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IS DANTES FOUR-LEVEL MODEL FOR THE INTERPRETATYON

OF LITERARY TEXTS STILL RELEVANT TO LITERARY


CRITICISM TODAY?
(Excerpt from Poems on Poetry Lead On

An Introduction to Essays on Various Poems with a Final


Glance at Waiting for Godot / En Attendant Godot
More people have dabbled in writing verses than those who boldly
confess they have done so. Even great poets have evinced

reticence

before seeing some of their works published. Goethe waited forty years
before allowing his poem Wandrers Sturmlied to appear in published
form. Robert Browning destroyed almost all records of his Juvenilia
verses. According to Barbara Melchiori 2even the main body of his works
was subject to a form of self-imposed censorship and as a consequence
the reader of his poetry should pay special regard to verbal clues that
point to the poets hidden, his deepest concerns, and of these he was not
himself fully cognizant.
We face here the entire question of the levels of meaning at which a poem
is to be interpreted. Can a regard for the four-level approach to textual
and originally scriptural exegesis formulated in the Middle Ages and
refined by Dante help us here? He differentiated between the four levels
of interpretation, to which he assigned the terms literal, allegorical, moral
and anagogical. 3It is interesting to note that Northrop Frye still found
the term anagogical relevant to his anatomy of literary criticism though
he found little place for the allegorical and moral levels.
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1 View:

2 Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (London, 1968).1.

To illustrate what these terms might mean to us today let us consider


Robert Brownings famous poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The literal
level reveals a story, a narrative which one could paraphrase in prose.
The town of Hamelin was once infested by a plague of rats,. .and so on.
At this level words have a specific and unambiguous meaning. In this
poem to cross means to traverse, passion means a fit of rage. The
statement Whats dead cant come to life, I think points to the Majors
confidence that his townsfolk have nothing more to fear from dead rats.
So far we have no need to ponder the nature of poetic language as
anything distinct from ordinary language.
How do we understand the possible allegorical meaning of the poem?
What urges us to find one? Is there any need to search for one? The
poem is

a childs story, after all, and why should it not simply be

enjoyed as such? It seems that most readers of the poem including


learned specialists in Brownings poetry have also come to this
conclusion. But not all. Milton Millhauser sees in the word pottage a
reference to the story of Esau and Jacob in the Book of Genesis with
regard its imprecation of Esaus readiness to sacrifice a spiritual benefit
for the sake of immediate physical gratification. 4 There are quite explicit
citations of words in the New Testament, the parable of the camels eye,
the trump of dooms tone and a conspicuous number of words that
evoke biblical themes, the image of the children rising from a dark
3 According to the hermeneutic principles laid down by Dante in his Letter to

Can Grande della Scala the biblical verse (Psalm 114, 1-2) referring to the
exodus from Egypt bears interpretation at four levels, the literal, allegorical,
moral and anagogical. These refer respectively to the literal accuracy purported
facts, the religious truth assigned to their unstated significance, the conversion
of the believer and the parting of the body and soul at death.Dantes mode of
interpretation finds precedents in those of Aquina and in rabbinic tradions.
4 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious Theme," Victorian

Poetry, 7 (1969), I63-168.

cavern, the Promised Land, water symbolism and the plagues of Egypt.
With all this in mind, can we dismiss the implied association of the
words cross and passion and the Mayors Sadducean

denial that the

dead can ever be revived as purely coincidental? As some linguists of the


Russian Formalist school have argued, at an allegorical level words in
verse are released from the constrictions placed on them at the literal
level. Can we find corroborative evidence for this possibility in other
poems written by Browning, or would this quest entail trespassing
beyond the confines of a single work?

Even E. D. Hirsch Jr., a strict

upholder of objective interpretation in line with a strict regard the


inviolability of the poetic object, allows that critics may compare word
patterns that emerge from a
words.

study of an authors habitual use

of

As Jurij Tynjanov argued in The Word in Verse.

words in a poem are

subject to the warping effect of mental associations that belie their


function as subservient parts of a narrative, a fact that often gives rise
to apparent oddities of style, verbal juxtapositions and what in prose
could come across as

stylistic lapses, repetitions and deviations from

common usage. Thus the line He never can cross that mighty top in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin seems an odd way of stating that the piper
will never be able to surmount the peak of a high mountain. In
Brownings poem By the Fire-Side we come across a truly glaring
departure from good style according to the criteria governing prose in
the line

We crossed the bridge that we crossed before, especially in

view of the occurrence of the words crossed and the Cross in the
immediately preceding lines. We note here a conflation of the word cross

5 Hirsch, E. D. Jr., "Objective Interpretation," PLMA5 (1960).

Tynjanov, Jurij, ''The Meaning of the Word in Verse,'' Readings in Russian,


Poetics Formalist and Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina
Pomorska). Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor. 1978. Original Russian
Title: ''Znacenie slova v. stixe '' in Problema stixotvornogo jazyke. 1924.
6

as a verb of motion and a religious symbol so central to the Christian


faith.
On the basis of these and similar instances one might be forgiven for
entertaining the suspicious that the straight narrative of Brownings
poems sustains some kind of allegorical and possibly religious message.
Certain critics will doubtlessly rule out this supposition as it would not
accord with their position that

a poem, understood as an aesthetic

object serving only the innate laws of aesthetics and the exigencies of its
functional integrity, has nothing to say about externals in areas such as
biography, history politics or religion, truth in short.
One should not imagine that the domain of literary criticism poses a
unified and monolithic body of opinion, for, to the contrary, this area is
not altogether dissimilar to Speakers Corner in Londons Hyde Park,
where the most divergent points of view are defended fervently, volubly
and often raucously by their respective proponents. While

Roland

Barthes denies that authors exist as anything more than scriptors and
Calvin Brown argued that what ordinary folk take to be Walt Whitmans
passionate eulogy of Abraham Lincoln in When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomd is not about Lincoln at all, 7 other no less erudite
scholars produce what seems to be convincing evidence that an authors
choice and arrangement of words reflect that

authors lifelong

development both as a private person and as a creative writer. One such


scholar was Professor L. A. Willoughby,

who traced major developments

in Goethes life and letters by studying the contextual placing of the word
Wanderer throughout the course of Goethes life from the time that he,
as a young man, declared that Shakespeare was the greatest of all
wanderers until the penning of his final work, which closes with Fausts
7 Calvin S. Brown, "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman," Music

and Literature (Athens [U.S.], 1948).


8 L. A. Willoughby, ''The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's

Poetry,'' Etudes Germaniques, July-December, 1951.

entry into eternity as the Wanderer. Thus the word Wanderer


embraces descriptions of physical journeys, the allegory of the pilgrims
journey through life,

Goethes striving and growth as a man and an

artist during his life and his concern with the transition from time to
eternity, all of which illumines the four-fold unity which inheres in
Dantes model for interpreting literary works. Why should we dwell only
on what we glean at the literal level of Brownings The Pied Piper of
Hamelin and of a simple and enchanting poem such as Wordsworths I
wandered lonely as a cloud? Alternatively, why should we shy away from
poems that evince no plain narrative such as Dylan Thomass Altarwise
by Owl-Light at the other end of the scale. Let nothing prevent us from
examining poems that could beguile with their simplicity or deter us by
their daunting obscurity, for all of these will yield their secrets if
approached with a well-founded understanding of poetic language, which
is universal.

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