Texts Discussed in the Educated Imagination

Texts Discussed in The Educated Imagination

1. William Shakespeare, “The lunatic, the lover and the poet”

Hippolyta. ‘Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. Theseus. More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lovers and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but aprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! Hippolyta. But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever strange and admirable.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.1-27; cf. EI, 75-76.

2. Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor”

You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon—

1 The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilirations of changes; The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound— Steel against intimation—the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X. from Transport to Summer (1947); cf. EI, 30-33

3. W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

I. That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

III O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal

2 It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. from The Tower (1928; written 1927); cf. EI, 54-55.

4. William Blake, “The Sick Rose”

O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. from Songs of Innocence and Of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789-1794); cf. EI, 73-75.

5. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time. the last sentence of Proust’s great continuous novel, In Search of Lost Time, translated Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin , revised D.J. Enright, Volume 6: Time Regained (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922; revised 1992), 451; cf. EI, 79-80.

Du moins, si elle m’était laissée assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je past d’abord d’y décrire les hommes (cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstreux) comme occupant une place si considérable, à côté de celle si restreinte

3 qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place au contraire prolongée sans mesure— puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants plongés dans les années, à des époques si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer—dans le Temps.

A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferre, Édition de la Pléiade, Volume 7: Le temps retrouvé (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 366.

6. James Joyce, “riverrun”

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to widlderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their muper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thusrtpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttened a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall (badabadagharaghtakamminarronnkkonnbronntonnronntonnthunntro- varrhouawskawntoohoohoodenenthrnuk!) of a once wallstrait olparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrensy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finneagn, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsirst loved livvy.

*** sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold fad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Oneto moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the foy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass belush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussofthlee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee! Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

PARIS, 1922-1939.

4 Finnegans Wake (1939), 3, 628; cf. EI,103-04.

7. Dylan Thomas, “Altarwise by owl-light” i Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies; Abaddon and the hangnail cracked from Adam, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream. Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds, Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg, With bonds unbottoned to the half-way winds, Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg, Scraped at my cradle in a walking word That night of time under the Christward shelter: I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer. ii Death is all metaphors, shape in one history; The child that sucketh long is shooting up, The planet-ducted pelican of circles Weans on an artery the gender’s strip; Child of the short spark in a shapeless country Soon sets alight a long stick from the cardle; The horizontal cross-bonds of Abaddon, You bu the cavery over the black stairs, Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam, And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars. Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent, Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers Over these groundworks thrusting through a pavement And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

*** x Let the tail’s sailor from a Christian voyage Atlaswise hod half-way off the dummy bay Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance: So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly. Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail

5 Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east, What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost? Green as beginning, let the garden diving

Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree. from Collected Poems (1957); cf. EI, 113-14.

8. St. John Perse, from Anabasis

Ha! ampler the story of the leaf shadows on our walls, and the water more pure than in any dream, thanks, thanks be given it for being no dream! My soul is full of deceit like the agile strong sea under the vocation of eloquence! The strong smells encompass me. And doubt is cast on the reality of things. But if a man shall cherish his sorrow—let him be brought to light! and I say, let him be slain, otherwise there will be an uprising.

Ha! plus ample l’histoire de ces feuillages à nos murs, et l’eau plus pure qu’en des songes, grâces lui soient rendues de n’être pas un songe! Mon âme est pleine de mensonge, comme la mer agile et forte sous la vocation de l’éloquence! L’odeur puissante m’environne. Et le doute s’élèlve sur la réalité des choses. Mais si un homme tient pour agréable sa tristesse, qu’on le produise dans le jour! et mon avis est qu’on le tue, sinon il y aura une sédition. translated by T.S. Eliot (1938); reprinted in Collected Poems, Bollingen Series LXXXVII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 108, 109; cf. EI, 133-34.

9. The Story of Babel (cf. EI, 155)

11. AND the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 6. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language’ and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. 8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth’ and they left off to build the city. 9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11: 1-9 (King James Version); cf. EI, 155-56.

10. Robert Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

[i] There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling, Whether are learned bard or gifted child; To it all lines or lesser gauds belong That startle with their shining Such common stories as they stray into.

[ii] Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues, Or strange beasts that beset you, Of birds that croak at you the Triple will? Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns Below the Boreal Crown, Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

[iii] Water to water, ark again to ark, From woman back to woman: So each new victim treads unfalteringly The never altered circuit of his fate, Bringing twelve peers as witness Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

[iv] Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty, All fish below the thighs? She in her left hand bears a leafy quince; When, with her right she crooks a finger smiling, How may the King hold back? Royally then he barters life for love.

7 [v] Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched, Whose coils contain the ocean, Into whose chops with naked sword he springs, Then in black water, tangled by the reeds, Battles three days and nights, To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

[vi] Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly, The owl hoots from the elder, Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup: Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. The log groans and confesses There is one story and one story only.

[vii] Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling, Do not forget what flowers The great boar trampled down in ivy time. Her brow was creamy as the crested wave, Her sea-blue eyes were wild But nothing promised that is not performed. from Collected Poems; cf. EI, 51-52.

11. Jay Macpherson, “Anagogic Man”

Noah walks with head bent down; For between his nape and crown He carries, balancing with care, A golden bubble round and rare.

Its shimmering sides surround All us and our worlds, and bound Art and life, and wit and sense, Innocence and experience.

Forbear to startle him, lest some Poor soul to its destruction come, Slipped out of mind and past recall As if it never was at all.

O you that pass, if still he seems One absent-minded or in dreams,

8 Consider that your senses keep A death far deeper than his sleep.

Angel, declare: what sways when Noah nods? The sun, the stars, the figures of the gods. from The Boatman; cf. EI, 69.