Adventures in Minor Victorian Criticism

So I spent today’s ride on the North Jersey Coast Local looking through Thomas Blackburn’s 1967 study of Robert Browning’s poetry. It’s a book that somehow came across my radar a few weeks ago, enough so that I interlibrary loaned it and then completely forgot that I had done so — enough that I was completely surprised when I got the email saying the book was in.

I still haven’t quite figured out why this book was so important. I have, however, stumbled across what’s obviously a forgotten gem of Browning scholarship.  Some examples:

“Browning’s admirers have not been remarkable for their subtlety. Perhaps it is just their lack of subtlety which has attracted them to some aspects of the poet, for when he is off-form he is a bird of the same feather and shares their heavy obviousness of thought and feeling. Time may well be an acid in which bad verse and bogus critical opinion dissolves, but the process is a lengthy one. Robert Browning has not been dead for a hundred years and around his great poems there is an exceptionally thick rind of bad work for the acid of time.”

“No doubt Baudelaire’s angst and syphilis were as effective in keeping his work clear of rubbish as a post in the Board of Trade. All Browning had was Elizabeth Barrett.”

“Unfortunately, though In Memoriam was extremely popular the public had an equal relish for Tennyson’s sentimental and didactic verse. The poet’s wife was a piece of human litmus paper. He had only to dip the devoted creature into some new poem and her change of color would suggest its value – in current market prices, not unfortunately in terms of poetry.”

On the “climax of … falsity” in Browning’s “Christmas Eve”: “…the poem’s supposed vision of Christ; a vision described in terms which would delight the heart of any producer of a super-technicolor film about Jesus; and was probably no more a part of the poet’s actual experience than the ascent of Everest.”

Those, at least, were the highlights I was able to record in my iPod while I was on the train. I’m sure I missed many other gems because I was skimming. I do think that the problem of a good poet writing bad poetry is an interesting one, and I think that we do tend to shy away from discussions like that in our contemporary criticism. On the other hand, I’m not sure that anyone who relies so much on the “thick rind” metaphor for bad writing (that’s an image that crops up with rather alarming frequency) gets to criticize other people’s poetic process.

In other news: it’s NVSA time! Inaugurating the lovely season of Victorian-tasticness that culminates in the CUNY Victorian Conference. I’m a bit sad to be missing the Pickwick Papers reading tonight, but I’ll be driving (!!) over to Princeton in the morning for a full day of panels and the big banquet. Now that I have a WordPress app installed on my iPod, anything is possible — depending on whether Princeton’s generous with the wifi.

 

More dactylic hexameters than you can shake a stick at

…or not. (If you’re really interested, go here.)

See, I went to the Crossing the Bar conference at Penn a few weeks ago. It pretty much rocked. I tweeted about it. But ever since I’ve been sort of impossibly tongue-tied. As Mia can attest, I’ve had this post in draft form for several weeks now, coming back to it at intervals when I thought the midsemester chatter (working at two schools with two different spring breaks adds up to no spring breaks, etc.) was dying down, but never really being able to get the words out. I haven’t been totally idle in the interim: I eked out an abstract on Christina Rossetti and sent it to NAVSA and I’ve managed to start to rethink the old albatross of the chapter on Browning without the abject misery that was afflicting me in January and February — and both of these projects have become possible in part because of the jump start that my thinking got in Philly.

But to some extent, these inspirations have all been somewhat tangential to what the conference was actually about — I think one of the things that’s made it difficult for me to write any sort of reflection on the thing is that, at least right now, I happen to be doing something different from what most of the people at the conference were doing. It’s certainly not for the lack of notes I took. I guess the short postmortem would be something like: transatlantic Tractarianism, why “format” (in a quasi-bibliographic sense) matters to our interpretation of poetry, tensions between historical prosody and the intentional fallacy, whether it’s really “about” the poem (the speaker in question said no, I privately said yes and informal conversations occurred), Adah Isaacs Menken and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers paired in an incredibly interesting panel about late 19th century transatlantic performances, more broadsheet ballads, the thought that I really should go back and revisit my thinking about Clough one of these days (apologies for the self-referential linkage but it was one of my favorite POTW posts), Thelwall becoming sexy, and a shout-out to Arthur Quiller-Couch in a discussion of the poem “Invictus” that also included Ronald Reagan and Timothy McVeigh.

The important thing that happened for me that weekend is that I came away with a new sense of how to do scholarship on poetry. I mean, I’m not going to suddenly change my focus to historical prosody — I came to poetry late anyway and have a long way to go. And I’m probably also not going to get all super-historical or archive-y — I assume that y’all wouldn’t want me to do that anyway. What I’m getting at is something like a sense of how to get around a certain stalemate I’d been facing in the more classically deconstructionist / speech act readings of Victorian poetry — eventually it *doesn’t* seem that interesting to show that yet another poem, despite its claims to be about something else, is really about language. I mean, that was a really earthshattering revelation in the 80s and it was actually really earthshattering to me until about 2007. It still sometimes strikes me with the force of newness even now. But I was increasingly finding that it wasn’t enough to get me through the dissertation.

It’s harder to articulate the solution or new direction I’m envisioning now — I guess it’s just to say that the conference reminded me of all the different ways that poetry can matter (and all of the different things that mattering can mean) — historically and in the present. I have a feeling that this may have something to do with my increasing interest in Victorian religion and, for that matter, with why I keep being drawn back to Quiller-Couch.*

In short, it was almost enough to just sit in the very beautiful rooms provided by Penn on a very beautiful weekend provided by Spring and soak in the world as it was being made new in these sorts of dizzying and wonderful investigations. I know that probably sounds cheesy, but I’m being serious here — this kind of weekend is, on some level, why we do what we do, including put up with so much else that is far less immediately rewarding and also downright sucktastic, why we put up with crappy apartments and adjunct pay and cobbling together fellowships and writing this damn dissertation and (in my case) four hours on New Jersey transit (including an hour on the not-so-scenic platform in Rahway, due to a somewhat unforgivable quirk of scheduling) — we do all of that so we can have weekends like this one.

