Philip Larkin – Poems (1955-1974)

Larkin, along with Amis, Conquest, Gunn, and others, were a group post-war authors christened “The Movement.” Conquest described their mantra as “little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles,” which is an obvious continuation of Auden’s project: the destruction of error. Larkin’s paired down lyricism–a lyric stunted by discontent and a hyper-active reality principle–is clear in the tight but flexible verse forms, often with minute variations that do not draw attention to themselves. Ironically, Kingsley Amis’s rollicking Lucky Jim  was partially inspired by Larkin’s life, which points to the forms of severe restraint imposed on the expression of emotion–not so much fro the sake of restraint (a la Eliot and Pound) but because of the realization that lyric expressiveness is hollow.

This marks out his difference with Auden. Auden never attempts the honest transparency of Larkin’s expressive attempts (failing not because, like Prufrock, he cannot find the words and take the action, but because he finds the words and they still fail to matter), but holds in secret an identity protected at all costs from systems that might otherwise subsume it. Auden puts the self in question, but in secret: Larkin’s self-deprecation stages this questioning as it central image.

“Church Going” (1955) is a poem about, the way churches (synecdoche for institutional religion) no longer function to unify the basic stages of human life–birth, marriage, death–but how humans till return to these hollowed out skeletons compelled by the sense of a lost unity that needs repair. The speaker stops as a tourist, and failing to be satisfied as a tourists, asks, “What remains when disbelief is gone?” What stands between belief and unbelief? A difference worthy of Hardy poem–the speaker, like the one in Hap, Darkling Thrush and Neutral Tones, yearns for a substantial system that he can negate….but to no avail. Yet something very much like an objective “neediness of the world” (Adorno) persists over and above individual loss of faith:

And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to  be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie around.

If Church Going is commenting on a contemporary lack, then “MCMXIV” (1964), which translates into 1914, pinpoints the loss of innocence as World War I: “Never such innocence again,” the poem closes. The opening line, “Those long uneven lines,” refers to the lines of men waiting to be conscripted, which doubles etymologically with the act of writing itself (script). Throughout Larkin, this sense of lost innocence is repeated again and again; it correlates with the loss of structures that would order everyday activity. So, for instance, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” comments on the difficulty of ascending to an objective viewpoint in relation to “customs and establishments.” In England, “no elsewhere underwrites my existence.” The impossibility of appeal to something beyond.

In “High Windows” (1974), Larkin attempts to link the current generation of youth’s attempts to mark out its own possibilities and opportunities (the sexual revolution of the sixties) to his generation’s attempt to escape the dread of religion. But the particularity of these two experiences, divided by thirty years, cannot be related, or sublated into a universal idea that would explain how each generation acts. The entrance of the lyric voice in the fifth stanza is empty:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows,
The sun-comprehending grass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The fiction of the lyric. The deep blue does not connect with broader network of religious symbolism, but merely signifies the lack of representation all together (shows nothing). “Sun-comprehending grass” marks out a pathetic fallacy for the 20th century.

 

 

 

T.S. Eliot – The Four Quartets (1936-41)

Ongoing post:

Frist the title–each poem is a quartet, but the whole thing is also a quartet of sorts. If the whole thing is a quartet, then the “four” is tautologous. Throughout the poem, Eliot will play with tautology, equivalence and difference: ends are beginnings, etc. Also, the “quartets” have five parts each, like the Waste Land. Could the think of the larger four as subsuming the individual fives: from synthesis and progress, to symmetry and order, etc.

Burnt Norton

“All time is unredeemable”: what “might have been” can only be registered as an echo in the rose garden–the past, present and future are one solid whole, which we cannot comprehend, but that nevertheless determines our existence. Past and Future press so hard one on the other that there is room “for little consciousness.” The presentness has a spatial analog–the stillness in the midst of a swirling world. This limited epistemological envelop comprises the limits of our language: poetry, for Eliot, is always too late, and words, once established, will never stay. Art, in other words, is subject to the processes of life and decay that our bodies are subject to.

