The Poem of the Week seeks a Victorian power ballad

245. “Say not the Struggle Naught availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861; Wiki)

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.

—

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,

Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,

And, but for you, possess the field.

—

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in the main.

—

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

But westward, look, the land is bright!

(published posthumously 1862)

In an unexpected fit of came across this poem during last week’s wanderings through the OBVV and knew I wanted to blog about it for this week. It seemed at the time like an appropriate coda to the spring semester, following on the last entry. I didn’t realize at the time how devastatingly relevant it would feel after the events of the past week. Suffice it to say that I had a lot of conversations with myself about what, precisely, this struggle was availing and was coming up with “naught” more often than not.

As usual, there’s a lot I want to say about this poem. Because as consolation, it’s slippery at best. It can make you feel a bit better, but you have to work just to get to that point–this poem seems to me to be as much about the effort of hope as it is about the consolations thereof. And this is true from the very first line, which I had trouble holding in my mind this week. For some reason no doubt at least partially related to the flatness of my midwestern American accent, I had an incredibly hard time holding “Say not the struggle naught availeth” in my head. I get tripped up in the knottiness of the not/naught every single time and I kept thinking the words out of order–” ‘Say not the struggle availeth not’…? No, that can’t be right.” At least the not/naught has been untangled for me by listening to a recording of the poem at Classic Poetry Aloud. I highly recommend listening to it, if only because it underlines the degree of deliberation and metrical mindfulness involved in succesfully speaking that first line, even if you happen to be possessed with a deep English-accented male voice.

And I think the difficulty of the opening is incredibly important. It keeps the message of the poem from being either “Cheer up, bucko, things will get better tomorrow” or “ye of little faith, God totally has a plan that you can’t see,” even though there is the sense throughout the poem that many of our problems are ones of perception, of seeing through a glass darkly. Perception, or maybe just language. What’s somewhat troubling about all this, what makes it such fragile consolation, is partly the conditional language (fears only “may” be liars, they could also be telling the truth) and partly the fact that a lot of this boils down to what you call it–say not the struggle naught availeth…even if the struggle, in fact, naught availeth. And, much as in last week’s poem, we have to do a lot of work to articulate exactly what it is we’re *not* saying.

I also feel like this poem is operating on too many different temporal registers to be fully stable. The second stanza seems very individualized, a matter of very limited personal perception, but also seeming to say, “maybe it’s just you, maybe you’re the one holding things up.” The third stanza is geological time, recalling those epic sweeps of In Memoriam–though, of course, that means that the consolatory potential is limited there, too. We can’t count on a beneficent God to pull us out of the mire when we lose our faith; rather, we trust in these mindlessly sublime processes that pass far out of our view. (I’m thinking about the mindlessness of the sublime after reading Gayatri Spivak on “Terror” yesterday.)

The last stanza seems to be the poem’s best effort at bringing the two together, uniting, at least momentarily, the personal and the geological. And I can tell you that this is empirically true. All the windows in my apartment face west; the last stanza seems particularly apropos as I sit here in reflected morning sunlight that is perhaps more conductive to working and thinking than the more direct rays of the afternoon which often encourage me to nap on the couch. The fact that I value the one over the other right now probably signifies that this is a Victorian moment for me.

And I don’t know if any of this is consolatory. Most of the time I’m making up my interpretations as I go along, and I wasn’t expecting to write this way about this poem. (I also planned to do more background on Clough, but he’s not so uncanonical that you can’t find him.) It really was supposed to be my Victorian poetry power ballad, the summer theme song around which I could rally to remind myself why I do what I do. Perhaps it still is, just in a different way.

 

After some wanderings and false starts, The Poem of the Week decides to refocus

I try to approach the OBVV each week with an open mind, ready to write about whatever leaps from the page for whatever reason. I generally try to keep to the order that the poems appear in the text, regardless of whether that works from a chronological perspective. Beyond that, I’m mostly looking for something that’s manageable both for retyping and reading–I’m sure there are many fantastic poems that go on for several pages that I am missing here, such as Frederick William Faber‘s “The World Morose” (#221).