*Does this mean that I will be restarting the Poem of the Week? Yes, it’s still a dream of mine. Right now the week-ness of my weeks is sort of impossibly fragmented by factors  largely outside my control and I have a lot of displacement coming up in the near future — traveling in April and apartment hunting / hopefully moving in May. But the intention is there.

 

Commonplace Book Sunday

So I admit that I’ve sort of been coasting on the series of posts I wrote in January, and once again I find myself in blog arrears. As an apology, I offer a smattering of my recent reading and scattered nineteenth-century-related thoughts:

At the risk of forever branding myself as a closet hipster, I confess that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the song “A Horse is Not a Home” on Miike Snow’s debut album (the two Is in Miike are intentional) is a rewriting of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” [Ed. note: the e on the end of Childe is intentional ;)] This has been the obsession of several commutes this past week. I don’t have any particular fantastic analysis for why these two texts have become connected in my mind, except for the similar images they evoke and (arguably) a shared mood. I think maybe it has something to do with the chorus, disenchanting the same things that Browning was: “With a hole in my heart I was supposed to ride / In morning traffic / With a golden hand by your fortress side / But without magic.” Okay, these guys aren’t Browning. And they’re, um, Swedish. But I can respect a good pop song. You can decide for yourself. The song is here. The lyrics are here. “Childe Roland” is coming to the Dark Tower here.

I don’t remember exactly why I went to the NYU library last week, but I’ve ended up checking out a bunch of books, many of them pulled from the shelf in fits of semi-desperate inspiration. One of these was Andrew Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection. I realize that I’m late to the party on this one, but–wow. Good stuff. I hope that I can write a book like this someday. It was somewhat gratifying to see that Miller and I are coming from a similar view of 19th century history, a shared sense of the “epistemological disarray” of Victorian modernity and a need for thinking about receptivity to others. Miller also quotes Maurice and Newman, two figures who are virtually guaranteed to lead to an hour of fun on GoogleBooks and the entertainment of the idea of writing my second book on Victorian theology.

…which explains why I was probably the only person on the North Jersey Coast Local line yesterday kicking back with a copy of Newman’s “Christ Hidden From the World.” Here, Newman’s dwelling not on the works of Jesus as they are recorded in the gospels but on the obscurity in which Christ passed the first thirty years of his life, and it imagines Jesus in those years as being deemed unremarkable to those around him, particularly his close family and friends.  One of the recurring themes, in fact, is how difficult it is to tell the difference between someone who is merely outwardly good because of habit or calculation and someone who is truly holy, since many of the acts of holiness that exceed outward form are hidden from view. Holiness, Newman implies, must almost by definition be misunderstood by most people who are not holy — even though not everyone who is misunderstood is holy. Newman delivers a particularly strong smackdown to those who assume that they would have been numbered among the faithful in Jesus’ time:

We are very apt to wish we had been born in the days of Christ, and in this way we excuse our  misconduct, when conscience reproaches us. We say, that had we the advantage of being with Christ, we should have had stronger motives, stronger restraints against sin. I answer, that so far from our sinful habits being reformed by the presence of Christ, the chance is, that those same habits would have hindered us from recognizing Him. We should not have known He was present; and if He had told us who He was, we should not have believed him. Nay, had we seen His miracles (incredible as it may seem), even they would not have made any lasting impression on us. … I believe this literally would have been the case with most men.

Burn! There’s also a somewhat weirder passage where Newman goes into pretty specific detail about how the people physically closest to Christ would have been those who tortured and crucified him, though that’s less relevant to the above to what I’m still trying to do with “Karshish.” I’m sure, incidentally, that there’s a lot of Christian fiction out there that’s predicated on the idea that Newman presents here, of our  not being able to recognize Jesus if he was literally our next door neighbor — there was a skit that I used to perform in my evangelical youth group days that was based on this premise — but it certainly doesn’t seem like a major epistemological concern in these days when everyone has a Personal Jesus. (You had to know I was going to go there. I thought the Johnny Cash version would be particularly appropriate.)

Also did some detouring through Arnold this week, revisiting some of my old favorites: “The Buried Life” (which I sent to my lovely first-year writing students this weekend), “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse.” I’m probably going to have to get Matt into my dissertation somehow. Maybe that will be the chapter I write when it’s a book. I’m very susceptible to some of Arnold’s complaints, even when I should know better. The following lines from “The Scholar-Gipsy” made their way into my notes for Wednesday:

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Fresh, undiverted to the world without;

Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;

Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,

Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.

O life unlike ours!

Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,

Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,

And each half lives a hundred different lives;

Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.

It’s at least a tempting lament when one is looking forward to days of meetings and various bureaucratic strife.

Speaking of “The Buried Life,” I haven’t yet caught the MTV show of the same name. I’m sure I will at some point — many of the cardio machines at the gym I recently joined are connected to TVs, and I’ve already seen several meta-iterations of Jersey Shore and an intensely disturbing feature called “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” So, yeah, “The Buried Life” can’t be far behind.

Finally, I’ve also been enjoying Pater this week. I’ll leave you with a quote from his 1865 essay, “Coleridge,” which was reprinted in Appreciations.

The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the criticism of human life.

In other news, I started my Christina Rossetti bibliography today in hopes of spurring myself to finish up with Browning. Am annoyed by journals that still have obnoxiously slim archives online. Essays In Criticism, I’m looking at you.

 

One last (Browning-related) thing

(Yes, I know. I don’t blog for like 2 1/2 months and now I won’t shut up. But bear with me.)