East Coker

A more earthy section, that talks about seasons while trying out various styles of poetry (Olde English, Vorticists) before admitting that these are all just attempts that always fail. Living “entre les deux-geurres,” Eliot claims that every attempt at poety is a new and fresh attempt bereft of former accomplishments–“a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment.” Curious, given the resonance of  The Waste Land throughout. The past, even if does not stay put as a tool for use, reamins that from which we cannot escape even as we continue to lose it.

The Dry Salvages

Draws attention to the changes of the human–not the same when they leave the station, etc. Focuses on image sof water and the sea. Despite being composed while being bombed, the poem is surprisingly hopeful. Connect imagery of boat and drowning to the the “Death by Water” section (the poem that wasn’t written), but also to the image of the boat guided by the craftsman at the end of the Waste Land.

Little Gidding

Circularity and fire are brought together in this final poem, that connects with imagery from Burnt Norton. The image of stillness in the middle of a circulating world is born out as paradigmatic poetic practice. it maintains the tension that runs throughout the poem: between time utterly lost and time redeemed, etc.

IMAGES AND THEMES

humility of thought (cf. Heidegger)

stillness in circle (cf. Yeats)

circular exploration (cf. Molloy)

inter-penetration of the seasons (cf. The Waste Land)

experimental nature of all language (M-P, Ulysses, early modernism)

the little space for consciousness (between past and present)

 

 

W.H. Auden – Poems (1929-1948)

“It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens” (October 1929)

Nice analog to the image of Spring as it appears in Eliot (“April is the cruelest month…”). Here Easter is associated with a time of creation, finding altering lines for altering things…the tautological nature of verse is a theme that will run throughout Auden’s poetry (“Poetry makes nothing happen…”). He sees a man like the embryo of a chicken (cf. startling image in Prufrock that disrupts love song, here the elegy is interrupted by the presence of that which is to be mourned). This reminds him of the death that is necessary for this season. A weird line, but one that calls the bluff of war propaganda (connect with Wilfred Owen). The images of decline focus on Oxford (cf. Waugh and all the stuff on I.A. Richards, Quiller-Couch, Empson, etc.). Auden ratchets up the stasis of something like the Wasteland opening, with compressed, abstract gerunds:

Coming out of me living is always thinking,
Thinking changing and changing living,
And feeling as it was seeing.

This a doubled-edged move, as it equalizes the processes of living, thinking, changing, etc. How is anything new produced in this plane of equality? Auden begins to intimate a negative, regulative function for poetry (a poetry of resistance and durability). “Home, a place Where no tax is levied for being there.” His idealized utopia can only be articulated by way of comparison (connect to Auden’s exile, and also to Eliot’s Unreal). Auden’s poetics could be described: “It is time for the destruction of error.” His poetry wants to communicate, clearly. And such destruction includes “the death of the old gang,” which becomes a part of a seasonal metabolic process (imaged as grain…connect to the fields of wheat in “I walked out one evening”).

“As I walked out one evening” (November 1937)

A love poem. Told in ballad style: abcb. The “I” hears another “I” proclaim a love song under an arch of the railway. Already, that the folks on Bristol street are “fields of wheat” intimate that TIME’s scythe  will be making an appearance.  The clocks in the city say: “You cannot conquer time….Time watches from the shadow and coughs when you would kiss.” For Auden, this isn’t just the individual human aging, but the grand forces of time penetrating the everyday: “The glacier knocks in the cupboard.” Despite these realities the poem introduces a great theme of Auden’s: a commitment to the everyday despite its misery: “Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless….You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.”

“Musée des Beaux Arts” (December 1938)

Auden is looking at the Icarus painting by Breughel and thinking about how great human suffering is just one small part of a larger world of daily activity. Most often, people don’t recognize the great tragedies [Connect with Lukács].

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along.

Note the long prosaic line, characteristic of Auden’s expository predilections (at times). He writes in all sorts of styles, not because he wants to idealize a past, or transmit the impulse of the past (Pound); rather, all these styles are simply tools available for the master craftsman (like Pound in this way). The diminution of the tragic can be read as a critique of Yeats. “Terrible beauty” and the slouching “rough beast” get transformed into a “miraculous birth” that no one registers, and others would prefer not to happen. A horse scratches its butt on a tree [think of this poem as a combination of Easter 1916 and Crazy Jane put together (house of excrement, etc.)]. The legs of Icarus are imaged as “white legs” in “green water,” a sort of generic abstraction of colors devoid of meaning, a flat, uncreative phenomenology.