But of course I’m always driven by obscure, less articulated desires, looking for something I can’t describe but swear I will know by sight. Some weeks this is all more clear than in others. Some posts become retroactively autobiographical. I’m not going to tell you which ones.

Tonight’s trajectory went something like this: I began by deciding not to write about Robert Browning (#195-213). Thing is, Bob and I are going to be spending quite a lot of time together this summer as it is, so there’s no need to rush into things. There will be all kinds of opportunities for you to hear what I have to say about him. (However, Maggie will be happy to know that “The Laboratory” comes in at #198.) After this, I paged listlessly past Aubrey de Vere–best known in my world for a comment he made about Tennyson writing Maud backwards–then on through Henry David Thoreau (you all know that there are Americans in here, I’m just being horribly non-transatlantic and not writing about them because, ack?) and a host of minor poets with names like Wathen Mark Wilks Call (#229-31) and Thomas Toke Lynch (#233) and no Wikipedia pages. You can, however, read about both of these last figures as “Lesser Poets of the Middle and Later Nineteenth Century” in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature in Eighteen Volumes.

Normally a name like Thomas Toke Lynch and a poem about children as cannon fodder in spiritual warfare would be enough to get me going here. Yet my eye was drawn instead to #234, which I present to you without further ado:

“Stanzas” — Emily Bronte (1819-1848)

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

To those first feelings that were born with me,

And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning

For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

—

To-day I will seek not the shadowy region;

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;

And visions rising, legion after legion,

Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

—

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality,

And not among the half-distinguish’d faces,

The clouded forms of long-past history.

—

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:

It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding,

Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.*

There are any number of reasons to love this poem. To be fair, I’m probably too groggy to do justice to them all, and this grogginess may be the reason why the poem seems to be somewhat shimmeringly suspended among several levels right now, not just in terms of the literal and figural aspects of the proposed walk itself, but also in its generic positioning.  And perhaps this has to do with the poem’s material aspect–the physicality of those last two lines after all those tropes that come before. It’s not exactly unexpected, since the entire poem is, in a sense, going through all these different tropes of walking and where one might walk if one were so inclined–all, of course, to reject it for some return to the moors. There’s a certain romanticism to this–and we know that it’s coming from that first stanza, a kind of return to self against the incursions of the world, turning aside from all teachers that are not nature, and so on. The “unreal world” is “too strangely near” and the answer is clarity, hardness, wind on mountains, and the present moment (that is, whatever is not occluded by “the clouded forms of long-past history).

Yet to the extent that there is a romanticism to this pedestrianism, it, too, seems to get turned back and refused for something more stark. It’s difficult to write well about refusals, to write well about other people’s refusals, and to write well about the kind of refusal that involves the invocation and citation of what is being refused. And this is why you should all immediately go get a copy of Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling and read the chapter on the periperformative utterance. It’s not exactly applicable to what Bronte’s doing here, but it at least approximates the process that interests me.

But I think what attracts me to this poem most of all right now is its reminder to focus on the present, to be mindful of what is needed, to take a break from speculations and bleak prospects of uncertain futures and ungraspable pasts. It doesn’t really, in my view at least, make grand claims for self-identity or authenticity–to a certain extent, to “walk where my own nature would be leading” is presented more as a choice among other choices, all valid and helpful at times, but not entirely in this particular case. This is not the agonistic longing of Arnold’s “The Buried Life” or some straightforwardly gendered rejection of predominately male poetic forms. (Though now as I type that, I can see it as an entirely plausible way to read the poem.) Indeed, despite the reference to “first feelings,” there’s not much of a hierarchy in this poem, which reveals those feelings–and the physical act of walking according to one’s own inner guide, away from striving and the “busy chase”–to be as important, as sacred even, as the sublime, epic, morality, history. And this, in turn, gives these stanzas a kind of grace.

