.

649 William Carlos Williams

This Is Just to Say Finally, the third stanza begins with a request for forgiveness, ‘Forgive me’, but then A reading of the poem rather surprisingly veers into a vivid description of how ‘delicious’ the plums were, This poem has an accessibility about it that encourages us to engage with it. Before we expressed in a more emotional tone of voice. Perhaps Williams is supporting his plea for even read it, the way that it looks on the page persuades us to come closer. It presents forgiveness by making it clear that the plums were so wonderfully ‘delicious’, ‘sweet’ and a non-threatening appearance constructed from short words, lines and stanzas. In many ‘cold’ that it is quite understandable that he simply could not resist them. On the other ways, this poem is as much about space as words. It is as if William Carlos Williams has hand, he could feel that the fact that he enjoyed the plums so much would please the deliberately chosen to include a lot of space in this poem so that we, as readers, can use it person who had plans for the plums because that person wants to see him happy. Or to think about the things that we might easily miss, the ‘real things’ of everyday life. perhaps Williams is just teasing this person in the hope that a bit of humour might speed up the process of forgiveness. As we draw closer we read the title of the poem, ‘This Is Just to Say’. This is a title that is bound to stimulate our curiosity so that we want to read on into the poem to find The structure of the poem out what is being said. The first stanza comes to the point quickly, as it provides a clear As a young poet, Williams was absolutely determined to develop a way of writing poetry explanation of the situation in a very businesslike tone: ‘I have eaten | the plums | that that would reflect the fact that he ‘was an American kid’. This meant that he rejected were in | the icebox’. many of the traditional features of poetry that had been developed by poets working in England. Above all, he wanted to ‘try to say it straight, whatever is to be said’. He did In the second stanza, the businesslike tone is tinged with guilt as there is an admission not write in rhyme because ‘I found I couldn’t say what I had to say in Rhyme. It got in that this was the wrong thing to do because the plums had been bought for a purpose: my way.’ He stopped putting a capital letter at the beginning of every line because he ‘and which | you were probably | saving | for breakfast’. ‘thought it pretentious to begin every line with a capital letter’. He explained his rejection 650 new explorations william carlos williams this is just to say

of the long line of poetry in favour of a much shorter one by commenting, ‘I didn’t go in for long lines of poetry because of my nervous nature.’ This ‘nervous nature’ is also evident in his lack of punctuation in this poem. This produces a kind of breathlessness in the pace of reading that, in the case of this poem, suggests a feeling of panic about the reaction that his eating of the plums will provoke.

651 Francis Ledwidge

Lament for Thomas MacDonagh a way, in British soil and not in the freedom and space of the Irish landscape suggested by the phrase ‘the wild sky’. A reading of the poem In spite of the short length of this poem, it successfully creates an overwhelming mood The second stanza presents us with images that are heard, felt and seen intensely, of sadness in stanzas 1 and 2 (and, unexpectedly, hope in stanza 3. The cause of the again to emphasise what MacDonagh can no longer experience because of his death. sadness is the death of Thomas MacDonagh, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter MacDonagh will not hear or feel what it is like when ‘loud March blows | Thro’ slanting Rising. Although Francis Ledwidge uses simple language and short lines, the images that snows’. He will not see ‘the golden cup’ of the daffodil dance like a ‘flame’ in the wind. he creates are vivid (intense and graphic) and easy to picture because they appeal to the Ledwidge adds to the mood of sadness by using the word ‘upset’ in line 8. On the one senses of hearing, touch and sight. hand, ‘upset’ could refer to the daffodils being blown about by the wind; on the other, it could suggest the emotional reaction of being upset by a death. The fact that this poem is about the death of Thomas MacDonagh creates a mood of sadness in stanzas 1 and 2. Hearing is said to be the last sense to fail just before death, so The mood changes in the final stanza as Ledwidge describes the image of a ‘Dark Cow’ it is interesting that in the first stanza, Ledwidge describes the sounds that MacDonagh moving from poor grazing land to ‘pleasant meads’. Once more, sound makes this image can no longer hear because he is dead: the ‘bittern’ and the ‘rain’. Through these images, come alive as the cow’s pleasure, because of her better conditions, is expressed in her Ledwidge adds to the mood of sadness because the cry of the bittern is a booming one, ‘low at morn’. But the full meaning of these lines only becomes clear when we know a rather like the slow drum beat that was once played at funerals, and the rain is ‘wailing’ little more about the historical facts behind them. In the 18th century, the ‘Dark Cow’ was like the keeners who, long ago, wailed at Irish funerals. It is also sad when Ledwidge refers a secret name used for Ireland so that people could talk about their country without the to ‘the wild sky’ in line 2, as MacDonagh was buried in a British army cemetery and so, in fear of being arrested. Consequently, the ‘Dark Cow’ in the ‘pastures poor’ becomes an

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image that represents Ireland suffering under British rule. The movement There is a genuine feeling of sorrow expressed by Ledwidge in lines of the cow to ‘pleasant meads’ and her lowing represents the hope that 1–8 that MacDonagh will no longer be able to experience the natural Ireland will one day be free and independent. Thus, the first hope that beauty of the Irish countryside. Finally, there is a gentle atmosphere of creates a mood of hope in the final stanza is the hope that Ireland will be thoughtfulness in the poem as Ledwidge thinks about what death means free. The second hope that also helps to create this mood is Ledwidge’s and the possibility that although he is dead, Thomas MacDonagh might hope that MacDonagh will somehow know when Ireland does achieve somehow know when Ireland gains her freedom. freedom, represented in the line ‘Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn’. This suggests that Ledwidge believes that once MacDonagh knows that Rhyme, assonance and alliteration Ireland is finally free, he will also know that his death in 1916 was not in Ledwidge shows considerable awareness of the sounds of the words that vain, and so he can rest easily. he uses, and as a result he creates a poem where the sounds of his words are almost as important as their meanings. The elegy ‘Lament for Thomas MacDonagh’ is an elegy, that is, a poem that is His use of rhyme is perfectly suited to a poem that is an elegy. In each written to lament, or express sorrow about, the death of someone. In this of his four-line stanzas, it is only the last words in the second and fourth case, the poem laments the death of Thomas MacDonagh, executed for lines that rhyme. This has the effect of slowing down the pace (speed) of his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. the reading so that it reflects the poem’s mood of nostalgia, sorrow and thoughtfulness. Try reading the poem aloud and you will hear this. The mood (feelings and atmosphere) created in an elegy is usually one of nostalgia (regretfully remembering earlier times), sorrow and Stanza 2 is an excellent example of the ways in which Ledwidge harnesses thoughtfulness. Ledwidge’s poem has all three of these. The nostalgia the sounds of his words to increase the impact of their meanings through is evident in line 1: ‘He shall not hear the bittern cry’. One interpretation his use of assonance and alliteration: of this line is that it is a reference to the fact that MacDonagh can no longer hear the bird because he is dead. However, this line could also be Nor shall he know when loud March blows seen as a reference to MacDonagh’s translation of an Irish poem about Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill, Blowing to flame the golden cup a bittern. Perhaps Ledwidge is thinking back to the times when he and Of many an upset daffodil. Thomas MacDonagh met as fellow poets in the Dublin literary scene.

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Assonance is where a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) sound is repeated in a line, or lines, of poetry. If we look at lines 7–8 in the stanza quoted above, it is clear from the highlighting that the vowels o, a and u are repeated in these lines. However, they are all mixed up, with an o sound being followed by an a and a followed by a u sound. Because of this, these sounds reflect the meaning of these lines. The poet describes daffodils being unsettled and disrupted by the wind, and the sounds of the words are similarly unsettled and disrupted.

Alliteration is where the same letter or sound at the beginning of words is repeated. Looking at line 6 above, there is alliteration with the letter s in ‘slanting’ and s in ‘snows’ (marked in italics). Again, this sound reflects the meaning of these words: the poet is describing cold snow falling at an oblique angle, and the s sounds convey the whispering sound of drifting snow and the stinging sensation as it hits the faces of those who are out in it.

654 Patrick Kavanagh

Shancoduff importantly, they will still be there after the people who sneer at them are gone. He also personifies them. They are given a personality, like a lover would have. The hills can A reading of the poem ‘look’, they are ‘Incurious’, they are ‘happy’, they ‘hoard’. According to the critic Antoinette Quinn, ‘Shancoduff is a north-facing hill farm depicted at its wintry worst, frostbound, starved of grass, swept by sleety winds.’ Yet this is a love Kavanagh relishes their drabness. Anything that might be seen as something negative poem to it. Kavanagh had a love–hate relationship with the countryside of his youth. can be construed into a positive: for example, the fact that the hills are so incurious or One of his most famous poems is ‘Stony Grey Soil’. In that poem, the poet accused the inactive that they can’t even be bothered to look at the sun. This is seen as a good thing area where he was reared of burgling ‘his bank of youth’. He describes the area as being when Kavanagh compares it with the fate of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt one that is lifeless and soulless and he questions how he managed to survive in a place for looking back as she left Sodom and Gomorrah. where even plant life struggled to maintain an existence. Yet in this poem his attitude is different; he is more interested in finding the good in his ‘black hills’. He turns any notion Kavanagh puts a lot of emphasis on the local place names. He lists them with pride: of something negative into something positive. He transforms the faults of Shancoduff in Glassdrummond, Rocksavage, Featherna Bush; these are as important as the Alps. The the same way that a lover transforms his partner’s faults into something to be loved. names themselves have mythic qualities. They sound tough and treacherous. They have a resonance of something from an action movie, in which a hero stands proud above the The immediate question that must be asked is: Why would anybody write a love poem hills. They all have a grandness granted to them by being multisyllabic. Kavanagh’s own to Shancoduff? The answer must be because the hills are his. He claims ownership four importance in the poem is also highlighted here as the person who has: times. He calls them ‘my black hills’ twice in the first verse, and then ‘My hills’ and ‘my … climbed the Matterhorn Alps’ in the second. Possession of this land is obviously very important to Kavanagh. With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves After all, they are ‘eternal’. Shancoduff will last long after he has gone and, more 655 new explorations patrick kavanagh shancoduff

This act itself seems heroic, as if he had climbed the most dangerous mountain face in the world – whereas all he has done is walk up a hill to feed the cows. This use of hyperbole shows the love that Kavanagh has for this place. The rebellious nature of the hills is also shown as they refuse to conform to the usual structures of nature. They are oblivious to the changes in the seasons and the weather. Their immortality is stressed by the fact that they are unchanged by the travails of time. Springtime cannot catch up with them, as his

… hills hoard the bright shillings of March While the sun searches in every pocket.

The poem turns at this point; the poet has come to the realisation, albeit after being told, that his mountains are not the glorious thing of beauty that he may have thought they were. The farmers who are in a more sheltered, wealthier place sneer at him. Even though his hills are personified with their ‘rushy beards’, nobody else declares them worth looking after. When he is acknowledged as a poet, it is almost done as a form of derision. A poet may be someone who is seen as poor.

Kavanagh departs with a rhetorical question that is forced on him by the comments of the other men. This affects him deeply, just as if his wife or lover were to be described as ugly or disgusting. He asks himself, ‘is my heart not badly shaken?’ The love that he felt for the hills is broken by the piece of reality forced on him.

656 W.H. Auden

Funeral Blues A reading of the poem This poem can be read either as an elegy or as a satire. If we read it as an elegy we tend Background to concentrate on the two final stanzas and focus on the depth of feeling, that intense It is sometimes difficult to trace the origins of certain Auden poems because he had sense of loss that finds expression in the outpouring of unbridled grief: the habit of revising his material frequently, incorporating some poems in longer works and generally rewriting. A version of ‘Stop All the Clocks’ (the first two verses as here, He was my North, my South, my East and West … The stars are not wanted now: put out every one with two others) first appeared in the drama Auden wrote and produced jointly with Christopher Isherwood in 1936, The Ascent of F6. In this satirical fable about politics and If we read it as an elegy, these exaggerated sentiments are an attempt to communicate leadership, the song is a spoof of a dirge for a dead political leader. It is a tongue-in- the depth of pain and the fearful grief felt by the speaker. cheek lament, making fun of the gullibility of the public, who insist on making heroes of flawed human beings. If we read it as a satire, we take our cue from the first two stanzas in particular and view the poem as a satirical treatment of public mourning, as a lament with exaggerated The present version appeared in the collection Another Time (1940) and was entitled sentiments and imagery that succeeds in ridiculing the practice of the public funeral and ‘Funeral Blues’, one of ‘Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Heidi Anderson’. At the time of is critical of the outpouring of popular grief for a public figure. composition Heidi Anderson was engaged to Auden’s friend and collaborator, the Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The music for these was composed by Benjamin Britten. Style On first reading this poem, one is struck by the ludicrous imagery and the wildly exaggerated emotions. The reader may not be sure whether this is comic or tragic,

657 new explorations w.h. auden funeral blues

but if we consider the poem’s origins as a blues song it may help our understanding. The critic John Fuller sees the poem as ‘a good pastiche The satire of the stoical lament and flamboyant imagery of the traditional blues lyric’. The satirical effect is created through exaggeration. The realistic sounds, In other words, the style is a mixture of features from the lament and the silences and colours of a funeral are evoked in the first two stanzas: blues lyric, and Auden has exaggerated these. We find an overstatement ‘Stop all the clocks’, ‘Silence the pianos’, ‘muffled drum’, ‘aeroplanes ... of the usual blues sentiment in lamenting a dead lover. This exaggerated moaning’, ‘crêpe bows’, ‘black cotton gloves’. The long o and u sounds feeling is carried in the imagery, which varies from the stately and help create the atmosphere of mourning: ‘phone’, ‘bone’, ‘drum’, solemn– ‘come’. But it all goes over the top into melodrama through the use of extremes: ‘Prevent the dog from barking’ and ‘Let aeroplanes circle Silence the pianos and with muffled drum moaning overhead | Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead’. Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. The flamboyant American advertising culture is quite inappropriate for conveying the announcement of a death; this bad taste heightens the – to the comic ‘Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public sense of satire. The somewhat hysterical tone of the opening (‘Stop all the doves’. clocks, cut off the telephone’) adds to the melodrama, as do the extremes of feeling in: We also find the blues style in the use of clichés: Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. He was my North, my South, my East and West, For nothing now can ever come to any good. My working week and my Sunday rest But do you think there might be a hint of real grief and sorrow behind Banal and much-used metaphors such as these help convey the notion this melodramatic exaggeration? Consider, for instance, the third stanza. that these feelings are felt by everybody, by ordinary people. They foster Could line 9 be read as meaning ‘he was the whole world to me’, line 10 the idea that this grief is universal. Blues rhythms are also suggested in as ‘he was always in my thoughts, both at work and leisure’ and line 11 as the metre. We get these long, rolling sentences, for example in the third ‘he was at the centre of all my moods, happy or depressed’ (‘noon’ or stanza, and then the division of some lines into two introduces a counter- ‘midnight’)? It might be useful to list (in your own words) the speaker’s rhythm and a regular beat: ‘I thought that love would last for ever: I was feelings for the dead person, then examine the final stanza in some wrong’. detail. Why do you think he chooses the references he does? Why the 658 new explorations w.h. auden funeral blues

sun, moon and stars? Why does he feel he will no longer need the ocean or the wood? Could these have been their favourite places? Do you find that the two final stanzas prompt you to consider that this poem communicates genuine feeling and depth of emotion?

659 William Stafford

Traveling through the Dark poem progresses. Clearly, ‘Traveling through the dark’ can be simply that: a reference to the fact that the poet was driving along the Wilson River road at night. Certainly, the Background first stanza reinforces this interpretation by remaining firmly fixed in a very real situation. It is interesting to note that this poem was rejected by some 20 magazines before He finds a recently run-over deer lying at ‘the edge’ of the road. It would seem that this Stafford finally succeeded in having it published. However, it has since proved to be one is a fairly common discovery, as there is no tone of shock or horror in his voice in lines of his most popular pieces. 1–2. Instead, in a very cool and balanced manner in lines 3–4, he decides to take the usual option and ‘roll’ the animal ‘into the canyon’ in order to prevent a further accident being In his biography of his father, William Stafford’s son notes that his father had a favourite caused by another driver attempting ‘to swerve’ to miss the dead deer. method for opening a poem: ‘as he often did, he started … with recent news from his own life before coming to deeper thoughts’. Indeed, William Stafford acknowledged that In the second stanza, he relates how he went to the back of the car and looked at the he had once come upon a dead deer. It is the way in which Stafford manages to blend his deer. There is an added feeling of intensity created by the image of the surrounding own life experience and thoughtful poetic expression about life that makes this poem a blackness of the night punctured by the red-brown body lit up in the ‘glow of the tail- particularly successful piece of writing. light’. There is something a little disturbing in the speaker’s initial description of the body as ‘the heap’. Although quickly followed by ‘a doe’, his recognition of the body as having A reading of the poem once been a living, breathing creature is brief, as he again returns to a rather impersonal Stafford begins his poem by repeating the title again in the opening line: ‘Traveling tone with the phrase ‘a recent killing’. His noting of how the doe was ‘stiffened’ and through the dark’. This repetition is deliberate and highlights the importance of the ‘almost cold’ is again suggestive of a person who has previously met with the bodies of phrase and alerts the reader to the changes in the meanings that are attached to it as the dead animals. However, as we read on, this familiarity begins to border on callousness.

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The impersonal tone in line 6 changes into rough action in line 8 as he The image is suggestive of a giant lazy cat with half-closed eyes, ‘lowered comments ‘I dragged her off’. His observation that ‘she was large in the parking lights’, its body gently vibrated by purrs of contentment and belly’ indicates that he is rather irritated by the size of the creature that he satisfaction. Indeed, this car seems to possess a certainty that the poet has to deal with. lacks because its ‘parking lights’ are ‘aimed ahead’: it knows what direction to take. Once again, in line 15, the colour red appears in the darkness as Suddenly, the third stanza presents us with a shift in his reaction to the the ‘exhaust’ turns a glowing, warm, vibrant red. Whereas in the second situation. Up until now, the scene has largely been described using the stanza the doe alone was highlighted, here it is the poet who is lit up. But sense of sight. The sense of touch had been introduced in line 8, but that he is no longer alone. Now he stands alongside the car and the doe in ‘our was an impersonal, almost ‘unfeeling’ kind of touch. Here, he suddenly group’. This shared community of three is surrounded by a sea of silence. notes details about ‘the heap’: it is female once again as he finds his He suddenly loses his objectivity as he allows himself to indulge in a ‘fingers touchingher side’, a side that is ‘warm’. There is a sense that this moment of pathetic fallacy where he imagines the non-human ‘wilderness’ touch is a lingering contact. In a surprising moment of empathy, given his as having the human urge to ‘listen’. previously practical approach, he pictures the source of this warmth: ‘her fawn’ lying within her. He momentarily seems to identify with the fawn The final two lines of the poem are significant, not least because they as it becomes ‘alive’ to him. But then it is as if his moment of empathy are only two lines. Previously, Stafford has used quatrains (groups of begins to dissolve into a confusion of meanings attached to the word ‘still’. four lines). There is something jagged about lines 17–18, as if he is trying Does he mean ‘still’ as in ‘not moving’ or ‘quiet’ or ‘even now’? Whatever to shake himself out of this moment of hesitation. Line 17 is broken the interpretation, he acknowledges that the fawn will ‘never … be born’. by dashes as he sees himself take on an almost prophet-like role as he And yet, he cannot recover his earlier brisk practicality. He admits that his acts for all human beings: ‘I thought hard for us all’. He seems to be actions stopped as he ‘hesitated’. excusing his hesitation with his declaration that it is his ‘only swerving’. The suddenness of line 18 is deliberate on Stafford’s part. His hesitation Once again, in the fourth stanza the lights of the car serve to heighten vanishes into practical activity; his lingering contact with the doe reverts the intensity of the moment in the overwhelming darkness. As he hovers to the ‘unfeeling’ touch of line 8. The doe may still be ‘her’ but she is in this moment of hesitation, his eyes follow the ‘parking lights’ of his car nevertheless pushed ‘over the edge into the river’. ‘aimed ahead’. Up until this point there has been no mention of sound in the poem, but in this moment he is struck by the sound of his car’s engine.

