POETRY MA English - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak
POETRY MA English - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak
POETRY MA English - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak
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<strong>POETRY</strong><br />
Paper-V<br />
Option-I<br />
Section A & B<br />
M.A. <strong>English</strong> (Previous)<br />
Directorate of Distance Education<br />
<strong>Maharshi</strong> <strong>Dayanand</strong> <strong>University</strong><br />
ROHTAK – 124 001<br />
1
2<br />
Copyright © 2003, <strong>Maharshi</strong> <strong>Dayanand</strong> <strong>University</strong>, ROHTAK<br />
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system<br />
or transmitted in any form or by any means; electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or<br />
otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.<br />
<strong>Maharshi</strong> <strong>Dayanand</strong> <strong>University</strong><br />
ROHTAK – 124 001<br />
Developed & Produced by EXCEL BOOKS PVT. LTD., A-45 Naraina, Phase 1, New Delhi-110028
Contents<br />
Unit 1 Spenser 5<br />
Faerie Queene<br />
Unit 2 Alexander Pope 43<br />
The Rape of the Lock<br />
Unit 3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 80<br />
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<br />
Kubla Khan<br />
Unit 4 Matthew Arnold 115<br />
The Forsaken Merman<br />
Dover Beach<br />
Scholar Gypsy<br />
Memorial Verses to Wordsworth<br />
3
4<br />
M.A. (Previous)<br />
<strong>POETRY</strong><br />
PAPER-V (Option-I) Max. Marks : 100<br />
Time : 3 Hours<br />
Note: Students will be required to attempt five questions in all. Question 1 will be compulsory. This question shall<br />
be framed to test students’ comprehension of the texts prescribed for Close Study. There will be one question<br />
on each of the Units in all the four Sections. The students will be required to attempt four questions (in<br />
about 200 words each) one from each section.<br />
The other four questions will be based on the texts for Close Study with internal choice i.e. one question<br />
with internal choice on each of the four units. The students will be required to attempt One question from<br />
each of the Four unit.<br />
Section A<br />
Unit 1 Spenser<br />
Faerie Queene<br />
Unit 2 Pope<br />
The Rape of the Lock<br />
Unit 3 Coleridge<br />
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<br />
Kubla Khan<br />
Unit 4 Arnold<br />
The Forsaken Merman<br />
Dover Beach<br />
Scholar Gypsy<br />
Memorial Verses to Wordsworth<br />
Section B
Course: M. A. (Previous) <strong>English</strong><br />
Paper V (option I) Poetry<br />
Section A; Unit I: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book I<br />
SPENSER’S LIFE AND WORK<br />
Although considerable information about Spenser’s life is available from<br />
official records and from the writings of his contemporaries, the more valuable<br />
information can be obtained from his poetry itself. For instance, from a sonnet<br />
Spenser wrote in 1593, the year of his courtship, we can know when he was<br />
born. The year (1593), says Spenser, seems longer “then all those fourty that my<br />
life outwent.” We can easily infer from the sonnet that Spenser was born in or<br />
abut 1542. We can also know from Prothalamion, where he speaks of<br />
… mery London, my most kindly nurse,<br />
That to me gave this life’s first native sourse;<br />
Though from another place I take my name,<br />
An house of ancient fame,<br />
that he was born and brought up in London, but that his parents were not<br />
Londoners. The reference to the “house of ancient fame” is to the Spencer’s of<br />
Althorpe, Northampton. Spenser received his school education at the Merchant<br />
Taylors, where Mulcaster was its first head master, who was a keen scholar with<br />
a generous conception of the aims of education. “It is not a mind,” he wrote,<br />
“not a body, that we have to educate, but a man; and we can not divide him.”<br />
This conception derives from the Humanist ideal of education; from, broadly,<br />
the culture of the Renaissance. The ideal of the perfect courtier, which Spenser<br />
later emulates and portrays, must have found its source in this early education.<br />
Mulcaster grounded his students in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He also trained<br />
them daily in music both vocal and instrumental.<br />
It was also at school that Spenser picked up French, and made his first<br />
attempts as a poet. Spenser translated certain sonnets of Petrarch and Du Bellay.<br />
Of his years at Pembroke college, Cambridge (1569-76) there is not much on<br />
record. But certain vital informations are available. The entry books of the<br />
college do make a reference to him as the recipient of allowances, “aegrotanti.”<br />
It is considered possible that Spenser’s chronic ill-health tended to develop in<br />
him the tendency to reflect and dream. He is considered among the most learned<br />
of the <strong>English</strong> poets. Even if some of his contemporaries have been better<br />
scholars, none has been as well read as Spenser. Of his contemporaries, Ben<br />
Jonson and, perhaps, Chapman alone could rival his knowledge of the classics.<br />
As Drummond has informed, Ben Jonson “did neither understand French nor<br />
Italiannes,” whereas Spenser knew both quite well. Spenser was a known Greek<br />
scholar in his time. He was an enthusiastic student of both Plato and Aristotle.<br />
He was more profoundly influenced by the mystical element in Plato’s thought,<br />
as revealed in the latter’s Symposium and Republic. The Roman poetry also
attracted Spenser both by its wealth of material which he could use for his own<br />
purpose, and by virtue of its style. It is also significant to note that while most<br />
Elizabethans turned chiefly to Ovid, Spenser was highly influenced by the art of<br />
Virgil.<br />
At Cambridge Spenser formed a deep and lasting friendship with Gabriel<br />
Harvey, who was among the most notable figures at the university. There can be<br />
no doubt that Harvey was both a loyal and a valued friend of Spenser’s, that he<br />
took keen interest in Spenser’s career, and introduced him to those who were in<br />
the best position to further it. If he gave Spenser bad advice on literary matters,<br />
obviously Spenser seldom followed it. Years later, he delighted to refer to<br />
Harvey as his “entire friend”. In 1576 Spenser earned the degree of M. A. and<br />
left Cambridge for the society of his Lancashire kinsfolk. Of his occupation at<br />
this place, we only know that he fell in love with a lady whose identity he veils<br />
under the name of Rosalind in the Shepheardes Calender. She was both a<br />
conventional love figure of Elizabethan poetry as well as a sincere object of<br />
love. This love experience remained an integral part of Spenser’s imagination<br />
for a long time in his life. Rosalind is again alluded to with chivalrous devotion<br />
in Spenser’s poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. However, whatever the<br />
depth of emotion for Rosalind, it did not save Spenser from the dangers and the<br />
delights of falling under other spells. The cautious Harvey had soon reason to<br />
warn his friend of the seductions of another “Rosalindula,” perhaps some lady<br />
of the court.<br />
Spenser returned to London in 1578, where Harvey introduced him to<br />
Sidney and Leicester. Spenser looked up to Leicester as the acknowledged<br />
political leader of the Puritan faction, the most favourite of Elizabeth, who had<br />
not yet lost the hope that a marriage with the Queen might turn his fortunes. He<br />
got bound more closely to Sidney than to Leicester and their relation was not<br />
that of patron and protégé. Although yet a young man, Sidney was regarded the<br />
most brilliant figure at the court of Elizabeth. Sidney, recognized for his<br />
abilities all over Europe, was considered by his own countrymen as the ideal<br />
courtier. An earnest Protestant, Sidney saw in Roman Catholicism the greatest<br />
threat to his country’s liberty. He remained persistent in persuading Elizabeth<br />
for a strong action against Spain. Spenser accepted Sidney’s political ideals<br />
without any reservation. In other matters, too, he felt closer to Sidney than to<br />
any one else around him. The Puritanism of both Sidney and Spenser was<br />
deeply tinged with Platonic mysticism. Both made an attempt to adopt to<br />
modern life the ideals of mediaeval chivalry. They saw in the romance of<br />
medieval times an inspiring symbol for the battles they were to fight in their<br />
times. The soul of Sidney that was stirred by a rude ballad of Chary Chase and<br />
later found an intimate expression in Arcadia found kinship with the poet of the<br />
Faerie Queene. In their judgements upon art, however, the two friends were not<br />
in complete agreement. Sidney was more committed to fashion and precedent.<br />
He did not endorse Spenser’s bolder linguistic experiments because he “dare not
allow, since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in Italian,<br />
did affect it.” Sidney, in fact, went a step further to lead the scholars’ movement<br />
for establishing classical metres in <strong>English</strong> verse. And yet, Sidney did not fail to<br />
encourage Spenser in his ambitious project of the Faerie Queene, whereas<br />
Harvey only condemned it. Spenser’s dedication of his poem The Ruins of Time<br />
to Sidney’s sister, the countess of Pembroke, claims no equal friendship with<br />
“that most brave knight your noble brother deceased.” Sidney had also inspired<br />
Spenser in his youth and given him a model for the brave courtier in Mother<br />
Hubberds Tale. This noble friend continued in Spenser’s memory to vitalize<br />
some of his most beautiful conceptions in the Faerie Queene. Spenser’s elegy<br />
on the death of Sidney, Astrophel, although in pastoral form, underlines the<br />
poet’s deep sentiment for Sidney.<br />
In Spenser as a poet, there is nothing of the realist. His genius expresses<br />
his emotion far more in verbal cadence, in melody of phrasing, than in the<br />
logical expressions of words. Even in his Astrophel, it is only through elaborate<br />
use of his characteristic effects of alliteration and repetition that he is able to<br />
give to his lay of lingering and tender pathos an effective expression of personal<br />
regard. It is not because Astrophel is an elegy that he uses the pastoral idiom.<br />
Pastorial idiom, for Spenser, was the most useful metaphor which could give an<br />
effective expression to his most intimate personal experience. It is not for<br />
nothing that the poet of the Faerie Queene was known as “Colin Clout” among<br />
his friends. Finally, when Spenser’s own Faerie land itself becomes pastoral,<br />
with Colin Clout straying into it, its hero, Sir Calidore, represents an ideal<br />
portrait of Sidney. Spenser’s first bid for poetic fame, in 1579, was also marked<br />
by his dedication of the book, the Shepheardes Calender, to “the president of<br />
noblesse and of chevalrie, “Sir Philip Sidney”.<br />
THE SHEPHEARDES CALENDER:<br />
Spenser’s the Shepheardes Calender, with its clear relations with the past,<br />
came to be recognized as a pioneering piece of a new movement. It appeared<br />
with explanatory and apologetic notes by an editor mentioned merely as E. K.<br />
Various scholarly views on the identity of the editor notwithstanding, the<br />
current critical opinion accepts the editor as Edward Kirk, a fellow student of<br />
Spenser at Cambridge and an enthusiastic disciple of Harvey. The poem has<br />
been accepted as a veiled autobiography of the poet, as a work of historic<br />
interest, and as a work of high intrinsic value. Spenser’s choice of the pastoral<br />
form was a happy one, for Virgilian eclogue was already popular. Its traditions<br />
in classical and Renaissance literature allowed Spenser a precedence for the<br />
allegorical use he made of it. The Shepherd’s cloak, in Spenser’s time, was an<br />
accepted disguise of the lover, the poet, the courtier, the pastor, and even the<br />
critic of contemporary life. Thus, the poem could be made the repository of the<br />
poet’s personal emotions, his religious and political beliefs, his hopes and fears<br />
for art. Spenser represents, in the dramatic personae, under a disguise
sometimes dark, sometimes transparent, himself as well as his friends. Spenser<br />
appears disguised as Colin Clout, Gabriel Harvey as Hobbinol, and Rosalind,<br />
the object of his unhappy love. Several more personalities are represented under<br />
different names.<br />
The poem’s editor, E. K., has divided the Eclogues into Plaintive<br />
(1,6,11,12); Recreative, “ such as certain matter of love, or commendation of<br />
special personages” (3,4,8); Moral, “which for the most part be mixed with<br />
some satirical bitternesse” (2,5,7,9,10). The various motives of the work are so<br />
interwoven that no division can, in fact, be entirely satisfactory. There is an<br />
Eclogue written for every month of the calendar. For instance, love is the main<br />
theme of January and December alone. The April Eclogue is in praise of “the<br />
fayre queene of sheperds all.” The February Eclogue brilliantly narrates the<br />
fable of the oak and the brier, contrasts old age with arrogant youth. Spenser’s<br />
purpose in May, July and September, is clear enough:<br />
To teach the ruder shepherd how to feed his sheepe,<br />
And from the falser’s fraud his folded flocke to keepe,<br />
The most deeply interesting of all the Eclogues is, in fact, the October one. It<br />
takes the form of a dialogue between two shepherds, Cuddie and Piers. The<br />
subject of dialogue is the state of poetry in Spenser’s time, the dialogue actually<br />
being between the two internal voices within the poet himself. Even more<br />
important than the contents of the Shepheardes Calender is, however, the style<br />
in which it is composed. The poet’s own attitude to his predecessors is equally<br />
important. The poet shows full knowledge of the pastorals of Greece, Italy, and<br />
France. He also adapts and translates from Mantuan and Marot. But he<br />
acknowledges his debt to Chaucer alone. At a time when his contemporaries<br />
were running after foreign models, it was Spenser’s ambition to be <strong>English</strong>. His<br />
reversion to Chaucer is the boldest sign of his independence.<br />
In the June Eclogue Spenser represents Harvey as calling Colin to the<br />
study of the classics, to which Colin modestly replies:<br />
Of Muses Hobbinol, I conne no skill,<br />
For they bene daughters of the hyghest Jove,<br />
I never lyst presume to Parnasse hyll,<br />
But pyping low in shade of lowly grove<br />
I play to plese myself, al be it ill.<br />
Colin’s reply in the above lines barely conceals his deliberate conviction that his<br />
native poetry can benefit little from the rhetoric of classical and Italian<br />
imitation. Here, the poet asserts that his master is Tityrus alone, by which he<br />
means Chaucer. The reason why he is drawn to Chaucer most is that he<br />
considers Chaucer one of those who “have right well employed themselves to<br />
the beautifying and bettering of the <strong>English</strong> tongue.”<br />
The Shepheardes Calender is no less experimental in its use of metre.<br />
Having no precedent in pastoral tradition for such metrical variety, Spenser was<br />
inspired solely by his own enthusiasm to explore the capabilities of his native
language. Although he does owe something to his immediate predecessors both<br />
in England and France, he reaches back for his models to an earlier age. He<br />
makes attempt at forms suggested by the ballad, at the irregular four-stressed<br />
lines, at the regular line of five feet, all being traditional in <strong>English</strong> poetry. But<br />
in this, too, he finds the fullest and most natural expression in the metre of<br />
Chaucer. In the exquisite and varied melody of Spenser’s poem lies, for sure, its<br />
greatest charm. But it also makes a further appeal to the admirer of Spenser’s<br />
poetry. That appeal comes from the strange pastoral country that the poet<br />
creates in the poem. With its ideal atmosphere that imparts to intimate personal<br />
allusion the remoteness of romance; with its unique mixing of artifice and<br />
naturalness; of nature and convention, of deep moral earnestness and tender<br />
delicacy of feeling, Spenser’s poem, despite all its borrowings, creates a world<br />
of its own. It lies along the high-road that leads him to Faery land.<br />
The status of the Shepheardes Calender (1579) is the same as that of the<br />
The Lyrical Ballads (1798); both are literary events of the same kind. Like<br />
Wordsworth, Spenser appeared like heaven’s benediction with the demand for<br />
homelier things and truer poetic language. He also aimed at fresher cadences,<br />
ballad simplicity, and a new social philosophy. Like Wordsworth, he did not<br />
stand alone, though for several years readers called him “the new poet,” or<br />
Colin Clout, or “Immerito.” The poem, consisting of twelve eclogues, is<br />
addressed to Philip Sidney in the most charming of all Spenser’s dedications:<br />
Go, little book: thyself present,<br />
As child whose parent is unkent,<br />
To him that is the president<br />
Of noblesse and of chivalry.<br />
The Shepheardes Calender marks the turning point in the Elizabethan poetry. It<br />
also forms the first landmark in Spenser’s career as a poet. He was only twentyseven<br />
years old. The breadth and immediacy of the poem’s intellectual basis and<br />
the variety of effects and rhythms obtained are what most call attention to the<br />
work.<br />
THE IRELAND EXPERIENCE:<br />
Only six months had passed after the publication of the Shepheardes<br />
Calender when Spenser was appointed as secretary to the new governor of<br />
Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Although the post in itself was highly honourable,<br />
the life of an administrator in Ireland was rather arduous. It checked for ten<br />
years the output of Spenser’s poetry. He had started the composition of the<br />
Faerie Queene before he left England in August 1580, and it was not till late in<br />
1589 that he was able to return and find a printer for the first three books, which<br />
appeared in 1590. This was the earliest publication to bear Spenser’s name. He<br />
boldly dedicated the books, as later the entire poem, to Queen Elizabeth, who<br />
rewarded him by the grant of a pension of fifty pounds a year. In 1591, Spenser<br />
was able to issue two volumes of his minor poems. One of these volumes,
Daphnaida, is a long ceremonious elegy on the recent death of a lady of rank.<br />
The poem is notable for its beautiful metrical structure and delicate balancing of<br />
parts. It remains reminiscent of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and has been<br />
considered Spenser’s most consummate tribute to medieval art and to his great<br />
predecessor. The second volume entitled Complaints, containing Sundry Small<br />
Poems of the World’s Vanity, consists of poems of mixed character, consisting<br />
of four parts, each carrying a signed dedication by Spenser to a lady of the<br />
court, namely, the Countess of Pambroke, and the three titled sisters of the<br />
Althorpe Spencer family with whom the poet claimed relationship. The four<br />
parts of the volume carry separate titles as The Vision of Belley, Visions of<br />
Petrarch, Visions of The World’s Vanity, and Ruins of Rome. All the poems in<br />
the volume are in sonnet form, showing the growth of Spenser’s style from its<br />
early beginnings to full maturity.<br />
The greatest poem, and the longest, in Complaints is Mother Hubbard’s<br />
Tale. The significance of this poem is that it is Spenser’s only ambitious effort<br />
in heroic couplets. There is no doubt about the poet’s satiric intention. The tale<br />
actually consists of four tales of the malefactions of a fox and an ape, who in the<br />
first three live disguised in the world of men, but in the last inhabit a beast<br />
world. The satire moves on four levels, in which the poet successively attacks<br />
agricultural, clerical, social, and finally imperial mores. The poem, especially<br />
the picture of “the brave courtier” (Philip Sidney) in the third part, portrays<br />
conditions of the Elizabethan court, in the strongest couplet verse written by any<br />
poet before Dryden:<br />
So pitiful a thing is suitor’s state…<br />
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,<br />
What hell it is in suing long to bide:<br />
To lose good days that might be better spent,<br />
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;<br />
To speed today, to be put back to-morrow;<br />
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;<br />
To have thy prince’s grace, yet want her peers’;<br />
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;<br />
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,<br />
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs:<br />
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,<br />
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.<br />
In the last tale, the fox becomes an apparent symbol of Burghley’s<br />
imperiousness, avarice, and nepotism. It is not surprising that for this and other<br />
impudences, the Complaints volume was “called in” or suppressed, and that<br />
Spenser did not adventure further along this congenial but most dangerous path.<br />
Spenser’s next poem, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, is, therefore, in a<br />
different tone altogether. It is also considered, in its attractiveness, only next to<br />
the Epithalamion. Although not printed until 1595, the poem is prefaced by a
letter to Raleigh, dated from Spenser’s Irish home, Kilcolman Castle, December<br />
27, 1589 – 90, which made possible the publication of the first three books of<br />
the Faerie Queene. In Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, Spenser lays off his<br />
singing robes and reverts to the humble character of Colin Clout. He is shown<br />
safe in Ireland again among his shepherd mates, to whom he describes the great<br />
things and persons he has seen. The poem is written in pentameter quatrain of<br />
rustic type and language in keeping with the poem’s character. Primarily, his<br />
purpose is to pay complements to Raleigh, the “Shepherd of the Ocean,” whose<br />
meeting with Spenser in Munster, companionship on the voyage, and patronage<br />
at court are delightfully narrated. The pastoral note is admirably sustained. The<br />
poem is equally important as poetic autobiography, though far less sublime than<br />
Milton’s Lycidas. The poem gives the impression that Spenser was now happily<br />
reconciled to his life in Ireland, and had sincerely abjured the enticements of<br />
courtly ambition. The poem ends in philosophic mood, with a Platonic praise of<br />
true love and a reassertion of Colin’s loyalty to the loved and lost Rosalind.<br />
ASTROPHEL AND AMORETTI:<br />
Spenser’s Astrophel, his elegy on the death of Philip Sydney, was printed<br />
in the same volume as Colin Clout’s Come Home Again. The poem is the first<br />
of a group of poems by various poets on Sidney’s death. Although published a<br />
little later, it was in all probability composed earlier than Shakespeare’s Venus<br />
and Adonis. Spenser’s elegy is written in the same stanza as Shakespeare’s. It<br />
figuratively represents Sidney’s wound as caused, like Adonis’s, by a tusked<br />
beast. An year later Spenser found himself enamoured of an <strong>English</strong> girl, named<br />
Elizabeth Boyle, who had come to Ireland with her brother and settled near<br />
Kilcolman. The account of the wooing and marriage in Spenser’s Amoretti<br />
sequence of sonnets and Epithalamion, published together in 1595, is expressed<br />
in the same autobiographical frankness as in Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe.<br />
But in these later volumes we come across much greater depth of feeling. The<br />
courtship was, of course, not easy. The girl was proud and much his junior, with<br />
her family having greater ambitions for her. The fourth sonnet of the Amoretti<br />
sequence is dated, by internal evidence, January 1, 1593. In the nineteenth, “the<br />
merry cuckoo, messenger of spring” has commenced to sing. In the twentysecond<br />
Lent has begun. The sixtieth sonnet notes that the poet has been in love<br />
for one year. The sixty-second sonnet speaks of New Year, 1594. The sixtyeighth<br />
speaks of Easter. The seventieth sonnet speaks of May Day. Their<br />
marriage took place on St. Barnaby’s Day, June 11, which by the Old Style<br />
calendar was the longest day of the year.<br />
In the Amoretti sonnets, except the eighth, which is of usual<br />
“Shakespearean” kind, Spenser employs his special form of linked quatrains, a<br />
b a b bc bc cd cd ee, which he had already used in the Vision of the World’s<br />
Vanity and the Dedication to Virgil’s Gnat. In terms of the content of these<br />
sonnets, they divide into three unequal parts. While sonnets 1-62 deal with
unrequited love, sonnets 63-84 deal with the lovers’ happiness, sonnets 85-88<br />
deal with the four little lyrics on Cupid. It is naturally the second group which<br />
matters most. One of the notable features of these sonnets is Spenser’s dabbling<br />
with the metaphysical conceit, commonly defined as a phase of the reaction<br />
against him. Although a less outstanding instance is sonnet no. 67, it merits<br />
mention because not many poets have written so like a gentleman:<br />
Like as a huntsman after weary chase,<br />
Seeing the game from him escape away,<br />
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,<br />
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey.<br />
So, after long pursuit and vain assay,<br />
When I all weary had the chase forsook,<br />
The gentle deer return’d the selfsame way,<br />
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.<br />
There she, beholding me with milder look,<br />
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide,<br />
Till I in hand her yet half-trembling took,<br />
And with her own good will her firmly tied,<br />
Strange thing, me seem’d, to see a beast so wild<br />
So goodly won, with her own will beguil’d.<br />
EPITHALAMION ANA PROTHALAMION:<br />
Spenser’s marriage, when finally arranged, was performed rather in a<br />
hurry. The Epithalamion is his gift to his bride and to himself. As he puts it, “I<br />
unto myself alone will sing.” But the song has actually been his most universal<br />
passport to posterity. The Faerie Queene may not always, or in all respects, be<br />
admired, but the superiority of Epithalamion to everything else in its class has<br />
seldom been disputed. For one thing, it differs from the other marriage hymns in<br />
its larger range of melody. It is said that Spenser has used in this poem the total<br />
resources of his musical power. For another, it differs in its broader humanity;<br />
for in its twenty-three strophes some twenty hours of an Irish day are registered<br />
with a vividness that never seems to fade. And the poem differs most of all in<br />
striking the nearly unattainable line between too hot and too cold.<br />
Spenser’s Prothalamion is one of the casual results of his visit to London<br />
in 1596 to see Books IV–VI of the Faerie Queene through the press.<br />
Epithalamion had been printed the year before. On this visit to London, Spenser<br />
was made to concede to a request by the Earl of Worcester, who had to provide<br />
a state wedding for his two daughters, the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine<br />
Somerset. Taking advantage of Spenser’s presence in London at the time, the<br />
Earl commissioned him to write a marriage poem similar to the one he had done<br />
for the occasion of his own marriage. Although less than half the length of the<br />
other poem, Prothalamion is not much inferior in quality. In fact, the Earl got an<br />
extraordinary value for his money. The poem, some critics believe, is even more
proportioned than the other one. However, the emotion of the earlier work could<br />
not be reproduced, nor did perhaps the poet make any attempt to do so. The<br />
brides and the bridegrooms remain lay-figures, but the poet’s emotion on being<br />
in London once again, walking beside the Thames, comes out in fascinating<br />
verses. The spousal interest is delicately dismissed in the opening lines, in<br />
which Spenser expresses his old grievance against courts:<br />
Calm was the day…<br />
When I, whom sullen care,<br />
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay<br />
In prince’s court, and expectation vain<br />
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away<br />
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,<br />
Walk’d forth to ease my pain<br />
Along the shores of silver-streaming Thames.<br />
At the end of the poem, Spenser brings over his associations with “merry<br />
London, my most kindly nurse,” expressing in lines that everyone remembers<br />
best. The marriage occasion actually gets pushed into the background as a<br />
decorative backcloth.<br />
THE FOUR HYMNS<br />
Preferred by an interesting letters to the Countesses of Cumberland and<br />
Warwick, date September 1, 1596, Spenser’s The Four Hymns were published<br />
the same year. They are perhaps the latest publications of his life-time. It is<br />
perhaps the only time that Spenser so directly attempts a formal statement on<br />
the idealistic philosophy of Pagan-Christian blend and neo-Platonic brand. The<br />
philosophy, no doubt, is suffused over the whole of The Faerie Queene. Of<br />
course, The Four Hymns are more poetic than systematic. As the poet’s letter<br />
explains, the first two poems, on the pagan theory of love and beauty, had been<br />
composed “in the greener times of my youth” when one of the sister countesses<br />
had urged Spenser to suppress them, he had been unable to do so by reason of<br />
the number of manuscript copies in circulation. Therefore, he resolved “at least<br />
to amend and by way of retraction to reform them, making instead of those two<br />
hymns of earthly or natural love and beauty two others of heavenly and<br />
celestial.” These Hymns are written in delicate and accomplished rime royal,<br />
making it lend itself to abstruse exposition. The first two start from the notion<br />
that love is born of beauty as Cupid was of Venus. They develop the conception<br />
of love as the prime creative force (as is done in Plato’s Symposium). They<br />
further demonstrate how man’s moral progress takes place through the love of<br />
beauty at its successive levels. In the Hymn of Heavenly Love, Christ replaces<br />
Cupid as creative love. The poem becomes a rationalization of the Fall and<br />
Redemption, a sort of Paradise Lost in miniature.<br />
Spenser retracted nothing in the later Hymns, which essentially remain as<br />
Greek as the earlier ones. They are also not much hampered by the new medium
into which the doctrine has been translated. “For all that is good is beautiful and<br />
fair” is the core of Spenser’s thought. The grand summary at the end of<br />
Heavenly Beauty is as frank neo-Platonism, or pure Platonism, as anything in<br />
the earlier two. The conception of love and beauty as a gradual infusion is one<br />
of the points that make Spenser stand apart from that other Hellenist, Marlowe,<br />
who stressed intuitive genius. In the second Hymn he categorically denies the<br />
Dead Shepherd’s yet unpublished cliché’:<br />
For all that like the beauty which they see<br />
Straight do not love; for love is not so light<br />
As straight to burn at first beholder’s sight.<br />
One of the controversial pieces of Spenser’s appeared in prose, namely, A<br />
view of the present State of Ireland. Although written in 1596, when Spenser<br />
was in England, it got into print much later in 1633. This treatise runs into<br />
60,000 words, and is a well-planned dialogue on Irish laws, customs, and<br />
military government. Spenser’s own opinions are expressed through a character<br />
named Irenius, who has recently arrived from Ireland. Another character,<br />
Eudoxus, interprets the opinion of Irenius. The prose style is beautiful, simple in<br />
diction and syntax, but with a periodic roll that marks it for the poet’s prose, as<br />
in Irenius’s condemnation of the social influence of the Irish bards. Large part<br />
of the essay shows sympathetic understanding of the antiquities, art, and<br />
customs of the island. But the poet’s view in the treatise has been described as<br />
“brutal” by most critics. An example of the View’s brutality is cited in the poet’s<br />
blatant defence of the British policy of imposing reforms “by the sword.”<br />
Unlike a “poet”, Spenser suggests group removal of disloyal population to<br />
another part of the country and systematic starvation to check outlaws. He<br />
advocates mercy for the mean and submissive, but none for the great rebels like<br />
Tyrone. No wonder that barely four months after Spenser’s book was<br />
ineffectively registered in London, Tyrone struck again. All Munster rose in<br />
unexpected tumult. Spenser’s Kilcolman residence was destroyed, with also<br />
probably an important portion of The Faerie Queene. Spenser, now Sheriff of<br />
Cork, was sent to London in December 1598 with official dispatches about the<br />
revolt. Spenser died at Westminster, January 13, 1599, owing to the tensions he<br />
had been under. He was about 47 years of age, and at the peak of his career both<br />
as poet and civil servant.<br />
THE FAERIE QUEENE<br />
Mature critical opinion insists that Spenser’s own life provides the key to<br />
much that is there in The Faerie Queene, which was his crowning achievement.<br />
Written for the most part during his long stay in Ireland, in the wild and solitary<br />
part of the island, the poem is reminiscent of the world from which the poet, so<br />
to say, remained exiled for the better part of his life. It expresses his yearning<br />
for a fuller life, for an abundance of all the good things that his spirit and senses<br />
felt deprived of in the “hostile” country. The poem is also fully charged with his
experience of those years in Ireland. The beauties of the countryside, the<br />
desolation of forest and hillside, the difficulties and dangers he was made to<br />
face living amidst rebellious people, the heroes and villains he actually<br />
encountered, the friends he made, and the women he loved, all find their places<br />
in the intricate structure of The Faerie Queene. The poem’s idealism,<br />
heightened by the poet’s desire to escape from sordid reality, is thus combined<br />
with a realism that bespeaks his sure sense of the imaginative value of all<br />
experience that is intensely lived.<br />
Thus, in a sense, all the earlier poetry of Spenser has been a preparation<br />
and exercise for his unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene. It has been viewed as a<br />
great inclusive attempt by the poet to bring together in one rich pattern all the<br />
various strands of civilization with which he was acquainted. Spenser drew<br />
upon the medieval allegorical tradition in both its secular and religious form, on<br />
medieval romance, classical epic, Aristotelian ethics, Plato and Italian neo-<br />
Platonism, Renaissance Humanism, geography and folklore, Elizabethan<br />
patriotism and political thought, and almost every current of European thought<br />
and expression and convention which were the rich heritage of the Elizabethan<br />
age. He constructed his comprehensive poetic vision of la condition humaine as<br />
it was, in a context of ideal suggestion, what it should be. Spenser’s immediate<br />
model for The Faerie Queene was Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. As Spenser told<br />
his friend Gabriel Harvey, he hoped to “overgo” the Italian epic. It provided<br />
Spenser the mould into which he could put his serious and complex vision. He<br />
might have used the older traditions and moulds, the vision that informs his<br />
poem was decidedly his.<br />
Spenser prefixed to the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene a letter<br />
addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh “expounding his whole intention in the course<br />
of his work”. He declared in this letter that “the general end … of all the book is<br />
to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”. He<br />
further pointed out that he had learned from Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso,<br />
“by example of which excellent Poets I labour to portray in Arthur, before he<br />
was king, the image of a brave Knight, perhaps in the twelve private moral<br />
virtues, as Aristotle hath devised, which is the purpose of these first twelve<br />
books, which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to<br />
frame the other part of politic virtues in his person, after that he came to be<br />
king”. The letter goes on as under:<br />
In that Faerie Queen I mean glory in my general intention, but in my<br />
particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our<br />
soveraine the Queen, and her kingdom in Faery land. And yet in some<br />
places else I do otherwise shadow her, for considering she beareth two<br />
persons, the one of a most royal Queen or Empress, the other of a most<br />
virtuous and beautiful Lady, this latter part in some places I do express in<br />
Belphoebe, … So in the person of Prince Arthur I set forth magnificence<br />
[the Aristotelian megalopsychia, magnanimitas, greatness of soul] in
particular, which virtue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is<br />
the perfection of all the rest, and containeth in it them all, therefore in the<br />
whole course I mention the deeds of Arthur applicable to that virtue<br />
which I write of in that book. But of the XII other virtues I make XII<br />
other Knights the patrons, for the more variety of the history. Of which<br />
these books [i.e. the first three books, published in 1590] contain three,<br />
the first of the Knight of the Redcross, in whom I express Holiness; the<br />
second of Sir Guyon, in whom I set forth Temperance; the third of<br />
Britomartis, a lady Knight, in whom I picture Chastity.<br />
Spenser further goes on to explain that he starts in medias res in proper epic<br />
fashion. But since only the three books are here presented, he had better explain<br />
what has happened before the events narrated there. “The beginning of my<br />
history,” he says, “if it were to be told by an Historiographer, should be the<br />
twelfth book, which is the last, where I devise that the Faery Queen kept her<br />
annual feast xii days, upon which xii several days the occasions of the xii<br />
several adventures happened, which being undertaken by xii several knights are<br />
in these xii books severally handled and discussed.” Spenser does not stop here.<br />
He goes on to give a brief account of how the adventure of the Redcross Knight,<br />
of Sir Guyon, and of Britomart first started. And “many other adventures are<br />
intermeddled, but rather as accidents than intendments.”<br />
Like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene also<br />
remained incomplete. Chaucer had planned 120 tales, but could complete only<br />
twenty. Similarly, Spenser planned a total of 24 books, but completed only 6.<br />
While the first three books were published in 1590, the next three books were<br />
published in 1596. In 1609, almost ten years after Spenser’s death, a folio<br />
edition of the poem was published containing the first six books and a fragment<br />
of book VII entitled “Two Cantos of Mutability.” Thus, Spenser’s epic poem is<br />
far from complete, being only a fragment of the whole. Decidedly, in a work of<br />
such a complex design incompleteness is bound to present difficulties of<br />
comprehension and interpretation. Nevertheless, the work as it exists today is<br />
noble and impressive. It is long enough to enable us to assess its merit and<br />
excellence. It still remains one of the greatest poems in the <strong>English</strong> language;<br />
but its greatness is of a rather special kind.<br />
BOOK I<br />
The Book I of The Faerie Queene relates to the story of the Redcross<br />
Knight, who represents Holiness. He sets forth as the champion of Una, who<br />
represents truth, to slay the old Dragon that is devastating her father’s country.<br />
The very opening stanza of the poem (as well as of Book I) strikes the note of<br />
observed adventure:<br />
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plain,<br />
Y-clad in mighty arms and silver shield,<br />
Wherein old dints of deep wounds did remain,
The cruel marks of many a bloody field;<br />
Yet arms till that time never did he wield.<br />
As much disdaining to the curb to yield.<br />
Full jolly knight he seemed, and fair did sit,<br />
As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fit.<br />
The Redcross knight becomes involved in a series of adventures which suggest<br />
(at a variety of levels) how man’s pursuit of holiness can be hindered by error,<br />
hypocrisy, false devotion, etc. At the same time, the Redcross knight is also<br />
Everyman, facing the ordinary temptations of this world. As such, he needs the<br />
help of Grace, represented by Prince Arthur. He also needs the help of Truth in<br />
order to attain the good life and achieve holiness. Thus, the Redcross knight<br />
both represents a quality (holiness) and represents man in search of that quality.<br />
Spenser also introduces in his narrative another level of meaning. He is also<br />
talking about the religious conditions in England, putting the Protestant against<br />
the Catholic view of the good life, thereby inducing many contemporary<br />
references.<br />
In the multilayered complex of meanings that Spenser has woven into the<br />
narrative of The Faerie Queene, the adventures as well as the various levels<br />
they represent carry in them both the story and significance, adventure and<br />
allegory. The reader is carried through a structure subjected to reflections and<br />
refractions of various colours. While the major characters and adventures arouse<br />
both the story interest as well as the significance interest, the incidental minor<br />
characters may or may not have human qualities, which enrich the narrative<br />
psychologically and ethically. The allegorical significance of characters and<br />
incidents varies at different times and at different places. In the company of<br />
Una. the knight fights a successful battle against the monster Error. The<br />
Redcross Knight slays the monster Error, who is described as “most loathsome,<br />
filthy, foul and full of vile disdain.” The monster is prolific of her poisonous<br />
young, and, in the midst of the fight, vomits forth books and papers together<br />
with lumps of local flesh and “loathly frogs and toads.” Spenser’s description<br />
here is vigorous, skillful, and thoroughly “Spenserian” in the popular sense. The<br />
allegory, too, is highly simple, to the point of childishness. The description goes<br />
on showing how the knight is harassed by the monster’s “cursed spawn”:<br />
The same so sore annoyed has the Knight,<br />
That wellnigh choked with the deadly stink<br />
His forces fail, he can no longer fight.<br />
Whose courage when the fiend perceived to shrink<br />
She poured forth out of her hellish sink<br />
Her fruitful cursed spawn of serpents small,<br />
Deformed monsters, foul and black as ink,<br />
Which swarming all about his legs and crawl,<br />
And him encumbered sore, but could not hurt at all.
This, for sure, is quite vigorous and effective. Both layers of meaning, literal as<br />
well as allegorical, are quite clear. But when we move to the next stanza, the<br />
tone changes altogether:<br />
As gentle Shepherd in sweet eventide<br />
When ruddy Phoebus gins to welk in west,<br />
High on an hill, his flock to viewen wide,<br />
Marks which do bite their hasty supper best,<br />
A cloud of cumbrous gnats do him molest,<br />
All striving to infix their feeble stings,<br />
That from their noyance he nowhere can rest,<br />
But with his clownish hands their tender wings<br />
He brusbeth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings.<br />
The background of postoral life introduced here reminds one of Milton’s similar<br />
comparisons in Paradise Lost. The sudden though brief metamorphosis of the<br />
Redcross knight here from a hero battling with a cursed spawn of serpents into a<br />
shepherd brushing off the innocent but annoying bring in a more human world.<br />
It establishes, as it were, a middle term between the world of heroic action on<br />
the one hand and the world of ethical ideals on the other. The transformation<br />
does not in any way spoil the force of the original incidents, because the change<br />
is introduced only as a simile. At the same time, it humanizes the heroic world,<br />
reminding us of the everyday world in which our ethical problems are to be<br />
faced and resolved.<br />
Spenser moves in Book I, as he does in the others, through a much wider<br />
range of tones. There is, for instance, the note of pure and simple romantic<br />
adventure:<br />
At length they chanced to meet upon their way<br />
An aged Sire, in long black weeds clad.<br />
Next, there is the pastoral:<br />
A little lowly Hermitage it was,<br />
Down in a dale, hard by a forest’s side.<br />
And then, there is the popular satirical:<br />
He told of Saints and Popes, and evermore<br />
He strewed an Ave Mary after and before.<br />
Thus, he keeps shifting the tone further from the mythological, to the homely<br />
proverbial, to the moralizing and religions, and then to the lofty heroic. The<br />
astounding variety of verse, the richness of imagery and music, the wealth of<br />
adventure and significance, all combine to make the slow but steady colourful<br />
but complex movement of the narrative.<br />
After slaying the monster Error, the Redcross knight has to soon<br />
encounter next the arch deceiver Archimago. This misleader of the knight is<br />
actually impersonating Guile and Fraud. He succeeds in deceiving the hero,<br />
making him distrust the integrity of his lady (Una) and take in her place Duessa.<br />
Since the hero is now enamoured of false Religion, he succeeds in defeating the
pagan knights named Sans Foy and Sans Joy. But since he is committed now to<br />
false Religion, he falls an easy prey to Orgoglio, the Giant of Pride. Now, Una<br />
brings to his aid the divine strength of Arthur. However, even though rescued<br />
from the sin of Pride, he is weakened by suffering and remorse, narrowly<br />
escaping the toils of Despayre. It is only after dwelling in the House of Holiness<br />
thereby learning the full meaning of the Christian faith that the Redcross knight<br />
gains strength to overcome the Dragon. Thus, he finally becomes worthy of<br />
winning the hand of Una, who represents Truth. Thus goes the surface or literal<br />
story of Book I. But each character and incident here, as well as elsewhere, is<br />
loaded with multiple meanings through allegorical suggestions. We need to<br />
know these allegorical meanings and significances of incidents and characters in<br />
Book I to fully appreciate the poem’s richness and complexity.<br />
THEME OF BOOK I<br />
C.S. Lewis, in his Allegory of Love, insists that “the subject of the first<br />
book is sanctification – the restoring of the soul to her lost paradisal nature by<br />
holiness. This is presented in two interlocked allegories. Una’s parents, who<br />
represent homo, or even, if you like, Adam and Eve, after long exclusion from<br />
their native land (which of course is Eden) by the Devil, are restored to it by<br />
Holiness whom Truth brings to their aid.” That, says Lewis, is the first allegory.<br />
In the second, we are told, “we trace the genesis of Holiness; that is, the human<br />
soul, guided by truth, contends with various powers of darkness and finally<br />
attains sanctification and beats down Satan under her feet.” Spenser chooses<br />
Truth as the heroine of both actions. The reason for this, in all probability, is<br />
owing to the age of Spenser being a time of religious doubt and controversy. At<br />
such a time, avoidance of error is as pressing a problem as, and in a sense prior<br />
to, the conquest of sin. It is for this very reason that the forces of illusion and<br />
deception, such as Archimago and Duessa, play such a part in the story of the<br />
Redcross knight. And it is for this very reason that St. George and Una get<br />
separated so easily. Moral instability and intellectual error, however, are<br />
inextricably mixed with each other. The knight’s desertion of his lady<br />
symbolizes the soul’s desertion of truth, and has an element of willful rebellion<br />
as well as of illusion.<br />
Will was his guide and griefe led him astray.<br />
The various temptations which the knight has to encounter can, for the<br />
most part, be easily recognized. The only difficulty he faces is to make<br />
distinction between Pride and Orgoglio. In the historical or political allegory,<br />
undoubtedly, Orgoglio is the dungeons of the Inquisition. But what is not<br />
obvious is his moral signification. However, if we do not forget that he is a<br />
blood relation to Disdain, and view, with imagination than intellect, the<br />
character of both giants, it is not difficult to get the inkling. Although Pride and<br />
Orgoglio are both pride, the one is pride within us, the other pride attacks us<br />
from outside. The outside attack of pride can be in the form of persecution,
oppression, or ridicule. In other words, while the one (the internal) seduces us,<br />
the other (the external) browbeats us. There has been noticed some<br />
inconsistency in the utter hopelessness with which St. George, who is unarmed<br />
and newly roused from the fountain of sloth, staggers forward to meet Orgoglio;<br />
for it cannot be easily reconciled with this view. It is quite possible that the<br />
giant is a survival from some earlier version of the poem.<br />
This can be called the allegorical core of the first book. Una’s adventure<br />
carry much less load of allegory. Only in a very general sense, the lion, the<br />
satyrs, and Satyrane represent the world of unspoiled nature, which cannot hold<br />
Una: she blesses it and passes on her way. But to go beyond this and read more<br />
in it would be a mistake. We need not expect that Truth separated from soul<br />
could, or should, be allegorized as fully as the soul separated from Truth.<br />
Certain characters in the poem are only types; they are not personifications.<br />
Satyrane is very first of these characters. He is truly a child of nature. Although<br />
he is a knight, we are told that “in vaine glorious frays he little did delight.”<br />
Decidedly, it is a deliberate rejection of that essential element of chivalry, which<br />
had survived, as the duello, into the courtly code of Spenser’s time. Spenser,<br />
very clearly, emphasizes this anti-courtly character in Satyrane. When this<br />
character is introduced again some twenty-four contos later, we are reminded<br />
that he<br />
In vain sheows, that wont young knights bewitch<br />
And courtly services, tooke no delight.<br />
One of the problems posed by the incompleteness of the poem is that we<br />
cannot say with certainty that Prince Arthur is the hero of the whole poem. We<br />
can only talk of the respective heroes of the six books that are complete. There<br />
we are very certain about the status of different characters. But the same<br />
certainty cannot be available about the hero of the entire poem. We do know<br />
from the preface that he personifies Magnificence and is seeking Gloriana, or<br />
Glory. But if it is considered how little one should know of Britomart from the<br />
mere statement that she is Chastity, it will be seen that this tells us little about<br />
Arthur. As C. S. Lewis observes, “And if we consider how little we should<br />
know of Spenser’s “chastity” if we had never been to the Garden of Adonis, and<br />
how little of his “justice” if we had never been to the temple of Isis, or of his<br />
“courtesy” if we had never seen its connexion with the Graces on Mount<br />
Acidale, then we must conclude that we do not know what “Glory” would have<br />
come to mean in the completed poem. I have very little doubt… that Glory<br />
would have been spiritualized and Platonized into something very like the Form<br />
of the Good, or even the glory of God.” It seems reasonable to argue that<br />
Spenser’s whole method is such that we come to have a rather dim perception of<br />
his characters until we are met by them or their archetypes at the great<br />
allegorical centre of each book. For example, Amoret would reveal nothing of<br />
her real nature unless the Garden of Adonis and the Temple of Venus are
known. Suppose they are lost, then the character would not carry the presently<br />
accepted connotations.<br />
THE HERO OF BOOK I:<br />
Very much like Virgil’s Aeneid, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, echoing<br />
the former, begins on a note where we see the pastoral poet turning to become<br />
the epic poet:<br />
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,<br />
As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,<br />
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,<br />
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,<br />
And sing of knights and Ladies gentle deeds;<br />
Whose prayers having slept in silence long,<br />
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds<br />
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:<br />
Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.<br />
Thus, the poet of the Shepheardes Calender, like Virgil before him, sees himself<br />
as reaching poetic maturity only when he faces the realities of his own world<br />
and ceases to linger in an imagined paradise of rural simplicity. In fact, it is not<br />
merely the poet who is shown leaving the pastoral mode, it is the hero as well.<br />
There is a clear juxtaposition of the pastoral marks of the early Spenser and the<br />
native rusticity of the youthful St. George. The anonymous “new poete” of the<br />
Shepheardes Calender, “Immerito” becomes the narrator of a poem whose hero<br />
had himself first appeared at Gloriana’s court in the guise of “a tall clownishe<br />
younge man” and had “rested him on the floore, unfitted through his rusticity<br />
for a better place.” We are told all this in Spenser’s letter to Sir Walter Raleigh<br />
prefixed to The Faerie Queene. As we see in Book I of the poem, it is only after<br />
Una has seen him dressed in the armour of a Christian Knight, which she has<br />
brought with her to Fairyland, that he seems “the goodliest man in all that<br />
company” and wins her approval as the champion of her cause.<br />
The hero of Book I is known only in terms of his armour until the tenth<br />
canto, when at the House of Holiness he learns that he is <strong>English</strong> and bears his<br />
name of George attributed to his childhood upbringing “in ploughmans state”.<br />
Spenser’s treatment of Redcross is rather periphrastic. It is an extreme instance<br />
of the poet’s habit of repeatedly giving his characters names symbolic of their<br />
roles but announcing those names only after showing them in action, so that the<br />
names themselves become capsule summaries or mottoes. Spenser’s rather<br />
extended emphasis on the anonymity of Redcross is directly related to the plot<br />
of Book I. As an unproved knight, Redcross is therefore only potentially St.<br />
George. Book I traces the steps by which the hero gains his identity. The<br />
poem’s opening incidents present the ambiguous position of the Redcross. His<br />
armour, at first, is a mere protection, or even a disguise. But there is a promise
that it may become an image of his inner nature. The natural settings of the<br />
poem, too, stress the same ambiguity.<br />
The first challenge to the hero, Redcross, comes as a consequence of a<br />
sudden shower which drives the knight and lady into the Wood of Error. In<br />
fleeing the shower, they have abandoned one kind of nature for another.<br />
Redcross and Una do not hesitate to take shelter. They find themselves in a<br />
wood with which they seem very familiar. They deliberately shroud themselves<br />
from the light, and praise the trees in a catalogue which reflects man’s confident<br />
moral dissection of his universe. We are shown here that humans seem to share<br />
with the animals and birds a false sense of security which ignores the changing<br />
moods of nature, of which seasons are a reflection. It is only when they come<br />
upon the hollow cave of Error that they realize their position of being lost. Una<br />
belatedly recognizes this position. Until then, they seem content to identify the<br />
trees and append the appropriate moral or emblematic tags to each:<br />
The sayling Pine, the cedar proud and tall,<br />
The vine-prop Elme.<br />
When Una urges caution at the mouth of Error’s den, an accumulation of<br />
proverbs is nicely suggestive of perplexity:<br />
Be well aware, quoth then that Ladie milde,<br />
Least suddaine mischiefe ye too rash prouoke:<br />
The danger hid, the place unknowne and wilde,<br />
Breeds dreadfull doubts: Oft fire is without smoke<br />
And perill without show: therefore your stroke<br />
Sir knight with-hold, till further trial made.<br />
Ah Ladie (said he) shame were to revoke<br />
The forward footing for an hidden shade:<br />
Vertue gives her selfe light, through darkenesse for to wade.<br />
The rapid exchange of comments reaches its climax when the Dwarfe is moved<br />
to interject his own comment:<br />
… Fly fly (quoth then<br />
The fearful Dwarfe:) this is no place for living men<br />
The Error is to be overcome. But that can be done only when faith reinforces the<br />
knight’s human powers. As Una urges,<br />
Add faith unto your force and be not faint<br />
Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee.<br />
The hero’s next encounter on the journey to Holiness is with Archimago.<br />
Redcross and Una are “drowned in deadly sleepe” when Archimago begins his<br />
enchantment. They go to their sleep suspecting nothing, lulled as they are by<br />
easy platitudes and the appearance of a cloistered virtue. The temptations<br />
offered by Archimago bring into clear focus the present spiritual health of the<br />
hero, Redcross. In the hero’s active conscience and his dependence on reason<br />
and the evidence of his senses there is implicit the combination of his strength<br />
and weakness. It is very much appropriate that Archimago’s assault should be
directed toward sexuality. The very sobriety and solemnity of the hero’s pursuit<br />
of his quest becomes at once his strength as well as weakness. Here is a<br />
challenge to his naïve idealism in an area where his faith in a reality contrary to<br />
appearance is most difficult. He has overcome Error by following Una’s advice,<br />
thereby adding faith to force. But when Archimago presents him, in his third<br />
and final phase of his temptation, with the apparent evidence of Una embracing<br />
a “young squire,” such a faith becomes impossible. Thus, the final stage comes<br />
in his fall when he yields to Duessa and presents to Orgoglio the compromising<br />
spectacle which is prepared for his sight by Archimago. As is common in The<br />
Faerie Queene here lust is presented as primarily a dereliction of chivalric<br />
duties. It amounts to a “loosness,” which is opposed to the “sternness” of the<br />
pursuit.<br />
Although the hero, at this stage, is running away from the imagined lust<br />
of his chaste lady, he himself becomes a victim of lust by falling for Duessa.<br />
Thus, the parallel stories of Una and Redcross complement each other. Put<br />
together, these stories define the “divided personality” produced by the<br />
separation of the two. This shows the movement of Book I towards a<br />
meaningful return symbolized by the climactic killing of the Dragon, by the<br />
formal blazoning of the Knight’s armour, and by the betrothal scene - the<br />
solemnization of the union of Knight and Una. The pattern of Book I seems to<br />
stress the repetition of scenes in which he overcomes a clear and present threat<br />
only to fall prey to a hidden danger. In the first canto he overcomes Error only<br />
to be fooled by Archimago’s deceptive appeal to the evidence of his senses. In<br />
the second, he vanquishes the clearly labeled Sans Foy but at the same time<br />
accepting uncritically Duessa when she calls herself Fidessa. The hero’s<br />
apparent aimlessness in the central cantos is also in keeping with his picture as<br />
naïve Knight.<br />
At this point of the narrative, Una is shown as a helpless maiden<br />
wandering in wilderness, susceptible to both menace and assistance represented<br />
by the savage figures she is made to encounter. Thus, in the third canto, we see<br />
one such cycle completed when the friendly lion is killed by Sans Loy. The end<br />
of the canto falls as she is carried off by this new, inimical figure of bestial lust.<br />
The next two cantos, the fourth and the fifth, in which her adventures are<br />
described, where Redcross visits the House of Pride and encounters Sans Joy.<br />
The gentle maiden’s experiences in an uncivilized setting thus provide a<br />
backdrop for her youthful knight’s equally passive role in a sophisticated world.<br />
Lucifera’s relationship to the norm of chivalry is quite clear: her house is built<br />
on the sands, and her diabolic ancestry is seen in her name and retinue. In the<br />
dubious battle that ensues, it is only befitting that Redcross should win his<br />
limited victory after misinterpreting Duessa’s shout of encouragement, and that<br />
his descent into the underworld to cure Sans Joy should present elements of<br />
considerable relevance to the hero’s own situation.
The motifs gathered, in the infernal setting in the later part of Book I, of<br />
the daytime quests of the poem acquire ironic overtones. However, the descent<br />
to the underworld in general seems to be designed to dramatize the challenge of<br />
mortality to the hero’s quest for identity. The story of Hippolytus’s fall seems to<br />
have a special relevance for the hero whose naïve literalism has limited him to<br />
purely nominal victories over his foes. It has also blinded him to Una’s<br />
pertinence to his quest. It is also a function of this same literal imagination that<br />
Redcross should be deprived of the vision of hell provided to the reader. His<br />
own vision is sufficient to rescue him from the House of Pride. But it also<br />
leaves him vulnerable to a new figure of pride who is more “natural” and<br />
“monstrous”. Reason, presented as Dwarf, is able to protect Redcross from the<br />
“civilized” world of Lucifera. The panorama of victims in his dungeons is<br />
precisely the kind of underworld vision that the Dwarf can unfold to his master.<br />
There, the Old Testament names flow into a list of Romans:<br />
The antique ruins of the Romaines fall.<br />
It suggests through the epithets used for the Romans (stout, stubborn, sterne,<br />
highminded) that the stoic virtues on which the Redcross is currently depending<br />
are no better than synonyms of pride.<br />
In Spenser’s poem, nemesis seems to take the form of a balancing force<br />
that reasserts the validity of the natural cycles of time. Redcross leaves the<br />
House of Pride only to fall in weariness before the enervating fountain, which<br />
ironically commemorates the weary nymph of Dianna, where all his energetic<br />
resistance will be mocked as he falls prey to Orgoglio. As we have seen, the<br />
hero of Spenser’s Book I of The Faerie Queene is very different from the<br />
Greeko-Roman and Italian or French models. No doubt, Spenser used those<br />
models for pattern or design of his epic. He used them for their mythologies and<br />
legends. He also used Platonic, Aristotalian and other ancient philosophic ideas.<br />
But he did not accept in full any of those. He evolved an outlook on life of his<br />
own. And to illustrate that outlook he shaped his hero of the poem, and the<br />
subsidiary heroes of different books representing a virtue each. The ideal that<br />
his hero represents seems a combination of values derived from the Renaissance<br />
humanism, Platonism, and Christian theology. Hence the values he embodies<br />
and represents are both secular as well as theological.<br />
AS AN ALLEGORICAL POEM:<br />
Following the wandering progress of Spenser’s poem, The Faerie<br />
Queene, to the point where the poet left it, one may feel confused at its<br />
construction. As originally conceived, the poem’s plot was rather loose, and in<br />
the course of its development, it became looser still. In the eighteenth century,<br />
Upton had the audacity to claim for Spenser’s poem the unity of a classical epic.<br />
In view of the fact that The Faerie Queene is an incomplete poem, having only<br />
six out of twenty four books, it is not possible to pass any judgement on the<br />
poem’s plot or structure with any measure of finality. In fact, even if the poem
had been completed, one thing is certain that its plot could not have come any<br />
closer to that of the classical epic. If a comparison must be sought for The<br />
Faerie Queene, one would find it in the Italian and French romances of the<br />
medieval period. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales sounds much closer to<br />
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene than Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid.<br />
The “adventures intermeddled, but rather as accidents and intendments,”<br />
throw far more light upon the moral conception than is commonly<br />
acknowledged. But they tend to complicate the narrative. In fact, by their very<br />
interest and importance they obscure the development of an already inchoate<br />
plot. Spenser was aware of this, and towards the end of the sixth book he<br />
offered a defence of his rambling method:<br />
Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde<br />
Directs her course unto one certain cost,<br />
Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,<br />
With which her winged speed is let and crost,<br />
And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;<br />
Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:<br />
Right so it fares with me in this long way,<br />
Whose course is often stayed, yet never is astray.<br />
As Smith and Selincourt have observed, “Such a defence will make no converts.<br />
Those who are imbued with the classical horror of voyaging upon strange seas<br />
will travel uneasily in this Elizabethan privateer, which sails at the mercy of<br />
every wind and tide, and is always ready to tack or to follow any course that<br />
seems to promise a costly prize. They will rudely question the poet’s<br />
seamanship, and accuse him of having lost his way, perhaps of having no way<br />
to lose.”<br />
Apart from the announced, and pronounced, moral allegory, The Faerie<br />
Queene has often a special and even topical significance. This significance is<br />
not coincident throughout with the main plot. It is generally fitful and allusive,<br />
appearing and disappearing as and when the characters and situations suggest a<br />
parallel to the real world. As Spenser himself has stated, “In that Faerie Queene<br />
I mean glory in my general intention, but in particular I conceive the most<br />
excellent and glorious person of our sovereign the Queen, and her kingdom in<br />
Faerie Land.” Here, Dryden’s observation seems pertinent: “The original of<br />
every one of his knights was then living at the court of Queen Elizabeth, and he<br />
attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought most conspicuous in<br />
them.” This should not, of course, imply that Spenser intended to draw portraits<br />
of Elizabeth, or of Leicester, even of Grey or Sidney. But he did see a<br />
possibility. And the beings who filled his visionary world took on, in the<br />
fashion of a dream, a likeness to those familiar to his waking life. It was very<br />
natural for a person like Spenser, who was a part of the political apparatus of his<br />
time, and remained a part until his last, to turn his mind continually to that vast<br />
stage of public life on which the players were the men he knew and loved. So,
as he developed his moral allegory, it kept acquiring at the same time political<br />
overtones. No doubt, quite often, the political allegory was almost a replica of<br />
the moral. This phenomenon is quite clear in the conduct of Book I, just as it is<br />
obvious in the conduct of Book V.<br />
If Una is Truth who must be freed from Falsehood, Deceit and Hypocrisy,<br />
if she must be united to Holiness, Spenser would not fail to associate her with<br />
his own faith, and Duessa with Roman Catholicism. He would also not fail to<br />
identify them with those two great queens, Elizabeth and Mary. Also, in tracing<br />
the development of the Redcross knight in his efforts to achieve holiness,<br />
Spenser would naturally follow, episode by episode, the history of the <strong>English</strong><br />
church in its fight with Rome. But such analogies are not always complete and<br />
consistent. Quite often, they are only suggestive as well as momentary. The two<br />
worlds of romance and politics converge for the moment only to part company.<br />
Different aspects of one and the same character appear under different guises.<br />
One of Spenser’s ideal creations can shadow forth different historical figures.<br />
For example, Elizabeth is found in Gloria, in Belphoebe, in Una, in Britomart,<br />
in Mercilla. Similarly, Arthur is now Sidney, now Leicester. Again, Sir Calidore<br />
is at one time Sidney, at another Essex. Spenser generally idealized these<br />
characters, but he could also hint a fault as well as extol a virtue. For example,<br />
Grey’s involvement in an intrigue with Mary Queen of Scots, which Elizabeth<br />
never forgave him, is glanced at in the subjugation of Archegal to Redegund.<br />
Similarly, in the vivid portrait of Timias the failings of Raleigh are as clearly<br />
shown as his splendid virtues. Such reflections of his own time enhanced the<br />
delight with which Spenser’s readers would follow the adventures of the faery<br />
knights. At the same time, it also saved the poet from the possible dangers of an<br />
allegory that could become too abstract and remote to interest his readers.<br />
Of course, allegory is not to every reader’s taste. Some tend to believe<br />
that Spenser was led to adopt the allegorical mode, partly by the force of<br />
medieval tradition, and partly under the influence of contemporary ideas which<br />
recommended didactic function of poetry. As a matter of fact, Spenser was so<br />
influenced because he was of that idealistic temper which made possible the rise<br />
of allegorical poetry. Another reason probably was that Spenser could most<br />
readily express in that medium the rich and varied interests of a mind which<br />
continually traveled between the worlds of fact and fiction. As an idealist,<br />
Spenser would start form the actual world of his experience, distil from it what<br />
seems to be its essence, and create another world of moral and spiritual<br />
conception which would become as real for him as that from which he has<br />
created it. For sure, ideas depend for their reality upon the vividness with which<br />
they kindle his imagination. Thus, the poet’s imaginative vision, which imparts<br />
to the world of fact higher reality by expressing the soul that informs it, imparts<br />
to the world of ideas a sensuous incarnation which utters its voice in song.<br />
We can convincingly assert that in the allegory of The Faerie Queene<br />
these two worlds meet and fuse. It cannot, of course, be asserted with certainty
that the fusion is complete or perfect. The creatures of each world carry upon<br />
their forms traces of their origin. We may normally distinguish two types of<br />
allegory. In one type, the poet starts from the idea, and then initiates the process<br />
of incarnation. The poet abstracts human qualities into the rarefied atmosphere<br />
of thought, which are then presented to the imagination for conscious artistic<br />
treatment. The result is somewhat formal personification, cast in the traditional<br />
mould of medieval allegory. The manner of execution in this case is that of a<br />
pageant or a Morality. Much of the incidental allegory in The Faerie Queene is<br />
of this type. The other type of allegory is when the poet’s mind is turned upon<br />
the warm realities of life. Human qualities, justice, temprance are still realized<br />
in their essence, but they are seen to be present in living human beings. Hence<br />
the poet does not present an abstract conception by a human symbol. He accepts<br />
under his idealizing vision of human being as the symbol of his conception. For<br />
instance, Britomart is not the abstract conception of chastity. She is a real<br />
woman who expresses through her person the essential quality of chastity, but<br />
not without some human weaknesses. Una may be Truth, but is much more. She<br />
is a woman with sufficient individuality. And such in the main is the structural<br />
allegory of The Faerie Queene. For sure, the characters are seldom presented<br />
with the subtle and complex detail of a realist.<br />
Spenser’s whole artistic method is that of idealization, and of emphasis<br />
on the essential. But for all that he bases it on real life. Also, it cannot always be<br />
decided whether the ideal conception or the character representing that ideal<br />
formed his initial inspiration. Who can say for certain whether in Sir Calidore<br />
he thought first of Courtesy or Sir Philip Sidney. Who can say whether he drew<br />
from Timias or from Raleigh or found himself in his delineation of reckless<br />
honouring, falling back unwittingly upon his knowledge of his daring and<br />
impetuous friend. Allegory of this kind is easily distinguishable from the more<br />
obvious personification, however vivid. It is marked by all the character of<br />
myth. It has complete artistic life apart from all its symbolism.<br />
Thus, in The Faerie Queene real persons are idealized. The poet breathes<br />
life into his abstractions. For instance, Spenser sees his Hope not merely as a<br />
symbolic figure leaning upon anchor, but as a real woman with a face bearing<br />
signs of the anguish hidden in her heart. Similarly, Spenser sees Lord Grey not<br />
simply as sagacious and fair-minded person, but as the faery knight of Justice.<br />
The poet sets by the side of Grey a character named Talus, the iron man, that<br />
most powerful embodiment of Justice in the abstract. Then, we see in Sir<br />
Artegal and his remorseless squire two very different types of allegory, which<br />
are at once in their boldest contrast and yet in perfect harmony. The most<br />
interesting case of a mixture of different allegories is that of Graces, who dance<br />
before Colin upon the mount of Acidale. They are actually four, not three, in<br />
number. We see that in the midst of the three ancient “handmaids of Venus,<br />
daughters of delight,” who symbolized for the Greeks the grace and charm of<br />
womanhood, is “placed paravaunt” the woman that Colin loved, the heroine of
Amoretti and the Epithalamion. And yet there is nothing incongruous between<br />
the ideal and the real; the two meet and their kinship is acknowledged.<br />
In Spenser’s poem, The Faerie Queene, even where the allegory is least<br />
spontaneous and quite dead, the poet is able to breathe life into what seems<br />
doomed to be mechanic and merely formal. One such case is the ingenious<br />
symbolism of the Castle of Alma. In all probability, it is borrowed from the<br />
driest scholasticism. Here, in the description of its lower regions, Spenser’s art<br />
seems to sink to its lowest. We see here the mechanical figures of the “maister<br />
cooke Decoction” officiating with the Kitchen clerke Digestion.” And yet even<br />
within these antiquated walls we meet with vividly real people. Like Sir Guyon,<br />
we find ourselves drawn to that strangely shy maiden, dressed in her thickly<br />
folded robe of blue. As Guyon addresses her, the flashing blood inflames her<br />
lovely face. The scene has a human appeal, which is not diminished when Alma<br />
reveals its ideal significance:<br />
Why wonder yee<br />
Faire Sir at that, which ye so much embrace?<br />
She is the fountaine of your modestee;<br />
You shamefast are, but Shamefastness it selfe is shee.<br />
Thus, the ideal conception of modesty is bodied forth in the lady. The human<br />
quality of modesty is the very essence of Guyon’s personality. The two are<br />
shown meeting for one brief but vivid moment in the spacious halls of Alma,<br />
the Soul. Here, the wide world in which they meet is the ideal world of<br />
Spenser’s imagination. We may sum up our discussion of allegory in The Faerie<br />
Queene with a cogent citation from Smith and Selincourt:<br />
This world of faery land is wide enough to embrace all that was<br />
most precious to Spenser in his own experience. With its<br />
chivalrous combats and its graceful leisure, its tangle of incident<br />
and character, its dense forest and glades, and pleasant sunny<br />
interspaces, where the smoke rises from the homely cottage or the<br />
stream tickles down with a low murmur inviting repose and<br />
meditation, it could mirror both the world of his philosophic<br />
vision and the real world of Irish countryside, of court intrigues,<br />
of European politics, of his own loves and friendships. The<br />
romantic setting of the faery forest and the idealizing form of<br />
allegory are more than a picturesque convention. They are the<br />
fitting artistic expression of that mood in which he looked out on<br />
the strangeness and the beauty of life, and brooded over its inner<br />
meaning.<br />
AS RO<strong>MA</strong>NCE-EPIC:<br />
Before we discuss, and can decide, the status of The Faerie Queene as an<br />
epic, we need to know the definition and descendance of the epic. Epic being the<br />
earliest and loftiest form of poetry also has the longest tradition in world
literature. The epic, or heroic poem, or simply long poem, is generally defined as<br />
a long narrative poem on a serious subject, related in an elevated style, and<br />
centred about an heroic figure on whose actions depends to some degree the fate<br />
of a nation or a race. Epics have been divided into two categories – the folk or<br />
primary epic and the literary or secondary epic. The folk or primary epics were<br />
shaped from the legends that developed in the heroic age. In that age, the nation<br />
was on the move, engaged in military conquest and expansion. In this group<br />
belong the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, both written by the blind poet Homer, as<br />
well as Ramayana and Mahabharta, both Indian, and Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon<br />
epic whose author is not known. The literary or secondary epics were written by<br />
sophisticated craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the folk or primary epic. Of<br />
this kind is Virgil’s Roman poem, the Aeneid, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.<br />
Although influenced by Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spenser’s The<br />
Faerie Queene are only loosely called epics, since they radically depart from the<br />
formal qualities of the original.<br />
The epic as poetry was ranked by Aristotle (in his Poetics) as second only<br />
to tragedy in the hierarchy of genres. The Renaissance critics, however,<br />
considered epic superior to tragedy, and the highest form of all. The controversy<br />
of hierarchy apart, epic is decidedly the most ambitious and most exacting of<br />
poetic forms. It makes immense demands on the poet’s knowledge, invention,<br />
and skill to sustain the scope, grandeur, and variety of a form which aspires to<br />
encompass the known world and its learning. Despite countless attempts over<br />
three thousand years, we possess only half a dozen or so epics of undisputed<br />
status. Literary epics commonly have the following features, derived from the<br />
folk epics of Homer in the west, and the Indian epics in the East. In the first<br />
place, the hero of an epic is of great national or international importance.<br />
Achilles in Iliad, Odysseus in Odyssey, Aeneis in Aeneid, Adam in Paradise<br />
Lost, Rama in Ramayana, and Arjuna in Mahabharta, are all great warriors or<br />
great men, who represent the ideals and aspirations of their respective societies<br />
that produced them. The second quality of an epic is the large canvas of its<br />
setting. The setting in an epic is always ample in scale, sometimes world-wide,<br />
or even larger. For example, Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin<br />
(the whole of the world known to its author). In fact, in Book VI he descends<br />
even into the underworld. The scope of Milton’s epic is all the more enormous;<br />
it is cosmic, including heaven, hell, and earth. The third quality of an epic is the<br />
grand action, involving heroic deeds in battle, such as the Trojan war, or a long<br />
and arduous journey bravely accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus.<br />
Paradise Lost includes the war in Heaven, the journey of Satan to discover the<br />
newly created world, and his audacious attempt to outwit God by corrupting<br />
mankind. The fourth aspect of an epic is the participation of gods and other<br />
supernatural beings. For instance, the gods of Olympus in Homer’s epics,<br />
Jehova, Christ, and the angels in Paradise Lost. This aspect of the epic is called<br />
machinery. The fifth aspect of an epic is its elevated style, befitting to the grand
subject and lofty hero. The poem is almost a ceremonial performance in a<br />
deliberately ceremonial style. Hence Milton’s Latinate diction and stylized<br />
syntax, his resounding list of strange and sonorous names, and, above all, his<br />
epic simile help elevate the poem’s style. The epic similes is an elaborate and<br />
sustained comparison, developed far beyond the specific points of parallel to the<br />
subject. The objective is to enlarge, elevate and exaggerate the subject in order<br />
to make it look larger than life size.<br />
The debate about the poem’s status notwithstanding, the use of epic<br />
similes by Spenser is deliberate and beyond dispute. Note, for instance, the<br />
following from Book I of The Faerie Queene:<br />
His huge long tayle wound up in hundred foldes,<br />
Does ourspred his long bras-scaly backe,<br />
Whose wreathed boughts when ever he unfolds,<br />
And thicke entangled knots adown does slacke,<br />
Bespotted as with shields of red and blacke,<br />
It sweepeth all the land behing him farre,<br />
And of three furlongs does but little lacke;<br />
And at the point two stings in-fixed are,<br />
Both deadly sharpe, that sharpest steele exceeden farre.<br />
There is, in fact, an abundance of such similes in Spenser. In fact, at times, the<br />
abundance starts sounding a little overdone. See, for instance, the following,<br />
which follows just a stanza after the above:<br />
His blazing eyes, like two bright shining shields,<br />
Did burne with wrath, and sparkled living lyre;<br />
As two broad Beacons, set in open fields.<br />
Send forth their flames farr off to evry shyre.<br />
And warning give, that enemies conspyre,<br />
With fire and sword the region to invade;<br />
So flam’d his eyne with rage and rancorous yre:<br />
But farre within, as in a hollow glade,<br />
Those glaring lampes were set, that made a dreadfull shade.<br />
There are several other conventions that the epic poets have been following,<br />
taking cue from the earliest practitioners of the genre. One such convention has<br />
been to open the poem by stating its theme, followed by an invocation to the<br />
muse to help accomplish the gigantic task of completing the long poem.<br />
Here again Spenser consciously follows the epic convention. The poem<br />
opens with a set of four stanzas in which the poet makes an announcement of the<br />
poem’s subject and invokes the muses to help him accomplish his heroic task of<br />
completing the ambitious narrative. The first stanza reads as under:<br />
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,<br />
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,<br />
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,<br />
For trumpets stern to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;<br />
Whose praises having slept in silence long,<br />
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds<br />
To blazen broad emongst her learned throng:<br />
Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.<br />
Thus, Spenser shows his conscious connection with the epic poets. He departs<br />
with the classical tradition on the point of structure largely, and on the point of<br />
subject partly. Spenser chose the Italian poets, closer to him in time than the<br />
ancient classics of Greek and Roman poetry, and followed their model for the<br />
structuring of his most ambitious poem.<br />
This more recent tradition of poetry dates back to the thirteenth century,<br />
wherefrom literary or secondary epic becomes the main form. Also, the poets in<br />
this tradition adopted Virgil as the source of inspiration. Virgil’s influence is<br />
particularly apparent in the works of two great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch.<br />
Early in the fourteenth century Dante wrote his Divine Commedia (1310). Later<br />
in the century Petrarch wrote his epic Africa in Latin. The Divine Commedia is a<br />
personal epic, a kind of autobiographical and spiritual Aeneid. Africa records<br />
the struggle between Rome and Carthage. Neither Langland’s Piers Plowman<br />
nor Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, though both are long poems, have any claims<br />
as conventional epics. But by virtue of their range, diversity, and scale they are<br />
of epic proportions. The same can be said of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Their<br />
imaginative depth and scope, too, rival the aspirations of their great epic<br />
predecessors. More than a hundred years later, two Italian poets created what<br />
can be called a new form of epic. This new form comprised of a long narrative<br />
written about romantic adventures and in comic spirit. Before these poets, the<br />
epic world had been overwhelmingly masculine. Boiardo’s unfinished Orlando<br />
Innamorato (late 15 th century) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), which<br />
was a sequel to the former, established this new tradition. Orlando is driven mad<br />
by love for Angelica. But the heroine of the poem is Bradamante whose love<br />
affair with Ruggiero is the main subject of the work. The poem also contains a<br />
certain amount of mockery of chivalric ideals and knightly prowess.<br />
Two other outstanding epics in the new tradition or form of Europe<br />
belong to the sixteenth century, namely Camoens’s Os Lusiadas (1572) and<br />
Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1575). Of these, while the first is classical and<br />
Virgilian in spirit and structure, the second is Christian rather than classical or<br />
nationalistic. Camoens does for Portugal what Virgil had done for Rome. It has<br />
for its theme Vasco Da Gama’s discovery of the sea-route to India. In the course<br />
of the narrative, Camoens covers the whole history of Portugal. In doing so, he<br />
creates a nationalistic epic in which the Portuguese wage a holy war against<br />
paganism. Tasso’s subject is the recovery of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. It<br />
has many heroes and heroines and owes a good deal to the tradition of the<br />
medieval romance. It also contains a strong element of the chivalric and<br />
supernatural. It is also a didactic and allegorical poem.
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1589, 1596) is an acknowledged greatest<br />
long poem in <strong>English</strong> of the Elizabethan age. Like the preceding Italian poems,<br />
it is a mixture of epic and romance. It is written in the specially designed stanza<br />
form now called the Spenserian stanza. He professedly planned the poem in<br />
twenty-four books, but only six could be completed, left unfinished in the<br />
middle of the seventh. That Spenser was conscious of writing the poem in the<br />
great epic tradition is evident in all aspects of his epic, including the opening<br />
announcement. In the prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, he also mentioned,<br />
as his four greatest predecessors, Homer, Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso. Spenser<br />
designed the poem as an elaborate allegory or, as he calls it, “darke conceit.” He<br />
uses in the poem the material of the Arthurian legends and the Charlemagne<br />
romances. The hero of each book represents a virtue, making the poem<br />
throughout a didactic narrative. The structure of the poem is astonishingly<br />
complex, rich, and allusive. Also, it needs to be noted that The Faerie Queene is<br />
a courtesy book, the most elaborate and courtly of all books of etiquette of the<br />
Elizabethan age. As Spenser explains in his letter to Raleigh, “the generall end<br />
therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous<br />
and gentle discipline.” With The Faerie Queene comes to an end the tradition of<br />
the epic of chivalry, in fact, the whole cult of chivalry. But that did not affect its<br />
great influence on the subsequent narrative poets.<br />
Although, as we have seen, The Faerie Queene combines within its fold<br />
both the traditions of the classical epic as well as the medieval romance, in its<br />
spirit it is neither classical nor medieval. Spenser gives his poem, through its<br />
allegorical structure, the spirit of the Renaissance ideal which combines<br />
Christian, Platonic and humanist codes. In that sense, it is the most complex epic<br />
poem of all the classical as well as medieval lot. The radical change in the spirit<br />
of The Faerie Queene from that of the classical epics need to be understood;<br />
else, we misjudge the merit of Spenser’s work. To get at the nature of that spirit<br />
we shall have to go back to the end of the eleventh century poetry. It was during<br />
this period that the idea of the holy crusade, and hence of the Christian epic, was<br />
born. “We are right and these miscreants are wrong” (as Roland utters in the<br />
French epic) conveys the spirit that dominated the European epics after Le<br />
Chauson de Roland. This was something altogether new for epic poetry. The<br />
epic had always lived by conflict. Until this time, it was simply a conflict<br />
between two sides, with both sides almost equally protected by gods. Also, both<br />
sides were noble, one destined to prevail only with the help of superior power,<br />
or the accidental support of an immortal conceived in essentially human terms.<br />
Homer writes from the Greek point of view, but he does not suggest that the<br />
Greeks were right, and the Trojans were wrong. Virgil has moved perceptibly<br />
nearer to the idea of a hero with a divine mission. But he also does not suggest<br />
that the Trojans have any sacred or pre-ordained superiority over the Latins. In<br />
these epics one does not perceive any attempt to portray one side representing<br />
faith and the other faithlessness, one side as good and the other as evil.
The notion of the conflict having supernatural sanction is original with the<br />
Christian epic. This idea, in various forms and with varying degrees of intensity,<br />
runs all through the European epics after the French Roland. It is not quite<br />
absent in the more frivolous Italian epics. And it runs with all the weight in the<br />
operation of Redcross Knight and Sir Artegall in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,<br />
Book I. To the readers of Ariosto, struck only by the fantasy and irony, the idea<br />
of the Christian crusade may look an absurdity. But there is a case to be made of<br />
it all the same. As for Tasso, the case needs no arguing. Writing in the full tide<br />
of the Counter-Reformation and completely expressing its spirit, he takes the<br />
holy war as his theme as well as his inspiration. It must, however, be added that<br />
neither in Ariosto nor in Tasso do the exigencies of the faith exclude chivalry<br />
and courtesy to those outside its bounds.<br />
The Italian romance-epic benefitted the most from the Arthurian<br />
literature, from its vast and many-sided appeal. Like Charlemagne, Arthur was<br />
Christian prince, fighting against pagan enemies. With the disappearance of the<br />
great theme of national and Christian war against a pagan foe, the exploits of the<br />
individual knights of the Round-Table became deeds of individual prowess,<br />
undertaken for love or personal renown. True, the knights of the Round-Table<br />
sometimes fight against pagan or Saracen knights; but these are in no other way<br />
distinguished from the Christians. They are equally likely to be noble and brave.<br />
The code of chivalry embraces pagan and Christian alike. Also, the<br />
disappearance of the holy war affects the supernatural no less than the natural<br />
events. They are no longer parts of a providential scheme. They become<br />
individual enchantments, infinitely various, and mysterious in means and<br />
motive. Above all, it was the love theme that distinguished the Arthurian<br />
romances from the older epic. In Italy, it was above all the love stories, of<br />
Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristan and Iseult, that represent the Arthurian cycle.<br />
Hence a new motive enters Italian romance literature – love and the fatal power<br />
of the heroine. We are already in sight of Spenser’s Angelica and Bradamante. It<br />
is this grafting of the new Arthurian romance on to the old Carolingian stock<br />
that brings the romantic epic into being. It also accounts for the pervasive<br />
atmosphere of Arthurian romance in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; of course,<br />
with the absence of specific Arthurian tales or specific debts to Malory. The<br />
Arthurian element is too obvious in Spenser to be denied or overlooked. But it<br />
came to him, not form Malory, but from his Italian sources. Whenever a<br />
different and distinctly British Arthurian element enters in The Faerie Queene<br />
the ordinary reader quite often fails to notice it.<br />
Spenser’s epic begins in the same manner in which does Boiardo’s,<br />
though Spenser, affected by later notions of epic correctness, plunged in medias<br />
res, left what was chronologically the beginning to the end, and so never got to it<br />
at all. The two fountains of Cupid and Merlin, the one inspiring love and the<br />
other hate, which play a large part in the story, are similarly removed from the<br />
Carolingian and Akin to the Arthurian spirit. Above all, there is the central
importance of the heroine, the delectable Angelica, whose caprices and<br />
enchantments control the entire intricate web. Spenser had read Boiardo as much<br />
as he had read Ariosto and Virgil. Boiardo’s style is straightforward, easy and a<br />
little rustic. He tells his tale with a rather grand carelessness and an undertone of<br />
irony that is nearer to simple humour than to the finesse of Ariosto. His<br />
admiration for the virtues of chivalry is whole-hearted and perfectly genuine.<br />
There are many parallels between Boiardo and Spenser. A certain old-fashioned<br />
simplicity of mind brings him in some way closer to Spenser. But ever more<br />
important than that is the fact that he created Ariosto’s world, and therefore, at<br />
one remove, form Spenser’s world. He laid down the lines both of its adventures<br />
and its characters. All the principal characters in Ariosto are taken over from<br />
Boiardo. The principal heroes, Orlando, Rinaldo, Astolfo, Ferran, all subject to<br />
the whims of Angelica. The faithful lovers Ruggiero and Bradamante,<br />
Brandimarte and Fiordilige, etc., with their beguiling gardens; the magic lance,<br />
the shield, the lions, the dragons, the hermits, the salvage men; all these that<br />
make Boiardo’s world are taken over bodily by Ariosto. Further, without these<br />
characters of Ariosto and Boiardo, there could not have been Spenser’s Arthur,<br />
Guyon, Calidore, Artegall and Britomart, Scudamour and Amoret, Archimago,<br />
Duessa and Acrasia. Intricate adventures proliferating into many episodes, feats<br />
of arms inspired by love, and a background, however treated, of religions<br />
conflict – these are the materials that Spenser inherited from these Italian writers<br />
of romance-epic. It is also possible to find, besides one or two explicitly<br />
allegorical episodes, a general allegorical undertone to Boiardo’s romance. And<br />
it is quite likely that Spenser read him in this way. It is, therefore, in these<br />
respects that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is different from the classic epics of<br />
Homer and Virgil, and is similar to the romance-epics of Boiardo and Ariosto.<br />
LITERARY ALLUSIONS:<br />
It was quite inevitable that Spenser’s faery land should be enriched with<br />
the spoils of literary reminiscence. A student from his youth, Spenser had lived a<br />
full and eager life in books. His imagination was kindled as much in the study as<br />
in the outside world. To know the sources of his art is to get familiar with the<br />
library to which the Elizabethan scholar had access. Spenser also drew with<br />
equal freedom from the Bible, from the Greek and Latin poets, from the writings<br />
of the Italian and French Renaissance, and from that medieval literature which<br />
the learned held up to contempt. La Morte D’Arthur, and kindred romances, Sir<br />
Bevis, Guy of Warwick, and the rest – “those feigned books of chivalry<br />
wherein,” says Ascham, “a man by reading them should be led to none other end<br />
but only to manslaughter and bawdry” – suggested to Spenser much incident and<br />
inspired many a noble reflection. His art was a compound of many simple<br />
elements extracted from many sources. Although he borrowed from his<br />
predecessors more than any other poet did, no one left as distinct a mark of his<br />
own personality on the borrowed material as he did. There is hardly an incident
or character in The Faerie Queene which cannot be traced in the writings of one<br />
or another writer that came before him. All that only proves the extent of his<br />
readings in earlier literature. However, more surprising than the extent and<br />
diversity of his reading is his power to combine in one composite picture<br />
materials drawn from very different sources. He is able to harmonize these<br />
borrowed materials because he leaves nothing as he found; his imagination<br />
colours all that passes through his mind. Thus, every particle included in the<br />
formation of the rich compound shows the distinctive imprint of the poet’s<br />
personality. The routine distinctions between classical and romantic, ancient and<br />
modern, sacred and profane do not come in his way of assimilating and<br />
amalgamating them into his multi-coloured texture he designs for each of his<br />
poems. Spenser pursued such an eclectic method alike in the weaving of his plot,<br />
in its incidental embellishment, in the similes and allusions that enrich his style<br />
and drive home his imaginative conception.<br />
The story of Una and Redcross knight in Book I of The Faerie Queene<br />
opens with suggestions of Malory’s Gareth and Lynette. Here, the enchanter,<br />
who is their chief enemy, is not a distant relative of Ariosto’s hermit, who<br />
deceives Angelica. Further, on their travels, Una and her knight meet with<br />
classical satyrs and Elizabethan courtiers. Their adventures at this time are<br />
reminiscent now of Virgil, now of Sir Bevis and The Seven Champions of<br />
Christendom, now of the Apocalypse. When their betrothal is described, its<br />
celebration marks a confusion of pagan and Christian rituals. However, despite<br />
all these echoes of earlier sources, the harmony of the imaginative atmosphere<br />
created with all these allusions is not disturbed by any individual element.<br />
Similarly, when we come upon the description of the ante-room in the house of<br />
Busirane, which is hung with goodly arras whereon, as in the castles of several<br />
medieval poets, are woven legends of classical mythology. Presumably, their<br />
source is Ovid, but nothing could be different form Ovid than the music and the<br />
feeling with which Spenser delineates them. Further, we see that over the portals<br />
of the room are inscribed the words Be bold, which are said to have come from<br />
the old wives’ tale of Mr. Fox. Also, among the lovers whose “spotless<br />
pleasures” make glad the garden of Venus, David and Jonathan, Pylades and<br />
Orestes walk side by side. Then, in the dark river of Cocytus, Pilate stands next<br />
to Tamtalus.<br />
Spenser’s style does not undergo any change when it comes to giving<br />
utterance to his religious thoughts. For instance, the well of life into which the<br />
Redcross knight falls and sinks in his conflict with the Dragon, is likened, not<br />
merely to Silo or to Jordon, but to Cephise and to Hebrus, to the <strong>English</strong> Bath,<br />
and to the German Spau. The guardian angel, who watches over the prostate Sir<br />
Guyon after his fierce struggle with the temptations of Mammon, and evokes<br />
that superb expression of Christian humility and gratitude, “O why should<br />
heavenly God to men have such regard?”, appears to Spenser as a fair young<br />
man “of wondrous beautie, and of freshest years,” like to Phoebus, or “to
Cupido on Idaean hill.” A pedant may find this comparison rather ludicrous, and<br />
the more prosaic pietist may find it profane. But to Spenser it seemed quite<br />
natural, even inevitable. As Truth appealed to the poet in terms of beauty, so all<br />
beauty, whatever its source, could be brought to serve and to illuminate the<br />
highest truth.<br />
Spenser brings this wealth of literary allusions in touch with his own<br />
observation of nature and of human character. The Irish scenery with which he<br />
was most familiar, and which resembled the traditional landscape of medieval<br />
romance, provided background for his poem, which is also often treated in a<br />
traditional manner. Also, as the fruit of intimate observation, it gave him<br />
pictures of vivid reality.<br />
STRUCTURE OF THE FAERIE QUEENE:<br />
It is a little odd that a poem, which is incomplete, should be subjected to<br />
the consideration of its plot and structure. And yet, there has been a running<br />
debate on the subject of the poem’s structure. One way of looking at the<br />
structure of The Faerie Queene is to see how far the proposed design of the 24<br />
books has been followed in the six that are complete. Another is to forget about<br />
the proposed pattern and look for the structure of the existing poem in six books<br />
and a small fragment of the seventh. The difficulty that one experiences in<br />
considering the poem’s structure is, however, posed not by its incompleteness so<br />
much as the mixing of modes that the poet has deliberately effected. The poem<br />
consciously follows the epic model, the romance model, the allegorical mode,<br />
etc.; all within the framework of a single poem. As C. S. Lewis has observed,<br />
“Formally considered, The Faerie Queene is the fusion of two kinds, the<br />
medieval allegory and the more recent romantic epic of the Italians. Because it is<br />
allegory, and allegory neither strictly religious nor strictly erotic but universal,<br />
every part of the poet’s experience can be brought in: because it is romantic<br />
epic, a certain unity is immediately imposed on all that enters it, for all is<br />
embodied in romantic adventures. ‘Faerie land’ itself provides the unity – a<br />
unity not of plot but of milieu. A priori the ways of Faerie Land might seem ‘so<br />
exceeding spatious and wide’ that such a unity amounted to nothing, but this is<br />
not found to be so. Few poems have a greater harmony of atmosphere. The<br />
multiplicity of the stories, far from impairing the unity, supports it; for just that<br />
multiplicity, that packed fullness of ‘vehement adventure’, is the quality of<br />
Faerie Land; as tragedy is the quality of Hardy’s Wessex.”<br />
Here, then, is one way of looking at the unity of the poem’s structure. The<br />
way is not to look at its unity in terms of Aristotalian beginning, middle and end,<br />
not in terms of a chain of incidents linked with each other on the principle of<br />
causality, nor in terms of the story of a single, or a set of characters. The unity of<br />
the poem’s structure, we are told, has to be seen in terms of its atmosphere. And<br />
the atmosphere of the Faerie Land, it is argued, is that of romance or romantic
adventure, just as in Hardy’s Wessex, the atmosphere is that of tragedy. So we<br />
study the poem’s structure in terms of its mood and atmosphere, not in<br />
traditional terms of incident and character. In Lewis’s view, there is in The<br />
Faerie Queene the originality and fruitfulness of its structural invention. In his<br />
view, whatever incidental faults the poem may have, it decidedly has a healthy<br />
constitution. The matter and the form fit each other like hand and glove.<br />
The primary structural idea (of atmospheral unity) is reinforced by two<br />
others, the first internal to each book, and the second striding across from book<br />
to book through the whole poem. Thus, Spenser seems to have decided that in<br />
each book there should be, what Lewis calls, an allegorical core (or shrine or<br />
inner stage) where the theme of the book would appear disentangled from the<br />
complex adventures and reveal its unity. The core of each book can be described<br />
as follows: in Book I, the House of Holiness; in Book II, the House of Alma; in<br />
Book III, the Garden of Adonis; in Book IV, the Temple of Venus; in Book V,<br />
the Church of Isis; and in Book VI, Mount Acidale. Since the position of the<br />
core in each book is not stable, no conclusion can be drawn based on the<br />
numbering of the two cantos of Book VII. Next in dignity to the core in each<br />
book comes the main allegorical story of the book. It may be Guyon’s or<br />
Calidore’s quest. Beyond that is a loose fringe of stories which may be fully<br />
allegorical (like Sendamore’s visit to the cottage of Care) or merely typical (like<br />
Paridell’s seduction of Hellenore) or not allegorical at all (like the story told by<br />
the Squire of Dames to Satyrane). So, the appearance of pathless wandering,<br />
which is very necessary to the poem’s quality, is largely a work of deliberate and<br />
successful illusion. It is quite possible, although a little improbable, that the poet<br />
does not always know where he is going with regard to particular stories. But he<br />
is always very much in command with regard to the symphony of mood, the<br />
careful arrangement of different degrees of allegory and different degrees of<br />
seriousness. And it is in this symphony and symmetry that the poem’s unity lies.<br />
The unity of The Faerie Queene’s structure is also to be seen in the<br />
symphony or symmetry of its imagery. As Northrop Frye has remarked, “To<br />
demonstrate a unity in The Faerie Queene, we have to examine the imagery of<br />
the poem rather than its allegory. It is Spenser’s habitual technique, developing<br />
as it did out of emblematic visions he wrote in his nonage, to start with the<br />
image, not the allegorical translation of it, and when he says at the beginning of<br />
the final canto of Book II:<br />
Now givs this goodly frame of Temperance<br />
Fairely to rise<br />
one feels that the ‘frame’ is built out of the characters and places that are clearly<br />
announced to be what they are, not out of their moral or historical shadows.” It<br />
is significant to note that Spenser prefaces his poem with sonnets to several<br />
patrons. And it is quite clear from those pieces that the poet meant to indicate to<br />
them that they are there somewhere in the poem. Of course, he does not specify<br />
where precisely anyone of them appears. However, the implication is that for
such readers the allegory is to be read more or less ad libitum. The expressions<br />
that Spenser chooses to use for allegory –“darke conceit,” “clowdily enwrapped”<br />
– emphasize that allegory’s deliberate vagueness. One example to this effect will<br />
suffice. It is quite clear in the poem that Belphoebe refers to Elizabeth, or so we<br />
believe. But, when Timias speaks of her, “to whom the heavens doe serve and<br />
sew,” can we really say, as someone does, that it is a reference to the storm that<br />
wrecked the Armada? Obviously, such a reading is only an example of a<br />
subjective allegorical meaning. In the work of Spenser, the greatest allegorical<br />
poet in <strong>English</strong>, the allegory can not merely be uncertain but even be muddled.<br />
Of course, Frye’s argument is not that we “let the allegory go,” but that it is<br />
evident in Spenser that the “imagery is prior in importance to it.”<br />
We must, therefore, while looking for unity in the poem, also look for the<br />
structure of imagery. Centring around the quest and journey motives each book<br />
of The Faerie Queene moves through a pattern of conflict between the forces of<br />
good and those of evil. Since the world of The Faerie Queene is that of romance,<br />
the presence of good and evil is shown in the simplified terms of separate<br />
existence of the two. Hence, Spenser’s method is to make every virtue and vice<br />
visual, which makes the moral of every conflict clear, besides making the<br />
presentation interesting in terms of fable. Thus, fable follows fable, image<br />
follows image, character follows character, incident follows incident, and all<br />
moving in a simultaneous visual show of moral and spiritual journey through<br />
light and sound apparatus. The structure thus of imagery that emerges in the<br />
poem is multi-dimensional. Romance may simplify the complex reality of life<br />
into static characters and symbolic incidents, but it complicates the matter in the<br />
presentation of the equations between different characters and incidents. Hence<br />
in such a work as Spenser’s while philosophy may get simplified, in almost<br />
adolescent vision of life, the structure gets complicated by the very wealth of<br />
details. But one can always notice the repetitive tracks which one finds in the<br />
web of visual imagery. Thus, both allegory as well as imagery help notice the<br />
principles or patterns which contrive unity in the poem.<br />
Still another way of finding an entry into the structure of The Faerie<br />
Queene to see where the unity of the poem lies is, as Rosemond Tuve has<br />
suggested: “By far the most striking element of structure which Spenser has<br />
caught from much attention to romances is the principle of entrelacement…. No<br />
doubt it is this characteristically ‘interrupted’ and interwoven structure which is<br />
referred to when Wilfred Owen distinguishes the typical ‘Ariostan structure’ of<br />
Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene from the contrasted ‘repetitive structure’<br />
of Books I and II; Spenser is thought to have failed to accommodate these<br />
structures to each other when he conceived the idea of a ‘super-epic’, in which<br />
each Book should be a little epic or miniature Aeneid, with its separate hero, as<br />
in Books I and II. However, typical romance entrelacement, a thoroughly<br />
medieval development though altered by Ariosto for more suspense and variety,<br />
seems to me to characterize all Spenser’s designs…. The well organized Books I
and II are not little epics with separate heroes, but parts of a whole, connected as<br />
the parts of cyclical romances are ordinarily connected, and in fact showing<br />
extreme likeness to the way the different quests of the Queste are connected.<br />
The separate Books exhibit, as units and as parts of the unfinished whole, a<br />
romance’s kind of coherence. It is unlike, even opposed to, that epic coherence<br />
which was most palatable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which<br />
was all the more attractive to the nineteenth century if the piece got its unity<br />
from an epic hero more visibly than from an epic action.” These remarks sum up<br />
the substance of the debate about the structure of Spenser’s poem. The critic is<br />
right in discouraging us from seeing the poem’s unity in terms of the traditional<br />
epic form. He rightly puts us on the path of romance, which the poem obviously<br />
is, suggesting how romance form holds the key to the poem’s unity. Of course,<br />
corroborating that unity in terms of the pattern of allegory or that of imagery<br />
does not, in any sense, contradict the romance structure. After all, romance quest<br />
is also to be about something and it would require some method and technique<br />
to make the quest or journey humanly interesting. The method and technique<br />
bring in allegory and imagery which, undisputedly, are the chief devices of<br />
Spenser as poet.<br />
Although we see Spenser’s poem closer to romance than epic, no one<br />
intends to deny the simple fact that Spenser deliberately tried to emulate epic<br />
structure and epic conventions. The problem arises only when we try to see epic<br />
in romance or romance in epic, and call it defective the moment we see any<br />
departure or deviation from the traditional form of an epic or romance. As<br />
Rosemand Tuve argues, “This web-structure has special possibilities of<br />
gradually discernible meaning as the woven pattern shows it is a pattern and<br />
takes shape. Hence it was a superbly invented instrument for conveying not only<br />
what we called the polyphonic nature of what is happening, but that which<br />
interested Spenser supremely, the fact to human minds what happens ‘means’<br />
something is significant.” Hence the real principle of unity, in this view, lies in<br />
“meanings” of happenings, which inform what happened and are not separable<br />
from the story. In a romance, the story can be advanced by conventions, such as<br />
customs of castles, quarrelsome knights provoking battles, stops for lodging,<br />
knights-errant who merely meet adventure, etc. It is such a use of significances<br />
as the cohering factor, not the fancifulness of romance, which makes it possible<br />
for the reader to move in and out of symbols like the ‘real’ places they are.<br />
Although this mode of making different incidents cohere in a unity is used<br />
all over the poem, it is easier to observe in Books where a single hero achieves<br />
some objective or learns some great lesson. Unlike the epic, Spenser’s poem<br />
does not depend on the sequential series of happenings, which is natural to a<br />
biography-of-hero principle of organization. In Spenser, we encounter a<br />
conception of structure very different from that which would give us an epic<br />
action towards which every events builds, or an epic hero whom every action<br />
ultimately exalts. In The Faerie Queene, structure is an interweaving of
unrelated parts which unobstrusively take shape as a pattern. In this poem, unity<br />
is not imparted by the series of a hero’s exploits, nor by the development of a<br />
mind, nor even by a conflict. The virtue, which is sought by the hero of each<br />
book, acts as the unifying factor in every Book. This is quite a common thing in<br />
romance, but not so common in epic. Spenser inherited this structure from the<br />
Italian poets who preceded him, those who wrote romances. Through the<br />
inheritance of this structure, which was neither episodic nor articulated like an<br />
epic action, Spenser found it convenient to heighten the presentation of reigning<br />
themes to produce real allegory, and yet evade the problem which teases the<br />
modern writer, where and when the story is subordinate to allegory.<br />
Thus, in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene the unifying principle of structure<br />
is not the history of a particular or an individual; the action is not a biography, a<br />
life, but an action. Allegory may have many definitions, all seen to agree to<br />
Sidney’s remark on poetry, that it deals with things “in their universal<br />
consideration,” so that we view abstractions themselves interacting. It seems<br />
Spenser acted brilliantly in realizing that a structure which weaves a tapestry<br />
before us is particularly well-suited to allegory, where pattern must overwhelm<br />
us. He also came out supremely successful at this secret conveying of<br />
unparaphrasable meaning. We need not obscure the poet’s success by re-writing<br />
his stories into their allegories. Instead, we should take the whole images with<br />
all their depicted feelings as the true statements of his allegorical meanings.<br />
SPENSER S POETIC STYLE:<br />
Spenser’s art can be said to vary from homeliness to splendour, from the<br />
remoteness of romance to the closeness of common life. We can be sure that the<br />
greatness of his art lies, not in the one sphere or in the other, but in the fusion of<br />
both the spheres. And in this very fusion lies the secret of his style. It easily<br />
adapts itself to the matter or mood in hand. It is also the fitting expression of the<br />
poet’s unique and graceful personality. His personality as poet may not be as<br />
forceful as that of Milton, but his character is no less indelibly stamped on all<br />
the different poems he wrote. Wordsworth and Keats have produced lines which<br />
could be mistaken for those of Milton, but no one has produced a stanza which<br />
could be mistaken for Spenser’s. the distinctive qualities of his style can be<br />
found in its diction and its melody. Spenser was drawn to an archaism, which is<br />
inimitable because it is purely capricious. He was drawn to it because of its<br />
reminiscent picturesqueness as well as by its musical potentialities.<br />
In his very first, and greatly successful, poem, the Shepheardes Calender,<br />
Spenser had experimented in the use of archaic language. The diction of The<br />
Faerie Queene is a more mature product of his peculiar poetic talent. Undeterred<br />
by the criticism of his contemporaries, he took complete advantage of the fluid<br />
state of <strong>English</strong> in his day, not only to recover the obsolete, but to construct new<br />
words on the analogies of the old, and to adapt both his spelling and
pronounciation to the desired effects of cadence and melody. One of the aims of<br />
Spenser as poet was to perfect for himself an instrument from which he could<br />
extract a music as subtle as Chaucer’s and by means of which he could create<br />
around his subject the atmosphere of an ideal antique world. The Chaucerian<br />
element in Spenser’s language is like a distinct but not often perceived flavour.<br />
It can be tasted in occasional words, such as “warry,” “encheason”, or “solas”. It<br />
can also be felt in the use of abstract nouns with romance terminations. Finally,<br />
it can be seen in the cadence or verbal reminiscence of such a line as “there<br />
many minstrales maken melodye.” It clearly shows how from Chaucer he learnt<br />
the metrical value of the short syllable.<br />
Spenser’s poetic style is also marked by a special touch of the old<br />
romance. Malory and others had transplanted it from France. It gets expressed in<br />
such words as “prow”, “persaunt”, “belgardes”, “heavperes”, “paravaunt”. We<br />
also need to remember that many of Spenser’s supposed archaisms are those of<br />
his age. He did, of course, cherish words which though still in use were rapidly<br />
going out of fashion. The sustained colouring and atmosphere of Spenser’s style,<br />
we find, is given by a constant use of words which are not so frequently found in<br />
Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Sidney. Thus, Spenser made the fullest use of the<br />
richly compounded language by freely adapting spelling, punctuation, and wordformation,<br />
to his needs. In order to lighten the movement and smooth the flow of<br />
his metre he could use old forms, “as whilom was the antique worldes guize.”<br />
To suit the play of his melody or rhyme he could vary his forms, using<br />
“dreriment”, or “drerihed”, or “dreariness”, “jollihed” or “jollitee”. Spenser also<br />
created his own forms such as the adjective “daint”, or the verb to “cherry”.<br />
Spenser has invited criticism about his diction, which has been labelled arbitrary<br />
and illogical. Yet Spenser has grafted his so-called idiosyncrasies on to a firm<br />
and healthy stock of pure and simple <strong>English</strong>. His style is decidedly free from<br />
the involved and pedantic mannerisms which were very common in his day.<br />
Therefore, it can be said that Spenser was the first conscious inventor of a<br />
distinct poetic diction. His diction provoked Daniel, his contemporary, to<br />
comment that Spenser used “aged accents and untimely words”; and Ben Jonson<br />
to say that “in affecting the ancients he writ no language.” However, while his<br />
contemporaries disparaged him, the romantics admired him. Note, how<br />
Coleridge comments: there was “no poet whose writings would safelier stand the<br />
test of Mr. Wordsworth’s theory than Spenser.”<br />
It has been unanimously acclaimed that the distinctive quality of<br />
Spenserian melody found perfect expression in the verse form of The Faerie<br />
Queene. Throughout the huge length of the poem he heightens the effect proper<br />
to his interlacing rhyme-system by an unbroken assonance and alliteration, as<br />
also by the haunting repetition of word, phrase and cadence. His supreme tour<br />
de force in this method can be seen in his often cited stanzas from the Bower of<br />
Bliss in Book II. Of course, this method is habitual to him. Also, it is capable of<br />
infinite variation according to his needs. Puttenham, another contemporary of
Spenser, noted some of those rhetorical figures, such as “both auricular and<br />
sensible, by which all the words and clauses are made as well tunable to the ear<br />
as stirring to the mind,” that find perfect illustration in The Faerie Queene. At<br />
times, Spenser repeats a word in such a manner that it gives the line a metrical<br />
balance. Another time it enforces an obvious antithesis. At times, the iteration is<br />
little more than a play upon the meaning of the word. But more often, the word<br />
suggests a subtlety in the poet’s thought or feeling by the peculiar quality which<br />
it imparts to the music of the stanza:<br />
Withal she laughed, and she blusht withal,<br />
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,<br />
And laughter to her blushing, as did fall.<br />
Spenser’s skill in playing with the recurrent word and phrase and cadence<br />
throughout a whole stanza is very much like that of an expert juggler who<br />
weaves in the air intricate patterns with various balls of different colours, and<br />
yet never allows any ball to go out of his control. Note, for example, the<br />
following:<br />
Amongst those knights there were three brethren bold,<br />
Three bolder brethren never were yborne,<br />
Borne of one mother in one happie mold,<br />
Borne at one burden in one happie morne,<br />
That bore three such, three such not to be fond;<br />
Her name was Agape whose children werne<br />
All three as one, the first hight Priamond,<br />
The second Dymond, and youngest Triamond.<br />
Puttenham gave this device the name of “translacer, which is when you turn and<br />
translace a word with many sundry shapes as the Tailor doth his garment, and<br />
after that sort to play with him in your dittie.” Some say that Spenser was<br />
attracted to this device in the prose of Sidney; others, that he caught its true<br />
poetic use from his study of the Latin poets. Dryden called it the “turn” upon the<br />
word or the thought. He rightly recognized that the <strong>English</strong> master of this device<br />
was “Spenser, who had studied Virgil, and among his other excellences had<br />
copied that.”<br />
One of the prominent aspects of Spenser’s poetic style is the music. He<br />
has been considered most musical among the <strong>English</strong> poets. His studied use of<br />
assonance and alliteration springs from his musical instinct. He employs<br />
assonance usually to give greater value to the vowel of the rhyme word, by<br />
anticipating it in some strong place within the line:<br />
Weening some heavenly goddesse he did see,<br />
Or else unweeting, what it else might be;<br />
This use can be especially noticed in the Alexandrine, where the assonance will<br />
often be found to emphasize the caesura (a break or pause in a line of poetry,<br />
dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and/or enforced by punctuation):<br />
Or A work of wondrous grace, and able soules to save.
That like a rose her silken leaves did fair unfold.<br />
At times Spenser continues his assonance through a stanza, as in the following,<br />
where he emphasizes the rhyme vowels ai and e by contrasting them with the<br />
harder sound of i:<br />
So there that right Sir Calidore did dwell,<br />
And long while after, whilest him list remaine,<br />
Dayly beholding the faire Pastorell,<br />
And feeding on the bayt of his owne bane.<br />
During which time he did her entertaine,<br />
With all kind courtesies, he could invent;<br />
And every day, her companie to gaine,<br />
When to the field she went, he with her went:<br />
So for to quench her fire, he did it more augment.<br />
Spenser’s most persistent stylistic device is alliteration, which he uses as<br />
much to mark his rhythm as to knit his verse together; as much to enforce his<br />
meaning as to enrich his melody. His source for this device was, decidedly, that<br />
earlier poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period which is alliterative by structure. Its<br />
artistic value was enhanced by his study of Chaucer, in whose poetry it is<br />
accidental rather than structural. He developed its musical possibilities to their<br />
utmost, so much so that it became for him an integral part of his melody, capable<br />
of sustaining his verse even when his poetic inspiration was at its lowest. Many<br />
of Spenser’s favourite phrases, such as “loving lord”, “girlonds gay”, “silver<br />
sleepe”, “lovely layes”, “wide wildernesse”, are born of his love of alliteration.<br />
It becomes such a natural element of his music that at times it even influences,<br />
almost unconsciously, his choice of words. Note, for instance, the following:<br />
I knockt, but no man aunswered me by name;<br />
I cald, but no man answerd to my clame.<br />
Spenser knew the power of alliteration upon w to give the sense of vastness and<br />
desolation:<br />
In all his wayes through this wide worldes wave.<br />
It seems that in Spenser’s mind certain combinations of consonants were<br />
associated with particular feelings or conceptions. He would always carry their<br />
use through several lines, sometimes even through an entire stanza. His<br />
alliteration upon s and l for conveying a sense of peace are particularly effective.<br />
The sense of peace is conveyed through “the senses lulled are in slumber of<br />
delight.” One of the best examples of this type is the Despair’s argument, which<br />
is rendered irrisitible by the music in which it is phrased:<br />
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,<br />
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?<br />
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,<br />
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.<br />
Very similar is Arthur’s dream of the faerie queene; the alliteration does the<br />
trick here also:
Whiles every sence the humour sweet embayd,<br />
And slombring soft my hart did steale away,<br />
Me seemed, by my side a royal Mayd<br />
Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay.<br />
We need to note here that in all these citations the effect of the alliteration is<br />
strengthened by the use of the alliterative letter in the middle and end as well as<br />
at the beginning of the words.<br />
All these are, of course, special uses. Apart from these uses, assonance as<br />
well as alliteration runs through Spenser’s entire verse as an integral part of its<br />
melody. It sounds as a kind of sweet undertone. It blends with the regular rise<br />
and fall of the verse. It enhances the rhythmical appeal. Finally, it forms a total<br />
effect of indefinable grace and beauty.<br />
A style like that of Spenser is always fraught with dangers as well as<br />
temptations. No wonder that Spenser did not escape them. No doubt, his finest<br />
music is strongly linked with his noblest imaginings, he could still convey, in<br />
music of a kind, any idea, however trivial, even though it was not always worth<br />
the carriage. In such cases, he ends up producing parodies of his own poetic self.<br />
He loses his imagination. His favourite and powerful devices become just<br />
threadbare artifice of a cunning metrical trickster. He fills out, then, the<br />
rhythmical structure of his stanza with words and phrases that add nothing to his<br />
picture. He gives then whole lines of comment. That is trite and commonplace.<br />
He never learnt the art of pruning, nor was he overcareful to weed. Although his<br />
verse has a vigour of its own, it is seldom rapid. His verse can be said to be the<br />
counterpart of that brooding habit in which he usually looked at life. Its<br />
sustaining principle was a slow circling movement that continually returned<br />
upon itself. The essential quality of Spenser’s style is better summed up by the<br />
inspired lines of Wordsworth than by any prose criticism can do:<br />
Sweet Spenser moving through his clouded heaven<br />
With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace.<br />
To Spenser the significance of the situations that he chooses to describe as well<br />
as his attitude to them were more than situations themselves. The music in<br />
which his imagination phrased them was very much a part of their significance.<br />
To say this is, of course, to deny him supreme place among narrative poets, even<br />
among the writers of romance. Also, even those readers who like a story for its<br />
own sake often find him tedious. They turn with relief to Ariosto, Byron, or<br />
Scott. But the charm of his romantic world is not only conveyed through an<br />
appropriate poetic style, it is also enhanced by the sound and colour of his verse.<br />
The charm assumes the nature of enchantment. It carries us along, far away from<br />
the real world, and into the faerie land of people and places better or worse than<br />
the real. ‘Style is the man.’ The statement is more true in the case of Spenser<br />
than anyone else.<br />
THE SPENSERIAN STANZA:
The unique and distinctive quality of Spenserian melody found perfect<br />
expression in the verse form of The Faerie Queene. The stanza form was his<br />
own invention. That is why it has come to be known as the Spenserian stanza. It<br />
is considered Spenser’s greatest contribution to the development of <strong>English</strong><br />
prosody. Perhaps it was Chaucer’s rhyme royal (a b a b b c c ) which called his<br />
attention to the effectiveness of a stanza with an uneven number of lines. The<br />
effects achieved in these two measures might well be said to represent the<br />
difference between the metrical genius of Chaucer and that of Spenser. He is<br />
also said to owe something to the ottava rima (a b a b a b c c). In all probability,<br />
Spenser relied more on rhyme royal than on ottava rima for forging his new<br />
stanza form. An evidence to this probability is the interlacing of his rhymes that<br />
brings his measure nearer to the stanza that he had borrowed from Chaucer for<br />
the opening of his April and November Eclogues (a b a b b c b c). But to admit<br />
this should not in any way detract from the absolute originality of the Spenserian<br />
stanza.<br />
Spenser added ninth line to the ottava rima and made it longer by adding<br />
two more syllables. He made it decasyllabic. This line provides magnificent<br />
conclusion to the linked sweetness of the preceding eight. In the last line, the<br />
music of the whole stanza spreads and settles to a triumphant or a quiet close.<br />
Note, for instance, the following:<br />
Nought is there under heaven’s wide hollownesse,<br />
That moves more dear compassion of mind,<br />
Then beautie brought t’unworthy wretchednesse<br />
Through envies snares or fortunes freakes<br />
I, whether lately through her brightnesse blind,<br />
Or through alleageance and fast fealtie,<br />
Which I do owe unto all woman kind,<br />
Feele my heart perst with so great agonie,<br />
When such I see, that all for pittie I could die.<br />
It logical value to the metrical scheme lies in the fact that, standing separate<br />
from the rest by reason of its length, it constitutes a distinct climax. Thus, in a<br />
manner, it remains detached. And yet, because it is linked in rhyme with the<br />
foregoing quatrain, it never suffers the sharp isolation that often marks the final<br />
couplet of the ottava rima or the rhyme royal .<br />
The ninth line, which is longer than the rest, and is the last line, is<br />
apparently fitted for sentitious (a short, pithy statement which expresses an<br />
opinion) and reflective comment upon the situation. Note, for example, the<br />
following:<br />
Ill wears he armes, that nill them use for Ladies sake<br />
Thus, it is admirable for rounding off an episode, or concluding a canto. It is<br />
quite often the most beautiful line of a stanza, which gathers strength as it moves<br />
on, giving the last beautiful touch to a detailed description. Note, for instance,<br />
the following:
Loe where the dreadfull Death behind thy backe doth stond,<br />
At times, it distils into one perfect sentence the emotion that the other eight lines<br />
of the stanza have evoked, such as the following:<br />
Ah Love, lay downe thy bow, the whiles I may respire.<br />
This ninth long line, called Alexandrine, as a rule, has an almost regular iambic<br />
beat, and a caesura which splits the line into two equal parts. Even with such a<br />
construction, it can be put to various uses, as Spenser does in The Faerie<br />
Queene. One of its uses is that it can express a tender beauty, such as the<br />
following:<br />
So faire a creature yet saw never sunny day.<br />
It can also roll magnificently as when it tells<br />
Of old Assaracus, and Inacbus divine<br />
Or when it tells of<br />
A sacrament prophane in mistery of wine.<br />
At times, it can also be utterly simple, such as the following:<br />
For all we have is this: what he list do, he may.<br />
Spenser quite often gives it a slight variation from the normal type to give<br />
expression to the subtlest grades of feeling. The addition of a syllable to the fifth<br />
foot of the line makes it dance with the grace and easy movement of a bride:<br />
When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th’ early morne.<br />
At times Spenser makes it avoid a marked caesura to gain an added length and a<br />
more sustained and sinuous flow like that of a snake. Note, for instance, the<br />
following:<br />
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares.<br />
Also, when the line is split by the caesura into three equal parts instead of two, it<br />
acquires a slow and halting movement, as of pain and weariness in the<br />
following:<br />
Their hearts were sicke, their sides were sore, their feete were lame.<br />
As we have seen, Spenser attains in all these lines an effect which seems beyond<br />
the scope of a decasyllabic verse. But to quote individual, isolated Alexandrine,<br />
as we have done here, does not give a fair idea of their true value. For their<br />
effect, these lines are dependent upon their vital relation with the metrical<br />
scheme of the entire stanza of nine lines. No poet has the distinction of ever<br />
weaving a web of verse as subtly intricate as Spenser’s. Throughout the vast<br />
length of The Faerie Queene Spenser heightens the effect proper to his<br />
interlacing rhyme-system by a continuous assonance and alliteration, and by the<br />
haunting repetition of word, phrase, and cadence. As the concluding quotation of<br />
the beauty that Spenser created in his wonder of nine lines, here is a piece which<br />
is so visual, so musical, and so stately:<br />
As when two rams stird with ambitious pride,<br />
Fight for the rule of the rich fleeced flocke,<br />
Their horned fronts so fierce on either side<br />
Do meete, with the terrour of the shocke
Astonied both, stand sencelesse as a blocke,<br />
Forgetful of the hanging victory:<br />
So stood these twaine, unmoved as a rocke,<br />
Both staring fierce, and holding idely<br />
The broken reliques of their former cruelty.<br />
SPENSER AS POET’S POET:<br />
Spenser has been known for over four hundred years now as the author of<br />
The Faerie Queene. More than any other poem in <strong>English</strong>, Canterbury Tales and<br />
Paradise Lost included, this has been a sort of source book for the subsequent<br />
poets. In this long poem, Spenser seems to have taken all poetic impressionism<br />
as his province. The poem is full of folklore, myth, and legend of all sorts. It is<br />
also crammed with influences Italian, medieval and classical. It is a peculiarly<br />
rich poem in pagan lore. Spenser’s metaphysic of fertility and creation is, in fact,<br />
often nearer to the pagan and the naturalistic than to the Christian. As G. Wilson<br />
Knight has observed, “The Faerie Queene is more a storehouse for poets of the<br />
future than itself a poem. In this, if in no other sense, he is the ‘poet’s poet’….<br />
Behind all our poetry there is unconsciously possessed legendary material:<br />
Spenser seems to have possessed it consciously.”<br />
Spenser has exercised the greatest influence on the subsequent<br />
generations of <strong>English</strong> poets. From Milton to Wordsworth, Shelly and Keats, to<br />
Tennyson, Swinburn and Bridges, his influence has been continuously felt.<br />
Descriptive or narrative, symbolic or allegorical, historical or mythological, for<br />
all kinds of poetry he has provided inspiration to the <strong>English</strong> poets. His stamp<br />
has been apparent and indelible on a large number of major <strong>English</strong> poets. When<br />
Milton described him as “our sage and serious poet Spenser,” he not only<br />
praised his predecessor, but also acknowledged his debt to him. Milton’s<br />
Paradise Lost shows that influence throughout its long narrative. Note, for<br />
instance, the following:<br />
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves<br />
Of cool recess, o’er which the mantling Vine<br />
Lays forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps<br />
Luxuriant.<br />
Milton is not “merely” or “simply” influenced here. The sudden dropping of the<br />
word “luxuriant,” and isolating it, shows direct use of the rhetorical technique<br />
that Spenser made his own in describing the Bower of Bliss. The technique<br />
involves pleasing or alluring the reader and then suddenly revealing moral<br />
danger, often by making us realize the dangerous moral meanings in words that,<br />
in other contexts, could be innocent or merely descriptive. Of course, Milton<br />
stands the technique on its head. He makes use of it only to remind us, in present<br />
case with a genuine shock of recognition, that this garden (Garden of Eden),<br />
unlike Spenser’s, is the true Eden. The point for us to note here is that the<br />
present use of Spenser involves on the part of Milton an active and critical
awareness of his poetic achievement. Like any great poet-critic Milton shows<br />
appreciation of Spenser’s rhetorical device both for its verbal craftsmanship as<br />
well as for the way it renders and evaluates man’s visions of and longing for a<br />
paradise on earth. It need to be remembered that among the poets who accept the<br />
reality of poetic genres and poetic styles and poetic conventions, writing a poem<br />
is often an act also of literary criticism. Much implicit commentary on Spenser<br />
is therefore to be found in the poems of his contemporaries and successors,<br />
which we the readers have to rediscover. It was not the rhetorical technique of<br />
Spenser’s poetry which influenced him, but also his moral teaching. As Milton<br />
remarks in his famous tract on the freedom of press, Areopagitica, Spenser “I<br />
dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true<br />
temprance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the<br />
cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know,<br />
and yet abstain.”<br />
That Spenser would become the poet’s poet got recognition in the early<br />
seventeenth century itself. Sir Kenelm Digby, a contemporary of Milton, had<br />
said as much, even more, as early as 1638:<br />
I hope that what he hath written will be a means that the <strong>English</strong><br />
tongue will now receive no more alterations and changes but will<br />
remain and continue settled in that form it now hath. For<br />
excellent authors do draw unto them the study of posterity, and<br />
whoever is delighted with what he readth in another feeleth in<br />
himself a desire to express like things in a like manner…. Which<br />
maketh me confident that no fate nor length of time will bury<br />
Spenser’s work and memory nor indeed alter that language that<br />
out of his school we now use….<br />
Very much in the same vein comes an acknowledgement of his debt to Spenser<br />
form Dryden, “I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin and Spenser in <strong>English</strong><br />
have been my masters. Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use<br />
sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which we call, though improperly, the<br />
Pindaric, because Mr. Cowley has often employed it in his Odes….” The<br />
influence of Spenser on the eighteenth century has been no less. As John<br />
Hughes, talking of Spenser being an “oak” of the <strong>English</strong> poetic tradition,<br />
having “serious, exalted and elegant mind, a warm and boundless fancy and was<br />
an admirable imager of virtues and vices,” proclaims: “the embellishments of<br />
description are rich and lavish in him beyond comparison; and as this is the most<br />
striking part of poetry, especially to young readers, I take it to be the reason that<br />
he has been the father of more poets among us than any other of our writers….<br />
It will not seem strange, therefore, that Cowley, as he himself tells us, first<br />
caught his flame by reading Spenser; that our great Milton owed him for his<br />
original, as Mr. Dryden assures us; and that Dryden studied him and has<br />
bestowed more frequent commendations on him than on any other <strong>English</strong><br />
poet.”
In the nineteenth century, Spenser received greater and warmer reception<br />
and admiration than ever before. The Romantics found in him a kindred soul,<br />
Keats in particular, and sought confirmation in him of their own views on<br />
poetry. Note how fondly Wordsworth recalls his reading of Spenser:<br />
In trellised shed with clustering roses gay,<br />
And, Mary! Oft beside our blazing fire,<br />
When years of wedded life were as a day<br />
Whose current answers to the heart’s desire,<br />
Did we together read in Spenser’s Lay<br />
How Una, sad of soul, in sad attire,<br />
The gentle Una, of celestial birth,<br />
To seek her knight went wandering o’er the earth.<br />
Here is an instance, not merely of a tribute to a predecessor, but also an imitation<br />
of his verses. The underlined phrases, the alliteration, consonance and<br />
assonance, all show a close copying of the earlier poet. Imitating an old master<br />
is in itself the greatest tribute to him. Among the Romantics Keats shows much<br />
greater affinity with Spenser than Wordsworth or any other poet of that age.<br />
Others who imitated Spenser include Walter Scott, who wrote his The Vision of<br />
Don Roderick in Spenserian stanza form. Byron’s Childe Harold and Shelley’s<br />
The Revolt of Islam and Adonais are also composed in the same stanza form.<br />
Keat’s The Eve of St. Agnes and an Inimitation of Spenser closely follow the<br />
poetic technique of Spenser, including his stanza form.<br />
In a way, Spenser is inimitable. His voice is, no doubt, highly distinctive<br />
and recognizable. As Dryden said of Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare as<br />
dramatists, there are “no bays to be expected in their walks.” Later, Tennyson, in<br />
the Victorian age, and then Swinburne, followed him as closely as did Keats.<br />
His influence continues, and will always continue, just as the influence of<br />
Homer and Virgil continues even today.<br />
SUM<strong>MA</strong>RY OF BOOK I:<br />
The plot-structure of Book I of The Faerie Queene is perhaps the clearest<br />
of all Books, its message no less. It closely follows the structure of a romance<br />
narrative. It presents a quest or journey full of adventures as well as dangers.<br />
The Book I consist of 12 cantos. The events in each canto follow in the<br />
chronological order as under:<br />
Canto I:<br />
Una, a lady, who represents Truth, accompanies a knight named Redcross.<br />
The knight is on a mission to overthrow a dragon that has occupied the land of<br />
Una’s parents. While going they lose their way in the Wandering Wood, where<br />
they encounter the monster Error. The Redcross knight, aided by Una,<br />
overcomes Error. Soon after, they come across Archimago, the enchanter.<br />
Unsuspecting, they go to his ‘hermitage’ to spend the night. He calls up infernal
spirits, sends one of them to Morpheus for fetching idle dreams of lust for the<br />
knight. He converts another spirit into someone resembling Una. This creacture<br />
goes to the knight’s bed. Although perplexed by the apparent change in virtuous<br />
“Una” (the false one in reality), he treats her gently and sends her away.<br />
Canto 2:<br />
Angered at the failure of his trick, Archimago converts one of the evil<br />
spirits into the like of the knight and sends him to Una’s bed. At the same time,<br />
he calls Redcross knight to witness Una’s “wanton lust and lewd embracement.”<br />
Tormented by the sight, Redcross leaves the hermitage at dawn, leaving Una<br />
behind. When Una wakes up, she feels grieved finding herself alone. She starts<br />
in search of the knight. Now Archimago disguises as Redcross knight to create<br />
further misunderstanding in her mind. Meanwhile, Redcross knight encounters<br />
Sansfoy, a Saracen knight, whose companion is the wantonly beautiful woman<br />
Duessa. As Sans foy attacks him, the Redcross knight kills the attacker. Now<br />
Duessa changes side, denigrates the dead, gets closer to the Redcross knight, and<br />
tells him that her name is Fidessa. She craves the knight’s mercy, which he<br />
extends. He falls for her charms and lies in dalliance under the shade of two<br />
mossy trees. When the knight plucks a bough from one of the trees to make<br />
garland for her, the tree speaks, revealing his name as knight Fradubio, who had<br />
abandoned his beloved Frelissa for Duessa. But, one day, when he had seen her<br />
in her true person as “filthy foule old woman,” he had tried to escape her, she<br />
perceived his thoughts and imprisoned him and his beloved in these two trees.<br />
Even after receiving the tree’s warning, the Redcross knight remains enchanted<br />
by Duessa.<br />
Canto 3:<br />
Searching for her knight, Una encounters a fierce Lion, who accompanies<br />
her as her guard and companion. When night falls, they stop at the cottage of<br />
blind Corceca and her daughter Abessa. When the Lion finds a robber,<br />
Kirkirapine, returning to the cottage with his loot stolen from the churches, the<br />
Lion kills the robber. Next morning, they resume their search for the knight and<br />
encounter on the way Archimago disguised as Redcross knight. Deceived by his<br />
disguise they feel overjoyed. As they are going along together, Sansloy, a<br />
Saracen knight, attacks Archimago (thinking he is Redcross knight). He does so<br />
in order to take revenge on Redcross knight who had killed his brother Sansjoy.<br />
In the encounter, Archimago gets injured, and then revealed as his helmet falls.<br />
Now Una feels perplexed and is in great distress. Attracted by her beauty,<br />
Sansloy tries to take her away, but the Lion resists and attacks Sansloy and gets<br />
killed. Sansloy succeeds in taking her away.<br />
Canto 4:
Meanwhile the Redcross knight is led by Duessa to the House of Pride,<br />
where he meets Lucifera (Pride) and the other deadly sins, Idleness, Gluttony,<br />
Lechery, Avarice, Envy, and Wrath, and also Satan with them. Now, the third<br />
Saracen brother, Sanjoy, attacks the Redcross knight as a measure of revenge for<br />
the death of his brother Sansfoy, but Lucifera stops the fight and decrees a<br />
proper duet for the next day. At night, Duessa goes to Sansjoy’s chamber, tells<br />
him of her love for his slain brother (Sansfoy) and also how she was captured by<br />
Redcross knight after her lover’s slaughter. She puts herself under Sansjoy’s<br />
protection.<br />
Canto 5:<br />
The next day takes place the fight between Redcross knight and Sansjoy.<br />
While about to fall, Sansjoy is saved from death by a “darksome cloud,<br />
presumably summoned on Duessa’s behest, by the infernal powers. Under the<br />
cover of this cloud Sansjoy escapes. Duessa straight rushes to Redcross knight<br />
and acclaims him. At night she travels to the secret chamber in which Sensjoy is<br />
hiding in woeful plight. Then she goes to the abode of Night to incite her to<br />
avenge the deaths of her descendant Saracen brothers. Night accompanies<br />
Duesa, and both come to Sansjoy, bandage his wounds, and take him<br />
underworld to Aesculapines for treatment. When Duessa returns to the House of<br />
Pride, she finds the Redcross knight gone.<br />
Canto 6:<br />
While being harassed by the lustful Sansloy, Una is rescued by a troop of<br />
fauns and satyrs, who then worship her. She stays with them for a while and<br />
teaches them Truth. Now arrives Sir Satyrane (born of a satyr father and a<br />
human female), who helps her leave the fauns and satyrs, and travels with her.<br />
They meet Archimago on the way, this time disguised as a pilgrim. He<br />
misinforms them that the Redcross knight was dead, killed by Sansloy. Satyrane<br />
rides off to trace Sansloy, finds him, and fights with him.<br />
Canto 7:<br />
The Redcross knight, enfeebled by drink from an enchanted spring, is<br />
found by Duessa, who rebukes him for having deserted her. On getting<br />
reconciled the knight again makes love to her. In his unguarded position, the<br />
knight is seized by the giant Orgoglio, and is imprisoned in the dungeon of the<br />
latter’s castle. As for Duessa, Orgoglio takes her for his leman (lover). The news<br />
of the capture of Redcross knight reaches Una, even possible death. At this point<br />
appears before Una Prince Arthur (the hero of the whole Faerie Queene),<br />
accompanied by his Squire Timias, and they proceed to liberate the Redcross<br />
Knight.<br />
Canto 8:
Prince Arthur, Timias and Una reach Orgoglio’s castle. A fight follows<br />
between Arthur and Orgoglio. Arthur slays the giant, captures Duessa, and at<br />
last finds the Redcross knight terribly wasted in the dungeon. Now Duessa is<br />
stripped of her rich garments, and is shown in her true person as filthy and ugly.<br />
Finding herself exposed she flees.<br />
Canto 9:<br />
Now Arthur reveals himself to Una as of unknown parentage, and tells her<br />
of his dream about the Faerie Queene, who is the object of his quest in this<br />
world. After being united, the Redcross knight and Una leave Arthur and<br />
Timias. On the way they encounter a knight named Sir Trevisan, who is fleeing<br />
from Despair. Moving further, they come upon the cave of Despair, where<br />
Redcross knight is tempted to suicide by Despair who helps him with a dagger.<br />
But since Una is with the knight and is not tempted by any such weakness, she<br />
snatches the dagger from him.<br />
Canto 10:<br />
Rescuing him from the cave of Despair Una brings the knight to the<br />
House of Holiness, where they are met by Dame Caelia, Faith, Hope and<br />
Charity. Here, Fidelia teaches him; Speranaza gives him comfort; Amendment,<br />
Penance, and Remorse discipline him; and Charissa show him the path to<br />
heaven, sending Mercy to accompany him to the hermitage of Contemplation.<br />
Now, Contemplation shows him the new Jerusalem, and tells him of his origin<br />
and his future. He reveals that he is destined to be a Saint, in fact St. George, the<br />
patron saint of England. Having received all these instructions, Redcross knight<br />
returns to Una, who is waiting for him, and they proceed on their journey.<br />
Canto 11:<br />
The duo of Una and knight finally arrives at the kingdom of Una’s<br />
parents, which lies ravaged by the Dragon. They make to the castle in which<br />
Una’s parents are imprisoned. A fight ensues between the knight and the<br />
Dragon, in which Redcross gets sorely wounded, and on the fall of evening, is<br />
hurled on to the ground. However, the knight falls into “the well of life”, which<br />
restores him to life again. The next day, the knight is again ready for the fight. In<br />
the terrible fight that ensues, the Redcross knight slips as he is recoiling from the<br />
Dragon’s fiery breath, this time near “the tree of life” growing near the stream of<br />
life. Once again the knight is revived. The third day’s battle begins, with the<br />
knight fully recovered at night, which ends in the death of the Dragon.<br />
Canto 12:<br />
With the Dragon now dead, all the inhabitants of the castle come out<br />
joyfully to have a look at the conquerer and the beast. Una’s parents, the King<br />
and Queen of Eden, thank the Redcross knight and shower gifts on him. They
carry Una and the knight into the castle. The job done, the knight wishes to<br />
return to the court of the Faerie Queene. He tells them that he still has six more<br />
years of service before his avowed marriage to Una can take place. Una unveils.<br />
Meanwhile, a messenger arrives with a letter from “Fidessa” saying that the<br />
Redcross knight is affianced to her and that he has deserted her. The messenger<br />
is none else than Archimago. On being discovered, he is thrown into the<br />
dungeon. The king then performs the sacred betrothal rites for the duo of Una<br />
and the knight. It is followed by grand feast and celebration. The Book I ends<br />
with the Redcross knight’s return to the court of the Faerie Queene.<br />
The Faerie Queene As A Gothic Poem:<br />
In Letter 8 of his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Richard Hurd said, in<br />
1762, the following:<br />
When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian<br />
rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic<br />
architecture has its own rules, by which when it comes to<br />
be examined, it is seen to have its merit as well as the<br />
Grecian. The question is not which of the two is conducted<br />
in the simplest or truest taste, when scrutinized by the laws<br />
on which each is projected.<br />
The same observation holds of the two sorts of poetry.<br />
Judge of The Faerie Queene by the classic models and you<br />
are shocked with its disorder; consider it with an eye to its<br />
Gothic original and you find it regular. The unity and<br />
simplicity of the former are more complete, but the latter<br />
has that sort of unity and simplicity which results from its<br />
nature.<br />
The Faerie Queene then, as a Gothic poem, derives its<br />
method, as well as the other characters of its composition,<br />
from the established modes and ideas of chivalry.<br />
To understand the nature of Spenser’s poem we need to know the world it<br />
pictures, its men and their manners, its hierarchy and occupations, its customs<br />
and conventions, its beliefs and beauties, etc.; for the poem’s structure is derived<br />
from the life style of that very world. Let us have a look at the outline and the<br />
essential nature of the faerie land.<br />
Spenser’s world is the world of knight errantry. It was usual at the holding<br />
of any royal feast or festival for the knights to appear before the presiding<br />
Prince, and claim the privilege of being sent on any adventure to which the<br />
solemnity might give occasion. At such an occasion, the distressed will also<br />
flock in from all sides knowing that they can get their grievances redressed<br />
there. Now, making this practice as a foundation for the poet’s design, we can<br />
see how properly The Faerie Queene is conducted. Spenser speaks of this<br />
foundation in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh which he added to the poem as a
preface: “I devise that the Fairy Queen kept her annual feast twelve days: upon<br />
which twelve several days, the occasions of the twelve several adventures<br />
happened; which being undertaken by twelve several knights, are in the twelve<br />
books severally handled.” Thus, we have here the poem’s design explained and<br />
the reason of it. The design arose out of the order of the subject. It was, thus, as<br />
requisite for The Faerie Queene to consist of the adventures of twelve knights as<br />
for the Odyssey to be confined to the adventures of one hero. Otherwise justice<br />
would not have been done to the poet’s subject. It is also pertinent to note here<br />
that the classic ideas of unity, for the same reason, have no place here and are in<br />
every view foreign to the purpose.<br />
Therefore, just as we seek the unity of Odyssey in the relation of its<br />
several adventures of its hero, so do we seek the unity of The Faerie Queene in<br />
the relation of the adventures of several knights to its central figure, the Fairy<br />
Queen. In other words, here the unity is to be seen, not in terms of action, but in<br />
terms of design. The gothic method of design, which Spenser’s poem follows,<br />
can be understood from what is called the gothic method of design in gardening.<br />
We are told that a wood or grove cut out into many separate avenues was<br />
amongst the most favourite of the works of art which they attempted in this<br />
species of cultivation. These walks used to be distinct from each other. They had<br />
each their several destination, and terminated on their own proper objects. Yet<br />
the whole was brought together and considered under one view by the relation<br />
which these various openings had, not to each other, but to their common and<br />
concurrent center. On this pattern, drawn from the gothic ideas, Spenser seems<br />
to have designed his poem. But, as he knew also what belonged to classic<br />
composition, he was tempted to tie his subjects still closer together by one<br />
expedient of his own and by another taken from his classic models.<br />
Spenser’s own was to interrupt the proper story of each Book by<br />
dispersing it into several. By this means he involved and intertwined the several<br />
actions together so that he could give something like the appearance of one<br />
action to his twelve adventures. For the conduct of this he had several examples<br />
before him in Italian poets. The other expedient that Spenser borrowed from the<br />
classics was by adopting one superior character who should be seen throughout.<br />
Prince Arthur, who has separate adventure of his own, is to have his part in each<br />
of the other. Thus, several actions are embodied by the interest which one<br />
principal hero has in them all. Now, considering The Faerie Queene as an epic<br />
or narrative poem constructed on gothic ideas, the unity of the poem can be<br />
easily seen in its design. But Spenser’s poem is not a simple narrative. It is also<br />
allegorical throughout. Spenser clearly subordinates the narration to his moral.<br />
As he himself announces in the very opening of the poem, “Fierce warres and<br />
faithful loves shall moralize my song.” That is, adventures of love and war shall<br />
serve as vehicle or instrument to convey the moral.<br />
Now, under this idea the unity of The Faerie Queene becomes more<br />
apparent. His twelve knights have to exemplify as many virtues, out of which
one illustrious character is to be shaped. In this design, then, the role of Prince<br />
Arthur in each book becomes essential, and yet not principal, exactly as the poet<br />
has contrived it. This management of the poem has come under heavy criticism<br />
over the years. They say that it necessarily breaks the unity of design. Their<br />
argument is that either Arthur should have had no part in the different<br />
adventures, or he should have had the chief part. He should have done either<br />
nothing or more. Conventional criticism apart, there are such designs in the East.<br />
Mahabharta is one example, where Lord Krishna plays a similar part. He<br />
appears only when others are not able to cope with the events on the ‘good’ side.<br />
He is to salvage every situation. The same is the case with Arthur. Both the<br />
characters are conceived with powers deemed superior to all others. There seems<br />
nothing wrong with this design so long as it offers an understandable pattern on<br />
that count. The Faerie Queene has a flawless design, offering a unity of its own,<br />
having no adventure for its own sake, and having all the very many for the sake<br />
of the grand purpose that governs the design.<br />
Thus, howsoever faulty the conduct of the poem may seem in the literal<br />
narrative, it is very much appropriate in the allegorical, which is moral.<br />
Spenser’s principal hero was not to have the twelve virtues in the same<br />
proportion in which they exist in the various persons of the knights – each of<br />
them his own. Such a character would not have been humanly probable. But he<br />
was to have so much of each as was requisite to form this superior character.<br />
The superiority of the human or superhuman character lies not in having any one<br />
superior virtue or having virtues in number more than the others. Having one or<br />
more virtues does not make a character superior to others. What makes him<br />
superior is the harmony or balance of all the virtues humans are capable of<br />
having. It is this proportion or harmony of all, not the excess of any one, which<br />
makes Arthur superior. The Greeks knew it. Spenser, who read them, knew it.<br />
We may have gone out of touch with this ancient concept of superiority or<br />
perfection. Aristotle’s concept of unity or beauty is based on this harmony or<br />
proportion of parts. Spenser is therefore doing nothing unusual or unheard of in<br />
the creation of Arthur or designing of The Faerie Queene.<br />
Obviously, this was the moral purpose of Spenser’s poem. And what way<br />
of expressing this moral in the history but by making Prince Arthur appear in<br />
each adventure and in a manner subsidiary to each Book’s proper hero? He may<br />
look inferior to each in his own specific virtue, he is superior to all by uniting in<br />
proportion the whole circle of their virtues in himself. And thus he arrives, at<br />
length, at the possession of that bright form of Glory, whose ravishing beauty, as<br />
he saw in a dream or vision, has led him out into these miraculous adventures in<br />
the land of the Fairy. The reasonable conclusion to the discussion is that, as an<br />
allegorical poem, the method of The Faerie Queene is governed by the justness<br />
of the moral. As a narrative poem, it is, obviously, conducted on the ideas and<br />
usage of chivalry. In either view, if taken by itself, the plan is defensible, quite<br />
comprehensible. Some say that the problem arises from the union of the two. To
us, there seems to be no such problem arising out of the poem’s design. It is very<br />
clearly explained in the poet’s letter to Raleigh, and as clearly conducted in the<br />
design of the poem. The romance and the allegory do not conflict with each<br />
other. They make only the two levels of the single narrative. The surface level,<br />
as is the case in any allegory, only illustrates in terms of humanly probable<br />
incidents and characters the abstract moral purpose of the poem. As such The<br />
Faerie Queene has, though incomplete, one of the most complex but cohesive<br />
design ever attempted in the long narrative, call it epic, if you so like. Spenser<br />
has fully succeeded in the execution of his moral plan of the poem. The poem,<br />
even as it is, in its incomplete form, makes a wonderful reading, so rich and<br />
varied in adventures, so solemn and single-minded in its moral purpose.<br />
BOOK’S FOR FURTHER READING<br />
1. C. S. Lewis. <strong>English</strong> Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford<br />
<strong>University</strong> Press, 1954.<br />
2. C. S. Lewis. The Allegory of Love. Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, 1936.<br />
3. Hallett Smith. Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meanings,<br />
and Expression. Harvard <strong>University</strong> Press, 1952.<br />
4. Paul J. Alpers (ed.). Edmund Spenser, in Penguin Critical Anthologies.<br />
Penguin Books, 1969.<br />
5. William Nelson. The Poetry of Edmund Spenser. Columbia <strong>University</strong><br />
Press, 1963.<br />
6. William Nelson(ed.). Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund<br />
Spenser. Columbia <strong>University</strong> Press, 1961.<br />
7. Graham Hough. A Preface to the Faerie Queene. Duckworth and Norton,<br />
1962.<br />
8. A. C. Hamilton. The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Oxford<br />
<strong>University</strong> Press, 1961.<br />
QUESTION BANK<br />
1. Discuss Spenser as the poet’s poet.<br />
2. Examine the case of Spenser as a Renaissance poet.<br />
3. Write a note on the poetic style of Edmund Spenser.<br />
4. Discuss The Faerie Queene as an epic.<br />
5. Examine the structure of The Faerie Queene.<br />
6. Write a critical note on the narrative of Book I of The Faerie Queene.<br />
7. Discuss the character of the Redcross knight as the hero of Book I of The<br />
Faerie Queene.<br />
8. Write a note on the Spenserian stanza, considering its origin and<br />
significance.<br />
9. Bring out the allegorical meaning of Book I of The Faerie Queene.<br />
10. Discuss Ben Jonson’s statement that Spenser “writ no language.”
Alexander Pope<br />
ALEXANDER POPE<br />
The Rape of the Lock<br />
43
44<br />
Unit-2: Alexander Pope<br />
Chronology of Pope's Life<br />
1688 (May 21 Pope born, Lombard St. London.<br />
1700 Pope s family moves to Binfield in Windsor<br />
Forest.<br />
1702<br />
1705 Becomes acquainted with Wycherley, Walsh,<br />
and other literary persons.<br />
1709 Pastorals.<br />
1710 Beginning of friendship with Caryll.<br />
1711 Essay on Criticism.<br />
1712 The Rape of the Lock (2 Canto version). First<br />
meets Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Parnell and<br />
Oxford. Beginning of Scriblerus Club.<br />
1713 Windsor-Forest. Proposals issued for<br />
translation of the Iliad. Painting lessons from<br />
Jervas.<br />
1714 Enlarged version of The Rape of the Lock.<br />
Scriblerus Club breaks up on death of Anne.<br />
1715 The Temple of Fame. Iliad, Books I-IV.<br />
Friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu<br />
begins.<br />
1716 Iliad, Books V-VIII. Family move to<br />
Chiswick.<br />
1717 Iliad, Books IX-XII. Pope s Works including<br />
Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory<br />
of an Unfortunate Lady . (October) Pope s<br />
father dies.<br />
1718 Iliad, Books XIII-XVI.<br />
1719 Pope and his mother move to Twickenham.<br />
1720 Iliad, Books XVII-XXIV.<br />
1721 Pope s edition of Parnell s Poems with Epistle<br />
to Oxford as Preface. Begins work on<br />
edition of Shakespeare.<br />
1722 Begins work on translation of the Odyssey<br />
with Fenton and Broome.<br />
Related Historical & Literary Events<br />
Poetry<br />
The Glorious Revolution William of Orange becomes<br />
King of England. James II flees to France.<br />
Death of Dryden.<br />
Death of William III. Accession of Queen Anne.<br />
Declaration of war on France.<br />
Peace negotiations.<br />
Fall of Whigs. Tory ministry formed under Robert<br />
Harley, later Lord Oxford.<br />
Swift s Conduct of the Allies.<br />
Peace of Utrecht. Harley and Bolingbroke struggle<br />
for power within Tory party.<br />
Death of Queen Anne. Accession of George I. Tories<br />
fall from power.<br />
Impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke. Oxford put<br />
in Tower, Bolingbroke flees to France. Jacobite<br />
rebellion.<br />
Septennial Act.<br />
Death of Parnell.<br />
Death of Addison. Defoe s Robinson Crusoe.<br />
South Sea Bubble.<br />
Robert Walpole becomes Lord Treasurer.<br />
Atterbury charged with complicity in a plot to reinstate<br />
the Pretender.
Alexander Pope<br />
1723 Pope s edition of Buckingham s Works,<br />
seized by Government on suspicion of<br />
Jacobite passages. Pope appears before<br />
House of Lords as witness at Atterbury s<br />
trial.<br />
1725 Pope s edition of Shakespeare in 6 volumes.<br />
Odyssey, Vols I-III.<br />
1726 Odyssey IV-V. Swift visits Pope. Friendship<br />
with Spence begins.<br />
1727 Pope-Swift Miscellanies I-II. Swift s second<br />
visit to Pope.<br />
1728 Pope-Swift Miscellanies, III, inci. Peri<br />
Bathous. The Dunciad, in 3 Books, with<br />
Theobald as hero.<br />
1729 The Dunciad Variorum.<br />
1731 Epistle to Burlington. Pope-Swift<br />
Miscellanies, IV.<br />
1732 Epistle to Bathurst. Imitation of Horace,<br />
Satire II, i.<br />
1733 An Essay on Man, Epistles I-III. (June)<br />
Death of Pope s mother. Pope becomes more<br />
committed to the Patriot opposition.<br />
1734 Epistle to Cobham. Essay on Man, Epistle<br />
IV. Imitation of Horace, Satire II, ii.<br />
1735 An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Epistle to a<br />
Lady. Pope s Works, vol. II. Curll s edition<br />
of Pope s letters. Prince of Wales visits Pope<br />
at Twickenham<br />
1737 Imitation of Horace, Epistle II, ii. Authorized<br />
edition of Pope s letters. Imitation of<br />
Horace, Epistle II, i.<br />
1738 Imitation of Horace, Epistle I, vi. Imitation<br />
of Horace, Epistle I, i. Epilogue to the Satires.<br />
1739 Spends winter with Ralph Allen at Prior Park<br />
near Bath.<br />
1740 First meets Warburton. Refurbishes his<br />
grotto.<br />
1741 Publisher Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.<br />
Works closely with Warburton on revised<br />
edition of his poems.<br />
1742 The New Dunciad (i.e. Book IV).<br />
1743 The Dunciad in Four Books, with Cibber<br />
replacing Theobald as hero. Pope s health<br />
deteriorates.<br />
45<br />
Atterbury found guilty of Jacobitism and exiled.<br />
Bolingbroke pardoned and returns for brief stay.<br />
Bolingbroke returns from exile and settles near Pope<br />
at Dawlay Farm.<br />
Bokingbroke begins. The Craftsman. Theobald s<br />
Shakespeare Restored. Swift s Gulliver s Travels.<br />
Death of George I. Accession of George II.<br />
Gay s Beggar s Opera. The War with the Dunces<br />
reaches a peak.<br />
Swift s Modest Proposal.<br />
Death of Gay. Hogarth s prints of The Harlot s<br />
Progress.<br />
Walpole s Excise Scheme defeated. Bolingbroke s<br />
Dissertation upon Parties appeared in The<br />
Craftman.<br />
Death of Arbuthnot and Lord Peterborough.<br />
Bolingbroke returns to France.<br />
Hogarth s Rake s Progress.<br />
Death of Queen Caroline. Prince of Wales heads<br />
Patriot opposition. Crousaz attacks An Essay on<br />
Man.<br />
Bolingbroke returns from France and stays with Pope<br />
at Twickenham. Dr. Johnson s London.<br />
Warburton s Vindication of the Essay on Man<br />
defends Pope against Crousaz.<br />
Handel s Messiah receives its first performance, in<br />
Dublin.<br />
Walpole resigns.
46<br />
The Age of Pope<br />
Poetry<br />
The revolution of 1688, which banished the last Stuart kings and called William of Orange to the throne,<br />
marks the end of the long drawn struggle of England for the political freedom. Once the goal of the political<br />
freedom was attained, thereafter the <strong>English</strong> people spent their energies in efforts to improve their political<br />
systems through discussions in order to bring about reforms in their socio-political life for which the votes<br />
were necessary. And to get the votes the people of England were to be approached with ideas, facts,<br />
arguments and information. So the newspaper was born and the first newspaper, The Daily Courant, appeared<br />
in London in 1702. Literature in the widest sense of the term, including books, newspapers, magazines and<br />
other forms of writing, focuses on the complete society that played an instrumental role in the progress of the<br />
nation. It makes some sense if one takes into account the political scenario of the age, but it attains a greater<br />
significance if one considers on the whole the circumstances, which were very largely favourable to all round<br />
development of the nation. In his comprehensive book, A History of <strong>English</strong> Literature, Louis Cazamian<br />
describes the literary scene and summaries its history thus:<br />
The Revolution 1688 does not constitute a break from the past; it inaugurates an organic and regular<br />
progress. The upper middle classes associate themselves with the nobility in the exercise of power a more<br />
extensive section of the nation participates in political influence and directs culture. . The classical ideal of<br />
art, elaborated under the Restoration in an atmosphere of aristocratic elegance, finds full realization during<br />
the reign of Queen Anne and George 1in a broadened society, whose members are growing more numerous<br />
and so diverse, but where the spirit of literature is undergoing no essential change.<br />
By the modern standards, the nation was parochial and sharply stratified. This kind of society could express<br />
itself most adequately in its high art because it has the potential to convey the whole truth.<br />
(A) Social Development of the Age<br />
The first half of the eighteenth century brought remarkable and rapid changes in the <strong>English</strong> society. Uptill<br />
now the society was governed by the narrow and obsolete standards of the Middle Ages and there was no<br />
freedom to question them or even to differ from them. The society was cultivating the art of living together,<br />
while still holding different opinions on various urgent issues. The social historians cite the example of the<br />
mushroom growth of the coffeehouses as the centers of sociability. In a single generation nearly two thousand<br />
public coffeehouses sprang up in London alone, and the number of private clubs is equally astonishing. The<br />
new social life and culture had its effect on the language and manners of the people. Though the typical<br />
Londoner of Queen Anne s days was rude and even a little vulgar in his tastes; the city itself was filthy, the<br />
streets unlighted and infested with the rowdies and bands of petty thieves, but outwardly men sought to refine<br />
themselves as per the prevailing standards. To have a good form and elegant manners was the first priority<br />
and duty if one wished to be a part of a refined society or wrote literature. Briefly, this superficial elegance<br />
fully registers itself in every book or poem of the age.<br />
On the political scene, the Government still had its opposing parties Tory and Whig and the Church was<br />
divided into Catholics, Anglicans and Dissenters, but the growing social life subsided many antagonisms, and<br />
gave the impression of peace and unity. The writers of the age participated in the religious and political<br />
debates through their writings. The scientists like Newton and philosophical thinkers like Locke and the<br />
religious men like Wesley, all recommended the virtues of moderation in their respective fields of thought.<br />
They argued from reason and Scripture, and used mild satire to deal with their opponents, instead denouncing<br />
them vehemently. W.J.Long has beautifully summed up the tendencies of the period stating:<br />
“ … the general tendency of the age was toward toleration. Man had found himself in the<br />
long struggle for personal liberty; now he turned to the task of discovering his neighbour,<br />
of finding in Whig and Tory, in Catholic and Protestant, in Anglican and Dissenter, the<br />
same general human characteristics, that he found in himself. This good work was helped,<br />
moreover by the spread of education and by the growth of the national spirit…. Under their<br />
many differences they were all alike <strong>English</strong>men.”
Alexander Pope<br />
In the latter half of the eighteenth century the political and social progress is almost bewildering. The modern<br />
form of cabinet government responsible to Parliament and the people had been established under George 1;<br />
in 1757, the cynical and corrupt practices of Walpole, Premier of the first Tory cabinet, were replaced by the<br />
more enlightened policies of Pitt. Schools and colleges were established; coffeehouses and clubs increased in<br />
number, books and magazines multiplied and the press became the greatest visible power in England. The<br />
preachers like Wesley and Whitefield brought a tremendous spiritual revival known as Methodism that was<br />
felt by all the churches of England. Outside her own borders three great men Clive in India, Wolfe on the<br />
plains of Abraham, Cook in Australia and the islands of Pacific discovered the hidden wealth of the new<br />
lands and spread the world wide empire of the Anglo-Saxons<br />
(B) Some Social Practices of the Age And their Projection In Literature<br />
The writers of the age were greatly influenced by the social condition of the age and their range was<br />
restricted to the town. They wrote for the critics of the Coffeehouses, for the noblemen from whom they<br />
expected patronage, and for the political party they were pledged to support. At the level of the political life<br />
in which most of the eminent writers participated with two important things in mind: (i) There was the custom<br />
of patronage and the writers wished to attach themselves to a patron and (ii) they were keen to take part<br />
active part in the political strife and even a writer like Swift was obliged to do so. Politicians divided<br />
themselves into two hostile camps, Whigs and Tories. The patriotic sentiment was more of a matter to be<br />
demonstrated than a thing to be felt. The poets and the writers wrote satires and lampoons on their patron s<br />
political enemies. Compton Rickett observes:<br />
“ At first, the poet or the pamphleteer attaches himself to some influential Minister using his<br />
pen on behalf of this gentleman s cause. Afterwards when the minister found he could get<br />
his work done more cheaply than by hiring man of taste, the literary man was thrown upon<br />
the suffrages of the public then rising into existence.”<br />
Patronage existed even in the days of Dr. Johnson. The story how Dr. Johnson sought Lord Chesterfield s<br />
help for preparing his Dictionary and what happened in the end is well known. In due course of time, the<br />
reading public increased and it put the custom of the author s dependence on a patron to an end. The most<br />
significant change in the eighteenth century society was the induction of the coffeehouse and club culture in<br />
the cities. It was at these places that the politicians and clergymen, lawyers and literary men discussed the<br />
problems of the age. Not only that they came in direct contact with the public and the readers also. At these<br />
coffeehouses the wits assembled to exchange repartees and the moralists to deliver their sermons; the<br />
satirists gathered to attack vices and vicious men and the literary artists to discuss their proposals of their<br />
forthcoming works. As it is commonly acknowledged, The well-known writers of the day congregated at<br />
these places and talked to their friends and criticized their rivals. It was at the coffeehouse that Pope met<br />
Dryden. It was from here that Addison discoursed to his selected circles and Dr. Johnson delivered many of<br />
his talks. These writers found their subject matters from these surroundings besides meeting their friends and<br />
foes. It is worthwhile to note that there came into existence separate coffeehouses of Whigs and Tories and<br />
they would not go to the coffeehouses of another party. It was so, may be, to avoid confrontation or to retain<br />
their privacy. The periodicals were published for the pleasure and profit of these visitors of the coffeehouses<br />
and books were judged not on their merit, but according to the political beliefs of the authors. Impartial<br />
criticism hardly existed. There was violence and hostility, which affected the literary criticism. His enemies<br />
even threatened Pope in that way and he took care to carry pistol with him for the personal safety while going<br />
out of Twickenham.<br />
One of the common social practices was that of snuff-taking which started towards the end of the eighteenth<br />
century, and it grew extremely popular. Both men and women used snuff and they seldom went out without<br />
a snuff-box with them. If Addison and Steele recommended to their readers of Tatler to take three dishes of<br />
bohea and two pinches of snuff, Pope showed in The Rape of the Lock, its place in the fashionable society<br />
and mildly criticized its use.<br />
47
48<br />
Poetry<br />
The age of Pope suffered from certain vices, which are projected in its literature especially in the novel.<br />
Prominent among them were dueling, drunkenness and gambling. Fielding, the father of modern <strong>English</strong><br />
novel and Goldsmith mentioned dueling in their novels; even Dr. Johnson defended it and Sir Walter Scott<br />
was willing to accept a challenge in his old age for a comment he made about Napoleon. Drunkenness was<br />
a wide spread weakness among all the ranks and level of people. Similarly, all the classes of people practised<br />
gambling. John Dennis mentions in his book, The Age of Pope, that<br />
“This evil was exhibited on a national scale by the establishment of the South Sea Company,<br />
which exploded in 1720…. At Bath, which was then the center of <strong>English</strong> fashion, it reigned<br />
supreme; and the physicians even recommended it to their patients as a form of distraction.<br />
In the greenrooms of the theatres, as Mrs Bellany assures us, thousands were often lost and<br />
won in a single night. Among fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among<br />
men…”<br />
Pope highlighted this fashion in The Rape of the Lock by showing Belinda playing a game of Ombre and<br />
losing it which seems to be the cause of the whole problem. Similarly, the ladies of the fashionable society<br />
adopted the custom of receiving visitors in their bedroom. The following couplet of The Rape of the Lock<br />
refers to it directly:<br />
The fair ones feel such maladies as these.<br />
When each new nightdress gives a new disease.<br />
Wits, who formed a significant group in the eighteenth century society, displayed their flair for intelligent and<br />
cleverness in interacting with people specially ladies. Their tone of gallantry was often carried to the point of<br />
absurdity; for instance, take the character of Sir Plume from The Rape of the Lock. Even Pope himself in<br />
his letter to Judith Cowper professed to worship her as much as any female saint in heaven, and used still<br />
stronger protestations of love and admiration for Lady Montagu. The irony is that women in that age were<br />
treated as pretty triflers, who were meant more to amuse men than elevate them. For their plight they<br />
themselves were responsible to a great extent. Lord Chesterfield made a very candid remark about it that,<br />
No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest and gratefully<br />
accept the lowest.<br />
The Augustan Age had other drawbacks like political corruption, dirty party strife and low morals. These<br />
problems started with King Charles, who along with his courtiers and statesmen, ignored these practices and<br />
the situation could not improve even during the reign of William and Mary. Queen Anne had an instinctive<br />
respect for moral law but being a meekly stupid person could not do much. However, the corruption was<br />
not limited to the domain of politics only, but infiltrated to almost every aspect of social life. Even religion was<br />
not spared from such degeneration and was used to serve personal ends.<br />
These common flaws in the age should not make us underrate certain very high qualities, which make it a<br />
great age, the silver age as Ian Jack called it. It was a great age of high political philosophy and oratory;<br />
it was an age when England won the continental wars and built up a mighty empire in India. The progress in<br />
the literature, art and music too was rapid. The novel attained an unprecedented robust life at the hands of<br />
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. Reynolds and Gainsborough, Romney and Wilson established<br />
schools of portrait and landscape painting. Under the inspiring leadership of Handel, the power of music was<br />
felt, as it was never experienced before. Sciences and inventions made rapid progress. Poets and writers<br />
enjoyed a status and position in society and were given important posts in government. If Addison could<br />
gain a pension and subsequently a high official position because of his powerful pen, Pope was the first poet<br />
to live comfortably by the sale of his works and could cherish friendships with the highest statesman and<br />
aristocrats of England. Briefly, the Age of Pope honoured its creative artists and promoted the talents of the<br />
nation.<br />
Major Literary Characteristics<br />
The term Augustan as Sainsbury points out, is sometimes applied to the whole period during which Pope<br />
wrote, sometimes limited to the reign of Queen Anne, and sometimes extended backwards so as to include
Alexander Pope<br />
the age of Dryden. If the last use of the term is considered to be the best, the Augustan Age in <strong>English</strong><br />
literature begins with the accession of Charles 11 in 1660. It covers the whole of Restoration period of which<br />
Dryden is the greatest writer and extends to the classical school, which develops approximately with Pope.<br />
Its traditions continue till 1798 when Wordsworth published the Lyrical Ballads. From this point of view, the<br />
Augustan age includes the age of Dryden (1660-1700), and the Age of Pope (1700-1744). Briefly the term<br />
Augustan Age includes the period of both the great writers, Dryden and Pope, and it originated in Dr.<br />
Johnson s famous comparison of Dryden with the Augustans when the former dealt with the <strong>English</strong> language<br />
and Literature and the latter with the city of Rome. He says:<br />
“To Dryden we owe… the refinement of our language, and much to the correctness of our<br />
sentiments. By him we were taught … to think naturally and express forcibly… What was<br />
said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied an easy metaphor to <strong>English</strong> poetry<br />
embellished by Dryden… he found it brick and he left it marble.”<br />
However, the Augustanism in <strong>English</strong> Literature implies veneration for the Roman classics, their thought and<br />
way of life. In the British history this period is of great significance and marks a beginning of a new society<br />
and a new literature. These changes were the outcome of the complex socio- political events, which had<br />
been occurring since the dawn of the seventh century. If the Elizabethan literature presents deep and intense<br />
emotions and boundless flights of imagination, which forms the texture of its plays and other literary genres,<br />
there is a gradual change in the tone and literary temperament of the writers ,for example ,in the last plays<br />
of Shakespeare. A clear touch of intellectuality and even philosophy as in the Metaphysical School of Poetry<br />
directly indicates the changes. During the early decades of the seventeenth century <strong>English</strong> literature was<br />
striving for regularity, restraint, reason, order and balance. During the reign of Charles-II, which began in<br />
1660, the King and aristocracy both helped to create an environment for this sort of literature. During the<br />
Restoration period the court with its elegance and an ordered balance becomes the center of fashion both in<br />
life and literature. The London society prided itself in exerting the deterministic influence on the literature of<br />
the time, which became the literature of the town , of London society.<br />
The contemporary France also influenced the literature of the Restoration Age. King Charles-II and his<br />
courtiers, including a number of writers who were with them, had spent many years of their exile in France,<br />
where they imbibed the French culture, and many new tendencies of French Literature. When they returned<br />
to England, they tried their best to enforce the French ideals in the realm of literature. Neo-classicism<br />
developed earlier in France than in England. Therefore the variety of influences which mark the new literature<br />
bear the impact of France as well as of the classics which were prevalent in the contemporary France. It<br />
was specially so in the case of poetry. The character and rhythm of the <strong>English</strong> classical lines are fixed, so<br />
to speak, by the authority of inner choice, which in its turn is prompted, accentuated and even controlled by<br />
the cadence of French verse. There also began a search for the authority of rules, and in this matter the<br />
authority of Latin poet, Horace, and of the French poet Boileau came to be accepted. As the characteristics<br />
of the new literature are restraint, rationality, a desire for order, balance and a composed tone, to attain these<br />
qualities, the classical writers like Ben Jonson were adored, though they did not lose sight of the Renaissance<br />
writers like Beaumont and Fletcher and in certain aspects Shakespeare also. The main themes of the new<br />
literature of the Restoration period were parody, comedy, satire, analytical reasoning and criticism.<br />
In 1700 begins the Neo-Classical Age, which continues with full force during the lifetime of Pope. Though its<br />
traditions prevail till the end of the eighteenth century, Pope is undoubtedly the greatest representative of the<br />
Neo-Classical Age as he accentuates and modifies the general traits of the new literature of the Restoration<br />
period. It is amazing that the literature of the Age of Pope, which is termed Classical, is not so either in its<br />
inspiration or in form It does not come very near to the literature of antiquity or the French model. The poets<br />
of the Neo-Classical school look for their model in Latin literature and all Latin poets, including Augustans<br />
like Horace and Ovid, have the Italian love for the beauty of nature. For illustration, consider Wordsworth,<br />
who has more in common with Virgil than Pope. Therefore the eighteenth century classicism is termed<br />
49
50<br />
Poetry<br />
pseudo classicism. The poets and writers of this period, no doubt, cherished deeply the desire to observe<br />
the aesthetic rules of the ancients but to achieve their end they imitated the French writers, who also observed<br />
the classical rules. Hence their actual achievement, that is, their writings, instead of being termed classical,<br />
are called Neo-Classical .The literary historians like A. N. Whitehead call it the silver age of the<br />
European Renaissance, which is a period between the civil wars and the middle of the eighteenth century.<br />
Briefly, the ideals produced by the interaction of medievalism and the vigorous classical and Continental<br />
influences of the new age provided the background which supported poets in their endeavours to match the<br />
literary standards of the literatures of Greece and Rome.<br />
These Neo-Classical writers have a marked distrust of originality and inspiration. They have a two-fold idea<br />
before them which they strictly follow: (i) Simple orderliness in idea and (ii) Smooth balance in form. They<br />
care more for form than for the spirit of literature; more for the expression than for the thing expressed. Pope<br />
suggests his idea for poetry in the famous following couplet:<br />
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed<br />
What oft was thought but never so well expressed.<br />
Pope was not uttering a barren half-truth characteristic of an age lacking in originality but repeating a<br />
simple, commonplace idea, which constantly guided them. In other words, the general tendency of the literature<br />
of the age was to look at life critically, to emphasize intellect rather than imagination, the form rather than the<br />
content of a sentence. Writers tried hard to repress all emotion and enthusiasm and to use only precise and<br />
elegant methods of expression. This is what is often meant by the classicism of the ages of Pope and<br />
Johnson. Actually, the classical movement in this age had become pseudo-classical which means partly or<br />
false classical.<br />
The poets of the Neo-Classical school aim at the perfection of form, for which they labour hard. To achieve<br />
two most significant characteristics The scrupulous searching for a perfection and the sovereignty of<br />
Form the writers of the Age strove persistently. Dr. Johnson made very perceptive remarks about Pope s<br />
efforts to achieve the desired effect in the art of versification when he observed:<br />
“ By perpetual practice, language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having<br />
always the same use of words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his<br />
call.”<br />
Such a laboured work of art will, no doubt, possess exquisite glitter and polish but it would lack spontaneity<br />
and novelty, which occurs only when the creative imagination is allowed a free play. Dr. Johnson again<br />
defends the approach of the Neo-Classical poets and says about Pope:<br />
New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification<br />
will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best and what shall be added will be the effort of<br />
tedious toil and needless curiosity If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?<br />
The Neo-Classical school of poetry is dominated by reason and correctness. As Geoffrey Tillotson puts it<br />
asserting the value of correctness and Intellectual quality in Pope s poetry that<br />
Pope satisfies the expectation in a thousand ways. ....To make his kind of poetry he relied partly on the<br />
intellectual quality of what he was saying. And his poetry served to demonstrate the proximity,<br />
interpenetrableness, of the intellect and the emotions<br />
In his book, On the Poetry of Pope he makes it specifically clear that For Pope and his contemporaries<br />
the word correctness had full colour of novelty. ‘ He elaborates the idea in relation to Nature, Design,<br />
Language and Versification of Pope showing how through the common and teachable element in literature he<br />
follows the principle of correctness. As the Augustan age broadens and intensifies the practice of free<br />
rational inquiry, which the Restoration could apply only in an incomplete way, the literature of the period finds<br />
therein its true inspiration whether in its poetry or prose. It earns the age another name by which it designates
Alexander Pope<br />
itself, that is, The Age of Prose and Reason . If in its poetry Pope is the center, and so to say its symbol, in<br />
prose it is Addison who carries the rational as the scruple of his style and Swift becomes one of the greatest<br />
masters of <strong>English</strong> prose. Pat Rogers rightly comments in his book, Introduction to Pope, that<br />
“ Pope was a representative writer of his time, to a far greater degree than Swift, Richardson<br />
and even Defoe. An outsider in the social sense, he was nonetheless able to infuse his best<br />
work with a sharp contemporary tang. Furthermore he did not disdain the superficial polish<br />
of Augustan vers de societe.”<br />
Pope’s life and works<br />
Pope was born on 21 May 1688. He was the only child of the second marriage of a prosperous London<br />
linen-merchant. Pope s father, who was the son of clergyman, could rank as a gentleman. Pope was born<br />
when his mother was already forty-six and his father forty-two. His lifelong devotion to his elderly parents,<br />
whom he cared for till the time of their respective deaths, is one of the most moving and significant aspects<br />
of his life. He loved them tenderly through out their lives and they loved him and were his refuge against the<br />
cruelty of the world. The household was a most happy and contented one. What an irony it is that if he was<br />
tiny, tall people crowded around him; though he was deformed, people with beautiful shapes surrounded him<br />
and were proud of knowing him. Pope s father, who was a successful businessman and was perhaps influenced<br />
by commercial trips to Portugal, had become converted to Roman Catholicism. The family lived over his<br />
warehouse in Lombard Street. But when James II led and William and Mary succeeded, it became the law<br />
that Roman Catholics must live at least ten miles away from the Cities of London and Westminster. Several<br />
laws were passed forbidding Catholics preventing their children from being taught by Catholic priests, compelling<br />
them to forfeit two-thirds of their estates or the value thereof. And, of course, they were prevented from<br />
serving in Parliament or holding any office of profit under the Crown. His parents thought it was best to live<br />
out of London and he himself found it inadvisable to come up to town for medical attention during his illness.<br />
As a result the elder Alexander Pope finally settled in a small farm in Windsor Forest at Binfield in Berkshire,<br />
taking his savings with him in large wooden boxes, perhaps he distrusted William s new Bank of England.<br />
Pope was about twelve years old then. Soon, the Old Mr. Pope made friends not only among the Romanist<br />
country gentry but also, because of his son s precious poetic talent and lively ways, with a staunch protestant<br />
Whig like Sir William Trumbull, who held a high office under William. However, the anti-Catholic laws<br />
became a major factor in determining the course of Pope s life. Though the literary historians have disagreed<br />
with the account of Pope s ancestry and its endless mystifications, but none can question that Pope had<br />
terribly poor health caused by the curvature in his backbone, which left him almost invalid. As the biographical<br />
details of Pope s early childhood are not fully known, nothing could be definitely said about its causes.<br />
However, Edith Sitwell states in her book, Alexander Pope that<br />
It is probable that Pope inherited at least some tendency to deformity from his father, who suffered from a<br />
slight curvature of the spine. It is quite undoubted that he inherited from his mother those terrible headaches<br />
that made his later life martyrdom. But, his half-sister Mrs. Rackett told Spence that he was a pretty little boy,<br />
with happy laughter, clear eyes and round rosy cheeks that healthy children have. He had too gentle and<br />
affectionate disposition, and it was as a small child that the sweetness of his voice earned him the loving<br />
name of the little nightingale.<br />
George Fraser mentions with considerable certainty in his book, Alexander Pope, that as a child Pope<br />
suffered two accidents: one, probably at Lombard Street or possibly in Binfield he had been trampled on by<br />
a large cow; second, later on from drinking bad milk from one of the Binfield cows. He developed that<br />
disease of curvature of the spine, which made it necessary, in his later years, for him to be sewn every<br />
morning into a tight pair of corsets and to have his withered legs warmed and disguised by three thick pairs<br />
of woolen stockings. He was almost a dwarf, well under five feet high (four feet six, in fact). What is<br />
particularly sad is that his earlier portrait, painted before these accidents, shows a chubby, cheerful little boy<br />
51
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Poetry<br />
with every promise of healthy growth .A renowned scholar like Geoffrey Tillotson in Pope and Human<br />
Nature gives an entirely different reason for his being a permanent invalid. He says: As a result of too much<br />
of study (so he thought), he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection which limited his<br />
growth .<br />
In A Preface to Pope, I.R.F.Godon points out that Pope s health was seriously impaired by some kind of<br />
tubercular disease of bones, which was known as Pott s disease and it was inevitable that his deformity and<br />
poor health should interfere with his activities throughout what he pathetically calls This long Disease, my<br />
Life in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. He actually was so weak that he was not able to dress and undress<br />
himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. Sympathy with Pope s character and for his sufferings<br />
shines through every page of Doctor Johnson s essay, though the poet s faults are not glossed over. None,<br />
who knew his sufferings, would fail to be saddened by the tragedy of this man whose body was too frail for<br />
the terrible burden of his genius, and whose life was one long torture of pain and weakness and humiliation<br />
caused by the knowledge of his deformity, as Edith Sitwell put it. Pope, who had perhaps the most subtle and<br />
sensitive feeling for beauty of form, realized painfully how his own outward form raised feelings of mockery<br />
or coarse pity in the beholders.<br />
Pope had been to two schools for Catholics in London, learning little or nothing, but the move to Binfield<br />
brought Pope s formal education to a close. Henceforth, he largely educated himself. In June 1739 he told<br />
Spence that:<br />
“ When I had done with my priests I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great<br />
eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. In a few years I had dipped into a great<br />
number of the <strong>English</strong>, French, Italian, Latin and Greek poets. This I did without any design<br />
but that of pleasing myself, and got the languages by hunting after the stories in several<br />
poets I read, rather than read the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my<br />
fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the woods and fields just as they fall<br />
in his way. I still look upon these five or six years as the happiest part of my life.”<br />
At Binfield his father set him to writing rhymes and some of his early efforts survive, mainly neat imitations<br />
of the earlier court poets of his own century. Though there is a patchy imitation of Chaucer also. Pope grew<br />
interested in poetry at a very early age as he himself told Spence in March 1743 I began writing verses of<br />
my own invention farther back than I can remember . There is some slight exaggeration in the claim which<br />
he lateron made in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot that,<br />
As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame,<br />
I lisp d in Numbers, for the Numbers came.<br />
His mother gave Spence similar testimony:<br />
“Mr. Pope s father … was no poet, but he used to set him to make <strong>English</strong> verses when very<br />
young. He was pretty difficult in being pleased and used often to send him back to new turn<br />
them. ‘These are not good rhymes he would say, for that was my husband s word for verses.”<br />
He was also busy with translations from Latin and even Greek though he was never in any profound sense<br />
a scholar. Self-taught, like many poetic translators, he learned the syntax of his original from the sense rather<br />
than the sense from the syntax. Pope too had ambitions towards original verse. A projected epic on Alcander,<br />
Prince of Rhodes, of which he wrote four books of about one thousand verses each, in the end came to<br />
nothing; besides, he had roughed out and shown to his friends his first pastorals before 1705. Earlier at the<br />
age of twelve Pope was not only extending his reading and writing he was also developing his literary<br />
acquaintance. He got to know the literary wits at Will s Coffee House, and was taken to see Dryden, a great<br />
writer then. The boy could immediately see that Dryden belonged to the world of books and serious writers<br />
but not to a polished society, as he himself was to belong. The particular members of the Will s group that<br />
Pope got to know apart from Trumbull were the critic William Walsh; the poet Samuel Garth; the dramatists
Alexander Pope<br />
William Wycherley and William Congreve; and the actor Thomas Betterton. These were all older and<br />
distinguished literary men by the time Pope knew them and it was obviously not mere coincidence that they<br />
should all share an enthusiasm for the young man s ability and company. He wrote to these worldly men of<br />
letters regularly but with Wycherly and Walsh Pope struck up particularly close friendship. He helped the old<br />
playwright prepare his verse for publication and maintained a long correspondence with him. It was from<br />
Walsh that he received the famous advice to make correctness his study and aim: Pope stated:<br />
“When about fifteen, I got acquainted with Mr. Walsh. He encouraged me much, and used<br />
to tell me that there was one way left of excelling, for though we had had several great<br />
poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct—and he desired me to make that<br />
my study and aim.”<br />
Pope really had a surprising range of social circle for two specific reasons: (i) In Pope s age an enormous<br />
importance was attached to poetic talent by well-bred and educated people. Hence could say that Nature s<br />
chief Masterpiece is writing well, and (ii) Windsor Forest, where the family had settled, was a favourite<br />
haunt of Catholic recusant families, like Blounts. They clung together with a certain disregard for social<br />
distinctions that were important for the Protestants. As it was, he was mainly self-educated and a precocious<br />
boy. He was a reader in several languages, which he managed to teach himself. Being an incessant scribbler,<br />
he turned out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of his early writings are the famous<br />
Ode On Solitude and a paraphrase of St.Thomas a Kempis, which he did at the age of twelve. He became<br />
more precocious as he grew in age. It in no way means that he was aiming at a slow laborious correctness.<br />
Pope was, in fact, brilliant and he wrote best when he wrote most rapidly. Though his home was in Windsor<br />
Forest, he frequently visited London and made friends with many of the well-known men of letters, such as<br />
Wycherley, Congreve, Garth and Walsh. Pope interacted and corresponded with them on the serious subjects<br />
like the art of versification. He showed them the manuscript of the Pastorals which a few years later<br />
became his first published work in 1709.<br />
From 1708 to 1717 were the years of experimental writings as well as of great expansion in his personal and<br />
social life. They mark a period during which Pope spent more time in London than at any other stage of his<br />
life, and at the same time he continued to visit his Catholic acquaintances in Binfield. They include making of<br />
the lasting and major friendships with Gay, Swift, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke and Oxford among his literary and<br />
political friends, and with Carylls, Englefields and Blounts among the Catholic friends. It also includes his first<br />
meeting with Martha Blount for whom he developed a love that, despite all the barriers, endured till his death.<br />
It is notable that throughout his life, Pope has been dearly admired by women who were ready to make<br />
friends of him and confide in him. His true and life long friend among women was Martha or Patty Blount.<br />
Though she was not brilliant and had lost her charms and sweetness of expression, which had attracted Pope<br />
to her first, but she cared for him with the tenderness of a nurse. Even Warburton, who strongly disliked her,<br />
admitted that when Pope was on his last sick-bed her entrance would stir him into new cheerfulness and life.<br />
In 1716, Pope s family moved from Binfield to Chiswick but the sudden death of his father on 23 rd October<br />
1717 brought this period of carefree gaiety to a close. After the death of his father, he became solely<br />
responsible for his seventy-five year old mother.<br />
The eight years from the time of Pope s first published work, the Pastorals (May 1709) to the time of the<br />
first edition of his collected Works (June 1717) form a fairly cohesive unit in his life. This period was of<br />
extraordinary poetic activity, which he later described as wandering in Fancy s maze . Pope tried his hand at<br />
half a dozen different kinds of poetry ranging from pastoral and georgic as (Windsor –Forest), to didactic<br />
(Essay on Criticism) to elegiac (The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady), to heroic (Eloisa to<br />
Abelard) to mock epic (The Rape of the Lock), to actual epic (the translation of the Iliad). When he<br />
attempted a variety of poetical works it was as if he was trying to judge where his strength lay. The period<br />
begins with the publication of the Pastorals. They were greatly admired by Pope s Tory friends at Will s but<br />
they immediately brought him into conflict with London s rival literary group, Addison s little Senate of<br />
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Poetry<br />
Whig writers who met at Button s Coffee-House. The quarrel ensued because of the great admiration of<br />
Addison s friend Ambrose Philips s Pastorals, which were undoubtedly inferior to the young Pope s Pastorals<br />
and for totally ignoring Pope. Nearly every publication of Pope was attended with this sort of critical and<br />
personal dispute. It is indeed ironical that age that had set literary<br />
standards like decorum and wit and other rules indulged in this kind of conflicts for literary standing and<br />
made it the part and parcel of the literary scene in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Following the<br />
model of Boileau and Horace, he tried his hand at a poem about writing of poetry and produced the Essay on<br />
Criticism in 1711.<br />
It was an ambitious attempt for a young man as in it Pope wished to compress and chisel out the wisdom of<br />
all past ages regarding criticism and poetry. The poem is fundamentally a staring point to establish quintessentially<br />
neoclassical assumptions about literature in the eighteenth century. Its reception was quiet at first but then<br />
John Dennis s furious attack in his Reflections upon an Essay upon Criticism made Pope retire sensibly in<br />
the country to his Catholic friends like John Caryll who lived in Ladyholt, near West Harting in Sussex It was<br />
during this period that Caryll suggested to Pope the subject matter of the most delightful of his poems The<br />
Rape of the Lock .The poem was written as Pope told Spence later on to make a jest of the estrangement<br />
between two Catholic families , the Fermors and the Peters , and to laugh them together again. It was Le<br />
Lutrin (1674) by Boileau Dispensary by Garth that gave him the brilliant idea of writing in a mock -epic form<br />
which he fulfilled in The Rape of Lock; it consisted of two Cantos and was published in 1712.Addison<br />
praised it as a delicious little thing but advised the poet not to attempt at its improvement. Pope attributed<br />
that advice to jealousy. It is Pope s masterpiece, which comes nearer to being a creation than anything<br />
Pope has written. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three more Cantos; in order to<br />
make it a more effective burlesque of an epic poem, he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs and salamanders,<br />
instead of the gods of the epics. The poem is well worth reading as an expression of the artificial life of the<br />
age of its cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and many more idle vanities. It was<br />
brought out in 1714 in its present form.<br />
Pope moved back to London in 1713, where he joined the group of the writers who strongly supported the<br />
Tory Government. His landscape poem called Windsor Forest , published in the same year, was meant to<br />
celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht. It was taken to be a statement of his party commitment despite his own<br />
attempts to maintain neutrality:<br />
In Moderation placing all my Glory,<br />
While Tories call me Whigs, and Whigs a Tory.<br />
However, during this year he lived mostly with his painter friend Jervas, who has been a pupil of the famous<br />
portrait painter Sir Godfrey Kneller, and studied painting seriously.<br />
The following spring Pope became involved with the Scriblerus Club with Swift, Parnell, Gay, Arbuthnot,<br />
Robert Harley, Lord Oxford and Pope himself as its members. They shared a common philosophical belief in<br />
conserving the best from the past not as a dead unit but as a living thing and had a scorn for false and<br />
superfluous taste in learning. They also planned to produce the Memoirs of Marinus Scriblerus to burlesque<br />
over the works of the pedantic scholars but there was an abrupt end of the activities of the Club because of<br />
the death of Queen Anne on 1 st August 1714. The members of the club dispersed to attend to their own<br />
literary pursuits. During these days Pope got an opportunity to pay back to Dennis what he did to Pope after<br />
the publication of his Pastorals Pope published The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris in which he invented a<br />
fictive episode in Dennis life and D. Norris was called to cure him of his lunacy. The piece is full of farcical<br />
jinks that completely destroy Dennis. In October 1713, Pope published his proposals to translate the Iliad and<br />
turned his attention almost entirely to Homer. It was his major literary occupation for next six years. It was<br />
a difficult task as he told Spence years later: In the beginning of my translating the Iliad I wished anybody<br />
would hang me a hundred times. It sat so heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and so<br />
do sometimes still. By June 1715 the first four books were published in one volume. From this time onwards
Alexander Pope<br />
he proceeded with the task at the rate of four books a year until the poem was completed in May 1720.The<br />
fame of Pope s Iliad, which was financially the most successful book, was due to the fact that he interpreted<br />
Homer in an elegant, artificial language of his own age. Even the Homeric characters lose their original<br />
strength and become the fashionable men of the court.<br />
One of the most important aspects of Pope s personal life these years was his increasing intimacy with the<br />
Blount sisters whom he met in 1711. Within one month after meeting them Pope wrote to his friend Cromwell<br />
praising them as two of the finest faces in the Universe. Theresa Blount, whom Pope admired, first, was<br />
the same age as Pope and Martha, for whom his affection grew stronger, was two years younger. In times<br />
of trouble and pain, Pope turned to them for comfort and solace. When his father suddenly died on 23 rd Oct.<br />
1717, it was to Martha that he wrote: My poor Father dyed last night. Believe, since I don t forget you this<br />
moment, I never shall. For the next sixteen years the responsibility of his life was to look after his aged<br />
mother who was so affected by the death of his father.<br />
Two of many more experiments made at this stage deserve a mention, they are: “Eloisa to<br />
Abelard” and “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate lady”.<br />
The former shows Pope s high-flown devotion for the great Whig beauty, lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but<br />
later on when she managed to hurt Pope s vanity, he made rather venomous and obscene references to her<br />
while the latter poem is a striking original poem. The year 1717 was the triumphant year of Pope s life as he<br />
brought out his beautifully printed book which contained his best works including his perfectly revised version<br />
of The Rape of the Lock, the famous proverbs of Essay on Criticism and exquisitely musical versification<br />
of the Pastorals, but none the less it is a volume of experiments. Pope knew now where his strength lay.<br />
Looking back on these experiments in his later years, he was accustomed to make a distinction between<br />
earlier Fanciful poems and his mature work in which he wrote of Truth and the Heart. This was a<br />
deliberate change, conscious canalizing of his poetical power. From henceforth, with the exception of his<br />
translation of Homer, Social Comment and Social Philosophy were to be his theme, but this theme is already<br />
fount in parts of 1717 volume, for instance take the grave Clarissa s speech of the 5 th Canto of The Rape<br />
of the Lock.<br />
Various changes took place in Pope s life after his father s death. He had already moved from Binfield to<br />
Chiswick in his lifetime itself, in March 1719 he moved with his mother to a new house at Twickenham,<br />
which was to be his last residence. He amused himself there with constructing a grotto, a kind of gnomes<br />
cave full of glittering crystals. This grotto, it appeared, housed his dreams of romance. On the whole, the<br />
improvement that he wrought on his house, garden and grotto became the chief source of relaxation in life as<br />
well as an integral part of his art. He set out to establish his small estate at Twickenham, which he affectionately<br />
called Twitnam, as a symbol of those cultural and civilized values- literacy, honesty, generosity and hospitality-<br />
, which seemed to be crumbling all about him in Hanoverian England.<br />
No doubt, Pope was recognized as the foremost poet of his day. He made a wide circle of several friends and<br />
several enemies as well because he had certain strong likes and dislikes, for instance, he did not like being<br />
patronized as much as Addison liked patronizing. It led to Addison s role in supporting a rival translation of<br />
Homer. However, his domestic life was much quieter and the translation of Homer was now absorbing all his<br />
time and energies. It was completed in 1720 and was well received but some of his contemporaries had not<br />
approved it. The great scholar, Bentley said: It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.<br />
Pope, however, did not go back to writing poetry. He turned instead to editing. He wrote to Caryll in October<br />
1722 saying:<br />
“I must again sincerely protest to you that I have wholly given over scribbling, at least<br />
anything of my own, but am become by due gradation of dullness, from a poet a translator,<br />
and from a translator a mere editor.”<br />
His main editorial project was an edition of Shakespeare that would supersede Rowe s which appeared in six<br />
Volumes finally in March 1725. Though the preface was a perceptively written piece but the text itself was<br />
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Poetry<br />
hastily collated and emended. A disapproval was expressed of the edition of Shakespeare, particularly, the<br />
scholar named Theobald exposed its deficiencies in his book called Shakespeare Restored Pope also edited<br />
the posthumous edition of his friend Parnell s Poems, which was published in 1721 and Duke of Buckingham s<br />
Works which appeared in 1723. As his own comment indicates, Pope was not a particularly good and<br />
successful editor, but the indiscreet attacks on his works and his character during the fifteen years had made<br />
him peculiarly sensitive about them. He was smarting under these attacks and was determined to repay<br />
them. Of that there is no doubt. He comforted himself by reflecting that he was maintaining the highest<br />
literary standards and that his enemies were pedants and other ordinary persons who were devoid of spirit,<br />
taste and good sense. However, the other major work belonging to these years was the translation of<br />
Odyssey. Pope was led into this venture by an extraordinary success of his translation of the Iliad. But his<br />
heart was no longer in translation. Therefore he engaged two Cambridge scholars as his collaborators,<br />
William Broome and Elijah Fenton to help him. The initial idea was that they would translate and Pope would<br />
revise and polish it, but the collaboration got him into all sorts of problems; as a result, in the end Broome<br />
translated eight books, Fenton four and Pope the remaining twelve. Pope made over 5000/= Pounds, and<br />
Broome and Fenton got under 1000/= between them. Pope s financial independence as an author was now<br />
completely secured. He by his own hard work became the first <strong>English</strong> author to be able to live off his<br />
writings and needed no patron. His description of himself as Un-plac d, unpensioned, no Man s Heir, or<br />
Slave , in his Imitation of Horace, Satire 11,written in1733, best sums up his justifiable pride. Four years<br />
later still he put the same thought slightly differently in his Imitation of Horace, Epistle 11,ii (68-69):<br />
But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive,<br />
Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive.<br />
Pope s labour was great, but the reward was great too. Pope paid a heavy cost of his health and gaiety of<br />
temperament by long labours of translations and comparative solitude stooping over the table for long daily<br />
hours, which made him a man older than his years. It was now that Pope s powers of verse showed a gift for<br />
lighter and gayer conversational satire on the minor follies in a Horatian tone. Not only that, satire, a mode in<br />
which he had as yet given glimpses of his genius as in The Rape of the Lock and The Narrative of Dr.<br />
Norris, was to become for the rest of his life the vehicle for its fulfillment.<br />
Pope had been facing attacks by many envious cotemporaries and he bore them bravely and said, These<br />
things are my diversions ; though his face<br />
contorted with agony, he had the sense to feel that even silence shows contempt. His fury in his great satire,<br />
The Dunciad, was aroused by Theobald s comments on Pope s edition of Shakespeare. The Dunciad,<br />
published first 1728, is a mock-epic like The Rape of the Lock but with a difference. The former is dark,<br />
furious but more somber, often more magnificent and less easily appreciated while the latter is sparking,<br />
bright, delightful, and renowned poem. The Dunciad has always been a controversial poem. It was of course<br />
written as such: Pope meant to annihilate his enemies. There is undoubtedly a strong element of personal<br />
revenge about The Dunciad, but it is important to recognize that the poem grew out of the most profound and<br />
deep-rooted of all Pope s feelings about literature. At its base is the firmly held belief that bad literature,<br />
indeed bad art generally, is immoral, and if allowed to spread unchecked will corrupt and eventually destroy<br />
civilization. The artist s duty therefore is a moral duty as I.R.F. Gordon remarked. The first version of<br />
Dunciad consists of three books that centered on the crowning of King Tibbard (Lewis Theo- bald) as King<br />
of the Dunes, and came to the climax with a vision of the future in which the Goddess of Dulness held full<br />
dominion. In 1728 version, it is still a vision but by the time of the revised Dunciad, in four books, of 1743, the<br />
vision has become an actuality. George Fraser writes in his book, Alexander Pope, that,<br />
“He is writing in The Dunciad not light Horatian but Juvenalian tragical satire, which at<br />
moments...is not a mockery of the sublime but true sublime. the end of the fourth book of the<br />
revised Dunciad has a Miltonic grandeur.”
Alexander Pope<br />
All this time Pope s health had been deteriorating. In 1728 his ailment had become so bad that in August he<br />
agreed to go to Bath to see if the waters would help him. He stayed there for ten weeks but there was no<br />
appreciable improvement. Partly because of his own health and partly because of his mother s failing condition,<br />
the five years from 1728 to 1733 were the most painful days of his life.<br />
In the winter of 1730 pope told his friend Spence of a new work which he was contemplating. It was to write<br />
a series of verse epistles, of which first four or five would be on The Nature of Man and the rest would be<br />
on Moderation or the Use of Things . This work was not completed but Pope never gave up the intention<br />
till the end of his life. In June 1730 itself he wrote to Swift: Yet am I just now writing, (or rather planning) a<br />
book, to make mankind look upon this life with comfort and pleasure, and put morality in good humour. The<br />
first poem actually to be published was the Epistle to Burlington, the famous amateur architect. The poem,<br />
which is one of the most characteristic works of Pope s maturity, presents an entertaining<br />
selection of examples of taste in architect and landscape gardening, and concludes with some suggestions for<br />
a worthier use of money. Within the next four years three more Moral Essays were published as well as a<br />
group of four epistles entitled An Essay on Man, which was intended to serve as the introduction to a larger<br />
work Pope had in mind. The former, with their brilliant observation of human nature, provide better reading<br />
than the latter, in which Pope is concerned to vindicate the ways of God to man based on the doctrine that<br />
whatever is, is right. But, the Essay on Man, in which there is much proverbial, and philosophical wisdom<br />
that springs eternal in the human breast is the best known and most quoted of all Pope s work. Except in<br />
form it is not poetry, and when one considers it as an essay one finds that there are innumerable literary<br />
ornaments and for its thought structure it has a deistic basis as there are no unanswered questions or problems<br />
in Pope s philosophy. To be precise, Pope, who had no philosophy of his own borrowed it from his friend<br />
Boilingbroke and the notion of vindication is perfectly accomplished in four poetical epistles: Epistle 1 discusses<br />
the nature and state of man concerning his relations to the universe; Epistle 11 shows man with respect to<br />
himself as an individual; Epistle 111 considers man with respect to society, and Epistle 1V man in his relationship<br />
to happiness. The essence of the poem is summed up in a few lines:<br />
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;<br />
All chance, direction that thou canst see;<br />
All discord, harmony not understood;<br />
All partial evil, universal good:<br />
And, spite of pride, in erring reason s spite,<br />
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.<br />
Though Pope, a true Christian humanist, is speaking in the spirit, though not in the language of Fenelon and<br />
the Gospel to use the words of Fraser, his An Essay on Man was received with a lot of noise and recrimination<br />
as if to indicate to Pope that his Dunciad, far from destroying his enemies, had multiplied them. Pope was<br />
deeply distressed by these attacks, which coaxed him to think out his position as a satirist. , and to ponder the<br />
ethics of writing satire. The form his defence took was to imitate the first satire of the second book of<br />
Horace, itself a defence of satire,; That is to say, he loosely translated this satire, substituting modern parallels<br />
for contemporary allusions in the original. In this poem, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), a further<br />
defence of himself and his writings, and in the Epilogue to the Satires(1738), his last word on the subject,<br />
Pope contended that the satirist s duty is to uphold a standard of moral rectitude and to point out deviations<br />
from that standard by chastising the most notorious and powerful offender to use the words of Geoffrey<br />
Tillotson.<br />
Pope s standards are expounded and defended not only in the Moral Essays but in his miscellaneous satires.<br />
Imitations of Horace (1733-8), entitled Satire 1, which is a paraphrase of the first satire of the second book<br />
of Horace, in form of a dialogue between the poet and William Forrescue the lawyer. Pope defends himself<br />
against the charge of malignity and professes to be inspired only by the love of virtue. However, he inserts in<br />
it a gross attack on his former friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was prompted by the success of<br />
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Poetry<br />
Satire1 which was followed by Imitations of Horace s Satire 11,ii, and 1,ii (Sober Advice from Horace)<br />
in 1734, and Epistle 1,iv; 11,ii, 11,i, and 1,I, in 1737. In these Satires he recommends the standards,<br />
which were the old Horatian standards of Temperance, of Contentment with a modest Competence. Above<br />
all, he recommends that one must cultivate an honest, open-hearted, and serene disposition. Though Pope<br />
himself was not completely successful in living up to these standards, but there is no doubt that these standards<br />
were real to him.<br />
Sick as he was, he was facing continual encounter with pain, and was actively preoccupied with writing till<br />
the end. During the last two years his condition became critical. He died of an asthmatical dropsy on 30 th<br />
May 1744, on the ninth day of his fifty-seventh year and was buried in Twickenham church. In his last illness<br />
he was watched over by many friends like Bolingbroke, Marchmont, Martha Blount and Spence. They<br />
appreciated his tenderness and love and thought themselves to be honoured by his friendship. From 1709<br />
to 1744 he dominated <strong>English</strong> poetry and remained the representative poet of the century who dared to speak<br />
out as boldly through his writings as he did in his life.<br />
Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: An Introduction<br />
Pope s The Rape of the Lock is an authentic and living picture of the actual happening in the eighteenth<br />
century society. Some time during the summer of 1711 the circle of prominent Catholic families in home<br />
counties was deeply disturbed by the rash act of Robert, 7 th Lord Peter, in removing a lock from the head of<br />
the famous beauty, Arabella Fermor. Pope himself told his first biographer, Joseph Spence:<br />
“ The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor s hair was taken too seriously, and caused an<br />
estrangement between the two families, though they have lived long in great friendship<br />
before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both desired me to write a poem to<br />
make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was in this view that I wrote my Rape of<br />
the Lock, which was well received and had its effect in the two families.”<br />
The first version of the poem in two cantos was written in less than a fortnight sometime in August /<br />
September 1711The well-wisher was Pope s friend John Caryll, to whom the poem s invocation refers. It is<br />
not sure that Pope personally knew any of the families concerned but when the manuscript was circulated<br />
among them, the lady vouchsafed to view and Lord peter approved . And apparently it succeeded in<br />
healing the breach between them. Here two things form the kernel of the poem: first, a small matter led to a<br />
serious quarrel between two Catholic families and secondly, it is Pope s handling of the incident in a light and<br />
playful manner, which put the discord to an end. He treated the subject on the model of Boileau s Le Lutrin,<br />
which makes it a mock-heroic poem.<br />
The first version appeared with Miss Fermor s permission anonymously in 1712. It received the praise of<br />
Addison who called it a delicate little thing, but he advised Pope not to enlarge it or improve it. Pope<br />
distrusted his advice. In 1714 appeared the second and revised version of the poem in five cantos by adding<br />
the machinery of sylphs, gnomes etc., which Pope adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. In<br />
other words, he introduced the domesticated supernatural agents, including the Cave of Spleen, the scene at<br />
Belinda s toilet and the game of Ombre. He told Spence that<br />
“the machinery was added afterwards to make it look a little more considerable; and the<br />
scheme of adding it was much liked and approved of by several of my friends, and particularly<br />
by Dr. Garth, who, as he was one of the best-natured men in the world, was very fond of it.”<br />
It was Dr. Garth s The Dispensary (1699) which served as a model for his mock-epic, The Rape of the<br />
Lock.<br />
Pope s satire did displease and disturb all the parties concerned for its indelicate innuendoes and some odd<br />
resemblances with the living characters around. It gave offence to Miss Fermor as the scandal had gone too<br />
far. He not only failed to please her but also earned the hostility of Sir George Brown about which he reported
Alexander Pope<br />
to Spence later: Nobody but Sir George Brown was angry, and he was so a good deal and for a long time.<br />
He could not bear that Sir Plume should talk nothing but nonsense Similarly Baron , who might be<br />
interested in marrying her as per the internal literary evidence, chose another bride just two months before<br />
the poem was issued. In A Key to the Lock, Pope tried to placate Sir George Brown showing two men as<br />
possible candidates for the role of Sir Plume; as for Arabella, Pope s dedication to the second and enlarged<br />
version of 1714 was contrived especially to give her favour and even to help her to get out of a rather silly and<br />
embarrassing position. Pope wrote to John Caryll on 9 th January, 1714:<br />
The dedication to Arabella and the enlarged poem of 1714 take us from the complicated and ultimately<br />
unimportant tangle of social trivia into sublet and permanent fabric of the poem s creation. For the original<br />
events, which led to the poem, the dedication stresses only the central one.<br />
As to the following Cantos, all the passages of them are as Fabulous, as the Vision at the<br />
Beginning, or the Transformation at the End; (Except the loss of your Hair, which I always<br />
name with Reverence). The Human persons are as Fictitious as the Airy ones; and the<br />
Character of Belinda, as it is now manag d, resembles you in nothing but in Beauty.”<br />
Pope s concern, beneath these courtesies, is now for his art. As the last lines of the fifth canto confirm this.<br />
They celebrate the lasting fame which poetry has granted to the ephemeral lock. Thus, Pope transforms the<br />
passing social event into permanent relevance.<br />
If the first version of 1712 sold poorly,while the revised version of 1714 was very well received, which sold<br />
3000 copies within four days. The only other addition or alterations came in 1717, when Pope decided to<br />
open more clearly the MORAL of the poem by adding Clarissa s speech in canto five. Her role so far has<br />
been to hand over the fatal scissors to the Baron in the third Canto. Ever since the publication of the poem in<br />
its final version The Rape of the Lock has almost always enjoyed an enthusiastic and delighted reception.<br />
R.K. Root has quoted a letter of George Berkley to Pope in his book, The Poetical Career Of Alexander<br />
Pope in which he writes:<br />
“I have accidentally met with your Rape of the Lock here (in Leghorn!), having never seen<br />
before. Style, painting, judgement, spirit, I had already admired in other of your writings;<br />
but in this I am charmed with the magic of your invention, with all those images, allusions,<br />
and inexplicable beauties, which you raise so surprisingly, and at the same time so naturally<br />
out of a trifle.”<br />
Pope did suffer for such charges against him as plagiarism of Garth and Boileau, which stemmed from the<br />
personal animosity and professional rivalries, literary in-fighting and personality conflicts in the first half of<br />
the eighteenth century. The first real adjustments in the critical reaction to Pope begin in the second half of<br />
the century and are due mainly to new movements in taste and aesthetics created by the writers like Edmund<br />
Burke and Joseph Warton who displays some of the eighteenth century notions about poetry and is confident<br />
at the same time of the new criteria which led him to observe that Pope is more a Man of Wit, and a Man<br />
of Sense than a True Poet. Radically new responses in the later part of the century made the critics<br />
highlight different aspects of his poetry though the preconceptions hampered the fair judgements. The Romantic<br />
critics like Hazlitt, Byron and others admired Pope, and Campbell goes to the extent of saying about The<br />
Rape of the Lock: There is no finer gem than this poem in all the lighter treasures of <strong>English</strong> fancy.<br />
In the nineteenth century, the criticism of Pope s work has really more historical interest than intrinsic value.<br />
It was read and appreciated with a limited delight. Actually a little has changed since Warton s claim that<br />
it was the best Satire Extant. The responsibility of saving Pope from utter neglect and to present him in the<br />
true perspective has fallen on the twentieth century scholars. Modern readings of Pope and The Rape of the<br />
Lock have revised most of the ideas propounded by the Romantics and have asserted that he is a serious<br />
writer who is justified in using satire as the vehicle of real imagination. They have focused on the following<br />
themes of Pope:<br />
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(a) The moral seriousness and imaginative intelligence with its full richness and complexity.<br />
(b) The social realities and Pope s witty manipulation of them.<br />
Poetry<br />
(c) Pope s powerful rejection of the superficialities and the artificialities of social mores in contemporary<br />
contexts.<br />
(d) The serious relevance of human passion especially about sex and religion.<br />
(e) Technical innovations like the density of allusions, metaphors and mimicking to maintain what<br />
J.S.Cunningham calls a continuous doubleness of apprehension by which the poet combined the flirtation<br />
with sublime, bathetic with poignant and trivial with significant.<br />
This sort of serious study has accorded to Pope s works a proportionate praise.<br />
The Rape of the Lock as a Burlesque<br />
According to Pope that first principle of criticism is to consider the nature of the piece, and the intension of<br />
the author as he put it in the postscript of his translation of the Odyssey. In this poem neither is in doubt. The<br />
title and the opening lines of the poem contain a kernel of the whole. The incident on which the poem is<br />
founded had caused a breach between the two Catholic families and it was suggested to Pope that he should<br />
write a poem to make a jest of it and laugh them together again. The writing of a narrative poem was the<br />
most obvious method and no variety of narrative was more suitable than the mock-heroic. Pope himself<br />
called The Rape of the Lock a heroi-comical poem, a form so highly praised by Dryden, but the literary<br />
affiliations of the poem are of a complicated kind. On the one hand, it belongs to a class of literature called<br />
burlesque, which is also a parody and at the same time it has some of the features of a Farce as well. To<br />
call it a mock-epic is to add another dimension as the term mocking implies laughing at something critically<br />
and the term epic adds a highly serious motif to the narrative. A brief analysis would make it absolutely clear<br />
that the poem may fit into a variety of comic and satirical writings. .<br />
Some critics assess that it is essentially a burlesque because A burlesque is a parody on a large scale, in<br />
which not a single poem but a whole type or style of literature is travestied, the language and thought proper<br />
to a serious theme being reproduced in setting forth something ridiculous and trivial. There are many famous<br />
literary burlesques, for instance take Batrachomyomachia – a poem in which the battle of Frog and Mice<br />
is described in the language of Homer, or Don Quixote the burlesque of chivalry, or Hudibras the<br />
burlesque of Puritanism. The Rape of the Lock is a burlesque of epic poetry at large and contains parodies<br />
of Homer, Virgil, Statius, Ariosto, Spenser and Milton .<br />
The writers of burlesque should be thoroughly acquainted with the manner he intends to parody, and he<br />
should have no genuine reverence, admiration or sympathy for it. Pope knew very well the phraseology of<br />
the ancient epics. At the same time he was capable of a real appreciation of Homer and Virgil. Therefore, he<br />
was fit for the task of parodying the ancient epic.<br />
The burlesque is partly a matter of treatment and partly a matter of language. By treating an insignificant<br />
subject in the manner of an epic the poem parodies that form of poetry. Instead of grand passions and great<br />
fights between heroes in which the immortals take part; we have as the theme of The Rape of the Lock a<br />
petty amorous quarrel assisted by the spirit of the air. The epic portrays an age around the personality of a<br />
god or a demi-god, and its characters are heroes, The Rape of the Lock, on the other hand, gives us the<br />
picture of a fashionable society. The central figure in that picture is a pretty young girl, and other characters<br />
are a rash youth, a foolish dandy and a few frivolous women. The place of deep and genuine passions found<br />
in the ancient epics is given to a succession of mock passions. Ariel s fears associated with an impending<br />
danger are travesty of genuine fears.<br />
This day, black omens threat the brightest Fair,<br />
That e ver deserved a watchful spirit s Care;<br />
Some dire disaster, or by Force, or Slight;
Alexander Pope<br />
But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in Night.<br />
Whether the nymph shall break Diana s laws,<br />
Or some frail China Jar receive a flaw.<br />
Likewise, Belinda s anger, when the lock of hair is removed from her head is sheer exaggeration of true<br />
passion:<br />
Then flashed the living Lightning from her Eyes,<br />
And Screams of Horror rend the affrighted Skies.<br />
Nor louder Shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast,<br />
When Husbands, or when Lap- dogs breathe their last;<br />
Or when rich China Vessels fallen from high,<br />
In glittering Dust and painted Fragments lie,<br />
Thus, by its trivial theme, puny characters and false and exaggerated sentiments, the poem becomes a<br />
parody of an epic.<br />
Besides, there are other incidents and features, which also suggest that the poem is a burlesque. As Addison<br />
wrote in Spectator No249 defining the varieties of burlesque:<br />
“Burlesque is of two kinds, the first represents mean persons in the accoutrements of heroes,<br />
the other describes great persons acting and speaking like basest among the people.”<br />
Pope exercised his talent in both the kinds, that is, in diminution and in aggrandizement. Agamemnon s<br />
sceptre dwindles to become Belinda s bodkin. Lord Peter builds an alter to the god of love but what kind of<br />
alter is it?<br />
Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt.<br />
There lay three Garters, half a pair of Gloves;<br />
And all the Trophies of his former Loves.<br />
With tender Billet-doux he lights the Pyre,<br />
And breathes three amorous sighs to raise the Fire.<br />
Likewise, a battle is drawn forth to combat on a velvet plain like the Greeks; but it turns out to be a game of<br />
cards on the fashionable card-table. Geoffrey Tillotson has summed up some other characteristics of this<br />
poem stating:<br />
“ We find a supernatural being threatening his inferior with torture; but it is sylph, not Jove<br />
and the tortures are neither thunder-bolts nor pains of Hades, but cruelties devised<br />
ingeniously from the requisites of the toilet table…. The epic is a long poem; The Rape of<br />
the Lock is short. The story of the epic covers years; that of The Rape of the Lock hours.<br />
The gods of the epic are stupendous creatures; Pope s sylph tiny.”<br />
These are some of the examples of the epic grandeur presented on a diminutive scale. But, its reverse is also<br />
present in The Rape of the Lock<br />
As Hazlitt points out:<br />
“The most glittering appearance is given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux,<br />
and patches…. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an alter raised to the goddess of<br />
vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry.”<br />
Pope is a master of the type of humour, which emerges from presenting small things in a grand form. A<br />
remarkable instance of this type of aggrandisement is the speech of Clarissa in The Rape of the Lock She<br />
begins thus:<br />
Say, why are Beauties prais d and honour d most<br />
The wise Man s Passion, and the vain man s Toast?<br />
Why deck d with all that Land and Sea afford,<br />
Why Angels call d and Angel-like ador d?<br />
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Poetry<br />
Clarissa swells and talks like a Homeric sage and effectively moves in the well-devised direction of the text.<br />
It has been rightly assessed that ,<br />
“The burlesque is both- a matter of treatment and a matter of language. There are number<br />
of lines and passages which are the parodies of Virgil”.<br />
For instance, consider the following lines as examples:<br />
1. Slight is the Subject, but not so the Praise<br />
If She inspires and He approved my Lays.<br />
This couplet parodies the following lines of Virgil from Georgies1V:<br />
Slight is the subject but the praise not small,<br />
If heaven assist and Phoebus hear my call<br />
Heaven and Phoebus in Virgil are replaced by she (Belinda) and he (Caryll) in Pope.<br />
2. The following couplet of Pope, again, is a parody of Virgil:<br />
Her joy in gilded chariots, when alive,<br />
And love of Ombre, after death survive,<br />
Similarly Virgil says:<br />
The love of horses which they had alive<br />
And care of chariot after death survive<br />
(Canto 1.11. 5-6)<br />
(Canto1,11, 55-56)<br />
3. The seven folds in the petticoat of Belinda refer to the shields of Ajax, which was made of seven bull s<br />
hides:<br />
Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,<br />
Though stiff with hoops; and armed with ribs of whale,<br />
(Canto11,11,267-268)<br />
Thus, there are many proofs to surmise that Pope in The Rape of the Lock was seriously attempting to write<br />
a burlesque with two purposes in mind, (a) to laugh away the conflict and (b) to expose playfully the follies<br />
of the fair sex and the artificialities of his age.<br />
Pope’s The Rape of the Lock as a Mock- Heroic Poem<br />
Despite its literary affiliation to other kinds of witty narratives, Pope s The Rape of the Lock is most obviously<br />
a mock-heroic poem. It had been evolved for the very purpose of diminishing a quarrel and combines in it<br />
two kinds of writing in which the age of Pope was really interested: Epic and Satire. Pope s handling of this<br />
genre has been so unique that it ceases to be an imitation of either of these forms and acquires an unprecedented<br />
novelty. Pope had two instances of this kind of writing in mind Boileau s Le Lutrin and Garth s The<br />
Dispensary which Pope followed with keen interest. They were suitable models but none of them was so<br />
brilliant as Pope s poem. It appears that Pope might have aspired to write a consummate example of the<br />
mock-heroic genre before Lord Peter gave him the occasion by stealing the lock. In other words, the quarrel<br />
of the Peters and the Fermors family gave him the subject matter and opportunity for realizing that idea as an<br />
actual poem.<br />
Some of the modern critics think that mock heroic poem is primarily a satire on the epic, but the writers of<br />
the Augustan Age took it differently. The technical brilliance of The Rape of the Lock is largely due to the<br />
fact that Pope had studied Shakespearean drama and Milton s epic and builds from both his poem . Preserving<br />
the essence of the heroic poetry, he gives it a humorous treatment and it was not a less worthy ambition in an<br />
age which had different requirements and a changed mental horizon.<br />
The writers who ridiculed the epic in Augustan age were the authors of burlesques and travesties and their<br />
object was, as Dennis put it a very scurvy one . In a mock-epic a dignified genre is turned to witty use
Alexander Pope<br />
without being cheapened in anyway. The poet has an opportunity of ridiculing through incongruity and<br />
offering his reader the sophisticated pleasure of recognizing ironical parallels to familiar passages of Homer<br />
and Virgil. If a mock- heroic poem is a parody of the epic, it is so in the Augustan sense, not in the modern.<br />
The new purpose of the frequent allusions throughout The Rape of the Lock is not to ridicule a literary<br />
form but to organize a chaos into an order by setting a lovers tiff in true perspective with their help.<br />
The fact that the 1712 version of The Rape of the Lock consists of no more than 334 lines and takes over<br />
only a few characteristics of the epic, makes it clear that Pope s concern was less with Homer and Virgil<br />
than with Miss Fermor and Lord Peter. In its 1714 form it becomes the masterpiece of the mock- heroic<br />
because it imbibes the maximum amount of the epic qualities. Here, the mockery takes different forms and<br />
employs different devices. The proposition of using an epic form for the purpose of diminishing the affair<br />
of the lock of hair, is in itself the general mockery of the epic form and substance the epic manner with its<br />
invocations, the descriptions, the moralizing asides, the speeches opening with He said , its battles, its machinery,<br />
its journeys on water and down to the underworld and its harangues are some of the structural features<br />
modeled on the epic. Clearly, the purpose of the poet at this stage was neither to ridicule the heroic genre nor<br />
to provide a humorous parallel to all the principal ingredients of epic, but to serve the occasion for which<br />
poem was written. This remains true of the 1714 version, in which Pope increased the length of the poem<br />
from two cantos to five, totalling 794 lines in all, and added such further allusions to the epic as the visit to<br />
the Cave of Spleen like the epic hero s visit to the underworld, the game of Ombre resembling other heroic<br />
games, the adoring of Belinda which parallels the arming of Achilles, and above all the extensive machinery<br />
of Ariel and sylphs. Pope was fully conversant with the formidable mass of criticism in which the function<br />
and nature of epic machinery is discussed as he himself had planned for writing an epic. Le Bossu had said<br />
that the Machinery crowns the whole work while Dryden concluded, no heroic poem can be writ on the<br />
Epicurean (i.e. atheistical) principles.<br />
In the first version of the poem, the supernatural agents play practically no part Pope realized that if a more<br />
extended mock epic was to be attempted, machinery of a more striking sort had to be invented. Pope could<br />
either revive the classical deities or would have taken personified moral qualities but he preferred to choose<br />
a machinery based on the Rosicrucian spirit, which proved to be fanciful and thus suitable for a mock-epic.<br />
For the action of the poem it was the most suitable invention. Geoffrey Tillotson aptly observes:<br />
“Pope, like any epic poet, had already made the action of the poem take place on the knees<br />
of the gods: it was Heaven and ‘the powers which, granting half the baron s prayer, wrested<br />
from the fingers the lock they had allowed him to cut. But from the start it must have been<br />
obvious to Pope that the epics usually allotted their celestials more room and colour than<br />
his own poem did, and his literary mockery accordingly gained in quality as the supernatural<br />
machinery gained in quantity.”<br />
Ian Jack says in Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom In <strong>English</strong> Poetry, 1660-1750: The epic poet s<br />
task of arousing admiration was particularly associated with the supernatural machinery of his poem. In the<br />
description of the sylphs and their actions Pope made his own bid to arouse admiration . Besides, It is rightly<br />
pointed out that,<br />
“Each epic poem has some peculiar passion, which distinguishes it in particular from other<br />
epic poems, and constitutes a kind of singular and individual difference between these<br />
poems of the same species. These singular passions correspond to the character of the<br />
hero.”<br />
The peculiar passion of each epic is surprisingly different. If in Iliad it is Anger and Terror, the softer and<br />
tender passions reign in the Aeneid. So coquetry and pride are the reigning passions in Pope s mock epic<br />
about Belinda s stolen lock.<br />
A mock heroic poem has been thought of primarily as a satire on the epic, but the vast difference made by<br />
the nature of Pope s subject has often been overlooked. Le Lutrin, The Dispensary and The Rape of the<br />
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Poetry<br />
Lock are all mock heroic poems describing a quarrel; but while the first two describe the quarrels between<br />
the lazy priests and grubby physicians, the third is concerned with a quarrel in the beau monde. The nature<br />
of Pope s subject and his intention creates an immense difference between his mock-epic and those of<br />
Boileau and Garth.<br />
Another quality lies in the descriptions in The Rape of the Lock, which are mock-heroic in a very different<br />
sense from other poems of the same genre. While others, like Dryden and Garth, had described ugly things<br />
with ironical elevation of style, Pope had objects of great beauty to describe. Ian Jack says that Pope s<br />
poem is shot through with strands of silk from the fashionable world.<br />
Joseph Warton in his Essay on Pope says, If Virgil has merited such perpetual commendation for exalting<br />
his bees, by the majesty and magnificence of his diction, does not Pope deserve equal praises for the pomp<br />
and luster of his language on so trivial a subject ? His style is heroic and it is evident from the opening lines<br />
onwards:<br />
What dire Offence from am rous Causes springs,<br />
What mighty Contests rise from trivial things,<br />
I sing….<br />
The inversion of the order of words and the use of the relatively pompous diction adds dignity to the verse. A<br />
similar elevation is particularly noticeable at the end of Canto III:<br />
What Time wou d spare, from Steel receives its date,<br />
And Monuments, like Men, submit to fate!<br />
Steel cou d the Labour of the Gods destroy,<br />
And strike to Dust th Imperial Towers of Troy;<br />
Steel cou d the Works of mortal pride confound,<br />
And hew Triumphal Arches to the Ground,<br />
What wonder then, fair Nymph!thy Hairs shou d feel<br />
The conq ring Force of unresisted Steel?<br />
Pope makes the serious use of what is basically Homer s style. The similarity of idiom between The Rape of<br />
the Lock and Homer is nowhere more striking than in the descriptions of the battles between the beaux and<br />
belles and between the opposing cards in the game of Ombre:<br />
Now move to War her Sable Matadores,<br />
In Show like Leaders of swarthy Moors…<br />
It is because of the idiom that Pope s mock-epic differs from that of epic itself only in being more brilliant<br />
and more laboured that he was able to work into the texture of his verse such numerous and such parodies of<br />
the classical epics. Of several passages in The Rape of the Lock, where the style is deliberately lowered,<br />
the most obvious is the description of Sir Plume, With his earnest eyes, and round unthinking face he says,<br />
Give her the Hair. Gildon called this style as something New; Heroic Doggrel . There are many speeches<br />
through out The Rape of the Lock which add the dignified colours of rhetoric associated with the heroic<br />
poem. They fulfill two important functions: (i) They wittily emphasize the poet s high seriousness and (ii)<br />
They provide remarkably effective transitions. Pope was right when he said in the Postscript to the Odyssey<br />
that the use of pompous expression for low actions is the perfection of Mock Epick.<br />
Periphrasis is one of the common manifestations of the eighteenth century poetic diction. Pope uses many<br />
periphrases as uncommon appellations For instances, for the scissors with which Lord Peter performs the<br />
rape two-edg d Weapon, little Engine, glittering Forfex, fatal Engine, Sheers, and meeting<br />
Points. The epic methods of heightening the effects are used not for ridiculing them but to produce the<br />
desired ends. Through them he emphasizes the artificiality of the milieu, which he presents. Similarly by<br />
yoking together the ideas which belong to very different levels Pope produces strongly satirical effect and<br />
also shows topsy turvy values in Belinda s world.
