Poetry in English Language Literature

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UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DO PIAUÍ - UESPI CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS E LETRAS – CCHL CURSO: LICENCIATURA PLENA EM LETRAS INGLÊS

POETRY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LITERATURE

Part two

PROFA. DRA. MARIA DO SOCORRO BAPTISTA BARBOSA

OUTUBRO 2012 1

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Robert Frost

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3. Early 16th Century Literature ………………………………………………………. 4 3.1. Introduction: Early 16th century …………………………………………………. 4 Toward the Golden Age – Louis Untermeyer ………………………………………. 4 3.2. Renaissance Authors ……………………………………………………………. 4 Sir Thomas Wyatt ……………………………………………………………………… 4 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ……………………………………………………… 8 4. Elizabethan Poetry …………………………………………………………………. 11 Elizabethan Poetry – Harry Blamires ………………………………………...... 11 4.1. Sir Philip Sidney ………………………………………………………………… 22 4.2. Edmund Spencer ………………………………………………………………… 25 4.3. William Shakespeare …………………………………………………………….. 28 5. Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets ………………………………………………… 31 Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets – Harry Blamires ……………………………… 31 5.1. John Donne ……………………………………………………………………….. 46 5.2. Richard Lovelace ………………………………………………………………… 50 5.3. Henry Vaughan …………………………………………………………………… 51 6. Restoration ………………………………………………………………………… 53 Milton to Dryden – Harry Blamires ………………………………………………… 53 6.1. John Milton ……………………………………………………………………… 64 Paradise Lost ………………………………………………………………………… 67 6.2. John Dryden ………………………………………………………………………. 82 7. Enlightenment ………………………………………………………………………. 83 Enlightenment – John Rahn ………………………………………………………….. 83 7.1. Alexander Pope ………………………………………………………………… 95 7.2. Robert Burns ……………………………………………………………………… 104 7.3. William Blake………………………………………………………………………. 107 8. Romanticism ………………………………………………………………………… 111 Form in Romantic Poetry – Elizabeth Nitchie ………………………………………. 111 8.1. William Worsworth ……………………………………………………………….. 124 8.2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge ………………………………………………………... 129 8.3. Lord Byron ………………………………………………………………………… 140 3

8.4. Percy Bysshe Shelley ……………………………………………………………. 146 8.5. John Keats ………………………………………………………………………... 151 9. Victorian Age ………………………………………………………………………... 155 Victorian Poetry – Harry Blamires …………………………………………………… 155 9.1. Elizabeth Browning ………………………………………………………………. 185 9.2. Robert Browning …………………………………………………………………. 187 9.3. Christina Rossetti ………………………………………………………………… 192 9.4. Gerard Manley Hopkins …………………………………………………………. 194 9.5. Alfred Tennyson ………………………………………………………………….. 196 10. Twentieth Century Poetry ………………………………………………………... 201 10.1. The Georgian Poets and the two World Wars ………………………………. 201 1898-1945: Hardy to Auden – George G. Gilpin …………………………………… 201 Thomas Hardy …………………………………………………………………………. 221 Rudyard Kipling ………………………………………………………………………... 225 W. H. Auden ……………………………………………………………………………. 227 10.2. Modernism ………………………………………………………………………. 230 Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot – Calvin Bedient ……………………………………………. 230 William Butler Yeats …………………………………………………………………… 231 D. H. Lawrence ………………………………………………………………………… 235 Mina Loy ………………………………………………………………………………... 239 10.3. British Poetry from 1945 to 1990 ……………………………………………… 242 Poetry in England, 1945-1990 – Vincent Sherry …………………………………… 242 Dylan Thomas …………………………………………………………………………. 269 Ted Hughes ……………………………………………………………………………. 271 10.4. British Poetry Now ……………………………………………………………… 273 Directions in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century poetry – Joseph Black et al …………………………………………………………………….. 273 Carol Ann Duffy ……………………………………………………………………….. 276 Alice Oswald …………………………………………………………………………… 278 References …………………………………………………………………………….. 281

3. Early 16th Century Literature

3.1. Introduction – Early 16th Century

Toward the Golden Age

Louis Untermeyer

BETWEEN the twelfth and fifteenth centuries English literature was diffused as it was diverse; it was composed for no one type of audience and no special class. The ballads were written primarily for the entertainment of the common people, but even in so "courtly" a writer as Chaucer there is much that is forthright, racy, and vulgar — in the sense of vulgus, pertaining to "the people." As we approach the sixteenth century, literature grows more patrician; with Wyatt, Howard, Raleigh, and Spenser poetry becomes the expression of an aristocracy. The aristocratic spirit remained dominant for almost two centuries, when it gave way to a literature written with organized society as its background, a literature concerned with the middle class and written chiefly by the middle class. Another century brought another change. Society itself was challenged by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century; the "romantic" period of Wordsworth and Shelley was devoted to the idea of individualism. But, as the "new learning" began to lure the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century man of culture, civilization was reflected in an increasing "elevation" of manner. The social sense, as V. de Sola Pinto wrote in THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, "was established by the Tudors, and exploited by the Stuarts, till it came to an end at the Revolution of 1688," when James II fled to France. -175-

3.2. Renaissance Authors o Sir Thomas Wyatt [1503?-1542] (In UNTERMEYER)

THE reputation of Thomas Wyatt rests, rather heavily, on the fact that he was the first to employ the Italian sonnet form in English poetry. This characterization presents Wyatt in the role of a research student and a cold formalist. It is anything but a true picture. Born about 1503, dead before he was forty, Wyatt was a hot- blooded courtier. Married at eighteen to Lord Cobham's daughter, he was Anne 5

Boleyn's lover before she was married to Henry VIII, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London after Anne's later infidelities were discovered. In his mid-thirties he was again imprisoned on suspicion of treason, and it required a strong personal following to procure his release. As a poet, Wyatt was precocious. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, when he was thirteen, in 1516, the year of its opening. His undergraduate verses were being quoted when he received his M.A. at seventeen. At twenty-five, he was sent as an ambassador to Italy, and it was there that he came under the influence of the Italian love poets, especially Petrarch, whom he translated. But Wyatt was more than a translator and transplanter; he was an innovator. His experiments Figure 01. Sir Thomas Wyatt Source: were as bold as they were accomplished; his sonnets http://www.luminarium.org/renlit /wyattholbein.jpg gave a new stimulus to English poetry. The first of the following sonnets, although adapted from Petrarch, is presumed to refer to Anne Boleyn, and the thirteenth line — "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am" -- indicates that Anne Boleyn was either married to the king or was considered his exclusive property. The Hind And graven with diamonds in letters plain Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an There is written, her fair neck round hind, about, But as for me, helas! I may no more. "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, The vain travail hath wearied me so And wild for to hold, though I seem sore, tame." I am of them that furthest come behind. -188- The Lover Renounceth Love Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth ever! afore Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, more: Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. Senec and Plato call me from thy lore Who list her hunt, I put him out of To perfect wealth my wit for to doubt, endeavor. As well as I, may spend his time in In blindest error when I did perséver, vain; 6

Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so I fly aloft yet can I not arise; sore, And nought I have, and all the world I Hath taught me to set in trifles no seize on, store; That locks nor looseth, holdeth me in And 'scape forth, since liberty is lever. prison, Therefore, farewell! go trouble younger And holds me not, yet can I 'scape no hearts, wise: And in me claim no more authority. Nor letteth me live, not die at my With idle youth go use thy property, devise, And thereon spend thy many brittle And yet of death it giveth me occasion. darts; Without eye I see; without tongue I For hitherto though I have lost my time, plain: Me list no longer rotten boughs to I wish to perish yet I ask for health; climb. -189-

Description of the Contrarious I love another, and I hate myself; Passions I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain. I find no peace, and all my war is done; Lo, thus displeaseth me both death I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like and life; ice; And my delight is causer of this strife.

Although Wyatt is continually classed as a sonneteer, he was a lyric poet of the first order. His passionate measures — at their best in the lines beginning: They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek -- strongly influenced his young friend, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the lyricists who followed him. Wyatt's verse had its beginnings in the work of foreign poets, but its energetic fulfillment is his own. The quality may be undefinable, but it springs from a fresh awareness, an alertness which is immediately recognizable and finally unmistakable.

The Lover Showeth How He Is To take bread at my hand; and now Forsaken they range Busily seeking with a continual change. They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, Thankéd be Fortune, it hath been With naked foot stalking within my otherwise chamber: Twenty times better; but once in Once have I seen them gentle, tame, speciál, and meek, In thin array, after a pleasant guise, That now are wild, and do not once When her loose gown did from her remember, shoulders fall, That sometime they have put And she me caught in her arms long themselves in danger and small, And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss, 7

And softly said, "Dear heart, how like To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon: you this?" Then shalt thou know beauty but lent, And wish and want as I have done. It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking: Now cease, my lute: this is the last But all is turned now through my Labor that thou and I shall waste, gentleness And ended is that we begun. Into a bitter fashion of forsaking, Now is this song both sung and past: And I have leave to go of her My lute be still, for I have done. goodness, -191- And she also to use new-fangledness. But since that I unkindly so am servéd, The Lover Rejoiceth "How like you this?" -- What hath she now deservéd? Tangled was I in Love's snare, Oppressed with pain, torment with -190- care; The Lover Complaineth Of grief right sure, of joy quite bare, Clean in despair by cruelty. My lute awake! Perform the last But ha! ha! ha! full well is me, Labor that thou and I shall waste, For I am now at liberty. The end that I have now begun: For when this song is sung and past, The woeful days so full of pain, My lute be still, for I have done. The weary nights all spent in vain, The labor lost for so small gain, As to be heard where ear is none, To write them all it will not be. As lead to grave in marble stone, But ha! ha! ha! full well is me, My song may pierce her heart as soon. For I am now at liberty. Should we then sigh, or sing, or moan? No, no, my lute, for I have done. With feignéd words which were but wind The rocks do not so cruelly To long delays was I assign'd; Repulse the waves continually, Her wily looks my wits did blind; As she my suit and affectión; Whate'er she would I would agree. So that I am past remedy, But ha! ha! ha! full well is me, Whereby my lute and I have done. For I am now at liberty.

Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain Was never bird tangled in lime That mak'st but game on earnest pain. That broke away in better time, Think not alone under the sun Than I, that rotten boughs did climb Unquit to cause thy lovers plain, And had no hurt but 'scapéd free. Although my lute and I have done. Now ha! ha! ha! full well is me, For I am now at liberty. Perchance thee lie withered and old In winter nights that are so cold, Patience Plaining in vain unto the moon: Thy wishes then dare not be told. Patience, though I have not Care then who list, for I have done. The thing that I require, I must, of force, God wot, And then may chance thee to repent Forbear my most desire; The time that thou hast lost and spent For no ways can I find 8

To sail against the wind. To heal me of my woe. -192- Patience without offence Patience, do what they will Is a painful patience. To work me woe or spite, I shall content me still Disdain To think both day and night; If in the world there be more woe To think and hold my peace, Than I have in my heart, Since there is no redress. Whereso it is, it doth come fro, And in my breast there doth it grow Patience, withouten blame, For to increase my smart. For I offended nought; Alas, I am receipt of every care, I know they know the same, And of my life each sorrow claims his Though they have changed their part. thought. Who list to live in quietness Was ever thought so moved By me let him beware: To hate that it hath loved? For I by high disdain Am made without redress; Patience of all my harm, And unkindness, alas, hath slain For fortune is my foe; My poor true heart all comfortless. Patience must be the charm -193-

If you want to know more about the relationship between Thomas Wyatt and Ann Boleyn, read: http://englishhistory.net/tudor/monarchs/boleyn-poems.html You can also see the film The Other Boleyn Girl, directed by Justin Chadwick (2008) or the TV Series The Tudors, created by Michael Hirst.

o Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey [1517?-1547] (In UNTERMEYER)

WYATT'S most eminent disciple, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was about fourteen years younger than his master. The date of Surrey's birth is uncertainly given as 1517, but there seems no doubt of his royal blood; his father was descended from Edward the Confessor, and his mother from Edward III. Brought up at court, he was companioned by princes; his most Figure 02. The Poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey by intimate comrade was the Duke of Richmond, the Hans Holbein the Younger, 1542. illegitimate son of Henry VIII. The two boys went to Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wiki France when Surrey was fifteen; a year later they pedia/commons/7/74/Holbein_- _henryhoward01.jpg were recalled to England, where Richmond married Surrey's sister, Mary Howard. 9

During the next dozen years Surrey was considered one of the most active, as well as one of the most fascinating, members of the court. He helped suppress a rebellion; he took command of a naval campaign against France; he jousted, quarreled continually, and wrote intermittently. His temper was easily roused — a record of 1539, when Surrey was twenty-two, describes him as "the most foolish and proud boy that is in England." His pride was his undoing. A foolish joining of the heraldic emblem of Edward the Confessor with his own was interpreted as a claim to succeed Henry VIII. The charge seemed frivolous, but Surrey's impulsiveness had made many enemies. Jealously at first, savagely at last, they testified against him, and he was convicted. On January 21, 1547, he was beheaded on Tower Hill. He was still in his thirtieth year. Although Surrey lacked the strength of his master, he surpassed him in range and refinement. As an innovator he was the first to use blank verse consistently; he translated two books of the AENEID. But, although, like Wyatt, he learned much from the Italians, the forty poems Tottel printed in the MISCELLANY proved that he could play new — and native — tunes upon old and imported instruments. -194- Complaint of a Lover Rebuked For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain. Love, that doth reign and live within my Yet from my lord shall not my foot thought, remove -- And build his seat within my captive Sweet is his death that takes his end breast, by love. Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought, Vow to Love Faithfully Oft in my face he doth his banner rest. But she that taught me love, and suffer Set me whereas the sun doth parch pain, the green, My doubtful hope and eke my hot Or where his beams do not dissolve desire the ice, With shamefast look to shadow and In temperate heat where he is felt and refrain, seen; Her smiling grace converteth straight to In presence 'prest of people, mad or ire. wise; And coward Love then to the heart Set me in high or yet in low degree, apace In longest night or in the shortest day, Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk In clearest sky or where clouds thickest and plain be, His purpose lost, and dare not show In lusty youth or when my hairs are his face. gray. 10

Set me in heaven, ' in earth, or else in Tickle treasure, abhorrèd of reason, hell; Dangerous to deal with, vain, of none In hill, or dale, or in the foaming flood; avail, Thrall or at large, alive, whereso I Costly in keeping, passed not worth dwell, two peason, Sick or in health, in evil fame or good; Slippery in sliding as an eelès tail, Hers will I be, and only with this Hard to attain, once gotten not geason, thought Jewel of jeopardy that peril doth assail, Content myself although my chance be False and untrue, enticèd oft to nought. treason, Enemy to youth (that most may I -195- bewail!), Ah, bitter sweet! infecting as the poison, Brittle Beauty Thou farest as fruit that with the frost is taken: Brittle beauty that nature made so frail, Today ready ripe, tomorrow all too Whereof the gift is small, and short the shaken. season, Flow'ring today, tomorrow apt to fail,

One of the poems with which Surrey's name is most closely associated did not appear with his others in Tottel MISCELLANY but in William Baldwin TREATIES OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. Strictly speaking, it is not Surrey's, for the original is in Latin, an expanded "epigram" by Martial. But, though the concept was not the English poet's, and though the sentiment was not new even in Martial's day, Surrey's translation has become a classic of English literature.

The Things That Cause a Quiet Life The mean diet, no dainty fare; True wisdom joined with simpleness; My friend, the things that do attain The happy life be these, I find: -196- The riches left, not got with pain; The night dischargéd of all care, The fruitful ground, the quiet mind; Where wine the wit may not oppress; The faithful wife, without debate; The equal friend; no grudge, no strife; Such sleeps as may beguile the night: No charge of rule, nor governance; Content thyself with thine estate, Without disease the healthful life; Ne wish for death ne fear his might. The household of continuance; -197-

If you want to read more poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, you can find them at: http://www.bartleby.com/people/Howard.html.

4. Elizabethan Poetry

Elizabethan Poetry

Harry Blamires

Sometimes the spirit of an age seems to be epitomized in the work and personality of one man. Such a man was Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86); one in whom the aristocratic virtues flowered in a life of study, travel, diplomacy and active service. When fatally wounded in the Netherlands, he handed to a dying soldier the cup of water brought for himself and spoke the famous words: ‘Thy need is greater than mine.’ The value that Sidney attached to literature may be judged from his Apology for Poetry, a serious critical work on the nature of poetry, the various categories of imaginative writing, and the current state of poetry in England. In it Sidney presents the poet as one who teaches more effectively than the philosopher. The philosopher ‘teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him, that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught’. But the poet is ‘the right popular philosopher’. He ‘yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description; which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul as much as the other doth’. Sidney’s Arcadia, whose first version was composed for his sister the Countess of Pembroke, is to modern eyes a remarkable extravaganza. It is a romance-epic in prose. It shows what are the effects of passions and vices on the individual, of bad rule and rebellious factions on the state, and it recommends private virtue and public duty. Its prose is interspersed with verse, and the prose itself is highly contrived, abounding in conceits and rhetorical devices, beautifully weighed and planted. Shipwreck, piracy, disguise, death sentences, imprisonment, magic potions — all the ingredients of the tragicomedy plot are interwoven with beautiful descriptions and fine speeches. -81- The once fashionable tendency to criticize the mixture as capricious and unbridled fails to do justice to the polychromatic character of the Renaissance mind. Sidney’s great work as a pure poet is the sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, whose basis is autobiographical. Sidney first met Penelope Devereux (‘Stella’) when she was a girl of twelve. She was married to Lord Rich very much against her 12

will — though not, it would appear, because she loved Sidney. Sidney’s affection seems to have grown in inverse ratio to her accessibility. The composition of sonnets continued after her marriage and even after his own (to Frances Walsingham). Astrophel and Stella contains poems very varied in mood and tone, and no attempt is made to present a fully coherent narrative. Rather it is a series of meditations on life and love — some intensely personal, others light-heartedly conventional. On the serious side, a conflict between love and virtue is represented with acuteness, as in Sonnet IV, where the poet begs Virtue to let him take some rest, for his mouth is too tender for her bit. The personal hunger sometimes breaks passionately across the dialogue: So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, As fast thy virtue bends that love to good: But, ah, Desire still cries, give me some food. (LXXI)

The sonnets are intermittently interrupted by lyrics, and one of the loveliest outbursts against Stella’s chaste refusal of Astrophel’s pressure is the Fourth Song, with its irresistible refrain: Take me to thee, and thee to me: No, no, no, no, my Dear, let be.

But equally charming are those sonnets in which the introspection and the analysis of Stella’s responses are touched with a light irony. There is wry humour in Astrophel’s contrast between Stella’s lack of pity for his ‘beclouded’ face and her capacity to dissolve in tears on hearing a tragic love story about ‘lovers never known’. If fancy can provoke more sympathy than her own ‘servants wreck’, he begs to be read as a tragedy: I am not I; pity the tale of me.

Sir Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke) (1554-1628) was born in the -82- month before Sidney, was a school-fellow of his at Shrewsbury School and became his life-long friend. Knowledge his light hath lost, valour hath slain her knight, Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world’s delight. So he wrote in his ‘Epitaph’ on Sidney which appeared in the anthology, The Phoenix Nest (1593). Greville’s sequence of 109 poems in different metres, Caelica (1633), published posthumously, shows a remarkable development. Some of the 13

early love poems (such as ‘I, with whose colours Myra dressed her head’) combine with the rhetorical verve of Sidney a toughness of argument that seems to foreshadow the work of the Metaphysical poets, but increasingly Greville’s religious sense of the ephemerality of things temporal asserts itself to bring human desires under judgement. The resultant tension is finely capsulated in famous lines from his closet-play, Mustapha (1609): Oh wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law to another bound: Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound.

Another who paid tribute in verse to Sidney after his death was Edmund Spenser (?1552-99). Spenser’s pastoral elegy, ‘Astrophel’, shows how immediate was the impact of Sidney’s sonnet sequence on his acquaintances, for it dwells much on Stella’s magnetism: To her he vowed the service of his days, On her he spent the riches of his wit: For her he made the hymns of immortal praise, Of only her he sung, he thought, he writ.

Spenser himself celebrated his own courtship of Elizabeth Boyle (his second wife) with a sonnet sequence, Amoretti. Quieter in tone than Sidney’s sonnets, they move steadily within the conventionalized literary idioms without becoming obvious. (One of the Amoretti has found its way into our hymn books — ’Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day’.) But the succeeding Epithalamion, in which Spenser -83- celebrated his marriage, exhibits the mature range of a new and distinctive poetic voice. The poem is a magnificent blend of high religious dignity with rich sensuousness, and is vibrant with reverence and joy. Open the temple gates unto my love, Open them wide that she may enter in.

The scriptural overtones, reaching back to the Song of Solomon and the Psalms (‘Wake, now my love, awake!’ and the ‘Damzels’ with ‘their tymbrels’), hymn a golden-mantled, green-garlanded, pearl-sprinkled maiden queen who yet has a breast ‘like to a bowl of cream uncrudded’ and ‘paps like lillies budded’. This poem, and the famous Prothalamion, a ‘spousal verse’ made in another’s honour (‘Sweet 14

Thames run softly, till I end my song’), represent some of Spenser’s most delightful work outside The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s literary career had earlier started in earnest with the publication of his Shepherds Calendar in 1579. This is a collection of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year; and they are mostly dialogues between shepherds, touching on love, religion, poetry and other matters, and figuring the author himself as ‘Colin Clout’. The June eclogue is ‘wholly vowed to the complayning of Colins ill successe in his love’, but in the May eclogue ‘under the persons of two shepheards Piers and Palinodie be represented two forms of pastoures or Ministers, or the protestant and the Catholique: whose chief talke standeth in reasoning, whether the life of the one must be like the other’. That Spenser, like Virgil and Milton, should have first tried his wings in pastoral verse, is appropriate. The versatility revealed in range of subject and of literary form gives the work vigour and freshness, for all its artifice. The sureness of Spenser’s touch may be gauged from the moving elegy in the eleventh eclogue (November). Its stately pace and solemn cadences have touching authenticity as feeling and reflection move through grief to its conquest. The figure of Colin Clout was to appear again in Colin Clouts come home again, an allegorical representation of a visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth, but this came some twelve years later and meantime Spenser had lived in Ireland, where he went in the service of the Lord Deputy, and where he worked on The Faerie Queene. Though he paid intermittent visits to London, he was still in Ireland in 1598 when his home, Kilcolman Castle, was burnt in a rising of the -84- O’Neills. Spenser and his family fled to Cork, and a year later he died in London. ‘Virgil without the Aeneid, Milton without Paradise Lost…would still rank as great poets’, C.S. Lewis observed, whereas Spenser’s reputation is almost entirely dependent on The Faerie Queene. In a dedicatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, appended to the first edition of Books I to III (1590), Spenser explains that his book is a ‘continued Allegory or darke conceit’ of which the general purpose is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. He has chosen King Arthur as his epic hero, following the tradition, he claims, of Homer, Virgil and Tasso. In the person of Arthur he represents ‘Magnificence’, as being the perfection of all the virtues, and has made twelve other knights the ‘patrons’ of the twelve other virtues. 15

The heroes of the first three books, The Redcross Knight, Sir Guyon and The Lady Britomartis, represent holiness, temperance and chastity respectively. The poem plunges in medias res of course, but Spenser explains that if a historian had represented the events of the poem chronologically, the starting point would have been what was to occur in the twelfth and last book of his poem (it was never written). This was to show the Faerie Queene keeping her annual twelve-day feast, and on each day an adventurous cause would present itself, requiring the service of an heroic knight. Thus the real beginning of the action is when a ‘clownish’ young man arrives at the royal feast and desires a boon which, because of the feast, the queen cannot refuse. The request granted, he settles down on the floor, the only place befitting his ‘rusticity’. A lady in mourning arives, riding on a white ass, with a dwarf behind her, leading a warlike steed and a suit of armour. The lady falls before the queen, telling how her father and mother, themselves king and queen, are besieged in a castle by a huge dragon. She asks for a knight to champion the cause and the ‘clownish person’ claims his right. The queen is astonished: but the man persists, and the lady says he can go only if the armour fits him. (Spenser explains that it is the Christian’s armour ‘specified by St Paul’ in the Epistle to the Ephesians.) Once fitted out in the armour, the man appears ‘the goodliest man in al that company’ and is forthwith ‘well liked of the Lady’. So they sally forth: and we have arrived at the beginning of -85- Book I and the adventures of the Redcross Knight. The lady is Una, symbol of truth, and their joint adventures involve encounters with Duessa (falsehood), Queen Lucifera in the House of Pride, the giant Orgoglio (arrogance) and Despair himself. Alongside the moral allegory there is a certain amount of topical allegory. That the Faerie Queene should be Gloriana, Queen Elizabeth, the perfect earthly beauty, is quite consistent with her spiritual significance as the symbol of heavenly beauty which is divine. Overtones of the Anglican-Catholic conflict accompany the Redcross Knight’s struggle with Duessa (Mary Queen of Scots). But the political allegory flares up fitfully and is quickly forgotten, while the moral symbolism continuingly determines the character of the narrative. Book II is really a little epic in itself. Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, comes upon the dying Amavia, widow of Sir Mordaunt, whose personality was destroyed by Acrasia, the enchantress, in her sensual and corrupting Bower of Bliss. Amavia has stabbed herself, and her baby, ‘sad witness’ of its 16

‘fathers fall’, is left with hands imbrued in her blood. This little miniature of the Fall and original sin is presented as ‘the image of mortalitie’, and from this point Sir Guyon’s quest is to destroy humanity’s corruptor, Acrasia, and tear her bower to pieces. But before achievement of this aim in Canto XII of the book, Guyon undergoes a series of testing adventures in which he is at grips with all the passions hostile to temperance. One of the tensest encounters occurs when we plunge with Guyon into the depths of the epic underworld, a miniature of those in Homer and Virgil, where Mammon, the symbol of covetousness and worldliness, dwells, his face tanned with smoke from his smelting furnaces, his eyes bleared, his head and beard covered in soot, his hands coal-black and his nails like claws. This formidable figure proclaims himself ‘greatest god below the skye’ and submits Guyon to a temptation that echoes Satan’s temptation of Christ. But even at the very ‘fountain of the worldes good’ Guyon has strength to say, ‘All that I need I have.’ The Faerie Queene is a monumental masterpiece, its magnificence lying so much in the fine texture of its detail, narrative and symbolic, that outline summary could do little to hint at its quality. Spenser did not finish the work, and it would appear, from the completed books, that he had deviated from his original scheme outlined in the letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. But Spenserian fragmentariness is perhaps less -86- tantalizing than Chaucerian fragmentariness; and a secret of the poem’s effectiveness is the stanza form which Spenser invented, the Spenserian stanza of nine lines, eight of them iambic pentameters and the ninth an Alexandrine. The stanza rhymes ababbcbcc. The cunning central couplet knits the two ‘halves’ of the stanza indissolubly, and, together with the final couplet, obviates any consciousness of quatrains strung together. The stanza proves a perfect vehicle for sustained use in a poem in which steadiness and discipline have to coexist with the maximum of flexibility for narrative, descriptive and reflective passages of all kinds and tones. The writer who creates a great world of his own asks you to submerge yourself in it, to make yourself at home there. The demand can be appropriately made provided that the prevailing atmosphere of that world is not too exhaustingly passionate or sensational, and yet that its inhabitants and events are immensely varied. Spenser’s world is one you can. settle down in. Moreover, having settled down and found yourself delighted by its ever-changing scenes, you can sense, through image and 17

overtone and symbol, the movement of a mind that has patterned the moral and religious realities that face all men in all ages within the scope of its survey. In speaking of the equable steadiness of Spenser’s spirit, one naturally has in mind by contrast the explosive restlessness of contemporary dramatists like Marlowe, yet oddly enough Marlowe left behind fragments of a poem which are as mellow and untroubled as his tragedies are dynamic. He chose the story of Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos on the northern shore of the Hellespont, who was loved by Leander. Leander lived at Abydos on the southern shore and used to swim across the Hellespont at night to be with Hero, until one night he was drowned in a storm. Then Hero drowned herself too. Marlowe wrote only two sestiads of Hero and Leander, but Chapman completed it after his death. Nevertheless Marlowe’s fragment is a richly satisfying poem, drenched in direct sensuousness, uncomplicated by psychological analysis, but exuding the flavour of an imaginary classical world. Even as Leander dives into the sea the god Neptune follows and assails him with love, sliding between his arms to steal kisses, so that Leander has to remind him: You are deceiv’d; I am no woman, I. He arrives naked, dripping, and cold, at Hero’s tower. Hero, in bed, -87- hears his knock, jumps up, herself unclothed, and ‘drunk with gladness’, rushes to the door. His nakedness frightens her: she screams and runs back to bed, and Leander, shivering, begs to share its warmth. Herewith afrighted, Hero shrunk away, And in her lukewarm place Leander lay.

The poem is a riot for the senses, an idealized romp for the appetites, gloriously framed in an idiom that leaves day-to-day realities and moral issues out of sight. Shakespeare’s first published work was a poem of the same genre, Venus and Adonis, which tells how Venus pursues young Adonis with oppressive love, pulling him from his hunting horse, pushing him on to the ground, kissing him and netting him in her arms — but in vain. When finally she releases him, pressing for a meeting next day, she is told that he will be hunting the boar. In terror she flings her arms round him: She sinketh down, still hanging on his neck, He on her belly falls, she on her back.

Even so, she is compelled to let him go; and next day he is killed in the hunt, a ‘wide wound’ trenched by the boar ‘in his soft flank’. The poem does not achieve the unity of tone evident in Marlowe’s; and it is not easy to come to terms with Shakespeare’s heavy-handed goddess of love whose ‘face doth reek and smoke’ with passion. The Rape of Lucrece is a more approachable work. The description of Tarquin’s stealthy approach to Lucrece’s room in the darkness as the wind through ‘little vents and crannies’ blows the smoke of his torch in his face, of his grasp at Lucrece’s glove — with the needle in it that pricks his finger, then of his guilty hand plucking at the latch while ‘with his knee the door he opens wide’; these clear impressions accompany a mood of suspense that grows with the sight of the sleeping Lucrece and then of her waking (‘Like to a new-kill’d bird she trembling lies’) till the battery of Tarquin’s ruthless demand and Lucrece’s hopeless appeal to his conscience and compassion bring us to the edge of the horrifying climax. For with the nightly linen that she wears He pens her piteous clamours in her head, -88- Cooling his hot face in the chastest tears That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed.

The descriptive power scarcely falters during this central passage till He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence, She like a wearied lamb lies panting there; and though there are artificial digressions and unnecessary elaborations elsewhere in the poem, the predominant memory for every reader must be of this tense and tragic episode. Shakespeare’s Sonnets represent the finest poetic craftsmanship of the age. They have the autobiographical content to be expected in such a sequence but the persons referred to defy identification. A large number of the poems express the writer’s devotion to a handsome man of rank, though the precise character of the relationship cannot be determined. There is a dark lady, unfriendly but fascinating, whose unworthiness the poet recognizes, yet he cannot help loving her; and there is a stolen mistress. Not all the sonnets have the intensity of feeling which suggests immediate personal experience as the source, and it cannot be assumed that the sequence is a direct personal record. Nevertheless the authentic emotional power of the poems has lured critics into the probably vain attempt to read the sequence 19

autobiographically and to reconstruct particular developments in the poet’s ultimate relationships. It is inevitable that readers will continue to be teased into curious speculation by admissions like that which opens Sonnet CXLIV: Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.

But in the finest of the sonnets Shakespeare has involved whatever particularities they relate to in reflection upon illimitable issues — upon time’s withering touch on love and beauty, upon love in absence and love in presence, upon the changing and the unchangeable, upon trust, upon resignation, and upon poetry’s power to make the loved object live for ever, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. -89- dependent on a series of patrons. The sequence, at first called Ideas’s Mirror, but later revised and called Idea, reflects a vigorous imagination. The style is extravagant yet forceful; the impact of image and declamation such that Drayton has been compared, at his best, with both Donne and Marlowe: Whilst thus my pen strives to eternize thee, Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face, Where, in the map of all my misery, Is modelled out the world of my disgrace.

The sequence includes the often anthologized sonnet, ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’, which is justifiably popular. It is less easy to explain the apparent popularity of the Ballad of Agincourt, ‘Fair stood the wind for France’ with its jog-trot dactyls and trochees. This is more like the Drayton who wrote ‘The Song of Jonah in the Whale’s Bellie’: but Drayton was a professional poet and no doubt tried to accommodate his public. Certainly he put a good deal of energy into historical poems like The Barons Wars and he created a massive poetic guide to England’s history and topography, Poly-Obion, a work of over 10,000 rhyming hexameters: Of Albion’s glorious isle the wonders whilst I write, The sundry varying soils, the pleasures infinite…

Any anthology of Elizabethan or Jacobean lyrics will include poems taken from plays and masques. Some, like Lyly’s ‘Cupid and my Campaspe’ (Campaspe) or 20

Heywood’s ‘Pack clouds, away’ (The Rape of Lucrece), stand out distinctly among their author’s poems, but others, like those of Jonson and Fletcher, represent a generous vein of productivity. ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’, from Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, and ‘Come, my Celia, let us prove/While we may, the sports of love’, from Volpone, are polished and compact poems, while ‘Her Triumph’ (‘See the chariot at hand here of Love’), from The Celebration of Charis, is a masterly blend of cunning rhythm and telling imagery with a rapturous lyrical climax (‘O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!’). Such treasures are scattered about Jonson’s prolific dramatic output. Similarly characteristic of their author are the hymns to Pan at the end of Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (‘All ye woods, and trees, and bowers’) and in the first act of the play -91- (‘Sing his praises that doth keep/Our flocks from harm’). They are not great poetry, but they are recognizably the work of a poet. Beaumont is credited with the authorship of ‘Come sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving’ in The Woman Hater, and of course with the lyrics in The Maid’s Tragedy, notably: Lay a garland on my hearse Of dismal yew; Maidens, willow branches bear; Say, I died true.

On a quite different level of philosophic generality, but nevertheless powerful in its rhetorical force and rhythmic dignity, is James Shirley’s lament from The Contention of Ajax and Achilles: The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things.

The poem rings with public rather than private grief and moralizes man’s response to death’s egalitarian dominion. Not only plays but prose romances too were decorated with lyrics. Greene’s romances are sprinkled with verses that move gracefully within the Elizabethan conventions, like the following from Perimedes the Blacksmith: Fair is my love, for April in her face, Her lovely breasts September claims his part…

Better known is Sephesta’s song to her child, from Menaphon (‘Weep not, my wanton’), where form and idiom and tone are intimately blended in expressing the 21

mother’s tenderness. And Rosader’s verses on his mistress’s excellence from Lodge’s romance, Rosalynde (‘Like to the clear in highest sphere’), might stand as the pattern of the Elizabethan love-catalogue, the stanza-by-stanza glorification of the beloved’s physical attributes — eyes (‘sapphires’), cheeks (‘blushing cloud’), lips (‘budded roses’), neck (‘stately tower’) and breasts (‘orbs of heavenly frame’). Thomas Campion (1567-1620) distinguished himself both as composer and poet. The lyrics he wrote and set to music have the lightness of touch and the avoidance of gravity appropriate to verses destined to be sung. Nevertheless they can stand on their own feet as poetry and, metrically speaking, very subtly splayed feet they are. -92- Indeed it is the variety of Campion’s rhythmic patterns and his inventiveness in verbal configuration that give his best work its irresistible charm. Rose-decked Laura, come: Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s Silent music, either other Sweetly gracing. Here and elsewhere Campion imitates classical metrical patterns and quantitative measure, but he was equally adroit in the use of rhyme. He published A Book of Airs (1601), Two Books of Airs (1613) and The Third and Fourth Books of Airs (1617), and wrote a number of masques. Among the less productive poets is Sir Walter Ralegh, whose long-standing devotion to Queen Elizabeth was rudely rebuffed when his marriage to her lady-in- waiting came to light. (Spenser represents Ralegh’s relationship with the queen in the account of Timias’s love for Belphoebe in Book III of The Faerie Queene.) Ralegh wrote commendatory verses on The Faerie Queene, a lively parodic reply to Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’, and the expression of religious commitment, ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet’. Another religious poem, of rare distinction, is ‘The Burning Babe’, a Christmas vision by the Roman Catholic priest Robert Southwell (1561-95) who was imprisoned, tortured and executed for his faith. Ben Jonson paid generous tribute to Southwell in the Conversations: ‘That Southwell was hanged yett so he had written that piece of his, the Burning Babe, he would have been content to destroy many of his.’ Jonson was less generous towards Sir John Davies (1569-1626), whose poem, Orchestra, he mocked on more than one occasion. Its opening lines tickled him: 22

Where lives the man that never yet did hear Of chaste Penelope, Ulysses’s Queen?

Jonson described how a gentleman called his cook to ask him if he had ever heard of Penelope, and on receiving a negative response exclaimed: Lo, there the man that never yet did hear Of chaste Penelope, Ulysses’s Queen. -93- Davies’s poem is in fact a competent treatment, in rhyme royal, of the theme of the dancing, ordered universe, in which Elizabeth’s court provides the image of perfect concord. The philosophical study, Nosce Teipsum, is well-organized argumentative verse but scarcely achieves the status of poetry. A more successful philosophical poem, though not strictly ‘Elizabethan’, is ‘Ode upon a Question moved Whether Love should continue for ever’ by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). It anticipates the stanza of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Lord Herbert, the elder brother of George Herbert, was a man who distinguished himself in so many fields, as philosopher, diplomatist, soldier and autobiographer, that Jonson declared: If man get name for some one virtue, then What man art thou, that art so many men. -94- 4.1. Sir Philip Sidney

SIDNEY, Sir Philip Columbia Encyclopedia Sir Philip Sidney 1554–86, English author and courtier. He was one of the leading members of Queen Elizabeth's court and a model of Renaissance chivalry. He served in several diplomatic missions on the Continent and in 1586 was fatally wounded at the battle of Zutphen. Sidney exerted a strong influence on English poetry as patron, critic, and example. His literary efforts circulated only in manuscript Figure 03. The poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), from a during his lifetime. Arcadia (1590), a series of nineteenth-century engraving. verse idyls connected by prose narrative, was Source: http://people.famouswhy. com/sir_philip_sidney/ written for his sister Mary, countess of 23

Pembroke. It is the earliest renowned pastoral in English literature. Sidney's prose criticism of the nature of poetry, written as a rebuttal to Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse, appeared in two slightly different versions — The Defense of Poesie and An Apology for Poetry (both 1595). Astrophel and Stella (1591) is one of the great sonnet sequences in English and was inspired by his love for Penelope Devereux, later Lady Rich. Sidney, however, married Frances Walsingham in 1583.

Some poems by Sir Philip Sidney 1 On those affects which easily yield to Since, shunning pain, I ease can never sight, find; But virtue sets so high, that reason's Since bashful dread seeks where he light, knows me harmed; For all his strife, can only bondage Since will is won, and stopped ears are gain: charmed; So that I live to pay a mortal fee, Since force doth faint, and sight doth Dead-palsy-sick of all my chiefest make me blind; parts; Since loosing, long, the faster still I Like those whom dreams make ugly bind; monsters see, Since naked sense can conquer And can cry 'Help!' with nought but reason armed; groans and starts. Since heart in chilling fear with ice is w Longing to have, having no wit to wish, armed; To starving minds such is god Cupid's In fine, since strife of thought but dish. mars the mind: -14- I yield, 0 love, unto thy loathed yoke, 3 Yet craving law of arms, whose rule do To the tune of Non credo gia che piu in th teach felice amante That hardly used, whoever prison The fire to see my wrongs for anger broke, burneth; In justice quit, of honour made no The air in rain for my affliction breach: weepeth; Whereas, if I a grateful guardian have, The sea to ebb for grief his flowing Thou art my lord, and I thy vowed turneth; slave. The earth with pity dull the centre keepeth; 2 Fame is with wonder blazed; When love, puffed up with rage of high Time runs away for sorrow; disdain, Place standeth still amazed, Resolved to make me pattern of his To see my night of evils, which hath no might, morrow. Like foe, whose wits inclined to deadly Alas, all only she no pity taketh spite,, To know my miseries, but, chaste and Would often kill, to breed more feeling cruel. pain; My fall her glory maketh: He would not, armed with beauty only, reign, 24

Yet still her eyes give to my flames Full woman-like, complains her will their fuel. was broken. Fire, burn me quite, till sense of But I, who daily craving burning leave me; Cannot have to content me, Air, let me draw no more thy breath in Have more cause to lament me, anguish; Since wanting is more woe than too Sea, drowned in thee, of tedious life much having. bereave me; O Philomela fair, O take some Earth, take this earth, wherein my gladness, spirits languish. That here is juster cause of plaintful Fame, say I was not born; sadness; Time, haste my dying hour; Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Place, see my grave uptorn; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart Fire, air, sea, earth, fame, time, place, invadeth. show your power. 5 Alas, from all their helps I am exiled. O my thoughts' sweet food, my my only For hers am I, and death fears her owner, displeasure. O my heaven's foretaste by thy Fie, death, thou art beguiled; heavenly pleasure, Though I be hers, she makes of me no O the fair nymph born to do women treasure. honour, 4 Lady my treasure: To the same tune Where be now those joys that I lately The nightingale, as soon as April tasted? bringeth Where be now those eyes, ever inly Unto her rested sense a perfect piercers? waking, Where be now those words never idly While late bare earth, proud of new wasted, clothing, springeth, Wounds to rehearsers? Sings out her woes, a thorn. her song- Where is, ah, that face, that a sun book making, defaces? And mournfully bewailing Where be those welcomes, by no Her throat in tunes expresseth worth deserved? What grief her breast oppresseth Where be those movings, the delights, For Tereus' force on her chaste will the graces? prevailing. How be we swerved? -15- O hideous absence, by thee am I O Philomela fair, O take some thralled; gladness, O my vain word gone, ruin of my glory! That here is juster cause of plaintful O due allegiance, by thee am I called sadness: Still to be sorry. Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; -16- Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart But no more words, though such a invadeth. word be spoken, Alas, she hath no other cause of Nor no more wording, with a word to anguish spill me: But Tereus' love, on her by strong Peace, due allegiance; duty must be hand wroken; broken Wherein she, suffering all her spirits' If duty kill me. languish, 25

Then come, O come; then do I come, Thy cries, O baby, set mine head on receive me, aching: Slay me not, for stay; do not hide thy The babe cries: 'Way, thy love doth blisses, keep me waking.' But between those arms; never else do Lully, lully, my babe; hope cradle leave me; bringeth, Give me my kisses. Unto my children alway good rest O my thoughts' sweet food, my my only taking: owner, The babe cries: 'Way, thy love doth O my heaven's foretaste by thy keep me waking.' heavenly pleasure, Since, baby mine, from me thy O the fair nymph born to do women watching springeth; honour, Sleep then a little, pap content is Lady my treasure. making: 6 The babe cries: 'Nay, for that abide I To the tune of Basciami vita mia waking.' Sleep, baby mine, desire; nurse beauty -17- singeth;

Sidney’s Defence of Poesie is a very important piece of Literary Criticism. You can read it in http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/defence.html

4.2. Edmund Spenser SPENSER, Edmund

Columbia Encyclopedia

Edmund Spenser 1552?–1599, English poet, b. London. He was the friend of men eminent in literature and at court, including Gabriel Harvey, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Robert Sidney, earl of Leicester. After serving as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester, Spenser was appointed in 1580 secretary to Lord Grey, lord deputy of Ireland. Afterward Spenser lived in Ireland, holding minor civil offices and receiving the lands and castle of Kilcolman, Co. Cork. In 1589, under Figure 04. Edmund Spenser, oil painting by an unknown artist; in the Raleigh's sponsorship, Spenser went to collection of Pembroke College, Cambridge, England. London, where he apparently sought court Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ preferment and publication of the first three media/31502/Edmund-Spenser-oil- books of The Faerie Queene. After the painting-by-an-unknown-artist-in-the 26

Tyrone rebellion of 1598, in which Kilcolman Castle was burned, he returned to London, where he died in 1599. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Recognized by his contemporaries as the foremost poet of his time, Spenser was not only a master of meter and language but a profound moral poet as well. Patterning his literary career after that of Vergil, Spenser first published 12 pastoral eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), which treat the shepherd as rustic priest and poet. His Complaints and Daphnaida, the latter an elegy on Douglas Howard, both appeared in 1591. In 1595 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, a pastoral allegory dealing with Spenser's first London journey and the vices inherent in court life, and Astrophel, an elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, were published. In the same year Amoretti, Spenser's sonnet sequence commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, and Epithalamion, a beautiful and complex wedding poem in honor of his marriage in 1594, were also published. Fowre Hymnes, which explains Spenser's Platonic and Christian views of love and beauty, and Prothalamion appeared in 1596. Also in 1596 the first six books of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's unfinished masterpiece, appeared. Although the poem is an epic, his method was to treat the moral virtues allegorically. The excellence of The Faerie Queene lies in the complexity and depth of Spenser's moral vision and in the Spenserian stanza (nine lines, eight of iambic pentameter followed by one of iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc), which Spenser invented for his masterpiece. Spenser's only extended prose work, A View of the Present State of Ireland, was first printed in 1633.

Edmund Spenser’s sonnets

I Of faulty men, which daunger to thee To the right worshipfull, my singular threat; good friend, Master Gabriell Harvey, But freely doest of what thee list Doctor of the Lawes. entreat, Like a great lord of peerelesse liberty; HARVEY, the happy above happiest Lifting the good up to high Honours men seat, I read: that, sitting like a looker-on And the evill damning evermore to dy. Of this worldes stage, doest note with For life and death is in thy doomeful critique pen writing: The sharpe dislikes of each condition: So thy renowme lives ever by And, as one carelesse of suspition, endighting. Ne fawnest for the favour of the great; Ne fearest foolish reprehension Dublin, this xviij, of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life, EDMUND SPENCER. 27

Their rich triumphall arcks which they II did raise, WHO so wil seeke by right deserts Their huge pyramids, which do heaven t'attaine threat. Unto the type of true nobility, Lo! one, whom later age hath brought t And not by painted shewes, trod titles o light, vaine Matchable to the greatest of those Derived farre from famous auncestrie, great: Behold them both in their right visnomy Great both by name, and great in Here truly pourtray'd as they ought to power and might, be, And meriting a meere triumphant And striving both for termes of dignitie, seate. To be advanced highest in degree. The scourge of Turkes, and plague of And when thou doost with equall insigh infidels, t see Thy acts, O Scanderbeg, this volume -762- tels. ED. SPENSER The ods twixt both, of both then deem

aright, IV And chuse the better of them both to THE antique Babel, empresse of the thee: East, But thanks to him that it deserves Upreard her buildinges to the threatned behight; skie: To Nenna first, that first this worke And second Babell, tyrant of the West, created, Her ayry towers upraised much more And next to Jones, that truely it high. translated. But, with the weight of their own ED. SPENSER. surque-dry,

They both are fallen, that all the earth III did feare, Upon the Historie of George Castriot, And buried now in their own ashes ly; alias Scanderbeg, King of the Espirots, Yet shewing by their heapes how great translated into English. they were.

But in their place doth now a third WHEREFORE doth vaine Antiquitie so appeare, vaunt Fayre Venice, flower of the last worlds Her ancient monuments of mightie delight; peeres, And next to them in beauty draweth And old heröes, which their world did neare, daunt But farre exceedes in policie of right. With their great deedes, and fild their Yet not so fayre her buildinges to childrens eares? behold Who, rapt with wonder of their famous As Lewkenors stile, that hath her praise, beautie told. Admire their statues, their colossoes EDM. SPENCER great,

-763- 28

Spencer’s masterpiece The Faerie Queene can be read in http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/fqintro.html . You can also listen to it, or even download the audio file for free, in http://archive.org/details/faeriequeene1_0906_librivox

4.3. William Shakespeare SHAKESPEARE, William

Columbia Encyclopedia William Shakespeare 1564–1616, English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-upon-Avon. He is widely considered the greatest playwright who ever lived. Life His father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also Figure 05. William involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of Shakespeare Source: alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Shakespeare.jpg known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and less Greeke," much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus. 29

In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man. Poetry Shakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the 1980s and 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612 entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed "W.S." exhibits many Shakespearean characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon. Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important nondramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content. The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; or they are possibly the initials of William Herbert, 3d earl of Pembroke, whose connection with Shakespeare is more tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127–152 has also been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the recurring themes of 30

beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of love and art to transcend time and even death.

Some of Shakespeare’s sonnet LV But hope of orphans and unfather'd NOT marble, nor the gilded fruit; monuments For summer and his pleasures wait on Of princes, shall outlive this powerful thee, rime; And, thou away, the very birds are But you shall shine more bright in mute; these contents Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer, Than unswept stone, besmear'd with That leaves look pale, dreading the sluttish time. winter's near. When wasteful war shall statues -99- overturn, CXL And broils root out the work of BE wise as thou art cruel; do not press masonry, My tongue-tied patience with too much Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire disdain; shall burn Lest sorrow lend me words, and words The living record of your memory. express 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity The manner of my pity-wanting pain. Shall you pace forth; your praise shall If I might teach thee wit, better it were, still find room Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me Even in the eyes of all posterity so; That wear this world out to the ending As testy sick men, when their deaths doom. be near, So, till the judgement that yourself No news but health from their arise, physicians know; You live in this, and dwell in lovers' For, if I should despair, I should grow eyes. mad, -57- And in my madness might speak ill of XCVII thee : HOW like a winter hath my absence Now this ill-wresting world is grown so been bad, From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting Mad slanderers by mad ears believed year! be. What freezings have I felt, what dark That I may not be so, nor thou belied, days seen! Bear thine eyes straight, though thy What old December's bareness proud heart go wide. everywhere! -142- And yet this time removed was CLI summer's time; LOVE is too young to know what The teeming autumn, big with rich conscience is; increase, Yet who knows not conscience is born Bearing the wanton burden of the of love? prime, Then, gentle cheater, urge not my Like widow'd wombs after their lords' amiss, decease: Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me 31

Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self As his triumphant prize. Proud of this prove: pride, For, thou betraying me, I do betray He is contented thy poor drudge to be, My nobler part to my gross body's To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side. treason; No want of conscience hold it that I call My soul doth tell my body that he may Her "love" for whose dear love I rise Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther and fall. reason, -153- But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee

If you like Shakespeare, you can read all his sonnets in http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/, or listen to them and download the audio file in http://archive.org/details/sonnets_librivox

5. Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets

METAPHYSICAL AND CAVALIER POETRY

Harry Blamires

Some writers leave behind them a biographical legend entwined inseparably with what they have written. John Donne (1572-1631) was one such. He came of a Roman Catholic family, and his mother, as the daughter of John Heywood, was great grand-daughter of Sir Thomas More. His father died before John was four, but the boy studied at Oxford and the Inns of Court and, after travel and foreign service, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper. But in December 1601 his prospects were ruined by his secret marriage to Lady Egerton’s niece, Ann More, whose father had him dismissed and, for a time, imprisoned. ‘John Donne—Ann Donne—Un-done’, the young husband wrote in a letter to his wife, and though he managed to make his peace with his father-in-law, he was not reinstated, and he and Ann brought up a rapidly increasing family in very straitened circumstances. Donne, who had early become critical of the Roman Church, joined in the polemical writing of the time and was pressed to take Anglican orders, but declined until pressure from James I, together with developments in his own thinking, brought him to the view that it was God’s will that he should do so, and he was ordained in 1615. The death of his wife in 1617 was the end of a most loving partnership. Izaak Walton, in his Life of John Donne, tells how Donne was now ‘the careful father of seven children then 32

living, to whom he gave a voluntary assurance never to bring them under the subjection of a step-mother; which promise he kept most faithfully, burying with his tears, all his earthly joys in his most dear and deserving wife’s grave…’ And indeed Donne’s sonnet on his wife’s death (‘Since she whom I lov’d’) is one of his loveliest: Here the admyring her my mind did whett To seeke thee God; so streames do shew their head… -95- It was in 1621 that Donne was made Dean of St Paul’s, where he achieved a great reputation for his sermons and his piety. The contrast between the young Jack Donne, a great visitor of ladies, who circulated witty mockeries in verse, recommending promiscuity, like ‘Communitie’ (women are ours ‘as fruits are ours’, to be tasted or devoured at will) and ‘Confined Love’ (‘Good is not good, unlesse/A thousand it possesse…’) and the Dean renowned for his piety can easily be overdramatized. One needs to see the element of fashionable charade in the literary postures of the young libertine. Moreover, like St Augustine and other converts, Donne tends to over-emphasize his past sinfulness. Nevertheless the contrast remains, an aspect of that life-long tension in which the man’s whole work is involved. Donne’s importance is enhanced for us today by his influence upon twentieth- century poetry. T.S. Eliot found in his work a blend of emotional and intellectual quality which was an example and an inspiration in the revivification of the poetic tradition. For Donne’s poems put us into immediate contact, not just with a sensitively feeling heart, but with a vigorously active mind; and the two move in concert: Yesternight the Sunne went hence, And yet is here to day, He hath no desire nor sense, Nor halfe so short a way: Then feare not mee, But beleeve that I shall make Speedier journeyes, since I take More wings and spurres than hee.

Thus Donne transmutes the emotional experience of parting into intellectual terms in ‘Sweetest love, I do not goe’. There is an argument; and it moves. The tone of the argument is such that it does not disinfect the emotion; rather it clarifies and intensifies it. 33

As well as an argument, there is a situation. The speaker confronts another and, though she does not directly speak, we are aware of her presence and of the movement of her responses through the express movement of the speaker’s own. In ‘The Sunne Rising’, the voice of the lover, wakened by the morning sun from a night of love, is alive with the joy and pride of possession as he pours scorn on the monarch

-96- of the sky—an interfering busybody, a peeping Tom at the window. The glorious all- regulating king of the planets is rebuked as ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne’. So the lover’s voice pours derision on sun, king, court, and everything subject to the ‘rags of time’; and we sense that the white-hot activity of the poet’s brain is the perfect expression of the lover’s abounding zest of superiority to all that till this moment passed as grand and magnificent. For now the beloved is the epitome of all kingdoms, himself the epitome of all kingship, and the world’s statesmanship but a charade imitative of the reality of honour and wealth that is with him in the bed: She’is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is. Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this, All honour’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.

What earned Donne and his fellows the label ‘metaphysical poets’ was the habit of philosophical argument of the kind just illustrated, and the use of extravagant and far-fetched imagery, sometimes technical in substance. In ‘The Flea’, for instance, the lover playfully builds a persuasive argument for feminine surrender on the basis of the fact that a flea has sucked the blood of speaker and lady alike, thereby already mingling their bloods. Donne is at his finest in his short poems, but he worked on a more extended scale in the Satyres— busy commentaries on topical affairs and current types, harsh in tone, and in the Elegies, a series of extremely diverse poems on various aspects of love. Satyre III, serious in tone, voices the indignant resolution of a searcher after truth in an age of violent strife between religious bodies, while Satyre IV is a devastating representation of being pinned at court by a pretentious social bore. Correspondingly there is an earnest simplicity in Elegy XVI, ‘On his Mistris’, while Elegy XIX, ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’, is a frank yet mannered prologue to coition: Licence my roaving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. 34

Even more extensive in scale are the two Anniversaries written in memory of Elizabeth Drury. Donne did not personally know her: he made the poems reflective studies of the human soul’s pilgrimage and destiny.

-97- In the Holy Sonnets the urgent voice of the lover is heard again in tortuous dialogue with his beloved: but now the beloved is God. The reluctance of the beloved has become the reluctance of God to sweep away the reluctance of the poet. He calls upon God to show the full force of his love by taking him from the grip of his rival, the Devil. ‘Except thou rise and for thine own work fight’, I shall be left in the possession of the Satan who hates me, he proclaims (Sonnet II). And he invites God to batter his heart, overthrow him, break and burn him, indeed to divorce him from betrothal to the diabolical enemy and imprison him: for I Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (XIV)

Never have the paradoxes of Christian vocation and surrender been more forcefully expressed than in the recapitulation of this loving contest with God. To have transposed the mock-hostilities of erotic dialogue onto this level of spiritual truth was a fine and sensitive achievement. But perhaps the high point of Donne’s poetic exploration is reached in ‘Good Friday 1613 Riding Westward’, where the paradoxical theme of rising by dying is handled with subtlety of image and intensity of personal devotion. Among Donne’s complimentary verse letters is one to Lady Magdalen Herbert, the mother of George Herbert (1593-1633), the next most important poet of the metaphysical school, and a friend of Donne, of Bishop Andrewes and of Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. It was into Nicholas Ferrar’s hands that Herbert entrusted the manuscript of his poems at death, leaving him the option of publication or incineration, so it was Ferrar’s wise decision that gave us The Temple, a collection of religious poems of extraordinary power and sincerity. Herbert came of an aristocratic family, but after early ambitions in the way of public office, he eventually found his vocation in the Anglican priesthood and spent his last years as rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire. He died at the age of forty, a loved and saintly parish priest. That he knew the value and delight of what he sacrificed in entering the priesthood is made evident 35

in ‘The Pearl’. ‘I know the wayes of Learning…. I know the wayes of Honour…. I know the ways of Pleasure…’

-98- My stuffe is flesh, not brasse; my senses live, And grumble oft that they have more in me Than He that curbs them, being but one to five: Yet I love Thee. The two poems called ‘Jordan’ make it clear that Herbert thought carefully about the use of poetry in expressing love for God, and the character it should have. There is in The Temple the maximum technical variety in rhythmic suppleness and in stanza form. The intellectual content is less obtrusive than in Donne, and the disconcerting restlessness of Donne is evident only where restlessness is appropriate. In ‘The Sacrifice’ Herbert sustains a reflective sequence on the Passion through sixty-three stanzas of cumulative meditation which has its paradoxes and its shocks, yet avoids the twistings and turnings that mark Donne’s thinking. There is no lashing and flailing of the intellectual tail in Herbert. Even when the opening mood of a poem is one of intense rebellion (‘I struck the board, and cry’d, No more’), the movement of thought rises steadily without tergiversation to its climax, and then lapses as suddenly to a magnificent peace: But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde At every word, Me thought I heard one calling, Child! And I repy’d, My Lord.

A number of the poems give expression to Herbert’s own spiritual experience and the conflicts he underwent. The sense of need and the hunger for peace are conveyed without histrionics yet with no dearth of bold imagery. ‘Kill me not ev’ry day’, one prayer (‘Affliction’) begins, and ‘Throw away Thy Rod’, another (‘Discipline’). ‘Take the gentle path’, the latter continues, a far cry from Donne’s demand for divine violence. But over against anguished appeals de profundis one must set the steady consolatory poise revealed in the well-known poem to ‘Vertue’ (‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright’) and the outbursts of triumphant joy in such poems as ‘Praise’ (‘King of glorie, King of peace’). Like Donne, Herbert indulges in controversy with God, but less heated and, it is fair to say, less one-sided. In ‘Love’ the poet is Love’s reluctant guest, guiltily conscious of ‘dust and sin’. Love draws near. Does he lack anything?

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‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here.’ Love said, ‘You shall be he.’ ‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee.’ Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

The poet does not just speak. He listens; and Love gets the better of the argument. There is more to follow: but God is given the last word: ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste My meat.’ So I did sit and eat.

Richard Crashaw (1612-49) too belonged to the circle of Nicholas Ferrar’s friends, but he became a Roman Catholic. His poetry is drenched in colour and he has rare imaginative sensitivity: Not in the evening’s eyes When they red with weeping are For the Sun that dyes, Sitts sorrow with a face so fair…

So he writes of St Mary Magdalene in ‘The Weeper’. It is in the same poem that Crashaw’s taste for hyperbole leads him to describe the eyes of the tearful woman following Christ not only as ‘two faithfull fountains’ but even as: Two walking baths; two weeping motions; Portable & compendious oceans.