It’s a grace (and I mean that in a loosely spiritual sense) that I’m seeking myself right now at the end of an exhausting, uncertain, wildly productive, intensely painful semester. It’s been that way for lots of reasons and not just for me either. Even the best things can tear our focus away from–well, from whatever it is we’re doing, from our efforts to be good to each other and our students and ourselves. The time it’s taken me to write this post is a case in point. And it’s not to say that Emily Bronte is going to solve all of my problems or keep me from getting sucked into Gawker rather than Zizek tomorrow or–whatever. But Bronte’s right about one thing: “unsustaining vastness” does wax pretty damn “drear.” And that makes me want to accept poetic grace where I can.

*Ed. note: I was checking the wording of one of the lines, and I found the poem on wikisource. There’s one more stanza:

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
  More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
  Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

In any case, Emily for the win. And it’s nice to think what happens to poem when they’re suggestively truncated.

 

The semi-triumphant return of the Poem of the Week

Apologies to those of you who have, no doubt, been assiduously checking this page at the beginning of each week waiting patiently for the next step in our tour through the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. April was truly the cruelest month in the land of the Long 19th Century (though T.S. Eliot would probably not admit that), and in the case of yours truly, that meant–among other things–that Arthur Quiller-Couch’s anthology collected dust on my shelf while I dealt with the 9,000 other things that life decided to throw in my direction. Many of which involved writing about 19th century British poetry, just not…here.

A new month, and we’re back to the OBVV. By all rights, we should be hitting Tennyson next, but, um…I just had a lot of writing on Tennyson come out recently–you can look me up on Project Muse–and I think maybe I should leave it at that for now. (I will say, briefly, that the Tennyson selections are fairly predictable, except for the part where there’s nothing from In Memoriam. My guess is that AQC wanted that to be fully a part of the Oxford Book of English Verse, which he’d previously put together. Or something. There are also a couple other selections that don’t make it into the one-volume selected Tennyson edited by Christopher Ricks. But, like many collections since–I assume–it’s pretty heavily weighted towards the Tennyson of 1855 and before, with the obligatory nod to “Crossing the Bar.”)

And so, with all of that impossible preamble, I give you the long-awaited Poem of the Week, which I fear will not live up to the hype.

180. “Faith” by Frances Anne Kemble

Better trust all, and be deceived,

And weep that trust and that deceiving,

Than doubt one heart that, if believed,

Had bless’d one’s life with true believing.

O, in this mocking world too fast

The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth!

Better be cheated to the last

Than lose the blessed hope of truth.

(1844? This is a guess.)

I could probably come up with a whole subcategory within this of “poems by people who are famous for things other than poetry.” And Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble–actress, abolitionist, travel writer, memoirist, divorcee–certainly fits here. Seriously, go read her Wikipedia page–she’s someone we should all know about, particularly with the American connection.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between things like faith and stupidity and how they are sometimes kind of indistinguishable (see any of the Great Pumpkin-themed Peanuts strips). My reaction to this poem thus went a bit like the following. First impression: yes, this poem is pretty much the plot of every Victorian novel, ever. Second impression: this poem knows what it’s talking about. What I mean by the second impression is mostly that it’s another lovely example of the Victorian double poem, in that on the first pass it expresses a conventional, almost stereotypical conduct-manual type counsel (“tis better to have loved and lost / then never to have loved at all”; “and may you stay forever young”) and on the second pass it makes us wonder about all of that, without really giving us an out.