Alexander Pope<br />
It is relevant to note that Pope s poem contains a very few directly diminishing images as they are used in<br />
a satire but it has a large number of mock-heroic images which intensify the effect of the fundamental irony.<br />
For illustration consider the following lines:<br />
Not fierce Othello in so loud a Strain<br />
Roar d for the hankerchief that caus d his pain.<br />
The apotheosis of the lock is drawn from the Roman myth:<br />
So Rome s great Founder to the Heav ns withdrew,<br />
To Proculus alone confess d in view.<br />
There are some images which are particularly found in a mock-heroic poem, for example consider the<br />
comparison of Belinda to the sun at the beginning of Canto II:<br />
Not with more Glories, in the Etherial plain,<br />
The sun first rises over the purpled Main,<br />
Than issuing forth, the Rival of his beams<br />
Launch d on the Bosom of the silver Themes.<br />
There is a paradox about this image, which is the paradox about the whole poem. In a mock-heroic poem the<br />
subject of the poem is compared to something great and made ridiculous by comparison. It is as Pope pointed<br />
out in the Postscript to the Odyssey a deliberate transgression against the rules of proportion and mechanics.<br />
It is using a vast force to lift a feather. The image is an exaggreration of the same imaginative truth as is in<br />
the line: Belinda smil d, and all the World was gay. There is an element of incongruity and the heroic idiom<br />
of the poem has its measure of appropriateness as well as inappropriateness, which establishes its claim as a<br />
mock-heroic masterpiece.<br />
Briefly, The Rape of the Lock is not a poem against anybody. Pope only wished to laugh the quarrel out of<br />
the court and does not want to give serious offence to anybody. In short his purpose is to conciliate everybody<br />
by means of mirth to use the expression of Ian jack.<br />
Themes of Love & Marriage And the Character of Belinda<br />
Love is such an obvious theme in The Rape of the Lock that it plays a title part in the poem. Whenever the<br />
critics attempted to analyze the themes they invariably commented on the love affair, which is the main force<br />
motivating the action of the narrative. Dr. Johnson observed that the subject of the poem..(is) an event<br />
below the common incidents of the common life , Geoffery Tillotson thought that the rejection of the hero by<br />
the heroine was unaccountable. Though many Twentieth century critics felt that the theme of love in the<br />
poem was too weak to invite analysis, but Cleanth Brooks stated that the poem is about war of the sexes<br />
over the rites of possession. It appears that Belinda and Baron might have gone there, like many young<br />
people, to find a suitable match to get married- he to another woman and she to another man. The poem does<br />
not show that they were concerned with finding a mate ; rather it confirms that in true neo-classical tradition<br />
they feigned death and believed in sophisticated love and shunning marriage. Both of them, however, wage<br />
a mock war in a mock-heroic poem. Hugo. M. Reichard has summed up the idea thus: The plot of the poem<br />
(is) a contest of wiles between commanding personalities- an uninhibited philanderer and an invincible flirt.<br />
Pope himself seems to be sharing this opinion as he puts it in his own words in The Rape of the Lock and in<br />
other poems. Addison & Steele who also projected in their papers many members of Belinda s and Baron s<br />
species but they certainly do not contain Belinda and the Baron and Pope s world of things.<br />
The axis of the story of The Rape of the Lock is the character of Belinda who, Brooks thinks, is out to<br />
catch a husband. As per the norms of the day the girl would be well advised to become somebody s wife<br />
before the heyday of her reigning beauty passes away. Belinda is not one of those girls who plan for<br />
marriage. In other words, there is not the slightest sign that she is thinking of marriage. The only characteristic<br />
feature of her personality, that catches the attention of the readers first, is Belinda s self-sufficiency as a<br />
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reigning beauty. Clarissa pointedly reminds her that since locks will turn to grey she who scorns a man,<br />
must die a maid (Canto V, 26-28) but Belinda persistently disdains wedlock. Reichard assertively says Her<br />
quest is plainly, not for a man in her life, but for men at her feet. Pope makes it clear that Belinda is keen to<br />
be wanted; she devotes herself to the destruction of mankind and even rejects a man. She no doubt likes<br />
with youthful lords to roam and chooses to reject a lord as her lover or husband. She not only declines the<br />
improper advances of the Baron, but she oft rejects other offers also.<br />
If one judges Belinda on the evidences of the text and the opinions of the critics like Murry, Addison and<br />
Steele one would simply agree with Reichard that, Pope s heroine is not a bride-to-be but a coquette par<br />
excellence. The Oxford <strong>English</strong> Dictionary defines this word coquette thus:<br />
“a woman ( more or less young) who uses arts to gain the admiration and affection of men,<br />
merely for the gratification of vanity or from a desire of conquest, and without any intention<br />
of responding to the feelings aroused; a woman who habitually trifles with the affections<br />
of men.”<br />
On the whole the word coquette stands for a self-loving woman who indulges in winning the hearts and<br />
throwing them away. Belinda fits reasonably well into such descriptions. Her patience before her dressing<br />
table and her fondness for the barges and courts, her delight in love letters, the bounds she puts on her<br />
blandishments and the assault she inflicts on the Baron support the idea that she is extremely self- admiring<br />
and self- loving dame. As Addison had concluded in Tatler, No. 107, They are the most charming, but the<br />
most unworthy sort of women.<br />
It is interesting to note that Ariel, who is an expert witness, himself like other sylphs, is a deceased and<br />
metamorphosed coquette. He is associated with live coquettes by the way of duty because they protect the<br />
fair and chaste girls like Belinda. They guide them through flirtations and keep them fancy- free. It is the<br />
chosen few women who are under the care of the sylphs but the services of all the sylphs are exclusively for<br />
such women. On the one hand, they distract them from the seductive treats of one man, and on the other,<br />
they draw them to the advances of another man.<br />
Belinda s behaviour fully matches her retinue though everything she says or does is a plain coquetry. When<br />
the Baron approaches her with the scissors, for instance, to cut the lock, Thrice she looked back, and thrice<br />
the foe drew near. This sort of turning back may be enchanting allurement, or it may be only an innocent<br />
response to the twitches of warning of the sylph. Pope has made her perform on the Thames barge, in the<br />
most natural and fascinating manner. She executes a tour de force of flirtation to borrow an expression<br />
from Reichard s article entitled: The Love Affair in Pope s Rape of the Lock”. Pope presents her thus:<br />
Fair Nymphs, and well-drest Youths around her shone,<br />
But every Eye was fixed on her alone…<br />
Favours to none, to all she Smiles extends,<br />
Oft she rejects, but never once offends,<br />
Bright as the sun, her Eyes the Gazers strikes,<br />
And, like the Sun, they shine on all alike.<br />
Belinda skillfully maintains the style that suits her charms without losing her grace. She keeps her chastity in<br />
tact even when she offers temptations and she rejects the advances of some young men. Belinda s motive is<br />
just not easily traceable and her conduct is stultifying. As the poem grows, the purpose of Belinda also<br />
becomes clear, that is, living in the present and enjoying her status as a maiden of infinite beauty. She shuns<br />
the dull glories of a virtuous housewife. Her motives are three fold: Vanity , the desire of conquest and selflove.<br />
After her defeat she herself protests that she does not know what mov d my mind with youthful lords<br />
to roam. With a characteristic inconsistency in her behaviour she says: Oh had I rather un-admired remain d<br />
/in some lone isle. Belinda has taken all pains with her charms and has got her tresses curled to seize and<br />
enslave the hearts of men before she comes to the Hampton Court. She plays her cards against the two
Alexander Pope<br />
dashing, adventurous Knights for the fame in the game of Ombre. Here Pope renders that Belinda s ruling<br />
passion is unmistakably pride, which asserts in her personality in the dual sense of self-conceit and selfassertion.<br />
Pope uses the sylphs to expose it for many purposes because they are as solicitous as the girl<br />
herself not only in the matter of dress and coiffure, but also in the inner, instinctive gratification. Ariel addresses<br />
Belinda: Fairest of mortals, Hear and believe! Thy own importance know. Ariel merely says what Belinda<br />
believes; His words are only the echo of Belinda s own sense of values. His message on honour is the most<br />
impressive. It begins and ends thus:<br />
What guards the Purity of melting Maids…?<br />
Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know,<br />
Tho Honour is the Word with Men below.<br />
The sylph that keeps the young maiden chaste represents something different from honour that preserves<br />
her in the worldly sense of the term.<br />
The term honour means a sense of self-respect , or nobleness of mind as<br />
Dr. Johnson would take it or a concern for good taste as Brooks signifies it but Pope plays on the shades of<br />
meaning in the spectrum of honour. Consider Thalestris outburst:<br />
Honor forbid! At whose unrival d Shrine<br />
Ease, Pleasure, Virtue, All, our sex resign.<br />
If at the first glance, honour seems to mean chastity , the word slowly fades into the meaning as reputation.<br />
Any discussion about the significance of true love must take into consideration the essential meaning of the<br />
term honour. Like all the classical poets, Pope brings out the relevance of love only if it is genuinely associated<br />
with honour. However, in the eighteenth century interpretation of the word has been brought to the forefront<br />
by Ariel when he tells Belinda: Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know, / Tho Honour is the Word with<br />
Men below. He means thatit is pride rather than nobility that keeps the young girl like her pure. It is<br />
interesting to note that sylph behind Belinda s purity is symbolically her alter ego.<br />
Belinda displays her real self most vividly at her dressing table. The scene is set in religious metaphor .Her<br />
vanity table is taken as an altar where she plays the double role. She is in person the chief priestess and in<br />
the mirror the goddess . Brooks resolves the mystery with a paradox when he says: Such is the paradox of<br />
beauty worship, she can be both the sincere devotee and the divinity herself. He feels that Pope himself<br />
was amused by the vanity of Belinda s performance. Hazlitt comes very close to the first principle of Belinda s<br />
soul as well as Pope s text when he says:<br />
“A toilette is described with the solemnity of an alter raised to the “Goddess” of vanity. .. In<br />
keeping with her honour, Belinda s religion is primarily not beauty worship, but selfworship.”<br />
Belinda is her own goddess, which according to Oxford Dictionary means woman whom one worships or<br />
devotedly admires. The line like puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux, builds the meaning through<br />
contrast between heaven and self, piety and vanity and ultimately shows the chaos of values which create<br />
the environment in which even love loses its substance and significance. Not only that, when she bends to<br />
her own image in the mirror, she is enamored by her own image. She worships the deity and decks her to<br />
evoke the worship of mankind. These are in earnest the sacred rites of pride.<br />
Belinda s antagonist, the Baron, is also unconventional. She fails to maneuvers the male into matrimony and<br />
assaults the well bred lord and he too attacks the gentle belle. Since Belinda s lock is an amatory symbol,<br />
the pursuit of it involves the Baron in a lover s toil. His aims are to kiss and tell- on his foe to die. Baron<br />
burns the previous trophies of love because he believes that Belinda s pretty lock of hair will make the<br />
grandest trophies. Hence:<br />
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Resolved to win, he meditates the way,<br />
By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray.<br />
Poetry<br />
Baron s preference for fraud or force shows that Baron s adventurism has no place for persuasion and<br />
matrimony.<br />
In the game of Ombre which is a parlour version of the epic battle, the Baron and Belinda encounter each<br />
other by name for the first time. Ariel, who has strict rules of heart, would not like Belinda to lose her heart<br />
to any young man. Momentary success of the diamonds in the game makes the whole environment a kind of<br />
challenge to Belinda s virtue. When the queen of heart is taken Belinda s cheeks turn pale because Belinda<br />
holds the king that can take the Baron s ace of heart, she averts the catastrophe and emerges out of the crisis<br />
with new honours as a heart- breaker. Within moments the tables are turned. On the way she falls in love<br />
and the earthly lover is probably the Baron. It does not directly affect her status or her adventures. Belinda<br />
tactfully keeps her new ideas about love to herself but betrays no sign of languishing into a wife. On the<br />
contrary, she flaunts Clarissa s suggestions about housewifery and marriage. When she tries to retrieve the<br />
lock she symbolically seeks to spike the Baron s claims. Never the less, after falling in love, Belinda is not<br />
all what she used to be. Ariel and other sylphs leave her because she does not meet the desired standards of<br />
purity and honour. Hazlitt comments that on this occasion You hardly know whether to laugh or weep.<br />
Ariel s painful departure is an indication that the worst is yet to come. The theft of Belinda s lock is degrading<br />
because the lock like the hankerchief in Othello would cause the possibility of a greater scandal as Thalestris<br />
prophesies:<br />
Gods! Shall the Ravisher display your Hair,<br />
While the Fops envy, and the Ladies stare!<br />
……………………………..……….<br />
Methinks already I your tears survey,<br />
Already hear horrid things they say,<br />
Already see you a degraded Toast,<br />
And all your Honour in a Whisper lost!<br />
Belinda is also anxious and somehow wants to get rid of such publicity, which is worst than intimacy. She tries<br />
to recover it by words in the fourth canto and by force in the fifth Canto. The battle is fierce and the young<br />
men prefer dying at the hands of these beautiful ladies than withdraw: dying here is physically as well as<br />
metaphorically. While other men dwindle and faint, only one man, Sir Plume, is bold and eccentric enough to<br />
draw Clarissa down. Even this unthinking fellow awakes to the unreality of the warfare and allows himself to<br />
be slain by the frowns of Chloe. On the whole, it is the belles and not the beaux who enjoy the initiative in<br />
Belinda s war. Reichard has very aptly observed:<br />
“When the girls rush bravely forward, they are flirting, not with death or dishonour, but<br />
with men.. and they limit themselves to light–hearted artillery.”<br />
The double point of her bodkin -lovely hair ornament flourished as a dagger is utterly disarming. Even<br />
more breath-taking is her charge of snuff. Like a nerve gas this dust is an absolute weapon; its atoms<br />
completely explode his pretensions to manhood. This fraternizing suits not only the mock-heroics and manners<br />
of drawing rooms, but also the envy felt by fops for another beau s conquest and the joy felt by belles for<br />
another beauty s shame. However, it adds new pleasure even to death,and turns on Belinda favourably.<br />
Single-handedly she wins the war. For Jove s scale the singular lady s hair outweighs the multiple men s<br />
wits. The Baron suffers humiliation as he is thrown out by a snip of her fingers. The lock, obtained with<br />
guilt has been kept with pain. Belinda threatens the Baron who exposed her honour to unfair whispers, to<br />
put him to an everlasting shame with a hairpin. To restore to the prewar equilibrium it is necessary that none<br />
is the gainer or the loser. After they have fought this game of love and honour with cards, scissors and snuff,<br />
their ambitious aims are thwarted and the contest is drawn. The disappearance of the lock has left the baron<br />
without a trophy of conquest and Belinda without a trophy of reprisal.
Alexander Pope<br />
In the end, the star, which is born from the lost lock of Belinda, shines to her advantage but it is hers only by<br />
the special providence of Pope s poetry. He has graced her career with sense and good humour:<br />
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,<br />
And mid st the Stars inscribes Belinda s Name.<br />
The poet invests her with a finer glory than she could ever achieve by her own art of beauty or love.<br />
Supernatural Element in The Rape of the Lock<br />
Pope introduced the supernatural agents in the second edition of the poem when he enlarged two cantos to<br />
five cantos. His choice of the supernatural shows how alive he was to the literature, which even could not be<br />
counted on to help him to be a poet. Pope found in the Rosicrucian doctrine many hints about the Sylphs<br />
specially in Le Comte de Gabalis, a roman written forty years ago in France by Abbe de Monfaucon de<br />
Villars, and which has been twice translated into <strong>English</strong>. The short novel is itself a skit on the sylphs of the<br />
system, the Rosicrucian philosophy, which had been inaugurated in Germany a hundred years earlier. Since<br />
the machinery of a serious epic is derived from established mythology, Pope s adoption of the machinery<br />
from the Rosicrucians was well known to be counted as established. Pope, then, owed to Gabalis the right<br />
to assume the existence of this particular system of elemental sprites who could change their sex at will, but<br />
the main attraction through out the novel is laid on their attractions for men as elementary mistresses. In<br />
Pope s poem, on the other hand, they figure primarily as the allies of women in their unceasing war with men.<br />
Pope took from this novel what he could conveniently develop as per the design of his poem; for instance, in<br />
Gabalis all the sylphs are good but Pope following the traditional categories of spirits, makes gnomes bad<br />
wickedly contriving vexations for the ladies. He makes them more like the factious celestials of the epics.<br />
According to the Rosicrucians,<br />
“the four elements are inhabited by spirits, which they call sylphs, gnomes, nymphs and<br />
salamanders. The gnomes or demons of earth delight in mischiefs; but the sylphs, whose<br />
habitation is in the air, are the best conditioned creatures imaginable. For they say, any<br />
mortals may enjoy the most intimate familiarities with these gentle spirits, upon a condition<br />
very easy to all true adepts, an inviolate preservation of chastity.”<br />
Pope also borrows the opinion that transmigrated souls protect their friends on earth, and conspire against<br />
their enemies; he makes the sylphs guardians of maidens and this again carries its epic reference since the<br />
epic heroes are provided with their divine guardians. He is, however, more interested than de Villars in the<br />
living conditions of the sylphs and goes for help to another French book, that is Fontenelle s Pluralite de<br />
Mondes .It is on this basis of the scientific whims of Fontenelle that Pope s fancy scrupulously build up its<br />
universe ,for example, take 77-86 line from Canto II.<br />
Like Milton s angels again, Pope s sylphs are invulnerable, i.e., if their bodies are divided they can come<br />
together again. Pope borrows the idea of their regimentation and names them,for instance, The light Militia<br />
of the lower sky. Ian Jack made an insightful observation that,<br />
“The main thing that he took over was merely the licence to invent a fantastic race whose<br />
presence would make every trivial incident in his poem ‘appear of utmost importance . The<br />
sylphs are mirrors added to his scene. By them the central action is reflected and multiplied<br />
a hundredfold, gaining in subtlety and mystery as well as in ironical importance.”<br />
The creation of the sylphs allowed Pope s imagination a much wider scope than before. The whole of <strong>English</strong><br />
poetry contains no passage of description more exquisite than that of the sylphs in Canto II of The Rape of<br />
the Lock Of the four Elementary Nations Pope concentrates on the sylphs, whose region is the air; and air<br />
is the element which marks every line of this description:<br />
He summons strait his Denizen of Air;<br />
The lucid Squadrons round the Sails repair:<br />
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Soft o ver the Shrouds Ariel Whispers breathe.<br />
That seem d but Zephyrs to the Train beneath.<br />
Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,<br />
Waft on the breeze, or sink in the Cloud of Gold.<br />
Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,<br />
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,<br />
Thin glittering textures of the filmy Dew.<br />
Poetry<br />
Fully immersed in the ethereal beauty of the sylphs, Pope describes some of the colours, which these sprites<br />
display:<br />
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,<br />
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,<br />
While ev ry Beam new transient Colours flings,<br />
Colours that change whene er they wave their Wings.<br />
Amid the Circle, on the gilded Mast,<br />
Superior by the Head was Ariel plac d;<br />
His Purple Pinions opening to the Sun,<br />
He raised his Azure Wand, and thus begun.<br />
Pope borrowed the idea of Ariel from Shakespeare s The Tempest, and got so fascinated by the beauty of<br />
the sprites, which are essentially the product of his own imagination, that he went much ahead of the given<br />
idea. Ian Jack has remarked in this context: Through out the poem the senses are flattered as delicately as<br />
they are in Belinda s world itself.<br />
In his letter to Arabella Fermor Pope explains the term machinery and its use in the epic. He says:<br />
“the machinery, madam, is a term invented by the critics, to signify that part which the<br />
deities, angels, or demons are made to act in a poem: For the ancient poets are in one<br />
respect like many modern ladies; let an action be never so trivial in itself, they always make<br />
it appear of the utmost importance. These machines I determined to raise on a new and odd<br />
foundation, the Rosicrucian doctrine of Spirits.”<br />
The machinery gives Pope an unrivalled opportunity of indulging in his descriptive powers and to follow the<br />
epic design more effectively as the machinery of sylphs is a parody on gods and goddesses in classical<br />
epics. In an epic the immortals intervene in action. They control the destiny of men and determine their<br />
success or failure. In The Rape of the Lock sylphs intervene in the small stratagems of love. Ariel tells<br />
Belinda that hundreds of sylphs attend the fair ones and zealously guard their chastity:<br />
What guards the purity of melting maids,<br />
In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades<br />
…………………………………………..<br />
Tis their sylph, the wise celestials know,<br />
Though honour is the word with men below.<br />
The sylphs contrive what is known as the levity of women. If a woman rejects a lover or prefers one suitor<br />
to another, it is because of the secret contrivance of sylphs. This is how the sylphs control the course of<br />
women s love on this earth, and guides them through its mystic mazes. It is because of their secret influence<br />
that<br />
With varying vanities, from every part,<br />
They shift the moving toyshop of their heart.<br />
As in the epic gods govern the human destiny; in Pope s The Rape of the Lock the sylphs influence the<br />
course of human affairs, especially love. Exactly like the gods, they intervene in the events as they develop.<br />
A thousand sprites try to prevent Lord Peter from cutting Belinda s lock:
Alexander Pope<br />
Swift to the Lock a thousand sprites repair,<br />
A thousand wings, by turn, blow back the hair:<br />
And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear<br />
Thrice she looked back and thrice the foe drew near.<br />
Against the brilliant background of the eighteenth century society, Pope s gorgeous descriptions about the<br />
sylphs make the poem an exceptionally fascinating piece of poetic creation.<br />
As the gods have their favourites among mortals, so sylphs have their favourites among beauties. Belinda is<br />
the favourite of Ariel who acts like the guardian angel. He could not, however, protect her hair because he<br />
viewed an earthly lover lurking in her heart. Thus, the gods in the classical epics are travestied in The Rape<br />
of the Lock through the machinery of the sylphs. Geoffrey Tillotson says that the scale in The Rape of the<br />
Lock is that of diminution. The mock-epic poem presents the methods of the epic on a diminutive scale. The<br />
sylphs are like the gods of epic on a diminutive scale. In a world of trivialities they take recourse to petty<br />
stratagems. They are quite suited to the world of The Rape of the Lock. Precisely, the machinery in the<br />
poem is a splendid and superb invention and achievement of Pope s imagination.<br />
Pope as a Satirist<br />
Of the entire genre that makes up the Western literary tradition, satire is the only form invented by the<br />
Romans rather than the Greeks. The Latin noun from which the word satire is taken is satura which<br />
means a medley, a variety of things or topics. The main aim of the comic satire developed by Horace is to<br />
castigate and thus to correct the prevailing follies and vices of the age. The Augustan age is the golden period<br />
of <strong>English</strong> satire because the finest and the most powerful satires were written in this age. It is not Pope but<br />
his friend Swift who was the great natural satirist and prior to him was Dryden. Pope uses this skill differently<br />
because he shows a sneaking liking for the society or the things he attacked through his satire. If Pope makes<br />
conventional attacks on pride, he had a dangerous kind of pride himself. He says:<br />
Yes, I am proud; — I must be proud to see<br />
Men not afraid of god, afraid of me…<br />
Pope could not be a satirist like Swift because he had taken a sanguine and cheerful view of London society.<br />
He loved London as the great centre of all pleasures and amenities of life and became, as Lowel aptly points<br />
out, the delineator of manners and the poet of society whose follies and frivolities also he knew well. Pope<br />
was temperamentally respectful to great lords, powerful statesmen, learned lawyers, courtly manners and<br />
loved his neighbour and he made these factors known publicly Pope was almost an invalid depending very<br />
much on the expensive life-style, glitter and gold of the society and close friendships. He could not take grim<br />
and limited view of the possibilities of life as a great satirist is bound to do. In his Essay on Man and Moral<br />
Essays Pope had taken a positive view of the power of reason to regulate passion and the tendency, implanted<br />
by God himself, of our self-love, the spring of all our energies, to grow into social love. He loved his age and<br />
his society, and if he criticized them, it had only one purpose, that is, to purge them of their limitations. Some<br />
of Pope s best writing in his satires is invective against his enemies or compliments to his friends-, which have<br />
all the eloquence of true feeling. Other pieces of excellent writing in Pope s satires are in the nature of an<br />
emotional autobiography; a kind of apology, as in the Arbothnot poem, for a life shut up in literature because<br />
it could have no other outlet, an apology that moves effectively between the self-mocking, the proud and the<br />
sad. In his satirical skill Pope comes next to Dryden, his later poems are more satirical in nature than his<br />
earlier ones and the note of satire is present in almost everything he wrote. He has a moral tendency, which<br />
naturally expresses itself in terms of satire.<br />
Pope s important satirical works are, The Dunciad, The Moral Essay and the Imitation of Horace and<br />
similar epistles and satires. In The Dunciad, his moral excuse was that he was defending a high civilization<br />
against forces of stupidity and corruption that were threatening to destroy it. No doubt, he ridicules dullness<br />
in literary works, but he also attacks his enemies who had given him real or imaginary offence. He attacks<br />
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Poetry<br />
Theobald, because he found fault with his edition of Shakespeare. Mark Jacobs says that it is a poem that<br />
holds one s attention by being at once broadly comic and strikingly nasty. It is probably the most powerful<br />
and original of all Pope s poems, but also the least charming; whereas elsewhere he always seems to write<br />
with ease, here one is conscious of recurrent triumph but also of continual effort. However, it displays<br />
Pope s majestic power which raised satirical poetry to a grandeur to use George Fraser s expression.<br />
Likewise, he attacks Colly Cibber for he ridiculed a play in which Pope had some share. Besides, Pope<br />
ridiculed his old enemy Dennis, who harassed him all his life and remained an enemy. He bitterly satirized<br />
Lintot who accused him of unfair dealings with his collaborators in his translation of Odyssey. In his Imitations<br />
of Horace Pope attacks grossly his former friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and in his Epistles to Dr.<br />
Arbothnot he caricatures Addison who was once his friend.<br />
There are two aspects of Pope s satire- impersonal and personal. His satires are basically directed against<br />
the follies of polite society, against corruption in politics, and against false values in art, particularly the art of<br />
poetry. But, this is also not the whole truth about Pope s satires because it is not as impersonal as stated by<br />
a critic. Pope did not succeed in emancipating himself from personal spite and in generalizing his dislikes.<br />
Talking about The Dunciad John Dennis says:<br />
“The theme is a mean one. Pope from his social eminence at Twickenham, looks with scorn<br />
on the authors who write for bread, and with malignity on the authors whom he regarded as<br />
his enemies. There is, for the most part, little elevation in his method of treatment, and we<br />
can almost fancy that we see a cruel joy in the poet s face as he impales his victims of his<br />
wrath…There is no part of it which can be read with unmixed pleasure, if we except the<br />
noble lines which conclude the satire.”<br />
This estimate may sound bitter but is true to some extent. Pope attacked in his satires not only man but also<br />
men and his attack on men is really conspicuous and ruthless. Pope could not forgive even his friends if they<br />
annoyed him or gave him offence real or imaginary.<br />
When an attempt is made to assess the ethical values of Pope s satire, it leads to certain controversies. What<br />
concern us most are its wit, vigour, brilliance and beauty of form. Saintsbury sums up Pope s contribution as<br />
a writer of satires thus:<br />
“It is in his later Essay, his Epistles, his Satires and his Dunciad that Pope s genius shows at<br />
its very greatest. They are no doubt mosaics—the “Atticus” passage was pretty in Epistle to<br />
Arbuthnot- but this is no defect in them…. Here he reigns triumphant. His philosophy may<br />
be always shallow and sometimes mere nonsense; his satire may lack the large Olympian<br />
sweep of Dryden, but he looked on society, and on humanity, as that society happened<br />
for the time to express it, with an unclouded eye, and he expressed views with a pen that<br />
never stumbled, never made slips of form, and always said the right thing in the right<br />
way…”<br />
Even in The Rape of the Lock, Pope has carried the responsibility of a satirist in the most dignified manner.<br />
He knew the social circle whose follies and frivolities are exposed in the poem. Besides, it presents the<br />
attitude of the age towards women. We have already seen that wits addressed ladies in a tone of gallantry,<br />
but in reality they were treated like pretty triflers. Addison also deplored the treatment given to them and<br />
added that the toilet is the great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair, the principal<br />
employment of their lives. Belinda, like the ladies of her age, seems to be devoted to the similar pursuits<br />
related to toilet and tea, Ombre and armour. Her mornings are spent in the adoration of the cosmetic<br />
powers , Puffs, powders, patches and bibles which make up her beauty. After her make up which repaired<br />
her smiles, she sallies forth to conquer the hearts of the young men. Her main occupations are balls, games<br />
and masquerades. This sort of life, deprived of any work or serious engagement obviously, results in petty act<br />
of removing the lock of a woman. Pope exposes the hollowness of the class, which is pompous only from<br />
without but is shallow within. It is a poem in which the coxcomb and dandies on the one hand and frivolous
Alexander Pope<br />
and pretentious woman on the other display their vanities. When invested in a grand attire of epic, their<br />
frivolities become all the more glaring and interesting. Pope does portray the life of the age from the point of<br />
view of a moralist. His purpose is to present their weaknesses with a view to improving them. When Pope<br />
presents their smallness, he is not condemning them rather he is amused by their follies, which he<br />
believes, must be corrected. Humour does not arise from a great and serious purpose. It emerges from a<br />
situation in which a lady loses a lock of her hair, or from a conflict in which a man is slain with a woman s<br />
bodkin.<br />
Thus, the satire in The Rape of the Lock exposes the life of the age in playful manner and the picture is<br />
saturated with a gentle irony. The instructive hours are passed by exchanging the scandals, and by singing,<br />
laughing and ogling. The trivialities are drawn with exquisite skill; they are meant to amuse and should not be<br />
taken more seriously than Pope meant them to be. Joseph Warton has summed up the whole issue stating<br />
that,<br />
“The Rape of the Lock is the Best satire extant; that it contains the truest and the liveliest<br />
picture of modern life; that the subject is of a more elegant nature, as well as more artfully<br />
conducted, than that of any other heroi-comic poem. Pope here appears in the light of a<br />
man of gallantry, and of a thorough knowledge of the world; and indeed he had nothing, in<br />
his carriage and deportment, of that affected singularity, which induced some men of genius<br />
to despise, and depart from, the established rules of politeness and civil life.”<br />
In fact, Pope s satire was mostly leveled against folly. He says, Fools rush to my head, and I write .<br />
Pope’s Language, Art of Versification and The Heroic Couplet<br />
Pope s verbal workmanship is unparalleled. He is the master of clean-cut and incisive phraseology and<br />
ornamental extravagances of the eighteenth century diction which has been attacked by the later critics<br />
principally on three grounds: (a) that it was a new borrowing from Latin, for example, take the word dehorting,<br />
or its use in the original Latin sense; or the word obvious; these words were already borrowed and developed<br />
in meaning, for example obvious;(b) that it adapted a Latin method of phrasing, for example, fleecy care;<br />
and (c) that it was used too much. Against the first objection the only reply is that the poets of the age were<br />
experimenters; for the second the only justification can be that it was Latin and therefore it provided cultivated<br />
pleasure. Fleecy care is good as sound. It is also subtle and complex as meaning. This kind of phrase<br />
provided an excellent method of compression, especially since it is often an abstract and a concrete, which<br />
are clashed together. This method of compression by periphrasis, of comprehensive description and designation<br />
acting simultaneously, becomes one of the most prominent items in the poetic diction of the eighteenth century.<br />
Another favourite phrase is Adjective + a group of words: for example, the feather d kind. The poets of the<br />
eighteenth century attained the stateliness befitting the Classical poets especially Virgil, his conception of<br />
poetry and his gracefulness by adopting their metre. They achieved it by avoiding low words like fish and<br />
sheep. There is another reason for this poetic diction. It is notable that it is principally used in reference to<br />
external nature. The eighteenth century inherited the Renaissance creed that man is the monarch in his<br />
world. Dryden and Pope looked at the external nature for what it could show them of splendour or beauty or<br />
even of mystery they superimposed on nature by allotting it a due and fit place in the human scheme. In other<br />
words, they made a selection from nature of elements that suited their interests, and superimposed on nature<br />
some of their own civilized humanity. Briefly the writers justified the use of Latin diction, phrases and expression<br />
used excessively. Pope, being an extremely laborious craftsman, learnt through constant labour and practice<br />
the art of expressing his ideas in the best words and phrases. To achieve the perfection of form, his one great<br />
concern was to express the best thought within his compass in the best words. Pope corrected his lines<br />
with meticulous care, polished and repolished them. Dr. Johnson speaks of Pope s incessant and unwearied<br />
diligence and adds that Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, therefore always endeavoured<br />
to do his best He examined lines and words with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched<br />
every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven.<br />
73
74<br />
Poetry<br />
Pope believes that there should be correctness of diction. Certain poems require to draw from a fund of<br />
acknowledged poetic diction, others require original diction. As Geoffrey Tillotson observes: He requires<br />
that language should be appropriate. There should be no incongruity between the length in space (or time)<br />
and the length in meaning, between decoration and substance, between obsolete and modern. Appropriateness<br />
is the cardinal virtue for Pope in life as well as literature. In Essay on Criticism Pope says:<br />
Expression is the dress of thought, and still<br />
Appears more decent, as more suitable<br />
For diff rent styles with diff rent subjects sort,<br />
As several garbs with country, town and court.<br />
Pope firmly believed that the style should be adapted to the subject. He had rules for a variety of styles even<br />
for the appropriate placing of the preposition:<br />
‘What is your opinion (asks the Boswellian Spence)of placing preposition at the end of a<br />
sentence? —It is certainly wrong: but I have made a rule to myself about them some time<br />
ago, and I think verily tis the right one. We use them so in common conversation: and that<br />
use will authorize one, I think, for doing the same in slighter pieces, but not in formal<br />
ones.”<br />
Pope cannot endure stiffness, which is created with high words and metaphors. He wanted his language to<br />
be appropriate and hence there is no diction in satires to borrow the expression of Tillotson. In the<br />
moral poetry Pope uses the words almost with freedom and fearlessness of Shakespeare. This freedom<br />
can be seen nowhere more readily than in Pope s verbs of the poetic diction which were predominantly<br />
of Latin origin. He is free but at the same time he is not free to use any word that comes to his head,<br />
because like all, his poems, the satires are addressed to the cultured society of his time. As Tillotson<br />
says:<br />
“Poeticisms are barred. These must be no merely ornamental epithets, and no compound<br />
ones. The epithet must therefore fall into its prose order, that is, it must precede the noun…”<br />
Such rules apply unless appropriateness demands their temporary suspension. Coleridge, in Biographia<br />
Literaria, considered that in satires, Pope was a poet of almost faultless position and choice of words.<br />
Pope inherited the Elizabethan dread that <strong>English</strong> language had a limited future. Hence his occupation with<br />
correctness in language is aimed partly at keeping <strong>English</strong> afloat. In his book On the Poetry of Pope<br />
Tillotson reflects on Pope s fancy for Latinizing <strong>English</strong>:<br />
“His envy of the adamant of Latin led him to respect and extend the seventeenth –century<br />
practice of latinizing <strong>English</strong>. In his early works his respect was shown mainly in vocabulary<br />
and methods of phrasing, in the later work mainly in the close Latin-like packing of line,<br />
and the precise correctness of each word used. Correctness was a likely preservative.”<br />
Pope wished to be concise in the meaning and the use of words. That perhaps was the first requirement for<br />
writing in the heroic couplet. He enunciated the rules which he felt were valuable for the writing of couplets.<br />
Though Dryden did not invent the couplet but he improved upon his predecessors and turned it into a powerful<br />
medium of expression. Besides, he broke the monotony of the couplet by frequent use of triplets and<br />
Alexandrines. In the Epistle to Augustus, Pope summarizes the history of seventeenth century versification,<br />
pays his tribute to Dryden though he thinks of him an incorrect versifier .<br />
The bulk of Pope s poetry is written in the heroic couplets because, as Pope believed,it attracts attention to<br />
itself as a metre and carries an unpretentious elegance . He learned his merical devices from Dryden but<br />
he narrowed down its metrical scope considerably. He discarded the triplet and Alexandrine by which Dryden<br />
introduced variety in his verse and brought more subtle variations of rhythm within the closed couplet. Tillotson<br />
rightly points out that
Alexander Pope<br />
“Heroic couplets had not always been written in the way Pope wrote them. He may be said<br />
to have regarded them as if they were stanzas, self-contained; or, if not quite that, as having<br />
a beginning , middle and end even though at the end stood a gate and a gate which on some<br />
occasions he opened to allow the sense to drive through. That is, the couplet may belong to<br />
the paragraph, even more than to itself: but if so, it is only because Pope deliberately chose<br />
to open the gate.<br />
Pope enunciated in letters to Cromwell and Walsh some of the principles upon which he worked in the heroic<br />
couplets such as of the feet, the quantities and the pauses . In the collected Works of 1717 he writes:<br />
There are indeed certain Niceties, which, tho not much observed even by correct versifiers, I cannot<br />
but think, deserve to be better regarded. Briefly they are:<br />
1. It is not enough that nothing offends the ear, but a good poet will adapt the very Sounds, as well as Words,<br />
to the things he treats of.<br />
2. In any smooth <strong>English</strong> verse of ten syllables, there is naturally a Pause at the forth, fifth, or sixth<br />
syllables<br />
3. Another nicety is in relation to Expletives, whether words or syllables Do before verbs plural is<br />
absolutely such which are almost always used for the sake of rhime<br />
4. I would also object to the irruption of Alexandrine verses, of twelve syllables I am of the same opinion<br />
as to Triple Rhimes.<br />
5. I could equally object to the Repetition of the same Rhimes within four or six of each other, as tiresome<br />
to the ear thro their Monotony.<br />
6. Monosyllabic Lines, unless very artfully managed, are stiff, or languishing: but may be beautiful to express<br />
Melancholy, slowness, or Labour.<br />
7. To come to Hiatus, or Gap between two words, which is caused by two vowels opening on each other .<br />
I think the rule in this case is either to use Caesura (by which Pope meant the elision of one of the vowels<br />
or admit Hiatus, for Caesura sometimes offends the ear more than the Hiatus .<br />
As these rules confirm, Pope s first need is onomatopoeia. There are thousands of examples of Pope s<br />
beautiful use of onomatopoetic effects through so many varieties of patterns. For instance, consider how<br />
Pope provides an antithesis as well as an echo in the following line:<br />
“So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow”<br />
Or take an instance of unbalance between two parts:<br />
“More bright than moon, yet fresh as early day.”<br />
Or the line:<br />
“ Fresh as the moon, and as the season fair.”<br />
in which there is an inversion of music but not an inversion of meaning. Tillotson s observation is<br />
remarkable when he says: Pope s regard for versification which, to speak approximately, began<br />
in the cause of music and continued in the cause of meaning, was the major element in his effect and his<br />
effectiveness.<br />
Pope s greatest triumph in the couplet lies in his making it dramatic with the help of the mechanics of his art<br />
which make them satisfying as complete stanzas and there is no doubt that Pope looked on the couplet as<br />
capable of attaining a temporary unity in itself. There are three significant qualities which make them<br />
astonishingly unpredictable: (a) He introduces in them a subtler variety of rhythm, and adds to it an incomparable<br />
lightness and polish. One of the critics of Pope has summed up the beauty of his couplet thus: Light, bright,<br />
glittering, varied in a manner almost impossible to account for, tipped over with the nearest, sharpest rhyme,<br />
volleying on the dazzled, though at times at any rate satiated reader, a sort of salvo of feud artifice, skipping,<br />
75
76<br />
Poetry<br />
crackling, scattering colour and sound all round and about him. (b) There is a quality of the verbal colouring<br />
and metre on the large scale. Pope s meaning is achieved through his metre as much as through his words.<br />
Pope, seeing the value of conciseness, saw also that the heroic couplet- that of all metres- could be patterned<br />
and rhythm d so as to save words, so as to complete the subtlety of a meaning which otherwise would have<br />
taken up more space. The metre whispers to the reader the sense, the tone, the nuance which those words<br />
have not needed to be used for. (c) Pope s couplet are self-sufficient so that they are curiously<br />
detachable even when lacking grammatical independence. From the stand-point of sense each couplet of<br />
Pope is complete in itself. He introduces in them sense pause and grammatical pause. to present a<br />
complete thought<br />
To sum up Pope s art of poetry it can be said that Pope with his concepts of correctness about human nature<br />
and society, art and values has risen above the old myth of being a satirical poet and has become a<br />
conscious Augustan prophet whose greatness is to voice the ideas and ideals of his age to use the expression<br />
of S.L. Goldburg who futher adds:<br />
“ He has created for his age, and in another sense for ours as well, … But that life and that<br />
artistic intelligence of it gleams most brightly as they also reflect the ‘chaos and ‘darkness<br />
that paradoxically sustain them.”<br />
Being a great writer, Pope did not deliver exactly what his audience had ordered. There are codes and secret<br />
messages in his work; there is a constant thread of myth, irrationality and fancy but he was sufficiently a man<br />
of his time who used the poetic idiom then in fashion, who used the inherited idiom with absolute mastery. He<br />
is a social poet who knew his people; he is a poet of correctness , he is a creative poet who is conscious<br />
of his responsibility and uses his art effectively. In the Preface to his volume of 1717 Pope observed that the<br />
life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the epigram makes an apt comment on his work, though in a more<br />
complex sense than he could have meant when he made it. The highest life of his Wit is certainly a warfare,<br />
not only directed at the earth he inhabited, but also an inextricable part of it. At his greatest, he does not<br />
simply oppose clear-cut doctrines or principles against an imperfect word, but participates in the endless<br />
conflicts that make it imperfect . As a poet Pope carries more inclusive, more subtle, more relaxed and more<br />
mature sense of life around him.<br />
Note: Answer the following questions.<br />
Assignments<br />
1. What are the characteristic features of the Augustan age , which is also known as the Age of Pope?<br />
2. Write an essay on Pope as a Neo-classical poet and a true representative of the eighteenth century.<br />
3. Discuss Pope as a Satirist with special reference to The Rape of the Lock.<br />
4. Consider Pope as a writer of Heroic couplets.<br />
5. Discuss The Rape of the Lock as a mock-epic poem.<br />
6. Write an essay on the supernatural machinery in The Rape of the Lock<br />
7. What are the qualities of Belinda s character? Illustrate your answer.<br />
8. Geoffrey Tillotson calls Pope as a poet of correctness? Elucidate the statement.<br />
9. Discuss Pope s art of versification. Give illustrations to support your answer.<br />
10. What are the structural qualities of The Rape of the Lock?<br />
11. Discuss the theme of love in The Rape of the Lock.<br />
12. In The Rape of the Lock Pope himself is fascinated by the glitter of his own age. Discuss the<br />
remark.<br />
13. What is the significant moral message of The Rape of the Lock?
Alexander Pope<br />
14. Discuss Pope as a poet. Give a reasoned answer.<br />
15. What are the limitations or demerits of Pope as a poet?<br />
Note: Answer the following questions in about two hundred words.<br />
1. What is a heroic couplet?<br />
2. Discuss the opening lines of the first Canto of The Rape of the Lock<br />
3. What are the epic qualities in The Rape of the Lock? Give two examples to support your<br />
answer.<br />
4. Pope has recommended certain niceties for poetry. Discuss any three of them briefly.<br />
5. Write a note on Sylphs.<br />
6. What is the difference between the first and the second version of The Rape of the Lock?<br />
7. What happens to Belinda s lock at the end of the poem?<br />
8. What was the purpose of writing the poem, The Rape of the Lock?<br />
9. Discuss the role of Clarissa.<br />
10. What is the significance of the title of The Rape of the Lock?<br />
11. What is a Satire?<br />
12. Discuss the significance of the metre in Pope s poetry.<br />
13. Write a note on Pope s classicism.<br />
14. Point out any two qualities of Pope s craftsmanship.<br />
15. What are the features that make Pope s poetry autobiographical?<br />
Poems<br />
Complete Editions<br />
Books Useful for the Students<br />
The Poems of Alexander Pope: the Twickenham Edition. General Editor, John Butt, 6 vols. Its 7, London,<br />
1939-6I. This is the definitive edition.<br />
The poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, London, 1963, new ed. 1965. A one-volume edition of the<br />
Twickenham Text with selected annotations.<br />
The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Herbert Davis, London, 1966. Oxford Standard Authors Edition.<br />
Letters<br />
The correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols. Oxford, 1956.<br />
Letters of Alexander Pope, A selection edited by J. Butt, London, 1960.<br />
George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, Oxford, 1934. The standard biography up to 1727.<br />
Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope, London, 1930. In spite of its sentimentality this book still has some value for its<br />
sympathetic account of Pope.<br />
Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, Collected form the Conversation<br />
of Mr. Pope and other Eminent Persons of His Time.<br />
(I) ed. S.W. Singer, 1820. Newly introduced by Bonamy Dobree, London, 1964.<br />
(II) Ed. J.M. Osborn, 2 vols. Oxford, 1966. An essential source for Pope s life.<br />
W.K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope, New Haven and London, 1965. An interesting and beautifully<br />
produced book.<br />
77
78<br />
Criticism<br />
A.L. Williams, Pope s Dunciad : A Study of its Meaning, London, 1955.<br />
Poetry<br />
Arden, John M., Something Like Horace: Studies in the Art and Allusion of Pope s Horatian Satires. Nashville,<br />
Tennessee, 1969.<br />
Arthur O. love joy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., 1936, Repr. 1950. See Chaps. VI-IX for an<br />
illuminating study of some key ideas in the 18 th century.<br />
Bateson, F.W. and Joukovsky, N.A (eds), Alexander Pope: Acritical Anthology, Harmondsworth,<br />
1971.<br />
Cleanth Brooks, The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor , in Sewanee Review, vol. LI, no. 4, 1943, pp. 505-24;<br />
also in The Well-Wrought Urn, New York, 1947.<br />
Dixon, Peter, The World of Pope s Satires: An Introduction to the Epistles and Imitations of Horace ,<br />
London, 1968.<br />
Dobree, Bonamy, Alexander Pope, London, 1951.<br />
Douglas Knight, Pope and the Heroic Tradition, A Critical Study of His Iliad, New Haven and London, 1951.<br />
Edith Sitwell, Alexander pope, London, 1930.<br />
Evan Jones, Verse, Prose and Pope: A From of Sensibility , in The Melbourne Critical Review, No. 4, 1961,<br />
pp. 30-40.<br />
Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope, London, 1938, rev. ed. 1950. The best book by a distinguished<br />
Pope scholar.<br />
Geoffery Tillotson, Pope and Human Nature, Oxford, 1958.<br />
Geoffery Tillotson, Alexander Pope, I and II , Two essays in Essays in Criticism and Research, Cambridge,<br />
1942.<br />
George Sherburn, Pope at Work , in Essays on the Eighteenth Century Prese4nted to David Nichol Smith,<br />
Oxford, 1945, pp. 49-64.<br />
G.Wilson Knight, The Poetry of Alexander Pope: Laureate of Peace, London, 1955, Paperback 1965. See<br />
Chapter The Vital Flame , originally published in The Burning Oracle, London, 1939. The rest of the book is<br />
not as helpful as this chapter.<br />
Ian Jack Augustan Satire: intention and Idiom in <strong>English</strong> Poetry 1660-1750. Oxford, 1952. Chaps. V-VII.<br />
John Butt, The Augustan Age, London, 1950. Has a useful chapter on Pope.<br />
J. Sutherland, A preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry, London, 1948. a sound introduction to the period.<br />
J.S. Cunningham, Pope: The Rope of the Lock , London, 1961. A detailed analysis of the poem.<br />
Maynard Mack, Ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, London, U.S.A. Printing, 1965. A<br />
valuable collection although of uneven quality. See in particular the essays by Auden, Brooks, Cameron,<br />
Empson, Griffith, Jack, Knight, Sutherland, Williams, and Wimsatt.<br />
Maynard Mack, Wit and Poetry and Pope : Some observations on his Imagery , in Pope and his<br />
Contemporaries: Essays presented to George Sherburn, ed J. L. Clifford and L. Landa, Oxford, 1949, pp.<br />
320-40. The other essays in this book are also worth reading.<br />
M. Price. To the Places of Wisdom, New York, 1964. Includes a good essay on Pope.<br />
Norman Ault, New Light on Pope, London, 1949.<br />
Owen Ruffhead, The Life of Alexander Pope, London, 1769.
Alexander Pope<br />
R.A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, Oxford, 1959. On the richness and meaning of<br />
classical allusion in Pope.<br />
Rebecca Price Parkin, the Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope, Minneapolis, 1955.<br />
R.W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, Urbana, Ill., 1955.<br />
T.R. Edwards, This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope, Berkeley, 1963.<br />
Warren, Austin, Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist, Princeton 1929.<br />
William Empson, Wit in the Essay on Criticism , in The Hudson Review, vol II, No. 4, 1950, pp. 559-77; also<br />
in The Structure of Complex Words, London, 1951. Difficult but interesting.<br />
79
M.A.ENGLISH<br />
LITERATURE IN ENGLISH FROM: 1772-1834<br />
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE`S: THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT<br />
<strong>MA</strong>RINER AND KUBLA KHAN.<br />
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE POET<br />
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery, St. Mary in Devon- shire,<br />
England in the year 1772. He was a great poet, a critic, a philosopher and<br />
dramatist. He was the youngest of the nine brothers and one sister. His<br />
father was the Vicar of the village; he was visionary and unworldly. As a<br />
boy Coleridge himself was very imaginative, and a solitary loving person.<br />
Coleridge was educated at Christ's Hospital, London (1781). Matriculated<br />
at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791). Coleridge’s marvelous gift of<br />
eloquence was already evident and his schoolfellows would listen to him<br />
with great interest, as the young poet poured out poetry with all his<br />
melody.<br />
Coleridge took little interest in games as a boy. He spent most of his time<br />
reading books. Once he ran away from home, fearing a whipping of his<br />
father and spent the night by the banks of the village stream. He caught<br />
cold and suffered from rheumatism, which embittered his future life, and<br />
so we lost a great poet at a young age.<br />
At the age of sixteen he fell in love with Mary Evans, the sister of a school<br />
friend, but was married to Sarah Flicker, the sister of Southey's fiancée.<br />
Sarah was neither emotionally nor intellectually a suitable partner for<br />
Coleridge. His marriage was a failure because of temperamental and<br />
practical difficulties from both sides.<br />
Coleridge was idealistic, sensitive, generous and openhearted. Southey<br />
was conservative and highly materialistic in his attitude. In 1795, the two<br />
spent enough time to realize their mutual incompatibility and bitterly<br />
quarreled with each other.<br />
MEETING WITH WORDSWORTH<br />
Coleridge met Wordsworth in 1795 and the two had felt attracted to each<br />
other by a common interest in political idealism and poetry. In 1797,<br />
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxdon to be near the<br />
Coleridges. The two poets were temperamentally different but they had<br />
great regards for each other’s talent and each stimulated the other.<br />
Coleridge was brilliant and commanded a vast range of ideas while
Wordsworth possessed great emotional stability. Coleridge said that when<br />
compared to Wordsworth, he felt himself "a little man". Wordsworth felt<br />
that he was no match for Coleridge's profundity. Dorothy has given a very<br />
vivid impression of the personality of Coleridge during these days.<br />
"He is a wonderful man. His conversation themes with soul mind and<br />
spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful, and like<br />
William, interests himself so much about every trifle. At first I thought<br />
him thin, has a wide mouth thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish,<br />
loose-growing, half curling rough black hair. But, if you hear him speak<br />
for 5 minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and<br />
not very dark, but grey- such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul<br />
the dullest _expression; but it speaks every motion of his animated mind;<br />
In the short time from June 1797 to September 1798 Coleridge wrote<br />
almost all of his best poetry- "The Ancient Mariner", "The Nightingale",<br />
"The first part of Christabel", "Love", "Fears in Solitude", "Frost at<br />
Midnight", "Kubla Khan" etc<br />
Some change in Coleridge’s writing is noticed due to Wordsworth’s<br />
influence upon him. Coleridge was by nature unsteady, and also rambling<br />
in his speculation; it was Wordsworth who checked his rambling tendency<br />
and helped and encouraged him to concentrate his poetic energy along a<br />
definite channel. And again Wordsworth's philosophy of nature influenced<br />
him and coloured to some extent his nature poetry. The later groups of<br />
nature poems show a deeper sense. But Coleridge did not fully and<br />
unreservedly accept Wordsworth's philosophy of nature. According to<br />
Wordsworth, nature lives her own life and heals and soothes man in his<br />
sorrows and suffering. But Coleridge opposes this view where he says in<br />
"Ode to DEJECTION":<br />
O Lady we receive but what we give<br />
And in our life alone does nature live.<br />
Nature to him is cold and inanimate, and if any glory or joy is to be found<br />
in her, it is due to the reflective mind of man and not any quality present in<br />
her:<br />
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth<br />
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud<br />
Enveloping the Earth...
Both Coleridge and Wordsworth revolted against the artificial poetic<br />
diction of the eighteenth century. But Coleridge did not wholly subscribe<br />
to Wordsworth theory. He would not give any importance to rustic speech,<br />
nor would he accept the dictum that "there is no essential difference<br />
between the language of prose and metrical composition".<br />
In September 1798, a few months after the birth of his second son<br />
Berkely, Coleridge accompanied Wordsworths to Germany. In their<br />
absence Cottle published the first edition of the “Lyrical Ballads”, a joint<br />
venture of Wordsworth and Coleridge, at Bristol. The book sold very bad<br />
and earned a lot of criticism.<br />
Coleridge returned to London to engage himself in political journalism for<br />
the "Morning Post" but gave it up in 1800. Since Wordsworth and<br />
Coleridge were now not living together, this adversely affected the quality<br />
of their poetry. Coleridge resumed "Christabel" and wrote its second part,<br />
but it is very much inferior to the first part.<br />
COLERIDGE'S HEALTH<br />
Coleridge was persistently scourged with rheumatism and spasms in the<br />
stomach. He started taking opium as a relief giver and soon got addicted to<br />
it. To distract himself from his health and domestic problems he took<br />
recourse to metaphysics and abstract philosophy. He soon became a<br />
nationalist, and in philosophy he began to believe in the supreme<br />
importance of mind and spirit. His sorrow and frustration is bewailed in<br />
his last green poem "Dejection: An Ode"' this was actually written as a<br />
verse letter to Sara Hutchinson. The Ode was written in April 1802.<br />
Coleridge spent the next three years of his life in Italy and Malta; His<br />
health was becoming very poor day by day. In 1819, he received a severe<br />
blow of his life when he got news of his son, Hartley's expulsion from an<br />
Oxford fellowship. His health became worse, and he took more of opium.<br />
From this day to 25th July 1834 {till his death} he never regained his<br />
health.<br />
Coleridge's life was full of vicissitudes and from many points of view, he<br />
was a singularly an unfortunate man. He left many of his works<br />
incomplete; but whatever he wrote is just brilliant. His talk was always<br />
fascinating and persuasive.” He was the most wonderful man ever known<br />
to me" -said Wordsworth about S.T. Coleridge. Charles Lamb has rightly<br />
described him as "an Archangel-slightly damaged”. His likeness, nor<br />
probably the world can see again" A very recent critic, Allan Grant praises<br />
him for his modernity as a poet and thinker.
Coleridge's life may be viewed as a composite of several careers (poet,<br />
preacher, lecturer, playwright, journalist, reviewer and a writer). He has<br />
been given more numerous and various reputations than perhaps any other<br />
<strong>English</strong> poet. Hazlitt called him an "Eagle dallying with the wind”, Shelley<br />
referred him as a "Hooded eagle among blinking owls".<br />
Coleridge's works may be categorized under three heads:<br />
1. His poetry<br />
2. His dramas<br />
3. His literary criticism.<br />
1. His Poetical Works: The early poems of Coleridge were published<br />
in the spring of 1796 in the volume entitled Poems on various<br />
subjects. The manner is artificial and stiff, under the strong<br />
influence of 18 th century poetic diction, modified by<br />
sentimentalism and melancholy. His political sonnets betray the<br />
influence of Godwin but are pompous in style. More promising,<br />
however, are the poems dominated by the young poet’s love and<br />
minute observation of natural scenery-The Song of the Pixies<br />
(1793); The Lines on Autumnal Evening; Lewti (1794) and<br />
Religious Musings (1794-96).<br />
Then came his golden period of intimacy with Wordsworth and Dorothy,<br />
which led to the planning of The Lyrical Ballads and the flowering of<br />
Coleridge’s best poetry- the true Wordsworthian pieces like The Lime Tree<br />
Bower, Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude (1797-98), followed by the<br />
master pieces stamped with his own original sensibility- The Ancient<br />
Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. Then the poetic fount began to<br />
dwindle in energy and after a few spurts in Dejection: An Ode and Love<br />
and Hope it became exhausted and the vacuum thus created had to be<br />
filled by critical and philosophical activities which yielded richer and<br />
more voluminous works, though quite fragmentary and discursive. The<br />
creative life of Coleridge is at once a miracle and a melancholy spectacle<br />
of waste and sudden collapse of divine imagination.<br />
2) His Dramas: His first drama, written in collaboration with Southey was<br />
The Fall of Robes Pierre (1794). It shows influence of Shakespeare but is<br />
marred by rhetorical declamation and poor characterization. His other<br />
dramas were Remorse (1798), which is a tragedy in blank verse and<br />
Zapolya (1817) a romantic tragedy.<br />
3) His Literary Criticism: Coleridge’s chief critical work was Biographia<br />
Literaria (1817). It is a sort of loose autobiography embracing a variety<br />
of subjects like religion, politics, literature and criticism. It contains a<br />
valuable criticism of Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction.
Coleridge as a Critic<br />
There are many for whom he is the most important critic, chiefly because<br />
he raised central questions about criticism itself, its methods and<br />
philosophical basis incorporating rites and materials pertaining to any area<br />
of life. The function of criticism itself he conceived to be the lifting of all<br />
these elements into awareness, not the prescribing or even describing of<br />
rule that can neither be adequately formulated by the critic, nor adhered by<br />
the writer, but rather the elucidation of what he called "the principles of<br />
grammar, logic and psychology. It is, however, in literary criticism that<br />
Coleridge's achievement is the most lasting. No one before him in England<br />
had brought such mental breadth to the discussion of aesthetic values. His<br />
judgments are all great doctrinal preconceptions. The well- known<br />
differentiation between imagination and fancy is a way of laying stress<br />
upon the creative activity of the mind, as opposed to the passive<br />
association of mental pictures, but for Coleridge, it has a mystical<br />
significance.<br />
COLERIDGE AS A RO<strong>MA</strong>NTIC POET<br />
The movement of romantic revival had started much before Coleridge, in<br />
the age of Johnson. Poets like Gray, Goldsmith and Blake initiated it. But<br />
the official date for the beginning of the romantic age is 1798, the year in<br />
which Wordsworth and Coleridge together brought out The Lyrical<br />
Ballads. Thus in the first generation of romantic poets, Coleridge is as<br />
important as Wordsworth himself. In certain respects, his poetry illustrates<br />
the romantic temper even better than that of Wordsworth. According to an<br />
eminent critic, his poetry is ‘the most finished, supreme embodiment of all<br />
that is purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit’.<br />
Coleridge may be called the most romantic of the poets of the Romantic<br />
Revival. . His early poems are more or less experimental, but they show<br />
his ardent delight in natural beauty and his self-consciousness as an artist.<br />
His emotional response to the beauties and glories of nature is poetically<br />
expressed in all his poems. Coleridge possessed the most vigorous mind<br />
among the <strong>English</strong> Romantic Poets. Whereas in the other poets of this<br />
period, romanticism tends to take a single dominant hue which colors the<br />
objects of experience; in Coleridge it attains a fullness of complexity. In<br />
his poetry, there is room for the spirit of bold adventure, the joy of<br />
discovery and the romance of action. There is nature in a variety of<br />
moods, familiar and comforting, weird and horrifying, tender and<br />
soothing, tumultuous and perturbing, gay and jubant, desolate and<br />
mournful. There are intensely human emotions, which flow out of<br />
supernatural incidents and are lifted into the upper heights of romance. All<br />
these elements are linked into a vital unity with a psychological bond that<br />
gives them the harmony of a perfect moral impression. Many of his poems
may be fragments, but reading them is a wholesome experience. And<br />
while the other romantic poets weave the web of wonders of the external<br />
world and links them to the subtleties of human psychology. And unlike<br />
most of the others writers, he possesses the gift of telling a story rich in<br />
dramatic situations with a close grip over psychological truths and a<br />
delicate sense of moral fitness.<br />
Coleridge has been called the "high priest of romantism", and as C.M.<br />
Bowra remarks, his three great poems,” The Ancient Mariner", "Kubla<br />
Khan" and "Christabel", are his supreme contribution to poetry and "of all<br />
<strong>English</strong> romantic masterpieces, they are the most unusual and the most<br />
romantic". This is so because in his poetry all the chief characteristics of<br />
romanticism find a rich _expression.<br />
To sum up, Coleridge’s whole career was romantic in the sense that his<br />
life was full of brilliant promises and broken aims. He found _expression<br />
for many an unheard-of mood of his mind in poems like Dejection: An<br />
Ode. He was a melancholy man given to brooding over the failure of his<br />
life- in fact he had the “romantic melancholy” to the full.<br />
Coleridge’s poetry represents the culmination of romanticism in its purest<br />
form. The Ancient Mariner and the Christabel mark the triumph of<br />
romanticism as fully as Wordsworth’s narrative poems mark the triumph<br />
of naturalism. It is by virtue of these poems that Saintsbury has called him<br />
“ the high-priest of romanticism”.<br />
There is a certain romantic note present in the best works of Coleridge. “In<br />
pictorial power” writes Buchan, ``felicity of phrase and word music he is<br />
one of the greatest masters. In his subtly suggestive treatment of the<br />
supernatural he stands almost alone.” It is not only that he eliminates from<br />
his supernaturalism the crude material horror, then popular with the<br />
writers of the romantic school; he also gives it a psychological foundation.<br />
This is particularly apparent in The Ancient Mariner, the backbone of<br />
which is provided, not only by the marvels of the narrative, but also by the<br />
spiritual history of the hero. By the power of his imagination Coleridge<br />
perceived the unseen forces at work behind the visible world, and through<br />
his poetry he tried to convey his perception of the mystery of things to<br />
others. He felt that there are more things under heaven and earth than the<br />
world of dreams, and it is this feeling, which Coleridge expresses in his<br />
poetry. This is the reason why Coleridge's poems are more mysterious and<br />
strange than that of any other romantic poet. He creates a sense of<br />
strangeness and wonder, and thus makes the words of Pater more truthful<br />
about the definition of romanticism as "the addition of strangeness to<br />
beauty,” or that of Watts Dutton as`` the renaissance of wonder".
Coleridge said that while writing about supernatural characters and events,<br />
his main problem was to transfer from our inward nature a human interest<br />
and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of<br />
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which<br />
constitutes poetic faith'. How he succeeds in his purpose is indeed<br />
admirable. He gives his supernatural the solid base of the dramatic truth of<br />
human emotions so that howsoever improbable the events might appear,<br />
the authenticity of human experience is never violated. Besides, his<br />
treatment is very subtle. He does not cumulate horrors; he does not give<br />
gruesome details, any blood curdling and spine chilling incidents for him.<br />
He just suggests giving his readers a free hand to use their imagination and<br />
fill in the necessary details. His descriptions are never a strain on our<br />
credulity. Instead of abruptly stepping into the realm of the supernatural,<br />
he first wins the faith of his readers with an accurate rendering of the<br />
familiar landscape and then slowly proceeds to exploit this faith and<br />
introduce the supernatural elements. The presence of the moral principle<br />
as a unifying link saves his poems from being a "Phantasmagoria of<br />
unconnected events".<br />
The essence of Coleridge’s romanticism lies in his artistic treatment of the<br />
supernatural. All of his three important poems Kubla Khan, Christabel and<br />
The Ancient Mariner are poems of pure supernaturalism. Kubla Khan is<br />
less directly concerned with the Supernatural, still the supernatural touch<br />
in the "Woman wailing for her demon-lover”, in the ancestral voices<br />
prophesying war and in the demoniac energy with which the mighty<br />
fountain is momently forced from the deep romantic chasm is quite<br />
unmistakable. Towards the end of the poem, the poet caught in a spell of<br />
creative inspiration, transcends his mundane existence and is transformed<br />
into a purely supernatural being. In Christabel, the evil spirit that haunts<br />
the body of Geraldine and blasts the innocent happiness of the lovely<br />
Christabel is in the true tradition of vampires, the Coleridge infuses a<br />
mysterious dread into her. But it is "The Ancient Mariner" that deals with<br />
the supernatural machinery on a large and in a generous sense. There is a<br />
phantom ship with its ghastly crew "Death and Life-in-Death”, the polar<br />
spirit seeking vengeance for the murder of the Albatross, two supernatural<br />
voices representing justice and mercy, and a troop of celestial spirits<br />
animating the dead crew. The eveìc of "Kubla Khan” is haunting and<br />
weird.<br />
CRITICAL ESTI<strong>MA</strong>TE OF COLERIDGE’S <strong>POETRY</strong><br />
There are certain limitations of Coleridge's poetry. First, his poetic output<br />
is extremely limited. Secondly, the period during which his creative genius<br />
was at his best was brief, and, therefore, much that he has written is flat,<br />
gross and dull. Thirdly, his poetry is dream-poetry and as such it does not<br />
deal with the realities of life. Human passions do not find an adequate
_expression in it. Fourthly, even the little that he could compose is<br />
fragmentary. His Kubla Khan and Christabel are mere fragments.<br />
In spite of all its limitations, Coleridge's poetry ranks among the rarest<br />
treasures of <strong>English</strong> literature. Romanticism reaches its acme in his poetry.<br />
All the characteristics, for which romanticism stands, are found in<br />
Coleridge's poetry. Love of liberty, interest in the supernatural and the<br />
mysterious world, the revolutionary zeal, the medieval imaginative<br />
faculty, new experiments in verse, simplicity of diction, humanism, love<br />
for Nature, and _expression of melancholy and similar other traits of<br />
romantic poetry are found in Coleridge's poems. Coleridge belonged to the<br />
Romantic School. He held a higher deal of poetry and fought bravely<br />
against the artificial style of the previous age. Thus, the variety of meter,<br />
simplicity of language, originality of thought, flight of imagination, love<br />
of nature, sympathy with all human beings, and democratic and<br />
humanitarian outlook are the characteristics possessed by Coleridge<br />
Coleridge’s status as a romantic poet is supreme. His poetry in certain<br />
respects illustrates the romantic temper even better than that of<br />
Wordsworth. According to a critic, Coleridge’s poetry is "The most<br />
finished, supreme embodiment of all that is purest and most ethereal in the<br />
romantic spirit".<br />
Most of his work in poetry again was of a fragmentary nature. His last<br />
pieces Christabel and Kubla Khan, are brilliant fragments. This small and<br />
fragmentary amount of Coleridge’s poetry is however, of exquisite<br />
quality. Stopford Brooke says: “All that he did excellently might be bound<br />
in twenty pages but it should be bound in pure gold”.<br />
His earlier poetry was like the poet himself, very turgid, rhetorical,<br />
diffused and harsh in diction and rhythm. Later, however, he outgrew all<br />
his deficiencies. Coleridge shares with other romantic poets a deep love<br />
for music; he is one of the most melodious poets in <strong>English</strong> poetry. The<br />
second part of Kubla Khan describing a damsel playing on a dulcimer is<br />
itself a piece of exquisite music. It supports Coleridge’s claim that “with<br />
music loud and long’ he could build Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome in the<br />
air, for the fact is that the kind of skill claimed by the poet is actually<br />
displayed in it. A number of lines in “The Ancient Mariner’ have a<br />
haunting and lilting melody about them. The alliteration and the simplicity<br />
of the words employed add to the melodious effect of the poem. The<br />
following four lines, almost picked at random from “The Ancient<br />
Mariner” aptly illustrate the witchery of Coleridge’s music:<br />
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;<br />
We were the first that ever burst<br />
Into that silent sea.<br />
And Christabel is even more musical than these two. The movement of<br />
verse in this poem is so free that, bewitched by its fluency, one just reads<br />
it on and on. Its musical quality just defies analysis.<br />
Thus, all the features of the Romantic Revival are fully manifested in the<br />
poetry of Coleridge. In his poetry, there is bold adventure, joy of<br />
discovery, and romance of action. There is the glamour of unraveled<br />
regions, elements of mystery and marvel. There is Nature in a variety of<br />
moods: familiar, weird, tender, tumultuous, gay, desolate, soothing or<br />
horrifying. All these features are linked into a vital unity with a<br />
psychological insight. Truly, in Coleridge’s poetry, romanticism attained a<br />
fullness of complexity.<br />
POET OF THE UNIQUE SUPERNATURAL<br />
As a poet of the supernatural, Coleridge's place is supreme and unique<br />
"Coleridge made an epoch in the poetry of the supernatural", remarks a<br />
critic. In the words of H.D. Trail, "Coleridge's imagination seems to<br />
acquire poetic distinction in the region of the fantastic and the<br />
supernatural”, Coleridge made his poetry not only convincing and exciting<br />
but also a positive criticism of life. Coleridge succeeded where the others<br />
had failed because he treated the supernatural as subordinate element in<br />
the wider scheme of human experience and secondly, unlike the other<br />
writers who had cultivated this creed as a fashion but had no belief in it,<br />
Coleridge wrote in full conviction. It can be said without any hesitation<br />
that he eminently succeeded in his field. In fact, he is known to be the<br />
greatest poet of the supernatural in the entire range of <strong>English</strong> poetry.<br />
The three important poems in which Coleridge has made use of the<br />
supernatural are "The Ancient Mariner", "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan".<br />
It is significant that in all the three poems, Coleridge takes us to distant<br />
times and remote places. "The Ancient Mariner” narrates the experience of<br />
an ancient mariner voyaging around polar regions in unknown<br />
seas."Christabel" takes us back to the Middle Ages, to the old moated<br />
castles with barons and bards. In "Kubla Khan”, the scene is laid in the<br />
oriental city of Xanadu, in forests as "Ancient as the Hills”, where Alph,<br />
the sacred river, ran through “caverns measureless to man down to a<br />
sunless sea.”
for a willing suspension of disbelief, Coleridge makes the supernatural<br />
look natural and convincing. The dream like nature of the supernatural in<br />
Coleridge makes the suspension of disbelief easily possible. Besides these<br />
devices, he also uses occult forces.<br />
In order to make his supernaturalism realistic and convincing, Coleridge<br />
humanizes it. It appears in his work, not in a traditional blood-curdling and<br />
hair raising form, but assumes the ordinary human personality The<br />
supernatural incidents convey a moral useful for normal everyday life of<br />
humans. The air of reality is also imparted to the supernatural by carefully<br />
blending it with the natural. Coleridge's settings are perfectly natural<br />
The main characteristics of Coleridge's supernaturalism are summarised as<br />
follows:<br />
a) Refined and Subjective: The supernaturalism in coleridge is refined<br />
and subjective. It does not have the objective palpability and crudeness of<br />
the marvelous, which is found in almost all pre-Coleridgean ghost<br />
literature.<br />
b) Its Suggestiveness: Coleridge's supernaturalism is highly suggestive,<br />
subtle, intuitive and subjective. It is the reader who has to infer himself<br />
what he understands by a supernatural agency or element. It is not sudden<br />
but slowly distilled into the air.<br />
c) Its Vagueness: Mystery shrouds and surrounds the supernatural of<br />
Coleridge. Everything is dim and vague; nothing is made very apparent<br />
and clear.. The poet excites curiosity, but does not gratify it. Mystery<br />
surrounds everything; the readers are left guessing.<br />
d) Its Indefiniteness: The supernatural in Coleridge does not have any<br />
definite or fixed character. It is difficult to say how much of it is real and<br />
how much of it is merely a subjective illusion<br />
Coleridge is careful not to show any abruptness in introducing<br />
supernatural elements. He first takes his reader around familiar places and<br />
wins his faith in the narrative through vividly portrayed minute details.<br />
Then minor hints of the supernatural are gradually dropped. Finally, the<br />
entire scene puts on a supernatural look<br />
Another very important feature of Coleridge's treatment of the<br />
supernatural is a very clever and subtle blending of the natural and<br />
supernatural. Indeed the two are so indistinguishably fused with each other<br />
that it becomes difficult to locate where the one ends and the other begins.<br />
THE ANCIENT <strong>MA</strong>RINER
A brief Introduction: -<br />
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was actually planned by Wordsworth<br />
and Coleridge together. It was planned on the afternoon of the 20 th of<br />
November 1797,while having a walk in the Quantocks. Among all the<br />
great works of Coleridge it is the only complete one. It is based on a<br />
dream of a friend of Coleridge, Cruikshank, who fancied he saw a skeleton<br />
ship, with figures on it Wordworth kill one albatross while entering the<br />
South sea and that the tutelary spirit of those regions might take upon<br />
them to avenge the crime. He also suggested the idea of navigation of the<br />
ship by the dead men. As the poem grew, both Coleridge and Wordsworth<br />
thought of creating a volume which would consist of all poems dealing<br />
with supernatural elements, and also on subjects taken from common life<br />
but which were looked at through an imaginative medium from its<br />
composition. Colridge continued his work on it alone and finally finished<br />
it on 23 rd March, 1798.<br />
The Origin of the poem: -<br />
Quite a deal is known about the literary sources of ‘The Ancient Mariner’.<br />
A detailed study has revealed that Coleridge was a voracious reader and<br />
the books he read and the men he met left a profound influence on him. He<br />
was like a honeybee, roaming from garden to garden to collect the best<br />
nectar. He gathered the materials for his great works from strange and<br />
little known places. It is enough for the reader to know that an exquisite<br />
work of art in presented to him. He need not be bothered about the sources<br />
from where the poet has brought the material. It is undesirable that<br />
Coleridge draws upon a variety of sources, but it has also to be admitted<br />
that he fuses and reshapes them in a unique unity. Colridge himself claims<br />
that ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is a poem of ‘Pure imagination ‘, and says<br />
keeping in view the way he ‘dissolved, diffused and dissipated’ his objects<br />
of contemplation.<br />
The purpose of writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was to be fulfiling his plan<br />
of writing a series of supernatural poems, in which the incidents and<br />
characters are to be at least in part supernatural and yet to present them as<br />
would impress the readers with a sense of their reality.<br />
In ‘The Ancient Masiver’, Coleridge with consummate skill he welded the<br />
story into an artistic skill. For vividness of imagery and descriptive power<br />
the poem is unsurpassed. We move in a world of unearthly weirdness<br />
whose mystery and charm is unbroken by an inconsistency. Coleridge sees<br />
the invisible and almost touches the intangible in this realm, where the<br />
things that are too seldom dreamt of in our philosophy loom within our
ken. The poem is absolutely simple, both in, metre and language.<br />
Coleridge himself stated it as “inimitable”.<br />
In chapter XIV of his ‘Biographia Literaria’, Coleridge tells us that in<br />
order to emancipate <strong>English</strong> poetry from the eighteenth-century<br />
artificiality and drabness, he and Wordsworth had agreed to write two<br />
different kinds poems. He was to write about ‘persons and characters<br />
supernatural, or least romantic’, but he was to give them “a semblance of<br />
truth sufficient to procure that willing suspension of disbelief for the<br />
moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Wordsworth was “to give the<br />
charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous<br />
to the supernatural, by awaking the mind’s attention to the lethargies of<br />
custom, and correcting it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world<br />
before us.” It was according to this mutual decision that Coleridge wrote<br />
‘The Ancient Mariner’.<br />
Wordsworth Account: -<br />
Wordsworth says that ‘The Gloss with which it was subsequently<br />
accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least not a<br />
hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a gratuitous<br />
afterthought. We began the composition together on that to me,<br />
memorable evening: I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the<br />
poem, in particular-<br />
“And listened like a three years’ child:<br />
The Mariner had his will”.<br />
These small contributions, may have slipped out of Wordsworth’s mind<br />
but are scrupulosesly recorded by Coleridge .As we endeavoures to<br />
proceed conjointly on that evening, our respective manners proved so<br />
widely different that anything but separate from an undertaking upon by<br />
Dulverton to Alfoxender. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ grew and grew till it<br />
became too important for our first object, which was limited to our<br />
expectation, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of<br />
poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but<br />
looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.” With a<br />
lot of skill Coleridge has welded the story into an artistic whole. Coleridge<br />
has tried to touch the intangible in writing this piece of art. The poem may<br />
be simple in metre and language, but still it is “inimitable,”as said by<br />
Coleridge himself.<br />
The book ‘Voyages’ written by shelvocke has a reference of a black<br />
Albatross, which was taken to be some ill omen. Coleridge has perhaps<br />
taken the idea of the Albatross from it. The bird was hovering around the
mariners and was ultimately shot dead by the Mariner,. It seems obvious<br />
that Coleridge has taken the killing of the Albatross incident from the<br />
‘voyages’. But Wordsworth reports that Coleridge had never read the<br />
book, so most probably it was merely on Wordsworth’s suggestion that<br />
Coleridge incorporated the incident in ‘The Ancient Mariner’.<br />
CRITICAL SUM<strong>MA</strong>RY OF THE POEM<br />
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is perhaps the most read poem of<br />
Coleridge. The poem Kubla Khan is read merely for pleasure but the poem<br />
The Ancient Mariner is read with an eye on criticism. The poem is divided<br />
into seven parts. It is the story of crime and punishment.<br />
In the first part the old Mariner stops the wedding guest to listen to his<br />
tale. He tells the guest how his ship leaves the harbour and, sails towards<br />
the southern horizon. The guest is impatient in the beginning but latter on<br />
is hypnotized and<br />
“Listens merely like a three years ’child:”<br />
The sun was shinning bright at the beginning of the voyage. As the ship<br />
sailed the people on the shore gave them a hearty send –off.<br />
“The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,<br />
Merrily did we drop<br />
Below the Kirk, below the hill,<br />
Below the lighthouse top.”<br />
It is like the ending of The Midsummer Night’s Dream, as daybreaks and<br />
the lovers wonder whether the adventures of the night were a dream.<br />
Dreaming without awaking is not dreaming. In the figurative sense of the<br />
word ‘perspective’, to be sure, the Wedding-Guest, in his momentary,<br />
palpitating interruptions of the narrative—‘Why look’thou so, ‘--’ ‘I fear<br />
the Ancient Mariner’—represents the middle distance, and the marginal<br />
comment is the nearer distance, though still from us remote.<br />
They sailed leaving the church, the hill and the lighthouse behind.<br />
Everyday the sun went higher and higher till at noon it stood right over the<br />
mast. Then came the furious storm. The Mariners can see no life on the<br />
sea when suddenly they come across an Albatross flying to the ship and it<br />
followed the ship. Thus it also brought good weather along with it. The<br />
first section tells of the actual crime. To us the shooting of the bird may<br />
seem a matter of little moment, but Coleridge makes it significant in two
ways: Firstly, he does not say why the Mariner kills the albatross. We may<br />
infer that it is in a mood of annoyance or anger or mere frivolity; but these<br />
are mere guesses. What matters is precisely the uncertainty of the<br />
Mariner’s motives, for this illustrates the essential irrationality of the<br />
Mariner’s crime, due to a simple perversity of the will. Secondly, the<br />
crime is against nature, against the sanctified relations of guest and host.<br />
The bird, which has been hailed in God’s name ‘as if it had been a<br />
Christian soul, and is entirely friendly and helpful is wantonly and<br />
recklessly killed. What matters is that the Mariner breaks a sacred law of<br />
life. In this action we see the essential frivolity of many crimes against<br />
humanity and the ordered system of the world, and we must accept the<br />
killing of the albatross symbolical of them.<br />
“God save thee, ancient mariner!<br />
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-<br />
Why look’st thou so?”-“With my cross-bow<br />
I shot the Albatross.<br />
The mariner is horror-stricken. The wedding guest also pities him and<br />
prays for mercy for the mariner. It is uncertain why the mariner kills the<br />
bird. The bird had always been friendly to the sailors, the mariner felt that<br />
because of the bird the ice had started to spilt and so he killed the bird.<br />
The superstitious belief is perfectly keeping the balance of the<br />
supernatural atmosphere of the poem.<br />
The second part of the poem supports the superstitious belief for a little<br />
while. The sailors also believed that the mariner had not done a rightful<br />
thing to kill the bird, which had brought them problems.<br />
And I had done a hellish thing,<br />
And it would work’em woe:<br />
For all averred, I had killed the bird<br />
That made the breeze to blow.<br />
Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay,<br />
That made the breeze to blow!
The sailors condemned him for his act. Suddenly the wind stops and the<br />
ship cannot move anymore.<br />
“All in a hot copper sky,<br />
The bloody Sun, at noon,<br />
Right up above the mast did stand,<br />
No bigger than the Moon.<br />
Day after day, day after day,<br />
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;<br />
As idle as a painted ship<br />
Upon a painted ocean.<br />
The sun burned fiercely. The silent sea looked like it had rotted; the slimy<br />
creatures crawled all around: the sailors did not get water also. It was like;<br />
“Water, water, every where,<br />
And all the boards did shrink;<br />
Water, water, every where<br />
Nor any drop to drink.<br />
Death – fires shone all about them at night. The sea-waters burnt like the<br />
oils burnt by a witch emitting multi-colored lights. Some of the sailors<br />
also dreamt that a spirit that had been following them from the land of<br />
mist and snow was avenging them. The thirst of the sailors was so much<br />
that their tongues were dried to their very roots<br />
We could not speak, no more than if<br />
We had been choked with soot.<br />
The sailors looked at the mariner reproachfully. They could not speak but<br />
their looks revealed the contempt they felt for him. They removed the<br />
cross from his neck and hung the dead Albatross round the mariner’s neck.
This was sign to show the sailors hatred for the mariner and also it served<br />
as a punishment for him.<br />
The third part shows the sailors plight. The sailors have a very awful time,<br />
and are almost dead with thirst. Their eyes were had a glossy appearance.<br />
Just then the mariner saw a small speck on the water, and thought it to be a<br />
ship. The mariner bit his own arm and moistened his lips with the blood so<br />
that he could tell the sailors about it. When the ship neared it was a<br />
surprise to see that it was a skeleton ship. The next moment he also sees<br />
Death and Life-in-Death playing at dice.<br />
Are those her ribs through which the Sun<br />
Did peer, as through a grate?<br />
And is that Woman all her crew?<br />
Is that Death? And are there two?<br />
Is death that woman’s mate?<br />
The woman has been described with great accuracy. She was like a<br />
nightmare personified and was capable of curdling any man’s blood.<br />
Her lips were red, her looks were free,<br />
Her skin was as white as leprosy,<br />
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,<br />
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.<br />
The naked hulk alongside came,<br />
And the twain were casting dice;<br />
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’<br />
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.<br />
The sun sank down below the horizon. The stars appeared, immediately it<br />
became very dark. The spectre ship also disappeared. The mariner felt<br />
very afraid .He felt like a man without life. The moon came out and under<br />
its light the Mariner saw his fellow sailors drop one by one dead. They<br />
died so quickly that they did not get time to even utter a groan. However,
just as they fell dead they cast a painful glance at the mariner and cursed<br />
him with their eyes.<br />
The souls did from their bodies fly, -<br />
They fled to bliss or woe!<br />
And every soul, it passed me by,<br />
Like the whiz of my cross-bow!<br />
The mariner saw their souls passing by him, but he was very helpless. The<br />
mariner is left alone on the ship to expiate by life –long suffering and<br />
penance.<br />
The fourth part of the poem shows the pity of the wedding guest for the<br />
mariner. He felt that he was not speaking to the mariner but to his ghost.<br />
He was afraid of the mariner’s skinny hand and his tall and thin figure.<br />
The mariner goes on to say that how he was all-alone on the ship with all<br />
his crew dead and a thousand of slimy creatures crawling all around him.<br />
He says that:<br />
I looked upon the rotting sea,<br />
And drew my eyes away;<br />
I looked upon the rotting deck,<br />
And there the dead men lay.<br />
He was unable to say his prayers also because even before he could pray,<br />
some wicked whisper influenced his heart and made it as dry as dust. The<br />
dead crew lay with their eyes open and full of curse. But they did not rot<br />
or smell foul. He faced them and lived with their curse for seven days and<br />
seven nights, yet he could not die.<br />
The mariner saw some water snakes in the water, they were of many<br />
bright colours and unknowingly the mariner blessed those living creatures.<br />
O happy living things! No tongue<br />
Their beauty might declare:<br />
A spring of love gushed from my heart,<br />
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,<br />
And I blessed them unaware.<br />
The self- same moment I could pray;<br />
And from my neck so free<br />
The Albatross fell off, and sank<br />
Like lead into the sea.<br />
He had been able to pray because he blessed the water creatures.<br />
The fifth part continues the process of the ‘soul’s revival’. The mariner is<br />
blessed with sleep for it soothes and refreshes man. The mariner praises<br />
Virgin Mary for having sent sleep for him. When he wakes that rain has<br />
moistened his parched lips. He felt very light and felt;<br />
I thought that I had died in sleep,<br />
And was a blessed ghost.<br />
And soon I heard a roaring wind:<br />
It did not come anear;<br />
But with its sound it shock the sails,<br />
That were so thin and sere.<br />
Soon after that he, heard the wind roaring at a distance. The air in the<br />
upper regions showed sudden signs of life. Hundreds of fire-flags, shining<br />
and moving to and fro could also be seen. In-between them the pale stars<br />
seemed to be dancing. All of a sudden the rain came and made the dead<br />
men to groan.<br />
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose.<br />
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;<br />
It had been strange, even in a dream,<br />
To have seen those dead men rise.<br />
The helmsmen steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;<br />
The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes,<br />
Where they were wont to do;<br />
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-<br />
We were a ghastly crew.<br />
The body of the Mariner’s nephew stood by his side, knee to knee. They<br />
were working at the same rope. Yet he did not speak even a single word to<br />
the mariner. The wedding guest shows signs of fear. But the mariner<br />
consoles him by saying that they were not the souls of the dead men, but<br />
they were a group of blessed souls, which had entered the dead bodies.<br />
The mariner falls down into a swoon and hears two voices maybe of the<br />
spirits talking to themselves. One of the voice says about the crime done<br />
by the mariner in killing the Albatross that had loved the mariner. The<br />
second voice, which was softer says:<br />
“The man hath penance done,<br />
And penance more will do.”<br />
The first voice was that of the spirit, which lived on the land of mist and<br />
snow, it loved the bird and also the man, but he had very cruelly killed the<br />
bird and so was suffering so hard.<br />
In the sixth section, the process of healing seems to be impeded. The<br />
Mariner is haunted by the presence of his dead comrades and feels that it<br />
has been planned by some fearful power of vengeance. In this figure of the<br />
Mariner, haunted by memories and fears, Coleridge gives his special<br />
symbol of remorse. But because remorse brings repentance and humility,<br />
the section closes with the vision of angels standing by the dead sailors.<br />
The forgiveness of God awaits even the most hardhearted sinner, if he<br />
only wants to receive it. The mariner wakes to find the moon shining<br />
calmly and the dead bodies still gazing at him. The _expression of agony<br />
had not left them and the curse with which they had died had not left them.<br />
The mariner felt helpless. He could neither take his eyes of them nor could<br />
he raise them to pray. And all of a sudden he feels that the spell has been<br />
broken.<br />
I viewed the ocean green,<br />
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen-<br />
It is like the ending of The Midsummer Night’s Dream, as daybreaks and<br />
the lovers wonder whether the adventures of the night were a dream.<br />
Dreaming without awaking is not dreaming. In the figurative sense of the<br />
word ‘perspective’, to be sure, the Wedding-Guest, in his momentary,<br />
palpitating interruptions of the narrative—‘Why look’thou so, ‘--’ ‘I fear<br />
the Ancient Mariner’—<br />
He was like a person who was walking all alone on the road but was afraid<br />
to turn, for he feared that some fiend was following him. Soon there is a<br />
sudden change in the scene, when the reader is lost into this frightful<br />
world the poet lessens the burden of fright. Soon there was a cold breeze<br />
blowing. It did not seem to be blowing on the sea, for it did not create any<br />
changes or ripples in the water. The ship moved on:<br />
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship<br />
Yet she sailed softly too;<br />
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-<br />
On me alone it blew.<br />
The mariner is all of a sudden filled with joy when he sees the lighthouse,<br />
the hill and the church; it was all very familiar to him. He could not<br />
believe his eyes; he felt it all to be a dream. The current drew the ship to<br />
the harbour. The bay was bright and silent and he saw some crimson<br />
shapes at some distance. On turning on the deck he was surprised to see<br />
that the dead crew was no longer standing, but each body lay on its back<br />
with an Angel bathed with light standing beside each body. The Angels<br />
did not make any sound; the silence sank into the mariner’s soul like<br />
music.<br />
Humphrey House has interpreted the poem and while speaking about the<br />
poem up to this point that is Part I to IV and the opening stanzas of Part V,<br />
he says- taken together it is relatively easy to interpret it as a tale of crime,<br />
punishment and reconciliation, with the recovery of love in the blessing of<br />
the water snakes as its climax. But the remainder of Part V and the whole<br />
of Part VI do not seem at first sight to have quite the same coherence and<br />
point. It is here that readers may still find ‘unmeaning marvels’ and<br />
elaborated supernatural machinery, which dissipates concentration. There<br />
are wonderful details in the verse, some of the finest descriptions of all;<br />
but they still fall apart and have too little bearing on each other and on the<br />
whole. Many published accounts of the poem do not adequately face the<br />
implications of the detail in these parts. Then as the ghost says: “The
Angelic spirits leave the dead bodies. And appear in their own forms of<br />
light.” This acts as the signal, which brings out the boat from land.<br />
Soon he hears the strokes of oars and he sees the Pilot and the Pilot’s boy<br />
coming towards him. He was so happy that he even for a while forgot the<br />
dead crew. The mariner also saw the Hermit and the mariner wished that<br />
the Hermit would listen to his confession. He feels that now he could wash<br />
the sin on his soul.<br />
In part VII a dreadful rumbling sound comes under the water and the ship<br />
sinks.<br />
A quite normally accepted and simple interpretation of Parts V and VI<br />
treats them as a further necessary extension of the expiation theme. In the<br />
blessing of the water-snakes the Mariner has reconciled himself to the<br />
creatures, but it remains for him to reconcile himself also with the Creator:<br />
therefore, he has to suffer once more (this time from the curse of the dead<br />
men’s eyes) and to win the power of recognizing the beauty of the angelic<br />
music.<br />
But as the boat approaches, there is heared a loud thundering noise below<br />
it and the ship goes down like lead into the ship<br />
Under the water it rumbled on,<br />
Still louder and more dread:<br />
It reached the ship, it spilt the bay;<br />
The ship went down like lead.<br />
The mariner was stupefied by this loud sound and when he recovered he<br />
found himself on the Pilot’s boat. The mariner requested the Hermit to<br />
remove the guilt from him. The Hermit made a cross on his forehead,<br />
immediately the mariner’s body was filled with a painful agony and it<br />
subsided after he had told the story of his crime. According to the mariner<br />
he always felt this way and so he always was in search of a patient<br />
listener.<br />
I pass, like night, from land to land;<br />
I have strange power of speech;<br />
That moment that his face I see,<br />
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.<br />
The mariner told the wedding guest that he had been all-alone on the vast<br />
sea. He said that he liked to pray in the church more than anything else.<br />
The mariner, while bidding the wedding guest farewell said that the best<br />
way to pray to God was to love all God’s creation. He walked away like<br />
one dazed and deprived of his senses.<br />
He went like one that hath been stunned,<br />
And is of sense forlorn:<br />
A sadder and a wiser man,<br />
He rose the morrow morn.<br />
These lines mark the powerful impact produced by the Mariner’s tale on<br />
the wedding guest.<br />
‘THE WEDDING GUEST’ IN THE ANCIENT <strong>MA</strong>RINER<br />
The wedding- guest has a very important character to play in the dramatic<br />
framework of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ Structurally, he reinforces<br />
interpenetration of two different kinds of realities, that of the everyday<br />
common existence with the world of uncanny and preternatural<br />
experience. The introduction of the wedding-Guest promotes our<br />
understanding of the significance of the Mariner’s experience.<br />
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ begins abruptly when the Ancient<br />
Mariner stops one of the three Wedding guests and begins to tell his story:<br />
“It is an ancient Mariner,<br />
And he stoppeth one of three.”<br />
The Wedding-guest at first is reluctant to hear the story, as he is in a hurry<br />
to go and attend the wedding. He even recoils in horror from the ghastly<br />
Mariner But the Ancient Mariner holds him by his arresting glittering eye.<br />
He holds him with his skinny hand,<br />
The helpless Wedding Guest collapses on a stone nearby and listens to the<br />
story like a three-year child.<br />
“The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:”<br />
On occasions he protests but cannot move away. In the end, he becomes<br />
so dazed with what he has heard that he does not have the heart or the<br />
mind to attend the wedding. He is a ‘sadder and a wiser man’. He is sadder<br />
for the realization of the human predicament which the ‘Ancient Mariner’<br />
has so vividly impressed upon him through his story .He is wiser for the<br />
profound moral truth that he has learnt, namely the love of all things, great<br />
or small.<br />
“The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast’<br />
Yet he cannot choose but hear;<br />
And thus spake on that ancient man,<br />
The bright-eyed Mariner.”<br />
The Mariner and the Wedding-Guest satisfy their mutual needs. Towards<br />
the end of the poem, the Mariner says:<br />
“I pass like night, from land to land;<br />
I have strange power of speech;<br />
That moment that his face I see;<br />
I know the man that must have me:<br />
To him my tale I teach.<br />
The Mariner thus, has an instinctive recognition of the person who ‘must<br />
hear’ him and to whom he may ‘teach’ his tale. Narrating the tale, it<br />
should be obvious, is a mutually beneficial deed. It relieves the mariner of<br />
his periodic spell of agony; at the same time, it teaches the wedding-Guest<br />
the much-needed lesson of consideration and compassion. If we recall for<br />
a moment how petulantly he reacts to the marine’s tale in the beginning,<br />
we would immediately feel that he is so pre-occupied with the ordinary<br />
convivial pleasures that he is not inclined to show commiseration to the<br />
old mariner, though the latter’s mental agony must be writ large on his<br />
face. We may even venture to suggest that there is in the composition of<br />
the wedding-guest something of the mariner who so wantonly and<br />
thoughtlessly shot the Albatross. The mariner’s experience has a salutary<br />
effect on the wedding-guest and teaches him the Christian concept of love<br />
and kindness. His sympathies are enlarged when he comes in contact with<br />
the mariner’s profound experience.
When the Wedding-Guest is initially accosted by the Mariner, he<br />
reacts with sharp impatience:<br />
Hold off! Unhand me, greybeard loon!<br />
The Mariner drops his hand but holds him with his glittering eyes:<br />
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:<br />
He cannot choose but hear;<br />
And thus spake on that ancient man,<br />
The bright-eyed Mariner.<br />
It is clear that if the Wedding-Guest meekly takes his seat on a stone and<br />
submits to the Mariner’s tale, it is only under a hypnotic effect created on<br />
him by the abnormal gleam in the Mariner’s eyes. His heart is in the bridal<br />
feast and he would fain escape and join; but he ‘cannot choose but hear’.<br />
The opening of the narrative is rather ordinary and the Guest finds it<br />
difficult to conceal his annoyance. As soon as he hears the merry sounds<br />
issuing from the bride’s place, he immediately gives vent to his<br />
fretfulness:<br />
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,<br />
For he heard the loud bassoon.<br />
There is a slight change in the attitude of the Wedding-Guest when at the<br />
end of Part I, the Mariner comes to the most crucial moment of his tale-the<br />
murder of the Albatross. Even the recollection of that heinous crime is so<br />
painful to the Mariner that he shudders to mention it and defers its<br />
announcement. The Wedding-Guest perceives the acute pain on his face,<br />
his initial indifference and hostility melt away in a moment and he<br />
exclaims:<br />
God save thee, ancient Mariner!<br />
From the fiends, that plagues thee thus! —<br />
Why look’st thou so?<br />
At this moment, the Mariner no longer remains an insolent, eccentric old<br />
seafarer undesirably imposing himself on a stranger. He becomes one of<br />
the millions of unfortunate people suffering untold miseries and deserving<br />
everyone’s unqualified sympathy. After this, the Weeding-Guest does not
interrupt the narrative because of impatience. He vicariously suffers what<br />
the Mariner’ has suffered and interrupts only when the pain generated by<br />
the Mariner’s excruciating experience becomes a little too unbearable for<br />
him .He suffers with the Mariner and learns what the Mariner has learnt at<br />
such a terrible cost. The hypnotic spell initially cast on soon ceases to<br />
exert, but he is totally absorbed in the experience .The wedding-bells keep<br />
ringing in the background to remind him that he is the ‘next of kin’ and<br />
that ‘the feast is set’. But he is utterly oblivious of what goes on around<br />
him. It is the Mariner who tries to awaken him from his spiritual reverie:<br />
What loud uproar bursts from that door!<br />
The wedding-guests are there:<br />
But in the garden-bower the bride<br />
And hark the little vesper bell,<br />
Which biddeth me to prayer!<br />
The Mariner’s experience proves so overwhelming for the Wedding –<br />
Guest that he becomes just insensitive to such calls.<br />
At this point, the Mariner and the Wedding-Guest exhibit a strange<br />
reversal of roles. Earlier, the Mariner has been undergoing an experience<br />
of alienation while the Wedding-Guest was going to attend a social<br />
gathering: but now the Mariner is able to enjoy company. He died with the<br />
death of the Albatross, but the gush of love he showed for the watersnakes<br />
led to his resurrection into a much larger brotherhood extending to<br />
the whole human race.<br />
This brotherhood embraces all living creatures and admits of no<br />
distinctions whatsoever between the great and the small, the young and the<br />
old, the gay and the serious. The Mariner has attained a complete<br />
reconciliation with god and all his creation. He likes going to the church<br />
‘in goodly company’ to pray to ‘his great father’. On the other hand, the<br />
Wedding-Guest, who was earlier fond of gay company, now withdraws<br />
into the loneliness of his inner self to ponder over the mystery of human<br />
existence and its real significance .He responds neither to the weddingbells<br />
nor to the ‘little vesper bell’. The profundity of his experience just<br />
stuns him. For a while, he is ‘forlorn’ of his senses. But when he rises the<br />
morrow, morn, he is ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.
THE STRUCTURAL IMPORTANCE OF THE WEDDING-GUEST<br />
The structural importance of the Wedding-Guest is easier to comprehend<br />
than his thematic relevance. Structurally, he helps to bring out more<br />
clearly and emphatically the spiritual crises undergone by the Mariner<br />
after he kills the Albatross. His interruptions pointed by draw the reader’s<br />
attention to the important stages of the Mariner’s fateful voyage and the<br />
accompanying emotional states. When the Mariner comes to the first<br />
important point in his narrative- the point when he shoots the Albatross –<br />
the Wedding-Guest makes a loud exclamation, which helps to elicit from<br />
the Mariner the much-evaded reply:<br />
With my cross-bow<br />
I shot the Albatross.<br />
Towards the end of Part III, the Mariner describes how his companions<br />
drop down dead one by one with their souls passing by his ear like the<br />
whiz of his cross-bow. It is such a ghastly episode that the Wedding-Guest<br />
is seized with terror. He suspects the Mariner himself to be a ghost:<br />
And the Mariner reassures him:<br />
Fear not, fear not, thou the Wedding-Guest!<br />
This body dropt not down.<br />
Another horrible situation occurs in the Part V when the dead bodies of<br />
the sailors are reanimated and they begin to work on the ropes:<br />
The body of my brother’s soon<br />
Stood by me, knee to knee:<br />
The body and I pulled at one rope,<br />
But he said nought to me.<br />
The Wedding-Guest again ejaculates: “I fear thee, Ancient Mariner.” And<br />
the Mariner promptly replies:<br />
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!<br />
‘ T was not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,<br />
But a troop of spirits blest:<br />
After this the Wedding-Guest is completely fascinated and he does not<br />
find any occasion to interrupt the narrative.<br />
It has been pointed out that the Wedding-Guest is an ideal for the reader,<br />
‘responsive, apprehensive and completely involved in what he hears’. He<br />
is used to articulate the reader’s own emotional reactions to the narrative.<br />
He has a refined and sharpened sensibility. He keenly feels and expresses,<br />
what an ordinary reader might overlook. The reader who instinctively<br />
identifies himself with the Wedding-Guest takes a cue from him to define<br />
his own emotional responses to the Mariner’s tale. The Wedding-Guest’s<br />
suspension of disbelief and the trust with which he accepts the tale helps<br />
the reader to suspend his disbelief as well. Besides, he helps to relieve the<br />
monotony of what otherwise would have been a monologue.<br />
It is clear from the above discussion that the introduction of the Wedding-<br />
Guest has a great significance. The Wedding-Guest is neither unimportant<br />
nor redundant. The contrast between the spiritual worlds of the Mariner<br />
with its rich moral values with the world of actuality with its mistaken<br />
values cannot be effective and perfect without the Wedding-Guest figuring<br />
as a link between the two worlds. The Wedding-Guest’s suspension of<br />
disbelief and trust assists to create suspension of disbelief in the reader.<br />
THE DREAMLIKE QUALITY OF “THE ANCIENT <strong>MA</strong>RINER”<br />
Coleridge was a great dreamer and he had greater admiration for dreams<br />
than any of the other romantics. He once even declared that he would like<br />
to sleep on the lotus in the sea of milk like the Indian ‘Vishnu’. The hours<br />
that he spent in dreaming were more important than his waking hours.<br />
When he was lost in sleep and it was thought he was lost in his dreams<br />
that were the time when actually a new work of art was being created in<br />
his mind. Infact, he fed on his dreams and vitalized them in his poetry. His<br />
entire poems have a dreamlike quality.<br />
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ also has dream like qualities. Prof.<br />
Bowra observes in this connection:<br />
“On the surface it shows many qualities of dream. It moves in abrupt<br />
stages each of which has its own single, dominating character. It visual<br />
impressions are remarkably brilliant and absorbing. Their emotional<br />
impacts changes rapidly, but always come with an unusual force as if the<br />
poet were haunted and obsessed by them. When it is all over, it is difficult
at first to disentangle ordinary experience from influences which still<br />
survive from sleep.”<br />
To begin with the dream like qualities of ‘The Rime of the Ancient<br />
Mariner’, even the inspiration to write it came from a dream. A friend of<br />
Coleridge, Mr. Cruikshank, had dreamt about a skeleton ship with figures<br />
in it. This dream caught Coleridge’s fancy and later he and Wordsworth<br />
got together to plan it. Thus Coleridge decided to make it on the basis of<br />
the poem.<br />
Wordsworth has criticized the poem in ‘Lyrical Ballads’ published in<br />
1800, “the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each<br />
other.” But this is wrong of Wordsworth. He is not being fair to Coleridge.<br />
It is quite certain that no one expects the events of dream to have any kind<br />
of necessary connection, which we find in our waking conditions. The<br />
subject is very supernatural, and one of the basic problems confronting<br />
him was to relate it to something, which his readers knew and understood,<br />
of the readers. Exploiting some of the characterstics of a dream did this.<br />
C.M. Bowra, in his book ‘The Romantic Imagination’, observes;<br />
“Dreams can have a curiously vivid quality which is often lacking in<br />
waking impressions. In them we have one experience at a time in a very<br />
concentrated form, and since the critical self is not at work, the effect is<br />
more powerful and more haunting than most effects when we are awake.<br />
If we remarkable dreams at all, we remember them very clearly; even<br />
though by rational standards they are quite absurd and have no direct<br />
relation to our waking life.”<br />
When we analyse ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in the light of the characteristics<br />
of a dream described above, we find unmistakable signs of a dreamlike<br />
quality in it. C.M. Bowra says again, “ it moves in abrupt stages, each if<br />
which has its own single, dominating character. Its visual impressions are<br />
remarkably brilliant and absorbing. Their emotional impact change<br />
rapidly, but always comes with an unusual force, as if the poet were<br />
haunted and obsessed by them. When it is all over, it clings to the memory<br />
with a peculiar tenacity, just as on waking it is difficult at first to<br />
disentangle ordinary experience from influences which still survive from<br />
sleep.”<br />
Things move in a mysterious way in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ but not<br />
without some connection, this may also be termed as casual. The Mariner<br />
commits crime when out of irritation and anger he shoots an innocent<br />
Albatross. He commits a crime and is punished by the doom of “Life-in-<br />
Death.” This means that he was haunted by the presence of his dead<br />
comrades. His shipmates are also victims to the curse because they<br />
supported the Mariner by killing the bird. The Mariner’s curse starts to
ecome lesser when love gushes from his heart at the sight of Water<br />
snakes. The first horror of his spell is removed and we see the Albatross<br />
falls from his neck. It is wrong to kill the Albatross, once this act is<br />
accepted; the rest of the action follows with an inexorable fatality.<br />
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a frightful dream. The Mariner is<br />
tormented through quite a nightmarish experience. In part II, we have a<br />
picture of the unmoving ship, and slimy creatures crawl through with legs<br />
upon the slimy sea. Death-fires dance and water burns like a witch’s oils,<br />
at night and we also see the picture of the Albatross hanging around the<br />
Mariner’s neck. All this is very terrifying. In part III of the poem, freezing<br />
chills are sent down the Mariner’s and also the reader’s spines; by the<br />
appearances of Life-in-Death with her red lips, yellow locks and skin as<br />
white as leprosy. The reader is left stunned to see the sight of two<br />
hundreds sailors cursing the Ancient Mariner, with their eyes and<br />
dropping dead one by one.<br />
In part IV we see the utter desolation and helplessness of the Mariner:<br />
Alone, alone, all, all alone,<br />
Alone on a wide wide sea!<br />
And never a saint took pity on<br />
My soul in agony.<br />
This imaginary world may have some rules, which are not same as ours,<br />
but still they touch the familiar chords in us. The events are more<br />
convincing and the reader somehow admits that in the world created by<br />
Coleridge it is right that things should happen as they are made in his<br />
world. Once the reader starts believing that spirits watch over human<br />
actions, and then it becomes more convincing to feel that the spirits have<br />
the right to interface with men and do all the extraordinary things. The<br />
spirits guiding the mariner towards his northward voyage have sufficient<br />
reality for the reader to feel that their actions are appropriate. It is also not<br />
absurd to see the ship sinking when it reaches home. This so happens<br />
because it has undergone so many unearthly adventures that now there is<br />
no place for it in the world of common things. Coleridge makes his events<br />
so coherent and so close that the reader accepts the things as valid and<br />
feels that they are not different from their own world.<br />
Coleridge knows that he must make the supernatural convincing and<br />
humane. In the ‘Biographia Literaria,’ after saying that such poetry<br />
interest the emotions and has dramatic truth, Coleridge adds that his aim is<br />
to transfer from the reader’s inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination<br />
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes<br />
poetic faith:<br />
‘The Ancient Mariner’ has a beautiful moral also. Its entire movement is<br />
directed towards teaching love and reverence for all things made and<br />
loved by God. If it terrifies, it guides and educates as well. And it brings a<br />
sense of assurance to sinners that through earnest penance they can atone<br />
for their sins and gains regeneration. Hence it is quite justified to say that<br />
Coleridge is a dreamer and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a<br />
beautiful but frightful dream. A critic has edgily observed:<br />
“The Ancient Mariner lives in its own worlds as events in dreams do, and,<br />
when we read it, we do not normally ask if its subjects is real or unreal.<br />
But this is due to a consummate art. Each action and each situation is<br />
presented in a concrete form in which the details are selected for their<br />
appeal to common experience. Coleridge exercises an imaginative realism.<br />
However unnatural his events may be they are formed from natural<br />
elements, and for this reason their constituents are familiar and make a<br />
direct, natural appeal. Once we have entered this imaginary world we do<br />
not feel that it is beyond our comprehension, but respond to it as we would<br />
to actual life.”<br />
‘The Ancient Mariner’ as a myth of guilt and redemption.<br />
The Ancient Mariner is a myth of guilt and redemption but of course it is<br />
also much more. Its symbolical purpose is but one element in a complex<br />
design. Though Coleridge has his own poetry of a guilty soul, it is not<br />
comparable in depth or in insight with the poetry of some other men who<br />
have given the full powers of their genius to writing about crime and the<br />
misery it engenders. Nonetheless Coleridge’s introduction of this theme<br />
into The Ancient Mariner gives to it a new dimension. What might<br />
otherwise be no more then an irresponsible fairy-tale is brought closer to<br />
life and to its fundamental issues. The myth of crime and punishment<br />
provides a structure for the supernatural events, which rise from it but<br />
often make their appeal irrespective of it. Much of the magic of The<br />
Ancient Mariner comes from its blend of dark and serious issues with the<br />
delighted play of creative energy. Coleridge had good reasons for<br />
fashioning his poem in this way. In the first place, the combination of<br />
different themes responded to his own complex vision of existence. For<br />
him life had both dark and its bright sides; it’s haunting responsibilities<br />
and ravishing moments of unsullied delight. He saw that the two were<br />
closely interwoven and that, if he were to speak with the full force of his<br />
genius, he must introduce both into his poem. In the second place, he saw<br />
life not analytically but creatively, and he knew that any work of creation<br />
must itself be an extension and the enchantment which he knew in his
finest poems, and for him these came alike from the beauty for the visible<br />
world and the uncharted corners of the human soul. The shadow cast by<br />
the Mariner’s crime adds by contrast to the brilliance of the unearthly<br />
world in which it is committed, and the degree of his guilt and his remorse<br />
serve to stress the power of the angelic beings, which watch over human<br />
kind. The result is a poem shot with iridescent lights. It appeals to us now<br />
is this way, now in that, and there is no final or single approach to it.<br />
In creating The Ancient Mariner in this way, Coleridge obeyed the<br />
peculiar and paradoxical were uneasily blended, and the creative spirit,<br />
witch was capable of such rapturous flights, worked most freely when it<br />
was free from metaphysical speculations.<br />
The poem is more than an allegory of guilt and regeneration. In any<br />
ordinary sense the Mariner is very little guilty. But he has broken the bond<br />
between himself and the life of Nature, and in consequence becomes<br />
spiritually dead. What happens to him when he blesses the water-snakes in<br />
the Tropical calm is a psychic rebirth –a rebirth that must at times happen<br />
to all men and all cultures unless they are to dry up in living death. The<br />
whole poem is indeed a vivid presentation of the rebirth myth as it is<br />
conceived by Jung-the psychologist who has done most to explain these<br />
recurrent forms of imaginative<br />
Literature. But such explanations of poetry are not convincing to everyone<br />
and are not easily demonstrable. What we must explain is that universal<br />
psychic experience that gives the poem its lasting power. It is as though<br />
Coleridge tapped a deeper level of consciousness here than he was ever to<br />
reach again. And none of the literary figures concerned with The Ancient<br />
Mariner, in its composition or in its appearance seems to have detected<br />
allegory or symbolism in it. The retribution is greater, simpler, less<br />
regardful of natural movement: punishment, repentance, a gush of love for<br />
other living things, prayer and relief, yet further penance for, as in ancient<br />
legend and somewhat as in life, ‘the train of cause and consequence knows<br />
no end’. For The Ancient Mariner is a structure, a perfectly ordered, a<br />
finely ‘complex design wrought out through the exquisite adjustment of<br />
innumerable details’. It is not an opium dream like Kubla Khan; and that<br />
is the answer to the symbolists of psychoanalytic and biographic bent.<br />
The gentle spirit who decrees that he shall win his way back to partial<br />
release through loving all things ultimately saves the Mariner from his fate<br />
worse than death. And so through a role of gentleness and sentimentality<br />
does Coleridge pursue his way through life. He plays the role and reaches<br />
the gospel of being in love and shooting the Albatross is, significantly an<br />
utterly unjustified act and….it is followed by a remorse out of all<br />
proportion to the deed. It is clearly a fantasy symbolizing guilt. The<br />
Mariner has killed the source of kindness, safety and guidance…the odd
omission of any justification, provocation or motivation is best explained<br />
as a symbolic device suggesting their sub rational, neurotic source. In<br />
view of the bird’s mission and pattern of emotional disturbance in<br />
Coleridge’s childhood, it would seem that this fantasy of killing the<br />
Albatross is associated with some deeply buried guilt, cither incestuous or<br />
Oedipal.<br />
With Coleridge a week or waning moon is pretty clearly a powerful<br />
…symbol for loss of mother love. The figure appears in Christabel:<br />
The moon is behind, and at the full;<br />
And yet she looks both small and dull.<br />
But the most astonishing moon symbolism occurs in The Ancient mariner.<br />
At the most awful moment in that poem, when the nightmare Life-in-<br />
Death has won the Mariner’s soul, and the night is thick and dark, then<br />
comes the Moon. The passage describing her coming has forever<br />
astonished and puzzled with its mystifying error in astronomy:<br />
Till climb above the eastern bar<br />
The horned Moon, with one bright star<br />
Within the nether tip.<br />
The figure comes at the end of a long stanza that reaches a climax of<br />
feeling in these lines. Can this impossible bit off astronomy be a Freudian<br />
slip? It seems inexplicable, yet if the moon holds reference here to<br />
motherhood, how wonderful that Coleridge should put the star within the<br />
nether tip, ‘enfolded’ so to speak. Is it possible that we have here the<br />
unconscious yearning of the narcissist in a magnificent bit of pure<br />
expressionism altering the very face of the heavens? Like a mother, the<br />
moon holds the little star within her arm. It is not so strange an idea in the<br />
mind of a poet dominated by the need of a universe essentially benevolent,<br />
essentially loving. Soft, gentle and benevolent presence in the sky,<br />
serenely she floats among the stars quietly shedding her light on all<br />
below—the lovely complement and partner of the strong mail Sun.<br />
The Ancient Mariner and his ship represent the small but persisting class<br />
of mental adventurers who are not content with the appearances<br />
surrounding them but who attempt to get behind Granted that the Mariner<br />
and his voyage signify the mental adventure of an unusually inquiring<br />
spirit, the outline of that adventure becomes tolerably clear, while it would<br />
be senseless of to seek more than an outline. From the social point of view<br />
these spiritual adventurers are criminals: they disturb the existing order
and they imply a criticism of the accepted round of life: they are selfappointed<br />
outcasts. The shooting of the Albatross in the present context<br />
was an anti-social act: something that by everyday rules would not be<br />
done. And the avenging spirit takes the Mariner into a region and a<br />
situation the utter loneliness of which is both the logical consequence and<br />
the avengement of his revolt against society. This same region is one more<br />
version of that aridity that besets all isolated mental voyagers at one stage<br />
of their voyage. Other versions are Donne’s conceit of himself in ‘A<br />
Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ as the quintessence of the primeval<br />
nothingness out of which God created the world; the emptiness<br />
experienced by the poet in Shelley’s Albatross, who, when he awakes<br />
from his dreams sees the ‘garish hills’ and ‘vacant woods’ while his ‘wan<br />
eyes’<br />
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly<br />
As oceans moon looks on the moon in heaven<br />
And the landscape in Browning’s ‘Child Roland’. The Mariner escapes<br />
from his isolation by the enlargement of his sympathies in the manner<br />
least expected and he is allowed to return to common life. And he does so<br />
as a changed man. He has repented of his isolation; his greatest<br />
satisfaction is to worship in company with his fellows of all ages. But he is<br />
still the marked man, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the victim of his<br />
own thoughts. Further, although he has been judged by society, he has the<br />
reward of the courage that propels the mental adventurer: that of arresting<br />
and disturbing and teaching those who have had no such experiences. And<br />
this ambivalent criterion enriches the poem incalculably.<br />
The Treatment of the Supernatural in the Ancient Mariner<br />
In “The Ancient Mariner” the series of supernatural events begins with the<br />
appearance of the spectre ship with its crew, Death and Life–in-Death, and<br />
ends with the leaving of the corpses by the troop of the angelic spirits.<br />
Death and Life-in-Death play at dice. The sailors’ fall-dead one by one.<br />
The Mariner himself, won over by Life-in-Death, begins a lifelong process<br />
of penance. At first, he despises the sea creatures and finds that his heart<br />
being as dry as dust, he is unable to pray. But he partly atones his crime by<br />
appreciating their beauty, acknowledging their worth, and blessing them.<br />
The spell is broken and he is able to pray, and no sooner dose he pray than<br />
the body of the Albatross that the sailors had hung round his beck instead<br />
of the cross drops into the sea. The Mariner, partly absolved, falls into a<br />
blessed sleep and is refreshed with rain. The bodies of the crew are<br />
animated by a troop of angelic beings and the ship moves on without any<br />
apparent wine. It is the Polar Spirit, desiring further vengeance that makes<br />
the ship move and carries it as far as the equator. The Mariner falls into a
swoon and hears two voices, one telling the other that the Mariner has<br />
done enough penance but will domore. When the angelic spirits quit the<br />
bodies, the Ancient Mariner nears his home country. His ship is wrecked<br />
and it sinks into the sea but the hermit to continue his penance rescues<br />
him.<br />
On the surface, “The Ancients Mariner” belonged to a class of poetry,<br />
which provoked adverse comment. Even Hazlitt, who regards it as<br />
Coleridge’s “Most remarkable performance,” adds less kindly that “It is<br />
high German, however, and in it he seems to ‘conceive of poetry but as a<br />
drunken dream reckless, careless and needless, of past, present, and to<br />
come”. Charles Lamb responded with greater sympathy but he too had his<br />
doubts about the use of the supernatural and said: “I dislike all the<br />
miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of<br />
such scenery dragged me along like Tom piper’s Magic Whistle.<br />
Coleridge set for himself a difficult task. To succeed in it he must do a<br />
great deal more than reproduce the familiar thrills of horrific literature; he<br />
must produce poetry of the supernatural, which should in its own way; be<br />
as human and as compelling as Wordsworth’s poetry of everyday things.<br />
Coleridge saw these difficulties and faced them much more than a thrill of<br />
horror. He lives up to his own programmed and interests the affections by<br />
the dramatic truth of what he tells.”<br />
The Scene set in distant times and remote places<br />
First of all, Coleridge transports us to distant times and remote places with<br />
vast weird possibilities. “It is an Ancient Mariner”, he tells us in the very<br />
first line of the poem. The word ancient immediately suggests Middle<br />
Ages when an atmosphere of magic and mystery was ripe all around and<br />
when supernatural occurrences were not dismissed as the figments of a<br />
feverish imagination but were believed to be really true. And the Mariner<br />
is not moving about in any familiar place but is voyaging around Polar<br />
Regions in unknown seas where anything might happen. Before any<br />
supernatural element is introduced, the Mariner does not forget to tell us:<br />
We were the first that ever burst<br />
Into that silent sea.<br />
Thus cut off from the everyday life, the Ancient Mariner’s story gets free<br />
from the rigorous logic governing the world of reality and can follow its<br />
own laws without unduly straining our credulity.<br />
In the beginning, the poet gives a very realistic description of the<br />
background:
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,<br />
Merrily did we drop<br />
Below the Kirk, below the hill,<br />
Below the lighthouse top.<br />
We notice that the church, the hill, the lighthouse top are mentioned<br />
exactly in the order in which they would disappear from the mariner’s<br />
sight. It might be a minor detail but it deepens one’s faith in the truth of<br />
the narrative. The next few lines give another similar detail contributing to<br />
the total effect of reality.<br />
The sun came up upon the left,<br />
Out of the sea came he!<br />
And he shone bright, and on the right<br />
Went down into the sea.<br />
Higher and higher everyday,<br />
Till over the mast at noon-“<br />
Notice how accurate and how vivid the description is. It does not allow<br />
any possibility of disbelief. So the reader just pins his faith in the poet.<br />
Such realistic descriptions of nature scattered through out help to sustain<br />
this faith. The ice mast high, as green as emerald, sending out fitfully a<br />
dismal sheen, and occasionally cracking and growing; the fair breeze<br />
blowing, the white foam flowing and the furrow following free; the bloody<br />
sun, looking no bigger than the moon, standing right above the mast in a<br />
hot and copper sky; the ship standing still as a painted ship upon a painted<br />
ocean; the pale moonshine glimmering all night; the horn moon with one<br />
bright star dogging its heels; all these are examples of vivid imaginative<br />
apprehension of the exact details of nature. Here the very essence of<br />
nature is distilled and with great vividness and imaginative energy at once<br />
stamped on one’s memory. These descriptions of nature surely help in the<br />
acceptance of the supernatural elements.<br />
“Fear at my heart, as at a cup,<br />
My life-blood seemed to sip”.
The poet wants us to grasp the dreadfulness of Life-in-Death through this<br />
effect on the Mariner’s mind. This method has been repeatedly used in the<br />
poem to avoid horrible details. At the end of part III, two hundred sailors<br />
drop down dead one by one, cursing the Mariner with their eyes:<br />
“One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,<br />
Too quick for groan or sigh,<br />
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,<br />
And cursed me with his eye”.<br />
Here again the poet does not provide any ugly details and leaves the entire<br />
scene to our imagination. It is for us to imagine how the Mariner must<br />
have felt when<br />
“Four times fifty living men,<br />
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)<br />
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,<br />
They dropped down one by one”.<br />
And not only can we imagine the scene fully but even share the Wedding-<br />
Guest’s fears that the Mariner himself is perhaps a ghost. Again, towards<br />
the end of the poem, the poet wants to tell us how horrible the Mariner’s<br />
face appears at the end of his face; instead, he describes the effect<br />
produced by the sight of it upon the minds of the Pilot, the Hermit and the<br />
Pilot’s boy.<br />
“ I moved my lips-the Pilot shrieked<br />
And fell down in a fit;<br />
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,<br />
And prayed where he did sit.<br />
I took the oars: the Pilot’s boy,<br />
Who now doth crazy go,<br />
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro”.<br />
This method of suggesting supernatural horrors is very different indeed<br />
from the practice of the novelists of the school of terror like Horace<br />
Walpole and Monk Lewis. It is also worth noting that even when<br />
Coleridge has to introduce supernatural beings, he does not introduce<br />
ghosts, he animates the bodies of the dead crew with a troop of spirits<br />
blest and avoids all gruesome details:<br />
“They groaned, they stirred, they all up rose,<br />
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes,<br />
It had been strange even in a dream<br />
To have seen those dead men rise”.<br />
The use of imaginative realism<br />
As suggested earlier, in The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge makes use of<br />
imaginative realism. He gives natural touches to supernatural beings and<br />
weaves a web of mystery and vagueness about simple incidents and<br />
common objects. Thus the two aspects get thoroughly fused together. The<br />
Mariner himself, with his glittering eye, grey beard and skinny hand seems<br />
to have descended from a world haunted by phantoms and specters, where<br />
as supernatural happenings, because of the psychological truth inherent in<br />
them, look to be quite natural. Moreover the relation between the<br />
supernatural happenings and the mind of the Mariner is firmly established.<br />
One who does not believe in the supernatural phenomena can easily accept<br />
them as taking place on the inner stage of the Mariner’s mind. The<br />
psychological truth of the incidents will only support such a reading. At<br />
the end of the poem, when the ship approaches the harbour, the sight of<br />
the familiar landmarks greeting our eyes also assures us of the truth of the<br />
whole experience. The horrified shrieks of the Wedding-guest<br />
occasionally appearing in the narrative tend to reassert the presence of the<br />
world of humanity in a supernatural environment.<br />
The [Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is a superb narrative, terse,<br />
vigorous and inimitable. The perfectly ordered story moves on<br />
unchecked through a world of mystery and wonder. The form<br />
adapted by Coleridge is an old traditional one- the ballad. By the<br />
time of Coleridge the medieval influence was considerably<br />
established and it was natural enough for a tale strange adventures<br />
to be told in ballad style.
As the narrative proceeds, its dramatic quality is intensified and its hold on<br />
the reader's imagination becomes stronger. The total absence of wind<br />
causing complete suspension of the ship's movement reflects a state of<br />
Mariner's sinfulness, which is also objectified by the hanging of the Dead<br />
Albatross round his neck. These events combine in themselves the<br />
strangeness of the supernatural with the psychological truth of human<br />
experience. They are not allowed to come down to the level of the drab<br />
commonness, nor are they made so fantastic that they start straining our<br />
belief. The poet also employs some clever devices to make the story more<br />
interesting. The Wedding - Guest's interruptions are used to highlight the<br />
climatic moments. The dramatic endings given to each part of the poem<br />
make the readers move on to the next without even a moment’s pause. The<br />
pronunciation of the moral at the conclusion gives the poem an air of<br />
finality, as if there were nothing more to be said. The various aspects of<br />
Nature, still and stagnant, tender and soothing, violent and furious, are<br />
presented in harmony with the events. They are used, as music is used in<br />
movies and stage representation, to enhance the dramatic effect of the<br />
incidents. The metrical organization of the verse that follows the pattern of<br />
a ballad adds to the poem's narrative charm.<br />
The Romantic Elements of the Ancient Mariner<br />
Supernaturalism: The Ancient Mariner is a romantic poem, impressing us<br />
by bold invention, and appealing to that taste for the supernatural, the<br />
longing for a shudder, to which the ‘romantic’ school in Germany, and its<br />
derivations in England and France, directly ministered. Fancies of the<br />
strange things which may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to<br />
men shut up alone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the<br />
human mind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about<br />
them, the fascination of a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them<br />
from other kinds of marvelous inventions. This sort of fascination “The<br />
Ancient Mariner” brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the<br />
dreamy grace, in his presentation of the marvelous, which makes<br />
Coleridge’s work so remarkable.<br />
The sudden and mysterious appearance of the skeleton ship, Death and<br />
Life-in-Death who are on board that ship, the coming back to life of the<br />
dead crew, the angels of light standing on the corpses, the popular spirits<br />
driving the ship- these are all supernatural elements in the poem. This<br />
supernaturalism lends to the poem an atmosphere of wonder, enchantment,<br />
and mystery, which are romantic qualities.<br />
Medievalism: The poem has a medieval background. Interest in the middle<br />
Ages too, is a romantic characteristic. The Middle Ages were a period of<br />
superstition, piety, and love and chivalry. In this poem the first two<br />
elements of the Middle Ages have been emphasized. The superstition of
the period is seen in the supernatural incidents. Its piety is seen in the<br />
religious basis of the poem and in the reference to the hermit. The poem<br />
thus carries us back to a remote period of time. Nature: There are many<br />
pictures in the poem showing Coleridge’s interest in nature. Love for<br />
nature is one of the outstanding qualities of romantic poetry. Every phase<br />
of seascape, landscape and cloudscape is touched upon in the poem. The<br />
sun shining brightly at the outset, the mist and iceberg surrounding the<br />
ship, the moving moon going up the sky, the water burning green, blue<br />
and white, the snakes moving in water and leaving tracks of golden firethese<br />
are some of the beautiful and richly-coloured nature-pictures, giving<br />
the poem a romantic interest.<br />
Melodious Movement: The poem is also romantic because of its melody<br />
and music. Coleridge here appears as a keen lover of sweet and musical<br />
sounds. Alliteration, medieval rhymes, onomatopoeia, etc are all employed<br />
to produce musical effects. As an example of melody the following stanza<br />
may be taken:<br />
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew<br />
The furrow followed free;<br />
We were the first that ever burst<br />
Into that silent sea.<br />
The simplicity and freshness of diction further enhance the romantic<br />
effect.<br />
Conclusion: The Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century was<br />
characterized by an upsurge of Imagination. Much of the magic of The<br />
Ancient Mariner comes from the blend of dark and serious issues with the<br />
delighted play of creative energy. The imaginative power of “The Ancient<br />
Mariner” gives to it its complex appeal-there is no final or single approach<br />
to it.<br />
The Significance of Life-in-Death<br />
The two instruments in the hands of God are Death and Life-in-Death.<br />
God punishes the people who go against the law of pity. They are not<br />
allowed to pray nor can they bless any creature in the world. God loves<br />
them best who love others and show kindness:<br />
He prayth well, which loveth well<br />
Both men and bird and beast.
Since the Mariner has gone against the rules of God, he has sinned. He is<br />
admitted from both God and his creation. He is not pited by the saints. The<br />
Mariner regrets that so many beautiful men lie dead on the deck while ‘a<br />
thousand thousand slimy things’ live on. This suggests that he still refuses<br />
to acknowledge the worth of his fellow creatures. He tries to pray but he<br />
fails.<br />
A wicked whisper came, and made<br />
My heart as dry as dust.<br />
The bird was hailed with joy when it first came through the fog. With it<br />
came the south wing, the ice split and the helmsman began to steer the<br />
ship. The Albatross followed the ship for nine days and played with the<br />
sailors. Suddenly, it was shot dead by the Mariner. It was a very<br />
irresponsible at committed.<br />
The guardian spirit of the Albatross began to avenge. It sent Death and<br />
Life-in-Death to punish the sailors. A skeleton ship approached them<br />
carrying two figures. One was a grim, looking ghastly skeleton. It was like<br />
a Nightmare, the personification of Death. The other was Life-in-Death. It<br />
had red lips, golden locks, and leprous skin. She represents the life-long<br />
torture that a sinful man endures on account of the- pricks of his<br />
conscience. Life-in-Death curdles one’s blood by striking terror into the<br />
heart of man. The two ghastly crew were playing at dice to determine who<br />
would win the Mariner. Life-in- Death won whereas Death fell upon the<br />
sailors. It can be said here that life is not always a blessing and Death is<br />
not always a curse. The sailors were infact blessed with death because<br />
they were saved from seeing the horrors faced by the Mariner. The<br />
Mariner had to penance and repent all his life for the sin he committed.<br />
As the souls of his sailors departed, they passed by the mariner with the<br />
whizzing sound of his cross-bow. This was so, to remind him of the crime<br />
he had committed. He was left all alone. No saint pitied his soul. The sight<br />
of the sea was dreadful and ugly. The timbers of the ship were rotting and<br />
heaps of dead men lay sinful on them. The Mariner wanted to pray but his<br />
sinful heart would not allow him to do so. Even God accepts the prayers<br />
said by hearts that are full of love and kindness. The eyes of the dead<br />
sailors seemed to curse the mariner. For seven days he had to go through<br />
this torture. He himself confused that he wished to die but could not die.<br />
After seven days of constant torture did his fate take pity on the mariner?<br />
In the moonlight he saw the water-snakes and slimy creatures, a fountain<br />
of sympathy and tenderness flowed from his heart and he blessed those<br />
creatures unswervingly. This love for the snakes was the best of prayers.
This illuminated his heart and he became calm. He was then able to pray<br />
to God; who ultimately took pity on the mariner.<br />
This recovery does not help to end the mariner’s suffering. It however<br />
opens the door to the future. The mariner is haunted by the presence of his<br />
dead sailors. The mariner becomes a symbol of remorse and he often feels<br />
the necessity of repeating his confession.<br />
Thus, we learn that nature has two tools of punishment Death and Life-in-<br />
Death. Life-in-Death is much more horrible than Death. Death heals us of<br />
pain instantly but Life-in-Death kills by degree<br />
KUBLA KHAN AN INTRODUCTION<br />
Coleridge himself stated that this poem was part of a gorgeous dream,<br />
which he once dreamt while asleep. It was the year 1797. One night at his<br />
farmhouse on the border of Somerset with Devon shire, he fell asleep<br />
while reading “Purchase’s Pilgrimage” written by Samuel Purchas. It was<br />
an anthology of travels. In it Coleridge was reading about Kubla Khan and<br />
his palace when sleep overcame him.” The author continued for about<br />
three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during<br />
which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have<br />
composed less than from two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be<br />
called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things,<br />
with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any<br />
sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself<br />
to have a distinct recollection of the whole dream, and taking his pen, ink<br />
and paper, instantly wrote down the lines which he saw in his dream. At<br />
this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from<br />
Porlock, and thus he had to stop writing .He was detained by him for<br />
above an hour, and on returning to his room, he found, to his small<br />
surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and<br />
dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the<br />
exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images on the surface of<br />
a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! Without the after<br />
restoration of the matter!<br />
According to the poet himself, Kubla Khan is now no more than a<br />
psychological curiosity. Humphry House, however, observes that if<br />
Coleridge had not told us that the poem is a fragment, it would not have<br />
occurred to anyone to regard it as such. He believes it to be a complete<br />
poem dealing with the theme of poetic creativity. Wilson Knight regards it<br />
as a poem about life. Raymond Wilson feels that just because the poem<br />
was “A Vision in a Dream” and not at all the product of conscious<br />
composition, it came to be regarded as an example of indisputably<br />
authentic inspiration. Its prestige rose when, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, a cult of “Arts for Arts sake” prevailed, and twentieth<br />
century theories of psychology have also tended to promote attitudes<br />
favourable to the poem, which can be dubiously honored as an early<br />
example of Secularism”. According to this critic, ``To this day, it is for the<br />
most readers a fragment of inspired incoherence, a piece of verbal magic,<br />
to ask the meaning of which would be impertinent.”<br />
CRITICAL SUM<strong>MA</strong>RY<br />
KUBLA KHAN<br />
Kubla Khan, the great oriental king, once ordered that a magnificent<br />
pleasure palace be built for him in Xanadu where the sacred river Alph<br />
winding its course through immeasurably deep caves ultimately sank into<br />
a dark, subterranean sea. So a fertile tract of land, about ten square miles<br />
in area was enclosed with walls and towers. This piece of land, with<br />
streams meandering their way through bright gardens and ancient forests<br />
enclosing the bright gardens and ancient forests enclosing bright green<br />
spots presented a spectacle of rich profusion<br />
From this valley, a fountain of water gushed out of the ground every<br />
moment. This burst of water threw up stones, which looked like hail or<br />
chaff being scattered around.<br />
Next the poet describes the source of river Alph. There was a deep,<br />
mysterious- looking, awe-insuring chasm that slanted down a green hill<br />
across a screen made by cedar trees. It was a savage, holy and enchanted<br />
place, the kind of place frequented by a woman desperately wandering<br />
about, in the light of a waning moon, in search of her demon-lover, who,<br />
after making love to her deserts her. A mighty fountain issued from this<br />
chasm intermittently. As the water gushed out, it flung about huge pieces<br />
of rock in the same way in which the hailstones rebound from the earth or<br />
the chaffy grain flings about under the thresher’s flail. The river Alph,<br />
issuing from this fountain, flowed meanderingly for five miles through<br />
woods and valleys, entered the deep caves and finally sank into the sunless<br />
sea with a loud, tumultuous sound. In the midst of this tumult, Kubla Khan<br />
could hear from far the voices of his ancestors predicting a war in the near<br />
future and exhorting him to be prepared for it. The dome presented a great<br />
marvel of human skill. It was a ‘sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice’<br />
and its shadow fell midway on the river. While standing here one could<br />
hear the mingled noises from the fountain and the caves.<br />
In the second part of the poem, Coleridge gives us a vivid picture of a poet<br />
caught in a spell of poetic inspiration. Once, in a vision, he saw an<br />
Abyssinian maid playing on her dulcimer and singing of the wild splendor<br />
of Mount Abora. It was a beautiful indeed. The poet says that if he could
ecreate in his imagination the sweet music of the Abyssinian maid, it<br />
would give him such an ecstatic joy and he would feel so inspired that<br />
with the music of his poetry he would build Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome<br />
in the air. In other words, he would give such a vivid description of the<br />
pleasure dome that his listeners would actually begin to see his<br />
imagination. They would then regard him as a mighty magician, a<br />
superhuman being who has fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of<br />
paradise. They would mark his flashing eyes and floating hair, weave a<br />
circle around him thrice and close their eyes in holy dread. The idea is that<br />
a poet caught in a spell of poetic inspiration transcends his mundane<br />
existence and becomes a superhuman being.<br />
The Use of the Supernatural in Kubla Khan<br />
Coleridge is pre-eminentally a poet of the supernatural. But he does not<br />
belong to the School of the late eighteenth century writers of the Gothic<br />
romance, whose works are marred by indiscreet accumulation of crude<br />
horrors. Today they do not appeal to us because they violate our sense of<br />
probability. The incidents described by them do not strike us as true, as<br />
capable of having happened. Coleridge also makes use of supernatural<br />
agencies and situations but he makes sure that they appear to us as natural.<br />
When he started writing, he said that he was aware that his major problem<br />
was how to make his presentation of the supernatural elements acceptable,<br />
how to get from his readers ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the<br />
moment, which constitutes poetic faith’, and it must be acknowledged that<br />
he solved this problem in the most convincing manner.<br />
To begin with, the scene of this poem is never laid in a familiar place. He<br />
takes us to remote, unknown regions and to distant times-mostly middle<br />
ages- where the very unfamiliarity of the scene prompts us to suspend our<br />
reasoning faculties. We do not argue, do not dispute, because we do not<br />
know. In Kubla Khan, the scene is laid in the oriental city of Xanadu, in<br />
forests as “ancient as the hills”.<br />
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran<br />
Through caverns measureless to man<br />
Down to a sunless sea.<br />
This is something we have not seen. It seems to be improbable, but not<br />
utterly impossible. So we accept it for a while. In the meantime the poet<br />
cleverly makes use of some other devices to strengthen our sense of belief.<br />
Another very important feature of Coleridge’s treatment of the<br />
supernatural is a very subtle blending of the natural and the supernatural.
The two are so indistinguishly fused with each other that it is very difficult<br />
to locate where the one ends and the other begins. The mighty fountain<br />
being momently forced from the deep romantic chasm is definitely<br />
invested with supernatural energy but the similes employed to describe it<br />
are so familiar that we accept the fountain as quite natural.<br />
Amidst whose swift half-intermitted burst<br />
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,<br />
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:<br />
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever<br />
It flung up momently the sacred river.<br />
Suggestiveness is the keynote of Coleridge’s treatment of the supernatural.<br />
Coleridge does not describe the supernatural; he simply suggests it.<br />
Suggestions stir one’s imagination; descriptions make it inert. Suggestions<br />
evoke our sense of mystery and make us more keenly interested;<br />
descriptions arouse our sense of improbability and make us protest. In<br />
Kubla Khan, Coleridge makes use of subtle suggestions in the description<br />
of the deep romantic chasm slanting down the green hill across a cedarn<br />
cover:<br />
A savage place! As holy and enchanted<br />
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted<br />
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!<br />
It has been remarked that these three lines contain the seeds of a complete<br />
love story comparable to Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci.<br />
The supernatural in Kubla Khan does not strain our sense of probability<br />
because the dramatic truth of human experience projected in it is nowhere<br />
falsified. Kubla Khan’s hearing the ancestral voices in the midst of the<br />
tumultuous noises heard from the chasm and the measureless caves may<br />
be slightly unusual, but once we accept that he can hear these voices (or if<br />
we so like, we can say that he interprets the noises as ancestral voices),<br />
how appropriate it is that he should hear a ‘war’ prophecy since he is<br />
himself a warrior of great renown! Toward the end of the poem, the poet is<br />
presented as a supernatural being:<br />
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!<br />
Weave a circle round him thrice,<br />
And close your eyes with holy dread,<br />
For he on honey-dew hath fed,<br />
And drunk the milk of paradise.<br />
A note of supernatural mystery runs through these lines and yet the whole<br />
descriptions is psychologically accurate because when a poet is caught in a<br />
spell of poetic inspiration, he transcends his ordinary existence and rises to<br />
the level of a supernatural being. Thus we find that Coleridge makes his<br />
supernatural acceptable mainly through a faithful adherence to the<br />
dramatic truth of human experience. Today we have come a long way<br />
from the days of supernatural belief. Supernatural agencies and situations<br />
no longer capture our imagination. Still we are able to enjoy the poem<br />
because it is relevant to us. Whether we read it as a poem about poetic<br />
creativity or a poem about life, it is intensely human and that is why we<br />
accept it as a convincing presentation.<br />
The Mystery and the Touch of the Supernatural<br />
The vagueness, however, is the greatest strength of the description. It<br />
leaves so much to suggestion that every reader with a little imagination<br />
will build a vast scene of his own. The mystery becomes very effective<br />
because of the vast vision of imagination, which surrounds the vivid<br />
picture of the poem. The poem is raised from the region of everyday<br />
realities to that of a supernatural world. The details though may be<br />
realistic but however each detail has an actual counterpart somewhere.<br />
The total impression however is of an unearthly rather than earthly scene.<br />
The deft touches scattered in the poem help to achieve the creation of a<br />
masterpiece. The very mention of “Xanadu”, “Kubla Khan”, “Alph”,<br />
“Abora” and “The Abyssinian maid’ evoke associations of remoteness,<br />
mystery and strangeness. “The woman wailing for the demon-lover”, the<br />
chasm “seething with ceaseless turmoil”, “the earth breathing in thick<br />
pants”,” the huge fragments” thrown up by the waves”, “the caverns<br />
measureless to man”, “the sunless sea”, “the caves of ice” etc are all<br />
nothing but touches which make the poem a supernatural one.
NATURE OF POETIC VISION IN KUBLA KHAN<br />
Coleridge’s preface to Kubla Khan reveals that it was composed during a<br />
dream. He adds that it was not really a composition in the ordinary sense.<br />
For, the entire images rose up before him as things with a parallel<br />
production of the corresponding expressions without any sensation or<br />
consciousness of effort.<br />
It has been pointed out by Humphrey House that by writing this preface<br />
the poet played out of modesty right into the hands of critics. Humphry<br />
House refers to other critics who talk of the ‘vivid incoherence’ and<br />
“patchwork brilliance’ of the poem and like to read it only as a<br />
‘psychological curiosity’. He himself believes the poem to be complete<br />
and intensely meaningful. According to him Kubla Khan is a poem about<br />
the act of poetic creation, about the ‘ecstasy in imaginative fulfillment’. It<br />
is “triumphant positive statement of the potentialities of poetry”.<br />
Kubla Khan not merely attracts the readers by giving good poetry; it is<br />
also often studied and esteemed for reasons other than poetic. It has been<br />
regarded as a forerunner of both symbolism surrealism. The claim is<br />
sometimes made that Kubla Khan is an immediate and undistorted<br />
_expression of poetic inspiration, as it has been written without a poet’s<br />
mind functioning at the conscious level.<br />
Humphry House writes, “The precision and clarity of the opening part are<br />
the first things to mark even in the order of the landscape. In the centre is<br />
the pleasure-dome with its gardens on the river bank; to one side is the<br />
river’s source in the chasm, to the other are the ‘Caverns measureless to<br />
man’ and the ‘sunless sea’ into which the river falls: Kubla in the centre<br />
can hear the ‘mingled measure’ of the fountain of the source from one<br />
side, and of the dark caves from the other. The river winds across the<br />
whole landscape. Nobody need keep this mere geographical consistency of<br />
the description prominently in the mind as he reads. Humphry House<br />
suggests that if this factual-visual consistency had been absent, and there<br />
had been a mere random sequence or collection of items, such as a dream<br />
might well have provided items which needed a symbol-system to<br />
establish relations at all- then the absence would be observed: The Poem<br />
would have been quite different, and a new kind of effort would have been<br />
needed to apprehend what unity it might have had. The fertility of the<br />
plain is only made possible by the mysterious energy of the source. The<br />
dome has come into being by Kubla Khan’s decree: the dome is stately;<br />
the gardens are girdled round with wall and towers.
Even so, even if the poem is the outcome of an opium dream, it has to be<br />
studied as poetry by the critics. In seeking the significance of the poem,<br />
there is often a tendency to discover some kind of allegory or symbolic<br />
meaning. If we have to read an allegory into the poem, it must be<br />
consistent throughout. Most of the details, if not all of them, must have<br />
significance in the allegory. Now it will be difficult to find the hidden<br />
meaning behind such features of the landscape as the deep romantic<br />
chasm, the forest full of cedar trees, the walls, the towers, and the sinuous<br />
rills.<br />
Attempts have been made to link the poem with the poet’s own life.<br />
Graham Hough supposes that Kubla is the inspired poet-magician who,<br />
towards the close of the poem, becomes the inspired poet-prophet. The<br />
Alph may stand for poetic inspiration. It rises up under awe-inspiring<br />
circumstances. For a while, it flows smoothly in sunlight. Then it falls into<br />
deep caverns and reaches the sunless sea.<br />
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran<br />
Through caverns measureless to man<br />
Down to a sunless sea.<br />
So twice five miles of fertile ground<br />
With walls and towers were girded round:<br />
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,<br />
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree”.<br />
To Hough, this suggests the story of the rise and fall of creative<br />
imagination in a poet.<br />
“It is so often said that ‘kubla khan’ achieves its effects mainly by ‘far<br />
reaching suggestiveness’, or by incantation or by much connotation, with<br />
little denotation, that it is worth emphasizing this element of plain clear<br />
statement at the outset, statement which does particularize a series of<br />
details inter-related to each other, and deriving their relevance from the<br />
inter relation and their order. Further more, the use of highly emotive and<br />
suggestive proper names is proportionately no large source of the poem’s<br />
effect; it is only necessary to watch the incidence of them. Xanadu, Kubla<br />
Khan and Alph occur once in that form within the poem’s opening twoand-a-half<br />
lines: and none of them occur again except for the single<br />
repetition of kubla in line 29 “And ‘mid this tumult kubla heard from far
ancestral voices prophesying war!”Abyssian and Mount Abora occur once<br />
each, in the three lines 39-41<br />
“It was an Abyssinian maid,<br />
And on her dulcimer she played,<br />
Singing of Mount Abora.<br />
Could I revive within me<br />
Her symphony and song “.<br />
There are no other proper names in the poem at all, unless we should<br />
count the final word Paradise.<br />
“For he on honey-dew hath fed,<br />
And drunk the milk of paradise”.<br />
An even more personal view of the poem is taken by Robert Graves. He<br />
finds it dealing in a roundabout way with Coleridge’s relation with his<br />
wife. According to Graves, the poet identifies himself with the serene and<br />
powerful Kubla Khan. The pleasure dome is the state of joy brought by<br />
opium. The caves of ice should be taken to mean that passion did not<br />
disturb his retreat from the difficulties of life. Graves suns up: “We<br />
understand from the poem that Coleridge has determined to shun the mazy<br />
complications of life by retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and<br />
opium. Its far-fetched symbolism is admitted; every kind of fanciful<br />
meaning can be read into the poem. It may be taken to refer to the poet’s<br />
own experience or desires, whether expressed or hidden. Such<br />
interpretations can neither be proved nor disapproved.”<br />
It is best therefore, to understand the poem without burdening it with any<br />
deep symbolic or allegorical purpose. After the entire poem is felt to be a<br />
lovely lyric. It is full of evocative phrases and images. The poem shows<br />
the distilled essence of all the romance and adventure of travel and<br />
discovery. As Prof. Lowes put it: “And over it is cast the glamour<br />
enhanced beyond all reckoning in the dream, of the remote in time and<br />
space-that visionary presence of vague and gorgeous and mysterious past<br />
which brooded, as Coleridge read, above the inscrutable Nile and domed<br />
pavilions in Kashmir, and the vanished stateliness of Xanadu. Kubla Khan<br />
makes us feel the magic of distance called romance”.<br />
RO<strong>MA</strong>NTIC ELEMENS IN KUBLA KHAN
The main theme of Coleridge’s romanticism lies in his artistic rendering of<br />
the supernatural phenomenon. A major part of his poems are engrossed<br />
deep in supernatural mystery. Kubla Khan, it is true, is less directly<br />
connected with the supernatural, but still the supernatural elements in the<br />
poem appear quite prominent. ‘The woman wailing for her demon lover’<br />
and the ancestral voices prophesying war’ are actually supernatural<br />
occurrences. The poetic frenzy of an inspired poet is based on the<br />
supernatural. The tumultuous rise of the river Alph from a deep romantic<br />
chasm is also given an unmistakable supernatural touch. But what is<br />
remarkable about Kubla Khan is the convincing presentation of the<br />
supernatural elements. The description of the landscape is so vivid and<br />
precise, the similes used for the mighty fountain so homely and familiar<br />
that it just does not occur to the reader that anything impossible is<br />
described. The psychological truths hidden behind Kubla Khan’s hearing<br />
ancestral voices prophesying war or the presentation of the poet as a<br />
superhuman being make these facts acceptable.<br />
Kubla Khan is full of dream imagery. Now the essence of a dream is its<br />
inconsequence and illogicality which we realize only after we wake up<br />
from it. While experiencing the dream we are entirely lost in it and find no<br />
objections to its details. That is the first thing to remember in estimating<br />
the significance or effect of the poem. There is also the disconnected<br />
nature of the thing seen or the impressions evoked in our minds by them.<br />
We are told of a palace and fortress, but there is no description of the inner<br />
decoration except for the mention of a sunny dome and caves of ice. A<br />
river tuned to flow in many clever or romantic ways is possible, but this<br />
river is said to be a sacred river. This idea is particularly Hindu or Eastern,<br />
for only in the East do people Treat Rivers as holy. Where there are rivers<br />
and subterranean springs, there are bound to be caverns as well. Rivers do<br />
often go underground and then come up again. This is given a supernatural<br />
or magical turn, and the associations with magic, wizardry and mystery<br />
are emphasized. In fact, and nearly half of the entire poem is taken up with<br />
the course of the sacred river.<br />
Reference to distant times and places with a view to evoke a sense of awe<br />
and mystery is another romantic characteristic used by Coleridge in Kubla<br />
Khan. The very first line transports us to the distant city of Xanadu, the<br />
summer capital of the great oriental king Kubla Khan, and the son of the<br />
great Chenghiz Khan. These names, unfamiliar and wrought with the spirit<br />
of mystery, lend to the poem an enchantment of their own. The same<br />
purpose is served by the allusion to the Abyssinian girl singing of Mount<br />
Abora in the second part of the poem.<br />
The third feature of the poem is the mixing and blending of the vision of<br />
the palace of Kubla Khan with another dream, which the poet is said to<br />
have dreamt on another occasion. In that dream, he saw a maiden playing
on a dulcimer and singing to the accompaniment of the instrument. The<br />
effect of it on the poet was to intoxicate him with the purest fervour of<br />
poetic imagination. For, he becomes transfigured with hair disheveled,<br />
eyes flashing forth fire, being completely transported from the world of<br />
ordinary humdrum existence. He is sustained by the food of the gods and<br />
drinks the milk of paradise, such as are earmarked for the children of<br />
poetry.<br />
Kubla Khan abounds in suggestive phrases and lines capable of evoking<br />
mystery. The description of the romantic chasm, the source of the river<br />
Alph in the second part of the poem is romantic in spirit. Perhaps the most<br />
appropriate lines in the poem refer to the woman wailing for her demonlover.<br />
A savage place! As holy and enchanted<br />
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted<br />
By woman wailing for her demon-lover.<br />
But almost equally suggestive in Kubla Khan’s hearing the war prophecy<br />
made by the ancestral voices.<br />
The disjoined entities are each pictures, but together they have no<br />
connection with one another. The whole poem is like a series of snatches<br />
of music remembered in bits and on different occasions. Such unity as<br />
they may possess will derive its meaning or significance from the<br />
personality or subjective bias of the reader acting on the suggestions given<br />
by the poet.<br />
Sensuous phrases and pictures so generously used in the poem contribute a<br />
good deal to its romantic spirit. The bright gardens and sinuous rills, the<br />
incense-bearing trees laden with sweet blossoms, the sunny sports of<br />
greenery, the half-intermittent burst of the mighty fountain the rocks<br />
vaulting like rebounding hail-all these vivid pictures give the poem a<br />
sensuous touch so characteristic of romantic poetry.<br />
The very idea of poetic creativity taking place under divine inspiration and<br />
of the poet transcending his prosaic existence and rising o the level of<br />
superhuman being when caught in his poetic frenzy is based on the<br />
romantic concept of poetry and of a poet’s identity.<br />
Above all, the dream-like atmosphere of Kubla Khan makes it an exquisite<br />
romantic poem. It was not only composed in a dream but even exhibits a<br />
dream-like movement.
DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT IN KUBLA KHAN<br />
Kubla Khan is one of the three great poems of Coleridge. It is the shortest<br />
but in some ways the most remarkable of the three. In the first part of the<br />
poem the poet describes a mighty river and a rare pleasure dome<br />
constructed on it by the mighty Kubla Khan. In the later part the poet has<br />
described the power of poetry and inspiration as well as a poet in the<br />
frenzy world of creation. The poem is not related to a story in any way; it<br />
is but a masterpiece of description. The critics also feel that the poem<br />
Kubla Khan is “Airy and Unsubstantial”. At the first reading there comes<br />
the impression that the poem is “airy and unsubstantial”. There is a feeling<br />
that there is no coherence and that the two parts of the poem do not hang<br />
together. In the first part the river Alph and its beauty are depicted where<br />
as the second part describes a vision and the poet in frenzy. The first part<br />
also does not follow an even Course. There is no connection between the<br />
Abyssinian maid and the river Alph. However a close study reveals that<br />
the poem does have ‘Coherence and substance’. It cannot be explained in<br />
a rational terms, but when we follow the course of association and<br />
suggestions that run through the poem, it does yield a coherent meaning.<br />
The imagination of the poet is aroused by the river Alph and its<br />
subterranean Course. The measureless caverns, the panting earth, the<br />
dancing rocks, sunless and lifeless sea, and the tumult of the mighty waves<br />
as they rush into the silent ocean, the scene where a woman wails for the<br />
demon-lover, all these excite his imagination. A feeling of awe and<br />
mystery is upon the poet, and he is lifted into a mood of poetic creation.<br />
The poet glides into this new theme through suggestion; the power of<br />
creation in man is suggested through the damsel; who is the symbol of<br />
creative power. The poet is aroused by the desire to capture the weird<br />
beauty of the entire scene, and reminds him that this can be built in<br />
colours, strains and words. The symbol of this creative power is the<br />
maiden whom he saw in a vision. Both the parts of the poem are<br />
connected by the poet’s desire to build a pleasure dome with the help of<br />
his imagination.<br />
The whole poem follows the course of a dream. It can be interpreted as a<br />
complete poem; but the coherence and the completeness is of a dream seen<br />
by the poet and not of waking life. The description of river Alph has<br />
dream like qualities. It is not easy to follow the course of the river. It is not<br />
clearly suggested whether the entire course of the river is of ten miles or<br />
whether this was a part of its entire course. It is difficult to also associate<br />
the wild and the fertile parts of the course of the river. The transition from<br />
the description of the river to the description of the vision is abrupt, and<br />
the second part tenuous. The poem feels to be a dream due to its vividness<br />
and lack of smooth transitions
The poem is a master-piece of descriptive art. It is nothing but a series of<br />
pictures which following quick succession. First the poet describes the<br />
pleasure-dome and immediately after he describes the course of the river<br />
Alph. He builds up the picture of romantic chasm-by a scene of vast<br />
desolation in the dim light of the moon. The picture of the mighty fountain<br />
follows this. The vision of the river is repeated again and is followed by<br />
the pictures of the pleasure dome; after this there is the description of the<br />
vision and finally we get the picture of the poet in frenzy.<br />
There is a clear combination of vagueness and vividness. The pictures of<br />
‘the dome’, ‘the river’, ‘the damsel’, are at once vivid and get vague. It is<br />
just like being in a dream. The details are left vague. The impressions of<br />
the dream have clear outline, yet they concentrate only on a few details.<br />
The details are imaginative and leave the reader also in a state of<br />
imagination. The details are suggestive and not explicit.<br />
The entire description of the poem has the indefiniteness of a dream;<br />
because we don’t know exactly about the pleasure dome or the river Alph.<br />
There are many questions which haunt our minds like-How far was the<br />
sunless sea from the pleasure domes? How far was the fountain from the<br />
river? We have a vague picture of the pleasure dome-that it was situated<br />
on the banks of the river Alph, it had a sunny dome and caves of ice, its<br />
shadow floats on the waves and the pleasure dome is haunted by the<br />
tumult of the mighty river.<br />
KUBLA KHAN AS THE POEM OF DESCRIPTION<br />
In view of the absence from the poem of any story or plot or episode<br />
intended to be narrated, we have to look out for the significance of it in<br />
terms of the descriptions it contains. Major described are the sacred river<br />
Alph and its romantic course, the chasm bubbling up with violent<br />
upheaval of rocks and boulders alternating with gushing and foaming<br />
waters. Next to these we have a damsel with a dulcimer, who though not<br />
otherwise described, at once suggests the whole world of romance and<br />
mystery. Lastly, we have the picture of the poet roused to creative<br />
utterance. The poet is inspired, his hair is loosened and he looks scarcely<br />
mortal. All the details mentioned are enough to deepen the sense of either<br />
mystery or charm of delight. The reference to the waning moon at once<br />
starts a train of associations which end in magic and sorcery; from the<br />
ancient times the moon has been associated with all occult manifestations<br />
and powers.<br />
The figures of speech employed also promote the same elements of<br />
mystery and magic. The demon-lover has a mortal woman in love with<br />
him, and this at once thrills us with a creepy feeling. Romance of the<br />
exciting and pleasurable type is provided by gods and mortals marrying, as
they often do in classical mythology. But men and the demoniac spirits<br />
having similar love- bonds are neither so common nor so natural. But such<br />
superstitious beliefs are common among ordinary people especially in outof-the-way<br />
rustic areas. The underground commotion made by the river or<br />
by some panting force strikes us as fearful, for it suggests earthquakes.<br />
Some idea of the tremendous violence felt by the earth may be formed<br />
from the poet’s description of rocks and boulders being scattered about<br />
like the chaff by the winnower of newly harvested grain.<br />
These are all unforgettable details. And the very fact that they do not fit in<br />
with one another in any prosaic or logical manner is a characteristic of the<br />
poem underlying the poem.<br />
The element of magic in the poem.<br />
Magic is generally associated with the ability to invoke powers or exploit<br />
Nature in defiance of what we consider to be natural and universal laws. It<br />
appeals to the irrational or mysterious element in all of us, since, there is<br />
nothing wonderful in what is known. It is the human tendency to always<br />
try to know more about the other world. But when suggestions or details<br />
are calculated to stir our feelings and inspire in us vague dread or terror,<br />
and then we say that some sort of magic is at work. It is the supreme virtue<br />
of Coleridge’s poetry that he creates this elusive but powerful feeling<br />
more often and more intensely than many others great poets.<br />
In the poem Kubla Khan, Coleridge speaks of a place being holy, savage<br />
and haunted at once; the readers cannot imagine the combination easily’<br />
but we accept it since the poet says so with a matter-of-fact certainty. Only<br />
magic can account for the combination of a sunny dome with icy caves.<br />
Lest we should disbelieve it, the poet himself says that it was a miracle of<br />
rare device.<br />
In order that people may be exempt from being bewitched by the poet<br />
when he is under the influence of his poetic inspiration, the poets represent<br />
the beholders as crying to themselves:<br />
“Beware! Beware!<br />
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!<br />
Weave a circle round him thrice,”<br />
And in these ways let us protect ourselves from his dreaded influence. The<br />
reference to the number- three, is wholly magical, for mystic powers are<br />
ascribed to numbers in all systems of magic. The most striking indication
of this magical influence is found in the last two lines. Honey-dew<br />
suggests something sweet as honey, and fresh, cool and sparking as dew.<br />
It is the blend of these qualities that is entrancing to the mind. To drink the<br />
milk of paradise is to be one of the best creatures already enjoying the<br />
privileges of blessed spirits. Such is the power conferred by the spirit of<br />
poetry on the poet.<br />
Coleridge’s style and diction in the poem<br />
The wonderful effect of the poem is to be found compressed for the most<br />
part in single words or pregnant epithets, which carry a whole world of<br />
meaning and association. The language of the poem is simple and sublime:<br />
not a word can be changed for the better and not an image or sentiment<br />
jars on the mind or offends the sensibilities. The poem is, as we may say,<br />
‘word perfect’. Phrases like pleasure-dome, demon-lover, incense bearing,<br />
holy-dread and honey-dew, are compounded of the most ordinary words,<br />
but they sound different and convey intensified meanings. The sentence,<br />
“Ancestral voices prophesying war’, defies analysis. But it conveys some<br />
idea of part played by oracles in foretelling the future, of the interpretation<br />
of natural phenomena by soothsayers and auger’s and of the practice<br />
among primitive tribes of inspired priests indicating when a war should be<br />
begun. The two words ‘damsel’ and ‘dulcimer’ are themselves romantic<br />
and help us to visualize a beautiful maiden highly gifted with all artistic<br />
accomplishments.<br />
The element of music in the choice of the diction is no less worthy of<br />
notice. The word ‘Xanadu’ at once strikes the note of the remote and<br />
mysterious; for few have heard of such a place. Kubla Khan is sonorous<br />
and dignified and also suggestive of an eastern emperor and of the pomp<br />
and luxury associated with one. A sunless sea sounds smooth and strange<br />
and a rarity. By describing the shadow of the dome of pleasure as moving<br />
the poet conveys to us the idea of how the waters are disturbed and so the<br />
images formed on the surface of the stream are also disturbed. Prosaically<br />
we reproduce a song we have heard well or ill. But, poetically, he would<br />
‘rebuild that dome in air’, that is, describe it in the musical language of<br />
inspired poetry.<br />
By making these analyses, however, we come no nearer to the heart of<br />
mystery of how great poetry is produced. We recognize the quality of it<br />
when we read it, and by the persistence with which these impressions<br />
linger our consciousness without our realizing it always or fully.<br />
“Kubla Khan” is steeped in the wonder of all of Coleridge’s enchanted<br />
voyaging”, a critic rightly observes.
Kubla Khan – fragment or a complete poem<br />
A very important question asked by critic’s is “Is the poem a fragment?”<br />
All critics however don’t hold this opinion. George Saints bury disbelieves<br />
Coleridge’s statement. He remarks the prose as rigmarole in which<br />
Coleridge tells the story of the coming and going of the vision called<br />
Kubla Khan. It is “A Characteristic piece of self-description”.<br />
Humphrey House, a modern critic also holds that the poem is complete.<br />
He regards the poem Kubla Khan as poem about the process of poetic<br />
creation, about the ecstasy of imaginative fulfilment.<br />
Coleridge himself feels that the poem Kubla Khan is not complete but a<br />
fragment. According to him it is only a part of the poem of two or three<br />
hundred lines, which he saw in his dream. He not only saw the picture but<br />
he painted the whole scene in the poem as a portrait. He says that the lines<br />
and words written are as they came to him in the dream. The poem could<br />
not be completed. Coleridge says because a visitor interrupted him and the<br />
vision faded.<br />
Kubla Khan when read as a story or even as a piece of connected<br />
description, it seems but a fragment. The unwritten parts of the poem are<br />
needed to give us a clear idea of the story of the places and things<br />
described. But it will be wrong to treat the poem in this way. Actually,<br />
when read, it somehow does not make us feel that it is incomplete or<br />
inadequate. It creates a vivid and full impression of a mood or an<br />
atmosphere. It seems to bring before us the very essence of romance.<br />
Coleridge steeps his poem in romance of distant in space or time.<br />
Coleridge says that the poem was composed in a dream after he fell<br />
asleep, reading a volume of travels edited by the Elizabethan writer,<br />
Purchas.<br />
Professor J.L. Lowes had traced most of the features of the landscape and<br />
the persons mentioned or described in the poem to the accounts of travels<br />
in Africa and Asia. It is a piece of remarkable detective work in the field<br />
of literary origins. The identification of the sources of Coleridge’s words<br />
and images does not in any way make the poem less original or exciting.<br />
For even his opium induced dream, the imagination of the poet was<br />
selecting combining and transforming the materials from travellers<br />
descriptions. So well has this been done that George Sampson has<br />
declared: So far from being the opium dream, Kubla khan is the product of<br />
one expected lucid interval before the fumes closed up once more the<br />
_expression of the spirit: moreover, it is complete”.
The poem starts with a reference to a city called Xanadu. The name is<br />
exotic. To an <strong>English</strong> reader, it suggests the distant and mysterious East.<br />
One to Kubla Khan follows the reference to Xanadu. This is another<br />
exotic name. Anyone with some knowledge of world history can<br />
recognize in him a notable emperor of China, who was the patron of<br />
Marco Polo. Kubla Khan and Xanadu determine the setting of the poem. It<br />
is laid in the Far East in the Middle Ages. The impression is strengthened<br />
by the mention of a sacred river called Alph.<br />
Africa too is brought into the poem. To do this, the poet has to describe<br />
something seen in a vision by him. It WAS AN Abyssinian maid playing<br />
on a dulcimer. Her song was about Mount Abora. The poet connects her<br />
song with the pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan in a curious way. The song at<br />
the time of the vision filled him with joy. If that joy could be revived in<br />
him, he could build from mere music the wonderful dome of Kubla Khan.<br />
The pleasure-dome is in the midst of a fertile valley. It is girdled round<br />
with walls and towers. Near it are gardens with winding streams. Incensebearing<br />
trees grow there. There are also forests and sunny glades. The<br />
most remarkable thing there is a deep romantic chasm. From it a mighty<br />
fountain flings up the sacred river, which after meandering for five miles,<br />
reaches underground caverns and meets the sea somewhere under the<br />
earth.<br />
These features of the landscape suggest some kind of paradise. Prof.<br />
Lowes has pointed out that we have here a mixture of Milton’s Garden of<br />
Eden and Mohammed’s paradise as described in an account of one<br />
Aladdin in Purchase’s Pilgrims. The fragment trees and sacred river may<br />
owe their origin to Eden. But the Abyssinian is partly suggested by one of<br />
the inferior paradises described by Milton as a foil to Eden and partly from<br />
the story of Aladdin.<br />
Prof. Lane Cooper suggested that Coleridge’s Mount Abora was really<br />
Milton’s Mount Amara. The latter is described as the place where<br />
Abyssinian kings kept their sons under guard. The poet adds that it is near<br />
the origin of the Nile. Now Coleridge is known to have read Bruce’s<br />
popular book, dealing with travels to discover the source of the Nile.<br />
There we find the concept of a sacred river to which the pagan prays<br />
everyday as if it were God. We have also the description of two fountains<br />
forcing themselves out with great violence at the foot of the mountain.<br />
Then the stream meanders five miles through green meadows. All this<br />
seems to have got into Kubla Khan. Lowes goes further to suggest that<br />
Coleridge must have read in Bruce about Abola, a tributary of the Nile.<br />
Moreover, Bruce also mentions another river called ‘Astaboras’. So it is<br />
possible that between Abola and Astaboras, Agora may have been coined<br />
in the dream.
Coleridge probably takes the sunny dome with caves of ice from an<br />
account of the Cave of Amarnath in Kashmir. The image formed there of<br />
ice which attracts pilgrims was known to the poet through the accounts of<br />
travellers. The incense –bearing trees may be a reminiscence of the groves<br />
in Eden “whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm”.<br />
In this way, we find the poem full of fascinating images, suggesting the<br />
scene of strange adventures in Africa, India and China. It is pervaded by<br />
the magic of travel and exploration. In his imagination, Coleridge traveled<br />
with the explorers and is thrilled with their discoveries. His poem allows<br />
us to capture the spirit of romance. In this sense, the poem, even though a<br />
fragment is complete. The poet presents a mood in all its fullness.
Matthew Arnold<br />
<strong>MA</strong>TTHEW ARNOLD<br />
The Forsaken Merman<br />
Dover Beach<br />
Scholar Gypsy<br />
Memorial Verses to Wordsworth<br />
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116<br />
Unit-4: Matthew Arnold<br />
Poetry<br />
Life Sketch<br />
Matthew Arnold, writer, critic, poet, thinker, publicist and educationist was born at Leleham, England on<br />
December 24, 1882. His father, Thomas Arnold, was the famous Headmaster of Rugby. Matthew was his<br />
eldest son but second lchild. His childhood was spent at the place of his birth, Laleham which is full of natural<br />
beauty. Poet Wordsworth who lived nearby was a family friend of the Arnolds. The influence of Nature las<br />
well as that of Wordsworth the poet can be traced in Matthew Arnold s work, specially, in his poetry. But the<br />
most dominant was the influence of his own father who was a scholar and a disciplinarian. Thomas Arnold<br />
taught him Latin when Matthew was still a boy of thirteen years. The Boy Matthew was sent to Winchester<br />
School but he could not adjust to the atmosphere prevailing in that school and came back to the care of his<br />
father at the Rugby School development as a serious poet and thinker. As a boy he used to be have flippantly.<br />
His childhood passion for fishing remained with him through his career at Oxford university with which he<br />
had long and lasting association.<br />
At Oxford <strong>University</strong>, he got admitted to Balliol College, Where he pursued the study<br />
of the classics, that is, Latin and Greek. He was not a serious student and during<br />
holidays and vacation, he roamed over the Oxford countryside in the company of<br />
friends and his brother Tom. Predictably, he got a second class and was disappointed.<br />
But he more than made up his handicap by obtaining a fellowship at Oriel College.<br />
l For a while, he worked at the Rugby school. he has developed literary tastes and creative inclination. He<br />
met George Sands, the novelist which he had developed a liking. Arnold writer who made a lasting<br />
impression on his mind at this time was Etienne Pivert de Senacour who is famous for his work<br />
OBER<strong>MA</strong>NN. mattew Arnold had also developed zest for the theatre during this period of his life.<br />
l In 1847, Matthew Arnold got appointed as Private secretary to Lord Lansdown. He, thus hot an opportunity<br />
to intermingle with the aristocracy but was not impressed by their aristocratic ways. Those were the<br />
times of new ideas and of reforms and many a social and political movement . Those were also the days<br />
when England had emerged as the most dominant Imperial Power of the world. Matthew Arnold, somehow,<br />
kept his balance. He did not turn a radical, though he had sympathies with the masses who were prone<br />
to be exploited and led dismal lives, deprived of their basic human rights. he listened to thinkers and<br />
speakers of the Chartist Movement and hoped that men would eventually look toward possibilities of<br />
developing a better civilization and develop a humanistic culture. he, apparently, did not like the aristocratic<br />
class whom he later on called barbarians<br />
l In 1849, Matthew Arnold published his first volume of verse entitled : THE STRAYED REVELLER<br />
AND OTHER POEMS which established his reputation as a literary figure. Three years late, he published<br />
EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA AND OTHER POEMS.<br />
l Arnold this time a fruitless love affair with Marguerite, whom he had met in Switzerland, left him darkly<br />
despaired. The influence of this despairing experience can be found in several of his poems he wrote<br />
later by many critics are regarded his best poems. But he recovered from the shock of failed love and<br />
returned to England where he married France Lucy Wightman, daughter of a Judge, in 1851. He was<br />
also appointed an Inspector of Schools. he led a happily married life and his wife bore him six children.<br />
Only two daughter and one son survived. Arnold, much influenced by Greek survived. Arnold, much<br />
influenced by Greek classics, faced his grief stoically.<br />
l Arnold found it hard to adjust to the routine demands of his job but slogged on and two years before his<br />
retirement he became the Chief Inspector of schools. he however, gained very high reputation as a man
Matthew Arnold<br />
of ideas, a writer, critic and poet. He made his contribution to the cause of Education in England. he in<br />
may ways, was ahead of his times and promoted the ideas that Education ought to be the sole responsibility<br />
of the State. He made official tours of Europe thrice and studied the school and university educational<br />
system in Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria.<br />
l In 1853, he got published yet another volume of poetry with a preface which became famous like<br />
Wordworth s preface to his Lyrical Ballads, With this Preface he emerged as literary critic of immense<br />
influence.<br />
l In 1857, Matthew Arnold was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford and remained in that position for<br />
ten years. He was the first Professor of Poetry to use <strong>English</strong> for academic communication instead of<br />
Latin. During his Professorship the published ON TRANSLATING HOMER, ESSAYS IN CRITICISM,<br />
ON THE STUDY OFCELTIC LITERATURE AND WHICH WAS TO BECOME IN LATER YEARS<br />
AND AFTER HIS DEATH , HIS MOST FAMOUS CONTRIBUTION TO HU<strong>MA</strong>NISM, Culture<br />
and Anarchy, Later Years saw more publications, such as Friendship s Garland, Mixed Essays and other<br />
prose writings and social criticism. He was then much occupied with the problems of Culture and Religion<br />
and devoted much thought to the controversies and debated of his time . St Paul and Protestantism,<br />
Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, Last essays on Church and Religion reflect his concerns for<br />
man s development as a civilized and culture being and disnction between fake and real values that<br />
sustain the human element in man.<br />
l Arnold became an institutional his life time. He is counted among the wise men of Victorian Age and<br />
enjoys the sobriquet : THE VICTORIAN SAGE, even as Thomas Carlyle, a more formidable and<br />
prophetic writer-thinker too is remembered by the same title. Arnold carried a relentless campaign<br />
against hypocrisy and cant as also against boorish behavior. He coined the word Philistinism for this type<br />
of behavior. Some of his phrases have lingered on beyond his age to wit, Sweetness and light high<br />
seriousness , to see life steady and see it whole , to see an object as it in itself is . While conferring an<br />
honorary degree on him, the Chancellor of Oxford <strong>University</strong> cited him as the most sweet and most<br />
enlighterned man. That was in 1870.<br />
l In 1883, Matthew Arnold visited the United States on a lecture tour and his daughter Lucy who<br />
accompanied him got married to an American and he vsted Amerca agan when a child was born to hs<br />
daughter. Arnold s influence s still felt in American universities and the best book on him is written by<br />
Lionel Trilling, an American. He is taught in American universities as a major literary and social critic as<br />
much a poet. He was granted a liftime pension by Gladstone, the then Prime Minister of England.<br />
l Arnold retired from ative life in 1886 and died in 1888 inL verpool where he had gone to receive his grand<br />
daughter who was to avvompany her mother Lucy from America. He had jumped a fence to catch a<br />
tram car but drpped dead on April 15, 1888 leaving behind a formidable reputation and profound influence<br />
on the succeeding generations, far beyond the borders of his own country and is immortalized in his<br />
highly valued literary works.<br />
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Important Dates in Arnold’s Life<br />
Poetry<br />
1822 Born 24 December, Laleham on the Thames. Second child and eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold<br />
and Mary Penrose Arnold.<br />
1828 Dr. Thomas Arnold appointed Headmaster at Rugby school.<br />
1833 Dr. Thomas Arnold bought a house in the <strong>English</strong> Lake District, known as Fox How.<br />
1836 Arnold admitted to Winchester School, his father had studied there.<br />
1837-41 Arnold could not adjust at Winchester and joined Rugby school. Arthur Hugh Clough, senior to<br />
him by three years, whom he immortalised in an elegy entitled thyrsis, also studied there.<br />
1840 Arnold won the Rugby poetry Prize for Alaric at Rome, elected to and open classical Scholarship<br />
at Balliol Collage, Oxford under the tutorship of R. Lingen.<br />
1841 Arnold went to Oxford in the Michaelrnas term. Dr. Thomas Arnold appointed Regius Professor<br />
of Modern History at Oxford.<br />
1842 Dr. Thomas Arnold died at forty-seven of angina pectorisa on 12 June.<br />
1843 Arnold won the Newdigate Prize for his Cromwell.<br />
1844 Arnold got Second class in Literae Humaniores, i.e., Humanities.<br />
1845 Arnold taught at Rugby, elected to a Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford.<br />
1846 Arnold travelled in France and Switzerland. In Paris he met George Sand , the female novelist<br />
and Rachel, the famous actress.<br />
1847 Arnold appointed Private Secretary to Lord Landowne, President of Lord John Russell s Cabinet.<br />
1848-49 Arnold travelled in Switzerland , when he met Marguerite.<br />
1849 Arnold s first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and other Poems published anonymously<br />
as by A .<br />
1851 Arnold appointed Her Majesty s Inspector of Schools on 14 April; married Frances Lucy<br />
Wightman, daughter of Judge Wightman on 10 June.<br />
1852 Arnold s Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems published anonymously as by A .<br />
1853 Arnold s volume of Poems appeared, with a long preface; he expounded his poetic thery and<br />
vindicated Classicism in an age of Romanticism.<br />
1855 Arnold s Poems, Second Series appeared.<br />
1857 Arnold appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, delivered Inaugural Lecture on The Modern<br />
Element in Literature re-elected to the Professorship for the Second term after five years.<br />
1858 Arnold s classical drama, Merope published.
Matthew Arnold<br />
1859 Arnold appointed Foreign Assistant Commissioner to the Newcastle Commission. In that capacity<br />
visited Schools in France, Switzerland and Holland, appeared his England and the Italian<br />
Question.<br />
1861 Published The Popular Education in France and On Translating Homer. His friend Arthur Hugh<br />
Clough died at Florence of 13 November.<br />
1861 Arnold s eldest son, Thomas, and infant son, Basil died. His Schools and Universities on the<br />
Continent published.<br />
1862 Arnold s Culture and Anarchy and New Poems published.<br />
1862 Arnold s Twice-Revised Code and On Translating Homer: Last words were published.<br />
1865 Arnold visited France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland as a member of the Taunton Commission.<br />
His Essays in Criticism, First Series published.<br />
1866 Arnold s elegy Thyrsis appeared in Macmillan s Magazine.<br />
1867 New Poems and On the Study of Celtic Literature published Arnold s Professorship at Oxford<br />
ended.<br />
1870 The degree of Doctor of Civil Law (D.C.L) conferred of him at Oxford <strong>University</strong>. His St. Paul<br />
and Protestantism, published appointed Senior Inspector ot Schools.<br />
1872 His son William died. A Bible Reading for Schools: The Great Prophecy of Israels Restoration<br />
Published.<br />
1873 Arnold s Literature and Dogma published.<br />
1875 Arnold s God and the Bible appeared.<br />
1877 Arnold declined Rectorship of St. Andrew s university. His Last Essays on Church and Religion<br />
published.<br />
1879 Arnold s Mixed Essays published.<br />
1882 Arnold s Irish Essays published.<br />
1883 Arnold s granted a Civil of 250 a year by Gladstone, Prime Minister Of England, published<br />
visited America on a Lecture tour. His Isaiah of Jerusalem appeared.<br />
1884 Arnold appointed Chief Inspector of Schools.<br />
1885 Arnold did not accept re-nomination Oxford Professorship. His Discourses in America published.<br />
1886 Arnold resigned the Inspectorship of Schools. His Report on certain points connected with Elementary<br />
Education in Germany, Switzerland, and France, released, visited America for the<br />
second time.<br />
1888 Died of angina Pectoris, A hereditary curse on 15 April, buried at Laleham. His Essays in<br />
Criticism, Second Series appeared posthumously.<br />
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120<br />
The Victorian Age<br />
(A) Life of the Novelist<br />
Times of Arnold<br />
Poetry<br />
Was Victorian Age an extension of the Romantic Era? The question is interesting for viewing the Literature<br />
as well as the history of Arnold s times. keats and Shelley, who epitomised the spirit of the romantic age died<br />
young but Carlyle who also wrote with fire and a searing vision lived long and continued to stride the Victorian<br />
times though he was also a contemporary of Shelly and Keats. It also needs to be noted that Wordsworth,<br />
prophet and leader of the Romantic Age lived into the Victorian era though when he died he had lost the zeal<br />
and vision of his early romantic poetry. In fact, the romantics regarded him as a lost leaders and, though he<br />
gained Laureateship and respectability of the Establishment, he was reduced to be a hollow ghost of his early<br />
poetic achievements; voice the living man of the victorian times was hardly a shadow of the prophetic voice<br />
of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads: He survived only:<br />
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost<br />
which blamed the living man.<br />
But we tend to impose division on the continuity of time, especially for academic purposes, so that we are<br />
able to perceive patterns of social or literary trends and tendencies of a certain length of period of time for<br />
easier and more logical understanding of literary and social history than a formless, chaotic flow of time<br />
would allow. Yet, it is difficult to impose a sharp division between the end of the Romantic era and the<br />
beginning of the Victorian age. The high tide of Romantic inspiration disintegrated and got scattered into<br />
different channels whose flow was not swift but somewhat dull and limited in comparison. The new<br />
developments in the literature of the Victorian Age are represented by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, the pre-<br />
Raphaelites and Meredith. All these writers, in someway or the other, are related to the Romantic Age.<br />
Rossetti looks back to Keats; Arnold to Goethe and, surprisingly, to Byron; Browning looks back to Shelley;<br />
and Tennyson imbibed the romantic inspiration and made it dulcet and oversweet but with disappearing<br />
freshness and fading colours.<br />
New Directions in Victorian Writers: Mair and Ward, in their history, note a distinctive departure from the<br />
Romantic tendency of treating men and women as projections of Nature itself. The Victorians started looking<br />
at man and women in terms k of world life if not entirely existentially. Wordsworthian Characters such as<br />
Michael, or The Brothers appear to be natural objects while Browning s Last Duchess or even Pippa<br />
belong to life. Mair calls it an advance but we beg to differ. It is not very helpful to pass judgements in such<br />
matters. It is a question of perceptions. The universe of man has many world and they exist all at once rather<br />
than being advanced or backward. The romantic cared more for the spirit that soars and looks beyond. The<br />
Victorians were more occupied with the milleu in which they lived. With the development of industrialism,<br />
life was becoming more complex and the Victorians felt the impact of the forces of science and industry<br />
more powerfully than the Romantic in whose times life was comparatively simpler. In this context it will be<br />
meaningful to understand the rise of the novel in the Victorian age. Even Browning the poet has been<br />
described as a novelist in verse. Fiction as a form lends itself more comprehensively to analysing and depicting<br />
the world of men and women as individuals interactiong with one and another in relationship of changing<br />
equations.<br />
The Victorian Age, then, added, humanity to nature and art, as the subject-matter of Literature . Arnold s<br />
own poems such as The Forsaken Merman, Scholar Gypsy Rostum and Sohrab are kind of novels. While
Matthew Arnold<br />
the Romantics were overly conscious of the forces of Nature and Destinty and other larger than life forces,<br />
the Victorrians were conscious of themselves, increasingly so of their social environment and social fate.The<br />
scientific spirit of doubt and discovery too was in the ascendant in this period and Darwins Theory of Species<br />
profoudly affected Man s view of God and Universe. At the same time, the invention of steam engine<br />
changed,nay, revolutionised and exploitation of man by man for industrial and commercial work and profit.<br />
Doubt started being celebrated as much as faith as Tennyson, the Poet Laureate of the Victorian Age wrote:<br />
There lives more faith in honest doubt<br />
Believe me, than in half creeds.<br />
The harsh reality about the evolution of man is his animal existence; and, survival of the fittest is the<br />
prevailing rule. It was now a time of factories and fact , the immediate Fate of men was no longer metaphysical<br />
but in the hands of other men and in the hands of distant gods.<br />
The Span of Victorian Age: In terms of time, the Victorian Age has been assigned a period of sixty-four<br />
years: From 1837 to 1901. This period of time is marked with scientific advance, political unrest and dissensions,<br />
material progress. The methods and means of increasing prosperity and wealth also underwent revolutionary<br />
These changes brought increased comfort to some and increased struggle for existence for many. England,<br />
a small island nation, became an Empire where the Sun never set. The Great Exhibition of 1851 signified both<br />
commercial expansion and national pride. But all was not power and glory. The slums increased with the<br />
same rapidity as the brand new urban habitat all over England. The disease and decrepitude and deprivation<br />
of humanity in England was as glaring as the rising class of the newly rich or nouous riche. And this social<br />
phenomenon attracted the attention of the writers and poets of the times.<br />
Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Mrs Gaskall, Dickens, Galswaorthy and so many other writers<br />
responded with anger and protest in varying degrees. Starved child-workers, sweating seamstresses, hungry<br />
ill-paid men of labour wrenched the consciousness and conscience of sensitive minds. Millowners and capitalists<br />
were heartless toward their servants and workers. The middle-class gained the right to vote and the Whig<br />
and Tory parties got transformed into Liberals and Conservatives respectively. Liberals supported and promoted<br />
relentless and limitless individualism. The British Empire was expanding in all directions and the plight of<br />
colonies in far flung areas of the world across the seven seas was throwing up new political and economic<br />
forces. The British Government, full of imperial arrogance, was also full of complacency. Democracy at<br />
home and despotism in colonies of alien soil was the Janus-faced policy of the British Ruling Classes. India<br />
too became a part of the British Empire after the 1857 political upheavil and sepoy revolt. This was around<br />
this time that Arnold had already published the second volume of his poems.<br />
Other important national and international developments ware in the offing. In 1832, slavery was abolished.<br />
Anti-corn Law League was formed in 1838. Penny Postage Act was passed in 1840. Ashley s Factory Act<br />
got passed in 1844. Free trade was declared to be the national policy in 1846, as Corn Law was repealed.<br />
The Jews in England ware allowed to hold public offices, marching a step ahead in an atmosphere marked by<br />
racial discrimination and hatred. Chartism and the Chartist Movement Launched in 1836 need special<br />
mention and are signnificant developments in the early part of the Victorian Era. This Movement of the<br />
common people is a part of the history of democracy. Chartism was a response to unbridled exploitation<br />
under capitalist dispensation and the policy of laissez-faire which favoured the factory owners and moneyed<br />
upper crust of British society. The severity of the capitalist system had become unbearable and working class<br />
and conscious elements within the society gave went to their discontentment through collective agitational<br />
methods. The masses and the mainstream of society lent moral support to the Chartist activists. A People s<br />
Charter demands continued until 1918. Some of the Chartist demands ware: (i) universal manhood franchise,<br />
(ii) annual elections to Parliament (iii) fixed salaries/emoluments for Members of Parliament (iv) voting by<br />
secret ballot (v) qualification for seeking membership of Parliament (vi) equal electoral constituencies or<br />
districts. The government yielded to these demands not all at once by degrees over a period of time but by<br />
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1918 (almost two decades after the ending of the Victorian era in 1901) most of them had been met. The<br />
Chart is Movement was a working class movement and on the public mind and it proved to be a historical<br />
force that had to be reckoned with. Strikes, protests, demonstrations and riots ware reduced to ten; women<br />
and children were not forced to work in the mines in the wake of this movement. Robert Owen, a leader and<br />
man of vision proposed checks and controls over indiscriminate use of machine for ensuring humane treatment<br />
toward who operated or worked on them. In the beginning workers were neither united nor organised but<br />
bargaining. By the end of the Victorian era, labour leaders from the United Kingdom of Great Britain were<br />
visiting other countries, including India, to organize factory and other workers for agitational action.<br />
Though the Victorian Age was a time of scientific and intellectual development, it was also a time of doubt,<br />
self-deception and disillusionment. Matthew Arnold, a foremost thinker and critic of his own times shared<br />
with other scholars and scribes, poets and thinkers an ironic view of the material progress and mental<br />
advancement recorded by the Victorian era. Lytton Strachey, G.K.Chesterton, Ruskin and Carlyle debunked<br />
the claims of wealth and riches and were horrified by the dishonesty and degradation of human beings under<br />
the impact of the new forces unleashed by capitalism and greedy pursuit of getting and possessing more and<br />
more resulting in the loss of godly values and drying up of the human conscience. G.M. Young wrote THE<br />
PORTRAIT OF AN AGE which has his assessment of the Victorian era. On re-reading, it does not appear to<br />
be an encomium. Anthony Trollope, a novelist and realistic observer in his Autobiography has this to say<br />
about his times: Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on is a question which<br />
probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less<br />
cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt; but have they become less honest ? If so,<br />
can a world retrograding from day today in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress? We know the<br />
opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr. Carlyle. If he be right, we are all going straight away to<br />
darkness and the dogs. But then we do not put much faith in Mr. Carlyle nor in Mr. Ruskin and his followers.<br />
The loudness and extravagance of their lamentations, the wailing and gnashing of teeth which comes from<br />
them, over a world which is supposed to have gone all together shoddy-wards, are so contrary to the convictions<br />
of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased, how health has been improved, and education<br />
extended- that the general effect of their teaching is the opposite of what they have intended. It is regarded<br />
simply as Carlylism to say the <strong>English</strong>-speaking world is growing worse from day to day. And it is Carlylism<br />
to opine that the general grand result of increased intelligence is a tendency of deterioration<br />
Macaulay, who laid the foundation of the <strong>English</strong> system of education in India, and a historian in the service<br />
of the British Raj was excessive in his praise of the Victorian age. More balanced critics while conceding<br />
advancement of science and material progress to Victorianism castigated the deteriorating ethos of the<br />
times. Arnold, a votary of culture, regarded the achievements of materialism as detrimental to human culture.<br />
L.M.Myers was scathing in his observation of the deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lie at he heart of our<br />
civilization. The rising trends of promotion of self-interest shocked most of the eminent writers and publicists.<br />
The scramble for power and pelf which we are witnessing in India today had its beginnings in the Victorian<br />
England who ruled over us then. Just as India is seeing and experiencing the phenomenon of expansion of<br />
education and intellectual capacities so did England in the Victorian era when Industrial development was<br />
creating the new middle-classes who, gaining economically and losing contact with the rural population, were<br />
no longer dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, The British society was undergoing structural changes<br />
disrupting the old order which was yielding place to the new order as celebrated by Tennyson in his famous<br />
poem with the refrain: Ring in the New .<br />
Revolution in scientific thought and transformation to scientific temper cannot be denied and England shared<br />
this change with the rest of Europe. In the medical research Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Paget made truly spectacular<br />
contributions that have had a long term impact on the conditions of living. Their discoveries and successful<br />
experiments and the spirit on inquiry generated by their practical application to daily life have helped reduce<br />
physical pain and suffering. Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, A.R. Wallace
Matthew Arnold<br />
and John Tyndall are some of the several eminent men of science who through their theories and writing are<br />
writings pushed the frontiers of scientific thought with a sudden and final blow of intellectual force. Just as in<br />
our own day, computer and internet and electronic media are revolutionizing communication and speedier<br />
aeroplanes and trains are restructuring human society everywhere, so also, the beginnings made in the<br />
Victorian era in these spheres had a deep and lasting impact on European society. Telephone, Telegraph.<br />
wireless, electricity changed the world. Human beings changed not only their ways of thinking but, more<br />
significantly, their ways of relating to one another. The institutions of family, marriage, friendship all underwent<br />
fundamental changes dramatically and visibly. These changes were grist to the novelist s mill and fiction<br />
emerged as a dominant and major form and genre in imaginative writing.<br />
Political and social transformation went hand in hand. From the slums and poor segments of society emerged<br />
DEMOCRACY as the triumphing form of Government in Europe and England. The <strong>English</strong> people, the<br />
common people, had more freedom than ever enjoyed by them in their history. They now had personal liberty<br />
and certain fundamental rights. They also could feel a sense of equality more palpably. The Queen was now<br />
merely a symbol of glory bereft of her power, almost totally stripped of political awe and authority. The<br />
Divine Rights of Kings was a mythical proposition, or rather, supposition. The kings, queens, princes no<br />
longer enjoyed too many privileges at the cost of the public at large. Both the practice and theory of democracy<br />
were making revolutionary advance. The solid gainers of these advancements were, however, the middle<br />
classes. The lower and poorer classes and sections of society now looked up to the middle classes for<br />
shaping their own lives because the aristocracy was disappearing. The new middle-class was the model for<br />
the lower classes for promotion and socio-economic status. But there were writers and thinkers who in the<br />
rise of middle-classes saw a decline in the social value system and of western culture. The most ardent<br />
contemner of Democracy and Industrialism was Thomas Carlyle who searingly wrote about the evils brought<br />
about by these twin forces in his famous books and treatises such as LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS, CHARTISM,<br />
SHOOTING NIAGRA.<br />
# A Special feature of the Victorian era is an unprecedented expansion of colonialism. The British Empire<br />
had colonies and subject people on all continents. The whole of Australia, Canada, Newzealand, the <strong>English</strong>speaking<br />
countries came under the British rule. Britain made colonial inraods into the Muslim; world also,<br />
Egypt and Sudan came under the British sway. E.M. Forster, a novelist and don at Cambridge <strong>University</strong><br />
who served in India and made India as the setting and subject-matter of his novel, A PASSAGE TO INDIA,<br />
records a telling account of the expansion of British colonialismin in the last quarter of the nineteenth century<br />
in his book THE COMMON PEOPLE: The closing quarter of the nineteenth century opened symbolically<br />
with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India and ended with the South African War. Between<br />
1875 and 1990 the total area of the British Empire was increased by not far short of 5,000,000 square miles,<br />
containing a population of at least 90,000,000. In other words in space five years the British governing class<br />
added to the Empire territories forty times as large as Great Britain, and with a population more than twice as<br />
large. In all, by 1900 Great Britain was the centre of an Empire ruling over 1300,000,000 persons of whom<br />
nearly 300,000,000 were to be found in India alone . India, of course, has been called the Jewel of the British<br />
Crown and a popular TV serial has been made on this theme. Henry James, an American novelist of those<br />
times called it the great grabbed-up British Empire .<br />
We often find distinction between culture and civilization difficult as both terms are in certain contexts used<br />
interchangeably. But the imperial Victorian era helps us understand the distinction and even contrast between<br />
the two clearly. The Victorian Age, as earlier remarked, saw the advance of civilization and decline of<br />
culture. Matthew Arnold in this context wrote: I am a Liberal . yet I an a liberal tempered by experience,<br />
reflection, and renouncement. And, I am, above all a believer in culture. There were other voices who<br />
joined this chorus: The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human<br />
race , said john Stuart Mill in his famous essay On Liberty. He was a zealous supporter and advocate of<br />
democracy and freedom for all as he observed: The only freedom which deserves the name is that of<br />
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pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede<br />
their effort to obtain it .<br />
The Victorian era was also the era of philosophers and philosophies, of social and political thinkers. Democracy<br />
had brought in new waves of thought. How best the benefits of this new form of politics and government<br />
could be made to reach the common people in largest possible numbers was a challenge that remains to this<br />
day as creation of wealth does not necessarily implies equal or equitable distribution of wealth. The instinct of<br />
greed is over powering and man is reluctant to give others their due. These challenges were more prominently<br />
and distinctly felt and experienced by the Victorians because the thought and fact of multiplication of wealth<br />
of the society and people were new and lent confidence to theorists to propose philosophic approaches to not<br />
only remove inequality but also to ensure greater economic benefits, amenities of life and higher standards of<br />
living for the maximum number of people, if not for all. There emerged a school of thought which has been<br />
called UTALITARIANISM and the propounders of the utalitarian theories or philosophies have been called<br />
the UTILITARIANS, the more famous among them being Jermy Bentham, James Stuart Mill and John Stuart<br />
Mill. They were radical thinkers who suggested basic changes and approaches to social, political and economic<br />
problems. Their basic creed was THE GREATEST GOOD OF THE GREATEST NUMBER. Bentham is<br />
regarded as the foremost among Utilitarians . Bentham was a jurist first and economist after. There are<br />
contradictory strains of thought in Bentham. As a jurist he was very conscious of the importance of restraint.<br />
As a philosopher of Law, he had reservations on the possibility of Liberty as a universal principal. Liberty, as<br />
a concept, is a generalization without scientific precision. Social science is the science of restraints as it is the<br />
science of laws. The Liberalist Economic Philosopher on the other hand overemphasizes liberty and suppresses<br />
restraint. Bentham, as a Jurist and Liberal Economist both at the same time, has the dexterous task of<br />
promoting and advancing the cause of Liberty and Restraint simultaneously.<br />
What about Religion in the Victorian Age?. Religion was facing challenge and revolt in the wake of new<br />
scientific discoveries and social philosophies which questioned the existence of God. Ritualistic aspects of<br />
religions got jolted. Politics and Religion too had to re-define their relationship. The British church is Anglo-<br />
Catholic, a kind of cross between Catholicism and Pretest antism, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as the<br />
State-appointed Head of the Church of England. Catholics, like the Jews, had historical disabilities in England<br />
and they did not enjoy certain basic rights. Though the denominational discrimination was not completely<br />
overcome yet The Catholic Emanicption Act of 1829 did aim at removing the disabilities of the practioners of<br />
Roman Catholicism in Great Britain. The Catholics, however, still remained debarred from some Universities.<br />
They could not be appointed as Regents, Keepers of Great Seal, Lord Chancellor. In the context, it will be<br />
relevant to remind us of the OXFORD MOVE MENT.<br />
The OXFORD MOVEMENT IS also known as the TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. This was surely a religious<br />
movement. The aim of this movement was to revive the religious beliefs and practices of the Middle Ages<br />
when the Roman Catholic Church was supreme. The promoters of this movement perceived that religion<br />
was in danger because of the new forces of politics and society. The society and culture, to these revivalists,<br />
were exposed to evil influences and could and should be protected by re-introducing the sacramental form of<br />
piety that was once advocated and sponsored by Lancelot Andrews and William Laud. Symbolism and<br />
ritualism to the Oxford Movement appeared essential. John Keble is regarded as the initiator of the Oxford<br />
Movement and his TRACTS OF THE TIMES (1833-41), a set of ninety pamphlets, may be regarded this<br />
movement s manifesto. Cardinal Newman emerged as a charismatic leader of this movement. Principal<br />
Shairp assesses Cardinal Newman s role and personality A mysterious veneration had by degrees gathered<br />
round him, till now it was almost as though some Ambrose or Augustine or older ages had reappeared . As<br />
irony of Fate would have it, this charismatic leader later lost fame, got embroiled in religious and theological<br />
controversies and had to face ignominy. But, irrespective of the merits and demerits of Oxford Movement<br />
and its impact, the fact remains that religion held its own and was not and could not be dethroned by Science<br />
and Reforms of the times.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Though Victorian age has earned the disparagment, revulsion and even contempt of the twentieth century<br />
and succeeding generations have been pejorative about the Victorians and their morality or lack of it, there<br />
are writers who have thought otherwise. G.M. Young thought that 1850 s were exciting times and the right<br />
time for men "to be young in". Raymond William, writing in the riper part of the twentieth century described<br />
it as the age of the long revolution . There is no doubt the reign of Victoria Queen after whom the era takes<br />
its name was full of activity and extending horizons. The Britishers were recognised as the ruling and imperial<br />
race. The skeptics like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin were heard but not much cared for their<br />
discounting view of the Victorian norms. These prophets have found greater acceptance in other climes such<br />
as America and India. Gandhi venerated John Ruskin and Arnold continues to have audience in America.<br />
Traditional religion did not yield entirely its ground to science or utilitarianism. Gladstone, four-times Prime<br />
Minister of England wrote in THE CHURCH IN ITS RELATION WITH THE STATE : I cast over that<br />
party a prophetic mantle and assigned to it a mission distinctly religious .<br />
The preceding commentary on the Victorian Age will indicate that it was an age of increasing complexity and<br />
several new and varied streams of thought and action/reaction, beliefs, theories and ideas had entered the<br />
mainstream of the <strong>English</strong> society. Arnold, the prophet of culture saw anarchy and disorder taking over the<br />
life of his nation and society. He was unhappy and morose about the new development in politics and economy<br />
of the country. In a letter to his friend Arthur High Clough, he said : These are damned times- everything is<br />
against one-the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury our physical enervation, the absence<br />
of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate<br />
friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties".<br />
Arnold remained at odds with his times, he never could compromise with the changing mores of his age and<br />
increasing coarseness and vulgarity of taste and loss of refinement in social behaviour. He continues in the<br />
same letter Reflect too, as I cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk,<br />
how deeply unpoetical the age and all one s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving-<br />
,but unpoetical.<br />
Arnold, in his famous essay Culture And Anarchy pronounces his preference for Hellenism which for him<br />
stands for enrichment and flowering of the mind; and its opposite is Herbraism, the dominant tendency of his<br />
own age, which stands for hectic, thoughtless activity. Arnold was a modernist and was not averse to new<br />
ideas but it was the degradation of his times that annoyed him. He was not an orthodox christian. In the Bible<br />
he saw imaginative poetry as he wrote: Its real superiority is in its charm for the imagination - its poetry. I<br />
persist in thinking that catholicism has, from this superiority, a great future before it; that it will endure while<br />
the Protestant sect(in which I do not included the Church of England) dissolve and perish. I persist in thinking<br />
that the prevailing form for the Christianity of future will be in the form of catholic Catholicism; but a<br />
Catholicism purged, opening it self to the light and air having the consciousness of its own poetry, freed from<br />
its sacerdotal despotism and freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of supernatural dogma. its forms will<br />
be retained as symbolising with the force and charm of poetry: a few cardinal facts and ideas, simple indeed,<br />
but indispensable and inexhaustible, and on which our race could lay hold only by materialising them.<br />
The preceding account and analysis of the Victorian Age might leave one with the impression that it was a<br />
period of intense conflict and confusion, But in fact, it was not so. The Victorian Era is known for its<br />
reconciliation of diverse strands and opposing pulls. The continental model of the French Revolution had<br />
made the people of England wary of bloody revolution which degenerates into inhumanity of man to man .<br />
Therefore, in spite of the rising class conflict and discontent among the poorer sections, the respect for<br />
authority was maintained. There was both the assertion of liberty and restraint. Doubt and Faith found equal<br />
pedestals. Wealth of the few and want of the many only glared at each other and did not come to each<br />
other s throats. The imperial supremacy made the <strong>English</strong> people proud and patriotic. There were divisions<br />
but people were not divided in their common goal of achieving England s good which, according to the<br />
prevailing wisdom of the times lay in the golden mean and that was the Grand Victorian Compromise.<br />
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The golden mean worked in all the spheres of human activity in religion, politics, industry and even in<br />
Literature.<br />
The influence of the continental Europe on the British Isle to was visible. Matthew Arnold himself was much<br />
influenced by Europe. He had a failed love affair in the Swiss Alps and retained the memory of this deep<br />
experience in his literary inputs. He was also influenced by two French critics, namely, Trine and Sainte<br />
Beuve. Taine believed that literature was the product of social forces-race, the moment and the milieu<br />
contributed to the shaping of literary forms. These factors are essential to be studied before arriving at an<br />
assessment of the literature emerging from their interaction. Sainte-Beuve had similar views and emphasised<br />
the study of a poet s personality for a proper understanding of his poetry and other literary creations. But the<br />
critic has to be objective in studying the work of a poet keeping his own likes and dislikes at<br />
bay. Disinterestedness , thus became an Arnold criterion in life and literature.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Major Themes in Arnold’s Works (Poetry)<br />
Matthew Arnold is regarded highly both as a poet and critic. he is a major writer of the Victorian Age. Here<br />
we are mostly concerned with the major themes in his poetry. As already pointed out in previous chapters,<br />
Arnold published poetry between 1849 and 1867. His earlier poems written in his youth such as Cromwell<br />
though won the Newdigate prize, are considered as juvenilia. In the same category is placed his Rugby prize<br />
poem Alaric at Rome.<br />
What are the major themes in his poetry between 1849 and 1867? LOVE, NATURE, LOSS OF LIFE,<br />
DEATH, STOICISM, UNREST OF THE VICORIAN TIMES, FAITH AND DOUBT are recurrently<br />
expressed themes in his poems, including in those poems that have been prescribed for reading.<br />
Arnold was a self-conscious poet. He was conscious of the inevitable comparison the reading public was<br />
prone to make with his contemporary poets who were held in higher esteem and were writing on similar<br />
themes with attitudes and approaches to life that differed from his own. He also had made disinterestedness<br />
as a basic criterion to judge poets. That he was capable of an objective appraisal of his own poetry can be<br />
gauged from a letter he wrote to his mother: "It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than<br />
Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour than Browning yet, because I have perhaps more of fusion of the two<br />
than either of them and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am<br />
likely enough to have my turn.<br />
Yes, Matthew Arnold did get his turn, perhaps not in his own times but in the twentieth century when much<br />
greater attention began to be paid both to his poetry and criticism. The trends in the twentieth century<br />
favoured the intellectual type of poetry that reflected the conflicts, confusion and tensions within and without<br />
the human mind and its environment. Therefore, in some ways, Arnold did surpass in his acceptance by the<br />
reading public, especially, among the academic world, the poet Laureate Tennyson though it is doubtful if he<br />
has surpassed Robert Browning. This is because of Browning’s capacity for inovation and understanding of<br />
the complex psychology of the human mind which Arnold lacked. Arnold s poetry has a bitter-sweet taste<br />
compared to that of Tennyson s which is over sweet. Tennyson, too much taken up with line-alignment<br />
aspect of his poems is now seen as a superior type of versifier rather a post. Arnold had the penetrative<br />
quality to his poetry and he deeper depend in the human dilemmas and projected the conflicts and complexities<br />
that have continued to linger beyond his time. Large social, political, religious conflicts of his age find verbal<br />
equivalence in his poems and engage the modern mind. Like Goethe, the great German poet, whom he<br />
admired, Arnold too put his finger on the painfully tingling nerve. What he said about Goethe could also be<br />
said about himself.<br />
“He took the suffering human race<br />
He read each wound, each weakness clear,<br />
And struck his finger on the place,<br />
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!”<br />
Arnold, thus, has survived the general demotion and devaluation of the many eminent Victorians , to borrow<br />
the title from Lytton Strachey s famous book. Carleton Stanley, a literary commentator opines: "In his poetry<br />
there is a mature wisdom appealing to the elemental and universal in man; austerely expressed without pomp,<br />
ornament, or tinkling music; and sometimes falling into lines as perfect and flawless as anything we know .<br />
Love As Theme in Arnold’s Poems<br />
Autobiographical element is sought to be foisted on Arnold s love poems. he had a love affair with Marguerite<br />
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in Switzerland which could not mature in marriage. Critics have traced the memory of this failed love in<br />
several of his poems. These poems are not his greatest or even more striking. They do not compare well with<br />
the love poems of Browning, his own contemporary and with those of Shelley, a romatic lover and poet from<br />
the preceding age. He later married Frances Lucy who also is part of a pattern in some of his love-poems,<br />
also classed as lyrics. Love, however, is, by no means, a very prominent or persistent theme in his poetry as<br />
death and loss of life are. He is today remembered as a poet who wrote elegies rather than love poems.<br />
Some critics have traced his lack of strong expression of love in his poems to his Puritanism and his revulsion<br />
toward the so-called French lubricity . Among the most conspicuous example of his love poems are those<br />
entitled: SWITZERLAND which, according to Smith and Grierson, hint at a love for one between whom and<br />
him lay the gulf of a different ethics, temperament and experience .<br />
He kept revising the titles of some of these poems which were mostly written in 1853. For example the poem<br />
entitled THEY ARE TO MY FRIENDS WHO RIDICULED A TENDER LEAVE TAKING later on was<br />
called A MEMORY PICTURE. Other love-poems are The Like, A Dream, Parting, To Marguerite and<br />
Absence. In 1854, he added A Farewll. In 1857, he changed the title of To Marguerite to Isolation and<br />
another poem that he called To Marguerite. In 1869, some more changes were incorporated. We WERE<br />
Apart now he called as Isolation and most liked of the Switzerland series poems Yes ! in the Sea of Life<br />
was given the title To Marguerite. This obsession with the title changes may have something to do with the<br />
psychological disturbance the memory of his long-receding love -affair may have been causing as he tried to<br />
forget it in his apparently very happy marriage with Frances. But these are speculations that do not either<br />
enhance or detract from the value of his love poems but such academic speculations are a part of our studies<br />
and need not be ignored in the present context. It is believed that there are about 29(twenty-nine) love poems<br />
that can be ascribed to the memory of Arnold s failed love and inspiration from Marguerite.<br />
There is another bunch of love-poems or love-lyrics which form part of the anthology called Faded Leaves.<br />
The second series of love-lyrics includes: The River, Too Late, Separation, On the Rhine and Longing.<br />
Was Marguerite an idealized woman like Wordsworth s Lucy ? Or a real person. Though such enigmas are<br />
hard to resolve the fact is that Marguerite did exist. Also, Frances Lucy also is an inspiration though married<br />
love is often discounted as a source of inspiration. Arnold confided in his friends about the secret of blue eyes<br />
in a letter from Switzerland: Tomorrow I repass the Gemmi and get to Thum : linger one day at Hotel<br />
Bellevue for the sake of the blue eyes of one of its own/inmates. Marguerite was the one with blue eyes<br />
speculators believe.<br />
The quality of Arnold s love poetry is peculiar to him. It does not have the element of ecstasy as found in<br />
Browning and Shelley. There is deep despair in them. Even in such poems as Dover Beach he calls on love<br />
for help from pain; love to him is a soothing balm for the aches and sorrows of fate and times:<br />
Ah love, let us be true<br />
To one another.<br />
Echoed in The Buried Life is the same strain :<br />
When a beloved hand is laid in ours<br />
....................................................<br />
Abolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,<br />
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.<br />
The love poems of Matthew Arnold are full of elegiac tones and content. They are a kind of mourning for the<br />
death of love. The only exception’s Dover Beach which places love at the centre of an aching heart for<br />
succur and solace. It is married love which is a constant companion and fulfilment amidst the failures and<br />
despairs of life. Arnold, unlike Keats, was not a passion s slave . He had no faith or obsession with romatic<br />
love. Love was not his ideal either. Peace, calm and resignation of life were his pursuit. Duffin s remarks<br />
about his love poetry are apropos here : There is no lurid passion like that in the Sonnets (of Shakespeare s) .