There are too many tears in Crashaw and too many lavishly pictured wounds. The lack of restraint (‘Upwards thou dost weep’, he writes in ‘The Weeper’) combined with his mellifluousness and his taste for fragrant eloquence sometimes produces a cloying sweetness. Nevertheless, where the dignity of restraint is preserved, the rich texture of the verse shows up as something precious: it is jewel-studded poetry. Crashaw paid Herbert the tribute of calling his own volume of poems Steps to the Temple. Henry Vaughan (?1622-95) was even more indebted to Herbert, whose influence is reflected in detailed echoes in many poems. Vaughan’s volume Silex Scintillans was published in 1650. His poetic vein is altogether chaster than Crashaw’s. Its texture sometimes has an uncluttered lucidity and limpidity highly appropriate to the mystical strain. There is much spiritual self-criticism in his

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earlier work and that sense of the world’s dreariness in its alienation from God that is the reverse side of the coin of mystical insight. Vaughan’s brightest lines are those in which the mystic’s glimpse of the divine brings joy to himself, light and life to the whole of creation: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light. (‘The World’)

Many a poem contrasts the vision or hope of the beyond with the sad dimness of man’s life in a clouded world, shut off from God’s brightness. They are all gone into a world of Light, And I alone sit lingering here, he begins a celebrated poem, and ends by praying either that the mists blotting his vision may be dispersed, or that he shall be removed away to that hill ‘Where I shall need no glass’. In ‘Night’, however, a fine piece of ruminative artistry inspired by Nicodemus’s visit to Jesus by night, the blackness of night is ‘this worlds defeat’. The contrast is between ‘this worlds ill-guiding light’ and the ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’ of God. There is anticipation of Wordsworth in The Retreate, a reminiscent poem of those early days of ‘Angell-infancy’ when heaven was about him and, seeing the ‘weaker glories’ of a gilded cloud or a flower he could spy ‘Some shadows of eternity’. This is the authentic Wordsworthian experience. He feels through all his ‘fleshly dresse/Bright shootes of everlastingness’. There is the same theme of childhood insight and innocence in the poetry of Thomas Traherne (1637-74), a parish priest, and later a household chaplain, whose prose work Centuries of Meditations is full of Christian joy in creation and in the love of God. There is an infectious freshness and urgency in his work. ‘Shall Dumpish Melancholy spoil my Joys?’ he begins his ode ‘On Christmas Day’, a paean of unclouded praise. But the same urgency runs through ‘Solitude’, a poem vastly different in tone, in which he laments the absence in the world around him, and even in the Church’s rites, of that ‘Eden fair’, that ‘Soul of Holy Joy’ which he is vainly seeking to ease his mind. The poems in praise of infancy, however, like ‘The Rapture’ and ‘The Salutation’, represent the more constant mood of delight and wonder. That the child is ‘A Stranger here’ means that he

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meets strange things, sees strange glories, finds strange treasures ‘in this fair World’. And strangest of all is the fact that ‘they mine should be who Nothing was’. It is difficult not to like the man who wrote thus. More so than Vaughan’s, Traherne’s raptures are earthed in wonder at things as they are. Correspondingly his style has a clarity and sturdiness that compels the reader from stanza to stanza. If it is true that there is nothing in Traherne to match Vaughan’s finest lines, we must remember that there is not a lot in Vaughan to match Vaughan’s finest lines. Traherne’s style is reliable. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), though another priest, is sharply distinct from the religious poets we have just dealt with. Although he wrote some religious poems, they have not the mystical reach nor the spiritual depth of Vaughan’s and Traherne’s: they do not reveal grave inner tensions nor reflect any grappling with the conflict between divine vocation and human weakness. Poems like ‘A Thanksgiving to God for his House’ (‘Thou mak’st my teeming Hen to lay/ Her egg each day’) and the justly admired ‘Letanie to the Holy Spirit’: When (God knowes) I’m tost about, Either with despair, or doubt, Yet before the glasse be out, Sweet Spirit comfort me. are religious only in the sense that they are addressed to God. The poet’s concern is with the earthly pleasures he delights in and the earthly pains he fears. The prayers are sincerely directed, but they are not outbursts of love for God, still less of impatience to know Him more closely. In this, no doubt, Herrick is nearer to most of us than either Donne or Herbert is. Herrick demands of us no entry into pieties beyond our reach. Similarly Herrick’s lyrics expressing a sense of life’s brevity, and the quick fleeting away of beauty and love and youth, make no intellectual demand but call out a quick response by their apt phrasing (‘Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may’ and ‘Fair Daffadills, we weep to see/You haste away so soone’), phrasing with the semi- proverbial flavour that derives from voicing the commonplace human reaction without being commonplace in utterance. Sometimes (as in ‘Bid me to live, and I will live/Thy Protestant to be’) fine feelings are unpretentiously embodied in shaped and fluent stanzas

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that defy criticism; and sensuous experience of touch or sight may be neatly recaptured in images of unpremeditated felicity. The voluptuous quality of silk is subtly verbalized in: When as in silks my Julia goes, Why, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes That liquefaction of her clothes.

Herrick wrote much bad and mediocre verse, and he could be guilty of indecent bad taste, but an idealized world of great charm is freshly and frankly reconstituted in his best lyrics. Faultlessly patterned stanzas shape it, and it is sprinkled with the lore of a well-stocked, if wanton, mind. In reading Herrick we note a decisive shift from the centre of poetic interest evident in the work of Donne and his school. We leave the poets who struggle with themselves, struggle with love and struggle with words, for a poet who comments with an air of facility. The group of poets known as the ‘Cavalier poets’ are akin to Herrick in this respect. Poetry does not seem to be an essential business of their lives. This does not merely mean that they were not professional poets: neither were Donne and Herbert. But poetry seemed to matter to Donne and Herbert precisely because what they were using it for mattered enormously. Much of the poetry of the Cavalier poets is, we feel, so peripheral to their true inner and active lives as to represent a fashionable accomplishment rather than an art. Thomas Carew (?1594- 1640), in ‘Disdain returned’, explains to Celia why, having learned her arts, he will never return to her. Wordsworth spoke of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, but this is emotion dissipated in tranquillity. So is the poem ‘Ingratefull beauty threatned’. ‘Let fools thy mystique forms adore’, says the poet, explaining that his verse created Celia’s image and he himself cannot be taken in by it. This is the poetry of disengagement, even, very often, of disenchantment. What is said of Carew applies even more surely to Sir John Suckling (1609-42), another royalist man about town. The one or two polished lyrics that creep into anthologies are really all that are worth preserving. The amusing conclusive outburst (‘The divel take her’) in ‘Why so pale and wan, fond lover?’ and the jaunty ‘Out upon it, I have loved/Three whole days together’ are entertaining stuff but when, at times, Suckling’s disenchantment is applied to what is

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nauseating or obscene, the note of cynicism is struck where humour was intended. There is a crucial difference between Carew and Suckling on the one hand and Richard Lovelace (1618-c.1657) on the other, for Lovelace’s work reveals a wide range of feelings rather than a set of postures. It is notable that when Carew writes in praise he seems to be posing, whereas Lovelace is obviously posing when he writes in mockery: Why should you sweare I am forsworne, Since thine I vow’d to be? Lady it is already Morn, And ‘twas last night I swore to thee That fond impossibility.

This tongue-in-the-cheek testimony to the joy of variety in love is much in the vein of Donne’s light-hearted mockeries. But when Lovelace writes seriously of fidelity and duty, as in the poems to Lucasta (‘If to be absent were to be/Away from thee’ and ‘Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkinde’) the note, though not deeply passionate, is authentic. And Lovelace’s finest lyric, ‘To Althea from Prison’ (‘Stone Walls doe not a Prison make/Nor iron bars a Cage’), was written while he was paying the penalty for signing a petition on behalf of Church and episcopacy in 1642. Even here, however, there is a courtly polish which seems to distance tribulation—and such distancing of what might disturb with passion or anguish is a mark of Cavalier poetry in general—but to rise in scorn above the confinement of prison is to be distinguished from rising in scorn above commitment to the female sex. In the end it must be remembered that the poets of this period had grave issues to face. Carew died too young to suffer under the Commonwealth; but Herrick lost his living for over twelve years, Suckling, an ardent royalist but not a hardliner, had to flee abroad after supporting Strafford, and Lovelace was in prison more than once. It may be that the posture of libertinism and the devil-may-care stance were roles played out defensively when passion and anguish were about them in action too immediate for transmutation into literature. A royalist whose quality sets him a little apart from this group is John Cleveland (1613-58). His contemporary literary success was

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immense, but his extravagant metaphysical conceits appealed to his own age more than they have appealed to posterity: I am not Poet here; my pen’s the spout Where the rain water of my eyes run out.

So he writes in his elegy to Edward King, published in the same volume that contained Lycidas, for Cleveland was Milton’s contemporary at Christ’s College, Cambridge. His elegy on Ben Jonson is more restrained and tasteful; and there is a charming tribute, ‘Upon Phillis walking in a morning before Sun-rising’. The roses mix amicably in her cheeks—’no Civil War/Between her Yorke and Lancaster’. Probably Cleveland’s liveliest vein is the satirical vituperation with which he baits the Scots in heroic couplets in ‘The Rebell Scot’: Had Cain be Scot, God would have chang’d his doom, Not forc’t him wander, but confin’d him home.

This kind of thing links Cleveland with his friend, Samuel Butler. Abraham Cowley (1618-67) too stands apart from the group by the fact that writing was a more dominant interest in his life. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge until the Civil War, and then, having moved to France, became cipher- secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria. In this post he coded and decoded letters between the queen and the king. His status as a poet was at its peak in his own day. His technical gifts were immense and he had a lasting influence in establishing the Pindaric ode, with its freedom for irregular patterning of line length, rhyme and stanza, as an English form. (See the ode ‘To Mr Hobbes’.) The Pindaric and other odes illustrate the diversity of his interests and his poetic expertise. We find mastery of the heroic couplet in the massive biblical epic, Davideis, but as often with Cowley, the work shows him occupied energetically with interests he fails to communicate to the modern reader. More approachable is The Mistress, a cycle of love poems in which familiar themes of Cavalier poetry are handled with fine artistry. Nevertheless the work smacks of the study, for a vein of dispassionate analytical objectivity runs through its reflections on the dilemmas of love. Cowley sometimes has an obviousness of phrasing that, in an age of startling lines, clamours to pass unnoticed. ‘It was a dismal, and a fearful night’, the elegy on Mr William Hervey begins, and later we have ‘He was my -105-

Friend, the truest Friend on earth’. This intermittent pedestrianism is one aspect of that lack of passion and intensity which have ensured neglect of his work in the past. For all his technical brilliance, and indeed his graceful directness, he fails to compel attention. But his essays are delightful, combining ingredients of humour, engaging self-revelation, social observation and philosophical reflection in a most appetizing blend. The prose of the essays is interspersed with poetry. The essay, ‘Of Myself’, includes a lively visionary dialogue in which the royalist sets the record straight against Cromwell. It also includes verses on himself written when he was only thirteen: This only grant me, that my means may lie Too low for envy, for contempt too high.

It is odd that, historically, his poetic reputation should have achieved just such a status. Where Edmund Waller (1606-87) matches Cowley is first in the shared professionalism of his approach to poetry. That does not mean that he was a full-time writer; but his poems were not the easy throwaways of Cavalier spiritedness; rather they were conscious attempts to make progress in the techniques of versification. Waller matches Cowley too in the achievement of a high contemporary reputation. He left us one or two lyrics in which the mannered graces of the Cavaliers are recaptured without their air of disenchantment. In the well-known lyrics, ‘Goe, lovely Rose’ and ‘On a Girdle’: That which her slender waist confin’d Shall now my joyfull temples bind; No Monarch but would give his Crowne His armes might do what this has done, the feeling is no doubt carefully posed, but it is neither nerveless nor insipid. The mastery of smoothness and lucidity is evident in Waller’s (unsuccessful) poetic courtship of ‘Sacharissa’ (Lady Dorothy Sidney, of the celebrated family). Her portrait is claimed to exalt her above the ladies in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: This glorious piece transcends what he could think, So much his blood is nobler than his ink.

The cultivated neatness of thought and style was highly regarded, and indeed, along with Denham, Waller helped to bring the heroic -106- 43

couplet to that degree of polish and flexibility which was to make it such a fine instrument in Dryden’s hands, and later in Pope’s. He experimented with the balancing of line against line, and half-line against half-line, while at the same time preserving a smooth sequence; so he played his part in establishing that contrapuntal relationship between form and flow which is the secret of the best eighteenth-century work in the couplet. Thus he addresses Cromwell in ‘A Panegyric to my Lord Protector’: If Romes great Senate could not wield that Sword, Which of the Conquer’d world had made them Lord, What hope had ours, while yet their power was new, To rule victorious Armies but by you?

It is customary to link Waller’s name with that of Sir John Denham (1615-69). Denham’s most significant work is Cooper’s Hill, a long topographical poem in which descriptions of scenery are mingled with reflective consideration of subjects brought to mind by what is pictured. The description of Runnymede leads to reflections on kingship, for instance. On the strength of his achievement in this poem Johnson claims Denham as the originator of the genre of ‘local poetry’ to which later works like Pope’s Windsor Forest and Dyer’s ‘Grongar Hill’ belong. Denham’s close affinity with Waller is shown in his skilful heroic couplets: they have a simple directness of idiom and an easy syntactical naturalness. Economy and concentration of expression are combined with impressive architectural symmetry. His most quoted lines come in the description of the view of the Thames from Cooper’s Hill: O could I flow like thee and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

To Denham goes the credit for paying an immediate tribute to Paradise Lost in the House of Commons when it was first published. Lesser poets of the period who deserve to be mentioned include Francis Quarles (1592-1644), who is still remembered for his Emblems, a book highly rated by his contemporaries. It consists of symbolic engravings illustrated by biblical texts, quotations from the Fathers, and verses in various metres. Thus Quarles comments in -107- verse on, ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his; He feedeth among the lillies’: 44

Ev’n like two little bank-dividing brooks, That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams, And having rang’d and search’d a thousand nooks, Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames, Where in a greater current they conjoyn: So I my best-beloved’s am; so he is mine.

Soon after the publication of this work there appeared A Collection of Emblemes by George Wither (1588-1667). Its character may be judged from ‘The Marigold’, beginning: When, with a serious musing, I behold The grateful, and obsequious Marigold, and leading to the prayer that, as the flower bends to the sun in total dependence on its light, so the poet may aspire, though grovelling on the ground, to the Sun of Righteousness. Wither became a Puritan and exercised his powers on didactic and satiric poetry. His famous lyric, ‘Shall I wasting in Dispaire/Dye because a Womans faire?’ was included in the pastoral epistle, Fidelia. Wither collaborated with William Browne (1591-1643) in Shepherds Pipe, but Browne is chiefly remembered for his Britannia’s Pastorals, a long narrative poem in couplets, treating of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses and interspersed with lyrics. Two brothers, Giles Fletcher (1585-1623) and Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650) call for attention if only because they exercised some influence on Milton. Giles Fletcher’s Christs Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth deals fluently and readably with the Fall, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Ascension, and ends with a vision of the marriage of the divine Spouse and his mystical Bride, the Church. It is effective descriptively, yet not because there is much inventiveness: rather there is much that is recognizably derivative, harking back to standard prescriptions: About the holy Cittie rolls a flood Of molten chrystall, like a sea of glasse…

Its section dealing with the temptation of Christ influenced Milton in Paradise Regained. Phineas Fletcher’s influence on Milton may be -108- gauged from ‘The Locusts’, a harsh attack on the Jesuits, who are involved in a diabolical conspiracy against healthy religion, originating in Hell: The Porter to th’infernal gate is Sin, A shapeless shape, a foule deformed thing, 45

Nor nothing, nor a substance… Phineas’s imaginative range is bigger than Giles’s, but he too has limited resources of imagery so that the poetic instrument at his disposal often seems an impoverished one. There is an enigmatic quality about the character and work of Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Though he seems to have been in royalist circles in his twenties, he became Cromwell’s admirer. He lived for a time in the household of Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentarian commander, at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, acting as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary; and it was here that he wrote ‘Upon Appleton House’, a descriptive and reflective poem in stanzas made up of octosyllabic rhyming couplets. Later Marvell was tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, and eventually he had a post in the Latin secretaryship under Milton. He became a member of Parliament in 1659. Marvell’s admiration for Cromwell can be measured from his three poetic tributes, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, ‘The First Anniversarie of the Government under O.C.’ and ‘A Poem upon the death of O.C.’ The famous ‘Horatian Ode’ exalts Cromwell as the mighty man of destiny, picked out from his ‘private Gardens’ to ‘cast the Kingdome old/Into another Mold’; yet it also speaks with respect of Charles’s dignity at his execution: He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable Scene…

In ‘The First Anniversarie’ foreign ambassadors are moved to question where Cromwell can have learned the arts of rule: He seems a King by long succession born, And yet the same to be a king does scorn.

The poem on Cromwell’s death includes a note of more private and personal sorrow which indicates how Marvell’s appreciation of the Protector grew. Marvell is linked to the metaphysical poets by his fanciful conceits -109- which achieve a vitality of their own. In ‘Upon Appleton House’ a correspondence is drawn between England and a garden: the flowers become soldiers displaying silken ensigns, drying their ‘pans’ (of the muskets), then firing ‘fragrant Vollyes’: Well shot ye Firemen! Oh how sweet, And round your equal Fires do meet; 46

Whose shrill report no ear can tell, But echoes to the Eye and smell. The imaginative theme is explored through several stanzas, but the eventual sober reflection: But War all this doth overgrow: We Ord’nance Plant and Powder sow. leaves the reader feeling that the gravity of the couplet is out of key with the less earnest character of the conceit it interrupts: and this in itself is a serious problem for the student of Marvell—that it is by no means always clear in what tone of voice he is speaking, and therefore how he is to be understood. At its best Marvell’s poetry has the shapeliness of conception and the living tension within it which are the marks of the metaphysicals. Crisp couplets are taut with such tension in the ‘Dialogue between the Soul and Body’. Moreover the implicit dialogue threaded through ‘To his Coy Mistress’ is more than a confrontation between lover and beloved, for the plea to seize the moment is given the dimensions of man’s outcry against finitude: But at my back I alwaies hear Times winged Charriot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lye Desarts of vast Eternity.

Marvell’s best-loved poem, ‘The Garden’, is at once richly sensuous and packed with thought. The implicit contrast between the beauty of women and the beauty of the garden leads to an emphasis on the paradisal purity and sweetness of the place so intense that it seems to predate even the creation of Eve. The idea that an Eveless Paradise would be two Paradises in one, and a delight beyond the lot of mortal man, matches the idea that the mind finds greater pleasure within itself than in the loveliest garden. The familiar contemporary theme of disengagement acquires a mystical dimension. -110- 5.1. John Donne

DONNE, John

Columbia Encyclopedia

John Donne (dŭn, dŏn), 1572–1631, English poet and divine. He is considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets. 47

Life and Works Reared a Roman Catholic, Donne was educated at Oxford, Cambridge, and Lincoln's Inn. He traveled on the Continent and in 1596–97 accompanied the earl of Essex on his expeditions to Cádiz and the Azores. On his return he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton (later Baron Ellesmere), lord keeper of the great seal, and achieved a reputation as a poet and public personage. His writing of this period, including some of his Songs and Sonnets (others were

Figure 06. John Donne written as late as 1617) and Problems and Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_ Paradoxes, consist of cynical, realistic, often Donne_BBC_News.jpg sensual lyrics, essays, and verse satires. Donne's court career was ruined by the discovery of his marriage in 1601 to Anne More, niece to Sir Thomas Egerton's second wife, and he was imprisoned for a short time. After 1601 his poetry became more serious. The two Anniversaries — An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) — reveal that his faith in the medieval order of things had been disrupted by the growing political, scientific, and philosophic doubt of the times. He wrote prose on religious and moral subjects; a polemic against the Jesuits; Biathanatos (not published until 1644), a qualified apology for suicide; and the Pseudo-Martyr (1610), an argument for Anglicanism. After a long period of financial uncertainty and desperation, during which he was twice a member of Parliament (1601, 1614), Donne yielded to the wishes of King James I and took orders in 1615. Two years later his wife died. The tone of his poetry, especially the Holy Sonnets, deepened after her death. After his ordination, Donne wrote more religious works, such as his Devotions (1624) and sermons. Several of his sermons were published during his lifetime. Donne was one of the most eloquent preachers of his day. He was made reader in divinity at Lincoln's Inn, a royal chaplain, and in 1621, dean of St. Paul's, a position he held until his death. Poetry All of Donne's verse — his love sonnets and his religious and philosophical poems — is distinguished by a remarkable blend of passion and reason. His love 48

poetry treats the breadth of the experience of loving, emphasizing, in such poems as "The Ecstasie," the root of spiritual love in physical love. The devotional poems and sermons reveal a profound concern with death, decay, damnation, and the possibility of the soul's transcendent union with God. Original, witty, erudite, and often obscure, Donne's style is characterized by a brilliant use of paradox, hyperbole, and imagery. His most famous poems include "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "Go and catch a falling star," "Hymn to God the Father," and the sonnet to death ("Death be not proud" ). Neglected for 200 years, Donne was rediscovered by 20th-century critics. His work has had a profound influence on a number of poets Including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden.

Some of John Donne’s poems

The Flea Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence? Mark but this flea, and mark in this, In what could this flea guilty be, How little that which thou deny'st me Except in that drop which it sucked is; from thee? It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that And in this flea, our two bloods mingled thou be; Find'st not thyself, nor me the weaker Thou know'st that this cannot be said now; A sin, or shame, or loss of 'Tis true, then learn how false fears be; maidenhead, Just so much honour, when thou Yet this enjoys before it woo, yield'st to me, And pampered swells with one blood Will waste, as this flea's death took life made of two, from thee. And this, alas, is more than we would -81- do. The Good Morrow Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, nay more than I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I married are. Did, till we loved? were we not weaned This flea is you and I, and this till then, Our marriage bed, and marriage But sucked on country pleasures, temple is; childishly? Though parents grudge, and you, Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' we'are met, den? And cloistered in these living walls of 'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies jet. be. Though use make you apt to kill me, If ever any beauty I did see, Let not to this, self murder added be, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a And sacrilege, three sins in killing dream of thee. three. And now good morrow to our waking Cruel and sudden, hast thou since souls, 49

Which watch not one another out of Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, fear; and desperate men, For love, all love of other sights And dost with poison, war, and controls, sickness dwell, And makes one little room, an And poppy, or charms can make us everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to sleep as well, new worlds have gone, And better than thy stroke; why swell'st Let maps to others, worlds on worlds thou then? have shown, One short sleep past, we wake Let us possess one world, each hath eternally, one, and is one. And death shall be no more, Death My face in thine eye, thine in mine thou shalt die. appears, -202- And true plain hearts do in the faces Holy Sonnet # 17 rest, Where can we find two better Since she whom I loved hath paid her hemispheres last debt Without sharp north, without declining To nature, and to hers, and my good is west? dead, Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; And her soul early into heaven If our two loves be one, or, thou and I ravished, Love so alike, that none do slacken, Wholly in heavenly things my mind is none can die. set. -82- Here the admiring her my mind did Holy Sonnet # 6 whet To seek thee God; so streams do show Death be not proud, though some have the head, called thee But though I have found thee, and thou Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not my thirst hast fed, so, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. For, those, whom thou think'st, thou But why should I beg more love, when dost overthrow, as thou Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou Dost woo my soul, for hers offering all kill me; thine: From rest and sleep, which but thy And dost not only fear lest I allow pictures be, My love to saints and angels, things Much pleasure, then from thee, much divine, more must flow, But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt And soonest our best men with thee do Lest the world, flesh, yea Devil put go, thee out. Rest of their bones, and soul's -207- delivery.

You can read all of John Donne’s poems and other works in http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/donnebib.htm. If you want, you can listen to the Holy Sonnets in http://www.learnoutloud.com/podcaststream/listen.php?url=http://librivox.org/boo kfeeds/holy-sonnets-by-john-donne.xml&all=1&title=34857 50

5.2. Richard Lovelace

LOVELACE, Richard

Columbia Encyclopedia

Richard Lovelace 1618–1657?, one of the English Cavalier poets. He was the son of a Kentish knight and was educated at Oxford. In 1642 he was briefly imprisoned for having presented to Parliament a petition for the restoration of the bishops. An ardent royalist, he served with the French army during the English civil war. On his return to England in 1648, he was imprisoned by the Commonwealth. His royalist sympathies lost him his Figure 07. Richard entire fortune, and he died in extreme poverty. He is Lovelace Source: remembered almost solely for two extremely graceful, http://www.nndb.com/peop le/984/000097693/ melodic, and much-quoted lyrics, "To Althea, from Prison" and "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." The first volume of his poems, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c., appeared in 1649; the companion volume, Lucasta: Posthume Poems, in 1660.

Some of Richard Lovelace’s poems (In UNTERMEYER)

To Althea from Prison The sweetness, mercy, majesty And glories of my King; When Love with unconfinèd wings When I shall voice aloud, how good Hovers within my gates, He is, how great should be, And my divine Althea brings Enlargéd winds that curl the flood To whisper at the grates; Know no such liberty. When I lie tangled in her hair Stone walls do not a prison make, And fetter'd to her eye, Nor iron bars a cage; The birds that wanton in the air Minds innocent and quiet take Know no such liberty. That for an hermitage; When flowing cups run swiftly round If I have freedom in my love With no allaying Thames, And in my soul am free, Our careless heads with roses crown'd, Angels alone, that soar above, Our hearts with loyal flames; Enjoy such liberty. When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go free, -472- Fishes that tipple in the deep To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars Know no such liberty. When, like committed linnets, I Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind With shriller voice shall sing That from the nunnery 51

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, Have I not loved thee much and long, To war and arms I fly. A tedious twelve hours' space? True, a new mistress now I chase, I should all other beauties wrong, The first foe in the field; And rob thee of a new embrace And with a stronger faith embrace Should I still dote upon thy face. A sword, a horse, a shield. Not but all joy in thy brown hair Yet this inconstancy is such In others may be found; As you too shall adore; But I must search the black and fair, I could not love thee, dear, so much, Like skilful minerallists that sound Loved I not honor more. For treasure in un-plowed-up ground. -473- Then if, when I have loved my round, The Scrutiny Thou prov'st the pleasant she, With spoils of meaner beauties Why shouldst thou swear I am crowned forsworn, I laden will return to thee, Since thine I vowed to be? Even sated with variety. Lady, it is already Morn, And 'twas last night I swore to thee -474- That fond impossibility.

If you like Lovelace’s poems, you can read all of them in http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/lovelace/lovebib.htm. If you want, you can listen To Althea from Prison in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd3xHaV20lE

5.3. Henry Vaughan

VAUGHAN, Henry

Columbia Encyclopedia

Henry Vaughan (vôn), 1622–95, one of the English metaphysical poets. Born in Breconshire, Wales, he signed himself Silurist, after the ancient inhabitants of that region. Figure 08. Henry Vaughan After leaving Oxford, where he did not take a degree, he Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ turned to the study of law. Later he switched to medicine and wales/mid/sites/books helf/pages/henry_vau spent his life as a highly respected physician. His greatest ghan.shtml poetry is contained in Silex Scintillans (1650; second part, 1655), which includes "The Ascension Hymn," "The World," "Quickness," "The Retreat," and "They are all gone into the world of light." Though he openly admitted his indebtedness to George Herbert, where Herbert celebrates the institution of the Church, Vaughan is more interested in natural objects and in a mystical communion 52

with nature. Vaughan's other works include Poems (1646), Olor Iscanus (1651), Thalia Rediviva (1678), The Mount of Olives (1652), and Flores Solitudinis (1654).

Some poems by Henry Vaughan

Quickness. (O not in vain!) now beg thy breath; Thy quickning breath, which gladly False life! a foil and no more, when bears Wilt thou be gone? Through saddest clouds to that glad Thou foul deception of all men place, That would not have the true come on. Where cloudless Quires sing without tears, Thou art a Moon-like toil; a blinde Sing thy just praise, and see thy face. Self-posing state; A dark contest of waves and winde; The Queer. A meer tempestuous debate. O tell me whence that joy doth spring Life is a fix'd, discerning light, Whose diet is divine and fair, A knowing Joy; Which wears heaven, like a bridal ring, No chance, or fit: but ever bright, And tramples on doubts and despair? And calm and full, yet doth not cloy. 'Tis such a blissful thing, that still Whose Eastern traffique deals in bright Doth vivifie, And boundless Empyrean themes, And shine and smile, and hath the skill Mountains of spice, Day-stars and To please without Eternity. light, Green trees of life, and living streams? Thou art a toylsom Mole, or less A moving mist Tell me, O tell who did thee bring But life is, what none can express, And here, without my knowledge, A quickness, which my God hath kist. plac'd, -538- Till thou didst grow and get a wing, The Wreath. A wing with eyes, and eyes that taste?

Since I in storms us'd most to be Sure, holyness the Magnet is, And seldom yielded flowers, And Love the Lure, that woos thee How shall I get a wreath for thee down; From those rude, barren hours? Which makes the high transcendent The softer dressings of the Spring, bliss Or Summers later store Of knowing thee, so rarely known. I will not for thy temples bring, -539- Which Thorns, not Roses wore. The Book.

But a twin'd wreath of grief and praise, Eternal God! maker of all Praise soil'd with tears, and tears again That have liv'd here, since the mans Shining with joy, like dewy days, fall; This day I bring for all thy pain, The Rock of ages! in whose shade Thy causless pain! and sad as death; They live unseen, when here they Which sadness breeds in the most fade. vain, 53

Thou knew'st this papyr, when it was Cloath'd with this skin, which now lies Meer seed, and after that but grass; spred Before 'twas drest or spun, and when A Covering o're this aged book, Made linen, who did wear it then: What were their lifes, their thoughts & Which makes me wisely weep and look deeds On my own dust; meer dust it is, But Whither good corn, or fruitless weeds. not so dry and clean as this. Thou knew'st and saw'st them all and Thou knew'st this Tree, when a green though shade Now scatter'd thus, dost know them so. Cover'd it, since a Cover made, And where it flourish'd, grew and O knowing, glorious spirit! when spread, Thou shalt restore trees, beasts and As if it never should be dead. men, When thou shalt make all new again, Thou knew'st this harmless beast, Destroying onely death and pain, when he Give him amongst thy works a place, Did live and feed by thy decree Who in them lov'd and sought thy face! On each green thing; then slept (well -540- fed)

Read other Henry Vaughan’s poems in http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/vaughan/vaughbib.htm If you want, you can listen to one of his poems in http://amblingbooks.com/books/view/the_world_1#.UIxGHpMldBc

6. Restoration

Milton to Dryden Harry Blamires For John Milton (1608-74) poetry was a vocation, and such is the personal and public importance of his masterpiece Paradise Lost that one can fitly measure the other activities of his life up to its composition according to how they prepared the ground for it or delayed it. Milton’s father was a well-to-do scrivener who gave him a good education and every encouragement to steep himself in literary and musical culture. Before he completed his studies at Cambridge by taking the MA degree in 1632, Milton had already written his first significant poem, the ode ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (1629). ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ followed not long after. For five years Milton lived at Horton in Buckinghamshire, preparing himself mentally and spiritually for his chosen vocation. The masque Comus was written for performance 54

at Ludlow Castle in 1634 and ‘Lycidas’, the elegy for his fellow student, Edward King, in 1637. Milton’s next phase of self-preparation was a tour on the Continent on which he met Italian men of letters. It was the Civil War that brought him back, and he threw himself into polemical writing on the anti-episcopal front, later on behalf of Cromwell’s government and even in justification of Charles’s execution. Meanwhile sudden marriage in 1642 to Mary Powell, a young girl of sixteen, had been so unsuccessful that Mary returned to her royalist parents within a few weeks and did not come back to her husband until 1645; and Milton had by then written pamphlets in defence of divorce. Distaste for censorship provoked his Areopagitica, a stout defence of the freedom of the press. Milton’s appointment as Latin Secretary in 1649 committed him more officially to the Commonwealth so that when the Restoration came it put an end to his cherished endeavours. His eyesight had completely failed -125- as early as 1652, and his first wife had died in the same year, leaving three daughters. His second wife, whom he married in 1656, lived only two years. Milton’s retirement to private life at the Restoration brought his life’s work to a climax in the composition of Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published in 1671. Milton’s years of work for the Parliament deflected him from pursuit of his prime work as a poet: yet the years of active controversy in the heat of fierce conflict, superimposed on the years of disciplined intellectual self-preparation, perhaps provided the exact nourishment needed for poetic endeavour on the scale of the epic. Certainly, though the substance of Milton’s prose output removes much of it from the sphere of what is lastingly interesting except to specialist scholars, the long discipline of developing a style apt for all the purposes of heated current controversy must have operated towards the achievement of that mature periodic fluency which marks the style of Paradise Lost. Be that as it may, no English writer’s career is so memorably, even dramatically, shaped as that which leads from Cambridge and the ‘Nativity’ ode, through Whitehall and political pamphleteering, to the cottage at Chalfont St Giles, and the portrait of the lone and broken and blinded Samson. ‘L’Allegro’ is the cheerful spirit’s cry for laughter and jollity, mirth and pleasure, while its companion piece, ‘Il Penseroso’, calls for pensive musing melancholy, peace and quiet, and retirement to silent contemplation. Each explores scenes and 55

activities proper to its mood in the most accomplished octosyllabic couplets in our literature. These two poems with ‘Lycidas’ would have made Milton’s name as a front-rank poet had he written nothing more. ‘Lycidas’ is an elegy contributed to a collection of memorial tributes on the occasion of the death of a fellow student, Edward King, who was drowned en route for Ireland. The elegy seems to effect the impossible by giving emotional authenticity and moral gravity to the pastoral convention with its stylized machinery of shepherds and swains. King was destined for the priesthood, and lament for lost youthful talent and promise is the keynote. The threat of being cut off in the prime of life leads to meditation on the motive that fame provides to ‘scorn delights, and live laborious days’. The grief of King’s loss is shared even by Saint Peter: he could better have spared the many worldly and ignorant priests under whom the ‘hungry sheep look up, and are -126- not fed’. There is a final triumphant cry of faith in Lycidas’s rising in Christ. In introducing his tribute, the poet insists that he is plucking fruit prematurely ‘with forc’d fingers rude’: he is writing before his self-preparation is complete. ‘Bitter constraint and sad occasion drear’ compel this untimely anticipation. The apology is for writing prematurely ‘once more’ because in 1634 Milton fulfilled a commission to supply a masque for presentation at Ludlow Castle before the Earl of Bridgewater, and wrote Comus for the occasion. Comus is an enchanter, descended from Bacchus and Circe, who lures travellers to his ‘palace’ and transforms them into half-monsters. A Lady loses her two brothers in a forest and Comus deceptively takes her to his ‘palace’, there to press his corrupting drink upon her. Her resistance is the resistance of chastity to self-indulgence. There are interesting anticipations of Paradise Lost in the discussion between the brothers about whether virtue in itself is proof against assault and in the cunningly persuasive arguments by which Comus tries to seduce the Lady. He is an amateur Satan confronted by an incorruptible Eve. Unblushing delight in innocence and cheerful praise of chastity give the play its appealing warmth. It is Milton’s ‘Paradise Preserved’. His Paradise Lost sets out to ‘justifie the wayes of God to men’ by rehearsing the high argument of man’s fall and redemption. We are taken first to Hell to see the plight of the fallen angels and to hear them debating whether to renew active warfare or to try to make the best of things in Hell. A notable feature of the debate is the total diabolical irrationality brilliantly registered by Milton in sequence after sequence of 56

illogicality and self-contradiction that is conveyed with all the emotive blur and sleight of intellect characteristic of cosmic media-men. The debate is rigged so that Satan is chosen to set out and seek God’s new world with the intention to alienate His new creature from Him and thus damage Him indirectly. Book III takes us to Heaven where we listen to a council at which the fall of man is foreseen. The Son of God offers self-sacrificially to save man by ransom as Satan offered himself to destroy man by seduction, and we recognize that as Hell travestied Heaven by its grotesque parody of rational discourse in irrationality, so the movements of Satan are parodic negativities burlesquing the acts of the divine. Meantime Satan has found his way to earth, and we go to Eden to see Adam and Eve, erect and godlike creatures in whom the ‘image of their glorious Maker’ shines. In the idyll of their innocent -127- converse and their connubial delights Milton’s poetic range reaches levels of sensuous wonder that are at once deeply personal and sublime. The metaphorical overtones and allusions add a symbolic dimension, so that we recognize Paradise as Heaven’s image just as Hell was Heaven’s parody: correspondingly the human family with its offspring-to-be is as clearly an image of the heavenly Trinity as the satanic family (Satan, Sin and Death) is its parody. In the central books of the poem we are taken back to the beginning of things, for Raphael is sent by God to Adam, and the War in Heaven, the Creation of the World, and the waking to life of Adam and Eve, are covered in their converse. Book IX brings the drama to its climax, for Eve encounters Satan in the body of a serpent marvellously able to speak, to flatter, to indicate how a being can rise above its own nature. A serpent, he claims, may become virtually human, a human being virtually divine: the secret is the fruit of a certain tree. Eve is taken to see it, knows it for the forbidden tree, but nevertheless accepts the diabolical guarantee of its virtue: So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.

Returning to Adam, she induces him against his better judgement to eat as well. Shame, lust and quarrelsomeness overtake them. 57

The concluding books not only trace the judgement upon Adam and Eve but also include a vision of the future of the human race, presented for the consolation of our first parents by the Archangel Michael. The vision, by its inclusive summary of the pattern of redemption in Christ, completes the original intention to justify God’s ways to men. Our greatest poem is a masterpiece of organization in which blank verse is employed to enable words to stand out with the force which in rhymed verse only rhyming words have. Thus key words, employed time after time (‘fruit’, ‘death’, ‘woe’, ‘seat’, ‘mute’, and many more) are so planted (using all feet of the pentameter) as to resoundingly pull together far scattered but related passages in a pattern of sound and meaning musical in shape, associative and symbolic in texture. The pattern of interconnections is so subtle and complex that the -128- poem offers the delights of unlimited exploration and discovery on a scale rare in literature. It is a masterpiece too by virtue of the universality of its substance, psychological and emotional, mythic and religious. The blending of deeply felt personal interest in the lot of Adam and Eve with a profound theological estimate of the human predicament and destiny is delicately sustained. The balance is preserved by the presence of the humble, prayerful poetic persona, drawing the reader into involvement with himself and with Adam and Eve. Paradise Regained is a remarkably superfluous poem in view of the vision of human redemption and the endless ages of new Heaven and new Earth prefigured at the conclusion of Paradise Lost. It concentrates on the temptation of Christ by Satan, which is not in fact capable of bearing the weight of a central significance shifted from the events of the Passion. The static interchange of dialogue is not inspired. It is difficult to understand Milton’s lapse from the poetic level sustained elsewhere. One inevitably feels, on reading, that the magnificent flow of Paradise Lost, to which Milton’s muse had geared itself, just had to be allowed to run out. Samson Agonistes is a tragedy in the ‘Greek mould, presenting Samson’s final act of retribution after his imprisonment by the Philistines. He is visited by a series of people while a Chorus keeps up an intermittent commentary, recalling the past, musing in prayer and exhortation on the ways of God to men, consoling Samson and blessing his resolve. The first visitor, Samson’s old father Manoa, brings the tempting hope of release. Samson’s response is that his evils are remediless and that death 58

alone can close his miseries. The second visitor, Samson’s wife Dalila, who betrayed him by cutting off the hair in which his strength lay, offers the tempting lure that even for a blind and broken man life ‘yet hath many solaces, enjoy’d/ Where other senses want not their delights/At home in leisure and domestic ease’. Samson resists with a ferocity that testifies to the seductive power of the temptation. The third visitor, Harapha the Philistine, comes to taunt and mock the beaten champion and receives a dignified rebuke. Samson has sustained the battery of confrontation and he is spiritually ready now to fulfil his destiny. The Philistines call him to entertain them at their feast and his first refusal is quickly retracted as he senses a divinely offered opportunity in the invitation. He goes, assuring the Chorus that they will hear nothing -129- dishonourable of him, nothing unworthy. After Manoa has returned to stimulate a last shallow hope of escape by ransom, the news comes that Samson has pulled down the theatre on the audience and himself. The free verse which Milton adopts is an instrument of power and flexibility. Of the four Miltonic figures who have to wrestle with temptation—the Lady (Comus), Eve, Christ and Samson—there is most of Milton in Samson, the blind old warrior who has lived to see himself bereft of power and influence under an alien dispensation. Though Milton’s self-projection is never obtrusive, the pathos of the obviously felt correspondences comes through in the voice of suffering and the voice of faith. The reaction at the Restoration against the austerities of the Commonwealth gave a tone of licentiousness to the life of the court and of London society. To turn from the poetry of Milton to the poetry of fashionable Restoration society is to bridge a chasm. Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye, In every gesture dignitie and love.

That is Adam’s praise of Eve. She’s plump, yet with ease you may span her round Waste, But her round swelling Thighs can scarce be embrac’d; Her Belly is soft, not a word of the rest; But I know what I think when I drink to the best.

So the court poet, Sackville, hymns his Bess. Charles Sackville (1638-1706), better known as the Earl of Dorset, was one of the group of Court Wits surrounding Charles II and sharing in the gay dissipations that marked his reign. They were not of 59

course mere crude debauchees, but men of culture who patronized the arts. Nor was the vein of satirical bawdy presented above their predominant idiom; but certainly the group sought to shock sensitivities by outrageous exhibitionism as well as by cultivated raillery, and their practice of permissiveness is near in psychological origin to the movements towards decadence in our own post-war society. Sir Charles Sedley (?1639-1701), the dramatist, was another member of the group. His graceful versification achieves a lyrical ease whose rhythmical distinctiveness lifts it well above banality, as in the well-known ‘Song to Celia’: -130- All that in Woman is ador’d In thy dear self I find, For the whole Sex can but afford The Handsome and the Kind.

Another dramatist, Sir George Etherege (?1635-91), though deriving from a humbler social background, skilfully assumed the poses of the circle with an air of unaffectedness that can briefly charm in spite of its obviousness: Then since we mortal lovers are, Let’s question not how long ’twill last; But while we love let us take care, Each minute be with pleasure past: It were a madness, to deny To live, because w’are sure to die.

Yet this unforced flow of phrase, masterfully contrived, somehow frames word and pose alike in isolation from reality. The point may be made even in relation to some of the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), the best of the group. He dramatizes the paradox of constancy and inconstancy in ‘Absent from thee’, where the lover demands freedom to leave his mistress so that his ‘fantastick Mind’ can ‘prove’ the torments of separation. Then let him return ‘wearied with a World of Woe’ to her safe bosom and expire there contented: Lest once more wand’ring from that Heav’n, I fall on some base Heart unblest; Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven, And lose my everlasting Rest.

Stance and stanza alike are beautifully fashioned, so neatly indeed that the awareness of toying with life as well as with words is the impression left on the sensitive reader. Yet Rochester’s lyrics (‘All my past life is mine no more’, for instance) often touch deeper levels, levels on which the realities of adoration, change 60

and inconstancy are at once metaphysically formulated and keenly felt. Moreover Rochester is a satirist, deftly characterizing contemporary poets in ‘An Allusion to Horace’, and achieving a philosophic dimension in ‘A Satyr against Mankind’. In the latter, and in the gravely devastating -131- cadences of ‘Upon Nothing’, the new ‘Augustan’ spirit is decisively with us: The great Man’s Gratitude to his best Friend, King’s Promises, Whores’ Vows, tow’rds thee they bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

A poet of a different breed, but no less representative of Restoration reaction, was Samuel Butler (1612-80), author of Hudibras, a lengthy mock-heroic poem immensely successful in its day. Its targets are bigotry and hypocrisy. It ridicules the Puritans and Independents by describing the adventures of Hudibras and his squire Ralpho, absurd figures derivative from Cervantes’s Don Quixote. If the satire is sometimes heavy-handed and the octosyllabic metre heavy-footed, Butler can be dexterous in word-play, and many a shaft has shrewd epigrammatic force: What makes all Doctrines plain and clear? About two Hundred Pounds a Year. And that which was prov’d true before, Prove false again?—Two Hundred more.

The literature of the last quarter of this century was dominated by the massive figure of John Dryden (1631-1700). He was a literary giant of a kind very different from Milton, and his claims are always more difficult to demonstrate than to recognize. He was a superb professional craftsman. His career was a writer’s career; and the turbulent events that rendered it a life of conflicts, of failures and successes, were many of them literary events arising from the rivalries of competing dramatists and poets. Because he was a professional, consciously devoting himself to the refinement of English prose and verse, he was prepared to turn his hand to a great variety of forms and purposes; and Dryden’s greatness lies in a total achievement comprising plays, prose and poems of varying character rather than in this or that masterpiece. There is no single work that brings all his immense gifts to fruition, no single work on which all those gifts are brought to bear. It would be idle to pretend that his best poem, Absalom and Achitophel, in any way represents the fullness of his genius as Paradise Lost represents Milton’s. And the satirical voice which gives 61

such brilliance to Absalom and Achitophel never breathes a sound in his best play, All for Love. -132- Dryden came of a Puritan family, but moved in stages through royalism and Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. The changing nature of his allegiances indicates the serious search for stability and truth that occupied him mentally and spiritually during years of experience which taught him to see through the postures of successive ruling parties. Dryden’s first successes were in the theatre, but we reserve consideration of his plays to the next chapter. In Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666, he celebrated the national achievements against the Dutch and also paid tribute to London’s ordeal in the Fire: Methinks already, from this chymic flame, I see a city of more precious mould: Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, With silver pav’d, and all divine with gold.

The characteristic energy and fluency are already apparent, though the tautness and concentration of Dryden’s maturity are yet to be achieved. After a decade of immersion in the theatre, the full flowering of Dryden’s satiric wit was marked by the publication of Absalom and Achitophel in 1681. It is a topical poem intended to sway people’s minds about immediate events. Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, became involved in an attempt to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from succession to the throne. Dryden represents the Earl of Shaftesbury as Achitophel and the Duke of Monmouth as Absalom. Absalom is lured by Achitophel to join the rebellious action. The first description of Achitophel is devastating in its impact: Of these the false Achitophel was first; A name to all succeeding ages curst: For close designs, and crooked councils fit; Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit; Restless, unfix’d in principles and place; In power unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace.

Achitophel’s cunning appeal to Absalom to make himself ‘champion of the public good’ touches the spirit of a youth ‘too covetous of fame, /Too full of angel’s metal in his frame’; and in spite of loyal devotion to his father, the burden of his illegitimacy weighs heavily upon him. ‘Desire of greatness is a godlike sin’, he cries and Achitophel 62

-133- diabolically pours poison into this wound in his virtue. But the memorable force of the poem lies in its gallery of portraits, scathingly sketched with an adroitness of stroke that flaunts Dryden’s consummate mastery of the couplet. No one is polished off more deftly and ironically than Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham: A man so various, that he seem’d to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long…

In view of the numerous identifiable portraits it is not surprising that the popularity of the poem was immediate, and Nahum Tate wrote a second part a year later to which Dryden contributed some 200 lines. There is comparable polish and humour in the satire, MacFlecknoe, an attack on the poet Shadwell, who is selected to succeed the retiring arch-poet of nonsense, as being supreme in that sphere: Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Dryden’s use of the heroic couplet for the very different purpose of philosophical and theological reasoning is, considering the superficial unattractiveness of such a project, remarkably successful. His Religio Laici is ostensibly a defence of the established religion against the extremes of Roman traditionalism and dissenting individualism. On the one hand the ‘partial Papists’ have claimed infallibility for their Church and abused the claim. On the other hand the loudest dissenting bawler becomes the most inspired interpreter of biblical truth. ‘The spirit gave the doctoral degree.’ The conclusion is rather a philosophical plea for a middle way between institutional arrogance and individual ignorance than a doctrinal defence of the claims of Ecclesia Anglicana. But there is a decisive theological emphasis earlier in the poem where Dryden defends orthodox Christianity against the Deists, laying great stress on the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Atonement. This firm theological base, considered alongside the poet’s urgent quest for authority, makes his subsequent conversion to Rome readily understandable. Hence, after his conversion in 1685, the instrument of argument -134- 63

here perfected is applied to a full-scale defence of the Roman Church in The Hind and the Panther. Dryden shows remarkable skill in modifying the sharp, biting couplet of the satirical poems to an instrument for sustaining the flow of logic so that the reader is carried easily yet wakefully, and not bounced from shaft to shaft, from tirade to tirade. The ‘milk-white hind, immortal and unchang’d’ represents the Roman Church. There is also a ‘bloody Bear’ representing the Independents, a ‘buffoon Ape’ for the atheists, the ‘bristled Baptist Boar’, and various other brutes. The Church of England is represented by the Panther, ‘sure the noblest, next to Hind,/And fairest creature of the spotted kind’. As ‘mistress of a monarch’s bed’, she wields the crosier and wears the mitre; her upper part reveals ‘decent discipline’ but Calvin’s brands mark her too so that, ‘like a creature of a double kind’, she is confined in her own labyrinth and cannot be exported. When such creatures argue about the religious issues of the day the animal allegory is inevitably ornamental rather than essential to the dialogue, and when in the last book the Panther and the Hind resort to animal fables to make their points, one finds oneself reading a fable within a fable. Dryden’s odes are technically brilliant. There is one ‘To the Pious Memory of Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of poesy and painting’, which Dr Johnson described as ‘undoubtedly the noblest ode that our language has produced’. It includes an interesting lament on the ‘steaming ordures’ of the contemporary theatre, produced by prostitution of the Muse in a ‘lubrique and adulterate age’. Two odes were written for St Cecilia’s Day in 1687 and 1697 respectively. There is an element of bravura about both of them (‘From harmony, from heavenly harmony’ and Alexander’s Feast). It is as though the craftsman is showing off the full scope of his virtuosity. One feels that Dryden has flexed his poetic muscles for a demonstrative work-out, as perhaps a solo instrumentalist might display the range of his expertise in the cadenza of a concerto. It is all done with splendid ease and consummate skill. And there is monumental evidence of Dryden’s mastery of the couplet in his translation of Virgil. Wherever one opens the text of his Aeneid one finds it astonishingly readable. The vitality is sustained through action, description and dialogue alike, and diverse moods are caught in phrase and rhythm with unerring aptness. There are many good things, too, scattered about the numerous prologues and epilogues -135- 64

which Dryden wrote for performances of his plays and other special occasions. One might cite the incisive comments on Shakespeare, Fletcher and Jonson in his ‘Prologue to The Tempest’. For sheer polish there is little to match the beautifully modulated couplets in which Dryden pays touching tribute to John Oldham, a gifted poet cut off at the age of thirty (‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’): For sure our souls were near allied, and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.

Dryden wrote a great number of prefaces and dedications, and in many of them he discussed literary subjects and defended his own practice. In addition he wrote the Essay of Dramatic Poesy in the form of a platonic dialogue. It was in this essay that he paid his famous tribute to Shakespeare: To begin, then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient, poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul.

It is only necessary to quote one such sentence to indicate what Dryden did for English prose. The readiest way to sum up his achievement is to admit that of all seventeenth-century writers he is the only one to write sentences which, we feel, might almost have been written yesterday. Dryden’s recognition of Shakespeare’s outstanding quality, at a time when it was far from generally appreciated, is a mark of his critical acumen. Nor was it exceptional, as his appreciation of Milton and Spenser would show. Chaucer he called ‘the father of English poetry’. It was highly appropriate that Dr Johnson should have called Dryden himself ‘the father of English criticism’. -136-

6.1. John Milton

MILTON, John Columbia Encyclopedia John Milton 1608–74, English poet, b. London, one of the greatest poets of the English language. Early Life and Works The son of a wealthy scrivener, Milton was educated at St. Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge. While Milton was at Cambridge he wrote poetry in both Latin and English, including the ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629). 65

Although the exact dates are unknown, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" were probably written not long after this. His dislike of the increasing ritualism in the Church of England was the reason he later gave for not fulfilling his plans to become a minister. Resolved to be a poet, Milton retired to his father's estate at Horton after leaving Cambridge and devoted himself to his studies. There he wrote the masque

Figure 09. John Milton Comus (1634) and "Lycidas" (1638), one of Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John- his greatest poems, an elegy on the death milton.jpg of his friend Edward King. Political and Moral Tracts In 1638 Milton went to Italy, where he traveled, studied, and met many notable figures, including Galileo. Returning to England in 1639, he supported the Presbyterians in their attempt to reform the Church of England. His pamphlets, which attacked the episcopal form of church government, include Of Reformation in England (1641) and The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty (1642). In 1643 Milton married Mary Powell, a young woman half his age, who left him the same year. Disillusioned by the failure of his marriage, he started work on four controversial pamphlets (1643–45) upholding the morality of divorce for incompatibility. His Areopagitica (1644), one of the great arguments in favor of the freedom of the press, grew out of his dissatisfaction with the strict censorship of the press exercised by Parliament. Milton gradually broke away from the Presbyterians, and in 1649 he wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which supported the Independents who had imprisoned King Charles in the Puritan Revolution. In it he declared that subjects may depose and put to death an unworthy king. This pamphlet secured Milton a position in Oliver Cromwell's government as Latin secretary for foreign affairs, and he continued to defend Cromwell and the Commonwealth government in his Eikonoklastes [the image breaker] (1649)—an answer to Eikon Basilike—and in the 66

Latin pamphlets First Defense of the English People (1651), Second Defense of the English People (1654), and Defense of Himself (1655). Later Life In the midst of his heavy official business and pamphleteering, Milton, whose sight had been weak from childhood, became totally blind. From then on, he had to carry on his work through secretaries, one of whom was Andrew Marvell. Mary Powell returned to Milton in 1645 but died in 1652 after she had borne him three daughters. He married Catharine Woodcock in 1656, and she died two years later. She is the subject of one of his most famous sonnets, beginning, "Methought I saw my late espoused saint." In 1663 he married Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him. Milton supported the Commonwealth to the very end. After the Restoration (1660) he was forced into hiding for a time, and some of his books were burned. He was included in the general amnesty, however, and lived quietly thereafter. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained For many years Milton had planned to write an epic poem, and he probably started his work on Paradise Lost before the Restoration. The blank-verse poem in ten books appeared in 1667; a second edition, in which Milton reorganized the original ten books into twelve, appeared in 1674. It was greatly admired by Milton's contemporaries and has since then been considered the greatest epic poem in the English language. In telling the story of Satan's rebellion against God and the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Milton attempted to account for the evil in this world and, in his own words, to "justify the ways of God to man." Paradise Regained, a second blank-verse poem in four books, describes how Jesus, a greater individual than Adam, overcame the temptations of Satan. In both works, Milton's characterizations of Satan, Adam, Eve, and Jesus are penetrating and moving. Indeed, his portrayal of Satan is so compelling that many 19th-century critics maintained that he rather than Adam was the hero of Paradise Lost. In these two great works Milton's language is dignified and ornate, replete with biblical and classical allusions, allegorical representations, metaphors, puns, and rhetorical flourishes. Samson Agonistes, a poetic drama modeled on classical Greek tragedy but with biblical subject matter, appeared together with Paradise Regained in 1671. Other Works 67

Milton's theology, although in the Protestant tradition, is extremely unorthodox and individual on many points; it is set forth in the Latin pamphlet De doctrina Christiana [on Christian doctrine]. Unpublished during Milton's lifetime, this work was discovered and published in 1825. Milton also wrote 18 sonnets in English and 5 in Italian, which generally follow the Petrarchan style and are accepted as among the greatest ever written. Paradise Lost – Book I

The Argument THIS first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac't: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep. Which action past over, the Poem hasts into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his Angles now fallen into Hell, describ'd here, not in the Center (for Heaven -15- and Earth may be suppos'd as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call'd Chaos: Here Satan with his Angels lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht, after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him who next in Order and Dignity lay by him; they confer of thir miserable fall. Satan awakens all his Legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded; They rise, thir Numbers, array of Battel, thir chief Leaders nam'd, according to the Idols known afterwards in Canaan and the Countries adjoyning. To these Satan directs his Speech, comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven, but tells them lastly of a new World and new kind of Creature to be created, according to an ancient Prophesie or report in Heaven; for that Angels were long before this visible Creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of this Prophesie, and what to determin thereon he refers to a full Councel. What his Associates thence attempt. Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the Deep: The infernal Peers there sit in Councel.

You can get much information about Paradise Lost in the following sites: 1. http://www.paradiselost.org/ 2. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/paradiselost/ You can listen to the text in: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio- Video/Literature/European-Classics/Paradise-Lost/35015 68

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first Fruit what cause Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy tast State, Brought Death into the World, and all Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off our woe, From their Creator, and transgress his With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Will Restore us, and regain the blissful For one restraint, Lords of the World Seat, besides? Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret Who first seduc'd them to that foul top revolt? Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose That Shepherd, who first taught the guile chosen Seed, Stird up with Envy and Revenge, In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and deceiv'd Earth The Mother of Mankind, what time his Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill Pride Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all that flow'd his Host Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, aspiring That with no middle flight intends to To set himself in Glory above his soar Peers, Above th' Aonian Mount, while it He trusted to have equal'd the most pursues High, Things unattempted yet in Prose or If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim Rhime. Against the Throne and Monarchy of And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost God prefer Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Before all Temples th' upright heart Battel proud and pure, With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou Power from the first Hurld headlong flaming from th' Wast present, and with mighty wings Ethereal Skie outspread With hideous ruine and combustion Dove-like satst brooding on the vast down Abyss To bottomless perdition, there to dwell And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire, dark Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Illumin, what is low raise and support; Arms. That to the highth of this great Nine times the Space that measures Argument Day and Night I may assert Eternal Providence, To mortal men, he with his horrid crew -16- Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery And justifie the waves of God to men. Gulfe Confounded though immortal: But his Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from doom thy view Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought 69

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his If thou beest he; But O how fall'n! how baleful eyes chang'd That witness'd huge affliction and From him, who in the happy Realms of dismay Light Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast Cloth'd with transcendent brightness hate: didst out-shine At once as far as Angels kenn he Myriads though bright: If he whom views mutual league, The dismal Situation waste and wilde, United thoughts and counsels, equal A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round hope As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize, those flames Joynd with me once, now misery hath No light, but rather darkness visible joynd Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, From what highth fall'n, so Much the where peace stronger prov'd And rest can never dwell, hope never He with his Thunder: and till then who comes knew That comes to all; but torture without The force of those dire Arms? yet not end for those Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage With ever-burning Sulphur Can else inflict do I repent or change, unconsum'd: Though chang'd in outward lustre; that Such place Eternal Justice had fixt mind prepar'd And high disdain, from sence of injur'd -17- merit, For those rebellious, here their Prison That with the mightiest rais'd me to ordain'd contend, In utter darkness, and thir portion set And to the fierce contention brought As far remov'd from God and light of along), Heav'n Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd As from the Center thrice to th' utmost That durst dislike his reign, and me Pole. preferring, O how unlike the place from whence His utmost power with adverse power they fell! oppos'd There the companions of his fall, In dubious Battel on the Plains of o'rewhelm'd Heav'n, With Floods and Whirlwinds of And shook his throne. What though the tempestuous fire, field be lost? He soon discerns, and weltring by his All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, side And study of revenge, immortal hate, One next himself in power, and next in And courage never to submit or yield: crime, And what is else not to be overcome? Long after known in Palestine, and That Glory never shall his wrath or nam'd might Beëlzebub. To whom th' Arch-Enemy, Extort from me. To bow and sue for And thence in Heav'n call'd Satan, with grace bold words With suppliant knee, and deifie his Breaking the horrid silence thus began. power 70

Who from the terrour of this Arm so Can perish: for the mind and spirit late remains Doubted his Empire, that were low Invincible, and vigour soon returns, indeed, Though all our Glory extinct, and That were an ignominy and shame happy state beneath Here swallow'd up in endless misery. -18- But what if he our Conquerour, (whom This downfall; since by Fate the I now strength of Gods Of force believe Almighty, since no And this Empyreal substance cannot less fail, Then such could hav orepow'rd such Since through experience of this great force as ours) event Have left us this our spirit and strength In Arms not worse, in foresight much intire advanc't, Strongly to suffer and support our We may with more successful hope pains, resolve That we may so suffice his vengeful To wage by force or guile eternal Warr ire, Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe, Or do him mightier service as his Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of thralls joy By right of Warr, what e're his business Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of be Heav'n. Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire, Or do his Errands in the gloomy Deep; So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in What can it then avail though yet we pain, feel Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep Strength undiminisht, or eternal being despare: To undergo eternal punishment? And him thus answer'd soon his bold Whereto with speedy words th' Arch- Compeer. fiend reply'd.