“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (January 1939)

Against the pathetic fallacy (cf. Browning on “Porphyria’s Lover” ?? and Ruskin, of course). In short, Yeats dies and it we know it was a cold day, not because of poetry or other forms of representation, but because of instruments like barometers and thermometers that can measure tese objectie conditions. [Interesting to talk about in term sof the scientific metaphors of Eliot, Woolf, etc.]

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Auden imagines Yeats as his words become digested by his admirers (modified in the guts of the living)…in connection to Pound’s worries over Gaudier-Brezka’s relation to posterity. Yeats, in short, has nto changed much with his poetry; he hasn’t solved the epistemological problems staged in the wasteland [And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom]. The second section slides into pretty strict hexameter, a dramatic shift from the prosodic lines of the opening stanzas. Auden does say that poetry makes nothing happen, but, instead, “it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper….it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.”  Poetry as RESISTANCE. Talk about in terms of Schiller and Bergson and Arendt.

 

“In Praise of  Limestone” (1948)

Good example of Auden’s syllabic structuring: 13 syllables, with varying accentual patterns. Lots of enjambment, little rhyme, making this poem very expository. Can be read as a pastoral of sorts, but one that does not place a golden landscape in a receding, hazy past: “examine this region of short distances and definite places.” He is talking about the Mediterranean, the limestone is built up over time, organically, and dissolves quickly because of the calcium deposits. This transience, fluidity, carelessness is contrasted to the Northern cities of England and Germany, associated with destruction and violence:

…accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed.

The theme of sculpture is also played throughout, with reference to Greek sculptures, that somehow mock the poet that confines himself to the “antimythological” tautologies of Auden’s earlier poems, which is associated here with scientist dissecting Nature’s remotest aspects (a Romantic turn?). The religious turn in the end seeks to sublimate God within a realistic vision–sorta like Kafka’s “there is hope, but not for us.” The murmuring of the underground streams picks up the murmuring river at the end of “I walked out on evening.” displacing even more the “stream” of creativity that somehow remains constant (but inaccessible).

Yeats – General Comments and Themes

Ongoing Post

—–

Standard narrative: early period characterized as Irish national visionary, writing himself into a mythic past, writing Ballads, etc. Dressed as an old Irish king whose harp is broken..wandering in the woods, etc. This lure of the aesthetic withdraw, dangerous but irresistible, is rejected because of Yeats’ growing sensibility of the political exigencies of his day. He starts to write in a leaner, colder, more pessimistic style: the “heroic realist.” [But a comparison of Aengus and Fisherman shows something closer to a mere exchange of symbols: one for another. The Fisherman does not exist] Late Yeats is characterized by growing doubts about the efficacy of art and the worries that come with old age. There is a return to Irishness, but in the form of a senile peasant.

Relation to Modernism. Can be seen as a reactionary of sorts. “A Coat” can be seen as both a rejection of his former baroque style, but also of the public that failed to appreciate it. His new style will have a “nakedness” and a “coldness” that is still elite and symbolic. The “terrible beauty” of “Easter 1916” is, well, both terrifying and beautiful. Like the isolated Fergus, Aengus and Fisherman, Yeats imagines his own withdraw from and responsibility to a public that is “changed utterly.” He does not change, but his relationship to them does. The final stanza of Easter 1916 positions the poet as mother that has a duty to the particularity of historical violence. However, this is an aestheticization of violence.

The Occult in Yeats: Wandering Aengus and The Second Coming.