Matthew Arnold<br />
According to Duffin, Arnold also lacks any touch of the fine abandon of Burns, the romantic etherealism of<br />
Shelley, the angel worship of Browning and Patmore.<br />
In longer poems of Arnold also the theme of love streaks through. In The Forsaken Merman, The Youth of<br />
Nature, A Modern Sappho, The New Sirens and Tristram and Iseult are such examples. In The Forsaken<br />
Merman, the Marguerite figure makes its presence felt more than incidentally. This aspect will be taken up<br />
in the discussion of the text of this poem later on. A modern Sapho bears comparison with Browning and has<br />
the appearance of imitation of Browing s dramatic-lyrics. In Tristram and Iseult, Arnold projects two types<br />
of women: those who satisfy their lovers and another type of women are those who can be identified with<br />
Bernard Shaw’s Life Force itself, full of passion, almost abstract in their cravings for creation and creativity<br />
who care not for men but for their own passions and pursuits, lovers for them are only encounters not very<br />
purposeful or for materializing dreams. Finally, it can be said that Love for Arnold the poet was a territory he<br />
feared to tread and in his poems pure love as a passion appears only timorously.<br />
Stoicism<br />
Arnold was a scholar of Greek and Latin. He borrowed heavily from these classical resources. He has a<br />
very strong streak of stoicism in his poetry. Stoics is the name given to the Greek philosophers such as<br />
Zeno of Tarsus, Diogenese, Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysioppus. Later on, Roman scholars and philosophers also<br />
donned airs of Stoicism and their works have left a deep imprint of stoicism on the western tradition. The<br />
Latin or Roman stoic philosophers include Cato, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Brutus who<br />
were part of the Roman ruling elites and of the Roman establishment.<br />
Stoicism and Cynicism pertain to a certain view of life which is pessimistic and negative. It takes note of<br />
human failing to cope with reality as it is. It has at the same time a piercing gaze on men and their activities.<br />
As a philosophy, Stoicism, has a higher purpose of teaching virtue as the Art of Right Action and of Right<br />
Living. Stoicism stands for capacity to absorb shocks, bear the burden of fate and darkness of despair,<br />
fortitude in the face of calamity. It is an ethical posture. Arnold s stoicism dervies from Epictetus and Marcus<br />
Aurelius, the former a Greek slave and the latter, an Emperor of Rome. Aurelius wrote Meditations, a set of<br />
private reflections that show his peculiarities as a public figure. According to Bertrand Russell, Aurelius felt<br />
his public duties burdensome, and the he suffered from a great weariness.<br />
Epictetus philosophised that human beings are nothing but prisoners in an earthly or physical body. Marcus<br />
Aurelius echoed the same sentiment when he wrote: Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse . These<br />
two philosophers loved their enemies. They abhored pleasure, luxuries and material manifestations of man s<br />
wealth. Death being an over present reality, one must organise and arrange ones life and actions keeping this<br />
harsh fact in mind. Arnold was excessive in his praise of Epictetus. In his poem TO A FRIEND:<br />
Who prop, thou ask st in these bad days, my mind? .................<br />
That halting slave, who Nicopolis<br />
Taught Arrianm when Vespesian s brutal son<br />
Clear d Rome of what most sham d him.<br />
In the Scholar Gipsy, Arnold s stoicism comes through most strikingly :<br />
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,<br />
Still clutching the inviolable shade<br />
With a free onword impulse brushing through.<br />
In personal life as well as in his writings and poems, Arnold sought inspiration from the Stoics. He tried to be<br />
objective and disinterested in his views and ways of life, in the manner of the Stoics.<br />
Nature As A Theme in Arnold’s Poetry<br />
Arnold lived near where Wordsworth lived. They were also friends, though Wordsworth was much senior. In<br />
his Memorial Verses, Arnold wrote about his proximity to Wordsworth and the tenderness of feeling between<br />
the two.<br />
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In the Memorial Verses, he says about Wordsworth:<br />
He found us when the age had bound<br />
Our souls in its benumbing round;<br />
He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears.<br />
He laid us as we lay at birth<br />
On the cool flowery lap of earth.<br />
Poetry<br />
Wordsworth was a lover and worshipper of Nature. But Arnold is not a pantheist as was Wordworth.<br />
According to Stopford Brooke: Nature to Arnold is frequently the nature the modern science has revealed<br />
to us, matter is motion, always acting rigidly, according to certain ways of Nature, which, for want of a wiser<br />
term, we call laws. For the first time this view of Nature enters into <strong>English</strong> poetry with Arnold. He sees the<br />
loveliness of her doings but he also sees their terrors and dreadfulness and their relentlessness. But in his<br />
poetry he chiefly sees in the peace of Nature s obedience to law, and the ever lasting youth of her unchanging<br />
life.<br />
Arnold s Nature, then, is not a divine and benign agency as was perceived by Wordsworth. Nor does his<br />
nature import for the poet Dryads and Naiads on the wings of poesy! Smith and Grierson say that Arnold<br />
knew Wordsworth s healing power; his visionary power he did not understand . For Arnold the secret gift<br />
of Nature was peace rather than joy. In Quiet Work and other similar poems, Nature imparts tranquillity .<br />
Toil is the fate of man but Nature can provide relief of toil, usever d from tranquillity . Nature too is<br />
ceaselessly working but with no weariness or boredom or tension on its face. This is the quiet work which<br />
men could emulate or imbibe by their travelling in life s common way in cheerful godliness. Arnold s<br />
accuracy as observerof Nature too is a notable feature of his poetry. This quality of his poetry comes through<br />
very impressively in poems such as Resignation and The Merman :<br />
Sand-strewn caverons cool and deep,<br />
......................................................<br />
Where great whales come sailing by<br />
Sail and sail, with unshut eye. -The Scholar Gipsy<br />
The entire poem is full of such accurate description.Dover Beach and the Scholar Gipsy too have accurate<br />
descriptions of Nature: Tall grassesand white flowering nettles wave, under a dark-red fruited yew-heeshads.<br />
The Scholar Gipsy.<br />
And the famous lines from Dooer Beach:<br />
The sea is calm tonight,<br />
The tide is full, the moon lies fair<br />
Upon the straits.....the cliffs of England stand,<br />
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay<br />
Arnold s Nature exudes serenity. Lewis correctly points out that he loved Nature in her quieter and more<br />
subdued moods, he preferred her silences to her many voices . The sea, the moon and water are recurring<br />
symbols and images in his poetry. In Southern Night, serenity is the gift of shore-locked lakes that melt<br />
into open, moonlit sea; as The soft Mediterranean breaks/At my feet free . And in A Farewell, Sweet<br />
the unbroken moon beams lay. In The River, glides the stream, slow drops the boat . Oxford countryside<br />
was dear to Matthew Arnold and it was a quiet country. In The Scholar Gipsy, The oxford countryside<br />
has been described with loving tenderness. Nature is serene and contrasted with the hectic human activity<br />
full of sick hurry and cross-purpose. Nature, of course, is superior to Man. At some places, we find Arnold<br />
congnizant of Nature s indifference to Man and his activity and perceptions. He was after all a product his<br />
age. And, a humanist who believed in the perfecting and perfection of man. he wanted Man to live in<br />
harmony with Nature which was yet an impossibility. He appears to shift his view-point while regarding<br />
Nature:.
Matthew Arnold<br />
We, O Nature, depart<br />
Thou survivest us! this,<br />
This I know, is the Law - The Youth of Man<br />
Victorian Unrest as a Major Theme in Arnold’s Poetry<br />
Arnold is not regarded as a representative poet of the Victorian Age. That appellation is more appropriately<br />
reserved for the Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson of the Victorian Times who wrote for more than sixty years<br />
and epitomised the entire era in his poetry; he presented art, phiosophy, movements, society, religion in his<br />
poems and, in his own day was fondly accepted as their poet by all classes of <strong>English</strong>man. Browning and<br />
Arnold, in later times achieved greater recognition for their contribution to poetry Poetry (Arnold s reputation<br />
is also due to his criticism, literary as well social) but they were not identified with the age in which they<br />
wrote. In the beginning of this note on major themes in his poetry, we referred to Arnold s letter to his mother<br />
in which he conceded having less poetical sentiment than Tennyson but at the same time he asserted that<br />
he had a fusion of these two elements or gifts possessed by Tennyson and Browing and has more regularly<br />
applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn .<br />
Arnold wrote and thought like a crusader with a mission. Because, he thought that this age was unpoetical<br />
and that he lived in damned times. He was scared of being rendered arid by the dismal surroundings or<br />
social milieu which was full of philistines and barbarians . Only let us pray the time- God keep us both<br />
from aridity Arid that is what the times are. he wrote to Clough, his friend. He also wrote to Clough about<br />
his poems: As for my poems they have weight, I think, but little or no charm...... But woe was upon me if I<br />
analysed not my situation and Werter (sic) Rene, and such like, none of them analyse the modern situation in<br />
its true blankness, and unpoetrylessness(sic) . Arnold was not satisfied with his times; hailed and extolled by<br />
many of his contemporaries as exciting and prosperous . He found the Victorian Age joyless and heading<br />
toward spiritual darkness as he sadly reflects in his oft-quoted poem:<br />
Hath really neither joy nor love nor light<br />
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;<br />
And we are here as on darkling plain<br />
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flights<br />
Where ignorant armies clash by night<br />
– Dover Beach<br />
To Arnold, the so-called progress of contemporary life was without significance or direction, Religion, Christian<br />
religion, had also lost its lustre and shine and had little to offer by way of consolation. He was a poet of doubt<br />
and scepticism. He lacked Tennysonian geniality and gentle faith even in the face of scientific fact and doubt,<br />
he also lacked the buoyancy and sturdy optimism of Browning s poetry. he could not absorb the shock of<br />
conflicts between science and religion, matter and spirit and in his hopelessness harked back to the surer<br />
times of antiquity:<br />
The Sea of faith<br />
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth s shore<br />
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle fur d.<br />
But now I only hear<br />
Its long, mealncholy, withdrawing roar.<br />
– Dover Beach<br />
He was sliding into a hostile, godless, confused world. In his poem To A Fried, he says: Who prop, thou<br />
ask st, in these bad days, my mind? .<br />
It is the old maters, Homer, Sophocles and Epictetus who beam light to him to let him see through the<br />
encircling gloom of his times. In The Buried Life he remonst-rated I feel a nameless ov r me roll . At times,<br />
his dramatic personal are so deep in the abyss of misery that willingly they go to death as in Empedocles on<br />
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Poetry<br />
Etna who escapes from the confusing, despairing world and jumps into the crater of Etna. Arnold felt lonely<br />
in the existentialist sense of alienation; he felt alientated from his own milieu and social setting. Lionel Trilling<br />
observes:... The loneliness which Arnold represent in the person of Empedocles is no small part of the<br />
burden of own age . He was disturbed, restless; and his spiritual tension represents the spirit of Victorian<br />
unrest . In his Scholar Gipsy, he gives vent to his melancholy and tiredness brought about by the sick<br />
hurry and divided aims of the Victorian Era. In The Memorial Verses, the Victorian age is called the iron<br />
age that symbolized: Europe s dying hour,/Of fitful dream and feverish power and frightening was The<br />
lurid flow/Of terror, and insane distress, Arnold s spiritual depression is vividly projected in The Stanzas from<br />
the Grande Chartreuse. He continued Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to<br />
be born.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Arnold And Literary Traditions<br />
Classicism And Romanticism<br />
CLASSISM: has become a part of Western Literary Tradition after the Rennaissance or re-birth of<br />
European Culture after its scholars and learned men rediscovered Greek and Latin Books of Knowledge and<br />
traced their origin to the Greek and Roman fountains of knowledge. Classicism is a term now used in wider<br />
sense to connote qualities of clarity, proportion, balance of form and content, lucidity in expression or presentation<br />
and light of reason that should brighten a work of art, including Literature. In one sense, any later work that<br />
looks back, seeks inspiration from the Greek and Roman masters in art and literature and other branches of<br />
knowledge is also ternmed as a Classic. An important trait of classical poetry is its restrained expression; the<br />
emotion and feeling which are the basic elements in a poem are never allowed to overflow but need to be<br />
subordinated to the requirements of forms (stanza, metre, sonnet, couplet, quartrain etc). Often, the original<br />
inspiration and spontaneity and freshness gets lost in the hands of lesser poets or versifiers and the result is<br />
insipidity and tastelessness. Therefore, to fit emotion into an arrangement of words has to be more than a<br />
decorative art. Long sustained inspiration to support the diligent effort required is a necessary condition for<br />
achieving classical perfection in poetry or else it would appear either fake imitation of some other creation or<br />
a failed experiment or exercise. At its highest, classical poetry achieves universality of perceived truth and<br />
simplicity of expression which repetition cannot weary. Economy of expression and the guiding principal of<br />
brevity is the soul of wit lend not only excellence but abiding permanence to a classsical work of art<br />
which retains its shine and never ages through the passage of time, rather gains the status of everlasting truth<br />
and beauty.<br />
Parthenon (epithet applied to Greek goddesses, especially Athena; a Doric temple of Athena, built in 5th<br />
century B.C) of ancient Greece is regarded as the ideal of CLASSICISM because it is an example of a<br />
perfect proportion between the parts and their whole. Classicism, laid emphasis on Reason and the Knowledge<br />
and the Known. Mystery is not denied but it is put in the brackets. The Greeks knew that no creativity was<br />
possible without inspiration and imagination whose sources are mysterious yet a work of art has to be seen<br />
and placed in the context of a world lived in by mortals and, therefore, should not be beyond their comprer<br />
hension or grasp. They also knew that Reason cannot explain or capture Reality which imagination can<br />
embody mysteriously but still they insisted on Reason because, perhaps it clarified the significance of the<br />
imaginatively created wonders. They had the belief that an artist can create only under inspiration of the<br />
Muses but these creations had to become a part of the common and ordinary world of men/women and<br />
created works have to be timeless within time. Limitations are a necessary fact for the Greek Masters and<br />
their later followers.<br />
Romanticism, which shall be discussed separately, on the other harld, spurned the very idea of limitation and<br />
for The Romantics imagination has to be unbounded and unrestrained in its expression and impose its won<br />
form on thought and feeling without outward rules, regulation and control. They believed that Imagination has<br />
and knows its own order and harmonizes better, if it is left to itself, and if it is true, it will find its own form. For<br />
Wordworth, the high priest of Ramantic poetry, poetry is an overflow of spontaneous feelings .<br />
The two categoties of Classicism and Romanticism are not hidebound classificiations of art and literature<br />
and often are present together in the works of the same creator/poet. In <strong>English</strong> literature, Milton is a most<br />
astouding example of Classicism and Romanticism running like an intertwining stream of thought and expression.<br />
Matthew Arnold too, in his poetry, combines the two strains of romanticism and classicism. Lewis, in his The<br />
poetic Image warns the students of Literature to resist the temptation, as strong now as ever it was, of<br />
dividing poets into teams and making them play against each other.<br />
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Arnold was not a believer and practitioner of unbridled imagination . He was endowed with too much of a<br />
critical spirit for doing so. He relied more on intellect than on powerful feelings or strong emotions. He was<br />
critical of Shelley and Keats and said: Keats and Shelley were on false track when they set themselves to<br />
reproduce the exuberance of expression, the charm, the richness of images, and felicity of the Elizabethan<br />
poets. He also often protested against subjectivism and Individualism. In his preface to 1853 Poems he<br />
recorded the necessity and importance of owning up the legacy and heritage of the Greeks; Watson regards<br />
1853 preface as a manifesto of classicism of the Victorian times. Arnold favoured poems that are particular,<br />
precise and firm , that deal with primary emotions and affection and elementary feelings which subsist<br />
permanently in the race . The virute of the Greeks was that They regarded the whole; we regard the parts .<br />
Matthew Arnold possessed a Greek temperament. In Advertisement to the second edition of his poems, in<br />
the Oxford lecture entitled The Modern Element in Literature and in the many letters he wrote to friends<br />
and relatives, he pays homage to the Greek Masters; Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus; and his drama Merope<br />
follows Sophocles. He wanted the example of the Greeks for precision and spartanism to prevail against the<br />
excesses of expression and imprecision of observation of his own times. Hugh Walker s comment is relevant<br />
here: As regards his poetical methods, Arnold is essentially classical not romantic. Not since Milton has<br />
there been any <strong>English</strong> poet more deeply imbued with classical spirit. Arnold was so by native predilection;<br />
but his innate tendency was strengthened by the operation of a principle he was never tired of insisting upon<br />
the principle that what we ought to attempt should be determind for us by a consideration of what is<br />
needful.....Arnold s own design was to tone down what was exessive and to supply what was deficity.It was<br />
this, which made him turn to France and insist so much on the value of French Literature to England. It was<br />
this priniple which made him seek to Hallenise, to emphasise the importance of seeing the whole instead of<br />
seeing only the beauty of parts and cultivate the qualities of lucidity, restraint and proportion. He only<br />
occasionally opted for an antique theme, nor was he very successful in the implementation of such ancient<br />
designs as Merope which is frigid or Empedocles who is none else but himself, the nineteenth century<br />
mordern man . Empedocles does not speak like the Greek original but he speaks like Matthew Arnold, the<br />
man despaired of his own Victorian times. Yet, Arnold was a classicist and not a new-classicist. If he<br />
reprimanded Keats and Shelley for excessive overflow of expression, he equally admonsihed Dryden and<br />
pope for their slavish imitation and superficial glitter of their Greek and Latin original models. In his Study of<br />
Peotry he remarks about these pseudo classicists (Pope and Dryden) their poetry was conceived and<br />
composed in their wits; genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.<br />
Grand action and grand subject were the main consideration for the Greeks, Arnold said: This is the Greek<br />
understood....With them, the poetical character of the action in itself..... was the first consideration; with us,<br />
attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images; which occur in the treatment of<br />
and action. They regarded the whole, we regard the parts.... the unapproached masters of the Grand Style .<br />
The Greek expression, he says, is excellent because it is simple and so well subordinated because it draws<br />
its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys. He always avoided the grotesqueness<br />
- conceit and irrationality which in others distressed him. He craved and tried, irrespective of his total<br />
successs in this respect what he called architectonice . Sophocles was his favourite model from the Greek<br />
example because whose even balanced soul/From first youth tested up to extreme old age/ Business could<br />
not make dull, not passion wild/Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. It was his persistent quest for<br />
classical values in his poetry that perhaps failed him to win popularity. The Romanticism had not yet exhausted<br />
its stream and the Victorians fall for it and fell for the poetry of Tennson which, though has not the tide of<br />
Shelleyan passion, or Keatsian numbness of sense under the influence of hemlock, nor has it the gurgling<br />
/sound of Wordsworthian cataracts but still it had the dozes of sensation, degrees of somnolence and hypnotic<br />
sounds that could and did haunt the Victroians in their bourgeois bowers.<br />
Arnold could not fully over come the influence, tendency and demands of his times and romaticism does<br />
creep in his avowedly classical poems and poetic drama such as Sohrab and Rustum, Merope, Balder
Matthew Arnold<br />
Dead, The Scholar Gipsy, Thysris, The Grand Chartreuse, which are otherwise examples of highly<br />
restrained expression. He practised in these poems the lessons learnt from the Greek masters. Sohrab and<br />
Rustum display resignation to Fate and diction remains highly retrained throughout. The theme is noble, the<br />
legend is noble and grand and rouses the basic and primary human emotions which are freed from the<br />
limitation of temporality. The story is about sublime acquiescence in the course of fate . Similes are very<br />
classical, e.g.; Like some rich hyacinth which by the scythes/Or and unskilful gardener has been cut/Moving<br />
the garden grass-pots near its bed/ and lies, a fragrant tower of purple bloom.......Merope is a tragedy in the<br />
classical mould and in Arnold s own words the most complete reproduction in <strong>English</strong> of the forms and<br />
conventions of Sophoclean tragedy. in which Aristotelian rules were consciously followed. But as a play, it<br />
failed. Balder Dead is not as epical in its objectvity as Sohrab... but its ending is poignant. The Scholar<br />
Gipsy is a pastoral elegy modelled on the Creskipal model but it also has a heavy doze of modernism in which<br />
he wanted not only to animate but also to ennoble The complaining millinons of men who Darken in<br />
labour and pain . The same is true of Thyrsis which too is an Elegy, quietly undertoned, for which Arnold<br />
looked to The ocritus and Virgil. Empedocles On Etna, classical in theme yet is romantic in treatment.<br />
According to Arnold himself suffering finds no vent in action.... a continuous state of mental distress is<br />
prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be<br />
done . He was so convinced of its imperfection that he withdrew it from public circulation. Thus, Arnold<br />
remained a committed classicist but poetry has a way of violating norms set by its own creator, the poet and<br />
Arnold s poetry crosses over to Romanticism because poetry is a force of verbal freedom.<br />
ARNOLD S RO<strong>MA</strong>NTICISM. If classicism prescribes restrained expression, Romanticism calls for supremacy<br />
of Imagination to prevail against all odds. In <strong>English</strong> Literature, Coleridge and Wordsworth are its greatest<br />
propagators and practioners. For Wodsworth, it is inner light that was never on sea or land . It is there to<br />
embody the poet s visions and dreams. Romanticsm has many and differing definitions. For some it is a<br />
curious mix of beauty and wonder or strangeness added to beauty or renaissance of wonder to others<br />
it is the awkening of the imaginative sensibility . Romanticism has been called liberalism in literature ,<br />
liberation often ego , revival of medievalism , escape from life , withdrawal from the actualities of life,<br />
passion flower born out of the blood of Christ , Romanticism is spirit, classicism is form , if you like. It is<br />
clear that Romanticism does not like any fixed definition. It is a pulsating impulse and always on the wings.<br />
Imagination is its essential and highest quality or characteristic.<br />
Gothic cathedrals and grotesque medieval castles have been presented or projected as its symbols.<br />
Disproportionate parts of building that just out in lonely majesty declaring its independence from the whole of<br />
the building may be eited as good an example of the Romantic style and Imagination as any other far fetched<br />
example. No predetermined scale or design, no unity, no symmetrical arrangement are necessary for the<br />
Romantic imagination to prevail. Yet, at the same time, a work of imagination may have all the attributes of<br />
a classical work of art but it has to be spontaneous and not based upon a priori dictates of composition or<br />
creation. The medieval mind worked and lived in the very midst of the Supernatural , the unknown and<br />
unknowable, mysterious and bewitching and stretching to infinity and nothingness alike. Almost like God the<br />
unknowable. And Romantics draw their inspiration from this kind of medieval mind away from the rational<br />
mind of the ancient Greeks or modern scientific inquiring mind.<br />
Classicists believe Truth is manifested in outer reality; Romanticism believes Truth remains essentially inner .<br />
A Romantic is an explorer of the unknown and is satisfied returning from his/her explorations without any<br />
objective gain but a transformed imagination, a transformed self. For classicists, Truth cannot be individual<br />
and it has to appear as common to all and experienced by all. According to Wordsworth the poet is with<br />
more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness than are supposed to be common among mankind .<br />
The Greeks proposed Golden Mean, the Romantics are for emotions and passions with no holds barred.<br />
Subjectivity and Individualism are also important features of Romanticism. Rousseau, an important figure<br />
and thinker of the Romantic era highlighted the perfectibiltity of man which is also a humanist belief.<br />
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Shelley and Swineburne and many other romantic poets sang glories of man. Individuality, which is now a<br />
basic factor is the concept of human rights is an essential item of faith with the Romantics. Classicists did<br />
not rely on feelings because they cloud judgement but the Romantics believed without feeling no human<br />
development is possible. The classicists made objectivity and reason as the soundest criteria for deciding the<br />
issues of life and art but the romantics said it was personal reflection or subjective response and inner voice<br />
that ought to be the deciding principles. It is perhaps for this reason that most romantic poets are lyrical and<br />
lyricists. The source of Supreme Truth for the Romantics lies within the human personality and, therefore,<br />
expression of that truth has to be unpremeditated and profusely abundant. In spite of commonality and<br />
universality of human experience, each human being is also distinctive and even unique and the right subject<br />
for artisitc and poetic celebration, howsoever paltry and small his status in the world of human affairs, say the<br />
Romantics. For the Classicist, there are the heroes and heroines who, when they suffer or feel elevation of<br />
thought and feeling, because of their high status in society, affect all the common and lesser beings, especially<br />
the hero s or the Great Man s fall holds both example and lesson for the viewer of Tragedy in a theatre. But,<br />
the Romantics ideas such debunk of greatness and the poorest and most anonymous among human beings<br />
is capable of soaring into heights of passion and suffering and of achieving greatness both in life and drama<br />
and poetry, and are fit subjects for imaginative art or poetry and drama and fiction.<br />
Romantic poets find formalism obstrucive for their expression which has to be very spontaneous and without<br />
controls. Poetic expression has to be full of power and flow, gusty, intense like the Shelleyan whirlwind or<br />
West Wind. Wordsworth asserted that the Poet is a man who has more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm<br />
and tenderness . The Romantics are full of wonder, supernatural, unfamiliar and Utopion in their thought and<br />
imagination and project them freely in their works of art and literature.<br />
Arnold as a Romanticist: Arnold practised and professed classicism yet there is a visible strain of romanticist:<br />
Arnold practised and professed classics yet there is a visible strain of romanticism in his poetry. All the<br />
Romantic poets exercised great influence on him and he wrote deeply and extensively on Keats, Shelley,<br />
Byron and Wordsworth who was almost a neighbour and friend, besides being an influence on him. There<br />
are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt - a very different thing from merely<br />
receiving a strong impression... and the four are... Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte Beuve, and yourself , Arnold,<br />
wrote to Henry Newman. Wordsworth has been called Arnold s spiritual father. In Memorial Verses,<br />
Arnold pays a glowing tribute to the departed poet. Laid us as we lay at birth/On the cool flowery lap of<br />
earth . In The Youth, he reminds Wordsworth as a priest to us all/of the wonder and bloom of the world .<br />
In his essay on Wordsworth, Arnold reminds us of the romantic poet s extra-ordinary power in feeling the<br />
joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties. But, more amazing is Arnold s fascination for<br />
Byron, the sensualist considering Arnold s strict sense of morality and almost puritanic approach to life.<br />
“And Byron! let us dare admire<br />
If not thy fierce and turbid song<br />
yet that, in anguish doubt, desire<br />
The fiery courage still was strong.”<br />
But Byron had no direct influence as did Keats. He appears to have fallen for Keat s diction in Sohrab and<br />
Rustum and To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore. Tristram and Iseult have descriptive similarity to The Eve<br />
of St. Agnes, and important poem by eats. For Arnold Coleridge and Shelley were no major poets but critics<br />
have traced the influence of these poets on him. Coleridge s Christable and The Rime of the Ancient<br />
Mariner cast their shadow on Arnold s Saint Brandon, Tristram and Isuelt and The Forsaken Merman.<br />
Even among the continental writers he turned to those who had distinctly romantic imagination: Joubert,<br />
Maurice de Guerin, Senancourt and George Sand.<br />
Which Tradition Matthew Arnold belongs to - Romantic or Classic? The answer is not and cannot be straight<br />
and absolute. Arnold, in fact, interestingly belongs to both the traditions. And, in equal measure. This duality<br />
of tradition ought to be clear from the preceding discussion on Arnold s classicism and romaticism.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Detailed Critical Summary of the Text<br />
1. The Forsaken Marman<br />
2. Memorial Verses<br />
3. Dover Beach<br />
4. The Scholar Gipsy<br />
The Poems :<br />
1. The Forsaken Marman is one of the six narrative poems written by Matthew Arnold. It is based upon<br />
The Story of My Life by Hans Christian Anderson and George Borrow s Romantic Ballads. The Story<br />
is rather simple though somewhat strange. A Merman (Merman is a Fabled Creature of the waters<br />
having a man s body and a fish s tail. Mere means a sheet of standing waters or a lake, sea or pool.<br />
Mermen and Mermaids figure in Romantic fables, stories and poems) marries an ordinary human woman<br />
whose name is Margret (reminds of Marguerite, the French woman with whom Arnold fell in love but<br />
could not marry). Merman and Margret have five children. One day, Margret feels a longing to go back<br />
to her own village for saying prayers in her former Church. Merman, her husband, allows her to go back.<br />
Margret never returns. The Merman and the children keep wailing but they and their father, the Merman,<br />
have been deserted by Margret. Arnold has recreated the story with pathos and effective imagery. This<br />
is one of the early poems of Arnold but it has been hailed as a better poem than Tennyson s Mermaid<br />
and Merman, though Tennyson is an acknowledged craftsman of verse. Elizabeth Barret Browining,<br />
wife of Browning the poet had liked this poem and wrote about it to her friend Mary Mitford. Arnold s<br />
poetry, as already discussed, is a mixture of romantic and classical styles and traditions. Merman, however,<br />
is predominatly romantic; it has both strangeness and beauty, two cardinal qualities of romantic poetry.<br />
Though it is a narrative poem, poetic flow is sustained over a long sequence making it a long lyrical poem.<br />
The poem s atmosphere has haunting music, brooding melancholy and sincerity of feeling which all<br />
together and in unison heighten its beauty. The classical elements in the poem too are not lacking. It has<br />
lucidity of style which is a special feature and requirement of classicism. It is in fact a curious mixture of<br />
diverse strains. For example, the lyrical element harmoniously mixes with the dramatic in this poem.<br />
Duffin, a discerning critic points out that The Forsaken Merman has three dramatic characters; The<br />
Merman, Margret and the Sea. The children too are there but they not serve as the main characters.<br />
They only enhance the pathos and melancholy of the drama. But, the Sea is the most interesting character<br />
as it is the Sea s kingdom, the watery home of the Merman which has been painted by the poet with an<br />
intimate and tender touch of art. The great winds, salt tides, the white horses, the cool and deep caverns<br />
with the snakes and great whales, and the Marman s retreat, are wonderfully depicted.<br />
Lines 1-29<br />
Detailed Analysis/ Critical Comments<br />
Come, dear children, let us away,<br />
Down and away below!<br />
.....................................<br />
The poem opens with the above lines and sets the mood of desperation for the deserted husband and his<br />
children. The anguish and agony caused by the unexpected disappearance of Marget, the wife of the<br />
Merman and mother to his five children is heart-rending. The Marman appears to have lost all hope; he<br />
is on the edge of dispair and social shame as is suggested by now my brother call from bay . The<br />
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gathering storm Now the great winds shoreward blow enhances the feeling of forsakenness, helplessness<br />
and helplessness. The accurate imagery of the sea acquaint us with the consummate skill of the young<br />
poet and his controlled manipulation of the action of the story set against the sea and storm. The inner<br />
disturbance finds a verbal equivalence in the lines:<br />
“Now the salt tides seaward flow;<br />
Now the wild white horses play,<br />
champ and chafe and toss in the spray,<br />
And appear to be the enlarged and elemental version of Merman s anguished implorations to his innocent<br />
and deprived children to Call her once before you go- / Call once yet ! , as he prepares to go back to the<br />
bottom of the sea, his habit at and face his brothers as deprived man forsaken by his woman.<br />
In a last hopeless bid, he calls upon his children to call their mother by her first name Margret! Marget!<br />
because dear is the voice of her children to a mother s ear and if their voices are wild with pain<br />
that should wrench her back to her crying children/ Mother dear, we cannot stay! as wild white<br />
horses foam and fret .<br />
Margrea! Margret!. and they hope Surely she will come again but it was all in vain. And, now there<br />
is no hope, no more calling, no more harking, they have lost her forever; Call no more! . With a masterstroke<br />
of human psychology, the poet let s the last whimper of hope and the last look on the white wall d<br />
town and And the little grey church on the windy shore /, Then come down to the bed of the sea<br />
where a motherless home awaits the children. And, in the very next moment all hope is lost: She will not<br />
come though you call all day / Come away, come away ! There is a kind of tour de force, psychological<br />
and poetic finality of forsakenness in these lines.<br />
Lines 30-63<br />
It seems some time has elapsed. It, is a time to remember the happy past. How soon the time passes! It<br />
looks as if it was only yesterday that all this happened on the seashore: the parting and desertion on the<br />
part of her wife, Margret. And how all this came about? He speaks to his children, perhaps lost in his<br />
own thoughts and memories, sweet memories of yesterday , of a sweet home, tender time and loving<br />
nature of his wife. The memory of yesterday dramatizes the incident on the seashore, the going away<br />
forever of his life s companion; Children, dear, was it yesterday/ We heard the sweet bell s over the<br />
bay? These are questions of life s pain. Perhaps the memory will serve and the articulation of the<br />
memory of the last scene between him/his children and his wife/their mother will serve to relieve the pain<br />
and regain strength to come to terms with the reality of separation and desertion. Next few lines from In<br />
the caverns where lay... .. to Where great whales come sailing by/sail and sail, with unshut eye , have<br />
been singled out by critics for the accuracy of observation of the sea-imagery. Arnold seems to have a<br />
botanist s and zoologist s knowledge of the activities of the sea animals and the setting of the sea. They<br />
poetically establish the Robitat of the Merman with any convining sea scenery by the poet and, what is<br />
even more impressive, by the bond that the Merman feels with his sea- environment in the same way<br />
perhaps as the bold of Margret s human environment, her natural habitat before she decided to live with<br />
The Marman as his wife and where she went back forever, never to return to sea-home.<br />
It was the sweet sounds of the bell emanating from the gray church that did the trick. It was Easter<br />
time when good Christians celebrate the suffering, sacrifice and rising again of the Holy Christ. It is the<br />
time of good Friday. It is time to repent and rejoice. It is a time of sacrifice and rejuvescence , it is the<br />
time of the Spring. The tolling of the church bell reminds Margret of her Christian soul which she has<br />
lost ( I lose my poor soul Marman ) by marrying, the Marman. Now is the occasion to reclaim the lost<br />
soul. If she could go to the gray church where her own kinsfolk pray as it is Easter-time in the<br />
world . She is full of Christian pangs! Ah me ! . Merman loves his wife and perhaps cares for her<br />
soul and let us her go/ go up, dear heart, Through the waves/ Say thy prayer, and come back to the
Matthew Arnold<br />
sea-caves but she never returns and is no more heard of. There is only the memory of the cosy times<br />
the Merman and children spent with her, as if it was only Yesterday the She combed the hair of her<br />
youngest child who sate on her knee as she herself sate On the red gold throne in the heart of the<br />
sea. Painful and sweet are the memories of those days!<br />
Lines 64-84. Clear and deeply carved is the memory of that fateful day when Merman s wife and his<br />
children s mother Margret left them forever to go to the gray church to say prayers . His children had<br />
started to moan as they were long alone and Margret was taking too much time at the prayers with<br />
her kinsfolk in the white-walled town. The Marman had said to Himself Long prayers.. in the world they<br />
say as the moments of waiting started stretching beyond endurance and the children continued to<br />
moan He recalls how in her search, he along with his children went through the surf .. up the beach,<br />
by the sandy down where the sea-stocks bloom and on to the white walled town . They walked<br />
through the narrow paved street and where the gray church stood on they windy hill . They did hear<br />
the murmur of the town folk s prayers as they stood at some distance in the cold blowing air . They<br />
even had a little glimps of Margret by the pillar then they saw her clear and called Margret, hist!<br />
come quick, we are here and he recalls having been long alone . They reminded her about the gathering<br />
strom at the sea and he pointed out The sea grows stromy/ the little ones moan but she had her eyes<br />
glued only to the holy book , the priest was saying prayers loudly. And, the door of the church was<br />
shut . So he had said, Come away, chikdren/call no more because it was all in vain.<br />
Line 85-107. The Merman. from his abode in the depths of the sea let s his mind and imagination<br />
wander into the human world, The world where his wife Margret now lives, leaving him and her children<br />
behind. She is no longer a mermaid now. On the country, she now is a part of the humming town and<br />
perhaps, he imagines, is plying her weaving wheel doing it as a part of the household chores. Perhaps,<br />
she is singing Joyfully and listen, what she is singing. she is singing joyfully about the child with a toy<br />
she had seen in the busy humming street . Or is she singing about her found again life of a woman of the<br />
human world, of her town, of the priest, of the bell in the church that had enticed her back to her town,<br />
of the holy well , in the church where shep rayed to rescue her soul , of her being back in the world<br />
of familiar faces , of her return to the world of sunshine from the dark deaths of the sea . And so she<br />
is singing to her fullest satisfaction on the turn her fate had now taken and on finding herself back in the<br />
blessed light of the sun ! But, then, maybe she also remembers her life in the deep sea, her days with her<br />
Merman husband, her children and may be, suddenly the spindle drops from her hand as a thought of<br />
those times in the sea passes her mind, may be the spinning wheel stops suddenly and she comes to the<br />
window to throw a backward glance at the sand and beyond over the sand at the sea and perhaps<br />
she fixes a stare seaward and as in her mind s eye she sees her past sea-life and she lets out a sigh at<br />
remembrance of things past ! And perhaps, here and there drops tears from her eyes for her children and<br />
for her husband, a strange being, half-human, half-fish !And sorrow brims into her saddened eyes for<br />
having lost that world of intimacy, love and affection, a very different life in the deep sea than the life now<br />
on earth, sunny earth !Merman, has memories, sweet and sad memories of her golden hair and strange<br />
eyes which now are perhaps cold with looking too much fixedly to the sea that was once her home.<br />
Lines 108-123. The Merman, consoling his children and himself, lets his fancy roam into the imaginary<br />
world where the faithless woman now lives. May be she will some day reawaken to the realization of<br />
what suffering she has caused to her husband and children, may be when the gusts shake the door , or<br />
a storm hits her town and the sun s shine is gone, she would be reminded of the sea and of those she left<br />
behind in the sea. She will hear the winds howling and waves roar from her life of yesterday and it<br />
will also be an occasion for us to see and say, as we see pearls of the sea strewn above us and in the<br />
roaring and whining of the waves we shall also have an occasion to say, say that Here camea mortal/<br />
But faithless was she . Faithless woman is a recurring theme in romatic poetry. In fact, these lines<br />
remind us of Keats lines O Knight, what can ail thee when the flowers and leaves are withered from<br />
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the Lake/And no birds sing , from The Lady Without Mercy. The faithless woman from the world of<br />
men has forsaken the kings of the sea . The Merman too would be singing because from a sad, painful<br />
heart flow the feelings into poetic strains. And, now he imagines his lonely future with his lonely children,<br />
who will learn to live without Margret, wife and mother of yesterdays, and yet shall not be able to forget<br />
her. Winds would go on doing their usual work, moonlight shall come and go at midnight, spring tides<br />
will be low, sweet airs come seaward and the (Lines 124-143) moon will light the gloomy, blanched<br />
sand and glistening beach , Up the creeks and there will be a time in the future, to remember the<br />
Faithless Woman and go up to the sleeping town or gaze it from the sand hills and look at the hillside<br />
church and then come back, after perhaps throwing a wistful glance on the scene which was once<br />
a witness to the forsaking act of the faithless wife and mother and a time to sing: There dwells a loved<br />
one<br />
Lines 128-143<br />
But cruel is she!<br />
She left lonely for ever<br />
The kings of the sea”.<br />
The Forsaken Merman has been called a romantic poem of a classicist. Not only that, it is an example<br />
of Arnold s peculiar genius, not often expressed with such consummate skill where the lyrical and<br />
dramatic elements are so well mixed as romaticism and classicism. It has modernity, it has the intellectual<br />
element, it has the elegiac note, it has tranquillity and disturbance of the mind and, in other words, it has<br />
all the elements Arnold s distinctive style was capable of manifesting. It sings of the death of love, of the<br />
incompatibility of the natural and the human. The Merman represents Nature and Margret the human<br />
and never the twain shall meet. It was a part of Victorianism to think this way. Nature is incomplete while<br />
man is perfectible. This is also the humanist creed. Just as the dramatic is expressed in the lyrical, so also<br />
the narrative has been lent charm and poetry through the lyrical flow of the Arnoldian lines. And, then,<br />
there is also a touch of the autobiographical in this poems. Arnold s own failed love with Marguerite, a<br />
French woman, is a variation on this theme. Perhaps, as his letters indicate, the element of personal and<br />
cultural incompatibility was responsible for Arnold s not being able to seek marriage to Marguerite. The<br />
religious element, a major concern in the Victorian age among writers and thinkers also find expression<br />
in this poem. Merman s willingness to let Margret go to the gray church to save her soul by kneeling in<br />
prayer at the Easter-time and the resulting faithlesseness in return for this very human gesture is a<br />
comment on the rigidity of religion and its interference with personal life of the practioner s of an organised<br />
religion. Arnold s poem is also acclaimed as an example of accurate observations and remarkable<br />
descriptions that reach our hearts as much as entice our eye. The magical quality of Colerigde, Keatsian<br />
melancholy, both imagery and metrical felicity make this poem stand out among the finest of the Victorian<br />
age.<br />
2. Memorial Verses (Elegy to William Wordsworth) This poem was composed by Matthew Arnold on<br />
the occasion of Wordswoth s death. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850 and was buried on April 27,<br />
1850. Arnold was a family friend of William Wordsworth s and the latter s son-in-law Edward Quilinan<br />
requested Arnold to write an elegy on his father-in-law, a poet respected by other poets including Arnold.<br />
Wordsworth was, in fact, the usherer of a new era of Romanticism in the history of <strong>English</strong> Literature.<br />
He inspired many other poets. Arnold, as a poet and thinker and critic was also much influenced by<br />
Wordsworth. And, he was glad to respond to this request as he states in a letter to his dearest friend<br />
Arthur Clough... I have at Quilinan s solicitation dirged W.W. in the grand style .<br />
An elegy is a conventional poem written in the memory of a departed figure. There are hundreds of<br />
examples where a poet of later times celebrates a dead, departed poet and eulogizes him and pays his<br />
homage to him, enumerating his contributions and qualities. It is also usual for an elegist to highlight the<br />
impact the departed poet has left on the times and life of others, his contemporaries and later generations.
Matthew Arnold<br />
In Memorial Verses, Arnold has sung praises of Wordsworth. As the elegiac convention demanded, he<br />
has spoken glowingly about the departed elder poet but his tribute pierces through the cover of convention<br />
and reveals the sincerity of feeling and genuine respect in which Arnold held Wordsworth.<br />
In order to assign Wordsworth a high place among other great poets and writers of his time, Arnold<br />
brings in two other poets who died earlier but had put up a strife against the unwholesome trends of their<br />
times.<br />
Lines 1-14<br />
Byron had died in 1824 and Goethe in 1832. Goethe, though a German, had influenced the whole of<br />
Europe and the impact of his writings continues to be felt. Though very different personalities who wrote<br />
in very different styles, yet all the three had their struggle and strife and their influence travelled<br />
beyond the countries of their birth. Goethe was buried in Weimar, Germany and Byron died in Greece<br />
though he belonged to England and Wordsworth wrote about the French revolution Bliss was it in that<br />
dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven ; but now gone are these revolutionary voices of truth<br />
and beauty; and, Arnold and his friends have come to bury Wordsworth The last poetic voice is dumb/<br />
We stand by Wordsworth s tomb . Byron was not a teacher or a priest like Goethe or Wordsworth<br />
and He taught us little but he did move our hearts and we felt him like the thunder s roll and strove<br />
with passion against eternal law . That was the daring life of Byron, enfant terrible of his age, the<br />
fount of fiery life which was like that of the Titans, larger than life s dimensions and Byron took art in<br />
the big battles of his times for his beliefs in liberty and human rights. It is interesting to note that Arnold s<br />
own sense of uritanic morality is in sharp contrast to Byron s unbridled pasion for life but perhpas it is the<br />
earlier poet s courage and daring to fight against hypocrisy and cant that has impressed Arnold.<br />
Lines 15-33<br />
As compared to Byron, Goethe was a true teacher, who was Europe s sagest head .In fact, he was a<br />
physician of the ailing age in whose soul iron had entered, which had become hardened and cold and this<br />
physician of the iron age was so accomplished a practitioner of his art that he could minutely diagnose<br />
the disease of his time and like a doctor would objectively put his finger on the place/And said Thou<br />
ailest here and here ! .The hectic activity, power and pelf, the tensions of mindless actions and conflicts,<br />
weltering strife and turmoil of expiring life , he knew what would be the end of all this meaningless<br />
overreaching of the human self. He knew the cure for the ailments of his ambitious and furious age and<br />
revealed the secret: The end is everywhere./Art still has truth, take refuge there! .Materialism and<br />
scepticism were leading to cultural death in Europe when Goethe was creating his art and inviting the<br />
maddened and maddening crowd to take refuge in the tranquil beauty of art, stop for a while and stay<br />
and stare , to borrow Wordsworth s words from his poem The World Is Too Much With Us . Goethe<br />
knew the causes of things and he watched and observed the lurid flow/of terror, and inssane distress/<br />
And headling fate .This is a sarcastic and scathing comment upon Arnold s own times. It may be relevant<br />
here to remind ourselves that Goethe was writing when the French Revolution has lost its earlier promise<br />
and Napolean had come on the scene and was demolishing the ideals of justice, equality, liberty and<br />
fraternity. Europe had to go through a period of extreme suffering because of the Napoleanic was.<br />
Goethe was appalled by the barbarity and terror of these developments and proposed to the troubled<br />
mind of Europe to embrace the ideals of art and beauty so that order and harmony is restored and<br />
tranquillity and peace prevail in the world of human affairs.<br />
Lines 34-57<br />
With Byron and Geothe in the background, Arnold now prepares to pay his homage to William Wordsworth,<br />
regarded by critics and historians, as the greatest among the romantic poets of his times. He was also a<br />
friend of Arnold and a great influence on him. In the next fioe lines (34-39), Arnold addresses himself to<br />
the denizens of the under world, pale ghosts , the spirits of the world of death and asks them to be glad<br />
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and full of joy because amidst them has just arrived a musical being, with a soothing voice which they<br />
have never heard since the days of Orpheus, the great Greek musician of antiquity, of myth and son of<br />
Apollo. Orphells ha lost his wife Eurydice the Orpheus followed her to Hades, the underworld of the<br />
dead where he met Pluto, the god of death. Orpheus so pleased the god of death, Pluto, with his dulcet,<br />
sweet and moving tunes that emanated from his lyre (a musical instrument) that he agreed to Orpheus s<br />
prayer and released his wife Eurydice on the condition that while returning to the world of the living<br />
Orpheus would not look back. But in this context, the reference to Orpheus is confined to his music and<br />
its soothing, pleasing effect which could even move the heart of the god of death, known for his hardest<br />
of all hearts. So, now Wordsworth, who once sang and soothed the world of the living shall be singing to<br />
and soothing the world of the dead.<br />
Now the sweet and soothing voice of the great Romantic poet Wordsworth belongs to the dead and they<br />
can also hear the same Wordsworth who has gone from us and feel his voice as we! did once in our<br />
world ( clime ) or region which had been experiencing doubts, disputes, distractions, fears which had<br />
turned our age into iron time , cold and souless. He found us when the age had bound/our souls in<br />
benumbing round . The World which Wordsworth saw was a world that was becoming senseless and<br />
insensitive, too much going round in circles of foolish and maddening pursuit of wealth and materialism,<br />
having lost all faith and full of doubts and scepticism but he created that kind of poetry which had a<br />
restoring effect and soothed our ruffled feelings and loosed our heart and moved us to tears of sympathy<br />
and pity for fellow beings and the fate of man; through his poems he made us feel like innocent children,<br />
even like the babies who can never sin as they are the closest to the divine spirit and made us return to<br />
Nature to seek our original innocence back. He laid us as we lay at birth/on the flowery lap of earth , he<br />
removed our tensions and we had ease and smiles by responding to his poetry. This was a veritable<br />
Return to Nature as was felt once again proximity and closeness to The hills...round us and felt the<br />
fresh breeze/..ov r the sun lit fields again . We could once again enjoy the fresh touches of Nature and<br />
our mids were balmed as Our foreheads felt the wind and rain . A new life was breathed into us by<br />
Wordsworth s poetry and Our youth return d as his poetry showered on us The freshness of the early<br />
world , the serenity and peace and harmony of Nature as was received by the earliest man when he was<br />
innocent and free from ugly cravings of greed and vemality for insatiable lust for wealth and material<br />
possessions; our long...dead , dried up and closed and closely furl d spirtits were re-awakened to a<br />
new life and a new world, joyful add heavenly and not worldly and ugly.<br />
Lines 58-70<br />
In these last lines, Arnold keeps to the conventions of Elegy in which the immediate subject or, for whom<br />
the Elegy has been written, has to be placed on the highest pedestal. It has to be an eulogy, praise in<br />
purest forms. Therefore, Arnold, though he introduced comparisons with Byron and Goethe, must now<br />
find ways to elevate Wordsworth the poet to his most distinctive place and pay tribute to his unique<br />
qualities and contributions to the world in general. In classicism, individual good and benefits, rendered to<br />
friends are not so consequential and meaningful. It is the general and common good done by the doer that<br />
is of the highest significance. So, how Wordsworth is greater than Byron and Goethe who too set high<br />
examples in their respective public life? Goethe s sage mind , his wisdom and counsel and Byrons’<br />
force did a lot to warm and fight against the ignoble tendencies of their times. But, then, out of dark<br />
days emerges light . Out of ignorance is born consciousness and courage; Therefore, it is possible that<br />
other Goethe s and Byrons shall come back ( restored ) to the world sunk in gloom and darkness of<br />
ignorance as examples of prudence and fiery might like Goethes sagacity and Byron s daring but<br />
never in Europe, in later times of tensions and ruffled feelings and frayed nerves would Wordsworth with<br />
his unique healing power be found. Arnold attached gret importance to his special quality of wordswords<br />
poetry on distribution also. In his essay on wordworth, he observed that polty is great of Wordsworth s<br />
poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in
Matthew Arnold<br />
nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary<br />
power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it . Like<br />
Goethe, we shall possibly find other teachers who will teach us how to fend against the fears and terrors<br />
of our times and how to summon up courage for doing so. Like Byron we will likely receive lessons in<br />
daring to meet the challenge of times and have the strength to bear the onslaught of the bad times. But<br />
hard would it be to find a poet and philosopher and friends like Wordswoth who would be able to impart<br />
feelings to us. But who, ah! who, will make us feel? Others shall come and yet again face the<br />
troubling clouds of doubt and weaknesses which is the destiny and condition of human living and fearlessly<br />
shall they confront the odds. But who, like Wordsworth shall keep our feelings alive? Who will give us the<br />
gift of feeling? Who will save and store human feelings even in the midst of clutter and corrosion of the<br />
hectic, thoughtless and insensitive world of profit and loss and greed to have more, more and yet more.<br />
Therefore, O Rotha (the river along whose bank Wordsworth was buried), keep fresh and green the<br />
grass on Wordworth s grave, as a symbol of nautre O: River Rotha, you do this small favour to us who<br />
seek to preserve the Greazt Poet s mmeory, the source and fountain of human feelings, And you sing to<br />
him the soo thing songs the best you have because only he was capable of hearing the Voice of Nature<br />
and he will surely, hear your sweet voice as none are left now to gain feelings from rivers and mountains<br />
and springs and cataracts and brooks and vernal woods and the one who could and did it is gone forever<br />
and lies with you here, O Rotha along your side.<br />
Arnold difined poetry as the criticism of life . Memorial Verses fulfil this criterion. He found in Goethe<br />
a physician of iron age and Byron a poet of daring spirit. The verse, according to Swin burne at<br />
once praise and judge the great poet and place him at a high pedestal in the context of his and later<br />
Victorian time (of Arnold). Eliot, somewhat antagonistic to Arnold in his views of the latter’s poetry and<br />
thinking called this poem a testimonial of what Wordsworth had done for him , though Arnold himself<br />
would say it was Wordsworth s general gift to people, the gift of feeling as healing power that he had<br />
celebrated in this poem. His epithets sagesthead and poet of titanic power and healing power for<br />
Goethe, Byron and Wordsworth respectively are just and appropriate, more so in the context of Meomorial<br />
Verses being an international elegy.<br />
3. Dover Beach: This is at once religious and sceptical, philosophical and emotional says Herbert Paul,<br />
(a critic who has made a special study of Arnold s works) about Dover Beach. This poem was written<br />
in the early part of his poetic career but, for some reason, got published only in 1867 in the first edition of<br />
his New Poems. It is said that Arnold after his marriage to Frances Lucky Wightman visited Dover<br />
Beach in her company. This otherwise romantic occasion resulted into this very melancholy (one of the<br />
most melancholy of Arnol s poems) poem. The sight of Dvoer Beach, inspite of its enchanting and quiet<br />
beauty, does not rouse in him any romantic feelings; on the other hand, his mind gets invaded by thoughts<br />
about what humanity has lost in his own times, the Victorian times. This feeling of general loss is<br />
overwhelming and sets the mood of the poem which is full of lament and sad reflection. The poet<br />
observes the sea intimately which he finds on that night calm and The tide is full as the moon scatters<br />
its light on the waters of the Brtish Channel. A slow game of hide and seek between the waters of the<br />
sea and gleaming light from the moon is going on as the steep rock on the <strong>English</strong> side of the Channel<br />
watch and witness the scene all bathed in the moonlight and the glimmering shine makes them look<br />
bigger or vast as reflected in the tranquil bay .<br />
Lines 1 to 20<br />
He seems to address his wife: Come to the window and tells her sweet is the nightair . There is no<br />
noise here excepting the sound of the sea originating from the shore Where the sea meets the moonblanched<br />
land . There you will hear a peculiar sound of the sea like a grating roar/of pebbles which the<br />
waves draw back, and fling and this sound is generated with a poetic cadence or rhythm of soft music,<br />
slow and sad, slow and sad, with a repetition that appear to produce The eternal note of sadness in .<br />
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The poet in other words, instead of finding the sea encouraging the married couple to have a fling of<br />
delight and happiness forces upon them a note of sadness carrying memories of a never-ending ( eternal )<br />
Time, of times gone by and of distant lands where the sea meets likewise the land as it does at Dover<br />
Beach. Memory from antiquity, from the cultural past, invades Arnold s mind. This is the memory of<br />
Sophocles, a writer of Greek tragedies, who perhaps also stood on a seashore as does Arnold now and<br />
heard the same note of sadness along the Greek Aegean sea which brought to his mind the still<br />
and sad music of humanity , to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth and saw in that Aegean Sea on that<br />
moonlit night the rise and fall of men and their being in the clutches of time and fate - the turbid ebb and<br />
flow/of human misery . Sophocles, Arnold s favourite poet and tragedian lived in 495-? -406 B.C.) and<br />
wrote highly moving tragedies like Antigone, Oedipus, Elebra, in which heroes and heroines of high<br />
stature. Stature fall victims to Fate and undergo misery and suffering, at times for no deliberate fault on<br />
their part. In these lines some passages of Sophocles dramas are incorporated with appropriate modification.<br />
For example Answer to the roar is from Antigone. Just as Sophocles gathered from the notes of the<br />
sea sad thoughts about life and human misery so also now standing by this northern sea , the <strong>English</strong><br />
channel, we (Arnold and his wife in the immediate context) can hear and gather the same sounds and sad<br />
thoughts from the moonlit waters spread before us.<br />
Lines 21-27<br />
In the lines starting with The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full there is a poetic transition, from the<br />
immediate scene and physical setting of the scene to the distant past, to antiquity, to times when people<br />
had Faith and certitude, which with the passage of time has given way to doubt and despair. The faith in<br />
the past was a universal phenomenon, shared by men and beings of all climes, in all parts of the world,<br />
round earth s shore and it hung like a bright girdle hangs around the figure of a lovely woman (women<br />
and men also used to wear girdle around their waists as a piece of ornament. In indian villages too, not<br />
long back this customary wearing of a girdle was common). But the hugging faith is now gone. Now, just<br />
as the sea is producing its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar so also Faith has withdrawn itself from<br />
the lives of human beings and from their world. It is Retreating and leaving behind, only the nightwind<br />
and dreary edges and naked shingles of the world.<br />
And, now the aweful thought of a faithless world, brings the Poet back to the quest for a refuge from<br />
such a harsh world. This the poet finds in individual love, the strength and comfort of the body and soul,<br />
both Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of<br />
dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor<br />
peace, nor help for pain . Left abandoned in this sea of confusion and illusion, our fate is no better than<br />
of those armies perhaps of the Peloponnesian war, who get caught in battles on a darkling plain , in the<br />
dusk hurriedly embracing night, raise noisy alarms and helter-skelter run around and try to escape onslaught<br />
of one another, knowing not a friend form foe. In the world, men ts fate is like that of these ignorant<br />
armies that clash by night and perhaps injure and kill their own sides.<br />
The quality of lyrical poetry is not often associated with Arnold but Dover Beach, is lyrical, musical,<br />
albeit, it is sad, and full of the usually Arnoldian melanchioly. He is philosophical and intellectual as is his<br />
poetic wont, but in this poem he is also subjective and personal, if you like. This is a short poem but has<br />
a ranging thought and depth of meaning. His statements are not bare thoughts, concrete imagery loads<br />
his thought with solid ore. The moon-blanched land and sea provide a very convincing setting for his<br />
peculiar handling of the usual Arnoldian themes of loss of faith, of hopelessness of modern or victorian<br />
life, of looking back to antiquity for succur and solace but what he achieves in this poem is somewhat<br />
modern goal of establishing personal, individual love between man and woman as an abiding source of<br />
shielding against the inflictions of the mileu and the times. In a single, short lyric poem, Arnold has<br />
succeded in expressing not only the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century but<br />
answered a larger riddle of the life s question: where to seek strength and comfort against the pains and
Matthew Arnold<br />
agony of times? There is comfort in the strength of love said Wordsworth in his Michaal and a<br />
similar sentiment has been expressed and offered here by Arnold, though in a different context. Dover<br />
Beach has also been called the greatest elegy by Arnold or one of the greatest, at least. Though it does<br />
not mourn and pine for a personal loss or grief expressed here is not for the death of a human being. It<br />
mourns the death of Faith, an essential source and sustainer of meaningfulness in life.<br />
Says Herbert Paul about Dover Beach: ..it expresses the peculiar turn of Arnold s mind at once religious<br />
and sceptical, philosophical and emotional, better than his formal treatises on philosophy and religion and<br />
it is full of Arnoldian melancholy . The literary allusion according to J.D. Jump serves not only to<br />
suggest that we have here to do with an archetype image but also to introduce Arnold s own commentary .<br />
These remarks of Jump are in reference to Sophocles already discussed in the above detailed analysis of<br />
the poem. The following five lines have been especially cited by Jump for Arnold s success here with<br />
balancing and harmonising his didacticism with feeling. This has been achieved though a falling syntactical<br />
rhythm and a series of open vowels which invest his verse with an eerie resonance that echo and<br />
re-echo for line to line, especially in the following five lines:<br />
“But now I only hear<br />
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,<br />
Retreating, to the breath<br />
of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear<br />
And naked shingles of the world”.<br />
While most Victorians hailed the rise of material prosperity and democracy in the Victorian age, Arnold<br />
was worried about the decline and degradation of cultural taste of his times. These concerns find a<br />
subdued but effective expression in Dover Beach as discussed above in the detailed analysis of the<br />
poem. The theme of the loss of Faith symbolized by the Retreating Sea and its withdrawing roar and<br />
naked shingles act as nearly perfect objective correlative of the poetic feeling or subjective ingredient<br />
of the poem. This most famous of his poems contains, in a way, his most representative and central<br />
statement about man s fate and human condition as perceived by him: we are here as on a darkling<br />
plain . This perception he shares with the modern poets of the twentieth century and speaks of the<br />
modern element in his poetry, conscious and critical, descriptive and not merely judgemental about Man<br />
who remains alienated and alone amidt crowds. He, as pointed by A.D. Culler, anticipates the Existentialists<br />
and Absurdists like Sartre, Camus and Karl Jaspers. For Arnold, Christian Church and Dogma have lost<br />
their capacity to offer consolation to modern man who is alone and separated from his community.<br />
Imagery used in Dover Beach has also attracted notice of the critics. The prevailing mode of imaging in<br />
the poem is meta phoric. (The intention behind the device of the image is to convey meaning or significance<br />
directly to the imagination through one or more or all of the five senses). The ear and the eye, auditory<br />
and visual imagination are the dominant modes in Dover Beach. For instance the Sea is calm , the<br />
moon shines fair , the light on, the French coast are examples of Visual Imagination; grating roar of<br />
pebbles , ignorant armies clash , Its melancholy long withdrawing roar are examples of Auditory<br />
Imagination at work.<br />
Dover Beach has also been studied as a part of Arnold s poetry of Nature. Nature here provides a very<br />
impactful setting for his philosophic reflection. It is not the Nature of Byron or Shelley, swift and shaking,<br />
forceful westwind but a Nature full of peace and tranquillity. (Read critical comments in the line-by-line<br />
descriptive analysis of the poem given above). This poem is full of choral cadence and, according to<br />
Lord Morely an exquisite piece of pensive music that brings the eternal note of sadness to our minds<br />
with tremulous cadence slow and a land of dreams as also of its disillusionment. Themes of love,<br />
nature, faith and its loss, doubt and disillusionment, aloneness and man s antique archetypal patterns, are<br />
intertwined in this short poem which is also a sober hymn of praise to married love.<br />
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4. The Scholar Gipsy: This poem appeared in the 1853 edition of Arnold s volume of poetry entitled<br />
Poems for the first time. Arnold had toyed with the idea of entitling The Scholar Gipsy as The First<br />
Mesmerist. The theme and conceptualization of this poem, now considered as one of the most<br />
representative of his poems, have their origin in Glanvil s Vanity of Dogmatizing which Arnold had read<br />
in 1845. The Scholar Gipsy has remained a popluar poem since its first appearance, though Arnold<br />
himself did not rate it very highly as is evident from his letter to Arthur Clough : I am glad you like the<br />
Gipsy Scholar - but what does it do; for you? Homer animates - in its poor way I think Sohrab and<br />
Rustum animates - the Gipsy Scholar at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we<br />
want. The complaning millions of men/Darken in labour and pain . What they want is something to<br />
animate or ennoble them not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams .<br />
In the above self-assesment of his creation, Matthew Arnold betrays his inclination toward his notion of<br />
Greek Classical tagedies or serious literature/poetry, especially as we find practised by Sophocles in his<br />
drama. Arnold as a critic assigned a high mission to poetry which ought to embody action and not merely<br />
ideas; which ought to offer healing power to suffering humanity and not mere stories. But there are<br />
other theories of poetry according to which a poem need not do anything except communicating a state<br />
of mind or just making the reader a little more aware, that poetry can be expected to perform no social<br />
function, that its commitment is to words and not to action. Therefore, we cannot regard Arnold s own<br />
comment that poem is deficient in action as the final word. The poem is sustained by its own beauty and<br />
its significance has to be found within its own discourse. Definitely, there are other ways of looking at this<br />
poem.<br />
In a letter to his brother Tom, Matthew Arnold gives hints about the circumstances that form a backdrop<br />
to the creation of this poem, his days at Oxford and his flippant ways of youth ! Writes he to his brother:<br />
You alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the freeest and most delightful past,<br />
perhaps of my life. When with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of<br />
the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you<br />
remember a poem of mine called The Gipsy - Scholar? It wasmeant to fix the remembrance of those<br />
delightful wonderings of ours in the Cummer Hills? .<br />
Though Arnold borrowed the story and basic materials of The Scholar Gipsy from Joseph Glanvill, this<br />
poem does not centre upon the mesmeric powers of the scholar gipsy which was a central theme of<br />
Glanvill s Vanity of Dogmatizing. The obvious theme of Arnold s The Scholar Gipsy is his debunking<br />
of Victorian materialism and sceptism, an age he found of sick hurry , divided aims and full of doubts ,<br />
distractions and confused and of confusing issues and curiousity. Arnold imparts a veritable character<br />
to the Scholar Gipsy he borrowed from Glamnvill. His wandering scholar is a symbol of idealism and<br />
quest for truth , not mere seeker of the curious art of hypnotism and mesmerism like Glanvill s Oxford<br />
scholar who confides to his two friends, former class-mates from Oxford, that he would give up the<br />
company of the wild brotherhood soon after learning these skills.<br />
Arnold s scholar - gipsy, on other hand, is alone in the existentialist sense, and spiritually transformed<br />
having no home, no bonds, no job or employment. This gipsy does not behave like a gipsy. In his imagination<br />
he is more akin to Empedocles, Obermann and self-conscious characters from eistentiolist and absurdist<br />
plays of modern times. Arnold s scholar - gipsy appears again for a brief moment in this Thyrsis, perhaps<br />
continuing his spiritual pilgrimage and transformation into another being; in the later poem, he is no more<br />
an escapist from the harsh world no is he full of dark despair. He rather symbolizes new hope and faith,<br />
a far, cry from Glanvill s scholar - gipsy. Arnold was not being a teller of tales and in his The Scholar -<br />
Gipsy he offers a criticism of life as lived and perceived by him in the Victorian times whose materialism<br />
and doubt had told upon his nerves. His transformation of Glanvill s scholar - gipsy allows him to make<br />
moral statement based upon deep reflection on his times. His gipsy- scholar if tired of knocking at<br />
preferment s door and he roamed the world with the wild brotherhood and to an extent he sticks to
Matthew Arnold<br />
the content of Glanvill s story as he read it. But he is very original in its treatment. His quest for the<br />
scholar - Gipsy is a tour de force of invention, very much his own. Glanvill s gipsy - scholar from the<br />
seventeenth century is changed into a dream apparition, beyond the clutches of time, a vision of faith and<br />
high principles: No, no, thou not felt the lapse of hours ; Thou has not lived, why should thou perish<br />
so?<br />
Lines 1-10<br />
The Scholar Gipsy is a pastoral elegy, that is, a poem written in remberance of things past, recalling<br />
and celebrating the memory of a person or some event or some precious thing now lost and which has a<br />
rural or natural setting. If the setting in a pastoral elegy is rural, with shepherds, farmers and other simple<br />
folks playing significant role, the mood is of pervasive sadness. This elegy, written in the grand style and<br />
manner recalling that of the Greek classicist, also dwells on serious general themes, impersonal and<br />
objective in their scope, treatment and dimension conveying elevatings thoughts on issues of general<br />
rather than of personal import.<br />
The first ten lines of the opening stanza set the pastoral scene, with images of shepherd life in the lap of<br />
nature profusely projected : from the hill , wattled cotes , wistful flock , cropped herbage , moonblanched<br />
green a recurring image in Arnold s other poems-give us a close-up of the rural life as the poet<br />
tells a shephered to do his chores, feed his flock of sheep as his fellow companions are calling him back<br />
now and come back after freeing himself from his daily tasks, in the evening when the fields are still<br />
and tired men and dogs are all gone to rest and may be only one or two sheep are straying from the<br />
flock. It is a very convincing portrayal of leisurely life of men and animals together interacting with one<br />
another, helping one another as a community (to be contrasted with urban, city life) that Arnold presents<br />
here as he sets the mood and the scene of the poem. It is important to note right at the beginning that<br />
Arnold, the poet does not identify himself with shepherds and the rural folk. He only makes friends with<br />
one of the shepherds who he requests to come backin the evening after he is at leisure and all others are<br />
gone from the scene. For, the poet seems to have come hither for a purpose. That purpose is to quest for<br />
something or some one will be revealed in later lines. For now, Come, shepherd, and again begin the<br />
quest , Some critics say, this shepherd a companion the poet has made in these lines is no other than<br />
Arnold s own friend, Arthur Hugh Clough as they were engaged in the same pursuit of ennobling human<br />
life and in Thyrsis, Arthur is presented as a shepherd by Arnold, as the subject of another pastoral elegy.<br />
Lines 11-20<br />
In the next lines upto the twentieth, the rural scene is further brought to our larger view as Arnold s poet<br />
i.e. eye pans to a spot in a camera-like motion. Here, where the reaper was at work of late , this high<br />
fields dark corner where he has left His coat, basket and other personal effects and where he shall<br />
return at noon It is here the poet will sit and wait for his shepherd companion of the opening stanza;<br />
from here he will be hearing The bleating of the folded flocks of sheep, and distant cries of reapers in<br />
the corn and other sounds and murmurs of a summer s day .<br />
Lines 21-30<br />
The poet continues to build the rural scene with green roots , thick corn , scarlet poppies , perfumed<br />
showers Of bloom on the bent grass and sits himself in a bower to find shade from the August<br />
sun What is important is that here a contrast to the serentity and other worldliness of the pastoral scene<br />
has been introduced as the eye travels down to oxford s towers .<br />
Lines 31-40<br />
In these lines there is a transition; the scene is now wrapped up into a memory of the past and gone by<br />
times. The poet has brought Glanvill s book with him which has a tale that is often told and let me read<br />
the of tread tale again . Thus a character is revealed; the character is the scholar gipsy from oxford<br />
university, a promising scholar Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain but who was tired of<br />
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knocking at preferment s door as his creative talents did not meet the medi are requirements of these<br />
who study in universitieis for a uniform and competitive world of success and money rather than to use<br />
their education for self-discovery and creative exploration. Unable to cope with the worldy demands, and<br />
response of the world, this oxford scholar One summer morn forsook his friends and went to learn the<br />
gipsy-lore , the tribal learning, esoteric and mysterious and started roaming the world of that wild<br />
brotherhood and got lost forever as to Oxford and his friends he came back no more. Desertion<br />
and forsaking are also recurring themes in Arnold s poetry (read Forsaken Merman). This scholar<br />
turned gipsy, naturally spoiled his career.<br />
Lines 41-50<br />
But, as the story goes, two of his class-fellows from the college whom he knew him chanced to meet him<br />
in a village street and questioned him about his gipsy ways and life of wandering. Wherat he answer d,<br />
that the gipsy-crew knew skills of such powers that they could control the minds of men, or in other<br />
words, could hypnotize other people and through this mesmerism they could make ordinary men do<br />
anything they wanted. The Scholar Gipsy disclosed to these companions, class-fellows from his college<br />
that he wanted to learn the secret of their art of reading others thoughts and workings of men s<br />
brains and When fully lean d, will to the world impart but this art is not learnt the way students/<br />
scholars learn in colleges and universities by putting in so many hours of study and books and writing<br />
exams and getting marks from teachers/examiners. It needs heaven s blessings, god-sent moments of<br />
illumination, some heaven sent moments for grasping and gaining this skill .<br />
Lines 51-60<br />
After this exchange, the Scholar-Gipsy once again departed from his mates and never came back.<br />
Stories keep doing the rounds that the scholar-Gipsy was seen here or thre, silent and sad wearing an odd<br />
type of hat that used to be worn by people of long gone times; great outer garment of the kind gipsies<br />
wear; and he was seen they say over Hurst Hillock under forest cover, in Berkshire fields near<br />
Oxford; he was some times spotted by country people; peasants and boorish clowns or vagabonds saw<br />
him sitting some warm-ingle bench or in loan ale houses .<br />
Lines 61-70<br />
It is in these lines 61-70, that the poet makes his quest clear to the reader and gives out an imaginative<br />
vision of the Scholar Gipsy whom he is searching with the help of shepherds in this Oxford country side.<br />
the scholar - gipsy shunned noisy places, and disappeared mid their drink and clatter and the poet<br />
imagines and recalls scholar gipsy s face or looks and have been describing his features to the shepherds<br />
so they recognised him when hey find him. These shepherds and boys who scare the birds from eating<br />
the crops in the fields too fields too the poet sets on a search for the scholar gipsy and the poet at times<br />
asks them if the scholar gipsy had passed by the silent places or when the poet lies in a floating boat on<br />
the cool banks in summer heats , amid grass meadows nestling in the sunshine or when he watches<br />
the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills , the poet wonders if the Scholar Gipsy has been to these quiet<br />
retreats rarely visited by others. So the poet s quest for scholar gipsy continues.<br />
Lines 71-90<br />
Scholar Gipsy is fond of secluded places; he was once met by the joyful riders of Oxford in a ferry who<br />
crossed the narrow river Thames near Bablock-hithe (about eleven miles from Oxford); seen by these<br />
Oxford ferry joy-riders when the Scholar Gipsy was dipping his fingers in the cool stream as the punt<br />
(a small boat plied by a single person) had just passed him by. They saw him in somewhat sadly dreaming<br />
with a single person) had just passed him by. They saw him in some what sadly dreaming with a heap<br />
of flowers perhaps gathered from the nearby Wychwood bowers and his eyes gazing the moonlit<br />
steam . And lo! now you are gone! As they landed on the banks, they could see you no more. Then,<br />
there were the young married girls, who had come from distant homes to dance in the Fyfield elm in
Matthew Arnold<br />
May , the spring time; they too had seen the scholar gipsy as the dusk desceneded on the fields. He was<br />
roaming and crossing over a stile into a public way.<br />
Lines 91-100<br />
But none of the maidens could tell if he had spoken and said anything! And during when men are busy<br />
cutting breezy grass in the hot sun with a scythe that flashes in the sunshine like flames , when the<br />
summer swallows black-win-ged hover over the river Thames. You have been seen there when the<br />
labouring men had come to bathe in the abandon d lasher pass . They passed by you when they came<br />
over Godstow Bridge . They have seen you sitting by the river bank recognizing you by your outlandish<br />
garb , that is, strange dress; by your lean and weakened body; and they have seen you dark vague<br />
eyes and withdrawn looks. But when they came back from bathing , lo! you were gone . Thus, the<br />
Scholar Gipsy, roams and haunts the lines 101-130 count tryside near Oxfordshire, has been seen by<br />
housewives busy with their chores in their households, hanging on a gate ; seen by children in The<br />
springing pastures and even when the stars come out and shine in the dewy grass or in the autumn,<br />
on the outskirts of Bagley Wood where other gipsies visiting the area pitch their tents. Even the birds who<br />
are not frightened of the Gipsy Scholar have seen him in all weathers and in all places in this countryside.<br />
The poet imagines the at one time Gipsy Scholar was seen with a twig clutch in his hand and waiting for<br />
a heavenly divine light to fall for self-fulfilment and self-realization, perhaps his aim of learning hypnotism<br />
by Heavenly Grace still unrealized. Even in the snowy winter the Scholar Gipsy has been roaming over<br />
the Oxford countryside; sometimes on he highway or the causeway that is used by travelers to reach<br />
their homes through flooded fields on foot. The poet is not sure if he too has seen the Scholar Gipsy or<br />
perhaps only imagined that he has seen him Wrapt in thy cloak and thudding through the snow going<br />
toward Hinksey , a village near Oxford along its wintry ridge and climbing the hill there reaching the<br />
snow-covered top of Cumner range , once the Gipsy Scholar was seen moving towards the Christ-<br />
Church hall, walking in the thick snowflakes to observe the lights on the occasion of feast and<br />
festival and, then looking for a bed to straw in the nearby secluded farmhouse- some sequestered<br />
grange .<br />
Lines 131-160<br />
The next thirty lines (131-160) mark a very definite and significant transition. Till now, the poet was<br />
narrating and largely describing the scene of Oxford Scholar Gipsy s haunts and wanderings in the<br />
Oxford-Berkshire countryside. Now he turns to the theme of life and death, of mortality and immortality,<br />
of ambitions of this world and quest for self-realization and spiritual discovery of the self and countrasts<br />
the Scholar Gipsy with the ordinary mortals of his times, the Victorian times.<br />
Back to the world of reality, the poet suddenly realizes that he was only dreaming. As it was two hundred<br />
years ago that Glanvill wrote the story of Scholar Gipsy and a legend was born in Oxford s halls of<br />
Learning, that you , the Gipsy Scholar had left the university premises ( studious walls ) and had<br />
chosen to learn strange arts , instead of the classics and liberal arts at the university, and joined a<br />
gipsy-tribe and, in fact, not only you , (the Gipsy Scholar) has left university but has left the world<br />
altogether and are dead and gone, and may be buried in some churchyard, in Some country-nook or<br />
unknown corner grave where now tall grass grows and thorny wild flower plants and dark, redfruited<br />
yew tree , a tree associated with human death.<br />
But, then, the Scholar Gipsy was no ordinary mortal or human being. He was not bound by the limitations<br />
of time. He did not experience the passage of time and the lapse of hours like other men who are born,<br />
live and act in life for a certain span and then die for ver. Mortal men go from one change to another<br />
change because, everything and everyone in this time-world changes excepting the law of change .<br />
Time wears the life of mortals, under repeated shocks and even the sturdiest among human beings<br />
finally give way to decline, lose their energy and powers after exhausting them on our thousand<br />
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schemes that one thinks up and pursues. And, at the end of it all, we have to submit remit - to the<br />
directives of the Angel of Life, the passing Genius who watches our performance only briefly and<br />
nothing remains but our past or what we have been which does not amount to much, actually.<br />
But the Gipsy Scholar has not lived like an ordinary mortal, therefore, he will not have the fate of an<br />
ordinary mortal. He will not die: Thou has not lived, why shouldst thou perish . Now the poet explains<br />
how Gipsy Scholar s life was different and why he will not be destroyed by time. And, here, in fact, the<br />
poet Arnold finds scope for his favorite and oft-indulged moral comment on his own times, the Victorian<br />
times. Compared to ordinary men who go from one scheme of life to another, who keep changing their<br />
norms and values and even give up theior aims and ideals to lead a cosy and comfortable life of compromise<br />
with the worldly reality, the Scholar Gipsy hadst one aim, one business, one desire . Had this not been<br />
so, thou long since number d with the dead or counted among the dead like the contemporaries of the<br />
Scholar Gipsy, and even like us who will also pass into oblivion. But, you are indestructible, immortal<br />
always living in our imagination, never growing or declining, exempt from age as thou liv st on Glanvill s<br />
page , or immortalized in Glanvill s book and because you had what we do not have. It is interesting to<br />
remind here about the meaning of word in Sanskrit, AKSHARA, that is beyond destruction. Thus, the<br />
immortality of the word has been bestowed upon the Scholar Gipsy, by the writer Glanvill and the Scholar<br />
Gipsy shall live as long as Times shall last.<br />
Lines 161-200<br />
In these lines, the poet continues with themes stated in lines 131-160, delving deeper in the causes of<br />
increasing preponderance of divided aims , doubts divisions and general sceptism and materialism<br />
prevailing in Arnold s own Victorian times and why he considers Scholar Gipsy as freed from these<br />
worldly ills. The first reason why he considers Scholar Gipsy has escaped the fate of the ordinary people<br />
who live in Victorian times of doubt and faithlessness is that early did leave the world , that is, early<br />
in terms of the time of history as well as time of individual being. The Scholar Gipsy, in the first lace lived<br />
in times when the world still was not devoid of Faith, and then, because he gave up the world in early<br />
youth when his powers , energy, and idealism had not been wasted upon or diverted to the world of<br />
dulling routine and not spent on other things , when he was still free from the sick fatigue and<br />
languid doubt that baffle and confuse us all. So, it was a life unlike to ours , who vacillate aimlessly<br />
and strive without knowing the object of our striving, and live piecemeal lives, a hundred different<br />
lives , who also wait like you but without hope. (Hope, Faith and Charity are regarded three guiding<br />
directives of Christian life, and hope here has to be understood as an ally of Faith, or the other Face of<br />
Faith).<br />
You waitest for heavenly bliss, godly illumination, the spark from heaven ! , because of your unshakable<br />
faith but we are only half-believers and have casual creeds , and our consciousness has not been<br />
translated into actions, or we say one thing and act quite the opposite or differently, our vague resolutions<br />
have remained unfulfilled because we are not clear in our resolves; on every step we falter, in every<br />
triumph there is disappointment, full of hesitations as we are, and lose our ground after every gain. So,<br />
this is our waiting; so different from yours who is continuing your quest without dithering from steady,<br />
single-minded course and direction once chosen and decided. Even the wisest amongst us who have<br />
been recognized for their intellectual achievements (reference is perhaps to Tennyson who was made<br />
the Poet Laureate, though the reference could also be made to Wordsworth who late in life was made<br />
the Poet Laureate of England), and seated upon the intellectual throne this wise man is still full of<br />
dejection and is pour his heart laying bare his sad and unhappy experience with and of the world, of his<br />
wretched days of life. From his works all we can gather is the tale of his misery, his loss of inspiration<br />
or the dying spark of hope and how he blamed and overcame his aches and pains of his life and how<br />
and what different medicines or painkillers he had swallow to relieves his pains and stresses of life.<br />
(Reference could be to Goethe, Wordsworth and Tennyson).
Matthew Arnold<br />
If this is the story of our wisest man of the times, then what about us, ordinary people? We only ply our<br />
lives in sorrow and pain, nourishing unhappy dreams, and forfeit our claim to bliss and seek Sad<br />
patience which is only next to being in the grip of despair . But none of us, the wisest and, the most<br />
simple-minded among us, has hope like thine , because real hope is to go on struggling on the strength<br />
of faith that striving is its own reward, Faith should be the other name of Hope. So you are still roaming,<br />
retaining your youth and you still are the same truant boy who ran away from the Oxford studies still<br />
Nursing thy project in clarity of mind or unclouded joy and if you had any doubt it has been long<br />
blown by time away . (Compare Keat s Ode to Nightingale Thou was not born for death and Ode<br />
to Grecian Urn : A thing of beauty is joy forever )<br />
Lines 201-250<br />
In these final verse paragraphs, Arnold or the poet of the poem, warns the Scholar Gipsy to keep away<br />
and come not in contact with the contaminated world and time of the Victorian age, lest he should get<br />
polluted and lose his Hope or Faith and Immortality and timelessness. Addressing the Scholar Gipsy, the<br />
poet reminds us that the Scholar Gipsy was born in happier times, when mind was free from bloated<br />
REASON and IRRATIONAL <strong>MA</strong>TERIALISM and life was clean like the Thames whose waters then<br />
were also crystal clear, before this strange disease of modern life sick with hurry and its divided<br />
aims , mental tensions, paralysis of hearts had prevailed. Go, go, go, away, come not near us, the infected<br />
denizens of this sick world ! Escape to some natural abode, to some jungle or wild and plunge deeper in<br />
the bowering wood , and take to a safer refuge there ! Shun us, avoid this our world in the same<br />
disdainful manner as did Dido, the betrayed beloved of Aeneas who even when Aeneas chanced to meet<br />
her in the Hades, the underworld of the Dead, avoided him, ran away from him. So also you, run away<br />
from us. We are like Aeneas, False Friends ! Indeed, not worthy of your contact. Just tell us to keep off<br />
and keep thy solitude , your solitary life of quest.<br />
The poet wishes the Scholar Gipsy keep to his solitude which will help him keep his hope unextinguished<br />
- nursing the unconquerable hope in the company of nature, he will be able to cling to his hope just as<br />
he has been seen clutching the invoilable ohade with energy flowing through his being as he negotiates<br />
the wild spaces of the forest, on 1the outer ring of the forest in the open area (glade) where no one<br />
follows him. May be, if need be, the poet ask the Gipsy Scholar to come to a sloping fields, on the moonlit<br />
fence, just to freshen up his flowrish the dew as did in the former times (when he was alive and roamed<br />
in the company of the gipsy) just to freshen up his flowers in the company of the gipsies) or perhaps listen<br />
to the nightingale sing in the valleys.<br />
But never cross your path with ours, and never come in contact with our hectic feverish world.<br />
Because, pollution of our minds is overwhelming; it gives no bliss or joy but it will spoil your peace of mind<br />
and serenity and rendery our being and life like ours, full of tension, distraction , devoid of joy overflowing<br />
with consciousness or bliss and you will lose your rejoicing self. Your faith and hope will become timid<br />
and weak and our powers will be lost and our clear and fixed aim will falter and our eternal joyful youth<br />
glad perennial youth would decline and you will then also like us grow old and finally, like us, die.<br />
The poet continues his good counsel to the Scholar Gipsy warning him against coming in contact with the<br />
poet s world, or the Victorians who will ruin his peace of mind and deprive him of his joyful bliss and<br />
immortality. Don t accept our greetings even; don t be taken in by our speech and smiles . Here, in the<br />
last stanza, the poet introduces a long simile in the Homeric style. It somewhat distracts the reader from<br />
the themes and the mood till now built by the poet but, then, Arnold is too much a classicist. He wraps up<br />
the poem with a classical simile of the trading sailors. Once the Tyrian or phooenician traders saw from<br />
some distance a Greek ships, loaded with luxury goods, emerging from the high waters as the sun was<br />
rising. That was in the Aegaean sea and the merry Grecian coaster was carrying amber grapes, and<br />
Chian wine and other luxury goods. The phoenician sailors who are respected for their serious trading<br />
business, set the sails and took to the sea, deeper and deeper toward the Mediterrarean and then on to<br />
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the Atlantic beyond Syrtes and Sicily. The idea was to give the Grecian ship the widest possible berth.<br />
And, there entering upon the Spanish waters, the Tyrian traders dropped their anchor and unloaded their<br />
boat on the Spanish shore, far away from the Grecian sailors ! The Gipsy Scholar too should give the<br />
Victorians and the materialist world same treatment, just keep himself away, far away from them!<br />
From the above DETAILED ANALYSIS of The Scholar Gipsy it will be clear that this is a representative<br />
Arnoldian Elegy in the pastoral mode. It has almost all the themes that were close to Arnold s heart. Its<br />
melancholy mood and tone are typically Arnoldian. The poem is biographical also since it gives us the<br />
Oxford background which Arnold shared with the Scholar Gipsy, though in a later age or time. It reveals<br />
Arnold s attitude to Nature and above all, it is, in the Arnoldian mould, a criticism of life as, according<br />
to him, all good poetry ought to be Critics, such as W.L. Jones have said that The Scholar Gipsy is one<br />
of the happiest in conception and execution of all Arnold s poems. Its charm lies partly in the subject,<br />
natural congenial to the poet, and partly in the scene, which stimulates one of Oxford s poetic children to<br />
lavish all the powers of description upon the landscape which he dearly loved. He was to return to the<br />
same natural scenery in Thyrsis but, although in the latter poem, there may be one descriptive passage,<br />
which surpasses anything to be found in the earlier, Thyrsis fails to give the impression of eager freshness<br />
and ease which are felt throughout The Scholar Gipsy”. Arnold has kept this pastoral elegy free from<br />
artificial conventions. The vividness and beauty of the pictures of Nature in this poem add charm to the<br />
poem. (For elaboration of this point see the line-by -line critical analysis of the poem in the proceding<br />
paragraphs). Oxford is not only the backdrop but almost a protagonist in the poem. In one of his essays,<br />
he pays his tribute to Oxford, his university, his alma mater : .....Oxford. Beautiful city ! so venerable, so<br />
lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century<br />
Arnold and Clough, close friends had a good doze of The Scholar Gipsy in themselves, in their personality<br />
and shared his traits. In his Essay, Culture And Anarchy, Arnold wrote : We in Oxford, brought up<br />
amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth - the truth that<br />
beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insists on this, I<br />
am in the faith and tradition of Oxford Arnold, the classicist, turns a romanticist while re-creating<br />
Oxford in his The Scholar Gipsy.<br />
It will be relevant here to mention about Arnold s classical models for his pastoral elegies. Among them<br />
both Greek and Roman or Latin practitioners of this ancient art influenced Matthew Arnold who had<br />
studied the Classics at Oxford. Theocritus, Bion, Moschus and Virgial are the major influences on Arnold.<br />
These poets wrote pastoral elegies which celebrate the lives of shepherds and rustic folks whose simple<br />
joys and sorrows, life and love find exquisite expression in their pastoral elegies which are set in the very<br />
heart of Nature. Nature, pastoral life and shepherds and other simple people are idealised in the poetry of<br />
these Greek and Latin elegits. Arnold proved to be a true successor to his Greek and Latin predecessors.<br />
It must be noted, however, that Arnold s pastoral elegies are neither exact copies nor artificial imitations<br />
of the Greek and Latin pastoral elegies. He has his inovations both on the theme and setting. He has<br />
renewed the pastoral tradition and not merely incorporated it in his poetry. In The scholar Gipsy, for<br />
example, the pastoral setting is not remote from urban areas; it is Oxford country side, within a radius of<br />
fifteen miles or so from Oxford, the Seat of Learning and Oxford city, the hub of hectic intellectual<br />
activity. It is not a purely idyllic atmosphere that he creates in this pastoral elegy. The shepherds he does<br />
introduce in the very beginning of the poem but, then, he also makes them disappear at the earliest. The<br />
poet, who goes to the Oxford-Berkshire countryside or the pastoral setting is also not a shepherd. He is<br />
only an Oxonian who has come there, hearing and reading about the strange story of another Oxonian of<br />
two hundred years ago who had escaped from the university and became a legend as he is known to<br />
have turned a gipsy and joined a band of gipsies/gipsy-tribe and lived like them and never returned to his<br />
studies and friends at Oxford. Thus,though the basic structure of the poem is that of a pastoral elegy but<br />
the tone and spirit of the poem is Victorian and Arnoldian.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Arnold also makes a departure from the conventional pastoral elegy by not idealizing the setting and the<br />
characters in the poem. For example, the Shepherd who is adopted as a companion for the purpose of<br />
searching the legendary scholar gipsy is a real-sounding shepherd like of whom could be seen in the<br />
Oxford vicinity. Then, the scenery around Oxford is beautiful as it is and needed no idealization, nor has<br />
Arnold made any attempt to do so. He has realistically depicted the Oxford countryside where he himself,<br />
with his friends and brother Tom had roamed and perhaps played truant from the classes. All the characters<br />
in the poem are, thus, real, not allegorical. The scenes too are re-created from the really existing originals.<br />
Nature presented is that and as perceived by an educated <strong>English</strong> person.<br />
It also differs from the conventional elegies in another aspect. It does not lament or mourn the death of<br />
an individial. Not only does Aronld differ in this regard from his Greek and Latin prototypes but also other<br />
<strong>English</strong> poets who also wrote elegies in the pastoral tradition. For example, Milton s Lycidas, Shelley s<br />
Adonais and Tennyson s In Memoriam lament the death of individuals on whose passing away these<br />
poets felt personal grief. In The Scholar Gipsy, the poet has enlarged the scope of his grief and added<br />
an impersonal dimension to the feeling of loss because he laments not the death of a person but the<br />
demise of an entire era, of religious faith, of the values of life. Remarking on the tone of the poem, Hugh<br />
Walker says that it is the natural tone of an agnostic who is, however, regretful of the vanished faith<br />
regretful of its beauty, and regretful of the lost promise . (For more details on this point read closely the<br />
line-by-line critical analysis of the text of the poem in the preceding paragraphs.)<br />
Arnold, the classicist, emerges as a romantic when it comes to his responding to nature, in this poem as<br />
in many other of his poems. The scholar gipsy is shown offering flowers to the dancing girls who are<br />
visiting the Fyfield elm, perfumed morning and similar descriptions of Nature are almost Keatsian in<br />
quality. (Read textual analysis for further examples and details). Swinburne, himself a poet, who indulged<br />
in oversweet and delibertely sensuous descriptions, observes: the beauty, the delicacy and affluence of<br />
colour, the fragrance, and the freedoms of wide wings of winds in summer over meadow and moor, the<br />
freshness and expansion of light and the lucid air, the spring and the stream as of flowing and welling<br />
water, enlarge and exalt the pleasure and power of the whole poem. Shakespeare who chooses his fieldflowers<br />
and hedge-row blossoms with the same sure loving hand, binds them in as simple and sweet<br />
order .<br />
The Scholar Gipsy is a criticism of life, to borrow Arnold s own phrase (see textual analysis for<br />
details). Arnold was influenced by oriental philosophy, including the teachings of Gita, His message in<br />
this poem seems to be that one cannot hope to acquire or know truth by external accomplishments or<br />
materialistic prosperity. It is the diving spark as the scholar gipsy is waiting for the spark from heaven<br />
to fall or God s Grace or Prasad that brings real perfection or ultimate bliss of life. T.S. Eliot, the<br />
twentieth century poet-critic and arbiter of the taste of his times, has been critical of Arnold s theory of<br />
poetry as a criticism of life . We cannot fly the company of men. We all have duties to perform, social<br />
obligations to discharge. It is impossible to have only one aim, one business, one desire as the poet bids us<br />
here. We must all be up and doing toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing . And like the mariners of Ulysses, taking<br />
with a frolic welcome, the thunder and the sunshine. The life picutred in The Scholar Gipsy, however<br />
pleasing and attractive it may be made to look, in poetry, can hardly be recommended as the ideal of life,<br />
for there is nothing in it inspiring and encouraging, nothing heroic . In a similar vein, stopford Brooks<br />
says: He (Arnold) had insight into evils, the dullness, follies, the decay and death of the time which he<br />
wrote; but he had little insight into its good, onto the hope and ides which were arising in its darkness . It<br />
is true that this poem presents some difficulties if considered as a criticism of life and if Arnold is looked<br />
upon as a moral teacher. But a poem need not perform any moral duty and yet be a beautiful and edifying<br />
work of art. It is not in its criticism but in its beauty and truth as a poem that we look for the inspiration<br />
and elevating thought and power of feeling and not in its philosophy or critque of values. Eliot himself<br />
has said that the first commitment of the poet is to poetry itself and not to society. And The Scholar<br />
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Gipsy does come out as a poem that is a work of art. The scholar who became a gipsy may be an ideal<br />
too much to reach for ordinary men of the world and no body would want such a one to be born in one s<br />
own family. But, this is true of most men who dared to differ from the mainstream or set high principles<br />
of life for themselves or whose devotion was examplary but not fit for being followed by others. How<br />
many fathers would want their sons to become Swami Vivekanand and leave their home, how many<br />
fathers would want their daughters to become Meera though they may be the devotees devotees of<br />
these divinely inspired figures of Indian Culture. Even Mahatama Gandhi every one admires but wisheshim<br />
to be born again in some other family than his/her own. Art and life have a peculiar inter relationship but<br />
each one has its own integrity, its own sovereignty and independence from each other. Let us not be<br />
confused about it.<br />
Finally, we may pay some attention to technical aspects of Arnold verse in this poem. The Scholar<br />
Gipsy is written in stanzas containing ten lines each. And the meter used is iambic pentameter, with the<br />
exception of the sixth line which uses trimeter. This is an example of Arnold s craftsmanship. He has<br />
also masterfully used compound words green muffled-hills , air-swept lindens , heaven-sent moments ,<br />
Light half-believer , a device Keats was also fond of using. We have already discussed his use of<br />
Homeric similie at the end of the poem in the detailed critical summary- analysis of the poem in an earlier<br />
paragraph, which is an example of his classical proclivities. Altogether, it is a classical -romantic poem, in<br />
the pastrol elegiac mode, with modern elements of criticism of prevailing ethos or lack of it.<br />
Major Topics on the Writer and Prescribed Text<br />
High Seriousness in Arnold’s Poetry: As a literary critic, Matthew Arnold introduced certain terms and<br />
phrases which have become a part of literary criticism as a discipline, especially as practised and taught in<br />
the universities and academic researchers, professors and students. Some of these terms and concetps are:<br />
High Seriousness , Sweetness and Light , Criticism of life , Touchstone Method , Disinterestedness ,<br />
To see the object as it in itself is , to see life steadilyand see it whole , Barbarism, Philistinism , Hellenism<br />
and Hebraism . These terms appeared innovative to the Victorians though they roused debate and remained<br />
controversial in later times. They have been used to evaluate literary works, poetry and other forms by critics<br />
and literary historians. But in academic studies they have found the maximum application. Critics like T.S.<br />
Eliot who criticised and evaluated Arnold s own poetry and criticism have found fault with his terminology.<br />
But, he too was encouraged to invent a few terms and these have also found currency in the academic<br />
studies on a wide scale. Some of these Eliot terms are: Dissociation of sensibility , Objective correlative ,<br />
auditory imagination etc.<br />
In his Essays in Criticism the concept of Truth and high Seriousness appears in the very first essay which<br />
is on Chaucer, the first major poet of <strong>English</strong> Literature as recognised by literary historians. While evaluating<br />
and appraising his work, especially, Chaucer s Canterbury Tales, Arnold says Chaucer s poetry is marked<br />
by Truth but not High Seriousness and this is the criterion to judge the poetry of all poets. Those who meet<br />
this criterion, are great poets and their poetry elevating to the human mind. High Seriousness is a quality of<br />
poetry which distinguishes it from mundane poetry which is only ephemeral or limited. High Seriousness and<br />
Truth make poetry and, indeed, all works of art, universal and lasting. Chaucer s poetry, because of its truth,<br />
is superior to the French models whom he learnt from and even imitated. But his French masters did not<br />
have High Seriousness and Chaucer himself lacked it. Chaucer meets the criterion of Truth but does<br />
not meet the criterion of High Seriousness . Truth alone does not make a poet CLASSIC. Therefore,<br />
Chaucer the First <strong>English</strong> Poet, is not a classic. He recreated the Medieval Romances and gave rise to a<br />
tradition which was followed and maintained by some great <strong>English</strong> poets after him such as Spenser, Shakespear,<br />
Milton and Keats. But a trend- setter is not necessarily a creator of Classics. It is the Greeks who had High<br />
Seriousness and they have left for posterities CLASSICS in their works. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare who<br />
had both Truth and High Seriousness are the Classics of all times and climes.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Arnold believed that Literature has a function to perform; that it should interpret life. It must elevate the<br />
human mind. Poetry is, thus, a criticism of life or a profound application of ideas to life. At one place he<br />
writes: There are two offices of poetry one to add to one s store of thoughts and feelings another to<br />
compose and elevate the mind by a sustained tone, numerous allusion, and a grand style . Garrod, a scholar<br />
and critic who studies Arnold closely illustartes the point about High Seriousness: Literature is a criticism of<br />
life exactly in the sense that a good man is a criticism of a bad one . In other words, Literature aspires to the<br />
ideal, the good,the beautiful and the powerful. In our own Indian tradition we have the trinity of SATYAM,<br />
SHIVAM, SUNDRAM or Truth,Power and Beauty. In life such a composite person or action is hard to find.<br />
In literatre, where imagination has a free run, it is possible to create such a composite action. Poetry and<br />
Literature exist on several levels. For Arnold, only such Literature deserves to be respected that has within<br />
it the strengh and validity of the values of Truth and High seriousness; which is not merly entertaining nor<br />
merely moralizing either. But that lifts up the human heart and transports the being of man on to another<br />
planet perhaps removed from our own world of weaknesses and foibles. Literature, in other words creates<br />
an ideal picture of life that provides an ideal standard of life as suggested by worsfold, with which facts<br />
of real life can be contrasted Critics have tried to equate moral profundity with High Seriousness. Perhaps<br />
in our own times amoral approach to life and its diverse spheres has gained greater currency. Therefore,<br />
Arnold s High Seriousness is not taken that seriously and is even debunked. But, in his own time, religious<br />
doubt was a real and frightful issue and Arnold was looking for a substitute for religion which he saw was<br />
losing its force. He acquired the belief that Culture that which results from the cultivation of the human<br />
mind-could be a substitute for religion and poetry is assigned a very high place in Arnold s scheme of things<br />
because poetry helps cultivate good minds. Therefore, he thought poery, if it has to play a high and serious<br />
role of remaking and reshaping society as once religion did, then it must have these attributes of Truth and<br />
High Seriousness as once Religion had.<br />
Arnold was a dedicated educationist. In his job as a School Inspector he had the responsibility for modifying<br />
the educational system. And, he believed in education as an instrument of transformation and not merely a<br />
system that helps young persons acquire skills for making a living. As a poet and critic, he assumed a larger<br />
role to directly address the Society and the intelligentsi and influence them with his ideas for a better tomorrow.<br />
He was critical of Shelley who wrote beautiful, even passionate and powerful poems but who lacked moral<br />
values in life. Arnold perceived man as an eternal trifler and he hated trivialization of art and beauty. Greek<br />
Classical writers were his ideal because they, through their works, imparted states of serenity and calm of<br />
mind. His own Victorian age was in a state of confused flux and was badly in need of calm and serenity. On<br />
the whole, he did not have and optimistic view of life an man s future. In this regard, he was not like Shelley<br />
and much less like Browning If winter, can spring be far behind? Shelly or Grow old with me, the best is yet<br />
to be In fact, Arnold does not look to the future. He sees the present and the world around him and comes<br />
to the conclusion that, he and his contemporaries were Wandering between two worlds, one dead/ The other<br />
powerless to be born . As he tells us in his Stanzas from The Grande Chartreuse. Those were the times of<br />
transition, a headlong hurtling it seemed to sensitive and serious minds then. In our own times, values have<br />
further declined and there is both physical and sipiritual pollution on a global scale; there is less sensitivity and<br />
evil has penetrated the human mind decisively. It has become a dangerous world where man complains about<br />
tension yet continues to live and opt for a life of non-stop tension.<br />
What about his own poetry ? Does it meet his own criterion of High Seriousness, and criticism of life .<br />
Arnold perhaps does not reach the heights of poetic inspiration as did Keats and Shelley and Byron who,<br />
according to Arnold had beauty in their poems but lacked High Seriousness and criticism of life. Arnold does<br />
try to come up to the norms set by himself. In his The Scholar Gipsy and Forsaken Merman, we do have<br />
examples of contrast with real life as it was perceived to have been lived by the Victorians.The Scholar<br />
Gipsy was heavenly inspired and did not give up hope and faith even though he was a failure by the standards<br />
of the work-a-day world. (Read the section on The Scholar Gipsy, critical summary and analysis to elaborate<br />
these points further). He left the university and turned into a Gipsy to seek selfrealization and fulfilment and<br />
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thus gained immortality. The Forsaken Merman also presents a contrast to the mundane world. It is not<br />
individual solace that Arnold seeks in his poems. It is general well-being and spiritual upliftment of humanity<br />
at large that is his aim. Whether poetry can actually achieve for men and women of this world such a state<br />
of mind and level of pure fulfilment is a moot question. Eliot says no one thing is a substitute for another,<br />
suggesting that poetry is poetry and religion is religion and the one cannot substitute for the other. Perhaps<br />
poetry can only make one aware of oneself and one s environment and of one’s possibilities but it cannot<br />
perform action that is required for projecting one s self into acts of being and Nothing for realization of self.<br />
But to become aware, to become disillusioned, in itself, is the first step toward enlightement.To that extent<br />
Arnold s poetry is definitely a poetry of Truth as well as High Seriousness but we need not be led away that<br />
such a poetry can achieve the heights of the Classics and/or can lucome classic in itself and by itself. What<br />
the classics achieve is simplicity and universality of both expression and thought or feeling. A classic has<br />
appeal equally for the highest intellectual and the most illiterate among humanity. Takes for instance Ramayana<br />
and Gita. Gita appeals to the village women of India who have never been to school and Gita also appeals to<br />
hightly intellectual minds like Huxley and T.S. ELIOT and Arnold himself, who borrowed the concept of<br />
disinterestedness from Gita and Eliot found it the second greatest book evenr written. Gita is a classic of<br />
all time and climes. Arnold s poetry is not classic in that sense, though it has loads of High Seriousness.<br />
Criticism of Victorian Age<br />
Doubt and Crisis of Faith in Dover Beach<br />
Matthew Arnold displayed vigorous enthusiasm and prophet-like posture in his relationship with his own<br />
times. Though he may have opted for questing after Truth in the manner of his Scholar Gipsy, he remained a<br />
product and child of his own Victorian Age to whom release from intellectual conflict and confusion was not<br />
easy. He remained embedded in the controversies of his own times. He himself described the World of the<br />
Victorian Age as an age of divided aims , doubts , dying spark of Hope that was in need of tranquillity<br />
and soothing of ruffled feelings (See section on The Victorian Age in the earlier part of this book). He, too,<br />
like his contemporaries, found himself.<br />
“Wandering between tworlds, one dead<br />
The other powerless to be born...”<br />
The rising wave of materialism brought with it sordidness of social and cultural life; expansion of democracy<br />
was accompanied by vulgarity and degeneration of taste; increase in creature comforts led to mental tension<br />
and fraying of the nerves; progress of science and knowledge resulted into loss of religious Faith and moral<br />
values. Decline was general and pervasive. Yet, mainstream of the Victorian society were brash about<br />
Industrial Revolution and Advancement of science which, philosophic minds like Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold<br />
thought, were mainly responsible for the disintegration of the Old Order in which Hope, Faith and Charity, the<br />
Trinity of Christian bases of Good Life had prevailed for a long time. Arnold, both in life and Literature,<br />
dwelled and reflected on the disappointing state of affairs of his times. In a letter to one of his closest friends<br />
from his Oxford days, he wrote: These are damned times -everything is against one - the height to which<br />
knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable<br />
contact with millions of small ones, high profligate friends, moral desperados like Carlyle, our own selves and<br />
sickening consciousness of our difficulties . All these concerns find expression in his short, lyrical but sad<br />
and elegiac poem DOVER BEACH which basically is a LOVE POEM. It is, in fact, a honeymoon poem. But<br />
critics have called it an elegy on the death of love , at once religious and sceptical, philosophical and<br />
emotional as Herber Paul has described it aptly.<br />
This poem shows that even Arnold s marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman (he lovingly called her Flu!), after<br />
a heart-break affair with Marguerite, a French woman, did not help him accept the Victorian ethos which he<br />
continued to regard as degenerative and pernicious. Lord Tennyson, who is considered the most representative<br />
of the Victorian poets, accepted the dictates of the Victorian Compromise. Tennyson wrote in his poems
Matthew Arnold<br />
enthusiastically about both Science and Religion, Old and New, and with equal ease. But, Arnold who assigned<br />
high role and destiny to poetry as a guiding force with regenerative and restorative powers for the spiritually<br />
and culturally sick humanity, found the Victorian times UNPOETICAL . Writes he: Reflect too, as I<br />
cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how-deeply unpoetical the<br />
age and all its surroundings are, Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving but unpoetical, In other words,<br />
people have lost their sense for beauty and their tastes have been vulgarrized under the impact of science and<br />
democracy. He could never come to terms with his age. In Dover Beach his disappointment with his times,<br />
his nostalgic backward, look on the glorious history of mankind and times when the sea of Faith was in full<br />
tide and had not dried up as in his own times, infact all his major concerns find a sad and tranquil expression.<br />
It is a poem of still and sad music of humanity . As Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and wasllace, scientists<br />
and trail-blazers were being given rousing receptions everywhere in England and abroad Arnold commiserated<br />
in his loneliness and felt alienated from his own culture and society and wrote poems like Dover Beach<br />
that tell us of his sad thoughts about the Victorian crisis with sweetness and light .<br />
Though the theme highlighted in Dover Beach is a recurrent theme and his other poems such as The Buried<br />
Life and Grande Chatreuse, The Scholar Gispy also articulate the same theme of restlessness and loss of<br />
faith of modern times compared to the fullness of Faith and tranquillity of the earlier times, the presentation<br />
of the same receding Faith here is lyrical not narrative, nor dramatic. The metaphor of the quiet and full sea<br />
in high tide in a moonlit night had been effectively sustained through a well-controlled expression and remarkably<br />
well-manipulated cadence of the verse. The same sea or <strong>English</strong> channel projects both the image of high and<br />
low points of Religious Faith. Advancing tide and waters of the <strong>English</strong> Channel symbolize the past, a past<br />
going back to the Classical times of Greek high noon of Homer, Theocritus and Sopholes; and, the receding<br />
tide, making a grating roar against the dried shingles on the parched shore on the British side of the <strong>English</strong><br />
channel, represent doubt and receding Faith of his own times, the crisis of cultural values in the England of<br />
Arnold s day. This poem reminds us of Wordsworth s picture of England who also decried the decay and<br />
decline of a <strong>English</strong> life:<br />
“She (England) is a fen<br />
Of stagnant water, altar, sword and pen<br />
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hell and bower”.<br />
Why was Arnold protesting against the trends of his times?<br />
He was not an orthodox fundamentalist. He was not a narrow-minded follower of the beaten path. Then,<br />
why was he disappointed by the diffusion of scientific knowledge? He was not a high-brow aristocrat. Then<br />
why was he opposing the expansion of democracy? He was not a primitive fellow. Then why was he<br />
frustrated with modern amenities and modern inventions such as the invention of steam engine, telephone,<br />
telegraphy, metalled roads, and improved navigation? He was not an ivory tower isolationist, then why did he<br />
object to mixing with millions of small ones ? He was not a boor, then why did he not appreciate better<br />
opportunities for education to the people? For a close reader of Arnold s prose and poetry these questions<br />
are, by no means, baffling. Nor do they present a paradox. He was not against these new influences and new<br />
forces in the social and economic life of his nation. What upset him was the baneful impact of these new<br />
influences and forces, which have had a very poisonous and injurious impact on his mind. Men, Arnold<br />
thought, and to a large extent he was correct in his view, was getting too much occupied with pursuit of<br />
increasing his creature comforts and material possessions. The wealth of his mind he was losing. His feelings<br />
were getting dried up. He was getting materially prosperous but spiritually he was getting deprived and<br />
poorer! Arnold advocated the promotion of culture, inner development of the human mind. He stood for the<br />
enrichment of the mental and emotional life of the individual so that he, instead of pursuing self interest<br />
relentlessly may learn to live in harmony with his community, his society and at peace with himself. Science<br />
gives us the spirit of inquiry and increases our curiosity. In limits, this is okay but preponderance of doubt will<br />
destroy human values by which man has existed and humanized himself. Lack of Faith, according to him, is<br />
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dehumanizing. Man s discovery should not be limited to finding of facts; it should extend to an exploration for<br />
and reaching out to Truth. Without feeling, without the poetic touch, with out human values, Man s Mind shall<br />
become defunct.<br />
Victorian era was a time of multiplex Thought and Action, and Market Forces. Diverse segments of society<br />
had started exercising opposing and differing pulls. This had disturbed the quiet scene of the preceding<br />
centuries when time appeared to have stopped. For sensitive minds like that of Matthew Arnold the disturbance<br />
of the social scene and advent of new forces of science, of utilitarian thought, of conflicting social segments,<br />
each promoting their separate claims to power and pelf, emergence of the ugly instinct of selfishness and<br />
greed, the increased speed and tension of daily life proved too much to bear. (See section on Victorian Age<br />
and Analysis of the Text in the foregoing discussion for further elaboration and comments). And, Arnold<br />
gave vent to his resonse to the hectic change and atrophying mind of his Age. In his poetry, and in his prose<br />
more clearly and directly, he atacked the mindless acceptance, on the part of even thinking people, of the new<br />
forces and influences without qualification, without objection, without any attempt at modifying their effect<br />
on their lives. In his Essay on Culture and Anarchy, he divided the <strong>English</strong> society into three distinct categories;<br />
The unfeeling, mindless newly rich were the Barbarians ; the middle-classes who found the new comforts<br />
and limitedly higher economic and social status as an unmixed boon, were the Philistines , and the larger<br />
sections of the poor people who were given greater say-only say, literally, no big benefits, under the new<br />
democratic dispensation, were the Populace . All the three segments of <strong>English</strong> people had one thing in<br />
common: They were soulless. They were all insensitive; not receptive to any ideas . They were all full of<br />
self-complacency.<br />
Arnold has been accused of putting on Olympian airs but many of his fears about the coming damnation of<br />
the civilized man are becoming fully real in our own times. Arnold was a well-wisher of the humanity in<br />
general. He found his times destroying their culture; becoming unpoetical, losing all sense of Beauty and<br />
Truth; mad after material gains. He came up with remedies against this disease of their minds. He suggested<br />
they look for and spread sweetness and light ; work and act disinterestedly , propagate the best that was<br />
written and thought in the world anywhere. In Dover Beach, the remedy suggested is Love , love between<br />
man and woman, may be it is married life. That love can offer succur and sustenance against spiritual<br />
incertitude, against doubt and confusion of the darkling plain or this, our world!<br />
Critical Comment on Disease of Modern Life<br />
in Arnold referenced The Scholar Giosy<br />
This phrase The strange disease of modern life occurs in Arnold s poem The Scholar Gipsy. It connotes<br />
Matthew Arnold s disapproval of disappointment with certain unsavoury trends and developments in the<br />
Victorian age (See the section on the Victorian Age in this book s earlier portion) which were brought about<br />
by revolutionary or speedy advancement of Science, its discoveries and inventions, expansion of democracy,<br />
industry, trade resulting in increase of material prosperity for a larger number of people. These developments<br />
gave rise to man s curiosity for new things and craving for amassing more and more of material possessions<br />
and diminishing of his concern for spiritual upliftment and intellectual refinement. Doubt started replacing<br />
faith and human values started to be discarded. Greed and selfishness began to guide or misguide human<br />
actions. Less sensitivity to human suffering, less feeling for other s misery, less consideration and courtesy<br />
for fellow-beings. Such trends, Arnold like many other thinkers of his age thought, were injurious to the<br />
Human Mind, unhealthy for Human Society and detrimental to Human Culture. In other words, these modern<br />
trends were symptoms of sickness of the collective life of the <strong>English</strong> society. They represented a kind of<br />
social disease of the times, his own times. This was the strange disease of modern times .<br />
Arnold s somewhat pessimistic view of modernism and progress of civilization in the Victorian era is a<br />
recurrent theme in his works poems, essays and lecturers. He often looks back with nostalgia on the ages<br />
and times past and gone by. He assumes and believes that those were better times; those were tranquil times;
Matthew Arnold<br />
those were the times when men had good will among them and peace reigned over their minds; those were<br />
the times when man lived in harmony with nature and did not tear it apart for satisfying its insatiable appetites.<br />
When golden mean was the principle of life and the instinct of greed was kept under control. But now all is<br />
changed. Man has lost his estate of innocence. He is thoughtless and wicked in his life and in his ways. He<br />
has lost the capacity to reflect and think about what is good and what is bad for him, in the long and short run.<br />
He has become prone to grabbing anything and everything that comes his way in order to lead a sensual life<br />
without caring for decency and good taste that alone can cultivate his mind and turn him from a brute to a<br />
cultured being. In The Scholar Gipsy, these themes have been directly and forthrightly stated and contrasted<br />
with the earlier times when The Scholar Gispy as student at Oxford actually lived (in the seventeenth century)<br />
and even then played a truant boy from his studies at Oxford to seek a more simple and joyful life of<br />
wandering and not acquiring and gathering unnecessary possessions or material gains or false values of<br />
status and intellectual pride in his scholarly accomplishments at Oxford.<br />
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear<br />
And Life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames<br />
Before this strange disease of modern life<br />
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,<br />
Its head O vertaxd, its palsied hearts, was rlife<br />
Fly hence, our contact fear!<br />
The theme is repeated elsewhere: This iron-time/of doubts, disputes/distrain, fears. In his letters to Clough<br />
and poems, especially written in his memory (Thyrsis), he reminds him of the disease of modern life : Resolve<br />
to be thyself, and know that he,/Who finds himself, loses his misery . Therefore, the cure against this modern<br />
disease of sick hurry and divided aims is to look within and discover the world of the self and gain spiritual<br />
insights for peace and serenity of life.<br />
While composing The Scholar Gipsy, he wanted to project the legend of the scholar Gipsy as narrated by<br />
Glanvill in a new light as a corrective to the life of an average Oxford scholar who was driven by false<br />
ambition and crazed by modern trends to seek worldly status and material possessions which was not a true<br />
aim of educated and intellectual life. He wanted to animate and rouse the drooping spirits of the educated<br />
people who were willy-nilly getting strayed from the right spiritual course of life to the Victorian ways of<br />
materialism. He wanted to act like Goethe, the German writer and philosopher whom he describes as the<br />
Physician of an iron-age . He perhaps thought that a poet was like a prophet who must send a message, a<br />
divine and edifying message to the world of men for their spiritual regeneration. The Victorians needed such<br />
a prophetic and spiritual message because they had become Barbarians, Philistines and Populace without<br />
taste or decency in their lives. They were the complaining millions of men who Darken in labor and pain ,<br />
to borrow his own words. His Scholar Gipsy is no mere hypnotist like that of Glanvill but an idealist, a spiritual<br />
seeker of illuminated moments, Heaven -sent moments of self-realization. He got alienated and separated<br />
himself by making a conscious, existentialist choice for a different life than the life of material prosperity and<br />
social recognition his class-mates were left behind to pursue. He wanted to offer a contrasted life from that<br />
of those who live the worldly life of his times carrying the disease of modern life all the time on their body<br />
and soul. He got rid of this diseased modern life by imposing a kind of Quarantine on himself; by opting for a<br />
change of milieu, from the organised modern society to tribal willd-brotherhood , free from the constricting<br />
demands and anodynes to kill the pain of modern life.<br />
The method and technique of contrast of older times with the new times, of examples of good life with bad<br />
life, of spiritual pursuit with the pursuit of materialism has been identified by the critics and commentators on<br />
Matthew Arnold as criticism of life . Arnold insisted that poetry or literature ought to offer criticism of life<br />
so that it performs a social function. This social function is not limited only to awakening or reawakening of<br />
the reading public to the need of ideal and high principles. It should result into measurable impact and improvement<br />
in the condition of man after exposure to great works of art and literature. It has been pointed out by some<br />
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critics who have studied Arnold s works more closely that he shares this view with the Classical writers of<br />
Greece and Rome. It may also be relevant in this context to observe that European and British Gipsies whose<br />
life the Oxford scholar had chosen to adopt are of oriental origin. These Gipsies, researchers have found,<br />
have a good deal common with their Indian counterparts. Thus, in The Scholar Giopsy, the view of life that<br />
has been contrasted and offered as criticism of life is a variation on Indian life. Even in his more serious<br />
criticism and lectures, Arnold has cited detachment as an Indian virtue . G. Wilson Knight observes:<br />
"Arnold s poem confronts our western tradition with suggestion of a wisdom, or magic of oriental affinities or<br />
origin . Arnold was ever eager to remove the mask of hypocrisy and illusion from the face of the Victorians.<br />
His age was ignorant of the impact their new-found riches of materialism, sciences and democratic dispensation<br />
on the soul and psyche. They were full of confusion and mental chaos. Some of them were full of<br />
disappointments and despair, having lots a world of serenity and peace in exchange for perplexities and<br />
complexities of modern life. Yet, Arnold was not scathing or biting as Carlyle was in his incendiary criticism<br />
of own times. He preferred Stoicism, a Greek creed which prescribes forbearance and patience in the face<br />
of the onslaughts of Fate. It is true that Victorians faced a different kind of Fate than the metaphysical Fate<br />
the philosophers and poets portrayed in their works depicting human beings as victims of this inscrutable<br />
Fate. The Victorians were faced with, what Galsworthy called Social Fate , a Fate of their own collective<br />
making but beyond an individual s control and perhaps beyond collective social control too, because it is<br />
irreversible.<br />
According to Arnold Poetry is always referring the actual life to the ideal and illustrating the one by the<br />
other . Like the Greeks, especially his adopted mentor, Sophocles, he sought to see life steadily and sea it<br />
whole . He also wanted that his own contemporaries lead a life of refinement and spiritual glory. Moralistic<br />
element is Arnold s poetry is not much appreciated in our own times because modern thought shuns moralizing.<br />
But with this exception, Arnold’s concerns are genuine. We cant take everything given by science and<br />
everything described as progressive as essentially good for human brings. Science and technology are neutral.<br />
Man is free to put them to whatever use. But once they are brought into play, it may not be possible to control<br />
the forces and influences generated by them. This is where the modern man faces dilemma. He cannot turn<br />
away from Science and Technology which are capable of getting him rid of disease, poverty and ignorance.<br />
But by not being cautious and selective in their use he runs the risk of being destroyed by them. Arnold, with<br />
a prophetic vision foresaw these dilemmas and in poem after poem and essay after essay and lecture after<br />
lecture issued warnings to his age about the possible pernicious effect of the so-called progressive forces and<br />
influences of his time and beware of this disease of modern life .<br />
Arnold s immediate gurus or masters or role models such as Senancour also held similar views and outlook<br />
on life. Senancour believed that life was a vale of tears and similar thoughts have been articulated by<br />
Indian sants and spiritual teachers. Didnt Guru Nanak say Full of grief is the whole world ( Nanak, dukhiya<br />
sab sansar )? Arnold traced the self-inflicted woes of his time to the loss of faith. We,/Light half-believers /<br />
never deeply felt, nor clearly will d / Whose insight never has born fruit in deeds /and therefore never got<br />
the spark from heaven! , As he observes in The Scholar Gipsy in order to diagnose this disease of modern<br />
life . The result is, as he continues to elaborate in The Scholar Gipsy, The sick fatigue and Languid<br />
doubt that bafflement brings . Lost is our heavenly legacy. Lost is our soul. As a cure, he suggests one<br />
aim, one business, one desire for seeking and not necessarily finding spiritual fulfillment because Faith, true<br />
Faith is that which ensures fulfillment in the seeking itself and not necessarily in finding it. For, finding too<br />
would be only by God s Grace and not necessarily the result or fruit of our effort or action. External glitter<br />
lasts only in time while spiritual life is timeless. It is a life of increasing and expanding consciousness. It is a<br />
life of harmony with Nature and the world around, not grabbing and striving to gain power, possessions and<br />
pelf and keep them greedily.<br />
Elegiac Element in Arnold’s Dover Beach and The Scholar Gypsy<br />
Matthew Arnold has been described as the poet of elegies . Compared to other poets of his age, especially,<br />
Tennyson and Browning, Arnold does appear to be a poet of sorrows who vents his grief and sense of loss in
Matthew Arnold<br />
his poetry. True, it is not personal loss that he cries about. Even when the subjects of his poems are personally<br />
related to him, like his own father Thomas Arnold of Rugby Chapel or Arthur High Clough, his friend in<br />
Thyrsis, or elder poet Wordsworth of Memorial Verses, personal loss is lifted to a larger plane and it is<br />
general sense of grief and loss that is mourned and lamented. Tennyson made a compromise with his age and<br />
he accepted old and new as a part of his times which were in a great flux. He expressed his feelings and<br />
ideas about Faith and Doubt, Science and Religion, Democracy and royalty and other divergent and<br />
contradictory strains with equal ease. Browning was a stubborn optimist. He did not care where he lived,<br />
patriotically at home or as a part or even a relic of the Renaissance in Italy amidst imaginary Bishops and<br />
Duchess who sought to satisfy their worldly vanities by building beautiful memorial tombs or getting portrayed<br />
by painters of renown. Even old age and its debilities did not bother him: Grow old with me, the best is yet to<br />
be .<br />
Arnold was much involved with his country’s life. He was employed as Inspector of Schools and was thus<br />
responsible for monitoring the state of school education in the country. He got appointed as the Professor of<br />
Poetry at Oxford, a position he retained for ten years. In this highly valued academic position he had the<br />
occasion and scope for critically examining the value system of his own society, prevailing ethos and its<br />
equation with the <strong>English</strong> morality of the past ages of <strong>English</strong> history. He was a keen student of the classics<br />
which were rated highly as the basis of not only academic education but accomplishment in social and<br />
political life; it was often a passport to higher echelons of aristocracy and diplomacy. A person with classical<br />
education, though of humbler social class had access to and acceptance in what used to be called polite<br />
society in those days. Both by his professional career, educational qualification and his involvement with the<br />
social and public affairs of his society, he was well set to comment upon contemporary issues and problems<br />
being faced by the Victorian society. Besides, he had a natural aptitude for a role as the wise man who would<br />
give good counsel for the general wall-being of his people. But as a critic and observer of his times, he had a<br />
pessimistic view of the life of his countrymen.<br />
He regarded the people of his age as unfortunate people who had lost a great heritage; who had gained the<br />
world and worldly riches but had lost their soul and who had failed to realise how great a treasure they had<br />
lost. But he did not hate human beings. He only pitied them and always thought of raising their cultural level.<br />
Because, by raising the cultural level he could hope to restore them to health and sanity. He was also not an<br />
isolationist or an ivory tower academic who liked to live away or far part from the average, intelligent people.<br />
He counted among his friends not only the classicist like Arthur Clough but also scientists such as T.H.<br />
Huxley, J.C. Shairp, Duke Coleride to name only a few of them But he could not come to terms with the<br />
times. As a poet more so. In his poems, Elegy is the dominant form. In most of his poems, elegiac or the sad<br />
note is the highest and loudest.<br />
Dover Beach and The Scholar Gipsy, two poems very different from each other, the first lyrica and the<br />
second narrative yet have the mood of sadness and sense of loss of Faith as common elements between<br />
them. In a letter to Clough, he complained of the damned times , spread of luxury , physical enervation ,<br />
the absence of great natures, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends (see Analysis of the Text in this<br />
book for the complete quotation in the critical summary of The Scholar Gipsy). Both these poems remember<br />
the vanished past as a loss. Both of them lament the demise of Faith which once was full and alive. Of<br />
course, these two poems have different designs, different stanza structures, different conception, different<br />
modes of narrative and lyrical expression but in mood and theme both are identical. In poetic elaboration of<br />
the theme and creation of the melancholy mood Dover Beach used the landscape and the Sea symbols.<br />
Some critics have found difficulties in the use of Sea as symbol of both the fullness of faith in times past and<br />
its drying up in modern times. But the high tide of the sea and the receding of the sea both at the same time<br />
symbolizing two opposite phenomenon in no way detract from the efficacy of Sea as a paradoxical symbol.<br />
We are not considering here some thing neat and clear like a logical argument which must avoid all contradictions.<br />
A symbol is a complex poetic device in which two opposite phenomenon, meanings and opposite images can<br />
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be present simultaneously and yet effectively. More complex a symbol, greater its significantory value.<br />
Therefore, if the Sea at its full tide reminds us of the high noon of Faith in ancient and earlier historical times<br />
and its receding grating roar calls to our mind the disappearance of Faith like the dry shingles on the<br />
shore of <strong>English</strong> channel, it should enhance the hidden meaning and significance behind the complex symbol<br />
of the Sea. If man has continuity of history, his rise and fall is like that of the sea which, at full moon swells to<br />
fullness, but recedes with a sad and melancholy sound leaving behind shingles and pebbles like the ruins of<br />
man’s own past. But the dominant note emanating from this simultaneous symbol of the past glory of faith and<br />
the present decline of faith is that of sadness as the Sea brings eternal note of sadness in . Sophocles, the<br />
Great master of Tragedy had also heard the same note of sadness on the Aegean Sea. The ebb and flow<br />
of the sea is eternal which is symbolic of the ebb and flow of human misery . But for Arnold, unfortunately,<br />
it was only the ebb of Faith to see and observe and experience. Materialism had dried up the soul of his<br />
times.<br />
But there is some healing, some comfort and consoling possible amidst this great loss and sorrow and the<br />
succur and solace is available to the whole humanity. This solace is possible through love between a man and<br />
woman; Arnold pays his tribute to married love in the lines Ah, love, let us be true/To one another in Dover<br />
Beach. The sadness and elegiac mood of the poem are set off by this assurance of love, individual love<br />
against general gloom. Love is real while the world is only an illusion.<br />
In The Scholar Gipsy, the description of Victorian life and its loss of Faith is not in terms of complex<br />
symbols. It is more forthright and direct: Mere triflers with Languid doubts suffering from the sick<br />
fatigue are the epithets used for the Victorians while, in contrast, the Scholar Gipsy has one aim, one<br />
business, one desire . Instead of complex symbolism, it is a clear contrast that has been used to reflect and<br />
project the present loss of faith and the past fullness of faith. It will also be noted that in Scholar Gipsy,<br />
Arnold, the poet emerges as an agnostic rather than as an orthodox believer in Christianity. The elegiac note<br />
in The Scholar Gipsy is unrelieved by any antidote for the pain of loss of Hope and Faith. A morose,<br />
existentialist alienation and despair are the dominant mood. For, the poet does not want the Scholar Gipsy to<br />
return to this rotten world afflicted with this diseases of modern life . (See also Critical Summary and<br />
Analysis of the Scholar Gipsy in this book in earlier sections).<br />
Arnold's Message (As A Poet)<br />
Arnold was a poet of social commitment. In his poems, as he asserted in a letter to his mother, is encapsulated<br />
the main movement of the mind of the last quarter of a century . He was conscious of the fact that his<br />
poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of the mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they<br />
will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what the movement of mind is, and<br />
interested in the literary production which reflect it (1869 letter to his mother). He was also aware that in his<br />
day his poetry was not regarded as representative of the spirit of his own times, that Tennyson, the Poet<br />
Laureate and his contemporary, had been readily accepted as the Representative Poet of the Victorian Age.<br />
The meaning and message of Arnold’s poetry, as is clear from the letter just cited, depended upon a responsive<br />
audience and how conscious that audience was of the main movement of the mind of his times. We may<br />
note here that Arnold has been paid greater attention in the twentieth century than in his own nineteenth<br />
century. But he is regarded as a serious thinker and poet who did not write poetry only to please the ear. That<br />
he was a sage and a seer . He assigned high mission to Poetry and the Poet. The poet was not only a<br />
creator of verses but also a prophet who proclaimed a message of high significance to the humanity at large,<br />
almost a divine message of spiritual and temporal importance. From the message perspective, his Memorial<br />
Verses written as an elegy and eulogy on Wordsworth s death assumes significance. Like the German poet<br />
and philosopher, Goethe, Arnold wanted to feel the pulse of his times like a doctor or a physician so that he is<br />
able to tell his contemporary audience about the ailment that they are suffering from ( disease of modern<br />
life as he said in another poem). Goethe knew how to diagnose the disease and identify the symptoms of the<br />
disease of his times:
Matthew Arnold<br />
He read each wound, each.<br />
Weakness clear -<br />
And struck his finger on the place<br />
And said-Thou ailest here, and here.<br />
With a deep, penetrating poetic insight Arnold found that his Age was a confused world, full of tension and<br />
unable to decide which way to go, to look back to its own past, its history for assurance and confidence or to<br />
the flux of the present moment which held no clear meaning. Victorian age was an age of transition. Arnold<br />
has described his own-milieu and times in memorable lines from the Grande Chartreuse.<br />
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead,<br />
The other powerless to be born,<br />
With no where yet to rest my head,<br />
like these, on earth I wait forlorn.<br />
Their faith, my tears, the world deride--<br />
In come to shed them at their side.”<br />
Some commentators on Arnold have found that Arnold in his poetry, dwells too much on that which is already<br />
dead but in his prose he does not appear to be so sad and melancholy and can see the birth and emergence<br />
of a brave new world. Basil Wiley remarks: If in his verse he is often the elegist of the dead world (and of<br />
something dead or dying within himself), in his prose he assists the birth of the new with cheerful alacrity .<br />
This, like all generalisations, may be partly true As a critic, Arnold attaches very high importance and role to<br />
poetry. He even believed that poetry, in fullness of time, could replace philosophy, religion and science. And<br />
poetry shall be the main promoter and protector of Culture. In The Study of Poetry, he states: The future of<br />
poetry is immense, because poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find<br />
an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not a received tradition which does not<br />
threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its<br />
emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of<br />
illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is also the fact. The strongest part<br />
of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.<br />
In our own times, Form in poetry has received greater importance. Medium is the Message , says McLuhan,<br />
this writer s Guru and the Philosopher of the Electronic Age. Eliot also emphatically says that Poetry is made<br />
of word and not of ideas. But Arnold had a different frame of reference. And, in the context of that reference<br />
he emphasized the content of poetry rather than its form , though the two cannot be separated but it has<br />
become a habit with the analystic mind of our times to reduce an object to its separate elements and then, if<br />
need and capability to do so allow, recombine the separate elements or parts back into the whole in order to<br />
comprehend and understand reality of the object under consideration. Arnold, it must be said here, did not<br />
subscribe to the theory of Art for Art s sake". Poetry for him was for humanity s sake. It definitely had a<br />
social function to perform. It had not only to awaken Man to his suffering and misery but also to heal him. For<br />
this reason, Modern Poetry can only subsit by its contents: by becoming a complete magister vitae as the<br />
poetry of the ancients did by including as theirs did, religion with poetry, instead of existing as poetry only and<br />
leaving religious want to be supplied by the Christian religion .<br />
Arnold s poetry presents a pattern of contrast to actual life. This becomes a part of the high function of<br />
poetry itself. Just as a good person is a criticism of a bad person or a good act is a criticism of bad act, just as<br />
mercy and its manifestations are criticism of cruelty and its manifestations, so also good poetry projecting<br />
values and ideals of Truth and High seriousness is a criticism of life which is delusive, illusory, mundane and<br />
depressive. This function of poetry was conceived by Arnold in response to the peculiar circumstances of his<br />
times in which Faith and serenity of life had disappeared and unbridled pursuit of ambition, greed, power and<br />
pelf had become a commonplace. Therefore, he arrived at another conclusion that Literature, Art or Poetry<br />
is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic<br />
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beauty . He explicated upon criticism in this context and defined it as the noble and profound application<br />
of ideas to life . While modern writers and critics make a distinction between life and art and even are<br />
inclined to keep them apart excepting to the extent that life provides art with materials to build itself on,<br />
Arnold saw a vigorous connection between life and poetry. The two-life and art can and do act upon each<br />
other and can be bettered by a more meaningful interaction between them. Greek Masters were his models,<br />
especially, Sophocles who saw life steadily and saw it whole . Moderns have lost the capacity and patience<br />
for such steady and whole grasping of life s meaning. There is superficiality and outward tinsel and colour<br />
rather than gaining of deep insight from the experience of life as it has been lived by man on a multidimensional<br />
canvas. His own age presented a contrast to life as depicted in the classical (Greek) literature and also as it<br />
was lived in the past centuries. This may be a romantic view as distance lends strangeness and charm. While<br />
viewing the past, a good deal is left to the imagination which likes to paint beautiful colours and even ruins<br />
look grand and majestic though hardly liveable. But, Arnold s arguments are not easy of rebuttal. The<br />
knowledge unleashed by Science and Technology has brought greater comforts of life but at the same time<br />
turned this world of man into a dangerous place to live devoid of human sympathy and fellow-feeling. Arnold s<br />
message or messages have a context and to understand him and the import of his message, we must understand<br />
his times and Arnold s response to those times. These are damned times , he protested, full of sick hurry ,<br />
languid doubts , fatigue . He could find no place to rest his head on for relief. He went back to the Greeks-<br />
Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus as guides, philosophers and friends, and to poetry:<br />
The poetry that in a grand style deals with man and his destiny inspired him and he looked to it as the source<br />
and fountain of all that is good in man. The best that has been thought and written holds the secret of man’s<br />
rejuvenation, of his being born again and again out of its own ashes. Because, when his bad act and mundane<br />
instincts have done their work and come to a sorrowful end, there will be poetry to which he can go and open<br />
the page from its depository of great ideas, passions and feeling and regain hope from the preserved memory<br />
of his race. That modern man is capable of seeing life steadily and see it whole . Because, there were men<br />
who had done so before him; so he can do so also. Poetry interprets by expressing with inspired conviction,<br />
the ideas and laws of the inward world of man s moral and spiritual nature , he said and sent other messages<br />
in the same vein. He speaks of the healing power of Wordworth s poetry and interpretive powers of<br />
poetry in general. For his taste, Poetry should hold the charm of natural magic as also moral profundity .<br />
While considering his message as a poet, we have to understand his terminology and phraseology: criticism<br />
of life , interpretation and moral profundity , Truth Beauty and their Laws; High Seriousness ,<br />
Disinterestedness and the like. Arnold also thought that Nature too has healing powers for the frayed<br />
nerves of man in turmoil as is clear from the message in the following lines from his Self Dependence<br />
“Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me,<br />
Calm me, ah, compose me to the end”.<br />
He did not see a divine agency in Nature as Wordsworth did but consolation and soothing it could surely give<br />
to the harried man of the world; it could also restore the self to the selfish persons who in the pursuit of greed<br />
and materialist gains lose their soul. In Doverb Beach, it is Love between man and woman that performs a<br />
similar function of imparting tranquility to a disturbed mind. In The Scholar Gipsy, it is the extinction of<br />
duality between the ideal and its pursuer , determined and everlasting in his Faith and hope, that is articulated<br />
as the message of the poet. Arnold s poetry seeks to send the same message as the Classicists like Sophocles<br />
left for the posterity.<br />
Modern and Existentialist Elements in Arnold<br />
If questing and questioning spirit are the marks of modernity, Arnold certainly is a modernist and a modern<br />
poet, critic and writer. He was a self-conscious writer and endowed with critical objectivity who could view<br />
his own work dispassionately. He knew that among his contemporaries there were poets and thinkers who<br />
were acclaimed as the representative of his times and/or for their intellectual acumen. He did not hesitate to<br />
compare his own contribution to Literature with that of his peers, two of whom deserve special mention here.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Browning and Tennyson. Quite often we have quoted from his well-known letter to his mother written in<br />
1867 in which he comparess himself with these two eminent poets and fellow Victorians. The relevant<br />
portion of the said letter bears repetition in the present context : ... "It might be fairly urged that I have less<br />
poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I<br />
have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to<br />
the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to my turn, as they had theirs . These are insightful<br />
self observations of a poet and critic who could not only see but also foresee time future. He proved right.<br />
Arnold s poems and criticism have evinced a remarkable degree of survival and staying power through the<br />
passage of time. Tennyson today looks good-goody stuff; Browning s poetry outshines Arnold s but through<br />
its parts and not as a whole. Arnold s modernity is not merely innovative or experimental as that of Browning<br />
but because of his concern with values and principles of life and literature and because of themes in his<br />
poems that are of lasting relevance to human beings. In his poems, namely, Dover Beach. The Scholar<br />
Gipsy, Memorial Verses. The Forsaken Merman he raises and deals with human issues that shake us out<br />
of the habit of taking things for granted and state of self-complacency. They moot questions of self, being,<br />
choice and projection of that choice in acts of being. Maybe, he is not so strong when it comes to going<br />
against one s grain for an existentialist form of self-realization but he points to the movements of our own<br />
times such as existentialism, absurdism and even structuralism and deconstructionism. The discourse that<br />
emerges from his works is not only a part of the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century in<br />
which he lived but as a forbearer of the intellectual movements of the later part of the twentieth century.<br />
It has been aptly observed that no poet of modern times, perhaps no <strong>English</strong> poet of any time, appeals so<br />
directly and exclusively to the cultivated taste of the educated classes" as does Arnold. He was neither<br />
excessive in his expression nor populist in his posture as a poet and man of culture. His pursuit of Truth,<br />
general fate of man, verities of life as themes of his poetry was persistent and vigorous. He reflected on<br />
these themes as well as embodied them in his poems: The end aim of all literature, if one considers it<br />
attentively, is truth, nothing but that. But the criticism which the men of genius pass on human life is permanently<br />
acceptable to mankind; the criticism which the men of ability pass upon human life is transitorily acceptable,"<br />
he said. He attached importance to criticism , not because it was a superior or higher activity of the human<br />
mind but because it created a ferment and a climate for creativity. Even poetry has to be a criticism of life so<br />
that it may give rise to more poetry. In his Essay on Wordsworth he states: It is important, therefore, to<br />
hold fast to this: poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and<br />
beautiful application of ideas to life." Criticism, not with a view to gaining or scoring a point over others, not<br />
with a view to pleasing some one or condemning a thing and person on the basis of personal bias or for the<br />
sake of practical gains or considerations; criticism has to be disinterested and not for ulterior, political,<br />
practical considerations.<br />
Arnold reflects these tendencies of disinterested criticism both in his theory and practice of the literary art.<br />
He is not an ivory tower, academic critic. He is very much a man of the world, fully involved in the daily<br />
chores of his life and also the movements of his time and in affairs of public and social importance. He had<br />
a broad, and cosmopolitan outlook who could look beyond his own <strong>English</strong> or racist traditions and cultures in<br />
his quest for answers to basic questions of life. For example he cites with approval the Indian Virtue of<br />
Disinterestedness which he interprets, perhaps erroneously with objectivity borrowing the term<br />
detachment from Gita. According to Arnold The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest<br />
moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be, indeed, the ondoyant divers ,<br />
the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne . He tried to develop within him what, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s<br />
phrase, maybe described as the Mind of Europe and allowed himself to be freely influenced by French<br />
writers such as Senancour ad George Sands and German Heine, and Goethe.<br />
Arnold’s modernism could be attributed to his criticism. He assigned a new function to criticism and widened<br />
its scope. He made the practising critic aware of not only his responsibilities to art, literature or poetry only<br />
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but also to society. But this Arnoldian posture should not be confused with the communist theory of Art for<br />
Community or Society . Arnold drove attention and capacities of the critic to a close relationship that exists<br />
between life and literature. The problems and issues of the society and community are relevant to the critic<br />
and the poet because he seeks inspiration, materials and even methods and attitudes from his society and<br />
culture at large. In his Essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” he defends criticism, though<br />
keeping it lower than Creation and credits it with germinating ideas that further pollinate poetry, literature,<br />
arts and, in fact, the entire culture. He ascribes the dissipation of the poetic urge in the times of Pope and<br />
Dryden and Gray to the lack of a climate of ideas and criticism. Even the Romantic writers did not have a<br />
milieu that could be described as infused with ideas and this makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so<br />
incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety , observes<br />
Arnold. All these poets failed to see life steadily and see it whole .<br />
Criticism, understood within the Arnoldian reference is, a disinterested pursuit and attempt at knowing the<br />
best that is known and thought in the world and which, by making diffused and widespread, generates<br />
currents of new thoughts, provokes new and deep ideas, offers new insights and this process is what ought<br />
to continually lead to renewal and refreshment of Tradition. Poets like Sophocles had that capacity and<br />
genius for applying thought to life and embody interaction between life and poetry in the creative act:<br />
Sophocles long ago<br />
Heard it on the Aegean,...... we<br />
...................................................<br />
Find also in the sound a thought<br />
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.<br />
– Dover Beach<br />
This is how Arnold helped create a climate of ideas - a climate conducive to greater creativity. Instead of<br />
accepting the turbid ebb and flow , soullessness , Vulgarity , Plebianism , haphazard provincialism<br />
and blundering of his age, he questioned the assumptions behind the smugness and complacency of his<br />
times. He acted somewhat in the manner of Goethe’s Faust who, unlike Marlowe’s damned Fanstus, saves<br />
himself from damnation because he was able to overcome the intertia or sense of self-complacency. He not<br />
only saved himself but also tried to save and uplift the barbarians, Philistines and the Populace of his age<br />
and propel them toward creativity. His vision discarded the immediately available sensual experience and<br />
rewards for the more abiding, more edifying, more human, spiritual fulfillment which disinterested endeavour<br />
ensures. He was not tied to the materialistic and machine culture of his age but sought comfort and satisfaction<br />
in the timeless soul of man. In Culture and Anarchy and Friendship’s Garlend he urged upon his countrymen<br />
to wake up and come back to life from the stupor of Victorianism, stupor of ignorance, stupor of materialism.<br />
In his Essay on Byron he writes: As the inevitable break up of the old order comes, as the <strong>English</strong> middleclass<br />
slowly awakenes from its intellectual sleep of two centuries, as our actual present world, to which the<br />
sleep has condemned us, shows itself more clearly -our world of an aristocracy materialised and dull, a<br />
middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class rude and brutal--we shall turn our eyes again and to more<br />
purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who, ignorant of future and unconsoled<br />
by its promises, nevertheless this conservation of the old impossible world so fiery battle, waged it till he fell-<br />
-waged it with such splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength.<br />
It is because of this openness of mind to unravel the beauty and excellence of even those like Byron with<br />
whose sense of morality or conduct of life he openly differed that Arnold today has a place among the<br />
modernists. He overcame the general sense of insularity and closedness in which the self-complacent Victorians<br />
suffocated and wallowed themselves. He allowed the winds and airs from all directions, alien and far lands,<br />
to knock at his intellect s door and he imbibed them with religious unction. RH. Hutton has analysed the<br />
contribution of Matthew Arnold to modern Thought, thus: When I come to ask what Mr Arnold s poetry has<br />
done for the generation, the answer must be that no one has expressed more powerfully and poetically its
Matthew Arnold<br />
spiritual weaknesses, its craving for a passion that it cannot feel, its admiration for a self-mastery that it<br />
cannot achieve, its desire for a creed that it fails to accept, its sympathy with a faith that it will not share, its<br />
aspiration for a peace that it does not know. But Mr Arnold does all this from the intellectual side,-sincerely<br />
and delicately, but from the surface, and never from the centre. It is the same with his criticism. They are<br />
fine, they are keen, they are often true, but they are always too much limited to their superficial layer of moral<br />
nature of their subjects, and seem to take comparative interest in the deepest individuality beneath."<br />
There are certain aspects of Arnold s modernism which only developments in the twentieth century can<br />
reveal. In the limited context here they can only be cursorily mentioned but they deserve full length and closer<br />
study. These relate to the sense of loneliness and alienation and separation in his poems. These are<br />
distinctly distinguishing features of certain modern philosophies developed in Europe toward the end and in<br />
between the two Great World wars. The basic inspiration and development of these philosophies lies in the<br />
works of Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jung, Kierkegaard, Merlau-Ponty, Sartre and Albert<br />
Camus and several others in whose poetry, philosophical works, novels and plays these philosophies known<br />
as Existentialism Absurdism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism have been projected and propounded.<br />
Certain anthropologists such as Levi-Straus have also contributed to their diffusion and application to diverse<br />
fields and academic disciplines.<br />
Loneliness, alienation and separation or foresakenness or becoming a stranger from one s own people, milieu<br />
or culture is a recurrent and repeated pattern of themes in his poems. In Dover Beach, The Forsaken<br />
Merman, The Scholar Gipsy, Memorial Verses, this theme of alienation and becoming part or exile of<br />
another world occurs. The theme of alienation is related to weariness and fatigue in one’s own environment<br />
and this theme too occurs in these poems. Sudden break with life till now lived without making a conscious<br />
choice is also a feature of existentialist living as depicted in modern plays and novels and short stories of<br />
Sartre and Camus and such moments and occasions too find expression in Arnold s above poems and several<br />
other poems and his poetic drama. Consider the following lines from Memorial Verses:<br />
And Wordsworth! --Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice!<br />
For never has such a soothing voice<br />
Been to your shadowy world convey’d...<br />
Wordsworth has gone from us- and ye,<br />
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!<br />
If Wordsworth s going to the world of pale ghosts appears somewhat existentialistically far-fetched because,<br />
after all, this going away is not a matter of choice and act of living or made in the living moments of life, then,<br />
consider:<br />
“The story of the Oxford scholar poor<br />
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,<br />
Who, tired of knocking at perferment s door,<br />
One summer-morn forsook<br />
His friends and went to learn the gipsy-lore<br />
And roam d the world with that wild brotherhood,<br />
but came to Oxford and his friends no more. - The Scholar Gipsy<br />
Here is a complete write-up on an Oxford scholar who leaving the alienated world of middle-class learning<br />
and values consciously and by choice gave it up and went to an alien society, the wild brotherhood , never<br />
to return to the life and environment he had left bored ( tired ) with. The scholar gipsy of Arnold s poem is<br />
an existentialist character in toto. He is a Victorian or seventeenth century version, if you like, of a modern<br />
Hippy.<br />
Consider also the character of Margret in The Forsaken Mmermaid, a mother and wife, who on a sudden,<br />
makes a very conscious choice to give up her home, abode, husband and children. She is a Kierkegaardian<br />
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character. The Christian existentialists tell us that you are free to make an existentialist choice, to become a<br />
Christian, to surrender to Christ . Margret goes to the Church for a prayer. This is the time of Easter, the time<br />
of Christ s sacrifice. The time to repent for her suffering and the time to rejoice for his rising again. Margret<br />
is an existentialist. She has the daring to give up all for just one moment of self-realization on the basis of<br />
conscious choice of her own making, and, own up responsibility for that choice, another important condition<br />
for existentialist living.<br />
The general mood of weariness on the occasion of honeymoon smacks of existentialist despair resulting in<br />
alienation form the society. Shipwreck is a metaphor used by zartre, the philosopher and practitioner and a<br />
representation of Existentialism of intellectual and literary Existentialism. Arnold s condition here in Dover<br />
Beach is that of a Shipwrecked existentialist being. Full of despair, wearied and bored with Victorianism,<br />
He goes deeper in his soul and finds this world a land of dreams , of delusions and illusions. He does find<br />
solace instead of plunging into the sea for a renewed self and being. He is a conscious person on the edge<br />
of being .<br />
Thus, Arnold may be called a predecessor of the existentialist movement of later times, thinkers and poet<br />
with a futuristic vision.; And, like the existentialists a man of commitment .<br />
A.D. Culler s observation may serve as a befitting close to the present note on Arnold s modernism: It is<br />
only the modern poet who has followed Arnold in his vision of the tragic and alienated condition of man. In<br />
this sense Arnold may be called a modern poet, and it is certain that he would have accepted this designation.<br />
He considered that his poem, more than those of his contemporaries, represented the main movement of<br />
mind of the last quarter of a century .<br />
Arnold’s Theory of Poetry<br />
In a letter to Jane, Matthew Arnold wrote: At Oxford particularly many complain that the subjects treated<br />
(in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems) do not interest them. But as I feel rather as a reformer in<br />
poetical matters, I am glad of this opposition. If I have health and opportunity to go on, I will shake the present<br />
methods until they go down, see if I don t. More and more I bent against the modern <strong>English</strong> habit (too much<br />
encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything.<br />
Arnold reacted rather sharply to the Romantic movement initiated by Wordsworth in <strong>English</strong> poetry. He had<br />
great respect for Wordsworth and healing power of his poetry but thought the Romantics had tendency of<br />
looking at life not steadily and not as a whole but partially. They were subjective and individual in their<br />
expression. Arnold found these tendencies neither healthy nor great nor of lasting value or worth. Greek<br />
masters were his inspiration because they saw life steadily and saw it whole. And they grasped and<br />
captured general truth about the fate and condition of Man in their poetry rather than individual and subjective<br />
experience of life. This contrast between the Romantics, his immediate predecessors and the Greek ancient<br />
masters such as Homer, Scophocles and Epictetus provides a well-considered basis for Arnold s Theory of<br />
Poetry.<br />
In his famous Preface to 1853 Poems, which may not have become as famous as Wordsworth s Prefaceto<br />
the Lyrical Ballads (1798), Arnold came to certain conclusions on Poetry and basic issues related to the<br />
Poet s art and role. In a way, 1853 Preface is a manifesto of classical Poetry as perceived and practised by<br />
Arnold even as 1798 Preface of Wordsworth s was the manifesto of Romantic Poetry. Arnold could not<br />
initiate a Classical Movement in <strong>English</strong> Poetry. Prehaps because he was too close in time to the Romantics<br />
and their influences could not be rebutted or repelled. But reforms introduced by him in <strong>English</strong> Poetry<br />
have flourished better in the twentieth century when eminent poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot began to<br />
write poetry that expressed the experience of not one generation only but of many generations, and not of<br />
one culture only but of many cultures. Arnold s Classicism has to be understood in terms to the human<br />
experience which provides materials to poets and poetry, and not in terms of the form or forms of
Matthew Arnold<br />
poetry which is a matter of choice for the poet himself. But the main inspiration for his theory of poetry came<br />
to Arnold from his realization that the <strong>English</strong> Poetry of his day was in need of radical reform. Melody or<br />
lyricism alone was not a measure of poetry; Arnold became clear about this fact early in his career as a poet<br />
and critic. Shelley and Keats may have given us sweet and sad songs but the vision of life presented in their<br />
poetry is like a flash in a shining pan which disappears momentarily and does not move or stir our spiritual self<br />
for deeper and renewed meaning as we read their poems again and again. Truth of life does not yield<br />
meaning, though it might provide invaluable insights in a momentary flash. Byron, Keats, Shelley offer us<br />
flashes of light and glimpses of Truth, but not its understanding. Beautiful thoughts and feelings, thus, need to<br />
be kept in subordination to the total impression because the part cannot be allowed to overwhelm or<br />
overpower or prevail upon the whole .<br />
A poet to be a theorist has to be endowed with critical and philosophical faculty. Arnold had those gifts. He<br />
withdrew from public circulation his poetic drama Empedocles On Etna because, in his self-assessment,<br />
this poem didn’t meet the classical ideal he was advocating to the poets of his age. It is a poem, he thought in<br />
which a continuous state of mental distress in prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which<br />
there is everything to be endured, nothing to br done . In such situations, he said there is inevitably something<br />
morbid, in the description of them something monotonous . Hence, such poems or works are not fit for public<br />
reading. It was a measure of intellectual honesty on his part to have withdrawn his own poem from publication<br />
as it was composed of elements that were contrary to the dictates of his own convictions.<br />
He dwells on his literary and poetic principles and convictions time and again. In a letter to Arthur Clough,<br />
comparing the Romantics with the Elizabethans he says: Those d-d Elizbethan poets were the troubleshooters.<br />
Keats was a mere style and form-seeker . Keats and Shelly had exuberance of expression, the<br />
charm, the richness of images, and felicity of the Elizabethan poets . And, with all these qualities the Romantics<br />
like Keats and Shelley had done disservice to the cause of <strong>English</strong> Poetry because true poetry does not<br />
consist of exquisite bits and images . Poetry can only subsist by its contents, by becoming complete<br />
Magister vitae as the poetry of the ancients did . As for his own Victorian Age, he thought it was unpoetical ,<br />
it sprawled all over in its true blankness and barrenness and unpoetrylessness (Sic) . He also condemned<br />
the so-called Spasmodic school of Poetry among whose followers may be counted Dobell, Bailey, Marston,<br />
Ebenezer Jones, Bigger and Alexander Amith. Writing about them Buckley notes: Inflamed by brewed<br />
passions and their own ranting emotion.. yield to a Titanic egotism... they neglected over-all theme and action<br />
to magnify isolated emotions....<br />
Arnold assigned a very high mission and function to Poetry in his theory. The time is not far off when poetry<br />
would replace even science and religion . As its function is not mere diversion or entertainment. It will<br />
interpret life for us. "Poetry" is, therefore, criticism of life . It creates a kind of anti-environment to our own<br />
mundane world and thus makes us conscious of the alternatives available to us to our own environment. To<br />
put it a little differently, Poetry is criticism of life in the same way as a good person is a criticism of a bad<br />
person; or a good life is a criticism of a bad life; poetry presents ideals - characters, actions, and moods that<br />
serve as contrasts or alternatives or other possibilities to what is available in life actually. He has an elaborate<br />
theory about these possibilities of poetry. Poetry is a criticism of life under certain conditions and under<br />
certain laws, as he calls them, these are the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty . In other words, the poet<br />
does not create life; he/she recreates it in another medium. Therefore, the laws of poetry have to be different<br />
since the situations and persons of poetry cannot be the same or identical to the persons and situations of life<br />
itself. They cannot be photographic reproductions either. So, it creates or should create ideal contrasts to life<br />
that one can seek to realize in life. Poet has to organise his/her matter under the laws of poetic truth and<br />
poetic beauty. That is the form of expression has to be aligned with the content of poetry. Truth and high<br />
Seriousness must emanate from the poet s expression and creation. Poetry should have healing power for<br />
the pains, sorrows and imperfections of life.<br />
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The Arnoldian dictum Criticism of life has been matter of continuous debate in academic circles. Arnold<br />
himself explained it as the noble and profound application of ideas to life . It is a kind of moral injunction. He<br />
also insisted that poetry ought to be written in a grand style . He explained it in his On Translating-Homer:<br />
The Grabd style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted treats with simplicity or with severity<br />
a serious subject .<br />
Arnold s Theory is only a theory and poetry cannot be bound within the limits of any theoretical framework.<br />
Therefore, we need not rely too much on it either while applying his assumptions or dictates to evaluate or<br />
appraise other poets or his own poetry or poems but his theory serves the purpose of agitating our minds and<br />
examining the thoughts and principles behind his theory for studying the function and role of Poetry and of<br />
Poets in relation to the Society. His theory, like any theory, cannot be expected to be valid universally and in<br />
all conditions, though it is general enough to be called so.<br />
Nature and Wordsworth’s Influence<br />
Matthew Arnold had close association with Worthsworth, and in spite of Wordsworth, being a Romantic<br />
poet, not fulfilling the entire gamut of criteria set by Arnold, he admired Wordsworth and his poetry. Arnold s<br />
masters were classical Greek poets and dramatists and in his theory of poetry Arnold draws inspiration from<br />
the Greek as has been discussed elaborately elsewhere in this book. Wordthworth was carried away by<br />
human passions and defined poetry as an overflow of powerful feelings . Arnold believe that passions have<br />
to be restrained and controlled and contained as was the practice with the Greek classicists such as Homer<br />
and Euripedes and Scophocles. Wordsworth was subjective and celebrated individual freedom and liberty<br />
and ideas of the French Revolution in its fancy, though he was completely disillusioned by its butchery and<br />
bloodiness in its later phases. So much was he adversely affected by this unexpected development that he<br />
lost poetic inspiration and became insipid in his poems. But, though Wordsworth failed to see life steadily and<br />
see it whole , his poetry had a great deal of healing power and it was this element and quality of his poetry<br />
that made Arnold set aside his classical ideals and fall for Wordsworth s poetry. Largely, Wordsworth s<br />
inspiration came from Nature. He saw in Nature a divine agency at work, This divine agency was capable of<br />
influencing and ennobling human beings. Nature was capable of enabling man through her benign contact to<br />
regain his innocence he daily loses to the work-a-day world of profit and loss. Arnold, on the other hand,<br />
product of his own age, (Victorian age as he was, much influenced by new discoveries of science according<br />
to which Nature was imperfect and Man has to exploit it for his own use) did not regard Nature as endowed<br />
with divine attributes. But, he certainly believed that Nature could, in its serene moods, calm the agitated,<br />
disturbed and doubt-ridden mind of man. Wordsworth was a family friend of the Arnolds and also lived in the<br />
vicinity in the Lake District where Arnold also resided. In his Memorial Verses, written on the death of<br />
Wordsworth at the request of Wordsworth s son-n-law(see discussion of Memorial Verses under Critical<br />
Summary and Commentary in the earlier section of this book), pays his homage to Wordsworth s memory,<br />
thus: (He)<br />
Laid us as lay at birth<br />
On the cool flowery lap of earth.<br />
And, in another poem, THE YOUTH OF NATURE, he says about Wordsworth:<br />
But he was a priest to us all<br />
Of the wonder and bloom of the world.<br />
But, Arnold never became a Pantheist like Wordsworth. He did not personify or deify Nature. Nature for<br />
Arnold was not animate as it was for Wordsworth. According to Stopford Brooke, Arnold s is frequently the<br />
nature the modern science has revealed to us, matter in motion, always acting rigidly, according to certain<br />
ways of Nature, which for want of wiser term, we call laws. For the first time this view of nature enters into<br />
<strong>English</strong> poetry with Arnold. He sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees their terrors and dreadfulness<br />
and their relentlessness. But what in his poetry he chiefly sees is the peace of Natures s obedience to law.,
Matthew Arnold<br />
and the everlasting youth of her unchanging life. Nor is his Nature poetry like that of keats who is found of<br />
painting Dryads and Naiads and fairy-like personifications of Nature. If there are somewhat Romantic<br />
echoes of Nature in his poetry they are Wordsworthian. While examining Wordsworth s influence on Arnold<br />
as a poet of Nature we have to understand the very distinctive aspects of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature:<br />
Wordsworth the healer and Wordsworth the visionary. Arnold was able to comprehend Wordsworth as a<br />
healer but he never understood him as a visionary , though he was devoted to Wordsworth as an elder<br />
poet. He could never hear or receive intimitations from immortality. Nor could share with the elder poet his<br />
moments of ecstacy in the company of Nature. Not rejoicing but tranquility, not elevating passion but serenity,<br />
not joy but peace were the gifts of Nature for Arnold.<br />
This peace was also a kind of for bearance, a kind of resignation. Or a satisfaction that comes from performing<br />
a duty like Nature does its work without complaining, day in and out. Stars shine, the moon shines, the tide<br />
ebbs and flows, clouds rain and they have their joy in their doing so! Or as Grierson and Smith observe about<br />
Arnold s response to Nature: "It was the steadfast self-sufficiency of Nature as she went about the business<br />
of her seasons that calmed and strengthened him . Such images of Nature are scattered all over his poetry,<br />
especially, in Quiet Work, Self–Dependence and Resignation: toil, unsever d from tranquillity , glorious<br />
tasks or Nature s quiet work and this quietly working Nature can teach him to do likewise travelling in<br />
life s common way in cheerful godliness . And in his Resignation, he states forthrightly:<br />
That general life, which does not cease,<br />
Whose secret is not joy, but peace.<br />
Critics have noted Arnold s very accurate descriptions of nature and its doing. Some of them think this<br />
accuracy of detail as his unique speciality. Remarks Hugh Walker, a historian of Victorian Era. In their<br />
wonderful accuracy, Arnold s references to nature illustrate the consciousness of this intellect which is one<br />
of his most honourable distinction." He could be described a botanist poet for his highly impressive accurate<br />
description of mountains, lakes, rivers and other phenomena. He was very precise in noting the facts of<br />
Nature, as would be graphically clear from a few passages from his verse:<br />
Sand–strewn caverns cool and deep<br />
Where the winds are all asleep<br />
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam<br />
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,<br />
Where the sea–beasts, ranged all round,<br />
Feed in the ooze of their pasture–ground;<br />
Where the sea–snakes coil and twine,<br />
Dry their mail and bask in the brine<br />
Where great whales come sailing by,<br />
Sail and sail, with unshut eye.<br />
– The Forsaken Merman<br />
Long since and in some quiet churchyard laid--<br />
Some country–nook where Ov r the unknown grave<br />
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,<br />
Under a dark-red fruited yew–tree s shade.<br />
– The Scholar Gypsy<br />
The Sea is calm tonight,<br />
The tide is full, this moon lies fair<br />
Upon the straights, – on the French coast the light<br />
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,<br />
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.<br />
– Dover Beach<br />
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Poetry<br />
Silent, quiet, serene, tranquil is Arnold s Nature as Lewish Jones remarks: He loved Nature in her quieter<br />
and more subdued moods; he preferred her silences to her many voices, moonlight to sunlight, the sea<br />
retreating from the moon blanched land with Its mechanically long withdrawing roar to the sea in tumult<br />
and storm. The sea was, from him, the one element in which he discovered the deepest reflection of his own<br />
melancholy and sense of isolation.<br />
The sea, the moon and water are the recurring symbols of the poetry. In Dover Beach these symbols appear<br />
with tour de force with a peculiar Arnoldesque impact:<br />
Only, from the long line of spray<br />
Where the sea meets the moon–blanch d land<br />
Listen! You hear the grating roar<br />
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling<br />
At their return, up the high strand.<br />
At times, Arnold s Nature appears within the world of men to add a larger than life dimension to human<br />
personality as in Shakespeare. Shakespeare the towering master of words, has been depicted as a colossus<br />
planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea. as the lesser mortals are in the sea of life enlisted . The Oxford<br />
countryside which had made him play truant from the classes has been portrayed with love and tenderness,<br />
memory adding charm and wonder to his descriptions. Frank Watts says: The country dear to Matthew<br />
Arnold was a very quiet country. Hinksey and Cumner the haunts of his youth to which he always returned<br />
on his visits to Oxford, were not what are called beauty spots. They were merely uplands of ancient pasture,<br />
down some of which, by the time of Thyrsis, the plough boy s team had already gone; with a bit of woodland,<br />
a wide outlook over Oxford it self, and the surrounding valleys, the little footpaths running from farm to farm<br />
beneath high hedges.<br />
In The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis Nature as depicted by Arnold is serene and tranquil and bears a sharp<br />
contrast to the hectic life and sick hurry and divided aims of the materialistic world and help Arnold turn<br />
his poetry into a criticism of life . Nature s changing scenes are recorded with care. Flowers have caught<br />
his fancy and exhale an unearthly perfume: As in The Scholar Gipsy<br />
Of thou has given them store,<br />
Of flowers–the frail leafed white anemone,<br />
Dark blue–bells drenched with dews of summer eves<br />
And purple orchises with spotted leaves –<br />
In some of his poems, Arnold expresses his belief in the indifference of Nature to man. Far from being a<br />
divine and benign agency penetrating through the wall of separation between itself and man s world as in<br />
Wordsworth, Arnold s Nature appears to be indifferent, unconcerned and non challant. Nature outcasts<br />
Man. That is a fact. And Arnold is wistfully aware of it. In the Youth of Nature, he says:<br />
We, O Nature, depart<br />
Thou survivest us! this,<br />
This I know is the law.<br />
In Literature and Dogma, he forthrightly states: Ah! what pitfalls are in that word Nature . Arnold does not<br />
accept the proposition that Man can exist in harmony with Nature. On the contrary, he believes that Nature<br />
is incomplete and if Man forsakes Society in order to live with Nature, he will lose his humanity. It will be a<br />
life of naked instincts and of not cultivated minds. If for Wordsworth and Coleridge, Nature had oneness<br />
with Man, for Arnold, Man and Nature have been made to dwell apart from each other. Man can seek<br />
calmness of mind and soothing of his nerves amidst Nature in selective places like Dover Beach or Oxford<br />
countryside. Thus, Arnold the Wordsworthian is also Arnold the Darwinian very conscious of Man s tenuous<br />
relationship with Nature.
Matthew Arnold<br />
A Note on Arnold’s Intellectualism<br />
Arnold s Theory of Poetry as discussed in the foregoing sections of this book clearly indicates that he was<br />
not a passionate or emotional poet. He preferred serious element of thought in his poetry and almost all his<br />
poems display his intellectualist proclivity. He did not believe in singing idle songs nor did he believe that<br />
poetry was a form of entertainment. He thought Poetry had high destiny and could even replace science and<br />
religion as a formative influence on man s culture. In his essay on Joubert he defined Literature as the<br />
criticism of life and in his Essays on Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Chaucer he applied the test of the Laws of<br />
poetic Truth and High Seriousness in appraising their poetry. A conscious poet and cogitative thinker and<br />
essayist could not but be an intellectual writer of Verse. He strove all through his career as a poet and thinker<br />
to propagate this belief that a poet s greatness depended upon the degree to which he applies the noble and<br />
profound ideas to life, and it is this quality of a poet s work that distinguishes him from transitory writers who<br />
may write powerfully on one aspect of life or the other but who never are able to make us see life steadily<br />
and see it whole as did the Greek poets of ancient times such as Homer and Sophocles.<br />
He agreed with Wordsworth that poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge and that poetry is<br />
the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science . And he himself sought to keep the<br />
highest norms of poetic composition in mind while publishing his own poetry. He even withdrew from publication<br />
his poetic drama Emjpedocles On Etna because by his own standards it did not meet the high criteria he had<br />
set for poetry.<br />
Arnold s intellectualism can be traced and studied as a part of his classicism. They both intertwine in the<br />
design and style of his poetry. In his insistence that a poet cannot afford to expend all his talent and genius on<br />
projecting the beauty of the separate parts instead of subordinating them to his sense of the whole, he was<br />
propagating Hellenism or the Greek practice of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. And, this philosophy<br />
is a part of his intellectualism. He always quested for simple and pure style. But this simplicity was loaded<br />
with meaning and significance. Just as a crystal is the purest element of a substance and carries within it all<br />
its essence so also simple and pure style must communicate Truth in its essence. Arnold came immediately<br />
after the Romantics in terms of time and history. He found the poetry of the Romantics and that of their<br />
imitators more overcloyed with emotion and feeling. Instead of purifying the Truth of life, it, through its<br />
overwhelming passionate expression, flooded or drowned the Truth of life. Instead to helping us penetrate<br />
reality and have clear vision, it confused our minds and coloured, if not blurred our" vision" of Truth or Reality.<br />
Unthinking endorsement of all that was going on in the name of material and scientific progress and democracy<br />
also came under his scrutinizing gaze. He debunked these ideas of progress and prosperity and largest good<br />
for the largest numbers as illusions. He, thus, went against the grain of his own age. And, this Herculean<br />
effort required intellectual stamina and acumen. We find the evidence of this intellectual quality in his poems<br />
as much as in his prose works.<br />
Goethe, the German sage and writer once remarked about Byron that whenever he thinks, he becomes a<br />
child or in other words, he loses his maturity. Byron was not a great thinker though he was a a powerful<br />
poet. But in the case of Arnold, it is the other way around. He is not one of those who sing because they<br />
must. Often he is more like one who has thought out his thoughts first and then set himself deliberately to give<br />
them a practical form, than one to whom verse is the most natural vehicle of expression . He was philosophic<br />
in his outlook and he dwelt on the problems and challenges of life, mostly of the community or those of his<br />
society and of his times in his poetry. His revival in the later part of the twentieth century is entirely due to his<br />
intellectual element which has gained currency and respectability in our own times. Larger number of<br />
universities and colleges and large numbers of students and readers have also contributed to Arnold s survival<br />
beyond his own age, compared to Tennyson who was overwhelmingly popular in the Victorian age but is a no<br />
longer read with that avidity any more. H. W. Paul correctly observes:<br />
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No poet of modern times, perhaps no <strong>English</strong> poet of any time, appeals so directly and so exclusively to the<br />
cultivated taste of the educated classes. To say that a classical education was necessary for understanding<br />
him would be to go too far. But a capacity for appreciating from and style, the charm of rhythm and the<br />
beauty of words, is undoubtedly essential. It may be said of Arnold with truth, and it is his chief praise, that<br />
the more widely mental culture spreads, the higher his fame will be. He was not indeed a profound thinker.<br />
He did not illuminate, like Wordsworth, with a single flash the abyss of man s nature and the inmost recesses<br />
of the human soul. He was not, as Plato was, a spectator of all time and all existence. His aim was, as he said<br />
of Sophocles, to see life steadily and see it whole, But he saw it as a scholar and a man of letters .<br />
Arnold was not a profound philosopher but he had a philosophic bent of mind. He was an interpreter of man s<br />
life. And he was also an interpreter of other minds, greater than his own. He lived up to his own ideals. He<br />
tried to know the best that was ever written or said in the western world and even beyond. Some critics have<br />
opined that after Milton he is the greatest <strong>English</strong> scholar who was also a poet. Education was his profession<br />
as he was a School Inspector. He was also a professor at Oxford. He understood Education in the broadest<br />
sense of the word. He was not a narrow-minded orthodox person. In his writing we do not find a trace of<br />
orthodoxy, pedantry, assumed manner or mannerisms, nor was he overly and obstructively technical. His<br />
work is academic-full of mental labour and consciously communicative. It is imbued with culture. It is work<br />
written by a learned person and meant for other learned or learned persons. He had his intellectual biases.<br />
The one most distinguishing of them all was his total acceptance of the Greek as ideal and perfect masters of<br />
the creative art. And he used their performance as the touchstone to judge and measure other poets and their<br />
works. As a man, writer critic and poet, his creed was Hellenism. He looked upon Europe as unity for<br />
expanding intellectual and spiritual life of the western world at that time. European was the common Tradition<br />
to which he wanted to belong; he was not of insular inclination preferring the self-complacent life of an<br />
islander belonging only British Isles.<br />
Arnold’s Language and Style<br />
It is helpful to know the distinction Arnold made between that which is rhetorical and what he called poetical<br />
sense. For him mere beauty of a poetic passage or lines or verbal manipulations for poetic use of words or<br />
heightened pitch of expression were not the essence of poetry. In his letter to Clough, a friend and likeminded<br />
person and writer, he says: a growing sense of deficiency of the beautiful in your poems, and of this<br />
alone being properly poetical as distinguished from rhetorical, educational or metaphysical;, made me speak<br />
as I did...... I will die protesting against the world that the other (the rhetorical) is false and jarring . His major<br />
complaint against the Elizabethan poet, and more vociferously, against the Romantic poets. was that they had<br />
no verbal discipline or control over their diction or use of language. And, they cared little to together the<br />
strings of relationship between the content and form of their poetry, or compositions. He believed that Shelly<br />
and Keats were highly irresponsible in this regard and by their examples had damaged <strong>English</strong> poetry. These<br />
two Romantic greats, according to Arnold, had only exuberance of expression , the charm, the richness of<br />
images, and the felicity of the Elizabethan poets.<br />
Keats especially was only a style and form seeker . Arnold had his own criteria to judge and appraise the<br />
greatness of a true poet: there are two offices of poetry one to add to one s store of thoughts and feelings<br />
another to compose and elevate the mind by a sustained tone, numerous allusions, and a grand style . In<br />
fact, he asserted that Poetry can only subsist by its contents and not by exquiaite bits and images. A poet,<br />
therefore, should not get lost in parts, and episodes and ornamental work but must press forward to the<br />
whole .<br />
This brief backdrop will arerve as a necessary curtain raiser for a fuller understanding of Arnold s grand<br />
style , a phrse he appears to have borrowed from Sir Hoshua Reynolds in his Discourses on Art. But he<br />
seems to use it in a some what different way. As stated earlier elsewhere in the present book, his 1853<br />
Preface to his Poems is a significant contribution to the history of criticism. And, it is in that Preface Arnold
Matthew Arnold<br />
makes his point on Grand Style clear with reference to the works of the Greek poets: They (the Greeks)<br />
regarded the whole; we regard the parts; with them, the action predominted over the expression of it: with us,<br />
the expression predominates over the action. Not that they failed in experssion, or were inattentive to it; on<br />
the contrary, they are the highets models of expression, and unurpassed masters of the Grand Style." In his<br />
reply to a reviewer who questioned him as to what he meant by Grand Style, Arnold wrote: The Grand<br />
Style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious<br />
subject . Arnold found Milton observing severity of treatment; in Homer s Illiad he found an example of<br />
simplicity. He felt that neither simplilcity nor severity is the hall-mark of Cowper, Alexander Pope, Chapman,<br />
Francis Henry Newman. HIstorian of <strong>English</strong> Literature Compton Ricket says that Arnold was a fine artist,<br />
more limited than Tennyson in his music, less virile than Browning in his grasp of life; but unequalled in<br />
depiciting within wistful moods of the spirit.<br />
Arnold did imbiled lucidity, brevity and clarity from the clssical Greek masters as he had studied them at<br />
Oxford as a student, He does not strive after an effect as did Keats. According to Duffin, Arnold s verse<br />
shows feeling under control, emotion singing though bridled - the poet s emotion must be roused by beauty,<br />
and those other high essences amid which he is privileged to dwell, and control must be that of artistic<br />
sensibility. In this latter aspect Arnold never fails: it is this that makes his irregular verse (not generally a<br />
medium to be commended) so completely satisfying . His style has grace and elegance. He does not allow<br />
levity of expression or crudeness even to make an exception to prove the rule of elgance. Nobility of thought<br />
as well as expression are consistently and rigorously pursued in his compositions, whether of prose or in<br />
verse. Some lines, of course,stand out as shining examples of his nobility of thought and expression as do the<br />
following lines from The Scholar Gipsy:<br />
Still nursing the unconquerable hope<br />
Still clutching the inviolable shade.<br />
Whatever he wrote he wrote at a sustained level of expression. W.L.Jones says, Few poets at any time<br />
have produced so much which is so uniformly excellent in style . A few examples will serve as illustration for<br />
the above remarks.<br />
“Eyes too expressive to be blue,<br />
Too lovely to be grey”<br />
This is how he draws a contrast between Marguerite and Lucy. The entire Grand Style of Scophocles<br />
has been summed up in half a line: He saw life steadily and saw it whole , so also the essence and spirit of<br />
Shakespeare s Tragedies is summed up in a short sentence: All pains the immortal spirit must endure . His<br />
observastion on the much touted industrial civilization are terse as follows:<br />
“Strange disease of modern life<br />
With its sick hurry, its divided aims”.<br />
The sea of poignancy that characterizes the scene of separation of The Forsaken Merman and the pain and<br />
agony of alienated affections between Husband and wife, and between children and their mother Margret<br />
are succinctly uttered as:<br />
“Childern dear, was it yesterday?”<br />
The Victorian doubt and confusion of the times and blind pursuit of materialism and general feeling of boredom<br />
and aimlessness are captured in a few poetic words with astonishing brevity that go on reflecting the context<br />
of times: Ignorant armies clash by night . The whole of Dover Beach, in fact, is resonant with Miltonic<br />
Movement of verse as we find in Lycidas, Arnold s poetry does not have the melodious tones of Tennyson s<br />
poetry.<br />
Again, Arnold cannot be called a symbolist like Yeats but certain symbols recur in his poems hauntingly<br />
suggestive of both personal and subjective melancholy as well as of myth and history. The Sea is a complex<br />
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Poetry<br />
symbol in Dover Beachd that echoes and signifies the Victorian doubt and confusion and classical assuredness<br />
and faith of former ages through its ebb and flow. The sea in this poem is also a symbol of the poet s own<br />
melancholy self. In The Forsaken Merman, the sea is symbolic of a separate world, of alienation of human<br />
world and the natural world at one level and of estrangement between huuman and cultural entities on the<br />
other. Margret leaves the Kings of the seas but she also leaves a husband , a part of the failed institutions<br />
of man s world, that is marriage.<br />
Symbolism apart, critics have also noted a peculiar verbal quality of Arnold s verse. Again, as Duffin points<br />
out most cogently, we have to refer to the music, sweet and sad of Dover Beach, especially of the ebb and<br />
flow of the sea:<br />
“But now I only hear/Its melancholy long/withdrawing roar<br />
Retreating, to the breath/Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/<br />
And naked shingles of the world.”<br />
Arnod’s contribution to free verse has been a matter of divergent opinions among critics. Saintsbury was not<br />
much appreciative of the internal rhythms of Arnold s poetry. However, there are other critics who have not<br />
missed to analyses Arnold s experiments with free verse. Robert Buchanan, quite early in 1872 dwelled on<br />
this aspect of Arnold s style in an essay in Paul s Magazine. Writes he : Just at this present moment we<br />
want a poet, if we want anything, and we particularly want a great poet, with the courage to "loosen" the<br />
conventional poetic speech-among living men, one poet, at least, is to be applauded for having, inspired by<br />
Goethe, kicked at the traces of rhyme, and written such poems as the Strayed Reveller , Rugby chapel<br />
and Heine s Grave . These poems are written almost in prose but have plausibly skillful rhythms. He treats<br />
rhythms as jingling of like endings . Regular mtetre is not a feature of his verse. like his observations of<br />
nature, his sense of rhythm too is accurate. His poems are interspersed with dactyllic and trochiac measures.<br />
His stanzas are often varied. The variety of his verse-form is consonant with the variety of moods in his<br />
poetry. Though, he was not so successful in handling blank verse. Similarly, Arnold is not very fond of<br />
metophor considered by Aristotle as the very life of poetry. The poet, in the Greek tradition, is regarded as a<br />
creator. The poet creates the language in which he writes; he does not merely use it. Therefore, metophor,<br />
which in a way is a device for extending the meaning and recharging it with new possibilities is a potent<br />
instrument in the hands of a poet. Arnold, however, lacks in metaphoric use of language.<br />
On the other hand, he is fond of using homeric epithets, comparisons or similies. These Greek similes are<br />
quite extended and elaborate. At times, if the reader is not clear about their mythical context, he/she might<br />
find himself/herself lost. for example, in The Scholar Gipsy at the end of the poem, Arnold introduces the<br />
Greek simile of Dido and Aeneas who betrayed her and this and this merges with the comparison with Tyrian<br />
Trader who shunned and avoided the greek ship. The reader is sequenced to be equipped with classical<br />
learning to understand the ending of the poem while the rest of the poem is not so demanding as it revolves<br />
around the living legend of the Oxford scholar who became a gipsy and led a wild life in the hope of learning<br />
hypnotism. Though the ending is not illogioal and, in a way, enhances the poignancy as well as the strength of<br />
the message of the poem which is to exhort the reader not to yield to the temptation of compromise in life and,<br />
instead continue to be indifferent and willing to avoid any compromise in order to continue the life s journey<br />
along a difficult and tortuous path with unshaken faith and unassailable will. Similar examples can be quoted<br />
from his other poems, most striking of them being from Sohrab and Rustum.(for detailed discussion of this<br />
point in the Scholar Gipsy, please read the section on Critical Summary /commentary on the text of The<br />
Scholar Gipsy, please read the earlier part of this book).<br />
Saintsbury, historian of <strong>English</strong> Criticism, believes that Arnold s Preface to his 1853 Poems was his manifesto<br />
of classicism wherein he set the criterion for his own poetic style. He tried to revive classicism both in form<br />
and content.