To read Browning he must exert himself, but he will exert himself to some purpose. If he finds the meaning difficult of access, it is always worth his effort — if he has to dive deep, “he rises with his pearl.”

This comment comes from George Eliot’s review of Men and Women that was published in the Westminster Review. (Thanks, Norton editors!) The observation that Browning’s work is difficult but rewards thought is hardly exclusive to Eliot. In fact, it’s more or less a commonplace about Browning and, I think we could see with fairly little effort how this kind of attitude produces on the one hand the Browning Societies of the 1880s and — in a much more nuanced, scholarly context, something like Donald Hair’s discussion of emblems in Robert Browning’s Language (1999) — the idea is basically that you have to work your way through the poem to find a  meaning that could not have been directly stated otherwise, engaging in an act of interpretation that is also, Hair argues, the process of saving one’s soul as far as Browning is concerned.

I am obviously on board with the idea that careful reading of poetry (or any literary text — or not-necessarily-literary text — for that matter) should be rewarding. But that’s different, I think, than saying that careful reading should be rewarded. A hair-splitting difference? Perhaps. But it helps me express something that bothers me about Eliot’s image of the reading of poetry as diving for a pearl — and, more than that, the implication that if you apply the correct, careful reading practices, you cannot help but come back with the pearl of meaning at the center of the poem. And as with Hair’s discussion of emblems and riddles, this seems to imply that there are right answers when it comes to these kinds of poems, even if we are meant to value the dive as much as or more than the pearl or the process of working out the riddle as much as or more highly than the answer to that riddle.

And I find myself wanting more, wanting something more uncertain, more contingent. This is the approach I’ve been trying to take in my reading of “An Epistle” for the last six months, but the poem does seem kind of impervious, at a certain level, to any kind of “new” reading — whether one applies New Criticism, historicism, deconstruction, Bakhtin, the best anyone seems to be able to do is come up with a slightly different version of the same story about faith and skepticism struggling with each other. Different approaches make it possible to notice different aspects of that struggle or read it in a slightly different way, but no amount of critical theory is going to be able to make the poem not be about Jesus, for instance. And this may be why, the last time I checked the MLA database, the last time anyone published an article on “An Epistle” was 1993.

It’s not that I think “An Epistle” is somehow not about the things that it is very obviously about. But I feel like there’s more to be done, that the working out of the riddle or the canonical Victorian religious doubt narrative may not actually be the most important thing to do. I hope, of course, that I can make this case from the poem — and I’m pretty sure that I can and will by December. But I’m beginning to see that a lot of this has to do with my resistance to the pearl-diving model of reading poetry, where we work hard and are sure to find a meaning. Perhaps what really needs to be interrogated here is something about the language of reading poetry — of what it means, for example, to “get something out of” a poem. It’s a discourse that we take for granted — one that I certainly do, particularly when trying to make the case for close reading to undergraduates — but it may be more difficult to do this if we’re going to take seriously the performative aspect of Victorian poetry, the whole “poetry as constitutive cultural event” school of thought. And I don’t think it’s a matter of shifting our attention from the pearl to the dive, but rather rethinking the metaphor entirely and changing the way we think about reading poetry. Part of the reason why I keep going back to Coleridge’s “poetic faith” is that it seems to imply a certain kind of contingency — the possibility and the threat not just of something overwhelming happening, but the equally and perhaps more terrifying (if we believe Lyotard) possibility of nothing happening. (Those of you who remember my ESA paper from March may recall that Peter only starts to sink *after* his faith has carried him to Jesus….)

I don’t know where I’m going with this at the moment, except towards another ginormous blog post. But at least now you have a sense of what I’m dealing with. And I’d be interested to know if anything of the foregoing seems like it might be valuable….

 

The Poem of the Week is Tangled Up In Blue

(Yes, I realize this feature is rapidly becoming the “Poem of the Week or Whenever I End Up Getting Around to It.” But POTWOWIEUGATI is an unwieldy acronym.)

380. “Art” by James Thomson (1834-1882)

What precious thing are you making fast

In all these silken lines?

And where and to whom will it go at last?

Such subtle knots and twines!

—

I am tying up all my love in this,

With all its hopes and fears,

With all its anguish and all its bliss,

And its hours as heavy as years.

—

I am going to send it afar, afar,

To I know not where above;

To that sphere beyond the highest star

Where dwells the soul of my Love.

—

But in vain, in vain would I make it fast

With countless subtle twines;

For ever its fire breaks out at last,

And shrivels all the lines.

(1865)

This poem keeps reminding me of the Conclusion to The Renaissance, where Pater talks about “that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” That’s not exactly what it *is* about, mind you, for the images are more three-dimensional than that; here we are not so much using those lines to trace out a flat representation (pace the Lady of Shalott) as we are engaged in creating a kind of package — but a package where the package is also what’s inside. If that makes any sense — basically, there isn’t a “box” here — the container is the content or at least part of it — the “precious thing” isn’t rattling around in a box, but is serving as a kind of (suspended??) core of the overall object.

Indeed, this is quite an effective rendering of writing as a material process. The “fast” at the end of the first line serves as an anchoring, that first knot that holds all the threads together to be braided. The second stanza in particular exemplifies a kind of braiding or tying, where lines 2-4 are expansions of what is being tied up after the tying has been announced.  (So it’s almost looping back around — exactly as if one was tying one’s lines in a big silken bow.)

But this is all what gets undone — and not just unwoven — in the fourth stanza: fast / lines / last / twines gives way to fast / twines / last / lines, which leaves the image of trailing threads, shriveled at the site where the fire burst through. The letter (as it were) doesn’t reach its destination not only because the delivery address was murky to begin with (stanza 3), but because it was transporting such volatile material, something too strong for the “subtle twines” of words. (Of course, the meter doesn’t get broken in the same way as the image does.)