 

Can track certain images:

Heart
– Easter 1916 (makes the heart a stone)
– Circus Animals Desertion (faul rag and bone shop of the heart)

Fish
– Wandering Aengus (trout turns into beautiful girl that flees)
– The Fisherman (glorified Irish peasantry)
– Sailing to Byzantium (species and cycles of birth and death: the slamon falls, the mackerel crowded seas)
– Circus Animal Desertion (a wholesale subversion of animal tropes)

Birds (and the abruption of the divine into human history)
– Wild Swans at Coole
-Leda and the Swan
– Second Coming

Helen (Maud Gonne)
– No Second Troy
– September 1913
– Among School Children

Temperature
– Wandering Aengus
– The Fisherman

Christina Rossetti – “Goblin Market” (1875)

Tells the story of two sisters, the elder Lizzie and the younger Laura. Laura is tempted by the Goblin’s trying to sell her a bunch of exotic fruits. Lizzie holds her back but can only do so for a little while. Laura sells her hair for some fruits, but then cannot quench her appetite and the goblins disappear. She pines away. The goblins return but only Lizzie can hear or see them. To help her sister, she tries to buy some fruit, but the Goblins will only sell it to her if she eats it. They try to force-feed hear and the smashed fruits gets all over her face. They return her penny and she goes to let Laura lick her face. But the taste is bitter. She flies into convulsions and almost dies. But she recovers. Surprise! Both sisters eventually marry, bearing their own “fruit,” to whom they tell the story of the nasty goblin merchants.

Rossetti is obviously worried about the market. Part of the problem is that it is impossible merely to taste–since taste is always already implicated in a cycle of appetite that cannot be quenched on the terms set by the market. Laura becomes listless, yes, but also voracious. Can think of this as a rewriting of the Lotos-Eaters. While males can taste the pleasures of the market and afford to not work, women, in order to taste those pleasures, must bear the burden of labor that is the precondition of something like the male aesthetic dimension.

The eating of fruit as violation of the aesthetic dimension.

Contrasting figures of Eve and Mary. How does Rossetti solve the antinomy of female sexuality: portrayed as always-already fallen but require to be completely pure nevertheless. How does this connect with the discourse of the secret and with purity and virginity more broadly (in Hardy, Brontës, etc.)

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti – The Blessed Damozel (1850)

The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her were seven.

The opening stanza sets out many of the major tensions that will frame the rest of the poem: between heaven and earth, depth and surface, stasis and motion. One can think of the gold bar as having a reference to the gold standard that England had recently adopted in 1844–as a universal metric for literal exchange, it allows for the figural exchange between these various oppositions. Indeed, the painting “The Blessed Damozel’ has a gold bar running right through the middle of it, separating the flattened portrait of the lady (a face that according to Christina Rossetti was exchangeable with all of the other portraits in Dante’s studio because he only used one or two models) with the ostentatious depth of the “squashed” scene on the bottom.

144 lines in 24 six-inch stanzas. The striking symmetry of the poem itself rides the line between perfection and pure exchangeability. This is of course what Adorno has to say about the artwork as the ultimate or super-commodity–that which is universal and universally exchangeable.

Time: It seems to the Damozel that she has been in heaven for only a day, which is somehow the same as thousands of years. On earth, of course, time is felt.

The language is meant to be simple and natural, an application of pre-Raphaelite principles to poetry. it therefore verges on the sentimental.

In the final stanza, the speaker uses parentheses to insert his factual declaration of sensation: I saw her smile, I heard her tears. That this enters parenthetically points to subordination of these sensory aspects to a form that flattens sensation, impression, reflection, etc. Sensation would rupture the poetic contract that keeps the real and the aesthetic in two distinct realms.

Gerard Manley Hopkins – Poems

Hopkins died before most of his poems were published. Not until 1918 did his friend Robert Bridges come out with an edition that includes what are considered his greatest works, those written between 1876 and his death in 1889. In the Preface to that collection, Hopkins described the difference between running rhythm (common rhythm) and sprung rhythm–the latter being more natural because closer to speech–it is identifiable by stresses coming together. Pure sprung rhythm cannot be counterpointed. The claim for its naturalness derives from the argument that the impulse (in all but the most “same and tame” poems) to invert and vary something like iambic pentameter eventually leads to sprung rhythm.