Matthew Arnold<br />
Short Question Answers<br />
(200 Word approximately)<br />
Q. 1. What is a pastoral elegy? Which of the following poems can be described as a pastoral elegy?<br />
(a) Dover Beach (b) The Scholar Gipsy (c) The Forsaken Merman.<br />
Ans.: The word postoral has its root in the Latin word pastor which means a shepherd or one who<br />
looks after the sheep. Pastoral poetry is a special genre or type of poetry which deals with the<br />
life of shepherds who dwelt in rural areas or rustic countryside, also described as bucolic life.<br />
Theocritus, Virgil, Bion and Moschus, in earlier times, wrote pastoral poetry and followed certion<br />
conventions. for example, a deceased person whom the poet wishes to pay his homage is shown<br />
in his pastoral poem as a shepherd, who lives amidst nature which is personified, and mourns the<br />
death of the poet s subject like a human person. The poem usually began with an invocation to<br />
the Muse (Goddess of Poetry). The poem contained many classical reference or allusions, and<br />
rich descriptions of flora and fauna in a rural setting. The poet then heightens his themes of life,<br />
justice scarce on earth, the deceased (main)character s struggles and suffering and finally merging<br />
with the Divine in death and attainment of peace.<br />
Elegy is from the Greek word elegos which signifies a mournful poem, sad and sombre in<br />
mood, a reflective lament. Arnold is regarded as the most elegiac of <strong>English</strong> poets, who wrote<br />
pastoral elegies, combining the above two forms-pastoral and elegiac.<br />
Q. 2. What do you understand by the term nostalgia ? What Rind of nostalgia do you sense and feel<br />
in Arnold s The Scholar Gipsy (b) What poetic function does nostralgia perform in The Scholar<br />
Gipsy ?<br />
Dictionary meaning of nostalgia is homesickness from the Greek notos or returning home.<br />
but as a literary term often used in book reviews and critical essays, nostalgia suggests craving<br />
or pinning for the past life of gone by days in a person’s life or history. The past usually appears<br />
more pleasant and for poets and writers this psychological fact becomes a tour de force of their<br />
art. It is a tendency more generally found inromantic poets but classical poets equally go back in<br />
time and highlight the virtues of life as it prevailed then. The emphasis, while remembering the<br />
past, may be on the subjective or personal or it may be common and general. Arnold’s poetry<br />
combines both these elements.<br />
In The scholar Gipsy, for example, Arnold recalls the Oxford days of his own as well as that of<br />
the legendary Scholar Gipsy of the poem. He also dwells upon the lost values which were once<br />
practised by men of olden and golden times. This is the most important function fnostalgia plays<br />
in this poem. It is offered as a criticism of life . Things past were good and Things present are<br />
unpoetic ; past ages were glorious, the present times are nasty; full of half believers and<br />
divided aims while The scholar Gipsy had one aim, one business, one desire .<br />
Nostalgia sustains and holds together the diverse elements and moods of the poem.<br />
Q. 3. Between two worlds one dead,/the other powerless to be born .<br />
Are these lines from Dover Beach ? (b) Apply them to a discussion of the theme of Dover<br />
Beach.<br />
Ans. (a) No, these lines are from Arnold s Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse<br />
(b) But these lines aptly sum up the theme as well as the mood of the poem Dover Beach and<br />
are oft quoted lines of the poet to describe the Victorian Age and also other times of transition.<br />
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The situations of the two poems named above were similar. In both the cases, Arnold and his<br />
wife Lucy visit the scene which later became famous because of these two poems. Both the<br />
Monastery in Grande Chartruese and Dover Beach offer criticsm of life, a creed with the poet<br />
Arnold. The ascetic and sparse life and living of the imtes of the life, the monastery are in sharp<br />
and contrast to the crazy mterialism and luxury of the victorians as pleceived commented upon<br />
by Arnold. Also, the firmness of their faith and divided aims and half-beliefs of victorians are<br />
contrasted in the same vein.<br />
Dover Beach was written after his marriage to Lucy. They visit the <strong>English</strong> channel on a<br />
honeymoon night but the mood is sombre and melancholy. In this solitude on the sea, the poet s<br />
thoughts remain embedded in the question of his own times, the Victorian age. The rise of<br />
materialism and doubt, loss of faith and good values of life trouble his mind which sees symbolized<br />
in the ebb and flow of the waters spread out before him in the moonlit night. This poem is shorter<br />
but deeper in thought and melancholy. Many other poets have expressed their resentment and<br />
despair with their own times. T.S. Elipot s The Waste land through the image of unreal city<br />
and London bridge is falling down,".. and wordsworth in his famous lines The world is too<br />
much with us also offer criticism of life and hollowness of the worldly existence where lost<br />
souls flit about like bits of paper against a stormy wind.<br />
Q. 4. Study The Scholar Gipsy as a comment on the disease of modern life ?<br />
Ans. The expression disease of modern life has a direct reference to the context of The Scholar<br />
Gipsy. But, his criticism of modern, victorien life, is not confined to this poem alone. Infact. it is<br />
a consistently recurring theme, not only of his poems but also of his prose works, especially. the<br />
essays. The decline of culture lowering of values, worsening of taste of pepole amidst rise of<br />
materialism, increased knowledge, rising of expectations of ordinary pepole with the expansion<br />
of democracy in England made the Victorian scene a confusing spectacle to sensitive minds like<br />
that of Matthew Arnold. In his letters to Clough and his elegy Thyrsis he is more direct in his<br />
debunking of his own times and its so called progress in all walks of life, especially in science,<br />
economy and democracy;and, he makes it clear that the miserable and confused mind of the<br />
average Victorian is the strange disease called modern life . He himself remained in its grip all<br />
through life. Though he was not driven out of this modern life and, unlike Robert Browning who<br />
lived a good part of his life in Italy, Arnold continued to live in England yet his prophetic voice<br />
never ceased to lash out the sick mind of his age, all classes of his society.<br />
Q. 5. Is the speaker in Dover Beach alienated? How do you interpret alienation? what is his answer<br />
to this alienation and lack of faith in the world around?<br />
Ans. Yes, the speaker often identified with the poet himself feels alienated from his society, the Victorian<br />
society. Lonely in a crowd is a modern phenomenon, much commemted upon by social critics,<br />
literary commentators and psychic consultants in our own time. Arnold himself, elsewhere says:<br />
we mortal millions live alone<br />
Alienation has to be interpreted in existentialist terms. In fact. modern Existentialist philosophers,<br />
poets, dramatists find it an aspect of man s life in the time-world. The more a person becomes<br />
conscious of his situation in life, more he feels estranged from his society and milieu. This<br />
phenomenon is more peculiar to urban living. In the machine age, the living element in the human<br />
soul has lesser scope for self-expression. In a world where every one is crazily running after the<br />
same amenities and comforts of life, the scope of individuality and uniqueness becomes limited.<br />
Thus prosperity accompanied by rising self-consciousness disturbs the mind. If he chooses not<br />
to listen to his inner voice, he is likely to be reduced to a mere object and if he seeks self-
Matthew Arnold<br />
realization with in the bounds of society, he finds himself at conflict with his social surroundings.<br />
This is a dilemma not easy of solution and estrangement between man and his environment<br />
grows.<br />
Individual love is the poet s answer to this estrangement : Ah ; love, let s be true to one<br />
another/ for this world which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams/ So various, so<br />
beautiful, so new/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/ nor certitude,nor peace, nor help for<br />
pain<br />
Q. 6. Write a short note on the past that has vanished with reference to The scholar Gipsy and<br />
Dover Beach.<br />
Ans. The elegiac strain is strong in Arnold s poetry. For him the whole world was nothing but a<br />
darkling plain and modern aristocracy, Middle classes, and the lower classes were the<br />
Barbarians , philistines and the populace , all with degenerative tastes and values. He turned<br />
to the post for succur and sustenance and relief from mental pain. His grief was not personal.<br />
He was a man of culture and cultural leader of his times. It the general decline of culture and<br />
disappearance of order that disturbed his mind and he sought solace in the past and gone by ages<br />
of Greak and classical time. Whether it was an imaginary world or not, for the poet s imagination<br />
it provided a rich resource for recharging his mental batteries.<br />
Dover Beach and The scholar Gipsy are interesting mixture of Romanticism and classicism.<br />
Romantics always look to the past as distance in time lends charm to the things past. A ruin has<br />
a grandeur of its own and tickles our memory to see through time and re-live the past and<br />
imagine the building that this ruin once was. In these impersonal elegies, Arnold mourns the<br />
death of Faith which once was like the sea spread out in the moonlit night and girdled the whole<br />
earth but now it is only dry pebbles or shingles on the shore! In the Scholar Gipsy too loss of<br />
Faith theme is repeated again and again in the later part of the poem.<br />
Q. 7. Explain briefly the context of the following lines poetry<br />
(i) “He read each wound, each weakness clear,<br />
And stuck his finger on the place<br />
And said: “Thou ailest here, and here 1”<br />
(ii) O Rotha, with thy living wave!<br />
Sing him thy best! for few or none<br />
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.<br />
(i) These lines occur in the poem Memorial Verses, Arnold wrote on the occasion of William<br />
Wordsworth s death on April 23, 1850. But the poet also recalls Byron and Goethe in his<br />
memorial to wordsworth as they all represented an age to which they made contributions as<br />
reformers or fighters against the wrong tendencies of time. These line refer to Goethe, a<br />
German Philosopher, writer, poet dramatist and novelist. Goethe died in 1832 but his work is<br />
immortal. He made very correct diagnosis of the disease of modern times and of his<br />
contemporay society even as he very accurately pin pointed the flaws and foibles of his<br />
society even as a doctor or physician examines a patient and feels his ailing body. And by<br />
digging his fingers can feel and find the exact places where the pain arises so that he can<br />
administer the right medicines or provide the right medical aid (ii) These lines are also taken<br />
from Arnold s Memorial Verses. Rotha is the name of the river along whose banks<br />
Wordsworth the poet was buried on his death. The poet exhorts the river to sing his best<br />
songs through lilting of his waves because the river has the right listener. Wordsworth himself<br />
was a poet of powerful, overflow of feelings. So he knows and can appreciate the rhythm<br />
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Poetry<br />
and poetry of Nature represented by Rotha. Though WW is gone from the world of men, he<br />
has come to Rotha, the lap of nature.<br />
Q. 8. Explain with reference to the context the following:<br />
(i) Come away, away children;<br />
Come children, come down !<br />
(ii) When the sweet airs come seaward.........<br />
We will gaze, from the sand-hills<br />
Singing: “There dwells a loved one / But cruel is she<br />
She left lonely for ever<br />
The kings of the sea.<br />
(i) These lines have been taken from The Forsaken Merman, a narrative, sad poem of<br />
separation by Matthew Arnold. Here the Merman is calling his children who like him feel<br />
deserted by Margret. Margret was a woman from the human world but she married the<br />
merman of the poem who was half-human and half-sea creature. After years of happy<br />
living and raising a family of five children, Margret one day comes for a visit to the surface<br />
of the Sea. On the shore, she listerns to the clanging of Churchbells. It is Easter time. She<br />
seeks permission of her husband to go back to her village church so she can pray and save<br />
her soul . The Merman lets her go but asks her to come back soon. Margret never returns.<br />
The lines occur when some time has passed and the merman goes out again toward the<br />
village. He is very aggrieved at his being deserted by his wife and mother to his children.<br />
Come children is a kind of refrain in the poem which enhances the poignancy and pathos<br />
of the poem. The Merman imagines that Margret must have been disturbed by the stormy<br />
wind; may be she came to the window of her house in the village, may be she looked<br />
seaward; may be she was reminded of the life of the sea of his children and of her husband.<br />
But finally it dawns upon him at they have been finally deserted by Margret and there is no<br />
use of imaging such things.<br />
(ii) Continuing in the same vein, the Merman makes his final comments in the poem about his<br />
wife. That Margret was a cruel woman who betrayed her husband s trust and never returned<br />
home, leaving behind her growing children, the youngest of them being very small. Now<br />
Merman and his children can only sing their songs theme of which is the cruelty of the<br />
woman who deserted them, forsook them after years of tender love. These kings of the sea<br />
will forever lament the moment when Margret left them, leaving them forever deprived and<br />
aggrieved.<br />
Q. 9. Write a two hundred-word comment on The Forsaken Merman<br />
This poem has been described as a romantic poem written by a classicist. The poem lilts with<br />
almost with Keatsian cadence. Though it must be admitted that this poem too is elegiac like most<br />
other poems by Arnold. It is a plaintive song of separation, though it is narrative in mode. It is not<br />
a story but a chant , as a critic has remarked. The tone is intense, feeling personal and pathos<br />
overwhelming in this poem. This is an example of mixture of romaticism and classicism for<br />
which Arnold has special aptitude. It is lucid, clear and limpid in its flow reminiscent of the Greek<br />
classicists. The poem has also been singled out for its autobiographical element. Margret of the<br />
poem some commentators say is none but Marguerite whom Arnold fell in love with but could<br />
not marry because of perhaps cultural incompatibilities. Marguerite was French and Arnold<br />
<strong>English</strong>; in the poem, Margret is from the human world and The Merman is from the Sea Kingdom.<br />
The sea is regarded by some scholars and academic critics as the most important character in<br />
the poem. It creates the atmosphere as well as the tragic situation in the poem. It is modeled on<br />
the Westmoorland lake with which Arnold was familiar since his youthful days. Then there is the
Matthew Arnold<br />
typical Arnold ian nostalgia. Going back in memory of things past. Toward the end, poignancy of<br />
this dramatic story lyrically told becomes a flowing emotion of journey through Merman s own<br />
past life. The sea imagery enhances the contrast between the denizens of the human world and<br />
the creatures of the perhaps freed from the pains and sorrows that come form human<br />
consciousness. In this poem, sea Arnold makes a departure from his usual depiction of nature as<br />
quiet and serene. Here Nature is calm as well as stormy, furious as well as serene.<br />
Q. 10. Write a brief note on LITERATURE AS THE CRITICISM OF LIFE<br />
Ans. This is a most important dictum Arnold’s practice as poet and critic. Arnold assigned a very high<br />
destiny to poetry and believed that it had a function to perform, nay, a mission to carry out on<br />
behalf Society. It will be instructive to understand this dictum in Arnold s own words. In his<br />
Study of Poetry, Arnold says:<br />
In poetry, as a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism, by the law of<br />
poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time goes on and<br />
as other helps fail, its consolation and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of power in<br />
proportion to the power of the criticism of life. And the criticism of life will be of power and<br />
proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound<br />
or half sound true rather than untrue and half true. For Arnold poetry was superior to science,<br />
religion and other agents of humanist culture. By criticism of life Arnold appears to suggest<br />
interpretation of life. Poetry is a criticism of life in the same way as a good person is a criticism<br />
of a bad person. Poetry has to be excellent so that it bears a contrast to the mundane realities of<br />
the work-a-day world.<br />
Since Arnold, other views have been expressed in our own time. T.S. Eliot, for instance, thought<br />
that the poet has no commitment to society ; He/she has a commitment to poetry only. And, that<br />
poetry is not composed of ideas as Arnold said but of words, Arnold s dictum on Literature was<br />
perhaps a reaction to the decline of culture and deteriorating taste of the <strong>English</strong> society. Thus,<br />
it has contextual validity rather than a universal application.<br />
Q. 11. What do you understand by Arnold s High Seriousness? Explain clearly.<br />
Ans. Arnold the critic and poet was also a sage figure with a missionary zeal. He wanted to<br />
communicate impactful massages to the declining culture of his time. He coined a number of<br />
pithy phrases for this purpose which were loaded with meaning and cultural significance. High<br />
Seriousness is a part of Arnoldian terminology which includes similar other phrases such as<br />
criticism of life Hellenism and Hebraisn , Sweetness and light, Touchstone Method, Poetic<br />
Truth and Poetic Beauty. These terms have become a part of the academic vocabulary and are<br />
frequently used by students and teachers. High Seriousness can be traced back to Aristotle,<br />
the Greek philosopher, and is equivalent to his phrase philosophoteron kai spoudaiteron<br />
which has been variously translated as remarkable serious or high or philosophical with<br />
deeper meanings etc. In his study of poetry" Arnold company poetry with history says that the<br />
superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and higher seriousness .<br />
though Aronld as a classicist advocated the supremacy of the whole over its part’s s in a work<br />
of art for practical purpose and somewhat diverging from this emphasis on wholeness he uses<br />
the touchstone method of judging the element of high seriousness and poetic truth in<br />
some great poets like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare by quoting passages from Illiad, Divine<br />
comedy, Hamlet and Milton s Paradise Lost. He ignored the claims of Chaucer to be a serious<br />
poet because of his comicality and vulgarity. Arnold’s seriousness cannot be taken as a reliable<br />
and serious criterion for estimating the worth, quality and greatness of a poem or poet, as has<br />
been shown by theory and practice of poet-critics such as Eliot in later times.<br />
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Q. 12. Briefly define Romanticism and comment on Arnold as a Romnaticist.<br />
Poetry<br />
Ans. Romanticism has been defined variously as triumph of imagination over convention or liberalism<br />
in literature, or liberation and assertion of the ago or curious mixture of wonder and beauty<br />
or revival of medievalism , nostalgic backward look on time , passionate overflow of feeling<br />
escape from life and many more things. Romaticsm may be all these things yet it may be much<br />
more. It is awakening of the imaginative sensibility or wonder added to common experiences<br />
or naturalisation of the supernatural.<br />
Arnold does not fall in any of the above definitions. He was a mixture of classicism and romanticism<br />
because, inspired by the Greek masters he wanted to see life steadily and see it whole as a<br />
poet, critic and man of culture. A romaticist does seek for truth within himself and his approach<br />
as poet is subjective, yet trancendental. We do meet quite a few examples of inner projection in<br />
Arnold s poetry. Dover Beach, The Scholar Gipsy, Memorial Verses and The Forsaken<br />
Merman, all have elements of romanticism in them. Dover Beach is almost Keatsian in its<br />
melancholy and lilting cadence; Scholar Gipsy s escape from Oxford to seek the company the<br />
wild brother hood and lore of hypnotisn is romatic even in conceptualization and characterization;<br />
equally so is landscaping and depiction of the Oxford countryside. In Memoerial Verses, his<br />
tributes to not only Wordsworth, the father of <strong>English</strong> romantic poetry but to the terrible child of<br />
<strong>English</strong> romaticism, Byron is a proof of Arnold s romantic inclinations irrespective of his avowals<br />
on behalf classicisn. And, to surpass tham a ll, we have The Forsken Merman which is romantic<br />
both in conceptualization and execution.<br />
Q. 13. Discuss Arnold as a poet of love in the context of poems prescribed in your course of study.<br />
Ans. Robert Bridges, poet critic, thinks that a poem is a reflection of the subjective experience of a<br />
poet or an intimate echo of the poets life. This may be partly true and to that extent applies to<br />
Arnold s poetry also. His personal experiences relevant in this context are his abortive love<br />
affair with the French Marguerite whom he is known to have met in Switzerland but they could<br />
not get married perhaps because of their cultural incompatibilities. Related to this failed love is<br />
his successful marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman. Both these experiences appear to have<br />
inspired quite a few of Arnold s poems. But, in other poems also the theme of love does occur<br />
and the indirect incidents portrayed in these poems even more effectively comment on the<br />
frustration of the failed love or the promise of the married love. Dover Beach is a tribute to<br />
married love because here in his lines Ah! Love let’s be true to one another, he finds solace<br />
and relief from the doubts and illusions of life and the world which is spread out before him like<br />
a charming landscape of dreams but which has neither joy nor help from pain. Only true<br />
love, married love is the mainstry of life. In The Forsken Merman failed love, betrayed love finds<br />
a piognant and bitter expression. The Marget of this poem appears to be none else than Marguarite<br />
of real life. Margret s desertion of her husband and children and the Merman s description of her<br />
as a cruel woman are an echo of the intimate life of Arnold himself more particularly of his<br />
failed love with the French woman Marguerite. Even in Scholar Gipsy toward the end of the<br />
poem, there is a reference to Dido who was betrayed by Aeneas. Though the situation here is<br />
reversed and it is the male partner who betrays the female partner yet indirectly this reference<br />
points to Arnolds personal experience.<br />
Q. 14. What do you know about STOICISM? How will you relate it to Arnold s poems that you have<br />
read in your courses of study?<br />
Ans. There was in Athens, the Greek city of ancient fame, a Hall or colonade also known as s to a<br />
Poikila. Some philosphers lectured there in the Greek times. Some of them were Zeno, Diogenese,<br />
Cleanthes. These philosophers were known as the STOICS. Later on, Greek philosophers and
Matthew Arnold<br />
men of action also followed their philosphy, famous among them are Cato, Brutus, Seneca,<br />
Epiptectus, Cicero and Marcus Aurlious.<br />
Stoicism actually branched out from CYNICISM. The Stoics taught how to practise the right<br />
virtue in life s conduct and living. Epipteus, though a Greek, became a Ministter in Marcus<br />
Aurelius, the Roman Emperor s court. Both practictised more or less the same philosophy which<br />
Epictetus had propounded. His view of Man s fate was rather dim. Thou art a little soul bearing<br />
about a corpse . Since life is uncertain and death can come any time, it is important that man<br />
must be doing the right things all the time lest he dies while doing a wrong thing. In Arnold s<br />
poems, we find stoicism scattered everywhere. But, in The Scholar Gipsy, it comes through<br />
very directly. Endurance is the test a stoicist must pass for good conduct in life. The Scholar<br />
Gipsy retains one aim, one business, one...: and Still nursing the unconquerable hope he is<br />
brushing through life. In the last lines of The Forsaken Merman also, the seacreature s continuing<br />
to live with his children hoping against hope, we find an illustration of Arnold s Stoicism. Dover<br />
Beach, ends on a note of affirmation. Life s agonies must be endured, may be by coming together<br />
and being true to one another in married love.<br />
Q. 15. “Goeth in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,<br />
Long since, saw Byron s struggle cease”....<br />
(i) Explane with reference to the context the above lines.<br />
(ii) Compare, Goeth Byron and Wordsworth, briefly pointing out why Arnold refers to them<br />
together?<br />
(iii) Where does he refer these poets together?(One line answer only) Full answer (200words)<br />
(i) & (ii) Ans. Goethe, Byon and Wordsworth liveed in what has come to be called the Romantic<br />
Age just preceding the Vicortian Age in which Matthew Arnold lived. All these men were poets<br />
and eminent literay figures, almost culture heroes of their times. They also had varying influence<br />
on Arnold s Mind as a poet, critic and thinker. Arnold was the closest to Wordworth who lived in<br />
close proximity in the Lake District of England. Arnold was much influenced by him because he<br />
thought that Wordworth s poetry had the healing power for frayed neves and hardened tempers,<br />
much needed aid in Arnold s own times when confused Victorians were sick with hurry and<br />
the disease of modern times as the <strong>English</strong> culture and society were fast declining in spite of<br />
the general apathy and complacency of the public at large.<br />
On April 23, 1850 Wordsworth died. Arnold wrote a poem or dirge ,as he called it in his letter<br />
to Clough, in the granstyle . Though this poem later called as Memorial Verses was written as<br />
a memorial to Wordsworth or an eulogy to the elder poet whom Arnold had great respect for, he<br />
thought it fit to include his homage to Goethe and Byron who had died earlier in 1832in Weimar,<br />
Germony and in 1824 in Greece, respectively. Wordswoth, Goethe, Byron were three different<br />
personalities but, for Arnold, they had something in common. In his memorial verses he recalls<br />
them together because all of them stood up against their times. Byron was the fount of fiery<br />
power which he used for that Titanic strife . Goethe s eye plunged down the weltering<br />
strife too as he looked as Europe s dying and he advised his contemporaries: The end is<br />
everywhere/ Art still has truth take refuse there! Wordsworth too lived and struggled against<br />
iron time/ of doubts, disputes, destractions, fears but He laid us as we lay at birth/ on the cool<br />
flowery lap of earth. In the final stanza of the poem Arnold distinguishes these three personalities:<br />
Gothe’s age mind and Byrons force time may restore or bring again but where will Europe’s<br />
latter hour/ Again find Wordsworth healing power?<br />
(iii) As already explained these three poets have been referred to together in Arnold’s Memorial<br />
Verses.<br />
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Q. 16. Discuss Dover Beach briefly as a comment on Victorian crises of Faith.<br />
Poetry<br />
Arnold’s letter to his close friend Arthur Clough will be relevant and will throw light on moot<br />
points of the discussion here. These are damned times-everything is against one-the height to<br />
which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absense of great<br />
natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, high profligate friends, moral<br />
desperados like Carlyle, our own selves and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties.<br />
He, like many others of his times, was then wandering between two worlds, one dead another<br />
to powerless to be born.<br />
The Victorian Age saw a sudden spurt of activity and times began to move faster as if the world<br />
were asleep for ages. Science, materialism, democracy all recorded immense growth and<br />
expansion. At the same time, morals and religions and culture declined steeply. Science Materilism,<br />
Democracy together appeared to have made a big assault on the steady values and verities of<br />
life. Doubt and devaluation of authority and disbelief in a divine dispensation eroded the sources<br />
of succur and consolation to man who for centuries had relied upon God and Faith for leading a<br />
life of for bearance and good conduct. Social cohesion and communtiy life likewise received<br />
jolts. In Dover Beach, which basically is a love poem and has been discussed as such earliear in<br />
this book, also dwells on the theme of the crisis of Faith. In the poem the sea becomes the<br />
symbol of lack of the faith of his own times as well as of the faith that gloriously ruled over the<br />
hearts of men in ages gone by. The greting roar of withdrawing sea across the <strong>English</strong> channel<br />
reminds him of his own times and his contemporay Victorians from whose hearts and minds faith<br />
is receding like the receding of sea at Dover Beach, leaving behind only shingles and pebbles on<br />
the dried up shore! But it was not like this always and Arnold is full of the nostalgia for the past<br />
ages when the sea of faith was at full tide like the tide he had observed a while ago on this very<br />
Dover Beach. It is a short poem but it has wide ranging thought and deepening significance and<br />
much philosophical meaning. Though Arnold is apparently on a honeymoon trip, the crises of<br />
Victorien times caused by the loses of Faith does not allow him to rest his mind or get lost in<br />
romantic embraces of love. Instead, the overwhelming mood of the poem remains melancholy<br />
and relective of the mind lost in worries and vicissitudes of life, a state of mind resulting from<br />
Arnold’s preoccupation, almost an obsession with the Victorian Crisis of Faith.<br />
17. Q. Praphrase the first ten lines of The Scholar Gipsy. Also give meanings of the following (i) wattled<br />
cotes (ii) wistful (iii) Bawling fellows (iv) Rack (v) shoot... (v) Gross and recross (vi) Strips<br />
(vii) Moon-blanched grass (viii) Begin the quest.<br />
Ans. In this opening pastoral scene, the poet urges the shepherd to leave his company for now because<br />
his fellow companions grazing the sheep in the hills yonder are calling him. Go back to your<br />
work, loosen the sheep from their fold; do not neglect your flock of sheep; they wish to be fed,<br />
so delay not. Nor should you let your shepherd companions angrily strain their throats to call you<br />
with hoarse throats.Go, right now, delay not and do not let grass blades already nibbled by the<br />
sheep grow into shoots (meaning make haste and go). But when the fields become quiet, that is<br />
when the working shepherds have ceased their activity and left the field; and the shepherds and<br />
their watch dogs have become tired andgone from the scene; may be only a few white straying<br />
sheep are lagging behind their flock and seen crossing recrossing the narrow plots and when the<br />
grass has become colourless (blanched) in the moonlight, then Shepherd, then at that quiet evening<br />
hour, you come again and be my companion in the quest (for the long lost legendary scholar gipsy<br />
of Oxford university whose story is written in Glanvill s book) Poetic language, it will be seen, is<br />
not easy to be rendered in prose. The poet is a creator of the language in which writes; he has<br />
what is called the poeticlicense , that he is allowed to take liberties with the grammar and
Matthew Arnold<br />
dictionary meantings of words and use them to convey contextual and universal significance<br />
through poetic use of language.<br />
Word meanings:<br />
(i) Sheep-fold made of wooden sticks (ii) wistful,. desiring, craving, feeling eager etc (iii) Bawling<br />
fellows... angrily shouting sheperds, his co-workers in the fields. (iv) rack.. to strain to be hard<br />
upon one s (throat here) (v) Shoot.. sprouting or growing of new, sharp blades of grass (vi) Cross..<br />
recross.. wandering, stray, straying sheep; sheep turning white in moonlight. (vii) Strips.. narrow<br />
grassy plots (viii) Moon-blanchsed grass.. the grass that has lost its colour in the light of the<br />
moon. (ix) Start the search for the legendary scholar gipsy known to be visiting these verry fields<br />
of the Oxford countryside.<br />
Q. 18 Explain lines 34-39 of the poem Memoria Verses by Arnold.<br />
And. ah, pale ghosts, rejoice..............mournful gloom.<br />
The poem was writen on the occasion of William Wordsworth s death in April 1850. In these<br />
lines Arnold eulogizes Wordsworth and pays his homage to him. The foremost among Romantic<br />
poets and leader of the Romantic movement in <strong>English</strong> peotry, Wrodsworth, who lived close to<br />
Arnold s place in the Lakes Districts, exercised very deep influence on Arnold s mind. Here<br />
Arnold is addressing the spirits of the underworld where Wordsworth, according to the old<br />
myths, now onward will be residing. Now they ought to rejoice, be joyful because now<br />
Wordsworth s spirit has joined their company. And, Wordsworth s spirit is a musical and singing<br />
spirit the like of which the Hades, or underworld of the dead spirits, has not seen since the days<br />
of the Greek mythic hero of immemorial times. The reference to Orpheus is interesting because<br />
Orpheus, a legendary musician, the son of Apollo himself, had visited the Hades or underworld<br />
of the dead in order to plead with Pluto, the God of Death, to release Orpheus wife Eurydice<br />
who had died. Orpheus entered the underworld, the kingdom of Pluto, playing his lyre and singing.<br />
His music had so moved Proseprine and her husband, Pluto, the god of death that they agreed to<br />
release Eurydice, wife of Pluto but on one condition. The condition was that Orpheus will not<br />
look back while on his journey back as Eurdice would follow him out of the underworld. But<br />
Orpheus could keep his promise, he could not control himself and burning his eyes fallen and<br />
looked at his wife Eurydice who was following him. Since he broke his promise with Pluto,<br />
Orpheus lost his wife once again, never to return to the world of the living. Now that Wordsworth<br />
with his sweet poems and musical verses has entered the underworld, he will be the first singer<br />
after Orpheus to charm and hyponitize and influence its denizens, with his earthly music. It<br />
should, hence, be a time of rejoicing and celebrating of the ghostly spirits just as it is a time of<br />
lamenting and mourning with the living spirits like Arnold.<br />
Q. 19. Clearly explain lines 21-28 of the poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.<br />
The Sea of Faith......of the world.<br />
These lines from Dover Beach should not be understood in literal sense because they have deep<br />
symboilic meanings. Arnold invests the Sea with Historical and cultural significance. He and his<br />
wife, on a honeymoon trip to Dover Beach, a sea resort on the <strong>English</strong> channel which divides<br />
England (an island) with the rest of Europe and France which is across the <strong>English</strong> Channel<br />
appear to be watching the scene of the ebbb and flow of the sea in the moonlit night. The sea<br />
here is in full tide. The sight reminds Arnold, the poet, of Faith. Faith that once its earlier times<br />
was also full like the present Sea in the moonlit night. This North Sea in the poem loses its<br />
physical dimension and becomes a symbol of Faith pulsated in the hearts and minds of men like<br />
this North Sea in full tide. In other words. once in ancient times, people had Faith, Hope and<br />
185
186<br />
Poetry<br />
Charity or the verities of life that governed their lives. They had fervour and spiritual grace and<br />
fulfilment. But the scene is now changing to the present times when people have lost that kind of<br />
Faith and are driven by forces of time, forces of science, forces fo materialism and industrialism.<br />
The people now are full of doubt, depression and distractions and they are not calm and serene.<br />
They have become skeptics, or doubting Thomases, or agnostics or godless. Just as the tide of<br />
the Sea ebbs away or recedes, leaving the shore dry so also the Sea of Faith has now receded<br />
leaving the hearts of men dried. Now only the naked pebbles are strewn on the shore. Arnold<br />
who did not have much faith in the claims of material prosperity, demcractic expansion and<br />
scientific progress here is in a sombre mood to be contrasted with the occasion of honeymoon<br />
that is usually joyful.<br />
Q. 20. Explain lines 48-58 of The Forsaken Merman Children dear, once she sate with you and me/<br />
... She said: I must go, for my kinsfolk pray/In the little grey church on the shore to-day / T will<br />
be Easter-time....Ah, me.<br />
In these lines the forsaken Merman who has been deserted by his wife Margret recalls wistfully<br />
the happier times and days spent by them together with their children in the kingdom of the sea,<br />
or at its bottom. She then was a loving wife and caring mother. She looked after their children<br />
with tenderness and loving care; but now that part of life has come to a sorry and sad end. She<br />
heard the sound of the bells clanging in the country church from the human world. It was Easter<br />
time when the Christian people pray together in the Church remembering the sufferring and<br />
sacrifice of Christ, the son of God in the belief that this act of prayer shall save their soul.<br />
Margret used to comb the hair of the littlest of their children and those were happy days but now<br />
it looks to be a distant dream or perhaps the time that never was! The call of the Church bells<br />
was overpowering; Margret thought she had failed hopelessly in her religious duties and was in<br />
danger of losing her soul. She wanted to go back to the Church to pray together with her people<br />
in the village. She was scared of damnation; her conscience was in trouble. She asked her<br />
husband permission to go back to her people to say prayers. The Merman, who loved his wife<br />
dearly could not say No . But he told her to come back soon, at the earliest. Margret had smiled<br />
at that time. Merman thought it was the smile of agreement but it was actually a smile of<br />
betrayal. She never returned home to the bottom of the sea, to her children and to her husband,<br />
the Merman!<br />
Q. 21. Paraphrase lines 85-107 of the poem The Forsaken Merman.<br />
Ans. The Merman is still hoping against hope about his wife Margret s reurn. He asks his children not<br />
to cry and call for their mother any more. It would be more proper to withdraw from the earth<br />
and go back to the depths of the sea, their home. He is imagining about the present life of<br />
Margret in the human world after she had left the Merman and her children behind. Maybe she<br />
now sits and works on her spinning wheel in her village. Maybe, as she spins she also sings some<br />
song or hums on some tune as the rest of the town is full of hustle and bustle and she is happy<br />
about the busy life of the town. May be she is watching some child playing with his toy in the<br />
street. And the church is lit with the sunlight and the church bell and the clergyman can be seen<br />
in that light. And, may be, she sings with full throated voice. May be, spindle has dropped from<br />
her hand as she got too much taken up with her own song. And, now the spinning wheel has<br />
stopped. Suddenly, the Merman feels a kick of joy as the thought crosses his mind that Margret<br />
is thinking and remembering her children, their children! And, may be, she has come over to the<br />
window to look seaward or in the direction of the sea where once she lived with the Merman as<br />
his wife and mother to his children. Softly, silently she looks to the shore along the sea. At times,<br />
the memory of her children must become too much to bear and she must utter sighs and weeping<br />
cries. She may be silent, she may be saying nothing about her past life but her tears and wails will
Matthew Arnold<br />
tell it all. May be she feels an intense desire within herself to see her young daughter, and the<br />
gleaming hair of the little mermaid , her daughter disturb her heart! These are the empty thoughts<br />
of a romantic imagination perhaps, because the hard reality is that Margret has returned to the<br />
human world never to return to the life in the Sea!<br />
Q. 22. Explain clearly the lines 31-40 of the poem The Scholar Giosy<br />
And near me on the grass lies Glanvil book..............<br />
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.<br />
The orieginal story of the Scholar Gipsy is to be found in Glanvil s book entitled THE VANITY<br />
OF DOG<strong>MA</strong>TIZING, written in the seventeenth century while the poet Arnold is writing his<br />
poem The Scholar Gipsy in the latter part of the nineteenth century or the Victorian Age.<br />
This book is lying close to the poet right now. The poet had read the story earlier with great<br />
interest and he feels is like reading the story once again. The story deals with the event of the life<br />
of a scholar who was studying at Oxford university. He had talent; he had a good inventive or<br />
curious brain or mind and creative imagination. But for his special kind of interests and skills and<br />
talents he could find not much scope within the framework of the university education and<br />
system of studies. Perhaps driven out by his sense of incompatibility with the Oxford environment,<br />
this scholar simply lelf the Oxford premises and his Oxford friends on a summer morning. He<br />
now joined the company of gipsies and from them he sought to learn the art of hypnontism, or<br />
thought-reading. He was spotted in the company of these gipsies or wild brotherhood and<br />
they thought that this young scholar had ruined his career at Oxford and life in general, even<br />
though he had remarkable abilities. Whatever be the pejorative view of the world, the fact<br />
remains that the Scholar Gipsy never returned to Oxford nor to his friends.<br />
Q. 23. Explain lines 201-210 of The Scholar Gipsy: Oh born in days...they solitude<br />
In these lines Arnold, addressing the legendary scholar gipsy of the poem says that it was good<br />
that he was born in an age different from Arnold s own age, that is the Victorian Age. In the<br />
earlier times when Scholar Gipsy was alive and left Oxfor by choice people were not assailecd<br />
by doubts and were not in the grip of despair. Science, materialism, democracy and reasoning<br />
which have weakened and debilitated the culture of the Victorians were not powerful forces as<br />
they are in Arnold s times. Life was carefree, free from doubt and skepticism, free from too<br />
much hurry and tension of life. It flowed like the sweet and soft Thames flows with its limpid<br />
waters. People then did not have divided aims and too many schemes and pursuits to get<br />
ahead in life or amass wealth and creature comforts. Their sensibilities were not disfunctional<br />
like ours, The scholar gipsy was not miserable as he lived in an age of Faith and Hope and<br />
Charity. Arnold urges the scholar gipsy most vehemently that he should keep away from the<br />
Victorians and Victorian times infected as they are with this disease of modern times . He<br />
should fly away from the corrupt and sick society of Arnold s times.<br />
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188<br />
List of Questions<br />
Q 1. Write an estimate of Arnold as a poet.<br />
Q. 2. Write a brief note on the life of Matthew Arnold.<br />
Q. 3. What are the main characteristics of Arnold as a Poet?<br />
4. Q. Which of the prescribed poems is an example of Arnold s narrative art?<br />
Poetry<br />
Q. 5. Discuss Arnold s poetry as a mixture of Classicism and Romanticism; illustrate your arguments with<br />
examples from your reading of prescribed texts.<br />
Q.6. Select one poem from those prescribed for your course of study which can be described as a love<br />
poem. Discuss the poem so selected as a love poem and difficulties you experience in giving it the<br />
description of a love poem .<br />
Q. 7. Arnold as a poet is not interested in expressing his subjective experience. He is more concerned with<br />
the general movements of his times. Discuss this statement showing clearly your agreements and<br />
disagreements citing passages from prescribed poems.<br />
Q. 8. Write a detailed note on the Victorian Age.<br />
Q. 9. Why Arnold cannot be called as the representative poet of the Victorian Age?<br />
Q. 10. Specify passages from the prescribed poems that would help you identify Arnold as a Classicist.<br />
Q. 11. Specify passages from the presecribed poems that would help you identify Arnold as a Romanticist.<br />
Q. 12. How do you define modernity? In what respects Arnold is modern as a poet?<br />
Q. 13. What do you understand by ALIENATION ? With which movement in modern phiolosophy<br />
and Literature you will associate ALIENATION ? Point out a few examples from Arnold s<br />
poetry limiting your choice to the poems prescribed to illustrate your understanding of<br />
Alienation .<br />
Q. 14. Would you describe Arnold as an intellectural poet or an emotional poet? IIIustrate your answer<br />
with lines quoted from his poems.<br />
Q. 15. Discuss Arnold as a poet of Victorian Unrest. Quote lines from prescribed poems to illustrate the<br />
various points raised in your discussion.<br />
Q. 16. Which one of the poems prescribed answers the Arnoldian injuntion that poetry ought to be a criticism<br />
of life ?<br />
Q. 17. Critically examine any one poem you appreciate most from your prescribed texts of Arnold s<br />
poems.<br />
Q. 18. Arnold is a poet of Nature but his attitude toward Nature is not the same as that of the Romantics<br />
(Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron etc.), Discuss.<br />
Q. 20. Discuss Arnold as a (i) Lyric Poet (ii) Narrative Poet (iii) Elegiac Poet giving examples from your<br />
prescribed reading (b) Name the poems from your prescribed reading that could be classified as<br />
(i) Lyric (ii) Elegy (iii) Narrative.<br />
Q. 21. What is the Nature of Arnold s Melancholy? Does it reflect his personal frustrations and despair in<br />
life?
Matthew Arnold<br />
Q. 22. Write critical appreciation of (a) The Scholar Gipsy (b) Memorial Verses (c) Dover Beach (d) The<br />
Forsaken Merman?<br />
Q. 23. Recall five or six lines from each of the prescribed poems and explain why you find these lines<br />
memorable?<br />
Critics on Arnold : Selected Comments<br />
(1) Arnold s much condemned criticism of life is at least true of his own poetry. Even in the literary sense<br />
there is a surprising quantity of wise criticism in his verse, Goethe, Byron and Wordsworth are all<br />
examined with wonderful insight. Memorial Verses and in The Epilogue to Lessing s Laocoon we<br />
have a discussion of the principles of the arts of music, painting and poetry. But Arnold s verse is<br />
critical in a far deeper sense than this. It is in accordance with his own definition, Criticism of Life. In<br />
all his deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, in Resignation, in the Obermann poems in<br />
A Southern Night Arnold is passing judgment on life and his age, the life of his country; the lives of<br />
individual men in his last-named poem, the fate of his brother, dying in exile in the attempt to return to<br />
the country of his birth, becomes the text for a sermon on the restless energy of the <strong>English</strong> and on the<br />
strange irony of fate which preserves for the numbers of such a race graves so peaceful on theirs by<br />
those hoary Indian hills, This gracious of Midland Sea .<br />
189<br />
– Hugh Walker-<br />
(2) If I had to define Arnold’s place in poetry. I should be disposed to say of him, quite simply, that he<br />
[Arnold] is the greatest elegiac poet in our language; not in virtue merely of Thyrsis if anyone likes<br />
to think Adonais a greater elegy. I am not overmuch disposed to quarrel with him but in virtue of his<br />
Muse. His genius was essentially elegiac character. Out of what experience came, we are to explain<br />
this dominant quality, it is not easy to know ...... His poetry, profoundly melancholy, runs from the<br />
world, runs from it as I think, hurt, hurt in some vital part.<br />
– H.W. Garrod<br />
(3) Thyrsis is a very quiet poem, but I think solid and sincere. It will not be popular, however. It had long<br />
been in my head to connect Clough with that Cumnor Country, and when I began I was carried<br />
irresistibly into this form: you say, truly, however, that there is much in Clough (the whole prophet side,<br />
in fact) which one cannot deal with in this way, and one has the feeling if one reads the poem as a<br />
memorial poem, that not enough is said about Clough in it; I feel this so much that I do not send the<br />
poem to Mrs. Clough. Still had this idyllic side too; to deal with that suited my desire to deal again with<br />
the Cumnor Country, any way, only so could I treat the matter this time.<br />
– M. Arnold<br />
(4) Integration this is the obsessive theme of Arnold’s youthful letters to Clough, the integration<br />
of the individual, the integration of the work of art, the integration, finally, of the social order.<br />
Paradoxically, Arnold sought the way to his own personal integration through an Elizabethan eccentricity<br />
of conduct. In the end, however, the fate he feared and fought overtook him; the poetic power<br />
passed away. It passed with youth and the ability to maintain the youthful dandyism. He was<br />
always to retain a reasoned admiration of gaiety and high spirits, and a light insouciance to use<br />
against the pointless sobriety of <strong>English</strong> culture; he was everlastingly elegant and perhaps not<br />
annoyed at being called a Jeremiah in kid gloves. But the youthful quality which had sustained his<br />
poetry disappears.<br />
He seems always, in the Romantic fashion, to have been awaiting its inevitable end. Few poets can<br />
have been more conscious of their youth. But be bustling about it; we are growing old, and advancing<br />
towards the deviceless darkness: it would be well not to reach it till we have at least tried some of the<br />
things men consider desirable . The theme recurs so often. How life rushes away, and youth. One has
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Poetry<br />
dawdled and scrupled and fiddle fiddled and it is all over. What a difference there is between<br />
reading in poetry the morals of the loss of youth, and experiencing it !<br />
– Lionel Trilling<br />
(5) Arnold does not make total war upon the Romantics: he is caught up in a love-hate relationship with<br />
them. We have seen how, in his poetry, he struggled to vanquish the Romantic in himself: intense<br />
subjectivity, a sense of alienation, a brooding melancholy are what the temperamental Romantics had<br />
offered repeatedly, but they had not been what we want . We have seen how, in the 1853 Preface, he<br />
sought to bring poetry (not least his own) to heel by invoking the Aristotelian virtues of disciplined form<br />
and the noble simplicity of the grand style , at the same time taking Keats and, behind him, Shakespeare<br />
to task, for self-indulgent Romanticism and for his enervating effect upon his imitators among whom<br />
Tennyson is implied. Neither Sohrab and Rustum nor Balder Dead nor Merope could turn the<br />
current in practice, for The Scholar-Gipsy and Dover Beach born down more strongly in the contrary<br />
direction. On the theoretical front, however, Arnold could, on the surface at least, give a more singleminded<br />
impression. In order to discipline Romanticism he takes up a classical stance; feeling and<br />
intellect must for the maximum effect cooperate.<br />
– Michael Thorpe<br />
(6) Arnold s love-poetry is possibly the least important part of his writing; it is certainly the least regarded.<br />
Marguerite , the dark lady of the poems, has received an almost embarrassing amount of attention,<br />
but the poems themselves have not been thought worthy of critical study. For myself, his love-poetry<br />
was what first attracted me to Arnold, perhaps because it was so different from Browning s, to me the<br />
ideal. It has a personal intimacy hardly found elsewhere; it is informed by an astringent emotion that<br />
touches the heart more poignantly than the sultrier passions of the greater love-poets. It is everywhere<br />
unhappy, like the complicated loves of the sonnets, and indulges a brooding meditativeness only paralleled<br />
in Donne. And partly, I suppose, because of the injunction on a biography an atmosphere of<br />
mystery attaches to the situation. We do not know who was the object of the poems, what were<br />
Arnold s relations with her, or indeed if she existed at all. And yet this is genuine love-poetry.<br />
– H.C.Duffin<br />
(7) He cannot paint the restlessness of the soul though he paints it vividly and well without painting also<br />
the attitude of resistance to it, without giving the impression of a head held high above it, a nature that<br />
fixes the limits beyond which the corrosion of distrust and doubt shall not go, a deep speculative<br />
melancholy kept at bay, not by faith, but by a kind of domineering temperance of nature. This is the<br />
refrain of almost all his poems. He yields much to this melancholy intellectually, we should say,<br />
almost everything but morally, he bids it keep its distance, and forbids it to engulf him.<br />
It is this singular equipoise between the doubts that devour, and the intrepid sobriety that excites him to<br />
resistance, which gives the peculiar tone to Mr. Arnold s poems. He has not the impulse or abandon of<br />
nature for a pure lyric melancholy, such as Shelley could pour forth in words that almost make the heart<br />
weep, as, for instance, in the Lines Written in Dejection in Naples. Again, Mr. Arnold has nothing of<br />
the proud faith that conquers melancholy and that gives to the poems of Wordsworth their tone of<br />
rapture. Yet he hits a wonderful middle note between the two. The lyrical cry , as he himself has finely<br />
designated the voice in which the true poetic exaltation of feeling expresses itself, is to be found in a<br />
multitude of places in his poems; but in him it neither utters the dejection of the wounded spirit nor the<br />
joy of the Victorious spirit, but rather the calm of a steadfast equanimity in conflict with an unconquerable<br />
and yet also unconquering destiny a firm mind without either deep shadows of despair or high lights<br />
of faith, only the lucid dusk of an intellectual twilight.<br />
– R.H. Hutton
Matthew Arnold<br />
(8) If nature is just a collection of things, it is hopeless to seek any spiritual presence there which might be<br />
a support for man. Imitating nature or seeking harmony with nature no longer means trying to plunge<br />
our roots, like nature s, in the ground of the absolute, or trying, through atonement with nature, to each<br />
that ground. Each man must imitate nature in her mute acceptance of separation from God, and be like<br />
a stone, rounded in upon himself, with a tone s independence and persistence in being itself. Joy comes<br />
not from participation in the general life, but from a blind perseverance in performing he acts appropriate<br />
to our own natures. The stars and the sea are Bounded by themselves, and unregardful/in what state<br />
God s other works may be and they demand not that the things without them/Yield them love,<br />
amusement, sympathy. Yet they perform their appointed tasks with joy. Each man must also learn to<br />
be a law unto himself: To its own impulse every creature stirs;/ Live by thy light, and earth will live by<br />
hers !’<br />
This lesson of nature is really a lesson of despair, for though nature is to be admired for her ability to<br />
endure isolation, this calm self-enclosure, the satisfied peace of a rock merely being a rock, is impossible<br />
for man. Man s trouble is that he finds in himself no given law to direct his, being. He desperately<br />
needs help from outside, someone or something to tell him what to do and who to be. Can nature do no<br />
more than bid man attempt something impossible ?<br />
191<br />
– J.Hillis Miller<br />
(9) What affirmation there in Arnold s poetry seems unimportant because it lacks the flow and thrill of the<br />
Romantic assertion; it provides a sad substitute for the vision of love in a struggling task d morality ,<br />
with its ideal of self-control, self-dependence, and release from passion. This is imaged in calm moonlight,<br />
the independent stillness of the stars, the calm motion of the sea: whatever token utterances he made<br />
occasionally to the contrary, his desire not for involvement with the one life in and around us, but for<br />
withdrawal, from that involvement in life which he felt to be necessary, and yet unavailing in his iron<br />
age :<br />
We, in some unknown Power s employ,<br />
Move on a rigorous line;<br />
Can neither when we will, enjoy,<br />
Nor, when we will, resign.<br />
Fate drives me , he says, back from Obermann s world to his own course of life, where he is caught:<br />
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,<br />
The other powerless to be born,<br />
With nowhere yet to rest my head.<br />
The world of faith, of the invasion of unity, of joy, is dead, and nothing has replaced it; all that remains<br />
is the desire to resign, to escape from the hot prison , the restlessness, the pain of life, into stillness like<br />
that of the stars or the sea, self-poised.<br />
It is not surprising then that his language proves often inadequate, especially in the rhetoric of assertion<br />
and the rhetoric of love. The vocabulary has become hollow, and is not supported by the imagery or the<br />
general tone of poetry.<br />
– R.A.Foakes<br />
(10) When in The Scholar-Gipsy the Scholar is tired of knocking at preferment s door, why is Arnold not<br />
merely living off Swift ( They crowd about Preferment s gate ) or off Johnson ( Unnumber d suppliants<br />
crowd Preferment s gate ) ? On the face of it, Arnold s wording is full of cliches; perhaps they are<br />
cliches newly used and renovated, but that would need to be argued for. Not to mention such things at<br />
all is to be in collusion with one s poet. Take the well-known praise of Wordsworth in Memorial Verses<br />
– Christopher Ricks
192<br />
Poetry<br />
(11) It used to be frequently said in fact, it is the tradition of Arnold s own family that the two series of<br />
love poems which Arnold called Switzerland and Faded Leaves were not inspired by an actual<br />
love affair. However, the evidence of several sentences in the letters of Arnold to Clough seems to<br />
refute this belief that the Marguerite of the poems was only a poetical figment. Yet even without the<br />
refutation of external evidence, it is almost impossible to read the poems themselves without being<br />
convinced that here is the attempt of a main to tell the truth about an important experience. Arnold is<br />
a very intimate poet; he is an occasional poet who writes of the hour as it passes; he is a literal poet<br />
who tries to say what he means at the moment even if what he says contradicts what he said the<br />
moment before. It is quite true that if we accept the evidence of the poems completely and literally, we<br />
accept what seems a tangle of contradictions: the girl rejects the lover, he rejects her; she is unworthy<br />
of him, he is unworthy of her; her love is his dearest need, or again, it is a deviation from his true path.<br />
It is very confusing but so much the better; these very condradictions attest to the actuality of the affair<br />
and certainly the whole point of the story lies in them.<br />
– Lionel Trilling<br />
(12) He had tried many resolutions of the weariness that comes with an acceptance of the Empedoclean<br />
universe and with the frustrations of the promise of Christianity. None had really succeeded. In Stanzas<br />
from the Grande Chartreuse published in 1855, Arnold stands in the ancient monastery, surrounded<br />
by the remembrance of the disproved promises, seeming to hear the surprised voices of the teachers<br />
who had seized his youth:<br />
And purged its faith, and trimm d its fire,<br />
Show d me the high white star of Truth,<br />
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.<br />
These teachers are the man of the enlightenment and their heirs who had destroyed in him<br />
the faith among whose monuments he meditates. They are asking, What dost thou in this living<br />
tomb ? He answers that he knows their world to be true, knows the past world to be past<br />
yet quite reconcile himself to the new, or quite forget the yearning for the old. And somehow<br />
among the sepulchres of the dead Carthusians he finds an apter place for his melancholy than in<br />
modern life.<br />
– Lionel Trilling<br />
(13) Professor Garrod, always a discerning critic and distinguished for the care with which he uses biography<br />
to illuminate poetical meaning, accepts the reality of Marguerite on the evidence of the poems alone: I<br />
used at one time to pooh-pooh Marguerite. In part, I was fearful of vulgarising a great poet. In part, I<br />
did not sufficiently believe that poets mean what they say: but they do even when they do not say<br />
what they mean; from our failure to recognise that proceed nearly all the faults of our criticism.......but<br />
I think now that it is a mistake to disparage Marguerite. The volume of 1852 has a somewhat surprising<br />
unity, the unity, I feel, of a single and intense experience. When you have added to it the poems which<br />
should never have been taken away (Mr. Garrod means The Forsaken Merman and The Voice , with<br />
these he might have included To my Friends, who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-Taking with its<br />
interesting change of the phrase of the first edition, ere the parting kiss be dry, to ere the parting<br />
hour go by and also The New Sirens , it is difficult not to assign to Marguerite an important place<br />
in that experience.<br />
– Lionel Trilling<br />
(14) The one difficulty of the poem it seems to me is in the famous third strophe wherein the actual sea is<br />
compared to the Sea of Faith. If Arnold means that the Sea of Faith was formerly at high tide, and he<br />
hears now only the sound of the tide going out, one cannot help thinking also of the cyclic nature of
Matthew Arnold<br />
tides, and the consequent coming of another high tide only a few hours after the present ebb. In other<br />
words, the figure of speech appears valid only on one level of comparison; the symbolic half fails to<br />
sustain itself. Despite the magnificence of the writing of this section, I cannot help believing that it is<br />
the weakest part of the poem when it should be the strongest; the explicitness of the comparison seems<br />
too ready-made. Yet I have the poem as it is so deeply in memory that I cannot imagine it changed, and<br />
would not have it changed even if I knew it would be a better poem thereby.<br />
193<br />
– James Dickey<br />
(15) Critics acquainted with the extant manuscript of Dover Beach sometimes complain that the last<br />
paragraph does not really belong with the remainder of the poem. In this draft, the last line is and<br />
naked shingles of the world. Ah! love & c , which certainly suggest that the paragraph beginning. Ah,<br />
love, let us be true had already been written. But no amount of knowledge of its author s methods of<br />
composition can prove that a finished work is or is not a unified whole. With greater critical relevance,<br />
it may be argued that in this final paragraph Amold has forgotten about the sea. But the sea has by this<br />
time served its purpose as a symbol; and that which it symbolized is still powerfully present in these last<br />
lines. Moreover, the darkness remains. Precisely because it is no longer possible to believe that the<br />
universe is in some degree adjusted to human needs, that it is informed by a divinity which sympathizes<br />
with men in their joys and sorrows and in their hopes and fears, the poet must seek in human love for<br />
those values which are undiscoverable elsewhere. Moreover and this is the primary meaning<br />
of the paragraph the lovers must support each other if they are to live in the modern world without<br />
disaster.<br />
– J.D.Jump<br />
(16) The Scholar-Gipsy involves a dream of being from the world of becoming and leaves undetermined<br />
whether the dream was a delusion. Thyrsis devotes itself to recovering a vision of being from the<br />
world of becoming and insists that it is true. Both dream and vision derive from a response to the<br />
features of the landscape.<br />
The Cumner poems exemplify the frequently discussed move in Arnold from what may be called<br />
uncertainty whether his dreams pass through the gate of horn or of ivory to a conviction that his<br />
dreams are all of horn. Severely qualified though it was, the greater optimism of Arnold s later work is<br />
unquestionable: the two Obermann poems provide another clear example. The twentieth century has<br />
found, with Tennysonian authority, the expression of doubt more satisfyingly honest than the expression<br />
of assurance, however, tentatively it may be offered. In itself this is a quite invalid criterion. We must<br />
allow a poet his faith or his doubt, and ask only that it be properly realized in his poem. Proper realization<br />
means in this context the due rendering of the Cumner countryside so that it really seems, at least for<br />
the duration of the poem, to contain the truths it is said to contain.<br />
The problem is the signal tree, not, certainly, whether it was oak or elm, truly solitary or near a clump<br />
of pines, on Cumner Hurst or just above Chilswell Farm, visible or not visible on the path from South or<br />
North Hinksey. The problem is whether the tree can do the work the poem asks it to do. It is important<br />
to pay careful attention to what is first said of the tree, for on that saying the poem will depend. The<br />
main details are given in the third stanza after a brief mention of the tree in the second:<br />
That single elm-tree bright<br />
Against the west – 1 miss it ! is it gone ?<br />
We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,<br />
Our friend, the Gipsy-Scholar, was not dead;<br />
While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.<br />
– A. Roper
194<br />
Poetry<br />
(17) Arnold felt no man more deeply the majesty of the poet s function: he solemnly attired himself to<br />
perform it; but the singing robe was not his daily wear. Arnold let it be repeated was not a bard; not<br />
a Muse-intoxicated man. He had the bardic, the architectonic gift. Something of the worldling in him<br />
forbade any such fervour, yet he brought to literature and in a happy hour, insisting by the example of<br />
his verse as well as by the percepts of his criticism that before anything becomes literature it must<br />
observe two conditions it must be worth saying, and it must be worthily written.<br />
– Sir Arthur Quiller Couch<br />
(18) Matthew Arnold is undoubtedly in poetry, and I believe also in some of his prose a classic: that is to<br />
say he has succeeded in addressing himself to all times . And yet, if ever an author, in poetry and prose,<br />
addressed himself to his own day and generation, on the surrounding scene, it was he.......In his poetry<br />
there is a mature wisdom appealing to the elemental and universal in man; austerely expressed, without<br />
pomp, ornament, or tinkling music; and sometimes falling into lines as perfect and lawless as anything<br />
we know.<br />
– Cariton Stanley<br />
(19) Matthew Arnold is not a popular poet; his style is too severely classical; he is too reticent in the<br />
expression of emotion and too seriously reflective to attract any but the thoughtful reader. He is his<br />
own best critic, and has fewer faults and redundancies of style than any of the contemporary poets.<br />
His productions are polished gems, and he never loses the sense of proportion, of the self-restraint<br />
which belongs to the artist. At the same time, his poems are full of his own personality and of the<br />
various forms which he adopted, the lyric and the elegiac were the best suited to him.<br />
READINGS<br />
Lionel Trilling : Matthew Arnold<br />
H.W.Paul : Matthew Arnold<br />
H.J.C.Griersol : Lyrical Poetry from Blake to Hardy<br />
Douglas Bush : Matthew Arnold: <strong>English</strong> Poetry<br />
H.W, Garrod : Poetry and the Criticism of Life<br />
Johnson and Garrod : Arnold: Poetry and Prose<br />
– G.C. Macaulay<br />
C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry : The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A commentary<br />
F.Bickley : Matthew Arnold and his Poetry<br />
Vincent Buckley : Poetry and Morality<br />
B.lforEvans : Tradition and Romanticism<br />
Grierson and Smith : A Critical History of <strong>English</strong> Poetry<br />
G. Saintsbury : Matthew Arnold<br />
U. LeonGottfried : Matthew Arnold and Romanticism<br />
G.K.Chesterton : The Victorican Age in Literature<br />
Hugh Walker : Literature in the Victorian Era
Matthew Arnold<br />
F.L. Lucas : Ten Victorian Poets<br />
G.R.Stange : Matthew Arnold : The Poet as Humanist<br />
A.D.Culler : Imaginative Reason : The Poetry of Matthew<br />
Arnold<br />
G.C. Macaulay : Poems by Matthew Arnold : A Selection:<br />
E.K. Chambers : Arnold : Poetry and Prose<br />
G.W.E Russell : Matthew Arnold<br />
Amy Shark : Victorian Poets<br />
J.D.Jump : Matthew Arnold<br />
Carlson Stanby : Matthew Arnold<br />
H.C.Duffin : Arnold the Poet<br />
E.K. Brown : Matthew Arnold<br />
A. Roper : Arnold s Poetic Landscapes<br />
W.A. Madden : Matthew Arnold<br />
Michael Thorpe : Matthew Arnold<br />
KennthAllott,Ed : The Poems of Matthew Arnold<br />
John Holloway : The Victorian Sage<br />
F.R. Leavis : Revaluation<br />
E.D.H.Johnson : The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry<br />
Basil Willey : Nineteenth Century Studies<br />
Kathleen Tillotson : Review of <strong>English</strong> Studies, N.S. Vol. 3,1952<br />
D.G. James : Matthew Arnold and the Decline of <strong>English</strong><br />
Romanticism<br />
E.M. Jacqueline, Ed : Matthew Arnold<br />
Arthur Quiller-Couch : Studies in Literature. First Series<br />
Carl Dowron. Ed : Matthew Arnold : The Critical Heritage<br />
Lon is Bonnerot : Matthew Arnold<br />
S. Tillotson : Criticism and the Nineteenth Century<br />
W.H. Dowson : Matthov Arnold and his Relation to the Thought of<br />
our Time<br />
John Drink-water : Eighteen Sixties<br />
195
196<br />
A. Gatton : Two Essays upon Matthew Arnold<br />
I. Hicks : The Stoicism of Matthew Arnold<br />
H.Kingsmill : Matthew Arnold<br />
J.B.Orrick : Matthew Arnold and Goeth<br />
L.Woolf : Aster the Deluge<br />
Frank Watts : Matthew Arnold (Writer & critics Series)<br />
G.H .Young, Ed : Victorian England, Portriat of an Age<br />
Poetry<br />
U.F.Lowry,ed. : The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh<br />
Clough<br />
B- G.W.E. Russell, ed. : Letters of Matthew Arnoldl Vols Unpublished Letters<br />
of Arnold (in Dorothy Ward s possession)<br />
Arnold Whitridage : Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold
<strong>POETRY</strong><br />
Paper-V<br />
Option-I<br />
Section C & D<br />
M.A. <strong>English</strong> (Previous)<br />
Directorate of Distance Education<br />
<strong>Maharshi</strong> <strong>Dayanand</strong> <strong>University</strong><br />
ROHTAK – 124 001<br />
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2<br />
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All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system<br />
or transmitted in any form or by any means; electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or<br />
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ROHTAK – 124 001<br />
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Contents<br />
Unit 5 W.B. YEATS 5<br />
Easter 1916<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
A Dialogue of Self and Soul<br />
Leda and Swan<br />
Lake Isle of Inisfree<br />
Among School Children<br />
Second Coming<br />
Unit 6 W.H. AUDEN 67<br />
Petition<br />
Musee Des Beaux Arts<br />
O What is that Sound<br />
September 1, 1930<br />
In Memory of W.B. Yeats<br />
The Shield of Achilles<br />
In Praise of Lime Stone<br />
Unit 7 DYLAN <strong>MA</strong>RLAIS THO<strong>MA</strong>S 152<br />
I see the Boys of Summer<br />
In My Craft or Sullen Art<br />
A Winter’s Tale<br />
To an Unborn Paper Child<br />
Storming Day<br />
Light Breaks where No Sun Shines<br />
Poems On His Birthday<br />
Unit 8 A.K. RA<strong>MA</strong>NUJAN 189<br />
Extended Family<br />
The Difference<br />
Fear<br />
Second Sight<br />
The Striders<br />
Hindoo to His Body<br />
Love Poem for a Wife<br />
The Last of the Princes<br />
Unit 9 WALLACE STEVENS 238<br />
Domination of Black<br />
Sunday Morning<br />
Idea of Order at Key West<br />
Study of Two Pears<br />
Of Modern Poetry<br />
Peter Quince at the Clavier<br />
Contrary Theses<br />
Holiday in Reality<br />
(from Oxford Book of American Verse)<br />
3
4<br />
M.A. (Previous)<br />
<strong>POETRY</strong><br />
PAPER-V (Option-I) Max. Marks : 100<br />
Time : 3 Hours<br />
Note: Students will be required to attempt five questions in all. Question 1 will be compulsory. This question shall<br />
be framed to test students’ comprehension of the texts prescribed for Close Study. There will be one question<br />
on each of the Units in all the four Sections. The students will be required to attempt four questions (in<br />
about 200 words each) one from each section.<br />
The other four questions will be based on the texts for Close Study with internal choice i.e. one question<br />
with internal choice on each of the five units. The students will be required to attempt One question from<br />
each of the Four unit.<br />
Section C<br />
Unit 5 W.B. Yeats<br />
Easter 1916<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
Dialogue of Self and Soul<br />
Leda and Swan<br />
Lake Isle of Inisfree<br />
Among School Children<br />
Second Coming<br />
Unit 6 W.H. Auden<br />
Petition<br />
Musee Des Beaux Arts<br />
O What is that Sound<br />
September 1, 1930<br />
In Memory of W.B. Yeats<br />
The Shield of Achilles<br />
In Praise of Lime Stone<br />
Unit 7 Dylan Marllais Thomas<br />
I see the Boys of Summer<br />
In My Craft or Sullen Art<br />
A Winter’s Tale<br />
To an Unborn Paper Child<br />
Storming Day<br />
Light Breaks where No Sun Shines<br />
Poems On His Birthday<br />
Section D<br />
Unit 8 A.K. RA<strong>MA</strong>NUJAN<br />
Extended Family<br />
The Difference<br />
Fear<br />
Second Sight<br />
The Striders<br />
Hindoo to His Body<br />
Love Poem for a Wife<br />
The Last of the Princes<br />
Unit 9 WALLANCE STEVENS<br />
Domination of Black<br />
Sunday Morning<br />
Idea of Order at Key West<br />
Study of Two Pears<br />
Of Modern Poetry<br />
Peter Quince at the Clavier<br />
Contrary Theses<br />
Holiday in Reality<br />
(from Oxford Book of American Verse)
W.B. Yeats<br />
W.B. YEATS<br />
Easter 1916<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
A Dialogue of Self and Soul<br />
Leda and Swan<br />
Lake Isle of Inisfree<br />
Among School Children<br />
Second Coming<br />
5
6<br />
Unit-5<br />
W.B. Yeats<br />
Introduction<br />
Poetry<br />
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a major poet of the twentieth century, is counted among such great Anglo-<br />
American moderns as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude<br />
Stein. He is certainly among the greatest of Irish poets. One might even think that his ambition to be Ireland s<br />
Homer, its first epic poet, was fulfilled. With him Ireland can be said to have found its major voice. As a colonial<br />
subject, working within the <strong>English</strong> literary tradition with the anxiety of influence weighing heavily on him (what<br />
with strong precursors like Shakespeare and Milton, to name only two of the many great <strong>English</strong> bards), he<br />
developed a uniqueness of voice. This led Eliot to criticize him in 1917 as a foreign mind . While saying so,<br />
little did Eliot realize that he was actually paying his rival a great compliment. A prolific writer, Yeats is the<br />
author of, apart from an enormous amount of poetry, mostly of high quality, many short stories, one novel, some<br />
poetic plays, autobiographical works, as well as quasi-mystical treatises. But it is primarily as poet that he<br />
enjoys the highest reputation. His poetical works are known for the variety of themes they deal with, their<br />
individuality of style, and lyrical intensity. Compared with other modern poets, he gives the casual reader the<br />
impression of being a reader-friendly poet. But on closer scrutiny, he emerges as no less obscure than them, for<br />
the personal and private nature of his allusions, and symbols, esoteric sources and unfamiliar images. By being<br />
very Irish, his themes, images and subjects can puzzle non-Irish readers of his poetry. This is further complicated<br />
by his own idiosyncratic view of history, and mythology that is articulated in his autobiographical and discursive<br />
writings.<br />
Thus it is that, the study of a poet like Yeats demands an extensive engagement with the biographical and<br />
historical context of the poet and his work. And it is necessary for the readers of his poetry to prepare<br />
themselves with some prior knowledge of his life and times, the circles he moved in, his Irish, British, and<br />
European contexts, as well as numerous other traditions, and cultures that he either imbibed or with which he<br />
was acquainted. This is perhaps true of any poet; but it is an indispensable approach to Yeats.<br />
For, as the years passed he started believing more in self-portraiture than in dealing with vision. This meant that<br />
his poetry would increasingly bear the imprint of his personal life and critical location as a colonized Irish<br />
subject and an influential figure in Anglo-American literary and cultural movement of modernism.<br />
I. Writer and his age<br />
This section attempts to deal with the life of the poet as it shaped his career and aesthetic, and the factors<br />
contributing to his poetic development. The secction has been divided into six subsections (i) early life,<br />
(ii)Yeats and Occult, (iii) Yeats and the Irish Cultural Context, (iv) Yeats and Ireland, (v)Yeats and Philosophy,(vi)<br />
Maud Gonne and the other women in Yeats s Life. These are issues that constantly interweave and overlap;<br />
interact and relate with each other and so should not be treated as isolated and unrelated areas of knowledge.<br />
(i) Early Life:<br />
The years of Yeats s childhood and adolescence can be studied around Sligo, the family s sojourn in London,<br />
and their frequent change of residence and his relationship with his father. The poet s childhood at Sligo with<br />
the Pollexfens was both a happy and a sad one. In many ways, these were his formative years. William<br />
Pollexfen, Yeats s maternal grandfather inspired awe and terror in the children who were afraid of his fierceness,
W.B. Yeats<br />
silence and disciplined way of life which tended to stifle a few opportunities and moments of amusement that<br />
the children sought.<br />
If the figure of the grandfather symbolized authority; the grandmother, with her ivory complexion was a charming<br />
soft-hearted lady. It is through the visits to the Middletons the grandmother s family that Yeats was<br />
introduced to the world of Celtic legends and stories which were to become an indispensable source of his<br />
poetic images and ideas. The Middletons enthusiasm contrasted with that of the poet s realatives, with their<br />
gentle behaviour and quiet humour, and Yeats tried to acquire both.<br />
In London he was sent to the Godolphin school at Hammersmith at the age of ten. There the young Yeats<br />
encountered a lot of hostility and resistance at school on account of his Irish nationality and background. It is<br />
here that the identity crisis of the young Yeats took shape. Uncomfortable with his foreign surroundings, Yeats<br />
started looking forward to spending his vacation at Sligo.<br />
The journey to Sligo also brought in an element of adventure and romance to his otherwise dull existence.<br />
These are described in his only novel, John Sherman, and in his Autobiographies. In Sligo what had earlier<br />
been a stifling life was now transformed into an endearing and expanded range of activities. Climbing the<br />
hillocks, Knocknarea and Ben Bulben, sailing with the local folks, fishing for trout in the laughs with Jim Healy,<br />
the stable boy, hunting, listening to the tales of the sailors and the inhabitants of Sligo, riding his red pony past<br />
the Holy Well of St. Patrick and monastery of St.Columba, constituted his vacations.<br />
The family moved back to Ireland in1880. The land war in 1880 made financial considerations an important<br />
factor in deciding the question of where to settle the family. Finally, the family returned to Ireland and lived at<br />
Balscadden Cottage at Howth, the north eastern side of Dublin Bay. Yeats was sent to the Erasmus Smith<br />
High School in Harcourt Street, Dublin in 1881 at the age of fifteen. It was there that he declared his interest<br />
in the philosophies of Darwin and Huxley. His inclination towards natural history may be seen as some sort of<br />
a refuge, a compensatory exercise that Yeats indulged in ,in the absence of a religion to lean on. For Yeats s<br />
father was an agnostic and his lack of belief affected him at a young age.<br />
It was at this time that Yeats s conversations on poetry with his father, John ButlerYeats, formed a crucial<br />
aspect of his education. His father talked to him of Blake and his own Pre-Raphaelite literary principles. The<br />
enormity of this influence can be measured from the fact that his juvenilia were primarily dramatic poetry,<br />
written in imitation of Spenser and Shelley, for it was dramatic poetry that his father esteemed as the most<br />
superior of all kinds of poetry. Yeats recited his poetry to Edward Dowden , his father s friend and the first<br />
holder of the Chair of <strong>English</strong> at Dublin <strong>University</strong>. Dowden who never discouraged the young Yeats, provided<br />
him with critical appraisals of these recitations.<br />
The influence of his father, J.B. Yeats, upon young Yeats lasted till he was in High School. After leaving High<br />
School Yeats joined the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street, where he attended classes from May<br />
1884 to July 1885. At the School of Art he met George Russell (AE) and together they composed plays and<br />
spent long hours with each other. George Russell also shared Yeats s awakening interest in mysticism. Yeats s<br />
early aesthetic principle that only beautiful things should be portrayed and that only ancient things were<br />
beautiful can be attributed to his years at the School of Art. A month or two at the Royal Hibernian Art School<br />
at the beginning of 1886 finished his formal education. Yet another change of residence, the move from Howth<br />
to 10 Ashfield Terrace, off Harold s Crossroads, a suburban district, proved beneficial. The conducive location<br />
that provided easy access to Dublin helped to widen Yeats s interest, which by now had become keenly<br />
observant of human nature and behaviour.<br />
(ii)Yeats and Occult<br />
Yeats wrote once of how he was repelled by the new sciences, which in turn had robbed him of traditional<br />
systems of faith: I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall [Darwinian rationalists and atheists],<br />
whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible<br />
church of poetic diction Though this gestures towards the poet s belief in aestheticism; it also is suggestive of<br />
why Yeats should have been attracted by esoteric and obscure belief systems.<br />
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This desire for a belief system found a fitting ethos in Yeats s early life. Certain opportunities presented<br />
themselves, which kindled in him an undying interest in and a ceaseless contemplation of these philosophies.<br />
For him the transition from philosophy to mysticism was easily accomplished. At Dowden s house he heard<br />
A.P Sinnett s The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism being discussed. He read these books and passed it<br />
on to Charlie Johnston, a brilliant pupil at the High School and the son of the Orange Member of Parliament for<br />
South-Belfast .With Johnston, he also read Baron Reichenbach s book on Odic forces. But Esoteric Buddhism<br />
had an indelible effect and Johnston relinquished his future aim of being a missionary and converted to Esoteric<br />
Buddhism. Johnston s article on this subject appeared in The Dublin <strong>University</strong> Review in July 1885. This<br />
was a paper he had read to a new group known as the Dublin Hermetic Society. This Society, consisting of<br />
seven youths, was started, according to a note in the same issue of the magazine, to promote the study of the<br />
Oriental Religions and Theosophy.The term Hermetic suggests an involvement in deciphering a hitherto<br />
hidden secret philosophy which revealed itself in symbolism.<br />
To this Yeats advanced his firm belief, derived from his reading of Shelley and Blake, that philosophy existing<br />
in poetry is permanent. But he could not gain converts to his poetic creed. Despite this lack of success, Yeats<br />
showed a continued interest in the Hermetic Society and its tenets. Meanwhile Johnston met Madame Blavatsky<br />
in London and returned to form the Dublin Theosophical Lodge . Though Yeats did not become officially a<br />
member of it, he was actively engaged in arousing the interests of others in Theosophy. George Russell s<br />
parents commented on Yeats s sway over their son in these matters.<br />
Like Johnston, who was impressed by Madame Blavatsky, Yeats submitted to the principles of Mohini Chatterjee.<br />
A Brahmin from Bengal and a man of repute among Theosophists, Mohini Chatterjee had been invited to visit<br />
Dublin to aid the foundation of the new Theosophical Lodge. Yeats adopted the sombre, quietist outlook of this<br />
philosopher. Chatterjee s belief that the dead who had imagined Beauty or Justice in this world become a part<br />
of that Beauty or Justice, and assert themselves through the minds of living men reinforced Yeats belief in<br />
reincarnation and his faith that the poets/artists are people who have access to truth . Yeats wrote a poem<br />
Kanva on Himself which encapsulated the Brahmin s ideas in the verse form. Thirty-nine years later he<br />
echoed these ideas in another poem called Mohini Chatterjee . Yeats s poems like Miserrimus , From the<br />
Book of Kauri the Indian .Section V, On the Nature of God and An Indian Song that appeared in The<br />
Dublin <strong>University</strong> Review in October and December 1886 reflected his new thoughts and interests.<br />
In 1887 at the age of twenty-two Yeats found his way into the Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, the<br />
residence of William Morris , the pre-Raphaelite poet and painter.He began to attend Socialist lectures held<br />
there on Sunday evenings .Despite his great admiration for Morris, Yeats became less socialistic in his ideas.<br />
His dislike of Bernard Shaw who frequented that place can be attributed to his general dissatisfaction with<br />
Socialist ideas. Besides the enormous literary influence that was shaping him, Yeats also sought Mysticism at<br />
the meetings of Theosophists . He was introduced to Madame Blavatsky by Charlie Johnston in a house at<br />
Norwood where she conducted sessions of the Society for Psychical Research. Like Yeats attraction to<br />
O Leary which he romanticised , he found in Madame Blavatsky a passionate nature, illogical and surrounded<br />
by an air of mystery which filled her house too. In such an individual, he thought , could wisdom be found<br />
which made possible communion with God. Yeats was admitted to the Esoteric Section of the society which<br />
met weekly to study tables of Oriental Mysticism .Once Yeats insisted upon the practical demonstration of<br />
these experiments, with the result that he was asked to resign by an official of the Section. Though later Yeats<br />
found out that the motivation behind his resignation was Madame Blavatsky herself, who found her principles/<br />
beliefs being challenged and interrogated.<br />
Another individual who equally appeared to be a figure of romance occupied the space within Yeats vacated<br />
by Madame Blavatsky. In the British museum Yeats met Lidell Mathers, who under the influence of Celtic<br />
movement, became MacGregor Mathers, and finally MacGregor. MacGregor, the author of The Kabbala<br />
Univeiled, was deeply interested in magic which was the subject of his research on the Continent. He introduced<br />
Yeats to a society of Christian Cabbalists, The Hermetic Student known to its students as the Order of the
W.B. Yeats<br />
Golden Dawn. The combined influence of Blavatsky and Mathers could be seen on Yeats writing which<br />
became more sensuous and vivid on account of symbolism and symbolic systems made available to him by<br />
both these associations.<br />
(iii) Yeats and the Irish Cultural Context<br />
Yeats s first major poetic output, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems published in 1889, shows how<br />
deeply the exposure described above had affected him. In what ways will be discussed in detail later. However,<br />
worth mentioning is the fact that William Morris commented on how the poems in the volume resembled his<br />
own poetry. You write my sort of poetry , he said, and promised to send his praise to The Commonweal , the<br />
mouthpiece of the League. Oscar Wilde also wrote favourable reviews of Oisin. Yeats shared Morris belief<br />
in an organic community. This led to a distrust of political institutions and parliamentary democracy in favour of<br />
revolution. Yeats found that Morris political principles were compatible with O Leary s. This was further<br />
strengthened by the Socialist League s sympathy for the Irish cause. Morris lectures were an adroit blend of<br />
Socialism and the romantic social criticism of Carlyle and Ruskin. However, Yeats could see the potential for<br />
violence embedded in Carlyle s political rhetoric. Yeats did not declare himself to be a Socialist, yet the influence<br />
of Morris persisted afterwards. In the words of Elizabeth Cullingford, It was revealed primarily in Yeats s<br />
Irish utopianism, and in specific instances such as his support for the workers in the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913,<br />
his desire for art galleries and educational facilities for the poor, his attitude to social legislation in the Irish<br />
senate, his conviction that the State should supply the basic necessities and decencies of life for its citizens, and<br />
in his often repeated approval of the idea of limiting incomes .<br />
Alongside his poetry, Yeats wrote prose articles based on or connected to Irish forklore. These were published<br />
by W.E. Henley in The Scots Observer and The National Observer. Yeats s Irish background made him<br />
different from those living in <strong>English</strong> towns, mainly because of his diversity of interest and unusual ideas. An<br />
important figure with whom Yeats discussed the needs for the poets and artists to interact and associate with<br />
each other was Ernest Rhys, who later commissioned his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. From<br />
these conversations emerged the idea of the Rhymer s Club, formed by the efforts of Yeats, Rhys, and T.W.<br />
Rolleston. It met in the Cheshire Cheese and its members soon included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,<br />
Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gaillienne, Selvyn Image, Edwin Ellis, John Todhunter, John Davidson and Herbert<br />
Horne. The formation of the club in 1891 helped Yeats to cope with his nostalgia and establish himself in the<br />
literary climate of London.<br />
The meetings of the club were self-conscious literary gatherings dominated by the figure of Lionel Johnson.<br />
Yeats greatly admired Johnson whose subsequent tragic failure of life is treated poetically by Yeats. These<br />
poets of the nineties influenced both his poetry as well as his attitude to life. Following the artistic principles<br />
propounded by Pater and practised by Rossetti, the Rhymer s club had the effect of introducing obscurity into<br />
his poetry. This can be seen in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics and especially the<br />
poems dealing with the Rose. Yeats assumed that his idea of pure poetry premised on the doctrine of<br />
Aestheticism was above the common man s understanding, yet for the next few years he did not return to the<br />
more comprehensible Irish subjects. Arthur Symons, with whom Yeats developed a close friendship, read him<br />
selections from Verlaine and Mallarme, and thus introduced him to the French Symbolists.<br />
Thoug he was now in Londodn he continued to take an active interest in the affairs of Irish society. He was<br />
elected to the Irish senate in 1922. The years of the twentieth century prior to Yeats s senatorship, are punctuated<br />
by successful lecture tours to the U.S. Beginning with 1903 Yeats travelled to the States in 1911, 1914, and<br />
1920. He met Ezra Pound in 1908 and the influence of Pound s Imagist doctrine is visible in the volumes<br />
published henceforth. Besides these men of influence, J.B.Yeats introduced Yeats, among others, to Todhunter,<br />
a Dublin doctor turned poet and playwright, and Edwin Ellis , a painter Pre-Raphaelite in outlook. Ellis was<br />
interested in Blake and gave Yeats an explanation of Blake s poems in which the four quarters of London<br />
represented Blake s zoas. Yeats informed Ellis about Christian Cabbala and in the spring of 1889, they decided<br />
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to work together on an explication of Blake s symbolism. Yeats s encounter with the romantic figures described<br />
above and his readings of the poetry of Shelley and Blake, which for him contained meaningful philosophical<br />
insight, produced a notion of perfect love . An idealized view, devotion without reward is the keynote of this<br />
love .In love with the idea of love, Yeats expressed a desire for an unusual woman modelled on the wild and<br />
heroic heroines of Shelley.<br />
(iv) Yeats and Ireland:<br />
Ireland s struggle for independence from England was longstanding. But it intensified during the last decades<br />
of the 19 th and the early decades of the 20 th century. Irish intellectuals could not avaoid getting caught up by the<br />
political developments. Yeats was no exception. Concurrent with his dabbling in theology and mysticism, Yeats<br />
got involved with the Home Rule League and Young Ireland Society. His father, who was himself a member of<br />
it and imbued Yeats with his own views on the subject, introduced him to the Home Rule. He also introduced<br />
him to the members of the Contemporary Club who held similar opinions. But Yeats soon turned from the ideas<br />
of the Home Rule to the more absolute demands of nationalism. This he encountered in the figure of John<br />
O Leary who for Yeats embodied the ideas of idealism and patriotism. The attraction for O Leary was based<br />
both on his ideas and appearance. O Leary matched Yeats s imaginative and romantic rendering of a hero and<br />
martyr. Bearded and venerable in appearance , O Leary s large personality revealed a passionate nature<br />
strengthened by a moral genius which had experienced real suffering .As a medical student at Trinity College<br />
,O Leary had been inspired by the Young Ireland Movement and had become a leader of the Fenian movement<br />
which succeeded it. He was imprisoned for five years and spent fifteen years of exile in Paris. On his return<br />
he was highly respected as a central figure in the context of Irish nationalist struggle. Yeats began to attend the<br />
debates and the meetings of the Young Ireland Society of which O Leary was the president.<br />
Apart from O Leary s dogged determination and unflinching spirit, his literary tastes proved to be a common<br />
ground between him and Yeats. Despite his intense political sentiments, O Leary was sensitive to artistic merit<br />
and worth. He was moved by the writings of the patriots like Davis, but criticized their lack of attention to<br />
aesthetic issues. O Leary lent Yeats the works of the nationalist poets Davis , Callaman and Mangan. It was<br />
to O Leary that he owed his knowledge of Irish patriotic literature. The awareness of the nationalist elements<br />
in the verse helped him formulate his ideas on the need for a new type of literature distinctly Irish in tone and<br />
subject matter. In an essay on Mangan published in The Irish Fireside in March 1887, Yeats expressed these<br />
concerns. Yeats veering from Indian subjects to Irish ones corresponds to the change from The Dublin<br />
<strong>University</strong> Review to The Irish Monthly and The Irish Fireside.<br />
Yeats also stressed the dimension of personal emotion that should characterize poetry. This reveals Yeats<br />
Romanticist leanings that privileges sincere self-expression as the primary feature of poetic articulation. At the<br />
same time, it is important to see that Yeats romanticism is interwoven with, and inseparable from his nationalist<br />
feelings, and John O Leary was the physical manifestation of this close association. Hence, contrary to the<br />
popular notions, Yeats Romanticism does not preclude his engagement with political issues; in fact encourages<br />
it.<br />
Yeats s involvement in Irish nationalism and politics achieved European/British twist with father s decision to<br />
leave Ireland and settle in London in1887 . The family moved to 58 Eardley Crescent, Earl s Court in June and<br />
Yeats tried to make contacts with editors and publishers. While in England Yeats compiled an anthology of the<br />
contemporary Irish poets entitled Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland for an Irish publishing firm. It included<br />
four of his poems along with those of Katherine Tynan. For the London publisher Walter Scott he compiled<br />
two selections entitled Stories From Carleton and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. These<br />
projects helped Yeats to widen his reading in Irish literature and suggested a vast range of images for his poetic<br />
compositions. O Leary further encouraged him by arranging his contributions to be sent to Boston Pilot and<br />
Providence Journal, Irish American journals in which Yeats work appeared in September 1888 in the form<br />
of correspondence.
W.B. Yeats<br />
Early on, more than political freedom, Yeats was interested in the Cultural Renaissance of Ireland. His<br />
political gestures were more often than not aimed to please Maud Gonne who was a thorough activist.<br />
Yet, the crucial political events of the day find a place in his poetry. However, even here the focus is more<br />
on personal friendships, emotional bonds, and artistic anxieties than on the politics per se. In Easter<br />
1916 , he is, if anything, ambiguous in his response to the event. The cultural/literary interests<br />
overshadow the political motives.<br />
The last fifteen years of the century also saw Yeats s involvement with Irish nationalist causes. He met John<br />
O Leary and to the end of his life Yeats s political outlook was determined by this. Likewise Yeats establishment<br />
of the Irish Literary Society and his involvement with the Abbey Theatre are appropriately located within a<br />
discussion of Ireland s political context. When Ireland obtained its partial autonomy, Yeats was elected to its<br />
senate in 1922. Yeats s interest in fascism was stirred by his desire to prove the historical speculations formulated<br />
in A Vision. He saw fascism as the initiation of the antithetical gyre. But Yeats did not engage with it in terms<br />
of active political action. For he remained a nationalist of the school of John O Leary who did not encourage<br />
participation in international politics. Yeats s work as a senator did not bear the influence of fascism. In 1935<br />
when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia until his death in 1939, Yeats condemned fascism. Yeats also condemned<br />
communism and saw both as symptomatic of an apocalypse.<br />
However, the examination of Yeats s allegiance to a fascist ideology, alleged or real, requires an understanding<br />
of the term as it is deployed in different contexts. Fascism when linked with Nazism carries the connotations of<br />
brutal totalitarianism, genocidal racism and, desire for world conquest. The term did not mean this in the 1920s.<br />
It has also been used indiscriminately to suggest right-wing tendencies and politics, however marginal. This<br />
discrepancy and imprecision has led critics to believe that Yeats condoned Nazi atrocities. By 1922, Ireland<br />
had experienced civil strife for nearly four years. Yeats, like others, longed for order and stability and mistook<br />
fascist revolution as a conservative one that aimed at the establishment of peace. Yeats was also deluded<br />
about Mussolini s beliefs and manner of operation. He believed that Mussolini functioned through a group of<br />
intellectual elite to realize the concept of the organic state. In short, he was taken in by Mussolini s demagoguery.<br />
That Yeats did not support the totalitarian regime can be seen in Yeats organic theory which, propounded on<br />
cyclicity, envisages an inevitable decline of state authority and power. A totalitarian state is premised on the<br />
belief in its immortality, and hence Yeats views are actually subversive of totalitarianism. Yeats s nationalism<br />
with its objective of legitimate satisfaction of internal aims is different from national fascism that believes in<br />
hysterical self-assertion, aggression and world conquest. Yeats did not indulge in anti-Semitism either. In fact,<br />
he saw similarities and parallels between the persecuted races of Jews and the Irish. Concurrent with these<br />
political events was the development of the Woman s Consciousness Movement. Since the 1880s women had<br />
secured significant legal rights: the first Married Women s Property Act was passed in 1870, they were beginning<br />
to achieve access to higher education, and finally acquired the right to vote in 1918 after much agitation from<br />
1905 to 1914.<br />
v)Yeats and Philosophy:<br />
For Yeats, Irish folktales, fairytales, cabbala, magic, and the Oriental belief system did not constitute the only<br />
window to the world of knowledge of truth, reality or the Absolute. A long line of philosophers belonging<br />
primarily to the Western philosophical tradition shaped Yeats s worldview. Some of these names recur in his<br />
poetry: Plato and Plotinus, and Pythagoras. But there were many others who contributed to his intellectual<br />
growth. But first let us examine the influence of Plato and the neoplatonists.<br />
Plato and the Neoplatonists: Central to Yeats philosophical beliefs was Plato s views on the immortality of the<br />
soul. This view was conducive to Yeats already formed belief on the subject via Hindu philosophy. Simply put<br />
Plato thought that the soul transferred itself from one decaying body to another body. The body is a garment<br />
with which the soul is invested . Hence, Yeats favorite sartorial image of the human body. Death, for Plato,<br />
accounts for the separation of the body from the soul. As the soul passes from one body to another it collects<br />
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or recollects knowledge which is stored there: Since the soul is immortal and has been born many times and<br />
has seen the things of this world and of Hades and all things, there is nothing which she has not learned. So that<br />
it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect virtue and all other things, seeing that she has learned them<br />
previously.<br />
Plotinus and Porphyry were neoplatonists of the 3 rd c A.D. They blended Plato with Oriental mysticism. They,<br />
along with the other neoplatonists used fixed symbols such as the symbol of the forest or tomb for the world.<br />
Man was thought of as beggar dressed in rags of mortality. After death the soul is escorted by dolphins over<br />
the seas to heaven. Soul is reality and form; body is a cloudy vapor without entity or form.<br />
George Berkley and Edmund Burke: Yeats had the capability to fuse diverse philosophical thoughts into his<br />
own system of belief. This is illustrated in his drawing upon philosophies as disparate as Nietzsche and Burke.<br />
Edmund Burke (1729-97) along with George Berkeley (1685-1753) were Yeats eighteenth-century literary<br />
and philosophic ancestors. Berkeley s philosophy that spirit or mind is the sole reality of physical things appealed<br />
to Yeats, who invested imagination with the power to comprehend reality. Yeats sympathized with Burke s<br />
political philosophy, according to which, tradition and inheritance and not rational or abstract thought is concerned<br />
with liberty. Burke s discussion of the union of discipline and self-assertion seem like Yeats own concept of<br />
the Unity of Being.A fellow Irishman, Berkeley believed that spirit or mind is the sole reality of physical things:<br />
the existence of object consists in their being perceived in the mind. This was in opposition to the Lockeian<br />
view that nothing that has not come from sense registers in mind. Berkeley denied that matter and the<br />
external reality of space existed. By referring to his rationality Yeats emphasized the difference between<br />
<strong>English</strong> and Irish thought.<br />
Burke, though not Irish in blood, was a great 18 th century supporter of the Irish cause. He was to influence<br />
Yeats late in his life, and the influence is evident only from The Tower onward. Burke thought that man s<br />
political duties result from tradition and inheritance rather than from rational thought, certainly not from the<br />
abstract thought concerned with reality. He said that the only liberty I mean is connected with order Men<br />
come (as young people) into a community with the social state of the parents, endowed with all the benefits .<br />
It is this conservation of Burke that appealed to Yeats.<br />
In spite of such exposure to great philosophers, Yeats was not a philosopher. As his father said, he was a poet<br />
and not a philosopher.<br />
Nietzsche: It was in 1902 that Yeats got a chance to read Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the German<br />
philosopher. The philosophy of Nietzsche is not easy to summarize; but some of the dominant ideas have been<br />
influential. They figure chiefly in his The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spake Zorathustra. In the first he sees<br />
the essence of Greek arts, especially that of tragedy, as the product of the tension between the opposed forces:<br />
the violent, lustful, frenzied and irrational force of the God Dionysus and the rational and formal force of<br />
Apollo. When Yeats appropriated this view and applied it to his own Hegelian historiography, he thoght of the<br />
entire Greek civilization as the opposite of what followed: the Christian era.<br />
Nietzsche had an intense dislike of the Christian era and Christianity as a religion, for what he thought was its<br />
weakness and its wrong morals. He saw it as an enemy of reason, honesty, sex, power, joy and freedom.<br />
These latter qualities can be developed by what he called the Will to Power by a superman. This is the<br />
subject of Thus spake Zorathustra. The Superman is full of energy, mastery and free from Christian morals,<br />
is neither repressed nor introverted. Like Yeats, many other moderns , adored Nietzsche, and misused his<br />
ideas consciously or unconsciously to equate dictatorial forces with Superman. After all, Hitler used these<br />
very ideas to perpetrate the holocaust.<br />
The theory of creative production and progression through the interaction of conflicting principles is one of the<br />
primary principles in philosophy of Nietzsche. Yeats was fascinated by Nietzsche s The Birth of Tragedy.<br />
According to it, Greek art derives its intellectual rigour from the opposition between rational forces of Apollo<br />
and the passionate frenzy of Dionysiac energies. The two movements of the soul with its accompanying
W.B. Yeats<br />
paradoxes result from this violent conflict. The affinity to Yeats own speculations is obvious. Nietzsche s<br />
admiration for the aristocratic quantities of Greek art also gained Yeats sympathy. Yeats formulated his<br />
concept of the superman whose passion, adventurous spirit and determined will is not far from Oisin s or<br />
Cuchulain s Yeats mythical heroes , thus endorsing fierce heroic action. Nietzsche is put in Phase Twelve of<br />
A Vision, the phase of the hero. A Vision s cyclical view of history is also corroborated by Nietzsche s belief<br />
in history as an endless flux, which he derived from Empedocles and Heraclitus.<br />
Italian philosophy: As Late as 1924, Yeats plunged himself into the reading and understanding of Italian philosophy.<br />
He concentrated on Benedetto Croce s Aesthetic and The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Vico derived his<br />
philosophy of history by a study of the classical writes and this culminated in his scienza Nuova (New Science),<br />
1725. Yeats capitatized upon Vico,s understanding of myth and tradition. According to Vico, myth and tradition<br />
are historical though they do not refer to real men. They constitute a form of Truth (for primitive men) which<br />
is apprehended by the imagination and when cast in an artistic mould becomes poetry Yeats aligned this with<br />
Blake s belief in imagination and the Platonic Anima Mundi. More important is Vico s cyclical view of movements<br />
in both religious and political history Vico, like Blake saw Man as the maker of his own history and destiny.<br />
These literary and philosophic studies coupled with his readings of Dante, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Donne,<br />
Castiliogne, Swift, Shelley and Kant made for an eclectic philosophy that is deployed in the service of his<br />
poetry in the socio-cultural context of Ireland and its struggle for freedom.<br />
(vi) Maud Gonne and the other women in Yeats’s Life<br />
Yeats s poetry is notable for the use of real life characters, whose character traits appealed to him in real life,<br />
and he dramatized them. However, of dozens of people with whom he was close, Yeats s poetry has a surprisingly<br />
restricted cast of characters. Even so, they were mostly dead when brought to life as dramatis personae in his<br />
poems. Maud Gonne was one of the exceptions. The reason why these dead people are scattered in his poetry<br />
is not far to seek. Their function is instrumental in that they are invoked in order to contribute to the storehouse<br />
of images or Great Memory (or Anima Mundi). This idea of the last is discussed elsewhere.<br />
Some of the characters are dead poets whom he knew, such as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and John<br />
Synge, some were dead relatives: such as the Pollexfens, some dead friends such as Lady and Major Gregory,<br />
and dead warriors, a few beautiful women. A few among the living , such as Maud Gonne, Iseult Gonne,<br />
Georgie Hyde-Lees find a place in his cast. Some, like Florence Farr, Olivia Shakespear, may not have figured<br />
as frequently in his poetry, but were important factors affecting his life. In 1890 at the beginning of his association<br />
with the Rhymer s Club, Yeats had met Florence Farr, a young dynamic woman who had access to artistic<br />
social circles. She did the verse-speaking for his play The Countess Kathleen and it was her fine techniques<br />
that later proved to be of immense help to Yeats in his theatre business . Farr is commemorated in Yeats<br />
poem All Soul s Night . In 1894 the members of the Rhymer s Club introduced him to a woman Yeats called<br />
Diana Vernon. She has been identified as Olivia Shakespear with whom Yeats had a brief affair in 1896.<br />
Although short-lived this first consummated affair made a considerable difference to his poetic style. Yeats<br />
maintained a life-long friendship and correspondence with her.<br />
It is Maud Gonne (1866-1953), however, whose presence looms large over the landscape of his poetry. Many,<br />
including Maude Gonne herself, believed that Yeats would not have been the great poet he became had he not<br />
met her. Some have gone further in maintaining that Maud Gonne s refusal to marry the poet led to the<br />
greatness and permanence of some of his love lyrics. She was nearly six feet tall, imperial in demeanor, and by<br />
many accounts the most beautiful woman in Ireland. He met her in 1889, when she called at his house,<br />
ostensibly to meet his father; it was the season of apple blossoms; she walked (Yeats wrote) like a goddess.<br />
He never quite recovered. Tall and noble but with face and bosom/Delicate in colour as apple blossom : This<br />
is how Yeats always remembered Maud Gonne. There is a frequent motif in Yeats work, of a man who is<br />
touched by a faery queen and whose life is forever blighted as in the Stories of Red Hanrahan and The<br />
Queen and the Fool . And Yeats regarded himself as a man whose emotional life was half crippled by his<br />
obsession with Maude Gonne:<br />
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A romantic, when romanticism was in its final extravagance, I thought one woman, whether wife, mistress, or<br />
incitement to platonic love, enough for a life time: a Parsifal, Tristam, Don Quixote, without the intellectual<br />
prepossessions. That gave them solidity. But if his life was deformed by his love for her, his art was much<br />
quickened- though he did not like to hear her say that posterity would be grateful to her for refusing him,<br />
because he wrote so many fine poems about it. Yeats met Maud Gonne at the age of twenty-three in Bedford<br />
Park and this meeting proved to be a turning point in Yeats personal and poetic/artistic life. Yeats fell deeply<br />
and passionately in love with her and her beauty, grace and a divine stature cast a spell so strong that Maud<br />
Gonne became the motivation and inspiration behind Yeats copious poetic output. Maud Gonne was a nationalist<br />
and a feminist activist who fiercely concentrated on the attainment of freedom for Ireland at all costs. She was<br />
an Anglo-Irish who rebelled against the values and ideas of that very class. Though Yeats himself was engaged<br />
in Irish politics, his efforts were primarily directed towards Ireland s cultural development through the channels<br />
of literary and artistic progress. In this he significantly differed from Maud Gonne whose aggressive, almost<br />
ruthless self-confidence and intense devotion to Irish nationalist politics was anathema to Yeats.<br />
Despite this from the time of his first meeting until Maud Gonne s marriage with John MacBride in1903 ,Yeats<br />
repeatedly proposed marriage to her. He paid personal visits to her in Dublin and London and Yeats experience<br />
with her in Howth in 1891 forms the focus of his poem The White Birds . He wrote The Countess Kathleen<br />
(1892) for her since she wanted this play to be staged in Dublin on account of its nationalist aspect. The<br />
Countess Kathleen sacrificed her own goods to save the souls of the Irish people from a devil in the time of a<br />
famine. The self-sacrificing fervour of Maud Gonne is equated to Kathleen s , and Yeats own position is<br />
portrayed as the bard Kevin, which introduces an autobiographical element in the play. Maud Gonne s refusal<br />
to marry him and the enormous strain Yeats underwent on account of this is captured in Kevin s offering his<br />
soul to the demons because his life seemed futile and hopeless. At the same time Kevin/Yeats wanted to save<br />
Kathleen/Maud Gonne from self- destruction that is inevitable while dealing with larger than personal forces.<br />
Yeats did not limit his interaction with her merely to a personal level. He plunged into action at the national<br />
front. In 1898 after the violence of the Jubilee Riots of 1897, he travelled with her on a lecture tour in England<br />
and Scotland to promote the 1898 Wolfe Tone Association and Irish nationalist celebrations. Later he regretted<br />
this involvement and henceforth refused to be drawn in her political schemes which were increasingly becoming<br />
violent and dangerous .<br />
Maud Gonne was attracted to radical politics; she was for example part of a scheme to blow up British troops<br />
on boats bound for South Africa during the Boer War. According to Yeats description, she seemed physically<br />
aroused by violence: when glass was being everywhere shattered during street rioting in Dublin, Maud Gonne<br />
has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing head thrown back. Yeast though alarmed by her blood<br />
thirsty politics, contrived to implicate himself in her emotional life in odd ways. She was interested in Yeats<br />
occultism, and studied with him; Yeats evoked for her a past personality , a vision of a life in which she had<br />
been an Egyptian priestess.<br />
In the mid - 1890s, Maud Gonne became the lover of a French anarchist editor, Lucien Millevoye; she bore him<br />
a child, who died in infancy; and she decide to assist the baby s reincarnation by sleeping with Millevoye in the<br />
vault under the child s grave. In this fashion was Iseult Gonne (1894 1954) conceived. Yeats continued his<br />
hopeless wooing of Maud Gonne; in 1898 she told him that, though they could never be physically married, she<br />
had had a great dream in which a great spirit put her hand into Yeats and married them; and she kissed him<br />
on the lips for the first time and confessed to him her sordid relations with Millevoye. Then they had a<br />
remarkable double vision:<br />
She thought herself a great stone statue through which passed flame, and I felt myself becoming flame and<br />
mounting up through and looking out of the eyes of a great stone Minerva. Were the beings that stand behind<br />
human life trying to unite us, or had we brought it by our own dreams?<br />
The double vision of statue and flame seemed to embody their complimentariness, their inter dependence as<br />
if together they added upto a single, animate, monumental thing.
W.B. Yeats<br />
When in 1903, Yeats heard the news that Maud Gonne had married a soldier, John MacBride he described<br />
the news as a blast of lightening . He felt that she had betrayed her mystical marriage of 1898. She and<br />
MacBride soon quarreled, and separated in 1905. The British for his part in the Easter Rebellion executed<br />
MacBride in 1916 and Maud Gonne was again free to marry. Once again Yeats pestered her with proposals;<br />
once again she refused; and then Yeats proposed to Iseult Gonne. To Yeats this playful, impetuous girl represented<br />
youth and spontaneity he often pictured her by the sea, singing or dancing, with the wind blowing in her hair.<br />
At the age of about fifteen, Iseult had suggested to Yeats that they marry but at the age of twenty-two she was<br />
unwilling to marry the fifty- two year old poet. Despairing Yeats asked another attractive woman, Georgie<br />
Hyde-Lees (1892 1968) little older than Iseult Gonne to marry him and she agreed. Yeats was not<br />
immediately excited by the marriage. The new wife often went into a trance and claimed she was being<br />
dictated to by unknown forces. The strange experience is described in Yeats s biographical writings.<br />
Mrs. Yeats automatic writing soon started to offer much, much more than words of consolation from the great<br />
beyond about Yeats treatment of Iseult Gonne. Thereafter Mrs. Yeats found - to her own surprise that she<br />
could easily enter a mediumistic state, and write or speak messages from dead or unborn spirits. Over the next<br />
few years she filled thousands of pages with automatic writing often in response to Yeats - and gave the poet<br />
rudiments of the system elaborated in A Vision (1925): a general system for explaining history, personality, and<br />
the progress of the soul after death. But the first purpose of the automatic writing was to elucidate Yeats<br />
personal relations with Maud Gonne, Iseult Gonne, and his wife.<br />
According to one of Mrs. Yeats favorite Controls, Thomas of Dorlowicz, Yeats and his three birds (three<br />
women) formed a kind of tetrad. Yeats was Heroic, Iseult Good, Maud Beautiful, George True; Yeats represented<br />
the fall (the loss of unity of being), Iseult the Heart, Maud the Head, George the Loins; Yeats was Instinct,<br />
Iseult Desire, Maud Intellect, George emotion; Yeats element was Earth, Iseult s Water, Maud s Air, and<br />
George s Fire and so on. William Blake an edition of whose poetry Yeats published in1893 conceived the<br />
Fall of Man as the division of a single Giant, Albion (the whole human race), into four Zoas, representing the<br />
various faculties of the soul, bickering, impeding one another, working fractiously towards reunion. Similarly, it<br />
seems that Yeats and his wife, Iseult and Maud Gonne together constituted a single human identity. Yeats<br />
believed that, for centuries, he and these women had known one another, sometimes as brother and sister<br />
sometimes in sexual relations, twisting, writhing, through a thousand incarnations, exploring every conceivable<br />
permutation of relationship:<br />
We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family<br />
of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted,<br />
the child of one life the husband, wife, brother or sister of the next.<br />
Thus, Yeats poems about Iseult and Maud Gonne and his wife are simply a form of extended self-inquiry. The<br />
women are not autonomous beings, but portions of those four fold beings of which Yeats himself forms a part.<br />
In addition to these three, Yeats celebrated other living women in his verse. In 1896 Olivia Shakespear, a gentle<br />
and attractive married woman, had become Yeats s first lover; in 1914 her daughter Dorothy married Ezra<br />
Pound. Yeats s liason with her lasted only a year, but they were to remain lifelong friends; he explained their<br />
unsuitability as lovers as follows:<br />
She was too near my soul, too salutary and wholesome to my inmost being. All our lives long, as da Vinci says,<br />
we long for our destruction, and how, when we meet [it] in the shape of a most fair woman, can we do less than<br />
leave all others for her? Do we not seek our dissolution upon her lips?<br />
Olivia Shakespear was Yeats-like, but he craved his opposite, a more devastating relation.<br />
Another vital presence in Yeats poetry was an Irish noblewoman, Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory (1852-<br />
1932). A widow older than Yeats, deeply involved in the revival of Irish literature, a folklorist and playwright,<br />
she provided (beginning in 1897) a tranquil environment in which Yeats could work, could take refuge from the<br />
tumult of passion. Yeats first met her in 1896. She owned the famous estate of Coole Park which, after the<br />
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Poetry<br />
death of her husband, was devoted to writers who could gather and discuss their work in the peaceful, surrounding<br />
of the estate. At her home, Cool Park, County Galway, Yeats spent many a pleasant months; and he frequently<br />
turned to her for literary collaboration (such as the play The Unicorn from the Stars) and personal advice.<br />
After she died, in 1932, Yeats endured a period of creative sterility; he feared that the subconscious drama<br />
that was my imaginative life end[ed] at Lady Gregory s death. Her drawing room was full of the works of her<br />
literary friends their poems, letters and prose compositions. It was at Coole that Irish national theatre was<br />
planned. For Yeats, opposites merged in the figure of the Lady. She represented a refined and a cultured<br />
aristocratic way of life; a modern example of the Protestant from the Irish landed class, she was against<br />
England and was inevitably on the side of the people . For Yeats Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee represented<br />
the cultural heritage of eighteenth century Ireland and these demanded preservation. In the civil war in the<br />
1920s Roxborough House, Lady Gregory s translations of Gaelic folklore into <strong>English</strong> provided Yeats with<br />
myths and legends. She collected these from the songs and stories of travelling men and beggars at Coole, or<br />
from the cottages in the Kiltartan district. She collaborated with Yeats on Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Pot<br />
of Broth. She also wrote Our Irish Theatre(1913), Hughlane s Life and Achievement (1921) her own<br />
Journals(1916-30) and Coole(1931). Throughout 1931 she suffered much pain from a malignant cancer<br />
which she bore courageously and died in May 1932. It was Lady Gregory who had arranged his meeting with<br />
Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1912. Yeats eventually married her in 1917 in London. In 1912 he also worked with<br />
Rabindranath Tagore on translation of Gitanjali from Bengali. The controversy over Hugh Lane pictures also<br />
happened in 1912 and disgusted with the Irish lack of reverence for art, he joined Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage<br />
in Sussex in 1913. In 1915, the year in which Hugh Lane was drowned in the Lusitania, Yeats refused a<br />
knighthood. In 1917 Yeats bought his dream Tower at Thoor Ballylee, and Yeats and his wife shifted to the<br />
place in 1918. The importance of this place has already been indicated.<br />
On the establishment of the Irish free state, Yeats served as a senator from 1923 to 1928. The same year i.e.<br />
in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He translated, in collaboration with Purohit Swamy, the<br />
Upanishads in 1935. Yeats died on 28 January 1939 and was buried in the county Sligo.<br />
II. Major themes and works<br />
This section deals with various themes and issues that dominate the works of Yeats, especially those concerning<br />
his poetry. Most of the volumes of his poetry will be analyzed chronologically. Yeats s poetry is better understood<br />
with reference to his prose writings, especially A Vision that contains Yeats poetic doctrine. A Vision was first<br />
published in 1925; Yeats issued a revised edition in 1938. But many of the ideas had always haunted Yeats even<br />
during the early Years of his career. It is the latter version that is of greater critical importance. Although A<br />
Vision is documented towards the end of Yeats s life, it is the product of his long-standing beliefs, his life-long<br />
philosophical leanings and practice and, of course, and his understanding of history: not just at the micro level<br />
of just Ireland, but the entire civilizational history of Europe and the whole world. Thus, ideally, this section<br />
ought to have begun with the explication of A Vision interwoven with his other prose works, so that the detailed<br />
examination of each volume that follows could have been aided by the perspective provided by the treatise.<br />
However, since a large number of other factors went into the making of A Vision, which we are yet to dwell<br />
on, it may not be possible to comprehend Yeats s arguments at this stage. So, except for a brief preview of his<br />
system, which follows, for practical reasons we shall postpone a detailed examination and analysis of Yeats s<br />
complex treatise later.<br />
All the volumes published by Yeats have thematic linkages. The theme of the exploration of love in its various<br />
moods and aspects is a major one in Yeats oeuvre. Related to this is the praise of beauty, especially Maud<br />
Gonne s beauty. The way the beautiful finds its way into his aesthetic is also an important subject to be taken<br />
up for discussion. Yeats love for Maud Gonne and her repeated refusal to marry him: the consequences of this<br />
autobiographical fact for his poetry, as we have already said, cannot be overestimated. His unrequited love for<br />
her constantly resurfaces in all the volumes, but in different ways. Also, his response to the emotional crisis
W.B. Yeats<br />
arising out of it kept changing with time and circumstances. Some other thematic concerns in his poetry are:<br />
the negotiation between the ideas and ideals of love and beauty, the conflict between youth and age, permanence<br />
and ephemera, body and soul, passion and the lack of it. In each case the examination of the issue at hand is<br />
tested in relation to Maud Gonne, often encoded as the Helen myth. This is not restricted to his later verse<br />
alone. Yeats s preoccupation with the question of death, the world of becoming that hampers the fulfillment of<br />
desires is evident throughout his poetic career. In addition to this, some volumes center round a dominant image<br />
or symbol; and some poems are written to commemorate events or pay homage or are rooted in topical<br />
happenings. But still these do not fall out of the larger framework, which this section attempts to outline.<br />
Though we shall take this up later in some detail, a sneak preview might be in order:<br />
We shall see how the genesis of the personal mythological history of A Vision can be traced back to the<br />
automatic writing of his wife. In so far as its theme is concerned, it chronicles those historical events that<br />
seemed important to Yeats. According to Yeats, it embraces the philosophy of the spirits , the Unknown<br />
Instructors who provided him with metaphors/symbols of poetry. It is this idiosyncratic ordering/imposition of<br />
time upon the history that is employed in the service and poetry perceived. History is a set of patterns and<br />
patterns which repeat themselves after a particular period of time depending on the Phases of the Moon. The<br />
waxing and waning of the moon that constitutes the Lunar cycle thus influences history. Yeats taps the symbolic<br />
and mythic potential of such an arbitrary ordering of time and this manifests itself in his poetic theory and<br />
practice.<br />
It bears the influence of Yeats s personal interests and artistic endeavour throughout his life. Oriental mysticism,<br />
the western philosophy of Heterodox Mysticism, his psychical research in the 1937 edition; Yeats mentions his<br />
indebtness to various sources. These include Pierre Duhem s Systeme du Monde, Toynbee s A Study of<br />
History, Henry Adams History as Phase, and Flinders Petrie s The Revolutions of Civilization and<br />
H.G.Wells Outline of History. It incorporates in his own Blakean practices of vision and dream.<br />
History is visualized as interlaced cones which are in a state of continuous motion always expanding or<br />
contracting. Within the cone moves the perne , a spool which unwinds the thread as the sphere moves onward.<br />
This complex of double cones and threads is referred to as gyre and the gyrations of the conical sphere are<br />
used to explain both the historical events and each man s life. Yeats idea of gyre is derived through many<br />
ramifications, from Plato, Heraclitus, Descartes, Swedenborg, Boehme and Blake. The double cones<br />
are symptomatic of the opposing pulls of external phenomena and internal psychic forces that assail an individual.<br />
The dialectical relationship between soul and self, man and nature, heart and head, youth and age is symbolized/<br />
articulated/expressed through the movement of the gyre. This underscores Yeats belief that thesis and antithesis<br />
are in progress simultaneously. It also shows the influence of Blake, which we have already examined, though<br />
briefly. Blake s poetic theory, we might recall, is premised upon the conviction that without contraries is no<br />
progression . We have also seen how Nietzsche influenced Yeats, and how he had met the idea of contraries<br />
in Boehme.<br />
The simultaneous articulation of the antithetical aspects of personality led Yeats to formulate his doctrine of the<br />
Mask. The Mask is an anti-self that represents the ideal opposite of oneself. Through the use of the mask an<br />
artist can assimilate in his poetry contradictory aspects /facets of experience and the multiple facets of personality<br />
that constitutes reality. In fact, for Yeats creativity/art arises out of the dramatic tension between the self and<br />
the anti-self. The theory of the mask also helps to create a narrative distance and hence personal, emotive<br />
utterance is objectified to a certain extent. His poetry thus enacts the mediation of Individual subjectivity in a<br />
social, historical and cultural context. Man desires his opposite.<br />
The Wanderings of Oisin though written early in Yeats career is a statement of what Yeats came to believe<br />
to be his major preoccupation in old age the acquision of wisdom is always at a cost of wisdom accompanies<br />
bodily decrepitude and death. While preparing the Definitive Edition of his poetry, Yeats wrote to Olivia<br />
Shakespeare on June30, 1932 , My first denunciation of old age I made in The Wanderings of Oisin before<br />
I was twenty and the same denunciation comes in the last pages of the book. Structurally, The Wanderings<br />
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of Oisin shows immense diversity in terms of the use of meter and rhyme. Ranging from the iambic tetrameter<br />
of Book I, hexameter of Book III. The romantic elements are bestowed with a symbolic significance which<br />
lends itself to multiple interpretations. The poem itself is dominated by occult symbols of birds, trees, the moon<br />
and the sun. The birds are birds of prey like eagles and ravens which symbolize Resurrection. It narrates the<br />
story of Oisin, Finn s son who is loved by a fairy Niamh. The word Niamh means beauty and brightness; she<br />
is the daughter of Aengus the God of beauty and poetry. Niamh and Oisin journey through three islands for a<br />
period of three hundred years. The three islands are the island of Dancing/Living, the Island of Victories and<br />
the Island of Forgetfulness and denote three aspects of one life: youth, middle age and old age. In terms of<br />
larger than personal influence, it portrays the world as experienced by three types of men: the lover, the active<br />
man and the contemplative man. Richard Ellman reads these as Sligo, London and Howard respectively. Yeats<br />
wrote to Katherine Tynan saying that Oisin presents the incompatible things which man is always seeking<br />
infinite feeling, infinite battle and infinite repose hence the three islands . The debate of Oisin with St.<br />
Patrick with which the poem opens superimposes the Christian view of mortal and immortal life on the pagan<br />
legend and hence is circular in form.<br />
Wanderings of Oisin meditates on such issues as how man can escape the world of becoming. The immutable<br />
and infinite islands offer no satisfaction to Oisin because the fact of desire underpins a human being s life. If it<br />
is not the world of human activity as represented by the three islands that can satisfy the adventurous Oisin ,<br />
then do the options rest in the world of art as represented by Byzantium. Clearly, the nature of human desire<br />
and fulfillment runs as a continuous thread through Yeats ouevre. Oisin s transition from one island to the<br />
other is necessitated by the remembrance of his people, the Irish Fenian and Fiama. The poem sheds light on<br />
Yeats s understanding of the intersection between individual and national destiny; a heroic figure like Oisin<br />
cannot just indulge in individualist pursuits but has to accept his duty and responsibility to the larger community<br />
of which he is a part. Romanticism is yet again tampered by the theme of old age and the condition of Ireland.<br />
This point is also underscored if one considers the departures from his sources . He drew mainly from The<br />
Transactions of the Ossianic Society. The fourth volume of the latter contained Michael Comyns poem.<br />
The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth . Yeats significantly alters this narrative according to which Oisin and<br />
Niamh travel to the land of Virtues and Victories about Yeats perennial grappling with the ideas of youth and<br />
age , private and public the antithesis has already begun to play a major role in his poetic composition. As<br />
Norman Jeffares says, The main light which the poem casts on Yeats own personality is that it reveals him<br />
in love with the idea of love .<br />
Crossways, published in 1889, comprises poems written between 1885 and 1887. The title is appropriate as<br />
these poems present, as Yeats pointed out in 1895, some of the many pathways he was to embark upon in the<br />
course of his poetic development. These poems have been revised and rewritten and considerably differ from<br />
the ones that appeared in his fist book of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. Among other<br />
things, Crossways is linked to the previous volume in its pervasive use of bird imagery peahen, parrots, dove<br />
etc. The poems in this volume came to be read as companion poems/pieces that are often imagistically linked,<br />
and then dialectically opposed or present the positive and negative aspects of the same theme, much in the<br />
manner of Blake s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems explore the theme of love in<br />
its varied aspects and in terms of different ways of treatment of passionate love and its fulfillment The Indian<br />
to his Love and The Falling of the Leaves deals with the subject of the waning of love . In Ephemera ,<br />
the treatment of fading of passion is stylistically different. It is cast in the form of a dialogue between lovers,<br />
thus lending the lyric I a certain measure of impersonality. Related to the themes of love is the speculation<br />
upon questions of subjectivity and personal vision that the poems engage in. The Song of the Happy Shepherd<br />
envisages a pearly brotherhood made possible by the conviction that words alone are certain good ; for<br />
sincere expression is the basis of poetry and truth alike, there is no truth/ saving in thine own heart. As<br />
opposed to this cheerful song , The Sad Shepherd is unhappy because his song has been changed to an<br />
inarticulate moan . These poems thus emphasize the importance of artists and art to a community as Yeats
W.B. Yeats<br />
envisioned it. Crossways also demonstrates Yeats diverse interests and the different techniques he employs<br />
depending upon the subject of the poem. The first eight poems of Crossways deal with Indian and Arcadian<br />
subject matter; the remaining eight are Irish in tone and mood.<br />
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) represents the culmination of Yeats early poetry in its undiluted and strict<br />
emphasis on symbolim and beauty . It shows the influence of the Rhymer s Club, the French symbolists and<br />
the literary movement of Aestheticism .At the same time , this lyrical poetry is also informed by a dramatic<br />
impulse, the dramatic aspect reflected in the creation of three characters that Yeats accomplishes at this time<br />
.Seeing them as principles of mind , Yeats creates Aedh, Hanrahan and Michael Robartes and endows them<br />
with specific characteristics which he explains in the note to these poems in magical terms. Aedh represents<br />
fire burning by itself ; Michael Robartes fire reflected in water and Hanrahan is fire blown by the wind .<br />
For Yeats, fire symbolized imagination, hence the three figures represent imagination in its different aspects. In<br />
terms of the role they play in the poems, Aedh is a sad lover offering up riches before all that he loves, Michael<br />
Robartes proudly broods over his possession and Hanrahan is too changeable to gather permanent possessions.<br />
This symbolic code shows Yeats steeped in occult and visionary philosophy. The symbols of water, sea, wind<br />
are derived from the Rosicrucian system of symbolism and Yeats elaborates upon the significance of these in<br />
his Notes. Water is explained as everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness<br />
of the dreams . The sea is identified with life itself or as a symbol of the drifting indefinite bitterness of life .<br />
Wind is a symbol of vague desires and hopes, not merely because the Sidhe are in the wind, or because the<br />
wind bloweth as it listeth, but because wind and spirit and vague desires have been associated everywhere.<br />
Responsibilities was published in 1914 and it bears the mark of personal and political events that took place<br />
between the publications of The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and this. Between 1910 and 1914<br />
Yeats visited America twice. Though Yeats had ceased to attend to the details of the Abbey management he<br />
was still interested in its performances. In 1911 he accompanied the players on the first part of the tour in<br />
America but he left before the furious reaction of the Irish-American audiences to Synge s play broke out. His<br />
second visit was in January march 1914 for a lecture tour. As the title of the volume suggests , the poems<br />
demonstrate Yeats s effort to grapple with personal and larger than personal forces, i.e., to see the events in<br />
his life without the veil of idealism and thus accept responsibility for it. In the political sphere, this manifests<br />
itself in the Yeats s indignant reaction to Hugh Lane Controversy. In 1912 Sir Hugh Lane, Lady Gregory s<br />
nephew, offered his collection of French paintings to the Dublin Corporation on the condition that they house<br />
them in a gallery worthy of them. But the Corporation refused and Sir Hugh subsequently handed the pictures<br />
to the National gallery, London. September 1913 is one of the several poems that Yeats wrote to voice his<br />
disgust at the stinginess and the lack of respect and appreciation of the contemporary Irish people for art and<br />
beauty. The poem castigates/satirizes the local inhabitants whom Yeats sees as unworthy of the numerous and<br />
great sacrifices of the nationalist revolutionaries like John O Leary .Ireland is not capable and not worthy of<br />
sustaining the heroism that characterized it in earlier times. The refrain Romantic Ireland s dead and gone,/<br />
It s with O Leary in the grave ,drives home the point rather forcefully. If September 1913 documents<br />
Yeats feelings viz-a-viz nationalist issues, In the The Cold Heaven the poet persona blames himself for the<br />
failure of his love for Maud Gonne. In a moment of intense feeling when the poet s experience approximated<br />
to a vision , I took all the blame out all of sense and reason ./Untill I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,/<br />
Riddled with light. The Cold Heaven also deals with questions of life after death and the state of the soul<br />
therein.<br />
Responsibilities is also crucial to our understanding of Yeats ouevre as it marks a change in his style and<br />
thought. During this time Yeats was much influenced by Ezra Pound whose imagist doctrines emphasized<br />
clarity and precision in the presentation of ideas .Pound, who reviewed the volume, said that Yeats had at last<br />
become a modern poet . Yeats himself refers to his transformation in his poem A Coat in the form of his<br />
favorite sartorial image. In the poem he indicates his renunciation of the decorative poetry of the past in fvour<br />
of the Imagist credo: the word itself is the adequate symbol. Now there is greater enterprise in Walking<br />
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Naked , i.e., confronting the issues of the changing times in all its starkness. Responsibilities shows yet<br />
another of Yeats preoccupations at this time: he made enquiries into the family history and the Prologue to<br />
the volume describes them . Yeats takes this up in the section of his Autobiographies called Reveries which<br />
he called some sort of an apologia for the Yeats family.<br />
The Seven Woods published in 1903, is informed by Yeats experience with theatre what he called the theatre<br />
business and the event of Maud Gonne s marriage in1903. His play On Baits Strand was published at the end<br />
of the first edition of In The Seven Woods which constituted fourteen poems .The involvement with theatre<br />
added the public dimension to his otherwise dream-burdened will , as Yeats described his subjectivity .<br />
Corresponding to this is the use of an anomalous conversational idiom and tone along with the mellowing of<br />
images. However, this does not reduce/mitigate the intensity of emotions and feelings which the poems articulate.<br />
This volume continues Yeats presentation of facts of aging and mortality rather an acute/a painful<br />
consciousness of these facts. Superimposed on this or juxtaposed to this is the autobiographical fact of Yeats<br />
frustrated hopes and thwarted desires in the act of Maud Gonne s marriage to MacBride in1903. After having<br />
been turned down by Maud Gonne several times ,Yeats once again proposed to her in Paris with the hope of<br />
finally winning her hand. But Yeats faced rejection yet again . From 1899 to 1902 , Yeats articulated/gave<br />
expression to his sorrow and unrequited love in poems like The Arrow , The Folly of Being Comforted ,<br />
Adam s Curse and Under the Moon . But the final blow came with the news of her marriage and is<br />
poetically rendered in lyrics like Old Memory , Never give all the heart , The Ragged Wood and O Do<br />
Not Love Too Long . As these are poems about the eventual unfulfillment in love, the poems contain the<br />
memories of some moments of togetherness and tenderness. Along with these recollections is an assertion of<br />
the poet s undying love. Adam s Curse is a case in point. The poem interrelates the three kinds of lobour: the<br />
poet s, the beautiful woman s and the lover s . In doing this, the poem tells about Yeats poetic strategy the<br />
semblance of spontaneity and sudden emotion even if in actuality it required hours of thinking and composition.<br />
It extends this poetic principle to the principle of social and behavioural and personal feelings by giving voice to<br />
the labour of a beautiful woman and a lover. Lovelorn and time-worn , the poet personalizes these efforts in his<br />
statements : you were beautiful and I strove/ To love you in the old high way of love . But the present is<br />
dominated by the weary hearted[ness] captured in the image of the hollow moon . Under The Moon is an<br />
extensive catalogue of myths that are not to be borne by the poet. The changed attitude to myth is also<br />
predicated upon disappointment in love.<br />
Adam s Curse , also shows the elements of narrative and drama that are introduced in the poem by virtue of<br />
reported dialogue. Stylistically, critics see it as anticipating Yeats modernist poetics. According to T.S. Eliot ,<br />
this was the volume in which Yeats became a modern as well as a poet. The title alludes to the Seven Woods<br />
Of the Lady Gregory s estate where Yeats had written many of the lyrics in the volume. Michael Sidnell points<br />
out that it is Yeats only title for the collection of the poems that directly implies the physical presence of the<br />
poet . This topographical settings reiterates Yeats new interest in self dramatization . But the woods do not<br />
loose their symbolic significance. Associated with natural innocence and quietude, they have recuperative<br />
power for the poet.<br />
Like the previous volume, the poems written between 1908 and 1912, show the influence of Yeats<br />
involvement in theatre. The Green Helmet is a play that deals with Helmets , and Swords, and half-forgotten<br />
thing ( Reconciliation ) in the absence of an impetus/catalyst for poetic composition .Maud Gonne s marriage<br />
affected Yeats lyrical output, but between 1903 and 1910 ,Yeats was beginning to formulate/forge a new<br />
aesthetic for himself and this is reflected in his lectures and correspondence. The personal lyrics of the middle<br />
section of the volume are flanked by two public poems : His Dream and Brown Pemy that speculate<br />
upon the themes of death and love respectively . Yeats was always fascinated with the idea of Amor as<br />
Death and these poems illustrate this.<br />
The more personal lyrics are thematically and imagistically integrated by the repeated use of conversational<br />
phrases. These again may be divided into two groups : those addressed to Maud Gonne and some addressed to
W.B. Yeats<br />
Lady Gregory . Maud Gonne assumes the larger than life stature as she becomes the real life counterpart of<br />
the mythological Helen. The image of Helen pervades Yeats poetry and sheds light on Yeats complex treatment<br />
of this myth in particular and his attitude towards myth in general. A Woman Homer Sung and No Second<br />
Troy are such examples. With Reconciliation Yeats articulated the need and desire to ameliorate his somewhat<br />
hard and bitter feelings for Maud Gonne on account of both her marriage and political strategies and outlook.<br />
But, dear, cling close to me ; since you were gone, / My barren thoughts hare chilled me to the bone is a<br />
moving expression of Yeats sense of loss. The other poems that refer to Maud Gome are Words , King and<br />
No King , Peace: and Against unworthy Praise .<br />
The fire poems that follow The Mask are all associated with Lady Gregory. Upon a House shaken by the<br />
Land Agitation is Coole Park, Lady Gregory s residence where Yeats spent much of his time relaxing and<br />
composing poetry. These are the clouds and A Friend s Illness both are about Lady Gregory, written at the<br />
time of her illness in 1909. The former recounts Lady Gregory s obsession with Coole and its history and the<br />
latter is Yeats statement of her importance to him.<br />
The Mask is Yeats first poem to examine this image which would become a central tenet of this personal<br />
and poetic belief. The autobiographical facts and poetic practice are once again connected: words and All<br />
Thing can Tempt Me . Contemplating the impact of Maud Game s rejection of him on his poetry, Yeats<br />
surmises that had she accepted him, I might have thrown poor words away / And been content to live<br />
( Words ). Important as his poetics vocation is to him, All Things can Tempt Me once again exhibits his<br />
uncontrollable urge to possess Maud Gonne, even if it means the loss of poetic inspiration: Yet this is tempered<br />
by the realization that I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; / Now I may wither into the truth as<br />
expressed in The Coming if Wisdom with Time . The volume thus examines / engages with themes that have<br />
been of continued relevance to Yeats in the formulation of his poetic creed: His love for Maud Gonne, her<br />
Hellenic beauty, the grudging acceptance of old age yet, a feeling of out of control passion are themes that go<br />
on to form the core of The Tower.<br />
III. Placing the Writer in a Literary Tradition Bringing<br />
Out his Contribution<br />
As a major and influential poet, and as a poet whose career spanned more than four decades, it was only to<br />
be expected that Yeats participated in several artistic movements and entered into and outgrew more than one<br />
tradition. In what follows we shall take a close look at how this happened. There is bound to be an overlap<br />
between some of the biographical details, the major themes and works discussed above and some of the points<br />
we take up for discussion in this section.<br />
Yeats and the fin-de-siecle, Late romanticism, decadence: Writing around the f n-dØ-siŁcle and well into<br />
the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Yeats came across literary movements predominant in<br />
those years. His poetry shows the influence that these movements had had on him. Of these he retained some<br />
and discarded the rest in his later years. Even though the Romantic Movement had exhausted itself by the<br />
1830s, it was to be one of the strongest influences on Yeats, something he could never get out of. Years later<br />
he would say, We were the last romantics chose for theme/Traditional sanctity and loveliness . ( Coole<br />
and Ballylee ). Though this claim is debatable, one can nonetheless discern certain romantic traits in Yeats s<br />
poetry, if we accommodate the argument that the newer aesthetic configurations were variants of the romantic<br />
movement. In fact, many moderns who disclaimed their romantic lineage or allegiance have been attributed<br />
romantic trappings. Be that as it may, the young Yeats came under the influence of the romantic visionary,<br />
William Blake and the romantic revolutionary, Shelley. Let us here try to chart the progress of Yeats<br />
through such movements as Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Symbolism and Imagism/<br />
Modernism. Throughout his career he strove for a unity of being which he so succinctly puts forward<br />
in poetic form in the Byzantium poems.<br />
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Yeats s drawing on the symbolist practice may have started with his reading of William Blake (1757 1827):<br />
His father used to read the poems of Blake to Yeats, and at the age of sixteen he lent him a copy of Blake.<br />
Yeats also produced a three volume edition of Blake in collaboration with Edwin Ellis explaining his symbols<br />
and mythology. For Blake, the faculty of imagination in man is the main source of spiritual consciousness. This<br />
imagination is articulated in the language of myth and symbols in poetry and other arts. Thus Man becomes the<br />
source and epitome of Poetic Genius. Yeats accepted these views and discovered reality in the imagination.<br />
He discusses this in William Blake and the Imagination in his Essays and Introduction. He says, In his<br />
[Blake s] time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of the imagination, but that<br />
they made their souls by listening to sermons and by doing or not doing certain things In our time we make<br />
our souls out of some one of the great poets of ancient times . The enormity of Blake s influence upon Yeats<br />
can be gauged in the basic premise of A Vision. Blake wrote I must create a system myself or be enslaved by<br />
another man s . Yeats did just that in his A Vision which, to him, was a vindication of his life s works and<br />
beliefs. He also found in Blake s writing his idea of the ultimate reconciliation of opposites in man s life and in<br />
history. Blake s belief in contraries as he expressed it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen in<br />
the following statement he makes: Without contraries is no Progression, Attraction and Repulsion, Reason<br />
and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence . This, as we shall see, gives rise to the two<br />
antithetical cones in Yeats s own A Vision.<br />
Yeats subscribed to the Blakean view encapsulated in his following statement: I must create a system or be<br />
enslaved by another man s . His system of philosophy, as delineated in A Vision (1926), is a more<br />
concrete form of mythology than Blake s The Four Zoas. Blake s was an abstract system, the<br />
mystical symbols making sense by and large only to himself. Yeats draws on occult and theosophy,<br />
among other things, in A Vision. Theosophy became a vogue in the 1830s and it was in the late 1880s<br />
that the Golden Dawn was founded and saw its membership flourish. The Rosicrucian doctrines along<br />
with their spirituality and mysticism made an impact on Yeats which can be followed in the volumes<br />
The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Yeats participated in all the principal traditions<br />
of his age, in the process nativizing them. He brought the Celtic heritage to bear upon them, thus<br />
contributing in a way to the Celtic Revival. The folkloric elements, fairy tales and other Irish legends<br />
that he mastered were made the subjects of many of his poems. The myth-making continues in the<br />
form of his various dramatis personae like Michael Robartes, Owen Ahern and Red Hanrahan.<br />
The fin-de-siecle:<br />
The practice of launching movements armed with labels, manifestos and magazines, so characteristic of the<br />
later high modernism, emerged as a strategy around the 1890 s. If the history of modernism is also the history<br />
of little magazines which Malcolm Bradbury has so aptly dubbed the shock troops of modernism, , the logical<br />
starting point of that history has to be the 1890s when, in England, the Yellow Book and Savoy were launched.<br />
Parodied contemporaneously, and often pejoratively referred to as decadent or fin-de-siecle, the decade was<br />
nonetheless a crucial launching pad for modernism. The predominant slogan that was heard in the literary<br />
London of the 1890s was that of art for art s sake . This credo was enunciated by Theophile Gautier in<br />
France much before it was taken up by the nineties aesthetes . When we examine in a later section how<br />
Pound and Eliot used Gautier to swerve the direction of modern poetry around 1918 the connections between<br />
the decade and the modern movement become that much easier to appreciate. Similarly Joyce would imbibe<br />
certain aesthetic ideals, as becomes evident from the portrayal of the egoist, Stephen Daedalus. Oscar Wilde s<br />
dicta that all artists are solipsists whether they know it or not, further go to prove the Wildean inspiration<br />
behind his bildungsroman..<br />
Yeats was very much a member of the Rhymers Club and his early poetry was forged in the Pre Raphaelite<br />
haze; Pound too was to be influenced by Dowson. The latter admitted The Rhymers, who he said, did<br />
valuable work in knocking bombast and rhetoric &Victorian syrup out of our verse. In placing a high value on
W.B. Yeats<br />
beauty and style in their art, the aesthetes, following Gautier, prided themselves in their craft. For them, the<br />
poets task became almost akin to the engraver s or sculptor s and the poem, a verbal icon. Such commitment<br />
to his art led to the aesthete away from any political commitment. Until the second wave of modernism came<br />
in the 1930s modern poetry remained fundamentally aesthetic in this sense. The public poet was superseded by<br />
the poet who addressed, like Yeats, the man who is but a dream, or, like Eliot the hypothetical intelligent man<br />
who does not exist. Even as late as 1938 Yeats would reflect this aesthetic ideal in his lines:<br />
How can I, or that girl standing there/My attention fix/ On Roman or on Russian/Or on Spanish politics?<br />
Owing their aestheticism to French writers such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert and others, the 90s poets had<br />
already brought in foreign elements into the <strong>English</strong> tradition, which were exploited to the hilt during the high<br />
modernist period. For Gautier, as indeed for the 90s poets, art was emphatically not what it was in the<br />
Romantic tradition, a cooperation with tradition that completes it . Nature could no longer suggest a process<br />
of composition, for natural spontaneity was distrusted. Art became the opposite of nature: formal and artificial.<br />
Thus, by bringing about the divorce between Nature and Art, art-for-art s-sake paved the way for high modernism.<br />
Hence the movement, in modern poetry, towards sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion,<br />
technical display .<br />
Thus, also, the movement from what was nature made to what was man made: the life in the city. Since city life<br />
had been found unpoetic as a subject matter for poetry in the greater part of the 19 th century, the 90s poets<br />
set out to depict it. They did so partly in reaction no doubt, but there were other reasons as well. First, as a vast<br />
and at that time unique capital city, London intrigued and preoccupied them. Second, the rising interest in the<br />
rights of the ordinary man, as projected by the socialist movements which brought to a sharp focus the plight of<br />
the London types. Examples abound in the 90s poetry, - Symon s City Nights: In the train . Dowson s<br />
Spleen, Henley s London types , and Davidson s Thirty Bob a week.<br />
Of Davidson s poem Eliot was to say how he had found inspiration on the content of the poem, and in the<br />
complete fitness of content and idiom: for I also a good many dingy urban images to reveal . Eliot for the<br />
same reasons was equally grateful to Baudelaire whom Frank Kermode calls the great poet of the modern<br />
city , who seems to have influenced the 90s poets no less. But, the city as a symbol or metaphor for the decay<br />
and degeneration of civilization came to be exploited to a greater extent only in the hands of the great moderns.<br />
Eliot, it would seem had such considerations in the mind when, later in life, he would say that he certainly had<br />
much more in common with the poet of the generation of the nineties than the <strong>English</strong> poets who survived to<br />
[his] own day .<br />
Thus, pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Symbolism (the French Symbolists) were the dominant traditions<br />
of the f n-dØ-siŁcle that defined Yeats politics in the pre-1900 era. Yeats enjoyed William Morris<br />
poems for their dream-like quality and mysticism. Something of this feeds into his first few volumes,<br />
especially the poem Lake Isle of Innisfree which espouses all these Romantic, Pre-Raphaelitic and<br />
Aestheticist ideals. Yeats had heard of Oscar Wilde and actually met him in 1888. He was impressed<br />
by the style of the chief protagonist of the Aestheticist Movement and tried to cultivate that apparently<br />
effortless refinement in his own work at the time. Arthur Symons was responsible for bringing<br />
Symbolism to England through his celebrated publication The Symbolist Movement in Literature<br />
(1899). Although the roots of this Movement lie in Romanticism, yet it tried to define a new aesthetic<br />
for the f n-dØ-siŁcle and was indeed an avant-garde Movement of its time. The symbol stood for<br />
something which would be reached at in steps, the reader pushed into exercising her imagination to<br />
grasp it. The thrust was on (word) associations, allusions, sensuous perception of reality, aural rather<br />
than visual elements among other things.<br />
As we have seen, when a boy, Yeats read Morris poetry. He first met William Morris in 1886 in Dublin<br />
and after that had become a regular visitor at Morris household. Although Yeats father with two of<br />
his friends had established a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it was through Morris that Yeats was<br />
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Poetry<br />
introduced to the aesthetic theories and controversies which had dominated artistic circles in the<br />
previous generation. Coming late in the long line of the Pre-Raphaelites from around 1850 Ruskin,<br />
Whistler, Pater, the Rossettis Morris was a sort of culminating point of notions about social values<br />
and art. His concept of courtesy, decorum and a regulated social order seeps into Yeats later work.<br />
One can suggest parallels between Yeats own Celtic folkloric ambience and Morris mediaevialist<br />
mythology. Yeats also recognized the importance of Pater s dictum in the Conclusion to The Renaissance:<br />
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. This was<br />
to become the Aestheticist tenet and Wilde concretized it in his personal life and literary style.<br />
According to Alasdair Macrae, In his poetic career [Yeats] was to swing about between an espousal<br />
of hermetic poetry, seemingly related to a notion of Art for art s sake , and a deployment of poetry<br />
as an instrument for ideological or attitudinal change and promotion. . The Lake Isle (written 1888),<br />
is a compound of the aestheticist tenets and the romantic yearning for a self-sufficient place. The<br />
whole poem has an atmosphere of a pre-Raphaelite languor.<br />
The foremost romantic influences on Yeats were those of Blake (which we have already discussed in<br />
some detail) and Shelley. Working with Edwin Ellis, Yeats had devoted some four years to Blake s<br />
poetry. The two editors elucidated Blake s mythological system of symbolism. By the time he came<br />
to work on Blake, Yeats had already embarked on explorations in the mystical tradition with George<br />
Russell (AE). Both Russell and Yeats shared an interest in the occult and Yeats was fascinated by<br />
the visions that others recorded. He was eager to discover their symbolism. Another thing that<br />
appealed to Yeats vis- -vis Blake was the latter s dialectic of contrary forces operating together.<br />
Shelley s Prometheus Unbound became one of the sacred books for Yeats. In 1900 he published<br />
The Philosophy of Shelley s Poetry , one of the seminal essays on the symbolic patterns in the poetry.<br />
Along with his studies in romanticism his explorations in occult continued. He had inherited his father s<br />
rational atheism, but was drawn to ideas of hierarchy, magic, hidden ancient wisdom. For the rest of<br />
his life he explored these mysteries, at first in psychic research and spiritualism, and among secret<br />
societies, later among hermetic philosophies. In 1887 he joined Madame Blavatsky s Theosophical<br />
Society in London. Another lifelong fascination, the Irish legends and fairy tales, remained with him. He<br />
found Lady Jane (Speranza) Wilde a major source of these ancient legends. Between 1888 and 1894<br />
Yeats went out to collect folklore and over the following years he continued this practice, either around<br />
Sligo or in Connaught, in cooperation with Lady Gregory. Mary Battle, his maternal uncle George<br />
Pollexfen s housekeeper, was another source for Yeats of amazing stories. According to Yeats, for<br />
Mary Battle, unblinkered with the modern bias, the ancient myths and legends were still alive and<br />
being re-enacted in the landscape around her. His earlier volumes viz. Crossways (1889), The Rose<br />
(1893), The Wind Among the Reeds (1889) and the long narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin<br />
(1889) draw on these Celtic folklores and myths. Most of the poems in these volumes also rely on<br />
overt symbols, the major ones being that of the rose and the cross [from Ros - rose and Crux -<br />
cross]. In Yeats case, even Symbolism goes through stages. His early poetry developed by and large<br />
on a single primary symbol, that of the rose. Rose could stand for any desirable object, thus subsuming<br />
a multitude of disparate objects. The Song of Wandering Aengus and When You are Old are other<br />
examples of poems wherein the influence of Irish legend and Occultism is felt.<br />
These symbols may vary from poem to poem but are nevertheless crucial to the themes. Besides rose<br />
and cross there are other symbols such as Swans, Moon, Tower, Staircase, in Yeats repertoire. Blake<br />
and Shelley were probably his most trusted exemplars and from Shelley, in particular, he gleaned<br />
patterns of symbols: caves, sages, rivers, journeys, shells, towers, winds, and the eagle and the serpent.<br />
He learned how a symbol can be introduced to the reader, then developed, repeated and echoed. Yeats<br />
brought Celtic mythology to Symbolism thereby making his brand of Symbolism esoteric enough. He<br />
had moved from Pre-Raphaelitism into Symbolism; Pound was able to help him move out of that
W.B. Yeats<br />
Symbolism which had about it the trappings and air of the 1890s decadence and to become a poet<br />
of the twentieth century.<br />
In the French Symbolism, the whole poem is turned into a mood through the incantatory power of the<br />
sound of the words. Symbolism saw the poem as verbal (and semi-musical) event, resonating with<br />
suggestion, brilliant, evocative, but refusing to yield up any one unequivocal conceptual meaning. Symbol<br />
far from being an expression of the self, becomes an attempt to reach out for something unreachable<br />
and inexpressible (without the help of a symbol). In 1921 Yeats talks of his symbols in one of his<br />
letters. The chief symbols around these years were of the sun, the moon in all her phases, the tower,<br />
the mask and the tree. In Adam s Curse [In the Seven Woods (1904)] the moon appears as a<br />
symbol of (in)constancy and shell as signifying emptiness, desolation. This poem also relies on the<br />
Symbolist articulation of mood through the words that contribute to the musical effect (ll.8-10).<br />
Yeats s symbols have a range that is less traditional than esoteric. It was Ezra Pound who helped the older<br />
poet s transition from Symbolism to Imagism/Modernism. Imagism as a Movement set itself in<br />
opposition to Symbolism. The emphasis on hardness and objectivity were aimed at removing all that<br />
Romantic and Symbolist dross from poetry. Pound proved to be the staunchest critic and simultaneously<br />
a keen disciple of Yeats, correcting the master ruthlessly wherever required. The Green Helmet (1910)<br />
and Responsibilities (1914) are some of the volumes where the changes in his idiom are marked. The<br />
volume Responsibilities is dedicated to Ezra Pound.<br />
Nevertheless, Yeats s early training was too strong to turn him into an extremist modern like Pound. Even in<br />
the mature volumes such as The Tower (1928), the Romantic streak continued. The old symbols gave<br />
way to the new ones, the mythology/philosophy matured but the esoteric element remained. We shall<br />
look at Yeats s affiliation with modernism in a later section. To be able to relate Yeats to the modernist moment/<br />
movement it might be necessary to trace the latter.<br />
Modernism and Yeats<br />
What is modernism/modernist poetry?: In what seems to be a telling moment in the history of modern poetry<br />
Ezra Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry (Chicago), the following lines about a young compatriot:<br />
I was jolly well right about Eliot He is the only American I know of who has made what I can call adequate<br />
preparation for writing. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own . It is such a<br />
comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914)<br />
on the calendar.<br />
The lines are well known. But as with many famous utterances, some significant aspects of Pound s letter<br />
have gone unnoticed. For, though he was by no means the first to use the term modern in connection with<br />
new things ( new was another of his favourite synonyms for modern ) that were happening in the world of<br />
letters, he was using the term in the sense which has endured most. Also, he was perhaps the first to use the<br />
term in its verbal form, as latter day sociologists often do: modernization as the process and modernism as<br />
the product. Further, the clarity and confidence with which Pound documents the modernist moment in poetry<br />
(Wyndham Lewis was to coin the phrase the men of 1914 ), what it contemporaneously meant to be modern ,<br />
are virtues not always met with in subsequent histories of modernism. Instead of these qualities what the<br />
uninitiated student of modern poetry encounters today in most histories are confusion and imprecision.<br />
In fact, though there is a general agreement over the year in which literary modernism came of age (most<br />
critics point to 1922), no such critical consensus has been claimed for the years of its birth and passing (with<br />
many doubting whether modernism has passed at all). Even some of the progenitors of modernism, who have<br />
seen it all happen, and who might say like the magi that There was a birth definitely, we had evidence and no<br />
doubt, have suggested directly or by implication different dates of birth. Lawrence, for example wrote, in<br />
Kangaroo, that On or about December 1910 human nature changed. ( Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown p.<br />
321). Eliot, writing more specifically of the evolution of modern poetry, would recall that the point de repere<br />
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Poetry<br />
usually and conveniently taken as the starting point of modern poetry is the group dominated. Imagists in<br />
London about 1910 . Yeats, on the other hand, would go a little further back to declare somewhat good<br />
humoredly: then suddenly 1900 everyone got off his stilts. Such a diversity of opinion among the great moderns<br />
seem to have confused later genealogists no less, with Richard Ellman and Charles Fieldson tracing the origins<br />
of modernism back into the romantic era. But whereas the moderns were very much in the thick of events and<br />
could not have viewed their situation with a fair degree of objectivity, the latter group ought to have been more<br />
objective, and less confused. As with the dating, so with the definitions. The reasons why critics and historians<br />
continued to disagree for decades on the subject were chiefly the wide variety of perspectives and definitions<br />
they employed to grapple with the very concept of modernism.<br />
If Lionel Trilling thought of modernism as essentially the drive toward freedom from society, culture and<br />
civilization and from anarchic surrender to experience , and found it nihilistic and apocalyptic; and Frank<br />
Kermode and Irving Howe similarly isolate the modernists : sense of an ending and nihilism as its characteristic<br />
features; Edmund Wilson found in it the essential traits of symbolism. That is to say, whereas some emphasized<br />
the cultural assumptions that went with modernism, a whole Weltanschauung that they thought shaped it,<br />
others stressed the formal and stylistic aspects of modernist works. Hardly have these questions been settled<br />
with postmodernism seems to have superseded (some would say extended) modernism and the latter is<br />
being looked at, or down upon, from fresh perspectives.<br />
Commonly, at least in the social sciences, modernism denotes the active participation in those social and<br />
intellectual changes which ushered in the modern era. In this sense both Marx and Mill, Freud and Darwin<br />
were all modernists. In literary history, however, the term is used to denote the highly self conscious cultural<br />
and artistic movement which attempted to create new aesthetic forms in reaction against romanticism , with<br />
which, it was later discovered, it shared many traits. So much so, not only modernists were called belated<br />
romantics, but even the post modernists had begun calling themselves late romantics. Be that as it may,<br />
modernism as an epoch goes far back in time beyond 1900, but as a specific literary period its beginnings are<br />
more recent. It may be said to have started when artists self-consciously sought a total break with the past.<br />
With the depletion of traditional value systems and an increasing mistrust of established institutions the artists<br />
began to look for new art forms and modes of utterances of their modern sensibility. The most decisive and<br />
irrevocable came with the breaking out of the First World War , no doubt, but the symptoms of the onset of the<br />
new world were already manifest to sensitive artists decades before the outbreak of the War. But a break<br />
with the past did not mean a break with tradition. The moderns, paradoxically enough, rejected the recent past<br />
in order to establish contact with a more authentic (for them), remote past. What led the modernist writers to<br />
reject the Victorian value system was their fundamental opposition to the consensus that had come to exist<br />
between the author and the reader. They tended to see themselves as belonging to the avant garde disengaged<br />
from bourgeois values, and disturbed their audience by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In<br />
the field of literature modernism took various forms. In fiction, for example, the accepted continuity of chronological<br />
development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner. James Joyce and Virginia<br />
Woolf attempted new ways of tracking the flow of characters thoughts in their narrative modes. This style<br />
was now called the stream of consciousness after the psychological concept was formulated by William<br />
James, brother of Henry James. In poetry similarly, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of<br />
thoughts with clusters or collage of fragmentary or disjointed images and complex allusions. And so on, in other<br />
genres and art forms.<br />
Moving away from an important 19 th century engagement of the writer with Nature or the Country ,<br />
modernist writing becomes predominantly cosmopolitan and metropolitan. It expresses a sense of urban cultural<br />
dislocation. As a matter of fact, the single most important image that distinguishes most modern poetry from all<br />
earlier poetry is that of the city. The city, the metropolis, or the megalopolis is the ultimate symbol of the modern<br />
world; and therefore , the modern poet is essentially a poet of the city. Traditionally, poets had drawn their<br />
subjects, characters and locales from the country and nature and hence the predominance of the pastoral
W.B. Yeats<br />
element in much of the poetry upto the Victorian times. But it is a plain historical fact that modern poetry grew<br />
in metropolitan centres like London, Boston Paris and so on. And the modern poet sang of the city men,<br />
drawing the bulk of his imagery from the cities and portraying the city life with all its squalor and gaping<br />
humanity. The industrial towns too were not spared as subjects for poetry.<br />
But even the city is neither the final nor the sole criterion on which can be based a proper understanding of the<br />
modern element in literature. Much of the poetry of Edward Thomas and Hardy is not city poetry at all. It is<br />
really the contrast between Innocence and Experience, as John-Heath Stubbs would say, that characterises<br />
the antithesis of style that one associates with the modern movement. The challenge of Experience, the<br />
expansion of subject matter demanded, for some modern poets at least, new styles; and the best poetry of the<br />
modern movement can be easily seen as a triumph of style matching the mood and subject matter of Experience.<br />
Experiments with style led some modern poets to use vers libre and prose stanzas. But the best of them used<br />
new variations of the traditional metre and stanzaic forms rather than free verse. As Eliot said, No verse is<br />
free. There is only good verse, bad verse and chaos .<br />
The elements briefly discussed here occur to a more or less extent in various schools of modernist poetry. But<br />
the movement was far from being as coherent or linear as it has been made out here. Only the historical<br />
perspective creates the illusion of uniformity. The modern movement seeded out of the coterie spirit which is<br />
the highest common factor between the movements, major or minor is, that it grew around coteries and coterie<br />
publications: Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism. Armed with their<br />
own manifestoes and little magazines, the coteries launched movements of their own and fought internecine<br />
debates. Many of these are now forgotten; some appear in retrospect to have been more influential than<br />
others.<br />
As we have already suggested, the situation of 1914 did not happen all of a sudden. The training of Eliot and<br />
Ezra Pound mentions in his letter, quoted in the beginning, is applicable to the individual cases of the other<br />
modernists as well, Pound himself included. And such a training involved an appreciation and inculcation of the<br />
1890s ethos, including, as we have seen, the latter s coterie spirit. As Eliot was to say later, [I] cannot help<br />
wondering supposing that poets of the generation of the nineties had survived perhaps they were men<br />
who could [had] they survived, they might have spoken in an idiom sufficiently like my own to have made<br />
anything I had to say superfluous .<br />
Imagism:<br />
But again, as Ross pointed out the Georgian revolt is not represented by the periodic appearance of the<br />
Marsh anthologies, (the innovative zeal did not last beyond the first); but by the growth of many other movements<br />
and campaigns: Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, the War poetry and the poetry represented by such coterie<br />
publications as Wheels, Art and Letters and Coterie, and the innovations of unaffliated poets. Of these, the<br />
Imagist movements, seems to be by far the most crucial and needs to be discussed in some detail. The history<br />
of imagism is difficult to trace, mainly because of the disagreement over points of detail between individual<br />
members: F.S. Flint, Pound, and Amy Lowell, and an impresario like Ford Madox Ford. But this is no place to<br />
sort out the historical tangle and decide between rival claims. Suffice it to say that Hulme was the father figure,<br />
who gathered together in 1909 at the Eiffel Tower restaurant a group comprising others, Flint, Edward Storer<br />
and Pound and discussed frequently a new, dry and hard poetic before Pound caught on to it and gave it the<br />
propulsion it needed to be known as a movement. Another influential figure was Ford, who though not exactly<br />
an Imagist, believed in certain Imagist dicta regarding the modern idiom and vers libre, and was instrumental<br />
in bringing changes atleast in Pound around 1910-12.<br />
So far as the name is concerned, Pound was to recall in 1927 that, the name was invented to launch H.D. and<br />
Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume ; and the name was first used by him in 1912. Before<br />
they were published in the now famous Des Imagistes anthology, H.D. and Aldington were published as such<br />
by Harriet Monroe s poetry (Chicago) at Pound s behest:<br />
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Poetry<br />
I have had luck again and am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is in the<br />
laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic Objective no slither; direct no excessive use<br />
of adjectives, no metaphors that wont permit examination. It s straight talk, straight as the Greek!<br />
Aldington s poems were also part of Pound s despatch, but he did not want his own poems to be published<br />
before theirs; don t use them until you have used H.D. and Aldington, S.V.P. He made H.D. sign herself as<br />
after the french manner Imagiste . Shortly before this, however, he had reprinted five poems by Hulme at<br />
the back of his own volume of poems Ripostes (1912), where he reffered to the imagistes as Les Imagistes,<br />
and as the descendents of Hulme s forgotten school of 1909. In the subsequent Imagist manifesto published<br />
in the March 1913 number of poetry, Flint supplied the followng credo:<br />
1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.<br />
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.<br />
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phase, not in the sequence of a metronome.<br />
Pound subsequently supplied a few Don t s for the Imagists, and defined an image more positively as an<br />
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. In fact, Pound s conception of the Image was based<br />
on an ideal deriving from such sister arts as painting, sculpture and music, as he describes in his account of his<br />
composition of In a Station of the metro .<br />
The less ardent members of the school seldom pursued the ideal of Pound. When Amy Lowell took over the<br />
movement Pound dubbed it Amygism .<br />
Yeats and Pound: By the time The Green Helmet (1910) was published Pound had already come into<br />
Yeats life. The relationship started off with Pound as the student of the by now famous poet. Within<br />
a year or two it had progressed to a stage where it was hard to tell who the student was and who<br />
the master. Pound wanted to pull Yeats out of the decadent Symbolist trappings. One of the faults<br />
with Yeats subjectivity , according to Pound, was a tendency to lapse into sentiment . Pound insisted<br />
on the qualities of hardness, concreteness and objectivity in poetry. He was dead set against the<br />
superfluous adjectives that the Tennysonians and the Aesthetes abound wth. Fallen Majesty<br />
(Responsibilities), is a typical example of Poundian correction. The last line of the poem read: Once<br />
walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning cloud. Pound in a typical bold stroke struck out<br />
as it were on the basis of superfluity and tautology. Yeats accepted Pound s objection but could not<br />
accept the correction. Instead he rewrote the last line: whereon a thing once walked that seemed a<br />
burning cloud.<br />
Responsibilities can be taken as Yeats s initiation into the practice of Imagism, or the tenets as<br />
outlined by Pound in his Imagist manifesto. A Coat best exemplifies the new idiom as Yeats adopted<br />
it. The poem works on a single emblem of coat. The coat works as an image as it is totally bare<br />
of any superfluous adjectives. The starkness and bareness of the image contributes to a hardened<br />
visual effect. In this poem he tries and succeeds in snapping out of the Symbolist evocative method.<br />
The sartorial image is used for his earlier poetry which he says was covered with embroideries / [.<br />
. .] of old mythologies . By the end of the poem he is done with those embroideries as is signified<br />
in the new ethic which he adopts. The poem itself works in accordance with this dictum.<br />
Yeats poetry of these middle and the later phases shows how a modern symbol is different from both<br />
Romantic symbol and Modernist image. The twentieth century symbols combine the concreteness of<br />
image with the evocative power of symbol. Rose, swan and moon which frequently occur in his earlier<br />
and middle poetry are symbols that work in the traditional sense (the Romantic use / denotative<br />
manner) apart from the complexities that are worked into them. The swans in the poem The Wild<br />
Swans at Coole [ The Wild Swans at Coole 1919] apart from their signifying function work as<br />
moods. Yeats always thought of Maud as a swan but here they (the swans) bring in a whole lot of
W.B. Yeats<br />
complexities of the relationship between Yeats and Maud. Even though the poem belonged to the<br />
middle phase of his career, he is not completely out of his Romantic leanings. The poet persona is<br />
imagining the meetings of the past and the scene is a very close rendition of Wordsworthian spots<br />
of time technique, the whole Romantic revisitation of the place (as in Tintern Abbey ). The poem<br />
also relies on a whole lot of other Romantic ethos, such as that of paradoxes (Stanza 2).<br />
In the later poems [The Tower onwards] Yeats works on concretizing the symbols into images.<br />
However, the images can also work like symbols as is shown in the use of the symbol of the tower,<br />
stairway, and gyres among others. Here it is an image that acquires a symbolic value. In The Tower<br />
the tower itself features as the setting for the poem, where the poet standing on its battlements gives<br />
in to the ruminations of the past, about old age, imagination during the course evoking mythical and<br />
real characters.<br />
In the later poems old age becomes one of Yeats greatest anxieties and the theme is dealt with in<br />
a number of poems, Sailing to Byzantium and The Tower being chief among them. In The Tower<br />
Red Hanrahan is a figure, created by Yeats earlier in his short stories, chosen by Yeats to represent<br />
himself and old age in general. Old Raftery is a legendary bard of Homeric dimensions representing<br />
the powers of imagination. The poem works on a dialectical model of realism and imagination (Parts<br />
II and III) out of which imagination comes out triumphant. Hanrahan is the poet s alter ego, thus best<br />
understands him due to similarity of circumstances.<br />
In Byzantium [The Winding Stair and Other Poems 1933] comes another example of image that<br />
works as a symbol. The dome in the first stanza is not described at all. Instead one conjures up the<br />
image of the dome in one s mind. Because of its evocation the dome acquires the character of a<br />
symbol. Similarly, in Sailing to Byzantium the gyres are hardly described. The reader has to associate<br />
with Yeats description of the same in the earlier poems and his philosophical system as enlisted in<br />
A Vision. In describing the aged person (Stanza 2) he uses sartorial image a tattered coat . Again,<br />
it is the words themselves that act as an image (in this case tattered ) and impart concreteness to<br />
the description rather than taking away from it.<br />
The mythical method that Yeats applied to his poetry becomes another feature of modernist technique.<br />
In fact, T. S. Eliot in his 1923 essay on Ulysses [ Ulysses, Order and Myth ] calls it a step toward<br />
making the modern world possible for art, toward [. . .] order and form [. . .]. This is a method<br />
which derives parallels between contemporaneity and history. Eliot sees the mythical method as being<br />
close to tradition, the whole classicist ethos as he had espoused in his essay Tradition and the<br />
Individual Talent . Yeats relied on the tradition of Irish folklore and Greek mythology. Further, he<br />
stretched the boundaries of the myth by bringing in personal associations. In the poems such as No<br />
Second Troy , Leda and the Swan , and Among School Children the figure of Helen is deployed<br />
in various ways, for various purposes. Apart from charting out the obvious parallels between Helen<br />
and Maud, he sought a relation between the contemporary state of affairs in Irish politics and the<br />
Battle of Troy specifically in No Second troy . The Second Coming is a poem written in the<br />
aftermath of the First World War. But it is only a mythical beast that can best describe the confusion<br />
wrought out by the hostile political scenario of the twentieth century Europe.<br />
Yeats s heavy reliance on Gaelic legends and the folk heroes such as Cuchulain, Fergus among others<br />
was dictated by his interest in the cultural heritage of Ireland. Indeed he strongly felt that there<br />
should be a pride in that national heritage that should lead to a new flowering of art and national life.<br />
His plays give a nationalist texture to these mythologies. The Countess Kathleen (1899) and Cathleen<br />
ni Houlihan (1902) are the plays with propagandist values. Maud Gonne was made to enact the role<br />
of Cathleen. J. M. Synge s A Playboy of the Western World (1906) proved to be another<br />
controversial nationalist play of its time. Yeats s acquaintance with John O Leary proved significant as<br />
the latter introduced him to a wealth of Irish literature and urged him to read back through it in order<br />
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Poetry<br />
to understand the patterns of culture. Other useful friendship in this direction proved to be that with<br />
Lady Gregory. Thus, the understanding of his cultural heritage not only helps him in forging a new<br />
poetics but in developing a nationalist literature as well. It opens before the country a wealth of native<br />
tradition, thereby limiting reliance on outside traditions (the <strong>English</strong> among others). In the fight against<br />
colonialism, this proves to be a significant step.<br />
Yeats s career graph charts a progressive path from his Romantic leanings to Modernism. However,<br />
the Romantic streak continues even in the later mature poetry. Through his interest in the Occult,<br />
Theosophy and Gaelic legends and folklores he brings a personal ethos to bear upon the traditions he<br />
handled. If Symons and before him Wilde and Pater helped him along the Aestheticist-Symbolist tenets,<br />
then Pound catalyzed his transition into Modernism. If Modernism demanded a radical aesthetics in<br />
style and idiom, Yeats recreated a singular kind of Modernism wherein the stanzaic forms of the<br />
poems are retained but with a new, stark idiom approaching colloquial style. After reading the Epilogue<br />
to the volume Responsibilities, the last lines which go: [. . .] all my priceless things / Are but a<br />
post the passing dogs defile Pound declared that Yeats had finally become a Modern poet. In fact<br />
Yeats showed that formal elegance can go along with modernity of diction. He brought respectability<br />
and credibility to such an alliance as he was already established on the literary circuit. Indeed, Pound<br />
and Eliot for all their Free Verse wrote some of their poems in the stanzaic form.<br />
Whatever tradition Yeats followed, he personalized it.<br />
IV. Detailed critical analysis of major topics on the<br />
writer and the prescribed texts<br />
The major topics for discussion in the context of Yeats and his work have all been touched upon, albeit briefly,<br />
directly or indirectly elsewhere in the other sections. But in this section we shall take them up in some detail.<br />
As we have seen, irrespective of the so called phases in his career, Yeats was always concerned with the<br />
questions of aesthetics, personal, national, and civilizational history. Thus the topics which emerge for discussion<br />
are as follows:<br />
Romanticism and Yeats / his theory of poetry<br />
Yeats s dislike of rhetoric is well-known. He shared this trait with fellow moderns. This was part of a general<br />
reaction against the kind of poetry that Victorian poets had popularized. After the private nature of the poetry<br />
of the early 19 th century, poets such as Tennyson and Browning and Arnold beieved in addressing the reader<br />
directly, poetry tended to be rhetorical in the sense that the poet wrote poetry with a message for the Victorian<br />
public. The poets believed in the social function of poetry. Though such poetry became popular and met with<br />
some success, with lesser poets it tended to be banal. Taking rcourse to Imperialistic jingoism the next generation<br />
of poets, apart from the aesthetes and decadents, continued the trend. To this group belonged Rudyrad Kipling,<br />
Thomas Watson, Alfred Noyes, and some otehrs. It is this kind of poetry that the younger generation disliked,<br />
and eschewed, with Pound calling it Victorian poppycock. Wring the neck of rhetoric was the clarion call.<br />
Yeats offered his own definition of poetry, mainly as being non-rhetorical. In spite of his absorption in the Self,<br />
Yeats continued to be as self critical as before, believing in the self proclaimed motto that, to paraphrase him,<br />
one makes rhetoric out of quarreling with others, and poetry by quarreling with oneself. One way by which he<br />
could fight the self was by finding an appropriate anti-self. Hence his theory of the Mask (see the section on<br />
the major topics for Yeats s theory of the Mask).<br />
It is in this dramatization of his Self that Yeats differs from the great Romantics, for whom the Self was<br />
nonconflictual. Though both, Yeats and the great Romantic had a shared preoccupation in the Self, and wrote<br />
their poetry out of that preoccupation the main difference lay in their understanding of the subject. Yeats s<br />
poetry is often compared with the metaphysical school. It may be because Donne and Marvell wrote poetry<br />
that was argumentative, ratiocinative and dramatic, because of, among other things, their profound
W.B. Yeats<br />
skepticism. Yeats seems to have married the dramatic style of the school of Donne with the romantic<br />
tendencies.<br />
The romantics and the other 19 th century poets who followed them valued emotions over reason. Heart was<br />
privileged over the brain, as it were. But most modernists believed in fusing the two. The memorable phrase<br />
that Eliot used to describe this fusion was the unification of sensibility. Yeats said something very similar about<br />
poetry, when he talked of the whole man blood, imagination, intellect, running together .<br />
Yeats’s theory of the Great Memory or Anima Mundi:<br />
Yeats s notion of the Great Memory comes from his preoccupation with his poetic craft, influenced as it was<br />
by his interest in supernaturalism, particularly the belief that the memory of the dead acts on the living. Where<br />
do poetic images come from? Once he wrote that some of the great lyrics, such as Keats s Ode to the<br />
Nightingale pre-existed, and Keats was merely the vehicle through whom the images passed. In fact, for<br />
most of his poetic ideals the romantics, beginning with Blake, provided him with his personal aesthetic. He<br />
modified or extended some of their ideas. The Blakean ideal for example: Invent your own system, or be<br />
enslaved by other people s. About Blake he would say: Blake spoke confusedly and obscurely because he<br />
spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the worldabout him. He was a symbolist who<br />
was trying to invent his symbols .He was a man crying out for mythology, and trying to make one because<br />
he could not find one to his hand. Yeats could well be stating the case about himself, and his A Vision. Similary,<br />
while editing a volume of Blake s poetry he sympathised with his dislike of vagueness of outline. Blake, having<br />
been an illustrator and engraver valued sharpness of outline. Yeats, after overcoming his initial training, strove<br />
for hardness and the concrete.<br />
This striving towards hardness of outline is not to be confused with a drive towrds the realistic mode, the<br />
imitative. In fact he hated realism in the arts. Like many other binaries he used, he spoke of the two modes: the<br />
reflective or mimetic and the suggestive and subjective. If the mirror stood for the mimetic, then the lamp stood<br />
for its opposite. Thus for him the image cannot be static or representational, it had to be symbolic. Yeats, of<br />
course, knew that some imitation was bound to come into play.<br />
As time passed, he would subtly revise his earlier position: There were two options for the poet in his time:<br />
either to continue in the Romantic symbolist tradition predominant especially in French poetry, or to try to<br />
create something less ethereal and more fully human.<br />
In literature, partly from the lack of that spoken word that knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality,<br />
in our delight in the whole man blood, imagination, intellect, running together but have found a new delight,<br />
in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes to us most easily, in elaborate music. There<br />
are two ways before literature upward into ever-increasing subtlety .or downward, taking the soul with us<br />
until all is simplified or solidified again. That is the choice of choices the way of the bird until common eyes<br />
have lost us, or to the market carts.<br />
Thus, the everyday world, the world of the carts was to be treated in such a way as to embody visions of the<br />
extraterrestrial, the view of the high-flying bird. [Hence his continuing with the romantic pun on bird/bard.] The<br />
mirror of his must not reflect, but fuse quotidian reality, to burn with images unseen before.<br />
Yeats s poetry shows a lifelong search for images, not the ones which reflect but illuminate. He sought these<br />
images everywhere: from Irish myths and legends to fairy tales, from the visionary poetry of Blake and Shelley<br />
to the world of magic and mysticism. Later in life he sought them out in ancient wisdom those among the Indian<br />
Upanishads and the anient Greeks and Romans. His search for these images led him to believe in the idea of<br />
a universal warehouse of images, which he called Anima Mundi (the soul of the world)<br />
Yeats first introduces the notion of the Great Memory in his essay, Magic (1901). He felt that Anima Mundi<br />
is a part of three doctrines that had been handed down from early times:<br />
1. that the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were,<br />
and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.<br />
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Poetry<br />
2. That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory,<br />
the memory of Nature herself.<br />
3. That the Great Mind and the Great Memory can be evoked by symbols.<br />
He would often associate the great mind with a spool or bobbin which winds, thread like memories. The<br />
unwinding of the spool would therefore signify remembering. His fullest participation in the world of images<br />
was to come with his wife s automatic writing . He narrates the circumstances which led to his wife s<br />
trances in A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929): On the afternoon of October 24 th 1917, four days after my<br />
marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost<br />
illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after<br />
day to the unknown writer . She wrote some scattered sentences. The unknown writer said, we have<br />
come to give you metaphors for poetry. He took his theme from Yeats s then recently published Per Amica<br />
Silentia Lunae. I had made a distinction between the perfection that is from a man s combat with himself and<br />
that which is from a combat with circumstance, and upon this simple distinction he built up an elaborate<br />
classification of men .<br />
Yeats’s View of the Self<br />
One species of self portraiture in Yeats s verse is the depiction of carnal self, intricately involved with many<br />
women the Wild Old Wicked Man, as Yeats called him in one late poem. But there is another kind of selfportraiture,<br />
harder and purer, eerie, sexless:<br />
Once out of nature I shall never take<br />
My bodily form from any natural thing,<br />
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make<br />
Of hammered gold and gold enameling<br />
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake…<br />
(‘Sailing to Byzantium )<br />
Yeats, as man and as poet, was unusually afraid of incoherence, sensation of being soft wax; and such images<br />
as the golden bird in the famous poem (written in 1926) offer an aesthetic refuge from the shapelessness of<br />
commonplace life. In 1906 Yeats described the evolution of his art as a turning away from his ordinary self:<br />
I had set out on life with the thought of putting out my very self into poetry I thought of myself as<br />
something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind and body Then one day I<br />
understood quite suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and unmixed and<br />
always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the<br />
fleeting thing that held out its hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more<br />
did I follow the opposite of myself<br />
It is important to note that, for Yeats Art is not self-expression the self is too shifty, evanescent but search<br />
for impersonal beauty. By 1909 this feeling that the proper subject matter of art is the opposite of oneself<br />
developed into the doctrine of the Mask. In the poem Ego Dominus Tuus (1915) and the essay Per Amica<br />
Silentia Lunae (1917), Yeats expounded the belief that every man has an ideal counterpart, an intimate double,<br />
an anti-self in whom every trait is the opposite of his own. Poets, according to this doctrine, gain imaginative<br />
intensity through the struggle to realize in their poems a vision of the Mask. Thus the lecherous Dante labored<br />
to create a Dante of austere and unforgiving purity, the poet as we infer him from the poem. The irritable and<br />
intense William Morris elaborated a vision of peaceful bucolic indolence. The penniless Cockney Keats dreamed<br />
of unparalleled luxury and splendor. The reader of Yeats s work must try to suspend some of his Freudian<br />
convictions, such as the postulate that a man s fundamental self is the birth-self, the baby, an incoherent<br />
monster of appetite. To Yeats, the fundamental self is what a man strives to become, and not what he originally<br />
is.
W.B. Yeats<br />
Yeats tried to define his own character according to this model:<br />
I know very little about myself and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my<br />
dinner knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me a gregarious man, going hither<br />
and thither looking for conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest conviction,<br />
that I love proud and lonely things.<br />
The random, restless, compromising Yeats was driven by fantasies of impossible solitude, integrity, focus. Little<br />
wonder, then, that in his poems he should present himself as a golden bird, or a statue of a kind of god hovering<br />
just beyond the range of vision, that dazzling, unforeseen, wing-footed wanderer . To realize a vision of the<br />
anti-self is to evoke the private divinity that lies beneath such fragmentary incarnation of self. The golden bird<br />
of Sailing to Byzantium is the idol of Yeats s personal godhead, always tempting, always out of reach.<br />
Several times Yeats recorded the sensation that he was petrifying, turning into an image. Yeats gathered many<br />
folk tales about surrogates logs, leaves, heaps of wood-shavings arranged into human likeness that the<br />
faeries left behind when they snatched people away. Such surrogates appear in Yeats s plays The Land of<br />
Hearts Desire (1894) and The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919); and once Yeats awoke from sleep to hear a<br />
voice, not his own voice, speaking through his lips: We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not him who<br />
sleeps, but it is like him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel . In his novel The Speckled Bird, abandoned<br />
around 1902, Yeats ascribed this shiver of involuntary speech to the chief character, who feels his body<br />
becoming impersonal, magical, a kind of tomb-sculpture. To be the dummy of supernatural ventriloquists was<br />
perhaps Yeats s closest approximation to his Mask. He had almost become a savage idol, stark and hieratic, a<br />
block of wood crudely cut into human shape.<br />
Yeats’s Theory of the Masks<br />
In order to understand Yeats s poetry it is necessary to be acquainted with his theory of the Mask. Between<br />
1909 and 1925, he was preoccupied with the formulation, elaboration and definition of the theory of the Mask .<br />
By the Mask Yeats meant the self fabricated around the natural man by conscious artifice. Far from being<br />
a pejorative term standing, for, say, hypocrisy, it is a poetic virtue, a poetic skill, a device. His early formulations,<br />
around 1909, were the result of a commonplace experience with people. He saw that wherever he looked<br />
people wore masks. These masks offered the joys of imaginative self-liberation, a kind of superior child s play.<br />
He said,<br />
I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the the mask of some other self; that all joyous or<br />
creative life is a rebirth as something oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and<br />
perpetually renewed.<br />
Yeats further thought that a man cannot be judged, cannot be defined and dismissed, if he cannot be located in<br />
the first place; and the mask helps him in escaping such judgement. It permits him an endless disassembling of<br />
identity. Later Yeats would believe that the mask can be either a vehicle of self realization or an escape from<br />
self realization, depending on the type of man. Each man has unique mask.<br />
Love for Yeats presented an important test case. Each man or woman can use mask to discover or strengthen<br />
love. But there is a risk involved. So Yeats offers two theories of the mask:<br />
1. The Benign Theory: in this case lovers played roles in order to help one another realize their nobler<br />
selves. It seems to me that true love is a discipline Each [lover] divines the secret self of the other, and<br />
refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror for the lover or beloved to copy in daily life; for<br />
love also creates the Mask.<br />
The lovers can improve one another s being : This Yeats called inter-imitation .<br />
2. Sinister situation: here the man is not a wise fellow who divines the best self of his beloved, and helps her<br />
to realize it in daily life; he is instead deceived and anxious. The woman is not sympathetic. Here the<br />
mask is not a felicitous ideal but a dazzling screen.<br />
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Yeats poem The Mask exemplifies this darker aspect.<br />
The other topics which could be discussed are, Love and beauty, youth and age,<br />
and Yeats s symbolism.<br />
Yeats’s Symbolism<br />
Poetry<br />
The role that symbols play in Yeats s aesthetic theory is inextricably connected with his view of the nature of<br />
imagination and both arise out of his mythological system. Yeats s complex symbolism is the product of his<br />
philosophical engagement with Western heterodox mysticism and eastern philosophies and religions. Emerging<br />
from this is the belief in Anima Mundi or the Collective Unconscious which is the guiding force behind the<br />
intellectual superstructure that Yeats erects. As Yeats says in his discursive work, Essays and Introduction:<br />
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association,<br />
evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied<br />
powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotion; and when sound and colour and form are in a<br />
musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form,<br />
and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion.<br />
Yeats s symbolism also bears the imprint of the contemporary French Symbolists. The strain of symbolism<br />
prevalent in Yeats s times saw it as a natural language , as opposed to allegory, which is the conventional<br />
language. This natural language was the only way that the higher or spiritual realities could be comprehended<br />
by the aid of the imaginative faculty. In Symbolism in Poetry , an essay written in 1898, Yeats discusses the<br />
French Symbolists denunciation of allegory that calls into play the right knowledge whereas symbolism relies<br />
upon right instinct for its understanding . Yeats identifies their comprehension of symbols and symbolism with<br />
that of Blake s. Commenting upon the significance of Michaelangelo s Moses he says, its symbolism has<br />
helped to awaken the modern imagination thus asserting the importance of symbolism and the Symbolist<br />
Movement to modernist aesthetics.<br />
Yeats s ideas that symbolism is particularly concerned with the supernatural, also derives from the French<br />
Symbolists. However, for all Yeats s interest in the Symbolist Movement, Yeats s poetic theory and practice<br />
significantly differs from that of the French Symbolists. For Baudelaire the symbol is the end product. The<br />
world is used to evoke the symbol that is of prime interest. But in Yeats s poetry symbol is deployed to mediate<br />
between the phenomenal and the noumenal world. A symbol evokes the world and the higher principles and is<br />
therefore, both sensuous and spiritual, material and philosophical.<br />
In his essay entitled Magic (1901) Yeats attempts to make distinctions between inherent symbols and<br />
arbitrary symbols i.e. symbols arising out of a received tradition or invented arbitrarily by the poet. This is<br />
further qualified in the essay on Symbolism where Yeats goes on to define emotional symbol and intellectual<br />
symbol . Emotional symbol like the arbitrary symbol depends primarily upon personal associations. The<br />
intellectual symbol on the other hand evokes ideas mingled with emotions , and so provides an access to<br />
tradition and thereby shapes a personal response to an inherent symbol . Yeats s art derives its intellectual<br />
force from the interaction of symbols that reverberate with personal resonance and the impersonal Occult and<br />
Rosicrucian symbols. Both may be further related to archetypal patterns and symbols in the form of myth.<br />
The poem, Her Vision in the Wood conjoins the blood-beddabled breast of the man with the torn body of<br />
the woman. It describes the embittered feelings of an old woman too old for a man s love and the rage of<br />
exhausted passion, within the framework of the Adonis myth. The poem capitalizes upon the image of the<br />
dying god, the present loss of fertility that will eventually lead to rejuvenation and thus ensure the cyclicity of<br />
the fertility myth. Parallel to this is the loss of the woman s fertility and her desperate masochistic attempts to<br />
recall the lip of lover . This bodily decrepitude is compensated by the image of the bleeding god who Halfturned<br />
and fixed a glazing eye on mine, / And, though love s bitter-sweet had all come back ; there occurs the<br />
rekindling of passion even as its physical fulfillment seems unviable. The poem asserts that the woman s vision
W.B. Yeats<br />
is no fabulous symbol . Yeats said that a vision is myth in action . The poem, while demonstrating this, also<br />
extends the apparently esoteric nature of Yeats s symbolism to encompass archetypal experience. Her private<br />
vision that conjures up her heart s victim and its torturer is endowed with a larger significance by the<br />
reference to the Adonis myth. The self-induced trance could equally be a Quattrocento painter s throng or<br />
Mantegna s thought or bodies from a picture or a coin . More generally the poem can be read as a<br />
sensuous and concrete manifestation of the fact of desire and passion in old age.<br />
Yet another way to relate to myth and history through symbols, is by establishing a direct or oblique, or even a<br />
negative connection to it. The Helen of Troy symbol and its relation to Maud Gonne is one such example.<br />
Throughout his oeuvre Yeats visualizes Maud Gonne in terms of Hellenic beauty. Yeats also gives a political<br />
spin to this personal comparison by linking up Helen s and Maud Gonne s destructive passion. Like Helen s<br />
impulsive act of elopement with Paris ended in the siege of Troy And Agamemnon dead ( Leda and the<br />
Swan ), so Maud Gonne s intense involvement with politics has stifled her life-force. Was there another Troy<br />
for her to burn? ( No Second Troy ). However, that it is a negative connection, is clear when one considers<br />
the primacy of desire and passionate fulfillment as reflected in Yeats s poetry. Seeing Helen and Paris as ideal<br />
lovers , the comparison with Maud Gonne stresses the loss of potential passionate experience that Maud<br />
Gonne could have achieved, given her beauty and grace and Yeats s amorous feelings for her. Instead she has<br />
become A Helen of social welfare dream,/ Climb on a wagonette to scream ( Why Should Not Old Men be<br />
Mad ). The symbol also sheds light on Yeats s own unrequited love for Maud Gonne. Like Helen Maud<br />
Gonne has, all living hearts betrayed ( The Tower ).<br />
Linked to this is Yeats s use of the myth of Leda and Zeus-Swan whose union engendered Helen. Yeats sees<br />
this as the First Annunciation giving birth to Greece, and it corresponds to the Second Annunciation. Yeats uses<br />
this to order two thousand years of classical history as delineated in A Vision. The creation of a personal<br />
mythology makes possible the development of related symbolism that employs symbols in varying contexts.<br />
Yeats s use of Celtic mythology also fits into this paradigm. But just as A Vision is a philosophical understanding<br />
of historical events and personages, so the symbols are both mystical and political in nature.<br />
In Autobiographies, Yeats said, when a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is it<br />
not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind? It is called up by an<br />
image as I think but our images must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately . The practical,<br />
political aspect of symbolism is also described. Nations, races and individual men are unified by an image or<br />
bundle of related images. The symbol of the Rose is one such example. It features in his early poetry where<br />
Rose signifies both Maud Gonne and Ireland. The Rose includes personal lyrics and songs about Ireland and<br />
Irish mythology. The Pity of Love , The Sorrow of Love , When You are Old are addressed to Maud<br />
Gonne. Fergus and the Druid , Cuchulain s Fight with the Sea , To Ireland in the Coming Times document<br />
Irish heroic legends and Yeats s attitude towards it. Red Rose, proud rose, sad rose of all my days ( To the<br />
Rose Upon the Rood of Time ) brings together the personal and the national within the ambit of the poem . The<br />
symbol of the Rose shows the influence of Blake and Shelley. Embodying love and nationalist feelings it also<br />
connotes Intellectual Beauty. The Rose which is so pervasive in Yeats s early poetry is conspicuous by its<br />
absence in the later volumes. However, this is not to imply that Yeats s symbolism lost its political undertones.<br />
For Ireland s mythical and historical people instead of objects, were invested with a symbolic potential. Cathleen<br />
ni Houlihan, the warrior Cuchulain, the warrior- poet Oisin and freedom fighters like Wolfe Tone and John<br />
O Leary came to symbolize a quest for life and freedom.<br />
Like the Rose, animal and bird symbolism derived from Irish mythology that formed the characteristic feature<br />
of The Wanderings Of Oisin and Other Poems and Crossways does not feature in such a striking manner<br />
after this. However, birds especially the swan, retain a special significance for Yeats. He wrote:<br />
Certain birds, especially as I see things, such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle and swan, are<br />
the natural symbols of subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting upon<br />
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some pool or river, while the beasts that run upon the ground, especially those that run in packs, are<br />
natural symbols of objective man.<br />
Poetry<br />
Along with the well-known connotations of purity, fidelity, strength and immortality the swans become symbolic<br />
of fulfilled love and youthful passion. The nine-and-fifty swans of The Wild Swans at Coole are unwearied<br />
still . Their hearts have not grown old ; /passion or conquest, Wander where they will, / Attend upon them<br />
still; unlike Yeats whose unconsummated affair with Maud Gonne and the physical fact of old age contrasts<br />
sharply with the swans. Yeats identifies himself with the swan in The Tower . Like the poet s songs, the<br />
swan must fix his eye /Upon a fading gleam,/ And there sing his last song. All the above-mentioned<br />
meanings coalesce in Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931 :<br />
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan<br />
I turned about and looked where branches break<br />
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.<br />
Another emblem there! That stormy white<br />
But seems a concentration of the sky ;<br />
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight<br />
And in the morning s gone, no man knows why;<br />
And is so lovely that it sets to right<br />
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,<br />
So arrogantly pure, a child might think<br />
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.<br />
The bird is also invested with mystical, mythical potential as illustrated in Leda and the Swan.<br />
Besides birds, Yeats wrote in a letter to Sturge Moore, My main symbols are Sun and Moon (in all phases),<br />
Tower, Mask, Tree, (Tree with Mask hanging on the trunk), Well. It is significant to note that Yeats hails his<br />
doctrine of the Mask and the anti-self as a symbol. As Yeats explains in A Vision, under certain circumstances<br />
the Mask is called the Image and it is the image [either] of what we wish to become, or of that to which we<br />
give our reverence. The importance of a symbol in Yeats s aesthetics is thus highlighted.<br />
The Tower is another dominant symbol and is best studied in conjunction with its counterpart, the Winding<br />
Stairs . The importance of this symbol can be indicated by the fact that Ireland is a land of towers and Thoor<br />
Ballylee, Yeats own residence, the much wished for and dreamt of place, is a tower rising above and dominating<br />
the cottages around it. Historical actuality and symbolical suggestions are thus blended in the image of the<br />
tower . An emblem of aristocracy it stands for the poet and his work and becomes the focus of his lifeexperience.<br />
The spiritual security of the tower furnishes a contemplative dimension and thus symbolizes wisdom<br />
and detachment necessary for spiritual pursuits. The poems in the volume by the same name, The Tower<br />
(1928) aptly demonstrate this. In the tower there is the winding stair and Yeats sees it as Jacob s Ladder as<br />
visualized by Blake. The stairs facilitate a connection with his Irish past intellectual and cultural:<br />
I declare this tower is my symbol, I declare<br />
This winding, gyring, spiring, treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;<br />
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there (“Blood and the Moon”).<br />
If the Tower is the symbol of soul-making, the Winding Stairs identified with the Japanese sword and its silk<br />
covering in A Dialogue of Self and Soul is Yeats s symbol of life . The sword and its covering representing<br />
the union of masculine and feminine principles relate to both the Tower and the Winding Stairs, as these also<br />
stand for the male and female genitalia respectively. As Yeats, said The Tower is characterized by power ,<br />
The Winding Stairs poetically articulates the subconscious gaiety that leaps up before danger or difficulty ,<br />
thus embodying the possibility of beauty and regeneration. Together they symbolize the coexistence of contraries<br />
that helps to achieve Unity of Being as captured in the figure of the dancer at one with the dance ( Among<br />
School Children ).
W.B. Yeats<br />
Byzantium, a poem belonging to the The Winding Stairs brings together the figure of the dancer with the<br />
symbol of fire: dying into a dance, /An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve . The<br />
importance of the symbol of fire and its connection with imagination has already been remarked upon in the<br />
discussion of The Wind Among The Reeds .Closely linked to Yeats use of fire and light are the symbols of the<br />
Sun and the Moon .The Moon is especially significant to Yeats s poetic theory, as the lunar cycle forms the<br />
basis of progression and change. This is reflected in The Phases of the Moon . Under the Moon gives a<br />
catalogue of legendary Irish figures especially women whose beauty was folded in dismay under the<br />
famished horn/ Of the hunter s moon, that hung between the night and the day . Adam s Curse captures the<br />
gradual decline of love in the image of the hollow moon . Blood and the Moon juxtaposes the Purity of the<br />
unclouded moon with the war-ridden, blood-saturated ground of Ireland. The Song of the Wandering<br />
Aengus brings together the symbols of fire, sun, and moon. Wandering in search of the glimmering girl ,<br />
arisen out of little silver trout fed to the fire , Aengus hopes and determines to find her, And pluck till time<br />
and times are done / The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.<br />
The richness and the indefiniteness of references make the symbols at once more mysterious and beautiful. By<br />
their triple allusion to self, world, and the spirit, Yeats s symbolism provides a key to his ideas about history,<br />
philosophy and art.<br />
V. Detailed Critical Summary of the texts<br />
The Lake Isle of Innisfree:<br />
Background: The poem was published in a volume called, The Rose (1893). The poems in this volume primarily<br />
deal with the complex relationship between the natural and the supernatural world. According to the Rosicrucian<br />
philosphy that he was studying at this time, there is a ladder between the two. The rose is the primary symbol<br />
of the philosophy. It stnads for anything that is very desirable, and hence quite flexible. Alongside this philosophy<br />
he was equally drawn towards the opposite Hindu view interpretated for him by Mohini Chatterjee that the<br />
sensible/natural world is a distraction from the real/transcendental world which lies beyond. Many poems of<br />
the volume attempted to strike a balance between the two. In some poems the first view seems to be upheld;<br />
in some, the second. In The Lake Isle he seems to offer the view that it is in this world that the seeker might<br />
glimpse the heavenly, the kingdom of the spirit.<br />
The Context<br />
This is one of the most well known, and the most anthologized of Yeats s poems. Its success among its early<br />
readers and critics took Yeats by surprise. The poet himself in the following passage taken from his autobiography<br />
describes the genesis of the poem.<br />
My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage<br />
on a little island called Innisfree I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination<br />
of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived seeking wisdom.<br />
[Note: The American intellectual, Thoreau is famous for his work Walden in which he writes the story of how<br />
he practiced the Emersonian virtue of self reliance. His ideals influenced Gandhi.]<br />
Innisfree is a little island in Ireland. As Yeats recalls, elsewhere in his Autobiography:<br />
I had still the ambition, formed in Ships in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a<br />
little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street [a famous street in London] very<br />
homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little<br />
ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem<br />
Innisfree , my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.<br />
Some of the details in the poem are from one of Yeats s stories called John Sherman . Some others are from<br />
an advertising display that Yeats may have actually seen in the tiny island such as: Bee Glade anyone<br />
interfering with the bee shall be severly dealt with or The beans must not be eaten etc.<br />
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Poetry<br />
Summary: We have discussed the three phases in Yeats s career and seen how the Pre-Raphaelite movement<br />
influenced his early poetry, and how there was a late romantic strain in the poems composed during this period.<br />
This means that one is apt to notice lyrical features, with emphasis on sound and music, some of which<br />
anticipated the later symbolist mode (After all, the symbolists believed later in evoking an atmosphere , rather<br />
than stating it, through sound and images.<br />
The romantic features are identifiable in the nostalgic and escapist elements that his poetry had. You might<br />
recall Wordsworth s nostalgia for his lost childhood and innocence, his escapist desire to flee from London into<br />
the lap of nature. Keats s odes (especially the ones on the Grecian Urn and Nightingale are redolent of<br />
nostalgia and escape.<br />
In the Lake Isle , Yeats experienced a similar yearning. Though the names of cities like London and Dublin<br />
are conspicuous by their absence. Its presence is felt in the ennui, the crowd, the dirt and squalor of the city,<br />
which compel the poet to run away to Innisfree. The escape through its syntax ( I will instead of I shall ),<br />
and, of course, now is clear.<br />
Note how the will of the first stanza changes to shall in the second, and then back to will in the third.<br />
This is as if to indicate to the reader the near slackening of the determination in the first stanza to the return to<br />
some sort of a resolution.<br />
The poem is replete with natural imagery: a hallmark of romantic poetry. bee-land glade , veils of the<br />
morning , cricket songs, glimmer of the midnight, and the purple glow of the moon, and the linnets, the lake<br />
water and so on. All these help the reader to conjure up an image of the place of escape, Innisfree ,. The<br />
name itself conveying the same sense of freedom from boredom and ennui of city life.<br />
When Thoreau lived near Walden Pond, he did so all alone, symbolizing the American/Emersonian virtue of<br />
self reliance, independence. If that individual freedom was a political statement, indicating the freedom of<br />
America from the erstwhile British rule, is it possible, that Yeats was making a political statement Irish<br />
freedom struggle?<br />
Notes:<br />
Title Innisfree: Yeats mentioned this island again in an uncollected poem, The Danaan Quicken Tree , in<br />
which the poet sails to Innisfree to eat the berries of an enchanted tree-according to one legend poisonous to<br />
mortals, and according to another, enable to endow them with more than mortals powers.<br />
arise and go: I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric but I only understood vaguely<br />
that I must use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written the first line<br />
with its conventional archaism Arise And Go nor the inversion in the last stanza. The poem s rythmic<br />
secret is the substitution of a bacchius for an iamb in lines 1 to 3.<br />
of clay and wattles: compare The Wanderings of Oisin I 249: A house of wattles, clay.<br />
a hive for the honey-bee: in John Sherman (1891), the hero imagines a happy marital life in a small house<br />
with a green door and a new thatch, and a row of bee hives under a hedge . For reference to bees, see The<br />
Stare s Nest by my Window , II. 1 5; and Among School Children V 2: Honey of generation .<br />
purple glow: Yeats explained in a radio broadcast that this referred to the reflection of heather in the water.<br />
The word Innisfree means heather island. This obscure allusion to water completes the tabulation of the four<br />
elements in II. 6 8.<br />
Lake water lapping: in 1920 Joyce added a postscript to a long letter to Pound: This is a very poetic epistle It<br />
should be read in the evening when the lake water is lapping .<br />
Lake Isle of Innisfree<br />
The poem is included in the second volume of Yeats s poetry The Rose published in 1893. It belongs to Yeats s<br />
early Romantic phase. The poem was written when Yeats was living in London in1890. It expresses the poet s
W.B. Yeats<br />
desire to visit and spend time at Innisfree. Innisfree is an island in Lough Gill, Country Sligo, the place where<br />
Yeats spent the formative years of his childhood and adolescence. Yeats recalled this in the Reveries<br />
section of his Autobiographies :<br />
My father had read me some passages out of Walden and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little<br />
island called Innisfree, and Innisfree was opposite Slishwood where I meant to sleep. I thought that having<br />
conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoureau<br />
lived, seeking wisdom<br />
The repetition of the word go in the first line of the poem underscores the ardent wish of the poet to spend<br />
time in these natural surroundings. Along with this repetition there is the use of archaism in the first line arise<br />
and go and inversion in the second and third lines of the first stanza: And a small cabin built there and Nine<br />
bean rows will I have there . Such syntax and the choice of words lend it a rhythm and a tone that contributes<br />
to the sense of urgency.<br />
This sense is intensified in the next stanza. The poet caught in the hustle and bustle and humdrum of a busy city<br />
hopes to find peace and solitude in the islet. He paints a vague, dream- like romantic picture of Ireland and the<br />
implied contrast with London emerges as a subtext. The third and the last stanza reiterates the yearning and<br />
seeks to provide a reason for the same. The poet seems to be continually reminded of the serenity and beauty<br />
of the lake water. Standing on the grey pavements or roadway of London, he feels emotionally and<br />
aesthetically drawn to Ireland. Yeats s account of it in The Trembling of the Veil in Autobiographies sheds<br />
light on the autobiographical origin of the poem. He says :<br />
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island<br />
on Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a<br />
fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the<br />
sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music .<br />
The sudden remembrance and the whole argument of the poem situates it in the Romantic tradition and<br />
reminds one of the Wordsworth s aesthetic beliefs, especially the poem the Tintern Abbey . The Lake has<br />
been criticized as being escapist and nostalgic.<br />
Innisfree actually was a protest against London. I see no reason to disbelieve Yeats s own statement that at the<br />
time when he wrote it, he was longing for County Sligo. And County Sligo is not a Never-Never Land. The<br />
poem is a mannere poem and, in a sense, escapist, but the escape which Yeats hankers for is not merely a<br />
whimsical fiction; it is an escape to a real place in Ireland which represented to him certain Irish realities.<br />
This is further strengthened by Yeats s own views on Irish history, legends and landscape. According to him<br />
this knowledge should be fixed upon the memory of the poet and thus make love of country more fruitful in the<br />
mind, more a part of daily life. In this sense, The Lake Isle of Innisfree can be considered a patriotic poem.<br />
Yeats himself said that Innisfree was his first properly Irish poem.<br />
Easter 1916<br />
This is one of the finest poems on the subject of a political event. W.H. Auden once said that a better poem had<br />
been written about a small Irish uprising in 1916 than about the whole of world war II. He went to make the<br />
following statement about it: Yeats could write great poetry about the troubles in Ireland because most of the<br />
protagonists were known to him personally and the places where the events occurred had been familiar to him<br />
since childhood. The reasons Auden sites are certainly valid from a poet s point of view. But there are deeper<br />
reasons than these which account for the poem s greatness. Postcolonial critics, however, seem to think that<br />
Yeats s ambivalent stand on the uprising was irresponsible, whatever the poetic merit of the poem. We shall<br />
take up these questions by and by. Since the poem is composed to commemorate a particular occasion it<br />
belongs to the lyrical sub-genre, occasional poetry, a form that Yeats perfected. Auden, in recognition of<br />
Yeats s mastery of the form pays a tribute to him on the occasion of the poet s death in his own poem, In<br />
Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939).<br />
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Context<br />
Poetry<br />
On the 24 th of April 1916, some 700 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood occupied the centre of<br />
Dublin and proclaimed the founding of an Irish state free from the British crown. British soldiers quickly moved<br />
in. The battle continued for a five days, and after the fifth day the British army duly gained the upper hand, and<br />
the uprising collapsed. The leaders were court-marshalled, some of them were shot dead. In all fifteen of the<br />
rebels were executed, among them was John MacBride, Maud Gonne s husband. The events leading to the<br />
execution shook Yeats into poetry (as Auden puts it in one of his poems: Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry ).<br />
Yeats s plans are evident in the following lines he wrote to Lady Gregory: That he was planning to write a<br />
poem about the men executed, and that terrible beauty has been born again and that I had no idea that any<br />
public event could so deeply move me and I am very despondent about my future .<br />
Background<br />
The poem turns around change, and hence the repetition of the phrase, all is changed utterly . This is part of<br />
the refrain that governs the poem. The refrain, and therefore, the poem, is better understood when the full<br />
range of implications of the term, change is appreciated. Yeats, for example, tells Lady Gregory in the same<br />
letter cited above that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the<br />
freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics. The way of perceiving the past as a happy and desirable<br />
state of affairs, and therefore the subject of comedy, is contrasted by the perception of the consequences of<br />
the uprising as undesirable, unhappy, and thus of tragic dimension. The poem turns on this theme: the mutation<br />
of comedy into tragedy. For Yeats, tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate<br />
man from man, and it is upon these dykes comedy keeps home. The rebels were all comedians, until the<br />
rebellion begins. Then under some kind of historical pressure, coal fuses into diamond. All the rebels grow<br />
impersonal, universal, outside the flux of nature, they are no more individual than stones or tombstones. These<br />
remarks by the poet go a long way in explaining some of the images/lines in the poem.<br />
Summary and notes<br />
Stanza I<br />
The first verse paragraph presents a vivid picture of the quotidian life of members of a certain class, the<br />
bourgeoisie. The images are carefully chosen as are the small gestures of courtesy. The personal pronoun is<br />
deliberately anonymous sounding; at the same time contemporary readers would immediately have identified<br />
who they were. The reluctance to name the rebels, though they were known to the poet personally, is a<br />
deliberate strategy to impersonalize the characters: a task that history performs. Ironically, at one point Yeats<br />
says, he names them as a mother names her child. It is only at the end of the poem that some names are<br />
named.<br />
them : the rebels<br />
where motley is worn: motley is the costume worn by comedians. The allusion may be to Shakespeare s<br />
famous image of the world as a stage. The rebels are represented as actors, who were all comedians on the<br />
world s stage before the rebellion began. Then suddenly all [is] changed utterly : comedy turns into tragedy.<br />
Some critics have compared this to a passage in an early review: this faithfulness to things tragic and bitter<br />
the Celt has above all others. Those who have it, alone are worthy of great causes. Those who have it not,<br />
have in their some vein of hopeless levity, the harlequins of the earth .<br />
All changed, changed utterly: change is an important motif in Yeats s work. It is central to his idea of history,<br />
personal, national or epochal. The moon, with its changing phases, therefore, becomes an important symbol for<br />
him. In another famous poem Yeats uses the same idea of change: The Wild Swans at Coole , l. 15: All s<br />
changed .<br />
A terrible beauty is born: This phrase is one of the most famous oxymorons in <strong>English</strong> poetry. It suggests to<br />
many Yeat s ambivalence towards the cause of Irish freedom struggle. But from the poet s letter to Lady
W.B. Yeats<br />
Gregory discussed above the phrase is expressive of the poet s complex response to the event. The feminist<br />
critic Elizabeth Cullingford compares this with Shelley s On the Medusa (1819) V 1-6: the tempestuous<br />
loveliness of terror all the beauty and the terror there a poem on the petrifying power of grace. Pater<br />
remembered these lines of Shelley when he wrote of the interfusion of the extremes of beauty and terror in<br />
Leonardo s mind when he painted the Medusa (The Renaissance [1893]). Shelley, Pater and Yeats all posited<br />
a collapse of Edmund Burke s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful.<br />
Stanza II<br />
That Woman: Con Markiewicz (1868-1927), nee Gore Booth, whom Yeats had known since 1894. She was<br />
active in the Rebellion but her death sentence was commuted. Yeats celebrates her beauty and poise in On<br />
a Political Prisoner and In memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz .<br />
Until her voice grew shrill: A contemptuous reference to political rhetoric. Her voice became shrill and high,<br />
but [in the 1890s] it was low and soft .<br />
This man had kept a school: Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), the chief of the Rebellion and Commandant-<br />
General of the Provisional Government; his surrender to the British at the Dublin Post Office ended the<br />
Rebellion. He had founded a boys school and was actively involved in the movement to promote the Gaelic<br />
language. Pearse also appears in Sixteen Dead Men , l. 10, The Tree , l. 2, The O Rahilly , l. 12, Three<br />
Songs to the Same Burden III 24, The Statues , l. 25, and The Death of Cuchulain (1939), l. 215. According<br />
to Pound, Yeats had said that Pearce was half cracked and wouldn t be happy until he was hanged. He seems<br />
to think that Pearce had Emmet mania, same as some other lunatics think that they are Napoleon or God.<br />
Our winged horse: Pegasus, a mythical creature representing poetic inspiration. Also appears in The fascination<br />
of What s Difficult , l. 4. The line alludes to the fact that Pearce wrote poetry.<br />
This other: Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), an <strong>English</strong> teacher at <strong>University</strong> College, Dublin, and author of<br />
a play performed at the Abbey Theatre. In 1909 Yeats described him as a man of distinguished feeling ,<br />
crushed by the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence of Ireland. He also appears in Sixteen Dead<br />
Men , l. 12.<br />
This other: John MacBride, whom Maud Gonne had married in 1903. Yeats uses angrier words in A Prayer<br />
for my Daughter when he indirectly refers to him. Also compare The Grey Rock , l. 47: some poor lot .<br />
The marriage was unhappy and they seperated in 1909. MacBride abused Maud Gonne s children.<br />
Some: Maud and Iseult Gonne.<br />
Stanza III<br />
From the middle of this stanza Yeats suddenly heaps images of motion with verbs such as comes, range,<br />
Change to give the impression of change and motion.<br />
Enchanted to a stone: evocative of Irish myths and folklore. Stone also symbolizes that which is static. Recall<br />
the poet s letter quoted earlier: All the rebels grow impersonal, universal, outside the flux of nature, they are<br />
no more individual than stones or tombstones. Compare The Two Kings , l. 94 the heart akin to the dumb<br />
stone ; and first love , l. 8: a heart of stone .<br />
Trouble the living stream:<br />
Trouble the living stream: suggestive of the world of change, flux, living.<br />
As against the stone the living stream signifies the changing world, the world of becoming. Yeats once wrote<br />
of an obsessive vision of a woman shooting at a star, an image that stood still, as it were, in the midst of the<br />
stream of my daily thought, so little did it resemble it .<br />
Moor-hens: This is symbolic of all that is born, begotten and dies: the world of flux..<br />
The Indian upon God , l. 3.<br />
41
42<br />
Stanza IV<br />
Poetry<br />
That is heaven s part…Yeats quoted these lines and commented that, when he wrote them, he was thinking of<br />
an old Irish politician who composed a ballad of no literary merit; the ballad lamented that new poets and new<br />
movements should have taken something of their sacredness away from Tone, Emmet, Roe the great old<br />
names of the Irish heroes who fought England a hundred years ago.<br />
As a mother names her child: according to Shepherd and Goatherd , l. 89, the dead live their lives backward<br />
until they become children again here too death exerts some simplifying power.<br />
No, no, not night but death: now the poet reasserts the terrible truth, after the beautiful smile of the mother<br />
and child the poem is governed as its refrain suggests, by terror and beauty.<br />
England may keep faith: the Home Rule Bill, granting Ireland a measure of independence, was passed by<br />
parliament in 1913. Then it was suspended in 1914 when The Great War began. Yeats considered that the<br />
Rebellion might have been averted by more skillful politicians. It was always thought that the suspension would<br />
some day be lifted.<br />
Excess of love / Bewildered: Cullingford notes that this recalls Shelley s Alastor, II. 18-82: sickened with<br />
access/of love .<br />
Connolly: James Connolly (1870-1916), a trade union leader and military commander of the uprising. He also<br />
appears in The Rose Tree , l. 2, The O Rahilly , l. 12, and The Death of Cuchulain, l. 215.<br />
Green: Irish national colour. This figures in Joyce s colour symbolism too.<br />
Easter 1916<br />
Easter 1916 belongs to the volume entitled, Michael Robartes and the Dancer published in 1921. This<br />
volume includes a group of poems commenting on the changed nature of things in Ireland caught in the throes<br />
of civil strife. Easter 1916 is the earliest of these poems. It commemorates the Easter 1916 uprising in the<br />
country. Supported by the IRB, the Irish nationalists saw the First World War as providing an appropriate<br />
opportunity to gain independence for Ireland. This, then, was an extremely crucial event in the history of Irish<br />
nationalism. Yeats s views on the topic have been critically attacked, for Yeats assumed an apparently neutral<br />
stance vis-a-vis Irish nationalism. Yeats s endeavour was oriented towards attaining intellectual liberty and<br />
cultural unity. The poem enacts the process by which comedy mutates into tragedy.<br />
According to Yeats, Tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from<br />
man and it is upon these dykes that comedy keeps house . Implicit in the idea of tragedy is a sense of<br />
destruction, but it is still preferable to comedy as it unifies man with man. Like the characters in a comedy, the<br />
rebels that the poem describes held idiosyncratic views before the rebellion, but when they were executed,<br />
there was a feeling of togetherness. This oxymoronic idea of tragedy as being beautiful is embodied in the<br />
phrase terrible beauty and the line A terrible beauty is born functions as the refrain throughout the poem.<br />
The poem begins in a colloquial manner describing accounts of ordinary meetings between individuals. Yeats<br />
says he has met them ; initially he remains vague about their identity of the rebels and clubs them together as<br />
them . These mundane meetings between him and these people with vivid faces have been curt though<br />
courteous, polite though meaningless . An instant s nod of the head a sign of recognition, a brief meeting or<br />
a longer one all are characterized by Polite meaningless words , the politeness and lack of purposeful<br />
intelligence typical of a bourgeois society. Yeats seems to state that he, along with them , inhabits an Ireland<br />
where motley is worn, motley being a metonym for comedy. The poem thus sets up an antithesis between<br />
the polite meaningless words which constitutes the casual comedy of pre-revolutionary Ireland, the Ireland<br />
where motley had been worn, and the tragic terrible beauty that is born of the Easter uprising.<br />
The second stanza provides a catalogue of the Irish nationalists with their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities.<br />
Lines 16-23 describe Con Markievicz whose passionate involvement in politics made her voice grow shrill .