I’m interested, too, with the way “love” functions in the poem. Most obviously, it becomes both the package and, in its capitalized form, the recipient of that package. There’s an interesting ambiguity that emerges in the personification, too, for it’s not just “love” that is repeated but “my love” — almost as if that “Love” isn’t personified at all but is rather a projection of the poem’s speaker — the small-l “love” is seeking its mothership. (Or something. Okay. Fine.) What I’m more interested in is the way that the first line of the second stanza functions performatively (or nearly so) — bringing forth the “love” so that it can be contained. Though so much of the poem is so engaged in material processes, this line (and the entire stanza) is a kind of irreducibly non-referential core — and I mean that on a number of levels. It’s a little bit like the poetic equivalent of blowing up a balloon — and noticing the mutual dependence of content and form. (See also the last stanza of Yeats’ “Among School Children” and then go reread the introduction to de Man’s Allegories of Reading.)

There’s something about the last stanza that makes me think of a mail bomb — but a mail bomb that, again, never quite explodes where you want it to. That’s probably the wrong connection to make (but oh, wasn’t it a great undergraduate moment when you made the missive/missile connection?) because of all the silken threads and subtle knots, but it is at least a potentially violent image. (There are, of course, reasons we have restrictions on what you can put in the mail.) It’s a violence against the poem itself, a rending of the image, and a reminder that words and meanings don’t often coincide. It’s also kind of strikingly ambivalent about the nature of art and poetry itself. Though we are sure that this precious thing does not  get all the way to “my Love” — how could it? — it does get somewhere, namely, to us. The last stanza implies that the force of the poem is spent in a single outbreak, but of course some residue remains in that we are here and we are reading — perhaps not in the precise way that the speaker intends.

Which brings me, finally, to the reason I chose to headline this post with a Bob Dylan reference. The song “Tangled Up In Blue” makes a couple similar moves, including the mixing of very physical, material language (“tangled up”) with something that doesn’t have the same material referent (“blue”). And in some ways it provides a counterpoint to Thomson’s ambivalence:

Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century.

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burnin’ coal

Pourin’ off every page

Like it was written in my soul from me to you

Tangled up in blue.

Or maybe that’s just me. I mean, I’m no Christopher Ricks or anything. But there seems to be something having to do with writing to be untangled here as well.

To return to the plane of biography and half-assed textual scholarship. James Thomson was not a particularly happy man, if his Wikipedia page is to be believed; his most famous work is 1874’s City of Dreadful Night and it’s not exactly known as a great work of Victorian optimism. (As far as I know. This was one of those works that was on my orals list at some point and then kind of quietly slipped off. Now I kind of regret that.) Somewhat amusingly, though, the Thomson selected for the OBVV seems at least superficially sunny — this is probably the selection here with the most obvious dark side.

And even this is truncated. When I went looking for a date on this one, I found that there are actually two more sections to this poem.(GoogleBook here.) Part two is more of the same in its stanza form, envisioning one’s writing as a “carrier dove”–a bit more romantic than a pigeon, I guess, though arguably less efficient.  The third section puts the breaks on all of this — quite literally in terms of the stanza form (two lines instead of four, etc.) and also in its message; it begins: “Singing is sweet; but be sure of this / Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.” Burn! It’s an interesting refutation of poetry in verse — although for that reason, I’m not sure it’s totally in earnest. The ending couplet is pretty simplistic:  “Statues and pictures and verse may be grand / But they are not the Life for which they stand.” This is a bit finger-wag-y to say the least, but it’s possible that this poem was making an intervention into some contemporary aesthetic conversation (the rise of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, maybe?) where it made sense to highlight the inadequacy of artistic representation in this kind of moralizing way. There’s also a not-so-subtle discourse of heterosexual masculinity going on here — real men being too busy wooing the women, drinking the wine, and fighting the battles to do anything as dumb as art.

With that move, of course, Thomson is arguably castrating himself; at any rate, the first section of “Art” — the one excerpted in the OBVV — is vastly superior, in my opinion, to the other two, and at least in this case, Arthur Quiller-Couch knows what he’s doing as an editor. If, of course, one believes that the job of an anthologist is to make its contributors, most of whom are dead, appear in their best lights by lopping off parts of poems and presenting them as wholes with absolutely no scholarly apparatus. But that’s an issue best left to another day.

Fun if somewhat annoying fact: the home page for GoogleBooks lists “Poetry” as a subject link under “Fiction.” Shelley, had he not been cremated, would be turning in his grave about now.

 

Nothing to see here, just the Poem of the Week

Apologies for the radio silence of the past couple weeks. I assure you that I was not trying to pull a Sarah Palin; I was merely housesitting and didn’t feel like hauling the OBVV across Brooklyn with my laptop and the stack of other books that I didn’t manage to get around to reading. I’ve also been pretty mucked up in my dissertation chapter — I’ve pretty much just been rewriting the first twelve pages all month. But that’s a different post, maybe.

Those struggles are, however, obliquely related to something that I see happening in this week’s poem:

365. “The Last Wish” by Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (1831-1892)

Since all that I can ever do for thee

Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be:

That thou mayst never guess nor ever see

The all-endured this nothing-done costs me.

(Just so we’re clear, this isn’t that Bulwer-Lytton — this dude is the son.)