O Prince, O Chief of many Throned Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is Powers, miserable That led th' imbattelld Seraphim to Doing, or Suffering: but of this be sure, Warr To do ought good never will be our Under thy conduct, and in dreadful task, deeds But ever to do ill our sole delight, Fearless, endanger'd Heav'ns -19- perpetual King; As being the contrary to his high will And put to proof his high Supremacy, Whom we resist. If then his Providence Whether upheld by strength, or Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Chance, or Fate, Our labour must be to pervert that end, Too well I see and rue the dire event, And out of good still to find means of That with sad overthrow and foul evil; defeat Which oft times may succeed, so as Hath lost us Heav'n, and all this mighty perhaps Host Shall grieve him, if I fall not, and In horrible destruction laid thus low, disturb As far as Gods and Heav'nly Essences His inmost counsels from thir destind aim. 71

But see the angry Victor hath recall'd Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on His Ministers of vengeance and pursuit Jove, Back to the Gates of Heav'n: The Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den Sulphurous Ha By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea- Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath beast laid Leviathan, which God of all his works The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice Created hugest that swim th' Ocean Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the stream: Thunder, Him haply slumbring, on the Norway Wing'd with red Lightning and foam impetuous rage, The Pilot of some small night-founder'd Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and Skiff, ceases now Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men To bellow through the vast and tell, boundless Deep. -20- Let us not slip th' occasion, whether With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind scorn, Moors by his side under the Lee, while Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe. Night Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn Invests the Sea, and wished Morn and wilde, delayes: The seat of desolation, voyd of light, So stretcht out huge in length the Arch- Save what the glimmering of these livid fiend lay flames Chain'd on the burning Like, nor ever Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us thence tend Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that From off the tossing of these fiery the will waves, And high permission of all-ruling There rest, if any, rest can harbour Heaven there, Left him at large to his own dark And reassembling our afflicted Powers, designs, Consult how we may henceforth most That with reiterated crimes he might offend Heap on himself damnation, while he Our Enemy, our own loss how repair, sought How overcome this dire Calamity, Evil to others, and enrag'd might see What reinforcement we may gain from How all his malice serv'd but to bring Hope, forth If not what resolution from despare. Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate On Man by him seduc't, but on himself With Head Lip-lift above the wave, and Treble confusion, wrath and Eyes vengeance pour'd. That sparkling blaz'd, his other Parts Forthwith upright he rears from off the besides Pool Prone on the Flood, extended long and His mighty Stature; on each hand the large flames Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as Drivn backward slope their pointing huge spires, and rowld As whom the Fables name of In billows, leave i'th' midst a horrid monstrous size, Vale. 72

Then with expanded wings he stears Receive thy new Possessor: One who his flight brings Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air A mind not to be chang'd by Place or That felt unusual weight, till on dry Time. Land The mind is its own place, and in it self He lights, if it were Land that ever Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of burn'd Heav'n. With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire; What matter where, if I be still the And such appear'd in hue, as when the same, force And what I should be, all but less then Of subterranean wind transports a Hill he Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter'd side Whom Thunder hath made greater? Of thundring Ætna, whose combustible Here at least And fewel'd entrals thence conceiving We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not Fire, built Sublim'd with Mineral fury, aid the Here for his envy, will not drive us Winds, hence: And leave a singed bottom all involv'd Here we may reign secure, and in my With stench and smoak: Such resting choyce found the sole To reign is worth ambition though in Of unblest feet. Him followed his next Hell: Mate, Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Both glorying to have scap't the Heav'n. Stygian flood But wherefore let we then our faithful As Gods, and by thir own recover'd friends, strength, Th' associates and copartners of our Not by the sufferance of supernal loss Power. Lye thus astonisht on th' oblivious Pool, Is this the Region, this the Soil, the And call them not to share with us their Clime, part Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the In this unhappy Mansion, or once more seat With rallied Arms to try what may be That we must change for Heav'n, this yet mournful gloom Regaind in Heav'n, or what more lost For that celestial light? Be it so, since in Hell? he Who now is Sovran can dispose and So Satan spake, and him Beëlzebub bid Thus answer'd. Leader of those Armies What shall be right: fardest from him is bright, best Which but th' Omnipotent none could Whom reason hath equald, force hath have foyld, made supream If once they hear that voyce, thir Above his equals. Farewel happy liveliest pledge Fields Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail oft horrours, hail In worst extreams, and on the perilous -21- edge Infernal world, and thou profoundest Of battel when it rag'd, in all assaults Hell 73

Thir surest signal, they will soon In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian resume shades New courage and revive, though now High overarch't imbowr; or scatterd they lye sedge Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion Fire, arm'd As we erewhile, astounded and Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose amaz'd, waves orethrew No wonder, fall'n such a pernicious Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry, highth. While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd He scarce had ceas't when the The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld superiour Fiend From the safe shore thir floating Was moving toward the shoar; his Carkases ponderous shield And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick Ethereal temper, massy, large and bestrown round, Abject and lost lay these, covering the Behind him cast; the broad Flood, circumference Under amazement of thir hideous Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, change. whose Orb He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist Deep views Of Hell resounded. Princes, At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole, Potentates, Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once Rivers or Mountains in her spotty yours, now lost, Globe. If such astonishment as this can sieze His Spear, to equal which the tallest Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this Pine place Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the After the toyl of Battel to repose Mast Your wearied vertue, for the ease you Of some great Ammiral, were but a find wand, To slumber here, as in the Vales of He walkt with to support uneasie steps Heav'n? -22- Or in this abject posture have ye sworn Over the burning Marle, not like those To adore the Conquerour? who now steps beholds On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Clime Flood Smote on him sore besides, vaulted With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till with Fire; anon Nathless he so endur'd, till on the His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates Beach discern Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and Th' advantage, and descending tread call'd us down His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay Thus drooping, or with linked intrans't Thunderbolts Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe. the Brooks Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.

They heard, and were abasht, and up Thir great Commander; Godlike they sprung shapes and forms Upon the wing, as when men wont to Excelling human, Princely Dignities, watch And Powers that earst in Heaven sat On duty, sleeping found by whom they on Thrones; dread, Though of thir Names in heav'nly Rouse and bestir themselves ere well Records now awake. Be no memorial, blotted out and ras'd Nor did they not perceave the evil By thir Rebellion, from the Books of plight Life. In which they were, or the fierce pains Nor had they yet among the Sons of not feel; Eve Yet to their Generals Voyce they soon Got them new Names, till wandring ore obeyd the Earth, Innumerable. As when the potent Rod Through Gods high sufferance for the Of Amrams Son in Egypts evill day tryal of man, Wav'd round the Coast, up call'd a By falsities and lyes the greatest part pitchy cloud Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake -23- God thir Creator, and th' invisible Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Glory of him that made them, to Wind, transform That ore the Realm of impious Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn'd Pharaoh hung With gay Religions full of Pomp and Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Gold, Nile: And Devils to adore for Deities: So numberless were those bad Angels Then were they known to men by seen various Names, Hovering on wing under the Cope of And various Idols through the Heathen Hell World. 'Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Say, Muse, thir Names then known, Fires; who first, who last, Till, as a signal giv'n, th' uplifted Spear Rous'd from the slumber, on that fiery Of thir great Sultan waving to direct Couch, Thir course, in even ballance down At thir great Emperors call, as next in they light worth On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Came singly where he stood on the Plain; bare strand, A Multitude, like which the populous While the promiscuous croud stood yet North aloof? Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to The chief were those who from the Pit pass of Hell Rhene or the Danaw, when her Roaming to seek thir prey on earth, barbarous Sons durst fix Came like a Deluge on the South, and Thir Seats long after next the Seat of spread God, Beneath Gibraltar to the Lybian sands. Thir Altars by his Altar, Gods ador'd Forthwith from every Squadron and Among the Nations round, and durst each Band abide The Heads and Leaders thither hast -24- where stood Jehovah thundring out of Sion, thron'd 75

Between the Cherubim, yea, often With these came they, who from the plac'd bordring flood Within his Sanctuary it self thir Shrines, Of old Euphrates to the Brook that Abominations; and with cursed things parts His holy Rites, and solemn Feasts Egypt from Syrian ground, had general profan'd, Names And with thir darkness durst affront his Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male, light. These Feminine. For Spirits when they First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd please with blood Can either Sex assume, or both; so Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, soft Though for the noyse of Drums and And uncompounded is thir Essence Timbrels loud pure, Thir childrens cries unheard, that past Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, through fire Nor founded on the brittle strength of To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite bones, Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape In Argob and in Basan, to the stream they choose Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, such Can execute thir aerie purposes, Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest -25- heart And works of love or enmity fulfill. Of Solomon he led by fraud to build For those the Race of Israel oft forsook His Temple right against the Temple of Thir living strength, and unfrequented God left On that opprobrious Hill, and made his His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down Grove To bestial Gods; for which thir heads The pleasant Valley of Hinnom, Tophet as low thence Bow'd down in Battel, sunk before the And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Spear Hell. Of despicable foes. With these in troop Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians Moabs Sons, call'd From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild Astarte, Queen of Heav'n, with Of Southmost A barim; in Hesebon crescent Horns; And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond To whose bright Image nightly by the The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Moon Vines, Sidonian Virgins paid their Vows and And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool. Songs, Peor his other Name, when he entic'd In Sion also not unsung, where stood Israel in Sittim on thir march from Nile Her Temple on th' offensive Mountain, To do him wanton rites, which cost built them woe. By that uxorious King, whose heart Yet thence his lustful Orgies he though large, enlarg'd Beguil'd by fair Idolatresses, fell Even to that Hill of scandal, by the To Idols foul. Thammuz came next Grove behind, Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate; Whose annual wound in Lebanon Till good Josiah drove them thence to allur'd Hell. The Syrian Damsels to lament his fate 76

In amorous dittyes all a Summers day, A crew who under Names of old While smooth Adonis from his native Renown, Rock Osiris, Isis, Orus and their Train Ran purple to the Sea, suppos'd with With monstrous shapes and sorcerics blood abus'd Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the Fanatic Egypt and her Priests, to seek Love-tale Thir wandring Gods disguis'd in brutish Infected Sions daughters with like heat, forms Whose wanton passions in the sacred Rather then human. Nor did Isreal Porch scape Ezekiel saw, when by the Vision led Th' infection when thir borrow'd Gold His eye survay'd the dark Idolatries compos'd Of alienated Judah. Next came one The Calf in Oreb: and the Rebel King, Who mourn'd in earnest, when the Doubl'd that sin in Bethel and in Dan, Captive Ark Lik'ning, his Maker to the Grazed Ox, Maim'd his brute Image, head and Jehovah, who in one Night when he hands lopt off pass'd In his own Temple, on the grunsel From Egypt marching, equal'd with one edge, stroke Where he fell flat, and sham'd his Both her first born and all her bleating Worshipers: Gods. Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, Belial came last, then whom a Spirit upward Man more lewd And downward Fish: yet had his Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to Temple high love Rear'd in Azotus, dreaded through the Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Coast Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon, then hee And Accaron and Gaza's frontier In Temples and at Altars, when the bounds. Priest Him follow'd Rimmon, whose delightful Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who Seat fill'd Was fair Damascus, on the fertil Banks With lust and violence the house of Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid God. streams. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns He also against the house of God was And in luxurious Cities, where the bold: noyse A Leper once he lost and gain'd a Of riot ascends above thir loftiest King, Towrs, Ahaz his sottish Conquerour, whom he And injury and outrage: And when drew Night Gods Altar to disparage and displace Darkens the Streets, then wander forth For one of Syrian mode, whereon to the Sons burn Of Belial, flown with insolence and His odious off rings, and adore the wine. Gods Witness the Streets of Sodom, and that -26- night Whom he had vanquisht. After these In Gibeah, when the hospitable door appear'd Expos'd a Matron to avoid worse rape. 77

These were the prime in order and in Of Trumpets loud and Clarions be might; uprear'd The rest were long to tell, though far His mighty Standard; that proud renown'd, honour claim'd Th' Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall: Gods, yet confest later then Heav'n Who forthwith from the glittering Staff and Earth unfurld Thir boasted Parents; Titan Heav'ns Th' Imperial Ensign, which full high first born advanc't With his enormous brood, and Shon like a Meteor streaming to the birthright seis'd Wind By younger Saturn, he from mighter With Gemms and Golden lustre rich Jove imblaz'd, His own and Rheas Son like measure Seraphic arms and Trophies: all the found; while So Jove usurping reign'd: these first in Sonorous mettal blowing Martial Creet sounds: And Ida known, thence on the Snowy At which the universal Host upsent top A shout that tore Hells Concave, and Of cold Olympus rul'd the middle Air beyond Thir highest Heav'n; or on the Delphian Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Cliff, Night. Or in Dodona, and through all the All in a moment through the gloom bounds were seen Of Doric Land; or who with Saturn old Ten thousand Banners rise into the Air Fled over Adria to th' Hesperian Fields, With Orient Colours waving: with them -27- rose And ore the Celtic roam'd the utmost A Forrest huge of Spears: and Isles. thronging Helms All these and more came flocking; but Appear'd and serried Shields in thick with looks array Down cast and damp, yet such Of depth immeasurable: Anon they wherein appear'd move Obscure some glimps of joy, to have In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood found thir chief Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as Not in despair, to have found rais'd themselves not lost To hight of noblest temper Hero's old In loss it self; which on his count'nance Arming, to Battel, and in stead of rage cast Deliberate valour breath'd, firm and Like doubtful hue: but he his wonted unmov'd pride With dread of death to flight or foul Soon recollecting, with high words, that retreat, bore Nor wanting power to mitigate and Semblance of worth, not substance, swage gently rais'd With solemn touches, troubl'd Thir fanting courage, and dispel'd thir thoughts, and chase tears. Anguish and doubt and fear and Then strait commands that at the sorrow and pain warlike sound From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they 78

Breathing united force with fixed Thir dread commander: he above the thought rest Mov'd on in silence to soft Pipes that In shape and gesture proudly eminent charm'd Stood like a Towr; his form had yet not Thir painful steps o're the burnt soyle; lost and now All her Original brightness, nor Advanc't in view they stand, a horrid appear'd Front Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' Of dreadful length and dazling Arms, in excess guise Of Glory obscur'd: As When the Sun Of Warriers old with order'd Spear and new ris'n Shield, Looks through the Horizontal misty Air -28- Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Awaiting what command thir mighty Moon Chief In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds Had to impose: He through the armed On half the Nations, and with fear of Files change Darts his experienc't eye, and soon Perplexes Nlonarchs. Dark'n'd so, yet traverse shon The Whole Battallion views. thir order Above them all th' Arch Angel: but his due, face Thir visages and stature as of Gods, Deep scars of Thunder had intrencht, Thir number last he summs. And now and care his heart Sat on his faded cheek, but under Distends With pride, and hardning in Browes his strength Of dauntless courage, and considerate Glories: For never since created man, Pride Met such imbodied force, as nam'd Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but with these cast Could merit more then that small Signs of remorse and passion to infantry behold Warr'd on by Cranes: though all the The fellows of his crime, the followers Giant brood rather Of Phlegra with th' Heroic Race were (Far other once beheld in bliss) joyn'd condemn'd That fought at Theb's and Ilium, on For ever now to have thir lot in pain, each side Millions of Spirits for his fault amerc't Mixt With auxiliar Gods; and what Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendors resounds flung In Fable or Romance of Uthers Son -29- Begirt with British and Armoric Knights; For his revolt, yet faithfull how they And all who since, Baptiz'd or Infidel stood, Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Thir Glory withered. As when Heavens Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Fire Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore Hath scath'd the Forrest Oaks, or When Charlemain with all his Peerage Mountain Pines, fell With singed top thir stately growth By Fontarabbia. Thus far these beyond though bare Compare of mortal prowess, yet Stands on the blasted Heath. He now observ'd prepar'd 79

To speak; whereat thir doubl'd Ranks Put forth at full, but still his strength they bend conceal'd, From Wing to Wing, and half enclose Which tempted our attempt, and him round wrought our fall. With all his Peers: attention held them Henceforth his might we know, and mute. know our own Thrice he assayd, and thrice in spight So as not either to provoke, or dread of scorn, New warr, provok't; our better part Tears such as Angels weep, burst remains forth: at last To work in close design, by fraud or Words interwove with sighs found out guile thir way. What force effected not: that he no less At length from us may find, who O Myriads of immortal Spirits, O overcomes Powers By force, hath overcome but half his Matchless, but with th' Almighty, and foe. that strife Space may produce new Worlds; Was not inglorious, though th' event whereof so rife was dire, There went a fame in Heav'n that he As this place testifies, and this dire ere long change Intended to create, and therein plant Hateful to utter: but what power of A generation, whom his choice regard mind Should favour equal to the Sons of Foreseeing or presaging, from the Heaven: Depth Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps Of knowledge past or present, could -30- have fear'd. Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere: How such united force of Gods, how For this Infernal Pit shall never hold such Cælestial Spirits in Bondage, nor th' As stood like these, could ever know Abyss repulse? Long under darkness cover. But these For who can yet beleeve, though after thoughts loss, Full Counsel must mature: Peace is That all these puissant Legions, whose despaird, exile For who can think Submission? Warr Hath emptied Heav'n, shall faile to re- then, Warr ascend Open or understood must be resolv'd. Self-rais'd, and repossess thir native seat? He spake: and to confirm his words, For mee, be witness all the Host of out-flew Heav'n, Millions of flaming swords, drawn from If counsels different, or danger shun'd the thighs By mee, have lost our hopes. But he Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze who reigns Far round illumin'd hell: highly they Monarch in Heav'n, till then as one rag'd secure Against the Highest, and fierce with Sat on his Throne, upheld by old grasped Arms repute, Clash'd on thir sounding shields the din Consent or custome, and his Regal of war, State 80

Hurling defiance toward the Vault of And Strength and Art are easily out- Heav'n. done By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour There stood a Hill not far whose griesly What in an age they with incessant top toyle Belch'd fire and rowling smoak; the And hands innumerable scarce rest entire perform. Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted Nigh on the Plain in many cells sign prepar'd, That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, -31- The work of Sulphur. Thither wing'd That underneath had veins of liquid fire with speed Sluc'd from the Lake, a second A numerous Brigad hasten'd. As when multitude Bands With wondrous Art founded the massie Of Pioners with Spade and Pickax Ore, arm'd Severing each kinde, and scum'd the Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Bullion dross: Field, A third as soon had form'd within the Or cast a Rampart. Mammon led them ground on, A various mould, and from the boyling Mammon, the least erected Spirit that cells fell By strange conveyance fill'd each From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his hollow nook, looks and thoughts As in an Organ from one blast of wind Were always downward bent, admiring To many a row of Pipes the sound- more board breaths. The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge Gold, Rose like an Exhalation, with the Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd sound In vision beatific: by him first Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices Men also, and by his suggestion sweet, taught, Built like a Temple, where Pilasters Ransack'd the Center, and with round impious hands Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth With Golden Architrave; nor did there For Treasures better hid. Soon had his want crew Cornice or Freeze, with bossy Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound Sculptures grav'n, And dig'd out ribs of Gold. Let none The Roof was fretted Gold. Not admire Babilon, That riches grow in Hell; that soyle Nor great Alcairo such magnificence may best Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine Deserve the precious bane. And here Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat let those Thir Kings, when Ægypt with Assyria Who boast in mortal things, and strove wondring tell In wealth and luxurie. Th' ascending Of Babel, and the works of Memphian pile Kings Stood fixt her stately highth, and strait Learn how thir greatest Monuments of the dores Fame, 81

Op'ning thir brazen foulds discover With his industrious crew to build in wide hell. Within, her ample spaces, o're the Mean while the winged Haralds by smooth command And level pavement: from the arched Of Sovran power, with awful Ceremony roof And Trumpets sound throughout the Pendant by suttle Magic many a row Host proclaim Of Starry Lamps and blazing Cressets A solemn Councel forthwith to be held fed At Pandoemonium, the high Capital With Naphtha and Asphaltus yeilded Of Satan and his Peers: thir summons light call'd As from a sky. The hasty multitude From every Band and squared Admiring enter'd, and the work some Regiment praise By place or choice the worthiest; they And some the Architect: his hand was anon known With hundreds and with thousands In Heav'n by many a Towred structure trooping came high, Attended: all access was throng'd, the Where Scepter'd Angels held thir Gates residence, And Porches wide, but chief the And sat as Princes, whom the supreme spacious Hall King (Though like a cover'd field, where Exalted to such power, and gave to Champions bold rule, Wont ride in arm'd, and at the Soldans Each in his Hierarchie, the Orders chair bright. Defi'd the best of Panim chivalry Nor was his name unheard or unador'd To mortal combat or carreer with In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian Lance) land Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and Men call'd him Mulciber; and how he in the air, fell Brusht with the hiss of russling wings. From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by As Bees angry Jove In spring time, when the Sun with Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: Taurus rides, from Morn Poure forth thir populous youth about To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy the Hive Eve, In clusters; they among fresh dews and A Summers day; and with the setting flowers Sun Flie to and fro, or on the smoothed Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star, Plank, -32- The suburb of thir Straw-built Cittadel, On Lemnos th' Ægoean Ile: thus they New rub'd with Baum, expatiate and relate, confer Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Thir State affairs. So thick the aerie Fell long before; nor aught avail'd him crowd now Swarm'd and were straitn'd; till the To have built in Heav'n high Towrs; nor Signal giv'n, did he scape Behold a wonder! they but now who By all his Engins, but was headlong seemd sent 82

In bigness to surpass Earths Giant Thus incorporeal Spirits to smallest Sons forms Now less then smallest Dwarfs, in Reduc'd thir shapes immense, and narrow room were at large, Throng numberless, like that Pigmean -33- Race Though without number still amidst the Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faerie Hall Elves, Of that infernal Court. But far within Whose midnight Revels, by a Forrest And in thir own dimensions like side themselves Or Fountain some belated Peasant The great Seraphic Lords and sees, Cherubim Or dreams he sees, while over-head In close recess and secret conclave the Moon sat Sits Arbitress, and neerer to the Earth A thousand Demy-Gods on golden Wheels her pale course, they on thir seats, mirth and dance Frequent and full. After short silence Intent, with jocond Music charm his then ear; And summons read, the great consult At once with joy and fear his heart began. rebounds. -34-

Besides Paradise Lost, Milton has written many other important texts. You can find much information about them in http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/milton/miltonbio.htm

6.2. John Dryden

DRYDEN, John Columbia Encyclopedia

John Dryden 1631–1700, English poet, dramatist, and critic, b. Northamptonshire, grad. Cambridge, 1654. He went to London about 1657 and first came to public notice with his Heroic Stanzas (1659), commemorating the death of Oliver Cromwell. The following year, however, he celebrated the restoration of Charles II with Astraea Redux. In 1662 he was elected to the Royal Society, and in 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard. His long poem on the Dutch War, Annus Mirabilis, appeared in 1667. The following year he became poet laureate. He had a long and varied career as a dramatist. His most notable plays include the heroic dramas, The Conquest of Granada (2 parts, 1670–71) and Aurenz-Zebe (1675); his blank-verse masterpiece, All for Love (1677), a retelling of Shakespeare's Antony 83

and Cleopatra; and the comedy Marriage à la Mode (1672). His great political satire on Monmouth and Shaftesbury, Absalom and Achitophel, appeared in two parts (1681, 1682). It was followed by MacFlecknoe (1682), an attack on Thomas Shadwell, and Religio Laici (1682), a poetical exposition of the Protestant layman's creed. In 1687, however, Dryden announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism in The Hind and the Panther. The preceding poems, as well as his Pindaric odes, "Alexander's Feast" and "Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew," place Figure 10. Portrait of Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller him among the most notable English poets. With the Source: http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/dry accession of the Protestant William III, Dryden lost den.htm his laureateship and court patronage. Throughout his life he wrote brilliant critical prefaces, prologues, and discourses, dealing with the principles of literary excellence. The best example is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). The last part of his life was occupied largely with translations from Juvenal, Vergil, and others. A 21-volume edition of his complete works was begun in 1956 under the general editorship of E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg.

Some of Dryden’s poems

ON THE DEATH OF LORD HASTINGS.[1] Must noble Hastings immaturely die, Himself to discipline? who’d not The honour of his ancient family; esteem Beauty and learning thus together Labour a crime? study, self-murder meet, deem? To bring a winding for a wedding- Our noble youth now have pretence to sheet? be Must Virtue prove Death’s harbinger? Dunces securely, ignorant healthfully. must she, Rare linguist, whose worth speaks With him expiring, feel mortality? itself, whose praise, Is death, Sin’s wages, Grace’s now? Though not his own, all tongues shall Art besides do raise: Make us more learned, only to depart? Than whom great Alexander may If merit be disease; if virtue death; seem less, To be good, not to be; who’d then Who conquer’d men, but not their bequeath 10 languages. 84

In his mouth nations spake; his tongue What new star ‘twas did gild our might be hemisphere. Interpreter to Greece, France, Italy. 20 Replenish’d then with such rare gifts as His native soil was the four parts o’ the these, Earth; Where was room left for such a foul All Europe was too narrow for his birth. disease? A young apostle; and, with reverence The nation’s sin hath drawn that veil, may which shrouds I speak it, inspired with gift of tongues, Our day-spring in so sad benighting as they. clouds: 50 Nature gave him, a child, what men in Heaven would no longer trust its vain pledge; but thus Oft strive, by art though further’d, to Recall’d it; rapt its Ganymede from us. obtain. Was there no milder way but the small- His body was an orb, his sublime soul pox, Did move on Virtue’s and on The very filthiness of Pandora’s box? Learning’s pole: So many spots, like naeves on Venus’ Whose regular motions better to our soil, view, One jewel set off with so many a foil; Than Archimedes [2] sphere, the Blisters with pride swell’d, which Heavens did show. 30 through’s flesh did sprout Graces and virtues, languages and Like rose-buds, stuck i’ th’ lily-skin arts, about. Beauty and learning, fill’d up all the Each little pimple had a tear in it, parts. To wail the fault its rising did commit: Heaven’s gifts, which do like falling 60 stars appear Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at Scatter’d in others; all, as in their strife, sphere, Thus made an insurrection ‘gainst his Were fix’d, conglobate in his soul; and life. thence Or were these gems sent to adorn his Shone through his body, with sweet skin, influence; The cabinet of a richer soul within? Letting their glories so on each limb No comet need foretell his change fall, drew on, The whole frame render’d was Whose corpse might seem a celestial. constellation. Come, learned Ptolemy[3] and trial Oh! had he died of old, how great a make, strife If thou this hero’s altitude canst take: Had been, who from his death should 40 draw their life! But that transcends thy skill; thrice Who should, by one rich draught, happy all, become whate’er Could we but prove thus astronomical. Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were,— Lived Tycho [4] now, struck with this 70 ray which shone Learn’d, virtuous, pious, great; and More bright i’ the morn, than others’ have by this beam at noon. An universal metempsychosis! He’d take his astrolabe, and seek out Must all these aged sires in one funeral here 85

Expire? all die in one so young, so The tongue may fail; but overflowing small? eyes Who, had he lived his life out, his great Will weep out lasting streams of fame elegies. Had swoln ‘bove any Greek or Roman But thou, O virgin-widow, left alone, name. Now thy beloved, heaven-ravish’d But hasty Winter, with one blast, hath spouse is gone, brought Whose skilful sire in vain strove to The hopes of Autumn, Summer, apply Spring, to nought. Medicines, when thy balm was no Thus fades the oak i’ the sprig, i’ the remedy,— blade the corn; With greater than Platonic love, O wed Thus without young, this Phoenix dies, His soul, though not his body, to thy new born: 80 bed: Must then old three-legg’d graybeards, Let that make thee a mother; bring with their gout, thou forth Catarrhs, rheums, aches, live three The ideas of his virtue, knowledge, long ages out? worth; 100 Time’s offals, only fit for the hospital! Transcribe the original in new copies, Or to hang antiquaries’ rooms withal! give Must drunkards, lechers, spent with Hastings o’ the better part: so shall he sinning, live live With such helps as broths, possets, In’s nobler half; and the great grandsire physic give? be None live, but such as should die? Of an heroic divine progeny: shall we meet An issue, which to eternity shall last, With none but ghostly fathers in the Yet but the irradiations which he cast. street? Erect no mausoleums: for his best Grief makes me rail; sorrow will force Monument is his spouse’s marble its way; breast. And showers of tears, tempestuous sighs best lay. 90

NOTES:

1: ‘Lord Hastings:’ the nobleman herein lamented, was styled Henry Lord Hastings, son to Ferdinand Earl of Huntingdon. He died before his father in 1649, being then in his twentieth year, and on the day preceding that which had been fixed for his marriage. 2: ‘Archimedes:’ a famous geometrician, who was killed at the taking of Syracuse, in the 542 year of Rome. He made a glass sphere, wherein the motions of the heavenly bodies were wonderfully described. 3: ‘Ptolemy:’ Claudius Ptolemaeus, a celebrated mathematician in the reign of M. Aurelius Antoninus. 4: ‘Tycho:’ Tycho Brahe

HEROIC STANZAS ON THE DEATH OF OLIVER CROMWELL, WRITTEN AFTER HIS FUNERAL.

1 Made him but greater seem, not And now ‘tis time; for their officious greater grow. haste, 7 Who would before have borne him to No borrow’d bays his temples did the sky, adorn, Like eager Romans, ere all rites were But to our crown he did fresh jewels past, bring; Did let too soon the sacred eagle [5] Nor was his virtue poison’d soon as fly. born, 2 With the too early thoughts of being Though our best notes are treason to king. his fame, 8 Join’d with the loud applause of public Fortune (that easy mistress to the voice; young, Since Heaven, what praise we offer to But to her ancient servants coy and his name, hard), Hath render’d too authentic by its Him at that age her favourites rank’d choice. among, 3 When she her best-loved Pompey did Though in his praise no arts can liberal discard. be, 9 Since they, whose muses have the He, private, mark’d the faults of others’ highest flown, sway, Add not to his immortal memory, And set as sea-marks for himself to But do an act of friendship to their own: shun: 4 Not like rash monarchs, who their Yet ‘tis our duty, and our interest too, youth betray Such monuments as we can build to By acts their age too late would wish raise; undone. Lest all the world prevent what we 10 should do, And yet dominion was not his design; And claim a title in him by their praise. We owe that blessing, not to him, but 5 Heaven, How shall I then begin, or where Which to fair acts unsought rewards conclude, did join; To draw a fame so truly circular? Rewards, that less to him, than us, For in a round what order can be were given. show’d, 11 Where all the parts so equal perfect Our former chiefs, like sticklers of the are? war, 6 First sought to inflame the parties, then His grandeur he derived from Heaven to poise: alone; The quarrel loved, but did the cause For he was great ere fortune made him abhor; so: And did not strike to hurt, but make a And wars, like mists that rise against noise. the sun, 12 87

War, our consumption, was their Nor was he like those stars which, only gainful trade: shine, We inward bled, whilst they prolong’d When to pale mariners they storms our pain; portend: He fought to end our fighting, and He had his calmer influence, and his essay’d mien To staunch the blood by breathing of Did love and majesty together blend. the vein. 19 13 ‘Tis true, his countenance did imprint Swift and resistless through the land an awe; he past, And naturally all souls to his did bow, Like that bold Greek [6] who did the As wands [9] of divination downward East subdue, draw, And made to battles such heroic haste, And point to beds where sovereign As if on wings of victory he flew. gold doth grow. 14 20 He fought secure of fortune as of fame: When past all offerings to Feretrian Still by new maps the island might be Jove, shown, He Mars deposed, and arms to gowns Of conquests, which he strew’d made yield; where’er he came, Successful councils did him soon Thick as the galaxy with stars is sown. approve 15 As fit for close intrigues, as open field. His palms, [7] though under weights 21 they did not stand, To suppliant Holland he vouchsafed a Still thrived; no winter could his laurels peace, fade: Our once bold rival of the British main, Heaven in his portrait show’d a Now tamely glad her unjust claim to workman’s hand, cease, And drew it perfect, yet without a And buy our friendship with her idol, shade. gain. 16 22 Peace was the prize of all his toil and Fame of the asserted sea through care, Europe blown, Which war had banish’d, and did now Made France and Spain ambitious of restore: his love; Bologna’s walls[8] thus mounted in the Each knew that side must conquer he air, would own; To seat themselves more surely than And for him fiercely, as for empire, before. strove. 17 23 Her safety rescued Ireland to him No sooner was the Frenchman’s cause owes; [10] embraced, And treacherous Scotland, to no Than the light Monsieur the grave Don interest true, outweigh’d; Yet blest that fate which did his arms His fortune turn’d the scale where’er dispose ‘twas cast, Her land to civilize, as to subdue. Though Indian mines were in the other 18 laid. 24 88

When absent, yet we conquer’d in his Proud Rome, with dread the fate of right: Dunkirk heard; For though some meaner artist’s skill And trembling wish’d behind more Alps were shown to stand, In mingling colours or in placing light, Although an Alexander[12] were her Yet still the fair designment was his guard. own. 31 25 By his command we boldly cross’d the For from all tempers he could service line, draw; And bravely fought where southern The worth of each, with its alloy, he stars arise; knew; We traced the far-fetch’d gold unto the And, as the confidant of Nature, saw mine, How she complexions did divide and And that which bribed our fathers brew. made our prize. 26 32 Or he their single virtues did survey, Such was our prince; yet own’d a soul By intuition, in his own large breast; above Where all the rich ideas of them lay; The highest acts it could produce to That were the rule and measure to the show: rest. Thus poor mechanic arts in public 27 move, When such heroic virtue Heaven sets Whilst the deep secrets beyond out, practice go. The stars, like commons, sullenly 33 obey; Nor died he when his ebbing fame Because it drains them when it comes went less, about, But when fresh laurels courted him to And therefore is a tax they seldom pay. live: He seem’d but to prevent some new 28 success, From this high spring our foreign As if above what triumphs earth could conquests flow, give. Which yet more glorious triumphs do 34 portend; His latest victories still thickest came, Since their commencement to his arms As near the centre motion doth they owe, increase; If springs as high as fountains may Till he, press’d down by his own ascend. weighty name, 29 Did, like the vestal,[13] under spoils He made us freemen of the Continent, decease. [11] 35 Whom Nature did like captives treat But first the ocean as a tribute sent before; The giant prince of all her watery herd; To nobler preys the English lion sent, And the Isle, when her protecting And taught him first in Belgian walks to genius went, roar. Upon his obsequies loud sighs[14] 30 conferr’d. That old unquestion’d pirate of the 36 land, 89

No civil broils have since his death His ashes in a peaceful urn[15] shall arose, rest; But faction now by habit does obey; His name a great example stands, to And wars have that respect for his show repose, How strangely high endeavours may As winds for halcyons, when they be blest, breed at sea. Where piety and valour jointly go. 37

NOTES:

5: ‘Sacred eagle:’ the Romans let fly an eagle from the pile of a dead Emperor. 6: ‘Bold Greek:’ Alexander the Great. 7: ‘Palms’ were thought to grow best under pressure. 8: ‘Bologna’s walls,’ &c.: alluding to a Popish story about the wall of Bologna, on which was an image of the Virgin, being blown up, and falling exactly into its place again. 9: ‘Wands:’ see the ‘Antiquary.’ 10: ‘Frenchman’s cause:’ the treaty of alliance which Cromwell entered into with France against the Spaniards. 11: ‘Freemen of the Continent:’ by the taking of Dunkirk. 12: ‘Alexander:’ Alexander VII., at this time Pope. 13: ‘Vestal:’ Tarpeia. 14: ‘Loud sighs:’ the tempest which occurred at Cromwell’s death. 15: ‘Peaceful urn:’ Dryden no true prophet—Cromwell’s bones having been dragged out of the royal vault, and exposed on the gibbet in 1660.

You can read other poems by Dryden in http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/dryden/drydenbib.htm; You can also listen to some poems in http://greaudiobooks.com/tag/john-dryden

7. Enlightenment

ENLIGHTENMENT John Rahn The Enlightenment, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the American colonies. Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment. Following close on the heels of the Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers believed that the advances of science and industry heralded a new age of egalitarianism and progress for humankind. More goods were being produced for less money, people were traveling more, and the chances for the upwardly mobile to 90

actually change their station in life were significantly improving. At the same time, many voices were expressing sharp criticism of some time-honored cultural institutions. The Church, in particular, was singled out as stymieing the forward march of human reason. Many intellectuals of the Enlightenment practiced a variety of Deism, which is a rejection of organized, doctrinal religion in favor of a more personal and spiritual kind of faith. For the first time in recorded Western history, the hegemony of political and religious leaders was weakened to the point that citizens had little to fear in making their opinions known. Criticism was the order of the day, and argumentation was the new mode of conversation. Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton are frequently mentioned as the progenitors of the Enlightenment. In the later phase of the English Renaissance, Bacon composed philosophical treatises which would form the basis of the modern scientific method. Bacon was also a logician, pointing out the false pathways down which human reason often strays. He was also an early proponent of state funding for scientific inquiry. Whereas Bacon worked in the realm of ideas and language, Isaac Newton was a pure scientist in the modern sense. Like Galileo, he relied on observation and testing to determine the soundness of his theories. He was a firm believer in the importance of data, and had no philosophical qualms regarding the reliability of the senses. Newton’s Principia, completed in 1687, is the foundation of the entire science of physics. This mechanistic view of the universe, a universe governed by a set of unchanging laws, raised the ire of the Church fathers. However, the mode of inquiry which both Bacon and Newton pioneered became much more influential than the Church’s teachings. The Enlightenment would see these ideas applied to every segment of life and society, with huge ramifications for citizens and rulers alike. The Enlightenment was, at its center, a celebration of ideas – ideas about what the human mind was capable of, and what could be achieved through deliberate action and scientific methodology. Many of the new, enlightened ideas were political in nature. Intellectuals began to consider the possibility that freedom and democracy were the fundamental rights of all people, not gifts bestowed upon them by beneficent monarchs or popes. Egalitarianism was the buzzword of the century, and it meant the promise of fair treatment for all people, regardless of background. Citizens began to see themselves on the same level as their leaders, subject to the same shortcomings and certainly subject to criticism if so deserved. Experimentation with elected, consensual leadership began in earnest. The belief was that the 91

combined rationality of the people would elect the best possible representatives. The idea of a collective, national intelligence led many to imagine that virtually all the world’s serious problems would soon be solved. Discussion and debate were considered healthy outlets for pent-up frustrations, not signs of internal weakness. Argumentation as a style of decision-making grew out of the new scientific method, which invited multiple hypotheses to be put to the test. Empiricism, or the reliance on observable, demonstrable facts, was likewise elevated to the level of public discourse. During the Renaissance, there was certainly unbridled optimism, and a sense of humanity’s great unfulfilled potential. The Enlightenment was believed to be the realization of the tools and strategies necessary to achieve that potential. The Renaissance was the seed, while the Enlightenment was the blossom. The idea of a “public,” an informed collection of citizens invested in the common good and preservation of the state, reached fruition during the Enlightenment. Curiously, the coffee shop or café became the unofficial center of this new entity. Citizens would gather to read whatever literature was available, to engage in heated conversation with neighbors, or to ponder the affairs of state. What made this kind of revolution in free time possible was an increasingly urban, sophisticated population coupled with the steady progress of industrialization. The coffee houses became the stomping grounds of some of the greatest thinkers of the age. Indeed, democracy would have been unachievable if the citizens had no community forum in which to commiserate, plan, and debate their needs and desires. Grassroots political movements were the natural outgrowth of these populist venues. It must be stated, of course, that this public entity was still a very exclusive one. Women, minorities, and the lower classes were not exactly welcomed into this new civil discourse. For all the high-minded discussion of a new, egalitarian social order, the western world was still predominantly owned by middle class men. One of the beneficial effects of the Industrial Revolution was a surge in the amount of reading material available to the general public. Consequently, the cost of such material decreased to the point that literature was no longer the sole purview of aristocrats and wealthy merchants. Literacy rates are believed to have risen dramatically during the eighteenth century, as the upwardly mobile citizenry clamored for information, gossip, and entertainment. Some coffee houses and salons appealed to more lowbrow tastes, and these were sometimes the target of authorities. Personal libraries were still expensive, but they were becoming more common. The 92

trend of solitary reading, initiated during the Renaissance, continued unabated throughout the Enlightenment. The first modern lending libraries began to dot the provincial capitals of Europe, with the trend eventually reaching America as well. A literate public was a more opinionated public, and so more equipped to engage in the political discourse. Probably some of the elites looked upon the new reading public with disdain. However, the days of literature as a sacred and guarded realm open only to a few were all but gone by the time the nineteenth century arrived. In Europe, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were the torchbearers of Enlightenment literature and philosophy. Rousseau was a strong advocate for social reform of all kinds. He more or less invented the autobiography as it is known today. His most important work, however, was Émile, a massively influential piece of non- fiction that argues for extensive and liberal education as the means for creating good citizens. Rousseau’s work on behalf of social empowerment and democracy would remain influential long after his passing. Espousing similar political positions, Voltaire employed dry wit and sarcasm to entertain his readers while making convincing arguments for reform. Voltaire was in fact the pen name of Francois-Marie Arouet, and there are endless interpretations of the meaning of that name. On the most practical level, a pen name probably helped shield him from the persecution which his writings encouraged. For like Rousseau, Voltaire had harsh criticism for many of the powers-that-were. He reserved especially pointed barbs for the Church, which he reviled as intolerant, backward, and too steeped in dogma to realize that the world was leaving the institution behind. Together, Voltaire and Rousseau are the most well-known of a collective of European writers working to promulgate Enlightenment philosophy, all for the sake of making their world a better and fairer place. Britain likewise had her share of satirists and humorists attacking the tired and ponderous institutions of the eighteenth century. In the genre of the novel, Jonathan Swift is probably most well-remembered. In all honesty, the Enlightenment was a bit of a dry spell for English literature. Working in the shadow of the Elizabethans presented creative difficulties for English writers, as no one could quite determine how to follow up after Shakespeare and Marlowe. Swift answered the call with a sizzling wit that resonates to this day. Gulliver’s Travels has established itself as a classic of world, not just English, literature. The fantastic story, which in one sense could be seen as mere children’s literature, works on multiple levels at once. Each of the societies that Gulliver encounters has a metaphorical relation to the eighteenth 93

century in England. Whereas some authors confronted social injustice head-on, Swift preferred the inviting trickery of the allegory. His sense of humor charmed his admirers, disarmed his critics, and cemented his reputation in literary history. Alexander Pope was arguably the only great poet of Enlightenment England. Not surprisingly, he was a controversial figure who invited as much scorn as praise. His biting satires were not modulated with as much humor as Swift or Voltaire, so he drew down the thunder of many powerful figures. From a literary standpoint, Pope was an innovator on several fronts. For one, he popularized the heroic couplet, a sophisticated rhyme scheme that suited his subject matter well. He took mundane settings and events and made them grandiose, a kind of irony that anticipated Modernism by two centuries. He blended formal criticism into his poetry, a diffusion of generic boundaries that also strikes one as an entirely modern practice. In his own day, Pope was possibly most admired for his capable and effective translations of classic literature. He single-handedly elevated translation to an art-form, and demonstrated that a good poetic sensibility was necessary to pull it off with any success. Pope’s great masterpiece was The Dunciad, a four-part, scathing indictment of eighteenth century English society. Although he initially attempted to conceal his authorship, the vitriol of his attacks made it clear that only Alexander Pope could have produced such a piece of literature. Unlike most of his Enlightenment brethren, Pope was singularly pessimistic about the future of civil society. Perhaps he foresaw that the tide of rationalism could sweep out just as easily as it had swept in. Like many other intellectual movements, the Enlightenment frame of mind transcended the distance between Europe and the American colonies. However, the vastly different political climate of the colonies meant that the Enlightenment was realized in very different ways. Though it may have been transmuted, the essential elements of Enlightenment philosophy had a profound impact on the history of the New World. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, each in his own way, took up the mantle of rational thinking and encouraged that perspective for an entire society. In America, one could effectively argue that the Enlightenment provided the accelerant for the fires of revolution. For Paine especially, the new ideas from Europe incited in him a desire to see the colonies separate and independent from the British Crown. His Common Sense, an impassioned yet well-reasoned plea for independence, was instrumental in gathering supporters to the cause. The rallying cry of “No Taxation 94

without Representation” was the manifestation of Enlightenment principles of fair governance. Franklin, for his part, was more utilitarian in his approach to matters of public consequence. He saw the need for becoming independent of the British Empire, but he also foresaw the difficulties in forging a strong and lasting union out of disparate and competing colonial interests. His contributions at the Constitutional Conventions were indispensible, and needless to say informed by the principles of rational thinking and the observable facts of the matter. The essential beliefs and convictions of Enlightenment thinkers were by and large committed to writing, thus a fairly accurate sketch of the eighteenth century mind is available to historians working in this century. The principles set forth during the Enlightenment had consequences in the near term that very few anticipated, and these would spell the end of the so-called Age of Reason. If there is a historical moment that can be said to mark the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment, then that moment was the French Revolution. France in 1789 was an example of a civil society intoxicated with its own power. The belief that the collective power of the public will could shape the future devolved into a kind of ecstatic anarchy. The sadism that French citizens perpetrated on each other was horrifying to the entire western world, and governments took quick measures to curtail the possibility of such violence on their own soil. As the eighteenth century drew to its inevitable close, the passionate calls for social reform and a utopian, egalitarian society quieted down substantially. If nothing else, people were simply tired. The bloodshed in France and a variety of other upheavals had seemed to demonstrate that Enlightenment principles were not practical, or at least not yet. The atmosphere that permeated early nineteenth century Europe was one of relative tranquility. Granted, there had been substantial gains made in nearly all walks of life thanks to the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment. Science had been propelled forward, such that the traditional authority of the Church was in real jeopardy. Monarchs no longer ruled by Divine Right, and citizens had frank conversations about their nation’s policies and the course of world events. The literary world, too, had to catch its breath. No one yet knew how to deal with a suddenly literate public, clamoring for reading material. The next several decades would be spent figuring that out. Despite its apparent failures and setbacks, the Enlightenment paved the way for the modern world.

7.1. Alexander Pope

POPE, Alexander Columbia Encyclopedia Alexander Pope 1688–1744, English poet. Although his literary reputation declined somewhat during the 19th century, he is now recognized as the greatest poet of the 18th century and the greatest verse satirist in English. Life Pope was born in London of Roman Catholic parents and moved to Binfield in 1700. During his later childhood he was afflicted by a tubercular condition known as Pott's disease that ruined his health and produced a pronounced spinal curvature. He never grew taller than 4 ft 6 in. (1.4 m). His religion debarred him from a Protestant education and from the age of 12 he was almost entirely self-taught. Although he is known for his literary quarrels, Pope never lacked close friends. In his early years he won the attention of William Wycherley and the poet- critic William Walsh, among others. Before he was 17 Pope was admitted to London society and Figure 11. Alexander Pope, painting by Michael Dahl encouraged as a prodigy. The shortest lived of his Source: friendships was with Joseph Addison and his coterie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Alexander_Pope_by_Michael_D who eventually insidiously attacked Pope's Tory ahl.jpg leanings. His attachment to the Tory party was strengthened by his warm friendship with Swift and his involvement with the Scriblerus Club. Works Pope's poetry basically falls into three periods. The first includes the early descriptive poetry; the Pastorals (1709); Windsor Forest (1713); the Essay on Criticism (1711), a poem written in heroic couplets outlining critical tastes and standards; The Rape of the Lock (1714), a mock-heroic poem ridiculing the fashionable world of his day; contributions to the Guardian; and "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloise to Abelard," the only pieces he ever wrote dealing with love. In about 1717 Pope formed attachments to Martha Blount, a 96

relationship that lasted his entire life, and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with whom he later quarreled bitterly. Pope's second period includes his magnificent, if somewhat inaccurate, translations of Homer, written in heroic couplets; the completed edition of the Iliad (1720); and the Odyssey (1725–26), written with William Broome and Elijah Fenton. These translations, along with Pope's unsatisfactory edition of Shakespeare (1725), amassed him a large fortune. In 1719 he bought a lease on a house in Twickenham where he and his mother lived for the rest of their lives. In the last period of his career Pope turned to writing satires and moral poems. These include The Dunciad (1728–43), a scathing satire on dunces and literary hacks in which Pope viciously attacked his enemies, including Lewis Theobald, the critic who had ridiculed Pope's edition of Shakespeare, and the playwright Colley Cibber; Imitations of Horace (1733–38), satirizing social follies and political corruption; An Essay on Man (1734), a poetic summary of current philosophical speculation, his most ambitious work; Moral Essays (1731–35); and the "Epistle to Arbuthnot" (1735), a defense in poetry of his life and his work.

ELOISA TO ABELARD The Argument Abelard and Eloisa flourished in the twelfth century; they were two of the most distinguished persons of their age in learning and beauty, but for nothing more famous than for their unfortunate passion. After a long course of -86- calamities, they retired each to a several convent and consecrated the remainder of their days to religion. It was many years after this separation that a letter of Abelard’s to a friend, which contained the history of his misfortune, fell into the hands of Eloisa. This awakening all her tenderness, occasioned those celebrated letters (out of 10 which the following is partly extracted) which give so lively a picture of the struggle of grace and nature, virtue and passion. In these deep solitudes and awful cells, Why rove my thought beyond this last Where heavenly-pensive retreat? Contemplation dwells, Why feels my heart its long-forgotten And ever-musing Melancholy reigns, heat? What means this tumult in a Vestal’s Yet, yet I love! From Abelard it came, veins? And Eloisa yet must kiss the name.

Dear fatal name! rest ever unrevealed, Now warm in love, now withering in thy Nor pass these lips in holy silence bloom, sealed: 10 Lost in a convent’s solitary gloom! Hide it, my heart, within that close There stern religion quenched the disguise, unwilling flame, Where, mixed with God’s, his loved There died the best of passions, Love idea lies: and Fame. 40 Oh, write it not, my hand—the name appears Yet write, oh write me all, that I may Already written—wash it out, my tears! join In vain lost Eloisa weeps and prays, Griefs to thy grief, and echo sighs to Her heart still dictates, and her hand thine. obeys. Nor foes nor fortune take this power away; Relentless walls! whose darksome And is my Abelard less kind than they? round contains Tears still are mine, and those I need Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains: not spare, Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees Love but demands what else were have worn; shed in prayer; Ye grots and caverns shagged with No happier task these faded eyes horrid thorn! 20 pursue; Shrines! where their vigils pale-eyed To read and weep is all they now can virgins keep, do. And pitying saints, whose statues learn to weep! Then share thy pain, allow that sad Though cold like you, unmoved and relief; silent grown, Ah, more than share it, give me all thy I have not yet forgot myself to stone. grief. 50 All is not Heaven’s while Abelard has Heaven first taught letters for some part, wretch’s aid, Still rebel nature holds out half my Some banished lover, or some captive heart; maid: Nor prayers nor fasts its stubborn They live, they speak, they breathe pulse restrain, what love inspires, Nor tears for ages taught to flow in Warm from the soul, and faithful to its vain. fires; The virgin’s wish without her fears Soon as thy letters trembling I unclose, impart, That well-known name awakens all my Excuse the blush, and pour out all the woes. 30 heart; -87- Speed the soft intercourse from soul to Oh name for ever sad! for ever dear! soul, Still breathed in sighs, still ushered And waft a sigh from Indus to the pole. with a tear. I tremble too, where’er my own I find, Thou knowest how guiltless first I met Some dire misfortune follows close thy flame, behind. When love approached me under Line after line my gushing eyes friendship’s name; 60 o’erflow, My fancy formed thee of angelic kind, Led through a sad variety of woe; 98

Some emanation of the all-beauteous Himself, his throne, his world, I’d scorn Mind. them all: Those smiling eyes, attempering every Not Caesar’s empress would I deign to ray, prove; Shone sweetly lambent with celestial No, make me mistress to the man I day. love; Guiltless I gazed; Heaven listened If there be yet another name more free, while you sung; More fond than mistress, make me that And truths divine came mended from to thee! 90 that tongue. Oh, happy state! when souls each From lips like those what precepts other draw, failed to move? When love is liberty, and nature law: Too soon they taught me ’twas no sin All then is full, possessing, and to love: possessed, Back through the paths of pleasing No craving void left aching in the sense I ran, breast: -88- Even thought meets thought ere from Nor wished an angel whom I loved a the lips it part, man. 70 And each warm wish springs mutual Dim and remote the joys of saints I from the heart. see; This sure is bliss, if bliss on earth there Nor envy them that Heaven I lose for be, thee. And once the lot of Abelard and me.

How oft, when pressed to marriage, Alas, how changed! what sudden have I said, horrors rise! Curse on all laws but those which love A naked lover bound and bleeding lies! has made! 100 Love, free as air, at sight of human Where, where was Eloïse? her voice, ties, her hand, Spreads his light wings, and in a Her poniard had opposed the dire moment flies. command. Let wealth, let honour, wait the wedded Barbarian, stay! that bloody stroke dame, restrain; August her deed, and sacred be her The crime was common, common be fame; the pain. Before true passion all those views I can no more, by shame, by rage remove; suppressed, Fame, wealth, and honour! what are Let tears, and burning blushes speak you to love? 80 the rest. The jealous god, when we profane his fires, Canst thou forget that sad, that solemn Those restless passions in revenge day, inspires, When victims at yon altar’s foot we And bids them make mistaken mortals lay? groan, -89- Who seek in love for aught but love Canst thou forget what tears that alone. moment fell, Should at my feet the world’s great When, warm in youth, I bade the world master fall, farewell? 110 99

As with cold lips I kissed the sacred Here bribed the rage of ill-requited veil, Heaven: The shrines all trembled, and the But such plain roofs as piety could lamps grew pale: raise, Heaven scarce believed the conquest And only vocal with Maker’s praise. it surveyed, 140 And saints with wonder heard the vows In these lone walls, (their day’s eternal I made. bound) Yet then, to those dread altars as I These moss-grown domes with spiry drew, turrets crowned, Not on the cross my eyes were fixed, Where awful arches make a noon-day but you: night, Not grace, or zeal, love only was my And the dim windows shed a solemn call; light; And if I lose thy love, I lose my all. Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray, Come! with thy looks, thy words, And gleams of glory brightened all the relieve my woe; day. Those still at least are left thee to But now no face divine contentment bestow. 120 wears, Still on that breast enamoured let me -90- lie, ’Tis all blank sadness, or continual Still drink delicious poison from thy tears. eye, See how the force of others’ prayers I Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be try, pressed; (O pious fraud of amorous charity!) 150 Give all thou canst—and let me dream But why should I on others’ prayers the rest. depend? Ah no! instruct me other joys to prize, Come thou, my father, brother, With other beauties charm my partial husband, friend! eyes; Ah, let thy handmaid, sister, daughter Full in my view set all the bright abode, move, And make my soul quit Abelard for And all those tender names in one, thy God. love! The darksome pines that o’er yon Ah, think at least thy flock deserves thy rocks reclined care, Wave high, and murmur to the hollow Plants of thy hand, and children of thy wind, prayer. 130 The wandering streams that shine From the false world in early youth between the hills, they fled, The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, By thee to mountains, wilds, and The dying gales that pant upon the deserts led. trees, You raised these hallowed walls; the The lakes that quiver to the curling desert smiled, breeze; 160 And Paradise was opened in the wild. No more these scenes my meditation No weeping orphan saw his father’s aid, stores Or lull to rest the visionary maid. Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the But o’er the twilight groves and dusky floors; caves, No silver saints by dying misers given, 100

Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the graves, sense, Black Melancholy sits, and round her And love the offender, yet detest the throws offence? A death-like silence, and a dread How the dear object from the crime repose: remove, Her gloomy presence saddens all the Or how distinguish penitence from scene, love? Shades every flower, and darkens Unequal task! a passion to resign, every green, For hearts so touched, so pierced, so Deepens the murmur of the falling lost as mine. floods, Ere such a soul regains its peaceful And breathes a browner horror on the state, woods. 170 How often must it love, how often hate! How often hope, despair, resent, Yet here for ever, ever must I stay; regret, Sad proof how well a lover can obey! Conceal, disdain, —do all things but Death, only death, can break the forget! 200 lasting chain; But let Heaven seize it, all at once ’tis And here, even then, shall my cold fired; dust remain, Not touched, but rapt; not wakened, Here all its frailties, all its flames but inspired! resign, Oh come! oh teach me nature to And wait till ’tis no sin to mix with thine. subdue, Renounce my love, my life, myself— Ah, wretch! believed the spouse of and you. God in vain, Fill my fond heart with God alone, for Confessed within the slave of love and He man. Alone can rival, can succeed to thee. Assist me, Heaven! but whence arose that prayer? How happy is the blameless Vestal’s Sprung it from piety, or from despair? lot! 180 The world forgetting, by the world Even here, where frozen chastity forgot: retires, Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Love finds an altar for forbidden fires. Each prayer accepted, and each wish I ought to grieve, but cannot what I resigned; 210 ought; Labour and rest that equal periods I mourn the lover, not lament the fault; keep; I view my crime, but kindle at the view, ‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and Repent old pleasures, and solicit new: weep’; -91- Desires composed, affections ever Now turned to Heaven, I weep my past even; offence, Tears that delight, and sighs that waft Now think of thee, and curse my to Heaven. innocence. Grace shines around her with serenest Of all affliction taught a lover yet, beams, ‘Tis sure the hardest science to forget! And whispering angels prompt her 190 golden dreams. 101

For her the unfading rose of Eden Where round some mouldering tower blooms, pale ivy creeps, And wings of seraphs shed divine And low-browed rocks hang nodding perfumes; o’er the deeps. For her the Spouse prepares the bridal Sudden you mount, you beckon from ring, the skies; For her white virgins hymeneals sing; Clouds interpose, waves roar, and 220 winds arise. To sounds of heavenly harps she dies I shriek, start up, the same sad away, prospect find, And melts in visions of eternal day. And wake to all the griefs I left behind.