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It is in the final two lines that we begin to understand another, symbolic level of meaning to the phrase ‘traveling through the dark’. Is Stafford suggesting that human life is much like this situation? Do we, too, spend most of our lives surrounded by a blackness that hinders our attempts to move along the road of life? Is it that, on occasions, there are glimpses of possibilities of other choices or decisions but we are often trapped in hesitation? And finally, is it possible that these moments of hesitation can suddenly give way to a certainty and decisiveness that enable us to make that choice, commit to a decision and move ‘ahead’?

662 Edwin Morgan

Strawberries the promise of this moment. The tension builds with each mouthful until the plates are empty and ‘laid on the stone’. The image of the ‘two forks crossed’ is reflected in A reading of the poem the poet’s moving towards his companion: ‘and I bent towards you’. The sweetness of Morgan begins his poem by focusing on the strawberries that were eaten by the couple the strawberries dipped in sugar becomes the sweetness of his companion’s presence, on this remembered afternoon. He regards the strawberries as special: ‘There were never and both merge in the taste of his lover’s lips. The hot sunlight that shined on the strawberries | like the ones we had | that sultry afternoon’, just as ‘that sultry afternoon’ ‘strawberries glistening’ now shines on the couple in their sensual ‘forgetfulness’ as they was special. create a ‘heat intense’. The remembered moment is so intense for Morgan that it comes out of the past and into the present as he urges his lover to ‘lean back again let me love His description of the two people is one of intimacy and closeness. They sit on a step you’. ‘facing each other’, knees interlocked. There is a feeling of commitment and belonging in the phrase ‘your knees held in mine’. The eating of the strawberries reinforces this sense The poem closes on the spectacular images of ‘summer lightning’ flashing ‘on the of physical intimacy. The actions of the couple mirror each other: ‘we dipped them in Kilpatrick hills’ and a rainstorm cleaning the forgotten plates. These could be seen as sugar’. They look not at the strawberries as they eat, but at each other. representing the intensity of the couple’s loving. However, there is an undercurrent of destruction and danger about the ‘lightning’. Could Morgan be suggesting that although The sensuality of the strawberries, evident in such phrases as ‘strawberries glistening’ and this sensual, intense love shared by the couple was incredibly special, it also carried ‘we dipped them in sugar’, captures the simmering sensuality that crackles between the danger with it because it made the lovers emotionally vulnerable to each other? Does the lovers. It becomes clear that the eating of the strawberries is, in reality, an introduction storm that washed the plates represent the ending of their love? to another type of sensual intimacy that the couple anticipates sharing. They eat the strawberries ‘not hurrying’, drawing out this anticipation, savouring the expectation and 663 new explorations edwin morgan strawberries

Theme Morgan writes about the theme of love in an intensely sensual and physical way. He uses the eating of the strawberries to suggest a sense of anticipation and close intimacy. Similarly, the heat of the sun indicates the intensity of their relationship. However, he seems to sound a cautionary note about such love with the images of the lightning and the storm.

Structure Interestingly, this poem is written as one unpunctuated piece. Morgan tries to represent, on the page, the continuous movement of his memories of ‘that sultry afternoon’. His words and phrases glide smoothly from one image to another, capturing the way in which remembered thoughts of an incident flow, without full stops or commas.

Morgan’s use of the past and present tenses cleverly communicates the way in which past memories can become so vivid that they take over the present moment. The past tense, used for eating the strawberries, suddenly becomes the present as he holds his lover and says ‘lean back again let me love you’ and urges that they surrender to ‘forgetfulness’.

664 Howard Nemerov

The Vacuum mention of ‘dead’ in this phrase echoes the image of death that was used to describe the bag of the vacuum cleaner in line 3: ‘Its bag limp as a stopped lung’. A reading of the poem The title of this poem, ‘The Vacuum’, is rather surprising, as it is an unexpected object In stanza 2 the link between the vacuum cleaner and death is developed further. The to appear in a poem. However, although the language of this poem is straightforward man admits that he has been living with untidiness ‘long enough’ and that he really and conversational, Howard Nemerov uses the vacuum cleaner to vividly convey the should use the vacuum cleaner to clean up. However, his tone (the emotion in his voice) devastating sadness felt by a man as a result of the death of his wife. becomes more intense as he explains that as far as he is concerned the vacuum cleaner swallowed his wife’s ‘soul’ when she died. Because of this, he cannot bear to see the Stanza 1 opens with the line ‘The house is so quiet now’, and at first this seems to refer vacuum cleaner working, since he imagines it as a monster with a ‘belly’ that brings death to the fact that the vacuum cleaner is not being used. As the poem goes on, it becomes by ‘eating’ up everything. The intensity of his emotions becomes so unbearable that he clear that although the ‘quiet’ does refer to the unused vacuum cleaner, it also suggests begins ‘to howl’. the loneliness that the man feels because his wife is dead. The vacuum cleaner is described using personification (giving human feelings and characteristics to something Line 11 of the final stanza continues on from line 10 in stanza 2, as the poet explains that that is not human). The ‘vacuum cleaner sulks’, the bag that collects the dust is described he is howling because he feels that ‘there is old filth everywhere’. This image of ‘old filth’ as a ‘lung’ and the head that sucks up the dust is a ‘mouth’. This not only suggests that could refer to the dirt and dust around his house or it could be a reference to the way the man is lonely and does not see many people, but it also conveys the man’s dislike of in which all bodies turn to dust when they are dead. If it refers to the dirt and dust, then the vacuum cleaner. He imagines the vacuum cleaner ‘Grinning’ nastily at him because his description of his wife crawling into places in order to clean could be interpreted as of his untidiness and the fact that he is no longer young, ‘my dog-dead youth’. The the man feeling frustrated that his wife wasted her life cleaning when there will always be

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‘old filth everywhere’. If it refers to bodies turning to dust, then it could be sobbing effect is further strengthened. Try reading the two lines again interpreted as the man feeling sad that his wife, who had been so diligent with a slight pause at the commas and you will hear this effect. In this way, about keeping her home clean, has now become dust, the very thing that we not only read the meaning of the phrase ‘biting at air’, but we also have she tried to clean away. Both of these interpretations can be linked to the the physical experience of it. man’s realisation in line 13: ‘I know now how life is cheap as dirt’. He feels that life, and cleaning, are both pointless because everyone is going to Using alliteration and punctuation in this way enables the poet to convey end up as ‘dirt’. The tone of the final two lines of the poem is not one that the meaning of his poem as vividly as possible. Rather than just reading suggests his acceptance of this fact. Instead, the tone and the image of a poem and translating the words into pictures in our heads, we have an the ‘angry heart’ suggest feelings of agonising loss and angry suffering. actual physical experience of it.

Alliteration and punctuation

And still the hungry, angry heart Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

The actual sounds of the words that a poet uses can help to convey the meaning of the words. Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words. The final two lines of this poem (lines 14–15) are an excellent example of how alliteration can help to convey the meanings of words. Nemerov repeats the letter h and this gives the two lines a gasping sound. Read the two lines aloud and you will hear it. The meaning of these lines concerns the man’s utter devastation at the loss of his wife. The gasping sound reinforces this meaning by suggesting that he is sobbing.

The poet’s use of punctuation acts in a similar way. By breaking up lines 14–15 with commas so that they become three short phrases, this gasping, 666 Richard Wilbur

A Summer Morning a moment of whole-hearted appreciation of his environment. And who could not appreciate a garden where the ‘beds mosaic with the dew’? In this effective and unusual A reading of the poem use of the word ‘mosaic’, Wilbur stunningly conveys the glittering droplets of the early The opening lines of this poem are deceptive in that they seem to suggest that this piece morning dew resting on the leaves and blossoms of the plants. could well be about the ‘young employers’. However, ‘having got in late’ and ‘scraped the right front fender on the gate’, they disappear to a rather distant upstairs. Their The gardener, like the cook, is employed by the ‘young employers’ in what appears to interaction with the house is definitely short and sharp in that their brief presence leads be a rather distant relationship. Neither the cook nor the gardener thinks of the ‘young to the gate being damaged. Indeed, although they ‘own’ both the car and the gate, the employers’ as individuals or by name. They seem to be unsurprised by the way that they ‘young employers’ seem to have little regard for either of them, or the estate. behaved the night before and they do not really seem to be concerned about when, or if, the ‘young employers’ will come down. Instead, both are content to savour the wonderful The cook, on the other hand, really enjoys caring for the kitchen. Her appreciation is summer morning: the cook in the kitchen that has become ‘hers’ as a result of the time shown in the ‘bright’ coffee-pot and the tidy surroundings where everything, including and effort that she has put into caring for it and the gardener in the garden that is ‘his’ the ‘jelly’, has its place. As she prepares her breakfast, her contentment with this light- because of his loving sweat and hard work. filled kitchen is added to by the sounds from the garden: the ‘thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears’. No doubt the ‘young employers’ will pay to have the car and the gate repaired because they own them, as they own all of the estate. But it is the cook and the gardener who Wilbur uses these sounds from the outside to make a seamless transition from kitchen understand that owning means nothing. They know that it is time and effort that turn to garden. Rather like a smooth panning shot of a camera, we move across the ‘terraced owning into ‘possessing’ and they give that time and effort willingly and lovingly to ‘their backward of the grounds’ until we come to the gardener as he interrupts his work for old estate’. And in return, they are gifted with a perfect, tranquil summer morning. 667 new explorations richard wilbur a summer morning

The rhyme scheme Wilbur unashamedly admits that he is fascinated by poetic form. By this he means such aspects of poetry as rhyme, rhythm and patterns of imagery, amongst others. Indeed, some critics have suggested that his concern with imposing form on his writing makes his poetry seem rather impersonal. However, Wilbur asserts that he does not in any way force a particular form onto his poetry. Rather, for him the form comes from the poetry. As regards rhyme, he describes how, when he is writing, he discovers ‘whether the poem wants to rhyme, whether it wants to emphasize itself or deepen its sound by rhyming’.

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the rhyme scheme in ‘A Summer Morning’ is beautifully managed. Although it is very regular, with each quatrain having an abab rhyme scheme (line 1 rhymes with line 3 and line 2 with line 4), the piece never reads awkwardly or unnaturally. In fact, it reads so smoothly that it is only on a second or third reading that we become aware that it does actually rhyme. There is no doubt that this rhyme scheme contributes greatly to Wilbur’s creation of the wonderful mood of calm tranquillity in the piece. His imagery that appeals so successfully to the eye and ear enables us to see and hear the cook in her kitchen and the gardener in his garden bathed in the early morning dewy sunlight. But it is the rhyme underpinning his writing that makes us actually feel it.

668 Denise Levertov

An Arrival (North Wales, 1897) outfit, showing that somebody close to her has died. She clearly wants to make a good impression on her relatives because she has bought an expensive mourning outfit, gives A reading of the poem gifts of money to them and tries to talk to them. However, lines 10–14 describe her The title of this poem suggests that it will be about an important historical event, but it cousins’ ‘amazed’ reaction to the very different attitudes and customs of the girl. is actually a description of a young orphaned girl arriving to live in a strange town with unfamiliar relatives. Many of Denise Levertov’s poems are concerned with incidents In lines 15–21 we learn more about the reactions of the ‘Auntie’ to the girl. She takes ‘the in the everyday lives of ordinary individuals. She believed that such everyday incidents gold’ gifts away from the cousins, so she obviously does not think it is appropriate for reveal more about the reality of how people live together than important events. She was young people to have control of money. She also takes away the girl’s mourning clothes very interested in how people’s lives can be made very difficult by differences in customs to have them ‘altered’, as she considers them to be ‘unsuitable’, and she is shocked that and attitudes. Levertov felt that we ought to question the customs and attitudes that we the young girl chose them herself. We learn from these actions that the aunt does not grow up with to discover if they are fair to everyone, and if we realise that they are unfair, approve of young girls wearing expensive and elaborate clothes. It is also evident that she then we should change them. believes that young girls should have their clothes chosen for them by adults, because they will know what is ‘suitable’. This shows us that the aunt does not like the different This poem is set in Wales over 100 years ago. Lines 1–9 describe a young orphaned customs and attitudes of the girl. The ‘Auntie’ also explains to the girl that because her girl arriving in a town that she does not know to live with unfamiliar relatives. The poet father has died, she is no longer ‘her father’s daughter’ but the ‘niece’ of her uncle, who mentions the girl’s ‘moss-agate eyes’ looking around the different place and her ‘Nostrils is a minister. This reveals that the aunt’s attitude is that girls and women only matter flaring’ as she smells the different smells, so it is evident that she is anxious about the because of the men to whom they are connected. The fact that the aunt refers to the changes that she is facing: moving from the more industrialised area of Glamorgan to a girl’s uncle as ‘the minister’ suggests that the aunt feels that her husband has an important country town and living with people she does not know. The girl is wearing a mourning role in their society. Because of this, the aunt expects that the young girl, as his niece, will 669 new explorations denise levertov an arrival (north wales, 1897)

always behave in a way that will not embarrass the uncle, no matter what the ‘orphan’ and the ‘Auntie’. Below is a summary of the main differences she herself would like to do. in their attitudes and customs, although you may find others in your reading of the poem. In lines 22–32, the poet uses a series of vivid images to convey the young The orphan’s clothes: The ‘orphan’ buys a mourning outfit that is girl’s unhappiness. She spends a lot of time on her own, walking around considered to be ‘right’ and likely to make a good impression, her ‘new world’s’ different streets. This behaviour shows that she has not according to the attitudes in her world. The ‘Auntie’ considers that the grown close to her new relatives. Also, she is puzzled and bewildered by mourning outfit is ‘wrong’, so she takes it to have it altered so that it the different customs and attitudes of her relatives, ‘enquiring’ about the will fit in with what is considered to be ‘right’ according to the ways in which they treat her and why her clothes and actions and speech attitudes in her world. seem to be so shocking to them. In addition, it seems that her relatives Buying the clothes: The orphan’s actions of choosing and buying the do not approve of expressions of emotions because the young girl can mourning outfit are considered to be ‘right’ according to the customs only show her ‘rage’ at the terrible changes to her life by weeping when in her world. The ‘Auntie’ considers these actions to be ‘wrong’ she is away from the house or when listening to ‘the choirs’ in her uncle’s according to the customs in her world. church. In the final image of the poem, Levertov conveys the depth of Giving gifts of money: The ‘orphan’ gives her cousins ‘gold funeral the girl’s distress in the touching image of her tears filling her eyes so that sovereigns’, the ‘right’ funeral custom in her world. The ‘Auntie’ thinks the hills seem to wobble and jump about, as if they ‘skipped like lambs’. that this is ‘wrong’ according to the customs in her world. Sadly, there is no skipping for the orphaned girl because the differences Behaviour: The behaviour of the ‘orphan’ as described in the points between her customs and attitudes and those of her relatives have not above was accepted as being ‘right’ for her role as ‘her father’s been discussed and settled so that everyone is treated fairly. daughter’ according to the attitudes in her world. The ‘Auntie’ regards this behaviour as ‘wrong’ and tells the girl that she will have to change Themes it so that it will fit in with what is considered to be ‘right’ for a minister’s Differences in customs and attitudes niece according to the attitudes in her world. One of the main themes (ideas) explored in this poem is the ways in which differences in customs and attitudes can make life very difficult for The difficulties that can be caused by such differences in attitudes and people, particularly if people are unwilling to compromise or change. This customs and an unwillingness to compromise or change are vividly is represented in the different ideas of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, held by conveyed in lines 22–32, with the sad image of the ‘orphan’ who is ‘Alone’

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walking her ‘new world’s’ streets, ‘turning things over | in her heart’, and in a society are often unwilling to compromise or change customs and feeling ‘rage’ and ‘weeping’. attitudes because they are afraid of losing the power that they have.

Power in a society This poem also explores the theme of power in a society. In the new, unfamiliar world where the ‘orphan’ now lives, the power is shared out in this order of importance: 1. The uncle, who is an adult male and a minister, has the most power. 2. The ‘Auntie’, who is an adult female and the minister’s wife, is next in line. 3. The ‘Cousins’, who are the children of the minister and part of his immediate family. 4. The ‘orphan’, who is a child, female, the niece of the minister and part of the minister’s extended family, has the least power.

It is also worth noting that the orphan is only described in terms of her relationship to men: ‘her father’s daughter’ and ‘the minster’s niece’. This suggests that adult males are considered to be the most important and therefore the most powerful members in this society.

It should be remembered that the theme of power in a society is connected to the theme of differences in customs and attitudes because structures of power in a society, such as the one outlined above, usually develop out of, and are supported by, customs and attitudes. Thus, changing a custom or an attitude involves a change in the way that power in a society is shared out. As a result, those who have the most power

671 Patricia Beer

The Voice Beer mixes humour and pathos, as the parrot becomes ill: ‘he got confused, and muddled up | His rhymes. Jack Horner ate his pail of water … I wept’. A reading of the poem Patricia Beer’s poem opens conversationally: ‘When God took my aunt’s baby boy, a There is some of Beer’s characteristic wry humour to be observed in ‘He had never merciful neighbour | Gave her a parrot.’ The reference to the parrot is unexpected and seemed puzzled by the bizarre events | He spoke of’ and clever phrasing in ‘And tumbled sets the tone for some wry observations from the poet. A dramatic turning point in the after’. Ironically, when the aunt died, ‘widowed, childless, pitied | And patronised’, the unnamed aunt’s life is referred to matter of factly: ‘And turned her back on the idea of poet is left with no memory of her voice, ‘But I can still hear his’. other babies’. Her difficult financial circumstances are suggested by the fact that she ‘could not have afforded’ the parrot. In her house, the parrot ‘looked unlikely’ because Language of his bright coloration; the only other colour there was the old-fashioned, cheap ‘local Beer captures the rhythms and idioms of colloquial speech: ‘When God took my aunt’s pottery’ with quaint dialect inscriptions, ‘Du ee help yerself to crame, me handsome’. baby boy’ and ‘And turned her back on the idea of other babies.’ Her style is direct: ‘But Beer describes how the parrot ‘said nothing’ while speculating entertainingly on what I can still hear his’, while displaying a playful sense of humour as she echoes the nursery sounds might have issued from him: ‘From pet-shop gossip or a sailor’s oath … tom- rhyme: ‘Said | “Broke his crown” and “Christmas pie”. And tumbled after.’ Her use of tom, war-cry or wild beast roaring’. The aunt teaches him ‘nursery rhymes morning after dialect helps to suggest the character of the aunt’s house and decorations: ‘With the local morning’; he learns to speak in a Devon accent. Beer associates the parrot with the aunt’s pottery which carried messages | Like “Du ee help yerself to crame, me handsome.” ’ Beer lost child: ‘He sounded like a farmer, as her son might have.’ In a telling phrase, ‘He fitted sums up the aunt’s life most succinctly: ‘My aunt died the next winter, widowed, childless, in.’ pitied | And patronised.’ The alliterating w and p sounds help make the line memorable, like the h sounds in the final line: ‘I can still hear his’.