I don’t think this poem needs a huge amount of explication, but I am really taking with this idea of doing nothing — or, as it comes in in that last line, the “nothing-done.” One of the things I’ve been struggling with conceptually in my dissertation is an argument I’m trying to make about suspension being a performative gesture, but of course what it does, much of the time, is, essentially, nothing — which potentially negates the whole “doing things with words” part of performativity. Nevertheless, there’s a residue in this nothing — and I can hear my undergrad adviser’s voice in my head saying “a no-thing that is not nothing, either” — this sense that “nothing” does take effort, that it rarely is simply void or interruption — or, for that matter, detachment or agnosticism. One of the things I’m trying to work through with Browning is how you can have a suspension of judgment that isn’t just a matter of rigorously marking the boundaries of the knowable and not going beyond them; I’m seeking a suspension that also maintains some kind of engagement, whether it’s an interest in the outcome or something more about the process and the working-through. Something more, well, performative, but a performative that “does nothing” in a kind of double sense. I would love to feel like Eve Sedgwick’s whole thing on the periperformative is helpful here — it may be in the same neighborhood (her metaphor), but I’m not sure where to put it yet.

And I’m well aware that at some level I’m probably giving this poem too much credit, that I’m writing more about Browning and my own life than “The Last Wish.” And it’s funny, too, because in the process of writing this post, I’ve begun to like this poem a lot less. I can almost feel the cliches swooping in — that whole “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” kind of thing — and something that’s not a cliche, some inchoate idea of political inaction, a suspension, say, of judgment or action that does more damage than any other alternative. And the fact that I’m writing in such tortured sentences suggests that I’m still writing around what I actually want to say.

And even more so. To call this “The Last Wish” is, I think, a bit self-indulgent, but that also may be, now that I think about it, the most transparently performative part of this, at least in its aspiration. But one does not place an end to things by drawing attention to one’s overweening efforts to end them — in what is, the more I look at it, a strikingly passive-aggressive bit of verse. (To a certain extent I think the same argument could be made about “Two in the Campagna” and probably a lot of love poetry in general. Second book?) This whole, “oh, don’t look at me, suffering for your sake” kind of thing. It pains me more than a little to say that because it’s also an experience close to my own heart and because it also engages a couple of topoi that I hold near and dear. (The other one is prayer.) And I think there’s probably a way to pull off what this poem is trying to accomplish without sounding like a whiny asshat, but for whatever reason, this isn’t doing it for me.

There are also at least two elephants in this interpretive room. One, if you clicked on the Wikipedia link to Earl Lytton, you no doubt read that poetry (which he published under the pseudonym “Owen Meredith”) is really only a minor claim to fame; his other accomplishments include presiding, as Viceroy of India, over the Great Famine of 1876-78. Or, as Mike Davis and others have recently argued, for helping cause it in the first place. (I admit that I’ve only read the first chapter of this book and that was some time ago — Mia and Kiran, can you shed light where light is needed?) That doesn’t “settle” anything one way or another when it comes to this particular text, but we’ve certainly pilloried our poets for lesser offenses (Oscar Wilde, anyone?). And forgiving political wrongdoings is always partially an aesthetic choice — in general, good poetry by bad people still gets read. It may also be hard to come up with a critical idiom for relatively minor literary work by people who are politically prominent. In some ways, I think this is probably one of the great mysteries of human nature, but it does, at least in this case, place a bit of an extra chill between the poem and me.

The other elephant is named “Textual Criticism” and has to do with the fact that I couldn’t really date this poem. I admit that I didn’t try all that hard and that my GoogleBooks-fu pales in comparison to Mia’s mad computer skills. But I’m usually able to find some trace of even minor poems. The “having a very similar name to your literar-ily famous father” and “writing under a pseudonym” parts didn’t help either, I’m sure. What I did find was a poem called “To A Woman,” which is kind of like this poem but also not:

Since all that I can ever do for thee

Is to do nothing, may’st thou never see,

Never divine, the all that nothing costeth me!

The first line and a half are the same in both versions, but without the interruption of prayer (which makes the utterance of the first one into something of a citation), this one feels a lot more direct. I’m suddenly inspired to go out and start a relationship just so I can use this as my parting shot in the breakup email. It’s either that or Tori Amos, right?

 

The Poem of the Week celebrates Independence Day by lying back and thinking of England

…in honor of the upcoming July 4 holiday, the Poem of the Week takes a quick, spasmodic step backwards in the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

304. Sonnets. America by Sydney Dobell (1824-1874)

i.

Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns.

But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?

Not that our sires did love in years gone by,

When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons

In merry homes of England? Back, and see

Thy satchell’d ancestor! Behold, he runs

To mine, and, clasp’d, they tread the equal lea

To the same village school, where side by side

They spell ‘Our Father.’ Hard by, the twin pride

Of that grey hall whose ancient oriel gleams

Thro’ yon baronial pines, with looks of light

Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.

Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams

His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?

ii.

Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us! O ye

Who north or south, on east or western land,

Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,

Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God

For God; Oh ye who in eternal youth

Speak with a living and creative flood

This universal English, and do stand

Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand

Heroic utterance–parted, yet a whole,

Far, yet unsever’d,–children brave and free

Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be

Lords of an Empire wide as Shakespeare’s soul,

Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme,

And rich as Chaucer’s speech, and fair as Spenser’s dream.

(c. 1855)

Dobell will be familiar to some of you as one of the major poets and theorists of the Spasmodic school. The entry on Dobell in Cambridge History of English and American Literature in Eighteen Volumes describes him as the “best of this group” and lavishes such praise as the following: “…England in a Time of War contains a good deal of rubbish, with some things as different from rubbish as it is possible to conceive.” Ridiculed in their time and afterwards as practicing a kind of overly materialist, cut-rate version of what the Romantics had been doing, the Spasmodics have more recently been reclaimed by VP scholars–for example, the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry was dedicated to “Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics.” My own attitude has always been that I’ve found the theories of the Spasmodics more palpable than their poetry; in some circles this makes me a snob. On the other hand, some of the poems that I love most dearly, among them Maud and Aurora Leigh, were derided in their time as spasmodic productions. (The other one that always gets named here is Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna.) So I’m a snob but not a particularly discerning one. Or something.