Far other dreams my erring soul For thee the Fates, severely kind, employ, ordain Far other raptures, of unholy joy: A cool suspense from pleasure and When at the close of each sad, from pain; 250 sorrowing day, Thy life a long dead calm of fixed -92- repose; Fancy restores what vengeance No pulse that riots, and no blood that snatched away, glows. Then conscience sleeps, and leaving Still as the sea, ere winds were taught nature free, to blow, All my loose soul unbounded springs to Or moving spirit bade the waters flow; thee. Soft as the slumbers of a saint O cursed, dear horrors of all-conscious forgiven, night! And mild as opening gleams of How glowing guilt exalts the keen promised Heaven. delight! 230 Provoking demons all restraint remove, Come, Abelard! for what hast thou to And stir within me every source of love. dread? I hear thee, view thee, gaze o’er all thy The torch of Venus burns not for the charms, dead. And round thy phantom glue my Nature stands checked; religion clasping arms. disapproves: I wake:—no more I hear, no more I Even thou art cold—yet Eloisa loves. view, 260 The phantom flies me, as unkind as Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those you. that burn I call aloud; it hears not what I say: To light the dead, and warm the I stretch my empty arms; it glides unfruitful urn. away. To dream once more I close my willing What scenes appear where’er I turn eyes; my view? Ye soft illusions, dear deceits, arise! The dear ideas, where I fly, pursue, 240 -93- Alas, no more! methinks we wandering Rise in the grove, before the altar rise, go Stain all my soul, and wanton in my Through dreary wastes, and weep eyes. each other’s woe, I waste the matin lamp in sighs for thee, 102

Thy image steals between my God and Forget, renounce me, hate whate’er me, was mine. Thy voice I seem in every hymn to Fair eyes, and tempting looks, (which hear, yet I view!) With every bead I drop too soft a tear. Long loved, adored ideas, all adieu! 270 O grace serene! O virtue heavenly fair! When from the censer clouds of Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care! fragrance roll, Fresh blooming hope, gay daughter of And swelling organs lift the rising soul, the sky! One thought of thee puts all the pomp And faith, our early immortality! 300 to flight, Enter, each mild, each amicable guest: Priests, tapers, temples, swim before Receive, and wrap me in eternal rest! my sight: In seas of flame my plunging soul is See in her cell sad Eloisa spread, drowned, -94- While altars blaze, and angels tremble Propped on some tomb, a neighbour of round. the dead. In each low wind methinks a spirit While prostrate here in humble grief I calls, lie, And more than echoes talk along the Kind, virtuous drops just gathering in walls. my eye, Here, as I watched the dying lamps While praying, trembling, in the dust I around, roll, From yonder shrine I heard a hollow And dawning grace is opening on my sound. soul: 280 ‘Come, sister, come!’ (it said, or Come, if thou darest, all charming as seemed to say) thou art! ‘Thy place is here, sad sister, come Oppose thyself to Heaven; dispute my away! 310 heart; Once, like thyself, I trembled, wept, Come, with one glance of those and prayed, deluding eyes Love’s victim then, though now a Blot out each bright idea of the skies; sainted maid: Take back that grace, those sorrows, But all is calm in this eternal sleep; and those tears; Here grief forgets to groan, and love to Take back my fruitless penitence and weep, prayers; Even superstition loses every fear: Snatch me, just mounting, from the For God, not man, absolves our blest abode; frailties here. ’ Assist the fiends and tear me from my I come, I come! prepare your roseate God! bowers, Celestial palms, and ever-blooming No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from flowers. pole; Thither, where sinners may have rest, I Rise Alps between us! and whole go, oceans roll! 290 Where flames refined in breasts Ah, come not, write not, think not once seraphic glow: 320 of me, Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay, Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee, And smooth my passage to the realms Thy oaths I quit, thy memory resign; of day; 103

See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls are o’er, roll, When this rebellious heart shall beat Suck my last breath, and catch my no more; flying soul! If ever chance two wandering lovers Ah no—in sacred vestments may’st brings thou stand, To Paraclete’s white walls and silver The hallowed taper trembling in thy springs, hand, O’er the pale marble shall they join Present the cross before my lifted eye, their heads, Teach me at once, and learn of me to And drink the falling tears each other die. sheds; 350 Ah then, thy once-loved Eloïsa see! Then sadly say, with mutual pity It will be then no crime to gaze on me. moved, 330 ‘Oh may we never love as these have See from my cheek the transient roses loved!’ fly! From the full choir when loud See the last sparkle languish in my Hosannas rise, eye! And swell the pomp of dreadful Till every motion, pulse, and breath be sacrifice, o’er, Amid that scene, if some relenting eye And even my Abelard be loved no Glance on the stone where our cold more. relics lie, O death all-eloquent! you only prove Devotion’s self shall steal a thought What dust we dote on, when ’tis man from Heaven, we love. One human tear shall drop, and be forgiven. Then too, when fate shall thy fair frame And sure, if fate some future bard shall destroy, join, (That cause of all my guilt, and all my In sad similitude of griefs to mine, 360 joy,) Condemned whole years in absence to In trance ecstatic may thy pangs be deplore, drowned, And image charms he must behold no Bright clouds descend, and angels more; watch thee round; 340 Such if there be, who loves so long, so From opening skies may streaming well, glories shine, Let him our sad, our tender story tell; And saints embrace thee with a love The well-sung woes will soothe my like mine. pensive ghost; -95- He best can paint them who shall feel May one kind grave unite each hapless them most. name, And graft my love immortal on thy Composed c. 1716; fame! First published 1717 Then, ages hence, when all my woes -96-

Listen to Eloisa to Abelard in http://greaudiobooks.com/author/shebop; You can read other poems and different works by Pope in http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/pope/popebio.php 104

7.2. Robert Burns

BURNS, Robert Columbia Encyclopedia Robert Burns 1759–96, Scottish poet. Life The son of a hard-working and intelligent farmer, Burns was the oldest of seven children, all of whom had to help in the work on the farm. Although always hard pressed financially, the elder Burns, until his death in 1784, encouraged his sons with their education. As a result, Burns as a boy not only read the Scottish poetry of Ramsay and the collections compiled by Hailes and Herd, but also the works of Pope, Locke, and Shakespeare. By 1781, Burns had tried his hand at Figure 12. Robert Burns, several agricultural jobs without success. Although he painting by Alexander Nasmyth had begun writing, and his poems were circulated widely Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi in manuscript, none were published until 1786. At this le:PG_1063Burns_Naysmith time he had already begun a life of dissipation, and he crop.jpg was not only discouraged but poor and was involved simultaneously with several women. Burns decided to marry Mary Campbell and migrate to Jamaica. To help finance the journey, he published at Kilmarnock Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), which was an immediate success. Mary Campbell died before she and Burns could marry, and Burns changed his mind about migration. He toured the Highlands, brought out a second edition of his poems at Edinburgh in 1787, and for two winters was socially prominent in the Scottish city. In 1788 he married Jean Armour, who had borne him four children, and retired to a farm at Ellisland. By 1791 Burns had failed as a farmer, and he moved to nearby Dumfries, where he held a position as an exciseman. He died at 37 after a severe attack of rheumatic fever. Verse Burns's art is at its best in songs such as "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton," "My Heart's in the Highlands," and "John Anderson My Jo." Two collections contain 268 of his songs — George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (6 vol., 1793–1811) and James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (5 vol., 105

1787–1803). Some of these, such as "Auld Lang Syne" and "Comin' thro' the Rye," are among the most familiar and best-loved poems in the English language. But his talent was not confined to song; two descriptive pieces, "Tam o' Shanter" and "The Jolly Beggars," are among his masterpieces. Burns had a fine sense of humor, which was reflected in his satirical, descriptive, and playful verse. His great popularity with the Scots lies in his ability to depict with loving accuracy the life of his fellow rural Scots, as he did in "The Cotter's Saturday Night." His use of dialect brought a stimulating, much-needed freshness and raciness into English poetry, but Burns's greatness extends beyond the limits of dialect. His poems are written about Scots, but, in tune with the rising humanitarianism of his day, they apply to a multitude of universal problems.

Some poems of Robert Burns

Poems 1794

DUMFRIES

442. To Miss Graham of Fintray— How pale is that cheek where the rouge lately glistened; HERE, where the Scotish Muse How silent that tongue which the immortal lives, echoes oft tired, In sacred strains and tuneful numbers How dull is that ear which to flattery so join'd, listened.-- Accept the gift; though humble he who If sorrow and anguish their exit await, gives, From friendship and dearest affection Rich is the tribute of the grateful mind. removed; So may no ruffian feeling in thy breast How doubly severer, Maria, thy fate, Discordant jar thy bosom-chords Thou diedst unwept, as thou livedst among; unloved.-- But Peace attune thy gentle soul to -576- rest, Loves, Graces, and Virtues, I call not Or love ecstatic wake his seraph song. on you; Or Pity's notes, in luxury of tears, So shy, grave and distant, ye shed not As modest want the tale of woe a tear: 10 reveals; But come, all ye offspring of folly so While conscious Virtue all the strain true, endears, And flowers let us cull for Maria's cold And heaven-born Piety her sanction bier.-- seals. We'll search through the garden for 443. Monody on Maria— each silly flower, We'll range through the forest for each How cold is that bosom which folly idle weed; once fired, But chiefly the nettle, so typical, shower, 15 106

For none e'er approached her but rued What once was a butterfly gay in life's the rash deed.-- beam: We'll sculpture the marble, we'll Want only of wisdom denied her measure the lay; Here Vanity respect, strums on her idiot lyre; Want only of goodness denied her Here keen Indignation shall dart on his esteem.-- prey, Which spurning Contempt shall 444. Wilt thou be my Dearie-- redeem from his ire.-- 20 Tune, The Sutor's dochter— THE EPITAPH-- Here lies, now a prey to insulting -577- Neglect,

Tune of thou Wilt bem y

3. 3.

Figure Figure 1 Dearie. Source: KINSLEY,1971, p.577

445. Sonnet, on the Death of Robert WILT thou be my Dearie; Riddel, Esq. of Glen Riddel, April When sorrow wrings thy gentle heart, 1794 O wilt thou let me chear thee: By the treasure of my soul, No more, ye warblers of the wood, no That's the love I bear thee! 5 more, I swear and vow, that only thou Nor pour your descant, grating, on my Shalt ever be my Dearie-- soul: Only thou, I swear and vow, Thou young-eyed spring, gay in thy Shalt ever be my Dearie.-- verdant stole, Lassie, say thou lo'es me; 10 More welcome were to me grim Or if thou wilt na be my ain, Say na winter's wildest roar. thou'lt refuse me: How can ye charm, ye flow'rs, with all If it winna, canna be, your dyes? 5 Thou for thine may chuse me, Ye blow upon the sod that wraps my Let me, Lassie, quickly die, 15 friend: Trusting that thou lo'es me — Lassie, How can I to the tuneful strain attend? let me quickly die, That strain flows round th' untimely Trusting that thou lo'es me.-- tomb where Riddel lies. Yes, pour, ye warblers, pour the notes of woe, 107

And soothe the Virtues weeping on this It is Maria's voice I hear; bier: 10 So calls the woodlark in the grove 10 The Man of Worth, and has not left his His little, faithful Mate to chear, peer, At once 'tis music--and 'tis love. Is in his 'narrow house' for ever darkly And art thou come! and art thou true! low. O welcome dear to love and me! Thee, Spring, again with joy shall And let us all our vows renew 15 others greet, Along the flowery banks of Cree. Me, mem'ry of my loss will only meet. -578- 448. Pinned to Mrs R-----'s 446. On Robert Riddel carriage—

To Riddel, much-lamented man, IF you rattle along like your Mistress's This ivied cot was dear; tongue, Reader, dost value matchless worth? Your speed will outrival the dart: This ivied cot revere. But, a fly for your load, your break down on the road, 447. Banks of Cree If your stuff be as rotten's her heart.-- 449. In answer to one who affirmed of HERE is the glen, and here the bower, a wellknown All underneath the birchen shade; Character here, Dr B -----, that there The village-bell has told the hour, was Falsehood in his very looks-- O what can stay my lovely maid. THAT there is Falsehood in his looks, 'Tis not Maria's whispering call; 5 I must and will deny; 'Tis but the balmy breathing gale, They say, their Master is a Knave-- Mixt with some warbler's dying fall --And sure they do not lie.-- The dewy star of eve to hail. -579-

Robert Burns is considered Scotland’s national poet, See more about him in the following sites: 1. http://www.robertburns.org/ 2. http://digital.nls.uk/burns/ 3. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/709 You can listen to some of his poems in http://archive.org/details/robert_burns_250th_anniversary_1002_librivox

7.3. William Blake

BLAKE, William Columbia Encyclopedia William Blake 1757–1827, English poet and artist, b. London. Although he exerted a great influence on English romanticism, Blake defies characterization by school, movement, or even period. At the same time no poet has been more sensitive or responsive to the realities of the human condition and of his time.

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Early Life and Work Blake's father, a prosperous hosier, encouraged young Blake's artistic tastes and sent him to drawing school. At 14 he was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver, with whom he stayed until 1778. After attending the Royal Academy, where he rebelled against the school's stifling atmosphere, he set up as an engraver. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to read, write, and draw. She became his inseparable companion, assisting him in nearly all his work. Figure 14. William Blake, painting by Blake's life, except for three years at Thomas Phillips Source: Felpham where he prepared illustrations for an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Willia m_Blake_by_Thomas_Phillips.jpg edition of Cowper, was spent in London. Poetical Sketches (1783), his first book, was the only one published conventionally during his lifetime. He engraved and published all his other major poetry himself (the rest remained in manuscript), for which he originated a method of engraving text and illustration on the same plate. Neither Blake's artwork nor his poetry enjoyed commercial or critical success until long after his death. Work in t he Visual Art s Blake's paintings and engravings, notably his illustrations of his own works, works by Milton, and of the Book of Job, are painstakingly realistic in their representation of human anatomy and other natural forms. They are also radiantly imaginative, often depicting fanciful creatures in exacting detail. Nearly unknown during his life, Blake was generally dismissed as an eccentric or worse long thereafter. His following has gradually increased, and today he is widely appreciated as a visual artist and as a poet. Mature Poetry In Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) the world is seen from a child's point of view, directly and simply but without sentimentality. In the first group, which includes such poems as "The Lamb," "Infant Joy," and "Laughing Songs," both the beauty and the pain of life are captured. The latter group, which includes "The Tyger," "Infant Sorrow," "The Sick Rose," and "London," reveal a 109

consciousness of cruelty and injustice in the world, for which people, not fate, are responsible. As parables of adult life the Songs are rich in meaning and implication. Blake's Prophetic Books combine poetry, vision, prophecy, and exhortation. They include The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790), The French Revolution (1791), America (1793), Europe (1794), The Book of Urizon (1794), The Book of Los (1795), Milton (1804–8), and Jerusalem (1804–20). These comprise no less than a vision of the whole of human life, in which energy and imagination struggle with the forces of oppression both physical and mental. Blake exalted love and pure liberty, and abhorred the reductive, rationalist Figure 15. One of Blake’s paintings: the Red Dragon. philosophy that served to justify the Source: http://www.gailgastfield.com/pageart/Blake_R political and economic inequities attendant edDragon.jpg upon the Industrial Revolution. The Prophetic Books are founded in the real world, as are Blake's passions and anger, but they appear abstruse because they are ordered by a mythology devised by the poet, which draw from Swedenborg, Jacob Boehme, and other mystical sources. Despite this, and despite the fact that from childhood on Blake was a mystic who thought it quite natural to see and converse with angels and Old Testament prophets, he by no means forsook concrete reality for a mystical life of the spirit. On the contrary, reality, whose center was human life, was for Blake inseparable from imagination. The spiritual, indeed God himself, was an expression of the human.

Some of William Blake’s poems

THE LAMB Softest clothing, woolly, bright ; Gave thee such a tender voice, LITTLE lamb, who made thee? Making all the vales rejoice? Dost thou know who made thee, Little lamb, who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed Dost thou know who made thee? By the stream and o'er the mead ; Gave thee clothing of delight, Little lamb, I'll tell thee; 110

Little lamb, I'll tell thee: Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, He is callèd by thy name, Appeared like his father, in white. For He calls Himself a Lamb. He kissed the child, and by the hand He is meek, and He is mild, led, He became a little child. And to his mother brought, I a child, and thou a lamb, Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely We are callèd by His name. dale, Little lamb, God bless thee! Her little boy weeping sought. Little lamb, God bless thee! -25- -21- (…) (…) THE TIGER THE BLOSSOM TIGER, tiger, burning bright MERRY, merry sparrow! In the forests of the night, Under leaves so green What immortal hand or eye A happy blossom Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Sees you, swift as arrow, Seek your cradle narrow, In what distant deeps or skies Near my bosom. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? Pretty, pretty robin I On what wings dare he aspire? Under leaves so green What the hand dare seize the fire? A happy blossom Hears you sobbing, sobbing, Pretty, pretty robin, And what shoulder and what art Near my bosom. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? -23- And, when thy heart began to beat, (…) What dread hand and what dread THE LITTLE BOY LOST feet ?

'FATHER, father, where are you What the hammer? what the chain? going? In what furnace was thy brain? O do not walk so fast! What the anvil? what dread grasp Speak, father, speak to your little boy, Dare its deadly terrors clasp? Or else I shall be lost.' When the stars threw down their The night was dark, no father was spears, there, And watered heaven with their tears, The child was wet with dew; Did He smile His work to see? The mire was deep, and the child did Did He who made the lamb make weep, thee ? And away the vapour flew. Tiger, tiger, burning bright THE LITTLE BOY FOUND In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye THE little boy lost in the lonely fen, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Led by the wandering light, -53-

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You can read other Blake’s poems in http://www.online-literature.com/blake/; you can also see his paintins in http://www.gailgastfield.com/blake3.html; and listen to some of his poems in http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/book/poems-of- william-blake-by-william-blake

8. Romanticism

Form in Romantic Poetry

Elizabeth Nitchie

THE CRITIC, says Mr. F. R. Leavis, "endeavours, where the poetry of the past is concerned, to realize to the full the implications of the truism that its life is in the present or nowhere; it is alive in so far as it is alive for us." [1] This is not the place to argue whether this is a truism or not. I merely accept the statement as a directive for thinking about the Romantic poets in the middle of the twentieth century. There is, of course, more than one way in which the poetry of the past may be alive for us. It may live because we have sufficient historical imagination to project ourselves into that past and to read the poetry as its contemporaries read it. [2] Or we can say, with Virginia Woolf, that the poet is always our contemporary [3], that his work, being universal, is as alive in our own century as in his. It is in this second sense that I shall try to show that the Romantic poets, no matter how we respond to their ideas, are alive for us by reason of a formal excellence in their work that knows no restriction to time or place. There is ample evidence that for modern critics as for modern readers Romantic poetry is alive. They are aware not only of breathing and heart -3- beat but of a vital energy that cannot be ignored, an energy not peculiar to the twentieth century but characteristic of all great poetry. Like all vital energy it rises from deep within the body and gives to it shape and action. Miss Edith Sitwell, quoting Blake ("Energy is the only life, and is from the Body"), says: "All technical achievement is, as it were, the Etheric Body of the poet." [4] This Etheric Body cannot be denied to the Romantic poets. Even the men commonly known as the new critics, who charge the Romantics with unreality and escapism, with adolescent thinking, especially with formlessness, recognize many of those technical virtues which they admire as they turn to examine individual poems. Cleanth Brooks includes Wordsworth Ode: Intimations of 112

Immortality and Keats On a Grecian Urn among the well wrought works of art. And Keats To a Nightingale Mr. Leavis says "has the structure of a fine and complex organism."[5] Mr. Kenneth Burke and Mr. R. P. Warren seek and find a unifying symbolism in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Although they differ on the symbols, and although they go to extremes of Freudian and theological interpretation, they agree that it is a well constructed poem. The attacks of the new critics are most often directed at those poems which, popular anthology pieces though they be, most scholars and critics would recognize as inferior. Shelley, for example, suffers under the analysis of The Indian Serenade or When the Lamp Is Shattered. But what poet is always at his structural best? The new critics have done us a signal service in stressing the importance of form. For the old critical mistake probably was to evaluate toolargely in terms of content. How far it is possible to dissociate ideas or content and form is a debatable point. Wallace Stevens maintained in a recent lecture that "the style of a poem and the poem itself are one." [6] And Mr. John Crowe Ransom has said, "The union of beauty with goodness and truth has been common enough to be regarded as natural. It is the dissociation which is unnatural and painful." [7] Surely form itself is good only if it is organically unified with content, if it is the skin of the hand rather than the glove. Mr. Allen Tate, however, says: "From my point of view the formal qualities of a poem are the focus of the specifically critical judgment because they partake of an objectivity that the subject matter, abstracted -4- from the form, wholly lacks." [8] His is a good point of view from which to consider Romantic poetry, one on which good critics, teachers, and scholars (even though they may not make the complete dissociation between content and form) have always taken their stand. The modern critic's conception of form and its function differs little upon examination from that which we inherit from the Romantics. Form is a control — the "bridle of Pegasus," Mr. I. A. Richards calls it. [9] Its function, says Mr. Ransom, is "to frustrate the natural man and induce the aesthetic one …; it wants us to enjoy life, to taste and reflect as we drink." [10] It controls also in the sense that it unifies all the diverse parts of the poetic structure, including the content, the meaning, the argument. "The composition of a poem is an operation in which the argument fights to displace the meter, and the meter fights to displace the argument," a fight in which 113

the terms of peace "are the dispositions in the finished poem." [11] Indeed the moral intelligence gets into poetry "not as moral abstractions but as form, coherence of image and metaphor, control of tone and of rhythm, the union of these features." [12] We should not find anything shockingly new in these statements. They remind us of Wordsworth's function kindred to organic power, The vital spirit of a perfect form; [13] or of Coleridge's definition of a poem as "proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part," and of his entire discussion of meter in the eighteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria. Even Mr. Cleanth Brooks's insistence on paradox as the language of poetry should not startle those who remember Wordsworth's recognition of "the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude" as a principle of the arts. In the familiar passage on the imagination in his Biographia Literaria Coleridge anticipated Mr. Brooks by more than a century: -5- This power … reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

Indeed the modern critics often seem to have echoed the Romantic critics. Signor Croce, for example, sounds much like Wordsworth when he defines a poet or draws a distinction between imagination and fancy. They recognize their indebtedness. Miss Sitwell, the technician, fills her notebook with quotations from Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. The advocates of paradox and wit appeal to Coleridge by name and by quotation. Mr. I. A. Richards comments on a letter from Coleridge to Godwin: "I can think of no passage in which so many of the fundamental problems of what is now known as semasiology are so brought together or so clearly stated." [14] Coleridge is, in fact, the father of many modern theories. [15] 114

Another proof that the Romantic poets have a voice to which the twentieth century listens is to be found in the admiration of the neoromantic poets of England. In revolt against the hard intellectualism and cynicism shown in argument and language by their immediate elders, especially the earlier Eliot and Auden, the poets who grew to young manhood between the two wars saw themselves as a new anticlassical, romantic generation. George Barker in his Vision of England '38 summoned the ghosts of Blake and Shelley and took Shelley's tear which like a single rain Dropped into the blood that murmured at my feet.

David Daiches has compared the imagery, the poet's attitude and approach to his object, in The Amazons to those of Coleridge [16]. Dylan -6- Thomas, in his inner vision, his symbolism, his imagery, whether the sexual and Freudian or the pastoral of his "five and country senses," shows his heritage from Coleridge and Blake and Wordsworth. The group that derived from Barker and Thomas and called itself the Apocalypse published a manifesto whose terms remind us of the 1800 Preface in the revulsion from the machine age and the emphasis on the "individual development of Man." One of their number, J. F. Hendry, using Coleridge's word organic, writes that art is "the recognition, the communication of organic experience, experience with personal shape, experience which (however wild and startling in content) is a formal whole." [17] Although their subjects are not strikingly different from those of the later Auden and Spender, their language is romantic. Of Henry Treece it has been said: "His poetry represents … a kind of contemporary romanticism, a romanticism of language." [18] He has indeed been charged with the same formal sins as those of which his Romantic ancestors are often supposed to be guilty: lack of specific observation, use of literary imagery, structural failure resulting from the use of a mere stream of images. Modern critics, as Mr. Barzun has pointed out [19], seem to contradict themselves by accusing Romantic poetry now of formlessness, now of too great concern for form. Yet the first charge is really implicit in the second. This second charge involves three alleged faults: too great insistence on conventional verse forms and on metrical rhythms for their own sake; too much use of language that is beautiful only by reason of sound or of vague suggestion and trite association; too 115

frequent use of images and figures of speech for their individual beauty, so that the result in a poem is a failure in close-knit architectural structure. If these things are so, the poets are untrue to their own critical theory. They furnish rebuttal in their statements on prosody, diction, imagery, and the organic structure of a poem. Writing of prosody in his Defence of Poetry, Shelley said that "every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification." Coleridge, explaining the variations in the meter of Christabel, said that they -7- occurred only "in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." Blake said of his septenaries: "Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, and the prosaic for the inferior parts; all are necessary to each other." Similarly diction must be the organic outgrowth of thought. In Style DeQuincey recognized that Wordsworth was profoundly right in saying "that it is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction 'the dress of thoughts.' … [H]e would call it the 'incarnation of thoughts.'" Blake wrote: "I have heard many people say, 'Give me the ideas, it is no matter what words you put them into.' … These people knew enough of artifice, but nothing of art. Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words." For Coleridge, "images, however beautiful … do not of themselves characterize the poet." The poetic image must have, among other qualities, "the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant." And Wordsworth has shown how the parts of a successfully imaginative figure of speech interact to produce the unity and concentration of poetic structure. For Keats the organization of imagery was that which gave shape and form to a poem. To him it is axiomatic that "Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight." He wrote to Clarke of the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax, and then dying proudly.

On the whole matter of organic form one may quote Coleridge: 116

The true… mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with… its outward form. -8- Lest we think Coleridge unique in his generation, we can turn to DeQuincey on Style, or to Keats's third axiom, that like the leaves of a tree poetry must come from the poet's very life-sap. Theory may be one thing, however, and practice another. These principles should be considered in the light of Romantic poetry, not merely of Romantic criticism. With a real concern for verse form and an unwillingness to be confined to the couplet the Romantic poets revived earlier English patterns — blank verse, the tetrameter couplet, the ballad stanza, the Spenserian stanza, the sonnet — and introduced from Italian verse the terza rima and the ottava rima. Of these strict forms the poets were not slavishly observant. Byron was unconventional in his occasional lyrical ottava rima and his freely overrunning Spenserian stanzas, as well as in his loose dramatic blank verse. Coleridge experimented with tetrameters in Christabel, with the ballad stanza, with quantitative verse, and with rhythmic prose. Blake used blank verse in lyric poems, revived, with infinite variations and substitutions, the old fourteeners or septenaries in his prophetic books, and in many of his shorter poems achieved the kind of supple, clipped "prose" rhythms that we associate with modern innovators. Keats and Shelley both experimented with the sonnet. Keats developed his own form of the ode; Wordsworth freely adapted both the irregular and the regular patterns. Although, except for blank verse and Blake's septenaries, the emphasis is on end rhyme and regularly recurrent internal rhyme, there is no lack of assonance and suspension. And the sound patterns are as intricate and as highly unified in the work of Shelley or of Coleridge as in any poem by Archibald MacLeish or Dylan Thomas [20]. The result is a rich variety of versification, with a range as wide as that of the twentieth century, except that the rhythms are those of music rather than of speech. 117

This music, though admittedly pleasing to the ear for its own sake, is primarily the music which belongs to the poem. The west wind sweeps through the terza rima; the cloud ever changes and shifts as the vowels and consonants shift, ever remains undying as the rhymes recur in Shelley's closely-patterned stanzas; the heavy, long- drawn sounds of grief wail for the world's wrong in A Dirge. Biblical cadences dignify the blank verse in Wordsworth's tragic idyll of the Cumberland Abraham and -9- Isaac. The visions in Kubla Khan melt one into another in hypnotic rhythms. The blank verse of Hyperion takes the shape of antique sculpture; the short lines of the Ode to a Nightingale have the sound of caught breath. The mocking colloquial tone of Don Juan is heard in the insistent, humorous reiterated rhymes of the ottava rima and the clinching finality of its couplet; a haunting regret lingers in the long vowels and feminine endings of So We'll Go No More a-Roving. The lament for fleeting beauty sighs in the echoes of The Book of Thel; the exciting hammer strokes of the Creator sound in the stresses and repetitions of The Tiger. The same principle obtains as that laid down by a modern critic for modern poetry: "So long as his form allows him to make the utmost of what he has to say, it does its work, and no more need be required of it." [21] The same principle applies also to language. To quote Wordsworth again, "Language is the incarnation of thought." The diction of the Romantic poet — when he is writing his great poems, of course — does not lose touch with reality. It is concrete — a quality which Mr. Albert Gerard says "a large section of the poetry- reading public of the present day chiefly values." [22] It puts flesh on the objects upon which he steadily fixes his eye. Whether the poet looks at the dancing daffodils or the swift cloud shadows, the inner nature and the thoughts of Michael or of Prometheus, the world of classic art and literature or of contemporary politics and society, the drab and evil present or the ideal future, he sees what is real and he uses the "real language of men." This point is made especially clear for Wordsworth by a study of his first choices, the passages in the 1805 version of The Prelude, for example, instead of the 1850 version. And yet who has surpassed the reality of vision and of language in the 1850 lines about Newton's bust, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone?

Romantic diction is not vague: it is precise. 118

Neither is it shallow or single: it is richly suggestive. "Ambiguity" was not unknown in the early nineteenth century, though Mr. Empson had not yet given it a name. What, for instance, of the two meanings of closing in the Ode to the West Wind — -10- this closing night Shall be the dome of a vast sepulcher — one, enclosing, related to dome, the other, ending, to sepulchre? The word pulls together the whole image and links it with the main theme of the poem: the enclosing cycle of death and rebirth. Mr. Brooks has pointed out possible ambiguities in the diction of Wordsworth Ode. But has anyone really interpreted the word piety in My Heart Leaps Up? Its usual religious sense, reverence for God and His laws, is linked with the exaltation of the opening words and the Biblical symbolism of the rainbow. But it also means reverence for parents, one aspect of the pietas of Vergil's Aeneas [23]. And so the poet wishes the days of the man to be bound by natural piety to the days of the child who is his father. The ultimate, climactic, "ambiguous" word unifies the poem. Like Romantic diction, the Romantic image is precise, often highly concentrated, wide in range, and structurally important to the poem. The imagery of Shelley in particular is frequently said to be abstract and vague. There is perhaps some excuse for this charge. His images are often bewilderingly profuse: he slips, with a music which may lull the critical intelligence into inattention, from image to image, from metaphor to metaphor until, in terms of one of his favorite symbols, we ship our oars and float down the stream of sound. Yet upon the examination which the reader owes to good and difficult poetry, the images may prove to be as cunningly nested as Chinese boxes; or a series of metaphors is seen to be climaxed by a unifying line: Even as a vapor fed with golden beams That ministered on sunlight, ere the west Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame-- No sense, no motion, no divinity — A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander — a bright stream Once fed with many-voiced waves — a dream Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever — Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. -11- 119

It should be clear too that images that seem abstract are the result of his expressed intention to draw them from the operations of the human mind: an avalanche is like a great truth loosened in a heaven-defying mind; the sun is like "thought-winged Liberty"; it is the spirits that come from the mind of humankind who comfort Prometheus and celebrate the millennium. His belief in "life's unquiet dream"- -that mutability is the law of life and that men know only the imperfect, unreal, halfseen forms of ideal beauty — is expressed and reflected by his repeated images of things that shift and change and of the light of eternity stained by life or half- hidden, imperfectly revealed, behind a veil: Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them; As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds, ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

This is the kind of precision which exactly expresses an idea. Shelley is capable also of the precision resulting from accurate observation: the "azure moss" submerged in the "intenser day" of the blue Mediterranean; the swift departure of Mercury over the eastern horizon: See where the child of Heaven, with winged feet, Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.

The precision of Wordsworth, who looked steadily at his subject, is rarely questioned, or that of Coleridge, or of Keats, or of Byron, who, as Keats said, described what he saw. Of himself in contrast Keats said that he described what he imagined, meaning, of course, that he exercised that abstracting and modifying power which Wordsworth ascribed to the imagination. The concentration that results from this activity is rare in Byron's poetry (though he occasionally startles us as by the image of the "arches on arches" of the Coliseum, where "the stars twinkle through the loops of time") and he is said to have asked Shelley what Keats meant by "a beaker full of the warm South." It is frequent in Keats's best poems. The development of an image can sometimes be traced from the lax assembling of details in the first draft to the poetic fusion in the published lines: from, for example, -12- The Oaks stand charmed by the earnest stars 120

to Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars.

As Robert Bridges said, Keats had "the power of concentrating all the far- reaching resources of language on one point, so that a single and apparently effortless expression rejoices the aesthetic imagination at the moment when it is most expectant and exacting, and at the same time astonishes the intellect with a new aspect of truth." [24] Blake too knows the secret of creating the image that astonishes by its truth and rejoices by its fulfillment of aesthetic expectations and exactions: And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace walls.

These lines of Blake's show something of the range of Romantic imagery. Although many of the images of the period are drawn from what are commonly regarded as beautiful natural objects, they are by no means confined to bird songs and boughs breaking with honey-buds. Nature herself is not always beautiful: the dead wind stinks in Shelley's ruined garden. In the chartered streets of Blake's London are heard not only the soldier's sigh but the cries of the chimney-sweeper and the new-born infant, the curse of the harlot, the rumbling of the marriage hearse. To these poets, as to those of other ages, the intellectual developments of the time furnished subject matter and images: new philosophical and psychological systems, innovations in social and political thinking, technological and scientific advances. As Lucretius used the atom, or Donne the compasses, or Tennyson the railroad, or our contemporaries the airplane or the bombsight, so Shelley, for example, that "Newton among poets," used electricity. E. L. Mayo, justifying his use of the bombsight as an image in a mid-twentieth-century poem, writes that how an A-bomb and a flying saucer are employed as imagery must depend on how we feel about them now, not on what the future holds… . In my 'The Pool,' for example, I allude to Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks and comment: -13- The rock she sits among Waits in a bombsight to be otherwise.

The 'Bombsight' in this instance is a metonymy for the whole technology of modern war and its threat to human values. Few 121

of us have seen a modern bombsight but most of us have heard, or read, of its uncanny, superhuman accuracy. That is, enough of us have a definite attitude toward it to make it accessible as poetic imagery. [25]

A hundred and fifty years ago Wordsworth wrote: The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.

The imaginal structure of the best poems of the Romantic period is tight and balanced and unified. It is no mere series of exquisite, flashing images. The sustained and intricate metaphor of On First Looking into Chapman's Homer determines and is determined by the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet. The images of death (Death and his brother Sleep) in the Ode to a Nightingale, from the word hemlock in the first stanza to the word buried in the last, are interlocked with those of eternal life to culminate in the exaltation of the seventh stanza and be resolved in the fading uncertainty of the last. In To a Skylark images of the ascending bird and the overflowing, descending sound — the "rain of melody" — blend in the emotional identification of bird and poet. The Solitary Reaper is constructed on the contradictions in the girl's song which is both natural and mysterious, near and distant, symbolic of eternal beauty. The images of power and daring mount in The Tiger to a point where they explode in a heavenly cataclysm and return through the wondering contrast with the lamb to the slight modification of the first question. Often the images are symbols which hold the meaning of the poem: the light in Wordsworth's Ode, the unfinished sheepfold in his Michael, the albatross and the watersnakes in the Ancient Mariner — whether or not we accept them as symbols for Sara Coleridge and opium. These images fulfill the requirements of Keats's second axiom. They help the imagination to reveal itself in "the balance or reconcile -14- ment of opposite or discordant qualities." Through arching movement and often paradoxical tension they build the organically unified poem. There is also in these poems a unity of logical or narrative structure. Even the reflective poems like Tintern Abbey or Frost at Midnight move along a line of somewhat free association to a 122

conclusion which echoes the beginning and completes the circle of the poem. The structure is as strict as that of many similar contemporary poems, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — and infinitely clearer to the reader. The Ancient Mariner has in its very narrative that fine circular movement which Coleridge himself compared to the symbol of unity and eternity, the snake with its tail in its mouth. The Mariner's voyage begins and ends in reality, which both surrounds and is penetrated by the mystery. The albatross closes each arc of the circle as it closes each division of the poem. Even the moral, I believe, is part of the dynamic circle [26]. Similar structure marks Keats's Eve of St. Agnes. Youth and love and warmth and quiet are set in a frame of age and hate and cold and noise. Yet there is no sharp demarcation: old Angela ministers to youth and love; the noise of the revelry penetrates Madeline's chamber; the sleet patters against her window panes. The quiet of Madeline's azure-lidded sleep in blanched linen is in contrast with that of the Beadsman's eternal sleep among his ashes cold. Her vespers balance his thousand aves. All is fused in a rich intricate pattern and is set in a verse form which has always seemed perfect for the "golden broideries" on the pages of "legends old." [27] As Sir Herbert Grierson summarizes the Romantic theory of unity, "It is a harmony of all the elements, sensuous, intellectual, imaginative, none of which would be what it is apart from the others — diction, thought, imagery, rhythm, all are interdependent." [28] The Romantics — indeed all good poets — knew and acted upon the principle that Stephen Spender seems to have discovered, with some surprise, for himself, "that form -15- does not lie simply in the correct observance of rules. It lies in the struggle of certain living material to achieve itself within a pattern." [29] By imposing artistic discipline upon their living material and enabling it so to achieve itself, these poets attained "the inward balance and fullness which was, to a larger extent than is commonly realized, the ultimate ideal of English romanticism." [30] -16- NOTES:

1. Revaluations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), p. 2. 2. Cf. J. C. Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Scribner's, 1938), p.70: "We so metimes pore over an old piece of poetry for so long thatwe fall under its spell a nd forget that its spirit is not our spirit… . Bymeans of one of the ripest and subtl est powers in us, that is, thehistorical sense, we made an adaptation of our min 123

ds to its mind,and we were able to suspend those centuries which had intervene d. .. . Yet it is not exactly with our own minds that we are reading the oldpoetry; otherwise we could not read it." 3. The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p.289. 4. A Poet's Notebook (London: Macmillan, 1943), p. 21. 5. Op. cit., p. 245. 6. Two or Three Ideas, Chap Book: Supplement to The CEA Critic, XIII, No. 7 (October, 1951). 7. The World's Body, p. 72. 8. Reason in Madness (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1941), p. 110. 9. Coleridge on Imagination (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), Chapter IX. 10. The World's Body, p. 39. 11. J. C. Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p. 295. 12. Allen Tate, Reason in Madness, pp. 109-10. 13. See Ernest de Selincourt, The Prelude (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. xliii, note 1. 14. Coleridge on Imagination, p. 12. 15. Mr. Tate, to be sure, thinks that it is a "false legacy" that Coleridge has passed on to us in his "failure to get out ofthe dilemma of Intellect-or-Feeling." See Reason in Madness, pp. 45-51. 16. "The Lyricism of George Barker", Poetry, LXIX, No. 6 (March, 1947), 338. 17. See Francis Scarfe, Auden and After (London: Routledge & Sons, 1942), pp. 155, 158. 18. H. R. Hays, "Hypnotic Words", a review of Treece Collected Poems, Poetry, LXIX, No. 6 (March, 1947), 347. 19. Romanticism and the Modern Ego (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 275. It is difficult to say anything about Romanticism and the modern ego half so well as Mr. Barzun. 20. See Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, La.: The State University Press, 1941), pp. 369 ff. 21. 21 C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (London: Macmillan & Co., 1949), p. 22. 22. 22 Coleridge, Keats, and the Modern Mind, Essays in Criticism, I, No. 3 (July, 1951), 251. 23. Cf. Herbert J. C. Grierson, Criticism and Creation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), p. 118: "Virgil and Wordsworth were both poets of pietas in an age of revolution… . Wordsworth learned his reverence, his pietas, from intercourse with Nature." 24. John Keats, an Essay, quoted by J. M. Murry, Keats and Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 10. 25. See John Ciardi (ed.), Mid-Century American Poets, (New York: Twayne, 1950), pp. 143-44. 26. See Elizabeth Nitchie, "The Moral of the Ancient Mariner Reconsidered", PMLA, Vol. XLVIII (1933). 27. These comments on the imaginal and structural unity of Romantic poems are by no means entirely original. See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947); Richard Fogle, Imagery in Keats and Shelley (1949), as well as a number of his articles; M. R. Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship (1935); J. M. Murry, "When Keats Discovered Homer", in Essays and Studies in Keats 124

(1930); Kenneth Burke , "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats", in Accent, Autumn, 1943; R. D. Havens , "Structure and Periodic Pattern in Shelley's Lyrics", PMLA, December, 1950; Frederick A. Pottle, "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth", in Wordsworth: Centenary Studies (1951). For further titles, see The English Romantic Poets. A Review of Research (New York, 1956). 28. Criticism and Creation, pp. 24-25. 29. World within World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 284. 30. Albert Gerard, Essays and Studies, I, 249.

8.1. William Wordsworth

WORDSWORTH, William Columbia Encyclopedia William Wordsworth 1770–1850, English poet, b. Cockermouth, Cumberland. One of the great English poets, he was a leader of the romantic movement in England. Life and Works In 1791 he graduated from Cambridge and traveled abroad. While in France he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter, Caroline, in 1792. Although he did not marry her, it seems to have been circumstance rather than lack of affection that separated them. Throughout his life he supported Annette and Caroline as best he could, finally settling a sum of money on them in 1835. The spirit of the French Revolution had strongly influenced Wordsworth, and he returned (1792) to England imbued with the principles of Rousseau and republicanism. In 1793 were published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, written in the stylized idiom and vocabulary of the 18th cent. The outbreak of the Reign of Terror prevented Wordsworth's return to France, and after receiving several small legacies, he settled with his sister Dorothy in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was extraordinarily close to his sister. Throughout his life she was his constant and devoted companion, sharing his poetic vision and helping him with his work. In Dorsetshire Wordsworth became the intimate friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, probably under his influence, a student of David Hartley's empiricist philosophy. Together the two poets wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they sought to use the language of ordinary people in poetry; it included Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey." The work introduced romanticism into England and became a manifesto for romantic poets. In 1799 he and his sister moved to the Lake District of 125

England, where they lived the remainder of their lives. A second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), which included a critical essay outlining Wordsworth's poetic principles, in particular his ideas about poetic diction and meter, was unmercifully attacked by critics. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, an old school friend; the union was evidently a happy one, and the couple had four children. The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, was completed in 1805, though it was not published until after his death. His next collection, Poems in Two Volumes (1807), included the well-known "Ode to Duty," the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and a number of famous sonnets. Thereafter, Wordsworth's creative powers diminished. Nonetheless, some notable poems were produced after this Figure 16. Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert date, including The Excursion (1814), Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Words "Laodamia" (1815), "White Doe of worth_001.jpg Rylstone" (1815), Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820 (1822), and "Yarrow Revisited" (1835). In 1842 Wordsworth was given a civil list pension, and the following year, having long since put aside radical sympathies, he was named poet laureate. Assessment Wordsworth's personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity. Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things and people as in "Margaret," "Peter Bell," "Michael," and "The Idiot Boy." His use of the language of ordinary speech was heavily criticized, but it helped to rid English poetry 126

of the more artificial conventions of 18th-century diction. Among his other well-known poems are "Lucy" ("She dwelt among the untrodden ways"), "The Solitary Reaper," "Resolution and Independence," "Daffodils," "The Rainbow," and the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us." Although Wordsworth was venerated in the 19th cent., by the early 20th cent. his reputation had declined. He was criticized for the unevenness of his poetry, for his rather marked capacity for bathos, and for his transformation from an open- minded liberal to a cramped conservative. In recent years, however, Wordsworth has again been recognized as a great English poet — a profound, original thinker who created a new poetic tradition.

Some poems of William Wordsworth

Rural Architecture And what did these School-boys?— The very next day There's George Fisher, Charles They went and they built up another. Fleming, and Reginald Shore, -211- Three rosy-cheek'd School- Some little I've seen of blind boisterous boys, the highest not more works Than the height of a Counsellor's bag; In Paris and London, 'mong Christians To the top of Great How did it please or Turks, 20 them to climb, Spirits busy to do and undo: And there they built up without mortar At remembrance whereof my blood or lime sometimes willflag. A Man on the peak of the crag. —Then, light-hearted Boys, to the top of the Crag! They built him of stones gather'd up as And I'll build up a Giant with you. they lay, They built him and christen'd him all in A Poet's Epitaph one day, An Urchin both vigorous and hale; Art thou a Statesman, in the van And so without scruple they call'd him Of public business train'd and bred, Ralph Jones. 10 —First learn to love one living man; Now Ralph is renown'd for the length Then may'st thou think upon the dead. of his bones; The Magog of Legberthwaite dale. A Lawyer art thou?—draw not nigh; Go, carry to some other place Just half a week after the Wind sallied The hardness of thy coward eye, forth, The falsehood of thy sallow face. And, in anger or merriment, out of the North Art thou a man of purple cheer? Coming on with a terrible pother, A rosy man, right plump to see? 10 From the peak of the crag blew the Approach; yet Doctor, not too near: Giant away. This grave no cushion is for thee.

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Some random truths he can impart 50 Art thou a man of gallant pride, The harvest of a quiet eye A Soldier, and no man of chaff? That broods and sleeps on his own Welcome!—but lay thy sword aside, heart. And lean upon a Peasant's staff. -213- But he is weak, both man and boy, Physician art thou? One, all eyes, Hath been an idler in the land; Philosopher! a fingering slave, Contented if he might enjoy One that would peep and botanize The things which others understand. Upon his mother's grave? 20 —Come hither in thy hour of strength, Wrapp'd closely in thy sensual fleece Come, weak as is a breaking wave! O turn aside, and take, I pray, Here stretch thy body at full length; That he below may rest in peace, Or build thy house upon this grave.— Thy pin-point of a soul away! 60 -212- —A Moralist perchance appears; A Character, Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod: in the antithetical Manner And He has neither eyes nor ears; Himself his world, and his own God; I marvel how Nature could ever find space One to whose smooth-rubb'd soul can For the weight and the levity seen in cling his face: Nor form nor feeling great nor small, 30 There's thought and no thought, and A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, there's paleness and bloom, An intellectual All in All! And bustle and sluggishness, pleasure and gloom. Shut close the door! press down the latch: There's weakness, and strength both Sleep in thy intellectual crust, redundant and vain; Nor lose ten tickings of thy watch, Such strength, as if ever affliction and Near this unprofitable dust. pain Could pierce through a temper that's But who is He with modest looks, soft to disease, And clad in homely russet brown? Would be rational peace—a He murmurs near the running brooks philosopher's ease. A music sweeter than their own. 40 There's indifference, alike when he He is retired as noontide dew, fails and succeeds, Or fountain in a noonday grove; And attention full ten times as much as And you must love him, ere to you there needs, 10 He will seem worthy of your love. Pride where there's no envy, there's so much of joy; The outward shews of sky and earth, And mildness, and spirit both forward Of hill and valley he has view'd; and coy. And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude. There's freedom, and sometimes a diffident stare In common things that round us lie 128

Of shame scarcely seeming to know -215- that she's there. In colour like a raven's wing; There's virtue, the title it surely may It fears nor rain, nor wind, nor dew, claim, But in the storm 'tis fresh and blue 30 Yet wants, heaven knows what, to be As budding pines in Spring; worthy the name. His helmet has a vernal grace, -214- Fresh as the bloom upon his face. What a picture! 'tis drawn without nature or art, A harp is from his shoulder slung; —Yet the Man would at once run away He rests the harp upon his knee, with your heart, And there in a forgotten tongue And I for five centuries right gladly He warbles melody. would be Of flocks and herds both far and near Such an odd, such a kind happy He is the darling and the joy, creature as he. 20 And often, when no cause appears, 40 The mountain ponies prick their ears, A Fragment They hear the Danish Boy, While in the dell he sits alone Between two sister moorland rills Beside the tree and corner-stone. There is a spot that seems to lie Sacred to flowrets of the hills, When near this blasted tree you pass, And sacred to the sky. Two sods are plainly to be seen And in this smooth and open dell Close at its root, and each with grass There is a tempest-stricken tree; Is cover'd fresh and green. A corner-stone by lightning cut. Like turf upon a new-made grave The last stone of a cottage hut; These two green sods together lie, 50 And in this dell you see Nor heat, nor cold, nor rain, nor wind A thing no storm can e'er destroy, 10 Can these two sods together bind, The shadow of a Danish Boy. Nor sun, nor earth, nor sky, But side by side the two are laid, In clouds above, the lark is heard, As if just sever'd by the spade. He sings his blithest and his best; But in this lonesome nook the bird There sits he: in his face you spy Did never build his nest. No trace of a ferocious air, No beast, no bird hath here his home; Nor ever was a cloudless sky The bees borne on the breezy air So steady or so fair. Pass high above those fragrant bells -216- To other flowers, to other dells, The lovely Danish Boy is blest 60 Nor ever linger there. 20 And happy in his flowery cove; The Danish Boy walks here alone: From bloody deeds his thoughts are The lovely dell is all his own. far; And yet he warbles songs of war; A spirit of noon day is he, They seem like songs of love, He seems a Form of flesh and blood; For calm and gentle is his mien; A piping Shepherd he might be, Like a dead Boy he is serene. A Herd-boy of the wood. -217- A regal vest of fur he wears,

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Wordsworth is one of the greatest poets in English language. You can find more about him and read his poems in the following sites: 1. http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/ 2. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/296 3. http://www.bartleby.com/145/ You can also listen to some of his poems in www.youtube.com, as for example, “I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud', available in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ6r5I6BGQA

8.2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor Columbia Encyclopedia Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834, English poet and man of letters, b. Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire; one of the most brilliant, versatile, and influential figures in the English romantic movement. Early Life The son of a clergyman, Coleridge was a precocious, dreamy child. He attended Christ's Hospital school in London and was already formidably erudite upon entering Cambridge in 1791. His erratic university career was interrupted by his impulsive enlistment in the dragoons, from which his brothers managed to extricate him. In 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey, who shared his political and social idealism, and together they planned to establish a small utopian community, which they called a pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States. The plan failed to materialize for practical reasons. In 1795 Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée, with whom he was Figure 18. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, painting by Pieter van Dyke never happy. They settled in Nether Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SamuelTaylor Stowey in 1797, and shortly thereafter Coleridge.jpg William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved into a house nearby. 130

Works Although Coleridge had been busy and productive, publishing both poetry and much topical prose, it was not until his friendship with Wordsworth that he wrote his best poems. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth jointly published the volume Lyrical Ballads, whose poems and preface made it a seminal work and manifesto of the romantic movement in English literature. Coleridge's main contribution to the volume was the haunting, dreamlike ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This long poem, as well as "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel," written during the same period, are Coleridge's best-known works. All three make use of exotic images and supernatural themes. "Dejection: An Ode," published in 1802, was the last of Coleridge's great poems. It shows the influence of (or affinity to) some poetic ideas of Wordsworth, notably the meditation upon self, nature, and the relationships among emotion, sense experience, and understanding. His Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (ed. by his nephew H. N. Coleridge) was published posthumously in 1840. Later Life While an undergraduate Coleridge had begun to take laudanum (an opium derivative then legal and widely used) for his ailments, and he was addicted by about 1800. That year, after having traveled with Wordsworth in Germany, Coleridge moved with his family to Keswick in the Lake District. He continued his studies and writings on philosophy, religion, contemporary affairs, and literature. In 1808 he separated from his wife permanently, and from 1816 until his death he lived in London at the home of Dr. James Gilman, who brought his opium habit under control. Assessment Coleridge worked for many years on his Biographia Literaria (1817), containing accounts of his literary life and critical essays on philosophical and literary subjects. It presents Coleridge's theories of the creative imagination, but its debt to other writers, notably the German idealist philosophers, is often so heavy that the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism becomes blurred. This borrowing tendency, evident also in some of his poetry, together with Coleridge's notorious inability to finish projects — and his proposal of impractical ones — made him a problematic figure. Coleridge's lifelong friend Charles Lamb called him a "damaged archangel." Indeed, 20th-century editorial scholarship has unearthed additional evidence of 131

plagiarism; thus, Coleridge is still a controversial figure. However, the originality and beauty of his best poetry and his enormous influence on the intellectual and aesthetic life of his time is unquestioned. He was reputedly a brilliant conversationalist, and his lectures on Shakespeare remain among the most important statements in literary criticism.

You can listen to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGH4p4z4s5A; Read other Coleridge’s works in http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere Quoth he, there was a Ship— “Now get thee hence, thou grey-beard IN SEVEN PARTS Loon! “Or my Staff shall make thee skip. I It is an ancyent Marinere, He holds him with his glittering eye— And he stoppeth one of three: The wedding guest stood still “By thy long grey beard and thy And listens like a three year's child; glittering eye The Marinere hath his will. 20 “Now wherefore stoppest me? The wedding-guest sate on a stone, “The Bridegroom's doors are open'd He cannot chuse but hear: wide And thus spake on that ancyent man, “And I am next of kin; The bright-eyed Marinere. “The Guests are met, the Feast is set, — The Ship was cheer'd, the Harbour “May'st hear the merry din.— clear'd— Merrily did we drop Argument: How a Ship, having first Below the Kirk, below the Hill, sailed to theEquator, was driven by Below the Light-house top. Storms, to the cold Countrytowards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner The Sun came up upon the left, cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of Out of the Sea came he: 30 hospitality, killeda Sea-bird; and how And he shone bright, and on the right he was followed by many andstrange Went down into the Sea. Judgements; and in what manner he came back to his own Country. [1800]. Higher and higher every day, -9- Till over the mast at noon— But still he holds the wedding-guest— The wedding-guest here beat his There was a Ship, quoth he— 10 breast, “Nay, if thou'st got a laughsome tale, For he heard the loud bassoon. “Marinere! come with me.” -10- The Bride hath pac'd into the Hall, He holds him with his skinny hand, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes 132

The merry Minstralsy. 40 “God save thee, ancyent Marinere! The wedding-guest he beat his breast, “From the fiends that plague thee thus Yet he cannot chuse but hear: — And thus spake on that ancyent Man, -12- The bright-eyed Marinere. “Why look'st thou so?”—with my cross bow Listen, Stranger! Storm and Wind, I shot the Albatross. 80 A Wind and Tempest strong! For days and weeks it play'd us freaks II — The Sun came up upon the right, Like Chaff we drove along. Out of the Sea came he; And broad as a weft upon the left Listen, Stranger! Mist and Snow, Went down into the Sea. And it grew wond'rous cauld: 50 And Ice mast-high came floating by And the good south wind still blew As green as Emerauld. behind, -11- But no sweet Bird did follow And thro' the drifts the snowy clifts Ne any day for food or play Did send a dismal sheen; Came to the Marinere's hollo! Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken— The Ice was all between. And I had done an hellish thing And it would work 'em woe: 90 The Ice was here, the Ice was there, For all averr'd, I had kill'd the Bird The Ice was all around: That made the Breeze to blow. It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd— Ne dim ne red, like God's own head, Like noises of a swound. 60 The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averr'd, I had kill'd the Bird At length did cross an Albatross, That brought the fog and mist. Thorough the Fog it came; 'Twas right, said they, such birds to And an it were a Christian Soul, slay We hail'd it in God's name. That bring the fog and mist.

The Marineres gave it biscuit-worms, The breezes blew, the white foam flew, And round and round it flew: The furrow follow'd free: 100 The Ice did split with a Thunder-fit; -13- The Helmsman steer'd us thro'. We were the first that ever burst Into that silent Sea. And a good south wind sprung up behind, Down dropt the breeze, the Sails dropt The Albatross did follow; 70 down, And every day for food or play 'Twas sad as sad could be Came to the Marinere's hollo! And we did speak only to break The silence of the Sea. In mist or cloud on mast or shroud It perch'd for vespers nine, All in a hot and copper sky Whiles all the night thro' fog-smoke The bloody sun at noon, white Right up above the mast did stand, Glimmer'd the white moon-shine. No bigger than the moon. 110 133

With throat unslack'd, with black lips Day after day, day after day, bak'd We stuck, ne breath ne motion, Ne could we laugh, ne wail: 150 As idle as a painted Ship Then while thro' drouth all dumb they Upon a painted Ocean. stood I bit my arm and suck'd the blood Water, water, every where And cry'd, A sail! a sail! And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where With throat unslack'd, with black lips Ne any drop to drink. bak'd Agape they hear'd me call: The very deeps did rot: O Christ! Gramercy! they for joy did grin That ever this should be I 120 And all at once their breath drew in Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs As they were drinking all. Upon the slimy Sea. She doth not tack from side to side— About, about, in reel and rout Hither to work us weal 160 The Death-fires danc'd at night; Withouten wind, withouten tide The water, like a witch's oils, She steadies with upright keel. Burnt green and blue and white. The western wave was all a flame, And some in dreams assured were The day was well nigh done! Of the Spirit that plagued us so: Almost upon the western wave -14- Rested the broad bright Sun; Nine fathom deep he had followed us When that strange shape drove From the Land of Mist and Snow. 130 suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And every tongue thro' utter drouth Was withered at the root; And strait the Sun was fleck'd with bars We could not speak no more than if (Heaven's mother send us grace) 170 We had been choked with soot. As if thro' a dungeon grate he peer'd Ah wel-a-day! what evil looks With broad and burning face. Had I from old and young; Instead of the Cross the Albatross Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat About my neck was hung. loud) How fast she neres and neres! III -16- I saw a something in the Sky Are those her Sails that glance in the No bigger than my fist; 140 Sun At first it seem'd a little speck Like restless gossameres? And then it seem'd a mist: It mov'd and mov'd, and took at last Are these her naked ribs, which fleck'd A certain shape, I wist. The sun that did behind them peer? And are these two all, all the crew, A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! That woman and her fleshless Pheere? And still it ner'd and ner'd; 180 And, an it dodg'd a water-sprite, It plung'd and tack'd and veer'd. His bones were black with many a -15- crack, All black and bare, I ween; 134

Jet-black and bare, save where with rust “I fear thee and thy glittering eye 220 Of mouldy damps and charnel crust “And thy skinny hand so brown— They're patch'd with purple and green. Fear not, fear not, thou wedding guest! This body dropt not down. Her lips are red, her looks are free, Her locks are yellow as gold: Alone, alone, all all alone Her skin is as white as leprosy, Alone on the wide wide Sea; And she is far liker Death than he; And Christ would take no pity on Her flesh makes the still air cold. 190 My soul in agony. -17- The naked Hulk alongside came The many men so beautiful, And the Twain were playing dice; And they all dead did lie! “The Game is done! I've won, I've And a million million slimy things 230 won!” Liv'd on—and so did I. Quoth she, and whistled thrice. -19- I look'd upon the rotting Sea, A gust of wind sterte up behind And drew my eyes away; And whistled thro' his bones; I look'd upon the eldritch deck, Thro' the holes of his eyes and the And there the dead men lay. hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans. I look'd to Heaven, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, With never a whisper in the Sea A wicked whisper came and made Off darts the Spectre-ship; 200 My heart as dry as dust. While clombe above the Eastern bar I clos'd my lids and kept them close, The horned Moon, with one bright Star 240 Almost atween the tips. Till the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea One after one by the horned Moon and the sky (Listen, O Stranger! to me) Lay like a load on my weary eye, Each turn'd his face with a ghastly And the dead were at my feet. pang And curs'd me with his ee. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, -18- Ne rot, ne reek did they; Four times fifty living men, The look with which they look'd on me, With never a sigh or groan, Had never pass'd away. With heavy thump, a lifeless lump 210 They dropp'd down one by one. An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high: 250 Their souls did from their bodies fly, — But O! more horrible than that They fled to bliss or woe; Is the curse in a dead man's eye! And every soul it pass'd me by, Seven days, seven nights I saw that Like the whiz of my Cross-bow. curse, And yet I could not die. IV “I fear thee, ancyent Marinere! The moving Moon went up the sky “I fear thy skinny hand; And no where did abide: “And thou art long and lank and brown Softly she was going up “As is the ribb'd Sea-sand. And a star or two beside— 135

-20- I was so light, almost Her beams bemock'd the sultry main I thought that I had died in sleep, Like morning frosts yspread; 260 And was a blessed Ghost. 300 But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway The roaring wind! it roar'd far off, A still and awful red. It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails Beyond the shadow of the ship That were so thin and sere. I watch'd the water-snakes: They mov'd in tracks of shining white; The upper air bursts into life, And when they rear'd, the elfish light And a hundred fire-flags sheen Fell off in hoary flakes. To and fro they are hurried about; And to and fro, and in and out Within the shadow of the ship The stars dance on between. I watch'd their rich attire: 270 Blue, glossy green, and velvet black The coming wind doth roar more loud; They coil'd and swam; and every track 310 Was a flash of golden fire. The sails do sigh, like sedge: The rain pours down from one black O happy living things! no tongue cloud Their beauty might declare: And the Moon is at its edge. A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware! Hark! hark! the thick black cloud is Sure my kind saint took pity on me, cleft, And I bless'd them unaware. And the Moon is at its side: -22- The self-same moment I could pray; Like waters shot from some high crag, 280 The lightning falls with never a jag And from my neck so free A river steep and wide. The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. The strong wind reach'd the ship: it roar'd V And dropp'd down, like a stone! 320 O sleep, it is a gentle thing Beneath the lightning and the moon Belov'd from pole to pole! The dead men gave a groan. To Mary-queen the praise be yeven She sent the gentle sleep from heaven They groan'd, they stirr'd, they all That slid into my soul. uprose, -21- Ne spake, ne mov'd their eyes: The silly buckets on the deck It had been strange, even in a dream That had so long remain'd, 290 To have seen those dead men rise. I dreamt that they were fill'd with dew And when I awoke it rain'd. The helmsman steerd, the ship mov'd on; My lips were wet, my throat was cold, Yet never a breeze up-blew; My garments all were dank; The Marineres all 'gan work the ropes, Sure I had drunken in my dreams Where they were wont to do: 330 And still my body drank. They rais'd their limbs like lifeless tools — I mov'd and could not feel my limbs, We were a ghastly crew. 136

Sadder and wiser thou wedding-guest! The body of my brother's son Thou'lt rise to morrow morn. Stood by me knee to knee: -24- The body and I pull'd at one rope, Never sadder tale was heard 370 But he said nought to me— By a man of woman born: And I quak'd to think of my own voice The Marineres all return'd to work How frightful it would be! As silent as beforne.

The day-light dawn'd — they dropp'd The Marineres all 'gan pull the ropes, their arms, But look at me they n'old: And clustered round the mast: 340 Thought I, I am as thin as air— -23- They cannot me behold. Sweet sounds rose slowly thro' their mouths Till noon we silently sail'd on And from their bodies pass'd. Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship 380 Around, around, flew each sweet Mov'd onward from beneath. sound, Then darted to the sun: Under the keel nine fathom deep Slowly the sounds came back again From the land of mist and snow Now mix'd, now one by one. The spirit slid: and it was He That made the Ship to go. Sometimes a dropping from the sky The sails at noon left off their tune I heard the Lavrock sing; And the Ship stood still also. Sometimes all little birds that are How they seem'd to fill the sea and air The sun right up above the mast 350 Had fix'd her to the ocean: With their sweet jargoning, But in a minute she 'gan stir 390 With a short uneasy motion— And now 'twas like all instruments, Backwards and forwards half her Now like a lonely flute; length And now it is an angel's song With a short uneasy motion. That makes the heavens be mute. Then, like a pawing horse let go, It ceas'd: yet still the sails made on She made a sudden bound: A pleasant noise till noon, It flung the blood into my head, A noise like of a hidden brook And I fell into a swound. In the leafy month of June, -25- That to the sleeping woods all night How long in that same fit I lay, 360 I have not to declare; Singeth a quiet tune. But ere my living life return'd, 400 I heard and in my soul discern'd Listen, O listen, thou Wedding-guest! Two voices in the air, “Marinere! thou hast thy will: “For that, which comes out of thine eye “Is it he? quoth one, “Is this the man? , doth make “By him who died on cross, “My body and soul to be still.” “With his cruel bow he lay'd full low “The harmless Albatross. Never sadder tale was told To a man of woman born: “The spirit who 'bideth by himself 137

“In the land of mist and snow, That in the moon did glitter. “He lov'd the bird that lov'd the man “Who shot him with his bow. 410 The pang, the curse, with which they died, The other was a softer voice, Had never pass'd away: As soft as honey-dew: I could not draw my een from theirs Quoth he the man hath penance done, Ne turn them up to pray. And penance more will do. And in its time the spell was snapt, VI FIRST VOICE And I could move my een: “But tell me, tell me! speak again, I look'd far-forth, but little saw “Thy soft response renewing— Of what might else be seen. 450 “What makes that ship drive on so -27- fast? Like one, that on a lonely road “What is the Ocean doing? Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks SECOND VOICE on “Still as a Slave before his Lord, And turns no more his head: “The Ocean hath no blast: 420 Because he knows, a frightful fiend “His great bright eye most silently Doth close behind him tread. “Up to the moon is cast— But soon there breath'd a wind on me, “If he may know which way to go, Ne sound ne motion made: “For she guides him smooth or grim, Its path was not upon the sea “See, brother, see! how graciously In ripple or in shade. 460 “She looketh down on him. -26- It rais'd my hair, it fann'd my cheek, FIRST VOICE Like a meadow-gale of spring— “But why drives on that ship so fast It mingled strangely with my fears, “Withouten wave or wind? Yet it felt like a welcoming.