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Tone As the poem opens, the poet seems detached: ‘When God took … a merciful neighbour | Gave her a parrot.’ There are flashes of humour as she describes the aunt’s pottery and ‘her jokes; she used to say turds and whey’. The parrot’s confusion in his final illness is humorously illustrated; she also suggests her feelings: ‘I wept.’

The final stanza allows a rather different perspective, as Beer reflects on the unnamed aunt’s life, ‘widowed, childless, pitied | And patronised’. She is far more sensitive to the woman’s suffering and concludes ironically with the poignant observation, ‘She would not have expected it to be remembered | After so long.’ In a poem about voices, the aunt has no voice and no name. The colourful parrot’s voice is still heard.

673 Richard Murphy

Moonshine

A reading of the poem Unlike most love poems, which are very serious, this one is light, whimsical and full of humorous wordplay. Murphy sets up the dilemma or problem in the first stanza between thinking and loving, being alone or being together. Thinking and loving do not mix, as thinking requires solitude.

The second stanza is dominated by wordplay on the different shades of meaning of ‘think’. ‘I think of you’ is straightforward thinking about you. It is highly ironic that a love poem should be structured as a piece of logical reasoning or argument, as this poem is. This undermines the conventional notion of love as overwhelming, non-rational emotion. Structuring the poem as a logical argument pokes fun at the conventional forms of love poetry. In a further witticism, the bones of the dilemma are echoed in the end-of-line words in each stanza. See the third stanza – think, loving, love, thinking – or the first stanza, repeated again in reverse order in the final stanza: think, alone, love, together and love, together, think, alone. If there is a serious point, it is that thinking and feeling do not combine very well in love.

674 Ted Hughes

The Stag Hughes introduces another setting to his poem in stanza 3, where he describes the ‘blue horsemen’ who are ‘on sodden horses’. They do not seem to be having a particularly A reading of the poem pleasant time as they are stuck in the rain, unable to cross a ‘brown impassable river’. In Ted Hughes uses a series of dramatic and vivid images to convey the opening scene of contrast, when we return to the stag, he is smoothly moving through the countryside as this poem: a wet, noisy country road filled with cars abandoned everywhere and people he comes ‘over the last hill of Exmoor’. struggling to climb to the top of a nearby bank. In this way, stanza 1 makes us, the readers, curious to find out what is causing all this excitement. It comes as something of In stanza 4, the three different settings begin to come together. We see the people a surprise when, in the last line of the stanza, the scene suddenly shifts to a stag running waiting expectantly at the roadside, the horsemen and the ‘hounds’ filling the ‘draggle through ‘his private forest’. of trees’ with their movements and sounds, and the stag unexpectedly ‘dropped into a strange country’. In the second stanza, the scene changes back to the people and the cars, but this time the poet brings us inside the cars. The chaos outside the cars, described in stanza 1, is It is at this point, stanza 5, that the pace of the poem suddenly speeds up as we find equalled by the chaos going on inside them, with chocolate-covered children crying ourselves experiencing the scene from the stag’s point of view. To the stag, it all appears while the women with them are more concerned with ‘gossiping’ and struggling to as a confusion of noise and dogs that ‘smash the undergrowth’ and ‘blue horsemen’ who unwrap sandwiches. Again, this stanza ends by returning to the very different image of suddenly pull back a sheet that has been covering ‘their terrible planet’. Is this simply a the stag as he ‘loped through his favourite valley’. As yet, it is not entirely clear how the reference to hunters with guns appearing from behind a screen? Or does this image people and the stag are connected, but the contrast between them is already becoming (word picture) also refer to the fact that humans are the only ones who kill for sport, but clear. they like to hide this by pretending to be the most civilised creatures on the planet?

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In the final stanza, the poet uses personification (giving human feelings our senses of hearing and touch as well as sight, we feel as if we are there and characteristics to something that is not human) to communicate the inside the cars, not just reading about them. emotional and physical stress of the stag as he is threatened not only by the men and dogs, but also by the strange, hostile countryside through Another particularly effective example of this is in the line describing the which he frantically charges, looking for an escape route. All seems to be terrified stag’s heart beating as he runs as fast as he can away from the lost for him. But then, in a wonderfully timed sudden change of pace and hunt: ‘And his heart became just a club beating his ribs’. Again, there is an setting, Hughes sweeps us back to the roadside where the poem opened. appeal to the readers’ sense of touch with the ‘club beating his ribs’. What However, the behaviour and mood of the ‘crowd’ are now very different. is particularly striking and dramatic about this appeal to touch is that it is The excitement of stanza 1 has gone, as they all slowly and dejectedly felt inside the body. It is as if the stag’s heart is inside our chests, ‘beating’ return to their cars. With these last lines and final image, Hughes reveals against our ribs. This not only has the effect of creating a vivid and the stag’s escape to us by describing the ‘disappointed’ people who had memorable image, but it also encourages us to feel sympathy for the stag hoped to see him killed. because we have actually experienced the physical effort going on inside his body as he tries to escape. Vivid images and the senses Images are the word pictures that a poet uses in a poem. In ‘The Stag’, Onomatopoeia Ted Hughes creates strikingly vivid (intense and graphic) images that In his appeals to the sense of hearing in this poem, Hughes sometimes convey the scenes of his poem in ways that we, the readers, can relate employs onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is the term used for words that to very easily and will remember. The vivid quality of Hughes’s images is copy the sounds that they describe, e.g. bees buzz, sausages sizzle. produced by his ability to stimulate his readers’ senses through his images, so that we do not just see one of his poems, we also hear and touch it. Examples of onomatopoeia in ‘The Stag’ are found in line 2, line 7 and line 26. In line 2, ‘While the traffic jam along the roadhonked ’, the word In stanza 2, Hughes brings us inside the parked cars of those waiting ‘honked’ directly describes the harsh blaring sound made by a car horn, for the hunt. Through his images, we hear how ‘the rain drummed on so we can hear the noise. This is much more effective than simply saying the roofs of the parked cars’ and ‘the kids inside cried’. We also feel the ‘While the traffic jam along the road was noisy’. Similarly with line 7, ‘While sticky mess as the children ‘daubed their chocolate’ on each other and the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars’, the word ‘drummed’ the humidity that is ‘Steaming up the windows’. Because of this appeal to helps us to hear the noise of the heavy rain hitting the metal roofs of the

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cars. Finally, line 26, ‘Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth’, conveys the crackling and cracking sounds of the dogs breaking through the undergrowth as they chase after the stag. All of these examples of onomatopoeia increase the vivid quality of his images because they create a sense of immediacy, so that it is as if we are there hearing the actual sounds and sharing in the experience.

677 Ted Hughes

Hawk Roosting But lines 12–20 make it clear to us that the hawk sees the place that it has in life as being much more than simply living as a successful product of Creation. With a casual tone A reading of the poem that reflects the hawk’s unquestioning acceptance that it is truly the creature who has Hughes opens this poem in a way that is designed to make the reader feel immediately power over all things, the hawk explains how it is stronger than the force of Creation involved: ‘I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.’ The combination of this dramatic because of its ability to destroy what Creation has made by killing. Significantly, Hughes image of the hawk perched on the very top of a tree, confident enough to close its suggests that there is something to be admired in the brutal honesty with which the hawk eyes, and the assured tone of the words that are spoken immediately catch the reader’s goes about its business. It does not try to hide behind arguments that are designed to attention. We cannot help but read on. Without feeling any need to question the deceive others as to the reasons for its actions, but rather, it frankly defines its purpose as ‘rightness’ of the life that it leads, the hawk celebrates the way in which its physical make- the ‘allotment of death’. The hawk’s ‘right’ to live in this way is based on something that up and instincts are so closely and successfully linked: the ‘hooked head’ and ‘hooked is far stronger than arguments – that is, instinct. To the hawk, it seems as if the sun, that feet’ are beautifully designed to carry out ‘perfect kills and eat’. power source that drives the world of nature, is actively supporting the fulfilment of its killing instincts by shining ‘behind’ the bird, so that any prey will be blinded by its rays. In lines 5–11, the hawk reveals the extent of its absolute certainty about its position in life: that to live as a hawk is, literally and metaphorically, to be at the centre of all things. In the final three lines of the poem, we witness the full extent of the hawk’s sense of its The hawk declares that the ‘high trees’, the air and the sun are all there purely to offer own supremacy. It comments confidently that ‘Nothing has changed since I began’ due ‘advantage to me’ and even the very position of the earth is located ‘upward for my to the fact that ‘My eye has permitted no change’. The poem ends as it began, with a inspection’. Without any trace of modesty or, indeed, gratitude, the hawk says ‘It took the statement that reveals the complete assurance and certainty of the hawk: ‘I am going to whole of Creation | To produce my foot, my each feather’. keep things like this.’

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Ted Hughes and nature them to the world of nature. However, suppressing such instincts is no Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire and from his childhood he loved the easy task, so consequently, Hughes regarded people as being pulled in world of nature and was particularly fascinated by animals. Over the years, two directions, one way by their natural instincts and the other way by he began to recognise significant differences between the relationship religion and rationalism. As a result, he believed that people live lives that that animals and birds have with the world of nature and the relationship are unfocused and full of questions and doubt. that people have with nature. Structure For Hughes, animals and birds are directly connected to nature by the Interestingly, the way in which Hughes has structured this poem reinforces ancient energies that they all share, the same energies that caused the the impression that the hawk is a bird that lives life in a focused and single- world of nature to first appear on the surface of the earth many millions minded way. Firstly, the poem is divided into six stanzas of four lines each, of years ago. These ancient energies still drive the world of nature and, suggesting an ordered and methodical approach, much like that of the in the form of the natural instincts that they are born with, the animals hawk to its killing. Secondly, the lines of poetry are short and many of and birds of today. The natural instinct to fight for survival is one of these them are one-sentence statements, such as line 1: ‘I sit in the top of the energies. Hughes believed that because animals and birds respond to wood, my eyes closed.’ Lines such as this one reflect the fact that there these instincts without questioning them, they are at one with the world is no room in the hawk’s instinct-driven thinking for long lines expressing of nature. They can live their lives in a focused and single-minded way, and examining doubts. using the powers that nature has given them, without experiencing any doubts about their behaviour. This is exactly what the hawk does in ‘Hawk Roosting’.

In contrast, Hughes felt that people, have become increasingly separated from the world of nature over time. He believed that this separation was caused by religion and, more recently, rationalism, that is, the belief that people should live their lives guided by reason. For Hughes, both religion and rationalism bring about situations where people are encouraged to suppress their natural instincts, the ancient energies that once connected

679 Brendan Kennelly

A Glimpse of Starlings Emotions and tone At one level, this is a very matter-of-fact, realistically described poem full of concrete Theme descriptive detail. The emotion is held in check, yet it is there in the way the poet This poem deals with the sense of loss experienced on the death of a loved one, probably empathises with the dead man, feeling the spirit’s confusion and displacement: ‘the first the poet’s father. For some time after a death in the family, mourners are frequently heart-breaking light of morning’; ‘Daylight is as hard to swallow as food’. The poet’s exact surprised, even disorientated at not finding the loved one in his or her familiar place. The recall of the sounds the man used to make (‘the drag of his feet’, ‘The close explosion poet explores this time of intense separation by imagining his father’s spirit attempting to of his smoker’s cough’, ‘The slow turn of the Yale key’) hints at the emotion felt without carry on with his daily routine, the spirit disorientated and confused (‘questions bang and stating it. The pent-up feelings are released in that rush of wings: ‘Suddenly lifted over rattle in his head’, ‘He doesn’t know why his days finished like this’), still lingering between field, road and river’. The poem finishes with the sombre awareness of how fragile life is, worlds. This is a unique perspective on death, the twilight zone of the spirit still caught ‘a fist of black dust pitched in the wind’. It is a good idea to read ‘Night Drive’ together between worlds. It culminates in the final three lines with the spirit’s release, signalled by with this poem, considering them as meditations on the time before and after death. that ‘glimpse of starlings’. This image of life, beauty still there in the world, nature moving and the lift of hope suggests the freeing of the spirit. But immediately the image develops into the second leg of the simile, where the starlings are compared to ‘a fist of black dust pitched in the wind’, recalling the custom of scattering a fist of earth on the coffin and also the religious image of human life as ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. We go from the romantic image of birds to a realistic religious image of dust in the composite simile joining together the beauty and energy of life with the reality of death. It brings a fitting conclusion of release and realigned awareness to this intensely moving poem. 680 Brendan Kennelly

Night Drive might pull through now.’ Altogether, this is a stark, realistic yet sympathetic and wise treatment of final days. Themes The central topic in this poem concerns the illness and impending death of a parent Imagery and language and the emotions and attitudes it arouses in family members. The hospital scene is The central image of a journey is a fitting scaffold for this poem – not just the physical described realistically and honestly but with great insight and empathy. We are made journey to the bedside, difficult and frightening as death, but also the implied journey of aware forcefully that despite having family and friends, each person must face death for death in religious thinking. The storm seems to mirror the poet’s thoughts and emotions, himself. This sense of isolation is emphasised by the image of the ‘white hospital bed’ that the Shannon River like some death-bringing destructive beast out of the Apocalypse – surrounds the sick man, frames his sweating head. Realistic too is the fierce will to live ‘roaring for its life | Or any life too near its gaping maw’ (stomach). Nature used to reflect displayed by the sick man: ‘I think I’ll make it.’ This vain hope is undermined by the poet’s human moods and emotions was a feature of Romantic poetry. The grotesque plague comment, ‘Outrageously’. We empathise with the old man, will him on, but we know the of frogs, unusual, even unnatural, conveys human feelings about death as something reality. The two conflicting voices – one expressing hope, the other reality – invite us frighteningly different, totally other. into the intimate scene and catch our emotions. Death is present everywhere in nature in the poem, always difficult, sometimes grotesque, as the frog imagery emphasises. The The language, while ordinary and everyday, is very effective. The long vowels of ‘drove | violent weather and the grotesque dead frogs, all suggesting a great, almost unnatural Along the road’ emphasise how long they feel the journey lasts. The disgusting episode upheaval, convey the emotions surrounding death: upheaval, destruction, danger and of the frogs is carried by the sounds of ‘crunched and flattened’. The musical rhythm of fear of the unknown. Yet there is deep human sympathy here too – the poet actually the language sometimes mirrors the disgusting wind – ‘pitch … against the ditch’. And feels the father’s pain. And there is always hope, however vain, as Alan says ‘I think he there are many examples of how the music of language carries and emphasises the meaning. These are worth exploring in detail.

681 Marge Piercy

Will we work together? that provides this affirmation. Indeed, in this poem she creates stunning images that help us, her readers, to understand something of the ‘core’ needs, wishes and hopes that lie A reading of the poem deep within each of us. It is significant that this poem opens with the word ‘You’, for although the poet’s lover does not speak in this poem, she makes him very much a part of it by her frequent Her description of the passionate connection that two people can share is both references to ‘you’. She goes on to describe how she knows that her lover will be angry emotionally powerful and deeply affecting in its old-fashioned ‘homeliness’ because when he wakes up because she is not there. Although he curses her, she is not upset of the imagery that she uses to convey it. When she is with her lover she is ‘bright | as she knows that this is because, without her, his world is ‘grey’. She tries to comfort as a fireplace’. In a world where central heating is becoming the norm, we still feel him by reminding him of how it is when she is there. When she is with him, she is the an emotional response to the idea of sitting in front of a warm fire with a loved one. bringer of light and bright heat. Her bones and heart, her face and body all function Similarly, her bones are ‘singing | like a tea kettle on the boil’. Again, we now have kettles in a different way in his company. But she does not see this wonderful condition as that switch themselves off once they have boiled and do not merrily whistle away, but we an end in itself. For her, it is merely a beginning. The intensity of her feelings for know what she is saying about feelings of being cared for, of the power of a comforting him, and his for her, are fuelled by an energy that can be used by them to construct cup of tea. There is something very vulnerable about the image of her heart wagging something that is ‘useful’: a respectful, lasting, fun, protective relationship where they as if she were ‘a big dog | with a bigger tail’. She is making it clear that when she is with can celebrate each other and the love that they share. her lover she reveals her feelings for him with the same unguarded openness as that of a sloppy, affectionate dog. Imagery Piercy believes that as a human being in this modern world, ‘You need affirmation of When she moves on to tell him of her hopes for the way in which their relationship the parts of you that the media doesn’t affirm – the core of you.’ For her, it is poetry will develop, she uses two images that at first seem to be very different to each other: 682 new explorations marge piercy will we work together?

the statue of a goddess and the sheep. The statue could be seen as something that is distant and cold, but although she is clearly a figure of respect, she actually has a rather appealing appearance. She may be ‘armed’, indicating strength, but she is ‘laughing’ and ‘wearing | flowers and feathers’ in a celebratory manner. In this way, the statue of the goddess represents characteristics that we would all like to have in our relationships. There is a touch of humour in the sudden change from the goddess to the sheep, but it too stands for one of our ‘core’ wishes – to be with someone who, when times are cold and gloomy, will wrap us up warmly and snugly with their presence. Truly, these are indeed ‘useful’ things that lie at the ‘core’ within us all.

683 Tony Harrison

Book Ends A reading of the poem In this autobiographical poem, section I deals with many of the elements of bereavement Note: Only part I of ‘Book Ends’ is set for examination experienced by people on the death of a loved one – the sense of shock at her

Background unexpected death; their world broken to bits; filling the space left with memories of her; This poem could be described as an elegy, a poem of sorrow and remembrance on the and now that she is gone, the spotlight is on their own relationship, that of father and son. death of the poet’s mother. The poem is divided into two sections and, like the bookends of the title, there are some similarities between them. The everyday kitchen imagery of the first two lines captures the unexpected invasion of death into the ordinary routines of home life: Section I explores the reactions and thoughts of the husband and son on the immediate aftermath of the mother’s sudden death. They eat and drink as usual, but each lives in his Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. own silent space. The speaker interprets the scene for both of them.

The sense both of her presence and her absence is held in the image of ‘that last apple Section II (not printed) occurs some time later, when father and son are trying to draft a pie’. And while the picture of them chewing it ‘slowly’ might seem like a touch of black possible inscription for the gravestone. Each in his own way is struggling to find the best humour, in the context of the obvious depth of feeling in the two lines following, it words to express the love felt for the dead woman. becomes a picture of poignant loneliness and sadness.