The most sustained example is “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem comprised of 35 8-line stanzas, with alternating rhymes, and varying length. In the fifth stanza he introduces the crucial idea of instress, which is able to translate in its wholeness the “inscape“: that which makes some individual thing beautiful:

Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

The poem as a whole is a meditation on the experience and meaning (perhaps lack of meaning) of divine violence. He correlates the inexplicable wreckage of a ship full of nuns with the brutal ascetic requirements of religious devotion:

Thous art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

The syntactical intensity of the poem is literally compounded by an overflow of hyphenated words–flint-flack, black-backed, white-fiery, whirlwind-swiveled all from stanza 13—perhaps miming the “make words break from me here all alone” in stanza 18. The poet wonders whether all of this violence (aesthetic, physical, historical) is somehow perversely pleasing to God, likening it a “harvest.” The concluding stanzas show his indebtedness to the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, but in Hopkins they are rendered overtly religious:

Now burn, new burn to the world
Double-natured name
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-aflame
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne.

Pretty stunning stuff. Talk about Christ, the notion of failure as success and the connection between religious and aesthetic sacrifice.

“God’s Grandeur” is a Petrarchan sonnet that works out the triple-implication of the first line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God“: economic, imperative, electric. Hopkins bemoans “trade” which seems to overdraw its account by extracting to much “oil” from the “soil.” The wonderful line–“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod“– syntactically mirrors the sort of repetitive nature of man’s dependence on natural resources. Despite this greed, “nature is never spent.” It remains charged with grandeur, and we are charged to recognize it as such.

“Pied Beauty” contrasts the variety of God’s creativity with the homogenizing drive of human work, “plotted and pieced.” The form of the poem: 10 1/2 lines or a Curtal-sonnet acc. to the Preface. Like the full sonnet, it attempts a fusion of opposites, but in condensed form: listing off binaries–swift, slow; sweet, sour–before positing a God whose beauty is beyond all change–that is, these variations are able to coexist in nature.

“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” and “To what serves Mortal Beauty” are two later poems displaying Hopkins at his most experimental. Both have long lines, sometimes twenty syllables, with graphic caesurae in each line. The former ruminates on the forms of destruction wrought by death: in general, the apocalyptic vision is one of division and forgetfulness, “disremembering and dismembering,” which leads to moral and aesthetic reductionism: “black, white; right, wrong.” This leads to an internal, subjective dimension, in which thoughts are turned one against another. Interesting to contrast this world of division to the organic variety (not totalizing) of earth’s natural state. The latter poem answers the title’s question: “See: it does this: keeps warm men’s wits to the things that are.” There is a danger inherent to form, however: “the O-so-seal-that feature” that Hopkins correlates with pride, domination, and the harmful reduction of nature’s infinite variety. He proposes something very much like recessive action: “Merely meet it….then leave, let that alone.”

Robert Browning – Poems

“My Last Duchess,” from Dramatic Lyrics (1842) – A poem about the violence of making art. Told in heroic couplets. The Duke is entertaining a Count who is trying to arrange a marriage with the Duke and his daughter. Walking through the palace, he shows him a painting of his latest wife: My Last Duchess. She was “too easily impressed” with other men’s gifts, ranking them with the Duke’s gift of “nine-hundred-years-old name,” and so he “gave commands / Then all smiles stopped together”–that is, he order her execution and subsequent (?) transformation into a work of art. “There she stands / As if alive.” All this story is told in a highly aesthetic situation–the Duke has created a special little room and curtain and bench form which viewers can aesthetically be impacted (“impressed”?) by the painting. The “aliveness” of the poem is conveyed through the “spot of joy” that mimics the involuntary blush that betrayed her enjoyment of the men’s advances: the question is where the excess is located: is the it the excess that characterizes life (that which goes beyond mere life) or the excess that characterizes art (makes it living). These converge in a painting that is predicated on the death of the represented object. In Duke’s words: “Paint / Must never hope to reproduce the faint . Half-flush that dies along her throat.” What does do is convert this dying “half-flush” into an artistic “full-flush” that cancels that violent life and death. Thus, in My Last Duchess, Browning is laying out the stakes of art’s relationship to life: a theme that EBB will take up in a more positive manner, by attempting to write a Verse-Novel that refuses to kill anything  by its formal inclusiveness. In the process, she kills the poem with a novel–but that’s what’s necessary for preserving the poem as a poem.