At any rate, a good intro to Spasmodic theory is Dobell’s own “Nature of Poetry.” I read this for my orals last year and remember it as being an interesting mishmash of the material (trying to ground meter and poetic form in the pulsations of the human heart) and the idealist, a sort of interesting though often reductive distillation of Kant and Burke with a strong strain of Shelley. And if my notes from that period of my life are any indication, I saw at the time a couple of ideas that seem to anticipate the Austinian performative as well as reflect more quintessentially Victorian theories of language.

Now, as the poetic works of the Spasmodic school go (or so I have heard), these sonnets are pretty tame. It took a little while for their weirdness to sneak up on me.

But let’s start with a bit of context.

These poems are excerpted from a longer series of sonnets on the subject of the Crimean War. “That’s funny,” you say, “I don’t remember there being significant American involvement in the Crimean War.” However, if this website is to be believed (and, hey, when has the first hit on Google ever been wrong?), America did end up being fairly sympathetic to Russia in the whole thing, and that relationship paved the way for American expansion in Alaska and Hawaii. Which basically means that Barack Obama’s presidency is perhaps the best thing to have come out of what was by all accounts a huge disaster. (Remember “The Charge of the Light Brigade“…)

I digress. But I do think that the historical context, such as it is, is at least a little bit helpful for understanding Dobell’s otherwise sort of perplexing insistence on the English language as this sort of sacred bond between Britain and the United States that reduces the Revolutionary War, for instance, to the outgrowth of a spat between schoolboys, some of whom then took their “satchells” and their Shakespeare and, apparently, crossed the Atlantic in a huff. That first sonnet in particular is pretty insistent on this idyllic childhood in England–note especially the emphasis on parity between these two “ancestors” that tries to appropriate some of the discourses surrounding American democracy–the “equal lea” sounds a lot like “equality,” and we have the “same village-school” (no class disparity here!), the “twin-pride” in an architectural patrimony, and women who are also equally attractive.

Of course, I’m not really doing justice yet to the first question that Dobell’s poems pose: “in what tongue shall be thy battle cry?” It’s an interesting version of a kind of linguistic imperialism, but it also seems to be a version of that truism of high school political science classes about democracies not fighting each other. I assume that Dobell is overstating the case for effect–though it’s interesting to think that in 1855 it could be seen as even a halfway plausible idea that the main language of America was still up for debate.

…but there’s the rub, isn’t it? I’m no Americanist, but I’m going to venture a guess that, by 1855, the majority of people who called themselves Americans were not, in fact, descended from those “Pilgrim Fathers” back in England–or *any* fathers back in England. Indeed, I’d even go out on a limb and say that many of these folk spoke English as a second or third language, if at all. (Americanists and/or people with more of an interest in Googling the above can feel free to correct me on this one.)

The developmemt of thought across the two sonnets suggest that Dobell himself knows that the “common national heritage” argument isn’t really going to carry the day. Something more complicated happens in the second sonnet–almost a kind of imagined community based on a common language–as in, you become American by speaking English (and who hasn’t heard versions of that one even now) but, in Dobell’s rendering, you also get the bonus of carrying on the “living and creative flood / This universal English”–you become the heir of Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spenser. So in a single fell swoop, American literary production–which, you know, by 1855 was not all that insubstantial–is reduced to something of a symptom, the triumphant productions of wandering children.

(And, let’s face it. “Ye who in eternal youth” is rarely a compliment in these kinds of contexts.)

There is also, of course, the “we use the same words so we obviously mean the same things with those words” canard that’s going on in that second sonnet. However, I am nearing 1200 words on this puppy and will therefore let you imagine what I would say about that.

Just, um, happy upcoming Fourth of July holiday, y’all.

 

The Poem of the Week takes the red eye

Before I start, I should say that I had every intention of coming back from the woods to take on Coventry Patmore again (specifically, this gem [#290] from The Angel in the House), largely because Mia’s always after me to write about poems that I dislike. Alas, I am finding that my Victorian heart is not rising to such an occasion today. (The reasons for this can be roughly approximated by the sentiments expressed in Browning’s “Two in the Campagna” [not in the OBVV]) So I plunged again into the pages of the OBVV, through poems about dead brides and modest attractions and Christian consolations. You know, the usual–without anything in particular striking me as an appropriate site for kicking my Victorianist brain back into gear. And it seems self-indulgently biographical to leap right to the “Bride’s Song” from Christina Rossetti’s Prince’s Progress (#338 — “Too late for love, too late for joy! / Too late, too late!” — yeah, you know what I mean).

Instead, I offer the following sonnet from George Meredith (1828 – 1909), which should at least be a change of pace:

332. Lucifer in Starlight

On a starr’d night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen’d,

Where sinners hugg’d their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he lean’d,

Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careen’d,

Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that prick’d his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d and sank.

Around the ancient track march’d, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.

(1883)

This is a particularly masterful sonnet, in my humble opinion, in both its content and the use of its form. I was particularly struck in the transcription of it by the number of end-stopped lines–especially the ones where a single line is also a single sentence–this, for me, helps convey the sense of disenchantment so powerfully present in the language. It verges almost upon the boring, the desultory. Everything is contained and measured, and “unalterable law” is as much a matter of meter and structure as it is of those epic geological forces that come to replace God’s providence in our narrative of Victorian thought. It’s not so much that the struggle naught availeth, contra Clough, but more that the struggle itself was just one manifestation of a different time, something to be looked back upon from an almost Hegelian historical distance, memories of Milton and Romanticism, and how quaint indeed these echoed questions of being of the devil’s party. Lucifer, in the old mythologies, was a star himself once. Now even his fans don’t do much for him.