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The father’s world, life, routines and any sense of certainty or safety are Thus, the second major theme in the poem is really a political one: how disintegrating: ‘Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed’, ‘Your education, for all its values of equality and opportunity, can separate a life’s all shattered into smithereens’. But this father and son don’t even have person from home, parents, class and culture. the comfort of talk, a great relief and support in time of mourning: ‘We never could talk much, and now don’t try.’ Ironically, though they are silent, The poem is structured as an elegy on the death of the poet’s mother. She the voice of the mother still echoes in the speaker’s mind: is a pervasive presence, from the kitchen imagery, to her voice in his head where she is a sort of absent presence (‘and she’s not here to tell us we’re You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say, alike!’). This poem catches very well the lingering presence of the recently Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare … dead. The relationship between father and son, separated by education, is also a major theme as they struggle from their different yet similar And so the poem moves from dealing with the bereavement to a perspectives with this bereavement. The poem manages to deal with issues consideration of the relationship between father and son. We know of death on a personal level but also manages to be a political poem about that they are not given to easy conversation. But why? ‘The “scholar” the values of education and about the class system. me, you, worn out on poor pay’. Harrison, himself from a working-class background, who got a scholarship to grammar school and university, A sonnet is usually a poem of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter with feels that this education has estranged him from his family and working- one or two regular rhyming schemes and some regular grouping of line class culture. Even the way educated people were expected to speak the (three quatrains and a rhyming couplet to finish or an octet and a sestet English language created a further rift between him and his background. of eight and six lines, respectively). These two alternative structures are He has written about this in a poem entitled ‘Them and UZ’. Ironically, known as the Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. the development of language skills the poet has acquired through his education does not help him, the ‘scholar’, communicate with his father. The form Harrison uses is an exceptional structure, referred to as the In fact, the opposite is true: it renders them both uncommunicative, Meredithian sonnet after its creator, the Victorian novelist and poet inarticulate, left staring into the fire. The poet is acutely conscious of the George Meredith (1828–1909). This sonnet typically has 16 lines, where reason for this impasse: ‘what’s still between’s | not the thirty or so years, the ideas are grouped in quatrains with an abab rhyming scheme. This but books, books, books.’ longer structure suits Harrison’s narrative style of writing, allowing him a little more space to tell the story. He also experiments with and adapts

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the structure (using it to emphasise a theme or issue or create a mood) by separating the quatrains into couplets of a sort while still maintaining the quatrain rhyming scheme. This has the effect of emphasising particular images that act like steps into the story. For example, in section I the steps are as follows: the apple pie → shock, sleeplessness, silence → the mother’s voice in his head comparing them to bookends → his exploration of why she thought that, etc. At other times he separates out a single line from the quatrain, again for emphasis: ‘Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.’ It carries the complete devastation of the father’s known world and his aloneness in the one line.

But he does maintain at least an element of the Shakespearean sonnet convention, that of ending with punchlines, though in Harrison’s case not so clean as Shakespeare’s couplet. Harrison also keeps the distilled wisdom of the poem to the very end: ‘What’s still between’s | not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books’. Though Harrison might appear to be just talking freely, narrating his story, he is very conscious of poetic form and he uses this structure experimentally and to good effect.

This poem is part of a growing and developing sequence of sonnets that began life in 1976 as just 10 poems entitled ‘The School of Eloquence’. This sequence has grown to 18 poems in From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978), to 50 poems when published as Continuous in 1981 and to 76 in the Selected Poems (1987). Thus, the poem is part of a living, developing sequence.

686 Les Murray Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

Joker as Told his childhood, | his foalhood and ours, when we played’. In other words, Joker was discontented and bad tempered because he was nostalgic for his foalhood/childhood A reading of the poem and that time of play. This links to the reference to ‘the Kingdom of God’ in the last This poem is structured as a memoir of the writer’s childhood experience growing up line. It is probably a reference to St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3, when Jesus on a farm in Australia. Working closely with animals was an integral part of that life. The was asked who is the most important in the Kingdom of heaven: ‘And he summoned particular little horse Joker, which they played with as kids, was indeed memorable, as it a little child and put it in the middle of them, and said “Amen I tell you: unless you turn seemed impossible to keep him out of their living quarters. Also, he proved impossible to and become like children, you won’t enter the kingdom of heaven”.’ This suggests that ride even though he had been castrated to prevent him breeding and also to make him Joker’s motivation was ever more complicated, that it was not just a desire for a return less aggressive. It would be usual that a horse who was used to human contact from an to his youth but that it was a sort of religious quest to find his place in ‘the Kingdom of early age would prove easy to ride, but Joker bit and kicked, would roll over on his rider God’. and even ate the washing. He was trouble on four legs. This can be read as a broad religious, ecological world view on the part of the poet that What gives this animal poem an unusual slant is the attempt to psychoanalyse Joker to sees humans, animals and all creatures together in the rich tapestry of creation. And this understand the reasons for his cussedness, his unmanageable nature. ‘They’, the adults, is quite likely, as Murray is of strong Catholic faith. But it could also be read as humorous. focused in on the most obvious eccentricity, his ‘coming in the house’, and suggested Perhaps he is poking fun at psychoanalysis and the belief that much unhappiness can be that he wanted to be human. Theirs was a human perspective on the problem. The traced back to deprivations in childhood, particularly being deprived of love. What do poet, however, takes a more horse-centred perspective. Firstly he reasons that if Joker you think? Is the poet being serious here or is this a tongue-in-cheek comment that ties in ‘couldn’t grow up to be a | full horse’ (i.e. couldn’t breed and sire foals), then he was with the title, ‘Joker as Told’? refusing to be a slave horse either. Secondly, he suggests that Joker was ‘looking for 687 Michael Coady

New World Coady begins to work out the answer to this question in the third stanza. He admits that the street is a ‘maelstrom’, but he realises that in this whirlpool of noise and people, his A reading of the poem glimpse of the lovers has reminded him of something that he used to know: that the In this poem, Coady presents images of a vivid and real-life situation where he, a ‘ecstasy and innocence’ shared by the two lovers, in the early stages of falling in love, will ‘traveller’, finds himself in an unfamiliar ‘Chicago street’. His language is conversational always ‘persist’. So, although there may be ‘circumstance’ and ‘dangers’ in life that may and the poem is written in the present tense, so it is as if we are actually there with him. damage or end their feelings, the poet understands that the purity of their early feelings of love for each other will always remain ‘untouched’. He recognises that all lovers, In the first stanza, the poet is surprised by the fact that he has been so affected wherever they are in the world, will always experience those wonderfully genuine feelings by a ‘chance | glimpse’ of a ‘starstruck | pair’ of lovers since, as he says, ‘Lovers are of ‘ecstasy and innocence’ as they fall in love. commonplace as day’. However, he explains that he noticed this couple in particular because of the way in which they were ‘uncaring’ about their surroundings. Instead, they The third stanza leads into the final stanza with Coady realising that it really does not focused their attention completely on each other in a ‘pristine pool of joy’, totally caught matter that lovers may be ‘forever falling out of love’, because not all early love develops up in the ‘fabled spring’ of their newly developing love. into a lasting type of love. What does matter, as far as the poet is concerned, is that there are always lovers starting to fall in love ‘somewhere’ in the world. For he believes The second stanza begins with the poet questioning why his mood (feelings) has been that when lovers are filled with the ‘ecstasy and innocence’ of a newly developing love, changed by his ‘glimpse’ of the couple. He realises that he now feels ‘blessed’. This is a they approach life in a very different way to everyone else. They become explorers rather unexpected feeling because he is, after all, in the middle of a dirty, noisy city street, because they look beyond the limits of their old worlds as individuals and towards the in a foreign country, surrounded by strangers. new ‘unmapped horizons’ of being a couple. Like explorers, they hope to discover their own perfect new world of lasting love, their ‘island’ or ‘El Dorado’. The poet celebrates 688 new explorations michael coady new world

the fact that all lovers always set out on this journey with unshakeable image includes a number of individual images, such as ‘the flintfaced confidence because they believe that they have found true, lasting love. cops’. They feel as if they alone are ‘hugging’ a secret so special that it must have originally been smuggled out of the paradise of the Garden of The term ‘imagery’ refers to where a poet uses images that appeal to the Eden. Is it any wonder that although he is ‘Far from home’, Coady feels reader’s senses in order to develop or clarify what he/she wants to express. ‘blessed’ to have been reminded that near or far, home or away, we can all When in ‘New World’ Coady describes the two lovers being in ‘their be positively touched by being reminded of the magic of human beings pristine pool of joy’, he does not mean that the two people were literally in falling in love? a pool of water. He is comparing the degree to which the two lovers are separated from the world around them to the degree of separation that The lyric poem they would have if they were swimming together in the middle of a big This poem is written in the form of a lyric. The central concern of the lyric pool. The ‘pristine pool’ image is called a comparative image because it is poem is to express an individual state of mind, mood or attitude in order used for comparison. Because of this comparative image, we, the readers, to share the poet’s feelings and thoughts with the reader. Although it is have a clearer understanding of Coady’s impression of the way in which the poet who selects the state of mind, mood or attitude that is expressed, the lovers were separated, the impression that he wants to express to us. the person who is speaking in a lyric poem is not necessarily the poet. On occasions, poets choose to create a persona (a character that the Imagery can often involve the use of a series of comparative images that poet adopts for the purposes of the poem) who does the speaking in are related to a specific topic. In ‘New World’, Michael Coady describes the poem. As a lyric poem is concerned with an individual state of mind, the early stages of falling in love by using comparative images that are mood or attitude, it can often be difficult to distinguish whether the ‘I’ in connected to the topic of the sea, ships and exploration. There are such a poem is the poet or a persona. In ‘New World’, the ‘I’ seems to be the images as ‘untouched havens’, ‘reefed about with dangers’, ‘their | lifted poet himself because there is a very personal tone (emotion) in his voice. hearts like ships full-sailing’. Again, this does not mean that all new lovers are literally going to take to the sea in ships. This imagery conveys to us Image and imagery Coady’s impression of the experience of new lovers exploring a new world ‘Image’ is the term used to describe the ‘pictures’ that the poet creates of shared love as being like the experiences of 15th- and 16th-century with words in a poem. An example of an image in ‘New World’ is the explorers setting off to discover new worlds, such as America. image (word picture) of the Chicago street in lines 10–16. This street

689 Michael Longley

Badger aura of significance. Somehow he becomes a symbol of the earth’s ancientness, its longevity and mythological power. Longley himself has said that he thinks of animals as A reading of the poem spirits. He tries to have an animal in each of his books. This nature poem celebrates that nocturnal woodland creature, the badger, but it also questions humankind’s interference in nature. The poem also deals with humankind’s destructiveness and cruelty, our interference in the natural world. The poet’s criticism of this is communicated through the bleak The badger’s legendary strength is evoked both in the descriptions (‘the wedge of ironies of section III: digging out the digger, the bitter euphemism of this process being his body’) and by his activities (‘He excavates … into the depths of the hill’), which described as a forceps birth, the irony of being ‘delivered’ to his death: personify him as a muscular miner. There is a sense of uncompromising directness and It is a difficult delivery dependability about his ‘path straight and narrow’ that contrasts with the deceptiveness Once the tongs take hold. of the fox and the giddiness of the hare. That ruggedness is also evident from his indiscriminate diet: he can cope with the poisonous dog’s mercury and the tough There is sympathy for the ‘Vulnerable … pig’s snout’ and implicit condemnation of brambles as well as the gentler bluebells. the brutal treatment (‘His limbs dragging after them’) and also of the environmental disturbance: But it is his relationship with the earth that is most interestingly portrayed. Longley sees the badger as a sort of horticulturalist: he ‘Manages the earth with his paws’ and facilitates So many stones turned over, the growth of great oak trees (‘a heel revolving acorns’). The picture comes across of an The trees they tilted. animal at one with the earth, the caretaker of the hill, which in turn takes care of him in death. The animal’s close association with prehistoric tombs lends him an even greater 690 new explorations michael longley badger

This treatment is in marked contrast to the badger’s careful management of the earth, unaided by machines or ‘tongs’ of any kind. A clear environmental statement is made here, but it is subtly put across through the contrast rather than by any kind of didactic statement.

Tone This is a tough, unsentimental poem recording the perennial secret workings of nature. True, it does romanticise the badger somewhat:

Night’s silence around his shoulders, His face lit by the moon

But it also records the violence, the suffering and the destruction of nature and creatures. Behind that wealth of observed details and naturalist knowledge, we can detect a tone of admiration for the animal’s strength and its management of the woodland (‘His path straight … not like the fox’s zig-zags’) and we can certainly feel the poet’s sympathy for the vulnerable animal in section III.

691 Macdara Woods

Kavanagh in Umbria But unexpectedly, in lines 8–9, we discover that the farmer the poet watches is driving through ‘olives’ and ‘vines’, so he cannot be in Ireland. He is, as the title tells us, in A reading of the poem Umbria, Italy. Woods realises that this scene of the farmer on the tractor ‘in November’ In this poem, Macdara Woods creates a November scene that seems to shift has been ‘marvellously translated’ in the sense of being changed from one place, Ireland, from Ireland to Italy in the fog that surrounds a farmer, perhaps the poet-farmer to another, Italy. But significantly, Woods also realises that whether this scene of a Patrick Kavanagh or perhaps an Italian farmer, driving home on a tractor. He uses farmer on a tractor in November happens in Ireland or Italy, it always communicates straightforward language in tightly constructed short phrases both to create the vivid an important message, or truth about life, that does not change, or as he puts it, is ‘not images of this shifting scene and to communicate the important message, or truth about translated at all’. Because this important message, or truth about life, never changes, life, conveyed to him by this scene. the farmer in the poem, and all the other farmers working in harsh conditions, are always ‘where he is’, that is, always acting as reminders to everyone about this important Reading the opening line of Macdara Woods’s poem – ‘I have seen him here in message or truth. November’ – is like pulling on the corner of a rolled-up poster, because the following lines of poetry unroll without any punctuation to interrupt them until line 12. Line by line This important message is revealed in the way in which farmers, such as the one in this from 1–7, the scene unfurls before us: the farmer in the ‘dark’ and ‘winter fog’ driving his poem, keep working in challenging conditions because they know that November is a tractor ‘in November’. This picture, painted with a few carefully chosen words, is so vivid necessary part of the natural cycle of growth. They know that ‘in November’ the olive that it is as if we are actually standing beside the poet looking at a farmer driving through trees may be ‘unseeing’, without their eye-shaped fruits, but in the natural cycle they will the Irish countryside, in a setting that is similar to those in which Patrick Kavanagh worked bear them; the vines may be ‘leafless sticks’ and the calves are ‘haggard’, but they all will as a farmer and described in his poetry about Co. Monaghan. grow in the natural cycle of nature. In this way, November is the ‘Genesis’, the starting point, the origin of all this growth, and that is why farmers continue to work in November.

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For Kavanagh and Woods, the first responsibility of poets is to look He was the single most significant influence on carefully at the everyday scenes around them and to notice the me, personally and in my work, and has remained unchanging important messages, or truths about life, that they reveal. – almost without my knowing it – both mentor and arbiter. Hardly a day goes by that he doesn’t come to Kavanagh saw the same truth that Woods sees in Umbria; Kavanagh mind, that I do not find myself wondering in different described the same truth in his poetry that Woods describes in his poem. situations what would Kavanagh have made of this? This is the truth that it is necessary to keep working hard in difficult conditions, where there seems to be no growth, because although it may Creating a mood not be obvious, the power of ‘Genesis’, that is, the origin or starting point Although this poem is only 15 lines in length, with tightly constructed lines of growth, begins in conditions such as these. of poetry, some consisting of only two words, Woods successfully uses the moods that he creates to draw his readers into the poem. The first Indeed, this is not only a truth for farmers, but also for poets. Poets must mood (the feelings and atmosphere) that we encounter is created in lines constantly put hard work into their writing. They must always try to be 1–14. In a series of brief but carefully expressed images, Woods steadily aware of and open to incidents in everyday life that will reveal such truths builds up the mood in these lines. We learn that it is ‘November’, a winter to them and to struggle to write with words that are meaningful. Like the month that is associated with unpleasant weather, that it is ‘dark’ and there farmers, poets all over the world do this because they know that ‘Genesis’ is a ‘winter fog’. The images of the dormant olives and vines, without fruit is in all such efforts: that such work in a challenging situation is the origin or leaves, are familiar ones in November, when most plants are nothing or starting point from which a poem will grow. For when a poem grows more than sticks. The atmosphere created by these images is of a dark, successfully, it does what Kavanagh and Woods believe is the second damp, lifeless November evening. The particularly dreadful impact that responsibility of a poet: to communicate this truth to us, the readers, so November has on farms is conveyed by the images of ‘broken fields’ and that it becomes an unchanging important message, a truth about life for ‘perishing calves’. The atmosphere is unmistakable: it is a miserable time everyone, whether they are farmers, poets or students. of the year for all living things. Indeed, miserable also describes the feeling suggested in the mood of lines 1–14. The man on the tractor, with only ‘a Macdara Woods and Patrick Kavanagh piece of sacking’ for protection against ‘the winter fog’, is the picture of In a speech that he gave in 2004 at a gathering to commemorate the misery, with his shoulders ‘hunched’. We can all relate to the mood that poet Patrick Kavanagh, Macdara Woods said of Kavanagh: the poet has created in these lines.

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Unexpectedly, in the final line of the poem (line 15), this mood of dark, damp, miserable lifelessness is changed. Here, ‘the winter fog’ becomes a ‘mist’, an image that is not quite so harsh or miserable: mist can appear in the early hours of the morning and disappear with the heat of the day; we talk about ‘the mists of time’ to describe the historical past. Indeed, this seems to be the direction that the poet takes in building up the atmosphere in this line, because the next word that he uses is ‘Genesis’. This word triggers memories of the biblical description of the creation of all things, the origin of life. The final word of the poem is ‘begins’, and with this the mood is changed to a much more positive atmosphere of hopeful expectancy: for November is, in fact, the origin, the starting point of growth in the farming world. The poet reinforces this change of mood in line 15 by repeating an s sound in the words ‘mist’, ‘Genesis’ and ‘begins’. This creates a dissolving effect, as if light is breaking through ‘the winter fog’. In addition, it is significant that the poet has not put a full stop at the end of this line: this is a sign that November is not an end, but a beginning. So although the farmer may be ‘hunched’ and miserable on this ‘dark’ evening, it is his hopeful expectancy that this is the beginning of growth that gives him, and all farmers, the determination to keep working in November.

694 Macdara Woods

Fire and Snow and Carnevale in. ‘White fantastic scorpions spit | in the fiery centre of the grate’, it burns away sorrows and frightening historical memories (‘plague pictures cauterised’). Home and indoors A reading of the poem means warmth, security and love – and there is love and protectiveness here. The father This poem is centred on a young boy coming home from an Italian Carnevale on a dark addresses the boy directly as ‘little son’; the use of the diminutive carries the sense of and chilly winter evening. He brings all the excitement and magic of the carnival with him protectiveness. There is also pride – ‘tall and almost ten’. as he comes ‘riding the tail of the wind | in triumph’, as if he is riding a dragon. He has just come from the imaginative and highly symbolic world of masks and costumes. His The world outdoors is less benign: own costume involves ‘two black swords | and your gold-handled knife’ – good and evil I feel the chill and hear reflected in primal colours of gold and black, that age-old challenge re-enacted in play. the absent sound of snow when you come in Age old too is the notion of home as a place of safety and refuge from the dangers of the world outside, as it was even in prehistoric time – ‘fire … lights the cave’. There is There is a sense of discomfort about the dark: ‘The day gets dark uneasy | dark and something atavistic about the image, a link to our primitive ancestors, when fire meant darker still’. There is also a sense of threat about the furthest hill, ‘where clouds have hung life and safety and food. all winter’.