W.B. Yeats<br />
She seemed to have betrayed the young and the beautiful Constance Gore Booth he had admired before<br />
for her aristocratic qualities. Lines 24-25 describe Patrick Pearse(1879-1916), the poet and founder of St.<br />
Enda s School.Thomas Mac Dough(1878-1916) is the helper and friend described in lines 26-30. A poet and<br />
critic, he was a man of great potential, a man with a vision in life. Lines 31-34 allude to John MacBride, Maud<br />
Gonne s husband, who is supposed to have treated her badly.Yeats calls him a drunken, vainglorious lout ,yet<br />
says that he is numbered in the song the song that Yeats sings as the Homer and historian of Ireland because<br />
he relinquished his personal, private nature and was transformed by becoming a part of the national sacrifice.<br />
Yeats extends his drama image by having them resign their parts in the casual comedy and become terrible<br />
and violent in their struggle for freedom.<br />
In the first two stanzas, change has been the main idea behind Yeats s metaphors but in the next two stanzas<br />
there occurs an ironic reversal. Yeats says it is in the insistence on one purpose alone through time that has<br />
transformed them into a stone . Not transforming their ideas, they have become stone-like. The lack of<br />
change makes them the only unchanging object in a world of flux. Being like a stone they trouble the living<br />
stream , the embodiment of change that sweeps disturbed by them. The long sentence (lines 44-58) defines<br />
minute by minute a huge range of activities that are marked by continual change. Horse riders, birds,<br />
clouds, all change the elements of nature by virtue of their activity.<br />
In the last stanza Yeats suggests this explicitly. Too long a sacrifice can make the stone of the heart. (Line<br />
59-60) The heart turned into a stone is, at last, sacrificed. Death is both metaphor and fact. These rebels are<br />
not asleep like a mother who sings her child to sleep, but dead. No no, not night but death . Yeats meditates<br />
upon the need or otherwise of their sacrifice. This depends on England s reaction to the Easter uprising. Yeats<br />
acknowledges that their deaths are brought about by a heroic dream, a dream founded, a heroic dream, a<br />
dream founded, perhaps, on an excess of love . This love almost drove them insane and brought about their<br />
death. The poet celebrates them in his verse whereby they gain immortality. At the time of composition of the<br />
poem and in later times whenever Ireland is remembered (Line 80, see annotation for green ) these<br />
revolutionaries will be remembered for participating in the tragic affair of the uprising.<br />
The Second Coming<br />
Context<br />
Many intellectuals historians, economists, writers of the period known as modern (late 19 th and early 20 th<br />
century) forecast various kinds of catastrophe which might destroy Europe. These may be called the apocalyptic<br />
narratives, the most well-known being The Decline of the West, the massive work by Spenglar, the German<br />
historian, who forecast that the West would soon lose its dominance and yield to the East. The volumes were<br />
translated into many languages, including <strong>English</strong>. It became quite an influential work and in many ways<br />
spawned the discourses on the subject. It may also have led to Herman Hesse s novel Siddharth. The outbreak<br />
of the First World War seemed to confirm such prognosis. Economists like John Maynard Keynes forecast<br />
economic disasters. Even poets and writers such as Hardy wrote monitory poems. Some of D.H. Lawrence s<br />
characters too discuss impending catastrophe. The most memorable and pervasive poetic treatment of the<br />
subject, of course, was to be Eliot s The Waste Land (1922). Even in his Hollow Men he sings of This is the<br />
way the world ends/not with a bang but with a whimper . Yeats s poem can be seen to belong to this long line<br />
of apocalyptic outcries.<br />
Through this poem Yeats attempts to subvert traditional Christian theological belief, that which posits that at the<br />
end of the millenium Christ will be born again to redeem mankind, like his first birth. Yeats, being to some extent<br />
a Nietzschean, offers a grim prognosis. Like Hegel, who offered his dialectic view of history, and not unlike<br />
Blake who believed in contraries, Yeats logically suggests that after the serenity of the Christian era, the next<br />
era will be inaugurated by the birth of a savage God. This was in keeping with his system of gyres. Yeats<br />
was confirmed about his prognosis about the Second Coming after the horrifying first World War.<br />
43
44<br />
Poetry<br />
In his note on the poem Yeats describes the system of gyres: how all the progress of the human soul and the<br />
progress of history can be analyzed mathematically as the movement of two interlocking spinning cones. In our<br />
age the primary cone, the cone of the Christian era, objective and self-effacy, has enlarged, it has weakened,<br />
it has lost its fervour<br />
New God the antithetical cone the antichrist.<br />
Summary<br />
Stanza I<br />
Title, The Second Coming: As forecast in the Scriptures, Christ will come again. But Yeats wrote in 1926, I<br />
do not believe in it [the Second Coming] at least not in its Christian form .<br />
Yeats quoted these lines to illustrate the sentence I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought:<br />
the growing murderousness of the whole world .<br />
The falcon: This bird of prey was (and still is) tamed, trained and used for various purposes by falconers. It<br />
seems to inscribe in air the shape of the historical gyre spiraling outwards to its farthest bound. In the automatic<br />
script for 17 April 1918 Yeats asked Thomas, Is not world as spiral ascends getting farther from reality . A<br />
passage from the 1910 draft of The Player Queen anticipates this image the Chancellor is anticipating the<br />
ruin that will come to the state if the Queen retires to convent or martyrdom: Come, your majesty, I am like a<br />
falconer that bears upon the wrist a hawk that struggles to lose itself in the heavens, and all I understand is to<br />
keep the jesses tight; yet it may be, before the day end, some murderer s hand may cut them .<br />
Mere anarchy: according to A Vision, anarchy and adoration of violence are characteristic of the end of a<br />
historical era.<br />
Spiritus Mundi: another name for the Anima Mundi or World s Soul, the treasure house of images not<br />
invented by man but given to him from beyond. II think of Anima Mundi as a great pool or garden where [a<br />
series of related images] moves through its allotted growth like a water-plant or fragrantly branches in the air .<br />
A shape with a lion body and the head of man: a sphinx in the automatic script for 2 June 1918, Yeats<br />
asked, referring to the initiator roof the cycle that will replace the Christian cycle, Can we call it the Sphinx .<br />
Perhaps the two most important precursors of this image are the murderous sphinx of the Oedipus legend, who<br />
asked the famous riddle whose answer is man; and the sexually obsessive, feline and aesthetic sphinx of<br />
Wilde s poem The Sphinx (1894), the concubine of Egyptian Gods. In A Packet for Ezra Pound , Yeats<br />
takes Oedipus as the opposite of Christ; and the Sphinx s bloodiness and sexines make it also appropriate as<br />
the contrary of the pale, abstract Christ.<br />
Desert birds: in Calvary (1929), l. 28, great desert birds pick bones bare.<br />
Twenty centuries of stony sleep: the whole Christian era. Yeats sometimes thought of Christianity as stony,<br />
sometimes as sleepy.<br />
What rough beast: in a summary of his career as a poet, Yeats wrote that around 1904 I began to imagine, as<br />
always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast that I associated with laughing,<br />
ecstatic destruction . Similarly Yeats predicted at the end of the refined, almost disembodied fin-de-siecle art<br />
that he loved: After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau after our own<br />
verse what more is possible? After us the Savage God .<br />
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born: As is well-known, Christ was born in Bethlehem. Yeats thought<br />
that the next civilization may be born, not from a virgin s womb, nor a tomb without a body, not from a void, but<br />
of our own rich experience . Yeats liked to describe the origin of an antithetical civilization as a sensual<br />
thrashing, a spasm of horror.<br />
The Second Coming<br />
This poem included in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) is a poetic rendering of philosophical and
W.B. Yeats<br />
ideological concepts that attracted Yeats throughout his life. The poem demands an awareness of Yeats s<br />
views as delineated in A Vision (a detailed description of it is given in a preceding section). In this poem Yeats<br />
hints at the destruction of the two-thousand-year Christian cycle and the birth of the new, violent anti-civilization<br />
represented and ruled by the figure of the beast . This is explicitly stated in terms of the movement of the<br />
gyres. In fact Yeats maps out the reversal of the worlds gyre that will inaugurate a new historical era.<br />
The poem begins with the depiction of ceaseless motion of the interpenetrating gyres that is captured in the<br />
image of the flight if the falcon which represents the outer, objective and impersonal gyre. The first six lines<br />
present powerful images of blood-letting, destruction and overwhelming chaos. In the disciplined Christian era,<br />
falcon is the Prime Mover/God. But now the lack of association between the two betrays a state of faithlessness<br />
and disorder - Things fall apart , that is the world, not just Ireland, that Yeats inhabits. It is the blooddimmed<br />
tide of violence that reigns supreme. Blood dimmed indicates smeared with blood as well as the<br />
source of blood itself. This tide or a second movement (in terms of the gyres) has been initiated and as a<br />
consequence the ceremony of innocence is lost. The idea of ceremony conveys Yeats s belief in a concept<br />
of aristocratic order and long cherished, traditional principles. Innocence is opposed to the sexual and social<br />
violence let loose in the world.<br />
The next two lines explain the effect of this chaos. Fanatical men, endowed with passionate intensity have<br />
gained an upper hand whereas the best have lost all sense of purpose and direction. This brings to the<br />
forefront the issue of Yeats s fascist leanings, which has been discussed elsewhere. The first stanza encapsulates<br />
circumstances marked by violence, anarchy and bloodshed. Yet this transformation wrought by these catastrophic<br />
events seems to bring about a welcome change for Yeats and thus is a celebratory one. The argument about<br />
Yeats s belief in authoritarian hegemony is further strengthened by the mention of the fact that in an earlier<br />
draft of the poem Yeats explicitly used the word Germans interwoven with his picture of general crisis and<br />
thus vent his hatred for the race. Though in an effort to lend universal, historical significance to his poem, he<br />
removed this topical allusion.<br />
The next stanza begins with Yeats s attempt to explain the convulsions of history that was rocking the world<br />
during the First World War. This is explained as a revelation and the second coming The next seven lines<br />
describe the birth, appearance and nature of the beast whose second coming it is. Yeats tends to authenticate<br />
his vision of the beast by alluding to it as an image suggested by and drawn from his great warehouse of<br />
images, the Spiritus Mundi.Line 14 suggests that the beast is a sphinx, a creature from the Sophoclean era.<br />
The poet attributes a blank and pitiless gaze to it, thus suggesting the impersonal rather, a cruel ,violent<br />
nature of the beast. This also links it up directly with the opening of the poem which describes the historical<br />
process in terms of the movement of the gyres. This is better understood by quoting a note that Yeats wrote<br />
for the Cuala press edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer:<br />
the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by<br />
the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At<br />
the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was<br />
narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take<br />
its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All the scientific, democratic, fast-accumulating,<br />
heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the<br />
revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be<br />
constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place when the revelation comes it will not<br />
come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince and the vizier.<br />
Line 18 describes this second coming as darkness , yet it seems that Yeats looks forward to it, for the stony<br />
sleep of the twenty centuries of Christian era seem to bear the weight of criticism. As the second stanza<br />
reveals, Yeats deploys biblical imagery only to subvert it and thus suit his own mythology. The magi envisioned<br />
the birth of Christ but Yeats, in an act of undermining Christian orthodoxy, predicts the birth of an anti-Christ.<br />
45
46<br />
Poetry<br />
And the future, as he said in A Vision, would be hierarchical ,multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. The<br />
antithesis of Christ, the rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem, the seat of dogmatic, leveling, unifying,<br />
feminine, humane, peace its means and end , Christian civilization and the poem thus ends rhetorically.<br />
Stylistically and structurally too, the poem reinforces Yeats s vision. The use of blank verse is unique to a lyric<br />
of this kind. The first few lines are in rhymed couplets but as the poem progresses half rhymes take over. The<br />
tight/rigid couplet form suggests the fact that old civilization has been strangled. But the subsequent loosening<br />
of rhyme scheme and the enjambment of lines enact the fact of an annunciation.<br />
The Second Coming thus forms a part of the overarching myth of catastrophe that the modernists believed<br />
in. The bloodiness of the First World War facilitated a metaphor for the beast. D.H.Lawrence in The Rainbow<br />
, Eliot in The Wasteland, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden and Spender all saw the war as signaling a major cultural<br />
and historical shift in the annals of human civilization.<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
Context<br />
The poem, from title onward, might indicate that like Lake Isle another attempt on the poets part to escape<br />
reality into a mythical world or an imagined past. In fact it is difficult not to read the poem as one of escape<br />
from and not an engagement with modern life. We can understand the poem better and apprehend the sources<br />
of Byzantium s attraction by investigating a little Yeats s construction of the space, part historical, part mythical,<br />
part imagined. But we must have some idea about what biographical/historical circumstances and what poetic<br />
ideals propelled and preoccupied Yeats around this time.<br />
The poet was growing old, and the subject of old age which so preoccupied Yeats all through his life (you might<br />
recall that when he was young, in two of his early poems entitled, When You Are Old and Adam s Curse<br />
he took up the subject), now obsessed him. So much so, it foregrounds in many of his poems, from 1919<br />
onward. He started cursing his old age even while philosophizing about it. Like Red Hanrahan, he became a<br />
great cursor of old age .<br />
This is what he said about Byzantium in A Vision in the chapter on the 15 th phase of the moon:<br />
Byzantium . substituted for the formal Roman magnificence, with its glorification of physical power, an<br />
architecture that suggests the Sacred City in the Apocalypse of St. John. I think if I could be given a month of<br />
Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium .I think I could find in some little<br />
wine-shop some philosopher worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending<br />
nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make [religious truths] show as a<br />
lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body.<br />
The passage is a crucial intertext for our understanding of Yeats s Byzantium poems, as well as illustrating and<br />
clarifying some of his preoccupations about art. It shows first of all that Byzantium is a symbol which is<br />
recoverable through imagination, and as such a journey to the city is not so much a physical as a metaphorical<br />
one. The virtues of the imaginative space are locatable in the following features: i. It is stripped of all materiality,<br />
made abstract, almost aerial. ii. In Byzantium the boundary between life and art is collapsed. Men are fused<br />
into mosaic, and symbols have a perfect human body. (iii) The cooperative nature of artistic production results<br />
in the anonymity of the artist. Byzantium is a community of workers and intellectuals. Though it is such an ideal<br />
city, it is finally inadequate.<br />
The Background<br />
1. The poem appeared first, as the first poem in Yeats s collection, The Tower (1928). He wrote it in 1926,<br />
the poem marking a point in his maturity while at the home of Lady Gregory in Coole Park near Gort in<br />
Co. Galway. In many ways the year 1922-23 was a year of fulfillment for Yeats. In 1922 Yeats became<br />
a senator of Ireland, and the winning of the Nobel Prize brought him further glory and prestige, giving him<br />
some measure of worldly success. Many of the poems written during the period of 1922-1928 which
W.B. Yeats<br />
found their way into The Tower were the result of this theory of the Mask. Some of the masks that he<br />
donned here are those of the smiling senator, the public man, visiting schools or meeting the soldiers, in<br />
brief, the sage.<br />
Around this time some of Yeats s ideas propounded in Per Amica Silentia Lunae were also percolating<br />
into A Vision which appeared in 1926. The poems in the collection, The Tower, are arranged according to<br />
the structure of the mystical treatise. The Great wheel is the subject of the first book of A Vision. It<br />
deals with the program of the soul through the lunar month, the cycles of the moon being the central<br />
symbol in A Vision. The 28 phases of the moon through a month (from full moon to no moon) amount for<br />
the account for the 28 incarnations of the month. The first poem in The Tower Sailing to Byzantium ,<br />
therefore, traces the progress of the poet-persona s soul from the mundane and ephemeral world of the<br />
present to the ideal and eternal world of Byzantium. From then on the poems which follow broadly define<br />
the trajectory of the lunar cycle Nineteen hundred and nineteen , Two Songs from a Play , Leda<br />
and the Swan , and finally All Soul s Night , are among the key poems describing the cycle. The title of<br />
the poem refers to the ancient city of Byzantium, capital of the Byzantine ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the<br />
city is now called Istanbul.<br />
2. Yeats was in some ways a Blakean, Hegelian and Nietzshean: he loved to think of everything in terms of<br />
contraries. Like Blake s contraries innocence and experience , Nietzsche s Apollonian and Dionysian,<br />
Yeats s primary dialectic was around life in this world (Ireland) and that in Byzantium. From this pair of<br />
binary opposites, everything else follows. Byzantium symbolized the anti-world; contrary to a world full<br />
of sadness of life, Byzantium becomes, for Yeats, a domain of great appetites, greatly gratified. In a<br />
vision, he wrote about how Emperor Justinian built the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia (AD560), which<br />
closely approximates a historical beauty of the full moon.<br />
Notes on the poem<br />
Stanza I<br />
That is no country: The indicative pronoun makes it obvious that the speaker has already sailed out of the<br />
reality of his own country. Critics often directly associate that country with Ireland, because of the similarities<br />
between Yeats s description and the geopolitical entity, Ireland. Consequently they identify the I with Yeats<br />
himself. But one must avoid such equations, if one were to go by Yeats s theory of the Mask. Compare this<br />
with Keats s I am already with thee in Ode to the Nightingale<br />
Old men: This provides an example of Yeats aforementioned preoccupation with old age. Together with,<br />
therefore have later in the poem, it indicates that the poetic persona considers itself old.<br />
The young in one another s arms: Following the reference to old age, this starts a series of contrasts around<br />
which the dialectic structure of the poem is organized. Observe the series of binarisms: age versus youth, art<br />
versus life, permanence versus ephemera, body versus soul, and so on. This phrase as well as the early prose<br />
drafts of the poem show that the implicit subject of the whole poem is sex, not platonic love. The stanza<br />
proceeds to pile up images of vitality and pleasure. However, the catalogue is halted by the phrase, Those<br />
dying generations , followed by whatever is begotten, born and dies . The collocation of the active and<br />
passive voice is worth pondering. This is in sharp contrast to the world of art, best represented by the magnificence<br />
of Byzantium , I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious,<br />
aesthetic and practical life were one. In 1912 he had visited the city of Ravenna, in northern Italy and had<br />
seen there some examples of early Byzantium art. He recognised that many generations of people had witnessed<br />
the pictures, but that the pictures themselves had maintained their vitality and freshness, they seemed ageless,<br />
the figures portrayed in them also achieved a permanence that was not possible in reality. The predicament<br />
facing Yeats, is what he perceives to be a growing dichotomy between his ageing body and his still youthful<br />
mind or intellect. He offers, in the opening stanza, the contrast between those who concentrate on the sensual<br />
world and those who are preoccupied with the permanent world of art.<br />
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48<br />
Stanza II<br />
Poetry<br />
Old man: The first line of this stanza elaborates the theme of old age suggested in its counterpart in the first<br />
stanza. The undesirability of age is vividly captured through the image of the scarecrow.<br />
Unless soul clap its hands and sing: According to A Vision impersonal and impartial artists are said to look<br />
on and clap their hands at the spectacle of the objective world. Thus what the phrase here seems to imply is<br />
unless one concentrates on the intellect of soul and by doing so seek to escape from the constraints of the<br />
human body . In an imaginary battle between body and soul, in the medieval tradition, which continued through<br />
centuries, either the soul or the body gains an upper hand. The image of the soul clapping is suggestive of its<br />
celebration of victory over the body.<br />
Monuments of its own magnificence: indicative of self-referentiality. This is again in contarst to what happens<br />
in the world of becoming ( neglecting monuments of unaging intellect )<br />
I have sailed: This confirms the persona s metaphorical journey in time and space having been already performed.<br />
Stanza III<br />
Sages: He begins by referring to a particular painting he saw in a Ravenna church, the painting depicts martyrs<br />
being burned for their faith. Yeats, who had edited Blake, said in a letter that he associated the sages with two<br />
of Blake s pictures with Christian themes. His interpretation suggests that t the flames represent the Holy<br />
Spirit. In other words, the moment of their deaths was equivalent to moving from the mortal life to immortality,<br />
and achieving a permanence through both the life of the soul and the Byzantine painting.<br />
perne in a gyre: refers to a spinning wheel such as those Yeats would have seen during his youth in Sligo. He<br />
is referring to the movement of thread through bobbin and spool, a movement that is so fast that it is imperceptible<br />
to the naked eye. Both the image of the gyre and its movement, as well as bobbin and spool are best understood<br />
with reference to his theory of the gyre as propounded in A Vision. The persona asks the sages, now immune<br />
from decay, to reenter the world of process long enough to seize him away to their realm of immortality. The<br />
emphasis on the persona s sexual urge and desire unmatched by the bodily decrepitude continues, though as<br />
something to be wished away rather than easily dismissed.<br />
Stanza IV<br />
Though successful in his journey, the poet is yet to meet his ultimate goal. Since nature follows a cycle leading<br />
to old age, there is bodily decay and death. It is here that his aim becomes clear: to opt out of that cycle by being<br />
gathered into the artifice of eternity. He begins by declaring that in this world of art, he would not take on the<br />
form of any natural thing, which like the images of the opening stanza, would be susceptible to the ravages of<br />
time, decay and death. Instead, he would take the form of a golden bird - an image based on golden birds that<br />
adorned trees in the palace of the Byzantine emperor. Yeats seems determined to finally break with the sensual<br />
mortal world, and reject life as we know it, in favour of an intellectual permanence produced by a work of art.<br />
However he has not fully succeeded, the use of the word drowsy, rekindles the sensuous overtones of the<br />
poem, suggesting that the poet s intellect is limited by his human condition, that in seeking a perfect existence<br />
his intellect is unable to avoid that which appeals to his senses. This becomes more obvious in the final lines of<br />
the poem, in line 30 is the voice of the golden bird that Yeats highlights again, contradicting his purpose in the<br />
poem. It is not the beauty of the hammered gold that Yeats now refers to, but the beauty of the birds voice<br />
which cannot come from a golden bird in a painting. The final line of the poem -: Of what is past passing or to<br />
come. reflects the line from the opening stanza: Whatever is begotten, born and dies. In an effort to<br />
represent permanence and timelessness, and in achieving a resolution to his quest, the poet, paradoxically<br />
completes the poem by dividing time into past, present and future, suggesting that his intellect remains within<br />
the bounds of his human condition. Although the poem is ostensibly about Yeats s attempts to achieve an<br />
artist s permanence, through: Monuments of unageing intellect. represented by Byzantine art. Some critics<br />
suggest that Yeats is far more concerned with his loss of sexual potency, his references in the opening stanza
W.B. Yeats<br />
to the young in one another s arms etc. are perhaps indicating a jealousy of the young and perhaps his<br />
concentration is a direct result of his recognition of his physical failings. The image chosen by Yeats to represent<br />
the ideal artist suggets that the golden bird, was only introduced in the poem in the final drafts. Earlier drafts of<br />
the poem show Yeats wishing to take on the form of Phideas a statue in Byzantium which represented the<br />
perfect like Adonis. This shows that at least during the writing of the poem, Yeats was wishing for physical<br />
perfection. This theme is also continued in Among School Children , where Yeats refers to Golden-thighed<br />
Pythagoras , and refers to the virility of Pythagoras. Yeats juxtaposes contrasting images of the sensuous<br />
world and the world of art, thereby creating a tension and conflict which he hopes to resolve by the end of the<br />
poem.<br />
Such a form: Yeats said once that, I have read somewhere that in the Emperor s palace at Byzantium was a<br />
tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang . The stanza firmly asserts that art can offer a body<br />
superior to mere flesh. Yeats was not satisfied with the celebration of Byzantine glory that he is able to offer<br />
in the final stanza. Sturge Moore, a senior contemporary of his pointed out the anomaly of the image of the<br />
golden bird singing to keep the drowsy emperor awake. Yeats wrote another poem to rectify this error, simply<br />
entitled, Byzantium .<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
Sailing to Byzantium occurs in The Tower (1928) which marks Yeats s efflorescence and achievement as a<br />
great poet. This poem has a companion piece called Byzanium published in The Winding Stair and Other<br />
Poems(1933).<br />
In the poem, Byzantium is a mythical city symbolizing the holy, spiritual life of the soul. But Yeats probably<br />
derived his idea from the real, historical city of eastern Christendom called Byzantium.It was, here, Yeats says<br />
in A Vision that may be never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were<br />
one The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were<br />
almost impersonal, almost without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter and<br />
that the vision of a whole people. So Byzantium connotes an ideal realm of existence. In 1931 Yeats wrote<br />
about the subject matter of this poem.<br />
Now I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of<br />
my thoughts upon that subject I have put into a poem called Sailing to Byzantium. When Irishmen were<br />
illuminating the Book of Kells Byzantium was the center of European civilization and the source of its<br />
spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.<br />
The motif of journey affords the poet a contemplation of philosophical and<br />
aesthetic issues. The issue poem is constructed between the antithesis between the youth and old age, nature<br />
and art, body and soul, thought and imagination and the world of Becoming and the world of Being. Yet the<br />
poem does not present a definite stance on either of these issues. It is one of the several poems in Yeats s<br />
literary corpus that he meditates on these seminal themes. Even within the progression of this poem, the poet s<br />
avowed intention of renunciation and the sub textual yearning for natural, physical world makes the poem<br />
complex and highly suggestive.<br />
The first stanza of the poem captures the physical, sensual activity of the natural world at once marked by<br />
fecundity and decay. The poem opens in a conversational manner and the use of that suggests that the poet<br />
has already embarked upon his journey and left Ireland. In Celtic mythology Ireland has been known as Tir na<br />
nOg i.e. the Land of the Young. The next four lines describing the preoccupations of youth engaged in lovemaking,<br />
birds singing songs, abundantly fertile seas and the presence of fish, flesh or fowl all suggest an<br />
Ireland teeming with life and activity. But the sense of passage of time and the reality of eventual decay is<br />
underscored by the use of the phrase dying generations . This idea is again repeated in line 6 and assumes an<br />
axiomatic status. Whatever is begotten, born and dies . According to the poet, owing to sensual music i.e.<br />
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50<br />
Poetry<br />
the delight in the life of senses, people forget the unageing or the eternally existing soul that is not subject to<br />
temporal decay. It is in pursuit of the life of the soul that is not possible amidst youthful, feverish activity, that<br />
the poet undertakes a journey to Byzantium. Monuments of unageing intellect besides referring to the soul,<br />
also refer to the object of arts, which, too are timeless creations. In the second stanza the poet further elaborates<br />
upon his stance and gives reasons for his intended opting out of the world of decay. He says that old age makes<br />
a man paltry i.e insignificant and unsubstantial a tattered coat upon a stick , and the only way in which he can<br />
be redeemed of this shadow like existence is by dwelling upon spiritual issues and principles- soul clap its<br />
hands and sing . But it is difficult to listen to the metaphorical song of the soul in a world dominated by the<br />
literal song of the birds and sensual music of youth. The land that the poet wants to leave is immersed in<br />
studying the structures produced by it, or in other words, not heeding the message of the soul but pursuing<br />
worldly wisdom. The last line of the stanza tells us that he has already reached Byzantium.<br />
Once in Byzantium, the third stanza shows the poet praying to the saints and sages of Byzantium for spiritual<br />
assistance. The sages are embodiment of wisdom and higher knowledge. They are depicted as standing in a<br />
Byzantium gold mosaic, the heavenly realm from which they are being asked to descend, perne in a gyre ,<br />
and be the singing -masters or the philosophical and spiritual guides of the poet. This appeal for divine<br />
intervention also betrays, through the confessional mode, the poet s involvement in the world of youthful passion.<br />
His heart is sick with desire , that is, overwhelmed by desire and hence subject to decay and death: And<br />
fastened to a dying animal (line22). The use of fastened recalls the caught of first stanza and dying<br />
animal refers back to the dying generations thus establishing a link between the world of Becoming described<br />
in the first stanza and the poet s own state of mind. He is in Byzantium, but is not free of physical longing and<br />
desires. Yet there seems to be realization that this is not right, it knows not what it is and hence prays to be<br />
assimilated into the fold of the saints. The much celebrated phrase artifice of eternity , then, expresses a<br />
paradoxical idea that that which lives forever is artificial. But artificiality is not falseness and so a work of art<br />
becomes supreme by virtue of its eternal existence.<br />
The next and the last stanza expresses the firm intention of the poet that having purged his base desires by<br />
spiritual aid, he will shun all natural things and processes. He wants to become a part of the dematerialized<br />
Byzantium world. He wishes to acquire the status and nature of art in becoming a golden bird, much like those<br />
hammered and enamelled by the Grecian artists. In being an object of art he also wants to create art to<br />
narrate songs of past, present and future. Gold is symbolic of purity and hence there is the excessive use of<br />
golden imagery to characterize this world. The song of the bird harkens back to the first stanza of the poem<br />
where the poet sang of mortal pursuits. The poet will be again involved in the real world.<br />
The poem, thus has a cyclical structure and shows that an absolute disjunction between body and soul, and by<br />
extension between nature and art is not possible.<br />
Among School Children<br />
The poem was first published in the volume The Tower (1928). Yeats, who always believed in sequencing the<br />
poems logically, so arranged the poems that two of them immediately preceding this one dealt with conception<br />
( Leda and the Swan ) and birth ( A Prayer for my Son ). In the poem under discussion, the poet arrives at the<br />
theme of childhood; at the end of The Tower comes old age ( A Man Young and Old ) and death ( All Souls<br />
Night ). The theme of this poem is education: in February 1926 Yeats visited St Otteran s school, established<br />
according to Montessori principles in a report to the Irish Senate on the condition of schools, Yeats praised<br />
the movement for its aptness to an agricultural nation ( Newspapers carried a favorable report on a visit to a<br />
convent school made twenty years earlier). But in the poem he regards St. Otteran s school with colder eyes:<br />
as in earlier poem about education, Michael Robartes and the Dancer , Yeats here concludes that education<br />
should be a dance, not ciphering or reading or sewing or any sort of labor. The poet rejects any sort of<br />
education (such as that associated with Pluto s academy) that excludes any part of experience; instead he<br />
finds that life gains purpose, gains meaning only by moving towards ever greater wholeness and largeness.
W.B. Yeats<br />
Yeats wrote a note shortly after his school visit: Topic for poem. School children, and the thought that life will<br />
waste them, perhaps that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams, or even<br />
their teachers hope . It brings in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens. (compare the end<br />
of Yeats Reveries Over Childhood And Youth : all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a<br />
preparation for something that never happens . )<br />
A sixty year old smiling public man : the self conscious poet is aware of the disengaged, arbitrary roles he<br />
plays, the appearances he presents (compare IV 8)- he has lost the integrity of being that is celebrated at II 8<br />
and VIII 1-8<br />
A ledean body: Maud Gonne. In the context of Leda and the Swan , this epithet at once lauds her as the<br />
mother of a heroic age and suggests how history deformed her life.<br />
Our two natures blent / into a sphere: at the end of his suppressed autobiography, Yeats described their<br />
complementary nature: My outer nature was passive but for her I should perhaps have never have left my<br />
desk- but I knew my spiritual nature was passionate, even violent. In her all this was reversed, for it was her<br />
spirit only that was gentle and passive and full of charming fantasy .<br />
Plato s parable: in Plato s Symposium, the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes describes how people used<br />
to be two headed, four armed, four legged, bisexual; but Zeus severed the man spheres into separate men and<br />
women, just as hair cleaves a cooked egg. Stephen Winnett has transcribed a passage from a 1917 draft of The<br />
Only Jealousy of Emer on the same theme, in whuch Fand tells Cuchulain that she can offer him completion<br />
of self: Have you not heard that man before his birth / Is two in one : the yolk & white of the egg / And that<br />
one half is born in wretchedness / while the other half remains among the Sidhe . For Plato, see The Tower I<br />
12. For other agglomerations of a man and a woman into a sphere, see Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn<br />
, l. 14; and the Hindu creation myth in TP, p. 119, in which the first person was as big as man and wife<br />
together; he divided himself into two, husband and wife were born .<br />
Yolk and white of the one shell: Donald Torchiana notes that in 1919 Maud Gonne designed a book illustration<br />
showing two swans squeeze into a tight sphere.<br />
Daughters of the swan … every paddler s heritage: the Laedean body has reminded the poet of Hans<br />
Christiaan Andersen s fable of the ugly duckling. Children are eggs that can hatch into any adult shape even<br />
Maud Gonne s.<br />
Quatrrocento: fifteenth century see also Her Vision in the Wood , l. 19 and Under Ben Bulben IV 17. In<br />
one draft Yeats wrote Da Vinci .<br />
Hollow of cheek as if it drank the wind: compare Two Songs of a Fool II 6: she drank the wind (referring<br />
to a hare, emblematic of Iseult Gonne); A prayer for my Daughter , l. 64: an old bellows full of angry wind<br />
(referring to Maud Gonne); and In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth I 12: skeleton-gaunt . Yeats once wrote<br />
of certain bad men who fed the gaping mouths with the east wind until they had destroyed all taste for better<br />
food .<br />
Shadows for its meat: compare Another Song of a Fool , l. 12: roses for his meat ; and The Statues , l. 19:<br />
Hamlet thin from eating flies .<br />
Pretty plumage: This anticipates the opposite, the image of the old scarecrow . Old, because it was used<br />
earlier, and also because it refers to old age. This can be compared with All my fine feathers would be plucked<br />
away ( The Gift of Haroun Al-Rashid ).<br />
Old scarecrow: for another scarecrow also an image of the disembodiment caused by old age see Sailing<br />
to Byzantium II 2. The scarecrow recurs here at VI 8.<br />
Honey of generation: I have taken the honey of generation from Porphyry s essay on The cave of the<br />
nymphs . Porphyry was a neoplatonic philosopher; he wrote a famous essay on Homer s Cave of the Nymphs,<br />
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Poetry<br />
showing it as an allegory of the unborn soul s descent the sexual pleasure of the parents acted as a kind of<br />
honey, luring the child s soul into incarnation.<br />
Betrayed: The sorrow of death is not so bitter as the sorrow of birth, and had our ears the subtlety we could<br />
listen amid the joy of lovers and the pleasure that comes with sleep to the wailing of the spirit betrayed into a<br />
cradle .<br />
Recollection or the drug: the newborn baby s recollection of his beatitude before birth, that makes him<br />
miserable about his present estate; or the drug the honey of generation that causes the baby to forget.<br />
Yeats found no warrant in Porphyry for considering [the honey] the drug that destroys the recollection of<br />
pre natal freedom .<br />
Yeats quoted a draft of this stanza in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare: Here is a fragment of my last curse upon<br />
old age. It means that even the greatest men are owls, scarecrows, by the time their fame has come .<br />
Plato thought nature but a spume: Plato (see The Tower I 12) taught that the physical world, mutable and<br />
corruptible, was only a humble shadow, an undignified copy of a world of ideal Forms.<br />
Soldier Aristotle: Plato s pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC) gave a little more dignity to the physical world, by<br />
teaching that reality was form ingrained in matter. An early draft of this stanza stressed Aristotle s talent for<br />
category: Aristotle was / The first who had a place for everything .<br />
A king of kings: Alexander the great (see On a Picture of a Black Centaur , l. 12). Aristotle, remember,<br />
was Alexander s tutor, hence the taws (form of birch) .<br />
Golden thighed Pythagoras: Pythagoras (c. 582-507 BC) was was said to have discovered the fact that<br />
musical pitches can be described mathematically as ratios of vibrating lengths of string; he also developed a<br />
doctrine of metempsychosis, teaching that the soul perpetually migrated from one body to the next. Like<br />
Plato s and Aristotle s, his investigations into reality took him (according to Yeats) too far from the hard facts<br />
of bodily life. The epithet, golden thighs, was applied to Pythagoras in classical times; compare golden armed<br />
Iollan (The Shadowy waters, l. 406), and the transvestite singer with gilded finger nails in The Resurrection<br />
(1931), l. 193. Pythagoras reappears in The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus , l. 9, The Statues , II. 1 and 9, and<br />
in News for the Delphic Oracle , l. ; and in A Full Moon in March (1935), II 16-18, a singer sings of love s<br />
excrementitousness: Crown of gold or dung of swine.<br />
What a star sang: see A Prayer for my Son , l. 19.<br />
Careless muses: see The Tower I 11.<br />
Old clothes upon old sticks: no inquiry into ultimate changeless reality can compensate for the decay of the<br />
philosophers bodies. For other scarecrows see Sailing to Byzantium II 2.<br />
Worship: in stanza VI, the poet asked whether human purpose might be found in the objects of affection. In the<br />
terms of A Vision, stanza VI concerns creative mind, stanza VII will.<br />
They too break hearts: the nun s heart is broken by her veneration of an icon, just as the mother s heart is<br />
broken by her love for her child. Compare The Friends of His Youth , where old Madge nurses a stone at her<br />
breasts and Thinks that the stone is a child .<br />
Presences / That passion, piety or affection knows :the beloved, the icon and the child, respectively. The<br />
Presences addressed by the poet include all objects of human affect.<br />
Self-born mockers: in The shadowy Waters, l. 567, the Gods are called Immortal Mockers . For self-born,<br />
see A Prayer for my Daughter , II. 67-68.<br />
Labour is blossoming or dancing: in the previous stanzas, all the things that could complete human life or<br />
endow it with meaning continually evade man s grasp; but in this final stanza the poet suggests that there is<br />
another perspective than that of the sad mutable world a perspective that reveals the unity of man and what<br />
he loves, what he thinks, what he works on (compare Quarrel in Old Age , II. 12-16).
W.B. Yeats<br />
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul: compare The Two Kings , II. 179-83: where we build / Our<br />
sudden palaces in the still air / Pleasure itself can bring no weariness, / nor can time waste the cheek, nor is<br />
there foot / That has grown weary of the wandering dance .<br />
Nor blear eyed wisdom out of midnight oil: compare The Living Beauty , 1. I: wick and oil are spent ; and<br />
the image if the Platonist toiling at his midnight candle in My House , l. 20.<br />
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?: the chestnut tree is an indivisible whole a metaphor for the<br />
human being who attains Unity of Being. These lines can be compared with a speech in which Yeats urged<br />
school teachers to teach religion as a part of history and of life itself, a part as it were, of the foliage of<br />
Burke s tree.<br />
How can we know the dancer from the dance?: in this poem about education, the poet understands knowing<br />
as making discrimination; but the kind of education he values is not analysis, but synthsis. In the dance., the<br />
artist and the artifact are one; there is no distinction to be known.<br />
Yeats conceived human life as wretchedly corruptible, human faculties as wretchedly divided and self-impeding;<br />
but he often teased himself with a vision of personal wholeness and liberty. At the end of A Vision (1937),<br />
Yeats wrote of the thirteenth sphere or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom ;<br />
the poem celebrates the moment of blessed introspection when a man sees his own integrity, the dance figure<br />
traced by his total effort.<br />
Among School Children<br />
Among school children is also included in The Tower (1928). As the title indicates, the poem describes an<br />
actual visit to a school. As Senator of the Irish Free State, Yeats visited the S.Otteran s School, Waterford in<br />
February 1926 for inspection. So the poem, at least at the start, promises to be a public address. But the way<br />
argument develops makes it a personal and meditative poem.<br />
The first two lines of the first stanza depict Yeats walking through the schoolroom, as in an inspection, and<br />
inquiring about the modes and methods of education in the school. The conversation with the old nun who<br />
has been identified as Reverend Mother Philomena , the principal of the school seems to be tinged with ironic<br />
humour. The phrase best modern way alludes to the Montessori methods of teaching that aims at developing<br />
the child s individuality. Yeats s perception of himself as the Sixty- year old smiling public man is also ironic.<br />
There is a sharp turn of thought in the second stanza. Amidst the school children, Yeats is suddenly reminded<br />
of Maud Gonne, the possessor of a Ledaean body . In sharp contrast to the first stanza that describes young<br />
children with their wonder stare , Yeats thinks of Maud Gonne in her old age when bent above a sinking<br />
fire she told him of an incident from her own childhood leading to a day s unhappiness and misery. The use of<br />
the word bent suggests old age and is reinforced by the use of the word sinking in the next line. For Yeats<br />
it became an instance when their two opposite natures were reconciled, blended into a sphere owing to a<br />
sympathetic understanding of each other. According to Yeats, this reconciliation was like the yolk and white of<br />
an egg both contained in one. The parable of the egg suggests primordial unity. At the subtextual level, this<br />
can be read as Yeats s longing to consummate his otherwise unfulfilled desire for Maud Gonne. The phrases<br />
Ledaean body and Plato s parable allude to classical mythology and learning.<br />
The third stanza continues the same thought and line of argument as the previous one. The poet still thinking<br />
of the grief and rage that Maud Gonne recounted, he tries to visualize her as a child and looks at young schoolgirls<br />
to see glimpses of Maud Gonne, to see how she might have looked at that age. But the poet is careful to<br />
distance her from ordinary children. He acknowledges that she is the daughter of the swan (Refer to the<br />
Zeus-Leda myth), yet may share characteristics and features of every paddler that is, ordinary people.<br />
Thinking about Maud Gonne, his heart is overwhelmed with passion (Line 23) and Maud Gonne assumes a<br />
forceful living presence as a child.<br />
Stanza four again depicts the present image of Maud Gonne in her old age.As opposed to the living child of<br />
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Poetry<br />
the previous stanza, Yeats wonders whether the hollow cheek is fashioned by Quattrocento, the fifteenthcentury<br />
Italian artist. Such hollowness seems to have been fed on wind and shadows. Hence the insubstantial<br />
figure of Maud Gonne in old age is contrasted with the bubbling energy of a young child. The image of Maud<br />
also leads him to think of his own appearance in old age. Acknowledging that he looked handsome when<br />
young, had pretty plumage , and is no more than a scarecrow now, he still does not succumb to self-pity and<br />
seems to bravely cope with the fact of old age. The first four stanzas thus oscillate between childhood and old<br />
age and a sense of inevitable loss is discernible in the poem. These stanzas provide the framework for the<br />
poet s meditation on the question of unfulfilled expectations discussed in the remaining four stanzas.<br />
In the fifth stanza Yeats says that if a young mother with a child on her lap can visualize or think about her son<br />
as a sixty year old man, his age betrayed by his looks and hair; she will surely consider if such a fate is enough<br />
compensation for the pain and the trouble that she experienced at the time of birth of her child. Along with the<br />
pain of childbirth are attendant other anxieties about the way the child will fare in life. In this meditation Yeats<br />
introduces the concept of the honey of generation . This refers to the soul that has been trapped into the body<br />
and the next line encapsulates two reactions of the soul- like the effect of a drug, it sleeps and forgets its past<br />
glory or it may struggle towards remembering past blessedness.<br />
This philosophical concept is carried on to the sixth stanza. In this stanza Yeats says that although Plato saw<br />
the world as a shadowy representation of the more real actual world of ideas yet time has its effects on the<br />
objects regulated and controlled by it. Aristotle, whose philosophy deals with solid matter as compared to that<br />
of Plato, as a tutor used the birch stick upon the bottom of Alexander the king of kings. This line implies that<br />
human intellect dominates over mere temporal power. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher with his philosophy<br />
of numbers, measured the intervals between musical notes on a stretched string, but all these philosophers<br />
Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras could not defer old age and ultimately became scarecrows. In such a case, are<br />
the achievements of human intellect ultimately reduced to nought?<br />
With stanza seven, Yeats gathers the various strands of thoughts and observations discussed earlier in the<br />
poem. The reference to a nun in stanza one and to a mother in stanza five are brought together here. Yeats<br />
says that both create and worship images. The nun worships an actual stone or a bronze image of god but the<br />
mother creates an image of her child in her heart. Line 53 means that these images break heart by pointing<br />
to the human inability to achieve perfection. These presences or images that nuns worship, the images of<br />
children that mothers cherish and the image of the lover in the heart of the beloved are created by the passion<br />
of lovers, the piety of nuns and the affection of mothers. These are symbolic of heavenly glory outside the<br />
world of Becoming. Though self-born that is, being images they do not really require a medium to be born, yet<br />
they too break hearts and mock human enterprise by exposing the limitations of mortal life.<br />
In the eighth and last stanza the poet refers to human labour and gives two instances of it: the blossoming of the<br />
chestnut tree and the act of dancing. According to the poet, labour is fruitful only when body is not employed<br />
in the service of the soul i.e. there is no disjunction between the body and the soul. Beauty that is born out of<br />
the despair of creating an image of perfect beauty is not real beauty, as wisdom acquired by exhaustive<br />
hardwork is not truly valuable. The blossoming of true labor is captured in the image of chestnut tree that<br />
symbolizes unity of Being. The tree is majestic, full of blossom and is all its parts roots, leaves, trunk, and<br />
flowers. Like the chestnut tree, perfect dance is that in which one cannot distinguish between the dancer and<br />
the dance. Inextricably merged into each other, the dancer and the dance, and the chestnut tree are symbolic<br />
of unity of Being in the world of nature. True labour, then, is the merging of the spiritual and the physical and<br />
indicates the wholeness of life that one should strive to attain. The poem is a meditation upon numerous issues<br />
central to Yeats s aesthetics and beliefs.<br />
Background<br />
Leda and the Swan<br />
Yeats s note explains that his study of mythological brutality began with a meditation on contemporary politics:
W.B. Yeats<br />
I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor [AE] of a political review asked me for a poem. I thought<br />
After the individualist, demagogic movement, founded by Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopedists and<br />
the French Revolution, we have a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow that crop for centuries . Then I thought,<br />
Nothing is now possible but some movement from above preceded by some violent annunciation. My fancy<br />
began to play with Leda and the Swan for metaphor, and I began this poem; but as I wrote bird and lady took<br />
such possession of the scene that all the politics went out of it and my friend tells me that his conservative<br />
readers would misunderstand the poem. In an interview Yeats continued this line of political analysis:<br />
Everything seems to show that the centrifugal movement which began with the Encyclopedists and produced<br />
the French Revolution has worked itself out to the end. Now we are at the beginning of a new centripetal<br />
movement [towards Mussolini and authoritarian government] .<br />
Fragments showed the exhausted soil of which the Yeats s note speaks, the impoverished and impoverishing<br />
idea world of empiricist philosophy and democratic politics; Leda and the Swan offers a vivid metaphor for<br />
the terror of the antithetical age to be born. According to A Vision 2000 BC (the age in which the swan came<br />
to Leda to inaugurate the heroic age) AD 2000 rhyme with each other; and so it is to be expected this poem<br />
bears many similarities to The Second Coming . Indeed there is a sense in which both the poems depict beast<br />
rapes of Yeats s imagination by a vehement overwhelming image. The sexual frenzy, the emphatic jagged<br />
diction of the sonnet s opening, were unprecedented in Yeats s poetry. In Pansies (1929), D.H. Lawerence<br />
published a sequence of poems on the Leda theme: the vast white bird / furrows our featherless women / with<br />
unknown shocks / and stamps his black marsh feet on their white marshy flesh.<br />
Drafts of this sonnet first appeared in a magazine under the title Annunciation . The whole poem is quoted to<br />
introduce the chapter in A Vision on historical process, Dove or Swan . A comprehensive review of Yeats s<br />
sources in mythology, poetry, sculpture, and painting (perhaps the most important as Michelangelo s image of<br />
Leda and the Swan, a copy of which Yeats kept by his desk as he wrote the poem) appears in Ian Feltcher s<br />
W.B Yeats and his Contemporaries, pp.220 51.<br />
Title Leda and the Swan: Zeus took the form of a swan in order to rape the mortal girl Leda; she presently laid<br />
three eggs: two eggs [had] already hatched Castor and Clytaemnestra [the wife of Agamemnon, the Greek<br />
leader during the Trojan War] broke the one shell, Helen [of Troy] and Pollux the other ; the third hung in a<br />
Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic . In the 1927 version of The Resurrection, II. 2 74 75, a<br />
character hears an eyewitness account of this Spartan temple, and exclaims, An egg of Leda, did you say?<br />
And unhatched? What frustrated destiny! . But Yeats, in his last short story, invented a sequel in which this<br />
destiny was no longer frustrated: Michael Robertes and his friends come into possession of the third egg the<br />
size of a swan s egg Hyacinthine blue and prepare to hatch it; this will lead to the return of the heroic age.<br />
For other references to Leda, see His Phoenix , 1.4: that sprightly girl that is trodden by a bird ; Among<br />
School Children II 1: Ledean body (referring to Maud Gonne); and Lullaby , II. 13 18, where Leda is<br />
oddly solicitous of her rapist s comfort.<br />
In a passage added to The Adoration of Magi in 1925, a mysterious voice prophesies the transformation of<br />
this world: another Leda would open her knees to a swan, another Achilles beleaguers Troy . In The Player<br />
Queen (1922) an actress, flirting with actors dressed as animals, sings, Shall I fancy beast or fowl? / Queen<br />
Pasiphae chose a bull, / While a passion for a swan / Made Queen Leda stretch and yawn . And in The<br />
Herne s Egg (1938) a king claims that virgins invent divine ravishers to appease frustrated sexual desire: Ovid<br />
had a literal mind, / And though he sang it neither knew / What lonely lust dragged down the gold / That crept<br />
on Danae s lap, nor knew / What rose against the moony feathers / When Leda lay upon the grass .<br />
The first four lines: in the first printing these lines read, A rush, a sudden wheel, and hovering still / The bird<br />
descends and her frail thighs are pressed / By the webbed toes, and that all powerful bill / Has laid her helpless<br />
face upon his breast.<br />
webs… bill: compare Attracta s song in The Herne s Egg about her intercourse with a divine heron: When<br />
beak and claw their work begin / Shall horror stir in the roots of my hair?<br />
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Poetry<br />
vague fingers: Leda was a popular subject for painting in the Renaissance - this phase may refer to blur<br />
representing the rapid movement of Leda s hand as well as to her hesitancy of resistance against an irresistible<br />
force. (The next poem in this volume is explicitly about a picture of a mythological animal.) Compare vague<br />
wing (The Dreaming of the Bones, 1 III).<br />
thighs: this edition follows AV, p. 267, in putting a comma, instead of a question mark, after this word.<br />
strange heart beating: Because, after all, it is a god s heart, not a human being s. The heart beat manifests the<br />
god s full descent to earth.<br />
The broken wall: the destruction of Troy as one of the consequences of Zeus insemination. Also a suggestion<br />
that the virgin s hymen was now ruptured.<br />
Did she put on his knowledge with his power: This can be compared with The Gift of Harun Al Rashid ,<br />
I. 169: I must buy knowledge with my piece ; and Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient , I. 23: What<br />
can she know until He bid her know! Mankind s incompetence at comprehending historical revelation is a<br />
common theme in Yeats s work: I see Phantoms also ends with a man s difficulty in constructing The half<br />
read wisdom of daemonic images.<br />
Summary<br />
Leda and the Swan, can be read in many ways: political, sexual, mythical, historical, anunciatory, and so on.<br />
It is certainly about rape. But that is hardly a critical discovery.<br />
Why Yeats should have decided to treat the subject poetically is a question that might lead to a better understanding<br />
of the poem. Thus, to understand fully the poem, a close reading of the text must be combined with certain<br />
intertextual strategies.<br />
Leda and the Swan is a sonnet, one of the most sophisticated forms of literature known. The poem is written<br />
in the traditional form of a sonnet, yet the subject matter is unusual given the context of its time and location.<br />
The sonnet form, traditionally is used to express profound emotions, such as romantic or Platonic love. This<br />
paradox is representative of the many oppositional elements which abound in the text and which help form the<br />
basis for understanding the oppositions which influence bot h Yeats and the poem.<br />
The rhyme scheme is traditional (ABAB CDCD EFG EFG) yet interestingly imperfect in that four of the<br />
rhymes are not perfect: push and rush, up and drop . This again is another oppositional element, typical<br />
of Yeats, and could be seen to symbolize the opposition between Yeats, the last Romantic, and Yeats, the<br />
Modernist. A transition exists in the poem s language, from an aggressive intensity to a vague passive distance.<br />
The language in the beginning of the poem sets the tone of an aggressive sense of urgency. Priscilla Washburn<br />
Shaw makes an excellent point when she states, The action interrupts upon the scene at the beginning with a<br />
sudden blow, and again, in the third stanza, with a shudder in the loins. It may seem inaccurate to say that a<br />
poem begins by an interruption when nothing precedes, but the effect of the opening is just that. The effect of<br />
this device is that it draws the spectator/narrator, and subsequently the reader, into the action and into the<br />
poem. The action continues for the first three lines of the first quatrain. Yeats doesn t bother with a full syntax<br />
until the final line of the quatrain, at which point, the urgency relaxes. The language in the first full quatrain is<br />
representative of the opposition inherent in the poem; in this case, between intensity and distance.<br />
The imagery, and wording in general, in Leda are also representative, in an initial reading, of oppositional<br />
elements within the text. A first reading shows Leda described in concrete terms and the swan in abstract<br />
terms. Leda is the staggering girl and the poem refers to Her thighs, her nape, her helpless breast, and<br />
her loosening thighs. The swan is never actually called Zeus or even the Swan (in fact, Agamemnon is the<br />
only name mentioned in the body of the poem). The swan is described as great wings, dark webs, that<br />
white rush, blood, indifferent beak, and feathered glory.<br />
A second reading of the poem, however, shows that ambiguities do exist. The concrete and abstract merge.<br />
Generalized terms are used for Leda ( terrified vague fingers ) and concrete terms for the swan (wings, bill,
W.B. Yeats<br />
beak). The purpose of this ambiguity could be, as Nancy Hargrove explains, to stress that the god is, after all,<br />
a real, physical swan engaged in a physical act . Regardless, this ambiguity is,<br />
again, representative of the conflict within the poem. Verbs play a major role in understanding Leda and the<br />
Swan. They are present tense through the octave and the first part of the sestet ( holds, push, feel,<br />
engenders ). They then shift to past tense in the last part of the sestet ( caught,<br />
mastered, Did ). The verbs in the present tense imply an intense immediacy while those in the past tense<br />
distance the reader (and perhaps the aggressor as well) from what has just occurred. Additionally, as Nancy<br />
Hargrove points out, there is a juxtaposition between active and passive verbs so that the active verb forms<br />
( holds, engenders ) belong to the swan while passive verb forms ( caressed,<br />
caught, mastered ) belong to Leda. The verb forms, then, play an active role in contributing to a close<br />
textual reading. Yeats continuously makes use of various devices to further heighten ambiguous, oppositional,<br />
and dramatic elements within his poetry. In his minimal use of the possessive adjective, and the consequently<br />
greater use of somewhat unusual alternative for ms, Yeats achieves effects which are curiously suspended<br />
between the concrete and the general , thus highlighting the ambiguities in the text. Further still, the linguistic<br />
suggestiveness of the absence of any qualifiers for body is considerable . It is considerable in that it makes<br />
us even more aware of the ambiguities (whose body?). It linguistically suggests the lack of an identity; it is<br />
essentially a dehumanizing element.<br />
While the subject matter of the poem is violent and disturbing, the structure of Leda conveys feelings of<br />
safety and beauty. The intensity of the rape is controlled by the narrow confines of the sonnet, an aesthetically<br />
pleasing and heavily structured art form. The sonnet form achieves for Leda a violence and historical sweep<br />
held in one of the most tightly controlled of poetic forms. The violence of the rape is then controlled within the<br />
constraints of the sonnet. Additionally, the sonnet itself is brief, thus ensuring the rape will be brief as well.<br />
While the rape is controlled through the structure of the poem, the organization of the poem reflects in an<br />
orderly manner the progress of the rape. The first quatrain presents the assault. The second quatrain reflects<br />
Leda s emotions. The first half of the sestet presents the ejaculation scene. The cut line represents a dramatic<br />
moment in time: a death-like silence. The final part of the sestet shows the act receding into memory while<br />
posing the question of meaning.<br />
Yeats makes use of several technical devices to convey the intensity of what is being portrayed in the poem.<br />
Among these devices are alliteration ( brute blood ), iambic pentameter, and the meter in general. Bernard<br />
Levine notes that no regular metrical pattern exists but there is a pervading rhythmic base in which verbal<br />
stress displaces the accent-guided line. The meter imitates the gasping and throbbing pulsations of the rape by<br />
its irregularity, its sudden sharp caesuras, its sentences spilling over from line to line, its dramatic broken lines<br />
in the sestet, its piling of stressed syllables.<br />
The ambiguities in Leda imply a confrontation both real and imagined, physical and intellectual. There is an<br />
ambiguity surrounding the staggering girl in line three. Staggering as intransitive participle means that the<br />
girl is literally physically staggering, but the transitive verb form shows that she staggers the mind (of the<br />
swan), so to speak. One notices another ambiguity in the connotation of the word still in line one. The bird<br />
is described as having just dropped down on Leda, yet the word still implies a timeless continuity.<br />
The text, then, presents the rape scene, painting a vivid and terrifying picture of its aggressive violence and its<br />
subsequent transition to passivity. The text also shows a pattern of oppositions and ambiguities which are<br />
manifestations of a series of conflicts between the material world and the spiritual world: the physical and the<br />
intellectual. The apparent opposition between abstract and concrete is representative of that between human<br />
and divine. Shaw views it in a more personal light: as the opposition between self and world.<br />
The oppositions inherent within the text, and the subsequent series of conflicts which they represent, are<br />
important in that they are manifestations of and parallels to oppositional conflicts occurring in Yeats s own life.<br />
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Poetry<br />
The violent textual rape is the result of his inability to reconcile these personal conflicts and the poem, then, is<br />
an example of Yeats displacing his frustration, and doing so in a positive and safe manner. If this assertion is<br />
indeed accurate, Leda and the Swan would be consistent with Yeats s later poems. Edmund Wilson, the<br />
famous American critic writes, The development of Yeats s later style seems to coincide with a disillusionment .<br />
Similarly, Cleanth Brooks argues that Yeats proposed to substitute a concrete, meaningful system, substituting<br />
symbol as a way of combating harsh, technical reality. Leda is consistent with the assertions.<br />
A Dialogue of Self and Soul<br />
A Dialogue of Self and Soul belongs to the volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems which<br />
was published in 1933. The volume belongs to the later phase of Yeats s career. Yeats had matured both<br />
physically and mentally by this time. Even though he was long past his sexual prime, he felt<br />
rejuvenated. The anxiety over aging which had pursued him since his earliest days [as is reflected in<br />
his early poems such as When you are Old (The Rose 1893)] was gradually lessening. He seems<br />
to have come to terms with the natural cycle of events. Moreover, his philosophy had matured as is<br />
reflected in A Vision (1925) which went through two more editions by 1933. Yeats was familiar with<br />
the Greek intellectual tradition but became serious only after 1900. He had also read Nietzsche.<br />
However, in his later poetry he revises and redefines these traditions. The Romantic strain is never<br />
too far off even in the mature poetry. The world of imagination remains triumphant over that of<br />
spiritual speculations.<br />
The poem A Dialogue of Self and Soul , according to Robert Snukal, is based upon the choice<br />
between a noumenal and a phenomenal world, between a retreat into pure mind or the repeated fall<br />
into matter. The poet persona chooses the world of here and now as is affirmed by the gradual<br />
ascendancy that is given to the Self, which in the second half of the poem becomes the sole speaker.<br />
Although the poem is entitled a Dialogue , by the second half the Self s domination over the Soul is<br />
so complete that it ceases to be a dialogue. Yeats follows the Medieval tradition of dialogue between<br />
the body and the soul but makes certain changes: instead of Body we have Self. George Russell noted<br />
in his book Song and Its Fountain (1932) that [. . .] [Yeats s] imagination was dominated by his<br />
own myth of a duality of self. This motif of a projected image of the self has its foundations in the<br />
Romantic tradition (painting and poetry) and overlaps with the idea of the doppelganger and alter<br />
ego so prevalent in nineteenth-century fiction such as Stevenson s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll<br />
and Mr. Hyde (1886), with slight variations in Bram Stoker s Dracula (1897), or, Oscar Wilde s The<br />
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) which fictionalizes the dichotomy.<br />
A Dialogue relies on such antinomies or masks as it is explained in the simultaneous contraction<br />
and expansion of the two cones, which Yeats calls the gyre . By this time he had internalized his<br />
philosophy that he could write an entire poem based on its central symbol of the gyre. In A Vision<br />
he explains the antithetical movement of the gyre wherein when the outer (objective) cone expands,<br />
the inner (subjective) contracts and at their extreme positions, a reversal of movements takes place.<br />
Yeats aligns the symmetry of this structure with that of the different phases of moon. He divides the<br />
soul into what he terms Four Faculties, two pairs of contraries: termed Will and Mask, Creative mind<br />
and the Body of Fate. This division derives from Blake s dictum: Without Contraries is no progression.<br />
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. His<br />
most sustained exposition of his theory of the anti-self and Mask is in the long essay Per Amica<br />
Silentia Lunae published in 1917 wherein art/poetry is seen as extending the self. A Dialogue is<br />
structured as a gyre wherein Self and Soul portray antithetical cones. The poem begins with the Soul<br />
at its highest intensity therefore completely dominating the Self.<br />
This poem takes up the theme of the conflicting desires of the poet s Self. It uses the imagery of the<br />
tower and the winding stairs among other things. The winding stairs in itself replicates the movement
W.B. Yeats<br />
of the gyre. Part I of the poem is dialectical, alternating between the Soul and the Self. The first<br />
stanza is given over to the Soul which is in ascendance. Yeats has the lunar cycle in mind (ll. 7). He<br />
incorporates the Christian tradition of Dark Night of the Soul in his own system of philosophy as<br />
espoused in A Vision. Dark Night of Soul or The Ascent of Mount Carmel or Spiritual Canticle<br />
deals with the notion of mysticism. According to this tradition, an individual soul must first reach an<br />
understanding that it is arid without its Maker, therefore in need of fulfillment and illumination.<br />
Winding…. Stair:<br />
Yeats had bought the ancient Norman tower, which late in life, stood for, among other things, Irish history,<br />
aristocracy, and traditon. Its vertical stairs became a symbol for the idea of the whirling gyre. Because of its<br />
journey in time, the tower helped Yeats summon sould of the dead.<br />
The hidden pole: A reference to the pole-star<br />
Then begins its descent to know itself, marked by a set of attempts on individual self to rid itself<br />
of various kinds of temptations and dependencies. Having progressed into this period of increased<br />
detachment the soul reaches darkness as it has purged itself of desire and appetite. Now, having gone<br />
through purgation, the soul is in a state which is open to illumination.<br />
That quarter where all thought is done: according to A Vision, the last quarter of the lunar month (Phases<br />
22-28) is marked by an Abstraction that has for its object or result the elimination of intellect .<br />
Sato s ancien blade: Yeats received a gift from a japanese admirer of his poetry. The sword was wrapped in<br />
an emroidered silk. The sword was oned by the family of the person for 550 years. It had been forged 550<br />
years ago. Thus the sword syblolized ancient wisdom, and the wrpped silk symbolized anima mundi<br />
Yeats revises this Christian mystical tradition slightly. In the third section of A Vision, which deals with<br />
life after death, the soul goes through reliving its earthly life, gradually reaching a blessed state, after<br />
many incarnations. This notion of reincarnation goes back to Plato. Another addition Yeats makes to this<br />
section is his concept of Anima Mundi, according to which it is possible for the souls of the dead<br />
to communicate, through Anima Mundi, with writers and artists.<br />
The second stanza is given over to the Self. Sato s sword which is still razor-keen, [. . .] like a<br />
looking-glass / Unspotted by the centuries and the wooden scabbard which is tattered [. . .] faded<br />
adorn symbolize changelessness of heart. (ll. 3-4, 8). The embroidery which is torn from a court<br />
lady s dress symbolizes aristocracy. Aristocratic values are sympathetic to art and culture. The winding<br />
and binding (of the wooden scabbard) refer back to the System, viz. the winding and unwinding of<br />
the Great Memory (Anima Mundi) or the memory of a race. Great Memory works through the<br />
individual artists. In dying a poet contributes to the wealth of the racial memory and in using it in the<br />
life-time he unwinds it. Gradually the Soul is shown as loosening its hold on the argument. The Soul s<br />
rejoinder starts with a rumination over imagination before moving on to the noumenal. Ancestral night<br />
that is mentioned in Stanza 3 has its bearing in the Christian mythology. Yeats distinguishes night and<br />
day in his philosophical system. Night is suggestive of one God associated with denial of self and<br />
Christ s sacrifice. It is also associated with Socrates. Here the soul turns towards spirit seeking<br />
knowledge. These are some of the associations Yeats makes with the Dark Night of the Soul. Day<br />
holds pagan associations, linked as it is to Homer and many Gods. It is a Nietzschean idea backing<br />
the affirmation of self. Here the soul turns away from the spirit and is life affirming. Even here the<br />
subject of ageing comes up but that is more in the context of imagination. The Christian spiritual<br />
tradition may be able to deliver from the cycle of death and birth, but only if the attention is removed<br />
from all earthly things.<br />
The Self in Stanza 4 picks up where it left off in the second stanza. The sword mentioned earlier<br />
was forged by Montashigi in fifteenth-century. Again the dialectic between night and day is set up.<br />
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Poetry<br />
The sword with its embroidery of flowers is seen as emblematic of day or the pagan tradition as<br />
opposed to the tower which signifies the night or the affirmation of soul. The crime talked of in<br />
ll.8 is the same one of participating in the natural cycle of birth and death. The Self is gaining in<br />
intensity by showing willingness to go through the cyclicity of nature.<br />
The crime of death and birth: The familiar theme in Yeats s poetry. Life and death is what awaits a being<br />
caught in the cycle of nature.<br />
Montashigi: according to Jeffares, a sword maker who lived in Osafune in the early fifteenth century.<br />
Heart s purple: If I say white or purple in an ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively<br />
that I cannot say why they move me; but if I bring them into the same sentence with such obvious intellectual<br />
symbols as a cross or a crown of thorns, I think of purity or sovereignty .<br />
I set / for emblems: the conscious process of emblem creation, symbol making, is an important theme in<br />
Yeats s later work.<br />
The basin of the mind:<br />
The basin full to the brim and overflowing is an image, which suggests, for Yeats, plentitude. He was fascinated<br />
by the Irish myth of a river overflowing with beer. Horn of plenty is another such image suggestive of plentitude.<br />
Deaf and dumb and blind:<br />
The end of all consciousness.<br />
Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known: in the technical terms of A Vision, these four entities are,<br />
respectively, Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate that is, desire and its object, and intelligence and<br />
its object. The soul is speaking of a condition when the human faculties will no longer be distinct from one<br />
another, a condition outside the reincarnative cycle.<br />
Only the dead can be forgiven: the Self contradicts this at II 27.<br />
The Soul talks of the spiritual fullness in the last stanza of Part I. Is and Ought ; Knower and<br />
the Known are antinomies. Is corresponds to the will, ought to mask ; knower to creative<br />
mind and known rational mind. In both the sets one state aspires for its opposite. But the intellect<br />
cannot make the distinctions when imagination is given full play. The confusion sets in as the intellect<br />
becomes completely non-functional. (ll. 4-7). The Soul is speaking of a condition where the human<br />
faculties are no longer functional. By the end of Part I the Soul s argument is considerably weakened<br />
as compared with its earlier certitude.<br />
Part II is dominated by the Self, thereby expressing Yeats s belief in the life of the body. The notion<br />
of reincarnation is used here. According to Robert Snukal, one of the ways in which the myth was<br />
couched was in terms of sight; that is, to be aware of this world is to be blind to heaven. It is not<br />
much farther from the Christian mystical tradition wherein the soul s progress is discussed through<br />
deprivation and purgation. In order to ascend to Heaven, the soul must leave all the earthly temptations<br />
behind. The drop mentioned in ll.1 is that of oblivion which a living man is supposed to have drunk.<br />
In the first two stanzas of Part II the poet persona is trying to relive his life imaginatively from<br />
boyhood to manhood. He has no regrets as he states in Stanza 3, I am content to live it all again .<br />
(ll.1). The body and the decrepitude which sets in the form of old age are no excuse for opting out<br />
of the self and glorifying soul. The strength of the self that it derives from its apparent weakness is<br />
owing to the power of imagination. As against the soul the body suffers decrepitude but because it<br />
summons imagination to its optimum use, it can triumph over the soul. No matter how mistaken he<br />
is and how often he is led into the ditch the poet persona would opt for life.<br />
My tongue s a stone: the soul falls silent because it has verged on sacred mysteries beyond articulation in<br />
human speech. Yeats himself sometimes felt the same incapacity: I tried to describe some vision to Lady
W.B. Yeats<br />
Gregory, and to my great surprise could not. I felt a difficulty in articulation and became confused .<br />
Ditches: see II 19.<br />
Ignominy of boyhood: compare a Prayer for my Son . It seems that between parts I and II, we have moved<br />
from the last quarter of the Great Wheel of reincarnations the quarter of God to the first quarter of the<br />
lunar month (phases 2-8) the quarter of nature, in which a man slowly extricates himself from a state of<br />
complete absorption in the physical world. The Self seems to be speaking partly about the growth of a man in<br />
the course of one lifetime, partly about the growth of a man s spirit through many incarnations phase 2 is<br />
called the Child.<br />
The unfinished man…brought face to face with his own clumsiness: compare this rabid self-sketch with<br />
Yeats s self descriptions: Perplexed by my own shapelessness, my lack of self possession on passing a<br />
tobacconist s I saw a lump of meerschaum not yet made into a pipe. She [Maud] was complete; I was not .<br />
Disfigured shape / The mirror of malicious eyes / casts upon his eyes: I have found that if many people<br />
accuse one of vanity, of affection, of ignorance, an ignoble image is created from which the soul frees itself<br />
with difficulty, an undiscerned self-loathing ; if men speak much ill of you it makes at moments a part of the<br />
image of yourself that is your only support against the world and that you see yourself too with hostile<br />
eyes .<br />
Blind man s ditch: The legendary blind Irish poet, Raftery is said to have written a poem celebrating the<br />
beauty of a peasnt girl which drove some young men crazy. They set out to see and verify for themselves<br />
whether she was indeed the beauty Rafter s song made her out to be. Unable to find their way at night, they<br />
were drowned in a bog of Cloone. Yeats celebrates this as a triumph of imagination in his poem The Tower .<br />
Wintry blast: a proud woman: for example, Maud Gonne.<br />
Forgive myself the lot! : according to the soul, purgation can be achieved only in death, but the Self, as it moves<br />
towards its zenith, is willing to take responsibility for its own salvation.<br />
So great a sweetness flows: the same phrase appears in Friends , l.27.<br />
We must laugh: There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings which arouses within us,<br />
through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and<br />
mock in the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and oblivion .<br />
We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest: the whole volume is full of blessings<br />
compare the first two lines of Blood and the Moon ; Coole and Ballylee, 1931 , II. 44-45: whatever most can<br />
bless / The mind of man ; and Vacillation IV 10: I was blessed and could bless . Yeats wrote to Ethel Mannin<br />
that our traditions only permit us to bless, for the arts are an extension of the beatitudes . Once again<br />
Yeats s sexual anxieties come to the fore. Frog-spawn and the fecundity of the ditch are metaphors<br />
for the seminal fluid. In the blind man , one can pick up a reference to Raftery ( The Tower ) who<br />
was blind but created a beautiful wench. (Stnz. 3 ll. 3-4). In The Tower the poet says that the<br />
people jostled among themselves to catch a glimpse of this girl but were led astray. One of them even<br />
drowned. The point Yeats s persona is making in both these poems is that the life of imagination is<br />
far richer than any philosophical or mystical speculation. The proud woman in the last line of Stanza<br />
3 could be either Helen or Maud Gonne. By now Maud s charm has worn off for Yeats and he sees<br />
his early wooing of her as a folly , especially as this woman is not a kindred of his soul . In the<br />
last stanza there is a sense of peace and tranquility. Despite the (subjective) Self having the last word<br />
against the (objective) Soul, nothing is resolved or diffused; all the contradictions are held in balance.<br />
Yeats s cyclical theory of change contains some elements of Nietzsche s theory of the eternal<br />
recurrence, as is espoused in the declaration of the Self figure in the concluding stanzas of the poem.<br />
The noumenal and the phenomenal are held in check at the end of the poem. On the one hand the<br />
poet persona will not shirk from the worldly responsibility. On the other hand he sees this in<br />
accordance with God s blessing.<br />
61
62<br />
Poetry<br />
The antinomies in the poem are held in a tenuous unity. At about the age of twenty-four Yeats<br />
became obsessed with the sentence Hammer your thoughts into unity. Unity of being came to be<br />
a central aim of his activities thereafter and is most nearly approached in The Tower and the<br />
subsequent poems. As he approached old age he came to accept that his optimism for political unity<br />
of Ireland was misplaced but he retained his belief in the source of such a unity in the Anima Mundi,<br />
the reservoir of archetypes of images or myths of the central experiences of the tribe.<br />
VI. Short Answer type Questions<br />
Try to answer the following questions in about 200 words each::<br />
The Lake Isle of Innisfree<br />
1. Identify the romantic elements in the first stanza of the poem.<br />
2. Compare the last stanza with the last lines of Wordsworth s poem The Daffodils .<br />
Easter 1916<br />
1. What is Yeats s attitude to Irish nationalist politics as delineated in the poem?<br />
2. What is Yeats s response to the death of the rebels?<br />
3. Discuss the significance of the title Easter 1916 ?<br />
Leda and the Swan<br />
1. The phrase Ledaean body occurs in the poem Among School Children . How, if at all, does the<br />
treatment of the myth differ in Leda and the Swan ?<br />
2. Do you think the depiction of the Zeus-Leda encounter sheds any light on Yeats s attitude to women?<br />
Explain.<br />
The Second Coming<br />
1. How does the rough beast differ from Christ in the poem The Second Coming ?<br />
2. Does the poem shed any light on the issue of Yeats s attitude to fascism?<br />
3. Do you think that the knowledge of Yeats A Vision helps in a better understanding of The Second<br />
Coming ?<br />
Among School Children<br />
1. How does Yeats s perceive his relationship with Maud Gonne at the time of the writing of the poem?<br />
2. Discuss the poem from the perspective of Yeats s public role as a senator.<br />
Sailing to Byzantium<br />
1. What country is Yeats referring to in line 1? What is that country like?.<br />
2. List the imageries in the first verse paragraph.<br />
3. The second paragraph contains an argument. Paraphrase the argument.<br />
5. Think about the image a tattered coat upon a stick . Write a short paragraph on it.<br />
6. In what sense has the speaker sailed the seas and arrived in Byzantium?<br />
7. What does Byzantium stand for?<br />
8. Explain the phrase Monuments of unageing intellect ?<br />
9. What is Yeats s attitude to old age as depicted in the poem?<br />
A Dialogue of Self and Soul<br />
1. What is the symbolic significance of the embroidered silk in the poem?
W.B. Yeats<br />
2. How does the poet explain the ascent to heaven as the inability of the intellect to know Is from the<br />
Ought or Knower from the Known ?<br />
VII. Long Answer type questions<br />
1. Yeats believed that whatever of philosophy has been made poetry alone is permanent. Is this true of<br />
Yeats s own poetry? Discuss.<br />
2. Yeats said: whatever the passions of men have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the Great Memory .<br />
In the light of this statement, write an essay on Yeats s use of symbols with reference to the poems<br />
prescribed.<br />
3. W. B. Yeats claimed, my glory was I had such friends. Critically examine the statement in the light of<br />
the poems you have read.<br />
4. A Dialogue of Self and Soul dramatises the tension which is central to Yeats s poetry. Do you agree?<br />
Discuss.<br />
5. Easter 1916 celebrates at once Ireland s new martyrs, and its transformation in the poet s conception<br />
of heroism. Critically examine the poem in the light of the statement.<br />
6. The greatest love poet in the <strong>English</strong> language since the seventeenth century. Do you agree with such<br />
an assessment of W.B. Yeats? Discuss with reference to the poems you have read.<br />
7. In responding to the conflicting claims of love, nationalism, art and spiritual quest, Yeats s poetry does<br />
not limit itself to a narrow and exclusive vision of life. Critically examine any two poems of Yeats in the<br />
light of this statement.<br />
8. In building his Dialogue of Self and Soul , Yeats in fact is speaking of the conflicting claims of art and<br />
asceticism. Do you agree? Discuss.<br />
9. W.B. Yeats claimed my glory was I had such friends. Critically examine any two of his poems as<br />
unforgettable .<br />
10. In a fallen world we are tortured by our longing for perfection, but the conditions of mortality time,<br />
change, and death render our ideals for ever inaccessible. Critically examine two poems of Yeats in<br />
the light of this comment.<br />
VIII. Suggested Readings<br />
Several kinds of approach to the poetry of Yeats are possible. In his life time critics and reviewers approached<br />
his poetry by paying close attention to his poetic craft and the form of his poetry. The exoticism arising out of<br />
the strangeness of celtic folklore and myths and legends, the wellsprings of his early works was also a favourite<br />
subject. The lyrical, dreamlike quality of his poetry, its emotional content were commented on. Many reviewers<br />
tried to trace his development as a poet. When his works were studied in universities, many academic critics<br />
such as Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, paid attention to the craft, the editorial changes he made,<br />
and his allegiance to the great tradition of <strong>English</strong> poetry. All the while, of course, critics tried to see the<br />
interconnection between his system and poetry. Gradually, his works were seen as belonging to another source,<br />
the Irish context. In the context of Anglo-American modernism, the modernist traits he shared with Pound and<br />
Eliot were seen to be in conflict with his romanticism. Henn, Ellman, and Jeffares were the preeminent Yeats<br />
critics. In the 1950s critics like Graham Hough and Frank Kermode tried to establish connection between the<br />
Symbol and the Image, romanticism and modernism. Yeats too was discussed in this general context. From the<br />
1970s, Yeats criticism tried to adopt political approaches such as those of feminism and nationalism, and<br />
postcolonialism etc.<br />
The following works are a selection from all these changing trnds and movements in Yeats criticism over seven<br />
decades.<br />
63
64<br />
A. Norman Jeffares W.B Yeats: A New Edition Macmillan 1984<br />
.. New Commentary on the Poems of W. B Yeats Macmillan 1984<br />
Poetry<br />
.. ,ed. W.B.Yeats: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegam Paul , 1977<br />
Adams, John F. Leda and the Swan : The Aesthetics of Rape. Bucknell Review 12.3 (1964):<br />
47-58.<br />
Adams, Joseph. Yeats and the Masks of Syntax. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.<br />
Archibald, Douglas. Yeats. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1983.<br />
Arden, W.H In Memory of W.B. Yeats . The poem<br />
Auden, W.H. The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats article Partisan Review<br />
Spring 1939, reprinted in Casebook, ed.Elizabeth Cullingford, Macmillan. 1984<br />
Bloom, Harold Yeats, Macmillan. NY, London. 1970<br />
Balakian, Anna. The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: New York UP,<br />
1977.<br />
Bhargava, Ashok. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities P, 1980. Bloom,<br />
Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.<br />
Brennan, Matthew. Yeats s Revisions of Leda and the Swan . Notes on Contemporary Literature<br />
13.3 (1983): 4-7.<br />
Bloom, Harold. Ed. William Butler Yeats. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.<br />
Brooks, Cleanth. Yeats: The Poet as Myth-Maker. The Permanence of Yeats. Ed. James Hall<br />
and Martin Steinmann. New York: MacMillan, 1950. 67-94.<br />
Burke, Kenneth. On Motivation in Yeats. The Permanence of Yeats. Ed. James Hall and Martin<br />
Steinmann. New York:MacMillan, 1950. 249-63.<br />
C.K. Stead The New Poetic Hutchinson 1964<br />
.. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound and the Modernist Movement Macmillan 1986<br />
Cullingford, Elizabeth. Gender and History in Yeats s Love Poetry. Cambridge:<br />
Cambridge UP, 1993<br />
Ellman, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: Norton, 1948.<br />
Eliot,T.S W.B. Yeats 1939<br />
. The Identity of Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1954.<br />
. . A Foreign Mind 1919 (A review of WSC)<br />
Frank Kermode The Romantic Image Routledge 1957Fite, David.<br />
Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision/<br />
Amherst: U of Mass P, 1985.<br />
Fletcher, Ian. Leda and the Swan as Iconic Poem. Yeats Annual<br />
No. 1. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:<br />
Humanities P, 1982. 82-113.<br />
Hall, James Hall and Martin Steinmann. Eds. The Permanence of Yeats. New<br />
York:<br />
MacMillan, 1950.<br />
Hassett, Joseph M. Yeats and the Poetics of Hate. New York: St.<br />
Martin s, 1986.
W.B. Yeats<br />
Hargrove, Nancy D. Esthetic Distance in Yeats s Leda and the<br />
Swan .” The Arizona Quarterly 39 (1983): 235-45.<br />
Harris, Daniel A Yeat s Coole Park and Ballylee. Baltimore, Md., 1974.<br />
Henn, T. R. The Lonely Tower (London, 1949; rev. edn, 1965), pp. 1-6, 7-13.<br />
Henn, T.R. The Lonely Tower. London: Methuen, 1966.<br />
Jeffares, Norman. W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems, London: Macmillan, 1997.<br />
Johnsen, William. Textual/Sexual Politics in Yeats s Leda and the Swan . Orr 80-89.<br />
Kenner, Hugh Extract from the essay, The Sacred Book of the Arts , Sewanee Review,<br />
LXIV, 4 (1956); reproduced in Kenner s Gnomon (New York, 1958), pp. 9-22.<br />
Lynch, David. Yeats: The Poetics of Self. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.<br />
Levine, Bernard. The Dissolving Image: The Spiritual-Esthetic Development of W.B. Yeats.<br />
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1970.<br />
Macrae, Alasdair D. F. W. B. Yeats: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan,<br />
1995.<br />
Malins, Edward. A Preface to Yeats. London: Longman Group, 1974.<br />
Macrac, Alastair D.F. W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1995<br />
Oppel, Francis Nesbitt. Mask and Tragedy. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1987.<br />
O Donnell, William H. The Poetry of William Butler Yeats. New York: Ungar, 1986.<br />
Olney, James. Sex and the Dead: Daimones of Yeats and Jung. Critical Essays on W.B. Yeats.<br />
Ed. Richard J. Finneran.Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. 207-23.<br />
. The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy- Yeats and Jung.<br />
Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.<br />
Orr, Leonard, ed. Yeats and Postmodernism. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991.<br />
Orwell, George. Review article on V. K. Narayana Menon s The Development of William Butler<br />
Yeats, in Horizon, VII, 37 (1943); reproduced in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus<br />
(eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and letters of George Orwell (London,<br />
1968, vol. 2, pp.271-5.<br />
Richard Ellman Yeats: The Man and the Masks Faber 1949<br />
. The Identity of Yeats Faber 1954<br />
. Eminent Domain London: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press 1965<br />
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-<br />
Yeats. American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age. Ed.<br />
Snukal, Robert. High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge<br />
UP, 1973.<br />
Stead, C.K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. London: Macmillan, 1986.<br />
Thurley, Geoffrey. The Turbulent Dream: Passion and Politics in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats. St.<br />
Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1983.<br />
Wilson, Edmund. W.B. Yeats. The Permanence of Yeats. Ed. James<br />
Hall and Martin Steinmann. New York: MacMillan, 1950. 15-41.<br />
65
66<br />
Seiden, Morton Irving. William Butler Yeats: The Poet as a Mythmaker. Michigan:<br />
Michigan State UP, 1962.<br />
Webster, Brenda S. Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study. Stanford:<br />
Stanford UP, 1973.<br />
F.R. Leavis New Bearings in <strong>English</strong> Poetry 1932 rpt 1982 Pelican<br />
T.R Henn The Lonely Tower 1989 revised 1965 Methuen<br />
Whitaker, Thomas R. Extract from ch. VIII, The Soiritualised Soil , in Swan and<br />
Shadow (Chapel Hill, N.C.,1964), pp. 171-87.<br />
Poetry
Contents<br />
Chapters Page No.<br />
I. W. H. Auden and his Age<br />
II. W. H. Auden: Themes and Works<br />
III. Literary Tradition: W. H. Auden — The Trend-Setter<br />
IV. Critical Analysis of the Prescribed Poems:<br />
1. Petition<br />
2. Musee Des Beaux Arts<br />
3. O’ what is that Sound<br />
4. September 1, 1939<br />
5. In Memory of W. B. Yeats<br />
6. The Shield of Achilles<br />
7. In Praise of Limestone<br />
V. W. H. Auden: A modern poet<br />
VI. W. H. Auden’s Technique<br />
VII. W. H. Auden: The Theme of individuality<br />
VIII. W. H. Auden: The Concept of Love<br />
Chapter-Wise References<br />
List of General Essay-Type and Short Questions<br />
Suggestions for further reading<br />
1
W. H. Auden: Life and Career<br />
Chapter-I<br />
W. H. AUDEN AND HIS AGE<br />
Wystan Hugh Auden is recognised as the most representative poet of his times on the<br />
British Literary scene. Rightly does R.G.Cox remark, “Here was unquestionably a new talent, the<br />
voice of an individual sensibility alive in his own times capable of vigorous expression”. 1 Auden<br />
was born on 21 st February, 1907 in York. Both his parents were in medical profession. Soon after<br />
his birth, Auden family shifted to Birmingham in 1908 where his father became Medical Officer<br />
and Professor of Public Health in the <strong>University</strong>. The atmosphere at his home was quite scientific.<br />
There were plenty of books on science which unfolded the intentions of Auden family regarding his<br />
career that he should adopt the career of a mining engineer. He was admitted to St. Edmund’s<br />
School in 1915. Here he came across Christopher Isherwood who was three years senior to him.<br />
After this he did his schooling in Norfolk at Gresham’s School, Holt from 1920-25.<br />
Auden stayed at Oxford from 1925-28 for further studies. He joined Christ Church under<br />
the guidance of his tutor Nevil Coghill of Exeter College. Here he became keenly interested in<br />
<strong>English</strong> poetry both old and modern, particularly in the most exciting modern poems of T.S. Eliot.<br />
Three years’ stay at Oxford became monumental as it was at Oxford that oft quoted Auden Group<br />
was formed. Here his interest in writing poetry was developed to a great extent. He edited Oxford<br />
Poetry in collaboration with Charles Plumb in 1926 and again in 1927 with C.Day Lewis. He took a<br />
good deal of interest in the study of psychology and Psycho-analysis. He defined poet as a person<br />
who observed the ills of society as a detached clinical analyst diagnosing the ills and giving them<br />
psychological treatment in the form of poetry. He dedicated his first volume of poetry to Isherwood.<br />
This volume was printed by Stephen Spender on a hand-press in 1928 at Oxford.<br />
Auden’s parents wanted to send him abroad for a year and he made a choice in favour of<br />
Germany for this purpose and went there in 1928 and spent a year in Berlin. Here he came across a<br />
number of new experiences-Rakes’s poetry, the theatre of Bretch, German cabaret songs, and John<br />
Layard’s ideas based on Freud, Groddeck and especially on HomerLane. During this visit<br />
Isherwood joined Auden in March 1929.<br />
After this he came back home and like numerous middle-class writers of his time he<br />
became a school master in Scotland and then at a place close to Malvern. He was thoroughly<br />
interested in his teaching profession and simultaneously he published his early work which sent a<br />
wave of thrill among the reading public of the thirties. Then came a series of his publications-Paid<br />
on Both sides, Poems 1930, The Orators, 1932 and The Dance of Death in 1933, collaborated with<br />
Isherwood on the play the Dog Beneath The Skin for the first season of the Group Theatre at West<br />
minster Theatre in London. In 1935 Auden married a girl called Erika Mann. After a year in 1936,<br />
he visited Iceland in the company of Louis MacNeice a master-poet at Birmingham school. Here he<br />
produced another of his creative works Letters from Iceland, 1937; in collaboration with Louis<br />
MacNeice.<br />
Auden produced his best known play written with Isherwood The ascent of F6 and a new<br />
published volume of poems Look Stranger, which was dedicated to Erika Mann. It is learnt that<br />
Auden married Erika Mann who was the daughter of a prominent German novelist, Thomas Mann<br />
to provide her with a passport for England. Then in January-March 1937 he visited war-torn Spain 2<br />
and published his famous poem ‘Spain’. By this time Auden had become as eminently successful as<br />
a poet that in November, 1937 prestigious magazine of poetry, New Verse brought out a special<br />
2
number on him. This magazine distinguished him “as the first <strong>English</strong> poet for many years who is a<br />
poet all the way round.” 2 Then he went to China along with Isherwood. They went there by way of<br />
the United States and during this trip they decided to return and settle in America. In collaboration<br />
Auden and Isherwood produced their most explicit play On the Frontier. In 1938 he edited The<br />
Oxford Book of Light Verse. In fact, his visit to China, his decision to settle in America, his writing,<br />
On the Frontier, and then his editing A Book of Light Verse in a single year’s time speaks volumes<br />
for his versatile personality. Charles Madge, a college friend wrote about him:<br />
“But there waited for me in the summer morning<br />
Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew”.<br />
Thus, Auden’s contact with a number of leading writers and musicians, theatrical groups<br />
and his frequent visits to foreign countries gave him versatility to earn for him a unique place<br />
among the most successful literary men of the twentieth century.<br />
While living in America Auden got his selected essays printed in The Dyer’s Hand in 1962<br />
and lectures which he delivered at the <strong>University</strong> of Kent in Secondary Worlds in 1968. In the fields<br />
of Music and Opera, Auden sought collaboration in composition of ‘Hymn to St. Cecilia’, with<br />
Brittan and ‘The Rake’s Progress’ with Stravinsky. <strong>English</strong> version of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’,<br />
‘Don Giovanni’, Henze’s opera, ‘Elegy for Young Lovers’, may be included among his variegated<br />
literary works. To cap it all, Davison has remarked about his abundant literary out put that to list<br />
Auden’s multifarious literary works is now a task for a bibliographer, and the breadth of his interest<br />
might be suggested by random choice of a few people he has written about, edited, translated or<br />
reviewed, Skelton, Pope, Rilke, Thurber, Neihbuhr, Freud, Kipling, Kierkegard, Kafka, Betjeman,<br />
Baudelaire, Dante, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Cervantes, Somerset Maugham, Poe, Colette,<br />
Virgil, Shakespeare, Cocteau, Lewis Carroll, Van Gogh, Dag Hammarskjöld, Goethe, etc.<br />
Auden had gone back to live in the United States of America after he was succeeded by<br />
Robert Graves as Professor of poetry at Oxford <strong>University</strong>. He lived there until he was invited by<br />
his own college, Christ Church to live on its campus but he could not live long as he died in Sept.<br />
1973.<br />
Auden and Ishwerwood had strong desire to settle in America and they had decided about<br />
this during their China visit, in accordance with that both of them left England for settlement in<br />
America on January 18, 1939. They acquired American citizenship in 1946. In America, Auden<br />
remained actively and constantly involved in his creative literary and publication work. His<br />
professional work included teaching in Schools and Universities and delivering public lectures. In<br />
the meanwhile, he kept on visiting Europe now and then. He used to spend a part of each year on<br />
the Italian island of Ischia from 1948 onwards. Then he bought a farm house in Kirchstetten, Lower<br />
Austria in 1957 for spring and summer residence.<br />
Auden was awarded a number of prizes and prestigious honours-king’s Gold Medal,<br />
Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, Feltrinelli Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, National Book Award for<br />
a number of excellent achievements in manifold fields. To add to this he was elected to the<br />
American Academy and to a fellowship at Christ Church. In 1956, he was appointed Professor of<br />
poetry at Oxford <strong>University</strong>. He remained in the office until 1961 as a distinguished Professor of<br />
poetry.<br />
In fact, Auden’s social awareness spurred him on to come to grips with the real sociopolitico-economic<br />
conditions of the times. His creative poetic output during the period bears<br />
testimony to his profound concern about the contemporary situation. François Duchene rightly<br />
suggests, “Auden at his best has treated some of the major troubles of his times in ways that<br />
3
measure up to daily lives.” 3 Auden recognised the gravity of the contemporary crisis in its entirety<br />
and made an attempt to project it by raising challenging contemporary issues in his poetry. His<br />
analytical approach to the issues of the ailing society of the times and his efforts to reach definite<br />
conclusions make him a prominent poet among the socially conscious poets of the period. Perhaps<br />
for this reason, Robin Skelton considers him “a leader, an innovator and a representative poet of his<br />
time and generation.” 4<br />
W. H. Auden: Formative Influences<br />
The character and literary temperament of W. H. Auden who established his hegemony by<br />
proclaiming the urgency of collective action and need for active involvement in the immediate<br />
cause, were moulded by a variety of influences-his parents, his home environment, his reading<br />
habits intellectual, literary, emotional and socio-economic-political factors. Rightly does<br />
M.Khrapchenko remark, “The artist’s overall views, formed during a life time of experience in a<br />
particular society and under particular historical circumstances give their qualitative distinction and<br />
shape to his ideas and observations.” 5 Christopher Ishwerwood pointed out that the three factors<br />
responsible for moulding Auden’s character and personality were – his Parentage, both his parents<br />
being in Medical Profession, his home environment provided him with scientific training, scientific<br />
interest and proper schooling and helped him to acquire scientific knowledge, outlook and<br />
technique. His Anglican upbringing which developed his interest in music, his preoccupation with<br />
rituals and his Scandinavian background coupled with emphasis on Icelandic sagas – all these<br />
influenced Auden’s world view to a great extent.<br />
Influence of T. S. Eliot and others<br />
Auden came under T. S. Eliot’s strong influence while he was a student at Oxford. He<br />
considered Eliot worthy of serious consideration to enlighten his poetic journey. He carefully<br />
perused Eliot’s poetry, his critical theories and then developed his ideas and beliefs. He used<br />
allusions, Jargons and private Jokes following Eliot’s practice in this sphere. A German poet Rilke<br />
was also a powerful influence on him.<br />
Skelton’s short laconic verse and the Anglo-Saxons were among other powerful influences<br />
on him. Auden was a voracious reader and whatever he read, he assimilated and thus his reading<br />
habits exerted an unconscious influence on his writing. He read A.E. Houseman, Walter de La Mare<br />
Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost who imperceptibly influenced his personality.<br />
Though in 1941, Auden himself described Dante, Langland and Pope as three major<br />
influences on him yet he appreciated Dryden, Tennyson and Robert Bridges also. The influence of<br />
Hopkins, Robinson, Emile Dickinson on Auden’s mind cannot be underestimated.<br />
In 1929 Auden came under the influence of American Psychologist HomerLane whose<br />
doctrines deeply influenced his mind. Auden’s early poems and The Orators abound in references to<br />
HomerLane’s theories of psychological causes to diseases. Auden was also influenced by John<br />
Layard, HomerLane’s follower, to a reasonable extent.<br />
Impact of Freudian theories<br />
The advent of Freudian psychology added a new dimension to the study of human<br />
behaviour with its emphasis on the unconscious operations of the mind. Freud and his followers had<br />
come out with new knowledge and understanding about sexual attitude and responses. For example,<br />
they showed that repressed sex instincts lead to neurosis and physical ailments like cancer. Richard<br />
Hoggart points out that “Auden’s psychological interest has been consistent: he knows a good deal<br />
about the subject and has read widely and carefully in it. That he sometimes used its jargon rather<br />
4
glibly, and was on the whole a Freudian, does not detract from his seriousness. Freud’s influence on<br />
him was greater than that of any other psychologist, but Auden does not make sustained use of<br />
Freud’s theories. He thinks Freud’s ‘map of mind’ largely correct, and finds the cross-reference<br />
between his own imaginative perceptions and the findings of the psychological scientist, stimulating<br />
and fertile.” 6<br />
The influence of Lawrence and William Blake<br />
Regarding Lawrence’s impact on the young men of the twenties and early thirties, W. H.<br />
Auden remarked that as a thinker Lawrence did influence the young men of the period as for as<br />
questioning the existing society was concerned but his influence was limited to that only. On the<br />
other hand, as has been noticed by critics. “Blake’s influence is greater; he began to interest Auden<br />
at the same time as Lawrence, and his appeal has increased over the years–so much so that in ‘New<br />
year Letter’ Auden, naming the tribunal which shall judge him, puts Blake second only to Dante.”<br />
The influence of Blake on Auden is equivalent to that of Freud. Auden’s The Orators clearly<br />
manifests Blake’s contribution where his impact is reinforced in the marriage of “Heaven and Hell”<br />
and “The Proverbs of Hell”. His attack on feelings of frustration and fear, the call of liberation and<br />
vigour, thrust on emotions – all speak volumes for Blake’s influence. Auden perfectly endorses<br />
Blake’s concept of the will. Bernard Blackstone clearly defines the concept of will and points out<br />
that Blake in his concept of will anticipates the findings of modern psychology. He says “By will<br />
here he means the faculty by which we try to change ourselves according to a pattern prescribed by<br />
the reason, by moral codes and by religious organisations. This attempt must always end in disaster<br />
(even if the victim does not always recognise it as disaster) for the reason has no faculties for<br />
understanding the whole of personality. It is concerned with a very limited portion of the human<br />
totality. Only the understanding, drawing its life from the senses, the instincts, the obscure physical<br />
processes, as well as from the reason and the intuition, is fitted to deal with the whole. So (Will in<br />
Blake’s sense aggravates the split between intuition and reason, presents special problems to the<br />
exceptional man, and helps to create the warped and lonely. On all these points Auden agreed with<br />
Blake.” 7<br />
Influence of Karl Marx<br />
In the existing state of urgency and unavoidable pressures in the British society two<br />
solutions were discernible–a collective resistance to fascism and pacifism. The poets of the thirties<br />
were driven to the left. They found Marxist view of society, art and culture, the most appropriate<br />
framework for a proper understanding of the existing dilemmas. The left wing trend imparted a new<br />
social significance to their poetic vision and sharpened their technique.<br />
Their attitude towards Peace Pledge Union founded by Canon Dick, Peace Ballet<br />
undertaken by League of Nations, Peace News Journal, Peace Marches and Peace Demonstrations–<br />
remained negative. Stretcher’s book The coming struggle for Power 1932, which underlined the<br />
application of Marxist ideas to the history of Britain, strengthened the faith of these poets in the<br />
inherent virtues of the working class and made them adopt a favourable attitude towards the Soviet<br />
Union. Under the same inspiration, they could recognise, with greater clarity, the need for collective<br />
resistance against fascism. Arthur Koestler’s remarks are pertinent in this context “….every period<br />
has its own dominant religion and hope and Marxist socialism has become the hope of the early 20 th<br />
Century” 8 .<br />
Strengthening communism in Russia sparked a revolutionary zeal and awakened the social<br />
consciousness of the poets of the period to shoulder the responsibility of investigating into the<br />
causes of dismal conditions and abrasive realities which engulfed the then British scenario. “The<br />
5
intellectuals were ‘persuaded to the left’ and as economic depression and violence persisted further<br />
to the left. Communism appeared to offer dramatic and radical solutions to dramatic and radical<br />
defects.” 9 Maxwell further suggests, “In Kaleidoscopic decay, the communists represent the<br />
alternative to fascism which both enshrined human values and is enduring enough to be politically<br />
effective” 10 .<br />
For the left wing writers of the thirties the immediate inescapable reality was that capitalism<br />
seemed to be collapsing, as evidenced by slump and mass–unemployment and general misery in the<br />
western democracies, and the triumph of fascism seen in Marxist terms, as the ultimate, most<br />
vicious form of capitalism in Italy and Germany. Soviet Russia claimed to offer the only hope for<br />
humanity, and its claims were accepted unhesitatingly at their face values….” 11 .<br />
Marx as a political economist, a social theorist, a revolutionary zealot influenced him the<br />
least. His Marxism is much more a conception of human nature than a political theory, diagnoses of<br />
social illness, not a partisan programme for action. Auden set the fresh trend by synthesising<br />
contemporary psychology and socialist thought mirroring forth a novel way of poetic expression for<br />
the execution of his social commitment. Rightly does Replogle remark “The period from about<br />
1933-38 can be labelled Auden’s Marxist period, just as the earlier can be labelled Freudian.” 12<br />
Influence of Kierkegaard and Niebuhr<br />
Auden came across Kierkegaard’s works during 1936-39 and his theories left a profound<br />
impact on him. He learnt through his existentialist philosophy not only the philosophical reason for<br />
accepting life but also the basis for its acceptance. According to Kierkegaard human life can be<br />
divided into the two distinct parts-the human and the divine. As for as the human part is concerned<br />
his views are similar to those of Marx and Engles. Justin Replogle remarks “Put simply it is an<br />
empirical philosophy insisting, contrary to empirical evidence, that God exists. That such a belief is<br />
logically contradictory and absurd is precisely Kierkegaard’s point. Life is absurd, precisely<br />
because, though God exists, men, confined to their empirical knowledge, cannot know Him, or even<br />
demonstrate His existence. An unbridgeable gulf separates man from God. By nature limited to<br />
temporal experience, three dimensional perception, empirical knowledge men can never leap across<br />
to the timeless multi-dimensioned existence on the other side. And yet they are commanded to do so<br />
in one sense, without moving an inch they can.” 13<br />
Richard Hoggart remarks, “Auden has always drawn sustenance from a few selected<br />
thinkers though the thinkers change from time to time. Since the Forties two of the most influential<br />
have been the Danish “existentialist” theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and the living<br />
American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In Kierkegaard to take only one instance, he was<br />
particularly interested to consider original anxiety, the basic insecurity of man which reflects his<br />
fallen nature and his possible salvation. Much in Niebuhr’s thought bears on Auden’s interest not in<br />
the mystical, but in the moral dilemmas and social involvements of man living in time and space,<br />
held in the fruitful grip of choice of freedom-with necessity” 14 .<br />
Carlo Izzo’s remarks that “Only in the light of mind like Auden’s which, at the same time,<br />
gives out brightness and is itself enlightened, can today’s society see itself reflected with all the<br />
flaws that may rupture it and find the way to redemption out of the blind alley in which it seems to<br />
have lost itself” 15 .<br />
Influence of Christian theology<br />
Auden’s later poetry reflects the influence of Christian theology. The influences of<br />
Kierkegaard’s philosophy and Christian theology were almost simultaneous on him. He read<br />
6
Kierkegaard in late 1937 or early 1938 and at the same time he started going to the Church. In 1939<br />
he wrote that while ‘a purely religious solution (for human hopes) may be unworkable….. the<br />
search for it is, at least the result of a true perception of social evil” and by 1940, he was using<br />
Kierkegaard’s terminology in his criticism. In 1956 he wrote, “I have come to realise that what is<br />
true in what (Blake, Lawrence, Freud and Marx) say, is implicit in the Christian doctrine of the<br />
nature of man (in that) each of them brought to some particular aspect of life that intensity of<br />
attention which is characteristic of one-sided genius”. Auden’s later work ‘For the Time Being’<br />
mainly emphasises his religious concepts and beliefs. In ‘Nones’, 1951, he celebrated life and its<br />
blessings. His later poems “Harae Canonicae” plead for forgiveness for all sinners and conclude<br />
with a delightful hymn of celebration of life in ‘Lauds’. Auden ultimately finds peace and serenity<br />
in Christian theology as is manifest in the words, “with calm of mind all passions spent” 16 .<br />
Emotional impact<br />
Regarding the emotional impact of the contemporary situation on the sensibility of the<br />
poets, Virginia Woolf points out that in the 1930, young men studying in colleges could not go on<br />
discussing aesthetic emotions and personal relations. They realised that the very tower of art and<br />
amenities of life was founded upon injustice and tyranny and it was wrong for a small class to<br />
possess what other people paid for, wrong to stand upon the gold that their fathers had made from<br />
their bourgeois professions 17 . These poets accordingly felt emotionally disenchanted with the values<br />
of their class and wanted to make a break with the liberal tradition.<br />
W.H. Auden His Age<br />
The most representative poet of his time, W. H. Auden came to grips with the real sociopolitico-economic<br />
conditions of contemporary England. In fact, Auden’s analytical approach to the<br />
contemporary ailing civilisation and his efforts to reach definite conclusions make him a prominent<br />
poet among the socially conscious poets of the thirties. Robin Skelton considers him “a leader, an<br />
innovator and a representative of his time and generation” 18 . Hence, it is imperative to highlight the<br />
social context of the period to understand a poet of such a great stature in proper perspective. As<br />
F.W. Bateson has aptly remarked in <strong>English</strong> Poetry A critical Introduction, “If we are to discover<br />
the qualities that make a poem good rather than merely pleasurable, we must read it in its original<br />
social context and relate the meaning of the poem to the social forces operative at the time of its<br />
composition…. in the interplay of past and present meanings, a more permanent critical verdict may<br />
eventually be attainable” 19 .<br />
A glimpse back at the historical vista reveals the urgency of looking at the things in a fresh<br />
way and relating the poetry of the period to the social and political happenings of the then Britain.<br />
So a comprehensive survey of the social, political and economic fronts is a prerequisite to establish<br />
a milieu which evoked a specific kind of response from the poets of the period. “A social order as<br />
such is necessarily the affirmation of certain values. In the social context, therefore, the values<br />
implied in the poem become explicit and its relative goodness and badness declares itself” 20 .<br />
The Great War (1914) had already created a haunting sense of desolation in the poets of the<br />
twenties. They felt that everything was done for and no real solutions were possible. As D.E.S.<br />
Maxwell points out “materially and spiritually the Great War had proved a ruinous adventure.<br />
Inherited modes of conduct and beliefs had lost their validity. But it seemed to the poets of the<br />
twenties that there was nothing to replace the fragmented traditions” 21 . The pressure of the situation<br />
was further aggravated in the nineteen thirties.<br />
When the decade opened Britain was under the vicious spell of the Wall Street Crash of<br />
1929 which brought in its wake the Great World Depression and which further led to a grave<br />
7
economic crisis and wide spread misery J.M.Keynes, the renowned British economist highlighted<br />
the evidently disastrous consequences of the peace treaty for Britain in his book Economic<br />
Consequences of the Peace. This economic collapse had resulted in rampant unemployment and<br />
endemic poverty with three quarter million people unemployed in England and about seven<br />
million people living on dole, with gaping hungry mouths. Stephen spender could capture the<br />
grimness of the economic crisis in the lines:<br />
They lounge at corners of the street<br />
And greet friends with a shrug of shoulder,<br />
And turn their empty pockets out,<br />
The cynical gestures of the poor 22 .<br />
It was a period of crisis, dismay and as Auden has described it, of smokeless chimneys,<br />
damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals” Writing about this period Stephen Spender<br />
remarks in his book Background to the Thirties The Thirties and After, “This was a decade in which<br />
many middle-class assumptions in democratic Europe and America seemed shattered.<br />
Unemployment exerted its scathing attack on down-trodden and hunger marches were a matter of<br />
routine. Capitalist system seemed on the verge of complete break down as it could neither stop<br />
starvation nor give employment to the poverty stricken but at the same time supported the cultivated<br />
leisured class whose aesthetic values were unconnected with politics and social conditions in such<br />
circumstances many young writers came to feel that this type of art involved a kind of refusal to<br />
recognise those conditions which emerged out of the political and social systems” 23 .<br />
Auden along with Stephen spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNiece popularly known<br />
as “The Auden Group” promptly responded to the major developments of the period and made a<br />
sincere attempt to grapple with the contemporary issues from a fresh angle. G.S. Fraser suggests<br />
that these poets saw around them a world which offered a sense of safety which was treacherously<br />
false. They turned away from that apparent safety to images of danger courageously faced and<br />
visualised actions which were imbued with a consciously shared human purpose. They found it<br />
impossible to remain passive when confronted by an England slugged by the slump, full of the<br />
unemployed leaning against the walls, reading papers with delicate cautious puffs, a single cigarette.<br />
They wanted to make men more alive in the tensions and dangers of the time and encourage them to<br />
see the possible power and beauty of the world in their time also” 24 .<br />
The socio- cultural milieu also presented a bleak picture. The rise of a technology based<br />
culture and the positivistic rationalism on which its edifice was based led to a questioning of<br />
accepted social beliefs, conventions and traditions. In this context R.A. Scott-James remarks, “The<br />
20 th century has, for its characteristic, to put everything, in every sphere of life, to the question and<br />
secondly, in the light of this scepticism, to reform, to reconstruct to accept the new age as new<br />
and attempt to mould it by conscious, purposeful effort” 25 . Instead of generating confidence in<br />
man’s capacity to build up, through his reason, a new value system in accordance with the needs of<br />
the times, the growth of science and technology merely produced in the middle classes, a levity and<br />
cynicism which discarded all values as fake and irrational. Consequently, confusion and uncertainty,<br />
prevailed in every sphere and man stood completely dazed.<br />
The advent of Freudian psychology added a new dimension to the study of human<br />
behaviour with its emphasis on the unconscious operations of the mind. Freud and his followers had<br />
come out with new knowledge and understanding about sexual attitudes and responses, for example,<br />
they showed that repressed sex instincts lead to neurosis and physical ailments like cancer. His<br />
theory of Oedipus complex seriously affected the family relationships. This also served, at that<br />
juncture, merely to aggravate the tendency towards deep cynicism. As a result of Freudian theories<br />
8
flippant legitimisation of distortions and perversions in the matters of sex became a fashion. Man–<br />
Woman relationships grew mechanical and devoid of any genuine emotional richness. Even in a<br />
period of economic crisis, emancipation of women was confused with frivolity and escapist<br />
entertainment.<br />
Post First World War period may also be treated as an era of revolt against authority.<br />
Scepticism on both fronts-political and religious, disillusionment and cynicism were the order of the<br />
day. It was an anti-heroic period when interrogating finger was raised against action and success.<br />
Old authoritarian patterns of conduct were disintegrating but in the absence of their replacement by<br />
more rational norms, whole armies of uprooted and alienated young men and women emerged on<br />
the scene and they did not know what to do with themselves. They :<br />
……. wait inertly in bar<br />
In netted chicken farms, a light house,<br />
Standing on these impoverished constricting acres,<br />
The ladies and gentle men apart 26<br />
Accepted patterns of social relationships collapsed and an atmosphere of uncertainty and<br />
disdainful rejection of positives prevailed. The Socio- economic disparities became so large that<br />
they had created a social segregation resulting in injustice, inequality and exploitation of the underprivileged<br />
at the hands of privileged ones. Even the educational institutions provided strong<br />
evidence of discrimination which created a big hiatus in human relationships<br />
On our cream walls donations, Shakespeare’ head<br />
Cloudless at dawn, civilised dome riding all cities<br />
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley open handed map<br />
Awarding the world its world, And yet for these<br />
Children, these windows not this world, are world<br />
Where all their future is painted with a fog<br />
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky<br />
Far from rivers capes and stars onwards 27 .<br />
Thus, the social and emotional chaos which invaded the ruling middle-class had to be<br />
exposed. The smart elites who were shallow beneath their brilliant façade had to be given a shock<br />
treatment.<br />
On the political front, the liberal government proved inefficient to meet the existing<br />
challenges. On the international plane, the Soviet Union was confronted with fascist Italy and<br />
resurgent Nazi Germany and in 1936 ideological conflict was to become a real battle-ground in<br />
Spain. Then as if to accentuate the crisis, the Spanish Civil War broke out. “The Spanish civil war<br />
which broke out in 1936, not only cost Spain a million dead but appealed to poets all over the world<br />
as a test of western civilization in its most mature and human form. So long as the poets wrote about<br />
their own experience in the civil war all was well, for they could use their advanced technique to<br />
give an exact form to their new experience. But some of them felt called to do more than this, to<br />
speak for their own country in its agony, to appeal to large audiences and encourage their fellows in<br />
their heroic efforts” 28 . The mounting pressure of fascism on the international plane also posed a<br />
standing threat to the very existence of liberal democracy. On top of all this, there was a growing<br />
sense of anxiety about the impending threat of another world war. In this context, Samuel Hynes<br />
remarks, “By 1936 war was a part of ordinary consciousness. It thrust itself into the major literary<br />
works of the year…And as the threat became clearer and more vividly documented, the efforts to<br />
find way to prevent it became more strenuous and more partisan” 29 . On the international plane, the<br />
9
situation was worse. In March 1939 Hitler occupied Rhineland again; in May 1939, the Italians<br />
captured the capital of Abyssinia, Japan waged an undeclared war on China in July 1937, then<br />
Hitler troops captured Vienna in March 1938 and Germany completed the conquest of<br />
Czechoslovakia between Autumn, 1938 and March 1939. Then the negotiations at Munich by<br />
Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain and finally in Sept. 1939, the Second World War started with all<br />
its fury.<br />
A definite fall was registered in the literary standards of the time. Though the rate of<br />
Literacy was rising, visible decline in the quality of literature was discernible. Cheap books,<br />
magazines, papers, etc. were pouring out in a large number. The cultural taste of the people in song,<br />
dance and rustic craft, etc. no longer existed.<br />
The Cinema, the Radio, the Literature projected criminal tendencies and love stories were<br />
made purposely for commercial purposes. Vulgarity, cruelty and crudity dominated the scene. There<br />
seemed absolute absence of finer and subtle emotional responses in human relationships. Moreover,<br />
the media nourished the sensibilities of the people with day-dreaming and their grasp on reality was<br />
loosening. All this adversely affected the art and literature of the times.<br />
This socio-cultural-economic, political and literary milieu impelled the poets of the period<br />
to visualise an alternative social set-up where healthy human relationships, free from the stifling<br />
distortions of the existing system, could become possible. The major developments of the period<br />
influenced the literary sensibilities of the prominent poets of the period and contributed to the<br />
articulation of a response from them which carried within itself an acute awareness of sociocultural-economic,<br />
political and literary responsibilities.<br />
The impact of these developments can be seen directly or indirectly in the literary works of<br />
the poets of the period. Samuel Hynes finds “Something new in their determination to act, even<br />
among negations, and the hope for poetry of new beliefs” 30 . There was, a clear rejection, at this<br />
juncture, of the earlier Ivory Tower approach. “The peculiarity of the 1930s was, as spender<br />
observes, not that the subject of a civilization in decline had been taken up but that the hope of<br />
saving or transforming the society had now arisen and it was combined with a firm determination to<br />
with stand social oppression and tyrannies” 31 .<br />
The poets of the thirties not only attacked the modernists for adopting a cynically bitter<br />
attitude towards the challenges posed by the contemporary society, they also championed collective<br />
socio-political action as a remedy for the grave problems created by the existing situation.<br />
Underlining the importance of active involvement in the social issues of the times in the case of<br />
these poets, C.M.Bowra remarks, “…in the twentieth Century crowded as it is with international<br />
and civil wars, social revolutions and awakening continents, Vigorous and comprehensive<br />
reappraisals of what man owes to himself became inevitable and the poets in such a situation could<br />
hardly be expected to keep clear of politics or remain indifferent to public affairs” 32 .<br />
It is not surprising that in such objective circumstances Rex Warner, a poet of the thirties,<br />
should sing songs of revolution:<br />
Now you can join us, now all together sing all power<br />
Not tomorrow but now in this hour,<br />
All power<br />
To lovers of life, to workers, to the hammer,<br />
Come then companion, this is the spring of blood,<br />
Heart’s hey-day, movement of masses,<br />
Beginning of good 33<br />
10
Chapter-II<br />
W. H. AUDEN: THEMES AND WORKS<br />
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) emerges as the most representative poet on the British Literary<br />
scenario. He recognised the gravity of the contemporary crisis in its entire entirety and proclaimed<br />
the urgency of direct political and collective intervention. He felt that the privileged elements who<br />
presided over the existing system not only created socio-political and economic problems for the<br />
oppressed humanity through their narrow and short-sighted view but also practically mutilated their<br />
own humanity in the process. Auden tried to investigate into the specific causes of the prevalent<br />
chaotic situation with scientific precision and objectivity and raised challenging issues in his poetry.<br />
Richard Hoggart in his, ‘Introduction to Auden’ remarks, “He has produced a body of verse which<br />
commands our respect and admiration in a number of ways; he has been the brilliant and sometimes<br />
profoundly evocative explorer of dilemmas within the human will; in his vividly epigrammatic,<br />
conversational and alert verse he held a mirror to a complex decade” 1 .<br />
In fact, Auden’s versatility and prolificacy as a poet is par-excellent. His actively<br />
productive literary span extends over a period of thirty five years. During this span, as Donald<br />
Davies puts it “….no other poet writing in <strong>English</strong> today, has attempted as much as Auden; just as<br />
no other poet of his generation can place beside his body of work so exciting for its peculiar insight,<br />
its range of reference, and its skill in use of language and rhythm. In the variety of subjects and<br />
manners he has used successfully, Auden has to be found a parallel outside contemporary poetry<br />
altogether-in the painter Picasso” 2 . Undoubtedly, Auden’s growth as a poet has been constant. A<br />
bird eye view of his works will afford the reader a glimpse into the vast variety of his works and his<br />
extraordinary capacity to grow in accordance with the times. His creative period may broadly be<br />
divided into two phases-the <strong>English</strong> phase (1928-40) and the American phase (1941-69).<br />
The <strong>English</strong> Phase: The Thirties Decade<br />
W. H. Auden responded to the major problems of his time and made efforts to reach<br />
definite conclusions, which enabled him to establish his hegemony over the socially-committed<br />
group of poets, who shared his attitudes and perceptions during the thirties. Jeremy Robson remarks<br />
in his article ‘Auden’s Longer Poems’, “Leavis apart the majority of the critics would seem to grant<br />
Auden his just place as the most accomplished and versatile of living poets and one who has been,<br />
and who remains, exceptionally influential. Clearly he dominated the generation of the 1930s with a<br />
power and range that few could approach” 3 .<br />
In terms of perspective and sensibility, W. H. Auden belonged to a section of radicalised<br />
middle-class intellectuals, who broke away from the ruling class to align themselves with the<br />
proletarians in the hope of bringing about radical changes in the existing system. He was for the<br />
capitalism only to the extent it provided an extended scope and sanction for individual freedom and<br />
initiative. He was rather pained by the inequalities it created for a large mass of people. The leftwing<br />
ideology present in his poetry is a genuine manifestation of his radical concern for reform but<br />
his commitment to the individual freedom always finds expression in a form which is possible only<br />
under the capitalist system. This contradictory response ultimately results in his being a radical<br />
reformer and not a revolutionary transformer of the existing system.<br />
In fact, Auden’s radicalism was an inherent attribute of his literary sensibility and his<br />
poems during the thirties reflect his acute awareness of the contemporary crisis. Barbara Everett’s<br />
comments regarding existing scenario are quite pertinent, “ It is one of high ground, from which the<br />
hawk…or the helmeted airmen survey, in isolation a world spread out below them : valleys<br />
11
containing pockets of decaying existence, industries failed or failing, villages in miscommunication<br />
from one another, individuals afraid and innocent. The lonely hillsides and the huddled and troubled<br />
communities between their means of production and of communication run down, themselves<br />
reduced to a hostile separation offer also an image of the failed and lonely individual, attempting<br />
to break through his silence by momentary and intense, though sterile, relationships. Every effort<br />
towards unity the groups of people to cohere into a society, the individuals to meet in love, the<br />
mind to hold together in peace-is frustrated” 4 .<br />
The manner in which Auden has handled the vital socio-political and economic issues of the<br />
times speaks volumes for his positive and pragmatic approach. Richard Hoggart strongly<br />
appreciates Auden’s “strong sense of social responsibility and great purposiveness” 5 . In fact,<br />
Auden’s aim during the whole of this period was concentrated on the establishment of qualitatively<br />
better social order congenial enough for the healthy and wholesome development of the individuals<br />
against the contemporary system, which bred distortions and perversions.<br />
In the early phase, his survey of the socio-economic decay of the contemporary society<br />
enabled Auden to provide an insight into the havocs of the oppressive working of the industrial<br />
civilization and the resultant adverse impact on the individual psyche but he shrinks from relating<br />
this malaise to the working of the inherent logic of the system. However, he retains confidence and<br />
optimism in man’s potentialities to overcome the crisis through a collective assertion of moral<br />
resistance. He considers it a high time to:<br />
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response,<br />
And gradually correct the coward’s stance.<br />
Cover in time with beams-those in retreat 6 .<br />
In the active social phase, Auden envisages that without substantial changes in the material<br />
conditions, change of heart is a far off feasibility. He, therefore, emphasises the urgency of<br />
undertaking a concrete programme of direct dynamic action from inner change to the change in<br />
the environment. However, even in this militant phase Auden’s typical liberal concern for the<br />
individual withholds him from total revolution in the system. Towards the climax of the decade, he<br />
recedes back to his private self anxious once again to realise individual concerns through social<br />
vision.<br />
The sharply visible shifts in emphasis reflected in preponderance of psycho-analysis in<br />
early poems, radicalism in the poems of the middle phase and dignified and unillusioned stoicism of<br />
the final phase are in a large part only surface shifts. In fact, Auden’s social perspective and social<br />
engagements remain consistent throughout the decade.<br />
In the early <strong>English</strong> phase (1930-33) Auden published The Orators and the Poems, 1930.<br />
The Orators, though a work of great merit, is not easy to comprehend. In spite of a number of<br />
obscurities and immaturities, it emerges as a successful and brilliant literary piece. It consists of five<br />
sections-‘The Initiate’ which contains ‘an argument’, a Statement and ‘Letter to wound’. ‘Journal of<br />
an Airman’ is another section. Then ‘Six Odes’ consists of a variety of poems. At the end there is an<br />
epilogue. The orators of one kind are representatives of a wasteful and treacherous demagogy. The<br />
others represent the restrictive and frustrating influences existing with the mind of a single<br />
individual. The book is an attempt to break free from- the voices and attitude, within and without a<br />
man, which bar the way in his quest for freedom, love and life. The Orators expresses Auden’s<br />
feeling as a political reformer, a middle-class intellectual trying to usher in the Marxist revolution<br />
and eliminate the bourgeois class of which he himself is a member.<br />
12
Auden introduced into the field of poetry a small volume of his poems in 1928. Stephen<br />
Spender, who owned a private press, printed privately this volume by bringing out only forty five<br />
copies. Later, Auden revised this volume and during the process eleven poems were rejected and<br />
twenty one new poems were added to the volume. A fresh collection of Auden’s poems was<br />
published in 1930. Richard Hoggart observes while describing his early verse, “It is the verse of a<br />
young man prepared to experiment widely with forms and manners of expression, but particularly<br />
suspicious of lustiness, and anxious to evolve a hard cerebral style” 7 . So this volume was further<br />
revised and many additions were made and the second edition of the poems came into being in<br />
1933. This volume, which was full of vigour and freshness, enhanced Auden’s status as one of the<br />
most remarkable poets of the period.<br />
In the middle phase (1933-39) “Auden’s reputation”, says Barbara Everett, “almost<br />
certainly rests on the work he produced during 1933-40. The earlier work-the 1930 poems, and The<br />
Orators has an original vitality and powerful immediacy never quite present afterwards, and the<br />
volumes published since 1940 have a greater suavity and intellectual maturity; but any one wising to<br />
recommend Auden at his most easy, fertile and interesting, would have little hesitation in turning to<br />
the work of the middle and late nineteen-thirties” 8 . The main works of this period are:<br />
1. Two volumes of lyric poetry-Look stranger, And another Time.<br />
2. Four Plays-The Dance of Death, The Dog beneath the Skin, The Ascent of 6 and On the<br />
Frontiers.<br />
3. Two Travel Books-Letters from Iceland and Journey to a War.<br />
Since here we are concerned with Auden: his themes and works as a poet, so perusal of two<br />
volumes of his lyrical poetry themes raised there in becomes imperative.<br />
1. Look Stranger, 1936<br />
This volume consists of 32 poems more successful and popular than any other of his<br />
books contains. Auden wrote these poems when the Marxist influence on him was at its height. The<br />
title poem presents the picture of England in turmoil. The rest of the poems also deal with the<br />
contemporary crisis. Auden’s main concern, here, is to trace all the evils present in society and in<br />
individual to the absence of love. He therefore, suggests that we should learn to love and banish<br />
hatred from our minds if we want the relations of society and the individual to come out of the<br />
morass in which they are.<br />
2. Another Time, 1940<br />
It has three sections : (a) People and Places, (b) Lighter Poems which include ballads,<br />
cabaret songs, etc. (c) Occasional poems which include elegies on W.B.Yeats, Sigmund Freud<br />
and Toller, ‘Spain 1937’, ‘September 1, 1939’ and ‘Epithalamion’.<br />
“Another Time marks the transition from the early Auden to the later Auden and<br />
clearly indicates the change in his moral attitude. It gives us a foretaste of the manner Auden is<br />
going to adopt both in his themes and technique. Besides, it has some distinctive qualities too as it<br />
contains some of his most discursive and reflective poetry” 9.<br />
These were his major works during his <strong>English</strong> Phase. Unlike his predecessors, W. H.<br />
Auden does not merely present the chaotic situation and watch the decay passively; he raises<br />
multifarious issues of vital social significance.<br />
Auden exposes the social values of the ruling middle class their pretensions their ethical<br />
decline and their moral turpitude. In ‘Consider this and in our time’ (1930), Auden unveils the<br />
hypocrisy and emotional bankruptcy of the sick and decaying bourgeois society. The poem<br />
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eveals the ugly impact of the emotional hollowness present in the urban middle-class people. In<br />
fact, their self-centred and mistrustful attitude has produced in the middle-class a sense of insecurity<br />
and lack of confidence. Auden tries to diagnose the social malady by identifying its symptoms in the<br />
wide spread neurosis and death wish prevalent among the members of the middle-class. He is<br />
indignant at their deliberate and conscious acceptance of their diseased condition and predicts<br />
extinction for the representative bourgeois elements:<br />
The game is up for you and for the others,<br />
Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns<br />
Of College Quad or Cathedral close,<br />
Who are born nurses, who live in shorts?<br />
Sleeping with people and playing fives<br />
Seekers after happiness……..<br />
(TEA, P.47.)<br />
Here, Auden attempts to bring about some improvement in the total climate by shattering<br />
the complacency of those who are victimised by the system and yet are unknowingly co-opted into<br />
it.<br />
Again ‘Its farewell to the drawing room’s civilised cry’ (Jan.1931) renders an ironic<br />
exposure to the moral degeneration of the members of the ruling middle-class, who spend their<br />
lives in:<br />
The buying and selling, the eating and drinking,<br />
The disloyal machines and irreverent thinking,<br />
The lovely dullards again and again<br />
Inspiring their bitter ambitious men<br />
(TEA, P.209.)<br />
s<br />
Auden highlights the gap between their preaching and the practice in the following lines:<br />
The behaving of man is a world of horror,<br />
A sedentary Sodom and slick Gomorrah.<br />
(TEA, P. 208. )<br />
Auden brings out the intensity of the approaching disaster by effectively unmasking the<br />
inconsistencies of an attitude of surrender or the easy escape into sterile utopias of hedonism. In<br />
‘Epilogue’ (October,1931) of The Orators, Auden protests against the typical petty-bourgeois<br />
middle-class intellectual’s fearful attitude to change.<br />
He criticises the selfish attitude of the privileged classes in their chosen position, cut off<br />
from the world of grief, hunger and fear in his poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’ (June, 1933). He<br />
ridicules their false sense of delight founded on wilful ignorance:<br />
And, gentle, do not care to know,<br />
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,<br />
What violence is done?<br />
Nor ask what doubtful act allows,<br />
Our freedom in this <strong>English</strong> house,<br />
Our picnics in the Sun.<br />
(TEA, P.137.)<br />
The poem underlines Auden’s faith in the inevitability of a social environment which does<br />
not breed apathy and timid self-centeredness.<br />
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In his poem ‘Here on the cropped grass’ (1933), Auden seems to suggest that cultivation of<br />
private life indirectly implies evasion of public responsibility:<br />
The presses of idleness issued more despair<br />
And it was honoured,<br />
Gross hunger took on more hands every month,<br />
Erecting here and every where his vast<br />
Unnecessary workshops,<br />
Europe grew anxious about her health,<br />
Combines tottered, credits froze,<br />
And business shivered in a banker’s winter<br />
While we were kissing.<br />
(TEA, P.142.)<br />
A sense of disenchantment with his own class, its privileges and the concepts of freedom<br />
and happiness, introduces a new socially vital theme in Auden’s poem the issue of alienation<br />
arising from the mechanical nature of human relationships. In ‘No change of place’ Auden builds up<br />
this theme representing it through the failure of socio-economic system and the resultant void<br />
created in human life. He suggests confrontation of desolation with a strong sense of individual<br />
responsibility. In ‘Prologue’ (1932) Auden refers to the symptoms of alienation in emotionally<br />
bankrupt heirs of decadent middle-class society. They:<br />
….inertly wait<br />
In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse<br />
Standing on these impoverished constricting acres,<br />
The Ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone……<br />
(TEA, P.119.)<br />
The poet suggests that environmental change through the unifying force of love might bring<br />
about adjustments in social institutions and enable people to shed their sickening isolation. In ‘May<br />
with its light behaving’ (1934) the poet emphasises the need to move beyond possessive love to an<br />
emotional awakening for public contact, a larger relationship to overcome a sense of isolation.<br />
In ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’ (1930), the poet advocates a higher kind<br />
of love far above.<br />
……..dreams of home,<br />
Waving from window, spread of welcome,<br />
Kissing of wife under single sheet; ……….<br />
(TEA, P.55.)<br />
Still more, in ‘That night when joy began’ (Nov.1931), even in private moment of the<br />
lovers’ union, Auden mentions about “morning’s levelled gun” and “tress-passers’ reproach” (TEA,<br />
P.113.).<br />
Though he affords us glimpses into love as a cure for social insecurity and alienation, a total<br />
oblivion into illusory love is definitely missing. Auden condemns self-regarding love and illusory<br />
escapes into romantic dreams.<br />
In his poem ‘The Chimneys are Smoking’ (April, 1932), Auden seeks the fulfilment of<br />
public vision through private means by presenting the individual struggle of the lovers as a struggle<br />
of life against the malignant disintegrating forces. In ‘O what is that sound’ (Oct.1932), Auden<br />
15
uilds the theme of social commitment by placing private love vis-à-vis situational urgency and<br />
making the lover finally respond to the call of duty. Auden’s condemnation of the self regarding<br />
love and the illusory escapes into romantic dreams comes out strongly in ‘Easily, my dear, you<br />
move, easily your head’ (Nov.1934) and ‘August for the people and their favourite islands’<br />
(Aug.1935).<br />
Auden’s realisation of the insufficiency of individualistic love to cope with the broader<br />
issue demanding urgent action and finally his desire to merge individual into social demonstrates his<br />
strong urge to find radical solutions to radical issues.<br />
Stephen Spender suggests, “Love is the cure for individual and for society yet the<br />
inadequacy of such an abstract ideal must have dissatisfied Auden making him seek the workings<br />
out of the task of love with in the social movement of his time” 10 . Hence, Auden takes up the issues<br />
of exploitation, injustice and inequality and strongly feels that these are directly related to the<br />
failure of the capitalist system. His intellectual sensibility makes him feel that middle-class<br />
intellectuals can no longer afford to be apathetic to the prevailing crisis. He exhorts them in ‘Get<br />
there, if you can’.<br />
Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town,<br />
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down<br />
(TEA, P.49.)<br />
There is a definite urge for action in the concluding lines:<br />
If we really want to live we’d better start at once to try,<br />
If we don’t it does not matter, But we’d better start to die.<br />
(TEA, P.49.)<br />
Although Auden’s approach shows all the trappings of his liberal humanism his militant<br />
stand does add to the radical content in the poem.<br />
Again, Auden raises the issue of economic insecurity and exploitation of workers in the<br />
capitalist system in his poem, ‘Brothers who when the Sires roar’ and expresses his solidarity with<br />
the proletariat in common fears and assures them that if they lend their support they will make this<br />
system “tumble down” (TEA, P.121).<br />
The tone might give the impression that Auden has finally chosen the path of total<br />
revolution but being a radicalised middle-class intellectual, he has his limitations. He can only<br />
imaginatively align himself with the working class struggle and end up trying to improve their lot<br />
within the framework of the existing system because of his bourgeois sensibility, which at times<br />
might make Auden look like a compromised accomplice of the system which he seeks to denounce.<br />
Nevertheless, his efforts to make the existing system shorn of its ills, his championing the interests<br />
of the proletariat through distributive justice and the generous acceptance of common man are<br />
definitely positive.<br />
Auden raises the issue of inequality and injustice in another poem entitled, ‘O for the<br />
doors to be open’ (1935), where he depicts a sick society wrought with distinctions of the rich and<br />
the poor. In ‘Its farewell to the drawing-rooms civilized cry’ (June 1937) his outcry for providing<br />
justice to the exploited and down trodden evidences not only his acceptance of the identity of the<br />
common men but also his genuine concern for their lot. But here also his middle-class sensibility<br />
interferes with his total identification with the interests of the workers “Hundreds of trees in the<br />
wood are Unsound; I am the axe that must cut them down to the ground”, (TEA, P.208.). Thurley<br />
remarks, “Auden’s best political poetry, though informed with genuine sympathy for the victims of<br />
16
capitalism, stems essentially from an astute awareness of his own real position in class war and of<br />
what things he most cherished in life” 11 . Though, Auden’s assurances may not be vital enough, still<br />
his humanistic approach supplemented by a radical imparts revolutionary fervour to the socially<br />
active phase of his poetry.<br />
The radical content of Auden’s social vision gets further strength from his treatment of the<br />
challenges posed by war. In ‘It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilized cry’ (1937) Auden is<br />
deeply struck by a sense of urgency to initiate immediate action. He feels that skirting the deep<br />
crisis which has loomed large over the socio-political horizon by indulging in polite nothings may<br />
become suicidal. The following line evidently suggests this: “Now matters are settled with gas and<br />
with bomb”. (TEA, P.208.). In “Spain” Auden raises the vital issue of future prospects of man<br />
while acknowledging the great scientific, religious, philosophic and artistic achievements of<br />
yesterday and visualising a tomorrow of more wonders, Auden keeps an emphatic focus on the<br />
necessity of struggle today to outlive the hostile forces and establish a just city for the betterment of<br />
individuals. Auden strongly feels the necessity of dynamic force of movement as he perceives that<br />
“fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive” (TEA, P.212.). A.T.Tolley discerns Marxist<br />
viewpoint in Auden’s statement in the poem that men are made by what they do and are not passive<br />
victims of life force 12 . He illustrates this in the following lines from Auden’s poem itself:<br />
Oh no, I am not the mover…..,<br />
I am your choice, your decision, yet I am Spain.<br />
(TEA, P.211.)<br />
Auden views the political situation as the clearest manifestation of modern malaise Ronald.<br />
Mason rightly appreciates ‘Spain’ as emphatic and eloquent expression of the European seriousness<br />
ever since the beginning of the thirties. He suggests that Auden’s ‘Spain’ is a revelation of his<br />
farsightedness” 13 . It is important to point out that in Spanish Civil War Auden favours active<br />
collective action against fascist tendencies and gives a poetic transcription to anti-fascist feelings in<br />
this poem.<br />
‘September 1, 1939’, though, deals with topical issues of the second world war but Auden’s<br />
scepticism about the success of any radical measure to change the society also comes to fore. There<br />
is a growing feeling about thirties decade being “a low dishonest decade” (TEA, P.245.).<br />
M.L.Rosenthal’s remarks seem quite pertinent when he suggests that “in this poem as in others<br />
written in the same period, Auden was still political, but like many others of his literary generation,<br />
had turned away from the activistic idealism that marked his more whole heartedly Marxian<br />
writing” 14 . Investigating into the causes that led to war Auden concludes that Hitler’s self-love<br />
resulted in Fascism and his fascist tendencies were responsible for the contemporary eventuality. He<br />
provides Freudian psycho-analysis for Hitler’s behaviour and attributes all crimes to the individual<br />
wish. War, he concludes, is the outcome of egotistical love:<br />
For the error bred in the bone<br />
Of each woman and each man<br />
Craves what it cannot have,<br />
Not universal love.<br />
But to be loved alone<br />
(TEA, P.246.)<br />
A person who earlier held rational and scientific view of life seems to betray a conservative<br />
outlook in holding out abstract theories regarding internal human revengeful feelings as cause of<br />
war. He gives humanistic solutions to the crisis. He who earlier gave a call for direct social action<br />
with “trumpet and anger and drum” (TEA, P.209.), has now become conscious of “Faces along the<br />
17
ar” (TEA, P.246.) and is desperately seeking to project an affirming flame. The poem, in fact,<br />
marks the later phase in Auden’s poetic output during the thirties decade when his enthusiasm was<br />
gradually receding and a change of attitude was taking place.<br />
Auden’s ruminations over the causes may appear sad and his conclusions individualistic,<br />
yet his concern with the exploited individuals and his emphasis on their awakening, his<br />
condemnation of imperialism ironically exposing America’s apparent neutrality in the Second<br />
World War crisis are indications of his radicalism.<br />
In ‘Musee Des Beux Arts’ ( Dec., 1938.), Auden’s condemnation of human apathy to<br />
individual suffering implies an ironic attack on the self-centredness of people in general. The<br />
poem, indirectly, reflects his deep concern for the anguish of the lonely suffering individuals also.<br />
The poem, thus, shows Auden’s sliding perceptively into an inwardly inclined phase. Even in ‘The<br />
Unknown Citizen’ he decries a system which curtails the freedom and happiness of the individuals<br />
and thus, raises the issue of individual freedom and identity. He ironically suggests that the<br />
success and identity of the unknown citizen are defined by his conformity to the rigid standards of<br />
the mechanisation of an individual by economic, commercial and even ideological institutions<br />
which exploit him to their suitability. The poem shows Auden’s sharp critique of the<br />
contemporary ethos and his liberal concern for the freedom and happiness of the individuals.<br />
In his two significant poems ‘Miss Gee and ‘Victor’ Auden has raised his voice against<br />
another form of social malaise, which is responsible for distorted emotional responses of the<br />
individuals i.e. the authoritarian and over-protective attitude of the parents towards their<br />
children. Auden holds over-religious puritanical training responsible for creating all kinds of<br />
inhibitions and resulting ultimately in morbid mental conditions.<br />
‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’ (1939) Auden underlines that art should play a constructive role<br />
by generating love and other human values required for the establishment of a well ordered society<br />
which he considers as necessary pre-requisite for the healthy development of the individual :<br />
Make a vineyard of the curse,<br />
Sing of human unsuccess<br />
In a rapture of distress;<br />
In the deserts of the heart<br />
Let the healing fountain start.<br />
(TEA, P.243.)<br />
The analysis of the representative poems of Auden spanning the thirties decade, thus shows<br />
that Auden promptly responded to the contemporary socio-political and economic situation and<br />
offered a sharp critique of the vital issues of the times. Towards the end of the decade Auden’s<br />
social attitudes grew inwardly inclined and the dominant radical thrust was subdued. His radical<br />
liberal perspective restrained him from going beyond the frontiers to overhaul and reconstruct the<br />
existing society. The predominance of the liberal concerns in the later phase of this decade of<br />
Auden’s socially productive literary period may subdue the overall social impact of the poems to<br />
some extent but the urgency of social vision for healthy development of individuals remains intact<br />
throughout Auden himself remarks “Individual in vocuo is an intellectual obstruction. The<br />
individual is the product of social life” 15 .<br />
John T.Wright’s comments seem very relevant here. “Auden sees the reality in sudden<br />
shifting perspectives and presents a general truth or Marx’s truth but other truths as well and<br />
especially truths that relate one sphere in which we live to others the public to personal, the<br />
interior to the cosmic and social” 16 . Auden’s perspective for building up a just society through<br />
18
liberal humanistic means remains constant in his poetry. His poems show that all his efforts were<br />
directed towards bringing about changes in the existing set up, extension of human personality by<br />
promoting human values of love, truth and justice challenges of life and optimistic confrontation<br />
with the challenges of life the values that could give man his due place in society so that both<br />
individual and society may struggle for a meaningful existence.<br />
W.H. Auden: The American Phase-The First Decade, 1940-50<br />
On January 18, 1939, Auden migrated to America and settled down in New York. His<br />
sudden decision shocked and dismayed the contemporary British poets and critics and various<br />
interpretations were made. It was opined that Auden got disillusioned with the existing conditions in<br />
the then Britain and felt the need to stay away from England to channelise his artistic talent in a new<br />
direction.<br />
The earlier <strong>English</strong> Auden believed in a ‘Good State’ and the American Auden showed<br />
explicit faith in the ‘City of God’. Earlier he was seeking to establish a good democratic state. In<br />
America his orientation was towards establishment of a just city. Being the most representative city,<br />
as far as culture and civilisation are concerned, New York was the most appropriate place for Auden<br />
as he himself puts it in one of his poems:<br />
More even than in Europe<br />
The choice of patterns is made clear<br />
Which the machine imposes, what<br />
Is possible and what is not,<br />
To what conditions we must bow<br />
In building the just city now<br />
A faith in Christian theology is predominant in all the writings of Auden’s American phase.<br />
This development, though, appears sudden after his <strong>English</strong> phase was, in fact, a continuation of the<br />
beliefs and ideals imperceptibly cherished by him even in his early phase of life. A perusal of his<br />
early poems reveals prayers, invocations, change of heart and humanistic solutions like love and<br />
sympathy to the social problems. It was, in fact, a constant evolution leading to his acceptance of<br />
Christianity. Auden might have migrated to America to meet his requirement of a new idiom and<br />
new modes of expression. While in the <strong>English</strong> phase Auden drew inspiration mainly from Freud<br />
and Marx, Kierkegaard-the existentialist philosopher and Niebuhr, the theologian became his main<br />
sources of inspiration in America. Suffering of the individual soul, the importance of moral choice<br />
and the nature of sin were the main issues which troubled Keirkgaard and Niebuhr and Auden’s<br />
writings during this phase predominantly deal with such issues.<br />
During his first decade in the U.S.A. from 1940-50, Auden published three long poems-<br />
‘New Year Letter’, ‘For the Time Being’, and ‘The Age of Anxiety’ which are clear manifestations<br />
of his theological and artistic views.<br />
New Year Letter, 1941<br />
This literary work contains the letter itself, the sonnet sequence entitled ‘The Quest’ and a<br />
‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’ rendering the work a compact structure. Written in octo-syllabics<br />
rhyming together, the letter is in the form of a long reflective poem. ‘New Year Letter’, as Richard<br />
Johnson has put it in Man’s Place: An essay on Auden, “The First full articulation of the<br />
philosophical bases of Auden’s mature style and equally, a fine example of the way in which style<br />
details refines and clarifies meaning. The work is not a final statement of a systematic position. It<br />
advertises its own tentativeness by its epistolary form and its high spirited, self-qualifying manner.<br />
It does not show much of the religious side of Auden, although its ideas are essentially those that<br />
19
underlay his formal return to Christianity. Nonetheless, because it is discursive in manner and<br />
eclectic in reference, it offers an introduction in ideas fundamental to Auden’s later poetry and to<br />
some of his characteristic poetic tactics” 17 .<br />
Eighty one pages of notes, including short poems in the manner of Blake and Rilke,<br />
quotations, anecdotes, statistics and summaries have been added to the fifty nine pages of verse<br />
(Text), which makes it difficult to sharply distinguish the poem and the notes. Nevertheless, most<br />
remarkably the poem bring together a vast range of diverse references or concords. The poem<br />
comprises meditations on literature, war politics, history, theology and philosophy, etc. “A<br />
coincidence of events: the end of a year, the end of a decade, the end of a historical era, and the<br />
beginning of the second world war, as Richard Johnson has pointed out in his book Man’s Place: An<br />
Essay on Auden, is what inspired Auden to write this sequence” 18 Three parts of this poem<br />
correspond to the three categories-the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, propounded by<br />
Kierkegaard. The poem ‘traces the historical roots of the crisis,…..he crisis of the movement, as<br />
Richard Johnson remarks, is primarily a crisis in man’s knowledge of himself and the world, and the<br />
immediate problems the dissolution of order in Europe and the rise of fascism stem from<br />
accepting simple solutions to complicated problems” 19 .<br />
In fact, the feeling of guilt and sin are always present in the disorder which engulfs human<br />
beings and disregard to moral and human values result in violence. Part-II of the poem deals with<br />
the role of Devil in human behaviour leading to disastrous consequences as in the case of Hitler.<br />
Part-III handles a variety of topics extending from history, politics, social sciences, philosophy and<br />
theology to the depiction of America. The poem concludes with an appeal to God which leads him<br />
from doubt to belief in the Almighty. But it can not be put in the category of religious poem. It, in<br />
fact, is as Richard Hoggart remarks, “an argument in verse, perceptive, careless, suggestive,<br />
bookish, vivid, almost everywhere competent, and in places brilliant and moving” 20 .<br />
Though, as Richard Johnson, has put it in Man’s place: An Essay on Auden, “the central<br />
paradox is that of man’s double nature. By this Auden means that man knows himself as two<br />
radically different entities: anthropomorphic, egocentric universe that extends outwards from each<br />
man; and as a physical me, an object, a small item in a giant universe that surrounds, includes, and<br />
acts upon him. Yet it is viewed in the larger context of a society as a whole” 21 .<br />
Commenting upon the poem, R. N. Srivastava in his book W. H. Auden: The poet remarks<br />
“The epilogue is the best thing in New Year Letter, for it does not have the defects either of the<br />
“Letter” which is a little too intellectual, or of “the quest” which looks like the work of a conscious<br />
artist. It is also more successful in communicating the author’s personal faith at which he has just<br />
arrived. It has greater dignity, more intensity, and points out more emphatically the need for<br />
humility and striving in the face of violence and death. The most important thing about the Epilogue<br />
is that it is finally free from the misery of doubt, as the author now becomes finally committed to<br />
Christianity” 22 .<br />
Thus, New Year Letter epitomises Auden’s spiritual development and his ultimate<br />
acceptance of the Christian faith. In this poem Auden has used the technique of finding ‘objectivecorrelatives’-the<br />
mythical technique and this certainly signifies a new development in Auden’s<br />
technique and it is discernible in his other works of the period also.<br />
The sea and The Mirror, 1944<br />
William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest provided Auden with the mythical background<br />
most suitable for this literary creation. As Richard Johnson puts it “His (Auden’s) reading of The<br />
Tempest is based on the notion that it is in part an allegory of the ‘inner dialectic of the human<br />
20
personality’ 23 . The sea and the Mirror present both this reading and its own allegory of human<br />
character.” Auden uses various technical devices to achieve his end and displays a synthesis of all<br />
the qualities, of art and life, of individual and society and of conflicting desires of the mind. About<br />
this work, Barbara Everett remarks, “It is a small master piece, one of the funniest, cleverest, and<br />
fundamentally, though paradoxically, serious thing Auden has ever produced” 24 .<br />
Richard Johnson’s remarks in this context are also worth quoting. “The work has<br />
ceremonial processional quality, with characters, forms and ideas paired off in intricate balances,<br />
giving the reader the pleasure of finding the achieved design” 25 .<br />
Again Richard Johnson comments “ It is impossible, the work suggests, to understand its<br />
substance without following its own complex point of view still, there is an object to be understand,<br />
a view to be seen, and a model of human existence presented” 26 .<br />
In The Sea and the Mirror Auden makes an attempt to explore the relationship of the<br />
Mirror of Art to the Sea of Life. He uses the structure of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a<br />
common ground upon which to build new ideas’ the poem consists of three sections. In the first<br />
section, the symbolism of Prospero and Ariel indicates Auden belief that his spiritual quest will take<br />
him beyond the realm of art. In the second section, the other characters who are returning in a ship<br />
to Italy celebrating their regeneration symbolise the return from the world of the play to the world of<br />
reality. In the third section, Caliban while defining his role and the role of Ariel spells out the<br />
relation between the world of art and the world of reality. In the preface the stage manager,<br />
addressing himself to the critics tells them that art is concerned with life without explaining its<br />
surprise and mystery. ‘Prospero to Ariel’ begins by outlining the basic terms on which the unknown<br />
must be approached. ‘Caliban to the Audience’ is a very long address, covering about half of the<br />
total length but a brilliant one.<br />
R. N. Srivastav remarks, “The Sea and the Mirror mark the turning point in Auden’s<br />
career, for now he renounces the use of art as magic. But it displays Auden’s technical<br />
accomplishment as each character speaks in a different form-Ballad, Villanelle, Sestina, Sapphics,<br />
Elegiacs, terza rima, syllabic verse and the prose style of Henry James. Besides, it contains some of<br />
Auden’s finest poetry. Prof. Beach also considers it the best of the three long poems” 27 .<br />
For the Time Being, 1945<br />
This work, which is subtitled ‘A Charismas Oratorio’, takes further the argument of New<br />
Year Letter and reveals his leanings towards Christian faith more vividly. An Oratorio, in fact, is a<br />
composition for choral singing, generally on a sacred theme. The gospel narrative of The Nativity<br />
(birth of Christ) provides the required mythical background for His long poem and helps to invoke a<br />
profound moral and emotional response from the reader.<br />
This Oratorio consists of nine sections. In the first section ‘Advent’ depicts the dismay and<br />
lifelessness of the ancient world before Christ’s birth. The singers sing about an atmosphere of fear<br />
and doubt which looms large everywhere. ‘The Annunciation’ the second section, personifies-<br />
Intuition, Sensation, Feeling and Thought-the four major human faculties as it happens in the case<br />
of the morality plays to indicate that man’s personality has become fragmented and consequently<br />
has lost its wholeness. Joseph, the third section, is like a popular song. St. Joseph is presented as an<br />
ordinary human being who is sceptical about Mary’s purity. This leads to the temptation not to trust<br />
God. In the semi-chorus, Joseph and Mary are exhorted to pray for all types of sinners. The next<br />
section, ‘The Summons’ shows a contrast between human wisdom and Christian revelation. The<br />
magi (three wise man) are summoned to face the reality. The star advises them to have faith.<br />
21
In ‘The Vision of the Shepherds’ the fifth section, the Shepherds are summoned to face the<br />
truth like the three wise men. These shepherds wait for the good news with hope and faith. Angels<br />
announce the truth of love which will become the ruling force, in future. The next section entitled<br />
‘At the entire Manger’ begins with Mary’s tender lullaby to the new born. This lullaby is followed<br />
by the songs of the wise men and the Shepherds and the seventh and finally their address to the<br />
chorus section, ‘The Meditation of Simeon’ unfolds the philosophical meaning of the Incarnation<br />
vis-à-vis love. This section expresses Auden’s religious views and underlines the influence of<br />
Niebuhr. In the Eighth section entitled ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ there is depiction of Herod<br />
who is both the historical character and the liberal of the late 1930s confronting the threats of war<br />
and fascism. In this section, he is presented as a proud nationalist confronted with the Irrational. He<br />
takes the help of military to protect law and order. He symbolises a man who cannot bring himself<br />
to believe without sufficient proof. ‘The Soldiers’ speech’ unfolds the dire consequences of Herod’s<br />
decision which will be nothing less than the massacre of the innocents. In the concluding section,<br />
‘The Flight into Egypt’ Joseph and Mary hear the voices of the Desert which tempts them to stay in<br />
the world, but they remark that insecurity is essential human condition. In this way the vision comes<br />
to an end and the world of reality stands there quite unchanged, though, for those who have seen the<br />
child, the things are not quite the same. Monroe K. Spears regards this work to be a fine work of<br />
Auden “Considered on its own terms and at this distance in time, the work (“For the Time Being”)<br />
may be seen as a unique and remarkable success both formally and as a whole” 28 .<br />
The Age of Anxiety 1947<br />
This poem consists of six parts- ‘Prologue’, ‘The Seven Ages of Man’, ‘The Seven Stages’,<br />
‘The Dirge’, ‘A Masque’ and ‘the Epilogue’. The poem is marked with, as R.N. Srivastav puts it,<br />
“the dramatic form with dialogue, the singing contest, elegy, love songs laments with courtship of a<br />
Shepherdess, a dirge, formal artificial diction and meter. Auden uses the old <strong>English</strong> meter with its<br />
alliterative line and four heavy stresses…..” 29 Commenting on the scene of action in this poem,<br />
Barbara Everett remarks, “with The Age of Anxiety, Auden returns to the local scene, for the<br />
greater part of the action occurs in a New York bar. The bar is, perhaps, an urban replacement for<br />
those Islands of escape and pleasure that recur in Auden’s earlier work, where lonely individuals<br />
meet in a fugitive search for an artificial togetherness. The bar in ‘The Age of Anxiety’ is the place<br />
where men meet to have their solitude in common” 30 .<br />
In this poem the four characters-Malin, Rosetta, Quant and Emble are personifications of<br />
thinking feeling, intuition and sensation respectively, intended to indicate that man’s personality has<br />
lost its wholeness and has been disintegrated. All the characters seek to attain spiritual knowledge,<br />
but their search is not deep enough as all of them seek escape routes only.<br />
The first part i.e. ‘The Prologue’ introduces characters in their private reveries. Instead of<br />
predominant war symbolism, these characters discuss man’s constant attempt to escape guilt,<br />
anxiety and fear. The second part ‘The Seven Ages’ interprets Shakespeare’s is seven stages of<br />
man’s life psychologically Malin initiates each stage and the different characters narrate their<br />
experiences. The theme throughout remains the loss of innocence. The third part ‘The Seven Stages’<br />
is a quest for the lost innocence. Here Rosetta performs the role of a guide. The six stages of their<br />
journey re-enact the fall. The fourth part ‘The Dirge’ is an elegy written on the death of American<br />
President Roosevelt, but it has general implications which make it mourning over the death of the<br />
secular law-givers who assume the role of a kind of God endowed with superhuman faculties.<br />
In the fifth part the quest pattern is taken up again. The infatuation between Rosetta and<br />
Emble develops into physical relationship. Malin and Quant appeal to them to continue to live with<br />
22
their illusion, but they fail to fulfil their cherished dream as all their illusions fade away. Emble<br />
passes out and Rosetta gives up her dream and makes a long speech. She laments that she is bound<br />
to suffer from evil, insecurity and fate.<br />
The concluding part is called ‘The Epilogue’ which depicts Malin’s meditations on the<br />
nature of love and time. She comes to the conclusion that although feeling may recognise the<br />
emotional need for God, it is really left to Intellect to make the Christian choice. The poem<br />
underlines the central theme Christianity is the only hope since there is no possibility of man’s is<br />
redemption by depending solely on his own resources. The poem ends on a note of despair like<br />
Auden’s earlier poem September 1, 1939. R.N.Srivastava quotes different critics who have<br />
expressed different views in the context of this poem. Richard Hoggart opines that the<br />
disappointment is greater after the expectations aroused by ‘The Sea and The Mirror’ and ‘For the<br />
Tim Being’. Prof. John Fuller believes that, actually ‘The Age of Anxiety’ is rich not only in noble<br />
despair, but in a kind of inner glee and inventive response to the conditions of life which is the mark<br />
of great literature. John Bayley goes so far as to call The Age of Anxiety Auden’s greatest<br />
achievement to date and the one which best shows the true nature of his scope and talent”. Monroe<br />
K.Spears’ opinion is the most balanced, “My own view is that The Age of Anxiety is almost as far<br />
from being Auden’s best as it is from being his worst poem” 31 .<br />
The Last Phase, 1950-70<br />
Auden remained a writer throughout his life. The stability and tranquillity he achieved after<br />
a reconciliation of opposites become manifest in his poetry of the sixties. Barbara Everett remarks,<br />
“Nones, The shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio are the only three successive volumes in<br />
Auden’s career which, if bound together, would offer something like a coherent political character,<br />
the different poems arousing no bewilderment by a diversity of tone and subject” 32 .<br />
Collected Shorter Poems, 1950<br />
Auden published an edition of his shorter poems after making a number of alterations,<br />
modifications and additions in the poems written during different periods of his career. The volume<br />
consists of four sections; ‘Poems’, ‘Paid on Both Sides’, ‘Songs and other Musical pieces’ and ‘In<br />
Time of War’ and its commentary. Barbara Everett remarks, “Auden offers a final and stabilised<br />
edition of a view of life strongly conditioned by the temporal” 33 .<br />
In 1960, again, minor adjustments and modifications were made, though, there were no<br />
fundamental changes.<br />
Nones, 1951<br />
This volume consists of Auden’s most beautiful songs and light verse. Written in a<br />
colloquial style, the lyrics in this collection are specifically excellent. The title of this volume, as<br />
G.S. Fraser, puts it, is intended to suggest “nonce” that is, this is poetry for the nonce, for the time<br />
being. But gives the foretaste of what is to come in The Shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio” 34 .<br />
Poems like ‘Nones’, ‘Prime’, etc. were reprinted as part of Horae canonica ‘The Shield of Achilles’<br />
and ‘In Praise of Limestone’ become the forerunner of the ‘Bucolies’ of ‘The Shield of Achilles’ in<br />
view of theme and technique. The reader is reminded of Horace because of its tone and concerns. In<br />
this volume, Auden reflects man’s weakness and ignorance to the same extent as it was shown in his<br />
earlier poetry, but here, the feelings of hatred have been replaced by sympathetic understanding.<br />
Auden continues using the landscape for mirroring forth variegated conditions of human life but his<br />
new landscape strikes a departure, man, here, asks no answers from it.<br />
23
The Shield of Achilles, 1955<br />
The most well-organised of all the volumes Auden’s ‘The shield of Achilles’ comprises<br />
three sections. The first section consists of seven ‘Bucolics’ which shows one aspect of man’s<br />
relationship with nature. ‘In Sun Shine and in Shade’ is another section which consists of fourteen<br />
poems. Though the poet employs different techniques to bring home his point, the main thrust of the<br />
poems remains on man-in-society or man as a social animal. In ‘The Shield of Achilles’, the shield<br />
is symbolic of human condition. Through contrast the poet shows that modern shield is devoid of<br />
any beauty or goodness which further reflects that modern world is devoid of goodness and there is<br />
emptiness, sterility and emotional vacuum. The poet underlines the need of the Christian faith which<br />
would restore its goodness and health.<br />
‘Horae Canonica’ is the third section which consists of seven poems based on canonical<br />
hours, the set times of the church for prayer and meditation. This sequence begins with ‘Prime’ and<br />
concludes with ‘Lauds. Like ‘The Age of Anxiety’, this section is complex one. This section<br />
celebrates the crucifixion of Christ. Auden makes use of Christ’s crucifixion as an illustration to<br />
underline the fact of inevitability of death. The poet makes, the readers realise this fact from ‘Prime<br />
to Lauds’ and ultimately there is awakening. In the central poem ‘Nones’ the poet highlights the<br />
communal and individual guilt and accountability for the crucifixion after the act is performed.<br />
Nature, on the other hand, is depicted as innocent and devoid of sympathy and guilt sense. The<br />
collection underlines Auden’s final statement on the subject of Christian belief.<br />
Homage to Clio, 1960<br />
This volume deals with the pivotal theme of contrast between the kingdom of Clio, Muse of<br />
Time and therefore, of human beings, and the kingdom of rulers of plant and animal life symbolised<br />
in Artemis and Aphrodite. Both Aphrodite and Artemis symbolise sexual urge and hunting-the two<br />
basic desires of man and therefore, they must be fulfilled. On the other hand, birth and death are<br />
inevitable facts and hence, Clio should not be defied.<br />
‘First Things First’, in this volume, presents nature as indifferent to human values. Again, in<br />
the prose interlude, ‘Dichtung’ and ‘Wahrheit’, Auden deals with the relation between poetry and<br />
truth and the role of poet. ‘Dame Kind’ in part-III deals with poetic diction- from the colloquial and<br />
bawdy to the technical and archaic.<br />
R.N. Srivastav remarks……… “Homage to Clio was coldly received by critics who rated it<br />
inferior to The Shield of Achilles. Thomas Gunn, Srivastav quotes, in a review of the book wrote<br />
that this was Auden’s worst work”. Monroe K.Spears, however, felt that “Some of the failures and<br />
peculiarities of Homage to Clio” seem to derive from an uncertainty of rapport with the audience.<br />
The poems in lighter vein, which Auden defined as ‘nonsense verse’, were probably a reaction<br />
against American seriousness in poetry, but they failed to impress the critics” 35 .<br />
The above three volumes-‘Nones’, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ and ‘Homage to Clio’ bring out<br />
Auden’s extraordinary technical skill. Barbara Everett’s remarks seem worth quoting, “His large<br />
technical talents, his quick mind, and his omnivorous interest in human phenomena make, whatever<br />
he does write, entertaining and absorbing. The large body of work that he has produced is - with all<br />
its flaws and unevenness - one worthy of considerable respect” 36 .<br />
About the House, 1966<br />
This volume comprises two parts. The first part consists of a poem sequence about various<br />
rooms in Auden’s house in Austria. The poet also underlines the sanctity of daily life. The activities<br />
of daily life have been presented both as symbolic of his existential nature and its meaningfulness.<br />
24
In the second part of the volume, ‘Ins and outs’, ‘A Change of Air’, ‘You’ and ‘Elegy of<br />
J.F.K.’ have been included. These deal with the themes of uncertain respect for the present world,<br />
spiritual enlightenment, conflict between mind and body and implied references to the assassination<br />
of American President John F. Kennedy respectively.<br />
City without Walls, 1960<br />
This volume deals with the theme of the complexity of modern civilization – a recurrent<br />
theme in Auden’s poetry. The poet synthesises seriousness with lightness of tone and his manner of<br />
handling the issues remains intellectual. However, the poems of this volume differ from the earlier<br />
poems in tone. Instead of reconciliation and hope of earlier poems these poems are marked by<br />
bitterness of love and irony.<br />
Ugliness and vices of the degenerated modern civilization find full expression in the title<br />
poem. The poet ironically unveils the self-centeredness and apathy of modern man. Prologue at<br />
sixty, the sequel to this poem combines high seriousness with lightness of tone and is in the form of<br />
a self-elegy. It ironically underlines the modern ethos and synthesises the private and public voices<br />
which lend an extraordinary grandeur and force to it.<br />
Thank you Fog<br />
Thank you Fog was published in 1974 posthumously. Auden wrote this volume of poems<br />
after his return to England from America in 1972. The poems in this volume express Auden’s thrill<br />
and happiness to be back home. As far as technique and style are concerned, this volume does not<br />
show any remarkable departure from the earlier volumes.<br />
Auden’s light verse includes light poems of social comment, Jazz Lyrics, The Blues, The<br />
Ballads, Drinking Songs, etc.<br />
To sum up, psychology was Auden’s predominant interest in the beginning, then Marxism<br />
gained momentum and Marxian ideology strongly preoccupied him in Nineteen Thirties. Then<br />
Auden began to realise that the totalitarian state deprived the individual of the freedom of thought<br />
and expression. Hence, Auden was drawn towards liberal humanism resulting in declaration of war<br />
against Fascism on an international plane. After 1939 he was gradually driven to Christianity and<br />
ultimately he achieved a firm and unshakable faith in Christianity which unequivocally gets<br />
manifest in his later works.<br />
25
Chapter-III<br />
LITERARY TRADITION: W.H. AUDEN THE TREND SETTER<br />
The pronounced dramatic thrust of events in W. H. Auden’s period demanded a response<br />
which had a more direct and specific connection with the actualities of social life than the abstract<br />
and general response to the problems of their times we find among the poets of the preceding<br />
decade. Auden’s attempt to confront the urgent and immediate challenges of the times compelled<br />
him to react very sharply to the aesthetics prevalent in the preceding decade. His poetry, in fact,<br />
could be seen as emerging in direct contrast to the poetry of his–immediate predecessors. Unlike the<br />
poets of the previous decade, Auden Group – Auden being the trend–setter, assumed a radical<br />
posture to counteract the unpleasant realities of the contemporary scene and refused to look upon art<br />
as a sanctuary or safe haven from the turmoil, turbulence and decay of actual social life. Clifford<br />
Dyment underlines the essential difference between the poets of the twenties and the thirties by<br />
showing how the world outlooks or the perspectives in the two cases are significantly divergent. He<br />
suggests that the poets of the nineteen-thirties commended Eliot’s achievements and were ready to<br />
be benefited by the technical innovations introduced by him in the art of poetry, yet their worldview<br />
was markedly different from religious outlook adopted by T. S. Eliot. They took note of<br />
Eliot’s sharply critical picture of contemporary civilization, but they also recognised that this<br />
criticism emanated, in large part, from distaste for vulgarity which as a man of cultivated sensibility<br />
he saw around him. The younger poets felt that something more disturbing than vulgarity was<br />
involved here. They also felt that withdrawal from contemporary scene was a mistake on Eliot’s<br />
part. 1<br />
Auden showed a radical concern for public issues. He did not allow his poetic talents to be<br />
confined to the expression of his private anxieties. The poets of the twenties, on the other hand, felt<br />
that there could be only a personal and private solution of the problem of spiritual sickness which<br />
they saw around them. They brought to bear upon their survey of modern scene a spiritual outlook<br />
which demanded from each individually a stance of transcendence and disengagement from the<br />
spectacle of dreadful decay. They were least interested in changing the external social conditions<br />
which, to them, were only a manifestation of the rottenness at the core of an individual’s spiritual<br />
being. This is evident from the following famous lines from Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’:<br />
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow<br />
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,<br />
You can not say, or guess, for you know only,<br />
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats<br />
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.<br />
And the dry stone no sound of water. 2<br />
The ideological thrust of Auden and the other prominent poets of the decade–Stephen<br />
Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, on the other hand, was towards re-orientation of<br />
society on leftist lines which would be an anathema to older poets like W.B.Yeats and T. S. Eliot for<br />
whom recapturing of tradition, religion and mythical beliefs by the individual was the real answer.<br />
This change in his social perspective determines the basic content of his poetry as well as the<br />
manner of expression adopted by him. He acknowledged the overpowering sense of moral<br />
confusion and spiritual uncertainty that had overtaken modern man, but they chose to take upon<br />
themselves the specific task of investigating in to social causes that had led to this phenomenon.<br />
Instead of limiting themselves to the expression of intense anguish and an ever growing sense of<br />
26
desolation over a situation, which was visualised as an abstract and external catastrophe, they<br />
believed in concrete action. The following lines of Stephen Spender illustrate the view point of<br />
these poets:<br />
Who live under the shadow of a war,<br />
What can I do that matters?<br />
My pen stops, and my laughter, dancing, stop<br />
Or ride to a gap. 3<br />
These lines suggest that Spender could visualise the approaching disaster of war even in<br />
early thirties and could suggest a line of concrete action to meet the challenges. In contrast with the<br />
theoretical approach adopted by the modernists of the twenties, who turned their back upon the<br />
concrete social realities in their preoccupations with cultural and spiritual values, the poets of the<br />
thirties came to grips with the down to earth realities of their times:<br />
The hooters are blowing,<br />
No heed let him take,<br />
When baby is hungry<br />
T’s best not to wake<br />
Thy mother is crying<br />
Thy dad is on the dole.<br />
Two shillings a week is<br />
The price of a soul. 4<br />
Since the subject matter dealt directly with the day to day issues, the manner of expression<br />
was also forthright and straightforward. The overall impact of social developments on the sensibility<br />
of the Auden Group was reflected in their poetry with its full immediacy. Stephen Spender<br />
highlights the difference in their approach in relation to that of the previous decade when he<br />
suggests that the poets of 1920s appeared to be making a leap in the dark and their vision of<br />
greatness of European past actually implied contempt and hatred for the present. Their emphasis on<br />
tradition, according to him, was merely a projection of their hatred for fragmented modern<br />
civilization and opposition to the whole ideas of progress. A conservative political stance was<br />
implicit in their poetry and some of them went to the extent of looking upon the fascists as<br />
supporters of tradition. As against this, the poets of the thirties incorporated in their vision an urgent<br />
determination to uproot fascism. They considered it a necessary and immediate task for poetry to<br />
become instrumental in the fulfilment of such an over riding social cause. Spender adds that the<br />
poets of the thirties identified themselves completely with the pressing social cause of their time. 5<br />
Critics like F.R.Leavis had reacted in their own way against the modernist’s<br />
transcendentalist outlook on life. Like the modernists they too recognised the seriousness of the<br />
crisis and felt deeply concerned about the decline and decay of cultural standards on account of the<br />
spread of mass civilization. The awareness of contemporary crisis in the case of the Leavisites was<br />
at least as acute as that of the modernists but instead of feeling merely baffled by the painful<br />
dilemmas created by the modern conditions of living or finding easy solace in some religious<br />
dogmas, they emphasised the need for strenuous moral resistance on the part of every sensitive<br />
individual in defence of his humanity. They insisted on finding solutions to the problems and<br />
actively advocated moral reform based on individual efforts. F.R.Leavis’s scrutiny group aimed,<br />
primarily at rescuing, through a collaborative effort, the moral, Intellectual and human values which<br />
had come under threat on account of growing pressure of mass-civilization. Such a collaborative<br />
effort was viewed by them as the minimum necessary assertion on the social plane for the fulfilment<br />
of vital human needs of the sensitive elites. Leavis’s position could be considered on the social<br />
27
consciousness front as a step ahead of T.S. Eliot whose approach had centred on mysticism and<br />
abstract spiritualism. The Leavisites, of course, advocated only individual effort to resolve the<br />
prevalent crisis and stopped short of contemplating a directly political collective action.<br />
Auden and his group not only attacked modernists for adopting a passively gloomy or<br />
cynically bitter attitude towards the challenges posed by the contemporary society. They also<br />
championed collective socio-political action as a remedy for the grave problems created by the<br />
existing situation. Underlining the importance of active involvement in the social issues of the times<br />
in the case of these poets, C.M. Bowra remarks, “In the twentieth Century crowded as it is with<br />
international and civil wars, social revolutions and awakening continents, vigorous and<br />
comprehensive reappraisals of what man owes to himself became inevitable and the poets in such a<br />
situation could hardly be expected to keep clear of politics or remain indifferent to public affairs” 6 .<br />
It is not surprising that in such objective circumstances Rex Warner, a poet of the thirties, should<br />
sing songs of revolution:<br />
Now you can join us, now all together sing all power<br />
Not tomorrow but now in this hour, all power<br />
To lovers of life, to workers, to the hammer, the sickle, the blood<br />
Come then companions, this is the spring of blood,<br />
Heart’s hey-day, movement of masses, beginning of good. 7<br />
Of course, in the twenties as well as the thirties, the poets were oppressed by an acute sense<br />
of social disintegration and decay of civilization but there was a sharp distinction in the approaches<br />
they adopted for reintegration and rejuvenation of the shattered contemporary civilization. The poets<br />
of the thirties definitely had a more sharp awareness of the social factors which had generated this<br />
crisis and were also guided by a firmer conviction in the need for collective intervention for the<br />
purpose of meeting the challenges of the situation. The poets of twenties, on the other hand, showed<br />
only a vague grasp of the social processes through which the crisis situation had emerged and the<br />
interpretation of chaotic society they offered did not enjoin upon them the duty to make any<br />
collective intervention on the political plane.<br />
Thus, the prominent poets of the thirties W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and<br />
Louis MacNeice-promptly responded to the major socio-political and economic developments of the<br />
period and made a sincere attempt to grapple with the contemporary issues from a fresh angle.<br />
28
Chapter-IV<br />
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PRESCRIBED POEMS<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
1. Petition<br />
Sir—Auden is addressing his prayer to someone may be god, the spirit of HomerLane or John<br />
Layard<br />
The supreme Healers—The use of the word is vague.<br />
No man's enemy—A friend to all<br />
Forgiving all—He who forgives every body including the sinners.<br />
But—Except, (here) It is used to indicate that there is only one exception.<br />
Be prodigal—(here) To be kind and generous in excess<br />
Power—(here) Moral strength<br />
Light—Wisdom<br />
A Sovereign touch—The power of the Stuart kings of England, James-I, Charles-I and Charles-II to<br />
cure even the incurable diseases by mere touch. They were called the supreme Healers.<br />
Neural itch—The diseases of itching and neurosis-physical and mental diseases which according to<br />
Auden and thinkers like Homer Lane and John Layard have psychological causes.<br />
The exhaustion of weaning—Mental tiredness or nervous breakdown caused by weaning. 'Weaning'<br />
in fact, is the process by which a child is taught to be fed by some other method than the breastfeed.<br />
Here this term is used to denote the fact that over protection or excessive attachment to mother<br />
may result in Mother Fixation or Oedipus complex which is a maladjustment, a kind of<br />
psychological ailment.<br />
Distortions—Deformity, deformation and act of distorting<br />
The Liar's quinsy—Homer Lane finds out lying as a cause of quinsy, which means sore throat.<br />
Ingrown Virginity—An unmarried woman's desires for love, sex and child are repressed or remain<br />
ungratified—these turn inwards and result in physical diseases like cancer. Auden's poem ‘Miss<br />
Gee’ is an excellent example of this.<br />
Prohibit sharply—To prevent strictly<br />
The rehearsed response—Repeated reaction, (here) it suggests that repression of emotions results in<br />
maladjustments in human psyche and consequently in a cowardly response to the realities of life<br />
signifying escapist attitude.<br />
Coward's stance—An Escapist's behavior or attitude<br />
Cover in time with beams—Find out by focusing the search lights on.<br />
Those in retreat—Those who fall a victim to defense mechanism- unable to face the challenges of<br />
life and resorting to escape routes.<br />
Spotted—Located<br />
Publish—To give publicity to<br />
At the end of drives—At the end of the road<br />
Harrow—Annihilate/destroy<br />
The house of the dead— (here) The old, decayed and rotten civilization<br />
Look shining at—To shower blessings<br />
New styles of architecture—(here) New civilization or a new social set-up<br />
A change of heart—Psychological change.<br />
29
Explanation — The sonnet is addressed to 'Sir' who may either be God or the supreme Healers—<br />
the spirit of Homer Lane or of John Layard. The beginning of the poem is quite abrupt. The poem<br />
opens with appreciation of "Sir" who forgives all and is enemy of none. Christian virtues of love<br />
and charity are made manifest through imparting of the quality of friendliness and forgiveness to<br />
Sir-the supreme Healers. This supreme Healer forgives all human beings except those who negate<br />
God's will i.e. who commit the sin of repression of emotions which is the outcome of man's pride in<br />
his own intellect and reasoning power. The sin is no doubt, unpardonable but the poet prays to "Sir"<br />
or God to bestow human beings with strength and wisdom to avoid repression of desires and give<br />
full expression to those desires so that they may not have to suffer psychological ailments.<br />
Auden uses the imagery of sovereign touch; Stuart kings had the power of curing the<br />
incurable disease by mere touch. Auden makes a prayer to God to bestow upon the human beings<br />
some such remedy of sovereign touch, which may cure the psychological maladies of the modern<br />
man. He attributes psychological causes to physical diseases. He shares the viewpoint of Homer<br />
Lane and John Layard that psychological causes – inhibition or repression in various forms – cause<br />
physical diseases which become manifest in " Intolerable" neural itch, over protection in childhood<br />
may result in mother - fixation and suppression of natural physical desires may lead to mental as<br />
wells as physical diseases. Sore throat, according to HomerLane, has a psychological origin.<br />
Repressed sexual desires may lead to dangerous disease like cancer. In this way suppression or<br />
repression of emotions causes widespread maladjustment in human psyche. Such psychologically ill<br />
people show cowardly or unsatisfactory reactions to life and thus represent an escapist attitude.<br />
Cowards are, in fact, those people who have been repressing their emotions constantly. They are<br />
unable to face the challenges of life and like a coward seek ways to escape from the reality. Auden<br />
prays to the supreme Healers or God to help these psychologically ill people in giving up their<br />
distorted emotional responses and correct their escapist attitude to life. In fact, if a positive vision is<br />
incorporated in them—if they are brought out of their psychic ailment, with their fears shorn off, they<br />
will develop positive outlook on life and there will be a definite change.<br />
Auden prays to the supreme Healer to focus the search light on them without losing time. If<br />
they are cured of their psychological malaise, they will turn back and return to life and will leave<br />
disturbed attitude to reality. Such a reversal of attitude is, no doubt, difficult to bring about but the<br />
Supreme Healer should do so before it is too late. Auden expresses the necessity of bringing forth<br />
the public healers who live in country house or at the end of the road. He seems to instruct the<br />
supreme healer and shows the urgency of replacing the old, decayed and rotten civilization with a<br />
new social order. The poem, thus, points out Auden's faith in the necessity of a change of heart in<br />
order to bring about a change in the existing social order.<br />
Introduction — First published in the ‘Poems, 1930’, the poem, 'Petition' signifies a transitional<br />
phase in Auden's poetry. It is typical of Auden's psychological poetry wherein he seeks<br />
psychological solutions to social maladies.<br />
Summary — The poet addresses some supreme power that forgives all human beings except those<br />
who commit the sin of repression of emotions. He prays to Him to be kind enough to forgive the sin<br />
of negation of His will and to bestow human beings with strength and wisdom to avoid repression of<br />
desires and give full expression to their desires. The poet uses the imagery of sovereign touch.<br />
Stuart kings of England were blessed with the power of curing the incurable diseases by mere touch.<br />
Auden prays for such supreme remedy, which may cure the modern man’s psychological malaises,<br />
which are caused by repression of desires.<br />
30
Auden, no doubt, endorses the view point of Homer Lane and John Layard in attributing<br />
psychological causes to physical ailments – inhibition or repression in various forms causes physical<br />
diseases which become manifest in sore throat, intolerable neural itch, over-protection in childhood<br />
may result in mother fixation and repressed sexual desires of a virgin result in dangerous diseases<br />
like cancer. In this way suppression or repression of emotions causes widespread maladjustments in<br />
human psyche. Such psychologically ill people project cowardly and unsatisfactory response or<br />
reaction to life. Cowards are people with repressed emotions. They are unable to face life and like a<br />
coward seek ways to escape from the truth or reality. They evolve a sort of defence mechanism<br />
which represents an escapist attitude to life. Auden prays to the supreme healer to prohibit this<br />
rehearsed response strictly and firmly. He prays to Him to help human beings to give up distorted<br />
emotional responses and adopt a positive out look on life and its realities.<br />
Rosenthal finds a genuinely religious component in Auden's writing, not only in the<br />
Romantic prayer for the realisation of vision but also, often in an assumption of the existence of<br />
God. This is seen, for instance, in the early 'Petition', which must be intoned like the Lord's prayer if<br />
we are to get the real feel of it. Petition is a catch-all prayer in favour of every kind of regenerative<br />
theory, all revolutionary innovations, every 'change of heart'. It wills that individuals be released<br />
from the sick rigidities of our culture, expressed psychosomatically as 'the intolerable neural itch',<br />
'the exhaustion of weaning’, 'the liar's quinsy', 'the distortions of ingrown virginity'. Auden, in this<br />
poem, brings together ideas derived from Marx, Lawrence, Homer Lane, Groddeck and other<br />
'Healers'. He looks upon these figures as Moslem looks upon the Old Testament heroes, Jesus and<br />
Mohammed—as prophets of divinity whom the poem's opening lines address:<br />
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all<br />
But will its negative inversion be prodigal. 1<br />
Auden makes a prayer to the supreme healer to focus the search light like a watchman on<br />
those who are psychologically ill people trying to escape from facing the challenges of life without<br />
losing time. If they are cured of their psychological malaise, they will turn back and return to life,<br />
and thus, leave their distorted attitude to the realities of life. Such a reversal of attitude is, no doubt,<br />
difficult to bring about but the supreme Healer should help the human beings to do so before it is<br />
too late. For the accomplishment of this yeoman's task public healers, psychiatric healers (Homer<br />
Lane, John Layard and others) should be brought to limelight.<br />
The poem, thus, points out Auden's social awareness and his faith in the necessity of a<br />
change of heart in order to bring about a new social order. This change of heart is brought about by<br />
correcting emotional responses of the people to life. Early thirties marks a psychological phase in<br />
Auden's creative output. Hence, in this poem he seeks psychological solutions to social maladies.<br />
The poem makes a petition for a change of heart though Auden's mission remains a new<br />
social set up. Rilkean sonnet characterized by assonance rather than rhyme helps the poet in<br />
achieving organic unity and compact thought content. Auden's imagery in this poem is characteristic<br />
of modernist imagery typical of T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate's poems. Images drawn from psychology-<br />
'Sovereign's touch', images representing old rotten society and new social order are strikingly<br />
unusual. The use of ambiguous phrases like ‘Liar's quinsy’ signifying escapist attitude is<br />
remarkable. Auden's belief in change and his adoption of psychological solutions to the maladies of<br />
individual as well as society are successfully affirmed in this poem.<br />
Though Auden did not include it in the ‘Collected Shorter Poems, 1950’ after giving it<br />
reconsideration, yet as John Fuller points out, the poem is “One of the most chronologically<br />
diagnostic of Auden's poems. It is typical of Auden's early poetry, both in matter and manner”. 2<br />
.<br />
31
Critical Appreciation — W. H. Auden, in the early phase of his poetry, emphasizes the necessity<br />
of a change of heart in order to bring about a new social order. In this poem, 'Petition' or 'Sir no<br />
man's enemy forgiving all' (Oct., 1929) Auden advocates a change of heart through psychologically<br />
curing the distorted emotional responses, which develop an escapist attitude to life. He makes a<br />
Freudian investigation into the causes of maladies and underlines that external illness is due to<br />
internal maladjustments in the form of prolonged repression of natural urges. Hence, he advocates<br />
free expression of natural desires to evolve healthy personalities. Inhibition or repression in various<br />
forms causes physical diseases like sore throat and cancer and ‘Intolerable neural itch’, etc. Over<br />
protection in childhood may result in mother-fixation and suppression of desires may result in<br />
maladjustments in human psyche. Such psychologically ill people project a cowardly or<br />
unsatisfactory reaction or response to life.<br />
If a positive vision is incorporated in the escapist or psychologically ill people and if they<br />
are brought out of their ailment with their fears shorn off, they will develop positive out look which<br />
will lead to a change of heart and which will further lead to a change in the social set-up. Such a<br />
reversal of attitude is, no doubt, difficult to bring about but it is not impossible. Auden prays to the<br />
supreme Healer that it is high time to:<br />
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response,<br />
And gradually correct the coward's stance<br />
Cover in time with beams those in retreat.<br />
The poet suggests that psychological cure of individual psychic imbalances may further<br />
help in changing the existing social order. Under the dramatic thrust of socio-economic and political<br />
events establishment of new social order is an immediate issue, which Auden takes up in this poem.<br />
This sonnet characterized by assonance helps the poet in effectively achieving organic unity and<br />
compact thought content. A Suggestion of complete change is made manifest through concrete<br />
images. Images drawn from psychology 'Sovereign's touch', 'images representing old rotten society<br />
and new social order', 'the house of the dead' and 'new styles of architecture' respectively are<br />
strikingly unusual. Though, ambiguity in phrases like ‘liar's quinsy', coward's stance is definitely<br />
there but his imagery in this poem is characteristic of modernist imagery represented by T. S. Eliot's<br />
and Allen Tate's poems. The poet has used Freudian terms 'exhaustion of weaning', 'distortions of<br />
ingrown virginity' to diagnose individual as well as social maladies.<br />
In the ultimate analysis the poet suggests psychotherapy or psychological solutions to<br />
individual as well as social maladies. Unlike his predecessors Auden does not merely present the<br />
chaotic situation and watch the decay passively, he also condemns the escapist attitude and is in<br />
strong favour of concrete changes in the existing social set-up.<br />
John Bayley’s remarks are most befitting in this context, “Auden combines an intense<br />
interest in the human heart with a desire to reform society and he thinks our psychological ills<br />
greater than our political. He is convinced of the urgent need for mental therapy, he believes that the<br />
spread and assimilation of the feelings of psychology can help society towards health he is sure that<br />
such action is morally desirable” 3 .<br />
Auden's desire for the establishment of a new social order, his attitude regarding positive<br />
outlet to be given to the natural desires, his reaction against repression of desires and inhibitions,<br />
imperceptibly inherited from the then middle class culture, his anti-authoritarian approach reflected<br />
in his condemnation of parental over-protection reflected in Mother Fixation, his condemnation of<br />
escapist attitude of people, his positive vision of incorporation of hope into escapists by curing them<br />
of their fixations, his obsessions, etc. demonstrate his social awareness but Auden's faith in the<br />
32
necessity of a change of heart in order to bring out a new social order, his invocations to the<br />
supreme Healer, then to the Healers, his reference to the magic touch of king reveal his orthodox<br />
views and a change of heart approach suggests individualistic solutions and hence, the poem finally<br />
brings out Auden's radicalised middle-class liberal’s perspective.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. ‘Petition’ represents psycho-analytical phase of W. H. Auden’s early poetic career.<br />
Comment.<br />
2. Write down critical appreciation of the poem, ‘Petition’.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Auden’s versification in the poem, ‘Petition’.<br />
2. Imagery in the poem, ‘Petition’.<br />
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Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
2. MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS<br />
Musee Des Beaux Arts—The museum of fine arts situated in Brussels. Auden visited this museum<br />
in 1938 during his winter sojourn. This visit gave him inspiration to compose the given poem.<br />
The old masters—The ancient painters like Brueghel, an Italian painter, 1520-69.<br />
Its human position—The place and significance of individual suffering in the scheme of things.<br />
It— (here) Individual suffering<br />
Dully along—Walking along in an aimless or causal manner, strolling.<br />
Explanation — In this poem, the poet uses the imagery of Brueghel’s paintings to bring out the<br />
theme of suffering inherent in human condition and human apathy to individual suffering. The poet<br />
begins the poem in a dramatic manner. At the very outset, he states that the conception of ancient<br />
artists regarding individual suffering was quite logical. They rightly understood the nature of human<br />
suffering and correctly painted it in their works of art. They were sensitively responsive to the place<br />
and significance of individual suffering inherent in human condition in the scheme of things. They<br />
opined that suffering is an integral part of human life. It may happen to an individual at any time<br />
when some other individuals are busy in performing their routine activities like eating meals,<br />
opening a window or walking along in a casual manner.<br />
Words-Meanings and the Explanatory Notes:<br />
The aged —The old<br />
Reverently —Respectfully, religiously<br />
Passionately —Eagerly<br />
Miraculous birth — Birth of Christ<br />
Skating on a pond — Playing games such as skating, etc.<br />
Martyrdom —The crucifixion of Christ<br />
Untidy—Dirty<br />
The torturer’s horse —The executioner’s horse<br />
Explanation — After defining the real position of suffering in human life, the poet points out that<br />
the routine activities continue in life in spite of individual suffering. The world at large remains<br />
indifferent to individual suffering. In this stanza he gives examples of two paintings of Brueghel to<br />
bring out the general indifference of humanity towards individual suffering. He refers to the first<br />
painting ‘The Numbering at Bethlehem’, which depicts the birth of Christ at Bethlehem. He says<br />
that on the one side, the old people are religiously praying and are eagerly waiting for the<br />
miraculous birth of Christ and strangely enough, on the other side, the children are playing as usual.<br />
They are busy in their activities like skating on a pond at the boundary of the jungle. The lines<br />
depict that the world is apathetic even to the unusual events like the birth of Christ. Here, the poet<br />
makes a searching observation on the subject of human apathy to extraordinary events like the birth<br />
of Christ through the contrast of ‘the aged’ and ‘the children’.<br />
Again, the poet reinforces his idea mentioned in the beginning that the ancient painters<br />
understood the real position of suffering in life i.e. inevitability and the general indifference towards<br />
it. The poet validates this point by introducing details about a painting of Brueghel which depicts<br />
the Crucifixion of Christ. The poet points out that the ancient painters knew that even a great tragic<br />
event like Christ’s crucifixion is just a usual occurrence for the world. The painting displays that<br />
34
Christ is being crucified in a secluded corner in an untidy place. In another corner the executioner’s<br />
horse is rubbing its back against a tree quite unconcerned. The dogs are leading their doggy life and<br />
are not even the least bothered about the tragic incident. In this manner the poet underlines the<br />
indifferent attitude of the worldly creatures to the sufferings of an individual.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Brueghel’s Icarus—One of the most original and most popular paintings of Brueghel, an Italian<br />
painter of 16 th Century.<br />
For instance — For Example<br />
Leisurely — In an easy manner<br />
Ploughmen — Farmer<br />
The disaster —The misfortune, (here) the fall of Icarus.<br />
Splash — (here) The sound of Icarus falling into the sea<br />
The Forsaken cry — The painful and miserable cry<br />
Expensive — Costly<br />
Delicate — Soft, fine<br />
Amazing — Wonderful/surprising<br />
Icarus — According to Greek mythology, Daedalus was an artist who made the Cretan Labyrinth (a<br />
maze). In order to get out of it, he designed wings of wax for his son Icarus and himself. Icarus who<br />
was excessively ambitious flew too near the sun and fell to death when the waxen wings melted.<br />
Icarus is quoted as an example of excessive ambition bringing about an inglorious fall but here in<br />
this poem the poet (Auden) uses Brueghel’s Icarus pictured in painting as an illustration of central<br />
argument of his poem i.e. as a symbol of individual suffering.<br />
Explanation — These are the concluding lines of the poem. Here, the poet refers to another<br />
painting of Brueghel titled ‘Fall of Icarus’, which is built round the theme that excessive ambition<br />
brings about an inglorious down fall. According to Greek mythology, daedalus was an artist who<br />
made the Cretan Labyrinth (a maze). In order to get out of it he designed wings of wax for his son<br />
Icarus and himself. Icarus in a fit of ambition flew too near the sun and fell to his death when the<br />
waxen wings melted. Icarus is quoted as an example of excessive ambition bringing about an<br />
inglorious downfall. The poet uses Brueghel’s painting of Icarus as an illustration of the statement<br />
he has made at the opening of the poem that the old masters of art understood correctly the position<br />
of human suffering in this world. In the painting, Icarus is shown to be falling from above down into<br />
the sea. But everything appears to be indifferent to this happening. It appears to be diverting away<br />
from the tragedy in a leisurely manner. The farmers working on their fields must have heard the<br />
sound and his agonising miserable cry but they did not bother because for them it was not an<br />
important event. The sun kept on shining as usual unconcerned about the fall. Its rays rather fell on<br />
Icarus’s white legs which were fast disappearing into the green water of the ocean. The crew of the<br />
costly and delicate ship must have observed a boy falling out of the sky as something wonderful-a<br />
miracle and remained indifferent to the tragic fall. The ship was in a hurry to reach its destination.<br />
So it kept on its voyage calmly without showing any concern for the misfotune of Icarus.<br />
These lines give details of the setting or the background against which Icarus is shown<br />
falling into the sea. The ploughmen, the sun and the ship all are shown going about their own<br />
business, turning leisurely away from the disaster of the young boy falling into the sea. The words<br />
‘turn away’ and ‘leisurely’ are highly ironic, so too are the phrases ‘not an important failure’ and<br />
‘sailed calmly on’. What is remarkable about Auden’s description of these items is his deliberately<br />
35
level tone, which makes the irony all the more sharp. The cold indifference of life to an individual is<br />
sharply evoked. Both humanity and nature are indifferent to individual suffering.<br />
Introduction — W. H. Auden visited Musee Des Beaux Arts (The Museum of Fine Arts) in 1938<br />
during his winter sojourn in Brussels. In this museum he came across three beautiful paintings of<br />
Brueghel, an Italian painter of 16 th Century. Deeply inspired by those paintings Auden composed<br />
one of his most celebrated short lyrical pieces entitled ‘Musee Des Beaux Arts’ (The Museum of<br />
Fine Arts) in December, 1938. Brueghel’s paintings transported Auden from the world of art into<br />
his own world of complexities and enabled him to confront the reality in a fresh manner. The<br />
thought content in the three paintings—‘The Numbering at Bethleham’, ‘The Massacre of the<br />
Innocents’ and ‘Fall of Icarus’ motivated him to envisage the central argument of the poem. The<br />
poet uses the imagery of Brueghel’s paintings as an objective co-relative to demonstrate the<br />
universal nature and timelessness of the theme—individual suffering versus human apathy.<br />
Summary — Auden begins his one of the most celebrated short lyrics ‘Musee Des Beaux Arts’ by<br />
extolling the ancient painters like Brueghel. At the very outset, he states that the concept of the<br />
ancient artists regarding individual suffering was quite rational, they rightly understood the nature<br />
of human suffering and correctly painted it in their paintings. They opined that suffering is inherent<br />
in human condition. This view pictured in their paintings motivated Auden to make a moving<br />
observation on suffering. The poet points out that the routine activities continue in life in spite of<br />
individual suffering. The world at large remains indifferent to individual suffering. The poet uses<br />
imagery from Brueghel’s paintings to validate his own view point. He refers to the first painting—<br />
‘The Numbering at Bethleham’, which depicts the birth of Christ at Bethleham. He pinpoints that<br />
old people are sincerely praying and are eagerly waiting for the miraculous birth, whereas, children<br />
are playing and doing activities like skating, etc. Children’s apathy shows general indifference to the<br />
unusual events like the birth of Christ.<br />
The poet reinforces his idea of inevitability of suffering and the general indifference to it by<br />
introducing another illustration. He, again, refers to Brueghel’s painting ‘The Massacre of<br />
Innocents’ which precisely depicts the crucifixion of Christ. The painting displays that Christ is<br />
being crucified in a corner in an untidy place, while in another corner, the executioner’s horse is<br />
rubbing its back against a tree and the dogs are leading their doggy life. Even a great tragic event<br />
like Christ’s crucifixion is a usual occurrence for the worldly creatures.<br />
The poet concludes the poem by referring to another painting of Brueghel entitled ‘Fall of<br />
Icarus’ which is built round the theme that excessive ambition brings about an inglorious down fall.<br />
Auden uses Brueghel’s painting as an illustration of the central argument of this poem. In this<br />
painting Icarus was shown to be falling from above down into the sea. No body took notice of this<br />
tragic incident. The ploughman did not consider it an important event so he did not bother about his<br />
cry of pain, the sun shone as usual, its rays were falling on his white legs, which were disappearing<br />
in to the green water of the sea and the crew of the costly and delicate ship, which sailed ‘calmly on’<br />
without showing any concern to the misfortunes of Icarus, must have observed a boy falling out of<br />
the sky as some thing wonderful and remained indifferent to the tragic fall. All these illustrations<br />
ironically bring to sharp focus the intended effect and establish the fact that humanity and nature are<br />
indifferent to individual suffering.<br />
Critical Appreciation — W.H. Auden successfully and systematically develops the theme of<br />
indifference of humanity and nature to the individual suffering with the help of imagery of<br />
Brueghel’s paintings. The strength of the poem lies in the searching and moving observation it<br />
36
makes on human suffering. The poem shows the poet’s awareness of the fact of human apathy to<br />
individual suffering. The poet’s keen observation, profound perception and deep insight go a long<br />
way in bringing his viewpoint to the forefront.<br />
The poet opines that individual tragedy is insignificant in the scheme of Nature and the<br />
world. At the very outset of the poem he states that the great painters correctly depicted the place<br />
and significance of individual suffering in the scheme of things. They knew that the routine<br />
activities will continue in spite of suffering on individual plane. Nature and humanity at large are<br />
pathetically indifferent to it. Whatever be the depth or magnitude of the individual suffering, the<br />
world moves on callously with its routine activities.<br />
Auden’s in-depth analytical insight into the art of painting makes him discern ironically the<br />
underlying human indifference to suffering through the contrast of age and childhood. In<br />
‘Brueghel’s Numbering at Bethleham’ the poet uses contrasting images by making the old anxiously<br />
and eagerly waiting for the miraculous birth which further symbolises bright future expectations and<br />
by presenting the children who ignore the incident and keep on playing. The ironical sting is<br />
discernible in the expectations of the old and the indifference of the children. Usually the young<br />
look to the future (like the rebirth of Christ) with sanguine expectation and the old are indifferent<br />
and passive about future. The reversal, here, is highly ironical.<br />
Again the poet shows the indifference of Nature to the most momentous of human suffering<br />
through another painting of Brueghel namely, ‘The Massacre of Innocents’. On the one hand, Christ<br />
is being crucified in a secluded corner and on the other hand, the executioner’s horse is rubbing its<br />
back against a tree quite unconcerned. The dogs are leading their doggy life and are not even the<br />
least bothered about crucifixion. The poet evokes the desired effect by contrasting images embodied<br />
in clear phraseology….<br />
there always must be<br />
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating<br />
On a pond at the edge of the wood:<br />
Contrasted against ‘the aged’ who are reverently passionately waiting for the miraculous<br />
birth and the image of crucifixion of Christ contrasted against ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life’<br />
and ‘the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree’. Again, the painting of the fall of<br />
Icarus is representative of individual suffering and the apathy of the world to it. The agonising cry<br />
of Icarus as he fell into the ocean and the indifference of the ploughmen for whom ‘it was not an<br />
important failure’, Nature’s apathy depicted through the sun rays callously falling on his white legs<br />
disappearing into the green water of the sea and the callous indifference of the crew and the ship,<br />
which sailed calmly on when Icarus fell. All these details project an insight into the distortions in<br />
the egocentricity and self-love of the modern man. Ironically the tragedy took place in idyllic<br />
surroundings but no body took notice of it. In the existing scheme of things individual suffering fails<br />
to evoke poignant emotions and hence, it becomes irrelevant. The conspicuous predominance of<br />
other things in Icarus’ painting—the ploughman, the sun shine, the ship painted in the minute<br />
details and the faint image of disappearing legs, through contrast shows that individual suffering is<br />
like a speck in the vast world phenomenon and therefore, insignificant.<br />
Auden’s keen eye penetrates beneath the surface to extract the inner response from the<br />
painting. Finally, the poem turns out to be a bitter ironic condemnation of human indifference to<br />
individual suffering—usually people remain busy in their own activities without showing a concern<br />
for the suffering of others.<br />
37
Though apparently the poem shows Auden’s digging at the selfish nature of human beings,<br />
condemnation of typically selfish <strong>English</strong> attitude and thereby reveals his broad social perspective<br />
that he wants people to show empathy or sympathy to suffering. The poem indirectly suggests the<br />
poet’s deep concern for the anguish of the lonely suffering individual also. The very theme of the<br />
poem—individual predicament versus human apathy exposes Auden’s radicalised middle-class<br />
liberal’s sensibility. He raises the issue of human apathy to individual suffering which shows his<br />
progressive temperament in the sense that he wishes to develop community feelings among people<br />
but the treatment of the issue shows that his bourgeois concern for the individual simmers beneath<br />
the universality of the poem. The poem unfolds Auden’s personal crisis towards the end of the<br />
decade when his revolutionary enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb and he was passing through a<br />
transitional phase. The poem with its supple argument, conversational tone and melody leaves an<br />
indelible imprint on the reader’s mind.<br />
The poem, thus, shows Auden’s sliding perceptively into a phase where he is more and<br />
more inwardly inclined. He seems to seek private vision of the happiness of the individual through<br />
projection of a public reality.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem, ‘Musee Des Beaux Arts’.<br />
2. What is the theme of the poem, ‘Musee Des Beaux Arts’.<br />
Or<br />
Illustrate with examples the theme of Individuality in the poem, ‘Musee Des Beaux’.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Write about the indifference of Nature and humanity to individual suffering.<br />
2. Role of Brueghel’s paintings in the poem.<br />
3. Auden’s Technique in the poem.<br />
38
3. O’ what is that sound<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Thrills — excites<br />
Scarlet Soldiers — Soldiers dressed in scarlet coloured uniforms.<br />
Explanation — This poem apparently deals with the theme of violence, betrayal of love and<br />
patriotism but a deeper scrutiny brings out a juncture when the lovers are placed in a situation where<br />
he has to make a choice between his love and the cause he represents. In the given lines the<br />
intrusion of soldiers into the private lives makes the beloved extremely anxious and she shares it<br />
with her lover and the lover quite casually and complacently replies to her queries. The beloved<br />
listens to the sound of the arrival of the soldiers. She (here) tells her lover that she is listening to the<br />
thrilling sound of the drum beating down in the valley. She wants to know about this from her lover.<br />
In a very casual and complacent manner her lover replies that the sound that she hears is the sound<br />
of the movement of the soldiers around the village. Soldiers who are dressed up in Scarlet uniforms<br />
are marching on.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Flashing — Glinting/blazing/sparkling<br />
The sun on their weapons — The sunlight reflected by their weapons.<br />
Explanation — Then the beloved sees very bright and clear light flashing at a distance. She wants<br />
to know about this clear and bright light. Her lover replies to her query in the same casual tone and<br />
complacent manner. He says that the soldiers are moving slowly forward and the bright light<br />
actually is the sunlight reflected by their weapons.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Gear — Weapons, armour<br />
Manoeuvre— (here) exercise<br />
Warning — (here) Warning the enemy by wielding weapons<br />
Explanation — The theme is built up through a series of questions and in the given lines question<br />
answer series continues. The beloved on seeing the marching scarlet soldiers asks her lover what<br />
those soldiers are doing with their weapons. She further asks what they are doing there in the<br />
morning equipped with their armour. The lover affectionately consoles his beloved by satisfying her<br />
queries in a casual manner. He tells her that they are doing their usual exercise or practice and there<br />
is nothing serious. He further tells her that perhaps they are giving a sort of warning to the enemy.<br />
The lines reveal the beloved’s anxiety to find the fact that the scarlet soldiers are equipped with<br />
armour and have visited the village in the morning time. The lines unfold the lover’s concern for his<br />
beloved also as he wants to comfort his beloved by saying that there is nothing serious.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Wheeling — Turning<br />
Kneeling — Bending down on knees to observe better or may be to make prayer to the Almighty.<br />
Explanation — The beloved’s eyes are fixed on scarlet soldiers. Now she observes their next<br />
move. Her observation gets reflected in the next question which she puts to her lover. She anxiously<br />
asks why the soldiers have left the road they were following. She further asks with repeated<br />
emphasis on last word of the second line why they are turning in a particular direction. The lover, as<br />
39
usual, replies in a causal tone that the soldiers are turning to a particular direction because there<br />
must be a change in the orders from the authorities. The lover observes that his beloved is kneeling<br />
so he asks her why she is doing so. The repetition of the word ‘wheeling’ by the beloved suggests<br />
intensity of emotions and urgency of the situation. She is shown kneeling which brings two<br />
explanations for this act in the reader’s mind-she either bends on knees to observe the scenario<br />
better or she, in her anxiety and fear of the intrusion of the scarlet soldiers in their private life,<br />
kneels down to offer her prayers to the Almighty. The lover, however, is not in a position to<br />
understand her particular behaviour.<br />
Words-Meanings and the Explanatory Notes:<br />
The doctor — The famous doctor in the village<br />
Forces — Soldiers<br />
Explanation — The observation of the beloved is acute enough. She is minutely observing the<br />
marching soldiers. She finds that they have stopped near the house of the village doctor. She fears<br />
that some one must have got injured and the doctor’s help is being sought. They have stopped near<br />
the doctor’s house probably they have stopped their horses there to seek the doctor’s help for the<br />
injured. She asks a question in this regard from her lover as if to confirm that her fears are genuine.<br />
But the lover, on the other hand, tells her that there is nothing serious and none of the soldiers has<br />
got wounded meaning thereby that her fears are false and that she shouldn’t be anxious. The lines<br />
reveal the beloved’s anxiety and the lover’s consolations to her. These help in building up the theme<br />
through anxiety on the one part and the emotional support on the other.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Parson — clergyman<br />
Explanation — The beloved notices that the scarlet soldiers have stopped near parson’s house.<br />
She thinks that the soldiers perhaps want the parson of the village who is an old parson. She asks<br />
from her lover about this to reassure herself that she is right but underneath her apparent uncertainty<br />
lurks the fears associated with the soldiers. The lover again consoles his beloved by telling her that<br />
the soldiers have not stopped to find the parson or to do him any harm but they are just passing by<br />
his gate. They have not gone into his house. The series of anxious questions and casual responses<br />
help to build the main theme.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Farmer — Particular farmer in the village<br />
Cunning — Crafty/artful<br />
Farm — The land used for cultivation/the field<br />
Explanation — In the given lines the beloved refers to the village farmer’s house. She observes<br />
that the scarlet soldiers, with their glinting weapons, have stopped at the crafty farmer’s house. The<br />
farmer’s house is quite near and the beloved gets worried about herself and her lover also. She<br />
thinks that the soldiers may intrude into the farmer’s house. But again the lover tells her that they<br />
have moved past the farm and have started running. With these words the soldier lover prepares<br />
himself to go and respond to the call of duty.<br />
40
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Deceiving — False, (here) the repetition of this word unfolds the intensity of the beloved’s<br />
emotions, her fears, her anxieties and sense of horror at the sight of the scarlet soldiers. She is afraid<br />
that her lover will desert her.<br />
But I must be leaving — (here) The soldier lover is telling his beloved that he must go and do his<br />
duty towards larger community.<br />
Explanation — The lover in these lines prepares to go and respond to the call of duty. The beloved<br />
who is already extremely anxious and afraid is at a loss to understand the situation. The lover, who<br />
was earlier consoling her with his casual, brief and comforting words suddenly decides to leave her.<br />
She pleads with him to stay with her. She reminds him of the oaths of love which he had taken and<br />
promises which he had made. But the lover has to go. He is not oblivious of his promises of love but<br />
he is caught in such a situation where he has to make a definite choice between two alternativesbetween<br />
his individual love i.e. love for his beloved and the cause which he represents. The<br />
predominance of public concern over the individual one is made explicit in these lines, in the lover’s<br />
favourable response to political expediency in the face of individual love and faith. The lines also<br />
bring out Auden’s pragmatic view of love which can bear the pangs of separation and can achieve<br />
the heights of love for a larger community and there by reflects his social perspective. Auden’s antiescapist<br />
approach also comes to fore, as in spite of his beloved’s earnest pleas and his own promises<br />
of love for her, nothing can prevent him from responding to the pressures of public duty.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes.<br />
Splintered — Broken into pieces<br />
Explanation — This is the concluding stanza of the poem. The beloved finally observes them<br />
breaking upon the door of their house to enter into it and take away the soldier lover who is an<br />
honest rebel. She can hear them breaking the lock first and then the door and then she observes that<br />
they have turned towards the soldier stamping the floor with their heavy shoes.<br />
There is anger in their eyes and they have come to catch her soldier lover. These observations<br />
put an end to her queries as the soldier lover makes the final choice and runs away to join his army.<br />
The scarlet soldiers violently smash their locked door and here the climax of the poem is reached<br />
rapidly enough as at this juncture the lover makes the final choice. The emotional outbursts of the<br />
beloved at the sudden developments in the situation are deep enough and reflect the effect of forces<br />
of public events intervening into the private lives.<br />
Introduction — ‘O what is that sound’ is a lyrical ballad. It was originally called ‘The Quarry’. It<br />
was written in Oct., 1932 and was first published in December 1934 in New Verse. It was later<br />
included in Auden’s Collected Poems, 1950’. It is written in traditional ballad stanza and comprises<br />
all the traditional elements of this genre. Its easy and simple diction corresponds well with its form<br />
and beautifully conveys the poet’s view point in a conversational manner.<br />
Summary — The poem dramatically begins with a dialogue between two lovers. The situation in<br />
which these lovers are placed is definitely tense, full of passionate outbursts, implications and<br />
suspense. In a village setting Auden builds up the theme of the poem with a series of questions and<br />
answers.<br />
The beloved listens to the thrilling sound of the scarlet soldiers slowly approaching. She<br />
wants to know about the bright light flashing so clearly over the distance and comes to know that<br />
the bright light is actually the sunlight reflected by the weapons with which the soldiers are<br />
41
equipped. She expresses anxiety over their presence in the village in the morning. The lover<br />
affectionately consoles her by telling her that there is nothing serious. The soldiers are doing their<br />
routine exercise or perhaps they are giving a warning to the enemy. Again she gets confused to see<br />
them wheeling and kneels down. The lover satisfies her confusion by telling her that the soldiers<br />
must have received some new order from the authorities. The lover, however, is not in a position to<br />
understand the act of her keeling down. She either does so to observe the scene of scarlet soldiers<br />
better or fears lead her to kneel in prayer to the Almighty. Then she finds them passing by the house<br />
of the doctor, the parson and the farmer – three important figures of village. Suddenly she finds<br />
them knocking at door of their house and then immediately the lover decides to go from there. The<br />
beloved pleads with him:<br />
O’ where are you going? Stay with me here!<br />
Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?<br />
But the lover gives her false consolations:<br />
I promised to love you, dear,<br />
But I must be leaving.<br />
The lover, who throughout this poem kept on consoling her with his casual, brief and<br />
comforting words in the two concluding stanzas, suddenly decides to leave her in spite of her<br />
insistent requests.<br />
Auden’s lover makes his final choice in favour of his duty. He is not oblivious of his<br />
promises of love but he is caught in a situation where he has to make a choice between his love and<br />
the cause he represents. The poem focuses on the emotional state of the lovers and the urgency of<br />
the situation in a village setting. The poem begins quite dramatically and reaches a rapid climax.<br />
Auden’s main aim seems to be to build a situation and an atmosphere – a romantic situation<br />
and an emotionally charged atmosphere, yielding forth his peculiar view point through the dialogues<br />
of two lovers. He successfully builds up the theme through contrast – the hurry and anxiety on the<br />
part of the beloved and brief and composed replies of the lover and the contrast of individual love<br />
and political expediency. Though openly Auden advocates the public issue, the private concerns<br />
continue lurking beneath the texture of the poem. Nonetheless, Auden manages to place the public<br />
concern above the private one in this poem. His final emphasis on the lover’s choice in favour of<br />
duty, in spite of his intensity of love for his beloved and his freedom to serve larger community<br />
even at the cost of individual love represent his active social phase.<br />
Critical Appreciation — ‘O what is that sound’ is a lyrical ballad comprising all the traditional<br />
elements of the genre. It is written in the traditional ballad stanza and easy and simple diction which<br />
corresponds well with its form and which further helps in conveying the poet’s viewpoint in a<br />
conversational language.<br />
The poem presents an emotionally charged situation - a situation which is definitely tense<br />
and is full of implications and suspense. Apparently the poem deals with the theme of violence,<br />
betrayal of love and patriotism. Spears points out that in the early Thirties nightmare image of<br />
soldiers brutally intruding upon private citizens was common. The pattern of the dialogue is of rapid<br />
questions by the woman in the hurried anapaestic beat and ending with the word repeated, as<br />
though, in horrified unbelief answered by the man in briefer lines laconically and deceptively<br />
unemotional. The following words, which Auden puts into the beloved’s mouth, affirm Spear’s<br />
view point:<br />
O’ where are you going? Stay with me here!<br />
Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?<br />
42
A close scrutiny brings out the final choice of the lover in favour of a call for duty. Auden’s<br />
lover is not oblivious of his promises of love but he is caught in a situation where he has to make a<br />
choice between his love and the cause which he represents. The lover’s choice in favour of duty is<br />
unavoidable; hence, his betrayal may be termed as thoughtful and calculated.<br />
The lover’s final decision to respond to the call of duty enables the poet to build the theme<br />
of social commitment by presenting a contrast between private love and situational urgency. The<br />
pressures of private concerns beneath the manifest social concerns are clearly discernible in<br />
expressions denoting the approaching thumping march of the scarlet soldiers, the beloved’s<br />
passionate reactions to these as well as to the lover’s false consolations:<br />
‘I promised to love you, dear,<br />
But I must be leaving.<br />
Here, the final emphasis on the lover’s choice in favour of duty in spite of his intensity of<br />
love for his beloved and his freedom to serve a larger community at the cost of individual love<br />
represent Auden’s active social phase.<br />
The poem, thus, expresses a dextrous fusion of private and public vision where the concern<br />
of Auden’s lover for the public issues weighs far above his private individual love for his beloved.<br />
The predominance of public concern over the individual one is made explicit in the lover’s<br />
favourable response to the political expediency in the face of love and faith, and the thematic pattern<br />
– romantic lovers placed in a situation which calls for action for a larger community brings out<br />
Auden’s pragmatic view of love, which can bear the pangs of separation and can achieve the heights<br />
of love for a larger community, reflects Auden’s social prospective. Auden’s anti-escapist approach<br />
also comes to fore, as in spite of his beloved’s earnest pleas and anxieties, he does not find love<br />
tempting enough to prevent him from responding to the pressures of the public events.<br />
The poem also reveals the poet’s fear of public events – menace of violence intruding upon<br />
the private lives. The vocabulary - marching thumping soldiers, scarlet soldiers and the beloved’s<br />
emotional reactions at their sight represent the forces of public events intervening into the private<br />
lives of the people. The repetition of the last word in the second line of each stanza underlines the<br />
sense of urgency in the central situation of the poem. The intensity of the lady’s emotions – her<br />
fears, her anxiety at the sight of approaching scarlet soldiers is deep enough. But the call of duty for<br />
a cause is all the more intense and puts an emphasis on the urgency of making a definite choice.<br />
Auden, here, champions the public cause and not the romantic escape into the emotional love of his<br />
beloved.<br />
The simple form of the poem helps in conveying the poet’s viewpoint in an effective<br />
manner. The poem, however, is remarkable for its lyricism-a characteristic of traditional ballad.<br />
Simplicity of language, clarity of expression and richness of vocabulary are strikingly noticeable in<br />
the poem. Auden successfully builds up the theme through the device of contrast – the hurry and<br />
anxiety on the part of the beloved and brief and composed replies of the lover and the contrast of<br />
individual love and political expediency and social love. The simple ballad form is aptly suited to<br />
make the message insistent and the urgency of its repetitions and tone sharp enough to reinforce the<br />
gravity and horror of the situation.<br />
On the other hand, Auden’s projection of his lover giving casual and complacent replies to<br />
his beloved’s anxious and restless queries show that the lover wants to comfort his beloved by<br />
saying that there is nothing serious. This shows that Auden’s lover is torn between public and<br />
private anxieties. Though openly he advocates the public issue, the private concerns continue<br />
43
lurking beneath the texture of the poem. Nonetheless, Auden manages to place his public concerns<br />
above the private ones in his poem.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. Trace the development of thought in the poem, ‘O what is that Sound’.<br />
2. Write down the theme of the poem, ‘O what is that sound.<br />
3. Write down the critical appreciation of the poem.<br />
4. ‘O what is that Sound’ is a manifestation of Auden’s active social phase.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Auden’s concept of love.<br />
2. Individual love versus situational urgency or social love.<br />
44
4. September 1, 1939<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Dives — Bars, taverns<br />
Fifty second street — A part of NewYork city<br />
Uncertain and afraid — Fearful of inevitable war and not sure about future<br />
Clever hopes — The hopes which were built-up as a result of negotiations with Hitler and<br />
Mussolini.<br />
Low dishonest decade — The decade of Thirties from 1930-40 was dishonest because the<br />
compromise was made with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini who were bound to ditch.<br />
Waves of anger and fear — Anger at the aggression on Poland and fear of attack.<br />
Bright and darkened lands — The nations which were untouched by war and the nations where<br />
clouds of war were looming large.<br />
Unmentionable odour of death — A vague uncertain feeling of impending death<br />
Offend - To cause injury, to hurt<br />
Explanation — The poem was written on the date when Hitler attacked Poland. At this juncture,<br />
the poet was in the U.S.A. He was sitting in one of the bars in the Fifty second street in NewYork.<br />
He was afraid of the imminent war and uncertain about future because the thirties decade had<br />
proved to be dishonest because dishonest efforts were made to reach a compromise with Germany<br />
knowing very well that a compromise with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini was meaningless.<br />
There were feelings of anger and fear everywhere. The countries which were yet untouched by war<br />
and those where war clouds were looming large were equally disturbed. The fear of impending war<br />
and the resultant death intruded into the private lives of the people also. As Hitler attacked Poland<br />
on 1 st September, 1939, there was a vague uncertain feeling that death or destruction was close by.<br />
In the above lines Auden has expressed his sense of disillusionment.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Accurate scholarship — Appropriate knowledge<br />
Unearth — Reveal<br />
Offence — Crime<br />
Luther — The father of Protestantism who initiated the process of disintegration of Christendom<br />
into separate states.<br />
Linz — Birth place of Hitler, (here) the place is mentioned to refer to the insults and injustices<br />
suffered by Hitler in his boyhood.<br />
Imago — Final stage of evolution of an insect. Here, it is used for fully grown up Hitler.<br />
psychopathic god — A person who is abnormal. Here, the expression refers to Hitler assuming such<br />
behaviour because of the psychological injuries he had suffered earlier.<br />
Explanation — In these particular lines the poet investigates into the causes of war. He grapples<br />
retrospectively with the issue. Auden points out that an appropriate study of history will reveal the<br />
true cause of the offence which created upheaval in German nation. The study will reveal that<br />
Luther, the father of Protestantism began the process of disintegration of Christendom into separate<br />
states. With the result, Germany was separated from Roman Empire. The adult Hitler caught the<br />
spark – German nationalism became a madness with him and he burned with a desire to acquire<br />
absolute power. The poet holds injustices and insults suffered by Hitler in his boyhood responsible<br />
for his behaviour and fascist tendencies responsible for the eventuality. Here the poet underlines that<br />
45
it is a known fact that the school life is formative period for the children. Their behaviour and<br />
manners are moulded and given orientation at schools. Those who are treated harsh and taught evil<br />
become harsh and evil when they grow. Thus, Auden provides Freudian psycho-analysis for Hitler’s<br />
behaviour and attributes it to the psychological injuries done to him in his boyhood.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Exiled Thucydides — A Greek historian condemned as traitor and so sent into exile for 20 years.<br />
Elderly Rubbish — Non sense spoken gravely<br />
Apathetic grave —(here) Indifferent and insensitive people<br />
Enlightenment — Knowledge / awareness<br />
Habit forming pain — Suffering to which one becomes habitual<br />
Mismanagement — Improper administration.<br />
Explanation — In the given lines the poet refers to Thucydides, a Greek historian who was<br />
condemned as a traitor and was exiled for 20 years. Thucydides analysed the nature of democracy<br />
and the fact that the dictators have exploited and twisted the principles of democracy to suit their<br />
selfish ends. They give nonsensical speeches gravely and continue to deceive people because the<br />
people are indifferent and passive. They are devoid of wisdom and knowledge. They have accepted<br />
the status quo. They have become habitual, taking suffering in their stride. It is as if it were a habit<br />
forming pain, a routine matter. They have become dead to rational thinking and have lost their<br />
sensitivity. The poet concludes this stanza by pointing out that the masses are going to suffer due to<br />
their irrationality, insensitivity and apathy and the improper administration of the politicians and<br />
leaders. In these lines, Auden indirectly underlines the need for public awakening—if the masses<br />
are wide awake they can interrogate the administration. Ignorance of masses, Auden discerns, is a<br />
negative point and in his observations lie leftist leanings.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Neutral air — The reference is to the U.S.A. which appeared neutral in the early stages of war.<br />
Sky scrapers — Multi-storeyed high buildings in New York<br />
Proclaim — Declare<br />
Collective Man — The state, the establishment, society<br />
Competitive excuse — Different countries compete with each other in justifying their actions and<br />
giving lame excuses for the predicament of common man.<br />
Euphoric dream — False dreams of healthy and happy life<br />
Imperialism — Policy of extending a country’s empire and influence<br />
International wrong — The wrongs done by America to the other countries of the world.<br />
Explanation — W. H. Auden was sitting in a bar on the Fifty Second street in New York. In this<br />
stanza he makes his observations about America and other capitalist countries. He points out that<br />
America’s fake neutrality gets exposed in sky scrapers and pseudo talks of Collective Man and<br />
speaks volumes for the hypocrisy of capitalist countries. Such countries compete with each other<br />
justifying their own actions and giving lame excuses for the causes of human predicament but the<br />
reality is other wise. Their false promises of a happier, healthier and brighter life are soon broken<br />
when the true face of imperialism is unveiled. Auden, here, compares the tall buildings and other<br />
reflections of collective power to the mirror in which human beings can clearly see the true face of<br />
imperialism and the wrongs which have been done by so-called neutral countries to the other<br />
countries of the world.<br />
46
In these lines W. H. Auden makes an effort to discover the maladies in the American<br />
capitalist system and he uses significantly Marxist vocabulary—Imperialism, competition and<br />
Collective Man, etc. He brings out the hypocrisy of capitalist countries. He underlines the fact that<br />
capitalist countries give individual freedom and indirectly encourage the spirit of competition<br />
between unequals which results in exploitation of different weaker nations by stronger ones.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Faces along the bar — Ordinary people in the bar<br />
Average day — Daily routine<br />
Conventions — Routine activities<br />
Conspire — Make a secret plot<br />
This fort — Refers to the bar, which protects the people like a fort.<br />
The furniture of home — Comfort and security of home<br />
Lost in haunted wood — Lost in horror and darkness of jungle<br />
The night — (here) It refers to uncertain and unknown future<br />
Explanation — Auden feels that the increasing imperialistic tendencies of capitalist countries are a<br />
standing threat to the happiness of the individuals. He refers to the men and women lost in their<br />
routine activities of life. They have little capacity to counteract the hostile forces of the world so<br />
they seek escape routes in superficial entertainments. He clearly hints at the ordinary people sitting<br />
in the bar. While being lost in superficial pleasures of life, they do not want to be disturbed at all.<br />
For them, lights should never go out and music should have no ending. The bar protects them like a<br />
fort from the hazards and challenges of the outside world. They do not want to give up their routine<br />
entertainments as they are afraid of reality. They are like children afraid of the darkness and horror<br />
about the uncertain future like the children who are fearful of darkness and horror of night.<br />
The stanza reveals that the poet is more concerned about the security of the private<br />
individuals than about the public event of outbreak of the Second World War. Shift of emphasis in<br />
his stance—from the public to the private—comes out very clearly in his bourgeois concern for the<br />
safety of individuals.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Windiest militant trash — High sounding but empty talks which the politicians do to befool the<br />
masses.<br />
Crude — Rough, (here) harmful<br />
Nijinsky — A Russian dancer (1890-1950)<br />
Diaghilev — A Russian organiser of dances who wanted to be loved alone.<br />
Error bred in bone — A sin which is in the very blood of all human beings.<br />
Craves — Longs for, desires strongly<br />
Universal love — Love of all<br />
Explanation — In these lines the poet condemns self-love. He says that high sounding empty and<br />
incoherent nonsensical talk with which the political leaders try to befool the masses is not as rough<br />
and harmful as the desire of human beings to be loved alone. Auden states that Nijinsky who was a<br />
Russian dancer (1890-1950) wrote about Diaghilev, a Russian organiser of dances, that he wanted<br />
to be loved alone. Auden calls Nijinsky made because what he wrote about Diaghilev is true of the<br />
common man. It is a mistake, a sin, which is in the very blood of human beings. Every man and<br />
woman strongly desires what he or she can not have. It is a wish to be loved alone and not love for<br />
all, which is the cause of human predicament.<br />
47
In this stanza Auden condemns selfish and possessive love and advocates universal love as<br />
a panacea for the ills of mankind.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Conservative dark — The darkness of routine activities in which the common men are lost to the<br />
extent that they do not know the reality.<br />
Ethical life — Morality or life which gives importance to moral values.<br />
Commuters — Daily passengers/ordinary people<br />
Concentrate — To devote attention<br />
Compulsory game — The game of befooling and deceiving the masses or common people<br />
The deaf — Those who do not listen or are insensitive to religious or moral values<br />
The dumb — Those who can not speak out or express themselves<br />
Explanation — In these lines Auden unveils the spiritual sterility of human beings. He says that<br />
the common men fail to see the reality because they are thoroughly lost in the darkness of their<br />
routine activities. When they (ordinary people) make an effort to come out of the darkness of<br />
selfishness and try to adopt ethical life and follow some moral values like being sincere to their<br />
wives and do their work sincerely in the office, then the rulers or the administrators once again start<br />
their game of befooling and deceiving them because it is some thing irresistible for them and the<br />
game goes on incessantly. There is no end to this. None can save the rulers from their degeneration<br />
because they have lost their moral moorings.<br />
In the above lines Auden unveils the spiritual sterility of the people. In their routine<br />
activities they think of morality only in crisis - the reference to ethical life, in these, lines is in the<br />
context of crisis of World War –II.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Voice — (here) Language to expose modern hypocrisies and pretensions<br />
The romantic lie — The mistake that one can escape reality through romantic love.<br />
Sensual man in the street — Common man given to the pleasures of sex and possessive love.<br />
The lie of Authority — The mistake which the rulers commit in thinking that their worldly power<br />
represented by sky scrapers, etc. can protect them.<br />
Explanation — The poet is unable to suggest any alternative. He has only his voice. As s poet he<br />
has expression—a language to expose modern hypocrisies and hidden lies—mistake in the brain of<br />
the common man that he can escape reality through romantic love and the mistake which the rulers<br />
commit in thinking that their worldly power represented by tall buildings and other things can<br />
protect them in an hour of crisis. The poet says that there is no such thing as the State or Collective<br />
Man. He says that the view that one exists alone is wrong but then he considers the view of<br />
Collective Man or the State to be equally wrong. The question of survival is important. There is no<br />
choice as one can not afford to be hungry whether one is an ordinary citizen or the police. The only<br />
solution to the human predicament is universal love when self-love and possessive love change in to<br />
love for all or universal love. Human beings must love one another or they will cease to exist.<br />
On re-reading his poem Auden modified the concluding line of this stanza and wrote, ‘we<br />
must love one another and die’ but he was not satisfied with this line because this makes the whole<br />
issue inextricable and hopeless. This suggests that the situation is irreparable even universal love<br />
cannot resolve the crisis. Ultimately, Auden decided in favour of not including this poem itself in<br />
48
his Collected Shorter Poems, 1950. Auden himself explains his reasons for rejecting this poem,<br />
“….The whole poem I realised was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped”.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Defenceless — Unprotected/helpless<br />
The night — Darkness of formidable event of war<br />
Stupor — Dazed condition or senselessness<br />
Dotted — Scattered like dots.<br />
Ironic points of light — (here) The reference is to a few wise and peaceful people who remain<br />
unacknowledged.<br />
The just — The wise people who flash out their messages to ignorant masses.<br />
Composed — Built up<br />
Eros — Greek god of sexual love, Romantic love which is selfish and possessive.<br />
Beleaguered — Surrounded/tortured. Suffering from<br />
Negation and despair — Negative thinking – death wish and rejection of spirituality which lead to<br />
disappointment<br />
Affirming flame — Illuminating message of hope.<br />
Explanation — The poet feels handicapped to offer any tangible solution to the contemporary<br />
crisis. He feels disillusioned to see the existing state of affairs at the time of out break of the Second<br />
World War. He has only his language to expose the hypocrisy, the folded lies of the modern age, the<br />
mistake in the brain of the common man given to the pleasures of sex and love that he can take<br />
escape from reality into the world of romantic love, the mistake in the minds of the rulers of the<br />
world.<br />
In this concluding stanza he says that the world lies in dazed or unconscious condition<br />
unprotected in the darkness of formidable event of war. Even at this juncture, the illuminating<br />
messages of hope from a few wise, just and peaceful people shine here and there like points of light.<br />
Here, the poet uses this simile ironically because the just people are flashing out their optimistic<br />
messages to the ignorant people who are unable to acknowledge their significance for them. As the<br />
points of light will be visible only when human beings will open their eyes and see them. Similarly,<br />
the sanguine messages of the just will become meaningful only when the common men will pay<br />
attention to them. The poet includes himself in the same category. He says that he is also made of<br />
the same fault of self-love and dust. Like ordinary people he also suffers from spiritual sterility and<br />
hence, filled with despair. But he wants to give a message of hope that universal love is the only<br />
solution for the survival of humanity in an hour of crisis.<br />
In these lines Auden affirms his faith in the humanistic values directed to the healthy<br />
development of individuals which will further help in the establishment of a well-ordered social setup.<br />
Introduction — First published in New Republic Oct., 1939, Auden’s poem, ‘September 1, 1939’<br />
assumes its title from the date of Hitler’s invasion on Poland. The occasion of the poem was the<br />
resurgence of fascist power with Hitler’s attack on Poland and the resultant threat of World War-II,<br />
which shattered Auden’s revolutionary dreams in a nightmarish manner. The poem captures the<br />
poet’s reflections on the mood of Europe vis-à-vis momentous and formidable historical event. At a<br />
later stage Auden found, as he himself puts it, the poem is “infected with an incurable dishonesty”<br />
and finally did not include it in his Collected Shorter Poems, 1950.<br />
49
Summary — The poem begins with Auden sitting in one of the bars situated on Fifty Second<br />
Street in New York. In this poem, the poet deals with the topical issue of the Second World War. He<br />
captures the mood of Europe on the eve of the out break of the world war—the feelings of fear and<br />
uncertainty that preceded the war and investigates into its causes and finally gives suggestions to<br />
resolve the crisis. The setting of the poem is a bar in the city of New York. In the first stanza, the<br />
poet refers to the waves of anger which engulfed the world—intruding even upon the private lives<br />
of the people with an uncertain fear of impending doom. He is sitting in a Bar, afraid of the<br />
imminent war and uncertain of future because hopes that had been built up on skilful negotiations<br />
and pacts with Hitler and Mussolini were shattered. He calls the decade of the thirties dishonest<br />
because he thinks that dishonest efforts were made to reach a compromise with Germany. In the<br />
second stanza, the poet investigates into the causes that led to the war. Grappling retrospectively<br />
with the issue, the poet concludes that the German Nationalism which began with Luther became a<br />
sort of madness with Hitler, letting loose an atmosphere of disintegration and violence. The poet<br />
holds injustices and insults—the psychological injuries suffered by Hitler in early life responsible<br />
for Hitler’s behaviour and fascist tendencies responsible for the eventuality of war. He<br />
unequivocally points out:<br />
Those to whom evil is done<br />
Do evil in return<br />
In the third stanza, the poet refers to Thucydides, a Greek historian (460 BC- 400 BC) who<br />
was condemned as a traitor and had to live in exile for 20 years, or pointing out political causes of<br />
war. Thucydides analysed the nature of democracy and the fact that the dictators have exploited and<br />
twisted the principles of democracy to suit their selfish ends. They continue to deceive people<br />
through their nonsensical talks because the masses are devoid of wisdom and knowledge and have<br />
accepted the existing state of affairs. It is as if it were a ‘habit forming pain’ – a matter of routine.<br />
Thus, the irrationality, insensitivity and apathy of the masses lead to their exploitation at the hands<br />
of cruel administrators and rulers. The poet indirectly hints at the impending war which will happen<br />
due to the failure and mismanagement of their leaders, rulers and politicians.<br />
In the fourth stanza, the poet says that American dream of neutrality is merely euphoric.<br />
The skyscrapers and the notion of Collective Man clearly hint at the grave implications of this<br />
stance. Actually the capitalist countries give individual freedom and indirectly encourage<br />
competition between unequal ones which results in exploitation of different weaker nations by<br />
stronger ones. Such countries compete with each other justifying their own actions and giving false<br />
excuses for the causes of human predicament but the reality is otherwise. Their false promises of a<br />
happier and healthier life are soon shattered when the true face of Imperialism is unveiled.<br />
In the fifth stanza, the poet gives the reader a peep into the tense situation which is so<br />
formidable that people are afraid of confronting it. The poet visualises men lost in their petty private<br />
anxieties having little capacity to counteract the hostile forces. Hence they seek escape routes to<br />
superficial entertainments without being disturbed. They do not want that lights should ever go out<br />
or music should ever cease. The bar protects them like a fort from the hazards and challenges of the<br />
outside world.<br />
In the sixth stanza, the poet points out that the empty and incoherent nonsense with which<br />
the politicians try to deceive people is not so crude as human beings’ desire to be loved alone. What<br />
Nijinsky, a Russian dancer, wrote about Diaghilev, an organiser of dances who wanted to be loved<br />
alone is true of every human heart. It is a mistake—a sin which is in the very blood of all human<br />
beings. Hitler’s self-love made him ambitious which further led to his imperialistic tendencies.<br />
50
Auden, in this stanza, condemns selfish and possessive love and advocates universal love and<br />
humanistic means to resolve the contemporary crisis.<br />
In the seventh stanza, Auden brings out insensitivity of human beings to the spiritual,<br />
religious and moral values. However, fear of impending war and ensuing death compel some<br />
morality out of spiritually sterile people. Auden feels that nothing can save the deaf and the dumb<br />
from the catastrophe except morality.<br />
The poet concludes the poem with a vague suggestion of ‘points of light’. These points of<br />
light are the few just and wise people who flash out their illuminating messages for the ignorant<br />
masses. The poet himself is victim of Eros, death wish, rejection of spiritual values which cause<br />
despair but in an atmosphere of negation and despair he seeks to give the world sanguine message<br />
of hope that universal love is the only panacea for the survival of mankind. Auden affirms his faith<br />
in the humanistic values directed at the development of individuals.<br />
Critical Appreciation — ‘September 1, 1939’ deals with the topical issue of the Second World<br />
War but Auden’s scepticism about the success of any radical measure to change the society also<br />
comes to fore. There is a growing feeling about thirties decade being a low dishonest decade. The<br />
poem expresses Auden’s disillusionment and bitterness at the resurgence of fascist power with<br />
Hitler’s attack on Poland and the resultant threat of World War-II which shattered Auden’s<br />
revolutionary dreams in a nightmarish manner. It captures the poet’s reflections on the mood of<br />
Europe in the face of momentous and formidable historical event. The poet refers to the waves of<br />
anger which engulfed the darkened lands of the earth affecting adversely even the private lives with<br />
an uncertain fear of impending doom.<br />
Investigating into the causes that led to war Auden concludes that Hitler’s self-love resulted<br />
in fascism and his fascist tendencies were responsible for the eventuality which intruded even upon<br />
the private lives of the people. Grappling retrospectively with the issue he concludes that the<br />
German Nationalism, which was triggered with Luther, became a sort of madness with Hitler<br />
letting loose disintegration and violence. The poet holds injustices and injuries suffered by Hitler in<br />
childhood responsible for Hitler’s fascist tendencies:<br />
Those to whom evil is done<br />
Do evil in return<br />
Auden, thus, provides Freudian Psycho-analysis for Hitler’s behaviour and attributes all<br />
crimes to individual wish for self-love the surging sense of identity which comes from lack of<br />