SECOND VOICE Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, “The air is cut away before, Yet she sail'd softly too: “And closes from behind. 430 Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze— On me alone it blew. “Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high, “Or we shall be belated: O dream of joy! is this indeed “For slow and slow that ship will go, The light-house top I see? 470 “When the Marinere's trance is Is this the Hill? Is this the Kirk? abated.” Is this mine own countrée?

I woke, and we were sailing on We drifted o'er the Harbour-bar, As in a gentle weather: And I with sobs did pray— 'Twas night, calm night, the moon was “O let me be awake, my God! high: “Or let me sleep alway!” The dead men stood together. The harbour-bay was clear as glass, All stood together on the deck, So smoothly it was strewn! For a charnel-dungeon fitter: 440 And on the bay the moon light lay, All fix'd on me their stony eyes And the shadow of the moon. 480 138

-28- They stood as signals to the land, The moonlight bay was white all o'er, Each one a lovely light: Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, This seraph-band, each wav'd his Like as of torches came. hand, No voice did they impart— A little distance from the prow No voice; but O! the silence sank, Those dark-red shadows were; Like music on my heart. But soon I saw that my own flesh Was red as in a glare. Eftsones I heard the dash of oars, I heard the pilot's cheer: I turn'd my head in fear and dread, My head was turn'd perforce away And by the holy rood, 490 And I saw a boat appear. 530 The bodies had advanced, and now Before the mast they stood. Then vanish'd all the lovely lights; The bodies rose anew: They lifted up their stiff right arms, With silent pace, each to his place, They held them strait and tight; Came back the ghastly crew. And each right-arm burnt like a torch, The wind, that shade nor motion made, A torch that's borne upright. On me alone it blew. Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on -30- In the red and smoky light. The pilot, and the pilot's boy I heard them coming fast: I pray'd and turn'd my head away Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy, Forth looking as before. 500 The dead men could not blast. 540 There was no breeze upon the bay, No wave against the shore. I saw a third—I heard his voice: The rock shone bright, the kirk no less It is the Hermit good! That stands above the rock: He singeth loud his godly hymns The moonlight steep'd in silentness That he makes in the wood. The steady weathercock. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same VII Full many shapes, that shadows were, This Hermit good lives in that wood In crimson colours came. 510 Which slopes down to the Sea. -29- How loudly his sweet voice he rears! A little distance from the prow He loves to talk with Marineres 550 Those crimson shadows were: That come from a far Contrée. I turn'd my eyes upon the deck— O Christ! what saw I there? He kneels at morn and noon and eve— He hath a cushion plump: Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat; It is the moss, that wholly hides And by the Holy rood The rotted old Oak-stump. A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood. The Skiff-boat ne'rd: I heard them talk, “Why, this is strange, I trow! This seraph-band, each wav'd his “Where are those lights so many and hand: fair It was a heavenly sight: 520 “That signal made but now? 139

And pray'd where he did sit. “Strange, by my faith! the Hermit said -32- — 560 I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, “And they answer'd not our cheer. Who now doth crazy go, “The planks look warp'd, and see those Laugh'd loud and long, and all the sails while “How thin they are and sere! His eyes went to and fro, 600 “I never saw aught like to them “Ha! ha!” quoth he—“full plain I see, “Unless perchance it were “The devil knows how to row.” -31- “The skeletons of leaves that lag And now all in mine own Countrée “My forest brook along: I stood on the firm land! “When the Ivy-tod is heavy with snow, The Hermit stepp'd forth from the boat, “And the Owlet whoops to the wolf And scarcely he could stand. below “That eats the she-wolf's young. 570 “O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy Man! The Hermit cross'd his brow— “Dear Lord! it has a fiendish look— “Say quick, ” quoth he, “I bid thee say (The Pilot made reply) “What manner man art thou? 610 “I am a-fear'd.—“Push on, push on! “Said the Hermit cheerily. Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench'd The Boat came closer to the Ship, With a woeful agony, But I ne spake ne stirr'd! Which forc'd me to begin my tale The Boat came close beneath the And then it left me free. Ship, And strait a sound was heard! Since then at an uncertain hour Now oftimes and now fewer, Under the water it rumbled on, That anguish comes and makes me tell Still louder and more dread: 580 My ghastly aventure. It reach'd the Ship, it split the bay; The Ship went down like lead. I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; 620 Stunn'd by that loud and dreadful The moment that his face I see sound, I know the man that must hear me; Which sky and ocean smote: To him my tale I teach. Like one that hath been seven days -33- drown'd What loud uproar bursts from that My body lay afloat: door! But, swift as dreams, myself I found The Wedding-guests are there; Within the Pilot's boat. But in the Garden-bower the Bride And Bride-maids singing are: Upon the whirl, where sank the Ship, And hark the little Vesper-bell The boat spun round and round: 590 Which biddeth me to prayer. And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound. O Wedding-guest! This soul hath been 630 I mov'd my lips: the Pilot shriek'd Alone on a wide wide sea And fell down in a fit. So lonely 'twas, that God himself The Holy Hermit rais'd his eyes Scarce seemed there to be. 140

O sweeter than the Marriage-feast, He prayeth best who loveth best, 'Tis sweeter far to me All things both great and small: To walk together to the Kirk For the dear God, who loveth us, With a goodly company. He made and loveth all. 650

To walk together to the Kirk The Marinere, whose eye is bright, And all together pray, Whose beard with age is hoar, While each to his great father bends, Is gone; and now the wedding-guest 640 Turn'd from the bridegroom's door. Old men, and babes, and loving -34- friends, He went, like one that hath been And Youths, and Maidens gay. stunn'd And is of sense forlorn: Farewel, farewell! but this I tell A sadder and a wiser man To thee, thou wedding-guest! He rose the morrow morn. He prayeth well who loveth well -35- Both man and bird and beast.

8.3. Lord Byron

BYRON, George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Columbia Encyclopedia George Gordon Noel Byron Byron, 6th Baron (bi´r_n), 1788–1824, English poet and satirist. Early Life and Works He was the son of Capt. John ("Mad Jack") Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon of Gight. His father died in 1791, and Byron, born with a clubfoot, was subjected alternately to the excessive tenderness and violent temper of his mother. In 1798, after years of poverty, Byron succeeded to the title and took up residence at the family seat, Newstead Abbey. He subsequently attended Dulwich school and Harrow (1801–5) and then matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Although the academic atmosphere did nothing to lessen Byron's sensitivity about his lameness, he made several close friends while at school. His first volume, Fugitive Pieces (1806), was suppressed; revised and expanded, it appeared in 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions. This was followed by Hours of Idleness (1807), which provoked such severe criticism from the Edinburgh Review that Byron replied with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a satire in heroic couplets reminiscent of Pope, which brought him immediate fame. 141

Byron left England the same year for a grand tour through Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Balkans. He returned in 1811 with Cantos I and II of Childe Harold (1812), a melancholy, philosophic poem in Spenserian stanzas, which made him the social lion of London. It was followed by the verse tales The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), The Siege of Corinth (1816), and Parisina (1816). Byron's name at this time was linked with those of several women, notably Viscount Melbourne's wife, Lady Caroline Lamb. In Jan., 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, a serious, rather cold, young woman with whom he had little in common. She gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, the following December. In 1816 she secured a separation. Although her reasons for such an action remain obscure, evidence indicates that she discovered the existence of an incestuous relationship between Byron and his half-sister, Mrs.

Augusta Leigh. Although his many Figure 19. Portrait of Lord Byron attachments to women are notorious, Byron by Thomas Phillips Source: was actually ambivalent toward women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Byron_18 24.jpg There is considerable evidence that he also had several homosexual relationships. Later Life and Works In Apr., 1816, by then a social outcast, Byron left England, never to return. He passed some time with Shelley in Switzerland, writing Canto III of Childe Harold (1816) and The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). With the party was Shelley's sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, who had practically forced Byron into a liaison before he left England, and who, in Jan., 1817, bore him a daughter, Allegra. Settling in Venice (1817), Byron led for a time a life of dissipation, but produced Canto IV of Childe Harold (1818), Beppo (1818), and Mazeppa (1819) and began Don Juan. In 1819 he formed a liaison with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who remained his acknowledged mistress for the rest of his life. Byron was induced to 142

interest himself in the cause of Greek independence from the Turks and sailed for Missolonghi, where he arrived in 1824. He worked unsparingly with Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos to unify the divergent Greek forces, but caught a fever and died the same year. Assessment Ranked with Shelley and Keats as one of the great Romantic poets, Byron became famous throughout Europe as the embodiment of romanticism. His good looks, his lameness, and his flamboyant lifestyle all contributed to the formation of the Byronic legend. By the mid-20th cent. his reputation as a poet had been eclipsed by growing critical recognition of his talents as a wit and satirist. Byron's poetry covers a wide range. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and in The Vision of Judgment (1822) he wrote 18th-century satire. He also created the "Byronic hero," who appears consummately in the Faustian tragedy Manfred (1817)—a mysterious, lonely, defiant figure whose past hides some great crime. Cain (1821) raised a storm of abuse for its skeptical attitude toward religion. The verse tale Beppo is in the ottava rima (eight-line stanzas in iambic pentameter) that Byron later used for his acknowledged masterpiece Don Juan (1819–24), an epic-satire combining Byron's art as a storyteller, his lyricism, his cynicism, and his detestation of convention.

Some poems of Lord Byron

TO EMMA When thinking on these ancient towers, SINCE now the hour is come at last, The shelter of our infant years; When you must quit your anxious Where from this Gothic casement's lover; height, Since now our dream of bliss is past, We view'd the lake, the park, the dell, One pang, my girl, and all is over. And still, though tears obstruct our sight, Alas! that pang will be severe, We lingering look a last farewell, Which bids us part to meet no more; O'er fields through which we used to Which tears me far from one so dear, run, Departing for a distant shore. And spend the hours in childish play; Well! we have pass'd some happy O'er shades where, when our race was hours, done,

And joy will mingle with our tears; 10 Reposing on my breast you lay; 20

Whilst I, admiring, too remiss, 143

Forgot to scare the hovering flies, United by the priest's decree: yet envied every fly the kiss By any ties but those divine, It dared to give your slumbering eyes: Mine, my beloved, thou ne'er shalt be See still the little painted bark, 20 In which I row'd you o'er the lake; See there, high waving o'et the park, Then let the secret fire consume, The elm I clamber'd for your sake. Let it consume, thou shalt not know: With joy I court a certain doom, These times are past — our joys are Rather than spread its guilty glow. gone, I will not ease my tortured heart, By driving dove-eyed peace from thine; You leave me, leave this happy vale; 30 Rather than such a sting impart, Each thought presumptuous I resign. These scenes I must retrace alone: Without thee what will they avail? Yes! yield those lips, for which I'd Who can conceive, who has not brave proved, The anguish of a last embrace? More than I here shall dare to tell; 30 When, torn from all you fondly loved, You bid a long adieu to peace. Thy innocence and mine to save, --- I bid thee now a last farewell. This is the deepest of our woes, For this these tears our cheeks be Yes! yield that breast, to seek despair, dew; And hope no more thy soft embrace; This is of love the final close, Which to obtain my soul would dare, All, all reproach -- but thy disgrace. Oh, God! the fondest, last adieu! 40 -89- At least from guilt shalt thou be free, TO M. S. G. No matron shall thy shame reprove; Though cureless pangs may prey on WHENE'ER I view those lips of thine, me, Their hue invites my fervent kiss; Yet I forego that bliss divine, No martyr shalt thou be to love. 40 Alas, it were unhallowd bliss! Whene'er I dream of that pure breast, TO CAROLINE How could I dwell upon its snows! Yet is the daring wish repress'd, THINK'ST thou I saw thy beauteous For that -- would banish its repose. eyes, Suffused in tears, implore to stay; A glance from thy soul-searching eye And heard unmoved thy plenteous Can raise with hope, depress with fear; sighs, 10 Which said far more than words can Yet I conceal my love—and why? say? I Would not force a painful tear. Though keen the grief thy tears I ne'er have told my love, yet thou exprest, Hast seen my ardent flame too well; When love and hope lay both And shall I plead my passion now, o'erthrown; To make thy bosom's heaven a hell? Yet still, my girl, this bleeding breast No! for thou never canst be mine, 144

Throbb'd with deep sorrow as thine Our passions still are not the same; own. Alas! you can not love like me.

But when our cheeks with anguish For e'en your lip seems steep'd in glow'd, snow, When thy sweet lips were join'd to And though so oft it meets my kiss, mine, It burns with no responsive glow, The tears that from my eyelids flow'd Nor melts like mine in dewy bliss. 20 Were lost in those which fell from thine. -90- Ah! what are words to love like mine, Thou couldst not feel my burning Though utter'd by a voice like thine, cheek, I still in murmurs must repine, Thy gushing tears bad quench'd its And think that love can ne'er be true, flame; Which meets me with no joyous sign, And as thy tongue essay'd to speak, Without a sigh which bids adieu; — In sighs alone it breathed my name. How different is my love from thine, How keen my grief when leaving you. And yet, my girl, we weep in vain, In vain our fate in sighs deplore; Your image fills my anxious breast, Remembrance only can remain, — Till day declines adown the West; 30 But that will make us weep themore. And when at night I sink to rest, In dreams your fancied form I view. Again, thou best beloved, adieu! Ah! if thou canst, o'ercome regret; 'T is then your breast, no longer cold, With equal ardour seems to burn, Nor let thy mind past joys review, — While close your arms around me fold, Our only hope is to forget! Your lips my kiss with warmth return.

1805. Ah! would these joyous moments last; TO CAROLINE Vain HOPF! the gay delusion's past, That voice! — ah, no, 't is but the blast You say you love, and yet your eye Which echoes through the No symptom of that love conveys; neighbouring grove. 40 You say you love, yet know not why, Your cheek no sign of love betrays. But when awake, your lips I seek, And clasp enraptured all your charms, Ah! did that breast with ardour glow, So chill's the pressure of your cheek, With me alone it joy could know, I fold a statue in my arms. Or feel with me the listless woe, Which racks my heart when far from If thus, when to my heart embraced, thee. No pleasure in your eyes is traced, You may be prudent, fair, and chaste, Whene'er we meet my blushes rise, But ah! my girl, you do not love. And mantle through my purpled cheek; But yet no blush to mine replies, TO CAROLINE Nor e'en your eyes your love bespeak. WHEN I hear you express an affection Your voice alone declares your flame, so warm, And though so sweet it breathes my Ne'er think, my beloved, that I do not name, believe; 145

For your lip would the soul of suspicion Which from passion like ours may disarm, unceasingly flow; And your eye beams a ray which can Let us pass round the cup of love's never deceive. bliss in full measure, Yet, still, this fond bosom regrets, while And quaff the contents as our nectar adoring, below. That love, like the leaf, must fall into 1805. the sear; That age will come on, when TO CAROLINE remembrance, deploring, Contemplates the scenes of her youth OH when shall the grave hide for ever with a tear; my sorrow? That the time must arrive, when, no Oh when shall my soul wing her flight longer retaining from this clay? Their auburn, those locks must wave The present is hell, and the coming thin to the breeze, tomorrow When a few silver hairs of those But brings, with new torture, the curse tresses remaining of to-day. Prove nature a prey to decay and -91- disease. From my eye flows no tear, from my lips flow no curses, 'T is this, my beloved, which spreads I blast not the fiends who have hurl'd gloom o'er my features, me from bliss; Though I ne'er shall presume to For poor is the soul which bewailing arraign the decree, rehearses Which God has proclaim'd as the fate Its querulous grief, when in anguish of his creatures, like this. In the death which one day will deprive Was my eye, 'stead of tears, with red you of me. fury flakes bright'ning, Would my lips breathe a flame which Mistake not, sweet sceptic, the cause no stream could assuage, of emotion, On our foes should my glance launch No doubt can the mind of your lover in vengeance its lightning, invade; With transport my tongue give a loose He worships each look with such to its rage. faithful devotion, A smile can enchant, or a tear can But now tears and curses, alike dissuade. unavailIng, Would add to the souls of our tyrants But as death, my beloved, soon or late delight; shall o'ertake us, Could they view us our sad separation And our breasts, which alive with such be-wailing, sympathy glow, Their merciless hearts would rejoice at Will sleep in the grave till the blast shall the sight. awake us, When calling the dead, in earth's Yet still, though we bend with a feign'd bosom laid low, — resignation, Oh! then let us drain, while we may, Life beams not for us with one ray that draughts of pleasure, can cheer; 146

Love and hope upon earth bring no ever are fled? more consolation, If again in the mansion of death I In the grave is our hope, for in life is embrace thee, our fear. Perhaps they will leave unmolested the dead. Oh! when, my adored, in the tomb will 1805. they place me, -92- Since, in life, love and friendship for

Don Juan is Lord Byron’s most famous poem. You can read it in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm, and listen to Canto I of this poem and other poems in http://www.learnoutloud.com/Results/Author/Lord-Byron/1336#play23698

8.4. Percy Bysshe Shelley

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe Columbia Encyclopedia Percy Bysshe Shelley (bIsh), 1792–1822, English poet, b. Horsham, Sussex. He is ranked as one of the great English poets of the romantic period. A Tempestuous Life The son of a prosperous squire, he entered Oxford in 1810, where readings in philosophy led him toward a study of the empiricists and the modern skeptics, notably William Godwin. In 1811 he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published their pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in their immediate expulsion from the university. The same year Shelley eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, by whom he eventually had two children, Ianthe and Charles. Supported reluctantly by their fathers, the young couple traveled through Great Britain. Shelley's life continued to be dominated by his desire for social and political reform, and he was constantly publishing pamphlets. His first important poem, Queen Mab, privately printed in 1813, set forth a radical system of curing social ills by advocating the destruction of various established institutions. 147

In 1814 Shelley left England for France with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin. During their first year together they were plagued by social ostracism and financial difficulties. However, in 1815 Shelley's grandfather died and left him an annual income. Laon and Cynthna appeared in 1817 but was withdrawn and reissued the following year as The Revolt of Islam; it is a long poem in Spenserian stanzas that tells of a revolution and illustrates the growth of the human mind aspiring toward perfection.

After Harriet Shelley's suicide in 1816, Figure 20. Percy Bysshe Shelley Source: Shelley and Mary officially married. In 1817 http://thefabulousbirthdayblog.blogspot.com. Harriet's parents obtained a decree from br/2012/08/august-4happy-birthday-mr- percy-bysshe.html the Lord Chancellor stating that Shelley was unfit to have custody of his children. The following year Shelley and Mary left England and settled in Italy. By this time their household consisted of their own three children and Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont and her daughter Allegra (whose father was Lord Byron). On July 8, 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici. Poetry Shelley composed the great body of his poetry in Italy. The Cenci, a tragedy in verse exploring moral deformity, was published in 1819, followed by his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound (1820). In this lyrical drama Shelley poured forth all his passions and beliefs, which were modeled after the ideas of Plato. Epipsychidion (1821) is a poem addressed to Emilia Viviani, a young woman whom Shelley met in Pisa and with whom he developed a brief but close friendship. His great elegy, Adonais (1821), written in memory of Keats, asserts the immortality of beauty. Hellas (1822), a lyrical drama, was inspired by the Greek struggle for independence. His other poems include Alastor (1816) and the shorter poems "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," "Ozymandias," "The Indian Serenade," and "When the Lamp Is Shattered." 148

Assessment Most of Shelley's poetry reveals his philosophy, a combination of belief in the power of human love and reason, and faith in the perfectibility and ultimate progress of humanity. His verse is at once deeply political, sensuous, and passionate, and his lyric poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur, and mastery of language. Although Matthew Arnold labeled him an "ineffectual angel," later critics have taken Shelley seriously, recognizing his wit, his gifts as a satirist, and his influence as a social and political thinker.

Some poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

SONNET. Through public scorn, —mud from a muddy spring, Lift not the painted veil which those Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor who live know, Call Life: though unreal shapes be But leech-like to their fainting country pictured there, cling, 5 And it but mimic all we would believe Till they drop, blind in blood, without a With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk blow,— Fear A people starved and stabbed in the And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever untilled field,— weave 5 An army, which liberticide and prey Their shadows, o'er the chasm, Makes as a two-edged sword to all sightless and drear. who wield,— I knew one who had lifted it--he sought, Golden and sanguine laws which tempt For his lost heart was tender, things to and slay; 10 love Religion Christless, Godless — a book But found them not, alas! nor was sealed; there aught A Senate, — Time's worst statute, The world contains, the which he could unrepealed, — approve. 10 Are graves from which a glorious Through the unheeding many he did Phantom may move, Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. A splendour among shadows, a bright blot ODE TO THE WEST WIND. Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove 1. For truth, and like the Preacher found it O wild West Wind, thou breath of not. Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence SONNET: ENGLAND IN 1819. the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an An old, mad, blind, despised, and enchanter fleeing, dying king, — Princes, the dregs of their dull race, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic who flow red, 149

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Of vapours, from whose solid 5 atmosphere Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 3. Each like a corpse within its grave, Thou who didst waken from his until summer dreams Thine azure sister of the Spring shall The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, blow 30 Lulled by the coil of his crystalline Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, streams, and fill 10 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, in air) And saw in sleep old palaces and With living hues and odours plain and towers hill: Quivering within the wave's intenser day, Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; All overgrown with azure moss and Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, flowers 35 hear! So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou 2. For whose path the Atlantic's level Thou on whose stream, mid the steep powers sky's commotion, 15 Loose clouds like earth's decaying Cleave themselves into chasms, while leaves are shed, far below Shook from the tangled boughs of The sea-blooms and the oozy woods Heaven and Ocean, which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Angels of rain and lightning: there are 40 spread On the blue surface of thine aery Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray surge, with fear, Like the bright hair uplifted from the And tremble and despoil themselves: head 20 oh, hear!

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the 4. dim verge If I were a dead leaf thou mightest Of the horizon to the zenith's height, bear; The locks of the approaching storm. If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; Thou dirge A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 45 Of the dying year, to which this closing night The impulse of thy strength, only less Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, free 25 Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even Vaulted with all thy congregated might I were as in my boyhood, and could be

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The comrade of thy wanderings over mankind! Heaven, Be through my lips to unawakened As then, when to outstrip thy skiey earth speed 50 Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, have striven If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70 As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. THE INDIAN SERENADE. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 1. I arise from dreams of thee A heavy weight of hours has chained In the first sweet sleep of night, and bowed 55 When the winds are breathing low, One too like thee: tameless, and swift, And the stars are shining bright: and proud. I arise from dreams of thee, 5 And a spirit in my feet 5. Hath led me—who knows how? Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: To thy chamber window, Sweet! What if my leaves are falling like its own! 2. The tumult of thy mighty harmonies The wandering airs they faint On the dark, the silent stream— 10 Will take from both a deep, autumnal The Champak odours fail tone, 60 Like sweet thoughts in a dream; Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, The nightingale's complaint, Spirit fierce, It dies upon her heart;— My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! As I must on thine, 15 Oh, beloved as thou art! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 3. Like withered leaves to quicken a new Oh lift me from the grass! birth! I die! I faint! I fail! And, by the incantation of this verse, Let thy love in kisses rain 65 On my lips and eyelids pale. 20 My cheek is cold and white, alas! Scatter, as from an unextinguished My heart beats loud and fast;— hearth Oh! press it to thine own again, Ashes and sparks, my words among Where it will break at last.

If you want, you can read most of Shelley’s poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/percy-bysshe-shelley/poems/page-1/?a=a&l=1&y=; you can also listen to some of his poems in www.youtube.com, as for example, 'OZYMANDIAS', in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krbX- 9ugbI4&feature=related

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8.5. John Keats KEATS, John Columbia Encyclopedia John Keats 1795–1821, English poet, b. London. He is considered one of the greatest of English poets. The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Figure 21. John Keats, by William Hilton Endymion, a long poem, was Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Keats_ published in 1818. Although faulty in by_William_Hilton.jpg structure, it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's Magazine — an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney school" of poetry — and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818 mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However, these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais." Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818. Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which 152

contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25. In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron, as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy. Keats's posthumously published pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as his "The Eve of St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art." "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" are delightful short poems. Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability"

Some poems of John Keats

Sonnet to Ailsa Rock Thou answer'st not, for thou art dead a sleep; Hearken, thou craggy ocean pyramid! Thy life is but two dead eternities — 10 Give answer from thy voice, the sea fo The last in air, the former in the deep; wls' screams! First with the whales, last with the When were thy shoulders mantled in eagle-skies — huge streams? Drown'd wast thou till an earthquake m When, from the sun, was thy broad ade thee steep, forehead hid? Another cannot wake thy giant size. How long is't since the mighty powers -111- bid Thee heave to airy sleep from fathom (…) dreams? Sleep in the lap of thunder or Ode to a Nightingale sunbeams, 1 Or when grey clouds are thy cold My heart aches, and a drowsy coverlid. numbness pains 153

My sense, as though of hemlock I had And leaden-eyed despairs, drunk, Where Beauty cannot keep her Or emptied some dull opiate to the lustrous eyes, drains Or new Love pine at them beyond tom One minute past, and Lethe-wards had orrow. 30 sunk: 4 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, Away! away! for I will fly to thee, But being too happy in thine Not charioted by Bacchus and his happiness, — pards, That thou, light-winged Dryad of the But on the viewless wings of Poesy, trees, Though the dull brain perplexes and In some melodious plot retards: Of beechen green, and shadows and Already with thee! tender is the night, numberless, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her Singest of summer in full-throated throne, ease. 10 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; -174- But here there is no light, 2 Save what from heaven is with the O, for a draught of vintage! that hath breezes blown been Through vendurous glooms and Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved winding mossy ways. 40 earth, 5 Tasting of Flora and the country green, I cannot see what flowers are at my Dance, and Provençal song, and feet, sunburnt mirth! Nor what soft incense hangs upon the O for a beaker full of the warm South, boughs, Full of the true, the blushful -175- Hippocrene, But, in embalmed darkness, guess With beaded bubbles winking at the each sweet brim, Wherewith the seasonable month And purple-stained mouth; endows That I might drink, and leave the world The grass, the thicket, and the fruit- unseen, tree wild; And with thee fade away into the forest White hawthorn, and the pastoral dim: 20 eglantine; 3 Fast fading violets cover'd up in Fade far away, dissolve, and quite leaves; forget And mid-May's eldest child, What thou among the leaves hast The coming musk-rose, full of dewy never known, wine, The weariness, the fever, and the fret The murmurous haunt of flies on Here, where men sit and hear each summer eves. 50 other groan; 6 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last Darkling I listen; and, for many a time gray hairs, I have been half in love with easeful Where youth grows pale, and spectre- Death, thin, and dies; Call'd him soft names in many a mused Where but to think is to be full of rhyme, sorrow To take into the air my quiet breath; 154

Now more than ever seems it rich to Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, die, Thou foster-child of silence and slow To cease upon the midnight with no time, pain, Sylvan historian, who canst thus While thou art pouring forth thy soul express abroad A flowery tale more sweetly than our In such an ecstasy! rhyme: Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about in vain-- thy shape To thy high requiem become a sod. 60 Of deities or mortals, or of both, 7 In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? Thou wast not born for death, immortal What men or gods are these? What Bird! maidens loth? No hungry generations tread thee What mad pursuit? What struggle to down; escape? The voice I hear this passing night was What pipes and timbrels? What wild ec heard stasy? 10 In ancient days by emperor and clown: 2 Perhaps the self-same song that found Heard melodies are sweet, but those a path unheard Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, sick for home, play on; She stood in tears amid the alien corn Not to the sensual ear, but, more The same that oft-times hath endear'd, Charm'd magic casements, opening on Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: the foam Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. canst not leave 70 Thy song, nor ever can those trees be 8 bare; Forlorn! the very word is like a bell Bold Lover, never, never canst thou To toll me back from thee to my sole kiss, self! Though winning near the goal--yet, do Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well not grieve; As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. She cannot fade, though thou hast not Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem thy bliss, fades For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 20 -176- Past the near meadows, over the still 3 stream, Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried shed deep Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring In the next valley-glades: adieu; Was it a vision, or a waking dream? And, happy melodist, unwearied, Fled is that music — Do I wake or For ever piping songs for ever new; sleep? 80 -177- More happy love! more happy, happy Ode on a Grecian Urn love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, 1 For ever panting, and for ever young; 155

All breathing human passion far above, 5 That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede cloy'd, Of marble men and maidens A burning forehead, and a parching overwrought, tongue. 30 With forest branches and the trodden 4 weed; Who are these coming to the sacrifice? Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of To what green altar, O mysterious thought priest, As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the When old age shall this generation skies, waste, And all her silken flanks with garlands Thou shalt remain, in midst of other drest? woe What little town by river or sea shore, Than ours, a friend to man, to whom Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, thou say'st, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is And, little town, thy streets for all evermore Ye know on earth, and all ye need to Will silent be; and not a soul to tell know. Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. -178- 40

Do you like Keats’s poems? You can read most of his poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/john-keats/; you can also listen to some of his poems http://archive.org/details/john_keats_selected_poems_lw_librivox

9. Victorian Age

Victorian Poetry Harry Blamires On Wordsworth’s death in 1850 Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) was made Poet Laureate. We are apt to think of the award as officializing his identification with the spirit of the age and to consider him the literary representative of Victorianism: but his brilliance as a poetic craftsman and the readiness with which, in his finest work, he voices perturbations and aspirations of the mind and spirit that come to men in all ages, make the ‘Victorian’ tag ultimately dispensable. The son of a Lincolnshire rector, Tennyson was educated at Cambridge and there became a member of a group of idealists who called themselves ‘Apostles’, having embraced a self-chosen prophetic mission to crusade for culture. A leading light in the group was Arthur Hallam who became Tennyson’s friend and his sister’s fiancé. Hallam’s sudden death in Vienna in 1833 at the age of twenty-two profoundly 156

shocked Tennyson and exercised a lasting influence on his poetic career. The Poems which came out in 1833 already included work of staggering technical virtuosity, such as ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Oenone’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ it is as though Keats’s sensuous richness and acute verbal sensitivity have coalesced with the haunting, incantatory magic of Coleridge; and the symbolic overtones add a mysterious dimension with a deeply felt personal implication. For the Lady, weaving her magic web and seeing only ‘shadows of the world’ outside passing by in her mirror, brings the curse of destruction upon herself (and her mirror) by leaving her loom and looking down on the real world. We recognize the underlying dilemma of the poet before the competing claims of art and the living world. And we are aware of a comparable dichotomy, and a comparable technical mastery, when we see how -270- the languid atmosphere in the imagery and music of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’: Music that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes— can be shattered in a flash at a momentary glimpse of the turbulent world that drugged contentment has escaped from: Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

After the death of Hallam this virtuosity meets with the discipline of a personal purpose so deeply felt that it must eschew exhibitionism and flamboyance, for Tennyson grapples with the problem of coming to terms with bereavement and death. His elegiac tribute, In Memoriam (1850), was begun in 1833. The sections were written at different times and in different places. The chaste metrical form adopted (four-foot iambic quatrains, rhyming abba) had been used by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, but Tennyson was unaware that it was not his own invention. Tennyson deftly exploited its metrical possibilities and, as he gave periodic vent to his private grief, brooded on its larger significance, and explored the answering consolations of Christian faith, the stanzas accumulated and the poet decided to arrange them in a meaningful sequence so that the whole should show the gradual conquest of suffering and doubt. It was to be at once an autobiographical record, the ‘Way of the 157

Soul’, and, as Tennyson himself said, ‘a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness.’ [1] Thus the scattered laments, probing reflections and fitful reckonings of grief’s continuance culminate in a marriage song that celebrates the wedding of his sister. The hope is expressed that an offspring of the union will be born to be a ‘closer link’ between men of the present and those of the future for whom nature will be ‘an open book’. For Hallam has finally become, in the eyes of the poet, a ‘noble type’ treading this planet prematurely and providing a foretaste of the future humanity that will shake off its animal affiliations. Those who follow the poet’s spiritual pilgrimage sympathetically -271- will perhaps find the wayward development of mood and response throughout the body of the poem more genuinely in accord with man’s inner dignities than this closing attempt to overlay it with a forward-looking philosophy. But the poem’s greatness lies in the way the poet recreates such scenes as the calm of a soundless morning with only ‘the chestnut pattering to the ground’ and the mood of calm despair that accompanies it. The concentrated character of grief, often sharply particularized, has rarely been so finely defined: Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow.

The reasoning which wrestles with this grief convinces because it is everyman’s reasoning, not because it is watertight. Piece by piece, there is much writing that is authentic and irresistible. Moreover here, as elsewhere, Tennyson is aware of current scientific thinking and the need to accommodate it. For all the flaws that arise from Tennyson’s philosophic over-simplifications, In Memoriam surely stands after The Prelude and alongside The Ring and the Book among the big poems of the century. Tennyson called Maud (1855) a ‘monodrama’. It is a collection of diverse lyrics, many of them intensely passionate in rhythm and expression, which recount a tragic story of frustrated love. The violence and turbulence of tone match the state of mind of the narrator. His father and family were ruined by the lord of the Hall, whose daughter Maud he has now fallen in love with. Her brother is contemptuous of him and though he gains Maud’s love, the brother’s insults provoke a confrontation in which the brother is killed, and the narrator is compelled to flee. Through the 158

impassioned rhythm and high register of the outcry an archetypal force is given to the experience of deep devotion countered by worldly arrogance that is inimical to genuineness and purity when they are devoid of rank and wealth. Yet it is also evident that a personal and particular awareness of rejection underlies the agitation. Agony and rapture alike are voiced with superb vigour. Tennyson’s most ambitious work was The Idylls of the King. It came out piece by piece between 1859 and 1885. The long-pondered scheme to present the story of Arthur and the Knights of the Round -272- Table in poetry squares with the kind of ambition that possessed Milton and Wordsworth to fashion a work of epic proportions and significance. Tennyson delivered himself of his magnum opus tale by tale, and not in the order which was eventually theirs. Between ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ are sandwiched the ten tales, beginning with the cheerful story of ‘Gareth and Lynette’, working through the saddening rhythm of demoralization and collapsing hopes to the events of ‘The Last Tournament’ and ‘Guinevere’. The blank verse is finely and melodiously handled, but it has an archaic stateliness that helps to distance the adventures and their participants. There is richness of colour and detail, but it is a tapestried richness, far from the monochromatic, but somehow bi-dimensional. This does not mean that the tales do not touch the emotions: they do, and with something more than sentiment, for even forsaken Elaine’s over-sweet song to sweet love and sweet death tears at the heart: High with the last line scaled her voice, and this, All in a fiery dawning wild with wind That shook her tower, the brothers heard.

The high peak of the work is ‘The Passing of Arthur’ where, against an uncannily sensitized natural background, masterly cadences measure out the grievous approach of the king’s end — his burden of lost hopes and broken loyalties, his haunting reminiscences, his last exhortation, and his committal to the queens, the barge and the lake. Much has been said of the Victorianization of Malory’s values and the expurgation of his substance. Tennyson’s determination to turn Arthur into an almost quasi-divine incarnation of ‘Ideal manhood’ involved sanctification of the king in accordance with current mores. When Arthur stands with sinful Guinevere at his feet: 159

I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, I, whose vast pity almost makes me die To see thee, laying there thy golden head the husband is momentarily lost in the embodied moral and religious authority: Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God Forgives. -273- And as the penitent queen grovels at his feet, she perceives in the darkness the waving of his hands in blessing: the husbandly parting is merged in sacerdotal benediction. To imagine that Tennyson wanted Victorian cuckolds to address their faithless wives in these lofty terms is surely to miss the point. Anyone who has studied the metrical force and versatility of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Locksley Hall’ and the ‘Tribute to Virgil’, and anyone who has savoured the imagery of ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’ or the music of ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’ knows that their impact is one of unique technical accomplishment covering every variety of orchestration from the majestic and the urgent to the delicate and ethereal. Yet this is only one aspect of Tennyson’s versatility. In Enoch Arden (1864) the story of the long-lost, shipwrecked wanderer’s return, to find wife and children in the keeping of his boyhood friend and rival, is handled with frank simplicity, if not with Wordsworthian force, and the blank verse keeps an unobtrusive grip on feeling and dialogue. Dialect poems like ‘Northern Farmer’ (‘Old Style’ and ‘New Style’) are vigorous and entertaining. Lastly, the magnificent monologue ‘Ulysses’, in which the old hero determines in age on one more venture before life is done, indicates Tennyson’s capacity, within a very small compass, to extend the import of an individual’s impulse transcendentally by investing it with potently mythic images: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Tennyson did not lack a sense of humour. When Browning published his Sordello in 1840 — over 5,000 lines of the most difficult poetry in the English language — Tennyson quoted the first line and the last: Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told. Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told.

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They were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, Tennyson said, and they were both lies. Robert Browning (1812-89) was difficult partly because he was learned in out-of-the-way branches of study like the thirteenth-century struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines that provides the background to the story of Sordello — of ‘the development of a soul’, as Browning called -274- it. He was difficult too because of his eccentricities of style. He relied on oblique implications and innuendoes for conveying impressions and information, especially in the form that was his speciality — the dramatic monologue, in which a character reveals himself and his past, sometimes, like the Duke of ‘My Last Duchess’, without any intention of doing so. The last (and least creditable) aspect of Browning’s difficulty was his penchant towards sheer display of expertise in the forcing of excruciating rhyme (‘fabric’ with ‘dab brick’, ‘Italy’ with ‘fit ally’) and in other parodic or semi-parodic caricatures of his own verbal dexterity. When the tongue is fully in the cheek, one can have a good laugh at this kind of thing; but the jokes seem to be little different from the apparently serious gymnastics that occur in earnest poems like ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’: Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?

Browning had begun his poetic career with the anonymous publication of Pauline in 1833. It is a sickly and confused outburst of pseudo-Shelleyan sentiment unanchored to reality and punctuated largely by dashes. Browning’s aunt financed its publication, but no one bought it. Paracelsus followed, a blank-verse drama dealing with a sixteenth-century magician-cum-scientist, a serious chemist who was denounced as a quack. His fervent pursuit of the secret of things, which puts him at loggerheads with his unadventurous fellows, is Browning’s theme. After Browning’s next venture, the blank-verse tragedy Strafford, failed, the poet worked on Sordello; but his potential only began to be realized in the pamphlets issued between 1841 and 1846, called Bells and Pomegranates, and beginning with Pippa Passes. Pippa’s song (‘The year’s at the spring:. God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world’) is the delighted cry of a girl from the silk mills of Asolo on her annual day off. As she goes singing through the town, her cheerful voice is overheard by four parties whom she is envying for their happiness, each of whom at the time is ironically involved in tragedy or near-tragedy, and each of whom is moved by her voice to appropriate remorse, 161

forgiveness, action or compassion. Other numbers of the series contained Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances (1845). These, together with Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864), contain most of Browning’s best poetry, apart from The Ring and the Book. Browning’s imaginative skill with dramatic monologue is notably -275- evident in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (Men and Women), companion studies of Florentine painters: Filippo Lippi was a fifteenth-century Carmelite monk who abducted a nun and whose frescoes are remarkable for the colourful detail and composition, and Andrea del Sarto, a generation younger, was known for his faultless technique (‘Andrea senza errore’). Browning brings these two to life in portrayals which at once match the character of their work and incidentally serve to press home Browning’s preference for the restless aspiration of an effervescent if wayward enthusiast like Lippi over the perfection achieved by one too ready to take the easy way. Brother Lippi is caught by the watch, sneaking home to Cosimo de Medici’s after a night of frolic, and tells his own story, as one who cannot accept inhibitions on his zest for living or on his artistic vocation to show spiritual beauty through physical beauty. The poem ends with daybreak; but the background of ‘Andrea del Sarto’ is evening twilight, and the painter muses regretfully yet resignedly on the weaknesses which offset his technical achievement. His ‘low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand’ shuts him off from the heaven that more inspired artists reach. A less obvious contrast on comparable lines might be detected between the self- revelation of the Renaissance bishop looking back on his self-indulgent life in ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, where the worldly old reprobate and aesthetic connoisseur is surrounded by his sons (‘nephews’) and is still brooding, at the hour of death, on his jealousies, animosities and petty vanities; and ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ which reproduces the funeral procession of a sixteenth- century German scholar. The mourners march to the heights to bury on a mountain top a man who has spent all his life studying, careless of earthly success. Aspiration, even in failure, has a transcendental value for Browning, never more buoyantly reflected than in ‘The Last Ride Together’. The rejected lover begs one last ride with his mistress; then, as they ride together, favourably compares his brief, immediate achievement-in-failure with the supposed achievements-in-success of great 162

statesmen, soldiers, poets, artists and musicians, and finally senses the present happiness as a foretaste of Heaven: What if we still ride on, we two, With life for ever old yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity -276- Like the lover’s, the musician’s experience can be, in Browning’s eyes, a sacramental entry to the eternal vision. In ‘Abt Vogler’ the organist extemporizes and the human touches the infinite at the moment of musical climax (‘For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far’). In ‘Saul’ Browning achieves argumentative clarity and emotional power attractively blended in David’s dramatically recalled account of how he brought back Saul from the depths of despair by singing to him. David sings in praise of life and Saul stirs; gradually the trance is broken, but the gloom remains. How shall David further restore him? The agony of loving him and wanting to do all for him at any cost itself provides the answer, and he sings it rapturously. For if God surpasses man immeasurably in all other respects he must also surpass him in the single respect of wanting (like David now) to sacrifice himself for man’s restoration. With this prevision of the necessity for God’s incarnation in the saving Christ, the work is done: ‘O Saul, it shall be ‘A Face like my face that receives thee, a Man like to me.’

Overwhelmed with the glory of his vision, David returns home, and one of Browning’s most moving climactic paeans settles down to peace and calm. Browning’s vigorous lyricism is vibrant in ‘The Lost Leader’ (‘Just for a handful of silver he left us’) and ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix’. There are gems of a gentler kind among the love lyrics—perhaps nothing more concisely managed than the capsulated drama of ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’. At the other extreme the magnum opus, The Ring and the Book (1868-9) has forbidding dimensions and has been unduly neglected. Browning picked up the ‘book’ from a stall in Florence. A goldsmith mixes alloy with gold to make a ‘ring’, and Browning fashions his work by adding to the basic story of the book — a seventeenth-century murder case. Guido Franceschini, an impoverished count, marries Pompilia Comparini, only to discover that the bride’s wealth is not what he thought — nor indeed her parentage. He persecutes her cruelly, accusing her of unfaithfulness with 163

the priest, Caponsacchi, who takes her away. Then she faces a charge of adultery, but protests her innocence. Caponsacchi, however, is banished and Pompilia is placed in a convent. Later, back at her old home, she is murdered -277- along with her ‘parents’ (they adopted her). Guido is executed. Browning presents the story in a series of monologues. ‘Half-Rome’ represents the case from Guido’s side and ‘The Other Half-Rome’ represents Pompilia’s side. After ‘Tertium Quid’ has voiced a further point of view, Guido makes his public case as the wronged husband, then Caponsacchi his, and Pompilia’s own dying confession follows: it is made with touching faith: Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, Mere imitation of the inimitable: In heaven we have the real and true and sure.

Rival advocates sum up — at great length (the vein is lighter here); and then, in BookX, the Pope considers the case and delivers judgement. Guido is to be beheaded next morning, the Pope nourishing the faint hope that the blow of death may flash out the truth. ‘And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.’

Thereupon Guido is given a second monologue — this time a private attempt at self-justification. At the end of it he hears the messengers of execution on the prison stairs and, just as the Pope had hoped, the imminence of death wrings from him in his very last line a cry that reveals the truth by its implicit claim for Pompilia’s goodness: ‘Pompilia, will you let them murder me?’

Browning was completely unknown when he found himself named favourably alongside Wordsworth and Tennyson in Elizabeth Barrett’s ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (Poems, 1844): Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’ which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett, whose fame was already established, and there followed the famous courtship that whisked the poetess from sofa and sickroom and imprisonment under a gaoler-father to years of married happiness and health in Italy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) is a poet whose reputation has slumped 164

inordinately. One can understand why: her defects are a strain on the patience; her poems often seem too long; for all their accomplishment, one puts them aside unfinished. Good passages, culled and -278- gathered, look impressive: they mark a poet of learning and dexterous verbal sensitivity. But they leave behind much unevenness and much diffuseness. In some of the Sonnets from the Portuguese — so called to veil the fact that they were a private record of Elizabeth’s love for Browning — the sonnet form disciplines the thinking and the expression admirably, as in ‘If thou must love’ (XIV) with its neatly perceptive psychological conceits: Neither love me for Thine own dear Pity’s wiping my cheeks dry, Since one might well forget to weep who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.

And there is firmness and directness, along with subtlety enough, in some of the urgent declarations of love, like ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ (XLII); but others are weakly and redundantly rhetorical and verbally self-indulgent. Oddly perhaps, in view of her prolixity elsewhere, Mrs Browning’s longest poem is readily readable. Aurora Leigh (1856) is a narrative poem with some 10,000 lines of blank verse, spirited in idiom and vigorous in rhythm. In its dedication the poet describes it as ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’. Aurora is a poet, and her cousin Romney Leigh an ardent social reformer whose proposal of marriage she refuses, being hurt by his proud demand for a ‘helpmate’ rather than a ‘mistress’. Romney sets up a socialistic community on his estate, rescues a tramp’s daughter, Marian Erle, plans to marry her, but loses her when she is tricked and taken to a brothel. His community breaks up, his hall is burnt, and he loses his eyesight. The final reconciliation between Romney and Aurora (one is inevitably reminded of Jane Eyre) represents a mellowing and blending of conflicting approaches, social and public, individual and personal, to the cause of humanity: Beloved, let us love so well, Our work will still be better for our love, And still our love be sweeter for our work.

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If Tennyson and Browning strove to voice the victory of faith over doubt in the Victorian age, Matthew Arnold (1822-88) may be said to have voiced the victory of doubt over faith. A dour melancholy -279- broods over his work as a poet. The son of a forceful and famous headmaster of Rugby, he laments the loss of his father in ‘Rugby Chapel’, stressing his cheerfulness and zealous strength. By contrast we on earth ‘strain on’ with ‘frowning foreheads’ and lips ‘sternly compress’d’. Father kills son in ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, a sombre and stately ‘epic’ fragment. The disaster is a grievous instance of accident and misunderstanding prior to the revelation of identities, pitiable rather than tragic. There is a pervasive sorrowful dignity, but the dispirited fatalism deprives the conflict and catastrophe of emotional spine. The deficiency is perhaps a correlative of that tormenting doubt by which Arnold’s imagination seems sometimes to be de- energized. There is comparable enervation in ‘Balder Dead’.This Norse myth of the god of light, whose release from the abode of the shades is conceded provided that all things on earth weep for him, involves a preoccupation with universal lamentation symptomatic of Arnold’s spirit. The lachrymose tone recurs in ‘The Scholar Gipsy’. Here Arnold resurrects a seventeenth-century legend of a student drop-out who joined the gipsies and still haunts the Oxford countryside. Arnold’s aim is to pin-point the ‘strange disease of modern life,/With its sick hurry, its divided aims’ and to versify envy of the unspoilt singleness of purpose that keeps the young scholar away from the ‘sick fatigue, the languid doubt’, the distintegration and hopelessness of the nineteenth-century urban mind and spirit. And Empedocles on Etna (1852) presents dramatically the last reflections of the disillusioned Sicilian philosopher before suicide in the volcano. Empedocles’s great lyrical outburst in Act I scene ii warns men against fabricating gods to be blamed for human suffering or to provide imaginary satisfactions, and gives the lie to Browning’s consolatory way of reading even failure and dissatisfaction as corroborative of faith: Fools! that in man’s brief term He cannot all things view, Affords no ground to affirm That there are gods who do

Man must face life’s harshness honestly, look inwards, and discipline his will to reality. 166

Arnold’s prose works represent an extended crusade against the materialism and philistinism of the Victorian Age. In works such as -280- Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Essays In Criticism (1865 and 1888) he strove to exercise a prophetic influence by bringing a surgically critical judgement to bear on society and literature. Culture is the only brake on current worship of wealth. English Protestantism has emphasized the moral at the expense of the cultural. We have relied on faulty religious organizations with inadequate ideas of perfection. ‘The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweetness and light.’ The whole of society must be ‘permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive’. Arnold’s idealism would do away with classes and ‘make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’ (Culture and Anarchy). In such poems as ‘Thyrsis’ a fine apparatus of authentic poetic ceremonial is brought into play, but it serves chiefly to probe the nerve of disquietude and stir the pool of uncertainty, and one is left in a mood of pensive nostalgia and poignant regret. Yet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61), whom ‘Thyrsis’ commemorates, was himself a man of some toughness, as his much-quoted verses, ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’ indicate. He resigned his Oxford fellowship in rejection of required Anglican orthodoxy: he wrote in hexameters a bright and lively long-vacation pastoral called The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) in which Oxford students visit Scotland in a party with a tutor and one of them falls in love with a Highland lassie, Elspeth Mackaye. Clough’s vigour contrasts with Arnold’s calculated deflation: Philip returned to his books, but returned to his Highlands after; Got a first, ’tis said; a winsome bride, ’tis certain. There while courtship was ending, nor yet the wedding appointed, Under the father he studied the handling of hoe and of hatchet.

Hexameters are employed again in the Amours de Voyage (1858), the product of a summer in Italy. The teasing contemporaneousness and the evasion of commitment have been seen as anticipatory of twentieth-century trends: But for the funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage-procession? But for the final discharge, would he dare enlist in that service? -281- 167

It is a far cry from the academic and literary world of Clough and Arnold to the Northamptonshire village in which John Clare (1793-1864) was brought up in poverty, the son of a labourer. He published Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 with considerable success, and followed it with three other volumes, the last of them being The Rural Muse (1835). But by this time he was struggling to look after a wife and seven children. His mind gave way, and he spent the last twenty-three years of his life in Northampton lunatic asylum. Clare’s power and precision as a descriptive poet are striking; and his observant exactitude is animated by an imaginative transference of human attitudes into creatures of earth and sky: And note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent, The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn, With earnest heed, and tremulous intent, Frail brother of the morn. (‘Summer Images’)

His knowledge and love of the country are a part of him, essential to the play of his senses and his mind. By comparison Matthew Arnold’s responsiveness to the country must be labelled ‘literary’. In Clare’s ‘February’ the response of natural life to the first peep of February sunshine and the first hint of spring is detailed in image after image of expertly etched clarity — the misty smoke reeking from behind the running sheep and the new coyness of the no longer hungry robin. In his more subjective poems, such as ‘A Vision’ and ‘The Peasant Poet’, Clare grasps at mythic symbols that give an impression of visionary depth (‘I snatch’d the sun’s eternal ray/And wrote till earth was but a name’), and the moving verses ‘Written in Northampton County Asylum’ (‘I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?’) give voice to agony and need: I long for scenes where man has never trod— For scenes where woman never smiled or wept— There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept.

A poet whose work is no less vividly rooted in the life of the country was William Barnes (1801-86): -282- While snowy night winds, blowing bleak Up hill, made rock-borne fir-trees creak, And drove the snow-flakes, feather-light, O’er icy streams in playsome flight_ (‘Burncombe Hollow’) 168

Barnes’s is a warmly peopled environment: unforced gaiety is captured or recaptured in present scenes or nostalgic memories. In ‘Shellbrook’ the remembered glee of the merry young in white Maytime is counterbalanced by the frozen churchyard all white now with ‘young offsunder’d from the young in sleep’. Such familiar moods, in poems of love, description and personal musing, are framed in unwasteful verses that point modestly forward to the work of poets like Thomas Hardy and R.S. Thomas. Barnes’s regional affiliation naturally links him with Hardy. His poems in the Dorset dialect impose the usual obstacles to the sympathy of outsiders, but of course they plant the poet four-square in the country he is depicting and give a particularized pathos to human studies like that of the widower in ‘The Wife a-lost’ (‘Since I noo mwore do zee your feace’). Emily Brontë (1818-48), though she might be called a ‘regional novelist’, was not a ‘regional poet’. She left behind a handful of poems of astonishing quality, charged with power, and sometimes opening up mystical dimensions: Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels. (‘The Prisoner’)

Her entry into the Unseen is a flight ‘home’ to a freedom and peace from which the return is a dreadful check, an intense agony, as senses, pulse and brain begin to work once more. In Emily’s poems there is a delight in Nature in all moods and seasons; there is suffering tersely compressed into a handful of burning words (‘If grief for grief can touch thee’); and there is one of the loveliest outcries from the heart of bereavement in our literature: Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Sever’d at last by Time’s all-severing wave? (‘Remembrance’) -283- Before we turn to the Pre-Raphaelites, it is fitting to mention Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), the historian. His History of England from the Accession of James II is one of the great prose achievements of the age. As a literary critic Macaulay has been accused of wrong-headedness and insensitivity. Certainly his Essay on Milton contains silly as well as discerning judgements. The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) display a mastery of bold rhetoric and rhythmic swing. The sledge- 169

hammer style of ‘Horatius’ is saved from vulgarity by a degree of metrical variety, by quick flashes of sharply delineated personal and scenic detail, and of course by the stately stanzaic procession of named warriors and dignitaries strenuously living up to the unforgettable occasion (of keeping the bridge) in deed and word. The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed by a group of young artists, including Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt. Its aim was to combat the ‘Raphaelism’ of the artistic ‘establishment’ by drawing on the detailed naturalism of medieval frescoes. In the short-lived periodical, The Germ, started in 1850, the movement was extended to literature, and it was in this journal that Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel was first published. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), as painter and poet, was the man through whose work the phrase ‘Pre-Raphaelite Movement’ came to have a bigger, vaguer, but nevertheless more useful connotation in relation to aesthetic ideals prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is a rich pictorial tapestry of literary medievalism in which the transfigured beloved leans out from ‘the gold bar of Heaven’, wishing for her earthly lover left behind. If the three lilies in her hand and the seven stars in her hair catch a note of idealized Dantesque symbolism, the sensuousness of other images brings us back to the colour and warmth of the real earth. A more complex essay in romantic medievalism is ‘The Bride’s Prelude’, an unfinished narrative in which Rossetti arranges his composition with a flamboyant ease and grace: Against the haloed lattice-panes The bridesmaid sunned her breast; Then to the glass turned tall and free, And braced and shifted daintily Her loin-belt through her cote-hardie.

The bride tells her story compulsively to her sister — the story of her -284- secret passion and the suffering it has brought her as a mother bereft of her baby. The quiet tension is oppressive, eerie and vibrant with suspense. The personalities are felt as immediate presences, the sister all the more for her reticence, the bride for the hint of possession that hangs about her. And a touch of the Coleridgean magic pervades the strange haunting archaisms of ballads such as ‘Troy Town’ and ‘Sister Helen’ with their insistent awesome refrains. By contrast ‘Jenny’, a poem in lively octosyllabics, is a monologue by the poet. He sits with a prostitute’s hand on his knee in her room, and wonders why he is where he is. Jenny falls asleep. Touchingly, 170

whimsically, he muses on her, doing full justice to both her wantonness and her charm, till the cold light of dawn breaks, and he steals off silently without disturbing her, laying among her golden hair the golden coins she has not earned. Interest will always focus on Rossetti’s sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Some of the poems record his love for Elizabeth Siddal whom he married, after intolerable delay and some faithless distraction, in 1860, and who died from an overdose of laudanum two years later. Rossetti’s grief and remorse were such that he buried the manuscript of his current poems in her coffin. The lost poems were exhumed with his permission nine years later, and published in 1870; but the complete sequence, The House of Life, did not appear until 1881 in Ballads and Sonnets, and by this time Rossetti’s addiction to chloral had sadly disordered him. Jane Morris (William Morris’s wife) was another source of inspiration in a collection notable for emotional openness and for that blend of perceptive realism and romantic idealism that so distinguishes Rossetti: What of her glass without her? The blank grey There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face. Her dress without her? The tossed empty space Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away. (‘Without Her’)

The 101 sonnets are by no means all love poems. They include packed descriptive studies like ‘Ardour and Memory’ (LXIV) and dramatizations of subjective psychological probing like ‘Lost Days’ (LXXXVI), where the poet pictures himself re- meeting after death his murdered selves — representative of the lost days of his life. Perhaps the most searching and disquieting of all are those in which -285- symbolism and passion meet to register the dreams and wastages of love frustrated — in the ‘fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood’ (‘Willowwood’, XLIX, L, LI and LII), or the agitations and reflections of love known (‘Body’s Beauty’, LXXVIII and ‘Lovesight’, IV). Rossetti’s sister, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94), differs from her brother in her poetry as in her personality. She was a devout Anglo-Catholic who refused to marry, and the chastity of her life and her poetry seems to counterbalance her brother’s excesses with compensatory spiritual and artistic discipline. She is known to the young for her delightful verse fairy tale, Goblin Market (1862), in which two sisters, Laura and Lizzy, are tempted by the rich fruits the goblins sell. Laura 171

succumbs, yearns for more, and becomes gravely ill when the goblins refuse her. Lizzy saves her sister redemptively by resisting the goblins’ allurements. The allegorical meaning is oddly consonant with the contrast between Christina and her brother. Some of Christina’s finest poems are exquisitely wrought miniatures, giving graceful stanzaic form to descriptive scenes or reflective moods (see ‘Twilight Calm’ or ‘A Birthday’—‘My heart is like a singing bird’). There is nothing in them to match her brother’s decorative lavishness, yet the comparative freedom from ornament does not produce in the best ones any weakness in the fabric or thinness of effect. Rather simplicity and directness gives translucency to the texture. The lucidity makes for a searching poignancy in those poems where personal relationships are at issue, regretfully or nostalgically (‘When I am dead, my dearest/Sing no sad songs for me’ and the sonnet, ‘Remember me when I am gone away’). Many of the poems that reflect personal renunciation, or give expression toreligious dedication and need, touch the heart deeply. Monna Innominata, a sonnet sequence, is her fervent record of love denied: Many in aftertimes will say of you ‘He loved her’—while of me what will they say?< I charge you at the Judgment make it plain My love of you was life and not a breath.