Fire is central to the concept of home; it certainly creates the atmosphere. ‘Beautiful The poem shows a world of opposites: outside, snow and darkness; inside, fire and light … as music’, it creates a mood, a feeling, releases emotion. ‘Generous as music’, it and music. The boy seems to negotiate all these elements successfully: he comes home suggests, makes pictures in the flames, encourages creativity and brings the carnevale through dark and snow to fire, carrying with him the magic and imaginative drama of

695 new explorations macdara woods fire and snow and carnevale

the Carnevale. Indeed, this is the father’s prayer for him, his wish-gift for the boy – that he would have this creative excitement in his life but would overcome the dangers and always come safely home:

… may you always come this safely home in fire and snow and carnevale

696 Tess Gallagher

The Hug benefit, something to make her feel more ‘comfortable’. It is significant that she says I‘ finish but keep on holding’. There is no sense that her partner is involved in the hug. A reading of the poem We are pretty much thrown into the action of this poem in the first line. There is no sense The arrival of the ‘man’ who ‘looks homeless because of how | he needs’ breaks into the of setting up the background to the story – it is as if we have turned on the television in moment. The strength of his neediness is such that the poet decides that he can only be the middle of a programme. There is a woman ‘reading a poem’ and another is listening. a man totally on his own, both in the emotional sense and in the concrete physical sense Although standing close to each other, the two women are clearly separate individuals. In of not having a ‘home’, a ‘place’ to belong. Surprisingly, this stranger asks her partner, not contrast, the poet seems to be very much part of a couple as she and her partner listen, her, if he can have a hug. Even more surprisingly, her partner nods yes. It is odd that she their ‘arms around each other’. There is the suggestion that there is something special is not consulted by either the stranger or her partner. It is as if she is seen as a possession. about the fact that the poem is being read and listened to ‘in the open’ and, to be honest, However, it soon becomes clear that she would, to some degree, like to be possessed by it is not often that poetry is read ‘on the street’. Yet it is a very quiet ‘open’, as the overall her partner as she longs for him to reveal his love for her by declaring that she is his ‘only’. impression is of the four figures standing together in an otherwise deserted street of However, there is something rather amusing about the way she puts ‘etc.’ into the list of houses. what she would like him to say: ‘that I’m yours, only | yours, etc.’. It rather sounds as if she is dictating a letter. Moved by the uniqueness of this moment, the poet feels the urge to hug her partner. She conveys her emotion in a vivid simile, comparing it to ‘a variable star’. However, there Perhaps in a fit of ‘I’ll show you!’, she goes over to the stranger and begins to hug him, is something a little unsettling, perhaps even bordering on amusing, in the idea of the trying to appear as if she means it. She clearly feels awkward as she tries to work out how star ‘shooting light | off’ so that it feels ‘comfortable’. It suggests that this hug, although long it should last. But then her feelings begin to change as she surrenders to her ‘needs’. she says that she is ‘giving it’ to her partner, is almost a form of pressure release for her She is hit with the full sense of how big this man is. Rather like a child with her father, she 697 new explorations tess gallagher the hug

relaxes and puts her head on his chest, starting to ‘snuggle | in’. Magically, Hug’ it is her use of imagery that has the greatest impact. Unsurprisingly the physicality of the hug dissolves and they share something much more for a woman who studied film, Gallagher employs what could be termed meaningful than body contacting body: they share their wishes. The hug a cinematic approach here. Lines 1–6 read almost like notes about a scene is such an overwhelming experience that she is no longer conscious of in a film. She attacks the description of an abstract emotion in an equally anything else: her ‘lover’, the women, even the houses have disappeared. thorough manner. The simile of the real and concrete ‘variable star’ is vivid and enables us to appreciate just how overwhelming the poet’s There is a dry humour in her comment ‘Clearly, a little permission is desire to hug is. However, this image also carries with it the implication a dangerous thing.’ The permission her ‘lover’ gave her was far from that this desire comes from her need to release some emotion so that she ‘little’, since it indicated a major weakness in his feelings. The truth of herself can feel ‘comfortable’ rather than a desire to engage in a mutual the situation is apparent to the poet. She, like all of us, wants a hug to sharing with her lover. be ‘a masterpiece of connection’: a total embrace of body, heart, soul and mind. Her comparison of such a special engagement to ‘the button Her other particularly haunting image is that of the imprint of the button | on his coat’ leaving ‘the imprint of | a planet’ on her cheek may seem on her cheek, indicating the consequences of this incident. On first ridiculous, but it does capture the consequences of this moment. For reading, this connection seems to be a little odd, if not slightly amusing, hugging this stranger is in itself a small act, taking only a matter of seconds but it is these qualities that make the reader think about the image. in her life – a ‘button’, as it were – but the mark it has made on her life is The button may be a small item that leaves a temporary but potentially huge, ‘a planet’. She knows that she will have to end this hug and ‘walk embarrassing mark on her face, but in emotional terms this incident has away’. But that is not really the end of it. For she also knows that when she consequences of planetary proportions for the poet. walks away she will have to face up to the fact that the ‘place’ that she had in life (being in a couple, being in love and being, as she thought, loved) is gone. She finds herself, in a very real sense, ‘homeless’.

Imagery ‘I’m interested in the type of poetry that will haunt me and stop me in my tracks,’ says Tess Gallagher. There are many ways in which Gallagher’s poetry can ‘haunt’ and ‘stop’ readers in their ‘tracks’, but perhaps in ‘The

698 Liz Lochhead

Revelation suddenly made her realise that this animal had a capacity for violence, as is indicated by her use of the word ‘wounds’ to describe the bull’s nostrils. A reading of the poem Liz Lochhead uses straightforward, conversational language to describe an incident Lines 15–23 suddenly place the poet, as a young girl, back into the setting where she had that at first seems to be nothing more than a narrative (a story) based on a childhood once felt so safe and cared for: the ‘yard’ of the farm. But now, because of the revelation experience of collecting eggs and milk from a nearby farm. In lines 1–7 she describes the she has experienced with the bull, she can no longer feel the same way. In her radically setting: a farmyard with an outhouse for a bull rather unsuitably named Bob. The tone changed state, the poet describes how she envied the ‘oblivious’ hens. Unlike them, of these lines suggests that the poet, as a young girl, felt comfortable coping with the however, she now fully understood something that she had ‘always half-known’: that the errand to the farmhouse for milk and eggs. She felt safe and cared for at the farm, as is world is not a completely safe place because there is evil in it. This evil, which can be indicated by the ‘someone’ who was willing to hold her hand as she looked in at Bob for represented as the devil or the ‘Anti-Christ’, brings violence, ‘anarchy’ and destruction the first time. into the world and seeks to destroy life and anything that is life-sustaining, such as the eggs and milk. However, going to see Bob led the poet to an experience that took her out of her comfort zone and into a situation where she was forced to confront, in a dramatic So it is that in the final section of the poem, the poet tells how as a young girl she ran way, a new level of understanding about the world in which she lived. In lines 8–14, home, feeling very vulnerable, through a world in which this evil seemed to surround Lochhead uses images that appeal to the senses of smell, sight and hearing to convey her. To her, the boys carelessly destroying the butterflies and the frogs seemed to be the overwhelming impact that the bull had on her. The powerful physicality of the bull, part of the violence and anarchy that she now saw everywhere, even in the world of barely restrained by a chain, and the uncontrolled emotional strength of the roar of ‘rage’ nature, conveyed by the images of the ‘thorned hedge and harried nest’. Following her revelation about the presence of evil in the world, she felt that all she could do was to try

699 new explorations liz lochhead revelation

to protect the eggs and milk, and perhaps herself, from such evil with her Following her revelation about the presence of evil in the world, this ‘small and shaking hand’. childish sense of security and safety disappeared. She recognised that she was no longer ‘oblivious’ like the hens. She had been forced into knowing A persona about a much more adult world where evil, and the violence and anarchy It is unclear whether we should read the ‘I’ in this poem as the poet that it caused, was always active in trying to destroy life, both in the world speaking as herself and recalling an incident from her own childhood or of people and the world of nature, as represented by the activities of the as a persona, that is, a character that the poet has created and adopted ‘the big boys’ and the ‘thorned hedge and harried nest’. In the face of for the purposes of the poem. However, there is a very personal tone (the this, the poet felt ‘fear’. The image of her holding the jug with her ‘small emotion in the speaker’s voice) in this poem, so it does seem to be based and shaking hand’ in an attempt to prevent the milk from spilling can be on the poet’s personal experience. interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it could be implying that her attempts to protect the milk against the evil of destruction that the spilling Themes represents indicate that she was trying to enter into this adult world by Through this incident from her childhood, the poet explores two main becoming the protector rather than the protected, as she was in her themes (ideas): the transition, or change, from childhood to adulthood childish state. On the other hand, it could suggest that the poet felt afraid and what it is to be male or female. about becoming an adult and wanted to stop this process of transition, as she wanted to stop the milk being spilled. However, what is clear is that Transition from childhood to adulthood the poet, in her exploration of the theme of the transition, or change, As a young girl, the poet goes to the farm in a childish way. We can from childhood to adulthood, understands that this can be a difficult and imagine how grown-up she felt as she walked, on her own, ‘for eggs challenging time in everyone’s life. and milk’. Her childish state is conveyed by the behaviour of the people there who took care of her, as is suggested by the ‘someone’ holding her What it is to be male or female hand and the fact that she was ‘let’ to look inside the outhouse, but only The poet, as a young girl, seemed to be unaware of male and female from the ‘threshold’. So she felt secure, protected and safe and was only at the beginning of the poem, as is indicated by her reference to the vaguely aware that there were dangers like the ‘monster’ Bob in the world. ‘someone’ who held her hand. Then she looked in at the bull, which she knew was male because of his male name, ‘Bob’. Her recognition of the bull’s physical size and strength that led to her revelation concerning

700 new explorations liz lochhead revelation

his capacity for violence were connected to her awareness that the bull and she tried to protect the eggs and milk. But she was ‘scared’ and her was male. As she associated violence with anarchy and evil and the urge ‘small’ hand was ‘shaking’. to destroy life, she continued to use the male pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’. Consequently, ‘the big boys’ as males, violently wounding and destroying Clearly, this theme of what it is to be male or female is linked to the life, also became part of this mixture. It is important to note that her use of previous theme of the transition, or change, from childhood to adulthood, the words ‘antidote and Anti-Christ’, both with the prefix ‘anti’, suggests because working out what it is to be male or female is one of the issues that she was also becoming aware that this mixture was the opposite to involved in making the transition from childhood to adulthood. It is another type of mixture. evident from this poem that the poet was in the early stages of trying to sort out what being male or female involved. No doubt as she moved Following her revelation, the poet recognised that she was not part of the through her process of transition from childhood to adulthood she came mixture that she connected with the male bull and the male ‘big boys’. to understand that what it is to be male or female is complex. For surely Therefore, she must be part of the opposite mixture, where girls like her that is part of what being an adult involves: the realisation that not only went to collect ‘eggs and milk’ that operate not to destroy life, but to life, but also those who live it are complex. sustain it. But she also realised that the eggs and milk were vulnerable because they could be easily wounded or destroyed: eggshells could be broken and milk could be spilled. She linked this physical vulnerability to herself, as is indicated by her awareness that her smaller and weaker body registered the relatively small weight of her ‘pigtails thumping’ on her back, something that the bull would not have noticed at all. Also, her recognition of her similarities with the eggs and milk included a growing awareness of her emotional vulnerability. She did not feel the ‘rage’ of the bull, therefore she must be ‘well rounded, self-contained’ like the eggs and share the ‘placidity’ of the milk. To her, these seemed to be frail qualities in the face of ‘rage’ and ‘anarchy’. Consequently, all she could do was to take the actions of avoidance and of protection: she ‘ran’ from the threats

701 Penelope Shuttle

Jungian Cows Imagery It is Shuttle’s effective use of imagery that really draws us on into this examination. In A reading of the poem the opening section of the poem, she cleverly introduces the setting as Switzerland, the The title of this poem plays a significant part in the way in which we approach our home of Carl Jung, again to signal that this will be a thought-provoking poem. There reading of it. Shuttle uses the two words ‘Jungian Cows’, and their complex meanings, is the rather amusing hint in this section that perhaps some of Jung’s complex theories to signal that there is a lot more to this poem than simply an amusing incident. There is were triggered by hearing the yodelled names of the cows near his holiday home in indeed humour in this poem: the naming of the cows after significant female figures; the Bollingen. picture of these names being yodelled ‘across the pasture’ by burly farmers to chewing cows; the male figures dressed in what is traditionally accepted as female clothing; and This is then followed by the farmer who, because his wife is busy, must dress in one of the cows knowing full well that the so-called ‘female’ who is milking them is only ‘an echo her skirts in order to successfully milk ‘the most sensitive cows’. Once more, there is a of the woman’. depth to this image in that it implies that the female ‘wife’ is better able to deal with the sensitivities of the female cows. The only way that the farmer can access this ability is by But the important thing about humour is that a large part of the reason why we see it as taking on a traditionally female appearance. funny is because it deals with incidents that break the rules of what we would normally expect to happen. These rules are based in the traditions, or as Jung describes it, the The solution to the cows’ refusal to yield milk to the ‘electric milking-machine’ is archetypes, that we have inherited. Thus, it is amusing to see a big strong farmer dressed described using similarly vivid images. The ‘man who works the machine | dons cotton in a skirt. Shuttle’s use of humour is not only intended to make us smile, but to encourage skirt’ in order ‘to hide his denim overalls and big old muddy boots’. The implication is that her readers to examine the way that we think about our world, and in particular, what it is the physical strength of males, represented by the ‘overalls’ and the ‘boots’, the traditional to be ‘female’ and ‘male’. root of their power in society, is absolutely useless in this situation. The only solution is for 702 new explorations penelope shuttle jungian cows

him to take on something of the traditional physicality of the female so nourished them and that will, in turn, enable their milk to feed. By allowing that he ‘walks smelling feminine and shy among the cows’. It seems that themselves to be milked they are reinforcing their power in the world. It the production of life-giving milk by the female cows and the collection of is easy, and amusing, for them to allow the male to think that he has won, milk by the farmer’s female wife is a relationship that can only be shared that it is he who has the power, because they know the truth. by females. Males are powerless to take part unless they are prepared to participate in ‘femaleness’. Interestingly, neither man seems to be upset by having to become a ‘disguised man’, perhaps because, as Jung believed, they carry something of the female in them. The farmer simply sees that his wife is too busy to milk the cows and puts the skirt on. The man working the milking machine fastens the ‘cool soft folds’ of the frilly skirt ‘carefully’. While it does produce some funny pictures of the men, their acceptance that this has to be done in order to obtain the milk represents an overturning on their part of the traditional archetypes of what it is to be male and female. And it is never an easy thing to overturn the traditions and customs of our forebears.

In the final section of the poem, the image of the life-giving milk gushing out ‘into the churns’ suggests that the male has been successful: he has fooled the female cows into co-operating. Indeed, ‘Venus, Salome, Eve, and Fraulein Alberta’ appear to be drowsily submitting to the clever trick played by the man. But the final two lines of the poem reveal the truth of the situation. The female cows are not at all fooled, they are simply ‘accepting the disguised man as an echo of the woman’. After all, they can afford to be generous because they are female, and as females, whether animal or human, they have the ultimate power: that of producing and sustaining life. Their breath is filled with the ‘green’ of life that has

703 Penelope Shuttle

Zoo Morning and the animal world. The poem explores this with clever humour and a lightness of touch, in contrast to the usual heavy preaching on this theme. This is very effective and A reading of the poem memorable. This is a brilliantly clever, inventive poem, imagining the real, unobserved night life of animals as the very opposite of what we observe by day. The elephants are party animals; Central to this poem is the contrast between perception and reality. This theme of the the monkeys are dull academics and researchers with their huge books (‘tomes’) and gap between the outward and the hidden life of both humans and imagined animals research volumes (‘theses’); the bears are politicians; and the big cats pursue the feminine is explored. A trip to the zoo is always referred to as a fun day, but the reality is often pastimes of genteel Victorian ladies. The contrasts are witty and hugely exaggerated different, as ‘The kids howl, baffled’. In the comparison between animals and humans for maximum comic effect. The tongue-in-cheek humour and irony pervades the entire (‘we drag our unfurred young’), the humans are inferior: poem in examples such as the snakes opening their ‘hinged jaws in welcome’. All the animals are very good at being animals. As usual, we are not up to being us. But at another level the poem is also serious, as the poet invites us to think seriously about the world around us and our participation in it. She turns the world as we see it on The poet’s slightly cynical view of human nature contrasts with the romanticised view of its head to make us consider it afresh. Here, the animals are conscious, sentient beings the natural world, where the spider ‘waltzes and twirls; | joy in her hairy joints, her ruby-red who are performing for us. We are the punters, the ones being exploited, pretended eyes’. to, given a false impression. This reverse angle view invites us to explore a number of issues about both animal and human life. It brings to the fore the question of the exploitation of animals in zoos and circuses; how we dominate and exploit animals for our doubtful enjoyment; and that we need to rethink the relationship between us humans 704 Kerry Hardie

Daniel’s Duck This constitutes the major theme of the poem – the shock of insight, the moment of awareness of a child’s first encounter with death – ‘the world stilled’. The child’s reaction A reading of the poem is shown in physical body language – ‘a step forward, a step back … moving to touch, This is a narrative poem describing an ordinary neighbourly act in the country, the his hand out’. He is too young to possess a language capable of expressing his thoughts bringing of a gift of food, this time a wild duck the writer has shot. The incident is and feelings, so he uses pictures and the senses to attempt to comprehend this new described step by step, in minute detail and vivid pictures. experience: ‘I thought there was water on it … but there isn’t’. Water may suggest life, as he associates the duck with its natural element, alive. Daniel’s struggle to understand One of the issues the poem encourages us to think about is that much of our food and communicate is sensitively and accurately described in realistic detail. The mother comes from animals or birds that were once alive. In cities and towns we are more plays the role of protector and educator as she gently leads him towards this new isolated from this reality, but butchering or shooting for food is more common in country knowledge. He feels comforted, ‘saw the gentleness in her face and his body loosened’, living. There is a more practical, less sentimental attitude to animals in the country. and is relieved that his communication has got across, that ‘his wing-drag of sounds was (Read, for example, Heaney’s ‘The Early Purges’.) The unspectacular ordinariness of the enough’. The poem makes us aware that this is a very delicate and significant moment for all concerned. event is obvious from the first two lines:

I held out the shot mallard, she took it from me, The use of contrasts plays a central part in the structure of this poem. The duck is at the looped its neck-string over a drawer of the dresser. end of its life, Daniel at the beginning of his. The image of the duck when alive, ‘arrowing up out of black sloblands’, contrasts with the dead bird ‘like a weighted sack – | all that While this is of some interest, there is no major reaction from anyone, apart from Daniel. downward-dragginess of death’. The dead bird is brought into the full-of-life kitchen, ‘warm, lit, glowing’. These contrasts reinforce the issues raised – death, life and the understanding of it all, particularly for a child. 705 Paul Muldoon

Anseo little Ward-of-court?’ There was a sense of expectancy around this question; the other students would look at each other to see the reaction to it. The teacher was obviously A reading of the poem having fun at Ward’s expense. ‘Anseo’ describes how things happen in cycles and how the abused can often become the abuser. In the second stanza we see the twisted nature of the teacher, as he would send Ward out to find his own stick to be beaten with. The teacher would refuse different options The initial scene is a typical Irish primary school. The poet describes the roll call system until he got the right one. This is the sort of ritual that Ward was seeing and he was by which everybody would answer ‘Anseo’ as their name was called out. This word learning from it as well. The poet gives us fine detail as he outlines the trouble Ward ‘Was the first word of Irish I spoke’, as was the case and possibly still is for many Irish would go to when he was preparing his own tormentor. We can almost imagine Ward schoolchildren. The poet remembers what would happen at the start of every class taking pride in his work or being given a lecture about it from the teacher. when the teacher would call out the last name on the roll, which belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward. This name is significant for a number of reasons. Joseph Mary We can see the engraving being like a commemoration on a gift: Plunkett was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. The Mary part of the name Its twist of red and yellow lacquers is also significant, in so far as it is usually a name associated with girls rather than boys, Sanded and polished, and certainly not with a military leader – which the 1916 leader was, and which this boy is And altogether so delicately wrought about to become. That he had engraved his initials on it.