faith in and acceptance of existence of others:<br />
For the error bred in the bone<br />
Of each woman and each man<br />
Craves what it cannot have,<br />
Not universal love<br />
But to be loved alone.<br />
The impact of incidents in the German society, no doubt, moulded Hitler’s personality but<br />
making war an individual burden and attributing it to Hitler is not justified. It was rather the<br />
cumulative impact of the whole ethos of the times. Hence, a sense of uncertainty lurks beneath<br />
Auden’s analysis of the causes of war in this poem.<br />
The poet refers to Thucydides who analysed the nature of democracy and the fact that the<br />
dictators have exploited and twisted the principles of democracy to suit their selfish ends. They<br />
51
continue to deceive people through their nonsensical talks because the masses are devoid of wisdom<br />
and knowledge and have accepted the existing state of affairs; it is as if it were a ‘habit forming<br />
pain’, a matter of routine. The people have become deadened to rational thinking and have lost<br />
sensitivity. Thus, the irrationality, insensitivity and apathy of the masses are the factors which lead<br />
to their exploitation at the hands of cruel administrators and rulers.<br />
Auden indirectly underlines the need for public awakening if the masses are wide awake<br />
they can interrogate the administration. Ignorance of masses, Auden discerns, is a negative point<br />
and this observation shows his leftist leanings.<br />
Auden has bitter realisation that American dream of neutrality is merely euphoric and it is<br />
high time that America reconsidered its stand. He clearly hints at the grave implications. The sky<br />
scrapers and the notion of Collective Man representing one State or an establishment are standing<br />
evidence of this fact. Capitalist countries give individual freedom and indirectly encourage the spirit<br />
of competition between unequal ones which results in exploitation of different weaker nations by<br />
stronger ones. Such countries compete with each other justifying their own actions and giving false<br />
excuses for the causes of human predicament but the reality is otherwise. Their false promises of a<br />
happier and healthier life are soon shattered when the true face of imperialism is unveiled.<br />
Thus, socio-economic and political exploitation ultimately results in Imperialism.<br />
America’s fake neutrality gets exposed in skyscrapers and pseudo talks of Collective Man and<br />
speaks volumes for the hypocrisy of capitalist countries.<br />
Auden makes an effort to discover the maladies in the American capitalist system and he<br />
uses significantly Marxist vocabulary—‘Imperialism’, ‘competitive’ and ‘Collective Man’, etc, Yet<br />
his expressions voice his fears rather than confidence of a committed poet:<br />
But who can live for long<br />
In an euphoric dream<br />
Out of the mirror they stare<br />
Imperialism’s face<br />
And the International wrong.<br />
Auden feels that the increasing Imperialistic tendencies of capitalist countries are a standing<br />
threat to the happiness of individuals. Moreover, he visualises men lost in their petty private<br />
anxieties having little capacity to counteract the hostile forces. They seek escape routes in<br />
superficial entertainment without being disturbed—the ‘lights must never go out and the music must<br />
never cease’. The bar protects them like a fort from the hazards and challenges of the outside world.<br />
Their escapist attitude is likened to the children’s state of being:<br />
Lost in haunted wood<br />
Children afraid of the night<br />
Who have never been happy or good.<br />
Thus, the poet here seems to be more concerned about the security of the private individuals<br />
than with the public events.<br />
Auden opines that human beings suffer from a desire to be loved alone. Hitler’s self-love<br />
made him ambitious which further lead to his imperialistic tendencies. Auden here condemns selfish<br />
love and possessive love and advocates universal love and humanistic means to resolve the crisis.<br />
He unveils the spiritual sterility of the people who seek escape from outer realities into romantic<br />
love— an escape from the public events into private vision and forget morality which can lead them<br />
to redemption and which is possible through humanistic values. None can save the rulers from their<br />
52
degeneration because they have lost their moral moorings. Auden here seems to recollect the<br />
euphoric dream of the earlier years of establishing a socialist state and destroying Imperialism,<br />
about earlier period of great cultural achievements and concludes:<br />
Defenceless under the night.<br />
Our world in stupor lies…..<br />
This disillusionment shows that the poet feels handicapped to offer any definite solution —<br />
any alternative. He has only his voice, his language to expose the hypocrisy, the unfolded lies of the<br />
modern age, the mistake in the brain of the common man given to the pleasures of sex and love that<br />
he can escape reality through romantic love, the mistake in the minds of the rulers of the world that<br />
their power represented by the skyscrapers can protect them. Auden feels that the only solution to<br />
the human predicament is ‘universal love’.<br />
There is a vague suggestion of ‘points of light’, in an atmosphere of ‘negation’ and<br />
‘despair’, the just and wise people who flash out their illuminating messages for the faltering<br />
ignorant humanity. The poet himself is a victim of Eros—death wish, rejection of spiritual values<br />
but he is imbued with a desire to give the world a message of hope that the universal love is the only<br />
panacea for the survival of mankind and he affirms his faith in the humanistic values. Auden’s<br />
concern for the exploited individuals and his emphasis on their awakening, his condemnation of<br />
imperialism his ironic exposure of America’s neutrality in the Second World War crisis are<br />
indications of his radicalism and show his social consciousness but his ruminations over the causes<br />
of war appear passive and his solutions individualistic. A poet who earlier held rational and<br />
scientific view of life seems to betray a conservative outlook in holding out abstract theories<br />
regarding eternal human revengeful feelings as causes of war.<br />
In his book, The modern poets-A Critical Introduction, M.L.Rosenthal in his article ‘Auden<br />
and the thirties’ comments, “In this poem as in others written in the same period, Auden was still<br />
‘Political’ but like many others of his Literary generations has turned away from the activistic<br />
idealism that marked his more wholehearted Marxian writing. He did not seek programmatic<br />
alternatives to the communist and popular Frontist set of his earlier thinking. Apparently the whole<br />
realm of political action had became more and more distasteful and with it the need to identify with<br />
the people that communist thought stresses – although one can say, ‘the people, yes’ and follow out<br />
other lines of activism without being a communist. Auden was still very much a political poet, but<br />
in a new way; he used the political situation as an incentive for coaching himself into a tragic vision<br />
of man’s fate and for incantation of Judaeo-Christian humanitarian pieties” 5 .<br />
Rosenthal further comments, “The poem like many of Auden’s foreshadows his later<br />
assertions of a more orthodox Christianity and of a basic social conservatism. Aesthetically such a<br />
development was almost expected …yet in his later work as in his earlier, the irresolute and<br />
tentative edge of sensibility cuts across the doctrine and the dogma early and late, Auden is<br />
obsessed with the question of what man is to do with his terrible new responsibility for himself, now<br />
that the time of unconscious evolution, biological and social, has ended” 6 .<br />
In fact, the poem marks the later phase in Auden’s poetic output during the thirties decade<br />
when his enthusiasm was gradually receding and a change in his attitude was taking place. A shift in<br />
emphasis is discerned here. From outward events the emphasis is shifting to inward – from the<br />
public vision it is receding into private concerns. Hence, in this poem too, he is seeking private<br />
causes to the contemporary crisis and providing individualistic solutions to the social malaise.<br />
Some critics feel that the poem is written in laconic style. Auden has used terse and tense<br />
diction. There is conspicuous lack of imagery. They also note ambiguity and vagueness in the poem.<br />
53
The shortcomings of diction and style may be ignored in view of the didactic stance and prophetic<br />
tone of the poet. Though the poem strikingly lacks in imagery, yet the images of skyscrapers<br />
symbolic of power, the image of activities in bar reflecting escapist attitude and the bar itself<br />
symbolising the world at large, correspond well with the contents of the poem. The poem, no doubt,<br />
suffers from ambiguity and vagueness at some places. The poet does not give any explanation of the<br />
expressions like ‘just people’ and ethical life and holds no accountability for it. Auden himself is<br />
known to have rejected this poem and he did not include it in his Collected Shorter Poems, 1950 as<br />
he was not satisfied with the line, “We must love one another or die”, in the 8 th stanza.<br />
Though the poem has certain weaknesses, yet it does show Auden’s reactions to the<br />
catastrophe and brings forth his analysis of the causes and there by shows his social awareness. In<br />
the degenerating contemporary situation his concern for moral and humanistic values is directed to<br />
the development of individuals which will be instrumental in establishment of a well-meaning and<br />
well-ordered society.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. What is the theme of Auden’s poem, ‘September 1, 1939’.<br />
2. What are the crucial issues which Auden raises in his poem, September 1, 1939’.<br />
3. September 1, 1939 is an honest criticism of the contemporary situation. How far do you agree ?<br />
4. What message does the poet want to convey through the poem, ‘September 1, 1939’ ?<br />
5. September 1, 1939 is a topical piece which reflects the mood of Europe on the eve of the<br />
outbreak of the World War-II.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Auden’s concept of love.<br />
2. Auden’s Freudian psycho-analytical method.<br />
3. Ambiguity and vagueness in the poem.<br />
4. Auden’s attitude to war.<br />
54
5. In Memory of W.B.Yeats<br />
Section-I<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Disappeared — Died<br />
Disfigured — Distorted<br />
Dead of winter — (here) It was extremely cold.<br />
Sank — Came down<br />
All the instruments — The Instruments which record weather conditions.<br />
Explanation — W.B.Yeats died when winter was at its peak in the month of January. It was<br />
extremely cold. The rivulets were frozen due to extreme cold. There was an air of desolation<br />
everywhere. There were no passengers on the airports as people had postponed their flights due to<br />
bitter cold. Hence, airports assumed a deserted look. The snow was falling and the public statues<br />
were covered with snow and their forms got distorted. In the evening, when the sun was going to set<br />
the level of mercury came down in the barometer and it became piercing cold. All the weather<br />
instruments indicated that the day of W.B.Yeats’ was really very cold and dark. The stanza begins<br />
in an informal manner. Instead of using the word death the poet has used the expression<br />
‘disappeared’. The poet has used scientific imagery to describe the death of W.B.Yeats. The state of<br />
affairs in Europe and the reality of the poet’s death simultaneously get reflected in the lines. The<br />
poet has used realistic and common men’s language.<br />
Words-Meanings and explanatory Notes:<br />
Peasant river — Countryside river<br />
Fashionable quay — Modern harbours<br />
Mourning tongues — Sorrowful expressions of the people.<br />
Explanation — Nature’s apathy to individual suffering has been brought out in this stanza. W.B.<br />
Yeats was undergoing death pangs but Nature was not affected at all. It continued running its usual<br />
course unconcerned about his serious illness. The wolves kept running on through the forests which<br />
were evergreen. Even the countryside river kept on running its normal course. It was least attracted<br />
by modern harbours near the towns. The poet was dying and the people were expressing grief and<br />
concern over his deteriorating health. The poet is of the opinion that W.B.Yeats may die physically<br />
but will continue to survive in his poems. The lines depict Nature’s indifference to human suffering<br />
on the one hand and on the other hand focuses on the point that the poet will continue to live<br />
through his poems, which encompass his art, which is immortal.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
As himself — As a living human being<br />
Squares—Parts<br />
Invaded — Attacked, (here) pervaded<br />
Revolte —(here) Refused to co-operate<br />
Provinces of histor —Different parts of his body<br />
Explanation — The given stanza reflects the heightened feeling of sadness associated with the<br />
moment of the poet’s death. As W.B.Yeats was on his death bed, the poet feels that as a living being<br />
it was his last afternoon. The anxiety, the pathos and hurry loomed large in the atmosphere. There<br />
were nurses moving around in hurry. They were actively attending on him. Everywhere there were<br />
55
umours about his impending death. He was becoming weak and senseless. Different parts of his<br />
body which were like provinces of the empire refused to co-operate. Different parts of his mind<br />
became empty and lost their power of feeling and thinking. The outer parts of his body became inert<br />
and insensitive to everything as the current of feeling stopped to flow. Numbness prevailed over his<br />
body due to loss of sensation and ultimately he breathed his last. He was dead but as poet he will<br />
continue to live in the hearts of his admirers. The minute details about the actual moment of W.B.<br />
Yeats’ death and the realisation of the fact how life gradually slipped away from his body rendering<br />
him dead evoke intense pathos in the reader’s mind. However, the last line holds a pointer to the<br />
immortality of art as the poet asserts that Yeats will continue to live in his poems.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Affections—(here) Feelings, thoughts, sensibilities, etc.<br />
Another kind of wood—Strange, unfamiliar countries<br />
Foreign code of conscience—Rules of conduct and art<br />
The words—(here) Poetry<br />
Unfamiliar—Unknown<br />
Modified—Changed<br />
W.B.Yeats died as a person but he will remain alive in his poems through his admirers. He<br />
will live in the form of his poems which are scattered in a number of cities. As a poet he is<br />
completely at the mercy of feelings and emotions of the unknown people (critics). His poetry will be<br />
appreciated in strange unfamiliar countries. Now he will be praised or criticised according to the<br />
rules of conduct and art which were quite unknown to the poet. His poems will be interpreted<br />
according to the sensibilities, likes and dislikes of the living critics. W. H. Auden highlights the fact<br />
that the poetry of a dead poet like W.B.Yeats will get transformed by the interpretation of the living<br />
critics. The living critics and his admirers will judge his poetry and give it a new meaning according<br />
to their conceptions of art.<br />
There is no glorification of the dead but Auden has underlined the real position of a poet<br />
who though dies physically, yet keeps on living in his works—read, interpreted and evaluated by all<br />
kinds of people.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Accustomed—Habituated<br />
Cell of himself—(here) Prisoner of his ego<br />
A few thousand—(here) Readers and Admirers of W.B.Yeats<br />
Explanation — In this stanza the poet depicts the fact that the routine activities of life continue and<br />
worldly affairs go on. The world at large is apathetic to individual suffering. He brings out this fact<br />
through the tragic incident of W.B.Yeats’s death. The poet opines that people will forget W.B.Yeats<br />
as a person, though, as a poet he will continue to survive. His death as a person will be forgotten /<br />
lost in the hectic routine activities of life. The brokers will shout as usual on the floor of the Boursea<br />
busy commercial centre. The poor will continue leading their miserable life to which they are<br />
habituated to a great extent. Each person has his ego (he is imprisoned in the vicious circle of his<br />
ego), but he is greatly assured of his freedom—he considers himself to be free. But a few thousand<br />
people will think of the day of W.B.Yeats’s death as the day on which they did something different<br />
to some extent. The last two lines of the stanza are reiteration of the fact that the day of W.B.<br />
Yeats’s death was dark and extremely cold. The lines express human apathy to individual suffering<br />
56
through indifference of the world at large to the tragic incident of W.B. Yeats’ death. The poet uses<br />
the device of repetition to strengthen the factual description of the day of Yeats’ demise. The stanza<br />
is an implied satire at the contemporary creed of individualism which is responsible for creating an<br />
illusion of freedom for isolated individuals.<br />
Section—II<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
The Parish of rich women—Large number of rich women like Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespeare,<br />
etc., who admired the poet and inspired him to write poetry<br />
Physical decay—Deterioration in health, process of old age, disease and death<br />
A mouth—A language, a way of saying things, a style<br />
Ranches of Isolation—Isolated parts in human psyche<br />
In the valley of its saying—The source of its being, the human sole<br />
Explanation — This elegy is a departure from other conventional elegies in the sense that it does<br />
not glorify Yeats, it rather points out that like common human beings Yeats had infirmities,<br />
shortcomings and weaknesses. The poet was a common man with all the absurdities and follies, but<br />
his poetry will survive above everything. A large group of rich women like Lady Gregory admired<br />
and inspired Yeats’ way of life, his social and literary success were encouraged by flattering women<br />
like Lady Gregory. His personality had its own weaknesses. But his deteriorating physical health<br />
and injustices with in Ireland hurt him to write poetry. The poet underlines here that his poetry<br />
could not bring about any change in the conditions of Ireland and its people. The poet raises his<br />
finger at the insensitivity of the people to the voice of poetry and remarks that poetry cannot bring<br />
about any change. The poet compares poetry to a river which can fertilize only the soul. It can’t<br />
bring about any improvement in the outward world. The human soul is not subjected to the action of<br />
the administrators of the world. Poetry flows from the isolated corners of the human mind and<br />
nourishes human grief. It is a style, a language which gives comfort to human soul through its<br />
expression of human condition. In this way the poet redefines poetry and holds a mirror to its real<br />
significance in human life.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Section-- III<br />
Honoured guest—The body of Yeats<br />
Irish vessel—Used for W.B.Yeats who was Irish<br />
Intolerant—Does not care for<br />
With the strange excuse— Because they were masters of language<br />
Explanation — The concluding section of the poem makes a formal statement that time does not<br />
care for what the poets said but the way they said it. This section brings out the inevitability of<br />
death. The poet addresses the earth to receive an honourable man W.B.Yeats. He is now like an<br />
Irish vessel without poetry – a physical being who is dead and has been buried. Time destroys<br />
everything and everyone. It does not spare anybody, weather he is brave, innocent, beautiful or ugly.<br />
It destroys a beautiful body in a week but it has no effect over art. Time values and adores art and<br />
artists. It worships language and poets and excuses their faults like cowardice, conceit, pride, etc.<br />
Artists may die physically but they remain alive in their art. The lines, thus, bring out the<br />
57
immortality of art and mortality of human beings through the reference to the physical death of the<br />
poet and the immortality of his poetry.<br />
Time respects great artists. Their great works are remembered after their death. So yeats<br />
will continue to live in his poetry. Time will forgive his common human weaknesses and follies. It<br />
forgives the faults of character like cowardice and pride, etc. of a great artist. W. H. Auden gives<br />
two examples to clarify his point of view. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an imperialist in views<br />
but he was a great <strong>English</strong> author who won Nobel Prize for his writings. So time forgave him and he<br />
is still remembered and honoured. Paul Claudel was a French poet who supported the Fascist cause<br />
but as he was a good poet he survived through his poems and proved true James Shirley’s line-<br />
‘Only the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom in the dust’. Thus, the stanza brings out the<br />
idea that time honours the greatness of an artist and it will honour W.B.Yeats’s greatness as a poet.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
The dogs of Europe bar —Selfish, blood thirsty leaders like Hitler and Mussolini<br />
Sequestered—Separated and isolated<br />
Intellectual disgrace—Hatred due to ideological and political differences<br />
Stares from—Is to be seen on<br />
Explanation — In this stanza the poet’s intense grief caused by the death of a fellow poet turns<br />
into anger against those who were responsible for throwing Europe into chaos. He changes the focus<br />
from individual to the entire milieu and universalises the theme. Auden makes a departure from<br />
conventional elegy when he extends his subject. The poem no longer remains confined to the<br />
immediate subject of W.B.Yeats’s death; it speaks as much of the times in which Yeats lived as it<br />
does of the poet. In fact, the real strength of the poem lies in the lines about the sorry state of affairs<br />
in Europe caused by war and violence on the continent. In the chaotic situation when W.B.Yeats<br />
died, selfish and blood thirsty leaders like Hitler and Mussolini were crying for war. The entire<br />
Europe was torn into hatred, prejudice and mistrust and all the nations waited for the impending war<br />
isolated from each other due to hatred and selfishness. Hatred due to ideological differences was<br />
reflected on the faces of human-beings. There was absolutely no pity or fellow-feeling in the hearts<br />
of the people. It appeared as if the seas of pity and sympathy had frozen and dried. These details<br />
unearth the chaotic conditions in Europe at the time of Yeats’s death.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
The bottom of the night—The innermost depths of truth<br />
Persuade—Convince<br />
Farming of a verse—Gift of writing poetry<br />
Make a vineyard of the curse —Turn a curse into a blessing<br />
Unsuccess — Failure<br />
A rapture of distress—Happy despite distress/failure<br />
Deserts of the heart—Dry hearts, devoid of sympathy and fellow-feeling<br />
W. H. Auden feels that at such a juncture Yeats’ poetry will guide the misled humanity. It<br />
will change the curse into a blessing and will make human beings happy. He, therefore, exhorts the<br />
poet’s soul to follow the right to the innermost depths and make every possible effort to explore the<br />
hidden truth. He should convince the people to learn to take delight in life, despite the threats of<br />
impending war. He alone can make the people confident and happy through his forceful and<br />
vigorous poetry. His poetry will teach us to sing about human future joyfully in spite of distress.<br />
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The hearts of people are devoid of sympathy and follow-feeling. The poet, through his<br />
poetry, should start the fountain of sympathy in their hearts. The poet should first free men from the<br />
prison of self and then inspire them to accept and praise their life, despite its many limitations and<br />
drawbacks. The poet is confident that Yeats’s poetry will give message of hope and courage.<br />
It is great poetry alone, that can enlighten and bring a change in human soul. Auden does not praise<br />
Yeats as great genius. But he conveys to us the real value and importance of his poetry even in<br />
times of crisis. Yeats or any other artist is not to be worshipped as a man because all men are made<br />
of common clay. He is to be valued and honoured for the greatness of his art. Time will worship and<br />
make him immortal for his language, for his art.<br />
Introduction — ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’, one of the masterpieces of W. H. Auden, is an elegy<br />
which was written to mourn the death of W.B.Yeats, a renowned Irish poet who died in 1939. The<br />
poem strikes a departure from other conventional elegies in its informal manner, its simple diction,<br />
its realistic portrayal of the dead poet, its depiction of indifferent attitude of Nature and humanity to<br />
individual predicament and finally its extending beyond the immediate subject of W.B.Yeats’ death<br />
and emerging as a representative poem of its times.<br />
The poem is divided into three sections which form three units of varying lengths. Each<br />
poetic unit apparently deals with independent strain of thought but taken together the poem<br />
successfully evolves Auden’s radical liberal intellectual’s perspective. Section I of the poem gives<br />
details about W.B.Yeats’s death, the indifferent attitude of Nature and humanity to his death.<br />
Section-II deals with the theme that the strength of poetry lies in the manner in which it objectifies<br />
the human condition. Section-III deals partially with the significance of art and language and<br />
partially with inevitability of World War-II and the duty of a poet. Auden assigns a responsible role<br />
to the poet to resolve the contemporary crisis.<br />
Summary — W.B.Yeats died in the month of January 1939. The day of his death was extremely<br />
cold. There was an air of desolation everywhere. The rivulets were frozen, the airports were<br />
disfigured due to snowfall. All the weather instruments indicated that the day of W.B.Yeats’ death<br />
was really very cold and dark.<br />
Very pathetically, the poet points out the fact of Nature’s indifference to W.B.Yeats’ death.<br />
Unconcerned about his serious illness, the wolves kept on running through the evergreen forests.<br />
Even the countryside river kept on running its normal course. The poet feels that as a living human<br />
being it was his last afternoon. Nurses were quickly attending on him. Everywhere there were<br />
rumours about his impending death, gradually his body became weak and inert and his mind lost its<br />
power of thinking. He was dead physically but he will continue to live in the hearts of his admirers.<br />
The minute details about the actual moment of W.B.Yeats’s death evoke intense pathos.<br />
Now as a poet he will be praised or criticised according to the rules of conduct and art. His<br />
poems will be interpreted according to the sensibilities, likes or dislikes of the living critics. His<br />
death as a person will be forgotten in the hectic activities of routine life. The brokers will shout as<br />
usual on the floor of Bourse. The poor will continue to live their miserable lives. The day of the<br />
W.B.Yeats’s death will be taken only by a few people as the day when they did some thing slightly<br />
unusual.<br />
In the second section of the poem Auden does not glorify Yeats. He rather points out that<br />
Yeats had shortcomings, weaknesses and follies like common human beings but his poetry will<br />
survive above everything. Though his poetry could not bring about any radical change in the<br />
material conditions of Ireland because of the insensitivity of the people to the voice of poetry, yet it<br />
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flows from the isolated corners of human mind and nourishes human grief. It is a style- a language<br />
which gives comfort to human soul through its expression of human condition.<br />
The third section brings out the inevitability of death. W.B.Yeats is dead and has been<br />
buried. Time is a great destroyer. It does not spare anything but it values and adores art and artist. It<br />
excuses their faults like cowardice, conceit and pride, etc. W.H. Auden gives two examples to<br />
authenticate his viewpoint. Rudyard Kipling was an imperialist in views but he is still honoured<br />
because he was a great <strong>English</strong> author who won Nobel Prize for his writings. Paul Claudel, though,<br />
supported the fascist cause yet he survived through his poems. In the second half of section three of<br />
the poem, Auden expresses his anger against those who were responsible for throwing Europe into<br />
chaotic situation. He points out that selfish and blood thirsty leaders were crying for war. The entire<br />
Europe is torn into hatred, prejudice and mistrust and all the people and the nations wait for the<br />
impending war. Their faces reflect hatred due to ideological and political differences. It appears as if<br />
the seas of pity and sympathy have been frozen and dried.<br />
At such a juncture W. H. Auden feels that Yeats’ poetry will guide the strayed humanity. It<br />
will change the curse into a blessing and will make the people happy. A poet alone can make the<br />
people confident and optimistic through his forceful and vigorous poetry. He should convince the<br />
people to learn to rejoice despite the threats of impending war. The poet should first free man from<br />
the prison of self and then praise their life, despite its constraints and drawbacks. The poet is<br />
confident that Yeats’ poetry will be a harbinger of hope and courage in an hour of dismay.<br />
Thus, in this poem three sections of varying length with apparently different strains of<br />
thought project Auden’s vision of a well-ordered social set-up replete with sympathy and fellowfeelings<br />
and not a society torn completely by animosity and hatred. This shows that Auden wants to<br />
develop individuals so that they may learn to appreciate each other. Auden attacks the concept of<br />
individual freedom which instigates competitive spirit, self-centredness, hatred and consequently,<br />
war but he advocates humanistic means to resolve the contemporary crisis. This approach shows<br />
Auden’s radical-liberal-intellectual’s perspective.<br />
Critical Appreciation — One of the master pieces of W. H. Auden, the poem ‘In Memory of<br />
W.B.Yeats’ is in the form of an elegy. It was written on the death of W.B.Yeats, a renowned Irish<br />
poet who died in 1939. The poem strikes a fresh approach—a departure from other conventional<br />
elegies like Milton’s ‘Lycidas’or Shelly’s ‘Adonis’. Its informal manner, its use pf common men’s<br />
language and realistic portrayal of the dead poet signify his revolt against conventional elegy by<br />
focussing on the indifference of Nature to the sad event of W.B.Yeats’s death, whereas in the<br />
traditional elegy Nature sympathises with human suffering. The poet underlines the fact that the<br />
death of an individual has little impact on routine human activities. Nature and human life go on as<br />
usual, unconcerned.<br />
In this poem the poet puts emphasis on the permanence of art. W. B. Yeats as an individual<br />
dies but his poetry survives, though, with all modifications. It is what its readers make it according<br />
to their sensibilities, likes and dislikes. The poet brings out the insignificance of an individual after<br />
his death through metaphorical conceit. After death an individual loses his identity and his<br />
individuality, as W. B. Yeats became his admirers. Henceforth, he will be nothing but what the<br />
readers and admirers will think and interpret him and his poetry. Unlike conventional elegies this<br />
elegy does not idealise, or glorify the dead poet. It depicts Yeats as he was, an ordinary man having<br />
common virtues, infirmities and follies.<br />
The poet points out that the way in which poetry is expressed—the language and the manner<br />
i.e. art is important. The source of its existence is human soul which is not subjected to the actions<br />
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of the administrators. Physically an individual dies but spiritually he lives in his art. The follies of<br />
human beings become insignificant if they have a command over art or language. Style, of course, is<br />
the man. Time does not care for what the poet said but for the way he said. The poet points out that<br />
the uniqueness of poetry lies in the manner in which it objectifies the human condition.<br />
The poem is unconventional in the sense that it extends beyond the immediate subject of<br />
W.B.Yeats’s death and becomes representative of its times. It speaks as much of Yeats’ time as it<br />
does of Yeats himself. He is not only talking about W.B.Yeats’s death but also about the mood of<br />
Europe as Geoffrey Thurley points out: “It is winter, not only in the year (1939) but in the life of<br />
Europe, and the natural mourning for a great man merges into the anticipatory mourning for the end<br />
of European civilisation over which the dead poet had kept such vigilant watch” 7 .<br />
Auden expresses his anger and contempt at the sorry state of affairs in Europe caused by<br />
war and violence. Hence, the poet’s grief over the death of Yeats turns into angry outbursts against<br />
those who were responsible for the existing chaotic conditions. Auden points out that in this terrible<br />
year of W.B. Yeats’s death, selfish and blood thirsty leaders of Europe—Hitler and Mussolini herald<br />
war crisis and the nations split apart due to hatred and selfishness and live in the constant dread of<br />
impending war. People hate each other due to ideological and political differences. They are<br />
absolutely devoid of fellow-feelings and sympathy. Auden underlines the creative role of art in the<br />
flux of contemporary crisis. He defines his concept of the poet and highlights the social role of<br />
poetry, which reflect a high degree of social consciousness in his poetic vision. Auden<br />
optimistically exhorts the poet to play a constructive role in this hour of dismay—make every<br />
possible effort to explore the hidden truth in the contemporary crisis and persuade the people of the<br />
nations to rejoice despite the horror of war looming large on the horizon. He inspires them to :<br />
Make a vineyard of the curse<br />
Sing of human unsuccess<br />
In a rapture of distress.<br />
In the hearts dry of human sympathy and fellow-feeling produce the springs of sympathy so<br />
that humanity is cured of selfishness and lack of sympathy and can learn to appreciate art.<br />
Thus, Auden points out that the poet can strike a psychological ebullition in the minds of<br />
individuals and thus exert an ennobling influence which will eventually help in the establishment of<br />
a better society. So W. B. Yeats is to be honoured and valued for the greatness of his art. Hence, he<br />
suggests that art should play a constructive role by generating love and other humanistic values<br />
required for the harmonious development of individuals.<br />
The poem emerges as an attack on bourgeois concept of individual freedom, which<br />
instigates a competitive spirit and leads to adoption of crooked means to achieve success and which<br />
is distorted into self-centeredness and hatred consequently leading to war but Auden’s assigning a<br />
creative and constructive role to art for making a well-ordered social set-up replete with sympathy<br />
and fellow-feelings and not a society torn completely by animosity and hatred shows that Auden<br />
wants to develop the individuals spiritually so that they may learn to appreciate each other. This<br />
approach shows Auden’s radical-liberal-intellectual’s perspective. Thus, he advocates humanistic<br />
means to resolve the contemporary crisis. In this sense his private vision and public vision have<br />
been synthesised to fulfil his intended goal of betterment of individual as well as establishment of a<br />
well-meaning and well-ordered society.<br />
To conclude, this poem is a modernised version of the conventional elegy. Its informal tone,<br />
common men’s language, factual description and its enlargement of the subject from the individual<br />
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to the existing socio-political scenario in the erstwhile Europe not only prove Auden’s ingenuity but<br />
also lend an additional grandeur to the poem and make it a unique work of art.<br />
Essay- Type Questions:<br />
1. Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.<br />
2. Write down the theme of the poem, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.<br />
3. Trace the development of thought in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Role of poet.<br />
2. Apathy of Nature and humanity to human suffering.<br />
3. Auden’s attitude to war.<br />
4. Auden’s imagery.<br />
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6. The Shield of Achilles<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
She—Thetis, the mother of Achilles, one of the Greak heroes of Trojan war.<br />
Vines and olive trees—Symbolic of orchards engraved on the shield of Achilles.<br />
Marble Well-governed cities—Well- administered cities with marble buildings.<br />
Wine-dark— (here) Stormy and wild<br />
The shining metal—The shield made by modern artist.<br />
Artificial wilderness—Contemporary chaotic world where every thing is artificial.<br />
A sky like lead—Ugly and dark contemporary atmosphere because of spiritual desolation and<br />
hollowness.<br />
Explanation — In this poem Auden employs the technique of Greek myth to present a contrast<br />
between the glorious and adventurous past with the desolate and barren contemporary situation. The<br />
poet begins the poem by referring to Greek mythology in which Thetis, the mother of Achilles looks<br />
at the shield hung over Achilles’ shoulders. In fact, the shield of Achilles, one of the Greek heroes<br />
of Trojan war, was made by Hephaestus, who was the blacksmith of the gods. In these lines the use<br />
of the word shield is symbolic. It is a symbol of the culture and conditions of life. The shield of<br />
Achilles was characterised by beautiful scenes of adventure, art and sea adventures, etc. On this<br />
shield were engraved orchards of vines and olive trees, well-administered cities with buildings of<br />
marble and wine-dark seas with beautiful ships sailing on them.<br />
Thetis, Achilles’ mother is surprised to find that the modern artist had depicted dark<br />
pictures of artificial and desolate life of the contemporary world. The modern shield of Achilles<br />
projects the contemporary chaotic world, where everything is artificial and the contemporary<br />
atmosphere signifies desolation, bleakness and barrenness. The lines effectively bring out the<br />
contrast between cultured past and chaotic present. It is written in short lines and is characterised by<br />
incantation, music and Homeric echoes.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Feature—Characteristic<br />
Bare and brown—Desolate and barren, without any vegetation<br />
Congregated—Gathered together<br />
Blankness—Emptiness, hollowness<br />
Unintelligible multitude—Masses deprived of power to communicate their feelings, etc.<br />
No sign of neighbourhood—The state of being lonely even in a crowd, a characteristic feature of<br />
cities.<br />
A million boots in line—Million of soldiers standing in a line.<br />
Waiting for a sign—Waiting to obey an order<br />
Without expression—Blank<br />
Explanation — Thetis, the mother of Achilles looks for familiar scenes in the modern shield of<br />
Achilles and is surprised to find just the contrast of what she saw in Achilles shield of the past,<br />
which was made by Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods. The modern shield which Auden uses<br />
as a symbol of contemporary culture presents a vast landscape which is a total wasteland without<br />
any characteristics of change visible. It is desolate, bleak and barren without any vegetation. It is a<br />
lonely place where there are no friends or neighbours around. An extreme sense of alienation is<br />
noticeable. It is a world stricken with starvation-problem of food and shelter. In this world, which<br />
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the modern shield projects, there are multitudes of soldiers who behave like thoughtless dumbdriven<br />
cattle unable to communicate their sufferings, their emotions and their inner loneliness and<br />
mechanically follow the orders of their rulers. They display blank faces without any sign of emotion<br />
or feeling. This stanza unfolds complete spiritual desolation and insensitivity which overwhelms the<br />
entire modern world. The modern shield reflects a sense of absolute desolation, deprivation,<br />
insensitivity and blankness. The stanza is written in Iambic pentameter in comparatively longer<br />
lines.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
A voice without a face—(here) The indication is towards lack of personal contact. The military<br />
commanders, Generals, rulers, etc. speak to their people over the Radio-Their voice is hard and their<br />
face remains unseen.<br />
Dry and level—Plain without rise and fall of emotions.<br />
Column by Column— (Used for marching soldiers) One by one, line after line, group after group,<br />
etc.<br />
Enduring a belief— (here) Believing the justification of a cause<br />
Logic— (here) Plain reasoning behind their going to war<br />
Explanation — The shield projects that in the modern wasteland there is lack of personal contact.<br />
The military Commanders, Generals and rulers, etc. speak to their people over a radio and the<br />
people or the soldiers can listen to their voices only. Their faces remain unseen. They can listen to<br />
their plain, dry, dull and unsympathetic voice. The commanders validate the justness of the cause<br />
and persuade the unthinking people, who are hollow from within, to go to the war, surely, to come<br />
to grief or to be killed in the battle field. Unlike the past, in the modern age no body is cheered up,<br />
or encouraged speech and no questions are asked and no answers are encouraged. They are just to<br />
obey without asking questions. The unemotional voice of the General or the ruler dictates them that<br />
their cause is righteous and just and that they have no option but to obey and follow the instruction.<br />
The lines throw sufficient light on the insensitivity of the rulers and the helplessness of the ruled-a<br />
typical phenomenon emerging in the modern world. Auden’s concern for helpless unthinking<br />
individuals who are ready to obey orders like dumb-driven cattle, shows the later phase of his poetic<br />
career where he was inwardly inclined. This stanza is written in iambic Pentameter. Auden uses<br />
here the pattern of longer lines. It forms the conclusion of the first part of this poem which consists<br />
of three parts.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Ritual Pieties—Religious rites and ceremonies-here, these scenes engraved on Achilles’ shield<br />
Heifers—Cows<br />
Libation—Distribution of sweets after some religious ceremony.<br />
The shining metal—The modern shield<br />
Altar—The place of worship<br />
Flickering Forge-light—Dim light, which blacksmith uses to do his work.<br />
Explanation — Thetis, the mother of Achilles had seen the scenes of religious rites and<br />
ceremonies engraved on the shield of Achilles, who was one of the Greek heroes of Trojan War.<br />
She had seen on the shield the white flower-garlanded cows and the scenes of distribution of sweets<br />
after the sacrificial ceremony performed on the altar. Thetis today is wonderstruck to find that those<br />
scenes are missing on the modern shield. By the dim light, which the blacksmith uses to do his<br />
work, he has made some other scene instead of the altar and scenes of religious rites and ceremonies<br />
white flower-garlanded cows, Libation and sacrifice.<br />
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The lines reflect Thetis’ sense of wonder and dismay over the changed scenario engraved<br />
on the modern shield of Achilles, quite unlike the classical shield. This stanza, which forms the first<br />
part of the second major part of the poem, is written in short lines and rings with incantation, music<br />
and Homeric echoes. It unveils disappearance of religious values from the modern world scenario.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Barbed wire—Wire with sharp hooks<br />
Enclosed—Surrounded<br />
Arbitrary spot— (here) It is a spot (concentration camp) where war prisoners were kept.<br />
Lounged—Spent time lazily<br />
Cracked a joke—Made a joke<br />
Sentries—Soldiers on guard<br />
Sweated—Perspired<br />
Decent folk—Gentlemen<br />
Posts—Stakes<br />
Explanation — Thetis is pained to see the scenes of concentration camps engraved on the modern<br />
shield. There is a place, where prisoners of war are kept. This place is surrounded by sharp-hooked<br />
wires from all sides. At this place mockingly enough, the officials who get bored are spending their<br />
time lazily and the soldiers on guard are perspiring because of hot weather. There is a scene of three<br />
pale prisoners of the concentration camp who are being taken to three stakes planted vertically on<br />
the ground to be tied and later shot dead. There is a crowd of so called gentlemen and women, who<br />
stand there motionless and speechless and just watch the scene of martyrdom. The stanza brings out<br />
aimless and directionless violence in the modern times. In a flash back the stanza takes us to the past<br />
acts of cruelty, when Christ was crucified but that, Auden points out, was martyrdom for the<br />
redemption of mankind. But this massacre of the modern times is a mockery of Christ’s sacrifice. It<br />
merely reflects spiritual degeneration of the people who are helpless and soulless. The poet, here,<br />
underlines spiritual sterility, insensitivity and unsympathetic attitude of the officials on duty and the<br />
general masses towards such killings.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Mass and Majesty—The reference (here) is to the three soldiers who were flattered and persuaded to<br />
undertake the hazards of war by the generals and rulers.<br />
That carries weight—The reference is to the three soldiers-made Prisoners of war, who were<br />
befooled by their sweet-tongued dictators / rulers to go to war- their argument being the cause was<br />
just and they were important and would bring laurels to their nation.<br />
Lay in the hands of others—They were completely at the mercy of the enemy.<br />
They were small—Reference is to their realisation that they were insignificant.<br />
Their shame was all the worst could wish—They suffered the worst possible insult.<br />
Lost their pride—Realisation of their insignificance made them small in their own eyes and they<br />
were no longer proud of their heroism, etc.<br />
And died— Died before physical death, died spiritually.<br />
Explanation — These three soldiers, who were taken prisoners of war, were tied to the stakes<br />
fixed on the ground. These soldiers were the common men who were flattered and persuaded by the<br />
generals and rulers to undertake the hazards of war. Ironically, they were befooled by their sweet<br />
tongued rulers \ the dictators to go to war. Their generals told them that they were going to fight for<br />
a just cause. The rulers argued that they were honourable men and important ones who were sure to<br />
65
ing honour to the country. Unfortunately, they were captured by the enemies and were made<br />
prisoners and were kept in the concentration camps to be brought to the stakes and shot dead. At this<br />
juncture, the soldiers became aware of their insignificance and suffered the worst possible insult.<br />
The realisation of their insignificance made them very small in their own eyes and they were no<br />
longer proud of their heroism. In fact, they were dead spiritually before their physical death. W.H.<br />
Auden, in this stanza, exposes the hollowness and meaninglessness of war and soldiers. He<br />
investigates into the cause of war-the role of rulers and the helplessness of the soldiers who are<br />
killed for reasons unknown to them because they are lured into the trap of rulers and dictators.<br />
Written in iambic pentameter and longer lines this stanza exposes the hypocrisy of warfare in the<br />
modern world.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Athletes—Players<br />
Weed-choked field—The field overgrown with weeds (here) spiritual desolation<br />
Explanation —This stanza brings the reader to the concluding (third) part of the poem, which<br />
consists of three stanzas. On the modern shield Thetis looks for the scenes which she saw on<br />
Achilles’ shield of ancient times. On that classical shield there were carvings of athletes busy in<br />
playing games and men and women dancing to the rhythm and music with quick steps. Thetis is<br />
grieved to find that modern artist has carved fields overgrown with wild plants on the modern shield<br />
instead of play grounds and dancing floors. This short line stanza throbs with music and rhythm as<br />
the reference shifts to Greek mythology, where Achilles’ shield displays play grounds and dancing<br />
floors. It reflects past cultural values juxtaposed against spiritual sterility of the present times.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Ragged urchin—A boy in (torn clothes) tatters<br />
Loitered—Moved about leisurely<br />
Vacancy— (here) The modern wasteland<br />
Axioms—Maxims or self-evident truths<br />
Explanation — Thetis, the mother of Achilles, while searching for familiar scenes of the past,<br />
finds engraved on the modern shield, a shabby boy in tatters who moves about lonely, aimlessly and<br />
in a leisurely way on the modern wasteland, instead of players busy in playing games. In direct<br />
contrast to the healthy games of the past this ragged boy cruelly aims a stone at a bird with the<br />
intention to hurt it and the bird is shown to fly away in the engraving on the modern shield. This<br />
indicates vicious games played in the modern world. Here on the modern shield are engraved the<br />
scenes of girls being raped or becoming victims of sexual violence and the boys quarrelling with<br />
one another carrying knives. Thus, the modern shield mirrors forth two important features of<br />
modern wasteland sex and violence. Sympathy, love and friendship which were characteristics of<br />
the past are shamelessly lacking in the present age. This stanza is an ironic comment on the modern<br />
wasteland, which is blotted with vicious sexual violations and acts of senseless violence. The<br />
modern shield displays absolute absence of the sympathy, love and promises of friendship.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Armourer—The maker of armour, the blacksmith<br />
Thetis—The mother of Achilles, (here) it is a symbol of audience or on lookers<br />
Hephaestus—The blacksmith of the gods-symbol of ancient artist.<br />
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Explanation — This is the concluding stanza of the third part of the poem. On seeing the different<br />
scenes engraved on the modern shield, which reflects the contemporary culture. Thetis feels<br />
disappointed and terrified to think that the modern artist has made a terrible shield which exhibits<br />
that completely chaotic situation prevails in the modern world and the thin – lipped artist of<br />
Achilles’ shield has left the place. The concluding lines underline the inevitability of death a<br />
person who would slay others will himself be slain by someone else one day or the other. Achilles<br />
would also not live for long. War brings destruction and death. Thus, Auden condemns war and<br />
violence and pleads for Christian values of love, sympathy and fellow-feelings. He has built up this<br />
theme with the help of mythical technique and through the stylistic device of contrast. The past and<br />
the present highlight the contemporary wasteland and emphasise the urgency of establishment of<br />
moral and religious values of love, sympathy and fellow-feelings to change the existing scenario.<br />
Summary — The poet begins the poem by referring to Greek mythology in which Thetis, the<br />
mother of Achilles, the great Greek hero of Trojan, looks at the shield made by Hephaestus, hung<br />
over Achilles’ shoulder. Thetis looks for familiar scenes of adventure, art and sea adventures—<br />
scenes depicting past culture and conditions on the modern shield. She is surprised to find that the<br />
modern artist had depicted bleak pictures of the artificial and desolate contemporary world. The<br />
modern world, engraved on the shield, is desolate, bleak and barren without any sign of positive<br />
change. It is characterised by deprivations, insensitivity and blankness. In this world which the<br />
modern shield projects, there are multitudes of soldiers who behave like dumb-driven cattle and<br />
mechanically follow the dictates of their Generals who speak to them over a radio in dry and<br />
unsympathetic voices. The commanders persuade them to go to war by justifying the cause and<br />
lured in their trap people go to war, surely to come to grief or to be killed. The soldiers have no<br />
option but to obey and march in line to the battle field.<br />
In the second part of the poem, the poet focuses light on the spiritual sterility and lack of<br />
religious and moral values in the modern world which the modern shield reflects. Instead of scenes<br />
of religious rites and ceremonies, distribution of sweets, white flower-garlanded cows and sacrificial<br />
ceremony being performed on the altar, modern shield mirrors forth scenes of concentration camps<br />
where war prisoners were kept. There is the scene of three pale prisoners of the concentration camp<br />
being taken to be tied on stakes to be shot dead. Auden, by implication, suggests that this scene is a<br />
mockery of Christ’s crucifixion. It merely reflects spiritual degeneration of the people who are<br />
helpless and soulless. Ironically these prisoners were befooled by their sweet tongued rulers or<br />
dictators and persuaded to undertake the hazards of war. Unfortunately, they were captured by the<br />
enemies and were made prisoners, kept in the concentration camps and were finally brought to the<br />
stakes to be shot dead. At this juncture the soldiers became aware of their insignificance and<br />
suffered worst possible disgrace. This made them very small in their own eyes and they were no<br />
longer proud of their heroism and they ‘died as men before their bodies died’. This exposes the<br />
hypocrisy of modern warfare and spiritual degeneration prevalent in the modern world.<br />
In the concluding part of the poem the poet once again juxtaposes the past cultural values<br />
against spiritual sterility of the present times. Thetis looks for carvings of athletes busy in playing<br />
games and men and women dancing to the rhythm and music, but to her dismay the modern shield<br />
flashes across fields overgrown with wild plants, a shabby boy in loiters, who totters about<br />
aimlessly. The ragged boy cruelly aiming a stone at a bird which is shown to fly away, the girls<br />
being raped and the boys quarrelling, carrying knives project a terrible picture of modern society.<br />
Two major characteristics of modern culture, thus, get exposed here – sexual abuse and violence.<br />
The modern shield, in fact, displays absolute absence of sympathy, love and fellow-feelings. Thetis<br />
feels extremely disappointed and frightened to think that the modern artist has made such a terrible<br />
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shield which shows scenes of complete chaos in the modern world that she cries in dismay. Finally<br />
she is awakened to the inevitability of death – a person who would slay others will himself be slain<br />
by someone else. This shows the futility of warfare as it brings destruction and death. Thus, Auden<br />
has successfully used the mythical technique to highlight the contemporary wasteland through<br />
contrast of the present and the past and finally he condemns war and violence and pleads for<br />
Christian values of love, sympathy and fellow-feelings. The poem marks the later phase of his<br />
poetic career when he was inwardly inclined and was seeking humanistic means to resolve the<br />
contemporary socio-political and cultural crisis.<br />
Introduction — First published in ‘Poetry’ in Oct, 1952 W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of<br />
Achilles’ was later included as the title poem in the volume of poems entitled, The Shield of<br />
Achilles, 1955 and then in the Collected Shorter Poems. The poem consists of three parts, each part<br />
comprises three stanzas. In the first two parts, the first part is written in short lines stanza<br />
characterised by incantation music and Homeric echoes. In the next two stanzas, Auden has used<br />
Iambic Pentameter and comparatively longer lines. In the third part, the second stanza is in Iambic<br />
Pentameter and in the first and the third stanzas again music, coupled with Homeric echoes,<br />
predominates and makes it a unique lyrical piece. In this poem Auden builds up the theme of<br />
desolation, barrenness and hollowness of modern world through contrast by using classical myth of<br />
Achilles and his Shield to juxtapose the past and the present and thus brings out the desolation,<br />
emptiness and barrenness of the contemporary scenario contrasted against the heroic past. He strikes<br />
a very effective parallelism by alternating the glorious past with the hollowness of the scene and<br />
thus producing antithetical effect. The poet begins the poem by referring to Greek mythology in<br />
which Thetis, the mother of Achilles, looks at the shield hung over the shoulders of her son.<br />
The Shield of Achilles, one of the Greek heroes of Trojan War, was made by Hephaestus<br />
who was the blacksmith of the gods. This shield was characterised by beautiful scenes of adventure,<br />
art and sea adventures, etc. On it were depicted orchards, well-governed cities with marble buildings<br />
and calm seas with beautiful ships sailing on them. To her wonder on the modern shield of Achilles,<br />
the modern artist had depicted the bleak pictures of artificial and desolate life of the contemporary<br />
world. The modern shield of Achilles projects a vast landscape desolate, bleak and barren without<br />
food, rest or a place for shelter. There are multitudes of soldiers behaving like thoughtless cattle,<br />
mechanically following the dictates of their leaders and rulers who do not have any personal contact<br />
with them. They merely give them orders through radio in a dry and unsympathetic voice, justify<br />
the cause by statistics and persuade them to go to war, surely to come to grief or to be killed. This<br />
exposes the emptiness and worthlessness of adventure in desolate and bleak modern age.<br />
Auden reinforces his point through another conspicuous contrast which underlines<br />
degeneration of religious values. Achilles’ mother observes a scene of a concentration camp<br />
depicted on the modern shield instead of the depiction of the scenes of ritual pieties/white flowergarlanded<br />
heifers which remind one of the romantic poet, John Keats’ reference to Grecian Urn in<br />
his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. There, on the shield, she observes:<br />
Three pale figures were led forth and bound<br />
to three posts driven upright in the ground.<br />
The scene unfolds the utter futility of ideals as the prisoners of war, who are tied to the<br />
posts to be shot dead, suddenly become aware of the hollowness of the ideals they fought for and<br />
lost their pride and died as men before their bodies died. Christ was also crucified. His crucifixion<br />
was termed as martyrdom as it was for the cause of redemption but massacre in the modern age is<br />
aimless, insignificant and carries no meaning, no significance. It is rather a sign of spiritual<br />
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degeneration of the people who are helpless and soulless-the killed and killers both. The poet<br />
underlines the insensitivity and unsympathetic attitude of the officials on duty and the general<br />
masses towards killings. The third part of the poem reveals Thetis’ searching eye trying to locate on<br />
the shield:<br />
For athletes at their games.<br />
Men and Women in a dance<br />
Moving their sweet limbs.<br />
Quick, Quick to music……<br />
Contrary to the carvings of athletes busy in playing games, and men and women dancing to<br />
the rhythm and music with quick steps, engraved on Achilles’ shield, the modern shield displays no<br />
playgrounds or dancing floors. Here Thetis comes across weed-choked fields where a ragged urchin<br />
loiters about, where girls are raped, where acts of violence are committed ruthlessly and aimlessly<br />
and where old values of sympathy love, promises of friendship are unscrupulously lacking. The<br />
contrast reflects that in the past heroic warriors fought for a cause – they fought for religion, for<br />
country even for love, but brutal and soulless violence is the order of the day in modern times.<br />
Thetis, the mother of Achilles, is frightened to view the contemporary scenario engraved on<br />
the modern shield and goes away crying in despair at the degeneration of religious, moral and<br />
spiritual values in the modern age.<br />
About this poem Monroe K. Spears remarks…. “The shield symbolises art, image of the<br />
human condition. Auden’s version however, is mock-heroic, contrasting the Homeric description to<br />
the life the modern artist must represent. In the shield of art Hephaestus (the artist) shows Thetis<br />
(the audience), not the classical city but the plain of modern life on which multitudes are ordered<br />
about by totalitarian rulers (a faceless voice reciting statistics through a loudspeaker). Instead of the<br />
‘ritual pieties’, we have barbed wire enclosing an ‘arbitrary spot’ where there is a travesty of the<br />
crucifixion being performed by bureaucrats–while ‘ordinary decent folk’ watch—in which helpless<br />
individuals are shamelessly deprived of human dignity before death” 8 .<br />
In the concluding stanza Auden brings out Thetis’ despair and the inevitability of Achilles’<br />
death. There is a reference to the hobbling away of Hephaestus, the thin-lipped armourer, who made<br />
such a classical shield representing symbolically the inevitability of death of man, though he may be<br />
as brave as iron hearted man slaying Achilles himself - even Achilles could not escape death. The<br />
implication here is that making a shield like that of Achilles in modern times is insignificant in the<br />
face of inevitability of death.<br />
Auden successfully employs the technique of classical myth to build up his theme of<br />
spiritual decay and desolation in the modern age through the contrast of past having significant<br />
artistic and cultural values with the chaotic present, with its loss of spiritual and artistic values.<br />
There is an implied suggestion of Christian belief in inevitable end of old world order and the<br />
emergence of the new world order. The poem belongs to the later phase of Auden’s poetic career<br />
and, therefore, it shows spiritual and religious leanings.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’.<br />
2. Trace the development of thought in the poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’.<br />
3. What is the theme of the poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’?<br />
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Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Contemporary world reflected through the Shield.<br />
2. Use of Symbolism.<br />
70
7. In Praise of Limestone<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes :<br />
Inconstant ones—Those who constantly change their views-the opportunists (called the limestone<br />
ones in the poem).<br />
Ingenious—Clever, skilful persons showing ingenuity.<br />
Consistently—Constantly<br />
Conduits—Water channels, drains<br />
Chuckle—To show signs of glee or to laugh in a repressed manner.<br />
Private Pool—Private world<br />
Ravine—A Mountain cleft<br />
Lounges—To recline idly<br />
Displaying his dildo—Reference (here) is to sexual overtures to seek pleasure<br />
Extensions—Expansions<br />
Conspicuous—Striking to the eye<br />
Explanation—In this poem Auden presents a word-picture of limestone landscape, which<br />
symbolizes an idyllic world of art, where norms of good and evil are quite different from those of<br />
human world. Modern world of human beings follows an artificial, theoretical and impractical<br />
religion and a strict code of morality which stand in stark contrast against the religion which is free<br />
from retribution, guilt and shame, which artistic world exhibits.<br />
Here, the poet defines limestone men and describes the scenic beauty and the characteristics<br />
of the limestone men. The poet calls the human beings who keep on changing their views, the<br />
limestone ones. According to the poet such people are, in fact, the opportunists who seek material<br />
advancement by moving with the wind. Just as the limestone, when it is dissolved in water loses its<br />
individuality, similarly, the opportunists change according to the changing needs of the hour and are<br />
ready to lose their identity to achieve material heights. Hence, such people always feel nostalgic for<br />
the limestone landscape.<br />
The poet draws attention to the attractive appearance of the limestone landscape by pointing<br />
at its round slopes, which are fragrant with a fragrant shrub, thyme. Just beneath its pleasant surface,<br />
the poet points out are the caves and the water channels through which flows the water. There is a<br />
reference to those springs which while they flow appear to produce a chuckling sound expressing<br />
glee. Metaphorically, this limestone landscape symbolises a human world where people are<br />
inconstant like limestone. They keep on changing and adopting themselves to the requirements of<br />
the changing time like the water which flows beneath the limestone through the most convenient<br />
routes. They make out private worlds of their own and each in his own world lives a life given to<br />
sensuous pleasures, availing himself of each given opportunity and sucking honey like a butterfly<br />
from one flower to another and keeps sticking to his own world like a lizard.<br />
In a conversational language the poet brings to the notice of the reader the well-marked<br />
limestone landscape with definite outlines. He underlines that this region is the most congenial place<br />
for limestone men as it provides men who are afraid of the unknown and the undefined, with the<br />
security of motherly love. For a man who is given to the pleasures of sex and love and who leans<br />
against a rock lazily, making sexual overtures fully assured that whatever his faults may be he is<br />
perfectly secure and loved and hence, fully given over to the enjoyment of the present moment, this<br />
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limestone landscape offers the most secure refuge. Here, limestone men are free to attract others and<br />
win over others and hence, enjoy worldly pleasures and achieve material success.<br />
The poet compares these limestone ones with little children at play. Just as the children live<br />
in their own fairy lands and make-believe worlds easily imagining one thing at one time and<br />
something else at another and their imaginings are neither logical nor consistent, similarly, the<br />
grownups (the limestone ones) keep on making private world of their own—a world where they can<br />
pursue selfish pleasures and motives. Just as the children compete among themselves and use fair or<br />
foul means to win their mother's attention or love, so do these pleasure seekers of limestone<br />
landscape indulge in competition—even cut throat competition for worldly power and wealth. Thus,<br />
it is the landscape for which the opportunists constantly feel home sick.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Band of rivals—Group of competitors<br />
Voluble discourse— A Loud discussion<br />
Temper-Tantrums—Fits of anger<br />
Lay— (here) Song, a short narrative poem or balled<br />
Accustomed to—Used to<br />
Crater—Mouth of a volcano<br />
Blazing fury—Flaming anger<br />
Local needs of valleys—Routine requirements of that area<br />
Lattice-work— Inter crossing bars<br />
Nomad's comb—Wanderer's instrument for untangling hair, etc.<br />
Encountered—Faced<br />
Fungi—Poisonous growth<br />
Monstrous forms—Wild horrible forms<br />
Comprehensible—Understandable<br />
Pimp—A pander, one who helps in wicked designs<br />
Fake—False, counterfeit, fraudulent<br />
Tenor— (here) Highest male voice<br />
Bring down the house— (here) Earn loud applause<br />
The best— (here) The saints to be<br />
The worst—(here) Over-ambitious and bloodthirsty people like Caesar<br />
Explanation — In this stanza the poet draws the reader's attention to a group of limestone men<br />
who keep on competing with each other using fair or foul means. Though, they are seen arm in arm<br />
sometimes, their steps are not in harmony and they always try to harm their rivals. They can be seen<br />
involved in loud discussions with each other about the moral and ethical aspects of God. They know<br />
each other to the extent that they cannot think that there can be any important secrets. They do not<br />
know any rigid code of morality. They can not think of a god whose anger is so volcanic that he<br />
cannot easily be pacified by a hymn or a line of poetry in His praise. Living in the limestone<br />
landscape they are habitual of limestone-persons who can easily be moulded like the limestone<br />
which can be easily cut and given any shape. Hence, their god can easily be pleased and won over<br />
by sweet tongued flattery. Limestone people are well adjusted within their limited surroundings. It<br />
is a world where everything is familiar and conventional and so they are afraid of the new, the<br />
unknown, the mysterious and the infinite. They are born fortunate. They have never come across<br />
poisonous growth, insects of the jungle and the horrible forms which involve dangers and horrors of<br />
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life. They have never seen bad days or faced challenges. They take life easily in its stride without<br />
any fear or threats. So when any one of them is destroyed or falls on evil days or takes to evil days<br />
they can understand the operations or working of his mind because he was very much like them-a<br />
limestone one. It doesn't matter whether one becomes a pander, a person who helps in wicked<br />
designs or a dealer who deals in false Jewellery or an opera singer who uses his fine resounding<br />
voice in an opera—these will earn for them a lot of loud applause. This is the word picture of the<br />
limestone landscape metaphorically presented by the poet.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes :<br />
Immoderate—Extraordinary<br />
Humor—Wait or Intention<br />
Tamed—made useful or managed<br />
Altered—Changed<br />
Intendant—(here) Prospective over-ambitious person like Caesar<br />
Slamming the door—Closing the door with force and noise<br />
Older colder voice—(here) the call of the ocean<br />
Envies— (here) Objects of envious feeling<br />
Explanation — In this stanza the poet points out that those who are above average or below<br />
average do not like to live in this limestone country. Only the ordinary or the average people want to<br />
stay there. Saints, who are above the worldly affairs, may be termed as the best and over-ambitious<br />
and bloodthirsty people like Caesar come in the category of the worst. The best seek extraordinary<br />
places which extol intrinsic beauty, moderate or dim light and where life holds deeper and more<br />
persuasive meanings than mere pleasure seeking and cut-throat competitions for material<br />
achievement in the form of power and wealth characteristic of limestone country. The saints to be<br />
respond sorrowfully to the call of the hard rocks of granite that their wit or intention is fallacious<br />
and their display of love is merely accidental whereas death is permanent and certain. Then clays<br />
and gravels extend a cordial invitation in a soft and profound tone by pointing to the specific place<br />
reserved for drill of the armies, they can achieve even much more there, for example, build dams to<br />
tame the rivers, etc. Over-ambitious persons can get constructed grand and magnificent tombs.<br />
Those who were over ambitious and wanted to be powerful and great, ambitious like Caesar listen<br />
to the call and in a fit of anger leave the place to bring about radical changes. They in fact, extol<br />
material existence but they are not pleasure seekers. They want to attain power to control and rule<br />
the earth. But the reckless or rash people are attracted by the ocean, which has always been an<br />
object of fascination for the adventurous people, but in whose vast expanse of water human<br />
aspirations are lost for ever. In fact, ocean's might is unchallengeable. No doubt, it offers freedom,<br />
which involves risk of life and promises nothing. In fact, the poet underlines the fact that reckless<br />
adventures involve risk and lead such people no where.<br />
Words-Meanings and Explanatory Notes:<br />
Dilapidated province—Wasted or ruined province<br />
Tunnel—A subterranean artificial passage through a hill (here tunnel represents time linking the<br />
past to the present)<br />
Earnest habit—sincere habit<br />
Calling the sun the sun—to call a spade a spade-the stark truth<br />
Anti-mythological—Act against mythology<br />
Modifications—Transformations or changes<br />
Gesticulating—Making gestures or indicating<br />
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Angle— (here) Point of view<br />
Explanation — In these particular lines the poet underlines the lesson which history teaches i.e. in<br />
the world nothing is permanent. The world is not as it appears to be. Different approaches to life<br />
prove the validity of this fact. This world is devoid of the quietness of a place where every thing is<br />
settled or fixed. It is a degenerated and ruined world. But all this does not end the matter. It poses a<br />
worldly duty upon itself to call in question the rights of human beings. The poet, who is appreciated<br />
for the sincere habit of calling a spade a spade i.e. stark realism, feels uncomfortable by the<br />
mysterious statues which seem to interrogate his anti-mythological myth of limestone landscape,<br />
obviously made out of the realities of life and not out of the imaginary performances of gods and<br />
goddesses. Indisciplined and rowdy university students pursue the scientist down the tiled path<br />
between trees or a gallery, no doubt, with pleasant offers but they seem to criticise his concern for<br />
the remotest aspects of Nature. The poet is not an exception. He is also criticised for not being one<br />
among them—not wasting time, not getting caught, not lagging behind and not resembling beasts<br />
who always act in the same manner, and finally, for not being a thing like water or stone whose<br />
conduct or way of behavior can be predicted.<br />
However, death is a fact. If human beings become aware enough to realise it then they are<br />
right. If sins can be forgiven and if there is life to come, the various shapes, which limestone can<br />
easily assume made merely for pleasure, emphasis that the fortunate will not bother about the point<br />
of view from which they are considered because everything is transparent. There is no secretnothing<br />
to hide. Death is the ultimate reality. Human nature is weak and inconsistent. It is as strange<br />
and unreal to think of perfection in love or a life to come as are the different shapes assumed by the<br />
limestone. One should accept the reality of life and face its challenges instead of hankering after<br />
empty dreams and finding out escape routes to religion or romantic love.<br />
Introduction — One of the most remarkable poem of W. H. Auden, about which G.S.Fraser has<br />
most appropriately commented in his essay ‘The career of W. H. Auden’ that It is “One of the most<br />
beautiful of all his recent poems”. ‘In Praise of limestone’ was first published in Horizon in July<br />
1948. This poem later formed part of another volume of Auden's poem Nones. In fact, the<br />
technique and style adopted by the poet to build up the main argument necessitates the intensive<br />
study of the poem to understand its main thrust.<br />
Summary — In this poem Auden has presented a limestone landscape, which symbolises an<br />
idyllic world of art, where norms of good and evil are quite different from those of the human<br />
world. Modern world follows an artificial theoretical and impractical religion and strict moral code<br />
which stand contrasted against a religion, which is free from retribution, guilt and shame, exhibited<br />
in the artistic world.<br />
The poet calls the opportunists the limestones because they are inconstant ones who seek<br />
material advancement by moving with the wind. The poet draws attention to the attractive limestone<br />
landscape with its round slopes, underground caves and conduits, its chuckling springs and points<br />
out that this landscape is symbolically a human world where people are inconstant like limestone.<br />
They keep on adapting themselves to the requirement of the changing time and through the most<br />
convenient routes they make private world of their own and each in his own world lives a life given<br />
to sensuous pleasures and material achievements. The poet earmarks the well-marked landscape<br />
with definite outlines and underlines that this region is the most congenial place for limestone men<br />
as it provides men given to pleasures of sex, love and other material comforts, the most secure<br />
refuge and security of motherly love. The limestone men keep on seeking or pursuing selfish<br />
pleasures and motives in their private world and like children who vie with each other to win<br />
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mother's attention or love and use fair or foul means, these pleasure-seekers also compete for<br />
worldly power and wealth.<br />
They are sometimes seen arm in arm but their steps are never in harmony with each other.<br />
So they always try to harm their rivals. They get involved in loud discussions regarding the moral<br />
and ethical nature of their God. They are so well familiar with the ways of each other that they can<br />
not think that there can be any important secrets. They cannot conceive of a god, whose tempertantrums<br />
are moral to the extent that He cannot easily be pacified by a hymn or a line of poetry in<br />
His praise. They know that their god is not so volcanic that He can not be easily pleased or won<br />
over by sweet tongued flattery. Limestone people are well adjusted in their limited surroundings.<br />
They are born lucky and take life in its stride. When any one of them falls on evil days or takes to<br />
evil ways, they can understand the working of his mind because he happens to be one of them.<br />
But the best—the saints to be and the worst—over-ambitious persons like Caesar do not like<br />
to live in this limestone country, only the average live there. The best seek extraordinary places<br />
which extol intrinsic beauty, which are away from gaudy light and where life has more persuasive<br />
and deeper meanings than mere pleasure seeking or material achievements. They respond<br />
sorrowfully to the call of the granite wastes saying that their intention or humor is fallacious and<br />
their display of love is accidental where death is permanent. The over-ambitious persons are given<br />
many other incentives by the clays and gravels like a place for drill of armies, building of dams to<br />
tame rivers and magnificent tombs to be constructed but they leave the place in anger. They want to<br />
bring radical changes. They extol material existence but they crave for power to control and rule the<br />
earth. But the people who are reckless are attracted by the call of the ocean, which has always<br />
fascinated the adventurers but in whose vast expanse of water human aspirations are lost forever.<br />
The ocean offers freedom but it is at the cost of life-adventurous life involves risk and may lead<br />
nowhere. Human efforts can not challenge its might.<br />
The poet underlines the lesson which history teaches i.e. in the world of reality nothing is<br />
settled or definite. It is a fact that this world is not as pleasant as it appears to be. It is devoid of the<br />
quietness of a place where every thing is fixed or settled. This is a degenerated and ruined world,<br />
which makes an appeal regarding its duty to call into question the rights of human beings. The poet<br />
who is appreciated for his stark realism feels uncomfortable by the mysterious statues which appear<br />
to doubt his anti-mythological myth—a myth formed out of the realities of life and not out of the<br />
imaginary warnings of gods and goddesses. He is criticized for his actions and behavior because he<br />
does not lose time, does not get caught, is not left behind and because he does not behave like the<br />
beasts, who always act in the same manner and also because he is not a thing or a stone whose<br />
conduct can be predicted.<br />
In spite of this Auden feels that death is a fact, a certainty. If human beings realise it then<br />
they are right. The various shapes, which limestone men can easily assume, made merely for<br />
pleasure, emphasise that the fortunate people will not bother about the point of view from which<br />
they are considered because everything is transparent. There is nothing to hide. Death is a fact.<br />
Human nature is weak and inconstant and so to think of perfection in love or future life seem as<br />
strange as are the different shapes assumed by the limestone landscape. This implies that one should<br />
accept the reality of life and face its challenges and should not take recourse to escape routes to<br />
religion or romantic love.<br />
Critical Appreciation — ‘In Praise of limestone’ was first published in Horizon in July 1948. Later<br />
it formed part of another volume of Auden's poems Nones. It is one of the most remarkable poems<br />
75
of W. H. Auden, about which, G. S. Fraser has most appropriately commented in his essay, ‘The<br />
Career of W. H. Auden’ that it is “one of the most beautiful of all his recent poems”. In this poem<br />
Auden presents a limestone landscape which symbolises an idyllic world of art where there are<br />
human figures carved in limestone.<br />
Auden gradually builds up the main argument by presenting a well marked limestone<br />
landscape with definite outlines, characteristics of limestone men, the best and the worst types of<br />
people-the saints-to-be and over-ambitious Caesars respectively and finally reckless adventurers<br />
who want to enjoy freedom which involves risk to life and try to challenge ocean's might. His<br />
ultimate analysis leads him to a stark realization-death is a certainty, it is a fact, Human nature is<br />
weak and inconsistent and so it is as strange and unrealistic to expect perfection in love or future life<br />
as are the different shapes assumed by the limestone landscape. By implication the poem underlines<br />
the fact that one should accept the reality of life and face its challenges and should not hanker after<br />
empty dreams and should not take recourse to escape routes to religion or romantic love.<br />
Justin Replogle remarks that the fine lyric, ‘In praise of limestone’ within its elaborate<br />
metaphorical landscape, considers four ways of responding in life. Limestone men live solely for<br />
pleasure. Their tribe spreads all the way from unsophisticated simple living unspoiled in the natural<br />
state, Rousseau dreamed of, to aesthetes in high civilisation graced by “conspicuous fountains” and<br />
“formal vineyards”. Unable to imagine anything beyond their control, these attractive limestone<br />
types can experience neither Religious despair and joy nor Ethical good and evil. They are Aesthetic<br />
saints or Caesars. Saints live elsewhere, on granite wastes, while Intendant Caesars prefer "clays and<br />
gravels". Saints are obsessed by time-death, chance and uncertainties beyond human control. So<br />
they soon flee the limestone softness for a harder land where every austere rock reminds them of<br />
human pettiness and limitation. Caesars, like their limestone cousins, cherish earthly existence, but<br />
not for its pleasures. They thrive on power and act to transform the earth to control it and make it<br />
yield. So they seek out malleable builder's soil, gravel and clay. A “really reckless” fourth group<br />
prefers the ocean, in whose liquidity human aspirations sink without a trace. The sea offers freedom<br />
by annihilation and guarantees that no human triumph shall mar its indifference to men's efforts.<br />
Those who prefer freedom, the freedom of life-denial are so completely uncongenial to Auden that<br />
the he never mentions them again even to disapprove” 9 . Auden's selection of an idyllic setting for<br />
this poem lends it an extra grandeur—the landscape in pastoral surroundings with its “rounded<br />
slopes” and “secret system of caves and conduits” and “the springs that spurt out everywhere with a<br />
chuckle”. An atmosphere of mystery, suspense and secrecy lend a romantic setting to the landscape<br />
which is the most congenial place for limestone men given to pleasures of love and sex. The<br />
limestone men keep on seeking or pursuing selfish pleasures and motives in their private world and<br />
like children who vie with each other to win mother's attention or love and use fair or foul means,<br />
these pleasure seekers compete for worldly power and wealth.<br />
These limestone men (Human figures carved in the limestone) stand 'arms in arm' but their<br />
steps are never in harmony with each other. They are involved in loud discussions. They are so well<br />
familiar with the ways of one another that they cannot think that there can be any important secrets.<br />
They cannot conceive of a god whose temper-tantrums are moral and volcanic to the extent that He<br />
cannot easily be pacified by a hymn or a line of poetry. They know that their god can easily be<br />
pleased by sweet-tongued flattery. Limestone men are well adjusted in their limited surroundings.<br />
They are born lucky and take life in its stride. When any one of them falls on evil ways, they can<br />
understand the working of his mind, as he happens to be one among them. Though, the idyllic world<br />
of limestone men holds temptations to saints-to-be, over-ambitious Caesars and the reckless ones,<br />
they slip away from it. Thus, the limestone landscape with its limestone men is an idyllic world of<br />
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art where concepts of good and evil are quite different from those of the real human world. The<br />
human world follows an artificial, theoretical and impractical religion and a rigid code of morality<br />
which stands contrasted against the religion of artistic world of limestone men, which upholds a<br />
religion free from retribution, guilt and shame and which affords a glimpse of powerful expression<br />
of natural human instincts and desires.<br />
Finally, the poet strikes a personal and religious note and leads the poem quietly to its<br />
climax by underlining the fact about weak and inconsistent human nature and strangeness of<br />
seeking perfection in love or future life and comparing it with the fragile nature of different shapes<br />
assumed by the limestone landscape. He says:<br />
“….but when I try to imagine a faultless love<br />
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur<br />
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape”.<br />
Auden, in fact, quite skillfully projects a variety of moods in this poem. The characteristic<br />
technique and leisurely style of the poem lend an additional edge to its appreciation. About this<br />
poem Barbara Everett in her book Auden remarks that the success of Auden's later style, “lies in the<br />
leisurely, apparently casual, but in fact, deliberate, winding movement towards a quiet climax that is<br />
half denied by, but half resists, the profusion of circumstantial detail that precedes it” 10 . In fact, the<br />
technique and style adopted by Auden to build up the main argument of the poem necessitates a<br />
thorough perusal of the poem to understand its main thrust.<br />
The poet’s handling of a variety to moods and feelings leading to the central subject,<br />
gradually developing the main argument through the contrast of artistic world and the human world<br />
and in a sustained dramatic tone and finally by implication a pragmatic approach to face the<br />
challenges of life with fortitude and not to seek escape routes to romantic love or religion are indeed<br />
remarkable features of the poem.<br />
Essay-Type Questions:<br />
1. Trace the development of thought in the poem, ‘In Praise of Limestone’.<br />
2. Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem, ‘In Praise of Limestone’.<br />
3. Write down the theme of the poem, ‘In Praise of Limestone’.<br />
Write short notes on the following:<br />
1. Auden’s use of symbolism.<br />
2. Incongruous diction.<br />
3. Auden’s versification.<br />
4. Landscape Imagery.<br />
Questions:<br />
Note: The Students are advised to take help from the detailed stanza-wise Explanation, Summary<br />
and Critical Appreciation of the given poems for the preparation of answers to the textual essay-type<br />
and short questions.<br />
77
Chapter-V<br />
W.H. Auden: A Modern Poet<br />
W.H. Auden (1907-73) is the most representative poet on the British literary scenario.<br />
Socially and politically conscious in a leftwing way, he established his leadership over the group of<br />
poets, who shared his attitudes and perceptions by proclaiming the urgency of collective action and<br />
the need for active involvement in the immediate cause. Perhaps for this reason, Robin Skelton<br />
considers him “a leader, an innovator and representative voice of his time and generation” 1 .<br />
Keeping in view the variety and abundance of his literary outputs Auden is a modern poet.<br />
Richard Hoggart in his ‘Introduction to Auden’ remarks, “He has produced a body of verse which<br />
commands our respect and admiration in a number of ways; he has been the brilliant and sometimes<br />
profoundly evocative explorer of dilemmas within the human will; in his vividly epigrammatic,<br />
conversational and alert verse he held a mirror to a complex decade” 2 . In fact, Auden’s versatility<br />
and prolificacy as a poet is per-excellent. His actively productive literary span extends over a period<br />
of thirty five years. During this span, as Donald Davies in ‘Remembering the Thirties’ puts it,<br />
“……..no other poet writing in <strong>English</strong> today, has attempted as much as Auden; just as no other<br />
poet of his generation can place beside his body of work so exciting for its peculiar insight, its range<br />
of reference, and its skill in use of language and rhythm. In the variety of subjects and manners he<br />
has used successfully, Auden has to be found a parallel outside contemporary poetry altogether in<br />
the painter Picasso” 3.<br />
Auden’s attempt to confront the urgent and immediate challenges of the times compelled<br />
him to react very sharply to the aesthetics prevalent in the preceding decade. His poetry, in fact, can<br />
be seen as emerging in direct contrast to the poetry of his immediate predecessors. Unlike the poets<br />
of the previous decade, ‘Auden Group’ - Auden being the trend-setter, assumed a radical posture to<br />
counteract the unpleasant realities of the contemporary scene and refused to look upon art as a<br />
sanctuary or safe haven from the turmoil, turbulence and decay of actual social life. He showed a<br />
radical concern for public issues. He did not allow his poetic talents to be confined to the expression<br />
of his private anxieties. The poets of the twenties, on the other hand, felt that there could be only a<br />
personal and private solution of the problems of spiritual sickness which they saw around them.<br />
Instead of limiting himself to the expression of intense anguish and an overpowering sense of<br />
desolation over a situation which was visualised as an abstract and external catastrophe, Auden<br />
believed in concrete action. Here in lies a poetry of revolt, a characteristic feature of modern poetry.<br />
Colloquial diction, difficult and prosaic vocabulary, which signify Auden’s poetry, make him a<br />
modern poet.<br />
Another marked feature of Auden’s poetry is humanitarianism. ‘A communist To others’<br />
later entitled as ‘Brothers, who when the sirens roar’ represents the highest watermark in the middle<br />
phase of his poetry dealing with the issues of socio-economic exploitation, injustice and inequality.<br />
Auden expresses his solidarity with the proletariat in common fears and assures them that if they<br />
lend their support, they can make this system ‘tumble down’ 4 Again, his humanitarian impulse<br />
inspires him to raise the issue of inequality and injustice in the poem ‘O for the doors to be open’.<br />
The poem presents a sick society wrought with the distinctions of the rich and the poor. In ‘Its<br />
farewell to the drawing room’s civilised cry’ his outcry for providing justice to the exploited and<br />
down-trodden evidences not only his acceptance of the identity of the common man but also his<br />
genuine concern for their lot.<br />
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In Auden’s poetry another modern trend emerges as the most predominant feature-its<br />
realism. Auden made a sincere attempt to grapple with the contemporary issues from a fresh angle.<br />
His direct involvement in some of the topical developments and the strong sense of commitment to<br />
the cause of society shows his poetry to be a realistic one. He, in fact, wrote down-to-earth poetry.<br />
Auden and his group attacked T.S. Eliot and other modernists for adopting a passively<br />
gloomy or cynically bitter attitude towards the challenges posed by the contemporary society and<br />
championed collective socio-political action as a remedy for the grave problems created by the<br />
existing situation. The ideological thrust of Auden and his group was towards re-orientation of<br />
society on leftist lines which would be an anathema to older poets like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot for<br />
whom recapturing of tradition, religion and mythical beliefs by the individual was the real answer.<br />
This change in his social perspective determines the basic content of his poetry as well as his<br />
manner of expression. He acknowledged the overpowering sense of moral confusion and spiritual<br />
uncertainty that had overtaken modern man, but he chose to take upon himself the specific task of<br />
investigating into the social causes that had led to this phenomenon and to resolve the crisis.<br />
Auden’s later poetry evidences another modern characteristic i.e., of revival of religious<br />
faith. The compositions of Francis Thompson, W.B. Yeats, Masefield are clear manifestations of<br />
this modern trend. A faith in Christian theology is predominant in all the writings of Auden’s<br />
American phase. This development, though, appears sudden after his <strong>English</strong> phase, was, in fact, a<br />
continuation of the beliefs and ideals imperceptibly cherished by him even in his earlier phase of<br />
life. A perusal of his early poems reveals prayers, invocations for a change of heart and humanistic<br />
solutions like love and sympathy to social problems. It was, in fact, a constant evolution leading to<br />
his faith in Christianity.<br />
A revival of interest in the poetry of Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17 th<br />
Century is a remarkable trend in the modern poetry which gets reflected in the poetry of W.H.<br />
Auden also. His startling and far-fetched imagery is a reflection of the imagery used by<br />
Metaphysical poets. Though Auden’s poetry deals with down to earth realities, the undercurrents of<br />
romanticism, a typical modern trend, are also felt. Love in its various shades remains a major theme<br />
of his poetry. Like Romantics Auden has also made extensive use of symbolism in his poetry to<br />
communicate his viewpoint. His use of landscape, war and journey as symbols is quite effective<br />
modern trend. Auden commands a rich and varied medium of expression. He has also experimented<br />
with new verse forms and techniques. He was constantly experimenting, making modifications and<br />
developing his technique. He captures the reader’s attention by using brilliant and vigorous phrases.<br />
Among the technical devices, which strengthen his style, are personifications, allegorical images,<br />
use of adjectives, simile, short declarative statements, symbolism traditional verse forms, Rhetorical<br />
devices, metres, use of long catalogues and idioms, etc.<br />
Some critics have reservations about W.H. Auden’s being a modern poet. R. N. Srivastav<br />
quotes John Blair who called him “a second generation modern” 5 . Auden may be traditional in his<br />
views about the role of the poet, he recognised the gravity of the contemporary crisis in all its<br />
entirety and made an attempt to project it by raising challenging issues in his poetry. He tried to<br />
investigate into the specific causes of the chaotic situation and sought to offer possible solutions to<br />
the issues. Towards the end of the decade of Nineteen Thirties his social attitudes grew inwardly<br />
inclined and the dominant radical thrust was subdued. He turned towards Christianity for support.<br />
As far as technique was concerned, he was highly modern. All his efforts were directed towards<br />
bringing about changes in the existing setup, extension of human personality by promoting human<br />
values of love, truth and justice and optimistic confrontation with the challenges using life-values<br />
79
that could give man his due place in society so that both individual and society may struggle for a<br />
meaningful existence. R. N. Srivastav’s remarks seem quite appropriate, “Auden stands out among<br />
modern poets by his earnest effort to be a great modern thinker. He was well-versed in history,<br />
philosophy and theology and had a remarkable grip on contemporary currents of thought in political<br />
theory science and psychology. No wonder, he has been such a great influence on younger poets<br />
both in England and America. His virtuosity and the versatility of his powers over language will<br />
long remain a source of inspiration and, in course of time, may earn him the title of the poets’<br />
poet” 6 .<br />
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Chapter VI<br />
W. H. AUDEN’S TECHNIQUE<br />
The overall impact of social developments on Auden’s sensibility was reflected in his<br />
poetry with its full immediacy. Since, the subject matter dealt directly with the day-to-day issues.<br />
Auden had to make corresponding adjustments in form and technique. He was a master of a variety<br />
of styles. His literary output extended over a large period during which he was constantly<br />
experimenting, making modifications and developing his technique.<br />
In the poetry of early Nineteen thirties Auden’s style tends towards difficulty to the extent<br />
even of obscurity. One significant cause of this obscurity is that he writes in a telegraphic style, in<br />
which there are significant omissions like connectives, conjunctions, articles, auxiliaries and<br />
sometimes even pronouns. This becomes challenging for the reader because such ellipses hinder his<br />
understanding and many times remain beyond his grasp. In part I of ‘It was Easter as I walked in<br />
the public gardens’ his fondness for abbreviated expressions and omissions of articles or<br />
connectives is clearly discernible:<br />
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,<br />
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted<br />
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.<br />
(TEA,P.37.)<br />
The omission of ‘a’ before the word, solitary and ‘as’ before distorted make the reading<br />
difficult. Again, there are some omissions, which create a disjointed and disturbing effect in the<br />
following lines:<br />
Coming out of me living is always thinking,<br />
Thinking changing and changing living,<br />
Am feeling as it was seeing –<br />
In city leaning on harbour parapet<br />
To watch a colony of duck below<br />
(TEA, P.37. )<br />
Here, Auden’s deliberately compressed style makes the reading and comprehension of the<br />
poem quite difficult. His use of poly syllabic phrases to lend an extra grandeur to the occasion<br />
becomes manifest in his use ‘glittering generalities in his poem ‘In Sickness and in Health’ written<br />
at a later stage.<br />
In fact, Auden, during this period, was experimenting with all sorts of forms and manners of<br />
expression making his style difficult to the extent of developing an incomprehensible cerebral style.<br />
Christopher Isherwood, Auden’s great friend and collaborator remarks about his early poetry, “I<br />
liked one line he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way, whole poems were<br />
constructed, which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of manner or<br />
sense. This is the simple explanation of much of Auden’s celebrated obscurity.” 1<br />
Auden hypnotises the reader by using brilliant and vigorously incisive phrases in individual<br />
lines but his use of this kind of phraseology, sometimes, results in lack of coherence and<br />
81
compactness. To add to this, private jokes, myths, allusions, private and personal symbols together<br />
make his early poetry difficult and obscure.<br />
Auden, no doubt, uses effective vocabulary but his use of imagery lacks organic growth. A<br />
pertinent example of his incoherent and uninteresting imagery is found in his poem ‘Petition’ in the<br />
following lines:<br />
……..the intolerable neural itch,<br />
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,<br />
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.<br />
82<br />
(TEA, P.36.)<br />
These details, however, do not suggest that Auden was inefficient in his technical skill and<br />
versification. Nevertheless, one thing is clear that he never bothered to correct or polish his verses<br />
due to his casual attitude in this regard during the early period of his poetic career. At a later stage<br />
Auden did retrospection and recognised his earlier shortcomings and went to the extent of calling<br />
his poetry of the early phase “pure rubbish’’. Auden’s capacity for assimilation was commendable.<br />
He read a number of writers and assimilated their style and rhythms and benefited from T.S. Eliot’s<br />
innovations in technique also.<br />
In his socially active phase, Auden acquired more clarity and maturity in technical skills<br />
with the passage of time. He, being a constant seeker of techniques of communications, attained<br />
greater command over language, imagery and versification. Even this search for a new idiom was<br />
one of the reasons of his migration to America. He could create new expressions, new poems out of<br />
the potentialities of language. Regarding intellectual tone of Auden’s poetry, Justin Replogle<br />
remarks, “his poetry more than that of any important poet of our time, is made out of conceptual<br />
diction, words that by themselves, out of their context of phrase or line, produce in the reader not<br />
feeling states but intellectual responses.” 2 Auden’s diction, in fact, is predominantly conceptual<br />
which makes his poetry prosaic. His poetry does not produce ecstasy of sensuous sound, which<br />
makes his poetry prosaic and this leads to its slow and grudging acceptance. His poetry, in fact, is a<br />
poetry of direct statement. He puts his conceptual words in order to make a sentence in verse which<br />
gives the impression of something prosaic, dull and uninteresting.<br />
Among the technical devices which strengthen his style are personifications allegorical<br />
images, use of adjectives, simile, short declarative statements, symbolism, traditional verse forms,<br />
Rhetorical devices, metres, oratorical devices, use of long catalogues and idioms, etc. His<br />
personifications of conceptual nouns lend life and vitality to his expression. His allegorical<br />
constructions supply action and verbal animation to his diction. An excellent example of Auden’s<br />
use of is to be seen in his poem ‘In praise of Limestone’, where Auden has used expanded<br />
allegorical image allegorical landscape. It is a masterpiece which unfolds the potentialities of<br />
such a technical device which has the power to create something really of the highest order. Again,<br />
to strengthen his expression Auden makes ample use of adjectives which impart peculiarity and<br />
uniqueness to his language. Not only in his early poetry but also in his later poetry, there is no<br />
dearth of adjectives.<br />
Simile is another technical device which abounds in Auden’s poetry to the extent that it has<br />
come to be known as ‘Auden simile’. His similes ‘Here war is simple like a monument’, ‘Museums<br />
stored his learning like a box’, ‘And paper watched his money like a spy’, etc. are some of the<br />
examples of his use of this device. Auden also makes use of short declarative statements like<br />
‘wisdom is a beautiful bird’, ‘Touching is shaking hands’, etc. In addition to the above devices,
Auden has used Rhetorical devices. In the late Nineteen Thirties Auden developed the habit of<br />
making his statements followed by colons or implied colons to give his verse an additional edge.<br />
Auden uses the device of symbolism to arouse emotions in the reader. There is frequent use<br />
of symbols from geography and landscape to depict the psychological states of mind. These<br />
symbols have also been employed to expose corrupt and degenerated industrialised and urban<br />
society. The shield in ‘The Shield of Achilles’ projects the contrasting perspectives of a civilization.<br />
Then, ‘In Praise of Limestone’, is a befitting example of Auden’s use of long versesentences.<br />
In this poem there are several examples of run-on lines of irregular stops with in lines.<br />
Among other devices, use of long catalogues, usage words and idioms may be included which help<br />
to produce the desired effects in his poetry.<br />
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Chapter-VII<br />
W. H. Auden: The Theme of Individuality<br />
The question of individual identity is one of the most crucial and pressing issues that Auden<br />
takes up in his poetry. He initiates it in one of his early poems entitled, ‘It is time for the destruction<br />
of error’ (1929) where he painfully notes that the fashionable rich classes evade the real issues<br />
through their indulgence in the superficial kind of entertainment. He is grieved to note that these<br />
people view ‘the destruction of error’ as only an ineffective threat symbolised in the ‘storm’ to be<br />
evaded by bringing in chairs. He condemns this apathetic and non assertive response on their part<br />
because their attitude will pose a serious threat to their individuality. Auden apprehends planned<br />
attacks against the individual and refers to the plans being made:<br />
To haunt the poisoned in his shunned house,<br />
To destroy the efflorescence of the flesh,<br />
To intricate play of the mind, to enforce<br />
Conformity with the orthodox bone,<br />
With organised fear, the articulated skeleton 1 .<br />
Similar warning is reiterated in a number of Auden’s later poems, particularly, the poems<br />
selected for intensive study.<br />
In ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ the poet underlines the indifference of Nature and Society to<br />
W.B. Yeats’ death as an individual. W.B. Yeats was undergoing death pangs but Nature was not<br />
affected at all. It continued running its usual course. Unconcerned about his serious illness, the<br />
wolves kept running on through the evergreen forests. His death as an individual will be forgotten in<br />
the hectic routine activities of life. The brokers will shout as usual on the floor of the Bourse-the<br />
busy commercial centre. Each person has his own ego i.e. he is imprisoned in the vicious circle of<br />
his ego, but he is greatly assured of his freedom – he considers himself to be free. Auden pleads for<br />
the freedom of the individual who is not only threatened but actually imprisoned;<br />
In the prison of his days<br />
Teach the free man how to praise.<br />
(TEA P.243.)<br />
The poet suggests that art should play a constructive role by generating love and other<br />
human values required for the establishment of a well-ordered society which he considers as a<br />
necessary prerequisite for the healthy development of the individuals:<br />
Make a vineyard of the curse,<br />
Sing of human unsuccess<br />
In a rapture of distress;<br />
In the deserts of the heart<br />
Let the healing fountain start.<br />
(TEA, P.243.)<br />
In ‘The unknown Citizen’ Auden decries the system which curtails freedom and happiness<br />
of the individuals. Here his criticism of the system is subjected to his deep concern for the well-<br />
84
eing of the individuals in a society. The poet points out that the identity of an individual has<br />
already been destroyed. He is merely a number-JS/07/M/378. He ironically suggests that the success<br />
and identity of the unknown citizen are defined by his conformity to the rigid standards of the<br />
regimental establishments. He is identified as a faceless creation of the ‘Bureau of Statistics’, ‘One<br />
against whom there was no official complaint. The poet criticises the mechanisation of an individual<br />
by economic, commercial and even ideological institutions which exploit him to their own<br />
suitability. The ironic exposition of the implications of this forced conformity, expected from the<br />
unknown citizen, shows Auden’s powerful critique on the contemporary ethos and his liberal<br />
concern for the freedom and happiness of the individuals.<br />
In another poem ‘Musee Des Beaux Arts’ also the poet raises this issue by pointing out that<br />
the world at large remains indifferent to an individual and his suffering by giving three examples.<br />
The poet successfully and systematically develops the theme of indifference of humanity and Nature<br />
to the suffering of an individual with the help of imagery of Brueghel’s paintings.<br />
At the very outset of the poem the poet states that the great painters correctly depicted the<br />
place and significance of individual suffering in the scheme of things. They knew that the routine<br />
activities will continue in spite of suffering on individual plane. Whatever be the depth or<br />
magnitude of the individual suffering, the world moves on callously with its routine activities. The<br />
poet uses contrasting images to bring out the subtle irony by making the old anxiously and eagerly<br />
waiting for the miraculous birth of Christ and by presenting the children who ignore the incident<br />
and keep on playing. Again, the poet highlights this issue of Nature’s indifference to the most<br />
momentous of human sufferings through another painting of Brueghel, namely, ‘The Massacre of<br />
Innocents’. On the one hand, Christ is being crucified in a secluded corner and, on the other hand,<br />
the executioner’s horse is rubbing its back against a tree, quite unconcerned. The dogs are leading<br />
their doggy life and are not even the least bothered about the crucifixion. The painting of ‘The fall<br />
of Icarus’ is representative of individual suffering and the apathy of the world to it. The agonising<br />
cry of ‘Icarus’ as he fell into the ocean and the indifference of the ploughman for whom ‘it was not<br />
an important failure’, Nature’s apathy depicted through the sun rays callously falling on his white<br />
legs disappearing into the green water of the sea and the callous indifference of the crew and the<br />
ship which sailed calmly on when Icarus fell – all these details offer an insight into the distortions in<br />
egocentricity and self-love of the modern man. Ironically, the tragedy took place in idyllic<br />
surroundings but no body took notice of it. In the existing scheme of things individual suffering fails<br />
to evoke poignant emotions and hence it becomes irrelevant. The conspicuous predominance of<br />
other things in Icarus painting-the ploughman, the sunshine, the ship painted in the minute details,<br />
and the faint image of disappearing legs, through contrast shows that individual suffering is like a<br />
speck in the vast world phenomena and therefore, insignificant. The poem, indirectly, suggests the<br />
poet’s deep concern for the anguish of the lonely suffering individual.<br />
In ‘September 1, 1939’ Auden shows his deep concern for the safety of individuals. At the<br />
time of composition of this poem, the poet was sitting in a New York bar, ‘Uncertain and afraid’<br />
(TEA, P.246.), viewing himself and his fellow-beings as ‘lost in a haunted wood’ (TEA, P.246.) like<br />
‘Children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good’. (TEA,P.246.). Auden was afraid<br />
of the imminent war, and uncertain of future because the thirties decade had proved to be dishonest<br />
because dishonest efforts were made to reach a compromise with Germany knowing very well that a<br />
compromise with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini was meaningless. Auden is concerned with the<br />
safety of the individuals as the fear of impending war and the resultant death intruded into the<br />
private lives of the people also. He visualises men lost in their petty private anxieties having little<br />
capacity to counteract the hostile forces. He who gives a call for direct social action with ‘trumpet<br />
85
and anger and drum’ (TEA, P.209.) has now become conscious of ‘Faces along the bar’ (TEA,<br />
P.246.) and is desperately seeking to project an affirming flame<br />
Investigating into the causes that led to war Auden concludes that Hitler’s self-love resulted<br />
in Fascism and his fascist tendencies were responsible for the eventuality which intruded even upon<br />
the private lives of the people. Auden further points out that the high-sounding, empty and<br />
incoherent non-sensical talk with which the political leaders try to befool the masses is not so rough<br />
and harmful as the desire of human beings to be loved alone. He refers to Nijinsky, who was a<br />
Russian dancer (1890-1950) wrote about Diaghilev, a Russian organiser of dances, that he wanted<br />
to be loved alone. Auden calls Nijinsky mad because what he wrote about Diaghilev is true of the<br />
common man. It is a common human weakness. Each man or each woman wants to be recognised<br />
as an individual:<br />
For the error bred in the bone<br />
Of each woman and each man<br />
Craves what it cannot have,<br />
Not universal love<br />
But to be loved alone.<br />
(TEA, P.246.)<br />
In Auden’s later poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’ the theme of individuality asserts itself in<br />
the form of an appeal for the freedom to express one’s emotions freely, to be free to change<br />
according to one’s desires. Here the limestone landscape with its limestone men is an idyllic world<br />
of art where concepts of good and evil are quite different from those of the real human world. The<br />
human world follows an artificial, theoretical and impractical religion and a rigid code of morality<br />
which stands contrasted against the religion the artistic world of limestone upholds - a religion free<br />
from retribution, guilt and shame, and which affords a glimpse of powerful expression of natural<br />
human instincts and desires.<br />
In ‘The Shield of Achilles’ Auden talks about automatons devoid of all sense of identity or<br />
individuality. The poet refers to Greek mythology in which Thetis, the mother of Achilles, the great<br />
Greek hero of Trojan, looks at the shield made by Hephaestus, hung over Achilles’ shoulder. Thetis<br />
looks for familiar scenes of adventure, art and sea adventure-scenes depicting past culture and<br />
conditions on the modern shield:<br />
She looked over his shoulder<br />
For vines and olive trees,<br />
Marble well-governed cities,<br />
And ships upon untamed seas.<br />
Here the image of ‘Untamed seas’ unfolds Auden’s concern for freedom. Thetis is surprised<br />
to find that the modern artist had depicted bleak pictures of the artificial and desolate contemporary<br />
world. The modern world, engraved on the shield, is desolate, bleak and barren without any sign of<br />
positive change. It is characterised by deprivations, insensitivity and blankness. In this world, which<br />
the modern shield projects, there are multitudes of soldiers who behave like dumb-driven cattle and<br />
mechanically follow the dictates of their Generals, who speak to them over a radio in dry and<br />
unsympathetic voices. The commanders persuade them to go to war by justifying the cause and<br />
lured by and befooled by their sweet tongues, they undertake the hazards of war, surely to come to<br />
grief or to be killed. The soldiers have no option but to obey and march in line to the battle field like<br />
automatons.<br />
86
Auden’s poem ‘Prologue at Sixty’ epitomises his appreciation for individuality in the<br />
following lines:<br />
a Mind of Honor must acknowledge<br />
the happy eachness of all things.<br />
The above details show that in his poetry, particularly, in the poems prescribed for intensive<br />
study W.H. Auden has successfully and effectively built up the theme of individuality.<br />
87
Chapter - VIII<br />
W. H. AUDEN’S CONCEPT OF LOVE<br />
W. H. Auden frequently uses the word love in his poetry. To understand his concept of love<br />
one has to go through the development and growth of his literary outputs. Being a socially<br />
conscious poet, he thought of love as a supportive mechanism for the establishment of healthy and<br />
harmonious relationships, which are required for a better social set-up. Hence, he thought of<br />
romantic love in terms of an escape route or self-regarding love.<br />
In the psycho-analytical phase of his creative output during the thirties, Auden had been<br />
identifying the symptoms of psychic maladies leading to social crisis. He placed specific emphasis<br />
on the role of love as an instrument to implement change of heart process for ushering in of a better<br />
social order. In ‘Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all’ (Oct., 1929) Auden advocates a change of heart<br />
through psychologically curing the distorted emotional responses which develop an escapist attitude<br />
to life. In his poem, ‘No change of place’, (1931) Auden points out that the delicate sentiment of<br />
love has become mechanical and is devoid of direct emotional expression. He, therefore, emphasises<br />
the need to make it a stronger and more emotional factor to strengthen human relationships.<br />
In ‘Prologue’ (1932) Auden refers to the symptoms of alienation in emotionally bankrupt<br />
heirs of decadent middle-class society. He suggests that the unifying force of love may bring about<br />
adjustments in social institutions and help in ushering in of a social change. In this poem Auden<br />
emerges as the exponent of love as something that gives ordered pattern to man’s understanding of<br />
social reality. Auden strongly advocates social love for the establishment of a stable society and for<br />
bringing about an environmental change, which might ultimately enable people to shed their<br />
sickening isolation.<br />
In ‘May with its light behaving’ the poet’s treatment of the issue of alienation emphasises<br />
the need to move beyond possessive love to an emotional awakening of social love. Auden<br />
considers the socio-economic system responsible for loneliness of individual and underlines the<br />
importance of something more stable and lasting than temporary escape routes into pleasure trips.<br />
His realisation of a need for a deeper kind of relationship based on a broader concept of love<br />
becomes evident in the line:<br />
How insufficient is the endearment and the look 1<br />
Thus, in the final analysis Auden seems to advocate Joyous awakening to love as an<br />
instrument of social change. Stephen Spender suggests: “Love is the cure for the individual and for<br />
the society yet the inadequacy of such an abstract ideal must have dissatisfied Auden making him<br />
seek the workings out of the tasks of love within the social movement of his time” 2 .<br />
In the socially active phase, Auden lends an extra dimension to the concept of love by<br />
raising it from individualistic basis to the collective social good. In the poems like ‘Doom is dark<br />
and deeper than any sea- dingle’, ‘That night when joy began’, ‘The chimneys are smoking’, ‘O<br />
what is that Sound’, ‘Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head’ and ‘August for the people and<br />
their favourite islands’, Auden’s response to the social crisis and his aversion to illusory escapes<br />
into romantic individualistic kind of love come to limelight.<br />
In ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’ (1930), the poet advocates a higher kind<br />
of love far above:<br />
88
……….dreams of home,<br />
waving from window, spread of welcome<br />
kissing of wife under single sheet,……….<br />
(TEA, P.55.)<br />
Even in private love, the poet perceives a social sense. All these emotions make him<br />
conscious of forward looking love. At this stage, the attraction of private anxieties is difficult to<br />
overcome. Nevertheless, the beginning has been made. Still more, in ‘That night when joy began’<br />
(Nov.1931), we are made conscious about the existence of social reality. Even in private moments<br />
of the lovers’ union, Auden mentions about ‘morning’s levelled gun’ and ‘trespasser’s reproach’<br />
(TEA, P.113). Auden shows us glimpses into love as a cure for social insecurity but a total oblivion<br />
into illusory love is definitely missing. Again in ‘The Chimneys are Smoking’ (April, 1932), the<br />
individual struggle of the lovers represents the struggle of life against the malignant disintegrating<br />
forces. Auden is seeking once again the fulfilment of public vision through private means and a<br />
distinct shift of emphasis from individual to collective can be easily marked.<br />
Auden’s radicalism in this context finds forceful expression in his poem ‘O what’s that<br />
sound’ (Oct.1932). Auden places the lover in a situation where he has to make a choice between his<br />
love for his beloved and the call of duty enabling the poet to build the theme of social commitment<br />
by presenting a contrast between private love and situational urgency. The pressures of private<br />
concerns beneath the manifest social concerns of the poem are clearly discernible in expressions<br />
denoting the approaching thumping march of the ‘scarlet soldiers’ (TEA, P.126.) and the beloved’s<br />
passionate reactions to these as well as the lover’s false consolations:<br />
…I promised to love you, dear,<br />
But I must be leaving.<br />
(TEA, P.126.)<br />
Here, the final emphasis on the lover’s choice in favour of social duty, in spite of his<br />
intensity of love for his beloved, represents his pragmatic view of love which can bear the pangs of<br />
separation and can achieve heights of love for a larger community and thereby reflects his social<br />
perspective.<br />
Auden’s condemnation of the self-regarding love and the illusory escapes into romantic<br />
dreams comes out strongly in ‘Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head’ Nov.1934).The poet<br />
disfavours individualistic love, which moves easily through ‘the night’s delights and the day’s<br />
impressions’ (TEA, P.152.) without any concern for the ‘sombre skies’ of Europe and the ‘Danube<br />
flood’ (TEA, P.152.). He projects the inadequacy and incompleteness of individualistic love<br />
because of its lack of concern for broader social issues. Auden investigates into the causes of social<br />
malady and pleads for a positive outlet to natural desires which, if repressed can become perverted.<br />
His consciousness of an objective world of hunger and deprivations reflects a heightened sense of<br />
forward looking love:<br />
Ten thousand of the desperate marching by<br />
Five feet, Six feet, Seven feet high,<br />
Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses<br />
Churchill acknowledging the voter’s greeting<br />
Roosevelt at the microphone, Van der lubbe laughing<br />
And our first meeting<br />
(TEA, P.153.)<br />
89
Auden’s belief suggests his radicalism in the line “…………..through our private stuff must<br />
work/His public spirit” (TEA, P.153.) but the intervention of individualistic love is ironical in the<br />
following lines:<br />
The voice of love saying lightly lightly,<br />
Be Lubbe, Be Hitler, but be my good<br />
Daily, nightly.<br />
(TEA, P.154.)<br />
In his emphasis on individual responsibility to mould love in a positive or negative manner,<br />
Auden calls for an action which should have a social base but depending on the capacity of the<br />
individual to overcome selfish individualism. Love, here, is supposed to emerge as a basis for social<br />
relationships, social harmony and individual fulfilment. As analysed in earlier poem also, Auden’s<br />
solutions when they emanate from individual capabilities, are essentially rooted in his social vision.<br />
Auden’s spontaneous urge for social kind of love is further reflected in ‘August for the<br />
people and their favourite islands’ (Aug., 1935). The poem unfolds his disillusionment with illusory<br />
ideas of individualistic love held precious by him and Isherwood in the early thirties. The poet<br />
considers illusory, the dreams of freedom enjoyed by the holiday-markers and condemns the<br />
evasive efforts of these apparent controllers of ‘the complicated apparatus of amusement, (TEA,<br />
P.155.). The poet is greatly critical of any romantic escape into self-regarding love and regrets<br />
believing earlier that ‘one fearless kiss would cure the million fevers’ (TEA, P.156.). Love<br />
represented through private joking and the solitary vitality is insufficient, as a mere ‘flabby fancy’<br />
like the studied taste and ‘the whisper in the double bed’ (TEA, P.156.) in the face of contemporary<br />
social challenges. Here, Auden’s major contribution lies not in underlining the power of love to cure<br />
the psychological ailments but in the extension of the power of love to get over the material chaos.<br />
Again, in his poem ‘Fish in the unruffled water’ (March 1936), Auden projects love as a powerful<br />
factor in establishing a better and happy social order.<br />
In ‘Miss Gee’ (1937) and ‘Victor’ (1937) Auden talks about distorted emotional responses<br />
and repression of physical desires. Towards the end of the decade Auden seems to seek solutions to<br />
private concerns through social criticism. During this period his social attitudes seem to have grown<br />
inwardly inclined and the dominant radical thrust gets subdued and he looks to humanistic means to<br />
resolve the contemporary crisis. ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’, W. H. Auden underlines the role of<br />
love to generate fellow-feelings among human beings so that they may shake themselves of<br />
negative feelings of jealousy and hatred and develop healthy harmonious human relationships. In<br />
September 1, 1939 Auden concludes that egotistical love is the cause of suffering. Here he seems to<br />
advocate the psychological revolutionary treatment of change of heart through universal love, ‘we<br />
must love one another or die’. (TEA, P.246.)<br />
To conclude, in his American Phase, Auden turned towards Christianity for solace and<br />
support and advocated humanistic values love, fellow-feeling and sacrifice. Obviously, Auden’s<br />
concept of love in this phase has wider connotations. It is this extended form of love which can<br />
resolve the all pervading contemporary crisis. It is not self-fulfilment but sacrifice and suffering<br />
which go into the making of such a wider concept of love.<br />
90
Chapter-I<br />
CHAPTER-WISE REFERENCES<br />
1. R.G.Cox, ‘The Poetry of W.H.Auden’ The Modern Age Vol.VII The Pelican Guide to<br />
<strong>English</strong> literature ed., Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1964), P. 378.<br />
2. Christopher Isherwood, ‘Some Notes on Auden’s Early Poetry’, New Verse (Auden Double<br />
Number), November, 1937.<br />
3. Francois Duchene, The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A study of W. H. Auden’s Poetry<br />
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), PP. 212-213.<br />
4. Robin Skelton, ed., ‘Introduction’ Poetry of the Thirties (London: Penguin Books, 1964),<br />
P.35.<br />
5. M. Khrapechenko, The writer’s creative individuality and the Development of Literature<br />
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), P.9.<br />
6. Richard Hoggart (quoted in) W.H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
7.<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), PP-19-20.<br />
8. Bernard Blackstone (quoted in ) W. H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New<br />
Delhi: Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P. 21.<br />
9. Arthur Koestler (Quoted in) W. H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.4.<br />
10. D.E.S. Maxwell, Poets of the Thirties ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), P.2.<br />
11. Ibid., PP. 3-4.<br />
12. Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties Text’s and Contexts (London: Macmillan Press,<br />
1978), P.135.<br />
13. Justin Replogle (quoted in ) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak, (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.21.<br />
14. Justin Replogle(quoted in ) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilalk (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.22.<br />
15. Richard Hoggart, ‘Introduction to Auden’s Poetry’ Auden-A Collection of Critical Essays:<br />
Twentieth Century views ed., Monroe K. Spears ( Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs,<br />
N.J. 1964), P.121.<br />
91
16. Carlo Izzo, ‘The Poetry of W.H. Auden’ Auden-A Collection of Critical Essays: Twentieth<br />
Century views ed., Monroe K. Spears (Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1964),<br />
P.136.<br />
17. W.H.Auden (quoted in) W.H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi: Rama<br />
Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.25.<br />
18. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’ vide: <strong>English</strong> Prose selection for degree Course<br />
(India: Gauhati: <strong>University</strong>, 1966), PP. 186-187.<br />
19. Robin Skelton, ed., ‘Introduction’ Poetry of the Thirties ( London: Penguin Books, 1964),<br />
P.35.<br />
20. F.W. Bateson, <strong>English</strong> Poetry - A Critical Introduction (London: Longman Group Limited,<br />
1971), P.19.<br />
21. F.W. Bateson, ‘<strong>English</strong> Poetry’: A Critical introduction (London: Longman Group Limited,<br />
1971), P.189.<br />
22. D.E.S. Maxwell, Poets of the Thirties (London: Rout ledge and Kegan paul, 1969), P.2.<br />
23. Stephen Spender, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1985),P.45.<br />
24. Stephen Spender, ‘Background to the Thirties’- The Thirties and After (London: Macmillan<br />
Press Ltd., 1978), P.21.<br />
25. G.S. Fraser, The Modern Writer And His World (Verschoyle: 1953, revised ed., Pelican,<br />
1964, 1970), P.214.<br />
26. R.A. Scott-James, (quoted in) W.H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1989), P.1.<br />
27. Edward Mendelson, ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essay and Dramatic writings (1927-<br />
1939), (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), P.119.<br />
28. Stephen Spender, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), P.80.<br />
29. C.M. Bowra, Poetry and Politics (London: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 1966), PP.124-125.<br />
30. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s<br />
(London: Faber and Faber, 1976), PP.193-194.<br />
31. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s<br />
(London: Faber and Faber, 1976), P.19.<br />
32. Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Faber and Faber, 3 Queen square, 1977),<br />
P.249.<br />
33. C.M. Bowra, Poetry and Politics (London: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 1966),P.1.<br />
92
34. Robin Skelton, Poetry of the Thirties (London: Penguin Books, 1964), P.61.<br />
Chapter-II<br />
1. Richard Hoggart, ‘ Introduction to Auden’s poetry’ Auden – A Collection of Critical<br />
Essays: Twentieth Century views ed., Monroe K. spears ( Prentice Hall, INC Englewood<br />
Cliffs, N.J. 1964),P.124.<br />
2. Donald Davis, ‘Remembering the Thirties’ The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse ed.,<br />
Kenneth Allot (London: Penguin Books, 1962), P.199.<br />
3. Jeremy Robson, ‘ Auden’s Longer poems’ W.H. Auden: The Critical Heritage ed., John<br />
Haffendon ( Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), PP 73-74.<br />
4. Barbara Everett quoted in W.H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak ( New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), PP. 26-27.<br />
5. Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), P.16.<br />
6. Edward Mendelson , ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic writings (1927-<br />
39), (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), P.36.<br />
7. Richard Hoggart (quoted in) W.H.Auden: The Poet ed., R.N. Srivastav ( Delhi: Doaba<br />
House), P.7.<br />
8. Barbara Everett (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.33.<br />
9. R.N.Srivastav, W.H.Auden: The Poet ( Delhi: Doaba House), P.18.<br />
10. Stephen Spender, ‘W.H.Auden and His Poetry’ Auden - A Collection of Critical Essays<br />
Twentieth Century views ed., Monroe K.Spears ( Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs,<br />
N.J., 1964), P.30.<br />
11. Geoffrey Thurley, The Ironic Harvest: <strong>English</strong> Poetry in the Twentieth Century ( London:<br />
Edward Arnold Ltd., 1974), PP.62-63.<br />
12. A.T.Tolley, The Poetry of Thirties (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1975), P.348.<br />
13. Ronald Mason, ‘ W.H.Auden’ Writers of Today (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948),<br />
P.106.<br />
14. M.L. Rosenthal, ‘ New Heaven and Earth’ The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (New<br />
York: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, 1965), P.193.<br />
15. W.H.Auden, ‘I Believe’ The Personal Philosophies of Twenty Three Eminent Men and<br />
Women of our Time ed., Cliffton Fadiman (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1940),<br />
P.19.<br />
93
16. John T. Wright, W.H.Auden ( New York: Twayne Publishers INC, 1969), P.61.<br />
17. Richard Johnson, Man’s Place – An Essay on Auden (Ithaca and London: Cornell<br />
<strong>University</strong> Press, 1973), P.5.<br />
18. Ibid., P.6.<br />
19. Ibid., P.7.<br />
20. Richard Hoggart (quoted in ) W.H.Auden: The Poet ed., R.N. Srivastav ( Delhi: Doaba<br />
House), PP.25-26.<br />
21. Richard Johnson, Man’s place – An Introductory Essay on Auden (Ithaca and London:<br />
Carnell <strong>University</strong> Press, 1973), PP.9-10.<br />
22. R.N. Srivastav, W.H. Auden: The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House), PP.26-27.<br />
23. Richard Johnson, Man’s place- An Essay on Auden (Ithaca and London: Cornell university<br />
Press, 1973), P.48.<br />
24. Barbara Everett (quoted in) W.H. Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.39.<br />
25. Richard Johnson, Man’s Place – An Essay on Auden (Ithaca and London: Cornell<br />
<strong>University</strong> Press, 1973), P.47.<br />
26. Ibid., P.59.<br />
27. R.N.Srivastav, W.H.Auden: The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House), P.32.<br />
28. Monroe K. Spears (quoted in) W.H.Auden: The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House), P.30.<br />
29. R.N.Srivastav, W.H.Auden: The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House), P.33.<br />
30. Barbara Everett (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers Karol Bagh, 1987), P.40.<br />
31. R.N.Srivastav, W.H.Auden: The Poet ( Delhi: Doaba House), P.35.<br />
32. Barbara Everett (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak ( New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, 1987), P.43.<br />
33. Ibid., P.44.<br />
34. G.S.Fraser (quoted in) W.H.Auden: The Poet ed., R.N.Srivastav (Delhi: Doaba House),<br />
P.35.<br />
35. R.N.Srivastav, W.H.Auden: The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House), P.39.<br />
36. Barbara Everettt ( quoted in ) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.46.<br />
Chapter-III<br />
94
1. Clifford Dyment, C.Day Lewis (London: Longman, Green & Co. 1955), P.7.<br />
2. T.S.Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), P.63.<br />
3. Stephen Spender, Collected Poems ( 1928-1985) (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), P.34.<br />
4. Ian Parsons, ed. Poems of C. Day Lewis (1925-1972), (London: Jonathan Cape Limited and<br />
Hogarth Press, 1977), PP.90-91.<br />
5. Stephen Spender, ‘Reactionaries’ The Thirties And After (London: Macmillan Press Ltd.,<br />
1978), PP.195-201.<br />
6. C.M. Bowra, Poetry and Politics, (London: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 1966), P.1.<br />
7. Robin Skelton, Poetry of the Thirties (London: Penguin Books, 1964), P.61.<br />
Chapter-IV<br />
1. M.L.Rosenthal, ‘New Heaven and Earth’ The Modern Poets: A Critical introduction (New<br />
York: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, 1965), PP.193-194.<br />
2. John Fuller (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak ( New Delhi: Rama<br />
Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol bagh), P.121.<br />
3. John Bayley, ‘W.H.Auden’ Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays Twentieth Century<br />
views (Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs, N.J.1964), P.78.<br />
4. Monroe K. Spears (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select poems ed., Raghukul Tilak ( New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.152.<br />
5. M.L. Rosenthal, ‘ New Heaven and Earth’ The Modern Poets: A Critical introduction<br />
(NewYork: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, 1965), P.193.<br />
6. Ibid.,P.195.<br />
7. Geoffrey Thurley, The Ironic Harvest: <strong>English</strong> poetry in the Twentieth Century (London:<br />
Edward Arnold Ltd., 1974), P.75.<br />
8. Monroe K. Spears (quoted in) W.H.Auden : Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.195.<br />
9. Justin Replogle (quoted in ) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.159.<br />
10. Barabara Everett (quoted in ) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New<br />
Chapter-V<br />
Delhi:Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.158.<br />
1. Robin Skelton, ed., ‘Introduction’ Poetry of the Thirties (London: Penguin Books, 1964),<br />
P.35.<br />
95
2. Richard Hoggart, ‘Introduction to Auden’s Poetry’ Auden A Collection of Critical Essays:<br />
Twentieth Century views ed., Monroe K. Spears (Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs, N.J.<br />
1964), P.124.<br />
3. Donald Davis, ‘Remembering the Thirties’ The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse ed.,<br />
Kenneth Allot (London: Penguin Books, 1962), P.199.<br />
4. Edward Mendelson, ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings (1927-<br />
1939) (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), P. 121.<br />
5. R. N. Srivastav, W. H. Auden The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House, 1688, Nai Sarak), P.102.<br />
6. R.N. Srivastav, W.H. Auden The Poet (Delhi: Doaba House, 1688, Nai Sarak), P.102.<br />
Chapter-VI<br />
1. Christopher, Isherwood, ‘Some Notes on Auden’s Early Poetry’, New Verse (Auden<br />
Double Number), November 1937), P.4.<br />
2. Justin Replogle, (quoted in) W.H.Auden: Select Poems ed., Raghukul Tilak (New Delhi:<br />
Rama Brothers: Educational Publishers, Karol Bagh, 1987), P.99.<br />
Chapter-VII<br />
1. Edward Mendelson, ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings (1927-<br />
1939) (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), P.40.<br />
Chapter-VIII<br />
Subsequent references to the text of the poems in this chapter are from the same edition,<br />
here after, abbreviated TEA and given with relevant page numbers within parenthesis<br />
immediately after the quotation.<br />
1. Edward Mendelson, ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings (1927-<br />
1939), (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), P.152.<br />
Subsequent references to the text of the poems in this chapter are from the same edition,<br />
here after, abbreviated TEA and given with relevant page numbers within parenthesis<br />
immediately after the quotation.<br />
2. Stephen Spender, ‘W. H. Auden and his poetry’ Auden A Collection of Critical Essays:<br />
Twentieth Century views ed., Monroe K. Spears (Prentice Hall, INC Englewood Cliffs,<br />
N.J., 1964), P. 30.<br />
LIST OF GENERAL (ESSAY-TYPE) QUESTIONS ON W.H. AUDEN AND HIS <strong>POETRY</strong><br />
1. Is it correct to say that Auden’s verse related to the political, social and intellectual<br />
climate of Nineteen Thirties? Give reasons for your answer.<br />
96
2. “The diversity of Auden’s work is indeed amazing”. Discuss.<br />
3. Trace the early influences on Auden’s early work.<br />
4. Bring out the characteristics of Auden’s early poetry.<br />
5. “Psychology and Marxism shaped Auden’s early poetry”. Discuss.<br />
6. Do you agree with the view that Auden is essentially an anti-Romantic poet?<br />
7. Why is Auden described as the most representative poet of the Nineteen Thirties?<br />
8. Describe Auden’s concept of love.<br />
9. “Auden is a satirist with a difference”. Discuss.<br />
10. Can love be said to be a major theme in Auden’s poetry? Discuss.<br />
11 Learning love and unlearning hatred is proposed as a remedy in almost every poem of<br />
Auden”. Elaborate.<br />
12. “It is said that Auden and his Group appealed to the people of their generation because their<br />
poetry sprang from a common feeling of guilt and responsibility”. Discuss.<br />
13. “Auden seeks out new styles as a means of discovering new insights”. Elaborate.<br />
14. “Auden has tried to resolve the central problem raised by war as the prime example of man’s<br />
infallible nature”. Discuss.<br />
15. Discuss theme of individuality in W.H. Auden’s poetry.<br />
16. “Auden has been called “a stylistic chameleon”. Discuss.<br />
17. Discuss Auden’s use of contemporary imagery with examples.<br />
18. Give a general estimate of W.H. Auden as a poet.<br />
19. Comment on the statement, “Auden is the most important and influential modern poet after<br />
T.S. Eliot”.<br />
20. Describe W.H. Auden’s poetic achievements, giving examples from the prescribed poems.<br />
Short Questions : Write Short notes on the following :–<br />
1. Auden’s imagery.<br />
2. Auden’s use of allegory in his poetry.<br />
3. ‘Auden simile’<br />
4. Auden’s symbolism.<br />
5. Role of middle-class sensibility in Auden’s poetry of Nineteen Thirties.<br />
6. Auden’s versification<br />
7. Auden’s attitude to war<br />
8. Role of poet in Auden’s poetry<br />
9. Auden’s concept of love<br />
10. Obscurity in Auden’s Technique<br />
97
11. Auden as a second generation modern poet.<br />
12. Humanistic solutions to contemporary chaos in Auden’s poetry<br />
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING<br />
98
1. Mendelson, Edward. ed., The <strong>English</strong> Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic writings (1927-<br />
1939) London: Faber and Faber, 1977.<br />
2. Allot, Kenneth. ed., The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse Harmondsworth, MiddleSex,<br />
England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1962.<br />
3. Skelton, Robin. ed., Poetry of the Thirties London: Penguin Books, 1964.<br />
4. Bahlke, George W. The Later Auden New Brunswick: Rutgers <strong>University</strong> Press, 1970.<br />
5. Beach, J.W. The Making of the Auden Canon London: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, 1957.<br />
6. Bhattacharya, B.K. W. H. Auden and the other Oxford Group of Poets New Delhi: Bahri<br />
Publications, 1989.<br />
7. Blair, John G. The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden Princeton: N.J.: Princeton <strong>University</strong> Press, 1965.<br />
8. Bogan, Louise. Quest of W. H. Auden, Selected Criticism New York: Noonday Press, 1955.<br />
9. Bowra, C. M. Poetry and Politics London: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 1966.<br />
10. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Social context of Modern <strong>English</strong> Literature Newyork: Schocken<br />
Books, 1971.<br />
11. Buell Frederic. W. H. Auden as a Social Poet Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press, 1971.<br />
12. Cox R. G. ‘The Poetry of W. H. Auden’ The Modern Age Vol.VII. The Pelican Guide to<br />
<strong>English</strong> Literature ed., Boris Ford, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1964.<br />
13. Daiches, David. Present Age: After 1920 London: The Cresset Press, 1958.<br />
14. Davison Dennis. W. H. Auden London: Evens Bros., 1970.<br />
15. Duchene Francois. The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A study of W. H. Auden’s Poetry<br />
London: Chatto and Windus, 1972.<br />
16. Everett, Barbara. Auden London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964.<br />
17. Fuller, John. A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.<br />
18. Haffendon, John. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage London: Routledge and kegan Paul,<br />
1983.<br />
19. Hoggart, Richard. W. H. Auden London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1961.<br />
20. Hynes, Samuel. The Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s London: Faber and Faber,<br />
1976.<br />
99
21. Johnson, Richard. Man’s Place An Essay on Auden Ithaca and London: Cornell <strong>University</strong><br />
Press, 1973.<br />
22. Kettle, Arnold. Poetry and Politics Milton Keynes: The Open <strong>University</strong> Press, 1976.<br />
23. Maxwell, D. E. S. Poets of the Thirties London: Routledge and Keyan Paul, 1962.<br />
24. Osborne, Charles. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet London: Eyre Methuen Limited, 1980.<br />
25. Replogle, Justin. Auden’s Poetry London: Methuen and Co., 1962.<br />
26. Srivastva, Narsingh. W. H. Auden A Poet of Ideas Delhi: S. Chand Co., 1978.<br />
27. Rodway, Allan. A Preface to Auden London: Longman Group, 1984.<br />
28. Spears, Monroe K. ed., Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays Twentieth Century Views<br />
Prentice Hall, INC Englewood cliffs, N.J. 1964.<br />
29. Tolley, A. T. The Poetry of the Thirties London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1975.<br />
30. Rosenthal, M.L. The Modern Poets: A Critical introduction New York: Oxford <strong>University</strong><br />
Press, 1960.<br />
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152<br />
DYLAN <strong>MA</strong>RLAIS THO<strong>MA</strong>S<br />
I see the Boys of Summer<br />
In My Craft or Sullen Art<br />
A Winter's Tale<br />
To an Unborn Paper Child<br />
Storming Day<br />
Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines<br />
Poems On His Birthday<br />
Poetry
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Unit-7<br />
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
One of the greatest poets of <strong>English</strong> literature Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 in Swansea where he spent his<br />
childhood years and a large part of his youthful and exuberant growing days towards adulthood. He was<br />
descended from small farmers on both sides of his family who belong to the Welsh speaking part of South-<br />
Wales. His father, a teacher used to read Shakespeare to his son when he came home from school and the<br />
young Dylan started to write poems at early age of about eight. In later life Dylan said that his proper<br />
education consisted of the liberty to read whatever I cared to I read indiscriminately and all the time.<br />
In 1931 when Dylan left Swansea grammar school, he began his most important year as a poet this continued<br />
till he went to London in 1934 during which he wrote all the poems in his first volume, Eighteen Poems, and<br />
many of those in Twenty Five Poems. He spent much of his time with other young bohemian writers in Soho<br />
pubs when he was in London. Dylan who was an unknown poet won acclaim and fame with the publication of<br />
Twenty Five Poems in 1936. He married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937, they were both poor and although Dylan<br />
later made large sums of money by broadcasting, film scripts: journalism and finally his exhausting American<br />
poetry: reading tours, he was never able to keep it. The perpetual threat of poverty contributed to his early<br />
disintegration.<br />
He was giving a performance of his play Under Milk Wood, when he collapsed and died in New York in 1953.<br />
He was thirty nine.<br />
Dylan Thomas and His Welsh Background<br />
One: I am a Welshman; two; I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.<br />
This concise, comic and not untruthful account of himself was given by Dylan Thomas to an audience in Rome<br />
in 1947, it shows that he was well aware of the extent to which his poetic temperament and his imagination<br />
were the products of his Welsh environment.<br />
With his remark we may compare two earlier statements made by Thomas<br />
Second,<br />
I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem<br />
is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.<br />
Poetry, recording the stripping of the individual darkness, must inevitably cast light upon what has been hidden<br />
for too long, and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure. Freud cast light on a little darkness he had<br />
exposed. Benefiting by the sight of the light and the knowledge of the hidden nakedness, poetry must drag<br />
further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realize.<br />
The tone and substance are self-conscious and rhetorical, showing the impact of surrealism and Freudian<br />
psychology on a young mind. But they represent attitudes the poet was to outgrow sooner or later. Dylan<br />
Thomas grew from dragon s tooth to druid in his own land. The movement in his poetry was from a clinical<br />
towards a religious purpose a path undertaken with a definite purpose and commitment.<br />
Writing under the influence of early attitudes, Thomas often dissipated his prodigious energy. His work was too<br />
diffuse, and his imagination frequently lacked direction and proper channelisation. With an increase in<br />
craftsmanship, a growing sense of purpose and dedication as a poet, came a widening, and at the same time a<br />
greater control, of theme and form that defined the general nature of his poetry in his later years too . There is<br />
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Poetry<br />
an extension of sympathy and understanding; the use of Christian myth and symbol; the emergence of a poetry<br />
of vision towards poetic structures mature and stable. But the potentiality of this development was present in<br />
his early work, the achievement represented by Collected Poems and Under Milk Wood indicates that Thomas,<br />
with an increasing sureness of instinct, came to make the best use of his poetic talent.<br />
The progress of a writer depends, however, not only upon his own canalization of his energies, but also upon<br />
the prevailing climate of influence and taste. Thomas began publishing in the thirties, but from the beginning he<br />
was neither a political nor an intellectual poet. The first impact of 18 poems and, two years later, of Twenty five<br />
poems, lay in their originality: they were unlike any other poetry written in <strong>English</strong> at the time. Certainly there<br />
were few affinities with such poets as Auden, Spender, and Empson. His poetry was the product of a strongly<br />
individual imagination fostered by ways of thought and feeling of typical Welsh in origin.<br />
The distinctive characteristics of Thomas s work are its lyrical quality, its strict formal control, a romantic<br />
conception of the poet s function, and religious attitude to experience. These are the major characteristics<br />
shared by other Anglo-Welsh writers; they were not qualities particularly current among <strong>English</strong> writers of the<br />
thirties. If we remember the difference between Thomas s use of Christian thought and symbol and T. S.<br />
Eliot s we need hardly seek any relationship there. Thomas s ideas derived from a different tradition. Religion,<br />
such as he knew it, writes Karl Shapiro, was direct knowledge. Religion is not to be used: it is simply part of<br />
life, part of himself; it is like a tree; take it or leave it, it is there. That is, it was part of the man; a way of feeling<br />
he inherited and imbibed right from his early childhood rather than acquired. The religious element in Thomas s<br />
poetry is the key to its correct interpretation; it was the most important result of Welsh influence. When he<br />
said he was a Puritan he was not believed; but it really was true. This fact is central to a full understanding of<br />
his work, for Puritanism had long directed Welsh life and thought. Its influence, for better or worse, was<br />
inescapable and could be palpably felt by a discerning reader.<br />
The Welsh influence was present in three forms. First and the most important, there was the direct and<br />
inevitable influence of a particular community with particular traditions. Secondly, there was the influence of<br />
other Welshmen writing in <strong>English</strong>, these Anglo-Welsh writers helped to create a national consciousness, the<br />
sense of a life being lived that was peculiar to Wales: with them Thomas discovered a community of ideas and<br />
outlook a distinct world view. The third influence present in his environment was the tradition of culture existing<br />
in and through the Welsh language. Since he knew no Welsh this influence came through the two channels<br />
already mentioned: contact with Welsh-speaking relatives and friends, and through translations of Welsh poetry<br />
and prose.<br />
As Geoffrey Moore writes in an article viewing the poet s work against his Welsh environment:<br />
The national feeling engendered by so many hundreds of years of Welsh speaking survives now<br />
without the actual bond of language. The harp of Wales sounds in the ears of Welshmen whether<br />
they are archdruids from Bangor or boys from the back streets of Cardiff. Without being hopelessly<br />
mystical about race, one can with some confidence assert that both it and environment have an<br />
effect on the nature of a people and the art that springs from them the spirit of place and of<br />
country is an inescapable influence. To this degree, and to the degree that Dylan Thomas opened<br />
himself to the scenes and people and manners of the place in which he was born, it is meaningful to<br />
talk about the Welsh quality of his work.<br />
Welsh influence is, inevitably, present in his earliest work, but he was then less aware of it as such. It was when<br />
Thomas for the first<br />
As Dylan moved away from Wales he began to see its life and tradition in perspective, and realized how they<br />
differed from the life and traditions of England. What was more important, he became aware of himself as<br />
belonging to this native culture, a culture which was becoming increasingly related to that of England but<br />
inescapably of different origin and a typically different creed. His parents spoke Welsh, but he himself, though<br />
not fluent in the language knew as much as any inhabitant of South Wales, he was familiar with the more
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
common phrases in use and well acquainted with the sound and verbal music of the Welsh tongue.<br />
In his Note to the Collected Poems Thomas wrote:<br />
I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to<br />
the moon to protect his flocks, replied: I d be a damn fool if I didn t! These poems with all their crudities,<br />
doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I d be a damn fool they<br />
weren t.<br />
There is a distinct bardic ring about this statement; Thomas is claiming a high function for the poet, though as<br />
usual there is dog among the fairies mocking wisdom, which, in the light of such apocalyptic and romantic<br />
claims, is a defensive irony. This is so, for example, in Author s Prologue to the Colleted Poems, “Over Sir<br />
Johns hill,” and Poem on his birthday. The poet here is a man endowed with special wisdom. In his<br />
statements about his work Thomas was very careful to support this myth already created in the poetry. This<br />
high estimation of the poet s place and function in the overall configuration of the society derive from specific<br />
tradition of Welsh life and thought. For in ancient Wales or Ireland a poet was not merely a professional versewriter:<br />
he was acknowledged to exercise extraordinary spiritual power. A. G. Prys Jones writes:<br />
These influences had always been in his environment . . . No one who had read his poems or heard him<br />
declaim them can fail to recognize his bardic affinities or the racial source of his headlong rhetoric, his<br />
passionate intensity, his powerful imaginative strength and his mystical, religious vision. In one very real sense,<br />
he belonged to the company of the great pulpit orators of Wales who were often bards . . .<br />
To this tradition can be attributed, in part, Thomas s confidence in his romantic and apocalyptic manner. General<br />
cultural movements such as surrealism and Freudian theories of art had, at best, clinical rather than religious or<br />
moral pretensions. It was his Welsh environment which offered a background of thought and culture fostering<br />
belief in the more primitive, mystical, and romantic conception of the poet.<br />
The Environment of Dylan Thomas' Poems<br />
Dylan Thomas first book of published poetry, Eighteen Poems, appeared in 1934 and was followed two years<br />
later by Twenty-five Poems. The form / contents and the techniques of the two volumes were similar in many<br />
respects; the critical reactions to these volumes, with a few exceptions, were similar also. Critics, favourable<br />
or unfavourable, found the poetry difficult, irrational, and undisciplined, but also thought it sufficiently important<br />
to demand critical comment. H.G. Porteus called the poetry an unconducted tour of bedlam . Louis MacNeice<br />
decided that it was wild but rhythmical drunken speech, Stephen Spender made the categorical pronouncement<br />
that it was just poetic stuff with no beginning or end, or intelligent and intelligible control .<br />
By 1934 there could scarcely have been anything remarkable about a writer whose works were irrational and<br />
undisciplined. Movements such as dadaism and surrealism had notoriously forsworn reason and discipline as<br />
vices, and the spate of works produced by dadaists and surrealists was quite sufficient to drown eighteen<br />
poems by a relatively unknown artist. What was remarkable about the poetry of Dylan was that it had its<br />
effect even before it was understood, and sometimes even when it was misunderstood as it could still be by<br />
many. The very minimum of the effect, moreover, left the reader with the impression that a poet with a<br />
remarkable sense of language and rhythm was saying something important about subjects of importance; at<br />
the very worst, he had somehow strangulated his statement by his violence and obscurity.<br />
There was a further facet which differentiated Thomas work from that of other poets. It was unclassifiable.<br />
Its themes , in so far as they could be grasped at all, were the age-old ones of birth, sex, and death, but they<br />
were conceived and treated in a way that was anything but familiar. In an age which was beginning to discuss<br />
myth and symbol as universalizing all human experience, this poetry used myth so private and symbol so special<br />
that it had the effect of recording unique experiences in a distinctly unique manner. The age was beginning to<br />
demand that poetry indicate a social reference; the poetry of Thomas, quite obviously, had no social responsibility<br />
of the obvious kind. The age was acquiring the habit of considering and judging poetry in terms of the tradition<br />
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Poetry<br />
that had given rise to it; the poetry of Thomas was apparently unrelated to any tradition traceable. The age<br />
was fond of explicating/elucidate obscure poetry; the poetry of Thomas was so obscure that no one could<br />
explicate it.<br />
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house<br />
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;<br />
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,<br />
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,<br />
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,<br />
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows screem …….<br />
Edith Sitwell, in a highly appreciative review, sought to interpret these lines and thereby not merely engaged<br />
herself in some controversy but provoked the following reproof from the poet himself:<br />
Miss Edith Sitwell s analysis . of the lines The atlas-eater with a jaw for news / Bit out the mandrake with<br />
to-morrow s scream seems to me a bit vague. She says the lines refer to the violent speed and the sensationloving,<br />
horror-loving craze of modern life . She doesn t take the literal meaning: that a world-devouring ghostcreature<br />
bit out the horror of tomorrow from a gentleman s loins. A jaw for news is an obvious variation of<br />
a nose for news , and means that the mouth of the creature can taste already the horror that has not yet come,<br />
or can sense its coming, can thrust its tongue into news that has not yet been made, can savour the enormity of<br />
the progeny before the seed stirs, can realize the crumbling of dead flesh before the opening of the womb that<br />
delivers that flesh to to-morrow. What is this creature? It s the dog among the fairies, the rip and cur among<br />
the myths, the snapper at demons, the scarer of ghosts, the wizard s heel-chaser. This poem is a particular<br />
incident in a particular adventure, not a general, elliptical deprecation of this horrible, crazy, speed-life .<br />
We have to consider and take the poet s insistence an oft-repeated one that his poetry be read literally. If<br />
we begin by considering the relation of Thomas paraphrase to the lines in question, certain things are evident<br />
at once. World-devouring paraphrases atlas-eater ; but an atlas is not literally the world. If we are to<br />
understand atlas as standing for world , we can do so only by first understanding a geographic atlas as<br />
representing the world. Similarly with the adaptation of a nose for news into a jaw for news ; such a jaw<br />
becomes a possibility only if we equate news with the latest events or happenings, as in fact we do in the<br />
conventions of ordinary conversation. So, too, with mandrake for horror ; the mandrake is a horror only in<br />
the conventions of witchcraft. In short, the relation of the paraphrase to the verses can be seen only if we<br />
observe that Thomas is describing things by reference to other things which, in one convention or another, are<br />
their representatives or surrogates or in other words indicative of a larger context.<br />
The language is scarcely literal in the ordinary sense, as the reader can easily surmise himself by attempting to<br />
determine, after Thomas literal exposition, precisely what the dog among the fairies is. If we take<br />
metaphor as the substitution of names made warrantable by a resemblance between the things signified by the<br />
names that is, as the putting of the name of A for that of B, on the ground that A resembles B, or seems to<br />
we can scarcely suppose that Thomas lines are metaphorical. A metaphor, then, involves verbal<br />
substitution merely, whereas in these lines of Thomas we have the ideas of atlas substituted for the idea of<br />
world because an atlas is a cartographic representation of the world; the use of the word is merely a consequence<br />
of a conceptual substitution which has already occurred. In short, we have here, not metaphor, but symbolism.<br />
We must beware at this point. First of all, there is a general tendency in contemporary discussion of art to<br />
assume that all art is symbolic. If the point of this is that a few strokes of the painter s brush are not really a<br />
cat, but still represent a cat; that a block of granite, chiselled a bit, is not really Venus, but represents Venus;<br />
suppose we grant that all art is symbolic. What is the difference between poetry which really can be read<br />
literally and the poetry of Dylan Thomas? What is the difference between Tintern Abbey or the Ode to a<br />
Nightingale and the portion of Thomas Altarwise by owl-light sonnet just quoted? One generally<br />
finds, moreover, that those who assume that all art is symbolic will assume, as having absolute force, some
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
universal symbolic system, such as that afforded by the Freudian or Jungian psychology. The consequence of<br />
such an assumption is that the value or meaning of the symbol is known before the symbol is inspected in its<br />
context. There is some warrant for this position in that any attempt to set forth a symbolic system must<br />
perforce assign certain values to the symbols under certain conditions; but the view that symbols have a fixed<br />
and unconditional value, or even function in all cases as symbols, is expressly disavowed by both Freud and<br />
Jung. What is more important, it is contrary to fact.<br />
That it is contrary to fact in the present instance can be seen at once. Thomas admitted to the influence of<br />
Freud; but the reader who seeks to interpret the symbols of Thomas in terms of Freud is not likely to find the<br />
poetry very clear. Such a reader will be gratified, no doubt, to observe that Thomas speaks of the forest of the<br />
loin , that he frequently connects birth with an emergence from water, and in a few other matters appears to<br />
conform to the Freudian symbolic. But the negative instances will quickly diminish that gratification. Whereas,<br />
for Freud, fruit symbolizes the female breast and definitely does not symbolize offspring, it is generally a childsymbol<br />
for Thomas (as indeed it is in common discourse). Whereas, for Freud, caves, churches, and chapels<br />
refer to the female genitalia, Thomas uses caves to signify the innermost recesses of the self, and churches<br />
and chapels particularly sunken ones to signify lost pristine faiths. Thomas associates ladders and climbing,<br />
not with sexual intercourse, but with man s spiritual ascent. The reader who has the Jungian archetypes in<br />
mind is likely to fare no better, although the experiences with which Thomas deals are archetypal enough; and,<br />
much as Thomas is concerned with the experience of birth.<br />
It is folly to pretend to interpret what anyone says before you have listened to what he has to say; it is worse<br />
folly to declare what a work of art must be before you have observed what it is. If universal symbolic systems<br />
had unconditional validity, there would be no problem of interpreting Thomas, or any poet worth the name. In<br />
Thomas case his symbols, far from yielding to the easy key of a ready-made symbology, demand close<br />
inspection/introspection, and ultimately yield their meaning only when the reader, by an act of intuition, recognizes<br />
the particular derivation of the symbol.<br />
For instance:<br />
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind?<br />
The reader who approaches this with symbolic presuppositions is likely to remain baffled, if, on the other hand,<br />
he simply thinks about winds a bit, he is likely to remember the tradition of twelve winds blowing from twelve<br />
points of the compass and to recall that ancient maps conventionally represented winds as issuing from a small<br />
human head with its puffed-out cheeks blowing furiously. When he realizes further that cherubs are often<br />
depicted in old religious pictures as bodiless heads, and that, as shown on a flat map, the winds would describe<br />
triangles, he has interpreted the symbol.<br />
Indeed, the symbolism of Thomas is drawn from a whole variety of sources. It falls under three general heads:<br />
(a) natural, (b) conventional, and (c) private. The natural symbolism is of the sort that almost any poet, indeed<br />
almost any human being, is likely to employ. Light is a symbol of good or knowledge, dark of evil or ignorance,<br />
warmth of life or comfort, cold of death or discomfort, ascent of progress or resurrection, descent of regression<br />
or death, and so on<br />
The conventional symbols depend for interpretation upon knowledge of the conventions of the subject from<br />
which they are taken. How numerous the kinds of these are may be seen from the fact that Thomas draws<br />
them from cartography, astronomy and the history of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, anatomy, mechanics,<br />
and in particular such pseudosciences as go under the name occulta astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and<br />
black magic, among others; from games and sports; from a mass of myth and legend, including some rather<br />
recondite rabbinical materials; as well as from the more usual resources of literature and history.<br />
The private symbolism can best be interpreted by following him from work to work, whether of verse or prose,<br />
and observing his habits. One observes, thus, that he tends to use wax as a symbol of dead or mortal flesh, oil<br />
as a symbol of life, the sea as a symbol of the source of life, salt as a symbol of genesis in the sea. Scissors or<br />
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Poetry<br />
knives are symbols of birth (on the ground that the birth-coil is cut open, the birth-string cut) or of death (on the<br />
ground that the thread of life is cut, the branch lopped) and of sexual connection (on the ground of its relation<br />
to life and death). He analogizes the anatomy of man to the structure of the universe, too, and sees the human<br />
microcosm as an image of the macrocosm, and conversely; and this analogy begets a whole series of symbols.<br />
Wounds, one of his most persistent symbols, stand for a number of things; the pain of life, the heart, the navel<br />
wound. Tailors are often symbols of what sews man together or sews his shroud or cuts the vital thread.<br />
Embalmment, particularly of the Egyptian sort, is a symbol of an obstacle that cannot be overcome, or that can<br />
be overcome, in the attempt to resurrect the spirit. In all these private symbols there is undoubtedly a fertile<br />
field for psychological inquiry; but the psychologist who wishes to investigate had better be willing, first of all,<br />
to find out what Thomas is saying.<br />
Commenting on the nature of modern poetry Eliot has remarked that this age is a complicated one and therefore<br />
requires a poetry which is complicated A second notion, much knocked about in the press of late, that<br />
contemporary poets have gone in for obscurantism out of sheer perversity, seems even more trivial. Poetry in<br />
general does not have to be anything determinate at all, as ought to be clear to anyone aware of the vast variety<br />
of good poetry in different forms contrived upon different principles and involving different subjects and devices.<br />
Symbolism itself is merely a device, and a special order of symbolism is merely a special order of devices; and<br />
there is obviously no necessity that poetry or any other art should employ any one device invariably. Thomas<br />
is a symbolist, but not all of his poems are symbolistic; indeed, as he developed he seems to have drawn farther<br />
and farther away from the use of symbolism. A device may be well or ill used; whether it is well or ill used<br />
depends upon the powers of the device-what the device can do-and upon its being more or less effective than<br />
any other device in meting the particular exigencies of the individual poem.<br />
Since all the arts involve invention, and continually discover new devices or new uses for old devices, it is never<br />
possible to make a list exhaustive of all the possible uses of a given device; but we may note that symbolism has<br />
several principal powers. First, since symbolism involves the representation of one idea through the medium of<br />
another, it can cause us to entertain ideas remote from, or totally outside of, ordinary experience, by the<br />
extension of ideas we already possess; thus mystics tend to use symbols in their descriptions of the mystical<br />
experience precisely because that experience is an extraordinary one. Second, since the symbolic concept, the<br />
idea which stands for another, is always presented in the form of an image (something which can be either<br />
perceived by our senses or imagined), symbols can make immediate and vivid what otherwise would be remote<br />
and faint, and thus act powerfully upon our thoughts and emotions. Anyone who has observed the influence of<br />
patriotic and religious symbols will be well aware of this particular power of symbolism.<br />
In the same vein, symbols can either focus our attention upon a single aspect of something or cause us to<br />
conceive that thing in many aspects simultaneously, and so determine our emotional reactions to it. Death, for<br />
example, can be conceived in its benignant or its malignant aspects or both, and produces different emotions as<br />
it is differently conceived. The artist who symbolizes it by a smiling shadowy angel presents to us a quite<br />
different conceptual aspect, and arouses in us quite different emotions, from those produced by the artist who<br />
takes for his symbol the corpse amid all the terrors of the charnel-house. Furthermore, it is possible by the<br />
choice of a particular symbol to regulate the degree, as well as determine the kind, of emotional reaction; the<br />
artist may, for instance, not only arouse a fear of death by his symbol but arouse greater or less fear by the<br />
choice of a symbol more or less dreadful. Finally, we can frequently infer from a given symbol something of the<br />
character, beliefs, state of mind, or situation of the person who employed the symbol; we should have little<br />
difficulty in inferring, from their different symbols for death, a difference between the pagan Greek and the<br />
medieval Christian views of death; and a writer can utilize our tendency to make inferences of this kind,<br />
depicting the mood, thought, and character of his personages by letting us see the symbolic processes of their<br />
minds.<br />
Other devices metaphor and simile, particularly share in these powers; but symbols tend to have much<br />
greater range and power. A figure of speech is a figure of speech; whatever it puts before us we tend to
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
contemplate, not as an actuality, but as a manner of speaking. A symbol, on the contrary, exhibits something to<br />
us as an actuality, and so affects us more strongly. Metaphor and simile are based upon resemblance only;<br />
symbols are based upon many other relations. Thomas, or any poet s, use of symbols must be judged in terms<br />
of its effectiveness in the individual poem; but his general tendency to use them is accounted for, in part at least,<br />
by the quality of his imagination. He has been praised as a poet who dealt with the major themes of birth, life,<br />
love, and death but some of the worst poetry in existence has been written on these themes, and there is<br />
nothing inherent in them, as themes, which demands any particular poetic treatment, symbolic or otherwise.<br />
What is much more to the point, and what is likely to strike his reader first of all, is Thomas extraordinary<br />
imaginative conception of these themes? His imagination permits him to enter into areas of experience previously<br />
unexplored or to unveil new aspects of perfectly common experiences. Part, indeed, of his obscurity results<br />
from the sheer unfamiliarity of the world which he presents to us; like certain mystics, he is often forced into<br />
symbol and metaphor simply because there is no familiar way of expressing something in itself so unfamiliar.<br />
His imagination is first of all a strange one, an odd one; he sees things quite differently from the way in what we<br />
should. We should see flowers on a grave; he sees the dead who periscope through flowers to the sky . We<br />
should see the towering flames after a fire raid; he sees the fire-dwarfed street . We should see geese high<br />
in the air; he sees geese nearly in heaven . He looks into what we should find opaque, looks down at something<br />
we are wont to loop up at, looks up where we should look down, peers in where we should peer out, and out<br />
where we should look in.<br />
His poetic imagination has its limits, but within those it has enormous range and power so enormous that we<br />
are apt to think of it as unlimited. It transports him instantly into the mysteries of the womb; it informs him how<br />
the child feels at the moment of birth, how the foetus feels during its process of development, how the seed<br />
feels at the moment of conception, how all would feel and think if they were prescient of the whole of life.<br />
Death is no terminus for him; he descends into the grave and suffers the strange and secret existence of the<br />
dead, suffers the resolution of the body into its elements and the transmutation of those elements into other<br />
forms of life. He can look back on life as only a dead man could, and can rise from the grave in the Resurrection.<br />
The Creation and the ultimate Catastrophe are no limits to him; he penetrates into the mind of God before the<br />
Creation, and can feel what would be felt by the scattered particles of a universe utterly dissolved. He can be<br />
mineral, vegetable, or beast as easily as he can be man; he can penetrate the depths of the earth and the<br />
abysses of the sea, and move about in the depths of the unconscious mind as a diver might walk the ocean<br />
bottom.<br />
These are tokens of a mighty, an appalling imagination that sweeps us up with it, like an angel, and forces us to<br />
endure that visions of another world, thronged with enchantments and horrors. This is a great natural force,<br />
we cannot be unmoved by it; but there is more than natural genius, there is art; we should not stand so in the<br />
immediate presence of strange things, did not Thomas exert every power of image, symbol, and metaphor to<br />
transport us there<br />
Thomas employs symbols in many ways, but his principal use of them is to make immediate and factual what<br />
metaphor and analogue would have left remote and fanciful, to coerce the imagination and so coerce belief; he<br />
arouses our emotions before we have time to doubt. Through the repeated use of symbols in this fashion, he<br />
builds in his first two volumes, as very real indeed, a fantastic universe of his own.<br />
Thomas, like Baudelaire, is at times nothing more than a stage-magician and frights us with fires patently false.<br />
But it is na ve to suppose, as Shaw does in his criticism of Shakespeare, that because poetry involves touches<br />
that might be effective in melodrama, it is itself melodramatic. The essence of the sensational forms is that<br />
they exaggerate and readily depart from truth in order to achieve the sensation they propose; the essence of<br />
tragedy is that its action must embody grave and universal truths. The world of the early Thomas is not a<br />
melodramatic one because, as symbolic, it presupposes a reference of its horrors to something further, and<br />
does not propose them for their own sake; it does not exaggerate, it can barely approximate the horror of what<br />
it symbolizes. Thomas tells us that to a serious and sensitive individual, life in the absence of a sustaining faith<br />
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Poetry<br />
is a nightmare, and so it is; that it is the worst of nightmares, and it is; and if that nightmare is as horrible as<br />
possible, images which adumbrate that horror do not exaggerate it they express it. Without their reference,<br />
the symbols of Thomas would be melodramatic, even morbid; because they have reference to the serious<br />
suffering of a man of some nobility, they are tragic.<br />
Critics on Dylan Thomas' Poetry<br />
Drunk with melody and what the words were he cared not. This view, pronounced by Robert Grave in his<br />
1954-55 Clark lectures at Cambridge, was common among early commentators on Dylan Thomas. During this<br />
lecture Grave offered a one pound note to anyone who could make sense of the opening lines of Thomas s<br />
poem If my head hurt a hair s foot. When M. J. C. Hodgart came forward to claim the money, offering the<br />
now well-known interpretation that the unborn child in the womb is addressing the mother, Graves remained<br />
unconvinced. If Graves made such an offer today, he could expect a queue of students demanding payment.<br />
They would have only to look up the poem in William York Tindall s useful A Reader s Guide to Dylan<br />
Thomas (1962), where it is explained that nothing by Thomas could be plainer than this debate between<br />
embryo and mother. In his introduction Tindall even goes so far as to assert that Close reading and comparison<br />
of texts prove Thomas as rational and orderly as any poet this side of Alexander Pope. Tindall s book<br />
demonstrates the considerable change in critical opinion that has taken place.<br />
The appraisal and condemnation now appear to some extent misinformed. Particularly since the publication in<br />
1957 of Thomas s letters to Vernon Watkins it has been realized that he not only was an artful maker of<br />
complicated rhythms and verse structures, but also cared very much what the words meant. His discussions<br />
with Watkins show that he knew precisely what effects he intended, and to some degree justify his controversial<br />
claim that his poems should be read literally, the notebooks in the Lockwood Memorial Library of the State<br />
<strong>University</strong> of New York at Buffalo prove how carefully he revised;; and a number of recent theses have<br />
helped to clear up many of the obscure points in his work<br />
The new approach towards understanding of Thomas does not mean, however, that controversy is ended.<br />
Academic scholars may too easily believe that their growing insight into his meaning necessarily leads to higher<br />
estimate of his poetry. After his death in 1953 a reaction to his influence began, and many young poets of the<br />
1950, particularly in England, felt his experiment in syntax and imagery was pretentious. Donald Davie accused<br />
Thomas of indulging in pseudo-syntax, abandoning the task of articulation so that the objects to which he<br />
refers, tumbled pell-mell together, can no longer be identified. Davie placed Thomas among those modern<br />
poets who fail because their work falls into isolated units. The sentences that seem to drive forward in time<br />
through their verbs do no such thing, for the poems proceed by repetition rather than by the establishment of<br />
proper syntactical arrangements between beginning, middle, and end. For Davie, the abandonment of syntax<br />
testified to a failure of the poet s nerve, a loss of confidence in the intelligible structure of the conscious mind,<br />
and the validity of its activity. Our attitude to Davie s criticism must depend, to a large extent, on how far we<br />
sympathize with the view that Thomas could only express the confusion in which we live by a complete break<br />
with orthodox forms of articulation.<br />
At a first reading the surface brilliance of the early poems suggests a violent, uncontrollable energy; but, as<br />
Robert M. Adams asks in his essay on Crashaw and Thomas: Is it a defensible aesthetic position to say that<br />
so long as each individual section of his poem is built on sufficiently violent and intensive contrasts the poet<br />
need provide no structure of mood, tone, imagery, temporal order, or grammatical assertion?<br />
In poem after poem he questions the meaning of his own genesis. Particularly in the early poetry, this conflict<br />
is presented through puns such as worm or seedy, through dialogue poems such as I see the boys of<br />
summer, and through a repeated war between opposite kinds of imagery. The theme is not developed<br />
locally, for progress in the poems is achieved through verbal play, repetition, and incantation. Whether in these<br />
poems Thomas achieves rational control, as Tindall suggests, is still a very open question. This leads to a<br />
further critical problem. In his late poems such as Poem in October, Fern Hill, and Over Sir John s hill,
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Thomas achieved a new lucidity and serenity, and many readers have felt that in the 1940 he at last began to<br />
solve his technical problems; yet William Empson, in a review admits that he prefers the early obscure poems.<br />
It is true that in the early poems Thomas discovered a form which communicated fully the strain under which<br />
he lived, and that the later poems withdraw from such problems into nostalgia.<br />
David Holbrook has criticized the subconscious psychological motives underlying Thomas s obscurity. There is<br />
evidence that as he reviewed his poems their obscurity increased. It is also true that for twenty years he<br />
proved incomprehensible to some of the most perceptive critics and poets of his time and that most of the<br />
spellbound listeners to his inspired reading had little idea what the poems were about. In his book Dylan<br />
Thomas and Poetic Dissociation (1964), Holbrook argues that Thomas developed his imagery of wombs<br />
and tombs, sex and corpses, as a means of protecting himself against adult reality. In spite of Thomas s care in<br />
preparing his work, his poems affect a kind of hallucination or dissociated phantasy. He invented a<br />
babble-language which concealed the nature of reality from himself and his readers and in its very oral<br />
sensationalism, in its very meaninglessness, it represented for him and his readers a satisfying return to the<br />
delusions of the stage of infancy when we tend to resist the uncomfortable exigencies and losses consequent<br />
upon the development of a growing reality sense. This may be linked with the man s alcoholism and his sexual<br />
promiscuity.<br />
Certainly a palpable evidence could be traced for Holbrook s argument that Thomas could never accept an<br />
adult sexual relationship. His Welsh protestant conscience appears to have been disgusted and shocked by his<br />
first experiences with women, and all his life he felt drive by uncontrollable sexual impulses. The famous<br />
pranks and the hard drinking also suggest some kind of neurotic alienation from ordinary life. Holbrook goes<br />
too far, however, when he accuses Thomas of inventing a babble-language to cover up his own psychological<br />
problems. Thomas had acquired a popular knowledge of Freud and Jung, and it can be argued that his<br />
understanding of the irrational power sex holds over human life is decidedly realistic.<br />
It is known that in the 1930 Thomas read the surrealist magazine, transition, and in 1936 he visited the<br />
International Surrealist Exhibition in the New Burlington Galleries at London. The many references to dreams<br />
and madness in both his poetry and prose reflect this interest in irrational forms of art. The wild fantasies of<br />
Gothic romance provided nineteenth century romantics with a means of representing violent emotions<br />
unacknowledged by the conventions of their society; so the ghosts, vampires, and watches of Thomas s poems<br />
depict the nightmare powers in control of man. These alien forces are most often associated with sex, but there<br />
are also a number of poems where he reacts with horror to the madness of war. He was born in October 1914,<br />
at the very time when the young men of Europe were about to die by the millions on the Western Front:<br />
Rammed in the marching heart, hole<br />
In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled<br />
Death on the mouth that ate the gas.<br />
Shocked and appalled by the suffering and killing in the two wars, he found it difficult to impose any rational<br />
sense on this horror. His imagination found a more appropriate expression in opposing and contradictory images.<br />
In his writings, however, Thomas resisted the attraction of surrealism and struggled against complete submission<br />
to the anarchic and the irrational. In prose and poetry alike he sought self-under-standing, and his work accordingly<br />
offers repeated portraits of the artist. By exhortation, bardic gestures, and assertive rhythms, he labours to<br />
coerce his readers and himself into acceptance of life. By exuberant fancies, wit, and gaiety, he exorcises the<br />
powers of darkness, or at least contains them within a bound they dare not pass. As the careful arrangement<br />
of stanza and rhyme conflicts with the neurotic reaction to sex in Love in the Asylum, so throughout his<br />
poetry verbal play and exhilaration of language work against images of sterility and disgust. Of his poem A<br />
Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London Empson writes that the poet says he will not say<br />
what he says. His refusal to mourn is a form of mourning; so in many poems, such s And death shall have no<br />
dominion and Do not go gentle into that good night, the assertions ask for the impossible. At times the<br />
rhetoric moves close to hysteria, but Thomas is determined to create, to build his ark on the flood of life.<br />
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Poetry<br />
At a time when the language of poetry had seemed to be in danger of being pulled apart between the meaningless<br />
exuberance to be in danger of on the pen hand, and the self conscious precision of poets influenced by positivistic<br />
theory on the other, he has achieved a balance between the two, in his best poems, while retaining and even<br />
drawing our attention to the separateness of both.<br />
Sudden and premature death of Dylan Thomas produced elegies and appreciations in extraordinary numbers<br />
on both sides of the Atlantic. Thomas was the most poetical poet of our time. He talked and dressed and<br />
behaved and lived like a poet; he was reckless, flamboyant, irreverent, innocent and bawdy. His verse, too, had<br />
a romantic wildness about it that even a reader who could make nothing of it recognized as poetic. And<br />
surely the exaggeration of the sense of loss at the death of a poet is a sign of health in any culture. In a note to<br />
the collected edition of his poems, Thomas wrote: These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions,<br />
are written for the love of Man and in praise of God And in his prologue to the same volume he proclaimed<br />
his intention of celebrating the world and all that is in it:<br />
A single piece of evidence, i.e., any one poem from his small corpus is perhaps enough to prove that, for all the<br />
appearance of spontaneity and sometimes of free association that his poems present to some readers, Thomas<br />
was remarkably conscientious craftsman for whom meaning was bound up with pattern and order. No modern<br />
poet in <strong>English</strong> has had a keener sense of form or has handled stanzas and verse paragraphs whether<br />
traditional or original with more deliberate cunning. It is worth stressing this at the outset because there are<br />
still some people who talk of Thomas as though he were a writer of an inspired mad rhetoric, of glorious,<br />
tumbling, swirling language which fell from his pen in magnificent disorder. He has been held up by some as the<br />
antithesis of Eliot and his school, renouncing the cerebral orderliness of the 1920s and the 1930s in favour of a<br />
new romanticism, an engaging irresponsibility. On the other hand there are those who discuss his poems as<br />
though they are merely texts for exposition, ignoring the rhyme scheme and the complicated verbal and visual<br />
patterning to concentrate solely on the intellectual implications of the images. The truth is that Thomas is<br />
neither a whirling romantic nor a metaphysical imagist, but a poet who uses pattern and metaphor in a complex<br />
craftsmanship in order to create a ritual of celebration. He sees life as a continuous process, sees the workings<br />
of biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of identity, identity out of unity, the generations<br />
linked with one another and man linked with nature. Again and again in his early poems he seeks to find a<br />
poetic ritual for the celebration of this identity:<br />
Thomas did not rush towards the celebration of unity in all life and all time which later became an important<br />
theme of comfort for him; he moved to it through disillusion and experiment. The force that drives the flower<br />
and the tree to full burgeoning and then to death would destroy him also, only later came the realization that<br />
such destruction is no destruction, but a guarantee of immortality, of perpetual life in a cosmic eternity.<br />
Evidently it is this thought that sounds the note of triumph in Ceremony After a Fire Raid and which provides<br />
the comfort in A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by fire, of a Child in London. A Refusal to Mourn is a poem<br />
worth pausing at, for it illustrates not only a characteristic theme of what might be called the middle Thomas,<br />
but also a characteristic way of handling the theme. The poem is ritualistic in tone; its dominant images are<br />
sacramental; and cunning contrived rise and fall of the cadence of each stanza adds to the note of formal<br />
ceremony. There are four stanzas, the first two and one line of the third containing a single sentence which<br />
swells out to a magnificent surge of meaning. Then, after a pause, the final stanza makes a concluding ritual<br />
statement, an antiphonal chant answering the first three stanzas. The paraphrasable meaning of the poem is<br />
simple enough: the poet is saying that never, until the end of the world and the final return of all things to their<br />
primal elements, will he distort the meaning of the child s death by mourning. One dies but once, and through<br />
that death becomes reunited with the timeless unity of things. But the paraphrasable meaning is not, of course,<br />
the meaning of the poem, which is expanded at each point through a deliberately sacramental imagery while at<br />
the same time the emotion is controlled and organized by the cadences of the stanza. The first stanza and a half<br />
describe the end of the world as a return from differentiated identity to elemental unity.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Anybody who knows Thomas s idiom, obscurity is not deliberate but rather an essential. We have only to recall<br />
This bread I break was once the oat to realize the significance of the first three lines of the second stanza.<br />
The water bead and the ear of corn are symbolic primal elements, to which all return at the end. But why Zion<br />
of the water bead and synagogue of the ear of corn ? The answer is simply that these are sacramental<br />
images intended to give a sacramental meaning to the statement. It is a kind of imagery of which Thomas is<br />
very fond of. One might still ask why he says synagogue and not church. The answer is that he wants to<br />
shock the reader into attention to the sacramental meaning. A more everyday religious word might pass by as<br />
a conventional poetic image, but synagogue attracts our attention at once; it has no meaning other than its<br />
literal one, and therefore can be used freshly in a non-literal way. In the third stanza words like mankind,<br />
blaspheme, stations of the breath (recalling stations of the Cross ) play and easily discernible part in the<br />
expansion of the meaning, while the pun in grave truth represents a device common enough in modern<br />
poetry. The concluding stanza gives the reason, the counter-statement, this echoes, in its own way, the opening<br />
stanza; but its tone is new; it is that of liturgical proclamation. We need not wince at the suggestion that long<br />
friends means (among other things) worms; worms for Thomas were not disgusting, but profoundly symbolic:<br />
like maggots they are elements of corruption and thus of reunification, of eternity. How much a poem of this<br />
kind owes to the imagery and to the cadence, as well as to the careful patterning, can be seen at once if one<br />
takes the perhaps extreme method of turning its paraphrasable content into conventional rhymed verse.<br />
His earlier poems often fail by being too packed with metaphor suggestive of identity. Words like Adam ,<br />
Christ , ghost , worm , womb , phrases like the mouth of time , death s father , beach of flesh ,<br />
hatching hair , half-traced thigh abound, and though each has its orderly place in the poem the reader often<br />
feels dulled by the continuous impact of repeated words of this kind. A fair number of Thomas s earlier poems<br />
are obscure for this reason. It is not the obscurity of free association or of references to private reading, but an<br />
obscurity which results from an attempt to pack too much into a short space, to make every comma tell, as it<br />
were. With his continuous emphasis on birth, prenatal life, the relation of parent to child, growth, the relation of<br />
body and spirit, of life of death, of human and animal to vegetable, and similar themes, and his constant search<br />
for devices to celebrate these and identify them with each other, he does not want one word to slip which may<br />
help in building up the total pattern of meaning In his desire to avoid that breaking up he sometimes piles up the<br />
images and metaphors until the reader simply cannot construe the lines. But it must be emphasized that this is<br />
not the fault of a bad romantic poetry, too loose and exclamatory, but comes from what can perhaps be called<br />
the classical vice of attempting to press too much into a little space which is indicative of his obscurity too.<br />
Dylan Thomas progressed from poems in which his techniques of identification are sometimes pressed too far,<br />
through a period of occasional verse in which he focused his general notions on particular incidents and<br />
situations to give a grave and formal ceremonial poetry ( A Refusal to Mourn, Do not go gentle into that<br />
good night. On the Marriage of a Virgin, etc.) to a period of more limpid, open-worked poetry in which,<br />
instead of endeavouring to leap outside time into a pantheistic cosmos beyond the dimensions, he accepts time<br />
and change and uses memory as an elegiac device ( Poem in October, Fern Hill , Over Sir John s hill ,<br />
Poem on his birthday ). But these divisions are not strictly chronological, nor do they take account of all the<br />
kinds of verse he was writing. There is, for example, A Winter s Tale , a middle poem, which handles a<br />
universal folk theme with a quiet beauty that results from perfect control of the imagery.<br />
Out of the less lucid open-worked poems of the third period, Poem in October , though written earlier than the<br />
others in this group, can stand as an excellent example. Again we have the sacramentalizing of nature ( heron<br />
priested shore ) and we have also a sense of glory in the natural world which Thomas learned to render more<br />
and more effectively as his art matured. Again, one cannot see the quality of the poem from an extract; elegy<br />
is combined with remembrance and commemoration, and the emotion rises and falls in a fine movement.<br />
Not for the proud man apart<br />
From the ranging moon I write<br />
On these spindrift pages<br />
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Nor for the towering dead<br />
With their nightingales and psalms<br />
But for the lovers, their arms<br />
Round the griefs of the ages,<br />
Who pay no praise or wages<br />
Nor heed my craft or art.<br />
Poetry<br />
Dylan never deliberately desired to be difficult or esoteric. He drew on the Bible and on universal folk themes<br />
rather than on obscure late classical writers or Jessie Weston s From Ritual to Romance. Unlike Eliot, Thomas<br />
accepted man as he was: he had a relish for humanity. By the end of his life he had learned to be both poetically<br />
honest and poetically simple a difficult combination, especially in our time. And in choosing the spoken verse<br />
of the radio as a medium he was pointing the way towards a bridging of the appalling gap in our culture<br />
between professional critic and ordinary reader or even a layman.<br />
Temprament of Dylan Thomas<br />
Dylan Thomas once remarked that his poetry is the record of his individual struggle from darkness to illumination.<br />
The world of these early symbols is the universe of his darkness; he builds new worlds as he advances in that<br />
struggle towards light. It is notable that after the Altarwise by owl-light sonnets, he discards nearly all of this<br />
particular body of symbols and gradually develops new symbols and new diction to correspond with his ever<br />
changing view of life. In the early poems, Adam is a symbol of sin and of the perishing flesh; in the later, Adam<br />
is upright Adam/ (who) Sang upon origin . Eden is at first thought of as the garden where the Apple was<br />
eaten; it later becomes associated with the innocence of the earth; the earth is seen as recapturing that<br />
innocence at times, in token of the Redemption.<br />
A lurking danger is always there, when a poet s work exhibits some kind of rounding-out and development in<br />
a particular direction, that we may tend to treat his poems merely as parts of one long poem. If the poetry of the<br />
dark period is concerned wholly with personal problems, the poetry of the middle phase is charged with<br />
powerful and poignant feeling for others for his wife, his children, his aunt, and the victims of air raids and<br />
the poems of the later volumes are, for the most part, exultant expressions of his faith and love towards<br />
humanity. There are even touches of humour in Once Below A Time and particularly in Lament . Over<br />
Sir John s hill and Poem on his birthday contemplate death with calm acceptance; the universe of darkness,<br />
with its swarming horrors has disappeared. He does not move from that Inferno to a Paradiso, but he has<br />
recaptured, in the charming natural world of Wales, something of the lost Eden and something of a foretoken<br />
of Heaven. There is undoubtedly a development from doubt and fear to faith and hope, and the moving cause<br />
is essentially love; he comes to love of God by learning to love man and the eternal world.<br />
The three periods in his work are not only distinct in their subject matter; they are distinct in their diction and<br />
prosody too. The language of the first period is limited, its vocabulary so small that it reminds one of Basic<br />
<strong>English</strong>. Repletion of certain words is so frequent as to suggest obsession with them; indeed, one critic, has<br />
thought their frequent use an instance of verbal compulsion. Fork , fellow , half , vein , suck , worm<br />
seem to dot every page; the phrase death s feather , among others, recurs in poem after poem. When a<br />
limited vocabulary is used to designate a multiplicity of things, ambiguity is bound to result and we find Thomas<br />
using, or rather exploiting, his key-words in a whole variety of senses/meanings. Fork , for instance, is used<br />
in nearly all of its senses as noun or verb. The sentences of this period are generally short, the verse itself is<br />
short-breathed, very much based on the line-length, and its pulsations are irregular in beat and uneven in<br />
strength, as if a heart were to beat violently for a moment, stop altogether, and suddenly resume again with full<br />
gusto typical of Dylan.<br />
After the selection of the poems following the Altarwise by owl-light sonnets, the later poems are, generally<br />
speaking, characterized by a marked increase in vocabulary and a discarding of some of the old fork , is<br />
never used again after the first sonnet as well as by extension of breath through longer and longer grammatical
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
units. In the sonnets the iambic pentameter line, although now used as a unit of construction rather than as a<br />
limit, is still much in evidence; in A Refusal to Mourn a single sentence extends into the third stanza; in<br />
Poem in October most of the long and complex stanzas consists of a single sentence. As the old symbolism<br />
is rejected or transformed, symbols also decrease in number and in frequency of use, and there is increasing<br />
employment of metaphor and images both in degree and kind.<br />
Towards the last phase terseness is supplanted by verbosity; sentences, clauses, phrases become long. Adjective<br />
is piled on adjective; masses of words are jammed together to make one compound epithet, until the ordinary<br />
reader could scarcely stretch his breath over the long reaches of language. Despite the enchanting imagery,<br />
one has the feeling that the requisite eloquence is sometimes strained. The early work had presented a<br />
multiplicity of ideas and emotions in very small compass; the last poems stretch a single thought or emotion to<br />
its utmost limits, and perhaps beyond. Curiously enough, he never achieves lucidity; the obscurity wrought by<br />
his early terseness slips into the obscurity wrought by his final verbosity. The early poems depend upon a<br />
technique of isolation, of singling out the essential factors of an experience; the very last depend upon a<br />
technique of accumulation. Perhaps he becomes a bit too consciously the bard, overwhelming us with copiousness<br />
of language, his eloquence, booming at us, working upon us too obviously, even exciting himself unnecessarily.<br />
Taken together this goes back to the kind of poet he essentially is. That can best be seen by comparing<br />
Thomas the poet with Thomas the prose-writer. The poet is great; the prose-writer, despite many evident<br />
marks of genius, merely highly competent; but the prose-writer is far more versatile than the poet. The prosewriter<br />
assumes many characters, devises many situations, and plays upon emotions which range from the<br />
serious to the comic. The poet assumes a single character; and, strictly speaking, he is a poet only of the most<br />
exalted emotions, the most exalted sadness or joy. Call him what you will, tragic poet, bard, poet of sublimity;<br />
the point is that his proper character is a lofty, a heroic one. You will find despair, but it is the despair of<br />
Philoctetes. So with everything he feels. Compare A Refusal to Mourn or Ceremony After a Fire Raid<br />
or After the funeral with John Crowe Ransom s Bells for John Whiteside s Daughter or Walter de la<br />
Mare s Sunk Lyonesse , and it will be manifest to you that Thomas never achieves, indeed never attempts,<br />
certain ranges of emotion.<br />
Always invariably Dylan comes through love to his faith, we never see him in the poems, really thinking how<br />
others think or feel; they exist simply as objects of his own emotion. In his poetry he is capable of immense<br />
emotion for another; but he cannot stand in another s skin. As we read him, we are shaken by what he feels<br />
for another, not by the sufferings and the feelings of that other. Moved by grief for a burned child, nobly and<br />
powerfully moved as he is, he does not suffer imaginatively the experience of the child, he sees the pain and the<br />
horror from without, and the resolution he reaches is a resolution for his own being, not for the child. This<br />
curiously external view is revealed in one of his least successful poems; the death of a hundred-year-old man<br />
provides him matter for a string of fantastic conceits, and the poem is really unintelligible, not because it is<br />
particularly obscure, but because the emotion he exhibits is impossible to relate to any emotion that the event,<br />
however conceived. Thomas imagination could transport him anywhere, through space and time; but it is also<br />
true that, wherever it takes him, he sees nothing but himself. He can enter into worm and animal, but he will<br />
look out through his own eyes. He can create worlds; but he creates his worlds in his own image, and remains<br />
the centre of his own thought and feeling. He is not a Dante, a Chaucer, a Shakespeare, or a Browning, who<br />
stood inside the men they made; he is a Keats, a Byron, a Yeats, or an Eliot if at some sort of resemblances are<br />
to be drawn.<br />
The two limitations his restriction to certain ranges of emotion and his restriction to one character must not<br />
be taken too seriously, for they amount to this; that he was a lyric poet of the lofty kind. But they cannot be<br />
disregarded; a poet so restricted must either aim at or achieve the sublime, or he fails. When the conception<br />
underlying his poem is a powerful and lofty one, and controls all the devices of his poem, Thomas is magnificent;<br />
when the conception is trivial, or when his treatment of it does not sufficiently manifest it, he is disappointing.<br />
His art demands great energy of thought and passion and all the accoutrements of the grand style; when the<br />
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high conception is wanting, energy becomes violence and noise, the tragic passions become the melodramatic<br />
or the morbid, ecstasy becomes hysteria, and the high style becomes obscure bombast. Within a given period,<br />
his good work and his bad involve the same devices; it is their employment, what they are employed in and<br />
what they are employed for, that differs; and it makes all the difference that could be apprehended.<br />
Fern Hill and Poem in October , are both luminous with all the weathers of childhood; A Refusal to Mourn<br />
the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London , apprehending the child s death in its relation to the whole universe (all<br />
creation is spanned, awesomely, from beginning to end, in the first stanza, and the last carries us back to the<br />
first dead ); the Altarwise by owl-light sonnets (surely among the greatest poems of our century) all of<br />
these are founded upon conceptions possible, we feel, only to a man of great imagination and feeling. Sometimes<br />
the conception is of the very essence of passion and feeling such as only a towering character could support<br />
When we talk of Thomas faults one thing is starkly clear that the very principles which exhibit his genius when<br />
he is a genius also exhibit his failures when he fails. Let us put it this way, there are no rules or laws of art.<br />
The only necessary by which the artist, as artist, is bound is that that essential element imposed upon him by the<br />
particular work he seeks to execute. But if he is executing it, as he must, in a particular medium language,<br />
let us say he can only make it do what language can do. He can discover new possibilities of language and<br />
realize them; but they must be possibilities and not impossibilities. If he is representing something dramatically<br />
(i.e., on the stage), his work will have to be something that can possibly be represented on the stage. And if he<br />
proposes to affect us, his audience, in any way, he will have to invent something that will affect us. Bound to<br />
one thing, he is at once bound to many; he suffers the restrictions of his medium, of the way in which he<br />
proposes to use it, and of the laws of human nature. Thus we respect the poet who observes no more than we<br />
do and conceives it no more profoundly than we should, if only he formulates it better than we could; we<br />
respect him still more if he does this better than most poets have. We respect still more the poet who observes<br />
more than we do, and still more than poet who feels or conceives more than we; and in proportion as the<br />
performance surpasses such standards, our respect increases.<br />
Singular judgments arrived at through these principles may be incorrect, because the particular work may<br />
somehow be misapprehended; the artist may complain of the particular judgment, but he has no appeal against<br />
the principles. Not that they are necessarily right, they may very well be wrong; the point is that they are the<br />
grounds on which we inevitably judge. The subtlest and the crudest judgments proceed from them. In Dawn<br />
Raid Thomas sees and feels less than we should have, perhaps less than anyone should have seen and felt,<br />
and so his verbal skill goes for naught. When he is Thomas, when he rises to his true stature, he towers indeed.<br />
To see that, you have only to ask yourself whether you think much of a birthday as a poetic theme; and then<br />
read Twenty-four years , Poem in October , and Poem on his Birthday .<br />
The Poetic Character of Dylan Thomas<br />
We have been examining the more general characteristics of Thomas art; we may now turn to the more<br />
particular question of his poetic practice. This can be treated under three heads: the kinds of activities he<br />
represents his poetic character as engaged in; the particular devices, over and above language, through which<br />
he shows us that character as so engaged; and his handling of language. Thomas tends, like most lyric poets,<br />
to exhibit single character acting in a single situation rather than several interacting in a single situation. Those<br />
famous old ballads, The Nut-Brown Maid, Man, Put Thine Old Cloak about Thee, The Lass of Lochroyan,<br />
and Edward, Edward, all show the interactions of several characters in a given situation; what the poet<br />
exhibits is not the uninterrupted activity of a single individual but the interplay among several individuals acting<br />
upon and reacting to one another. Poems like Keats Ode on Melancholy, Shelly s Ode to the West Wind,<br />
Arnold s Dover Beach, on the other hand, give us the uninterrupted activity of a single individual. This is not<br />
a question of how many people are present at the supposed scene of the poem; it is a question of whether the<br />
activity shown involves several agencies or one agent only in one or singular events thus recorded.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Let us try to understand, of the activity and not of whether monologue or dialogue is employed. The latter<br />
relates to how the poet represents, whereas we are considering what he represents. Thomas deals with u<br />
single agent, but some of his poems are in dialogue form I see the boys of summer and Find meat on<br />
bones, for example although in the first of these instances he carefully disguises that fact by omitting<br />
quotation marks. In such
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or several and, further, whether it involves causes which co-operate or causes which conflict. A man wants a<br />
drink of whiskey and takes it; that is a simple process. He hesitates whether to take whiskey or gin and makes<br />
up his mind; that is slightly more complex. He hesitates on moral grounds; that is more complex. The more<br />
there is in greater conflict, in short, the more complex. The selection of the dynamic rather than the static, of<br />
the complex rather than the simple, has its consequences for poetic method, as Thomas himself was well<br />
aware. In a letter to Henry Treece he defends himself against the charge of dif-fuseness as follows:<br />
When you say that I have not [Norman] Cameron s or [Charles] Madge s concentric movement round a<br />
central image, you are not accounting for the fact that it consciously is not my method to move concentrically<br />
round a central image. A poem by Cameron needs no more than one image; it moves around one idea, from<br />
one logical point to another, making a full circle. A poem by myself needs a host of images, because its centre<br />
is a host of images. I make one image though make is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be made<br />
emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess let it breed another, let<br />
that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory<br />
image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own<br />
destruction, and my dialectal [dialectical?] method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking<br />
down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same<br />
time.<br />
What I want to try to explain and it s necessarily vague to me is that the life in any poem of mine cannot<br />
move concentrically round a central image; the life must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die<br />
in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions,<br />
contradictions. I cannot, either as Cameron does, and as others do, and this primarily explains his and their<br />
writing round the central image make a poem out of a single motivating experience; I believe in the simple<br />
thread of action through a poem, but that is an intellectual thing aimed at lucidity through narrative. My object<br />
is, as you say, conventionally to get things straight. Out of die inevitable conflict of images inevitable,<br />
because of the creative, recreative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of<br />
war I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem. I do not want a poem of mine to be, nor can it be,<br />
a circular piece of experience placed nearly outside the living stream of time from which it came; a poem of<br />
mine is, or should be, a watertight section of the stream that is flowing all ways, all warring images within it<br />
should be reconciled for that small stop of time. I agree that each of my earlier poems might appear to<br />
constitute a section from one long poem; that is because I was not successful in making a momentary peace<br />
with my images at the correct moment; images were left dangling over the formal limits, and dragged the poem<br />
into another; the warring stream ran on over the insecure barriers, the full stop armistice was pulled and<br />
twisted raggedly on into a conflicting series of dots and dashes.<br />
This passage is itself curiously diffuse, curiously confused in its metaphors; but it is not, unclear. The poet who<br />
deals with a moment, or even the poet who treats a simple process, can unify his poem in terms of a single<br />
image. The poet concerned with a complex process cannot; he must affect unity by the formal limits of the<br />
poem, and within those formal limits everything is in conflict. This is true enough, but it will be even more<br />
convincing if we look into the reasons why it is true. The static or momentary poem is necessarily analytic; it<br />
breaks a single moment of experience, to use Thomas phrase, into its constituent elements; but the experience<br />
is still whole and single, a single idea, a single intuition, a single emotional reaction or sensation. As a consequence<br />
a single image, metaphor, or symbol may be employed to reintegrate the elements factored out by the poet<br />
into the whole of which they are parts. An image represents a moment of sensation, metaphor and symbol<br />
represent a moment of thought and feeling; all will serve only so long as there is something constant in sensation,<br />
thought, or feeling. If sensation, thought, or feeling change, they will serve no longer; and the more radical that<br />
change, the more radical will be the change in image, metaphor, or symbol. A process of the soul involves<br />
changes of sensation, thought, and feeling, hence changes in the images, symbols, and metaphors which express<br />
these subtle experiences.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Dylan s typical poems are dialectically complex, in the sense that they balance idea against idea, argument<br />
against argument; indeed, his images, symbols, and metaphors are often succinct statements of argument, and<br />
the reader who fails to recognize them as such is often in danger of misreading the poem as a whole. Thomas<br />
has been romanticized as a primitive, an aboriginal, a hairy wild man out of Wales, the elemental antithesis of<br />
the intellectual; I see the boys of summer has been much admired for its faery imagery ; that it is a terse<br />
and complicated argument about how life ought to be lived seems to have escaped notice. Poem after poem<br />
presents argument, if one sees at all what is being presented. A process in the weather of the heart and<br />
Light breaks where no sun shines work out, with extreme complexity, the relations between man and the<br />
external universe; so too, though more simply, does The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.<br />
When once the twilight locks no longer is a meditation on the origin of the idea of death, terminating in the<br />
decision that life is to be lived vigorously. My world is pyramid is a strange meditation on the physical child<br />
and the secret child, and resolves the problem of death in these terms, through the discovery that the secret<br />
child survives.<br />
The essential complexity of Thomas poems goes far beyond the matter of complex argument and statement.<br />
Their complexity is really due to their presenting three lines, so to speak, at once: the process of conscious<br />
thought, the process of the emotions, and the process of the subconscious. Imagine three files of people<br />
passing through a narrow corridor and pushing against one another in all directions; you will then have a<br />
simplified parallel to a Dylan Thomas poem. I say simplified because the conflicts are not as simple as that;<br />
there is quite possibly a conflict within the dialectical line, as opinion clashes with opinion, argument with<br />
argument; and there can be emotional conflict and subconscious conflict as well. We have to examine Thomas<br />
words very closely:<br />
Daft with the drug that s smoking in a girl<br />
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.<br />
An old man s shank one- marrowed with my bone,<br />
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,<br />
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail<br />
Wearing the quick away.<br />
It is quit evident that the point thus far, we may observe, is that the character does fear all these thing? (A<br />
really detailed study of the imagery would show how very bitterly he fears them). Now we learn that he is prey<br />
to all of them already. He is madly in love; the very bone of his shank unites hint to the old man he must be; the<br />
stench of the sea of debauchery is already in his nostrils; death is already gnawing at him in the very pure of his<br />
veins. Notice that whatever he fears, he also desires as much as he fears. What attracts or compels him is also<br />
what repels him; he shares his world with the devil.<br />
There is subconscious conflict here, since all the processes of life are associated with sex; sex is desirable,<br />
indeed compelling, but it does not sufficiently gratify to shut out fear, and, moreover, it is associated with sin,<br />
senile impotency, pain, and death, and so undesirable. Yet, since association is reciprocal, these in turn are<br />
desirable, indeed compulsive, since they are linked to sex. Again, there is rational conflict, because he is aware<br />
that what attracts him also repels him, and cannot come to terms with himself as to whether what he desires is<br />
really desirable or not. He knows, too, that his rational decision will not matter in the end, for he is compelled;<br />
at the same time he would like his rational decision to triumph. And there is emotional conflict stemming both<br />
from his reason and from his subconscious. The former with it s ought and ought-not, can and cannot,<br />
balances each of these with its contradictory, and generates emotions based on conflicting moral dictates and<br />
conflicting ideas of the possible and impossible. The latter generates emotions of simultaneous hope and fear<br />
based on simultaneous desire and aversion; and the emotions generated by the conscious mind also conflict<br />
with those generated by the subconscious.<br />
The passage and the language is dreadfully revelatory of all this. He is in love; but see how he puts it. He is<br />
daft, but this is no pretty convention of love-madness ; he is suffering hallucinations as if he had taken a<br />
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drug the drug that s smoking in a girl. Notice a girl a highly impersonal, possibly even contemptuous,<br />
designation of the beloved. He does not see her as beautiful; he sees her anatomically, in terms of the bud that<br />
forks her eye the branching veins of her eyeball. Forks her eye is a painful image; we are bound to call to<br />
mind a sharp prong in connection with the sensitive organ of the eye, and the effect is unpleasant in itself. But<br />
there is more than that; in a poet as addicted to puns as the early Thomas, we may look for puns; and there is<br />
a suggestion both of the fork of the girl s loin, as visible in her eye, and of the pitchfork of the devil with whom<br />
the character shares his world further attraction and repulsion. The girl herself is not responsible for the<br />
attraction; it is the drug. This curls smoking up through her body, but is not part of her; it comes from the<br />
devil; we have the devil s fork and the smoke of hell-fire visible in the eye of the beloved. He is repelled; but in<br />
the moment of repulsion at sex, he also dreads the impotency of age, the old man s shank already preparing<br />
in his groin; at the moment of repulsion at the thought of impotency, he dreads the sea of scums and can<br />
already smell its stench. He sits and watches the vein pulsing below his fingernail; and he sees it as a worm<br />
wearing the quick away, robbing him of life even as its pulse gives him life.<br />
We can with some certainty now observe that the character in this poem one assumed again and again and<br />
constant throughout changing moods and situations is a modern Hamlet; but, in the old phrase, he out-Hamlets<br />
an out shins Hamlet. Hamlet s problems stem from a particular situation; Thomas character has as his problem<br />
life itself. He is , a simpler character than Hamlet; while he has a grim humour of his own, he lacks Hamlet s<br />
mordant wit and cynical gaiety. His imagination, too, is foul as Vulcan s stithy, but though it has its flights like<br />
Hamlet s, it never, in the early poems, rises free of hell-smoke. If he is simpler than Hamlet, his problems are<br />
more complex and general than Hamlet s. Hamlet shifts more rapidly from mood to mood, but is actually less<br />
indecisive than Thomas hero. It is not that he does not make decisions; he makes them repeatedly in the early<br />
poems, but we remain unconvinced of their durability, or of the possibility of their realization.<br />
It has been suggested before that he is a tragic figure; his hideous, all-penetrating doubts; his painful joy in his<br />
transitory convictions; his love of truth and hatred of falsehood and hypocrisy; his willingness to stand by the<br />
consequences of any solution he finds for his problems; his terrible sensitivity; and his evident genius. Like<br />
Hamlet he shows genius and that in conflict with itself on the basic issues of life.<br />
The Modes of Poetic Representation<br />
We may now turn to the question of how Thomas depicts, that is, the general devices by which he represents<br />
his subjects. We have already touched on one of these devices, the pseudo-drama. Pseudo-drama is the use<br />
of dialogue to suggest that the action represented is the interplay among several distinct persons, whereas in<br />
fact there is no such interplay because the persons of the dialogue are not distinct. The Nut-Brown Maid<br />
shows us the interplay of action between two really distinct persons, the Maid and the banished man, who<br />
turns out to be an Earl s son; they are as distinct as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. But in such poems as the<br />
medieval Debate between Soul and Body or Elinor Wylie s This Corruptible, in which Mind, Heart, and<br />
Soul discuss, the interplay is feigned only; there are not several persons here, but one, for Heart, Mind, Body,<br />
Soul, are all one person. Again, pseudo-drama is a use of monologue in which a supposed character (who is<br />
really, however, only the object of thought of someone thinking) utters the thoughts of the person thinking of<br />
him. Whether dialogue or monologue is employed, characters are assumed as mere masks and made the<br />
mouthpieces of the real agents. Crazy Jane and the Bishop, in Yeats Words for Music Perhaps, are masks<br />
of this kind; so are all the characters of Eliot s The Waste Land (in fact, he tells us himself in one of his<br />
notes that they all resolve into one). To put the whole thing more generally: pseudo-drama is the use of<br />
dramatic devices to represent an action that is not dramatic.<br />
Among Thomas pseudo-dramatic dialogues are I see the boys of summer, Find meat on bones, and If my<br />
head hurt a hair s foot ; the masks in these are, respectively, the boys of summer and the person criticizing<br />
them; the father and the son; the unborn child and its mother. Instances of pseudo-dramatic monologue are<br />
Before I knocked, My world is pyramid, and When once the twilight locks no longer ; the mask in the
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
first is Jesus, in the second the secret child, in the third the spirit; but all are mouthpieces of the Thomasian<br />
hero, think as he thinks, feel as he feels, and speak in his characteristic idiom, with his distinctive vocabulary<br />
and turns of language that is contrived to suit his own idiosyncrasies.<br />
This typical technique of pseudo-drama has many uses; it permits concreteness, immediacy, and vividness<br />
where these otherwise would be impossible; it can heighten the contrast between two opposing points of view,<br />
or between conflicting motives and desires; it can produce a striking degree of economy as well. Thomas also<br />
uses pseudo-narrative, the narrative parallel of pseudo-drama. The three principal poems utilizing this device<br />
are the Altar-wise by owl-light sonnets, A Winter s Tale, and the Ballad of the Long-legged Bait ; the<br />
poet had projected a fourth In Country Heaven, of which In the white giant s thigh is a fragment. In these<br />
the characters are also masks for aspects of the underlying lyric character; for instance, the girl in the Ballad<br />
is a symbolic mask of the fleshly desires of the character and remains so till the very end.<br />
Real impact and effectiveness of these devices lies in the especially vivid actuality and immediacy which they<br />
confer; but they also serve, like representative devices in general, to select those aspects of the lyric activity<br />
which are necessary for the effect, to arrange these in the order in which they will have their greatest force<br />
(for example, to increase their effect through suspense and the unexpected), to set them in a context which will<br />
make them intelligible and probable as well, and to bind them into a whole as effective as possible. The scale<br />
on which events and activities are represented is also important to their intelligibility, credibility, and effect, and<br />
this, too, is a matter of devices of representation.<br />
Essentially a lyric poet does not necessarily represent the whole of the lyric action; just as the novelist and the<br />
dramatist may exhibit only a part of their plot, leaving the rest to inference, the poet may present only a part of<br />
the lyric action. Conversely, again like novelist and dramatist, he may exhibit more than the activity if this<br />
requires for its effect some emotional preparation or information. Finally, he may represent the whole of the<br />
activity, and nothing more. There is nothing invariable about Thomas procedure in this respect; he begins<br />
before, after, and with the beginning of his lyric actions, according to the demands of the individual poem. A<br />
few poems, like Over Sir John s hill, have some sort of introduction; a greater number begin with the activity,<br />
or after it has begun. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, for instance, starts immediately<br />
with the intuition that the forces which create and destroy both man and vegetable are identical, and pursues<br />
the consequences of that intuition; If I were tickled by the rub of love, , begins after the idea which initiates<br />
the lyric action. The choice of one or another of these kinds of beginnings depends upon the amount of<br />
emotional preparation, or of information, required for the proper effect, A fairly constant, and quite peculiar,<br />
characteristic of Thomas, however, is his use of what we may call circumstantial ambiguity. There is a<br />
curious difficulty, as one first approaches his poetry, of determining who is saying what or doing what to whom<br />
in what circumstances. Part of the difficulty, no doubt, is due to the difficult language, but part of it, as certainly,<br />
is due to his deliberately minimizing, in some instances even omitting, the ordinary indications which settle such<br />
questions. He reminds one of a dramatist who should leave out the title of his play, the indications of place and<br />
time, the cast of characters, the assignment of speeches, and all stage directions to leave the reader totally<br />
independent.<br />
I see the boys of summer gives none of the conventional indications that it is, dialogue; certain other pieces,<br />
such as Do you not father me and the sonnets, ascribe speeches to speakers like seaweedy, the antipodes,<br />
and the fake gentleman in suit of spades (as a matter of fact these are not even really speeches!), and so on.<br />
The ambiguity in representation, as in diction, is not merely deliberate; it is studious and deliberately worked on<br />
by the poet. Part of the difficulty of Thomas poetry stems from the oddity and originality of his imagination;<br />
part, as he once acknowledged,- from the terrific compression he was trying to achieve; part, no doubt, from a<br />
certain wilfulness or, at any rate, from his peculiar habits as a poet. Yet we must not suppose that obscurity can<br />
have no artistic purpose, that it is a mere fault of literary composition.<br />
This deliberate obscurity and complexity is a device; and one obvious use of it is to force the reader to give a<br />
poem the close attention it requires; properly handled, the cryptic excites curiosity rather than disgust, returns<br />
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Poetry<br />
the reader again and again to contemplation of the work until the problems it sets have been resolved. Or one<br />
should say properly handled : what makes the difference between proper and improper handling, between the<br />
production of curiosity and the production of disgust, is the value of the work to which attention has been so<br />
forcibly directed. The poet who puzzles us to force our attention to a work which is not worth attention is a vain<br />
fool, deserves our contempt and will get it; but the poet who tantalizes us in order to make us read more closely,<br />
and so understand more perfectly and react more completely to, a piece that is delicately and subtly made is<br />
perfectly within his rights. He is entitled to the attention he demands, and he rewards us handsomely at the end,<br />
not only with the satisfaction which attends the achievement of something difficult, but also with our increased<br />
pleasure in the poem as poem. Obscurity, like clarity, is not a criterion but a device of art; it is folly to praise or<br />
condemn a work because it does or does not entail the use of a given device. We have rather to ask what the<br />
artist gains or lose by using it or not using it, what he does with it or could have done with it or at the end<br />
whether it succeeds in the desired foregrounding of the complex.<br />
There are more important reasons for obscurity or complexification. We can see something of these if we<br />
consider how the poet .produces emotional effects in us. If we leave aside the sympathetic reactions produced<br />
in us by sound and rhythm, we can say, with fair accuracy, that poetry moves us by causing us to entertain<br />
opinions. That opinion is so involved in emotion can be seen from the fact that if, for example, we think that<br />
something dreadful is about to happen to ourselves or someone we cherish, we shall feel fear, whether the<br />
thing is really dreadful and imminent or not; conversely, if we do not think so, we shall not feel fear, regardless<br />
of the true case; and so with the other emotions. But opinion itself is not sufficient; the opinion must be actively<br />
entertained, that is, present to the mind, not merely in the background; and it must be present to the mind in the<br />
form of an image either of the pain and harm to be suffered or of the dangerous agency that may inflict it. For<br />
mere ideas and opinions in the abstract do not move us, as experience shows; they must be concretized and<br />
made actual in the imagination (or present to sensation) before they have any working power.<br />
It might be said, thus, that the poet controls the emotions of the audience by regulating the amount of knowledge<br />
or opinion (concerning the poetic characters and their fortunes) possessed by the audience at any particular<br />
moment, and by regulating the imaginative form which such opinion takes! Dramatist, novelist and even lyric<br />
poet through their representations of the activities of their characters deal out informal ion bit by bit. What the<br />
audience feels is a function of what it knows at a given point, of the relation of this to what has gone before, and<br />
of any inference which can be made on such bases. Of course the particular emotion or emotions felt at a<br />
given point are a resultant also of the whole train of precedent emotions; but when these are examined in<br />
retrospect they will also be found to vary with the amount of information available at the point of their inception.<br />
Emotions are particularly heightened by suspense and the unexpected. Suspense is not an emotion in itself, as<br />
can be seen from the fact that it can attend many contrary emotions, such as fear and hope; it is merely tension<br />
resulting from prolonged uncertainty or from prolonged expectation.<br />
The extraordinarily skilful facet of Dylan Thomas is evident in the techniques of representation. Great art is<br />
impossible of exhaustive discussion, and there is no point in trying to be exhaustive; but consider, for example,<br />
the Ballad of the Long-legged Bait. The poem begins abruptly with the start of a voyage. Before two lines<br />
are complete, we have a sense that there is something odd about this voyage; it is not the fisherman who takes<br />
a last look at the land and bids it goodbye, but the other way round. Another oddity in the second stanza: the<br />
boat seems to be moving as fast as a bird hooking over the sea. In the third, the looking land says, For my<br />
sake sail, and never look back. Our curiosity is aroused; we wonder whether these impossibilities result<br />
merely from metaphorical statement. The strangeness increases: night falls, the sun is shipwrecked west on<br />
a pearl, and the moon swims out of its hulk (if so, it rises in the west!).Bit by bit the tale unfolds. We are<br />
ready to pity the girl, but we learn that she longs among horses and angels and we learn that she is evidently<br />
in a kind of sexual ecstasy, in which all the creatures of the sea join.<br />
She dies as a result of this, but any painful emotions we might feel are eliminated as we learn that she was all<br />
the wanting flesh which was the enemy of the fisherman, that she was Susannah and Sheba and Venus and
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
the women sent by the Tempter in erotic dreams, in short, all Sin, who had a woman s shape ; and so to the<br />
magnificent conclusion in which all that was lost through Sin, Time, and Death emerges with the lost continent<br />
from the sea. As these things are successively disclosed, we move through curiosity, wonder, astonished<br />
horror, bewilderment, regret, and resignation to a surprised delight. We are held in constant suspense until the<br />
last line of the poem, for until then we do not know what the action is, or who the agents, or what the<br />
circumstances. Nor can we foretell the next development of, the action; each new turn undercuts our feelings<br />
for the events that have gone before, and sets them in a new light. The host of impossibilities incline us to doubt;<br />
the furious actuality of the images forbids us to doubt; we are thus inclined to wonder instead.<br />
The poet Thomas forces us to bear in mind every point of the tale, if we would avoid utter confusion; but at the<br />
moment when we view it as a whole, we see that the tale has a further reference; and that reference resolves<br />
all of our problems and confusions. As we consider each element of the representative device, our admiration<br />
for Thomas is likely to increase. Why was it right, in this instance, to fix on the object of thought rather, than on<br />
the thoughts and emotions of the character thinking? Because these latter are inferable from the object of<br />
thought. The symbolic imagery can arouse more powerful emotions, more rapidly and economically, than could<br />
the literal delineation. The poem is cast into a narrative which begins after the decision of the fisherman to<br />
mortify the wanting flesh, and which bars us from the workings of his mind to increases suspense. In the<br />
same vein the narrator should know the real significance of the voyage to heighten, step by step, the conflict<br />
between our superficial interpretations until we are at last driven into comprehension and understanding.<br />
The Language and the Devices in Dylan Thomas' Poetry<br />
Major difficulty in Thomas poetry is that offered by his diction the choice and the range of words he uses in his<br />
poems. We depend upon diction first of all to get at the poem; unless we can grasp its meaning, we can hardly<br />
penetrate to character or activity or situation or anything else; and Thomas puts such formidable obstacles in<br />
the path of his reader as sometimes to dampen all hope of understanding him. An obvious way to remove such<br />
difficulty would be to supply the reader with a translation or paraphrase of each of the difficult poems. But this<br />
has several serious disadvantages. In the first place the reader is likely to take the mere meaning for the poem<br />
itself. Again, paraphrase frustrates the poet s purposes by removing all need for intellectual activity on the part<br />
of the reader, although precisely that activity is necessary for the effect of the poem. Again, paraphrase leaves<br />
the reader quite unaware of the particular verbal techniques of the poet. Finally, it puts a kind of permanent<br />
screen of explication, criticism, and analysis between the reader and the poem<br />
Dylan Thomas is fond of words with multiple meanings and multiple syntactic functions. He uses these for<br />
various kinds of puns and similar tricks, for achieving simultaneous meanings, and for parody. For example,<br />
My world is pyramid plays on various meanings of the word fellow, which can be a noun meaning a<br />
person, partner, friend, or companion; an adjective meaning associate, accompanying, etc.; and a. verb with<br />
similar meanings. Again the sonnets play upon words like wether; weather, rung (like a bell), rung (of<br />
a ladder), which, witch, where there is similarity of sound only.<br />
Sometimes he wants simultaneous meanings of a multiple-meaning word; in A grief ago, the phrase boxed<br />
into love has simultaneous meanings; as Thomas himself declared, boxed has the coffin and the pug-glove in<br />
it. He will mix levels or kinds of language most startlingly, current with archaic, literary with slang and thieves<br />
lingo, either to achieve simultaneous meanings or to make you consider which meaning he intends. For instance,<br />
in To-day, this insect, air-drawn windmill does not mean, as we should take it in current language, drawn by<br />
the air, but has its archaic sense of drawn on the air (i.e., imagined, illusory ); like Macbeth s air-drawn<br />
dagger. Thomas will also affect parody through the use of similar words: minstrel angles for ministering<br />
angels, maid and head for maidenhead, man through macadam for man through Adam, God in bed,<br />
good and bad. He uses such parodies for many purposes but chiefly to sharpen an antithesis. He likes to coin<br />
words and devise new uses for words.<br />
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Poetry<br />
The coined expressions are nearly all compounds, and some are very strange indeed: grave-gabbing, motherseyed,<br />
scythe-eyed, skullfoot, bird-papped, etc. These compounds are based on no one principle; sometimes<br />
they merely put together two words in their literal meanings, sometimes they involve metaphor, sometimes they<br />
are condensed paraphrases. Thomas will use nouns quite commonly as verbs, for example, Jacob to the<br />
stars means climbs Jacob s ladder to the stars, and there are many similar instances of his wrenching a<br />
word out of its conventional function. His metaphors are likely to give a good deal of trouble.<br />
In the first place, he dislikes the obvious kinds and goes in for types in which the resemblance is extremely in<br />
obvious; sometimes it is a resemblance which is fancied only, and likely to be fancied only by a man in a<br />
particular mood or pursuing a particular train of thought. Second, Thomas likes to make the metaphor appear<br />
self-contradictory. Third, he likes to mix metaphors, to achieve various special effects through the dissonances<br />
they beget. The result is that his metaphors, being made as they are out of such materials as the metaphysical<br />
poets used in their conceits, become enigmas or riddles, since, unlike the metaphysical poets, Thomas does<br />
not make explicit the grounds for his fantastic comparisons and analogies<br />
Dylan s often used metaphors could be classified in separate categories. First, there is the apparently selfcontradictory<br />
metaphor in which the contradiction comes from incomplete statement; either Thomas has given<br />
you the missing part already or will come back later and supply it. In Our eunuch dreams, for instance, we<br />
have one-dimensioned ghosts. Ghosts here is itself a metaphor for images on a movie screen; but how are<br />
these one-dimensioned ? Thomas returns to the metaphor in the succeeding section of the poem, in the lines<br />
The photograph is married to the eye, / Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth, and we realize that what<br />
he meant by one-dimensioned is one-sided ; there is no further side to a photograph or a movie image. The<br />
trick here is that he counted on our reading one-dimensioned literally, whereas it is a metaphor. He uses this<br />
particular trick here to emphasize his point that, while the photograph and the image are half-true, dreams are<br />
totally false.<br />
In the next category he uses metaphors which deceive you as to what is being analogized to what. This again<br />
involves partial statement which has to be filled out with something that went be fore or comes after. For<br />
example, in When, like a running grave we have time tracks you down, one is quite likely to think of time<br />
here merely as a hunter tracking, but the last stanza clarifies this; time is also being analogized to a runner on<br />
a cinder track who on completion of his course shapes an oval, an 0, a zero standing for the nothingness of<br />
death.<br />
Thomas uses what we may call the metaphor of logical consequence. One of his most famous and supposedly<br />
most simple poems, In my Craft or Sullen Art, contains some five or six of these. Sullen art means so<br />
stubborn, unresponsive, refractory, that if it were human one would call it sullen. Spindrift pages means if<br />
Keats was one who wrote in water, my more ephemeral work ought to be called spindrift. Ivory stages<br />
means stages whereon people act falsely, like actors ; it involves an allusion to the Virgilian gates of ivory and<br />
of horn through which the false and the true dreams, respectively, come. This sort of metaphor always contains<br />
some supposition or allusion from which the metaphorical term results as a logical consequence; frequently the<br />
supposition is a metaphor of Thomas own.<br />
He is also fond of a highly composite metaphor in which the parts are unintelligible until we grasp the whole.<br />
In Over Sir John s hill, for instance, the hill is called just and the heron is called holy. How so? the<br />
reader may ask. These terms derive from Thomas over-all comparison of the events taking place to a trial and<br />
execution; the hill is just because it is a judge, and it is a judge because, like a judge pronouncing the death<br />
sentence, it puts on a black cap in this instance a black cap of jackdaws. The hawk is seen as, the hangman<br />
executing small birds, and, since he is a hangman, his stoop is seen as a rope (and a fuse is a sort of rope, so his<br />
rope is called a fuse ). The heron is the chaplain or priest and so is called saint and holy. Once one gets<br />
the whole, the parts are clear. He effects metaphor also by his compounds. These do not usually offer much<br />
difficulty. Lamb white days, for instance, means days innocent as a lamb is white ; a springful of larks
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
means as many larks as you would find in a whole spring ; apple towns means the trees in apple orchards;<br />
and so on.<br />
Thomas likes various kinds of implied or suggested metaphor. We had an example of one sort in the lines<br />
quoted earlier from the Ballad of the Long-legged Bait, where the storm was analogized to a supernatural<br />
warship, although the warship itself was never mentioned. This sort of metaphor is produced by mentioning<br />
attributes of a thing until a kind of rough definition results. Another sort comes from taking a stock phrase and<br />
altering part of it to produce an implied analogy, as, for example, a nose for news is altered into a jaw for<br />
news, the stations of the Cross into the stations of the breath, once upon a time into once below a<br />
time.<br />
He uses periphrasis in so many different ways that classification is difficult and perhaps pointless; indeed, he<br />
writes as if he were one of the Welsh enigmatic poets of the fourteenth century. One of his less successful<br />
poems, Because the pleasure-bird whistles, carries this to an extreme that has irritated many critics. In this<br />
poem Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires means Because the song-bird sings more<br />
sweetly after being blinded with red-hot wires or needles ; a drug-white shower of nerves and food is the<br />
long way around for snow, snow being conceived both as the snow of cocaine addicts and as manna from<br />
heaven.<br />
Thomas also uses the Anglo-Saxon device of kenning, as in windwell for source of the wind ; and he uses<br />
an odd form of periphrasis which makes a familiar thing unfamiliar by describing it accurately but in the manner<br />
of a primitive definition: thus shafted disk for clock, bow-and-arrow birds for weathercocks. His<br />
syntax is full of pitfalls for the unwary. We have seen already that he tends to use words in other than their<br />
conventional functions; but he is also fond of ambiguous reference, false parallelism, ellipsis, something that we<br />
might call false apposition, and something else that we may call delayed complement. As in the first stanza<br />
of Poem in October many words intervene between hearing and its infinitive object beckon and many<br />
again between beckon and its object myself.<br />
Thomas deliberately increases such ambiguities by the use or omission of punctuation. For example, in the first<br />
three lines of A Refusal to Mourn, a little hyphenation would have clarified everything, thus: Never until the<br />
mankind-making / Bird-beast- and flower- / Fathering and all-humbling darkness. The reader who perseveres<br />
will find that Thomas seldom does what he does pointlessly, and usually rewards the effort of interpretation<br />
most handsomely. Obviously he cannot be read literally; to read him so would be either to run headlong into<br />
bewilderment or to miss nine-tenths of what he was saying. We can make the mistake of taking him too literally<br />
when he says that he wishes to be read literally; his paraphrases, explanations, and commentaries show him to<br />
be a man with anything but a literal mind.<br />
What he meant, is that he wanted to be read, not read into. It is common practice for critics nowadays, to<br />
impose a host of meanings on poetry which the text itself in no way justifies, sometimes even contradicts. For<br />
such hypothesis-ridden readers any poem is merely an occasion for working their favourite automatic apparatus.<br />
Any poem means, not what the poet thought he meant, but what the hypothesis dictates that he must have<br />
meant. This is worse than an infringement on the freedom of speech; this is dictation of thought and feeling.<br />
Thomas wanted the reader to begin with the idea that he might be speaking literally; to declare some- thing<br />
a symbol or a metaphor only after it was evident that it could not be a literal expression; to find out, in that case,<br />
what kind of symbol or metaphor it was; and so go, eventually, from the text, to Thomas meaning. This is the<br />
right way to read Thomas, and the right way to read anything; and it is the only right way to read poetry that has<br />
significance and immortality written all over it.<br />
Comments on Selected Poems<br />
The following paraphrases are intended merely to give a general idea of the poems with which they deal, and<br />
so to start the reader on the process of reading Thomas. (The discussions and ideas given below rely on the<br />
treatment in the reader s guide up to a very large extent)<br />
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I See the Boys of Summer<br />
Poetry<br />
This poem is a pseudo-drama involving the boys , their critic, and the poet. The critic speaks first, and<br />
charges the boys with seeking ruin; they destroy harvests, freeze the seeds in the soils, are frigid in their loves,<br />
and put the Flood before Eden; they destroy the sweetness of summer, entertain thoughts of winter in summer<br />
itself., and in the very sunlight think of darkness; the moon also means nothing to them.<br />
Further, if the boys take no account of time and season, the summer children , as yet unborn, make time<br />
within the timeless womb, and reckon day and night where they are not. The critic predicts that nothing will<br />
ever come of such fellows; probably in the winter of their old age they will feel the heat they should have felt<br />
in the prime of their summer. The poet, speaking in the last line, cries out that, if so, they will have preserved<br />
youth in their old age. In Section II the boys defend their view: time and the seasons must be challenged, or<br />
the very stars are made into bells which chime the hour; to observe time is to be at the mercy of death, night,<br />
winter; the old man, watchman of death, does not offer any comforting cry such as Twelve o clock and a<br />
moony night!<br />
No, they say, let us be the dark deniers who doubt and deny all; who draw everything out of its opposite; death<br />
out of the woman of life, life and love out of dead lovers, light out of the darkness of the sea, straw and not<br />
grass out of the planted seed (the reference is to a fertility ritual in which a womb is planted to insure the<br />
birth of vegetation). We shall reverse everything; elevate the deeps of the sea and lower the high birds,<br />
flood the dry deserts with waters, look through gardens for funeral wreaths, celebrate Christmas in spring, and<br />
so on. The poet remarks that the boys promise to include in their experience all the extremes of life.<br />
In the last section the critic says this will end in ruin; there is a time for everything; when man is dead and eaten<br />
by maggots, what can he do then? The boys retort that they are young; he responds that no one stays that way;<br />
he, for instance, is now what their father was once. The boys refuse to acknowledge any such father; they are<br />
the sons of flint and pitch , the ageless universe. The poet remarks that the extremes are really one; that in the<br />
whole view North Pole and South Pole are the same, the poles are kissing as they cross .<br />
When we first encounter the poem we admire a dazzling surface, a quarrel of images with no immediate sense.<br />
Frozen loves , cargoed apples , boiling honey , and jacks of frost create a climate of extremes where<br />
brawned womb s weathers and dogdayed pulse seem more at ease, but monotony of rhythm and regularity<br />
of structure indicate some order within this chaos. Even dissonance and assonance are to a certain extent<br />
alongside these. (dissonance mean an approximate rhyme in which vowels disagree and consonants agree,<br />
e.g. goat-gate, thrashflesh, assonance mean an approximate rhyme in which consonants disagree and vowels<br />
agree, e.g. rake-pain). This order of disagreements, we must agree, offers an experience like nothing else<br />
and a good experience, too. But poetry, made of words, is not music, whatever these arts have in common.<br />
Examination of this thing of words shows the element of sense that words must bear. Indeed, examination<br />
shows a rational theme that determines and orders what we have been struck by. To see how rhythm, rhyme,<br />
structure, and image serve this theme we must explore the images and place the contenders in what seems to<br />
be a debate.<br />
The speaker, taking a dim view of the boys in Part I, sees their ruin. Justifying themselves in Part II, the boys<br />
answer their critic. Part III, asserting the structure dialectic, resolves this conflict of thesis and antithesis by a<br />
kind of synthesis. Of the debaters, the boys claim our notice first. Summer is the season of fulfilment; yet the<br />
boys of summer, like improvident grasshoppers, are doomed. Probably these boys are all men in their<br />
aspects of sperm cells, embryos, and adolescents. That they are also Welshmen, drive from mine, factory, and<br />
home by the depression of 1931 (the year Thomas had to leave school) and ruined in London, is not altogether<br />
very unlikely. Plainly the speaker who sees these complex boys is one of them, sharing their fate. Poets,<br />
Welshmen, adolescents, sperm cells, and embryos all of these at once these boys are victims of fate and<br />
time. Temporal process, suggested by sun and moon, is established in four stanzas by the four seasons, autumn,<br />
winter, spring, and summer.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
The first stanza, is a contention among images of heat and cold, wet and dry, love and sterility, and involves the<br />
autumnal game of bobbing for apples; but apple and flood, from Genesis, suggest conception. As fertility and<br />
sterility, life and death, creation and destruction proceed together, each binary involves its opposite.<br />
The second stanza, following conception and genesis in the first, concerns the development of the embryo in<br />
the dark hive or void of the womb which holds death s frost. The signal moon may be that of the ninth month.<br />
Womb and moon are zero by shape and promise. That the boys at this point are also adolescents in the sun<br />
is made almost plain by their activity. Playing with words and with themselves, they finger jacks of frost . Still<br />
in their mothers the adolescents, the summer children of the third stanza enjoy the brawned womb s weathers<br />
until obstetrical spring paints emerging skulls with light at birth and promises bony death. As embryos, they<br />
paint the shades (ghostly darkness) of the quartered (four, inhabited) seasons on the walls of their dams<br />
(mothers and retainers of amniotic fluid).<br />
Grown up at last or fully statured, the boys of summer come to nothing in summer. Their hot pulse is frozen<br />
stiff; yet thaw is not impossible. As there is ice in summer, so there is summer in ice. This ambiguity,<br />
complicating doom by hope, is confirmed by seedy , the generative word, which includes fertility and decay.<br />
Our seedy boys lame the air as the pulse of love and light bursts in their throats<br />
The part two, shows these seedy men of nothing , responding more to the nasty tone of their critic than to his<br />
ambiguities, cap them with ambiguities of their own; for nothing is simple in this debate. It may be, that all men<br />
are victims of time; but making the most of time, let us challenge it before the clock strikes the chiming<br />
quarter of midnight or death. Midnight may be irreversible, but blowing, however vain, is the activity of vital<br />
winds, poets, and whales; and ringing the bell of the starts could imply New Year.<br />
Being Deniers , we may deny promise, they agree in the second stanza; and it may be true that begetting<br />
children brings death into the world, but even men of straw are better than nothing. Death in the second line<br />
certainly indicate/means birth. Cramp refers to embracing and death by water. The fair dead who flush the<br />
sea are embryos, pulling the chain of the amniotic cistern. Davy s lamp , lighting the dark submarine or<br />
subterranean womb, seems Welsh.<br />
In the third stanza, four-winded spinning , green (life), seaweed and iron (metal in Thomas world is<br />
flesh) present nature. Holding the sea up to drop her birds is another image of birth, which flushes the<br />
wasteland, bringing momentary fertility. Spinning , ball , and comb complicate water by suggestion of the<br />
fatal sisters and their thread. The wreath suits death and poets alike. Country gardens have introduced the<br />
merry squires of Christmas Mr. Pickwick s host at the Manor Farm Nailing the squires of Christmas to the<br />
trees, we confuse Christmas with Good Friday, birth with death yet Easter means rebirth. Drying love s<br />
damp muscle and breaking a kiss in no love s quarry mean love s end in sterility. The poles of the last line,<br />
not only cross and phallus, are all the antipodes that have obsessed the speakers. Pointing to life and death,<br />
promise is both ironic and literal. The boys of summer, as ambiguous as their critic, have said nothing more<br />
than he intended to say.<br />
In part three, a quick interchange between the old boy and the ruined boys, speaking alternate lines, adds little<br />
but an air of finality to the established theme of life and death, creation and destruction. The maggot s barren ,<br />
as doubtful in grammar as in sense, includes wormy womb and tomb, the double pouch in which all men are<br />
both full and foreign . The old boy as the man their father was unites the living and the dead, fathers and<br />
sons.. The last line, a geographical conceit, like Andrew Marvell s plainsphere , unites all contraries, ambiguously.<br />
No less double, exclamatory O see carries two attitudes. Cross , implying union and crucifixion, includes<br />
sex, two generations, religion, death, poetry in short, life, our general cross.<br />
Here the danger of guessing the senses of a thing like this is that idea, replacing poem, will drive out the<br />
elemental marvel. If we can put the commonplace idea into its place among many elements, awareness of the<br />
idea may enrich the rest but subordinating the idea is difficult. Our first experience of this poem as something<br />
rich, strange, and mysterious, remains better than our present experience, limited by awareness of the<br />
commonplace ambiguity that centres the parts.<br />
177
178<br />
Poetry<br />
A detailed examination helps us to admire the poet s art. All the parts, we find, conspire. Conflicts among<br />
images, is not there alone to dazzle us, but to present the conflicts of life. Rhythmic monotony and formal<br />
regularity give the feeling of eternal process, while dubious rhyme mixes our feelings. Man s condition and his<br />
fate emerge as theme; but verbal play and the gaiety of language prove life good, however bad it may seem to<br />
be from the out side.<br />
Light Breaks where no Sun Shines<br />
As we embark on our exploration in trying to answer unanswerable questions about this dark poem on light, let<br />
us see what is certain here. In the beginning in place of the usual dissonance and rhyme, there is new assonance<br />
(shines, tides, light) interwoven with tenuous consonance of s in the first stanza. Later stanzas return to<br />
habitual dissonance and its shades. Similarity of form may imply similarity of subject, certainly the images are<br />
familiar. We have met wax, oil, worm, water, poles, globe, light, and the others in poems preceding this in The<br />
Collected Poems, though not necessarily preceding this in date of composition. The quarrel of opposites is<br />
familiar. Here we have another series of contradictions and paradoxes, conflicts among the old antagonists of<br />
dark and light, inner and outer, above and below, microcosm and macrocosm. The monotony of rhythm, the<br />
recurrence of verbal patterns, and the repetition with variation in place of detectable forward movement are<br />
equally familiar. Yet the essential theme remains a puzzle.<br />
Although it may appear as plainly a war between darkness and light, in which light may be the winner, this<br />
poem leaves us in the dark about the nature of light, that appears as glowworm, candle, day, spring, and dawn<br />
This is a progression from small lights to big. Is light literal or metaphorical or now one, now the other? If<br />
metaphorical, does it mean creative power or enlightenment? The dawning of awareness a new awakening or<br />
the coming of knowledge seems as likely a theme as any. The poem is about individual development from<br />
fertilized egg to maturity and the coming of knowledge proper to each stage. The poem could be viewed as an<br />
abstract arrangement like a recent painting.<br />
Light breaks certainly states the uncertain theme. Breaks , connecting this light with dawn, agrees with<br />
push in and file through , the other verbs of intrusion; yet breaks can mean ending as well as beginning. No<br />
sun, no sea, no flesh in this place, yet, paradoxically, there are light, waters, and flesh. Light without sun<br />
suggests the first day of Genesis or, if light is life, a cell s first night in the womb. Outer sea and inner waters<br />
recall the green fuse . The things of light as broken as light itself, are ghosts with glowworms in their<br />
heads , like those worms of the boys of summer . Since they file flesh in its absence, these wormy ghosts,<br />
which make womb seem tomb, may be the knowledge of life and death that instinct furnishes a cell or what<br />
precedes a cell. No amniotic water, no flesh here, may be, because this is so long before conception that the<br />
knower is hardly there at all. The stanza could mean that knowledge of sex, frustration, and sublimation is<br />
present in child, embryo, cell.<br />
The Dawn, replacing general light, breaks in the head, behind the eyes . Enlightenment is localized in the<br />
brain. Meanwhile our blood flows like a sea between the poles of head and toe. Perhaps adding a little to the<br />
sea of stanza one, this sea is windy . The external world seems evermore near with us. If the first stanzas<br />
are about conception, this one suggests birth. The gushers spouting oil recall those of In the beginning . But<br />
the gushers are in the sky with stars, not below where they belong. The divining rod that locates them may be<br />
the divine rod. The dark sockets are those of candles and eyes. Moon and globes continue celestial and<br />
geographical metaphors. A pitch moon is dark as a socket. The globes are also eyes since vision is as<br />
necessary as candle for enlightenment. But after dark night, Day lights the bone . This could be birth or<br />
resurrection from the tomb. The knower knows the skinning gales not October winds but those of spring<br />
that strip old winter s snowy robes off. The lids to be removed are those of eyes and coffins .We have had<br />
something to do with day and spring, womb or tomb, birth or rebirth, without knowing precisely what. Someone s<br />
vision is opening wider to some windy light; yet the limit of the eye is known to this visionary.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
The light breaks over a wasteland of secret lots , waste allotments , and stinking tips or dumps the secret<br />
of this soil strikes our eye. This enlightenment is social, moral, or religious, like that of Eliot s Waste Land,<br />
apparently alluded to. But dawn ambiguously halts over the waste. Halt certainly means that dawn pauses<br />
to increase the light on dark places or it means that dawn stops dead, depriving dark places of further light. But<br />
more than social or moral, the lots and tips are intellectual, like the dawn of stanza three. The tips are those<br />
of thought, dumps for dead and stinking logics . Jumping blood (the sea of stanza three), replacing dead<br />
thought, may be Lawrence s thinking with the blood. Enlightenment now occurs below the neck rather than<br />
behind the eyes. Eliot and Lawrence seem present here, the one by virtue of tips and vacant lots, the other by<br />
virtue of blood.<br />
Now we know for sure is that many paradoxes and contraries, uneasily side by side, agreeing and disagreeing,<br />
produce a confusion that may be that of life and so intended. As John Wain said, looking at an abstraction on<br />
my wall, There s a lot going on there .<br />
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London<br />
The war of burning brains and hair feared no more, provided elegiac Thomas with welcome replacements<br />
for Ann Jones and the married virgin. Here, the girl to be mourned has ruined house or street for tombstone to<br />
tell where she died. In burning babies and water to put them out, Thomas found an agreeable subject. Fire and<br />
water are destructive and vital. Brightness falling from air to earth rounds the cycle of elements out Ritual<br />
turns on paradox. Here, the ceremonious elegist paradoxically refuses to mourn what he mourns or, as<br />
William Empson says, the poet says he will not say what he says. Nature is holy , as Thomas tells the sleeping<br />
child of In Country Sleep . We come from nature and return to it for secular renewal with the bees and<br />
flowers.<br />
Dylan Thomas viewed the outbreak of the war in 1939 with gloomy loathing. The least politically conscious of<br />
men, he detested the prospect of violence and bloodshed, partly because it all appeared purposeless and<br />
wasteful, partly because the war was bound to disrupt his life and hinder him from following his vocation as a<br />
poet. This unheroic and unashamed selfishness governed his conduct, and his attitude towards the war. He did<br />
not, however, feel able to seek exemption from military service for religious reasons, and was saved from such<br />
service by being found medically unfit. He spent most of the war in London, and experienced the German airraids<br />
on the city. It is noteworthy that the few poems he wrote about the war are all based upon these<br />
experiences.<br />
The child s death is the result of a German raid. Why should he call his poem A Refusal to Mourn . ? The<br />
answer is partly that Thomas wishes to dissociate himself from any suggestion of political propaganda, to shun<br />
the easy emotionalism aroused by the killing of a young girl in an enemy raid on London. But the deeper<br />
reasons for his refusal can only be discerned if we consider the nature of his poetic temperament and the<br />
character of his art.<br />
Thomas experienced with unusual intensity a comparatively limited range of emotions: ecstatic joy, exalted<br />
grief, overwhelming despair, terror and disgust. Moreover, he lacked the ability, perhaps even the desire, to<br />
enter imaginatively into the experience of another person, to see through the eyes of anybody other than<br />
himself. His poetry is essentially a lyrical incantation, the poetic equivalent of the fervent eloquence beloved of<br />
Welsh preachers and known in Welsh as hywl.<br />
Thus Dylan Thomas is not concerned in this poem with the suffering of the burned child as experience by that<br />
child and with the grief of her parents, or with the tragedy of individuals in war-time. He is primarily celebrating<br />
the cosmic process of creation, destruction and recreation; he is employing the Biblical imagery of light and<br />
darkness, fire and water, corn and salt, in order to convey the incomprehensible mystery of all human life.<br />
A study of the poem should be enough to dispel the lingering relics of the superstition that Thomas was a<br />
surrealistic poet who cared neither for intellectual order nor for poetic craftsmanship. It would be truer to<br />
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argue that he often tried to compress too large and complex an intellectual structure into too small a space, and<br />
that his relentless desire to find the exact word or phrase became an obsession which at times betrayed him<br />
into excessive ingenuity. But in A Refusal to Mourn the intellectual design of the poem is beautifully concerned,<br />
and the language is perfectly fitted to the design.<br />
The best way to grasp the richness and skill of the poem is to read it aloud. The reader will then inescapably<br />
experience the remarkable oratorical power of that long first sentence, which extends from the first to the<br />
thirteenth line; the strictness of the rhythmical pattern; the subtlety of rhyme, assonance and alliteration which<br />
bind together the elements of the poem. Yet the poem is by no means a mere piece of metrical virtuosity, or of<br />
rhetorical manipulation. It is, on the contrary, a solemn meditation which employs with classical exactitude and<br />
strength the traditional symbols of the Bible and of Christian doctrine.<br />
The poem opens with the declaration that the poet will not in any way mourn the dead child until the world<br />
ends. The first four lines are, syntactically, a little puzzling.<br />
Never until the mankind making<br />
Bird beast and flower<br />
Fathering and all humbling darkness<br />
Tells with silence the last light breaking ….<br />
But their difficulty vanishes as soon as we grasp the fact that it is the darkness which makes mankind, father s<br />
bird, beast and flower, and humbles all things. As so often in Thomas, the use of a few hyphens would have<br />
immediately clarified the relationship of the words to one another. It is probable that the conjunction of<br />
mankind with bird, beast and flower owes something to a passage from D.H. Lawrence s Apocalyse which<br />
runs:<br />
For man as for flower, beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.<br />
Thomas thinks of the darkness as the source of all life, since, in the opening chapter of Genesis, God is<br />
represented as summoning light from the primal darkness. There may also be the suggestion that most human<br />
procreation takes place at night: it is characteristic of Thomas to fuse a number of possible meanings into one<br />
phrase.<br />
There follow several Biblical references, all designed to emphasize the sacramental nature of existence, the<br />
unity of life and death. He speaks of his own death, when he<br />
must enter again the round<br />
Zion of the water head<br />
And the synagogue of the ear of corn<br />
Thereby investing with a religious significance his reabsorption into the elemental unity. Zion and synagogue,<br />
like the other allusions in this second stanza, have an Old Testament origin, but in Wales many Nonconformist<br />
places of worship are known as Zions, and Thomas thus unifies the symbols of the Bible and the familiar<br />
objects of daily life in his native land.<br />
In the third stanza he declares his refusal to indulge in sterile moralizing over the death of the child.<br />
I shall not murder<br />
The mankind of her going with a grave truth<br />
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath<br />
With any further<br />
Elegy of innocence and youth.<br />
He is not primarily concerned with the child s death, but with the fact of death which is the condition of<br />
mankind. Thomas is often at his most serious at the moment of making a pun, and in this stanza he employs the<br />
device of a pun with brilliant effectiveness. A grave truth is both a truth about the grave, and a solemn truth.<br />
Even more daring is the phrase stations of the breath .