 

“Porphyria’s Lover” (1836, published in Dramatic Lyrics, 1842) – 5 line stanzas, rhyming ABABB. Porphyria visits her lover and, with startlingly agency, puts his arm around her waist, and makes his cheek lie on her shoulder while her yellow hair is “displaced” “o’er all.” The lover discovers that Porphyria “worships” him, and the transfer power follows from the declaration of possession:

That moment she was mine, mine, fiar,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her.

The unprovoked violence connects with the violence inherent to the act of painting (and all forms of representation) in “My Last Duchess,” even to the extent of a blush appearing appearing “bright beneath my burning kiss.” In the last stanza, the time of narration converges with the time of the story: “And thus we sit together now,” which implies that the writing of the poem has taken place while her head is on his shoulder (reversal of agency). The last line: “An yet God has not said a word!” is a giddy, childlike rupture of guilty consciences, disjunctive with the rest of the poem. Yet it draws a contrast with the violence of speaking for someone else–that is, free indirect discourse. The agency of the first part of the poem is therefore qualified by this final outburst. God has no said a word, but the artist’s imposition on the object of representation bears a guilt that cannot be exculpated within the sphere of art.

 

“The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (published in Dramatic ROmances and Lyrics, 1845)

Unlike “My Last Duchess” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” which employ highly intricate rhyming schemes, this poem, spoken by the bishops, is told in iambic pentameter, unrhymed, blank verse, a more traditional vehicle for dramatic monologue. The Bishop wants to arrange his tomb to be better, more monumental, then Old Gandolf’s tomb of onion stone–but he fears that his inability to oversea all the particulars will end in a product that is as disappointing. But above all the poem is about identifying difficulty of identifying the line between life and death:

For as I lie here, hours of the dad night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work

In other words, the Bishop is readying himself for death be being dead, taking on the qualities of the dead stone that is supposed to memorialize his life. Of course, this confounds the whole idea of the monument, which is suppose to represent a life. Living in order to die short-circuits the aesthetic. Does the aesthetic convey a life or a death?

 

“Fra Lippo Lippi” (from Men and Women, 1855) – About the ability of daily artistic practice to sustain an individual life (and along the way, perhaps, the life of the object the subject is representing).  Fra Lippo Lippi, who has penchant for drinking and sleeping with prostitutes, is picked up one evening by some authorities and tells his story: abandoned by his parents, he gets by on eating rubbish and, when taken in by a cloister, learns to paint. He is clear that he became a painter, and continued to become a better painter because of hunger:

Soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things, and none the less
For admonition from the hunger pinch.

He refines his craft so well that some townspeople declare: “it’s the life!” The priests declare that his job is not to be a realist–“Faces, arms, legs, bodies like the true”–but to “paint the souls of men.” He has violated, in other words, the ban on graven images. He asks the question: “Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flesh?”–a question inherited from The Winter’s Tale: what fine chisel has cut breath? But he is unable to “unlearn” the “value and significance of flesh,” and stages a defense of mimesis:

For don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have
passed
perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted–better for us.

He then proceeds to take the connection between hunger and art full circle: “To find its [life’s] meaning if my meat and drink.” The narrative frame closes with his release by the authorities. He returns to the cloister and the poem finishes with a “Zooks!” one of those Browning interruptions that somehow capture that which escapes the formal structures of the poem: there’s an uncontrollable quality to the language and bodies that populate these poems.

 

 

Elizabeth Barret Browning – Aurora Leigh (1856)

A Verse-Novel that strains to the condition of a modern epic. According to Browning, “The poem I am about will fill a volume when done. It is…written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form; the heroine, an artist woman–not a painter, mind. It is intensely modern, crammed from the times (not the ‘Times’ newspaper) as far as my strength will allow.” The narrative is simple: Aurora Leigh, born in Italy, becomes an orphan at a young age and is shipped back to England to be raised by her conventional aunt, who discourages her artistic endeavors. At the age of 21, her cousin Romney asks her to marry him and also to give up her poetic enterprise in order to fight contemporary social evils. Aurora declines, claiming equal importance for her art. At book 5, the narrative shifts to the theme of writing itself. Aurora eventually hears that Romney has decided to marry the indigent Marian Erle, but she stands him up on the wedding day. Aurora runs into her and hears her violent story, takes her and her child to Italy, where the now blind Romney eventually meets them. In the much more novelistic conclusion, Aurora and Romney marry.