Finally, the name is also important because it gives the teacher a chance to make a The poet then brings us further along in time. Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward is now doing pun on the boy’s name. Every day he would ask the same question: ‘And where’s our what his part namesake had also done: he is leading a secret IRA battalion and has 706 new explorations paul muldoon anseo

obviously risen through the ranks. There are many contradictions in his life when we see that ‘He was living in the open, | In a secret camp’. He is no longer the boy who is being bullied and victimised. Instead, he is ‘Making things happen’. He has become an important person in a vicious world.

He has also learned from his old schoolteacher. He calls a roll, just like in primary school. One feels the punishment for not answering the roll call this time could be much more severe than getting beaten by a hazel- wand. He is now the one in the position of authority. He is able to put people in their place and tell them what to do. People are afraid of him now.

Muldoon makes a simple point in a clever way and uses the simple Irish word ‘anseo’ to illustrate it. He says that power must be used carefully. He also says that if not cared for properly, the bullied can become the bully.

707 Gary Soto

Oranges What is impressive is its very ordinariness. This is not the romanticised ideal of sun-kissed beaches; it is winter and he is cold. He is carrying a simple gift of two oranges, thinking A reading of the poem perhaps to impress her. The simplicity and innocence of this is wonderful. Perhaps he Gary Soto frequently writes in autobiographical or confessional mode, often focusing on does feel some tension in the situation, ‘weighted down’ by the oranges. He is acutely the lives of young people and the difficulties of adolescence. self-aware – he can hear his steps and see his breath in the frost. And through this urban winter landscape he heads towards her house, which is a permanent source of light, a This is a narrative poem told by a young boy, nearly a teenager, who is taking his first beacon in all weathers. The reader cannot help feeling that there is symbolism at work in walk with a girl. Every detail of the weather, her house, her face, the places they walked, his journey towards the light. We could regard these first 11 lines as the introduction to the shop, etc. is etched in his memory with such clarity that it is like watching a film the story. through his eyes. But he leaves us, the readers, to interpret the significance of all this for ourselves. Lines 12–21 might constitute the second movement – the meeting and greeting and the journey to the drugstore. Once again the poet’s eye for ordinary detail is impressive. First The narrative voice he uses to take us into the story has the simplicity of speech: a dog barked at him, until

The first time I walked She came out pulling With a girl, I was twelve, At her gloves, face bright Cold, and weighted down With rouge. With two oranges in my jacket.

708 new explorations gary soto oranges

Though she has worked on her appearance, any suggestion of false … I fingered perfection in undermined by the ordinary rushed gesture of pulling at A nickel in my pocket, her gloves. Perhaps she is also feeling some tension. The understated And when she lifted a chocolate That cost a dime, greeting, which is shy, personal and friendly rather than romantic and I didn’t say anything. showy, catches perfectly the relationship between them:

That last line captures all the tension and the drama. His solution is … I smiled, Touched her shoulder, and led spontaneous and ingenious. His took out the nickel and an orange and Her down the street ‘set them quietly on | The counter’. There follows that critical moment of complete understanding and complicity between the boy and saleslady. It The drugstore (lines 22–42) provides the setting for the moment of high is a moment of insight and generosity, and perhaps of romantic memory tension and drama. Once again, the sharp level of observed detail makes on her part and of breath-stopping tension on his. It is one of the few everything real – the tiny bell, the saleslady, the narrow aisle of goods, the moments in this poem when the poet interprets – he states what the ‘candies | Tiered like bleachers’. It is so authentic that the arrangement of saleslady is thinking. But no words are spoken. In fact, nothing is said in sweets should remind the boy of the tiered seating in a sports field. Her this entire poem. It is a love poem without words and the communication delight at being asked to choose is beautifully understated and observed is all the better for that. in close-up: His reward comes in the final section (lines 43–56), as with renewed Light in her eyes, a smile confidence ‘I took my girl’s hand | In mine for two blocks’. Suddenly, Starting at the corners everything is transformed as she unwraps the chocolate and he peels Of her mouth. the remaining orange. The metaphorical transformation of the orange into glowing light and fire dispels the grey weather, the tension and the Then he is faced with one of the dilemmas of teenage lovers everywhere uncertainty. It is a moment of delight, illumination and love. – money! This poem has all the common structural elements of the classic love quest: the journey to the girl; the test or challenge; passing the test and winning; and success, which is happiness together. But one aspect that is 709 new explorations gary soto oranges

particularly noteworthy about this poem is the innocent happiness of the emotions conveyed. Consider the following elements: the simplicity of the gift of oranges; the smile and gentle shoulder touch of his greeting; the ‘Light in her eyes’ at the drugstore; his offering of the orange in payment and the saleslady’s understanding of young love; the hand- holding ‘for two blocks’; and finally, the peeling of the orange, which releases all that fire of emotion. That final image of brightness links back to the image of the porch light of her house that ‘burned yellow | Night and day, in any weather’. She is the light that attracts him; he is journeying towards her out of his winter and his gift of the orange achieves the power of the sun.

Another noteworthy aspect is the absolutely unspectacular, everyday ordinariness of the setting and the context. Consider such details as the frost cracking, their winter breath in the air, the unromantic journey across ‘A used car lot’ and ‘Fog hanging like old | Coats between the trees’. The place of challenge and risk and ultimate success is a little corner shop! And happiness is walking hand in hand for two blocks in the winter streets, with ‘A few cars hissing past’. This is first love in the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday.

710 Julie O’Callaghan

Problems Usually a conversation involves people taking turns to talk, but here the speaker does not even pause to take a breath but speaks in short bursts that come out at a very quick pace: A reading of the poem ‘There is the wasp problem, | the storms problem’. The impression is that this speaker This poem begins quite suddenly, with the line ‘Take weeds for example’, giving the feels very strongly about all of these problems – they are a source of deep agitation. impression that we are joining in on a conversation that is already underway. Indeed, Again, O’Callaghan cleverly builds up this idea of agitation by making the speaker O’Callaghan develops this conversational aspect as the poem continues: her speaker ridiculously exaggerate the seriousness of these problems (‘and hordes of thuggish uses everyday language, ‘But forget about weeds’; the structure of the phrases is that slugs | will invade’) and use emotive and rather offensive language about the attitude of normal conversation, ‘We won’t even go into | how leaves block up the gutters’; and of other people to these problem: ‘Hey, knuckleheads!’ The speaker’s tone borders on her use of questions also adds to the impression that this is a conversation with someone the hysterical, jumping from problem to problem and throwing out questions without else: ‘ever thought about that?’ She does, however, use some poetic devices but in a very allowing time for them to be answered. subtle way so that the conversational aspect is not lost. For instance, the rhyme in the phrase ‘thuggish slugs’ adds to the humour of the image because the broad sound ‘ugg’ Finally, in the last two lines of the poem, the speaker recognises that others do not feel reinforces the meaning of the words so that we can imagine an army of Sumo wrestler- as he or she does. But rather than question his or her own attitude to these problems, the style slugs advancing on the garden. speaker takes the view that other people simply ‘don’t appreciate | how many problems there are’. There is the clear indication that they feel this proves that they are absolutely What is not entirely natural, however, is the way in which the speaker in the poem simply correct in calling everyone else ‘knuckleheads’. lists off a huge number of occurrences that are regarded as problems. The list begins with weeds, then moves on to leaves, followed by snails and slugs, blocked gutters, water left in baths, wasps, storms, grass growing between bricks and locking windows. 711 new explorations julie o’callaghan problems

Theme This poem illustrates how viewing relatively minor incidents in life as problems can lead to obsessive worrying that will, just like weeds, ‘overrun … your life’.

Dramatic monologue O’Callaghan uses the device of the dramatic monologue very effectively, as in the course of this poem she allows her speaker to reveal his or her true character. Her lone speaker appears to be speaking to a listener who is given no opportunity to contribute to the conversation. This shows a streak of arrogance on the part of the speaker. The agitation that the speaker feels about relatively minor problems would be amusing if it were not for the rude, dismissive tone that is used about the other people who do not think as he or she does. Similarly, the speaker’s use of exaggeration to try to prove that these are indeed big problems results in some ridiculous images, such as that of the ‘hordes of thuggish slugs’. The speaker is self-opinionated, as is revealed in the stubborn way he or she persists in believing that his or her view is the right one.

712 Julie O’Callaghan

The Net curiosity seems to get the better of her and she cannot resist regularly logging on to ‘watch the list | of Found Classmates’ as it continues to ‘grow by the month’. Suddenly, A reading of the poem the poet’s feelings erupt once more in lines 9–15 as she imagines just how awful the Although the first line of this poem consists of only five words, it makes for a brilliant reunion will be: the ‘Found Classmates’, who have not met for 30 years, will be enclosed opening. The poet’s dramatic declaration – ‘I am the Lost Classmate’ – instantly like cattle in a ‘hotel ballroom’, decorated, no doubt, by the ever-active ‘class committee’ stimulates our curiosity: what does the term ‘Lost Classmate’ mean; how is she ‘Lost’? with faded and battered objects of ‘70s paraphernalia’ while outdated ‘hit tunes’ blare Before we can answer either question, lines 2–5 sweep us off on a high-speed chase with out. She sees this reunion as an attempt to return to the past and it is clear that she has this ‘Lost Classmate’ through the ‘superhighways’ and ‘byways of infinite cyber-space’. It no desire to go back to that time. Indeed, the strength of her negative feelings about this is a desperate race to avoid the pursuing ‘class committee’ who are looking for the poet’s reunion is evident in her declaration that the night should not be seen as a celebration of ‘lost self’: the person that she was when she attended Sullivan High School all those years the classmates meeting again after 30 years, but as a celebration of the classmates not ago. O’Callaghan has created such an incredibly vivid scene in the first stanza that it having to meet for 30 years when, as she sees it, they all had ‘freedom from each other’. comes as something of a shock to realise that this chase takes place in a landscape that Her use of the word ‘freedom’ suggests that she felt trapped, maybe even oppressed, does not exist in any real, concrete sense, but in the ‘superhighways’ and ‘byways’ that during her time with these people. Perhaps there is a hint that she was forced to become belong to the abstract world of the Internet. the ‘self’ that she does not wish to return to by her experiences with her classmates or, indeed, the school environment. The pace of the poem slows down and the tone becomes less emotional as we move into the second stanza. The poet gradually reveals the reason behind the breakneck In the fourth stanza her curiosity triumphs once again and she takes another ‘peek at pursuit in the first stanza: the Internet is being used to organise a class reunion that she the message board’. One of the ‘Found Classmates’ turns out to be her ‘locker partner’, does not want to attend. In spite of the intensity of her desire to avoid this situation, a term indicating that any connection between the two existed for practical purposes 713 new explorations julie o’callaghan the net

rather than out of friendship. The poet’s rather isolated position is further tension of the ‘Corralled’ middle-aged classmates packed into the ‘hotel reinforced by her puzzled reaction to this girl, who seems to live some ballroom’. We can hear the noise as the ‘Found Classmates’ try to shout distance away ‘out in California’, enthusiastically preparing to travel so out their news above the blaring ‘hit tunes’. We can see the old, rather that she can meet up with her ‘old school chums’. There is the strong ridiculous-looking 1970s objects that have been dug out of attics and suggestion here that the poet was never a part of this group of ‘chums’, hung on the walls. or any other group, as she has no fond memories of ‘old school chums’ to encourage her to travel. Perhaps even more impressive is the way in which her use of imagery around the concept of ‘the net’ cleverly blends the real with the unreal, In the final stanza, the full truth of the situation is revealed. The poet the abstract with the concrete. In the first stanza the very ‘real’ chase declares that she will continue to ‘evade the class committee’ until the scene occurs in the ‘unreal’ world of the Internet. In the final stanza, the reunion is over. She is determined not to go back, not to return to that abstract concept of her favourite method of behaviour is conveyed by the ‘lost self’, presumably because she now feels that she is a very different concrete image of her physically moving to ‘slip through’ a physical ‘net’. ‘self’. But the final three lines of the poem indicate that her determination to draw a line between her present ‘self’ and her past ‘self’ may not be quite as definite as she would like it to be, for in the final lines of the poem she reveals that her way of avoiding being found by ‘the class committee’ is to do what she has ‘always done’, that is, to ‘slip through the net’. So it would seem that in this respect she is still behaving as she behaved while she was at school. Perhaps her ‘lost self’ is not quite as lost as she would like it to be?

Imagery Although this is a relatively short poem written in everyday, conversational language, O’Callaghan’s imagery is both vivid and intricate. Her imagining of the night of the class reunion is wonderfully vivid and conveys her horror at the idea. We can feel the heat and the nervous

714 Carol Ann Duffy

Valentine All these images are harsh, and in a way they are cold. The poet seems to be bringing a wake-up call to her lover. The implication could be that they do not have a traditional A reading of the poem romantic relationship, and therefore to give a traditional romantic present would be the This is a love poem, but it is not a straightforward, romantic love poem. Indeed, in wrong thing to do and would be dishonest. the first line we see that the poet is putting great emphasis on the fact that her love (the emotion and the person) is not ordinary, and therefore she is not going to give a At the end she adds her own caution: getting too close is dangerous; love can be ‘Lethal’. traditional gift for St Valentine’s Day, like a ‘red rose or a satin heart’; instead, she is going to give her lover ‘an onion’. Tone Duffy uses a forceful, matter-of-fact tone. There is little ambiguity. Note her use of the The rest of the poem explains why she feels she should give an onion to her lover. The definite ‘I will’ and ‘I give’ instead of ‘It could’ or ‘I offer’. There is a sense of ‘these are the onion becomes an extended metaphor. She points out that the onion can give light in facts; if you don’t like them – tough’, though there is a little hint of teasing in the poem as a time of darkness, just like the moon. She examines the erotic nature of an onion. She well. compares the onion to a lover who brings out the truth regardless of the price. She says that a love affair, like an onion, can make the protagonists see sides of themselves that Structure and language they’d rather not see. She talks about its taste, which is difficult to shift, but like the taste Duffy uses very few formal traditional poetic devices, though she is careful with her use of an onion, a love affair can eventually end as well. Then she compares the inside of an of sound, especially in such lines as onion to a wedding ring, but then she says that this is lethal. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips

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The metre in the poem seems to be purpose built. She varies her line lengths a lot, even giving one word to one line. What do you think the significance of these small lines is?

716 Paula Meehan

The Russian Doll the north’. Apart from this weather being physically difficult, it was also mentally and emotionally draining because it triggered thoughts of ‘our dead’, adding to the mood A reading of the poem of sadness and depression. This is certainly a description of a climate where it would be In this poem, Paula Meehan uses straightforward, conversational language and vivid difficult to feel cheerful or in the mood for a celebration. imagery, appealing to the senses of sight and touch, to describe her experience of buying a Russian doll for her daughter. However, it is clear from lines 11–13 that the poet’s mood was cheered up by the doll. Carrying this brightly coloured ‘gift wrapped’ doll, she felt as if she herself was ‘wrapped’ The first line in stanza 1 immediately places us in the story of the poem with Meehan’s in a bright, warm, God-given glow, a ‘Holy Fire’. This protected her from the ‘January’ explanation that it was the dolls’ bright ‘colours’ that attracted her attention. She goes on weather during her ‘seven miles’ walk home with her ‘face to a wind from the north’. to describe how when she looked at the dolls, she realised that the wonderful colours that Then, in lines 13–16, she describes how the world around her also seemed to be cheering had been used to paint them came from plants that grow in hot climates. However, for up: the glowing yellow of ‘the first primroses’ signalled to her that January, and winter, her this sun seemed to be ‘far off’ and the ‘dry weather’ that the colours reminded her of were coming to an end, and the ‘smoke from the chimney’ of her home reminded her of was only ‘promised’. In this way, lines 1–4 suggest that the poet lived in a very different the physical and emotional warmth that waited for her there. type of climate to the one that she was reminded of by the Russian doll. In the final stanza the poet explains that she knew that her daughter would also feel that In lines 5–10 we learn that one of the main reasons that the poet decided to spend her the doll was more special than eating a dinner. She too would love the ‘gaudy’ colours of ‘fiver’ on the doll was, in fact, the climate where she lived. The images that the poet uses the doll and would be delighted by the surprise of ‘what’s in her’. For this poem is more in this stanza help us to both see and feel the ‘January’ weather: it was so ‘grey all month than a narrative about the poet bringing home a Russian doll to her daughter. It is the and damp’ that it got into the ‘bones’, along with a ‘Bitter’ cold caused by ‘a wind from story of the poet bringing her daughter a celebration of life: the life that was beginning 717 new explorations paula meehan the russian doll

once again in their world with ‘the first primroses’; the life where the ‘far effects, as the harsh weather makes everyone feel as if life is a struggle. off sun’ would return to banish the ‘grey’ and the ‘damp’; the life that was The third image is ‘and our dead had been too much with us’. This takes to be treasured to honour those who were ‘dead’; and the life that was us fully into the emotional and psychological effects in that it suggests made magical by plants that could be turned into bright paint colours to feelings of depression and sadness. The final image, ‘January almost decorate a doll filled with lots of surprises. It is no wonder that the poet over. Bitter’, does nothing to lift these feelings. Although the poet does was pleased that a ‘fiver’ for the doll was ‘all they asked for’. say ‘January almost over’, there is little feeling of hope in this phrase; instead, it expresses the grim determination to keep going. Similarly, Creating a mood the word ‘Bitter’ can be applied not only to the cold, but also to life in Although this poem is only 20 lines long, Paula Meehan succeeds in ‘January’. In four images the poet has helped us to physically, emotionally creating two very different moods in the piece. The term ‘mood’ refers to and psychologically experience the negative feelings and the depressing the feelings and atmosphere that are created in a poem or in a section of atmosphere inspired by the month of January. a poem. Here, Meehan creates these two moods by skilfully building two very different sets of images into her poem. If we examine the images that Meehan links to the weather that she associated with the Russian doll (in lines 1–4 and lines 11–14), we find In this poem Meehan wants to express the differences in mood between ourselves experiencing a very different mood. In lines 1–4 the poet the ‘January’ weather and the weather that she associated with the describes bright colours – ‘carmine, turmeric, indigo, purple’ – so that Russian doll. we see a world that is much brighter than ‘grey’. The image of plants growing in the warmth of ‘the light of a far off sun’ and the image of The images that she uses to describe the ‘January’ weather are in lines ‘dry weather’ appeal to the sense of touch. Thus, we are encouraged to 7–10. The first image – ‘It had been grey all month and damp’ – appeals remember our experiences of these. There is also a feeling of excitement to the sense of sight with the word ‘grey’ and touch with the word ‘damp’. as the poet describes how she spotted this wonderful gift. Again, this is an This triggers memories in us, the readers, of experiencing such weather experience that we can all relate to: the discovery of the perfect present so that we begin to experience this image physically. This is further for a loved one. In this way, the images in lines 1–4 create a positive mood developed in the second image, ‘We felt every year in our bones’. This with feelings of physical warmth and an atmosphere of excitement that is image moves us on towards recalling not only the physical effects of directly linked to the Russian doll. January in aches and pains, but also the emotional and psychological

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This positive mood develops in lines 11–14 as the poet describes how it seemed to spread out from the doll to her, and then on out into the countryside. The image of the poet carrying the doll ‘like a Holy Fire’ is not meant to be taken literally: the poet is not carrying a fire. This is a comparative image because the poet is comparing the way in which the doll made her feel with her ‘face to a wind from the north’ to the way that she would feel if she were carrying ‘a Holy Fire’: that is, warm, protected and happy. The image of the ‘first primroses’ brings together two ideas that we met already in lines 1–4: the idea of bright colours, the yellow flowers and the idea of plants growing. Here again, we can all relate to the poet’s delight at seeing the first flowers blooming after the hard winter months.