A bit more slowly, what I mean is this: the first quatrain is doing something really interesting with its line endings. The deceived/believed and deceiving/believing rhyme scheme suggests, not entirely subtly, the ways in which the two are indistinguishable. But I find it more interesting that we go from the past participle/adjective to the gerund (deceived–>deceiving / believed–>believing), which suggests all kinds of other possibilities, perhaps how we can move from being deceived to going out and deceiving, but also disrupting the self-sameness of these states, particularly since the whole scheme of tenses is already a bit convoluted. (As is my prose here. I apologize. Clearly, The Poem of the Week is not to be analyzed with the baseball game on in the background. Also, the Cardinals lost.) Whether belief and that “hope of truth” are even possible is never really clear in this poem because of the way that first stanza works.

And what is “true believing,” anyway? Especially when by the end of the poem it’s become “the blessed hope of truth”? This does not strike me as being particularly consolatory. The “truth” that seems most evident in the poem lies in something like that movement to action charted in the first stanza–the truth being in the affective investments that we make again and again, even though most of them will lose. If we don’t “trust all” and be deceived, we almost by definition trust more than we don’t trust when we decide to get out of bed in the morning. If we justify it in retrospect as being worth it–well, we’re still here to make that retrospective judgment, so maybe it *is* worth it after all.

I’m not feeling particularly eloquent or focused right now, so I won’t subject you to more ramblings. (Don’t want to presume on how much anyone missed me.) I will say, though, that there’s a lot to be done with thinking about temporality in this poem, particularly the way it is forward-looking, subjunctive, perhaps even suspensive. Possibly I’m just marking this for myself right now, too.

 

A quick intro to the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse

Note: I resolved in my last post to blog The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse during the spring semester. Most of the time I will be picking poems more or less at random to share with all of you. For this first post, however, some initial impressions on the anthology as a whole.

For my part, after many months spent in close study of Victorian verse–re-reading old favourites and eagerly making acquaintance with much that was new to me–I rise from the task in reverence and wonder not only at the mass (not easily sized) of poetry written with ardour in these less-than-a-hundred years, but at the amount of it which is excellent, and the height of some of that excellence…  (from the preface)

There’s something a bit seductive about an anthology that describes its principle of selection as “my old rule of choosing what seems to me the best, and for that sole reason.” The sophisticated reader on my shoulder tells me that this is wrong, that it is complicated, that it is just as problematic as the Arnoldian critical vision it implicitly echoes: that of identifying and disseminating the best that has been thought and said. I probably don’t need to lay that out for anyone reading here.

But I guess what makes me linger more than half-admiringly on this line is its sense of confidence, that such a selection principle is somehow “enough”–whatever that means–to justify a text of nearly a thousand pages of Victorian poems, with virtually no scholarly apparatus, just because they’re that good and this book should exist. And I know this in itself isn’t unproblematic, either, but it approaches a spirit that I try to keep in play as I carry out my own work: not so much uncritical appreciation, but perhaps a willingness to trust in something being “good” even if I can’t fully explain why that should matter.

And, on a more practical level, I think this book does an admirable job in the range of poets presented.  While Q-C says that he’s not in the business of “recapturing fugitive, half-forgotten poems–frail things that by one chance or another cheated of their day have passed down to Limbo,” many of the pieces contained herein have become just that in the last alm0st-century. I doubt that even the most assiduous scholars of Victorian poetry could quote the opening lines of Sir Lewis Morris‘s “On a Thrush Singing in Autumn” (#380).

Of course, some of Q-C’s concerns do seem very familiar to us today: how do we define the “Victorian”? Is it a matter of temporality? A certain sensibility? Geography? (As I mentioned yesterday, a number of American poets are also represented here.) The Victorian-Romantic distinction seems to be firmly in place: “Though Wordsworth happened to be the first Laureate of Queen Victoria’s reign, no one will argue that he belongs to it.” Similarly, you will find poems by Hartley, Sara, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, but not Samuel Taylor, and this seems right. Yet Walter Savage Landor, born just three years after S. T. Coleridge, opens the anthology, and you’ll also find a handful of poems by John Clare, who, at our critical moment, has been pretty definitively claimed by Romanticists. All of which makes somewhat glaring the omission of Felicia Hemans (b. 1793, the same year as Clare) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (b. 1802), female poets who have been “recovered” by scholars eager to expand our conception of romanticisms and by those interested in establishing a proto-Victorian tradition of the poetess. If nothing else, this underscores a kind of resistance to making the anthology a fully historical or historicized document, but I do find it somewhat suspect that there wouldn’t be a single poem of L.E.L.’s, for instance, that could stand up to any given poem in the collection. However, in general–as I mentioned yesterday–female poets are remarkably well-represented here, especially in comparison to where things were in the field by the 1950s and 60s.