Mixes all genres together, including lyric, epic and novel. Browning is self-conscious about the formlessness of the poem–“I’m writing like a poet, somewhat large” (Henry James would call it “muddy,” Woolf would call it absurd but exhilarating):

What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit…
…Inward evermore
To outward–so in life, and so in art
Which still is life. (v.223-228)

The closing bars of the poem are particularly novelistic, as if the novel becomes necessary for the consolidation of the lyric. Can talk about the end as a zone of poetic emergency, to use Agamben’s terms. Coincides with the conventional marriage (similar endings in David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1852), North and South (1854)). Do we consider this coda as extra-diagetic? How can we realte this mixing of genres to Bakhtin’s heteroglossia on the one hand, and Lukacs theory of epic on other other? One can at least ay that there is no simple one-to-one relationship between the subject and the world…rather, the soul is amalgamation of many experiences across a diachronic axis:

A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s–
The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on
Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps
Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,
Some upstroke of an alpha and omega
Expressing the old scripture. (i.826-32)

That which has been overwritten and must be uncovered by more writing is precisely that element of life which the work of art is able to convey, create, or hold. The question this poem asks: how can a poem hold a charge of life? How can it represent without killing (perhaps in this posing an answer to the question of “The Kraken”). We can begin to talk of an ethics of NOT REDUCING. This entails a certain vitalism that detaches LIFE from any particular subject, and redistributes it to all the objects of the outside world. Life is in everything: “Life’s violent flood / Abolished bounds–and, which my neighbor’s field, / Which mine, what mattered?”

                                             Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
Behold–behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets our beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.’ (v.216-221)

This is manages a convergence of lyric and epic–a brush so close with materiality that we forget we are looking at it…so now brute materiality brushes with infinity in the zone of maximal contact with the present.

Tennyson – Shorter Poetry

General: Tennyson graduates form sensibility in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical to critique of sensibility (realism) in Poems (1832) to something like national poet in In Memoriam (writing to an audience) and finally to something like an Arthurian  bard in  Idylls of the King.

“Supposed Confessions” (1830) – Iambic tetrameter with heavy caesura. Expresses poet’s anxiety over the weight of natural decay and death. Tracks the emergence of “This excellence and solid form / of constant beauty.” Ends with a  romantic outburst: “O weary life! O weary death!” What makes it different is the way in which it is a “vacillating state,” not one easily defined according to  chronological status…Life is not measurable in terms of a single life. Relate both to definition of Victorian age (in term of the life of Queen Victorian), and the objectification of life in both EB Browning and Dickens.

“The Kraken” (1830) – A sonnet with fifteen lines. Rhyme scheme is sorta Petrarchan, but with variations. The sestet is extended into seven lines and is therefore able to squeeze in a couplet. It returns to the sounds and images of the opening quatrains in such a away that it forestalls development, confirming the elusiveness of the sea-beast that is less visible than the various polypi that crowd the vision. The image of coming to the surface only to die (“In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die“)  connects with the larger trope of belatedness that runs throughout Victorian poetry, but here in 1830, it is particularly poignant–Tennyson has somehow missed the Romantic movement (Byron dead, etc.). The surface/depth image also marks out a mode of representation AND interpretation that distrusts surface and appearance. Connect with Carlyle’s belief that all surface is (a very important) deception.

“The Lady of Shallot” (1832/1842) – The 1842 collection is obsessed with the excluded middle between sensation and reflection. Whereas Wordsworth claims primary sensation inheres in rocks, stones and trees, Hallam (and later Tennyson) will claim that by unlocking the Real (something deeper, psychological) we can then be granted access to these sensations “primary sensations”…but they are always mediated by a reflective process.