Reading this, I’m reminded of that thing that Kant says about the two things that fill him with wonder: “the starry sky above us and the moral law within us.” “Awe” (as in “the memory of the old revolt from”) is sometimes used as a figure for the sublime as well as for God himself. Is it possible, then, that the memory here is not simply that of the epic battles of good and evil (decided in advance, though only according to another set of laws) but also of awe itself, of the sublime, of wonder? For Meredith writes of the stars as the “brain of heaven”–a jarring, striking, clinical-seeming image. Something vast but mappable: a game of connect the dots that is infinite only because we’re better at spurious connections than intrinsic ones. Ever-expanding, but also ever dying.

Yes, these are reflections of the “middle height”: a mediocrity that passes, in these times (though I’m not speaking historically here, necessarily) for an apex, a zenith. In the old days–or so it seemed, we thought–he flew much higher, burned much more brightly before he sank.

And it’s possible, of course, that I’m projecting too much of my own world-weariness onto these fourteen lines. We could see this all, certainly, as simply another iteration of a detente between rationalism and religion–in a world where the hand of God has become more difficult to see, we still need not worry about the old demons–they are here, but the laws that bind them to defeat are more stable, more unalterable, than the myths by which we used to contain them. “Brain” will triumph, even if we no longer call it Providence or Love. It’s not so bad. It’s just that–it’s this formalist itch again–something about doing this in a mostly end-stopped sonnet that makes me feel like it’s not just projection. What still moves in all of this is the dark shadow, the “huge bulk” of Lucifer himself–and it moves more fleetingly, more powerfully, than the forced march below or the intelligent pulses above. Yet, in this movement, it doesn’t seem entirely malignant anymore, possibly because Lucifer, in leaving the sleeping sinners alone, has perhaps learned to pick his battles more carefully–no longer subject to this one “hot fit of pride,” now itself passed on?

…but what does it mean for us if the Awe (revolted against and otherwise) is a memory that only Lucifer has?

 

The Poem of the Week can’t believe you’re gone

288. “Heraclitus” by William (Johnson) Cory (1823-1892)

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remember’d how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

—

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest

Still thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

(written 1850?ish, published 1891)

There’s a moment in the “Fair Ship” sequence of In Memoriam where the poet imagines himself meeting the ship that bears the corpse of Arthur Hallam and for just one moment finds that he expects his friend to simply walk off the ship instead. Absence is a funny thing, something we can get used to as long as it meets our expectations and conforms to our timetables. Temporary if somewhat open-ended absences are bittersweet, though they often don’t change our routines so much; when more definitive, traumatic partings take place…well, it’s also sometimes striking how quickly their effects fade. This is all, to some extent, par for the course in a world of constant flux–a world, perhaps, as understood by Heraclitus–though that very sense of flux, perhaps akin to a kind perpetual Paterian weaving and unweaving of ourselves. How can you register absence when the river you step into isn’t even really the same river, or when you can still hear the nightingales?

There is, of course, a fairly obvious “trick” going on in the first line of this poem (which, according to its Representative Poetry Online page, is a translation of “an epigram of Callimachus”–though if you read that epigram, you’ll see that the repetitions and the tricks, as it were, belong to Cory). “They told me you were dead” suggests the kind of misinformation that one recalls years later while having a good laugh with Heraclitus himself–who may, if we read line 5 too quickly (the one about “thou art lying”), have faked his own death. But Heraclitus is dead–so far as we know, for the poem’s speaker still seems somewhat divided on this point. Sure, his friend’s ashes are not just at rest but “long, long ago at rest” (“Cinders there are”? Anyone?), but so much of the rest of this short poem seems to be conspiring to make the speaker’s hold on this bit of knowledge somewhat tenuous. He knows it in his head but not, perhaps, in his senses, in his body.

Aside from all their overdeterminedness as poetic symbol* the nightingale voices strike me as interesting here because they’re used to invoke a kind of permanence that is actually produced through a kind of endless replaceability. Death “cannot take” the nightingales away because there is nothing to take–unlike Heraclitus himself, they are not individuated (since this isn’t an Oscar Wilde fairytale–see “The Nightingale and the Rose”) and in fact are kind of expendable–it’s not death, exactly, but a kind of mindlessness in advance thereof.

The other thing I just want to observe about this poem is the overall difficulty of talking about the issues of death–and survival. I’ve been beginning to think about this as an angle on Browning’s “Epistle,” since one usually doesn’t get the chance to be both the dead guy and the dead guy’s survivor at the same time. But even when they are (as per usual) different people, the lines get blurred a bit.

William (Johnson) Cory, in case you were wondering, was a famed tutor at Eton and, as Wikipedia puts it, “the ‘coach’ of the cult of Victorian pederasty,” in actions as well as in literature, which seems to be related to his eventual resignation from his post. He was also an influence on Pater, Symonds, and perhaps Wilde. You can see the 1891 edition of his Ionica (from which “Heraclitus” was taken) here. He also said, according to an unsourced quote on the Wiki page, that “Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge,” which seems quite lovely and true indeed.

*Really, can you think of a bird more overdetermined in Western poetry/literature than the nightingale? I’m not sure even the albatross holds a candle to this. (I think Google’s going to back me up. 4.2 million hits for albatross, 7.9 million for nightingale.)

—-

A brief programming note. By this time next week I will have winged my way to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and a cabin remote enough from the rest of the world to be served only by a dial-up connection that runs somewhat slower than a Victorian-era telegraph. So there will be no new Poem of the Week until June 22 or thereabouts. Try not to miss me too much while I’m gone.

 

The Poem of the Week has a chat with Matthew Arnold. It was somewhat one-sided.

Something about gray weather near the end of May puts me in a quasi-canonical mood. Kind of. Also, in the interest of at least partial disclosure, I spent most of my afternoon reading Melanie Klein and various Kleinians. This seems at least obscurely relevant to what I’m about to inflict on you, and stands in for all those other things I can’t say in this semi-professional space.