Thus, through her two sets of images, Paula Meehan creates two very different moods in ‘The Russian Doll’. On the one hand, there is the negative, sad and depressed mood connected to the ‘grey’, ‘damp’, ‘Bitter’ month of ‘January’ with its thoughts of death; while on the other hand, there is the positive mood of bright ‘colours’, ‘sun’, ‘primroses’ and growth linked to the Russian doll. As a result, it is easy for us to understand why the poet bought the doll, instead of the dinner, for her daughter.

719 William Wall

Ghost Estate bequeathed by someone who cared for us, but the ghost estate is a sick version of the concept – an unwelcome ‘gift’ by people who couldn’t care less. As with all inheritances, A reading of the poem it is something the women are given, it is not of their choosing. If emphasises their This poem takes its title from the ghost estates, i.e. the great number of still unfinished powerlessness: housing estates around the country that were begun during the Celtic Tiger times. their unborn children William Wall himself has written the following note on the title of the collection from play invisible games which this poem is taken: of hide & seek in the scaffold frames The title of this collection, Ghost Estate, refers to the thousands of empty housing estates, partially built and sometimes occupied The children are ‘unborn’, still not realised, just like the estate. This is a surreal playground by a few miserable souls who made the mistake of buying their new homes on the cusp of the Irish housing bubble, just before the for the children yet to be born. This is far from the usual romantic image of mothers and developers went into liquidation, and now find themselves living children enjoying a well-equipped green park or playground. Rather, it is a dangerous alone or almost alone among hundreds of empty and decaying place, as the ‘scaffold frames’ suggest, being both scaffolding and scaffold. It is an buildings or unfinished sites. I believe the ghost estate is a fitting illusion about unborn children playing invisible games. It represents the fractured dream metaphor for our failed republic. of individual couples and of the community. In a sense, the ghosts in this estate are the ghosts of future children, so the sense of emptiness in the poem stretches into the future. This is a poem of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland that examines the human and environmental consequences of that economic collapse: ‘women inherit | the ghost estate’. ‘Inherit’ The refrain – ‘if you lived here | you’d be home by now’ – reads like an advertising slogan is an interesting word to use in the context. An inheritance usually involves a gift left/ that might have been used on those huge hoardings that dominated the view outside 720 new explorations william wall ghost estate

towns and villages. Now there is a bitter and ironic twist to it – as if this ‘Open plan’ is a familiar cliché and advertising slogan in the property could be anyone’s ideal of home! Yet it continues to echo, a hollow jingle industry – ‘open plan living’ refers to where the kitchen and living/ tacked onto the end of each of the first four stanzas where it contrasts sitting room all open into one big space. This interesting metaphor pathetically with the reality described and serves to emphasise the applies building terminology (‘open plan’, ‘alarm’) to the human heart. In dangerous, deceitful power of advertising. literature, the heart is commonly and mistakenly regarded as the centre of emotions, feelings and worries. Despite this sensitivity, people felt no The second stanza focuses on the fears of those who have moved into warning of the coming economic catastrophe. the estate. These are ordinary, everyday, practical concerns – they fear the cold and slush of winter, the danger of the unlit roads, the In the final stanza there is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, of enveloping darkness without street lights and what kind of neighbours fatalism: ‘it’s all over now … nowhere to go’. At one level this stanza is still will move in next door, if anyone comes at all. These mundane, human dealing with physical aspects of this dreadful, half-finished housing estate, worries emphasise that these are ordinary people who are caught in this with filling in the potholes and dealing with the dangerous young joyriders predicament, not some abstract speculators. out on the edge of the estate. Yet their ordinary, everyday clichés of language carry layers of suggestiveness. Do they refer to filling in the The adjective ‘saurian’, used to describe the abandoned cranes in the third holes just in the landscape, or in people’s lives or even in national finance? stanza, with its connotations of prehistoric reptiles, creates the suggestion ‘Out on the edge’ refers to the physical boundaries of the estate, but the of an alien landscape, a life force that is now extinct. Altogether, it is a phrase carries suggestions of being ‘out on a limb’, on the edge financially bleak landscape, with the rain pouring into the foundations of the never- or emotionally. to-be-built houses and ‘the wind | in the empty windows’. This desolate landscape of the third stanza has neither sight nor sound of people: The poem ends on the same note of bitter irony that the refrain brought us in the first four stanzas, but the object of the poet’s caustic eye now is the heart is open plan another familiar advertising sign from the boom times that encouraged wired for alarm people to buy right away or they might lose out on their dream home: but we never thought we’d end like this that old sign says first phase sold out

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Heavy with irony, this is also a phrase of many meanings. In how many The poet empathises totally and uncritically with them. He sees them different contexts can you use the phrase ‘sold out’? as completely innocent victims. No difficult questions are raised about whether or not some may have been naïve, uncritical, opportunistic, This is a poem that addresses the present time and immediate current overambitious, even reckless. What this poem provides is a powerful issues. Unvoiced social, environmental and political questions echo partisan plea on behalf of the many victims seduced by the hype and the through it: how was this allowed to happen, who was responsible, are slick advertising of property development companies. there no laws to cover this, is this a suitable environment for human beings to live in, and so on. In that sense, it is a poem about society, about The language is simple and spare; the thoughts are punched out in short the environment, about politics. Though these questions are not debated lines without full stops or capitals. But it has a certain speaking rhythm to directly, we are enticed to think about them as we consider what the poet it, like a litany of despair. Three startling and thought-provoking images focuses on – the plight of people trapped in this ghost estate. fix that ghost estate in the reader’s eye and memory.

It is a narrow focus and all the more effective for that. Firstly, he focuses on a single iconic feature of the current recession in Ireland, the ghost estate. Just as the cranes dominating the skyline in the first decade of the 21st century were taken as signs of progress and wealth, the ghost estates are images of failure, empty promises and failed dreams. Secondly, he focuses in on the thoughts and feelings of the people in this predicament. We hear their thoughts, like disembodied human voices, because we never actually see anyone. It is like a Greek chorus of bewilderment: the thoughts of women who find themselves powerless in the situation; expressing their fears of winter in that place; their fear for future children; their shock at their own lack of foresight; their fatalism in the final stanzas; their experience of living on the edge, literally and metaphorically.

722 Greg Delanty

After Viewing The Bowling Match at Castlemary, dinger of a curve throw’. The uninhibited language (‘the earthy lingo’) and the ‘antics’ of Cloyne, 1847 the supporters will be greatly enjoyed.

But the most personal moment comes in the third stanza, with the revelation that one A reading of the poem of the attractions of a bowling match would be to provide escape from thinking about This poem operates on two levels: at a personal level and also at the level of cultural ‘whatever lurks in our background’. The detail is left delicately unvoiced, but we suspect, politics. It is a personal poem in that it is addressed to the ‘you’ in the first line. We are from the word ‘lurk’, that it is not something pleasant or something they are anxious to not told whether this ‘you’ is a girlfriend, partner or visiting companion, but it is probably explore. someone with whom the speaker has a close relationship and who is a visitor to Cork. The poem is sparked by his companion’s excited reaction to Daniel Mac Donald’s Thus, at one level this poem is a personal communication, like an informal letter painting ‘The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne’, which they viewed together, addressed to the ‘you’ of the first line, as a follow-up to the viewing, talking about probably at the Crawford Gallery. The poet lists the details that left his companion ‘so reactions to the painting and about his intention to view a real bowling match. And it taken with that painting’ – the peasants in their formal clothes focusing with such intensity finishes with that note of unease, infuriatingly unspecific, about ‘whatever lurks in our and anticipation at the athletic figure of the bowler in his open shirt and tight trousers and background’. In this, it has the intimacy of a private letter, where references may be that moment before the bowl is released, which is caught so dramatically by the painter. understood by the participants but not by an outside reader.

The poet promises an experience of a real live bowling match. In a very laid back However, it is also a historical poem featuring aspects of Irish cultural history, namely the conversational opening, he says: ‘I promised to show you the bowlers | out the Blarney 19th-century painting, reflected on in some detail. There follows a vivid description of Road after Sunday mass’. He knows his companion well enough to say with conviction modern-day bowling. It is worth remembering that this is one of a set of ‘cross-cultural’ that she or he will relish the athletic skill of the game – ‘each fling’s span’ and ‘delight | in a 723 new explorations greg delanty after viewing the bowling match at castlemary, cloyne, 1847

poems from his collection American Wake (1995), which introduces ‘the picture’s crowd is freed | of famine & exile darkening the land’, so the US as the ‘Fifth Province of Ireland’ and introduces aspects of Irish too the speaker and his companion are ‘relieved | from whatever lurks in culture and history to US readers. Thus, the American-induced simile ‘as our background’. It is in the sharing of this moment of escapism, whether indecently tight as a baseballer’s’, while a startling comparison with 19th- through involvement in sport or by viewing art, that the personal story and century Irish dress, can be understood as part of the intercultural dialogue the historical story are joined, and both share the sense that things are out of the poem. Attention is also drawn to other aspects of peasant dress. of control. They are ‘waiting to see where the bowl spins | off, a planet out But the main cultural focus is on the game of road bowling, both in its of orbit, and who wins’. 19th-century and modern format. The sense of drama and the intensity of involvement of the spectators that is caught in that snapshot moment The fragile nature of things, the lack of control people have over of the painting are brought vividly to life by the sights, sounds and relationships, health, victory, even life are all caught in this disturbing movement of the second stanza. The multisensory description of ‘dinger metaphor at the end where the spinning bowl becomes a planet out of of a curve throw’ along ‘blackberry boreens’, the ‘earthy lingo’, fans giving orbit. The poem leaves us with this great sense of uncertainty – personal, ‘thumbs-up’ or shouting ‘down the banks’ makes all this as real as a TV historical, cosmic. sports viewing.

The everyday or demotic language used to describe this – ‘dinger,’ ‘lingo’, ‘antics’, ‘shenanigans’, etc. – gives it an authenticity and an immediacy that make it real for any audience, home or foreign.

But the darker historical context, always present from the date in the title (like the elephant in the room, as it were), finally breaks the surface in the third stanza. The year 1847 was referred to as ‘Black ’47’ in Irish history, when hundreds of thousands died from starvation and fever. This sporting event for the 19th-century crowd provides a moment of escapism from the grim reality of life all around. Even the incongruity of dressing up in best clothes has all the unreal make-believe of a stage play. But just as

724 Peter Sirr

Madly Singing in the City A momentary return to his plan to sing is signalled by his comment ‘In a second I will sing’ and he offers the promise that his performance of his writing will be so wonderful ‘it will A reading of the poem be as if | a god has leaned with me’. But once again, it is the space in which he writes that This poem is beautifully developed through a series of vivid images appealing to the lures him away to imagine that god leisurely enjoying, as no doubt the poet does, the senses of sight, hearing and smell that interrupt the poet’s desire to ‘sing’ out his ‘new walk to his home. poem’. Finally, the poet recognises the truth of his situation: despite his reluctance to be Lines 1–6 set the scene as we go to the ‘dark roof garden’ to look down on and to hear entwined by the ‘thousand ties of life’, he is ‘tangled’ with the city in a deeply physical, the city. The poet is intent on sharing the ‘news’ of his ‘new poem’ with his fellow citizens. emotional and spiritual way. He does not need to ‘sing’ the poem that he has written The move away from this to the ‘chip-shop’ is neatly introduced by the irresistible smell using physical words. He realises that every thought that he has thought and every of fish and chips in line 6. The process of making, buying and packaging the chips is feeling that he has felt since he climbed up ‘to the dark roof garden’ has created an presented in ways that highlight the ceremonial aspects of the procedure, suggestive of incredible internal poem that celebrates his space in the world. And so he decides to ‘go an Asian tea ceremony. back down’.

It is the word ‘darkness’ in line 15 that brings the poet back to his original intention of Tone communicating his new poem, but ‘the spires’ entice him away again to lovingly list the Sirr manages the tone of this poem beautifully so that what is said is always honest and names of the historic religious buildings that surround him and to recall a cherished from the heart. We do not feel that we are reading a piece of writing that has been memory of carrying a ‘glass table-top’. worked on, although it clearly has been, but rather it is as if we are Sirr’s best friends

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standing with him in the roof garden as he openly and spontaneously tells Line 20 sees him trying to refocus his attention back on what he had us what he is feeling and thinking. originally intended to do as his tone becomes businesslike – ‘In a second I will sing’ – and he motivates himself by confidently declaring ‘it will be as The opening lines of this poem (lines 1–6) have a tone of quiet if | a god has leaned with me’. But once again, the city that he loves leads contentment about them. This is the voice of a man who has worked hard him astray as he thinks about how he has become part of it. There is a and long into the night as most of his fellow citizens slept. But now he has touch of amusement in his tone as he recognises that completed his task successfully and so he rewards himself by going up to his ‘dark roof garden’ to look out onto the city and to celebrate by telling … The thousand ties of life his ‘news’. I thought I had escaped have multiplied.

Distracted by the smell from the ‘chip-shop’ in line 6, he imagines himself He is clearly happy to accept that he is now connected to this place by inside. Here, the tone is filled with the growing excitement of going ties that are not only physical, but also emotional and spiritual. through the reassuringly familiar process of preparation and the barely concealed anticipation of hurrying home to eat the fish and chips before The final four lines of the poem (lines 29–32) are filled with a tone of joy they get cold. and elation as he totally surrenders himself to the wonderful emotions that fill his body: along with air, his new internal poem courses through his In line 16 the tone changes once again. He tries to pull himself back lungs, as his eyes are ‘filled with buildings | and people’. This is his song together so that he can give a truly great performance of his words to an and he is, in his heart and soul, ‘Madly Singing’. Filled with the tone of audience that includes the impressive spires of some of Dublin’s oldest certainty born out of true understanding, the poet says ‘without saying a churches. But once more, he is distracted as he recalls their names. word, I go back down’. He has celebrated, and now it is time for him to There is a great deal of affection in the way he lists these historic and join his city and his fellow citizens in sleep. atmospheric places that have clearly touched him. The tone of affection strengthens as he thinks of the ‘Myra Glass Company’ because he remembers an incident that happened there involving a loved one.

726 Joseph Woods

Letting the Cat out of the Bag traumatised by the deed? The alliterative s and f sounds draw particular attention to his actions. Certainly, he was so affected by it that he made a family announcement. A reading of the poem This poem deals with quite a sensitive issue which was and still is a real feature of life, So this is a somewhat sensitive treatment of the topic in that the cruelty of the action was particularly on farms – the disposal of unwanted and multiplying small animals and how deeply felt, admitted and voiced by the father. Indeed, he continues to suffer the guilt it should be carried out. In the past, before more humane methods were available or long afterwards under the seemingly accusing stare of the mother cat that escaped and could be afforded by everyone, it was the practice to drown unwanted small animals, as would ‘observe for some years | my father’s uneasy comings and goings’. described here. Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Early Purges’ deals with the drowning of kittens in a factually descriptive and unemotional way, creating a picture that is much Though the subject matter is brutal, this poem is relieved by feelings of sensitivity and more stark and brutal than this. guilt. There is also a hint of wry humour in imagining that the cat continued to remember and accuse. The title also provides some black humour because it is taken here in its Here, the gathering of the cat and kittens into the sack that is then weighted down with literal sense as well as in the more usual metaphorical sense of inadvertently letting slip a some heavy object so that it won’t float provides the only graphic detail. Unlike the third secret. The title functions in both senses here – while this was practised, it wasn’t much person voice in Heaney’s poem, this is narrated in the first person, through the voice of spoken about. a young person in the family, so it is more personalised. It is a viewpoint that records the father’s troubled reactions to what he has done, emotions that are carried in the choice of words – he ‘stole’ into the scullery. Was he feeling guilty, ashamed or regretful? He is described as having ‘faltered over fields’. Does his stumbling indicate that he was

727 Enda Wyley

Poems for Breakfast Suddenly, their feelings change: ‘And there are the poems for breakfast’. Again, Wyley constructs a remarkably brief line, consisting of seven words, filled with layers of meaning. A reading of the poem The monotonous routine suggested by ‘Another’ in line 1 becomes a welcome ritual The poem opens with what appears to be a very simple statement: ‘Another morning here, indicated by her use of ‘And’. This is indeed a surprising ritual, ‘there are the poems shaking us’. However, there is a wealth of meaning in this line. Wyley’s use of the word for breakfast’. This remarkable image is expanded beautifully in the following five lines ‘Another’ suggests her reluctance to face the day. Similarly, the word ‘shaking’ creates as we ‘see’ the delicate pages, with their even more delicate thoughts, placed carefully a wonderful image of the morning coming into the room and, like a person, trying to among the everyday solid chunkiness of a ‘pepper pot, | marmalade jar, a sugar bowl’. shake the couple awake. This sleepy reluctance affects the way that the room is seen For this is a table that not only bears food for the body, but also for the spirit and the by the poet. To her, it is filled with jobs that will need to be tackled during this new day: heart. These ‘Secret gifts’ placed with love on the table, like presents from Santa Claus, the willow needs watering, there are books to be tidied, dirty cups to be washed and put have the power to bring magic to the most unwelcome morning with their ‘rhythms’. away and a mountain of worn clothes that will have to be sorted. True, the cat is purring They ‘wake up’ the recognition of what is good about life: ‘the cat, the dog’ and the fact contentedly as he sleeps wrapped around the willow, but he seems to be the only thing that the couple greet the day ‘together’. Above all, these poems are reminders of what holding the dried-out plant upright; there are orange flowers under the window, but they this togetherness brings to them: their wonderful communication, made ‘open’ by their are ‘frail’ and the window is ‘chipped’. Even the noises sound irritating and annoying. To love, and the confidence and enthusiasm to live life with their ‘door forever opening’, to make matters worse, the postman arrives to deliver letters that are as welcome as bad welcome all that each day may bring. weather forecasts, and not only that, he makes the dog bark. It is clear that the day has to be faced, so they go down the stairs, each creak an echo of their unwillingness to start Mood carrying the ‘weight’ of the day. There are many aspects of this poem that could be addressed: the imagery, the use of sound, the clarity of the writing. But it is Wyley’s exceptional handling of mood that will

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be addressed briefly here because her success in this aspect is built on her mastery of all three aspects mentioned above. The first section of the poem evokes a mood of reluctance and dejection. As we have seen, the imagery is wonderfully negative: it is what is wrong rather than what is right that is seen. Similarly, the ‘clicks’ and ‘clinks’ irritatingly chip away at the couple’s relaxed drowsiness. This is a world where ‘Another’ morning is truly unbearable.

Wyley changes this mood with seven simple words: ‘And there are the poems for breakfast’. The mood soars to become one of delighted expectation as the sight of the poems on the ‘glass table’ welcome the couple. The choosing and placing of each one of these poems is an act of love, the desire to share and communicate. Their delicacy among the breakfast things is deceptive, as the poems can ‘wake up’ the couple much more effectively than the pepper, the marmalade or the sugar.