It was Rossetti’s influence that first involved William Morris (1834-96) in the Pre- Raphaelite Movement, and indeed Rossetti’s love for Morris’s wife became a sorrow and a burden to the husband. Another crucial influence on Morris was that of John Ruskin (1819-1900) whose three-volume treatise, The Stones of Venice, exalts -286- Gothic art and discredits Renaissance art. Ruskin’s wide-ranging enthusiasms committed him to richly written polemics against contemporary philistinism and on behalf of social reform. Of his many works he valued especially Sesame and Lilies (1865) and Unto this Last (1862). Morris was an artist-poet. His products extended from furniture and wallpaper to book-production. He founded the Kelmscott Press for issuing his own works and for reprinting classics, like Chaucer, in 1890. His devotion to fine craftsmanship and his concern for aesthetic values were closely bound up with his rejection of capitalistic industrialism and his zealous work for the cause of socialism. The range of his interests and achievements is formidable, the expression of a rare and rich 172

personality. His historical knowledge of the Middle Ages would not allow him to be satisfied with vaguely idealized Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. Guenevere is at once lovingly and spiritedly projected in The Defence of Guenevere. The dramatic energy locked in terza rima brings the tone closer to Browning than to Arthurian Tennyson. This poem, like ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ from the same volume (The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, 1858), has emotional tension and imaginative concentration. It may be argued that the smoother decorativeness of some of Morris’s subsequent work involved a loss of intensity. The poetry becomes an intentional means of escape from contemporary ugliness. Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke

So begins the Prologue to The Earthly Paradise (1868). It tells how Norsemen, fleeing the Black Death, set sail in search of the earthly Paradise and eventually reach an unknown Western land where they settle, and exchange stories with their hosts, month by month. Thus the twenty-four tales that follow derive from alternate classical and Northern sources. They show an easy mastery and fluency in varied verse forms, including rhyme royal, octosyllabics and pentametrical couplets. Morris’s sustained readability is achieved without lapses into vulgarity, though the texture of his verse is inevitably often insipid and its embellishments thinly spread. ‘Atalanta’s Race’ is probably now the best known of the tales, but ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is an impressive achievement. It is a version of the Norse saga, the Laxdaela, and tells of Gudrun, daughter of the Icelandic -287- lord, Oswif, who is loved by dear friends, Kiartan and Bodli. The rivalry brings tragic death to both. Morris had achieved his first success with The Life and Death of Jason (1867), telling the story of the Argonauts, Medea and the winning of the Golden Fleece. The poem had outgrown its intended place in The Earthly Paradise. Its seventeen books of uncomplicated couplets are all alive with pictorial delights. It may be claimed, however, that the distanced charm of Morris’s archaic settings and archaic poetic stance has a devitalizing effect on the inner spirit of his work. One senses a pervasive, languid sadness. Dreamer of dreams, born out of due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? 173

he asked in verses prefaced to The Earthly Paradise, frankly adding that what he was about was the attempt to ‘build a shadowy isle of bliss’. However that may be, his later epic, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), bred of his enthusiasm for Icelandic literature, has a more sinewy, though sombre, spirit, and the rolling, rhyming seven- footers give it external vigour that sweeps the reader along. There is energy and freshness too in the long work, Pilgrims of Hope (1886), at once a poem of love and of socialism. Immediate in relation to Morris’s deep personal concerns, private and public, it deals with a husband-wife-lover triangle and takes us to the Paris Commune. Among Morris’s numerous prose works are A Dream of John Ball (the poet’s dream about John Ball, not John Ball’s dream) and News from Nowhere (1890), a vision of a post-revolutionary Utopian English future. The aesthetic movement, which was orientated towards social reform in the work of writers like Ruskin and Morris, took a quite different direction in the work of the critic Walter Pater (1839-94). Pater formulated a philosophy of receptivity to works of art as a means of enriching human experience through the intensest responses of the sensibilities. The doctrine presupposes the supreme significance of art: it also isolates the individual with his ‘own dream of a world’. The core of Pater’s thinking can be found in the famous ‘Conclusion’ to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). His book, Marius the Epicurean (1885), portrays the quest for truth of a young Roman in the second century. Marius moves through various phases before finding what he seeks in an early Christian community. The force of the work lies in the important correspondence between Antonine -288- Rome and Victorian England, and between Marius’s pilgrimage and Pater’s. In Pater the ‘movement’ drifted towards hedonistic aestheticism. He should not be credited with consciously fathering Wilde’s attitudes, but he probably influenced them, and Swinburne’s too. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was the friend of Morris and Rossetti from his Oxford days. He was with Rossetti on the very evening of Mrs Rossetti’s tragic death and indeed spoke for him at the inquest, on the love between husband and wife. But Swinburne’s interests soon took him away from Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. He published Atalanta in Calydon, a drama on the classical Greek model, in 1865 (‘It is a long day since I have read anything so fine’, Tennyson said), 174

[2] but it was the first of the three series of Poems and Ballads (1866, 1878 and 1889) that laid bare his poetic character and provoked the Saturday Review to call him ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’ with ‘a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière’. No doubt Swinburne asked for what he got. He assumed the posture of a perverted prophet preaching pagan sensuality in negation of the religion of the ‘pale Galilean’. In ‘Dolores’ he hymned the actress Adah Isaacs Menken, known as the ‘naked lady’, with an abandoned sexual acclamation that parodies a litany to the Virgin: Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? Men touch them, and change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice.

Swinburne’s sensual extravagances, which often amount to hints of biting and bleeding, of bruised flesh and foaming lips, of the white and the red of nudity, sweep over the reader in a swirl of sound whose basis is rhythmic and assonantal. There is an infectious, self-proliferating musicality: phrase grows from phrase, line from line, stanza from stanza, in an intoxicating accumulation, wave after wave of cloying melody. Anapestic metres and feminine rhymes heighten the hypnotic effect. The native gift which gave Swinburne this virtuosity of unfailing aggregative versification, compelling in its -289- vigour and unfaltering in its thrust, is one that any poet might envy. When the versification is informed with vision and directive thought, the product is good. But the process goes on of its own accord when little or nothing is being said. The poetry seems to write itself. Swinburne turned course in Songs before Sunrise (1871). The ‘Prelude’ has a new confession of purpose — to use life’s opportunities for service to humanity. The poems that follow were inspired by the struggle for independence in Italy. Bitter anti- clericalism is now at the service of social revolution rather than of sexual emancipation. In ‘Before a Crucifix’ Christ is told how our souls ‘sicken’ to see against his side the foul and ‘leprous likeness of a bride’. The volume also contains the nearest thing in Swinburne to a basic philosophical statement — ‘Hertha’. The goddess of earth speaks, as animating all nature and all living things. She is the only ultimate reality. Man is urged to free himself from supernatural faiths: they are 175

delusive superstitions that parasitically corrupt the tree of life. Swinburne’s dissipation was rapidly killing him when his friend, Theodore Watts Dunton, took him over in 1879 and looked after him at The Pines, Putney, for the nearly thirty years of life left to him. The poet settled down to a steady routine of walking and eating and reading, like a wild thing domesticated. One of the poems in the first Poems and Ballads, ‘Laus Veneris’, a frankly sensual rendering of the Tannhäuser story, was directly inspired by Swinburne’s introduction (at the hand of Rossetti) to Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Its quatrains fired him with admiration. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-93) published the famous verses (‘Rubáiyát’ means ‘quatrains’) in 1859. The Persian poet and astronomer was born in the eleventh century, and Fitzgerald arranged Omar’s verses in a connected sequence, translating and freely adapting the original material. The poet muses pessimistically on the passing of time and the vanity of the world’s glories, and calls his beloved to fill the cup and make merry while they can. The oriental flavour disinfects the message even for rigoristic readers. A writer who threw in his lot with the Pre-Raphaelites for a time was George Meredith (1828-1909). It is to his credit as a critic that he had reservations about Swinburne’s poetry (‘I don’t see any internal centre from which springs anything that he does’); [3] and it is -290- to Swinburne’s credit that he rose to the defence of Meredith’s Modern Love when it was savaged by the Spectator on publication. Modern Love (1862) is a series of fifty sixteen-lined ‘sonnets’ recounting growing uneasiness between husband and wife, and recording the total disintegration of their relationship. In the first sonnet one is taken straight inside the bedroom where the wife is sobbing in the night at her husband’s side. The immediacy of contact is sustained in scene after scene in which psychological analysis lays bare the nerves of pretence, suspicion and jealousy. It is all done with a wiry economy of expression and intermittent aphoristic force. The outer gambits of the marriage game are underscored with irony, as emotional permutations deployed under the shadow of infidelity are recorded with devastating accuracy. Finally, on the edge of a possible clarification, the wife takes poison. No doubt writing this personal record eased the tension and grief consequent upon Meredith’s loss of his first wife. Modern Love apart, Meredith the poet is remembered chiefly for one or two items from Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), notably 176

‘Phoebus with Admetus’, ‘The Woods of Westermain’ and above all ‘Love in the Valley’, a pulsing song that gushes up like a fountain in the first stanza and goes flowing, flooding away in an innocent rapture of young love. Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward, Couched with her arms behind her golden head, Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.

Another poet with Pre-Raphaelite connections at an early stage in his career was Coventry Patmore (1823-96). His own connections were helpful to the young Brethren. During his early married life (with his first wife, Emily) his ‘drawing-room became the meeting-place of such different personalities as Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning’. [4] He was asked to contribute to the first number of The Germ and sent his poem ‘The Seasons’. Rossetti was delighted. The cultivated simplicity of the Pre- Raphaelites is evident in Patmore’s The Angel in the House, but he has none of their taste for archaism. This substantial work came out in four parts between 1854 and 1862. It is basically a homely story of wooing and marrying Honoria, the -291- daughter of a dean. But in tracing the growth and maturing of love, the poet adds to his homespun verses hints of the mystical significance of the sexual and marital bonds: This little germ of nuptial love, Which springs so simply from the sod, The root is, as my song shall prove, Of all our love to man and God.

Patmore lost his first wife, and his second marriage took him from the Church of England to the Church of Rome. His later poetry substituted for the earlier plainness of style a loose free verse that allowed greater flexibility and sometimes degenerated into diffuseness. The ‘other poems’ of The Unknown Eros and Other Poems (1877) include personal records like that of his bereavement, ‘Departure’ (‘It was not like your great and gracious ways’) and ‘Tired Memory’. The odes ‘To the Unknown Eros’ explore the mystical dimension of romantic love in marriage. Though there is sometimes an embarrassing preciousness of concept (‘Little, sequester’d pleasure- house/ For God and for His Spouse’, he calls the body in ‘To the Body’,) the best passages have imaginative power. ‘Eros and Psyche’ is ostensibly a dialogue between the two mythical figures. But it is also a dialogue between God and the 177

human soul, illuminating the relationship of the soul to God by illuminating the sexual relationship between woman and man. The mystery of divine condescension in seeking man’s love, and the pride involved in reluctant response to what is proffered, are matters finely explicated within sexual equivalents. Two younger fellow Catholic poets closely associated with Patmore were Alice Meynell (1847-1922) and Francis Thompson (1859-1907). Patmore’s admiration for Alice Meynell produced an emotional crisis for both of them. Her famous sonnet, ‘Renouncement’ (‘I must not think of thee; and tired yet strong/I shun the love that lurks in all delight’), is what she is now best remembered for. It was Alice Meynell and her husband Wilfred who rescued Francis Thompson when opium had reduced him to selling matches in the street. The subsequent friendshipbetween Thompson and Patmore was one of intimate mutual understanding and admiration. In Thompson’s verses, ‘O world invisible we view thee’, occurs the memorable image in which he sees ‘the traffic of Jacob’s ladder/ -292- Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross’. There is sometimes a vein of simplicity in Thompson: The faintest things have fleetest end; Their scent survives their close, But the rose’s scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose. (‘Daisy’)

But the purple prose of his Essay on Shelley is characteristically lavish, and his most celebrated poem, ‘The Hound of Heaven’, is an exercise in verbal richness in places reminiscent of Crashaw: I was heavy with the even, When she lit her glimmering tapers Round the day’s dead sanctities.

It is a record of conversion. The hound of Heaven is the love of God pursuing the poet’s soul till he surrenders to it. As he tries to evade the challenge, seeking consolation in human loves and earthly delights, the pressure of the divine demand gathers urgency in the image of following feet that pound behind him till he is beaten to his knees by the inadequacy of alternative satisfactions. The pursuit is halted when the poet realizes that the darkness of deprivation which all along he feared was really 178

but the shadow of the divine hand stretched over him in love. He has been resisting the offer of protection and peace. An even more fascinating literary friendship was that between Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), a friendship that was represented by few personal contacts but by a voluminous exchange of letters. Hopkins had become a Roman Catholic in 1866 and soon after joined the Jesuit Order. His self-dedication meant a total commitment of all his faculties and restricted the exercise of his poetic talent within the limits allowed by his rigorous conscience and his superiors. It may be doubted whether these restraints damaged him as a poet, for when he did write, it was poetry that measured out in concentrated form the backlog of intensely pressurized experience. For Hopkins’s account of the world is indwelt not only by the sensed objective harmony of its multifariousness as it utters God’s glory, but also by the subjective need to be involved in that utterance. The exciting thing about Hopkins’s technique is that poetry itself has -293- to be disciplined — subjected to open co-operation with the essential character of what it portrays. Words, syntax, rhythm, all the constituents of poetry must move in obedience to that which they are grappling to realize in all its distinctiveness and uniqueness. The image of the farrier in ‘Felix Randal’ is a case in point. In the same way, in ‘Inversnaid’, the burn is realized by a process which makes you feel that words have been gathered, scoured and wedged in place by a mind fiercely determined that they shall do his will in reconstituting an unrepeatable experience: This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

Hopkins’s concern with the attempt to bring to view the inner reality of the living world led to his use of the word ‘inscape’, which seems to connote not only the essential pattern at the heart of objects and experience but also the individual distinctiveness and uniqueness of a thing — its selfhood. Hopkins released new currents of verbal power by arranging words in a pulsing, jostling counterpoint of rhythm and image that would be right for one experience alone, but dead right for it and inseparable from it. The metrical principle which enabled Hopkins to free his stanzas from subjection to traditional patterns, and to bind rhythm and word, sound 179

and image together in recapturing the flow of a burn (‘Inversnaid’) or the flight of a bird (‘The Windhover’), he called ‘sprung rhythm’. Though his most substantial work was ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, written ‘to the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of December 7th 1875’, his most deeply moving poems are the last ‘terrible sonnets’. They record the testing of faith by moods of desolation, and it is done with such distinction as to revivify the sonnet form: I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is chronologically in place here by virtue of his birth date, but his poetry, though he wrote it all through -294- his writing career, was actually published in the latter part of his long life — most of it in the twentieth century (Poems of the Past and Present, 1902, Time’s Laughingstocks, 1909, and Satires of Circumstance, 1914). Hardy likes to versify incidents of country life, imposing on its greyer ironies and coincidences the pessimistic outlook expressed in the novels. There are powerful poems of personal observation, like ‘The Darkling Thrush’, characteristic in the sharp concreteness of the descriptive touches — The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres— and characteristic too in that the sudden burst of joyful song which lights up the winter greyness seems so little justified by what is evident on the terrestrial scene that the poet must assume the bird to have some reason of hope not disclosed to him. It is in reflective observations of this kind, often melancholy and nostalgic, that Hardy excels. The simplicity of his style sometimes seems like a hard-won simplicity; but the sense of strain, which makes for awkwardness at times, also makes for an awareness of thoughts and words grappled with and thoroughly brought to book — as in ‘On the Departure Platform’: We kissed at the barrier; and passing through She left me, and moment by moment got Smaller and smaller, until to my view She was but a spot.

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In spirit, perhaps, Hardy is a twentieth-century poet. In the effects he seeks and the style he cultivates he has little in common with the Pre-Raphaelites and those close to them. His readiness, in the pursuit of directness and authenticity, to run the risk of seeming prosaic or unpolished, separates him from the Victorians. The death of his first wife, Emma, in 1912, put an end to a relationship whose early happiness had long given way to division and even bitterness. The shock of bereavement was deepened by perusal of autobiographical papers Emma left behind, and Hardy’s tangled feelings became vocal in some of his finest poems. Many of them combine a devastating honesty towards himself with poignant recollections of Emma’s latest or her earliest days (such as ‘The Going’ and ‘Your Last Drive’ or ‘Beeny Cliff’). They give the reader an -295- acute and intimate encounter with his sorrow and voice an astonishing resurgence of love: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. (‘The Voice’)

Hardy’s last great work, The Dynasts, is largely in verse and is dramatic in form. It was published in three parts in 1904, 1906 and 1908, and makes a panoramic survey of events from Napoleon’s threat to invade Britain in 1805 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Scenes which depict great political and military events, like Napoleon’s coronation or the ball at Brussels before Waterloo, are balanced by scenes showing the day-today reactions of ordinary countrymen and soldiers. And superimposed on the progress of human history is a commentary by supernatural beings — the Spirit of the Years, the Spirit of the Pities, the Spirits Sinister and Ironic, and accompanying Choruses. Thus something like the form of Shakespearian historical drama is fitted with over-world dimensions like those of Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. In the background is the Immanent Will, the ‘Great Foresightless’ which a Semichorus of Pities hopes will one day mend its ways: Nay;—shall not Its blindness break? Yea, must not Its heart awake, Promptly tending To Its mending In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness’ sake? 181

A poem of even blacker gloom than this is The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (1834-82). Thomson was an atheistic free-thinker and, though there is a more cheerful vein in lesser-known poems, The City of Dreadful Night (1880) is charged with utter pessimism and despair. Thomson’s introductory verses declare that he writes in ‘cold rage’ with the delusive hopes and dreams of men and because it gives him ‘some sense of power and passion’ to try ‘in helpless impotence’ to catch human woe in words. There follows the nightmare account of the city of darkness and horror. The cumulative exploration of misery is unrelieved in its bitterness by the humour -296- and compassion that accompany Hardy’s pessimism. The poetic quality of the work is uneven: there is metrical and verbal clumsiness; and one feels that literature is being ransacked to garner the vocabulary and imagery of maximum calamity. In Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) the Pre-Raphaelite revaluation of art became caricatured in an aestheticism with a self-parodic centre. Outside the drama, Wilde’s reputation depends chiefly on works of sheer charm, like The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), and works which reflect the aesthetic issue directly, like The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In the latter the dichotomy between real world and art world is clearly present: for Dorian Gray pays a terrible price for having prayed that his ‘portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth’. Wilde’s early poetry (he published Poems in 1881) is competently derivative from the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites. In ‘The Garden of Eros’ he pays explicit tribute to Keats and Shelley, Swinburne (‘morning star/Of re-arisen England’ who sang ‘the Galilean’s requiem’) and Morris (‘sweet and simple Chaucer’s child’). The flashy poeticisms are abandoned in The Ballad of Reaching Gaol (1898). Wilde’s passion for Lord Alfred Douglas provoked Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, to accuse him of perversion, and Wilde foolishly brought an unsuccessful libel suit which recoiled in a successful homosexual charge and a sentence of two years’ hard labour. During imprisonment Wilde wrote the prose apologia later published as De Profundis, and it shows us the epigrammatist’s art baptized by suffering (‘

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky And every wandering cloud that traced Its ravelled fleeces by.

The compelling incantatory power sustains a portrayal of life inside at its point of maximum intensity when the death penalty is to be carried out. The poem carries an indictment burdensome to the social conscience, for which the simple ballad structure is an apt vehicle. -297- Among minor poets in the last decades of the nineteenth century Austin Dobson (1840-1921) took a special interest in the literary history of the eighteenth century and his three series of essays, Eighteenth-Century Vignettes (1892, 1894, 1896), contain charming insights into such matters as Samuel Richardson’s home life, the topography of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and the contents of Dr Johnson’s library. Dobson had agility in light verse which once made his ‘Ballad of Queen Elizabeth’, on the Spanish Armada, a school-room favourite. King Philip had vaunted his claim; He had sworn for a year he would sack us.

Indeed Philip was determined to crack us, hack us, out-thwack us and all the rest, had we not had Neptune to back us. There is nothing of this good-humoured verve in the poetry of the critic Arthur Symons (1865-1945), who had published his first verse, Days and Nights, in 1899 and became, like Yeats, a member of the Rhymers’ Club. He was given to melancholy musings in mellifluous verses tenuous alike in texture and substance. A fellow member of the Rhymers’ Club, Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), personified the aesthetic temper of the fin-de-siècle decadents, and his life was overshadowed by alcoholism and consumption. His vein of melancholy abandon and desolation is well exemplified in the swooning cadences of his popular verses, ‘Non sum qualis eram’ (‘Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet’). Symons and Dowson were among those who contributed to the quarterly Yellow Book (1894-7) of which Aubrey Beardsley was the first art editor. Lionel Johnson (1867-1902), the poet of ‘By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’, also contributed; and so did Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), caricaturist and satirist of social and literary fashion, whose pose provoked Oscar Wilde’s claim that 183

the gods had granted him the gift of eternal old age. Another contributor was Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913), who claimed the title of ‘Baron Corvo’. His further day dreams were given fulfilment in Hadrian the Seventh (1905), a novel of self-revelation (not to mention revenge) in which a rejected priest is elected to the papacy. A.E. Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and poet, belongs to the same generation, though it was many years before his volume A Shropshire Lad (1896) was succeeded by the second volume, Last -298- Poems (1922). In his Shropshire countryside he gave his readers an up-to-date version of pastoral. His simply structured but finely fashioned verses have appealed to musicians looking for songs to set. The much-sung ‘Bredon Hill’ (‘In summertime on Bredon’) neatly miniatures the joy and sorrow of love and loss. The gale in ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ blows us feelingly back through history from today’s disquiet to ‘the Roman and his trouble’. Housman’s carefully moulded simplicities of form contain a contrived countryside contemplated with melancholy reflections on the sadness of things. ‘Heartless, witless Nature’ cares nothing for us whose lot is to ‘endure an hour and see injustice done’. In a world where beauty and joy are quickly past, where soldiers’ breasts find bullets, and where even the weather is against us, we have at least the certainty of knowing that we are not the first generation to have cursed ‘Whatever brute and blackguard made the world’. Robert Bridges (1844-1930) is a poet whose Victorian output made his name, though he was to become a twentieth-century Poet Laureate in 1913. His three series of Poems (1873, 1879 and 1880) and his Shorter Poems (1890) have fed the anthologies with felicitous if mannered verses like ‘I will not let thee go’ and ‘A Passer-By’ (‘Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding’). There is perceptive and observant descriptive work in such poems as ‘London Snow’ and ‘November’. These, and such favourites as ‘Awake, my heart, to be loved’ and ‘Spring goeth all in white’, are the product of a sensitive ear. There can be no question about Bridges’s metrical skill and mastery of prosody. Even when one senses a straining after borrowed dignity, in such poems as ‘Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come’ (‘Nightingales’), one is aware of a highly skilled practitioner fastidiously probing the pen’s resources. All the sadder is the fact that Bridges moved away from reality to incarnate his mature reflections in a vast verbal mausoleum, Testament of Beauty (1929), a pretentious fabric of craftsmanship about whose precious idiom it is difficult 184

to speak seriously. We described Young’s Night Thoughts as ‘semi- conversationalized philosophy in ornate garb’. One detects an interest and a talent in Bridges’ most ambitious poem that claim him as Young’s successor. By contrast Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) puts all his poetic cards on the table face upwards. He knows what he wants to say and he speaks to his audience in a tongue they can understand. The rhythms -299- of sturdy ballads and stately hymns undergird his vigorous rhetoric, and the fluent ‘catchiness’ is the product of superb control. Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and The Seven Seas belong to the nineteenth century (1886, 1892, 1896), and The Five Nations and The Years Between to the twentieth (1903, 1919). At his best his poems have an ingratiating comeliness evident in the gently archaized minstrelsy that is practised between the chapters of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies. Kipling addresses himself to a mass public in racy ballads and in more cultivated if scarcely less hearty experiments in rhythmic facility such as ‘The Flowers’. This poem might stand as a sample of Kipling’s flair for rolling out the right words and leaving his artefact shipshape. The repeated chorus, ‘Buy my English posies! /Kent and Surrey May’, knits together an imperial nosegay; for the refrains interlock with quatrains of stirring seven-footers, devoted in turn to Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and concluding: Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas; Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these! Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land— Masters of the Seven seas, O, love and understand.

With Kipling we take dignified leave of Victorian poetry. He is a fit man to ring down a curtain. At the individual or public level, hand on shoulder as in ‘If’ (‘You’ll be a man, my son’), or head bowed as in ‘Recessional’ (‘God of our fathersBLest we forget, lest we forget!’), Kipling makes the most of standard moral and emotional postures, and is wise enough not to outreach himself. -300- NOTES: 1. Tennyson, In Memoriam, Annotated by the Author (1905). 2. Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Macmillan, 1917, p. 139. 3. Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, p. 93. 4. Derek Patmore, Portrait of my Family, Cassell, 1935.

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9.1. Elizabeth Browning

BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett Columbia Encyclopedia Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806–61, English poet, b. Durham. A delicate and precocious child, she spent a great part of her early life in a state of semi-invalidism. She read voraciously — philosophy, history, literature — and she wrote verse. In 1838 the Barrett family moved to 50 Wimpole St., London. Six years later Elizabeth published Poems, which brought her immediate fame. The volume was a favorite of the poet Robert Browning, and he began to correspond with her. The two fell in love, but their courtship was secret because of the opposition of Elizabeth's tyrannical father. They married in Figure23. Elizabeth Browning Source: 1846 and traveled to Italy, where most of their http://wikis.lib.ncsu.edu/images/d/dd/ Ebb.jpg married life was spent and where their one son was born. Mrs. Browning threw herself into the cause of Italian liberation from Austria. "Casa Guidi," their home in Florence, is preserved as a memorial. Happy in her marriage, Mrs. Browning recovered her health in Italy, and her work as a poet gained in strength and significance. Her greatest poetry, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), was inspired by her own love story. Casa Guidi Windows (1851), on Italian liberty, and Aurora Leigh (1857), a novel in verse, followed. During her lifetime Mrs. Browning was considered a better poet than her husband. Today her life and personality excite more interest than her work. Although as a poet she has been criticized for diffuseness, pedantry, and sentimentality, she reveals in such poems as "The Cry of the Children" and some of the Sonnets from the Portuguese a highly individual gift for lyric poetry.

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Some poems of Elizabeth Browning

From SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

I Less absolute exclusion. "Nay" is worse I THOUGHT once how Theocritus had From God than from all others, O my sung friend! Of the sweet years, the dear and Men could not part us with their worldly wished — for years, jars, Who each one in a gracious hand -7- appears Nor the seas change us, nor the To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: tempests bend; And, as I mused it in his antique Our hands would touch for all the tongue, mountain-bars: I saw, in gradual vision through my And, heaven being rolled between us tears, at the end, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy We should but vow the faster for the years, stars. Those of my own life, who by turns -8- had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I III was 'ware, UNLIKE are we, unlike, O princely -5- Heart! weeping, how a mystic Shape did Unlike our uses and our destinies. move Our ministering two angels look Behind me, and drew me backward by surprise the hair; On one another, as they strike athwart And a voice said in mastery, while I Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink strove,— thee, art " Guess now who holds thee?"— A guest for queens to social "Death," I said. But, there, pageantries, The silver answer rang,—"Not Death, With gages from a hundred brighter but Love." eyes -6- Than tears even can make mine, to II play thy part Of chief musician. What hast thou to BUT only three in all God's universe do Have heard this word thou hast said,— With looking from the lattice-lights at Himself, beside me, Thee speaking, and me listening! and A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing replied through One of us ... that was God, ... and -9- laid the curse The dark, and leaning up a cypress So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce tree? My sight from seeing thee,—that if I The chrism is on thine head,—on mine, had died, the dew,— The deathweights, placed there, would And Death must dig the level where have signified these agree. 187

-10- To let thy music drop here unaware In folds of golden fulness at my door? IV Look up and see the casement broken THOU hast thy calling to some palace‐ in, floor, The bats and owlets builders in the Most gracious singer of high poems! roof! where -11- The dancers will break footing, from My cricket chirps against thy mandolin. the care Hush, call no echo up in further proof Of watching up thy pregnant lips for Of desolation! there 's a voice within more. That weeps ... as thou must sing And dost thou lift this house's latch too ... alone, aloof. poor -12- For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear

You can read most of Elizabeth Browning’s poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/elizabeth-barrett-browning/; you can also listen to some of her poems in http://www.learnoutloud.com/Results/Author/Elizabeth- Barrett-Browning/306#play35099

9.2. Robert Browning

BROWNING, Robert Columbia Encyclopedia Robert Browning 1812–89, English poet. His remarkably broad and sound education was primarily the work of his artistic and scholarly parents — in particular his father, a London bank clerk of independent means. Pauline, his first poem, was published anonymously in 1833. In 1834 he visited Italy, which eventually became his second homeland. He won some recognition with Paracelsus (1835) and Sordello (1840). In 1837, urged by William Macready, the Shakespearean actor, Browning began writing for the stage. Although not especially successful, he wrote eight verse plays during the next nine years, two of which were produced — Strafford in 1837 and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1843. The narrative poem Pippa Passes appeared in 1841; it and subsequent poems were later published collectively as Bells and Pomegranates (1846). Included were "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," both dramatic monologues; this form proved to be the ideal medium for Browning's poetic genius. Other notable poems of this kind are "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," and "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." In 1846, after a romantic courtship, Browning secretly married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and took her 188

to Italy, where they lived for 15 happy years. There he wrote Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855). In 1861, after the death of his wife, he returned to England, where he wrote Dramatis Personae (1864). This was followed by what is considered his masterpiece, the murder story The Ring and the Book (4 vol., 1868– 69). Set in 17th-century Italy, the poem reveals, through a series of dramatic dialogues, how a single event — a murder — is perceived by different people. Browning gained recognition slowly, but after the Figure 24. Robert Browning," oil on canvas, publication of this work he was acclaimed a by Michele Gordigiani Source: great poet. Societies were instituted for the http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robe rt_Browning_by_Michele_Gordigiani_1858.j study of his work in England and America. pg His later works include Dramatic Idyls (2 vol., 1879–80) and Asolando (1889). Browning's thought is persistently optimistic. He believed in commitment to life. His psychological portraits in verse, ironic and indirect in presentation, and his experiments in diction and rhythm have made him an important influence on 20th-century poetry. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Some poems of Robert Browning

From MEN AND WOMEN

XLII 2 LOVE AMONG THE RUINS Was the site once of a city great and gay, 1 (So they say) WHERE the quiet-coloured end of Of our country's very capital, its prince evening smiles Ages since, Miles and miles Held his court in, gathered councils, On the solitary pastures where our wielding far sheep Peace or war. Half-asleep

Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop 3 As they crop-- Now — the country does not even boast a tree, 189

As you see, While the patching houseleek's head of To distinguish slopes of verdure, blossom winks certain rills Through the chinks-- From the hills Intersect and give a name to, (else 8 they run Marks the basement whence a tower in Into one) ancient time Sprang sublime, 4 And a burning ring all round, the Where the domed and daring palace chariots traced shot its spires As they raced, Up like fires And the monarch and his minions and O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall his dames Bounding all, Viewed the games. Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest, 9 Twelve abreast. And I know, while thus the quiet- -341- coloured eve Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling 5 fleece And such plenty and perfection, see, of In such peace, grass And the slopes and rills in Never was! undistinguished grey Such a carpet as, this summer-time, Melt away— o'erspreads

And embeds Every vestige of the city, guessed 10 alone, That a girl with eager eyes and yellow Stock ot stone-- hair Waits me there In the turret, whence the charioteers 6 caught soul Where a multitude of men breathed joy For the goal, and woe When the king looked, where she looks Long ago; now, breathless, dumb Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, Till I come. dread of shame Strck them tame; -342- And that glory and that shame alike, 11 the gold But he looked upon the city, every Bought and sold. side, Far and wide, 7 All the mountains topped with temples, Now,— the single little turret that all the glades' remains Colonnades, On the plains, All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,— By the caper overrooted, by the gourd and then, Overscored, All the men!

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12 When I do come, she will speak not, 2 she will stand, Sixteen years old when she died! Either hand Perhaps she had scarcely heard my On my shoulder, give her eyes the first name— embrace It was not her time to love: beside, Of my face, Her life had many a hope and aim, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight Duties enough and little cares, and speech And now was quiet, now astir— Each on each. Till God's hand beckoned unawares, And the sweet white brow is all of her. 13 In one year they sent a million fighters 3 forth Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope? South and north, What, your soul was pure and true, And they built their gods a brazen pillar The good stars met in your horoscope, high Made you of spirit, fire and dew— As the sky, And just because I was thrice as old, Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full And our paths in the world diverged so force— wide, Gold, of course. Each was nought to each, must I be told? 14 We were fellow mortals, nought Oh, heart! oh, blood that freezes, blood beside? that burns! -348- Earth's returns 4 For whole centuries of folly, noise and No, indeed! for God above sin! Is great to grant, as mighty to make, Shut them in, And creates the love to reward the With their triumphs and their glories love,— and the rest. I claim you still, for my own love's sake! Love is best! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, -343- Through worlds I shall traverse, not a (…) few— Much is to learn and much to forget XLIV Ere the time be come for taking you. EVELYN HOPE 1 5 BEAUTIFUL Evelyn Hope is dead! But the time will come,—at last it will, Sit and watch by her side an hour. When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I That is her book-shelf, this her bed; shall say, She plucked that piece of geranium- In the lower earth, in the years long flower, still, Beginning to die too, in the glass. That body and soul so pure and gay? Little has yet been changed, I think— Why your hair was amber, I shall The shutters are shut, no light may divine, pass And your mouth of your own Save two long rays thro' the hinge's geranium's red— chink. 191

And what you would do with me, in All be as before, Love, fine, — Only sleep! In the new life come in the old one's stead. 2 What so wild as words are? 6 — I and thou I have lived, I shall say, so much since In debate, as birds are then, Hawk on bough! Given up myself so many times, Gained me the gains of various men, 3 Ransacked the ages, spoiled the See the creature stalking climes; While we speak— Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full Hush and hide the talking, scope, Cheek on cheek! Either I missed or itself missed me— And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! 4 What is the issue? let us see! What so false as truth is,

False to thee? 7 Where the serpent's tooth is, I loved you, Evelyn, all the while; Shun the tree— My heart seemed full as it could hold— There was place and to spare for the 5 frank young smile Where the apple reddens And the red young mouth and the Never pry— hair's young gold. Lest we lose our Edens, So, hush,— Eve and I! I will give you this leaf to keep— See, I shut it inside the sweet cold 6 hand. Be a god and hold me There, that is our secret I go to sleep; With a charm— You will wake, and remember, and Be a man and fold me understand. With thine arm!

-349- 7 (…) Teach me, only teach, Love! XLVI As I ought A WOMAN'S LAST WORD I will speak thy speech, Love, 1 Think thy thought-- LET'S contend no more, Love, -353- Strive nor weep—

If you are interested, you can read most of Robert Browning’s poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/robert-browning/; you can also listen to his own voice reading one of his poems in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYot5- WuAjE; or listen to other poems in http://www.learnoutloud.com/Results/Author/Robert-Browning/1473#play35032

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9.3. Christina Rossetti

ROSSETTI, Christina Georgina Columbia Encyclopedia Christina Georgina Rossetti (roset´e), 1830–94, English poet; sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Publication of some of her poems in her brother William's magazine the Germ was her only contribution to Pre-Raphaelite activities. She was a devout Anglican and lived the last 15 years of her life as a recluse in her home. Many of her poems are religious, some melancholy and death-obsessed, e.g., "Uphill" and "When I Am Dead, My Dearest." Possessing a spontaneous lyrical gift, she had a firm command of Figure 25. Christina Rossetti Source: traditional poetic forms. Much of her work shows a http://gallimaufry.typepad.com /.a/6a014e5fb9e8aa970c0177 marked moral intelligence and independence of spirit, 448e680e970d-pi and she is recognized as an important Victorian-era poet. Her simple songs, especially in Sing-Song (1872), were favorites with children. Her volumes of poetry include Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), probably her best work; The Prince's Progress (1866); and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).

Some poems of Christina Rossetti

DREAM LAND WHERE sunless rivers weep Rest, rest, a perfect rest Their waves into the deep, Shed over brow and breast; She sleeps a charmèd sleep: Her face is toward the west, Awake her not. The purple land. 20 Led by a single star, She cannot see the grain She came from very far Ripening on hill and plain; To seek where shadows are She cannot feel the rain Her pleasant lot. Upon her hand. -22- She left the rosy morn, Rest, rest, for evermore She left the fields of corn, 10 Upon a mossy shore; For twilight cold and lorn Rest, rest at the heart's core And water springs. Till time shall cease: Through sleep, as through a veil, Sleep that no pain shall wake, She sees the sky look pale, Night that no morn shall break 30 And hears the nightingale Till joy shall overtake That sadly sings. Her perfect peace. 193

Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a AT HOME glow, WHEN I was dead, my spirit turned Flushed to the yellow hair and finger- To seek the much-frequented house: tips; I passed the door, and saw my friends And one there sang who soft and Feasting beneath green orange smooth as snow boughs; Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a From hand to hand they pushed the show; wine, And one was blue with famine after They sucked the pulp of plum and love, peach; Who like a harpstring snapped rang They sang, they jested, and they harsh and low laughed, The burden of what those were singing For each was loved of each. of. 8 -24- I listened to their honest chat: One shamed herself in love; one Said one: ' To-morrow we shall be 10 temperately Plod plod along the featureless sands Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish And coasting miles and miles of sea.' wife; Said one : ' Before the turn of tide One famished died for love. Thus two We will achieve the eyrie-seat.' of three Said one : ' To-morrow shall be like Took death for love and won him after To-day, but much more sweet.' strife; -23- One droned in sweetness like a ' To-morrow,' said they, strong with fattened bee: hope, All on the threshold, yet all short of life. And dwelt upon the pleasant way: ' To-morrow,' cried they one and all, LOVE FROM THE NORTH While no one spoke of yesterday. 20 I HAD a love in soft south land, Their life stood full at blessed noon; Beloved through April far in May; I, only I, had passed away: He waited on my lightest breath, ' To-morrow and to-day,' they cried; And never dared to say me nay. I was of yesterday. He saddened if my cheer was sad, I shivered comfortless, but cast But gay he grew if I was gay; No chill across the tablecloth; We never differed on a hair, I all-forgotten shivered, sad My yes his yes, my nay his nay. To stay and yet to part how loth: I passed from the familiar room, The wedding hour was come, the I who from love had passed away, 30 aisles Like the remembrance of a guest Were flushed with sun and flowers that That tarrieth but a day. day; I pacing balanced in my thoughts: 11 A TRIAD 'It's quite too late to think of nay.'—

My bridegroom answered in his turn, SONNET Myself had almost answered ' yea:' THREE sang of love together: one with When through the flashing nave I lips heard A struggle and resounding 'nay.' 194

-25- In which I will not say thee nay.' Bridemaids and bridegroom shrank in fear, He took me in his strong white arms, But I stood high who stood at bay: He bore me on his horse away 'And if I answer yea, fair Sir, O'er crag, morass, and hairbreadth What man art thou to bar with nay? 20 pass, But never asked me yea or nay. He was a strong man from the north, He made me fast with book and bell, Light-locked, with eyes of dangerous With links of love he makes me stay;30 grey: Till now I've neither heart nor power 'Put yea by for another time Nor will nor wish to say him nay. -26-

If you want, you can read most of Christina Rossetti’s poems in http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/rossetti_christina.html; you can also listen to her famous Goblin Market in http://literalsystems.org/abooks/index.php/Audiobook/GoblinMarket and some of her other poems in http://archive.org/details/selected_poems_rossetti_lw_librivox

9.4. Gerard Manley Hopkins

HOPKINS, Gerard Manley Columbia Encyclopedia Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844–89, English poet, educated at Oxford. Entering the Roman Catholic Church in 1866 and the Jesuit novitiate in 1868, he was ordained in 1877. Upon becoming a Jesuit he burned much of his early verse and abandoned the writing of poetry. However, the sinking in 1875 of a German ship carrying five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany, inspired him to write one of his most impressive poems "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Thereafter he produced his best poetry, including Figure 26. Gerard Manley "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "The Leaden Hopkins Source: Echo," and "The Golden Echo." Since Hopkins never http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Manley_Hopkins.jpg gave permission for the publication of his verse, his Poems, edited by his friend Robert Bridges, did not appear in print until 1918. His life was continually troubled by inner conflict, which arose, not from religious skepticism, but from an inability to give himself completely to his God. Both his poems and his 195

letters often reflect an intense dissatisfaction with himself as a poet and as a servant of God. Though he produced a small body of work, he ranks high among English poets, and his work profoundly influenced 20th-century poetry. His verse is noted for its piercing intensity of language and its experiments in prosody. Of these experiments the most famous is "sprung rhythm," a meter in which Hopkins tried to approximate the rhythm of everyday speech.

Some poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

13 I never promised such persistency In its condition. No, the tropic tree

Has not a charter that its sap shall last WHERE art thou friend, whom I shall n

ever see, Into all seasons, though no Winter cast Conceiving whom I must conceive The happy leafing. It is so with me: amiss? My love is less, my love is less for Or sunder'd from my sight in the age thee. that is I cease the mourning and the abject Or far-off promise of a time to be; fast,

Thou who canst best accept the And rise and go about my works again certainty And, save by darting accidents, forget. That thou hadst borne proportion in my But ah! if you could understand how bliss, then That likest in me either that or this,—

Oh! even for the weakness of the plea That less is heavens higher even yet

Than treble-fervent more of other men, That I have taken to plead with,— if the Even your unpassion'd eyelids might sound be wet. Of God's dear pleadings have as yet

not moved thee, — And for those virtues I in thee have (ii) found, I must feed Fancy. Show me any one That reads or holds the astrologic lore, Who say that had I known I had And I'll pretend the credit given of yore; approved thee, — And let him prove my passion was For these, make all the virtues to begun abound, — No, but for Christ who hath foreknown In the worst hour that's measured by and loved thee. the sun, With such malign conjunctions as -22- before 14 No influential heaven ever wore; The Beginning of the End That no recorded devilish thing was (i) done My love is lessened and must soon be past. With such a seconding, nor Saturn took 196

Such opposition to the Lady-star With fiercer weepings of these In the most murderous passage of his desperate eyes book; For poor love's failure than his hopeless rise. And I'll love my distinction: Near or far But now I am so tired I soon shall send He says his science helps him not to look Barely a sigh to thought of hopes At hopes so evil-heaven'd as mine are. forgone. -23- Is this made plain? What have I come across (iii) That here will serve me for You see that I have come to passion's comparison? end; The sceptic disappointment and the This means you need not fear the loss storms, the cries, A boy feels when the poet he pores up That gave you vantage when you on would despise: Grows less and less sweet to him, and My bankrupt heart has no more tears knows no cause. to spend.

-24- Else I am well assured I should offend

If you want, you can read most of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems in http://www.bartleby.com/122/; you can also listen to some of his poems in http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video/Literature/Poetry/Poems-of- Gerard-Manley-Hopkins/35036#plink

9.5. Alfred Tennyson

Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Columbia Encyclopedia Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, 1st Baron (ten´Is!n), 1809–92, English poet. The most famous poet of the Victorian age, he was a profound spokesman for the ideas and values of his times. Early Life and Works Tennyson was the son of an intelligent but unstable clergyman in Lincolnshire. His early literary attempts included a play, The Devil and the Lady, composed at 14, and poems written with his brothers Frederick and Charles but entitled Poems by Two Brothers (1827). In his three years at Cambridge, Tennyson wrote a prizewinning poem, Timbuctoo (1829), and Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and began his close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian Henry Hallam. 197

Upon the death of his father in 1831, Tennyson became responsible for the family and its precarious finances. His volume Poems (1832) included some of his most famous pieces, such as "The Lotus-Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "The Lady of Shalott." In 1833 he was overwhelmed by the sudden death of Hallam. Mature Works and Later Life Tennyson's next published work, Poems (1842), expressed his philosophic doubts in a materialistic, increasingly scientific age and his longing for a sustaining faith. The new poems Figure 27. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, photographed by Lewis Carroll included "Locksley Hall," "Ulysses," "Morte Source: d'Arthur," and "Break, Break, Break." With this http://georgemacdonald.info/lord_alfred _tennyson_photo_by_carroll.jpg book he was acclaimed a great poet, and in addition, he was granted an annual government pension of £200 in 1845. The Princess (1847) was followed in 1850 by the masterful In Memoriam, an elegy sequence that records Tennyson's years of doubt and despair after Hallam's death and culminates in an affirmation of immortality. The same year saw his appointment as poet laureate and his marriage to Emily Sellwood, whom he had courted since 1836 but had been unable to marry because of his precarious financial position. Occasional poems, such as the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1855), were part of his duties as laureate. The first group of Idylls of the King appeared in 1859; it was expanded in 1869 and 1872, and in 1885 Tennyson added the final poem. He arranged the 12 poems chronologically in 1888 to constitute a somber ethical epic of the glory and the downfall of King Arthur. In the Arthurian legend, Tennyson projected his vision of the hollowness of his own civilization. Included among his other works are Maud (1855), a "monodrama"; Enoch Arden (1864); several poetic dramas, most notably Becket (1879; produced 1893); Ballads and Other Poems (1880); and Demeter and Other Poems (1889), which contained "Crossing the Bar." 198

Tennyson passed his last years in comfort. In 1883 he was created a peer and occupied a seat in the House of Lords. Throughout much of his life he was a popular as well as critical success and was venerated by the general public. Unappreciated early in the 20th cent., Tennyson has since been recognized as a great poet, notable for his mastery of technique, his superb use of sensuous language, and his profundity of thought.

Some poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

LOVE AND DEATH My hope and heart is with thee--thou wilt be First printed in 1830. A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest To scare church-harpies from the What time the mighty moon was master's feast; gathering light Our dusted velvets have much need of Love paced the thymy plots of thee: Paradise, Thou art no Sabbath-drawler of old And all about him roll'd his lustrous saws, eyes; Distill'd from some worm-canker'd When, turning round a cassia, full in homily; view But spurr'd at heart with fieriest energy Death, walking all alone beneath a To embattail and to wall about thy yew, cause And talking to himself, first met his With iron-worded proof, hating to hark sight: The humming of the drowsy pulpit- "You must begone," said Death, "these drone walks are mine". Half God's good sabbath, while the Love wept and spread his sheeny vans worn-out clerk for flight; Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from Yet ere he parted said, "This hour is a throne thine; Mounted in heaven wilt shoot into the Thou art the shadow of life, and as the dark tree Arrows of lightnings. I will stand and Stands in the sun and shadows all mark. beneath, So in the light of great eternity THE LADY OF SHALOTT Life eminent creates the shade of death; First published in 1833. The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, PART I But I shall reign for ever over all". On either side the river lie SONNET TO J. M. K. Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; First printed in 1830 And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; 199

And up and down the people go, Shadows of the world appear. Gazing where the lilies blow There she sees the highway near Round an island there below, Winding down to Camelot: The island of Shalott. There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-churls, Willows whiten, aspens quiver, And the red cloaks of market girls, Little breezes dusk and shiver Pass onward from Shalott. Thro' the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, Flowing down to Camelot. An abbot on an ambling pad, Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, Overlook a space of flowers, Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad, And the silent isle imbowers Goes by to tower'd Camelot; The Lady of Shalott. And sometimes thro' the mirror blue By the margin, willow-veil'd The knights come riding two and two: Slide the heavy barges trail'd She hath no loyal knight and true, By slow horses; and unhail'd The Lady of Shalott. The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd Skimming down to Camelot: But in her web she still delights But who hath seen her wave her hand? To weave the mirror's magic sights, Or at the casement seen her stand? For often thro' the silent nights Or is she known in all the land, A funeral, with plumes and lights, The Lady of Shalott? And music, went to Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead, Only reapers, reaping early Came two young lovers lately wed; In among the bearded barley, "I am half-sick of shadows," said Hear a song that echoes cheerly The Lady of Shalott. From the river winding clearly, Down to tower'd Camelot: PART III And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, Listening, whispers "'Tis the fairy He rode between the barley sheaves, Lady of Shalott". The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, PART II And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. There she weaves by night and day A redcross knight for ever kneel'd A magic web with colours gay. To a lady in his shield, She has heard a whisper say, That sparkled on the yellow field, A curse is on her if she stay Beside remote Shalott. To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the 'curse' may The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, be, Like to some branch of stars we see And so she weaveth steadily, Hung in the golden Galaxy. And little other care hath she, The bridle bells rang merrily The Lady of Shalott. As he rode down to Camelot: And from his blazon'd baldric slung And moving thro' a mirror clear A mighty silver bugle hung, That hangs before her all the year, And as he rode his armour rung, 200

Beside remote Shalott. With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot. All in the blue unclouded weather And at the closing of the day Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle- She loosed the chain, and down she leather, lay; The helmet and the helmet-feather The broad stream bore her far away, Burn'd like one burning flame together, The Lady of Shalott. As he rode down to Camelot. As often thro' the purple night, Lying, robed in snowy white Below the starry clusters bright, That loosely flew to left and right-- Some bearded meteor, trailing light, The leaves upon her falling light-- Moves over still Shalott. Thro' the noises of the night His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd; She floated down to Camelot; On burnish'd hooves his war-horse And as the boat-head wound along trode; The willowy hills and fields among, From underneath his helmet flow'd They heard her singing her last song, His coal-black curls as on he rode, The Lady of Shalott. As he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river Heard a carol, mournful, holy, He flashed into the crystal mirror, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, "Tirra lirra," by the river Till her blood was frozen slowly, Sang Sir Lancelot. And her eyes were darken'd wholly, Turn'd to tower'd Camelot; She left the web, she left the loom; For ere she reach'd upon the tide She made three paces thro' the room, The first house by the water-side, She saw the water-lily bloom, Singing in her song she died, She saw the helmet and the plume, The Lady of Shalott. She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; Under tower and balcony, The mirror crack'd from side to side; By garden-wall and gallery, "The curse is come upon me," cried A gleaming shape she floated by, The Lady of Shalott. Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot. PART IV Out upon the wharfs they came, Knight and burgher, lord and dame, In the stormy east-wind straining, And round the prow they read her The pale yellow woods were waning, name, The broad stream in his banks 'The Lady of Shalott' complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Who is this? and what is here? Over tower'd Camelot; And in the lighted palace near Down she came and found a boat Died the sound of royal cheer; Beneath a willow left afloat, And they cross'd themselves for fear, And round about the prow she wrote All the knights at Camelot: 'The Lady of Shalott.' But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, "She has a lovely face; And down the river's dim expanse-- God in his mercy lend her grace, Like some bold seër in a trance, The Lady of Shalott". Seeing all his own mischance--

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If you want, you can read most of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems in http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/; you can also listen to The Lady of Shalott in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUuZBXNw0O8

10. Twentieth Century Poetry

10.1. The Georgian poets and the two World Wars 1898-1945: Hardy to Auden George H. Gilpin "My mother had a Tennyson; her present parallel would not possess Eliot or Auden." Sir Frederic J. Osborn The canon of English poetry since the Renaissance, as established by the High Victorian Francis Palgrave in his selections for The Golden Treasury (1861), had "a certain unity"; he divided his anthology "Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language" into "Books of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth." If Palgrave had continued his canon into his own time, he would most certainly have added a "Book of Tennyson” — the friend to whom his collection was dedicated. Palgrave's mid-nineteenth-century assumptions remained explicitly turn-of-the- century Romantic — tradition defined as "natural growth," and canon understood on the basis of Shelley's Neoplatonic ideal of "'that great Poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.'" A hundred years later — by the time Palgrave's nineteenth-century selection had been supplemented by Philip Larkins's twentieth-century one in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973) — another book had been added to the English canon that could be called the "Book of Hardy." For the generation of poets like Larkin who came of age after World War II, it was Thomas Hardy, and not W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound, who seemed central — again — to the English canon. Between the world wars, the figures of the international Modernist movement, particularly Eliot through his essays, aggressively attempted to displace Hardy and the English tradition from the literary mainstream (a dis -532- placement that still continues in the anthologies presented to students by scholars with a Modernist bias), but Larkin, who declared Hardy's Collected Poems "the best body of poetic work this century has to show," allotted the most poems in his Oxford 202

anthology to Hardy and acknowledged how the model for his own poetry had shifted to him from Yeats: "Hardy taught me to feel rather than to write — of course one has to use one's own language and one's own jargon and one's own situations and he taught one as well to have confidence in what one felt." Donald Davie, speaking for the poets of this postwar generation — seen by the mid-1950s to be "the Movement" — thought that "in British poetry of the last fifty years (as not in American) the most far-reaching influence, for good or ill, has not been Yeats, still less Eliot and Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy." The revival of Hardy's reputation by Larkin and "the Movement" was a reaffirmation of a tradition of interrelated insular and Romantic attitudes quintessentially English: observation over participation, self-absorption over reaching out, withdrawal over involvement, nature over art, simplicity over complexity, the old- fashioned over the modern, naïveté over sophistication — most of all, the personal voice of a Wordsworth over the impersonal one of an Eliot. During the first two decades of the century these qualities continued to be expressed in work by a group of poets known as the "Georgians," whose models came from Palgrave's English canon; these poets regularly published in popular anthologies entitled Georgian Poetry and edited by Edward Marsh. D. H. Lawrence, reviewing the first volume of 1911-1912, found it to be a healthy antidote to the nightmare world of early Modernism: "This collection is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams. The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people — Ibsen, Flaubert, Hardy — represent the dreams we are waking from. It was a dream of demolition." To include Hardy among the founders of the movement of intellectual pessimism that stirred in Europe at the turn of the century and continued between the world wars is to acknowledge the disturbing, dark anxiety about the state of civilization that underlies and shapes the best poetry of the twentieth century, both traditional and Modernist. Indeed, expression of a sense of crisis in modern history had begun with Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800). Fearing that his own violent Age of Revolution, in which "the multitude of causes, unknown -533- in former times … now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind," might overwhelm poetic creativity, he argued for stylistic clarity, for "a selection of language really used by men," and for the retention of rhyme and 203

meter as a kind of formal frame "in tempering the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions." While in the twentieth century the Moderns expressed this anxiety about the state of civilization in a style that became increasingly difficult and obscure, the poets of the English tradition coped with and consciously expressed the same anxiety by retaining Romantic strategies. Because of the propaganda of the Modernists, the Georgians constitute a lost generation in the history of twentieth-century English poetry. Yet, along with Hardy, the Georgians liberated English poetry from the stultifying conventions of flowery, archaic diction and constant moralizing of the late Victorians; as post-Darwinians, they could engage poetically with the bloody violence and fateful brutality of nature. Edmund Gosse, in reviewing Marsh's 1911-1912 collection of Georgian poetry, acknowledged this engagement by finding that these poets "exchange the romantic, the sentimental, the fictive conception of literature, for an ingenuousness, sometimes a violence, almost a rawness in the approach to life itself." Hence, the poetic world of W. H. Davies has the pessimism of Blake's Songs of Experience in which the imagery of innocence becomes twisted by predatory violence. In "The Villain" description of a delightful pastoral evening closes with this disturbing image: I turned my head and saw the wind Not far from where I stood, Dragging the corn by her golden hair, Into a dark and lonely wood.

The emaciated corpse of a four month old baby haunts the coroner at "The Inquest" with the refrain, And I could see that child's one eye Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee: What caused my death you'll never know — Perhaps my mother murdered me'; and from the point of view of "The Rat" an old woman, abandoned at home while her husband drinks, her daughter flirts, and her son taunts a lame cobbler, is a victim ready for sacrifice: -534- 'Now with these teeth that powder stones, I'll pick at one of her cheek-bones: When husband, son and daughter come, They'll soon see who was left at home.'

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Innocence lost to survival of the fittest is chronicled in "A Woman's History," in which Mary Price at five years old loses her pet bird and "called her friends to pray to God, / And sing sad hymns for hours"; at fifteen loses her virginity and marries "With no more love-light in her eyes / Than in the glass eyes other doll"; at thirty-five mourns her dead husband while "neighbors winked to see the tears / Fall on a lover's neck"; and Now, Mary Price is seventy-five And skinning eels alive: She, active, strong, and full of breath, Has caught the cat that stole an eel, And beaten it to death.

Another Georgian, Edmund Blunden, captures the decay and violence of a world of survival in his naturalistic "Malefactors." The observer in the poem addresses the remains of two predators, a kite and a stoat, nailed to the boards of an old, abandoned mill; he speculates on how they were killed by the miller for their intrusion, and then meditates on Time's "revenge" — "the wheel at tether, / The miller gone, the white planks rotten, / The very name of the mill forgotten" — and on the criminality of a fallen world that links man and beast in their mortality. The observer asks, can "There lurk some crime in man, / In man you executioner, / Whom here Fate's cudgel battered down?" Thus, the Georgians in their tragic renderings of natural and human life imagine a cynicism and harshness about the nature of reality that the suffering and death of the First World War confirmed. Indeed, the poets who went to war in 1914 were Georgians, and the death of one of the founders of the movement, Rupert Brooke, became the defining tragedy of the literary generation. Brooke became famous before the war for poems like "The Old Vicarage", Grantchester (Cafe des Westens, Berlin, 1912)," which in celebrating the speaker's longing to escape decadent Europe and recover the purity of home, seems to express the very provincialism that the Modernists abhorred in Georgian poetry: "Here I am sweating, sick, and hot, / And there the shadowed waters fresh / Lean to embrace the naked flesh." Yet, there is a -535- Byronic tone of self-mockery about the English and their heritage in Brooke's poem that would have been more obvious if it had retained its original title, "The Sentimental Exile." This irony, reinforced by the forced rhyming of couplets, is evident in Brooke's catalogue of his literary ancestors, starting with Byron: 205

Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by and in his sardonic treatment of the virtues of village life: In Grantchester their skins are white; They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought. They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told).

But the war took Brooke a long way from Grantchester and turned his mood from playfulness to patriotism; as a result, he is commemorated as a soldier-poet of war sonnets. In the sestet of one of his most famous, "The Soldier," the speaker contemplates death: And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

When Brooke died in 1915 of disease on a troopship bound for Gallipoli, Winston Churchill wrote of him in The Times: "The thoughts to which he gave expression … will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hard -536- est, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself." Receiving recognition of this kind, Brooke took a place among the legendary poets who have died in their prime — Chatterton for the Romantics, Keats for the Victorians, Brooke for the Georgians. Other Georgian poets approached the horror and violence of world war either with Darwinian cynicism about sacrifice and death or a Coleridgean sense of the 206

nightmare wrought from mankind's violation of the order and beauty of nature. For Edward Thomas, whose poetic career began at the time of the war and who died on the western front, war presented seasons of despair: The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead, Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed. ("The Cherry Trees") It is enough To smell, to crumble the dark earth, While the robin sings over again Sad songs of Autumn mirth. ("Digging")

Far more bitter, twice-wounded Siegfried Sassoon wrote wartime poems on the model of Blake's Songs of Experience, attacking the authorities and their patriotic and sentimental clichés. "The General" greets his troops with smiling "good- mornings" before sending them to destruction with "his plan of attack." "They" presents a Blakean dialogue between a Bishop's naive and abstract pieties about "the boys" who fight "the last attack on Anti-Christ" and who will "not be the same" spiritually and the realistic and specific voices of "the boys" themselves: "We're none of us the same!" the boys reply. For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind; Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die; And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find A chap who's served that hasn't found some change." And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!" -537- One of those killed in the trenches, Isaac Rosenberg, wrote vividly and honestly of the surreal experiences of soldiers on the western front: the "queer sardonic rat" amid the poppies at "Break of Day in the Trenches," naked soldiers, "Nudes — stark and glistening, / Yelling in lurid glee," engaged in "Louse Hunting," the wheels of caissons crunching bones and faces of the newly killed in "Dead Man's Dump." For Wilfred Owen, who met Sassoon while being treated for shell shock, the hell of the war is essentially emotional and psychological rather than physical. The real horror, he writes in "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo," comes from thought and understanding of one's condition in war, "Where death becomes absurd and life absurder." "Insensibility" speaks of the loss of not only feeling and compassion but imagination 207

and mind in battle. And terror at the loss of mind is summed up in the plight of poor Jim told in dialect in "The Chances": 'e's livin' an' 'e's not; 'E reckoned 'e'd five chances, an' 'e'ad; 'E's wounded, killed, and pris'ner, all the lot, The bloody lot all rolled in one. Jim's mad.

For the "Disabled" confined to a wheelchair in a hospital and awaiting an attendant to remember to put him to bed, the final hardship is the terrible indifference of fellow human beings that his condition brings, the loss of beauty and the possibility of warm affection; for the "blind, and three parts shell" who speaks in "A Terre (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)," it would be better to be dead and buried, "Pushing up daisies," as he recalls soldiers saying, than to live disabled, "dead-old," "a dug-out rat": "Friend, be very sure / I shall be better off with plants that share / More peaceably the meadow and the shower." Owen himself escaped both disability and madness; he was killed in action a week before the armistice. Some poets who survived continued to cope with their experiences long after the armistice. Ivor Gurney was wounded and gassed and was eventually confined for mental problems for the rest of his life. His were poems recounting times of quiet terror for the soldiers, moments of anticipation within the action when troops on the march notice the "sweet air" and experience "homethoughts soft coming," as they anticipate the barbwire and "ditches of heart-sick men" they will soon join at the front ("Towards Lillers"), or in "The Silent One," when a soldier quietly refuses to advance the line in the face of certain death: -538- "Do you think you might crawl through there: there's a hole." "I'm afraid not, Sir." There was no hole no way to be seen. Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied — Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes.