270. “Isolation” by Matthew Arnold ( 1822-1888 )

Yes: in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

—

But when the moon their hollows lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour;

—

O then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent!

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain–

O might our marges meet again!

—

Who order’d that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindl’d, cool’d?

A God, a God their severance rul’d;

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

(1852, 1857)

Oh, Matthew Arnold. You have a way of making me feel like the Dover Bitch (“To have been brought / All the way down from London, and then be addressed / As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort / Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty”)–even when I’m in the mood to be much more serious, liable to feel guilty about how I never really believed in the “object as in itself it really is” and I may have kind of used Tennyson to poke fun at your whole “Buried Life” troping–even though I think it’s a much better poem than its omission from the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse suggests.

But the thing about this poem–yeah, I get it. Believe me. You thought nineteenth century society was all estranging, try living among Facebook and Twitter and Gchat and *still* feeling enisled and isolated–yes, there’s something about these fictions of connectedness that are always throwing the gaps in intimacy into stark relief, at least for a certain kind of personality…I think part of what you and I share–what allows, for instance, a poem like “Dover Beach” to stop me in my tracks as if I am encountering it for the first time every time I read it–is a genuine wish for things to be better than in themselves they really are–things, of course, beginning with ourselves as we really are.

Except that this poem bothers me in ways that “Dover Beach” and “The Buried Life” don’t. A rather forecful interior voice calls out, “It’s so whiny!”–hence, I’m sure, the Dover Bitch thing. The scientific language of the third stanza, coupled with the image of a severing God in the fourth, takes this mounting sense of helplessness over the top–it’s a kind of geological version of Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters,” where the self-administered narcotic lethargy has become a matter of mindless plate tectonics–a situation in which we not only cannot intervene, but we are never asked nor expected to. This seems like kind of a troubling model for thinking human relations. Not that I haven’t been guilty of this myself. And it’s also not like you invented the trope exactly…it’s just–maybe it’s that first line. “Yes” as in response to something, a gesture that necessarily opens and connects this poem to something–as in, it is not itself an island (more on this anon)–but it’s followed by this very disconnected non-image image of being “in the sea of life enisled”–we don’t even know what’s “enisled” until the “we” of line 4. (Thanks, GRE reading sections!) It’s meant to be oppressive, I know, meant to make us feel boxed in–and, again, the limitedness of these human/islands is thrown up against the limitlessness of whatever it is that estranges us, which is given a kind of absolute power of separation and force and movement and expansion. This isn’t your sea of faith.

But it still is the *sea*–which I think is why this metaphor seems so frustratingly partial to me. The sea separates but it also connects and moves and allows–for instance, the “lovely notes” of the nightingales to travel across great distances. Instead of longing for the time when we were all one big supercontinent (yawner), why can’t there be another way of understanding the archipelago, as it were?

Yes, Matthew Arnold, I know it’s your poem. But the answer may have more to do with the title that Arthur Quiller-Couch chose to attach to this particular set of stanzas in the OBVV. To call this poem “Isolation,” as you did in the 1857 edition of your Poems and as AQC does here, rather reinforces that whole enislement, forcing us to see ourselves as fixed in our estrangement, about which we can do nothing.

On the other hand, if we were going to approach this poem as, “To Marguerite, in returning a volume of the Letters of Ortis” (as we would do if we were reading this poem in 1852 or thereabouts), things change a bit. Personally, I might have just let you keep that copy of the Letters of Ortis, even though I can’t get it on Google Books. And what makes this all more confusing, of course, is that “To Marguerite” in the 1857 edition is a different poem and this one also appears as “To Marguerite: Continued.”

My point in going through all of this (and I’m sure someone’s untangled this somewhere) is only to highlight this very obvious tension, wherein a poem that seems to be about the fixity of isolation is itself part of a conversation with another person (even an imaginatively projected one) and with other texts, real or not. And on the one hand this makes me even more annoyed by this poem–not only is it positing an entire lack of agency, it’s doing so while making use of agency that it isn’t supposed to have. And that’s the kind of thing that Coleridge is always going to do better.

But then again. The act of responding to this poem has helped shake me out of some of my own despair, at least temporarily. Nothing you say here is anything that doesn’t cross my mind on a regular basis, that I wasn’t thinking about tonight. I came to the OBVV looking to have my own sense of something articulated and reinforced in a way that would help me gain some comfort. In this, you failed miserably, taking all those thoughts that I was hoping to cherish a little longer and taking them to such an extreme that it’s making me intervene to say, “No–this isn’t how it has to be”–and to look for possibilities within the poem of thinking these relations differently.

Because maybe we’re not the islands–maybe we’re just on the islands. And if that’s the case, then there doesn’t have to be this absolutely estranging space between us–if the longing is already there as a connection, that’s something. Sure, we can’t turn back the tide of divine severance. But we can teach ourselves how to build boats, right?

Yes, that’s right. I’m On A Boat.

Also, a quick follow up on one of the recent Poems of the Week. When I was consulting the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (a collection of rather more recent vintage) to see what its stance on the Marguerite poems were, I noticed that Emily Bronte’s “Stanzas”–which I wrote about here–made it into this anthology as well, with a few changes. The poem does contain the final stanza that Mia mentioned in her editor’s note, but–perhaps more intriguingly–the poem is attributed to either Emily or Charlotte. Daniel Karlin’s editor’s notes mention that this poem was originally published in a memorial edition of Wuthering Heights (edited by Charlotte) in 1850–but apparently there’s some debate about the authorship. Karlin’s source is Janet Gezari’s edition of Emily Bronte’s Complete Poems (Penguin, 1992)–but, sadly, GoogleBooks is giving me only a snippet view. Alas.