As far as the ending of the “Victorian,” Q-C takes an expansive view, writing, “…I have thought it no insult to include any English poet, born in our time, under the great name ‘Victorian’; a title the present misprision of which will no less surely go its way as a flippancy of fashion than it will be succeeded by fresh illustration of the habit, constant in fallen Man, of belittling his contemporaries in particular and the age next before his own in gross.” (Take that Auden, Eliot, et al.) Hence, as I mentioned yesterday, we get James Joyce and Ezra Pound following Michael Field; we also have Yeats preceding Kipling. I suppose this is the one advantage of arranging the poets strictly by birth dates–I know that I at least don’t consider them to be contemporaries, but they were both born in 1865. Such an arrangement also allows Sir Arthur himself (b. 1863) to insert three of his own verses in between the work of Rosamund Marriott Watson (who I’ve heard of) and Stephen Phillips (who I haven’t, despite his apparently being “a highly famed English poet and dramatist, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his lifetime).

There are 779 poems in the volume, which runs to just over 1,000 pages with the index. Many of the poets (I don’t have the patience to count them) have more than one poem here, though the relative numbers are sometimes surprising. As I wrote yesterday, the version I have is a 1955 reprinting, and I assume there was a second edition in there somewhere. I haven’t done the research on that part yet.

But those are the basics. Next week I’ll begin with a poem, probably from the earlier pages of the book. The goal is not to blog every poem or poet, but to explore and discover. However, if you have any requests or curiosities about who and what’s in here, feel free to let me know in the comments. Also, I promise that not everything I write here will actually be 1,000 words long. Really, I do.

 

Clipart Victorians and some musings on Coventry Patmore

(Original image is here.)

So, as I’m in full-on dissertation-prospectus-avoidance mode, I thought it would be a good time to finally get around to checking out The New Adventures of Queen Victoria. The strip’s premise is that it traces the adventures of a clip-art Queen Victoria (and, as they say on Rocky & Bullwinkle, a host of others) as she attempts to navigate the modern world. I really, really want to like this strip. At the moment, there are a series of strips about Banned Books Week featuring a clipart Sarah Palin. I can see why the juxtaposition is inherently funny, but (for reasons largely related to growing up religious in the midwest) Sarah Palin scares me enough that I can’t really find her funny. But I do find myself wondering whether there’s more to the strip than just the inherent humor of a clipart Queen Victoria talking about the fall TV schedule with a clipart Queen Elizabeth I (“Liz” in the strip). Or maybe that’s enough? I’ll have to start reading it to see.

In the world of clipart Victorians, there’s also the Victorian Comics site, which I’m not sure is being updated regularly at the moment. (It’s hard to tell sometimes.) Some of these are pretty funny; one of them (I’m not saying which) has been the image on my computer desktop for a few months. Others I think seem to depend too much on the inherent humor of the juxtaposition, though.

For some reason, I don’t feel the same way about someecards.com, the source of the above image. It’s not  just Victorian clipart, of course, but much of it is, and I find these mostly hilarious. The production qualities are great. The writing is almost always impeccable and slightly evil, which no doubt appeals to me on a number of levels. But it’s possible, too, that there’s something else going on there, something that goes beyond the inherent hilariousness and almost achieves the level of interpretation. As if the joke comes not from the incongruities (or just making fun of those crazy Victorians) of the text and image but from the plausibility of the captions as weirdly appropriate to the image. And in certain contexts, it’s almost, albeit barely, possible to imagine the joke actually succeeding for certain segments of a nineteenth century audience.