David Jones published in 1937 a retrospective epic on the war, combining poetry with prose to describe the experiences of an infantry unit from their arrival in France in December 1915 to their tragic discovery — bogged down a few months later at the western front in the Somme offensive — that the legendary role of the amateur soldier had been transformed by trench warfare of the twentieth century. As Jones writes in his preface: "July 1916 … roughly marks a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front. From then onward things hardened into a 208

more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the continuing, intimate, domestic life of small contingents of men. …" Only one (wounded) soldier of the English and Welsh unit survives at the end of Jones's epic, testimony to the terrible suffering and loss of a war in which 780,000 British troops were killed. Published in 1937 and entitled "In Parenthesis" — "I don't know between quite what," as Jones said — this epic effort commemorated the past war and anticipated the frightening, unknown violence of a second world war about to begin. Laurence Binyon, a Red Cross orderly too old for soldiering, predicted accurately in his poem "For the Fallen": "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn." Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum with special interests and competence in Oriental art (and in Blake), Binyon, like his friend T. Sturge Moore, dedicated his life to art, a Romantic vein of poetry, and poetic drama. After an almost continuous flow of lyrics on the sweetness of love in London and life abroad, he survived to ask, "Where lost we then, this peace?" Moore, looking to classical subjects and resorting often to awkwardly classical diction, only occasionally achieved the creative tension central to the aesthetics of his Armour for Aphrodite. In spite both of the involvement of many of the Georgians in the war and their poems expressing post-Darwinian naturalism, the movement became denounced as a "bloodless school" of pallid Romanticism. -539- While some poets who published in Georgian Poetry, like Lawrence and Robert Graves, remained influential and became associated with the Modernists, the Georgian movement could be declared "dead" (as it later was, by Laura Riding and Graves) for producing many poems that were too derivative and conventional to be memorable; the Romantic qualities could be easily mocked, as one wag did by asking, Have you even been on a walking tour? Do you make friends easily with dogs, poultry etc.? Are you easily exalted by natural objects? For Eliot and the Modernists, it was the Anglo-American movement of Imagism, rather than the Georgian movement, that afforded a stylistic transition away from the effusive late Victorians. English Imagists like T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Ford Madox 209

Ford, and Richard Aldington, along with their expatriate American colleagues, Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Pound, and Eliot, were fostering a movement contemporary with the Georgians but asserting classical restraint, clarity, and simplicity — usually in spare lyric poems and haiku that avoided ideas and narrative while expressing "momentary phases in the poet's mind" (according to Hulme) or "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (Pound). Along with vigorous debate of their movement in essays published in the "little magazines" of the mid- teens, anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets were published in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Ironically, then, while it was the so-called bloodless Georgians who engaged poetically — and personally — in the "bloody" tragedy of the time, the Imagists stylistically evaded issues of death and suffering, offering instead their superficial glances at the surfaces of things; Pound published his influential example of Imagism, "In a Station at the Metro"—"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough" — in 1916, as the tragic Somme offensive unfolded. Nevertheless, in essays published just after the First World War, Eliot, in the wake of Imagism and in an effort to make way for his own, Modernist style of verse, tried to bury — and did quite effectively smother for a while — the Georgian movement with its early nineteenth-century English roots: "England puts her Greater Writers away securely in a Safe Deposit Vault, and curls to sleep like Father. There they go rotten; … Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth (poets of assured though modest merit) … punish us from their grave with the annual -540- scourge of the Georgian Anthology." Pound and Wyndham Lewis declared emphatically that democracy had brought decay of language. Eliot wanted to replace the Romantics — and especially Wordsworth ("To remain with Wordsworth is equivalent to ignoring the whole of science subsequent to Erasmus Darwin") — with the Metaphysical Poets and the French symbolistes, as a source and model for poetry. He directly attacked Wordsworth's definitions of poetry and poetic diction (in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads): "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Against Wordsworth's emphasis on clear and natural poetry, Eliot asserted the syntactical complexity and "artificiality" of his own style of poetry: "Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. … The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to 210

dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. …" Eliot prescribed "town" poetry for a cosmopolitan elite in place of the accessible, familiar "country" poetry of the popular "Georgians." In his campaign against the established Georgians and their anthologies Eliot even praised the first volume of Wheels, edited by Edith Sitwell in 1916. Eliot called it "a more serious book" than the current volume of Marsh's Georgian Poetry, one that, like his own work, looked outside the English canon — to classical and European poetry, especially the French, for its sources: "Instead of rainbows, cuckoos, daffodils, and timid hares, they give us garden-gods, guitars and mandolins … they have extracted the juice from Verlaine and Laforgue." However, Eliot damned the Georgians with faint praise for the poets in Wheels, saying that "the book as a whole has a dilettante effect" and adding, in another review, "The poets who consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgement only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons." Certainly poetic extravagance and personal flamboyance identify the work of Sitwell, who, along with her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, published six volumes of Wheels between 1916 and 1921. In 1923, when she and Osbert introduced the poems in the volume Façade with a public performance in London, the two spoke through megaphones from behind masks on a curtain, accompanied by music composed by William Walton. One of the poems from Façade, "Hornpipe," begins, -541- Sailors come To the drum Out of Babylon; Hobby-horses Foam, the dumb Sky rhinoceros-glum

Such a style of free associations, mixed metaphors, and metrical experiments — rather than meditation and thought — mark Sitwell's work; Judgement Day is evoked in "The Shadow of Cain" through passages like this: There were great emerald thunders in the air In the violent Spring, the thunders of the sap and the blood in the heart —The Spiritual Light, the physical Revelation.

In the streets of the City of Cain there were great Rainbows 211

Of emeralds: the young people, crossing and meeting.

Focusing on Sitwell's effort to shake up the established Georgians, Eliot may have associated her work with that of the Modernists, but in introducing her Collected Poems (1957), Sitwell traces her wit and rebellion against literary custom to sources well within the English canon — to the energetic satire of poets like Christopher Smart and Blake. Moreover, when she proclaims her poems to be "hymns of praise to the glory of life," she is certainly fulfilling the ambition of a Romantic rather than a Modernist. Nevertheless, like most avant-garde art that startles the expectations of the audience, Sitwell's work continues to be considered evocative rather than significant. Hardy responds to harsh criticism like Eliot's — and Lawrence's — by defending his tradition, and implicitly, that of the Georgians, in an ironically entitled "Apology" for his Collected Poems (1922). He invokes the precedent of Wordsworth's "Preface" (itself an answer to critics) to speculate on causes for "the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day": "Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, 'a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation' (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age." Hardy sums up this cultural malaise as the rise of a new form of superstition in sharp contrast to his -542- own scientific Darwinian philosophy; referring to his "obstinate questionings" and "blank misgivings" (phrases borrowed from Wordsworth's Immortality Ode), he defends as philosophical the pessimism for which he had been criticized: "the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in the witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and 'the truth that shall make you free', men's minds appear … to be moving backwards rather than on." This seems to be a sweeping — although in light of the German aggression of the First World War allusive — rebuke to the Modernist zeitgeist of Nietzschean pessimism and disbelief and of fascination with the darker forces of the Freudian unconscious. Donald Davie associates it with Hardy's dismay as a "scientific humanist" at the ignorance of Modernists substituting 212

their own mythologies for philosophy or religious belief. Hardy's explicit Darwinian response to the issue of the loss of faith made him seem "Victorian" and old- fashioned, easy to dismiss by the advocates of "make it new" on their own terms, but his work would be returned to fashion in view of a century's appalling work by reactionary "witches." Molly Holden's poem "T. H." looks at Hardy's intermixture of peasant simplicity and keen irony, comparing him to a sly dog fox: I see now how much alike these Wessex creatures, fox and man, in their wariness were; for the latter also, despite his downcast eyes, saw everything he needed about his fellow-men and the world, marking it all upon the full-mapped country of his mind and memory.

In form, Hardy remains a poet of Romantic pastoral modes, of the ballad and lyric in the tradition of Wordsworth, of the elegy in the tradition of Coleridge, and of the music of dialect in the tradition of Burns; but in philosophy his Darwinian sense of chance and fate mitigates the Romantics' confidence in the design of nature as an expression of the Creator. The skepticism of his more scientific-minded antecedents, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats, has been honed through the dismay at an indifferent universe expressed by a believing Tennyson and an unbelieving Arnold into Hardy's "pessimism" in the face of an arbitrary and often tragic world. After all, Hardy chose to abandon fiction and to publish poems for the first time in 1898 — the very moment of awakening awareness of the imperial "heart of darkness" when the Victorian sense of confidence in civilization was being chal -543- lenged by violence in the Sudan and South Africa; he continued to write poetry through the horrible conflict of the European colonial powers in the First World War. In that sense, Hardy's 1898 volume, Wessex Poems, could be said to mark the beginning of the modern period in poetry. Yet Hardy's poems often focus on and convey--even celebrate in a Romantic's way — a sense of attachment to local place (the title of his first volume evoked the fictional name of the world of Dorset and southwest England of his novels). His poems express the desire to hold on to this sense of place amid fear of the displacing and trying destiny identified by personifications like "Crass Causality" or "Immanent Will" or "Sinister Spirit" that disrupt and destroy human lives. As a result, the landscape of Hardy's poetry is not that of Wordsworth's spring and summer lyrics but that of the winter cruelty of 213

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" and Keats's "Drear Nighted December" and "Upon Visiting the Tomb of Burns," a wasteland of "the God-cursed sun, and a tree, / And a pond edged with greyish leaves" ("Neutral Tones"), where even April hints of being a cruel month — "Say, on the noon when the half-sunny hours told that April was nigh, / And I upgathered and cast forth the snow from the crocus-border" (“In Tenebris" III). In such a place, the personal concern of the poet is to survive in a season of death — "Birds faint in dread: / I shall not lose old strength / In the lone frost's black length" ("In Tenebris" I). The irony that defines Hardy's poetry is that of Blake's innocence and experience; many poems are tales or personal anecdotes "showing contrary states of the human soul." This tragic human condition is expressed in the story of "Drummer Hodge," whose fate is to die in the Boer War and be buried "uncoffined" in Africa, in a place so alien to his native land that he could not even understand the place-names: Young Hodge the Drummer never knew-- Fresh from his Wessex home-- The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.

The poet's persona in most of Hardy's poems is still innocent enough to be in awe of the evidence of a terrible cosmic indifference and silence to human needs, even though he must accept this fate — it is a persona -544- created out of the elegiac voices of a Romantic who has lost faith in the renewing possibilities of nature (Coleridge in "Dejection: An Ode") and of a Victorian who is desperately reaching for love (Matthew Arnold in his "Marguerite" poems). These voices can be heard in the complaint of the octave of "Hap" — "If but some vengeful god would call to me / From up the sky" before causing loss and suffering — or the confusion of hearing the joyful voice of "The Darkling Thrush" in the midwinter of New Year's 1900, that marks for Hardy the turn of the century: So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 214

And I was unaware.

This is also the voice of sheer horror expressed in "The Convergence of the Twain" at the oblivious nature that buries the Titanic and the "vaingloriousness" of the civilization the ship represents: Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

In "Channel Firing," the sounds of war threaten the very idea of civilization, and Hardy relates his fear for his own world to that of other high moments of English civilization that have passed into legend: Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

In such a dangerous and evolving universe, Hardy finds philosophical consolation when the hills of home provide the momentary solace of a Wordsworthian landscape. He walks "Wessex Heights," for instance, to escape the "ghosts" of his haunting memories of personal loss: So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, -545- Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

Only in such fleeting moments in high, familiar places can Hardy join the Wordsworth of "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" in a close companionship within nature defined by a keen sense of place and a fleeting sense of serenity in knowledge of the self. Under the same cultural pressures, D. H. Lawrence's poetic treatment of nature narrowed from Hardy's panoramic sense of landscape in a Darwinian universe to a focus on vital, living details. Inevitably, Lawrence's early model was Hardy, but, as the titles for later collections suggest — Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and Pansies (1929) — his Romantic antecedents became the Immortality Ode (not "Tintern Abbey") of later Wordsworth and the odes of Keats and Shelley, lyrics in which natural details like a pansy (Wordsworth's "meanest flower that grows") or a 215

nightingale (Keats's "light-winged Dryad of the trees") or a wind ( Shelley's "Wild Spirit", which art moving everywhere") inspire meditation and philosophy. For Lawrence after the First World War — as for the Wordsworth after the rise of Napoleon — the focus of poetry must be these intense, immediate experiences of nature, as he explains in his introduction to New Poems (1918): "There is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. … There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened." In form, Lawrence affected a compromise with the English tradition using the style of the American Walt Whitman, discovering in "free verse" a clarity of diction combined with the expressive exuberance that allowed "the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The result is a poem like "Medlars and Sorb-Apples," in which sucking the decaying fruit evokes a sense of loss and loneliness of the fallen world, a literal tasting of "the flux of autumn," and, through references to the mythology of the Underworld of Dionysus and Orpheus, a sense — like Keats's — of eternal leave- taking: "Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell." The apples failing in "The Ship of Death" trigger brooding on the need to prepare for death — "A little ship, with oars and food / And little dishes, and all accoutrements / fitting and ready for the -546- departed soul," for a journey that will lead to "no port, there is nowhere to go" — yet the poem provides a kind of consolation by becoming the means to be "renewed with peace," even in contemplating that a "voyage of oblivion awaits you." Nevertheless, Lawrence's universe is one of frightening supernatural portents: bats replace swallows at nightfall to give an "uneasy creeping in one's scalp," and a snake that the poet attacks out of fear is found to be, like the infamous "albatross" of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, an inviolable sign of the potential for nightmare in the world of nature: "For he seemed to me again like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, / Now due to be crowned again." Lawrence's sense of the world seems finally still as much postlapsarian as post-Darwinian as he poetically explores myth, both classical and literary, as a means to understand the ambiguous dark forces of his age. For Robert Graves, another poet whose career began in the company of the Georgians, poetry was also to offer a healing vision in the face of the nightmare of 216

modern history that he had personally experienced in the First World War. His stated goal was "to help the recovery of public health of mind as well as my own by writing of 'therapeutic poems'"; initially he worked within the English tradition to present his healing topic, eros and love. These love poems range in topic from the playful phallicism of "Down, wanton, down!," Will many-gifted Beauty come Bowing to your bald rule of thumb Or love swear loyalty to your crown? to the frustration of courtship of "Not at Home," And yet I felt, when I turned slowly away, Her eyes boring my back, as it might be posted Behind a curtain slit, and still in love, to the grizzled veteran's desire for the female ideal in "The Face in the Mirror,"

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention, And once more ask him why He still stands ready, with a boy's presumption, To court the queen in her high silk pavilion. -547- Over time, Graves evolves a poet's mythology of hope and salvation centered around the celebration of an imagined female deity who rivals the terrible, dark "witches" of the neoclassical Modernists. His poem, "The White Goddess," begins by describing his search for this elusive and obscure female figure, whose erotic power threatens prevailing cultural values: All saints revile her, and all sober men Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean-- In scorn of which we sail to find her In distant regions likeliest to hold her Whom we desired above all things to know, Sister of the mirage and echo.

Eventually, Graves's literary quest for renewing vision during the course of history in the first half of the twentieth century culminates not in poetry but in a grand prose work of mythology called The White Goddess. The White Goddess is a work like the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads that Wordsworth wrote after the French Revolution and like the "Apology" that Hardy wrote after the First World War; Graves's narrative critiques the assumptions of modern culture and suggests a new understanding of the civilized for the era. His inspiration is the writer's compelling need under duress of the history of his times to 217

explain what has brought the disaster represented by World War II to civilization and to express, spontaneously and haphazardly, a radical new view to replace the old, dishonored one. Graves's creation of what he subtitled "a historical grammar of poetic myth" was an outpouring of syncretic mythologizing (he wrote the first version in a frenzy in six weeks); as such, it was part of the neo-Romantic movement that arose in the arts of the 1940s in reaction against the legacy of Modernism. Graves modestly claims his intention is only to recover the mythology necessary to reinspire poetry in his time: "My task in writing The White Goddess was to provide a grammar of poetic myth of poets, not to plan witches' Sabbaths, compose litanies and design vestments for a new orgiastic set, nor yet to preach matriarchy over a radio network." Like Yeats, in A Vision (1925), he is a poet merely needing to find and define metaphors for poetry, particularly his own, yet in the effort there is clearly higher aspiration. While not proclaiming a new religion, Graves, like Lawrence in his fiction, is affirming the Romantic desire to reclaim for civilization -548- Humane — and perhaps, humanizing--experiences of powerful feelings to confront the dominant, patriarchal rationalism of the modern age: The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But "nowadays"? it is now a reminder that he [man] has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought rain on himself and his family. "Nowadays" is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; race horse and grey-hound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to sawmill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as "auxiliary State personnel."

Like Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, which finds in old pastoral themes of the importance of nature and the simple life a basis for the renewal of the human spirit, Graves's "grammar" finds in old themes of the battle of the sexes, feminism and the relations of women and men, a new civilized beginning; it offers a vision of an ideal, the "golden age" of a matriarchal society, past and future, for which human beings should aspire. Wordsworth after long argument in his "Preface" states, 218

"The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man." In a similar vein Graves writes, "Certainly, I hold that critical notice should be taken of the Goddess, if only because poetry which deeply affects readers — pierces them to the heart, sends shivers down their spine, and makes their scalp crawl — cannot be written by Apollo's rhetoricians or scientists." Like Wordsworth, Graves is defending passion and ecstasy to a world dedicated to the cult of reason and death. He affirms the creative necessity of the female principle in society by asserting the mythology of the Goddess in response to what he perceives to be a dominant tradition of effete, masculine rationality. And he concludes: "The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian Classicists would have it." If Graves's vision of culture were to prevail, art would be restored to its proper role and civilization would be revived by the love of man and woman. Graves's concern, saving civilization, was the context for poetry of the English tradition between the world wars, and especially once the -549- Great Depression began. John Masefield had known and reported hard times from the beginning of the century. An admirer of Hardy and of the Romantics, Masefield had made his own way in book-length narratives of the last age of the sea under sail and of country life when individual character still seemed to determine events. Renewal of the once enormous popularity of such pungent narratives as Dauber and The Widow in the Bye Street has never quite come off, although he left, for after times as well as for his own, "Sea Fever" in Salt-Water Ballads (1902) — "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky"--and "Cargoes," a succinct history of shipping, in Ballads and Poems (1910). In an introduction to Poems (1925), he declared for "a school of life" instead of the "school of artifice" that had made disciples of Tennyson speak only to "a small comfortable class." With Binyon, Sturge Moore, and Gordon Bottomley, he strove against the grain of realism in the theater to revive poetic drama. They won respect, but not the later commercial success of Eliot and Christopher Fry. Masefield declined, as Byron would say, into Poet Laureate in 1930, and holder of the Order of Merit in 1935. 219

In Scotland a poet still more independent, and probably greater, wrote for a smaller audience than the Georgians and Masefield enjoyed. Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) brought into brief being a phase of writing poetry in Scots to replace the revival by Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns, and with it an intenser nationalism expressed in Gaelic verse. In several volumes of the 1920s MacDiarmid harnessed fervor and skill to counteract the romantic influence of Burns, with greatest success in the organic collection of poems A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). In the 1930s, declaring allegiance to Lenin as the best program for achieving the full development of the individual, and needing a scientific terminology lacking in Scots, he began to compose poems in English. With a sharp focus from the beginning on particulars, he now described in "The Kind of Poetry I Want" (in Lucky Poet, 1943) a poetry of fact: "A poetry full of erudition, expertize, and ecstasy / --The acrobatics and the fly-like vision,"-- "'wide-angle' poems, / Taking in the whole which explains the poet." David Daiches analyzed an earlier poem, "Ex Vermibus," on a worm conspiring with the bird that eats it to produce superior song — "Gape, gape, gorlin', / For I ha'e a worm / That'll gi'e ye a slee and sliggy sang"--to illustrate the thesis that MacDiarmid possessed at all stages "a rock-like apprehension of the sheer stubbornness of life." -550- Meanwhile, W. H. Auden and the other "pylon poets" in his circle brandished aerodromes, speedways, power stations, Freud, and Marx as economic, social, and political emblems and cures for "a low dishonest decade." At Oxford or soon after, Auden gathered into this circle — briefly but with proclamations and redounding tributes — Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and in Berlin the novelist Cristopher Isherwood. Adept as a schoolboy in diction and prosody, he accumulated devices from Old English, Skelton, Hopkins, music halls, Hardy (rejections of Tennysonian melody), Wilfrid Owen (half-rhyme and near rhyme), and inevitably from Eliot. In his poems of the 1930s words of moral implication, pointed toward contemporary objects, speak obliquely of crises in British and European culture. Auden made the particular universal by mere omission of article: "Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench"; in nearly every poem, the shrewdly contrived understatement: "As for ourselves there is … a reasonable chance of retaining \ Our faculties to the last." 220

Colloquial in diction but chock-full of theories, Auden became, in C. H. Sisson's words, "the pedagogue or doctor advising others what truth is." He was to write with assurance in 1956: "My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good." Admired by academics and intellectuals who abhorred Hitler and welcomed a poetry of public commitment, Auden departed for the United States in January 1939 and announced, in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (D. Jan. 1939)," that a poet's and poem's meaning is whatever diverse readers make of it, "modified in the guts of the living." He was to say, a little further on, that poets and poems make nothing happen. He renounced one of his best-known poems, "September 1, 1939," because it had come to seem dishonest in a Christian to strive for the honesty or improvement of society. And in transition from near-Marxist to Christian, he composed one of his finest poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts," generalizing from several Brueghels — particularly the "Icarus" seen in Brussels — that art can elevate above the untidy banalities of life, where "the torturer's horse" scratches "its innocent behind on a tree." Spender and Day Lewis had less to exhibit, although Day Lewis in the 1930s expressed in poetry and action views much more revolutionary than Auden's. Auden in America remained a poet and librettist. Day Lewis wrote detective fiction, served on committees of the Establishment, and issued poems as Professor of Poetry at Oxford -551- (1951-1956) and Poet Laureate (1968). As a poet of Auden's school, Spender was notably personal, variable, and recessive, in Sisson's phrase, "disarming and disarmed"; in Francis Scarfe's, with the "hesitation and recoil" of a "sensitive"; in Spender's own words, What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away.

When he chose to honor, there was no "not too good," no "perhaps." After decades of disparagement, respect and praise for Spender's poetry of dilemma has revived, as in Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation and in Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves, Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (1992). Accepting what has been often said, that Spender was to Auden as Shelley was to Byron, and 221

aware of Shelley's intellectual subtlety, O'Neill and Reeves describe Spender's rare failures of fluency as deliberate. The political, social, and psychological poetry of the Auden circle made mandatory poems about war from 1939 to 1945, but could not afford it competitive advantage. Poetry of the First World War had survived the pacifist years preceding the rise of Hitler and the Great Depression; poems both of patriotism and of outrage remained too well known for emulation. No certainties inflated hopes; with grim determination the conflict had to be engaged. Perhaps most inhibiting of all for soldiers at the front, destruction and deprivation struck unceasingly at home. Where could heroic or complaining rhymes find lodging? No poet in Britain could avoid the subject except in total silence, but those identified as poets of World War II are three who were killed in uniform — Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, and Keith Douglas. Poets somehow independent of Sassoon and Brooke they had to be; Linda Shires identifies Rilke as the single major influence. Both Keyes and Lewis emphasized boredom, rain, resentment that the subject needed to be combat, talk of girls. The subject came more acceptably to Douglas; angry, political, he had chosen a military role and honed his language to greet conscripted comrades with scorn. As if to acknowledge the supremacy of irony, the poem that spoke most poignantly for the besieged and for the era came from Laurence Binyon, in "The Burning of the Leaves" (1942), regarding things past with "Rootless hope and fruitless desire": -552- Now is the time for the burning of the leaves ...... Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind. The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more. -553- o Thomas Hardy

HARDY, Thomas Columbia Encyclopedia Thomas Hardy 1840–1928, English novelist and poet, b. near Dorchester, one of the great English writers of the 19th cent. The son of a stonemason, he derived a love of music from his father and a devotion to literature from his mother. Hardy could not afford to pursue a scholarly career as he wished and was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local church architect. He continued, however, to study the Greek and Latin classics. From 1862 to 1867 he 222

served as assistant to Arthur Blomfield, a London architect; ill health forced him to return to Dorset, where he worked for Hicks and his successor until 1874. Despite his employment, Hardy was writing continually during this period of his life. Such early novels as Desperate Remedies (1871) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) met with small success and may be considered formative works. After the appearance of Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), popular as well as critical acclaim enabled him to devote himself exclusively to writing. His success also made marriage feasible, and in 1874 he married Emma Lavinia Gifford. Over the next 22 years Hardy wrote many novels, including those he referred to Figure 28. Thomas Hardy by Walter William Ouless as "romances and fantasies" —most of Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Har which were first serialized in popular dy_by_Walter_William_Ouless.jpg magazines. His major works are The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896), the latter two considered masterpieces. Hardy's novels are all set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape (referred to as Wessex in the novels), whose physical harshness echoes that of an indifferent, if not malevolent, universe. The author's characters, who are for the most part of the poorer rural classes, are sympathetically and often humorously portrayed. Their lives are ruled not only by nature but also by rigid Victorian social conventions. Hardy's style is accordingly roughhewn, sometimes awkward, but always commanding and intense. Hardy had always written poetry and regarded the novel as an inferior genre. After Jude the Obscure was attacked on grounds of supposed immorality (it dealt sympathetically with open sexual relations between men and women), he abandoned fiction. However, the compelling reason was probably that his thought had become too abstract to be adequately expressed in novels. Beginning at the age of 58, Hardy 223

published many volumes of poetry, including Wessex Poems (1898), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), and Winter Words (1928). His poetry is spare, unadorned, and unromantic, and its pervasive theme is man's futile struggle against cosmic forces. His verse drama The Dynasts (written 1903–8) is a historical epic of the Napoleonic era, expressing the view that history, too, is guided by forces far more powerful than individual will. Hardy's vision reflects a world in which Victorian complacencies were dying but its moralism was not, and in which science had eliminated the comforting certainties of religion. Hardy's wife died in 1912, and in 1914 he married Florence Emily Dugdale, a children's book writer, some 40 years his junior. He spent the latter half of his life at Max Gate, a house built after his own designs in his native Dorset, and died there. His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, but his heart is buried separately, with a certain dark propriety, near the Egdon Heath made famous by his novels.

Some poems of Thomas Hardy (In UNTERMEYER)

The Darkling Thrush Upon the growing gloom.

I leaned upon a coppice gate So little cause for carolings When frost was specter-gray, Of such ecstatic sound And winter's dregs made desolate Was written on terrestrial things The weakening eye of day. Afar or nigh around, The tangled bine-stems scored the sky -970- Like strings from broken lyres, That I could think there trembled And all mankind that haunted nigh through Had sought their household fires. His happy good-night air Some blessed hope, whereof he knew The land's sharp features seemed to And I was unaware. be The Century's corpse outleant; (…) His crypt the cloudy canopy, Afterwards The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth When the Present has latched its Was shrunken hard and dry, postern behind my tremulous stay, And every spirit upon earth And the May month flaps its glad green Seemed fervorless as I. leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will At once a voice burst forth among the neighbors say, The bleak twigs overhead "He was a man who used to notice In a full-hearted evensong such things"? Of joy unlimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, If it be in the dusk when, like an In blast-beruffled plume, eyelid's soundless blink, Had chosen thus to fling his soul 224

The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the That with this bright believing band shades to alight I have no claim to be, Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a That faiths by which my comrades gazer may think, stand "To him this must have been a familiar Seem fantasies to me, sight." And mirage-mists their Shining Land, Is a strange destiny. If I pass during some nocturnal Why thus my soul should be consigned blackness, mothy and warm, To infelicity, When the hedgehog travels furtively Why always I must feel as blind over the lawn, To sights my brethren see, One may say, "He strove that such Why joys they've found I cannot find, innocent creatures should come Abides a mystery. to no harm, Since heart of mine knows not that But he could do little for them; and now ease he is gone." Which they know; since it be That He who breathes All's Well to If, when hearing that I have been stilled these. at last, they stand at the door, Breathes no All's-Well to me, Watching the full-starred heavens that My lack might move their sympathies winter sees, And Christian charity! Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, I am like a gazer who should mark "He was one who had an eye for such An inland company mysteries"? Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark! And will any say when my bell of The glorious distant sea!" quittance is heard in the gloom, And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in And wind-swept pine to me!" its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new Yet I would bear my shortcomings bell's boom, With meet tranquillity, "He hears it not now, but used to notic But for the charge that blessed things e such things"? I'd liefer not have be. -971- O, doth a bird deprived of wings The Impercipient Go earth-bound wilfully! Enough. As yet disquiet clings AT A CATHEDRAL SERVICE About us. Rest shall we. -972-

If you want to know more about Thomas Hardy, look at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/index.html; you can also read some of his poems in http://www.bartleby.com/121/

225

o Rudyard Kipling

KIPLING, Rudyard Columbia Encyclopedia Rudyard Kipling 1865–1936, English author, b. Bombay (now Mumbai), India. Educated in England, Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked as an editor on a Lahore paper. His early poems were collected in Departmental Ditties (1886), Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and other volumes. His first short stories of Anglo-Indian life appeared in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888). In 1889 he returned to London, where his novel The Light That Failed (1890) appeared. Kipling's masterful stories and poems interpreted India in all its heat, strife, and ennui. His romantic imperialism and his characterization of the true Englishman as brave, conscientious, and self- reliant did much to enhance his popularity. These views are reflected in such well-known poems as "The White Man's Burden," "Loot," "Mandalay," "Gunga Din," and Figure 29. Rudyard Kipling Source: Recessional (1897). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil e:Rudyard_Kipling_three_qua In London in 1892, he married Caroline Balestier, an rter_length_portrait.jpg American, and lived in Vermont for four years. There he wrote children's stories, The Jungle Book (1894) and Second Jungle Book (1895), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), and Captains Courageous (1897). Returning to England in 1900, he lived in Sussex, the setting of Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). Other works include Stalky and Co. (1899) and his famous poem "If" (1910). England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature (1907), he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Some poems of Rudyard Kipling

A CHARM But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Take of English earth as much Report or lamentation. As either hand may rightly clutch. Lay that earth upon thy heart, In the taking of it breathe And thy sickness shall depart! Prayer for all who lie beneath— It shall sweeten and make whole Not the great nor well bespoke, Fevered breath and festered soul; 226

It shall mightily restrain You will hear the beat of a horse's feet, Over-busy hand and brain; And the swish of a skirt in the dew, It shall ease thy mortal strife -103- 'Gainst the immortal woe of life, Steadily cantering through Till thyself restored shall prove The misty solitudes, By What grace the Heavens do move. As though they perfectly knew -5- The old lost road through the woods … Take of English flowers these— But there is no road through the woods. Spring's full-facéd primroses, -104- Summer's wild wide-hearted rose, (…) Autumn's wall-flower of the close, THE RUN OF THE DOWNS And, thy darkness to illume, Winter's bee-thronged ivy-bloom. The Weald is good, the Downs are Seek and serve them where they bide best— From Candlemas to Christmas-tide, I'll give you the run of 'em, East to For these simples used aright West. Can restore a failing sight. Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill, They were once and they are still. These shall cleanse and purify Firle, Mount Caburn and Mount Harry Webbed and inward-turning eye; Go back as far as sums'll carry. These shall show thee treasure hid, Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Thy familiar fields amid; Ring, And reveal (which is thy need) They have looked on many a thing; Every man a King indeed! And what those two have missed -6- between 'em (…) I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen 'em. THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down Knew Old England before the Crown. THEY shut the road through the woods Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood Seventy years ago. Knew Old England before the Flood. Weather and rain have undone it And when you end on the Hampshire again, side— And now you would never know Butser's old as Time and Tide. There was once a road through the The Downs are sheep, the Weald is woods corn, Before they planted the trees. You be glad you are Sussex born! It is underneath the coppice and heath, -137- And the thin anemones. (…) Only the keeper sees IF That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, IF, you can keep your head when all There was once a road through the about you woods. Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; Yet, if you enter the woods If you can trust yourself when all men Of a summer evening late, doubt you, When the night-air cools on the trout- But make allowance for their doubting ringed pools too: Where the otter whistles his mate, If you can wait and not be tired by (They fear not men in the woods waiting, Because they see so few) Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, 227

Or being hated, don't give way to And never breathe a word about your hating, loss: And yet don't look too good, nor talk If you can force your heart and nerve too wise; and sinew To serve your turn long after they are If you can dream — and not make gone, dreams your master; And so hold on when there is nothing in If you can think — and not make you thoughts your aim, Except the Will which says to them: If you can meet with Triumph and "Hold on!" Disaster And treat those two impostors just the If you can talk with crowds and keep same: your virtue, If you can bear to hear the truth you've Or walk with Kings — nor lose the spoken common touch, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for If neither foes nor loving friends can fools, hurt you, Or watch the things you gave your life If all men count with you, but none too to, broken, much: And stoop and build 'em up with worn- If you can fill the unforgiving minute out tools; With sixty seconds' worth of distance -200- run, If you can make one heap of all your Yours is the Earth and everything that's winnings in it, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and- And — which is more — you'll be a toss, Man, my son. And lose, and start again at your -201- beginnings

If you want to read other poems of Rudyard Kipling, look at http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/kipling_ind.html; you can also listen to If in http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video/Literature/-/If/15422

o W. H. Auden

AUDEN, W. H. Columbia Encyclopedia W. H. Auden (Wystan Hugh Auden) (ô´d!n), 1907–73, Anglo-American poet, b. York, England, educated at Oxford. A versatile, vigorous, and technically skilled poet, Auden ranks among the major literary figures of the 20th cent. Often written in everyday language, his poetry ranges in subject matter from politics to modern psychology to Christianity. During the 1930s he was the leader of a left-wing literary group that included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. With Isherwood he wrote three verse plays, The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), 228

and On the Frontier (1938), and Journey to a War (1939), a record of their experiences in China. He lived in Germany during the early days of Nazism, and was a stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Auden's first volume of poetry appeared in 1930. Later volumes include Spain (1937), New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio (1945), The Age of Anxiety (1947; Pulitzer Prize), Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), Epistle of a Godson and Other Poems (1972), and Thank You, Fog (1974). His other Figure 30. W. H. Auden, works include Letters from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice, photo by Carl Van Vechten Source: 1937); the libretto, with his companion Chester Kallman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:AudenVanVechten193 for Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (1953); A 9.jpg Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970); and The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1968). In 1939, Auden moved to the United States, he became a citizen in 1946, and beginning that year taught at a number of American colleges and universities. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Subsequently he lived in a number of countries, including Italy and Austria, and in 1971 he returned to England. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1967.

Some poems of W. H. Auden

Museée des Beaux Arts Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood: About suffering they were never wrong, They never forgot The Old Masters: how well they That even the dreadful martyrdom understood must run its course Its human position; how it takes place Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot While someone else is eating or Where the dogs go on with their doggy opening a window or just walking life and the torturer's horse dully along; Scratches its innocent behind on a How, when the aged are reverently, tree. passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always In Brueghel Icarus, for instance: how must be everything turns away 229

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the And be tormented by an Either-Or, ploughman may The right to fail that is worth dying for, Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, If so, the sweets of victory are rum: But for him it was not an important A pride of earthly cities premising failure; the sun shone The Inner Life as socially the thing, As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Where, even to the lawyers, Law is Water; and the expensive delicate ship what, that must have seen For better or for worse, our vows Something amazing, a boy falling out become of the sky, When no one whom we need is Had somewhere to get to and sailed looking, Home calmly on. A sort of honour, not a building site, In War Time Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might (For Caroline Newton) Be somewhere else, yet trust that we have chosen right. Abruptly mounting her ramshackle -20- wheel, Fortune has pedalled furiously away; Never Stronger The sobbing mess is on our hands today. Again in conversations -19- Speaking of fear Those accidental terrors, Famine, And throwing off reserve Flood, The voice is nearer Were never trained to diagnose or heal But no clearer Nightmares that are intentional and Than first love real. Than boys' imaginations. Nor lust nor gravity can preach an aim To minds disordered by a lucid dread For every news Of seeking peace by going off one's Means pairing off in twos and twos, head. Another I, another You, Nor will the living waters whistle; Each knowing what to do though But of no use. Diviners cut their throats to prove their claim, Never stronger The desert remains arid all the same. But younger and younger, If augurs take up flying to fulfil Saying good-bye but coming The doom they prophesy, it must be back, for fear Is over there so; And the centre of anger The herons have no modern sign for Is out of danger. No. The Composer If nothing can upset but total war The massive fancy of the heathen will All the others translate: the painter That solitude is something you can kill, sketches A visible world to love or reject; If we are right to choose our suffering 230

Rummaging into his living, the poet The falls of the knee and the weirs of fetches the spine, The images out that hurt and connect. Our climate of silence and doubt invading; From Life to Art by painstaking You alone, alone, O imaginary song, adaption, Are unable to say an existence is Relying on us to cover the rift; wrong, Only your notes are pure contraption, And pour out your forgiveness like a Only your song is an absolute gift. wine. -21- -22- Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading

You can read other poems of W. H. Auden in http://allpoetry.com/W_H_Auden; you can also listen to Stop all the clocks in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Veoxcceo0Ro

10.2. Modernism

Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot

Calvin Bedient

"Everything mattered—except everything." -- G. K. Chesterton (1905)

Chesterton's summation of Victorian metaphysical claustrophobia is as succinct as it is accurate. Nineteenth-century positivism pinched spirituality like a cop. The genius of the Religion of Humanity, as of utilitarianism, was ethical. But, in the 1910s, along came writers for whom religion was, and had to be, once again divine in essence — that is, inhuman, an experience of what is so deeply inside that it is also out there, so endless that it is everything. Several of the English-language modernists rediscovered the sacred as unlimited continuity, hence as immediacy, intimacy — a clear violation of the paltry pocket of socially convenient ideas and practical habits called the "human." D. H. Lawrence summoned back an old name: Pan. W. B. Yeats used newer old names: Plato's Sphere, Plotinus's There. T. S. Eliot spoke of the Absolute. These three, together with Ezra Pound, whose traffic with the sacred was more sporadic, were chief among the English-language modernist poets who reopened negotiations with the divine. For the most part, English-language modernism was (and is) the wrestling back into human experience (imagined human experience, to be sure) of the sublime, what Longinus called the "too much" (too much for a steady heart rate or clear 231

thought). The Great War (the title itself invokes sublimity) seemed to show, in a flare light, that the human cause was already lost. Which left the inhuman, something that the semicolonial poet Yeats, shying away from English humanism as from -554- a lifted boot, anyway preferred. The inhuman other is elsewhere, even when it is violently here. It gives the lie, the laugh, to worldly powers. How could it not appeal to those sickened by their human country, their human blood? o William Butler Yeats

Yeats, W. B. Columbia Encyclopedia W. B. Yeats (William Butler Yeats), 1865– 1939, Irish poet and playwright, b. Dublin. The greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance. Early Life Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883–86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland, which was the setting for many of his poems. He became fascinated by Irish legends and by the occult. His first work, the drama Mosada (1886), reflects his Figure 31. William Butler Yeats, photo by George Charles Beresford concern with magic, but the long poems in The Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Willia Wanderings of Oisin (1889) voiced the intense m_Butler_Yeat_by_George_Charles_ Beresford.jpg nationalism of the Young Ireland movement. Poetry: First Period Yeats's verse can be divided into two periods, the first lasting from 1886 to about 1900. The poetry of this period shows a debt to Spenser, Shelley, and the Pre- Raphaelites. It centers on Irish mythology and themes and is mystical, slow-paced, and lyrical. Among the best-known poems of the period are "Falling of Leaves," 232

"When You Are Old," and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Yeats edited William Blake's works in 1893, and his own Poems were collected in 1895. Drama and Prose Yeats's efforts to foster Irish nationalism were inspired for years by Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot for whom he had a hopeless passion and to whom he repeatedly and fruitlessly proposed marriage. In 1898 with Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn he founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin; their first production (1899) was Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (written 1889–92). Yeats helped produce plays and collaborated with Lady Gregory on the comedy The Pot of Broth (1929) and other plays. The Irish Literary Theatre produced several of Yeats's plays including Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), and — after the Abbey Theatre was opened — The Hour Glass (1904), The Land of Heart's Desire (1904), and Deirdre (1907). Yeats's prose tales of Irish legend were collected in The Celtic Twilight (1893) and in the symbolic The Secret Rose (1897). Poetry: Second Period, and Later Life Yeats's poetry deepened as he grew older. In the verse of his middle and late years he renounced his early transcendentalism; his poetry became stronger, more physical and realistic. A recurring theme is the polarity between extremes such as the physical and the spiritual, the real and the imagined. Memorable poems from this period include "The Second Coming," "The Tower," and "Sailing to Byzantium." Yeats initiated his second period in such volumes as In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). In 1917 he married Bertha Georgiana Hyde- Lees (known as Georgie or George), and his occultism was encouraged by his wife's automatic writing. His prose work A Vision (1937; privately printed 1926) is the basis of much of his poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and Four Plays for Dancers (1921). Yeats ultimately became a respected public figure, a member (1922–28) of the Irish senate, and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of his best work was his last, The Tower (1928) and Last Poems (1940). All of Yeats's work shows interesting and important revisions from earlier to later versions.

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Some poems of William Butler Yeats

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROSE OF THE WORLD THE ROOD OF TIME Who dreamed that beauty passes like _Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of a dream? all my days! For these red lips, with all their Come near me, while I sing the ancient mournful pride, ways: Mournful that no new wonder may Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; betide, The Druid, gray, wood-nurtured, quiet- Troy passed away in one high funeral eyed, gleam, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and And Usna's children died. ruin untold; And thine own sadness, whereof stars, We and the labouring world are grown old passing by: In dancing silver sandalled on the sea, Amid men's souls, that waver and give Sing in their high and lonely melody. place, Come near, that no more blinded by Like the pale waters in their wintry man's fate, race, I find under the boughs of love and Under the passing stars, foam of the hate, sky, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Lives on this lonely face. Eternal beauty wandering on her way._ Bow down, archangels, in your dim _Come near, come near, come near-- abode: Ah, leave me still Before you were, or any hearts to beat, A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Weary and kind one lingered by His Lest I no more hear common things seat; that crave; He made the world to be a grassy road The weak worm hiding down in its Before her wandering feet. small cave,_ _The field mouse running by me in the THE ROSE OF PEACE grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and If Michael, leader of God's host pass; When Heaven and Hell are met, But seek alone to hear the strange Looked down on you from Heaven's things said door-post By God to the bright hearts of those He would his deeds forget. long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue men do Brooding no more upon God's wars not know. In his Divine homestead, Come near; I would, before my time to He would go weave out of the stars go, A chaplet for your head. Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all And all folk seeing him bow down, my days._ And white stars tell your praise, Would come at last to God's great town, Led on by gentle ways; 234

Of their sad hearts, that may not live And God would bid His warfare cease. nor die._ Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the A peace of Heaven with Hell. World! You, too, have come where the dim THE ROSE OF BATTLE tides are hurled Upon the wharves of sorrow, and Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the heard ring World! The bell that calls us on; the sweet far The tall thought-woven sails, that flap thing. unfurled Beauty grown sad with its eternity Above the tide of hours, trouble the air, Made you of us, and of the dim gray And God's bell buoyed to be the sea. water's care; Our long ships loose thought-woven While hushed from fear, or loud with sails and wait, hope, a band For God has bid them share an equal With blown, spray-dabbled hair gather fate; at hand. And when at last defeated in His wars, _Turn if you may from battles never They have gone down under the same done_, white stars, I call, as they go by me one by one, We shall no longer hear the little cry _Danger no refuge holds; and war no Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor peace, die. For him who hears love sing and never cease, THE SECOND COMING Beside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade: Turning and turning in the widening But gather all for whom no love hath gyre made The falcon cannot hear the falconer; A woven silence, or but came to cast Things fall apart; the centre cannot A song into the air, and singing past hold; To smile on the pale dawn; and gather Mere anarchy is loosed upon the you world, Who have sought more than is in rain The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and or dew everywhere Or in the sun and moon, or on the The ceremony of innocence is earth,_ drowned; _Or sighs amid the wandering, starry The best lack all conviction, while the mirth, worst Or comes in laughter from the sea's Are full of passionate intensity. sad lips And wage God's battles in the long Surely some revelation is at hand; gray ships. Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The sad, the lonely, the insatiable, The Second Coming! Hardly are those To these Old Night shall all her words out mystery tell; When a vast image out of Spiritus God's bell has claimed them by the Mundi little cry Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; 235

A shape with lion body and the head of The darkness drops again but now I a man, know A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, That twenty centuries of stony sleep Is moving its slow thighs, while all Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking about it cradle, Wind shadows of the indignant desert And what rough beast, its hour come birds. round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats is a very important Irish writer, responsible for the Irish Literary Renaissance. Learn more about him and the movement in the following sites: 1. http://www.trentu.ca/admin/library/archives/zyhome.htm 2. http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/ 3. http://www.bartleby.com/147/ You can also listen to The Second Coming in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEunVObSnVM

o D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence, D. H. Columbia Encyclopedia D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence), 1885–1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction. Life The son of a Nottingham coal miner, Lawrence was a sickly child, devoted to his refined but domineering mother, who insisted upon his education. He graduated from the teacher-training course at University College, Nottingham, in 1905 and became a schoolmaster in a London suburb. In 1909 some of his poems were published in the Figure 32. D. H. Lawrence English Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford, Source: http://www.317am.net/2010/07/kaze- who was also instrumental in the publication of out-there-skating-with-d-h- lawrence.html/d-h-lawrence-2 Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). 236

Lawrence eloped to the Continent in 1912 with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, a German noblewoman who was the wife of a Nottingham professor; they were married in 1914. During World War I the couple was forced to remain in England; Lawrence's outspoken opposition to the war and Frieda's German birth aroused suspicion that they were spies. In 1919 they left England, returning only for brief visits. Their nomadic existence was spent variously in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, the United States (New Mexico), and Mexico. Lawrence died at the age of 45 of tuberculosis, a disease with which he had struggled for years. Works Lawrence believed that industrialized Western culture was dehumanizing because it emphasized intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a part of nature. One aspect of this "blood consciousness" would be an acceptance of the need for sexual fulfillment. His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921), concern the consequences of trying to deny humanity's union with nature. After World War I, Lawrence began to believe that society needed to be reorganized under one superhuman leader. The novels containing this theme — Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926) — are all considered failures. Lawrence's most controversial novel is Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), the story of an English noblewoman who finds love and sexual fulfillment with her husband's gamekeeper. Because their lovemaking is described in intimate detail (for the 1920s), the novel caused a sensation and was banned in England and the United States until 1959. All of Lawrence's novels are written in a lyrical, sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality. Lawrence's works include volumes of stories, poems, and essays. He also wrote a number of plays, travel books such as Etruscan Places (1932), and volumes of literary criticism, notably Studies in Classic American Literature (1916).

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Some poems of D. H. Lawrence

THE WILD COMMON How it looks back, like a white dog to its master! The quick sparks on the gorse- I on the bank all substance, my shadow bushes are leaping all shadow looking up to me, Little jets of sunlight texture imitating looking back! flame; And the water runs, and runs faster, Above them, exaltant, the peewits are runs faster, sweeping: And the white dog dances and quivers, They have triumphed again o'er the I am holding his cord quite slack. ages, their screamings proclaim. But how splendid it is to be substance, Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie here! Low-rounded on the mournful turf they My shadow is neither here nor there; have bitten down to the quick. but I, I am royally here! Are they asleep?--are they living?-- I am here! I am here! screams the pee Now see, when I wit; the may-blobs burst out in a Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves laugh as they hear! under their spurting kick! Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the insects far and The common flaunts bravely; but near. below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to Over my skin in the sunshine, the challenge the blos-soming bushes; warm, clinging air There the lazy streamlet pushes Flushed with the songs of seven larks His bent course mildly; here wakes singing at once, goes kissing me again, leaps, laughs, and gushes glad. You are here! You are here! We have Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, found you! Everywhere Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, We sought you substantial, you with the brook ebbing through so touchstone of caresses, you naked slow; lad! Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the turf I stand watching my own Oh but the water loves me and folds white shadow quivering to and fro. me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and What if the gorse-flowers shrivelled, sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous and I were gone? stuff! What if the waters ceased, where were No longer shadow!—and it holds me the marigolds then, and the Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, gudgeon? touches me, as if never it could -25- touch me enough. What is this thing that I look down -26- upon? Sun, but in substance, yellow water- White on the water wimples my blobs! shadow, strains like a dog on a Wings and feathers on the crying, string, to run on. mysterious ages, peewits wheeling! a rabbit lobs. 238

All that is right, all that is good; all that LOVE ON THE FARM is God takes sub-stance! In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark- What large, dark hands are those at songs pealing. the window Grasping in the golden light CHERRY ROBBERS Which weaves its way through the evening wind Under the long dark boughs, like At my heart's delight? jewels red In the hair of an Eastern girl Ah, only the leaves! But in the west Hangs strings of crimson cherries, as if I see a redness suddenly come had bled Into the evening's anxious breast— Blood-drops beneath each curl. 'Tis the wound of love goes home!

Under the glistening cherries, with The woodbine creeps abroad folded wings Calling low to her lover: Three dead birds lie: The sun-lit flirt who all the day Pale-breasted throstles and a Has poised above her lips in play. blackbird, robberlings And stolen kisses, shallow and gay Stained with red dye. -28- Of pollen, now has gone away— Against the haystack a girl stands She woos the moth with her sweet, laughing at me, low word; Cherries hung round her ears. And when above her his moth-wings Offers me her scarlet fruit: I will see hover If she has any tears. Then her bright breast she will uncover And yield her honey-drop to her lover. TWILIGHT Into the yellow, evening glow Darkness comes out of the earth Saunters a man from the farm below; And swallows dip into the pallor of the Leans, and looks in at the low-built west; shed -27- Where the swallow has hung her From the hay comes the clamour of chi marriage bed. ldren's mirth; The bird lies warm against the wall. Wanes the old palimpsest. She glances quick her startled eyes Towards him, then she turns away The night-stock oozes scent, Her small head, making warm display And a moon-blue moth goes flittering Of red upon the throat. Her terrors by; sway All that the worldly day has meant Her out of the nest's warm, busy ball, Wastes like a lie. Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies The children have forsaken their play; In one blue swoop from out the sties A single star in a veil of light Into the twilight's empty hall. Glimmers; litter of day Is gone from sight. Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes, Hide your quaintly scarlet blushes, Still your quick tail, lie still as dead,

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Till the distance folds over his ominous sword tread! Of his hand against my bosom and oh, The rabbit presses back her ears, the broad Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes Blade of his glance that asks me to And crouches low; then with wild spring applaud Spurts from the terror of his oncoming; His coming! With his hand he turns my To be choked back, the wire ring face to him Her frantic effort throttling: And caresses me with his fingers that Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! still smell grim Ah, soon in his large, hard hands she Of rabbit's fur! God, I am caught in a dies, snare! -29- I know not what fine wire is round my And swings all loose from the swing of throat; his walk! I only know I let him finger there Yet calm and kindly are his eyes My pulse of life, and let him nose like a And ready to open in brown surprise stoat Should I not answer to his talk Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the Or should he my tears surmise. blood.

I hear his hand on the latch, and rise fro And down his mouth comes to my m my chair mouth! and down Watching the door open; he flashes His bright dark eyes come over me, like bare a hood His strong teeth in a smile, and flashes Upon my mind! his lips meet mine, and his eyes a flood In a smile like triumph upon me; then Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I careless-wise drown He flings the rabbit soft on the table Against him, die, and find death good. board -30- And comes toward me: he! the uplifted

You can read other poems of D. H. Lawrence in http://www.blackcatpoems.com/l/d_h_lawrence.html; you can also listen to some of his poems in www.youtube.com, as Gloire de Dijon, for example, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fTmTpTZ-0U

o Mina Loy

Mina Loy

PoemHunter.com

Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Lowy (December 27, 1882 – September 25, 1966) was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps and bohemian extraordinaire. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired 240

by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia and Yvor Winters, among others. Loy's extremely original poems started to frequent smaller magazines such as Rogue, attracting the attention of the New York avant-garde. Once her work started to gain momentum, she began to publish poems and articles in more significant New York publications. In 1914, "Aphorisms on Futurism" was published in Alfred Stieglitz's Figure 33. Mina Loy Camera Work. "Parturition", her graphic depiction of Source: childbirth, was printed in Trend. http://www.poets.org/poet .php/prmPID/95 In July 1915, Loy began to write what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1]"(originally "Love songs"), a collection of modernist, avant-garde love poetry about her disenchantment with Giovanni Papini, another founding Futurist with whom Loy had been in a romantic relationship with in Florence. First readers of "Songs to Joannes" were shocked by Loy's forward expressions of human sexuality, particularly the grotesque and uncensored depictions of erotic desire and bodily functions. However, beyond the surface, Loy exposed the inequities and hypocrisies of male dominated society, and the resulting damage suffered by women physically and emotionally. She also unleashed criticism against supposedly superior theories held by fellows artists.

Some poems of Mina Loy

An Old Woman Does you mirror bedevil you? Or is the impossible The past has come apart possible to senility? events are vagueing the future is a seedless pod How could the erstwhile the present pain. agile and slim self— that narrow silhouette— Not even pain has that precision come to contain with which it struck youth. this huge incognito— this bulbous stranger— Years like moths only to be exorcised by death? erode internal organs hanging or falling Dilation has entirely dominated in a spoiled closet. your long reality.

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Love Songs Lethe for posthumous parvenues Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Delirious Avenues Pig Cupid his rosy snout Lit Rooting erotic garbage with the chandelier souls 'Once upon a time' of infusoria Pulls a weed white star-topped from Pharoah's tombstones Among wild oats sown in mucous- membrane lead to mercurial doomsdays I would an eye in a Bengal light Odious oasis Eternity in a sky-rocket in furrowed phosphorous— Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher the eye-white sky-light Than a trickle of saliva white-light district of lunar lusts These are suspect places I must live in my lantern —Stellectric signs Trimming subliminal flicker "Wing shows on Starway" Virginal to the bellows "Zodiac carrousel" Of Experience Cyclones Coloured glass of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl Gertrude Stein crusaders from hallucinatory citadels Curie of shattered glass of the laboratory into evacuate craters of vocabulary she crushed A flock of dreams the tonnage browse on Necropolis of consciousness congealed to phrases From the shores to extract of oval oceans a radium of the word in the oxidized Orient

Lunar Baedeker Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists A silver Lucifer observe serves the flight Cocaine in cornucopia of Eros obsolete

To some somnambulists And "Immortality" of adolescent thighs mildews... draped in the museums of the moon in satirical draperies "Nocturnal cyclops" Peris in livery "Crystal concubine" ------Prepare 242

Pocked with personification waxes and wanes---- the fossil virgin of the skies

You can read some other poems of Mina Loy in http://www.poemhunter.com/mina-loy/; you can also see an animation about her in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSXt_ZdxB8I&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeP3z8R0mc&feature=relmfu

10.3. British Poetry from 1945 to 1990

Poetry in England, 1945-1990 Vincent Sherry THE anonymous leading article in the Spectator of October 1, 1954, "In the Movement," hailed the emergence of a new group of writers, a generation whose sensibility was "bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility. … The Movement, as well as being anti- phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic. …" This is a Movement manqué, it seems, for the reviewer defines its energy entirely by negatives. Again, in the polemical introduction to the first English anthology of Movement verse, New Lines (1956), Robert Conquest groups his poets under "a negative determination to avoid bad principles." And in a poem that now reads as a thesis piece for the movement, Philip Larkin's "I remember, I remember," the speaker lists the high moments in the life of the conventional poet as nonexperiences: remembering where his "childhood was unspent," including the garden where he "did not invent / Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits," he recalls how his uninspired juvenilia "was not set up in blunt ten- point, nor read," and drifts (hardly drives) toward the proverbial wisdom that "'nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'" While this sensibility appears (it is hard to think of it "flourishing") in the mid- 1950s, its cartoonlike simplifications have prolonged its life among critics of postwar English poetry, especially American commentators. They can use it to label the imaginative project of a subsiding world power, whose poets, formally conservative and reactionary, battle the (putative) excesses of an energy they do not own, in particular the experimental and convention-dismaying verve of American -577- 243

modernists and postmodernists. The credibility of this caricature will be questioned, but the tendency to regard English poetry as behind the times derives from the reality of circumstances in postwar Britain. By 1946 it was clear that the chain of poetic generations had been broken — the departure of W. H. Auden for America in 1939 was followed by the deaths of the best war poets (Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes) — and this disruption of continuity helped to create the impression that English poets would never catch up. The war itself represented a hiatus in English cultural life, when intellectuals became people who sent messages to captive Europe. Yet the duress that slowed the initial renaissance of English verse might also remain as a potent imaginative memory, a resource that supplies poetry with a sense of the reality of history and the truths of tragedy. The best English poets of the postwar period — Larkin, Donald Davie, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, and Charles Tomlinson, in the first generation — engage those awarenesses, among other things, in ways that certainly challenge a critical stereotyping of their diminished force. The negativism of the movement writers, first of all, represents more than a justification of inertia: it is a response, sometimes predictable but in other ways searching and intelligent, to the intellectual and political culture of the recent war. In this context their poetry recovers some of its original strength and complexity. Movement writers aimed their rebukes at the excesses of the major school of the preceding decade. The New Romantics or Apocalyptics, seeking to reach an emotionally and sensually charged awareness equal to that of war, had exaggerated the mannerisms of Romantics such as Dylan Thomas, and their extravagant surrealism was countered by the dour probity of the 1950s. More subtle and interesting are the connections the movement poets drew between those literary excesses and the calamities of history. Kingsley Amis, writing a Fabian tract on Romanticism, linked the ideological extremism of the war with the emotional and imaginative excesses of Romanticism, which leads one, he argued, to believe in causes which are not one's own, not subject to the approval of the individual's reason. While the movement poets feared ideological commitment and the verbal inflation attending it, they had also gone through adolescence in the 1930s, a decade in which English verse had ostensibly regained its social commitment. Their sense of 244

lost purpose emerges in a play whose energies are often likened to theirs, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger -578- (1956); the problems of its disaffected protagonist — the "angry young man" Jimmy Porter — turn around the fact that there are "no great causes left." An understanding of this moment in literary history is properly thickened, then, in Donald Davie's 1955 poem, "Remembering the Thirties," which reads at once like a rejection of heroic intellectual causes and a lament for their passing: "A neutral tone is nowadays preferred," he notes, but then concedes, "it may be better, if we must, / To praise a stance impressive and absurd / Than not to see the hero for the dust." Another point of provocation for movement poets was the vatic posturing of the New Romantics — the quasi-prophetic intensities of apocalyptic poets such as G. S. Fraser. On one hand the incomprehensibility of that verse allowed it to stand as the most recent example — a kind of terminus ad quem — of the whole cult of difficulty in literary modernism. The phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s of coterie literature proved synonymous, a number of commentators agreed, with the destruction of meaning, the global nihilism of recent history. More specifically, Donald Davie linked the mysterious, irreducible images of Pound (and other Imagists) with the hieratic powers of fascism, claiming that the line of descent from aesthetics to politics was direct. Thus Davie's Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) and Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (1955) attempted to raise the standards of intelligent lucidity and rational statement in verse to replace the coercive unintelligibility of the postsymbolists, modernists, and New Romantics. The oracular difficulty of this verse fractured the old contract between writer and reader, complained Philip Larkin, who joined others in blaming it for the "decline" in contemporary English culture and society. The very dire nature of postwar circumstances, on the other hand, placed the poet in the role of a reformer, who may assume the mantle of moral authority, the character-in-voice of the social prophet. Thus their rappel à l'ordre comprises but exceeds the orderly surfaces of neo- Augustan verse, calling upon the latent strengths of the visionary. Davie's poem on the 1930s, for example, moves its grammar of discursive statements toward final images no less elemental, no more readily convertible into easy prose meaning, than the hierophantic figures of Isaiah: For courage is the vegetable king, 245

The sprig of all ontologies, the weed That beards the slag heap with his hectoring, Whose green adventure is to run to seed. -579- "Run to seed": degenerated, or passed on to the next generation? The phrase catches up divided attitudes to the social causes of the 1930s poets and, more crucially, to the value of prose clarity that its oracular ambivalence defies. That the movement was nonprogrammatic but eclectic or even dialectical is suggested most forcibly by its youngest member, Thom Gunn, who combined its severe punctilio of prosodic form with the stagy machismo of the Angry Young Man. As in "Lines for a Book": I think of all the toughs through history And thank heaven they lived, continually. I praise the overdogs from Alexander To those who would not play with Stephen Spender.

