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Minds Moving Upon Silence: PB Shelley, Robert Durham E-Theses MINDS MOVING ON SILENCE: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. GOSDEN-HOOD, SERENA,LUCY,MONTAGUE How to cite: GOSDEN-HOOD, SERENA,LUCY,MONTAGUE (2015) MINDS MOVING ON SILENCE: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11214/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Minds Moving Upon Silence: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Serena Gosden-Hood Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD Durham University Department of English Studies December, 2014 1 Abstract Minds Moving Upon Silence: P.B Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot. The purpose of this study is to explore the function and significance of the various representations and manifestations of silence in the poetry of Shelley, Browning, Yeats and Eliot. Attention ranges from specific allusions to the absence of speech and sound, to the role played by punctuation and poetic form. The choice of these poets stems from Shelley’s function as an acknowledged, influential precursor to both Browning and Yeats and, as an un-acknowledged, though arguably no less essential, influence on Eliot. The aim is to establish to what extent poetic interaction with silence alters and shifts in the period under study, and to make coherent the development from Shelley to Eliot in their fascination with silence, and its centrality to poetic expression. The approach primarily involves close textual analysis of the poetry itself, the objective being to access a new angle of consideration by focusing on each poet’s particular relationship with silence, and the extent to which this cumulatively expands into either a coherent philosophy, or a series of recurring themes on the part of the poet. The thesis is also concerned with poetic influence. Theorists who have previously written on silence, such as Steiner and Wagner- Lawlor, are also engaged with, as are critics concerned with the specific poets and epochs addressed (e.g Bloom, Ricks, Keach, O’Neill, and Perry). Chapters look in turn at Shelley’s Mont Blanc, considering the role played by silence in the poem’s consideration of the relationship between imagination and nature (1); at the same poet’s treatment of the relationship between poetry and death (2); at Browning’s relationship with the unrealized objective, especially in relation to love (3); at the role of the silent auditor in Browning’s dramatic monologues (4); at the relationship between silence and the unknown in Yeats’s poetry, and the extent to which he substituted an aesthetic approach for Browning’s preoccupation with justice and pragmatism (5); at silence and the fertile nature of the contradictory in Yeats (6); at modernity and language’s simultaneous pursuit of, and resistance to, silence in the poetry of Eliot (7). Overall, the thesis demonstrates that to discuss the silence of poetry should be as natural, and as necessary, as to discuss the language of it. 2 Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………pg 7 Chapter One “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain”: Silence, nature and the poetic voice in Shelley.………………………………………………………………..pg 17 Chapter Two “Speak to me once again… ”: Silence, death and elegy in Shelley.…….pg 62 Chapter Three “And we missed it, lost it forever.”: Silence in love, religion and the unrealized moment in Robert Browning………………………..………pg 94 Chapter Four “With deeds as well undone”: Silence and the simultaneity of opposites in Browning’s dramatic monologues…………………………….…………pg 139 Chapter Five “His mind moves upon silence”: Silence in the individual and the unknown in the poetry of W.B. Yeats…………………………………………………pg 179 3 Chapter Six The Fruitful Void: silence and the fertile nature of the contradictory in Yeats…………………………………………………….……………..…pg 215 Chapter Seven Ending our song: silence, time and the fragmentation of language in T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land………………………………………………….pg 250 Conclusion …………………………………………………………pg 344 Bibliography ……………………………………………………….pg 347 4 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 5 Acknowledgements My profound gratitude to my supervisor, Michael O’Neill, whose unwavering and superhuman patience during this protracted process puts one in mind of the eponymous archangel. His advice, erudition and support are what has made it possible to arrive at a submission date. My thanks also to Stephen Regan, my second supervisor, and to the rest of the Durham English department, among whom I have been grateful to spend so much time. I also wish to thank Harold Bloom, both for his kindness and support and for the fact that his ‘Yeats, Stevens Lawrence and Crane’ class at Yale was the impetus for this thesis. Love and thanks that defy both language and silence are due to my parents, without whose unceasing insight and generosity neither this, nor anything else in my life, would have been possible. I likewise wish to thank my Great-Aunt and Uncle, Dene and Brian Degas, for their love and kindness, especially during my time at school. Many thanks are also due to my wonderful brother Sebastian for making a marathon drive to Newmarket to fix the internet one drizzly Saturday afternoon. Finally, I would like to thank David Hemming for his care and patience in the final months of this elaborate process, and to extend my apologies for the fact that a tidal wave of literature-related neuroses overwhelmed his otherwise functional life. Dedication In memory of my grandmother, Peggy ‘Hammy’ Gosden, who will always be much missed. 6 Introduction “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”1 So wrote George Eliot in her 1874 novel, Middlemarch, and it is a thought that conjures an image of all that is obscured by a cursory and imprecise perception of our surroundings. It is also the germ of the notion that silence itself may be a far more populated condition than a traditional understanding of it would allow. Within this space, which is classified by its own quietness, there may exist a riot of sound that, could we attune ourselves in the necessary fashion, is only waiting to be heard and comprehended. The relationship between silence and literature is, necessarily, one that falls somewhere along a hypothetical line between the cooperative and the combative. On the one hand silence can be understood as the antithesis of language, the inevitable and approaching absolute which our temporary rhetoric strives to eclipse and overwhelm. It might be said that an anxiety about silence, to the literary mind, is synonymous with anxiety regarding death. In Shakespeare we see the consummate rhetorician, Hamlet, declare, “But I do prophesy th’election lights / On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice. / So tell him th’occurrents more and less / 1George Eliot. Middlemarch. Ed. Bert G Hornbeck. New York: Norton, 1977. 7 Which have solicited. – The rest is silence.” (Act V, Scene ii).2 There is some comfort perhaps to be found in passing, as Hamlet does, the metaphorical baton of the “voice” to a worthy perpetuator but there is still the emphasis on the fact that death robs us of our language. At the same time, however, Hamlet’s musical pun on ‘rest’ suggests that ‘silence’ has its own eloquence. Poetry and silence formulate a perhaps even more complex relationship than silence and prose, insofar as the space upon the page, the visualization of silence, has a part to play in the synthesis of allusion and metaphor that may also serve to depict it. The porcelain gap following an unanswered question, the ellipses or colon that seems almost to enter into eternity, or the dash that, abyss- like, may separate one thought or image from another, all form part of the tapestry that makes up the language and imagery of silence in poetry. To say that every poem begins and ends with silence is not a remarkable observation but an exploration of the relationship each poem has with the underlying living and eternal silence, to which it can sometimes give voice, may help us to access the extraordinary. The anxiety dimension of silence, its condition as the opposite of language, is something that has cultural ubiquity. George Steiner in his Language and Silence writes that: 2William Shakespeare, Stanley Wells, and Gary Taylor. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press, 1986. 8 Both Hebraic and Classical mythology have in them the traces of an ancient fear. The tower broken in Babel and Orpheus torn, the prophet blinded so that sight is yielded for insight, Tamyris killed, Marsyas flayed, his voice turning to the cry of blood in the wind – these tell of a sense, deeper rooted than historical memory, of the miraculous outrage of human speech.3 Steiner suggests that there is some essential human conviction of the transgressive nature of speech, as though the fact of “harvesting echo where there was silence before” must somehow have an unknown but decisive cost.4 It is a thought that appears preoccupied with the unruptured purity of the natural world.
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