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
The first thirteen lines of the poem must be spoken without any station, or stopping for breath, and the phrase<br />
derives from the Stations of the Cross, which depict the stages of Christ s journey to the place of crucifixion.<br />
The final stanza emphasizes the universality of the child s death:<br />
Deep with the first dead lies London s daughter,<br />
Robbed in the long friends,<br />
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,<br />
Secret by the unmourning water<br />
Of the riding Thames.<br />
After the first death there is no other.<br />
The long friends are, almost certainly, the worms in which the child is now clothed. She has entered again the<br />
unmourning elements. The reference to the riding Thames evokes the imagery of Stanza I, where the seas<br />
is tumbling in harness . The last line of the poem can be interpreted in several ways. It can be taken to mean<br />
that after physical death the soul is immortal. Or it may be interpreted as a denial of immortality, a rejection of<br />
the Biblical doctrine of the second death inflicted on the wicked, an assertion that physical death is the end of<br />
life. There is a third implication that the first death, the death of Adam and Eve, is the prototype of all death.<br />
These three meanings, although impossible to reconcile logically and emotionally at variance with one another,<br />
are poetically harmonious and are acceptable to the reader no matter what his metaphysical beliefs may be.<br />
The last line, rising to majesty, provides elegiac consolation for the simple reader and for the alert, a pleasing<br />
doubt. The first death , recalling the first dead , could be that of Adam, Eve, Jesus, this child, or anybody<br />
(Compare Donne s an issue from the first death , Death s Duel ). That there is no other death after the<br />
first means, as the context demands, that death is followed by perpetual life: Christian heaven or natural rebirth<br />
in bird or flower. In either case death shall have no dominion . But, whatever the demands of context and the<br />
elegiac tradition, this line is ambiguous. After the first death, there is no other can mean that death is death.<br />
There is no other because, once dead, you are dead for good. A poet as aware as Thomas of what he was<br />
about must have intended this ambiguity, which seems there to combine with admirable exactness and<br />
condensation his two beliefs: that life is eternal and death, final. The believing unbeliever, at once holy and<br />
secular, hopeful and desperate, believed what he knew to be untrue. This great and fitting conclusion to a<br />
structure of paradoxes precisely joins what a double talker wants with what he knows.<br />
A Winter's Tale<br />
Narrative is essential , said Thomas, speaking of poetry in Replies to an Enquiry . Though many of his poems<br />
are static abstractions of concretions, many show movement in theme from stanza to stanza, and many are<br />
dramatic. Few are narratives in the customary sense. There are narrative elements in such poems as A<br />
Warring Absence , Once Below a Time , or even The Conversation of Prayer . Poem in October tells a<br />
little story. But the unmistakable narratives are Ballad of the Long-legged Bait and A Winter s Tale .<br />
Narrative in a poem is good, Thomas continues, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, because, while the mind of the reader<br />
is detained by events, the essence of the poem will do its work on him . The essence of the poem must be the<br />
sound of shape and the shape of sound. A Winter s Tale , a sounding shape, shows a crafty delight in<br />
alliteration, rhythm, structure, texture, and vowels. There are many fine-sounding lines: Torn and alone in a<br />
farm house in a fold , or Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air , or A she bird dawned, and her<br />
breast with snow and scarlet downed . Indeed, this story is more remarkable for craft than for story. Plainly<br />
the poem, lacking the magic it attempts, is the deliberate, calculated, product of great skill. Dream fantasy in<br />
kind or fairy tale with mythical centre, this contrivance is the story of a sorrowing hot-and-cold man, alone by<br />
the fire in the cold dark. His prayers for human warmth are answered by a vision of a burning she bird in the<br />
snow. A dream of quest and capture ends at a dark door, gliding wide. Engulfed by his dark firebird, he dies<br />
in two senses, sexually and actually. In this fantasy of love and death, the poet revisits the asylum for another<br />
look at that girl mad as birds the phoenix, Lawrence s bird in pot, has figured in Unluckily for a death .<br />
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Snow, in contention with fire, is the central image here. Seasons and times, seeds and dusts abound, awaiting<br />
call, in this white preservative. Though snow is dead white we wade to life and, wading, die. We die to love<br />
and love to die and all life long enjoy the fires of ice. .<br />
The five-line stanza with short first line is that of the ballad, lengthened and given heavier movement by<br />
intervention of Hopkins. Five sprung stresses in the long lines give variety while rhyme, both good and<br />
approximate, gives the assurance of custom; stanza is linked to stanza by echo of word and image. The first<br />
two stanzas set the scene by a confusion of snow and water that anticipates melting at the end. The frozen<br />
fields float, twilight is a boat, and the vale of the farm a cup. Snow blind twilight is better for omission of the<br />
hyphen, and so the other unhyphenated adjectives, Hand folded , for example, which frequently recurrent,<br />
suggests white linen or book. And , which appears four times in the second stanza, introduces the syntax of<br />
dream, which, according to Freud, is innocent of logical connectives<br />
The next three stanzas introduce the protagonist, a man , evidently a poet since apocalyptic scrolls of fire<br />
burn in his heart and head . Although he is nameless and his story proceeds in third person, first person<br />
singular is around, behind the scenes. This man is alone on a firelit island , surrounded by snow, and, although<br />
no man should be an island or on one there he will sit, insulated, till cock crow combs through the white<br />
farmyard and the morning men go out to dig and the milkmaids go out in clogs to walk the fallen sky . These<br />
lovely oafs at their white trades anticipate the boy at his blue trades at Fern Hill and the bouncing goose girls<br />
of The White Giants Thigh . This bucolic vision, celebrating future dawn, is the happiest of the poem. But<br />
back to present night. On such a night Christ, ever in Thomas service, was born On a star of faith pure as the<br />
drifting bread of the snowy Eucharist. Turned old , an ambiguity, may mean grew up, became old, or turned<br />
of old.<br />
In the next two stanzas the lonely man, as forsaken as Jesus on the cross, weeps. But on no cross, he can<br />
kneel and pray for communion. The heaven of his desire, forever sought , is the bride bed . As the believer<br />
lost and the hurled outcast of light , he combines, like Stephen Dedalus before him, the conditions of Lucifer<br />
and Christ, light and dark. His cup and cut bread are the remains of his last supper, and snow, equally<br />
Eucharistic, becomes the bread of water , which birds, the harvest melting on their tongues , will receive. A<br />
nameless need , plainly romantic, will drive him forth to run cold as snow over the glass of the frozen pond,<br />
past the icy statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties , an instructive meeting of above with below.<br />
Meanwhile, on the point of love (love s cross, its impaling stake, or its almost), he directs his cries to heaven,<br />
the home of prayers . May his hunger go howling on bare white bones is the most impressive line of this<br />
section. But the quick of night is a successful play on the dead of night.<br />
The prayer for bride bed , in the eleventh stanza, is as paradoxical as marriage. Let me be saved by being lost,<br />
the man prays with the hero of Vision and Prayer , and be delivered by being engulfed The word time ,<br />
emerging from this puzzle, introduces the recapture of past time in the following stanzas. Stanzas 12 and 13<br />
concern the past, preserved in the seedy snow and evoked from it. Minstrels sing under Hardy s greenwood<br />
tree from now deserted villages, and nightingales, now grains of dust, sing on the winds and wings of the<br />
dead . The voice of snow, the dust or water from some vanished spring magically spells and tells this<br />
winter s tale . Wizened stream , as frozen as the withered spring and the long gone glistening dews of the<br />
past, thaws and trings its bells. In short, Time sings from the dead and intricate snowflake that preserves it.<br />
Listen , which suitably introduces these two stanzas of past music, ends them suitably and links them by a kind<br />
of chiasmus. Stops, falling here and there within the lines, impart an unusual movement to the thirteenth stanza.<br />
Alliteration helps the belling, baying, and bounding song along.<br />
Time s music of the long ago land , aided by dissonant hand or sound and by elaborate alliteration, glides the<br />
dark door wide . Stanza 14 heralds this story s heroine, a burning she bird like Caitlin a firebird to warm the<br />
snowbound hero up. She rises, arrayed in rays of bright light. Alliteration, ever more intricate, attends this<br />
phoenix, in whose light the hero, dazzled by sound, enjoys a vision. In stanzas 15 and 16, Look , replacing the
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
Listen of stanzas 12 and 13, forms a parallel. Dead minstrels sing in stanza 12. Here, dead dancers, like<br />
those of East Coker , move on a green spread now white with snow. Movement in the past has taken the<br />
place of past sound, to embody another aspect of the poetic tradition. Calligraphy of leaves and lines of age<br />
on the stones are fossils, as the twenty-fourth stanza proves Emerging from the past with centaur and phoenix,<br />
fossils also respond to the harp plucked by water s dust , the evocative snows of poetry. That all this is<br />
dream or vision seems indicated in stanza 17. The soft feathered voice flies through the house where the<br />
man is still kneeling alone, asleep on his knees or, awake, seeing things. The head of his phoenix is folded or<br />
enfolded by her wings<br />
The running, ragged scarecrow of snow , he scares the priest like blackbirds and runs them ragged the poles<br />
of the year , hardly those of summer and winter, must mean the arctic and the Antarctic of winter. The cloth<br />
of counties , like the hedges cloak, is both white snow and black vestments of priests. A scarecrows antlers<br />
must be his stick. A scarecrow trying to attract a bird is odd, but a phoenix is no crow. Listen and look as he<br />
chases her through the goose plucked sea of the slow flakes , through all their times and lands and tribes ,<br />
deep frozen and out with the phoenix for cooking. Stanza 21, beginning with a catalogue, recapitulates. The<br />
fields of seed and time dying flesh astride , for example, repeats elements of the ninth and eleventh stanzas.<br />
Heaven, grave, and burning font , plainly sexual, mark triumph and death: the door of his death glided wide .<br />
But sexual possession of the bird is in the far ago land , preserved and revealed by the snow. Retreat to the<br />
past is his success as it was to be that of Dylan Thomas. Indeed, this poem seems an allegory of Thomas<br />
marriage, his recovery of the past, his poetic career, the nature of poetry, and, maybe, his premonitions of<br />
death. Poetry, love and death involve one another and generate a space that defines its ongoing contours.<br />
Apparently, he is still safe in the farm as the tale ends in stanza 22. The rest is coda. Stanza 23, reviewing<br />
material from stanzas 12 and 15, adds flying fish figure=skating over lakes. The next stanza recalls nightingale,<br />
dew, centaur, and fossil. However shorn this rite of midwinter spring, it continues for two more stanzas, a<br />
terminal flourish that adds little to what we know or guess. We know that the engulfing bride is a whirlpool .<br />
We may guess the heavenly peace in its wanting centre, where, like Eliot s Chinese jar, a man enjoys movement<br />
and stillness, time and eternity at once. Thomas paradise of the multifoliate bud , we agree, is improved<br />
as a bidet would be by hot and cold running water; and melting snow , bringing the flowers of heavenly<br />
spring, is a good a way as any to end a winter s tale.<br />
In My Craft or Sullen Art<br />
First cursory glances indicate that Yeats is the director of these proud verses seems established by many<br />
echoes. Except for the feminine endings, which assure individual movement, the lines of three stresses are<br />
those of The Fisherman . Thomas has caught something of Yeats coldly passionate feeling and something of<br />
his tone, nobly austere. The pattern of five good rhymes lends an air of finality and assurance. All rhymes are<br />
good, even that of psalms and arms . Going naked, suitable for indignation and advice, has other use. This<br />
bare poem concerns poet, poetry, and audience.<br />
The problems that attend the poet s simplest lines begin at the beginning with craft or sullen art . The or<br />
imply the identity of craft and art and a distinction between them. As a craftsman, Thomas, at his best, was<br />
certainly an artist. In On Poetry (Quite Early) he makes a distinction between the intricate craft which<br />
may approximate accidental magic and art itself. Preserving a distinction, or implies a connection. The word<br />
sullen, for which Thomas must have preceded us to the dictionary, owes some meanings to its Latin and<br />
Middle-<strong>English</strong> origins. Gloomy, morose, peevish, and ill-humoured, the meanings that come readily to mind<br />
are secondary. The primary meaning is lonely, solitary, unsociable, and unique. Among the accretions are<br />
crabbed, obstinate, and austere. Thomas sullen art , crowded with these meanings, is lonely and austere<br />
from his point of view, and, since this is a poem of artist and today s audience, unsociable, crabbed and maybe<br />
morose in the eyes of that audience that reads it.<br />
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Dylan the craftsman pursues his art under Yeats raging moon, sign of imagination and inspiration here, while<br />
lovers sleep. Lovers, for who he labours, seem lovers of women and life common men, the common wages<br />
of whose hearts are commonly no payment at all. Their most secret heart implies depth, unawareness, and,<br />
like Yeats secret rose , a multitude of remote and unknowable privacies. The griefs in their arms , not only<br />
women, are the troubles of life and thieving time the griefs of the ages . By the singing light of the moon<br />
that directs the tide, Dylan, the lonely craftsman, labours without hope of fame or money, the common incentives.<br />
He dismisses strut or the public pretensions of poets and the trade of charms or poetry as business, the<br />
exchanging of magic spells for cash. Ivory stages seem an odd synthesis of the private and the public, of<br />
ivory tower and theatre. However noble and austere in his tone, Thomas seems torn between the pleasures of<br />
strutting on an ivory stage and of solitude in tower or steeple somewhere in the remotest corner of the world.<br />
There, strutting alone, he devotes his craft to the spindrift of modest, impermanent art. The proud man apart<br />
/ From the raging moon has a Yeatsian sound. Such proud men, account executives or brokers maybe, are not<br />
his audience; for, apart from the moon s pull, they are indifferent to spindrift and singing tide. Just as sensibly,<br />
Thomas also excludes the dead even the towering dead of poetry: Milton, translating psalms in his high,<br />
lonely tower , and Yeats in his, or tower less Keats among his nightingales . The trouble with the grieving<br />
lovers for whom the poet writers is that, heedless of his craft or art, they do not praise or pay. The payment of<br />
their most secret heart , responding beneath their notice to borrowed copies perhaps, seems inadequate.<br />
Hence the art of this poet without audience is sullen in every sense and his neat structure more ambiguous<br />
than his brave airs make you think or rather compel you to think.<br />
Fern Hill<br />
Fern Hill is the farm of Ann Jones, the aunt who is celebrated in After the Funeral . This farm, the place of<br />
holidays from Swansea, glows in memory with brighter shoots of everlastingness . In The Peaches , a<br />
recapture of the past in prose, Annie Jones presides over Gorsehill , which, although it affords a dingle , is<br />
dilapidated and muddy. Yet there was nowhere like that farm-yard in all the slap dash country . Transfigured<br />
by the eyes of youth, ramshackle outhouses yield glory. Something of this glory is recaptured in A Prospect<br />
of the Sea and in the merry barnyards of A Winter s Tale and The Long-legged Bait . Though not devoted<br />
to the farm, Poem in October and The Hunchback in the Park are comparable visions. Fern Hill brings<br />
poems by other poets to mind: Vaughan s Retreat , Marvell s Garden , and Hopkins sonnet of May-day in<br />
girl and boy . Not how it feels to be young, the theme of Fern Hill is how it feels to have been young.<br />
Time, which has an art to throw dust on all things, broods over the poem. Time is our enemy, yet, as Eliot says,<br />
it is only in time and through it that we escape from it. Youth is an ignorant escape that time allows, and wiser<br />
memory another. But art, at once in time and out of it, is time s great evader and destroyer. Fern Hill is<br />
Thomas victory over what he laments. The green and golden joy of childhood and the shadowy sorrow of<br />
maturity become the joy of art. An elder s opinion of another s youth forbids such happiness and art.<br />
The stanza of Fern Hill seems a variant upon that of Poem in October . The young and easy rhythm, below<br />
timing or above it, conspires with alliteration and assonance to shape a symphony in green and gold major. As<br />
the poem transcends time and timing, so the craft rebukes analysis. Unlike A Refusal to Mourn , Fern Hill<br />
is not a poem in which an elaborate argument has been compressed into a few lines. On the contrary, it is a<br />
spacious, expansive poem, a lyrical incantation which displays scarcely any intellectual or emotional development.<br />
Every one of the stanzas returns to the one theme of the poem, retelling the tale of childhood, celebrating in a<br />
slightly different form the glory of that lost state. Repetition is indeed the guiding principle of the poem. It is<br />
sometimes argued that Fern Hill recaptures the mood which pervades the writings of Vaughan and Traherne<br />
and there are passages in the poem which recall the prose and verse of these seventeenth-century mystics.<br />
Some of these images recur in Fern Hill , but the obsession with time which pervades Thomas s poem<br />
differentiates it sharply from the meditations of Vaughan and Traherne. Time held me green and dying this<br />
is the overwhelming burden of the poem; and it is in keeping with the whole tenor of Thomas s work. For<br />
Dylan Thomas the journey towards death begins at the moment of conception.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
There exist over two hundred manuscript versions of the poem. Thomas used to rewrite the entire draft of a<br />
poem even if he made only one minor correction to it, and he would also devote an entire sheet of paper to<br />
trying out alternative versions of a single line before fitting it into the pattern of the poem. Fern Hill may be,<br />
intellectually and emotionally, a simple poem, but it is one of Thomas s most cunningly constructed pieces of<br />
verbal artifice, what he once called a formally watertight compartment of words .<br />
It would be possibly by a detailed analysis to point to the incredibly complex pattern of verbal interplay which<br />
distinguishes the poem. Once again the best way of apprehending the total musical effect of the poem is to<br />
read it aloud, and then to read it again slowly, so that the formal devices may permeate one s understanding of<br />
the poem. It is enough for our present purposes simply to mention the most efficacious of these devices the<br />
elaborate metrical pattern repeated in every stanza; the structure of sound patterns linking stanza to stanza; the<br />
use of assonance and alliteration; the metrical and rhythmical variations; even the deliberately calculated<br />
repetitions of colours.<br />
These devices can only be appreciated by the individual reader speaking the poem himself, or listening to its<br />
being read aloud. It is, however, possible to call attention to certain other features of the poem which reinforce<br />
the effect of these formal, structural elements. The first point to notice is the simplicity of the vocabulary, the<br />
absence of any difficult, learned words, the avoidance of the verbal daring and virtuosity which Thomas revels<br />
in at other times. Almost the only tropes which he permits himself are the playful twisting of colloquial phrases,<br />
or the compression of a simple idea into a brief image. He uses the phrase happy as the grass was green ,<br />
once below a time replaces the normal once upon a time ; at my sky blue trades is a vivid way of saying<br />
as I went about my business under the blue sky , just as lamb white days signifies days innocent as white<br />
lambs .<br />
Secondly, the world of childhood is evoked by Thomas s naming of objects, by his avoidance of abstractions, by<br />
the constant, breathless piling up of description linked by the conjunction and , often placed at the beginning of<br />
a line for greater emphasis. Thomas also employs the device of supposing that the farm vanishes as the child<br />
falls asleep, to reappear only when he reawakens. The child s world is thus recaptured by a reversion to the<br />
thought-processes of childhood.<br />
And nightly under the simple stars<br />
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away ….<br />
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white<br />
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder.<br />
The primal innocence of the scene is emphasized by the employment of Biblical images to suggest the paradisal<br />
quality of the child s experience.<br />
And the Sabbath rang slowly<br />
In the pebbles of the holy streams ….<br />
it was all<br />
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,<br />
The sky gathered again<br />
And the sun grew round that very day.<br />
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light<br />
In the first, spinning place …..<br />
But, despite the ecstasy, the golden happiness of childhood so vividly re-enacted in this poem, the predominant<br />
mood is one of regret, and the recognition of mortality casts its shadow.<br />
The final stanza is an elegy for the doomed child:<br />
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me<br />
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand.<br />
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In the moon that is always rising,<br />
Nor that riding to sleep<br />
I should hear him fly with the high fields<br />
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.<br />
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,<br />
Time held me green and dying<br />
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.<br />
Poetry<br />
Elements from the previous stanzas acquire pathos and new meaning from new context. The lamb white ,<br />
careless days of innocence are over. Led by the shadow or the dark ghost of his childish hand to the moony<br />
loft where he once slept, Thomas, revisiting the farm, finds glory gone. He wakes again this time to a farm<br />
forever fled from the childless land , which glows in memory alone.<br />
Led by time and at this mercy, even when young and easy , the poet knows now that time has always held<br />
him. Once green, he was dying like all green things like the ignorant, green sea itself. As the sea sings in<br />
the chains of moon and sun so the chained boy sang then. But tuneful time allows morning songs . Waking<br />
to death, the poet still sings green and golden songs: the coins on his eyelids sing like shells of the tide-tongued<br />
sea.<br />
Poem on His Birthday<br />
This is the fourth and last of the birthday poems. Birth and autumn again put Thomas in mind of death and<br />
fabulous, dear God . From under Sir John s hill the heron comes to speed a more desperate voyage than those<br />
of Once below a time , Lie still , and The Long-legged Bait . Now, crossing the bar that detained him,<br />
Thomas puts out to sea in Lawrence s ship of death. The twelve stanzas, crowning years of experiment in<br />
assonance, alliteration, and rhythm, are dense and clear. Syntax weaves freely in and out of prosodic pattern.<br />
The scene is Laugharne with its full tilt , swiftly running river and its switchback sea , where tides and waves<br />
go up and down like a roller coaster. The poet s ramshackle, seaside house is high on stilts among steeple<br />
stemmed herons. These holy birds, who assisted at an earlier birthday bring each of the first three stanzas to<br />
a close. As the poet celebrates and spurns his birthday, herons, parodying him, spire and spear . The time<br />
is October, whose sun is as small, yellow, and hot as a mustard seed . Inconsiderable as a sand grain and<br />
yellow as the sun, the day is mined with a motion , like sand in Hopkins hourglass. Thistledown fall is seedy<br />
October and the thistle s downfall. Driftwood , turned by sea and wind, prepares us for the voyage in a<br />
drowned ship . Remark the assonance and woven alliteration of sandgrain day in the bent bay s grave . In<br />
the sepulchral second stanza, flounders, gulls, curlews, and eels of the conquered waves all those dying<br />
animals, doing what they are told to do by life, Work at their ways to death . So too, in his long tongued<br />
room , the wounded poet, toiling and tolling, works his way toward death s ambush . The bell of poetry,<br />
celebrating and lamenting birth and death, rings from the heron s steeple. Dying herons and tolling poet bless<br />
life.<br />
As he sings towards anguish in the third stanza, the hawks of the seizing sky kill finches, as in Sir John s<br />
precincts, and otters kill fish. Shells in the winds (winding streets) of sunken towns bring thoughts of shipwreck<br />
and death to the craftsman at the hewn coils of his trade Hewn implies headstone cutting, and coils are<br />
art s intricacies and all its troubles. One with dying animals, the poet sees herons walk in their shroud , as<br />
John Donne once walked in his to preach Death s Duel . The livelong river s robe of the fourth stanza is the<br />
shortlived heron s shroud. Praying for life and prey to herons, minnows prepare wreaths for their funerals. As<br />
the water of herons is their shroud, so the water of dolphins is their turnturtle dust , or water turned on its back<br />
to die. What we live in is our tomb; and our work our death. Seals, at their trade of fishing, will be food for<br />
sleeker and larger mouths than theirs. Far at sea with minnow, dolphin, and seal, the poet works like his<br />
marine parallels to a common end. But, more than death, his eternal end is poetry. Crouched is the posture<br />
of poets, tailors of shrouds, and dying embryos. Under a serpent cloud could be the place of fallen man and<br />
his climate. Adam, who brought death into the world, must sweat to die.
Dylan Marlais Thomas<br />
In Thomas early poems there is a multitude of images in violent disagreement. Here so far, a multitude of<br />
images has been in general agreement an agreement that, like blood, Slides good in the sleek mouth But the<br />
momentary disagreement of tomb and womb, of silence and bell, of white tears and black, is quickly settled<br />
by angelus knells , a synthesis of birth and death that agrees with everything said so far.<br />
In the drowned ship , the voyager hears his age struck by a sunken ship s bell. Little wonder, for a navigator<br />
who fixes his position by falling stars must expect to founder. Better navigators use sextants at noon. Just as<br />
well to be sunk, however; for the morrow holds terror of atomic war, maybe. The imagery of cage, chain,<br />
and the bolt has served Thomas earlier vision of war. Like unbolting love , the hammer seems both<br />
creative and destructive. Having forged burning Tygers, it knocks them to bits.<br />
As he emerges in stanza six from his dark immersion, the poet of Vision and Prayer is lost in light again.<br />
Dark is a way to the light of God and heaven. As in the earlier poems, both God and heaven remain<br />
uncertain. A fabulous god, both wonderful and mythical, sits in a heaven that never was / Nor will be ever .<br />
Yet God and heaven are always true ; for myth is truer than fact. Although a void , heaven is paradoxically,<br />
a crowded blackberry patch, where the dead grow for God s joy. Grow means thrive and heap up. Once<br />
again Thomas long struggle through the dark towards the light seems over; but as he comes to light, what<br />
comes to light is light s ambiguity. In the unknown, famous light he is lost indeed. Famous , great , and<br />
fabulous are words from Yeats, not T.S. Eliot. Since air shaped or imagined heaven is a blackberry patch,<br />
There , which commences the seventh stanza, includes heaven and earth or the place of the dead. Thomas<br />
felt at home in graveyards. Laugharne s shore, no less sepulchral than the blackberry patch, is littered with<br />
dead horseshoe crabs and<br />
In Laugharne s heap of marrow bones, the poet, wandering with the spirits of the dead, is not, but might be, at<br />
peace with blessed, unborn God and His Ghost . His Ghost , even if the Holy Ghost, means that God is as<br />
dead as the horseshoe crab whose ghost haunts the shore ; but dead God is unborn . Referring maybe to<br />
Jesus before the Nativity, unborn also means non-existent. The souls of the dead are fit priests for such a<br />
god; for every soul is gulled and chanter . Gulled means winged, eaten with the other garbage, and fooled.<br />
Chanter may mean a celebrant at the altar or, as Webster tells us, a deceitful horse-dealer, who gulls the<br />
gullible. And chanter implies enchanter; and in this context a magician is another deceiver. Young Heaven s<br />
fold may mean Eden, the manger, or an enclosure for leading foolish sheep into. The cloud quaking peace of<br />
heaven is no less dubious.<br />
But dark is a long way , which the poet is still pursuing. Being lost in such light as he knows, he is lost in the<br />
dark, on the earth of the night, alone / With all the living like the rest of us. He is aware of the general<br />
resurrection that will bring all the dead to light; for he has read the Apocalypse. But waters giving up their dead<br />
and rocketing winds blowing bones out of the grave seem more natural than supernatural, more suggestive of<br />
future wars than of any but cloud quaking peace . Whatever the agency of resurrection, it will bring the dead<br />
Faithlessly unto Him . Thomas dark way seems a faithless, hopeful approach to a light that never was nor<br />
will be. But Dante s stars are still quick ; and on the dark way up, hope has charity by the hand. Continually<br />
praying, Thomas prays again. A colon in the ninth stanza, introducing his prayer, marks a necessary but<br />
surprising shift from third person to first. Stephen Dedalus commends a poet who, in the course of a poem,<br />
shifts from lyrical first person to dramatic third.<br />
Midlife (thirty-five years) in stanza nine recalls Dante s journey from dark to light, as voyage to ruin recalls<br />
the voyage towards oblivion of Lawrence s ship of death , which, breached in autumn by wounds , is<br />
unsteered in the dark towards problematical light and peace. Though already wrecked, the poet s tumbledown ,<br />
long tongue continues, like those of his druid herons , to bless and count blessings. Those counted in the tenth<br />
stanza are mostly temporal; the four elements, the five senses, and love of the spun slime that Joyce calls<br />
whorled without aimed . Tangling through the slime of man and nature, the poet proceeds with little faith but<br />
great fortitude toward the Clough-Cuckoo-Land of kingdom come . Its lost, moonshine domes are from<br />
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Poetry<br />
dreams of Coleridge and Yeats. Such domes are moonshine, but the Freudin sea is a real blessing; for it hides<br />
man s secret selves . Though the sea s black, base bones seem another graveyard for old ram rods this<br />
time there are spheres (pearl or microcosmic spheres0 in the flesh of skeletal seashells . Pearls and<br />
moonlit domes offer hope for those sunk by Prospero s tempest or tangled in slime.<br />
The last and greatest blessing seems delight in nature. Hulks may be sundered and the poet may be one<br />
man alone with all the living, but sun, sea, and world are joyous. The louder the sun blooms , the more it<br />
brings Lawrence and Joyce to mind. The ramshakling , long-legged sea may menace tumbledown old ram<br />
rods, but, nautical to the last, they tackle the gale. As the sea exults and the world, revealing faith in itself,<br />
gives praise, the exultant poet echoes the praise, with more triumphant faith , the flattest line of the poem, can<br />
apply to world or poet; but whichever our application, such faith is a secular, not a theological, virtue. World,<br />
Word, and poet are romantically one.<br />
The bouncing hills of Laugharne triumphantly become heaven s hill where images roar. Autumn, as in<br />
Poem in October , is transformed into thunderclap spring , Mansoulded islands, the voyager s landfalls,<br />
become angelic, shining men . No longer alone, the charitable captain, almost like Noah of Author s Prologue ,<br />
welcomes all men aboard as passengers or crew for a voyage to death in sunken, drunken ship.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
A.K. RA<strong>MA</strong>NUJAN<br />
Extended Family<br />
The Difference<br />
Fear<br />
Second Sight<br />
The Striders<br />
Hindoo to His Body<br />
Love Poem for a Wife<br />
The Last of the Princes<br />
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Unit-8<br />
A.K. Ramanujan's Biography: A Critical Sketch<br />
Poetry<br />
Born on 16 March 1929, into a Tamil Brahman family in Karnataka, Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan s<br />
upbringing provided him a fertile environment for his creative imagination to flower and flourish in many<br />
directions. In the first place he inherited a tri-lingual environment and three corresponding cultures. When he<br />
spoke to his father on the second-floor study of the family s three-storey house in Mysore he used <strong>English</strong>; with<br />
his mother in the kitchen, Tamil was spoken. And on the streets outside, he communicated in Kannada. In<br />
Ramanujan s critical idiom, Tamil is the language of interior landscape, <strong>English</strong> is the language of outer domain.<br />
Kannada is language of communication at local level. The three languages clash and collide in the mind of the<br />
poet and generate the possibilities of rich cultural discourse, which may not necessarily be very assimilative.<br />
While approaching Ramanujan s poetry, the play of multiple languages is to be kept in mind.<br />
Besides the linguistic variety, Ramanujan inherited a very complex set of values from his parents. His father<br />
Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami was a professor of mathematics at Mysore <strong>University</strong> and at the same time<br />
intriguingly enough he was a staunch believer in astrology. In his essay, Is There Any Indian Way of Thinking?<br />
Ramanujan observes the duality in father s profile thus: he could read the Gita religiously having bathed and<br />
painted his forehead the red and white feet of Vishnu, and later talk appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and<br />
even Ingersroll . Ramanujan s father entertained two kinds of exotic visitors: American and <strong>English</strong><br />
mathematicians who called on him when they were on a visit to India, and local astrologers, orthodox pundits<br />
who wore splendid gold-embroidered shawls dowered by the Maharaja . In terms of his outer description too,<br />
the father was a mixed being: He wore neat white turbans, a Sri Vaishnava caste mark, yet wore Tootal ties,<br />
Kromentz buttons and collar studs, and donned <strong>English</strong> serge jackets over is muslin dhotis which he wore<br />
draped in traditional brahman style . In a poem, presumably a portrait of his father, Ramanujan describes the<br />
polarity of his father s mental make-up thus: Sky man in a man-hole/ with astronomy for dream/ astrology for<br />
nightmare .<br />
Ramanujan s father had a study crammed with books in <strong>English</strong>, Kannada and Sanskrit. This in a way ensured<br />
an intellectual climate in the family. The friends of Ramanujan recount the rather vibrant intellectual scene of<br />
his household thus: On summer nights the children gathered on the third floor terrace while their father pointed<br />
out and explained the constellations. Sometimes at dinner listened intently as their father translated for their<br />
mother the stories of Shakespeare and other Western classics into Tamil .<br />
Ramanujan s mother was traditional to the core. She was an orthodox brahman woman of her time limited by<br />
custom in the scope of her movement and control. She was more or less a typical housewife. Though she did<br />
not possess the intellectual prowess of her husband, yet she had a sound anchoring in native ethos and folk<br />
literature. She was neither typical nor limited in her learning and imagination. She was widely read in Tamil and<br />
Kannada, and comfortable in the world of ideas. Most of the Tamil and Kannada proverbs, idioms and tales<br />
that Ramanujan employs in his poetry seem to have come from his mother. Mother, despite her not being<br />
modern, is a regular presence in his poetry. About six-seven poems have exclusively been written on the<br />
mother. Mother stands for home and native landscape in the poetry of Ramanujan.<br />
These were the parents who gave Ramanujan the telling metaphor of father tongue and mother tongue . By<br />
the time his father died, when Ramanujan was only twenty, the older man had already helped shape his son s<br />
devotion to an intellectual life. As a youth Ramanujan was perplexed by his father s seemingly paradoxical<br />
belief in both astrology and astronomy. Curiously Ramanujan chose magic as his first artistic endeavour. While
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
in teens, he had the neighbourhood tailor fashion him a coat fitted with hidden pockets and elastic bands in<br />
which he concealed rabbits and bouquets. The desire to be magician was perhaps a strange use of the insight<br />
he gained from his father s quirky belief in the irrational. Ramanujan later on evinced properties of a magician,<br />
of his many poems end on a note of brilliant unforeseen conclusions.<br />
Ramanujan had always a wide variety of interests. His father, in fact, after browsing through his son s shleves<br />
filled with literature, philosophy, anthropology and zoology, wryly termed him intellectually promiscuous . In<br />
college Ramanujan majored in science in his first year, but later on the persuasion of his father he switched<br />
over to <strong>English</strong> literature. He subsequently received a BA with honours in <strong>English</strong> Literature from Mysore<br />
<strong>University</strong> in 1949. That same year, he took a job of teaching <strong>English</strong> in Kerala. Shortly afterwords, Ramanujan<br />
moved to another teaching position in Dharwar in Karnantaka. He earned the reputation of master-performer<br />
who mesmerized his students through his ingenuous images and metaphors. He would use a diversity of texts<br />
and contexts, oral and written tales, poems etc. to look at the posed questions from a fresh and highly innovative<br />
perspective. He used to address to packed class-rooms.<br />
Ramanujan meanwhile had developed a love for Shakespeare, who remains a constant presence, though at a<br />
sub-textual level, in his creative output. But in 1957, Ramanujan gravitated towards social linguistics. He did<br />
his Ph.D. on the generative grammar of Kannada, and received doctorate. from Indiana <strong>University</strong> in 1963.<br />
Once in America, he attracted admiration from all quarters. He was accommodated in the South Asian<br />
Languages programme at the <strong>University</strong> of Chicago. Though he was reluctant to take up his assignment as<br />
Tamil teacher, yet he undertook the job with all sincerity, and developed an interest in Tamil classics to the<br />
extent that he became the first-rate translator later on.<br />
Ramanujan died on 13 July 1993, with many honours to his name. Most prominent among them were the<br />
Padma Shri, award of the Government of India, a MacArthur Fellowship, and election to the American Academy<br />
of Arts and Sciences.<br />
Introduction to A.K.Ramanujan’s Works<br />
After his formal education, Ramanujan taught as professor of <strong>English</strong> at Belgaum, Dharwar and Baroda<br />
before moving to US in early 1960s as a professor of Dravidian Languages at the <strong>University</strong> of Chicago.<br />
Impressed by the intellectual capabilities of Ramanujan as a Ph.D. scholar at Indiana <strong>University</strong>, his teachers<br />
recommended his name for a vacancy in South Asian Languages at Chicago <strong>University</strong>. He agreed on the<br />
condition that he would be given a free hand in pursuing his interests in Tamil and Kannada literature.<br />
To begin with Ramanujan published two early collections of poems in Kannada (Proverbs 1955; Hokkulalli<br />
Huvilla, 1969), but after that he concentrated on writing in <strong>English</strong>. He published his first collection of poems<br />
in <strong>English</strong> The Striders in 1966, followed by another collection entitled Relations in 1971. Selected Poems<br />
was published by OUP, Delhi in 1976. In 1977 he once again switched over to Kannada and wrote Mattu Itaru<br />
Padyagalu, a book of Kannada poems and Mattobbana Atmakate a novella in the same language. In 1986,<br />
he came out with another collection of poems in <strong>English</strong> under the title The Second Sight. The instinct to write<br />
in Kannada remained alive and he wrote Kuntobille, a book of poems in 1990. In 1995 two years after the<br />
death of the poet, his friends and colleagues published his collected poetry entitled simply as Collected Poems,<br />
which includes poems from last unpublished collection called The Black Hen.<br />
All along his creative ventures, Ramanujan remained almost obsessively pre-occupied with his enterprise of<br />
translating classical Tamil and Kannada texts in <strong>English</strong>. Not only did he translate Tamil sangam texts, he also<br />
translated medieval bhakti poets, writing in Tamil as well as Kannada with equal elan and commitment. It is not<br />
true that Ramanujan only translated the classic texts to satisfy the oriental interests of the West in ancient<br />
India. He translated a novel of U R Ananthamoorthy called Samskara a text which some believe has<br />
acquired a canonical status in Indian literature largely because of its excellent translation. Dilip Chitre in his<br />
article on Namdeo Dhasal. entitled Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld informs that Ramanujan also<br />
translated a couple of Marathi dalit poems for an American journal.<br />
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Poetry<br />
Ramanujan championed the cause of Indian literatures in translations at a time when there was no serious<br />
taker of such an enterprise. He co-edited a number of books on Indian literature(s) across languages. As early<br />
as 1974, Ramanujan co-authored with Edward C. Dimock Jr. and others to produce The Literatures of India.<br />
He, along with Vinay Dharwadkar edited a collection of poems from various Indian languages under the title<br />
The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry in 1994 a year after his death. As a matter of credo,<br />
Ramanujan sought to start a positive dialogue among Indian language literatures. He had undertaken a mission<br />
to make Indian Literature(s) international through his translations, and compilations of various translated works<br />
in form of anthologies.<br />
Ramanujan wrote extensively on Indian culture, its folklore, food habits and mythologies with the sharpness of<br />
a well-bred social scientist and anthropologist. Some of the chaste anthropological, sociological and cultural<br />
essays he wrote, included: Who Needs Folklore? ; Towards an Anthology of City Images ; Is There an<br />
Indian Way of Thinking? , Varieties of Bhakti etc. Ramanujan is a true claimant of Geertz s ideal of<br />
anthropological authorship . His collection of folktales of India, most of which he himself culled from the oral<br />
narratives in circulation in the countryside, not only brought forth the uncanny brilliance and wit of indigenous<br />
wisdom to international limelight, but also widened the cultural spectrum of Indian culture which was hitherto<br />
understood in terms of the marga only. Ramanujan was awarded the Padma Shri in 1976, a MacArthur Prize<br />
Fellowship in 1983. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.<br />
Critical Appreciation of the Poems Prescribed<br />
The Difference<br />
The poem consists of two parts. The first part deals extensively with the process of icon-making of the divine<br />
by the community of traditional artisans. Ramanujan, known for his precise eye and sense of detail, offers a<br />
step-wise commentary on the division of labour among the traditional village artisans. Women undertake the<br />
raw work of mould[ing] a core of clay and straw , they wind strings of beeswax around it . Men undertake<br />
the finer work of eyes and toenails . In order to create a metallic icon of the divine, these men pour eight<br />
metals through a hole in the head made on the top of the clay. Ramanujan does not miss an opportunity to take<br />
a dig at Hindu metaphysics. The hole on the top of the mould, is compared with the hole on the head which,<br />
according to Hindus, is the escape hole that opens for release of soul at the time of death. In Hindu metaphysics,<br />
this hole stands for the end of life, in the process of making of the metallic divine, this hole brings the divine into<br />
tangible forms. In Hindu metaphysics, the hole stands for release from worldly bondage; in the making of the<br />
icon, the hole brings back the abstract divine back into worldly form.<br />
After pouring the ashtadhatu in the mould, the artisans bake the pot of the inchoate god . The use of<br />
inchoate as adjective to the divine is quite significant. It gives the artisan a sense of creating the divine,<br />
maker of the god itself. Secondly in such a scheme, the God is not given and granted, it is made and iconized<br />
thorough a well-laid out process. The moment it is baked, it begins to make faces . In Ramanujan s poetry, the<br />
iconized god is at best a caricature of the abstract divine. God s rather static and fixed gaze is rather embarrassing<br />
for His human-makers.<br />
Once the baking process is over, and the pot of the inchoate god cools down, the artisans take a knife and<br />
hack it . The language of violence is deliberately employed to underline the pangs of creating the image of<br />
divine. The gleaming god is like a newly born baby radiant and bright. Without the artisan as father, the god<br />
would die in the public imagination rather too soon. Artisan in this sense is the maker of the divine. He ensures<br />
an immortality to the divine.<br />
The traditional artisans after performing the sacred act of shaping the divine, switch over to the mundane job<br />
of making terracotta toys and other playthings for the children. Life in its ordinary forms and shapes does not<br />
attract the attention of the traditional artisans for to them the domain of the spiritual is more authentic and<br />
fulfilling than the usual plane of existence.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
In the second part, the poet, master as he is of overturning the hierarchies, reverses the order of traditional<br />
artisan s preferences in favour of his own set of consumer-oriented preferences. If the traditional artisans<br />
prefer to shape the icons of the divine first and make horse, toys;/life scenes of women/pounding rice with<br />
lifted pestles;/ boys; or a drummer girls with the leftovers later; the poet as a highly individualized and arrogant<br />
commercialized artisan would do my {his} dancers first,/jet bombers/and tiny Taj Mahals for tourists . The<br />
inversion is stretched to its most naughty limits when he says that gods will bake/only if time permits, if there s<br />
metal left,/and desire,/or if my children s quarrels need new gods for playthings . The icons of gods and<br />
goddesses happen to be nothing more than playthings good enough to placate the quarreling children. The<br />
implication is that being devout is being childish. Gods are good enough to humour the children. In Ramanujan s<br />
poetry children act as unwitting rebels who, with all their innocence and immaturity, happen to expose the<br />
hollowness of the institutionalized divine. The parodic latter half of the poem is motivated as much by the postmodern<br />
perfunctory ethos of consumerism and obscene commercialism, as by the faithfulness of the natives in<br />
the icons of the divine. Commodification of the divine for grossly utilitarian ends constitutes one of the major<br />
strategies of parody in Ramanujan s poetry. The community life of the native countryside is set against the<br />
grossly utilitarian city life.<br />
The way Ramanujan overturns the traditional sanskritic bhakti-paradigms in the poem deserve serious attention.<br />
The poet-persona, as modern clay-artisan, mocks at the giant sized Lord Vishnu, and expresses his inability to<br />
carve out or mould His statue. In fact more than inability, it is the lack of desire to undertake the task. With his<br />
characteristic naughtiness, he argues that the clay that he is left with, is good enough to fashion/ his [Vishnu s]<br />
big toe . But shaping the toe would not do him any good, it would hardly yield him the idea or feeling of the<br />
divine. The skeptic persona deflates the myth of the Vishnu thus:<br />
but I know I ve no way at all of telling<br />
the look,<br />
if any, on his face, or of catching<br />
the rumoured beat of his extraordinary heart.<br />
The god is dismissed as mere rumour, a gossip of the first order, a false consciousness. Instead of reaching up<br />
to the crown of Vishnu, as the traditional devotee does, the poet-persona dismisses the entire enterprise of his<br />
search for the divine at the first step of the ladder itself. Toe is the end of his eclectic semi-irreverential<br />
enterprise The supra-human aspects of Indian iconography are regularly held to ridicule in Ramanujan s rather<br />
humanistic universe. The Greco-Roman anthropomorphic representation of the divine is preferred over the<br />
esoteric symbolic and spiritual Indian art.<br />
In fact the contemporary theories of postmodernism and post-structuralism seem to provide Ramanujan paradigms<br />
and metaphors basic to his creative output. These theories deliver him the poetic design, the argument and in<br />
fact, a much sought-after different poetic idiom. In the poem not only the very title is inspired by Derridian<br />
philosophy of difference , or Lyotardian concept of differend , even on the level of content and subject<br />
matter the poem seems to be at best an extended execution of this idea only. The poet persona flaunts his<br />
playful post-modern attitude towards the divine by way of juxtaposing it with the god-fearing community of<br />
traditional artisans. In the postmodern theory, God is a wishful fiction, an essentialized abstraction, a metaphysical<br />
untruth. In Ramanujan s different poetic universe too, the divine as transcendental signified is nothing more<br />
than a rarefied unreality. If traditional village artisans choose to iconize the divine first and toys later on, the<br />
different poet persona as the self-styled a community of one (172), would shape gods only if time permits,<br />
if there s metal left/ and desire/ or if my (his) children s quarrels need new gods / for playthings . This is a<br />
typical postmodern playful dismissal of the divine.<br />
As far as the structure of the poem is concerned, it is a poem conceived in two parts. In the first part, the story/<br />
process of the community ritual in shaping metallic icons of the divine has been recounted in terms that are<br />
reversed in the second. In a village of traditional craftsmen, while the women mould a clay and straw/ [and]<br />
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around it/ strings of beeswax , the men do the fine work of eyes and toenails/ picking / with hot needles the<br />
look in the eyes . It is only with the leftovers that these traditional artisans make horses, toys etc. In the<br />
second part of the poem, it is the poet-persona who takes over the role of village artisans single-handedly and<br />
subverts their order of preference in shaping the icons of divine first and toys later on. I as community of<br />
one , first of all would not divide the role of moulding clay and metal among men and women, he would instead<br />
do both the things himself. Then, instead of shaping the divine, he chooses to do his dancers first,/ jet bombers/<br />
and tiny Taj Mahals for tourists . The folk beliefs and rituals are deliberately reversed by the consumerist<br />
modern poet-persona. The second part of the poem is a counter-narrative to the first.<br />
If one were to account for the bi-partite structure of the poem in terms of Tamil poetics, it could be accounted<br />
for in terms of movement from puram to akam, i.e. from outer to the inner. Akam poetry is the poetry of<br />
interior landscape, puram stands for poetry of the outer world. The first part of the poem offers images of a<br />
community of craftsmen and women of a village who perform different operations to shape metallic icons of<br />
the divine. In the second part of the poem, the persona as an individual takes over single-handedly the role of<br />
entire community ( But I, a community of one ), thus internalizing the external, and personalizing the<br />
communitarian. The studio as site of modern craftsman as against the open fields of village craftsmen generates<br />
different set of preferences. Instead of shaping the divine, the persona shapes Taj Mahals for purely commercial<br />
ends. The second part of the poem constitutes akam-ization of the puram form of the first part.<br />
If the poem is approached in terms of the play of time frames, it could be studied in terms of juxtaposition of<br />
two time frames the communal and the private, the objective and the subjective, the pedagogical and the<br />
performative . Subjective/ private time has its specific priorities and preferences. If community (of craftsmen)<br />
spends its prime time in shaping the divine figures out of clay and straw, the stray individual might choose to<br />
spend the same time in shaping his toys. In the first part of the poem, the poet describes the routine of<br />
traditional craftsmen: It s with leftovers that they [the community of artisans] make horses/ toys; life scenes<br />
of women/ pounding rice with lifted pestles . . . . In the second part of the poem, the order of preference or<br />
the time-schedule is reversed. The eclectic poet-persona, however, would do my [his] dancers first,/ jet<br />
bombers/ and tiny Taj Mahals for tourists . In the fragmentary vision of the persona, eternity is no more than<br />
a a rumoured beat of his [an] extraordinary heart .<br />
Overall the poem evinces the poet s sound forgrounding in both the traditional and modern set of values. The<br />
modern is not an original response to the reality, it is more or less a reversal of the traditional. It is very difficult<br />
to say whether the poet approves one set of values at the cost of another, but what comes clearly in the poem<br />
is the fact that Ramanujan as a poet is trader of ambivalences. Ambivalence is the very condition of modern<br />
living.<br />
Extended Family<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry the focus is on the genealogy of the self, its processes of becoming, and its evolution<br />
from an arbitrary origin to its dissipation and diffusion in different directions without visible continuities or<br />
predictable programmes. The poet examines his descent in terms of various fragmentary experiences that<br />
compose and decompose his self continually. The poet traces his evolution in terms of those motley and<br />
unsteady experiences and impressions that pre-empt the possibility of his smooth linear growth. Ramanujan s<br />
self does not evince any measure of unity or synthesis a point which the enthusiastic unity-conscious Indian<br />
critics have always missed. Indian critics, obsessed as they are with Indian metaphysics of the ordinary human<br />
self lapsing into a grand impersonal Self , try to figure out the metaphysical sublimation of the self in the poetry<br />
of Ramanujann too.<br />
Self is an utterly divided site in Ramanujan s poetry. This fragmentation of the self is not a state of loss or<br />
lament, the fragmentation is not a marker of entropy or loss, it is a marker of enrichment, multiple belongings<br />
and lineages. In simple words, Ramanujan s self revels in its dispersal and diffusion. The self embodies a<br />
carnival of experiences, a cacophony voices; it is a volume in perpetual disintegration, a site of constant
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
becoming and unbecoming. The poet-persona discovers in his self, peculiar traits of his entire family right from<br />
dead grandfather to an unborn great great-grandson.<br />
Grandfather as a relation outdoes father in the family-scape of Ramanujan s poetry. He stands for tradition<br />
with all its ritual trappings. Along the axis of time, he stands for pristine, uncorrupted and sacred countryside<br />
past. While in Chicago the poet, keeping the native family tradition alive, bathe(s) before the village crow .<br />
Chicago proves to be a rather secular and non-sacred parodic site of the poet s native land where the dry<br />
chlorine water replaces the holy Ganges and the naked Chicago bulb becomes a cousin of the Vedic sun .<br />
Such parodic tropes belittle both the postmodern Chicago and equally conservative native Karnataka. Clearly<br />
the self hops between two cultural frames one of mechanized America and other of rural India.<br />
Ramanujan s poetic consciousness thus permeates primarily between Chicago in the foreground and Karnataka<br />
in the background in a way that uproots the poet eternally. This uprootedness engenders in him a double voice,<br />
a dialogical vision characteristic of post-colonial condition. In such bi-cultural tropes, Ramanujan decommodifies<br />
and Indianizes dry chlorine water or Chicago bulbs, putting metaphor to work in a kind of reverse colonization.<br />
It is however difficult to say whether Ramanujan enlivens the hackneyed America or modernizes ancient India<br />
by employing cultural metaphors of two civilizations in such a dialogic frame. One can see the operation of two<br />
cultures being invoked in a parodic relationship in other poems as well. In Waterfalls in a Bank Ramanujan s<br />
bi-focal vision comes into play in similar terms. In the poem while watching waterfalls in America, the poet<br />
goes back to his Tamil past thus: And then one sometimes sees waterfalls/ as the ancient Tamils saw them,/<br />
wavering snakeskins,/ cascades of muslin .<br />
In such a dialogic frame, while the poet-persona seems to make his adjustments in alien landscape through the<br />
strategy of equivalences, he is also hinting at the limitations of such an enterprise. The naked Chicago bulb<br />
is his working equivalent of Vedic sun , yet it is too facile an object to be compared with Vedic sun .<br />
Similarly, the Ganges is discovered in the dry chlorine water , yet the equivalence is absurd and remote. The<br />
poet-persona not only belittles the mechanical Chicago life, he also ridicules the obsessive brahmanical lifestyle<br />
back home. It is not that Ramanujan cannot think independently about his cultural landscape, he is employing<br />
Chicago not to assert any fundamentalist or rank nationalist association with his home . Both the landscapes<br />
are juxtaposed, and yet none is redeemed.<br />
After grandfather, in the inventory of influences, it is the turn of father. Father in Ramanujan s poetry receives<br />
a rather unfriendly treatment. He is invoked in terms of his eccentricities. The poet-persona slap[s] soap on<br />
his my [his] back / like his father . In Love Poem for a Wife I , the same image comes to play: how noisily/<br />
father bathed/ slapping soap on his back . If Grandfather is remembered in reverential terms, father is drawn<br />
in terms which are at best caricaturized, if not altogether derisive and dismissive. Somehow the poet-persona<br />
does not come to terms with his father s obsessions. In a poem A Wobbly Top , he describes his relationship<br />
with his father as two perfect concentric circles on the fast moving wobbly top. Interestingly it is father who<br />
gifts the top to the son. In other words, it is the father who provides his son, the occasion, the medium and the<br />
tools necessary for disagreement with his son. In Obituary also, the dead father is invoked in a rather<br />
unceremonious manner thus: Father when he passed on, / left dust/ on a table full of papers/ left debts and<br />
daughters . The caricature of father is drawn in terms which are not innocuously humorous: Being the<br />
burning type,/ he burned properly/ at the cremation . The place and manner of father s birth and death are<br />
mentioned in terms that are more derisive than mere descriptive: his caesarian birth/ in a brahmin ghetto/ and<br />
his death by heart-/ failure in the fruit market.<br />
Ramanujan s persona does not look upon his father as utterly oblivious of Indian proverbial wisdom. Besides<br />
remembering father s noisy bath, he, like his father, think[s]/ in proverbs . Father is straightaway connected<br />
to proverbial wisdom a wisdom which lacks the veracity of self-experience. Ramanujan s father is a strange<br />
bundle of contradictions, traditional to the core, yet very modern in terms of his intellectual make up, a learned<br />
astronomer who believes in astrology. This is how the poet-persona in another poem portrays him: Sky-man in<br />
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a manhole/ with astronomy for dream,/ astrology for nightmare . The so-called outer domain assigned to<br />
patriarchy is also ghettoized in the sense that it also tends to be exclusive and arrogant.<br />
Only after the grandfather and the father, the poet-persona brings his own self into play. The role of the<br />
individual is very limited. All soaked and watered by the inheritance and paternal legacies, he has the nominal<br />
role of wiping himself dry , that too with an unwashed turkish towel. In Ramanujan s poetry being unwashed<br />
is not abnormal. It is a signifier of the persona s ordinary human self a self not necessarily clean and pure.<br />
The purity of past is at once set in contrast with the impurity of present. Indian obsession of cleanliness does<br />
not enamour the poet-persona.<br />
Important aspect of Ramanujan s family-scape is that it accords quite a significant space to women-relations<br />
in the making of his self. Mother as keeper of the inner domain, is remembered for her daily prayers and<br />
kitchen clatter . Her prayers in the alien environs of Chicago sound Japanese . Ramanujan deliberately<br />
brings in different cultural nuances into the fold of his makeup. Tamil prayers in Chicago create a distinct<br />
cultural-mix which for want of better word Ramanujan terms as Japanese . At every juncture of his growth,<br />
the poet-persona is intensely aware of his cultural displacement. As a displaced being he becomes all the more<br />
nostalgic of his native past which is invoked in terms not entirely celebratory.<br />
Ramanujan is very possessive about his daughter. In the absence of the wife as a support, the poet-persona<br />
looks up to his daughter. Of all the relations, which is by-passed so clinically in his so-called extended-family ,<br />
it is the relation of wife. Clearly strained marital life and two divorces plays heavy on the mind of the persona.<br />
Wife as we shall read in other poems, appears more as a rival and an estranged other.<br />
Writing about a daughter, that too a growing one is a moral challenge, which only seasoned and sensitive poets<br />
can undertake and fulfill. Ramanujan, as a self-critical father, assigns a definite role to his children in his make<br />
up. This is reversing the usual direction of bequeathing inheritance. Instead of a father bequeathing manners<br />
and culture to his wards, it is the wards who bequeath their father some measure of integrity. From her<br />
daughter, the poet-persona as father learns shyness: like my little daughter/ I play shy . The dynamics of<br />
shyness is dwelt upon further thus: hand over crotch/ my body not yet full/ of thoughts novels and children .<br />
It requires tremendous moral and aesthetic control to describe daughter s shyness in terms of putting hand<br />
over his crotch .<br />
By all biographical accounts available, Ramanujan had no son. Yet in the poem, in the extended family of the<br />
poet, there is a reference to the little son . This fictional son stands for the babies in general. As an adult, the<br />
poet-persona discovers in his self, an uncanny presence of a perennial child in him. Like his little son, he<br />
hold[s] my [his] peepee and play[s] garden hose/ in and out/ the bathtub . The fact that this son is a fictional<br />
one adds a rare poignancy to the poem, and lifts the poem from being extremely personal to an impersonal one.<br />
The expansive profile of the self is reinforced through such insertions.<br />
Unborn is as much a presence as the dead past is. By stretching time frame to the unborn, the poet tends to go<br />
beyond the normal trend of recording evolution in terms of backward journey into time. History becomes a<br />
journey into future too. I am not yet/ may never be/ my future/ dependent/ on several/ people/ yet/ to come .<br />
The self is not just a product of past and present, it is also the site of future. The self is no longer defined in<br />
terms of heritage or a possession that grows and solidifies, rather it is seen as unstable assemblage of faults,<br />
fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from with or from underneath.<br />
The self remains unfinished, in all likelihood it would ever remain so. Such an open-endedness is quite redeeming<br />
in the sense that it does not commodify the self into a closed final product. Being indefinite or being eternally inthe-process<br />
is not a position of loss or disadvantage. It is not a state of tentativeness or incertitude. It is
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
acceptance of the flow of life. By tying down his future to several people who have yet to come, the poetpersona<br />
ensures an immortality which is very different from the immortality of spirit, cherished so feverishly in<br />
Indian metaphysics. Ramanujan as a poet anchored in the present, does not want either past or future to go<br />
unattended in his present. The present of the self subsumes both the past as well as the future.<br />
If one looks at the poem, in the context of contemporary tendencies of writing about the self, one finds<br />
Ramanujan s approach towards the self is not an exception. In Salman Rushdie s Midnight s Children Saleem<br />
Sinai, the protagonist, makes an issue of wild profusion of my [his] inheritance . What goes into the making of<br />
a self is not just the chromosomes of the parents or five basic elements viz. earth, air, fire, space and water. A<br />
whole lot of memories, impressions, dreams, fears, smells, idiosyncrasies of forefathers, history of nation etc<br />
inform and shape the consciousness of Rushdie s protagonist. Rushdie gives an inventory of influences that<br />
constitute Saleem s inheritance thus: On that day, my inheritance began to form the blue of Kashmiri sky<br />
which dripped into my grandfather s eyes; the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become<br />
the forbearance of my own mother and late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather s gift of conversing<br />
with birds which would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey;.<br />
For the proper contextualization of the poem The Extended Family , it would be much better to read other<br />
poems of the poet that deal with the theme of the self and family. In Elements of Composition , for instance,<br />
the poet once again dwells on the various discourses that go into the making of his self. In the poem, he goes<br />
beyond the sphere of family and incorporates outer social experiences as well. Far from being a simple product<br />
of father s seed and mother s egg, the poet s self is composed of scary dreams, the look/ of panic on<br />
sister s face/ an hour before / her wedding , the sight of the lepers of Madurai and a host of other impressions<br />
that normally go unaccounted for or even sidelined as minor aberrations in the growth of the self. : . . . and<br />
even as I add, / I lose, decompose/ into my elements .<br />
The Striders<br />
There is nothing unquestionably reverential or sacred in the poetry of A.K.Ramanujan. From divinity to self,<br />
mythology to history every idealized and notional construct of reality is turned upside down through deft<br />
parodic inversions and clever ironic twists. The serious and the non-serious, the holy and the profane, the<br />
sacred and the blasphemous collapse into each other without any sense of moral outrage. To de-mystify the<br />
grandeur of the great and the godly, the poet would invoke most petulant and petty stuff for his poetic metaphors.<br />
The rarefied divine which is dislodged as grand gossip, a metaphysical lie and a fictional conspiracy in Ramanujan s<br />
topsy-turvy poetic universe, is pitted against the ghastly and the grisly insects. No wonder in the poet s mythopoetic<br />
universe not only prophets/walk on water, even certain thin-/stemmed bubble-eyed water bugs<br />
perch on the ripple skin/of a stream The mighty Hindu water-gods are deliberately set up against the<br />
weightless insects of New England. The bugs, as utterly weak creatures, are reminders of the helplessness<br />
of the divine.<br />
In fact in Ramanujan s poetry, insects with all their stingy and stinky attributes are regularly deployed to demythify<br />
the power of the divine. In another poem Some Relations , in the abode of the god, the praying<br />
mantis retains its deadly sting thus: a praying mantis, deathly still/ on a yellow can of DDT/in the Madurai<br />
temple . The inability of DDT cans to de-fang or de-poison the temple-precincts of poisonous insects reinforces<br />
the impotency of the holiest of holy Hindu temples. Neither insecticide nor the gods can checkmate the deadly<br />
designs of the poisonous insect. In the same poem, someone is shown cleaning out scorpions/ from the<br />
many armpits of Shiva . Not only does the poet-persona caricaturize the non-human iconization of Shiva as<br />
many-armed deity, he lampoons the entire credo of idol worshipping. Idols are happy sites for the dangerous<br />
and the deadly insects to grow and multiply.<br />
Small insects, their sting notwithstanding, always invite Ramanujan s admiration for their diligence and<br />
industriousness. The way ants design and build their cantonment, and lay out their barracks outdoes the human<br />
endeavor. In a poem Army Ants , the poet marvels at the aristocratic tasters of ants for they have<br />
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separate apartments / for the queen , colonies/ for the various castes , several nurseries/ for the abstract/<br />
and the bean-eyed young . The clinical precision which ants show in clearing up the flesh of dead snakes is<br />
looked upon with the innocence of a child in a poem entitled Old Indian Belief : they ll [ants] / leave snake<br />
skeletons/ complete with fang and grin/ for a schoolgirl s picnic . The snake-ant binary constitutes a polarity<br />
potent enough to yield humour as well as dread in the mind of the reader.<br />
More than its thematic strength, the highpoint of the poem is its chiselled and delicate imagery. The graphic<br />
description of the insect with all its microscopic details creates an effect that is serious and not-serious at the<br />
same time. The water-insect is thin-stemmed/ bubble eyed . Both thin and bubble as adjectival prefixes<br />
of the compound words reinforce the rather fragile physical frame of the insect. Bubble is also a signifier of<br />
transient and dreamy world- view. Also the application of bubble is in consonance with the watery abode of<br />
the insect. Capillary tubes as legs once again point out to very fragile frame of the insect, but the very fact<br />
that these legs are tubes suggests that Ramanujan as a poet is as much interested in outer as he is in the inner<br />
operation of body parts. Capillary tubes not only ensure firm hold on the water surface, they also hint at the<br />
sucking nature of the insect. These tubes are dry outwardly giving an optical illusion of water-insect s noninteractive<br />
relationship with the water-below. Dry also stands for the disinterested and indifferent nature of<br />
the insect with the environment around. In terms of its body weight, insect is weightless which is to say that<br />
it does not sit heavy on the ripple skin of its watery-habitat. Being weightless is an ambivalent position. At a<br />
literal level, it stands for a very weak and feeble power that insect may possibly wield, at a slightly indirect<br />
level, it could stand for the rarefied soul which does not bulk under the pressures of gravity or other such<br />
physical pulls.<br />
In the entire description of the insect s delicate positioning on the water-surface, Ramanujan evinces his keen<br />
understanding of the basic laws of physics. Capillary tubes as an image is highly scientific. Weightlessness is<br />
a concept of astrophysics, usually seen in operation in places where the pull of gravity is minimal. Ripple skin<br />
as a figurative expression of taut water surface of the stream is very much in keeping with the laws of surface<br />
tension that liquids evince in some measure. The point that needs to be kept in mind is that Ramanujan does not<br />
invoke mere imaginary adjectives to lend a purple perspective of reality. His descriptions are highly scientific,<br />
and it is this scientific veracity and rigour of his imagery that lends a unique poetical accuracy in his idiom. His<br />
idiom is scientific as it is poetic; it is accurate as it is figurative.<br />
In order to dramatize and overplay the position of insect vis- -vis the divine, he gives a colourful description of<br />
the landscape. The bug, the poet observes, sits on a landslide of lights . The use of landscape as against the<br />
water-scape is significant for the water-insect. The water-stream happens to be its landscape. The water<br />
insect enjoys the lights that falls on the surface of the water. It sits ever so precariously on the kaleidoscopic<br />
water-surface in the posture of a yogi. As it sits on the water-surface, it drowns/ eye-/deep / into its tiny strip<br />
of sky . In Ramanujan s poetry this kind of reversal of significations is very common. Water-scape turns into<br />
landscape and one drowns in the sky.<br />
Interestingly enough, Ramanujan even while he juxtaposes the prophets with the water-bugs, shies away from<br />
describing the divine at all. The non-description of the divine is deliberate and functional. The mythical is taken<br />
for granted and is a part of value the system. Hence, it does not require any re-statement. Any re-statement of<br />
the given does not offer creative possibilities. Insects, as marginal characters of human landscape, require<br />
attention and space, the divine as presiding presence does not need poetic affirmation.<br />
The frequent deployment of insect-imagery in Ramanujan s poetry has serious political ramifications. Most<br />
often the small insects and birds, which appear powerless enough to generate violence or wild uproar to upset<br />
the balance of society in a revolutionary manner, turn out to be cunning enough to outwit the powerful . And<br />
this outwitting of the powerful by the powerless and the small constitutes one of the basic dynamics of protest<br />
in Ramanujan s poetry. The usage of animal as characters for political messages in his poetry is in keeping with<br />
Panchtantra and other such beast tales found in other civilizations where they perform a similar kind of<br />
function.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
The Last of the Princes<br />
It is not that Ramanujan ridicules only the abstract and high philosophical concepts or constructs of divinity ,<br />
soul or Self ; even history as the chronological account of secular domain becomes the subject of his<br />
relentless inversions. History as a record of grand royal heroes and warriors is de-romanticized by way of its<br />
juxtaposition with ordinary personal experiences. If politics is scrambling for power among insects, history is<br />
nothing more than a petty account of fight among aunts over the property of the dead great-aunt. In his poem<br />
History, the poet records the historical sight of two/ daughters, one fair,/ /alternately picked [picking]<br />
their mother s body clean/ /of diamond ear-rings, /bangles, anklets, the pin/in her hair etc.<br />
In The Last of the Princes, the poet digs up the grand imperial Mughal history only to subvert it in terms of<br />
the ludicrous present. The decline of the great mughals is de-mystified and in the process sufficiently<br />
humanized. The descendents of Aurangzeb did not vanish from the scene all of a sudden: They took their time<br />
to die . The tone is casual and even dismissive. The poet does not hold the dynasty in awe and wonder. The<br />
last of the princes of the mughal dynasty died of utterly human reasons: some of bone TB/ and other of<br />
London fog that went to their heads . Instead of locating the decline of Mughals in terms of their policy of<br />
overreach or what historians usually overplay as Deccan Ulcer , Ramanujan gives his own account of the fall<br />
of the Mughals.<br />
One reason that led to the decline of Mughals was their lavish and extravagant life style. The later Mughal<br />
kings and chieftains had developed a taste of imported wine and women . Some were too satisfied for being<br />
mentioned in the ballad either for their bravery or for being their austerity. The myth of Mughals had acquired<br />
the status of folklore. The love affairs of mughal princes and princesses immortalized in folk ballads and stories<br />
created a sense of superiority among Mughal descendents. They began believing in what was mere mythical.<br />
The royal mynahs and parrots with a horde of wives in the harem had given the last of the great mughals a<br />
legacy of lewd and lascivious court culture. Unable to rise to the demands of modern life, the princes were<br />
bound to lose the glory of their dynasty.<br />
The last of the princes is left only with memories of his forefathers. The rich and fabulous past makes his<br />
rather ordinary present all the more miserable. It becomes extremely difficult for him to negotiate between two<br />
time frames one of romantic past and other of impoverished existential terrain. The past stands for plenty and<br />
glory; the present is diseased. The prince therefore while cherishing his exotic past, lives on to cough. A whole<br />
lot of diseases that the prince suffers from bring into focus his rather sordid present: . . . he lives on, to cough,/<br />
remember and sneeze, a balance of phlegm/ and bile, alternating loose bowels . . . Importantly remembering<br />
too is disease.<br />
The two girls Honey and Bunney of the last Mughal prince go to school/ on half fees , and his first son,<br />
trainee/ in telegraphy, telegraphs thrice already for money . The anglicized names of the daughters of the<br />
last Mughal princesses, their schooling, the son undergoing training a telegraphy are signifiers of change which<br />
belie the grandeur of Mughal past. The colonial culture has already invaded the inner chambers of rather<br />
closed Mughal household. The fact that the daughters are being sent to school is a marker of slow acceptance<br />
of female education among muslim women. Half-fees suggests the low-income status of the last of the<br />
princes. Despite poverty, the wife of the prince is pregnant again. This is an indication enough of Mughal<br />
backwardness in general. Ramanujan thus through the uncanny eye of a poet as de-constructor looks at the<br />
Mughal tragedy from an intensely human perspective.<br />
In the poem, the last of the princes is at best a mimic man lost between two cultures one of the Mughal past<br />
and another of colonial present. The colonial encounter reduced the native Indian, irrespective of his status,<br />
into a mimic man in the sense that he is to strike a working relationship between two civilizations. The schooling<br />
of the daughters and the education of son in telegraphy are two tropes that reveal the irrevocable presence of<br />
colonial education system. The poem is as much a dirge on the slow and steady decline of Mughal dynasty as<br />
it is a sordid commentary on the unsettling of native ethos at the invasion of colonial culture.<br />
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In terms of structure, the poem is built along very sharply defined binaries. The glorious past is juxtaposed with<br />
the sick present. The erstwhile prosperity brings into focus the poor present. The rich cultural past is set<br />
against the mechanized modern present. The last of the princes is the site of this binary clash of values. He is<br />
a victim of memory and experience, of remembrance and reality, of history and existence. Despite the deft<br />
play of binaries, the poem does move towards a logical finale. The son sending three telegrams for money<br />
stands for the complete reversal of Mughal fortunes in India.<br />
History is Ramanujan s favourite hunting ground for poetic metaphors. In The Last of the Princes , Mughal<br />
history becomes a metaphor of rise and decline of human fortunes. In the process of writing poems on historical<br />
situations, the poet with his rather maverick poetic make up, de-constructs the myths perpetuated by the<br />
official and nationalist versions of history.<br />
Fear<br />
The fears are no different from hopes in Ramanujan s ambivalent world. The poet-persona is hopeful as well<br />
as fear-struck, staring out of a window/ of a house on fire . Yet the belief that fears are more ubiquitous than<br />
hopes runs through his poetry. He has an uncanny belief that fears are more definite and precise which even<br />
an ear can see and an eye can smell. This is how he would sum up the archetypal presence of fears in the<br />
human unconscious: Born blind/ a whole skin glistening/ and a seeing ear,/ they do not have to grope . These<br />
fears cannot be apprehended by ordinary human senses. As Eyes cannot follow/ a bird over the bill , or<br />
Ears hear a whistle a wheel, but not the grass , the nose too has it limitations: Noses know when anything<br />
burns/ anywhere but cannot/learn the smell of fear ( Blind Spots ). Obviously this fear is not conspicuous to<br />
the naked eye. It is never bold and belligerent. Born-blind such a fear can be spotted only by skin listening<br />
and seeing ear . A sensitive mind can sense or anticipate fear, hopes are elusive as well as illusive. In fact in<br />
the entire range of modern Indian <strong>English</strong> poetry, the fears are deliberately understated or conveyed in hushed<br />
tone for a clear and loud articulation of such fears entails antagonism with the all pervading system of coercion.<br />
The modern Indian <strong>English</strong> poets, like their British counterpoints do not blare out their apprehensions.<br />
Ramanujan s fears do not spring as much from the outer international or national incidents of violence or mass<br />
destruction as from tiny insects like lizards and scorpions revealing the mundane dimensions of his outlook. In<br />
the poem Fear , the poet begins on a note of general environment of terror and violence at macro level. A<br />
series of images from the world of violence are catalogued in a manner that one is gripped with a sense of<br />
threat and intimidation. The global range of references in the poem that the poet invokes to hint at all-round<br />
violence is an ample evidence of the poet s sharp political awareness.<br />
Right in the beginning, the poet creates a dialogic situation. There is the other in the poem, therefore, the self<br />
of the poet addresses to the other thus: For you, fear/ is Terror . Fear is not as much as a synonym of terror<br />
or vice versa, the two terms rather bear a binary relationship. While fear is retained in the lower case, terror<br />
is deliberately spelled with T capital. Terror is fear in its most visible form. The beauty of the fear is that its<br />
source is indefinite and unknown. Terror is too bland and blatant. It does not enamour the poet as much. Terror<br />
is fear in macro form, fear on the other hand is very personal feeling of insecurity. Terror is public; fear is<br />
private. Terror is social and political; fear is intensely psychological. The poet is not discounting Terror , he is<br />
only juxtaposing it with archetypal fears that the man inherits right from his birth onwards. The outer Terror<br />
accentuates the inner fear. Therefore Terror does hold a functional value in the personal and private world of<br />
the poet.<br />
The poet enlists number of international events that have rocked the world for their mass-violence. The first<br />
image that comes to him is that of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1942. The museums as<br />
archives of past bring live the images of the mass destruction: the wound museums/ of Hiroshima . In<br />
Ramanujan s poetry museums are reckoned as live and animate theatres of the past. In a poem entitled<br />
Museums , the horses in the painting are so vibrantly portrayed that they seem to break away from the frozen<br />
frame into royal gardens to trample the flowers/ in the emperor s gardens/ night after night . The museums in<br />
Ramanujan s poetic universe represent arrested time as against dead time or static time.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
From outer manifestations of violence, the poet moves inward. He senses the smell of cooking/ in Dacca<br />
sewers . From over-seeing, the shift is towards under-seeing. The underground is a favourite terrain of<br />
Ramanujan s poetic hunt. The poet under-sees or over-sees to reinforce the universality of violence. The<br />
obverse of the scene is equally ob/scene. The poet could be seen slipping into the inner recesses of the seen/<br />
scene to lay bare the politics of the visible. In the poem It , underground Ganges stands for the undercurrents<br />
of indigenous culture that keep purring his subconscious like tummy gargles , but does not exactly wet his<br />
throat . The underlined message is that Ganges does cause some turbulence in the self, but falls short of<br />
quenching its spiritual/ sacred quests. Seabed is the poet s chosen refuge: I sink to the seabed in a barrel<br />
( Smalltown, South India ) The under-water world has its own dreads: Water-layers salt and pickle the sun/<br />
Toes mildew green, trees are porous coral . It is a brackish image of the world above. Dacca sewers<br />
became the chosen abode of political adversaries during the Bangladesh s freedom struggle.<br />
Reference to Madame Nhu s/ Buddhist barbecues pertains to violence perpetrated on non-violent Buddhists<br />
in the Far East. Buddhist barbecues is an oxymoron. The alliteration created in phrase highlights only the<br />
barbarity of the situation. The next image in Ramanujan armoury is that of that well-known child/ in napalm<br />
flames/ with X-ray bones/ running, running . This particular image pertains to US-Vietnam war. Frustrated by<br />
guerilla attacks of Vietnamese, the US resorted to chemical weapons. The US army dropped napalm bombs<br />
which unleashed fire on the ground. Ramanujan refers to the world famous photograph which showed a<br />
Vietnamese child running naked in the streets with his back burning in flames. The X-ray bones stand for the<br />
skeleton like figure of the impoverished Vietnamese child.<br />
As the poet gives a running account of mass-violence, he demolishes the role of news agencies for bringing<br />
into focus only the violence visible in the outer sphere. Reuter news agency with its reach and access to the<br />
important world centres is the real maker of history. The poet seeks to offer a perspective of violence different<br />
from what is being reported by the news agencies. Ramanujan, as a poet of the ordinary and the small, locates<br />
fear and dread in the inner recesses of man s unconscious. The wound museums/ of Hiroshima/ the smell of<br />
cooking/in Dacca sewers/Madame Nhu s/Buddhist barbecues/ that well-known child in napalm flames / with<br />
X-ray bones running do not intimidate him to an extent to which a tiny lizard/ with its stare, deadsnake/<br />
mouth/ and dinosaur toes . The overarching tendency, however, is to withdraw to the inner chambers of<br />
consciousness in the face of external threat and fear.<br />
In the poem, a movement from outer to inner, from macrocosmic to the microcosmic is all too evident. The<br />
poem begins with the description of fear in the exterior landscape: wound museums/ of Hiroshima ; the<br />
smell/ of cooking/ in Dacca sewers ; that well-known child/ in napalm flames/ with X-ray bones/ running,<br />
running, . . . . In terms of perception and precision, Ramanujan is alert and alive to whatever tragic and<br />
destructive happens around the world. Whatever be the propensity to shrink to his inner self, as a twentieth<br />
century poet, it is indeed difficult for Ramanujan to shut his eyes off from the perils of nuclear war, chemical<br />
and biological weapons, ethnic violence and state-sponsored terrorism. In the next section of the poem, the<br />
poet turns inward, not to avoid the horrors and challenges of the world outside, but to feel their presence in the<br />
inner domain. Akam poetry is not poetry of the insulated self, nor is it a poetry of the narcissitic self-indulgence;<br />
it is poetry of a sensitive self who internalizes the external and meets out the challenges of the world in his tiny<br />
little chamber of the mind in his own small ways. The second section brings forth the intensity of insecurity that<br />
the poet-persona experiences while he is very much inside his room: a certain knock / on the backdoor/ a<br />
minute/ after midnight, . . . . The external knocks at the door of the internal, that too at midnight, sending waves<br />
of fear in the already terror-struck persona. Midnight is not a time of passive retrieval or easy sleep, it is a time<br />
when all kinds of archetypal fears and hallucinations take over the very unconscious of the poet. Akam does no<br />
longer remain a form of love poetry, it becomes an apt form of fear poetry in the subversive poetics of<br />
Ramanujan. Fear like love too is an intensely private feeling.<br />
The observation that the fear of white snake is archetypal is strengthened by the fact that the poet describes as<br />
a fossilized fear imprinted on his skull: flattened to a fossil/ in the crease/ of my rolling/ sleeping/ ignorant/<br />
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skull . The fact that these fears haunt him during his sleep also hints towards their primordial presence. The<br />
poet uses a very significant metaphor of monkey cap for his ignorant skull. Clearly he has in his mind the<br />
Darwinian theory of perceiving man as descendent of monkey. The fears are not historical or even existential,<br />
they are pre-historical and date back to the very evolution of man from monkey.<br />
Second Sight<br />
As a translator and a commentator of bhakti literature, Ramanujan has an impeccable foregrounding in Hindu<br />
mythology and metaphysics. In his Hymns of Drowning, he translates, the poets who adored Vishnu as their<br />
main deity, in his Speaking of Shiva, the poet-translator translates the vachanas of Shiva-worshipping bhakti<br />
poets. The complex dynamics of exchange between translation and creativity can be seen operating in the<br />
poetry of A.K.Ramanujan in different ways. It is pertinent to take note of Ramanujan s own ideas about the<br />
relationship of his poems vis- -vis his translations. In one of the interviews given to Chirantan Kulshreshtha, he<br />
says:<br />
I found that there were any number of poems which I would have liked to have written myself. I do not<br />
translate out of love but out of envy, out of kind of aggression towards these great poems I think one translates<br />
out of a need to appropriate someone else s creation, done better than one could ever do .<br />
Apparently enough it is the enterprise of translation that propels Ramanujan into writing poetry. He wonders<br />
why he could not think and write as the ancient Tamil poets did. His poetry is an aggressive response to the<br />
creations of his Tamil poet-ancestors. However, at no point does Ramanujan believe that his poetry stands up<br />
to the quality of sangam Tamil poets. Despite acknowledging close inter-penetration between his translation<br />
and his poetry, he hesitate[s] to put my own [his] poems next to them .<br />
Many poems of the poet, including Second Sight take off directly from his experience as a translator. He not<br />
only imitates the Tamil forms, he shares thematic concerns with his bhakti poets. Here sharing thematic<br />
concerns does not imply that the poet is in perfect consonance with bhakti poetry; he has his own egoistic<br />
improvisations, re-considerations and even re-visions. In Second Sight , the poet writing very much in the<br />
traditional vachana style of poetry of Kannada bhakti poets, puts into perspective the relevance of Shiva s<br />
myth of Third Eye in a departmental store in America.<br />
But before the poem is taken for detailed critical scrutiny, let us understand the poetics of vachana poetry first.<br />
Vachanas constitute the very form as well as content of kannada bhakti poetry. As against the tradition of<br />
shruti and smriti valorized in Sanskrit oral tradition, vachanas is an active mode of learning. It is neither<br />
knowledge received nor remembered, it is knowledge uttered here and now. Ramanujan s poetry does not<br />
have the spontaneity of vacanakaras for he is more a poet in the intellectual mould a poet who reacts to the<br />
knowledge received and remembered, but at times, particularly in his shorter poems, one comes across a<br />
persona who is far more forthcoming and straight.<br />
Second Sight has an unmistakable tinge of directness that is usually associated with the vachanakaras.<br />
Doing away with the rarefied received knowledge/ myth of Hindus having Third Eye , the poet-persona,<br />
strikes a this worldly note thus:<br />
I fumble in my nine<br />
pockets like the night-blind<br />
son-in-law groping<br />
in every room for his wife<br />
and strike a light to regain<br />
at once my first, and only<br />
sight.<br />
The aesthetics of here and now overtakes the aesthetics of eternity or timelessness. Vachanakars as protestpoets<br />
always held Only/ sight to be the only reliable human attribute that is to be believed and cared for.<br />
Although to grant some kind of impersonality to the poet, it is better to attribute the poem not to the poet directly
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
but to his persona, but in such poems, there is hardly only gap between the poet and the persona. Such poems<br />
very much like vachanas, are uttered, not through a persona or mask, but directly in the person of the poet<br />
himself (Speaking of Shiva). Like vachanas these poems are highly personalized utterances.<br />
Insight or the inner eye, which the upanishadic seers describe rather enigmatically as the Eye of the eye is<br />
privileged over the normal human eye in the spiritualist accounts of Indian thought. In Shaiv-philosophy it is also<br />
termed as Third Eye, the eye of the mind over and above the two eyes which ordinary mortals are born with.<br />
Standing in a queue in a Departmental Store of Chicago, Ramanujan, a Hindu with supposedly second sight,<br />
feels quite helpless. The resultant comment is as much a dig at Hindu metaphysics, as it is on the Orientalist<br />
Western onlookers who take it too literally:<br />
I fumble in my nine<br />
pockets like the night-blind<br />
son-in-law groping<br />
in every room for his wife, . . .<br />
The imagery of pockets and son-in-law groping/ . . . for his wife has material and sensuous connotations<br />
which are often underplayed vis- -vis the so-called lofty Indian metaphysics. Maybe, Ramanujan is invoking<br />
some sort of epicureanism of the Charvakas or the Lokayatas which is usually kept aside from the essentialist<br />
accounts of Indian thought as a counter-discourse to the Vedantic canon. Informed by the dialectics of dharma<br />
and postmodernism, the poem concludes on a note of inversion:<br />
and strike a light to regain<br />
at once my first, and only,<br />
sight.<br />
Inversion is a dialogic device as what it negates later on, is established first. The emphasis on first and<br />
only is an indication enough of how precariously the poet is caught between his inherited dharma on one<br />
hand, and the acquired post-modernism on the other. In order to counter the Orientalist construction of Hinduism<br />
as being mere metaphysical , the gross assertion of the physical through the first and only/ sight leads<br />
the poet back to the colonial narrative of the material or the carnal. Richard King explains this predicament of<br />
Indian post-colonial intellectual thus: . . . , for in opposing British colonial rule, Hindu nationalists did not fully<br />
transcend the presuppositions of the West, but rather legitimized the Western Orientalist discourse by responding<br />
in a manner that did not fundamentally question the Orientalists paradigm .<br />
It would not be out of place to discuss another poem of Ramanujan, where he in the fashion of native bhakti<br />
poets holds canonical Shaivism to some kind of critical ridicule. Ramanujan is not a mindless and submissive<br />
Shiv bhakta, prostrating at the feet of the divine eternally. He thinks and feels like an ordinary human being. In<br />
his A Devotee s Complaint , he disfavours the shaiv idea of absolute asceticism. If Shiva s touch dries out<br />
the human in the devotee, it is of hardly any human use. A bhakta should not cease to be a living and throbbing<br />
human being. His complaint as a devotee therefore is:<br />
If Shiva touches you -<br />
when you cut your finger<br />
in the kitchen<br />
not blood but ash spills<br />
from your cut as it did<br />
for that ascetic<br />
who dried out for Shiva<br />
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The ash-blood binary is the binary of dharma and postmodernism in its most fundamental form. The poet does<br />
seek the grace of Shiva, but at the same time he wants the blood to run through his veins. After all what can<br />
hold the devotee if he becomes a sack of ash? Ramanujan has a special penchant of testing divine s graces in<br />
spaces like kitchen, bathrooms and toilets.<br />
Son-in-laws are unwanted relations. They receive very harsh treatment from Ramanujan. Seen as stupid<br />
nitwits, short-lived idiots ( Small Scale Reflections on a Great House , they are condemned as drags on the<br />
family. In the poem under consideration, when someone asks the Hindu poet-persona about the second sight<br />
that Hindus are supposedly bestowed with, he begins to fumble like the night-blind/ son-in-law groping/ in<br />
every room for his wife . The image of the night blind son-in-law is derived from the Kannada folk tale in<br />
which a night-blind son of an old widow somehow manages to marry a nice girl from a good family . The<br />
story is all about the cleverness with which he manages to hide his night-blindness from his in-laws. The poem<br />
gathers a sting if the story is read along with it as its possible co(n)text.<br />
A Hindoo to his Body<br />
Ramanujan has written many poems which deal directly with the theme of his approach towards Hinduism. In<br />
these poems Hindu is spelt in Americanized way as Hindoo . Obviously the poet as a hyphenated Indo-<br />
American re-interprets his Hindu background in terms of his experiences in the US. Hindoo therefore stands<br />
for an American-Hindu, or an Americanized Hindoo. The Hindoo-poems in a way dwell around the interesting<br />
interface between inherited dharma on one hand and adopted (post-)modernism on the other, in an extended<br />
and exclusive manner. The travails and tribulations of a diasporic Hindu come forth in these poems in a tone<br />
which is surprisingly least remorse or elegiac. The poet, located as he is on an alien perch, is able to look at<br />
Hinduism from a very distinct perspective. The canonical Hinduism, orientalized so much for its excessive<br />
spiritualism and facile escapism, undergoes semantic mutations. One comes across a very different Hinduism<br />
in these poems.<br />
In canonical Hinduism, the body-soul conflict is settled invariably in favour of the claims of the soul. Soul is<br />
supreme, and constitutes the very self of a being. Body is mere an outer covering, a protective shell. It is held<br />
that after death, the imperishable soul the so-called essence of life leaves the physical frame and rises<br />
upwards the sky. The entire enterprise of conventional Hinduism is directed towards the enhancement of the<br />
self in terms of the march of the spirit or the soul. Ramanujan with his characteristic inverted humour caricaturizes<br />
the body-soul divide created in all religious discourses, including Hinduism through a very non-religious, if not<br />
irreverent and heathen, invocation to dear body that brought me [him]/ curled in womb and memory . Body<br />
is very dear to the poet, for it is the locus of memory and future.<br />
In A Hindu to His Body , the poet inverts the traditional Hindu focus by asserting the participation of the<br />
physical in the spiritual. Spiritual is mere fiction, unless it is seen and experienced by the human self. Without<br />
physical attestation, the experience of the so-called ecstatic spiritual is nothing more than a rarefied rumour.<br />
Body is a metaphor of the poet s tangible being for it empowers him to clutch/ at grace, at malice; and ruffle/<br />
someone else s hair . In Ramanujan s dyadic universe, grace and malice co-exist. A sensuous verification is<br />
required to prove the existence of the two human gestures.<br />
Self-caricaturization is a conscious strategy, employed in the poem to ensure an air of impersonality and<br />
intellectual withdrawal from the emotive issue/ situation. Therefore when the poet pleads the soul not to<br />
abandon him, he is aware of his being garrulous: my garrulous face . In fact in many ways, Ramanujan s<br />
entire attitude towards dharma is marked by this garrulity which acts like a double-edged weapon in his poetry.<br />
The poetry becomes a plea for and against the self, the metaphor of essential dharma. The poet somehow<br />
believes that garrulity would save him from the impending death. In this context, garrulity is a response of a<br />
persona who is utterly nervous at the very idea of leaving the body behind, after the death.<br />
The ending of the poem reveals unmistakably the poet s desire to experience physically the much-fantasized<br />
spiritual fullness. This is an unusual desire, for spiritual fullness is not possible by being aware of the body at the
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
same time. The poet pleads: let me go with you and feel the weight/ of honey-hives in my branching / and the<br />
burlap weave of weaver-birds/ in my hair . Honey-hives and burlap weave are signifiers of soul s refulgence.<br />
There is an underlying metaphor of human-body-as-tree holding honey-hives and nests of weaver-birds. The<br />
poet-as-pleader would not mind losing the human face or his unkissed/ alien mind in the process of death, but<br />
he is not ready to part away with his sensory perceptions. The poem, once again, brings into focus, the<br />
metaphysical vagueness in-built in Hinduism. As a self-reflexive modernist, Ramanujan fails to reconcile with<br />
the so-called grand spiritual course of the soul. There is no attempt to absolutize either dharma to the total<br />
exclusion of modern imperatives and vice versa.<br />
Love Poem for a Wife I<br />
Love acquires an ambivalent semantic association in modern poetry. It does no longer stand for effusive<br />
romantic response, it is not a signifier of unbridled passion. Love ironically enough stands for its absence, its<br />
loss and its uselessness. It is through its negation or absence, that the modern poets underline the necessity of<br />
love, its perennial value in human relationships. Love poems are written in memory of estranged relations. In<br />
modern love poems, the thrust is towards an intellectual understanding of the emotion of love. More often than<br />
not, these poems are post-marital, as against much of the pre-marital love poetry. Instead of beloved, it is<br />
wife or an ex-girlfriend who is the focus of attention. In such love poems, love as an emotion is scrutinized post<br />
facto.<br />
Love Poem for a Wife 1 is a poem in which the poet-persona dwells on the possible cultural factors that in<br />
a way fore-ordained his unhappy marital life. Right in the beginning the poet questions the very theory and<br />
practice of adult-marriage. Here adult-marriage is used as binary opposite to child-marriage a practice much<br />
castigated by the reformers. Almost throwing a gauntlet to the so-called reformers, the poet-persona challenges<br />
the votaries of adult marriage on many counts. In adult-marriage, two grown up individuals from different<br />
families vow together to remain as life partners till eternity. Ramanujan wonders how two different individuals<br />
with different histories can enter a bond as demanding as marriage.<br />
The emphasis of the poet is on the shared childhood as the primary condition of life long stable relationship.<br />
So he accounts for his marital debacle in terms of unshared childhood : Really what kept us apart/ at the end<br />
of years is unshared/ childhood. As adults husband and wife may spend any number of years together, but<br />
that cannot make up for unshared childhood. The poet seems to privilege childhood over and above any other<br />
phase of human life. It is in this phase that individuals do not hide their selves from each other. Children do not<br />
have the sense of the private; whereas adults are very possessive about their private spaces. Relations formed<br />
during childhood are lasting, relations formed during adulthood are at best transactional.<br />
As adults, husband and wife cannot appreciate and understand each other s past. In his usual half-comic, halfserious<br />
tone, the persona presumably addressing his wife says: You cannot, for instance, meet my father. He<br />
is some years/ dead. Father in Ramanujan s poetry is a functional presence for he is a shaping force. The<br />
dead father stands for the invisible past, which is dead yet it continues to live through the body of his children.<br />
Similarly the poet-persona as husband cannot appreciate the shifting moods of his father-in-law : he has lately<br />
lost his temper/ and mellowed . In-laws always invite a comic treatment in Ramanujan s patriarchal universe.<br />
The mellowing down of his otherwise aggressive father-in-law is rather melodramatic and hence funny.<br />
In the next stanza, the poet-persona goes deeper into the ambience of family network where each one grows<br />
anxious to know about the past of another. In the cordial familial set up, when relations meet and gossip<br />
through the night among brandy fumes, cashews and Absences/ of grandparents , the wife as an outsider<br />
suddenly grow[s] nostalgic for my [husband s] past . In Ramanujan s poetry, presence and absence together<br />
constitute the frame of the real. Absent grandparents are presences of a type which run through the family<br />
genetically as well as culturally. The poet as inheritor of family code, is always conscious of the presence of his<br />
forefathers in his blood and veins.<br />
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The poet-persona is not an arrogant exclusive male one who is utterly indifferent to the wife s past. As a<br />
sensitive and inquisitive individual he seeks to share every bit of his self with his life-partner. He is equally<br />
envious of his wife s rich cultural background: . . . and I/ envy you your village dog-ride/ and the mythology<br />
of the seven crazy aunts . It is the feverishness to know each other inside out that comes in the way of<br />
husband-wife relationship. Knowing is a pre-condition to possessing.<br />
The task of knowing anyone in terms of one s past can at best be speculative. The wife begins to recognize<br />
her husband. The process is arduous. First she goes back to his ghostly past, then she looks at his real self,<br />
that is, the self in the time present. Finally she once again lapses into images of his family s past in albums and<br />
anecdotes and family-rumours. The reconstruction of past is always selective and therefore very arbitrary. In<br />
Ramanujan s poetry history is valid if it is self-experienced, its reconstruction through sources as flimsy as<br />
albums and family rumours is bound to be tentative and therefore hardly sustainable.<br />
The wife looks forward to some of the familiar sources, tapped usually to construct husband s past. One of<br />
these sources is the photo, preferably the wedding photo of the husband s parents. In the traditional wedding<br />
photograph, the father is in a turban, while the mother stands on her bare/ splayed feet, [with] silver rings on<br />
her second toes . The wife tends to locate the persona of the husband in the photo, thus reducing his entire<br />
career/ of my [his] recent unique self to a set pattern. The emphasis is singularly on the my recent unique<br />
self . It is this unique self which is compromised in an arranged adult marriage. The poem is a plea for the<br />
preservation of the unique self, which both husband and wife as two individuals enjoy separately before marriage.<br />
Ramanujan is always skeptical about his wife s antecedents. He would imagine his father-in-law pacing up and<br />
down the balcony fuming and fretting at his daughter s (the poet-persona s wife) pre-marital flirtations with a<br />
Muslim friend. But after marriage, the father-in-law would feign ignorance about any affair that his daughter<br />
ever have had: He will acknowledge the wickedness/ of no reminiscence: no, not/ the burning end of the<br />
cigarette in the balcony . The wife would underplay her affair as an innocent/ date with a nice Muslim friend/<br />
who only hinted at touches . The way the poet-persona makes an issue of the exclusive communal identity of<br />
her wife s ex-boyfriend, does point towards the subtle operation of the deep-seated communal consciousness<br />
in his cultural make-up.<br />
The poet-persona as husband defines himself as a total outsider among his in-laws. When his wife and his<br />
brother-in-law start a discussion on the topography of their ancestral house in Aleppey, he finds himself totally<br />
at sea. He and his sister just become mute witnesses or what he terms as blank cut-outs in the serious<br />
dispute ( drag-out fights ) his wife and her brother have on the position of bathroom in their ancestral house.<br />
Bathroom is strategic sight in Ramanujan s poetry. It is the inner most private chamber of one s cultural<br />
backyard. As a poet of the interior landscape, Ramanujan is not interested in drawing room politics, or even<br />
bedrooms.<br />
The fight over where the bathroom was is significant for one who knows its position in the ancestral house<br />
can claim to have an inside view of what cultural landscape one has inherited. The controversy is so serious<br />
that both the wife and her brother get down to the floor to draw/ blueprints of a house from memory . The<br />
wife is carried away by the fight so much that she wagers heirlooms and husband s earnings on what/ the<br />
Uncle in Kuwait would say about the Bathroom . The helplessness of the poet-persona is expressed in terms<br />
of his total ignorance about a controversy in which his earnings are being put to stakes. The poet deliberately<br />
puts spells bathroom with capital B for in the drag-out fight it is no less than a sanctum sanctorum.<br />
The location of wife s uncle in Kuwait who would act as a possible arbiter of dispute between his wife and<br />
brother-in-law adds yet another third axis to the husband-wife relationship. India and America are the two<br />
cultural binaries within which the poetry of Ramanujan normally operates, the opening of the Arab world adds<br />
to the complexity of the situation. The poet-persona could have possibly negotiated with the wife, but this uncle<br />
in Kuwait is beyond his cultural landscape.<br />
The point, which the poet-persona makes rather painstakingly, is that husband and wife despite their avowed<br />
intimacy and togetherness cannot know each other on issues, which may appear trivial and flippant, yet have
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
serious bearings on their relationships. It is not a question of bathroom or any other room, the issue is of the<br />
degree of identification which adult individuals can have after marriage. The poet-persona does not want to<br />
enter into any relationship which does not lend him an inside perspective of the partner. Adult marriage does<br />
not provide the space for total identification. It is an institution based on an impossible premise that two<br />
individuals, having strong well-evolved consciousness can enter into a life long intimate partnership.<br />
As an alternative to arranged adult marriage across families, Ramanujan takes the moral risk of endorsing the<br />
Egyptian practice of marrying within the family. In Egyptian society, royal families in particular, the marriage<br />
among cousins, half-brothers, half-sisters is not uncommon. Sisters become queens, and thus carry childhood<br />
incests into the acceptable fold of marriage. Marriages among brothers and sisters ensure lesser cultural<br />
estrangement that afflicts adult marriage across families. Such a practice of marriage mitigates sufferings/ or<br />
misunderstandings that otherwise rock the conventional adult marriage on account of unshared childhood.<br />
Before entering into a marital bond as husband and wife, the two have the experience of living together as<br />
brother and sister. The issue of marriage, according to Ramanujan, should not be approached with moral<br />
hangovers. Incest as an acceptable form of marriage is better bet than the so-called adult marriage outside the<br />
family fold.<br />
There is yet another option which the poet-persona puts forth. This option might sound retrogressive and even<br />
primitive, but to Ramanujan, it is the viability of marital bond that is of utmost importance. Being primitive or<br />
archaic is not necessarily anti-modern or outdated. Having suffered at the modernized version of marriage, the<br />
poet likes to revive the old Indian practice of child-marriage, even marriage before births of prospective bride<br />
and bridegroom. The poet pleads for betrothing before birth. Instead of cross-checking the horoscope to<br />
ensure compatibility of the bride with the bridegroom, the poet would like to emphasize the necessity of having<br />
shared childhood as a pre-condition to successful marital life. He makes a fervent plea thus: wed us in the oral<br />
cradle/ and carry marriage back into/ the namelessness of childhoods . The namelessness suggests the total<br />
annihilation of modern individuated ego, in favour of a life-long partnership called marriage. Only during childhood<br />
can an individual rise above names. Therefore childhood is the most appropriate phase of tying the nuptial knot.<br />
The poem on the whole contests the notion of love after marriage. Love demands total negation of ego. Only<br />
child-marriage or incestuous marriage within family can possibly ensure love right from beginning, that is<br />
before the formation of stable uncompromising egoes.<br />
Ramanujan as an Indian Poet<br />
Indianness, enigmatically enough, remains an unresolved issue for the checkered Indian present and past<br />
precludes the possibility of its essentialization. A poet as multivalent as Ramanujan does not fit in any given<br />
stereotypes of Indianness. His poetry is poetry of plural belongings. His locations keep shifting in time and<br />
space, deferring his placement in any narrow provincial bounds. In order to understand the dynamics of<br />
Ramanujan s location in a cultural set up, it is necessary to approach the poet without any a priori notion of<br />
Indianness. Not only poetry as a genre secularizes and de-provincializes responses, the poet as spokesman and<br />
participant of history cannot betray narrow parochial interests.<br />
Ramanujan s Indianness can be measured in terms of the poet s attitude towards his religion, i.e. Hinduism, his<br />
family relations and finally in terms of his attitude towards his native landscape. As a poet of the Indo-American<br />
diaspora, Ramanujan does not evince easy linear approach towards any of the three co-ordinates of his cultural<br />
make up. Ambivalence is perhaps the only sure way to negotiate the ever-confounding Indianness. As a poet,<br />
he could have taken a lyrical, passionate and even panegyric view of Indian past, present and future, but<br />
Ramanujan is not a court poet, nor is he a poet laureate. He is a poet in the intellectual mould, his responses are<br />
therefore measured and well-modulated.<br />
I<br />
The Hindu forbearings of A.K.Ramanujan as a poet have hitherto been taken for granted. Such an uncritical<br />
(even communal) stance not only under-values the critical potential of poetry as a genre in secularizing or de-<br />
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communalizing religion, it also tends to underplay the impact of other counter-canonical impulses that operate<br />
in his poetic world as potential impulses of contestation and dis-belief. First, there is the impulse of native folk<br />
experience that runs counter to the standard marga beliefs. As a poet rooted in local desi traditions, Ramanujan<br />
does not subscribe to any sanskritic notion of Hinduism. He has his own will and a subjectivity to question<br />
and interrogate his Hindu background. In his interviews, prose essays, afterwords etc, he insists on a pluralist<br />
frame of Indian society wherein the hegemony of the canonical is always contested by various local subcultures.<br />
Though Ramanujan, avoids being labeled, yet given a choice, he would prefer to be identified more as Tamil or<br />
a Kannada of deep South India than simply as a Hindu Brahmin. The counter-canonical thrust stems from the<br />
fact that Ramanujan as expatriate Indian responds to his Hindu background in a way that is highly skeptical, if<br />
not utterly irreverential. Cultural displacement does accentuate nostalgia for nation, and in some cases might<br />
breed a sense of communal consciousness. This nostalgia or invocation, both of nation and dharma, in<br />
Ramanujan s poetry is not salutary or panegyric. In fact, displacement provides a critical distance too, a<br />
perspective very different to see through the granted construct of dharma. A nostalgic pull is invariably<br />
counter-balanced by the critical pull. The religious credo of Ramanujan s poetry therefore has to be seen in<br />
terms of his re-interpretation and re-contextualization of Hinduism in the light of his high modernist surroundings,<br />
and the overtly nativist leanings of the poet.<br />
Religious identity is central to Ramanujan s poetic output for two reasons primarily one, he is a Brahmin of<br />
the Deep South, another, he is intellectually aware of Hindu mythos and rituals. He inherits the relatively<br />
untainted form of South Indian brahminism. As a translator of Shiva and Vishnu hymns and Sangam poetry of<br />
love and war, along with a compiler of Indian folk-tales from the oral tradition, his portfolio of being an extraordinary<br />
Hindu becomes almost complete and impeccable. But religion is never an unqualified or absolute<br />
metaphor of realization, nor is it an emptied or exhausted signifier of ritual. Local cultural factors pull down its<br />
canonicity. Modernism likewise, too makes a visible dent in the poetic universe of the poet, but never is it<br />
heralded as an inevitable and exclusive credo of self-emancipation.<br />
To begin with, there are poems wherein some Hindu belief or philosophic ideal forms the main subject matter.<br />
In poems like Conventions of Despair , A Devotee s Complaint , Guru , A Meditation , Pleasure and<br />
Second Sight , the tension between religion on one hand and modernity on the other hand generates the<br />
necessary creative impetus. In Conventions of Despair modernism, hitherto privileged for its open-endedness,<br />
becomes a credo of ritualism, no less closed than the so-called institutionalized religion. Consequently both<br />
modernism and religion as frames of conventions become the target of the poet s critical despair. Modernism,<br />
despite its promises of freedom and choice is not free from the tyranny of rituals. In day-to-day practice<br />
modernism, boils down to some set practices which ossify later on into standard rituals. In the poem Ramanujan<br />
catalogues a number of stylized responses that construct and at the same time de-construct the discourse of<br />
modernism thus:<br />
Marry again. See strippers at the Tease.<br />
Touch Africa. Go to movies.<br />
Impale a six-inch spider<br />
under a lens. Join the Testban,<br />
or become The Outsider<br />
Or pay to shake my fist<br />
(or whatever-you-call-it) at a psychoanalyst.<br />
Modernism is a fetish, a stereotypical way of life. The eight-nine images reveal beyond doubt the fetishism inbuilt<br />
within the so-called emancipating and progressive project of modernism. If divorces, live-in relationships,<br />
re-marriage etc. are symptomatic of unstable modern family life, striptease is the modern hedonistic way of
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
releasing libidinal energies. Africa, with its exotica and innocence, is the new destination of rapacious colonial<br />
modern mindset. It is fashionable to be the flag-bearer of some pro-environment or anti-nuclear weapons or<br />
anti-apartheid movement.<br />
The conventions of religiousity are not easy to forsake in order to give way to the conventions of modernism :<br />
But sorry, I cannot unlearn/ conventions of despair. Relgion, deep seated as it is, cannot be unlearnt despite<br />
its so-called obscurantism and orthodoxy. The association of despair with conventions is quite significant. At<br />
one level, it stands for Hindu ideal of forsaking of material gains or earthly joy, at another level it stands for<br />
poet s disenchantment with abstract spiritualism intrinsic to Hindu world-view. The grand Hindu metaphysics<br />
of rising above the worldly pleasures is ironically summed up thus: weep/ iron tears for winning what I should<br />
have lost . The poet s religious background only brings back the archaic despair , yet it is not obsolete or<br />
defunct to be relinquished once for all.<br />
Is reason, an alternative to religious faith? Ramanujan does not approve of modern rationality as the ultimate<br />
answer to spiritual sickness. Reason is too brittle to withstand the pressures of the outside world: Reason,<br />
locked out of the chicken coop/ fearful of eagles it cannot see . The archetypal fears overtake the rational<br />
mind. In his moments of belief in unbelief the poets seeks a crumb of faith to sustain his mortal self. He,<br />
who is otherwise committed to enlightenment ideals of reason and secularism, gravitates towards the gypsy<br />
tents of witchcraft . The zodiac, he thinks, circulates my [his] blood . Ramanujan inherits this duality between<br />
science on one hand and astrology on the other from his father. In a poem Real Estate , the poet-persona<br />
caricaturizes his rationalist architect cousin who would calculate stress and strain on wood/ and steel to<br />
utmost perfection to design his buildings.. The indisciplined poet-persona instead would know/ windows<br />
without walls . Reason despite its glass-like apparent transparency does not enamour the poet.<br />
Meditation is an exercise of knowing one s own self through concentration. It is an act of internalizing the<br />
external. Ramanujan, once again, as an egoistic bhakta, does not seek a meditation that denies the devotee his<br />
humanity, or that reduces the devotee into a blank entity, forgetful of the mundane and even excremental<br />
realities of life. In the poem A Meditation , the poet is apprehensive of losing the normal human touch in the<br />
process of meditation: In the course of a meditation/ I thought all day I was a black/ walnut tree . It is not only<br />
the fear of rigidity that meditation might breed in him, it is the fear of insensitivity that troubles him all the more:<br />
as I stood waiting for the traffic<br />
light, [the golden retriever] lifted its hind leg<br />
and honoured me<br />
with its warm piss.<br />
The traffic lights are suggestive of hectic modern life, where any exclusive meditation amounts to resignation<br />
or easy escapism. The poet is not against meditation, provided it does not de-humanize the bhakta mentally as<br />
well as physically. The dog s warm piss is a befitting reminder of life s ordinariness.<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry, there is no such anxiety to hitch on to the bandwagon of mach-fancied Indian spirituality.<br />
There is no such urge to underplay sensual pleasure in favour of a long celibacy. In the poem Pleasure , the<br />
poet describes rather vividly how a Jaina monk is torn asunder by his oath of long celibacy and the sensuous<br />
spring/ fever :<br />
lusting now as never before<br />
for the reek and sight<br />
of a mango bud, now tight and now<br />
loosening into petal<br />
stamen and butterfly,<br />
his several mouths<br />
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thirsting for breast,<br />
buttocks, smells of finger,<br />
long hair, short hair, . . .<br />
Poetry<br />
The more the monk tries to suppress his sensual/sexual desires, the more they come forth. The carnal desires<br />
become irrepressible if they are denied unnaturally. It really needs Ramanujan s intellectual audacity to suggest<br />
that celibacy too is a kind of perversion. A point comes when celibacy itself becomes a kind of perverted<br />
pleasure:<br />
skin roused even by<br />
whips, self touching self,<br />
all philosophy slimed<br />
by its own saliva,<br />
cool Ganges turning<br />
sensual on him,<br />
Ramanujan apparently does not idealize celibacy, nor is he in favour of abnegation of sensual pleasure. The<br />
sensual is not detrimental to the spiritual, rather it is the medium through which the spiritual is to be realized.<br />
The self-styled spiritual leaders of Hindu dharma, the saffronized saints that occupy the dharma-bazaar are<br />
targeted in the poem The Guru . Ramanujan is not an uncritical worshipper whose devotion to the guru would<br />
remain unflinching forever. Guru s message to forgive the weasel his tooth , the tiger his claw is well taken,<br />
but the latter part of message do not give woman her freedom/ nor man his midday meal till he begs - is<br />
plain hypocrisy. After hearing the sacred sermons of the guru, he leaves the luxurious guru to clean his own<br />
shoe/ for I [he] remembered I [he] was a man born of woman . To Ramanujan worshipping is not an act of<br />
total surrender, it is not boot-licking. The dignity of the self is paramont to the modern worshipper who would<br />
not let his guru go unaccountable.<br />
In Ramanujan s Hindoo Poems , the high Hindu ideals of disinterestedness, third eye, soul s upward march<br />
after death etc. come under severe critical scrutiny. These poems offer insights into this interface between<br />
religion on one hand and modern skeptical thinking on the other. In Hinduism, at the level of philosophy, the<br />
body-soul conflict is settled invariably in favour of the soul. It is believed that after death, the imperishable soul<br />
- the so-called essence of life leaves the physical frame and rises upwards the sky. Ramanujan caricaturizes<br />
the body-soul fissure created in all religious discourses, including Hinduism through a very non-religious, if not<br />
irreverent and heathen, invocation to dear body that brought me [him]/ curled in womb and memory . In his<br />
A Hindu to His Body , the poet inverts the traditional Hindu focus by asserting the participation of the<br />
physical in the spiritual. Without physical attestation, the experience of the so-called ecstatic spiritual is nothing<br />
more than a rarefied rumour. Body is a metaphor of the poet s tangible being for it empowers him to clutch/<br />
at grace, at malice; and ruffle/ someone else s hair . Self-caricaturization is an important strategy to engender<br />
an air of impersonality and intellectual withdrawal from the emotive issue/ situation. Therefore when the poet<br />
pleads the soul not to abandon him, he is aware of his being garrulous: my garrulous face . In fact in many<br />
ways, Ramanujan s entire attitude towards dharma is marked by this garrulity which acts like a double-edged<br />
weapon in his poetry. The poetry becomes a plea for and against the so-called moral and the metaphysical.<br />
The ending of the poem reveals unmistakably the poet s desire to experience physically the spiritual fullness.<br />
This is an unusual desire, for spiritual fullness is not possible by being aware of the body at the same time. The<br />
poet pleads: let me go with you and feel the weight/ of honey-hives in my branching / and the burlap weave of<br />
weaver-birds/ in my hair . Honey-hives and burlap weave are signifiers of soul s refulgence. There is an<br />
underlying metaphor of human-body-as-tree holding honey-hives and nests of weaver-birds. The poet-aspleader<br />
would not mind losing the human face or his unkissed/ alien mind in the process of death, but he is not
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
ready to part away with his sensory perceptions. The poem, once again, brings into focus, the metaphysical<br />
vagueness in-built in Hinduism. As a self-reflexive modernist, Ramanujan fails to reconcile with the so-called<br />
grand spiritual course of the soul. There is no attempt to absolutize either dharma to the total exclusion of<br />
modern imperatives and vice versa.<br />
Disinterestedness as a principle of objectivity and equipoise is central to Hindu metaphysics. In his poem THE<br />
HINDOO: he reads his GITA and is calm at all events , Ramanujan deflates this high metaphysical doctrine<br />
first through overstatement and then through understatement. On the plane of existence, disinterestedness<br />
may well be mistaken for indifference and apathy. The poet s uses of semantic equivalents unstuck and<br />
stand apart which de-mythicize the concept of non-attachment implicit in disinterestedness. In philosophical<br />
terms, withdrawal does not imply non-participation; rather it marks a higher stage of awareness that involves<br />
itself in human action and yet has the capacity to be impartial and dispassionate. In lines quoted below the poet<br />
brings forth the existential dimensions of the metaphysical doctrine thus:<br />
. . . ., I do not marvel<br />
When I see good and evil: I just walk<br />
Over the iriidescence<br />
Of horsepiss after rain. Knives, bombs, scandal,<br />
And cowdung fall on women in wedding lace:<br />
Disinterestedness as a principle of self-denial stands transformed into an existential precept of survival. Dharma<br />
as concept takes on a rather mundane form on the level of praxis. In the face of all-round violence and chaos,<br />
the poet s preferred response is that of careful and calculated silence: I say nothing, I take care not to gloat.<br />
The unreality of disinterestedness is suggested through another telling reversal towards the end of the poem.<br />
The impossibility of rising above the genealogical past is brought forth thus: Yet when I meet on a little boy s<br />
face/ The prehistoric yellow eyes of a goat/ I choke, for ancient hands are at my throat . Inheritance is an<br />
inescapable aspect of life that no intellectual or meditational endeavour can wish away. One may choose to<br />
overlook the outer violence, but the inner violence, i.e., violence caused by the tyrannical genetic code is<br />
impossible to get rid of. The Darwinian dictum that man is a descendent of monkey belittles man s grand claims<br />
to metaphysics. The pre-historic and the archaic is eternally present in us to checkmate and, as the poet says,<br />
even choke our high designs. Built around the dialectics of cohesive dharma on one hand and amorphous<br />
existence, on the other, the poem brings forth the diverse pulls within the poet s Hindu self. Not satisfied at the<br />
rarefied abstractions of dharma, Ramanujan seeks dharma at the level of praxis.<br />
Violence is negation of life. Non-violence therefore constitutes the core of Hindu metaphysics for it not only<br />
fits into the non-dual frame of advait; it also facilitates a stable and relatively quiet social order. In his poem<br />
THE HINDOO: he doesn t hurt a fly or a spider either , Ramanujan traces the roots of non-violence in him<br />
from the impotency and cowardice of his Great Grandfather who could not save his great swinging grandfather<br />
from the fisherman lover who waylaid her/ on the ropes in the Madras harbour . The high principle of nonviolence<br />
has deliberately been equated with non-action or some latent weakness in character. The poet as a<br />
descendent of his still and mute Great Grandfather bears not only his name , he inherits his spirit too.<br />
Indirectly, the poet does acknowledge the inescapable hold of dharma on his mental being, but not without<br />
exposing its politics. The postmodern strategy of misreading history does enable the poet in understanding the<br />
politics of dharma.<br />
The asceticism in-built in Hinduism has emerged as a perfect metaphor for a creative postmodernist revision in<br />
Ramanujan s religion-centred poems. True that life is a bottomless/ enterprise but it needs to be lived fully.<br />
Instead of being bogged by cold morality, the poet advises us to keep the heart s simple given beat/ through a<br />
neighbour s striptease or a friend s suicide ( THE HINDOO: the only risk ). The neighbour s striptease<br />
and friend s suicide are symptomatic of volatile postmodern life style. The poet subverts the Hindu ideal of<br />
fasting or abstaining from food when he says: Always and everywhere, to eat/ three square meals at regular<br />
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Poetry<br />
hours. The petty and petulant, the dirty and murky realities must be faced head on with a sense of challenge.<br />
The ascetic-moral frame if stretched to its extremes, can breed in an element of heartlessness in an orthodox<br />
Hindu. The postmodern misreading of asceticism within Hinduism does enable the poet to critique it.<br />
In his treatment of Hindu myths, Ramanujan once again reveals his predicament of being a product of hyperreal<br />
constructs of religion on one hand and (post-)modernity on the other. Myths as grand fables do attract him,<br />
but their grandeur does not remain intact. The archetypal hold of mythology on the poet s religious mindset and<br />
the enticements of postmodernism inherent in the Chicago milieu generate a unique poetic mix in which nothing<br />
remains insular or unmixed.<br />
In Mythologies I , the divine becomes Terror with a baby face . But the irony is that it is this Terror only<br />
that redeems him; it suck[s] me [him] dry. Drink[s] my [his] venom/ Renew[s] my [his] breath . The poet<br />
identifies himself with a demon full of poison and milk . The acceptance of mythology is typically playful. The<br />
seemingly contradictory combination of poison and milk and Terror with a baby face once again point out<br />
a mixed character of Ramanujan s poetic universe. It is this playfulness that lends a distinct creative edge in<br />
Ramanujan s poetry. He does not rationalize myths, nor does he sulk under them as a helpless spell-bound,<br />
submissive conservative. Ramanujan s poetry does neither valorize, nor rationalize any of the constructs of<br />
either canonical dharma or high modernism or loud nativism, it is more a poetry of negotiation between these<br />
opposite cultural pulls.<br />
Mythologies 2 is a creative reflection on famous Hiranyakshyapa-myth where Vishnu taking the shape of<br />
half- man, half-lion, i.e., Narasimha disembowels the pride of arrogant and clever King Hiranyakashyapa<br />
who earlier through the perfect boon of not to be slain by demon, god, or by/ beast, not by day nor by night,/<br />
by no manufactured weapon etc. had ensured immortality for himself. Instead of seeking the perfect insularity<br />
from death, the poet as devotee seeks his ordinary vision to be re-adjusted to see all things double . Such a<br />
vision is more useful than the impossible immortality. Immortality is blindness. Seeing things double is not<br />
doubt or lack of sight, it is rather seeing the ambivalence of things clearly.<br />
In Mythologies 3 , the fashionable binary of the sensuous and the spiritual has once again been invoked to<br />
underline their complimentarity and inclusiveness in the making of the self. The groom of Shiva s worshipper<br />
Akka encounters unprecedented situation, a unique experience which is neither sensuous, nor spiritual, a<br />
caress like nothing on earth as Akka becomes death-/ly cold to [his] mortal touch but remains hot for<br />
God s/ first move . But soon as the groom continues to hover around her, she after initial indifference, throws<br />
away her modesty, as the rods/ and cones of her eyes gave [give] the world a new birth . It is through the<br />
groom that Akka sees Him then, unborn, form of forms , the Rider .<br />
In Ramanujan s prayer-poems , the double-edgedness of Hindoo poems becomes all the more sharp and<br />
acute as the divine is invoked and deflated at the same time. The invocation is not unconditional and unqualified.<br />
The poet s Prayers to Lord Murugan present a rather non-conformist version of Tirumurugattrupadai [ A<br />
Guide to the Holy Murugan] in which fifth century Tamil poet Nakkirar sings the praises of Lord Murugan, the<br />
ancient Dravidian god of fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war and love. In this original Tamil Guide, Murugan is<br />
valorized as the war god of the Dravidians, and the patron deity of the kuravas or hunting tribes of the<br />
dravidian country . The ironic subversion begins right at the outset. In the original Tamil prayers, Lord Murugan<br />
shows his presence at all festivals/ that are with much pomp held on holidys . The rejoicing followers herald<br />
his arrival and presence with the flag that bears/ the image of cock . In Prayer -1 , the sceptic persona of<br />
Ramanujan s prayers does not herald His arrival as simply an arrival of goodwill and harmony among the<br />
worshipping tribal; rivalries too appear with his arrival. The image of cock as symbol of victory in war reveals<br />
the rivalries within the tribes. Therefore the intellectual persona sees in His arrival, the arrival of both love and<br />
hate: lovers and rivals/ arrive/ at once with cockfight and banner-/dance . The wishfulness in-built in the<br />
religious psalms, hymns and prayers is undone by the intervention of self-reflexive persona of the modern<br />
poetry.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
In Prayer-2 , the poet expresses his sense of bewilderment at the six faces of Lord Murugan: Twelve etched<br />
arrowheads/ for eyes and six unforeseen /faces and you are were not/embarrassed . More than simply<br />
deprecating the supernatural divine, the poet deprecates his own shaky and tentative self. The poet wonders<br />
how twelve eyes and six faces of the divine make love to one woman when he with his only one human face<br />
and two eyes finds it difficult to do so. It is at once an admission of the fallible human love and a dig at divine s<br />
extra-ordinary indulgence.<br />
In Prayers 3,4,5 the poet juxtaposes the mythical with the existential. As a denizen of a modern city Chicago,<br />
the poet asks the red god Murugan:<br />
will the red flower ever<br />
come to the branches<br />
of the blueprint<br />
city?<br />
The mythical red is set in contrast with the modern blue. The colour red in the original prayers is suggestive of<br />
vibrant tribal life. The red robes made up of red flowers and leaves of asoka symbolize healthy fearless life.<br />
The poet questions the relevance of red when Our blood is brown;/ our collars white . The colours brown and<br />
white represent the cold and corrupt urban sensibility. Questioning the divine is not non-religious or irreligious,<br />
it may well be a strategy of self-criticism.<br />
The crisis of retaining and preserving the average human face needs to be addressed first and foremost:<br />
Lord<br />
of faces<br />
find us the face<br />
we lost early<br />
early this morning<br />
Only gods can afford the luxury of having six faces while the poet struggles to save his one and only face. His<br />
plea for the preservation of his only human face may be taken as a hearty laugh at the multi-faced god, but it<br />
also is a naughty dig at the unfaithful and dishonest worshipper. The poet true to his radical re-visionary<br />
leanings does not want god to be in the headlines, at the same time he does not want god to be absolutely<br />
absent: Lord of headlines,/ Help us read / The small print . The very idea of being endowed with a rarefied<br />
sixth sense is fanciful and remote to his human experience: Lord of the sixth sense/ Give us/ Our five senses .<br />
The poet seeks intuitive as well as empirical knowledge for both together sustain human life. Only sixth<br />
sense is not enough to sustain it, the ordinary five senses must respond first; the sixth is to be achieved<br />
through first five.<br />
Ramanujan as worshipper seeks dissolution but without any risk of drowning: Lord of solutions/ Teach us to<br />
dissolve/And not to drown . To G.N.Devy, the prayers in a way mark the limited range of Ramanujan s plunge<br />
into the unknown infinite: To belong is to drown oneself in one s particular context. Ramanujan would be<br />
willng to drown himself only eye-deep . . . he would altogether resist drowning . In fact, Ramanujan s<br />
religious poetry is neither a total denial of self, nor an unabashed assertion of it. It is poetry of a man-in the<br />
process as against man as product. It is a poetry of a critical devotee in the process of dissolution as against<br />
the non-critical worshipper who is already drowned. In Prayer - 9 , the poet caught in the discourse of<br />
absences and aporias seeks a deliverance from them: Deliver us O presence/ From proxies/And absences<br />
Being needs to be defined both in terms of the presence and the absence. The poet does never think in terms<br />
of abandoning the religion altogether, but he does not want to live in the world of the absent or the nonmaterial<br />
perpetually. Mrs. S. Sengupta rightly sums up the poetic credo of Ramanujan s religious poems thus:<br />
[his poetry] seems to be engaged in wresting existential meanings in God and religion through down to earth<br />
mocking images . More than the criticism of the divine, the prayers are petitions for self-appraisal.<br />
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Bhakti saint-poetry definitely forms the sphere of influence in Ramanujan s poetry. Here an extended analysis<br />
of Fear No Fall a poem written on Arunagiri, a Tamil saint-poet provides us important clues about<br />
Ramanujan s approach towards bhakti poetry and paradigms in general. Arunagiri, rich and spoiled , was a<br />
womanizer too. He spent his youth whoring after woman till one of them sucked him dry/ of all his juices,/<br />
gave him syphilitic sores/ in all the wrong places/ / and threw him out,. . . / on the garbage heap . Unhoused<br />
Arunagiri roams till an Old Man implores him to sing of Murugan as the only remedy of his despair deeper<br />
than his wounds . Arunagiri, illiterate, one who didn t have an alphabet/ in his past nor ever a tune in his<br />
head suddenly begins to form new lines and songs from the first line given to him by the Old Man. Arunagiri s<br />
songs now can be seen twining around trees, ensnaring/ passerby, unlocking cages/ even for mynahs and<br />
parrots.<br />
Against the divine experience of illiterate but enlightened Arunagiri, the poet evaluates his own pursuit of<br />
knowledge. He finds himself overtaken by the load of books: I was tottering without a foothold/ on a ramshackle<br />
pyramid/ of all my books piled . . . He fears fall, till voice both within and without comes, Fall, fall/ you ll<br />
never fear a fall again . Clearly the poet accepts the fallibility of man, and it is in this fallibility that he seeks<br />
a room for redemption. In canonical dharma, fall is irrevocable; it is a condition of no-return. In bhakti poetry,<br />
there is always a scope for return. Academic knowledge is no substitute for wisdom or spiritual awareness.<br />
Overtly the poet seems to endorse the bhakti cult for its being eclectic.<br />
The pertinent question that needs to be addressed is: Can Ramanujan be placed in the bhakti tradition of poets<br />
or poetry for his being eclectic and unconventional towards the canonical dharma? Most often by critics and<br />
Indian <strong>English</strong> poets themselves, the contemporary Indian <strong>English</strong> poetry is placed in the protest discourses of<br />
say Kabir or Tukaram or any other bhakti saint. True that in respect of negotiating and even subverting the<br />
religious paradigms, its orthodox practices and rituals, Indian <strong>English</strong> poets seem to carry forward the bhakti<br />
tradition of iconoclasm. But their claims to bhakti tradition cannot be stretched beyond a point. In bhakti<br />
poetry, the divine is never ridiculed, questioned or lampooned, it s the brahmanical order, the institutionalized<br />
and monopolized religion that comes under fire. The bhakti poets, even in their moments of vehement protest,<br />
remain essentialist or spiritual or sacred.<br />
The Indian <strong>English</strong> poets including Ramanujan approach the divine with humanistic considerations - considerations<br />
which do not necessarily lionize the human as an alternate centre of universe, but as one who is corruptible and<br />
fallible. In other words, the protest in bhakti poetry stems from a deep conviction of the spiritual and the<br />
sacred, whereas in the poetry of Ramanujan the protest stems from a deep awareness of the devotee being an<br />
ordinary vulnerable human being who cannot live on mere abstract ideals. Secondly in terms of language too,<br />
the bhakti poetry used the native idiom, the local dialects; Ramanujan s medium is not only alien, it is colonial<br />
too. Bhakti movement was a social protest, a people s movement; Indian <strong>English</strong> poetry is at best an elite<br />
intellectual response from outside.<br />
Ramanujan s poetry, therefore is neither a substitute of dharma; nor just a trick to blow up the established<br />
images/ icons upside-down. It does neither rise up to the quasi-religious expectations of Arnold; nor does it end<br />
up as a playful discourse of utter irreverence. It is poetry neither of the counter-sublime, nor of a minor<br />
corrective swerve. It does not tread any middle path either. Dharma, in its canonical form, proves to be an<br />
unrealistic proposition; and postmodernism, with all its irresponsible playfulness, an utterly non-viable credo.<br />
This poetry therefore is a double-edged discourse which does not throw any easy alternatives. Even in poems<br />
where postmodern poetics of subversion and caricaturization operate overtly, dharma as an underlying impulse<br />
of order counterbalances the parodic drift. This inner drama of sublime and the subliminal generates a poetry<br />
of process in which there is a constant re-defining of the granted and the trendy, the inherited and the prevalent,<br />
the past and the present, the native and the foreign.<br />
In the crossfire of the two grand-narratives of dharma and postmodernism what ultimately stands out is the<br />
poet s kavi-karma. Ramanujan s kavi-karma lies in his being creatively responsive to the reality, inherited as<br />
well as adopted, context-specific as well as context-free . This responsiveness, as shown above, at times
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
might lend a partly non-reverential edge to his poetry, but it does vindicate his dharma of being a poet. The<br />
dharma of poetry consists in being skeptic about and interrogative towards the received notions of dharma<br />
per se.<br />
With the kind critical revisionism in-built in Ramanujan s creative responses, question of his placement in the<br />
stereotypical matrices of tradition versus modernity, nativism versus globalism, regional versus universalist etc.<br />
becomes quite complex. Is Ramanujan a critical traditionalist or a critical modernist or both? Or, in other<br />
words, is he a critical insider or a critical outsider or both? His Hindu background makes him a critical insider;<br />
his location in Chicago makes him a critical outsider. In fact the very binary of insider and outsider becomes<br />
redundant in case of expatriate Indian poets like A.K.Ramanujan. Since critical traditionalists as well as critical<br />
modernists do not believe in the absolutization of either tradition or modernity, Ramanujan can be placed<br />
anywhere between these two hybridized categories.<br />
II<br />
If religion provides a larger frame of identity, the family as social institution acts as micro-level site of the poet s<br />
cultural moorings. Among family relations, one relation that occupies the central stage in Ramanujan s familyscape<br />
is understandably that of mother. What lifts this relationship beyond ordinary son-mother oedipal pull is<br />
the expatriate status of the author. Displacement as a condition of culture, on one hand triggers off a deeper<br />
sense of nostalgia for home as motherland, on the other it provides a necessary distance to critically examine<br />
it. The fact that Ramanujan has written five-six poems on his relationship with his mother is an indication<br />
enough of the feverish pitch with which he as a displaced subject re-invokes the old metaphor of mother as<br />
motherland. But the crucial question is: does Ramanujan engender new significations in the stereotypical trope<br />
or does he merely work within the earlier nationalist poetics and politics of deifying the mother as insular,<br />
incorruptible, sacred, timeless motherland?<br />
Deployment of mother as motherland has been a regular feature in nationalist rhetoric right from colonial times,<br />
but it gains a renewed urgency in the postmodern phase of cross-national nomadism. In the wishful nationalist<br />
accounts, India is often invoked as bharat mata, pure, pious and spiritual to the core. From Bankim s famous<br />
Vande Matram, to Ananda Coomaraswamy s short narrative Mata Bharata , to Nehru s famous explication<br />
of what constitutes Bharat Mata to villagers in his Discovery of India, one can count any number of<br />
references to the myth of mother in nationalist discourse. Of course Mahboob Khan s famous blockbuster<br />
Mother India in fifties contributed a lot to the consolidation of the construction of mother in terms of moral<br />
and spiritual motherhood. Ramanujan, as a post-nationalist, not strictly in terms of credo, but in terms of his<br />
location between two cultures, does revive the myth of mother but with qualifications and a measure of<br />
reflexivity and re-vision. The simultaneous play of home and return in his poetry generates a perspective of<br />
mother (as motherland), which may not be as cataclysmic as to overturn the received notions of motherhood,<br />
but is critical enough to unravel the politics of mother s sublimation into an essential being one who is cut off<br />
from the material and historical conditions of life .<br />
To begin with, Ramanujan despite his playful and subversive tendencies does not discount the pull of the<br />
umbilical chord. Rather, it is so strong that at every possible chance of its being snapped or severed off, the<br />
poet-persona cherishes its intimate hold, all the more. The chord is a kind of hanger that engenders in him a<br />
sense of belongingness and attachment right from the embryonic stage onwards: A foetus in an acrobat s<br />
womb/ . . . . / hanger-on in terror of the fall/ while the mother-world turns somersaults ( Alien ). But what<br />
distinguishes Ramanujan from erstwhile nationalist accounts of mother is that his mother is extremely unstable,<br />
turbulent and mobile. A pregnant mother as an acrobat taking somersaults unsettles the usual connotations of<br />
stable and measured motherhood and maternity. Also in the poem, instead of using mother as metaphor of<br />
nation, with its distinct cartographic and cultural co-ordinates, the poet-persona employs mother as signifier of<br />
world, thus extending its frontiers beyond narrow nationalistic bounds.<br />
Woman s body is seen analogous with nature , and mother is often projected as a flowering tree . In his<br />
commentary on a very famous folk-tale entitled A Flowering Tree , Ramanujan dwells on the relationship of<br />
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flowering with mothering in the Indian context thus: A tree that has come to flower or fruit will not be cut<br />
down; it is treated as a mother, a woman who has given birth. Thus the metaphoric connections between a tree<br />
and a woman are many and varied in the culture. A relevant one here is that words for flowering and<br />
menstruation are the same in languages like Sanskrit and Tamil. In Sanskrit, a menstruating woman is called<br />
a puspavati, a woman in flower and in Tamil, puttal ( flowering ) means menstruation . Menstruation itself<br />
is a form and a metaphor for a woman s special creativity. Thus a woman s biological and other kinds of<br />
creativity are symbolized by flowering. (A Flowering Tree) In his poem Of Mothers, among other things , the<br />
poet-persona revives the image of mother as tree I smell upon this twisted/ blackbone tree . . . . ; but the<br />
tree is all dried up: Her sarees/ do not cling: they hang, loose . . . . The diligence of mother is appreciated<br />
much in the traditional vein: and I see my mother run back/ from rain to the crying cradles , but once again she<br />
is rather crippled and overworked:<br />
But her hands are a wet eagle s<br />
two black pink-crinkled feet,<br />
one talon crippled in a gardentrap<br />
set for a mouse. . .<br />
In this poem, the mother remains confined to the inner domain of domesticity. But far from providing her a<br />
sense of fulfillment, it is a domain of her constant entropy and attrition. The silver and youth/ petal of my [his]<br />
mother s youth dwindles down to loose/ feather of a onetime wing . The poem as a whole could be seen as<br />
a parody of Bankim s Vande Matram, where the mother is eulogized in terms as romantic as these:<br />
Mother I bow to thee!<br />
Rich with thy hurrying streams,<br />
Bright with thy orchard gleams,<br />
Cool with thy winds of delight<br />
Dark fields waving, mother of might<br />
Mother free<br />
Glory of moonlight dreams<br />
The association of mother with nature is not as easy and mutually conducive as is made out in the spiritualized<br />
nationalist historiography . ( Ecology ). As the poet-persona comes back after the season s first rain, from a<br />
distance he spots our [their] three Red Champak Trees . The flowering tree makes him utterly unhappy<br />
because it gives her Mother/ her first blinding migraine/ of the season . The street-long heavy-hung/ yellow<br />
pollen despite all measures to block it, enters through the porous door to cause the allergic ache. Mother<br />
deeply religious as she is, would not let the poet-persona cut down a flowering tree . She has a life-long<br />
association with the tree, seeded, she said, by a passing bird s/ providential droppings . If the flowering tree<br />
gave her gods and her daughters/ and daughters daughter basketfuls of annual flower , it also bequeathed<br />
one line of cousins/ a dower of migraines in season. In the phallocentric nationalist discourse nature is seen<br />
as the very hub of woman s blossoming, but it requires Ramanujan to undo the myth of flowering tree as an<br />
unquestionably benign presence in the family courtyard. Questioning the newfangled credo of ecofeminism,<br />
the poet-persona locates the cause of Mother s sickness in the flowering of the tree.<br />
The extraordinary relationship with the mother(-land) comes to fore in a poem entitled Farewells . Going<br />
away from mother is no easy rupture, it transcends all formulaic farewells. The poet catalogues a number of<br />
farewells that are farewells without , i.e., farewells without any real inner involvement. First, there is a usual<br />
farewell drama at railway stations, when standing at the window of your friend , [you] wait for the delayed<br />
train to come on the platform. Then there is that recurring farewell/ to the lady president/ of the cooperative<br />
society when colleagues present her a silver medal but forget to get inscribed her name over it. There is yet<br />
another type of a dramatic farewell: farewell/ of the dying patriarch/ among all his clan . The death of the<br />
grandfather in a family also has its typical setting:
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
mother crying into her sari, father busy on the phone<br />
trying to locate brothers<br />
on trains that do not arrive<br />
according to the time changes in April.<br />
It is only mother s farewell where sentiments flow without verbalization, without tears even. Mother only takes<br />
a long look/ that moved on your body/ from top to toe . The possessive maternal gaze is counter-poised with<br />
the moment of his farewell. She bids her son farewell with the advice that you should/ not forget your oil bath/<br />
every Tuesday/ when you go to America . While acknowledging the sincerity of mother s emotions, the poetpersona<br />
as the departing son, also ridicules her for being too fastidious on things like oil bath/ every Tuesday<br />
etc. In Ramanujan s poetry, very much in consonance with nationalist ideal of motherhood, motherhood stands<br />
for purity of response; but this purity is too much for the persona to bear. Rather than idealizing his mother s<br />
purity, it is her na vety that the poet-persona is concerned with. The humour of mother advising her expatriating<br />
son to observe daily rituals cannot be missed. Unlike the serious nationalists, Ramanujan takes the liberty of<br />
being playful and naughty. Mother s crying into sari is more melodramatic than just sombre.<br />
Mother (as an embodiment of home) is a lingering presence, but her immortality is no cause for celebration.<br />
After her death she makes a comeback in the form of a toothache which the poet-persona suffers in his left<br />
jaw. This ache reminds him of the same kind of pain which his mother had suffered just before her death: . ..;<br />
it s mother again/ complaining of the large tooth/ in her left jaw/ the week before she died ( Tooth ). Mother<br />
is both a pain and a fond remembrance. Though she is ignorant, yet in moments of pain she is a healer. In a<br />
poem entitled Pain , the poet-persona invokes his mother to kiss away my [his] pain/ as she has always<br />
done .<br />
In the poem Returning , the home-mother symbiotic relationship is exploited to underline the poet s increasing<br />
longing and at the same time alienation from his intrinsic cultural self. In the opening stanza of the poem, the<br />
poet-persona wary of outer blaze seeks to return to his home, to be precise, his mother s comforting lap, but<br />
she is no longer there:<br />
Returning home one blazing afternoon,<br />
He looked for his mother everywhere.<br />
She wasn t in the kitchen, she wasn t<br />
In the backyard, she wasn t anywhere.<br />
Kitchen and backyard are two culturally less-exposed space-segments of a conventional house where emotions<br />
flourish without make-up. The exterior domain is blazing , by implication the interior is cozy and comforting.<br />
The poet goes inward as he looks even under the beds only to find old shoes and dustballs . The seriousness<br />
of the enterprise is sufficiently punctured by the presence of old shoes and dustballs . The inner space in<br />
absence of mother is all stinky and dust-ridden. He rushes out, this time more frantically, but the effort goes in<br />
vain:<br />
Where are you? I m home! I m hungry!<br />
But there was no answer, not even an echo<br />
In the deserted street blazing with sunshine.<br />
Suddenly he realizes the impossibility of his enterprise. The home is not simply retrievable. With the death of<br />
the mother long back, he had lost contact with his motherland irrevocably: Suddenly he remembered he was<br />
now sixty-one/ and he hadn t had a mother for forty years ( Returning ). The exterior world is deserted ;<br />
inner too is desolate and answer-less. In Ramanujan s poetry, the eternity and essential purity of motherland is<br />
never taken for granted.<br />
Ramanujan s mother is a hard-task master and motherhood therefore in his poetry is not a soft cushion to rest<br />
on. Well-meaning mothers teach bitter lessons to their children: Mother smear bitter neem/ paste on their<br />
nipples/ to wean greedy babies ( A Taste ). Intelligent mothers, Ramanujan would conclude thus, give them<br />
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Poetry<br />
[their children] an inexplicable taste for bitter gourd/ late in life . Clearly good motherhood is not just pampering<br />
the child, it is disciplining him as well. Mother thus is a giver of both sweet milk and bitter neem; she is a<br />
remembrance, recuperative as well as painful, if her touch can heal the wound, her toothaches can re-surface<br />
in the teeth of the poet-persona at a later stage. Mother stands for both freedom and bondage, reinforcing thus<br />
the double-edgedness of experience in Ramanujan s poetic vision.<br />
Father is no less an important relation, and in the nationalist construction of patriarchy, he stands for outer<br />
material world, reformatory colonial influences, scientific Western education and authority. Ramanujan as son<br />
and later on a father himself, while working very much within the rubric of nationalist division of domains<br />
inner and outer between mother and father respectively, makes his own adjustments and critical alterations.<br />
Despite all his disagreements, he could be seen grateful to the father for enabling him to understand the tyranny<br />
of fatherhood/ colonialism. In A Wobbly Top , Ramanujan describes his relationship with his father as two<br />
perfect concentric circles on the fast moving wobbly top. Interestingly it is father who gifts the top to the son.<br />
In other words, it is the father who provides his son, the occasion, the medium and the tools necessary for<br />
disagreement with his son. This kind of dialogic relationship with the father ensures that in Ramanujan s poetry<br />
colonialism or Western education is not utterly undesirable. Colonial education provides tools for its critique.<br />
In Obituary , the dead father is invoked in a rather unceremonious manner thus: Father when he passed on,<br />
/ left dust/ on a table full of papers/ left debts and daughters . The poem could be read as an obituary on the<br />
demise of colonialism in India. By the time British left India, it was thoroughly impoverished, effete and debtridden.<br />
The caricature of father is drawn in terms which are not innocuously humourous: Being the burning<br />
type,/ he burned properly/ at the cremation . Such is the sense of outrage against colonial excesses, that the<br />
caricature fails to camouflage the anger. More than just the psychology of oedipal aggression which a son<br />
evinces against the father, it is the politics of colonialism that is at work in such descriptions. The place and<br />
manner of father s birth and death are mentioned in terms that are more derisive than mere descriptive: his<br />
caesarian birth/ in a brahmin ghetto/ and his death by heart-/ failure in the fruit market . But despite all his ire<br />
against his father, the persona realizes the irrevocability of history: And he left us/ a changed mother/ and<br />
more than/ one annual ritual . Father and mother do not constitute neat exclusive binary, the outer domain does<br />
influence and change the inner. The annual ritual here stands for elaborate Independence Day celebrations<br />
that the nation is obliged to observe every year.<br />
Unlike the nationalists, Ramanujan s persona does not look upon his father as utterly oblivious of Indian traditions<br />
and value-system. The father is a strange bundle of contradictions, traditional to the core, yet very modern in<br />
terms of his intellectual make up, a learned astronomer who believes in astrology. This is how the poet-persona<br />
portrays him: Sky-man in a manhole/ with astronomy for dream,/ astrology for nightmare ( Astronomer ).<br />
Ghetto , fruit-market and manhole are obviously not very enchanting locations for the father to live and<br />
survive. The so-called outer domain assigned to patriarchy is also ghettoized in the sense that it also tends to be<br />
exclusive and arrogant.<br />
The post-colonial self bastardized to the core by the colonial past is rendered permanently disabled into having<br />
any sustained relationship. Marriage, especially adult marriage, instead of mitigating alienation compounds it,<br />
for according to Ramanujan it is at best a contractual or arranged relationship between two evolved individuals<br />
with totally different cultural histories. The wife as an outsider is an unwanted presence in Ramanujan s<br />
genealogical space mapped out in Extended Family . In the poem, right from grand-father to unborn<br />
great great-grand-son , every one bequeaths a legacy to the making or unmaking of the poet-persona, the<br />
conspicuously missing link space is wife. It is not that the poet-persona constructs his home in exclusive<br />
patriarchal terms only; mother, daughter and even sister are acknowledged as significant contributors to the<br />
making of his self .<br />
In Love Poem for Wife, 1 , the poet-persona contests the very efficacy of adult marriage with its in-built flaw<br />
of unshared/ childhood . His wife, he finds, is much closer to her brother, whereas he and his sister-in-law are<br />
mere blank cut outs in their [wife and her brother] old drag-out fights/ about where the bathroom was/ in the
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
backyard . The poet-persona is so thoroughly disgusted with the hypocrisy of adult marriage that he would<br />
much like to continue the incests/ of childhood into marriage . He endorses the old Egyptian practice of<br />
marriage within family. Another suggestion to mitigate the trauma of adult marriage is equally retrogressive.<br />
Ramanujan as a failed husband, would much prefer child marriage as a possible way out of overcoming the<br />
problem of unshared childhood built in adult marriage:<br />
betroth us before birth,<br />
forestalling separate horoscopes<br />
and mothers first periods,<br />
and wed us in the oral cradle<br />
and carry marriage back into<br />
the namelessness of childhoods.<br />
Orality as culture of the yore is Ramanujan s ideal of a harmonious familial past. If marriage is to approximate<br />
high Hindu ideal of marriage as union of two souls at all, then wife and husband must grow together right<br />
from childhood, even before their births. Wife as a relation thus could be seen as the very site of expatriation<br />
which fails to wean the poet-persona away from the mother s pull. Had the poet-persona gone to US much<br />
before his birth, he could have shown interest in American history and culture. A late entry when he had<br />
already acquired a definite cultural make-up entails an element of alienation that he eventually suffers. Marriage<br />
in this context becomes a trope of exile .<br />
In another Love Poem for a Wife 2 once again the distinct cultural background of the wife is narrated with<br />
such an enviable passion that any possibility of emotional union with her looks remote and distant. The wife<br />
blessed as she is with her inheritance in all its richness does not pay much attention to the poet-persona s<br />
passionate overtures. The wife s cultural past is recounted in terms of her vehement foregrounding in mythos,<br />
history and natural bountifulness of Kerala, the region she belongs to. Her changing syriac face has to do<br />
with chameleon/ emerald/ wilderness of Kerela . Her mythic/ regional consciousness is highlighted through a<br />
playful relationship thus: a small cousin to tall/ mythic men, rubberplant / and peppervine . The print patterns<br />
on her dresses have been copied locally/ from the dotted/ butterfly . . . full of the colour schemes/ of kraits and<br />
gartersnakes .<br />
One reason that Ramanujan distrusts his wife is her prurient permissive past. In Any Cow s Horn Can Do It .<br />
The wife is shown growing cold at remembering how was she belted by father/ standing on a doorstep/ with<br />
a long strip of cowhide/ and the family idiom/ the day he caught her/ in the hotel lobby . In Love Poem for<br />
Wife 1 , the poet-persona as husband doubts her integrity; he makes an issue of what his wife just dismissed<br />
as an innocent/ date with a nice Muslim friend/ who only hinted at touches . As against the insular and<br />
impeccable Hindu past of the mother, the wife s past is impure and adulterated.<br />
In Ramanujan s exclusive family, the wife is more a rival to the mother and the daughter, than a positive<br />
relationship. In Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees , the mother-fixated persona at once compares wife s<br />
love with mother s warmth: you re not Mother/ certified dead but living on, /. . . ./ You remind of the difference .<br />
America as the exiled poet-persona s abode, despite all material promises is no match to the emotional comforts<br />
that his motherland, left behind years ago, would have provided. Unborn daughter pre-occupies his mind even<br />
though he posts letters to the wife:<br />
Dear woman, you remind me again<br />
in unlikely places like post offices<br />
where I lick<br />
your stamps, that I must remember<br />
you re not my Daughter, unborn maybe<br />
but always present: . . .<br />
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Both dead mother and unborn daughter outlive the live wife in terms of their hold on the consciousness of<br />
the poet-persona. Wife despite all her efforts to play mama/ sob-sister/ daughter who needs help with arithmetic/<br />
even the sexpot nextdoor remains an Another, the faraway/ stranger who s nearby . The poet-persona is as<br />
much an Another as his wife is. Another could as well be a signifier of Alien-nation. The irony implicit in<br />
the expression stranger yet nearby sums up the predicament of an expatriate in an alien location, his temporary<br />
abode.<br />
The relationship with children daughter and son becomes very challenging in the twin context of father s<br />
postcolonial past and his expatriated present. With so many cultural inheritances to manage, locked as they<br />
are in a dissenting relationship, the attitude towards children could be at best tentative and full of apprehensions.<br />
As a father to his daughter, Ramanujan is very apprehensive about her future. In a poem, On the Very<br />
Possible Jaundice of an Unborn Daughter written before his departure to US, the poet-persona fears a<br />
diseased future of his unborn daughter, inherit as she would, the jaundiced legacy of his parental home. As<br />
his father sits with the sunflower at the window/ deep in the yellow of a revolving chair and as that daffodil<br />
too flaps all morning/ in grandma s hands , the yellowness all around his ancestral home, the poet-persona<br />
worries, might cause jaundice to the unborn daughter congenitally. The colonial past has invalidated the present<br />
in a manner that third-world paternity as an able, healthy and benign legacy/ practice becomes impossible.<br />
The state of confusion that the little turtles collected by the daughter in her jar experience, reveals the inner<br />
unease of the daughter in an alien landscape. Very much like the turtles, the daughter has to bear the cross of<br />
many cultures as she views life from the narrow window of a Chicago apartment: grounded here, carrying a<br />
daily cross/ of window bars, an ordinary square/ of sun, glowing and dimming with each cloud/ up there<br />
( Some Relations: nursery turtles ). Far from their natural habitat, as these turtles try to hibernate in the jar,<br />
they are confused by the heat of this Chicago s winter . Ramanujan appreciates that his daughter is up<br />
against a highly disjointed present.<br />
With so many irregularities around, Ramanujan seems to be wary of the very idea of fatherhood. Paternity is<br />
one challenge which he would avoid to take: So beware, I say to my children/ unborn lest they choose to be<br />
born ( Warning ,). The maverick poet-persona as father simply does not have the patience to be a vigilant<br />
father. To love children is to possess and control them: I ll love my children/ without end,/ and do them infinite<br />
harm ( Entries for a Catalogue of Fears ). Fatherhood is exercising authority in the name of tradition and<br />
family-values; it is staying on the roof,/ a peeping-tom ghost/ looking for all sorts of proof/ for the present of<br />
the past . Children are victims of paternal structures, which they suffer endlessly. The tragedy is compounded<br />
by the fact that as they grow older they analyze its tyranny through tools and terms bequeathed to them by their<br />
father only:<br />
they ll serve a sentence<br />
without any term<br />
and know it only dimly<br />
long afterwards<br />
through borrowed words<br />
and wrong analyses.<br />
Father is perceived as a colonial master who supervises his progenies as na ve natives to be civilized and taught<br />
language and syntax ( sentence ) that would imprison them perennially.<br />
The conscious decision to abdicate fatherly prerogatives lends an unprecedented freedom to both the father<br />
and his children. The approach between the two does not betray hierarchy of relationship. No wonder when<br />
the daughter approaches the father to announce her love affair with a man much older, he takes it rather<br />
sportingly. He cites his own obsession of looking at all the women/ [that] I ve [he has] ever loved as<br />
eighteen [years old] forever ( Love 4: what he said, to his daughter ). Another example he gives is that of<br />
Pierre Bonnard who always painted his wife/ as thirty six/ getting in and out/ of bathtubs . . . Such playfulness<br />
in relations seems to be the only feasible working principle among Ramanujan s family-relations.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry, affection towards the daughter is always counter-posed with hatred towards the wife,<br />
once again pointing towards the poet-persona s unqualified disliking for the outsider in his inner space. The<br />
daily routine of the poet-persona begins with a walk before dark with my [his] daughter , and ends with a<br />
bed time story/ of dog, bone and shadow. A bullock cart/ in an Eskimo dream ( A Routine Day Sonnet ).<br />
The image of bullock cart in an Eskimo dream in a very succinct and telling way sums up the bi-cultural mindscape<br />
of the daughter. The bedtime story is marker of native inputs that go into the making of the girl-child.<br />
The bonhomie and playfulness during the day that the persona enjoys in the company of his daughter proves to<br />
be short-lived. Night however is the period of acrimony, as the poet-persona as husband wake[s] with a start/<br />
to hear my [his] wife cry her heart/ out as if from a crater in hell . The routine day sonnet comes to a violent<br />
and brazen end: she hates me, I hate her,/ I m a filthy rat and a satyr . In another poem, Eyes, Ears, Noses,<br />
and a Thing about Touch , the day s bought flowers/ [are] crushed into a wife s night/ grouses .<br />
On the whole, it is true that the mother is the most favoured relation, but it does not mean that Ramanujan<br />
idealizes his mother as the granted source of comfort and warmth. This kind of dialogic approach towards<br />
mother(land) is further complicated by the fact that other relations also keep walking in and out of his life. The<br />
way poet-persona relates himself with them albeit reluctantly or critically proves beyond doubt the uneasiness<br />
built in the nation-space.<br />
III<br />
Though not primarily a poet of landscapes, yet Ramanujan, in his effort to dig out the personal and the private,<br />
searches for the co-ordinates of his inner experience in the concrete landscape outside. The inner is located in<br />
the local landscape with an eye that looks as much inward as it stares outside. The in-scapes (what Ramanujan<br />
would prefer to describe as poetry of the interior landscape ) are images of the outer landscape, interiorized.<br />
Landscape, as compulsive logic of cultural mainstay, thus stands thoroughly scrutinized by the searching poetic<br />
eye, foreclosing the possibilities of its unqualified idealization or downright infernalization. In his earlier poetry<br />
most of which was written prior to his departure to US, Ramanujan gives an insider s perspective of his native<br />
landscape. In such poems, Chicago, as an adopted abode of the poet, is missing altogether. These poems offer<br />
a perspective of home from within.<br />
Poona Train Window is one poem that can be described exclusively as a poem of the outer landscape . It is<br />
the ever-present window in Ramanujan s crowded and claustrophobic inner landscape that makes his contact<br />
howsoever circumscribed with the outer world possible. Looking out is no intimate act of survival, it is not<br />
acquiring third eye. It is a hole through which the poet-persona peeps at the human carnival. Window in a<br />
moving train provides a full length peep show to the inquisitive persona. The first image that scrolls across his<br />
mobile window screen is that of a man defecating between two rocks, and a crow . At once one is reminded<br />
of illustrious Indian-baiters like Naipaul and Chaudhary who run down India as a huge latrine. But Ramanujan<br />
looks beyond as he spots a whole range of scenery outside: the blinding noise/ and the afterhush of one train<br />
passing , a rush of children , white hair in a red turban , Six gulls/ sitting still etc. The image of<br />
Three women with baskets<br />
on their heads, climbing<br />
slowly against the slope<br />
of a hill, one of them<br />
lop-sided, balancing<br />
between the slope and<br />
the basket on the head<br />
a late pregnancy.<br />
unfolds the adverse terrain of activity in countryside India. On one hand the image reinforces the grit and<br />
stamina of rural woman, on the other it ridicules their capacity to produce children without much ado. The rural<br />
women are burdened three-fold. First they walk up the hilly pathways to collect fuel and fodder; second they<br />
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carry all their collection on their heads; and third, they have to manage the pull of pregnancy along with other<br />
burdens.<br />
There is an unsparing critique of the native landscape because it happens to be the possessive space of the<br />
poet, and its degeneration worries him all the more. What really redeems Ramanujan s approach towards his<br />
home is this simultaneous play of love and hate, emotional intimacy and intellectual withdrawal, reification and<br />
criticism. Indian culture is basically riverine. More than just a romantic symbol of refulgent life, the river forms<br />
the very hub of local culture. Its invocation in poetry brings into play the dynamics of culture that thrives along<br />
its banks. Ramanujan draws vignettes of rivers that run through the native landscape in shades not very<br />
different form another expatriate Indian <strong>English</strong> poet R. Parthasarathy. In Ramanujan s native landscape<br />
every summer/ a river dries to a trickle in the sand,/ baring the sand ribs ( A River ). If there is<br />
eaglewood in her [Parthasarathy s river] hair/ and stale flowers , Ramanujan s river too is clogged by straw<br />
and women s hair/ . . . at the rusty bars ( A River ,). If in Parthasarathy s poetry the river represents<br />
decadence, in Ramanujan s discourse, it becomes destructive too. When once in a year the river has water<br />
enough to be poetic , it carries away/ in the first half-hour/ three village houses,/ a couple of cows/ named<br />
Gopi and Brinda/ and one pregnant woman/ expecting identical twins . . . ( A River ). River as a trope of<br />
nativity and nation does no longer sustain life; during summers, it stinks, and during rainy season it overflows<br />
ominously to swallow the whole range of life on and around its shores.<br />
In a number of poems Indian landscape has been portrayed in terms which smack of colonial arrogance, but on<br />
a close reading one finds more than contempt it is concern that informs the fundamental response of Ramanujan s<br />
persona. At times Ramanujan does portray home as a typical Third World space, either it is too banal to offer<br />
any respite, or too chaotic to soothe the sophisticated self: It s a dogfight/ all over. Noises, noises . The<br />
poet s Smalltown, South India is crowded with cows and buffaloes: Temple employees have whiskered<br />
nipples./ The street cows have trapezium faces./ Buffaloes shake off flies with a twitch of ripples . In fact<br />
Buffaloes swatting flies/ with their tails ( Poona Train Window ) is one of those many stock images that<br />
appear in the poetry of both the poets as signifier of passive Indian mindset. In Parthasarathy s Rough Passage,<br />
instead of buffaloes, it is the bull that is surrounded with the fleas of Kodambakkam . Bulls and buffaloes,<br />
the prime movers of agrarian Indian society are looked down upon as beasts of idleness. The Bulls and<br />
bulldozers/ block each other/ on the road to Chidambaram ( Bulls ). By clubbing together the bulls with the<br />
bulldozers, the poet associates the attributes of destruction with the holy bull. Home is presented as a space of<br />
rituals where Every evening . . . bells roll in the forehead of temples . Ramanujan would like to define these<br />
rituals/ cultural practices as conventions of despair (CP, Conventions of Despair , 35).<br />
In his later poetry, one finds the simultaneous presence of landscapes from both Chicago and India, in a<br />
relationship which is at best contrapunctal. In a contrapunctal, relationship, the effort is to draw out, extend,<br />
give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented in one standpoint<br />
from a reference which is external. Both Chicago and deep Indian South act as external standpoints for each<br />
other; one brings out the strengths and weaknesses of the other.<br />
In Chicago Zen Himalayan river and Lake Michigan are locked against each other. Chicago traffic with a<br />
deluge of orange headlights gives the poet-persona a vision of forest fires , which in turn reminds him of the<br />
rapid river back home:<br />
you fall into vision of forest fires,<br />
enter a frothing Himalayan river<br />
rapid silent<br />
On the 14 th floor<br />
Lake Michigan crawls and crawls<br />
in the window. . . .