All of this has me musing on the relationship between what we find funny about the Victorians and what the Victorians found funny about themselves. On the one hand, I would venture to guess that most of the things that make me laugh or smile when reading Dickens or Austen or Thackeray are those that the authors more or less intended–even if there are obviously going to be places where the jokes misfire 150 years later or passages that are unintentionally hilarious. The same goes for something like the “Philosophy of Drinking” article I linked to in an earlier post–it’s obviously a light piece and is still funny. On the other hand, I don’t generally go to, say, the archives of Punch for a good nineteenth-century-style bellylaugh. These kinds of things are more texts to be read and deciphered with our historical knowledge of political and cultural meanings–seeing the humor in it is more an act of effort and excavation and of pulling back from our initial “WTF?” reaction. (This seems to me to be the kind of work we did with that image from the O’Malley book in the September reading group.)

That “WTF?” reaction is a strong one, though–and, to be honest, it probably motivates the plurality (if not the outright majority) of my moments of mirth in Victorian literature. It has made my other prospectus-avoidance activity–reading Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel In The House“–not only bearable but actively pleasurable. Yes, that’s right kids. I’m having fun reading “The Angel in the House.” And I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s probably not the kind of fun that Patmore intended. What keeps me reading is, more or less, a series of moments where I have to go back to what I just read and say to myself “OMG! Did he just mean to *say* that?” Which has made this a lot more interesting text than I’d been led to believe by the way that we tend to throw around the phrase as if we know what it means. It did not, for instance, prepare me for “Love at Large,” one of the preludes to Canto II:

Whene’er I come where ladies are,

How sad soever I was before,

Though like a ship frost-bound and far

Withheld in ice from the ocean’s roar,

Third-winter’d in that dreadful dock

With stiffen’d cordage, sails decay’d,

And crew that care for calm and shock

Alike, too dull to be dismay’d,

Yet if I come where ladies are,

How sad soever I was before,

Then is my sadness banish’d far,

And I am like the ship no more;

Or like the ship that if the ice-field splits,

Burst by the sudden polar Spring,

And all thank God with their warming wits,

And kiss each other and dance and sing,

And hoist fresh sails, that make the breeze

Blow them along the liquid sea,

Out of the North, where life did freeze,

Into the haven where they would be.

What starts out as a paean to the rejuvenating influence of (respectable) female company should *not* in the normal logic of things end up as sort of the musical version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” complete with homoeroticism that doesn’t really even need to be pointed out. And yet there you go. Maybe it’s too easy, in a way, to even bother to talk about it. But I’m also not sure if I want to dismiss it outright as sub-scholarly frivolity. I don’t, for instance, have any legitimate reason to think that Patmore himself thinks he’s being funny here or elsewhere in the text. And given the weight that the phrase “angel in the house” carried both in its time and in our own scholarly discourse (and see, of course, Virginia Woolf’s famous description of the female writer’s task as “killing the angel in the house“), I do wonder if we laugh at our peril. Are we at the point yet where we *can* laugh at this sort of thing, provided that we do so in a kind of Nietzschean way–a laughter out of the whole truth that is also laughing at ourselves? And what’s the status of a “we” that laughs at these kinds of Victorian moments? (I assume that everyone runs across some of these, no matter what field they’re in, but the Victorians seem especially open to this. I’m having trouble thinking of similar WTF? moments in Romanticism, for instance, except for something like Godwin’s memoir of Wollstonecraft, which is more tragic than funny.)

I suppose the broader question is about the place of laughter in our work and about the different positions that we take on when we do laugh. Laughing at, laughing with, laughing near. At least in my case, the laughing-at position has been seemingly productive, at least in the short term.

Now if only I could have this much to say about  my nascent dissertation….