Filtering his fantasies of sexual dominance through the traditions of poetic wit and the Renaissance school of magnificence, measuring the excitements of motorcycle gangs and rock-and-roll music to the decorous cadences of the heroic couplet, Gunn seemed to allow the elements of verbal and metrical control to hypostatize as themes. Thus he validated, unwittingly it now seems, the coarsest of masteries, producing a verse of fiercely intelligent brutality. His self-awareness in this regard coincided with his move to the United States later in the 1950s, where the influence of Yvor Winters both extended and modified his earlier formalism, and where his poetry developed in response to pressures different from those affecting his English contemporaries. Yet he remains the most visible register of the tensions and countercurrents at work in the popular and literary culture of the decade. These conflicts enriched the more important poetry Larkin wrote through the 1950s. He overtly rejected by 1946 the hieratically Yeatsian manner of his earlier verse, but later (mostly unpublished) pieces witness its more than residual force. His most productive challenge lay in its accommodation to the plain-speech ethic of Thomas Hardy (the "neutral tones" Davie hears in the 1950s acknowledge a model in Hardy's poem of that title). Little accommodation occurs in "Church Going," however, one of Larkin's best known poems. Here the typically wry and sardonic English wit, the poet-clerk, asserts a poetics of common sense against the portentous absurdity of the poet-prophet: 246

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly … -580- Despite a strategic concession to the value of "seriousness" that religion reinforces, the poem is really an opportunistic deflation of sacral majesties. It differs from the more complex engagements of "Next, Please," whose character-in-voice is waiting in a ration queue. Speaking in lines politely filed, waiting for his proverbial ship to come in, he hears the call of the title, but notes drolly: Only one ship is seeking us, a black- Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence. In her wake No waters breed or break. Unlike "Church Going," which opposes its blandly reasonable speaker to the mysteries, "Next, Please" allows its title idiom — the whole order of civil normality that it invokes — to tap into the dark backward and abysm of fate. Such interactions between the vatic and prosaic were prepared for in a number of poems Larkin tried unsuccessfully to publish in the later 1940s (gathered in the book-length manuscript In the Grip of Light). In "Many Famous Feet Have Trod," for example, the gnomic, incantatory voice is moderated by a plonky pentameter, a homey decasyllabic that does not neutralize it, but rather grounds it in a kind of proverbial wisdom. Those "famous feet" have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need; And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity …

Behind this measure lies a force of critical intelligence articulated in Davie's 1957 poem, "Rejoinder to a Critic." Just as the prophetic intensity of the apocalyptics partakes of the riot of recent history, emotional excess risks the catastrophes of the last war. "'Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?'" he quotes Donne to query, "And recent history answers: Half Japan!" At this moment of political and literary history, then, the one thing needful is a controlling of the time, a simple metrical regularity, and Davie offers this as the tonic measure: "Appear concerned only to make it scan!" Davie's new metrical contract opens a middle way between social normality and imaginative intensity and so defines an area of common ground for poets normally 247

regarded as antithetical talents. Geoffrey Hill, usually heard as a poet thriving in solitary defiance of his times, -581- enters into the same compromises that characterized the work of Larkin and Davie. The fiction of "Holy Thursday" (1952), for example, leads the poet toward "the wolf's lair," emblematic of the dangerous precincts of apocalyptic poetry (Hill's title identifies a sacred location), while the taming of the beast in the final lines relies for its poetic credibility on the normalizing cadence, more interestingly varied but no less stabilizing than Larkin's or Davie's: 'I have been touched with that fire, And have fronted the she-wolf's lair. Lo, she lies gentle and innocent of desire Who was my constant myth and terror.' Similarly, in "The Bidden Guest" (1953), a regular iambic octosyllabic parcels out the blessings of the pentecostal inspiration, scanning and counterstressing the vatic inrush: The starched unbending candles stir As though a wind had caught their hair, As though the surging of a host Had charged the air of Pentecost.

With the movement poets Hill also shares a central, ramifying wariness about the morality of poetic engagement with the horrors of history. In "Eight Years After" Davie speaks for the conscience of his contemporaries--we might "have no stomach for atrocities," he concedes, but "we brook them better once they have been named." "To name," as Davie continues, "is to acknowledge," ultimately to make reasonable and acceptable, and so the one responsible strategy for engaging the unspeakable is to leave it unnamed, to evoke it in an art of extreme obliquity. These needs help to explain the broad appeal in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which allowed paradox and irony, those hallmarks of movement tone, to stand in place of the violent conflicts of history and nature. If poetic appeasement is the one phobia of the decade, however, movement poets often avoid its dangers to a fault, settling for the most attenuated presentation of the world's torn body; more frequently, they choose not to engage at all, not to risk the accommodation. It is Hill who turns the anxiety of the age into the lasting art of the period, at once forcing the problem to critical mass and breaking through to unique solutions. In "Two Formal Elegies: For the Jews in Europe" 248

-582- (1955-1956) he echoes Davie, to begin with, noting how the "long death" of the last war, in being "documented," will be sanitized, made verbally "safe." In his radical definition, however, the problem goes to the roots of poetry, which "deceives with sweetness harshness," traducing the matter of sordid fact into the consonance of aesthetic form, thus making it not only acceptable but attractive. The task is to find a music that replicates the brutality of history without abandoning a sense of the superior order of poetry, a tonic possibility that gives nothing away to the realist. These ambitions generate the distinctive textures of the poems he begins to write in 1955. Witness the studied ineloquence of the abrupt overture to "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings": For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

A parallel extension of New Critical principles informs the early work of Ted Hughes, who is usually (and wrongly) seen as a poet wild and whirling as the moors of his native Yorkshire. The challenge and value of that critical sensibility — to densify the world's body in the physical body of language and thus subject it to the formal order of art — inspires Hughes's imaginative vision as well as his technical practice in The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The title poem, for example, uses heavy alliteration to thicken the verbal texture and consolidate the material reality of words, while its fiction shows the poet straining toward the hawk's steady flight — a point of supernal perfection, an overmastering formal control: I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up Hell after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth, From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye. His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet …

The vantage of the hawk is associated more specifically with the advantage of art in other poems, as in "A Modest Proposal." Here two lovers, likened to two frenzied wolves in the wood, are recomposed and calmed at the sight of the great huntsman, depicted here in the lineaments of -583- 249

aesthetic concord. As "His embroidered / Cloak floats" by, the lovers may follow the model of "the two great-eyed greyhounds," who "leap like one, making delighted sounds." Like Hill and, before him, Allen Tate, Hughes utters "the 'formal pledge of art against aimless power.'" These principles are pushed to visionary extreme in "The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar," which includes the (reputed) last words of the title figure in the epigraph: "'If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.'" Like this witness's body, Hughes's own artifice attests to the powers of a transcendent art by containing the pain of history, subduing its primary violence to the higher order of art — a poetry lined by the silence of its own constraint. The skill and nerve needed to hold this New Critical balance are too often lost in Hawk in the Rain, which lapses frequently into sheer verbal sensationalism. The textured tensility of its best poems proves the norm rather than the exception in Hughes's second book, Lupercal (1960). His achievement finds precept and example in "To Paint a Water Lily," which develops a contrast between the exquisite flower — precious as the verbal surfaces of his best verse — and the submarine horrors, the elemental forces that Hughes both replicates and contains in the well-behaved body of his poetic language. Here the trim couplets convey a sense of immanent force — as a barrel of water charged with a million volts might show only the faintest rippling on the surface: Now paint the long-necked lily-flower Which, deep in both worlds, can be still As a painting, trembling hardly at all Though the dragonfly alight, Whatever horror nudge her root.

The successes of Lupercal turn on acts of verbal restraint that suggest a psychological complex and interest of their own. The first two poems frame it. "Things Present" develops a comparison between a tramp's shelter, fabricated out of materials at hand, and the make-shift constructions of the poet, whose "hands" use words to "embody a now, erect a here" — a homey version of the New Critic's verbal icon. But the lowly circumstances of the tramp's abode generate a compensatory fantasy — "My sires had towers and great names, / … dreams / The tramp in the -584- 250

sodden ditch" — and a similar fiction informs the second poem, "Everyman's Odyssey." Here Telemachus awaits his own noble forebear, who "arrives out of the bottom of the world" to avenge himself on "the beggars that brawl on my porch"; they will be "flung through the doors," the poet's diction promises exultantly, "with their bellies full of arrows." The parallel situations of the two poems suggest that the energies being repressed in Hughes's best art may well return to be revenged. The New Critical compact is being observed in Lupercal in a fashion equally charged and precarious. No such doubts attend the technical masteries of Charles Tomlinson, who returns the New Critical emphasis on craft to its formative energies in Anglo- American modernism. If the movement poets shared at least partially in the spirit of early modernism, echoing the anti-Romantic exertions of T. E. Hulme, these affinities were realized only in the face of similar enemies. Despite Davie's (rejected) suggestion that Tomlinson be included in New Lines, this poet was alone from the start. On his own he discovered and drew upon the eclectic verve of radical modernism; painter as well as poet, he projected the possibility of a synthetic art, like the vorticists'. Its debts are acknowledged and its dividends promised already in "Poem" (1951): Wakening with the window over fields To the coin-clear harness-jingle as a float Clips by, and each succeeding hoof fall, now remote, Breaks clean and frost-sharp on the unstopped ear.

The allusion to Odysseus' stopping of his mariners' ears against the Sirens' song recalls Pound's evocation of the same myth in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. That dangerous music is made safe here, for its sensuous acoustic has been rinsed and wrung clean by a visual stringency: The hooves describe an arabesque on space, A dotted line in sound that falls and rises

And space vibrates, enlarges with the sound; Though space is soundless, yet creates From very soundlessness a ground To counterstress the lilting hoof fall as it breaks.

Tomlinson directs his attentions to the dynamics and subtleties of sense perception. For him, the aesthetic object offers the sacramental occa -585- 251

sion for sense activity, and its quasi-sacred quality accounts for the visual puritanism here. To make verse a kind of painterly music is the ambition that accounts for a major body of work in Tomlinson's poems of the 1950s. Much of The Necklace (1955) extends the synthetic principle of "Poem," using the silence of the painter's space to edge a valid poetic speech, parsing and sharpening verbal music with the divisions and definitions special to the eye, as enacted by short plastic lines and radical enjambments: Facts have no eyes. One must Surprise them, as one surprises a tree By regarding its (shall I say?) Facets of copiousness.

By the early 1960s it was easy to see Tomlinson's turn to American modernism as a symptom and warning of the depletion of English poetic resources. The image of The Stagnant Society (the title for Michael Shanks's 1964 study first instanced the phrase) depicted the mood in the early years of that tumultuous decade. The 1950s had succeeded in stabilizing Britain, producing the limited triumphs of consensus politics — the "middle way" of democratic socialism testified to the broad center of English political life, which witnessed the practical reconciliation of Tory and Labour interests. Its most notable achievements were the (by and large) peaceful contraction of the old empire and the establishment of programs in the new welfare state. These two developments were cited in Anthony Hartley's A State of England (1963), however, as an explanation for the current malaise: the waning of global power and the expenses of the domestic agenda conspired to produce a feeling of shrinkage — financial, intellectual, spiritual — in English national life. This sense of enervation generated two poetic responses. On one hand there was the rejuvenation of art by mass culture, whose energies had been stimulated by the democratic programs of the 1950s and whose voices were heard most memorably in the pop poetry of "the Liverpool scene." The prospect of a huge audience for poetry certainly affected the work of the major poets, but they did not participate in that culture so much as respond to the whole social upheaval it seemed to symbolize; their reactions may best be assessed later, from the vantage of the end of the decade. The other response to stagnancy, integral to the ongoing work of these poets in the 1960s, was set out by A. Alvarez, 252

-586- in his now well known 1962 essay "The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle." Identifying the misguided faith of the English in normality (the principle of good manners), Alvarez asked contemporary poets to open themselves to the awarenesses of modern history, both political and intellectual. "The forcible recognition of a mass evil outside us," he stated, "has developed precisely parallel with psychoanalysis; that is, with the recognition of the way in which the same forces are at work within us." Alvarez called for a poetry written in the elemental clarity of these basic facts. These issues inform some of the most important English verse to be written in the 1960s, although not all poets resolve the problems in his terms. The most interesting poems of Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings (1964) elude the blandishments of gentility and engage the crisis Alvarez defined — for Larkin a critical point at which poetry always finds itself. "At this unique distance from isolation," Larkin writes in an Auden-like discourse on the poet's social contingency, "It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind." The Old English style of litotes (negating the contrary) is a form of understatement, which here both concedes and defies the awful truth, affirming the humanist wish to resist it through the antithetical powers of poetry. These powers translate the subject of "MCMXIV," Larkin's poem on the outbreak of the Great War, into the unpronounceable silence of the Roman numerals in its title. Unspeakable, these archaic letters provide a powerful coadjutor to the atrocity of mass war, and they promise an oppositional force in the English language of the verse that follows. How forceful is this opposition? "Never such innocence, / Never before or since," Larkin concludes, as he envisions that last moment, the climacteric of the premodern, with the men

Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a while longer: Never such innocence again.

The very resistance of human language to the fury and mire of human veins causes the poem, in the actual fabric of its images, to lose touch with the dire reality, and, in its imaginative attention, to lapse into the single vision of golden age nostalgia. 253

-587- The limitations of Larkin's engagements appear as nothing less than dangerous delusions to Geoffrey Hill, much of whose work in King Log (1968) sounds a vital challenge to the humanist compromise. "September Song," responding to a Jewish child "deported" from the Reich, holds the art of not saying to a fierce rebuke. The negative constructions in its opening lines show the susceptibilities of poetic avoidance: Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time.

"Not forgotten" reads here as an obscene euphemism for the all too powerful memory of the Nazi state, whose seizure (the Passover failing) of the child assumes the normality of a bureaucratic timetable — "at the proper time." The humanist tendency to mark the atrocity as alien, thus to push it to the fringes of language and celebrate the normal, amounts to nothing less than appeasement. Atrocity is accepted (in the rhetorical fiction of the poem) in the pastoral elegy of the final lines, which assimilate the child's death to the beneficent cycles of the seasons: September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Far from countering the horror, Hill suggests, such poetry enters into passive complicity with it, as revealed in the (strategically failed) apologia of "Ovid in the Third Reich," a poet who remained silent under Hitler. "I love my work and my children," this caricature of the poetclerk protests, but "God / Is distant, difficult." And "Things happen." Hill's own poetry of historical engagement appears at its finest in "Funeral Music," a sequence of eight sonnets that move freely through the political and intellectual circumstances of the Wars of the Roses, commemorating the deaths of three prominent aristocrats in particular. The nascent Neoplatonism of the period gives all three a touch of contemptus mundi, a diffidence that intersects oddly but engagingly with the momentum of worldly power they assumed with their birthrights. This contradiction goes to a formative paradox in the sequence. The sonnets combine a severe punctilio with a riot of sensations, a fastidious observation of rules with the densely sensuous sounds of history— 254

-588- a counterpoint Hill characterizes as "an ornate and heartless music punctuated by mutterings, blasphemies, and cries for help." As in the third sonnet: They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge.

Here the need to maintain the decasyllabic line of the blank-verse pentameter causes the exclamation to be broken at the formal division, heightening the force of the expletive. The aesthetic form applies an ascetic edge that serves to echo and amplify the primary violence of history, not to deny it. The same paradox generates the complex verbal textures of "History as Poetry," Hill's dramatic declaration on the subject. Its quatrains are rigidly syllabic, featuring nine counts per line, but the very strain of observing this ascetic form — syllabic measure goes against the stress rhythms natural to the physical body of the English language — fractures the language into phrasal fragments, orchestrating a music as abrasive as history: Poetry as salutation; taste Of Pentecost's ashen feast. Blue wounds. The tongues's atrocities. Poetry Unearths …

It is Hill's studied effort to handle language as verbal plastic, reshaping it as a material no less thickly resistant than the history to which the contemporary muse has called poets. The corporeal word is also the mark of Ted Hughes's achievement in Wodwo (1967). These poems witness a remarkable combination of acoustic density and representative immediacy, an effect that depends on the substantiality of the words themselves. Not onomatopoeia but a more individual and intricate art shows in Hughes's practice of loading his line with two sound patterns: an outcrop stone is "wart ed with quartz pe bb les from the sea's wom b." The repetition gives weight to the language, while the double pattern injects variety, a sense of suppleness, effecting all in all a kind of elastic substantiality. The poetic line moves like a muscle flexing, exerting a force equally compelling and disturbing when it is exercised on the subjects of recent history--as in "Out," on the two wars of the century. It is the nerve and sinew of the world's body that Hughes is seeking to capture in words. In doing so, however, he is testing the limits of the -589- 255

(now old) New Critical compact. A sign of his opportunistic compliance with its rules appears in a now dominant stylistic mannerism. He frequently allows the title of a poem to run into its first line: "Her Husband (Comes home dull with coal-dust …"); "Boom (And faces at the glutted shop window . . ."); "Bowled Over (By kiss of death, bullet on brow . . ."); "The Howling of Wolves (Is without world . . ."); "You Drive in a Circle (Slowly a hundred miles through the powerful rain . . ."). According to convention, the title works like the frame on a painting, both composing the verbal icon and providing distance on it. Hughes obliterates the distance he has invoked; the vantage is titillating in being precarious — it exerts the excitement of a foothold being washed from under us. The old sense of absolute separation on which the artifact relies for its status as re-presentation now seems to be valued mainly for the sensation it conveys in being violated. These tricks signal an exhaustion of the resources Hughes drew upon in his early career. Between 1963 and 1966, in fact, he wrote almost no poetry. This inactivity is not surprising, in light of Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, but it also attests to Hughes's need for new points of poetic growth. His productivity revives strikingly in 1966, when he begins (with Daniel Weissbort) to edit Modern Poetry in Translation, and discovers the work of Eastern Europeans such as Miroslav Holub and Vasco Popa. Having grown up in the midst of World War II, these poets showed Hughes an imagination fired and hardened by the worst history had to offer. Thrown back on their primitive wits, negotiating grimly but jauntily with the void, their language sounds equally banal and hieratic, clichéd and secretly wise, displaying the same kind of heroism in minimal conditions that characterizes the best theatrical art of the absurd. Their compatibility with Hughes seemed natural, given his characteristic concerns, but it is fair to say that the English poet seems to be mimicking a sensibility too hard won to be imitated successfully. Their gallows humor, testifying to their own unkillable humanity, never quite assumes for Hughes the grace of the gratuity it represents in their world. In fear of rubbing away the horror in "Karma" — "When the world-quaking tears were dropped / At Dresden at Buchenwald" — he tends to rub it in: "Earth spewed up the bones of the Irish." He fails the chance for redemptive laughter that Holub or Popa would seize with suitably somber gusto. While Hughes's cultivation of this foreign influence betrays a stance alien to theirs, it is a mark of Tomlinson's major achievement that he -590- 256

appropriates the pyrotechnics of American modernism for the sake of praising and preserving a specifically British tradition. The challenge emerges in Return to Hinton, Written on the author's return to Hinton Blewett from the United States (1963), the first poem he composed in the three-step line of William Carlos Williams. How can that rhythm, reputedly shaped to the cadences of Williams's own regional speech, work to the advantage of the English tradition, as typified in the poem by the King James Bible lying open on the parlor table? The American technique offers the English poet an externality of perspective, promoting a higher than usual self-consciousness in his presentation of British material and a speech rooted in that culture. This motive appears clear in light of "History," where Tomlinson depicts a provincial Englishman, entirely tied to his locale, as "the guardian / Of a continuity he cannot see." Tomlinson's is a characteristically modernist enterprise, for it turns on the central crisis of the modern--the perception that present and past are not continuous; that tradition, far from living on its own, must be consciously maintained and restored. In technique as well as in spirit Tomlinson follows the lead of the modernists Pound and Williams, Olson and Creeley. The line is his focus of critical attention and poetic experiment. Returning in "Lines" to the original image (and etymological meaning) of verse (versere, to turn) as lines ploughed in a field, he attends specially to the moment of the turn, the hiatus between consecutive lines, "when, one furrow / more lies done with / and the tractor hesitates." The pause at the end of a line provides a point of heightened awareness, a kind of high ground from which we can see language as language, as the content as well as the means of artistic representation. Similar aims had been instanced in the work of Stevie Smith (b. 1902), who could present her own character-in-voice — a rich compound of generic idiom and individual inflection — as the center of verbal attention. And while Tomlinson's initiative also aligns him with the poetics of avant-garde movements such as Dadaists and the language school, it works to essentially conservative purposes for him. Displaying the language as well as speaking it expressively, Tomlinson can exhibit styles otherwise archaic or outdated. He recovers forms of traditional eloquence — regaining an Augustan decorousness and symmetry in isochronous lines, or reviving a Renaissance splendor in diction. In "The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone," for 257

-591- example, the irregularly enjambing line disrupts the Marvellian period, making its grandiloquence seem equally self-conscious and assured: but let her play her innocence away emerging as she does between her doom (unknown), her unmown green.

Renewed by experiment and invention, Tomlinson's traditionalism stands opposed to developments in contemporary literary culture, above all the pop-poetry and mass-reading scene of the later 1960s. Sharing the stage with crowd-pleasing poets in A Dream, or the worst of both worlds (1969), he feels no connection to their newly expanded audience. A nearly ascetic revulsion drives him back "to the sobriety of a dawn-cold bed, to own / my pariah's privilege, my three-inch spaces, / the reader's rest and editor's colophon." Asserting the stringencies of print-based literacy against the casual orality of the public muse, he is reacting to forces that have produced changes greater than a shift in poetic media. The freedoms of the new poetry were synonymous with the license of the new "permissive society." Poetry drew a demotic brio from its expanded base, but its alignment with the idiom and sensationalism of rock music signaled a coalition aimed at ends more drastic and far- reaching than a removal of verse from the hands of an aging poetic clerisy. To numerous commentators the new permissiveness announced nothing less than the end of the old civic culture that had made Britain great. Old certainties undone, a sense of living at the end of history: these conditions inform much of the poetry written in the later 1960s and early 1970s. The most durable, like Tomlinson's, seems to have been conceived in opposition to mainstream developments, but these reactions vary in their quality and credibility. The title of Donald Davie's Or, Solitude (1969) promises an obvious alternative to the mass compulsions of the 1960s. "A farm boy lost in the snow," who "is called 'alone,'" leads Davie to proclaim: The metaphysicality Of poetry, how I need it! -592- And yet it was for years 258

What I refused to credit.

Trading the movement poet's skeptical empiricism for transcendent principles and fixed assumptions, Davie's reaction to the conventiondismaying decade now ending seems complete but simplistic. A more complex engagement sustains the book-length sequences of Ted Hughes's Crow (1970) and Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns (1971), which proceed according to needs and aims similar to those explained, simultaneously but independently, in a set of lectures by George Steiner, published in 1971 as In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. Echoing Eliot in his subtitle but addressing other redefinitions of culture in the 1960s, Steiner places Eliot's idea of a centered, unified tradition in crisis. Drastic uncertainty in the present returns him to the roots of cultural identity: a story of origins. He directs attention to "the myth of the nineteenth century" and its "imagined garden of liberal culture" — secular, post-Enlightenment version of the Eden tale. Identifying the now widespread need to (re)claim the primary values of human civilization, Steiner provides context and rationale for the essential imaginative action of Hughes's and Hill's sequences, which return, variously, to myths of the beginning. The title figure of Hughes's Crow belongs to the "trickster" type in primitive and folk literature. He engages in a game of wits with the creator, ostensibly attempting to improve nature and make it suitable for human habitation. No idealistic messiah, the trickster is usually greedy, oversexed, and perverse, but his actions spring out of a kind of unkillable biological optimism, seeking to ameliorate the first conditions of existence. This project brings Crow to the scenes of biblical Genesis. In "A Childish Prank," for example, God's work has left Adam and Eve in somatic stupor, which Crow attempts to cure by inventing human sexuality: He bit the Worm, God's only son, Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail half With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman.

The change hardly marks an improvement, however. "Neither knew what had happened" as "Man awoke being dragged across the grass" -593- 259

and "Woman awoke to see him coming." Failing to alter creation for the better (the high jinks generate no redemptive laughter), the sequence revisits the Eden topos constantly, expressing the protagonist's indefatigable energy but inscribing no new design worth changing the world into. Mired in the old Paradise, tied to scenes of contested beginnings, Crow has taken on the challenge Steiner defined, but it seems to have failed the task of rewriting the myth of origins credibly, satisfactorily. This judgment should not miss another level of meaning in the poem, however, one which shows it participating in the conflicts of its own historical moment. While Hughes is responding to Steiner's perception that contemporary mass culture has disrupted traditional certainties, and is thus returning to the site of origins for the sake of clarifying first principles, the poem relies for its literary manner on the very stuff of the popular culture it is reacting against. The farcical logic of the absurd, Crow's miraculous comeback from spectacular deaths, and Hughes's denial of cause-and- effect sequence in the progression between episodes: these features align Crow with the durable comicstrip character, the rubbery cartoon hero of popular culture. Building a poem up to a final punch line, concentrating its effect on the sudden "Bang!" or reversal of expectation, Hughes shows a crowd-exciting touch that testifies as well to the compulsions of the new mass audience. And so Crow's attempt to restart the world out of the ruins of the old witnesses his historical contingency, revealing Hughes's own imprisonment in the circumstances he is straining so powerfully to counter. While Hughes fails to rewrite a myth of cultural beginnings, he manages to inscribe a legend of the self, one which he generates out of his evident connection to the protagonist. Like Crow, Hughes is a survivor — of the death of Plath, of the various holocausts that provide the sequence with its vocabulary of historical reference. Yet this self-enlargement also marks another reaction syndrome. Hughes is protesting the anti-individualist premise of contemporary history, specifically, the leveling tendency of commodity culture, swollen in the 1960s to previously untold proportions: the fate of art and artist in the age of mechanical reproduction is to have uniqueness annulled. Anticipating this reaction in the early 1960s, Hartley's A State of England proleptically denied the power of popular masses to generate culture and offered a fervent apologia for the primacy of the single, creative individual. A decade later, Hughes's defensive myth of the self — a fabulous -594- 260

figure pumped up to gigantistic proportions—records, in its very distortions, the assaults the private individual has suffered. The same enterprise of mythologizing the self informs Geoffrey Hill's sequence of thirty prose poems (or versets) Mercian Hymns, which turns on a single dramatic conceit. Hill presents his own character as a child in Worcestershire, in his own native Mercia, in the likeness of its first king, the eighth-century Offa. The self- aggrandizement implicit in this scheme does not issue into the egotistical indulgence of Crow, however. Hill grounds the sequence in provincial history and local geography; he subjects his sometimes airy fantasy of the self to those elementary facts, a limitation that produces a tone of complex, modulating ironies: Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings — I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.

Hill's identification of king and child also allows him to transform the order of the political state into the rules of a child's game. In this way he follows the motive and plot of trickster literature: he revisits the origins of human society (Offa's is the first Mercian kingdom) and reorganizes it according to the paradigms of desire; of child's games. He follows the psychology of play in Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, which presents it as equally anarchic and regulated, spontaneous and disciplined, and Hill uses this vision in his redefinition of the original character of human society. In Hymn VII, for example, he balances the child's antic and disruptive behavior, his regal caprice, with the formal order of his imaginative domain, and he matches this complex in the tonality, which assimilates the child's violence to the decorous repetitions of ritual: After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named Albion.

The ceremonial demeanor of Mercian Hymns extends from these local moments to its containing form, which ritualizes beginning and end. It opens with an invocation of the medieval king in the cadenced heroic catalogue of the Old English scop, and it concludes with a pro -595- 261

tracted liturgy for Offa's death. Formal closure and integral structure appear as well in the model sequences of English poetic modernism — The Anathemata of David Jones (b. 1895) and the autobiographical Briggflatts of Basil Bunting (b. 1900) — and these features tend to distinguish English examples of the genre from their modern American counterparts. Following the polycentric design of Pound's Cantos, contemporary American sequences seem to proceed in the fear that a rigid structure will choke the spontaneity and intensity of the lyric moment; they tend to leave their energies open-ended, pursuing a sense of form that is purely potentialist. The English poet who most notably varies and enriches this convention is Roy Fisher, who adds to the literature of the open-form sequence in City (1961) and A Furnace (1986). City assembles poems and prose in a discontinuous montage, which imitates the fluctuating intensities of urban perceptual life (in his native Birmingham) and its rhythms of mental fragmentation. Antidiscursive and antinarrative as his strategy may be, it adheres at least to a quasimusical presentation, returning to motifs as figures in a composition. Evocative but dense and impenetrable images — "the bell in the river, / the loaf half-eaten, / the coat of the sky" — prove perplexing until they recur, when each appears, like a musical note or chord, as a moment of untranslatable, sensuous feeling. Drawing on his work as a jazz musician, Fisher combines a directness of emotional or imaginative experience with a sense of fluid artifice. He seeks not only to reach an intensity of lyric feeling but to stylize it, thus achieving the "mannerism of intensity" that he regards as the special virtue of jazz. Thus he can create a sequence that is "rigidly composed" but free, in his own nomenclature, of "an authoritarian centre," that is, "a rule or mandate somewhere in its middle which the work will unfold and reach." Fisher's resistance to this "authoritarian centre" expresses values equally political and aesthetic. More than a shift in structural tactic is occurring twenty-five years later, in A Furnace (Birmingham is again the site), which uses a single image as manifest center for the sequence: the double spiral, a whirlpool or vortex. Now, the avant-garde energies of the original vorticists (Pound and Wyndham Lewis, among others) led them to see artistic form as a vortex, a mere trace left by a force, and Fisher uses this figure to record the movements, alternately centripetal and centrifugal, in the history of a city. Yet the same shape suggested to Pound a model form and endorsement of authoritarian government (he 262

-596- linked that "form-sense 1914" to Lewis's own later "discovery" of Hitler's Reich). It is this possibility that Fisher realizes sardonically in the fourth section of A Furnace, where he complements that central position with a dramatic — symptomatic, not expressive — articulation of the totalitarian principle immanent in the design: We're carving the double spiral into this stone; don't complicate or deflect us. We know what we're at Write sky-laws into the rocks. …

The static, programmatic form of the spiral, here appropriately cut into stone, inscribes an inflexible political order, its "sky-laws" imposed from above. This picture of formal authority and central power clearly warns that such developments are the susceptibility of any society like the one whose geography Fisher maps in this sequence. Yet he is responding as well to a development in British political history of the 1970s and 1980s, one which allowed his own socialist humanism to wane under the imperial standards of Thatcherite conservatism. The currents that carried Thatcher into office were clearly gathering momentum in the early 1970s, when the Labour government had already outlived the energies of its mid-1960s initiatives. A growing disaffection with the idea of social welfare, an antagonism to Keynesian economics and the sense of government responsibility, emerged in her turn toward privatization and her emphasis on entrepreneurialism and technology. Asserting that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families," Thatcher not only denied the Tory-Labour consensus of the preceding decades. She departed sharply from one source of moral authority and value in traditional conservatism, the communitarian spirit in the old Toryism of the shires. By the mid-1970s these developments are already generating a poetic response from Hughes and Hill, whose increasing conservatism is sometimes misleadingly conceived as a collateral development to Thatcherism. Their main effort lies instead in a return to those lost locales of conservative value. Season Songs (1975) and Moortown (1979) present a Virgilian or practical- moral pastoral new to Hughes, a development which traces a parabolic return to the topography of an older, local, rooted Toryism. The -597- 263

political significance of Hill's Tenebrae (1978) appears both more obvious and complex. His sequence of thirteen sonnets "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" takes its epigraph from Disraeli's Coningsby (1844), a devoted apologia for the orderly echelons of Old England: altar, throne, country house, cottage. Like William Morris and Richard Oastler, Disraeli admired the hierarchy of feudal society as a community of reciprocal interests and shared responsibilities — a kind of vertical socialism — and Hill gives this archaic political ideal an appropriately complicated formulation. No less attractive than it is problematic, its values (seen in retrospect do not mitigate its severities. Ultimately, the sequence reads like an elegy to a forgone order; its poignancy is sharpened, its images edged more clearly with resentment, in view of its immediate and local context--the bogus conservatism (for Hill it conserved nothing) that had risen since the early 1970s: it is an enclave of perpetual vows broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair, disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer, Old Moore's astrology, all hallows, the squires's effigy bewigged with frost. Nostalgia also enters the poetry of Tony Harrison, but from another angle: his background in the urban working class of industrial Leeds accounts for sensitivities strikingly different to those of Hughes or Hill. By 1970 his poems are witnessing a crisis of belief in the values that had defined the cohesive center of national postwar politics--liberal social welfare. The bind of Progress, the irony of advancement: the material circumstances of working-class life have been improved but — in his elegiac presentation — the grainy strength of its soul has been lost. Harrison is not simply writing pastoral backwards, however; at his best, he avoids an inverted nostalgia for the starkly chastening force of poverty. He confronts a paradox, one which he focuses constantly, if obsessively, on the impoverishing benefits of literacy. His poems give literate speech to an underclass, and present a dramatic, searching analysis of the conditions of language and class in England. The poems in The Loiners (1970; a "Loiner" is a citizen of Leeds) display a studied coarseness, a kind of street-ballad brio that Harrison stylizes sufficiently to suggest its claim on literature: -598- In Leeds it was never Who or When but Where. The bridges of the slimy River Aire, 264

Where Jabez Tunnicliffe, for love of God, Founded the Band of Hope in eighteen odd

The hurdy gurdy rhythms and rigmarole music show the end rhyme exerting inordinate control over the language, whose subjection is otherwise witnessed in an excessive reliance on cliché. Predetermined, this is the speech of a class whose accent still determines its imprisonment. This symptomatology is balanced by Harrison's ability to tap the expressive potential of class dialect, as in the final lines of "Allotments," where the Loiner, greeting the end of World War II from the privations it has enforced, cried For the family still pent up in my balls, For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide.

Relying on Harrison's considerable metrical skill, these lines express the speaker's feeling of frustrated potential, at the crucial point, through those monosyllables' fiercely compacted energy. Yet this effect becomes credible mainly through the working-class character's perspective-invoice, where a corned beef sandwich and genocide vie for primacy of attention. The ambitious task of Harrison's Continuous (1981), a sequence of fifty sonnets written in the sixteen-line form devised by George Meredith for Modern Love, is announced through an allusion in its first poem to the local Leeds lore of class strife. Like the "Enoch of Leeds," the iron sledgehammer used by Luddites to smash the oppressive frames made by its namesake, Enoch of Marsden, Harrison writes his sonnet against itself, clanging "a forged music on the frame of Art, / the looms of owned language smashed apart!" Harrison may have faked the conventional sonnet by writing it in dialect, thus destroying the privilege an ownership of literary language has traditionally sanctioned, but he has also forged a new and durable product of his own. He reclaims the Luddites's share of a common language and gives their speech the dignity and gravity of literature. This project accounts for the major importance of Continuous, but the strenuousness of the enterprise should not excuse Harrison's tendency to lapse from it. Not only does he quit the struggle, falling into -599- facile contrasts between languages raw and cooked (his father's awkwardly genuine usage is constantly opposed to his own deviously polished Latinisms); he tends to 265

idealize inarticulateness. That first sonnet, "On Not Being Milton," already raises "three cheers for mute ingloriousness." To praise this silence actively is to endorse, if passively, the same economic and political conditions that have strangled Harrison's people into speechlessness. As though to correct that error, V. (1985) recounts Harrison's experience of finding his parent's graves defaced by the local hooligans. He presents their language — rank, clannish, densely vulgar — as a speech steeped in the culture of deprivation. The title V. stands for "versus" and puns on "verses." Yet the poem studiously denies itself the New Critical satisfaction of assimilating historical conflicts into forms of aesthetic concord. Unattenuated, the miners' strike of 1984-1985 provides both a containing context for V. and a primary example of unresolved struggle. "Standing up to the unions," the Thatcher government ultimately forced the miners back to work, and this result could be taken to signal, finally and uncompromisingly, the reversal of the whole postwar tradition of social welfare. In this light the indignity of the graffiti scrawled on Harrison's parents' tomb reads as no merely local, motiveless malignancy. It is the sign of lost values, the signature of those fallen, not only through the social safety net, but through the web of human culture. These are the lost people, who include (but are not limited to) the growing homeless population of Britain in the 1980s. To this historical reality Peter Reading's poems give urgent, terse, and disturbing witness. Diplopic (1983), C (1984), and Ukelele Music (1985) present a panorama of urban violence and hopelessness. Representative scenes — an infant sliced with glass by thugs stealing the mother's wedding ring; an octogenarian ritually and gratuitously murdered — seem to make his the poetic voice of the 1980s. But his timeliness lies in his manner of presentation: a postmodern diffidence, a deadpan coolness of observation that redeems the mannerisms of that contemporary style with his own greater complexity. Reading's strategy follows the formula announced in the title of Diplopic, whose double vision contrasts an empathic response with a nearly insane scientific detachment, as in "Telecommunication," where news of a grandmother's death, at first making the boy feel "scared, excited, numb. Sad / memories of—," issues into a parent's instruction- -600- 266

al response: "'Yes, Grandma's bones might fossilize, of course, / like those in your First Book of Dinosaurs.'" Stimulating compassion, then disrupting it, he makes the reader question that habituated response — sympathy more than horror is his subject. Earlier Stevie Smith's experiments with idiom hardened the language into a poetic material, leaving it unmoved by the (not always comic) horrors she reported, but Reading's verse moves a turn further, perhaps in response to the currents of his own time. Provoking and denying the consolations of fellow feeling, he forces the reader back to ask the questions that the ideal society of consensus socialism had answered, and whose solutions were being undone through the decade. Such diffidence also presents a response to the culture of verbal excess — to the coercive appeals of commodity sentiment on television; to the vacuous overstatements, equally compelled and compelling, of mass media politics. Silences locate the main points of attention in the social poetry of James Fenton. Sometimes Fenton presents this reticence symptomatically, as in A German Requiem (1981), where survivors of the war steer monologues of careful avoidance. At other times his clipped, brisk, abstemious report seems the only tonic response, as in "Dead Soldiers," which recounts an absurdly elegant lunch on a Cambodian battlefield (Fenton attended it). This manner reveals its center of moral gravity and political conscience in a poem from his 1989 collection Manilla Envelope (mailed in a "manilla" envelope to English readers from the Philippines, where Fenton had moved to finance and sustain a local fishing industry). "Jerusalem" overheats the language of contemporary political divisions, allowing its rhythms to run away with the speaker and push him into the intense inane of factional fanaticisms — a mania dramatized still more remarkably for being attached seamlessly, in the final lines here, to a voice of self- awareness and self-indictment: I'm an Armenian. I am a Copt. This is Utopia. I came here from Ethiopia ...... Have you ever met an Arab? Yes, I am a scarab. I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn. I cry Impure from street to street And see my degradation in the eyes I meet. -601- 267

The circumstances that force Reading and Fenton to court silence in their political verse may explain, conversely, the appeal of personal lyric, but the same historical moment makes it more difficult to legitimate a song of subjective experience. The lyric voice of Craig Raine is individualized but highly stylized; the zones of perception are idiosyncratic without being private. Strange metaphors--the oddness of outlook belongs to the alien or "Martian," the label given to a gathering of likeminded poets in the early 1980s — offer their exotic likenesses as the stuff of sensuous music. Yet Raine's usual unwillingness to consolidate a person at the core of these perceptions seems to deprive the pyrotechnic of a necessary fiction, an intensity of presence. Such intensity appears as aim and effect in the poems of Alan Jenkins, whose early lyrics assume a persona at once fictional and true, imaginatively heightened and historically informed. Picaresque lover, the main speaker of In the Hot House (1988) is driven through scenes of the post-1960s milieu. This is a story of eros furens--of a sexual liberation now jaded and sung in a language of disappointed excitements. Jenkins proceeds to poems of greater personal directness and emotional complexity in Greenheart (1990). A lyric elegy to his father, for example, "Keep-Net," alternates his sense of present loss — focused in a fishing rod lost overboard--with the memory of experiences shared with his father, balancing that immediacy of lived affection in a unique and beautiful counterrhythm with memory's sharp melancholy: The float bobs, I want him to catch one too, more than I want to catch them all myself, I who have caught the past, which is made of him, maroon or silver flashes in a grey-brown river, into which I dive, as my rod, in slow motion, disappears, as the spools of our reels click and whirr, click and whirr, the Imperial Bruyere has fallen into my lap as I wake, a book for keep-net, and mouth My father.

The energies of poets coming to maturity in the 1970s and 1980s have not been organized by single critical anthologies like Conquest's in the 1950s, Alvarez's in the 1960s. Literary culture has become decentered--or multicentered. The old hegemony of London-based houses like Faber has been challenged from Manchester, for example, by Carcanet Press, which publishes talents as various as C. H. Sisson and Michael Hamburger and Jeremy Hooker, or from Newcastle-upon- -602- 268

Tyne, where Bloodaxe Books maintains a commitment to northern poets like Ken Smith and to a political sensibility similar to Harrison's. The increasing democratization of education has simply dissolved the old London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle into the new polygon of provincial universities and local writing groups, and it becomes increasingly difficult to legislate an ars poetica for a generation. (The center of gravity in English poetry might be said to have shifted, around 1975, to Northern Ireland, where the political situation served both to unify poets and to challenge the "English" character of their verse.) The voices of Harrison, Reading, Fenton, Raine, and Jenkins are various and particular; they share common historical ground but, for now, no recognizably common purpose. The groupings of poets from previous decades seem fixed, but the permanence of individual achievements is still uncertain. Of these Larkin and Hughes have proved to be the most popular, addressing their technical skills to subjects at the antipodes of central human experience. The large if diverse audience they share also suggests their equal appeal to current attitudes, their joint mastery over the contemporary, that is, the conventional. "Tradition" posits a frame of reference and standard of judgment at once more elusive and demanding. Eliot's claim that the "existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) among them" has of course suffered the postmodern challenge to the canonical--tradition proves impermanent, its values arbitrary. Yet these awarenesses replicate those made in the early century by modernists. They also sensed a break between past and present and took these circumstances as the impetus for radical invention, at once delighting in technical experiment for its own sake and using it to revive materials no longer expected to live on their own. This project continues in poems that orchestrate the mutterings and blasphemies of history into the sweet ceremony of sonnet form; in versets that adjust the rhythms of an Old English psalter to the pace and psyche of contemporary speech; in lines that reconcile the projective energy of American postmodernism to an Augustan diction of civil latinity or the stately cadences of Elizabethan verse. The really new poems, perhaps the most lasting, have come from Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson. -603-

269

o Dylan Thomas

THOMAS, Dylan Columbia Encyclopedia Dylan Thomas (dIl´_n), 1914–53, Welsh poet, b. Swansea. An extraordinarily individualistic writer, Thomas is ranked among the great 20th-century poets. He grew up in Swansea, the son of a teacher, but left school at 17 to become a journalist and moved to London two years later. His Eighteen Poems, published in 1934, created controversy but won him immediate fame, which grew with the publication of Twenty- five Poems (1936), The Map of Love (1939; containing poetry and surrealistic prose), The World I Breathe (1939; also containing some prose), Deaths and Entrances (1946), and In Country Sleep and Other Poems (1952). The prose Thomas published is fragmented into stories and sketches, many autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical, all touched with fantasy; they are collected in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955), and Quite Early One Morning (1955). He had a remarkable speaking voice, flexible and resonant, and his radio readings over the BBC were popular. In addition he wrote for the radio A Child's Figure 34. Dylan Thomas Christmas in Wales (published 1954) and his Source; http://www.dylanthomasboathouse.co striking dramatic work, Under Milk Wood m/english/education/biblio.html (published 1954), which records life and love and introspection in a small Welsh town. Thomas's themes are traditional — love, death, mutability — and over the years he seemed to pass from religious doubt to joyous faith in God. His complex imagery is based on many sources, including Welsh legend, Christian symbolism, witchcraft, astronomy, and Freudian psychology; the private myth he created makes his early poetry hard to understand. Yet his sure mastery of sound (perhaps related to his fine voice), his warm humor, and his robust love of life attract the reader instantaneously. Thomas greatly enjoyed his success but lived recklessly and drank heavily. His third highly popular tour of the United States ended in his death, which was brought 270

on by alcoholism. The autobiography of Thomas's wife, Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill (1957), and the account of the Thomases' tours by J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (1955), vividly describe his last years.

Some poems of Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night Holy Spring

Do not go gentle into that good night, O Old age should burn and rave at close Out of a bed of love of day; When that immortal hospital made one Rage, rage against the dying of the more moove to soothe light. The curless counted body, And ruin and his causes Though wise men at their end know Over the barbed and shooting sea dark is right, assumed an army Because their words had forked no And swept into our wounds and lightning they houses, Do not go gentle into that good night. I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only Good men, the last wave by, crying That one dark I owe my light, how bright Call for confessor and wiser mirror but Their frail deeds might have danced in there is none a green bay, To glow after the god stoning night Rage, rage against the dying of the And I am struck as lonely as a holy light. marker by the sun No Wild men who caught and sang the sun Praise that the spring time is all in flight, Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the And learn, too late, they grieved it on its morning grows joyful way, Out of the woebegone pyre Do not go gentle into that good night. And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall, Grave men, near death, who see with My arising prodgidal blinding sight Sun the father his quiver full of the Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and infants of pure fire, be gay, But blessed be hail and upheaval Rage, rage against the dying of the That uncalm still it is sure alone to light. stand and sing Alone in the husk of man's home And you, my father, there on that sad And the mother and toppling house of height, the holy spring, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce If only for a last time. tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Love In the Asylum Rage, rage against the dying of the light. A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, 271

A girl mad as birds The Hand That Signed the Paper

Bolting the night of the door with her The hand that signed the paper felled a arm her plume. city; Strait in the mazed bed Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, She deludes the heaven-proof house Doubled the globe of dead and halved with entering clouds a country; These five kings did a king to death. Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room, The mighty hand leads to a sloping At large as the dead, shoulder, Or rides the imagined oceans of the The finger joints are cramped with male wards. chalk; A goose's quill has put an end to She has come possessed murder Who admits the delusive light through That put an end to talk. he bouncing wall, Possessed by the skies The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever, She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she And famine grew, and locusts came; walks the dust Great is the hand that holds dominion Yet raves at her will over On the madhouse boards worn thin by Man by a scribbled name. my walking tears. The five kings count the dead but do And taken by light in her arms at long not soften and dear last The crusted wound nor pat the brow; I may without fail A hand rules pity as a hand rules Suffer the first vision that set fire to the heaven; stars. Hands have no tears to flow.

You can read some other Dylan Thomas’ poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/dylan-thomas/poems/; you can also listen to some of his poems in www.youtube.com, as Do not go gentle into that good night, for example, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z7SiZbqXZU, and many others.

o Ted Hughes

HUGHES, Ted Columbia Encyclopedia Ted Hughes (Edward James Hughes), 1930–98, English poet, b. Mytholmyroyd, Yorkshire. Hughes's best poetry focuses on the unsentimental within nature. His poems are marked by controlled diction and style, which create a sense of order and meaning in violent or passionate natural events, often in the world of animals. His volumes of poetry include The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Lupercal (1960), Wodwo 272

(1967), Crow (1971), Gaudete (1977), Moortown (1980, 1989), River (1984), and Wolfwatching (1991). From 1984 until his death Hughes was poet laureate of England. He also wrote fiction, plays, stories for children, and essays, e. g., those included in Figure 35. Ted Hughes Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the- the large collection Winter northerner/2011/oct/19/poetry-tedhughes Pollen (1995). In addition, he edited a number of books and translated such authors as Ovid (1997) and Aeschylus, Euripides, and Racine (all: 1999). Hughes was married (1956–63) to the American poet Sylvia Plath; he explored their complex relationship in Birthday Letters (1998), his last book of verse.

Somes poems of Ted Hughes

Green Mother And the worm leans down - A forgiving God. I am the pillow where angels come for And you shall climb with the angels the sleeper. Of the insects - the trembling hosts of Grey-long-eyed and silvery-limbed, a light tremor, a girl, strong-fingered The chivalry of sun and moon With the washed voice of a thrush, On the field of the leaf. Glistening wet - the angle of the ash And from heaven to heaven You shall enter the heaven of the birds A toppling tower of gargoyles and - the trumpets ogres – The heaven of the beasts - who labour With a voice of splitting, a sulphur- in the foundations glare The heaven of the fish - banners in the And a numbness long flame The angel of the oak lifts his trophy Of the beginning Many heavens, none of them fallen. Slow and charred from the furnace, in Do not think I am the stone of the red-oiled strength, grave. Crippled with overcoming, the angel of I pillow the face of everliving. the yew Lie down - rejoice! among roots, Cradles the molten dove, which is his among mouths. voice. Every flower sends an angel. Brooktrout

The Brooktrout, superb as a matador, 273

Sways invisible there No good shouting: 'Look!' In water empty as air. It vanished as it struck. The Brooktrout leaps, gorgeous as a You can catch Brooktrout, a goggling jaguar, gewgaw - But dropping back into swift glass But never the flash God made Resumes clear nothingness. Drawing the river's blade. The numb-cold current's brain-wave is lightning –

You can read some other Ted Hughes’s poems in http://www.poemhunter.com/ted-hughes/poems/; you can also find many interesting things about him on www.youtube.com

10.4. British Poetry now

DIRECTIONS IN LATE TWENTIETH AND EARLY TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY POETRY

Joseph Black et al

Modernism, the most important movement in twentieth-century British poetry before the Second ‘World War, has remained an important inﬂuence in the post-war period. The densely allusive style of Geoffrey Hill, for example, has often been seen as an extension of the traditions of Modernism. And the language poetry of such writers at Veronica Forrest-Thornton, Maggie O'Sullivan, and J. H. Prynne is often said to represent a different sort of offshoot of Modernism (described by some at a form of postmodernism), one that lends itself less to the unpacking of meaning than to the free association of images — and, especially, of sounds. The poetry of Prynne or of Forrest-Thomson, indeed, may tend to frustrate any effort to locate expressible meaning, and often calls into questian assumptions about the nature and function of poetry. As a far extreme from language poetry (and from Modernism) stands the verve of Philip Larkin, whose poems for the most part employ familiar and accessible forms to convey meanings that may fairly readily be articulated. In the l950s, 60s, and 70s, when, for the most part, the practice of poetry was moving away from accentual- syllabie forms (and from rhyme). Larkin continued to develop his extraordinary versatility in those traditional forms. The deqree to which Larkin, together with W. H. Auden. was able to demonstrate poetic possibility in traditional forms may in part 274

explain the degree to which the mainstream of Britith poetry over the part 30 years has returned to those paths. (Certainly British poetry in recent generations has been far less dominated by free verse than has poetry in the United Stales or in Canada.) A poet such as Carol Ann Duffy may, in the attitudes behind her work, be light yearn away from the social and political conservatism of Latltin, but poetically the two share a surprising amount of common ground. Respected by critics and academics while also appealing to a broad, popular readership, their work connect strongly with readers not only through in emotional lnrelligertoe but also through its technical virtuosity — not least of all through rhyme and other aural qualities. The leading lights of British poetry in the I970s were considered to be Larkin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Whereas Larkin's work is rooted most strongly in unvarnished observations of the human, that of Hughes and, especially, of Heaney might fairly be said to be rooted in the earth — in the elemental suggestiveness of nature imagery. They, too, have exerted considerable influence on subsequent writers: echoes may he hard, for example, in the work of poets such as Medbh McGuckian and Alice Oswald. (It should be emphasized, however, that there poets have found their own distinctive voices: they are successor to poets such as Hughes and Heaney, not their imitators.) The prominence of writers such as Duffy, MeGuckian. Oswald, and a host of other women writers in contemporary British and Irish poetry points to a striking change over the part 30 years. As late as the 1980s almost any list of acknowledged major living poets in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland would have been composed overwhelmingly of rnen. This is no longer true: the past generation is perhaps the first in the history of British poetry in which significant women poets have emerged in number at least as great as those of their male counterparts. Another shift has been towards increasing identification of poets with national groups. Liz Lochhead is one often identified strongly as a Scottish poet: Gwyneth Lewis and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill have letl the way in forging fresh traditions at bilingual poets in Welsh and English (in the case of Lewis) and Irish and English (in the case of Dhomhnaill), finding immense poetic resources in the sounds as well as the meanings of the two languages. And there has been an extraordinary outpouring of works from poets born and raised in Northern Ireland; Seamus Haney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, and McGuckian are among the most notable 275

names. (It is essencial here to note, however, thst many of these poets have self- identified as lrish rather than as Northern Irish.) In their different ways all have created work that has connected with readers in its sense of place — at well as through itnagery and through aural qualities. A very dilierent sort of aural connection with readers and listeners has been created by dub poetry, a form that constitutes another important direction in the British poetry of the past thirty years. The blending of reagge music and poetry into dub in the work of writers and performers such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and ]ean Binta Breeze is one important way in which poets have created hybrid expressions of the traditions of the Caribbean and the realities of present-day Britain. More broadly, poets such as Derek Walcott, David Dabydeen, Kamau Brathwaite, and Grace Nichols have brought from their background in the Caribbean a range of styles and of concerns that have broadened the scope of 'British" poetry immeasurably. In like fashion, poets such as Moniza Alvi connect with the roots of their own cultural heritage and the heritage of British colonialism. Finally, mention should he given here to the degree to which poetry in Britain — and the public discussion of this poetry — has often been infused in recent generations with strongly political content. The politics of posteobnialhm and of race are here important strands, but the politics of gender, of class, and of aetthetics have often been just as hotly contested. (Sexual orientation, on the other hand, is no longer in itself an object of controversy; with the coming into prominence over the course of the twentieth century first of openly gay poets — W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn chief among them — and then of openly lesbian poets such as Dofiy and Jackie Kay, and with the overall change in societal attitudes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a gay or lesbian sexual orientation has come to he regarded almost universally as unexceptionable.) Poets such as Tony Harrison have powerfully addressed issues relating to social class; Heaney, Muldoon, Tom Paulin, and others have spoken out provocatively on issues in British and Irish politics; poets such as Johnson and Kay have focused strongly in their work on issues of race and culture; and so on. Poets such as James Fenton, Craig Raine, and Andrew Motion, on the other hand, have often been labeled (whether fairly or not) representative: of the ‘Oxbridge' establishment; the choice of Motion as Poet laureate in I999 was highly controversial, with many suggesting that Duffy would have been a more forward-looking choice. 276

Through these controversies various observers have depictecl British poetry as divided into politically-charged binaries of poetic style as well as of politics, positing a mainstream tradition stemming from the work of Larkin, Hughes, and Heaney, contrasted with a rival tradition of bold experimentation with roots in Modernism and port-modernism. British poets themselves, however, with only a few exceptions, have been reluctant to enlist in movements that have aimed to make a battleground of the ﬁeld of British poetry — and have remained powerfully aware of the degree to which the actual work of poets alleged to be in entirely dilferent camps often cuts across the supposed lines of demarcation. In this, as in so many other respects, it is diversiy that has above all characterized British poetry in the generations since World War ll. o Carol Ann Duffy

On May 1st 2009, Carol Ann Duffy became the UK's twentieth Poet Laureate. She is one of Britain's best known and most admired poets. Her poems appeal to those who wouldn't usually read poetry and they appear on the national curriculum. Here, an Observer reviewer celebrates her popularity and her technical adroitness: "Duffy's poems are at once accessible and brilliantly idiosyncratic and subtle". She writes of life in all its sadness — life, as what Eliot

Figure 36. Carol Ann Duffy calls, that "infinitely gentle, infinitely Source: http://www.carolannduffy.co.uk/ suffering thing". She was born in Glasgow in 1955 to a Scottish father and an Irish mother. Raised Catholic, she grew up in Staffordshire an ardent reader and elder sister to four brothers. Her mother would invent fairy tales for her — a form whose archetypes she has always found seductive. She has been particularly interested in exploring feminine archetypes, which she subverts with dexterity in The World's Wife (Anvil Press Poetry 1999). Duffy wanted from a very early age to be a writer and was encouraged to write poetry by an inspirational teacher at a Convent school when she was ten years old. 277

Duffy graduated from Liverpool University in 1977 with a BA in Philosophy. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1983, an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and her first collection Standing Female Nude (1985) was met with acclaim. Robert Nye in The Times declared the book "The debut of a genuine and original poet". In 1993, Mean Times won the Forward Best Collection Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has gone on to publish many books for adults and children and is also an acclaimed playwright and editor. A sense of the ritual of language learned in her school days pervades Duffy's work, although she is no longer a practicing Catholic. Indeed, her much anthologized sonnet 'Prayer' speaks of religious feelings and of epiphanies, but also of the absence of formal religious beliefs. "Poetry and prayer are very similar," she explains. "I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite."

Some poems of Carol Ann Duffy

You Name Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, When did your name so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, change from a proper noun hard, woke with your name, to a charm? like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the Its three vowels sound of its bright syllables like jewels like a charm, like a spell. on the thread of my breath. Falling in love Its consonants is glamorous hell; the crouched, brushing my mouth parched heart like a kiss. like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce I love your name. licks under the skin. I say it again and again Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, in this summer rain. you strolled in. I see it, I hid in my ordinary days, in the long discreet in the alphabet, grass of routine, like a wish. in my camouflage rooms. You I pray it sprawled in my gaze, into the night staring back from anyone's face, from till its letters are light. the shape of a cloud, I hear your name from the pining, earth-struck moon rhyming, rhyming, which gapes at me rhyming with everything. as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are December on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream. The year dwindles and glows 278

to December's red jewel, simple as faith. my birth month. These nights are gifts, The sky blushes, our hands unwrapping the darkness and lays its cheek to see what we have. on the sparkling fields. The train rushes, ecstatic, Then dusk swaddles the cattle, to where you are, their silhouettes my bright star.

You can read some other poems of Carol Ann Duff in http://www.freewebs.com/carolannduffypoems/index.htm; you can also find many interesting things about her on www.youtube.com, including the readings of some of her poems by herself, like Premonitions, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrMznlN6i4

o Alice Oswald

In its vivid, hypnotic and often startlingly imaginative qualities, the poetry of Alice Oswald (b. 1966) confirms a unique sensibility at work. From her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Figure 36. Alice Oswald Source: Collection and the T.S. Eliot http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/30/alice- oswald-ted-hughes-award Prize, her unusual, almost visionary style — personifying Nature and its birds, beasts and flowers; plumbing the historical and spiritual depths of the landscape – has been admired by readers, critics and fellow poets alike. Oswald’s voice arrived almost fully formed: surefooted yet delicate, bold yet attentive, marrying extravagance with humaneness and humour. A second volume, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Dart (2002), brought her work to prominence. A capacious book-length poem, it unfolds, in the poet’s own words, as “a map poem or song line” guided by the meanderings of the eponymous Devon river. A three-year project in the research and writing, its richly textured narrative encompasses a range of voices — from poachers and milk workers to swimmers and canoeists; from the 279

human and historic to the natural and mythic — exploding the contained forms of her early poems into a free-flowing and garrulous work. But as the poet Michael Longley has noted, alongside the many voices Oswald “maintains a personal melody”, and it is this democratic yet cohesive approach, coupled with her playfulness, rhythmical prowess, and the presence of an inquisitive intelligence, which lends her poetry its wide appeal. In her sixth book of poetry, Memorial, a special extract from which can be heard here, Oswald draws on her classical education and longstanding fascination with the oral tradition — tales told rather than written — to produce a mesmeric reworking of the world’s greatest war story: Homer’s Iliad. Yet where most critics have praised, and most translators have sought to capture, what Matthew Arnold called the poem’s “nobility”, Oswald’s version abandons its narrative — the wrath of Achilles — approaching instead what ancient critics called its “enargeia”, or “bright unbearable reality”. The result is a darkly atmospheric poem which flits between biographical laments for the many war-dead and soaring, dramatic similes; “an antiphonal account”, as Oswald states in her introduction, “of man in his world”. Throughout, the unflinching, plain realism of the former – “DIORES son of Amarinceus / Struck by a flying flint / Died in a puddle of his own guts / Slammed down into mud he lies” – is often as gripping as the elemental blaze of the latter – “Like the hawk of the hills the perfect killer / Easily outflies the clattering dove / She dips away but he follows he ripples / He hangs his black hooks over her” – blending the human and the workings of nature to remarkable, incantatory effect.

Some poems of Alice Oswald

Beaufort Poem Scale But I keep feeling (force 3) a scintillation, As I speak (force 1) smoke rises As if a southerly light breeze vertically, Was blowing the tips of my thoughts Plumed seeds fall in less than ten force 4) and making my tongue taste seconds strongly of italics And gossamer, perhaps shaken from the soul's hairbrush And when I pause it feels different Is seen in the air. As if something had entered (force 5) whose hand is lifting my page Oh yes (force 2) it's lovely here, One or two spiders take off (force 6) So I want to tell you how a And there are willow seeds in clouds whole tree sways to the left

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But even as I say so (force 7) a Groping up through us, a kind of persistent howl is blowing my hair outswelling weakness, horizontal Yes once I was half frail, half glittering, And even as I speak (force 8) this Continually emerging from the store of speaking becomes difficult the self itself, Always staring at rivers, always And now my voice (force 9) like an Nodding and leaning to one side, I umbrella shaken inside out came gloating up, No longer shelters me from the fact And for a while I was half skin half (force 10) breath, There is suddenly a winged thing in the For a while I was neither one thing nor house, another, Is it the wind? A waterflame, a variable man-woman of the verges, Wearing the last self-image I was left Narcissus with Once I was half flower, half self, Before my strenth went down down That invisible self whose absence into the darkness inhabits mirrors, For the best of the year and lies That invisible flower that is always crumpled inwardly, In a clot of sleep at the root of nothings all

You can read and listen to some other poems of Alice Oswald in http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=15354; you can also listen her sonnet Wedding in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jr1itiQIZw

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