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
Once in America, the poet-persona negotiates his estrangement through two ways one by way of imagining<br />
Indian equivalents among things/ situations foreign, and two by way of juxtaposing them with alien landscape.<br />
Chicago traffic lights are likened to a rapid Himalayan river which is then contrasted with the calm and still<br />
Lake Michigan. Such equivalences or contrasts, overarching as they are, while bringing the two cultures in one<br />
frame, serve more importantly as reference points for their mutual critiquing. It becomes very difficult to<br />
conclude as to what is redeemed and what is ridiculed in such a frame of juxtaposition.<br />
In Extended Family , the contrapunctal inter-locking of the alien with the native is terse and pointed:<br />
the dry chlorine water<br />
my only Ganges<br />
the naked Chicago bulb<br />
a cousin of the Vedic sun<br />
In such a dialogic frame, while the poet-persona seems to make his adjustments in alien landscape through the<br />
strategy of equivalences, he is also hinting at the limitations of such an enterprise. The naked Chicago bulb<br />
is his working equivalent of Vedic sun , yet it is too facile an object to be compared with Vedic sun .<br />
Similarly, the Ganges is discovered in the dry chlorine water , yet the equivalence is absurd and remote. The<br />
poet-persona not only belittles the mechanical Chicago life, he also ridicules the obsessive brahmanical lifestyle<br />
back home. It is not that Ramanujan cannot think independently about his cultural landscape, he is employing<br />
Chicago not to assert any fundamentalist or rank nationalist association with his home . Both the landscapes<br />
are juxtaposed, and yet none is redeemed. This in a way belies Jameson s exaggerated account of the encounter<br />
of third-world-cultures with the first world capitalism, wherein he says: none of these cultures can be conceived<br />
as anthropologically independent or autonomous, rather they are all in various distinct ways locked in a lifeand-death<br />
struggle with first-world cultural imperialism .<br />
Straddling between two rich cultures, Ramanujan does not think in exclusive terms as one culture becomes a<br />
ready critical frame for the other. In Take Care , the poet presumably concentrates on life in Chicago, but at<br />
the back of his mind his native landscape works as the reference point. Here in Chicago, the native Kannada<br />
peppergrinders or salt shakers take on the look/ of meat grinders,/ cement shakers . The black/ and<br />
white squares/ of kitchen cloth appear as boxes against boxes/ in the grilled/ city . If the native landscape<br />
provided time enough to stare , in Chicago there is no time/ to stand and stare . A comparative frame is so<br />
inseparably inter-locked in the entire fabric of the poem, that while being a poem on Chicago, Take Care<br />
becomes as much a poem on native landscape.<br />
Through his oft-quoted poem Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House , Ramanujan gives an extended<br />
account of the history of home/nation in terms which are ambivalent and self-critical. He looks back at<br />
home/ nation as a trope of cultural recuperation and dissipation both. It is a matter of concern as<br />
well as contempt. Its present state of inertia is a matter of deep concern. If the poet describes it as a<br />
perfect breeding ground for insects, he does so with a sense of loss. In the sleepy space of this human<br />
habitation, in the absence of real human activity in the form of frequent family get-togethers, only insects lend<br />
life and momentum:<br />
Unread library books<br />
usually mature in two weeks<br />
and begin to lay a row<br />
of little eggs in the ledgers<br />
for fines, as silverfish<br />
in the old man s office roombreed dynasties among long legal words<br />
in the succulence of<br />
Victorian parchment.<br />
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Here Unread library books in the old man s office room become the poet s chosen tropes for the decrepit<br />
home. Home a traditional referent of stability and security at once stands inverted as a referent of stagnation<br />
and unhealthy stasis.<br />
Home, hitherto regarded as the dynamic centre of culture, is underplayed as hub of routine life. As against the<br />
challenges of exiled living, it offers a course of life well-laid out by family-traditions and customs. In Ramanujan s<br />
world-view too, home is domain where women who come as wives/ from houses open on one side/ to rising<br />
suns, on another/ to the setting become accustomed to wait and to yield to monsoons . . . . The poet-persona<br />
has utmost disregard for women as wives, as they easily fit into the scheme of the great house. At the same<br />
time, the persona could be seen as a sympathizer of women as wives, as they are compelled to bear the<br />
tyranny of the great house offering little space for the assertion of their individuality.<br />
To Ramanujan home at one level is a kind of a prison or just a ghetto one is eternally a captive of, at another<br />
level, it is a meeting ground of distant relatives. On the one hand, the poet-persona berates the<br />
tyrannical centripetal pull of home that does not allow an individual any independent and free thinking space,<br />
on the other, he acknowledges home as the site of realizing the communitarian self. It is as much an<br />
institution of self-fulfilment and self-recovery, as it is an institution of self-curtailment and self-erosion. To<br />
Ramanujan it is a kind of blackhole that swallows all the (p)articles that fly around it: Sometimes I think that<br />
nothing/ that ever comes into this house/ goes out. Things come in every day/ to lose themselves among other<br />
things/ lost long ago among/ other things lost long ago . Home s invitational pull yields joy and regret at the<br />
same time.<br />
Home is as much a refuse as it is a refuge. Nothing stays out: daughters/ get married to short-lived idiots;/<br />
sons who run away come back . . . Even the songs of the beggars keep on re-visiting this home: A beggar<br />
once came with a violin/ to creak out a prostitute song/ that our voiceless cook sang/ all the time in our<br />
backyard . Here the word prostitute has serious semantic connotations. It at once relates home to<br />
some kind of a brothel visited and re-visited by its clients namely the family-relations to get a emotional<br />
kick now and then. Home, is thus the site of both permanent ever-lasting emotional bonds and ephemeral<br />
one-night relationships. This prostitutional value of home ruptures the noble notion of home as the sacred<br />
space.<br />
Home is as much a cultural junkyard as it is a place of roots. It is a place where ideas . . ./ once casually<br />
mentioned somewhere/ . . . come back to the door as prodigies and where Letters mailed/ . . . [find] their<br />
way back/ with many re-directions to wrong/ addresses and red inkmarks/ earned in Tiruvella and Sialkot . Its<br />
seminal functional value is that it provides one a ‘permanent address . It is a rarefied confession box where the<br />
poets can easily shed off their sins without any fear of backlash or accountability. They tend to take home as<br />
an innocent space a space too inane and sentimental to counter-argue, to lay its own demands on its<br />
inhabitants. There is a tendency to take home for granted. To Ramanujan, home perhaps stands for abstention<br />
as well as inescapable participation in life. When high modernism of West impinges upon Ramanujan, he<br />
prefers to retreat back to his particular hell only in my [his] hindu mind ( Conventions of Despair ) not for<br />
cultural recuperation or cultural assertion as such, but for temporary relief and respite.<br />
In Ramanujan s double-edged poetic discourse, home is thus raised and erased simultaneously; it is desired<br />
and shunned in the same breath.. It turns towards the nation, as much as it turns away from it. In his topsyturvy<br />
vision, stability is also a synonym of stagnation; security is as much a semantic equivalent of complacency;<br />
tradition could well be an excuse of not-to-change. Never does the poet show the nationalist anxiety of a<br />
persona-in-exile, for no space to him is absolute and perfect. In terms of the poetics of home, Ramanujan s<br />
poetry is poetry of understatement and critical nostalgia, very much distinguishable from the rabid and overstated<br />
poetry of exile .
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
Poet of the Dispersed Self<br />
I<br />
Those who hold a rather orientalized or exotic view of Indian self as an abstract grand construct would find<br />
it difficult to approach Ramanujan as poet of the self at all. The self in his poetry is not that rarefied metaphysical<br />
entity which seeks expansion across time and space. Ramanujan s self is grossly human, it admits faults and<br />
lapses in its making. It is not mindlessly selfless; it claims no purity or unbroken continuity. It is neither original<br />
nor pristine, it is professedly derivative and mimetic. Yet if one were to sum up Ramanuujan s poetry in one<br />
phrase, it is poetry of the self a self highly dispersed and fragmented, reflexive and critical. The poet does not<br />
lament the loss of pristine and essential self, rather he celebrates its disintegration in and across many cultures<br />
and time frames.<br />
Ramanujan s poetry is a celebration of a self that loves to be eternally lost and utterly decentered. The focus<br />
always shifts from evolution of self from an arbitrary origin to its dissipation in different directions with no<br />
visible continuities. The poet accounts for his descent in terms of various fragmentary experiences that compose<br />
and decompose his self perpetually: . . . and even as I add, / I lose, decompose/ into my elements ( Elements<br />
of Composition ). The evolution is traced in terms of those motley and countless forgettable experiences that<br />
foreclose the possibility of his predictable linear growth. The self of Ramanujan evolves, as it dissolves. Far<br />
from being a simple product of father s seed and mother s egg, the poet s self is composed of scary dreams,<br />
the look/ of panic on sister s face/ an hour before / her wedding , the sight of the lepers of Madurai and a<br />
host of other impressions that normally go unaccounted for or even sidelined as minor aberrations in the growth<br />
of the self. The self is not selectively constructed in terms of the sublime or the serious.<br />
Ramanujan s self does not flaunt any foundational unity or a centrality of vision, cracks and fissures within it<br />
are its highlights. The self is a site of a carnival a cocophony of experiences; it undergoes perpetual disintegration,<br />
constantly becoming and unbecoming in one go. The poem Extended Family concludes on a note of the<br />
poet s disintegrating credo thus: My future/ Dependent/ On several/ People/ Yet/ To come . The self is no<br />
longer defined in terms of heritage or a possession that grows and solidifies, rather it is seen as unstable<br />
assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from<br />
underneath. The self is not just a product of past and present, it is also the site of future.<br />
Ramanujan s poetry becomes an unending mirroring process through which the self is continually reviewed<br />
and re-visualized. There is always an unfamiliarity with the reflected self, pointing to a deep divide within. The<br />
reflected self happens to be an uncomfortable parodic version of the poet s real self :<br />
I resemble everyone<br />
But myself, and sometimes see in<br />
Shop-windows,<br />
Despite the well-known laws<br />
Of optics,<br />
The portrait of a stranger,<br />
Date unknown. ( “Self-portrait”)<br />
The reflected self keeps splintering in Ramanujan s poetry till it multiplies into several selves. Mirrors in a<br />
mirror shop/ break me [him] upto how I [he] was/ show me [him] in profile, that is a collage of different<br />
people: whose head I have whose nose. Instead of any metaphysical organic flowing within, the poet s self<br />
experiences a thoroughly pastiched lineage.<br />
The self is spread over different spaces and times; it is like clocks in the clockshop/quartz digital grandfather<br />
and mickey/mouse each showing a different/time all at one ( Not Knowing ). Grandfather and mickey/<br />
mouse are signifiers of distinct cultural sensibilities of India and Chicago respectively. Grandfather represents<br />
time past and traditional authority; mickey mouse stands for virtual time and playfulness. As an Indo-American<br />
poet, Ramanujan keeps hopping between the two.<br />
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In A Meditation, the poet grows all the more aware of the multiple bodies and centres of consciousness into<br />
which he has been split, processed, and distributed. This also goes against the very grain of meditation, which<br />
should ideally integrate the self. Meditation in the poem leads to disintegration. The multiple centers, that the<br />
body is divided into, inter-act with and reflect upon each other in ways that undermine the granted integrity of<br />
the self. The living hands of the poet communicate with a dead one , firm imagined body works with the<br />
transience/of the breathless/real bodies . This communication of the dead with the living or of imaginary with<br />
the real provides the basic excuse for parodic self-reflexivity. Meditation thus involves an unpacking of the self,<br />
its re-vision from within, even if it entails its undoing.<br />
Ramanujan is more a poet of becoming than a poet of being . The self in his poetry is not a product; it is a<br />
process. The becoming is not an easy upward movement of self-realization, it is more a movement of selfsplintering.<br />
The self-in-process is always vulnerable, liable to be distracted and allured by material matrices of<br />
life. In traditional poetics of the self, the role and value of the material is underplayed and even despised.<br />
Ramanujan as a this-worldly poet would reflect on the material foregrounding of the self. He knows that the<br />
contemporary forces of commercialization intervene and highjack man s desire of becoming, the entire credo<br />
of becoming lapses into a project of its commodification:<br />
. . . Men and women run<br />
races in faraway places like Seoul<br />
and Munich, make four-minute miles<br />
beat their own records, to become videos<br />
and photographs that sell shoes.<br />
The lines take a hard look at contemporary athletes and Olympians who rise to stardom overnight and are<br />
easily seduced by the media managers for blatantly consumerist purposes. In the same poem, the poet invokes<br />
a series of images that show how pre-mature and catastrophic the end is:<br />
On the grass of sloping hills<br />
a scatter of white sheep,<br />
unravelling already like the balls<br />
of wool they are going to be.<br />
Balls of wool is what the grand project of becoming ultimately degenerates into. The sudden transformation<br />
or snowballing of a living being into a commercial product is one of the predicaments of self-growth in modern<br />
times. Instead of going higher, man recedes into a product and thus becomes his own caricature.<br />
Ramanujan s self is never definite; it has its own doubts. It comes into existence in the presence of the other<br />
only. This is how Ramanujan would express the predicament of human self:<br />
This body I sometimes call me,<br />
sometimes mine<br />
as if I m someone else<br />
owning and informing this body<br />
that affects me most when it affects<br />
another by look . . .<br />
( “One More on a Deathless Theme”)<br />
The poet imagines himself to be a modern incarnation of mythic man with two backs , a mix of mammal and<br />
a quadruped , a four-armed androgyne . The self is twosome; it is mix of two beings with their back to each<br />
other, a creature part animal and part man, half-man and half-woman. These polarities or hybrid formations<br />
reduce the rarefied self into a mimic man.<br />
Death is regarded as the finale of self s journey into eternity, a leap towards ultimate realization. Even death is<br />
not a state of unconditional release of the soul into a higher stage of evolution. The life-after-death scenario is
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
a hotchpotch of conflicting time frames, a play of various subjective times. Death idealized as an impermanent<br />
and perishable aspect of eternal living, or as gate-way to divine revelation in Hindu metaphysics, takes on an<br />
altogether different shape, puncturing all stereotypical notions surrounding it. In the scheme of Ramanujan s<br />
poetry death is not the marker of self s plunge into soul. It is neither a full stop, nor a continuum; it is a small<br />
change . The transplantation of organs after one s death to other human beings generates a distinct paradigm<br />
of continuity very different from much lionized immortality.<br />
In Death and Good Citizen self s disintegration undergoes postmodern mutation. Disintegration does not lead<br />
to total demise or absence of life, it creates its own avenues of re-integration, The self s life-span is extended<br />
as parts of body are donated to other human beings of other races/ tribes. Like ordinary unthinking mortals<br />
the poet-persona refuses to decompose after his death, he would rather prefer the dismantling of his body<br />
and the transplantation of spare parts taken out from his dead corpse to other needy beings. Instead of<br />
disintegration into anonymity or nothingness, the poet would much like to dismantle his self. Dismantling ensures<br />
a re-connection. The bodily-time is challenged as he donates his Eyes in an eye bank/ to blink some day for a<br />
stranger s brain , and his heart seeks to make connection/ with alien veins .<br />
The poet questions different ways of disposing of the dead body in different communities as each method<br />
forecloses any possibility of the post-death self. The Hindu way of cremating the dead is detrimental to the<br />
growth of self after life: they ll cremate/ me in Sanskrit and sandalwood,/ to a scatter of ash . The poet<br />
regrets that he would not be available to even worms after his death. The Christian way of burying the dead<br />
also is no less harmful to the interests of the self. It too keeps the dead poet-persona out of nature: they ll lay<br />
me out in a funeral/ parlour, embalm me in pesticide, bury me in a steel trap, lock me out of nature/ till I m<br />
oxidized by left/-over air, withered by my own/ vapours into grin and bone . Tissue-grafting holds the potential<br />
of extending physicality into the self after the death. What Ramanujan visualizes is a scenario of checkered<br />
and pastiched post-death, rather than a vision of deathlessness or immortality of the spirit.<br />
Butcher s Tao is also a poem on the post-death disposal of the physical self into various forms. As a Chinese<br />
butcher dismantles the body parts of a bull with a clinical finesse, they are processed into different usable<br />
commodities. Bull s horns go into the making of combs,/ sandals for the pedestrian/ peasant ; its thong and<br />
head are used as kettledrums to scare away/ eclipses from the sun . Bull s blood is used for sprinkling/ on<br />
children with polio . Such a multiple usage of bull s remains ensures a meaningful posterity for the dead a<br />
concern that runs through the poetry of Ramanujan. Recycling of body parts for the benefit of community<br />
guarantees the usability of the self beyond life.<br />
In another poem, Birthdays Ramanujan is not very sure of death as gateway to another life: There is no<br />
evidence as far/ as I can see, which isn t/ very far, to say that death/ throes are birth pangs . On the other<br />
hand, he is very sure of birth as a definite beginning of life: Birth seems quite special/ every time a mayfly is<br />
born/ into the many miracles/ of day, night and twilight . Death is a big unresolved question: but death? . The<br />
poem ends on an interrogative note revealing the poet s rather ambivalent attitude towards death:<br />
….. Is it a dispersal<br />
of gathered energies<br />
back into their elements,<br />
earth, air, water, and fire,<br />
a reworking into other moulds,<br />
grass, worm, bacterial glow<br />
lights, and mother-matter<br />
for other off-spring with names<br />
and forms clocked into seasons?<br />
Death is not moksha or a state of perfect resolution, it is a dispersal of gathered energies . In Ramanujan s<br />
poetry, death is an opening not of one possibility, but many. It marks liberation from one s narrow personal<br />
physical frame to its possible merger into many elemental forms.<br />
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In Ramanujan s poetry death has not been romanticized as a pre-condition for salvation or as a happy leap<br />
towards the liberation of soul the essential time. The poet-persona wants to realize the essence in the<br />
existence, timelessness in time and vice-versa. This simultaneity of two extreme time-frames generates very<br />
unconventional time-structures where their exclusiveness or even hierarchy becomes simply unsustainable. In<br />
his A Hindu to His Body , the poet does not want to relinquish the physical time in favour of eternal time.<br />
After his death, the persona would like to carry his sensuous self in the realm of eternity: let me go with you<br />
and feel the weight/ of honey-hives in my branching/ and the burlap weave of weaver-birds/ in my hair .<br />
Ramanujan s poetry is held together by this kind of tension between the claims of death and life, between an<br />
impossible eternity and an actual transience.<br />
Death annihilates the physical self, what happens to mind after death is a question of speculation. Ramanujan<br />
draws a distinction between mind and matter. Mind is timeless and imperishable, matter is mortal and timebound.<br />
In a poem Postmortem the poet depicts the decay of a female statistician in terms of her physical<br />
degeneration: She could not bear/ the touch of clothes on her skin/ in the last year of her life . At the time of<br />
her death, her mind was full of numbers: A statistician/ Lived alone with numbers/ . . ./ numbers and graphs,<br />
not/ even a cat . After her death her attorney sells off her furniture, TV, VCR etc., but the poet marvels at the<br />
fate of numbers that she had in her mind at the time of her death:<br />
. . . .Her body<br />
went to Science, her attorney said,<br />
the proceeds of her posthumous sale<br />
would go to the <strong>University</strong>, her rugs<br />
lie in my bedroom<br />
and where did the numbers go?<br />
For Ramanujan post-death phenomenon is highly cataclysmic. Mind as consciousness or even memory survives<br />
the death of the physical self, and it is this deathlessness of mind that adds complexity to the poet s idea of<br />
human time. Death is more a state of confusion as it disembodies the incoherent consciousness into the open<br />
space. Death unleashes a carnival of time-frames; it bursts its back/ and gives birth/ to numerous dying<br />
things . These things termed terrifying, intricate beauties are interlocked to eat, grow, sting, multiply .<br />
The word sting is very significant as it reveals the duality in-built in the post-death scenario. In Ramanujan s<br />
poetry, self does not move in one direction, it grows into many sides; it splinters as it moves down from one<br />
generation to another.<br />
II<br />
As a poet more of dissolution than solution , Ramanujan cannot operate within the paradigms of the predictable.<br />
In his poetry, life is not a cause-effect tale, rather it holds surprises, shocks and scandals; it is a story of hits and<br />
misses; it is too complex to be defined in terms of simple Euclidian geometry. This is how the poet would like<br />
to define the self: Not geometric as the parabolas/ of hope, it has loose ends/ with a knot at the top/ that s me .<br />
It can find no metaphor . Self is so checkered and polysemic that it cannot be contained in any horizontal or<br />
homological frame of representation. Ramanujan as a modern poet does not aspire to bridge the gap between<br />
self and its representation; rather he dwells on the fissures between the signifier and the signified.<br />
Foundlings in the Yukon is a poem in which paradigms of evolution work unpredictably. The Pleistocene<br />
times come into life now by an accident . Accident is not very uncommon in Ramanujan s poetry;<br />
rather accident is normal condition of existence. Accidents make strange things happen past distant and<br />
forgotten comes back as immediate present, present may appear the moment of antiquity. In the poem, some<br />
seeds/ in a burrow/ sealed off by a landslide are re-sown after a lapse of ten thousand/ years . The seeds<br />
sprout within forty-eight hours as though, as the poet puts it, long deep/ burial made them hasty/ for birth and<br />
season . The inordinate slowness implicit in long deep/ burial is juxtaposed with the extraordinary speed with<br />
which seeds crave for immediate sprouting in the new soil.
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
The candelabra of eight small leaves drinks up the sun and unfurls much early than the usual gestation span<br />
of three years. The sprouting of the seed into a candelabra is marker of the self bursting into many-branched<br />
tree. The buried past like a pent-up/ centenarian s lust can grow on one s self in no time if it gets congenial<br />
environment, a conducive opening or an outlet. The infants, older than the oldest/ things alive skip million<br />
falls/ and the registry of tree-rings . The linear genealogical constructions of the self are playfully done away<br />
with. An accidental displacement of the fossilized native self, and its subsequent settlement in a different timespace<br />
matrix can result into its rather-too-quick re-birth. The linearity is not exactly reversed but it has definitely<br />
been undermined by the accident of flowering .<br />
The poem KMnO 4 in Grandfather s Shaving Glass can also be read as a poem of the self. It takes on a<br />
structure in which the linearity of self is not radically reversed, but it is definitely mediated by non-linear<br />
vectors. One drop of KMnO 4 in a glass of water unleashes a riot of purple-coloured fine strands: It descends/<br />
slow-motioned by the element,/ unravelled into a loosening skein/ of unravelling strands/ of loose vein,/ trees,/<br />
and filament . The words loosening and unravelling are significant for they stand for the diffusion of the<br />
self. The roots as well as the branches of the tree branch out into all directions, revealing self s manifold<br />
division both below the surface and in the air. If stem gives the impression of stable firmly anchored self, the<br />
roots and branches stand for its widespread expansion. After creating almost a mini, multi-hued storm in the<br />
glass, the drop pales into transparency/ till it leaves again a watercolumn of clarity . The transparency is<br />
slightly blued/ by a past sensation . One drop is enough to bring about a revolution, to triggers off a huge<br />
spectrum of possibilities, to generate an array of colours, till subsumed by the water in the glass. Every subsequent<br />
drop of KMno 4 unpacks its knots/ of darkness till water is brewed/ to winedark . The poem has a linear<br />
evolution as one drop after another of KMno 4 adds hue on hue in the transparent water. But with each such<br />
addition, an unpacking of drop-knots takes place. It is this unpacking of knots [the complexes of the self] that<br />
explains the dynamics of self in Ramanujan s poetry.<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry the self always branches out into non-linear frames and its eventual dispersal into space<br />
creates a situation that helps the poet-persona to experience life in all its heterogeneity. In the poem PAIN:<br />
trying to find a metaphor , this is how the poet-persona describes the branching out of pain in the body:<br />
a nerve in the vice of a cyst<br />
in the bone: a growth like a bonsai tree<br />
spreading like smoke in the mist of an X-ray<br />
vague as a face in a corridor on fire.<br />
First the nerve splinters into a bonsai tree, then it spreads out like smoke on a X-ray film creating a vagueness<br />
about a man behind the flames of fire. Pain thus is shooting forth of local physical malfunctioning of cells into<br />
entire system of the body, it is a burning sensation with definite origin, which with the passage of time engulfs<br />
the whole being. As a matter of pattern, in Ramanujan s poetry, the so-called unitary self branches out, instead<br />
of rising upwards vertically.<br />
III<br />
The physical purity or continuity of the self is under relentless scrutiny in Ramanujan s poetry. Not only does<br />
the self disperse and diffuse into myriad directions, its biological composition itself has many pasts and parentages.<br />
Genetically the self is a site of utter confusion and atavistic reversals. Contesting the notion of self as a<br />
genetically predictable construct, he chooses to dwell on the stray and the most poorly understood genetic<br />
disorder called atavism . This dramatic genetic flaw operates in Ramanujan s poetry as double-edged metaphor<br />
if on one hand it underlines the genetic superstructure of family which one is an inescapable part of, on the<br />
other it disrupts the notion of predictable genetic descent. In this very special way, genes therefore, connect the<br />
poet as much as they alienate him. The mutant is not uncommon, it is the very structure of the self in Ramanujan s<br />
poetry.<br />
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In his On the Very Possible Jaundice of an Unborn Daughter , Ramanujan rather mischievously apprehends<br />
his unborn daughter suffering from jaundice. The pre-occupation of his ancestors with things yellow, he believes,<br />
could be reason of jaundice in his unborn daughter. The apprehensions of the poet are really amusing as they<br />
are far-fetched: the cats tiptoeing from the sulphur mines of the sun/ into the shadow of our house , father<br />
sitting with the sunflower at the window/ deep in the yellow of a revolving chair , daffodil that flaps all<br />
morning in grandma s hands . The yellow-images might cause yellowness in the while of her eyes a<br />
symptom of jaundice. In such poems, the poet does bring out the irrevocability of the family-fold in the making<br />
up of the self, but more important than this is the way he asserts it. There is definitely an element of petty<br />
malice in recounting the evolution of self. The self in Ramanujan s poetry has a genetic history that predates its<br />
birth in the physical form. The unborn is not wished away in Ramanujan s poetry. The self is located between<br />
the dead (past) and the unborn (future).<br />
Heredity or descent is never romanticized in the geneological construction of the self. It is seen as source of all<br />
physical and psychological aberrations in the descendent. The insurmountable grip of heredity is source of<br />
perpetual evil:<br />
Even Accident woos<br />
Only the accident-prone.<br />
Even gambling dues<br />
Are bred in an ancestor s bone.<br />
The poet is not very possessive about heritage as it influences his unconscious in most negative ways. Quite<br />
possibly, the poet has in mind the famous gambling episode of Mahabharata in which Draupadi, the wife of<br />
Pandavas is put at stake. Gambling is therefore a part of his collective unconscious, the samskaras. Such is the<br />
sense of bondage to heritage, that the poet would like his children to remain unborn:<br />
Poverty is not easy to bear.<br />
The body is not easy to wear.<br />
So beware, I say to my children<br />
Unborn, lest they choose to be born.<br />
The legacies are not necessarily very cherishable. The poet as poor father does not want to bequeath his sick<br />
legacies to his progenies. The genetic code is a sentence/ without any term which children suffer. The poetpersona<br />
as father is reluctant to hand over this sentence to his children. The self in Ramanujan s poetry defies<br />
structures and syntax. A structured self is a doomed self. The social, the psychological and the mythical<br />
combine with the biological (i.e. genetics) to determine the limits as well as possibilities of the poet s self. The<br />
rhetoric of genetics being the holistic science of human descent, does not seem to work in the poetic universe<br />
of Ramanujan..<br />
Drafts , yet another poem on the genetic make-up of the poet s self, underlines how deeply the poet-persona<br />
has been programmed by the DNA-code: The DNA leaves copies in me and mine/ of grandfather s violins,<br />
and programmes/ of much older music . To lend sweetness to the tyranny of DNA code, the poet-persona in<br />
his familiar tongue-in-cheek style compares it with sonorous music compositions scripted by his ancestors long<br />
back. What was music then, re-appears in the form of epilepsies and other neurotic convulsions in later<br />
generations: The epilepsies go to an uncle/ to fill him with hymns and twitches,/ by passing me for now . The<br />
music of the past is all noise to the modern poet-persona. The poet-persona deliberately keeps himself away<br />
from the legacy of grandfather s violin strings, only to be trapped by some other funny habits of his forefathers.<br />
There are so many codes that operate on the physical self of the individual, if he escapes one, he is likely to be<br />
caught by the another. Mother has also something to bequeath, once again not as much to him, as to his<br />
daughter:<br />
mother s migraines translate, I guess,<br />
into allergies, a fear of black cats,<br />
and a daughter s passion<br />
for bitter gourd and Dostoevsky; . . .
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
The daughter s passion for bitter gourd has mischievously been combined with her passion for Dostoevsky, a<br />
Russian novelist of The Crime and Punishment fame. People of ordinary tastes cannot appreciate the<br />
psychological depth of Dostoevsky s fiction. Migraines, allergies, taste for bitter gourd and fascination for<br />
Dostoevsky, fear of black cats are mutually co-extensive phenomena/ or traits of a personality. In Ramanujan s<br />
poetry, allergy is not different from passion. Allergy from one thing leads to love towards another. A fear of<br />
black cats in father induces in his daughter a love for Dostoevsky.<br />
In the same poem while conceding a major role to atavism in the genetic reconstruction of human self, Ramanujan<br />
is careful enough to deny absolute value to the genetic code. The genetic forbearings of the typical greenish<br />
eyes of the son are speculated thus; mother s almond eyes mix with my wife s/ ancestral haze/ to give my son<br />
green flecks . . . But very playfully Ramanujan is quick to add: but the troubled look is all his own . Thus the<br />
human self becomes a unique combination of subjective will and inherited physical appearance. This combination<br />
is hardly ever harmonious, it rather generates a caricaturized picture of the persona.<br />
Ecology is another poem based on the principle of atavism. The mother of the poet-persona is allergic to the<br />
flowers of Red Champak trees . But still the mother would not let the persona-as-son to cut down these<br />
flowering trees. True these trees gave her gods and her daughters/ and daughters daughters basketfuls/ of<br />
annual flower , but they also bequeathed for one line of cousins/ a dower of migraines in season . The<br />
inclusion of maternity in the genealogical construction of the human self is significant. One line of cousins<br />
stands for cousins from the maternal side a side usually overlooked in the construction of heritage.<br />
In another mini-poem Tooth , the poet-persona once again locates the source of his toothache in the pain that<br />
his mother had in her tooth right before her death:<br />
The large tooth in my left jaw<br />
aches: it s mother again<br />
complaining of the large tooth<br />
in her left jaw<br />
the week before she died.<br />
It is not only the shape of the tooth that persona inherits from one s forefathers, the pain that any tooth causes<br />
to him is also a part of inherited genetic code. In most of the poems, the poet holds his genes responsible for his<br />
present dis-eases. Mother is the source of pain in fingers as well:<br />
The two fingers you learned to pop<br />
on your sixth birthday<br />
crook and ache now,<br />
like mother s on her sixtieth. (“Saturdays”)<br />
What pained mother in her old age troubles the poet right from his childhood. More than the umbilical-chord it<br />
is the thread of maternal genes that informs the persona from within. The descent through disease is almost<br />
uninterrupted. Diseases are reminders of relationships. They lend a distinct family stamp on the individual self<br />
of the poet-persona, even though they may be utterly undesirable. Undesirable is very much an integral part of<br />
Ramanujan s poetic make up.<br />
In some of the poems, Ramanujan questions the purity of genes that one so proudly inherits. The purity of the<br />
lineage is ridiculed. The notion of a well-defined family-tree has been challenged in A Poem on Particulars .<br />
Through the metaphor of an orange, the poet dismisses the idea that the fruit belongs to a particular tree.<br />
Rather, it belongs to a family of trees even the dead and the unborn trees of the family. He says:<br />
I have heard it said<br />
among planters:<br />
you can sometimes count<br />
every orange<br />
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Poetry<br />
on a tree<br />
but never<br />
all the trees<br />
in a single<br />
orange.<br />
The self in Ramanujan s poetry is a site of many beings, multiple parentages, real as well as phantom. One<br />
orange subsumes the history of not just one tree, but many trees of the same family. It is a fruit of long<br />
genealogical struggle spanned over time and space.<br />
In his poem The Hindoo: he doesn t hurt a fly or a spider either , the poet observes the presence of a<br />
perpetual outsider in his self. The poet recounts how once his great swinging grandmother was waylaid by<br />
fisherman lover in the Madras harbour and how his Great Grandfather kept mum over the entire episode. It is<br />
the unrecorded presence of the unofficial other that makes the self in Ramanujan s poetry so impure and<br />
tentative. The use of metaphor timeless eye for great grand-father has serious cultural connotations. It<br />
stands for India s non-violent metaphysical past which did not permit even hurt[ing] a fly or a spider either .<br />
The aggressive other has taken advantage of India s passivity. The solemnities of the origin or purity of<br />
descent is de-mythicized in the poem.<br />
In his poem Lines , genes they become construct of time and space. The genes of the parent do not add up<br />
to making of the self of the poet-persona: His or is it her, parts of yours, but they do not add up/ to who you<br />
are . In a different time-space matrix, genes undergo alteration:<br />
Clones subtly gone wrong<br />
make you wrong unmake your sense,<br />
change your toilet habits<br />
as if you re in a different time<br />
zone, . . . (“Lines”)<br />
As an Indian living in America, the poet seems to accord greater value to the immediate cultural environment<br />
than to the genes one inherits from the forefathers. Of course, when the genetic code is overtaken by the<br />
cultural code, it is violence to the self:<br />
. . . , you develop knots<br />
in your fingers and you feel<br />
sudden streaks of orange heat<br />
across your chest.<br />
The root of the poet s physical unease lies in his genes going wrong in a different time zone. This rupture in the<br />
body pre-empts the possibility of a linear physical growth of the poet-persona.<br />
The dead as living presences possess the consciousness of the poet. There is no way he can ignore them. It is<br />
genetics as well as religious beliefs that combine together to yield space to the dead in the present of the family.<br />
The Hindu belief of another life after death makes him search the lost ones in his immediate present all the<br />
more. In Some People , the poet while attending a conference/ on Delhi milk and China soyabean , is<br />
suddenly overtaken by the image of dead wife . Suddenly he sees your [his] wife from another life/ wed<br />
and left behind in childhood,/ now six weeks dead, yet standing there/ in raw-silk and in sandalwood footwear .<br />
Elements of Composition offers an exhaustive checklist of elements that go into the making of the atavistic<br />
self of the poet-persona. Besides the usual stuff of father s seed and mother s egg , the poet s self is a site of<br />
so many atavistic presences. Inputs as varied and distant in both space and time as Millennia of fossil<br />
records/ of insects , body prints of mayflies , a legend half-heard/ in a train , twisted lives of epileptic<br />
saints go into the constitution of the poet s self. The persona links our biological heritage back to non-human<br />
primate insects and flies. In another poem he brings reptiles into the heritage-fold as well: . . . all over me are<br />
greenish/ soft underbellies of ancestral/ crocodiles and tortoises/ the silent thud of their bloodbeat ( in rem<br />
time ). The family tree takes on epic dimensions as it penetrates beyond three four knowable generations<br />
into a past that goes back to pre-recorded times, to fossilized history. It is this act of ancestral remembrance
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
and acceptance that keeps the poet s self, dynamic as well as unstable: and even as I add/ lose, decompose/<br />
into my elements .<br />
Ramanujan as a Poet of Love<br />
Love as a romantic sentiment is an anomaly in modern reflective poetry, yet it continues to figure as its seminal<br />
trope that lends momentum, albeit dialectically, to its own growth. One might even describe modern poetry as<br />
a parody of erstwhile love poetry, a dialogic engagement with its rosy, purple, sensuous vision of pastoral life,<br />
a playful reversal of its unproblematic idealizations. No longer just a signifier of intimacy and warmth, it<br />
emerges more as a perversion, a kind of morbidity, a behavioral flaw, an aberration in the personality, an<br />
eccentric desire, a weird emotion that splinters the self into a disorder and asymmetry. The use of phrase<br />
reverse romanticism is therefore quite pertinent as it sums up the subtle reversal of ideals in Ramanujan s<br />
poetry.<br />
Let us consider love poems addressed to the estranged wife directly. There are three love poems for a wife .<br />
In Love Poem for Wife, 1 , the poet-persona contests the very efficacy of adult marriage with its in-built flaw<br />
of unshared/ childhood . His wife, he finds, is much closer to her brother, whereas he and his sister-in-law are<br />
mere blank cut outs in their [wife and her brother] old drag-out fights/ about where the bathroom was/ in the<br />
backyard . The poet-persona is so thoroughly disgusted with the hypocrisy of adult marriage that he would<br />
much like to continue the incests/ of childhood into marriage . He endorses the old Egyptian practice of<br />
marriage within family. Another suggestion to mitigate the trauma of adult marriage is equally retrogressive.<br />
Ramanujan as a failed husband, would much prefer child marriage as a possible way out of overcoming the<br />
problem of unshared childhood built in adult marriage:<br />
betroth us before birth,<br />
forestalling separate horoscopes<br />
and mothers first periods,<br />
and wed us in the oral cradle<br />
and carry marriage back into<br />
the namelessness of childhoods.<br />
Orality as culture of the yore is Ramanujan s ideal of a harmonious familial past. If marriage is to approximate<br />
high Hindu ideal of marriage as union of two souls at all, then wife and husband must grow together right<br />
from childhood, even before their births. Wife as a relation thus could be seen as the very site of expatriation<br />
which fails to wean the poet-persona away from the mother s pull. Had the poet-persona gone to US much<br />
before his birth, he could have shown interest in American history and culture, a late entry when he had already<br />
acquired a definite cultural make-up entails an element of alienation that he eventually suffers. Marriage in this<br />
context becomes a trope of exile .<br />
In another Love Poem for a Wife 2 , once again the distinct cultural background of the wife is narrated with<br />
such an enviable passion that any possibility of emotional union with her looks remote and distant. The wife<br />
blessed as she is with her inheritance in all its richness does not pay much attention to the poet-persona s<br />
passionate overtures. The wife s cultural past is recounted in terms of her vehement foregrounding in mythos,<br />
history and natural bountifulness of Kerala, the region she belongs to. Her changing syriac face has to do<br />
with chameleon/ emerald/ wilderness of Kerela . Her mythic/ regional consciousness is highlighted through a<br />
playful relationship thus: a small cousin to tall/ mythic men, rubberplant / and peppervine . The print patterns<br />
on her dresses have been copied locally/ from the dotted/ butterfly . . . full of the colour schemes/ of kraits and<br />
gartersnakes .<br />
One reason that Ramanujan distrusts his wife is her prurient permissive past. In Any Cow s Horn Can Do It .<br />
The wife is shown growing cold at remembering how was she belted by father/ standing on a doorstep/ with<br />
a long strip of cowhide/ and the family idiom/ the day he caught her/ in the hotel lobby . In Love Poem for<br />
Wife 1 , the poet-persona as husband doubts her integrity; he makes an issue what his wife just dismissed as<br />
an innocent/ date with a nice Muslim friend/ who only hinted at touches . As against the insular and impeccable<br />
Hindu past of the mother, the wife s past is impure and adulterated.<br />
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In Ramanujan s exclusive family, the wife is more a rival to the mother and the daughter, than a positive<br />
relationship. In Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees , the mother-fixated persona at once compares wife s<br />
love with mother s warmth: you re not Mother/ certified dead but living on, /. . . ./ You remind of the difference .<br />
America as the exiled poet-persona s abode, despite all material promises is no match to the emotional comforts<br />
that his motherland, left behind years ago, would have provided. Unborn daughter pre-occupies his mind even<br />
though he posts letters to the wife:<br />
Dear woman, you remind me again<br />
in unlikely places like post offices<br />
where I lick<br />
your stamps, that I must remember<br />
you re not my Daughter, unborn maybe<br />
but always<br />
present: . . .<br />
Both dead mother and unborn daughter outlive the live wife in terms of their hold on the consciousness of<br />
the poet-persona. Wife despite all her efforts to play mama/ sob-sister/ daughter who needs help with arithmetic/<br />
even the sexpot nextdoor remains an Another, the faraway/ stranger who s nearby . The poet-persona is as<br />
much an Another as her wife is. Another could as well be a signifier of Alien-nation. The irony implicit in<br />
the expression stranger yet nearby sums up the predicament of an expatriate in an alien location, his temporary<br />
abode.<br />
In the poem the poet-persona addresses his beloved as Dear woman , which itself is a very impersonal way<br />
of addressing a relation as close as that of wife. As a woman, she reminds him of all woman-relations around<br />
him, including the mother and the daughter. She reminds him of the continual presence of certified dead, but<br />
living on mother, as well as unborn may be/ but always/ present daughter in his male self . The impressions<br />
that the persona inherits and the legacies that he might pass over to his progenies impinge upon his present<br />
marital life. As a son to a Mother , and a father to an unborn Daughter , he is unable to identify his wife s<br />
position vis- -vis himself. In moments of awareness, he discovers a stranger in his wife: I forget at night and<br />
remember at dawn/ you re not me but Another, the faraway/ stranger who s nearby . Wife/beloved is seen in<br />
terms of differences she has vis- -vis the persona s dead mother and unborn daughter. Genes help the<br />
poet-persona relate himself, albeit inconveniently to his family, but they also happen to be the major stumbling<br />
block in his marital life. The family trees of both husband and wife are different, hence their marriage as<br />
solemn pledge to life-long bonding is unreal and impossible. After instinctual honeymoon, in the daylight of<br />
realities the distinctness of the two individuals becomes all too clear.<br />
In other two love poems for his wife, the persona is torn between the pulls of biological code on the one hand<br />
and demands of cultural codes on the other hand. In Love Poem for Wife I , he goes on to suggest marriage<br />
of brother and sister as a possible solution of his dilemmas. At least brother and sister belong to the same family<br />
tree both genetically and culturally:<br />
. . . . Probably<br />
only the Egyptians had it right:<br />
their kings had sisters for queens<br />
to continue the incests<br />
of childhood into marriage.<br />
Genes serve as befitting paradigms of postmodernity as they root and uproot the poet-persona simultaneously.<br />
Ramanujan as father to a young daughter evinces enough maturity to talk about the love affairs of his daughter.<br />
Most of the love-poems deal with the love-longings of the daughter. Her free and frank exchange of ideas on<br />
issues pertaining to love engenders boldness in the poetic idiom of the poet. The approach between the two<br />
does not betray hierarchy of relationship. No wonder when the daughter approaches the father to announce<br />
her love affair with a man much older, he takes it rather sportingly. He cites his own obsession of looking at all
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
the women/ [that] I ve [he has] ever loved as eighteen [years old] forever . Another example he gives is<br />
that of Pierre Bonnard who always painted his wife/ as thirty six/ getting in and out/ of bathtubs . . . Such<br />
playfulness in relations seems to be the only feasible working principle among Ramanujan s family-relations.<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry, affection towards the daughter is always counter-posed with hatred towards the wife,<br />
once again pointing towards the poet-persona s unqualified disliking for the outsider in his inner space. The<br />
daily routine of the poet-persona begins with a walk before dark with my [his] daughter , and ends with a<br />
bed time story/ of dog, bone and shadow. A bullock cart/ in an Eskimo dream ( A Routine Day Sonnet ). The<br />
image of bullock cart in an Eskimo dream in a very succinct and telling way sums up the bi-cultural mindscape<br />
of the daughter. The bedtime story is marker of native inputs that go into the making of the girl-child.<br />
The bonhomie and playfulness during the day that the persona enjoys in the company of his daughter proves to<br />
be short-lived. Night however is the period of acrimony, as the poet-persona as husband wake[s] with a start/<br />
to hear my [his] wife cry her heart/ out as if from a crater in hell . The routine day sonnet comes to a violent<br />
and brazen end: she hates me, I hate her,/ I m a filthy rat and a satyr . In another poem, Eyes, Ears, Noses,<br />
and a Thing about Touch , the day s bought flowers/ [are] crushed into a wife s night/ grouses .<br />
In Ramanujan s poetry, incest as relation is not looked down upon. The poet does give enough suggestions<br />
about his incestuous relationship with sisters and cousins. Though there are not exclusive poems on the relation<br />
of sister, yet she does feature in some poems as an ancillary character. The incestuous overtones of Ramanujan s<br />
persona cannot be brushed aside as mere suggestive. The gaze on sister s braids in the following lines from the<br />
poem Snakes is not just brotherly, it is pure and plain male voyeurism:<br />
Sister ties her braids<br />
with a knot of tassel.<br />
But the weave of her knee-long braid has scales,<br />
their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins,<br />
I look till I see her hair again<br />
The braids remind the persona of glossy snakes that crowd his unconscious as archetypal images of deadly<br />
sensuality and surreptitious sexual motives. In women-centric folk tales, snakes are often lovers or husbands.<br />
On the occasion of sister s wedding, Ramanujan remembers his moments of intimacy with her. When he hears<br />
a single summer woodpecker/ peck-peck-Peck-pecking away at that tree/ behind the kitchen right before<br />
his sisters marriage, both he and his sister wish[ed] a tree could shriek or at least writhe/ like that other snake<br />
we [they] saw under the beak of the crow . Woodpecker could be seen as sister s husband pecking furiously<br />
the sister as tree, which the brother as lover (of her sister) cannot bear. The sudden use of capital P for peck<br />
implies the usage of the word peck in a specific context. The woodpecker s peck attains sexual connotations.<br />
Crow is another metaphor for the would-be brother-in-law holding her sister as a helpless snake in his<br />
beak.<br />
Looking for a Cousin on a Swing is not a poem on the relation of sister, but the cousin here is female one. The<br />
poet-persona s relationship with his female cousin is once again overtly incestuous:<br />
When she was four or five<br />
she sat on a village swing<br />
and her cousin, six or seven,<br />
sat himself against her;<br />
with every lunge of the swing<br />
she felt him<br />
in the lunging pits of her feeling;<br />
and afterwards<br />
we climbed a tree, she said.<br />
The relationship is very much in keeping with Ramanujan s ideal of continue[ing] the incests of childhood/ into<br />
marriage an ideal articulated without any moral hangover in Love Poem for a Wife 1 .<br />
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Poetry<br />
Then there are poems which are not love poems as such because they do not involve a female character.<br />
These are poems on love as an emotion. The attitude of the poet is intellectual. In his Two Styles in Love ,<br />
the two approaches to love have been juxtaposed with each other. The first style of love is akin to the potboiler<br />
stuff of fairy-tales wherein the heroic lovers despite all odds manage to love . There is the anxiety of losing<br />
the lover, if the moment of love is stretched too far : . . and night will be sudden:/ Your one face, found in a rush<br />
of nettles, will be lost . The second style of love is that of patient passion: Love is no hurry, love is no burning;/<br />
it is no fairytale of bitter and sweet . Further he sermonizes: No, no love is sudden/ Coupling hands take time<br />
to kill the frost/ Even leaping Beast shall wait to be bidden/ by Beauty. The poet does not express his<br />
preferred style of love in categorical form, but the second part of the poem seems to be after his heart. He<br />
admires the second style of love more than the first one which is effusive and sudden.<br />
In the poem Still Life , the poet s preference for love as patient flowering comes to the fore. Here instead of<br />
jumping into passionate kissing or passionate love overtures, the poet watches patiently, rather too intently on<br />
the half-eaten sandwich, left in the plate, of his beloved: . . . and I saw the half-eaten/ sandwich/ bread,/<br />
lettuce and salami,/ all carrying the shape/ of her bite . The love is moment arrested or frozen in time, it is not<br />
a liquid impulse. It is not to be frittered away in a hasty impulse, it is to be slowly internalized. Love calls for<br />
patient eye-to-eye to dialogue than feverish physical gestures.<br />
In another poem Love 10 , the poet once again refers to the death of spontaneous love as a theme of lovepoetry.<br />
Love as a sentiment has exhausted itself. It cannot be verbalized afresh for words have also lost the<br />
connotative charge which they were once imbued with. Ramanujan as a poet of love poems expresses his<br />
helplessness in not being able to restore glory to love: Love poems, he says, are not easy to write/ because<br />
they ve all been written before./ Words play dead./ The seasons are trite . The poet deliberately uses the third<br />
person he to distance himself away from the urgency of love. The possibilities of love have already been<br />
speculated over and again in the past, and there is little left unsaid about it. Neither the times are such as to<br />
arouse new sensations of love, nor the language is such as to arrest its finer nuances. Mere verbiage does not<br />
constitute love poetry.<br />
Lover is more an object of rivalry than possession. Love poetry presupposes an unqualified lyrical adoration of<br />
the lover a gesture no longer possible in critical times such as ours. Therefore the poet as lover recognizes<br />
the impossibility of love as subject of poems any longer thus: Love poems are not easy to write/ for anyone<br />
present: their lips are sore,/ hearts elsewhere, or just full of spite. Love-in-separation is supposed to be more<br />
fervent and effusive than love-in-meeting, but in Ramanujan s poetry neither meeting nor separation inspires<br />
love. The absent beloved(s) is (are) easily forgettable. The lover fails to remember any more/ the colour of<br />
their eyes . Dead beloved also slips away from memory. After the initial sting of sorrow , there are ironies<br />
of relief , which make the lover oblivious of his dead beloved(s).<br />
Beloved present, absent or even dead none is capable of generating a true and sustaining impulse of love in<br />
the poet-persona, If there is still Love, unwritten , it cataracts his [the poet s] sight . Lover has turned totally<br />
insensitive to the feeling of love. The sense of exhaustion which the poet suffers partly stems from the fact that<br />
as a translator of ancient Tamil love poems, the poet realizes his effort of writing love verses does not match<br />
the vivacity and vividness of the original love poetry of the yore.<br />
Despite his strong advocacy for patient love, the poet is always aware of dark side of beastly passions inside<br />
the physical self. In The Day Went Dark , such dark passions do overpower him. The woman as beloved has<br />
always invited weird responses from the poet-as-lover. Ensnared by the turquoise eyes and whirlpool-like<br />
naval of his beloved, the poet simply lapses into the zone of dark, primitive and beastly desires: and the day<br />
went dark/ my hands were lizards,/ my heart turned into a hound . Once again the delicacy and subtlety of<br />
romance is undone by way of invoking images of lizard and hound.<br />
Patient love is not denial of love as an emotion. Being not in love is a state of loss and confusion. Love 2: what<br />
he said, groping is a poem about the state of mind of a lover who loves someone/ not in love . It is a state of<br />
groping under water/ You no longer see/ eye to eye , Lights loom, [like] dead/ oranges in a fog . It is a state<br />
of blurred vision, it is losing one s glasses, it is a sensation of estrangement from familiar places/ faces. The<br />
senses are benumbed as they fail to feel the fuzz/ on a beach/ or a familiar cheek . The bright and sunny day<br />
is at best semi-lit: All day it s late/ afternoon .
A.K. Ramanujan<br />
Suggested Questions<br />
1. Give a critical estimate of A.K.Ramanujan s poetry in terms of its thematic richness.<br />
2. Discuss at length A.K.Ramanujan as an Indo-Amrican poet?<br />
3. What are the stylistic features of Ramanujan s poetry? To what an extent does he depend upon his<br />
poet-predecessors?<br />
4. Discuss Ramanujan as a poet of distinct religious sensibility? Does he advocate a narrow sectarian<br />
perspective of life?<br />
5. Give an extended critique of Love Poem for Wife 1 ? In what sense can the poem be approached as<br />
love poem?<br />
6. A.K.Ramanujan is poet of this world. of reality around him. What is his attitude towards Hindu<br />
metaphysics?<br />
7. Discuss A.K.Ramanujan as an Indian Poet. To what an extent does the poet abide by the so-called<br />
Indian values ?<br />
8. The self is the poetry of A.K.Ramanujan is not linear, nor does it evolve in one direction. Comment<br />
and illustrate from the poems prescribed in the syllabus.<br />
9. Ramanujan s poetry borders on the comic. Cite examples from his poems where the serious is<br />
articulated in non-serious terms.<br />
10. A.K.Ramanujan has written a number of poems on family-relations? Would you consider him a poet<br />
of family values?<br />
11. In what ways does Ramanujan break free from conventional Indian way of life? Would you consider<br />
him a poet beyond nationalistic boundaries?<br />
12. Ramanujan s poetry is poetry of remote fears and fanciful apprehensions. Do you agree?<br />
13. The concerns of A.K.Ramanujan the poet are the concerns of ordinary man. Do you agree? Argue<br />
and illustrate.<br />
14. Discuss A.K.Ramanujan as a post-colonial poet. How does the poet subvert the colonial paradigms<br />
of knowledge?<br />
15. Ramanujan s poetry is essentially autobiographical. Discuss and illustrate?<br />
16. Indian <strong>English</strong> poetry as a whole evinces little political consciousness. Would you consider Ramanujan<br />
as poet of well-laid out political choices?<br />
Suggested Readings<br />
1. A.K.Ramanujan The Collected Essays of A.K.Ramanujan, Delhi:OUP, 1999.<br />
2. Special Issue of Indian Literature (162, July-Aug, 1994) on A.K.Ramanujan<br />
3. A.N Dwivedi The Poetic Art of A.K.Ramanujan, Delhi: B.R.Publishers, 1995.<br />
4. Ramazani Jahan, The Hybrid Muse, Chicago & London: <strong>University</strong> of Chicago Press, 2001<br />
5. Bruce King Three Indian Poets, Delhi:OUP, 1991<br />
6. Surya Nath Pandey (ed) Millennium Perspectives on A.K.Ramanujan, Delhi:Atlantic, 2001<br />
7. M.K.Bhatnagar (ed) The Poetry of A.K.Ramanujan, Delhi: Atlantic, 2002<br />
8. Rama Nair, Of Variegated Hues: The Poetry and Translations of A.K.Ramanujan, Delhi: Prestige,<br />
2002<br />
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WALLACE STEVENS<br />
Poetry<br />
Domination of Black<br />
Sunday Morning<br />
Idea of Order at Key West<br />
Study of Two Pears<br />
Of Modern Poetry<br />
Peter Quince at the Clavier<br />
Contrary Theses<br />
Holiday in Reality<br />
(from Oxford Book of American Verse)
Wallace Stevens<br />
Unit-9<br />
Wallace Stevens<br />
1. The Writer and His Age<br />
Wallace Stevens was born in a small town Reading in the East of Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879. His<br />
father Garret Stevens was an attorney of Dutch origin and his mother Margaret Catherine who was a school<br />
teacher before her marriage was also a keen musician and a piano player. She also sang religious hymns to<br />
her children every night. While the father was a successful attorney concentrating on providing the best of<br />
education to his three sons, the mother was a deeply religious woman. Later on, Wallace Stevens confessed<br />
that he inherited his imagination and love of arts from his mother and his pragmatism from his father. The<br />
early life of the poet was spent in Reading and he not only graduated from Reading Boy s High School in<br />
1897 with merit but also explored on foot and on bicycle the lovely countryside around Reading. George<br />
Silencing has pointed out in his excellent book Wallace Stevens : A Poet s Growth (Louisiana State <strong>University</strong><br />
Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1986, P.4) Mount Penn, Mount Neversink, the fields of Oley, the Sehuyllcill,<br />
Perkiomen, and Tuepehocken rivers-place names often reflecting the settlers, German and Dutch heritage<br />
became for Stevens a personal arcadia, an inexhaustible pastoral landscape for the intrepid explorer and<br />
future poet. It is from this world, surrounding his family, church and school, that Wallace Stevens origins as<br />
a poet spring. Later on, Wallace Stevens confessed to his wife Elsie that the early years of his life spent in<br />
and around Reading were the most happy phase of life spend in nature s midst. There was a touch of the<br />
great Romantic poet Wordsworth in Wallace Stevens. His most famous poem Sunday Morning is a vivid<br />
portrayal of the sublime in nature.<br />
From 1897-1900 Wallace Stevens was a student at Harvard, the most famous and perhaps the oldest of the<br />
educational institution of America. At Harvard, the young man came in contact with Russell Loines who was<br />
a keen lover of poetry. He was also editing a literary magazine called The Shadow. Wallace Stevens<br />
interest in poetry made him join a literary club named the Signet. In his second year at Harvard, he joined the<br />
OK. which was a literary group led by George Santayana, a famous Spanish philosopher who had joined the<br />
faculty at Harvard. The contact with a distinguished teacher and philosopher like George Santayana stimulated<br />
the imagination of the young poet. He seriously began to dream of becoming a poet and one of his juvenile<br />
poem s beginning with the line Cathedrals are not built along the sea provoked George Santayana into<br />
writing a poem as a rejoinder to the young poet s poem. Later on, George Santayana s famous literary study<br />
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion was published during the young poet s last year at Harvard. It left<br />
an impact on the mind of the young poet who wanted to live a life of dreams. Consequently, young Wallace<br />
Stevens was slowly getting alienated from his home and his family.<br />
While at Harvard, the young poet got a number of letters from his father Garret Stevens who urged him to<br />
become practical and follow an occupation which might provide him economic security and social status. On<br />
November 13, 1898 his father wrote to him Our young folks would of course all prefer to be born like<br />
<strong>English</strong> noblemen with Entailed estates, income guaranteed and in choosing a profession they would simply<br />
say How shall I amuse myself but young America understands that the question is starting with nothing<br />
how shall I sustain myself and perhaps a wife and family and send my boys to college and live comfortably<br />
in my old age. (Ibid, p. 19). As a young American of Dutch origin, Wallace Stevens knew that he did not<br />
have the advantage which an <strong>English</strong> noble s son had and he decided to leave Harvard after three years<br />
without taking a degree. He went to New York and tried to become a journalist. He had an illusion that he<br />
could be both a successful journalist and a dedicated poet. He had a modest success as a journalist but the<br />
profession didn t provide him adequate social and economic security. He also fell in love with a young woman<br />
named Elsie of Reading but due to his struggling career in New York he had to postpone his marriage with<br />
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Poetry<br />
her for five years. He longed to roam the countryside in and around Reading in Elsie s company but economic<br />
necessity kept him grinding and working like a machine in New York.<br />
He also began to feel that he could not lead a life of dreams and speculation, as his mentor George Santayana<br />
had inspired him at Harvard, and he had to live a practical life, a life of deeds which may provide him<br />
adequate economic security and high social status. He grew more and more alienated from his family and it<br />
was not a wonder, that when he married Elsie at Reading in 1909 no member of his family was present. It<br />
showed how deeply Wallace Stevens was alienated from his family. He got married and Elsie stayed with<br />
him in New York but they did not have a social life which could make the young bride relish her stay in a<br />
mega city like New York. While the young bride missed her life in a small town like Reading, her husband<br />
complained to her, and promptly at nine O clock tomorrow the stale round of the office will commence all<br />
over again and I must grind for six days before I can get back to the sun. (Ibid, p. 43). In spite of being a<br />
married man, Wallace Stevens led a sort of mechanical life which made him prefer solitude to company. Like<br />
many great American writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens<br />
too lived a life of isolation and brooding and his journal is a proof of his introspection and brooding. Dissatisfaction<br />
with journalism as a career forced Wallace Stevens to join New York Law School and after his professional<br />
education he was admitted to the bar on June 29, 1904. Initially, he didn t like the profession of law but his<br />
becoming an attorney fulfilled his father s dream that his son must follow his father s profession. The profession<br />
of law prepared young Wallace Stevens to live a life of deeds, a practical life that could provide him adequate<br />
social and economic security.<br />
He worked for some time as an attorney in New York but it was in 1916 that he joined Hartford Accident and<br />
Indemnity company in Connecticut, New England. His work involved a lot of travelling to the Midwest and to<br />
the South, including Florida. His visit to Florida opened his eyes to the lush greenery of the warm and bracing<br />
beauty of the state. He also became the vice-President of the company which marked the climax of his life<br />
of deeds. His life of dreams had been postponed but not stifled completely. As is well known, he kept on<br />
plodding during the day but at night he kept on writing poems. Harriet Monroe had started publishing Poetry<br />
in the year 1902. It is a journal that has celebrated its centenary last year. Some of the war poems of Wallace<br />
Stevens were published in November 1914 issue of Poetry. The publication of, his poems in a prestigious<br />
journal like Poetry gave some recognition to the poet. He sent some more poems to Poetry but Harriet<br />
Monroe returned them because she found the poems recondite, erudite, provocatively obscure. (Ibid, 247).<br />
Many critics are of the view that the poems of Wallace Stevens are not only Romantic but obscure and<br />
difficult as well. His first anthology of poems Harmonium was published in the year 1923 when he was forty<br />
four years old. With this publication his life of dreams started and it came to an end with his collected Poems<br />
in 1954. He died of cancer in the year 1955 after being recognized as a major American poet of the twentieth<br />
century. He wrote at a time when Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams were writing in<br />
America. T.S. Eliot had settled in England and published The Wasteland in 1922. While Wallace Stevens had<br />
a Romantic streak, he developed as a modern poet in America. His preoccupation with imagination was<br />
strengthened by his friendship with William Carlos Williams who was preoccupied with objective reality, that<br />
is the reality that exists outside the human mind. Ezra Pound, the most daring inventor and editor of modern<br />
poetry was a friend of William Carlos Williams. He was also one of the Pioneers of Imagism in which the<br />
stress is on the hard, concrete and sometimes starting and shocking images. The impact of imagism is most<br />
clearly visible in Wallace Stevens famous poem Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird .<br />
How a native of Reading of a Dutch origin became a great modern American poet is a fascinating story. If<br />
you want to know more about it, kindly read George S. Lensing s Wallace Stevens: A Poet s Growth .<br />
2. Major Themes and Works<br />
Harmonium (1923) was the first major work published by Wallace Stevens in which there are poems like<br />
Domination of Black, Sunday Morning and Peter Quince at the Clavier. These are the three poems prescribed
Wallace Stevens<br />
for your study. Harold Bloom has described these poems as a celebration of the sublime in nature, an<br />
awareness of change and mortality and a quest for transcendence amid the flux of life. There are also<br />
influences of nineteenth century poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats and Walter Peter. From Wordsworth<br />
Wallace Stevens derived the quest for the sublime in nature, from Keats a preoccupation with beauty and the<br />
death of gods, and from Walter Peter a preoccupation with beauty in life and nature, beauty that was momentary<br />
and short-lived. Like John Keats, Wallace Stevens also felt, what the imagination seizes as beauty must be<br />
true whether it existed before or not. .<br />
The first poem in Harmonium is Earthy Anecdote . It is a fascinating poem in which a dramatic encounter<br />
between the bucks and a fire cat has been graphically delineated in distant Oklahoma. While the bucks went<br />
clattering , the fire cat bristled in the way. The bucks which were making a noise turned to the right, and<br />
turned to the left, the fire cat leaped and confronted the bucks. In this romantic encounter, the fire cat<br />
seemed to have an upper hand. According to Prof. V.Y. Kantak the fire cat with its leap stands for the<br />
imagination of the poet which is able to confront successfully the bucks which stand for the mundane reality<br />
and the hurly burly of human life. In other words, Earthy Anecdote is a picture of the interaction between the<br />
imagination and humdrum reality. This is the major thematic concern that is present in nearly all the poems of<br />
Wallace Stevens. It is no wonder that the chapter four of The Poetry of Wallace Stevens by Robert Rehder<br />
(St. Martin Press, New York, 1988) has the title, My Reality-Imagination Complex.<br />
Le Monocle de Mon Uncle is another important poem in which the cooling of passionate love has been<br />
described by the narrator, Mon Uncle. He is like a rabbi who ironically castigates his erotic passionate self,<br />
Le Monocle, for forcing himself on a reluctant woman whom he describes as the radiant bubble. The<br />
narrator is a foolish and romantic lover who has the illusion that the intensity of sexual love would never<br />
decline. The ironical and sarcastic stand of the narrator is an index of the fact that the Romantic poet that<br />
Wallace Stevens was slowly transforming himself into a modern poet who is keen to face the most unpleasant<br />
reality of human life. The mask of the rabbi that the narrator puts on is another indicator of the poet s<br />
objectivity and self-criticism. Mortality affects not only human life in general but the erotic impulse as well.<br />
Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird is another significant poem in which, with the perception of a<br />
modern painter the blackbird has been described. Harold Bloom is of the view that the blackbird is a symbol<br />
of man s fate in the modern world. To know the blackbird is to know one s own self in the modern age of Two<br />
World Wars and Hiroshima (1945). The Emperor of Ice-cream is another well-known poem from the poet s<br />
first anthology. The title of the first anthology of poems by Wallace Stevens is also an index of his preoccupation<br />
with music, something he had imbibed from his piano playing mother, and also for his quest for harmony<br />
between the individual and the community, the heavenly and the earthly, the reality and the imagination.<br />
Ideas of Order was the second anthology of poem published by the poet in 1935. It was a critical time in<br />
post-war America and the economic crisis that began in 1929, The Great Crash, led to the failure of the<br />
banks and the corporate institutions, the pauperization of a section of the middle class, the working class and<br />
the rural poor and the rise of radicalism and anger among major writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck<br />
and Eugene O Neill. Wallace Stevens, however, continued to write poems from the point of view of an<br />
aesthete, that is a lover of beauty. You will study in detail The Idea of order at Key West which is one of<br />
the major poems of his second anthology. It is again a poem that reminds us of William Wordsworth s The<br />
Solitary Reaper in which the great Romantic poet had celebrated the moving song of an unknown young<br />
woman in Scotland. What Wallace Stevens does is to Juxta Pose the song of an unknown woman against the<br />
roar of the sea near Key West, a low-lying island near the state of Florida famous for its natural beauty.<br />
There is no other poet except Walt Whitman who has celebrated the beauty, the varied beauty of America as<br />
exuberantly as Wallace Stevens has done. Farewell To Florida and Lions in Sweden are two other important<br />
poems in this anthology. While Farewell To Florida is a poem in which the warm beauty of the state is<br />
contrasted with the cold leaflessness of his native town Hartford in New England, Lions in Sweden is a<br />
fanciful projection of man s craving to negotiate the far-off frontier. In the poems of Wallace Stevens lions<br />
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Poetry<br />
are a symbol of the distant ideal. There seems to be a grain of truth in the charge of radical and progressive<br />
literary critics that much of Wallace Stevens poems in this anthology, in particular, are poems of escape. As<br />
an aesthete he keeps on dreaming of lions while America was suffering from the Great Crash of 1929. His<br />
poem Mozart, 1935 also shows his preoccupation with the transcendental genius of Mozart, the greatest<br />
musician of Europe, and the narrator urges his contemporaries, poets and artists, to rise above the temporal<br />
and achieve the perfection that Mozart had achieved in his life time. Wallace Stevens pays a moving tribute<br />
to Mozart in the last paragraph of the poem:<br />
We may return to Mozart,<br />
He was young, and we,<br />
We are old.<br />
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Thomson Press (India) Limited, 1974, p. 132.<br />
The Man With The Blue Guitar (1937) was the third anthology of poems published by Wallace Stevens. The<br />
poem The Man With The Blue Guitar is the longest poem celebrating the man who plays on the blue<br />
guitar. The blue guitar is a symbol of a poet or artist of imagination. Robert Rehder is of the view that the blue<br />
guitar is, perhaps, inspired by a painting of Pablo Picasso, the greatest painter of the modern age. In that<br />
famous painting, The Picture , in haunting and melancholy shades of blue, shows an old man sitting<br />
cross-legged on a window seat, playing a six-stringed guitar. (The Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Robert<br />
Rehder, p. 311). The man is old and emaciated but the blue guitar enables him to present things as they<br />
appear to a sensitive artist or poet. The following four lines convey beautifully the stand of Wallace Stevens:<br />
They said, you have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are? The man replied, things as they are ,<br />
Are Changed upon the blue guitar .<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 165<br />
In other words, modern poetry and modern art, do not portray things as they are. They portray reality as<br />
perceived by the mind of a sensitive poet or an artist. Far from being a mirror of the surface aspects of reality,<br />
the blue guitar enables the poet or an artist to illuminate the hidden and the far from obvious aspects of reality.<br />
The function of poetry is to be a lamp that illumines darkness than be a simple mirror. There is no wonder that<br />
The Man With The Blue Guitar is one of the most memorable poem written by Wallace Stevens.<br />
As the second world war was going on 1939-45 the poet s next anthology of poem s Parts of A World was<br />
published in 1942. You will study a number of poems from this anthology like Study of Two Peers, of Modern<br />
Poetry, Contrary Theses (I) and Contrary Theses (II). While Study of Two Peers is an authentic portrait of<br />
two peers as seen by a sensitive painter, of Modern Poetry is an attempt to present the modern poet as an<br />
actor on a new-fangled stage and a metaphysician in the dark, twanging an instrument, twanging a wiry<br />
string ..<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 240.<br />
Contrary Theses (I) and (II) are short poems in which an attempt has been made to present the paradox of<br />
the modern age. In Contrary Theses (I) the grapes, plush upon vines, have been juxtaposed against a soldier<br />
walking before the narrator s door. The luxuriance of nature has been described along with a soldier who<br />
stalks before my door. Ibid, p. 267. This is the modern world in all its starkness, nature is bountiful but man<br />
is ready to stalk and be a killer. The killer is not very far from the narrator s door. Keeping in mind the mood<br />
of the time, the last poem in the anthology is aptly titled Examination of the Hero In a Time of War. There<br />
is a quest for a new kind of man, a superman as conceived by Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw who could save<br />
the modern world from anarchy and violence.<br />
Transport to summer (1947) was the next anthology of poems published by Wallace Stevens. The last poem<br />
that has been prescribed for your study Holiday in Reality belongs to this anthology and is preoccupied with<br />
the January sun . A sun in an almost colorless, cold heaven. (Ibid, p. 312). In such a bleak and cold
Wallace Stevens<br />
world, Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake. (Ibid, p. 313). It is the juxtaposition of the<br />
January sun and spring that brings out the strange nature of the reality in this world. What seems to be real<br />
to the ordinary, conventional people of the world, has a touch of the unreal for the narrator of the poem.<br />
Esthetique Du Mal is another important poem in which the tragedy of father-son relationship has been most<br />
trenchantly expressed. The life of the son becomes a punishment because the father is stern and unforgiving.<br />
Both the father and the son stick to their way, their dream, their aspiration and the result is that both of them<br />
are utterly exhausted and alienated. One cannot help remembering the stormy relationship between Wallace<br />
Stevens and his father Garrett Stevens.When Wallace Stevens had been courting Elsie at Reading and<br />
sometimes visited his home along with her, his father curtly told him, If you re going to consider our home<br />
just a hotel, just a place to bring your laundry, you might as well not come at all. We come to know from<br />
Georges. Lensing that this was the last he saw of his father. (Wallace Stevens: A Poet s Growth, p.44).<br />
Notes toward a supreme Fiction is another long, rambling poem in this anthology. In this poem there is<br />
ephebe, a young Greek citizen, who is initiated into the mystery of life and literature. In the fourth section of<br />
the poem there is an elaborate evocation of the mystery of life. What appear as opposites, man and woman,<br />
day and night, the imagined and the real, winter and spring, music and silence, north and south are an intrinsic<br />
couple. They are opposites and yet interdependent. The captain and his men, the sailor and the sea, the sun<br />
and rain are also plural like two lovers. Reality is so large and comprehensive that it embraces and encompasses<br />
all of these contraries. One is reminded of the great <strong>English</strong> Romantic poet William Blake who has a more or<br />
less similar grasp and appreciation of the phenomena of life. There is no wonder that Notes towards a<br />
Supreme Fiction, along with The man With The Blue Guitar, is counted as one of the most profound and<br />
moving poem written by Wallace Stevens. It is governed by the reality-imagination complex of the poet. This<br />
anthology also contains Sketch of the Ultimate Politician in which there is a trenchant and satiric portrait of<br />
the ultimate politician of the modern age. The ultimate politician has been pictured thus :<br />
He is the final builder of the total buildings,<br />
the final dreamer of the total dream,<br />
or will be.<br />
Building and dream are one.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 335<br />
The Auroras of Autumn (1950) is the next anthology of poems by Wallace Stevens. Robert Rehder is of the<br />
view, This is the work that establishes him as a great poet. (p. 54). Harold Bloom is also of the view, In his<br />
later sixties, Stevens began to write with an uncanny clairvoyance that critics have been slow to apprehend.<br />
(Wallace Stevens : The Poems of our climate, p. 253). Among the striking poems of this anthology are The<br />
Auroras of Autumn, The Woman in Sunshine, What We See Is What We Think and An Ordinary Evening.<br />
There is a precision of images and economy of means in these poems that is lacking in the poems of Harmonium.<br />
For example, in The Auroras of Autumn there is a vivid description of the movement of the wind :<br />
A wind will spread its windy<br />
grandeurs round<br />
And knock like a rifle-butt<br />
against the door.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 414<br />
The image of a rifle-butt shows the deadly ferocity of the wind. The image is neither vague nor romantic. It<br />
is an image that shows that in spite of his Romantic sensibility and Keatslike belief in the sanctity of the<br />
imagination, Wallace Stevens had learned from the imagists like Ezra Pound and achieved a hard precision in<br />
the use of words and images. One is reminded of another great modern poet William Butler Yeats who<br />
retained his Romantic sensibility and belief in the primacy of the imagination but learned to use startling and<br />
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Poetry<br />
hard images from the French symbolists like Charles Baudelaire and the Imagists like Ezra Pound. There is<br />
no wonder that till the age of seventy Wallace Stevens continued to grow as a poet. Robert Rehder is of the<br />
view that Stevens resembles Yeats, Valery and Rilke in that they all composed most of their best poems<br />
after the age of forth, and, in the case of Stevens and Yeats, the bulk of their best work was done when they<br />
were over forty. Theirs is the poetry of maturity. (p. 44)<br />
Nowhere is this maturity of thought and expression better expressed than in his poem An Ordinary Evening<br />
in New Haven. This is the last of his great poems and shows the poet s preoccupation with the nature of<br />
poetry. The poet does see through his imagination but he cannot escape the phenomena of life. The poet<br />
affirms, we seek / Nothing beyond reality. The Collected Works, p. 471. It is the poet s capacity to negotiate<br />
with the hidden and the deeper aspects of reality that helps him in producing poetry that is not only a mirror<br />
but also a lamp, a lamp that illumines the dark corners of the poet s mind. New Haven stands as a symbol of<br />
the deep and mysterious aspects of reality which a poet has to negotiate through his words and images.<br />
Reality is a house that has many rooms. It is physical, it is solid but it is equally more than physical. The poet s<br />
mind in perception is as real as the object or the idea that it perceives.<br />
It was in 1954 that The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens was published to mark the completion of<br />
seventy five years of his life.<br />
Wallace Stevens wanted to call his collected poems The Whole of Harmonium . (Robert Rehder, p. 302).<br />
He felt that all his poems were preoccupied with the reality-imagination complex and together they amounted<br />
to one single, individual attempt to explore reality in all its depth. Later on, he changed his mind and did not<br />
insist on retaining the title, The Whole of Harmonium. The poems under the section, The Rock were also<br />
included in this definitive anthology. Three of the most remarkable poems under the section, The Rock are To<br />
an old Philosopher in Rome, The World as Meditation and Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. The<br />
first poem is a moving account of the death of his Harvard teacher George Santayana in Rome. The process<br />
of the gradual decay of the man who inspired him to live a life of dreams and be a poet has been described<br />
poignantly as the majestic movement / of men growing small in the distance of space. (The Collected<br />
Poems, p. 508). Rome was far away from Wallace Stevens, but in spite of the distance, he could feel its<br />
solemnity and majesty as if the death was occurring in a neighbourhood. The World as Meditation and Final<br />
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour are two other fascinating poems in which the interior landscape of the<br />
poet s mind has been graphically depicted. While in the first poem, Penelope has been waiting for Ulysses, in<br />
the second poem there is a paramour, a woman within the poet s mind that has been evoked. The paramour<br />
does exist in flesh and blood but the poet s imagination makes her more real, more tangible than any other<br />
object in the world. There is no wonder that God and the Imagination are one (The Collected Poems,<br />
p. 524).<br />
Wallace Stevens , suggestion that his collected poems constitute The Whole of Harmonium was not<br />
accepted but it has a grain of truth. Whether it is an early poem like Sunday Morning or a late poem like Final<br />
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, the voice of the imagined woman is always audible in Wallace Stevens,<br />
poetry. That woman has been visualized as the interior paramour. It is the dialogue between the poet and his<br />
interior paramour that makes his poetry so resonant and appealing. Psychologists tell us that there is a<br />
woman within every man and there is a man within every woman. A genius is bisexual. It encompasses both<br />
the male and the female. There is no doubt that Wallace Stevens was a genius.<br />
[If you want to know more about it, kindly read the chapter two, The Woman Won, The Woman Lost in<br />
Wallace Stevens : A Mythology of Self, by Milton J. Bates, (<strong>University</strong> of California Press, Berkeley, Los<br />
Angeles, London, 1985)].<br />
3. Placing the Writer in the Literary Tradition, bringing out his Contribution<br />
As a reaction to decadent Romanticism that prevailed in the early decades of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot<br />
said that while there may be a place for Romanticism in life, in poetry and in literature there was no room for
Wallace Stevens<br />
Romanticism. He had in mind the decadent Romanticism that flourished in England towards the end of the<br />
nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. There was Oscar Wilde who led the life<br />
of an aesthete and a dandy and denied the social utility of poetry and literature. There was Dante Gabriel<br />
Rossetti who made a cult, a religion of beauty, and did not see anything in life except beauty, beauty as<br />
perceived by the senses. There was Walter Peter who said that a Romantic hungered for beauty that was<br />
singular and strange. One can understand that the cult of beauty that flourished both in life and poetry<br />
towards the end of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the didactic poetry that was written in the<br />
Victorian England by poets like Tennyson, Browning and Matthew Arnold. The decadent Romantics lived in<br />
an ivory tower and did not understand that nations like England and Germany were involved in a cut-throat<br />
competition for oversea markets and power to derive the maximum advantage from the growth of capitalism<br />
as a global system. There is no wonder that the crisis of capitalism led to the First World War (1914-1919)<br />
which led eventually to the growth of modernism in poetry and literature. Modernism as practiced by T.S.<br />
Eliot and Ezra Pound was a reaction to decadent Romanticism.<br />
It was towards the end of the eighteenth century, after the French Revolution of 1789, that Romanticism<br />
developed in England. It asserted the right of the individual to defy authority and live a life of freedom- liberty,<br />
equality and fraternity were the ringing slogans behind the French Revolution which led to the abolition of<br />
feudalism and monarchy in France. A Republic was established in France which alarmed the vested interests<br />
and monarchs all over Europe. The common people of England felt that a new dawn, an era of liberty,<br />
equality and fraternity would be ushered in and decadent monarchy would be abolished. Historically speaking,<br />
Romanticism was a radical shift in the history of Europe and involved a transition from feudalism and monarchy<br />
towards a Republic in which the rights of men and women were guaranteed by law. The liberating influence<br />
of the French Revolution has been described by the great poet William Wordsworth in his famous poem The<br />
Prelude :<br />
“Bliss was in that down to be alive,<br />
To be young was Heaven.”<br />
As a literary movement, Romanticism began with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads by William<br />
Wordsworth in the year 1978. There was a radical note in the poetry of William Wordsworth who described<br />
the life of the beggars, the maid servant and the leech-gatherer. He also celebrated the sublime beauty of<br />
nature and attacked vehemently the greed of the rich. He also affirmed that he would like to be a pagan who<br />
believed in old god and goddesses rather than be a hypocritical Christian. The note of social protest and the<br />
individual s right to revolt against corrupt authority was also visible in the poetry of the second generation of<br />
Romantics like Lord Byron and P.B. Shelly. It is true that John Keats, the last of the great Romantics, began<br />
as an aesthete and a lover of beauty and paganism, but even his quest for beauty also involved a confrontation<br />
with pain and suffering. He did not live in an ivory tower as most of the decadent Romantics lived towards<br />
the end of the nineteenth century. The Romantics were, however, in their preoccupation with the imagination,<br />
the sanctity of the individual, the hunger for a life of the senses, the love of nature, the love between a man<br />
and a woman, more or less united and they were both lovers and critics of the life of their time. Like Robert<br />
Frost of America, a contemporary of Wallace Stevens, they would have also affirmed that they had a lover s<br />
quarrel with the world.<br />
After the First World War (1917-19), Modernism developed both in poetry and literature and also in other<br />
arts, notably painting. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were the pioneers of the movement and the Imagists stood<br />
for a new kind of poetry, new both in sensibility and style. According to a note in The Oxford Companion to<br />
American Literature, (Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press, New York, 1968, p. 401), Imagism, poetic movement of<br />
England and the United States, flourished from 1909 to 1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets<br />
(1915), included the use of the language of common speech, precision, the creation of new rhythms, absolute<br />
freedom in the choice of subject matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.<br />
One can see that Modernism and Imagism were a reaction against the sentimentalism, utopian thinking and<br />
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Poetry<br />
vague images found in the decadent Romantic poets of the nineties. While Ezra Pound concentrated on the<br />
hard, clear-cut, shocking images, T.S. Eliot said that the modern poet is one who is able to encompass the<br />
squalor, boredom and beauty of urban life. While the Romantics were preoccupied with the beauty of the<br />
pastoral countryside, the modern were preoccupied with the squalor, boredom and beauty of urban life. If<br />
Charles Praudelaire was preoccupied with the boredom, pain, and nausea of Paris, T.S. Eliot mirrored the<br />
seediness, squalour and boredom of London.<br />
In the realm of painting modernism led to the growth of Impressionists who rejected realism in which an<br />
object was presented as it appeared to a man of normal sight. There were painters in France like Degas,<br />
Monet, Manet, and Renoir. They distorted the hard outline of an object and depicted it as it appeared to the<br />
imagination of a painter of unusual sensibility. As a group, the Impressionists, were more concerned with<br />
moods and sensations rather than with the mere observation of details. They were also preoccupied with the<br />
subtle effects of light and shade of an object. There was in France, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) who went<br />
beyond Impressionism into the structural analysis of an object in nature and with his extraordinary insight<br />
could see the cube, the cone, and the cylinder in nature. Robert Rehder is of the view that the influence of<br />
Paul Cezanne s landscape is perceptible in Wallace Stevens Study of Two Pears (p. 206). As we all know,<br />
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) of Spain was perhaps, the greatest modern painter of the world. He was also the<br />
painter who is supposed to be the master of cubism and modern art.<br />
Where does Wallace Stevens fit in this scenario? There is a native American tradition of Romanticism in<br />
which we have poets like R.W. Emerson, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. While Emerson was a<br />
Transcendentalist who believed like the <strong>English</strong> Romantics that the individual had immense possibilities of<br />
growth, Walt Whitman was a poet who celebrated the landscape and the common people of America with a<br />
Romantic ecstasy. Emily Dickinson was an intensely solitary poet who peopled her solitude with her<br />
overwhelming imagination. Robert Frost was a lover of nature who had a lover s quarrel with the world. Carl<br />
Sandburg was a poet who celebrated the city, Chicago, and the burly-shouldered workers who had built the<br />
city. When we look at the early poems of Wallace Stevens, especially Sunday Morning and Peter Quince at<br />
the Clavier he looks like a cross, a hybrid of a nature-loving Wordsworth and beauty-obsessed Keats. There<br />
is also a tinge of Walter Pater in his stress on the transitoriness of beauty in this world. But when we look at<br />
his later poetry, The Man With the Blue Guitar, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, An ordinary Evening in<br />
New Haven and To an old Philosopher in Rome we find that there is a hard precision in the use of concrete<br />
images, a sustained intensity of vision, and firm tone which is entirely his own. Like W.B. Yeats, another poet<br />
with a Romantic streak, Wallace Stevens could be described as a neo-Romantic poet of the modern age who<br />
had learnt precision in the use of images from the Imagists, and a subtle perception of reality from the<br />
Impressionist painters of France. [If you want to know more about Wallace Stevens, a modern poet, you<br />
could read the first chapter I was the world in which I walked (p.1-55) from Robert Rehder s excellent study<br />
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (St. Martin s Press, New York, 1988)].<br />
Summary:<br />
4. The Text and its Detailed Critical Summary and Glossary<br />
Domination of Black<br />
It is a poem in three unequal paragraphs, the second one being the largest consisting of eighteen lines. The<br />
first and the last paragraph consist of ten and eight lines. In all, the picture is that of a dark night in the<br />
countryside. The title Domination of Black seems to imply the preponderance of darkness over the plants and<br />
the animal Kingdom.<br />
The narrator visualizes the countryside at night. The colour of the bushes, the fallen leaves and the colour of<br />
the hemlocks are dark. Darkness seems to become deeper and makes one turn in one s room and also<br />
surrender turn in to the wind. In other words, the narrator withdraws from the comfort and security of
Wallace Stevens<br />
a room and surrenders to the wind in the countryside. The narrator has used the phrase turn in both in the<br />
sense of to withdraw and also in the sense of to surrender to a larger force. Nothing, however, is darker than<br />
the hemlocks which are large and heavy. The darkness of the hemlocks invades and dominates the countryside.<br />
Their darkness is so overwhelming that the narrator suddenly remembers the cry of the peacocks in the<br />
countryside. Is it a cry of life, a cry of hope against all-pervading darkness in the countryside at night?<br />
With this question in the mind, the contrast between the darkness of the hemlocks and the cry of the peacocks,<br />
it is possible to read the rest of the poem. The tails of the peacocks are as dark as the leaves of the bushes<br />
in the countryside. They are also turning in the wind, that is they are feeling the full impact of the wind. The<br />
peacocks fly from the branches of the hemlocks and their cry seems to sweep over the room. The narrator<br />
hears the cry of the peacocks again and again. He also wonders if the peacocks cry is against the darkness<br />
of the hemlocks.<br />
In the last paragraph we come to know that the narrator is inside the room. From the window, he can gather<br />
how the planets gather and orbit around the earth. From the countryside, the narrator s gaze shifts to the<br />
cosmos, that is the planets orbiting around the earth. When the narrator thinks of the globe and the planets<br />
orbiting around the globe, again he is reminded of the overwhelming darkness of the hemlocks and the cry of<br />
the peacocks.<br />
If the hemlocks symbolize the force of annihilation in a dark mysterious universe, the cry of the peacocks<br />
symbolize a kind of protest against the dark and sinister force operating in the universe. The peacocks are a<br />
ray of hope for the narrator and their cry is, perhaps, a cry of life, an affirmation of life instinct. It is a ray of<br />
hope in a universe where the domination of the black is nearly absolute.<br />
Harold Bloom is of the view that the hemlocks stand for mortality, for death and the peacocks stand for life<br />
in the midst of death.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Hemlocks: plant with finely divided leaves and small flowers from which poison is made. It stands for<br />
death in the context of the poem.<br />
2. Turned in: (colloquial): go to bed, withdraw from contact, surrender to the police; fold or slant in; give<br />
back to those in authority.<br />
Summary :<br />
Sunday Morning<br />
According to Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 27 Sunday Morning<br />
remains Stevens most famous single poem, an eminence achieved at the expense of even stronger poems in<br />
Harmonium. What makes the poem so good and compelling for readers? How are readers supposed to<br />
approach Sunday Morning which consists of eight free verse paragraphs of fifteen lines each?<br />
In the first paragraph of Sunday Morning, the narrator has created the picture of a woman who has put on<br />
a loose robe, a kind of bathrobe. The woman has a kind of dream, day-dream to be precise, and her imagination<br />
makes her travel to Palestine, the holy land, the land dominated by the holy tomb and also the holy blood. She<br />
is also able to feel the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe. (The Collected Poems, p. 27) Needless<br />
to add that the tomb is that of Jesus and the blood is that of the Son of God. The old Catastrophe refers to<br />
the crucifixion of Jesus.<br />
The second paragraph shows the response of the narrator to the situation why should the woman be still<br />
devoted to the dead, that is the son of God who has been crucified long ago? Why should divinity be ascribed<br />
to the silent shadows (and memories) in our mind? Would not the woman find greater comfort and solace in<br />
the sun, the fruit and the green wings seen on the earth? There is no need to look for divinity outside the earth,<br />
the passion of rain or the mood at the falling of snow. The woman s soul has a spark of the divine and in the<br />
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Poetry<br />
words of the narrator, Divinity must life within herself. (Ibid, p.67). The celebration of the varied phenomena<br />
occurring on the earth reminds a careful reader of John Keats, a great nineteenth century Romantic poet,<br />
who had affirmed, The poetry of the earth is never dead.<br />
The narrator has referred to the Roman God Jove in the third Section of the poem. The ancient God had his<br />
mysterious (Inhuman birth) and he was neither breast fed by a mother nor was be brought up in a pleasant<br />
land. He moved among human beings at that time as a muttering king would move among his hinds (that is<br />
workers and attendants). From the fourth paragraph onwards there is a sudden shift in narration. The woman<br />
begins to narrate her own experience of living in the world, the world that is discovered through the senses.<br />
She also says that as long as she can see lively birds fly across the misty fields and hear their warbling, she<br />
senses that she is in paradise. Once the birds go away, not to return, the earth does not seem like a paradise.<br />
It is the beating of the swallows wings in the June evening and the lush greenery of the earth in April that<br />
makes Nature s beauty so tangible and patpable. As a pagan, like words worth s Lucy, she celebrates the<br />
beauty of nature. A paradise is crated on the earth as long as her hunger for beauty is satisfied.<br />
In the fifth paragraph, however, the woman says that her hunger is for beauty that is imperishable, that is<br />
lasting and eternal. The difficulty, however, arises from the fact that the beauty that she can see in nature is<br />
subject to change. This idea of the mutability of nature has been expressed through an extremely striking line,<br />
Death is the mother of beauty. (Ibid, p 68). What she is trying to say is that death is a universal phenomena<br />
and after the triumph of lush greenery in April there occurs the littering of leaves. (Ibid, p.69). That is, after<br />
the end of Spring, the earth is littered with dead leaves. Women who have a passion for littering leaves stray<br />
and lose communion with companions. Nature s beauty is indeed sublime but it is a kind of sublime that is<br />
subject to decay and degeneration. It is far from imperishable. Mortality is something that deeply offends the<br />
woman s paganism and passionate love of nature.<br />
The sixth paragraph starts with a speculation, Is there no change of death in paradise? (Ibid, P.69). If the<br />
paradise on the earth is far from perfect, is the paradise in heaven different from it? Whatever be the reality<br />
of the paradise in heaven, the earthy paradise is subject to deeay and degeneration. There is resplendent<br />
beauty on the earth but there is death as well. This is the strange reality pertaining to the earthly paradise.<br />
The striking line, Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, recurs in this paragraph as well. The mystery of<br />
the sublime and death co-existing on the earth is hard to explain.<br />
The Seventh paragraph is a magnificent recreation of the triumph of nature in summer. A ring of men (why<br />
not women?) gather and chant to the glory of the sun. Those men are, Not as a god, but as a might be.<br />
(Ibid, p.70). They have a savage vitality and their chanting, their sun worship, is a kind of boisterous orgy, that<br />
is a kind of Romantic frenzy and madness. They would also be able to know from where they came and<br />
where they would go. There is a touch of Walt Whitman who believed in the perfectibility of man and also<br />
a touch of William wordsworth s Immortality ode in this sustained paragraph where man is celebrated as a<br />
Godlike creature, a kind of superman with inexhaustible power.<br />
In the eighth and the last paragraph, the voice of the woman is heard again. She hears a voice that tells her<br />
that the tomb of the son of God in Palestine is neither vital nor relevant as far as living men and women<br />
(spirits lingering) are concerned. Jesus, the son of God, lies buried in his grave. We, the men and the women,<br />
of the modern world live in an old chaos of the sun. (Ibid. p.70). The chaos of the sun is a striking phrase<br />
which, perhaps, refers to the modern world in which God does not seem to operate and figure prominently<br />
and our chaotic life is governed by ill-organized, way ward impulses. There is the sublime on the earth which<br />
transports and lifts us out of our petty self but even the sublime in nature is subject to the law of mutability and<br />
death. Towards the end, there is a vivid picture of a deer walking upon mountains and the quail whistling<br />
spontaneously. Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness and lastly a flock of pigeons undulate (move) ambiguously<br />
in the vast sky and eventually after a flight they sink, downward to darkness, on extended wings, (Ibid,<br />
p.70). The flight of the flock of pigeons in the vast sky and Their sinking down to darkness seems to echo<br />
the ups and downs, the rise and the fall of man s life upon the earth.
Wallace Stevens<br />
It is not an accident that the black is dominant not only in domination of Black but is Sunday Morning as<br />
well. In this context, the black is not beautiful, the black is sobering, if not absolutely frightening. The black<br />
is inseparable from the earthly paradise visualized so eloquently by Wallace Stevens. It stands for mortality,<br />
for death.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Peignor: A woman s loose robe, a kind of bathrobe.<br />
2. Cockatoo: A crested colourful parrot<br />
3. Sepulchre: Tomb in this context the tomb of Jesus, the son of God, in Patesline.<br />
4. hinds: old sense : Workers or attendants<br />
5. Multterign: one who is grumbling, always complaining<br />
6. Seraphin: Seraphism, angels of the highest order and rank<br />
Summary:<br />
Peter Quince at the Clavier<br />
Peter Quinee at the Clavier is a poem in which there are four paragraphs of unequal length. The title of<br />
the poem is derived from a character, Peter Quince, a carpenter in Shakespear s Midsummer Night’s<br />
Dream. In the poem, Peter Quince is a worker who tries to play music on the Clavier with his fingers. He<br />
has a keen hunger for music (an art that is subtle) but his fingers are not nimble enough for the task. The<br />
narrator in the first paragraph, consisting of fifteen lines in all, speaks in the first person (I). He admits that his<br />
fingers work on the keyboard and product music. It is audible. There i silos music that he can hear with his<br />
spirit, that is his auditory imagination. Real music does not lie in sounds that we hear. Real music lies in<br />
melody, in harmony that we can hear (and feel) without imagination. One is reminded of a famous remark by<br />
the great <strong>English</strong> Romantic poet John Keats, Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are sweeter . There<br />
is no doubt that Wallace Stevens is a Romantic poet who is attracted by what he sees and hears but he wants<br />
to go deep and see and hear what lies beyond our senses. He wants to appreciate the unheard melodies.<br />
The narrator points out in the latter part of the first paragraph that he is full of desire for his paramour. Music<br />
is more than sound. It releases our strong feelings, our desires. When he thinks of her, he also thinks of the<br />
music of the blue-shadowed silk put on by his paramour. In this context, the music of silk makes him feel the<br />
soft exterior of his paramour. She arouses the same passionate music within the narrator as is aroused by<br />
Susanna among the elders. The elders are saintly men whose eyes turn red with passion as they have a<br />
glimpse of Susanna. When the elders have a glimpse of Susanna having a bath in her garden, their basic<br />
instinct and lust for her is aroused fully. They may not have much blood in their veins (their thin blood) but he<br />
naked glory of Susanna makes their blood tingle and sing.<br />
The first paragraph of the poem is able of juxtapose the nudity of Susanna against the lust of the saintly<br />
elders. It also creates a suspense for an alert reader. What is going to happen? Are the saintly elders going<br />
to retain their purity and piety? Is Susanna, in all her nudity and naked glory, destined to be inviolable, and unravished?<br />
The second paragraph is the largest of all paragraphs and draws attention to Susanna lying in<br />
water that is green, clear and warm. There is so much melody for her that all her emotions are stimulated<br />
enormously. When she comes out of water and walks upon the grass, there is quavering all over her flesh.<br />
There is at that evitical moment a breath upon her hand and the night becomes mute. In silence, she is able<br />
to hear the ample sound of a cymbal and also the roaring of horns. The music of a cymbal and that of the<br />
horns simply overwhelms her, and enters her flesh. The last two lines of the second paragraph, with the<br />
overwhelming sound of cymbal and the horns, perhaps, mark the climax of the human drama engulfing the<br />
innocent, youthful Susanna and the red-eyed lustful elders.<br />
The third paragraph is relatively brief and consists of ten lines. The attendants of Susanna come to the spot<br />
at night. They wonder why Susanna has let out a cry against the elders by her side. They have lamps in their<br />
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hands and the light of the lamps reveals the shame of Susanna. In other words, Susanna has been ravished<br />
and violated by the white-haired, lustful elders. Her dream of love has led to an orgy perpetrated by the<br />
saintly elders. The attendants have a silly smile on their faces and they go away as quickly as they had come.<br />
The last paragraph is a kind of the narrator s response to the stark human tragedy. Susanna has lost her<br />
innocence and purity and the white-haired elders have lost their saintliness. There is no wonder that Susanna<br />
has let out a cry at her defilement by crooked age.<br />
The voice that we hear in the last paragraph is not that of a moralist. It is the voice of an aesthete, that is a<br />
lover of beauty and a lover of music. Where does beauty really lie? Is it fleeting, only of a brief moment, or<br />
does it transcend and rise above the law of mutability operating in nature and in human life as well? The<br />
narrator seems to be of the view that beauty is not objective, existing outside the mind of the perceiver.<br />
Beauty is entirely subjective and it is perceived only for a brief moment by the human mind. In other words,<br />
beauty is fleeting and short-lived. The narrator is able to see a paradox in the world that we perceive through<br />
the senses. The paradox is, The body dies; the body s beauty lives. (Ibid, p.92). As far as an individual is<br />
concerned, the law of mutability operates. Beauty can glow for a moment, as that of Susanna, and it can also<br />
be disfigured and utterly humiliated. Instead of being a glory, it can also become a cause of shame. In the<br />
same way an evening vanishes and disappears. Gardens are also denuded in winter. Young maidens die and<br />
Susanna s exceeding beauty provokes a brutal lust among the saintly, white-haired elders. Finally, death is<br />
inexorable and the most lovely object is rendered worthless and worn-out. In what sense does the beauty of<br />
the body transcend and rise above its decay and degeneration? The narrator s response is the response of an<br />
aesthete and a dandy. The individual objects and persons die, but their memory lingers on in the human mind.<br />
It is only in memory, in the celebration of A maiden s choral and the celebration of the aurora, the goddess<br />
of the dawn, that beauty is immortal and transcends nature s law of mutability.<br />
Beauty in its sensory aspect either dies or is disfigured, by the idea of beauty, an abstraction, ligners on. It is<br />
on this Platonic note of an archetypal beauty transcending the law of mutability that the poem Peter Quince<br />
at the Clavier comes to an end. One may forget the lust of the white-haired, saintly elders, the retreat of the<br />
attendants from the shameful scene, but the image of Susanna in water that was transparent and warm<br />
remains in the mind firmly.<br />
The narrator looks at the episode pertaining to Susanna and the lustful elders with the eye of an aesthete and<br />
a dandy. He doesn t respond to the episode as a moralist and a humanist. The moral dimension is missing in<br />
this fascinating poem.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Basses: lowest part in music, low in tone, deep-rooted.<br />
2. Pizzication: music played by plucking the strings (of a violin) instead of using the bow.<br />
3. Quavering: Shaking or trembling<br />
4. Scarves: a piece of cloth that covers a woman s hair<br />
5. Cymbal: a pair of round brass plates struck together to make a sharp, clanging sound.<br />
6. Horns: Wind instruments<br />
7. Tambourines: Small, shallow drums<br />
8. By zantines: citizen of the East Roman empire: in this context, Susanna s attendants<br />
9. Willow: trees and shrubs with thin, easily bent branches in this context, it stands for Susanna.<br />
10. Simpering: giving a silly kind of smile.<br />
11. Momentary: lasting for a moment; short-lived.<br />
12. Portal: doorway an imposing one of a large building.
Wallace Stevens<br />
13. Cowls: long, loose gown with a hood that can be pulled over the head; the hood itself.<br />
14. Auroral: pertaining to Aurora the Roman goddess of the dawn.<br />
15. Choral: Sung together in a choir.<br />
16. Bawdy: vulgar, lustful; in this context refers to the white-haired elders.<br />
17. Scraping: Throwing away an useless or worn-out<br />
18. Viol: Stringed instrument of the middle Ages from which the modern violin was developed.<br />
19. Sacrament: Solemn religious ceremony in the Christian Church, for example Baptism, Confirmation and<br />
matrimony.<br />
20. Susanna: A woman of Babylon against whom a charge of adultery was brought by two elders which<br />
was false and she was exonerated by Daniel, a Judge, famous for probity.<br />
21. Hosanna: a shout of adoration of God in the Church in this context, the beauty of Susanna is something<br />
Godlike, irresistible for the lusty elders.<br />
Summary:<br />
The Idea of Order at Key West<br />
The Idea of order at Key West is a poem which consists of seven sections of unequal length The first<br />
section consists of seven lines and the second section too has seven lines. The narrator discovers a young<br />
woman singing near the sea at key West in Florida. Key west is a low-lying island near the mainland and is<br />
famous for its beaches. The water of the sea makes a constant cry and it doesn t fuse in the young woman s<br />
song. The narrators, however, feels strongly that She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (The Collected<br />
Poem, p.128). Neither the sea nor the young woman has any mask or pretence. The young woman s song<br />
is uttered, word by word, and the grinding water and the gasping wind at key west are also audible. The<br />
narrator is most keenly responsive to the young woman s song. He makes an honest confession. But it was<br />
she and not the sea we heard. (Ibid, p.129). it is clear that the poet is not alone. He has a companion who too<br />
listens to the young woman s song. It is her song that enters the depths of their being.<br />
The third section of the poem consists of six lines. The narrator says that the sea seems to wrap up (everhooded)<br />
the young woman but in reality she is the maker of the song she sang. He also wonders whose spirit<br />
has animated the young woman. He wants to find out that spirit which is behind her exuberant and resonant<br />
song. The fourth section of the poem consists of thirteen lines in which the narrator speculates if the young<br />
woman s voice has been shaped by the waves of the sea. He also speculates if the summer, the air, and the<br />
clouds have shaped her melody. He is of the view that there is more than the sum total of all that in her<br />
singing. The movement of the sea and the wind sometimes appear meaningless and incomprehensible but<br />
her song speaks to us in a way that nothing else does. It has an irresistible human appeal.<br />
In the fifth section of the poem, consisting of ten lines, the narrator has pinpointed the unique nature of the<br />
young woman s song. It is her voice, so human and direct, that makes us aware of the sky s capacity to<br />
absorb and assimilate it. Further, the solitude of Key West is also measured by her ringing voice. The narrator<br />
says, She was the single artificer of the world. (Ibid, p.129). In other words, without her rolling, ringing<br />
voice the world doesn t seem to exist. The solitude makes her song. So exquisite and compelling. The<br />
narrator sees her alone, striding hear the sea, heaving her heart out in full-throated ease. She becomes a<br />
symbol of a Romantic poet whose poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. There is a touch of<br />
William words worth about her solitary genius.<br />
It is in the sixth section of the poem that we come to know that the narrator has been at Key West, Florida<br />
with a companion. This section consists of eight lines and shows the narrator s response to the classical ideal<br />
of poetry of his companion Ramon Fernadez, a French literary critic. As a critic of poetry his companion<br />
believes that great poetry, like music and painting is a product of order, self control and formal perfection. It<br />
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Poetry<br />
is not a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, as Wordsworth argued in the Preface to the Lyrical<br />
Ballads. Great poetry is the result of meditation, prolonged thinking and a highly literary style imitating the<br />
great poets of ancient Greece and Rome. Imitation was the core of great poetry, not passion and imagination<br />
as Romantic poets argued. The narrator s stand is different from that of a classicists like Ramon Fernadez<br />
and is closer to that of a Romantic Poet.<br />
The Narrator tells his companion that when the young woman s singing comes to an end, they go towards the<br />
town. Night, however, comes to the sea-shore, and light in the fishing boats illumines darkness and an enchanting<br />
scene is crated near the sea. In the seventh and the last section of the poem, Ramon Fernadez, the classicist,<br />
has been addressed by the narrator. The French literary critic looks pale and his pre-occupation with the<br />
virtue of order, self-control and propriety, fail to see any harmony between the passion and the rage of the<br />
maker the young woman and the wild roar of the sea. Something of the roar of the sea also infuses the young<br />
woman. But there is also a subtle difference between the genius of the sea, and the genius of the young<br />
woman. While the roar of the sea is far from human, the young woman s song is passionate and overwhelming.<br />
It speaks directly to our own self. Her song is both human and also mysterious . It is not distant and forbidding<br />
like the sea s constant roar. Ramon Fernadez has such a rage for order and self-control that he would like to<br />
tame the voice of the sea. The word Order is the key word in this poem and it shows the futility of Ramon<br />
Fernadez s passion for Order which can t either explain the sea or the spontaneous song of the young<br />
woman.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Genius: guardian spirit; except ional natural ability.<br />
2. Veritable: real, rightly so called<br />
3. Mask: Covering for the face<br />
4. Grinding: crushing to small par ticks oppressing<br />
5. Gasping: Convulsive catching of breath<br />
6. Dark: deep or somber colour<br />
7. Coral: hard substance built up by marine polyps. Red or pink<br />
8. heaving: rising<br />
9. Plungings: enter into forcefully, diving.<br />
10. Acutest: most keen (in a positive sense)<br />
11. Artificer: Craftsman, maker<br />
12. Striding: waling firmly<br />
13. Descended: Sloped down sank<br />
14. Portioned: divided<br />
15. Portals: doorways<br />
16. Ghostlier: looking more like apparition of a dead person starting shapes.<br />
17. Demarcations: marking boundaries<br />
18. Key west: a low- lying island near the mainland in florid; a popular tourist resort.<br />
Note : Wallace Stevens wrote this poem during his second visit to Key West in 1934.<br />
Summary:<br />
Study of Two Pears<br />
If Peter Quince at the Clavier and The Idea of order at key West are poems steeped in music, and<br />
melody, Study of Two Pears is a poem visualized by one who has the eye of a painter, a French impressionist
Wallace Stevens<br />
painter to be precise, who can respond to the outline, curves and colours of a commonplace object like pears.<br />
The Study of two Pears has largely a visual appeal. The poem consists of six stanzas of four unrhymed<br />
lines each. The narrator s gaze is focused on two pears which constitute a single scene. The pears are two<br />
small objects but eh narrator has used two rare Latin words, Opusculum, paedagogum to begin the poem<br />
which mean two small minor objects. These Latin words impart a sort of dignity to two small pears. They<br />
introduce somewhat indirectly two pears to the reader.<br />
They have also been defined in terms of a series of negations. They are neither viols, a music instrument nor<br />
nudes, that is painting of a nude model. They are also not bottles. They are in terms of shape, unique objects.<br />
They do not resemble any other object in the world. In the second stanza, the narrator brings out the yellow<br />
tinge of the two pears. They also have curves and towards the base they have a bulge. There is also a touch<br />
of red that they have. Yellow seems to be their natural colour but they have a touch of red, perhaps near the<br />
bottom.<br />
In the third stanza, the narrator says that the surface of the two pears is to flat. There are curves and on the<br />
whole they are round, three-dimensional. They taper towards the top. In the next stanza, the narrator is also<br />
able to discern bits of blue over the pears. There is also a hard dry leaf that hang from the stem and it covers<br />
the pears. The yellow found over the pears glistens, shines brightly. There are so many shades of yellow that<br />
gleam over the pears. There is also a tinge of citrons (Lemon-like Fruits), oranges and green over the skin of<br />
the two pears. This is the narrators contention in the fifth stanza.<br />
The last stanza of the poem refers to the shadow of the two pears over the green cloth that is beneath them.<br />
The shadow is like a small drop or a spot on the green cloth. The narrator also points out that the two pears<br />
are not seen as the observer wills are expects. They have an independent existence of their own and the<br />
observer cannot but discern gradually their various tints, shades and curves. With the eye of an expressionist<br />
French painter like Paul Cezanne the narrator has gradually visualized a commonplace object like two pears,<br />
drawing attention to their specific unique features of shapes, curves and colours.<br />
The variegated reality of the two pears has been graphically described by Wallace Stevens in his compact<br />
and modern poem Study of Two Pears. There are no traces of morbid sentiment-ability and vague imagery<br />
as found in decadent Romantic poets. There is a precision in the use of words and phrases which is the<br />
distinguishing feature of a modern poet.<br />
According to Robert Rehder, This poem .. demonstrates how much Stevens learned about vision from<br />
French painting, in this case especially Cezanne . (The Poetry of Wallace Stevens , p.206).<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Opusculum (Latin): a minor work or object<br />
2. Paedagogum (Latin): art or process of teaching learning.<br />
3. Viols: violins<br />
4. Bulging: becoming thick<br />
5. Tapering: becoming narro<br />
6. Glistens: shines<br />
7. Citrons: lemon like fruits<br />
8. Blobs: drops of spots<br />
9. Observer: one who notices reality<br />
10. Impressionism: A school of nineteenth century painters in France among whom Paul Cezanne, Roussean,<br />
and Renior were not important. Of these Cezanne had the greatest influence on Wallace Steven. According<br />
to Paul Cezanne. The great truth is that we believe in the existence of things not through their<br />
surface textures, their light and shadow, their perspective, but through the ideas we bring to them,<br />
through our memories and knowledge of their weight, depth, volume, and substance.<br />
Art and Society, by Sidney Finkelstein, (New york, International Publishers, 1947, p. 234-235).<br />
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Summary:<br />
Of Modern Poetry<br />
Poetry<br />
Of Modern Poetry is, according to Harold Bloom, a weak poem . It is also a poem that has been misread<br />
as a a Typical modernist manifesto against Romanticism. (Wallace Stevens, The Poem of our climate<br />
by Harold Bloom, Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press, Ithaca and London, 1977, p.149).<br />
Before one passes any judgment on the poem, it would be fair to look at the poem steadily and see it whole.<br />
The poem consists for the first paragraph of four lines, second paragraph of twenty lines and the third and the<br />
last paragraph of four lines. If the first and the last paragraph are taken as the prologue and the epilogue of<br />
the poem, the second paragraph is certainly the main body of the text. The whole poem, perhaps, hinges on<br />
the elaborate central section of the poem.<br />
The prologue states that in creating a poem, the activity of the mind is paramount. It is the mind which tells<br />
the creator what will suffice in a poem. There was a time, however, when the mind was not so active in<br />
creation. The poetry then followed a set pattern, repeated the established harm and was bound by the script,<br />
that is the established and standardized norms and cannons of writing poetry. Everything was conventional<br />
and followed the beaten track.<br />
Suddenly, the narrator points out that the Theatre was changed. It changed beyond recognition. The past<br />
could be a reminder of the days gone by. Time had changed much. The poetry of the modern age had to be<br />
relevant the changed time. In the words of the narrator, It has to face the men of the time. (The Collected<br />
Poem p.240). It has also to create a new stage, a new voice for the poetry of our time. The word Stage<br />
in this context refers to the setting of a poem in the modern age. The men and women of our time have to act<br />
and gesture in a mode appropriate for them.<br />
The protagonists of the poetry of the modern era have to mount the new stage and speak what they want to<br />
communicate in the most delicate mode that can be imagined and crated. The audience of the modern age<br />
responds to the insatiable actor s words and gestures without any hesitation. The actor and the audience<br />
have the same emotion and operate at the same wavelength. They become one, inseparable. The actor of the<br />
modern stage had also been visualized as a metaphysician in the dark, as a musician who plays with vigour<br />
on an instrument that produces the right and the appropriate music. The phrase Metaphysician in the dark<br />
refers to the poet of the modern age who endeavors hard to come to terms with the complex reality of the<br />
changed time. He keeps to the appropriate level, to what will suffice-neither more, nor less, with no need of<br />
either rising too high or stooping too low.<br />
The satisfaction that is provided by modern poetry is nearly the same that a man gets through skating, a<br />
woman through dancing and also through combing her hair. When a poem is the product of an act of<br />
the mind, when The metaphysician in the dark tries his utmost to reveal the mystery of existence,<br />
when he cultivates a mode and a voice appropriate to the changed time, there is no doubt that modern poetry<br />
is crated.<br />
The key word or phrase in this poem occurs in the prologue, What will suffice. The idea of appropriateness,<br />
both of matter and manner, content and form has also been suggested in the last few liens of the second<br />
paragraph. In the epilogue, as well, the satisfaction derived from modern poetry has been communicated<br />
through various human activities like skating, dancing and combing one s hair. These activities are of a nature<br />
to provide a kind of aesthetic satisfaction to the doer. The reader of a modern poem also gets ample aesthetic<br />
satisfaction. Far from being a weak poem, of Modern Poetry is a poem that pinpoints the intense mental<br />
activity and also innovation in the use of words and gestures that precedes the writing of poetry appropriate<br />
to the changed time. The poet who dares to dabble in modern poetry is neither a versifier nor a rhyster. He<br />
is a metaphysician in the dark . He has the courage and the stamina to grapple with the mystery and secrets<br />
of the existence on the earth.
Wallace Stevens<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Souvenir: gift, a reminder of the past.<br />
2. Insatiable: that cannot be satisfied<br />
3. Twanging: sound of a tight string or wire being pulled and released<br />
4. Wiry: lean and with strong sinews<br />
5. Metaphysician: One concerned with ultimate reality<br />
Summary:<br />
Contrary Theses (I)<br />
Contrary Theses (I) consists of six couplets in which the paradox of life has been presented. On the one<br />
hand, we have nature in all its luxury and bounty, and on the other hand, we have a soldier walking before the<br />
door of the narrator. There are grapes in abundance upon the vines. The hives are heavy with comb, that is<br />
honeycomb, wax secreted by bees. There are seraphs gathering near the domes of he churches and saints<br />
look radiant in fresh cloaks. Just before the narrator s door, the shadows look smaller on the walls. A sharp<br />
sunlight fills the halls of his bare house. The oaks are smeared with blood and soldier pursues the victim<br />
before, just before his door. While nature is luxurious and abundant, the soldier is on the prowl. He is after the<br />
victim. There are both nature s bounty and fecundity and human destruction going on simultaneously. The<br />
soldier stalks the victim just before the narrator s door. In other words, the narrator has sharply juxtaposed<br />
the bounty of nature against the violence that is embedded in social order, the violence is brutal and not very<br />
far from the narrator s door. The word we live in is full of the contraries of destruction and creativity. This is<br />
the paradox of life that has been trenchantly presented in the poem .<br />
Glossary :<br />
1. Plush: Luxurious and rich<br />
2. Seraphs: The highest of the nine orders of angels<br />
3. Cluster: bunch or group<br />
4. cloaks : loose sleeveless garments<br />
5. Acid: sour, biting, sharp<br />
6. Smears: daub or mark with grease, smudge, defame in this context blood<br />
7. Stalks: pursues stealthily hunts.<br />
Summary:<br />
Contrary Theses (Ii)<br />
Contrary Theses (II) is a short poem consisting of six stanzas of three lines each. It is mid-Autumn. In the<br />
afternoon, the earth and the sky are near. They have also been visualized as grand mechanics who want to<br />
design something new. In autumn, the leaves, that is the wings of the locusts look yellow. There is a man who<br />
walks with his one-year old boy on his shoulder. The sun shines and the dog barks. The baby sleeps. While<br />
the leaves of the Locust are yellow, the Locust itself looks green.<br />
The man wants and looks for a final refuge, a shelter from the extravagant and wild touch of winter. He does<br />
not want to become a martyr and lose his life. The winter is far off. Autumn is present everywhere. The man<br />
walks towards an abstract, a configuration, a complex consisting of the sun, the dog and the boy. The abstract<br />
is, perhaps, the winter which is away. As it is mid-Autumn, there is still a touch of chill. Swans that are<br />
moving in the sky widely have been chilled. The leaves fall from the trees as copiously as notes fall from the<br />
piano. The abstract, the winter is not very far-off but for the moment the winter vanishes from the mind. It is<br />
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Poetry<br />
mid-Autumn in reality. Negroes are playing football in the park. In spite of a little chill of mid-Autumn, it is on<br />
the whole a pleasant time. Winter, severe winter, is only an idea, an abstraction, as deadly and destructive as<br />
locusts can be.<br />
As we all know, locusts are deadly grasshoppers that destroy plants and crops. They are a symbol of death.<br />
If locusts are equated with the deadly winter, the flies and the bees are stimulated by the odor of chrysanthemum<br />
in mid-Autumn.<br />
We do not know if the man with the boy on his shoulder can really find a refuge from the extravagant chill of<br />
winter. We also do not know if there is any link between the man with the boy and the Negroes playing<br />
football in the park. These are the gaps and the silences in the text.<br />
We, however, have a certainty that locusts can be as destructive as the winter. The poem is largely a picture<br />
of mid-Autumn with a touch of chill. The swans are chilled even in mid-Autumn. The winter is far off, it is an<br />
abstraction in the mind. Mid-Autumn is, however, not an abstraction. It is concrete. It is real. But the process<br />
of change, mutability, is on. Autumn would not last long. Winter would come in triumphantly.<br />
If there are contraries in this poem, if there is any paradox, it is between mid-Autumn and the extravagant<br />
chill of winter. On the whole, mid-Autumn is pleasant but the seeds of winter are present in it. The sun, the<br />
dog and the man with the boy on his shoulder would certainly have a harrowing time in winter. Then winter<br />
would not be abstract. It would be concrete and burst in all its fury. Then, perhaps, Negroes would not be<br />
playing football in the park.<br />
All this, however, is a matter of speculation. What is real is mid-Autumn and the winter as deadly as locusts.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Mechanics: one who handles machines<br />
2. Bombastic: pompous, extravagant<br />
3. Contours: outlines<br />
4. Chilling: unpleasantly cold<br />
5. Premises: previous statement from which another is inferred.<br />
6. Verve: energy, vigour<br />
7. Chrysanthemum: a garden plant flowering in autumn<br />
8. Locusts: grasshoppers that devour all crops in the field<br />
Summary:<br />
Holiday in Reality<br />
Holiday in Reality is a poem that consists of two paragraphs of fourteen and twelve lines. In the first<br />
paragraph, the narrator has visualized a scene in which the sun is almost colourless. The sky is cold and there<br />
is no vibrancy, no brightness, no hear in the sun. A touch of yellow can make the sun warm and natural. It is<br />
only the January sun that looks so pale and colourless. It shows the prevalence of severe winter. In that<br />
severe climate, men have been isolated and there is no bond between man and nature There is no bond<br />
between man and man. As a social being, man doesn t exist in such a severe winter. He can exist only if he<br />
can find his earth, his sky, his sea. (The Collected Works, p. 312). Since man is alienated from nature, he<br />
is also alienated from man. A community composed of such isolated men can not live and breathe freely.<br />
They can go to Durand Ruel and still feel utterly lonely and alienated. The January sun is a symbol of the<br />
utterly isolated men who can t live a humane and full life.<br />
In the second paragraph of the poem, there is an invocation of the spring. There are flowers (Judas) and<br />
violets growing everywhere. The spring is loudly visible. It also seems to be real and lasting, not fake. The<br />
trees and their dark-spiced branches grow out, full of vitality and verve. There are buds, there is gold that
Wallace Stevens<br />
falls down (golden leaves), and there is the catbird that gobbles leftovers in the morning. She is half-awake,<br />
not fully conscious. All these objects seem to be real. They are real because the narrator perceives them. If<br />
he doesn t do so, at any point of time, they would cease to exist. The narrator is also of the view that<br />
intangible arrows (Sensations) move and stick to his skin. What is real, spring everywhere, in reality appears<br />
unreal to him. That is, it is like a shadow that may vanish any moment. Spring that initially appears real to him<br />
has also a touch of unreal. It may not last long.<br />
What does the title Holiday in Reality imply? It implies that reality is fluid. In winter, the sun is cold and<br />
devoid of brightness. In spring, one gets a feeling that the sensation derived from spring would not last. It is<br />
fleeting, short lived. Mutability is so prevalent that even the real has a touch of unreal. Both winter and spring<br />
are real and due to mutability (change) they also seem to be unreal. If reality is fluid and utterly subjective, it<br />
doesn t exist outside the human mind. It keeps on changing and teasing men and women. In such a situation,<br />
man can never be comfortable with ever-changing reality. He can never have a holiday, a comfortable<br />
existence as long as reality eludes his grasp.<br />
The central idea of the poem is condensed in this line, Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring. (The<br />
Collected Poems, p. 313). The word umbilical brings to our mind the cord which attaches the fort us to<br />
placenta and the cord is cut after the birth of a child. The word also humanizes spring and we can visualize<br />
its birth and growth. In other words, spring is a part of the cycle of seasons and it is real when we perceive<br />
it and the cycle leads to winter when spring is not real. It is just an idea. That is the dilemma of man. He is<br />
never comfortable with reality. He never feels at home either with spring or with winter. He is ever restless,<br />
disturbed and agitated. The subtle shifts of reality make him a stranger in an ever shifting world.<br />
Glossary:<br />
1. Vibrancy: resonance and brightness<br />
2. Umbilical: cord like structure attaching the fortus to the placenta during the fortus growth in mother s<br />
womb; also suggests the idea of spring s birth, growth and death<br />
3. Argentines: silver or silvery shrubs and plants<br />
4. Gobble: eat leftovers hurriedly<br />
5. Intangible: something that canot be touched or mentally grasped<br />
6. Aix: a city of provence in Southern France. It was the home of the great French painter Paul Cezanne.<br />
He was a painter who painted still life and landscapes in bright animated yellow colour.<br />
7. Stockholm: the capital of Sweden. Famous for its artists and painters<br />
8. Judas: a tree with purple flowers<br />
9. Palabra: La Palabra was a famous orchestra in Hollywood. La Palabra also means the word.<br />
5. Important Questions and their Answers.<br />
1. The poem of Harmonium celebrate the earth. Discuss with reference to the poems you have read.<br />
Harmonium (1923) was the first anthology of poems published by Wallace Stevens. A second edition of<br />
the anthology was published in 1931. This time was a period of social ferment and religious crisis and<br />
T.S. Eliot s The Wasteland was published in 1922 in which the civilization of Europe was described as<br />
sterile and degenerate. W.B. Yeats published his great poem The Second Coming in 1921 in which he<br />
drew a frightening portrait of a post-Christian era in which a savage animal would rule the world and the<br />
Christian values of piety and fellow-feeling would be subverted by naked savagery of the new ruling<br />
class. As compared to these great modern poets who emerged after the First World War (1914-1919),<br />
Wallace Stevens in his first anthology appears to be an aesthete, a lover of beauty in life and nature and<br />
as a sort of a Romantic poet preoccupied with mortality and the survival of the individual. The three<br />
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poems prescribed for study are Domination of Black, Sunday Morning and Peter Quince at the<br />
Clavier. The first poem is a vivid portrayal of mortality and our attention is drawn to the fallen leaves in<br />
the countryside, the dark colour of hemlocks and the spontaneous cry of the peacocks. While the dark<br />
shade of the hemlocks is a symbol of poison and death, the cry of the peacocks is a symbol of life and<br />
vitality. The tail of the peacocks is colourful and a sharp contrast to the darkness of the heavy hemlocks.<br />
(The Collected Poems, p. 9). The title of the poem is also apt and signifies the domination of the black,<br />
which is a negation of life. Although mortality and death are so pronounced, yet the narrator remembers<br />
the lusty cry of the peacocks. The life on the earth is subject to mortality and death doesn t spare anyone<br />
but the cry of the peacocks also can not be overlooked. The theme of mortality and death is also prominent<br />
in Sunday Morning which is one of the most widely read poems by Wallace Stevens. The narrator of<br />
the poem refers to the tomb of Jesus, the son of God, in Palestine and points out that his tomb and his<br />
blood, that is his crucification, does not seem to matter much to the men and women of the modern age.<br />
The idea that mortality and death govern the life on the earth is repeated again and again. The narrator<br />
says, Death is the mother of beauty. (Ibid, p. 68). This is the mystery of life that beauty, the most<br />
luminous beauty, is not able to escape death. In other words, beauty and death are an integral part of<br />
human life. In spite of the dark shadow of death that hovers over us, the sublime in nature has been<br />
memorably evoked in the seventh stanza of the poem. Men gather in a ring and worship the sun which<br />
shines in the sky. They worship the sun the source of life upon the earth with so much fervor that for<br />
a moment they seem to transcend mortality and death. They feel a moment of transcendence and they<br />
behave Not as God, but as a might be. (Ibid, p. 70). It is during such moments of transcendence that<br />
the earth looks like a paradise. Walt Whitman, in the nineteenth century, affirmed man as a God-like<br />
creature and Wallace Stevens does the same in Sunday Morning.<br />
Peter Quince at the Clavier is also a poem in which human life has been presented from the point of<br />
view of an aesthete, a, lover of beauty. There is a beautiful young woman Susanna who has been bathing<br />
in her garden in water that is clear and warm. Her beauty arouses the lust of two white-haired elders.<br />
Their eyes become red due to lust and they make an attempt to rape her. Susanna s attendants come to<br />
the garden with lamps and although it is dark at night Susanna and her shame are revealed. The entire<br />
episode takes place near the garden and the surpassing beauty of the young maiden arouses the lust of<br />
white-hair elders. The narrator makes a point from the point of view of an aesthete and says, Beauty is<br />
momentary in the mind. (Ibid, p. 91). Susanna has been disfigured and humiliated and her transparent<br />
beauty has been defiled. Only the memory of her beauty will linger. Her beauty is also subject to mortality<br />
and death.<br />
Wallace Stevens emerges before us as a Romantic poet like Keats who is primarily an aesthete, that is<br />
a lover of beauty in all its forms. Death is another of his preoccupations and the stern law of mortality<br />
(birth, growth and decam) give to his poems in Harmonium a note of elegy. He does celebrate the<br />
beauty and bounty of the earth and is simultaneously aware of mortality and death. Domination of<br />
Black is a subtle lyric in which life and death are symbolized by the peacock s cry and the hemlocks.<br />
The word hemlock again reminds us of John Keats famous poem The Nightingale in which it has<br />
been pointedly mentioned. While the nightingale saves John Keats from the effect of the hemlock, the<br />
narrator in Domination of Black is comforted by the lusty cry of the peacocks. The juxtaposition of the<br />
darkness of the hemlocks and the lust cry of the peacocks shows to us that life exists in the midst of<br />
death. The earth is beautiful indeed and Wallace Stevens is an aesthete, a lover of beauty.<br />
2. There is no poet except Walt Whitman who has celebrated American landscape as Wallace Stevens has<br />
done.<br />
Wallace Stevens was born at a small town Reading in the east of the state of Pennsylvania. The first<br />
twenty years of his life were spent in Reading and later on he confessed to his wife that they were the<br />
most happy years of his life. He was a good student but not a bookworm. He loved to explore the
Wallace Stevens<br />
countryside around and the valley, mountains and rivers which thrilled him enormously. Later on, he spent<br />
three years at Harvard and more time in New York as a journalist and also as an attorney. Destiny,<br />
however, took him to Hartford, Connecticut in New England. The relatively bare landscape of the region<br />
also excited him. As a professional, he had to go to the Mid-West and also to Florida, the Southern most<br />
tip of the country. The warm and bracing climate of Florida and the lush greenery and the lovely beaches<br />
made an everlasting impression on the mind of the poet. There is no wonder that the variegated landscape<br />
of the American continent figures so prominently in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.<br />
There is a short poem The Snow Man in which the landscape is bare but the pine-trees are crusted with<br />
snow. (The Collected Poems, p. 9). Perhaps, it is a scene of Hartford, Connectient. In his famous<br />
poem Sunday Morning there is a vivid portrayal of April 9 green which is enduring and the birds fly<br />
over the misty fields. When the birds go away from the warm fields, paradise seems to vanish from the<br />
earth. In the month of June, the summer is consummated by the swallows that wing across the sky. (Ibid,<br />
p. 68). Again, it is on a summer morning that men stand in a ring in the open countryside and chant<br />
boisterously a hymn to the sun. They worship the sun because it is the source of life on the earth which<br />
looks like a paradise. As sun-worshippers they realize that they are Not as a God, but as a god might<br />
be. (Ibid, p. 70). Walt Whitman is the only other American poet who has celebrated man as a God-like<br />
creature with a boundless capacity for fulfillment and joy. As a Romantic poet Wallace Stevens also<br />
believes that man can reach the most distant stars.<br />
There is also a vivid portrayal of the garden and the clear, warm water in the poem Peter Quince at the<br />
Clavier. Susanna has been bathing like Venus at a place that looks like Eden and like Eve she is not<br />
aware of the hidden serpent. We all know that the two white-haired elders are the serpent which stung<br />
her viciously. The landscape that is pictured is not only beautiful but is also a symbol of the youthful purity<br />
and innocence of a virgin like Susanna. After his visit to the warm climate of Florida, Wallace Stevens<br />
wrote a remarkable poem Farewell to Florida in which there is an unforgettable picture of Key West<br />
which is a low-lying island near the mainland. As Wallace Stevens left Key West, its vanishing beauty<br />
gripped him. The poet has pictured the scene in these poignant words:<br />
Key West sank down ward under massive clouds<br />
And silvers and greens spread over the sea.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 117<br />
In the last section of the poem, there is a reference to the relatively bare landscape of the north, that is<br />
Hartford in connectient, New England. The poet says with a touch of pathos :<br />
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime<br />
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.” (Ibid, p. 118)<br />
Slime is the key word here. The idea is that the men and the landscape of the North is equally slime.<br />
That filled with disgusting mud and filth. One can detect a not of stark realism in Wallace Stevens who in<br />
spite of his innate Romantic streak has also been able to confront the unpleasant reality of his time. There<br />
is also a touch of incredible pathos because he would not be able to be in Florida again. The poet says :<br />
Farewell and to know that the land is forever gone<br />
And that she will not follow in any word or look, nor ever again in thought. (Ibid, p. 118)<br />
The poet makes it clear that the North is the land of prolonged snow, leaflessness and gloom. He has to<br />
leave the warm, bracing and sunny Florida.<br />
Desting, however, took Wallace Stevens again to Key West, Florida and it was after his second visit that<br />
he wrote one of his major poems. The Idea of Order at Key West. The focus in this poem is on a<br />
young woman who has been singing on the sea-shore. Her song is far more human than the sea s roar.<br />
There is, however, a vivid and graphic portrayal of the sea and its continual roar. It is in the context of the<br />
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sea and its roar that the young woman s song acquires its strange majesty. It incorporates the verve and<br />
vigour of the sea. If the young woman were in a room, her song would not be that romantic and fascinating.<br />
The sun also figures again and again in the poems of Wallace Stevens and both in The Brave Man and<br />
in A Fading of the Sun the focus is on the sun s capacity to sustain the life on the earth. (Ibid, p. 138 and<br />
139). There is a poem Winter Bells in which the poet describes the Jew s rage against chaos, the chaos<br />
of modern life. (Ibid, p. 141). In the same poem, towards the end, the poet has expressed a desire, To go<br />
to Florida one of these days. (Ibid, p. 141).<br />
In other words, Florida becomes for the poet a symbol of a life of adventure and fulfillment. The landscape<br />
that figures so prominently in the poetry of Wallace Stevens is more than a geographical entity. It becomes<br />
a symbol of hope and fulfillment. There is also a short poem of Hartford In A Purple Light in which a<br />
strange, purple light has been pictured which is usually seen in a country like Norway which is near the<br />
North Pole. There is another poem The Auroras of Autumn in which the strange medley of colours<br />
seen in the sky near the Arctic at night has been graphically delineated in these words :<br />
As light changes yellow into gold and gold<br />
To its opal elements and fire s delight. (Ibid, p. 416)<br />
We have come to know from critics like Robert Rehder and Milton J. Bates that Impressist painters like<br />
Paul Cezanne and others had a powerful impact on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Nowhere else can<br />
this impact be felt better than in the poet s portrayal of the American landscape in all its variety.<br />
3. Mortality is the dominant theme in Domination of Black and Sunday Morning. Do you agree with the<br />
statement ?<br />
For a Romantic poet like Wallace Stevens the individual was primary and so was his imagination. The<br />
individual also had the right to pursue life and liberty and happiness. The individual could develop so much<br />
that he could become a God like creature. In secular terms, he could become a Superman who could<br />
control the elements and realize all his dreams. In the poem Sunday Morning, especially in the seventh<br />
section there is a graphic portrayal of men who worship the sun with vigour and fervour. They behave<br />
Not as a God, but as a god might be. (Ibid, p. 70). It becomes difficult for a Romantic poet who<br />
believes in the divinity of man to accept the fact of mortality. The protagonist in Sunday Morning admits<br />
that the old gods have died. Jesus, the son of God lies buried in his grave in Palestine and he does not<br />
seem to mean much to the men and women of our time. Jove, the Roman God, has also vanished and<br />
become a part of classical mythology. The sun, the fruit, the birds give more solace and comfort than<br />
these obsolete gods and angels.<br />
The protagonist in Sunday Morning says that Death is the mother of beauty. (Ibid, p. 68). In other<br />
words, even the most beautiful objects are subject to mortality, that is death. Immortality is only a longing<br />
of man to transcend the horror of death. It cannot easily come to terms with the phenomena of death. If<br />
the mountains, the rivers and the sea seem to transcend mortality, why can t he? This is the feeling that<br />
disturbs men and women in the modern age. The paradise on the earth is subject to mortality and the<br />
protagonist of the poem wonders if the life in heavenly paradise is also subject to mortality. If it is, how is<br />
the heavenly paradise different from the earthly paradise? These are the questions that keep on disturbing<br />
the protagonist in Sunday Morning. Towards the end of the poem, the protagonist again draws a<br />
graphic portrait of the life upon the earth :<br />
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail<br />
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;<br />
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;<br />
And, in the isolation of the sky,<br />
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make<br />
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,<br />
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” (Ibid, p. 70)
Wallace Stevens<br />
While the deer and the quail symbolize the positive aspect of life, the flocks of pigeons are ambiguous.<br />
Their wings are extended in the sky but as darkness deepens they begin to sink and come down to the<br />
earth. The ambiguity of the pigeons flight lies in their sinking in spite of their extended wings. Their<br />
extended wings cannot prevent them from sinking, from ending their flight. The pigeons sinking seems to<br />
imply mortality and death which is inseparable from life. In other words, the image of the pigeons sinking<br />
in darkness is a stern reminder of the phenomenon of mortality.<br />
Domination of Black is also a short lyric in which the darkness of the hemlocks has been contrasted<br />
with the peacocks cry. It is night and the narrator has from his room a glimpse of the fallen leaves, the<br />
bushes in the space outside. He also has a glimpse of leaves turning in the dark and the dark colour of the<br />
hemlocks which is a plant from which poison can be made. All these objects undergo change every<br />
moment and they cannot escape the curse of mortality. The key metaphor is that of the hemlocks which<br />
is associated with poison and death. The title Domination of Black is most appropriate and signifies the<br />
preponderance of mortality and the ultimate triumph of death. It is at this moment of dark despair that the<br />
narrator is able to hear the cry of the peacocks. It is a cry that simply startles and astonishes the narrator.<br />
The peacocks have multi-coloured tails which also undergo a change, like the leaves. The peacocks fly<br />
over the room from the branches of the hemlocks. At that moment, the narrator again hears the cry of<br />
the peacocks. The narrator wonders if the cry of the peacocks is against the darkness of the hemlocks.<br />
He also worders if the lusty cry of the peacocks is an affirmation or a denial of the darkness of the<br />
hemlocks. It is evident that the hemlocks stand for death and for mortality. The has a fear of mortality<br />
and death. He describes his ear in these words :<br />
I saw how the night came,<br />
Came striding. Like the color of the heavy hemlocks<br />
I felt afraid.<br />
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (Ibid, p. 9)<br />
This is the climax of the poem Domination of Black. Both the hemlocks and the night striding are a<br />
symbol of mortality and death. Striding in this context means walking briskly with firm steps. It shows<br />
the inevitable triumph of death and the sternness of mortality. Naturally, the narrator has a fear of death<br />
and also a fear of mortality. It is more than an ordinary fear. It is a kind of terror at the inevitability of<br />
death. Suddenly, the narrator remembers the cry of the peacocks. One can guess that it must be the call<br />
of the peacock during the mating season. It seems to be a call for life, an affirmation of the existence on<br />
the earth. Even if there is domination, and utter sway of death, and mortality, it is difficult to forget the cry<br />
of the peacocks. There is mortality, there is inevitable death but the lust cry of the peacocks cannot be<br />
forgotten. Life continues to flicker and flame strongly in spite of the gloom and darkness of the hemlocks.<br />
4. Sunday Morning is the most widely read of all the poems of Wallace Stevens. Attempt its critical<br />
evaluation.<br />
Harold Bloom is of the view, Sunday Morning remains Stevens most famous single poem, an eminence<br />
achieved at the expense of even stronger poems in Harmonium. But Sunday Morning is a wonderful<br />
poem by any standards. (Wallace Stevens The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press,<br />
Ithaea and London, 1977, p. 27). The poem consists of eight regular stanzas of fifteen lines each and the<br />
narrator is a woman who is sitting in her room on a sunny chair. It is the morning on Sunday on the<br />
woman has a dream, a day-dream to be precise. In her imagination she undertakes a journey to Palestine,<br />
the holy land across wide water. She reaches the holy land where there is Dominion of the blood and<br />
sepulcher. (The Collected Poems), p. 67. One wonders if her journey is a pilgrimage of a devout<br />
Christian. In the second stanza there is, however, a touch of skepticism and the narrator wonders why<br />
she must be a devoted Christian. Jesus, the son of God is dead and his blood, that is crucifixion and<br />
resurrection, do not seem to matter much to the men and women of the modern age.<br />
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What matters to them is the sun, the fruit, green wings of birds and the beauty of the earth. The narrator<br />
also points out that Divinity must live within herself; (Ibid, p. 67). The narrator is also thrilled by the<br />
fury of rain, the falling of snow and blooms in forests. In other words, it is the sublime in nature that<br />
transports the narrator out of herself and makes her feel that the divine is within her.<br />
The narrator is more of a pagan, a pantheist rather than a devout Christian. She also muses about the<br />
Roman God Jove (or Jupiter) and realizes that the ancient God doesn t really rule the modern world. He<br />
has become just a memory of the ancient past. As a pagan and a lover of nature the narrator affirms her<br />
passionate love for nature. She says, I am content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality<br />
/ of misty fields; by their sweet questionings; but when the birds are gone, and their warm fields / Return<br />
no more, where, then, is paradise ? (Ibid, p. 68). A common perception is that Wallace Stevens is a<br />
difficult poet who often uses rare and recondite words but when he is at his best, for example in the<br />
extract from Sunday Morning that has been just quoted, he has the bare simplicity and pathos of a great<br />
poet like William Wordsworth. As long as there are birds in the warm fields, as long as April s green<br />
endures, as long as the swallows wings beat in the sky, the earth becomes lovely like paradise. The<br />
narrator in moments of transcendence feels that the bliss on the earth is imperishable. The Romantic<br />
ecstasy, however, doesn t last long. There is the fall of leaves in autumn and the narrator is painfully<br />
made aware of mortality and death. She also begins to wonder if mortality also governs life in the<br />
heavenly paradise. If it does, where is the difference between the earthly paradise and the paradise in<br />
heaven ?<br />
Sunday Morning is a powerful poem because it is more than a monologue. It is a dialogic masterpiece<br />
and the dialogue is between the narrator s skeptic self as a Christian and her pagan self as a lover of the<br />
sublime in nature. If the skeptic self is expressed powerfully in the sixth stanza of the poem, the pagan<br />
and aesthetic self has been memorably expressed in the seventh stanza of the poem. The narrator says<br />
in the seventh stanza :<br />
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men shall chant in orgy on a summer morn their boisterous devotion to the<br />
sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, (Ibid, p. 69-70). These sun-worshipping pagans are full of<br />
vigour and verve and they also remind us of the ancient Greeks who worshipped Apollo, the sun god.<br />
These pagans and sun-worshipping people constitute a strong and healthy community fired by a common<br />
vision. They experience not only moments of ecstasy but also cognition of a high order. They have an<br />
awareness of the origin of life upon the earth and also its end. In other words, they know the deepest<br />
secrets of birth and death.<br />
In the last stanza of the poem Sunday Morning the narrator sums up her vision of life. She has a<br />
realization that Christianity and its ritual and creed belong to the past. In the modern age :<br />
The tomb in Palestine<br />
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.<br />
It is the grave of Jesus,<br />
Where he lay. (Ibid, p. 70)<br />
The key phrase in this extract is spirits lingering. It refer, not to the dead, but men and women who are<br />
alive in the modern age, the age that began with the First World War (1914-1919). The great German<br />
philosopher Nietzsche had said in the nineteenth century, God is dead. He also affirmed the need of<br />
producing a new race of Superman. The narrator in Sunday Morning also seems to be of the opinion<br />
that Zesus, the son of God is dead. His tomb in Palestine does not seem to mean much to the men and<br />
women of our time. They live in a topsy-turvy world and their dilemma is expressed in a beautiful line<br />
which is not easy to understand :<br />
We live in an old chaos of the sun, Ibid, p. 70<br />
Is it a chaos, a disorder made by the sun or under the canopy of the sun? Whatever be the ultimate reality,<br />
there is a split in the modern men and women, a split between paganism and religions skepticism. This<br />
split creates anguish and anxiety which warps the human personality.
Wallace Stevens<br />
Wallace Stevens rounds up the dialogic masterpiece Sunday Morning with a picture that is hard to<br />
forget. Nature continues to be sublime. Deers walk upon the mountains and the quail whistles<br />
spontaneously. Berries ripen in the wilderness. All these images are positive and they are an affirmation<br />
of life, of vitality and hope. There is an impression of stability and order in the universe. The final image<br />
in the poem is of a different timber. The sky is isolated and in the evening a flock of pigeons fly in the sky<br />
on extended wings. As evening leads to darkness, the flock of pigeons sink Downward to darkness,<br />
(Ibid, p. 70). One can safely conclude that the flock of pigeons sinking down to darkness is a metaphor<br />
that negates the affirmation of life earlier. In other words, life and death seem to be juxtaposed through<br />
the positive images of deers and the quail and the stark negative image of the pigeons sinking in darkness.<br />
There is a kind of rounded perfection and finish in the poem Sunday Morning and in spite of echoes of<br />
William Wordsworth who wrote Tintern Abbey and The Immortality Ode, it is an authentic poem by<br />
Wallace Stevens. The diction has a kind of simplicity and transparency that is rare in Wallace Stevens<br />
Poems.<br />
5. Discuss Peter Quince At the Clavier as an erotic poem. Do you agree with the aesthetic approach of<br />
Wallace Stevens?<br />
Peter Quince At the Clavier is a poem in which beauty and eroticism have been presented with the<br />
help of images drawn from literature and music. Peter Quince is a minor character in Shakespear s<br />
romance Mid summer Night’s Dream. He is a carpenter who pretends to be a stage manager and<br />
allots the various parts to the actors in a play within the play Pyramus and Thisbe. In the context of<br />
Wallace Stevens poem, Peter Quince is a musician who plays on the Clavier, a stringed instrument and<br />
his fingers produce music on the keyboard. The music that is audible leads to another kind of music,<br />
music that is not heard with ears but is deeply felt. In other words, the narrator s desire, his lust for his<br />
beloved is aroused. Like Charles Baudelaire, the greatest symbolist poet of France in the last decades of<br />
the nineteenth century, Wallace Stevens also felt that music and feelings and colours were connected in<br />
a subtle way. The narrator is also able to visualize his beloved wrapped in a blue-shadowed silk garment,<br />
the softness and the colour of her blue apparel stirs lust within the mind of the narrator. It has to be<br />
remembered that blue is the colour of imagination and passion in Wallace Stevens poetry.<br />
The narrator, Peter Quince, says that his lust for his lady love is similar to the lust that Susanna s naked<br />
beauty had aroused in the mind of the white-haired elders. The tale of Susanna is found in a book of<br />
Apcrypha in the Greek Version of the old Testament. According to the tale a false accusation of adultery<br />
was brought against Susanna, a woman of Babylon, by two elders of the Church. She was condemned<br />
for adultery and finally she was exonerated by a wise judge named Daniel. (The Oxford Encyclopedic<br />
<strong>English</strong> Dictionary, Clarenden Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 1457). The focus in the Biblical tale of Susanna<br />
is on the youth innocence and purity of Susanna and the crooked and vindictive conscience and brutal lust<br />
of the two white-haired elders. Wallace Stevens has, however, recreated the tale of Susanna from the<br />
point of view of an aesthete and a dandy. In the poem, Susanna has been described as a voluptuous<br />
young woman who is bathing in a garden where the water is clear and warm and the evening is green. In<br />
such a romantic atmosphere the naked, glistering flesh of Susanna arouses lust in the mind of whitehaired<br />
elders of the Church. Their eyes turn red due to passion. The narrator has described the elders<br />
lust in images derived from music:<br />
The basses of their beings throb<br />
In witching chords, and their thin blood<br />
Pulse pizzieati of Itosanna.<br />
(The Collected Poems, p. 90)<br />
The point of the narrator is that the thin blood of the elders begins to beat fast in the veins and the deep<br />
chord of their musical instrument, that is their lust begins to throb wildly.<br />
Susanna comes out of the water in the garden and stands on the bank. Her emotions spent , she walks<br />
upon the grass in all her naked glory. Her flesh is still tingling and the winds are like her maids. They tickle<br />
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her scarves and she feels on top of the world. It is at this critical moment that the breath of the elders<br />
reaches her. Like a good story-teller, the narrator does not tell us explicitly what happens to her. The<br />
narrator simply points out that the night becomes mute, Susanna turns to see who is near her and then<br />
again there is a preponderance of images drawn from music:<br />
A cymbal crashed,<br />
And roaring horns. (Ibid, p. 91)<br />
The crashing of the cymbal and the roaring of the horns, perhaps, suggest masculine violence against an<br />
innocent but exceedingly beautiful young woman. In the next paragraph, the narrator tells us that Susanna s<br />
attendants, Byzantines, come towards their mistress. They wonder why Susanna has let out such a cry.<br />
Since night has descended, the attendants come with lamps in their hands. They discover that Susanna<br />
has been seized by the elders of the Church, the white haired respected elders. The narrator has again<br />
described the tragic scene in few words:<br />
They wondered why Susanna cried<br />
Against the elders by her side;<br />
And as they whispered, the refrain<br />
Was like a willow swept by rain.<br />
Anon, their lamps, uplifted flame<br />
Revealed Susanna and her shame. (Ibid, p. 91)<br />
Some critics are of the view that Susanna has only been molested. She has not been raped. From the<br />
violence of the images, cymbals crashing, horns roaring, a willow swept by rain, it is clear that Susanna<br />
has been raped by the elders. She has become a victim of male lust, especially the lust of the elders who<br />
are supposed to be gentle and protective. Her shame is so abounding that the attendants simper foolishly<br />
and flee away from the scene of her shame. It is at this point that the action in the tale is over. The ethical<br />
dimension of Susanna s rape by the elders of the church has been trenchantly expressed in the boot of<br />
Apocrypha. The elders lust, brutal lust has been juxtaposed against Susanna s innocence and helplessness.<br />
The crookedness of the elders charge of adultery has also been exposed in the Biblical tale of Susanna.<br />
The narrator in Wallace Stevens, poem, however, is primarily an aesthete and also something of a dandy.<br />
The ethical aspect of Susanna s rage is something that just doesn t enter his mind. The question of the<br />
punishment of the guilty, the elders, has also not been pinpointed by the narrator.<br />
The last section of the poem begins with a striking line, Beauty is momentary in the mind. (Ibid, p.91).<br />
The narrator is preoccupied with beauty, and in this context it is Susanna s beauty. There is beauty that<br />
is an attribute of the body. There is also beauty that is an idea, an archetype. The body undergoes a<br />
change, Susanna who is lovely like Venus has been defiled and disfigured. She has lost her innocence and<br />
her purity. She will grow old and die but the glimpse of beauty associated with her body would live in the<br />
narrator s memory. The rest of the poem is concerned with mortality, that is change and death. Evenings<br />
die, so does a wave. Gardens also die and decay in winter. Many maidens also die and their death is<br />
mourned in a solemn mass, prayer. Along with their death, aurora, the goddess of dawn is also celebrated.<br />
It is fact that Susanna s music touched the bawdy strings / of those white elders; (Ibid, p. 92). Susanna<br />
could survive the white-haired elders lust but she couldn t escape Death s ironic scraping. (Ibid, p.<br />
92). Her beauty may have seemed immortal to the onlookers, but she could not escape scraping, that is<br />
ruthess destruction at the hands of death. Her memory, however, lingers long in the mind. True, but so<br />
does the brutal lust of the white-haired elders. And also the fact that the narrator doesn t think of<br />
retribution; of justice to Susanna and adequate punishment to the elders. At the moral level, the poem is<br />
not fully satisfactory. It is devoid of the ethical dimensions.<br />
6. Compare and contrast Sunday Morning and the idea of order at Key West as Romantic poems.<br />
Sunday Morning and The Idea of order At Key West are two of the most famous poems written by<br />
Wallace Stevens. While Sunday Morning is included in his first anthology of poems, The Idea of
Wallace Stevens<br />
Order At Key West is included in his second anthology The Idea of Order. While Harmonium was<br />
published in 923, Ideas of Order was published in 1936 when the Depression had brought on a great<br />
economic crisis and millions of men and women were struggling for sheer survival. There was a radical<br />
temper that animated writers like John Steinbeck who wrote his famous protest novel The Grapes of<br />
Wrath and showed the terrible life of the dispossessed farmers of California. Wallace Stevens, however,<br />
was preoccupied with the transcendental issues of life like mortality and the death of gods, the worship<br />
of the sun as a pagan god, the solitary genius singing by the sea, and the urge for order shown by a<br />
Classical literary critic like Ramon Fernandez. Some critics are of the view that Wallace Stevens was a<br />
decadent Romantic like Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater and Edgar Allan Poe who lived in an ivory tower and<br />
kept on dreaming dreams which had little or no bearing on the issues that agitated men and women in the<br />
era of Depression. In other words, they accuse Wallace Stevens of being an escapist and a votary of art<br />
for art s sake. His poems are the poems of escape and they do not help us in confronting the dilemma of<br />
living in a society that was disintegrating due to economic inequality, social stratification and a cynical<br />
pursuit of acquiring wealth and status through any means fair and foul.<br />
Before the charge of being an escapist is refuted , it would be better to look at the two poems, Sunday<br />
Morning and The Idea of Order at Key West steadily and objectively. Sunday Morning is a poem<br />
consisting / of eight stanzas of fifteen lines each. The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem consisting<br />
of two paragraphs of seven lines, two paragraphs of six and thirteen lines, two paragraphs of ten and<br />
eight lines, and one and the last paragraph of five lines. In terms of structure, there is a kind of regularity<br />
and harmony in Sunday Morning but The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem that is irregular and<br />
somewhat sporadic and lacks a definite focus. While Sunday Morning is largely preoccupied with the<br />
issue of mortality and transcendence, The Idea of Order at Key West fails to show the exact relationship<br />
between the genius of the young woman who was singing a solitary song and the sea that was roaring in<br />
all its majesty and splendour. There is no wonder that Sunday Morning appeals deeply to our craving<br />
for immortality but The Idea of Order at Key West doesn t have that universal appeal for ordinary<br />
men and women. It is concerned with purely a literary problem, the passion of a solitary genius, and the<br />
indifference of the sea to the plight of the genius. As pointed out earlier, the narrative that is unfolded<br />
lacks a clear focus.<br />
As opposed to The Idea of Order at Key West, that is structurally disjointed. Sunday Morning is a<br />
structurally cohesive poem with a woman as the narrator. The woman is sitting comfortably in a chair<br />
dreaming, day dreaming to be precise. Her imagination takes her to the holy land of Palestine where<br />
Jesus, the son of God has been buried in the grave. She has a realization that Jesus is like gods who lived<br />
once but vanished from the world. Jove, the God of the Romans, also has vanished and become a part of<br />
classical mythology. The narrator wonders if there is death and mortality in the heavenly paradise. If<br />
there is, how does the earthy paradise differ from the heavenly paradise? In section seven of the poem<br />
Sunday Morning there is a marvelous description of a group of men worshipping the sun, a pagan God<br />
with a deep religious fervour. They are chanting and celebrating the sun as the source of life and vitality<br />
upon the earth. They are in such a frenzy that they are able to understand the mystery of life, they are<br />
able to understand where they came from and where they are destined to go. Reading this poem, we are<br />
reminded of Wordsworth s great poem The World Is Too Much With Us where he says that he would<br />
prefer to be a pagan wh believes in old gods and goddesses rather than be a hypocritical Christian in<br />
nineteenth century England obsessed with making money through any means fair and foul.<br />
It is true that even in Sunday Morning Wallace Stevens does not have the sharp vision that Wordsworth<br />
had at his best. He doesn t understand the crisis that destroyed traditional religious faith and his Romanticism<br />
is somewhat limited by his purely aesthetic approach. It would, however, be unfair to regard as a poem<br />
written by a decadent Romantic like Walter Pater. It would also be unfair to regard Sunday Morning as<br />
a poem of escape. It doesn t deal with the socio-economic problem of the depression but it does deal<br />
with man s universal craving to achieve transcendence and immortality in a world governed by mortality<br />
and death. Sunday Morning affirms, like another great Romantic John Keats, that transcendence and<br />
immortality can only be attained by a courageous acceptance of mortality and death which are inseperable<br />
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from life. The magnificent image of the flight of flocks of pigeons and their sinking Downward to<br />
darkness (Ibid, p. 70) at the end of the poem signifies that life upon the earth exists along with death.<br />
The phrase Downward to darkness is a poetic evocation of the phenomenon of death. It is a plea for<br />
a courageous acceptance of mortality and death.<br />
To sum up, Sunday Morning and The Idea of Order at Key West are Romantic poems in the sense<br />
that they affirm the right of the individual to live an independent life and to achieve fulfillment and<br />
transcendence. There is also an unforgettable image of the sublime in nature that turns men into God-like<br />
figures. It will not be fair to equate Wallace Stevens with decadent Romantic poets like Walter Pater and<br />
Oscar Wilde who were primarily aesthetes and lovers of beauty. He belongs to the noble tradition of<br />
great Romantic poets like Wordsworth and John keats. Sunday Morning, however, is a far more universal<br />
poem than The Idea of Order at Ken West. It is compact and deals with a universal problem. It is not<br />
a poem of escape.<br />
Compare and Contrast Contrary Theses (I) and (II). Evaluate Wallace Stevens philosophy of life as<br />
expressed in these companion poems.<br />
Contrary Theses I and II are two companion poems that belong to Wallace Steven s fourth anthology of<br />
poem Parts of the World (1942). The Second World War began in 1939 and lasted till 1945. Talking<br />
about his growth as a Romantic poet Wallace Stevens says, While, of course, I come down from the<br />
past, the past is my own and not something marked by Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who<br />
has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex I entirely my own even though I<br />
see it in others. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Robert Redher (St. Martin s Press, New York, p.<br />
133). As a child and as a young man, Wallace Stevens lived in a world of fantasy. His imagination, his<br />
world of make believe, was far more important to him than humdrum reality. There has been a prolonged<br />
conflict between his imagination and his sense of reality. Sunday Morning and The Idea of Order At<br />
Kay West have been poems in which the imagination seems to have an upper hand. Study of Pears is<br />
a poem that marks a turning point in Wallace Steven s growth as a poet. As a result of his friendship with<br />
William Carlo Williams who believed in Objectivism and also due to the impact of the French impressionist<br />
painter Paul Cezanne who painted wonderful landscape transformed and made strangely luminous by<br />
the interplay of light and shade, Wallace Stevens grip on reality became firm and formidable. It does not<br />
mean that the imagination became dormant in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The imagination was in a<br />
tussle and conflict with reality. His first famous poem Earthly Anecdote shows the protracted and<br />
complex interaction between reality and imagination. It is this complex interaction which gives a strange,<br />
singular quality to the poet s vision. Contrary Theses (I) and (II) are short poems but they are able to<br />
perceive and recreate the paradox of the life of the men and women of our time. Irony and paradox<br />
become more prominent in Wallace Stevens later poetry. Like W.B. Yeats, a great Romantic poet, he<br />
was transformed into a great modern poet. He portrayed the contradiction of modern life with a penetrating<br />
insight.<br />
7. Contrary Theses<br />
Contrary theses (I) is a short poem consisting of six stanzas of two lines each. In the very first stanza<br />
we have two contrary images. On the one hand, there are luxuriant and juicy grapes on the vines and on<br />
the other hand there is a soldier walking before the narrator s door. There are also bee hives full of wax<br />
and honey just before the narrator s door. They are very, very near. There are also seraphs, that is angels<br />
gathering near the poems of the church. There are also saints who took brilliant in fresh cloaks, that is<br />
long, flowing robes. In the fourth stanza, the narrator says that just before his door, the shadows get<br />
smaller on the walls. They must be the walls of the narrator s hours. In the fifth stanza, the narrator says<br />
that the house is bare. The halls of the hours are full of sharp sunlight. Acid Sunlight is a key phrase<br />
suggesting the sharp cutting edge of sunlight. The climax comes in the last stanza. After a string of<br />
images suggesting the bounty of nature, the august presence of the seraphs, and the saints, the narrator<br />
refers to an image suggesting violence and disorder. The oaks in the neighbourhood are smeared with<br />
blood which implies that a lot of bloodshed has occurred. The narrator rounds up the sixth and the last line
Wallace Stevens<br />
with a simple but startling image: A Soldier stalks before my door. The Collected Poems p.267.<br />
The narrator is of the view that the soldier has been stalking, pursuing the victim. He is on the prowl<br />
looking for the enemy.<br />
The thrust of Contrary theses (I) is to portray the contradiction between the bounty of nature and the<br />
piety of religion, and the simultaneous bloodshed and violence perpetrated by the soldier. While nature<br />
and religion are full of life-affirming urges, the soldier is full of vengeance and life-denial. There is no<br />
wonder that the shock at the mass slaughter and destruction during the second world war (1939) has a<br />
strong impact on the imagination of wallace stevens who has been largely a Romantic poet and aesthete<br />
in his early poems. The plea, the insistence, that A Soldier stalks before my door is an index of the fact<br />
that violence and disorder are so close to the life of the men and the women in the modern world which<br />
has been a witness to the World War I and the World War II. The unpleasant and frightening reality of<br />
the modern age is as much present in the poem as the Romantic dream of the bounty of the nature and<br />
the piety of religion. The imagination of Wallace Stevens is that of a humanist who is deeply hurt at the<br />
violence and bloodshed which have been inevitable due to the crisis of the Western civilization in the<br />
twentieth century. The aesthete has become a humanist who can face the contradiction of the age. The<br />
images that he has used are also precise and sometimes hard, concrete and startling, for example, the<br />
image of a soldier stalking the victim and the image of oaks smeared with blood. His friendship with<br />
William Carlos Williams and the impact of the Imagists turned him into a modern poet who could explore<br />
the irony and the paradox of the life of the age. Contrary Theses (II) is a companion poem in which the<br />
contradiction between mid-autumn and winter has been presented. While mid-autumn is real, winter is<br />
abstract, it is simply an idea in the mind. The narrator has visualised an evening in mid-autuin when the<br />
earth and the sky are one and they have also been imagined as grand mechanics who may perform some<br />
chemical action. The image of the green locusts which have yellow wings reminds one of the image of a<br />
soldier stalking his victim. Both these images connote violence and destructive impulses which has become<br />
dominant in the modern age. Mid-autumn may seen relatively mild but winter would be formidable. In<br />
winter the chill would be so much that the swans moving in the wide sky would be nearly frozen. The<br />
leaves would fall copiously, like falling notes from a piano. The trees would become bare and nude and<br />
the sun that shines during mid-autumn would also cease to shine and warm. While nature s bounty has<br />
been emphasized in Contrary Theses (I), it is winter s severity and chill that has been emphasized in<br />
Contrary Theses (II). The image of the locusts appears again and again in the second poem. It is evident<br />
that reality, unpleasant reality of civilization and nature, has become more prominent in both these poems.<br />
If the civilization is bristling with violence and bloodshed, nature will lead to winter and the narrator can<br />
visualise winter as clearly as he can see the locusts. Both these poems show how Wallace Stevens can<br />
confront the crisis of civilization and the challenge of a harsh winter.<br />
8. Bring out the full significance of the thematic and structural cohesion of Holiday in Reality. Do you think<br />
the poet has been successful in this poem?<br />
Holiday in Reality is a poem that figures in Wallace Stevens fifth anthology of poem Transport to<br />
Summer (1947). The second world war was over and the poet was nearly sixty eight years old. The<br />
horror and the anguish of the second world war was behind him and approaching the seventy years of his<br />
life, slowly and gradually, the poet was over the subtle relationship between the real and the imagined. As<br />
an adolescent when he was meditating by his father to be practical and refrain from indulging in leaps of<br />
imagination, he felt that the real was humdrum and monotonous and frightening and it stifled his imagination<br />
and the flowering of poetry. He also felt that what appeared real and practical to his father was a<br />
negation of his imagination. Later on, he postponed the writing of poetry and qualified as an attorney.<br />
When he settled as an attorney and achieved both economic security and status, at the age of 44 he<br />
published his first anthology, Harmonium. The title of the poem shows the poet s imperative need to<br />
achieve harmony and equilibrium between his private self and the competitive world around him. In other<br />
words, he wanted to have order and harmony between his soaring imagination and reality that constricted<br />
his freedom.<br />
267
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Poetry<br />
Holiday in Reality is a poem that consists of two paragraphs of fourteen and twelve lines each. While in<br />
the first paragraph the focus is on the January sun, in the second paragraph our attention is drawn to<br />
spring that is unbilical or else it is not spring. The image of the January sun, pale, cold and colourless<br />
brings to our mind the severity of winter. The image of spring being umbilical brings to our mind the<br />
navel cord and also the idea of birth. In other words, spring takes birth and in course of time it also<br />
vanishes and dies. While winter seems to be prolonged and almost unending, spring seems to be shortlived<br />
and fleeting. In the first paragraph there is also a pointed reference to the people who are utterly<br />
alienated and do not have a common speech which may create a durable and healthy community. Such<br />
people exist as shadows and they fail to find their earth, their sky and their heaven. They are alienated<br />
from nature, from community and their life is so constricted that they also do not have the compensation<br />
of possessing a particular woman and her touch. Ibid, p.312. They are so alienated and atomised that<br />
even if they go to a comfortable place like Durand-Ruel s, they are not able to breathe and live like<br />
healthy, fully integrated human beings. The thrust of the first paragraph is that their life is summed up by<br />
a sharp white, that is the sharp white of the January sun. While white in this context seems to imply a<br />
cold and colourless life, yellow implies colour, vitality and nature bathed in summer sun s glow. As a poet,<br />
Wallace Stevens shows a keen sense of colour. While white is a negation of life, yellow is an affirmation<br />
of a lust for life and vitality. There is a reference to Aix in the first half of the poem where Paul Cezanne,<br />
one of the most remarkable painter of France was born and in his landscapes the luminuous sunlight<br />
casts an unearthly glow on trees and shrubs.<br />
Inspired by the painting of Paul Cezanne and the dark, gloomy but colourful poetry of Charles Baudelaire,<br />
Holiday in Reality has a remarkable glow and resonance. In the second and the last section of the poem,<br />
it is spring that is portrayed in all its diversity. There are Judas (a flower) that grows in spring. There are<br />
also violets every where and the landscape is a green leaf. (Ibid, p. 132). This is the concentrated<br />
effect produced in spring. Greenery is luminous, radiant everywhere. One may get an impression that<br />
Spring is as lasting as the January sun in winter. It is, however, not true. There is a striking line in the<br />
second half of the poem, Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring. (p. 313). It is not easy to paraphrase<br />
this line. The word Umbilical means navel and by association it also brings to mind umbilical cord<br />
which binds the foetus to the placenta. After childbirth, umbilical cord comes out along with the baby. In<br />
other words, spring is born and after sometime it vanishes. Spring is beautiful beyond words but it is real<br />
only for a little while. Spring is the time when apples bud and bloom, gold is spangled everywhere and the<br />
catbird gobbles left-overs in the morning. As long as the narrator is able to perceive spring and also the<br />
objects mentioned, they seem real. The narrator takes an extremely subjective stand. He says that they<br />
are real as long as we perceive them. When we do not perceive them they, at least to the perceiver, do<br />
not exist. The point is that spring is real, if we think of the moment, the specific context, but as a result of<br />
the law of mutability spring vanishes and therefore in a philosophical sense, spring is real and it is also<br />
unreal. The narrator has expressed this strange idea at the end of the poem in these words:<br />
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin<br />
And I taste at the root of the tongue of what is real. Ibid, p.313<br />
What he wants to say is that winter seems to be unending but spring, short-lived and fleeting, is both real<br />
and unreal. In this complex situation, what does the title Holiday in Reality imply? The men and women<br />
in this world are utterly alienated and they do not constitute a healthy and integrated community. They<br />
are alienated from nature also alienated from each other, words do not lead to communication and fellow<br />
feeling. The result is that they are also alienated from the reality which is far from pleasant. In the<br />
context of the poem, men and women are not comfortable with the reality of estrangement and alienation<br />
in the modern world. They are not in a position to confront the terrible reality and still be comfortable and<br />
enjoy a pleasant holiday, or vacation. In other words, the acceptance of the terrible reality of the time is<br />
a negation of the concept of a pleasant holiday. The reality of an unending winter and a fleeting spring is<br />
so stark that one cannot enjoy and be cheerful. Far from being a holiday, life turns into a nightmare. While<br />
as a Romantic poet, the early poetry of Wallave Stevens celebrates the sublime in nature, in his later<br />
poetry he faces the paradox of life with courage and candour. He becomes a great modern poet pre
Wallace Stevens<br />
occupied with death and mutability. Holiday in Reality is a poem in which Wallace Stevens is able to<br />
express trenchantly the paradox of modern life. Shelley had said, If winter comes, can spring be far<br />
behind? Wallace Stevens seems to revise Shelley and say, If spring goes, winter can t be far away.<br />
This is the grim vision of life that Wallace Stevens has communicated successfully in the poem.<br />
9. Comment critically on the reality-imagination complex in the major poems of Wallace Stevens.<br />
Wallace Stevens admitted that the reality imagination complex has been the dominant theme of his major<br />
poetry. When his definite anthology the Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens was published in 1954,<br />
he had suggested the Whole of Harmonium as the title, implying that a common thread ran through<br />
nearly all his poems. The reality-imagination complex was the common thread. The first poem in his the<br />
Complete Poems was Earthly Anecdote. It is a short but extremely beautiful and fascinating poems<br />
portraying a dramatic confrontation between the bucks that went clattering and a fire cat that bristled in<br />
the way. While the bucks that were making a loud noise stood for the humdrum reality of life, the firecat<br />
with bright, sparkling life stood for the imagination. The bucks swerved to the right, swerved to the left<br />
but the cat leapt to the right, leapt to the left and confronted the ducks boldly. The point of the poem was<br />
that the reality was quite complicated and circular but the imagination was equally determined and<br />
bristled in the way. It was the interaction between the bucks and the firecat that was the dominant theme<br />
of the play. The interaction led to the creation of a strange world which was both lifelike and fantastic.<br />
The truth embedded in poetry illumined the obscure and dark corners of humdrum reality. It enabled us<br />
to have an entirely fresh and original perception of reality. Poetry was more than a simple mirror,<br />
reflecting the superficial aspects of reality. It was a lamp that illumined the dark secrets of reality.<br />
Sunday Morning is another important poem in which the interaction between the reality and the imagination<br />
has been portrayed in the context of a woman dreaming, daydreaming to be precise. Her daydreaming<br />
takes her to the holy land of Palestine where she is able to find the tomb of Jesus, the son of God. She<br />
also has a realization that the old gods have died and mortality doesn t spare anyone, neither human<br />
beings nor gods. This is the aspect of reality, the truth of life that possesses the woman and she begins to<br />
dream of transcending the iron law of mortality. This dream shows how her imagination wants to transcend<br />
the limitation of mortality and achieve immortality. It is the leap of her imagination that makes her visualise<br />
men in a ring, chanting and celebrating the sun. They are in a frenzy and feel that they have become Godlike<br />
in the intensity of their devotion to the sun. They also have such a profound experience of the<br />
mystery of life that/they know whence they came and whither they shall go. Mortality is stern and can t<br />
be escaped but the sun worshippers and able to transcend it. That is the leap of Wallace Stevens<br />
imaginating in the context of his most widely read poem I taste Sunday Morning.<br />
The Man With The Blue Guitar is one of the longest and also one of the three best poems of wallace<br />
Stevens. The reality imagination complex is present right in the first section of the poem.<br />
The man bent over his guitar,<br />
A shearsman of sorts the day was green.<br />
They said, “You have a blue guitar,<br />
You do not play things as they are.”<br />
The man replied, “Things as they are<br />
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”<br />
(The Collected Poems, p. 165). The blue guitar stands for the poets imagination which does portray<br />
things as they are. They portray things as they appear to the poet s imagination. The humdrum reality is<br />
transformed by the imagination. This fact is expressed again and again in this poem which has been<br />
inspired by a famous painting of Pablo Picasso in which an old man plays upon a blue guitar. It is the blue<br />
star that stands for the imagination which perceives humdrum reality in a most original and fresh manner.<br />
The poet s original perception of humdrum reality is of such a nature that it stris the chord of millions of<br />
readers and listeners. It becomes universal and ceases to be personal universal and ceases to be personal<br />
like a diary maintained by an individual. Study of Two Pears is a poem in which a common place object<br />
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like two pears has been presented through the eyes of an impressionist painter and we become slowly<br />
and slowly aware of the shape, curves and colours of the two ordinary pears. It is the eye of a painter<br />
that makes us perceive the two pears as extraordinary objects.<br />
There is another poem A Dish of Peaches in Russia in which simple and commonplace objects like<br />
peaches have been presented through the poet s imagination in these words:<br />
I see them as a lover sees,<br />
As a young lover sees the first buds of spring<br />
And as the black Spaniard plays his guitar. (Ibid, p. 224)<br />
We can easily see that the imagination has transformed the reality perceived by the poet. Of Modern<br />
Poetry is a poem in which the modern poet has been pictured as an actor, an actor who is a metaphysician<br />
in the dark. (Ibid, p. 240). While the Romantic poet Wordsworth described the poet as a man speaking<br />
to men, Wallace Stevens has described the modern poet as a metaphysician in the dark. In other words,<br />
the modern poet is a metaphysician who is pre occupied with the dark and hidden dimensions of reality.<br />
Contrary Theses (I) is a poem in which the bounty of nature and the piety of religion has been juxtaposed<br />
against the grim reality of a soldier stalking, that is pursuing his helpless victim. Thus we find that the<br />
interaction of the imagination and the reality has been shown in innumerable context. The/reality is not<br />
disregarded but the imagination is also not slighted. Their dramatic encounter is shown in different,<br />
exciting contexts.<br />
Holiday in Reality is, perhaps, the poem in which the reality-imagination complex has been portrayed<br />
with a rare insight. On the one hand, we have a picture of winter, of the January sun which seems to be<br />
unending and on the other hand, we have a glimpse of spring that also seems to be real and eternal. The<br />
poem makes us discover that spring may seem to be real and eternal. But in reality, it is subject to<br />
mutability. Spring is real and simultaneously it is not real. In the long run, it is fleeting, and short-lived.<br />
Winter is prolonged and seems to be unending. In a situation like this, reality is no comfort to the men and<br />
women of our time. It is not a holiday. It is more of a nightmare with spring, fleeting, short-lived, and<br />
winter unending in its vigour. This is the shape that the reality imagination encounter takes in Holiday in<br />
Reality. For a moment, grim reality seems to be paramound. We are reminded of the poem Domination<br />
of Black. Thanatos seems to triumph over Eros.<br />
10. Discuss critically the image of the woman in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Do you think he idealises<br />
women too much?<br />
Wallace Stevens admitted that he derived his practical sense and worldly wisdom from his father and his<br />
imagination from his mother who played on the piano and sang hymus to her children everynight. It is<br />
from his mother that he derived emotional warmth and, after his three years stay at Harvard and getting<br />
initiated into the mystery of French and <strong>English</strong> literature from his mentor George Santayana, he got<br />
completely alienated from his father. There is no wonder that the image of the woman is present in most<br />
of his poems. Le Monocle De Mon Uncal is one of his famous poems in which there is a kind of a<br />
dialogue between Mon Uncal (Wallace Stevens) and Le Monocle (his erotic self), lamenting the loss of<br />
the passion of love. While the lover is still ardent, the lady love has become rather cool and aloof: The<br />
frustration of Mon Oncle has been portrayed graphically in the following lines:<br />
No spring can follow past meridian Yet you persist with anacdotal bliss to make believe a starry<br />
connaissance. (The Collected Poems, p. 13).<br />
Mon Oncle is telling his erotic self the phase of abounding passion is over and spring is not likely to come<br />
again. In the context, spring connotes the phase when the thrill of love, both physical and emotional, is at<br />
its peak. He also tells his erotic self, (you) that you persist in snatching physical proximity and union<br />
which does not always approximate to the frenzy of the first union - the beloved has been visualised as<br />
a radiant bubble, that is a beautiful but somewhat cold and frigid woman. There is no wonder that the<br />
narrator in the poem keeps on dreaming of A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. (Ibid, p. 15)<br />
Sunday Morning is one of the most widely read poems of Wallace Stevens in which the narrator is a
Wallace Stevens<br />
woman. She is a comfortable woman of the middle class and after having coffee and sitting in a sunny<br />
chair she has a dream, a daydream to be precise. Her imagination takes a leap and she is able to reach<br />
the holy land of Palestine. She seems to be a devout Christian who, however, has also a streak of<br />
scepticism. She wonders why she should be still devoted to the dead. In the context of the poem, the<br />
dead refers to Jesus, the Son of God.<br />
She is also of the view that divinity does not lie either in Jesus, the son of or in his tomb. As a Romantic<br />
she believes that Divinity must live within herself. (Ibid, p. 67) The sight of the birds flying, April s<br />
enduring greenery and the beating of the Swallow s wings in June fill her with ecstacy and the sublime in<br />
nature makes her captive. She begins to thing that the earthly paradise is for more real than the heavenly<br />
paradise. If the woman in Le Monocle De Mon Oncle is something is a prude and an inhibited woman,<br />
the woman in Sunday Morning is a sceptic as a Christian and a pagan who celebrates the people who<br />
worship the sun as a pagan god. The sun is Not as a god, but as a god might be. (Ibid, p. 70)<br />
Peter Quince At The Clavier is another erotic poem in which the beauty of a young woman, Susanna,<br />
who figures in the old Testament has been graphically portrayed in her naked glory. There is something<br />
fatal about her beauty which provokes the lust of two white-haired elders of the church. Eventually, her<br />
fatal beauty leads to her rape and shame. Susanna has been portrayed by Wallace Stevens from the point<br />
of view of an aesthete and a lover of beauty. The ethical dimension of her rape is missing in the poem<br />
and there is no condemnation of the white-haired elders brutal rape. The image of the woman that is<br />
presented in this poem is that of an object to be manipulated and used by men she is all flesh and the<br />
other dimension of her personality, her individuality, her resistance to being manipulated by men, is nearly<br />
missing from the poem.<br />
The Idea of Order at Key West is another important poem by Wallace Stevens in which the woman<br />
plays a crucial role. The narrator, along with his companion, is near the sea-shore at Key West, a lowlying<br />
island and popular resort near Florida. The narrator discovers a woman near the sea-shore. In the<br />
words of the narrator, She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (Ibid, p. 128). The sea has been roaring<br />
and it made a cry that the narrator is not able to understand. It was the woman s song that has an appeal<br />
and it stirs a chord in the narrator s heart. The final impression that the narrator has of that woman is we<br />
beheld her striding there alone. (Irid, p. 129)<br />
The woman is not a soft, sentimental woman, leaning for support on others. She is a bold, independent,<br />
tough woman walking alone on the sea-shore, singing for her own satisfaction. The image of the woman<br />
in The Idea of Order At Key West makes one remember the ideal of a Romantic Poet who stands<br />
alone in the world for his own satisfaction. She is such a bold contrast to the doomed young woman in<br />
Peter Quince At The Clavier.<br />
There are two short poems Another Weeping Woman and Woman Looking At a Vase of Flowers<br />
In Another Weeping Woman , woman has been presented first as a conventional who is weeping<br />
because of her too bitter heart (Ibid, p. 25) and in the other poem the woman is presented as the form<br />
and the fragrance of things/without clairvoyance, close to her. Ibid, p. 247. the point of the latter poem<br />
is that the woman is fuller and better formed than the objects she has been watching. Wallace Stevens<br />
has recreated the figure of Penelope as a woman waiting for her mate and companion in his famous<br />
poem The World As Meditation. Penelope is the eternal female waiting for ulysses, the eternal male.<br />
Their union has been pictured beautifully in the poem His arms would be her necklace/And her belt,<br />
the final fortune of their desire. (Ibid, p. 521) There words, so simple, so appropriate, so complete show<br />
how Wallace Stevens had matured as a modern poet. The pent-up passion of Penelope has been compressed<br />
in a really beautiful line: The barbarous strength within her would never fail. (Ibid, p. 521)<br />
Final Soliloquy of The Interior Paramour is one of the most fascinating poem in which the woman is<br />
the interior paramour, the ideal woman that sits within every man and chats with him all the time. In this<br />
poem occurs a strange line, We say God and the imagination is certainly stimulated by the woman, the<br />
ideal woman, the eternal woman, sitting within the mind of every man. There is no wonder that the<br />
woman in Wallace Stevens poetry is sometimes a prude, sometimes a doomed woman, sometimes a<br />
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solitary Romantic genius and sometimes the interior paramour . The woman is always, nearly always<br />
present in his poetry.<br />
11. Attempt a critical evaluation of the imagery and style in Wallace Stevens poems that you have read.<br />
Wallace Stevens published his first anthology of poems in 1923 under the title Harmonium. T.S. Eliot,<br />
the most influential poet of England had published The Wasterland in 1922 after the first World War.<br />
While the poems of Harmonium remind one of the poems of the great Romantic poets like Words<br />
Worth and John Keats in their imaginative perception of the beauty of nature, The Waste land of T.S.<br />
Eliot is a modern poem in which the crisis of the western civilization has been portrayed in a rich, highly<br />
allusive style, full of hard, clear cut and startling and shocking images. While the poems of Harmonium<br />
are predominantly Romantic in theme and imagery, The Waste land is starkly realistic, sometime<br />
surrealistic poem, in which the nightmare of the urban metropolis has been recreated with a chilling<br />
insight and candour. In his Romantic streak and the celebration of the sublime of American landscape<br />
Wallace Stevens is closer to W.B. Yeats rather than T.S. Eliot. The early poetry of W.B. Yeats is<br />
romantic in its preoccupation with Irish landscape, beauty of women and the valour of the Irish heroes of<br />
the past and the present. So is the early poetry of Wallace Stevens in its preoccupation with the hemlocks,<br />
the sun and the beauty of Susanna in all its naked glory.<br />
Domination of Black is a short but significant poem in which the darkness of the hemlocks has been<br />
juxtaposed against the cry of the peacocks. While the darkness of the hemlocks stands for mortality and<br />
death, the cry of the peacocks stands for life and procreation. When these objects are seen in the context<br />
of the gathering of the planets in the sky, they seem to assume a cosmic dimension. The point of the richly<br />
symbolical poem is that the domination of black, that is mortality, loss of bloom and eventual death and<br />
annihilation is the law that operates in the cosmos. The style of Wallace Stevens is supposed to be full of<br />
abstract, recondite and rare words and phrases but the style in Domination of Black is plain and<br />
trenchant that of wordsworth and Keats at their best the crucial word the hemlocks does appear in<br />
John Keats s famous Romantic poem, Ode To Nightingale. Sunday Morning is another poem of<br />
Wallace Stevens that reminds us of Wordsworth who wrote Tintern Abbey and Ode on the Intimations<br />
of Immortality. The sublime in nature has been graphically depicted in Sunday Morning especially in<br />
the famous seventh section of the poem. The images drawn from nature and the transparent use of<br />
words remind one of Wordsworth at his best. A few lines could be quoted to substantiate the point:<br />
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men shall chant in orgy on a summer morn their boisterous devotion to the<br />
sun, Not as a god, but as God might be.<br />
The Collected Poems, p.70<br />
Perhaps, it is from his next poem Peter Quince At the Clavier that Wallace Stevens develops his<br />
unique style. He is indeed a Romantic poet but a Romantic poet of the twentieth century who had lived<br />
through the First World War. He had also imbibed the impact of the Imagists who laid stress on precise,<br />
clear-cut and startling images. These poets also rejected excessive sentimentality of the decadent Romantic<br />
poets who emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Decadent Romantic poets like Walter<br />
Pater, Oscar Wilde and others were also guilty of vague, amorphous and rare images. Wallace Stevens<br />
portrays the triumphs and despair of Susanna, a youthful woman of Babylon figuring in the Old<br />
Testaement with a sense of detachment, objectivity and candour. There is a preponderance of images<br />
derived from music. Susanna s rape at the hand of the white-haired elders of the church described in<br />
these words:<br />
She turned-<br />
A cymbal crashed,<br />
And roaring horns. (Ibid, p. 91)<br />
The violence of the verbs that have been used, crashed, and roaring is a precise indication of the<br />
sexual violence inflicted on an unsuspecting Susanna. The objectivity and detachment, and lack of emotional<br />
involvement, on the part of the poet is an index of his maturing as a modern poet. Instead of ranting
Wallace Stevens<br />
against the high handedness of the white-haired elders who had raped Susanna, Wallace Stevens allows<br />
the situation to be recreated with utmost objectivity and candour. The poets voice is not audible, it is the<br />
situation that speaks loudly enough. There is no need for the poet to comment like a moralist.<br />
Poems like Contrary Theses (I) and (II) and Holiday in Reality show that Wallace Stevens has<br />
matured as a great modern poet. In Contrary Theses (I) the paradox between the bounty of nature and<br />
the latent violence of a soldier stalking his victim has been recreated with a degree of precision that is<br />
found in a great modern poet. In Contrary Theses (II) the paradox between the mid-autumn and the<br />
savage fury of winter has been forcefully communicated. Holiday in Reality is a poem in which the<br />
paradox between th January sun and the fleeting spring has been depicted graphically. Above all, there is<br />
a poem Study of Two Pears, in which a commonplace object like two pears has been presented through<br />
the eyes of an impressionist painter. The poet has suggested artistically the size, shape and colours of two<br />
pears. The poet s precision in the use of words is evident in this evocation of the tints of the two pears:<br />
The yellows glisters,<br />
It glistens with various yellows,<br />
Citrons, oranges and greens<br />
Flowering over the skin. (Ibid, p. 196)<br />
In sum up, the early poems of Wallace Stevens show traces of Wordsworth and Keats but his later<br />
poetry shows that he became more objective, precise and perceptive in his portrayal of reality. While his<br />
imagination seems to run riot in his earlier poems like Domination of Black and Sunday Morning, his<br />
later poems like Contrary Theses (I) and (II), Study of Two Pears and Holiday in Reality show that<br />
his powerful imagination is kept in check by his objectivity and critical sense. He has also profiled much<br />
from the objectivity and colloquial language used by his friend William Carlos Williams who had<br />
been a friend of Ezra Pound and learnt precision and self-control from the Imagist poets of the modern<br />
age.<br />
Short Questions and Answers:<br />
1. Harold Bloom said that Of Modern Poetry is a weak poem. Do you agree with the statement?<br />
Before one reacts to the point made by Harold Bloom in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our<br />
Climate, Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press, Ithaca and London, 1977, it would be proper to look at the poem<br />
steadily and see it whole. Of Modern Poetry is a poem that consists of three paragraphs. The first<br />
paragraph has four lines, the second has twenty lines and the third and the last paragraph has four<br />
lines.If the first paragraph is the prologue, the last one is its epilogue. In the nineteenth century wordsworth,<br />
the pioneer of Romanticism, described poetry as the Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. As<br />
opposed to it, the narrator in Of Modern Poetry lays stress on the mental and intellectual activity of the<br />
poet. The modern poet is not swayed by emotions. For him the writing of portray is preceded by intense<br />
mental activity. In the past, poetry was conventional and followed the old beatend track the poet repeated,<br />
somewhat mechanically, what was done by the ancestors. The Modern poetry was, however, written for<br />
a different kind of audience. The narrator is of the view:<br />
It has to face the men of the time and to meet<br />
the woman of the time. It has to think about war<br />
And it has to find what will suffice.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 240<br />
Therefore, modern poetry is more than a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The modern poet is<br />
something of an actor and he puts on the mask of a dandy, an aesthete or a rabbi. The actor is not simply<br />
an entertainer; he is metaphysician in the dark. (Ibid, p. 240) In other words, the modern poet is a<br />
metaphysician, that is a thinker who wants to probe into the dark, hidden secrets of reality. Therefore<br />
modern poetry is primarily intellectual and the modern poet is a seeker. Modern Poetry gives the reader<br />
or the listener as much satisfaction as a man gets through skating and a woman gets through dancing. A<br />
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poem is the product of an intense activity of the mind. It is difficult to agree with Harold Bloom s<br />
judgement that Of Modern Poetry is a weak poem. It is a deeply satisfying poem and sheds light on the<br />
specific nature of modern poetry.<br />
2. Attempt a critical appreciation of Study of Two Peers.<br />
Study of Two Peers is a poem that consists of six stanzas of four lines each. It does not have rhyme but<br />
it is regular in the sense that all stanzas have four, unrhymed lines. The focus in the poem is on two pears<br />
that are visible to the narrator who has the keen eyes of a painter. Gradually, the narrator discovers the<br />
shape and colours of the two pears. They are ordinary, common place objects but the narrator s contention<br />
is that even from small, minor objects one can learn much. The two latin words, Opusculum paedagogum<br />
simply means that from small, minor objects (Opusculum) one can learn adequately. The narrator then<br />
makes use of a series of negations. They are neither viols (a music instrument) nor are they nudes. They<br />
are also not bottles. They are unique because they do not resemble any other object. The narrator notices<br />
the shape and the colours of the pears. They bulge towards the base and also have curves. There is a<br />
touch of red towards the base. They are not flat. They are three-dimensional and they taper towards the<br />
top. There are also bits of blue over them and a hard dry leaf hang from the stem. The yellow has many<br />
shades, reminding one of Citrons, oranges and greens/Flowering over the skin. (Ibid, p. 197). Finally,<br />
the narrator makes a discovery that the two pears are placed on a green cloth and there are shadows of<br />
the pears over the green cloth. These shadows are connoted by the word blobs. This is how an<br />
ordinary and commonplace object like two pears has been perceived and pictured by Wallace Stevens.<br />
Robert Rehder is of the view that the poet had learnt much from Paul Cezanne, a famous impressionist<br />
painter in nineteenth century France. He was famous for his landscapes in which ordinary objects become<br />
extraordinary and luminous due to interplay of sunlight and shade. The point of Study of Two Pears is<br />
that they are ordinary objects but they are also extraordinary. They are unique and nothing else resembles<br />
them. From a perusal of this poem we understand how carefully the poet had perceived ordinary objects<br />
like two pears. He could see their size, their shape and their colours. He had the eyes of a painter like<br />
Paul Cezanne.<br />
3. As a Romantic poet, Wallace Stevens was obsessed with death and immortality. Do you agree?<br />
It is true that Wallace Stevens was a Romantic poet in his afirmation of the dignity and sanctity of the life<br />
of the individual. The sublime in nature thrilled him and it also seemed to be immortal. It made him feel as<br />
if he was a God-like creature, destined to live for ever. That was, perhaps, the dream of a young man<br />
who felt that death and mortality were only some kind of illusion. This youthful dream of immortality, the<br />
hope of transcending death and mortality, got a rude shock as he grew up and matured. Domination of<br />
Black Harmonium in which mortality is suggested by the leaves, the fallen leaves. Death is very<br />
powerfully suggested by the hemlocks which are a plant from which poison can be made. In other words,<br />
the colour of the heavy hemlocks, signifies death. The image of the hemlocks is repeated again and again<br />
and the title Domination of Black suggests the inevitability and sway of death on the earth. Sunday<br />
Morning is another important poem in which the narrator has questioned divinity of Jesus. The son of<br />
God, Jesus, died and his tomb in Palestine is only a tomb. It shows the triumph of death. Even a Roman<br />
God like Jove Vanished from the earth and neither Jesus nor Jove means much to the men and women of<br />
our time. The sun-worshippers seem to transcend mortality and death but the final image of a flock of<br />
pigeons, sinking into darkness, is a powerful symbol of mortality and death. The lovely Susanna who has<br />
been pictured in all her voluptuousness in Peter Quince At the Clavier is also a victim of lust and<br />
finally she too dies. Her memory remains in the mind of the narrator but even a glorious, radiant woman<br />
like Susanna cannot escape mortality and death. In Contrary Theses) (I) also the bounty of nature and<br />
the piecy of religion has been sharply negated by the stak image of a soldier stalking his victim. Howsoever,<br />
sublime and eternal nature (mountains, rivers and valleys) be, human beings can t escape mortality and<br />
death. Immortality was a youthful dream but mortality was a stern reality.<br />
4. Discuss the contribution of Wallace Stevens to modern American poetry.<br />
Wallace Stevens published Harmonium in the year 1923 after the first world war. T.S. Eliot, the most
Wallace Stevens<br />
influential poet of the modern age, had published his great poem the Waste land in 1922. The literary<br />
climate of that time was anti-Romantic and Romanticism had become sickly and decadent. The word<br />
Romanticism had a negative connotation of escapism, excessive emotionalism and a morbid preoccupation<br />
with death. The poetry of decadent Romantic poets like Walter Pater, Osear Wilde and Swineburne gave<br />
Romanticism a bad name. It was the unique achievement of Wallace Stevens, like that of W.B. Yeats, to<br />
assimilate the best of Romanticism from great poets like Wordsworth and Keats, and synthesize it with<br />
modevnity and Imagism laying stress on particularity, hard, clear cut and shocking images. He became a<br />
Romantic poet of the twentieth century who had also learnt discipline, self-control, and realism from<br />
poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. The landscape in the continent of America, from<br />
Hartford, connectinent to key west in Florida, has also been celebrated as no one else, except Walt<br />
Whitman, did in the modern age. In his later poems like Study of Two Pears, Wallace Stevens looks at<br />
commonplace, ordinary objects like two pears with the eyes of an accomplished painter. From his friend<br />
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens had learned Objectivism, that is, the focus was on the object<br />
outside the human mind. The emotional response of the poet, the perceiver, is also present in the poem<br />
but the poet has also the objectivity to look at an object steadily and see it whole. There is no wonder that<br />
in his later poems Wallace Stevens has the maturity and penetrating insight of a great modern poet. He<br />
was nearly seventy when he wrote a great poem like The World As Meditation in which Penelop s<br />
longing for ulysses has been portrayed with a rare insight and candour. He was a poet who never<br />
became senile and sick. To an Old Philosopher in Rome is an unforgettable poem portraying how an<br />
old man encounters death with equanimity courage. It is said that Wallace Stevens also faced with the<br />
stoic courage of an old man. In other words, he could anticipate his own death.<br />
5. Comment on the image of the sun in Wallace Stevens’ poetry.<br />
There are so many poem of Wallace Stevens in which the sun figures prominently. There is a poem the<br />
Brave Man in the narrator has celebrated the sun in these words:<br />
The sun, that brave man,<br />
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,<br />
That brave man.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 138<br />
The Sun has been humanized by the narrator of the poem and it is his presence that makes gloom, good<br />
stars and fears of life and death run away. The phrase That man shows that as a person the sun is not<br />
far away. He is in our midst, working miracles, protecting life and hope. There is another poem A Fading<br />
of the Sun in which the sun has been visualised as the sustainer of life. Without the sun, everyone grows<br />
suddenly cold. The narrator says that at that time, The tea is bad, bread sad. (Ibid, p. 139). It is the sun<br />
which is the pillar of life. Then, everything is transformed. In the words of the narrator, The wine is<br />
good, the bread/the meat is sweet. (Ibid, p. 139). As long as the sun is there the people feel, And they<br />
will not die. (Ibid p. 139) The most remarkable and extended picture of the sun occurs in Wallace<br />
Stevens famous poet Sunday Morning. While the old gods have become obsolete and inert, the sun is<br />
worshipped by a ring of men who are supple and turbulent and they, in the narrators s words, Shall chant<br />
in orgy on a summer morn/their boisterous devotion to the sun,/Not as a god, but as a god might be.<br />
(Ibid, p. 69-70). It has to be remembered that the sun was worshipped, as Apollo, in ancient Greece and<br />
is also worshipped in India today as Surya. The sun-worshippers are in a frenzy and they worship the sun<br />
with such a mighty passion that they transcend mortality and death and feel the surge of immortality in<br />
their veins. The sun is more than a human being, more than a planet in the solar system. The sun is a god<br />
who sustains life and sustains hope. In the later poetry of Wallace Stevens, the sun almost becomes a<br />
synonym for life and hope..<br />
6. Do you think that Wallace Stevens was only an aesthete that is a lover of beauty?<br />
Wallace Stevens confessed to his wife Elsie that the first twenty years of his life spent in and around the<br />
small town of Reading in east Pennsylvania were the most happy years of his life. He was a good student<br />
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in the local school and graduated with merit. He was an equally keen lover of nature and explored the<br />
countryside, the mountains, the rivers and the valleys, around Reading some times on a bicycle ad<br />
sometimes on foot. The years of his struggle in New York were particularly unpleasant to him because<br />
he was grinding in offices from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. and that kept him away from The Sun! For Wallace<br />
Stevens the sun stands for nature s beauty and resonance. In other words, he was primarily an aesthete,<br />
that is a lover of sensuous beauty. He was also an aesthete because he celebrated the beauty of nature<br />
and also the beauty of a woman in his poetry. Sunday Morning is a poem in which the sublime in nature<br />
has been portrayed most graphically. The earth becomes a sort of paradise in those moments of ecstasy.<br />
Peter Quince At The Clavier is another famous poem in which Wallace Stevens appears to be an<br />
aesthete or a hedonist. The beauty of Susanna, a young woman from Babylon, has been presented in all<br />
its naked glory. She is bathing in a pool in a garden where the water is clear as well as warm. The sight<br />
of Susanna provokes the lust of the white haired elders of the church. Susanna is raped by the elders and<br />
the incident has been presented as if she alone is fully responsible for her rape. The red-eyed elders, full<br />
of lust, are not subjected to any criticism. The ethical dimension of the rape is completed overlooked by<br />
the poet. It is the sensuous, beauty of Susanna, her youth and sex appeal, that seduces the elders into the<br />
act of rape. There is something fatal about her beauty. This is the point of view, the point of view of an<br />
aesthete that governs the unfolding of the situation. The last section of the poem is preoccupied with the<br />
poet s meditation over beauty. The aesthete is of the view that Susanna has been disfigured and she will<br />
not be able to escape death. The memory of her incredible beauty and sex appeal would, however, linger<br />
long. In his earlier poems, Wallace Stevens is largely an aesthete.<br />
7. The sea in the major poems of Wallace Stevens.<br />
The American landscape figures prominently in Wallace Stevens poetry. The sea which is a part of the<br />
landscape figures in a number of poems. There is a poem Sea Surface Full of Clouds in which the<br />
strange beauty of the sea has been described in these words:<br />
Then the sea<br />
And heaven rolled as one and from two<br />
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.<br />
The Collected Poems, p. 102<br />
One has to note that blue is the colour of the sea and the sky mingled. It is a sight that cannot be<br />
described in words. There is also a vivid portrayal of Key West, low-lying island near the mainland of<br />
Florida in another poem Farewell To Florida:<br />
Key West sank downward under massive clouds<br />
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. (Ibid, p. 117)<br />
The most elaborate and detailed picture of the sea is found in a well-known poem The Idea of Order at<br />
key West. The narrator has made an affirmation that, She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (Ibid, p.<br />
128). That means that the sea had a cry, a constant cry, a kind of repetition which, however did not have<br />
the human appeal of the young woman s song. The narrator was able to hear the grinding water and the<br />
gasping wind near the seashore. The sound of the sea was full but the narrator found that it was she<br />
and not the sea we heard. (Ibid, p. 129). It was because the sea s roar was somewhat mechanical and<br />
repetitive but the young woman was the maker of the song she sang. Her song had the stamp of her<br />
personality. Her song had a strange human appeal. The sea had its music, its cry, but it was encompassed<br />
by her human song:<br />
And when she sang, the sea,<br />
Whatever self it had, became the self<br />
That was her song, for she was the maker. (Ibid, p. 129).<br />
The young woman was striding near the seashore, along. She stood for an artist who alone and illuminated<br />
the world. At night, the sea looked enchanting with blazing light and the beauty of the sea looked like that
Wallace Stevens<br />
of a fairland. It looked enchanting as well. The young woman s song was human and personal therefore<br />
it had a strange appeal for human beings. The sea had its own genius but it was not human. It was<br />
impersonal and somewhat mechanical and repetitive. The sea, however, ws the backdrop against which<br />
the genius of the woman was pictured.<br />
8. Irony and Paradox in Contrary Theses (I) and Contrary Theses (II).<br />
While Romanticism sings of the Godlike and the divine in man in a subjective and lyrical mode, Modernity<br />
portrays the irony and paradox of life in a largely objective and satiric mode. While Romantic art is<br />
largely subjective, personal and impassioned, Modern art and poetry is somewhat detached and objective<br />
presentation of the irony and paradox inherent in the life of the time. Contrary Theses (I) is a short<br />
poem consisting of six unrhymed stanzas of two lines. On the one hand, there is the frightening image of<br />
a soldier who stalks a victim just before the narrator s door. The bounty of nature is intensified by the<br />
grapes plush upon the vines and bee hives full of wax and honey (the combs). The piety of religion is<br />
indicated by the seraphs who cluster on the domes and the saints looking brilliant in fresh cloaks.<br />
(The Collected Poems, p. 266). Above all there is the startling, imagistic image of Blood smears the<br />
oaks. (Ibid, p. 267). The age that had seen The World War I (1914-1919) and The World War II (1939-<br />
1945) is depicted by the blood that smears the oaks. The bounty of nature and the piety of religion are<br />
effectively juxaposed against the soldier stalking his victim with a shocking, frightening determination.<br />
The violence of man and the bounty of nature are just before the door of the narrator. Contrary Theses<br />
(II) is a companion poem in which mid-autumn and The Bombastic intimations of Winter (Ibid , p. 270)<br />
have been juxtaposed sharply. While mid-autumn is an affirmation of life (a man walking with his year<br />
old boy on his shoulder, the sunshine and the dog barking), winter is an idea, an abstraction. When winter<br />
will break in all its fury, even swans moving in the wide sky will be chilled. The paradox of mid-autumn<br />
and a remote winter has been recreated in all its particularity. Nature also encompasses both life and<br />
death. Mid-autumn is mild and winter will be severe. Mortality in irreversible. Man who lives in the midst<br />
of nature also cannot escape mortality and death. As we all know, mid-autumn shows nature is its glory<br />
but the fall also begins in autumn. In other words, life contains the seed of death. It is inherent in the very<br />
process of life.<br />
9. Holiday in Reality : a critique<br />
Holiday in Reality is a poem that is difficult to interpret and explain in simple and plain words. Wallace<br />
Stevens is at times a difficult and obscure poet and no poem of his is as difficult and obscure as this<br />
poem. It consists of two sections of fourteen and twelve lines. In the first section the life of the people in<br />
the modern age has been portrayed with candour and insight. The people are alienated from each other<br />
and they are also alienated from nature. White is the colour of their life, white which is different and yet<br />
sharp as The January sun. (Ibid, p. 312). The image of the pale, colourless, cold sun is a symbol of<br />
death. The people are so alienated from each other that they do not have (Palabra), that is words to<br />
convey their self. They do not feel kinship with his earth, his sky, his sea. (Ibid, p. 312). They are their<br />
own and yet they are alienated. They also do not know that each had a woman and her touch. (Ibid, p.<br />
312). The world (including but they fail to respond to colour and beauty). They are so impoverished in<br />
spirit, that even at an attractive place like Durand-Ruel s they are not able to live and breathe with elan.<br />
While the first section of the alienation from which the people (they) suffer, the second section of the<br />
poem is a rather too involved and convoluted musing on spring. There is a line that is indeed difficult to<br />
explain. The narrator says, Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring. (Ibid, p. 313). The word umbilical<br />
reminds us of umbilical cord which binds the foetus to the placenta and which comes out after the birth<br />
of the child. We can guess that spring is in some way associated with child-birth. As a child is born and<br />
it grows old and finally dies, perhaps spring is also governed by mortality. To an onlooker spring may<br />
seem to be real but it has also a touch of unreal in the sense that it will vanish and winter will have a<br />
prolonged sway. The core and the heart of the poem seems to be a real and unreal spring and winter<br />
indicated by the January sun. The pale, colourless January sun is the most powerful image in the poem<br />
that is the ultimate reality, the holiday for the man of our time.<br />
277
278<br />
Additional questions (long and short)<br />
1. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is a poetry of escape. (long)<br />
2. Domination of Black is a deeply pessimistic poem. Do you agree? (long)<br />
3. The narrator in Sunday Morning is an atheist. Do you agree with the statement? (long)<br />
4. The earthly paradise in the poem Sunday Morning. (short)<br />
5. The sun worship in the poem Sunday Morning. (short)<br />
6. The elders of the church in Pater Quince At The Clavier. (short)<br />
7. Beauty and mortality in Peter Quinee At the Clavier. (short)<br />
8. The young woman in the poem The Idea of Order At Key West. (short)<br />
9. Ramon Fernadez in The Idea of Order At Key West. (short)<br />
10. The Man With the Blue Guitar. (short)<br />
11. Paul Cezanne and his influence on Wallace Stevens. (short)<br />
12. The Hero in United Dames of America. (short)<br />
13. A metaphysician in the dark. (short)<br />
14. The stalking soldier. (short)<br />
15. Spring is real yet unreal. (short)<br />
16. The January sun. (short)<br />
17. Nature as depicted in the poem Holiday in Reality. (long)<br />
18. Startling images in Wallace Stevens. (short)<br />
Suggested Reading<br />
1. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth<br />
by George S. Lensing (Louisiana State <strong>University</strong> Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1986).<br />
It is a perceptive biography of the poet.<br />
2. Wallace Stevens : A Mythology of Self<br />
by Milton J. Bates (<strong>University</strong> of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angels, London, 1985).<br />
It also lays stress on the complex personality, the aesthete and the rabbi, found in the poet.<br />
3. Wallace Stevens : Poems of Our Climate<br />
Poetry<br />
by Harold Bloom (Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press, Ithaca and London, 1977).<br />
It is a provocative study of the major poems. Also traces the influence of British Romantic poets on<br />
Wallace Stevens.<br />
4. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens<br />
by Robert Rehder (St. Martin Press, New York, 1988).<br />
It is a perceptive study of the poems of Wallace Stevens.<br />
5. The Dome And The Rock<br />
by James Baird (The John Hopkins, Press, Baltimore, 1968).<br />
It is also a fine study of the images in the poet.<br />
6. Parts of A World : An Oral Biography<br />
by Peter Brazeau (Random House, New York, 1983).<br />
It contains a lot of information about the life of the poet.<br />
7. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens<br />
(Alfred A. Knoph, New York, 1993).<br />
The definitive edition of his poems.<br />
8. The Oxford Companion to American Literature<br />
(the latest edition)<br />
(New York, Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press).<br />
9. The Oxford Encyclopedia <strong>English</strong> Dictionary<br />
edited by Joyce M. Hawkins and Robert Allen<br />
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991)<br />
Glossary :<br />
1. Abbey Theatre, a theatre in Abbey Street, Dublin, first opened in 1904, staging chiefly Irish plays. W.B.<br />
Yeats, the great Irish poet, was associated with it.<br />
2. Abstract: exiting in thought rather than matter, or in theory than practice.<br />
3. Acute: C of sensation or senses) keen, penetrating<br />
4. Aesthetic movement: a literary and artistic movement devoted to art for art s sake which blossomed in<br />
the 1880 s, heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin and Walter Pater, in which the adoption of<br />
the ideal of beauty was carried to extravagant lengths and often accomplished by affectation of speech<br />
and manner and eccentricity of dress. Oscar Wilde was its chief follower.<br />
Wallace Stevens was also an aesthete, especially in his earlier poetry. Beauty was his obsession.<br />
5. Aphrodite: the Greek goddess of beauty, fertility, and sexual love, born of the sea-foam, identified by the<br />
Romans with Venus.<br />
6. Apocryphia: the Biblical books received by the early church as part of the Greek version of the Old<br />
Testament, but not included in the Hebrew Bible. The tale of Susanna occurs in them.<br />
7. Apollonian: related to Apollo, the Greek and Roman sun-god, patron of music and poetry.<br />
8. Apotheosis: elevation to divine status; deification.<br />
9. Archetype: a recurrent symbol or motif in literature.<br />
10. Argentine: silvery in colour<br />
11. Arianism: a doctrine that Jesus, the son of God was not divine<br />
12. Atheism: the theory or belief that God does not exist.<br />
13. Autumn: the third season of the year, when crops and fruits are gathered, in the northern hemisphere<br />
September to November. Leaves also start falling in autumn.<br />
Autumn is very important in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.<br />
14. Autumnal: past the prime of life containing the seeds of decay and death.<br />
15. Babylon: the capital of Babylonia, first prominent under Hammurabi. The city (now in ruins) lay on the<br />
Euphrates in modern Iraq (179) and was noted for its luxury and for the Hanging Gardens, one of the<br />
seven wonders of the world.<br />
16. Bass: the lowest adult male singing voice.<br />
17. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67): the greatest French symbolist poet whose Less Fleurs Du Mal (1857)<br />
is one of the seminal works of Modernism. In <strong>English</strong> translation the anthology is Flowers of Evil. His<br />
poetry is the poetry of isolation, exile, boredom, melancholy and fascination with evil. He had an enormous<br />
impact on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens.<br />
18. Bawdy: indecent and vulgar<br />
19. Byzantine: of Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire. Also a citizen of Byzantium or the Eastern<br />
Roman Empire.<br />
279
280<br />
Poetry<br />
20. Byzantium: an ancient Greek city on the European side of the south end of the Bosporus, founded in the<br />
7 th century BC and re-founded as Constantinople by Constantine.<br />
21. Catastrophe: disaster or ruin<br />
22. Cloudburst: violent rainstorm<br />
23. Coleridge, Samuel (1772-1834), pioneer of <strong>English</strong> Romanticism along with William Wordsworth. They<br />
produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798, marking the start of the Romantic movement in <strong>English</strong> Literature.<br />
While Wordsworth loved nature, Coleridge was preoccupied with the supernatural.<br />
24. Keats, John (1795-1821), the youngest of the second generation of poets in England. He wrote Hyperion<br />
where the death of old gods has been graphically portrayed. Along with Wordsworth, he too influenced<br />
Wallace Stevens who too was an aesthete, a lover of beauty. He is also famous for his preoccupation<br />
with beauty. His other famous poems are Ode to Melancholy, and Ode to Autumn.<br />
25. Pater, Walter (1839-94), <strong>English</strong> essayist and critic, greatly influenced by the Pre-Raphelites. Among his<br />
friends were Swimburne and Rossetti. His celebrated evocation of the beauty of Mona Lisa reads like<br />
poetry. He turned beauty and its appreciation into a kind of religion. He also made art for art s sake<br />
popular.<br />
26. Pedagogue: School-Master or teacher<br />
27. Penelope: the wife of Odysseus or Ulysses in Homer s great romance Odyssey. She waited for husband<br />
for a long time.<br />
28. Phanta-Smgoria: a shifting series of real or imaginary figures as seen in a dream.<br />
29. Phantom: a ghost, a spectre<br />
30. Philistine: a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture.<br />
31. Philomel: the daughter of a legendary king of Athens. She was turned into a swallow and her sister<br />
Procne into a nightingale.<br />
32. Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973). A Spanish painter, Perhaps, the greatest painter of the modern age who<br />
worked in the monumental enterprise of cubism which challenged for the first time since the whole<br />
function of painting, replacing mimesis with a new self-sufficient pictorial order distinct from everyday<br />
perception. Gurenica is his most celebrated painting.<br />
33. Pizzicato: plucking the strings of a violin with the finger.<br />
34. Plushy: stylish and luxurious<br />
35. Polyphony: Counterpoint, contrasted sounds in music.<br />
36. Poseidon: the sea-god<br />
37. Post-impressionism a movement in French painting whose members sought to reveal the subject s structural<br />
form without strict fidelity to its natural appearance. Gaugin, Van Gogh and Cezanne were the luminaries<br />
of the autumn exhibition of French painting in London in 1910.<br />
38. Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), <strong>English</strong> poet, a keen lover of nature and its sublime beauty. Along<br />
with Coleridge, the creator of the <strong>English</strong> Romantic movement. Radical in his youth, he was made poet<br />
laureate in 1843. He defined poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; which takes its<br />
origin from emotions recollected in tranquility. Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode are two of his<br />
most famous poem.<br />
40. Zephyr: mild gentle wind or breeze<br />
41. Zeus, the supreme God in Greek mythology. He was the son of eronus whom he dethroned. The Romans<br />
identified him with Jupiter. They also used the word Jove to connote the supreme God.