Crazy rhyme scheme: AAAABCCCB. The narrative is: Lady of Shallot is in her room,weaving, while looking at her mirror  which reflects the outside world. But when she hears Camelot sing “Tirra Lirra” she turns from her mirror, looks down to Camelot:

Out flee the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The lady of Shalott

Here Lady Shalott’s “I am half sick of shadows” leads her to forgo the modes of representation that bind her to a detached mimesis–the cracked looking glass therefore looks forward to both Wilde and to Joyce. In the fourth part, her name gets converted into the graphic symbol on the side of the boat (she is not longer the maker of textiles, but is herself textualized), on which she is passing to Camelot. Indeed, we can imagine this journey from Shallot to Camelot as as running against the grain of the rhyme: “Camelot” and “Shallot” are the ‘B’ rhymes for the rest of the poem. What it takes to get from B to B is the formal mechanical rhyming, almost mind numbing…the expectation of “lot” at the end each stanza has become engrained. Yet this mechanical propulsion forward (rhyme) is contradicted by the action being described (journey down river)..from Camelot to Shalott.  The inadequacy of the form to the content is mirrored by the inadequacy of Arthurian romance itself, when Lancelot casually dismisses the death of the Lady with “She has a lovely face.”

“The Two Voices” (1842) – a long poem (460 lines or so) comprised of tercets of all rhyming endings. Think of as response to Pope’s Essay on Man, but one that is so mechanical that it undercuts itself. The question: What will happen if Tennyson keeps writing like 1830 while in in 1842—along the way, begins to critique sensibility.

“The Palace of Art” (1832-53) – A compartmentalization of aesthetic history. Tennyson wrote: “It is the most difficult of all things to devise a statue in verse.” And “When I first conceived the plan of the poem, I intended to have introduced both sculptures and painting into it.” There is an accretion of images that forces a rather strained comparability between everything and everything else, thereby threatening identity. The logic of the “Or” is introduced, a sort of bad seriality, interchangeable. After romping through the many wonders of the aesthetic, the nameless “She” that stands in for art itself undergoes a slef-imposed diminution, seeking redemption by casting off the opulence of the palace in favor a rustic cottage “Where I will mourn and pray.” But the last stanza asks that the palace not be torn down: “Perhaps I may return with others there / When I have purged my guilt.” The aesthetic can remain despite the withdraw of the subject…..

Ulysses (1842) – Written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, expressing Tennyson’s desire to move forward despite the death of his friend. Offers a curious pairing with Lotos-Eaters as a portrait of Life. It is imaged in terms of consumption “I will drink life to the lees” (a technical terms that literally means drinking those parts of wine that are usually refined out of the end product). Ulysses refuses to rest, discontent with “Life piled on life,” the redundancy of mere breathing. The final line, however (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”) with the perfect meter (mono syllables make the stresses incredibly clear, the words lock into the metter) seems to call attention to the very conventions that Ulysses is going forward to fulfill. So ending could be an attempt to synthesize epic adequation, but the potential dissonance introduced into the epic is that Ithaca has itself become conventional, much like the final line is conventional.

The Lotos-Eaters (1832, 1842) – Starts our with a lazy rhyme : land = land. Much of the poem explores the potentially deadening effects of poetic practice:

                                        and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices form the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

This is the frightening mirror image of Mill’s definition of poetry: overhearing a conversation with oneself. This produces a “mild-eyed melancholy” that is content to have too successfully internalized and then expunged the object of desire. Eating of the Lotos therefore makes good on the promise of the aesthetic as imaged by Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the promise of happiness before or beyond the demands of self-preservation and reproduction (this is why some Europeans eat candied violets, he says). Can connect this also with Empson on Shakespeare and Pastoral:

The flower ripens in its place
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruited soil.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 describes the flower’s power as inhering in its very vulnerability. Yet here, the imposition of a toil-less existence is explicitly aligned with aesthetic deception and danger. The final section, number 8, bursts into lines with eight feet in order to describe the carnage of a world that the mariners have decided to forget. There is also an excess of three line rhymes (connect to “Two Voices”), which seems to in some ways bridge the deathless repetition of the mild-eye melancholics with the cycles of destruction that characterize life on earth.

This poem raises the question of what sort of work poetry does. Is poetry the absence of work? Connects with something like Lady of Shallot, where the mere rhyming propels us a forward. I Poetry working when it means the most or the least? When we say things without knowing why (the rhyme, etc.)