Unlike the sounds in the first section, these ‘Secret gifts’ have quiet ‘rhythms’ that will soothe and comfort throughout the day, whatever life experiences it may bring. The mood is positive and joyful in the final lines as she understands that it is what they hold dear together, and what holds them dearly together, that enable both her and her partner to embrace life, to keep ‘our door forever opening’.

729 Colette Bryce

Self-Portrait in the Dark (with Cigarette) These opening lines are taken directly from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, beginning ‘To be, or not to be’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1). In this soliloquy, talking to A reading of the poem himself, just as the poet is here, Hamlet considers whether death would be preferable Here the poet shares some thoughts with us and hints at her feelings after the break-up than continuing to struggle with his unhappy life. Ironically, Hamlet’s debate with the of a relationship. issue turns on the word ‘dream’ – not knowing what dreams might come with this ‘sleep of death’ makes him rethink. While the poet here longs for sleep and perhaps The poem is structured in three movements, like a play. The first sets the scene – the pleasant dreams, the phrasing she borrows from Hamlet has darker and more troubling poet ‘wakeful | as an animal’ at 4 a.m., sitting at the window, smoking a cigarette, looking significance. As if she realises the danger of acknowledging the depth of her misery, even out onto the street. In the second movement we find out that despite ‘moving on’ two to herself perhaps, she jolts us back to the present, breaking with the poetic phrases of months ago, her former partner has not yet picked up the car. This section focuses on Shakespeare in the sharp, everyday language: the car, the only remnant of the relationship. In a cleverly crafted third movement, the … No chance: winking security light of the car links us back, through a series of connected images, to a it’s 4 a.m. and I’m wakeful figure smoking in the dark. Overall, we are taken on a circular thought journey, through a as an animal story told with wit and humour in an attempt to hide the feelings of loneliness. Then the reason for her wakefulness is revealed – ‘caught between your presence and To sleep, perchance the lack’. Her departed lover is still present in some ways, perhaps in her head and to dream? through the car, as we find out later, but she lacks his presence in any real sense. This is her dilemma, and another connection with Hamlet, who was beset by dilemmas. He

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was constantly debating two opposing ideas and so ended up unable to She also draws attention to the irony that despite having used the phrase decide on a course of action, for the most part. That connection is still ‘moving on’, he hasn’t yet managed to move his car! It ‘waits, spattered there in the next line when she uses the archaic word ‘realm’, often used in in raindrops like bubble wrap’, as if it was something precious to be Shakespeare, to describe her state: ‘This is the realm insomniac.’ All these protected. Was he more protective of the car? With disarming self- allusions and connections to Hamlet hint at a more troubled state of mind honesty she acknowledges her ability to go off on a tangent rant about than is made explicit. cars and pets looking like their owners, though she rather dignifies it by describing it as a ‘riff’, which is a repeated phrase in jazz or rock music. But This opening movement concludes with the silhouetted figure on the she decides not to ‘go there’, in American speak (yet another wordplay on window seat looking out, lighting a cigarette from a slim flare. It could be the ‘moving on’ theme), because his car is a ‘clapped-out Nissan Micra’. a screen shot from an old romantic movie. Indeed, that’s suggested when The point is made without appearing to be made! And from the musical the street is described as ‘a stilled film, bathed in amber’. But it is not love riff she took off on, she comes down to earth and the less romantic reality fulfilled – rather, it is the solitary image of an abandoned lover from the of the ‘clapped-out’ car she has been driving illegally at night. She gets romantic movie that we see here. some fun imagining his horror at her treatment of the car: ‘Morrissey … jammed in the tape deck now and for eternity’. The movement ends on a The second movement opens on an ordinary housing estate with moment of wicked humour. romanticised addresses like ‘Riverside Drive’. The single moving vehicle seems to emphasise her own solitariness, particularly since she welcomes The tone drops back to a conversational mode at the opening of the final it as ‘a sign of life’. Lines 15–18 play on the phrase ‘moving on’, a cliché section, like a very ordinary ‘joke over’ sort of conversation: ‘no. It’s fine, that is used unthinkingly to describe the end of a relationship, as if it was all gleaming hubcaps’. But the details betray the emotion – ‘seats like an as easy and painless as moving on in traffic – a phrase that belies the upright, silhouetted couple’ (which they no longer are). Also she thinks pain and hurt in the break-up. Here, the poet contains any emotion by that the wink of the small red security light ‘could represent a heartbeat focusing on wordplay and verbal wit: or a pulse’ (both of which have traditionally had romantic associations) or even represent ‘loneliness: it’s vigilance’. The metaphor has led her to and two months on the hard truth of her own situation – the loneliness that keeps her awake from ‘moving on’ and watchful. But she recovers quickly, pulls back from the emotion of loneliness and reconfigures the image into that of a ‘lighthouse-regular

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spark | of someone, somewhere, smoking in the dark’. She is back to safe, impersonal anonymity: ‘someone, somewhere, smoking’.

This movement towards and away from the danger of being emotional has been a pattern throughout the poem. She plays it as a poetic ‘riff’ all through, shying away from the hurt feeling, taking refuge in wordplay and humour. In this it is a delicately balanced poem with feelings kept in check in case they overwhelm her. The emotional tightrope that she walks creates a marvellous understated sense of tension.

Images of brief, transitory light are to be found throughout the poem: the glow of the cigarette and the slim flame of the lighter in the first movement; the slow vehicle ‘pushing its beam’; the winking of the small red security light; the ‘lighthouse-regular spark | of someone, somewhere, smoking in the dark’ as a conclusion. Perhaps the suggestion is that love is transitory yet always to be found with ‘someone, somewhere’. Some images in the poem convey her solitariness: the lone figure watching the almost deserted streets; the ‘lighthouse-regular spark’. The image of the car is probably the most unexpected in a love poem. It is modern, an icon of the times, an alternate love object. A remnant of his presence and yet a reminder of his absence, it gives form to her dilemma, ‘caught between your presence and the lack’. Ironically, she has a lot in common with the car, abandoned and still keeping lonely vigilance.

732 David Wheatley

Chronicle The dominant features of the landscape are ‘dirt tracks, twisting lanes and third-class roads’, ‘back roads’, ‘up-and-down Wicklow’, ‘farming … poor roods’, ‘windy corridor’ Themes and issues and of course the mountains appear five or six times. But the roads are all-pervasive in This poem is a reflection on generations of a family and on the love and commitment the poem, suggestive of journeys (ironically, not taken by some here), suggestive of to their native place, or áit dúchais, they all share in varying degrees over the different the journey of life made by all. They even seem to be a symbol of the call of destiny or generations. The grandfather is the most seriously entrenched, even berating his son, the personal mission in life – ‘before my father and I ever followed the roads’. The pace of poet’s father, for living in Bray – 20 miles up the road and still in Co. Wicklow! It is too life on all these journeys of road or of life is deliciously slow. The grandfather is ‘chugging close to ‘town’, i.e. Dublin. The son did not keep up the family tradition of farming, yet he along the back roads’ in his ‘wood-panelled Morris Minor’. The father prefers to ‘trundle still works in Co. Wicklow, ‘preferring to trundle his taxi along the back roads’. He is still a his taxi along the back roads’. It is an accurate but somewhat romanticised vision of a part of the landscape. Despite the poverty of the land, people farm it rather than move. bygone era, traced back through many generations of the family, to his grandfather’s There are ‘Clannish great-uncles somewhere nearer the mountains … farming their few grandfather’s grandfather. Altogether, it is a memorable, graphic story of bloodlines and poor roods’. The poet himself is somewhat distanced from this fierce loyalty and freely roadlines. admits ‘Cattle, accents and muck: I don’t have a clue’. Yet even he is not totally immune to the power of the landscape as he climbed Tone The poem is structured as a reminiscence and, though a little romanticised, it is not … the uncarpeted stairs to look at the mountains nostalgic or sentimental. The poet’s own personal distance from it all is asserted: ‘I don’t hulking over soggy, up-and-down Wicklow. have a clue’. Yet there is a sense of enjoyment, perhaps even of quiet pride, particularly in the larger-than-life grandfather still remembered for driving through the barn door. Even the schoolchildren write poems about ‘wet and wonderful Wicklow’. This sense of deprecating fun and also the sense of irony (the ancestors, for all their love

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of place, are buried outside the county line and there must be a hint of irony in the children’s poetry) keeps any nostalgia firmly at bay. This is very much a poem of the modern generation of Irish people who can appreciate their heritage but are neither physically nor emotionally tied to it.

734 Paul Perry

River of Light space. This highlights the uniqueness of this tragic event for the people involved and affected. The graphic detail of the car that follows, while described in a matter-of-fact A reading of the poem way, draws attention to how fragile the vehicles are in which we hurtle down roads: The poem deals with an almost everyday occurrence – a fatal accident on the roads. The the car should not scene is described from the point of view of an observer, a ‘dumb spectator’. It is part factual description but it is also part imaginative interpretation. While the tone strives to be cut in half be neutral, emotion is just below the surface and breaks through at times. so easily, so simply but it is The first stanza is really an exploration of the title, describing how motorway illumination and the constant stream of headlights at night create the effect of a ‘river of light’. The ‘dumb spectators’ watch the police get on with the ordinary business end of death This could be interpreted as a romantic image, indeed a very positive one, as it brings as they ‘measure | confer and agree’. This unemotional processing (necessarily so, of together the main elements of life and growth – water and light. The rest of the poem course) continues in the impersonal reference to the ‘unnamed dead’. But once again, does not follow in this vein, as suddenly, in the second stanza, the intersection ‘appears the emotion surfaces in the simile of ‘the yellow plastic … like an ignominious flag’ – a flag | like a mirage’, as if it is something unreal, an optical illusion. We are quickly led into a of shame or disgrace. The poet sees it: tragic scene where the ‘policeman’s flares’ become ‘mourning candles’ in a deft image transition in the third stanza. We are brought face to face with the emotional reality of flapping absurdly in rhythm with the smashed blinker this in that clear simile in the fourth stanza: ‘the intersection | like a small island of sorrow’. This image tunes in to the main metaphor of the poem – this is an island in the river of of the halved car light. But the island image also marks out the intersection as a different space, an isolated 735 new explorations paul perry river of light

It is as if he is desperate to find some pattern or sense in this grotesque scene. This somewhat surreal and disturbing image conveys the unnaturalness of this tragedy.

The final four stanzas show how swiftly and easily the scene is all cleaned up, as if it had never happened. This moment of horror and tragic death is eradicated so that the river of traffic, the river of time flows again.

It is worth noting that this poem is written without a single full stop, which certainly fits in with the central metaphor of the river. It might also be a comment of the way we travel and the way we live our lives. The title, with all its connotations of energy, life force and life-sustaining elements, must be considered ironic in view of the carnage and destruction that this particular river creates.

This is a modern age poem, a modern age view of death. It features death by machine. It shows our careless living, our carelessness with life. The pointless death here is given such a very brief consideration in our so busy world. It is news but for a moment. It is presented with graphic visibility in this age of the image. The humans are merely ‘the unnamed dead’. It is definitely a poem that grows out of the TV age. But it is very effective for all that when we consider the thoughts it provokes about the way we live and the values we hold.

736 Caitríona O’Reilly

Interlude In fact, we learn in lines 5–9 that Binn had its own attractions for her: the godlike ‘six- foot clean-limbed blondes’ who were also there for the summer. O’Reilly uses short but A reading of the poem vivid descriptions to convey the different men she encountered. From one, she learned Caitríona O’Reilly hints as to what her poem is about with the title that she has chosen about a Norwegian author and his work, a German group and herbal tea. But this was for it: ‘Interlude’. This tells us that the experience that she remembers, of working for not the only man that she met, nor all that she learned, for in lines 10–13 she describes the summer in Binn, was very different to what she had experienced before and would her experiences with three other men: how she was called ‘pure’ in a ‘nasty’ way by one, experience after, in her more usual way of life. experienced ‘a failed seduction’ with another and had a ‘crush’ on the third. From these four men, she learned about relationships between the sexes, about different cultures and In lines 1–4, the poet’s tone (the emotion in the poet’s voice) conveys the wonder that about herself. The tone of these lines conveys the feelings of excitement, freedom and she felt at the way in which European countries, unlike Ireland, which is surrounded by independence that the poet felt as she threw herself into all of these new experiences. miles of sea, exist closely together on the one landmass. She was fascinated that Italy was She certainly does not seem to have been frightened or unhappy. only ‘five miles further’ from Binn in Switzerland, and yet it was a very different place. For her, Italy conjured up images of heat, sun and irresponsible showiness with its gelati (ice In lines 14–17 we see how the summer came to an end with ‘thunder’ and ‘ice’. The poet’s cream) and brightly coloured bougainvillea, while Binn had colder air and was far more description of the way in which she ‘bid a tender farewell to the urinals’ is somewhat ironic responsible and law abiding, the perfect example of the Swiss approach to life. But she (having the opposite meaning), as cleaning the urinals cannot have been pleasant. But seems to have been happy to stay in Binn, as she refers to Italy as a ‘rumour’, suggesting ‘tender farewell’ does suggest the regret that she felt about the ending of her chance to that she never actually travelled the five miles to see it. experience a different world.

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Her reluctance to return to her usual world and way of life is evident from that it made her feel exhilarated, excited and alive. Clearly, this is much the temptation that she felt to continue on to more new worlds by taking more effective than saying ‘the air in Binn was cold and fresh’. a ‘Berlin flat’ for ‘three months’. But as the final lines of the poem reveal, she headed back to her normal life. At the airport, her tone shows none Similarly, her use of words from languages other than English vividly of the excitement or wonder of the earlier lines. Instead, there are images conveys her experience of living in Europe and meeting people from that suggest how she felt in this, her usual world: trapped, like the kitten in many different countries and cultures. Learning words in a new language the basket, and unhappily struggling to cope, as indicated by the kitten’s is always an exciting part of travelling and showing off by using them wailing and the ‘jittery pilot’ trying to make sure that he would follow the when we get home is even better. The poet uses ‘gelati’, the Italian for ice right course. She had to accept that she ‘was back’: back to her usual life, cream, and refers to the ‘bier-garten’ rather than the beer-garden. She also back to her usual behaviour and, it would seem, back to feeling trapped refers to a Norwegian writer, Hamsun, ‘Kraftwerk’, a German group, and and struggling to cope. For her, the ‘interlude’ was over. ‘Kräutertee’, the German for an herbal tea. By using these words in their original form, rather than translated into English, we get more of a sense Communicating experiences vividly of the poet’s experience of engaging with new languages and new ideas. Poets work very hard to communicate experiences as vividly and as Again, contrast this with the poet simply saying ‘I learned some words in effectively as possible to their readers so that a poem is not simply reading Italian and German’. the meanings of words, but actually sharing in the experience. Here, Caitríona O’Reilly uses imagery that appeals to the senses to convey her reactions, feelings and experiences in Binn. One excellent example of this is the image that she uses in line 4 to suggest her experience of breathing the cold, fresh air of Binn: ‘where to breathe was like a sea- plunge’. This image is a simile (comparing one thing to another using ‘like’ or ‘as’) in that it compares her breathing in the cold air to the ‘sea-plunge’ to suggest more vividly what the experience was like for her. The poet appeals to the sense of touch by suggesting that feeling this air in her nose, mouth and lungs was like diving into the sea. This implies that the effects of the cold air washed over her both physically and emotionally,

738 Sinéad Morrissey Notes and Explorations: John G. Fahy

Genetics family togetherness, in a genetic sense, that sustains this poem through the revelation of difficulties that follow. A reading of the poem This is, of course, as the title indicates, a poem about genetics, the biological science The change of atmosphere and circumstances appear abruptly in the second stanza. The that deals with heredity and variations. In this case, certain physical features of the poet’s extremeness of the separation is caught in the word ‘repelled’ in the geographical space hands are the focus of the topic. But it is not any aspect of the physical inheritance that (‘separate hemispheres’) and in the visual image of ‘may sleep with other lovers’. Yet interests the poet. For instance, she doesn’t examine any of the detail of her fingers or despite the almost cosmic sense of the break-up, her parents are still linked in her. This is her palms. Genetics for her is not only about physical inheritance and physical identity, conveyed in a beautiful, tactile, even loving image: ‘but in me they touch where fingers it is also about emotional inheritance and identity. And that’s what is particularly link to palms’. unexpected and interesting about this poem. The third stanza follows the same pattern, opening with another image of dissolution: Her sense of her family identity is powerfully conveyed in the first stanza. The thoughts ‘With nothing left of their togetherness but friends | who quarry for their image by a are framed in the present tense, stated factually and in concrete, visual images: ‘My river’. Even the meaning is elusive here. There is nothing left of their ‘togetherness’ but father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.’ Here we have an image of intimate the friends they had when they were married – that much is clear. Perhaps the friends are physical co-existence, ‘in my fingers … in my palms’. It is something tactile, continuously being compared to 19th-century gold prospectors, panning for gold in a river, looking to present and gives her a sense of emotional security and well-being: ‘I lift them up and recover something precious but whose search was surely in vain. Now the only concrete look at them with pleasure’. And she has absolute conviction about it, as we hear in that and final evidence she still has of her parents’ marriage is literally in her hands. She definite ‘I know’: ‘I know my parents made me by my hands’. It is this powerful image of expresses this in minimalist terms: ‘at least I know their marriage by my hands’. This is probably the lowest point of the poem.

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The following two stanzas provide another unexpected change in mood Overall in this poem there is a positive, if unusual, slant given to the idea and imagery – this time, a lift – which is expressed in predominantly of family – that despite break-up and geographic separation, there is religious terms. Stanza four opens with that child’s image of hands a sense in which ‘family’ always survives and will continue to survive, in joined to represent a church, with the two forefingers extended to make genetic coding. It is a poem that finds optimism and hope in science. It a steeple. When she opens her hands she still sees ‘my father’s by my gets its cohesion and force from the way the recurring images of hands fingers, my mother’s by my palms’. The image recalls the church wedding are used with subtle variations to carry a range of ideas and thoughts on ceremony, an idea developed in the fifth stanza with reference to priest the theme. Consider the suggestions carried by hands through the poem: and psalms. This stanza concludes with the recurring optimistic note and They are the source of definite knowledge about her family identity image of continuity provided by the genetics metaphor. Her body is the (stanza 1). living register on which their marriage has been recorded: ‘My body is They are the location where mother and father are still in contact, their marriage register. | I re-enact their wedding with my hands.’ This is metaphorically (stanza 2). a clever and interesting idea – a continuous living wedding that can be They provide definite evidence of the marriage (stanza 3). re-enacted by proxy by the child of their marriage. It is the triumph of The religious image of joined hands shaped into a chapel recalls the genetics over the failure of human hopes and dreams. romance of a church wedding. They also drive the imaginative idea of being able to re-enact her This upbeat mood, rediscovered, is capitalised on and projected forward parents’ wedding through that configuration of her hands. into the future with confidence and certainty in the final stanza, the Finally, they carry that optimistic image of continuity in bequeathing only one of four lines. She and her partner will make their own DNA fingers and palms to a future generation. family chain as they ‘take up the skin’s demands | for mirroring in bodies of the future’. She uses the legal term employed in wills, ‘bequeath’, to emphasise this inheritance to a future generation: ‘I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.’ This verse recaptures the image of family togetherness seen in the first stanza – ‘So take me with you’, ’I’ll bequeath … if you bequeath’. It concludes with that same note of certainty found in the first stanza, except this time it is plural: ‘We know our parents’.

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